The Mysterious Force Page 7

  “There are no letters?” he asked. “Or newspapers?”

  “Neither letters nor newspapers; Monsieur knows that I would have brought them.”

  “Alas!”

  “Perhaps there’ll be a midday paper—like yesterday.”

  A few minutes later, Sabine appeared with the children and her chambermaid. Césarine followed them furtively. The reddish light hardly concealed the pallor of their faces, but the children were not manifesting any sadness, although a certain languor was affecting their gestures.

  Mental turmoil had made the young woman thinner. She had little hope left. Her long ordeal with Vérannes and Langre’s dramatic existence had dragged her down into black depression. Having so often envisaged the worst, she was scarcely astonished by the immense and subtle disaster that threatened humankind. A mystical correspondence had been established between that total misfortune and the afflictions accumulated within her. Although she envisaged the fatal denouement without rebellion, however, she suffered bitterly on behalf of others; she also endured an immeasurable remorse for having made such a ridiculous mess of her youth.

  Her gaze interrogated Langre’s face fearfully. The old man looked away, but she deciphered the nuances of his impatient features, inept at concealment.

  “Is it year 1000?” she said, for she did not want to terrify Berthe or Césarine.

  “We don’t know.”

  She heard the bell tolling at Saint-Jacques; then there was a piercing cry in the street.

  “The newspaper!” said Catherine.

  Three minutes later, she brought a sheet of paper entitled Le Bulletin—a makeshift paper printed on a hand-press, into which a group of journalists and scientists condensed the news. It contained nothing superfluous; anecdotal style had been abolished therein.

  Langre read it avidly. Apart from a few details, the information of a scientific nature told him nothing that he did not already know. The other facts were merely consequences of the general fact, but one of them was alarming; in Paris, mortality had tripled in the last 24 hours, and it was increasing exponentially. Between 8 a.m. and noon, the physicians had certified 39 deaths; between noon and 4 p.m., 44; between four and 8 p.m., 58; between eight and midnight, 82; between midnight and 4 a.m., 118; between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m., 177. In total, 518. Two out of three invalids had been carried off by a mysterious and rapid illness, without any manifest suffering save for a terrifying crisis of anxiety that manifested itself about an hour before death. That anxiety ended in a state of stupor, followed by a coma. No fever was observed, although the movements of the patients were accentuated, at the commencement of the malady, by shivers and contortions. The pupils were constantly dilated, the skin dry and red—a brownish red, that was not a consequence of blood-flow.

  Langre handed the paper to Meyral, saying: “It’s the turn of living chemistry!”

  “Alas!” said Georges, in a low voice, when he had read it in his turn. “If I hope against hope, it’s because the morbid crisis was, it seems, bound to have set in sooner or later—in a slower manner than the other!”

  Langre was pacing back and forth. Sabine, divining that the news was ominous, preferred not to interrogate the two men. What good would it do, since she expected the worst? As for Berthe, Catherine and Césarine, huddled in the corners, they had given up on understanding anything, and had put their destiny in the hands of their masters.

  Meyral continued reading. Brief paragraphs noted that animals were affected to various degrees; the disease was hitting herbivores hard; on the other hand, dogs—and cats especially—were proving more resistant than humans. Domestic birds were becoming sluggish, without their mortality being much higher than usual. It had not been possible to determine statistics relating to wild birds or insects, but their vitality appeared to have been reduced.

  The two men looked at one another grimly.

  “If the green radiations disappear…” Langre began. He set about examining the solar spectrum attentively. For a quarter of an hour, the men made precise measurements. Then Meyral whispered: “It’s eating into the green!”

  There was a miserable silence. All comment seemed derisory. The chill of oblivion enveloped that islet of individuals, lost in a boundless catastrophe.

  Through the windows, they could see the Val-de-Grâce and the Luxembourg, in a light reminiscent of artificial fireworks. A few people were wandering along the pavements, like phantoms; a black silence had settled over the neighborhood. Meanwhile, noon resounded from the nearby tower, and the chimes took on an inestimable grandeur, as if emerging from the depths of the ages, quivering with millenary memories.

  “Lunch time!” said Langre, mechanically.

  Catherine stood up in the corner where she had huddled up and said: “I’ll serve it.”

  Ten minutes later, they were reunited in the dining-room. There was fruit, biscuits, conserves and wine. Langre and Meyral eyed the foodstuffs suspiciously, fearing that they might have become inedible. The first mouthfuls, however, revealed that they were unaffected—and in spite of everything, the meager meal had its satisfaction. They all felt hungry—a “lazy” but continuous hunger—and the wine revived them; its confused gaiety, extending through their bodily fibers, awoke an unexpected confidence.

  “In a way, the cataclysm is merciful to living organisms!” said Meyral.

  Langre drank a large glassful to combat the pessimistic fog that was thickening his mind, and smiled. “We’ll get out of it!” he lied.

  He had picked up little Marthe and placed her on his knee. He was like a man condemned to death, in whom opium or morphine had both excited the sensation of nothingness and soothed distress. An extraordinary tenderness filled his old heart—the love of a father and a grandfather amalgamated with the love of the human race, and the love of all terrestrial life, which was enveloped by a force incomparably more cruel than all the forces that had assailed creatures through the myriad ages of the past.

  “Let’s go see our fellows!” he said, moved by a sudden and violent desire.

  Scarcely had he spoken than the same desire overwhelmed Georges, Sabine and the servants. All of them, to the extent of their instinct and intelligence, felt the overarching linkage of the species.

  The Rue des Feuillantines was deserted. Passers-by were circulating in the Rue Saint-Jacques and the Rue Gay-Lussac, walking furtively in the reddish light. Those who were moving in couples or groups scarcely addressed a word to one another. It was reminiscent of those twilights described by northern poets, which are not the twilights of a day but of an era. The absence of vehicles would have been sufficient to render the city silent; noises dissolved in the soft atmosphere; the pedestrians’ boots seemed fur-lined. All the faces displayed melancholy, bitterness and a dread that attenuated their lassitude.

  In the Boulevard Saint-Michel the crowd became dense. Young men, abandoned to the herd instinct, formed gangs; poor pale girls with purple lips slid mournfully along the pavements as if they had just been to mass. Here and there, the white head of a scientist or philosopher protruded. They met artisans, domestics, shopkeepers, rentiers, factory-owners, street-walkers, beggars, and even a flower-seller, offering faded lilacs with a bewildered expression.

  The subtle boundaries that divided up instincts, tastes and mentalities continued to separate these individuals, maintaining a vague hierarchy. Besides, the crowd was mild-mannered and slow-moving. The nature of the catastrophe, the sinister subtlety of its vicissitudes, restrained brutal impulses. Even fear was contained, as if dilated by amazement. There was a great unity of emotion: simple minds felt as keenly as the most intellectual how contradictory this adventure was to human destiny. That the Earth might swallow its inhabitants, that the seas might drown the continents, that a deadly epidemic might carry off all living things, that the Sun might go out, that a fiery star might burn them or a displaced planet crash into ours—they were conceivable events, in the image of things that had happened since the beginning of the world…but
this fantastic death of light, this dying of the colors, which affected the humblest of flames as well as the rays of the Sun and those of the stars, derisively gave the lie to the entire history of animals and men!

  “They’re accepting it more easily than I would have imagined,” Langre observed. “After all, why not? The destruction that threatens all of them would otherwise threaten them each in turn. How many are avoiding cancer, kidney failure, nights of choking, facial neuralgias—everything that threatens infimal creatures!”

  His speech was not at all consoling. The human race, which he had thought that he scorned and hated, had become strangely dear to him. Although the expectation of his own death and that of his family was sufficient to fill his heart, he experienced a sacred horror and a fraternal pain that far surpassed his own drama.

  That horror was even more profound in Meyral. He watched the multitude with tender compassion. In the depths of his inner being a religious sentiment emerged, for he was one of those people for whom the future of humankind is a passion and a promise. The energy and the persistence of the species had always excited his own energy and the sense of his persistence.

  As they passed Cluny, Sabine started and drew her children closer to her. A few seconds later, Meyral shivered in his turn; he had just seen Vérannes.

  What does it matter? he said to himself. He’s only one more wretch.

  In the orange light, Vérannes had a sulfurous and debilitated appearance. He was on the other side of the street, half-hidden in the crowd; he had obviously seen the young woman.

  “What are you looking at?” asked Langre. Turning his head, he perceived the man in his turn. The sight reanimated him to the point of wrath. He made a threatening gesture. A rearrangement of the crowd hid Sabine’s husband, and they saw that an adolescent had just fainted; two men were holding him up. A rumor spread—the rumor of a languid crowd, slow in its emotions.

  Then, in quick succession, a student collapsed against a façade, and a child rolled on the pavement. They were picked up and taken away; there was a sort of collective breathlessness.

  “The disease is getting worse!” murmured a tall, thin man who was coming along the boulevard. Langre and Meyral recognized Dr. Desvallières.

  “What disease?” asked the physicist, mechanically.

  Desvallières, who was preparing to cross the road, extended his hand to Langre. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “The planetary disease? These last three hours have been terrible. Furthermore, the deaths are increasingly sudden.”

  While he was speaking they heard a faint cry for help. A woman had just collapsed on the pavement. A policeman and two workers lifted her up. Her eyes were wide open; her gaze was visibly becoming extinct by the second. Desvallières, leaning over her, felt her neck at the location of one of the carotid arteries.

  Confused words strayed from the edges of her livid lips: “Cécile…I want…ah!”

  “She’s dead!” the physician declared.

  Horror paralyzed Sabine; her eyes were full of tears.

  Meyral whispered in Langre’s ear: “We need to go home as quickly as possible. I’m afraid of mental contagion.”

  Before the little group had turned the corner of the Rue du Sommerard, they saw another old man who had fainted in front of the Café Vachette and a little girl inanimate in an artisan’s arms. Langre had taken hold of Sabine’s hand; Meyral was carrying one of the children and the servants were lengthening their stride. In the Rue Saint-Jacques, which was almost deserted, the pedestrians were no longer idling; all of them were hurrying home. In straw-colored sky the Sun was visibly reddening ominously.

  The route seemed interminable; an increasing fatigue slowed down their progress, and the anguish would have been terrible if their ability to feel pain had not been strangely reduced.

  “Finally!” sighed Langre, when he found himself at the door. He gave Sabine a swift push, for he could see men in the distance carrying an inert body.

  Three minutes later, they were reunited again in the tiny fatherland of rooms. The relief of refuge! The immense peril ceased to be perceptible. They drew closer together, like children seeking the security that comes from being together in the same nest, in the midst of mysterious elements.

  It did not last. A terrible sick feeling turned their weakness tremulous; they frightened one another with their faces, whose pallor took on a coppery tint, in which the secret of the moment inscribed its threat.

  Furtively, Meyral had moved toward one of the large laboratory tables; Langre followed him.

  “The green’s decreasing!” said the young man, in a low voice.

  “What’s perhaps equally serious,” replied Langre, in the same tone, “is that the temperature’s falling—it seems that the brightness of the red has stopped increasing. There’s no longer any compensation…”

  “One degree—that’s not much, and could be due to normal causes. As for the brightness of the red, if it has stabilized in the elevated region, it’s increased in the vicinity of the infra-red. It even seems…yes, it seems that the region has enlarged slightly…”

  They measured the width of the red band with a micrometer gauge.

  “It’s enlarged.”

  “It’s just another kind of compensation,” said the old man, bitterly.

  V. The Grim Reaper

  Langre shivered. The tragic maidservant was shivering too; a sudden chill penetrated the depths of their flesh. That chill was followed by a period of excitation and fear. An intolerable distress weighted up the napes of their necks.

  The chambermaid, Berthe, was prowling along the walls, like an animal searching for a way out. “Death! Death! Death!” she croaked. She turned round, as if she had been shot in the head, raised her arms in a gesture of supreme anguish and suddenly collapsed on the floor.

  Langre and Meyral lifted her up. She was shivering, in brief fits, her cheeks hollowing out between her jaws. Her eyes remained wide open, losing their gaze fantastically.

  “Berthe! Poor Berthe!” moaned Sabine. She loved the young woman, for her gentleness and her patience.

  “Berthe’s dead!” murmured the dying woman. Her hands were groping in empty space; then a tragic smile contorted her lips, and her gaze continued its extinction.

  “Fetch a doctor!” Langre ordered.

  The tragic maidservant headed unsteadily for the door, but Meyral got there ahead of her. A few more words spilled confusedly from the dying woman’s lips, like pebbles in a stream. She released a groan, then a croak, and slipped away into eternal darkness.

  The doctor that Meyral brought was a thickset and bandy-legged man whose beard was going gray on the left, while remaining black on the right. He studied the corpse indifferently, and stammered: “We don’t know any longer! This disease has no name. If it continues, no one…no one…!” He made a gesture of renunciation, and looked into Berthe’s open eyes silently. “Their gaze!” he sighed. “That gaze has never existed before!” He shook his head and mechanically buttoned up his overcoat. “Nothing to be done! The afflicted are dying. Our presence is futile…futile!” Passing his hand over his forehead, with a gesture of immense lassitude, he added: “They’re waiting for me elsewhere…they’re waiting for me everywhere!” He slipped out of the laboratory like a specter.

  An hour went by, crushing and monotonous. They waited there, in unspeakable expectation, lost in the bosom of mystery to a greater extent than shipwreck-victims in the depths of the ocean. Their only relief was their weakness. It gave them long intervals of numbness, during which thoughts and sensations became physiologically distant, so slow and indecisive that they diluted the suffering. There were atrocious, glacial awakenings, in which their souls filled with terror and anguish squeezed their throats like a noose. The awakenings and torpors corresponded to a rhythm; they were manifest simultaneously in the adults and the children.

  At about 5 p.m., Langre and Meyral observed that the temperature was dropping more rapidly.

  “Th
is time, the intensity of the red rays is stable!” murmured the old man, in an ominous voice. “The end is approaching…” He was interrupted by a knock on the entrance door. “A visitor?” he groaned, with faint irony.

  The tragic maidservant dragged herself to the antechamber; they heard an exclamation and whispering, and then a tall silhouette appeared on the threshold of the laboratory.

  “Vérannes!” growled the old man.

  “Yes, Vérannes,” the visitor replied. He displayed a humble expression, hollow and pitiful. His tall stature seemed compressed; a continuous shiver was agitating his muscular hands. “I’ve come,” he continued, in a supplicatory manner, “because everything’s about to end—and I wanted to die with my children and the woman I love.”

  “You don’t deserve it!” Langre cried.

  If Vérannes had arrived while the crisis of numbness was still in force, perhaps he would have been greeted without resistance—but the phase of excitation was nearing its peak; the sight of “the enemy” exasperated the old man and drove Sabine to despair.

  “No!” Gérard continued, his excitement mingling with a sort of delirium. “You don’t deserve to die with your victim, and we don’t deserve to have our last moments disturbed by an odious presence.”

  “I’m a wretch!” sighed Vérannes. “My sins are irreparable, but remember that they drew their source from a boundless love! Remember, too, that these poor creatures are my children. I’m not asking for any compassion. Give me a corner in a room where I can tell myself that I’m close to the woman I love…Sabine, won’t you have pity on me?”

  “Yes, yes…let him stay!” sighed the young woman, hiding her face.

  There was a long silence. The chill seemed to increase; the red light surrounded people like a pyre about to consume them; death was hovering in the terror, and they were all shivering lamentably.