The Son of Clemenceau written by Alexandre (fils) Dumas

A >> Alexandre (fils) Dumas >> The Son of Clemenceau

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

"Punished?"

"Yes; he went on to live at Nice, where he had bought a villa in
foresight for some such day of disgrace. The Circe was to follow him,
but, instead of that, she has shaken off the golden links and
condescends to stay a week in Munich to amuse us coarse swiggers of
beer."

CHAPTER IV.

THE STAR IS DEAD LONG LIVE THE STAR!

By listening to others and observing them, man obtains the material for
self-preservation. Evidently this star of the minor stage was a woman to
be avoided; a rising light which might scar the sight and burn the
fingers of too venturesome an admirer. Claudius had a premonition that
he ought to go out and kill the few minutes in strolling the streets,
before keeping the appointment, even at the risk of being questioned by
the police. But he overcame the impulsion, and waited to face what might
be a danger the more.

All the hall, by instinct and from the stories circulating--perhaps
circulated by the agents of the management--divined that no common
attraction was to be presented. Besides, to displace La Belle
Stamboulane worthily on the stage, that chosen arena where the female
gladiator carries the day, a miracle of beauty, wit and skill was
requisite. Elsewhere, ability, practice, art, artifice, many gifts and
accomplishments may triumph, but the fifth element as indispensable as
the others, air, water, fire and earth--it is _love_, which legitimately
monopolizes the theatre for its exhibition and glorification. Men and
women come to such places of amusement to hear love songs, see love
scenes, and share in the fictitious joys and sorrows of love, which they
long to enact in reality. Nothing is above love; nothing equals it. He
reigns as a master in a temple, with woman as the high-priestess, and
man the victim or the chosen reward.

Preceding the novelty, a bass-singer roared a drinking-song, in which
he likened human life to a brewer's house, in which some quenched their
thirst quickly and departed; others stayed to quaff, jest, tell stories
to cronies, before staggering out "full;" the oldest went to sleep
there. Though rich-voiced and liked, this time he retired in silence,
for the audience was tormented with impatience.

The orchestra struck up a fashionable waltz, and, as the door, at the
back of a drawing-room scene, was opened in both flaps by the liveried
servants, a young lady entered, so fresh, delightful and easy that for a
moment it seemed as if it were a member of the "highest life" who had
blundered off the street into this strange world.

From her glistening hair of gold to the tip of her white satin slippers,
with preposterously high heels, this was the new incarnation of the
woman who ends the Nineteenth Century. She was indisputably beautiful,
and Claudius, who had thought that the Jewess was incomparable, feared
that the apple would have to be halved, since neither could have borne
it entire away. But the Jewess's loveliness exalted the beholder; this
one's was of the strange, irritating sort, resisted with difficulty and
alluring a man into those byways which end in the gaming hell, the
saturnalian halls, and the suicide's grave. Love had never chosen a more
appetizing form to be the pivot on which human folly--perhaps human
genius--was to spin idly and uselessly, like a beetle on a pin in a
naturalist's cabinet.

Kaiserina von Vieradlers was the modern Venus, a creation of the modiste
rather than of the sculptor; though hips and bosom were developed
extravagantly, the long waist was absurdly small; but no token of ill
health from the tight lacing appeared in the irreproachable shape, the
well-turned arms and the countenance which was unmarred in a single
lineament; the movements were not strictly ladylike, they were too
unfettered in spite of the smooth gloves and the stylish unwrinkled ball
dress, rather short in front to parade the slippers mentioned and silk
stockings so nicely moulded to the trim ankle as to show the dimple. She
was more fair in her eighteenth year--if she were so old--than a Danish
baby in the cradle. The yellow hair had a clear golden tint not tawny,
and the fineness was remarkable of the stray threads that serpentined
out of the artistic braid and drooping ringlets. The blue eyes had a
multitude of expressions and gleams; now hard as the blue diamond's ray,
now soft as the lapis lazuli's glow of azure; the expression was at
present one of longing, tender, cajoling and coaxing--like a gentle
child's, never refused a thing for which it silently pleaded.

The costume was a trifle exaggerated, as is allowable on the minor
stage, but what was that in our topsy-turvy age, when the disreputable
woman in a mixed ball is conspicuous among her spotless sisters by the
quiet correctness of her toilet?

Kaiserina came down to the flaring footlights, after a little
trepidation, which the inexorable demon of stage-fright exacted from
her, with the swing and confident step of one sure that--while man may
be unjust, cruel and oppressive to her sex off the stage--here she would
reign and finally triumph. She bowed her head, but it was to acknowledge
her gracious acceptance of the tribute of applause; she moistened her
fiery-coal lips with a serpent's active tongue; she surveyed her
dominion with eyes that assumed a passing emerald tint. There was a
depth to those apparently superficial glances. It seemed to Claudius
that one had singled him out, and he fancied, as his eyes became
fastened on this vision of concentrated worldly bliss, that it was for
him that she stretched her plump neck, waved her arms in long gloves,
undulated her waist and murmured--though to others she was but repeating
her song during the orchestral prelude:

"You talk of plunging into the strife; you are ready to endure
privations, you would study and toil till you vanquish. Nonsense; you
had far better repose, recruit after the humdrum, exhaustive life of
college; enjoy life a little. Hear a love-song, not a professor's
lecture--see a dance of the ballet, not the procession of the deans and
proctors; come to me for I am immediate sensation--the pleasure for all
times--eternal intoxication--certain oblivion--the ideal bliss of the
Hindoo! I am the grandest proof of Life--I am Love embodied!"

What did she sing to the strains of the voluptuous-waltz made vocal? The
words mattered not; in Esquimaux they would have been as intelligible
from the intonation with which she imbued every note, and the restricted
but perfectly comprehensible gestures with which she emphasized the
phrases of double meaning--one for the literary censors who had "passed"
this corruption, the other for even the more obtuse of the common herd.

The rival whom, without having seen her, she had dethroned, was
obliterated. It was not a transfer of allegiance--it was Semiramis;
trampling an overthrown empress among the charred ruins of her palace,
acclaimed without one dissentient shout, in her stead, and as the
initial of a new line of sovereigns. She enchanted, interested and
amused, while Rebecca had awed, ravished and strove apparently in vain
to lift to a level where the elite alone soar without dread of a fall.

A witty cardinal has said that if a fly were seen in the drinking-cup by
an Italian, a Frenchman and a German, respectively, the first would send
it away, the second fish out the insect before he drank, while the
German would gulp liquor and fly, without demur.

The good audience of Freyers' Harmonista swallowed the so-called
Fraulein von Vieradlers, flies and all! Claudius saw no more clearly
than they; not only was the girl an unsurpassable idol, but to its very
feet it was pure gold and immaculate ivory. An insane idea seized him
not only to win her--a hundred around him shared that desire--but to
keep her spotless, as he thought her, whatever the gossips had said.
After all, slander had no opening to attack one whose youth was
manifest; who owed no complexion to the wax-mask, the bismuth powder,
and the carmine; whose hair was real and fine and of a shade which no
dye could imitate; and whose movements, though in a society dance far
removed from the wild whirl of the monads seen on this same stage, had
the freedom of the bacchantes.

After all, the unworthiness of the object no more changes the quality of
love than that of the glass alters the banquet of wine.

Oh, to withdraw her from this turbulent career, for which surely she was
not inextricably destined, and let her be the bright but flawless
ornament of a happy home and a choice circle--if not the lady of
fashion, in case the student realized one of his fantastic dreams of
aimless ambition. The quiet learner felt an immense flame usurp the
place of his blood; he seemed gifted with the powers of the athletic
Duke of Munich, Christopher the Leaper, whose statue adorned the
proscenium, and like him, clearing the orchestra with a bound of twelve
feet, he would have grasped the girl wasting her graces of voice and
person on these boors, and carried her off to a more congenial sphere.

Obliged to repeat her song and the dance which filled the gap between
two verses, the charmer held the spectators in a spell even more firm
than that she had first imposed.

No one was conscious at the first that down the central aisle had come a
little party odd enough in its components and awe-inspiring in what
might be called its rear-guard to break even enchantment more potent.

An old woman, wearing over sordid garments an old furred Polish pelisse,
was the guide--the herald, so to say, to a gentleman in gold spectacles
and a black suit and silk hat, an inspector of police, a sergeant of the
watch, while behind this formidable official nucleus marched a serried
body of civil and of military police. After them all, wringing his fat
hands, trotted the proprietor, with a terrified expression too great not
to be assumed. Waiters completed the retinue, wearing faces much whiter
than the napkins slung on their arms.

As the orchestra faced the audience, they perceived this inroad before
the latter and, as by a signal, ceased playing. The startled dancer, for
all her aristocratic self-command, stopped immediately for explanation,
and, riveting her glances on the female head of the intruders, whom she
recognized--that was clear--stood stupor-stricken.

Claudius, following her hint, turned to the center and had no difficulty
in recognizing in the woman arrayed in the Polish pelisse, the chief of
the beggars, Baboushka. He recalled the remark of the Jew, that she
befriended this debutante, and he was averse to believing it. That
delicious creature and this hideous one in ties of communion!
ridiculous, monstrous!

Spite of his concern for himself, Claudius noticed that twenty or thirty
of the spectators, apparently perplexed at the rare conjunction of their
leader and the authorities in friendly communication, would not wait for
the elucidation but began to make a rush for the outlets.

The voice of the town inspector, rotund and sonorous, froze them with
terror, although not personal.

"Gentlemen--(the ladies were apparently here only on sufferance, and the
stage-performer was of no consideration in the authorities'
eyes)--Gentlemen, a murder has been committed and we seek the culprit
here in your midst!"

"Murder!" and the audience rose to their feet like one man.

"Stand up here," said the functionary, pointing to a place on a bench
which a timid spectator had vacated, and pushing Baboushka roughly, "and
point out the man who has made away with the honorable Major von
Sendlingen."

"Major von Sendlingen!" repeated the audience, shocked, as the officer
had been seen but the night previously among them in lusty life, and
death is a spectre most terrible in a saloon of mirth and carousal.

After that general exclamation, a silence ensued; one that meant
acquiescence in the proceedings of the police.

"I must have killed him," thought the student. "This is a black
prospect! I had better have quitted the hall and profited by the
invitation of refuge which Herr Daniels offered me."

For the moment, he could take no part, though he could not doubt that
Baboushka would denounce him--a stranger, and the principal in the duel
with canes. His cloak would help toward the identification and unless
the hag's crew had abstracted it, it would be forthcoming, he doubted
not.

Indeed, elevated on her perch, able to see the faces of all around her,
the hag's aged but brilliant eyes rapidly scanned those nearest her in
wider and wider circles. All at once they became fixed upon Claudius,
and by instinct, the neighbors fell away from him so that he was
isolated. She extended her arm with an unnatural vigor, and in a voice
also unexpectedly strong with malice, cried:

"That is he! there you have the slayer of poor Major von Sendlingen!"

At that very moment, a shrill, ear-splitting whistle sounded; and the
gas-jets all over the hall went out too simultaneously for the act not
to be that of a hand at the inlet from the street-main. Claudius heard
the soldiers and policemen buffeting the people to scramble over the
benches toward him. He had but a single road to a possible escape: by
the little door in the wall through which Rebecca Daniels had ushered
him into the auditorium. He stooped as he turned, to elude any
outstretched hands, drove himself like a wedge through the compacted
mass of frightened spectators and, spite of the gloom, the deeper
because of the glare preceding it, he reached the egress. The
uninitiated would never have suspected its existence, for the actors and
staff of the establishment alone had the right and knowledge to use it.

"Lights, lights!" the functionaries were shouting.

By the time matches were struck and lanterns brought into the scene of
confusion, Claudius had opened the panel, leaped through and closed it.
He did not dally in the passage, but hastened to follow the walled-in
road as well as he might by which he had penetrated the theatrical
region.

At the dividing-line, where the path parted to the men's and to the
ladies' dressing-rooms, he perceived a ghostly figure in the obscurity
which also prevailed here from the general extinction of the illuminant.
He was about shrinking back and fleeing in another direction when eyes
blazed in the dark like a cat's, and the sweet, unmistakable voice of
the singer, who had enthralled him, ejaculated:

"As God lives, it is you!"

"Suppose it is I!" he returned, impatiently. "Stand aside, or--"

"You must not pass here!" she returned, laying her hands on his lifted
arm.

"Must not? We shall see about that!" and he repulsed her violently.

"No, no; you are too hasty! I mean that would be a fatal course. Here,
here!" seizing him again and dragging him with her. "You were right to
kill that ruffian! to cane him to death--like the Russian grand-dukes,
he was not born to die by the sword. To abduct one woman while paying
court to another, the traitor! But, never heed that! He is punished, and
you must be saved. Here is an outlet: pursue the passage to the end and
leave the town!"

"But I--"

"How can you repay me? Bah! repay me in the other world--below, with a
drop of cold water when I parch!" And with a dulcet yet demoniacal
laugh, the singular creature pushed him into a lightless lobby, slammed
a door and seemed to run away, singing the refrain of the waltz which
was to haunt him forever-more.

CHAPTER V.

UNDER MUNICH.

After an instant's reflection in the impenetrable shades, Claudius
concluded to follow the advice of the variety theatre's prima donna.
While a stranger to the City of Breweries, he knew that its
predestination toward thirst was due to its being the site of an ancient
rock-salt mine. In other cities, subterraneans were melodramatic; here,
a labyrinth under the surface and at the level of the dancing and
drinking cellars was so natural that a child of Munich, dropped into a
well, would have no misgivings as to his worming his way up into the
outer air.

At the worst, when pressed by hunger, he could no doubt make an appeal
to the mounted patrol by night or the foot-passengers by day, whom he
would hear overhead, and be released from this living burial at the cost
of the imprisonment and trial which he had temporarily evaded.

Remembering that he had a box of cigar-lights, and regretting again the
want of the cloak so useful in these damp passages, he lighted a match
and began his flight by the sole opening that he spied. An odor of
sausages, cheese and coarse tobacco was here and there strong, and he
correctly divined that at these points, fugitives, probably from the
same enemy as he fled, had recently made halts. Once assured that he was
in a kind of thoroughfare, though one for the nefarious, he felt bolder
and more hopeful about reaching a desirable goal.

He did not pause to think, as he continued, choosing, where there was a
bifurcation, the most trampled corridor, hewn originally by the miners'
pick. But he had much on his mind for future elaboration. Heretofore no
man could have lived a less eventful life, passed among books, globes,
drawing tools and lecture notes. In a few hours the change was great.
The quiet student, with no aspirations but the completion of his
wandering-year in Italian picture-galleries, had become a fugitive from
justice, and on the hands, groping in a lugubrious earthen alley, were
the stains of a fellow-creature's blood. Then, too, the singular
friendships he had formed, the old Jew and his daughter, who were
awaiting him--and this still more remarkable creature who had glanced
across his path, like the divinities from above in antique poems, to
point out the safe retreat.

But too long a time elapsed without his finding such an evidence of his
security as he had too confidently expected. He might have mistaken the
true line, for while at any point of divergence there were marks in the
earth, where traces of saline flows still glistened, and even stones and
bits of stick placed in cavities in the manner of the gypsy clues
familiar to social outcasts, he could not interpret them; for once, his
university education proved faulty.

A new alarm arose from the presence of swarms of rats; larger and more
hideous than their fellows of which one catches a fleeting view in
houses and in the streets, they seemed to be less afraid of the lord of
creation than fables teach. They scuttled off in front of him, it is
true, but he began to think that they followed him when he went by. One
ray of comfort came in the two beliefs that his flashing matches
frightened them, and that, for certain portions of the way,
well-regulated droves of the vermin had districts assigned them; those
that ventured in chase of him too far were beaten back by those on whose
grounds they rashly trespassed.

This latter consolation was lost almost at the same time as the other:
his stock of fuses ran out, while with the last flash he feared that he
saw a larger mass than ever before in his track. The rats had united to
overwhelm him.

Seized with panic, spite of his philosophy, dropping the all but empty
wax-light case in his haste, he dashed madly forward, groping to save
his head and shoulders from contact with the capacious gallery sides,
but unable to take a step with any certainty how it would end.
Fortunately, he had strayed back into an often-traveled path, and while
the scamper of the rats died away at the close of his frantic race, he
heard a sound but little above his level revealing the presence of man.
It was not a cheerful sound; being the tolling of a bell such as is
swung when a dead body is entering a cemetery, is carried to the chapel
before interment.

Nevertheless, fellow beings would be near and he had only to find the
opening by which this burial-ground could be reached. He remembered that
the old cemetery had been immensely extended, if the guide-books were to
be credited, and, while he had no clear idea of the direction he had
rambled, he might have reached the town of twenty thousand dead. The
idea was gruesome of having to call for the aid of a grave-digger, but
he felt that he could not much longer support this journey in the
underworld without the bodily support of food or the mental one of human
fellowship.

Silence most oppressive had followed the patter of the myriad of rats'
feet, and it checked his efforts. They were brought to a termination
just when he looked forward with joy to a grey light dimly indicating
some aperture on the other side of which shone the day. The ground
seemed to give way under him, and he was hurled senseless into the pit
which he had not suspected.

When he returned to consciousness, the bell had ceased to toll; the
silence was once more heavy. But the pangs of hunger--remorseless master
over the young--spurred him into rising.

He was thankful that he had not been attacked in his helplessness by the
vermin, and he muttered a prayer in his first stride toward where he
recalled the feeble light. The rats' compact column had figured in his
dreams, and while they were led by the fair waltz-singer and dancer in
order to devour him, unable to resist, the benignant fairy, for once
dark--contrary to all precedent--wore the appearance of Rebecca.

He could not see the light; but a current of warm air stealing steadily
into the underground indicated the orifice. It was a welcome draft, for
it differed in many features from the noisome, dank and earthy
exhalations to which he had luckily become accustomed in his indefinite
sojourn.

His surmise was correct. Through a grating of iron bars, straight at the
side and semi-circular at the top, set in massive masonry of some
building, in the foundation of which he crouched, he saw, in the
vagueness of clouded starlight, the domain of the dead.

On being assured of this, the panic, mastering him before, resumed its
sway; it gave him a giant's strength to escape the fancied, grisly
pursuers, and he moved the whole series of bars far enough away to
enable him to crawl through the gap.

He stood, exhausted, panting, glad of the relief from the waking
nightmare which the darkness encouraged. His weakness could be accounted
for, as his wandering had lasted long; the syncope could not be brief
since nearly thirty hours must have transpired from his rush out of the
variety music-hall.

Before him, for at his back stood the chapel for services, stretched out
the vast cemetery. Some of the cracked, dilapidated tombs dated back to
1600; others marked the addition in 1788 to the original God's-acre. All
was hushed; it was difficult to imagine a phantom where neglect seemed
to rule. It was not in this olden part that descendants of the departed
flocked on All Saints' Day to decorate the mausoleums with evergreens,
plaster images and artificial immortelle garlands. Except for a
screeching-sparrow, which his first steps dislodged, not a sign of life
appeared in this town around which the living city slept as quietly.

His eyes clearing, he believed he descried the gateway and, sure that so
large a _campo santo_ would have a warder in hourly attendance, he made
his way, deviating as the tombs compelled, toward the entrance. To his
surprise, all was still there, and though a lamp burned in the little
stone lodge, it was certainly untenanted. The gate was ajar; there was
no fear of the tenants flitting out bodily for a night's excursion.

Claudius was dying for refreshment and he was not fastidious about
intruding. A man who has traversed the underlying catacombs need not be
delicate about taking a nip of spirits or a hunch of bread. Both were in
a cupboard in the little domicile, supplied with a porter's chair so
ample as to be the watcher's bed, and a stove where a fire merrily
burned, crackling with billets of pine wood.

The disappearance was the more strange, as on a framed placard, at the
base of which was a row of brazen knobs, there was a formal injunction
for the gatewarder never to go away without his place being taken by
another "from sunset to sunrise and an hour after!"

Claudius knew what those knobs and the instructions portended in this
adjunct to the charnel house. The public mortuary was at the other end
of the wires from those bells; the custom was to attach them to the dead
so that, if their slumbers were not that knowing no waking and they
stirred even so little as a finger, the electric transmitter which they
agitated would sound the appeal.

And now the watcher, on whom perhaps depended the duration of a worthier
life than his, had paltered with his trust, while drinking at the
beer-house or chattering with a sweetheart, the bell might ring
unheeded, and the unhappy creature, falling with the last tremor of
vitality, to obtain a desperate succor, would become indeed the corpse
like which he had been laid out in the morgue.

Claudius smiled grimly and sadly. On what flimsy bases the best plant of
wise men too often rest! The latest power of nature had been harnessed
to do man service in his utmost extremity; science had perfected its
instruments, but one link in the chain was fallible man. The bell would
tinkle--the watcher would be laughing out of earshot--and the life would
sink back into Lethe after swimming to the shore!

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15