Là-bas — Chapter XXII

CHAPTER XXII

"You like that?"

asked Mme.

Carhaix.

"For a change I served the broth yesterday and kept the beef for tonight.

So we'll have vermicelli soup, a salad of cold meat with pickled herring and celery, some nice mashed potatoes _au gratin_, and a dessert.

And then you shall taste the new cider we just got."

"Oh!"

and "Ah!"

exclaimed Des Hermies and Durtal, who, while waiting for dinner, were sipping the elixir of life.

"Do you know, Mme.

Carhaix, your cooking tempts us to the sin of gluttony--If you keep on you will make perfect pigs of us."

"Oh, you are joking.

I wonder what is keeping Louis."

"Somebody is coming upstairs," said Durtal, hearing the creaking of shoes in the tower.

"No, it isn't his step," and she went and opened the door.

"It's Monsieur Gévingey."

And indeed, clad in his blue cape, with his soft black hat on his head, the astrologer entered, made a bow, like an actor taking a curtain call, nibbed his great knuckles against his massive rings, and asked where the bell-ringer was.

"He is at the carpenter's. The oak beams holding up the big bell are cracked and Louis is afraid they will break down."

"Any news of the election?"

and Gévingey took out his pipe and filled it.

"No. In this quarter we shan't know the results until nearly ten o'clock.

There's no doubt about the outcome, though, because Paris is strong for this democratic stuff.

General Boulanger will win hands down."

"This certainly is the age of universal imbecility."

Carhaix entered and apologized for being so late.

While his wife brought in the soup he took off his goloshes and said, in answer to his friends' questions, "Yes; the dampness had rusted the frets and warped the beams.

It was time for the carpenter to intervene.

He finally promised that he would be here tomorrow and bring his men without fail.

Well, I am mighty glad to get back.

In the streets everything whirls in front of my eyes.

I am dizzy.

I don't know what to do.

The only places where I am at home are the belfry and this room.

Here, wife, let me do that," and he pushed her aside and began to stir the salad.

"How good it smells!"

said Durtal, drinking in the incisive tang of the herring.

"Do you know what this perfume suggests?

A basket funnelled fireplace, twigs of juniper snapping in it, in a ground-floor room opening on to a great harbour.

It seems to me there is a sort of salt water halo around these little rings of gold and rusted iron.

--Exquisite," he said as he tasted the salad.

"We'll make it again for you, Monsieur Durtal," said Mme.

Carhaix, "you are not hard to please."

"Alas!"

said her husband, "his palate isn't, but his soul is.

When I think of his despairing aphorisms of the other night!

However, we are praying God to enlighten him.

I'll tell you," he said to his wife, "we will invoke Saint Nolasque and Saint Theodulus, who are always represented with bells.

They sort of belong to the family, and they will certainly be glad to intercede for people who revere them and their emblems."

"It would take a stunning miracle to convince Durtal," said Des Hermies.

"Bells have been known to perform them," said the astrologer.

"I remember to have read, though I forget where, that angels tolled the knell when Saint Isidro of Madrid was dying."

"And there are many other cases," said Carhaix.

"Of their own accord the bells chimed when Saint Sigisbert chanted the De Profundis over the corpse of the martyr Placidus, and when the body of Saint Ennemond, Bishop of Lyons, was thrown by his murderers into a boat without oars or sails, the bells rang out, though nobody set them in motion, as the boat passed down the Saône."

"Do you know what I think?"

asked Des Hermies, looking at Carhaix.

"I think you ought to prepare a compendium of hagiography or a really informative work on heraldry."

"What makes you think that?"

"Well, you are, thank God, remote from this epoch and fond of things which it knows nothing about or execrates, and a work of that kind would take you still further away.

My good friend, you are the man forever unintelligible to the coming generations.

To ring bells because you love them, to give yourself over to the abandoned study of feudal art or monasticism would make you complete--take you clear out of Paris, out of the world, back into the Middle Ages."

"Alas," said Carhaix, "I am only a poor ignorant man.

But the type you speak of does exist.

In Switzerland, I believe, a bell-ringer has for years been collecting material for a heraldic memorial.

I should think," he continued, laughing, "that his avocation would interfere with his vocation."

"And do you think," said Gévingey bitterly, "that the profession of astrologer is less decried, less neglected?"

"How do you like our cider?"

asked the bell-ringer's wife.

"Do you find it a bit raw?"

"No, it's tart if you sip it, but sweet if you take a good mouthful," answered Durtal.

"Wife, serve the potatoes.

Don't wait for me.

I delayed so long getting my business done that it's time for the angelus.

Don't bother about me.

Go on eating.

I shall catch up with you when I get back."

And as her husband lighted his lantern and left the room the woman brought in on a plate what looked to be a cake covered with golden brown caramel icing.

"Mashed potatoes, I thought you said!"

"_Au gratin_.

Browned in the oven.

Taste it.

I put in everything that ought to make it very good."

All exclaimed over it.

Then it became impossible to hear oneself.

Tonight the bell boomed out with unusual clarity and power.

Durtal tried to analyze the sound which seemed to rock the room.

There was a sort of flux and reflux of sound.

First, the formidable shock of the clapper against the vase, then a sort of crushing and scattering of the sounds as if ground fine with the pestle, then a rounding of the reverberation; then the recoil of the clapper, adding, in the bronze mortar, other sonorous vibrations which it ground up and cast out and dispersed through the sounding shutters.

Then the bell strokes came further apart.

Now there was only the whirring as of a spinning wheel; a few crumbs were slow about falling.

And now Carhaix returned.

"It's a two-sided age," said Gévingey, pensive.

"People believe nothing, yet gobble everything.

Every day a new science is invented.

Nobody reads that admirable Paracelsus who rediscovered all that had ever been found and created everything that had not.

Say now to your congress of scientists that, according to this great master, life is a drop of the essence of the stars, that each of our organs corresponds to a planet and depends upon it; that we are, in consequence, a foreshortening of the divine sphere.

Tell them--and this, experience attests--that every man born under the sign of Saturn is melancholy and pituitous, taciturn and solitary, poor and vain; that that sluggish star predisposes to superstition and fraud, directs epilepsies and varices, hemorrhoids and leprosies; that it is, alas!

the great purveyor to hospital and prison--and the scientists will shrug their shoulders and laugh at you.

The glorified pedants and homiletic asses!"

"Paracelsus," said Des Hermies, "was one of the most extraordinary practitioners of occult medicine.

He knew the now forgotten mysteries of the blood, the still unknown medical effects of light.

Professing--as did also the cabalists, for that matter--that the human being is composed of three parts, a material body, a soul, and a perispirit called also an astral body, he attended this last especially and produced reactions on the carnal envelope by procedures which are either incomprehensible or fallen into disuse.

He cared for wounds by treating not the tissues, but the blood which came out of them.

However, we are assured that he healed certain ailments."

"Thanks to his profound knowledge of astrology," said Gévingey.

"But if the study of the sidereal influence is so important," said Durtal, "why don't you take pupils?"

"I can't get them.

Where will you unearth people willing to study twenty years without glory or profit?

Because, to be able to establish a horoscope one must be an astronomer of the first order, know mathematics from top to bottom, and one must have put in long hours tussling with the obscure Latin of the old masters.

Besides, you must have the vocation and the faith, and they are lost."

"Just the way it is with bell ringing," said Carhaix.

"No, you see, messieurs," Gévingey went on, "the day when the grand sciences of the Middle Ages fell foul of the systematic and hostile indifference of an impious people was the death-day of the soul in France.

All we can do now is fold our arms and listen to the wild vagaries of society, which by turns shrieks with farcical joy and bitter grief."

"We must not despair.

A better time is coming," said Mme.

Carhaix in a conciliating tone, and before she retired she shook hands with all her guests.

"The people," said Des Hermies, pouring the water into the coffee-pot, "instead of being ameliorated with time, grow, from century to century, more avaricious, abject, and stupid.

Remember the Siege, the Commune;

the unreasonable infatuations, the tumultuous hatreds, all the dementia of a deteriorated, malnourished people in arms.

They certainly cannot compare with the naïf and tender-hearted plebes of the Middle Ages.

Tell us, Durtal, how the people acted when Gilles de Rais was conducted to the stake."

"Yes, tell us," said Carhaix, his great eyes made watery by the smoke of his pipe.

"Well, you know, as a consequence of unheard-of crimes, the Marshal de Rais was condemned to be hanged and burned alive.

After the sentence was passed, when he was brought back to his dungeon, he addressed a last appeal to the Bishop, Jean de Malestroit, beseeching the Bishop to intercede for him with the fathers and mothers of the children Gilles had so ferociously violated and put to death, to be present when he suffered.

"The people whose hearts he had lacerated wept with pity.

They now saw in this demoniac noble only a poor man who lamented his crimes and was about to confront the Divine Wrath.

The day of execution, by nine o'clock they were marching through the city in processional.

They chanted psalms in the streets and took vows in the churches to fast three days in order to help assure the repose of the Marshal's soul."

"Pretty far, as you see, from American lynch law," said Des Hermies.

"Then," resumed Durtal, "at eleven they went to the prison to get Gilles de Rais and accompanied him to the prairie of Las Biesse, where tall stakes stood, surmounted by gibbets.

"The Marshal supported his accomplices, embraced them, adjured them to have 'great displeasure and contrition of their ill deeds' and, beating his breast, he supplicated the Virgin to spare them, while the clergy, the peasants, and the people joined in the psalmody, intoning the sinister and imploring strophes of the chant for the departed: "'Nos timemus diem judicii Quia mali et nobis conscii.

Sed tu, Mater summi concilii, Para nobis locum refugii, O Maria.

"'Tunc iratus Judex--'" "Hurrah for Boulanger!"

The noise as of a stormy sea mounted from the Place Saint Sulpice, and a hubbub of cries floated up to the tower room.

"Boulange--Lange--" Then an enormous, raucous voice, the voice of an oyster woman, a push-cart peddler, rose, dominating all others, howling, "Hurrah for Boulanger!"

"The people are cheering the election returns in front of the city hall," said Carhaix disdainfully.

They looked at each other.

"The people of today!"

exclaimed Des Hermies.

"Ah," grumbled Gévingey, "they wouldn't acclaim a sage, an artist, that way, even--if such were conceivable now--a saint."

"And they did in the Middle Ages."

"Well, they were more naïf and not so stupid then," said Des Hermies.

"And as Gévingey says, where now are the saints who directed them?

You cannot too often repeat it, the spiritual councillors of today have tainted hearts, dysenteric souls, and slovenly minds.

Or they are worse.

They corrupt their flock.

They are of the Docre order and Satanize."

"To think that a century of positivism and atheism has been able to overthrow everything but Satanism, and it cannot make Satanism yield an inch."

"Easily explained!"

cried Carhaix.

"Satan is forgotten by the great majority.

Now it was Father Ravignan, I believe, who proved that the wiliest thing the Devil can do is to get people to deny his existence."

"Oh, God!"

murmured Durtal forlornly, "what whirlwinds of ordure I see on the horizon!"

"No," said Carhaix, "don't say that.

On earth all is dead and decomposed.

But in heaven!

Ah, I admit that the Paraclete is keeping us waiting.

But the texts announcing his coming are inspired.

The future is certain.

There will be light," and with bowed head he prayed fervently.

Des Hermies rose and paced the room.

"All that is very well," he groaned, "but this century laughs the glorified Christ to scorn.

It contaminates the supernatural and vomits on the Beyond.

Well, how can we hope that in the future the offspring of the fetid tradesmen of today will be decent?

Brought up as they are, what will they do in Life?"

"They will do," replied Durtal, "as their fathers and mothers do now.

They will stuff their guts and crowd out their souls through their alimentary canals."

FINIS

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