The Bacchantes, page 12
“Do you have any money? You’ll need that, in any case.”
“No, I don’t have any money. That would only slow me down. I’ll do what the prisoners did in the German war and travel by night, without eating.”
“Take these thirty thousand francs in memory of me. Never tell anyone I gave them to you.”
“Oh, Madame, is it possible? But will I be able to I pay you back some day?”
“Don’t worry about that. I have no need of it. Go—run! Adieu!”
He threw himself on his knees.
The image of the victim suddenly presenting itself to her eyes, Ariana pushed him away, with a movement full of horror and disgust, and disappeared.
He put the wad of bills in his jacket pocket, opened the wooden door slightly, and then, with a lithe bound, slid into the thicket. He crouched down there.
A short while afterwards, he heard the sound of voices some distance away. They were searching for him. He had his plan, formulated a long time ago, which Ariana’s magnificent gift had just simplified unexpectedly: to wait for first light as best he could, to reach the railway branch-line between two stations, at a favorable location he knew, to jump aboard the four a.m. goods train, lie down in an empty wagon and thus to reach, if not Paris, a distant village in the direction of Paris.
In case, for whatever reason, he did not succeed in carrying out this initial plan, several days ago, he had hidden a bicycle, a change of clothes and a hat in the grass of a ditch lower down the Loire. By that means he counted on reaching either Orléans or Tours by road, and by the grace of God. At any rate, it was necessary to act quickly, before the alert was sounded to the police of the entire region.
Briefly, he had thought of taking refuge, once the shot was fired, with Abbé Parroy, who surely would not have refused him sanctuary. The presbytery dog knew him, and would not have barked, and the Flemish servant hated Ségétan, as he did—but a singular delicacy, which counterbalanced his ferocity, caused him to abandon that plan, for he would have put the worthy man in the situation of concealing a criminal, and, if there was an investigation, of perjuring himself.
The murder, in soothing his mind, had rendered him lucid and liberated him from all metal confusion, as well as any apprehension of a further fit. He was entering into a second life by a solemn door, red-stained by diabolical blood. Some other-than-providential power had furnished him, via the hand of an amorous pretty woman, with thirty banknotes, with the aid of which he expected to conquer the world.
For the moment, though, he said to himself, it’s as if I had nothing, since I can’t use the money. He imagined, with amusement, the frightened face of Baume, the grocer in Brancheville, if he were to go in calmly, after this drama, and ask him for change for a thousand francs!
The baying of hounds, not far away, reminded him that there had been a trial of police dogs two years earlier in Blois—but after one of them had become rabid and had bit its handler, that kind of sport had been abandoned. So much the better. The gendarmes knew the roads, but not the multiple shelters of the clumps of trees on the plain and the backs of the Loire. Calvat had a gift, precious in these circumstances. He could crawl and bound like a cat, and no one could catch up with him when he ran. Had someone picked up his rifle, which had been suspended, since his father’s death, from a nail in the dining-room at Les Arges? A family, heirloom, what!
He was hungry. Having put in his pocket, at hazard, a hunk of bread and a slice of sausage, he nibbled both, while pricking up his ears. He recalled the arrival of the morning bread, the young woman as blonde as Ariana, but less beautiful than Ariana, who attended to the hot galettes and gilded loaves in the kitchen. How good that was, with milky coffee, and how adorable Tullie was, passing the butter to everyone with her beautiful arms! Only then did he imagine the grief felt by his stepmother, whom he had adored since the first time he had seen her, so polite and gentle among the peasants, so ignorant of matters of the land, but so avid to learn and make herself useful! Today, infatuated as she was with the monster, she must be cursing him and wishing him dead.
Jean had seen the dawn many times, in various seasons. Never had he awaited it with such impatience, as the prelude to his deliverance.
They’ll all end up going to bed, and between the time when the peasants go back to the farms and the time when they wake up again on the day after the fête, I’ll have a good three hours. As for the local police and the gendarme, they’re not made of more solid matter than the others, and they must have only one desire by now—to go to bed.
His conjecture was sound. Having taken care to bring his watch and wnd it, he observed, by the concealed light of his pocket torch, that by two o’clock in the morning, the vain search had ceased. It was time to go.
The screech of a genuine night bird cut through the darkness. Just as long as Ariana didn’t imagine that he was calling her back! But there was such a difference between that authentic cry and his that he smiled. He knew that the point on the railway that he had chosen was about five kilometers away. It was half past two. The goods train would come around the bend at Image, slowly, at ten past four.
He risked leaving his hiding-place, on all fours. The night had become absolutely calm and silent. Every hundred meters, large hayricks marked out the route that he knew by heart, to the branch-line train that it was necessary not to confuse with the main-line train. The crossing of each of those hundred meters, in the open, represented the worst of ordeals for the young peasant prey to fever. That caused him him to curse the memory of the man whose murder had condemned him to the torture all the more. From time to time, while making a muscular and mental effort, he murmured: “Oh, the bastard!” addressed to the scientist, who was asleep—but not, as he hoped, between four planks.
Thirst had gripped him since eating the sausage, and he had nothing to drink. That was something of which, in his homicidal rage, he had not thought. While wriggling like a snake between the trunks of phantasmal cones, he imagined a bubbling spring, a trickle of water, even a pond, where he could slake his thirst and refresh his burning temples—but the plain remained arid and dismal, and the clumps of trees, convenient for hiding, did not offer the slightest humidity presaging a spring, or even an infiltration. The total absence of birdsong was characteristic of that damnable dryness.
He arrived in that fashion, like a serpent, beneath the green-tinted celestial dome, at the gate of an old cemetery, defended by a worm-eaten barred gate against the improbable curiosity of passers-by. Automatically, he shoved it, begging it not to creak. The grating of a lock, the barking of a dog are so many risks for a man running away, his crime accomplished, seeking to escape punishment.
O miracle! Between two graves with effaced names, invaded by verdure, there was a pitcher full of fresh water, doubtless forgotten by some pious commemoratrix, wife, mother or daughter. The blood-stained fellow knew how to pour water down his throat without his lips touching the vessel, having had a brave Catalan by the name of Gomez under his orders at Les Arges, who had abducted a girl from Quatrebois. He seized the pitcher with a firm hand and emptied its contents into his mouth in an ample—but not too ample—jet. It was a paradise populated with cool angels that inundated his gullet, his pharynx, his esophageal tube and stomach. Those delights he absorbed completely, and until the last icy drop, he thanked heaven for such a gift.
It was then that dawn suddenly broke, as fresh as the redemptive water, fringed with a hint of pink that reddened almost immediately, and then a narrow colar of nacreous light. It was as beautiful as Tullie and he lent it Tullie’s forms, in a sort of desperate amorous ecstasy.
The gate creaked. Jean shuddered. Who was coming here at this hour?
A little old lady appeared, who resembled Mairesse Taupin, the “deckchair attendant,” but tiny and desolate, at this more than early hour. She had a shiny watering-can in her hand.
She came to the young man and whispered to him, in a shadowy voice: “Monsieur le Gardien, can you show me the way to the tomb of General Saint-Onyx-Grane?”
“I don’t know, Madame.”
“How can you not know? I’ve come from Arras, and I sent you notice of my visit last week.” She added, with a pinched expression: “I’m the general’s mother.”
Damn it! thought Calvat. Here’s a witness who could ruin me. He advanced toward the little skeleton, in hat and dress at four o’clock in the morning, looked her in the eyes, and said: “You haven’t seen me, have you? If you ever tell anyone that you saw me in the Lès-Branchillon Cemetery today, I’ll find you and kill you.…”
Then, leaving the early riser to her amazement and fear, he continued on his way at top speed.
He was no more than three hundred meters from the little station of Chaussée Saint-Victor, through which the single-track railway passed, when he saw a sleeping gendarme leaning on the barrier, his rifle at his feet. The first rays of the rising sun lent that scarecrow of sparrows a gilded aureole, comparable to those of saints in books of hours. At Les Arges farm, there was a pious image of that sort, handed down from Calvat great-grandparents. Jean remembered it, on seeing the policeman.
He flattened himself against the last hayrick in the plain of the three villages, and wondered what to do. A metallic sound cut through the dawn. The four o’clock train was being signaled. Too late! Only the route to the Loire remained open, the bicycle and the disguise. Three kilometers in the open was nothing to him.
He set off, having made sure that he still had Ariana’s beneficent banknotes in his pocket.
Rapid and light, as if in a dream, he reached the main road, and thought he was safe there—but his very haste had doomed him. In fact, a watchman, this time in civilian clothes, who was stationed behind a tree on the edge of the road from Paris to Tours, intrigued by the tall slim body launched like a slingshot, sounded several strident whistle-blasts.
Silhouettes appeared in all directions. The real manhunt began.
While accelerating his run in the direction of the river, Jean weighed up his last chance of escape. Three curtains of trees and a few houses separated him from his bicycle. He would only just have time to get astride it, abandoning his change of clothing, and ride off along the Loire, in the opposite direction to Blois. He knew a little ferry of which he could make use. If he got a start, he could cross the river with his machine and get to the other bank—where his pursuers, for lack of a bridge, would be incapable of catching up with him. Once he had shaken them off, he would reappraise the situation. His hope of escape was diminished by half, to be sure, but not completely lost.
The roar of a motorcycle heading toward him at top speed on a steep pebble-strewn slope caused him to make a right turn into some bushes, fortunately not thorny. He did not fall—unlike the gendarme pursuing him, who ran into a large stone and was thrown violently, along with his machine, against a small dry stone wall. There was a dull thud, consecutive to the lurch, and a frightful cry.
He must have been knocked out, Jean thought—but he did not even look round, and, galloping along a bumpy path through a wheat-field at top speed, he perceived the landmarks that he had carefully memorized, and arrived there flat out.
Leaping back on to the bicycle, he assumed that the comrades of the injured gendarme would attend to him first, which is what happened. He therefore thought he was safe when, to the stridulation of whistles and echoes, he saw a sort of colossus rise up in front of him, holding out an arm and shouting: “Halt!” He thought he recognized him as Ségétan’s chauffeur—and it was, indeed, Abrice.
To fight was impossible. The countryside, as the unfortunate well knew, was guarded. There was nothing else to do but die. With a twitch of the handlebars he headed for the Loire, toward a gap in the levée, and plunged violently into the river, flying off the bike, with Tullie’s sweet face in his eyes.
“The bastard’s getting away!” shouted Abrice.
He took an automatic pistol from his pocket and fired in the direction of the drowning man—a cruel and unnecessary precaution, as the fellow could no longer get away.
An hour later, his body was found floating in the midst of water-weed and creepers close to the bank. The bicycle had disappeared, stuck in the mud or carried away by the current. The streaming corpse was pulled on to the bank. His face was still clam and resolute.
In his inside jacket pocket the captain of the gendarmerie found thirty thousand-franc banknotes. “It’s really money—he must have stolen it, the bandit!” he concluded.
One of his subordinates appeared, kepi in hand.
“Well?”
“Dalin’s not dead yet, Captain, but he has a fractured skull. We sent him to the hospital, dying. As for the motorbike, it’s in pieces.”
* * * *
The news of the drama soon spread throughout the region, including the discovery of a large sum of money in the Calvat boy’s pocket. Some said that it was the money from his inheritance, others, more malevolent, that it was Ségétan’s, which Tullie had given him as the price of his attempted murder.
“Good riddance,” said the Master, laconically, when he learned how his murderer had died. That was the general opinion, Jean being too different from others to have been liked, or even missed. It was also said that he was mad.
That was, at any rate, the appreciation transmitted to the examining magistrate in charge of the investigation, Monsieur Clépeside. He was a timorous magistrate, who sometimes went fearfully to court and sometimes concluded that a death was suicide in order to simplify the formalities and shorten the investigation. In every case he was given, he was in haste to reach a conclusion. His horror of the unknown, of enigmas, was great, and learning about the banknotes—soaked but still intact, although the numbers were indecipherable—put him in a bad mood.
“Oh,” he said to his old, permanently coughing clerk Reniflon, “why did the cretin need to take that money with him to his death? What an annoyance! What a sinister annoyance!”
He was nervous of Ségétan’s deposition—which was, however, indispensable. On entering the dark room in which the latter was confined to bed, consigned to obscurity on the orders of his Parisian colleague Pénétrot, his first words were to reassure the invalid.
“My dear Master, the death of the young villain puts an end to the judicial action, so it’s just a matter of a simple formality and purely oral information, which I’ll transmit to my clerk, who will write it down.
The scientist recounted, in the clearest and simplest fashion, how it had happened, and how he had only escaped death by a miracle, in view of the short range at which the shot had been fired. In his opinion, Calvat was a madman, inspired wth homicidal ideas by jealousy.”
“That’s surely true—there’s no doubt about it. I’ll transcribe that declaration word for word. I shall only ask you, finally, what it was that prompted his jealousy?”
“His stepmother, Madame Calvat-Moneuse, the widow of the well-known farmer, with whom he lived at Les Arges farm.”
“And whom you have, Master, I believe, married.…” added the eminent blunderer.
“I haven’t married her yet, but I intend to do so when cured,” replied Ségétan, coldly.
Clépeside knew about the rumor that the thirty banknotes had come from Tullie. In the course of her own deposition, he asked her whether it was true. She replied indignantly in the negative, and that it was an imbecilic and slanderous rumor—but that she had no idea where the money could have come from.
“With whom did the deceased keep company, except for you?”
“Peasants like himself.”
“Was it his inheritance from his father?”
“There were no so-called liquid assets in the legacy. It was all in farmland, in the wealth of the sun, and the Calvat son and I were in joint ownership.”
“Did he pay court to you?”
“Yes. Twice he threw himself upon me while his father was alive and I was obliged to fight him off.…”
“And since old Calvat’s death?”
“He remained placid, but I know that he hated my fiancé.”
“But he supervised the recent meal at the Château de Brancheville, to which the scientists were invited?”
Tullie told him about the epileptic fit, which interested the judge considerably, because it provided a rational explanation for the murder attempt—but it did not explain the wad of thirty banknotes. He anticipated that the Court in Blois would demand an explanation of that.
In the meantime, a host of journalists had descended on the three villages. They had come from Paris, the South, the West, the North and the center of France, some as correspondents of English and American newspapers, and they were collecting the gossip of the country folk, because Ignacio, Bénalep and Dévonet had made the miake of shutting the door in their faces. Abrice, the hero of the latter part of the drama, pocketed five thousand-franc bills in a matter of days.
Then came the photographers who took pictures of the Villa Dyonisos, the Château de Brancheville, Les Arges farm, hayricks, the station, the valley and the levee of the Loire for the illustrated papers, along with portraits of Ségétan, Tullie, the gendarme who had crashed into the wall, Maire Taupin and the Mairesse. Abbé Parroy, tracked by the objective lens as he emerged from his presbytery, had to yield gracefully.
Tullie, of course, received no quarter, and her beautiful face and figure, so voluptuous, went overseas to excite the imagination of remote peoples, cowboys on the pampas and gangsters in Chicago.
* * * *
Ariana, the former star, fearful of the evocation of her rather tumultuous past, shut herself up at Brancheville and did not see any reporters. Her husband had locked the art gallery and then left for Paris.
After a week, assuming that the tumult would have died down, he came home.
“Well, how’s Ségétan?”
“He still can’t see; he’s somber and silent, and Tullie is crazy with anxiety.”
