The Conqueror of Death, page 18
The long minutes went by—desperately long, in truth—but no obstacle emerged. And yet, the inventor was astonished to find himself devoid of strength to hope, when hope appeared to be permissible. He was invaded, unwillingly, by a very slow progressive paralysis of his faculties. Only the power of the enumeration, having taken on the force of a sort of instinct, still subsisted in the numbness that lulled him during each minute, the repetition of the same number, which, under the influence of the irresistible attraction of the brilliant spot in the vessel, was gradually augmenting to the extent of a blissful torpor, to the supreme peril, to slumber.
He murmured, in a voice that was still distinct, the number 495.
He began to recite it internally, but the ideally-articulated speech that designates a silent thought without the aid of the tongue gradually lost its clarity and was stifled in a sort of rhythm that only brought a distant cadence to the last glimmers of his perception, with which it was content.
Everything was conspiring against him: the fascination of the copper basin, his identical sense, devoid of meaning, of figures repeated sixty times over, fatigue and emotion, the alternations of despair and joy of the previous days, and even the movement of the train, rocked smoothly, like the maternal oscillations of a cradle, by the supple suspensions of the carriage.
He was asleep—what am I saying? He was dreaming!
His soul was traveling the immense space that dreams, liberated from the yoke of reason, open to the sleep of the unfortunate. The sky was radiant, illuminating the shimmering Seine. The bank was covered with people in their Sunday clothes. In the middle of the river was La Flèche, liberated from its stays, finished, painted white, decked with flags. He gave a signal. The ship slid along its slipway, in the midst of a slight puff of smoke. Its stern parted the tranquil waters, a joyous cheer rose up, and La Flèche, elegant and proud, swayed gently on the soft undulations, buoyed up by her majestic immersion.
All that, that entire triumphal scene, unfolded in the thirty seconds that separated him fatally from failure.
Springfield had straightened up, and was gazing at the individual overwhelmed by the absurd brutality of a natural need that seems so easy to vanquish. He gazed without his physiognomy expressing any sentiment of satisfied hatred or imperious pity, without anything being legible in his features but the curiosity of an observer. It was, in fact, at that moment, the physician alone who was following the phases of a natural phenomenon. And yet, the man had sought a vengeance. He knew full well to what ambushes he was exposing the unfortunate man he hated. He had calculated the power and the mode of action of all the bonds with which he had surrounded his mind. Was his vengeance not complete, then? Was there some chance that the fall of the doubloon would wake Pierre from his deep sleep, or that, if he did wake up, he would instantly find in his mind the exact figure to pronounce?
The scientist had taken out his chronometer. The speed being perceptibly constant, the coin ought to fall in ten seconds.
Seven went by. Then the eighth. Then the ninth...
Then, at the precise moment that the needle passed its zenith, Pierre said “Four hundred and ninety-six” in a firm voice—without ceasing to sleep.
At the instant when the second syllable vibrated, the doubloon fell.
The hypnotism that had brought Pierre his fatal slumber had also given him his lucidity.
Springfield had anticipated that effect, so he did not appear to be surprised. He remained motionless for three minutes, still gazing at the sleeper, who counted the successive kilometers without error at the very moment when the click was about to occur, as if he were able to see through the iron wall the play of the mechanism that produced it. Then he reached up to the window next to his head and opened it.
It was raining. The air came in through the opening in gusts, charged with cold raindrops. That sudden chill, falling on Pierre’s head, gradually broke the charm.
Springfield had resumed his place and seemed to be absorbed more than ever in his calculations. But this time he was wearing his ironic and malevolent smile, ready to enjoy the mental torture that was about to assail the patient when he awoke.
The effect of the cold air and the rain was rapid. Pierre opened his eyes, looked around and sat up abruptly. He recovered consciousness of his situation, and formulated the desolating reality in a realization that summarized all his anguish:
I fell asleep!
Finding Springfield in the same attitude, however, he said to himself: Perhaps I’ve only been asleep for a very short time; perhaps I simply lost consciousness. What was the last number? Four hundred and ninety-five. So it’s four hundred and ninety-six that I have to count. Evidently, that must be the case, for if it were not, Springfield would have told me that I’d lost the game. And yet, it’s not possible…I’m conscious of having slept for more than sixty seconds, and the coin hasn’t fallen yet. I was doubtless only drowsy, while maintaining consciousness of what I had to do. But I was dreaming…no matter! Sometimes one walks in one’s sleep, while dreaming, and yet avoiding obstacles. Then again, I have a vague memory of hearing my voice. Yes, I’m sure of it; I spoke. And since Springfield hasn’t said anything to me, I was counting.
Then, the question gripped him: Where am I up to?
He had scarcely arrived at the conclusion that all was not lost when that poignant interrogation loomed up before him.
If any element could permit him to solve the problem, it was necessary for him to extract it from his deductions in a matter of seconds. But what did time matter? What miraculous revelation could come to his aid to tell him how many numbers he had counted and fill in the gap that sleep had left in his memory. It was over: he would have to force himself to search, for a matter of seconds, for the solution of an insoluble difficulty.
Prey to a frightful constriction of the heart, his clenched fist on his breast, waiting for the moment when, the next coin having fallen, he would be obliged, in remaining silent, to admit defeat, the unfortunate man stared at the three mute dials, whose revelatory graduations were pitilessly masked by the circular screens that the atrocious hand of the far-sighted Englishman had placed there.
To think that salvation was there, behind that frail white paper, and that he could not tear away the obstacle and discover the saving secret!
Suddenly, a rush of blood rose to his face. For a few seconds, his eyes took on a frightful fixity, an indication of the rapid and superhuman work that his brain was doing.
Springfield had straightened up, directing his gaze at Pierre, hanging on his lips, certain that this time, the double vision of hypnosis would not come to his aid.
The patient was mentally calculating some mysterious equation. Suddenly, he straightened up, met the gaze of his sinister companion, in whom he now saw a torturer that it was necessary to battle to the end, and, at the moment when the strident vibration of the copper rang out, he cried, with a superb tone of challenge and victory: “Five hundred!”
The malevolent individual, beaten once again, stifled a cry of rage. Pierre was not mistaken!
What supernatural intuition, then, did he have at his disposal? The piece of paper on which the numbers had been ticked off was at the other end of the carriage. The annular masks on the dials were intact.
White with fury, he sat down, reproaching himself for having had the honesty, in the cruelty of his proof, not to abuse his victim’s sleep by telling him, when he woke up, that he had stopped counting. Then, suddenly, he burst out laughing and shrugged his shoulders. He had found the only plausible explanation.
Pierre’s sleep had been feigned.
Yes, obviously, the inventor had wanted to test his tormentor himself, and had thus defeated him with his own weapons. And on observing that fact, which seemed to him to be blindingly clear, Springfield sensed his inveterate and overexcited hatred boiling within him, and murmured; “Patience; the night is long, and there are still three hundred coins to fall.”
The night was, indeed, long.
The explanation that Springfield had found was, of course, false.
Pierre with his investigative mind, had simply made the following observation:
On the three dials, he could only see the needles. Those three needles, like those of a compass, each extended across the entire diameter of the dial. They were all, at the present moment, identical in direction and rigorously parallel, except that the indicative painted tip of the dial indicating hundreds was pointing downwards while the other two were pointing upwards.
From that starting-point, by means of his habit of making deductions, he had reasoned as follows:
The graduation of the three dials is necessarily decimal. The vertical diameter of the dial indicating hundreds thus has the zero at the top and a hundred at the bottom. The indicator needle being very close to downward verticality, a century is about to be completed, but how close is it? Within ten kilometers, at the most, since the needle indicating tens is near its zero point and is separated from it by a graduation of ten. But as the needle indicating units is similarly close to its zero point, it indicates that nine kilometers out of the ten have been used up. Therefore, the next fall will mark a round hundred.
Which hundred? Before going to sleep I’d counted to 495. I’m conscious of having slept for a very short time. If the hundred that I’m expecting were the sixth, I would have slept for about an hour and forty-five minutes. I’m certain of the contrary, for, in addition to the approximate notion that I have of the duration of my sleep, I couldn’t have counted more than four numbers in my sleep without making a mistake, and Springfield would already have told me if I had. The next number is, therefore, five hundred.
Another proof. The decimal apparatus is evidently conceived in such a manner as the register a round number of kilometers, a thousand or ten thousand; if it were ten thousand, the present position of the needle indicating hundreds would indicate a journey of five thousand kilometers traveled, half the total of the graduations of the dial. Now, it’s only eight hundred from Paris to Marseilles. The dial therefore indicates a maximum of a thousand kilometers—which is perfectly logical, the first dial containing ten units, the second ten tens and the third ten hundreds. The figure at the base of the vertical diameter therefore marks half the thousand—which is to say, five hundred.
The gravity of the situation had given Pierre an ephemeral lucidity. After that immense effort, however, he experienced an unfamiliar sensation, a feverish and dolorous overexcitement, which was succeeded, without transition by periods of depression, mental anguish and exhaustion. When the overexcitement was dominant, he stood up and directed a savage glare at his torturer, even advancing toward him for the two or three paces that the narrow space permitted, clenching his fists and leaning on the large central oak table, as if he wanted to embed them in the hard wood. Then the invincible torpor followed, all the more terrible because he was conscious of it as it invaded and took possession of him, like a fainting-fit whose approach one senses and whose effect one anticipates. Stronger than the erethism and the numbness, however, the instinct of the numeration was stubbornly, almost mechanically, sustained by virtue of a kind of indestructible momentum: the strange force that, even in madmen, allows the obsession pursued in a time of sanity to subsist the midst of a general disruption of the faculties.
The time flew by. The kilometers elapsed. The sun rose, illuminating a misty and sinister daylight, rendered even paler by the alliance of the lamps, burning ruddily in the carriage, whose enormous dynamometers were bolted to the ceiling. And in that diffuse and dead light, which gave objects indecisive contours and fantastic reflections, Pierre, either braced like a tiger, his eyes launching flames from their reddened irises, or slumped on the stool with a corpse-like lividity, was still counting, counting, counting...
Springfield was afraid now. He had not foreseen such phases. He had counted on enjoying a fearful struggle, in which his hatred, his vengeance and the instincts of a cold and cruel observer would all find their aliment. He had triumphantly imagined an unfortunate supplicant, sobbing, bowed down by the humiliation of defeat, the fear of returning empty-handed, under the annihilation of hopes already anticipated. But his physiological science had only calculated the first phases of that battle. The physician-engineer had not imagined the persistent victory, overcoming everything, leading his wretched victim to the intelligence of the web that had been spun, to the fury and exasperation of the whole organism, unbalanced by cerebral efforts, and alternatives capable of breaking any mental spring.
Yes, Springfield was afraid. His mask of impassivity had abandoned him. He was no longer pretending, now, to continue his experiments while the other struggled, and his hand trembled as he ticked off, by means of a last appeal to his self-composure, the numbers that Pierre uttered in a hoarse voice, the echoes of which made the copper vibrate..
He certainly felt vigorous and strong, capable of defending himself against an ordinary man, but not against an individual whose nervous system, thus overexcited, might triple his strength. And he watched, with his eyes dilated, all the movements of the companion who held his life in his crazed hands, with whom he was implacably trapped by the vertiginous rapidity of the express train.
The ordeal was approaching its end. The final hundred was already well advanced. Pierre had quit his seat. He had no more need, now, to look at the basin or listen carefully. The number emerged, with mathematical precision, as the coin fell through the air. The victim was three paces away from the torturer and seemed ready to exchange roles.
With his arms folded across his breast, Springfield, his hair bristling, his complexion pale, recoiled inch by inch—and Pierre, whose fits of prostration had ceased, advanced without saying anything, his lips contracted by a frightful rictus, his lips bloody from the bites he had inflicted on them.
The Englishman could feel the draught of his hot breath. Hideous, paralyzing terror took possession of him. His legs buckled. He was stammering now; he begged and pleaded with the man whose reason he had killed. He promised to help him, to support him. It was no longer a matter of eighty thousand francs; he would give him half his fortune. His influence, his workshops, everything would be at his disposal.
But Pierre did not reply, and continued laughing, his breast rising with convulsive hiccups.
During this drama the doubloons continued to fall, each at the precise moment, into the bronze basin, immediately saluted by the exact figure that Pierre was now shouting in his enemy’s face.
Then, suddenly, the inventor uttered a ferocious cry, the triumphant song of the brute that succeeded divine reason and howled, to the last ring of the last golden disk: “Eight hundred!”
At the same time he seized a lever and brandished it over Springfield’s head.
During the entire duration of the struggle—the torture—a supreme glimmer of honesty had illuminated the ashes of that intelligence, which was consuming itself. Pierre had respected the life of his adversary while there remained a contract to execute. He wanted that gold, and he had the vague idea that it would not be his until he had counted it to the last doubloon in front of his torturer. Now, it was over; the conditions had been fulfilled. He was about to avenge himself.
But the train was reducing its velocity, approaching a station. Mad with fear, Springfield did not wait for it to stop. He opened the door with the rapidity of thought, and leapt on to the track.
Pierre remained where he was momentarily, amazed by that abrupt disappearance, like a Spanish bull that stops, bewildered, before the solid barrier behind which the agile toreador had disappeared. Then, seemingly forgetting the Englishman, he went back to the other end of the carriage.
The heap of gold was now complete, lying in the basin. He piled it into a large bag that he had brought and sat down until the train stopped at Miramas station. There, he lifted up the bag, which contained nearly sixty pounds of gold, like a father, got down, and calmly walked along the platform, repeating in a loud voice all the numbers that he had counted.
Springfield had fractured his skull when he jumped from the train. He died two days later. He had only recovered consciousness for a few minutes, and had not given any explanation of the mysterious drama of which the experimentation carriage had been the heater. He limited himself to saying, in answer to a question addressed to him by the local Maire, that the possession of the large sum carried by Pierre Marsault was the result of a contract made between them, and that the gold really did belong to his companion.
Six months later, Dr. G***, the illustrious alienist got down from his carriage at the door to a pretty house whose garden extended all the way to the Bassin d’Argenteuil. It was a beautiful sunny day in April. The trees were in bud and the birds were singing. In a warm corner brightened by sunlight, a man with a gentle and sad expression was sitting on a large armchair, contemplated by the gaze of a young woman with red eyelids, who was holding his hand, while two thoughtful children fixed their beautiful blue eyes upon him, charged with mute interrogation.
The doctor went to the man, whose lips were moving incessantly, as if he were muttering some mysterious prayer. He examined him, seemed satisfied, and said to the woman: “We can attempt the experiment now.”
Half an hour later, they brought the invalid on to the little terrace that overlooked the basin, where a few white sails were gliding. Suddenly, there was a blast of a whistle, and a boat appeared, having been hidden until then on the section of the river that was masked by the wall of the property.
It was a steamboat, extremely elegant in form, its hull brightly painted white, which was cleaving through water with a rapidity that was almost prodigious.
The madman stood up, stared for a moment, with his eyes wide open and his finger extended, and then dissolved in tears, crying: “La Flèche!”
Pierre Marsault was saved.
