The Napus, page 7
So far as my dear Henriette and I were concerned, we had divided our existence into two parts since we had discovered our reciprocal love: one consecrated to pure sentiment, from which would emerge one day, after the projected marriage, a little Polyplast destined to continue the arduous research of his Mama and Papa; the other dedicated to methodical labor at the Aristotle Foundation.
The conference sessions were held in the vast palace constructed on the site of the old Académie, at the end of the bridge formerly knows as the Pont des Arts. Four hundred armchairs had been set out, some of which were discreetly pierced in view of the great age of the conference-members and the possible relaxation of their smooth muscles. The places reserved for the public only numbered a thousand, and were retained by people of the highest society, attracted by the curiosity of all those old carcasses. The committee comprised the president, two vice-presidents and five secretaries, with half a dozen stewards and technicians attending to the apparatus automatically recording the speeches.
Due to take part in the debate, apart from Ailette, Sidoine and Eustache, and immediately after the funeral oration of Mère Grégeois, were the foreign representatives of the problem of the Napus, eight in number—one of whom, van Sleegen, simultaneously represented Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Holland and Rumania. The others were Murmelthier, Morrow, Harold-Feller (for America), Ladilla, Kasavigata, Salvibianchi and Broussoloff. There was a vestige in the debate of the uses and customs of the old seesaw of the twentieth century called the League of Nations, which had given us the last two Franco-German wars as well as the recent conflagration of the Orient against the Occident, and then vice versa.
But the first thing of all was solemnly to welcome a deputation of negroes partly whitened—and not annihilated—by the Napus, to present what promised to be a most interesting communication regarding the protective virtues of dirt and the danger of cleanliness and hygiene in the face of the plague. As for the cryptogamic gigantism, it had suddenly retreated, as suddenly as it had arrived, from the mushrooms of the Parisian region, only to appear in the countries of the north and the Landes region, where it was literally stifling the pine forests.
There were eleven thick-lipped and flat-nosed negroes with dark and beautiful gazes, who had come by dirigible from the now-overpopulated banks of the Tanganyika in order to enable us to admire the partial whitening of their epidermis, with regard to the face, the arms and loins. The rest of the body was an indecisive shade of dark brown. That abrupt transformation had also commenced on a date corresponding to our third of May 2227 and was, without a doubt an attenuated form of the Napus.
One of them was carrying in his hand the corpse of a tiny elephant sixty centimeters long, an immediate diminution of a pachyderm six meters long and four meters tall. Thus, the Disease, which greatly magnified European mushrooms, minimized African elephants, and—thus far, at least—left near-normal proportions to the rest of creation.
The facility and rapidity of communication had not brought about any change in the intellectual impermeability of races and nations with regard to one another. The negroes imagined that the white men were about to furnish them with a rational explanation of an epidermal event that they considered, themselves, to be a consequence of the wrath of the gods. Their guide explained to us that they experienced a kind of baroque pleasure in these divergences of opinion with regard to causality. They had all immediately made a fetish of the Napus of their climate, and sacrificed children and young animals to it, with all sorts of intoxication, drums and dancing.
While these details were being furnished to the conference-members and the public, the off-white men contemplated the women, rolling veritable ocular billiard-balls of concupiscence and laughing as they pointed at the tiny elephant. Ailette invited them to calm down and behave decently, and the interpreter explained to them that the white men knew no more than they did and wanted to know their opinion, however infantile it might be, of the problem that was preoccupying the world. “For,” he added, “we’re all in the same boat.”
These final words were not to the taste of the American Harold-Feller, from Boston, who had been giving signs of a violent disgust during the discussion with the negroes. He stood up abruptly in his magnificent yellow leather boots and declared in English that there could be no question, for civilized individuals and “people of color,” of being “in the same boat.” Such an expression giving the impression of constituting a criticism of the legislation of the United States and essential moral law, he preferred to shake the dust from his fifty-dollar footwear over such a degenerate conference.
This time, Sidoine and Eustache rose to their feet together to protest against the awkwardness of the stammering and confused Professor Ailette, and to give a assurance that they would establish all the necessary difference between the poor river-dwellers of the Tanganyika, no matter how overpopulated they might be, and a professor of physiology from Boston.
Harold-Feller did not seem convinced, however. “I demand the arbitrage of Maître Claude Bernard,” he said, in French.
It was explained to him that Claude Bernard had died in 1878—which is to say, 349 years ago—and not only had a lot of water passed under the bridge, but a lot of glycogen through the liver, since then. That observation seemed to appease him without humiliating him.
Professor Sidoine observed that, the black men having been immunized by the change of coloration, against death without remains, there would come a time, as the plague continued its ravages, when they would come to repopulate Europe. That prospect brought grimaces to the charming faces in the gallery. Then the interpreter was invited to take away “these sympathetic African specimens,” while making sure that, if one of them died during his sojourn in Europe, his skin would be taken to the Aristotle Foundation for histological examination. As for the cadaver of the shrunken elephant, it was decided that it would be sent to the Museum.
The following communication brought to the podium a hairy, bearded, shrill and gesticulating individual of repulsive dirtiness, without underwear, who was nevertheless an authority on new or bizarre diseases, principally of colonial origin: Professor Pafenier. He had devoted a large part of his already-long life—he was approaching sixty—to combating the excess of hygiene: baths the employment of soap, massages, perfumes, improved toilet facilities, all sewers, and all supposed public health measures in general.
Pafenier had noticed that cases of longevity had appeared, since the remotest ages, in rural milieux where toilets are unknown and hygiene neglected or forgotten. He preached by example, not having washed for ten years. Since the appearance of the Napus he had been studying the social and hygienic situation of the victims of aphanasia and he had, he insisted, been able to verify the excellence of his thesis. Those people who, like the Eskimos, lived in a veritable matrix of dirt, were free of the implacable Disease.
The affirmations and explanations, as well as the sight and astonishing odor of the orator, excited the hilarity of the audience, which the president and vice-presidents had to call to order several times.
Pafenier, excited by his success, proposed to render himself as naked as a worm, in order to demonstrate the thickness of his protective carapace, but the committee rejected the proposal. He withdrew, cursing and thumbing his nose at the steward. Harold-Feller, as clean as a newly-minted dollar, whom that communication had scandalized, got up again and promised a reward of fifty thousand dollars to anyone who provided proof of the napusification of an incontestably disgusting dirty individual.
On that note, the session was suspended for a quarter of an hour and the secretaries had the shrunken and warped elephant passed around the ranks of the Academicians. Then the whitened negroes were examined at close range, as people at a circus, during the interval, go to consider the clever animals and chat to the brightly-costumed and heavily made-up clowns.
Almost no one had retaken their places when my friend Polyplast 14.026 gave the savant post-mortem—or, more exactly, post-napusum—eulogy for Mère Grégeois. Who, in any case, was interested now in controversies about cyton, as obsolete as the sera of the twentieth century? While Poly 14,026 was reeling off dates and figures, I observed the indifference of the few Academicians present, and noticed that many of them, although they were specialists, had been unaware of, or had forgotten, the resounding achievements of our defunct colleague. My dear Henriette, much rebuked by the harpy, and very unjustly, was well-avenged.
On the resumption, it was necessary to submit to a tedious lecture by Ailette, enunciated in his feeble and hoarse voice, composed of interminable references. This fastidious enumeration was followed by a bitter, even polemical, and thoroughly-documented speech by Sidoine, who advocated not merely the limitation but the suppression of all the electrical, magnetic and wave-transmitting installations throughout the European nations.
If indignation makes poets, Sidoine appeared in the eyes of everyone as a lyricist of a particular sort, prophesying on an anti-electric Sinai. He depicted the force—in sum unknown, although it was presumably the issue of the rupture or clash of atoms—gradually destroying the universal equilibrium, disharmonizing human tissues, more fragile and complex than those of even higher animals, and, in the final count, ending up annihilating them by virtue of a sort of secret superincandescence.
Sidoine, who was also claimed to have been belatedly touched by love, was not only a scientist; he was an artist, who, unlike Ailette, observed a remarkable gradation in his lectures. Nothing is harder than exciting the attention of old men laden with honors, uniquely occupied with themselves, some of them close to senility, who can only, even in the absence of any napusiform threat, calculate with anguish the moment of their final departure; Sidoine, however, achieved that tour de force. Veiled or vitreous gazes, with recently-treated cataracts and crumpled eyelids, and wrinkled foreheads devoid of eyebrows, turned toward him while he vaticinated, in a powerful voice, with a poignant expression and his prominent features feverish and radiant.
Henriette whispered tremulously in my ear: “He’s a strapping fellow, there’s no denying it.” That remark filled me with jealousy.
“Messieurs,” said Sidonie, by way of conclusion, “I have explained my point of view, which is explicit, with total frankness. I do not conceal from myself for a moment the gravity of the extraordinary measure that I am proposing to all the legislatures of Europe and America, at the expense of all our finances. But it is the existence of the civilized peoples that the frightful Napus threatens. You have heard, just now, the valiant representatives of the black world, spared, save for their coloration, from the plague. Do you want to disappear, en bloc, from here, in a matter of years or months—the latest statistics are terrifying—and make way for the sons of Ham? Then you have only to continue making use of the apparatus that is undermining our organisms and dispersing them, at a given moment, in the ether. The Baconian tables of presence and absence are implacable and inflexible, and they indicate the Cause, inexorably. Suppress that Cause and you will live. Allow it to act, and you will die.”
Unanimous applause greeted this impatiently-awaited conclusion—although Eustache pinched his lips, for the difficult task was incumbent on him of contradicting a fellow like Sidoine and incriminating, without any great plausibility, the cinebook.
Then, however, an incident occurred of extraordinary gravity, which neither Henriette or I had anticipated.
Scarcely had Sidoine left the podium than the German delegate Murmelthier, known for his work on vegetal alimentation and the parametabolic dispersal of cellular plasma, succeeded him. He was a fat beer-drinker, whose face looked as if it had been rubbed with carmine, endowed with a formidable Teutonic accent, who imagined—quite wrongly-that he could speak “Gallic” fluently. His lips were like draught-excluders, his nose bifurcated the extremity of a pig’s hind trotter. His arms were short and he wore sparkling improved spectacles, which he pushed up mechanically to his forehead when he wanted to produce an oratorical effect.
Murmelthier did not speak; he roared.
“Colleague,” he said, indicating Sidoine, “your audacity is great to bring here such a diabolical proposition. What is, in fact, present civilization if not wave-transmission and electromagnetism in general, and how has social unrest been vanquished if not by the well-being of domestic power and universal energy distribution? I declare”—and he extended his short arms and stubby fingers—“that Germany will never accept such a proposition. I add that it will be considered as a manifestation of hostility. In addition, and from the viewpoint of method, is it certain that the negroes of the Tanganyika are ignorant or negligent of electromagnetic systems? Is it certain that it is that ignorance and abstention from wave-transmission, or the cellular quality of their skin, that has spared them from the Napus?”
The interpreter repeated these words, to which the negroes replied calmly that, sixty years ago, the river-dwellers of the Tanganyika had renounced electricity and magnetism, their vanities and works, and had returned to prayers, supplications, sacrifices, daces around fetishes, which were judged to be much more effective and much less dangerous. “No shocks, no killing, no explosions, no Napus.”
Sidoine was exultant, and took his neighbors and colleagues as witnesses to the perfect common sense of the coffee-colored gentleman with the green stripes.
Van Sleegen, cold, tranquil, imperturbable, and compassed, declared in the name of Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Switzerland, and Rumania that he would adhere, without any reservations, to Sidoine’s proposal, and that the scientific committees of those various nations would impose this wise view on their respective governments.
The Japanese delegate Kasavigata said yes with a rapid nod of his handsome yellow head. Numerous cases of Napus had recently appeared in Japan, which had also been subjected, in a hundred years, to eighty earthquakes and as many volcanic eruptions—but the prolific valor of that intrepid people, who offer the sternest resistance to blows of that sort, did not seem to have had any effect. For three hundred and fifty years they had been preparing to wage a naval war on the United States. On the scientific side, they presented the particularity that they continued to concoct sera, as in the distant times of the Institut Pasteur. The dogmas of that Institut had been confused in Japan with the national religion, and the sera in question, henceforth deemed ineffective with regard to humans, were reputed there to be agreeable to the gods.
More timorous that his colleagues, the English delegate Morrow asked for time to communicate with London and the government of the Britannic Republic before offering formal support to Sidoine’s antielectric motion. But the British government, composed of Conservatives and fearing, in consequence, upsetting the Liberals and the Labor party, as well as the Dominions, also asked for a delay before giving Morrow a firm response. Now, it happened that neither the Liberals nor the Labor party had a clear view on the question, and that both feared bringing about a political, economical and financial upheaval by subscribing to a universal prohibition of electricity, magnetism and waves. As for the Dominions, notably Canada, the authorities were reluctant to bring about a rupture with what had, until then, been considered as the very emblem of progress. All these tergiversations, gradually revealed to the conference, indisposed the majority with regard to the English delegation, and England was falsely accused of covertly favoring the Napus as being “capable of depopulating Europe to the advantage of the less-afflicted British Isles.”
However, while Morrow—who belonged to an excellent family that had furnished several peers and two bankers—remained glued to the telephone and replete with embarrassments, the Spanish delegate, Ladilla, held forth with extravagant gestures, arguing in both directions. Having received a solid philosophical education at the University of Salamanca, that plump, dark-haired man with a highly-colored complexion, had a passion for pros and cons, and destroyed an argument as soon as he had given it weight. He expressed himself in a mixture of Castilian and French, which was very picturesque but difficult to follow.
“Do you know, Monsieur, that this question is not one of those that a good solution can be suddenly brought against. If you extirpate electricity, could be that you will not extirpate the Napus. In that manner will have thrown into misery a considerable number of persons, workers and others, who will go from there to revolution, to subversion, to rioting, to carnage, to massacre. What an unpheaval! What a disaster! What universal desolation!”
The more thunderous Ladilla’s accent became, sometimes emphasizing the penultimate syllable in the Castilian fashion, sometime the antepenultimate in the Catalonian, the more the audience in their armchairs and the public seats felt a strong desire to sleep, yawning, stretching and closing their eyes. The indefatigable orator took up an antithesis after every thesis, and a synthesis after every antithesis, accompanying his periods with supple gestures, as if steeped in oil, which further augmented the torpor. Deprived, to their good fortune, of parliaments, courts, forums and so on for three hundred years, the most loquacious of Spaniards seized and made the most of the opportunities offered by conferences and other debates. Woe betide anyone who opened those floodgates!
After having listened to that oratory monstrosity for six hours, the scientists and onlookers were no further forward that at the start. Everyone was harassed by exhaustion, as if they had become somnolent in the middle of a military band principally composed of brass instruments. The session was suspended until the following day…hasta la mañana. Everyone went to get a good night’s sleep, after a meal, with a horrible and nauseous headache—as often happens at those kinds of feasts.
Still to be heard were Salvibianchi, the Italian delegate, and Broussiloff, the Russian delegate, Italy and Russia had suffered from the Napus more than any other nation for a month, by reason of the density of their populations, and they were inclined to accept any method of combating the plague, however harsh, that seemed to have a chance of success.
