The Eternal Adam and other stories (31 page)

And the window was closed again. Twenty
fretzers! A grand fee! Risk a cold or lumbago for twenty fretzers, especially
when tomorrow one has to go to Kiltreno to visit the rich Edzingov, laid up
with gout, which is valued at fifty fretzers the visit! With this agreeable
prospect before him, Dr Trifulgas slept more soundly than before.

Swish! Swash! and then rat-tat! rat-tat!
rat-tat! To the noises of the squall were now added three blows of the knocker,
struck by a more decided hand. The doctor slept. He woke, but in a fearful
humour. When he opened the window the storm came in like a charge of shot.

‘I am come about the herring-salter.‘

‘That wretched herring-salter again!’

‘I am his mother.‘

‘May his mother, his wife, and his daughter
perish with him!’

‘He has had an attack—’

‘Let him defend himself.‘

‘Some money has been paid us,’ continued the old woman, ‘an instalment
on the house sold to the camondeur Doutrup, of the Rue Messagli
ère.
If you do not come, my granddaughter will no longer
have a father, my daughter-in-law a husband, myself a son.‘

It was piteous and terrible to hear the old
woman’s voice – to know that the wind was freezing the blood in her veins, that
the rain was soaking her very bones beneath her thin flesh.

‘A fit! why, that would be 200 fretzers!’
replied the heartless Trifulgas.

‘We have only 120. ‘

‘Good-night,’ and the window was again
closed. But, after due reflection, it appeared that 120 fretzers for an hour
and a half on the road,
plus
half an hour of visit, made a fretzer a
minute. A small profit, but still, not to be despised.

Instead of going to bed again, the doctor
slipped into his coat of valveter, went down in his wading boots, stowed
himself away in his great coat of lurtaine, with his
sou’wester
on his
head, and his mufflers on his hands. He left his lamp lighted close to his
pharmacopoeia, open at page 197. Then, pulling the door of Six-Four, he paused
on the threshold. The old woman was there; leaning on her stick, bowed down by
her eighty years of misery.

‘The hundred and twenty fretzers. ‘

‘Here is the money; and may God multiply it
for you a hundredfold!’

‘God! Who ever saw the colour of
His
money?’

The doctor whistled for Hurzof, gave him a small lantern to carry, and
took the road towards the sea. The old woman followed.

What swishy-swashy weather! The bells of St
Philfilena are all swinging by reason of the gale. A bad sign! But Dr Trifulgas
is not superstitious. He believes in nothing – not even in his own science,
except for what it brings him in. What weather, and also what a road! Pebbles
and ashes; the pebbles slippery with seaweed, the ashes crackling with iron
refuse. No other light than that from Hurzof’s lantern, vague and uncertain. At
times jets of flame from Vauglor uprear themselves, and in the midst of them
appear great comical silhouettes. In truth no one knows what is in the depths
of those unfathomable craters. Perhaps spirits of the other world, which
volatilise themselves as they come forth.

The doctor and the old woman follow the
curves of the little bays of the littoral. The sea is white with a livid
whiteness – a mourning white. It sparkles as it throws off the crests of the
surf, which seem like outpourings of glow-worms.

These two persons go on thus as far as the
turn in the road between sandhills, where the brooms and the reeds clash
together with a shock like that of bayonets.

The dog had drawn near to his master and
seemed to say to him, ‘Come, come! 120 fretzers for the strong box! That is the
way to make a fortune. Another rood added to the vineyard; another dish added
to our supper; another meat pie for the faithful Hurzof. Let us look after the
rich invalids, and look after them – according to their purses!’

At that spot the old woman pauses. With her
trembling finger she points out among the shadows a reddish light. There is the
house of Vort Kartif, the herring-salter.

‘There?’ said the doctor.

‘Yes,’ said the old woman.

‘Hurrah!’ cries the dog Hurzof.

A sudden explosion from the Vauglor, shaken
to its very base. A sheaf of lurid flame springs up to the zenith, forcing its
way through the clouds. Dr Trifulgas is hurled to the ground. He swears
roundly, picks himself up, and looks about him.

The old woman is no longer there. Has she
disappeared through some fissure of the earth, or has she flown away on the
wings of the mist? As for the dog, he is there still, standing on his hind
legs, his jaws apart, his lantern extinguished.

‘Nevertheless, we will go on,’ mutters Dr Trifulgas. The honest man has
been paid his 120 fretzers, and he must earn them.

Only a luminous speck at the distance of
half a kertz. It is the lamp of the dying – perhaps of the dead. Of course, it
is the herring-salter’s house; the old woman pointed to it with her finger; no
mistake is possible. Through the whistling swishes and the dashing swashes,
through the uproar of the tempest, Dr Trifulgas tramps on with hurried steps.
As he advances, the house becomes more distinct, being isolated in the midst of
the landscape.

It is very remarkable how much it resembles
that of Dr Trifulgas, the Six-Four of Luktrop. The same arrangement of windows,
the same little arched door. Dr Trifulgas hastens on as fast as the gale allows
him. The door is ajar; he has but to push it. He pushes it, he enters, and the
wind roughly closes it behind him. The dog Hurzof, left outside, howls, with
intervals of silence.

Strange! One would have said that Dr
Trifulgas had come back to his own house. And yet he has not wandered; he has
not even taken a turning. He is at Val Karnion, not at Luktrop. And yet. here
is the same low, vaulted passage, the same wooden staircase, with high
banisters, worn away by the constant rubbing of hands.

He ascends. He reaches the landing. Beneath
the door a faint light filters through, as in Six-Four. Is it a delusion? In
the dimness he recognises his room – the yellow sofa, on the right the old
chest of pear-wood, on the left the brass-bound strong box, in which he
intended to deposit his 120 fretzers. There is his armchair, with the leathern
cushions; there is his table, with its twisted legs, and on it, close to the
expiring lamp, his pharmacopoeia, open at page 197.

‘What is the matter with me?’ he murmurs.

What is the matter with him? Fear! His
pupils are dilated; his body is contracted, shrivelled; an icy perspiration
freezes his skin – every hair stands on end.

But hasten! For want of oil, the lamp
expires; and also the dying man! Yes, there is the bed – his own bed – with
posts and canopy; as wide as it is long, shut in by heavy curtains. Is it
possible that this is the pallet of a wretched herring-salter? With a quaking
hand Dr Trifulgas seizes the curtains; he opens them; he looks in.

The dying man, his head uncovered, is
motionless, as if at his last breath. The doctor leans over him —

Ah! what a cry, to which, outside, responds
an unearthly howl from the dog.

The dying man is not the herring-salter,
Vort Kartif – it is Dr Trifulgas; it is
he,
whom congestion has attacked
– he himself! Cerebral apoplexy, with sudden accumulation of serosity in the
cavities of the brain, with paralysis of the body on the side opposite that of
the seat of the lesion.

Yes, it is
he,
who was sent for, and
for whom 120 fretzers have been paid.
He
who, from hardness of heart,
refused to attend the herring-salter –
he
who is dying.

Dr Trifulgas is like a madman, he knows
himself lost. At each moment the symptoms increase. Not only all the functions
of the organs slacken, but the lungs and the heart cease to act. And yet he has
not quite lost consciousness. What can be done? Bleed! If he hesitates, Dr
Trifulgas is dead. In those days they still bled; and then, as now, medical men
cured all those apoplectic patients who were not going to die.

Dr Trifulgas seizes his case, takes out his
lancet, opens a vein in the arm of his double. The blood does not flow. He rubs
his chest violently – his own breathing grows slower. He warms his feet with
hot bricks – his own grow cold.

Then his double lifts himself, falls back, and draws one last breath.
Dr Trifulgas, notwithstanding all that his science has taught him to do,
dies beneath his own hands.

In the morning a corpse was found in the
house Six-Four – that of Dr Trifulgas. They put him in a coffin, and carried
him with much pomp to the cemetery of Luktrop, whither he had sent so many others
– in a professional manner.

As to old Hurzof, it is said that, to this
day, he haunts the country with his lantern alight, and howling like a lost
dog. I do not know if that be true; but strange things happen in Volsinia,
especially in the neighbourhood of Luktrop.

And, again, I warn you not to hunt for that
town on the map. The best geographers have not yet agreed as to its latitude – nor
even as to its longitude.

There were 700 or 800 of them at least. Of
medium height, but strong, agile, supple, framed to make prodigious bounds,
they gambolled in the last rays of the sun, now setting over the mountains
which formed serried ridges westward of the roadstead. Its reddish disc would
soon disappear, and darkness was already falling in the midst of that-basin
surrounded by the distant sierras of Sanorre and Ronda and by the desolate
country of Cuervo.

Suddenly all the band became motionless.
The leader had just appeared on the crest resembling the back of a skinny mule
which forms the top of the mountain. From the military post perched on the
distant summit of the Great Rock nothing could be seen of what was taking place
under the trees.

‘Sriss... Sriss’
– they heard their leader, whose lips,
thrust forward like a hen’s beak, gave that whistle an extraordinary intensity.

‘Sriss... Sriss’
– the strange army repeated the call in
perfect unison.

A remarkable being that leader: tall in
height, clad in a monkey’s skin with the fur outwards, his head shaggy with
unkempt hair, his face bristling with a short beard, his feet bare, their soles
as hard as a horse’s hoof.

He lifted his hand and extended it towards
the lower crest of the mountain. All simultaneously repeated that gesture with
a military – or rather with a mechanical – precision, as though they were
marionettes moved by the same spring. He lowered his arm. They lowered their
arms. He bent towards the ground. They bent down in the same attitude. He
picked up a stick and waved it about. They waved their sticks in windmill
fashion like his.

Then the leader turned: gliding into the
bushes, he crawled between the trees. The troop crawled after him.

In less than ten minutes they were
descending the rainworn mountain paths, but not even the movement of a pebble
had disclosed the presence of that army on the march.

A quarter of an hour later the leader
halted: they halted as though frozen to the ground.

Two hundred yards below them appeared the
town, stretched along the length of the roadstead, with numerous lights
revealing the confused mass of piers, houses, villas, barracks. Beyond, the
riding-lights of the warships, merchant-vessels, pontoons, anchored out at sea,
were reflected from the surface of the still water. Farther beyond, at the end
of Europa Point, the lighthouse projected its beams.

At that moment there sounded a cannon, the
‘first gunfire’, discharged from one of the concealed batteries. Then could
also be heard the rolling of the drums and the shrill sound of the fifes.

This was the hour of Retreat, the hour to
go indoors: no stranger had the right thereafter to move about the town without
being escorted by an officer of the Garrison. It was the hour for the crews to
go aboard their ships. Every quarter of an hour the patrols took to the
guardroom the stragglers and the drunks. Then all was silent.

General MacKackmale could sleep with both
eyes shut.

It seemed that England had nothing to fear, that night, for the Rock of
Gibraltar.

Everybody knows that formidable rock. It
somewhat resembles an enormous crouching lion, its head towards Spain, its tail
dipping into the sea. Its face discloses teeth – 700 cannon pointing from the
casemates – ‘the old woman’s teeth’, as they are called, but those of an old
woman who can bite if she is attacked.

Thus England is firmly placed here, as she
is at Aden, Malta, and Hong Kong, on cliffs which, aided by the progress of
mechanisation, she will someday convert into revolving fortresses.

Meanwhile Gibraltar assures to the United
Kingdom the incontestable domination of the fifteen miles of that Strait which
the club of Hercules struck open in the depths of the Mediterranean Sea between
Abyla and Calpe.