The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (13 page)

“There’s a brave boy! See how casual he is!”

“Eat it yourself, you fool,” retorted Paul.

“And die of it, I suppose. Suit you fine, wouldn’t it? No, thanks, I
propose to deposit
our
poison in the treasure.”

“The smell’s absolutely overpowering,” said Gérard.
“You ought to put it in a tin.”

Elisabeth wrapped it up, shoved it into an empty biscuit tin, and vanished from the room.
The top of the treasure chest was littered with their various
possessions—revolver, books, the whiskered plaster bust; she opened a drawer and
placed the tin on top of Dargelos. Carefully, with infinite precautions, she set it
down, with a schoolgirl’s grimace of concentration; with something of the air,
the gestures of a woman pricking a wax image, aiming precisely, then ramming home the
pin.

Paul saw himself back at school again, aping Dargelos, obsessed with violence and
barbaric rites, dreaming of poisoned arrows, hoping to impress his hero by an invention
of his own, namely, a project for mass-murder by means of poisoned gum affixed to
postage stamps. And all in wantonness, without a thought of poison’s lethal
implications, all to curry favor with a lout…. Dargelos would shrug and turn
away, scornful as of a silly girl.

Dargelos had not forgotten the abject slave who once hung on his lips: this gift of
poison was the crowning stroke of his derision.

Its hidden promise filled the brother and sister with a strange elation. The room had
become richer by an extra, an incalculable dimension. It had acquired the potentials of
an anarchist conspiracy; as if a charge of human dynamite had been sunk in it, would be
touched off at the appointed hour, explode in blood sublimely, stream in the
incandescent firmament of love.

Moreover, Paul was reveling in this parade of eccentricity from which Gérard,
according to Elisabeth, wished to protect Agatha; it was a smack at Gérard, and
also at his wife.

Elisabeth, for her part, was triumphant. She saw the old Paul back upon the war path,
trampling down convention, grasping the nettle danger, jealous as ever of the sacred
treasure.

She invested the poison with symbolic properties: it was the antidote to pettiness and
parochialism; would, must—surely—lead to the final overthrow of Agatha.

But Paul failed to respond to cure by witchcraft. His appetite did not improve; listless,
apathetic, he went on pining, wasting, sinking by slow stages into a decline.

S
UNDAY was a regular
day off for the whole household, according to the Anglo-Saxon custom adopted during
Michael’s lifetime. Mariette filled the thermos flasks, cut sandwiches, then went
out with the housemaid. The chauffeur, whose duties included lending a hand indoors with
the cleaning, borrowed one of the cars and spent his time profitably, picking up casual
passengers for hire.

On this particular Sunday it was snowing. Acting on instructions from the doctor,
Elisabeth had gone to her own room to lie down and had drawn the curtains. It was five
o’clock. Paul had been dozing since noon. He had insisted on her leaving him
alone, had begged her to listen to the doctor. She was asleep, and dreaming. She dreamed
that Paul was dead. She was walking through a forest, but at the same time it was the
gallery; she recognized it by the light falling between the tree-trunks from tall
windows set in dark intermittent panels of opacity. She came to a furnished clearing and
saw the billiard-table, some chairs, one or two other tables. She thought: I must get to
the mound. In her dream she knew that the word
mound
meant the billiard-table.
Striding, sometimes skimming just above the ground, she made haste to reach it, but she
could not. She lay down exhausted and fell asleep. Suddenly Paul roused her. She
cried:

“Paul, oh Paul! So you’re not dead?”

And Paul replied: “Yes, I am dead, but so are you. You’ve just died.
That’s why you can see me. You’re going to live with me for ever and
ever.”

They went on walking. After a long time they reached the mound.

“Listen,” said Paul, putting a finger on the automatic marker.
“Listen to the parting knell.”
The marker began to whirr
dementedly. The glade began to hum—louder, louder, a noise like buzzing telegraph
wires….

She woke aghast, to find herself sitting bolt upright, drenched in perspiration. A bell
was pealing. She remembered that the servants were all out. Still in the grip of
nightmare, she ran downstairs and opened the front door. On a white whirlwind Agatha
blew in, disheveled, crying out: “Where’s Paul?”

By now Elisabeth had come round, was shaking off the dream’s last clinging
threads.

“What do you mean?” she said. “What’s the matter with you?
Paul’s asleep as usual, I suppose. He said he didn’t want to be
disturbed.”

“Quick, quick,” gasped Agatha, “run, we must hurry. I had a letter,
he said by the time I got it it would be too late, the poison, he’d have taken
the poison, he said he was going to shut you out of his room and take it.” She
clutched Elisabeth, pushing, pulling, trying to urge her forward. Mariette had left a
note at the young couple’s flat at four o’clock.

Elisabeth stood stock still. It was the dream, she told herself, she must be still
asleep. She was turned to stone. Then she was running. She and this other girl were
running, running.

Now she had reached the gallery, but in the dream still, she was in a spectral glade of
roaring wind and darkness, of trees whipped white in the interlucent spaces; and there,
in the distance, still
the mound
, the billiard-table, the real and nightmare
relic of an earthquake.

“Paul! Paul! Speak to us! Paul!”

There was no answer. The shining precincts gave back, for all reply, a charnel breath.
They broke in, and the full impact of the disaster hit them simultaneously. The room was
thick with an ominous aroma: they knew it—reddish, black, a compound of truffles,
onions, essence of geranium, overpowering, beginning already to invade the gallery. His
eyeballs starting from their sockets, his face distorted beyond recognition, Paul lay
supine, wearing a bathrobe exactly like his sister’s. Lamplight, snow-blurred,
eddying down through the high windows, threw gusts of shifting shadow across the livid
mask, touched nose and cheekbones into faint relief. Beside him on the chair, jostling
one another, lay the remainder of the poison, a water-bottle and the photograph of
Dargelos.

The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the
event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by
that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them. What the girls found
impossible, at first, was to suspend their natural disbelief. They had to admit, to
accept the inadmissible, to recognize this unknown shape as Paul.

Rushing forward, Agatha flung herself on her knees beside him, brought her face close to
his, discovered that he was breathing. A flicker of hope leapt up in her.

“Lise,” she urged, “don’t stand there doing nothing, go and
get dressed, he may be only doped, this frightful thing may not be deadly poison. Get a
thermos bottle, run and fetch the doctor.”

“The doctor’s away, he’s shooting this weekend,” stammered
the wretched girl. “There’s nobody … there’s
nobody….”

“Quick, quick, get a thermos! He’s breathing, he’s icy cold. He must
have a hot water bottle, we must get some hot coffee down his throat.”

Agatha’s presence of mind amazed Elisabeth. How could she bring herself to speak,
touch Paul, how could she so bestir herself? How did she know he needed a hot water
bottle? What made her think she could prevail by commonsense against the implacable
decrees of snow and death?

Abruptly she pulled herself together, remembered that the thermos bottles were in her
bedroom. She flew to get them, calling over her shoulder:

“Cover him up!”

Paul was still breathing. Since swallowing what Dargelos had sent him, he had endured
four hours of sensations so phenomenal that he had wondered intermittently whether the
stuff was after all a drug, not poison, and if so, whether he had taken a sufficient
dose to kill him; but now the worst of the ordeal was over. His limbs had ceased to
exist. He was floating in space, had almost recaptured his old sense of well-being. But
his saliva had entirely ceased to flow, and consequently his dry tongue rasped his
throat like sandpaper; except where all feeling had become extinct, his parched skin
crawled unbearably. He had attempted to drink. He had put a faltering hand out, groping
in vain to find the water bottle. But now his legs and arms were all but paralyzed; and
he had ceased to move.

Whenever he closed his eyes, the same images reappeared: the head of a giant ram with a
woman’s long gray locks; some dead and blinded soldiers marching in stiff
military procession, slowly, then faster, faster, round and round a grove; he saw that
their feet were tethered to the branches. The bedsprings shook and twanged beneath him
to the wild knocking of his heart. The veins swelled, stiffened in his arms, the bark
grew round them, his arms became the branches of a tree. The soldiers circled round his
arms; and the whole thing began again.

He sank into a swoon, was back in the time of snow, the old days of the Game, was in the
cab with Gérard, driving home. He heard Agatha sobbing:

“Paul! Paul! Open your eyes, speak to me….”

His mouth felt clogged with sourness. His gummed-up, flaccid lips framed one word only:
“Drink….”

“Try to be patient…. Elisabeth has gone to get the thermos. She’s
bringing a hot water bottle.”

“Drink…” he said again.

Agatha moistened his lips with water. She took his letter from her handbag, showed it to
him, begged him to try and tell her what madness had come over him.

“It’s your fault, Agatha.”

“My fault?”

Syllable by syllable, he started to whisper, stammer out the truth. She interrupted him
with protestations, exclamations. The man-trap was exposed in all its tortuous
ingenuity. Together the dying man and the young woman touched it and turned it over,
unscrewed the diabolical contrivance piece by piece. Their words engendered a stubborn,
treacherous, criminal Elisabeth, whose machinations of that night were plain at
last.

“You mustn’t die!” cried Agatha.

“Too late,” he mourned.

At that moment, Elisabeth, fearful of leaving them too long alone together, came hurrying
back with the thermos and the hot water bottle. There was a moment of unearthly silence,
then nothing but the pervasive smell of death again. Elisabeth had her back turned; she
was busy hunting among boxes and bottles, looking for a tumbler, filling it with coffee,
not yet aware that all had been discovered. She advanced towards her victims, saw they
were watching her, stopped dead. By a savage and supreme effort, with Agatha’s
arms round him, her cheek against his cheek, Paul had half-raised himself among the
pillows. Deadly hatred blazed from both their faces. She held the coffee out towards
him, but a cry from Agatha arrested her:

“Paul, don’t touch it!”

“You’re mad,” she muttered, “I’m not trying to poison
him.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you.”

This was more than death; it was the heart’s death. Elisabeth swayed on her feet.
She opened her mouth, but no words came.

“Devil! Filthy devil!”

His words confirmed the worst of her suspicions and crushed her with an extra weight of
horror: she had not dreamed he had the strength to speak.

“Filthy, filthy devil!”

Over and over again, with his dying breath, he spat it at her, raking her with his blue
gaze, with a last long volley of fire from the blue slits between his eyelids. His lips,
that had been so beautiful, twisted and twitched spasmodically; from the dried well of
what had been his heart rose nothing but a tearless glitter, a wolfish
phosphorescence.

The blizzard went on battering at the windows. Elisabeth flinched, then said:

“Yes, you’re right, it’s true. I was jealous. I didn’t want
to lose you. I loathe Agatha. I wasn’t going to let her take you
away.”

Stripped, her disguise thrown off at last, she took the truth for garment; she grew in
stature. As if blown by a storm, her locks streamed back and her small fierce brow
loomed monumental, abstract, above the lucent eyes. She stood fast by the Room; she
stood against them all, defying Agatha, Gérard, Paul, and the whole world.

She snatched up the revolver from the chest of drawers.

“She’s going to shoot! She’s going to kill me!” screamed
Agatha. She clung to Paul, but he had left her side, was wandering.