The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (8 page)

So all the wheels began to turn; the parts to be assembled began to travel, with smooth
coordination, stage after stage, to their appointed ends: one moment more, and Agatha
was in the Room.

Elisabeth had half hoped that Paul would register some protest. She had warned him that
the girl had a silly name. But on the contrary, Paul said, the name Agatha was
illustrious: it had been immortalized in one of the most beautiful poems in the French
language.

T
HE PROCESS by which
Gérard had been drawn, through Paul, towards Elisabeth was now operating, less
deviously, in the case of Agatha, and drawing her, through Elisabeth, to Paul. Paul
found the presence of Agatha disturbing. Unpracticed in the art of self-analysis, he
classified her as
delicious
, and left it at that.

In fact, what he had done was to bestow upon Agatha the vague prolific fantasies which
had silted over Dargelos. This struck him with the blinding force of a revelation, one
evening when the two girls were in the Room. The treasure was on view, and Elisabeth
explaining it, when Agatha seized the photograph of Dargelos dressed as Athalie and
cried:

“Have you got my photograph?” in a voice so strange that Paul lifted his
head from his sarcophagus and stayed reclining on his elbows in the pose of
Les
jeunes Chrétiens d’Antinoé
.

“It’s not your photograph,” replied Elisabeth.

“No, I see it isn’t; the clothes are different. But it’s incredible,
the likeness to an old one of me. I’ll bring it. It’s exactly the
same—me, me!—the living image. Who is it?”

“It’s not a girl, duck. It’s that fellow I told you about, the one
at Paul’s school who threw the snowball…. You’re perfectly right;
he is like you. Paul,
is
he like Agatha to look at?”

At these words, the likeness which, till now, he had managed to suppress, burst
ineluctably across the threshold. Gérard recognized the fatal profile. Agatha
turned towards Paul, holding up a rectangle of white; and it was Dargelos Paul saw
against the shadows, brandishing the snowball, about to strike him down.

He let his head fall back and answered faintly: “No, my girl, no. The photograph
has got a look of you, but you’re not really like him in the least.”

This patent lie made Gérard anxious. The resemblance absolutely hit one in the
face.

In truth, there were buried levels of his spirit which Paul preferred to leave untouched.
The mine was rich and deep, loaded with unimaginable treasure: he was afraid of his own
clumsiness.
Delicious
was not a term applicable to anything below the crust
of that volcano, whose heady vapors numbed his ravished senses.

From that night on, the loom of Paul-and-Agatha began to weave a crisscross pattern. The
wheel of fortune had come round full circle; pride had had its downfall; proud Dargelos
of the marble heart, insensible to love, had suffered metamorphosis, was now a shy young
girl whom Paul could wholly subjugate.

Elisabeth thrust the photograph back in the drawer. Next morning she found it on the
mantelpiece. She frowned. She made no comment, but her thoughts raced ahead. In a flash
she realized that all Paul’s pin-ups—glamor girls, gunmen, sleuths, and
all—were prototypes of Agatha and Dargelos-Athalie.

A nameless consternation strangled her. “It’s the limit,” she told
herself, “he’s double-crossing me. He’s cheating.” She
decided to pay him back in his own coin, to play up Agatha at Paul’s expense
while feigning to ignore their goings-on.

The aura of family likeness in the Room was an indubitable fact, although, had it been
pointed out to Paul, he would have been astonished. His pursuit of one physical type was
quite unconscious. And yet its fascination for him and the fascination he himself
unwittingly exerted on his sister drove two straight lines through the disorder of their
lives, lines destined to meet as inexorably as in a theorem by Euclid; like those two
lines which, starting inimically at the base, converging, form the apex of the classic
Grecian pediment.

Agatha and Gérard had established their right to co-tenancy of this unlikely Room,
or rather of this gipsy camp; for that was what it was gradually coming to resemble. The
horse was lacking, but not the ragged children. Elisabeth suggested that Agatha should
come to live with them. Mariette could get the spare room
ready—“Mummy’s room,” the room of standing alone, of
remembering, of waiting to be swallowed up in darkness. But Agatha had no such
melancholy associations with it; a thorough cleansing and a lamp or two would make of it
a pleasant bedroom.

Gérard helped Agatha to bring along some suitcases. The domestic habits, the
wakings and the sleepings, the quarrels, the storms, the calms, the café and its
sandwiches, were hers already.

Every evening, when they had finished work, the girls found Gérard waiting, either
to take them for a stroll or to see them home. Mariette prepared the same cold supper;
they took it off the table and made a picnic of it; next morning Mariette came back and
swept the eggshells up.

Paul was determined to make the most of this propitious turn of Fortune’s wheel.
He had no coat-of-mail arrogance, like Dargelos, to buckle on; but other well-tried
weapons lay ready to his hand: in other words, the gentle Agatha became his butt. When
Elisabeth flew to her defence, he turned the tables on them, sided with Agatha in order
to upset his sister. This paid off nicely for all four of them: for Elisabeth, thus
enabled to enlarge the scope of her activities; for Gérard, given a
moment’s welcome respite; for Agatha, spellbound by Paul’s insolence; and
finally for Paul himself. He was no Dargelos; but insolence has a glamor all its own;
and with Agatha’s co-operation, and Elisabeth for target, he found he could
exploit it.

Agatha embraced her rôle with sacrificial ardor, feeling that the Room contained a
force of love so potent that though it must intermittently explode, it could not damage
her. It set her tingling violently as from electric shock, violent, yet it was positive
in its effect, life-giving as the salt wind blowing from the sea.

Her parents, drug-addicts, had maltreated her and ended by putting their heads in a gas
oven. She had been rescued by the manager of an important fashion house, who happened to
live in the same apartment house. He introduced her to the head of his firm, who took
her on as an apprentice and subsequently as a mannequin. Acquainted as she was with the
clenched fist, with malice and abuse, she recognized these portents in the Room, but
with a difference. Here they evoked a battering wave, the stinging wind, the bolt that
falls at random and in pure wantonness may strip the shepherd.

The contrast was a basic one, but all the same her experience of drug-addicts had
conditioned her to the seamy side of life, to threatening voices, footsteps, broken
furniture, cold snacks in the middle of the night. Behavior normally calculated to raise
a maiden blush failed to dismay her. The harsh school from which she had emerged had
left its mark on her. Something savage lurked around her eyes and nostrils, recalling
Dargelos at first sight, his mask of scorn.

She had ascended into the Room as if into the heaven of her hell. She could live at last;
she could draw breath. Nothing worried her; she had no fear that her new friends might
take to drugs; their addiction was, she knew, a natural and self-engendered one, and any
external stimulus would have been redundant.

But now and then a kind of delirium seemed to take possession of them. The Room waxed
feverish with images reflected in distorting mirrors. Then a dark shadow fell across
her; she would ask herself if this mysterious elixir they imbibed was none the less as
noxious, habit-forming, as likely as any other drug to lead to the gas oven. Then some
shift of ballast, some steadying of the keel would come to reassure her and dispel her
doubts.

But she had divined the truth, the workings in them of the wondrous substance. The drug
was in their bloodstream.

The cycles of drug-addiction proceed by gradual stages, each period producing its
characteristic phenomena and transformations. The frontiers are not marked, but along
each one of them stretches a no-man’s land of havoc and disturbance. The area of
vision breaks up kaleidoscopically, to form fresh patterns.

Less and less did the Game predominate in Elisabeth’s new life, and even in that
of Paul. As for Gérard, he was completely absorbed in Elisabeth and had given it
up. Every attempt made by Paul and Elisabeth to resuscitate it ended dismally and merely
made them irritable. They could not longer
be gone
. The dream wavered, its
thread thinned out, dissolved. The truth was, they were gone elsewhere. Past masters in
escaping from themselves, they accepted the new force which drove them inwards, but took
it for distraction. Where formerly they had swung airily above the tragic stage, like
gods and goddesses on wires at a command performance, they were now immersed in the
dramatic plot itself. Their own performances left much to be desired. To look within
requires self-discipline, and this they lacked. Primeval darkness, ghosts of feeling,
were all that they encountered. “Damn! damn!” cried Paul, exasperated.
They all looked up. “Damn!” meant that, to his furious annoyance, some
floating wraith of Agatha had cut across his preparations for departure to the land of
shades: the cause of the disaster was too plain for Paul, self-engrossed, or for his
sister, watching him, to recognize it. He insisted that the fault was Agatha’s
and made her bear the brunt of his ill-temper. As for Elisabeth, who also was
endeavoring to put out to sea, only to founder on hitherto uncharted reefs, she snatched
the opportunity to turn her observation outwards. She misinterpreted Paul’s
spitefulness, thinking: “He’s fed up with Agatha because she reminds him
of Dargelos,” and failing to discern the passion that provoked it. Thus once
again, between these two antagonists—as inexpert in self-analysis as they had once
been learned in the lore of the unknowable—the bitter duel was on, with Agatha for
gage.

But brawling leads to laryngitis. The wordy battles petered out, then ceased, and once
again the warriors found harsh reality impinging on their dream, disturbing
childhood’s vegetative existence and scattering all its harmless toys.

What cryptic impulse of self-preservation, what psychic nerve had momentarily stayed
Elisabeth’s hand, that day of adding Dargelos to the treasure? No doubt her
senses had vibrated to the complex instincts Paul was trying to suppress, to the
self-conscious, unconvincing tone of voice he had assumed to ask her: “Shall we
keep it?” Be that as it may, this much was certain: the photograph of Dargelos
was no idle toy. His suggestion had been flung out with the jaunty disingenuousness of
one caught red-handed. She had complied with patent lack of zest, and left the room with
knowing and ironic shrugs at Paul and Gérard, just to be on the safe side, just
to keep them guessing—just to impress on them that whatever their little game
might be, she was already on to it.

Stealthily, insidiously, it would appear, the silence of the drawer had wrought upon the
picture, to bring about the sinister merging of two separate images. That Agatha,
holding up the photograph, had brandished not Dargelos but his snowball, was scarcely a
matter for surprise.

F
OR SEVERAL days the
Room had been running into heavy weather. Elisabeth had persistently tormented Paul by
enigmatic looks and cryptic references to a “
delicious
something,” which he would not be allowed to share. She treated Agatha as her
confidante, Gérard as her accomplice, and countered any direct approach to the
forbidden subject with a great display of winks. These machinations succeeded beyond her
wildest hopes. Paul writhed and twisted on the rack of curiosity, pride alone preventing
him from trying to pump Agatha or Gérard, who, under pain of terrible reprisals,
were sworn to silence. At length curiosity prevailed. Posting himself at what Elisabeth
had nicknamed the “stage door,” he spied on the conspirators and
discovered that not only Gérard but a dashing young man in a sports car was
waiting for them.

The scene that occurred that night was cataclysmic. The girls were prostitutes, foul
prostitutes, and Gérard was a pimp. He himself would leave the house. Then they
could use it as a brothel. It was only to be expected. All mannequins were tarts, low
ones at that. His sister was a bitch in heat, she had corrupted Agatha, and
Gérard was behind it all.

Agatha wept. Gérard lost his temper, and in spite of Elisabeth’s mild and
repeated interjections of: “Leave him alone, Gérard, he’s
absurd,” insisted on explaining that the young man was a friend of his
uncle’s, was called Michael, was an American Jew, was enormously rich, and that
in any case they had been on the point of coming clean and introducing him to Paul.