The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (9 page)

Never, shrieked Paul, would he consent to meet the “filthy Jew”: he was
coming along tomorrow at the appointed hour to slap his face.

“It’s too squalid,” he concluded, his eyes glittering. “You
take an inexperienced young girl along with you, simply to sell her to a Jew. I suppose
you’re hoping for a rake-off.”

“Rubbish, my dear fellow,” retorted Elisabeth. “You’re
barking up the wrong tree, I do assure you. I’m the one Michael’s got his
eye on. He wants to marry me, and what’s more I like him very much.”

“Marry you? Marry you? You must be mad. Have you looked in the glass lately?
Don’t you realize you’re a monster? Do you really think anyone would want
to marry you, you prize idiot? He must be pulling your leg.”

And he burst into hysterical laughter.

Elisabeth was well aware that it was a matter of complete indifference to Paul, as to
herself, whether people were or were not Jewish. She felt suffused with warmth and
well-being. Her heart so overflowed it could have cracked the walls. How she reveled in
this pseudo-laughter! How grim his jaw looked now! What sport indeed to goad him to such
frenzy!

Next morning, Paul felt that he had made a fool of himself. His outburst, he secretly
admitted, had been unnecessarily extravagant. Quite forgetting that he had suspected the
American of designs on Agatha, he now told himself that Elisabeth was her own mistress,
that he couldn’t care less whom she chose to marry. He wondered why on earth he
had flown off the handle.

After a period of sulks, he finally let himself be persuaded to meet Michael.

Michael was in every way the Room’s antithesis. This was so evident that no
attempt was ever made to introduce him to it. He personified the outside world. One saw
at a glance that he was of the world worldly, that his whole treasure was laid up on
earth, and as for ecstasy, his only chance of it would come when driving at a hundred
miles an hour, at the wheel of the latest thing in high-powered sports cars.

His film-star personality captured Paul who promptly set aside his principles and fell
for him. Drunk with speed, they went whirling through the countryside at all hours other
than those tacitly consecrated by the four initiates to the ceremonies of the Room; and
by Michael, in all simplicity, to sleep.

Their midnight mysteries took nothing from the stature of the absent Michael. He was
invoked, worshipped, completely re-created.

How could he know, when next they met, that magic juices were laid upon their eyelids,
making them madly dote upon him, after the manner of Titania in
A Midsummer
Night’s Dream
?

“Why shouldn’t I marry Michael?”

“Why shouldn’t Elisabeth marry Michael?”

In the future their separate rooms would be assured. They lost their heads and sketched
wild plans for rooms-to-be—domestic projects as ambitious and grotesque as those
confided to reporters by the celebrated Siamese twins.

Gérard alone lacked stomach for the game. He silently withdrew. Never would he
have aspired to marry the Pythoness, the Sacred Virgin. It took a melodramatic film
type, an ignorant young racing driver, to desecrate the inner shrine and carry off its
inmate.

And the Room went on, and the wedding preparations were afoot, and still the
hair’s-breadth balance was maintained: the clown’s act, in the interval,
the sickening, ever-mounting pile of chairs, the clown ascending, step by giddy
step.

Nausea, giddiness, satiety of spirit now, sharper to the palate than the old physical
satiety of childhood’s barley-sugar orgies—a glutton’s diet of
sensation, a cloying hotchpotch of misrule, disorder.

But Michael had no notion of these things. He would have been astonished to discover that
he had picked a vestal virgin for his chosen bride. He was in love with a ravishing
young girl and wished to marry her. Lightheartedly he brought her his splendid house in
Paris, his cars, his fortune, and laid them at her feet.

For her own room Elisabeth settled on a Louis XVI period décor, leaving Michael as
sole tenant of the reception rooms, the music room, gymnasium, and swimming pool,
besides an absurd sort of Town Hall of a room, with windows level with the tree-tops,
that did duty for dining-room, billiard-room and fencing-gallery. Agatha was to live
with them. Elisabeth had set aside a little suite of rooms for her, just above her
own.

Agatha shed bitter tears in secret, seeing the contemplated break-up of the Room as a
personal disaster. What would become of her without its potent magic, without the
nights? Without Paul constantly beside her? The miracle depended on the alternating
current between the brother and the sister. Yet neither of them seemed to be affected by
this total shipwreck, this earthquake, this Apocalypse.

They simply acted, no more worried by the thought of consequences, direct or indirect,
than a dramatic masterpiece is concerned with the successive stages of the plot that go
to make its climax. Gérard was all self-sacrifice. Agatha bowed submissively to
Paul’s good pleasure.

“It’ll suit us all down to the ground,” said Paul. “Whenever
Gérard’s uncle goes away, Gérard can use Agatha’s
room.” (They no longer called it Mummy’s room.) “And supposing
Michael went abroad or something, the girls can simply move back here.”

The way he spoke of them as “the girls” showed clearly with what a daydream
eye he viewed this marriage, and how tenuous his grasp was on the future.

Michael tried to persuade Paul to come and live with them, but he had determined on a
solitary existence and declined. So Michael undertook entire financial responsibility
for the rue Montmartre household, with Mariette for steward.

The wedding ceremony was brief, witnessed by a couple of the trustees appointed to
administer the bridegroom’s unimaginable fortune. No sooner was it over than
Michael, thinking to give Elisabeth and Agatha a chance to settle in, jumped into his
racing car
en route
for a week in Eze, to see the architect who was building
them a villa. Domestic life would start when he came back.

But the genius of the Room was vigilant.

Need it be told in words? On the road between Cannes and Nice, Michael met his death.

It was one of those cars with a low chassis. The wind caught his long scarf, wrapped it
round the wheel, and in one savage second strangled him. The car skidded, buckled,
reared against a tree, and was nothing but a heap of wreckage with one wheel spinning
like a roulette wheel … slower, slower, slower in the silence.

E
LISABETH felt quite
incapable of coping with all the wearisome legal paraphernalia of her widowhood: all she
was to know of marriage was a series of meetings with solicitors, documents to be
signed, and widow’s weeds. Though freed from financial responsibility, the doctor
and Gérard’s uncle now found their burden even heavier and more thankless
than before. Elisabeth had no compunction in letting everything devolve on them.

They spent all their time with the executors, sorting papers and totting up columns of
figures representing sums of incalculable magnitude.

Mention has been made already of the inherent richness of Elisabeth and Paul—a
richness so entire, so absolute, that nothing in the way of further worldly wealth could
possibly accrue to them. Now that they had inherited a fortune, this was self-evident.
What did affect them was the dramatic impact of the accident. They had been fond of
Michael. Now, by virtue of his strange nuptials and astounding death, this youth without
a secret was translated into the most secret places. The scarf that sprang to stop his
mortal breath had touched the door and flung him, dead, into the Room.

W
ITH AGATHA’S
departure, Paul lost all relish for domestic solitude. The thought of living alone had
made some sense in the old days, when he and his sister had wrestled over bags of candy
and squabbled greedily; not now, when the years had given him desires more difficult to
compass.

He did not know precisely what it was he lacked; but the taste of solitude, once coveted,
was ashes on his tongue. Persuaded by Elisabeth, he took advantage of this state of
negativity to change his mind and set up house with her.

She gave him Michael’s room, divided from her own by an enormous bathroom. The
colored staff of four, including the chef, gave notice and went back to America.
Mariette replaced them by a woman from her native Brittany. The chauffeur stayed on.

No sooner was Paul settled in than they began to gravitate towards a dormitory.

Agatha felt frightened, all alone on the floor above…. Paul couldn’t sleep
in his four-poster…. Gérard’s uncle had gone to Germany to inspect
some factories…. In no time, Agatha had moved downstairs to share
Elisabeth’s bed, while Paul dragged his bedding over to the couch and made
himself a burrow, and Gérard wrapped himself in a cocoon of shawls.

It was here, in this abstraction, this Room fortuitously assembled or dispersed, that
Michael had come to dwell since the disaster. O Sacred Virgin! … Gérard
had guessed truly. Never would Elisabeth be his, Michael’s, or any man’s
in the whole world. Love made him clairvoyant, and he beheld the impenetrable circle
that severed her from human love, that none might violate, save at the price of life
itself. And even could the virgin have been ravished by the living Michael, only by his
death could he have won possession of the temple.

T
HE READER will
remember that one of the features of the mansion was a gallery, which more or less did
duty for study, dining-room and billiard-room. Architecturally considered, it was a
technical anomaly, for it served no conceivable purpose and led nowhere. A strip of
stair-carpeting had been laid down over the linoleum from end to end of one side of the
room. On the other side, beneath a cheap electric light fixture suspended from the
ceiling, stood a dining-room table, a few chairs and a number of plywood screens. The
screens partitioned off the so-called dining-room from the so-called study, where a
sofa, one or two leather armchairs, a revolving bookcase, and a globe were disposed
haphazard round another table—an architect’s trestle table—furnished
with a reading lamp that cast the only focal beam of light in the whole room.

Beyond this, despite a rocking-chair or two, all seemed immensities of vacant space; then
came the billiard-table, monumental in its isolation. Here and there, tall windows cast
watchful slats of light upon the ceiling and bathed the décor in an unreal lunar
radiance.

It seemed a stage, set for the sound of a casement cautiously pushed up, the muffled thud
of a stealthy leap, the spark of a torch in darkness.

Silence and spectral sheen recalled the old rue Montmartre drawing-room frailly suspended
in a cage of snow-light, and even tenuously suggested the snowbound, shrunken aspect of
the Cité Monthiers just before the battle. There was the same sense of isolation,
of expectancy; and in the high windows a faint simulacrum of those pallid walls.

Altogether the room seemed the result of one of those fantastic aberrations or
miscalculations, comparable to the omission of kitchen or staircase, in the
architect’s original plan.

Michael had rebuilt the house; but the problem of reconciling this cul-de-sac, which
seemed to lurk at the end of every turning, with the rest of the design had continued to
defeat him. Such failures, however, were his human opportunity; they marked the point
where mechanical efficiency yielded to life itself. Here, in this dead-end alley, in a
scarcely breathing structure, before the immitigable onslaught of lifeless stone and
metal, Life stood at bay. Here she had fled for sanctuary, crouching in this enormous
niche like a banished and distraught princess outwitting her pursuers.

Locally, the house was not without admirers. “You can’t call it
ostentatious, anyway,” they said. “Nothing flashy about it. That’s
saying something, for a fellow as rich as Croesus.” As for his fellow-countrymen,
who would have found nothing to impress them, they had as little inkling as poor Michael
how American it was in essence.

Better than luxurious marble fittings and ornamental ironwork, it evoked New
York—the New York of freak religions, theosophy, Christian Science, the
Ku-Klux-Klan; of crazy endowments and eccentric heiresses, of morticians, spiritualist
séances, the occult world of Edgar Allan Poe.

It suggested also some sort of waiting-room in a mental hospital; or the stage set for
the materialization of departed spirits reporting their demise. The room was not without
a hint, besides, of the Jewish-baronial taste for the flamboyant—for that sort of
Gothic penthouse chapel, forty storeys up, whose lady inmates pace up and down the nave,
burn wax tapers, and play upon the organ. For there is a greater demand for tapers in
New York than in Lourdes, or Rome itself, or for that matter any holy city in the
world.