The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (12 page)

“Well, now,” she concluded, “we’ve made a big step forward.
Now go to bed. I’ll just run up to Agatha and break it gently to her. You
are
in love with her. You’ve been living in a dream world. Your dreams
carried you above your station. Wake up. Think how lucky you are. Give me a kiss and let
me hear you say you’re the happiest man alive.”

Too stunned by now to offer any further resistance,
Gérard bleated out some vague affirmation. She conducted him to Paul’s
room and shut the door on him; then, sleepless Arachne, she climbed the stairs to
Agatha.

M
URDERERS have been
known to find that young girls give them more trouble than anybody else.

Though Agatha reeled beneath the blows, she would not break. In the end, however, after a
desperate battle, in the course of which Elisabeth went on insisting that Paul was
incapable of love; that he did not love her because he could love no one; that,
self-destructive, monstrously selfish as he was, he could not fail to destroy any woman
who surrendered to him; that Gérard, on the other hand, was that rare being, a
man devoted and reliable enough to guarantee a woman’s future happiness; in the
end, the poor girl collapsed, worn out, and relinquished the last vestige of her dream.
Prostrate beneath Elisabeth’s scrutiny, she lay inert, uncovered, her head flung
back, her damp hair sticking to her forehead, one hand pressed to her heart as if to
staunch its wound, the other dropped stone-dead upon the floor.

Elisabeth raised her on her pillows, powdered her face, assured her that Paul was and
would remain without an inkling of her feelings for him: all she had to do was to assume
a cheerful face and tell him she was going to marry Gérard.

“Thank you … thank you … you are kind….” she gasped
brokenly, between her sobs.

“Don’t thank me, go to sleep,” said Elisabeth; and she left the
room.

She paused for a second. She felt serene, detached, eased of a heavy burden. Just as she
reached the stairs, her heart began to knock. She heard a footstep. A moment after, she
saw Paul coming towards her.

His long white bathrobe made him luminous. In a flash she realized that he was walking in
his sleep, as he had often done, when under strain, in the old rue Montmartre days. She
leaned against the banisters, one foot suspended, not daring to move a muscle, lest Paul
should wake and question her. But he did not see her where she stood palpitating, poised
for flight; his gaze was on the stairs. She could have been a woman cast in bronze,
holding a lamp to light his upward progress. The thudding axe of her heart sounded so
loud in her own ears, she thought with dread that he must hear it too.

Paul stood still for a few moments, then turned away slowly and vanished into the
silence. She stayed listening to his retreating steps, let fall her weight again on her
numb foot and stole away.

Back in her own room, she could hear nothing from next door. Was Gérard asleep?
She stood long before the mirror in her bathroom. The image fascinated her. She bent her
head; she washed her terrifying hands.

F
EELING his end
approaching and anxious to see the young couple settled as soon as possible,
Gérard’s uncle hurried on the wedding preparations. The characters played
their allotted parts in an atmosphere of false cheerfulness and competitive generosity.
Behind the buzz and hum of cozy ritual lay the mortal weight of the unspoken. The
artificial merriment of Paul, Agatha and Gérard, weighed like lead upon
Elisabeth’s heart. In vain she told herself that her vigilance had saved them all
from shipwreck, that thanks to her Agatha would be preserved from Paul and all his waywardness, and Paul from Agatha’s mediocrity. In vain she rehearsed her inward
monologue: Gérard and Agatha are two of a kind, they were bound to come
together, we were nothing but the intermediary, a year from now there’ll be a
baby, they’ll be blessing me. In vain she attempted to forget her role of arbiter
during the night of wrath, casting it from her like a dream engendered by some
cataleptic trance; in vain she depersonalized the whole affair, dismissed it as the
workings of an all-seeing Providence; still she was troubled in the presence of the
melancholy trio, yet dared not leave them for fear of the dire consequences.

There was no one of them she did not trust. Could it ever have occurred to them to
compare notes, they might have found reason to suspect her of malevolence, and forced
her to a showdown; but they were too well-bred for that. Malevolent? But why? Why should
she want to harm them? She was encouraged to find she could produce no answers. She
loved them all, poor dears. They were her lifework, her vocation. She had gathered them
beneath her wing, sheltered them, shouldered the entire burden of their follies, managed
to avert the certain Nemesis that would have overtaken them. She had paid, must pay, in
blood and tears. It had to be.

She went on telling herself it had to be, in the manner of a surgeon staking his
reputation on a crucial diagnosis. The dagger she had grasped became his scalpel.
Confronted at a moment’s notice with an acute emergency, she had had no option
but to give the anesthetic and perform the operation. Thanks to her skill, the patient
was recovering. Then, at the sound of Agatha’s strained laughter, at the sight of
Paul’s haggard face, of Gérard’s artificial grin, she would start
awake, beset once more by doubts and terrors, flying from the rumor of the chase behind
her, knowing the Furies hard upon her heels.

The honeymoon left brother and sister alone together. Paul was pining visibly. Elisabeth
moved in behind the barricades, sat up with him, nursed him day and night. The doctor
was baffled by this mysterious relapse; but the whole illness had always been
unorthodox. The bamboo hut dismayed him; he advised the removal of the patient to a
comfortable room. Paul, permanently wrapped in a cocoon of shawls, refused to budge. A
muffled light fell on the seated figure of Elisabeth, bowed forward, her chin propped in
her hands, staring into space, careworn, consumed with somber thoughts. As
Gérard, once, seeing the face of Paul flushed by the glory of the fire-engines,
had fancied him reviving, so now she saw it bloom in the reflection from the scarlet
bunting; and since false hopes were now her only diet, told herself it was, must be the
ruddy glow of health.

The death of Gérard’s uncle brought the young couple hurrying home.
Elisabeth placed an entire floor of the mansion at their disposal; but despite her
insistence they declined the offer, and took up residence in the rue Lafitte. This
seemed to her to augur favorably for their future; they were clearly settling down
contentedly to humdrum domesticity (the most they were entitled to) and had decided to
shun their friend’s unruly sphere of influence. When he heard of their decision,
Paul breathed again. He had dreaded a resumption of their former intimacy.

“We’re going to be dropped,” declared Elisabeth.
“We’re thoroughly undesirable. Gérard made no bones about it. He
says we’re bad for Agatha. Yes, honestly! You wouldn’t recognize him.
He’s turned into his uncle. I was absolutely staggered. At first I thought he had
his tongue in his cheek. I thought he must be trying to get a rise out of
me.”

From time to time they came to the house for lunch or dinner. Paul would leave his bed
for the occasion and join the others in the dining-room. The meal would be swallowed to
the accompaniment of brittle chatter, under the watchful eye of Mariette—the
melancholy eye of a shrewd Breton, a peasant’s eye for the shape of grief to
come.

O
NE DAY, just as
they were sitting down to lunch, Gérard said lightly:

“Guess who I ran into?”

Paul replied with an inquiring shrug.

“Dargelos!”

“Not really?”

“Yes, really, my dear fellow.”

He went on to say that he had been almost run over by a small car when he was crossing
the street. The car stopped: Dargelos was driving it. He had already heard that
Gérard had inherited his uncle’s property and was managing the factories.
He was anxious to be shown over one. He obviously had an eye to the main chance.

Paul wanted to know if he had changed.

Pretty much the same, a bit less color than he used to have…. Extraordinarily like
Agatha—might be taken for her brother. And quite the opposite of high-hat these
days. Very, very friendly, in fact. He was an agent for a motor firm and spent his time
traveling between France and Indo-China. He had taken Gérard back to his hotel
and asked him if he saw anything of Snowball … that snowball fellow…. He
meant Paul.

“So what?”

“I told him I saw you constantly. Then he said: ‘Does he still like
poison?’”

Agatha gave a start.

“Poison?” she cried, thunderstruck.

“You bet.” Paul’s voice was loud, aggressive. “Glorious
stuff, poison! I was always dying to get hold of some when I was at school.” (It
would have been more accurate to say that Dargelos was obsessed by poisons and that he,
Paul, had copied Dargelos.)

“What could be the point?” asked Agatha.

“No point at all,” said Paul. “Because I wanted it, I wanted to have
some poison. It’s glorious. I’d like to have it in the same way as
I’d like to have a basilisk or a mandrake, in the same way that I like having a
revolver. You’ve got it, you know you’ve got it, it’s there for you
to look at. It’s poison. Glorious!”

Elisabeth agreed. It was an opportunity to snub Agatha and to demonstrate her old
solidarity with the magic of the Room. She declared that she adored poison. In the days
of the rue Montmartre, she used to play at brewing poisons, bottling and sealing them,
sticking gruesome labels on them, making up sinister names.

“How ghastly! Gérard, they’re mad! I know they’ll end in the
jug.”

Elisabeth was delighted by Agatha’s outburst; by corroborating the bourgeois
status she had conferred on the young couple, it absolved her of deliberate bad faith
towards them. She caught Paul’s eye and winked.

“Dargelos showed me his whole collection,” went on Gérard.
“Poisons from India, China, Mexico, the West Indies, poisons for arrow-tips,
poisons for lingering death by torture, vendetta poisons, poisons for sacrificial rites.
He said jokingly: ‘Tell Snowball I haven’t changed. I always wanted to
collect poisons. Now I do so. Here, give him this to play with.’”

Under the goggling eyes of Elisabeth and Paul, Gérard felt in his pocket and
pulled out a small package wrapped in a piece of newspaper. Agatha turned her back on
the proceedings.

They opened the parcel, and found inside it a lump of something round and dark, about the
size of a fist, contained in a flimsy paper sheath. It was the color of earth, and had a
texture not unlike a truffle, apart from one raw reddish gash in it. It gave off an odor
as of clay newly dug; also a pungent whiff of onion and of oil of geranium.

Nobody spoke. They stood frozen before this object that drew and yet repelled them, as if
a uniform reptilian mass should suddenly uncoil before their eyes and rear a dozen snaky
heads. It was death’s absolute presence that confronted them.

“It’s a drug,” said Paul. “He must be a drug-addict. He
wouldn’t make so free with it if it was poison.”

He put a hand out.

“Don’t touch it!” Gérard pushed the hand away.
“Whatever it is, it’s a present from Dargelos, but he said you
weren’t on any account to touch it. But I wouldn’t dream of letting you
keep the horrible thing—you’re much too casual.”

Paul lost his temper. Taking his cue from Elisabeth, he told Gérard not to be so
stuffy. Who did he think he was? His dear departed uncle, etc.?

“Casual, are we?” sneered Elisabeth. “Just you wait!”

Snatching up the parcel, she started to chase her brother round and round the table,
shouting:

“Go on, eat it, eat it!”

Agatha fled; Paul leapt on a table, buried his face in his hands. She panted after him,
jeering: