'Twixt Dog and Wolf (Valancourt Classics) Read online

  ‘But, hold!’ said Tourret; ‘what did you say? In Vigilâ Nativitatis—why it is precisely the Eve of Noel that we are in to-night.’

  ‘And so it is! If we were to try the charm?’ said Gavaudun.

  ‘Excellent! we will do so.’

  ‘John of Menz come to our aid!’ said Sommarel, folding his hands.

  ‘Tush! You don’t invoke John of Menz,’ said Gavaudun. ‘Let me see, whom have we got to call upon?’

  ‘Oh, Diabolus, I suppose, or the Anima Mundi, the Soul of the World,’ said Tourret.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Gavaudun, who had taken up the book.

  Glad of a little change they all rose up. ‘We have to inscribe a pentacle, the Pentacle of Mars, on the floor,’ said Raynaud. ‘Then prick our arms and transfer the blood from one vein to another, he directs.’

  ‘No, you say the incantation or conjuration first,’ said Gavaudun, as he turned back to an earlier page. As he did so a sort of tune seemed to be running in his head. They scratched the pentacle on the floor with a rusty iron nail, and each took his stand in one of the angles. Then Gavaudun shouted out the conjuration:—‘I conjure and require you,—Ja, Pa, Asmodai, Aleph, Beleph, Adonai, Gormo, Mormo, Sadaï, Galzaol, Asrael, Tangon, Mangon, Porphrael!’[2] It was not precisely thus that the words were written; but they seemed to come out of his mouth in this sort of chant; and all the four took it up and sang, ‘Galzael, Asrael, Tangon, Mangon, Porphrael!’ till the roof echoed. Then they stopped suddenly and stared at one another. They were all in a sweat; but each one laughed. Of course that was part of the joke; the other three had been roaring like that for a joke, but each one felt that for himself the chanting had been a mere contagion, had come out of him without his will.

  ‘O vos omnes spiritus terreni, invocamus et convocamus vos! Ye spirits of the earth, we call and conjure you! Be ye our aiders and confederates, and fulfil whatever we demand!’ Gavaudun with a solemn mien pronounced this prayer. ‘Now for the drop of blood!’ And he turned round to the table to re-read the passage of John of Menz. He seemed to take the lead now, while Raynaud did everything in a reluctant, half-mechanical way as one walking in his sleep. They had all been sitting without their coats, as the custom was in those days; two in loose dressing-gowns, one in a light jacket, and one in shirt sleeves. As they stood in the pentacle they took off these outer garments, or turned up the sleeves of them to bare their arms. Each one made with his penknife or stiletto a small incision in his arm, a little blood was squeezed out, according to the prescription, and exchanged against a drop of blood from his neighbour’s arm, which, as well as it might be, was conducted into the wound made to receive it. It took time; for each one had to make the exchange with his neighbour; each had to make two pricks upon his arm, for only so could he be sure that he had not squeezed out again the foreign blood just imported.

  ‘Quick!’ said Sommarel. ‘It is near twelve, and the whole must be done on the Eve of the Nativity.’

  ‘There ought to be five of us,’ said Tourret, ‘to fill all the five angles.’

  ‘No; it specially says not more than four. I suppose the Terrestrial Spirit, whose names we have been reciting, fills up the fifth angle.’

  ‘Why Raynaud and I have not exchanged yet,’ said Gavaudun, as the others held out their hands to complete the mystic circle.

  ‘Bon Dieu, we cannot wait any longer. You see it is just twelve.’

  They linked hands and shouted once more in chorus, and to the self-same chant: ‘Ja, Pa, Asmodai, Aleph, Beleph, Adonai, Gormo, Mormo, Sadaï,’ and the rest. Louder and louder they called, the sweat pouring down their foreheads. A wanderer of the night, supperless in the bitter cold, looked up at their windows which shone like a high beacon, heard the shout, and in his heart cursed those jovial revellers as he supposed them to be. Then from the neighbouring church of St. Genevieve rang over the compact mass of roofs the first notes of the clock, and next a chime of bells. Raynaud tore his hands from the others; a look of terror was in his face.

  ‘That was famous!’ said Sommarel, bursting into a laugh.

  II

  This room in the Rue Pot-de-Fer was for the four students no more than an inn on the high road of life. In six months they had separated again, and gone their different ways. It was now nearly six years since they had lived together in that room. Gavaudun had left Paris to become a professor at Lille, and, young as he still was, was a man already distinguished. On the capture of Lille he had become an Austrian subject, and had left Revolutionary France forever. Sommarel was practising the law in his native town. Tourret had married a rich wife and had disappeared from ken. Only Raynaud remained behind in the old room.

  Since the four had parted the Revolution had begun, and had marched along its appointed way. At first Raynaud had taken his share in all the excitement of the time. He had been among the crowd when the Bastille fell. He had followed the procession of women to Versailles, and seen the King carried to Paris in triumph. But during the last two years all energy seemed to have ebbed from him; and a fantastic pageant of events had passed him, he himself taking no part in what was going forward, scarcely even heeding it. Time after time the faubourg of St. Marcel hard by had risen in black wrath, had flowed out in its thousands to meet St. Antoine, to meet the Marseillais volunteers, to whirl and eddy round the Tuileries and the Hall of the National Convention; or had gone forth in frantic joy to take part in I know not what Feast of the Revolution, Feast of Reason, Fraternal Supper, as the occasion might be; and had flowed back again, neither the better nor the worse in its every day life for all its wild exhibitions of rage and hope. Over all this Raynaud looked from his high citadel as if he had no concern in these terrene matters. But his indifference was not born of philosophy, only of a strange dulness which he could not shake off.

  He had remained the constant inhabitant of the same room. But not always its sole occupant. A succession of persons had lain upon one or other of the three tressel-beds left vacant by Gavaudun, Sommarel, and Tourret; a strange procession of beings emblematical of the times: esurient lawyers from the provinces; disfrocked abbés much given to cards; Jews come to deal, if it might be, in assignats and the domaines nationaux. Nor were the lighter occupations of life unrepresented in these grim times. Not long since three players from the Theâtre de Lyons had been his room-fellows. One of them had got an engagement at the Theâtre Français in the Rue de Bondi; the other two had come up to bear him company, and look out for work and play. The last co-occupant of the room had called himself a composer. People said that he was in reality a Royalist agent, and he had been haled to the guillotine. Nay, but he was a composer, whatever else he might be; for his companion had one or two fragments of songs set to music by him which he had left behind in his hurry. Raynaud was now left in his ancient room alone; he himself was under the protection of Citizen Fourmisson, formerly barber, now member of the Tribunal Criminel Révolutionnaire, who lived in the better apartments below, and whose children Raynaud taught. But it was best to keep one’s self to one’s self in those suspicious days; and at that moment Raynaud reckoned not a single friend in Paris.

  Life had not gone well with him. He was thinking this as, one winter afternoon, he returned to his room after giving his accustomed lesson on the floor below, and in spite of the cold stood for a moment gazing out from his window over the view of plots and cottages and distant woods which it showed. The houses and cottages had become more frequent, the patches of land fewer, during the last six years; for the faubourg had grown considerably. Raynaud noticed this much; he knew nothing about the changes in the rest of Paris. During the last three years he had never once crossed the river. He knew nothing of the changed appearance of the Quai de Grève since the conflagration, nothing of the new names which had been bestowed upon the parts of Paris near the Tuileries. Above all he had never been to the Place de la Révolution, nor seen the alta
r raised to the new patron saint of the City of Paris, la Sainte Guillotine. Certainly this indifference to the growth of the Republic, One and Indivisible, was in itself a thing suspect. But Citizen Fourmisson had his reasons for wishing to retain the services of the dreamy young tutor.

  No; life had not gone well with him. Citizen Fourmisson paid his salary chiefly in the protection which his august name afforded. What Raynaud lived upon was a pittance due to him from his brother Gilbert, who cultivated the few patrimonial acres of Les Colombiers. ‘Why do I linger on here?’ Raynaud thought, or half-thought. ‘What value is protection to a life so colourless as mine?’’ But then he realized that if he did talk of going, Fourmisson would without doubt denounce him at once. He thought of his last chamber-companion Briçonnet, the musician, the only one with whom he had made any sort of friendship; of the knocking which had mingled with Raynaud’s dreams on that morning when the sergents de ville came to carry the poor composer off to the Luxembourg hard by; of the man’s white face when he awoke, of how he had clutched at the bedstead and screamed to Raynaud to come to his help. The sergeants had searched everywhere, had ripped open the bed, but so far as Raynaud could see they had found nothing but scores of music. Most of the music they had carried away, but some scattered sheets remained. One contained the setting of a song by the unhappy Berthier de Saint Maur, who had been before then as little known to Raynaud as he was for long after to the English reader until, not long since, a critic unearthed him and translated some of his songs. It was a verse from the song of Le Pèlerin which was running in Raynaud’s head now:

  Alone, alone, no mortal thing so much

  Alone! The eagle captured from the hills;

  The solitary chouan[3] when he fills

  The air with discord; the cast mariner,

  What time the spar parts from his frozen clutch,

  Are not so lone as I,—ah no, sweet sir!

  Raynaud even tried to sing the tune, as he had heard Briçonnet sing it. Singing was not in his way; he got nowhere near the air; rather the words came out in an unearthly chant.

  Then, suddenly, he was brought back to the scene in this very room, six years before, when he and the three others had chanted together a magic formula out of a book by,—by,—he forgot the name. The whole scene rose before his eyes; then faded as quickly. No; his life had not gone well since then. He had in those ambitious student days (he had always passed then for the cleverest of the four) planned that great work on the Comité des Nations, an extension of the doctrine of the social contract into the domain of national law. It was to inaugurate a new era. The plan of the book and its very name were identical with those of the work which Gavaudun had actually published in these years; and which even in the times in which they lived had made him famous. Had Gavaudun taken his idea? Had he, Raynaud, left much on record? Had he expounded it fully in those days? He could not remember now; but he thought he had drawn it all out later. Yet it could not be so; Gavaudun must have stolen the thought from him. But his spirits felt too dulled to allow of his feeling active resentment even for such a piece of plagiarism as that.

  Then Tourret; that was stranger still. Tourret had acted out in real life what had been Raynaud’s dream. He had almost from boyhood had that romance in his mind. How he was to be riding along the dangerous way where the main road to Tours branches off from the Orleans road, there where the disused water-mill peeps out from among the trees,—that mill was always thought to be a rendezvous for footpads; how he was to overhear the two men planning the seizure of an approaching vehicle, was to ride past them receiving a shot through his hat (he remembered all the details), was to meet the coach in which sat an old father and a beautiful young daughter, to ride up (in imminent danger again of being shot) and give them warning. Alas, too late, for here are the two upon us! But the old father fires, he, Raynaud, fires, and the two rogues fall. But what if more are coming? So he offers his own horse to the father, and the daughter rides on pillion behind, Raynaud and the coachman driving after at the best rate they can make. The result, the eternal gratitude of the father and his, Raynaud’s ultimate marriage to the beautiful heiress. Such had been Raynaud’s romance, elaborated in every detail. And three years ago it had fallen to Tourret actually to do this thing! The robbers from whom Tourret saved his future father-in law were not common highwaymen, but two from the terrible band of the chauffeurs, wherefore his heroism had been the greater. Tourret had married the heiress, and had, it was thought, at the beginning of the troubles found his way out of France to Switzerland.

  No; not well. And last night he had dreamed that a great treasure had been found on the farm at Les Colombiers. The dream was so vivid that even after he woke he had been speculating what he should do with the money, what new life he should lead. But now that his thoughts had run back into their accustomed sombre channel he saw things in a different light. He professed to be an enlightened thinker; but no small measure of rustic superstition lingered in his mind. Dreaming of a treasure he knew was reckoned a bad omen. Who knows what it might portend?

  Musing of all these things Raynaud descended to take his walk. As he passed along the passage at the bottom of the house the concierge stopped him with the familiar and, as we should call it, insolent action which one citizen used to another in those days, and always emphasized if he had to do with a man better born and better educated than himself.

  ‘A despatch for you, citizen,’ he said.

  The lower floor of this old hotel was now a wine-shop, and the two or three men in the room were grouped together examining a rather official-looking envelope bound round with a cord and sealed with black wax.

  ‘Here is the citizen for the letter,’ said the concierge; and the man who was actually holding it handed the envelope to the porter without apology and without rising. ‘Good luck to the citizen with his letter,’ he said, turning back to the table to take up his glass.

  The others laughed a little, and all eyed Raynaud rather curiously as he broke the seals. The idea of Government was in those days almost synonymous with the idea of Death. Therefore even an envelope with an official seal upon it, especially if the seal were black, suggested the vague possibility either that the citizen who received it was going to be guillotined himself, or else that one of his relatives had been—not here in Paris, perhaps, but down in the country.

  Raynaud with the thoughts that had been running in his head could not help turning pale as he opened the letter. But it proved to be of a very inoffensive character, though for some reason the Bureau of Police had thought fit to open and read it and seal it up again in this official manner. It was from Raynaud’s brother Gilbert. ‘My dear brother,’ he wrote. ‘The agriculture marches very ill here, no doubt in great measure because of the plots of Pitt and of the enemies of the Republic; but also because the workmen work not very willingly and there are not enough métayers[4] to be found. It has happened that my brother-in-law Emile Plaidoyer has lately died. Wherefore my father-in law writes to offer me to work with him upon his farm of Guibrauche in Plessis-le-Pèlerin, where he prospers better than I. Now precisely at this moment comes an offer from Maistre Sommarel of Tours to buy Les Colombiers. He offers a good price for it, seven thousand livres. Wherefore if thou consent, my dear brother, the bargain shall be made and the instruments drawn up. D. G. Thy brother, Gilbert.’ D. G. was the nearest that those who still possessed religion dared put for the ordinary salutation, Dieu te garde.

  Curious; Raynaud’s dream of last night come true, after a fashion! Only unhappily the treasure of which the dream spoke was diminished to this miserable sum of seven thousand livres, of which only the moiety would come to him. That at any rate was worth having. To-morrow he would write to Gilbert authorizing him to complete the sale. With that he issued into the street.

  III

  There was very little variety in Raynaud’s walks. They took place at th
e same time, that is at the completion of his afternoon’s lessons with his pupils, and therefore at this winter season just about the hour of dusk. They never extended outside a short radius from his lodging, and generally comprised some sort of a circle round Mount St. Geneviève. Up the Rue des Postes, the Rue Neuve St. Geneviève, down the Rue Mouffetard, the Rue Bordet, till he reached the Place du Panthéon; this was his route to-day. He extracted a certain dull pleasure from the sight of these familiar streets growing dusky in the gathering night. They made an image for him of the fading of all things, all worldly ambitions and troubles into the same dull twilight of the tomb; an image or half-image, for his thoughts themselves had grown dim and as it were muffled in his brain.

  But to-night he was roused up a little, cheered by the letter which he had got from Gilbert. ‘Maistre Sommarel, Sommarel,’ he said to himself, as he reviewed the letter in his mind. ‘Likely enough that is my old comrade Sommarel. He was a Tourrainais like myself; I know that. Everything seems to bring back those days to me this evening.’ The scene of their last Christmas Eve came once more distinctly before his mind. ‘And, par Dieu!’ he thought to himself, ‘if this is not also Christmas Eve!’ The Christian religion had been abolished, and the months and the days of the month had been changed; so that it took Raynaud a minute to remember that this, the fourth of Nivose, was in ‘slave-style’ the twenty-fourth of December. But, as he walked, the words of the old incantation came back to him, and under his breath he kept on humming, to the selfsame chant that they had used, the meaningless invocation,—‘Ja, Pa, Asmodai, Aleph, Beleph, Adonai, Gormo, Mormo, Sadaï!’ It was sad nonsense.