Monsieur Jonquelle Read online

  Monsieur Jonquelle

  Prefect of Police of Paris

  By

  Melville Davisson Post

  Contents

  I. The Great Cipher

  II. Found in the Fog

  III. The Alien Corn

  IV. The Ruined Eye

  V. The Haunted Door

  VI. Blücher’s March

  VII. The Woman on the Terrace

  VIII. The Triangular Hypothesis

  IX. The Problem of the Five Marks

  X. The Man With Steel Fingers

  XL. The Mottled Butterfly

  XII. The Girl With the Ruby

  A Note on the Author

  I.—The Great Cipher

  It was a night of illusions. The whole world was unreal. The city could not be seen. There was a sort of fairy vista extending over the gardens across the bit of park into the haze, pierced by the narrow white shaft of the National Monument extending into the sky.

  There was a heavy odor of jessamine and honeysuckle lying about the southern portico of the Executive Mansion. But there were no lights. The whole of the portico was in heavy shadow. A big, strong, masculine voice, cultivated and firm, was speaking.

  “I am glad that business of your embassy brought you to America, Monsieur Jonquelle,” it said, “because I wanted to ask you about that last expedition of Chauvannes’. I knew Chauvannes in South Africa. He was a first-class man. What was the mystery about his death? The current report at the time could not have been the truth. It was too fantastic.”

  One might have made out the figure of the Frenchman by looking closely in the dim light. He sat in a long chair, his legs extended, a cigarette, unlighted, moving in his fingers. His voice was low and clear when he spoke, like one engaged with a reflection.

  “It was all the truth, Excellency,” he said, “as we now know.”

  The big voice interrupted: “That fantastic story!”

  The Frenchman’s voice did not change.

  “The truth about it,” he said, “is even more fantastic than the current story of the time. Nobody believed it. Nobody could have believed it. When his journal finally came in, everybody thought Chauvannes had gone mad before the end. The things he wrote down simply could not have happened!”

  He paused. “But it was every word the truth.… There are the emeralds in the Louvre.”

  The big man beyond Monsieur Jonquelle, obscured by the thick shadow, made an exclamation of astonishment.

  “The emeralds,” he said, “are of course proof of the fact that Chauvannes found some evidences of the thing he was after. But his journal could not have been the truth. The man who wrote the closing pages of that journal must have been mad.”

  The Frenchman replied with no change in his voice.

  “Excellency,” he said, “the man who wrote the closing pages of that journal was not only sane, but he was so clever that I have never ceased to admire him. He was in a desperate position, from which, he knew perfectly well, there was no escape, and he undertook to do a thing that not only required the soundest intelligence, but it also required a degree of cleverness that has not been equaled by anybody. I feel that I ought to stand and uncover whenever I think about Chauvannes.”

  There was a sound in the darkness as of one drawing one’s body swiftly together in a chair. There was a sort of booming in the big voice.

  “You amaze me!” it said. “Of course, I knew what Chauvannes was after. He used to talk about it when we were shooting on the Vaal. He had the clue, he thought, to a lost civilization of an immense age, in the great wilderness of Central Africa, a little north of the Congo. The old route of the ivory raiders had touched it. And there were the stories the slave traders had brought out, and so forth. I thought at the time that he was building on insufficient data, but one never knows what civilization may have flourished on any portion of the earth’s surface. An immense wilderness laid down over it would mean nothing. The race is much older than we imagine.”

  He continued to speak in his strong, firm voice:

  “I was not surprised that Chauvannes found some evidence of the thing he was looking for. He was a first-class archeologist. He knew all about everything of the sort that had been uncovered. And he was a good, all-around explorer, none better. If there was any man in the world who could have gone from the Congo across the old trail of the ivory raiders, northeast to the Albert Nyanza, it was Chauvannes. I can believe that Chauvannes went in there, and that he found the evidences of the thing he was looking for; but the journal that the survivor of the expedition brought in could not be true. Chauvannes was insane when he wrote it—if the excerpts I saw of it were not colored. One could easily go mad at the end of an adventure like that. It was an appalling thing to undertake. That forest lies on the equator. It is very nearly three thousand miles across it. There is every conceivable peril in it. One would look for a man to come out on the Nyanza mad, if he ever did come out.”

  Monsieur Jonquelle replied in the same even voice.

  “Our government, Excellency,” he said, “was precisely of your opinion, when the journal finally came in. They thought Chauvannes was mad at the end. But he was not mad! He was sane and clever—how sane and how clever you will realize when you get the whole thing clearly in your mind. It was a long time before we understood it, although how we could have been so stupid seems to me now a greater wonder than the fantastic incidents with which Chauvannes filled the closing pages of his journal.

  “I think the first clue we got was the method Chauvannes had taken to be sure that the journal would get into Paris after his death. His direction, written on the back of it, was that the bearer who brought it in should be paid five thousand francs by the executors of his estate. You see he was offering a reward for the thing to get in.

  “Only one of the three men that Chauvannes constantly speaks of in his journal ever appeared. One can imagine what happened to the other two—the same thing, doubtless, that happened to all the persons who started with Chauvannes northeast to the Nyanza after he had abandoned his excavations.”

  The big man beyond Monsieur Jonquelle in the dark seemed to have composed himself to listen. He was silent, and Monsieur Jonquelle went on:

  “These men, who were the only persons alive with Chauvannes when he finally reached the Ituri on the morning of the seventeenth of December, must have been three of the most desperate adventurers in the world. They were evidently broken men at the end of their tether, willing to stake everything on a last chance, or they would not have joined Chauvannes. They were not men he selected. He never would have selected men of this character. They seem to have followed him in and to have literally annexed themselves to his expedition when he left the Congo east of the Leopold. They must have been an exquisite devil’s guard—those three; the little wolf-faced Apache, Leturc, the Finn sailor, and the American beach comber they called Captain Dix.

  “The Apache was the one who came in with the journal. He must have been, after all, what you would call the ‘best man’ of the three. Nevertheless it was these three hell birds who came out alive with Chauvannes. And what he had to say about them is on every page of the journal. He must have changed his mind very shortly after they joined him, because the first impressions he wrote down, which were probably what our own would have been, were afterward scratched out. We might have believed that some one else had made these erasures but for the fact that the journal from this time on never fails to speak of these three men in the highest terms. Their tirelessness, their energy, their courage, their devotion to Chauvannes is the one note that continues through this journal to the end.

  “Of course, one could say that as these three men had to depend on Chauvannes to bring them out, the pr
esence of a common peril would have united them in his support, and that while they were apparently exerting themselves for him, they were, in fact, laboring to get out of that wilderness alive.

  “They were evidently densely ignorant persons of a low order. The Finn and the American beach comber had no education whatever; Leturc could read—he was a deserter, we think, from the Foreign Legion—and he had a sort of devil’s shrewdness. But he was no match, when it came to wits, for Chauvannes. None of them were. They were ignorant and superstitious. But they were determined, desperate to the last degree, and afraid of nothing.

  “One of the features of the journal that first impressed me was the fact that Chauvannes had no illusions about these men. He understood each of them perfectly. He pinned the success of his great plan to an accurate conception of the Apache, Leturc. He thought this desperate human creature was what you would call the ‘best man.’ He expected him to come out the best man, and he laid the plan he had in mind to fit that eventuality. And he was right. I saw that when I got to thinking about the journal.

  “And I saw something else. I saw that Chauvannes realized his own situation pretty early in the march of events. He knew what he was going into. And he knew where the thing would lead. He realized it a long way ahead. This fact, as I have said, was one of the conspicuous features of the journal. I suppose one, in an incipient madness, might realize all the accurate features of the situation that lay about Chauvannes, and before him, as he did; but I doubt it. I think only a man sound and sane could have seen it with the certainty that Chauvannes saw it, and at the distance beyond the event. Only the soundest intelligence, in the calm control of every faculty, could have realized that the thing before him was inevitable. A man in any other state of mind would have undertaken to delude himself. He would have resorted to futile devices, or to some tragic issue before the end, or to some vain hope. It took a mind like Chauvannes’, profoundly sane, to see that the thing that awaited him was inevitable!

  “I studied that journal as closely as a cipher dispatch. The evidences of Chauvannes’ mental condition did not appear until the entries beginning about the seventeenth of December—the day on which they finally came out of the forest on the old elephant trail. Of course, strange things had happened before that—the decimation of the force, for one thing. But Chauvannes never seemed to attribute this to any but a natural cause, a sort of united plan of the dwarf camps to destroy the members of the expedition.

  “He found that whole, awful wilderness veined through with these camps, precisely as Stanley found it when he was following the Ituri in his effort to relieve Emin Pasha. And Chauvannes seems to have had precisely the same experiences as Stanley, in that the poisoned arrows, which the dwarf tribes used, were always fatal to the natives, but not to the white men of the expedition. At least, the three white men with Chauvannes, and the explorer himself, always escaped, while the persistent destruction of the other members of the expedition continued until only Chauvannes and the other white men came out alive.

  “Chauvannes, like other men who have been into the Congo, tried to find out what the poison was that these dwarfs used, but he had no more success at it than Stanley. He thought the fact that white men did not die of this poison, as Stanley’s expedition demonstrated, may have, perhaps, convinced these hostile tribes that a white man could not be so destroyed, and was the reason why they directed their attacks against the natives of the expedition and not against the four white men who conducted it. The explanation seems possible. It seemed intelligent to Chauvannes, for he makes it very clear in his journal that this is his belief. He gives it as the reason why all the members of the expedition finally perished except the four members of it who were white.

  “The expedition was not large. It was as small as Chauvannes could get on with. He never intended it to be more than a scouting party, to lay out the thing he was looking for. The discovery of the emeralds was a sort of accident in removing the portion of an ancient wall that an uprooted tree had dislodged.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Monsieur Jonquelle went on:

  “Of course, the average person, accustomed to adventure tales, has a fantastic notion about these hostile natives. But there is in fact nothing fantastic about them. The whole of this immense forest, lying above the equator, is inhabited by these tribes, and their furtive attacks with poisoned weapons, usually at night, are well known to everybody. Stanley’s whole expedition was constantly menaced by them. You will see his map dotted all over with their camps. They are no fairy creatures of romance. They are a constantly menacing, actual peril in the Congo.

  “Chauvannes saw nothing strange or mysterious about what happened to the native members of his expedition. His journal is clear on that.

  “I said a while ago that the incredible things set out in the journal did not begin to appear until about the seventeenth of December, when they had finally come out. It is true that some indicatory things are noted in the journal before that date. Chauvannes could not sleep. He returns again and again to this fact. Bromides did no good. He continues to complain about the failure of the bromides. He wonders if the drugs have lost their virtue, or if they could not have been pure. He notes that he tested this with one of the other men and observed the effect. The bromides were all right. This fact gave him a good deal of concern. He could not sleep. And the drugs upon which the medical profession depends in such a case, failed.

  “We find this feature in considerable detail and beginning some time before December 17 while the expedition was still in the forest of the Congo, in its awful march to the northeast.

  “It could have been nothing short of awful in every conception of the word. The whole of that vast wilderness is a kingdom of Satan. We never can get any adequate realization of it—a horror of gloom and rain, the heavens shut out nearly all the time by the tree tops, the whole earth underneath a bog, every form of creeper, of vermin, of reptile, the stench of a rotten world, and this invisible enemy that never relented and never tired out. It was enough to break down the morale of anybody. No wonder Chauvannes couldn’t sleep! But it never did break down his morale—that’s precisely what I am going to make clear to you—not even when he saw, with an almost uncanny second sight, what was inevitably ahead of him.

  “I don’t know when it was that Chauvannes realized what was ahead of him, but as I have said, I think he saw it almost from the first day of the march north.

  “I studied that journal word by word and sentence by sentence. I felt at the time that no one of us understood it, that the thing meant something which ought to appear if we were able to grasp a proper conception of it. I felt before it as I used to feel before those clever German dispatches, which appeared on their faces to be merely a narrative of a domestic incident, when they were in fact army orders containing a definite direction. I was right, as events proved, but the government authorities in Paris at the time considered my notion fantastic.

  “Still, as I have said, the strange digressions in his journal did not begin to appear until about the seventeenth of December, when they came out on to the great grass-covered plateau outlined to the east by a low mountain range, beneath which lay Lake Albert Nyanza. As it happened, they had come out ten days ahead of the date which they had determined upon for the arrival of the lake boat. It was to receive the expedition at the same point on the Nyanza that Stanley met Emin Pasha.

  “Now, here was another indicatory point. They did not go ahead to the Nyanza as Stanley had done. They camped on a grassy slope—it looked like an English lawn, Chauvannes said—within the first day’s march out of the forest. Here they remained.

  “Chauvannes had all the modern implements that an explorer carries with him, and he laid down the exact location of this camp with the most painstaking accuracy. It was charted in the journal in half a dozen different forms and checked in every variety of way. He seemed to have spent a lot of time at this. He was determined that the exact spot of this camp should be definite
ly located for all time and beyond any possibility of error. And he did not fail. The exact location of that camp is as certain as any boundary monument on our Belgian frontier. It can be located to-day within the error of half a meter. He had plenty of time for this, because he remained in this camp with Leturc while the other men went on to the Nyanza.

  “The route to the lake could now be laid out to the eye. It was directly below a marked rocky promontory of the sky line. But the men with Chauvannes thought it better to be certain of the way out, and as they had to put in the time until the boat arrived, it seemed advisable to go over the route. The American beach comber, Dix, and the Finn set out for the Albert, Leturc remaining in the camp with Chauvannes.

  “Chauvannes seemed in the journal to take a certain care to justify this course. He was now alarmed about his condition. The camp was in a spot little less than heavenly after the awful forest of the Congo. It was a rolling country of bright green pasture land, veined with an outline of trees, its hilltops studded with thickets beyond which lay to the east the range of mountains rimming the Nyanza. It was simply a paradise after the horror of the vast wilderness to the southwest of it. Birds were everywhere. It was a glorious country, full of antelope, eland, buffalo and the like. It was no trouble for a hunter to supply a camp.

  “It was here alone with Leturc that Chauvannes finished the journal, which I finally deciphered, as one might say, at the Service de la Sureté in Paris.

  “I have said that the only thing indicating Chauvannes’ condition before the seventeenth of December, when they came out on the old elephant track into this heavenly country below the Albert, was the fact that he could not sleep and that the bromides had failed him. But this was not precisely all. The journal began to indicate a state of mind in Chauvannes that he apparently hesitated a long time to record, the impression that they were approaching some sort of creature of which they had very little, if any, dependable information.