“Well?”
“First of all let me give you back your document: here it is. Everything is fine. The ship has left. It’s going to anchor up-stream off the French Consulate. Almost on the other side of the river.”
“Any difficulties?”
“Not a word. The old confidence: if not, I wonder how we would manage. In these matters, young man, confidence is aU the greater the less there is to justify it. ”
An allusion?
Clappique lit a cigarette. Kyo could see only the spot of square black silk on the indistinct face. He went to get his wallet-May was waiting-came back, paid the commission agreed upon. The Baron put the bills in his pocket, in a roll. without counting them.
“Generosity brings good luck,” he said. “My good fellow, the story of my night’s adventure is a re-mar-ka- ble moral tale: it began with charity and ends in wealth. Not a word!”
Raising his forefinger, he leaned over towards Kyo’s ear:
“Fantomas 1 salutes you!” then ^turned and left.
As though he were afraid to return into the house, he watched disappear, his dinner jacket bobbing up and down against the white wall. “Rather like Fantomas, as a matter of fact, in that outfit. Did he gues, or suppose, or. ” Enough of the picturesque: Kyo heard a cough and recognized it all the more quickly as he was
1 A popular character in French detective fiction who plays the role о t an elusive and clever criminal.
expecting it: Katov. Everyone was hurrying tonight.
In order to be less visible, perhaps, he was walking in the middle of the street. Kyo guessed his blouse rather than saw it; somewhere, above it, in the dark, a nose in the wind. Especially he sensed the swinging of his hands. He walked towards ^m.
“Well?” he asked, as he had asked Clappique.
“All’s well. And the ship?”
“Opposite the French Consulate. Far from the wharf. In half an hour.”
“The launch and the men are four hundred meters from there. Let’s go.”
“And the uniforms?”
“Don’t worry. The feUows are absolutely ready.”
He went into the house, dressed in a moment: trousers, a sweater, rope-soled shoes (he might have to do some climbing). He was ready. May offered her lips. Kyo’s spirit wanted to kiss her; his mouth, not-as though it bore an independent grudge. He finally kissed her, awkwardly. She looked at him with sadness, her eyelids lowered; her eyes, in deep shadow, became intensely expressive whenever the expression came from the muscles. He left.
He was walking by Katov’s side once more. Yet he could not free himself from her. “A while ago she seemed to me like a mad or a blind woman. I don’t know her. I know her only to the extent that I love, in the sense in which I love her. One possesses of another person only what one changes in ^m, says my father. And then what?” He withdrew into himself as he advanced into the increasingly dark alley, in which even the telegraph insulators no longer gleamed against the sky. His torment returned, and he remembered the records: “We hear the voices of others with our ears, our own voices with our throats.” Yes. One hears his own life, too, with his throat, and those of others?. First of all there was solitude, the inescapable aloneness behind the living multitude like the great primitive night behind the dense, low night under which this city of deserted streets was expectantly waiting, full of hope and hatred. “But I, to myself, to my throat, what am I? A kind of absolute, the affirmation of an idiot: an intensity greater than that of all the rest. To others, I am what I have done.” To May alone, he was not what he had done; to him alone, she was something altogether diferent from her biography. The embrace by which love holds beings together against solitude did not bring its relief to man; it brought relief only to the madman, to the incomparable monster, dear above all things, that every being is to himself and that he cherishes in his heart. Since his mother had died, May was the only being for whom he was not Kyo Gisors, but an intimate partner. “A parmership consented, conquered, chosen,’, he thought, extraordinarily in harmony with the night, as if his thoughts were no longer made for light. “Men are not my kind, they are those who look at me and judge me; my kind are those who love me and do not look at me, who love me in spite of everything, degradation, baseness, treason-me and not what I have done or shaU do-who would love me as long as I would love my- self-even to suicide. With her alone I have this love in common, injured or not, as others have children who are il and in danger of dying. ” It was not happiness, certainly. It was something primitive which was at one with the darkness and caused a warmth to rise in him, resolving itself into a motionless embrace, as of cheek against cheek-the only thing in him that was as strong as death.
On the roofs there were already shadows at their posts.
Four o'clock in the morning
Old Gisors crumpled the badly torn scrap of paper on which Ch’en had written his name in pencil, and put it in his pocket. He was impatient to see his former pupil again. His eyes fell once more upon the man he was conversing with, a very old Chinaman with the head of a mandarin of the India Company, wearing the robe; he was moving towards the door, with little steps, his forefinger raised, and was speaking English: “It is well that the absolute submission of woman, concubinage and the institution of courtesans exist. I shall continue to publish my articles. It is because our ancestors thought thus that those beautiful paintings exist (he indicated the blue phCI!nix with his eyes, without moving his face, as though he were ogling it)-you are proud of them, and I too. Woman is subject to man as man is subject to the State; and it is less hard to serve man than to serve the State. Do we live for ourselves? We are nothing. We live for the State in the present, for the order of the dead through the centuries….”
Was he ever going to leave? This man clutching to his past, even today (didn’t the sirens of the battleships suffice to fill the night?..) in the face of China corroded by blood like its sacrificial bronzes, was invested with a certain poetic quality, like some lunatics. Order! Crowds of skeletons in embroidered robes, lost in the depth of time in motionless assemblies: facing them, Ch’en, the two hundred thousand workers of the spinning mills without embroideries, the crushing horde of the coolies. The submission of women? Every evening May brought back accounts of suicides of fiancees. The old man left, his forefinger raised: “Order, Mr. Gisors!.. ” after a last bouncing nod of his head and shoulders.
As soon as he had heard the door shut, Gisors called Ch’en and returned with him to the room with the phrenixes.
Ch’en began to pace back and forth. Each time he passed before him, at a slight angle, Gisors seated on one of the divans was reminded of an Egyptian bronze hawk of which Kyo had kept a photograph through fondness for Ch’en, “because of the resemblance.” It was true, in spite of the kindliness which the thick lips seemed to express. “In short, a hawk converted by Saint Francis of Assisi,” he thought.
Ch’en stopped in front of him:
“It’s I who killed Tang Yen Ta,” he said.
He had seen in Gisors’ look something almost affectionate. He despised affection, and was afraid of it. His head which was sunk between his shoulders and pushed forward when he walked, and the curved ridge of his nose, accentuated the resemblance to the hawk, in spite of his squat figure; and even his narrow eyes, almost without lashes, made one think of a bird.
“Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Yes.”