RETURN TO CONSCIOUSNESS.
Leon Roch sat alone, but not at peace, by the bed where his wife
lay sleeping. Watching her face, to note in its varying expression
anything that might be a symptom of danger or a sign of improvement,
his attention wandered occasionally from the patient to himself and
the painful position in which he was placed by events and persons.
How was it that he had fallen into it. How was it that he had not
been able to foresee and prevent this diabolical crossing of the two
circles in which he moved--the two orbits of antagonistic ideas and
feelings? And as he asked himself the answer came with a mocking laugh
from the depths of his consciousness, in the words of his own theories
at the time of his engagement and marriage. In the early days of this
veracious history he had, as we know, dreamed magnificent dreams, and
among others that of moulding his life by making himself its master
and ruling it absolutely to his will. But the men who cherish this
dream of triumph take no account of what we may call Social Destiny--an
irresistible power composed of creeds--our own and others; of personal
or collective resistance; of the errors--nay of the virtues--of our
neighbours; of a thousand trifles which, from time to time, must be
defied or deferred to; and finally of law and custom which it is rarely
permissible, or even possible, to fight single-handed.
Leon was sorry for himself; at the same time he could not help laughing
himself to scorn. “It is really absurd,” he said to himself, “that a
stone cannot move without rolling down hill.”
As he thought of all this and much more, he did not cease to watch
the progress of his patient. Two or three times in the course of the
day María roused from her torpid state, but her mind was clouded; she
knew no one and talked wildly. Conscious of suffering and unable to
determine or localize it she tried to fling herself out of bed, and
Leon had to use some force to prevent her. Towards night she became
quieter but the fever did not diminish. The doctor, however, found
that her pulse was steadier. In her sleep she spoke more clearly and
coherently, but at last, clasping her hands on her bosom she cried
aloud: “No, no, never! He is mine--mine!” With this she woke to clear
consciousness; her eyes wandered round the room examining the walls,
the ceiling, the bed--she perceived that she was in a strange place.
Her calm gaze showed that her mind was collected though somewhat weary
and that she had recovered her powers of judgment. Seeing her husband
sitting by the bed, alone, watchful, and anxious, her eyes softened and
she smiled as she said: “You?”
Leon went close to her and bent down putting his hand under the
coverlet to feel her pulse; she clutched at his wrist and clasped it
to her breast saying with a tremulous sob:
“What a mercy, to know that it was only a dream. I saw you--it was
dark, and they were going to put you into a fiery furnace. I was
terrified to death--I screamed out....”
Her imagination, excited by emotion and rage had been entangled in a
vortex of horrible visions--a frenzying whirl of shapes and colours
ending without colour or shape, and then had gone through an agony
of terror--lost in a void of space and blackness, filled only by
the very presence of Fear. As she reached the bottom of the abyss,
rushing downwards with increasing impetus, she was suddenly dazzled
with light. This was Hell. She saw it of course with its hideous
inhabitants as she had imagined them in her waking hours from written
descriptions and pictures; but as our conceptions of the supernatural
are always modified by the ideas of the time, and wear the aspect of
familiar scenes and objects--so that, as we know, our notion even of
the Almighty varies with the age--María saw the infernal precincts
as vast railway tunnels or gasometers reeking with smoke and stench,
or as a murky foundry with its roaring forges and machines clashing
and shrieking, with the groaning of bellows, the thud of hammers, and
the glare and swelter of a furnace. The demons, while retaining their
traditional guise of deformed men with hoofs and tails, seemed to toil
like smiths and scavengers, like the myrmidons of a gas-factory or of
a coal-mine, the Cyclops of Birmingham or Sheffield. All were grimy,
and bathed in sweat, and shiny as with the exuded grease of machinery.
It was a gulf formed by the meeting of tunnels, and galleries, and iron
causeways; the atmosphere was a mixture of coal dust, sulphur, gas and
petroleum--the odour was most abhorrent to our heroine. In the midst
of it all there was a tumult, a noise, a turmoil of which she could
have given no conception but by saying that a thousand trains rushed
at express speed on a central point and met--but no sooner was the
catastrophe accomplished than it at once began again. Locomotives were
in fact the principal feature in the Inferno of her delirious dream;
she saw them tearing past, flying with wings tipped with claws of iron,
snorting, groaning, rolling fiery eyes, and breathing out smoke and
sparks and steam. Though they were as large--as she thought--as in
real life, in that infinite void they were as a cloud of flies buzzing
stupendously.
Soon after their marriage Leon and María had made a tour in Germany
where, among other things, they had seen Krupp’s great foundry works
at Essen. The scene had made a deep impression on María that had never
quite been effaced, and in this torment of hallucination the images
brought away from that immense laboratory played a leading part in
the composition of the picture of the eternal limbo whither men are
consigned for their sins. Smaller foundries of the same kind, at
Barcelona and in France, had supplied various details and gave movement
to the terrific scene. The damned were spun round in a lathe and
rounded off like cannons or passed between rollers, coming out as flat
as paper; then they were cast into the white heat of the furnace and
recovered their natural form. Some were put into chains and their heads
laid on an anvil under a gigantic hammer that crushed their skulls. The
inferior demons--the rabble rout of Hell, amused themselves by drilling
holes in the skulls of some of their victims, and inserting a spoonful
of fused metal--the extract of a heap of books which were seething
in a bulky black cauldron, a hell-broth of heretical ideas. Others,
whose crime was evil-speaking of sacred things, had their tongues torn
out by particularly hideous fiends, and these tongues, hundreds and
thousands of them, were twisted together to form a rope which was then
hung to the vault, looking like strings of sausages put there to dry.
Others again were put through a strange torment, almost impossible to
describe. The wretches were knotted together, legs with arms, and arms
with heads, into a string or chain--a tissue of suffering and wailing.
This chain was then dragged out by a huge screw, till its length was
stretched from miles to leagues, while the bones cracked with a noise
like that of nuts trampled on by a thousand horses, and the flesh
was racked and torn; and these again, being flung into the furnace,
recovered their original shape to go once more through the same torture.
María saw all this in an anguish of terror: She was there, and she
was not; she could not shriek, she could not even breathe. But at
length there came a moment when terror gave way to grief. Among the
crowd of damned--guilty of unpardonable sin--was one who seemed to be
especially heinous, judging from the crowd of demons, male and female,
who surrounded him. This was Leon. María saw him seized, clutched by
the horrible greasy hands, cast into the boiling cauldron, dragged out
with a skimmer, pushed back with a spoon. Finally they picked him up
on a pitchfork and carried him to the mouth of a furnace so fiery that
any earthly fire would seem as ice by comparison. Then it was that
María uttered a cry, threw up her arm and hand--her arm that seemed of
enormous length, her hand that smarted with the burning heat:
“No, no, never--he is mine!”
The dream was broken, it vanished like the page of a book that is
suddenly closed--but the impression remained.