BERSELIUS BEHOLDS HIS OTHER SELF
On the morning after Berselius's conversation with Adams, Berselius left
the Avenue Malakoff, taking his way to the Avenue des Champs Elysées on
foot.
The change in the man was apparent even in his walk. In the old days he
was rapid in his movements, erect of head, keen of eye. The weight of
fifteen years seemed to have suddenly fallen on his shoulders, bowing them
and slowing his step. He was in reality carrying the most terrible burden
that a man can carry--himself.
A self that was dead, yet with which he had to live. A past which broke
continually up through his dreams.
He was filled with profound unrest, irritation and revolt; everything
connected with that other one, even the money he had made and the house he
had built for himself and the pursuits he had followed, increased this
irritation and revolt. He had already formed plans for taking a new house
in Paris, but to-day, as he walked along the streets, he recognized that
Paris itself was a house, every corner of which belonged to that other
one's past.
In the Avenue Champs Elysées, he hailed a _fiacre_ and drove to the house
of his lawyer, M. Cambon, which was situated in the Rue d'Artiles.
Cambon had practically retired from his business, which was carried on now
by his son. But for a few old and powerful clients, such as Berselius, he
still acted personally.
He was at home, and Berselius was shown into a drawing room, furnished
heavily after the heart of the prosperous French _bourgeois_.
He had not to wait long for the appearance of the lawyer, a fat,
pale-faced gentleman, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, tightly buttoned up
in a frock-coat, the buttonhole of which was adorned with the red rosette
of the Legion of Honour.
Cambon had known Berselius for years. The two men were friends, and even
more, for Cambon was the depository of Berselius's most confidential
affairs.
"Well," said the lawyer, "you have returned. I saw a notice of your return
in the _Echo de Paris_, and indeed, this very day I had promised myself
the pleasure of calling on you. And how is Madame Berselius?"
"She is at Trouville."
"I had it in my mind that you proposed to remain away twelve months."
"Yes, but our expedition came to an end."
Berselius, in a few words, told how the camp had been broken up, without
referring, however, to his accident; and the fat and placid Cambon
listened, pleased as a child with the tale. He had never seen an elephant
except at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. He would have run from a milch-cow.
Terrible in the law courts, in life he was the mildest of creatures, and
the tale had all the attraction that the strong has for the weak and the
ferocious for the mild.
But even as he listened, sitting there in his armchair, he was examining
his visitor with minute attention, trying to discover some clue to the
meaning of the change in him.
"And now," said Berselius, when he had finished, "to business."
He had several matters to consult the lawyer about, and the most important
was the shifting of his money from the securities in which they were
placed.
Cambon, who was a large holder of rubber industries, grew pale beneath his
natural pallor when he discovered that Berselius was about to place his
entire fortune elsewhere.
Instantly he put two and two together. Berselius's quick return, his
changed appearance, the fact that suddenly and at one sweep he was selling
his stock. All these pointed to one fact--disaster.
The elephant story was all a lie, so resolved Cambon, and, no sooner had
he bowed his visitor out, than he rushed to the telephone, rang up his
broker, and ordered him to sell out his rubber stock at any price.
Berselius, when he left the lawyer's house, drove to his club. The selling
of his rubber industry shares had been prompted by no feeling of
compunction; it was an act entirely dictated by the profound irritation he
felt against the other one who had made his fortune out of those same
rubber industries.
He wished to break every bond between himself and the infernal entity that
dominated him by night. Surely it was enough to be that other one at
night, without being perpetually haunted by that other one's traces by
day.
In the Place de L'Opera, his _fiacre_ paused in a crowd of vehicles.
Berselius heard himself hailed. He turned his head. In a barouche drawn up
beside his carriage, was seated a young and pretty woman. It was Sophia
Melmotte, a flame from his past life, burning now for a space in the life
of a Russian prince.
"_Ma foi_," said Sophia, as her carriage pushed up till it was quite level
with Berselius. "So you are back from--where was it you went to? And how
are the tigers? Why, heavens, how you are changed! How gloomy you look.
One would think you had swallowed a hearse and had not digested the
trappings----"
To all of which Berselius bowed.
"_You_ are just the same as ever," said he.
The woman flushed under her rouge, for there was something in Berselius's
tone that made the simple words an insult. Before she could reply,
however, the block in the traffic ceased, and as the carriage drove on
Berselius bowed again to her coldly, and as though she were a stranger
with whom he had spoken for a moment, and whom he had never seen before.
At the club in the smoking room, where he went for an absinthe before
luncheon, he met Colonel Tirard, the very man who had presided at the
banquet given to him on the day of his leaving for Africa. This man, who
had been his friend, this man, in whose society he had always felt
pleasure, was now obnoxious to him. And after a while the weird fact was
borne in on the mind of Berselius that Tirard was not talking to him.
Tirard was talking to the man who was dead--the other Berselius. The new
rifle for the army, which filled Tirard's conversation, would have been an
interesting subject to the old Berselius; it was absolutely distasteful to
the new.
Now, for the first time, he quite clearly recognized that all the friends,
pursuits, and interests that had filled his life till this, were useless
to him and dead as the cast-off self that had once dominated his being.
Not only useless and dead, but distasteful in a high degree. He would have
to re-create a world of interests for himself out of new media. He was
living in a world where all the fruit and foliage and crops had been
blighted by some wizard's wand; he would have to re-plant it over anew,
and at the present moment he did not know where to cast about him for a
single seed.
Yet he did not give in all at once. Like a person persisting in some
disagreeable medicine, hoping to become accustomed to it, he continued his
conversation with Tirard.
After luncheon, he sat down to a game of écarté in the card-room with an
old acquaintance, but after half an hour's play he left the table on the
plea of indisposition and left the club, taking his way homeward on foot.
Near the Madeleine occurred one of those incidents which, in tragic lives,
appear less incidents than occurrences prepared by Fate, as though she
would say, "Look and deny me if you dare."
Toward Berselius was approaching a victoria drawn by two magnificent
horses, and in the victoria lolled a man. An old man with a gray beard,
who lolled on the cushions of the carriage, and looked about him with the
languid indifference of a king and the arrogance of a megalomaniac.
It was Leopold, King of the Belgians.
When Berselius's eyes fell upon that face, when he saw before him that man
whom all thinking men abhor, a cold hand seemed laid upon his heart, as
though in that person he beheld the dead self that haunted his dreams by
night, as though he saw in the flesh Berselius, the murderer, who, by
consent, had murdered the people of the Silent Pools; the murderer, by
consent, who had crushed millions of wretched creatures to death for the
sake of gold; the villain of Europe, who had spent that gold in nameless
debauchery; the man whose crimes ought to have been expiated on the
scaffold, and whose life ought to have been cut short by the executioner
of justice, many, many years ago.
It was thus at one stroke that Berselius saw his other self, the self that
haunted him in his dreams, saw it clearly, and in the light of day.
The terrible old man in the carriage passed on his way and Berselius on
his.
When he reached home, in the hall, just as he was handing his hat to a
servant, Maxine appeared at the door of the library. Her beauty,
innocence, and sweetness formed a strange vision contrasted with that
other vision he had seen near the Madeleine. Was it possible that God's
world could hold two such creatures, and that God's air should give them
breath? For a week or ten days after this, Berselius remained in his own
suite of apartments without leaving the house.
It was as if the sight of Leopold, so triumphantly alive, had shown him
fully his own change and his weakness had demonstrated to him clearly that
he was but the wraith of what he had been.