The new terror
part people of good position, with titles and names indicating their
relationship to aristocratic families, but I learned afterwards that
these were false names given to me for reasons which will be obvious.
Lord Wilmer certainly maintained the best front of them all, with
his fine golden beard and no less fine mustache which he continually
stroked with his hook. He did not leap from chair to table like the
others, nor did he have the air of a huge bat taking wing from wall to
wall.
* * * * *
“‘We are only waiting for the doctor,’ said the mistress of the house,
who every now and then gave me a look of obvious gloom, but quickly
resumed her smile for her guests.
“The doctor arrived. He was a cripple but he possessed both arms.
“He offered one of them to Madame Beauvisage and led her to the
dining-room. I mean that she touched his arm with the tips of her
fingers.
“Covers were laid in the room with the closed shutters. The table,
which was laden with flowers and _hors d’œuvre_, was illuminated by a
large candelabrum. There was no fruit. The dozen cripples at once leapt
upon their chairs and began to pick greedily from the dishes with their
hooks. It was not a pleasant sight, and I marveled at the voracity with
which these trunks of men, who seemed just before so well-mannered,
devoured their food.
“And then suddenly they quietened down; their hooks kept still, and
it seemed to me that they lapsed into what is usually described as a
‘painful silence.’
“Every eye was turned on Madame Beauvisage, whose husband sat by her
side, and I noticed that she buried her face in her napkin, looking
very uncomfortable. Then my friend Gérard, clapping one hook against
the other with a flourish, said:
“‘Well, my dear old friends, it can’t be helped. One doesn’t meet the
luck of last year every day. But don’t distress yourselves. With the
exercise of a little imagination we shall succeed in being as merry as
we were then....’
“And turning to me as he lifted the small handle of the glass which
stood on the table before him:
“‘Your health my dear Michel. To us all!’
“And each man raised his glass by its handle with the end of his hook.
The glasses swung over the table in the quaintest fashion.
“My host went on:
“‘You don’t seem to be equal to the occasion, my dear Michel. I have
known you in merrier mood, more up to the mark. Is it because we are
“like this” that you are so gloomy? What do you expect? We are what we
are. But let us have some amusement. We are met together here, all of
us very special friends, to celebrate the time when we became “like
this.” Is that not true my friends of the _Daphné_?...’
“Then my old comrade,” Captain Michel went on to explain, heaving a
deep sigh, “told us how the _Daphné_, which sailed between France and
the Far East, was wrecked; how the crew escaped in the boats, and how
these miserable people took refuge on a chance raft.
“Miss Madge, a beautiful young girl who lost her parents in the
catastrophe, was also picked up by the raft. Some thirteen persons
in all were on it, and at the end of three days the victuals were
consumed, and at the end of a week the survivors were dying of hunger.
It was then that, as the old song says, they agreed to draw lots as to
‘which should be eaten.’
“Messieurs,” added Captain Michel, in a serious voice, “such things
have happened more often perhaps than they have been talked about, for
the great blue waters close over these peculiar feats of digestion.
“They were on the point, therefore, of drawing lots on the raft when
the doctor’s voice was heard: ‘Mesdames and Messieurs,’ said the
doctor, ‘you have lost all your belongings in the wreck of the ship,
but I have saved my case of instruments and my forceps for arresting
hemorrhage. This is my suggestion: There is no object in any one of us
running the risk of being eaten as a whole. Let us, to begin with, draw
lots for an arm or leg at will, and we will then see to-morrow what the
day brings forth, and perhaps a sail may appear on the horizon.’”
At this point in Captain Michel’s story the four old salts, who up to
this had not interrupted, cried:
“Well done!”
“What do you mean ‘well done’?” asked Captain Michel with a frown.
“Yes, ‘well done!’ Your story is a good joke. These people were ready
to lose an arm or leg in turn.... That’s a good joke, but there’s
nothing frightful about it.”
“So you really find it a good joke!” growled the Captain, bristling
with annoyance. “Well, I swear that if you had been seated among all
those cripples whose eyes were bulging like live coal, and heard the
story, you wouldn’t have found it such a good joke.... And if you had
noticed how restless they were in their chairs! And how vigorously they
clasped hooks across the table with an obvious delight which I couldn’t
make out, but which was none the less frightful for all that.”
“No, no,” broke in Chanlieu once more—that old fellow Chanlieu—“your
story is not in the least frightful. It is funny simply because it is
logical. Would you like me to tell you the end of the story? You shall
say whether I am right or not. The people on the raft drew lots. The
lot fell to Miss Madge who was to lose one of her beautiful limbs.
Your friend the captain, who is a gentleman, offered his own instead,
and he had his four limbs amputated so that Miss Madge should remain
unscathed.”
“Yes, old man, you’ve got it. That is so,” exclaimed Captain Michel,
who felt a longing to break the heads of these imbeciles who treated
his story as a good joke. “Yes, and what’s more, when it was a question
of cutting off Miss Madge’s limbs after the survivors, except the young
lady and the doctor—who had been left with both arms because they were
wanted—had lost all their limbs, Captain Beauvisage had the pluck to
have the poor stumps left from the first operation, cut off on a level
with his body.”
“And the young lady could do no other than offer the Captain her hand
which he had so heroically saved,” interposed Zinzin.
“Why, of course,” growled the Captain in his beard. “And you consider
it a good joke!”
“Did they eat all those limbs quite raw?” inquired that ass of a
Bagatelle.
Captain Michel struck the table such a resounding blow that the glasses
danced like rubber balls.
“That’ll do, shut up,” he exclaimed. “All that I’ve told you is
nothing. Now comes the frightful part of it.”
The four friends looked at each other smiling, and Captain Michel grew
pale, whereupon seeing that they had carried matters too far they hung
their heads.
“Yes, the frightful part of it,” went on Michel with his gloomiest air,
“was that these people who were only rescued a month later by a Chinese
sailing vessel which landed them somewhere on the Yang-Tse-Kiang where
they separated—the frightful part of it was that these people retained
a taste for human flesh, and when they returned to Europe arranged to
meet together once a year to renew as far as possible the abominable
banquet. Well, messieurs, it did not take me long to find that out!
First of all there was the scarcely enthusiastic reception accorded to
certain dishes, which Madame Beauvisage herself brought to the table.
Though she ventured to claim, but with no great assurance, that they
were pretty nearly the same thing, the guests were of one mind in
abstaining from congratulating her. Only certain slices of tunny-fish
were received with any sort of favor, because they were, to use the
doctor’s terrible expression, ‘well cut,’ and, ‘if the flavor was not
entirely satisfactory at all events the eye was deceived.’ But the
cripple with the spectacles met with general approval when he declared
that ‘it was not equal to the plumber.’
“When I heard those words I felt my blood run cold,” growled Captain
Michel huskily, “for I remembered that about this time the year before
a plumber had fallen from a roof near the Arsenal and was killed, and
his body was picked up minus an arm.
“Then ... O then ... I could not help thinking of the part which my
beautiful neighbor must, of necessity, have played in this horrible,
culinary drama, I turned my eyes to her and I noticed that she had put
on her gloves again, gloves which covered her arms to the shoulder, and
also hastily thrown a wrap over her shoulders which wholly concealed
them. The guest on my right, who was the doctor, and, as I have said,
was the only man among the cripples with both arms intact, had also put
on his gloves.
“Instead of bothering my head in vain to discover the reason of this
fresh eccentricity, I should have done better to follow the advice
which Madame Beauvisage gave me at the beginning of this infernal
party, namely, to leave the place early—advice which she did not repeat.
“After showing an interest in me during the first part of this amazing
feast in which I seemed to discern—I don’t know why—a sort of pity,
Madame Beauvisage now avoided looking at me and took a part which
greatly grieved me in the most frightful conversation which I have
ever heard. These little people with a vigorous clatter of nippers
and clinking of glasses indulged in bitter recriminations or warm
congratulations with regard to their peculiar appetite.
“To my horror Lord Wilmer, who until then had been most correct, nearly
‘came to hooks’ with the cripple with the monocle, because the latter
had once on the raft complained of the former being tough, and the
mistress of the house had the greatest difficulty in putting things in
their true light by retorting to the monocled bust, who was obviously
at the time of the shipwreck a good-looking stripling, that neither was
it particularly agreeable to have to put up with ‘an animal that was
too young.’”
“That’s also funny,” the old salt Dorat could not help interjecting.
It looked as if Captain Michel would fly at his throat, particularly as
the three other mariners seemed to be shaking with inward joy and gave
vent to queer little clucks. It was as much as the Captain could do to
control himself. After puffing like a seal he turned to the foolhardy
Dorat:
“Monsieur you have two arms still, and I have no wish for you to lose
one of them, as I did on that particular night, to make you see the
frightful part of the story. The cripples had drunk a great deal. Some
of them jumped on the table round me, and were gazing at my arms in a
very embarrassing manner and I ended by hiding them from sight as far
as possible by thrusting my hands deep into my pockets.
“I realized then, and it was a startling thought, why Madame Beauvisage
and the doctor, the two persons who still had arms and hands, did not
show them. I grasped the meaning of the sudden ferocity which blazed in
the eyes of some of them. And at that very moment, as luck would have
it, I wanted to use my pocket handkerchief, and instinctively I made a
movement which revealed the whiteness of my skin under my sleeve, and
three terrible hooks swooped down at once on my wrist and entered my
flesh. I uttered a fearful shriek.”
“That’ll do, Captain, that’ll do,” I exclaimed, interrupting Captain
Michel’s story. “You were quite right. I’m off. I can’t stand any more.”
“Stay, monsieur,” said the Captain in a peremptory tone. “Stay,
monsieur, for I shall soon finish this frightful story which has made
four imbeciles laugh. When a man has Phocean blood in his veins,”
he added with an accent of unspeakable contempt turning to the four
ancient mariners who were obviously choking in their efforts to keep
back their laughter, “when a man has Phocean blood in his veins, he
can’t get over it.
“And when a man lives in Marseilles he is doomed never to believe in
anything. So it is for you, for you alone, monsieur, that I am telling