The Three Eyes

by Maurice Leblanc

translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (1921)

Chapter I:

Bergebonnette

For me the strange story dates back to that autumn day when my uncle Dorgeroux appeared, staggering and unhinged, in the doorway of the room which I occupied in his house, Haut-Meudon Lodge.

None of us had set eyes on him for a week. A prey to that nervous exasperation into which the final test of any of his inventions invariably threw him, he was living among his furnaces and retorts, keeping every door shut, sleeping on a sofa, eating nothing but fruit and bread. And suddenly he stood before me, livid, wild-eyed, stammering, emaciated, as though he had lately recovered from a long and dangerous illness.

He was really altered beyond recognition! For the first time I saw him wear unbuttoned the long, threadbare, stained frock-coat which fitted his figure closely and which he never discarded even when making his experiments or arranging on the shelves of his laboratories the innumerable chemicals which he was in the habit of employing. His white tie, which, by way of contrast, was always clean, had become unfastened; and his shirt-front was protruding from his waistcoat. As for his good, kind face, usually so grave and placid and still so young beneath the white curls that crowned his head, its features seemed unfamiliar, ravaged by conflicting expressions, no one of which obtained the upper hand over the others: violent expressions of terror and anguish in which I was surprised, at moments, to observe gleams of the maddest and most extravagant delight.

I could not get over my astonishment. What had happened during those few days? What tragedy could have caused the quiet, gentle Noel Dorgeroux to be so utterly beside himself?

“Are you ill, uncle?” I asked, anxiously, for I was exceedingly fond of him.

“No,” he murmured, “no, I'm not ill.”

“Then what is it? Please, what's the matter?”

“Nothing's the matter... nothing, I tell you.”

I drew up a chair. He dropped into it and, at my entreaty, took a glass of water; but his hand trembled so that he was unable to lift it to his lips.

“Uncle, speak, for goodness' sake!” I cried. “I have never seen you in such a state. You must have gone through some great excitement.”

“The greatest excitement of my life,” he said, in a very low and lifeless voice. “Such excitement as nobody can have ever experienced before... nobody... nobody....”

“Then do explain yourself.”

“No, you wouldn't understand.... I don't understand either. It's so incredible! It is taking place in the darkness, in a world of darkness!...”

There was a pencil and paper on the table. His hand seized the pencil; and mechanically he began to trace one of those vague sketches to which the action of an overmastering idea gradually imparts a clearer definition. And his sketch, as it assumed a more distinct form, ended by representing on the sheet of white paper three geometrical figures which might equally well have been badly-described circles or triangles with curved lines. In the centre of these figures, however, he drew a regular circle which he blackened entirely and which he marked in the middle with a still blacker point, as the iris is marked with the pupil:

“There, there!” he cried, suddenly, starting up in his agitation. “Look, that's what is throbbing and quivering in the darkness. Isn't it enough to drive one mad? Look!....”

He had seized another pencil, a red one, and, rushing to the wall, he scored the white plaster with the same three incomprehensible figures, the three “triangular circles,” in the centre of which he took the pains to draw irises furnished with pupils:

“Look! They're alive, aren't they? You see they're moving, you can see that they're afraid. You can see, cant you? They're alive! They're alive!”

I thought that he was going to explain. But, if so, he did not carry out his intention. His eyes, which were generally full of life, frank and open as a child's, now bore an expression of distrust. He began to walk up and down and continued to do so for a few minutes. Then, at last, opening the door and turning to me again, he said, in the same breathless tone as before:

“You will see them, Vivien; you will have to see them too and tell me that they are alive, as I have seen them alive. Come to the Yard in an hour's time, or rather when you hear a whistle, and you shall see them, the three eyes, and plenty of other things besides. You'll see.”

He left the room.

The house in which we lived, the Lodge, as it was called, turned its back upon the street and faced an old, steep, ill-kept garden, at the top of which was the big yard in which my uncle had now for many years been squandering the remnants of his capital on useless inventions.

As far back as I could remember, I had always seen that old garden ill-tended and the long, low house in a constant state of dilapidation, with its yellow plaster front cracked and peeling. I used to live there in the old days with my mother, who was my aunt Dorgeroux's sister. Afterwards, when both the sisters were dead, I used to come from Paris, where I was going through a course of study, to spend my holidays with my uncle. He was then mourning the death of his poor son Dominique, who was treacherously murdered by a German airman whom he had brought to the ground after a terrific fight in the clouds. My visits to some extent diverted my uncle's thoughts from his grief. But I had had to go abroad; and it was not until alter a very long absence that I returned to Haut-Meudon Lodge, where I had now been some weeks, waiting for the end of the vacation and for my appointment as a professor at Grenoble.

And at each of my visits I had found the same habits, the same regular hours devoted to meals and walks, the same monotonous life, interrupted, at the time of the great experiments, by the same hopes and the same disappointments. It was a healthy, vigorous life, which suited the tastes and the extravagant dreams of Noel Dorgeroux, whose courage and confidence no trial was able to defeat or diminish.

I opened my window. The sun shone down upon the walls and buildings of the Yard. Not a cloud tempered the blazing sky. A scent of late roses quivered on the windless air.

“Victorien!” whispered a voice below me, from a hornbeam overgrown with red creeper.

I knew that it must be Berangere, my uncle's god-daughter, reading, as usual, on a stone bench, her favourite seat.

“Have you seen your god-father?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “He was going through the garden and back to his Yard. He looked so queer!”

Berangere pushed aside the leafy curtain at a place where the trelliswork which closed the arbour was broken; and her pretty face, crowned with rebellious golden curls, came into view.

“This is pleasant!” she said laughing. “My hair's caught. And there are spiders' webs too. Ugh! Help!”

These are childish recollections, insignificant details. Yet why did they remain engraved on my memory with such precision? It is as though all our being becomes charged with emotion at the approach of the great events which we are fated to encounter and our senses thrilled beforehand by the impalpable breath of a distant storm.

I hastened down the garden and ran to the hornbeam. Berangere was gone. I called her. I received a merry laugh in reply and saw her farther away, swinging on a rope which she had stretched between two trees, under an arch of leaves.

She was delicious like that, graceful and light as a bird perched on some swaying bough. At each swoop, all her curls flew now in this direction, now in that, giving her a sort of moving halo, with which mingled the leaves that fell from the shaken trees, red leaves, yellow leaves, leaves of every shade of autumn gold.

Notwithstanding the anxiety with which my uncle's excessive agitation had filled my mind, I lingered before the sight of this incomparable light-heartedness and, giving the girl the pet name formed years ago from her Christian name of Berangere, I said, under my voice and almost unconsciously:

“Bergeronnette!”

She jumped out of her swing and, planting herself in front of me, said:

“You're not to call me that any longer, Mr. Professor!”

“Why not?”

“It was all right once, when I was a little mischief of a tomboy, hopping and skipping all over the place. But now...”

“Well, your god-father still calls you that.”

“My god-father has every right to.”

“And I?”

“No right at all.”

This is not a love-story; and I did not mean to speak of Berangere before coming to the momentous part which, as everybody knows, she played in the adventure of the Three Eyes. But this part was so closely interwoven, from the beginning and during all the early period of the adventure, with certain episodes of our intimate life that the clearness of my narrative would suffer if it were not mentioned, however briefly.

Well, twelve years before the time of which I am speaking, there arrived at the Lodge a little girl to whom my uncle was god-father and from whom he used to receive a letter regularly on each 1st of January, bringing him her good wishes for the new year. She lived at Toulouse with her father and mother, who had formerly been in business at Meudon, near my uncle's place. Now the mother had died; and the father, without further ceremony, sent the daughter to Noel Dorgeroux with a short letter of which I remember a few sentences:

“The child is dull here, in the town.... My business”— Massignac was a wine-agent — “takes me all over the country... and Berangere is left behind alone.... I was thinking that, in memory of our friendly relations, you might be willing to keep her with you for a few weeks.... The country air will restore the colour to her cheeks....”

My uncle was a very kindly, good-hearted man. The few weeks were followed by several months and then by several years, during which the worthy Massignac at intervals announced his intention of coming to Meudon to fetch the child. So it came about that Berangere did not leave the Lodge at all and that she surrounded my uncle with so much gay and boisterous affection that, in spite of his apparent indifference, Noel Dorgeroux had felt unable to part with his goddaughter. She enlivened the silent old house with her laughter and her charm. She was the element of disorder and delightful irresponsibility which gives a value to order, discipline and austerity.

Returning this year after a long absence, I had found, instead of the child whom I had known, a girl of twenty, just as much a child and just as boisterous as ever, but exquisitely pretty, graceful in form and movement and possessed of the mystery which marks those who have led solitary lives within the shadow of an old and habitually silent man. From the first I felt that my presence interfered with her habits of freedom and isolation. At once audacious and shy, timid and provocative, bold and shrinking, she seemed to shun me in particular; and, during two months of a life lived in common, when I saw her at every meal and met her at every turn, I had failed to tame her. She remained remote and wild, suddenly breaking off our talks and displaying, where I was concerned, the most capricious and inexplicable moods.

Perhaps she had an intuition of the profound disturbance that was awaking within me; perhaps her confusion was due to my own embarrassment. She had often caught my eyes fixed on her red lips or observed the change that came over my voice at certain times. And she did not like it. Man's admiration disconcerted her.

“Look here,” I said, adopting a roundabout method so as not to startle her, “your god-father maintains that human beings, some of them more than others, give forth a kind of emanation. Remember that Noel Dorgeroux is first and foremost a chemist and that he sees and feels things from the chemist's point of view. Well, to his mind, this emanation is manifested by the emission of certain corpuscles, of invisible sparks which form a sort of cloud. This is what happens, for instance, in the case of a woman. Her charm surrounds you...”

My heart was beating so violently as I spoke these words that I had to break off. Still, she did not seem to grasp their meaning; and she said, with a proud little air:

“Your uncle tells me all about his theories. It's true, I don't understand them a bit. However, as regards this one, he has spoken to me of a special ray, which he presupposed to explain that discharge of invisible particles. And he calls this ray after the first letter of my name, the Bray.”

“Well done, Berangere; that makes you the god-mother of a ray, the ray of seductiveness and charm.”

“Not at all,” she cried, impatiently. “It's not a question of seductiveness but of a material incarnation, a fluid which is even able to become visible and to assume a form, like the apparitions produced by the mediums. For instance, the other day...”

She stopped and hesitated; her face betrayed anxiety; and I had to press her before she continued:

“No, no,” she said, “I oughtn't to speak of that. It's not that your uncle forbade me to. But it has left such a painful impression....”

“What do you mean, Berangere?”

“I mean, an impression of fear and suffering. I saw, with your uncle, on a wall in the Yard, the most frightful things: images which represented three — sort of eyes. Were they eyes? I don't know. The things moved and looked at us. Oh, I shall never forget it as long as I live.”

“And my uncle?”

“Your uncle was absolutely taken aback. I had to hold him up and bring him round, for he fainted. When he came to himself, the images had vanished.”

“And did he say nothing?”

“He stood silent, gazing at the wall. Then I asked him, 'What is it, god-father?' Presently he answered, 'I don't know, I don't know: it may be the rays of which I spoke to you, the B-rays. If so, it must be a phenomenon of materialization.' That was all he said. Very soon after, he saw me to the door of the garden; and he has shut himself up in the Yard ever since. I did not see him again until just now.”

She ceased. I felt anxious and greatly puzzled by this revelation:

“Then, according to you, Berangere,” I said, “my uncle's discovery is connected with those three figures? They were geometrical figures, weren't they? Triangles?”

She formed a triangle with her two fore-fingers and her two thumbs:

“There, the shape was like that.... As for their arrangement...”

She picked up a twig that had fallen from a tree and wag beginning to draw lines in the sand of the path when a whistle sounded.

“That's god-father's signal when he wants me in the Yard,” she cried.

“No,” I said, “to-day it's for me. We fixed it.”

“Does he want you?”

“Yea, to tell me about his discovery.”

“Then I'll come too.”

“He doesn't expect you, Berangere.”

“Yes, he does; yes, he does.”

I caught hold of her arm, but she escaped me and ran to the top of the garden, where I came up with her outside a small, massive door in a fence of thick planks which connected a shed and a very high wall.

She opened the door an inch or two. I insisted:

“Don't do it, Berangere! It will only vex him.”

“Do you really think so?” she said, wavering a little.

“I'm positive of it, because he asked me and no one else. Come, Berangere, be sensible.”

She hesitated. I went through and closed the door upon her.

Chapter II:

The "Triangular Circles"

What was known at Meudon as Noel Dorgeroux's Yard was a piece of waste-land in which the paths were lost amid the withered grass, nettles and stones, amid stacks of empty barrels, scrap-iron, rabbit-hutches and every kind of disused lumber that rusts and rots or tumbles into dust.

Against the walls and outer fences stood the workshops, joined together by driving-belts and shafts, and the laboratories filled with furnaces, pneumatic receivers, innumerable retorts, phials and jars containing the most delicate products of organic chemistry.

The view embraced the loop of the Seine, which lay some three hundred feet below, and the hills of Versailles and Sevres, which formed a wide circle on the horizon towards which a bright autumnal sun was sinking in a pale blue sky.

“Victorien!”

My uncle was beckoning to me from the doorway of the workshop which he used most often. I crossed the Yard.

“Come in,” he said. “We must have a talk first. Only for a little while: just a few words.”

The room was lofty and spacious and one corner of it was reserved for writing and resting, with a desk littered with papers and drawings, a couch and some old, upholstered easy-chairs. My uncle drew one of the chairs up for me. He seemed calmer, but his glance retained an unaccustomed brilliance.

“Yes,” he said, “a few words of explanation beforehand will do no harm, a few words on the past, the wretched past which is that of every inventor who sees fortune slipping away from him. I have pursued it for so long! I have always pursued it. My brain had always seemed to me a vat in which a thousand incoherent ideas were fermenting, all contradicting one another and mutually destructive.... And then there was one that gained strength. And thenceforward I lived for that one only and sacrificed everything for it. It was like a sink that swallowed up all my money and that of others... and their happiness and peace of mind as well. Think of my poor wife, Victorien. You remember how unhappy she was and how anxious about the future of her son, of my poor Dominique! And yet I loved her so devotedly....”

He stopped at this recollection. And I seemed to see my aunt's face again and to hear her telling my mother of her fears and her forebodings:

“He will ruin us,” she used to say. “He keeps on making me sell out. He considers nothing.”

“She did not trust me,” Noel Dorgeroux continued. “Oh, I had so many disappointments, so many lamentable failures! Do you remember, Victorien, do you remember my experiment on intensive germination by means of electric currents, my experiments with oxygen and all the rest, all the rest, not one of which succeeded? The pluck it called for! But I never lost faith for a minute!... One idea in particular buoyed me up and I came back to it incessantly, as though I were able to penetrate the future. You know to what I refer, Victorien: it appeared and reappeared a score of times under different forms, but the principle remained the same. It was the idea of utilizing the solar heat. It's all there, you know, in the sun, in its action upon us, upon cells, organisms, atoms, upon all the more or less mysterious substances that nature has placed at our disposal. And I attacked the problem from every side. Plants, fertilizers, diseases of men and animals, photographs: for all these I wanted the collaboration of the solar rays, utilized by the aid of special processes which were mine alone, my secret and nobody else's.”

My uncle Dorgeroux was talking with renewed eagerness; and his eyes shone feverishly. He now held forth without interrupting himself:

“I will not deny that there was an element of chance about my discovery. Chance plays its part in everything. There never was a discovery that did not exceed our inventive effort; and I can confess to you, Victorien, that I do not even now understand what has happened. No, I can't explain it by a long way; and I can only just believe it. But, all the same, if I had not sought in that direction, the thing would not have occurred. It was due to me that the incomprehensible miracle took place. The picture is outlined in the very frame which I constructed, on the very canvas which I prepared; and, as you will perceive, Victorien, it is my will that makes the phantom which you are about to see emerge from the darkness.”

He expressed himself in a tone of pride with which was mingled a certain uneasiness, as though he doubted himself and as though his words overstepped the actual limits of truth.

“You're referring to those three — sort of eyes, aren't you?” I asked.

“What's that?” he exclaimed, with a start. “Who told you? Berangere, I suppose! She shouldn't have. That's what we must avoid at all costs: indiscretions. One word too much and I am undone; my discovery is stolen. Only think, the first man that comes along...”

I had risen from my chair. He pushed me towards his desk:

“Sit down here, Victorien,” he said, “and write. You mustn't mind my taking this precaution. It is essential. You must realize what you are pledging yourself to do if you share in my work. Write, Victorien.”

“What, uncle?”

“A declaration in which you acknowledge that... But I'll dictate it to you. That'll be better.”

I interrupted him:

“Uncle, you distrust me.”

“I don't distrust you, my boy. I fear an imprudence, an indiscretion. And, generally speaking, I have plenty of reasons for being suspicious.”

“What reasons, uncle?”

“Reasons,” he replied, in a more serious voice, “which make me think that I am being spied upon and that somebody is trying to discover what my invention is. Yes, somebody came in here, the other night, and rummaged among my papers.”

“Did they find anything?”

“No. I always carry the most important notes and formulae on me. Still, you can imagine what would happen if they succeeded. So you do admit, don't you, that I am obliged to be cautious? Write down that I hare told you of my investigations and that you have seen what I obtain on the wall in the Yard, at the place covered by a black-serge curtain.”

I took a sheet of paper and a pen. But he stopped me quickly:

“No, no,” he said, “it's absurd. It wouldn't prevent... Besides, you won't talk, I'm sure of that. Forgive me, Victorien. I am so horribly worried!”

“You needn't fear any indiscretion on my part,” I declared. “But I must remind you that Berangere also has seen what there was to see.”

“Oh,” he said, “she wouldn't understand!”

“She wanted to come with me just now.”

“On no account, on no account! She's still a child and not fit to be trusted with a secret of this importance.... Now come along.”

But it so happened that, as we were leaving the workshop, we both of us at the same time Berangere stealing along one of the walls of the Yard and stopping in front of a black curtain, which she suddenly pulled aside.

“Berangere!” shouted my uncle, angrily.

The girl turned round and laughed.

“I won't have it! I will not have it!” cried Noel Dorgeroux, rushing in her direction. “I won't have it, I tell you! Get out, you mischief!”

Berangere ran away, without, however, displaying any great perturbation. She leapt on a stack of bricks, scrambled on to a long plank which formed a bridge between two barrels and began to dance as she was wont to do, with her arms outstretched like a balancing-pole and her bust thrown slightly backwards.

“You'll lose your balance,” I said, while my uncle drew the curtain.

“Never!” she replied, jumping up and down on her spring-board.

She did not lose her balance. But the plank shifted and the pretty dancer came tumbling down among a heap of old packing-cases.

I ran to her assistance and found her lying on the ground, looking very white.

“Have you hurt yourself, Berangere?”

“No... hardly... just my ankle... perhaps I've sprained it.”

I lifted her, almost fainting, in my arms and carried her to a wooden bench a little farther away.

She let me have my way and even put one arm round my neck. Her eyes were closed. Her red lips opened and I inhaled the cool fragrance of her breath.

“Berangere!” I whispered, trembling with emotion.

When I laid her on the bench, her arm held me more tightly, so that I had to bend my head with my face almost touching hers. I meant to draw back. But the temptation was too much for me and I kissed her on the lips, gently at first and then with a brutal violence which brought her to her senses.

She repelled me with an indignant movement and stammered, in a despairing, rebellious tone:

“Oh, it's abominable of you!... It's shameful!”

In spite of the suffering caused by her sprain, she had managed to stand up, while I, stupefied by my thoughtless conduct, stood bowed before her, without daring to raise my head.

We remained for some seconds in this attitude, in an embarrassed silence through which I could catch the hurried rhythm of her breathing. I tried gently to take her hands. But she released them at once and said:

“Let me be. I shall never forgive you, never.”

“Come, Berangere, you will forget that.”

“Leave me alone. I want to go indoors.”

“But you can't, Berangere.”

“Here's god-father. He'll take me back.”

My reasons for relating this incident will appear in the sequel. For the moment, notwithstanding the profound commotion produced by the kiss which I had stolen from Berangere, my thoughts were so to speak absorbed by the mysterious drama in which I was about to play a part with my uncle Dorgeroux. I heard my uncle asking Berangere if she was not hurt. I saw her leaning on his arm and, with him, making for the door of the garden. But, while I remained bewildered, trembling, dazed by the adorable image of the girl whom I loved, it was my uncle whom I awaited and whom I was impatient to see returning. The great riddle already held me captive.

“Let's make haste,” cried Noel Dorgeroux, when he came back. “Else it will be too late and we shall have to wait until to-morrow.”

He led the way to the high wall where he had caught Berangere in the act of yielding to her curiosity. This wall, which divided the Yard from the garden and which I had not remarked particularly on my rare visits to the Yard, was now daubed with a motley mixture of colours, like a painter's palette. Red ochre, indigo, purple and saffron were spread over it in thick and uneven layers, which whirled around a more thickly-coated centre. But, at the far end, a wide curtain of black serge, like a photographer's cloth, running on an iron rod supported by brackets, hid a rectangular space some three or four yards in width.

“What's that?” I asked my uncle. “Is this the place?”

“Yes,” he answered, in a husky voice, “it's behind there.”

“There's still time to change your mind,” I suggested.

“What makes you say that?”

“I feel that you are afraid of letting me know. You are so upset.”

“I am upset for a very different reason.”

“Why?”

“Because I too am going to see!”

“But you have done so already.”

“One always sees new things, Victorien; that's the terrifying part of it.”

I took hold of the curtain.

“Don't touch it, don't touch it!” he cried. “No one has the right, except myself. Who knows what would happen if any one except me were to open the closed door! Stand back, Victorien. Take up your position at two paces from the wall, a little to one side.... And now look!”

His voice was vibrant with energy and implacable determination. His expression was that of a man facing death; and, suddenly, with a single movement, he drew the black-serge curtain.

My emotion, I am certain, was just as great as Noel Dorgeroux's and my heart beat no less violently. My curiosity had reached its utmost bounds; moreover, I had a formidable intuition that I was about to enter into a region of mystery of which nothing, not even my uncle's disconcerting words, was able to give me the remotest idea. I was experiencing the contagion of what seemed to me in him to be a diseased condition; and I vainly strove to subject it in myself to the control of my reason. I was taking the impossible and the incredible for granted beforehand.

And yet I saw nothing at first; and there was, in fact, nothing. This part of the wall was bare. The only detail worthy of remark was that it was not vertical and that the whole base of the wall had been thickened so as to form a slightly inclined plane which sloped upwards to a height of nine feet. What was the reason for this work, when the wall did not need strengthening?

A coating of dark grey plaster, about half an inch thick, covered the whole panel. When closely examined, however, it was not painted over, but was rather a layer of some substance uniformly spread and showing no trace of a brush. Certain gleams proved that this layer was quite recent, like a varnish newly applied. I observed nothing else; and Heaven knows that I did my utmost to discover any peculiarity!

“Well, uncle?” I asked.

“Wait,” he said, in an agonized voice, “wait!... The first indication is beginning.”

“What indication?”

“In the middle... like a diffused light. Do you see it?”

“Yes, yes, I think I do.”

It was as when a little daylight is striving to mingle with the waning darkness. A lighter disk became marked in the middle of the panel; and this lighter shade spread towards the edges, while remaining more intense at its centre. So far there was no very decided manifestation of anything out of the way; the chemical reaction of a substance lately hidden by the curtain and now exposed to the daylight and the sun was quite enough to explain this sort of inner illumination. Yet something gave one the haunting though perhaps unreasonable impression that an extraordinary phenomenon was about to take place. For that was what I expected, as did my uncle Dorgeroux.

And all at once he, who knew the premonitory symptoms and the course of the phenomenon, started, as though he had received a shock.

At the same moment, the thing happened.

It was sudden, instantaneous. It leapt in a flash from the depths of the wall. Yes, I know, a spectacle cannot flash out of a wall, any more than it can out of a layer of dark-grey substance only half an inch thick. But I am setting down the sensation which I experienced, which is the same that hundreds and hundreds of people experienced afterwards, with a like clearness and a like certainty. It is no use carping at the undeniable fact: the thing shot out of the depths of the ocean of matter and it appeared violently, like the rays of a lighthouse flashing from the very womb of the darkness. After all, when we step towards a mirror, does our image not appear to us from the depth of that horizon suddenly unveiled?

Only, you see, it was not our image, my uncle Dorgeroux's or mine. Nothing was reflected, because there was nothing to reflect and no reflecting screen. What I saw was...

On the panel were three geometrical figures which might equally well have been badly described circles or triangles composed of curved circles. In the centre of these figures was drawn a regular circle, marked in the middle with a blacker point, as the iris is marked by the pupil.”

I am deliberately using the terminology which I employed to describe the images which my uncle had drawn in red chalk on the plaster of my room, for I had no doubt that he was then trying to reproduce those same figures, the appearance of which had already upset him.

“That's what you saw, isn't it, uncle?” I asked.

“Oh,” he replied, in a low voice, “I saw much more than that, very much more!... Wait and look right into them.”

I stared wildly at the three “triangular circles,” as I have called them. One of them was set above the two others; and these two, which were smaller and less regular but exactly alike, seemed, instead of looking straight before them, to turn a little to the right and to the left. Where did they come from? And what did they mean?

“Look,” repeated my uncle. “Do you see?”

“Yes, yes,” I replied, with a shudder. “The thing's moving!”

It was in fact moving. Or rather, no, it was not: the outlines of the geometrical figures remained stationary; and not a line shifted its place within. And yet from all this immobility something emerged which was nothing else than motion.

I now remembered my uncle's words:

“They're alive, aren't they? You can see them opening and showing alarm! They're alive!”

They were alive! The three triangles were alive! And, as soon as I experienced this precise and undeniable feeling that they were alive, I ceased to regard them as an assemblage of lifeless lines and began to see in them things which were like a sort of eyes, misshapen eyes, eyes different from ours, but eyes furnished with irises and pupils and throbbing in an abysmal darkness.

“They are looking at us!” I cried, quite beside myself and as feverish and unnerved as my uncle.

He nodded his head and whispered:

“Yes, that's what they're doing.”

The three eyes were looking at us. We were conscious of the scrutiny of those three eyes, without lids or lashes, but full of an intense life which was due to the expression that animated them, a changing expression, by turns serious, proud, noble, enthusiastic and, above all, sad, grievously sad.

I feel how improbable these observations must appear. Nevertheless they correspond most strictly with the reality as it was beheld at a later date by the crowds that thronged to Haut-Meudon Lodge. Like my uncle, like myself, those crowds shuddered before three combinations of motionless lines which had the most heart-rending expression, just as at other moments they laughed at the comical or gayer expression which they were compelled to read into those same lines.

And on each occasion the spectacle which I am now describing was repeated in exactly the same order. A brief pause, followed by a series of vibrations. Then, suddenly, three eclipses, after which the combination of three triangles began to turn upon itself, as a whole, slowly at first and then with increasing rapidity, which gradually became transformed into so swift a rotation that one distinguished nothing but a motionless rose-pattern.

After that, nothing. The panel was empty.

Chapter III:

An Execution

IT must be understood that, notwithstanding the explanations which I must needs offer, the development of all these events took but very little time: exactly eighteen seconds, as I had the opportunity of calculating afterwards. But, during these eighteen seconds — and this again I observed on many an occasion — the spectator received the illusion of watching a complete drama, with its preliminary expositions, its plot and its culmination. And when this obscure, illogical drama was over, you questioned what you had seen, just as you question the nightmare which wakes you from your sleep.

Nevertheless it must be said that none of all this partook in any way of those absurd optical illusions which are so easily contrived or of those arbitrary ideas on which a whole pseudo-scientific novel is sometimes built up. There is no question of a novel, but of a physical phenomenon, an absolutely natural phenomenon, the explanation of which, when it comes to be known, is also absolutely natural.

And I beg those who are not acquainted with this explanation not to try to guess it. Let them not worry themselves with suppositions and interpretations. Let them forget, one by one, the theories over which I myself am lingering: all that has to do with B-rays, materializations, or the effect of solar heat. These are so many roads that lead nowhere. The best plan is to be guided by events, to have faith and to wait.

“It's finished, uncle, isn't it?” I asked.

“It's the beginning,” he replied.

“How do you mean? The beginning of what? What's going to happen?”

“I don't know.”

I was astounded:

“You don't know? But you knew just now, about this, about those strange eyes!...”

“It all starts with that. But other things come afterwards, things which vary and which I know nothing about!”

“But how can that be possible?” I asked. “Do you mean to say that you don't know anything about them, you who prepared everything for them?”

“I prepared them, but I do not control them. As I told you, I have opened a door which leads into the darkness; and from that darkness unforeseen images emerge.”

“But is the thing that's coming of the same nature as those eyes?”

“No.”

“Then what is it, uncle?”

“The thing that's coming will be a representation of images in conformity with what we are accustomed to see.”

“Things which we shall understand, therefore?”

“Yes, we shall understand them; and yet they will be all the more incomprehensible.”

I often wondered, during the weeks that followed, if my uncle's words were to be fully relied upon and if he had not uttered them in order to mislead me as to the origin and meaning of his discoveries. How indeed was it possible to think that the key to the riddle remained unknown to him? But at that moment I was wholly under his influence, steeped in the great mystery that surrounded us; and, with a constricted feeling at my heart, with all my overstimulated senses, I thought of nothing but gazing into the miraculous panel.

A movement on my uncle's part warned me. I gave a start. The dawn was rising over the grey surface.

I saw, first of all, a cloudy radiance whirling around a central point, towards which all the luminous spirals rushed and in which they were swallowed up while whirling upon themselves. Next, this point expanded into an ever wider circle, covered with a light, hazy veil which gradually dispersed, revealing a vague, floating image, like the apparitions raised by spiritualists and mediums at their sittings.

Then followed as it were a certain hesitation. The phantom image was striving with the diffuse shadow and seeking to attain life and light. Certain features became more pronounced. Outlines and separate planes took shape; and at last a flood of light issued from the phantom image and turned it into a dazzling picture, which seemed to be bathed in sunlight.

It was a woman's face.

I remember that at that moment my mental confusion was such that I felt like darting forward to feel the marvellous wall and lay my hands upon the living material in which the incredible phenomenon was vibrating. But my uncle dug his fingers into my arm:

“I won't have you move!” he growled. “If you budge an inch, the whole thing will fade away. Look!”

I did not move; indeed, I doubt whether I could have done so. My legs were giving way beneath me. Both of us, my uncle and I, dropped into a sitting posture on the fallen trunk of a tree.

“Look, look!” he commanded.

The woman's face had approached in our direction until it was twice the size of life. The first thing that struck us was the cap, which was that of a nurse, with the head-band tightly drawn over the forehead and the veil around the head. The features, handsome and regular and still young, wore that look of almost divine dignity which the primitive painters used to give to the saints who are suffering or about to suffer martyrdom, a nobility compounded of pain and ecstasy, of resignation and hope, of smiles and tears. Bathed in that light which really seemed to be an inward flame, the woman opened, upon a scene invisible to us, a pair of large dark eyes which, though filled with nameless terror, nevertheless were not afraid. The contrast was remarkable: her resignation was defiant; her fear was full of pride.

“Oh,” stammered my uncle, “I seem to observe the same expression as in the Three Eyes which were there just now. Do you see: the same dignity, the same gentleness... and also the same dread?”

“Yes,” I replied, “it's the same expression, the same sequence of expressions.”

And, while I spoke and while the woman still remained in the foreground, outside the frame of the picture, I felt certain recollections arise within me, as at the sight of the portrait of a person whose features are not entirely unfamiliar. My uncle received the same impression, for he said:

“I seem to remember...”

But at that moment the strange face withdrew to the plane which it occupied at first. The mists that created a halo round it, drifted away. The shoulders came into view, followed by the whole body. We now saw a woman standing, fastened by bonds that gripped her bust and waist to a post the upper end of which rose a trifle above her head.

Then all this, which hitherto had given the impression of fixed outlines, like the outlines of a photograph, for instance, suddenly became alive, like a picture developing into a reality, a statue stepping straight into life. The bust moved. The arms, tied behind, and the imprisoned shoulders were struggling against the cords that were hurting them. The head turned slightly. The lips spoke. It was no longer an image presented for us to gaze at: it was life, moving and living life. It was a scene taking place in space and time. A whole background came into being, filled with people moving to and fro. Other figures were writhing, bound to posts. I counted eight of them. A squad of soldiers marched up, with shouldered rifles. They were spiked helmets.

My uncle observed:

“Edith Cavell.”

“Yes,” I said, with a start, “I recognize her: Edith Cavell; the execution of Edith Cavell.”

Once more and not for the last time, in setting down such phrases as these, I realize how ridiculous they must sound to any one who does not know to begin with what they signify and what is the exact truth that lies hidden in them. Nevertheless, I declare that this idea of something absurd and impossible did not occur to the mind when it was confronted with the phenomenon. Even when no theory had as yet suggested the smallest element of a logical explanation, people accepted as irrefutable the evidence of their own eyes. All those who saw the thing and whom I questioned gave me the same answer. Afterwards, they would correct themselves and protest. Afterwards, they would plead the excuse of hallucinations or visions received by suggestion. But, at the time, even though their reason was up in arms and though they, so to speak, “kicked” against facts which had no visible cause, they were compelled to bow before them and to follow their development as they would the representation of a succession of real events.

A theatrical representation, if you like, or rather a cinematographic representation, for, on the whole, this was the impression that emerged most clearly from all the impressions received. The moment Miss Cavell's image had assumed the animation of life, I turned round to look for the apparatus, standing in some corner of the Yard, which was projecting that animated picture; and, though I saw nothing, though I at once understood that in any case no projection could be effected in broad daylight and without omitting shafts of light, yet I received and retained that justifiable impression. There was no projector, no, but there was a screen: an astonishing screen which received nothing from without, since nothing was transmitted, but which received everything from within. And that was really the sensation experienced. The images did not come from the outside. They sprang to the surface from within. The horizon opened out on the farther side of a solid material. The darkness gave forth light.

Words, words, I know! Words which I heap upon words before I venture to write those which express what I saw issuing from the abyss in which Miss Cavell was about to undergo the death-penalty. The execution of Miss Cavell! Of course I said to myself, if it was a cinematographic representation, if it was a film — and how could one doubt it? — at any rate it was a film like ever so many others, faked, fictitious, based upon tradition, in a conventional setting, with paid performers and a heroine who had thoroughly studied the part. I knew that. But, all the same, I watched as though I did not know it. The miracle of the spectacle was so great that one was constrained to believe in the whole miracle, that is to say, in the reality of the representation. No fake was here. No make-believe. No part learned by heart. No performers and no setting. It was the actual scene. The actual victims. The horror which thrilled me during those few minutes was that which I should have felt had I beheld the murderous dawn of the 8th of October, 1915, rise across the thrice-accursed drill-ground.

It was soon over. The firing-platoon was drawn up in double file, on the right and a little aslant, so that we saw the men's faces between the rifle-barrels. There were a good many of them: thirty, forty perhaps, forty butchers, booted, belted, helmeted, with their straps under their chins. Above them hung a pale sky, streaked with thin red clouds. Opposite them... opposite them were the eight doomed victims.

There were six men and two women, all belonging to the people or the lower middle-class. They were now standing erect, throwing forward their chests as they tugged at their bonds.

An officer advanced, followed by four Feld-webel carrying unfurled handkerchiefs. Not any of the people condemned to death consented to have their eyes bandaged. Nevertheless, their faces were wrung with anguish; and all, with an impulse of their whole being, seemed to rush forward to their doom.

The officer raised his sword. The soldiers took aim.

A supreme effort of emotion seemed to add to the stature of the victims: and a cry issued from their lips. Oh, I saw and heard that cry, a fanatical and desperate cry in which the martyrs shouted forth their triumphant faith.

The officer's arm fell smartly. The intervening space appeared to tremble as with the rumbling of thunder. I had not the courage to look; and my eyes fixed themselves on the distracted countenance of Edith Cavell.

She also was not looking. Her eyelids were closed. But how she was listening! How her features contracted under the clash of the atrocious sounds, words of command, detonations, cries of the victims, death-rattles, moans of agony. By what refinement of cruelty had her own end been delayed? Why was she condemned to that double torture of seeing others die before dying herself?

Still, everything must be over yonder. One party of the butchers attended to the corpses, while the others formed into line and, pivoting upon the officer, marched towards Miss Cavell. They thus stepped out of the frame within which we were able to follow their movements; but I was able to perceive, by the gestures of the officer, that they were forming up opposite Nurse Cavell, between her and us.

The officer stepped towards her, accompanied by a military chaplain, who placed a crucifix to her lips. She kissed it fervently and tenderly. The chaplain then gave her his blessing; and she was left alone. A mist once more shrouded the scene, leaving her whole figure full in the light. Her eyelids were still closed, her head erect and her body rigid.

She was at that moment wearing a very sweet and very tranquil expression. Not a trace of fear distorted her noble countenance. She stood awaiting death with saintly serenity.

And this death, as it was revealed to us, was neither very cruel nor very odious. The upper part of the body fell forward. The head drooped a little to one side. But the shame of it lay in what followed. The officer stood close to the victim, revolver in hand. And he was pressing the barrel to his victim's temple, when, suddenly, the mist broke into dense waves and the whole picture disappeared....

Chapter IV:

Noel Dorgeroux's Son

The spectator who has just been watching the most tragic of films finds it easy to escape from the sort of dark prison-house in which he was suffocating and, with the return of the light, recovers his equilibrium and his self-possession. I, on the other hand, remained for a long time numb and speechless, with my eyes riveted to the empty panel, as though I expected something else to emerge from it. Even when it was over, the tragedy terrified me, like a nightmare prolonged after waking, and, even more than the tragedy, the absolutely extraordinary manner in which it had been unfolded before my eyes. I did not understand. My disordered brain vouchsafed me none but the most grotesque and incoherent ideas.

A movement on the part of Noel Dorgeroux drew me from my stupor: he had drawn the curtain across the screen.

At this I vehemently seized my uncle by his two hands and cried:

“What does all this mean? It's maddening! What explanation are you able to give?”

“None,” he said, simply.

“But still... you brought me here.”

“Yes, that you might also see and to make sure that my eyes had not deceived me.”

“Therefore you have already witnessed other scenes in that same setting?”

“Yes, other sights... three times before.”

“What, uncle? Can you specify them?”

“Certainly: what I saw yesterday, for instance.”

“What was that, uncle?”

He pushed me a little and gazed at me, at first without replying. Then, speaking in a very low tone, with deliberate conviction, he said:

“The battle of Trafalgar.”

I wondered if he was making fun of me. But Noel Dorgeroux was little addicted to banter at any time; and he would not have selected such a moment as this to depart from his customary gravity. No, he was speaking seriously; and what he said suddenly struck me as so humorous that I burst out laughing:

“Trafalgar! Don't be offended, uncle; but it's really too quaint! The battle of Trafalgar, which was fought in 1805?”

He once more looked at me attentively:

“Why do you laugh?” he asked.

“Good heavens, I laugh, I laugh... because... well, confess...”

He interrupted me:

“You're laughing for very simple reasons, Victorien, which I will explain to you in a few words. To begin with, you are nervous and ill at ease; and your merriment is first and foremost a reaction. But, in addition, the spectacle of that horrible scene was so — what shall I say? — so convincing that you looked upon it, in spite of yourself, not as a reconstruction of the murder, but as the actual murder of Miss Cavell. Is that true?”

“Perhaps it is, uncle.”

“In other words, the murder and all the infamous details which accompanied it must have been — don't let us hesitate to use the word — must have been cinematographed by some unseen witness from whom I obtained that precious film: and my invention consists solely in reproducing the film in the thickness of a gelatinous layer of some kind or other. A wonderful, but a credible discovery. Are we still agreed?”

“Yes, uncle, quite.”

“Very well. But now I am claiming something very different. I am claiming to have witnessed an evocation of the battle of Trafalgar! If so, the French and English frigates must have foundered before my eyes! I must have seen Nelson die, struck down at the foot of his mainmast! That's quite another matter, is it not? In 1805 there were no cinematographic films. Therefore this can be only an absurd parody. Thereupon all your emotion vanishes. My reputation fades into thin air. And you laugh! I am to you nothing more than an old impostor, who, instead of humbly showing you his curious discovery, tries in addition to persuade you that the moon is made of green cheese! A humbug, What?”

We had left the wall and were walking towards the door of the garden. The sun was setting behind the distant hills. I stopped and said to Noel Dorgeroux:

“Forgive me, uncle, and please don't think that I am over lacking in the respect I owe you. There is nothing in my amusement that need annoy you, nothing to make you suppose that I suspect your absolute sincerity.”

“Then what do you think? What is your conclusion?”

“I don't think anything, uncle. I have arrived at no conclusion and I am not even trying to do so, at present. I am out of my depth, perplexed, at the same time dazed and dissatisfied, as though I felt that the riddle was even more wonderful than it is and that it would always remain insoluble.”

We were entering the garden. It was his turn to stop me:

“Insoluble! That is really your opinion?”

“Yes, for the moment.”

“You can't imagine any theory?”

“No.”

“Still, you saw? You have no doubts?”

“I certainly saw. I saw first three strange eyes that looked at us; then I witnessed a scene which was the murder of Miss Cavell. That is what I saw, just as you did, uncle; and I do not for a moment doubt the undeniable evidence of my own eyes.”

He held out his hand to me:

“That's what I wanted to know, my boy. And thank you.”

I have given a faithful account of what happened that afternoon. In the evening we dined together by ourselves, Berangere having sent word to say that she was indisposed and would not leave her room. My uncle was deeply absorbed in thought and did not say a word on what had happened in the Yard.

I slept hardly at all, haunted by the recollection of what I had seen and tormented by a score of theories, which I need not mention here, for not one of them was of the slightest value.

Next day, Berangere did not come downstairs. At luncheon, my uncle preserved the same silence. I tried many times to make him talk, but received no reply.

My curiosity was too intense to allow my uncle to get rid of me in this way. I took up my position in the garden before he left the house. Not until five o'clock did he go up to the Yard.

“Shall I come with you, uncle?” I suggested, boldly.

He grunted, neither granting my request nor refusing it. I followed him. He walked across the Yard, locked himself into his principal workshop and did not leave it until an hour later:

“Ah, there you are!” he said, as though he had been unaware of any presence.

He went to the wall and briskly drew the curtain. Just then he asked me to go back to the workshop and to fetch something or other which he had forgotten. When I returned, he said, excitedly:

“It's finished, it's finished!”

“What is, uncle?”

“The Eyes, the Three Eyes.”

“Oh, have you seen them?”

“Yes; and I refuse to believe... no, of course, it's an illusion on my part.... How could it be possible, when you come to think of it? Imagine, the eyes wore the expression of my dead son's eyes, yes, the very expression of my poor Dominique. It's madness, isn't it? And yet I declare, yes, I declare that Dominique was gazing at me... at first with a sad and sorrowful gaze, which suddenly became the terrified gaze of a man who is staring death in the face. And then the Three Eyes began to revolve upon themselves. That was the end.”

I made Noel Dorgeroux sit down:

“It's as you suppose, uncle, an illusion, an hallucination. Just think, Dominique has been dead so many years! It is therefore incredible...”

“Everything is incredible and nothing is,” he said. “There is no room for human logic in front of that wall.”

I tried to reason with him, though my mind was becoming as bewildered as his own. But he silenced me:

“That'll do,” he said. “Here's the other thing beginning.”

He pointed to the screen, which was showing signs of life and preparing to reveal a new picture.

“But, uncle,” I said, already overcome by excitement, “where does that come from?”

“Don't speak,” said Noel Dorgeroux. “Not a word.”

I at once observed that this other thing bore no relation to what I had witnessed the day before; and I concluded that the scenes presented must occur without any prearranged order, without any chronological or serial connection, in short, like the different films displayed in the course of a performance.

It was the picture of a small town as seen from a neighbouring height. A castle and a church-steeple stood out above it. The town was built on the slope of several hills and at the intersection of the valleys, which met among clumps of tall, leafy trees.

Suddenly, it came nearer and was seen on a larger scale. The hills surrounding the town disappeared; and the whole screen was filled with a crowd swarming with lively gestures around an open space above which hung a balloon, held captive by ropes. Suspended from the balloon was a receptacle serving probably for the production of hot air. Men were issuing from the crowd on every hand. Two of them climbed a ladder the top of which was leaning against the side of a car. And all this, the appearance of the balloon, the shape of the appliances employed, the use of hot air instead of gas, the dress of the people; all this struck me as possessing an old-world aspect.

“The brothers Montgolfier,” whispered my uncle.

These few words enlightened me. I remembered those old prints recording man's first ascent towards the sky, which was accomplished in June, 1783. It was this wonderful event which we were witnessing, or, at least, I should say, a reconstruction of the event, a reconstruction accurately based upon those old prints, with a balloon copied from the original, with costumes of the period and no doubt, in addition, the actual setting of the little town of Annonay.

But then how was it that there was so great a multitude of townsfolk and peasants? There was no comparison possible between the usual number of actors in a cinema scene and the incredibly tight-packed crowd which I saw moving before my eyes. A crowd like that is found only in pictures which the camera has secured direct, on a public holiday, at a march-past of troops or a royal procession.

However, the wavelike eddying of the crowd suddenly subsided. I received the impression of a great silence and an anxious period of waiting. Some men quickly severed the ropes with hatchets. Etienne and Joseph Montgolfier lifted their hats.

And the balloon rose in space.

The people in the crowd raised their arms and filled the air with an immense clamour.

For a moment, the screen showed us the two brothers, by themselves and enlarged. With the upper part of their bodies leaning from the car, each with one arm round the other's waist and one hand clasping the other's, they seemed to be praying with an air of unspeakable ecstasy and solemn joy.

Slowly the ascent continued. And it was then that something utterly inexplicable occurred: the balloon, as it rose above the little town and the surrounding hills, did not appear to my uncle and me as an object which we were watching from an increasing depth below. No, it was the little town and the hills which were sinking and which, by sinking, proved to us that the balloon was ascending. But there was also this absolutely illogical phenomenon, that we remained on the same level as the balloon, that it retained the same dimensions and that the two brothers stood facing us, exactly as though the photograph had been taken from the car of a second balloon, rising at the same time as the first with an exactly and mathematically identical movement!

The scene was not completed. Or rather it was transformed in accordance with the method of the cinematograph, which substitutes one picture for another by first blending them together. Imperceptibly, when it was perhaps some fifteen hundred feet from the ground, the Montgolfier balloon became less distinct and its vague and softened outlines gradually mingled with the more and more powerful outlines of another shape which soon occupied the whole space and which proved to be that of a military aeroplane.

Several times since then the mysterious screen has shown me two successive scenes of which the second completed the first, thus forming a diptych which displayed the evident wish to convey a lesson by connecting, across space and time, “two events which in this way acquired their full significance. This time the moral was clear: the peaceable balloon had culminated in the murderous aeroplane. First the ascent at Annonay. Then a fight in mid-air, a fight between the monoplane which I had seen develop from the old-fashioned balloon and the biplane upon which I beheld it swooping like a bird of prey.

Was it an illusion or a “faked representation?” For here again we saw the two aeroplanes not in the normal fashion, from below, but as if we were at the same height and moving at the same rate of speed. In that case, were we to admit that an operator, perched on a third machine, was calmly engaged in “filming” the shifting fortunes of the terrible battle? That was impossible, surely!

But there was no good purpose to be served by renewing these perpetual suppositions over and over again. Why should I doubt the unimpeachable evidence of my eyes and deny the undeniable? Real aeroplanes were manoeuvring before my eyes. A real fight was taking place in the thickness of that old wall.

It did not last long. The man who was alone was attacking boldly. Time after time his machine-gun flashed forth flames. Then, to avoid the enemy's bullets, he looped the loop twice, each time throwing his aeroplane in such a position that I was able to distinguish on the canvas the three concentric circles that denote the Allied machines. Then, coming nearer and attacking his adversaries from behind, he returned to his gun.

The Hun biplane — I observed the iron cross — dived straight for the ground and recovered itself. The two men seemed to be sitting tight under their furs and masks. There was a third machine-gun attack. The pilot threw up his hands. The biplane capsized and fell.

I saw this fall in the most inexplicable fashion. At first, of course, it seemed swift as lightning. And then it became infinitely slow and even ceased, with the machine overturned and the two bodies motionless, head downwards and arms outstretched.

Then the ground shot up with a dizzy speed, devastated, shell-holed fields, swarming with thousands of French poilus.

The biplane came down beside a river. From the shapeless fuselage and the shattered wings two legs appeared.

And the French plane landed almost immediately, a short way off. The victor stepped out, pushed back the soldiers who had run up from every side and, moving a few yards towards his motionless prey, took off his mask and made the sign of the cross.

“Oh,” I whispered, “this is dreadful! And how mysterious!...”

Then I saw that Noel Dorgeroux was on his knees, his face distorted with emotion:

“What is it, uncle?” I asked.

Stretching towards the wall his trembling hands, which were clasped together, he stammered:

“Dominique! I recognize my son! It's he! Oh, I'm terrified!”

I also, as I gazed at the victor, recovered in my memory the time-effaced image of my poor cousin.

“It's he!” continued my uncle. “I was right... the expression of the Three Eyes.... Oh! I can't look!... I'm afraid!”

“Afraid of what, uncle?”

“They are going to kill him... to kill him before my eyes... to kill him as they actually did kill him... Dominique! Dominique! Take care!” he shouted.

I did not shout: what warning cry could reach the man about to die? But the same terror brought me to my knees and made me wring my hands. In front of us, from underneath the shapeless mass, among the heaped-up wreckage, something rose up, the swaying body of one of the victims. An arm was extended, aiming a revolver. The victor sprang to one side. It was too late. Shot through the head, he spun round upon his heels and fell beside the dead body of his murderer.

The tragedy was over.

My uncle, bent double, was sobbing pitifully a few paces from my side.

He had witnessed the actual death of his son, foully murdered in the great war by a German airman!

Chapter V:

The Kiss

Berangere next day resumed her place at meals, looking a little pale and wearing a more serious face than usual. My uncle, who had not troubled about her during the last two days, kissed her absent-mindedly. We lunched without a word. Not until we had nearly ended did Noel Dorgeroux speak to his god-child:

“Well, dear, are you none the worse for your fall?”

“Not a bit, god-father; and I'm only sorry that I didn't see... what you saw up there, yesterday and the day before. Are you going there presently, god-father?”

“Yes, but I'm going alone.”

This was said in a peremptory tone which allowed of no reply. My uncle was looking at me. I did not stir a muscle.

Lunch finished in an awkward silence. As he was about to leave the room, Noel Dorgeroux turned back to me and asked:

“Do you happen to have lost anything in the Yard?”

“No, uncle. Why do you ask?”

“Because,” he answered, with a slight hesitation,” because I found this on the ground, just in front of the wall.”

He showed me a lens from an eye-glass.

“But you know, uncle,” I said, laughing, “that I don't wear spectacles or glasses of any kind.”

“No more do I!” Berangere declared.

“That's so, that's so,” Noel Dorgeroux replied, in a thoughtful tone. “But, still, somebody has been there. And you can understand my uneasiness.”

In the hope of making him speak, I pursued the subject:

“What are you uneasy about, uncle? At the worst, some one may hare seen the pictures produced on the screen, which would not be enough, so it seems to me, to enable the secret of your discovery to be stolen. Remember that I myself, who was with you, am hardly any wiser than I was before.”

I felt that he did not intend to answer and that he resented my insistence. This irritated me.

“Listen, uncle,” I said. “Whatever the reasons for your conduct may be, you have no right to suspect me; and I ask and entreat you to give me an explanation. Yes, I entreat you, for I cannot remain in this uncertainty. Tell me, uncle, was it really your son whom you saw die, or were we shown a fabricated picture of his death? Then again, what is the unseen and omnipotent entity which causes these phantoms to follow one another in that incredible magic lantern? Never was there such a problem, never so many irreconcilable questions. Look here, last night, while I was trying for hours to get to sleep, I imagined — it's an absurd theory, I know, but, all the same, one has to cast about — well, I remembered that you had spoken to Berangere of a certain inner force which radiated from us and emitted what you have named the B-rays, after your god-daughter. If so, might one not suppose that, in the circumstances, this force, emanating, uncle, from your own brain, which was haunted by a vague resemblance between the expression of the Three Eyes and the expression of your own, might we not suppose that this force projected on the receptive material of the wall the scene which was conjured up in your mind? Don't you think that the screen which you have covered with a special substance registered your thoughts just as a sensitive plate, acted upon by the sunlight, registers forms and outlines? In that case...”

I broke off. As I spoke, the words which I was using seemed to me devoid of meaning. My uncle, however, appeared to be listening to them with a certain willingness and even to be waiting for what I would say next. But I did not know what to say. I had suddenly come to the end of my tether; and, though I made every effort to detain Noel Dorgeroux by fresh arguments, I felt that there was not a word more to be said between us on that subject.

Indeed, my uncle went away without answering one of my questions. I saw him, through the window, crossing the garden.

I gave way to a movement of anger and exclaimed to Berangere:

“I've had enough of this! After all, why should I worry myself to death trying to understand a discovery which, when you think of it, is not a discovery at all? For what does it consist of? No one can respect Noel Dorgeroux more than I do; but there's no doubt that this, instead of a real discovery, is rather a stupefying way of deluding one's self, of mixing up things that exist with things that do not exist and of giving an appearance of reality to what has none. Unless... But who knows anything about it? It is not even possible to express an opinion. The whole thing is an ocean of mystery, over-hung by mountainous clouds which descend upon one and stifle one!”

My ill-humour suddenly turned against Berangere. She had listened to me with a look of disapproval, feeling angry perhaps at my blaming her god-father; and she was now slipping towards the door. I stopped her as she was passing; and, in a fit of rancour which was foreign to my nature, I let fly:

“Why are you leaving the room? Why do you always avoid me as you do? Speak, can't you? What have you against me? Yes, I know, my thoughtless conduct, the other day. But do you think I would have acted like that if you weren't always keeping up that sulky reserve with me? Hang it all, I've known you as quite a little girl! I've held your skipping-rope for you when you were just a slip of a child! Then why should I now be made to look on you as a woman and to feel that you are indeed a woman... a woman who stirs me to the very depths of my heart?”

She was standing against the door and gazing at me with an undefinable smile, which contained a gleam of mockery, but nothing provocative and not a shade of coquetry. I noticed for the first time that her eyes, which I thought to be grey, were streaked with green and, as it were, flecked with specks of gold. And, at the same time, the expression of those great eyes, bright and limpid though they were, struck me as the most unfathomable thing in the world. What was passing in those limpid depths? And why did my mind connect the riddle of those eye«r with the terrible riddle which the three geometrical eyes had set me?

However, the recollection of the stolen kiss diverted my glance to her red lips. Her face turned crimson. This was a last, exasperating insult.

“Let me be! Go away!” she commanded, quivering with anger and shame.

Helpless and a prisoner, she lowered her head and bit her lips to prevent my seeing them. Then, when I tried to take her hands, she thrust her outstretched arms against my chest, pushed me back with all her might and cried:

“You're a mean coward! Go away! I loathe and hate you!”

Her outburst restored my composure. I was ashamed of what I had done and, making way for her to pass, I opened the door for her and said:

“I beg your pardon, Berangere. Don't be angrier with me than you can help. I promise you it shan't occur again.”

Once more, the story of the Three Eyes is closely bound up with all the details of my love, not only in my recollection of it, but also in actual fact. While the riddle itself is alien to it and may be regarded solely in its aspect of a scientific phenomenon, it is impossible to describe how humanity came to know of it and was brought into immediate contact with it, without at the same time revealing all the vicissitudes of my sentimental adventure. The riddle and this adventure, from the point of view with which we are concerned, are integral parts of the same whole. The two must be described simultaneously.

At the moment, being somewhat disillusionized in both respects, I decided to tear myself away from this twofold preoccupation and to leave my uncle to his inventions and Berangere to her sullen mood.

I had not much difficulty in carrying out my resolve in so far as Noel Dorgeroux was concerned. We had a long succession of wet days. The rain kept him to his room or his laboratories; and the pictures on the screen faded from my mind like diabolical visions which the brain refuses to accept. I did not wish to think of them; and I thought of them hardly at all.

But Berangere's charm pervaded me, notwithstanding the good faith in which I waged this daily battle. Unaccustomed to the snares of love, I fell an easy prey, incapable of defence. Berangere's voice, her laugh, her silence, her day-dreams, her way of holding herself, the fragrance of her personality, the colour of her hair served me as so many excuses for exaltation, rejoicing, suffering or despair. Through the breach now opened in my professorial soul, which hitherto had known few joys save those of study, came surging all the feelings that make up the delights and also the pangs of love, all the emotions of longing, hatred, fondness, fear, hope... and jealousy.

It was one bright and peaceful morning, as I was strolling in the Meudon woods, that I caught sight of Berangere in the company of a man. They were standing at a corner where two roads met and were talking with some vivacity. The man faced me. I saw a type of what would be described as a coxcomb, with regular features, a dark, fan-shaped beard and a broad smile which displayed his teeth. He wore a double eye-glass.

Berangere heard the sound of my footsteps, as I approached, and turned round. Her attitude denoted hesitation and confusion. But she at once pointed down one of the two roads, as though giving a direction. The fellow raised his hat and walked away. Berangere joined me and, without much restraint, explained:

“It was somebody asking his way.”

“But you know him, Berangere?” I objected.

“I never saw him before in my life,” she declared.

“Oh, come, come! Why, from the manner you were speaking to him... Look here, Berangere, will you take your oath on it?”

She started:

“What do you mean? Why should I take an oath to you? I am not accountable to you for my actions.”

“In that case, why did you tell me that he was enquiring his way of you? I asked you no question.”

“I do as I please,” she replied, curtly.

Nevertheless, when we reached the Lodge, she thought better of it and said:

“After all, if it gives you any pleasure, I can swear that I was seeing that gentleman for the first time and that I had never heard of him. I don't even know his name.”

We parted.

“One word more,” I said. “Did you notice that the man wore glasses?”

“So he did!” she said, with some surprise. “Well, what does that prove?”

“Remember, your uncle found a spectacle-lens in front of the wall in the Yard.”

She stopped to think and then shrugged her shoulders:

“A mere coincidence! Why should you connect the two things?”

Berangere was right and I did not insist. Nevertheless and though she had answered me in a tone of undeniable candour, the incident left me uneasy and suspicious. I would not admit that so animated a conversation could take place between her and a perfect stranger who was simply asking her the way. The man was well set-up and good-looking. I suffered tortures.

That evening Berangere was silent. It struck me that she had been crying. My uncle, on the contrary, on returning from the Yard, was talkative and cheerful; and I more than once felt that he was on the point of telling me something. Had anything thrown fresh light on his invention?

Next day, he was just as lively:

“Life is very pleasant, at times,” he said.

And he left us, rubbing his hands.

Berangere spent all the early part of the afternoon on a bench in the garden, where I could see her from my room. She sat motionless and thoughtful.

At four o'clock, she came in, walked across the hall of the Lodge and went out by the front door.

I went out too, half a minute later.

The street which skirted the house turned and likewise skirted, on the left, the garden and the Yard, whereas on the right the property was bordered by a narrow lane which led to some fields and abandoned quarries. Berangere often went this way; and I at once saw, by her slow gait, that her only intention was to stroll wherever her dreams might lead her.

She had not put on a hat. The sunlight gleamed in her hair. She picked the stones on which to place her feet, so as not to dirty her shoes with the mud in the road.

Against the stout plank fence which at this point replaced the wall enclosing the Yard stood an old street-lamp, now no longer used, which was fastened to the fence with iron clamps. Berangere stopped here, all of a sudden, evidently in obedience to a thought which, I confess, had often occurred to myself and which I had had the courage to resist, perhaps because I had not perceived the means of putting it into execution.

Berangere saw the means. It was only necessary to climb the fence by using the lamp, in order to make her way into the Yard without her uncle's knowledge and steal a glimpse of one of those sights which he guarded so jealously for himself.

She made up her mind without hesitation; and, when she was on the other side, I too had not the least hesitation in following her example. I was in that state of mind when one is not unduly troubled by idle scruples; and there was no more indelicacy in satisfying my legitimate curiosity than in spying upon Berangere's actions. I therefore climbed over also.

My scruples returned when I found myself on the other side, face to face with Berangere, who had experienced some difficulty in getting down. I said, a little sheepishly:

“This is not a very nice thing we're doing, Berangere; and I presume you mean to give it up.”

She began to laugh:

“You can give it up. I intend to go on. If god-father chooses to distrust us, it's his lookout.”

I did not try to restrain her. She slipped softly between the nearest two sheds. I followed close upon her heels.

In this way we stole to the end of the open ground which occupied the middle of the Yard and we saw Noel Dorgeroux standing by the screen. He had not yet drawn the black-serge curtain.

“Look,” Berangere whispered, “over there: you see a stack of wood with a tarpaulin over it? We shall be all right behind that.”

“But suppose my uncle looks round while we're crossing?”

“He won't.”

She was the first to venture across; and I joined her without any mishap. We were not more than a dozen yards from the screen.

“My heart's beating so!” said Berangere. “I've seen nothing, you know: only those — sort of eyes. And there's a lot more, isn't there?”

Our refuge consisted of two stacks of small short planks, with bags of sand between the stacks. We sat down here, in a position which brought us close together. Nevertheless Berangere maintained the same distant attitude as before; and I now thought of nothing but what my uncle was doing.

He was holding his watch in his hand and consulting it at intervals, as though waiting for a time which he had fixed beforehand. And that time arrived. The curtain grated on its metal rod. The screen was uncovered.

From where we sat we could see the bare surface as well as my uncle could, for the intervening space fell very far short of the length of an ordinary picture-palace. The first outlines to appear were therefore absolutely plain to us. They were the lines of the three geometrical figures which I knew so well: the same proportions, the same arrangement, the same impassiveness, followed by that same palpitation, coming entirely from within, which animated them and made them live.

“Yes, yes,” whispered Berangere, “my godfather said so one day: they are alive, the Three Eyes.”

“They are alive,” I declared, “and they gaze at you. Look at the two lower eyes by themselves; think of them as actual eyes; and you will see that they really have an expression. There, they're smiling now.”

“You're right, they're smiling.”

“And see what a soft and gentle look they have now... a little serious also.... Oh, Berangere, it's impossible!”

“What?”

“They have your expression, Berangere, your expression.”

“What nonsense! It's ridiculous!”

“The very expression of your eyes. You don't know it yourself. But I do. They have never looked at me like that; but, all the same, they are your eyes, it's their expression, their charm. I know, because these make me feel... eh, as yours do, Berangere!”

But the end was approaching. The three geometrical figures began to revolve upon themselves with the same dizzy motion which reduced them to a confused disk which soon vanished.

“They're your eyes, Berangere,” I stammered; “there's not a doubt about it; it was as though you were looking at me.”

Yes, she had the same look; and I could not but remember then that Edith Cavell had also looked in that way at Noel Dorgeroux and me, through the three strange eyes, and that Noel Dorgeroux similarly had recognized the look in his son's eyes before his son himself appeared to him. That being so, was I to assume that each of the films — there is no other word for them — was preceded by the fabulous vision of three geometrical figures containing, captive and alive, the very expression in the eyes of one of the persons about to come to life upon the screen.

It was a lunatic assumption, as were all those which I was making! I blush to write it down. But, in that case, what were the three geometrical figures? A cinema trade-mark? The trademark of the Three Eyes? What an absurdity! What madness! And yet...

“Oh,” said Berangere, making as if to rise, “I oughtn't to have come! It's suffocating me. Can you explain?”

“No, Berangere, I can't. It's suffocating me too. Do you want to go?”

“No,” she said, leaning forward. “No, I want to see.”

And we saw. And, at the very moment when a muffled cry escaped our lips, we saw Noel Dorgeroux slowly making a great sign of the cross.

Opposite him, in the middle of the magic space on the wall, was he himself this time, standing not like a frail and shifting phantom, but like a human being full of movement and life. Yes, Noel Dorgeroux went to and fro before us and before himself, wearing his usual skull-cap, dressed in his long frock-coat. And the setting in which he moved was none other than the Yard, the Yard with its shed, its workshops, its die-order, its heaps of scrap-iron, its stacks of wood, its rows of barrels and its wall, with the rectangle of the serge curtain!

I at once noticed one detail: the serge curtain covered the magic space completely. It was therefore impossible to imagine that this scene, at any rate, had been recorded, absorbed by the screen, which, at that actual moment, must have drawn it from its own substance in order to present that sight to us! It was impossible, because Noel Dorgeroux had his back turned to the wall. It was impossible, because we saw the wall itself and the door of the garden, because the gate was open and because I, in my turn, entered the Yard.

“You! It's you!” gasped Berangere.

“It's I on the day when your uncle told me to come here,” I said, astounded, “the day when I first saw a vision on the screen.”

At that moment, on the screen, Noel Dorgeroux beckoned to me from the door of his workshop. We went in together. The Yard remained empty; and then, after an eclipse which lasted only a second or two, the same scene reappeared, the little garden-door opened again and Berangere, all smiles, put her head through.

She seemed to be saying:

“Nobody here. They're in the office. Upon my word, I'll risk it!”

And she crept along the wall, towards the serge curtain.

All this happened quickly, without any of the vibration seen in the picture-theatres, and so clearly and plainly that I followed our two images not as the phases of an incident buried in the depths of time, but as the reflection in a mirror of a scene in which we were the immediate actors. To tell the truth, I was confused at seeing myself over there and feeling myself to be where I was. This doubling of my personality made my brain reel.

“Victorien,” said Berangere, in an almost inaudible voice, “you're going to come out of your uncle's workshop as you did the other day, aren't you?”

“Yes,” I said, “the details of the other day are beginning all over again.”

And they did. Here were my uncle and I coming out of the workshop. Here was Berangere, surprised, running away and laughing. Here she was, climbing a plank lying across two barrels and dancing, ever so gracefully and lightly! And then, as before, she fell. I darted forward, picked her up, carried her and laid her on the bench. She put her arms round me; our faces almost touched. And, as before, gently at first and then roughly and violently, I kissed her on the lips. And, as on that occasion, she pose to her feet, while I crouched before her.

Oh, how well I remember it all! I remember and I still see myself. I see myself yonder, bending very low not daring to lift my head, and I see Berangere, standing up, covered with shame, trembling with indignation.

Indignation? Did she really seem indignant? But then why did her dear face, the face on the screen, display such indulgence and gentleness? Why did she smile with that expression of unspeakable gladness? Yes, I swear it was gladness.

Yonder, in the magic space where that exciting minute was being reenacted, there stood over me a happy creature who was gazing at me with joy and affection, who was gazing at me thus because she knew that I could not see her and because she could not know that one day I should see her.

“Berangere!... Berangere!...”

But suddenly, while the adorable vision yonder continued, my eyes were covered as with a veil. Berangere had turned towards me and put her two hands over my eyes, whispering:

“Don't look. I won't have you look. Besides, it's not true. That woman's lying, it's not me at all.... No, no, I never looked at you like that.”

Her voice grew fainter. Her hands dropped to her sides. And, with all the strength gone out of her, she let herself fall against my shoulder, gently and silently.

Ten minutes later, I went back alone. Berangere had left me without a word, after her unexpected movement of surrender.

Next morning I received a telegram from the rector of the university, calling me to Grenoble.

Berangere did not appear as I was leaving. But, when my uncle brought me to the station, I saw her, not far from the Lodge, talking with that confounded coxcomb whom she pretended not to know.

Chapter VI:

Anxieties

“You seem very happy, uncle!” said I to Noel Dorgeroux, who walked briskly on the way to the station, whistling one gay tune after another.

“Yes,” he replied, “lam happy as a man is who has come to a decision.”

“You've come to a decision, uncle?”

“And a very serious one at that. It has cost me a sleepless night; but it's worth it.”

“May I ask...?”

“Certainly. In two words, it's this: Fm going to pull down the sheds in the Yard and build an amphitheatre there.”

“What for?”

“To exploit the thing... the thing you know of.”

“Now do you mean, to exploit it?”

“Why, it's a tremendously important discovery; and, if properly worked, it will give me the money which I have always been trying for, not for its own sake, but because of the resources which it will bring me, money with the aid of which I shall be able to continue my labours without being checked by secondary considerations. There are millions to be made, Victorien, millions! And what shall I not accomplish with millions! This brain of mine,” he went on, tapping his forehead, “is simply crammed with ideas, with theories which need verifying. And it all takes money.... Money! Money! You know how little I care about money! But I want millions, if I am to carry through my work. And those millions I shall have!”

Mastering his enthusiasm, he took my arm and explained:

“First of all, the Yard cleared of its rubbish and levelled. After that, the amphitheatre, with five stages of benches facing the wall. For of course the wall remains: it is the essential point, the reason for the whole thing. But I shall heighten and widen it; and, when it is quite unobstructed, there will be a clear view of it from every seat. You follow me, don't you?”

“I follow you, uncle. But do you think people will come?”

“Will they come? What! You, who know, ask me that question! Why, they will pay gold for the worst seat, they'll give a king's ransom to get in! I'm so sure of it that I shall put all I have left, the last remnant of my savings, into the business. And within a year I shall have amassed incalculable wealth.”

“The place is quite small, uncle, and you will have only a limited number of seats.”

“A thousand, a thousand seats, comfortably! At two hundred francs a seat to begin with, at a thousand francs!...”

“I say, uncle! Seats in the open air, exposed to the rain, to the cold, to all sorts of weather!”

“I've foreseen that objection. The Yard will be closed on rainy days. I want bright daylight, sunshine, the action of the light and other conditions besides, which will still further decrease the number of demonstrations. But that doesn't matter: each seat will cost two thousand francs, five thousand francs, if necessary! I tell you, there's no limit! No one will be content to die without having been to Noel Dorgeroux's Yard! Why, Victorien, you know it as well as I do! When all is said, the reality is more extraordinary than anything that you can imagine, even after what you have seen with your own eyes.”

I could not help asking him:

“Then there are fresh manifestations?”

He replied by nodding his head:

“It's not so much that they're new,” he said, “as that, above all, they have enabled me, with the factors which I already possess, to probe the truth to the bottom.”

“Uncle! Uncle!” I cried. “You mean to say that you know the truth?”

“I know the whole truth, my boy,” he declared. “I know how much is my work and how much has nothing to do with me. What was once darkness is now dazzling light.”

And he added, in a very serious tone:

“It is beyond all imagination, my boy. It is beyond the most extravagant dreams; and yet it remains within the province of facts and certainties. Once humanity knows of it, the earth will pass through a thrill of religious awe; and the people who come here as pilgrims will fall upon their knees — as I did — fall upon their knees like children who pray and fold their hands and weep!”

His words, which were obviously exaggerated, seemed to come from an ill-balanced mind. Yet I felt the force of their exciting and feverish influence:

“Explain yourself, uncle, I beg you.”

“Later on, my boy, when all the points have been cleared up.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing from you.”

“From whom then?”

“Nobody. But I have my misgivings... quite wrongly, perhaps. Still, certain facts lead me to think that I am being spied upon and that some one is trying to discover my secret. It's just a few clues... things that have been moved from their place... and, above all, a vague intuition.”

“This is all very indefinite, uncle.”

“Very, I admit,” he said, drawing himself up. “And so forgive me if my precautions are excessive... and let's talk of something else: of yourself, Victorien, of your plans...”

“I have no plans, uncle.”

“Yes, you have. There's one at least that you're keeping from me.”

“How so?”

He stopped in his walk and said:

“You're in love with Berangere.”

I did not think of protesting, knowing that Noel Dorgeroux had been in the Yard the day before, in front of the screen:

“I am, uncle, I'm in love with Berangere, but she doesn't care for me.”

“Yes, she does, Victorien.”

I displayed some slight impatience:

“Uncle, I must ask you not to insist. Berangere is a mere child; she does not know what she wants; she is incapable of any serious feeling; and I do not intend to think about her any more. On my part, it was just a fancy of which I shall soon be cured.”

Noel Dorgeroux shrugged his shoulders:

“Lovers' quarrels! Now this is what I have to say to you, Victorien. The work at the Yard will take up all the winter. The amphitheatre will be open to the public on the fourteenth of May, to the day. The Easter holidays will fall a month earlier; and you shall marry my goddaughter during the holidays. Not a word; leave it to me. And leave both your settlements and your prospects to me as well. You can understand, my boy, that, when money is pouring in like water — as it will without a doubt — Victorien Beaugrand will throw up a profession which does not give him sufficient leisure for his private studies and that he will live with me, he and his wife. Yes, I said his wife; and I stick to it. Good-bye, my dear chap, not another word.”

I walked on. He called me back:

“Say good-bye to me, Victorien.”

He put his arms round me with greater fervour than usual; and I heard him murmur:

“Who can tell if we shall ever meet again? At my age! And threatened as I am, too!”

I protested. He embraced me yet again:

“You're right. I am really talking nonsense. You think of your marriage. Berangere is a dear, sweet girl. And she loves you. Good-bye and bless you! I'll write to you. Good-bye.”

I confess that Noel Dorgeroux's ambitions, at least in so far as they related to the turning of his discovery to practical account, did not strike me as absurd; and what I have said of the things seen at the Yard will exempt me, I imagine, from stating the reasons for my confidence. For the moment, therefore, I will leave the question aside and say no more of those three haunting eyes or the phantasmal scenes upon the magic screen. But how could I indulge the dreams of the future which Noel Dorgeroux suggested? How could I forget Berangere's hostile attitude, her ambiguous conduct?

True, during the months that followed, I often sought to cling to the delightful memory of the vision which I had surprised and the charming picture of Berangere bending over me with that soft look in her eyes. But I very soon pulled myself up and cried:

“I saw the thing all wrong! What I took for affection and, God forgive me, for love was only the expression of a woman triumphing over a man's abasement! Berangere does not care for me. The movement that threw her against my shoulder was due to a sort of nervous crisis; and she felt so much ashamed of it that she at once pushed me away and ran indoors. Besides, she had an appointment with that man the very next day and, in order to keep it, let me go without saying good-bye to me.”

My months of exile therefore were painful months. I wrote to Berangere in vain. I received no reply.

My uncle in his letters spoke of nothing but the Yard. The works were making quick progress. The amphitheatre was growing taller and taller. The wall was quite transformed. The last news, about the middle of March, told me that nothing remained to be done but to fix the thousand seats, which had long been on order, and to hang the iron curtain which was to protect the screen.

It was at this period that Noel Dorgeroux's misgivings revived, or at least it was then that he mentioned them when writing to me. Two books which he bought in Paris and which he used to read in private, lest his choice of a subject should enable anyone to learn the secret of his discovery, had been removed, taken away and then restored to their place. A sheet of paper, covered with notes and chemical formulae, disappeared. There were footprints in the garden. The writing-desk had been broken open, in the room where he worked at the Lodge since the demolition of the sheds.

This last incident, I confess, caused me a certain alarm. My uncle's fears were shown to be based upon a serious fact. There was evidently some one prowling around the Lodge and forcing an entrance in pursuance of a scheme whose nature was easy to guess. Involuntarily I thought of the man with the glasses and his relations with Berangere. There was no knowing....

I made a fresh attempt to persuade the girl to communicate with me:

“You know what's happening at the Lodge, don't you?” I wrote. “How do you explain those facts, which to me seem pretty significant? Be sure to send me word if you feel the least uneasiness. And keep a close watch in the meantime.”

I followed up this letter with two telegrams dispatched in quick succession. But Berangere's stubborn silence, instead of distressing me, served rather to allay my apprehensions. She would not have failed to send for me had there been any danger. No, my uncle was mistaken. He was a victim to the feverish condition into which his discovery was throwing him. As the date approached on which he had decided to make it public, he felt anxious. But there was nothing to justify his apprehensions.

I allowed a few more days to elapse. Then I wrote Berangere a letter of twenty pages, filled with reproaches, which I did not post. Her behaviour exasperated me. I suffered from a bitter fit of jealousy.

At last, on Saturday, the twenty-ninth of March, I received from my uncle a registered bundle of papers and a very explicit letter, which I kept and which I am copying verbatim:

“MY DEAR VICTORIEN,

“Recent events, combined with certain very serious circumstances of which I will tell you, prove that I am the object of a cunningly devised plot against which I have perhaps delayed defending myself longer than I ought. At any rate, it is my duty, in the midst of the dangers which threaten my very life, to protect the magnificent discovery which mankind will owe to my efforts and to take precautionary measures which you will certainly not think unwarranted.

“I have, therefore, drawn up — as I always refused to do before — a detailed report of my discovery, the investigations that led up to it and the conclusions to which my experiments have led me. However improbable it may seem, however contrary to all the accepted laws, the truth is as I state and not otherwise.

“I have added to my report a very exact definition of the technical processes which should be employed in the installation and exploitation of my discovery, as also of my special views upon the financial management of the amphitheatre, the advertising, the floating of the business and the manner in which it might subsequently be extended by building in the garden and where the Lodge now stands a second amphitheatre to face the other side of the wall.

“I am sending you this report by the same post, sealed and registered, and I will ask you not to open it unless I come by some harm. As an additional precaution, I have not included in it the chemical formula which has resulted from my labours and which is the actual basis of my discovery. You will find it engraved on a small and very thin steel plate which I always carry inside the lining of my waistcoat. In this way you and you alone will have in your hands all the necessary factors for exploiting the invention. This will need no special qualifications or scientific preparation. The report and the formula are ample. Holding these two, you are master of the situation; and no one can ever rob you of the material profits of the wonderful secret which I am bequeathing to you.

“And now, my dear boy, let us hope that all my presentiments are unfounded and that we shall soon be celebrating together the happy events which I foresee, including first and foremost your marriage with Berangere. I have not yet been able to obtain a favourable reply from her and she has for some time appeared to me to be, as you put it, in a rather fanciful mood; but I have no doubt that your return will make her reconsider a refusal which she does not even attempt to justify.

“Ever affectionately yours,

“NOEL DORGEROUX.”

This letter reached me too late to allow me to catch the evening express. Besides, was there any urgency for my departure? Ought I not to wait for further news?

A casual observation made short work of my hesitation. As I sat reflecting, mechanically turning the envelope in my hands, I perceived that it had been opened and then fastened down again; what is more, this had been done rather clumsily, probably by some one who had only a few seconds at his disposal.

The full gravity of the situation at once flashed across my mind. The man who had opened the letter before it was dispatched and who beyond a doubt was the man whom Noel Dorgeroux accused of plotting, this man now knew that Noel Dorgeroux carried on his person, in the lining of his waistcoat, a steel plate bearing an inscription containing the essential formula.

I examined the registered packet and observed that it had not been opened. Nevertheless, at all costs, though I was firmly resolved not to read my uncle's report, I undid the string and discovered a pasteboard tube. Inside this tube was a roll of paper which I eagerly examined. It consisted of blank pages and nothing else. The report had been stolen.

Three hours later, I was seated in a night train which did not reach Paris until the afternoon of the next day, Sunday. It was four o'clock when I walked out of the station at Meudon. The enemy had for at least two days known the contents of my uncle's letter, his report and the dreadful means of procuring the formula.

Chapter VII:

The Fierce-Eyed Man

The staff at the Lodge consisted in its entirety of one old maid-servant, a little deaf and very short-sighted, who combined the functions, as occasion demanded, of parlour-maid, cook and gardener. Notwithstanding these manifold duties, Valentine hardly ever left her kitchen-range, which was situated in an extension built on to the house and opening directly upon the street.

This was where I found her. She did not seem surprised at my return — nothing, for that matter, ever surprised or perturbed her — and I at once saw that she was still living outside the course of events and that she would be unable to tell me anything useful. I gathered, however, that my uncle and Berangere had gone out half an hour earlier.

“Together?” I asked.

“Good gracious, no! The master came through the kitchen and said, 'I'm going to post a letter. Then I shall go to the Yard.' He left a bottle behind him, you know, one of those blue medicine-bottles which he uses for his experiments.”

“Where did he leave it, Valentine?”

“Why, over there, on the dresser. He must have forgotten it when he put on his overcoat, for he never parts with those bottles of his.”

“It's not there, Valentine.”

“Now that's a funny thing! M. Dorgeroux hasn't been back, I know.”

“And has no one else been?”

“No. Yes, there has, though; a gentleman, a gentleman who came for Mile. Berangere a little while after.”

“And did you go to fetch her?”

“Yes.”

“Then it must have been while you were away...”

“You don't mean that! Oh, how M. Dorgeroux will scold me!”

“But who is the gentleman?”

“Upon my word, I couldn't tell you.... My sight is so bad....”

“Do you know him?”

“No, I didn't recognize his voice.”

“And did they both go out, Berangere and he?”

“Yes, they crossed the road... opposite.”

Opposite meant the path in the wood.

I thought for a second or two; and then, tearing a sheet of paper from my note-book, I wrote:

“MY DEAR UNCLE,

“Wait for me, when you come back, and don't leave the Lodge on any account. The danger is imminent.

“VICTORIEN.”

“Give this to M. Dorgeroux as soon as you see him, Valentine. I shall be back in half an hour.”

The path ran in a straight line through dense thickets with tiny leaves burgeoning on the twigs of the bushes. It had rained heavily during the last few days, but a bright spring sun was drying the ground and I could distinguish no trace of footsteps. After walking three hundred yards, however, I met a small boy of the neighbourhood, whom I knew by sight, coming back to the village and pushing his bicycle, which had burst a tyre.

“You don't happen to have seen Mile. Berangere, have you?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “with a gentleman.”

“A gentleman wearing glasses?”

“Yes, a tall chap, with a big beard.”

“Are they far away?”

“When I saw them, they were a mile and a quarter from here. I turned back later... they had taken the old road... the one that goes to the left.”

I quickened my pace, greatly excited, for I was conscious of an increasing dread. I reached the old road. But, a little farther on, it brought me to an open space crossed by a number of paths. Which was I to take?

Feeling more and more anxious, I called out:

“Berangere!... Berangere!”

Presently I heard the hum of an engine and the sound of a motor-car getting under way. It must have been five hundred yards from where I was. I turned down a path in which, almost at once, I saw footsteps very clearly marked in the mud, the footsteps of a man and of a woman. These led me to the entrance of a cemetery which had not been used for over twenty years and which, standing on the boundary of two parishes, had become the subject of claims, counterclaims and litigation generally.

I made my way in. The tall grass had been trampled down along two lines which skirted the wall, passed before the remnants of what had once been the keeper's cottage, joined around the kerb of a cistern fitted up as a well and were next continued to the wall of a half-demolished little mortuary chapel.

Between the cistern and the chapel the soil had been trodden several times over. Beyond the chapel there was only one track of footsteps, those of a man.

I confess that just then my legs gave way beneath me, although there was no trace of a definite idea in my mind. I examined the inside of the chapel and then walked round it.

Something lying on the ground, at the foot of the only wall that was left wholly standing, attracted my attention. It was a number of bits of loose plaster which had fallen there and which were of a dark-grey colour that at once reminded me of the sort of wash with which the screen in the Yard was coated.

I looked up. More pieces of plaster of the same colour, placed flat against the wall and held in position by clamp-headed nails, formed another screen, an incomplete, broken screen, on which I could plainly see that a quite fresh layer of substance had been spread.

By whom? Evidently by one of the two persons whom I was tracking, by the man with the eye-glasses or by Berangere, perhaps even by both. But with what object? Was it to conjure up the miraculous vision? And was I to believe — the supposition really forced itself upon me as a certainty — that the fragments of plaster had first been stolen from the rubbish in the Yard and then pieced together like a mosaic?

In that case, if the conditions were the same, if the necessary substance was spread precisely in accordance with the details of the discovery, if I was standing opposite a screen identical at all points with the other, it was possible... it was possible...

While this question was taking shape, my mind received so plain an answer that I saw the Three Eyes before they emerged from the depths whence I was waiting for them to appear. The image which I was evoking blended gradually with the real image which was forming and which presently opened its threefold gaze upon me, a fixed and gloomy gaze.

Here, then, as yonder, in the abandoned cemetery as in the Yard where Noel Dorgeroux summoned his inexplicable phantoms from the void, the Three Eyes were awakening to life. Chipped in one place, cracked in another, they looked through the fragments of disjointed plaster as they had done through the carefully tended screen. They gazed in this solitude just as though Noel Dorgeroux had been there to kindle and feed their mysterious flame.

The gloomy eyes, however, were changing their expression. They became wicked, cruel, implacable, ferocious even. Then they faded away; and I waited for the spectacle which those three geometrical figures generally heralded. And in fact, after a break, there was a sort of pulsating light, but so confused that it was difficult for me to make out any clearly defined scenes.

I could barely distinguish some trees, a river with an eyot in it, a low-roofed house and some people; but all this was vague, misty, unfinished, broken up by the cracks in the screen, impeded by causes of which I was ignorant. One might have fancied a certain hesitation in the will that evoked the image. Moreover, after a few fruitless attempts and an effort of which I perceived the futility, the image abruptly faded away and everything relapsed into death and emptiness.

“Death and emptiness,” I said aloud.

I repeated the words several times over. They rang within me like a funereal echo with which the memory of Berangere was mingled. The nightmare of the Three Eyes became one with the nightmare that drove me in pursuit of her. And I remained standing in front of the gruesome chapel, uncertain, not knowing what to do.

Berangere's footprints brought me back to the well, near which I found in four places the marks of both her slender soles and both her pointed heels. The well was covered with a small, tiled dome. Formerly a bucket was lowered by means of a pulley to bring up the rainwater that had been gathered from the roof of the house.

There was of course no valid reason to make me believe that a crime had been committed. The footmarks did not constitute a sufficient clue. Nevertheless I felt myself bathed in perspiration; and, leaning over the open mouth, from which floated a damp and mildewed breath I faltered:

“Berangere!”

I heard not a sound.

I lit a piece of paper, which I screwed into a torch, throwing a glimmer of light into the widened reservoir of the cistern. But I saw nothing save a sheet of water, black as ink and motionless.

“No,” I protested, “it's impossible. I have no right to imagine such an atrocity. Why should they have killed her? It was my uncle who was threatened, not she.”

At all events I continued my search and followed the man's single track. This led me to the far side of the cemetery and then to an avenue of fir-trees, where I came upon some cans of petrol. The motor-car had started from here. The tracks of the tyres ran through the wood.

I went no farther. It suddenly occurred to me that I ought before all to think of my uncle, to defend him and to take joint measures with him.

I therefore turned in the direction of the post-office. But, remembering that this was Sunday and that my uncle after dropping his letter in the box, had certainly gone back to the Yard, I ran to the Lodge and called out to Valentine:

“Has my uncle come in? Has he had my note?”

“No, no,” she said. “I told you, the master has gone to the Yard.”

“Exactly: he must have come this way!”

“Not at all. Coming from the post-office, he would go straight through the new entrance to the amphitheatre.”

“In that case,” I said, “all I need do is t# go through the garden.”

I hurried away, but the little door was locked. And from that moment, though there was nothing to prove my uncle's presence in the Yard, I felt certain that he was there and also felt afraid that my assistance had come too late.

I called. No one answered. The door remained shut.

Then, terrified, I went back to the house and out into the street and ran round the premises on the left, in order to go in by the new entrance.

This turned out to be a tall gate, flanked on either side by a ticket-office and giving access to a large courtyard, in which stood the back of the amphitheatre.

This gate also was closed, by means of a strong chain which my uncle had padlocked behind him.

What was I to do?

Remembering how Berangere and then I myself had climbed over the wall one day, I followed the other side of the Yard, in order to reach the old lamp-post. The same deserted path skirted the same stout plank fence, the corner of which ran into the fields.

When I came to this corner, I saw the lamppost. At that moment, a man appeared on the top of the wall, caught hold of the post and let himself down by it. There was no room for doubt; the man leaving the Yard in this way had just been with my uncle. What had passed between them?

The distance that separated us was too great to allow me to distinguish his features. As soon as he saw me, he turned down the brim of his soft hat and drew the two ends of a muffler over his face. A loose-fitting grey rain-coat concealed his figure. I received the impression, however, that he was shorter and thinner than the man with the eye-glasses.

“Stop!” I cried, as he moved away.

My summons only hastened his flight; and it was in vain that I darted forward in his pup-suit, shouting insults at him and threatening him with a revolver which I did not possess. He covered the whole width of the fields, leapt over a hedge and reached the skirt of the woods.

I was certainly younger than he, for I soon perceived that the interval between us was decreasing; and I should have caught him up, if we had been running across open country. But I lost sight of him at the first clump of trees; and I was nearly abandoning the attempt to come up with him, when, suddenly, he retraced his steps and seemed to be looking for something.

I made a rush for him. He did not appear to be perturbed by my approach. He merely drew a revolver and pointed it at me, without saying a word or ceasing his investigations.

I now saw what his object was. Something lay gleaming in the grass. It was a piece of metal which, I soon perceived, was none other than the steel plate on which Noel Dorgeroux had engraved the chemical formula.

We both flung ourselves on the ground at the same time. I was the first to seize the strip of steel. But a hand gripped mine; and on this hand, which was half-covered by the sleeve of the rain-coat, there was blood.

I was startled and suffered from a moment's faintness. The vision of Noel Dorgeroux dying, nay, dead, had flashed upon me so suddenly that the man succeeded in overpowering me and stretching me underneath him.

As we thus lay one against the other, with our faces almost touching, I saw only part of his, the lower half being hidden by the muffler. But his two eyes glared at me, under the shadow of his hat; and we stared at each other in silence, while our hands continued to grapple.

Those eyes of his were cruel and implacable, the eyes of a murderer whose whole being is bent upon the supreme effort of killing. Where had I seen them before? For I certainly knew those fiercely glittering eyes. Their gaze penetrated my brain at a spot into which it had already been deeply impressed. It bore a familiar look, a look which had crossed my own before. But when? In what eyes had I seen that expression? In the eyes looming out of the wall perhaps? The eyes shown on the fabulous screen?

Yes, yes, those were the eyes! I recognized them now! They had shone in the infinite space that lay in the depths of the plaster! They had lived before my sight, a few minutes ago, on the ruined wall of the mortuary chapel. They were the same cruel, pitiless eyes, the eyes which had perturbed me then even as they were perturbing me now, sapping my last remnant of strength.

I released my hold. The man sprang up, caught me a blow on the forehead with the butt of his revolver and ran away, carrying the steel plate with him.

This time I did not think of pursuing him. Without doing me any great hurt, the blow which I received had stunned me. I was still tottering on my feet when I heard, in the woods, the same sound of an engine being started and a car getting under way which I had heard near the cemetery. The motor-car, driven by the man with the eye-glasses, had come to fetch my assailant. The two confederates, after having probably rid themselves of Berangere and certainly rid themselves of Noel Dorgeroux, were making off....

My heart wrung with anguish, I hurried back to the foot of the old lamp-post, hoisted myself to the top of the fence and in this way jumped into the front part of the Yard, contained between the main wall and the new structure of the amphitheatre.

This wall, entirely rebuilt, taller and wider than it used to be, now had the size and the importance of the outer wall of a Greek or Roman amphitheatre. Two square columns and a canopy marked the place of the screen, whose plaster, from the distance at which I stood, did not seem yet to be coated with its layer of a dark-grey composition, which explained why my uncle had left it uncovered. Nor could I at first see the lower part, which was concealed by a heap of materials of all kinds. But how certain I felt of what I should see when I came nearer! How well I knew what was there, behind those planks and building-stones!

My legs were trembling. I had to seek a support. It cost me an untold effort to take a few steps forward.

Bight against the wall, in the very middle of his Yard, Noel Dorgeroux lay prone, his arms twisted beneath him.

A cursory inspection showed me that he had been murdered with a pick-axe.

Chapter VIII:

"Some One Will Emerge from the Darkness"

Notwithstanding Noel Dorgeroux's advanced age, there had been a violent struggle. The murderer, whose footprints I traced along the path which led from the fence to the wall, had flung himself upon his victim and had first tried to strangle him. It was not until later, in the second phase of the contest, that he had seized a pick-axe with which to strike Noel Dorgeroux.

Nothing of intrinsic value had been stolen. I found my uncle's watch and note-case untouched. But the waistcoat had been opened; and the lining, which formed a pocket, was, of course, empty.

For the moment I wasted no time in the Yard. Passing through the garden and the Lodge, where I told old Valentine in a few words what had happened, I called the nearest neighbours, sent a boy running to the mayor's and went on to the disused cemetery, accompanied by some men with ropes, a ladder and a lantern. It was growing dark when we arrived.

I had decided to go down the cistern myself; and I did so without experiencing any great emotion. Notwithstanding the reasons which led me to fear that Berangere might have been thrown into it, the crime appeared to me to be absolutely improbable. And I was right. Nevertheless, at the bottom of the cistern, which was perforated by obvious cracks and held only a few puddles of stagnant water, I picked up in the mud, among the stones, brickbats and potsherds, an empty bottle, the neck of which had been knocked off. I was struck by its blue colour. This was doubtless the bottle which had been taken from the dresser at the Lodge. Besides, when I brought it back to the Lodge that evening, Valentine identified it for certain.

What had happened might therefore be reconstructed as follows: the man with the eye-glasses, having the bottle in his possession, had gone to the cemetery to meet the motor-car which was waiting for him and had stopped in front of the chapel, to which were nailed the fragments from the old wall in the Yard. These fragments he had smeared with the liquid contained in the bottle. Then, when he heard me coming, he threw the bottle down the well and, without having time to see the picture which I myself went off in the car to pick up Noel Dorgeroux's was to see ten minutes later, he ran away and murderer near the Yard.

Things as they turned out confirmed my explanation, or at least confirmed it to a great extent. But what of Berangere? What part had she played in all this? And where was she now?

The enquiry, first instituted in the Yard by the local police, was pursued next day by a magistrate and two detectives, assisted by myself. We learnt that the car containing the two accomplices had come from Paris on the morning of the day before and that it had returned to Paris the same night. Both coming and going it had carried two men whose descriptions tallied exactly with that of the two criminals.

We were favoured by an extraordinary piece of luck. A road-mender working near the ornamental water in the Bois de Boulogne told us, when we asked him about the motor-car, that he recognized it as having been garaged in a coachhouse close by the house in which he lived and that he recognized the man with the eye-glasses as one of the tenants of this same house!

He gave us the address. The house was behind the Jardin des Batignolles. It was an old barrack of a tenement-house swarming with tenants. As soon as we had described to the concierge the person for whom we were searching, she exclaimed:

“You mean M. Velmot, a tall, good-looking man, don't you? He has had a furnished flat here for over six months, but he only sleeps here now and again. He is out of town a great deal.”

“Did he sleep at home last night?”

“Yes. He came back yesterday evening, in his motor, with a gentleman whom I had never seen before; and they did not leave until this morning.”

“In the motor?”

“No. The car is in the garage.”

“Have you the key of the flat?”

“ Of course! I do the housework!”

“Show us over, please.”

The flat consisted of three small rooms; a dining-room and two bedrooms.

It contained no clothes or papers. M. Velmot had taken everything with him in a portmanteau, as he did each time he went away, said the concierge.

But pinned to the wall, amid a number of sketches, was a drawing which represented the Three Eyes so faithfully that it could not have been made except by some one who had seen the miraculous visions.

“Let's go to the garage,” said one of the detectives.

We had to call in a locksmith to gain admittance. In addition to the muffler and a coat stained with blood we found two more mufflers and three silk handkerchiefs, all twisted and spoilt. The identification-plate of the car had been recently unscrewed. The number, newly repainted, must be false. Apart from these details there was nothing specially worth noting.

I am trying to sum up the phases of the preliminary and magisterial enquiries as briefly as possible. This narrative is not a detective-story any more than a love-story. The riddle of the Three Eyes, together with its solution, forms the only object of these pages and the only interest which the reader can hope to find in them. But, at the stage which we have reached, it is easy to understand that all these events were so closely interwoven that it is impossible to separate one from the other. One detail governs the next, which in its turn affects what came before.

So I must repeat my earlier question: what part was Berangere playing in it all? And what had become of her? She had disappeared, suddenly, somewhere near the chapel. Beyond that point there was not a trace of her, not a clue.

And this inexplicable disappearance marked the conclusion of several successive weeks during which, we are bound to admit, the girl's behaviour might easily seem odd to the most indulgent eyes.

I felt this so clearly that I declared, emphatically, in the course of my evidence:

“She was caught in a trap and carried off.”

“Prove it,” they retorted. “Find some justification for the appointments which she made and kept all through the winter with the fellow whom you call the man with the glasses, in other words, with the man Velmot.”

And the police based their suspicions on a really disturbing charge which they had discovered and which had escaped me. During his struggle with his assailant, very likely at the moment when the latter, after reducing him to a state of helplessness, had moved away to fetch the pick-axe, Noel Dorgeroux had managed to scrawl a few words with a broken flint at the foot of the screen.

The writing was very faint and almost illegible, for the flint in places had merely scratched the plaster; nevertheless, it was possible to decipher the following:

“Bray.... Berge...”

The term “B-ray” evidently referred to Noel Dorgeroux's invention. My uncle's first thought, when threatened with death, had been to convey in the briefest (but, unfortunately, also the most unintelligible) form the particulars which would save his marvellous discovery from oblivion. “B-ray” was an expression which he himself understood but which suggested nothing to those who did not know what he meant by it.

The five letters “B.E.R.G.E.,” on the other hand, allowed of only one interpretation. “Berge” stood for Bergeronnette, the pet name by which Noel Dorgeroux called his god-daughter.

“Very well,” I exclaimed before the magistrate, who had taken me to the screen. “Very well, I agree with your interpretation. It relates to Berangere. But my uncle was simply wishing to express his love for her and his extreme anxiety on her behalf. In writing his god-daughter's name at the very moment when he is in mortal danger, he shows that he is uneasy about her, that he is recommending her to our care.”

“Or that he is accusing her,” retorted the magistrate.

Berangere accused by my uncle! Berangere capable of sharing in the murder of her godfather! I remember shrugging my shoulders.

But there was no reply that I could make beyond protests based upon no actual fact and contradicted by appearances.

All that I said was:

“I fail to see what interest she could have had!...”

“A very considerable interest: the exploitation of the wonderful secret which you have mentioned.”

“But she is ignorant of the secret!”

“How do you know? She's not ignorant of it, if she is in league with the two accomplices. The manuscript which M. Dorgeroux sent you has disappeared: who was in a better position than she to steal it? However, mark me, I make no assertions. I have my suspicions, that's all; and I'm trying to discover what I can.”

But the most minute investigations led to no result. Was Berangere also a victim of the two criminals?

Her father was written to, at Toulouse. The man Massignac replied that he had been in bed for a fortnight with a sharp attack of influenza, that he would come to Paris as soon as he was well, but that, having had no news of his daughter for years, he was unable to furnish any particulars about her.

So, when all was said and done, whether kidnapped, as I preferred to believe, or in hiding, as the police suspected, Berangere was nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, the public was beginning to grow excited about a case which, before long, was to rouse it to a pitch of delirium. No doubt at first there was merely a question of the crime itself. The murder of Noel Dorgeroux, the abduction of his god-daughter — the police consented, at my earnest entreaties, to accept this as the official version — the theft of my uncle's manuscript, the theft of the formula: all this, at the outset, only puzzled men's minds as a cunningly-devised conspiracy and a cleverly-executed crime. But not many days elapsed before the revelations which I was constrained to make diverted all the attention of the newspapers and all the curiosity of the public to Noel Dorgeroux's discovery.

For I had to speak, notwithstanding the promise of silence which I had given my uncle. I had to answer the magistrate's questions, to tell all I knew, to explain matters, to enter into details, to write a report, to protest against ill-formed judgments, to rectify mistakes, to specify, enumerate, classify, in short, to confide to the authorities and incidentally to the eager reporters all that my uncle had said to me, all his dreams, all the wonders of the Yard, all the phantasmal visions which I had beheld upon the screen.

Before a week was over, Paris, France, the whole world knew in every detail, save for the points which concerned Berangere and myself alone, what was at once and spontaneously described as the mystery of the Three Eyes.

Of course I was met with irony, sarcasm and uproarious laughter. A miracle finds no believers except among its astounded witnesses. And what but a miracle could be put forward as the cause of a phenomenon which, I maintained, had no credible cause? The execution of Edith Cavell was a miracle.- So was the representation of the fight between two airmen. So was the scene in which Noel Dorgeroux's son was hit by a bullet. So, above all, was the looming of those Three Eyes, which throbbed with life, which gazed at the spectator and which were the eyes of the very people about to figure in the spectacle as the actors thus miraculously announced!

Nevertheless, one by one, voices were raised in my defence. My past was gone into, the value of my evidence was weighed; and, though people were still inclined to accuse me of being a visionary or a sick man, subject to hallucinations, at least they had to admit my absolute bona fides.

A party of adherents took up the cudgels for me. There was a noisy battle of opinions. Ah, my poor uncle Dorgeroux had asked for wide publicity for his amphitheatre! His fondest wishes were far exceeded by the strident and tremendous Clamour which continued like an unbroken peal of thunder.

For the rest, all this uproar was dominated by one idea, which took shape gradually and summed up the thousand theories which every one was indulging. I am copying it from a newspaper-article which I carefully preserved:

“In any case, whatever opinion we may hold of Noel Dorgeroux's alleged discovery, whatever view we may take of M. Victorien Beaugrand's common sense and mental equilibrium, one thing is certain, which is that we shall sooner or later know the truth. When two such competent people as Velmot and his accomplice join forces to accomplish a definite task, namely, the theft of a scientific secret, when they carry out their plot so skilfully, when they succeed beyond all hopes, their object, it will be agreed, is certainly not that they may enjoy the results of their enterprise by stealth.

“If they have Noel Dorgeroux's manuscript in their hands, together with the chemical formula that completes it, their intention beyond a doubt is to make all the profits on which Noel Dorgeroux himself was counting. To make these profits the secret must first be exploited. And, to exploit a secret of this kind, its possessors must act openly, publicly, in the face of the world. And, to do this, it will not pay them to settle down in a remote corner in France or elsewhere and to set up another enterprise. It will not pay,' because, in any case, there would be the same confession of guilt. No, it will pay them better and do them no more harm to take up their quarters frankly and cynically in the amphitheatre of the Yard and to make use of what has there been accomplished, under the most promising conditions, by Noel Dorgeroux.

“To sum up, therefore. Before long, some one will emerge from the darkness. Some one will remove the mask from his face. The sequel and the conclusion of the unfinished plot will be enacted in their fullness. And, three weeks hence, on the date fixed, the 14th of May, we shall witness the inauguration of the amphitheatre erected by Noel Dorgeroux. And this inauguration will take place under the vigorous management of the man who will be, who already is, the owner of the secret: a formidable person, we must admit.”

The argument was strictly logical. Stolen jewels are sold in secret. Money changes hands anonymously. But an invention yields no profit unless it is exploited.

Meanwhile the days passed and no one emerged from the darkness. The two accomplices betrayed not a sign of life. It was now known that Velmot, the man with the glasses, had practised all sorts of callings. Some Paris manufacturers, for whom he had travelled in the provinces, furnished an exact description of his person. The police learnt a number of things about him, but not enough to enable them to lay hands upon him.

Nor did a careful scrutiny of Noel Dorgeroux's papers supply the least information. All that the authorities found was a sealed, un-addressed envelope, which they opened. The contents surprised me greatly. They consisted of a will, dated five years back, in which Noel Dorgeroux, while naming me as his residuary legatee, gave and bequeathed to his god-daughter, Berangere Massignac the piece of ground known as the Yard and everything that the Yard might contain on the day of his death. With the exception of this document, which was of no importance, since my uncle, in one of his last letters to me, had expressed different intentions, they found nothing but immaterial notes which had no bearing upon the great secret. Thereupon they indulged in the wildest conjectures and wandered about in a darkness which not even the sworn chemists called in to examine the screen were able to dispel. The wall revealed nothing in particular, for the layer of plaster with which it was covered had not received the special glaze; and it was precisely the formula of this glaze that constituted Noel Dorgeroux's secret.

But the glaze existed on the old chapel in the cemetery, where I had seen the geometrical figure of the Three Eyes appear. Yes, they certainly found something clinging to the surface of the fragments of plaster taken from that spot. But they were not able with this something to produce a compound capable of yielding any sort of vision. The right formula was obviously lacking; and so, no doubt, was some essential ingredient which had already been eliminated by the sun or the rain.

At the end of April there was no reason to believe in the prophecies which announced a theatrical culmination as inevitable. And the curiosity of the public increased at each fresh disappointment and on each new day spent in waiting. Noel Dorgeroux's yard had become a place of pilgrimage. Motor-cars and carriages arrived in swarms. The people crowded outside the locked gates and the fence, trying to catch a glimpse of the wall. I even received letters containing offers to buy the Yard at any price that I chose to name.

One day, old Valentine showed into the drawing-room a gentleman who said that he had come on important business. I saw a man of medium height with hair which was turning grey and with a face which was wider than it was long and which was made still wider by a pair of bushy whiskers and a perpetual smile. His threadbare dress and down-at-heel shoes denoted anything but a brilliant financial position. He expressed himself at once, however, in the language of a person to whom money is no object:

“I have any amount of capital behind me,” he declared, cheerfully and before he had even told me his name. “My plans are made. All that remains is for you and me to come to terms.”

“What on?” I asked.

“Why, on the business that I have come to propose to you!”

“I am sorry, sir,” I replied, “but I am doing no business.”

“That's a pity!” he cried, still more cheerfully and with his mouth spreading still farther across his face. “That's a pity! I should have been glad to take you into partnership. However, since you're not willing, I shall act alone, without of course exceeding the rights which I have in the Yard.”

“Your rights in the Yard?” I echoed, astounded at his assurance.

“Why, rather!” he answered, with a loud laugh. “My rights: that's the only word.”

“I don't follow you.”

“I admit that it's not very clear. Well, suppose — you'll soon understand — suppose that I have come into Noel Dorgeroux's property.”

I was beginning to lose patience and I took the fellow up sharply:

“I have no time to spare for jesting, sir. Noel Dorgeroux left no relatives except myself.”

“I didn't say that I had come into his property as a relative.”

“As what, then?”

“As an heir, simply... as the lawful heir, specifically named as such by Noel Dorgeroux.”

I was a little taken aback and, after a moment's thought, rejoined:

“Do you mean to say that Noel Dorgeroux made a will in your favour?”

“I do.”

“Show it to me.”

“There's no need to show it to you: you've seen it.”

“I've seen it?”

“You saw it the other day. It must be in the hands of the examining-magistrate or the solicitor.”

I lost my temper:

“Oh, it's that you're speaking of! Well, to begin with, the will isn't valid. I have a letter from my uncle...”

He interrupted me:

“That letter doesn't affect the validity of the will. Any one will tell you that.”

“And then?” I exclaimed. “Granting that it is valid, Noel Dorgeroux mentions nobody in it except myself for the Lodge and his god-daughter for the Yard. The only one who benefits, except myself, is Berangere.”

“Quite so, quite so,” replied the man, without changing countenance. “But nobody knows what has become of Berangere Massignac. Suppose that she were dead...”

I grew indignant:

“She's not dead! It's quite impossible that she should be dead!”

“Very well,” he said, calmly. “Then suppose that she's alive, that she's been kidnapped or that she's in hiding. In any event, one fact is certain, which is that she is under twenty, consequently she's a minor and consequently she cannot administer her own property. From the legal point of view she exists only in the person of her natural representative, her guardian, who in this case happens to be her father.”

“And her father?” I asked, anxiously.

“Is myself.”

He put on his hat, took it off again with a bow and said:

“Theodore Massignac, forty-two years of age, a native of Toulouse, a commercial traveller in wines.”

It was a violent blow. The truth suddenly appeared to me in all its brutal nakedness. This man, this shady and wily individual, was Berangere's father; and he had come in the name of the two accomplices, working in their interest and placing at their service the powers with which circumstances had favoured him.

“Her father?” I murmured. “Can it be possible? Are you her father?”

“Why, yes,” he replied, with a fresh outburst of hilarity, “I'm the girl's daddy and, as such, the beneficiary, with the right to draw the profits for the next eighteen months, of Noel Dorgeroux's bequest. For eighteen months only! You can imagine that I'm itching to take possession of the estate, to complete the works and to prepare for the fourteenth of May an inauguration worthy in every respect of my old friend Dorgeroux.”

I felt the beads of perspiration trickling down my forehead. He had spoken the words which were expected and foretold. He was the man of whom public opinion had said:

“When the time comes, some one will emerge from the darkness.”

Chapter IX:

The Man Who Emerged from the Darkness

“When the time comes,” they had said, “some one will emerge from the darkness. When the time comes, some one will remove the mask from his face.”

That face now beamed expansively before me. That some one, who was about to play the game of the two accomplices, was Berangere's father. And the same question continued to suggest itself, each time more painfully than the last:

“What had been Berangere's part in the horrible tragedy?”

There was a long, heavy silence between us. I began to stride across the room and stopped near the chimney, where a dying fire was smouldering. Thence I could see Massignac in a mirror, without his perceiving it; and his face, in repose, surprised me by a gloomy expression which was not unknown to me. I had probably seen some photograph of him in Berangere's possession.

“It's curious,” I said, “that your daughter should not have written to you.”

I had turned round very briskly; nevertheless he had had time to expand his mouth and to resume his smile:

“Alas,” he said, “the dear child hardly ever wrote to me and cared little about her poor daddy. I, on the other hand, am very fond of her. A daughter's always a daughter, you know. So you can imagine how I jumped for joy when I read in the papers that she had come into money. I should at last be able to devote myself to her and to devote all my strength and all my energy to the great and wonderful task of defending her interests and her fortune.”

He spoke in a honeyed voice and assumed a false and unctuous air which exasperated me. I questioned him:

“How do you propose to fulfill that task?”

“Why, quite simply,” he replied, “by continuing Noel Dorgeroux's work.”

“In other words?”

“By throwing open the doors of the amphitheatre.”

“Which means?”

“Which means that I shall show to the public the pictures which your uncle used to produce.”

“Have you ever seen them?”

“No. I speak from your evidence and your interviews.”

“Do you know how my uncle used to produce them?”

“I do, since yesterday evening.”

“Then you have seen the manuscript of which I was robbed and the formula stolen by the murderer?”

“Since yesterday evening, I say.”

“But how?” I exclaimed, excitedly.

“How? By a simple trick.”

“What do you mean?”

He showed me a bundle of newspapers of the day before and continued, with a smirking air:

“If you had read yesterday's newspapers, or at least the more important of them, carefully, you would have noticed a discreet advertisement in the special column. It read, 'Proprietor of the Yard wishes to purchase the two documents necessary for working. He can be seen this evening in the Place Vendome.' Nothing much in the advertisement, was there? But, to the possessors of the two documents, how clear in its meaning... and what a bait! To them it was the one opportunity of making a profit, for, with all the publicity attaching to the affair, they were unable to benefit by the result of their robberies without revealing their identity to the public. My calculation was correct. After I had waited an hour by the Vendome Column, a very luxurious motor-car picked me up, you might almost say without stopping, and, ten minutes afterwards, dropped me at the Etoile, with the documents in my possession. I spent the night in reading the manuscript. Oh, my dear sir, what a genius your uncle was! What a revolution his discovery! And in what a masterly way he expounded it! I never read anything so methodical and so lucid! All that remains for me to do is mere child's-play.”

I had listened to the man Massignac with ever-increasing amazement. Was he assuming that anybody would for a moment credit so ridiculous a tale?

He was laughing, however, with a look of a man who congratulates himself on the events with which he is mixed up, or rather, perhaps, on the very skilful fashion in which he believes himself to have manipulated them.

With one hand, I pushed in his direction the hat which he had laid on the table. Then I opened the door leading into the hall.

He rose and said:

“I am staying close by, at the Station Hotel. Would you mind having any letters sent there which may come for me here? For I suppose you have no room for me at the Lodge?”

I abruptly gripped him by the arm and cried:

“You know what you're risking, don't you?”

“In doing what?”

“In pursuing your enterprise.”

“Upon my word, I don't quite see...

“Prison, sir, prison.”

“Oh, come! Prison!”

“Prison, sir. The police will never accept all your stories and all your lies!”

His mouth widened into a new laugh:

“What big words! And how unjust, when addressed to a respectable father who seeks nothing but his daughter's happiness! No, no, sir, believe me, the inauguration will take place on the fourteenth of May... unless, indeed, you oppose the wishes which your uncle expresses in his will....”

He gave me a questioning look, which betrayed a certain uneasiness; and I myself wavered as to the answer which I ought to give him. My hesitation yielded to a motive of which I did not weigh the value clearly but which seemed to me so imperious that I declared:

“I shall raise no opposition: not that I respect a will which does not represent my uncle's real intentions, but because I am bound to sacrifice everything to his fame. If Noel Dorgeroux's discovery depends on you, go ahead: the means which you have employed to get hold of it do not concern me.”

With a fresh burst of merry laughter and a low bow, the fellow left the room. That evening, in the course of a visit to the solicitor, and next day, through the newspapers, he boldly set forth his claims, which, I may say, from the legal point of view, were recognized as absolutely legitimate. But, two days later, he was summoned to appear before the examining-magistrate and an enquiry was opened against him.

Against him is the right term. Certainly, there was no fact to be laid to his charge. Certainly, he was able to prove that he had been ill in bed, nursed by a woman-of-all-work who had been looking after him for a month, and that he had left his place in Toulouse only to come straight to Paris. But what had he done in Paris? Whom had he seen? From whom had he obtained the manuscript and the formula? He was unable to furnish explanations in reply to any of these questions.

He did not even try:

“I am pledged to secrecy,” he said. “I gave my word of honour not to say anything about those who handed me the documents I needed.”

The man Massignac's word of Honour! The man Massignac's scruples! Lies, of course! Hypocrisy! Subterfuge! But, all the same, however suspect the fellow might be, it was difficult to know of what to accuse him or how to sustain the accusation when made.

And then there was this element of strangeness, that the suspicion, the presumption, the certainty that the man Massignac was the willing tool of the two criminals, all this was swept away by the great movement of curiosity that carried people off their feet. Judicial procedure, ordinary precautions, regular adjournments, legal procrastinations which delay the entry into possession of the legatees were one and all neglected. The public wanted to see and know; and Theodore Massignac was the man who held the prodigious secret.

He was therefore allowed to have the keys of the amphitheatre and went in alone, or with labourers upon whom he kept an eye, replacing them by fresh gangs so as to avoid plots and machinations. He often went to Paris, throwing off the scent of the detectives who dogged his movements, and returned with bottles and cans carefully wrapped up.

On the day before that fixed for the inauguration, the police were no wiser than on the first day in matters concerning the man Massignac, or Velmot's hiding-place, or the murderer's, or Berangere's. The same ignorance prevailed regarding Noel Dorgeroux's secret, the circumstances of his death and the ambiguous words which he had scribbled on the plaster of the wall. As for the miraculous visions which I have described, they were denied or accepted as vigorously and as unreasonably by both the disputing parties. In short, nobody knew anything.

And this perhaps was the reason why the thousand seats in the amphitheatre were sold out within a few hours. Priced at a hundred francs apiece, they were bought up by half-a-dozen speculators who got rid of them at two or three times their original cost. How delighted my poor uncle would have been had he lived to see it!

The night before the fourteenth of May, I slept very badly, haunted by nightmares that kept on waking me with a start. At the first glimmer of dawn, I was sitting on the side of my bed when, in the deep silence, which was barely broken by the twittering of a few birds, I seemed to hear the sound of a key in a lock and a door creaking on its hinges.

I must explain that, since my uncle's death, I had been sleeping next to the room that used to be his. Now the noise came from that room, from which I was separated only by a glazed door covered with a chintz curtain. I listened and heard the sound of a chair moved from its place. There was certainly some one in the next room; and this some one, obviously unaware that I occupied the adjoining chamber, was taking scarcely any precautions. But how had he got in?

I sprang from the bed, slipped on my trousers, took up a revolver and drew aside a corner of the curtain. At first, the shutters were closed and the room in darkness and I saw only an indistinct shadow. Then the window was opened softly. Somebody lifted the iron bar and pushed back the shutters, thus admitting the light.

I now saw a woman return to the middle of the room. She was draped from head to foot in a brown stuff cloak. Nevertheless I knew her at once. It was Berangere.

I had a feeling not so much of amazement as of sudden and profound pity at the sight of her emaciated face, her poor face, once so bright and eager, now so sad and wan. I did not even think of rejoicing at the fact of her being alive, nor did I ask myself what clandestine business had brought her back to the Lodge. The one thing that held me captive was the painful spectacle of her pallid face, with its feverish, burning eyes and blue eyelids. Her cloak betrayed the shrunken figure beneath it.

Her heart must have been beating terribly, for he held her two hands to her breast to suppress its throbbing. She even had to lean on the edge of the table. She staggered and nearly fell. Poor Berangere. I felt anguish-stricken as I watched her.

She pulled herself together, however, and looked around her. Then, with a tottering gait, she went to the mantelpiece, where two old engravings, framed in black with a gold beading, hung one on either side of the looking-glass. She climbed on a chair and took down the one on the right, a portrait of D'Alembert.

Stepping down from the chair, she examined the back of the frame, which was closed by a piece of old card-board the edges of which were fastened to the sides of the frame by strips of gummed cloth. Berangere cut these strips with a pen-knife, bending back the tacks which held the cardboard in position. It came out of the frame; and I then saw — Berangere had her back turned in my direction, so that not a detail escaped me — I then saw that there was inserted between the cardboard and the engraving a large sheet of paper covered with my uncle's writing.

At the top, in red ink, was a drawing of the three geometrical eyes.

Next came the following words, in bold black capitals:

“Instructions for working my discovery, abridged from the manuscript sent to my nephew.”

And next forty or fifty very closely-written lines, in a hand too small to allow me to decipher them.

Besides, I had not the time. Berangere merely glanced at the paper. Having found the object of her search and obtained possession of an additional document which my uncle had provided in case the manuscript should be lost, she folded it up, slipped it into her bodice, replaced the cardboard and hung the engraving where she had found it.

Was she going away? If so, she was bound to return as she had come, that is to say, evidently, through Noel Dorgeroux's dressing-room, on the other side of the bedroom, of which she had left the communicating-door ajar. I was about to prevent her and had already taken hold of the door-handle, when suddenly she moved a few steps towards my uncle's bed and fell on her knees, stretching out her hands in despair.

Her sobs rose in the silence. She stammered words which I was able to catch:

“God-father!... My poor god-father!”

And she passionately kissed the coverlet of the bed beside which she must often have sat up watching my uncle when he was ill.

Her fit of crying lasted a long time and did not cease until just as I entered. Then she turned her head, saw me and stood up slowly, without taking her eyes from my face:

“You!” she murmured. “It's you!”

Seeing her make for the door, I said:

“Don't go, Berangere.”

She stopped, looking paler than ever, with drawn features.

“Give me that sheet of paper,” I said, in a voice of command.

She handed it to me, with a quick movement. After a brief pause, I continued:

“Why did you come to fetch it? My uncle told you of its existence, didn't he? And you... you were taking it to my uncle's murderers, so that they might have nothing more to fear and be the only persons to know the secret?... Speak, Berangere, will you?”

I had raised my voice and was advancing towards her. She took another step back.

“You shan't move, do you hear, Stay where you are. Listen to me and answer me!”

She made no further attempt to move. Her eyes were filled with such distress that I adopted a calmer demeanour:

“Answer me,” I said, very gently. “You know that, whatever you may have done, I am your friend, your indulgent friend, and that I mean to help you... and advise you. There are feelings which are proof against everything. Mine for you is of that sort. It is more than affection: you know it is, don't you, Berangere? You know that I love you?”

Her lips quivered, she tried to speak, but could not. I repeated again and again:

“I love you!... I love you!”

And, each time, she shuddered, as though these words, which I spoke with infinite emotion, which I had never spoken so seriously or so sincerely, as if these words wounded her in the very depths of her soul. What a strange creature she was!

I tried to put my hand on her shoulder. She avoided my friendly touch.

“What can you see to fear in me,” I asked, “when I love you? Why not confess everything? You are not a free agent, are you? You are being forced to act as you do and you hate it all?”

Once more, anger was overmastering me. I was exasperated by her silence. I saw no way of compelling her to reply, of overcoming that incomprehensible obstinacy except by clasping her in my arms and yielding to the instinct of violence which urged me towards some brutal action.

I went boldly forward. But I had not taken a step before she spun round on her heel, so swiftly that I thought that she would drop to the floor in the doorway. I followed her into the other room. She uttered a terrible scream. At the same moment I was knocked down by a sudden blow. The man Massignac, who had been hiding in the dressing-room and watching us, had leapt at me and was attacking me furiously, while Berangere fled to the staircase.

“Your daughter,” I spluttered, defending myself, “your daughter!... Stop her!...”

The words were senseless, seeing that Massignac, beyond a doubt, was Berangere's accomplice, or rather an inspiring force behind her, as indeed he proved by his determination to put me out of action, in order to protect his daughter against my pursuit.

We had rolled over the carpet and each of us was trying to master his adversary. The man Massignac was no longer laughing. He was striking harder blows than ever, but without using any weapon and without any murderous intent. I hit back as lustily and soon discovered that I was getting the better of him.

This gave me additional strength. I succeeded in flattening him beneath me. He stiffened every muscle to no purpose. We lay clutching each other, face to face, eye to eye. I took him by the throat and snarled:

“Ah, I shall get it out of you now, you wretch, and learn at last...”

And suddenly I ceased. My words broke off in a cry of horror and I clapped my hand to his face in such a way as to hide the lower part of it, leaving only the eyes visible. Oh, those eyes riveted on mine! Why, I knew them! Not with their customary expression of smug and hypocritical cheerfulness, but with the other expression which I was slowly beginning to remember. Yes, I remember them now, those two fierce, implacable eyes, filled with hatred and cruelty, those eyes which I had seen on the wall of the chapel, those eyes which had looked at me on that same day, when I lay gasping in the murderer's grip in the woods near the Yard.

And again, as on that occasion, suddenly my strength forsook me. Those savage eyes, those atrocious eyes, the man Massignac's real eyes, alarmed me.

He released himself with a laugh of triumph and, speaking in calm and deliberate accents, said:

“You're no match for me, young fellow! Don't you come meddling in my affairs again!”

Then, pushing me away, he ran off in the same direction as Berangere.

A few minutes later, I perceived that the sheet of paper which the daughter had found behind the old engraving had been taken from me by the father; and then, but not till then, I understood the exact meaning of the attack.

The amphitheatre was duly inaugurated on the afternoon of that same day. Seated in the box-office was the manager of the establishment, the possessor of the great secret, Theodore Massignac, Noel Dorgeroux's murderer.

Chapter X:

The Crowd Sees

Theodore Massignac was installed at the box-office! Theodore Massignac, when a dispute of any kind occurred, left his desk and hastened to settle it! Theodore Massignac walked up and down, examining the tickets, showing people to their places, speaking a pleasant word here, giving a masterful order there and doing all these things with his everlasting smile and his obsequious graciousness.

Of embarrassment not the slightest sign, Everybody knew that Theodore Massignac was the fellow with the broad face and the wide-cleft mouth who was attracting the general attention. And everybody was fully aware that Theodore Massignac was the man of straw who had carried out the whole business and made away with Noel Dorgeroux. But nothing interfered with Theodore Massignac's jovial mood: not the sneers, nor the apparent hostility of the public, nor the more or less discreet supervision of the detectives attached to his person.

He had even had the effrontery to paste on boardings, to the right and left of the entrance, a pair of great posters representing Noel Dorgeroux's handsome face, with its grave and candid features!

These posters gave rise to a brief altercation between us. It was pretty lively, though it passed unnoticed by others. Scandalized by the sight of them, I went up to him, a little while before the time fixed for the opening; and, in a voice trembling with anger, said:

“Remove those at once. I will not have them displayed. The rest I don't care about. But this is too much of a good thing: it's a disgrace and an outrage.”

He feigned an air of amazement:

“An outrage? You call it an outrage to honour your uncle's memory and to display the portrait of the talented inventor whose discovery is on the point of revolutionizing the world? I thought I was doing homage to him.”

I was beside myself with rage:

“You shan't do it,” I spluttered. “I will not consent, I will not consent to be an accomplice in your infamy.”

“Oh, yes, you will!” he said, with a laugh. “You'll consent to this as you do to all the rest. It's all part of the game, young fellow. You've got to swallow it. You've got to swallow it because Uncle Dorgeroux's fame must be made to soar above all these paltry trifles. Of course, I know, a word from you and I'm jugged. And then? What will become of the great invention? In the soup, that's where it'll be, my lad, because I am the sole possessor of all the secrets and all the formulae. The sole possessor, do you understand? Friend Velmot, the man with the glasses, is only a super, a tool. So is Berangere, Therefore, with Theodore Massignac put away, there's an end of the astounding pictures signed 'Dorgeroux.' No more glory, no more immortality. Is that what you want, young man?”

Without waiting for any reply, he added:

“And then there's something else; a word or two which I overheard last night. Ha, ha, my dear sir, so we're in love with Berangere! We're prepared to defend her against all dangers! Well, in that case — do be logical — what have I to fear? If you betray me, you betray your sweetheart. Come, am I right or wrong? Daddy and his little girl... hand and glove, you might say. If you cut off one, what becomes of the other?... Ah, you're beginning to understand! You'll be good now, won't you? There, that's much better! We shall see a happy ending yet, you'll have heaps of children crowding round your knee and who will thank me then for getting him a nice little settlement? Why, Victorien!

He stopped and watched me, with a jeering air. Clenching my fists, I shouted, furiously:

“You villain!... Oh, what a villain you make yourself appear!”

But some people were coming up and he turned his back on me, after whispering:

“Hush, Victorien! Don't insult your father-in-law elect.”

I restrained myself. The horrible brute was right. I was condemned to silence by motives so powerful that Theodore Massignac would soon be able to fulfil his task without having to fear the least revolt of conscience on my part. Noel Dorgeroux and Berangere were watching over him.

Meanwhile, the amphitheatre was filling; and the motorcars continued to arrive in swift succession, pouring forth the torrent of privileged people who, because of their wealth or their position, had paid from ten to twenty louis for a seat. Financiers, millionaires, famous actresses, newspaper-proprietors, artistic and literary celebrities, Anglo-Saxon commercial magnates, secretaries of great labour unions, all flocked with a sort of fever towards that unknown spectacle, of which no detailed programme was obtainable and which they were not even certain of beholding, since it was impossible to say whether Noel Dorgeroux's processes had really been recovered and employed in the right way. Indeed, no one, among those who believed the story, was in a position to declare that Theodore Massignac had not taken advantage of the whole business in order to arrange the most elaborate hoax. The very tickets and posters contained the anything but reassuring words:

“In the event of unfavourable weather, the tickets will be available for the following day. Should the exhibition be prevented by any other cause, the money paid for the seats will not be refunded; and no claims to that effect can be entertained.”

Yet nothing had restrained the tremendous outburst of curiosity. Whether confident or suspicious, people insisted on being there. Besides, the weather was fine. The sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Why not indulge in the somewhat anxious gaiety that filled the hearts of the crowd?

Everything was ready. Thanks to his wonderful activity and his remarkable powers of organization, Theodore Massignac, assisted by architects and contractors and acting on the plans worked out, had completed and revised Noel Dorgeroux's work. He had recruited a numerous staff, especially a large and stalwart body of men, who, as I heard, were lavishly paid and who were charged with the duty of keeping order.

As for the amphitheatre, built of reinforced concrete, it was completely filled up, well laid out and very comfortable. Twelve rows of elbowed seats, supplied with movable cushions, surrounded a floor which rose in a gentle slope, divided into twelve tiers arranged in a wide semicircle. Behind these was a series of spacious private boxes, and, at the back of all, a lounge, the floor of which, nevertheless, was not more than ten or twelve feet above the level of the ground.

Opposite was the wall.

It stood well away from the seats, being built on a foundation of masonry and separated from the spectators by an empty orchestra. Furthermore, a grating, six feet high, prevented access to the wall, at least as regards its central portion; and, when I say a grating, I mean a businesslike grating, with spiked rails and crossbars forming too close a mesh to allow of the passage of a man's arm.

The central part was the screen, which was raised to about the level of the fourth or fifth tier of seats. Two pilasters, standing at eight or ten yards' distance from each other, marked its boundaries and supported an overhanging canopy. For the moment, all this space was masked by an iron curtain, roughly daubed with gaudy landscapes and ill-drawn views.

At half-past three there was not a vacant seat nor an unoccupied corner. The police had ordered the doors to be closed. The crowd was beginning to grow impatient and to give signs of a certain irritability, which betrayed itself in the hum of a thousand voices, in nervous laughter and in jests which were becoming more and more caustic.

“If the thing goes wrong,” said a man by my side, “we shall see a shindy.”

I had taken up my stand, with some journalists of my acquaintance, in the lounge, amid a noisy multitude which was all the more peevish inasmuch as it was not comfortably seated like the audience in the stalls.

Another journalist, who was invariably well-informed and of whom I had seen a good deal lately, replied:

“Yes, there will be a shindy; but that is not the worthy Massignac's principal danger. He is risking something besides.”

“What?” I asked.

“Arrest.”

“Do you mean that?”

“I do. If the universal curiosity, which has helped him to preserve his liberty so far, is satisfied, he's all right. If not, if he fails, hell be locked up. The warrant is out.”

I shuddered. Massignac's arrest implied the gravest possible peril to Berangere.

“And you may be sure,” my acquaintance continued, “that he is fully alive to what is hanging over his head and that he is feeling anything but chirpy at heart.”

“At heart, perhaps,” replied one of the others. “But he doesn't allow it to appear on the surface. There, look at him: did you ever See such swank?”

A louder din had come from the crowd. Below us, Theodore Massignac was walking along the pit and crossing the empty space of the orchestra. He was accompanied by a dozen of those sturdy fellows who composed the male staff of the amphitheatre. He made them sit down on two benches which were evidently reserved for them and, with the most natural air, gave them his instructions. And his gestures so clearly denoted the sense of the orders imparted and expressed so clearly what they would have to do if any one attempted to approach the wall that a loud clamour of protest arose.

Massignac turned towards the audience, without appearing in the least put out, and, with a smiling face, gave a careless shrug of the shoulders, as though to say:

“What's the trouble? I'm taking precautions. Surely I'm entitled to do that!”

And, retaining his bantering geniality, he took a key from his waist-coat pocket, opened a little gate in the railing and entered the last enclosure before the wall.

This manner of playing the lion-tamer who takes refuge behind the bars of his cage made so comic an impression that the hisses became mingled with bursts of laughter.

“The worthy Massignac is right,” said my friend the journalist, in a tone of approval. “In this way he avoids either of two things: if he fails, the malcontents won't be able to break his head; and, if he succeeds, the enthusiasts can't make a rush for the wall and learn the secret of the hoax. He's a knowing one. He has prepared for everything.”

There was a stool in the fortified enclosure.

Theodore Massignac sat down on it half facing the spectators, some four paces in front of the wall, and, holding his watch towards us, tapped it with his other hand to explain that the decisive hour was about to strike.

The extension of time which he thus obtained lasted for some minutes. But then the uproar began anew and became deafening. People suddenly lost all confidence. The idea of a hoax took possession of every mind, all the more as people were unable to grasp why the spectacle should begin at any particular time rather than another, since it all depended solely on Theodore Massignac.

“Curtain! Curtain!” they cried.

After a moment, not so much in obedience to this order as because the hands of his watch seemed to command it, he rose, went to the wall, slipped back a wooden slab which covered two electric pushes and pressed one of them with his finger.

The iron curtain descended slowly and sank into the ground.

The screen appeared in its entirety, in broad daylight and of larger proportions than the ordinary.

I shuddered before this flat surface, over which the mysterious coating was spread in a dark-grey layer. And the same tremor ran through the crowd, which was also seized with the recollection of my depositions. Was it possible that we were about to behold one of those extraordinary spectacles the story of which had given rise to so much controversial discussion? How ardently I longed for it! At this solemn minute, I forget all the phases of the drama, all the loathing that I felt for Massignac, all that had to do with Berangere, the madness of her actions, the anguish of my love, and thought only of the great game that was being played around my uncle's discovery. Would what I had seen vanish in the darkness of the past which I myself, the sole witness of the miracles, was beginning to doubt? Or would the incredible vision arise once again and yet again, to teach the future the name of Noel Dorgeroux? Had I been right in sacrificing to the victim's glory the vengeance called for by his death? Or had I made myself the accomplice of the murderer in not denouncing his abominable crime?

Yes, I was becoming his accomplice and even, deep down in my consciousness, his collaborator and his ally. Had I imagined that Massignac had need of me, I would have hastened to his aide. I would have encouraged him with all my confidence and assisted him to the full extent of my ability. First and foremost I wished him to emerge victoriously from the struggle which he had undertaken. I wanted my uncle's secret to come to life again. I wanted light to spring from the shadow. I did not wish twenty years of study and the supreme idea of that most noble genius to be flung back into the abyss.

Now not a sound broke the profound silence. The people's faces were set. Their eyes pierced the wall like so many gimlets. They experienced in their turn the anxiety of my own waiting for that which was yet invisible and which was preparing in the depths of the mysterious substance. And the implacable will of a thousand spectators united with that of Massignac, who stood there below, with his back bent and his head thrust forward; wildly questioning the impassive horizon of the wall.

He was the first to see the first premonitory gleam. A cry escaped his lips, while his two hands frantically beat the air. And, almost at the same second, like sparks crackling on every side, other cries were scattered in the silence, which was instantly restored, heavier and denser than before.

The Three Eyes were there.

The Three Eyes marked their three curved triangles on the wall.

The onlookers had not, in the presence of this inconceivable phenomenon, to submit to the sort of initiation through which I had passed. To them, from the outset, three geometrical figures, dismal and lifeless though they were, represented three eyes; to them also they were living eyes even before they became animated. And the excitement was intense when those lidless eyes, consisting of hard, symmetrical lines, suddenly became filled with an expression which made them as intelligible to us as the eyes of a human person.

It was a harsh, proud expression, containing flashes of malignant joy. And I knew — and we all knew — that this was not just a random expression, with which the Three Eyes had been arbitrarily endowed, but that of a being who looked upon real life with that same look and who was about to appear to us in real life.

Then, as always, the three figures began to revolve dizzily. The disk turned upon itself. And everything was interrupted....

Chapter XI:

The Cathedral

The crowd could not recover from its stupefaction. It sat and waited. It had heard through me of the Three Eyes, of their significance as a message, a preliminary illustration, something like the title or picture-poster of the coming spectacle. It remembered Edith Cavell's eyes, Philippe Dorgeroux's eyes, Berangere's eyes, all those eyes which I had seen again after-wards; and it sat as though cramped in obstinate silence, as though it feared lest a word or a movement should scare away the invisible god who lay hidden within the wall. It was now filled with absolute certainty. This first proof of my sincerity and perspicacity was enough; there was not a single unbeliever left. The spectators stepped straight into regions which I had reached only by painful stages. Not a shadow of protest impaired their sensibility. Not a doubt interfered with their faith. Really, I saw around me nothing but serious attention, restrained enthusiasm, suppressed exaltation.

And all this suddenly found vent in an immense shout that rose to the skies. Before us, on the screen which had but now been empty and bare as a stretch of sand, there had come into being, spontaneously, in a flash, hundreds and thousands of men, swarming in unspeakable confusion.

It was obviously the suddenness and complexity of the sight which so profoundly stirred the crowd. The sudden emergence of life innumerable out of nothingness convulsed it like an electric shock. In front of it, where there had been nothing, there now swarmed another crowd, dense as itself, a crowd whose excitement mingled with its own and whose uproar, which it was able to divine, was added to its own! For a few seconds I had the impression that it was losing its mental balance and swaying to and fro in an access of delirium.

However, the crowd once more regained its self-control. The need, not of understanding — it seemed not to care about that at first — but of seeing and grasping the entire manifestation of the phenomena mastered the force let loose in its midst. It became silent again. It gazed. And it listened.

Yonder — I dare not say on the screen, for, in truth, so abnormal were its dimensions that the picture overflowed the frame and was propelled into the space outside — yonder, that which had impressed us as being disorder and chaos became organized in accordance with a certain rhythm which at length grew perceptible to us. The movement to and fro was that of artisans performing a well-regulated task; and the task was accomplished about an immense fabric in the course of erection.

How all these artisans were clad in a fashion absolutely different from our own; and, on the other hand, the tools which they employed, the appearance of their ladders, the shape of their scaffoldings, their manner of carrying loads and of hoisting the necessary materials in wicker baskets to the upper floors, all these things, together with a multitude of further details, brought us into the heart of a period which must have been the thirteenth or fourteenth century.

There were numbers of monks supervising the works, calling out orders from one end of the vast site to the other, setting out measurements and not disdaining themselves to mix the mortar, to push a wheel-barrow or to saw a stone. Women of the people, uttering their cries at the top of their voices, walked about bearing jars of wine with which they filled cups that were at once emptied by the thirsty labourers. A beggar went by. Two tattered singers began to roar a ditty, accompanying themselves on a sort of guitar. And a troop of acrobats, all lacking an arm, or a leg, or both legs, were preparing to give their show, when the scene changed without any transition, like a stage setting which is altered by the mere pressure of a button.

What we now saw was the same picture of a building in process of construction. But this time we clearly distinguished the plan of the edifice, the whole base of a Gothic cathedral displaying its huge proportions. And on these courses of masonry, which had reached the lower level of the towers, and along the fronts and before the niches and on the steps of the porch, everywhere, in fact, swarmed stone-hewers, masons, sculptors, carpenters, apprentices and monks.

And the costumes were no longer the same. A century or two had passed.

Next came a series of pictures which succeeded one another without our being able to separate the one from the other or to ascribe a beginning or an end to any one of them. By a method no doubt similar to that which, on the cinematograph, shows us the growth of a plant, we saw the cathedral rising imperceptibly, blossoming like a flower whose exquisitely-moulded petals open one by one and, lastly, being completed before our eyes, all of itself, without any human intervention. Thus came a moment when it stood out against the sky in all its glory and harmonious strength. It was Rheims Cathedral, with its three recessed doorways, its host of statues, its magnificent rose-windows, its wonderful towers flanked by airy turrets, its flying buttresses and the lacework of its carvings and balconies, Rheims Cathedral such as the centuries had beheld it, before its mutilation by the Huns.

A long shudder passed through the crowd. It understood what those who were not present cannot easily be made to understand now, by means of insignificant words: it understood that in front of it there stood something other than the photographic presentment of a building; and, as it possessed the profound and accurate intuition that it was not the victim of an unthinkable hoax, it became imbued and overwhelmed by an utterly disturbing sense of witnessing a most prodigious spectacle: the actual erection of a church in the Middle Ages, the actual work of a thirteenth-century building-yard, the actual life of the monks and artists who built Rheims Cathedral. Enlightened by its subtle instinct, not for a second did it doubt the evidence of its eyes. What I had denied, or at least what I had admitted only as an illusion, with reservations and flashes of incredulity, the crowd accepted with a certainty against which it would have been madness to rebel. It had faith. It believed with religious fervour. What it saw was not an artificial evocation of the past but that past itself, revived in all its living reality.

Equally real was the gradual transformation which continued to take place, no longer in the actual lines of the building, but as one might say in its substance and which was revealed by progressive changes that could not be attributed to any other cause than that of time. The great white mass grew darker. The grain of the stones became worn and weathered and they assumed that appearance of rugged bark which the patient gnawing of the years is apt to give them. It is true, the cathedral did not grow old, yet lived, for age is the beauty and the youth of the stones by means of which man gives shape to his dreams.

It lived and breathed through the centuries, seeming all the fresher as it faded and the more ornate as its legions of saints and angels became mutilated. It chanted its solemn hymn into the open sky over the houses which had gradually concealed its doorways and aisles, over the town above whose crowded roofs it towered, over the plains and hills which formed the dim horizon.

At different times people came and leant against the balustrade of some lofty balcony or appeared in the frame of the tall windows; and the costume of these people enabled us to note their successive periods. Thus we saw pre-Revolutionary citizens, followed by soldiers of the Empire, who in turn were followed by other nineteenth-century civilians and by labourers building scaffoldings and by yet more labourers engaged in the work of restoration.

Then a final vision appeared before our eyes: a group of French officers in service uniform. They hurriedly reached the top of the tower, looked through their field-glasses and went down again. Here and there, over the town and the country, hovered those small, woolly clouds which mark the bursting of a shell.

The silence of the crowd became anguished. Their eyes stared apprehensively. We all felt what was coming and we were all judging as a whole a spectacle which had shown us the gradual birth and marvellous growth of the cathedral only by way of leading up to the dramatic climax. We expected this climax. It followed from the dominant idea which gave the film its unity and its raison d'etre. It was as logical as the last act of a Greek tragedy. But how could we for-see all the savage grandeur and all the horror contained in that climax? How could we foresee that the bombardment of Rheims Cathedral itself formed part of the climax only as a preparation and that, beyond the violent and sensational scene which was about to rack our nerves and shock our minds, there would follow yet another scene of the most terrible nature, a scene which was strictly accurate in every detail?

The first shell fell on the north-east part of the cathedral at a spot which we could not see, because the building, though we were looking down upon it from a slight elevation, presented only its west front to our eyes. But a flame shot up, like a flash of lightning, and a pillar of smoke whirled into the cloudless sky.

And, almost simultaneously, three more shells followed, three more explosives, mingling their puffs of smoke. A fifth fell a little more forward, in the middle of the roof. A mighty flame arose. Rheims Cathedral was on fire.

Then followed phenomena which are really inexplicable in the present state of our cinematographic resources. I say cinematographic, although the term is not perhaps strictly accurate; but I do not know how else to describe the miraculous visions of the Yard. Nor do I know of any comparison to employ when speaking of the visible parabola of the sixth shell, which we followed with our eyes through space and which even stopped for a moment, to resume its leisurely course and to stop again at a few inches from the statue which it was about to strike. This was a charming and ingenuous statue of a saint lifting her arms to God, with the sweetest, happiest and most trusting expression on her face; a masterpiece of grace and beauty; a divine creature who had stood for centuries, cloistered in her shelter, among the nests of the swallows, living her humble life of prayer and adoration, and who now smiled at the death that threatened her. A flash, a puff of smoke... and, in the place of the little saint and her daintily-carved niche, a yawning gap!

It was at this moment that I felt that anger and hatred were awakening all around me. The murder of the little saint had roused the indignation of the crowd; and it so happened that this indignation found an occasion to express itself. Before us, the cathedral grew smaller, while at the same time it approached us. It seemed to be leaving its frame, while the distant landscape came nearer and nearer. A hill, bristling with barbed wire, dug with trenches and strewn with corpses, rose and fell away; and we saw its top, which was fortified with bastions and cupolas of reinforced concrete.

Enormous guns displayed their long barrels. A multitude of German soldiers were moving swiftly to and fro. It was the battery which was shelling Rheims Cathedral.

In the centre stood a group of general officers, field-glasses in hand, with sword-belts unbuckled. At each shot, they watched the effect through their glasses and then nodded their heads with an air of satisfaction.

But a great commotion now took place among them. They drew up in single rank, assuming a stiff and automatic attitude, while the soldiers continued to serve the guns. And suddenly, from behind the fortress, a motor-car appeared, accompanied by an escort of cavalry. It stopped on the emplacement and from it there alighted a man wearing a helmet and a long fur-cloak, which was lifted at the side by the scabbard of a sword of which he held the hilt. He stepped briskly to the foreground. We recognised the Kaiser.

He shook hands with one of the generals. The others saluted more stiffly than ever and then, at a sign from their master, extended and formed a semicircle around him and the general whose hand he had shaken.

A conversation ensued. The general, after an explanation accompanied by gestures that pointed towards the town, called for a telescope and had it correctly pointed. The Kaiser put his eye to it.

One of the guns was ready. The order to fire was given.

Two pictures followed each other on the screen in quick succession: that of a carved stone balustrade smashed to pieces by the shell and that of the emperor drawing himself up immediately afterwards. He had seen! He had seen; and his face, which appeared to us suddenly enlarged and alone upon the screen, beamed with intense delight!

He began to talk volubly. His sensual lips, his upturned moustache, his wrinkled and fleshy cheeks were all moving at the same time. But, when another gun was obviously on the point of firing, he held his peace and looked in the direction of the town. Just then he raised his hand to a level just below his eyes, so that we saw them by themselves, between the hand and the peak of the helmet. They were hard, evil, proud, implacable. They wore the expression of the miraculous Three Eyes that had throbbed before us on the screen.

They lit up, glittering with an evil smile. They saw what we saw at the same time, a whole block of capitals and cornices falling to the ground and more flames rising in angry pillars of fire. Then the emperor burst out laughing. One picture showed him doubled up in two and holding his sides amid the group of generals all seized with the same uncontrollable laughter. He was laughing! He was laughing! It was so amusing! Rheims Cathedral was ablaze! The venerable fabric to which the kings of France used to come for their coronation was falling into ruins! The might of Germany was striking the enemy in his very heart! The German heavy guns were things that were noble and beautiful! And it was he who had ordained it, he, the emperor, the King of Prussia, master of the world, William of Hohenzollern!.... Oh, the joy of laughing his fill, laughing to his heart's content, laughing the frank, honest laughter of a jolly German!

A storm of hoots and hisses broke loose in the amphitheatre. The crowd had risen in a body, shaking their fists and bellowing forth insults. The attendants had to struggle with a troop of angry men who had invaded the orchestra.

Theodore Massignac, behind the bars of his cage, stooped and pressed the button.

The iron curtain rose.

Chapter XII:

The "Shapes"

On the morning of the day following this memorable spectacle, I woke late, after a feverish night during which I twice seemed to hear the sound of a shot.

“Nightmare!” I thought, when I got up. “I was haunted by the pictures of the bombardment; and what I heard was the bursting of the shells.”

The explanation was plausible enough: the powerful emotions of the amphitheatre, coming after my meeting with Berangere in the course of that other night and my struggle with Theodore Massignac, had thrown me into a state of nervous excitement. But, when I entered the room in which my coffee was served, Theodore Massignac came running in, carrying a heap of newspapers which he threw on the table; and I saw under his hat a bandage which hid his forehead. Had he been wounded? And was I to believe that there had really been shots fired in the Yard?

“Pay no attention,” he said; “a mere scratch. I've bruised myself.” And, pointing to the newspapers: “Read that, rather. It's all about the master's triumph.”

I made no protest against the loathsome brute's intrusion. The Master's triumph, as he said, and Berangere's safety compelled me to observe a silence by which he was to benefit until the completion of his plans, he had made himself at borne in Noel Dorgeroux's house; and his attitude showed that he was alive to his own rights and to my helplessness. Nevertheless, despite his arrogance, he seemed to me to be anxious and absorbed. He no longer laughed; and, without his cheery laugh, Theodore Massignac disconcerted me more than ever.

“Yes,” he continued, drawing himself up, “it's a victory, a victory accepted by everybody. Not one of all these articles strikes a false note. Bewilderment and enthusiasm, stupefaction and high-flown praises, all running riot together. They're everyone of them alike; and, on the other hand, there is no attempt at a plausible explanation. Those fellows are all astounded. They're like blind men walking without a stick. Well, well, it's a thick headed world!”

He came and stood in front of me and, bluntly:

“What then?” he said. “Can't you guess? It's really too funny! Now that I understand the affair, I'm petrified by the idea that people don't see through it. An unprecedented discovery, I agree, and yet so simple! And, even then, you can hardly call it a discovery. For, when all is said and done... Look here, the whole story is so completely within the capacity of the first-comer that it won't take long to clear it up. To-morrow or the next day, some one will say, 'The trick of the Yard?' I've got it! And that's that. You don't want to be a man of learning for that, believe me. On the contrary!”

He shrugged his shoulders:

“And besides, I don't care. Let them find out what they like: they'll still need the formula; and that's hidden in my cellar and nowhere else. Nobody knows it, not even our friend Velmot. Noel Dorgeroux's steel plate? Melted down. The instructions which he left at the back of D'Alembert's portrait? Burnt to ashes. So there's no danger of any competition. And, as the seats in the amphitheatre are selling like hot cakes, I shall have pocketed a million in less than a fortnight, two millions in less than three weeks. And then good-bye, gentlemen all, I'm off. By Jove! It won't do to tempt Providence or the gendarmes.”

He took me by the lapels of my jacket and, standing straight in front of me, with his eyes on mine, said, in a more serious voice:

“There's only one thing that would ruffle me, which is to think that all these beautiful pictures can no longer appear upon the screen when I am gone. It seems impossible, what? No more miraculous sights? No more fairy-tales to make people talk till Doomsday? That would never do, would it? Noel Dorgeroux's secret must not be lost. So I thought of you. Hang it, you're his nephew! Besides, you love my dear Berangere. Some day or other you'll be married to her. And then, as I'm working for her, it doesn't matter whether the money comes to her through you or through me, does it? Listen to me, Victorien Beaugrand, and remember every word I say. Listen to me. You've observed that the base of the wall below the screen stands out a good way. Noel Dorgeroux contrived a sort of recess there, containing several carboys, filled with different substances, and a copper vat. In this vat we mix certain quantities of those ingredients in fixed proportions, adding a fluid from a little phial prepared on the morning of the performances, according to your uncle's formula. Then, an hour or two before sunset, we dip a big brush in the wash thus obtained and daub the surface of the screen very evenly with it You do that for each performance, if you want the pictures to be clear, and of course only on days when there are no clouds between the sun and the screen. As fop the formula, it is not very long: fifteen letters and twelve figures in all, like this...”

Massignac repeated slowly, in a less decided tone:

“Fifteen letters and twelve figures. Once you know them by heart, you can be easy. And I too. Yes, what do I risk in speaking to you? You swear that you won't tell, eh? And then I hold you through Berangere. Well, those fifteen letters....”

He was obviously hesitating. His words seemed to cost him an increasing effort; and suddenly he pushed me back, struck the table angrily with his fist and cried:

“Well, no, then, no, no, no! I shall not speak. It would be too silly! No, I shall keep this thing in my own hands, yes! Is it likely that I should let the business go for two millions? Not for ten millions! Not for twenty! I shall mount guard for months, if necessary, as I did last night, with my gun on my shoulder... and if any one enters the Yard I'll shoot him as I would a dog. The wall belongs to me, Theodore Massignac. Hands off! Let no one dare to touch it! Let no one try to rob me of the least scrap of it! It's my secret! It's my formula! I bought the goods and risked my neck in doing it. I'll defend them to my last breath; and, if I kick the bucket, it can't be helped; I'll carry them with me to the grave!”

He shook his fist at invisible enemies. Then suddenly, he caught hold of me again:

“That's what things have come to. My arrest, the gendarmes... I don't care a hang. They'll never dare. But the thief lurking in the darkness, the murderer who fires at me, as he did last night, while I was mounting guard.... For you must have heard, Victorien Beaugrand? Oh, a mere scratch! And I missed him too. But, next time, the swine will give himself time to take aim at me. Oh, the filthy swine!”

He began to shake me violently to and fro.

“But you too, Victorien, he's your enemy too! Don't you understand? The man with the eyeglass? That scoundrel Velmot? He wants to steal my secret, but he also wants to rob you of the girl you love. Sooner or later, you'll have your hands full with him, just as I have. Won't you defend yourself, you damned milksop, and attack him when you get the chance? Suppose I told you that Berangere's in love with him? Aha, that makes you jump! You're not blind surely? Can't you see for yourself that it was for him she was working all the winter and that, if I hadn't put a stop to it, I should have been diddled? She's in love with him, Victorien. She is the handsome Velmot's obedient slave. Why don't you smash his swanking mug for him? He's here. He's prowling about in the village. I saw him last night. Blast it, if I could only put a bullet through the beast's skin!”

Massignac spat out a few more oaths, mingled with offensive epithets which were aimed at myself as much as at Velmot. He described his daughter as a jade and a dangerous madwoman, threatened to kill me if I committed the least indiscretion and at length, with his mouth full of insults and his fists clenched, walked out backwards, like a man who fears a final desperate assault from his adversary.

He had nothing to be afraid of. I remained impassive under the storm of abuse. The only things that had roused me were his accusation against Berangere and his blunt declaration of her love for the man Velmot. But I had long since resolved not to take my feelings for her into account, to ignore them entirely, not even to defend her or condemn her or judge her and to refuse to accept my suffering until events had afforded me undeniable proofs. I knew her to be guilty of acts which I did not know of. Was I therefore to believe her guilty of those of which she was accused?

At heart, the feeling that seemed to persist was a profound pity. The horrible tragedy in which Berangere was submerged was increasing in violence. Theodore Massignac and his accomplice were now antagonists. Once again Noel Dorgeroux's secret was about to cause an outburst of passion; and everything seemed to foretell that Berangere would be swept away in the storm.

What I read in the newspapers confirmed what Massignac had told me. The articles lie before me as I write. They all express the same, more or less pugnacious, enthusiasm; and none of them gives a forecast of the truth which nevertheless was on the point of being discovered. While the ignorant and superficial journalists go wildly to work, heaping up the most preposterous suppositions, the really cultivated writers maintain a great reserve and appear to be mainly concerned in resisting any idea of a miracle to which a section of the public might be inclined to give ear:

“There is no miracle about it!” they exclaim. “We are in the presence of a scientific riddle which will be solved by purely scientific means. In the meantime let us confess our total incompetence.”

In any case, the comments of the press could not fail to increase the public excitement to the highest degree. At six o'clock in the evening the amphitheatre was taken by assault The wholly inadequate staff vainly attempted to stop the invasion of the crowd. Numbers of seats were occupied by main force by people who had no right to be there; and the performance began in tumult and confusion, amid the hostile clamour and mad applause that greeted the man Massignac when he passed through the bars of his cage.

True, the crowd lapsed into silence as soon as the Three Eyes appeared, but it remained nervous and irritable; and the spectacle that followed was not one to alleviate those symptoms. It was a strange spectacle, the most difficult to understand of all those which I saw. In the case of the others, those which preceded and those which followed, the mystery lay solely in the fact of their presentment. We beheld normal, natural scenes. But this one showed us things that are contrary to the things that are, things that might happen in the nightmare of a madman or in the hallucinations of a man dying in delirium.

I hardly know how to speak of it without myself appearing to have lost my reason; and I really should not dare to do so if a thousand others had not witnessed the same grotesque phantasmagoria and above all if this crazy vision — it is the only possible adjective — had not happened to be precisely the determining cause which set the public in the track of truth.

A thousand witnesses, I said, but I admit, a thousand witnesses who subsequently differed in their evidence, thanks to the inconsistency of the impressions received and also to the rapidity with which they succeeded one another.

And I myself, what did I see, after all? Animated shapes. Yes, that and nothing more. Living shapes. Every visible thing has a shape. A rock, a pyramid, a scaffolding round a house has a shape; but you cannot say that they are alive. Now this thing was alive. This thing bore perhaps no closer relation to the shape of a live being than to the shape of a rock, a pyramid or a scaffolding. Nevertheless there was no doubt that this thing acted in the manner of a being which lives, moves, follows this or that direction, obeys individual motives and attains a chosen goal.

I will not attempt to describe these shapes. How indeed could I do so, considering that they all differed from one another and that they even differed from themselves within the space of a second! Imagine a sack of coal (the comparison is forced upon one by the black and lumpy appearance of the Shapes), imagine a sack of coal swelling into the body of an ox, only to shrink at once to the proportions of the body of a dog, and next to grow thicker or to draw itself out lengthwise. Imagine this mass, which has no more consistency than a jellyfish, now again putting forth three little tentacles, resembling hands. Lastly, imagine the picture of a town, a town which is not horizontal but perpendicular, with streets standing up like ladders and, along these arteries, the Shapes rising like balloons. This is the first vision; and, right at the top of the town, the Shapes come crowding from every side, gathering upon a vast horizontal space, where they swarm like ants.

I receive the impression — and it is the general impression — that the space is a public square. A mound marks its centre. Shapes are standing there motionless. Others approach by means of successive dilations and contractions, which appear to constitute their method of advancing. And in this way, on the passage of a group of no great dimensions, which seems to be carrying a lifeless Shape, the multitude of the living Shapes falls back.

What happens next? However clear my sensations may be, however precise the memory which I have retained of them, I hesitate to write them down in so many words. I repeat, the vision transcends the limits of absurdity, while provoking a shudder of horror of which you are conscious without understanding it. For, after all what does it mean? Two powerful Shapes protrude their three tentacles, which wind themselves round the lifeless Shape that has been brought up, crush it, rend it, compress it and, rising in the air, wave to and fro a small mass which they have separated, like a severed head, from the original Shape and which contains the geometrical Three Eyes, staring, void of eyelids, void of expression.

No, it means nothing. It is a series of unconnected, unreal visions. And yet our hearts are wrung with anguish, as though we had been present at a murder or an execution. And yet those incoherent visions were perhaps what contributed most to the discovery of the truth. Their absence of logic brought about a logical explanation of the phenomena. The excessive darkness kindled a first glimmer of light.

To-day those things which, in looking up the past, I describe as incoherent and dark seem to me quite orderly and absolutely clear. But on that late afternoon, with a storm brewing in the distant sky, the crowd, recovering from its painful emotion, became more noisy and more aggressive. The exhibition had disappointed the spectators. They had not found what they expected and they manifested their dissatisfaction by threatening cries aimed at Theodore Massignac. The incidents that were to mark the sudden close of the performance were preparing.

“Massignac! Massignac!” they shouted, in chorus.

Standing in the middle of his cage, with his head turned towards the screen, he was watching for possible premonitory signs of a fresh picture. And, as a matter of fact, if you looked carefully, the signs were there. One might say that, rather than pictures, there were reflections of pictures skimming over the surface of the wall like faint clouds.

Suddenly Massignac extended one arm. The faint clouds were assuming definite outlines; and we saw that, under this mist, the spectacle had begun anew and was continuing.

But it continued as though under difficulties, with intervals of total suspension and others of semi-darkness during which the visions were covered by a mist. At such moments we saw almost deserted streets in which most of the shops were closed. There was no one at the doors or windows.

A cart, of which we caught sight now and again, moved along these streets. It contained, in front, two gendarmes dressed as in the days of the Revolution and, at the back, a priest and a man in a full-skirted coat, dark breeches and white stockings.

An isolated picture showed us the man's head and shoulders. I recognised and, generally speaking, the whole audience in the amphitheatre recognised the heavy-jowled face of King Louis XVI. This expression was hard and proud.

We saw him again, after a few interruptions, in a great square surrounded by artillery and black with soldiers. He climbed the steep steps of a scaffold. His coat and neck-tie had been removed. The priest was supporting him. Four executioners tried to lay hold of him.

I am obliged to interrupt my narrative, which I am deliberately wording as dryly as possible, of these fleeting apparitions, in order to make it quite clear that they did not at the moment produce the effect of terror which my readers might suppose. They were too short, too desultory, let me say, and so bad from the strictly cinematographic point of view which the audience adopted, in spite of itself, that they excited irritation and annoyance rather than dread.

The spectators had suddenly lost all confidence. They laughed, they sang. They hooted Massignac. And the storm of invective increased when, on the screen, one of the executioners held up the head of the king and faded away in the mist, together with the scaffold, the soldiers and the guns.

There were a few more timid attempts at pictures, attempts on the part of the film, in which several persons say that they recognized Queen Marie Antoinette, attempts which sustained the patience of the onlookers who were anxious to see the end of a spectacle which they had paid so heavily to attend. But the violence could no longer be restrained.

Who started it? Who was the first to rush forward and provoke the disorder and the resultant panic? The subsequent enquiries failed to show. There seems no doubt that the whole crowd obeyed its impulse to give full expression to its dissatisfaction and that the more turbulent of its members seized the opportunity of belabouring Theodore Massignac and even of trying to take the fabulous screen by storm. This last attempt, at any rate, failed before the impenetrable rampart formed by the attendants, who, armed with knuckle-dusters or truncheons, repelled the flood of the invaders. As for Massignac, who, after raising the curtain, had the unfortunate idea of leaving his cage and running to one of the exits, he was struck as he passed and swallowed up in the angry swirl of rioters.

After that everybody attacked his neighbour, with a frantic desire for strife and violence which brought into conflict not only the enemies of Massignac and the partisans of order, but also those who were exasperated and those who had no thought but of escaping from the turmoil. Sticks and umbrellas were brandished on high. Women seized one another by the hair. Blood flowed. People fell to the ground, wounded.

I myself did my best to get out and shouldered my way through this indescribable fray. It was no easy work, for numbers of policemen and many people who had not been able to obtain entrance were thronging towards the exit-doors of the amphitheatre. At last I succeeded in reaching the gate through an opening that was made amid the crowd.

“Boom for the wounded man!” a tall, clean-shaven fellow was shouting, in a stentorian voice.

Two others followed, carrying in their arms an individual covered with rugs and overcoats.

The crowd fell back. The little procession moved out. I seized my opportunity.

The tall fellow pointed to a private motor-car waiting outside:

“Chauffeur, I'm requisitioning you. Orders of the prefect of police. Come along, the two of you, and get a move on!”

The two men put the victim into the car and took their places inside. The tall fellow sat down beside the chauffeur; and the car drove off.

It was not until the very second when it turned the corner that I conceived in a flash and without any reason whatever the exact idea of what this little scene meant. Suddenly I guessed the identity of the wounded man who was hidden so attentively and carried off so assiduously. And suddenly also, notwithstanding the change of face, though he wore neither beard nor glasses, I gave a name to the tall, clean-shaven fellow. It was the man Velmot.

I rushed back to the Yard and informed the commissary of police who had hitherto had charge of the Dorgeroux case. He whistled up his men. They leapt into taxi-cabs and cars. It was too late. The roads were already filled with such a block of traffic that the commissary's car was unable to move.

And thus, in the very midst of the crowd, by means of the most daring stratagem, taking advantage of a crush which he himself doubtless had his share in bringing about, the man Velmot had carried off his confederate and implacable enemy, Theodore Massignac.