The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack: 20 Classic Novels and Short Stories (42 page)

“That is certainly,” he cried, “the most frightful work of the creation. The mere sight of it—it makes me shudder!”

In truth, a sudden pallor overspread his face.

“Bah!” said my tutor, “all that is only a prejudice from childhood—one hears his nurse cry out—one is afraid—and the impression sticks. But if you should consider the spider with a strong microscope, you would be astonished at the finish of his members, at their admirable arrangement, and even at their elegance.”

“It disgusts me,” interrupted the commodore brusquely. “Pouah!”

It had turned over in his fingers.

“Oh! I don’t know why,” he declared, “spiders have always frozen my blood!”

Dr. Weber began to laugh, and I, who shared the feelings of Sir Thomas, exclaimed:

“Yes, cousin, you ought to take this villainous beast out of the box—it is disgusting—it spoils all the rest.”

“Little chump,” he said, his eyes sparkling, “what makes you look at it? If you don’t like it, go take yourself off somewhere.”

Evidently he had taken offense; and Sir Thomas, who was then before the window contemplating the mountain, turned suddenly, took me by the hand, and said to me in a manner full of good will:

“Your tutor, Frantz, sets great store by his spider; we like the trees better—the verdure. Come, let’s go for a walk.”

“Yes, go,” cried the doctor, “and come back for supper at six o’clock.”

Then raising his voice:

“No hard feelings, Sir Hawerburch.”

The commodore replied laughingly, and we got into the carriage, which was always waiting in front of the door of the house.

Sir Thomas wanted to drive himself and dismissed his servant. He made me sit beside him on the same seat and we started off for Rothalps.

While the carriage was slowly ascending the sandy path, an invincible sadness possessed itself of my spirit. Sir Thomas, on his part, was grave. He perceived my sadness and said:

“You don’t like spiders, Frantz, nor do I either. But thank Heaven, there aren’t any dangerous ones in this country. The spider crab which your tutor has in his box comes from French Guiana. It inhabits the great, swampy forests filled with warm vapors, with scalding exhalations; this temperature is necessary to its life. Its web, or rather its vast snare, envelops an entire thicket. In it it takes birds as our spiders take flies. But drive these disgusting images from your mind, and drink a swallow of my old Burgundy.”

Then turning, he raised the cover of the rear seat, and drew from the straw a sort of gourd from which he poured me a full bumper in a leather goblet.

When I had drunk all my good humor returned and I began to laugh at my fright.

The carriage was drawn by a little Ardennes horse, thin and nervous as a goat, which clambered up the nearly perpendicular path. Thousands of insects hummed in the bushes. At our right, at a hundred paces or more, the somber outskirts of the Rothalp forests extended below us, the profound shades of which, choked with briers and foul brush, showed here and there an opening filled with light. On our left tumbled the stream of Spinbronn, and the more we climbed the more did its silvered sheets, floating in the abyss, grow tinged with azure and redouble their sound of cymbals.

I was captivated by this spectacle. Sir Thomas, leaning back in the seat, his knees as high as his chin, abandoned himself to his habitual reveries, while the horse, laboring with his feet and hanging his head on his chest as a counter-weight to the carriage, held on as if suspended on the flank of the rock. Soon, however, we reached a pitch less steep: the haunt of the roebuck, surrounded by tremulous shadows. I always lost my head, and my eyes too, in an immense perspective. At the apparition of the shadows I turned my head and saw the cavern of Spinbronn close at hand. The encompassing mists were a magnificent green, and the stream which, before falling, extends over a bed of black sand and pebbles, was so clear that one would have thought it frozen if pale vapors did not follow its surface.

The horse had just stopped of his own accord to breathe; Sir Thomas, rising, cast his eye over the countryside.

“How calm everything is!” said he.

Then, after an instant of silence:

“If you weren’t here, Frantz, I should certainly bathe in the basin.”

“But, Commodore,” said I, “why not bathe? I would do well to stroll around in the neighborhood. On the next hill is a great glade filled with wild strawberries. I’ll go and pick some. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Ha! I should like to, Frantz; it’s a good idea. Dr. Weber contends that I drink too much Burgundy. It’s necessary to offset wine with mineral water. This little bed of sand pleases me.”

Then, having set both feet on the ground, he hitched the horse to the trunk of a little birch and waved his hand as if to say:

“You may go.”

I saw him sit down on the moss and draw off his boots. As I moved away he turned and called out:

“In an hour, Frantz.”

They were his last words.

An hour later I returned to the spring. The horse, the carriage, and the clothes of Sir Thomas alone met my eyes. The sun was setting. The shadows were getting long. Not a bird’s song under the foliage, not the hum of an insect in the tall grass. A silence like death looked down on this solitude! The silence frightened me. I climbed up on the rock which overlooks the cavern; I looked to the right and to the left. Nobody! I called. No answer! The sound of my voice, repeated by the echoes, filled me with fear. Night settled down slowly. A vague sense of horror oppressed me. Suddenly the story of the young girl who had disappeared occurred to me; and I began to descend on the run; but, arriving before the cavern, I stopped, seized with unaccountable terror: in casting a glance in the deep shadows of the spring I had caught sight of two motionless red points. Then I saw long lines wavering in a strange manner in the midst of the darkness, and that at a depth where no human eye had ever penetrated. Fear lent my sight, and all my senses, an unheard-of subtlety of perception. For several seconds I heard very distinctly the evening plaint of a cricket down at the edge of the wood, a dog barking far away, very far in the valley. Then my heart, compressed for an instant by emotion, began to beat furiously and I no longer heard anything!

Then uttering a horrible cry, I fled, abandoning the horse, the carriage. In less than twenty minutes, bounding over the rocks and brush, I reached the threshold of our house, and cried in a stifled voice:

“Run! Run! Sir Hawerburch is dead! Sir Hawerburch is in the cavern—!”

After these words, spoken in the presence of my tutor, of the old woman Agatha, and of two or three people invited in that evening by the doctor, I fainted. I have learned since that during a whole hour I raved deliriously.

The whole village had gone in search of the commodore. Christian Weber hurried them off. At ten o’clock in the evening all the crowd came back, bringing the carriage, and in the carriage the clothes of Sir Hawerburch. They had discovered nothing. It was impossible to take ten steps in the cavern without being suffocated.

During their absence Agatha and I waited, sitting in the chimney corner. I, howling incoherent words of terror; she, with hands crossed on her knees, eyes wide open, going from time to time to the window to see what was taking place, for from the foot of the mountain one could see torches flitting in the woods. One could hear hoarse voices, in the distance, calling to each other in the night.

At the approach of her master, Agatha began to tremble. The doctor entered brusquely, pale, his lips compressed, despair written on his face. A score of woodcutters followed him tumultuously, in great felt hats with wide brims—swarthy visaged—shaking the ash from their torches. Scarcely was he in the hall when my tutor’s glittering eyes seemed to look for something. He caught sight of the negress, and without a word having passed between them, the poor woman began to cry:

“No! no! I don’t want to!”

“And I wish it,” replied the doctor in a hard tone.

One would have said that the negress had been seized by an invincible power. She shuddered from head to foot, and Christian Weber showing her a bench, she sat down with a corpse-like stiffness.

All the bystanders, witnesses of this shocking spectacle, good folk with primitive and crude manners, but full of pious sentiments, made the sign of the cross, and I who knew not then, even by name, of the terrible magnetic power of the will, began to tremble, believing that Agatha was dead.

Christian Weber approached the negress, and making a rapid pass over her forehead:

“Are you there?” said he.

“Yes, master.”

“Sir Thomas Hawerburch?”

At these words she shuddered again.

“Do you see him?”

“Yes—yes,” she gasped in a strangling voice, “I see him.”

“Where is he?”

“Up there—in the back of the cavern—dead!”

“Dead!” said the doctor, “how?”

“The spider—Oh! the spider crab—Oh!—”

“Control your agitation,” said the doctor, who was quite pale, “tell us plainly—”

“The spider crab holds him by the throat—he is there—at the back—under the rock—wound round by webs—Ah!”

Christian Weber cast a cold glance toward his assistants, who, crowding around, with their eyes sticking out of their heads, were listening intently, and I heard him murmur:

“It’s horrible! horrible!”

Then he resumed:

“You see him?”

“I see him—”

“And the spider—is it big?”

“Oh, master, never—never have I seen such a large one—not even on the banks of the Mocaris—nor in the lowlands of Konanama. It is as large as my head—!”

There was a long silence. All the assistants looked at each other, their faces livid, their hair standing up. Christian Weber alone seemed calm; having passed his hand several times over the negress’s forehead, he continued:

“Agatha, tell us how death befell Sir Hawerburch.”

“He was bathing in the basin of the spring—the spider saw him from behind, with his bare back. It was hungry, it had fasted for a long time; it saw him with his arms on the water. Suddenly it came out like a flash and placed its fangs around the commodore’s neck, and he cried out: ‘Oh! oh! my God!’ It stung and fled. Sir Hawerburch sank down in the water and died. Then the spider returned and surrounded him with its web, and he floated gently, gently, to the back of the cavern. It drew in on the web. Now he is all black.”

The doctor, turning to me, who no longer felt the shock, asked:

“Is it true, Frantz, that the commodore went in bathing?”

“Yes, Cousin Christian.”

“At what time?”

“At four o’clock.”

“At four o’clock—it was very warm, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, yes!”

“It’s certainly so,” said he, striking his forehead. “The monster could come out without fear—”

He pronounced a few unintelligible words, and then, looking toward the mountaineers:

“My friends,” he cried, “that is where this mass of débris came from—of skeletons—which spread terror among the bathers. That is what has ruined you all—it is the spider crab! It is there—hidden in its web—awaiting its prey in the back of the cavern! Who can tell the number of its victims?”

And full of fury, he led the way, shouting:

“Fagots! Fagots!”

The woodcutters followed him, vociferating.

Ten minutes later two large wagons laden with fagots were slowly mounting the slope. A long file of woodcutters, their backs bent double, followed, enveloped in the somber night. My tutor and I walked ahead, leading the horses by their bridles, and the melancholy moon vaguely lighted this funereal march. From time to time the wheels grated. Then the carts, raised by the irregularities of the rocky road, fell again in the track with a heavy jolt.

As we drew near the cavern, on the playground of the roebucks, our cortége halted. The torches were lit, and the crowd advanced toward the gulf. The limpid water, running over the sand, reflected the bluish flame of the resinous torches, the rays of which revealed the tops of the black firs leaning over the rock.

“This is the place to unload,” the doctor then said. “It’s necessary to block up the mouth of the cavern.”

And it was not without a feeling of terror that each undertook the duty of executing his orders. The fagots fell from the top of the loads. A few stakes driven down before the opening of the spring prevented the water from carrying them away.

Toward midnight the mouth of the cavern was completely closed. The water running over spread to both sides on the moss. The top fagots were perfectly dry; then Dr. Weber, supplying himself with a torch, himself lit the fire. The flames ran from twig to twig with an angry crackling, and soon leaped toward the sky, chasing clouds of smoke before them.

It was a strange and savage spectacle, the great pile with trembling shadows lit up in this way.

This cavern poured forth black smoke, unceasingly renewed and disgorged. All around stood the woodcutters, somber, motionless, expectant, their eyes fixed on the opening; and I, although trembling from head to foot in fear, could not tear away my gaze.