The Toilers of the Sea (23 page)

VI

LIGHT THROWN ON AN ABYSS

When this man found himself alone on this rock, in this fog, amid this waste of water, far from any contact with living beings, far from any sound of human life, left for dead—alone between the rising sea and the night that was now coming on—he had a feeling of intense joy.

He had succeeded.

He had realized his dream. The long-term bill of exchange that he had drawn on destiny was about to be met.

For him, to be abandoned was to be saved. He was on the Hanois, a mile from land, and he had seventy-five thousand francs. Never had any shipwreck been so skillfully arranged. No detail had been forgotten; everything had been planned. Since his earliest days Clubin had had one idea: to use honesty as his stake in the roulette game of life, to have the reputation of a man of integrity, to wait for the decisive moment, to allow his stake to accumulate, to find the winning streak, to choose the right moment; he would not fumble about but would seize his opportunity; he would make his coup, and make only one; he would scoop the pool and leave other poor fools behind him. He intended to achieve at one blow what stupid crooks failed to do twenty times in a row; and while they ended up on the gallows he would make his fortune. The meeting with Rantaine had given him the idea, and he had immediately formed his plan. He would relieve Rantaine of his money; he would frustrate any revelations by Rantaine by disappearing; to be believed dead was the best mode of concealment; and to achieve that he was prepared to destroy the Durande. The shipwreck was a necessary part of the scheme; and it had the additional advantage of leaving a good reputation behind him, making his whole life a masterpiece of contrivance. Anyone seeing Clubin in his present situation would have thought him a fiend, but a successful and contented fiend.

He had lived his whole life for this moment.

The whole of his character was summed up in the words “At last!” A frightful serenity settled palely on his dark brow. His expressionless eye, its inmost part seeming blanked off as if by a wall, became fathomless and terrible, reflecting the fire within his soul.

Man's inmost being, like external nature, has its own electric tension. An idea is a meteor: in the moment of success the accumulated meditations that have prepared the way for that success half-open and emit a spark. A man who, like some evil predator, feels a prey within his claws enjoys a happiness that cannot be concealed. An evil thought that has triumphed lights up a face. The success of some scheme, the achievement of some aim, some fierce delectation will momentarily bring to men's eyes somber flashes of illumination. It is like a joyful storm, a menacing dawn. It is an emanation of a man's consciousness, become a thing of darkness and cloud.

This was the gleam in Clubin's eye. It was like no gleam ever seen in the heavens or on earth. The villain who had been pent up within Clubin had now burst forth.

Looking into the vast darkness around him, he could not restrain a burst of low, sinister laughter.

Now he was free! Now he was rich!

His equation was coming out. He had solved his problem.

He had plenty of time. The tide was rising and supporting the Durande, and would eventually lift it off. In the meantime it was firmly lodged on the rock and in no danger of sinking. Besides he had to give the longboat time to get well away, and perhaps to be lost at sea, as Clubin hoped it would be.

Standing on the Durande, he folded his arms, savoring his isolation in the darkness.

For thirty years he had borne the burden of his hypocrisy. Being himself evil, he had coupled with integrity. He hated virtue with the hatred of a man who has married the wrong wife. All his life he had been meditating evil, but since he had reached man's estate he had worn the rigid armor of outward appearance. In his hidden self he was a monster; within his outer semblance of an honest man was the heart of a bandit. He was a pirate with the appearance of a gentleman. He was a prisoner of honesty, shut up in the mummy's casket of innocence; he was graced with the wings of an angel—a backbreaking encumbrance for a rascal. He had a heavy burden of public esteem. Keeping up the reputation of an honest man is a hard task. What a labor it is to maintain the balance between evil thoughts and fair words! He had been at the same time the phantom of uprightness and the specter of crime. This contradiction had been his destiny. He had had to maintain a good appearance, always appear presentable, while seething under the surface, concealing the grinding of his teeth under a smile. Virtue was a thing that stifled him. He had spent his life wanting to bite this hand that was held over his mouth; and, wanting to bite it, had been obliged to kiss it.

To have lied is to have suffered. A hypocrite is of necessity patient, in the double meaning of the term: he must plan the means of achieving his triumph, but while doing so he suffers torments. The long-continued premeditation of some evil deed, accompanied by and mingled with an appearance of austerity; internal infamy coupled with a good reputation; always to be pretending; never to be yourself; to be deceiving people all the time—all this is hard work. To compose an appearance of straightforwardness from all the black substances churning in your brain, to seek to devour those who respect you, to be affectionate, to restrain yourself, to repress your feelings, to be always on the alert, to watch yourself all the time, to put a fair face on your latent crime, to present your deformity as beauty, to fabricate an appearance of perfection from your vileness, to hold a dagger in your hand but use it to caress, to sugar the poison, to watch over the ease of every gesture and the tone of every word, never to have a natural glance: what can be harder than this, or more painful? The odiousness of hypocrisy is felt in some obscure way by the hypocrite himself. To be perpetually ingesting his own imposture brings on nausea. The sweetness that deceit gives to villainy is repugnant to the villain, who is continually forced to have this mixture in his mouth, and there are moments of retching when the hypocrite is on the point of vomiting up his thoughts. To swallow this saliva is revolting. Then, too, there is, deep down, the hypocrite's feeling of pride. There are times when, curiously, he thinks well of himself.

Within a deceitful rogue there is an outsized ego. The worm has the same crawling motion as the dragon, and the same way of raising its head again. The traitor is a despot in trammels, able to achieve his aims only by accepting a secondary role. He is littleness capable of any enormity. The hypocrite is a titan, but a titan who is also a dwarf.

Clubin really believed that he had been ill-used. Why had he not been born rich? He would have liked nothing better than to inherit from his parents an income of a hundred thousand pounds a year. Why had he not? It was not
his
fault. Why, because he had not been given all the pleasures of life, was he compelled to work: that is, to deceive, and betray, and destroy? Why had he thus been condemned to this torture of flattering, toadying, and trying to please others, of struggling to make himself liked and respected, and of having all the time to wear a false face over his own? Dissimulation is an act of violence against yourself. A man hates those to whom he lies. But now the time had come, and Clubin was taking his revenge.

On whom? On everyone, and on everything.

Lethierry had always treated him well. This was another grievance, and now he was avenging himself on Lethierry.

He was avenging himself on all those in whose presence he had been obliged to constrain himself. Now he was getting his own back. Anyone who had thought well of him was his enemy; he had been captive to such men.

Now he was free. He had made his escape; he had left mankind. What would be seen as his death was in reality his life; he was going to begin again. The real Clubin was shedding the likeness of the false one. He had dissolved everything at a stroke. He had kicked Rantaine into space, Lethierry into ruin, the world's justice into oblivion, men's minds into error, the whole of humanity away from himself. He had just eliminated the world.

As for God, that word of three letters meant little to him. He had been regarded as a religious man; but what did that matter?

Within the hypocrite there are hidden caverns; or rather a hypocrite is nothing but a cavern. When Clubin found himself alone his cavern opened up. He had a moment of exquisite pleasure; it was oxygen to his soul. He savored his crime to the full.

The depths of evil became visible on Clubin's face. His full personality was now revealed. At that moment, compared with the look on his face, Rantaine would have seemed as innocent as a newborn child.

What a release it was to tear off the mask! He delighted to see himself in all his hideous nakedness and to bathe ignobly in evil. The constraint of keeping up appearances over the years finally excites an intense appetite for shamelessness, a lascivious enjoyment of villainy. In these fearful moral depths, so rarely plumbed, there is a kind of appalling and pleasurable ostentation that is the very obscenity of crime. The insipidity of a false reputation for respectability creates a longing for shame. A man in this situation disdains other men so much that he wants to be despised by them. He is tired of being respected, and enjoys the freedom of action that degradation brings. He hankers after the turpitude that is so much at ease in ignominy. Eyes that have to be kept cast down often have sidelong glances of this kind. Marie Alacoque is not far removed from Messalina. Consider also Cadière and the nun of Louviers.
¹⁴⁷
Clubin, too, had lived under a veil. Effrontery had always been his ambition. He envied the whore and the brazen brow of the declared villain; he felt himself to be more of a whore than the whore herself, and had only disgust at having passed for a virgin. He had been the Tantalus of cynicism. And at last, on this rock, in this solitude, he could be frank; and now he was so. What a pleasure it was to feel himself wholeheartedly vile! At this moment Clubin enjoyed all the ecstasies that are possible in Hell. The arrears of debt due to dissimulation had been paid in full. Hypocrisy is a loan, and Satan had paid it back. Now that there was no one else there and he was alone with the sky, Clubin gave himself up to the intoxication of his shamelessness. Saying to himself, “I am a villain!” he was content.

No human consciousness had ever conceived such a state of mind as this. No opening up of a volcanic crater is comparable to the eruption of a hypocrite.

Clubin was delighted that there was no one there, but he would not have been sorry if there had been someone. He would have liked to appear abominable in presence of a witness. He would have been happy to tell the human species to its face: “You are all fools!”

The absence of any other human being ensured his triumph, but at the same time diminished it. The only spectator of his glory was himself.

To wear the iron collar of a galley-slave has a charm of its own. It advertises to all the world that you are vile.

To compel the crowd to look at you is a manifestation of power. A galley slave standing on a trestle at a street corner with his iron collar around his neck is a despot controlling all the glances that he compels to turn toward him. The scaffolding on which he stands is a kind of pedestal. What finer triumph is there than to be the point on which all eyes converge? To compel the public to look at you is one form of supremacy. For those who see evil as their ideal, opprobrium is a halo. It is a position of dominance. They are on a summit on which they can luxuriate in their sovereignty. A pillory exposed to universal view has some likeness to a throne.

To be exposed is to be looked at.

An evil reign, too, offers the same pleasures as the pillory. Nero setting fire to Rome, Louis XIV treacherously occupying the Palatinate, the Prince Regent condemning Napoleon to a slow death, Tsar Nicholas destroying Poland under the eyes of the civilized world must have enjoyed something of the same voluptuous pleasure as Clubin was luxuriating in. The immensity of the world's contempt seems to the object of that contempt to confer greatness on him.

To be unmasked is a defeat, but to unmask oneself is a victory. It is an intoxication, an insolent and self-satisfied act of imprudence, a reckless display of nakedness calculated to insult all who behold it. It is supreme happiness.

These ideas in a hypocrite seem a contradiction, but are not so. All infamy is consistent.

Honey is gall. Escobar is close to the Marquis de Sade. The proof? Léotade.
¹⁴⁸
The hypocrite is the complete figure of wickedness, combining within himself both extremes of perversity: he is both priest and courtesan. He is a demon of double sex, the abominable hermaphrodite of evil. He fertilizes himself; he engenders himself and transforms himself. Seen from one side, he is charming; seen from the other, he is horrible.

Clubin had within him all this dark turmoil of confused ideas. He did not perceive them very clearly, but he gloried in them. The thoughts passing through his soul were like a shower of sparks from Hell flashing in the night.

He remained for some time deep in thought, looking back on his past honesty as a snake looks at the skin it has sloughed off. Everyone had believed in his honesty, and even he had come to believe in it a little. Again he burst into laughter.

People were going to think he was dead, and he was rich. They were going to think him lost, and he was saved. What a trick to play on the universal stupidity of mankind!

And included in this universal stupidity was Rantaine. Clubin thought of Rantaine with limitless disdain: the disdain of the weasel for the tiger. Rantaine had bungled his escape; he had succeeded in his. Rantaine had departed sheepishly; he was disappearing triumphant. He had taken Rantaine's place in his criminal act, and it was he who had won the spoils.

As for the future, he had no definite plan. In the iron box concealed in his belt he had his three banknotes, and this certainty was sufficient for the moment. He would change his name. There are countries where sixty thousand francs are worth six hundred thousand. It would not be a bad idea to go to one of them and live honestly with the money taken from that robber Rantaine. To speculate, to go into big business, to increase his capital, to become a millionaire in earnest: these were also worth thinking about. In Costa Rica, for example, where coffee was becoming big business, there were tons of gold to be won. That was a possibility.