CHAPTER VI.
RETURN TO CONSCIOUSNESS.
Leon Roch sat alone, but not at peace, by the bed where his wife lay sleeping. Watching her face, to note in its varying expression anything that might be a symptom of danger or a sign of improvement, his attention wandered occasionally from the patient to himself and the painful position in which he was placed by events and persons. How was it that he had fallen into it. How was it that he had not been able to foresee and prevent this diabolical crossing of the two circles in which he moved—the two orbits of antagonistic ideas and feelings? And as he asked himself the answer came with a mocking laugh from the depths of his consciousness, in the words of his own theories at the time of his engagement and marriage. In the early days of this veracious history he had, as we know, dreamed magnificent dreams, and among others that of moulding his life by making himself its master and ruling it absolutely to his will. But the men who cherish this dream of triumph take no account of what we may call Social Destiny—an irresistible power composed of creeds—our own and others; of personal or collective resistance; of the errors—nay of the virtues—of our neighbours; of a thousand trifles which, from time to time, must be defied or deferred to; and finally of law and custom which it is rarely permissible, or even possible, to fight single-handed.
Leon was sorry for himself; at the same time he could not help laughing himself to scorn. “It is really absurd,” he said to himself, “that a stone cannot move without rolling down hill.”
As he thought of all this and much more, he did not cease to watch the progress of his patient. Two or three times in the course of the day María roused from her torpid state, but her mind was clouded; she knew no one and talked wildly. Conscious of suffering and unable to determine or localize it she tried to fling herself out of bed, and Leon had to use some force to prevent her. Towards night she became quieter but the fever did not diminish. The doctor, however, found that her pulse was steadier. In her sleep she spoke more clearly and coherently, but at last, clasping her hands on her bosom she cried aloud: “No, no, never! He is mine—mine!” With this she woke to clear consciousness; her eyes wandered round the room examining the walls, the ceiling, the bed—she perceived that she was in a strange place. Her calm gaze showed that her mind was collected though somewhat weary and that she had recovered her powers of judgment. Seeing her husband sitting by the bed, alone, watchful, and anxious, her eyes softened and she smiled as she said: “You?”
Leon went close to her and bent down putting his hand under the coverlet to feel her pulse; she clutched at his wrist and clasped it to her breast saying with a tremulous sob:
“What a mercy, to know that it was only a dream. I saw you—it was dark, and they were going to put you into a fiery furnace. I was terrified to death—I screamed out....”
Her imagination, excited by emotion and rage had been entangled in a vortex of horrible visions—a frenzying whirl of shapes and colours ending without colour or shape, and then had gone through an agony of terror—lost in a void of space and blackness, filled only by the very presence of Fear. As she reached the bottom of the abyss, rushing downwards with increasing impetus, she was suddenly dazzled with light. This was Hell. She saw it of course with its hideous inhabitants as she had imagined them in her waking hours from written descriptions and pictures; but as our conceptions of the supernatural are always modified by the ideas of the time, and wear the aspect of familiar scenes and objects—so that, as we know, our notion even of the Almighty varies with the age—María saw the infernal precincts as vast railway tunnels or gasometers reeking with smoke and stench, or as a murky foundry with its roaring forges and machines clashing and shrieking, with the groaning of bellows, the thud of hammers, and the glare and swelter of a furnace. The demons, while retaining their traditional guise of deformed men with hoofs and tails, seemed to toil like smiths and scavengers, like the myrmidons of a gas-factory or of a coal-mine, the Cyclops of Birmingham or Sheffield. All were grimy, and bathed in sweat, and shiny as with the exuded grease of machinery. It was a gulf formed by the meeting of tunnels, and galleries, and iron causeways; the atmosphere was a mixture of coal dust, sulphur, gas and petroleum—the odour was most abhorrent to our heroine. In the midst of it all there was a tumult, a noise, a turmoil of which she could have given no conception but by saying that a thousand trains rushed at express speed on a central point and met—but no sooner was the catastrophe accomplished than it at once began again. Locomotives were in fact the principal feature in the Inferno of her delirious dream; she saw them tearing past, flying with wings tipped with claws of iron, snorting, groaning, rolling fiery eyes, and breathing out smoke and sparks and steam. Though they were as large—as she thought—as in real life, in that infinite void they were as a cloud of flies buzzing stupendously.
Soon after their marriage Leon and María had made a tour in Germany where, among other things, they had seen Krupp’s great foundry works at Essen. The scene had made a deep impression on María that had never quite been effaced, and in this torment of hallucination the images brought away from that immense laboratory played a leading part in the composition of the picture of the eternal limbo whither men are consigned for their sins. Smaller foundries of the same kind, at Barcelona and in France, had supplied various details and gave movement to the terrific scene. The damned were spun round in a lathe and rounded off like cannons or passed between rollers, coming out as flat as paper; then they were cast into the white heat of the furnace and recovered their natural form. Some were put into chains and their heads laid on an anvil under a gigantic hammer that crushed their skulls. The inferior demons—the rabble rout of Hell, amused themselves by drilling holes in the skulls of some of their victims, and inserting a spoonful of fused metal—the extract of a heap of books which were seething in a bulky black cauldron, a hell-broth of heretical ideas. Others, whose crime was evil-speaking of sacred things, had their tongues torn out by particularly hideous fiends, and these tongues, hundreds and thousands of them, were twisted together to form a rope which was then hung to the vault, looking like strings of sausages put there to dry. Others again were put through a strange torment, almost impossible to describe. The wretches were knotted together, legs with arms, and arms with heads, into a string or chain—a tissue of suffering and wailing. This chain was then dragged out by a huge screw, till its length was stretched from miles to leagues, while the bones cracked with a noise like that of nuts trampled on by a thousand horses, and the flesh was racked and torn; and these again, being flung into the furnace, recovered their original shape to go once more through the same torture.