He looked around and above him, as though seeking an idea, and he seemed also to look inside himself, as though he were seeking that idea amid all the memories which he had accumulated at the moment when his father also held the ladder, in a last effort of will. And suddenly, throwing up his leg, he placed his left foot on the fifth rung of the ladder and began to raise himself by the uprights.
It was an absurd attempt to scale the ladder, to reach the skylight, to lay hold of the enemy and thus save himself and Coralie. If his father had failed before him, how could he hope to succeed?
It was all over in less than three seconds. The ladder was at once unfastened from the hook that kept it hanging from the skylight; and Patrice and the ladder came to the ground together. At the same time a strident laugh rang out above, followed the next moment by the sound of the skylight closing.
Patrice picked himself up in a fury, hurled insults at the enemy and, as his rage increased, fired two revolver shots, which broke two of the panes. He next attacked the doors and windows, banging at them with the iron dog which he had taken from the fender. He hit the walls, he hit the floor, he shook his fist at the invisible enemy who was mocking him. But suddenly, after a few blows struck at space, he was compelled to stop. Something like a thick veil had glided overhead. They were in the dark.
He understood what had happened. The enemy had lowered a shutter upon the skylight, covering it entirely.
“Patrice! Patrice!” cried Coralie, maddened by the blotting out of the light and losing all her strength of mind. “Patrice! Where are you, Patrice? Oh, I’m frightened! Where are you?”
They began to grope for each other, like blind people, and nothing that had gone before seemed to them more horrible than to be lost in this pitiless blackness.
“Patrice! Oh, Patrice! Where are you?”
Their hands touched, Coralie’s poor little frozen fingers and Patrice’s hands that burned with fever, and they pressed each other and twined together and clutched each other as though to assure themselves that they were still living.
“Oh, don’t leave me, Patrice!” Coralie implored.