The Supermale by Alfred Jarry

Author:Alfred Jarry [Jarry, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1977-11-14T13:00:00+00:00

5

Beyond that he would have had to improvise, but his legs were going too quickly for his brain.

Thought, at least Sammy White’s, is not so rapid as they say, and I can’t see it going on exhibition on any track.

There is really only one record that it will be a long time before either Sammy White, the world champion, or I, or our five-man team, will beat; the record of light, and I have seen it beaten with my own eyes. When the lamp was lit behind us, sweeping our shadow forward along the track, the five members of our shadow were grouped for an instant so as to seem, fifty yards in front of us, like a single racer seen from behind, riding in front of us. Our simultaneous pedal strokes completed the illusion – which I heard afterwards was not an illusion. When our shadow was thrown forward we all felt sharply and distinctly that some silent and unbeatable opponent, who must have been watching us for days, had taken off on our right at the same time as our shadow, hidden within it, and kept fifty yards ahead. So well did we emulate it that the rods linking our legs began to oscillate with no less force than that with which a mad dog turns on its own tail, for want of something better to bite.

Yet the locomotive, burning its cars, was still at the same level, giving the impression of a great calm near a geyser. . . It seemed to carry no living soul besides Miss Elson, who was following with an overexcited and inexplicable curiosity the contortions – which were certainly fairly grotesque – of our distant shadow. William Elson, Arthur Gough, and the mechanics stood motionless. As for ourselves, lined up in the pale light of our lamp, and so cramped into our masks that we were only. slightly caressed by the mighty hurricane created by our speed, we were reliving, I think, to judge from my own feelings, our evenings as children, under the lamplight, bending over our homework on the table. And we seemed to be re-creating one of my visions on such an evening: a large death’s-head moth had gotten in my window and, taking no notice, curiously enough, of the lamp, went seeking with warlike passion its own shadow cast on the ceiling by the flame, banging it again and again with all the battering rams of its hairy body: whack, whack, whack. . .

Immersed in these thoughts or this reverie, I did not notice that the vibrations caused by our speed had put out the lamp, and yet the same odd outline, still visible because the track was very white and the night quite clear, was “leading the pack” fifty yards in front!

It could not have been projected by the locomotive’s headlamps: the very kerosene from both lamps had long since gone to add more heat to the darkening boiler.

Still, there is no such thing as a ghost

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