Thirty Hours with a Corpse

by Maurice Level

  “Next day they brought the poor child home on a stretcher. He had a shot in his chest. From what I could learn or guess they had quarreled because of me, and because he didn’t give her enough money. When he realized that he no longer amused her, that she didn’t want to see him again, he lost his head, and without thinking of himself, or me, or anything, he tried to kill himself. Ah! it is hard to bear such things at my age.”

  Standing near the narrow hospital bed, the nun had listened in silence. The sick youth, who had been in a state of coma, was beginning to give little broken cries like calls. Trembling, the mother asked:

  “What does the doctor say? Is there any chance of his getting well?”

  “I’m afraid, poor mother, that he is very ill. But we haven’t lost hope. He is young . . . Now you must go home. He must not have the excitement of seeing you when he first recovers consciousness. You may be quite sure he will be well looked after. You can come again tomorrow for a few minutes . . . every day if you like.”

  Weeping bitterly, but biting her lips to prevent her sobs being heard by those in the other beds, the old woman walked slowly away, turning every few steps to look back.

  A deep silence fell on the ward. The shadows of night were creeping in. The whisperings and turnings caused by an exit or an entrance gradually died away. It was the hour when the sick, tired by a long, weary day, fall gently asleep. The nun sat down by the pillow of the boy.

  She was very young. Her eyes were clear as crystal, and there was still in them something of the wonder you see in those of children. Her lips were curved; there had been no time for them to take the lines given by the never-ceasing murmur of prayers. Her face was round and rosy; little curls with golden lights in them sometimes escaped from under the white band that circled her forehead. But notwithstanding her fresh young laughter, she knew all the words and ways that soothe pain. When she spoke to the sick men her voice had tender inflections like those of a mother or elder sister.

  Toward the middle of the night the boy recovered consciousness. The nun had not left his side. He wanted to ask questions, but she told him he must keep quiet. He obeyed, docile as a child, and fell asleep.

  During the first days he saw her constantly, for she rarely left his side. Timid, almost ashamed, he hardly ever spoke, lying motionless for hours with his eyes shut. It was only when the door opened or shut that he raised his eyelids, and they would fall again immediately.

  More than once on these occasions he had spoken, saying shyly:

  “Sister . . .”

  But when the nun had bent over him with a: “What is it, little one?” he turned away his head, murmuring:

  “Nothing . . . Nothing . . .”

  One morning he had more courage:

  “Tell me, please, Sister, if anyone has come to ask about me since I came here?”

  “But of course. Your mother—you know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes . . . But anyone else?”

  “No, nobody.”

  He turned away his head, but she saw there were tears in his eyes.

  “Come, come, little one, this won’t do. What’s the matter?”

  A pressing need to confide in someone after his long silence drew the confession from him:

  “It is so unkind. I can tell you anything . . . you are so good to me . . . and I shall feel better if you know . . . Mother doesn’t know, she thinks it was an accident . . . But it wasn’t. I tried to kill myself . . .”

  The nun stopped him with a gesture:

  “She knows all about it.”

  “Ah!”

  For some time he was silent, slowly shaking his head.

  “My poor old mother . . . I have given her so much trouble. She will forgive me, for she knows it wasn’t my fault . . . I was so unhappy. When that woman turned me away, I thought I couldn’t go on living without her. I loved her so much . . . She could have done anything she liked with me . . . And you see that even though she knows it is because of her I am here, she has never even come to ask how I am. Whenever I heard the door open I thought I should see her walking toward me . . . But now I know she will never come . . . I don’t want her to, either . . . I shall leave off thinking of her . . . I shall leave off loving her . . . No, I don’t love her at all now . . .”

  The tears that were in his eyes gave the lie to his words.

  Presently he asked:

  “It is a great sin, isn’t it, Sister, to try to kill yourself ?”

  “A very great sin. The greatest of all.”

  “But if you are too unhappy . . . wouldn’t God know that, and understand? . . .”

  She bowed her head and clasped her hands; her shoulders moved, and the wings of her white head-dress trembled as she replied in a low voice:

  “Shh . . . Shh . . . You must not tire yourself, little one . . . You must shut your eyes and go to sleep . . .”

  He seemed to do so, but about two in the morning he became very restless. They sent for the nun.

  “Well, and what’s all this about?” she said as she bent over him. “You are not being good?”

  He burst into harsh, incoherent words that came in gasps.

  She took one of his hands in hers and with the other gently wiped the perspiration from his forehead, trying to calm him.

  Soothed as if by a caress, he grew quiet. He breathed more easily, his voice was even, his words intelligible.

  “Yes, I know I am late . . . It was my work that kept me . . . I will come earlier next time. You don’t like the flowers? . . . On Sunday we will pick a lot . . . We will go to the river for the day, we will have dinner on the grass . . . We will go home early, and you will see how much I love you . . . If you only knew how much I love you! I love your eyes and your hair . . . all of you. Your skin smells like flowers.”

  This was said in a tone of supplication, and it sounded like a passionate prayer. But soon he was talking too quickly again, the words running into one another.

  The nun, her eyes anxious, let him talk on, and the prayers she murmured mechanically sounded like the accompaniment to a Song of Love.

  He began to moan and shudder, and suddenly he sprang up:

  “What! Going away? Never see you again! . . .”

  He was panting now, the breath coming in short, painful gasps. The nun hurriedly brought a light and looked carefully at him.

  He was livid, and his eyes were wild. Deep shadows stretched from the eyes to the corner of the lips; the temples seemed to have fallen in. Drenched with perspiration, his hair was sticking in wisps to his forehead, and his palpitating nostrils seemed to draw all the rest of his face to them.

  Ah! she knew them, these agonized faces that looked as if the mind were trying in one minute to live over again the whole of a life . . .

  Softly, so as not to disturb those in the other beds, she said to a night-nurse:

  “Quick . . . quick . . . bring the doctor and send for the chaplain . . . No. 6 is very ill . . .”

  Kneeling by the bed, she began to pray: “Thy will be done, O God, but pardon, oh, pardon this poor child.”

  The dying boy had taken her folded hands in his and went on talking, but his voice was now quiet, far, far away.

  “Don’t go . . . I will give you everything you want . . . Anything, if you only will stay with me . . . If you leave me, I shall die . . . Come . . .”

  His head brushed against the forehead of the nun. His neck stretched forwards, he bent toward her.

  “Come . . . I adore you . . .”

  He was touching her eyes and cheeks . . . He reached her lips—

  She started back and tried to rise.

  But he grasped her shoulders, and his dream carrying him right over the threshold of eternity, he implored:

  “Oh, stay . . . I love you . . .”

  She shut her eyes and bent her head. He pressed his lips on hers in a long, fervent, noiseless kiss, one of those deep kisses in which two beings merge their identity, a kiss like those he had learned in the a
rms of the prostitute.

  Under it the trembling lips of the nun opened—was it in a last prayer? Or had her thoughts flashed back to the fiancé whose death had turned her life to God?

  A Maniac

  HE WAS neither malicious nor bloodthirsty. It was only that he had conceived a very special idea of the pleasures of existence. Perhaps it was that, having tried them all, he no longer found the thrill of the unexpected in any of them.

  He went to the theatre, not to follow the piece, or to look through his opera-glasses at the spectators, but because he hoped that some day a fire might break out. At the fair of Neuilly he visited the various menageries in anticipation of a catastrophe: the tamer attacked by the beasts. He had tried bullfights, but soon tired of them; the slaughter appeared too wellregulated, too natural, and it disgusted him to watch suffering.

  What he was always looking for was the quick and keen anguish caused by some unexpected disaster, some new kind of accident; so much so that, having been at the Opéra Comique on the night of the great fire, from which he escaped unhurt; that, having been a couple of steps from the cage the day the celebrated Fred was devoured by his lions, he lost almost all interest in theatres and menageries. To those who were astonished at this apparent change in his tastes, he replied:

  “But there’s nothing more to see there. They don’t give me the slightest sensation. All that I care for is the effect produced on others and on me.”

  When he was deprived of these two favorite pleasures—it had taken him ten years to get what he wanted from them—he fell into a state of mental and physical depression, and for some months rarely left his house.

  Then came a morning when the walls of Paris were covered with multi-colored posters that showed, on an azure background, a curious inclined track that came down, wound round, and fell like a ribbon. Up at the top, little bigger than a dot, a cyclist seemed to be waiting for a signal to rush down the giddy descent. At the same time the newspapers gave accounts of an extraordinary feat that explained the meaning of this weird picture.

  It seemed that the cyclist dashed down the narrow path at full speed, went up round the loop, then down to the bottom. For a second during this fantastic performance he was head downwards, his feet up in the air.

  The acrobat invited the press to come and examine the track and the machine so that they might see there was no trickery about it, and he explained that his ability to perform the feat was due to calculations of extreme precision, and that so long as he kept his nerve nothing could prevent its accomplishment.

  Now it is certain that when the life of a man hangs on keeping his nerve, it hangs on a very insecure peg!

  Since the appearance of the advertisement, our maniac had recovered some of his good humor. He went to the private demonstration, and becoming convinced that a new sensation awaited him, was in a seat on the first night to watch closely this looping the loop.

  He had taken a box that faced the end of the track, and he sat there alone, not wishing to have near him anyone who might distract his close attention.

  The whole thing was over in a few minutes. He had just time to see the black speck appear on the end of the track, a formidable spurt, a plunge, a gigantic bound, and that was all. It gave him a thrill, swift and vivid as lightning.

  But as he went out with the crowd, he reflected that though he might feel this sensation twice or thrice, it must eventually fail, as all the others had done. He had not found what he was looking for. Then came the thought that a man’s nerve has limitations, that the strength of a bicycle is, after all, only relative, and that there is no track of the kind, however secure it may seem, that may not some time give way. And he arrived at the conclusion that it was inevitable that some day an accident must occur.

  From this to deciding to watch for that accident was a very small step.

  “I will go to see this looping of the loop every night,” he decided. “I will go till I see that man break his head. If it doesn’t happen during this three months in Paris, I will follow him elsewhere till it does.”

  For two months, every evening at the same time, he went to the same box and in the same seat. The management had grown to know him. He had taken the box for the whole period of the turn, and they wondered vainly what could account for this costly whim.

  One evening when the acrobat had gone through his performance earlier than usual, he saw him in a corridor and went up to him. There was no need for an introduction.

  “I know you already,” said the bicyclist. “You are always at the hall. You come every night.”

  Surprised, he asked:

  “It is true I am deeply interested in your performance. But who has told you so?”

  The man smiled:

  “No one. I see you.”

  “That is very surprising. At such a height at such a moment . . . your mind is sufficiently free to pick out the spectators down below?”

  “Certainly not. I don’t see the spectators down below. It would be extremely dangerous for me to pay any attention to a crowd that moves and chatters. In all matters connected with my profession, in addition to the turn itself, its theory and practice, there is something else, a kind of trick . . .”

  He started.

  “A trick?”

  “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean trickery. I mean something of which the public has no suspicion, something that is perhaps the most delicate part of the whole performance. Shall I explain? Well, I accept it as a fact that it is not possible to empty the brain till it contains but one idea, impossible to keep the mind fixed on any one thought. As complete concentration is necessary, I choose in the hall some one object on which I fix my eyes. I see nothing but that object. From the second I have my gaze on it, nothing else exists. I get on the saddle. My hands gripping the bars, I think of nothing; neither of my balance, nor my direction. I am sure of my muscles; they are as firm as steel. There is only one part of me I am afraid of: my eyes. But once I have fixed them on something, I am sure of them as well. Now, the first night I performed here, it happened that my eyes fell on your box. I saw you. I saw nothing but you. Without knowing it, you caught and held my eyes . . . You became the point, the object of which I have told you. The second day I looked for you at the same place. The following days it was the same. And so it happens that now, as soon as I appear, by instinct my eyes turn to you. You help me; you are the precious aid indispensable to my performance. Now do you understand why I know you?”

  Next day the maniac was in his usual seat. In the hall there were the usual movements and murmurs of keen anticipation. Suddenly a dense silence fell; that profound silence when you feel that an audience is holding its breath. The acrobat was on his machine, which was held by two men, waiting for the signal to set off. He was balanced to perfection, his hands grasping the bar, his head up, his gaze fixed straight ahead.

  He cried “Hop!” and the men pushed him off.

  Just at that moment, in the most natural way possible, the maniac rose, pushed back his seat, and went to one at the other side of the box. Then a terrible thing happened. The cyclist was thrown violently up in the air. His machine rushed forwards, flew up, and lurching out into the midst of the shrieks of terror that filled the hall, fell among the crowd.

  With a methodical gesture the maniac put on his overcoat, smoothed his hat on the cuff of his sleeve, and went out.

  The 10:50 Express

  “THEY SAY you are leaving us today, sir?” the cripple said to me. “I must. I have to be at Marseilles on Monday morning. I shall go by the 10:50 express tonight from the Gare de Lyon. It’s a good train . . . but you ought to know it—you were employed by the P. L. M. before you fell ill, weren’t you?”

  He shut his eyes, and his face became suddenly very pale as he replied:

  “Yes . . . I know it . . . too well . . .”

  There were tears under his eyelids as, after a moment’s silence, he added:

  “No one knows it as well as I do! . . .”

>   Thinking he was moved by regret for the work he was no longer able to do, I said:

  “It must have been an interesting job. Fine work needing plenty of intelligence.”

  He shuddered; his paralyzed body strained violently, and there was a look of horror in his eyes as he protested:

  “Don’t say that, sir! Fine work? You mean work of terror and death . . . of horror and nightmare . . . Sir, I am nothing to you, but I am going to ask you a favor—don’t go by that train. Take any other train you like, but don’t go by the 10:50 . . .”

  “Why?” I queried smiling. “Are you superstitious?”

  “I’m not superstitious . . . but I was the driver in charge of the express the day of the disaster of 24th July, 1894. I will tell you about it and you will understand . . .

  “We left the Gare de Lyon at the usual time, and had been running about two hours. The day had been suffocatingly hot. In spite of the speed we were going at, the breeze that came to me on the platform was stifling, the heavy, sultry air that goes before a storm . . .

  “All at once, as if an electric light had been switched off, everything went out in the sky. Not a star left. The moon gone, and great flashes of lightning cutting the night with a light clear enough to make the darkness that followed black as ink.

  “I said to my stoker:

  “ ‘We’re in for it! There’ll be a mighty downpour.’

  “ ‘Not before time. I couldn’t stand this furnace much longer. You’ll have to keep your eyes peeled for the signals.’

  “ ‘No fear. I can see right enough.’

  “The thunder was so loud I couldn’t hear the hammering of the wheels, nor the exhaust of the engine. The rain still kept off and the storm came nearer. We were running right into it. It seemed as if we were running after it.

  “You needn’t be a coward to feel a bit queer when you find yourself being hurled into a great storm on a monster of steel that rushes on like a madman.

  “In front of us, quite close, a flash of lightning pierced the ground, and at the same time a terrible thunderclap sounded, then another, so violent that I shut my eyes and sank on my knees.