Delphi Collected Works of Marie Corelli

by Marie Corelli

  Slowly and with an inexplicable reluctance I crept away, — slinking through the trees like a terrified beast that shuns some fierce pursuer; afraid of both moonbeams and shadows, and still more afraid of the deep calm about me — a calm that could almost be felt. I stole out of the Bois, and set foot on the Suresnes bridge — a loose plank creaked beneath my tread, and the sound sent the blood up to my brow in a hot rush of pain, — and then — then some impulse made me pause. Some deadly fascination seized me to lean my arms upon the bridge-parapet and look over, and down, into the river below. The water heaved under me in a silvery white glitter, — and while I yet gazed downwards, — a dark mass drifted into view — a heavy floating blackness, out of which two glistening awful eyes stared at me and at the moon!... clutching at the edge of the parapet, I hung over it, with beating heart and straining sight — anon, I broke into a fit of delirious laughter!

  “Silvion!” I whispered. “Silvion Guidèl! What! — are you there again? Not at rest yet? Sleep, man! sleep; Be satisfied with God now you have found Him! — Good night, Guidèl; good night!”

  Here my laughter suddenly spent itself in a fierce sobbing groan, — I shrank back from the parapet trembling in every limb, — and like a sick man waking out of a morphia-sleep I suddenly realized that the tide seemed flowing towards Paris, — not down to the sea! Well! — what then?

  I dared not stop to think! With a savage cry I covered my face and fled, — fled in furious panting haste and fear, rushing along the silent road to the city with the reckless speed of an escaped madman, and followed as it seemed by the sound of a whispered “Murder! Murder!” hissed after me by the vindictive, upward-turning Seine, that pursued me closely as I ran, bearing with it its awful witness to the black deed I had done!

  XXIII.

  FOR the next three or four days I lived in a sort of feverish delirium, hovering betwixt hope and terror, satisfaction and despair. But by degrees I began to make scorn of my own cowardice, — for though I searched all the newspapers with avidity I never saw the one thing I dreaded, — namely an account of the discovery of a priest’s body in the Seine, and a suggestion as to his having come to his death by foul means. Another murder had been committed in Paris just the day after I had killed Silvion Guidèl, — and it was a particularly brilliant one — quite dramatic in fact. The mistress of a famous opera-tenor had been found in her bed with her throat cut, and the tenor, — a ladies’ favourite, — had been arrested for the crime in spite of his gracefully stagey protestations of sorrow and innocence. This event was the talk of Paris, — so that one corpse more or less found floating in the river would at such a time of superior excitement, awaken very little if any interest. For though the natural stupidity of the unofficial man is great, that of the strictly official personage is even greater. I allude to the chiefs of the police. They are a very excellent class of blockheads and their intentions are no doubt admirably just and severe, — but they have too much routine, — too many little absurd minutiæ of rule and etiquette out of which they can seldom be persuaded to move. It follows therefore that the perpetrators of crime having no specially designed routine, and being generally totally lacking in etiquette, very often get the best of it, and that nine out of every ten murders remain undiscovered. It was so in my case; — it is so, you may sure, in many another. Mere formal rule must be done away with in the task of discovering a murderer, — there must be less writing of documents, and tying of tape and docketing of accounts, and more instant and decisive action. When, for example, a policeman on duty finds the body of a murdered and mutilated woman in a pool of blood on a doorstep, and after much cogitation and reflection, decides that bloodhounds might be useful in tracking the murderer, he would do well to get those bloodhounds at once, and not wait till the next day when the scent will be more than difficult to pursue. But I have no wish to complain of the respectable muddlers who sit in their offices carefully writing descriptive reports and compiling evidence, while the criminal they are in search of probably passes under their very windows with a triumphant grin and scornful snap of his gory fingers, — not at all! On the contrary, I am very much obliged to them for never taking any trouble about me, and allowing me to roam through Paris at perfect liberty. For at the time I strangled my priestly victim, I had no wish to be even known as a murderer. ‘Extenuating circumstances’ would no doubt have been found sufficiently strong to save me from the guillotine, — but I really should not have cared particularly for the renown thus attained! Yes, renown! — why not? A notorious Paris murderer gains more renown in a day than a great genius in ten years! There is a difference in the quality of renown, you say? I fail to see it! There is a difference, if you like, in the character of the person renowned, — but the renown itself — the dirty hand-clapping of the many-tongued mob, — is almost the same. Because, they, the mob, never praise a great man without at the same time calumniating him for some trifling fault of character, — like- wise, they never cast their opprobrium at a criminal without discovering in him some faint speck of virtue of which they frequently make such a hullabaloo, that it sometimes looks as if they thought him a martyred saint after all! “Not this man but Barrabas!” is shouted all over the world to this day, — the crucifixion of great natures and the setting free of known robbers is the common and incessant custom of the crowd. We are told by the teachers of the present age, that Christianity is a myth, — its Founder a legendary personage, — but by all the creeds of this world and the next, the story remains and I fancy will continue to remain, a curiously true and significant symbol of Humanity!

  I suppose nearly a week must have passed since I had sent Silvion Guidèl to his account with that Deity he professed to serve, when one day, straying down a back-street which was a short cut to the obscure hotel I inhabited, I saw Pauline! It was dusk, and she was hurrying along rapidly; but for one instant I caught sight of the young childish face, the soft blue eyes, the dark curling clusters of hair. She did not perceive me, and I followed her at a distance, wondering whither she was bound and how she lived. She was miserably clad, — her figure looked thin and shadowy; — but she walked with a light swift step, — a step which to my idea seemed to imply that some interest or hope or ambition still kept her capable of living on, though lonely and abandoned in the wild and wicked world of Paris. Suddenly at a corner she turned and disappeared, — and though I pursued her almost at a run I could not discover in what direction she had gone. Provoked at my own stupidity, I rambled aimlessly up and down the place I found myself in, which was a mere slum, and was on the point of asking some questions at one of the fllthy-looking hovels close by, when a hand grasped me from behind, a loud laugh broke on my ears, and I turned to confront André Gessonex.

  “Have you come to pay me a visit, mon cher?” he asked, with a half mock, half ceremonious salutation. “By my faith, you do me an inestimable honour! I live here” — and he pointed to a miserable tenement house, the roof of which was half off and the three upper windows broken. “Behold!— ‘Appartements Meublés!’” And true enough, this grandiose announcement was distinctly to be read on a wooden placard dangling from one of the aforesaid broken windows. “I have the best floor,” he continued, “the ‘salon’ let us call it! — the other apartments I have not examined, but I should imagine they must be airy! No doubt they also command an open view from the roof, which would probably be an attraction. But enter, cher Beauvais! — enter! — I am delighted to welcome you! — the best I have of everything is at your service!”

  And with the oddest gestures of fantastic courtesy, he invited me to follow him.

  I hesitated a moment, — he looked so wild about the eyes, so gaunt and ghastly, that for the moment I wondered whether I was not perhaps entrusting myself to the tender mercies of a madman. Then I quickly remembered my own condition, — what if he were mad, I thought, his madness had not led him to commit Murder, — not yet! I had a certain dull curiosity to see what sort of a place he dwelt in, — I therefore complied
with his request, and stumbled after him up a crooked flight of stairs, nearly falling over a small child on the way, — a towzled half-naked creature who sat crouched in one of the darkest corners, biting a crust of bread and snarling over it in very much the fashion of an angry tiger-cat. Gessonex, hearing my smothered exclamation, turned round, spied this object and laughed delightedly.

  “Ah voilà!” he cried. “That is one of my models of the Stone Period! If you have kicked that charming boy by accident, Beauvais, do not trouble to ask his pardon! He will not appreciate the courtesy! Two sentiments alone inspire him — fear and ferocity!” And seizing the mass of hair and rags by its neck, he shook it to and fro violently, exclaiming, “Viens ici, bête! Montres tes dents et tes ongles! Viens!”

  The creature uttered some unintelligible sound, and got on its feet, still biting the crust and snarling, — and presently we all three stood in a low wide room, littered about with painter’s materials and various sorts of tawdry rubbish, where the first thing that riveted the eye was an enormous canvas stretched across the wall, on which the body of a nude Venus was displayed in all its rotundity, — the head, not yet being painted in was left to the imagination of the spectator. Gessonex, still grasping the bundle he called his “bête” threw himself down in a chair, after signing to me to take whatever seat I found convenient, — and, with the handle of a long paint-brush, began by degrees to lift the matted locks of hair from off the face of the mysterious object he held, who bit and growled on continuously, regardless of his patron’s attentions. Presently, a countenance became visible — the countenance of a mingled monkey and savage, — brutish, repulsive, terrible in all respects save for the eyes, which were magnificent, — jewel-like, clear and cruel as the eyes of a wolf or a snake.

  “There!” said Gessonex triumphantly, turning the strange physiognomy round towards me, “There’s a boy for you! He would do credit to the antediluvian age, when Man was still in process of formation. The chin, you see, is not developed, — the forehead recedes like that of the baboon ancestor, — the nose has not yet received its intellectual prominence, — but the eyes are perfectly formed. Now about these eyes, — you have in them the most complete disprovers of the poetical sentiment about ‘eyes being the windows of the soul,’ because this child has simply no soul. He is an animal, made merely, if we quote Scripture, to ‘arise, kill and eat.’ He has no idea of anything else, — his thoughts are as the thoughts of beasts, and the only sentences of intelligible speech he knows are my teaching. Hear him! — he will give you an excellent homily on the duty of life. Now tell me, mon singe,” he went on, addressing the boy, and artistically lifting up another of his matted curls with the paint-brush handle, “What is life! It is a mystery to us! Will you explain it?”

  The savage little creature glared from one to the other of us in sullen curiosity and fear, — his breath came quickly and he clenched his small grimy hands. He was evidently trying to remember something and found the effort exhausting. Presently between his set teeth came the words —

  “J’ai faim!”

  “Bravo!” said Gessonex approvingly, still arranging the hair of his protégé. “Very well said! You see, Beauvais, he understands life thoroughly, this child! ‘J’ai faim!’ All is said! It is the universal cry of existence — hunger! And the remarkable part of the whole affair is that the complaint is incessant; even Monsieur Gros-Jean, conscious of the well-rounded paunch he has acquired through over-feeding has never had enough, and at morning, noon, and evening, propounds the hunger problem afresh, and curses his chef for not providing more novelties in the cuisine. Humanity is never satisfied, — it ransacks earth, air, ocean, — it gathers together gold, jewels, palaces, ships, wine — and woman, — and then, when all is gotten that can be gained out of the labouring universe, it turns its savage face towards Heaven and apostrophizes Deity with a defiance. ‘This world is not enough for my needs!’ it cries. ‘I will put Orion in my pocket and wear the Pleiades in my button-hole! — I will have Eternity for my heritage and Thyself for my comrade l — j’ai faim!’”

  He laughed wildly, and opening a drawer near him, took out a small apple and threw it playfully aloft.

  “Catch!” he cried, and the boy, tossing up his head caught it between his teeth with extraordinary precision as it fell. “Well done! Now let us see you munch as Adam munched before you — ah! what a juicy flavour! — if it were only a stolen morsel, it would be ever so much sweeter! Sit there!” — and he pointed to an old bench in the opposite corner, whereon the strange child squatted obediently enough, his wonderful eyes sparkling with avidity as he plunged his sharp teeth in the fruit which was to him an evident rare delicacy. “He is the most admirable rat-hunter in Paris, I should say,” went on Gessonex, eyeing him encouragingly. “Sharp as a ferret and agile as a cat! — he kills the vermin by scores, and what is very human, eats them with infinite relish afterwards!”

  I shuddered.

  “Horrible!” I exclaimed involuntarily. “Does he starve, then?”

  Gessonex regarded me with a rather pathetic smile.

  “My friend, we all starve here,” he answered placidly. “It is the fashion of this particular quartier. Some of us, — myself for instance, — consider food a vulgar superfluity; and we take a certain honest pride in occasionally being able to dispense with it altogether. It is more à la mode in this neighbourhood, which, however, is quite aristocratic compared to some others close by! All the same I am really rather curious to know what has brought you here, mon cher! May I, without rudeness, ask the question?”

  “I saw a woman I thought I knew,” I answered evasively. “And I followed her.”

  “Ah! — And the result?”

  “No result at all. I lost sight of her suddenly, and do not know how or where she disappeared.”

  “Ah!” said Gessonex again meditatively. “Women are very plentiful in these parts, — that is, a certain sort of women, — the flotsam and jetsam of the demimonde. From warm palaces, and carriages drawn by high-fed prancing horses they come to this, — and then, — to that!”

  He pointed through the window and my eyes followed his gesture, — a glittering strip of water was just pallidly visible in the deepening twilight, — a curving gleam of the Seine. A faint tremor shook me, and to change the subject, I reverted once more to the ‘brute’ child, who had now finished his apple and sat glowering at us like a young owl from under his tangled bush of hair.

  “What is he?” I asked abruptly.

  “My dear Beauvais, I thought I had explained!” said Gessonex affably. “He is a type of the Age of Stone! But if you want a more explicit definition, I will be strictly accurate and call him a production of Absinthe!”

  I started, — then controlled myself as I saw that Gessonex regarded me intently. I forced a smile.

  “A production of Absinthe?” I echoed incredulously.

  “Precisely. Of Absinthe and Mania together. That is why I find him so intensely interesting. I know his pedigree, just as one knows the pedigree of a valuable dog or remarkable horse, — and it is full of significance. His grandfather was a man of science.”

  I burst out laughing at the incongruity of this statement, whereupon Gessonex shook his head at me in mock-solemn reproach.

  “Never laugh, mon ami, at a joke you do not entirely understand. You cannot understand, and you never will understand the awful witticisms of Mother Nature, — and it is a phase of her enormous jesting that I am about to relate to you. I repeat, — this boy’s grandfather was a man of science; — with a pair of spectacles fixed on his nose and a score or so of reference volumes at hand, he set about prying into the innermost recesses of creation. Through his lunettes he peered dubiously at the Shadow-Brightness called God, and declared Him to be non est. He weighed Man’s heart and mind in his small brazen scales, and fossilized both by his freezing analysis. He talked of Matter and of Force, — of Evolution and of Atoms. Love went on, Faith went on, Grief went on, Death went on, — he
had little or nothing to do with any of these, — his main object was to prove away the flesh and blood of Life, and leave it a mere bleached skeleton. He succeeded admirably, — and at the age of sixty, found himself alone with that skeleton! He dined with it, supped with it, slept with it. It confronted him at all hours and seasons, rattling its bones, and terrifying him with its empty eye-sockets and dangling jaws. At last, — one stormy night, — its hand roused him from sleep, and showed him the exact spot where his razor lay. He took the hint immediately, — made the long artistic slit across his throat which the skeleton so urgently recommended, — and died — or, to put it more delicately, departed to that mysterious region where lunettes are not worn, and knowledge is imparted without the aid of printer’s ink. He was a very interesting individual, — great when he was alive, according to the savants, — forgotten in the usual way, now he is dead.”