Thirty Hours with a Corpse

by Maurice Level

  “Why don’t you send a telegram to say you’re very sick?”

  “But Aunt Sophie is already on the way!”

  “Suppose I try to find another vase like it?”

  “In an hour?”

  They waited, overwhelmed. At three o’clock Aunt Sophie came. Immediately the pallor of her young relatives struck her.

  “What is wrong, my children? You look out of sorts.”

  “Henri will explain,” sobbed Mme. Jutelier. And Henri explained. “A misfortune, a great misfortune. The beautiful vase that you gave us, the vase we loved so much—all broken! That miserable maid of ours. We told her never to dust it with a feather duster, and she knocked it off on the floor this very morning.”

  He burst into tears, which were almost genuine. Aunt Sophie drew herself up and murmured, “That is certainly too bad. That is certainly too bad.”

  “Oh,” groaned her niece, “I shall never feel the same again.”

  “You must never utter such words except over human beings,” said her aunt with a certain dryness.

  “And yet—oh aunt, aunt, you do not know—you can’t know how much we liked it. It was so pretty, and then, besides, it came from you.”

  Aunt Sophie had not yet accepted the armchair that her nephew was delicately pushing up behind her. Madame Jutelier waited for a gesture, for a word, but Aunt Sophie crossed her cloak over her breast and started toward the door. M. and Mme. Jutelier held out suppliant arms toward her. She paused and lifted her finger: “Never mind. I know where to find one just like it, and I will go there right away. Only this time you must do what I do with my own valuable things. You must have it cemented fast to the mantelpiece. All you have to do is to hunt up my workman. In fact, it will be simpler if I send him to you myself.”

  Night and Silence

  THEY WERE old, crippled, horrible. The woman hobbled about on two crutches; one of the men, blind, walked with his eyes shut, his hands outstretched, his fingers spread open; the other, a deaf-mute, followed with his head lowered, rarely raising the sad, restless eyes that were the only sign of life in his impassive face.

  It was said that they were two brothers and a sister, and that they were united by a savage affection. One was never seen without the other; at the church doors they shrank back into the shadows, keeping away from those professional beggars who stand boldly in the full light so that passersby may be ashamed to ignore their importunacy. They did not ask for anything. Their appearance alone was a prayer for help. As they moved silently through the narrow, gloomy streets, a mysterious trio, they seemed to personify Age, Night and Silence.

  One evening, in their hovel near the gates of the city, the woman died peacefully in their arms, without a cry, with just one long look of distress which the deaf-mute saw, and one violent shudder which the blind man felt because her hand clasped his wrist. Without a sound she passed into eternal silence.

  Next day, for the first time, the two men were seen without her. They dragged about all day without even stopping at the baker’s shop where they usually received doles of bread. Toward dusk, when lights began to twinkle at the dark crossroads, when the reflection of lamps gave the houses the appearance of a smile, they bought with the few halfpence they had received two poor little candles, and they returned to the desolate hovel where the old sister lay on her pallet with no one to watch or pray for her.

  They kissed the dead woman. The man came to put her in her coffin. The deal boards were fastened down and the coffin was placed on two wooden trestles; then, once more alone, the two brothers laid a sprig of boxwood on a plate, lighted their candles, and sat down for the last all-too-short vigil.

  Outside, the cold wind played round the joints of the illfitting door. Inside, the small trembling flames barely broke the darkness with their yellow light. . . . Not a sound. . . .

  For a long time they remained like this, praying, remembering, meditating. . . .

  Tired out with weeping, at last they fell asleep.

  When they woke it was still night. The lights of the candles still glimmered, but they were lower. The cold that is the precursor of dawn made them shiver. But there was something else—what was it? They leaned forward, the one trying to see, the other to hear. For some time they remained motionless; then, there being no repetition of what had roused them, they lay down again and began to pray.

  Suddenly, for the second time, they sat up. Had either of them been alone, he would have thought himself the plaything of some fugitive hallucination. When one sees without hearing, or hears without seeing, illusion is easily created. But something abnormal was taking place; there could be no doubt about it, since both were affected, since it appealed both to eyes and ears at the same time; they were fully conscious of this, but were unable to understand.

  Between them they had the power of complete comprehension. Singly, each had but a partial, agonizing conception.

  The deaf-mute got up and walked about. Forgetting his brother’s infirmity, the blind man asked in a voice choked with fear:

  “What is it? What’s the matter? Why have you got up?”

  He heard him moving, coming and going, stopping, starting off again, and again stopping; and having nothing but these sounds to guide his reason, his terror increased till his teeth began to chatter. He was on the point of speaking again, but remembered, and relapsed into a muttering:

  “What can he see? What is it?”

  The deaf-mute took a few more steps, rubbed his eyes, and, presumably reassured, went back to his mattress and fell asleep.

  The blind man heaved a sigh of relief, and silence fell once more, broken only by the prayers he mumbled in a monotonous undertone, his soul benumbed by grief as he waited till sleep should come and pour light into his darkness.

  He was almost sleeping when the murmurs that had before made him tremble wrenched him from an uneasy doze.

  It sounded like a soft scratching mingled with light blows on a plank, curious rubbings, and stifled moans.

  He leaped up. The deaf-mute had not moved. Feeling that the fear that culminates in panic was threatening him, he strove to reason with himself:

  “Why should this noise terrify me? . . . The night is always full of sounds. . . . My brother is moving uneasily in his sleep . . . yes, that’s it. . . . Just now I heard him walking up and down, and there was the same noise. . . . It must have been the wind. . . . But I know the sound of the wind, and it has never been like that . . . it was a noise I had never heard. . . . What could it have been? No . . . it could not be . . .”

  He bit his fists. An awful suspicion had come to him.

  “Suppose . . . no, it’s not possible. . . . Suppose it was . . . there it is again! . . . Again . . . louder and louder . . . someone is scratching, scratching, knocking. . . . My God! A voice . . . her voice! She is calling! She is crying! Help, help!”

  He threw himself out of bed and roared:

  “François! . . . quick! Help! . . . Look! . . .”

  He was half mad with fear. He tore wildly at his hair, shouting:

  “Look! . . . You’ve got eyes, you, you can see! . . .”

  The moans became louder, the raps firmer. Feeling his way, stumbling against the walls, knocking against the packing-cases that served as furniture, tripping in the holes in the floor, he staggered about trying to find his sleeping brother.

  He fell and got up again, bruised, covered with blood, sobbing:

  “I have no eyes! I have no eyes!”

  He had upset the plate on which lay the sprig of box, and the sound of the earthenware breaking on the floor gave the finishing touch to his panic.

  “Help! What have I done? Help!”

  The noises grew louder and more terrifying, and as an agonized cry sounded, his last doubts left him. Behind his empty eyes, he imagined he saw the horrible thing. . . .

  He saw the old sister beating against the tightly closed lid of her coffin. He saw her superhuman terror, her agony, a thousand times worse than that of any
other death. . . . She was there, alive, yes, alive, a few steps away from him . . . but where? She heard his steps, his voice, and he, blind, could do nothing to help her.

  Where was his brother? Flinging his arms from right to left, he knocked over the candles: the wax flowed over his fingers, hot, like blood. The noise grew louder, more despairing; the voice was speaking, saying words that died away in smothered groans. . . .

  “Courage!” he shrieked. “I’m here! I’m coming!”

  He was now crawling along on his knees, and a sudden turn flung him against a bed; he thrust out his arms, felt a body, seized it by the shoulders and shook it with all the strength that remained in him.

  Violently awakened, the deaf-mute sprang up uttering horrible cries and trying to see, but now that the candles were out, he too was plunged into night, the impenetrable darkness that held more terror for him than for the blind man. Stupefied with sleep, he groped about wildly with his hands, which closed in a viselike grip on his brother’s throat, stifling cries of:

  “Look! Look!”

  They rolled together on the floor, upsetting all that came in their way, knotted together, ferociously tearing each other with tooth and nail. In a very short time their hoarse breathing had died away. The voice, so distant and yet so near, was cut short by a spasm . . . there was a cracking noise . . . the imprisoned body was raising itself in one last supreme effort for freedom . . . a grinding noise . . . sobs . . . again the grinding noise . . . silence. . . .

  Outside, the trees shuddered as they bowed in the gale; the rain beat against the walls. The late winter’s dawn was still crouching on the edge of the horizon. Inside the walls of the hovel, not a sound, not a breath.

  Night and Silence.

  The Cripple

  BECAUSE HE had good manners, and although there was no one present but Farmer Galot, Trache said on entering:

  “Good day, gentlemen!”

  “You again!” growled Galot, without turning around.

  “To be sure,” replied Trache.

  He raised his two maimed hands, as if explaining, by their very appearance, his instructions.

  Two years ago, in harvest-time, a threshing-machine had caught him up and, by a miracle, dashed him to the ground again instead of crushing him to death. They had borne him off, covered with blood, shrieking, with arms mangled, a rib smashed in, and spitting out his teeth. There remained from the accident a certain dullness of intellect, short breath, a whistling sound that seemed to grope for words at the bottom of his chest, scrape them out of his throat, and jumble them up as they passed his bare gums, and a pair of crooked hands that he held out before him in an awkward and apprehensive manner.

  “Well, what do you want?” snapped Galot.

  “My compensation money,” answered Trache with a weak smile.

  “Compensation money! I haven’t owed you anything for a long time. There’s nothing the matter with you now but laziness and a bad disposition. To begin with, you were drunk when the thing happened. I needn’t have given you anything.”

  “I was not drunk,” said Trache quietly.

  The farmer lost all patience.

  “At this moment you can use your hands as well as anybody. You keep up the sham before people, but when you are alone you do what you like with them.”

  “I don’t move them then; I can’t,” mumbled Trache.

  “I tell you, you are an impostor, a trickster, a rascal; I say that you are fleecing me because I have not been firmer with you, that you are making a little fortune out of my money, but that you shall not have another cent. There, that’s final. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, from your point of view,” assented Trache without moving.

  Galot flung his cap on the table and began to pace the room with long strides.

  Trache shook his head and hunched up his shoulders. At last Galot squared up before him.

  “How much do you want to settle for good and all? Suppose we say five hundred francs and make an end of it?”

  “I want what is due to me according to the judgment of the court.”

  Galot became transported with rage:

  “Ne’er-do-well, lazy-bones, good-for-nothing; I know what you told the court through the mouth of your doctor, and why you would not let mine examine you.”

  “It was upon the sworn evidence of the doctors that the case was decided,” observed the cripple.

  “Ah, it isn’t they who have to pay!” sneered Galot. “Let me see your hands. . . . Let me look, I say: I know something about injuries.”

  Trache stretched out his arms and presented the wrists. Galot took them between his heavy hands, turned them over, turned them back, feeling the bones and the fleshy parts, as he would have done with cattle at a fair. Now and then Trache made a wry face and drew back his shoulder. At last Galot pushed him away with brutal force.

  “You are artful, cunning. But look out for yourself: I am keeping my eye on you, and when I have found you out, look out for yourself ! You will end by laughing on the other side of your face, and to get your living you will have to work—you hear what I say?—to work.”

  “I should like nothing better,” sighed the cripple.

  Pale with wrath, Galot emptied a purse of silver money on the table, counted it and pushed it toward him.

  “There’s your money; now be off.”

  “If you would be so good as to put it in my blouse,” suggested Trache, “seeing that I can’t do it myself. . . .”

  Then he said, as on entering: “Good day, gentlemen,” and with stuffed pocket, shaking head and unsteady step, he took his departure.

  To return to his lodging he had to pass along the riverside. In the fields the patient oxen trudged on their way. Laborers were binding the sheaves amid the shocks of corn; and across the flickering haze of the sultry air the barking of dogs came with softened intonation.

  Near a bend of the river, where it deepened into a little pool, a woman was washing linen. The water ran at her feet, flecked with foam and in places clouded with a pearly tint.

  “Well, are things going as you wish, Françoise?” asked Trache.

  “Oh, well enough,” said she. “And you?”

  “The same as usual . . . with my miserable hands.”

  He sighed, and the coins jingled under his blouse. Françoise winked at him.

  “All the same it isn’t so bad—what the threshing-machine has done for you, eh? . . . And then, to be sure, it’s only right; Galot can well afford to pay.”

  “If I weren’t crippled for life, I wouldn’t ask for anything.”

  Thereupon she began to laugh, with shoulders raised and mallet held aloft. She was a handsome girl, and even a good girl, and more than once he had talked to her in the meadow, but now he reddened with anger.

  “What is the matter with you all—dropping hints and poking your fun at me?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “If I gossip it’s only for the fun of gossiping.”

  He sat down near her, mollified, and listened as she beat her linen. Then, wanting to smoke, and unable to use his helpless hands, he asked her:

  “Would you mind getting my pouch out of my pocket and filling my pipe for me?”

  She wiped her hands on her apron, searched in his blouse, filled his pipe, struck a match and, shielding it with her hand, said jokingly:

  “You’re lucky in meeting me.”

  He bent forward to light his pipe. At the same moment she slipped on the bank, lost a sabot, threw up her arms and fell backward into the water.

  Seeing her fall, Trache sprang up. She had sunk immediately, dragging her washtub after her, in a place where the water was deep and encumbered with weeds. Then her head reappeared, stretched out into the air, and she cried, already half choking:

  “Your hand! Your hand!”

  Trache stopped short, his pipe shaking in the corner of his mouth. Shriller, more despairingly came the cry:

  “Your hand! I’m drowning. Help! .
. .”

  Some men in a neighboring field were running. But they were at a great distance and could only be seen as shadows moving over the corn.

  Françoise sank again, rose, sank, rose once more. No sound came from her lips now: her face was terrible in its agony of supplication. Then she sank finally; the weeds, scattered in all directions, closed up again; their tangled network lay placid as before under the current. And that was all.

  It was only after an hour’s search that the body was found, enmeshed in the river growth, the clothes floating over the head. Trache stamped on the ground.

  “I, a man, and powerless to do anything! . . . Curses, curses on my miserable hands!”

  They tried to calm him as they condoled with him on his wretched lot, accompanying him to his cottage in their desire to soothe. Seeing him approach in this way, his wife uttered a piercing cry. What new disaster had befallen her husband? . . . They told her of the catastrophe, and of his anguish at not being able to save Françoise, whereupon she joined her lamentations to his.

  But when they were alone behind closed doors, taking off his hat with a brisk movement, Trache rubbed his benumbed hands, stretched out his fingers, worked his joints, drew forth his pouch full of coins, flung it on the table and said:

  “No, damn it. A fine business if I had given her my hand and she had gone and chattered to Galot! . . . No! damn it . . .”

  The Look

  THE LOG fire was dying in the grate. About the whole room, lighted by a too heavily shaded lamp, there was something vaguely menacing that chilled my blood the moment I entered it.

  My friend came forward. “I am glad to see you, very glad,” he said, holding out his hand.

  He had aged and altered so that I hardly recognized him. Extending his hand in the direction of the fireplace, he said in a low voice, “My friend Janville . . . my wife.”

  I discerned a very pale face and a slender form that bowed slightly, while a subdued voice, a melancholy, weary voice, murmured, “We are pleased to see you here, Monsieur.”