by Otto Penzler
“Er—thank you,” she said dryly, “Anyway, come in and make yourself comfortable, and tomorrow I’ll show you a perfect estate.”
Aylett studied his hostess carefully through dinner. He felt uneasy at what he saw whenever he caught her off her guard. He could hardly believe that this was the same woman whom he had welcomed as a bride only a few years ago. The lonely life had hardened her, but he had expected that. There was something more, though—a kind of bitter hardness, he called it, for want of a better term.
After her formal welcome Mrs. Sinclair spoke very little. She seemed preoccupied with the affairs of the plantation. “My very own stake in Africa,” she said. “Oh, how I love the country, its magic and mystery and its vast grandeur.” She reminded him how she had refused to go home. But tomorrow, she said, when he saw her Africa—the plantation—he would understand.
Aylett retired early, distinctly puzzled. He had noticed her looking over the swept and garnished tidiness of the plantation before she had said goodnight. She had unconsciously stretched out her hands to it in a kind of adoring supplication and yet, in the brilliant moonlight under this sensual adoration, he distinctly noticed the contrast of the hard lines on her face and the bitterness of the mouth. Africa . . .
Exhausted as he was, he slept well. Whether the little cross the padre had given him had anything to do with it or not, he did not know, but in the morning he had waked more refreshed than he had been for weeks. He looked forward to the visit over the estate.
Mrs. Sinclair had not exaggerated when she had used the word perfection. Fields had been hoed till not a stray blade of grass grew among the crops; barns stood in serried rows; wood fuel was stacked in the neatest of “cords”; the orchard and the kitchen garden were luxurious, and the pasture in the miniature home farm was the greenest he had seen in the tropics.
“For what?” his subconscious brain kept hammering at him. “Why—and above all, how?”
Aylett had noticed what only an expert would have seen. There was a great shortage of labour, though such workers as were dotted about seemed to be very busy.
As if she divined his thoughts, Mrs. Sinclair answered them. “My ‘boys’ work,” she said, in even tones as she flicked the hippo hide whip she carried.
Aylett raised his eyebrows. “Portuguese methods?” he asked quietly, and looked at the whip.
Mrs. Sinclair turned to him. For the first time he noticed her deliberate antagonism. “Not at all,” she said evenly. “A knowledge of how to get the most out of a native, a faculty which I notice officialdom has not yet acquired.”
The district officer took the rapier-like thrust without faltering. “Touché,” he answered, but nevertheless he knew he had not been wrong about the labour. “Queer,” he thought, “damnably queer . . .”
Mrs. Sinclair took no notice of his acknowledgement of her point. Her lips were set hard and she spoke coldly. She continued, “It’s only a matter of getting to the heart of Africa—the throbbing beating heart below all this—Africa has no use for those who do not join their own souls.” Suddenly she realized what she was saying, but before she could change the subject Aylett took up the question. He matched her tone.
“Very interesting . . .” he said, “but we don’t encourage Europeans, especially European women, to go ‘native.’ ”
The last word, however, was with the woman. “All the perspicacity of officialdom!” she murmured. Then she looked Aylett full in the face. “Do I sound native,” she said harshly, “or look native?”
Aylett was hardly listening. He was staring at her. Her eyes belied her words, for if ever he saw an expression of masterful, baleful perversion in any human face, he saw it then. He began to understand. . . .
He was thankful when the inspection was over, and felt relieved that she did not offer the formal suggestion that he should stay a little longer.
Five miles beyond her boundary he had a bivouac tent pitched behind a thorn-bush, and stored two days’ rations in its shade. He sent his safari on at the double to the mission station, and watched it till it was out of sight. Then he sat down to wait for the night.
“The heart of Africa . . .” he repeated to himself, but his voice was grim, and his eyes flashed in cold anger.
It was not till he heard the news drums throb that Aylett retraced his steps along the ill-defined track to the plantation. At the edge of the estate he merged himself in the shadows of the forest fringe, and gradually worked his way along the eucalyptus wind breaks. He crawled noiselessly as far as the tree which grew in the garden before the homestead.
In a little while he saw Mrs. Sinclair come out on to the verandah. Beside her stood a gigantic native who looked like some obscene devil, a witch doctor, sinister and grotesque, and naked but for a necklace of human bones dangling and rattling on his enormous chest. Daubs of white clay and red ochre plastered his face.
Only partly covered by a magnificent leopard skin, the white woman stepped down into the clearing and snapped the whip she had in her hands. It sounded like a revolver shot. As if it were a signal Aylett heard the roll of drums near at hand. From one of the barns began the most grotesque procession he had ever seen. The drums throbbed malevolently—the short staccato throb that had preceded the fetid mist which had almost suffocated him. Louder they grew and louder. The message rolled through the jungles, was caught up and answered again. There was no doubt as to its meaning.
He crouched lower as the drums approached, his eyes fixed on the macabre scene before him. Following the drums, as regularly as a column on the march, moved the men who worked the perfect plantation. In columns of four they moved, heavy footed and automatic—but they moved. Every now and then the crack of that terrible whip sounded like a pistol-shot through the roll of drums, and every now and then Aylett could see that cruel thong cut through naked flesh, and a figure drop silently, only to pick itself up again and rejoin the column.
They marched round the garden. As they came near Aylett held his breath. He had to strain every nerve in his body to prevent himself screaming. Almost as if he were hypnotised he looked on the dull expressionless faces of the silent, slow-moving automatons—faces on which there was not even despair. They simply moved to the command of that merciless whip, as they would shortly move off to their allotted task in the fields. Bowed and crushed they passed by him without a sound.
The nervous tension almost broke Aylett. Then the realisation came to him—these pitiful automatons were dead—and they were not allowed to die. . . .
The figures in the unbelievable photograph came back to him; the padre’s words; the magic of the voodoo, acknowledged as fact by the greatest Christian Church in history. The dead . . . who were not allowed to die . . . Zombies, the natives called them in hushed voices, wherever the curse of Noah was borne . . . and she called it knowing Africa.
A cold terror came over Aylett. The long column was nearing its end. Mrs. Sinclair was walking down the line, her whip cracking mercilessly, her face distorted with perverted lust, the foul witch doctor leering over her naked shoulder. She stopped by the tree behind which he crouched. A single bent figure followed the column. With a gasp of horror Aylett recognized Sinclair. Then the whip crashed across the poor thing who had once died in his arms.
“My God!” Aylett muttered helplessly. “It’s not possible—” but he knew that the witch doctor’s voodoo had thrown the impossibility in his face. The whip cracked again, hurling the lone white Zombie to the ground. Slowly it picked itself up—without a sound, without expression—and automatically followed the column. He heard, as in a nightmare, unbelievably foul obscenities fall from the woman’s lips—cruel taunts. . . . And the whip cracked and bit and tore, again and yet again. At the head of the column the drums throbbed on.
Horror gave way at last. Aylett found himself desperately clutching the tiny cross the padre had given him. With the other hand he found his revolver and took aim with icy coolness. . . . Four times he fired at a point above the leopard
skin and twice into the ochred face of the witch doctor. . . . Then he leapt forward, cross in hand, to what had once died as Sinclair.
The figure was standing silently, bent and expressionless. It made no sign as Aylett approached, but as the crucifix touched it a tremor shook the frame. The drooping eyelids lifted and the lips moved. “You have repaid,” they whispered gently. The body swayed slightly and toppled over. “Dust to dust . . .” Aylett prayed. In a few moments all that remained was a little greyish powder. A tropical year had passed, Aylett remembered with a shudder. . . . Then he turned, and, crucifix in hand, walked along the column. . . .
GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850–1893) was born in Normandy, France, to an old and distinguished family. His parents divorced when he was eleven and his mother was befriended by Gustave Flaubert, who took an interest in her elder son, becoming his literary mentor. Immediately after graduating high school, Maupassant served with distinction in the Franco-Prussian War, then took a job as a civil servant for nearly ten years. He was beginning to write, first poetry, which was undistinguished, then short stories, most of which Flaubert forced him to discard as unworthy. When his first story was published in a collection with such literary lions of the day as Émile Zola, it outshone them all and his future was secured. Over the next decade, he wrote more than three hundred short stories, six novels, three travel books, poetry, several plays, and more than three hundred magazine articles.
His naturalistic style was a powerful influence on other great short-story writers, including O. Henry and W. Somerset Maugham. Unfortunately, Maupassant died before his forty-third birthday. As an ardent womanizer, he had contracted syphilis when he was quite young and suffered from other ailments as well. His brother died in an insane asylum, and when Maupassant felt he was losing his mind, he twice attempted suicide; he died a lunatic.
“Was It a Dream?” was first collected in the United States in Pierre and Jean, Ball-of-Tallow: The Complete Works of Guy de Maupassant (Boston: C. D. Brainard, 1910).
“I HAD LOVED her madly! Why does one love? Why does one love? How queer it is to see only one being in the world, to have only one thought in one’s mind, only one desire in the heart, and only one name on the lips; a name which comes up continually, which rises like the water in a spring, from the depths of the soul, which rises to the lips, and which one repeats over and over again which one whispers ceaselessly, everywhere, like a prayer.
“I am going to tell you our story, for love only has one, which is always the same. I met her and loved her; that is all. And for a whole year I have lived on her tenderness, on her caresses, in her arms, in her dresses, on her words, so completely wrapped up, bound, imprisoned in everything which came from her, that I no longer knew whether it was day or night, if I was dead or alive, on this old earth of ours, or elsewhere.
“And then she died. How? I do not know. I no longer know; but one evening she came home wet, for it was raining heavily, and the next day she coughed, and she coughed for about a week, and took to her bed. What happened I do not remember now, but doctors came, wrote and went away. Medicines were brought, and some women made her drink them. Her hands were hot, her forehead was burning, and her eyes bright and sad. When I spoke to her, she answered me, but I do not remember what we said. I have forgotten everything, everything, everything! She died, and I very well remember her slight, feeble sigh. The nurse said: ‘Ah!’ and I understood, I understood!
“I knew nothing more, nothing. I saw a priest, who said: ‘Your mistress?’ and it seemed to me as if he were insulting her. As she was dead, nobody had the right to know that any longer, and I turned him out. Another came who was very kind and tender, and I shed tears when he spoke to me about her.
“They consulted me about the funeral, but I do not remember anything that they said, though I recollected the coffin, and the sound of the hammer when they nailed her down in it. Oh! God, God!
“She was buried! Buried! She! In that hole! Some people came—female friends. I made my escape, and ran away; I ran, and then I walked through the streets, and went home, and the next day I started on a journey.”
“YESTERDAY I RETURNED to Paris, and when I saw my room again—our room, our bed, our furniture, everything that remains of the life of a human being after death, I was seized by such a violent attack of fresh grief, that I was very near opening the window and throwing myself out into the street. As I could not remain any longer among these things, between these walls which had enclosed and sheltered her, and which retained a thousand atoms of her, of her skin and of her breath in their imperceptible crevices, I took up my hat to make my escape, and just as I reached the door, I passed the large glass in the hall, which she had put there so that she might be able to look at herself every day from head to foot as she went out, to see if her toilet looked well, and was correct and pretty, from her little boots to her bonnet.
“And I stopped short in front of that looking-glass in which she had so often been reflected. So often, so often, that it also must have retained her reflection. I was standing there, trembling, with my eyes fixed on the glass—on that flat, profound, empty glass—which had contained her entirely, and had possessed her as much as I had, as my passionate looks had. I felt as if I loved that glass. I touched it, it was cold. Oh! the recollection! sorrowful mirror, burning mirror, horrible mirror, which makes us suffer such torments! Happy are the men whose hearts forget everything that it has contained, everything that has passed before it, everything that has looked at itself in it, that has been reflected in its affection, in its love! How I suffer!
“I went on without knowing it, without wishing it; I went towards the cemetery. I found her simple grave, a white marble cross, with these few words:
“ ‘She loved, was loved, and died.’
“She is there, below, decayed! How horrible! I sobbed with my forehead on the ground, and I stopped there for a long time, a long time. Then I saw that it was getting dark, and a strange, a mad wish, the wish of a despairing lover seized me. I wished to pass the night, the last night in weeping on her grave. But I should be seen and driven out. How was I to manage? I was cunning, and got up, and began to roam about in that city of the dead, I walked and walked. How small this city is, in comparison with the other, the city in which we live: And yet, how much more numerous the dead are than the living. We want high houses, wide streets, and much room for the four generations who see the daylight at the same time, drink water from the spring, and wine from the vines, and eat the bread from the plains.
“And for all the generations of the dead, for all that ladder of humanity that has descended down to us, there is scarcely anything afield, scarcely anything! The earth takes them back, oblivion effaces them. Adieu!
“At the end of the abandoned cemetery, I suddenly perceived the one where those who have been dead a long time finish mingling with the soil, where the crosses themselves decay, where the last comers will be put to-morrow. It is full of untended roses, of strong and dark cypress trees, a sad and beautiful garden, nourished on human flesh.
“I was alone, perfectly alone, and so I crouched in a green tree, and hid myself there completely among the thick and somber branches, and I waited, clinging to the stem, like a shipwrecked man does to a plank.
“When it was quite dark, I left my refuge and began to walk softly, slowly, inaudibly, through that ground full of dead people, and I wandered about for a long time, but could not find her again. I went on with extended arms, knocking against the tombs with my hands, my feet, my knees, my chest, even with my head, without being able to find her. I touched and felt about like a blind man groping his way, I felt the stones, the crosses, the iron railings, the metal wreaths, and the wreaths of faded flowers! I read the names with my fingers, by passing them over the letters. What a night! What a night! I could not find her again!
“There was no moon. What a night! I am frightened, horribly frightened in these narrow paths, between two rows of graves. Graves! graves! graves! nothing but grav
es! On my right, on my left, in front of me, around me, everywhere there were graves! I sat down on one of them, for I could not walk any longer, my knees were so weak. I could hear my heart beat! And I could hear something else as well. What? A confused, nameless noise. Was the noise in my head in the impenetrable night, or beneath the mysterious earth, the earth sown with human corpses? I looked all around me, but I cannot say how long I remained there; I was paralyzed with terror, drunk with fright, ready to shout out, ready to die.
“Suddenly, it seemed to me as if the slab of marble on which I was sitting, was moving. Certainly, it was moving, as if it were being raised. With a bound, I sprang on to the neighboring tomb, and I saw, yes, I distinctly saw the stone which I had just quitted, rise upright, and the dead person appeared, a naked skeleton, which was pushing the stone back with its bent back. I saw it quite clearly, although the night was so dark. On the cross I could read:
“ ‘Here lies Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. He loved his family, was kind and honorable, and died in the grace of the Lord.’
“The dead man also read what was inscribed on his tombstone; then he picked up a stone off the path, a little, pointed stone, and began to scrape the letters carefully. He slowly effaced them altogether, and with the hollows of his eyes he looked at the places where they had been engraved, and, with the tip of the bone, that had been his forefinger, he wrote in luminous letters, like those lines which one traces on walls with the tip of a lucifer match:
“ ‘Here reposes Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. He hastened his father’s death by his unkindness, as he wished to inherit his fortune, he tortured his wife, tormented his children, deceived his neighbors, robbed everyone he could, and died wretched.’
“When he had finished writing, the dead man stood motionless, looking at his work, and on turning round I saw that all the graves were open, that all the dead bodies had emerged from them, and that all had effaced the lies inscribed on the gravestones by their relations, and had substituted the truth instead. And I saw that all had been tormentors of their neighbors—malicious, dishonest, hypocrites, liars, rogues, calumniators, envious; that they had stolen, deceived, performed every disgraceful, every abominable action, these good fathers, these faithful wives, these devoted sons, these chaste daughters, these honest tradesmen, these men and women who were called irreproachable, and they were called irreproachable, and they were all writing at the same time, on the threshold of their eternal abode, the truth, the terrible and the holy truth which everybody is ignorant of, or pretends to be ignorant of, while the others are alive.
