The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries

by The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries (retail) (epub)

  Little by little, he sank to sleep. Olga, crouching in one corner of the opposite sofa, warmed her hands upon the chimney of the lantern, hidden beneath her cloak. From time to time she shuddered, besieged with fears of the cold and the dark, besides remorse for the atrocious crime, disproportionate to even the worst of human sufferings. Her woman’s heart, too tender to understand Loris’s savage passion, turned to her love for him as to a refuge—and meanwhile, he was able to sleep tranquilly above the mine that he had laid!

  III

  From that day forward, everything worked in their favor; but the relations between Olga and Loris became more and more strained. Three days later, the azure of the sky had turned to white, and the cold had perceptibly diminished. These were the first symptoms of snow, which, driven by an impetuous wind, began that evening to fall over houses and streets, like a storm of fine dust. Loris was in readiness. As he left the house, at half-past ten, the storm-swept square was empty.

  Lemm saw Loris move off in the direction of the theater, which could hardly be distinguished through the cloud of snowflakes. The street lamps glimmered faintly, as if seen through a thick fog. The cold was increasing; the whole square was already white, and it remained white, in spite of passing carriages and people. It was time for Lemm to do his part. Gathering his courage, he made his way back to the corner where Loris’s house stood, twirling his stick with assumed carelessness, but slackened his pace, as he noticed an approaching carriage. That would be the best moment to give the blow. As the horses passed noisily, their steel-shod hoofs striking the pavement through the light covering of snow, he pretended to stumble and struck a powerful blow upon the pipe that resounded dully. To Lemm it sounded like a formidable explosion; his ears buzzed painfully, his head whirled, and he instinctively threw himself prostrate, in order to escape the notice of the policeman, who must infallibly be coming. But no policeman came, no one seemed to have heard. Becoming calmer, he inserted three fingers through the puncture, found the wire, drew it forth, and stretched it a few yards along the wall. His part of the work was done and he was safe.

  Brushing the snow from his coat, he turned back to a point from which he could watch for Loris. But growing anxiety made it impossible for him to stand still. What could have happened to Loris? Madly he hurried on, almost running, meaning to pass close to his friend and tell him to make haste; then checked himself. If Loris saw him approaching he might mistake him for an enemy. Shortly after, he perceived a white mass looming up from the direction of the square. Loris was approaching with methodical slowness. Lemm divined that he had the coil in his hand, and that he was treading on the wire as it unrolled, in order to bury it more effectually in the snow; immediately he set himself to do likewise. This was the most perilous moment of all; any passer-by crossing their line might catch his toe in the wire, and stop to investigate.

  When they met, Loris flung him the end of the coil, saying, “Take the pliers out of my pocket and make the connection, my fingers are numb.” Lemm, who had already snatched off his gloves, rapidly made the joint, hiding the rest of the wire in his pocket.

  “Now Russia is in our hands!” As he spoke, Loris’s voice trembled from the cold. Yet they must remain at least two hours longer waiting for the snow to become deep enough to hide the wire beyond possible discovery.

  Three hours later Loris was asleep; Olga still stood before the window, her burning forehead pressed against the glass; Lemm, sitting by the stove, drank and drank.

  IV

  The Emperor arrived in Moscow on the morning of January 6th. The evening of the 8th would be the gala night at the theater. Those last two days seemed an eternity. The imminence of the catastrophe oppressed them like an unforeseen fatality. Loris and Olga had ceased even to speak to each other, and Lemm avoided coming to their apartment. Meanwhile Loris had been undergoing the worst strain of all, because the city authorities had kept workmen busy digging a number of holes in the snow throughout the square, to make place for the bonfires that were to keep the coachmen warm while waiting for the close of the performance. He had forgotten this custom, which might easily defeat his whole attempt, if by chance a single pile should be placed along the line of the wire. But as luck would have it, they came nowhere near.

  The sight of the Square, with its tumult of people and carriages, fascinated him. The gay mood of the public was steadily augmenting; the massing throngs would be content to remain for long hours, unconscious of the cold, consumed with curiosity regarding this festival from which they were excluded, worshiping from without, as if before a mysterious temple. The great woodpiles were all ablaze, sending up spirals of ruddy flame, that drowned the light of the street lamps, and seemed to impart an eddying motion to all the surrounding buildings. Carriages found difficulty in cleaving a furrow through the compact mass of humanity, even when the dragoons, posted there to keep order, spurred forward their horses into the thick of the crowd. From every window lights were shining; from every doorway came a joyous glow; while the roar of the rising tide of men and women continued to gain volume, mingling in the air with the whirling smoke of the bonfires. And the theater, whiter than ever in the midst of the incandescence, flung back the light from all its dazzling walls, as wave after wave of illumination ran over their surface as over the gleaming surface of water.

  Loris summoned Olga and Lemm, bidding the former stand guard at the window and give notice if any suspicious person should enter the house; while the latter was to go to the theater, and wait in the entrance for the Prince.

  The performance had already begun, when Lemm, working blindly with shoulders and elbows, reached the front row, before the massive portico of the main entrance. The lobby of the theater emitted the blinding glow of a furnace, within which the arriving guests were, one after another, successively engulfed, still enveloped in their costly furs.

  The people around him were shouting and struggling and wasting their efforts in vain attempts to break through the lines and obtain a nearer view of that other crowd of aristocratic guests.

  Suddenly the Prince appeared in the entrance, flung himself down the two outside steps, his coat unbuttoned and flying open, revealing his decorations. Lemm sprang forward, slipping behind the dragoon’s horse. “Prince!” he exclaimed.

  The dragoon was about to drive him back again, when the Prince turned and waved the soldier aside. “Oh, hurry, hurry!” he said, dragging Lemm along.

  “What has happened?” questioned Lemm, whose numbed limbs found difficulty in keeping up with him.

  The other replied with a gesture of despair. They were halfway across the Square; carriages impeded their progress, while the snow, crushed by all those trampling feet, had become perilously slippery. Two or three times, in trying to dodge the passing wheels, they were on the point of falling. As they passed one of the bonfires, Lemm got a good view of his companion’s face; it looked ghastly. The Prince plunged ahead, in furious haste, towards Loris’s house.

  When they entered the cabinet, Olga, who had recognized them from the window, was already there, waiting at the door. The cabinet was almost in darkness. The single flame of a kerosene lamp that stood near the electric battery was shielded by a green shade, that seemed to concentrate all its rays upon the gleaming nickel of the electric key.

  Loris arose, pushing back his chair, but the altered expression of their faces arrested him. Lemm had entered close upon the Prince, whose labored breathing seemed steadily growing more painful. Suddenly the Prince staggered and grasped at a chair for support. Loris gazed in his face with piercing eyes.

  “The Emperor?” he questioned. But the other, staggering forward another step, answered precipitately, in strangling tones:

  “My daughter is there!”

  Loris, imagining that he was about to fling himself upon the electric transmitter, turned swiftly and laid his hand upon it. But the Prince recoiled in horror; his face wa
s livid, his eyes staring wildly.

  “No! no!” he cried pantingly. “Wait! oh, wait!”

  Olga and Lemm came nearer. Loris, foreseeing a startling explanation, had turned even whiter than his wont, wearing that sinister expression of a face carved in marble, which Olga knew only too well. One and all, they scarcely dared to breathe.

  “My daughter is there!” repeated the Prince, as though in these simple words he had with one supreme effort condensed his final argument.

  Loris made no answer.

  Then the Prince made a gesture of hopeless impotence, as if now for the first time he realized that he was face to face with the impossible. His face had become the color of clay, his eyes shot forth flame. He drew himself to his full height; an unavailing struggle was about to begin. Loris turned upon him a glacial glance, and grasped the key of the transmitter in the hollow of his hand.

  “Wait!” cried the Prince once more. “Grant me just a word. My daughter—can’t you understand?—she entered the theater just a minute ago——” His lips were trembling convulsively. “I was in my box with the Minister of the Navy; I had noticed that one of the boxes opposite was empty; suddenly she came in, ahead of the rest of her party. She had not intended to go to-night. For God’s sake wait!” he cried, seeing a movement of the hand upon the key. “She is my only child, the one being in the world who loves me. I did not dare to stop, to warn her, to invent some excuse to bring her away. I was afraid, horribly, afraid, that you might not wait my signal before touching the key.” Pausing, he gazed anxiously at Loris. The latter remained silent, impassively examining the batteries.

  “What!” cried the Prince, “will you not even answer me?” He glanced around, as if invoking aid from Lemm and Olga; the latter left the room, apparently unable to endure the painful scene.

  “What is the use of discussing?” replied Loris.

  The Prince advanced a few steps, but something in Loris’s glance warned him that the least attempt at violence would be the signal for pressing the key.

  “You place your daughter’s welfare above that of Russia?”

  “We can wait, and mine the theater at St. Petersburg!”

  “Revolutions cannot be countermanded.”

  “But I won’t have it! I won’t have it!” cried the Prince in accents of desperate grief. “I will kill the Czar with my own hands! I am ready to go back now and kill him openly in the theater!”

  “Prince,” said Loris, “let us not discuss it. Because of your wife, you precipitate a revolution; because of your daughter, you would bring it to a halt. That is an impossibility, you must see for yourself. The sacrifice of a daughter is nothing unusual; recall the names of conspirators who have sacrificed themselves and their entire families to the cause of the revolution.”

  “Is there then no one in the world whose presence to-night in the theater would stop you from firing the mine?”

  Loris did not even deign to answer.

  The Prince seemed upon the point of falling, but Lemm sprang forward and caught him by the arm. He also looked at Loris with pleading eyes, not venturing to speak.

  “Be merciful,” murmured the Prince once more. But Loris resolutely averted his head, and with nervous haste pressed the electric key. It was the work of an instant. Neither Lemm nor the Prince had time to utter a cry; they seemed to feel the tremendous explosion in their very hearts, it seemed to them that the house itself was crumbling in ruins. Instead—nothing happened!

  Loris glanced up in amazement; then, scarcely crediting his senses, struck the key furiously, several times in succession.

  At this moment Olga reappeared in the doorway.

  “Ah!” roared Loris. “You have cut the wire!”

  Olga fell upon her knees, with clasped hands, but before the Prince or Lemm could make a movement to intervene, Loris had drawn a revolver and fired.

  Olga fell forward upon her face.

  The Prince flung himself upon Loris. “Unhappy man, what have you done?”

  Loris stood, as if in a trance, the smoking pistol still in his grasp. He saw the girl lying motionless; the fury left his face. But through its ghastly pallor the marble fixity remained.

  “Come,” said the Prince.

  The Little Old Man of Batignolles

  ÉMILE GABORIAU

  When Émile Gaboriau (1832?–1873) wrote L’Affaire Lerouge in 1866, titled The Widow Lerouge (1873) in the United States and The Lerouge Case (1881) in England, it was described by some as the first detective novel although, as in his other works, detection was only one element of the story, with old family scandals and their investigation as the basic theme of most of his novels.

  L’Affaire Lerouge introduced “the marvelous sleuth” Inspector Lecoq, the master of disguise, who appeared in four subsequent novels that enjoyed immense popularity, though Sherlock Holmes dismissed him as “a miserable bungler.” He was heavily based on François-Eugène Vidocq, the criminal who went on to become a founder of the Police de Sûreté.

  Gaboriau had spent seven years in the cavalry before becoming secretary, assistant, and ghostwriter to Paul Féval, a popular writer of feuilletons (leaflets issued serially by French daily newspapers that recounted lurid tales of romance, crime, and low life). Féval sent Gaboriau to police courts, morgues, and prisons to gather material that was a bottomless well for plots and interesting characters.

  In 1859, Gaboriau wrote his own serialized novels, producing seven romances before his first detective novel. Its immediate success impelled him toward prolificity, churning out twenty-one novels in thirteen years.

  Gaboriau’s skill was having his detectives pay close attention to gathering and interpreting evidence, rather than on the previously emphasized sensational commission of the crime. He was quickly copied by hack writers who established a formula: a brutally murdered victim is found, a policeman ingeniously solves the crime, and the villain almost invariably turns out to be a handsome nobleman, often of illegitimate birth.

  “The Little Old Man of Batignolles” was originally published as “Le Petit Vieux des Batignolles” in Le Petit Vieux des Batignolles (Paris, E. Dentu, 1876), which contains the title story and five others. It was first published in English translation in the United States in The Little Old Man of the Batignolles (New York, George H. Munro, 1880).

  THE LITTLE OLD MAN OF BATIGNOLLES

  Émile Gaboriau

  I

  When I had finished my studies in order to become a health officer, a happy time it was, I was twenty-three years of age. I lived in the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, almost at the corner of the Rue Racine.

  There I had for thirty francs a month, service included, a furnished room, which to-day would certainly be worth a hundred francs; it was so spacious that I could easily put my arms in the sleeves of my overcoat without opening the window.

  Since I left early in the morning to make the calls for my hospital, and since I returned very late, because the Cafe Leroy had irresistible attractions for me, I scarcely knew by sight the tenants in my house, peaceable people all; some living on their incomes, and some small merchants.

  There was one, however, to whom, little by little, I became attached.

  He was a man of average size, insignificant, always scrupulously shaved, who was pompously called “Monsieur Mechinet.”

  The doorkeeper treated him with a most particular regard, and never omitted quickly to lift his cap as he passed the lodge.

  As M. Mechinet’s apartment opened on my landing, directly opposite the door of my room, we repeatedly met face to face. On such occasions we saluted one another.

  One evening he came to ask me for some matches; another night I borrowed tobacco of him; one morning it happened that we both left at the same time, and walked side by side for a little stretch, talking.

  Such were our first relations.r />
  Without being curious or mistrusting—one is neither at the age I was then—we like to know what to think about people to whom we become attached.

  Thus I naturally came to observe my neighbor’s way of living, and became interested in his actions and gestures.

  He was married. Madame Caroline Mechinet, blonde and fair, small, gay, and plump, seemed to adore her husband.

  But the husband’s conduct was none too regular for that. Frequently he decamped before daylight, and often the sun had set before I heard him return to his domicile. At times he disappeared for whole weeks.

  That the pretty little Madame Mechinet should tolerate this is what I could not understand.

  Puzzled, I thought that our concierge, ordinarily as much a babbler as a magpie, would give me some explanation.

  Not so! Hardly had I pronounced Mechinet’s name than, without ceremony, he sent me about my business, telling me, as he rolled his eyes, that he was not in the habit of “spying” upon his tenants.

  This reception doubled my curiosity to such an extent that, banishing all shame, I began to watch my neighbor.

  I discovered things.

  Once I saw him coming home dressed in the latest fashion, his buttonhole ornamented with five or six decorations; the next day I noticed him on the stairway dressed in a sordid blouse, on his head a cloth rag, which gave him a sinister air.

  Nor was that all. One beautiful afternoon, as he was going out, I saw his wife accompany him to the threshold of their apartment and there kiss him passionately, saying:

  “I beg you, Mechinet, be prudent; think of your little wife.”

  Be prudent! Why? For what purpose? What did that mean? The wife must then be an accomplice.