Maurice Level - Thirty Hours with a Corpse, and Other Tales of the Grand Guignol

Their two armchairs were almost touching. She was silent. He sighed:

“Ah, I can smell your scent! How I have longed for it. I bought a bottle of the perfume you always used, but on me it didn’t smell the same. From you it comes mixed with the scent of your skin and hair. Come nearer, let me drink it in… You are going away, you will never come back again; let me draw in for the last time as much of you as I can… You shiver… am I then so horrible?”

She stammered:

“No… it is cold…”

“Why are you so lightly dressed? I don’t believe you brought a cloak. In November, too. It must be damp and dreary in the streets. How you tremble! How warm and comfortable it was in our little home… do you remember? You used to lay your face on my shoulder, and I used to hold you close to me. Who would want to sleep in my arms now? Come nearer. Give me your hand… There… What did you think when your lawyer told you I had asked to see you?”

“I thought I ought to come.”

“Do you still love me?…”

Her voice was only a breath:

“Yes…”

Very slowly, his voice full of supplication, he said:

“I want to kiss you for the last time. I know it will be almost torture for you… Afterwards I won’t ask anything more. You can go… May I?… Will you let me?…”

Involuntarily she shrank back; then, moved by shame and pity, not daring to refuse a joy to the poor wretch, she laid her head on his shoulder, held up her mouth and shut her eyes. He pressed her gently to him, silent, prolonging the happy moment. She opened her eyes, and seeing the terrible face so near, almost touching her own, for the second time she shivered with disgust and would have drawn sharply away. But he pressed her closer to him, passionately.

“You would go away so soon?… Stay a little longer… You haven’t seen enough of me… Look at me… and give me your mouth again… more of it than that… It is horrible, isn’t it?”

She moaned:

“You hurt me…”

“Oh, no,” he sneered, “I frighten you.”

She struggled.

“You hurt me! You hurt me!”

In a low voice he said:

“Sh-h. No noise; be quiet. I’ve got you now and I’ll keep you. For how many days have I waited for this moment… Keep still, I say, keep still! No nonsense! You know I am much stronger than you.”

He seized both her hands in one of his, took a little bottle from the pocket of his coat, drew out the stopper with his teeth, and went on in the same quiet voice:

“Yes, it is vitriol; bend your head… there… You will see; we are going to be incomparable lovers, made for each other… Ah, you tremble? Do you understand now why I had you acquitted, and why I made you come here today? Your pretty face will be exactly like mine. You will be a monstrous thing, and like me, blind!… Ah, yes, it hurts, hurts terribly.”

She opened her mouth to implore. He ordered:

“No! Not that! Shut your mouth! I don’t want to kill you, that would make it too easy for you.”

Gripping her in the bend of his arm, he pressed his hand on her mouth and poured the acid slowly over her forehead, her eyes, her cheeks. She struggled desperately, but he held her too firmly and kept on pouring as he talked:

“There… a little more… you bite, but that’s nothing… It hurts, doesn’t it! It is hell…”

Suddenly he flung her away, crying: “I am burning myself.”

She fell writhing on the floor. Already her face was nothing but a red rag.

Then he straightened himself, stumbled over her, felt about the wall to find the switch, and put out the light. And round them, as in them, was a great Darkness…

IN THE evenings, when the wounded were asleep, when there were left burning in the halls only the Argand lamps, shaded by hoods of cardboard, the old doctor used to take a little turn up and down the road.

His pipe stuck between his teeth, he used to climb the little hill, from which through the trees he could see the denuded plain, the villages, whose mutilated profiles made strange, sharp-drawn figures against the sky, and, further off, St. Quentin, which for eight days past had been illuminated by the glare of incendiary fires.

Then, his back bent forward, his hands in his pockets, he watched going up in smoke the city in which for twenty years he had visited the poor and the rich—the peaceful little city where formerly the old people whom he had cared for and the children whom he had brought into the world greeted him as he passed by; the sorrowful little city, now in captivity, where his mother awaited him. Now and then, as the wind blew aside the smoke and the flames licked the black horizon, he would say:

“It is the factory which is afire. Or maybe it is the city hall—or the church.”

Clenching his fists, his lips trembling, he made his way back to the hospital—older, more weary, heavier at heart.

On the mornings of the days of the attacks, when the cannon passed at a gallop, when the tread of regiments on the march echoed through the silence, he stole softly from his bed to watch, buoyed with the hope that this time at last they were going to retake his city; that he would re-enter it and see there once more his old mother, his old home and his old friends.

But when he saw the soldiers coming back, when the thunder of the cannonade slackened and died away, he would sigh, “Not this time, either,” and resume his tasks.

One day when there had been sharp fighting, they brought into the hospital a batch of wounded prisoners. One of them, a Feldwebel (sergeant-major), whose shoulder was shattered by a shell, astonished him by the dignity of his bearing and the refinement of his talk. Examining the wound, he asked the prisoner in German:

“Where do you come from?”

“From Magdeburg, in Saxony, Monsieur le Médecin-Majeur,” replied the sub-officer, in good French.

“Ah,” said the doctor, with an intonation of regret, for he had hoped that the wounded man was an Alsatian, conscripted by force. The latter seemed to understand, and murmured:

“What can you expect, Doctor? War is war. But that doesn’t prevent me from loving France, where I grew up.”

Of a sudden the blood mounted to the face of the old surgeon. Pushing up his glasses and looking sternly at the prisoner, he hurled at him this question:

“And are you not ashamed to ravage this country, to ruin these poor people, who before the war, received you with kindness?”

“Yes,” the other answered softly. “I am often ashamed. For my part I have always striven to be humane, to be just, to avoid mistreating anybody and to alleviate mistreatment by others as far as lay in my power. The combat over, one becomes a human being again; and the inhabitants of the occupied regions are not responsible. Their persons and their property ought to be sacred. I have to apologize for those of my companions who have not understood this. For instance, my regiment has been for the last six months at St. Quentin—”

The doctor gave a start.

“You have been at St. Quentin for six months? I come from St. Quentin. Perhaps you can give me some news. Often in the evenings I see fires—now in one quarter of the city, now in another. You haven’t destroyed the place systematically, have you, as you did Noyon, Péronne and Bapaume?”

“Alas, Doctor, that is a foul blot on our arms.”

“But,” pursued the surgeon, his voice almost choked, “you have been burning only public buildings, haven’t you? Not private houses?”

“No; the private houses are practically untouched up to now.”

“Ah! Do you know a street called Beffroi Street?”

“I know it very well. It is there—”

“It is there that my old mother lives,” said the doctor slowly. “My name is Journau. Do you know my mother?”