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

And yet this did not keep Madame Jutelier from saying to Aunt Sophie every time she called, “Come and see us oftener, my dear aunt; you are neglecting us.”

On the third Monday in February, after her usual custom, Aunt Sophie wrote a letter to announce her coming. As soon as they received it, everybody got ready to greet her. Madame Jutelier said to her maid after lunch, “Josephine, go to the sixth story, get the vase, dust it, and bring it down here.”

She was just getting its place ready on the mantelpiece when a terrible crash made her leap up and rush out to the landing, with her heart in her mouth and a terrible foreboding in her soul.

The misfortune exceeded the worst that she could imagine. Hanging over the banister, with round eyes, Josephine was staring down upon the shattered fragments of the vase. It had been smashed so small that the whole stairway was powdered with it. At his wife’s shriek of dismay, M. Jutelier came running. For a moment he was too stupefied to speak, and then he had the most absurd ideas.

“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.”

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.