“Being innocent, I have nothing to confess.”
“Once again, remember that these denials have no weight at all. I myself am prepared to believe that you gave way to a fit of passion, one of these sudden madnesses when a man sees red… Look again at your victim… Can you see her lying there like that and feel no emotion, no repentance?…”
“Repentance, you say? How can I repent of what I have not done?… As for emotion, if mine was not entirely deadened, it was at least considerably lessened by the simple fact that I knew what I was going to see when I came here. I feel no more emotion than you do yourself. Why should I? I might just as well accuse you of the crime because you stand there unmoved.”
He spoke in an even voice, without gestures, as a man would who had complete control of himself. The overwhelming charge left him apparently undisturbed, and he confined his defense to calm, obstinate denials.
One of the minor officials said in an undertone:
“They will get nothing out of him… He will deny it even on the scaffold.”
Without a trace of anger, Gautet replied:
“That is so, even on the scaffold.”
The sultry atmosphere of an impending thunderstorm added to the feeling of exasperation caused by this struggle between accusers and accused, this obstinate “no” to every question in the face of all evidence.
Through the dirty window-pane the setting sun threw a vivid golden glare on the corpse.
“So be it,” said the magistrate: “You do not know the victim. But what about this?”
He held out an ivory-handled knife, a large knife with clotted blood on its strong blade.
The man took the weapon into his hands, looked at it for a few seconds, then handed it to one of the warders and wiped his fingers.
“That?… I have never seen it before either.”
“Systematic denial… that is your plan, is it?” sneered the magistrate. “This knife is yours. It used to hang in your study. Twenty people have seen it there.”
The prisoner bowed.
“That proves nothing but that twenty people have made a mistake.”
“Enough of this,” said the magistrate. “Though there is not a shadow of doubt about your guilt, we will make one last decisive test. There are marks of strangulation on the neck of the victim. You can clearly see the traces of five fingers, particularly long fingers, the medical expert tells us. Show these gentlemen your hands. You see?”
The magistrate raised the chin of the dead woman.
There were violet marks on the white skin of the neck: at the end of every bruise the flesh was deeply pitted, as if nails had been dug in. It looked like the skeleton of a giant leaf.
“There is your handiwork. Whilst with your left hand you were trying to strangle this poor woman, with your free right hand you drove this knife into her heart. Come here and repeat the action of the night of the murder. Place your fingers on the bruises of the neck… Come along…”
Gautet hesitated for a second, then shrugged his shoulders and said in a sullen voice:
“You wish to see if my fingers correspond?… and suppose they do?… What will that prove?…”
He moved toward the slab: he was noticeably paler, his teeth were clenched, his eyes dilated. For a moment he stood very still, his gaze fixed on the rigid body, then with an automatonlike gesture, he stretched out his hand and laid it on the flesh.
The involuntary shudder that ran through him at the cold, clammy contact caused a sudden, sharp movement of his fingers which contracted as if to strangle.
Under this pressure the set muscles of the dead woman seemed to come to life. You could see them stretch obliquely from the collarbone to the angle of the jaw: the mouth lost its horrible grin and opened as if in an atrocious yawn, the dry lips drew back to disclose teeth encrusted with thick, brown slime.
Everyone started with horror.
There was something enigmatic and terrifying about this gaping mouth in this impassive face, this mouth open as if for a death-rattle from beyond the portals of the grave, the sound only held back by the swollen tongue that was doubled back in the throat.
Then, all at once, there came from that black hole a low, undefined noise, a sort of humming that suggested a hive, and an enormous blue-bottle with shining wings, one of these charnelhouse flies that live on death, an unspeakable filthy beast, flew out, hissing as it circled round the cavern as if to guard the approach. Suddenly it paused… then made a straight course for the blue lips of Gautet.
With a motion of horror, he tried to drive it away; but the monstrous thing came back, clinging to his lips with all the strength of its poisonous claws.
With one bound the man leaped backwards, his eyes wild, his hair on end, his hands stretched out, his whole body quivering as he shrieked like a madman:
“I confess!… I did it!… Take me away!… Take me away!…”
Poussette
EVERY MORNING as the clocks of the town struck six, the old maid left her house, shutting the door carefully behind her, and grasping tightly in her hand an old prayer book with broken corners and greasy pages, she crossed the road quickly and hurried to the neighboring church to hear the first mass.
There, in the almost empty nave, kneeling on her prie-dieu, her hands clasped, her head trembling, the murmur of her prayers mingled with the voice of the priest. When the service finished she went quickly home.
Her face was thin, and her narrow, obstinate forehead was covered with lines, but her deeply set eyes flamed with a strange fever.
As she walked she mumbled prayers and counted the beads of her rosary. Her heels made no sound on the pavement, and round her there floated a vague smell of incense and damp stones as if the long years of churchgoing had impregnated her yellow fingers and pointed knees with the odor of the old vestry and the vaults.
She lived alone in a suburb in a little house full of oldfashioned furniture, ancient portraits, and religious emblems; her only companion was a gray cat she called Poussette, a thin old cat that lay half asleep all day, glancing with an indifferent eye at the movements of the flies, sometimes rising lazily to look through the windowpanes at a leaf carried on the wind.
The old maid and the old cat understood each other. Both of them loved their hermitlike existence, the silence of the long summer afternoons with the shutters closed, the curtains drawn. They were afraid of the streets which seemed to them full of dangers.
Hidden behind the persiennes, the old maid watched the passers-by, listening to their footsteps dying away in the distance, and the cat stretched out its neck, drew itself up on three legs and turned away from the other cats that crouched by the doors, licking themselves with their heads bent back, or disappearing like dark flashes as they ran away.
In bygone days when the warm, fragrant silence of night seemed to bathe the motionless trees in love, the cat would sometimes stretch out its neck toward the gardens, replying to the calls of the males whose shadows moved on the roofs; and excited by their entreaties, she would rub her flanks against the legs of the chairs.
Then the old maid used to snatch her up, shut her in the bedroom, open the window and cry in a voice of hate:
“Go away!… Get away!…”
The miaulings would cease for a moment, and when they broke out afresh and the shadows began to leap again, she would shut the shutters, draw the curtains closely, and shrinking in her bed, draw the cat under the clothes so that it should not hear the noise, stroking it between the ears to soothe it to sleep.