Werewolf of Paris (31 page)

When Sophie woke up, late, she thought at first that Bertrand had only hurried out to buy something for breakfast. But when a considerable time had passed she began to feel troubled. Had he gone out to join his battalion at the fight now raging near the Porte Saint-Cloud? Mme Labouvaye, the concierge, had not seen Monsieur. Sophie ran to the headquarters of the battalion. The shop that had served as such was closed. No one could give her any information. She dashed here and there, looked into every canteen, interrogated every official-looking person. Pursued a dozen misdirections.

Evening found her exhausted mentally and physically. Her hopes aroused a hundred times only to be destroyed as often. At last, footsore and hungry, but careless of her comfort, she returned to their room. As she crossed the court, she was certain that he would be there, waiting for her. But the room was dark and empty, and the disorder was precisely the same she had left.

She promised herself better success in the morning and lay down to find rest. But sleep would not come to her. She missed the body beside her. She missed the reassurance of Bertrand's presence. She found herself doing what she had not done for several months: carving the darkness into terrifying shapes, peopling the shadows with crouching figures about to leap upon her. She could see them moving into positions of advantage, waiting for an opportune moment to leap at her throat and kill her. Why was not Bertrand here to guard her? “Bertrand, Bertrand!” she moaned.

Would she never see him again? Was this the end? Were they to go to separate graves? Would she then truly lie in the Cimetière Israélite? And would the picture she had so often dreamt come true? Her parents weeping beside her coffin. Barral swearing vengeance. She could actually hear the weeping. Yes, she could almost hear Barral's words. And now they had lowered her into the ground. She could hear, yes, now she could hear, could hear distinctly the earth thrown spadeful after spadeful on the lid which covered her.

She rose in horror. Sweat covered her body. She gasped for breath.

How stupid of her! It was only someone walking about in the room overhead. Some laborer in heavy, hobnailed boots.

She heard another sound. This, at last, was Bertrand coming home. Finally! Thank God! The footsteps grew louder. She was about to cry out, “Bertrand!” Then they turned off, diminished down a long neighboring corridor. Extinguished.

The swarming darkness closed in on her again. She rose and lit the candle. There was only a little stub left and it soon burned out. The petroleum lamp had a wick that wouldn't turn up. Besides, the supply of oil in the base was down to a smear.

The candle flickered its last. Sophie had nothing left but a few matches and these she husbanded, lighting them at long intervals. Inevitably they must be used up. But somehow she fell asleep. In her moist, warm hand the sulphur heads of the matches softened and coalesced. She woke up in the morning with a mass of evil-smelling chemicals adhering to her palm. There was no sign of Bertrand.

He had, as a matter of fact, been put under arrest. Since he was a soldier and his captor a soldier, his case was left for the court-martial.

That morning as Aymar was walking he met Colonel Gois. Aymar congratulated him. “I saw, a few days ago, that you were nominated president of the new courtmartial.”

“As it happens,” Gois replied, “we are having our first session. There are some interesting cases to be tried. Several traitors, a madman who tried to bite a comrade—”

At this Aymar interrupted: “A madman who tried to bite a comrade?”

“I know nothing about it,” said Gois, “but if the case interests you, come along.”

On the way he revealed his intentions to Aymar: to reestablish the severity of the revolutionary tribunal. “What is the sense of a court-martial, if it is to be a mere board of pardon?” he complained. “The court-martial is losing its revolutionary character of rapidity and severity, and the fault is in the public that comes to the session. We should function behind closed doors and kill five innocents before allowing one traitor to escape. I guarantee you our military reverses would cease at once.

“Yes,” he continued, “the mistake we made was to abolish the guillotine. We threw away there the most valuable tool revolutionaries have ever had at their disposal.”

He was not particularly concerned about Aymar's interest in the madman who was to be tried that afternoon. Perhaps his mind was full of other matters. The hundreds of confiscated sheets, pillow cases, etc., all of the finest linen damask, and the fine furniture, etc., which he had had transported to London, to be there a kind of nest egg in case the Commune should fail. Or else he was wondering about his speculation in garlic, of which there was serious shortage. Or are these tales mere anti-Communard inventions? Who can say? Certain it is that his closest friends had little respect for anything pertaining to him except his throat, which was capable of accepting without a murmur as much live brandy as he cared to throw down it, and that was by no means little.

Absent-mindedly he fussed about his papers and finally furnished Aymar with a pass to see the madman. “
Il estpermisau citoyen Galliez de communiquer avec le Bertrand Chaillet détenu pour la cour martiale à la prison du Cherche-Midi
,” signed it and passed it over to Aymar who, seeing the name, was now certain of the matter.

“Just the addition of an
h
after the
c
was enough to hide him from me,” he thought. Aloud he said: “There's a good deal I can tell you about this man. I should like to write out a little report for you.”

“It will be welcome,” said Gois. “But I'm not sure that there will be time to go into the matter very deeply. In cases of that kind I like to show clemency to balance my severity in more important matters.”

Aymar hurried off to see Bertrand. A National Guardsman brought him to a small room, not originally intended for a cell. Inside, seated on a cot, was Bertrand, his features almost unrecognizable behind purple blotches. A strait-jacket immobilized his arms. He did not raise his head from its sunken position.

“Bertrand,” said Aymar softly.

“You, uncle?” Bertrand asked without moving.

“Bertrand,” Aymar repeated with compassion. “You, here? What has happened?”

“Nothing. Leave me here. I want to die.”

“Where is Mlle de Blumenberg?”

“I don't know. I don't want to know. I must never see her again. I have done enough harm in my life.”

“Is she safe?”

“I hope so. But I know that I ruined her life. Do you recall when you used to give me raw bloody meat and said it was for my anemia? Well, I know now that it was just a ruse. But it didn't work.”

“What are you implying?” Aymar urged. Under his interrogation, Bertrand rapidly explained Sophie's sacrifice for him. He concluded:

“Don't try to save me any more and don't let Sophie know I'm here, for I cannot trust myself. It is best that I die.”

“I have long had no intention of saving you. Bien au contraire. If you had not assured me, at Piepus that time, that you were cured, I can tell you I would have had you then where you now are. And I shall do my best to see that you do not escape this time. Good-bye, Bertrand.”

“Good-bye, uncle,” the boy

Aymar's heart was wrung. Could he really leave the lad thus? He was not only sacrificing Bertrand, but all those hours of instruction, all those long years of training. Could one forget such things utterly, and separate thus with so few words?

“Isn't there something I can do for you?”

No answer.

“Take a message to Sophie?”

Bertrand shook his head vigorously. Then he said: “Say goodbye to Françoise, she was always good to me, and to my mother, if you ever see her.”

Aymar, his eyes misted with tears, limped out and took a cab home. “Yes, let this be the end of it,” he thought, and set to work at once to prepare a damnatory report.

He had purposed, at first, to confine himself to a rapid sketch of the implicating crimes. He had intended no more than an outline. But he was carried aw subject and allowed his personal feelings a sha brief. It was a ridiculous thing to do and he was ashamed of it. But these matters had fermented in him too long. They burst through the cold phrases in which would have liked to set down the plain narrative of a criminal career. Willy-nilly, he was swept away by a flood of emotion that translated itself into a heated harangue, full of misplaced rhetoric, but a natural rhetoric nevertheless, for it flowed from his pen-point as if it were born there and not in his brain.

And as he went on he warmed to his subject. He permitted himself remarks that were blasphemous to the minds of the Commune, he developed arguments that at this point in history were plain heresy. Then he cast aside all fear and launched himself into his subject with all the fire and vigor he could command.

After all, there was a point to be gained. Colonel Gois had said: “In cases of that kind I like to show clemency to balance my severity in more important matters.” This must on no account be permitted. Bertrand must be sentenced to death. To this end Aymar made a display of all his research, attempted to show that the punishment of burning at the stake which the Church had meted out was not to be rejected as mere medieval cruelty, but to be examined on its own merits.

“The vast strides of our generation in the conquest of the material world must not mislead us into thinking that when we have plumbed the physical world to its depths we shall thereby have explained all there is to explain. The scientists of a former day strove mightily to fathom the depth of the spiritual world and their successes and conquests are all but forgotten.

“Who can estimate what thanks we owe to those courageous priests of old who went into the forbidding Druidic forests and with bell and book and swinging censer, exorcised the sylvan spirits, banished the familiars, expelled the elementals, cast out the monsters and the devils of old Gaul? Who can estimate the debt we owe to them for helping to slay all the strange and unnatural beasts that formerly cowered in every dark cranny and recess, under ferns and moss-covered rocks, waiting to leap out at the unwary passer-by who did not cross himself in time? Not all of these monsters were equally evil, but all constituted unwelcome interferences in the destiny of man.

“If today the lonely traveler can walk fearlessly through the midnight shadows of the silent forests of France, is it because of the vigilance of our police? Is it because science has taught us to be unbelievers in ghosts and monsters? Or is not some thanks due the Church, which after a millennium of warfare succeeded at long last in clearing the atmosphere of its charge of hidden terror and thus allowed for the completer unfolding of the human ego? We who have profited thereby should not allow pride to blind us to our debt. Future clearer thinkers will support my contention.

“Yes, if today we feel safe from the diabolic terrors that afflicted the benighted folk of former days, let us not take pride as if we had merely outgrown a childish fear. Let us examine the matter without bias.

“Evil exists. And evil breeds evil. The horrors and cruelties of history link hands down the ages. One deed engenders another, nay, multiplies itself. One perpetrator of crime infects another. Their kind increases like flies. If nothing resists this plague, it will terminate with the world a seething mass of corruption.

“Let us beware of judging hastily. The Catholic Church is said to have burnt 300,000 witches, until the world exclaimed in horror: ‘What gross superstition! There are no witches.' And truly there were none. At any rate there were no more.

“But now the bars have been let down, the doors are opening wide and monsters of old, in new disguises, will soon throng the world. The new terror will not lurk in the forest but go abroad in the marketplace; it will not attack lonely wayfarers but will seize the throat of nations. There will be wars such as the world has never seen, and inhumanities such as no one has dreamt of. And the dark blood of life will flow in cataracts, and the cries of those 300,000 witches will be only as the twitter of birds to the massed groans of dying mankind.”

Flushed with labor, for he had written in great hurry in order to finish before the trial, and flushed too with the embarrassment that comes of having uncovered secret places in his heart, he ran off to the building set aside for the councils of war, at the corner of the rue du Cherche-Midi and the rue du Regard.

Colonel Gois was visible, but busy. It was past seven o'clock and the session of the court-martial was to begin at nine in the evening. Colonel Gois took Aymar's brief, asked a few questions which Aymar parried as best he could, saying, “You'll find everything in there,” and having received the colonel's assurance that the document would be read, he left.

Well, that was over and done with. If it was a mistake, it was now irreparable. And in that fact there was more consolation than in debating whether to do or no. Relieved, Aymar took a seat in the large uninteresting hall in which the trials would soon take place. For the moment the room was empty. A few lamps suspended from the ceiling attacked the gloom. The shadows retreated slightly and massed themselves in the corners as if to gather their strength and return a swarm of bats, to strangle the feeble lights.

A few National Guardsmen, bayonets fixed, saw to the orderly seating of the public which began to fill the benches. Ladies, expensively gowned, took the first row.

Finally Gois entered and immediately the cases were brought up. Minor matters: theft, lack of respect, brawls. Then came the meat of the evening. Jean-Nicolas Girot, Captain of the 74th, accused of insubordination by the chef d'escadron, Gandin. The lawyers argued. Then Girot spoke.

He admitted the facts. His company had been on duty at the Porte Maillot under fire from the enemy for three days. It had been promised them that they were to be relieved. The men were weak from constant exertion and from lack of food. But no sooner had they been relieved and marched off than they were ordered back. “In my conscience,” Girot concluded his defense, “I found the right to disobey. As chief of my company, I arrogate all responsibility.”