And he vanished in the darkness.
II
Jérémie advanced three steps, then wavered, thrust out his hands, found a wall to hold him upright, and went on again with tottering steps. Now and then a squall, rushing up the narrow street, hurled him forward into a run for several paces; then, when the violence of the swirling blast died down, he halted abruptly, his forward impulse lost, and began to waver drunkenly again upon his wayward legs.
Instinctively he went towards his own home, as birds towards their nest. He recognised his door at last and began to fumble at it in order to find the lock and put his key in it. He could not find the hole, and began to swear in a low voice. Then he knocked upon the door with his fists, calling to his wife to come and help him.
“Mélina! hi! Mélina!”
As he leant against the door to keep himself from falling, it yielded and swung open, and Jérémie, losing his support, collapsed into his house, and rolled on to his nose in the middle of his own dwelling-place. He felt something heavy pass over his body and escape into the night.
He did not move, overwhelmed with fright, bewildered, in terror of the devil, of ghosts, of all the mysterious works of darkness; for a long time he waited without daring to stir. But as he saw there were no further signs of movement, he recovered a little of his wits, the muddled wits of a hard drinker.
He sat up very softly. Again he waited for a long time, and at last, plucking up courage, murmured:
“Mélina!”
His wife did not answer.
A sudden misgiving crossed his darkened brain, an undefined misgiving, a vague suspicion. He did not move, he stayed there sitting on the ground, in the dark, ransacking his thoughts, brooding over unfinished speculations as unsteady as his feet.
Again he asked:
“Tell me who it was, Mélina. Tell me who it was. I won’t do anything to you.”
He waited. No voice rose in the darkness. He was thinking aloud, now.
“I’ve had a drop to drink, I have. I’ve had a drop to drink. It was him that treated me, the lubber; he did it, so as I wouldn’t go home. I’ve had a drop to drink.”
And then he went on in his former manner.
“Tell me who it was, Mélina, or I’ll do you a mischief.”
After another pause of waiting, he went on with the slow, obstinate logic of a drunken man.
“It was him that kept me at that swab Parmelle’s place; and all the other nights too, so as I mightn’t go home. He’s plotting with someone. Oh, the stinking swine!”
Slowly he rose to his knees. Blind rage was taking possession of him, mingling with the fumes of the liquor.
“Tell me who it was, Mélina,” he repeated, “or I’ll bash your head in, I give you fair warning!”
He was standing upright now, shaking all over in a blaze of fury, as though the alcohol in his body had caught fire in his veins. He made a step forward, bumped into a chair, snatched it up, walked on, reached the bed, fumbled at it, and felt under the clothes the warm body of his wife.
Then, mad with rage, he snarled:
“Oh! So you were there all the time, you slut, and wouldn’t answer!”
And, raising the chair he grasped in his strong fist, the sailor dashed it down in front of him with exasperated fury. A scream came wildly from the bed, a mad piercing scream. Then he began to beat at it like a thresher in a barn. Soon nothing stirred. The chair broke to pieces, but one leg remained in his hand, and he went on, panting.
Suddenly he stopped and asked:
“Now will you say who it was?”
Mélina did not answer.
At that, worn out with fatigue, besotted by his own violence, he sat down again on the ground, stretched himself to his full length, and went to sleep.
When dawn appeared, a neighbour, noticing that the door was open, came in. He found Jérémie snoring on the floor, where lay the remains of a chair, and, in the bed, a mess of blood and flesh.
A Woman’s Hair
The walls of the cell were bare and whitewashed. A narrow, barred window, so high that it could not easily be reached, lighted this bright, sinister little room; the madman, seated on a straw chair, looked at us with a fixed eye, vague and troubled. He was very thin, with wrinkled cheeks and almost white hair that had evidently grown white in a few months. His clothes seemed too large for his dried-up limbs, his shrunken chest, and hollow body. One felt that this man had been ravaged by his thoughts, by a thought, as fruit is by a worm. His madness, his idea, was there in his head, obstinate, harassing, devouring. It was eating his body, little by little. It, the Invisible, the Impalpable, the Unseizable, the Immaterial Idea gnawed his flesh, drank his blood, and extinguished his life.
What a mystery, this man killed by a Thought! He is an object of fear and pity, this madman! What strange dream, frightful and deadly, can dwell in his forehead, to fold such profound and ever-changing wrinkles in it?
The doctor said to me: “He has terrible paroxysms of rage, and is one of the strangest lunatics I have ever seen. His madness is of an erotic, macabre kind. He is a sort of necrophile. He has written a journal which shows as plainly as daylight the malady of his mind. His madness is visible, so to speak. If you are interested, you may run through this document.”
I followed the doctor into his office and he gave me the journal of this miserable man.
“Read it,” said he, “and give me your opinion about it.”
Here is what the little book contained:
“Up to the age of thirty-two years I lived quietly, without love. Life appeared to me very simple,
