I am about to leave my room after breakfast, when little Victoire who
carries the meals up-stairs in a wooden tray, screams out:--"_Gadé,
Missié! ni bête-ni-pié assous dos ou!_" There is a thousand-footed beast
upon my back!
Off goes my coat, which I throw upon the floor;--the little servant, who
has a nervous horror of centipedes, climbs upon a chair. I cannot see
anything under the coat, nevertheless;--I lift it by the collar, turn it
about very cautiously--nothing! Suddenly the child screams again; and I
perceive the head close to my hand;--the execrable thing had been hiding
in a perpendicular fold of the coat, which I drop only just in time to
escape getting bitten. Immediately the centipede becomes invisible.
Then I take the coat by one flap, and turn it over very quickly: just
as quickly does the centipede pass over it in the inverse direction, and
disappear under it again. I have had my first good look at him: he
seems nearly a foot long,--has a greenish-yellow hue against the black
cloth,--and pink legs, and a violet head;--he is evidently young.... I
turn the coat a second time: same disgusting manreuvre. Undulations of
livid color flow over him as he lengthens and shortens;--while running
his shape is but half apparent; it is only as he makes a half pause in
doubling round and under the coat that the panic of his legs becomes
discernible. When he is fully exposed they move with invisible
rapidity,--like a vibration;--you can see only a sort of pink haze
extending about him,--something to which you would no more dare advance
your finger than to the vapory halo edging a circular saw in motion.
Twice more I turn and re-turn the coat with the same result;--I observe
that the centipede always runs towards my hand, until I withdraw it: he
feints!
With a stick I uplift one portion of the coat after another; and
suddenly perceive him curved under a sleeve,--looking quite small!--how
could he have seemed so large a moment ago?... But before I can strike
him he has flickered over the cloth again, and vanished; and I discover
that he has the power of _magnifying himself_,--dilating the disgust of
his shape at will: he invariably amplifies himself to face attack....
It seems very difficult to dislodge him; he displays astonishing
activity and cunning at finding wrinkles and folds to hide in. Even at
the risk of damaging various things in the pockets, I stamp upon the
coat;--then lift it up with the expectation of finding the creature
dead. But it suddenly rushes out from some part or other, looking larger
and more wicked than ever,--drops to the floor, and charges at my feet:
a sortie! I strike at him unsuccessfully with the stick: he retreats
to the angle between wainscoting and floor, and runs along it fast as
a railroad train,--dodges two or three pokes,--gains the
door-frame,--glides behind a hinge, and commences to run over the wall
of the stair-way. There the hand of a black servant slaps him dead.
--"Always strike at the head," the servant tells me; "never tread on the
tail.... This is a small one: the big fellows can make you afraid if you
do not know how to kill them."
... I pick up the carcass with a pair of scissors. It does not look
formidable now that it is all contracted;--it is scarcely eight
inches long,--thin as card-board, and even less heavy. It has no
substantiality, no weight;--it is a mere appearance, a mask, a
delusion.... But remembering the spectral, cunning, juggling something
which magnified and moved it but a moment ago,--I feel almost tempted to
believe, with certain savages, that there are animal shapes inhabited by
goblins....