WHAT THEY HEARD
They crept round the house. At the back a pair of French windows were
open, but heavy curtains were drawn across them. No light was visible.
They listened. A voice was speaking--slowly, scarcely above a whisper,
but a whisper of contemptuous pride.
"Yes," it said, "I am the Destroyer! I was born to kill. It was the
curse of my birth."
The silence of the room was broken only by the faint sound of a woman
sobbing. Monsieur Dupont and the inspector drew nearer to the window.
"You fools!" said the arrogant voice. "What are your laws of Right and
Wrong to me? I _am_ Right and Wrong. What are your Codes of Sin? I _am_
Sin. Who are you to judge me? Who are you to set your little laws
against My Madness?"
There was a long pause. Then the voice continued, in a tone of dull
bitterness.
"Ever since I had strength to break, I have broken--to tear, I have
torn. The disease took command of me long before I knew its meaning.
When I was a child the sight of pretty things frightened me. I used to
shrink from them, and hide my face. I was only quiet and normal when
there were plain, colorless things about me. As I grew older the fear
developed into hatred--and with hatred grew, slowly and subtly, the
inclination to destroy. At first the opposition of all that was normal
in me sufficed to keep the desire in check, but day by day it grew
stronger and stronger, and day by day the power to resist became less
and less. The increase of the hatred into madness followed the growth of
the impulse towards the first surrender. It came upon me for the first
time when I was twelve. How well I remember that day! My sanity had
fought its strongest battle, and my head was still throbbing and
swimming with the strain of it. I was taken to a strange house, and left
alone in a bright room. On the wall there was a picture of a very
beautiful woman. I couldn't take my eyes off it. I couldn't move from in
front of it. New passions, that I had never felt before, were tearing
me. The picture seemed to be alive, to be mocking me. I hated it. I felt
that it was cruel and loathsome--that it had wronged me. My whole body
was on fire--my brain was flaming. Then something seemed to snap in my
head. I lost myself. Irresistible forces took possession of me, and used
me. When I came to myself ... the picture was lying at my feet ... in
fragments."
The voice settled down into an expressionless monotone, pursuing its
story without emotion.
"From that moment my doom lay on me. I had made the initial submission.
Any attempt at resistance after that was futile. I was helpless. Out of
my hatred of beauty in any shape or form came the desire to obtain the
most beautiful things I could find to enjoy the mad ecstasy of
shattering them. I had all the morbid secret longing to induce attacks
of my own madness--to enjoy the awful exaltation, the triumph of
destruction. I was not ashamed. I found myself entirely without
scruple, without conscience, incapable of remorse. When the periods of
desire were upon me, I hesitated at nothing to gratify them. At first
they were frequent--sometimes there were only a few days between--but as
I grew older the intervals lengthened, until sometimes I dared to think
myself free. But, sooner or later, it came again. I knew all the warning
signals--the creeping in of uncontrollable thoughts--the brain
pictures--the quickening of mind and body--then the grip of the madness.
All I could do at such times was to collect a number of things
sufficiently beautiful to satisfy my lust, and lock myself in to an orgy
of destruction. Then I was normal again for another period. So I grew
up. When I was twenty, I learnt the truth."
"I told him," a woman's broken voice said. "I hadn't the heart to tell
him before. I was hoping against hope that the curse would pass away as
he grew into manhood. But when I saw that it would not ... I told him."
"Then I knew there was no escape," the dull voice went on. "The results
of my father's vices and my mother's madness were my inheritance.
God! ... what a legacy!"
The voice flamed for an instant--then subsided again into its previous
monotony.
"The intervals became longer and longer, but each time the madness
recurred it tightened its clutches. Each time it made me more and more
its own property. Whenever the warnings showed themselves I fled to the
refuge of Miss Masters's house. She bought and kept there things on
which, when the mania was at its height, it satisfied me to expend my
lust. But those inanimate things, though sufficient for that purpose,
had no power in themselves to produce an attack of the madness. The
capability to do that was reserved to a woman's beauty--the effect of
which, so far, I had had no opportunity to experience. That opportunity
came to me for the first time at Nice--twenty years ago. I had never
seen a really beautiful woman before I saw Colette d'Orsel."
Another pause followed the name. The room behind the curtains remained
in tense silence until the voice resumed.
"I can remember it now--as if it were yesterday. How she stood
there--in the soft shaded light--terribly beautiful. And I--the
Destroyer--watched her paralyzed--knowing for the first time the
pinnacle of my madness. The sight of her numbed all my sanity. I could
no more have torn myself away from that place than I could have resisted
the new flood of my disease that broke over me like a nightmare wave. I
was introduced to her. As I bent over her hand I almost laughed at the
thought of what her horror would have been if she had known the impulses
that surged through me. Her voice--the touch of her--burnt into me like
flames. I knew what the end would be, but I was powerless in the grip of
my inheritance. And she--in the pitiless irony of it--liked me! Three
evenings later I met her in the gardens of the hotel. We sat together
... alone for the first time. I struggled. My God, I struggled! But it
was useless. The white shape of her next to me--the dim outline of her
features--the whole nearness of her beauty.... Then it came on me, as I
knew it would--the final rush of irresistible hatred. When I knew myself
again ... she was lying on the ground ... smashed ... my first living
victim."
The woman sobbed.
"God forgive him!" she cried. "He was innocent himself. It wasn't really
him...."
Light footsteps moved across the floor.
"Let me be," said the voice hardly. "What God does with me is for God to
do. Sit down again."
The footsteps returned.
"I left her there, and went back to the hotel. I sat down in my room,
and analyzed my feelings. The madness had left me. My mind was perfectly
clear and steady. I felt no horror at what I had done--no remorse--only
a sense of impersonal regret at the death of an innocent woman, and a
faint detached pity for her misfortune in crossing my path. I carefully
considered my position, and certainty that there could be no evidence
against me dispelled any fears for myself--but my cold-blooded sanity
realized that the odds were tremendously against a recurrence of the
same good fortune, and that the avoidance of the opposite sex must
become the chief care of my life. Then I went to bed, and slept
soundly. The discovery of Colette d'Orsel's body early the next morning
provided the sensation of the year at Nice. The police were confounded.
There was no motive--no clue. It is an unsolved mystery to-day."
The callousness of the story was so revolting that even the inspector,
seasoned as he was, allowed a muttered expression of disgust to escape
him. But Monsieur Dupont remained as silent and still as the house
itself.
"Ten years later," continued the voice, "I went to America. For five
years I had been free from any return of the madness. You can imagine
the longing to be like other men--to presume on the years of immunity. I
felt unshakably sane. I even felt that I had never been mad. I gloried
in the keenness of my intellect, the absolute order and control of my
thoughts. What had I to do with madness? But in Boston ... I saw
Margaret McCall. In an instant I was mad. In an instant----"
A cry tore the air--a cry so awful in its inhuman fury that the two
listeners shrank back horrified. For a moment the room seethed with
confusion. The voices of men and women were blended in rage, terror, and
command. Then the curtains were wrenched aside, and two figures rushed
out shrieking into the darkness of the garden.