Tales
of Mystery and Horror
By Maurice Level
Contents
The Debt Collector
The
Kennel
Who?
Illusion
In the Light of the Red Lamp
A Mistake
Extenuating Circumstances
The Confession
The
Test
Poussette
The Father
For Nothing
In the Wheat
The Beggar
Under
Chloroform
The Man Who Lay Asleep
Fascination
The Bastard
The Scoundrel Miron
The Taint
The Kiss
A Maniac
The 10.50 Express
Blue Eyes
The Empty House
The Last Kiss
INTRODUCTION
In
allowing his stories to take on an English form, M. Maurice Level is courting comparison with some very
remarkable writers in his own particular line of writing. It was Mr.
Arnold Bennett who said that there are as good short stories in the
English language as in any other, and if he had gone on to say there are
as good stories of weirdness and horror in English as in any other
language, he would not have been wide of the mark. Edgar Allan Poe,
Sheridan Lefanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Eliot in “The Lifted
Veil,” Marion ‘Crawford in “The Upper Berth,” Henry James in
“The Two Magics,” and, among living authors, Kipling, H. G. Wells,
Conan Doyle, Quiller Couch, W. W. Jacobs, the Provost of Eton and Arthur
Machen; all these have excelled in varying degree in the kind of story
which M. Level writes.
But M. Level can well afford to stand the test of comparison.
Reminding one of Edgar A]len Poe more than any other, he employs the
method of O. Henry in the service of the horrible.
M. Level has given literary expression of a high order to the
compact horrors of the Grand Guignol. There is undoubted originality in
his treatment of that kind of gruesomeness which fascinated the
imagination of Poe. But his stories are more real than those of Poe,
terser, more concentrated in their horror, they bear a closer relation
to life, and, in certain of them, there is a genuine pathos of which Poe
was incapable. This last quality finds best expression in such of his
stories as “The Beggar” and “Extenuating Circumstances.” It
would be idle to pretend that M. Level’s stories are all of equal
merit: in so prolific a writer it would be impossible that they should
be. But to the reader who likes this sort of thing, they offer something
new in the way of tasting horrors. Jaded as his palate may be, he will
get unaccustomed thrills out of M. Level. He can sit in his armchair
and enjoy some of the terrors of the Grand Guignol, without risking the
frequent ineffectiveness of the horrible when it is put crudely on the
stage.
M. Level is himself a gay, light-hearted man, essentially
Parisian in temperament. He is no morbid student, no irredeemable
pessimist, whose natural melancholy colors his whole life and
imagination. He is a daring sportsman, fond of all outdoor sports,
leading a simple life, an ardent patriot, who has proved his patriotism
in the field. When asked on one occasion to explain the difference
between the Bomber character of his work and his apparent lightheartedness,
he said that writers of sad things are usually gay in real life, while
professional humorists are frequently melancholy. His sad stories, he
said, were written in youth, which by a law of contrast seems inclined
to dwell on the sad side of things.
M. Level is now about forty years of age. His first story was
written during a night watch in a hospital, at which he was
house-surgeon. He took it to José Marie de Heredia, the Academician,
then literary editor of “Le Journal,” who accepted it for
publication, and was a warm friend of the author till his death a few
years ago. M. Level’s father was an Alsatian. From him he inherited an
intense love of France and hatred of Germany; indeed, to the latter
influence he traces his early sense of tragedy in life. His father was
an officer in the army, and much of his youth was spent in Algiers. He
came to Paris to study medicine and in the course of that study acquired
the knowledge of, and sympathy with, real suffering which gives to
some of the most tragic of his tales a true and human touch. An accident
he met with while skating in Switzerland in 1910, made very active work
impossible. “Depuis, helas! je pêche à la ligne” was his own
description of his apparent future. But in 1914 he left the sanatorium
in Switzerland, where he was resting, and joined the 2nd Tirailleurs
Marocains. He fought with them until his health gave way, and then acted
as a military surgeon in a base hospital.
I trust I have said enough to commend to English readers the work
of one who, as artist and man, may justly claim their interest and
admiration.
H.
B. IRVING.
TRANSLATOR’S
NOTE.
In
his scholarly little Preface, Mr. H. B. Irving has said all that is
necessary to introduce Maurice Level, the writer of the original French
of these stories, to English readers, but I feel that I should like to
explain why I sat down during a war that overwhelmed us all with misery
to translate work that is only too well described as “Tales of Mystery
and Horror.” It was certainly not because, as a smiling friend
suggested, I imagined I was thereby adding to the gaiety of nations. I
hope and believe that I am adding something better than that.
Violà. It is some
years since I first came across Maurice Level’s work in “Le
Journal,” the French newspaper that is famed for its daily short story
which is almost always contributed by one or other of the most
celebrated writers in France. ‘The story that attracted my attention
was one that is translated here under the title “Blue Eyes.” For me
there was nothing “shocking” in the theme. France is one of those
happy countries where people accept knowledge of the facts of life as
simply as they accept the state of the weather, and in its salons you
may discuss subjects we others still feel it polite to ignore as
impersonally as you would the rising of the Seine or the’ price of
coal. What struck me was the sympathy and understanding that underlay
the telling of the episode. Not a word of explanation or moralizing:
just a simple statement of a dramatic happening—en
passant, you want to know the superstitious horror the submerged
classes have of the guillotine to realize how dramatic the denouement
is—that revealed, apparently ma-consciously, a devoted love, heroic
effort to keep a promise and a complete abnegation of self that raises
an apparently lost soul to a height it is not given us all to attain.
This was all the more striking because between the lines you divine the
details of the sad little life-story:—a child, pretty and delicate,
who was either brought up in or had sunk into the depths of the
underworld where she fell into the hands of a souteneur
who represented all she knew of Romance and Love; the ghastly
existence that led to forgetting the words of prayer that rise
mechanically to all lips in Catholic countries when the cemeteries are
visited on the day that is annually, and very beautifully, given up to
the memory of the Dead; the moral insensibility that underlay her way
of getting the flowers for the grave of the dead lover. Never had I read
anything that so well explained the truth of the “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.
I began to look out for further stories by the same author and found that,
whatever the subject, there was always the same profound understanding
and sympathy. What could be more pity-compelling, for instance, than the
life-history of the unfortunate hero of “The Beggar”! It is again
between the lines that you learn of an abandoned child picked up out of
charity, pre-destined by circumstances and limited brainpower to know
nothing of life but its miseries, yet who retained a simple, kindly
nature dulled by misfortune, his greatest grief being that children were
always afraid of and ran away from him, and who revolts only when a
selfless attempt to do a kind action for a chance acquaintance leads to
his being treated as if he were of less account than a dog—“never
before had he felt so despised and rejected.” “Illusion” is
another story of the same kind; and there are scores of similar examples
among the seven hundred contes M.
Level has written.
It goes without saying that I was also influenced by the
supreme art that can in two thousand words give a clear and definite impression,
not only of the character of people who in many of the stories do not
even have names given to them, but frequently of their heredity and
other influences that amount to pre-destination. But that was not the important
point, and in any case the literary merit must be left to the judgment
of the reader. Another human attribute that struck me immensely as I
read was the writer’s complete understanding of the sick as well as of
the mentally-deficient brain. The terrible happenings in “The
Taint,” “The Maniac,” “A Mistake;” the titanic,
Greek-drama-like revenge in “The Last Kiss,” etc., are all natural
and logical if you consider the effect the circumstances that led to
the crises would have on exasperated nerves and over-strained brains,
the latter probably never well-balanced. One would be inclined to regret
the brain-specialist who was lost when Maurice Level gave up his medical
career for literature, were it not that he has probably been more useful
in another direction. For I feel I cannot be alone in thinking that
stories that show so clearly how very fine the line is between sanity
and brain-sickness, how completely at the mercy of circumstances many of
us are, that the moral insensibility that causes so many manifestations
of criminal tendency is a disease and must be accepted and dealt with as
a kind of awful pre-destination; must lead to a better understanding of
various social evils, to a sort of “But for the grace of God there
goes John Bunyan” attitude towards many we might otherwise shrink from
and lead unaided.
Not that Maurice Level ever thought of that; be will probably be
amazed when he reads what I say. He wrote because he could not help it,
for—to use a much abused phrase—Art for Art’s sake, and his
subjects came unbidden, thrust on him by the obscure instinct that
guides the born writer. But the value of his work from the Human
Document point of view remains the same, and must have for many the
special appeal it had for Mr. Irving, whose two books, “Studies of
French Criminals of the Nineteenth Century” and “A Book of Remarkable
Criminals” prove how profound his own studies in criminology and the
psychology of criminals have been.
ALYS
EYRE MACKLIN.
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