from Vault Mk I;
Steve wrote
CONTAINS SPOILERS (AND LOTS OF 'EM!)
Tales of Mystery and Horror (1920)
Maurice Level
"The Debt Collector"
"The Kennel"
"Who"
"Illusion"
"In the Light of the Red Lamp"
"A Mistake"
"Extenuating Circumstances"
"The Confession"
"The Test"
"Porissette"
"The Father"
"For Nothing"
"In the Wheat"
"The Beggar"
"Under Chloroform"
"The Man Who Lay Asleep"
"Fascination"
"The Bastard"
"That Scoundrel Miron"
"The Taint"
"The Kiss"
"The Maniac"
"The 10.50 Express"
"Blue Eyes"
"The Empty House"
"The Last Kiss"
"...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 unacÂcustomed thrills out of M. Level."
Jeanne Mareteux Level (1875-1926) was a doctor and author of some 700 'conte cruel', many of which were adapted for performance at the infamous Grand Guignol theatre in Paris. Level began to write while on night shifts in a hospital where he was working as a surgeon, and his stories soon began to appear regularly in the newspaper,
Le Journal. 26 of his 'cruel tales' were translated into English by Alys Eyre Macklin and published shortly after the First World War as
Tales of Mystery and Horror in the US, and as
Crises in the UK.
This latter title is perhaps more fitting (
Tales of Ordinary Madness, as used 50 years later by Charles Bukowski, would be even more fitting). In his introduction to the collection, H. B. Irving compares Level to Edgar Allen Poe - although, as Irving points out; "He is no morbid student, no irredeemable pessimist, whose natural melancholy colours his whole life and imagination". Macklin, in her Translator's Notes, considers Level to have a "complete understanding of the sick as well as of the mentally-deficient brain" and laments the loss to the medical profession when Level chose instead to become a writer of "stories that show so clearly how very fine the line is between sanity and brain-sickness".
For a writer who relies so heavily on the 'sting in the tail', it may seem surprising that a common theme in Level's work, aside from "exasperated nerves and over-strained brains", is the awful inevitability of pre-destination.
A good example of this is "Fascination", about a man with a fascination for the fatal who, seeking only peace and quiet after being berated for not wishing to go out that evening, dispassionately shoots his mistress in the head - "I saw a red mark, very small, under the right lid, and the woman fell, inert, like a petticoat that has been unfastened and slips down on the carpet". He escapes the shadow of the guillotine (which looms large over a number of Level's stories) by claiming that his victim has committed suicide, only to be consumed by his curiosity over the murder weapon. Even though the ending of both the tale and its narrator are plainly inevitable to the reader, we are drawn along with the wholly unrepentant protagonist as he commits his increasingly irrational thoughts to paper - "...I keep on writing and the revolver is still before me... People who commit suicide must sit just like this writing their last wishes... Does it really need so much courage for a man to kill himself? ...I place the barrel against my temple... The sensation is not at all disagreeable..."
All leading up to one wonderful last line; "The Unknown calls you... And you press the trig..."
Grisly revenge also figures prominently, often exacted on faithless wives, their hapless lovers or even their unfortunate offspring.
"The Bastard", tells how a husband comes to suspect that the son he has raised from birth and treated as his own, may actually be the fruit, not of his loins, but of those of Big Jacquet - "When the child was born eight months to the day after the wedding, you told me it was the fright you got when the cow went astray..."
As this is a Maurice Level story and not an episode of
Trisha, rather than a DNA test the child's fate is decided by the Heutrot's rabid dog.
A similar fate befalls the apparently lifeless lover of the wife of M. de Hartevel in "The Kennel".
M. de Hartevel only wanted "long nights of love, orgies of caresses of which the thrill would be mutual" but instead is cruelly spurned, receiving love and respect only from his faithful hounds. The moral of this particular tale is clearly: Don't mess with the wife of a man who has forty "big mastiffs with ugly fangs".
One of Level's most popular stories was "Le baiser dans la nuit" (1912), translated as "The Last Kiss". It's been retold many times in many different forms, even forming the basis of a story in EC Comic's,
The Haunt of Fear in the 1950s.
A beautiful young girl is saved from a lengthy spell in prison by the former lover she had blinded and scarred for life in a (quite literal) vitriolic attack - "I remember I once saw a man whose mistress had thrown vitriol over him. His face was not human. Women turned their heads away as they passed..."
The young lady soon has cause to wonder whether prison might not have been the better option when her monstrously disfigured ex asks her for one last kiss...
"The Taint" is a particularly grim tale of infanticide (another common Level theme), made even more uncomfortable by the fact that the "horror", too frightful to be allowed to exist, comes in this case from a baby born into a family with a history of epilepsy - "Awful visions flashed before my eyes. I saw its father and his ghastly agonies. I imagined I saw the brother struggling in his straight jacket: the other, the repulsive idiot... epileptic also".
'Conte Cruel' is one thing but this is just nasty;
"I began to shudder as one would at the touch of some loathly reptile... A mother afraid of her own child... I flung myself on it... I seized the little neck that slipped under my fingers... miserable wretch... savage... criminal... I tightened my fingers..."
By contrast, "A Maniac" (which also exists in another translation as "The Madman"), is the delightful story of a ghoulish thrill-seeker who goes to see a famous lion-tamer hoping that he will be devoured by his charges, and who only attends the theatre in the hope it will catch fire - "He was neither malicious nor bloodthirsty. It was only that he had conceived a very special idea of the pleasures of existence".
Having witnessed both these happy events, a death-defying trick cyclist seems to offer our hero the possibilty of a new sensational experience - however, the cyclist seems to be particularly adept at cheating fate. Until M. Maniac, not one to be disappointed, discovers a way to force fate's fickle hand...
One of the most shudderingly effective tales in this collection is "The Test", in which a man accused of simultaneously stabbing and strangling a woman to death is confronted with the body of his victim and forced to re-enact the crime;
"He moved towards the slab... For a moment he stood very still, his gaze fixed on the rigid body, then with an automaton-like gesture, he stretched out his hand and laid it on the flesh...
Under this pressure the set muscles of the dead woman seemed to come to life. You could see them stretch obliquely from the collar-bone to the angle of the jaw: the mouth lost its horrible grin and opened as if in an atrocious yawn, the dry lips drew back to disclose teeth encrusted with thick, brown slime.
Then, all at once, there came from that black hole a low, undefined noise, a sort of humming that suggested a hive, and an enormous bluebottle with shining wings, one of these charnel-house flies that live on death, an unspeakable filthy beast, flew out..."
Well, that's one way of getting a confession.
Level also wrote a novel,
L'ombre ("The Shadow"), which was translated into English as
Those Who Return.
*******
Hugh Lamb re-ran at least five Level stories in his anthologies and you can download
Tales of Mystery and Horror for free at
Horror Masters. You'll also find more details of his plays in Mel Gordon's
Grand Guignol. Level's influence on Charles Birkin is at its most apparent in
The Kennel (which Charles mercilessly rips off in his
The Kiss Of Death collection) and the best of his stories are similarly ghoulish. Surely a Wordsworth in waiting?
The Kennel: M. de Hartevel surprises his wife Marie Therese with a man in her bedroom. His friend. And the fellow has had a heart attack. After pronouncing him dead, de Harteval goes on to make a drama of the shame that would befall their good name should the servants get to hear of this as, while he accepts her innocent explanation, others might not! Informing the police is obviously out of the question, so what to do with the corpse? It's at times like this when a man fully appreciates his forty vicious mastiffs.
Night And Silence: A pair of wretched beggars - one blind, the other a deaf mute, both crippled - freeze the night away in their hovel. The third of their number, a woman, has just died and is lying in her coffin in the same room. The blind man hears scratchings and muffled cries coming from within the box …
The Last Kiss: A husband, blinded and hideously deformed when his wife through vitriol in his face after he threatened to leave her, intervenes on her behalf when the case comes to court, preventing her from receiving a long jail sentence. At his request she pays him an emotional visit in which she begs his forgiveness and somehow even manages to kiss him, whereupon … Well, not for nothing is Level feted as a master practitioner of the
conte cruel.
Blue Eyes: A prostitute keeps her promise to lay flowers on her sweetheart’s grave on All Saints Day, he having been executed for murder. Wan and wasted, she leaves her sickbed and eventually finds a client. She arrives at the cemetery just as it is about to close, but manages to persuade the warden to allow her to lay her bouquet. Only when she returns to the brothel does she learn the identity of her customer …
In The Light Of The Red Lamp: "In the first shock of grief, you sometimes have extraordinary ideas ... can you believe that I photographed her lying on her deathbed? I took my camera into the white, silent room, and lit the magnesium wire. Yes, overwhelmed as I was with grief, I did with the most scrupulous precaution and care things from which I should shrink today, revolting things ... yet it is a great consolation to know she is there, that I shall be able to see her again as she looked that last day."
Now, six months after his beloved's death, accompanied by the narrator he prepares to develop the photographs of the dead woman. Slowly the images appear - and a horrible tragedy is revealed.
The Test: Bourdin is accused of stabbing a woman to death. The magistrates have him view the corpse in an effort to break him, but he maintains his innocence. It seems he'll get away with it until the spectacular intervention of a bluebottle ...
