[adapted]

by
Ambrose Bierce

I

One Does Not Always Marry When Insane

A man and a woman — nature had put them together — sat on a simple bench, in the late afternoon. The man was middle-aged, thin, dark-skinned, with the look of a poet and the skin of a pirate — a man you would look at again.

The woman was young, blonde, graceful, with something in her body and movements suggesting she was light and quick. She was dressed in a gray dress with strange brown marks in the cloth. She may have been beautiful; it was hard to say, because her eyes made you look at nothing else.

They were gray-green, long and narrow, with a look that you could not understand. You could only know that they were upsetting. Cleopatra may have had such eyes.

The man and the woman talked.

“Yes,” said the woman, “I love you, really! But I will not marry you, no. I cannot, will not.”

“Irene, you have said that many times, but you always refused to give me a reason. I have a right to know, to understand, to feel and to show my courage if I have it. Give me a reason.”

“For loving you?”

The woman was smiling through her tears and her paleness. That did not make the man feel like laughing.

“No; there is no reason for that. A reason for not marrying me. I have a right to know. I must know. I will know!”

He had stood up and was standing in front of her with tight fists, with a frown on his face — it might have been called an angry look. He looked as if he might try to learn by choking her. She smiled no more — she only sat looking up into his face with a fixed, hard look that was completely without emotion or feeling. Yet there was something in it that calmed his anger and made him shiver.

“Do you really want to know my reason?” she asked in a voice that was completely like a machine — a voice that could have been her look turned into sound.

“If it’s okay — if I’m not asking too much.”

It seemed this ruler of the world was giving up some part of his control over the other creature.

“All right, you will know: I am crazy.”

The man jumped, then looked doubtful and knew that he should be amused. But, again, his sense of humor failed him when he needed it and even though he did not believe he was very upset by what he did not believe. Between our beliefs and our feelings there is no good understanding.

“That is what the doctors would say,” the woman continued — “if they knew. I would rather call it a case of ‘possession.’ Sit down and listen to what I have to say.”

The man silently sat down again beside her on the wooden bench by the side of the road. Across from them on the eastern side of the valley the hills were already red with the sunset and the quiet all around was of that special kind that shows the evening is near. Something of its strange and serious feeling had come into the man’s mood. In the world of the spirit, as in the world of things, there are signs and warnings of night.

Rarely meeting her eyes, and when he did so feeling a fear he could not explain that, even though her eyes had a cat-like beauty, always made him feel afraid, Jenner Brading listened in silence to the story told by Irene Marlowe. Out of respect for the reader’s possible dislike of the simple way of an inexperienced storyteller the author chooses to use his own version instead of hers.

II

A Room May Be Too Narrow for Three, Though One Is Outside

In a little log house with a single room, simply and roughly furnished, bent down on the floor against one of the walls, was a woman, holding a child to her chest. Outside, a thick unbroken forest spread for many miles in every direction. It was night and the room was very dark: no human eye could have seen the woman and the child. Yet they were watched, closely, carefully, without even a moment of looking away; and that is the main fact on which this story depends.

Charles Marlowe was of the kind, now gone in this country, of woodcutter pioneers — men who felt most at home in quiet woods that went along the east side of the Mississippi Valley, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

For more than a hundred years these men kept going farther west, generation after generation, with rifle and ax, taking back from Nature and her wild children here and there a small, lonely piece of land for the plow, no sooner taken back than given up to those who came after them, who were less bold but more careful with money.

At last they pushed through the edge of the forest into the open land and disappeared as if they had fallen over a cliff. The pioneer of the woods is gone; the pioneer of the plains — he whose easy task was to make two-thirds of the country ready for people to live in, in one generation — is another and lower kind.

With Charles Marlowe in the wild land, sharing the dangers, hard times and lack of basic things of that strange life that brought no money, were his wife and child, to whom, in the way of his class, in which family values were like a religion, he was very close. The woman was still young enough to be pretty, new enough to the terrible loneliness of her situation to be cheerful.

By not giving the great need for happiness that the simple joys of the forest life could not fill, Heaven had treated her fairly. In her easy housework, her child, her husband and her few silly books, she found plenty for her needs.

One morning in the middle of summer Marlowe took down his rifle from the wooden hooks on the wall and said he wanted to go hunting.

“We have enough meat,” said the wife; “please don’t go out today. I dreamed last night, oh, such a terrible thing! I cannot remember it, but I’m almost sure that it will happen if you go out.”

It is hard to admit that Marlowe took this serious statement less seriously than was right for the strange kind of the bad event that was suggested. In fact, he laughed.

“Try to remember,” he said. “Maybe you dreamed that Baby could not speak.”

The guess was clearly shown by the fact that Baby, holding on to the edge of his hunting coat with all her ten chubby thumbs, was at that moment saying how she felt about the situation in a series of very happy goo-goos because she saw her father’s raccoon-skin cap.

The woman gave in: not having a sense of humor she could not say no to his kind gentle teasing. So, with a kiss for the mother and a kiss for the child, he left the house and closed the door on his happiness forever.

When night came he had not come back. The woman made dinner and waited. Then she put Baby to bed and sang softly to her until she slept. By this time the fire in the fireplace, where she had cooked dinner, had gone out and the room was lit by one candle.

This she later put in the open window as a sign and welcome to the hunter if he came from that side. She had carefully closed and locked the door to keep out wild animals that might choose it instead of an open window — she did not know the ways of animals that hunt when they enter a house without being asked, though with true woman’s care she may have thought about the chance that they could come in through the chimney.

As the night went on she became not less worried, but more sleepy, and at last rested her arms on the bed by the child and her head on her arms. The candle in the window burned down to the holder, flickered and flamed for a moment and went out without being seen; for the woman slept and dreamed.

In her dreams she sat beside the crib of a second child. The first one was dead. The father was dead. The home in the forest was gone and the house where she lived was strange. There were heavy doors made of oak wood, always closed, and outside the windows, fixed into the thick stone walls, were iron bars, clearly (as she thought) a protection against Indians.

All this she noticed with endless pity for herself, but without surprise — a feeling unknown in dreams. The child in the cradle could not be seen under its blanket which something made her remove. She did so, showing the face of a wild animal! In the shock of this terrible discovery the dreamer woke up, shaking in the darkness of her cabin in the wood.

As a sense of her real surroundings slowly came back to her she reached for the child that was not a dream, and made sure from its breathing that all was well with it; and she could not help moving a hand lightly across its face. Then, moved by a feeling she probably could not explain, she stood up and took the sleeping baby in her arms, holding it close against her chest.

The head of the child’s bed was against the wall, and the woman now stood with her back turned to that wall. Lifting her eyes, she saw two bright things shining in the darkness with a red-green light. She thought they were two coals in the fireplace, but when her sense of where she was came back, she had the worrying feeling that they were not in that part of the room, and were too high, being almost at eye level — at her own eye level. For these were the eyes of a panther.

The animal was at the open window directly opposite and not five steps away. Only those terrible eyes could be seen, but in the awful confusion of her feelings as the situation became clear to her she somehow knew that the animal was standing on its back feet, holding itself with its paws on the window ledge. That meant an evil interest — not just the simple pleasure of a lazy curiosity.

The awareness of the position was an extra horror, making the threat of those awful eyes stronger, in whose steady fire her strength and courage were both burned away. Under their silent questioning she shivered and felt sick. Her knees could not hold her, and little by little, without thinking, trying to avoid a sudden move that might make the beast jump on her, she sank to the floor, bent down against the wall and tried to protect the baby with her shaking body without taking her eyes away from the bright eyes that were killing her.

No thought of her husband came to her in her pain — no hope or idea of help or escape. Her ability to think and feel had become only one feeling — fear of the animal’s jump, of the hit of its body, the beating of its great arms, the feel of its teeth in her throat, the tearing of her baby. Still now and in complete silence, she waited for her death, the moments growing into hours, into years, into ages; and still those evil eyes kept their watch.

Returning to his cabin late at night with a deer on his shoulders Charles Marlowe tried the door. It did not open. He knocked; there was no answer. He laid down his deer and went around to the window. As he turned the corner of the building he thought he heard a sound like quiet footsteps and a soft sound in the bushes in the forest, but they were too slight to be sure, even for his trained ear. He came to the window, and to his surprise found it open, he put his leg over the window sill and went in. All was dark and silent. He felt his way to the fire-place, lit a match and lit a candle.

Then he looked around. Hiding in fear on the floor against a wall was his wife, holding his child. As he ran toward her she stood up and started to laugh, long, loud, and like a machine, without joy and without sense — the laughter that goes with the rattling of a chain. Hardly knowing what he was doing he held out his arms. She put the baby in them. It was dead — squeezed to death in its mother’s hug.

III

The Theory of the Defense

That is what happened during a night in a forest, but Irene Marlowe did not tell all of it to Jenner Brading; not all of it was known to her. When she had finished the sun had set and the long summer twilight had begun to grow darker in the low places of the land. For some moments Brading was silent, expecting the story to go on to some clear link with the talk that had started it; but the storyteller was as silent as he, her face turned away, her hands closing and opening as they lay in her lap, with a strange hint that they moved by themselves, not by her will.

“It is a sad, a terrible story,” said Brading finally, “but I do not understand. You call Charles Marlowe father; that I know. That he is too old for his age, broken by some great sadness, I have seen, or thought I saw. But, excuse me, you said that you — that you — ”

“That I am crazy,” said the girl, without moving her head or body.

“But, Irene, you say — please, dear, do not look away from me — you say that the child was dead, not crazy.”

“Yes, that one — I am the second. I was born three months after that night, my mother being thankfully allowed to die while giving me life.”

Brading was again silent; he was a little confused and could not right away think of the right thing to say. Her face was still turned away. Because he felt embarrassed, he reached without thinking toward the hands that lay opening and closing in her lap, but something — he could not say what — stopped him. He then remembered, a little, that he had never really liked to take her hand.

“Do you think,” she continued, “that a person born in such a situation is like others — is what you call normal?”