At this moment, Spy, having come out of his corner, was advancing toward me, shaking his back, dancing on his hind legs like those of a spider. And I looked at Spy persistently. I was thinking that Spy was the only creature that Juliette loved, that to kill Spy would be to inflict the greatest sorrow on Juliette! The dog raised its paws toward me and tried to get on my lap. He seemed to say:
"Even if you do suffer so much, I am not to blame for it. To avenge yourself on me--so small, so feeble, so trustful, would be cowardly. And then you think she really loves me so much! I amuse her as a plaything, I serve as a distraction for her for a moment and that is all. If you kill me now she will get another little dog like me this very evening, one whom she will call Spy as she did me and whom she will overwhelm with caresses as she did me, and nothing will be changed!"
I did not heed Spy any more than I heeded any of the voices that spoke within me whenever evil was drawing me on to commit some reprehensible deed.
Brutally, ferociously I seized the little dog by his hind legs.
"Here is what I am going to do, Mother Souchard!" I shouted. "Look!"
And hurling Spy into the air with all my force so that he turned over several times, I crashed his head against the corner of the fireplace. Blood streamed all over the looking-glass and the hangings, bits of brains stuck to the candlesticks and a torn-out eye fell on the carpet.
"What am I going to do, Mother Souchard?" I repeated, flinging the cadaver into the middle of the bed upon which a pool of blood appeared. "What am I going to do? Ha, Ha! You see this blood, this eye, these brains, this cadaver, this bed! Ha, Ha! Well, that's what I am going to do to Juliette, Mother Souchard! That's what I am going to do to Juliette, do you hear me, you old drunkard!"
"Ah! for the life of me!" Mother Souchard stammered out, terrified. "For the life of the good Lord, I...."
She did not finish. With bulging eyes, her mouth wide open and distorted into a horrible grimace, she was staring at the black body on the bed and at the blood absorbed by the bed clothes, the red stain on which was becoming purple and larger.
When I regained my senses, the killing of Spy appeared to me a monstrous crime. I was as horrified as if I had killed a child. Of all the cowardly acts committed I thought that was the most cowardly and loathsome! To kill Juliette! That would have been a crime, of course, but perhaps there could be found, if not an excuse, at least a reason for that crime in the revolt of my anguish. But to kill Spy! A dog ... a poor, inoffensive creature! Why? For no other reason than that I was a brute, that I had in me the savage and irresistible instinct of a murderer! During the war I had killed a man who was kindly, young and strong, and I had killed him just at the moment when, fascinated, with beating heart, he was rapturously watching the rising sun! I had killed him while hidden behind a tree, concealed by the shadow, like a coward! He was a Prussian? What difference does it make! He, too, was a human being, a man like myself, better than myself. Upon his life were depending the feeble lives of women and children; a portion of suffering humanity was praying for him, waiting for him; perhaps in that virile youth, in that robust body that was his, he had the germs of those superior beings for whom humanity had been living in hope? And with one shot from an idiotic, trembling gun I had destroyed all that. And now I killed a dog! ... and killed it when it was coming toward me, when it was trying with its little paws to climb on my lap! Verily, I was an assassin! That small cadaver haunted me, I always saw that head hideously crushed, the blood squirting all over the white clothes of the bedroom, and the bed indelibly stained with blood.