VI. THE MURDERESS. Serious cases do not come before the Juge de Paix. Strictly speaking, he is limited to civil pleas of less than 1000 francs importance. The drama which we found in the court of the Juge de Paix was strongly domestic. Yet real drama came to us. The French look with what appears to the English a lenient eye upon murder. Murder they seem to consider a crime only in dastardly cases. Give murder an epithet, tag it on to some perturbation of spirit, and the slayer escapes. Love, jealousy, hate, anger, fear, political passion, or even commercial interest, are held to be spiritual cyclones, which, acting on the normal humanity, can whirl it outside of itself-beside himself, as we say,—and so a crime committed outside of humanity is considered almost outside of the law. A curious feature of psychology this, that these French who are so primitively mosaic in their politics-an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth-should have travelled so far away from that boasted basis of human security, a life for a life. They do not hold that a misdeed committed in individual frenzy is to be balanced by another misdeed committed in communal revenge; they do not hold strongly that for murder, the last unpardonable theft, restitution can be made by a forfeiture in kind. Still we must think the French very lenient in murder. It was a question of café debate whether Landru, the modern Bluebeard, might not get off. A master barrister, playing with his eloquence upon the heart-strings of a jurywhich one must confess often seems to carry emotionalism beyond the limits of even a farce,-has released how many assassins back into society. It is true that murder rarely becomes a habit. But we remember a satirical article in a French paper proving the only person one was forbidden to murder with impunity to be the total stranger, since no sentimental excuse could be found for murdering him. So that the scene which we witnessed one afternoon-the return of a murderess to her village cannot be so rare a spectacle in France as it would be in England. Before she reached us, the rumour fled in front of her She is coming, she is com The village appeared unaltered. We sat quietly on our bench, where we had been since luncheon. The exterior of the village still was deserted, but the windows, usually so many blank panes, were now spectacles, glasses through which Paul Prys, male, or female, or children, took stock with curious and almost respectful eyes of this fellowvillager come "back to life." Was she really a strange-look- coming from her ex-aristocratic ing woman, or did our shocked husband's shop. There is nothsenses lend her an air of strange- ing aristocratic about Madame ness: unwarned, would we have St Mouxa: her husband, a noticed her? Her face was bootmaker, is the closest delike one of Modigliani's shorter- scendant of the old Seigneurie nosed models sentimental of N, but she, though she eggs, a satirical critic dubbed gives herself a hundred beauty them, but this woman had airs, remains unalterably the become startled and old; she over - plump little bourgeoise seemed amazed to find the that she is. Madame St Mouxa streets once more about her. is the incarnation of the obvious. Her face was a pallid mask, If one shows her a bottle, she in which those amazed eyes will say with a pretty air of stared darkly, and from which wisdom, "That is a bottle; the thin, grey, uncovered hair you put liquid into it and stop was drawn tightly back to a it with a cork." And if you mere knob of a bun at about are looking at a dog, she will the Iceland of her skull. She say, That is a dog; it is of went rigidly through the village a yellow colour, has four legs, with but brief glances to right one at each corner, runs about or to left, supporting legs, and barks." Like Mr Hilaire rheumatic from prison, with Belloc's strategy for beginners the aid of two sticks. If she during the war. Poor Madame encountered a villager of by- St Mouxa; she is vain, and gone acquaintance she gave a doubtless when she was sevendry little nod, "Eh, Joseph ! " teen had a certain enticing to which he would reply, "Eh, roundness which she mistook Suzanne!" and pass on. for beauty. Rotundity has now gone out of fashion even in provincial France, but Madame St Mouxa has become the rounder. Her little son let out to us a fact which doubtless Madame St Mouxa would rather have kept a close secret We think that she appreciated and was enjoying the sensation she aroused. No sooner was she gone beyond earshot than the curious sauntered into the street, regarding her distant back. 66 She killed her husband with a coal-hammer," said Madame Sestrol to us. It was a bad marriage always squabbling. Then one day she picked up the coal-hammer, and just hit him. Here," and she indicated the temple. We were on our road home when we met Madame St Mouxa "Mother thinks she is getting fat; she is taking castoroil regularly to try to become thinner." Il faut souffrir pour être belle, but Madame St Mouxa does not know that castor-oil, in spite of its obvious effects, is a fattening medicine. She now met us, and said with the painstaking precision of a governess— St Mouxa doesn't know anything about it. Why, they came here on their way to Dr Saggebou. She was supporting him, holding him up, and crying upon his shoulder. 66 6 She "That woman is a murderess, she has committed murder. She chopped open her husband's head with an axe, yes. hit him once, and then came back to hit him again, that makes twice, you understand. He walked up here after it had all happened. I saw him. His head was laid quite open, and his brains were running down his face. That is a fact; by brains I mean the inside of his head, you know. And she was only put in prison during five years for so horrible a crime. Crime, you know; a misdeed, what. Five years in prison, you understand, only that." In the evening we drew a few more facts from Madame Sestrol. "Chopper Nonsense," she said; 66 hit him with a coalhammer, a little coal-hammer it was, lying on the table, just there as you may say, and she picked it up in a temper and gave him a back-handed stroke without looking, just as she was running from the roomdidn't know that she had hit him till she got back. Then it might have been all right, only they left it for four days, till it all went bad inside his head. Brains running down? Nonsense! Who has been telling you all that stuff Genevieve Have I done thee any injury, my cabbage; have I harmed thee? who would never hurt a hair of thy head.' 66 And the doctor called them fools; but there was no getting over the fact that all the inside of his head had gone bad. They said that he must have been a strong man to have walked up here and down again in that state. But those two were never well suited, always squabbling till the neighbours said there'd be murder done one day. In fact, once before she did try to poison him with wash for the vines, but he got over it. Not a good home for the children; no. So the saintly sisters took them, but now doubtless the mother will want them back again. They would be better where they are now, because after all the woman isn't quite She tapped her forehead-" nor was the man either, to my thinking," she added. Monsieur le Juge de Paix does not touch such grave matters as this. He travels about from canton to canton, an affable, slightly pompous, slightly sardonic peacemaker, an ambulating olive branch dipped in vinegar. ... (To be continued.) THE HILLMEN OF THE SOUDAN. 66 BY A. J. P. SHOULD any commanding officer of a Soudanese regiment be asked to give his opinion as to the best fighters who are enlisted from the warrior tribes for training in the Egyptian Army, he will, as a rule, cast his vote for the men who are serving in his own particular Orta " (battalion). But the majority of soldiers of experience who have completed their ten years in the service of the Sirdar will award the palm to the Nuba (I can almost hear the indignant protest from British Beys who have commanded Dinkas, Shilluks, or Nuers!) They are hillmen, and in common with most inhabitants of the uplands, they are sturdily made, intelligent, and possessed of an independent spirit to a high degree. Owing to constant raiding among themselves, they take to warfare as the duck takes to water; but on adopting the profession of arms as regulars, they require time to settle down to the necessary routine of military life when not in the field. Their ideal programme for a month would be as follows: a fortnight's raid, with plenty of ammunition to expend on any old target that crops up; a week of indiscriminate looting; a week of song and dance to celebrate the occasion, interlarded by dalliance with the ladies who have been forcibly abducted during the operations. For genera tions this same General Idea has remained among them; and although it is more fullblooded than the one we remember at Aldershot in the old days of Red versus Blue, they both bear the same stamp of conservative adherence to ancient custom. Second to their interest in female society comes a love of firearms. No man among them is of account until he is the owner of a rifle of sorts, and the methods employed to gain this end would often make an Afridi border thief blush with envy. In spite of protective measures, Government rifles are frequently reported as missing, and find their way to the hills of the Mountain Province; but as a rule the old-fashioned Remington is the arm that finds most favour, the reason being that home-made ammuni tion may be used with these out-of-date but hard-hitting weapons. When on the warpath the Nuba armament is reminiscent of a museum, beside the prehistoric musket, with its reinforcement of hide binding to hold its component parts in comparative safety, may be found a purloined for 18 מר ed t masterpiece of accuracy and by a fantastic coiffure of the hair, which is clubbed into weird shapes with a mixture of cow-dung and mud. power by a fashionable London maker. These plums of the collection, carried by the headman, in right of seniority, are frequently bereft of the foresight as being an unnecessary piece of swank! The remainder of their clothing and equipment is simple in the extreme, and would delight the heart of the overworked quartermasters of more complex forces. Except among the bigger chiefs, of clothing there is none, their strongly made black bodies being naked. True, a few of the older men may sport an inadequate strip of cloth where it is most necessary to our ideas, but in the main it simply isn't done. Equipment consists of a bandolier, made of raw hide, worn round the waist; but here again sealed patterns are not de rigueur, for a very serviceable one was surrendered at the conclusion of some operations against them that had been in earlier days the windowstrap of a first-class carriage on the late London & North Western Railway. Their appearance in the field tis indeed strange. In order to de escape the attentions of stinging flies and mosquitoes, they smear their bodies to a leprouslooking whiteness with woodash on a foundation of grease. Around the eyes the ash is it cleared away, leaving black circles that give them the ghastly semblance to a death'shead. The toilette is completed The country is a most interesting one, and there are few who have lived in it for any length of time who do not carry away pleasant memories of its picturesque beauty. The Nuba Mountains do not vie with other ranges as regards towering peaks or snow-clad summits, for most of the important heights are of an average amounting to between three and four thousand feet; but in rugged impressiveness they are unequalled. There is a legend that in the dawn of time a race of Titans piled up gigantic boulders among the jumble of hills in sport, then tumbled them into chaos at the finish of their game; and indeed the legend describes the lie of the land most aptly. All about the ironstone rocks of colossal proportions a tangle of scrub and stunted trees has taken root, hiding the starkness of the bare stone with an adornment of many colours. At sunset, when the grotesque outlines of the hills are tinged with rosy light, and the verdure in the ravines is merged into delicate shades of purple and russet-brown, the scene is one of mystery and loveliness. At the foot of the steep slopes there are grass-clad valleys, where the cattle are grazed, and millet grown as the chief crop, all within easy reach |