Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/54

 pink tights, with a red velvet jacket, short shirt, and copper fish-scales; and above this picture were the words, in big letters, Woman Torpedo Fish.

"What a name! It was quite strange enough for Catherine to mix up with mountebanks at all—although they are good as other people, ay, and even better than a good many other people we meet. Still, it was surprising enough for her to become a strolling player, or such like; but Woman Torpedo Fish, that beat all! Of course you know that the torpedo is a fish which gives you an electric shock if you touch it—a fish which seems to have an electric machine in its body. Well, by some electrical arrangement, when you touched Catherine Coussac's hand you received an electric shock."

"It was not necessary for me to touch her to be electrified; I only had to look at her. Look at her now; she is twenty-eight and a little stouter, but she's still pretty. Well, ten years ago, when she used to wear that lace cap on her black hair—that lace cap which the silly women have thrown aside for hats like the ladies wear—well, very few people who passed her went on their way without looking back at her! Such a figure she had! and such a complexion! There were some handsome girls in Limoges, but Catherine was the handsomest, though I say it as shouldn't.

"Didn't she draw the people to the booth! She didn't want a big band like the Corvi Circus, nor a lot of gag like the troupe which plays the Tour de Nesle. Not a bit of it; she just showed herself; people said, 'I say, that's a pretty girl!' and they went in.

" day, at Magnac Laval—it was Shrove Tuesday—I went in with the other people to see the Woman Torpedo Fish. There she was on a little stage, and old Mrs. Coussac, Léonard's mother, sat below, squatting like a witch, and frowning at everyone who came in, as though she would like to throw a spell upon them. Since the murder of her son, she had become sullen, and she scarcely said anything but 'So they won't take him to the guillotine, the rascal who killed my son!'

"I stepped forward. Catherine recognised me, and, as I stopped in front of her, and thought how well the costume suited her, she smiled, and said to me in a significant tone: 'Oh, it is you; but it isn't your hand I am looking for.' And her black eyes blazed again, with a look of madness almost.

"Then I understood what the brave girl was doing. Then I knew why she was going all over the country, disguised as a mountebank. The recollection of that frightful hand was always present, and she held out her own white little hand—as soft as satin, but as strong as a vice—to everyone, hoping in this way to recognise the hand with the fingers all of the same size.

"That was her own idea! That was the only clue, but it would be sufficient for her, she thought. It was not an easy task to find that fellow—almost as bad as looking for a needle in a haystack. And yet there is always a chance that a murderer will come and prowl round the scene of his crime. Blood seems to attract like a magnet, that's what I think. Of course, the man had fled from Limoges after the crime, and might still be far away, but he would come back and have a look at Montmailler at some time or other; so the Woman Torpedo Fish had the chances in her favour that she would see him again and recognise that hand—that hand which seemed to haunt her to such an extent that she has told me that she often dreamt it was round her neck, strangling her.

"In this way Catherine went about from place to place with old Mrs. Coussac. The electric woman's van went wherever it could, drawn by an old horse which had served in the gendarmerie. From fair to fair they dragged along, the mother and the daughter, and they must have covered miles enough to make a journey round the world. They saw Auvergne, Bordeaux, Angoulême, Tours, and right on to Orléans—and a good many other places, too, in the south. But it was in the department of Haute-Vienne that they felt most confident of success. They said to each other: That is where he did it, and that is where he will be taken!' A superstitious idea, perhaps, but you can't help such things.

"Women soon get at the bottom of things, I tell you. They are as artful as can be.

"Well, one day—I remember it as if it was yesterday, it was the 22nd of May and a Tuesday also—the booths were making no end of a row upon the Place Royale—Place de la République. There were roundabouts, waxworks, athletic sports, performing monkey, Pezon's menagerie, everything