.54
PARTISAN REVIEW
kind." This curse of hate against the mother thus extends to the
whole universe, but is soon withdrawn, however, to concentrate with
redoubled force on its real object. Even before his first attack on
Pluto, we saw that the drunkard had "suffered himself to use intemp–
erate language" to his wife and, even, offer her "personal violence";
now, speaking under the spell of the horror inspired by the second
cat, to whose pleas he has turned a deaf ear, he says:
"from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to
which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife,
alas! was the usual and most patient of sufferers."
Thus does the woman, prototype of the cat, reappear behind it. It
need not, therefore, surprise us if, as we shall see, the blow intended
for one strikes the other.
"One day she accompanied me, upon some humble household
errand, into the cellar of the old building which our poverty com–
pelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and,
nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting
an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had
hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal which, of
course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended
JS
I
wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded,
by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew
my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead
upon the spot, without a groan."
"This hideous murder accomplished," the murderer forthwith
sets himself "with entire deliberation, to the task of concealing the
body. . . ." He considers and rejects several possibilities, such
;lS
cutting the corpse into minute fragments and destroying them by
fire, or digging a grave in the cellar, or casting the body in the well
in the yard, or "packing it in a box ... and so getting a porter to take
it from the house." Finally ... he determines
"to wall it up in the cellar-as the monks of the middle ages are
recorded to have walled up their victims."
"For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls
were loosely constructed" ... and the plaster was still moist and soft.
"Moreover, in one of the walls was a projection, caused by a false
