ho cry out if a burly ruffian is ordered twenty
strokes with the cat--could they see a hundred _chicotte_ administered
with a whip that is flexible as india-rubber, hard as steel.

Two soldiers at the yelping orders of Meeus cut the old woman apart from
her fellows and flung her on the ground.

The two soldiers armed with whips came to her, and she did not speak a
word, nor cry out, but lay grinning at the sun.

Papeete, seeing his old grandmother treated like this, dropped his tomato
tin and screamed, till a soldier put a foot on his chest and held him
down.

"Two hundred _chicotte_," cried Meeus, and like the echo of his words came
the first dull, coughing blow.

The villagers shrieked and cried altogether at each blow, but the victim,
after the shriek which followed the first blow, was dumb.

Free as a top which is being whipped by a boy, she gyrated, making frantic
efforts to escape, and like boys whipping a top, the two soldiers with
their whips pursued her, blow following blow.

A semicircle of blood on the ground marked her gyrations. Once she almost
gained her feet, but a blow in the face sent her down again. She put her
hands to her poor face, and the rhinoceros whips caught her on the hands,
breaking them. She flung herself on her back and they beat her on the
stomach, cutting through the walls of the abdomen till the intestines
protruded. She flung herself on her face and they cut into her back with
the whips till her ribs were bare and the fat bulged through the long
slashes in the skin.

Verily it was a beating to the bitter end, and Meeus, pale, dripping with
sweat, his eyes dilated to a rim, ran about laughing, shouting--

_"Two hundred chicotte. Two hundred chicotte."_

* * * * *

He cried the words like a parrot, not knowing what he said.

And Berselius?

Berselius, also dripping with sweat, his eyes also dilated to a rim,
tottering like a drunken man, gazed, drinking, drinking the sight in.

Down, away down in the heart of man there is a trapdoor. Beyond the
instincts of murder and assassination, beyond the instincts that make a
Count Cajus or a Marquis de Sade, it lies, and it leads directly into the
last and nethermost depths of hell, where sits in eternal damnation
Eccelin de Romano.

Cruelty for cruelty's sake: the mad pleasure of watching suffering in its
most odious form: that is the passion which hides demon-like beneath this
door, and