A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

1

She used to come into the casino every evening at the same hour to play. And every evening she lost. She was said to be a countess, but nobody seemed to know her name. She was always followed by her maid, carrying a knitting-bag stuffed with upper-bracket banknotes and a little book in which to enter the evening’s results. Which were always the same, anyway.

She would insert herself into the tightly packed group surrounding the roulette table, with the writhing motions of a snake caught between two rocks. Then, when she was in, the group closed up again and held her fast, like a constricted elastic band. All you could see were backs, an unbroken line of backs, some naked with tinsel shoulder-straps, some naked without tinsel shoulder-straps, and some reticently clothed in black.

The maid, meanwhile, would unfold a little camp-stool that the management had provided her with, seat herself directly behind her employer’s back, adjust a pair of prim rimless glasses to the bridge of her nose, pull a strip of lace and two small steel needles out of the pocket of her dress, and contentedly begin to crochet. From time to time her mistress’ arm would dart out of the spinal thicket surrounding her and halt before her face, palm upturned. Each time this occurred the maid would open the drawstring-bag on her lap, fish out the required banknotes, and place them in the hand’s garrotting grasp. The arm would vanish again back where it had come from, a doleful voice would intone “Nothing more goes,” and the maid would go back to her crocheting.

This unexciting routine would continue sometimes for hours, without a single variation. Outside, regularly every few minutes, the mercurial gleam of the lighthouse out on the promontory would strike the long line of casino windows, splash from one to the next like silvery water, and then go on back out into the Bay of Biscay. In the next room, with a sound that seemed to come from miles away, an orchestra muffledly played a tango and a couple or two could be seen moving about the floor like sleepwalkers locked in each other’s arms.

The taffeta bag slowly deflated like a toy balloon from which the air escapes little by little, until its glossy plumpness was all gone and only a crumpled rag remained on the maid’s lap.

Moments of absolute, breath-holding stillness. A click, and then people stirred again, breathed again, shifted from one foot to the other. A man ran his finger around the inside of his collar, as though it were choking him. A woman laughed, without joy. A coin dropped to the floor with a trill like that of a small bicycle-bell.

The maid looked up and the countess’ hand was being held out toward her once more, with a swift opening and closing of the fingers that resembled the beaks of five young birds clamoring to be fed. The maid dutifully explored the inside of the drawstring-bag, fitting it over her own hand almost like a glove, and came out with a last banknote that must have adhered to its lining. The countess’ arm flicked away with the suddenness of a whip being cracked. The maid folded the empty bag and neatly inserted it into her pocket. She took up her needles again and went on making lace.

Moments of breath-holding silence. Only a sound like a child’s toy top spinning on a wooden floor. Then the top fell over with a little cluck! Someone sighed. Someone else cleared his throat. Flimsy paper rustled sibilantly in transfer, then crackled more sharply in compressed folding.

When the arm came out again, the maid’s face was expressionless as she looked up from her lace. So was her voice. Like someone who has seen this point reached a hundred times before, on a hundred other nights, and long ago stopped hoping that anything will ever change it. “There’s nothing left, madame.”

She saw the fingers contract, turn inward; their pointed nails buried themselves in the soft palm, digging five little graves.

The maid sighed. Not with compassion, with boredom. The way a nurse would who becomes wearied of watching her sick patient’s unending and unvarying symptoms.

“Nothing more goes,” an entombed voice said, sounding as if it came from an open grave.

The maid rolled up her strip of lace, put it into her pocket. She removed her glasses, polished them with her breath. She took a last, frugal, suction-forced sip from the moist bottom of her lemonade-glass. She waited for the approaching debacle, as she had waited so many times before.

It came without sound. Discreetly, without commotion: with the good breeding that seeks anonymity for its moments of despair.

The countess extricated herself backward. There was no other way: there was no room to turn. Then she turned around, to face life once more. Life away from the table. A wisp of her sleek hair had fallen across one eye. Mechanically, with the rickety gesture of an automaton whose spring has run down, she brushed it aside with the back of her hand. It fell forward again immediately afterward. A furrow of moisture, like a satin ribbon, bisected the powder on her forehead.

“Let’s leave now,” she whispered hoarsely, as if even the use of her voice had been temporarily taken away from her.

The maid stood up and followed her out of the gambling room and into the chandeliered vestibule outside. Instead of a woman, a wax mannequin that sagged at the knees seemed to be tottering ahead of her. The maid hurriedly caught up with her. “Lean on me, madame,” she offered, extending her arm.

The offer was summarily rejected, with a downward push. She didn’t want physical assistance, she wanted financial.

“Don’t you have anything on you, Fernande?” she breathed avidly, moistening her lips. “Anything at all, no matter how small—?”

“You know I don’t. How could I?” the maid answered pointedly. “It’s been so long since I was last paid.”

The countess saw a chasseur standing there at attention, to open the vestibule-doors for arrivals and departures. She suddenly darted over toward him, blurted out: “Young man — my friend — would you by any chance have—?”

The maid caught her by the arm just in time, managed to insert herself between the two of them, so that the incipient bit of beggary was blocked off.

“Madame,” she pleaded in a horrified undertone. “Stop and think what you are doing.”

The countess looked down at the restraining hand that had been placed on her arm. The maid understood the unspoken rebuke, removed it. The countess, however, did not try to solicit him a second time.

He turned to stare after her as she passed through the doorway and blended into the night outside. He kept shaking his head pityingly to himself.

2

The following day she went to consult a mystic, or occultist, whom she had heard spoken of. Unaccompanied now, for the maid had finally quit her the night before. The woman she went to see was an escapee from one of the Eastern European countries, but unlike many of the others in that category, she seemed to have done fairly well in her chosen metier. She refused to allow herself to be called a fortuneteller, perhaps a precautionary measure in view of the unsympathetic French laws, but insisted upon calling herself a “consultant” or an “intimate consultant,” depending upon the size of the fee she extracted.

She lived in a somewhat banal yellow plaster villa on the Avenue de la Reine Natalie, and evidently had sources of information of her own to brief her on her various clients in advance — in this case probably a bellman or desk-assistant at the hotel, for the appointment had been made over the telephone — for she greeted the countess with Slavic affability, poured tea for the two of them from an ornate brass samovar, and managed to give the paid-for interview the aspect of a social visit.

After a few phrases of small-talk, the countess stated her case.

“I have a pressing need of guidance, of advice.”

“One already knows.”

“You know also the subject to which I have reference?”

“The casino.” The consultant’s sources of information were evidently extremely reliable.

“The casino,” agreed the countess with a wormwood-bitter smile.

“Must you play?” asked the consultant laconically.

“As long as I live, I must. It has me completely. If I locked myself in my room and threw the key out of the window, still, somehow, I would find myself standing beside the roulette wheel around midnight.”

“I have heard that’s the way it is,” murmured the consultant with an edge of contempt in her voice. The patronage of the well for the ill, of the whole for the maimed. “And you want, then?”

“I have lost almost everything I have. If I go there again tonight and play with the little that is left and lose that, what will become of me? I will never be able to recover my losses, for I will have nothing more to play with. All I can see is gray poverty staring me in the face. You must tell me how to win tonight, for it is my last chance.”

The occult lady took out a pack of cards, shuffled them, spread them before her in some sort of cryptic formation, and pored over them at great length. She gathered them together at last, shook her head as though dissatisfied, shuffled them once more, and tried again. Three times she repeated the endeavor. Finally she swept them all aside with a sudden switch of her hand. The countess, meanwhile, sat rigid, with the strained expression about her eyes of a nervous onlooker waiting to hear a gun go off.

The consultant cleared her throat, with a note of deep gravity. “I do not know what to say to you,” she said speaking with deliberation. “Do not go there. Do not play.”

The countess slowly backed her hand to her forehead, as though she had been dealt a blow there.

“I will lose if I go tonight?” she faltered.

She took a moment to recover, then painfully scraping up hope once more, asked wanly: “If I go tomorrow night, then? (I have often missed a night before. When I was on a train, when I was on a plane, when the casino employes went out on strike.) I could go to a doctor, and he could give me something in a glass of water or with a needle — that would make me miss tonight.” Her eyes were pleading febrilely, as though she were coaxing somebody for something that they had it in their power to give her. “Tomorrow night, then? Tomorrow? Say tomorrow, won’t you? Say tomorrow.”

The occultist said with brutal emphasis: “Not tonight. Not tomorrow night. Not any night. Not ever in this lifetime. Now do you understand?”

A low moan escaped from the countess’ tightly pressed lips.

“Perhaps you do not believe me, madame,” the other went on. “Let me try to help you understand.”

“Yes, help me,” the countess nodded expiringly. “Please. Help me—”

“Let us go back, then, before we go forward. Have you ever at any time won? Think, now.”

A touch of pride reasserted itself in the countess, as when one finds that she has certain accomplishments she can boast of after all. “Many times. Oh, many times. But I did not stop soon enough, that was the only trouble. I went on playing too long afterward, and—”

“There is no ‘soon enough,’ there is no ‘too long afterward,’ ” the consultant told her inexorably. “There is only one terminal point in this, and that is the point at which you did stop. Because you were meant to, because it was ordained for you to stop there by the forces that rule us. Take that. Let me repeat: when you have stopped, have you ever been winning?”

The countess closed her eyes despairingly for answer.

“You have never won at any time, you see? Judge by that. The past is the future that lies behind us, the future is the past that lies before us. They are one and the same. Only fools think that they can divide the two in the middle.”

The countess lowered her head fearfully.

“It is not only that you will lose tonight — and I have gone through the cards three times, as you noticed — you are not destined to win at any time. No matter when you play, tonight, a month from now, a year from now. The money-cards, the diamond suite, have all consistently avoided you, turned their backs on you, each time they came up. It happened too many limes. That shows clearly that your personality, your aura, in some mysterious way attracts only ill-fortune at the gaming-table. There is something that is not en rapport. It is inexplicable, it is in your birth, in your aspect, but there it is.”

“Then what am I to do? For I know that I will go back there and play. I cannot stay away.”

The consultant lighted a cigarette almost a foot long, only part of which contained tobacco, however, and held it poised beside her ear like a pen ready to write with. “I have only one solution. You have someone who could place your bets for you? A maid, perhaps? But the selection must be hers, not yours. It will not help if you tell her which plays to make. That is still you playing, then.”

The countess shook her head vehemently. “I would be only a spectator? I couldn’t! It is the excitement, the urge, to play myself that possesses me. If I am thirsty, and you give the drink to someone else, will that quench me? If I am in a fever, and you give the medicine to someone else, will that calm me?”

The consultant sighed, gestured fatalistically with her hands. “There you have it. There it is.” The ubiquitous, the unarguable, “voilà.”

“Couldn’t I alter my own personality in some way, change it, hide it — so that contact might be established between it and good-fortune at playing?”

“You mean cheat your own destiny? Tamper with it? That is dangerous, madame.”

“Some hope. Give me some hope. Don’t let me go out of here in this condition, that isn’t life and that isn’t death.”

“You could try. But I guarantee nothing.”

“I ask no guarantee. Who am I to ask a guarantee? I, who would not bet on a sure thing if I could, for then it would have no savor for me! All I ask is the outside chance, the short end of the odds.”

“Even in this you bet, madame,” sighed the consultant with sardonic detachment. “Not only on the game itself, but on the betting on the game.”

“Say only ‘maybe,’ say only ‘perhaps’; you need not say ‘for sure.’ ”

“What you really wish to hear.” the consultant told her drily, “are your own words, those you would say yourself, issuing from my lips. So that they may have a cachet of infallibility that you yourself cannot give them. Very well, on these terms, have them. ‘Maybe.’ ‘Perhaps.’ ‘Who knows?’ Try it. It may help.”

“But you yourself do not really believe—”

The consultant moved one shoulder in delicate nuance. “You are not asking what I believe. You are asking to hear me say that which you believe yourself.”

“And is this all you can do for me?”

“No,” said the occultist with almost brutal candor. “Since the consultation is not gratis, I can amplify it, I can dress it up. And in a little while you will forget that it is not my suggestion to you, but only your own suggestion to yourself, passed through me.”

“But it is your suggestion. You yourself told me that, as I am now. I will never win at gambling.”

“You see?” murmured the consultant, half to herself. “Already! Very well, then. We will garnish. Do not wear anything you have already worn before when playing. To be safe, do not wear anything that belongs to you at all, that you have worn even when not playing. Change your perfume, change your hairdress change everything. Do not arrive at the same hour, do not enter by the same door, do not stand at the same side of the table. Breathe different breaths, think different thoughts — those of someone else. Even in your own mind, be someone else. Call yourself by another name. Believe you are called by another name. You see how impossible it is?”

“No it isn’t!” cried the countess fervently. She was beside the other woman now, crouched in her intensity, knees clipping toward the floor. She caught her hand with both her own, suddenly bent her head and pressed her lips to it. Then looked up again, her face ecstatic as that of a child expecting candy to drop into her mouth. “You have helped me after all, my clear friend,” she breathed rapturously. “You have helped me after all.”

All the consultant said, cynically, was, “Have I?”

3

No withdrawal-symptoms of any narcotic-addict could have exceeded what she was now enduring. The caged-beast paring back and forth the length of the room, that had been going on for hours. The walk to nowhere, the walk of the damned.

No going to the casino tonight, no playing tonight.

The mirror, as she passed it to and fro, gave her back a glimpse of the spreading white gown that she’d had on there last night. She had it on again tonight. It was about the only thing she had left, everything else had been sold. No use to go there in it. Everything belonging to her doomed her to failure, the mystic had said.

When it had been new and she had first bought it, the designer who had made it had proudly told her it was called “Adieu Sagesse.” It had been well-named, she said to herself bitterly; well-named, all tight.

Unable to stand it any longer, she picked up a shawl, gave it a twist about her shoulders, and, like a fever-patient with a burning skin, a panting thirst, left the room to seek out the cool dark of the open, the refreshing feel of wind coming off the sea.

The last belated lovers were strolling back arm in arm from the direction of the Rock of the Virgin when she came out on the esplanade. She turned that way herself, a forlorn figure walking slowly, morosely along, arms embracing one another as if warding something off. The night was blowy, and the moon, struggling through fast-running mist that streamed across it, was like a half-erased chalk-sworl on some gigantic blackboard. The sea was like a vast expanse of boiling tar. Each time the revolving eye of the lighthouse caught her in its revealing beam, the white of her dress blazed a spurious blue it had never been in daylight, only to die down into blurred grayness again a moment later.

The esplanade, curving around until nearly the whole town lay like a jewelled tiara at the water’s edge behind her, and rising steadily as it went along, reached a promontory and turned in again toward the left. Now one by one the lights dropped out of sight, until Biarritz lay hidden from her. There was a brief glimpse of it again as she passed the Place Sainte-Eugénie, with its empty concert-kiosk and its middle-income-class boarding-houses and sidewalk-cafés. From one of these, emitted through an amplifier above its stacked chairs and deserted tables, came the thin strains of “Adios Muchachos.”

She half-turned her head toward the sound, in oblique acknowledgement of its appropriateness to herself.

Along the deserted Boulevard des Tamaris then, with rows of tamarisk trees like gnarled old men lifting despairing, writhing arms to heaven, now on this side, now on that, as though praying over her as she walked along below. Over in the west a flash of sheet-lightning flooded the horizon for an instant. Unhesitatingly (for what had she to fear except the spinning wheels of chance?) she passed through the long black tunnel piercing the overhanging rock, and emerged again onto the round flat Esplanade de la Vierge, with its memorial to the half-forgotten dead of the all-forgotten war. That other one, the one before the last. To her left the coastline turned south again, to sweep past Guethary, Bidart, St. Jean de Luz, Hendaye, until at last it became Spain. That white pin-point of light far away down there, visible from here, was the lighthouse of San Sebastian. But before her, jutting straight out into the ocean, was a succession of large tortured rocks, the nearest one, the famous Rock of the Virgin, linked to the mainland by a slender white bridge that seemed to sway with each inrushing, white-scalloped wave below it. Toward this she turned her steps.

Another noiseless tinsel flash paled the sky, nearer this

The wind, seeking her out around the corner of the rock, whipped her white skirt around her as though it were trying to apply a tourniquet to her legs. When she had passed over the exposed bridge and gained the shelter of the forward rock, it stopped again as suddenly, and all was calm. She halted on the hollowed-out amphitheatre cut into one side of it, and looked up at the dim statue above her, the Virgin of the Rock, with an iron railing about its feet and streamers of fast-moving mist veiling its head.

Looked, but nothing more than that, for she had not come here to pray.

“Good evening, Holy Lady,” she greeted Her gravely in her mind. “Forgive me for intruding upon You. You wouldn’t understand what ails me.”

A momentary flood of silver revealed the serene stone eyes; they were directed, as she had somehow known they would be, out over her head, into a greater distance, missing her entirely. The splashing silver drained off into the churning sea below. The beat of a huge drum filled the air. A few heavy drops came down, then stopped again.

Something soft brushed against the side of her leg, lay motionless at her feet, as though it had rolled down the rock from the base of the statue. Her brief scream of nervous shock was lost in the pounding, droning air. Her foot, unaided, had identified it long before her eyes could. An article of clothing, someone’s discarded garment, adhering to her almost suctionally by wind-action alone. Her arm reached down to free it, draw it up. Another came down, smaller. And then another still.

Someone, something alive, was up there, perhaps on the seaward side of the rock, around at the statue’s back.

And then she saw her. A blinding flash, like quicksilver in the sun, revealed her. A woman, hair flying angrily, the pristine outlines of her body completely unaltered by any draped line, standing upright, on the rock but lower than the statue, facing the other way, outward to the sea, the night, and her own little private eternity. She had her arms up, desperately holding her head in her agony; turning it tormentedly first to one side, then to the other, then back again, as though there were no relief in any direction. Any direction but one.

She, below, could not have saved her even if she had tried. And she did not try. Each one must die. Each one must die in his own way. And above all, each one must die alone. In death, there are not two, there is only one.

The last thing she saw her do was make the sign of the cross. The darkness came down again. When another Hash from above had lit up the rock, there was no longer anyone on it. A distant scream, borne upward from below in all that surging and elemental noise, was only an echo of what had once been a life.

And then there were the clothes. Successive flashes showed her the remainder, still undislodged, neatly piled on the slope of the rock. She had but to go in closer, past the iron guard-tailing; had but to raise an arm, perhaps take one step upward on some supporting ledge, to achieve them. As she did this, she knew already why she did this, what her purpose was in doing it.

Her mind instructed: “To go back to the casino. It is still open. I’ll still have time. This is what she meant, not the other. This is being somebody else, intact, complete. The other was just buying scattered bits of clothing. It was still I doing the buying — for me.”

Suddenly, back curved to the rock, she was as completely divested as the woman above had been just now. No thought whatever of the outrageousness of what she was doing, stripping like some small child in a public place, even though it was late, and dark, and completely deserted.

The clothes still seemed warm as they enfolded her, in spite of the wind and the drops of rain, so recently had they been on another’s body. The aura was of other blood, other flesh; those were gone now, the aura still remained, trapped now a second time, mingling with her own, perhaps overcoming it.

In a few moments, walking very slowly but without a backward glance, she was recrossing the bridge. Then through the tunnel, straw-soled Basque sandals making no noise.

In the tunnel, her mind kept rehearsing its intentions, at first clearly defined, then gradually becoming less so, more and more blurred, indefinable, finally almost meaningless. Thus:

The storm had evidently been an abortion. Or had been carried swiftly onward to burst somewhere else. No more drops fell. The sky-flashes became weaker, less frequent. The moon steadied to a greater clarity, ridding itself of the woolly mists that had soil-focussed it.

Under the tamarisks she stopped, and stood with her back to the stone parapet that began from that point on. Just stood there like that, ankles crossed, body sagging in an inert curve. “Just one more try,” something seemed to be saying to her. “One more try.” She opened a battered little mock-leather handbag that had been pressed under her armpit until now, and without looking down into it, took out a loose cigarette that she had known would be lying at the bottom of it. This had been about a quarter-consumed; one end was charred. She ignited it with a match, drew a single inhalation from it, then thriftily rubbed it out again against the stone of the parapet, and carefully deposited it back inside the handbag.

In a little while a man came along. He wore the loose blue smock of the Basques, a beret pulled low above his eyes, coiled net looped about his shoulder. A fisherman on his way to the Porte-Vieux to catch the early tide in his little boat.

She waited until he was directly opposite her. “Evening to you,” she piped in a squeaky sing-song, absolutely without inflection and as mechanically as when a phrase has been repeated so often it has lost all meaning.

He didn’t even turn his head to look. “Not to you,” he said curtly. “Clear out.”

She stayed on there after he had passed from sight. She took out the charred cigarette-stump once more, relit it, took a single frugal pull, then put it out and put it away again.

After a while another man came along; this one French, judging by the way he was dressed, not a Basquais. “Evening to you,” she sing-songed again.

He halted, looked at her inquiringly. “Oh, it’s you. We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

“Are you in a hurry?”

“I have a minute or two to spare, if you have,” he said patronizingly.

She detached herself from the parapet and joined him, and they went on together side by side. At the Place de I’Atalaye they turned off onto a sharply downgrade side-street and followed that back into the town. The town that lived there during all four seasons, and not just one. The town that worked hard and earned little. The town that had nothing to do with the casino.

She halted at the mouth of an alley, a mere crevice between two walls, and disappeared into it. On the wall alongside it the tattered remnants of a cinema-poster proclaimed fuzzily: Jeux Interdits.

The man who had walked here with her hesitated just long enough to reach into his hip-pocket for his billfold, transfer it with precautionary foresight to his inside coat-pocket, and button his coat down over it; then he too entered the cranny.

She came out again presently, and turned a heedless shoulder to the impotent warning, Jeux Interdits, still up there on the wall, and went on down the rest of the way, alone, without anyone, to the Rue Mazagran, the main shopping and business street. Behind her, footsteps died away in the opposite direction, but she did not turn her head.

Mazagran was still fully lighted, but there was no one on it and the corrugated iron shutters were down over all of the shop-windows. She turned toward the right, without hesitation, as though there were no other way for her to turn, and walked along rapidly now; the gait of someone who has a destination now, who no longer loiters and ambles.

Then suddenly she stopped short, and cringed defensively, and made a faltering move to turn and slink back the other way. There was a policeman watchfully ensconced against the buildings just a little ahead of her. It was too late, he had already seen her.

He knifed a peremptory finger at her. Then, standing his ground, made her come to him, instead of going to her himself.

“Keep off these main streets. I’ve told you girls that before. Do your hustling along the seafront-walks, where there aren’t so many lights.”

“I’ve knocked off. I’m on my way home now, that’s all, capitaine,” she said submissively.

She pointed. “Down there. Right past the next corner.”

“Yes,” he admitted thoughtfully, “that’s what you told me the last time too.” He gave an overarm pitch of the thumb. “All right, move on. If I catch you here again, I’ll run you in.”

She scuttled off with a breathlessly obsequious, “Much obliged, capitaine.” She didn’t look back. She knew he was watching her and she was afraid he might resent it, if she did, and cancel her reprieve.

When she came to the door, she knew it was the right one. She did not in fact even look at it to see which one it was, just knew it was the right one and went in. Quietly up wooden stairs, then, one flight, two, then three, until there weren’t any more. Past the doors of little flats, little lodgings, these doors all alike as well. Again she knew which one to go to, which ones not. Her eyes didn’t tell her this, it came from somewhere in her mind. Yesterday’s mind, and yesterday’s, and yesterday’s.

She opened the shabby bag, and knew there was a key in it, and there was. She took it out. Then she leaned her forehead against the door-frame, and pressed it there, and let it rest there. Not lack of breath from the stairs, not weariness from the long night behind her, but some kind of mournful penance, seeking to find alleviation, not knowing where to look for it.

At last she put the key quietly into the door. It belonged there, it turned the lock. She opened the door softly, and the room before her was dark. With her hand behind her back, she closed the door again. She stood there. The room was dark and the room was still, but somehow she waited to hear a voice.

It came. It breathed just one word. Sighed it, with inexpressible content. “At last.” Enfin. So small a sound, so short a word, to hold so much within it. A thousand hours of loneliness, a thousand hours of waiting, a thousand hours of being in the dark without a light. That was in it, all that.

She was cold, and it warmed her. She was unwanted, and it claimed her for its own. She was an outcast, and it gave her someone to belong to. For this the night had spent its terrible course. For this her feet had trudged the slime, her heart had rolled along the gutters. Just one word. Enfin. The compressed eloquence of love.

She too said just one word. “Back again.” Revenue. What more was there to say? It said so much already. The girl coming back to her man, that was in it. The woman coming back to her husband, that was in it. The mother coming back to her child, something of that was within it too.

He said, “You stood outside there a minute or two, before you came in. What was it?”

Even that he knew. The eyes of the heart, that can see so much more clearly than those of the head. “No, nothing,” She said. “The stairs. My breath.”

He said, “You’d better put up the light, for your own sake.”

When she turned the switch, he was smiling, even though he couldn’t see light.

“Is it late?” he asked her.

“Later than it should be,” she said contritely. “Even night they keep me overtime.”

“I know this clock by heart, I’m at it so much. I listen to it with my fingers every ten minutes. We talk to each other, the little clock and I. True. I say to it, ‘Will she be here soon?’ It answers me, ‘Tikk.’ That’s yes. I say to it, ‘Isn’t she perhaps already coming along the street down there?’ It answers me, ‘Tokk.’ That’s maybe. Those are the only two words it has, yes and maybe. It never says No. We’re great companions in the dark, we two. Or I say to it. ‘Are you lonely too, as I am?’ It answers me, ‘Tikk.’ Yes. That’s a great advantage; when two are lonely together, then each one is not as lonely as he would be separately. I say to it, ‘Is there a little girl-clock somewhere you too are waiting for?’ It says shyly, ‘Tokk.’ Maybe. But I put my finger to it and I can hear its little heart going inside, so I know the answer, it doesn’t have to tell me. Beating for someone else, like mine is.”

She knuckled the outside corner of her eye, and it shone there after her finger left. She picked the clock up in her turn. “It’s been kind to you,” she murmured. “I thank it for that, I love it for that.” She drew the short hand of the hours completely around the dial twice, then left it there two hours from where it had been. Two hours, stolen each night, put back again each day. “It’s been kind to you,” she said again. “I know that.” And put her lips briefly to the rounded rim of it, before she set it down again.

She took down from the shelf a small tin cannister and took off its lid. Then from her stocking-top she took out money, and put it in there.

He heard her. “They paid you tonight at the factory?”

“Yes,” she said softly, with a shudder.

“It was getting very empty in there, wasn’t it?” he told her commiseratingly.

“Very,” she said with a sort of dulled desolation. “Did you—?”

“Yes, I shook it once, when you were out of here. I knew you were worried. I had heard you pick it up and put it down, twice, but without opening it.”

She took out three buttons and a metal washer, hid them away before reclosing it and putting it back on the shelf. “It’s all right now,” she said quietly. “Bread, and the little sausages, a bottle of red with the meals, maybe even a pack of Caporals for you—” Her voice trailed off into melancholy silence.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” he said. He was leaning forward, his face held up, trying to find her. “That’s been part of the wait too. As much as the silence.”

She winced. “I will,” she promised. “In just a little minute. First let me—” She went to the wash-basin, poured a little water, dipped her hand into it. Then with the back of it she scoured her mouth, rubbing at it over, and over, and over again, as though there were not enough water in the whole world to ever get it clean again.

Then she went to him, got to her knees, and their lips blended together.

“Why are there drops on your cheeks like that?” he whispered after a while.

“That’s water from the basin. You heard me at it. My face gets grubby — from the factory.”

“But we have only cold water — and these are warm.”

“Is the loneliness over, now?”

“I can’t remember, what was it like?”

Kneeling there, her head inclined against the crook of his arm, at rest at last, while his fingers, each one a pair of lips that softly, devoutly kissed, lightly traced and stroked her hair. The terrible oneness of despair; yet the unalterable apartness — even of love.

“A cigarette?”

“We’re together now, we’re two: I don’t need any third thing, that’s for the empty hours.”

“Did the little boy from downstairs come and take you out as usual?”

“He found a nice bench for me, overlooking the Porte-Vieux. I sat there two hours in the sun. Then he came by and brought me home once more.”

“It’s kind of him.”

“He told me his older sister works at the same factory you do. She hasn’t seen you there in over a month.”

Her eyes closed. When she opened them, they held a secret trouble, like mist clouding a mirror.

“She works days,” she said quietly. “I’m on the night-shift. They transferred me about a month ago. You know that. Some they let out altogether, but I was lucky, I guess—” Her voice died, just the lips moved; “—I work nights now.”

His fingertips kissed the softness of her hair, over and over.

Her voice came back again, barely alive. “Don’t talk to the other people in the house. They may say something to hurt you. I don’t want them to hurt you.”

“No one exists for me but you. They’re just footsteps I pass on the stairs. Footsteps without faces.”

His fingers explored her face, like mirrors showing her to his heart. The forehead, the checks, the turn of her chin. After a while he said, “You haven’t changed. You’re still the same, as that last time I looked at you. Before it happened to me, before the light went out.”

“Everything changes. Everything must. Only one thing never changes, never does. Love. The love never changes that is all, but the one who loves — even she changes.”

“Not you. You’ll always be as you were in those happier days, in the beginning. When I was a brand-new husband, and you were a brand-new wife. When we had the little house. And I’d come back, and you’d meet me out in the garden, holding flowers in your arms. So fresh and clean-looking, so steadfast, so true.”

Her lips parted spasmodically, as when something suddenly hurts. “Not those words,” she begged almost inaudibly. “Some others — any others — gay, beautiful — not those.”

“But it was that about you, always that, more than anything else. You were not the most beautiful girl in the world. A red crayon at the mouth, a black one at the eyes, can make that. You were the freshest-looking, the most unspoiled — what other word can I use? — the cleanest thing that ever walked the earth. The truest. The—”

“Not that word,” she moaned. “Don’t—”

“Clean as sunlight on dew. Clean as a crystal waterfall cascading into a rock-pool. When you came into a room, the April breeze came in with you. Clover came in with you. So clean, so true, so honest — the girl my love was, the girl my love is.”

She didn’t move a muscle. Thrice-stricken, even the death-stroke caused no tremor as it penetrated, found and killed her. And yet he knew, he sensed. “What is it? There’s a tension I get all at once — you’re so still, almost you don’t breathe — vibrations of distress, pulsing at me, beating at me—” Ah, the heart is so smart. Smarter than books. Smarter than looks, and the eyes that can give them.

Suddenly she sidled downward to the floor, toppled, crumpled. As when a man has had a sack of meal propped against him, but neglected to clasp it tight enough to him, and it leans over of its own weight and then trundles downhill in an ebbing fluctuation. The coiled arm whose fingers had been prizing her hair was left with nothing to caress.

She was prone like a low-crouched animal, on knees and flats of hands, head bowed so that her hair touched the floor. Then with an awkward scuttling motion, like something maimed that cannot free its extremities, she turned and began to pull herself away from him, on padding palms and inching legs. The moribund do not rise, the dying do not walk on upright legs.

Her breath, fanning across the floor-surface each time in quick-spreading circles, had a wooden hollowness to it, came with a snort-like gush.

She found the door-frame across the room and pulled herself up by that, cleaving to it tremblingly as one does to a staff without which one cannot maintain oneself erect. Then rolled over against it, so that she faced toward him once more instead of outward against the blind wood.

He was transfixed with fear, face livid, burning whitely out across the room, not knowing where to find her but trying desperately to encompass her, almost like the light-house-beam back there on the seafront but gone berserk now, with a half-turn to this side, a half-turn to that.

“What have I said? I take it back—”

“It’s too late,” she retched in a soul-vomiting voice. “You’ve undone me. Nothing can put me together again now.”

“Paule, Paule, you’re standing by the door now. I hear your voice against the panel. What are you thinking, what are you doing?”

In torment herself, yet she thought of his pain, thought of making it less for a moment. Saints can do this. And women in love.

“Close your eyes, I’ll be right back.”

“They’re closed already. They’re always closed. How can that help when you’re not here with me?”

“Close your eyes, I’ll be beside you when you open them again.”

“Paule, the door is open now. I hear the emptiness of the stairs in back of your voice. You haven’t turned, and yet you’re going further back and further back, away from me, away—”

“Downstairs — something I forgot to get — something for tomorrow—”

“Paule, my light’s going out again. It’s double darkness for me without you. Don’t take my light away, the only light I have!” And then a scream of agony, of love turned mad. “Panic, don’t leave me in the dark!”

Her fling around to take the stairs swept his face away, burning whitely, burning brightly like something that will go out soon in a draught of darkness; the rushing of her footsteps down them, like noisily tumbling water, drowned out the sound of his cries. But her heart heard them anyway, heard every last expiring whispered word.

“Panic, don’t go! The little clock and I, we want you back—”

“Tikk... Tikk... Tikk...”

Around the turn, and down some more. Down into darkness, down into forever.

A door along the way opened sparingly and someone stuck his head out.

“Will you kindly be more quiet. Who is that shouting up there?”

“Be patient, madame. In a few more moments I won’t make a sound.”

Down the one last flight, then out into the stone-still street. The street whose silence lay over it like a coating of ice. And like someone running over a thin coating of ice, her pick-like footfalls seemed to shiver it, the silence, and crack it into crazy streaks of outshooting sound, glancing hollowly off the fronts of the buildings on the other side of the way, to come back again to the near side, then fall down once more from there into what they had originally risen from: the silence. Through chips of flying sound she ran, like chips of flying ice.

No policeman to stop her now. No policeman could have stopped her now. She was on her way to a higher court.

Down Mazagran, a lonesome thing running, with nothing in pursuit. Then left, toward the seafront. The sea, the tears that God has wept over this world. Past an alley, and a warning commandment: Jeux hitcrdits. Someone had lost a soul in there. Someone had lost a life in there, by not heeding and obeying. Forbidden games, that were being paid for now.

Along the Boulevard des Tamaris, a lightning-flash like a bite at her heel winging her along her way. A lightning-flash that showed the rows on rows of gnarled trees, like weazened acolytes raising their bony arms over her doomed head in supplication. The sea a black growl, low-crouched, beyond and below them on the far side.

Then into the tunnel, brief-lived darkness before a longer darkness, as when a curtain falls imperfectly, to rise again and be adjusted, before it falls for good.

Across the white-armed bridge, so short, so slender, yet that spanned an incalculable distance, the gap from life to death.

She was on the rock now, and curt lightning gave it the appearance of loose snow sidling down its sides, to disappear into the engorging darkness.

Around the guard-rail to the outer side, and under that, and up it halfway to the top, with clawing hands and nibbling feet, until she could stand erect and turn and face the nothingness that never ends.

The statue’s back was turned to her. That was the answer to what life had been for her. That was the warning of what death was to be for her.

God has turned His back on me.

I had no one in life; I will have no one even in death. But at least I will be clean. Even alone, in my nothingness, I will be clean.

Long ago when she was a little girl her mother had said. “Paule, when you take oil your things, fold them, put them one on top the other. Don’t just let them fall.”

The will to be good was still strong. That was why she was dying.

She folded them, each one as she took it off; she put them one on top the other. She didn’t just let them fall.

When the last one was off, though the wind snapped about her like a whip, she didn’t feel it. She felt no cold, she felt no wind, she felt no fear, no anything at all. She only felt she wanted to be clean again.

In her mind she spoke to the statue, who snubbed her, who looked the other way. Not prayed, but spoke.

For myself, nothing. I have no claim, I make none. But for him, mercy. Be kind, Madame. Have pity. Don’t let him hurt too much. Don’t let him call my name too much. Don’t let him be lonely in the dark, too much. And if he must be these things: don’t let him linger too long.

Her fingers traced the stations of the cross upon her brow and breast. She stared down hypnotically at the boiling whitecaps scalloping the base of the rock. They broke and filled the air with showers of jet that sometimes nearly reached to where she was, then dropped back upon the bosom of the water again.

Her eyes dilated, but not with fear, with dedication.

“Madame, I go now!” she cried out wildly.

As her body relaxed and prepared to fall forward, she turned her head and looked behind her one last time.

A flash of lightning, the last light she would ever see in this world, showed her a woman who had just come over the bridge, a woman standing there below, at the rail, at the inner side of the rock. A woman in a spreading white dress, staring up at her amazed.