The Tenth Man

14

“WHERE’VE YOU BEEN?” THERESE SAID.

He scraped the mud off his shoes with a knife and replied, “In the night I thought I heard someone move by the garden shed. I wanted to make sure.”

“Were there any signs?”

“No.”

“It may have been Chavel,” she said. “I lay awake for hours thinking. It was an awful night to turn a man out in. There we were, my mother and I, praying and praying. And he was outside walking. So many Paternosters,” she said. “I couldn’t leave out the bit about forgiveness every time or my mother would have spotted something.”

“Better to be walking in the rain than shot.”

“I don’t know. Is it? It depends, doesn’t it? When I spat in his face…” She paused, and he remembered very clearly the actor lying on the bed boasting of his gesture. She’ll be thinking about it, he had said. It was horrifying to realize that a man as false as that could sum up so accurately the mind of someone so true. The other way round, he thought, it doesn’t work. Truth doesn’t teach you to know your fellow man.

He said, “It’s over now. Don’t think about it.”

“Do you think he got some shelter? He’d have been afraid to ask for it in the village. It wouldn’t have done any harm to have let him spend a night here,” she accused him. “Why didn’t you suggest that? You haven’t any reason to hate him.”

“It’s better just to put him out of mind. You weren’t so anxious to forgive him before you’d seen him.”

“It’s not so easy to hate a face you know,” she said, “as a face you just imagine.”

He thought, If that’s true what a fool I’ve been.

“After all,” she said, “we are more alike than I thought, and when it came to the point I couldn’t shoot him. The test floored me just as it floored him!”

“Oh, if you are looking for points like that,” he told her, “take me as an example. Aren’t I failure enough for you?”

She looked up at him with a terrible lack of interest. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I suppose you are. Michel sent a message by him.”

“So he said.”

“I don’t see why he should have lied about that and not about the big thing. As a matter of fact,” she said with an awful simplicity, “he didn’t strike me like a man who told lies.”

During the night Madame Mangeot had been taken ill. Those large maternal breasts were after all a disguise of weakness: behind them unnoticeably she had crumbled. It was no case for a doctor and in any event there were not enough doctors in these days to cover so obscure a provincial corner as Brinac. The priest was of more importance to the sick woman, and for the first time Charlot penetrated into the dangerous territory of St. Jean. It was too early in the morning for people to be about and he passed nobody on his way to the presbytery. But there his heart drummed on his ribs as he rang. He had known the old man well: he had been used to dining at the big house whenever Chavel visited St. Jean. He was not a man who could be put off by a beard and the changes a few years wrought on the face, and Charlot felt a mixture of anxiety and expectation. How strange it would feel to be himself again, if only to one man.

But it was a stranger who replied to his ring: a dark youngish man with the brusque air of a competent and hardworking craftsman. He packed the sacrament in his bag as a plumber packs his tools. “Is it wet across the fields?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Then you must wait till I put on my galoshes.” He walked quickly and Charlot had difficulty in maintaining the pace. Ahead of him the galoshes sucked and spat. Charlot said, “There used to be a Father Russe here?”

“He died,” the young priest said, striding on, “last year.” He added somberly, “He got his feet wet.” He added, “You would be surprised at the number of parish priests who die that way. You might call it a professional risk.”

“He was a good man, they say.”

“It isn’t difficult,” Father Russe’s successor said with asperity, “to satisfy country people. Any priest who has been in a place forty years is a good old man.” He sounded as though he sucked his teeth between every word, but it was really his galoshes drawing at the ground.

Therese met them at the door. Carrying his little attache case the priest followed her upstairs: a man with his tools. He could have wasted no time: ten minutes had not passed before he was back in the hall drawing on his galoshes again. Charlot watched from the passage his brisk and businesslike farewell. “If you need me,” he said, “send for me again, but please remember, mademoiselle, that though I am at your service I am also at the service of everyone in St. Jean.”

“Can I have your blessing, Father?”

“Of course.” He rubber-stamped the air like a notary and was gone. They were alone together, and Charlot had never felt their loneliness so complete. It was as if the death had already occurred, and they were left face to face with the situation.