The Voyeur

II

A rectangular shadow less than a foot wide crossed the white dust of the road. It lay at a slight angle from the perpendicular without quite reaching the opposite side: its rounded—almost flat—extremity did not protrude beyond the middle of the road, of which the left side remained unshaded. Between this extremity and the close-cropped weeds bordering the road had been crushed the corpse of a little frog, its legs open, its arms crossed, forming a slightly darker gray spot on the dust of the road. The creature’s body had lost all thickness, as if nothing but the skin were left—hard, dessicated, and henceforth invulnerable—clinging to the ground as closely as the shadow of an animal about to leap, limbs extended—but somehow immobilized in air. To the right the real shadow, which was much darker, gradually became paler, disappearing altogether after a few seconds. Mathias lifted his head toward the sky.

The upper edge of a cloud had just concealed the sun; a rapidly shifting bright fringe indicated its position from moment to moment. Other clouds, diffuse yet of less than ordinary size, had appeared here and there from the southwest. Most were of indeterminate shapes which the wind broke up into loose meshes. Mathias followed the trajectory of a sitting frog which stretched out to become a bird seen in profile, wings folded, with a rather short neck, like that of the sea gull, and a slightly curved beak; even its big round eye was recognizable. For a fraction of a second the giant gull seemed to be perched on top of the telegraph pole whose unbroken shadow extended once again across the road. In the white dust the shadows of the wires could not be distinguished.

A hundred yards beyond, a country woman carrying a knapsack was walking toward Mathias—doubtless coming from the village near the big lighthouse. The winding road and the situation of the crossroads at the bottom of a hill prevented her from seeing where the traveler had come from. He could just as well have come directly from the town as be returning from the Marek farm. On the other hand, the woman would have noticed this inexplicable standstill, which he himself was surprised at, now that he thought about it. Why should he have stopped in the middle of the road, his eyes raised toward the clouds, holding in one hand the handlebars of a chromium-plated bicycle and in the other a small fiber suitcase? Only then did he sense the numbness he had been floating in (for how long?); he did not succeed in figuring out why, in particular, he had not gotten back onto the bicycle instead of pushing it along in this unhurried fashion, as if he had nothing better to do.

The country woman was now only fifty yards away from him. She was not looking at him but had certainly noticed his presence and his unusual behavior. It was too late to spring onto the seat and pretend to have been riding along ever since he had left the town, or the farm, or anywhere else. No hill, however small, had obliged him to walk the bicycle instead of riding it in this part of the country, and his dismounting could only be justified by an accident (not a serious one ) that had occurred to some delicate part of the machinery—the gearshift, for instance.

He considered the rented bicycle gleaming in the sun, and decided that such slight disturbances sometimes occur in even the newest machines. Seizing the handlebars in his left hand, which was already holding the suitcase, he leaned over to inspect the chain. It seemed to be in perfect condition, carefully oiled, fitting satisfactorily around the gearing of the sprocket-wheel. Nevertheless, the traces of grease still clearly visible on his right hand proved that he had already been compelled to touch it as least once. However, this indication was quite useless: as soon as his right hand had actually brushed against the chain, the tips of all four fingers were blackened by several fresh grease spots which greatly exceeded the old ones in size and intensity—even partially concealed them. He added two horizontal stripes to the heel of his thumb, which had remained unspotted; then he straightened up. Two steps away he recognized the wizened, yellow face of old Madame Marek.

Mathias had arrived that very morning by the steamer, intending to spend the day on the island; he had immediately made efforts to procure a bicycle, but while waiting until one was available he had begun his rounds at the harbor, contrary to his original plans. Since he had not succeeded in selling any of his merchandise—notwithstanding its excellent quality and moderate price—he had doggedly called at all (at almost all) the houses along the road where his chances had seemed somewhat better. He had wasted still more time doing this—so much time that once back at the crossroads he had suddenly become alarmed at how late it had grown and had decided it would be wiser to continue straight ahead instead of making another detour all the way to the farm. To add to his troubles, the gearshift of the bicycle he had rented at the café-tobacco shop was not working properly and…

The old woman was going to pass without speaking to him. She had stared at him and then looked away as if she did not know him. At first he felt a kind of relief, then wondered if the contrary would not have been preferable. Finally it occurred to him that perhaps she had pretended not to recognize him on purpose, though he could not see why she should show any reluctance to gossip with him for a few minutes, or in any case to say good morning, if nothing more. On the off chance, he decided to speak first, in spite of the considerable effort it cost him at this particular moment. That way, at least, he would know how far he could go. He emphasized the grimace he had begun, imagining it resembled a smile.

But now it was too late to attract the woman’s attention by a mere change of expression. She had already passed between the dried corpse of the frog and the rounded extremity of the telegraph pole. Soon she would be far behind him, and it would take a human voice to keep her from continuing toward still more inaccessible regions. Mathias clenched his right hand around the polished metal of the handlebars.

A sentence jolted out of his mouth—obscure and overlong, too sudden to be altogether friendly, grammatically incorrect—in which he could make out, nevertheless, the essential formulas: “Marek,” “good morning,” “not recognized.” The old woman turned toward him without understanding what he had said. He managed to repeat the indispensable words more calmly, completing them by giving his own name.

“Well, well!” the old woman said, “I didn’t recognize you.”

She thought he seemed tired, “funny-looking” was how she put it. At the time of their last meeting, more than two years ago (the last time she had been in town, at her son-in-law’s ), Mathias was still wearing his little mustache…. He protested: he had never worn a mustache, or a beard either. But the old woman did not seem convinced by his insistence. To change the subject, she asked him what he was doing so far from town: there wasn’t much chance of his finding many electric appliances to repair—especially out here in the country where almost everyone used oil anyway.

Mathias explained that he was no longer an itinerant electrician. He was selling wrist watches these days. He had arrived on the steamer this very morning, and planned to spend the day. He had rented a bicycle, which unfortunately was not working so well as its owner had claimed it would. (He showed his grease-stained hand.) Besides, he had wasted so much time getting as far as the crossroads that when he…

Madame Marek interrupted him. “That’s right, you wouldn’t have found anyone at the house.”

The salesman let her talk on. She told him about her daughter-in-law’s departure for a fifteen-day trip to the mainland. And her eldest son would be in town all morning (the other two were sailors). Josephine had lunch at lier family’s on Tuesdays. Her grandchildren didn’t come home from school until twelve-thirty, except the eldest boy, who worked as an apprentice at the bakery and didn’t come home until evening. That boy wasn’t all there: why only the week before…

Mathias might have met the father, or the son, for he had begun his rounds at the harbor, contrary to his original plans. Relying more on his country customers, he had then doggedly called at all the houses along the road. Here as in town he had wasted still more time. He hoped for a more favorable reception at the Marek’s at least—he wouldn’t have missed visiting his old friends for anything; he had been disappointed to find the house closed and apparently empty; he had been obliged to leave without news of the family—of Madame Marek, her children, her grandchildren. He was wondering what their absence—everyone’s—could mean at such an hour, when most people are at home eating dinner. How could he help worrying over this incomprehensible solitude?

His ears, straining for a clue, hear nothing; even his breathing, that might break the silence, stops of its own accord. Yet he cannot hear the slightest noise inside. No one speaks. Nothing moves. Everything is dead still. Mathias leans toward the closed door.

He knocks again, this time with his ring, on the door panel which echoes as if he had struck an empty box; but he already knows how futile such a gesture is: if someone were at home the door would be open on a sunny day like this, and probably the windows too. He lifts his head toward those on the first floor; not a sign of life there either—shutter pushed open, lifted curtain falling back, silhouette disappearing—not even that premonitory confusion of the gaping window recesses where someone leaning out might have just disappeared, or someone who has suddenly appeared is going to lean out.

Propping his bicycle against the wall, he takes a few undecided steps on the beaten earth floor of the courtyard. He reaches the kitchen window and tries to look in, but it is too dark inside to see anything. He turns back toward the door by the same way he came into the courtyard, walks two or three yards in that direction, stops, turns around and walks in the opposite direction, glances again at the door and at the closed shutters of the ground-floor windows, continuing this time as far as the garden fence. The lattice-gate is locked too.

Returning to the house, he approaches what must be the kitchen window and checks to see if the heavy wooden shutters are bolted or merely drawn: useless, in that case, trying to see anything inside.

He returns to where he left the bicycle. There is nothing else to do but leave.

He is very disappointed. Here, at least, he was hoping for a more favorable reception. All the way to the farm his spirits had been rising at the prospect of a visit to his old childhood friends, never suspecting they could all be away from home at once.

Ever since that morning—ever since the night before—his spirits had been rising at the prospect of a visit to his old childhood friends; he told himself how surprised they would be to see him—he had never revisited the island, and after all he had been born here. He had already seen Robert Marek’s four children on several occasions, however, when they were spending their short vacations with their uncle in the city, only a few doors away from his own house. They must have grown since the last time, there was a good chance he might not even recognize them now, but he would make sure that their parents didn’t notice that. Perhaps he would be invited to stay to lunch; that would certainly be more pleasant than gobbling down the two sandwiches he had brought along for a snack; the heat had turned them to jelly in the left pocket of his duffle coat.

The heat was certainly becoming excessive. And the road was growing steeper, obliging him to slow down. He stopped twice at isolated houses along the road. Realizing at once that he would sell nothing, he left them almost immediately. When he reached the fork to the mill, he continued straight ahead: his information about the people there left him no hope of selling even the cheapest of his wares; it was useless going there under such conditions; he had wasted enough time that way.

A little farther on he noticed a cottage set back from the road at the end of a long, ill-kept path. Its poverty-stricken appearance excused him from even attempting a visit there. He looked at his watch: it was after midday.

It was easier riding now that the road had stopped going uphill. Soon he was at the crossroads. On the white milestone he read the freshly repainted directions: “Black Rocks Lighthouse—One Mile.” Everyone on the island called it “the big lighthouse.” After another fifty yards he left the road, turning left on the fork to the Marek farm.

The countryside was noticeably different here: there was an embankment on either side of the road lined with a thick, virtually unbroken hedge behind which rose the occasional trunk of a pine leaning toward the southwest, the direction of the prevailing winds (that is, the trees on the left side of the drive leaning over the hedge, those on the right leaning away from it ).

In his haste to reach his immediate goal, Mathias tried to pedal faster. The bicycle chain began to make an unpleasant sound—as if it were rubbing sideways against the sprocket-wheel. He had already felt something strange about it shifting gears on the last hill, but he had not given it any thought, and the grating noise had gradually diminished—unless he had merely ceased noticing it. Now, on the contrary, it grew more pronounced—so rapidly that the traveler decided to stop. He put his suitcase down on the road and crouched down to examine the transmission, turning the pedal with one hand. He decided that he needed only to apply a little pressure to the sprocket-wheel, but in manipulating it he brushed against the chain itself and covered his fingers with spots of grease which afterward he had to wipe off as well as he could on the weeds growing along the road. He got back onto the seat. The suspicious noise had virtually disappeared.

As soon as he had entered the courtyard of beaten earth that extended in front of the farmhouse (actually the terminal enlargement of the road which came to a dead end here), he saw that the heavy wooden shutters of both ground-floor windows were drawn. The door between them, which he expected to find wide open, was also closed. The two upper-floor windows, situated just over those on the ground floor, had their shutters open but were closed in spite of the bright sunshine on the panes. Between them, above the door, was a large expanse of gray stone where a third window seemed to be missing; instead a little niche had been cut into the wall, as if for a statuette; but the niche was empty.

On either side of the door was a clump of mahonia; the still-greenish flowers were beginning to turn yellow. Mathias propped his bicycle against the wall of the house under the drawn shutters of the first window, to the left of the left mahonia bush. He walked to the door, still holding his suitcase in his hand, and knocked on the door panel—for conscience’ sake, since he knew that it would not be opened.

After a few seconds he knocked again, this time with his ring. Then he stepped back and lifted his head toward the first-floor windows. Obviously no one was there.

He looked toward the haysheds at the end of the courtyard, turned back toward the door by the same way he had entered the courtyard, walked three yards in that direction, stopped, turned around and walked in the opposite direction again, and continued this time as far as the garden fence. The lattice-gate was padlocked.

He returned to the house. The shutters of what must have been the kitchen window looked as if they had been merely pushed together to keep out the sunlight. He walked over and tried to open them, but did not succeed: the bolts had been shot inside.

Mathias could do nothing but leave. He returned to where he had propped the bicycle against the wall under the other window, got on it and took the same road back, holding the handlebars in his right hand and the suitcase in his left—which he also used to apply a slight pressure to the left grip of the handlebars. He had hardly reached the main road when the grinding noise began again—much louder this time. About a hundred yards in front of him a country woman carrying a knapsack was walking in his direction.

He would have to get off again in order to push the chain back onto the cogs of the sprocket-wheel. As before, he could not help dirtying his fingers. When the operation was completed and he stood up, he realized that the wizened, yellow-faced woman about to pass him was old Madame Marek.

She did not recognize him right away. If he had not spoken to her first, she would have gone on without looking at him, so little chance did she think there would be of meeting him here. To excuse herself she claimed that Mathias’ face had changed since the last time they had seen each other, in the city, and that he looked very tired today—which was to be expected, since he had had to get up much earlier than usual to take the boat, and without having gone to bed earlier the night before. Besides, he hadn’t been sleeping well for several days.

Their last meeting had been at least two years ago. Mathias announced that he had changed his job since then: he was selling wrist watches these days. He was disappointed to have found no one at the farm, for his moderately-priced wares would certainly have interested Robert and his wife. How did it happen that neither of them was at home, nor any of the children? Mathias hoped that they were all well, nevertheless.

Yes, they were all in good health. The grandmother specified the reason for the absence of each one in turn—the father in town, the mother on the mainland for fifteen days, the children not yet back from school, etc….—and declared that if Mathias passed by again in the course of the afternoon he would find Robert at home, and Josephine as well; the poor girl certainly needed a watch to get her work done on time—she was always fifteen minutes late for something.

The salesman had doubtless just missed the father and the three younger children who generally came home around twelve-thirty. They took the short cut across the fields and came in through the garden, behind the house. Perhaps, she added, they had arrived by now; but she did not invite Mathias to join her, which he dared not propose himself, hesitating to disturb them all at dinnertime. She merely asked him to let her see the watches and he had to show them there at the roadside, putting the suitcase down on the ground. Just next to it, flattened in the dust of the road, was the dried corpse of a toad.

In a hurry to get home, the old woman did not take long to decide. She wanted to give a nice present to her grandson—the one who worked as an apprentice at the bakery—for his seventeenth birthday. She took the hundred-fifty-crown model (with metal strap)—that was good enough, she said, for a boy. The salesman assured her she would not regret her choice, but the old woman was not interested in a description of the item’s qualities; she cut short his explanations and guarantees, paid him, thanked him, wished him good luck, and hurried away. Not knowing where to put the watch which the salesman, accustomed to home sales, was not equipped to wrap very carefully, the old woman had fastened it around her own wrist—but without setting the hands at the correct time, although the watch was wound.

Crouching in front of his suitcase, Mathias replaced the cardboard strips, the prospectuses, the black canvas memorandum book, closed the cover, and fastened the clasp. He looked more closely at the grayish spot on the white dust of the road which he had first taken for the remains of a frog. The hind legs were too short—it must have been a toad (besides, it was always toads that got run over). Its death could not have occurred earlier than the night before, for the creature’s body was not as dry as the dust made it look. Near the head, which was distorted by being flattened, a red ant was trying to find a scrap that was still usable.

The surrounding patch of road changed color. Mathias raised his eyes toward the sky. Moving rapidly, a cloud half-torn apart by the wind covered the sun again. The day was gradually becoming overcast.

The salesman mounted his bicycle and continued on his way. The air was growing cooler, the duffle coat more bearable. The ground neither rose nor fell; the good condition of the road made riding easy. The wind blew from the left, not impeding the bicyclist, who was pedaling rapidly, almost effortlessly, his little suitcase in one hand.

He made a stop at an isolated cottage at the edge of the road—a simple one-story dwelling of the most ordinary kind. Two clumps of mahonia framed the doorway, as in front of most of the island’s houses, and at the rear too. He leaned his bicycle against the wall under the window and knocked at the door panel.

The person answering the door appeared in its opening at a much lower level than he had expected. It was doubtless a child—height and size considered—even a rather young child—but Mathias could not decide whether it was a boy or a girl, for the silhouette quickly retreated into the shadow of the hallway. He stepped in and closed the door behind him. Because of the half-darkness to which his eyes had not yet had time to grow accustomed, he did not know by what means the next door he passed through was opened.

A man and a woman were seated facing each other across a table. They were not eating; perhaps they had already finished. It looked as though they were expecting the salesman.

Mathias set down his suitcase on the unpatterned oilcloth. Taking advantage of their tacit consent, he unpacked his merchandise while delivering his sales-talk with some assurance. The two people sitting in their chairs listened politely; they even examined the strips of cardboard with a certain interest, passing them back and forth to each other and attempting one or two comments: “This is a practical shape,” “This is a more elegant case,” etc…. But they seemed to be thinking of something else—or of nothing at all—to be weary, distressed, chronically ill, or perhaps suffering from some tremendous disappointment; their comments were confined to scrupulously objective remarks: “This one is thinner,” “The other has a convex glass,” “Here’s a rectangular face,” …of which the obvious futility did not seem to disturb them.

Finally they decided on one of the cheapest models—one just like the one the old country woman had bought. They indicated their choice without enthusiasm, and as if without reason. (“Why wouldn’t this one do just as well?”) They exchanged no words with the salesman himself. It was as if they scarcely saw him. When the man had taken out his wallet and paid for the watch, Mathias regretted not having insisted on an item two or three times as expensive, thinking that they would have paid for it with no more hesitation, with the same indifference.

No one came to show him out. The new watch (with the metal strap) was still lying on the oilcloth between the woman and her ahead)’ distracted companion: shiny, lost, unjustified.

There was not another house until the village at Black Rocks. Mathias pedaled steadily for about two-thirds of a mile. The bicycle cast only a pale—and intermittent—shadow which soon disappeared altogether. Against the gray background of the sky, in which only a few vague blue spots remained, rose the lighthouse, now quite near.

The structure was one of the highest of the countryside, as well as one of the most massive. Besides the white-painted, slightly conical tower itself, it included a semaphore, a radio station, a small power-house, four enormous foghorns for bad weather, and several accessory structures sheltering machines and equipment, as well as lodgings for the workmen and their families. Had these employees been engineers or even mechanics, they would have constituted a wealthy enough clientele for Mathias, but unfortunately the lighthouse workers were not the sort who bought their watches from traveling salesmen.

There remained the village proper. Originally merely a cluster of three or four farmhouses, it had grown with the neighboring installations, although more modestly Even had Mathias’ memory been better, he would scarcely have recognized it, so much had it developed since his childhood: perhaps ten cottages, jerry-built but of neat appearance, now surrounded and concealed the original group, whose thicker walls, lower roofs, and smaller windows were evidence of their earlier date. The new constructions were not a part of the world of wind and rain: although actually quite similar to their predecessors—granted certain minor differences—they seemed without climate, and at the same time without history and geographical location. It was remarkable that they managed to withstand, with apparently equal success, the same raw weather as the others; unless atmospheric conditions had grown somewhat gentler…

It was no different now from anywhere else. There was a grocery and a café, of course, almost at the beginning of the village. Leaving his bicycle near the door, Mathias went in.

The arrangement inside was like that of all such establishments in the country or even in the suburbs of big cities—or on the quays of little fishing ports. The girl behind the bar had a timorous face and the ill-assured manners of a dog that had been ill-assured manners of a dog that had been ill-assured manners of a girl who served behind the…. Behind the bar, a fat woman with a satisfied, jovial face beneath her abundant gray hair was pouring drinks for two workmen in blue overalls. She handled the bottle with the sure gestures of a professional, raising the neck with a slight rotation of her wrist at the precise moment the liquid reached the edge of the glass. The salesman went to the bar, set his suitcase on the floor between his feet, and ordered an absinthe.

Without thinking, the salesman was about to order an absinthe when he changed his mind—just before having spoken the word. He cast about for the name of some other kind of drink, and, unable to think of any, pointed to the bottle the proprietress was still holding after having served the two lighthouse workers.

“I’ll have the same,” he said, and set the suitcase on the floor between his feet.

The woman put in front of him a glass like the first two; she filled it with her other hand, which had not yet released the bottle—making the same rapid movement, so that a large quantity of liquid was still in the air, between the bottom of the glass and the neck of the bottle, as she was already lifting the latter away. At the very second she had finished twisting her wrist, the surface of the poured liquid immobilized on a level with the edge of the glass—without the slightest miniscus—like a diagram representing the theoretical capacity of the glass.

Its color—rather dark reddish-brown—was that of the majority of wine-base aperitifs. Promptly returned to its place on the shelf, the bottle could not be distinguished from its neighbors in the row of different brands. Previously, when the woman had been holding it in her huge hand, the spread of the fingers—or else the position of the label in relation to the observer—had prevented him from determining its brand. Mathias wanted to reconstruct the scene in order to try to fasten on some fragment of bright-colored paper to compare with the labels lined up on the shelf. He succeeded only in discovering an anomaly which had not struck him at the time: the proprietress used her left hand to serve drinks.

He studied her more attentively as she rinsed and dried the glasses—with the same dexterity—but he could not establish a preliminary standard as to the respective functions of each hand in these complex operations; so that it was impossible for him to determine whether or not she was right- or left-handed. His mind grew so confused between what he saw with his own eyes and his recollection of the previous scene that he began to muddle right and left himself.

The woman put down her towel; she seized the coffee mill beside her, sat down on a stool, and began to turn the handle vigorously. In order not to tire either arm at such a speed, she ground the coffee with one arm and then the other alternately.

The coffee beans made a pattering noise as they were crushed in the gearing, and when one of the two men said something to his companion Mathias could not hear him clearly. Several syllables, however,’ took shape in his mind, resembling the word “cliff” and—less positively—the verb “to bind.” He cocked his ears; but no one was speaking any longer.

The salesman found it strange that they had fallen silent in this way ever since he had come in, sipping their apéritifs and putting their glasses on the bar after each swallow. Perhaps he had disturbed them in the midst of an important conversation? He tried to imagine what it could be about. But suddenly he was afraid to guess, and dreaded the possibility that the subject might be broached again, as if their words, without their knowing it, might have concerned him. It would not be difficult to go a good deal further along this irrational course: the words “without their knowing it,” for instance, were superfluous, for if his presence had caused them to fall silent—although they were not embarrassed to speak in front of the proprietress—it was obviously because they… because “he”… “In front of the proprietress,” or rather, “with” her. And now they were pretending not to know one another. The woman stopped grinding only to refill the coffee mill. The workmen managed to keep another mouthful at the bottoms of their glasses. To all intents and purposes no one had anything to say; yet five minutes before he had seen through the window all three talking animatedly together.

The proprietress was about to pour another drink for the two men; they were wearing blue overalls, like most of the lighthouse workers. Mathias leaned his bicycle against the shop¬window, pushed open the glass door, stood against the bar next to the two workmen and ordered an apéritif. After having served him, the woman began grinding coffee. She was middle-aged, fat, imposing, self-assured. At this time of day there was no sailor in her establishment. The house in which her café was located had no upper floor. The sparkling water of the harbor could not be seen through the door.

Evidently no one had anything to say. The salesman turned toward the room. For a moment he was afraid it was all going to begin over again: three fishermen he had not noticed when he came in—a very young man and two older ones—were sitting over three glasses of red wine at one of the back tables; just then the youngest began speaking—but the noise of the coffee mill might have kept Mathias from hearing the beginning of the conversation. He cocked his ears. As usual, it was about the slump in crab sales. He turned back to the bar to finish this unidentifiable reddish drink.

His eyes met those of the proprietress; she had been watching him on the sly as she ground her coffee, while he himself had been looking in the other direction. He lowered his eyes to his glass, as if he had noticed nothing. To his left the two workmen were looking straight ahead, toward the bottles lined up on the shelf.

“You wouldn’t happen to be the man selling watches?” the woman asked suddenly, her voice calm.

He lifted his head. She was still turning the handle of her coffee mill, still staring at him—but kindly, he thought.

“Yes, I am,” answered Mathias. “Someone must have told you a salesman was coming this way. News travels fast around here!”

“Maria, one of the Leduc girls, came in here just ahead of you. She was looking for her sister, the youngest one. You visited them this morning: the last house as you leave town.”

“Yes, of course I visited Madame Leduc. Her brother is a friend of mine—Joseph—the one who works for the steamship line. But I haven’t seen the girls today, not one of them. No one told me the youngest was here.”

“She wasn’t. Her mother sent her to tend the sheep. And she ran away again. Always running off where she shouldn’t, making trouble somewhere.”

“They send her as far as this with the sheep?”

“No, of course not: back there, under the crossroads. Maria went to tell her to come home early, but no one was there—only the sheep. The girl had picketed them in a hollow.”

Mathias shrugged, hesitating between amusement and compassion. The proprietress didn’t take the matter too much to heart, but on the other hand she wasn’t laughing either; her expression was completely neutral—certain of what she was talking about, yet attaching no importance to it—a vaguely professional smile on her lips, as if she were merely talking about the weather.

“It sounds as if she’s something of a problem,” the salesman said.

“A real devil! Her sister came all the way here on her bicycle to see if anyone knew where she was. If she doesn’t take her home with her, there’s going to be trouble.”

“Children are a lot of trouble,” said the salesman.

They were obliged to speak very loudly, in order to be heard over the noise of the coffee mill. Between sentences, the pattering noise of the coffee beans as they were crushed in the gearing was all that could be heard. To reach the village at Black Rocks, Maria must have passed Mathias on the road while he was visiting the exhausted-looking couple. Before that, to cross the moor between the road and the place where the sheep were grazing on top of the cliff, she couldn’t have taken the same path he used, but a short cut probably, a short cut starting at the crossroads. In fact, the girl needed a certain amount of time to make the trip from the road to the cliff top and back and to look around a little as well. This amount of time would be much more than the few minutes it had taken the salesman to sell the one watch in the only house he had stopped at between the fork to the Marek farm and the village. And the distance between this fork and the cottage in question could not account for the difference either: beside the fact that it was scarcely more than five or six hundred yards, it was still the road both of them must have taken.

Thus Maria was already riding toward the cliff before he himself had climbed back onto his own bicycle. Consequently, if she had taken the path opposite the fork to the Marek farm, she would have come upon the salesman in the middle of the road, gossiping with the old woman—or examining his bicycle chain, the clouds, the dead toad—for this prolonged stop had occurred within sight of the crossing—not two steps away from it, so to speak. (This same hypothesis—in which the girl used the same path Mathias had taken, to reach the cliff top—worked no better if presuming she had arrived at the cliff top before he had made his stop, since then she would have encountered the salesman on the path itself. )

She must have come by another road. But why had she mentioned him to the proprietress? Because of the rolling ground, it seemed unlikely—it was impossible—it was impossible—it was impossible that she had seen him from another path, supposing that she had been going toward the cliff top and he returning from it. Back there, in the sheltered hollow where the sheep were grazing, she had doubtless just missed him. After a rapid exploration of the environs, repeated calls, a few seconds’ hesitation, she had returned to the main road—this time, probably, by the same path he had taken (the only one he knew), but the tire tracks were too numerous and too indistinct to be able to tell one from another. It seemed unlikely that there would be a new short cut between the sheep and the village at Black Rocks—not a very useful short cut in any case, given the size of the bay jutting into the land northwest of the lighthouse.

Mathias, who had omitted this last possibility in the course of all his previous deductions, feared for a moment that he might have to reconstruct his entire train of thought. But on reflection, he decided that even if this unlikely short cut had existed, it—would not have been sufficient to negate the conclusions he had arrived at—although it would have modified his reasoning, without a doubt.

“I came in here as soon as I reached the village. If Maria was here shortly before, she must have passed me without my seeing her—while I was visiting customers: in the cottage along the road, the only one between the village and the crossroads. Before stopping there, I had gone to see my old friends the Mareks—where I waited for a long time in the courtyard: no one was there and I didn’t want to leave without saying hello, hearing the family news, gossiping a little about the neighbors. I was born here on the island, you know. Robert Marek was a childhood playmate of mine. He had gone into town this morning. His mother—still an active woman—was marketing here at Black Rocks. Maybe you ran into her while she was here. Luckily I met her on her way back, at the crossroads—at the fork, I mean—but there is a crossroads there, since the road to their farm crosses the main road and continues as a path over the moor. If Maria went that way, she must have been there while I was waiting at the farmhouse. Didn’t you say that the path just after the crossroads led to the cliff top—to that place on the cliff top where she took the sheep to graze?”

He had better stop. These specifications as to time and itinerary—both furnished and requested—were futile, suspect even—worse still: confusing. Besides, the fat woman had never said Maria took the road passing through the crossroads, but only that the Leduc sheep were grazing “after the crossroads”—an ambiguous expression, since it was impossible to know if she meant “after” in relation to her own village or to the town where Madame Leduc lived.

The proprietress did not answer his question. She was no longer looking at the salesman. Mathias thought he had not made himself heard above the noise of the coffee mill. He did not try again, however, and pretended to drink the liquid remaining in his glass. Afterward, he doubted whether he had spoken aloud at all.

He was glad of it: if it was useless to go over the details of his alibis with listeners as inattentive as this, it could only be dangerous to falsify those parts of his story relating to the sister, who would certainly remember which road she had taken. Doubtless she had reached the cliff top by another road—a short cut the proprietress must know about. It was stupid, under such conditions, to refer to the “fact” that the girl had taken a path at the crossroads.

Then the salesman remembered that the fat woman had not said “after the crossroads,” but something like “under the crossroads”—which meant nothing in particular—or even nothing at all. As a last resource, there still remained….

He had to make a conscious mental effort to understand that here too any attempt at deception would be useless: the place where the sheep were picketed had been determined beyond all possibility of dispute. They were always pastured in the one spot, perhaps, and Maria went there often. In any case, she had had time today, certainly, to examine the place as much as she liked. Furthermore: the sheep, left where they had been picketed, would be the most irrefutable indication of all. And besides, Mathias knew the hollow on the cliff top as well as anyone else. He would obviously not succeed in changing its position by pretending to interpret incorrectly the declarations of an indirect witness.

Anyway these various pieces of information concerning location and route were of no importance whatever. The thing to remember was that Maria could not have seen him crossing the moor, or else he would have seen her himself, especially since they were going in opposite directions. All these explanations were intended solely to account for the fact that they had not met each other when he stopped in the middle of the main road, near the toad’s dried corpse—a place where such a meeting would be of no importance. To try to prove in addition that they had not seen each other because he was waiting at the Marek farm during that time would lead to nothing.

It would be much more likely, everyone would think, that Maria Leduc had passed the salesman well before he reached the crossroads, while he was showing his merchandise in another house—the mill, for instance. The few minutes Mathias had spent at the Marek farm, added to the trip to the cliff top and back on the little path, did not leave the girl time enough to look for her youngest sister in all the nooks and crannies of the cliff.

True enough, Mathias had not gone to the farm—but a conversation with the old woman at the crossroads sounded as if it would have lasted an even shorter time. The mill would be a solution less open to dispute. Unfortunately it too had to be rejected as altogether spurious for at least two reasons, one being that the salesman had no more made this side-trip to the mill than he had made the other to the farm.

As for the other reason, it must be confessed that Maria’s investigations represented only the time it would take to sell a watch—near a crossroads—to repair a new bicycle, to tell the difference between a frog’s skin and a toad’s, to rediscover in the all-too-changeable shapes of clouds the fixed eye of a sea gull, to follow the movements of an ant’s antennae in the dust.

Mathias prepared to recapitulate his movements since he had left the café-tobacco shop-garage on the rented bicycle. That had been at eleven-ten or eleven-fifteen. To establish the subsequent chronology of his stops presented no particular difficulty; but this would not be true in determining their respective lengths, which he had neglected to note. And the length of time on the road between each stop scarcely influenced his calculations, the distance from town to lighthouse not exceeding three miles—that is, scarcely more than fifteen minutes in all.

To begin with, the distance to the first stop being virtually negligible, he could state that the latter had occurred at exactly eleven-fifteen.

It was the last house as he left town. Madame Leduc had opened the door almost at once. The preliminaries had gone very fast: the brother working for the steamship line, the wrist watches at prices defying all competition, the hallway splitting the house down the middle, the door to the right, the big kitchen, the oval table in the middle of the room, the oilcloth with the many-colored little flowers, the pressure of his fingers on the suitcase clasp, the cover opening back, the black memorandum book, the prospectuses, the rectangular frame on top of the sideboard, the shiny metal support, the photograph, the sloping path, the hollow on the cliff sheltered from the wind, secret, calm, isolated as if by thick walls… as if by thick walls… the oval table in the middle of the room, the oilcloth with the many-colored little flowers, the pressure of his fingers on the suitcase clasp, the cover opening back as if on a spring, the black memorandum book, the prospectuses, the shiny metal frame, the photograph showing… the photograph showing the photograph, the photograph, the photograph, the photograph…

The noise of the coffee mill suddenly stopped. The woman rose from her stool. Mathias pretended to drink the liquid remaining in his glass. To his left, one of the workmen said something to his companion. The salesman cocked his ears; but again, no one was speaking any longer.

There had been the word “soup” at the end of a rather short sentence; perhaps the words “come home” as well.

It must have been something like “… come home in time for soup,” beginning with words like “Be sure to…” or “I always…” It was just a figure of speech, probably; it had been several generations since the fishermen took soup at the noon meal. The woman seized the empty glasses before the two men, plunged them into the sink, washed them quickly, rinsed them under the tap, and set them upside down on the drainboard. The man next to Mathias thrust his right hand into his trouser pocket and brought out a handful of coins.

“We’re going to be late for soup again,” he said, counting out the money on the tin slab that covered the bar.

For the first time since he had left town, the salesman looked at his watch—it was after one—one-seven, exactly. He had already been on the island over three hours—three hours and one minute. And he had sold only two wrist watches, both at one hundred fifty crowns.

“I’ll have to hurry,” said the second workman, “on account of the kids going to school.”

The proprietress picked up the money with a quick movement of her hand, smiled, and said “Thank you, gentlemen!” She put the coffee mill in a cupboard. She had not emptied the tray after having ground the beans.

“Yes, children are a lot of trouble,” Mathias repeated.

The two lighthouse employees had left. He thought, too late, that he should have tried to sell them watches. But he still had to obtain information on two points: where was Maria Leduc going after she left Black Rocks? Why had she mentioned him? He tried to find some expression that would give an air of indifference to the question.

“And sometimes satisfaction, too,” the fat woman said.

The salesman nodded. “Of course they are!” And, after a pause, “One man’s trouble…” he began.

He went no further. That was not at all the right formula.

“Maria went home,” the woman continued, “by the path along the cliff.”

“That’s no short cut,” Mathias declared, hoping to find out if it was.

“It’s a short cut if you’re walking; but with her bicycle, she’ll take longer that way than by the road. She wanted to see if Jacqueline would be playing down on the rocks, near Devil’s Hole.”

“Maybe she wasn’t that far away. She might not have heard Maria on account of the wind. They’ll find her peacefully tending her sheep in the usual place, like a good girl.”

A good girl. Peaceful, in the quiet hollow.

“Then too,” said the woman, “they may find her still prowling around here—over at the lighthouse. And maybe not alone either. At thirteen, it’s hard to believe.”

“Bah! She can’t do anything very bad…. She wasn’t going to play too close to the edge, was she—where the rocks are dangerous? Sometimes it caves in in places. You have to watch where you put your feet.”

“Don’t worry about that. She’s a lively one!”

Lively. She was. Lively. Alive. Burned alive.

“Anyone can lose his footing,” the salesman said. -

He took his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and removed a ten-crown note from it. He took advantage of this movement to put back in place a newspaper clipping that stuck out a little beyond the other papers. Then he held out the note to the proprietress. When she gave him his change, he noticed that she put the coins on the counter, one by one, with her left hand.

Then she picked up his glass which rapidly underwent the series of ablutionary operations: sink, circular rubbing, tap, drainboard. Now the three identical glasses were again lined up on the drainboard—as they had been on top of the bar—but at a noticeably lower level this time, and nearer one another besides, empty (that is, transparent and colorless instead of opaque because of the brown liquid which had filled them so perfectly), and upside down. Nevertheless, the shape of these glasses—a cylinder bulging at the middle—made their silhouettes virtually the same whether they were standing rightside up or on their rims.

Mathias’ situation was unchanged. Neither his own reasoning nor the proprietress’ words had enlightened him on the essential point: why had Maria Leduc just mentioned his presence on the island apropos of her sister’s disappearance? That was the one thing to find out, and he would scarcely further his knowledge on the point by disputing the existence of more or less favorable short cuts in the inextricable tangle of paths that ran along the cliff top in all directions.

Why would the girl have mentioned him, unless she had seen him riding over the moor—“under the crossroads”—where there was no reason for him to be? The fact that he had not seen her was all too easy to explain. Their two paths, separated from each other by the considerable unevenness of the ground, had only a few privileged points from which two observers could see each other at the same time. At a given moment he and the girl had occupied these favorable positions, but she alone had turned in his direction, so that the reciprocity of their points of view had not functioned. At that particular moment Mathias had his eyes somewhere else—on the ground, for instance, or raised toward the sky, or looking in any direction except the right one.

The girl, on the contrary, had immediately identified the person she had glimpsed by the shiny bicycle and the little brown suitcase her mother had just described to her. There was no possibility of a mistake. Now she was hoping he might know where her sister was hiding, for he seemed to be coming back from where she was supposed to be. And if there was a chance that the mother had related the salesman’s remarks about his itinerary incorrectly, Maria might even have been positive that he was coming back from the cliff top. And in fact he remembered that while he had been trying to leave the overly talkative Madame Leduc without being actually rude, she had spoken of an eventual meeting between him and her youngest daughter. The idea was a preposterous one, of course. What would he be doing on that awkward path without any houses along it and leading nowhere?—except to the sea, to steep rocks, to a hollow sheltered from the wind, and five sheep grazing on their pickets under the superfluous vigilance of a thirteen-year-old child.

He had recognized Violet immediately, she was wearing the same peasant-girl disguise she had on in the photograph. Her thin black cotton dress was more suitable for midsummer, but it was so warm at the bottom of the hollow that it seemed like August. Violet was there on the sunny grass, half-sitting, half-kneeling, her legs bent under her, the rest of her body vertical and slightly twisted toward the right in a rather strained attitude. Her right ankle and foot protruded from under the top of her thigh; the other leg remained completely invisible below the knee. Her arms were lifted, her elbows bent, and her hands were at the nape of her neck—as if arranging her hair behind her head. A gray sweater was lying next to her on the ground. The sleeveless dress exposed the hollows of her armpits.

Turned toward him, she had not moved as he approached, her eyes wide as they met his. But on reflection Mathias wondered whether she was looking at him or at something behind him—something of enormous size. Her pupils remained fixed; not a feature of her face moved. Without lowering her eyelids or shifting her uncomfortable position, she twisted the upper part of her body to the left.

He had to say something at any cost. The three glasses on the drainboard were nearly dry. The woman picked them up one after another and gave them a quick wipe of her towel; they disappeared under the counter from where she had originally taken them. They were lined up again at the end of a long row of others—all invisible to customers standing at the counter.

But arrangement by rows being impractical for serving, they were grouped in rectangles on the shelves: the three apéritif glasses had just been set down next to three similar glasses, ending a first series of six. A second identical series was just behind, then a third, a fourth, etc…. The sequence disappeared in the darkness at the back of the cupboard. To the right and to the left of this series, and on the shelves above and below it as well, were arranged other rectangular series of glasses: they varied in shape and size, rarely in color.

Nevertheless, certain differences of detail were noticeable. One glass was missing from the last row of those used for the wine-base apéritifs; two other glasses, furthermore, were not of the same make as the rest, from which they could be distinguished by a slight pinkish cast. This heterogeneous row thus included (from west to east): three units of the orthodox type, two pinkish glasses, and an empty place. In this series the shape of the glasses resembled a slightly convex barrel on a smaller scale.

It was from one of these—a colorless one—that the salesman had just drunk.

He lifted his eyes toward the gray-haired fat woman and saw that she was watching him—had been watching him, perhaps, for a long time now.

“Well, Maria…. What did she want me for? You said just now…. What did she mention me for?”

The proprietress continued to stare at him. She waited almost a minute before answering.

“No reason. She only wanted to know if anyone had seen you. She expected to find you in the village. That’s part of the reason she came this far.”

After another pause, she added: “I think she wanted to have a look at your watches.”

“So that’s what’s at the bottom of it!” said the salesman. “Well, you’re going to see for yourself that what I have here is well worth going a few miles out of your way to find. Her mother must have told her. If you ever admired splendid watches, ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves…”

As he continued in a tone bordering on parody, Mathias picked up his suitcase from between his feet and turned around to set it down on a table near the one where the three sailors were drinking. They looked in his direction; one moved his chair to be able to see better; the woman walked around the bar and came closer.

The copper-plated clasp, the cover, the black memorandum book, everything went as usual, without deviation or obstruction. Words, as always, worked a little less well than gestures, but with nothing too disturbing in the total effect. The proprietress wanted to try on several styles which had to be detached from the cardboard strips and afterward replaced as well as possible. She fastened them on her wrist one after another, moving her hand about in all directions to determine their effect, suddenly revealing a coquettish self-interest which her appearance scarcely suggested. She finally decided on a large watch with a heavily ornamented case in which the hours were indicated by tiny, complicated designs of interlaced knots rather than by numbers. Originally, perhaps, the artist had been inspired by the shapes of the twelve numbers; so little of them remained, however, that it was virtually impossible to tell the time—without a close examination, in any case.

Two of the sailors, who wanted their wives’ advice, asked the salesman to stop by after lunch. They lived in the village, of which the topography could scarcely be complicated; nevertheless, they began extremely lengthy explanations to indicate the location of their respective dwellings. They probably gave him a number of useless or redundant details, but with such exactitude and such insistence that Mathias was completely confused. A description of the place containing willful eiTors would not have misled him more; he was not certain, in fact, that a good many contradictions were not mixed in with their redundancies. Several times he even had the impression that one of the two men was using the words “to the right” and “to the left” almost by chance—indiscriminately. A quick sketch of the cluster of houses would have cleared up everything; unfortunately, none of the sailors had anything to write with, the woman was too absorbed by her recent purchase to offer them a sheet of paper, and the salesman had no desire to have his memorandum book used as a spot-map. Since he intended to visit every house in the village anyway, he soon decided merely to nod with an understanding expression and not even listen to the rest of the directions, which he nevertheless punctuated now and then with a convincing “All right” or “Yes.”

Since their two houses were in the same direction in relation to the café, the sailors had at first taken turns telling him where they were, the one who lived farthest away beginning his account where his companion left off. As an extra precaution, the first sailor began all over again as soon as the second one had finished. The successive versions referring to the same ground to be covered naturally included variations—which seemed, in fact, considerable. But then a real disagreement arose about the beginning of the route, and both men began to talk at once, each trying to impose his own point of view, although Mathias could not even understand the difference between them. The dispute would have been endless if the dinner hour had not forced them to put a provisional end to it: the salesman would settle the discussion later by telling them which way he considered better; since he spent his life on the road, he must be a specialist in such matters.

They paid for their wine and left, accompanied by the third, still silent, sailor. Mathias, who could not call on his customers before one-forty-five or two (because of the island’s appreciably later daily routine as compared to that of the mainland), had plenty of time to eat his two sandwiches. He carefully put back the contents of his suitcase, closed it, and sat down at a table to wait for the return of the proprietress, who had disappeared into the room behind the counter; then he would order something to drink.

Alone now, he looked straight ahead, through the window, at the road that passed through the village. It was very wide, dusty—and empty. On the other side rose an unbroken stone wall higher than a man, doubtless screening some of the lighthouse outbuildings. He closed his eyes and thought how tired he was. He had risen early in order not to miss the boat. There was no bus line between his house and the harbor. In an alley of the Saint-Jacques district a ground-floor window revealed a deep, rather dark room; although it was already broad daylight, the light from a little lamp fell on the unmade bedsheets at the head of the bed; lit at an angle, from below, a lifted arm cast its magnified shadow on the wall and the ceiling. But he couldn’t afford to miss the boat: this day on the island could save everything. Counting the first watch he had already sold in town this morning, just before getting on board, his sales still amounted to no more than four. He would write them down later in the memorandum hook. He thought how tired he was. Nothing disturbed the silence, neither in the café nor outside. No. On the contrary—in spite of the distance and the closed door—the steady crashing of the waves against the rocks beyond the lighthouse was distinctly audible. The sound was so clear he was surprised he had not noticed it sooner.

He opened his eyes. The sea, of course, was not visible from here. A fisherman was standing behind the window and looking into the café—one hand on the doorknob, the other holding an empty bottle. Mathias thought it was one of the men who had been in the café—the one who had not spoken. But when the man came inside, the salesman saw that he was mistaken. He realized, furthermore, that the delighted expression on the newcomer’s face was the result of his own presence. The sailor walked straight over to him with loud exclamations: “It’s really you? I’m not seeing things?”

Mathias rose from his chair in order to shake the hand held out to him. He made the handclasp as brief as possible and made a fist as he drew back his arm, so that his nails were hidden within Iris palm.

“Oh yes, it’s me all right.”

“Good old Mathias. It’s been a hell of a long time!”

The salesman fell back into his chair. He did not know what to do. At first he had suspected a hoax: the fellow was merely pretending to know him. Since he did not see the fisherman’s advantage in such a trick, he abandoned the idea and declared without further reserve: “My God, yes! It has been a hell of a long time!”

At this moment the fat woman returned; Mathias was not sorry to have an opportunity to prove he was not a stranger, that he really had friends on the island, that he could be trusted. The sailor took her for his witness: “I come in here to buy some wine, and who do I find myself next to but old Mathias—I haven’t seen him in I don’t know how long. That’s a good one!”

The salesman didn’t know how long either; he too found the encounter strange. But it was useless trying to stir up his memories, he didn’t even know what he should be looking for.

“Such things happen,” the proprietress said.

She took the empty bottle and brought a full one in its place. After taking it from her, the sailor declared that it would be “best” to put it on his bill “with the others.” The woman made a dissatisfied face, but did not raise any objection. Looking at the wall with a vague expression, the sailor then announced that with a second bottle he could invite “this old Matt” to lunch. He addressed himself to no one in particular. No one answered.

Doubtless it was up to Mathias to intervene. But the man turned to him and began to question him with an increased cordiality about what had become of him “since old times.” It seemed difficult to tell him without knowing beforehand how long ago he meant. The salesman did not have to puzzle about this for long, however, for the sailor had apparently no intention of listening to his answer. His new old comrade spoke more and more rapidly, making gestures of which the vigor and extent endangered the full bottle in his left hand. Mathias soon gave up trying to unravel any clues concerning the common past supposedly linking him to this person. His entire attention barely sufficed to follow the movements—sometimes divergent, sometimes convergent, sometimes without apparent relation—of the free hand and the bottle of red wine. The former, more agile, led on the other; by weighing it down with a load equal to the one already encumbering the left hand, the agitation of both might have been reduced to almost nothing—to slight movements, slower and more orderly, less extensive, necessary perhaps, easy to follow, in any case, for an attentive observer.

But first of all there would have to be a certain lull to interrupt this series of intertwined gestures and sentences which increased from moment to moment, assuming an alarming intensity. The slight breaks still evident here and there were of no use, for they could only be discerned at a distance, hence too late, when the current was already re-established. Mathias regretted not having bought the second bottle when the occasion had obviously permitted. To return to that point now demanded an immediacy of reaction utterly beyond his power. He closed his eyes. Behind the sailor, the threatening—or liberating—wine, the glass door, the road, the stone wall, the sea continued to dash against the cliff in regular assaults. After the shock of each wave against the irregular rock walls came the sound of water falling back in a mass, followed by the rustling of innumerable white cascades streaming out of the hollows and down the projections of the rock, the diminishing murmur lasting until the next wave.

The sun had completely disappeared. Past the shoreline the sea appeared a flat, even green, opaque, as if it had been frozen. The waves seemed to form at a very short distance from land, suddenly swelling up, submerging the giant rocks off the coast and spreading milky fans behind them as they advanced, collapsing farther inshore, boiling into the indentations in the slope, surging into unsuspected holes, breaking against other waves in gutters and grottoes, or leaping toward the sky in plumes of surprising height—which nevertheless were repeated at the same points with each wave.

In an indentation protected by an oblique ledge, where the calmer water lapped in rhythm with the undertow, a thick layer of yellowish moss had accumulated, from which the wind tore off long strips, spreading them in whorls along the face of the cliff. Mathias was walking rapidly along the path on the cliff top, his suitcase in one hand and his duffle coat buttoned up, several yards behind the fisherman. The latter, a full bottle dangling at the end of each arm, had finally stopped talking because of the racket the waves made. From time to time he turned around to face the salesman, and cried out a few words, accompanying them with confused movements of his elbows—vestiges of vaster demonstrations. Mathias could not reconstitute their full development, for he was obliged, in order to turn his ear in the man’s direction, to keep his eyes elsewhere. He stopped for a moment in order to hear better. At the angle of a narrow passageway between two almost vertical walls, the water alternately swelled and hollowed with each wave; at this point there was neither foam nor backwash; the moving mass of water remained smooth and blue, rising and falling against the rock walls. The disposition of the nearby rocks forced a sudden influx of liquid into the narrows so that the level rose to a height greatly exceeding that of the initial wave. The collapse followed at once, creating in a few seconds, in the same place, a depression so deep that it was surprising not to be able to see sand, or pebbles, or the undulating fronds of seaweed at the bottom. On the contrary, the surface remained the same intense blue tinged with violet along the rock wall. But away from the coast, the sea appeared beneath a sky filled with clouds, a flat, even green, opaque, as if it had been frozen.

A reef farther offshore, where the swell seemed almost insignificant, escaped the periodic immersion despite its low configuration. A border of foam traced its contours. Three gulls sat perfectly still on slight eminences on it, one a little above the other two. They were sitting in profile, from where he was standing, all three facing the same direction and as identical as if they had been painted on canvas with a stencil—legs stiff, body horizontal, head raised, eve fixed, beak pointing toward the horizon.

Then the path descended to a little beach forming the end of a narrow cove full of reeds. The triangle of sand was completely covered by a beached fishing-smack and five or six crab traps—big round openwork baskets made of thin wands tied in place with osier knots. Immediately behind the beach, near the first reeds, stood a lone cottage in the center of a tiny lawn joined to the beach by a steep path. The fisherman pointed one of the bottles toward the slate roof and said, “Here we are.”

Mathias was surprised by his voice, which had suddenly become normal again: he no longer needed to shout to make himself heard; the deafening noise of sea and wind had disappeared so completely that it seemed he had been transported several miles away. He looked behind him. The slope down had barely begun, but the narrowness of the cove and the hillocks along the cliff top above him were enough to shelter the path almost immediately. The waves were no longer visible—neither their successive arrivals, nor their collapse, nor even their highest columns of spray—concealed as they were by the rocky projections three-quarters of the way across the entrance to this little basin. Protected as if by a series of staggered dikes, the water here had the smoothness of a flat calm. Mathias leaned over the perpendicular edge.

He saw beneath him, barely above the surface, a horizontal platform roughly hewn from the rock, long enough and wide enough for a man to stretch out comfortably. Whether the formation was entirely natural or the result of human handiwork, human beings certainly used it—or had used it in the past—probably for landing little fishing boats when the tide permitted. It was accessible, without too much difficulty, from the path, thanks to a series of breaks and faults forming a staircase missing only a few steps. The appointments of this rudimentary quay had been completed by four iron rings set into the vertical flank: the first two were quite low, on a level with the platform, about a yard apart, the others at a man’s height, and a little wider apart. The unusual position in which the legs and arms were thus held revealed the body’s grace. The salesman had recognized Violet immediately.

The likeness was perfect. It was not only the still-childish face with the huge eyes, the slender, round neck, the golden color of the hair, but even the same dimple near the armpits and the same fragile texture of the skin. Slightly below the right hip was a tiny blackish-red mole about the size of an ant and shaped like a three-pointed star—it looked very much like a v or a y.

The sun was hot down in this sheltered hollow. Mathias unbuckled the belt of his duffle coat; although the sky was overcast, the air did not seem so fresh now that the wind no longer reached him. Toward the open sea, on the other side of the reefs protecting the cove, the same low rock could still be seen with its fringe of foam and its three motionless gulls. They had not changed direction; but since they were rather far away they continued, despite the observer’s change of position, to be seen from the same angle—that is, exactly in profile. Tlirough an invisible opening in the clouds a pale sunbeam illuminated the scene with a wan, flat light. The rather lusterless white of the birds, in this light, gave an impression of distance that was impossible to estimate; the imagination might locate them at a mile off, or twenty feet, or even, without much more effort, within arm’s reach.

“Here we are,” said the fisherman boisterously. The sunbeam disappeared. The grayish plumage of the gulls was restored to its sixty yards’ distance. At the edge of the steep cliff—too near, in places, following the recent cave-ins—the path sloped steeply down to the cottage and the bit of lawn. The cottage had only one small, square window. The roof was covered with thick, irregular, hand-hewn slates. “Here we are,” the voice repeated.

They went in, the sailor followed by the salesman who closed the door behind him; the latch caught by itself. The cottage was really a good way from the village and not “thirty seconds” as its owner had promised. The latter’s name was written on the door in chalk: Jean Robin. The clumsy script, both laborious and uncertain, suggested the school exercises of young children; but a child could not have reached so high on the door panel, even standing on tiptoe. The vertical side of the b, instead of being straight, leaned backward, and its upper loop, too rounded, looked like the reversed image of the bulge against which it was braced. Mathias, groping his way forward in the dark vestibule, wondered if the sailor had written these two words himself—and with what purpose. “Jean Robin”—the name suggested something, but nothing precise enough for him to locate the man in the past from which he claimed to emerge. The cottage’s dark interior seemed more complicated than its size and its single window had led him to suppose from outside. The salesman directed his steps according to the back preceding him—turning several times at sharp angles—without discovering whether he was crossing rooms, hallways, or only going through doors.

“Be careful here,” the man said, “there’s a step.”

His voice was low now, whispering, as if fearful of waking a sleeper, an invalid, an unfriendly dog.

The room impressed Mathias as being rather large—certainly less cramped than he had expected. The little square window—the one looking out toward the cove, doubtless—provided a brilliant, raw, but limited light, which did not reach the corners of the room, nor even its central section. Only the comer of a massive table and a few inches of rough flooring clearly emerged from the darkness. Mathias turned toward the light to look through the dirty panes.

He did not have time to recognize the landscape, for his attention was immediately drawn in the opposite direction by the noise of some utensil falling, a kitchen implement, probably. In the corner farthest from the window he could make out two silhouettes, one the fisherman’s and the other, which he had not noticed up to now, that of a girl or young woman—slender, graceful, and wearing a close-fitting dress which was either black or very dark. Her head did not reach to the man’s shoulder. She leaned over, bending her knees, to pick up the fallen object. Motionless above her, his hands on his hips, the sailor bent his head a little, as if to gaze at her.

Behind them were flames appearing through a circular opening in a horizontal surface—short yellow flames spreading sideways in order not to extend beyond the level of the opening. They issued from the grate of a large kitchen stove standing against the rear wall from which one of the two cast-iron lids had been removed.

Mathias walked around the big table to join the couple; but not the slightest attempt was made at an introduction, nor any other kind of speech. His exuberance gone now, the host’s expression was severe, his half-closed eyes producing a line across his brow portending either anxiety or anger. Something must have happened, while the salesman had his back turned, between him and the girl—his daughter?—his wife?—a servant?

They sat down at the table in silence. There was nothing on it but two soup plates, two glasses, and an ordinary hammer. The two men sat facing the window, each at an end of the long bench running the length of the table. The sailor uncorked the two bottles of wine one after the other with a corkscrew attached to his pocket knife. The woman set another glass and plate for Mathias; then she brought a casserole of boiled potatoes and finally, without bothering to put them on a plate, two whole broiled spider-crabs. Then she sat down on a stool facing the salesman—between him and the window, her back to the light.

Mathias tried to see through the panes. The sailor poured the wine. In front of them the two crabs were lying side by side, the angular legs in the air, half-crooked toward their bellies. Looking at the simple cotton dress worn by the girl opposite him, Mathias decided he was getting too warm. He took off his duffle coat, threw it on a box behind the bench, and unbuttoned his jacket. He regretted having let himself be brought all the way to this cottage, where he felt alien, importunate, as if he inspired defiance in its inhabitants, and where, furthermore, his presence was justified by no hope of a sale, as he might have guessed.

His two companions had begun to peel their potatoes, using their nails with deliberate movements. The salesman reached into the casserole and imitated them.

Suddenly the fisherman burst out laughing, so unexpectedly that Mathias gave a start; his eyes shifted from the girl’s black dress to his neighbor’s suddenly cheerful face. The man’s glass was empty again. Mathias drank a swallow from his own.

“It’s damned funny all the same!” said the man.

The salesman wondered if he should answer. He decided it was more discreet to busy himself with his task, facilitated by the unusual length of his nails. He looked at the thin, close-fitting black dress, and the reflections of the light playing about the base of the girl’s neck.

“When I think,” the man said, “that here we are, the two of us, calmly peeling potatoes together….” He laughed and left his sentence unfinished. Indicating the crabs with his chin, he asked, “Don’t you like hookers?”

Mathias answered in the affirmative, asked himself the same question, and decided that he had just lied. The odor, however, was not disagreeable. The sailor picked up one of the creatures and tore off its limbs one by one; with the largest blade of his knife he pierced the belly at two points and then stripped off the carapace with a precise, vigorous gesture; the body in one hand and the shell in the other, he stopped a moment to inspect the flesh.

“And they claim they’re empty!”

This exclamation was followed by several insults intended for the fish merchants, and the man finished with a few recriminations about the low prices spider-crabs were bringing now. At the same time he had taken the hammer and begun to break open the legs with sharp taps, using the table between his own plate and the salesman’s as an anvil.

As he was struggling with a particularly difficult joint, a little liquid squirted out, spattering against the girl’s cheek. She said nothing but wiped it off with the back of her forefinger. She was wearing a gold circlet which might have been a wedding-ring.

The sailor continued his monologue, speaking in turn of the increasing difficulties of life for the islanders, of the development of the village at Black Rocks in recent years, of the electricity which a large part of the countryside was now installing, of his objections to the extension of the current to this house, of the “good life” he led here in his corner of the cliff, “with the little girl,” among his traps and nets. The conversation presented no problems for Mathias, the other man never requiring an answer, even when he happened to speak in interrogation; on such occasions it was enough to wait until a few silent seconds had passed and then the monologue continued as if there had been no interruption.

From all appearances, the sailor preferred keeping to generalities rather than dwelling on his own experiences. Not once did he refer to the friendship which had bound Mathias and himself together for that vague period the salesman vainly attempted to determine in time. Sometimes the fisherman spoke to him as to his own brother, immediately afterward treating him as a guest or a casual visitor. The diminutive “Matt,” which he employed in his bursts of intimacy, provided no illumination, for he could remember no one who had ever called him by this name.

There was no greater specification of place or circumstance than of date or duration. In Mathias’ opinion, their friendship could scarcely have originated on the island—for all kinds of reasons—unless it was connected with his earliest youth. But the man was not speaking of his youth. On the contrary, he expatiated at length on the new system of lenses which had been installed in the lighthouse last autumn, attaining an unprecedented optic power capable of piercing the heaviest fog. He undertook to explain their operation, but his description of the apparatus, despite a certain technical jargon, was from the start so obscure that the salesman did not even try to follow its course. It seemed to him that his host was using the words without understanding their meaning, satisfied to set one here or there, almost at chance, into the surface of his discourse, which was itself quite vague and meaningless. He emphasized most of his sentences with rapid, expansive, complicated gestures which seemed only remotely connected with what he was saying. The various joints of one of the big claws thus described above the table a trajectory of circles, spirals, loops, and figure eights; since the shell had been broken, tiny fragments fell off and landed all around them. The crab and his own garrulity making him thirsty, the man frequently interrupted himself to refill his glass.

In the girl’s glass, on the contrary, the level remained the same. She said nothing and ate scarcely at all. After each piece she swallowed, she carefully licked her fingers clean—perhaps in honor of their guest. She rounded her mouth, pushed out her lips, and passed her fingers between them several times, from back to front. To see better what she was doing, she half turned toward the window.

“It lights up the cliff like broad daylight,” declared the fisherman in conclusion.

It was obviously untrue: the beam of the lighthouse did not reach the coast below them. An astonishing error on the part of a man who was supposed to be a sailor; yet he seemed to think that this was its function, doubtless in order to show navigators the detail of the rocks to be avoided. He probably never used his fishing-smack at night.

The “little girl” was sitting perfectly still, profile toward him, her middle finger in her mouth. Leaning forward, her head was bent; the outline of the nape of her neck, rounded and taut, gleamed in the light behind her.

But she was not half-turned toward the light to make sure she was cleaning her hand thoroughly. Her eyes, as far as Mathias could judge from where he was sitting, were looking sideways at the corner of the window, as if trying to make out something through the dirty pane.

“It’s the whip she deserves, that trollop!”

At first the salesman did not know what his host was talking about, for he has not been paying attention to what had gone before. When he realized he was referring to the youngest Leduc girl, Mathias wondered how the sailor had managed to shift the conversation to such a subject. Nevertheless, he took advantage of a pause to agree with the master of the house: after everything he had heard since morning it really seemed that the girl deserved a good whipping, perhaps an even worse punishment.

At this moment he discovered that the sailor was looking in his direction. He glanced to his left; the man was staring at him with so profound an expression of astonishment that Mathias himself was surprised. After all, he had said nothing remarkable. Was it only because his interlocutor did not expect an answer? Mathias tried to remember if he had said anything else since he had come into the cottage. He was unable to be sure: perhaps he had said that the room was warm—perhaps some banality about the lighthouse…. He swallowed a mouthful of wine and sighed as he put down his glass: “Children are a lot of trouble.”

But he was relieved to see that the fisherman was no longer concerned with him; his face had grown serious again, preoccupied as it had been before. He stopped talking, his hands empty, inert, his forearms leaning on the edge of the table. His gaze—over the remains of the crab, the empty bottle, the full bottle, the shoulder under the black cotton—was unquestionably toward the little window.

“Rain tomorrow,” he said.

He was still not moving. After about twenty seconds he corrected himself: “Tomorrow—or the day after for sure.”

In any case, the salesman would be far away.

Without changing position, the fisherman said: “If it’s that Jacqueline you’re watching for…”

Mathias supposed he was speaking to his young companion, but nothing gave him the slightest clue. She had begun to toy with her food again, and behaved as if she had not heard. The man continued: “You can hope I’ll give her a fine reception.”

He emphasized the word “fine” to show that it should be taken in the opposite sense. Furthermore, like most islanders, he used “hope” instead of “imagine”—which in the present case seemed more likely to mean “fear.”

“She won’t come now,” the salesman said.

He wished he had not spoken, and merely increased his confusion by adding far too hurriedly: “I mean, she must have gone to lunch by now.”

He glanced anxiously around him: luckily no one seemed to have noticed his interruption or his embarrassment. The girl had lowered her eyes over a piece of shell into which she was trying to insert the tip of her tongue. Over the outline of her shoulder which the thin cloth divided into two parts—one flesh, the other black—the man was looking toward the window.

In a low though distinct voice he pronounced these words: “… with the crabs…,” which seemed to have no relation to anything at all, and then burst out laughing for the second time.

Mathias’ sudden fear gave way to a sense of confusion and lassitude. He tried to find something to cling to in his distress, but found only fragments. He wondered what he was doing there. He wondered what he had done for an hour or more: in the fisherman’s cottage… along the top of the cliff… in the village café…

In the cottage, at this moment, there was a man sitting at the table whose face (eyes half-closed) was turned toward a little window. His strong, inert, empty hands, half-open, showed his long nails which were slightly curved, like claws. In passing his eyes grazed the slender, smooth neck of the young woman who was also sitting at the table, as motionless as he, keeping her eyes lowered on her own hands.

Sitting at the man’s right and facing the girl, at an equal distance from each, Mathias imagined exactly what could be seen from where his neighbor was sitting.… In the fisherman’s cottage, at this moment, he was eating lunch, waiting until it was time for him to continue his rounds. To get here, he had had to walk along the cliff top with his host—the old friend he had met in the village. As for the café, hadn’t he managed to sell one of his wrist watches there?

Nevertheless, these justifications did not manage to satisfy him. Casting back still further, he asked himself what he was doing on the road between the town and the lighthouse, then in the town itself, then earlier still…

What had he been doing, then, since morning? This whole extent of time seemed to him long, uncertain, unaccounted for—not so much, perhaps, because of the small number of items sold, as because of the casual and unsystematic way in which these sales had been conducted, which also applied to the sales that had not succeeded, and even the intervening expeditions.

He would have preferred to go at once. But he could hardly leave his hosts so abruptly, without even knowing if the meal was over. The complete lack of form which presided over the latter’s arrangement prevented the salesman once again from knowing what to do. Here too he found himself unable to act according to any rule he could interpret as applicable—which might serve as an example for his conduct—behind which he could have entrenched himself.

The state of things around him furnished no point of reference: the meal had no more reason to be over than it had to continue. An empty bottle stood next to one that was still untouched (although uncorked); one of the crabs had been scattered about in innumerable shreds of shell, scarcely identifiable now, while the other, still intact, lay as before on its spiny back, its angular legs bent inward toward a central point on the belly where the whitish carapace showed a y-shaped star; about half the potatoes were still left in the casserole.

No one was eating any more, however.

The regular sound of the waves dashing against the rocks at the entrance to the cove almost imperceptibly filled the silence, remotely at first, but soon drowning the whole room in its swelling volume.

The head bent in front of the window, with the light behind it, turned to the left—exposing all four square panes to view—in profile again, but this time in the opposite direction: the forehead toward the darkest corner, the nape of the neck in full light. Just above the black cloth at the nape of the neck, appeared a long, fresh scratch, the kind left by brambles on a skin that is too tender. The tiny pearls of blood along its length seemed to be still wet.

A wave broke, farther off, almost inaudibly—or else it beat, Mathias counted to nine; a wave broke. On the panes the former course of raindrops could be traced in the dust. In front of this window, one rainy day when they had left him alone in the house, he had spent all afternoon drawing a sea gull perched on one of the fence posts at the end of the garden. He had often heard the story before.

The head returned to its original position in front of the panes, above the soup plate full of spider-crab legs broken into tiny red and white fragments.

A wave broke, farther off, almost inaudibly—or else it was only the sound of breathing—the salesman’s, for instance.

He recalled the movement of the water rising and falling against the verfiele embankment.

Nearer, on his own plate, he found the same red and white accumulation of blades and needles. Once again the water covered the marks made by the iron ring.

He was on the point of making the gestures and speaking the words which would automatically lead to his departure—looking at his watch, saying, “It is already such and such an hour,” suddenly standing up and apologizing for having to… , etc.—when the sailor, making a sudden decision, stretched his right hand toward the casserole, seized a potato, and brought it close to his eyes, too close, really, as if to examine it near-sightedly—but with his mind elsewhere, perhaps. Mathias thought he was going to begin peeling it. Nothing of the kind occurred. The tip of his thumb was passed slowly over the surface of a large, gnarled-looking excrescence, then after a few moments more of this silent observation, the potato rejoined the rest in the bottom of the casserole.

“The blight’s starting again,” the fisherman murmured to himself.

Doubtless the preceding subject of conversation was closer to his heart, for he immediately returned to it. He had, he said, run into Maria Leduc, one of the two older girls, who was out looking for her sister Jacqueline “one more time.” He bestowed upon the latter a number of insulting names, of which the most emphatic ranged from “hellcat” to “little vampire”; warming to his subject, he shouted that she would never again set foot in his house, that he was even forbidding her to come near the place, and that he didn’t advise “her” to try seeing her on the sly anywhere else. “Her” was the girl sitting opposite Mathias. She did not react to these threats, even when the man, standing up in anger, leaned across the table as if he were going to strike her.

His violence somewhat abated, he spoke cryptically of the Leduc gill’s crimes—still the same ones—which seemed to the salesman, on this new hearing, even more obscure than they had been before. Instead of a straight-forward account of this or that act, there were only—as usual—involved allusions to matters of a psychological or moral order, lost in an interminable series of consequences and causes among which the responsibilities of the protagonists disappeared altogether.

… Julian, the bakery apprentice, had almost drowned himself the week before. Besides Jacqueline Leduc, several other people were involved, if not with the event, at least with the story the sailor told about it; in particular, a young fisherman called “little Louis” and his fiancee—“his ex-fiancee,” to be more exact, since she now refused to marry him. Louis was just twenty, Julian was two years younger. A quarrel had broken out between them on Sunday evening….

But Mathias could not determine to what degree the girl was the subject of this quarrel, nor whether it was a matter of attempted murder or attempted suicide, or merely an accident. The fiancee’s role was not confined, furthermore, merely to breaking off her engagement (she had probably only threatened to break it off); as for the older friend who had repeated to the baker’s apprentice his rival’s words—distorting them somewhat, it seemed…

It seemed to Mathias that the sailor was particularly irritated with the two youths for not agreeing to drown the girl. Lest he be suspected of avoiding the discussion of Violet’s misdeeds and their necessary punishment, the salesman did not dare manifest his eagerness to continue on his way. He even decided it would look better if he took an active part. His host having started on a eulogy of “that poor Leduc woman,” Mathias decided to tell about his morning visit to the three girls’ mother; as he did not recall a single detail concerning the approaching marriages of the two older daughters, he was constrained to improvise. Then he mentioned his friendship with their uncle Joseph, who worked for the steamship line in the city. Speaking of a recent conversation he had had with the latter on the quay, just before sailing, he proceeded quite naturally to a complete account of his day. He had got up, he said, very early in order to catch the boat, for he had to make the long trip between his house and the harbor on foot. He had walked fast, without stopping once. He had arrived a little too early to go on board, and had taken advantage of the remaining time to sell his first watch to a sailor of the line. He had been less fortunate since landing on the island—at least at first. Altogether, though, he couldn’t complain about his morning—thanks of course to the pains he took to prepare his sales trips in every detail. According to his plans made the day before, he had begun with the houses along the harbor; having then rented a good bicycle, he had headed toward Black Rocks, stopping at every door, and even leaving the main road here and there to visit isolated dwellings whenever it seemed worth it. That was how he had happened to sell one of his finest models at the Marek farm. All these side-trips took a negligible amount of time, for the bicycle he had rented worked perfectly—it was a real pleasure to ride on it. The sales themselves were sometimes transacted with astonishing speed: it was enough to open his suitcase, and the quality of the merchandise immediately gained him customers. Press the clasp, open the cover, etc…. This had happened, for example, in the case of the couple who lived along the road just before you reached the village at the lighthouse. A little farther on, at the village café, the salesman had just sold another watch and was getting ready to have his lunch, when he met his old friend Jean Robin, and had immediately been invited here for lunch.

Mathias had then followed him to his cottage, situated just beyond the village in a little cove near the sea. They had begun dinner at once, exchanging old recollections and discussing the changes that had occurred in the countryside since those days. Afterward, the salesman had shown them his line of watches, but without delaying long, for he had to continue his rounds according to the established schedule in order to be back at the harbor before the boat left—at four-fifteen.

First he had finished the systematic canvassing of the village at Black Rocks, where he had managed to sell several more watches—including three to a single family, the one that ran the grocery-general store. He had also found the two fishermen he had met an hour before, at the café. One of them had bought a watch.

Once beyond the village, the road followed the coast east, but at a certain distance from the cliff, across a moor as barren of bushes as of houses. The ocean, because of the rolling ground, remained generally invisible. Mathias pedaled rapidly, impelled rather than impeded by the wind. The sky was quite overcast. It was neither cold nor hot.

The road, narrower and less well-kept than that leading from town to the lighthouse, was nevertheless satisfactorily paved—broad enough, in any case, for a bicycle. In this almost deserted section of the island—and off the main arteries—there was probably never much traffic. The road made a large semicircular curve which reached the farthest point of the island and then curved back toward the center. It was on this last portion, extending from the seaboard villages to the southwest section of town, that he might meet a cart or an old automobile. But on the less-frequented part, toward the tip of the island, the traffic was so rare that patches of low vegetation had invaded the sides of the road in some places, while the wind, at others, accumulated little beaches of dust and sand in which the bicycle left its tracks. Crushed into the surface of the road—no toad, no frog.

No streak of shadow could be seen lying across the road, since there was neither telegraph pole nor sunshine. Having already crossed the narrow passageway between the dried corpse and the rounded extremity of the pole, old Madame Marek would have continued on her way without seeing him.

The salesman, at the last moment, had had to call out to her in order to be recognized. After having inquired why he had found the farm deserted and locked, he turned to the object of his visit: the sale of wrist watches. There, at the roadside, he had gained his first success on the island.

He tried to calculate from memory the total amount received since he had landed. First of all there was old Madame Marek: one hundred fifty-five crowns; next, the exhausted-looking couple: one hundred fifty-five crowns, making three hundred ten; then the proprietress of the café: two hundred seventy-five—and three hundred ten: five hundred eighty five… five hundred eighty-five… five hunched eighty-five…. The next transaction had not been a sale but a gift: he had made a present of a gold-plated lady’s watch to the girl… or young woman…

As a matter of fact there had been a third person at lunch at Jean Robin’s. It was to her that Mathias had shown his collection, since the sailor was obviously uninterested., (Standing in front of the little window, he was looking outside.) The salesman had set down his suitcase at the end of the long table—pressing the clasp, folding back the cover, moving aside the memorandum book…—the girl, who was beginning to clear the table, had come closer to look.

He took the cardboard strips out of the suitcase one by one; she admired them without saying a word, opening her eyes very wide. He stepped back a little to let her examine his wares as long as she liked.

Over her shoulder, he saw her fingering a gold-plated watch strap, then the case itself, more slowly. Twice—once in one direction, then in the other—her middle finger followed the circular shape. She was slender and graceful, bending her neck at the nape—under his eyes—within reach of his hand.

Leaning over a little, he says: “Which do you like best?”

Still without answering, without turning around, she picks up the cardboard strips one by one. Exposed by the rounded collar of her dress, a long scratch studded with red pearls tears across the tender skin of her neck. Mathias imperceptibly stretches out his hand.

He checks the gesture at once. The arm falls back. He has not tried to stretch out his hand. Slender and graceful, the young woman bends her head a little lower, exposing the nape of her neck and the long scratch at its base. The tiny pearls of blood seem to be still wet.

“This one is the prettiest.”

After the story about Violet, the fisherman had again begun on some general considerations of life on the island—oddly contradictory though they were. Each time that he seemed to want to illustrate what he was saying by some more personal detail, the latter contradicted the very point of view he was defending. In spite of this, the general tone of his remarks retained—in appearance, at least—a coherent structure, so that a distracted attention would not realize the anomalies involved.

It was to have a pretext for leaving the table—the first step toward departure—that Mathias had proposed showing the watches. He could not delay any longer, for he had to finish his rounds and return to the harbor before four-fifteen.

Suitcase, clasp, cover, black memorandum book…

Having glanced distractedly at the first cardboard strip, the fisherman turned his back to look out the window. His companion, on the contrary, came closer to look. It occurred to Mathias that he might thank her for her hospitality by making her a present of one of the cheaper watches, which at her age would still make her happy.

Afterward, he returned to the village, which he quickly finished canvassing. He managed to sell several more watches—including three to a single family, the one that ran the grocery-general store.

After Black Rocks, the road ran east along the coast, but at a certain distance from the cliff, and turned inland after the fork leading to the nearby point—where there was no house to interest the salesman—toward the seaboard villages extending to the southwest section of town. Mathias, who was riding very fast, hurrying because of the lateness of the hour, soon found himself among the first houses. He managed to make a good many sales without wasting too much time, as many in the little clusters of houses as in the isolated cottages that marked the intervals between them. Encouraged by his success, he even made excursions off the main road (venturing farther inland again), returning to the coast at an important fishing village—the last before the big pier, the harbor dominated by its ruined fortifications, the flat housefronts along the quay, the landing slip, and the little steamer which was doubtless already preparing for departure.

But the salesman did not take advantage of the short cut which would have brought him directly to the harbor. His watch indicated barely three o’clock, and according to his schedule he still had to explore the whole northwest section of the island—that is, the wild and sparsely settled west coast to the left of the lighthouse, then the steep peninsula called “Horses Point,” symmetrical to the one he was now heading for, and finally the villages—or rather the groups of farmhouses—scattered between the point and the fort, located inland for the most part, so that he would not even try the least accessible ones if his time was running short.

For the moment he had more than an hour ahead of him, and if he hurried he could make up for his delay without difficulty. He therefore returned to the main road and kept to his prescribed course.

Almost at once he was at the point where the road to Black Rocks, which he had taken this morning after leaving town, crossed the main road. To his right the town began some five hundred yards away at the bottom of the hill, with the house where the widow Leduc lived with her three daughters. To the left would be the fork leading to the mill. Actually the salesman did not remember the landscape precisely enough to situate these elements with much assurance. He had barely noticed the crossroads in passing. But he had no doubt that it was indeed this crossroads, and that was the important thing. Besides, Mathias did not have time, on this second occasion, to worry any more about it.

As he rode along he mechanically looked at his watch again, to reassure himself that he was not too late to begin this last section of his itinerary—the big loop from the cliff to Horses Point and back. He continued straight on his way; the hands had virtually not moved at all. Since there was no traffic at the crossroads, he did not even have to slow down.

He touched his suitcase with his fingertips to be sure it was still there on the luggage rack—where he had finally fastened it in an ingenious way that permitted him to remove and replace it promptly. Then he looked down at the movement of the pedals, the chain, the gearing, the wheels that turned without any grinding noise. A film of dust was beginning to cover the chromium tubing.

Pedaling still faster, he was now traveling at a speed that astonished the few people he passed coining toward him; those he passed from behind sometimes gave an exclamation of surprise—or of fear.

He came to a sudden halt in front of the traditional clumps of mahonia and dismounted. He knocked at the window-panes, leaned his bicycle against the wall, picked up the suitcase, entered at once…. Hallway, first door to the right, kitchen, the big oval table covered with an oilcloth patterned with little flowers, opening the clasp, etc…. When the customer looked dubious, Mathias waited no more than a few moments; often he left without even having unpacked his collection. With practice, thirty seconds are enough to tell the ones that will never buy anything.

Along this coast, many farmhouses were in ruins, or in such disrepair that there was no reason to visit them.

There was a fork to the right which certainly led to town. Mathias continued straight ahead.

The road, unfortunately, became rather bad. Since he did not want to slow down, the salesman was severely jolted by the irregularities of the terrain. He tried as much as he could to avoid the most evident holes, but their number and depth constantly increased, making his progress increasingly hazardous.

The entire surface of the road was soon nothing more than holes and humps. The bicycle was shaken by a continual jarring, and at every rotation of the wheels bucked against huge stones; his precious burden was threatened with one bad fall after another. In spite of his efforts, Mathias was losing speed.

The wind off the point was not as strong as was to be feared. The edge of the cliff, higher than the adjoining moor, protected the latter somewhat. Nevertheless, the salesman, who here received it full in the face, found the wind an additional impediment.

From now on he stopped with relief here and there to show his merchandise. But luck was less with him in this part of the country. In the few homes into which he made his way, he found only undecided and quibbling people with whom it was impossible to come to an agreement.

He failed to make two sales after having wasted much more time than usual, believing at every moment that a decision would finally be reached and that only one more complimentary moment would keep him from regretting all that had already passed. When he left the second of these houses, having failed completely, he consulted his watch with a certain uneasiness. It was a little after three-thirty.

Leaping onto the seat without bothering to fasten the suitcase to the luggage rack, he began pedaling as hard as he could, holding the handlebars with one hand and the imitation-leather handle of his suitcase in the other.

Luckily the road from here on was in slightly better condition. After the first village on the north coast, it became quite good in fact. The road now led to the fort and then the town. The wind was once again behind him—or almost.

He rode on at a steady speed, although conscious of a slight nervousness.

The houses were becoming a little more numerous—and less poverty-stricken—but whether it was because the salesman presented his wares too hurriedly, or simply did not permit his customers the minimum amount of time indispensable to country people’s decisions, Mathias did not make as many sales as he had anticipated.

He made the first scheduled side-trip—a very short one—at the old Roman tower near the village of Saint-Sauveur. He was cordially received but managed to sell only one watch—and from the cheapest series.

When he looked at his watch again, it was already ten minutes to four.

He calculated rapidly that at most a mile and a quarter separated him from the little triangular square where he would leave the bicycle at the café-tobacco shop-garage. Without side-trips, it would take him about ten minutes to get there, including the short walk from the tobacco shop to the boat and the thirty seconds he needed to pay the garageman.

He had just under a quarter of an hour until then. The salesman would have time enough to try his luck at a few last doors.

Rushing on as if he were being pursued, running, bounding, throwing himself about—but without wasting his strength in gesticulations—he persisted until the last possible moment. Leaving matters somewhat up to chance, as soon as a house along the road seemed to look rather prosperous, or less ramshackle, or newer, he jumped off the bicycle and raced to the door, suitcase in hand.

Once…. Twice…. Three times…

When he found a window open on the ground floor, he spoke from outside, ready to show his merchandise from where he stood. Otherwise he walked into the kitchen without even knocking. Sometimes he economized on words and gestures—excessively, even.

As a matter of fact, all of these attempts were useless. He was going too fast: he was taken for a madman.

At five after four he caught sight of the fort. Now he would have to get back to town without stopping again. There were only three hundred yards or so to travel uphill, then the slope down to the harbor. He wanted to go faster still.

The bicycle chain began to make an unpleasant sound—as if it were rubbing sideways against the sprocket-wheel. Mathias pedaled vigorously.

But the grinding noise grew more pronounced so rapidly that he decided to get off and examine the transmission. He set his suitcase down on the ground and crouched over the machine.

There was no time to study the phenomenon in detail. He confined himself to pushing the sprocket-wheel back toward the frame—dirtying his fingers as little as possible—and started off again. The abnormal friction seemed to grow worse.

He got off again at once and twisted the axle of the sprocket-wheel in the opposite direction.

As soon as he was back on the seat again he realized that matters were going from bad to worse. He was making no progress at all: the machinery was almost completely jammed. Trying another remedy, he manipulated the gearshift—once, twice, three times—pedaling at the same time. As soon as it reached its maximum gear expansion, the chain sprang away from the sprocket-wheel.

He got off the bicycle, set down the suitcase, and lay the machine on its side in the road. It was eight minutes after four. This time, while adjusting the chain in place on the little toothed wheel, he covered himself with grease. He was sweating.

Without wiping his hands he seized his suitcase, mounted the bicycle again, and tried to pedal. The chain sprang away from the sprocket-wheel.

He put it back a second time, then a third. He tried it on all three gear-wheels, without managing to make it hold on any: it came off at the first revolution. Giving up, he continued on foot, half-running, half-walking, holding the suitcase in his left hand and with his right pushing the bicycle.

An essential piece of the machinery must have been broken during the jolting on the bad road from Horses Point.

Mathias had just begun walking down the slope to town when he suddenly realized he might be able to coast down without using the pedals. He got back on the bicycle and impelled himself forward with a vigorous kick. For balance he pressed the hand carrying the suitcase against the left grip of the handlebars.

Now he had to be careful not to disturb the chain which he had put back around the sprocket-wheel—therefore he must not move his feet, or he would make it spring off again and tangle with the rear-wheel spokes. In order to fasten the chain more firmly to the sprocket-wheel, since it no longer had to revolve, the salesman thought of attaching it with a piece of cord he had picked up that morning; he began looking for the cord in the pockets of his duffle coat. But not finding it in either one, he remembered…. He remembered that he no longer had it.

Furthermore, he had arrived without mishap at the level section of the road just before the fork; he was forced to stop in order to avoid a little girl who was heedlessly crossing just in front of him. In order to gain momentum he unthinkingly gave the pedals a turn… then several more. The bicycle was working perfectly. The peculiar noise had entirely disappeared.

At the other end of the town he heard the little steamer’s whistle: once, twice, three times.

He entered the square, the town hall on his left. The whistle blew again, shrill and prolonged.

On the movie bulletin-board, the advertisement had been changed. He leaned the bicycle against it and dashed into the café-tobacco shop. No one was there: no customer in the room, no proprietor behind the counter. He called. No one answered.

Outside there was no one either, no one in sight, Mathias remembered that the man had returned his security. The sum amounted to…

The ship’s whistle blew a long blast—in a slightly lower tone.

The salesman jumped onto the bicycle. He would leave it at the end of the quay—would hand it to someone—with the amount he owed for its rental. But even pedaling as hard as he could along the uneven cobbles, he managed to remember that the garageman had still not told him the terms. At first it had only been a question of the two-hundred-crowns security, which obviously bore no relation to the value of the bicycle nor to the cost of a half-day’s rental.

Mathias decided not to try riding along the pier, for it was encumbered with a great many baskets and hampers. There was not a single stroller on this part of the quay to take the money, so he abandoned the bicycle against the parapet and immediately ran toward the steamer. In a few seconds he had reached the landing slip, where a little crowd of about ten people was standing. The gangplank had been pulled up. The steamer was slowly pulling away from the embankment.

The tide was high now. The water covered a good part of the inclined plane—half of it, perhaps—or two-thirds. The seaweed on the bottom could no longer be seen, nor the tufts of greenish moss which made the lower stones so slippery.

Mathias looked at the narrow strip of water almost imperceptibly widening between the ship’s side and the oblique edge of the landing slip. He could not jump across it, not so much because of the distance—which was still very slight—but because of the dangers of landing on the gunwale or in the midst of the passengers and their baggage on the stem deck. The downward slope along which he would have to run to gain momentum increased the difficulty still further, as did the heavy shoes and the duffle coat he was wearing, not to mention the suitcase he was carrying.

He looked at the half-turned backs of the people staying behind, their faces in profile, their stares motionless and parallel—meeting identical stares from the ship. Standing against an iron pillar that supported the deck above, a child of seven or eight was gravely staring at him with large, calm eyes. He wondered why she was looking at him that way, but then something—a silhouette—came between him and the image—a sailor on board whom the salesman thought he recognized. He ran forward three steps toward the end of the pier and shouted: “Hey there!”

The sailor did not hear him over the noise of the engines. On the pier Mathias’ immediate neighbors turned toward him—then others farther away, by degrees.

The passengers, noticing the general movement of heads on the pier, also looked in his direction—as if in astonishment. The sailor raised his eyes and caught sight of Mathias, who waved his arms in his direction and cried again: “Hey there!”

“Hey!” answered the sailor waving his arms in farewell. The little girl next to him had not moved, but the maneuver executed by the ship changed the direction of her gaze: now she would be looking at the top of the pier, above the landing slip, where another group of people was standing on the narrow passageway that led to the beacon light. These too were now facing Mathias. All of them had the same strained, frozen expression as before.

Without addressing anyone in particular, Mathias said: “I didn’t miss it by much.”

The little steamer executed its usual maneuver, which consisted of turning so that it presented its stem to the open sea. The islanders left the end of the pier one after the other to return to their houses. The salesman wondered where he would sleep that night, and the next, and the one after that too—for the boat would not return until Friday. He also wondered if there were any policemen on the island. Then he decided it wouldn’t change matters, whether there were or not.

In any case, it would have been better if he had left, since that had been his plan.

“You should have shouted! They would have come back.”

Mathias turned toward the person who had spoken these words. It was an old man in city clothes whose smile might have been kindly as well as ironic.

“Bah!” answered Mathias. “It doesn’t matter.”

Besides, he had shouted—not right away, it was true—and not very insistently. The sailor had not seemed to understand that he had just missed the boat. He did not know why he had shouted himself.

“They would have come back,” the old man repeated. “At high tide they can tum easily.”

Perhaps he wasn’t joking. “I didn’t have to go,” said the salesman.

Besides, he had to take back the bicycle and pay for its rental. He looked at the water lapping against the foot of the embankment—slack tide probably. In the sheltered angle of the landing slip, the backwash produced scarcely any swell at all.

Then came a series of little waves from the steamer’s propeller. But the harbor was empty. Only a fishing-smack was dancing out in the middle somewhere, its mast waving to and fro. Since he risked getting spattered on the landing slip, Mathias walked up the slope and found himself again on top of the pier, walking alone among the baskets, nets, and traps.

He put his right hand—the free one—in the pocket of his duffle coat. It came into contact with the slender cord rolled into a figure eight—a fine piece for his collection. He had often heard the story before: once he had had a whole boxful—perhaps twenty-five or thirty years ago.

He did not remember what had become of them. The slender cord picked up that morning had also disappeared from his duffle coat pocket. His right hand encountered only a pack of cigarettes and a little bag of gumdrops.

Thinking this was a good time to have a smoke, he took out the pack and discovered that several cigarettes were already missing—three, to be exact. He put the pack back in his pocket. The bag of gumdrops had also been opened.

He was walking slowly along the pier, on the side with no railing. The water level was several yards higher. At the end of the pier, against the quay, the sea had entirely covered the strip of mud. Beyond stretched the row of houses and shops: the hardware store at the comer of the square, the butcher shop, the café “A l’Espérance,” the shop that sold everything—women’s lingerie, wrist watches, fish, preserves, etc….

Groping at the bottom of his pocket, Mathias opened the cellophane bag and took out a gumdrop. This one was wrapped in blue paper. Still using only one hand, he unwrapped the paper, put the gumdrop in his mouth, rolled the little rectangle of paper into a ball, and threw it into the water where it floated on the surface.

Leaning over a little farther, he saw at his feet the vertical embankment that plunged into the black water. The strip of shadow cast by the pier would have grown very thin at this time of day. But there was no longer any sunshine; the sky was uniformly overcast.

Mathias advanced to the middle of the cluster of gray parallel lines between the water level and the outer edge of the parapet: the inner rim of the parapet, the angle formed by the jetty and the base of the parapet, the side of the pier that had no railing—rigid horizontal lines, interrupted by several openings, extending straight toward the quay.