The Voyeur

III

The new advertisement represented a landscape.

At least Mathias thought he could make out a moor dotted with clumps of bushes in its interlacing lines, but something else must have been superimposed: here and there certain outlines or patches of color appeared which did not seem to be part of the original design. On the other hand they could not be said to constitute another drawing entirely; they appeared to have no relation to one another, and it was impossible to guess their intention. They succeeded, in any case, in so blurring the configurations of the moor that it was doubtful whether the poster represented a landscape at all.

On the upper section appeared the names of the leading actors—foreign names Mathias thought he had already seen many times, but which he associated with no particular faces. Underneath was spread in huge letters what must have been the name of the film: “Monsieur X on the Double Circuit.” Not conforming to the trends of recent productions, this title—which was scarcely enticing, having little or no relation to anything human—provided remarkably little information about what type of film it described. Perhaps it was a detective story, or a thriller.

Attempting once again to decipher the network of curves and angles, Mathias now recognized nothing at all—it was impossible to decide whether there were two different images superimposed, or just one, or three, or even more.

He stepped back to get a better look at the bulletin-board as a whole, but the more he examined it the more vague, shifting, and incomprehensible it seemed. There were performances on Saturday night and Sunday, not before; he would be unable to see the film, since he intended to leave Friday afternoon.

“Good-looking sign, isn’t it?” said a voice he knew.

Mathias raised his eyes. Above the bulletin-board the garageman’s head had appeared in the doorway.

“That one, yes!…” the salesman began, cautiously.

“Wonder where they get colors like those,” the other continued.

Did this mean that he had discovered what the lines were supposed to represent?

“Here’s your bicycle,” said Mathias. “It’s just played me a nasty trick!”

“I’m not surprised,” the garageman returned, still smiling. “All these new makes are the same—they’re shiny enough, but no good when you need them.”

The salesman recounted his misfortune: he had just missed the boat by a few seconds because of this chain, which at the last minute had made him lose five precious minutes.

The garageman found the incident so commonplace he did not even listen to him. He asked instead: “You came from the pier?”

“Just now…”

“Then you were going to take the bicycle with you?” the man exclaimed as jovially as before.

Mathias explained that he had stopped by the tobacco shop beforehand to leave the bicycle and pay for its use;

but he had found no one there. As he returned to the square—not knowing what to do next—he had heard the boat’s last whistle, the one that meant the gangway was about to be closed, so he had headed toward the pier—not hurrying, since it was too late—just to watch the little steamer pull out—to have something to do, really…

“Yes,” the man said, “I saw you. I was there too, at the end of the pier.”

“Now I’m going to need a room until Friday. Where can I find one?”

The garageman seemed to be thinking it over.

“The boat left at least five minutes late today,” he said, after a rather long silence.

Of course there was no hotel on the island, not even a rooming house. From time to time people rented an empty room, but it was difficult living in someone else’s house, and there were really no conveniences. The best solution, as far as finding out what was available at the moment, was to ask at the café “A l’Espérance,” on the quay. Then the salesman asked how much he owed for the bicycle and paid the twenty crowns he was charged. In consideration of the bicycle’s newness, on the one hand, and its irregular operation on the other, it was difficult to say whether this was cheap or expensive.

“Wait a minute,” the tobacconist continued, “there’s the Widow Leduc just nearby—she used to have a good room to rent out; but she’s off her head today, ever since her kid disappeared. You’d better leave her alone.”

“Disappeared?” the salesman asked. “Madame Leduc is an old friend; I saw her only this morning. I hope nothing has happened…”

“It’s that little Jacqueline again: they’ve been looking for her since noon, but no one can find her.”

“She can’t be far, after all! The island isn’t so big as that!”

The meadows and the moor, the potato fields, the edge of the fields, the hollows in the cliff, the sand, the rocks, the sea…

“Don’t fool yourself,” said the man, winking at him. “Someone knows where she is.”

Mathias did not dare leave. He had waited too long again. And now he was obliged to struggle a second time with silences that threatened to riddle the conversation at every turn: “Then that was it,” he said, “that business with the sheep they were talking about at Black Rocks?”

“Yes, that’s it—she was tending the sheep, but the wolf got the shepherdess!” etc…. etc….

And also: “At thirteen! It’s really a shame”—“She’s got a devil inside her”—“A wild animal!”—“Children are a lot of trouble”—“She deserves to be….”

There was no reason for it to stop. Mathias said something, the man answered, Mathias answered that. The man said something, Mathias answered. Mathias said something, Mathias answered. Little Jacqueline was walking along the path on top of the cliff, showing off her delicate, scandalous silhouette. In the hollows, sheltered from the wind, in the long meadow grass, under the hedges, against the trunk of a pine, she stopped and slowly ran her fingertips over her hair, her neck, her shoulders…

She always came home to sleep—the last house as you left town on the road to the big lighthouse. Tonight, when Mathias would climb upstairs to his room, having said goodnight to the mother and the two older sisters, holding his lighted candle in front of him in his right hand and in his left his little suitcase in which he had carefully stored the cord, raising his head—he would see, a few steps higher, showing him the way up the dark staircase, so slender in her little black peasant girl’s dress, Violet as a child…. Violet! Violet! Violet!

He pushed open the door of the café. Three sailors—one almost a boy and two older men—were sitting at a table drinking red wine. Behind the counter the girl with the timorous expression of a dog that had been whipped was leaning against the doorway of the room back of the bar, her wrists behind the small of her back. Mathias passed his hand in front of his eyes.

He asked for a room. Without a word she preceded him step by step up the narrow spiral of the suddenly darkened second staircase, gracefully slipping between the boxes and various utensils that blocked their passage. They reached the landing, the little vestibule, the room with the black and white tiling…. The bed had been made. The bed lamp on the night table was turned on, lighting more brightly the red material at the head of the bed, as well as several tiles, and the lambskin. On the dressing table among the jars and bottles, was the slightly tilted chromium-plated frame holding the photograph. Directly above it, the big oval minor again reflected…. Mathias passed his hand in front of his eves.

The girl had finally understood that he wanted a room as near the harbor as possible for three days. The lodging she suggested, and which he went to see at once, was not in the town proper, but just beyond, a house on the moor near the sea, just beyond the pier. This spot, despite its relative isolation, was nearer the pier than certain sections of the town itself—those, for instance, between the old harbor and the ruins of the fort.

Although of better appearance—cleaner certainly, and more frequently repainted and whitewashed than most the salesman had approached hitherto—the building, obviously the same age as the rest, presented identical physical features, the same simplified architecture: a ground floor with neither upper story nor dormers, and two identical facades, each with two small, almost square windows on either side of a low door. Facing the road—a secondary one which must have been the short cut to the village Mathias had visited before reaching Horses Point—the entrance was embellished with the same holly-leaf mahonias, here perhaps somewhat more flourishing.

Between the doors extended a rectilinear hallway onto which opened all four rooms. Mathias’ was the back one on the left, overlooking the cliff.

The cliff was not very high at this point—lower, in any case, than along the southwest beach or at the two promontories at either end of the island. On the right it fell away toward an indentation in the coast where the sea could be seen, perhaps a third of a mile away.

From the ridge where the face of the cliff began—opposite the house—to the house itself was a distance of no more than three hundred yards of gently rolling moors and a small garden that had been left fallow, although enclosed by barbed-wire attached to wooden fence posts. The whole landscape—low sky, patch of ocean, cliff, garden—was composed of various flat, lusterless, grayish hues.

The window that looked out on it was a yard wide and slightly higher—four panes of the same size with neither curtains nor shade; since it was deeply recessed in the thickness of the wall, the rather large room for which it was the only source of daylight remained virtually in darkness. Only the heavy little table wedged into the recess received enough light for him to write there—add up his accounts there—or draw there.

The rest of the room was in semidarkness. Its appointments further accentuated this defect: a dull-colored carpet and high, heavy pieces of dark furniture. The latter were crowded so close together along all four walls that there was some doubt whether this room was actually intended to be lived in or merely used as a storeroom for all the discarded furniture from the rest of the house. Especially noticeable were three immense cupboards, two side by side opposite the door to the hallway. They filled almost the whole of the rear wall, leaving just enough room for a modest dressing table—this last in the dimmest corner, to the left of the window from which it was separated by two straight chairs standing against the flowered wallpaper. On the other side of the window recess, two other chairs occupied a symmetrical position. But only three of the four chairs were of the same design.

Hence, starting at the window and proceeding left (that is, counter-clockwise), were a chair, another chair, the dressing table (in the corner), a third chair, a cherrywood bed (placed lengthwise against the wall), a tiny pedestal table with a fourth chair in front of it, a commode (in the third corner), the door to the hallway, a kind of drop-leaf table that could be used as a desk when the sides were extended, and finally the third cupboard, standing diagonally across the fourth corner with the fifth and sixth chairs next to it. It was in this last, most imposing, cupboard—which was always locked—that the shoebox which harbored his string collection was kept, on the right-hand side of the lowest shelf.

The girl’s body was discovered the following morning at low tide. Some fishermen—looking for the soft-shelled turtle crabs called “sleepers”—happened to find the body on the rocks under the crossroads.

The salesman heard the news while he was drinking an apéritif at the bar of the café “A l’Espérance.” The sailor who was telling the story seemed quite well informed as to the location, the posture, and the state of the body; but he was not one of the men who had found it, and he did not even say if he had seen it for himself. Furthermore, he seemed completely unmoved by what he was describing. It might as well have been a stuffed doll thrown over the cliff. The man was speaking slowly and with a certain concern for accuracy, furnishing—although sometimes in scarcely logical order—all the necessary material details and offering for each some plausible explanation. Everything was clear, obvious, banal.

Little Jacqueline was lying naked on a bed of brown seaweed among the big, round rocks. Doubtless the movement of the waves had undressed her, for it was unlikely that she had been drowned while swimming—in this weather, and at such a dangerous spot. She must have lost her balance playing at the edge of the cliff, which was very steep at this point. Perhaps she had even tried to reach the water by a more or less passable rock spur which ran down on the left. She must have missed her footing, or slipped, or tried to balance on too weak a point in the rock. She had been killed by the fall—of several yards—her slender neck broken.

The hypothesis that a sudden wave might have swept her off her feet during the rising tide was no more tenable than the supposition that she had drowned while swimming: there was very little water in her lungs—much less, certainly, than if she had drowned. Besides, there were wounds on her head and limbs which corresponded more closely to a ricocheting fall against stone outcroppings than to injuries sustained by a lifeless body tossed about by the sea. Nevertheless—as might be expected—on what remained of her flesh there were also a number of bruises which resembled the result of this kind of contact.

In any case, it was difficult for nonspecialists, even those accustomed to such accidents, to establish with any certitude the origin of the different wounds and abrasions found on the girl’s body; especially since the crabs, or the fish perhaps, had already begun their ravages at certain particularly tender spots. The fisherman thought that the body of an adult would have held out longer against them.

He doubted that a doctor would have anything else to say about the case, which in his opinion was unequivocal. By the same token the salesman learned that there was no doctor on the island and that the man who spoke in such a knowing way had served in the navy as a hospital attendant. There was only an old Civil Guard who as a rule confined himself to making out a death certificate.

The body had been brought to Madame Leduc’s house, along with two or three pieces of the girl’s clothing that had been scattered on the nearby rocks, among the seaweed. According to his informant, Madame Leduc had actually grown “rather calm” on learning what had become of her youngest daughter and the reason that had kept her from coming home. No one who witnessed the scene was surprised.

His audience—five other sailors, the proprietor, and the young barmaid—had listened to the entire account without once interrupting, merely nodding at the most decisive passages. Mathias contented himself with imitating them.

There was a pause at the end. Then the hospital attendant repeated elements of his story from first one part, then another, employing the same terms and constructing his sentences in the identical manner: “The hookers had already begun to nibble at the tenderest parts: the lips, the neck, the hands… other places too…. Only just begun, though: almost nothing. Or else it might have been a red eel, or a barbel…”

At last, after another silence, someone said: “It’s the devil that finally punished her!”

It was one of the sailors—a young one. Several murmurs rose around him—vague sounds, signifying neither acquiescence nor protest. Then everyone was still. On the other side of the glass door, beyond the cobbles and the mud, the water of the harbor was gray, flat, and lusterless. The sun had not reappeared.

Someone spoke up behind Mathias: “Maybe she was pushed—did you ever think of that—to make her fall…. She was fast on her feet, that girl.”

This time the silence was longer still. The salesman turned around to face the room and searched every face to discover who had just spoken.

“Anyone can lose his balance,” the hospital attendant said.

Mathias emptied his glass and set it down again on the counter.

He looked at his right hand on the edge of the counter, next to the empty glass, and immediately concealed it in his duffle coat pocket. There it came in contact with the open pack of cigarettes. He took one out of the pack, still in his pocket, then put it in his mouth and lit it.

The smoke, expelled through his rounded lips, formed a great circle above the bar, slowly twisting in the calm air into two equal loops. As soon as possible Mathias would ask his landlady for a pair of scissors to cut these embarrassing nails; he did not want them to be this long for two days more. It was at that moment that he first remembered the three cigarette butts left on the cliff, in the grass, under the crossroads.

There was no harm in taking a little walk; after all, he had nothing else to do. The trip there and back would take an hour, an hour and a half at the most—he would easily be back for lunch—the visit to his old friends the Mareks—he had not found them at home the day before.

Once again he was at the bottom of the little depression, in the hollow sheltered from the wind. At least he thought he recognized it; but his recollection of it differed slightly from what was now before his eyes. The fact that the sheep were no longer there was not enough to account for the change. He tried to imagine the bicycle lying on the weeds, gleaming on the sunny slope. But the sun was missing too.

Moreover he could not find the slightest trace of a cigarette. Since all three had been only half-smoked, some passer-by might have picked them up last night or this morning. A passer-by! Nobody passed by in a place as remote as this—unless it happened to be the people looking for the lost shepherdess.

He glanced once more at the grass underfoot, but he no longer considered such matters important: on the island as elsewhere, everyone smoked the same brand of cigarettes—the ones in the blue pack. Nevertheless, Mathias kept his eyes on the ground. He saw the little shepherdess lying at his feet, feebly twisting from side to side. He had wadded up her shift and stuffed it into her mouth to keep her from screaming.

When he looked up again, he realized he was not alone. That was why he had looked up. Standing on the ridge fifteen or twenty yards away, a delicate silhouette was etched against the gray sky: someone was standing there, motionless, watching him.

For an instant Mathias imagined he was seeing little Jacqueline all over again. And just as he realized the absurdity of such an apparition, he noticed that the newcomer was several inches taller and several years older than she. Scrutinized carefully, moreover, this face bore no resemblance to Violet’s, although it too was not unfamiliar to him. Soon he remembered: it was the young woman who lived at Jean Robin’s, in the cottage at the mouth of the cove.

He walked toward her—deliberately—almost without moving. Her dress—like that of almost all the island girls—was merely a simplification of the ancient regional costume: thin, long-sleeved, and black, rather close-fitting from shoulders to hips, with a wide skirt; the rounded collar exposed the neck; the girl’s hair was arranged in two short braids, one on each side of a part beginning at the nape of her neck; the braids were coiled into little buns concealing the upper part of her ears. The little girls wore practically the same dress, but much shorter and usually without sleeves; they wore their hair in the same way too, but without coiling the braids into buns.

When they went out-of-doors, the island women left their narrow, bright-colored aprons at home and wrapped big fringed shawls around their shoulders. Yet this girl wore neither apron nor shawl, nor any other outer clothing, although Mathias was wearing a duffle coat without discomfort in such weather. On the windblown ridge toward which he was walking she had to hold the folds of her skirt in one hand to keep it from rising. She half turned her head away from him, as if surprised in some misconduct.

“Hello,” said Mathias. “…Taking a walk?”

“No,” she said. And then, after a few seconds, “It’s all over.”

He had not noticed, yesterday, how deep her voice was. In fact he did not recall having heard her speak a word. She was rather short—as soon as their respective positions did not force him to look up at her from below, she barely reached to the salesman’s shoulder.

“It’s not so nice out this morning,” he said.

She suddenly lifted her head, stepping back at the same time. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying for some time. She cried out, her voice surprisingly low: “What are you looking for around here? You know perfectly well he killed her!”

And she turned her face away again, bending her neck. The fine scratch, half-scabbed over, must have opened again; the edge of lier dress, as it moved, smeared a little blood over the surface of her skin.

“‘He?’ Who?” asked Mathias.

“Pierre.”

“Which Pierre?”

“Pierre, your friend!” she said impatiently.

Then Jean was not his name? Nor Robin either, perhaps? It was not his name written on the door panel.

She straightened up and said more calmly: “Still, it’s a good thing I met you.” She raised the hem of her left sleeve and removed the wrist watch beneath it—the present Mathias had given her. “I had to return this.”

“You don’t want it any more?”

“I have to give it back to you.”

“Well, if you have to.”

“He’ll kill me… the way he killed Jackie…”

“Why did he kill her?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders.

“He’ll kill you if you keep the watch?” Mathias asked.

She turned her eyes away again: “He said you told me.… He said he had heard you.”

“Heard what?”

“What you told me.”

“And what did I tell you?”

“I don’t know.”

Mathias took the watch she held out to him and put it in his pocket. “Why did he kill her?” he asked.

“I don’t know…. Jackie made fun of him.”

“That’s no reason.”

The girl shrugged lier shoulders.

“He didn’t kill her,” Mathias continued. “No one killed her. She fell all by herself. She slipped when she was too near the edge.” “Jackie didn’t slip,” the girl said.

“Look at this place—here. The ground caves in every minute. All you have to do is come a little too close….”

He pointed to the edge of the cliff quite near by, but she did not even turn her eyes in that direction.

“You want to cover up,” she said. “Don’t worry, I won’t say anything either.”

“What proof would you have?”

“You heard what he was yelling yesterday, at dinner: that she wouldn’t come any more now!… What did that mean?… He pushed her to get revenge. You know perfectly well he did. He was prowling around here when it happened.”

Mathias thought for a few moments before answering: “You don’t know what time it happened.”

“But Maria was looking for her after twelve-thirty…”

“There was the whole morning before that.”

The girl hesitated, then lowered her voice and said, almost in a whisper: “Jackie was still here after eleven.”

Mathias recalled the succession of his own movements; what she was saying was quite exact. He found it irritating that this detail should be known. He asked: “How do you know?”

But her answer told him nothing he had not already guessed: the girl had paid a secret visit to her young friend out here on the cliff. She had not left her before eleven-thirty. The accident could therefore be situated within about thirty minutes of its occurrence. If his customers had noted the salesman’s course with the same accuracy…

“Even so,” he said, “that leaves a whole hour in between…. Plenty of time to lose your balance.”

“And that was just when he was prowling around the cliff, running after me, the way he does whenever I set foot outside the house!”

“Yes… certainly… it is strange, all right. Tell me again what he said at dinner. ‘She won’t come back any more…’”

“‘…now.’ ‘She won’t come back any more now!’”

“Yes, that’s it—I heard it too!”

“Then you see!”

“Perhaps you’re right after all,” said Mathias.

They stood without moving, neither of them speaking. Then he thought she was going to leave; but after taking two steps, she came back toward him, holding something she had been concealing in the palm of her hand.

“And then I found this, too.”

It was one of the cigarettes. She pointed toward the bottom of the hollow: “I found it here, just now. People don’t usually throw away half-smoked cigarettes. He had it in his mouth, the way he does in the morning, and he dropped it because Jackie was struggling.”

Mathias held out his hand and took the object—to look at it more closely, supposedly. With a sudden gesture he made it disappear into his duffle coat pocket. The girl watched him with astonished eyes, her hand still stretched out to take it back. But he merely declared: “This is the actual proof that you are right.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything, you didn’t need to take it away from me.… I wanted to throw it into the water…”

She stepped back.

Mathias forgot to answer. He saw her retreating, still staring at him, her eyes wide. Then suddenly she turned around and began to run toward the lighthouse.

When she had disappeared behind a hillock, he returned down the path by which he had come. The first thing that caught his attention—in the grass, at the bottom of the hollow sheltered from the wind—was a second half-smoked cigarette exactly like the first. He had not noticed it just now, when he had come. A tuft of grass slightly longer than the rest concealed it from view except at the very point where he happened to be standing.

Having picked it up and put it in his pocket, he began looking for the third as well, thoroughly examining the few square yards of ground where it might have fallen. But his only approximate recollection of such places prevented him from establishing the area’s perimeter with much certitude.

Despite his efforts, he could not manage to discover the third cigarette. He decided it must be smaller than the other two; hence it would be less compromising—especially by itself—since it was virtually the size of the cigarette butts any smoker might throw away. No one could reasonably imagine what it had been used for.

Mathias concluded that even if this third cigarette was as little smoked as the preceding two, it could still pass for the one Jean Robin—or rather the man whose name was not Jean Robin—might have lost while he was dragging the little shepherdess toward the edge of the cliff by force. The main thing, after all, was that an eventual investigator would be unable to find more than one; for if nobody knew what they had been used for, it would be ridiculous to suspect the salesman—perhaps the only person on the whole island who had never harbored any resentment toward the girl.

On the other hand, the presence of several half-smoked cigarettes would certainly seem strange—might even suggest motives other than the vengeance of a rejected lover, if it was ever discovered, at the same time, that the wounds on the body were more suspect than those left by a fall against the rocks, the action of the sea, the ravages of fish or crabs.

Mathias would have only to destroy the two butts in his possession and claim to have thrown away the one the girl had just given him.

To gain time—all these ideas and investigations had delayed him considerably—Mathias decided to take a path back to town that would avoid the lighthouse crossroads. There were plenty to choose from among the complicated network crossing the moor. But the rolling ground prevented him from calculating his steps according to the goal to be reached—invisible from where he was—so that he had to orient himself by guesswork, deciding on an angle of approximately thirty degrees with his original direction.

He decided to follow a path that was well marked. Aside from the inconvenience of cross-country walking, it was quite likely that if he kept to such a path he might find the very short cut Maria Leduc had taken to the cliff.

Unfortunately none of the numerous existing paths coincided with the theoretical direction Mathias had selected; he was therefore confined, from the start, to one of two possible detours. Besides, every path looked winding and discontinuous—separating, reuniting, constantly interlacing, even stopping short in a briar patch. All of which obliged him to make many false starts, hesitations, retreats, posed new problems at every step, forbade any assurance as to the general direction of the path he had chosen.

Furthermore, Mathias often chose without giving much thought to the possible alternatives. Since he was walking fast, he did not have much time to think in any case. Something more serious was bothering him, something about his reasoning in the case of those three cigarettes: the one still on the cliff was not the one the young woman had picked up. Yet she was relying on its abnormal length to prove the crime. If a butt less than an inch long should now come to light, how could the salesman manage—in the eventuality of a confrontation—to make her admit it was the one she had given him? To explain the fact that it had grown shorter, it would be necessary for Mathias to have lighted it again and smoked it himself before throwing it away—an alibi which lacked both simplicity and likelihood.

His deductions and hypotheses were interrupted by his surprise at suddenly finding himself on the main road again, just opposite the road to the Marek farm—that is, not far from the milestone.

He turned around and realized that the path he was on was the very one he had taken less than an hour before, and on his bicycle yesterday afternoon. After several detours and devious curves, the junction had occurred without his noticing it.

He was not a little troubled by this discovery: at present he doubted the existence of a short cut from the town to the hollow in the cliff, whereas all his previous reflections had posited the inevitability of it. Of course the mistake delayed him still longer: he turned up for lunch almost forty minutes later that he had expected to.

This kind of inexactitude irritated as well as disturbed him, since the café had only agreed to serve him his meals as a particular favor, in the absence of any regular restaurant at this time of year. When he walked in, the proprietor pointed this out to him politely, but firmly. Mathias, breathless from running, was put out of countenance.

“I went over to see my old friends the Mareks,” he gave as an excuse. “You know, near Black Rocks. They kept me longer than I expected…”

He immediately realized the imprudence of his words, and fell silent without adding—as he had at first intended—that Robert Marek had asked him to stay for lunch and that he had refused because he was expected here. Perhaps Robert Marek himself was leaving the café “A l’Espérance” at this very moment; it would be better not to get in any deeper. This one he had already exposed him far too dangerously to a formal denial that risked awakening all kinds of suspicion…

“You came by the road from the big lighthouse, didn’t you?” asked the proprietor, who had been waiting for his guest in the doorway.

“Yes, of course.”

“Since you were walking, you could have taken a much shorter way. Why didn’t anyone show you?”

“Probably they were afraid I might lose my way.”

“It’s simple enough, you just take the path behind the fields all the way. It begins here, out back.” (Vague gesture of the right arm.)

It was essential for Mathias to change the subject in order to avoid any further questions about such places, or the people he had met at the farm. Fortunately the proprietor, more talkative today, shifted the conversation of his own accord to the obvious subject: the accident which had cost the youngest Leduc girl her life. Dangers of the cliff, brittleness of the rock, treachery of the ocean, disobedience of children, always doing what they’re not supposed to do…

“To tell you the truth, it’s nobody’s loss, I’m sorry to say. She was a real devil! A wild animal!”

Mathias listened to this peroration with only half an ear. The business no longer interested him. The false step he had made so lightly only a moment ago preoccupied him too much: he was in constant terror his interlocutor would make some new allusion to it. A single idea possessed him: to gulp down his lunch as soon as possible and actually visit that damned farm—finally—in order to transform his lie into a mere anticipation of the truth.

Nevertheless, once out on the quay again—calmer now, feeling himself out of danger—he did not start looking for the sliQrt cut across the fields mentioned by the proprietor as well as by old Madame Marek. He turned left and headed, as usual, toward the little triangular square. He was beginning to mistrust short cuts.

He preferred the large flat stones along the quay to the uneven cobbles: it was easier to walk there. But he did not waste time staring at the exposed strip of mud—two or three yards below—which the rising tide had not yet covered. He also renounced the next temptation without difficulty:—the hardware shop¬window. In the middle of the square the monument to the dead seemed more familiar under this cloudy sky. The high circular fence with its vertical rails cast no shadow on the surrounding sidewalk. The statue on its rock pedestal was still looking toward the open sea, but no anxiety showed on its granite face. The salesman was merely going to visit some old acquaintance from whom, moreover, he would have nothing particularly startling to hear—neither good nor bad—in the way of gossip, since the old woman had already told him all their important news. His eyes happened to fall on the gaudy advertisement on the bulletin-board. He turned his head away. He was merely going to pay a visit… etc.

The streets were empty, which was not surprising: everyone on the island was eating dinner; it was served much later here than on the mainland; the proprietor had waited on Mathias a little ahead of time so that he himself could eat at his usual hour. The last house as you left town had its door and windows closed, like the others. The silence was reassuring, reassuring, reassuring…

Having climbed up the ridge, Mathias soon arrived at the junction of the two main roads—the one he was on, heading toward Black Rocks, and the one describing a kind of S from one end of the island to the other, giving access to the east and west shores—the one he had taken the day before, at the end of his rounds, to Horses Point.

A few steps farther a smaller road appeared on his right, between two retaining walls covered with gorse—a grassy path marked by a central furrow and two lateral ruts—just wide enough for a cart. Mathias decided he could scarcely appear at the farm until after dinnertime. He had plenty of time to try this path, to see if it wasn’t the same one Maria Leduc had taken—the one he had not found this morning when he left the cliff.

Unlike the paths across the moor, this one gave him no chance to choose the wrong fork: it ran along between low embankments or fieldstone walls: regular, continuous, solitary, evidently straight. Mathias followed it for about two-thirds of a mile. Then its direction changed, leading the salesman left. The angle was rather obtuse—perhaps it was better not to reach the seashore too quickly. No side road, however, offered any alternative.

After scarcely ten minutes, he was once again on the main road at the crossroads. On the white milestone he read the freshly repainted directions: “Black Rocks Lighthouse—One Mile.”

It was the usual kind of milestone: a rectangular parallelepiped flush with a half-cylinder of the same thickness (and with the same horizontal axis). The two principal sides—squares surmounted by half-circles—were inscribed with black characters; the rounded surface on top was shiny with new yellow paint. Mathias passed his hand in front of his eyes. He should have taken some aspirin before lunch. The headache that had dazed him since waking now began to make him suffer in earnest.

Mathias passed his hand in front of his eyes. He would ask his good friends the Mareks for some tablets. Another fifty yards and he turned—left—onto the road to the farm.

The landscape changed perceptibly: the higher embankment, which even obscured what was on either side of the road in some places, was lined with a virtually unbroken hedge of thick bushes behind which rose the occasional trunk of a pine tree. This far, at least, everything seemed to be in order.

The treetops became more numerous. They were bent and twisted in all directions with a general tendency, nevertheless, to yield to the prevailing winds—that is, to lean toward the southeast. Some were lying practically on the ground, raising only their dwarfed, irregular, almost leafless tops.

The road did not continue beyond the farm, of which the courtyard was its terminal enlargement.

In broad outline, there was little to describe again: the sheds, the garden fence, the gray house with its clumps of mahonia, the arrangement of the windows and the wide expanse of bare stone above the door…. The whole picture corresponded almost perfectly to reality.

The salesman was walking forward on the beaten earth floor which muffled the sound of his steps. The four windows were closed, but all the shutters were open—of course. The only surprising thing about this house was the distance between the two openings on the first floor. It looked as if something were missing there—a niche, for instance, cut into the wall to hold a statuette of the Virgin, or a wedding bouquet under a glass bell, or some kind of mascot.

He was about to knock on the door panel when he noticed that one of the mahonia bushes was about to die, if not dead already; although the other bush was already showing its buds, the one on the right bore only a few brownish leaves at the ends of the stems, half-shriveled and spotted with black.

The door was not bolted. Mathias pushed it open and heard voices quite close by as he made his way down the hallway—it sounded like a vehement argument. He stopped.

As soon as he had released it, the door slowly returned to its original position without making the slightest sound. The kitchen door was ajar.

“Well?… Can’t you say anything?”

“Oh, leave the boy alone. He told you he came straight here and waited for you out in the courtyard!”

That was the old country woman’s voice. She sounded out of patience. Mathias took a step forward, carefully setting down his heavy shoe on the tiles. Through the opening, which was three or four inches wide, could be seen only one end of the table, covered with an oilcloth patterned with small, many-colored flowers, on which were lying a pair of glasses, a paper-knife, and two identical stacks of clean white plates, side by side; behind them, sitting bolt upright on a chair beneath a calendar tacked to the wall, was a young man holding himself perfectly motionless, his hands on his knees, head high, eyes fixed. He might have been fifteen or sixteen. Although his lips were not moving, it was easy to tell from his shiny, rigid face the importance of his role in this scene. Other people were talking and moving about in the rest of the room. Then came a man’s voice: “He told me…. He told me! He was lying, as usual. Look at that mule’s face. You think you know what’s going on inside that head? The boy’s not all there…. Still, he could answer a question when he’s asked!”

“But he’s told you again and again…”

“He sits there on that chair as if he had lost his tongue!”

“Because he’s already told you what he had to say! You always start the same thing over and over.”

“Oh, of course, I’m the one who’s crazy!”

Heavy steps resounded on the cement, a man’s steps (doubtless those of Robert Marek—who else could have been talking that way? ). But nothing crossed Mathias’ field of vision, the vertical strip remained unchanged: the cement squares of the floor, the table leg, the edge of the oilcloth with the pattern of little flowers, the steel-rimmed glasses, the long paper-knife with a black handle, the pile of four soup plates and the second pile just behind it, the upper part of the young man’s body, a part of the back of his chair to the left, his frozen face, pinched mouth, fixed eyes, the illustrated calendar on the wall.

“If I knew he was the one who did it…” the father’s voice growled.

The old woman began to cry. Amidst her wails and pleas for divine compassion, several words recurred again and again, a leitmotif: “… a murderer… murderer… he thinks his son is a murderer…”

“That’s enough of that, Mother,” the man shouted. The wailing stopped.

After a moment of silence, punctuated by the sound of his steps, he continued more deliberately: “You told us yourself that this—what did you call him?—this watch salesman had stopped here while I was away and found no one in the house. If Julian had been sitting on the doorstep, the way he claims he was, the man would certainly have seen him.”

“He might have gone away for a minute… did you, darling?”

Mathias felt a sudden impulse to laugh, so unsuited to this impassive countenance was the word “darling,” used by all the islanders in speaking to children. His efforts to contain himself prevented him from hearing an exchange in which he nevertheless made out a new voice—that of a younger woman. Yet the boy had not moved a muscle; perhaps these words did not really concern him after all, perhaps the others were interrogating someone else. This second feminine voice might be the boy’s mother…. But no, she was away on a trip. Besides, the father had brutally silenced the importunate interruption; he continued his accusation: “First of all, Julian says he didn’t leave the door. So he lied in any case…. The brat can’t even keep his job in the bakery! Liar, thief, murderer!…”

“Robert! Are you crazy?”

“Yes, that’s right—I’m the one who’s crazy…. All right, you, are you going to answer—yes or no? You were out there, weren’t you—out on the cliff, when that fellow came here; you had just time enough to get back before I did—without taking the road, since your grandmother didn’t see you…. Well, say something, stubborn! You met the little Leduc girl, didn’t you—you tried something with her? Oh, I know she wasn’t a saint.… All you had to do was leave her alone…. And then? You were fighting? or what? Maybe you made her fall without meaning to? You were at the edge of the rock, and in the struggle.… Or was it for revenge, because they threw you off the pier the other night? Well?… You’re going to say something or I’ll break your head for you!”

“Robert, you’re losing your temper again, you’re…”

The salesman instinctively stepped back into the shadow: a sudden thrill of warmth ran through him. He realized that a change had just occurred (but when?) in the relation between the plates and the calendar, in the face directly opposite—now staring at his own. Immediately recovering his composure, Mathias walked deliberately toward the door, while the father’s voice repeated louder and louder: “Then let him answer, let him answer!”

“Someone’s there,” the young man said.

Mathias exaggerated the noise his shoes made on the tiles and knocked with his ring on the half-open door. In the kitchen all sound had immediately ceased.

Then Robert Mareks voice said: “Come in!” and at the same moment the door was violently opened from inside. The salesman stepped forward. Everyone came toward him. They all seemed to know him: the old woman with the yellow face, the man in the leather jacket, even the young woman washing the dishes in a comer; half-turned toward the door, she had stopped in the midst of her work, a pot in her hand, and greeted him with a nod. Only the boy on the chair had not moved. He merely moved his eyes a little, in order to keep them fixed on Mathias.

Mathias, after having shaken all the hands held out to him, without succeeding despite his happy “hello’s” in relaxing the tension in the air, ended up by walking over to the calendar tacked to the wall: “And there’s Julian, my word! How he’s grown! Let’s see… how many years is it?”

“Can’t you stand up when you’re being spoken to?” shouted the father. “A real mule-face! That’s why we were shouting a little, a minute ago: he’s got himself fired from the bakery—yesterday morning—where he was working as an apprentice. I’ve half a mind to send him off as a cabin-boy if this goes on…. Always making trouble…. Last week he got into a fight with a drunken fisherman, fell in the harbor, and almost drowned…. That’s what we were shouting about a minute ago. We were shaking some of the fleas out of him…”

Julian had stood up and was staring at his father. Then he turned and looked at the salesman. A vague smile hovered at the corners of his tightly-closed lips. He said nothing. Mathias did not dare hold out his hand to him. The wall was painted a flat ochre color of which the top layer was coming off here and there in polygonal scales. The picture on the calendar represented a little girl, her eyes blindfolded, playing blind-man’s buff. He turned toward the grandmother: “And where are the children? I’d like to see them too…”

“They’ve gone back to school,” Robert Marek said.

Julian’s eyes did not leave the salesman’s face, compelling him to speak, to speak rapidly, as rapidly as possible, in constant fear his mind would be wandering over dangerous ground, or into some place impossible to get out of… he had missed the boat last night; he came back to the farm because he thought he had forgotten something… (no). So he had to wait here until Friday; he would take advantage of his time to get some rest. Nevertheless, he had come back to the farm to sell one or two more watches…(no). He had missed the boat by about three minutes because of the bicycle he had rented, which at the last minute… (no); the chain had been giving him trouble since morning: when Madame Marek had seen him at the crossroads, at the fork, at the turn, he was already trying to get it back into place. Today, with plenty of time to spare, he was making the trip on foot; he was back at the farm to hear about the whole family…

“Did you bring your wrist watches with you?” the old country woman asked. Mathias was about to answer in the affirmative when he remembered he had left his suitcase with his landlady. He thrust his hand into his duffle coat pocket and brought out the only item he had with him: the little gold-plated lady’s model returned this morning by…

“This is the only one I have left,” he said, hoping to get out of the difficulty. Had not Madame Marek expressed the desire to furnish a certain member of her household with a watch—someone who was always late with her work?

The man in the leather jacket was not listening any more. At first, the old woman herself did not seem to understand; then her face brightened: “Ah, you mean Josephine!” she exclaimed, pointing at the girl. “No, she’s not going to get any watch for a present—she’d forget to wind it. And she wouldn’t know where she’d put it. And before three days were up she’d have lost it for good!”

The notion made both of them laugh. Mathias put the article back in his pocket. Deciding the situation was improving a little, he risked a glance in the young man’s direction; but the latter had not moved, nor left off staring at Mathias. The father, who had been silent for several moments, suddenly asked the salesman point-blank: “I was sorry to get home too late yesterday to be able to see you. Do you happen to remember when it was you were here?”

“I’d say around noon,” Mathias answered evasively.

Robert Marek looked at his son. “That’s strange! And where were you at the time?”

A strained silence fell on the room again. Finally the boy decided to open his mouth. “I was in the shed on the other side of the courtyard,” he said, without taking his eyes off the salesman.

“Yes,” Mathias broke in hastily, “that’s quite possible. I didn’t see him because of the haystacks.”

“There! You see!” cried the grandmother. “Just what I said all along!”

“What does that prove?” the man replied. “It’s too easy to say that now!”

But the boy continued: “You got off the bicycle and you knocked at the door. Then you went to look at the gate to the garden. And before leaving you took a key out of a little bag fastened to the seat and used it to tighten something on your gearshift.”

“Yes, that’s right!” Mathias confirmed after each phrase, trying to smile as if these imaginary acts had been as obvious as they were unimportant.

All of which, in fact, merely reinforced his own alibi. Since Julian Marek was bearing witness to the fact that Mathias had been at the farm, had even waited some time for the absent owners, how could he have been on the cliff at the very moment—that is, in the opposite direction where the girl was tending her sheep? The salesman was obviously above suspicion from now on…

At least Mathias wanted to believe he was, with all his might. Yet this unexpected guarantor disturbed rather than reassured him: he invented too glibly. If the boy had really been in the courtyard or the shed at the end of the morning, he knew perfectly well that no salesman had come to the door. On the other hand, if he hadn’t been there and merely wanted to make his father think he had, why would he make up details as precise as the little bag, the key, and the gearshift? The chances he would hit on the exact elements were so slight that their inventor ran the risk of an immediate and categorical denial. The only explanation—madness aside—would be that Julian had known beforehand that Mathias would not contradict him, in any case, because of his own irregular situation—because of his reciprocal fear of a denial.

Now, if Julian knew about the salesman’s questionable status, it was obviously because he had been at the farm at the time of Mathias’ supposed visit; he knew no one had knocked at the door. Which was why he had stared at the stranger so insolently at the very moment he was accumulating his fictitious details…

The question then remained the same as before: what was the boy’s reason for supporting Mathias’ position? Why, having told his father from the start that he had remained in the doorway, could he not defend himself against the declarations made by a passer-by to his grandmother? Was he afraid that the latter had a better chance of being believed than he himself?

No. From the moment Julian began lying—so recklessly—it seemed more likely that things had happened differently: the boy was not at the farm that morning. (On the other hand, he certainly was not in the hollow of the cliff—where he was accused of being; he was somewhere else, that was all. ) And he believed the salesman had visited the farm. But since his father demanded actual proof, he had needed to invent some precise detail—hit upon by chance. In order to ask Mathias’ help—for he would think the whole matter was of no importance to Mathias—Julian had looked him straight in the eyes, hoping to communicate his distress and obtain the salesman’s complicity. What Mathias had attributed to insolence was really supplication. Or else the young man was trying to hypnotize him…

All the way back down the little road, between the gnarled trunks of the pines, the salesman examined the many aspects of the problem over and over again. He reminded himself that his headache might have prevented him from arriving at a solution, for he would certainly have established one indisputably if all his forces had been at his disposal. In his haste to escape that inhospitable kitchen and the young man’s overinsistent stares, he had left without asking for the aspirin tablets he had counted on. Words, efforts of attention, all these calculations had now increased his discomfort to considerable proportions. He would be better off having avoided that damned farm altogether.

On the other hand, wasn’t it worth having provoked such testimony? Julian Marek’s public declaration, no matter how confused his motives, nevertheless was the desired proof that he had been waiting for some time in a place far from the scene of the accident.… A place “far” from the scene? Waiting for “some time”? How much time? As for the distance, the whole island measured only four miles from end to end! With a good bicycle…

After having struggled so hard to establish this alibi—supposing it could free him from all suspicion—Mathias now realized its inadequacy. He had stayed much too long on the cliff to be able to account for his time in this manner. There was still a hole in his schedule.

Mathias again began to recapitulate his movements since leaving the café-tobacco shop-garage. It had been then eleven-ten or eleven-fifteen. The distance to the Leduc house being virtually negligible, his arrival there could be set at eleven-fifteen exactly. This first stop certainly accounted for less than fifteen minutes, although the woman’s chatter had made it seem exasperatingly long. The subsequent stops had been both rare and brief—two or three minutes altogether. The mile or so on the main road, between town and the turn, at full speed and without a single side-trip, had taken scarcely more than five minutes. Five and three, eight; and fifteen, twenty-three…. Less than twenty-five minutes had therefore elapsed between his start at the square and the place where the salesman had encountered Madame Marek. That made it eleven-forty at the most, more likely eleven-thirty-five. Yet this meeting with the old country woman had actually occurred an hour later.

In order to reduce the difference as much as possible, Mathias tried getting back to the same point figuring backward from the moment he had looked at his watch (seven minutes after one) in the café at Black Rocks. He had been there about ten minutes, fifteen perhaps. It had taken ten minutes, at the most, for the second sale (to the exhausted-looking couple), and approximately fifteen for the first (including a long conversation with Madame Marek). This part of the road, traveled without any particular haste, might figure on the schedule as ten extra minutes. Unfortunately all these figures seemed a little excessive. Their total, nevertheless, scarcely exceeded three-quarters of an hour. The meeting with the old lady must therefore have occurred at twenty after twelve at the earliest—probably at twelve twenty-five.

The abnormal, excessive, suspicious, inexplicable time amounted to forty minutes—if not fifty. It was more than enough to account for the two successive detours: the trip to the farm and back—including the minor repair to the gearshift in front of the closed door—and the trip to the cliff and back—including…. Mathias would merely have had to hurry a little.

He hurried on. Then, having crossed the main road, he continued down the opposite path—broad enough at the outset but subsequently narrowing to a vague dirt track—twisting to avoid roots and stumps, briar patches, and clumps of stunted gorse. The fields had disappeared. The last wall of fieldstone, half in ruins, indicated the beginning of the road beyond. On either side stretched a series of low ridges covered with reddish vegetation and relieved only occasionally by a gray rock, a thorn bush, or some vaguer, more distant silhouette which was harder to identify—at first sight.

The terrain sloped down. Mathias noticed ahead of him, at eye level, a darker line separating the uniform and motionless gray of the sky from another gray surface—similarly flat and perpendicular—the sea.

The path came out onto the central section of a horseshoe-shaped ridge facing the open sea, enclosing between its two arms a kind of elongated basin which extended to the very edge of the cliff, its dimensions not exceeding twenty by thirty yards. A bright speck attracted the salesman’s notice; he was upon it in a few strides, and leaned over to pick it up; it was only a tiny pebble, cylindrical, smooth, and white, shaped deceptively like a cigarette.

The flattened bottom of the hollow, where the sparse vegetation of the moor gave way to richer grass, came to an end thirty steps away—without transition—in a steep rock face, plunging down about fifteen yards into the eddying water. After an almost perpendicular fall came an irregular series of sharp, protruding ridges, and at the very base, rising out of the foam between the more imposing rock masses, a cluster of conical reefs against which the waves dashed with great violence, countered by the backwash in the opposite direction, producing bursts of spray that sometimes reached higher than the top of the cliff.

Higher still, two sea gulls described interlacing circles in the sky—sometimes executing them so that the loops occurred side by side, sometimes combining their circuits into a perfect figure eight—their maneuvers achieved without a single movement of their wings. The fixed, round eye which the slightly tilted head directed toward the interior of the horseshoe, stared immutably downward like the lidless eyes of fish, as if complete insensibility precluded any need to blink. He was watching the water rising and falling against the wet, polished rock, the runners of whitish moss, the periodic bursts of spray, the intermittent cascades, and farther away the rough stone outcroppings.… Suddenly Mathias noticed, a little to his right, a piece of cloth—knitted cloth—a piece of knitted gray wool hanging from a projecting rock two yards beneath the upper edge—that is, at a height the tide never reached.

Fortunately this spot looked accessible without too much difficulty. Without a moment’s hesitation, the salesman took off his duffle coat, put it on the ground, and advanced along the edge of the precipice, making a detour of several yards to reach—still farther to the right—a point where the descent would be possible. From there, clinging with both hands to the outcroppings, moving his feet cautiously from fissure to projection, pressing his body against the granite flank, he reached, at the cost of more effort than he had supposed, not his goal but a point about two yards below it. Then he had only to stand up as high as he could, stretch out one arm (holding on with the other), and seize the desired object. The cloth came away from the rock without difficulty. There was no doubt about it, it was the gray sweater Violet had been wearing—had not been wearing, rather—but which had been lying on the grass beside her.

Yet Mathias was certain he had thrown it away with the rest, checking everything piece by piece to assure himself that nothing had caught on the rocks halfway down. It would have been better to leave the sweater at the top of the cliff in the hollow where the timid sheep were walking round and round their pickets. Since she had taken it off herself, it would have been more natural for her to fall without it. In any case, it seemed peculiar that she had lost her balance with it on, so that a projecting rock had stripped it from her as she fell without turning it inside out or even tearing it a little. It was lucky no one had discovered it during the search.

But at the same moment Mathias realized the uncertainty of such a conjecture, for the person who might have seen the sweater hanging there would doubtless not have risked trying to get it, regarding such an attempt as unnecessarily dangerous. Under such conditions would it not be a still graver error to remove it now? If someone had noticed it down there on the rock, would it not be better to put it back where he had found it, trying, in fact, to make it hang in exactly the same way?

Then, on consideration, Mathias wondered who such a witness might have been. Maria Leduc, discovering her sister’s sweater, would certainly have decided she had fallen here, and brought a searching party in this direction, where no one had thought of looking yesterday. As for the fishermen who had found the body this morning, they had been down below, looking through the seaweed exposed at low tide, too far away to make out anything in particular. The compromising object had hitherto escaped notice.

Since, on the other hand, it was now impossible to put it back in the grassy hollow where Maria would have found it the day before, there remained only one solution. Mathias steadied himself by spreading his feet farther apart on the narrow ledge, wadded up the sweater into a compact mass, and grasping the rock wall behind him with one hand, threw the sweater out to sea with all his strength.

It landed gently on the water—floating between the rocks. The two gulls screamed, left off their circling, and plunged down together. They did not need to go as far as the water itself to recognize a simple piece of cloth, and immediately rose again, screaming still louder, toward the top of the cliff. Standing near the spot where he had left his duffle coat, at the edge of the vertical rock face, someone was leaning over the precipice, looking at the sea. It was young Julian Marek.

Mathias lowered his head so quickly that he almost fell in. At that moment the gray sweater, already half-saturated, was caught between a little wave and the backwash. Engulfed in the collision, it slowly sank, soon drawn out to sea beyond the rocks. When the surface rose again with the next wave, everything had disappeared.

Now he would have to raise his head toward the boy. The latter had obviously seen the sweater and the salesman’s incomprehensible gesture…. No; he had certainly seen the gesture, but perhaps only a piece of gray cloth, wadded up into a ball. It was important to make him say just what it was he had seen.

Mathias also took into account his own bizarre position at the moment; he would have to furnish some explanation for that. He estimated the distance separating him from the cliff top. The silhouette against the sky frightened him all over again. He had almost forgotten its immediacy.

Julian watched him in silence with the same fixed eyes, thin lips, frozen features.

“Hey! Hello there, boy!” Mathias cried, pretending surprise, as if he had only then discovered his presence.

But the boy did not answer. He was wearing an old jacket over his work-clothes, and a cap that made him look older—at least eighteen. His face was thin, pale, and rather ominous.

“They thought I was throwing them a fish,” the salesman said, pointing to the gulls spiraling over their heads. And he added, embarrassed by the persistent silence: “It was an old rag.”

As he spoke he looked hard at the water moving under the parallel lines of foam between each wave. Nothing returned to the surface…

“A sweater.”

The voice came from above, neutral, smooth, unchallengeable—the same voice which had said: “Before leaving you took a key out of a little bag fastened to the seat…” The salesman turned to face Julian. The latter’s attitude and expression, or rather lack of expression, were exactly the same. It was as if he had never opened his mouth. “A sweater?” Had Mathias heard right? Had he heard anything?

Considering this distance of seven or eight yards, considering the noise of the wind and the waves (even though they were not so strong today), he could still manage to pretend he had not understood. His eyes swept over the gray wall again, examined the humps and hollows, then stopped in an indentation protected against the eddying waves, where the water level rose and fell more markedly along the polished surface of the rock.

“An old rag,” he said, “I found it here.”

“A sweater,” corrected the voice of the imperturbable onlooker.

Although not shouting, he had spoken more loudly. No doubt remained. The same elements were repeated: the eyes raised toward the top of the cliff, the body leaning forward, the motionless face, the closed mouth. With a movement of his hand, Mathias specified: “Here, on the rocks.”

“I know. It was there yesterday,” the young man answered. And when Mathias had lowered his eyes: “It was Jackie’s.”

This time the salesman decided on an obvious interruption to give himself time to understand what was happening and to determine what line to take. He began climbing up the rocky slope by the same path he had taken down. It was much easier than the descent; he reached the top almost immediately.

But once on the moor at the cliff edge, he was still not certain what would be best to do. He walked as slowly as possible across the short distance still separating him from Julian Marek. What did he need to think about? Actually he had merely retreated before the threat, hoping, perhaps, that the other would say something more of his own accord.

Since the boy, on the contrary, maintained an obstinate silence, the salesman’s first concern was to put his duffle coat back on. He thrust his hands into the pockets to check their contents. Nothing was missing.

“Smoke?” he asked, holding out the open pack of cigarettes.

Julian shook his head and stepped back. The salesman replaced the blue pack in his pocket, where his hand came in contact with the little cellophane bag.

“Would you like a gumdrop?” He held out the transparent bag filled with multicolored twists of paper.

The frozen face was already beginning to make the same sign of refusal, when the features underwent an almost imperceptible modification. Julian appeared to be changing his mind. He looked at the bag, then at the salesman, then at the bag again. It was at that moment that Mathias realized what was so extraordinary about his eyes: they expressed neither effrontery nor hostility, they were merely a little strabismic. The discovery reassured him.

Besides, Julian—now interested—was walking toward him to take a gumdrop out of the bag. Instead of taking the one on top, he pushed his fingers farther in, to grasp the twist of red paper he had decided on. He looked at it attentively, without unwrapping it. Then he looked at Mathias…. There was certainly some flaw in the young man’s vision, yet he did not squint. It was something else…. Extreme myopia? No, he was holding the gumdrop at a normal distance from his eyes.

“Well, go on and eat it!” the salesman said, laughing at Julian’s hesitation. Perhaps he was merely a little simple-minded.

The boy unbuttoned his jacket to reach one of the pockets in his work-clothes. Mathias thought he wanted to keep the tidbit for later.

“Here,” he said, “take the whole bag.”

“It’s not worth it,” Julian answered. And he stared again…. Could it have been a glass eye that made his stare so embarrassing?

“Is this yours?” the boy asked.

Mathias glanced from his eyes to his hands: the right one still held the wrapped gumdrop, and in the left, between thumb and forefinger, was an identical piece of red paper—shiny, translucent, crumpled—but untwisted and empty.

“It was here in the grass,” Julian continued, with a movement of his head to indicate the little hollow beside them. “Is it yours?”

“Maybe I dropped it on the way,” said the salesman, feigning indifference. He realized at once that gumdrop wrappers are not “dropped,” but thrown away. To disguise his error he added, as agreeably as he could, “You can keep it too, if you like.” “It’s not worth it,” Julian answered.

The same quick smile he had noticed at the farm passed across the boy’s thin lips. He wadded the rectangle of red paper into a hard ball and flicked it into the sea. Mathias followed its trajectory, but lost sight of it before it had reached the bottom of the cliff.

“What made you think it was mine?”

“It’s just like those.”

“What does that prove? I bought them in town. Anyone else could have bought them. Violet must have been eating them while she was tending the sheep…”

“Who is Violet?”

“I mean poor little Jacqueline Leduc. You’re mixing me up with all your nonsense!”

The boy said nothing for several seconds. Mathias took advantage of the time to let his face become pleasant and peaceful again, a task he had not taken enough trouble with during the last few remarks. Julian took the gumdrop out of its wrapper and put it in his mouth; then he spat it out into his hand, wrapped the paper around it, and threw it into the sea.

“Jackie always bought caramels,” he said afterward.

“Well, then it was someone else.”

“At first you said it was you.”

“Yes, it was. I took one just now, on the way here, and I threw the paper away. You’re confusing me with your questions.”

The salesman was talking naturally now, even cordially, as if he understood none of the reasons for this interrogation, but was nevertheless yielding to his interlocutor’s childish caprices. One of the gulls plunged, then gained altitude with great strokes of its wings, almost grazing the two men as it passed them.

“I found it yesterday,” Julian said.

Mathias, not knowing what to answer now, was on the point of walking away from young Marek with all the abruptness of justified impatience. Yet he remained where he was. Although it was impossible to prove anything by this one piece of red paper, it would be better not to alienate so persistent an investigator, one who might be acquainted with other elements of the story. But which ones?

There was already the episode of the gray sweater. Julian might also have discovered a second gumdrop wrapper—the green one—and the third half-smoked cigarette…. What else? The question of his presence at the farm at the time of the salesman’s supposed visit also remained to be cleared up. Actually, if the boy had happened to be in the courtyard or the shed that morning, why had he not told his father that no one had knocked at the door? What was his motive in backing up Mathias’ story? And if he had been somewhere else, why did he behave in such a strange way about it? After his long, stubborn silence, why this preposterous last-minute invention of a repair made to the bicycle gearshift?… A bolt tightened?… Perhaps that was the solution to all these incidents, now that he had come full circuit.

But if Julian Marek had not been at the farm, where had he been? Did his father have good reason for supposing him to have run off to the cliff on the way home from the bakery? Suddenly a wave of terror broke over Mathias: Julian, coming by another path—by “the other” path—to meet Violet, from whom he had demanded explanations—against whom, in fact, he harbored enough resentment to desire her death—Julian, catching sight of the salesman, had taken cover and had watched…. Mathias passed his hand over his forehead. Such imaginings did not hold water. His headache had become so violent that he was going out of his mind.

Was it not sheer madness to be ready—suddenly, because of an ordinary gumdrop wrapper—to get rid of young Marek by pushing him over the edge?

Until now Mathias had not taken into account the two little pieces of paper which he had thrown away the day before and which—to his mind, at least—did not constitute actual evidence in the case. He considered it a matter of bad taste that they should be so regarded, since he had not even thought of recovering them; they had seemed so unimportant when he was in a state of composure. Julian himself had just unwrapped one quite casually, demonstrating that nothing could be proved.… All the same, another interpretation…

Another interpretation occurred to him: was this spectacular gesture not meant to show that Julian would keep silent, that the guilty party, once brought to light, would have nothing to fear from him? His strange attitude back at the farm could have no other explanation. There too he was proclaiming his power over Mathias: he was destroying evidence with the same facility with which he unearthed further indications of guilt, modifying as he chose the content of the hours that had already elapsed. But there would have to be something more than suspicions—even detailed suspicions—to justify such assurance as this. Julian had “seen.” There was no use denying it any longer. Only the images registered by these eyes could have given them such an intolerable fixity.

Yet they were quite ordinary gray eyes—neither ugly nor beautiful, neither large nor small—two perfect, motionless circles set side by side, each one pierced at the center by a black hole.

The salesman had begun talking again to conceal his agitation, rapidly and without a break—unconcerned, moreover, with relevance or even coherence; it did not seem to matter much, since the boy was not listening. Any subject he could think of seemed worth trying: the harbor shops, the length of the crossing, the price of watches, electricity, the sound of the sea, the last two days’ weather, the wind and the sun, the toads and the clouds. He also described how he had missed the return boat, which obliged him to remain on the island for several days; he was spending this compulsory leisure time, until his departure, making visits and taking long walks…. But when he came to a stop, out of breath, desperately casting about for something else to say in order not to repeat himself too much, he heard Julian’s question, asked in the same neutral, even tone of voice: “Why did you go get Jackie’s sweater again if you were only going to throw it into the sea?”

Mathias passed his hand over his forehead. Not “go get the sweater,” but “go get the sweater again”… He began his answer in an almost supplicating tone: “Listen, boy, I didn’t know it was hers. I didn’t know it was anyone’s. I only wanted to see what the gulls would do. You saw them: they thought I was throwing them a fish…”

The young man said nothing. He was looking Mathias straight in the eyes, his own fixed and strange—as if unconscious, even blind—or imbecile.

And Mathias still went on talking, though without the slightest conviction, carried away by the flood of his own words across the deserted moor, across the series of dunes where no trace of vegetation remained, across the rubble and the sand, darkened here and there by a sudden shadow of a specter forcing him to retreat. He went on talking. And the ground, from sentence to sentence, gave way a little more beneath his feet.

He had come out here on one of his strolls, following the paths wherever they led, for no other reason than to stretch his legs a little. He had noticed a piece of cloth hanging from the rocks. Having climbed down to have a look, out of sheer curiosity, he had decided it was merely an old rag of no possible use (but Julian was doubtless aware of the gray sweater’s excellent condition…) and had unthinkingly thrown it to the gulls to see what they would do. How could he have known that this rag, tills dirty piece of wool (on the contrary, extremely clean)—this object, really—belonged to little Jacqueline? He didn’t even know this was the place she had fallen… fallen… fallen.… He stopped. Julian was looking at him. Julian was going to say: “She didn’t fall, either.” But the boy did not open his mouth.

The salesman resumed his monologue still more rapidly. It was no easy matter to climb down the rocks, especially wearing such big shoes. Toward the top the ground might easily cave in under his feet. Yet he hadn’t suspected it was so dangerous; otherwise he would not even have tried. Since he didn’t know this was the place…. But no one had said any such thing; the fact that the sweater belonged to Jacqueline did not mean the accident had occurred here. Just now, in the matter of the gumdrop wrapper, Mathias had already given himself away, admitting he knew the exact spot where the girl tended her sheep. Too late, now, to go back…. He couldn’t suppose, in any case, given the position of the sweater, that it had been torn off in the course of her fall… etc.

“That’s not it, either,” said Julian.

Mathias was seized with panic and hurried on, too apprehensive for explanations. He began to speak at such a rate that objections—or even regret at his own words—became utterly impossible. In order to fill in the blanks, he often repeated the same sentence several times. He even caught himself reciting the multiplication table. Seized with a sudden inspiration, he fumbled in his pocket and brought out the little gold-plated wrist watch: “Here, since it’s your birthday I’m going to give you a present: look at this fine watch!”

But Julian, his eyes still fixed on Mathias’, retreated farther and farther into the grassy hollow, away from the edge of the cliff toward the curve of the horseshoe. Lest the boy run away even faster, the salesman dared not make the least move in his direction. He stood where he was, holding in his outstretched hand the watch with its band of metal links, as if he were trying to tame birds.

When he reached the foot of the slope bordering the inner limit of the horseshoe, the young man stopped, his eyes still fixed on Mathias’—who was equally motionless, twenty yards away.

“My grandmother will give me a finer one,” he said.

Then he thrust his hand into his work-clothes and brought out a handful of miscellaneous fragments, among which the salesman recognized a thick cord spotted with grease; it seemed washed out or discolored, as if by prolonged immersion in sea water. The other things were hard to see at this distance. Julian picked out a cigarette butt—already three-quarters smoked—and put it between his lips. The little cord and the other articles went back into his pocket. He buttoned his jacket again.

Keeping the butt in the right corner of his mouth—without lighting it—and his glassy eyes on the salesman, the boy waited, his face pale; the brim of his cap was tilted slightly toward his left ear. Mathias lowered his eyes first.

“You rented the new bicycle from the tobacco shop,” the voice said next. “I know that bike. There’s no tool bag under the seat. The tools are in a box behind the luggage rack.” Of course. The salesman had noticed it right away the day before: a chromium-plated, rectangular box—one of the permanent accessories; on its rear surface was the red reflector, usually attached to the mudguard. Of course.

Mathias lifted his head again. He was alone on the moor. In front of him, in the grass, in the center of the little hollow, he saw a short cigarette butt—which Julian must have thrown away as he was leaving—or else it was the one he had been looking for himself since morning—or perhaps they were one and the same. He came closer. It was only a little pebble, cylindrical, white, and smooth, which he had already picked up once, when he had come here.

Mathias headed slowly toward the big lighthouse, taking the customs road along the edge of the cliff. He could not help laughing at the thought of the dramatic retreat Julian had just made in order to reveal his discovery: a metal box fastened behind the luggage rack…. The salesman had never denied it! Was this detail so imporïant that he ought to have corrected Julian when he spoke of a bag under the seat? If he had no proof better than that…

He might just as well have said that the gray sweater was not lying “on the rocks,” but “on a projection of the rocks”—or that only one of the mahonias was budding at the Marek farm. He might have said: “The road is not altogether level, nor entirely straight, between the crossroads and the fork leading to the mill”—“The bulletin-board is not precisely in front of the café-tobacco shop door, but slightly to the right, and does not block the entrance”—“The little square is not really triangular: the apex is flattened by the plot of grass around the public building so as to form a trapezoid”—“The enameled iron skimmer sticking out of the mud in the harbor is not the same color blue as the one in the hardware store”—“The pier is not rectilinear, but turns in the center at an angle of one hundred seventy-five degrees.”

Similarly the time wasted at the crossroads to the Marek farm did not amount to forty minutes. The salesman had not arrived there before eleven-forty-five or eleven-fifty, taking into account the long detour to the mill. On the other hand, before meeting up with the old country woman at twelve-twenty, he had spent nearly fifteen minutes repairing the gearshift on his bicycle—with the help of the tools that were in the box… etc. There remained just enough time to make the trip to the farm and back—including the wait in the courtyard, near the mahonia bush, and the first two attempts to deal with the abnormal friction of the chain: on the little path, then in front of the house.

The customs road did not actually follow the edge of the cliff very closely—at least not continuously—and often diverged from it for three or four yards, sometimes for much greater distances. Besides, it was not easy to determine where this “edge” actually was, for with the exception of the areas where a steep rock wall towered above the sea for the whole height of the cliff, there were also grassy slopes running down almost to the water, as well as heaps of jagged rock more or less encroaching on the moor, and even planes of schist that ended in huge lumps of rubble and earth.

Sometimes the indentations along the shore were enlarged by a deep fault cutting into the cliff, or a sandy bay forming an even larger jag. The salesman had been walking for a long time—it seemed to him—when the lighthouse suddenly rose up before him, high above the mass of auxiliary constructions, walls and turrets clustered together.

Mathias turned left, toward the village. A man in fisherman’s clothes had been walking ahead of him on the road for some time now. Following him, Mathias again came out onto the main road where the first houses began, and walked into the café.

There were many people, much smoke and noise. The electric lights hanging from the ceiling had been turned on; they were harsh and blue. Scraps of almost incomprehensible conversation were momentarily audible in the general uproar; here and there a gesture, a face, a grin emerged from the shimmering haze for a few seconds.

There was no table free. Mathias headed toward the bar. The other customers pressed a little closer together to make room for him. Exhausted by his day’s walking, he would have preferred to sit down.

The fat, gray-haired woman recognized him. He had to make explanations all over again: the boat he had missed, the bicycle, the bedroom… etc. The proprietress, fortunately, had too much to do to listen or question him. He asked her for some aspirin. She had none. He ordered an absinthe. Besides, his headache was bothering him less now; it had become a sort of cottony humming in which his whole brain was steeped.

An old man next to him was telling a story to a group of the lighthouse workmen. They were young, and laughed at him, or nudged one another with their elbows, or else interrupted with bantering, apparently serious observations which produced still more laughter. The narrator’s low voice was lost in the din. Only a few phrases, a few words reached Mathias’ ears. Nevertheless, he understood, as a result of the old man’s deliberation and his incessant repetitions, as well as from the sarcastic remarks of his listeners, that he was telling an old local legend—which Mathias had never heard mentioned in his childhood, however: each spring, a young virgin had to be hurled from the top of the cliff to appease the storm-god and render the sea kind to travelers and sailors. Rising from the deep, a gigantic monster with the body of a serpent and the head of a dog devoured the victim alive under the eyes of the sacrificer. It was doubtless the little shepherdess’ death that had provoked such a story. The old man furnished a quantity of mostly inaudible details about the ceremony; it was strange that he used only the present tense: “they make her kneel down,” “they tie her hands behind her back,” “they blindfold her,” “down in the water they can see the slimy coils of the dragon”… A fisherman slipped in between Mathias and the group of men to reach the counter. The salesman squeezed in the opposite direction. Now he could hear nothing but the young men’s exclamations and laughter.

“…little Louis was mad at her too… their engagement… had threatened her…” This voice was loud and sententious; it came from the opposite direction, over the heads of three or four drinkers.

Behind Mathias, several people were still discussing the recent sensation. The whole room, the whole island, was passionately interested in the tragic accident. The fat woman served the newcomer on the salesman’s left a glass of red wine. She was holding the bottle in her left hand.

On the wall, above the top row of apéritifs, hung a yellow placard attached by four tacks: “Buy your watch at your jeweler’s.”

Mathias finished his absinthe. No longer feeling the little suitcase between his legs, he lowered his eyes toward the floor. The suitcase had disappeared. He thrust his hand into his duffle coat pocket to rub his grease-spotted fingers against the wad of cord, keeping his eyes fixed on the salesman. The proprietress thought he was looking for change and shouted out the price of his drink; but it was the absinthe he was going to pay for. He turned to face the fat woman, or the woman, or the girl, or the young barmaid, then set down the suitcase in order to pick up the suitcase while the sailor and the fisherman sneaked between, crept between, came between, Mathias and the salesman…

Mathias passed his hand over his forehead. It was almost night now. He was sitting in a chair in the middle of the street—in the middle of the road—in front of the Black Rocks café.

“Feeling better now?” asked a man wearing a leather jacket.

“Much better, thank you,” Mathias answered. He had already seen this person somewhere. He wanted to justify his indisposition, and said, “It’s the smoke, the noise, so much talk…” He could not find words to express himself. Yet he stood up with no difficulty.

He glanced around for the suitcase, but immediately remembered he had left it in his room that morning. He thanked the man again and picked up the chair to return it to the café, but the man took it out of his hands, and the only thing left for the salesman to do was to leave—by the road to the solitary cottage in its reed-filled valley at the back of the narrow cove.

In spite of the half-darkness, he walked on unhesitatingly. When the path followed the edge of the cliff, above the sea, he felt no fear whatsoever, although scarcely making out where he was putting his feet. With sure steps he climbed down toward the house, where a single, curtainless window showed a reddish gleam in the blue twilight.

He bent his head toward the panes. Despite the accumulated dust clinging to the surface, what was happening inside could be seen quite clearly. It was rather dark, especially in the corners. Only the objects near the source of light were really clear to Mathias—who was standing sufficiently far back to remain invisible to anyone inside.

The scene is lit by an oil lamp in the middle of the long, blackish-brown table. Also on the table, between the lamp and the window, are two white plates next to each other—touching each other—and an uncorked liter bottle of which the dark glass prevents any certainty as to the color of the liquid filling it. The rest of the table is clear, marked only with a few shadows: the huge, distorted one cast by the bottle, a crescent underlining the plate nearest the window, a large spot surrounding the lamp base.

Behind the table, in the room’s right corner (the one farthest away), the big kitchen stove against the rear wall can be discerned by an orange glow from the open ash-drawer.

Two people are standing face to face: Jean Robin—called Pierre—and, much shorter than he, the young woman of unknown identity. Both are on the other side of the table (in relation to the window), he to the left—that is, in front of the window—she at the opposite end of the table, near the stove.

Between them and the table—running its whole length but concealed from view by it—is the bench. The entire room is thus cut up into a network of parallel lines: first the back wall, against which, at the right, are the stove and several boxes, and at the left, in shadow, some more important piece of furniture; next, at an unspecifiable distance from this wall, the line determined by the man and the woman; then, still advancing toward the front of the room, the invisible bench, the central axis of the rectangular table—including the oil lamp and the opaque bottle—and the window itself.

Cutting across this system by perpendiculars, from front to back, the following elements can be discerned: the central upright of the window, the shadow crossing the second plate, the bottle, the man (Jean Robin, or Pierre), a crate set upright on the floor; then, a yard to the right, the lighted oil lamp; and about a yard farther, the end of the table, the young woman of unspecified identity, and the left side of the stove.

Two yards—or a little more—separate the man from the woman. She lifts her timorous face toward him.

At this moment the man opens his mouth, moving his lips as if talking, but nothing can be heard by the observer behind the square panes. The window is too tightly closed; or the noise of the sea behind him, breaking against the reef at the mouth of the cove, is too loud. The man does not articulate his words clearly enough for the syllables to be counted. He has been speaking slowly for some ten seconds—which must be about thirty syllables, perhaps less.

In reply the young woman screams something—four or five syllables—at the top of her lungs, it appears. Yet this time too, nothing can be heard through the glass. Then she steps forward toward the man and rests one hand (the left) on the edge of the table.

Now she is looking at the lamp and says a few words more—less intensely—as her features become progressively more distorted and a grimace narrows her eyes, widens the corners of her mouth, and raises the wings of her nostrils.

She is crying. A tear can be seen falling slowly down her cheek. The girl sits down on the bench; without putting her legs between it and the table, she turns the upper part of her body toward the latter and rests her forearms on it, hands clasped. Finally she lets her head droop forward, her face hidden in her hands. Her golden hair gleams in the lamplight.

Then the man slowly approaches, stands behind her, stares at her for a moment, stretches out his hand, and slowly caresses the nape of her neck with his fingertips. The huge hand, the blond head, the oil lamp, the edge of the first plate (on the right), and the left upright of the window are all aligned in the same oblique plane.

The lamp is made of brass and clear glass. From its square base rises a cylindrical, fluted stem supporting the oil reservoir—a half-globe with its convexity underneath. This reservoir is half-full of a brownish liquid which does not resemble commercial oil. On its upper part is a flange of stamped metal an inch and a half high, into which is screwed the glass—a perpendicular tube widening slightly at the base. It is this perforated flange, brightly lighted from within, which can be seen most clearly of all the articles in the room. It consists of two superimposed series of equal tangent circles—rings, more exactly, since their centers are holloweach ring of the upper series being exactly above a ring of the lower row to which it is joined for a fraction of an inch.

The flame itself, produced from a circular wick, appears in profile in the form of a triangle deeply scalloped at the apex, therefore exhibiting two points rather than just one. One of these is much higher than the other, and sharper as well; the two joints are united by a concave curve—two asymmetrical, ascending branches on each side of a rounded depression.

Blinded from staring at the lamp too long, Mathias finally turned away his eyes. To rest them, he examined the window itself—four identical panes with neither curtain nor shade, looking out into the darkness of the night. He blinked violently several times, pressing his eyeballs in order to get rid of the circles of fire still printed on his retinas.

He brought his head close to the glass and tried to look through, but could see nothing: neither sea nor moon nor even the “garden. There was no sign of the moon or the stars—the darkness was complete. Mathias returned to his memorandum book, open at the day’s date—Wednesday—on the massive little table wedged into the window recess.

He re-read the schedule he had just brought up to date, accounting for his recent movements. For the day that had just passed, on the whole, there was little to suppress, or to add. And besides, he had met too many witnessess.

He turned back a leaf, found himself at Tuesday, and once again went over the imaginary succession of minutes between eleven in the morning and one in the afternoon. He confined himself to closing the ill-formed loop of an eight with the point of his pencil. Everything else was in order.

But he smiled, thinking of the futility of his task. Such a concern for exactitude—unaccustomed, excessive, suspect—far from clearing him, rather tended to accuse.… In any case, it was too late. Young Julian Marek had probably turned him in late that afternoon. Certainly after their encounter at the edge of the cliff the boy’s doubts had vanished completely; the salesman’s words and ridiculous behavior gave him away indisputably, without even taking into account what Julian knew already, perhaps from having seen it with his own eyes. Tomorrow, early in the morning, the old Civil Guard would come to arrest “the unspeakable individual who… ,” etc. There was no hope of escaping in a fishing boat: the police in all the little mainland harbors would be waiting for him as he arrived.

He wondered if they used handcuffs on the island, and how long the chain linking the two rings would be. On the right side of the memorandum book were listed amounts received, as well as descriptions of articles sold. This part, at least, had needed no retouching, and showed no flaws, since Mathias had recovered possession of the wrist watch given away the day before. He decided to finish the account of this unjustified day: at the top of Wednesday’s page he wrote two words, pressing hard on the pencil: “slept well.”

On Thursday’s page—still blank—he wrote in advance the same remark. Then he closed the black book.

He set the oil lamp on the pedestal table at the head of his bed, undressed, piling his clothes on the chair, put on the nightshirt his landlady had lent him, wound his watch and laid it near the lamp base, lowered the wick a little, and blew into the top of the chimney.

While he was groping for the open side of the bedsheets, he remembered the electric light. When the latter had suddenly gone out he had flicked the switch back and forth several times, supposing that the circuit was in bad working order. But the light had not come back on despite all his manipulations, and soon the landlady was knocking at his door (with her foot?), holding a lighted oil lamp in each hand. The “local breakdowns,” she said, were very frequent and sometimes lasted a long time; the islanders had therefore retained their old oil lamps, which they kept ready for use as in the past.

“It wasn’t worth making all that fuss about progress,” the woman had concluded, carrying away only one of her two lamps.

Mathias did not know in which position he had left the switch. If it was “off,” then the current might have been reestablished for some time now without his knowing it; and on the other hand, the light might suddenly go on in the middle of the night. He reached the door in the darkness, his hands recognizing as he passed them the chair with his clothes on it and the marble top of the big commode.

He flicked the switch near the door. There was still no current. Mathias tried to remember which position was “off,” but could not, and pressed the little metallic ball for a last time, just in case.

Groping his way back to bed, he slipped between the sheets which seemed cold and damp. He stretched out on his back at full length, legs together, arms crossed over his chest. His left hand bumped into the wall. The outlines of the window on his right began to emerge from the darkness—a vague, dark blue gleam.

It was only then that the salesman realized how tired he was—overcome by an immense fatigue. The last mile or so, taken at a fast pace in the dark from Black Rocks to town had exhausted his strength. At dinner he had scarcely touched the food the proprietor had served him; fortunately the latter did not speak to him once. Mathias had hurried through the meal in order to return to his room—the back room with the high, dark furniture—looking out onto the moor.

Thus he was alone again in this room where he had spent his whole childhood—with the exception, of course, of his first years following his mother’s death, which had occurred shortly after his birth. His father had remarried soon after, and had immediately taken Mathias back from his aunt, who had intended to bring him up as her own son. The child, adopted quite naturally by the new bride, had spent a long time wondering which of the two women was his mother; it had taken him still longer to understand that he had no mother at all. He had often heard the story before.

He wondered if the big corner cupboard, between the door and the window, was still locked. That was where he had kept his string collection. It was all over now. He did not even know where the house was anymore.

At the foot of the bed, on the chair with its back against the wall (where a horizontal streak had been worn into the wallpaper ), sat Violet, a timorous expression on her face. The childish chin was pressed against the rail of the wooden bed, around which her little hands were clasped. Behind her was another cupboard, a third one on the right, then the dressing table, two other chairs different in design from each other, and finally the window. He was alone again in this room where he had spent his whole life, looking through the curtainless panes of the small, square window set deep in the wall. It looked out over the moor, with no courtyard or even the least bit of a garden intervening. Twenty yards from the house stood a big wooden fence post—the remains of something, no doubt; on its rounded extremity was perched a sea gull.

The sky was gray and the wind came in strong gusts. Yet the gull remained completely motionless on its perch. It could have been there a long time; Mathias had not seen it come.

Its head was facing toward the right, in profile. It was a big whitish bird with no dark patch on its head; its wings were of a darker color, though they looked dusty: it was a common species.

It is a big gray and white bird; its head has no dark patch. Only the wings and tail have any color. It is the type of sea gull most common in the vicinity.

Mathias has not seen it come. It must have been there a long time, motionless on its perch.

Its head is facing toward the right, in profile. The points of the long, folded wings cross over the tail, which is rather short. The beak is horizontal, thick, yellow, slightly curved, but strongly hooked at the tip. Darker feathers border the lower edge of the wing as well as its sharp tip.

The right leg (the only one visible, the left being directly behind it ) is a thin vertical stem covered with yellow scales. It begins, under the belly, with a joint attached at an angle of one hundred twenty degrees, connecting at one end with the fleshy, feathered part just the beginning of which can be distinguished. At the other end of the leg can be seen the webbing between the toes and the pointed claws spread out on the rounded extremity of the fence post.

From this post is hung the wicket-gate connecting the moor with the garden, which is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence attached to wooden posts. The garden, carefully laid out in parallel beds separated by well-kept lanes, is a profusion of many-colored blossoms sparkling in the sunshine.

Mathias opens his eyes. He is in his bed, lying on his back. In the half-consciousness of waking, the bright (but vague)

image of the window, now on his left, begins to move around the room with an irresistible although uniform movement, as steady and deliberate as the current of a river, appearing successively at the places which should be occupied by the chair at the foot of the bed, the cupboard, the second cupboard, the dressing table, the two chairs side by side. Then the window stops at Mathias’ right—at the place it occupied yesterday—four identical panes divided by a dark cross.

It is broad daylight. Mathias has slept well, not waking once, not moving an inch. He feels rested, calm. He turns his head toward the window.

It is raining outside. The sun was shining in his dream. He suddenly remembers it for a second, after which it immediately disappears.

It is raining outside. The four panes are spattered with tiny brilliant drops forming oblique—although parallel—lines less than half an inch long, cross-hatching the window’s whole surface in the direction of one of its diagonals. The almost imperceptible sound of the raindrops against the glass is audible.

The lines occur closer and closer together. Soon the fusion of the drops with one another disturbs the well-ordered pattern. The shower was just beginning when Mathias turned his eyes toward the window. Now big drops are forming everywhere, streaming along the glass from top to bottom.

Threads of water cover the whole image, their direction generally vertical, a series of winding lines occurring at regular intervals of about three-eighths of an inch.

These vertical threads disappear in their turn, giving way to a punctuation with neither direction nor movement—thick, frozen drops evenly covering the whole surface. Each of these, observed attentively, reveals a different, although uncertain, form in which only a single constant characteristic is preserved: the swollen, rounded base shading into black and touched at the center with a speck of light.

At this moment Mathias notices that the electric light hanging from the ceiling (in the middle of the room between the window and the bed) is on, shining with a yellow radiance at the end of its wire beneath a lamp shade of ground glass that has a rippled edge.

He stands up and goes to the door. There he flicks the chromium switch fastened to the door frame. The light goes out. For the light to be off the little polished metal ball must be in the “down” position—how logical. Mathias should have thought of that last night. He looks at the floor, then at the oil lamp on the pedestal table.

The tiles feel cold under his bare feet. About to get back into bed, he turns around, walks to the window, and leans over the table wedged into the recess. The liquid granulations covering the panes on the outside are impossible to see through. Although wearing only his nightshirt, Mathias opens the window.

It is not cold. It is still raining, but only a little; and there is no wind. The sky is uniformly gray.

Nothing remains of the sudden squall that drove the rain against the panes a few moments before. The weather is very calm now. A continuous light rain is falling; if it blurs the horizon it does not obstruct the view for shorter distances. On the contrary, it is as if in this new-washed air the objects near at hand profit from an additional luster—especially when they are light-colored to begin with—like that gull, for instance, arriving from the southeast (where the cliff falls away to the sea). Its already deliberate flight seems to become even slower as it loses altitude.

After turning around almost in the same place, in front of the window, the gull slowly rises again. But then it lets itself drop to the ground without once beating its wings, in a short, sure, widening spiral.

Instead of landing, the gull rises again, effortlessly, merely by changing the inclination of its wings. Then it turns once again, as if it were looking for its prey, or a perch—twenty yards from the house. It gains altitude with a few great strokes of its wings, describes a last loop, and continues its flight toward the harbor.

Mathias returns to his bed and begins to dress. After a summary toilet he puts on the rest of his clothes: the jacket and the duffle coat as well, since it is raining. He automatically thrusts his hands into the pockets. But he pulls out the right hand at once.

He heads toward the big cupboard in the corner, next to the window, between the chairs and the desk. The two doors are closed tight. The key is not in the keyhole. He opens one door with his fingertips—it opens easily. The cupboard was not locked. He opens it wide. It is absolutely empty. On the entire surface of its great, regularly-spaced shelves there is not even the smallest piece of cord.

The desk at the left of the cupboard is not locked either. Mathias drops the leaf in front, opens the many drawers one after another, inspects the pigeonholes. Here too everything is empty.

The five big drawers of the commode on the other side of the door can be opened just as easily, although they have no handles, merely wide openings of old—missing—locks into which Mathias thrusts the tip of his little finger in order to draw them toward him, getting a purchase on the wood as well as he can. But from top to bottom of the commode he finds nothing: not one piece of paper, not one old box top, not one piece of string.

He picks up his watch from the pedestal table next to him and fastens it around his left wrist. It is nine o’clock.

He crosses the room to where the memorandum book is lying on the square table in the window recess. He opens it to Thursday, picks up his pencil, and under the indication “slept well” adds in his most painstaking handwriting: “up at nine”—although he is unaccustomed to recording such details as this.

Then he stoops, seizes the little suitcase under the table, and puts the black memorandum book in it. After a moment’s reflection he puts the suitcase on the lowest shelf of the big empty cupboard in the right corner.

Having closed the door—forcing it a little in order to make it stay closed—he automatically thrusts his hands into his duffle coat pockets. The right hand again comes in contact with the gumdrops and the cigarettes. Mathias removes one of the latter from the pack and lights it.

He takes his wallet from his inside jacket pocket, removes a small newspaper clipping whose edge protrudes slightly beyond the other papers inside. He reads this printed text from beginning to end, chooses a word in it, and after tapping the ash from his cigarette, brings the red tip near the selected spot. The paper immediately turns brown. Mathias gradually presses harder. The brown spot spreads; the cigarette finally burns through the paper, leaving a round hole ringed with black.

Then, with the same deliberation and care, Mathias pierces a second identical hole at a certain distance from the first. Between them is only a thin blackened isthmus, scarcely a thirty-second of an inch wide at the point of tangency between the two circles.

New holes succeed these two, first grouped in pairs, then occurring in whatever space is left. The rectangle of newspaper is soon entirely perforated. Mathias then undertakes to make it disappear altogether, gradually burning whatever fragments remain with his cigarette. He begins at one comer and proceeds along the fuller parts of the lacework, taking care that no piece falls off unless it is a completely charred fragment. When he blows gently at the point of contact he notices that the line of incandescence gains ground a little more quickly. From time to time he inhales on the cigarette to quicken combustion of the tobacco; he knocks the ashes onto the tiles at his feet.

When nothing is left of the clipping but a tiny triangle which he holds between the points of two fingernails, Mathias sets this fragment on the floor, where he finishes it off. Thus no trace of the news item discernible to the naked eye remains. The cigarette itself has diminished, during the course of the operation, to a half-inch butt which it is only natural to toss out the window.

Mathias gropes at the bottom of his pocket for the two overlong butts he had recovered in the grass on the cliff top. He lights them one after the other in order to reduce them to a less noticeable size; he smokes them as rapidly as possible, inhaling puff after puff, and throws them in turn out the window.

His right hand again plunges into the pocket, this time bringing out a gumdrop. The transparent wrapper goes back into the bag while the brownish cube is put into his mouth. It is rather like a caramel.

Mathias buttons up his duffle coat. Since there is no wind, it will probably not rain in; no need to close the window. Mathias walks over to the door.

The moment he opens it to step into the hallway and cross the house—since the main entrance is on the other side—he decides that his landlady, if he should meet her, will doubtless want to talk to him. He leaves the door of his room ajar, making no noise. Some indistinct words reach him, probably from the kitchen at the other end of the hallway. Among several voices he recognizes his landlady’s. Two men—at least—are talking with her. It sounds as if they were trying not to raise their voices—as if they were even whispering from time to time.

Mathias closes the door carefully and turns back to the window. It is very easy to get out that way. Having hoisted himself up on the heavy little table, kneeling in order not to scratch the waxed wood, he straddles the sill, crouches on the outer stone ledge, and jumps down into the low grass of the moor. If the two men want to talk to him, they can just as well do it later on.

Mathias walks straight ahead; the moist air refreshes his forehead and his eyes. The carpetlike vegetation along this part of the coast is so full of water that the soles of his shoes sound like sponges being squeezed. Walking on this elastic, half-liquid soil is easy and spontaneous—whereas last night his feet were constantly bumping into invisible stones along the way. This morning, all the salesman’s fatigue has vanished.

He reaches the edge of the cliff almost immediately; it is quite low in this area. The tide is still ebbing. The sea is perfectly calm. The regular hiss of the waves is scarcely louder than the sound of his shoes in the grass, but slower. To the left can be seen the long, rectilinear pier sticking out at an angle toward the open sea, and at its tip the beacon-light turret indicating the entrance to the harbor.

Continuing in this direction, sometimes on the moor, sometimes on the rocks themselves, Mathias’ progress is hindered by a long crevice running perpendicular to the shoreline. It is no more than a yard wide at the top, narrowing below until it is too restricted for anything larger than the body of a child to slip through. But the crevice must penetrate much deeper into the rock; the various outcroppings along the sides make it impossible to see to the bottom. Instead of widening as it approaches the sea, the crevice narrows still more—at least on the surface—and offers, along the cliffside, no practicable opening in the chaos of granite blocks extending as far as the beach. It is therefore impossible to slip into it at any point.

Mathias takes the bag of gumdrops out of his pocket, opens it, inserts a pebble for ballast, twists the cellophane neck several times, and drops it where the crevice seems least choked. The object bumps against the stone sides once, then again, but without being damaged or obstructed in its fall. Then it disappears from sight, swallowed by distance and darkness.

Leaning over the crevice, his ears straining, Mathias hears it ricochet a third time against something hard. A characteristic noise, immediately afterward, indicates that the body has ended its course in a hole full of water. The latter doubtless communicates with the open sea at high tide, but by channels too narrow and complicated for the undertow ever to bring the little bag to light. Mathias straightens up, makes a detour in order to bypass the crevice, and continues his interrupted walk. He wonders if crabs like gumdrops.

Soon the flat rocks on which the beginning of the big pier is constructed are at his feet—sloping reaches of gray stone that extend to the water without the least bit of beach, even at low tide. Here the customs path joins a more important road to the interior, turning away from the shore at an old, half-razed wall, apparently the remains of the ancient royal city.

Mathias climbs down the rocks without difficulty, owing to their convenient arrangement. In front of him rises the outer wall of the pier, extending vertically and rectilinearly toward the beacon light.

He climbs down the last slope, then up the few steps leading to the quay by the opening cut into the massive parapet. He finds himself once again on the rough pavement, new-washed by the morning’s rain. The harbor is as smooth as a frozen pond: not the slightest undulation, not the slightest ripple at the edge, not the slightest tremor on the surface. At the end of the pier, moored against the landing slip, a small trawler is loading crates. Three men—two on the pier, one on the deck—laboriously pass them from hand to hand.

The strip of mud exposed below the quay no longer looks the same as on the preceding days. Mathias nevertheless has to think several seconds before he realizes the nature of the change, for nothing strikes the eye as extraordinary in this grayish-black expanse: it is merely “clean”—all the debris which previously covered it has been removed at one stroke. Mathias actually recalls having noticed, the day before, a group of men raking here at low tide. The proprietor had remarked that certain habits of cleanliness had been maintained on the island ever since the naval occupation. The salesman had pretended, of course, to remember something of the kind from his earliest childhood; but in reality he had completely forgotten this detail, along with all the rest, and such images awakened no response.

Remains of shellfish, pieces of iron or crockery, half-rotten seaweed—everything has disappeared. The sea has smoothed out the layer of mud, and as it retreats, leaves behind a shining, immaculate beach from which emerge here and there only a few solitary rounded stones.

As soon as he enters the café, the proprietor calls out to Mathias; there is a chance for him to return to the city without waiting for the boat tomorrow night. A trawler—the one at the landing slip—will be leaving in a little while for the mainland; in spite of the strict regulations, the captain has agreed to take him as a passenger. Mathias looks through the glass door at the little blue boat still being loaded in the same laborious fashion.

“The captain is a friend of mine,” the proprietor says. “He’ll do it for you as a favor.”

“Thank you very much. But I have my return ticket. It’s still good—I don’t want to waste it.”

“They won’t ask much, don’t worry about that. Maybe the steamship line will refund your money anyway.” Mathias shrugs his shoulders. His eyes are following the silhouette of a man walking down the pier, coming from the landing slip.

“I don’t think so,” he says. “And I’d have to get on board right away, probably, wouldn’t I?”

“You’ve still got a good quarter of an hour: plenty of time to get your things together.”

“But not time to have lunch too.”

“I can give you a quick cup of coffee.”

The proprietor bends over the open cupboard to take out a cup, but Mathias stops him with a gesture of his hand and makes a face: “If I can’t take my time over a good cup of café au lait with two or three rolls and butter, I’m not good for anything.”

The proprietor lifts his arms and smiles, a sign that in that case he can do nothing more. Mathias turns his head toward the glass door. The fisherman in red clothes walking along the pier seems to have stayed in the same place while he was not looking; yet his regular pace must have brought him noticeably closer during these last remarks. It is easy to check his progress by means of the baskets and fishing tackle along the route. As Mathias watches him, the man quickly leaves these reference points behind, one after the other.

Mathias smiles back at the proprietor and adds: “Besides, I have to go and pay for my room. My landlady probably won’t be home now.”

A glance through the glass door affords him the same surprise: the fisherman is at exactly the same place he appeared to occupy a moment before, when Mathias’ eyes had left him, still walking with the same even, rapid pace between the nets and traps. As soon as the observer stops watching him he stands still, continuing his movement at the very moment Mathias’ eyes return to him—as if no interruption had occurred, for it is impossible to see him either start or stop.

“It’s your business,” the proprietor says. “If you want to stay with us so badly…. I’ll bring you something right away.”

“Thank you. I’m hungry this morning.”

“I’m not surprised! You didn’t eat anything last night.”

“I’m usually hungry in the morning.”

“In any case, nobody can say you don’t like the country around here! You’d think you were afraid of missing a day of it.”

“Oh, I know the country quite well—I’ve known it for a long time. Didn’t I tell you I was born here?”

“You had plenty of time to drink a cup of coffee and get your things. As for the money, you’ll spend more staying here.”

“Well, that’s too bad. I don’t like making decisions at the last minute.”

“It’s your business. I’ll bring you something right away…. Hey! Here’s little Louis now.”

The door opens to admit a sailor in a faded red uniform—the one who was walking on the pier just now. Besides, his face was not unfamiliar to Mathias.

“Don’t bother,” the proprietor says to him. “He doesn’t want anything to do with your old tub.”

The salesman smiles amiably at the young man: “I’m not in such a hurry as all that, you know,” he says.

“I thought you wanted to leave the island right away,” the proprietor says.

Mathias glances at him stealthily. The man seems to have meant nothing in particular by his remark. The young sailor, his hand still on the doorknob, looks at each of them in turn. His face is thin and severe. His eyes seem to see nothing.

“No,” Mathias repeats, “I’m not in such a hurry.”

No one answers. The proprietor, leaning in the doorway behind the bar, is facing the sailor wearing the red canvas jumper and trousers. The young man’s eyes are turned toward the back wall, to the comer of the room occupied by the pin-ball machine. It looks as if he were waiting for someone.

He finally mutters three or four words—and goes out. The proprietor exits too—by the other door, into the room behind the bar—but returns almost at once. He walks around the bar to the glass door to look outside.

“This drizzle,” he says, “will last all day.”

He continues his commentary on the weather—the island’s climate in general and the meteorological conditions during the last weeks. Although Mathias had feared another discussion of his poor reasons for not leaving, the man, on the contrary, seems to approve heartily of his decision: today is scarcely a good day, actually, to risk going out in a fishing boat. Not that there is much danger of seasickness in a calm like this, but on so modest a trawler there is nowhere to keep out of the spray; the salesman would be soaked to the skin before reaching port.

The proprietor also mentions the filthiness of such boats: no matter how much time is spent washing them down, there is always some fish refuse around, as if it grew there as fast as it could be cleaned away. And it is impossible to touch an inch of rope without covering your hands with grease.

Mathias glances at the man stealthily. Evidently he spoke without any special meaning—with no meaning at all—he was merely talking for the sake of conversation, without attaching the slightest importance to what he was saying, without insistence or conviction; he might just as well be saying nothing.

The young barmaid appears from the room behind the bar, walking with tiny steps and carrying on a tray the silverware for breakfast. She sets it down on Mathias’ table. She knows where everything belongs now and no longer makes the errors or the hesitations of the first day. An almost imperceptible deliberation still betrays her attention to her work. When she has finished arranging the silverware, she lifts her large, dark eyes to the traveler’s face to see if he is satisfied—but without waiting longer than a second, a flicker of her eyelashes. It seems to him that she has smiled faintly at him this time.

After a final, roundabout inspection of the table service, she stretches out her arm as if to move something—the coffeepot, for instance—but everything is in order. Her hand is small, the wrist almost too delicate. The cord had cut into both wrists, making deep red lines. Yet she was not bound very tightly. The cord must have sunk into the flesh because of her futile efforts to get free. He had been forced to tie her ankles too—not together, which would have been easy—but separately, each one attached to the ground, about a yard apart.

For this purpose, Mathias still had a good piece of string, for it was longer than he had thought at first. In addition he would need two stakes solidly planted in the ground…. It was the sheep grazing nearby that furnished the ideal solution to this problem. Why had he not thought of it before? First he ties her feet together, so that she will lie still while he goes to shift the pickets; the sheep haven’t time to move before he has swiftly attached them all to a single peg—instead of their original grouping into two pairs and one solitary animal. He thus recovers two of the metal pegs—pointed stakes with a loop at the top.

He had the most difficulty in restoring the sheep to their respective tetherings, for they had taken fright in the meantime. They ran in terrified circles at the ends of the taut cords…. She, on the other hand, was lying very still now, her hands hidden under her, behind the small of her back—her legs spread and slightly apart, her mouth swollen by the gag.

Everything becomes even calmer: the chromium-plated bicycle has been left in the hollow of the cliff, lying on the slope, conspicuous against the background of short weeds. Its contours are perfectly clear, with no suspicion of disorder and no blurred areas, despite the complication of its parts. The polished metal does not reflect the sun, doubtless because of the fine layer of dust from the road—almost a vapor—deposited on it. Mathias calmly drinks the rest of the café au lait.

The proprietor, who has again taken up his observation post behind the glass door, announces the little trawler’s departure. The hull gradually slides away from the oblique stone rim; between can be seen the widening streak of black water.

“You could have been home by four o’clock,” the proprietor says without turning around.

“Oh well, no one is expecting me,” Mathias answers.

The other man says nothing, still watching the boat maneuvering—it now turns so that it is headed in a line perpendicular to its original direction, the stem facing the entrance to the harbor. In spite of the distance, the letters painted in white on the hull are still legible.

Mathias gets up from the table. One last reason—he adds—keeps him on the island until tomorrow: before leaving, he still would like to finish his rounds, which had remained uncompleted the first night. Since he now had more time than he needed, he had done nothing the day before—or virtually nothing—relying on this third day to finish up the last part of his rounds at his usual rate. He explains to the proprietor the general plan of his itinerary: a kind of figure eight, of which the town constitutes not precisely the center, but a point along the side of one of the two loops—the northwest one. At the tip of this loop is Horses Point. It is the ground between Horses Point and the harbor—less than a quarter of his anticipated route—that he has to cover again, but thoroughly this time, without missing a single house or neglecting the least side road. In a hurry last Tuesday, he had actually abandoned most of the little groups of houses that were not on the main road. Finally he had had to go on without stopping at all, not even at doors he passed right before, traveling at the fastest speed the bicycle could manage.

Today he would not need to rent a bicycle for such a short route: there was plenty of time to do it on foot. Nevertheless, he prefers starting out right away and not coming back to town for lunch. So he wonders if the proprietor would make him two ham sandwiches—he would pick them up here in ten minutes, when he comes back with his suitcase—the one with the wrist watches.

The landlady catches sight of him from her open kitchen window when he steps into the hallway. She cries out a cheerful “Good morning, sir.” He realizes at once that she has nothing particular to say to him—and nothing general either. Yet she steps over to the door; he himself stops; she asks him if he has slept well—yes; he didn’t close his shutters last night—no; when the east wind blows, it’s not a good idea to leave them open during the day… etc.

In his room he immediately notices the suitcase is not under the table. But then he remembers having put it else-

where this morning. He opens the big cupboard—with his fingertips, since it has neither key nor handle—removes his suitcase, closes the cupboard again. This time he leaves the house by the door, and takes the main road to town. The raindrops have become so infrequent and so tiny that it requires particular attention to notice them at all.

Mathias enters the café “A l’Espérance,” puts the sandwiches, which aie wrapped in yellow paper, in the left pocket of his duffle coat, and continues toward the little square, walking on the cobbles washed clean by the rain, revealing all their colors.

The hardware shop¬window is empty: all the objects have been removed. Inside, a man in a gray jacket is standing on the display case, facing the street. His black felt slippers, his socks, and the bottoms of his trousers, raised by the movement of his arms, are exposed in broad daylight, about a yard above the ground. He is holding a big rag in each hand; the left hand is merely pressing against the glass, while the right is cleaning the surface with short, circular gestures.

As soon as he has walked around the shop corner, Mathias finds himself face to face with a young girl. He steps back to let her pass. But she stands where she is, staring at him as if she intended to speak to him, shifting her eyes several times from his suitcase to his face.

“Good morning, sir,” she says at last. “Aren’t you the watch salesman?”

It is Maria Leduc. She was just looking for Mathias; she was on the way to the house where he was staying, for she had heard he was still on the island. She wants to buy herself a watch—something sturdy.

Mathias decides it is no use to go back with her to her mother’s house—the last house as you leave town on the road to the big lighthouse—which would take him out of his way now. He points to the sidewalk surrounding the monu-

ment: now that the rain has stopped, that would be a good place to look at his merchandise. He sets down the suitcase on the damp stones and opens the clasp.

While lifting out the first strips of cardboard, which he piles one by one in the cover after having shown them to his customer, he mentions the fact that he missed her at Black Rocks, hoping she will voluntarily make some allusion to the tragic accident that has taken her little sister from her. But the girl shows no intention of discussing the subject, and he will have to lead into it more directly. She cuts Mathias’ polite formulas short, however, and confines herself to telling him the time of the funeral—Friday morning. Her words make it clear that the family prefers the simplest possible ceremony and the presence of only the closest relatives. It was as if they persisted in their bitterness toward the dead girl; she had no time to delay, she said, returning to the subject of the sale. In a few minutes she has made her choice and decided on the best way to conclude the transaction: the salesman is to leave the watch at the café where he takes his meals; for her part, she will leave the money there too. No sooner had Mathias closed his suitcase than Maria Leduc left.

On the other side of the monument he notices that the bulletin-board is covered with a completely white sheet of paper pasted on the surface of the wood. At this moment the garageman comes out of his tobacco shop carrying a little bottle and a fine brush. Mathias asks him what happened to the sign that was up the day before: it wasn’t the right one, the garageman answers, for the film they had sent along with it; the distributor had made an error in the shipment. He would have to announce next Sunday’s program by a hand-made ink inscription. Mathias leaves the man already busy with his task, firmly tracing a large letter O.

After taking the street to the left of the town hall, the salesman passes the end of the old harbor, completely empty at low tide—for the tide-gate there has not held in the water for years. Here too the mud has evidently been raked.

Next he follows the high wall of the fort. The road beyond returns to the coast, but without sloping down to the shore itself, and continues curving left, toward the point.

Mathias reaches the fork leading to the village of Saint-Sauveur much sooner than he expected—this was the last point he had systematically canvassed. He sold only one watch here—the last of the day—but since he has visited the principal residences, zealously and not over-hastily, it is futile to try his chances here once again.

Hence he sets out on the main road itself in the opposite direction, walking rapidly toward town.

After about fifty yards he comes upon an isolated cottage on his right, built at the edge of the road—which he had not bothered with on Tuesday because of its poverty-stricken aspect. Nevertheless, it is much like the other buildings on the island: a simple ground floor with two small square windows on each side of a low door.

He knocks on the door panel and waits, holding his suitcase in his left hand. The shiny finish, freshly repainted, imitates with remarkable accuracy the veins and irregularities of wood. At eye level are two round knots drawn side by side, so that they look like a pair of glasses. The salesman knocks again, this time with his ring.

He hears steps in the hallway. The door opens on a woman’s head—with no expression whatever—neither welcoming nor scowling, neither confident nor mistrustful, not even surprised.

“Good morning, madame,” he says. “Would you like to look at some splendid watches unlike any you’ve ever seen before, of ideal manufacture, guaranteed unbreakable, shock-proof, waterproof, and at prices that will surprise you? Just take a look at them! You’ll never regret the time—only a moment; it doesn’t commit you to a thing. Just take a look!”

“All right,” the woman says. “Come in.”

He makes his way down the hallway, then through the first door on the right into the kitchen. He sets down his suitcase on the big oval table in the middle of the room. The new oilcloth is decorated with a pattern of small many-colored flowers.

He opens the clasp by pressing on it with his fingertips. He seizes the cover in both hands—one on each side, thumbs over the reinforced corners with the copper rivets—and folds it back. The cover remains wide open, its outer edge resting on the oilcloth. The salesman takes the black memorandum book out of the suitcase with his right hand and puts it in the cover. Then he picks up the prospectuses and puts them on top of the memorandum book.

With his left hand he then takes hold of the first rectangular strip of cardboard by its lower left corner and holds it at the level of his chest, tilted at an angle of forty-five degrees, the two long sides parallel to the table top. Between the thumb and index finger of his right hand he takes hold of the protecting paper attached to the upper part of the cardboard strip; holding this paper by its lower right comer, he raises it, making it pivot on its hinge until it has made a rotation of more than one hundred eighty degrees. Then he lets go of this paper which, still fastened to the cardboard strip by one edge, continues its rotating movement until it occupies once again a vertical position next to the cardboard strip, although slightly askew because of the natural stiffness of the leaf. Meanwhile the right hand returns toward the salesman’s chest, that is, lowered to the level of the center of the cardboard strip, while moving toward the left. The thumb and index finger are extended forward, pressed together, while the other three fingers curve toward the interior of the palm. The end of the extended finger approaches the circle formed by the face of the watch attached to…

…circle formed by the face of the watch attached to his wrist and said: “Four-fifteen, exactly.”

At the base of the glass, he saw his long, pointed fingernail. Of course the salesman did not file them to look like that. And tonight, as soon as…

“It’s on time, today,” the woman said.

She walked away toward the bow of the little steamer, immediately swallowed up by the crowd of passengers on deck. Most of them had not yet taken their seats for the crossing; they were wandering aimlessly about the deck, looking for comfortable places to sit, bumping into one another, calling directions, piling and counting luggage; others were standing along the railing next to the pier, waving a last farewell to those remaining behind.

Mathias also leaned on the gunwale and stared at the water; a wave had just broken against the stone slope. The lapping undulations of the surface, in the sheltered angle of the landing slip, were weak but regular. Farther to the right, the ridge formed by the inclined plane and the vertical embankment began its oblique retreating movement.

The whistle blew a last shrill, prolonged blast. The gangway’s electric bell sounded. Against the ship’s hull the darker strip of water widened almost imperceptibly.

On the pier, beneath the thin sheet of liquid covering the stone, the slightest unevenness of the blocks could be clearly distinguished, as well as the joints in the cement separating them by more or less hollow lines. The relief was both more apparent than it would have been in air, and more unreal, made noticeable by shadows that were emphasized—exaggerated, perhaps—without quite giving the impression of real outcroppings: as if they had been painted in trompe-l’oeil.

The tide was still rising, although it was already high compared to its level this morning, when the steamer arrived. The salesman was standing at the gangway watching the passengers: there were only civilians with benign faces, local people returning home to be met on the pier by their wives and children.

At the bottom of the portion of the inclined plane that was still dry, a slightly stronger wave suddenly wet a new area, less than six inches wide. When it retreated, a number of gray and yellow marks, previously invisible, appeared on the granite.

The water in the sheltered angle rose and fell, reminding the salesman of the swell several miles offshore as it ran against a floating buoy the ship had passed. It occurred to him that in about three hours he would be on land. He stepped back a little, in order to glance at the fiber suitcase at his feet.

It was a heavy iron buoy, the portion above water constituting a cone surmounted by a complex assemblage of metal stems and plates. The structure extended three or four yards into the air. The conical support itself represented nearly half of this height. The rest was divided into three noticeably similar parts: first, prolonging the point of the cone, a narrow, openwork, square turret—four iron uprights connected by crosspieces; above this came a kind of cylindrical cage, its vertical bars sheltering a signal light fastened in the middle; and last, topping the structure and separated from the cylinder by a stem which continued its main axis, three equilateral triangles, superimposed so that the tip of one supported in its center the horizontal base of the next. The whole of this structure was painted a shiny black.

Since the buoy was not light enough to follow the movement of the waves, the water level rose and fell according to their rhythm against the sides of the cone. Despite the water’s transparency, the detail of the substructures could not be distinguished—merely a number of dancing shapes: chains, rocks, trailing seaweed, or perhaps reflections of the mass above water…

The salesman thought, once again, that in three hours he would be on land.