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 her 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 her 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 lie 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 short 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 shopwindow. 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 ha
d 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 Light-house—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.
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