I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?
No, no. I thought of something. He paused a moment. Then, in a lighter voice, he said: Now, you tell me, you are an experienced woman, I can see that, and you are not over-fastidious. Now, would you say I was like the devil?
Shhhhhh! Don’t think about such things.
You haven’t answered me.
She glanced at the young man’s face, leering, and his dark eyes looking at her and she thought of the story of how an outraged husband had tried to shoot him dead and she said: You don’t look like a devil to me.
(Later when she told the story she pretended that she replied like that because it is the duty of a nurse to keep a patient calm.)
That is what he called me. But imagine trying to shoot the devil! Do you know the only way to get rid of the devil? Offer him what he asks. Would you do that?
In drying his face with a towel she tried to stop him talking by clapping her hand over his mouth.
Now, would you offer him what he asked? he insisted. It’s the only way—even if it’s your soul he wants!
It is wrong to blaspheme even in jest. You shouldn’t talk like that. Bo! he cried.
(She confessed later that she had been so surprised that she couldn’t help laughing.)
The face of his fiancée who had come from Paris and was sitting by his bed was the length of the Gondo away from Chavez. If he stretched out his arm to touch her, he had the impression that his arm was the sleeve of the Gondo, from which his fingertips, moving round her mouth, could just emerge but not the remainder of his body.
His agony of mind was the result of an axiomatic truth, in which he had believed all his life, having been inexplicably overturned. In face of his courage and his survival without serious wounds, God, nature and the world of men should have found themselves in accord. Why were they not? He had proved his right to succeed and he had been forced to forego it. The wind he so wrongly under-estimated, the mountains, the treacherous icy air, the earth which entered his mouth and now his own blood, his very own body refused to accord him his achievement. Why?
During the night he repeatedly muttered: Je suis catholique, je suis catholique.
G. woke up and found himself re-hearing word for word what Camille had said in the motor car on the way back from Domodossola.
I will write to you. Where shall I write to you?
No, do not write. As soon as I arrive in Paris I will give you a sign.
You will be amazed to see what I am capable of. I will astonish you. I shall be cunning. I shall be as cunning as an avocat. I will disguise myself. Can you imagine me as a baker? I will come to you disguised as a baker. Or as an old woman. (She laughed a little.) You will be horrified—and then I will take my disguise off and you will see your corn-crake. If Maurice wants to kill me, he can. I am not afraid. But it is you he will try to kill. It is you who must wear a disguise. What would suit you? You might be a Spaniard. A Spanish priest! It must be something unlike you, so that I can hardly believe—but now I would know you, however you were disguised, I would recognize you anywhere, and Maurice would recognize you because of the light in my eyes when I saw you. Supposing you knew afterwards you must die? And I too knew that you must die? I wouldn’t try to stop you now. Now I wouldn’t. Before, I would have done. I would have tried to save you. I would have refused you. Perhaps I would have been afraid myself. I know now. I would welcome you. That is what you would want. And you would want me then under threat of death more than you have wanted any woman. And afterwards I would die with you—happy.
Next day, Chavez’ last words, whose meaning cannot be interpreted, were: Non, non, je ne meurs pas … meurs pas.
Weymann came into the room with a pained expression on his face. He greeted G. coolly and then went and stood by the window, through which he kept looking out as though something surprising were happening on the lawn below.
The funeral is tomorrow, Weymann said.
I hear everything from the corridor. The walls aren’t very thick here. He died at three o’clock yesterday afternoon.
The whole town is in mourning, said Weymann.
If Hennequin had been a better shot, we could have had a double funeral!
That is a remark in very poor taste.
It would have been my funeral, not yours. Why are you so solemn? Because it is a solemn occasion and your—your—he struggled for the right word and looked out on the invisible events taking place on the lawn below—your philanderings are most inappropriate. The whole town is in mourning. The factories have stopped work.
It will be like an opera by Verdi. The Italians love deaths. Not Death but deaths. Have you noticed?
They feel the tragedy of the occasion.
You said he was an idiot.
That was before I knew he was dying.
Does it make any difference? He asked this in a gentler voice, and Weymann, somewhat mollified, left the window and approached the bed.
He has passed over into the sky, said Weymann in the voice of the priest whom he often resembled, a bit of the sky which the rest of us, who are still alive, call the paradise of lost flyers.
I shall be out of here by tonight and then I will be able to pay my respects too. Have the Hennequins left?
I must tell you that the whole affair in which you were involved has been a considerable embarrassment to all of us. Scenes like the one you provoked give the flying community a bad name. It makes us out to be adventurers—
But aren’t you?
You know exactly what I mean.
Tell me, have they gone back to Paris?
Madame Hennequin was in a state of collapse, if it gives you any satisfaction to know that.
And Monsieur?
He had to be constrained from coming to find you in hospital. The second time he wouldn’t miss, he said.
You should have let him come. I should have liked to have seen him again.
Suddenly Weymann was angry. His thin face became red and his eyes protruded as he stared at the figure in the bed: Yes, I think we should have let him come. What are you doing? What are you playing at? Let me tell you something. This town is full of men. Tomorrow it will be fuller—men coming from all over the world to pay their homage to the magnificent contribution, the historic courage of Geo. Do you know there are peasants who have walked from the mountain villages into town today to line up and pay their last tributes to the man they loved. You should look at their faces. You might learn a little modesty. You might see what it means to be offered hope for your children after a lifetime of toil and sacrifice. You might understand what achievement is. And amongst these men, these men who fill the town like pilgrims and lend it their own dignity, there is a little—there is a little runt!
He banged the door and was gone.
The crowd made the town look like a village. Figures in black pressed against the walls of the narrow streets. In an open doorway several children were barred and held back by women with straight rigid arms, lest they run out into the street as the procession passed and by this single act diminish the long-lasting gravity of the moment. From first-floor windows and from the balconies above hung improvised flags of black crêpe and tricolours with black upon them. It was sunny. The streets through which the cortège would not pass were deserted. All shops and offices were shut. The bells in the campanile tolled very slowly. The last note of each peal seeped almost completely away before the next refilled the silence. The sound was such that even in the arcade from where you could see neither sky nor mountains you were reminded of solitude. In the precincts of the Piazza Mercato there was an unusually strong smell of horses and leather, for carriages and carts had brought mourners from all over the countryside and many had been left there, unattended, while the mourners followed the coffin on foot.