“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.