Part 1 — X

WHILST waiting for dinner Lewis walked up and down the deserted terrace. A tinge of blue lay over everything. He looked at the sea a thousand feet below him, casting little short waves on to the beach so lazily that each one seemed as if it were going to be the last, after which one expected it to become once for all a large silent lake. A lizard made the dry leaves rustle; the walls, warmed all day by the sun, were growing cold as the evening drew on and creaked like a cooling stove. Along the thread-like paths rising to where he stood, Lewis saw old women returning from the spring carrying their water jars on their heads. The coastline quivered like a rustic script and, underlined by lights, strove to maintain a straight line cut only here and there by harbours.

Would he ever see her again?

Lewis escaped from none of those monotonous but charming problems which arise between two people placed in direct contact by fate. He was first conscious of that local anæsthesia which extends itself to every thought but the one that is absorbing us, on discovering that he could not get up any interest in the purchase of the mine. Whatever subject he touched on, he lost himself in reverie. He was thinking of this stranger woman. She had doubtless hired the car for lack of something to do. What was she doing all alone in this country? Where did she spend her evenings? He had already forgotten her features. Her image seemed to fall with the night: he rather doubted whether it would rise again with the sun next morning. He had lost it for ever. He tried very hard to recall it. Suddenly he remembered one perfect and illuminating detail which had never struck him at the time: her hand with its nails quite violet from their long immersion in cold water. A short hand in which common sense triumphed over dreaminess; the thumb was large, in itself rather a rare thing amongst women, and full of common sense; but she had tapering fingers which were always close together. There was a general effect of loyalty, fidelity, quickness and clearness of intelligence which, on reflection, won him completely. A useful hand. A seventeenth-century hand. He had held so many others, sensuously modelled, too exquisite to be followed in all their lines, dimpled, full of whims, hands which grow damp under the influence of music or pleasure.

To see her again. To touch that hand at last.... To distract himself he began to compose a song in the German manner:

He suddenly realized with a pang of regret that this evening no one was waiting for him anywhere. He thought of Madame Magnac in Paris. The pleasant life he led seemed to him from this distance to be full of privations. He pictured his existence as having been terribly hard hitherto; a womanless childhood and an orphaned youth; he began to pity himself. He hoped that happier days were in store for him. He decided to make more friends; he managed his life extremely well and had always kept away from big dinner parties, definite office hours, servant troubles, professional conversationalists, marriage, scenes with mistresses and all other things that might prey upon his liberty, the luxury tax of snobbishness, the money troubles of his friends, children, the disdain of the haughty, the envy of his inferiors, in fact everything that spoils our daily life. But all this was negative and unsatisfying.

Night began to fall, accompanied by music coming from no one knew where; a shutter banged against a wall, rattling like a skeleton; the ancient clocks beat out one by one the dangerous weapons of the iron hours.

Above the village street the mountain still thrust up its dusky hump, bearing, without flinching, the weight of the older quarters of the town, placed so high that the topmost windows touched the lowest stars.