He had now been absent from his battalion for a hundred and twelve days. God knows how he did it; he must have lived like a beast, hidden, eating when he could, lurking in the shadow with every man’s hand against him, as he sought through the entire B.E.F. for a man whose laugh he had heard one time, knowing that the one thing he could surely count on finding would be his own death, and to be foiled on the verge of success by an artificial leg propped on a chair in the dark.
How much later it was I don’t know. The candle was lighted again, but the man who had awakened me was bending over the cot, between me and the light. But despite the light, it was a little too much like that night before last; I came out of sleep upstanding this time, with my automatic.
“As you were,” I said. “You’ll not—” Then he moved back and I recognized the padre. He stood beside the table, the light falling on one side of his face and chest. I sat up and put the pistol down. “What is it, padre? Do they want me again?”
“He wants nothing,” the padre said. “Man cannot injure him further now.” He stood there, a portly figure that should have been pacing benignantly in a shovel hat in green lanes between summer fields. Then he thrust his hand into his tunic and produced a flat object and laid it on the table.
“I found this among Jotham Rust’s effects which he gave me to destroy, an hour ago,” he said. He looked at me, then he turned and went to the door, and turned again and looked at me.
“Is he — I thought it was to be at dawn.”
“Yes,” he said. “I must hurry back.” He was either looking at me or not. The flame stood steady above the candle. Then he opened the door. “May God have mercy on your soul,” he said, and went out.
I sat in the covers and heard him blunder on in the darkness, then I heard the motorcycle splutter into life and die away. I swung my foot to the floor and rose, holding on to the chair on which the artificial leg rested.
It was chilly; it was as though I could feel the toes even of the absent leg curling away from the floor, so I braced my hip on the chair and reached the flat object from the table and returned to bed and drew the blanket about my shoulders. My wrist watch said three o’clock.
It was a photograph, a cheap thing such as itinerant pho tographers turn out at fairs. It was dated at Abingdon in June of the summer just past. At that time I was lying in the hospital talking to George, and I sat quite still in the blankets, looking at the photograph, because it was my own face that looked back at me.
It had a quality that was not mine: a quality vicious and outrageous and unappalled, and beneath it was written in a bold sprawling hand like that of a child: “To Everbe Corinthia” followed by an unprintable phrase, yet it was my own face, and I sat holding the picture quietly in my hand while the candle flame stood high and steady above the wick and on the wall my huddled shadow held the motionless photograph. In slow and gradual diminishment of cold tears the candle appeared to sink, as though burying itself in its own grief.
But even before this came about, it began to pale and fade until only the tranquil husk of the small flame stood unwinded as a feather above the wax, leaving upon the wall the motionless husk of my shadow.
Then I saw that the window was gray, and that was all. It would be dawn at Pop too, but it must have been some time, and the padre must have got back in time.
I told him to find it and kill it. The dawn was cold; on these mornings the butt of the leg felt as though it were made of ice. I told him to. I told him.
The End
Mistral, William Faulkner
Mistral
I
IT WAS THE last of the Milanese brandy. I drank, and passed the bottle to Don, who lifted the flask until the liquor slanted yellowly in the narrow slot in the leather jacket, and while he held it so the soldier came up the path, his tunic open at the throat, pushing the bicycle.
He was a young man, with a bold lean face. He gave us a surly good day and looked at the flask a moment as he passed. We watched him disappear beyond the crest, mounting the bicycle as he went out of sight.
Don took a mouthful, then he poured the rest out. It splattered on the parched earth, pocking it for a fading moment. He shook the flask to the ultimate drop. “Salut,” he said, returning the flask. “Thanks, O gods. My Lord, if I thought I’d have to go to bed with any more of that in my stomach.”
“It’s too bad, the way you have to drink it,” I said. “Just have to drink it.” I stowed the flask away and we went on, crossing the crest. The path began to descend, still in shadow.
The air was vivid, filled with sun which held a quality beyond that of mere light and heat, and a sourceless goat bell somewhere beyond the next turn of the path, distant and unimpeded.
“I hate to see you lugging the stuff along day after day,” Don said. “That’s the reason I do. You couldn’t drink it, and you wouldn’t throw it away.”
“Throw it away? It cost ten lire. What did I buy it for?”
“God knows,” Don said. Against the sun-filled valley the trees were like the bars of a grate, the path a gap in the bars, the valley blue and sunny. The goat bell was somewhere ahead. A fainter path turned off at right angles, steeper than the broad one which we were following. “He went that way,” Don said.
“Who did?” I said. Don was pointing to the faint mark of bicycle tires where they had turned into the fainter path.
“See.”
“This one must not have been steep enough for him,” I said.
“He must have been in a hurry.”
“He sure was, after he made that turn.”
“Maybe there’s a haystack at the bottom.”
“Or he could run on across the valley and up the other mountain and then run back down that one and up this one again until his momentum gave out.”
“Or until he starved to death,” Don said.
“That’s right,” I said. “Did you ever hear of a man starving to death on a bicycle?”
“No,” Don said. “Did you?”
“No,” I said. We descended. The path turned, and then we came upon the goat bell. It was on a laden mule cropping with delicate tinkling jerks at the pathside near a stone shrine. Beside the shrine sat a man in corduroy and a woman in a bright shawl, a covered basket beside her. They watched us as we approached.
“Good day, signor,” Don said. “Is it far?”
“Good day, signori,” the woman said. The man looked at us. He had blue eyes with dissolving irises, as if they had been soaked in water for a long time. The woman touched his arm, then she made swift play with her fingers before his face. He said, in a dry metallic voice like a cicada’s:
“Good day, signori.”
“He doesn’t hear any more,” the woman said. “No, it is not far. From yonder you will see the roofs.”
“Good,” Don said. “We are fatigued. Might one rest here, signora?”
“Rest, signori,” the woman said. We slipped our packs and sat down. The sun slanted upon the shrine, upon the serene, weathered figure in the niche and upon two bunches of dried mountain asters lying there.
The woman was making play with her fingers before the man’s face. Her other hand in repose upon the basket beside her was gnarled and rough. Motionless, it had that rigid quality of unaccustomed idleness, not restful so much as quite spent, dead. It looked like an artificial hand attached to the edge of the shawl, as if she had donned it with the shawl for conventional complement. The other hand, the one with which she talked to the man, was swift and supple as a prestidigitator’s.
The man looked at us. “You walk, signori,” he said in his light, cadenceless voice.
“Sì,” we said. Don took out the cigarettes. The man lifted his hand in a slight, deprecatory gesture. Don insisted. The man bowed formally, sitting, and fumbled at the pack. The woman took the cigarette from the pack and put it into his hand. He bowed again as he accepted a light. “From Milano,” Don said. “It is far.”
“It is far,” the woman said. Her fingers rippled briefly. “He has been there,” she said.
“I was there, signori,” the man said. He held the cigarette carefully between thumb and forefinger. “One takes care to escape the carriages.”
“Yes.” Don said. “Those without horses.”
“Without horses,” the woman said. “There are many. Even here in the mountains we hear of it.”
“Many,” Don said. “Always whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.”
“Sì,” the woman said. “Even here I have seen it.” Her hand rippled in the sunlight. The man looked at us quietly, smoking. “It was not like that when he was there, you see,” she said.
“I am there long time ago, signori,” he said. “It is far.” He spoke in the same tone she had used,
