Mathias wondered what the girl could ever have done to make her own mother speak of her with such hatred. Certainly she seemed precocious, but “heartless,” “perverse,” “wicked”… that was quite a different matter. The story of the young fisherman whose engagement—it was claimed—she had just ruined was rather vague. To say the least, any young man actually “in love” with such a child was playing rather an odd role in the first place. And why had the tourist sent his little companion of a single afternoon a photograph so expensively framed? The mother spoke unsmilingly of the girl’s “magic power” and assured him that “not so long ago she would have been burned as a witch for less.”
At the foot of the pine tree the dry grass began to blaze, as well as the hem of the cotton dress. Violet twisted at the waist and flung back her head, opening her mouth. Finally, however, Mathias succeeded in taking his leave. Yes, he would tell the overindulgent uncle about his Jacqueline’s latest escapade. No, he wouldn’t have a chance to meet her this morning because she was tending sheep at the edge of the cliff, far from the road, and even if he should leave the road it would be in the opposite direction—toward the Marek farm—unless he continued straight ahead to the lighthouse.
He avoided looking at his watch, anticipating his vain regrets at again having lost so much time. He tried instead to pedal faster, but the suitcase got in his way; he coasted in order to shift gears, holding the handlebars and the handle of the suitcase in his left hand—which was uncomfortable. The grade was steeper now, obliging him to slow down: besides, the sun and the heat were becoming excessive.
He stopped twice to visit isolated houses along the road; he was in such a hurry to leave them that he suspected he had spoiled the sales by not staying ten seconds longer.
When he reached the fork to the mill he continued straight ahead: the detour suddenly seemed futile.
A little farther on, with the excuse that it was too modestly built, he passed without stopping a cottage just off the road—which was level from now on. He thought he would make at least an appearance at the Marek farm: he had known the family for so long, certainly he would sell something there. The road to the farm forked left from the main road after the next bend; at the same point on the right would be the path to the southwest coast—where young Violet is tending sheep at the edge of the cliff…
The tide is still rising. The sea dashes forward all the more violently because of the inshore wind. After the big waves crash against the shore, a series of whitish cascades streams back down the smooth slope. Sheltered by the foremost rocks, reversed by the undertow, little flakes of rust-colored foam whirl about in the sunshine.
In a hollow to the right, the waves, more peaceful here, die out one after the other on the smooth sand, leaving thin traces of foam which advance in successive and irregular festoons—ceaselessly effaced and revived in ever-fresh designs.
He was at the crossroads already, and there was the white milestone (it was sixteen hundred yards to the big lighthouse at the end of the road ).
The crossroads appeared immediately afterward: to the left the road to the farm, to the right a path that was quite broad at the outset but which subsequently narrowed to a vague dirt track—twisting to avoid roots and stumps, briar patches, and clumps of stunted gorse—just wide enough for the bicycle to pass. After a few hundred yards the ground sloped gently toward the first rises of the cliff. From here on Mathias could coast down.
II
A rectangular shadow less than a foot wide crossed the white dust of the road. It lay at a slight angle from the perpendicular without quite reaching the opposite side: its rounded—almost flat—extremity did not protrude beyond the middle of the road, of which the left side remained unshaded. Between this extremity and the close-cropped weeds bordering the road had been crushed the corpse of a little frog, its legs open, its arms crossed, forming a slightly darker gray spot on the dust of the road. The creature’s body had lost all thickness, as if nothing but the skin were left—hard, dessicated, and henceforth invulnerable—clinging to the ground as closely as the shadow of an animal about to leap, limbs extended—but somehow immobilized in air. To the right the real shadow, which was much darker, gradually became paler, disappearing altogether after a few seconds. Mathias lifted his head toward the sky.
The upper edge of a cloud had just concealed the sun; a rapidly shifting bright fringe indicated its position from moment to moment. Other clouds, diffuse yet of less than ordinary size, had appeared here and there from the southwest. Most were of indeterminate shapes which the wind broke up into loose meshes. Mathias followed the trajectory of a sitting frog which stretched out to become a bird seen in profile, wings folded, with a rather short neck, like that of the sea gull, and a slightly curved beak; even its big round eye was recognizable. For a fraction of a second the giant gull seemed to be perched on top of the telegraph pole whose unbroken shadow extended once again across the road. In the white dust the shadows of the wires could not be distinguished.
A hundred yards beyond, a country woman carrying a knapsack was walking toward Mathias—doubtless coming from the village near the big lighthouse. The winding road and the situation of the crossroads at the bottom of a hill prevented her from seeing where the traveler had come from. He could just as well have come directly from the town as be returning from the Marek farm. On the other hand, the woman would have noticed this inexplicable standstill, which he himself was surprised at, now that he thought about it. Why should he have stopped in the middle of the road, his eyes raised toward the clouds, holding in one hand the handlebars of a chromium-plated bicycle and in the other a small fiber suitcase? Only then did he sense the numbness he had been floating in (for how long?); he did not succeed in figuring out why, in particular, he had not gotten back onto the bicycle instead of pushing it along in this unhurried fashion, as if he had nothing better to do.
The country woman was now only fifty yards away from him. She was not looking at him but had certainly noticed his presence and his unusual behavior. It was too late to spring onto the seat and pretend to have been riding along ever since he had left the town, or the farm, or anywhere else. No hill, however small, had obliged him to walk the bicycle instead of riding it in this part of the country, and his dismounting could only be justified by an accident (not a serious one ) that had occurred to some delicate part of the machinery—the gearshift, for instance.