Olivier did not recover consciousness. Amélie and the little hunchback were left alone in the room. Such a sad room it was, airless and gloomy! It was almost dark. … For one instant Olivier emerged from the abyss. He felt Emmanuel’s tears and kisses on his hand. He smiled faintly, and painfully laid his hand on the boy’s head. Such a heavy hand it was! … Then he sank back once more. …
By the dying man’s head, on the pillow, Amélie had laid a First of May nosegay, a few sprays of lily-of-the-valley. A leaky tap in the courtyard dripped, dripped into a bucket. For a second mental images hovered tremblingly at the back of his mind, like a light flickering and dying down … a house in the country with glycine on the walls: a garden where a child was playing: a boy lying on the turf: a little fountain plashing in its stone basin: a little girl laughing. …
II
They drove out of Paris. They crossed the vast plains of France shrouded in mist. It was an evening like that on which Christophe had arrived in Paris ten years before. He was a fugitive then, as now. But then his friend, the man who loved him, was alive: and Christophe was fleeing towards him. …
During the first hour Christophe was still under the excitement of the fight: he talked volubly in a loud voice: in a breathless, jerky fashion he kept on telling what he had seen and heard: he was proud of his achievement and felt no remorse. Manousse and Canet talked too, by way of making him forget. Gradually his feverish excitement subsided, and Christophe stopped talking: his two companions went on making conversation alone. He was a little bewildered by the afternoon’s adventures, but in no way abashed. He recollected the time when he had come to France, a fugitive then, always a fugitive. It made him laugh. No doubt he was fated to be so. It gave him no pain to be leaving Paris: the world is wide: men are the same everywhere. It mattered little to him where he might be so long as he was with his friend. He was counting on seeing him again next day. They had promised him that.
They reached Laroche. Manousse and Canet did not leave him until they had seen him into the train. Christophe made them say over the name of the place where he was to get out, and the name of the hotel, and the post-office where he would find his letters. In spite of themselves, as they left him, they both looked utterly dejected. Christophe wrung their hands gaily.
“Come!” he shouted, “don’t look so like a funeral. Good Lord, we shall meet again! Nothing easier! We’ll write to each other tomorrow.”
The train started. They watched it disappear.
“Poor devil!” said Manousse.
They got back into the car. They were silent. After a short time Canet said to Manousse:
“Bah! the dead are dead. We must help the living.”
As night fell Christophe’s excitement subsided altogether. He sat huddled in a corner of the carriage, and pondered. He was sobered and icy cold. He looked down at his hands and saw blood on them that was not his own. He gave a shiver of disgust. The scene of the murder came before him once more. He remembered that he had killed a man: and now he knew not why. He began to go over the whole battle from the very beginning; but now he saw it in a very different light. He could not understand how he had got mixed up in it. He went back over every incident of the day from the moment when he had left the house with Olivier: he saw the two of them walking through Paris until the moment when he had been caught up by the whirlwind. There he lost the thread: the chain of his thoughts was snapped: how could he have shouted and struck out and moved with those men with whose beliefs he disagreed? It was not he, it was not he! … It was a total eclipse of his will! … He was dazed by it and ashamed. He was not his own master then? Who was his master? … He was being carried by the express through the night: and the inward night through which he was being carried was no less dark, nor was the unknown force less swift and dizzy. … He tried hard to shake off his unease: but one anxiety was followed by another. The nearer he came to his destination, the more he thought of Olivier; and he was oppressed by an unreasoning fear.
As he arrived he looked through the window across the platform for the familiar face of his friend. … There was no one. He got out and still went on looking about him. Once or twice he thought he saw. … No, it was not “he.” He went to the appointed hotel. Olivier was not there. There was no reason for Christophe to be surprised: how could Olivier have preceded him? … But from that moment on he was in an agony of suspense.
It was morning. Christophe went up to his room. Then he came down again, had breakfast, sauntered through the streets. He pretended to be free of anxiety and looked at the
