Four Souls Read Online Free PDF Page A

her ever since she had entered the house. After all, she was used to great spaces and large doings. She missed getting her own meat and medicines, catching her own fish, snaring rabbits and looping the necks of roosting partridge, the repair and upkeep of her cabin, canoe, traps, and gun, and most of all she missed the care of her daughter. In a strange fit of disconnection, she imagined that she longed for Lulu far more than the girl would miss her. After all, school was a child’s world, far from all that Fleur knew. Never having gone to such a place, she imagined it consisted of toys, games, play, children shrieking with excitement—all she’d seen of schools were children at recess. So she fell into the trap, like Mauser, of pitying herself. The great and strong, how is it that they can be so feeble in this regard? Sometimes it seems to me that it’s the old sodden weaklings like myself who have the least mercy on our own persons. Maybe we expect nothing. Or have been through far too much. Maybe we are just bottomlessly foolish. At any rate those two, one the shadow of a shadow in the hall and the other a shadow also, an imitation of the ruthless man who’d stolen from the world with careless ease, both poised, caught in time.
    Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. It’s hard to swim against the current. Onrushing, inevitable, carried like a leaf, Fleur fooled herself in thinking she could choose her direction. But time is an element no human has mastered, and Fleur was bound to go where she was sent. Maybe in those long nights as she watched the crack of light beneath the door, she had an inkling. She thought revenge was behind that door, and satisfaction. Maybe she began to realize that she was wrong. There was only time. For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain? She was time. Mauser was time. I am a sorry bit of time myself. We are time’s containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.
    Though Fleur was immensely disciplined, the wait got to be too much for her. She sank down against the wall one night, still frowning at the band of light that said Mauser was sleepless. Annoyed with everything to do with him and with her situation, she brooded. The sharp anger that kept her wakeful dulled. Her thoughts drifted. She longed for the trusting touch of her daughter, grew angry at the man behind the door, forgot him, ached for her daughter, grew angry at the man again. Felt that self-pity that they both felt, on either side of the door. Finally, resenting that she had to waste her time to take revenge, she fell asleep.
    I haven’t said this, but she had a tendency to snore.
    The snores of a beautiful woman are both ridiculous and somehow moving. I know. Recall, she had lived in my cabin. Slumped in that grand hallway with her face tipped back, unguarded, her skin exquisitely molded over the stern bones, her eyes up-slanted, the bitter perfection of her lips stuck half open, she breathed an even gurgling gnash. Fleur’s snores, her self-betrayal, started softly and then increased in volume as she fell deeper into her sleep. Mauser, in his bed of feather down and fancy silk quilts and ruffed pillows, set his book aside. At the sound of the snores, he was alarmed. He imagined that Fantan had come to curl at his door, out of a protective instinct or because he’d had a bad dream himself. Or if not Fantan, perhaps, he thought, one of his old hunting dogs had been mistakenly left out of his plush night kennel and might catch cold on the floor. He turned his light off, and here is why Fleur did not hear him. Mauser also knew precisely where the creaks hid in the floor. He trod his way around the noisy boards when he wished not to rouse Polly Elizabeth. Now he padded to the door in absolute silence, and opened it. As Fleur herself had greased the hinges, the door