The Horseman on the Roof Read Online Free PDF Page B

just to the right of the eminence Angelo had now reached, together with the village where the man shivering under the eiderdowns had finally shot out like a spring and plunged to his wife’s feet, and was, at that precise moment, being contemplated by four or five neighbors, all munching garlic and chanting: “He is dead, he is dead,” at a safe distance from his bared white teeth and protruding eyes. The Jewish doctor was telling himself that perhaps there was no ground for being so sure of his intelligence. Those heights seemed to him better than Bourdeaux as a protection for Rachel and little Judith. He was now not at all sure of the privilege of immortality of the soul. He no longer took a simple pride in the thought that Rachel would manage to find a cabriolet at Vaison. She was certainly incapable of imagining that he might have been wrong in sending them to Bourdeaux. But he could not warn them now; he had to stay here and do his duty. He cursed intelligence. He realized that what he ought to be cursing, in all logic, was false intelligence. He spat on false intelligence. He was in despair at not having true intelligence. He spat on himself. He spat on Rachel and Judith for being incapable of protecting Rachel and Judith for him. He spat on that race tormented by an inscrutable God.
    While he was cursing, he noticed that the east was becoming troubled and that there was going to be an evening and a night. It surprised him, as if night were about to rise from the east for the first time. “All my thinking is fallacious,” he told himself. “I even overlooked a simple thing like this. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Rachel and Judith will be quite all right at Bourdeaux, in any case no worse than anywhere else, and certainly better than here. For the rest, let’s stick to the well-tried remedies. No more explorations of the intelligence.” He went back to his phials, put some of them on the table in his room, and others into his bag. He whistled a little tune. He also listened for the sounds of footsteps in the street and on the stairs, at every moment expecting his doorbell to ring. Meanwhile, in the village that he could see from his window on the distant flank of the mountain spur, the women had gone to find the priest. The priest came as a good neighbor should, his cassock unbuttoned. “Night is coming,” he said; “let’s hope it will be less hot. Poor Alcide!” “He’s already quite black,” said a woman. “So he is,” said the priest. “It’s most extraordinary.” He took a look at the corpse, which was a horrible sight, but found comfort in the approach of evening. “Just to have a little rest,” he murmured, “to be able to breathe.” The idea of being able to breathe enabled him to triumph over the appalling grimace of that mouth, unveiling to the gums its stumped and rotten teeth.
    Evening was still only a hint of pale blue in the east. Enough, even so, to dull the pattern of tiny crescent moons that the foliage of the plane trees in the rue Lafayette cast upon the pavement by the navy medical inspector’s wicker chair. He thought the cause must be a cloud. He let out a groan that drew the attention of the customers sitting near him at the terrace of the Duc d’Aumale. “And now rain,” he said aloud, “God damn it!” But he had respect for his uniform. He counted the saucers. “It’d take more,” he thought, “than seven absinthes, even in quick succession, to stop me seeing that it’s only the approach of evening.” And he said, very calmly, out loud: “It’s evening, but I’ve seen others.” He meant that he had decided to approach the Admiral again. “All that I need,” he told himself, “is to be able to pronounce ‘Dangerous effluvia on board the Melpomène’ correctly. The rest is up to him. I’m not going to