The Woollen Dress by Henry Bordeaux

I HAD spent almost the entire night reading the two notebooks which Raymond Cernay had entrusted to me. It was nearly dawn when I lay down for a few hours. As soon as I had risen, I went to find my friend.

He was seated at his table, in the same place where I had surprised him the previous night. But what a change had come over him! Instead of the over-excitement and the melancholy tension which had been almost killing him, instead of fatigue intensified by lack of sleep and mental strain, he now exhibited such tranquillity and self-control that I stopped, stupefied, in my offer of sympathy. I had left him in despair, and now I found him smiling.

"Here," I said to him, handing him his notebooks. "I understand you now."

Already, however, I was beginning not to understand him. By a new move, the trend of which escaped me, he had re-established between us the distance which his confidence had seemed to wipe out. I came to him, disturbed by what I had read, and he received me with indifference! I might have connected his attitude with the last sentence of his journal, but not yet had I reached that state of composure which enables us to rise above sorrow.

"It was so simple," he declared, using Raymonde's words. "There was nothing to do but tell the truth."

He pointed to the scattered sheets of a letter which he had not yet sealed. He had been compelled to write to Mlle. Simone de R -- , he told me. Their engagement made at Rheims had been broken. He added:

"She too will understand, since it is the truth which I had no right to conceal from her, and which will broaden her. Should she suffer a little on my account, it is better so."

His indifference, which for the moment shocked me, was after all like that of a surgeon recognising the necessity of an operation.

"What are you going to do? " I asked.

He looked at me, somewhat astonished by my question, and I discovered at last on his face that transfiguration, by the like of which he himself had been dazzled at his wife's deathbed. A divine phenomenon had taken place within him, a miracle of peace, a final choice: I can think of nothing but a theological term to express my whole thought: a state of grace. A monk who has taken eternal vows in the exaltation of firm assurance must wear on his countenance a similar reflection of his decision.

"Live," he replied.

"Living" meant for him "accepting."

A long silence followed, which he broke with these words, spoken more for himself than for me:

"There is no horror in the death of those we love if it serves to make us better. Do you not see that she was given to me for my improvement? Oh, God! That I should have taken so long to see it! Since yesterday I have drawn nearer to her; I am happy. She knew that nothing is finite, especially a love like hers."

The following day I left the Sleeping Woods. Raymond Cernay, henceforth guided by unfailing memories, no longer needed my presence.

I read of his death one morning in the newspapers.

He had been found at nightfall the day before, in a field near the seashore where he experimented with his aeroplane on his lonely flights, -- mangled, his shattered machine on top of him. No one, it was at first supposed, had seen the accident, and consequently no details could be learned.

I went to him at once. Admitted to the shed where his body had been placed before the laying-out, I raised the sheet which covered him. He was not disfigured. One could just make out above his right eye a slight bruise. A fracture of the skull and a broken spine, only natural, considering the weight of the motor, had caused his death. But the face, spared by a curious chance, showed no sign of fear, and his serenity was more impressive than any wounds.

On account of the mystery which surrounded his end, and recalling that sorrowful evening when he had struggled against an impulse to kill himself, I wondered if his fall had been voluntary. What he had confided to me at the little lake, came back to me:

"One can not betray his machine, or allow false suspicion to fall upon it. It may make a mistake, but the man that it carries -- no -- "