The Widow Read Online Free Page A

of everything—his stubbly cheeks, his pale, unseeing eyes, his gray suit, worn yet having a touch of ease about it, his thin shoes. A man who could walk noiselessly and spring like a cat. And who, after the seven francs fifty he had given to the driver in exchange for a blue ticket, probably had no money left in his pockets.
    He was watching her, too, screwing up his eyes as if to see her better, and from time to time he pursed up his lips as though smiling to himself. Perhaps he was amused at widow Couderc’s wen. Everyone called it “the wen.” It was on her left cheek, a spot the size of a five-franc piece, a spot covered with hundreds of brown, silky hairs, as if a piece of animal’s hide, a marten say, had been grafted there.
    The bus was now going down the other slope, and behind the trees there were occasional glimpses of the river Cher, its lively water leaping over the stones.
    Widow Couderc too hugged a secret smile. The man blinked slightly. It was rather as if, in the midst of all these old women with their nodding heads, the two had recognized each other.
    She almost forgot that she had reached her stop. She realized suddenly that they were at the foot of the hill. She leaned forward, tapped the driver on the back, and he braked.
    â€œHave to give me a hand with my incubator!” she said.
    She was short and broad, rather plump. It was quite a business getting out of the bus with all her baskets: at one moment she wanted to get out first herself, the next she wanted to put her baskets down on the road first.
    The driver jumped down. The thirty or forty women in the bus watched her without a word. There was a little house not far off, a tiny two-roomed house with a blue-painted fence around it.
    â€œMind you don’t break anything. Those things can’t take much handling!”
    The driver had climbed up the iron ladder at the back and onto the roof of the bus and now he lowered a kind of enormous box with four feet. The widow Couderc took it and set it very cautiously at the side of the road.
    She took a two-franc piece out of a full purse, and handed it to him. “There, young man …”
    But it was the man they had picked up from the road that she eyed, with a shade of regret.
    The bus started off again. Through the rear window the man could see the widow Couderc standing at the roadside, beside her enormous box and her baskets.
    â€œJust like her niece,” said the big girl next to the driver. “Do you know Félicie? …”
    The man could have sat down now that there was a seat empty. He kept standing. The road curved. Widow Couderc and the little house disappeared…. Then he too leaned forward and tapped the driver’s shoulder.
    â€œDrop me here, will you?”
    When the bus moved on, all heads turned to watch him making off in the opposite direction, and the girl confided her impression to the driver: “Queer fish!”
    He was already farther along than he had thought. It took him several minutes before he saw the little house once more, the packages at the roadside and widow Couderc, who had opened the gate and was knocking at the door.
    She was not surprised to see him coming. She moved toward the gate as he came to a halt.
    â€œI thought the Bichat woman would be at home and would lend me her wheelbarrow!” she said. “And now look, everything’s shut.”
    All the same, she called out in a shrill voice, turning different ways, “Clémence! … Clémence! …”
    Then: “I wonder where she can be. She never goes out. She must have had bad news about her sister….”
    She walked around the house, banged on another closed door.
    â€œIf only I could find her wheelbarrow!”
    But there was nothing but the vegetable patch and a few flowers. No wheelbarrow. A turtledove in a cage.
    â€œDo you live far from here?” asked the man.
    â€œLess than half a mile, by the canal. I was