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XXXIII
We greeted the dawn after a night of effort and anxiety, reunited in the dining hall, smoking, drinking coffee, listening to the commissioner's coarse dissertation.
 "Atwell has committed every act that Manning attributes to him," Aubry finally summed up, "except for one: killing young Mary. From the first moment I understood that Emilia was the guilty party. In order to save her, he was astute, he was clumsy, he was unscrupulous, he was heroic. He didn't hesitate to defame a boy. He didn't hesitate -- when it all seemed lost and he wanted to convince us of his own guilt -- to kill himself. But now there can be no doubt: Emilia committed the crime. She made the attempt against her own life with the poison we have been looking all over the hotel for, the poison that caused Mary's death."
Mary's valise lay on the table, the same valise that Atwell had searched the afternoon that I spied on him from the shadow of the hallway. The commissioner opened it and handed each of us a thick sheaf of manuscript pages. I leafed through the pages he gave me (I sneaked them away easily and now keep them as a memento); some of them, with sequential numbering, contained chapters of a novel; others, paragraphs or sentences, at times repeated, with variants and corrections. For example, on one page I read: I removed my stockings and, a little lower, the amended version: I removed my socks. Another ran: But four days after I arrived, a man arrived, and beneath it: a man came -- proof of the sensitivity of Mary's ear and of the richness of her vocabulary.
Aubry told us, "One of these pages was the deceased's 'message'. The inspector, who knew her quite well, knew that the young woman kept all the copies of her translations. When he understood that his fianceé was in a compromised position, he remembered the deceased's neurosis, remembered the letter from that novel by Phillpotts, and looked for the drafts in the valise. He was lucky: and it's just that he was, because the inspector is an observant man."
In a moment one of Aubry's officers entered the dining hall. He was hollow-eyed and covered in mud. The night before, he had left with the other officer and the chauffeur, who knew everything about the crab-grounds, in search of the inspector. They found him asleep next to a growth of esparto grass. The inspector had only had a few hours of freedom. In such a short term, it was easier to lose himself, to wear himself out, to fall asleep on the crab-grounds, than to cross them or die in them. Now Atwell was awaiting us in the office. I did not want to see him, but I was pleased that he was alive. Soon I would give him my authorization to see his fianceé who was out of danger. The presence of a doctor in that hallway, next to that door, was providential. A few minutes more, and a life for which every hope was flourishing would have been cut short. The tragedy had paralyzed my mind; but my hands, my unprotesting professional hands, had administered emetics and enemas.
I breathed deeply and felt a tremendous pride and a shameful happiness swell my thorax. Resolute, I promised myself my bath, clean clothes, breakfast. With an alert spirit I watched the morning; I watched it not with the contrite happiness that is the deadly result of a sleepless night but rather with the joy and faith of a pleasurable awakening.
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