Feast of All Saints Read Online Free Page A

again and he murmured in French out loud with a melodramatic air, “I
am
a criminal,” and felt some mild relief at being the abject object of his own condemnation. Too many nights had he indulged himself thinking of that chance childhood collision—the naked breast, uncorseted waist, wild perfume—so that now he had to draw himself up like a gentleman who, having glimpsed an unclad lady at her bath, shuts the door and quickly walks away.
    This was the Place d’Armes, someone was trying to break his arm.
    He stared astonished at the breast buttons of Richard Lermontant, his best friend.
    “No, go on Richard,” he said quickly as if they’d been arguing all the while, “go on back to school,” and craning his neck to see Juliet disappear in the throng at the market, tried to wrench himself free.
    “You are telling
me
to go back to school?” demanded Richard, holding him fast. His voice was low and deep, all but a whisper on the word of emphasis. “Marcel, look at me!” It was always Richard’s habit to lower his voice precisely at that point where others raise theirs, and it was invariably effective, perhaps because he was so tall. He towered over Marcel, though he was only sixteen. In fact, he towered over everyone in the street. “Monsieur De Latte’s furious!” he confided, drawing close. “You’ve got to come back with me now.”
    “No!” Marcel said shortly, and lurched forward freeing himself and stifling the urge to rub the upper part of his arm. Seldom in his life had he been touched except in anger, and he had a healthy distrust of being held, loathing it in fact, though it was impossible for him to loathe Richard. They were more than friends, and he simply couldn’t bear to be angry with Richard or to have Richard angry with him. “Be a good friend to me,” he turned pleading, “and go. I don’t care what you tell Monsieur De Latte. Tell him anything.” And he started off fast for the corner.
    Richard overtook him quickly.
    “But why are you doing this? What’s the point of it?” he pleaded, his shoulders slightly bent so he could be near Marcel’s ear. “You ran out in the middle of class, do you realize what you’ve done?”
    “Yes, I realize it. I did it, I did it,” Marcel said, blundering into the traffic of riverfront street, so that he was at once forced back on the curb. “But let me go please.” He could just make out the top of Juliet’s head at the fish market.
“Give up on me, please!”
    Richard let him go, and clasping his hands behind his back he gained at once what seemed a characteristic composure so that nothing of the sixteen-year-old boy was left in him. In fact he had an ageless look most of the time so that strangers might think him twenty, perhaps older. He had never asked for his height, in fact, had prayed against it, but a manly spirit had some time ago invaded his long limbs; and as he stood very still with one foot forward, and his shoulders only a little bent, his lean face with its prominent cheekbones and slanting black eyes made him appear at once majestic and exotic. He was darker than Marcel, all of an olive complexion, his hair wavy and black. But this suggested the Turk, the Spaniard perhaps, or even the Italian, and almost nothing of the French and the Senegalese from whom he was descended.
    Gesturing with a languid hand, fingers sloping gracefully from thewrist, he whispered. “You have to come back, Marcel, you have to!” But Marcel was looking toward the market again where a great flock of birds rose suddenly from the tiled roof, looping and descending on the masts above the dock. His eyes narrowed. Juliet had emerged from the crowd feeding fish on her fingers to her cat.
    Startled, Richard said, “You aren’t following her!”
    An involuntary look of distaste passed over his face, which he quickly banished, but not before Marcel had seen it. “But why?”
    “What do you mean, why? You know why,” Marcel said. “I have to ask her