She tore herself away. She tottered slightly, and appeared really influenced by the wine. It seemed as though a mist, passing over her eyes and into her brain, obscured her sight and thought. She put her hands to her forehead and burning cheeks.
"How warm it is!" she sighed. "I wish I had nothing on."
Possessed from now on by that one fixed idea, George repeated to himself: "Must I die alone?" As the fatal hour drew nearer, the deed of violence seemed more necessary. Behind him, in the shadow in the bedroom, he heard the ticktack of the clock; he heard the rhythmic blows of a flax-brake on a distant field. These two sounds, cadenced and dissimilar, intensified in him the sensation of the flight of time, gave him a sort of anxious terror.
"Look at Ortona aflame!" cried Hippolyte. "What a number of rockets!"
The festive city illuminated the sky. Innumerable sky-rockets, parting from a central point, spread out in the sky like a broad golden fan, that slowly, from top to bottom, dissolved into a shower of scattered sparks, and, suddenly, in the midst of the golden rain, a new fan was formed, entire and splendid, to dissolve again and reform again, while the waters reflected the changing picture. One heard a low crepitation, like a distant fusilade, interspersed with deeper reports that followed the explosions of multi-colored bombs in the heights of the sky. And at every report the city, the port, the great stretched-out mole, appeared in a different light, fantastically transfigured.
Upright against the parapet, Hippolyte admired the spectacle, and saluted the brighter splendors with exclamations of delight. From time to time it spread over her person like the reflection of a fire.
"She is overexcited, a little inebriated, ready for any madness," thought George as he watched her. "I could suggest a walk, which she has often wanted to take: to go through one of the tunnels by the light of a torch. I would go down to the Trabocco to get a torch. She could wait for me at the end of the bridge. I would lead her then to the tunnel by a path that I know. I would manage that the train should come upon us while we were in the tunnel—foolhardiness, accident."
The idea seemed to him easy of realization: it had presented itself to his imagination with extraordinary clearness, as if it had formed an integral part of his consciousness since that first day when, before the shining rails, he received the first confused glimmer from them. "She must die, too." His resolution became strengthened, immutable. He heard behind him the ticking of the clock. He felt a feeling of intense anxiety he could not master. It was getting late. Perhaps there was scarcely time for them to go down. He must act without delay, assure himself immediately as to the precise time indicated by the clock. But it seemed impossible for him to rise from his chair; it seemed to him that if he spoke to her carelessly, his speech would fail him.
He started to his feet as he heard in the distance the well-known rumbling. Too late! And his heart beat so fast that he believed he would die of anguish as he heard the rumbling and whistling draw nearer.
Hippolyte turned.