And in that way the summer slipped past and the autumn came, and neither of us gained anything. I was getting into a black rage over it all. Down inside of me was a feeling like fire in my stomach that made me not want to eat, and that made what I did eat go wrong. My poor mother had given up trying to talk to me. She saw that she could not change my way--and, too, I suppose that she pretty well understood it all: for she had lived her life, and she knew the ways of our men and of our women when love stings them here in Provence. Only, her sadness grew upon her with her hopelessness. What I remember most clearly as I think of her in those last days is her pale old face and the dying look in her sorrowful eyes.
But seeing her in that way grief-struck only made my black rage blacker and the fire in my stomach burn hotter. I had the feeling that there was a devil down there who all the time was getting bigger and stronger: and that before long he and I would take matters in hand together and settle them for good and all. As for keeping on with things as they were, it was not to be thought of. Better than much more of such a hell-life would be ending everything by killing Jan.
What made me hang back from that was the certainty that if I did kill him--even in a fair fight, with his chance as good as mine--I would lose Magali beyond all hope: for the gendarmes would have me away in a whiff to jail--and then off would go my head, or, what would be just as bad, off I would go head and all to Cayenne. It was no comfort to me to know that Magali would almost cry her eyes out over losing me. Of course she would do that, being a Provençale. But before her eyes were quite out she would stop crying; and then in a moment she would be laughing again; and in another moment she would be freshly in love once more--with some man who was not murdered and who was not gone for his lifetime over seas. And all that, also, would be because she was a Provençale.
All the devils are let loose on earth on All Souls Eve--that is a fact known to everybody here in Provence. But whether it was one of those loosed devils, or the devil that had grown big in my own inside, that made me do what I did I do not know. What I do know, certainly, is that about dusk on All Saints Day the thought of how I could force things to be as I wanted them to be came into my heart.