ALVMNW BOOK FYND 
 
 

WE OTHERS 
 
WE OTHERS 
 
 STORIES of FATE, LOVE and PITY 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF 
 
 HENRI BARBUSSE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "UNDER FIRE," ETC. 
 BY 
 
 FITZWATER WRAY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 68 1 FIFTH AVENUE 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
 BY E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK ONE: FATE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE BAD LITTLE MOON 3 
 
 FORCE 9 
 
 FATE? 15 
 
 IMMOBILITY 21 
 
 SCARLET THREAD 27 
 
 THE WATCHMAN 33 
 
 BLIND JUSTICE 39 
 
 THE WAG 45 
 
 THE GREEN SPECTRE 50 
 
 THE OTHERS 55 
 
 BOOK TWO: THE MADNESS OF LOVING 
 
 THE FUNERAL MARCH . . . 63 
 
 THE WAY THEY WENT 69 
 
 A TALE OF FOUR 74 
 
 THE FAIRY TALE 80 
 
 RESURRECTION 86 
 
 THE DREAM 92 
 
 THE STRICKEN 97 
 
 c / /> o /i 
 
vi CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE FIRST LOVE 103 
 
 THE LIBATION 108 
 
 A DREAM Too GOOD 113 
 
 A TRUE JUDGE . 120 
 
 THE THREE MADWOMEN 126 
 
 THE SENSITIVE PLANT 132 
 
 THE APPARITION 137 
 
 THE LAST STEPS 143 
 
 THE PRESENCE 149 
 
 THE INNOCENT 154 
 
 AFFECTION 160 
 
 BOOK THREE: PITY 
 
 THE EVIL EYE 169 
 
 THE STONE MAN 176 
 
 THE ELEVENTH 182 
 
 THE BAD CUSTODIAN . .188 
 
 THE CROSS OF HONOUR 195 
 
 SAAR 201 
 
 THE GREAT DEEDS OF LANTURLU 208 
 
 THE MIRACLE 214 
 
 THE OTHER WORLD 220 
 
 THE BROTHER 226 
 
 THE MORT 232 
 
 REVENGE 238 
 
CONTENTS vii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE NAME 244 
 
 THE ONE GROWN OLD 250 
 
 THE MOTHER 256 
 
 THE GREAT MEMORY 262 
 
 THE MISTAKE 269 
 
BOOK I 
 FATE 
 
THE NAUGHTY BAD LITTLE MOON 
 
 THEY emerged from the ground one, two, three, 
 up to six under the downfall of rain and night. 
 
 One would say rather that they were emerging from 
 out of water; for the continuous downpour of a month 
 had drowned the scrub and given a sea-like look to the 
 plain surrounding Adrianople and Devanjaros. 
 
 In the yellow spray of twilight each of them showed 
 like a tall mass of sheepskins, whence spurted the bar- 
 rel of a rifle. All six were crowned with green-topped 
 caps of astrakhan. 
 
 They were a patrol of Macedonians, incorporated 
 with the Bulgarian army and passing through the out- 
 posts. 
 
 Faltering and rocking in the ashen whirlwinds, they 
 waved their long arms like the sails of a windmill, 
 made the sign of the cross, and pointed their black 
 faces to right, to left; and the big troubled eyes they 
 opened wide were rat-like. 
 
 At fifty paces a branch that pricked up from the 
 glistening ground began to flutter, and the Macedo- 
 nians steered for the hole whence the signal came. 
 
 It was the abandoned trench. Sergeant Naritch and 
 his five men had gone to earth there and had given the 
 signal. 
 
 These six Bulgarians were fond of the six Mace- 
 donians. Diplovitch and Kaloub were companions of 
 
 3 
 
4 WE OTHERS 
 
 long date. The old brigand Alexis had formerly 
 taught Naritch law. Potrof and Reff were such near 
 cousins that they had laughed till they cried when they 
 discovered it at their first meeting. As for Sulei- 
 man and Nazif, they had to avenge the murder of 
 her whom they both loved, so they were more than 
 brothers. 
 
 Since the beginning of the siege these twelve men 
 had gathered together, at that grey hour when rifles 
 become blind and are obliged to sleep. 
 
 They used to meet in the old trench, now worthless. 
 There they sat and rested, face to face, their feet in 
 the same mud. Fraternally they exchanged a few 
 words, with a mien at once ferocious and tranquil. 
 They said, "It will be a long war," and "May God 
 smash the Turk !" 
 
 Then, saying no more, the twelve men would fall to 
 thinking, and their hearts were fuller, their thoughts 
 more solemn, for thus touching each other. At last 
 they would separate and the two squads return to camp 
 by their two ways. 
 
 This evening the comrades in arms were sad when 
 they assembled. The ceaseless rain, the unyielding 
 cold, and a sort of fatigue, huge and new, oppressed 
 them curiously. 
 
 "The war will never end !" announced Kaloub, and 
 his cheeks, black as gunpowder, twitched with grim- 
 aces. 
 
 "Never!" replied Nazif, yawning like a dejected 
 wolf. 
 
 They all lowered their heads and spat. And as it 
 happens when the malady of melancholy overmasters 
 
THE NAUGHTY BAD LITTLE MOON 5 
 
 a company, they thought of mysterious things, to them- 
 selves at first, then aloud. 
 
 "The moon's got the shape of the enemy's crescent," 
 said Kaloub in a changed voice, like some one who be- 
 gins to sing. 
 
 "A bad sign," declared Alexis the venerable bandit, 
 who had experience in matters of life and death ; "it is 
 the bad little moon." 
 
 He related the legend of the bad little moon, who kills 
 by devious means all those on whom she looks down. 
 
 They raised their heads and squinted towards the 
 slender crescent, now veiled in mourning. 
 
 "One should not tempt the moon !" muttered Potrof , 
 who was a new-wed man, though turning grey. "Bad 
 luck to us !" 
 
 "I'm sleepy," said Reft, plaintively, like a child. 
 
 "Let's be going!" growled Alexis. He fixed his 
 bayonet in his untanned leggings, where the Macedo- 
 nians carry their wooden table-tools as well, for they 
 wear no waist-belt. 
 
 One by one the Macedonians went away. The Bul- 
 garians watched them, and regretted their going. 
 Then, instead of setting off in their turn, they remained 
 in the ditch, prey to a great but random menace, wor- 
 ried by the gaze of the enemy moon, inebriate with fa- 
 tigue and superstition. 
 
 Each mused by himself. Sergeant Naritch saw his 
 little home and his wife, whose heavy dress showed as 
 many colours as a flowerbed. Dreaming, he saw the 
 sharp turn in the path, where a beloved little laugh an- 
 nounced the coming of a golden head. He caught the 
 
6 WE OTHERS 
 
 scent of the hedge, and recognised the stunted willows 
 that stand in rows along the brook like dolls. 
 
 Suddenly he cocked his chin and rubbed his eyes. 
 He could see nothing more than the drenched darkness, 
 and right at the bottom of it the pointed scimitar of the 
 moon, hanging, gleaming. 
 
 He shook himself. What were they thinking of? 
 It was late. Their little father the colonel would burst 
 from his tent on their tracks, with the scarlet lining of 
 his grey cloak dancing like flames, and then beware ! 
 
 "Come, en route !" 
 
 They set themselves in motion, weeping from their 
 yawns. With contracted faces they hoisted themselves 
 out of the long ditch. 
 
 They marched and marched, opening their eyes im- 
 moderately wide, and receiving a' rough blast of rain 
 on their faces every time they risked a look up at the 
 moon. 
 
 How now? Still no sentry. They stopped. They 
 had gone astray. It was the fault of the moon and its 
 half-light, its false, misleading light. 
 
 They shivered and set off again, lifting their feet 
 high out of the bog. Quite accurately they avoided the 
 shell-holes little lakes that would drown a team of 
 horses. They are reddish by day. At the end of half 
 an hour, no fires, nothing. 
 
 They tried to better their bearings in the huge plain 
 of mud, and again they filed forward with hanging 
 heads. 
 
 Suddenly a rifle-shot 
 
 The sergeant swore. He turned all ways, like a 
 wind-vane. 
 
THE NAUGHTY BAD LITTLE MOON 7 
 
 "We're in the Turkish lines!" 
 
 The remark would have seemed ridiculous, so re- 
 cently had they left the old trench, if it had not been 
 for the moon's hatred through the whole business. 
 They shook their heads, and Kaloub growled, "We 
 should have gone back to camp along with the others ; 
 the Macedonians smell the right way with their noses." 
 
 They stood still, their faces intently, furiously for- 
 ward. 
 
 "Ah, there are enemies watching us," gasped Diplo- 
 vitch. 
 
 The uncertain light of the moon, slightly cleared by 
 a squall, showed the shapeless outlines of soldiers, 
 grouped in the scrub, quite near, within hail. 
 
 "Curses!" barked another Bulgarian. 
 
 So sure were they of the trap into which the moon 
 was leading them that they could hardly help yelling in 
 the terrible relief of having at last discovered the 
 Danger. 
 
 Very quietly Naritch gave the order to fire. As if 
 they had overheard, it was the enemy party that fired 
 first. 
 
 Potrof, the man who had just been married, trem- 
 bled, held his belly, and fell, shaking his head in vigor- 
 ous protest. 
 
 The rifle-shots crackled and multiplied on both sides. 
 Quickly men fell. The last who stood leaned forward, 
 leaned farther, and lay full length. And it seemed to 
 him in an agonised dream that some one yonder, among 
 them who had killed him, groaned his name. The 
 death-rattle arose on both sides, then weakened, and 
 blended gently, like music. 
 
8 WE OTHERS 
 
 All was quiet and still when a squad came up, dan- 
 gling lanterns. 
 
 Twelve corpses. There, the six Macedonians ; there, 
 the six Bulgarians. Preyed upon by unnatural fear, 
 confused by a fantastic legend, neither party had been 
 able to regain the camp. The men of the two patrols 
 had but half seen each other, like shadows. And they 
 had killed each other at random, blindly, gropingly, 
 without recognition, without knowing that they liked 
 each other, without understanding that they were 
 brothers as always happens in war. 
 
FORCE 
 
 " ^"INE, ten!" droned the referee through the 
 
 ** ^ scrupulous silence. 
 
 They carried Phil M'Cue away motionless. Then 
 a huge uproar lifted the roof of the basement room and 
 its smell of a den of wild beasts, for here about fifty 
 years ago now the sensational prize-fight had just 
 ended between Phil M'Cue, champion of Australia, and 
 Otis Yerre, champion of the Pacific Coast, and idol of 
 San Francisco. 
 
 So the gentlemen amateurs of the 'Frisco ring gave 
 themselves up whole-heartedly to cheering their big 
 Yerre, who had just put M'Cue to bed so thoroughly, 
 after having wiped out so many other heavy weights 
 of equal or less celebrity, at the Mechanics' Hall, or 
 Woodward's Pavilion. 
 
 All the same, and on both sides, there were some ex- 
 perts of the noble art who thought that big Yerre had 
 hit rather hard at the end. M'Cue was a good sort, 
 and a fighter. Brave and prodigally generous, he did 
 not deserve such severe punishment. By the sixth 
 round he was no longer a boxer. He seemed rather 
 a man decapitated, who had had his head put on again 
 and been set up on his feet. With drooping arms he 
 oscillated to right and left, as a baboon does. Then, 
 instead of breathing on him, big Yerre drew back a 
 pace, waited and took aim ; and his left had hooked the 
 
 9 
 
io WE OTHERS 
 
 queer figure's carotid artery with a force that nocturnal 
 burglars might yearn to have for the persuasion of 
 locked doors. 
 
 Naturally, M'Cue collapsed on the ground with a 
 noise of dislocation; and no less naturally he died for- 
 ty-eight hours later, while still unconscious, and vomit- 
 ing blood. Thus may a champion act towards those 
 who are rightly called "boiled fish", but not towards 
 honourable adversaries. 
 
 Big Yerre continued his triumphant career. A star 
 in the West at twenty- five years of age, he was a na- 
 tional celebrity at twenty-eight. He outclassed all, one 
 after another. Never was he knocked out. Twice he 
 made a drawn battle of it and more ! Four times he 
 did not get the referee's decision. But when one care- 
 fully reads again the controversy that the master 
 evoked in the journals of the day, one realises that in 
 the case of those meetings when his superiority was 
 disputed there were intrigues and dirty doings on which 
 it is better not to dwell. 
 
 Ten years, twenty years went by. He continued to 
 be emperor of the ring, the Invincible. He still had his 
 magnificent presence ; he carried his huge shoulders like 
 a glorious burden, and his muscles were at least as hard 
 as those of the gladiator who makes his perennial pose 
 in the National Museum. 
 
 After being champion of the world, as is well known, 
 for five following years, he only lost the title in the 
 sixth year by his neglect of training. With one voice 
 the sporting Press of two worlds declared that he 
 would have done with Gus Jibson as with the others 
 
FORCE ii 
 
 if he had wished. But he preferred at that date to 
 take it easy. 
 
 Then he had enough of being always victor, or never 
 really beaten. Gradually he withdrew, and when at 
 sixty he announced his definite retirement from box- 
 ing in favour of running a tavern in New York, our 
 big Yerre was still the Invincible. Never had he bit- 
 ten the dust of the ring. Always had he been stand- 
 ing at the end of each fight. He had kept himself as 
 superbly upright as a statue that is bolted to its pedes- 
 tal, the statue of a smiter of men. Glory to our great 
 Otis Yerre from the nation and the world ! 
 
 The news of his retirement was beginning to get 
 round when J. S. Floyd, the Canadian manager, took 
 the floor one fine day and launched on him a challenge 
 that was almost an insult. The blood of the strenu- 
 ous champion boiled, and forthwith he besought the 
 indispensable Jim Sharpe to arrange the terms of a 
 meeting between himself and the unknown boxer in 
 whose name Floyd had just expressed himself in of- 
 fensive terms. And the spectators howled with glee 
 once more they were to see the great old Yerre in the 
 ring! 
 
 The adversary who thus forced the veteran to give 
 battle, a young man called Dick M'Cue, was the son 
 of the man whom Yerre had once upon a time so 
 knocked out that only the trumpets of the Last Day 
 were likely to waken him. 
 
 At the time of his father's violent death Dick was 
 quite young. Later he learned the details of the last 
 fight, and in his childish heart there grew an immense 
 
12 WE OTHERS 
 
 hate for the formidable brute who had needlessly or- 
 phaned him, and a stubborn hunger for vengeance. 
 
 Patiently, modestly he trained himself, and avoided 
 the booths and towns where clamorous posters multi- 
 plied the name of the accursed crack. He travelled 
 Australia, England, and France, which was beginning 
 to awake from its apathy of anti-sport and at last to 
 understand great ideas. He attained splendid and in- 
 telligent strength. When he believed himself of suf- 
 ficient might to beat down the enemy, he went in 
 search of him, and succeeded in bringing him back 
 into the arena by the means I have related. 
 
 In this fight an unforgettable one, by the Thun- 
 derer ! the conditions were not fair and equal. The 
 difference in age was too great, there's no denying it. 
 Compact and solid as the old oak-tree showed him- 
 self, perfect as was the structure of the matchless 
 champion's arms, the fight began badly for him. A 
 great fear crept into the hearts of the good citizens. 
 It was hardly likely, after all, that the antiquated 
 machinery of the old man could stand against such 
 youthful vigour. Was the spotless glory of Otis 
 Yerre going to be spoiled by a knock-out? 
 
 No! The old grey bear triumphed again! I will 
 not describe to you the incidents of the most dramatic 
 prize-fight I have ever seen. But I cannot help men- 
 tioning the two on his jaw in the first round that got 
 his adversary "groggy" at once; nor the two swings 
 of the second round a right on the ear and another 
 in the stomach; nor the finishing blow the irresistible 
 straight on the solar plexus. 
 
 In short, incredible as it may seem, Will Eden was 
 
FORCE 13 
 
 put to sleep like a nursling he had dropped his real 
 name in view of his avenging intent and hired him- 
 self to a hairdresser somewhere in the provinces. 
 
 After this fight Otis Yerre left the rope-encircled 
 stage for ever. What an affecting scene was the fare- 
 well ceremony! Dan Simons, though he had been 
 hangman at Detroit, wept. Yerre made a speech, and 
 we all of us drank for three days as though finally 
 
 to banish thirst. 
 
 ***** 
 
 In the clean sunlight of April no place is so pretty 
 as Hockney Hill. There are little paths, as straight 
 as though drawn on paper; glistening pebbles, like 
 eggs of painted china ; and turf so fine that you might 
 upholster furniture with it. 
 
 A very old man came and sat down in one of the 
 most tenderly green corners of Hockney Hill. 
 Though colossal, he was all broken down, and he 
 wagged an enormous white head that you would take 
 at a distance for the scalped skull of a lion. The 
 prodigious ruin let himself fall on a green seat, and 
 looked at the fields and the gardens with blue eyes 
 that wept all alone in the depth of sockets where one 
 could bury his fist. 
 
 His attention was drawn by a little object that 
 moved along the path and seemed to be drawing near. 
 "He, he, ha, ha," stuttered the old man in amusement. 
 
 His eyes, still of use, discovered when the little ob- 
 ject was ten paces away that it was a child of five or 
 six years, who held his clogs in his hand as he toddled 
 along. 
 
 The child went straight up to the old man and 
 
14 WE OTHERS 
 
 planted himself before him. "You are Otis Yerre?" 
 he demanded. 
 
 "My word, it's very likely !" laughed the jovial dod- 
 derer. 
 
 "Well," said the child. "I'm Bob M'Cue, the 
 grandson of Phil and the son of Dick. And I'm go- 
 ing to knock you out!" 
 
 So saying, he squared himself for fight. 
 
 Somewhat abashed, the old champion half opened 
 a gleaming mouth. He shut it again to swallow a 
 painful swing. Then, smack! he collected a double 
 hook. Painfully he lifted his huge and fleshless hands 
 in defence; he attempted a slow and uncertain reply, 
 but he was mastered, hammered, borne down by the 
 diminutive descendant of his victims so thoroughly 
 that he groaned, rolled bleeding down, and lay with 
 his face to the ground, motionless. 
 
 Very gravely the child counted out ten. And as 
 the ruins of the old man made no movement, the con- 
 queror stood on tiptoe, gave a little cockcrow of vic- 
 tory, and went away. 
 
FATE? 
 
 A LONG the bare wall there was a window, opened 
 -** upon the evening like a picture that never ended. 
 There were also the faces of the two old friends, as 
 little expressive as those of statues. 
 
 They were ending their days side by side, creeping 
 into the same corners of sunshine and shade, await- 
 ing the hours in the same rooms; and they talked now 
 and then. 
 
 "All is error. There is only Fate," said old Dom- 
 inic, by way of conclusion to something he had said or 
 thought he had said. 
 
 "No," replied old Claud; "Fate makes mistakes too, 
 like the rest." 
 
 The first speaker turned and looked at his com- 
 panion with a little compassion and a little scorn, but 
 no surprise. It was natural that he should wander a 
 little, at his age. 
 
 The other wagged his head and the divided, emaci- 
 ated neck that recalled a bundle of sticks, and tapped 
 his knee with the dry wood of his hand. "And there 
 are irreparable things," he added, "which are re- 
 paired." 
 
 "Ah!" murmured Dominic. He raised towards 
 heaven his frail eyes in their red caskets, uneasy to 
 think that soon, perhaps, he too would talk nonsense. 
 
 "I married Bernardine once upon a time," said 
 
 15 
 
16 WE OTHERS 
 
 Claud. "I had almost forgotten her. But the other 
 day I saw a girl who was much like her. Therefore 
 I saw her again and she returned wholly into my 
 thoughts. I married her; and two months before, I 
 had shattered the head of her father with a shot from 
 a gun." 
 
 Dominic was seized with sudden fear in the idea 
 that his companion was deliriously dreaming, and thus 
 he himself was all alone in the room. "Eh, Claud! 
 Are you asleep?" he cried, trembling violently. 
 
 "No," said Claud, "I am thinking, without sleep- 
 ing. I married the girl all right, and I sent her father 
 a bullet through the forehead, right enough. First I 
 must say that she adored her father and that he re- 
 paid it in full." 
 
 "That's a long time ago," said Dominic, appeased, 
 and become again discreet as a listening child. 
 
 "Yes, so long that it seems to me as if I were speak- 
 ing of some one else, and that all that was before me." 
 
 All at once the old man resumed the fluent tongue 
 of yore, discovering it like a memory : 
 
 "Old man Barbeau was shrewd and honest. So he 
 did not wish me to marry his daughter, because I was 
 a good-for-nothing. I was good for nothing, in truth, 
 but to love the daughter, and like those who only do 
 one thing, I did that one well. It is not possible to 
 be captivated by any one as I was by that woman, who 
 afterwards grew old and has been dead so long you 
 must listen, Dominic." 
 
 "Yes," said Dominic, and he drew nearer. 
 
 "He was unwilling then. Every one about him 
 tried to make him change his mind, but he pretended 
 
FATE? 17 
 
 not to hear, or not to understand. They durst not 
 go too far, for he was irascible and strong, with a 
 wrestler's arms, and hands as hard as tools. Myself, 
 I dared to speak to him one day, straight to his face, 
 but very softly; and he threw me out of the door, 
 while the beautiful Bernardine stuck herself in a corner 
 of the kitchen and sniffled, with her fists in her eyes. 
 I was mad with impotence and shame, and I said, 'I 
 will kill myself.' What mattered my life henceforth, 
 when he who held the joy and the charm of it was 
 perverse as the devil and strong as an ox? Every 
 new overture ended but in increased embarrassment 
 for me in the sight of others. It seemed to me much 
 easier to have done with life. I put a bullet into my 
 gun, and having chosen a fine night like the lover 
 that I was I ran straight ahead into the country. I 
 sat down, to do the job, on the edge of the road, near 
 the Briquet corner. But hardly had I finally grasped 
 my gun when I heard, and then saw, a carriage ap- 
 proaching. With twitching heart I knew it for that 
 of old Barbeau, and I remembered that it was indeed 
 the night of the month when he was wont to take a 
 bag of money to Madame Templier. The horse was 
 walking. The carriage passed close to my face, and 
 I saw him, bent forward, with his great massive and 
 hateful body, his beaky nose, his big pointed beard, 
 his savage black outline, like that of a negro king. 
 To see thus sprawling before me the brute who was 
 driving me to the worst extremity, filled me with un- 
 speakable rage. I rose with a jump, took aim at his 
 forehead, and fired. In a lump and without a cry he 
 plunged head foremost and fell on the horse's rump, 
 
i8 WE OTHERS 
 
 which took fright and galloped off, left the road at 
 the corner, and threw himself, fifty paces further, 
 right into the Loviots' farm. I ran away, ran away 
 as fast as I could, dizzy, stunned, ruined. And I had 
 already got a long way in my mad hurry when I be- 
 gan to understand what I had done. But no less des- 
 perately spurred for that, I rushed over the fields and 
 woods, as I remember, all the same, as if it was yes- 
 terday, I who have forgotten nearly all of the past, 
 the awful thickets I won through that night, all the 
 tragical barriers I upset to get by. Scarcely did the 
 certainty that I should kill myself when I got home 
 put a little calm and order into the whirlwind of my 
 thoughts. But now I saw that my accursed flight had 
 taken me to their house the one that he had just left, 
 but where she was. When / knew it, I was too near 
 to resist the temptation to see her again to see her 
 again through her window, looking out, vaguely re- 
 vealed in the shadow by the reflection from the fire! 
 I followed the wall along, panting and rustling as lit- 
 tle as possible, and turned the corner. Ah, the win- 
 dow was open, and she was there, with her arms on 
 the sill! She was there, angelically pale, and it 
 seemed to me that something had even made her ra- 
 diant. Yes, she was smiling! She saw me standing 
 a few paces from her, uttered a little cry and clapped 
 her hands; she beamed still more, and smiled more 
 sweetly ! 
 
 * 'Heaven has sent you/ she said. 'Father con- 
 sents! He saw how I was suffering, and suddenly 
 he said yes, to cure me. Before he went out, just now, 
 he said yes, and he laughed!' 
 
FATE? 19 
 
 "I could not even cry out. I was choked and blind. 
 I do not know how I recoiled, how I crept from her 
 gaze, how I escaped. I only remember the moment I 
 arrived home, one groping hand in front, the other 
 clenched on my gun the only treasure left to me in 
 the world! In the kitchen, without even making a 
 light, without even opening my eyes, I sought and 
 found the kind cartridge, and loaded the gun. But I 
 was so borne down by the cruelty of the Fate that was 
 undoing me and how terribly ! without allowing me 
 the time to know that it had saved me, that I no longer 
 had mettle even in destroying myself. Is that why 
 the bullet missed? Be that as it may, I felt only the 
 scorch of the blast, and only was a tuft of hair shot 
 away. I reeled and fell to the ground, believing my- 
 self dead but alive. 
 
 "I awoke in the full light of noonday, and came to 
 myself groaning, with a booming in my ears. But 
 there was a big noise outside as well a tumultuous 
 swarming of people. And just then John knocked on 
 my door with his fist he was my elder brother by 
 several years, and died of old age. With another 
 stroke he opened the door, and putting his face in, he 
 cried, 'Old Barbeau was murdered last night on the 
 road.* 
 
 ' 'Ah !' I cried, livid, recoiling to the far end of the 
 room. 
 
 " Those two gipsies of ill omen/ he added, 'they 
 were found by the bag that they'd carried off. 
 They've told everything! They attacked the carriage 
 at the end of the village, close to his home. The old 
 man got ten knife wounds in the back. He was killed 
 
20 WE OTHERS 
 
 outright, and there's a pool of blood. Then they put 
 him back on his seat, and let the horse go on, walking. 
 A long time after, at the Briquet corner, the horse 
 threw himself into the Loviots' farm/ 
 
 "I had not killed him! For he was already dead! 
 You cannot murder a dead man. Fate was in it, you 
 see, but she made a mistake that night/' 
 
IMMOBILITY 
 
 old charwoman, who had gone to the Micha- 
 -*- Ions that morning as usual, came out again at 
 once as if she had been thrown out. She fell on her 
 knees in the middle of the village street with horror- 
 stricken face, and a sort of cry in her throat that she 
 could neither swallow nor utter. 
 
 Ah, it was not without cause that she had foundered 
 so completely in the street, the fat old charwoman 
 whom we had to pass round before we could enter 
 the house ! Of big Michalon we could at first see only 
 his long outstretched legs, emerging from the dark- 
 ness under the table, and the vast boot-soles that stood 
 vertically on the floor-stones. You would never be- 
 lieve how terrifying those immense soles were to see 
 upright on their heels, standing up from the ground 
 like two posts in the half-light of that basement room 
 whose corners were tense with darkness. 
 
 We stooped, we extended ourselves towards the 
 space under the table, towards the dread nest of 
 shadow. The body of the giant lay there, black as 
 mould, on stones that were smeared with a new red 
 lacquer. The face? It was hidden by a folded arm, 
 of which the hand trailed and soaked on the pavement. 
 
 They lifted this arm to reveal the face. The great 
 dead arm trembled in the hand that gripped it. 
 
 "He's not stiff yet," they said. 
 
 21 
 
22 WE OTHERS 
 
 Assuredly, the crime was recent quite near to us. 
 We looked awkwardly at the door, with a confused 
 vision of the murderer in our eyes that frightful 
 visitor! Then our looks returned together- for we 
 were united in a sort of infirmity to the face, the face 
 which gradually, as we grew used to the half-light, 
 appeared at our feet. 
 
 We could not see it clearly. Ah, my friends, that 
 was because it had shape no longer ! It had been ham- 
 mered, crushed. Flat-nosed and broken, it looked like 
 the face of a lion. It shone all over when we brought 
 a lighted candle near. 
 
 It indicated no terror or rage or anguish, nothing. 
 It was too far destroyed to express agony. We could 
 not know what sort of outcry or groan had prolonged 
 the black opening of the mouth. 
 
 We turned away, then, from the man changed into 
 a monster. 
 
 "The other one?" some one hazarded. 
 
 The other ? He was there, for certain, since he was 
 unable to stir. 
 
 We saw him indeed, with his ghastly face, in his 
 usual corner, glued to the back of the armchair, his 
 hands hanging like rags on the arms. 
 
 The paralytic! This old man, who had come to 
 spend near his only relation the rest of a life lived else- 
 where, had been stricken with disease a year or more. 
 He had vegetated for a year, totally helpless, rooted in 
 that armchair. 
 
 The little life left to him was tenacious. His feeble 
 breath remained fast fixed in some corners of his 
 frame, and the secret, obstinate pit-pat of his heart 
 
IMMOBILITY 23 
 
 kept time with the oozing of his gums upon his lips. 
 A bluish gleam floated in his eye, and now and then 
 a look seemed to liquefy in the middle of his flabby, 
 creamy face. He saw, and perhaps he thought; but 
 to move one single finger, that was forbidden him! 
 In the hands of the charwoman he was like an empty 
 coat. 
 
 "Ah," I murmured, "he saw, and he knows!" 
 
 "That's true!" said the others, grimacing. 
 
 Imagine the horror of the butchery done quite close 
 to him who was no more use than a lifeless thing to 
 protect his good companion, his benevolent relation! 
 Who knows even if the assassin had seen him this 
 half-dead man, enshrouded but unburied? 
 
 Such were the nightmare glimpses, the disturbing 
 theories that assailed us all for meanwhile the whole 
 village had come running upon our heels. 
 
 Then came the police, for the pursuit of the mur- 
 derer. 
 
 It was not difficult to find the guilty one. Taking 
 no precaution, he had allowed accusing clues to remain. 
 Undoubtedly he was a brute. So at two in the after- 
 noon, with no hesitation in their quest, the police sur- 
 prised him on the edge of a spinney, bound him and 
 led him away. A brute indeed he was, with his ro- 
 tund trunk like a bundle of dirty linen, his head brist- 
 ling with yellow hair, and a beard as hard as a boar's 
 bristles. 
 
 The savage tried clumsily to simulate insanity by 
 means of a series of ape-like antics and little inarticu- 
 late cries. But pressed with pitiless proofs, he took 
 refuge in silence and lowered the couch-grass mass of 
 
24 WE OTHERS 
 
 his rough head. When they showed him the blood- 
 bespattered stick he put the finishing touch to the mat- 
 ter by losing countenance, and they saw his slug-like 
 lips tremble among the quills of his beard. Yet he 
 confessed nothing, and still less agreed to tell, in spite 
 of police wiles and cajolery, where he had hidden the 
 iron-bound casket which, as everybody knew, con- 
 tained the money. 
 
 However, our poor big Michalon would have been 
 quickly avenged if suspicion had not fallen the same 
 day, and been followed by multiplying evidence, on a 
 gipsy who had been at our door on the fatal night, at 
 an hour which coincided with the speculations of jus- 
 tice. 
 
 The other man was an honest idiot. Opinion went 
 right-about-face in his favour. But things muddled 
 themselves so far and so well that they could never 
 say which of the two had robbed and killed, though 
 confident that it was one or the other. Of the iron- 
 bound casket there was no trace! Willy-nilly, the 
 magistrate had to get out of it by declaring "no case" 
 generally. 
 
 As for me, this uncertainty touching the criminal 
 vexed me curiously. I took the matter to heart, cap- 
 tivated first by a desire and then by a passion, to know 
 the truth. 
 
 But neither my willingness nor my personal en- 
 quiries brought me any result, and like the magistrate 
 I was forced to be content to abandon the mysterious 
 problem. 
 
 I did this with such an ill grace that my disposition 
 and even my health suffered. I became nervous! 
 
IMMOBILITY 25 
 
 And that accounts for the careless folly which in- 
 duced me a few weeks later, one night when I was 
 driving home, to flog my horse, the skittish Pierrot 
 and a storm raging, too ! 
 
 What had to happen did happen, in the last half- 
 mile, and in sight of the houses. Pierrot bolted. I 
 spare you the details of how that runaway horse 
 dashed into the narrow streets in the midst of the 
 dense darkness, of whirling water, and lightning 
 flashes. 
 
 In bewilderment I grazed along walls, and a breath 
 of their dreadful nearness reached me as we sped. 
 Should I jump out? Suddenly a frightful shock was 
 followed by a light that burst forth. It seemed to 
 me that a wall had been rent asunder, and before I 
 rolled in the mud / saw! 
 
 I lay on the ground, gasping, shuddering, dis- 
 tracted not by reason of the shock or the danger, nor 
 of Death which had touched me and passed by; but 
 because of what I had seen! 
 
 The wall, as I said, gaped open. The shaft of the 
 carriage had smashed in the shutter of a little bolted 
 window, and through that gaping wound my glance 
 had rushed into a room. 
 
 I saw a man, standing and stooping over an iron- 
 bound casket, in which his hands were stirring gold 
 coins. I saw the big back of that man tremble at the 
 crash of the shattered shutter; I saw one hand go out 
 towards a gnarled stick that I knew. Above all, I saw 
 the ghastly face that had borrowed the tawny gleam of 
 the gold and yes, the rush of the gale did not put the 
 lamp out soon enough to hide that face from me. 
 
26 WE OTHERS 
 
 It was the paralytic. It was the murderer! 
 
 It was the strange, the supernatural shammer, plot- 
 ter of the most tangled and hellish of crimes a crime 
 that I shall unravel by degrees, but whose bewildering 
 riddle I possess at last. It was the monster whose 
 imperturbable fortitude and patience had played for 
 a year the sinister role of a lifeless thing! And for a 
 moment, stunned by a plethora of thoughts, I lay para- 
 lysed because he was there, so near he whose im- 
 mobility was victorious, and reigned like that of idols, 
 like that of the earth. 
 
SCARLET THREAD 
 
 FOR all those reasons, and for many others/' con- 
 tinued the foul person, "I had decided to kill that 
 rich old lady." 
 
 With eyes that were streaked with alcoholic lines 
 he regarded his huge hands, hooked and grey, planted 
 before him like two crabs. Then our ignoble speaker 
 went on : 
 
 "Her name ? I won't tell you it not at all because 
 I'm afraid, for by now the term of the warrant has 
 amply passed but because I don't remember it. Any- 
 way, let her be called Mother So-and-so or Madame 
 Thingumbob, it's none the less true that she was as 
 rich as I was poor, that she was putting by much more 
 than I was running into debt for in the village, that 
 she was as stingy in her food as I wasn't in drink ; in 
 short, that there was, on purpose, too much differ- 
 ence for it to last between this independent lady, over- 
 whelmed by old age, and the young workman without 
 a job that I was. 
 
 "So it was necessary, then, for me to do away with 
 her. She lived in the big house, which still exists such 
 as it is, opposite the miserable stone hut where I was 
 burrowing before the affair in question. She went 
 to bed every day at seven o'clock except in summer, 
 when she stayed up till half-past. Infallibly she got 
 up at four, and that suddenly, like a jack-in-the-box, 
 
 27 
 
28 WE OTHERS 
 
 and began to rove about the house in the black dark, 
 the grey, or the dull pink, according to the season. 
 
 "Her hoard was hidden in a rotten sabot, mixed with 
 other sabots and rubbish that encumbered the window- 
 less pantry that led out of her room. An unheard-of 
 chance, a heavenly miracle, had let me know about the 
 sabot. From then it was natural that the idea of tak- 
 ing that prize should spur me on, even though I should, 
 in passing, put the objectionable old lady definitely out 
 of action. 
 
 "This so simple and humane idea, one which all of 
 you would have had in my place, I remained a long 
 time without realising, I confess. Although I pleaded 
 guilty every time I saw the vixen go by with her yel- 
 low hair, her yellowish face, and a trailing leg hitched 
 behind the other so used up and thin that one won- 
 dered by what chance her bones still hung together- 4 , 
 still I did not act. 
 
 "One afternoon, however, when Pour sin had called 
 to me from his shop door that he'd take me to court 
 for that everlasting trifle of thirty-three and a half 
 francs, the afternoon when I went to dig Blanchissot's 
 asparagus bed (that's what he was called), uneasiness 
 came over me. What if the old woman died of 
 senility, and the heirs publicly stole the hoard! Or 
 if some one else adopted my plan, and, more prudent 
 than I, did what I ought to have done! A slight 
 trembling tickled my spine. Although alone, I snarled 
 aloud, and resolved to do it that night. 
 
 "At ten o'clock, when it was as dark as inside a 
 pudding, I got up. I put on two jackets, one on top 
 of the other, and two pairs of trousers, shoved my 
 
SCARLET THREAD 29 
 
 knife and my pipe in my pocket, and took my lantern 
 under my arm. Then I opened the door and crossed 
 the road, with no end of precaution, for it was so 
 dark I think I've told you that already you couldn't 
 poke your finger in your eye. 
 
 "I reached the enemy house. My foot stumbled 
 against the step, my hand touched the wood of the 
 door and then groped, flitting like a bat, up to the 
 latch. The bolt was shot, and resisted with all its 
 might. But I knew that by leaning on the door one 
 got a half-open line of access. Through this slender 
 cleft the point of a knife would find room to penetrate 
 and get a hold on the staple. 
 
 "Thanks to this method, I opened the door of the 
 house where the odious old woman kept the money. 
 I also broke the point of my knife on the job, and it 
 fell with a little sharp noise on the floor-tiles. I did 
 not linger to pick it up, but put back the knife in my 
 pocket. I shut the door, trying with all the might 
 of my muscles to go slowly and lightly, to make no 
 more noise than the clock was making, with its death- 
 like breathing. 
 
 "Slowly, with one hand outstretched, like a blind 
 ghost, I advanced towards the fireplace. I knew that 
 the infernal old lady's matches were above, in a round 
 tin box. I grasped them with a shudder, as if already 
 I was fingering the first of the treasure that lay hidden 
 there, protected by the creature's body. I lit the 
 lantern. Then I slid the tin box, which impeded my 
 hands, into my pocket. 
 
 "I steered towards the door of the bedroom, not 
 without a collision that made my pipe fall from my 
 
30 WE OTHERS 
 
 overfull pocket. I went into the room with the lan- 
 tern and the knife. 
 
 "It was a quick job two minutes perhaps. Then 
 I got at the precious rubbish of which I had thought 
 for months as other people think of heaven. When 
 I pulled the bundle of notes out of the dirty old sabot 
 and the heap of old lumber scattered and bristling 
 there, it seemed to me as if I were a wizard, working 
 a miracle, and bringing something back to life! 
 
 "I lost no time in wondering, but recrossed the bed- 
 room. I looked at the bed. I saw I saw in short, 
 I was reassured. I passed my hand over my moist 
 forehead. The movement made my cap fall, almost 
 at the foot of i the bed. Following it with my eyes, 
 I saw my knife, lying on the floor. I had let it fall 
 inadvertently, just before. So it was beached on the 
 floor in the middle of of what had run down. 
 Quickly I turned away, quitted all that, regained the 
 outer room, and skirted the walls and the fireplace, 
 where the deep ashes muffled the sound of my steps, 
 although I had on my big iron-shod boots so big 
 that people made game of them in the village. 
 
 "The door it was so dark that I bumped the wall 
 near the threshold, and broke the glass of my lantern. 
 The harsh noise of the falling glass set me trembling 
 and affected me so that, a moment later, with a nerv- 
 ous movement, I dropped the lantern itself on the 
 road, which I had reached at last. 
 
 "A few steps and I was at home. I pushed the 
 door never fast shut, however and without even 
 taking the trouble to close it, I undressed. With 
 feverish haste I threw my boots, trousers and jacket 
 
SCARLET THREAD 31 
 
 in a corner, and I took easily understandable pains 
 not to touch a stain that the coat had on one side. 
 
 "That done, I went barefoot and buried the nice 
 soft notes in Blanchissot's asparagus bed there was 
 only a grass meadow to cross. 
 
 "An hour later I was snoring although all the 
 cpld in space blew on me through the open door. 
 
 "And then, my good, my excellent sirs," the in- 
 famous brute concluded, "all came off as I had in- 
 tended. 
 
 "Justice arrived in the form of a person got up 
 entirely in black. And this man, who looked like a 
 widower, had a little gleam in his eye when he picked 
 the knife up on the spot and they told him it was mine. 
 He showed agitation when the ownership of the cap 
 was also made clear to him by the spectators. He 
 started when he learned that the pipe was also mine. 
 But he frowned when he knew the origin of the foot- 
 prints left in the ashes 'Decidedly they're his big 
 boots!' He shrugged his shoulders nervously when 
 they found on the road between our two houses the 
 carcass of my lantern, and uttered an ill-tempered ex- 
 clamation when he ascertained that the door of my 
 house had remained wide open all the night. 
 
 "He altered at that moment, and a sneering smile 
 adorned the rigid wooden lines of his face. He 
 nodded his head with an understanding air when they 
 pulled my blood-stained clothes from behind my bed, 
 and murmured, 'To be sure!' When the round box 
 rolled on the floor he said, Td have bet on it!' At 
 the first words which I stammered, with my face 
 drawn with fright as though by threads, to tell him 
 
32 WE OTHERS 
 
 I thought I had dreamed that some people had come 
 into my room during the night, he looked at me with 
 all the kindness his ugly face could manage, and said 
 to me, 'I knew it, my friend !' 
 
 "In short, I had piled up so much obvious evidence 
 against me that I had cleared myself! He who tries 
 to prove too much proves nothing! In life, one 
 should know how to make use of proverbs, which at 
 bottom are very well done. 
 
 "A single little imprudence would have marked me 
 out as the culprit. Ten huge imprudences indicated 
 me positively to all as the man who had not done it. 
 By dint of blackening myself, I was turned into the 
 unfortunate victim of barbarous plots, sewn together 
 with scarlet thread as the man in mourning said. 
 
 "That was my way. Whether new or old, it's 
 good. I make a present of it to those imaginative 
 people who are tempted by adventure, or to those who 
 are satisfied to set up their schemes in silly old books, 
 and devote their lucrative ideas to business." 
 
THE WATCHMAN 
 
 THE palings stretched out and out, like innumer- 
 able figures of men, around the future section 
 of the future town. For they had decided up there 
 or down there, at New York or Montreal, I don't 
 know where to make a town there. 
 
 While waiting for this tract of prairie (where old- 
 style farmers smoked their pipes up to the last min- 
 ute) to be changed into a new town, with its branch of 
 the National Bank, its Chamber of Commerce, its 
 two universities, its four cinemas, and its five Dis- 
 senting Chapels, the huge slice of Canadian territory 
 presented an intermediate appearance. It was a 
 marsh, a dirty marsh, crowded with building-stone, 
 prickly with scaffolding, perforated by gas-lamps with 
 the diameter of a well ; here the world of work-people 
 employed by the company swarmed and waded. 
 
 I was one of them. Bill Nogg, Sam Sharp, and 
 Joe McColl were, too; and Jep Joyce as well, though 
 he was not so all the time, on account of the dram of 
 alcohol that fell on his fate, and of the adventure to 
 which we are coming without seeming to, just as in 
 life. 
 
 In course of time, at the season of the two gen- 
 eral meetings of the Company they talked about 
 those meetings, but I never understood what they 
 were we worked day and night. But in the early 
 
 33 
 
34 WE OTHERS 
 
 days every gang left the building-yard at nightfall, 
 and it remained through the night as empty as the 
 tavern was on Sundays and the chapels on week-days. 
 
 Every night Mr. Pew, the man with the terrible 
 spectacles, placed a watchman in the yard, arming 
 him with peremptory instructions and two revolvers, 
 huge enough to machine-gun a village. 
 
 Nothing was more necessary than this watchman; 
 for the yard, with its alleys and holes and corners, 
 might easily have become a lair or den; and besides, 
 the copper cable heaped up there stood for a market- 
 able value that we did not fail to appreciate. 
 
 Without wishing to disparage ourselves wantonly, 
 I must tell you that we were all merry fellows of 
 dubious standing, either because they knew nothing 
 of our antecedents, or because they knew them too 
 well. You will understand that you could not demand 
 certificates of integrity, signed by the Pope or General 
 Booth, from gentlemen who bore a burden of hard 
 labour and were thousands of miles from the nearest 
 centre of civilisation. It was necessary to rely on 
 citizens who had some motive for remaining remote 
 from the said centre. 
 
 However, there were among us, by the way of con- 
 trast, two men who were integrity and honesty incar- 
 nate; Joshua Simpson, and that Jep Joyce of whom I 
 told you just now in a way, I hope at least, that excited 
 your curiosity. 
 
 So Mr. Pew, the spectacled under-manager, had 
 chosen Jep at once as night watchman, and every 
 evening, after he had installed him, he came away 
 gleefully striking the muddy ground with his stick, his 
 
THE WATCHMAN 35 
 
 bat-like cloak flapping widely in the wind, his owl- 
 like face grinning with content. 
 
 Mr. Pew, who hardly ever slept, used to return in 
 vain to the yard, no matter what the time, slipping 
 about in the mud, and poke his pointed nose over the 
 top of the palings or into the crevice between two 
 boards Jep was there at his post in the shadows, 
 standing, head erect, his two great revolvers tugging 
 at his arms like bundles. 
 
 Then over the physiognomy of Mr. Pew there de- 
 fined itself a devilish grimace, which was no other 
 than a smile. 
 
 From the month of May to the month of July brave 
 Jep did not cease to be the faultless watchman. We 
 used to get a glimpse of him in the evening, when he 
 woke up. What a bearing the chap had! Never a 
 strong word nor a sign of obscenity. I'll be damned 
 if he knew where the Godmother's Arms was! If 
 you offered him a glass, he politely refused like 
 Joshua in that, who seized the chance of such invita- 
 tions to turn up his eyeballs and talk to you about his 
 mother and sister. 
 
 Now, one night in July Mr. Pew, whose meagre 
 body was an untiring machine, approached by moon- 
 light the west fence of the yard, among the gleaming 
 puddles. 
 
 The poor fellow was obliged to grip the stakes with 
 those hands that were dry as his nails! Outlined 
 against the bluish sky, on the top of a pile of squared 
 stones, our Jep was doing a reeling dance! 
 
 He was drunk ! How could he, he who had till then 
 been so impenetrable by alcohol of any sort or colour, 
 
36 WE OTHERS 
 
 how could he have yielded to the general affection for 
 that devil of a drug? It was a mystery. The fact is, 
 however, that he was colossally, phantasmagorically 
 tipsy. 
 
 The old boy vibrated, summoned up his strength, 
 tightened the strings of his tendons, hurled himself to 
 the gate and through it, climbed the limestone hillock 
 at the top of which the other man continued his mar- 
 ionette dance under the pallor of the sky, seized Jep, 
 turned him and toppled him down, dragged him out 
 of the yard, and threw the heavy mass into a rut. 
 
 And Jep forthwith went to sleep in the rut, bliss- 
 ful, and gazing at the moon. 
 
 Mr. Pew, all a-flutter, his thin grey cloak flapping 
 about him, ran to the huts where we lodged, and after 
 several thumps on the shutters, with scolding and 
 persuasive clamour, took Joshua away. 
 
 He established Joshua in the yard, after having 
 rapidly explained how great a hop Jep had become, 
 and put into his hand a revolver the other having 
 doubtless fallen among the stone blocks at the time of 
 Jep's expulsion. 
 
 This done, Mr. Pew went to bed. Ah, his was a 
 sterling nature, and you may look where you will, my 
 dear friends, to find his equal, now that the old box 
 of tricks is broken and its fragments confined by fate 
 at the bottom of a coffin ! 
 
 All this that I have related happened pell-mell at 
 nine p.m. Towards midnight the rut where Jep was 
 piled up stirred and groaned. 
 
 It was Jep, awaking. The cold was intense. The 
 peculiar thing about drunkards who are sobered by 
 
THE WATCHMAN 37 
 
 cold is, as you know, that they cannot recall the cir- 
 cumstances which accompanied the period of intoxica- 
 tion. With haggard face he yawned, and if one may 
 say so, he yawned with his eyes as well. He looked 
 about him, saw nothing, lifted his right fist and found 
 his revolver, lifted his left fist to his face and verified 
 that it held no revolver; then he felt a dull pain in 
 his back. 
 
 A moment later, extended and erect, he remem- 
 bered suddenly that he ought to have been, at this 
 hour of the night, in the yard and protecting it. His 
 memory whispered nothing more to him. 
 
 He trudged towards the gate contrived in the pal- 
 ings, almost smelling the way, for the moon had 
 drowned itself somewhere. He sought his key, en- 
 tered, and with the weapon in his fist resumed his 
 vigil as if nothing had happened, rigid and alert as a 
 snare ! 
 
 The top of his head was still a bit turbid, befogged 
 by a sort of bad dream gone away; but the conception 
 of his professional duty was so riveted in the brain 
 and heart of the man that before he became himself 
 again he became the perfect watchman! 
 
 And now, quite naturally, behold our Jep as he sud- 
 denly starts and outstretches his neck towards a 
 shadow that moves, down there, at the foot of the 
 hillock of building-stone. He himself was planted 
 like a lighthouse just at the end of the storehouse of 
 iron girders. He cried, "Who goes there ?" Echo 
 replied precisely, "Who goes there?" and in the black 
 silence there were two little clicks, the kind produced 
 in opening the locks of certain revolvers. 
 
38 WE OTHERS 
 
 Three days later, while we were taking poor Joshua 
 and poor Jep to the cemetery side by side just as 
 they had been picked up we said to ourselves that 
 one may sometimes be a criminal and yet not be a 
 criminal, and that there are accursed complications in 
 life! 
 
 But above all, my companions and I, we who were 
 but lately acquainted with the convict-prison and other 
 places, it grieved us to be condemned never again to 
 see Joshua and Jep. Their eyes were so frank and 
 honest that we had never looked upon anything here 
 below more beautiful than their faces. 
 
BLIND JUSTICE 
 
 A SSUREDLY," said J. K. Alec Columbus, "I'm 
 ** no great shakes. Without being, properly speak- 
 ing, a rascal, I've been so much associated with rough 
 people in the Klondyke country that I can't swear I've 
 always been exactly a saint. Bah ! In our trade, ad- 
 venturers and hunters, scattered by the winds, isolated 
 in solitude without end, and chopped up with cold, 
 little slips don't matter. And doesn't it seem very 
 nice, nevertheless, to be administering the laws of 
 good old Britannia in a country hooked somewhere 
 up there to the Arctic Circle, where the trams are 
 drawn by dogs, where people die like flies, and where 
 towns spring up like mushrooms?" 
 
 Our speaker emptied a glass of whiskey, put it 
 down, poured out another and drank that too; for he 
 could not bear either full glasses or empty ones. 
 Then he looked out, from the bow window of his little 
 bungalow at Epsorn where we were, upon the Eng- 
 lish landscape green, yellow and red, so clean and 
 tidy that it seemed just to have received the last touch 
 of varnish and come straight out of the shop. 
 
 He had himself brought back from the North 
 American lands, where he had gathered wealth, a 
 taste for rich colours. He was bedecked in a green 
 waistcoat and a blood-red tie ; and his great head, set 
 
 39 
 
40 WE OTHERS 
 
 on his broad and glistening collar with turned-down 
 points, was comparable to a sirloin on a dish. 
 
 "However that may be/* he went on, "I was a 
 seraphim by the side of Daniel Coffin Butter shaw. 
 This damned Dan was a shameful scamp. Now that 
 the time has gone by, and I've thought about it, I'm 
 more and more sure that Danny killed the old Jew 
 shopkeeper. 
 
 "That story is a surprising one. It's one of the 
 most curious that we used to tell five years ago, on 
 the trail, during the spare moments in journeys so 
 devilishly long that you could follow the stages from 
 week to week on a map of the world no bigger than 
 your hand. 
 
 "Now my Coffin Buttershaw was evidently the mur- 
 derer of the unfortunate trader, who was found by 
 the light of the moon with his nose to the ground, 
 and his beard so frozen into the snow that it had to 
 be thawed out with matches. There was no doubt 
 about it in my mind or in that of the lurid scoundrel's 
 friends; he had done the job for a dirty matter of a 
 money-bag. We hoped greatly to see him hanged. 
 Unfortunately, no sort of proof could be brought 
 against him, and we had to bury the matter along with 
 the Jew. We were forced, too, we who were Danny's 
 companions, to continue his company as before, to 
 laugh at his jokes, and prepare damned schemes with 
 him; these are of the necessities of existence. The 
 robber! I can see him now as I see you, with his 
 snout-like face, his rat's eyes, his bristling, fish-bone 
 moustache, and his grilled cheeks. He was skinny as 
 a rail, his joints were terribly knotted, and nothing 
 
BLIND JUSTICE 41 
 
 was funnier than to see him stop in front of you, wav- 
 ing his lobster-like claws at the end of his emaciated 
 arms. Ah, the bankrupt cur! 
 
 "In short, off we went again into the country, him, 
 me, and two other gold-seekers of the same stamp, 
 having on our consciences either a crime, like him, or 
 a few deals of a delicate sort, like me. And willy- 
 nilly we were obliged to work together in a sort of 
 partnership. 
 
 "Then, one fine day, Coffin left us. Or rather we 
 left him. Hem! How can I explain that? You'll 
 understand me in the end. You must know that one 
 Innonit, arrived from the North, told my two other 
 companions and myself that there was an unknown 
 gold-field, some months' march away from Fort Yu- 
 kon, towards the frontier of the Dominion. Instinc- 
 tively what? We didn't breathe a word of it to 
 Coffin. Certainly we were partners with him. But 
 that doesn't alter the fact that one-third's worth more 
 than a quarter, eh? And then we remembered, ex- 
 actly at that moment, the story of the Jew, and better 
 late than never we realised all the horror there was 
 in living with such a brigand. Besides, our action 
 was much more excusable because that ass of an In- 
 nonit had had us disgustingly, and his gold-field had 
 no existence. (I have never since thought again 
 about that brute, so much it hurts me that I didn't 
 strangle him.) 
 
 "I've told you enough about him for you to under- 
 stand with what speed and what precautions we aban- 
 doned our Coffin one morning on the road if I may 
 put in that way. He was so full of whiskey that he 
 
42 WE OTHERS 
 
 would not wake up within six hours from then un- 
 less he preferred to have apoplexy. That was his 
 look-out, eh? He hadn't asked for the Jew's opinion 
 when he left him, after putting him to sleep with his 
 face in the snow! 
 
 "What happened to us, then? First, disappoint- 
 ments, failures, adventures, and herculean labour. 
 After we had undergone all that, I returned to Eng- 
 land rich, and settled down in this place, which I 
 bought honestly. 
 
 "And what happened to him? I found out after- 
 wards and am going to tell you. Being without re- 
 sources naturally we had taken certain precautions 
 concerning the dangerous blackguard he hired him- 
 self on to a farm in the nearest gold-bearing district. 
 He worked hard, from morning to night and from 
 night to morning, for he backed out of nothing, not 
 even work, and he hoped the son of vermin ! to put 
 a little money by, and so be able to plunge again into 
 the pursuit of gold, and of us! So for two months 
 he worked with all his might, demolishing the jobs of 
 a beast of burden. The farmer was delighted to have 
 such an all-round machine in his service, and for those 
 two months Coffin led a really exemplary life. 
 
 "But one midnight, behold, some men broke in upon 
 the little niche where he was sleeping, the cattle-shed 
 being chock-full on account of new-born beasts. 
 These men were the sheriff and four powerful fellows 
 who constituted the police force of the neighbourhood. 
 They shook friend Coffin without any consideration. 
 Bewildered and heavy with sleep, yawning, grumbling, 
 
BLIND JUSTICE 43 
 
 and opening the right eye and the left eye in turn, he 
 was hauled outside, half dressed. 
 
 " 'No resistance, my lad,' said the sheriff, 'they saw 
 you do the job/ 
 
 "'What job?' growled our ex-friend, who was be- 
 ginning to get cross about this manoeuvre in the icy 
 air. 
 
 "As they believed him rebellious, the most formida- 
 ble of the force advanced and administered the knock- 
 out in half a round. 
 
 "When he came round, the sheriff was in front of 
 him, in a little guard-house where a stove was snor- 
 ing; and he was adjured to tell the whole truth touch- 
 ing the murder of the old girl. 
 
 "Yes, exactly. Daniel Coffin Buttershaw was ac- 
 cused of having sent into another world a hoary- 
 headed lady whom he'd never seen! At first stupe- 
 fied, the scamp floundered and shouted and stormed. 
 But alas! I say 'alas' on his account, of course 
 a terrible bundle of circumstances overwhelmed him. 
 He had been seen where the crime had taken place; 
 the knife which had pierced the venerable victim was 
 his. He defended himself badly. When confronted 
 with the little mummy, his bearing was adjudged cyn- 
 ical. He could not prove an alibi. Losing his head, 
 he accused everybody of the crime, including the 
 sheriff himself! In short, they put a rope round his 
 neck one cold and snowy evening. 
 
 " 'Wait, wait, please P cried some one who came 
 up with his hair flying. 
 
 "He was a Catholic priest. The holy man had pre- 
 
44 WE OTHERS 
 
 cise knowledge that Coffin was innocent, having heard 
 the confession of the real culprit. 
 
 "But it happened you know how ferocious local 
 dislikes are in little places, and so it is no matter 
 where that the sheriff was on bad terms with the 
 priest. So he looked on him satirically as he re- 
 quested him, in that case, to name the guilty party. 
 As the priest refused, pleading the secrecy of the con- 
 fessional, the sheriff turned to the hangman and bade 
 him hoist the culprit into the air. 
 
 "While the hangman was obeying, the priest, held 
 back by two policemen, gesticulated and stammered 
 'It's an abominable injustice, a monstrous crime! 
 God will curse you! Beware of his malediction!' 
 
 "And a thousand other things of the same sort. 
 
 "God! I can imagine that He, who had from high 
 heaven seen all Coffin's life- time from the first act, 
 must rather have smiled some." 
 
THE WAG 
 
 THE life led by His Gracious Majesty's troops at 
 Dorsahabad was infinitely, rigidly mournful. 
 The district defined in the inferno of the North- West, 
 the limit of the vast Indian continent. It was bare, 
 consisting merely of a marsh, the green spectre of 
 meadows. 
 
 In the middle of this territory which would have 
 been a sea in Europe, but here was dwindled to a pud- 
 dle the Empire's boundary submerged itself, the line 
 where the English universe fits into Asia. 
 
 The station was an important one because of that 
 frontier. Sorrowfully as it arose out of the marsh- 
 land, by the side of the heap of streets that looked 
 like a cemetery and was really the town, our little fort 
 was placed like a landmark on a world's threshold. 
 That became clear, sometimes and suddenly, when we 
 happened to descry with the field-glass, far away yon- 
 der to the North, a horseman in an astrakhan cap. 
 
 And that is why we were so many and so select in 
 this derelict southern barracks. 
 
 That also is why, one year, in the heart of our regi- 
 ment, there were those frightful outrages, and those 
 three bombs. 
 
 The bombs were thrown by men disguised as sol- 
 diers who had mixed themselves among us. The af- 
 fair was Anarchist or Fenian. Anarchists are inver- 
 
 45 
 
46 WE OTHERS 
 
 tebrate sociologists; Fenians are Irishmen gone rotten. 
 The Committee, lurking somewhere in the United 
 States, and having at their command the unlimited 
 wealth of traitors, had decided to destroy the staff of 
 one of the outermost Indian garrisons by way of a 
 big stroke that would be within the whole world's 
 vision. 
 
 The long arm of the Committee had scattered its 
 emissaries in the North. Planted in the fort, in the 
 form of old soldiers, and by no one knows what in- 
 fernally patient plotting, the ringleaders aimed at ex- 
 ploding mutiny and dynamite. 
 
 The mutiny miscarried. As for the bombs, un- 
 fortunately, they did not miss. But they only caused 
 some wounds, which were soon cured. As for the 
 perpetrators, three of them were cured radically. 
 Others were put into safe keeping for life. 
 
 The Committee went to earth somewhere else, not 
 without saying that they would begin over again. 
 True, nobody could say where or when or how the 
 Committee had said it. 
 
 In spite of the extensive weeding-out which fol- 
 lowed, all we of the garrison set ourselves to keep our 
 eyes open, to take notice and watch. 
 
 A little later, ashamed that we had not unmasked 
 the sinister sham soldiers, we applied ourselves to our 
 own surveillance as to a duty and a fate, and I assure 
 you that it would have needed a miracle for the im- 
 postures and outrages to begin again. 
 
 Pat set about it like the rest. 
 
 Pat was the good genius of the military exiles of 
 
THE WAG 47 
 
 Dorsahabad, in the sense that their only diversion for 
 years had been to laugh at him. 
 
 He did that on his own, too Gad, didn't he ! and 
 I've never met a merrier dog. He was an Irishman, 
 from a root of strong quality. Indeed, he reminded 
 you of a root by his knotty fingers and his greyish 
 face, at once flattened and lumpy. But by way of 
 amends for that plain aspect, nature had finished him 
 off with a head of hair as scarlet as the gaudy mop 
 of the clown in pantomime. 
 
 He was recognised and noticed everywhere by that 
 clean red blot, as if he had carried a light. It put his 
 face into uniform, so to speak, and crowned him as 
 a great national joker. 
 
 In fact Pat had never never, mind you, and I use 
 the big word without flinching let a chance go by of 
 saying or doing some pleasantry, of carrying on like 
 a marionette by the help of his wooden arms and legs 
 or of cleaving with explosive laughter the cemented 
 bas-relief of his face. 
 
 But in spite of this tireless foolery, in spite even of 
 the "Bengal fire" so inadequately extinguished by his 
 cap, this Pat was an excellent soldier. He could re- 
 cite the verses of the drill manual backwards, and his 
 courage was of countless proofs. 
 
 So in our life of internal watchfulness and self- 
 examination, several circumstances proved that he was 
 not the least zealous. 
 
 As for poking fun at those affairs of lurking an- 
 archist ringleaders and the like, you may imagine he 
 took the chance ! He was always mimicking the con- 
 spirators. 
 
48 WE OTHERS 
 
 Often in the non-coms' square of blinding light and 
 crowding gossipers, you saw him appear enveloped 
 in a big black cloak, and rattling with a whole armoury 
 of weapons as he crept along the wall with all the 
 necessary melodramatic mimicry. He used to crawl 
 as far as the door, unmoved by our laughter, his wide 
 mouth set with gravity, his big bluish eye steady as a 
 night-light. 
 
 You follow me? The simple fact that they let him 
 apply his tricks to that sort of souvenir will give you 
 a much better idea of his popularity and ability than 
 all my feeble remarks and poor descriptions I who 
 only know how to edit service reports and tickets. 
 
 One day he went farther ; this time indeed he passed 
 the limit. We were all there in the guard-room, 
 awaiting the report of the officers who were assembled 
 close by. 
 
 The black and obscure outline of Pat appeared in 
 the doorway. 
 
 "How's that for a bomb!" he shouted at the top of 
 his voice. 
 
 He came in, carrying an enormous bomb, with a 
 piece of string hanging from it that looked red. The 
 big devil showed all the signs of intense terror. He 
 kept pretending to drop it, only to catch it again in 
 flight with the clumsiness of the accomplished juggler, 
 and uttering the little chuckles of a pretty woman. 
 Assuredly, even if the vessel only contained harmless 
 soup it would most certainly have spread itself over 
 the neighbourhood ! Luckily it was no such thing, and 
 we were left unstained. 
 
 Then he hugged his bomb in his arms and pressed 
 
THE WAG 49 
 
 it on his heart upside down. Then with little steps, 
 and absurdly rigid, indicating the bomb with desperate 
 excitement in his eyes, he placed it at the foot of the 
 wall. 
 
 That done, he sighed and mopped his forehead, and 
 as he looked at us a smile reflected our laughter on his 
 spacious face. Then once more, grimaces and antics. 
 He trembled on his long thin legs, pretended he had 
 arrived at the limit of fright, jumped up with his feet 
 together, bunged his ears up and went off at last like 
 a whirlwind. 
 
 I was doing sentry-go at the door of the guard- 
 room. Having gone just inside to watch the perform- 
 ance of our official jester, I resumed my post. In 
 amusement I went a few paces into the yard, so that 
 I could see the clown better as he galloped off with in- 
 credibly long strides exactly like those with which 
 comic artists extend the legs of sprinters in sketches. 
 
 To that action of mine I owed it that I was not 
 mangled with the rest when the terrible explosion 
 came that turned the frontier fort into a battlefield. 
 
THE GREEN SPECTRE 
 
 Reverend Mr. Parish was as rigid as a 
 corpse; he was alive all the same. From morn- 
 ing to night he devoted himself to all the pursuits en- 
 joined by heaven upon a pastor and an upright man. 
 He made certain the services of his denomination, 
 preached, prayed, talked to his sons sometimes as 
 one preaches and sometimes as one prays and even 
 ventured into his little garden, to which his tall and 
 mournful outline then gave the semblance of a ceme- 
 tery. 
 
 His speech had no accentuation. His pale face had 
 no expression; it had petrified itself into a statuette, 
 and his wrinkles had become as invariable as the let- 
 ters of his name. 
 
 It was not alone his feeling towards the sacerdotal 
 life, his stern respect for principle, his inconsolable 
 passion for perfection, that gave him that icy mien, 
 that made the smiles of children fade away as he 
 passed, and daunted the fleeting joy of life one has 
 sometimes. 
 
 He bore an internal wound, the measureless remorse 
 of a crime, a crime done by his father in overt dis- 
 obedience to God. The Reverend Abel Parish had, 
 in fact, committed suicide. 
 
 Because of that suicide, Abel Parish was writhing 
 in hell. This idea was unpleasant to his son, and it 
 
 so 
 
THE GREEN SPECTRE 51 
 
 embarrassed him, compared with him who had given 
 him life, in preaching the necessary religion. 
 
 But this was not all. They who believe in and who 
 practise the true faith know that generations are bound 
 together by their acts as if with chains. The iniquity 
 of the fathers is visited upon the children, related 
 people being, in the eyes of the Lord, only people that 
 hang on to each other and drag themselves into the 
 abyss. 
 
 How had the act come about? The pastor was al- 
 ways passionately putting the question to himself ; and 
 from time to time his conversation would suddenly 
 cease, as he fell into urgent meditation that one re- 
 spected. Or it fell on him when alone in the garden, 
 black and notionless as a cypress. 
 
 One stormy night his father, on whose devout al- 
 legiance nothing had ever cast suspicion, had retired 
 into the green room, and they found him there the fol- 
 lowing day, breathing his last behind the locked door. 
 
 Placed upon his bed, with his two sons standing by 
 like funeral tapers, he had opened his eyes and stam- 
 mered, "The Green Spectre!" Then he fainted, re- 
 peating the expression which to those present sounded 
 like nothing good on the lips of a Christian. 
 
 The doctor bent down. He was young and anx- 
 ious. Fraternally he announced to the young people 
 that their father was dead. A little later they learned, 
 as a result of the inquiry and of the doctor's evidence, 
 that the author of their days had succumbed as the re- 
 sult of taking the devilish substance called arsenic into 
 the stomach. They lowered their heads in foresight 
 
52 WE OTHERS 
 
 of all the punishments to come, and from that day a 
 huge melancholy fell upon them. 
 
 The younger had since died, and the older one bore 
 alone in this world, at least all the family sorrow. 
 
 Often his steps led him to the green room in the 
 summer-house, and often he entered the little retreat, 
 where nothing had been altered since the accursed 
 happening. Its paper hung in strips and had devel- 
 oped velvety stains of intense green. 
 
 Resting on the old seat the shapeless and only wit- 
 ness of the un forgiven drama the son would set him- 
 self stubbornly to find the reasons for his father's 
 suicide. 
 
 Sometimes the fervency of the meditation, furi- 
 ously persisted in for the sake of both knowledge and 
 penance, seemed to pulverise his brain and cause vi- 
 sions. One evening he thought he saw something in 
 green upright beside him. The little cry that he gave 
 exorcised it. He was really alone in the pale room 
 of the summer-house, with its blue-black skylight. 
 There was nothing new ; between the indelible memory 
 of the crime and the greatness of God there was noth- 
 ing but a futile suppliant. 
 
 That year, when the anniversary of the error re- 
 turned, it seemed to him that people would be able, 
 henceforth as they went by, to read on his face as on 
 a signboard his misery and dread. 
 
 His age was that at which his father had destroyed 
 the life only lent to him, and thus brought future pun- 
 ishment on all his family. It was even on a night as 
 stormy as that other when the ageing son climbed the 
 
THE GREEN SPECTRE 53 
 
 stone steps of the neglected building, and went heavily 
 into the green room. 
 
 A sudden gust of wind banged the door behind him. 
 He tried to open it again, and failed. The driving 
 force of the gale had been such that the door of dis- 
 jointed boards had strained the old uneven frame into 
 which it fitted, while the bolt of the lock had bent and 
 wedged itself into projecting wood. 
 
 When he knew himself imprisoned there until the 
 morning, he sat down. He was not afraid to remain 
 all night in the funereal place. He was afraid of 
 nothing, save of the Lord's purposes concerning him, 
 and he began to think of his only thought. 
 
 A great weariness crumbled and destroyed his ideas, 
 and he went to sleep. Waking, he remembered that 
 he had just struggled and groaned. He opened his 
 eyes, and saw a hideous green figure, that hovered in 
 front of him. The spectre threw itself upon the man, 
 and drove its finger-nail into his temples. The pastor 
 tried to breathe out a moan, and fell in a heap. At 
 that moment the hurricane hurled itself more fiercely 
 than ever on the old summer-house, and a worm-eaten 
 rafter gave way. The roof fell in, and the wild and 
 streaming wind of the night rushed into the green 
 room, where the pastor lay like one of those sculp- 
 tured figures which here and there in the course of 
 centuries have begun their eternal slumber upon the 
 tombstones. 
 
 In the morning, when his sons had found him and 
 carried him to his bed, he struggled slightly, his eye- 
 lids fluttered, and he said, "The Green Spectre!" 
 
 The two sons, standing and rigid, had that in their 
 
54 WE OTHERS 
 
 eyes which trembled like the flames of funeral tapers. 
 The doctor he who had come there a generation be- 
 fore bent over the dying man. He heard the mur- 
 mur, and he too trembled. But after a minute he said, 
 "He will not die, this time." 
 
 In deep thought the physician withdrew ; he sought 
 and enquired. At the end of the day he came and 
 sat down by the bed where the pastor lay paralysed 
 with weakness, but his eyes open. 
 
 "It's the green," said the doctor. 
 
 He explained that the room in the summer-house 
 was poisonous, by reason of the green dust which had 
 gathered upon the tattered decorations. That dust, a 
 residuum of former paint, was a highly separated sedi- 
 ment from Scheele's green. It is alleged that pro- 
 longed stay in places where fine particles of this pig- 
 ment are found in suspension provokes frightful hal- 
 lucinations. And it is admitted that these illusions, in 
 the case of sensitive people and those weakened by old 
 age or some other cause, may give rise to terrible or- 
 ganic disorders. And 
 
 He was continuing, when a harsh cry broke off his 
 words. Half risen in bed, the sick man stared at him 
 with an unutterable look of eager rapture, and stam- 
 mered : 
 
 "Then my father did not kill himself?" 
 
 He burst into laughter of strange sound, laughter 
 come to life again after so many years, and cried, "He 
 did not kill himself! Then I am innocent! I am 
 innocent !" 
 
THE OTHERS 
 
 YES, I was born at St. Vincent," said the general 
 to the surgeon-major who was accompanying 
 him back to brigade headquarters; "I've got a house 
 down there waiting for me, and some day I shall go 
 back, to peter out there as obscurely as I was born/' 
 
 "Oh !" said the gold-laced surgeon deferentially, and 
 it seemed proper that he should add, "How long has 
 your absence been, General?" 
 
 "Fifty years!" He laughed at the surprise which 
 the huge figure provoked; and the same night, as he 
 went to bed, he saw again the major's astonished face 
 when he had spoken to him of a fifty years' separa- 
 tion. Then suddenly, with a sort of faintness age, 
 perhaps, or a slight fever he saw it all more clearly, 
 and started with surprise at that half-century. 
 
 He wondered why he had never gone back down 
 there, found no possible reason, and went to sleep that 
 night more uneasy than before about the great con- 
 cerns of life. 
 
 According as the age of retirement drew more dis- 
 tinctly near him, he kept saying, "I must go down 
 there first." The idea took such root in his head that 
 one day he was impelled to set off. 
 
 When the train was under way, the idea quite daz- 
 zled him that he had at last acted on this astounding 
 resolve to go back for a day to the place whence he 
 
 55 
 
56 WE OTHERS 
 
 had come. Then he felt a pang of new anxiety the 
 apprehension that he was sacrificing something. 
 
 He shut his eyes and tried to picture the shapes and 
 the faces of the houses. He thought, "All must be 
 changed; it is so long ago!" 
 
 When the name of St. Vincent was shouted on the 
 platform, towards half -past four of a sunny day, it 
 roused him from his sleepiness and touched his heart, 
 and he frowned slightly. He got up with the same 
 composed heroic excitement that the eve of battle had 
 been wont to bring him, and descended from the car- 
 riage. 
 
 Certainly the humble station, though become poor 
 in comparison with important neighbours, and regu- 
 larly overlooked by the expresses, was similar to what 
 it always was, and he knew it again. 
 
 He went along the path that followed the palings, 
 turned into the Avenue des Peupliers, and looked 
 ahead. "Ah !" he said. 
 
 At a hundred paces forward on the road, to right 
 and left beyond the bridge, he found the village again 
 exactly as in the days when he played under those 
 poplars. It was the same picture of fields enclosed 
 by tall trees, of black windows framed in white, of 
 meadows and foliage ; so much the same, in truth, that 
 he no longer saw clearly how he stood in the matter. 
 And the breeze that met him, too, had not ceased to 
 be the same. 
 
 The old man walked with a brisker step along the 
 sunlit avenue, to meet the breeze and the village, a 
 village so pretty that childishly he looked on it as on 
 a picture. 
 
THE OTHERS 57 
 
 When he reached the first houses the farms that 
 expanded across the clover fields to the mill, the saw- 
 mill, with its perfume of a forest in quintessence he 
 declared decidedly that the village had remained quite 
 as it was before his long exile. 
 
 A vague delight, courage and hope, awoke within 
 him, thus to see all his memories coming to life. He 
 met himself again, as one discovers a treasure, when 
 he espied, on the border of the main street, the sign 
 of the inn, no rustier to-day than of yore. He even 
 recognised what he had forgotten. 
 
 The old officer, who had never felt himself brave 
 except when facing enemy bayonets and guns, plucked 
 up courage in the matter of the undefined ambushes of 
 fate. Time was not so terrible as all that, since it let 
 him come back, and gave him back at once the past as 
 he had left it. Fate had not got all those frightful 
 and irrevocable changes that people made out. There 
 were places which remained peaceful always, as if 
 they were Paradise. In its corner of the world, St. 
 Vincent was too simple to forget its own renewal, too 
 little to grow bigger. 
 
 On the second side of the square into which the man 
 was proceeding, he read the words "Railway Goods 
 Traffic." He remembered that it used to be "Imperial 
 Post." It was a very trivial and permissible altera- 
 tion, and it made him smile. 
 
 On the waste land which goes from the circle of 
 lime-trees as far as the buttressed walls of the convent, 
 there were heaped stones, planks, and a fragment of 
 roofing, scaly with slates. He had always seen it in 
 that state. But yes but formerly there was mate- 
 
58 WE OTHERS 
 
 rial there for a house they were going to build. And 
 now that house was in ruins. But it had quite the 
 same appearance, and he recognised it. 
 
 But now, the man who had come back blinked his 
 eyes. On the threshold of the shop which stood at 
 the corner of the path leading to the sandpits, he dis- 
 cerned a feminine and monumental outline. 
 
 "Hullo! Madame Chabot, or rather some one of 
 her family/' 
 
 He recalled the uncouth goodwife of former times 
 who used to obstruct her doorway with her circular 
 lines. Obesity was traditional in her family. 
 
 He compared dates and counted the years. Then 
 he stood still in the middle of the street with a slight 
 shudder. That woman could not be even the daugh- 
 ter of the other whom he used to see there, and she 
 made one think of several graves. That impression 
 scared him like the beginning of a nightmare. 
 
 What? There's that robber, Tripalet, his face 
 smudged with alcoholic colours, his nose like an old 
 cork, gesticulating at the door of the tavern! But no! 
 He gave up gesticulating long since. It was yes, it 
 was his grandson, unconsciously imitating the ances- 
 tral puppet. 
 
 As soon as he accosted one of those now living 
 there, there where he had learned to live, he had to 
 do with a remote descendant, with a stranger, who 
 moved in the gap left by the other, and smiled in his 
 place. 
 
 Any people of his time? There^ were none left. 
 His informant made a momentary sign of hope. Yet 
 no the decrepit invalid whose mouth was as empty as 
 
THE OTHERS 59 
 
 his eyelids, and who sat outside his house and gos- 
 siped, his cotton cap flashing in the sunshine he was 
 not a village ancient; he had come from elsewhere. 
 No one had escaped, no one ; and worse than that, for 
 since the passing of those with whom he had mingled, 
 an unknown generation had ceased to be. 
 
 Ah, the houses had not changed, and the stones had 
 remained in their places. Good ! But places and things 
 are chilling, and the village was only a cemetery that 
 had not grown bigger. To say truth, there had been 
 a huge massacre of living men, more obvious than 
 elsewhere in this stagnant place, where one met his- 
 tory again and the details of dramas on the faces of 
 the heirs, where melancholy resemblances to features 
 and names told all there was to tell, where marks of 
 mourning seemed written even on the immutability of 
 the house- fronts, on the signboards as in the epi- 
 taphs ! 
 
 The old man, who had smiled when he came, shook 
 himself, growled, and lamented. He perceived that 
 the village rejected him more surely than any other 
 place in the world. Was he not a belated and incon- 
 sistent survival, a residue of night in a new day? In- 
 stinctively he retreated into an alley as into a hole. 
 
 Close to his ear he heard a strange harsh cry. 
 Trembling, he looked up. It was he, the parrot he 
 had known before, exactly on the same spot, on the 
 other side of the spent half-century; and it was just 
 the same cry. But the bird was only a thing, its cry 
 only a blind and deaf noise. The caged survival of 
 the little green freak was worth no more to the heart 
 of the man than was the eternity of the wind or the, 
 
60 WE OTHERS 
 
 springtime or the sun, things which appear to live 
 though they are in reality dead. 
 
 Still, he went on as far as his house. Anthony Tar- 
 dieu's grand-niece opened the door and stood aside, 
 her mouth squared and her arms dangling, nor sus- 
 pected that here was the legendary master whom the 
 family had only known for so many years by the 
 money he sent. 
 
 He said, in an undertone and quickly, "It's me!" 
 
 She did not understand, but let him pass. He 
 mounted the stairs, crossed the landing, and entered 
 the drawing-room. 
 
 On the wall stood the portrait of a young fair man, 
 in the uniform of a sub-lieutenant. This portrait had 
 been painted several months before the accidental 
 death of the sub-lieutenant, who was the father of 
 the general. 
 
 The old man, enshrouded and buried in an arm- 
 chair, lifted his eyes to the picture, and looked at the 
 youth with a gaping look that was full of things im- 
 possible to express or to confess. 
 
 Little Martha Tardieu, who had come up on the 
 visitor's heels, saw his clenched hands and wrinkled 
 forehead shipwrecked at the foot of the beautiful 
 image, an image as unchanging,. serene, and infinitely 
 dead as a crucifix. 
 
BOOK II 
 THE MADNESS OF LOVE 
 
THE FUNERAL MARCH 
 
 AS she went along the urban quarter into where the 
 wet fog was filtering she wanted to cry. All the 
 same, she made haste, and skipped from one stone to 
 another, along the pallid glitter of the pavement. 
 
 From a distance, the slim outline looked smart, and 
 even fashionable. Her ankles, delicate as stalks, were 
 placed in little polished shoes with well-squared heels ; 
 her dress went straight as a die up to her chin ; and 
 her hat, shaped like a candle extinguisher, quite poorly 
 extinguished a lock of fair hair on her neck. 
 
 When near, the girl was no more than pretty. Her 
 skirt was too meagre, her hat quite eaten up with pin- 
 holes, her corsage of stuff so thin that any one could 
 have seen her heart-beats. 
 
 Although her haste left her little time for thought, 
 she felt desperately sad. Everything made her want 
 to cry her dull life, so young yet already futureless; 
 the hard work, and the impossibility of flirtation; the 
 house where she lived the most unfriendly of all 
 houses ; the only room, and its eternal accompanists 
 father chasing mother round the stove and dragging 
 a chair; the smell of greasy crockery, which sickened 
 you after dinner, and the smell of cooking, which 
 sickened you before; the dirty mirror, that had to be 
 cleaned every morning ; and on the landing, the untidy 
 and beastly neighbour who posted himself by the tap, 
 
 63 
 
64 WE OTHERS 
 
 and as soon as she appeared with her jug showed the 
 lewd eyes and greasy smile of his moonstruck face. 
 
 Added to all this, there was the grief of this morn- 
 ing, which was 'gloomy as a night; the infinite mo- 
 notony of the running gutter, cold as a river ; all this 
 autumnal, infectious sickliness, and above all, the 
 rough and wilful gusts of rain that began to make her 
 dress look stained and ridiculous. 
 
 There was no one in the world to whom gaiety was 
 more forbidden. 
 
 No one? Yes, there was some one. Just at that 
 moment his stooping figure was emerging from the 
 entry to some works. He was just the same age as 
 herself, and he was a prisoner in a forge, as she was 
 in a dressmaker's workroom. 
 
 To right and to left he turned his bluish face, one 
 that would have been very pleasant had it been less 
 thin and reduced. He sniffed at the blast, and then 
 let it take him away along the livid, gleaming street. 
 One before the other he put down his huge iron-bound 
 boots, wavered slightly in the wind, and thought about 
 nothing for fear of thinking about himself and what 
 it was he was doing here on earth. 
 
 Now, the young man whom the squalls handled as 
 roughly as the world did, and the girl bereft of smiles 
 by the bad weather that also punished her poor dress 
 these two were going towards each other. 
 
 They had met twice, by chance ; and this time, which 
 was the hour when the workshops close at midday, 
 they tried to meet (by chance) a third time, knowing 
 nothing of each other nor having spoken. 
 
 It happened that they really approached each other, 
 
THE FUNERAL MARCH 65 
 
 and that she turned up an alley just when he entered 
 it at the other end ; so that she appeared suddenly be- 
 fore him, like a fairy. 
 
 He stopped dead, pricking up from his massive 
 boots, and his back and shoulders trembling. The 
 eyes in his earnest face opened wide, with a look of 
 being rewarded. 
 
 She also stopped, and timidly they put their hands 
 out to ' each other, like two beggars. Then each 
 pressed the ringers of the other, more by way of cling- 
 ing to each other than of saying good-day for one 
 does not always know how to begin at the beginning. 
 
 One moment they stood still, seriously considering 
 which way they should go together. Bravely against 
 the wind they set off, he with a red nose and she with 
 pink eyes, and between them their two hands, making 
 one only, each nursing the other. 
 
 She was the first to speak "I've got till one o'clock ; 
 and you?" 
 
 "I, too," he replied ; "shan't we lunch together now, 
 don't you think?" 
 
 "Yes, yes!" she cried, enraptured of the plan. 
 
 They both laughed hesitatingly at first, as though 
 they were attempting it. When it ended, their faces 
 remained lighted up. 
 
 "Look," he said, "it hardly rains now!" 
 
 "What luck!" She clapped her hands. All the 
 same, the rain had not ceased to fall on the bare back- 
 ground of the avenue. 
 
 "Now that it's fine, let's sit down a minute." 
 
 "Wait!" He stopped her with a gesture, and pull- 
 
66 WE OTHERS 
 
 ing a newspaper from his pocket, he unfolded it upon 
 the damp seat. 
 
 "Ah," she said, moved to tears by the courtesy, 
 "how kind you are!" 
 
 She sat down, and looked at him so grandly that she 
 seemed to be enthroned. He placed himself beside 
 her. She tossed her head "Papa would beat me if 
 he knew where I was!" 
 
 "For my part," he replied, "it's my mother!" 
 
 The picture of the dangers defied made them merry, 
 and they smiled, being too near each other to dare to 
 laugh. 
 
 But when a gust of wind shook the plane-tree above 
 them and gave them quite a shower-bath, they were 
 obliged to laugh as they shook themselves. 
 
 Everything was growing darker. Mournful black 
 clouds ever more and more begloomed the sky and 
 submerged the earth. 
 
 "Look how pretty it is," she said. 
 
 She pointed out how the house-fronts shone with 
 water, the polished roofs, the dark slabs of the foot- 
 path, the glistening gutters. 
 
 "Yes," he stammered, "yes." Admiringly he 
 added, "We've still got half an hour." 
 
 She wanted to walk a little. He agreed that it 
 would certainly be still better. They got up and 
 steered straight ahead. When people walk together 
 they come magically near. Every minute their lone- 
 liness was enriched. 
 
 They passed in front of a ground-floor window that 
 was half -open. Through the aperture they saw a 
 shabby room dirty, sinister, bare, and breathing 
 
THE FUNERAL MARCH 67 
 
 forth dampness. But they thought with a quiver of 
 the room they might have. Then they thought still 
 of that heavenly room as they brushed past another 
 window, of which the shutters were closed. 
 
 In that moment they had together shut their eyes, 
 both of them blind, and guided by each other. 
 
 They walked and walked. The houses grew fewer, 
 and then the passers-by. The big avenue became a 
 main road. They breathed the free air, full-lunged. 
 A trail of smoke emitted by the works, stranded yon- 
 der towards the horizon, brought them a smell of 
 damp earth. They inhaled this scent of the country, 
 this holiday perfume. 
 
 "Just now the clouds were dirty, and now they are 
 pearly grey," said one of their little voices. 
 
 After they had walked still more, suddenly there 
 rose like an apparition on the side of the road a great 
 white wall. Above the wall arose cypress trees, new- 
 looking. 
 
 Hand in hand, they admired the foliage, reached 
 the gates, and entered the main drive. 
 
 "It's a cemetery," she said. 
 
 "Yes; isn't it pretty!" he replied, with an air of 
 convincement. 
 
 They travelled one drive, then another, and sat down 
 on a bench, so affected by the rich splendour of the 
 grounds that their hands forgot their clasp. 
 
 "Look, look !" A procession turned the corner and 
 went by. The hearse was covered with a white cloth. 
 Their hands sought and seized each other again, and 
 by reason of that wonder-working clasp they imagined 
 another procession, a pretty one, a momentous and 
 
68 WE OTHERS 
 
 trembling procession, and one which they should lead 
 she, wedded, and he the married also. 
 
 It was so natural, so right, to replace the passing 
 procession by the one which should be, that they had 
 no need to speak of the dream ere they could share it 
 and believe in it. When they got up to go, the first 
 steps they took/ side by side, were slow as in the 
 nuptial aisle. 
 
 With beaming faces they left the cemetery and fol- 
 lowed the white wall. 
 
 On a milestone hard by a man was seated before 
 an organ, and they drew near as he played. 
 
 It was the great funeral march, the most heart-rend- 
 ing De Profundis that earthly sorrow has chanced to 
 utter, a lamentation so immense and sinister that it 
 even mingles the living with the dead and falls on our 
 faces like an ice-cold mask. 
 
 The couple stopped, enchanted, and looked at each 
 other festively. "How nice music is!" she whispered 
 between her little teeth, and all attention. 
 
 "Come," he murmured at last. 
 
 They went away with a lightsome and joyous step, 
 keeping merry time with the most hopeless of human 
 music, smiling, chirping, finding good to say of what 
 was ugly unconscious of all their childish lips were 
 saying, unconscious of all their warm hearts were 
 creating. 
 
THE WAY THEY WENT 
 
 ON the crest of the long round hill that dominated 
 the village there was only one house. 
 
 It was placed just in the middle of the road that 
 skirted the summit, so that when one had followed the 
 road so far, he was obliged either to go back or enter 
 the house. 
 
 This anomaly, a house completely obstructing a 
 parish road (which went on again afterwards), was 
 not considered important in the sluggish district of 
 Ste Patenne. Besides, this bordering by-road was al- 
 most as deserted between morning and night as be- 
 tween night and morning. 
 
 In the scanty compass of this house, whose position 
 gave it the same prominence in the place as the ven- 
 erable nose of its church does to a city's outline, a 
 couple lived. They were reserved and silent folk, 
 who worked all day in the town, and had hardly 
 enough leisure to sit in the tiny blossoming enclosure 
 that embellished the house like a drawing-room. 
 
 This husband and this wife had not been cast in the 
 same mould, not by much. He had a pointed nose 
 between his greenish eyes, a receding chin, hemp-col- 
 oured hair, and a firm and rosy skin. She, of a nim- 
 ble insignificance which contrasted with the loose bulk 
 of her man, was adorned with a dull complexion and 
 a head of the finest hair, black and silky. In short, 
 
 69 
 
70 WE OTHERS 
 
 they were Day and Night from the head to the feet. 
 But these details matter little. What specially marked 
 them out was that they lived as though fastened to- 
 gether. One never saw them apart. As soon as they 
 were a little separated, inevitably they looked at each 
 other. They laughed or smiled at the same time, not 
 in order to be alike, but because they were actually 
 alike ; and their eyes, which were as dissimilar as one 
 can describe, had a look so similar that it was a miracle 
 of a look. 
 
 These people liked each other too much for the 
 taste of public opinion. Although they were born of 
 the countryside, and both their surname and their 
 Christian names abounded through the district, they 
 had become strangers, thanks to their self -preference 
 and consecration to each other. This attitude had 
 naturally given displeasure, like all that which is ex- 
 aggerated. Then it had come to be accepted, because 
 they were obliging, and also because one was forced 
 to accept it, and above all because one knew well that 
 it would not go on always. 
 
 From their house, which was brown as an old chest, 
 they set off every morning for Tholozan, a league and 
 a half away. In the main street of the town they 
 parted with a sort of careful awkwardness they had 
 been noticed as though it were always the first time. 
 In front of the Manoury shops he left his wife. At 
 six in the evening he picked her up again there, in the 
 shadow of the commercial porch, like a watchful men- 
 dicant, and shivering at his absence. 
 
 The village people watched them return every even- 
 ing. In winter you could only see the dance of their 
 
THE WAY THEY WENT 71 
 
 lantern, as little as a real star. In summer they out- 
 lined themselves in slender silhouettes above the dark 
 cloud of the hill, against the sunset. They took each 
 other's arm, and even the hand. They advanced with 
 a solemn step, as though they were returning from 
 the end of the world, and they always looked as 
 though they brought big news. 
 
 "There they are!" growled Gaspard. 
 
 "How they stick to each other!" said La Miette. 
 
 "Yes," assented the aged Remy woman. On great 
 occasions she was still able to let that big word pass 
 her white lips and bony gums : "yes." 
 
 "Ah !" murmured Mademoiselle Tindare, who by 
 the fact of her age would have been a great-grand- 
 mother if ever she had been a wife. 
 
 The Gibiers' son, that bag of vices, that dirty good- 
 for-nothing, opened his mouth wide, but could not find 
 to throw out of it any of those rude remarks in which 
 he was neither poor nor frugal ! Assuredly, one could 
 not shout all he would like to in the presence of people 
 so madly blended in the purple scene of sunset. One 
 could not. 
 
 Thus it was that they set off and returned each day, 
 above the village and its dwellers. Thus it was that 
 they went away that day that day of the fire. 
 
 It broke out, terribly, at ten in the forenoon. Ap- 
 parently it originated with a grindstone, from which 
 the wind scattered some glowing spray on the wooden 
 house. 
 
 However that may be, the house was consumed sa 
 completely and so quickly that nothing was left of 
 what it had held. Buckets of water only cooled the 
 
72 WE OTHERS 
 
 ends of charred beams among the crashing framework. 
 On either side of the road they drew back the poor 
 heap of rubbish ; and alone among the ashes the skele- 
 ton of an iron bedstead had human shape. 
 
 The most surprising thing was that no one, during 
 the fire, went to Tholozan to tell the inhabitants of the 
 destroyed dwelling, and that no one went afterwards. 
 
 "They'll know soon enough," hazarded an old wife. 
 
 "Yes," replied Mother Remy, applying once more 
 the monotonous cry that was choked with tremendous 
 truth and greedy of it. 
 
 When the evening fell that would bring the victims 
 back, a certain excitement prevailed in the village. 
 Faces appeared in the dark doorways, drawn by curi- 
 osity and fear, and then gathered in the market-place, 
 though never did a messenger break away from the 
 darkling group. But eyes looked up towards heaven 
 and the top of the hill, like those of night-imprisoned 
 crowds who came together to await a meteor. 
 
 Gaspard growled very quietly, "There they are!" 
 
 Two women were so distracted that they exclaimed 
 together, "It's impossible!" 
 
 Afar on the reddening heights they made their twin 
 appearance. One saw at once that they knew nothing 
 of the disaster, for they were making their way to- 
 wards the yawning place, the site of their house, with 
 steps as tranquil as ever. 
 
 The darkened watchers down below grew more agi- 
 tated. The two condemned, going to meet the punish- 
 ment that misfortune had prepared for them, were 
 talking to each other, and although quite near they 
 
THE WAY THEY WENT 73 
 
 saw nothing yet, so much were they engrossed with 
 themselves and their solitude. 
 
 They drew nearer and nearer. And now they have 
 raised their heads and looked before them. 
 
 But neither at that moment did they see anything. 
 No doubt they were thinking of each other as deeply 
 as if they were talking face to face. They were smil- 
 ing exactly the same smile. Did one see or did one 
 guess that smile, that poor and melancholy aureole 
 which lends added beauty to human faces? Visible 
 or invisible, one believed it was there. 
 
 Some moments passed, and the man and the woman 
 went on between the two heaps of ruins without no- 
 ticing them ; and they continued to walk, incapable of 
 seeing what lay at their feet, and disappeared on the 
 other side in the glory of the sun. 
 
 The faces of the watchers gazed at each other in 
 the twilight stupefied but fascinated. 
 
 La Miette was full of words far too simple for her 
 to say; she could only move her lips. But the old 
 Remy woman made her a gentle gesture that meant 
 "yes." 
 
 "Yes, yes," the others thought and dreamed; "yes, 
 evidently. They are somewhere else, so they haven't 
 seen anything. Yes ; their road is wide open and they 
 are following it, that's all. Yes, it is quite natural 
 they didn't stop at their house, seeing it's no longer 
 there." 
 
A TALE OF FOUR 
 
 VERY evening, at this corner of the two avenues 
 and not far from the lighted gas-lamp, a young 
 man took his stand. He was dismal, narrow, and 
 dark, like a gas-lamp gone out 
 
 To the same place he came every day at the same 
 hour, and walked about for a long time, venturing 
 glances to this side and that, looking everywhere for 
 some one, staring at the passers-by, the trees, and the 
 walls. A tawny overcoat, turning green, hung from 
 his meagre shoulders as if they had been bat-pegs. 
 By the light that fell on him from the street-lamp one 
 glimpsed a slight and mournful beard on a protuber- 
 ance of yellow cheek, or a corner of his forehead to 
 which the light from some office window had managed 
 to lend the pallor of paper. Even when the evening 
 was fine and the air kindly, this emaciated wayfarer, 
 so timidly beached on the pavement's edge amid the 
 flood of the others, seemed like one shipwrecked, ques- 
 tioning the whole world. 
 
 But at a certain moment one noticed that he straight- 
 ened himself, so that a gleam of light illumined him. 
 
 For a woman was walking delicately towards him 
 on the pavement. She stopped under his nose, like a 
 rose, showed him her shining teeth, shook her neck in 
 her feathery collarette, and carolled him a little greet- 
 ing. For his part, he began to smile, an unending 
 
 74 
 
A TALE OF FOUR yf 
 
 smile, big and leisurely. He poised above her, and 
 trembled like a drowning man who is pulled out and 
 set upright. She was radiant, perfect, pretty, al- 
 though poorly dressed. There was a remarkable con- 
 trast between the richness of what she was and the 
 poverty of what she wore. She seemed as if dis- 
 guised, like a fairy of the stage. Her eyes and her 
 lips made one think of lost jewels. 
 
 The man, his petition granted by this arrival, re- 
 covered himself at last from his rapture, and learning 
 again to speak, some words returned to his lips. He 
 took the young girl's arm, and they moved away with 
 her delicacy and his attenuation so slender both that 
 one would say from a distance they were a single be- 
 ing torn in two. 
 
 Now, at a hundred paces from there, also motion- 
 less in the crowd's tangled ebb and flow, a young 
 woman used to wait for some one every evening. 
 
 She always arrived too early, for at first she sought 
 nothing, and began by slowly circling the newspaper 
 Kiosk. 
 
 She wore a coat and skirt of dull grey, a hue of 
 nameless mourning. Her only adornment was a blue 
 ribbon in her hat. In the sudden harsh light of the 
 tram-car that glided over the roadway she showed an 
 irregular and faded face, pierced by eyes too little, 
 deformed by a nose too long, cloven by a mouth too 
 wide. Sometimes she yawned, when her long teeth 
 made her look ferocious, and then the dull eyelids flut- 
 tered, and watered in weariness. Now and again 
 she would become suddenly alert and erect, as though 
 wakened. With effort renewed, she then walked 
 
/6 WE OTHERS 
 
 more briskly, swinging her right hand, tightly closed 
 on the bony handle of her umbrella, and her left hand, 
 which took the impress of her hand-bag cords. 
 
 Behold her then suddenly transformed! Her eyes 
 began to light up her face like stars, her lips to move 
 in silent speech, like those that pray. 
 
 For yonder a man was turning into the square. He 
 crossed it and drew near leisurely. He was a splendid 
 fellow, broad, of strong shoulders, radiant cheeks, and 
 big fair moustaches, solid and golden. 
 
 He came up to her and nodded. She did not move 
 at first, as though bewildered, but her hands trembled 
 like the tips of little wings. He said nothing; she 
 could not. In ultimate decision she put out her hand 
 and grasped his arm, cautiously, because of his 
 strength and immense fascination. They went away. 
 She pressed close to him with all her might, but feebly, 
 as a grandmother might. He walked with such strong 
 assurance that he did not seem to notice her. 
 
 Such was the double meeting of which I was witness 
 every evening, being similarly occupied in the neigh- 
 bourhood at the time when the two couples formed 
 themselves, and were dissolved and submerged in the 
 multitude. 
 
 As in a sort of expiring novelette, I used every time 
 to read the continuation of these two love-stories on 
 the faces languid and then triumphant of the man 
 in the fawn overcoat and the woman with the blue 
 ribbon. 
 
 Both had found a companion to illumine their lives, 
 a face for their own transfiguration. Ugly and un- 
 sightly as both were, they had succeeded in securing 
 
A TALE OF FOUR 77 
 
 from among the host of men and women some one 
 who was worth more than themselves. 
 
 And I used to say to myself that these two idylls 
 would not last, that they were too fragile and, as it 
 were, unhealthy, for the reason that, in each of these 
 couples, the one had too great a need of the other, that 
 their destitution and their relief were too great. 
 
 It could only have been for poor and fleeting rea- 
 sons a bit of compassion or of chance that fate had 
 lent to the miserable work-girl the man with the beau- 
 tiful moustaches, and to the blossoming girl the un- 
 fortunate spectre whose company almost made her 
 ridiculous. 
 
 Doubtless the fine gentleman deemed it convenient 
 and profitable for the moment to be adored by a fer- 
 vent and slavish heart; but he was watched for by the 
 beautiful and generous women of the world. Doubt- 
 less the shop-girl, so young yet and so innocent, was 
 yielding to a first blind desire for love; but she was 
 fated to prefer, sooner or later, any one at all rather 
 than him who nightly begged for her at the corner of 
 the street. 
 
 Such were the thoughts that the spectacle of the 
 regular rendezvous suggested to my observant mind. 
 
 Well, I was right. The matter was badly arranged 
 as is usual in life, where everything happens as pite- 
 ously as possible ; or as in worthless novelettes, which 
 allow you from the beginning to guess the end. 
 
 The end? It was not long in coming. One day, 
 after a short absence from town, I was pacing the 
 usual sidewalk, much later than usual. The fawn 
 overcoat was waiting, alone. At the other place the 
 
78 WE OTHERS 
 
 woman topped by a scrap of blue ribbon was also aban- 
 doned to herself. 
 
 The next day also I crossed the path of these two 
 solitudes. He, his eyes wandering over the swarming 
 humanity, looked without end for her who did not 
 come. Among strangers living and hurtying, with his 
 shiny overcoat and the shoulders that drooped in the 
 form of an extinguisher, he seemed the dismal statue 
 of mediocrity punished. 
 
 She her looks no longer rose so high as faces, but 
 trailed on the ground in complete subjection and 
 watched the running gutter a narrow river of mud, 
 as mournful as the bigger ones, but not big enough 
 to drown one's self. Reducing my pace, I made out 
 the profile of her expressionless and ruined face, her 
 bosom flat as a slab, her great mouth, neglected and 
 fruitless. 
 
 Instinctively I stopped midway between the two un- 
 known with the visible wounds. 
 
 Too much left behind to be able to give up waiting, 
 yet no longer knowing how to wait, each of them 
 broke away a little from the place of rendezvous. 
 
 Backwards she moved from the shadow of the 
 Kiosk, then returned, and went slowly down the ave- 
 nue. He went up it, mechanically, after retiring ob- 
 liquely from the edge of the sidewalk. 
 
 With dispiriting slowness they went towards each 
 other. 
 
 It seemed curious to me then, but affecting, that fate 
 should thus be driving these two halves of love to- 
 wards the same point. On the dark stones of the 
 half -deserted footpath they were fated to meet. Who 
 
A TALE OF FOUR 79 
 
 could say if these two mourners, these strangers of 
 bleeding heart, would not find relief in recognition? 
 Who knew if these two survivors would not replace 
 by each other the two who had disappeared, the two 
 of old elected in a flash of too beautiful folly? 
 
 They arrived in front of each other, exactly. They 
 lifted their eyes; they saw each other; and quickly 
 they turned away their heads. 
 
 Ah, they did in fact recognise each other ! But also 
 they recognised their pitiful unpardonable ugliness, 
 their crime of ugliness. And I shall never forget the 
 look exchanged, a look that was full of savage hatred 
 and of a dreadful curse! 
 
THE FAIRY TALE 
 
 I" S it true that there are people who go to sleep 
 * for twenty years and wake up suddenly with 
 a white beard?" asked Eugene, as he left off reading 
 and turned towards his parents his dunce's face, with 
 its tiny forehead. 
 
 "No!" growled Paul. 
 
 "Children are stupid!" sighed Caroline maternally, 
 as she quickened her sewing. 
 
 Into the crowds of fairies and wizards that swarmed 
 over the pages of his book the family heir again 
 plunged his knife-like profile; and while his pointed 
 and shaggy head moved to and fro in enthralment, 
 his father resumed the reading of his paper and his 
 mother began again to hem the last edge of a duster, 
 which as she stretched it out exhaled the linen- 
 draper. 
 
 Five minutes later Papa, having absorbed the last 
 item of news with his big myopic eyes, folded his 
 paper and put it down, yawned, and in an effort to 
 speak while yawning, whinnied the remark, "We, too, 
 were stupid at that age." 
 
 "It's a fine long time since then," said Caroline, 
 whose voice was expressionless, though she sewed 
 with conviction. Some fifty years had tarnished her 
 hair with grey arid enshrouded her in fat. One could 
 presage the total disablement of her old age. Yet 
 
 80 
 
THE FAIRY TALE 81 
 
 over her balloon-like face there floated a faint but 
 perpetual smile. 
 
 Her husband, who resembled her as a brother might, 
 admitted a series of black yawns into the pale and 
 rounded mask of his face; and then, tearfully com- 
 posed, listened to his son, who snored open-mouthed 
 as he read, thanks to the prodigious growths which 
 next year would see removed by operation. The child 
 was prone in provocative absorption, and the noise 
 that he made in turning the pages from time to time 
 became intolerable. 
 
 "Go to bed!" said Papa suddenly. "It's past the 
 time. Come off you go !" 
 
 Torn from his book, the child raised a fearful and 
 malevolent eye towards his progenitor, sniffed, and got 
 up regretfully, mumbling between his teeth a rude re- 
 mark, which, though he alone heard it, would enable 
 him to boast about it next day at school. 
 
 With laggard feet he went to bid his parents good- 
 night. His face was thin and bloodless, suggesting 
 a vegetable; his look was so meek that it made him 
 squint. Behind his big pinafore, his loose-hanging 
 jacket and dangling knickers, one divined a frail body, 
 insufficiently fortified with cod liver oil. 
 
 Alone with his wife, Paul spoke of a new line of 
 tramway. She appeared interested, receptive; and 
 then met his move with a copious account of the dis- 
 putes between the charwoman and an aggressive aunt, 
 arrived from Poitou. Thereafter she embarked upon 
 an account and vindication of her day's work. The 
 man looked at his wife with stupid attention, yawning. 
 
 "Speaking of that," she said irrelevantly, "I found 
 
82 WE OTHERS 
 
 this while looking inside the clock, between the base 
 and the works. Some old stuff." 
 
 She fumbled in her bag and placed some folded 
 papers on the table. 
 
 He bent over the slender relics and said, "What 
 is it?" 
 
 "Some letters/' said Caroline. 
 
 "Well, what letters?" 
 
 "Some letters we wrote to each other before we 
 were married." 
 
 "Not really?" Surprised and amused, he extended 
 a finger to touch the bits of paper, and his fleshy face 
 drew quite near to them, in sniffing question. "Ah! 
 And what's this on them? Ribbons?" 
 
 "Yes. There's one from me with a pink one and 
 one from you with a blue one. You know we used to 
 put ribbons on them." 
 
 "By Jove, that's true! Now I'd forgotten that rib- 
 bon trick." 
 
 "So had I, you may be sure," said Caroline, "but 
 I remembered when I saw them." 
 
 "And what did we say in them?" asked the hus- 
 band, his plump fingers going forth over the table to 
 seize the flimsy paper jetsam. 
 
 "How should I know?" she replied. 
 
 He unfolded one of the letters, as awkwardly as 
 if he were handling some delicate insect and trying to 
 make it open its wings wide. 
 
 Something fell from it in flakes, and one of his 
 eyes dilated "What's that now?" He let loose a 
 great laugh "Rose leaves, my word ! They're twenty- 
 
THE FAIRY TALE 83 
 
 six years old, no doubt about it. I sent you some 
 rose leaves, that's all!" 
 
 Back into the envelope equally withered he put 
 the petal scraps. 
 
 The woman had become soberly silent. Chance had 
 turned her to-night towards the past, and she seemed 
 willing to remember. And as the letter lay motion- 
 less and wordless in his hand, he drew it nearer his 
 eyes, read the date in a whisper, and then, half aloud, 
 the first words "My adorable love!" 
 
 The man faltered over his letter of long ago as a 
 child over the puzzle of the alphabet. He recognised 
 nothing in it all. As he heard these new things, he 
 rolled his round eyes in their bulging lids. 
 
 At the foot of the page he stopped to take breath; 
 he prepared to speak, but could not, and coughed. 
 
 "And then?" she demanded. 
 
 He set himself anew to spell out and learn again 
 his letter. As for her, she had pushed up quite near. 
 The square of linen that busied her a moment ago 
 slipped from her lap, and she did not pick it up. With 
 hands and mouth half open, and the eyebrows con- 
 tracted to the utmost on her soft white forehead, she 
 listened; she listened hard. 
 
 Of a sudden the letter uttered two names, "Lolo 
 and Liline." 
 
 "Lolo and Liline!" he tittered. "What's that?" 
 
 "It's us," she answered simply. 
 
 He continued his reading, but broke off abruptly in 
 the middle of a sentence, full of quite obscure al- 
 lusions "We don't know the meaning " 
 
 With that profoundness which the heart of woman 
 
84 WE OTHERS 
 
 sometimes reveals she replied: "It's worse than that; 
 we no longer know the meaning." 
 
 He threw on the table the letter that could not rise 
 from the dead. Willy-nilly she reached out for her 
 letter, her own, and read it aloud in her turn with 
 strange attention. 
 
 The letter revealed her in melancholy mood. Af- 
 fectionate fiancee as she was, on that far-off day she 
 had written of solemn things, and besought her lover 
 to cherish her closely, having that ultimate parting 
 in mind which would come sooner or later. 
 
 At these words the big man jumped in his chair 
 and growled, "Eh, what? Die? We, I?" He ges- 
 tured dissent, with the desperation of one who cries 
 from a shipwreck. "It's not true!" he said. An in- 
 definable dread seemed really to waken him, at last 
 to waken him. She she was a little more heart-rent 
 than he. They stared at each other then, and for the 
 first time in so many years they found themselves truly 
 face to face again; they recognised each other con- 
 fusedly, as they were once upon a time, as they were 
 in reality. A world of formless and voiceless thoughts 
 stirred within them. 
 
 "We change and forget ourselves. Such is habit!" 
 stammered one of the voices. 
 
 "Habit! I had no idea it could become so strong!" 
 
 As a sudden idea illuminated the woman, she panted, 
 "Why, what the boy was saying from his fairy tale! 
 There are people who go to sleep for twenty years, 
 eh?" 
 
 But the man cried, already half emerged from the 
 dream, "Nonsense! It's not the same thing!" 
 
THE FAIRY TALE 85 
 
 "Yes, it is! We go to sleep we go to sleep side 
 by side." She lowered her voice. "We go to sleep 
 like that; by night at first, and then in the daytime." 
 
 Then she nodded her head, and after some moments 
 longer, changed, hurt, and doleful, she added, "Ah, 
 if we could wake up again!" 
 
 He had risen, pacified, relapsed into his perpetual 
 calm. He was straightening the chairs. But he mum- 
 bled, "It would be too good." 
 
 She took the lamp to follow him into the bedroom, 
 already docile as before, and even sleepy; but still a 
 little dazzled by the things that are impossible be- 
 cause they would be too good. 
 
RESURRECTION 
 
 CJO much this drawing-room resembled an an- 
 ^ cient print, with its old-fashioned furniture, the 
 knickknacks that breathed survival, its antique and 
 insipid colours, that it made you look instinctively for 
 its old frame. 
 
 In the middle of the mahogany table and of the 
 room, on a square of canvas, stood a cylindrical lamp, 
 whose cardboard shade cut into its cold and winterly 
 gleams. This feeble light reached the monotonous 
 face of the glass-shaded clock, the harsh green serge 
 of the mantelpiece and its woolly fringe, the armchairs 
 in red damask that stood in rows against the poppy- 
 coloured wall paper. More weakly it touched the 
 moss-green carpet, all quilted with textile flowers. 
 
 The old gentleman in the armchair said in a sub- 
 dued voice to the old lady who watched him on the 
 other side of the table, "What is there in the paper?" 
 
 "Wait," droned the old lady, "wait a minute." 
 
 They settled down, she to read, he to listen. With 
 meticulous precaution he wrapped himself up in his 
 soft and silent dressing-gown; and out of its form- 
 less folds he thrust a head so old that one could no 
 longer guess whether he had formerly been soldier, 
 artiste, or employee. 
 
 The old lady moved her chair, and her silk dress 
 made a noise of dead leaves. Then she raised the 
 
 86 
 
RESURRECTION 87 
 
 newspaper till it threw a pale reflection on her face 
 which also seemed to be drawn on delicate paper, and 
 would change no more until the last tragic and pro- 
 digious change. 
 
 They were as well behaved as thoughtful children. 
 Especially were they made up of tricks and habits 
 that in a light and almost frivolous way had floated 
 on from the shipwreck of their lives. 
 
 Though they performed this reading of the paper 
 every evening, she from eight to nine, and he from 
 nine to ten, they grasped no new things, for they 
 could no longer learn. What they best understood 
 were the accidents, those brief and dreadful dramas, 
 too quickly told to make one cry, too many to be 
 deeply pondered, which always have been and always 
 will be. 
 
 She read : " 'They pulled him out of the ruins. His 
 chest was crushed. The grief of the parents is inde- 
 scribable.' " 
 
 "The unfortunate man!" he observed, with tran- 
 quillity, with ignorance; "how old was he?" 
 
 She sought carefully among the lines that danced a 
 little: "It doesn't say. Ah, yes! Twenty. 'Jean 
 Rimel, the victim, was twenty years old, and was 
 engaged to be married.' ' 
 
 "Twenty! Then that's exactly like Julien, eh?" 
 
 A silence followed, in which they called up, among 
 the great multitude of dead that they comprised, the 
 far-off young man, the friend of their youth. 
 
 "How long ago was that?" asked the old man, his 
 forehead labouring in the quest. 
 
 "Julien? It's forty years since," she said. 
 
88 WE OTHERS 
 
 "Ah!" he replied. 
 
 Again, nothing. Then the voice of the old lady, 
 whose lips had been moving for a moment, arose trem- 
 blingly "Julien! Julien!" she said. 
 
 The little old man jumped slightly, for she said that 
 in a curious, unfamiliar tone. "Why do you call 
 him?" he asked, dimly awakened from himself, sur- 
 prised, and even uneasy. 
 
 She had laid the paper down on the table, put her 
 pearly old hands, with their wrists like dry wood, on 
 the top of it, and was looking in front of her. Her 
 voice remained tranquil and colourless. But she said : 
 
 "Listen. I may as well confess it to you now 
 Julien I loved him. And he loved me, too." 
 
 "What's that you say? You, he? And what about 
 me?" 
 
 She was still looking into nothing, like a sleep- 
 walker. "I loved you before, and after almost al- 
 ways. But once, it was he; a little before his death." 
 
 He sighed lightly. "Ah!" Reflecting, he gradually 
 brought back from the disturbance of this unexpected 
 news the face set eternally opposite his, the face he 
 had so long and so closely seen that it was in fact the 
 mirror of his own. 
 
 "It's no longer of importance!" one of them mur- 
 mured at last. 
 
 "No," said the other. 
 
 All the same, she had an afterthought, and it es- 
 caped from her lips : "And you ? Did you never have 
 a mistress?" 
 
 At once, easily, he opened his old heart wide : "Yes," 
 he said, "I've had one." 
 
RESURRECTION 89 
 
 She shook her soft-featured head: "You, too! I 
 should not have believed it." 
 
 They continued speaking of themselves, and sought 
 unknown things, as one speaks of strangers. 
 
 'Then Julien and you you had some meetings? 
 Where were they?" 
 
 "I don't know." 
 
 "How many times?" 
 
 "Three times, or four I only remember, just a 
 little, the first. And she? Is she dead?" 
 
 "To be sure a long time !" 
 
 "Was she beautiful?" 
 
 He closed his eyes, but opened them at once, as if 
 he found it useless: "No doubt I don't remember 
 but certainly she would be very beautiful. Since 
 then I've only seen the same little portrait, always, 
 and of course that portrait blotted her out, in the end." 
 
 "Yes, I know. He has disappeared like that, too." 
 She added, "How I loved him! How I must have 
 loved him!" 
 
 "We forget all that, don't we?" 
 
 "Yes; we only know it. And how long did it last?" 
 
 "From an autumn to a summer; six months. And 
 you?" 
 
 "Not quite a month. He died almost at once." 
 
 "And afterwards? You didn't forget him all at 
 once?" 
 
 "No, no. I remember that I remembered yes, 
 wait! I was even on the point of killing myself. It 
 seems to me, at least it's almost conjecture that I'm 
 making " 
 
 "And then nothing?" 
 
90 WE OTHERS 
 
 "No, nothing. We returned to each other.' 1 
 
 "Naturally." The old lady seemed surprised to have 
 only just now unveiled the secret. "How did it come 
 about that I saw nothing, nor suspected anything? 
 One is stupid, now !" 
 
 "No, not stupid. 7 saw nothing, either. One took 
 care, you know. Do you remember when I told you 
 I had to go to London?" 
 
 "You both went to London?" 
 
 "Not to London to St. Germain." 
 
 "Story-teller!" she said, with menacing finger. 
 "How I should have cried if I'd known!" 
 
 "And I how I should have bawled, had I known !" 
 
 "Yes," she murmured, magnificently, "we should 
 have been unjust and malicious." 
 
 They grew tired for a moment of saying nothing. 
 Then he ventured : "It must be late ?" 
 
 The clock marked only nine o'clock. The double 
 confession had all at once hastened and aged the eve- 
 ning. They rose, and looked at each other, standing. 
 It was then they realised that they were embarrassed 
 in each other's presence. Nervously he asked, as he 
 lowered his eyes, "We've done right, haven't we, to 
 tell all that?" 
 
 "Yes, yes," she assented, "it's better." 
 
 They reached the bedroom. As she undressed she 
 said, "So there have been for a long time these two 
 secrets between us we have deceived each other so 
 our life has been different from what we thought it 
 was it is a big change, deep down, you know." 
 
 They got into bed. In the twilight bestowed by the 
 
RESURRECTION 91 
 
 little lamp in the middle of the room, they fell to 
 thinking, trying to remember, trying to dream. 
 
 They did not sleep. And they were so used to each 
 other, so similarly fashioned, that in the middle of the 
 night they raised themselves together and called to 
 each other at the same time in low voices, but as if 
 they cried for help. They showed each other looks 
 more animate, more profound, than before, with tears 
 of resurrection in their eyes. 
 
 "It's too great a change, isn't it?" she stammered. 
 "All that was half dead, half lost. Ah, we ought not 
 to have told what we had done; we ought not to have 
 begun over agctin!" 
 
THE DREAM 
 
 T ITTLE by little they became sundered. Why? 
 --' For nothing. Because love does not endure. 
 From continually agreeing, one ends by getting angry. 
 A dispute arose, which was the final rupture. 
 
 "Good-bye!" cried Jeanne. 
 
 "Good evening!'' grinned Gerard. 
 
 She went away, wrapped in her fichu, and with two 
 stubborn tears. And the workman, as he leaned 
 against the wall, followed her with his eyes, and an 
 air of spiteful victory. 
 
 When evening came, no one awaited his coming 
 out of the factory, and he gave a cheerful sigh. When, 
 at the end of the long street, he entered the yard of 
 Number 23, he rubbed his hands. He passed between 
 the bony posts of the wooden porch, went along the 
 short paved path that a paling and an old wall en- 
 closed, and crossed the gloomy yard where the glass 
 door is squeezed between two little shops, at the top 
 of its three steps. 
 
 He went into the little room where they had so 
 often hidden to say so many things, and looked at the 
 great desert of it. He walked stumblingly among the 
 obscurity in which they had so often submerged them- 
 selves. 
 
 "So much the better !" he repeated, twisting his fine 
 
 92 
 
THE DREAM 93 
 
 moustache with the big hand that the day's work had 
 turned grey. "Ah, so much the better!" 
 
 All the same, he became irritable. He had nervous 
 fits, and even bad tempers. He nearly strangled 
 Bidon, for nothing at all, in the little pointed cafe con- 
 trived in the corner of the Rue des Turcs. He argued 
 about politics, with violence and insincerity. 
 
 "What's the matter with Gerard?" they said. 
 
 His aunt Lea, who was concierge to No. 23 and 
 who half opened the glass door now and then to look 
 in on him, was alarmed by the public talk, and ques- 
 tioned him. But his hostile attitude frightened her. 
 
 He forsook the tavern, and began to spend as much 
 time as possible in his half -widower's room; and there 
 he applied his attention to the mournful gleam that 
 came through the glass door. He seemed to be wait- 
 ing. 
 
 He was waiting, in fact for her. What could she 
 be doing anywhere else? No, it was impossible that 
 she would not come back once, at least. 
 
 Everything lacked her ; the furniture they had once 
 bought together, the red and shining sideboard, the 
 four bentwood chairs, the table, covered with oilcloth, 
 all pointed to an empty place. So did the caged birds, 
 so abandoned that they almost seemed to be children. 
 
 He set himself furiously to wait, with grasped fore- 
 head, not understanding the length of this absence, of 
 the exile's endurance. He did not light the lamp in 
 the evenings, but engulfed himself in the dark of the 
 room. 
 
 One week, two weeks went by. Jeanne did not re- 
 turn from the unknown. He asked one and another 
 
94 WE OTHERS 
 
 what had become of her, tried to find out, tried to pro- 
 voke gossip with winks of his eye. They gave him a 
 thousand contradictory details. In reality, they did 
 not know. 
 
 So he ceased to speak of her to others. He pre- 
 ferred to talk to her directly, that is, to wait for her 
 with meekness, and do nothing. 
 
 And one night, the last in February, when fixed in 
 a corner as in a niche, he saw her appear, between 
 eleven and midnight. 
 
 Lightly she pushed the door open and glided into 
 the room. She was hardly visible, clad cloudily, and 
 her face a pearl-grey. She seemed like evening in 
 night. 
 
 She advanced to the middle of the room and hesi- 
 tated there, irresolute. She was erect, but hazy, and 
 he could not see her feet move. 
 
 She went and opened the lock-up drawer in the side- 
 board, where there were letters, and stooped over 
 them; the papers moved. Then she turned round, 
 took two steps, raised her head, and looked at the cage 
 and the nest where the three fledglings were cuddling 
 up so recently imprisoned that their wings were still 
 only little arms. She unhooked the cage and put it on 
 the window-sill, so that she could see it better. 
 
 He held his breath, thrilled by the miraculous re- 
 turn. But little by little, jerkily, he straightened him- 
 self. With an abrupt effort he stood upright, and 
 staggered towards the woman with hands outstretched. 
 But his hands passed through the frail form. His 
 voice did not reach the apparition. She heard no more 
 than if she were an angel. She heeded him not, but 
 
THE DREAM 95 
 
 moved away, fled, vanished at his touch. She was 
 alone and he was alone. 
 
 "Good God!" 
 
 Realising that he was dreaming while wide awake, 
 he groaned in submission, and threw himself on a stool 
 at the corner of the table, with his elbows on the cloth. 
 He laid his face in his folded arms, and slept dream- 
 less at last, with the sure tranquillity of the dead. 
 
 When he awoke, it was late in the forenoon, near 
 midday, with dirty and rainy weather. 
 
 Yes, but she had come! He rubbed his eyes, and 
 immediately he smiled. 
 
 The glass door moved ajar, and Lea revealed her 
 rough-hewn face, like an old man's. Emerged from 
 his torpor, he looked at her. "Jeannette came back 
 last night," he said. 
 
 "No, my poor lad," exclaimed the concierge, "she 
 didn't come, for I opened the door to no one all 
 night!" The old lady raised her eyes and her arms 
 by way of compassionate protest against the madness 
 of her nephew, who saw people that were not there. 
 
 When she had gone, he looked this way and that, in 
 stupefaction. He pondered the peremptory words of 
 the concierge. Then with a sudden shock he recalled 
 the apparition's inconsistency. No, Jeanne had not 
 been! He had dreamed it! 
 
 He strode several paces in the room, poorly lighted 
 by the dirty sky, and suddenly his eyes opened wide. 
 "Ah!" he stammered. 
 
 The letter-drawer, usually shut, was open. The let- 
 ters were scattered, and one on the edge was on the 
 point of falling out. The bird-cage which had hung 
 
9 6 WE OTHERS 
 
 on its nail the night before had been taken down, and 
 now rested on the window-sill. And there, on the back 
 of a chair, a ruffle of white feathers was garlanded! 
 Her ruffle lost since the separation, gone away with 
 her! 
 
 And then what is this again? He inhaled the 
 lowly air of the room, and lo, it was slightly scented ! 
 Was it not the fragrance of the rose she wore? Yes, 
 yes! 
 
 He lowered his eyes in agitation. On the floor he 
 saw marks of footsteps, made by little shoes that had 
 trodden the muddy street. He laughed and cried. 
 
 "She did come back! I did see her! We are going 
 to live together again." 
 
 The man had had, in point of fact, an illusion. And 
 yet the woman had really been back. 
 
 But it was not at the moment when he had thought 
 he saw her. She had come back afterwards, through 
 the rain of the forenoon, while blindly and deafly he 
 slept. The vision was only an illusion ; but that mad- 
 ness had justified itself, seeing that only a few hours 
 later she had really come to touch their things, to 
 whisper to the letters, to see the bird-cage again, to 
 sweeten the room like a posy of flowers, and to say 
 that she would like to come back to life! 
 
THE STRICKEN 
 
 WHEN the wealthy physician informed me with 
 or without considerateness ; I don't remember 
 that I was vaguely consumptive, I replied, "Damn it !" 
 in a pretty calm way; but I beg you to believe that I 
 had to set my teeth so as not to make an ugly grimace. 
 
 But I am a man of decision. I knew what to do. 
 Tormented as I might be, at bottom of my unlucky 
 carcass, by pangs of pain and chronic fearfulness, I 
 closed my business. I did not wait to inform those 
 whom I liked or who like me I owed myself hence- 
 forth to myself and set off full steam ahead for a 
 mountain sanatorium. In the afternoon of the second 
 day a funicular railway conducted me to a pointed 
 station that put a cap on to a pallid peak. Pallid my- 
 self, I got down, and entered the sanatorium as others 
 enter by dint of crime rather than misfortune La 
 Roquette. 1 
 
 The make-up of the establishment was that of an 
 hotel, and the visitors, as they gathered after meals 
 in the great winter-gardens that trembled in an or- 
 chestral breeze, presented the appearance of harmless 
 holiday travellers. 
 
 But that was worldly concealment. The house, as 
 a matter of fact with its spy-like attendants haunting 
 the corridors, its heaps of spare spittoons in discreet 
 
 1 A convict prison in Paris. Tr. 
 
 97 
 
98 WE OTHERS 
 
 corners, its acrid puffs from the crevices of rooms in 
 process of disinfection, its dramatic circle of linoleum 
 where the chief doctor's door attracted every morning 
 processions of colourless spectres was a hospital in 
 good earnest. And each of those beings, although 
 they largely imitated the free and easy ways of sea- 
 side bathers, was passionately occupied with the dark 
 mystery of his lungs. 
 
 I established myself at the dining-table between a 
 Russian and an Italian, facing a Syrian. From time 
 to time we were swallowed up by the loud voice of the 
 close-cropped German, or the bursting laughter of the 
 American lady, who seemed to have been copied from 
 a picture in some magazine. I accustomed myself to 
 hearing our talk, which turned on heat and on cold, 
 but especially on our own morning and evening tem- 
 perature, and its flights round about the prophetic 37th 
 degree. It turned on literature and art, but especially 
 on diet; on famous personalities, but especially on Dr. 
 Otto, our master, our nearest deity. Tried we never 
 so hard to get away from ourselves, we tumbled back 
 there. 
 
 At the end of the first fortnight I had gained more 
 than two pounds in weight. This discovery composed 
 me a little. I spread it about. Some people were en- 
 vious, but laboriously succeeded in congratulating me; 
 others pretended, with no skill, to believe me. 
 
 It was a brief respite. The following week I gained 
 no weight, and there were vacant seats at the dinner- 
 table; Where were Messieurs Schmidt, Lorenzaccio, 
 and van der Bock ? One dared not dwell too much on 
 the disappearance of this one, who had gone back 
 
THE STRICKEN 99 
 
 cured to his corner of the globe, or of that one, who, 
 on the other hand, had been buried. The month of 
 May is the most trying of all. 
 
 And yet, in the middle of the hypocritical invalids 
 that we were, there were eighteen divinely healthy 
 beings who performed evolutions. These were the 
 waitresses, or servants of the dinner-table. They were 
 full-bloomed and charming, and their graces blended 
 with their health as colours in light. 
 
 They circulated round the tables where two hun- 
 dred patients squatted; they formed into files, con- 
 verged as they went out with empty hands, and scat- 
 tered symmetrically as they came in adorned with 
 dishes. Their unison of movement gave them the air 
 of a music-hall chorus. 
 
 I had never dared to cast eyes on these fresh-air 
 roses, brief captives of that unwholesome hall where 
 we all vegetated with our empty words and our un- 
 confessable nightmares, when one of them took it into 
 her head to smile at me. She was not quite one of 
 them. She was their mistress, their superintendent, 
 their Queen. Much more, she was the loveliest a 
 sort of Madonna become a woman, with an aureole 
 become hair. She smiled at me twice. A single smile 
 is a wayward thing; smiles only think of making up 
 their minds at the second time. 
 
 So, without any sort of reflection, I was consoled 
 nay, rewarded! for my distress and my loneliness, 
 for the accumulation of haunting details, and even for 
 the heavy toil that I should have to face, later, in or- 
 der to live my life again! 
 
 I confess to you, my friends I have only told you 
 
ioo WE OTHERS 
 
 this story so that I might be able to confess that I 
 turned towards this young woman completely thrilled. 
 
 I met her as the chance came, sometimes in a corri- 
 dor, sometimes in the hall, or outside, on the threshold 
 of the kitchens, or near a window, attentive to some 
 letter that brightened her cheek. 
 
 I spoke to her. Miraculously she vouchsafed an 
 answer. Through the medium of her artless retorts, 
 by the touch of her gentle derision and the smile that 
 clung to her, I discovered that she was not indifferent. 
 
 Naturally, I was not just then in a reasoning con- 
 dition. The idea did not occur to me that some mate- 
 rial bait was doubtless tempting her to turn her little 
 shell-shaped ear obligingly towards the expression of 
 my emotion, and her eyes to that wonder which filled 
 my face as with light when she passed. For, to these 
 pure little souls gathered in from the mountain ham- 
 lets, every patient is a millionaire. 
 
 I allowed myself to go and to take but suddenly 
 I had an awakening! 
 
 I made a conscientious inquiry. I remember it well 
 it was in my bedroom, at the end of a day when a 
 chill had thrown me back upon recurrent and keener 
 anguish. 
 
 Standing among my instruments, my inhaler, my 
 thermometer, my spirit lamp, standing near my bed, 
 the terrible bed of sweat and fever, the sleepless bed 
 I saw in the glass my hawk-like, fleshless face, my 
 evil leanness, my poisoned mouth. And I saw that 
 my action was wrong. 
 
 Ah, how infamous, to touch with my desire the 
 being who had brought there the wonderful virginity 
 
THE 
 
 of healthfulness, who made a spot of purity among 
 us, and to threaten with an idyll that angel of igno- 
 rance ! 
 
 How evil to make her forget, with the jar of a 
 bad dream, the corner of the earth whence she had 
 come as from a garden, where doubtless there was 
 some one betrothed to her, as rich in health as she and 
 as worthy! 
 
 I perceived the crime. Recoiling, as people not too 
 stupid can, I replaced my nervous passion with a sort 
 of boundless tenderness, an infinite hunger of happi- 
 ness for her. 
 
 Henceforth I approached her with more of defer- 
 ence and respect. Hardly daring to murmur the words 
 with my infected lips, looking at her feet when she 
 answered me, I asked her about her family. I was 
 touched by the story she told me of her grandmother, 
 and no less moved by the troubles of her sister Ger- 
 maine. 
 
 Now, two weeks after this victory rather a noble 
 one, don't you think? which had led me to love her 
 for her own sake, I came on her in the glass corridor, 
 to which the outer snows gave a sharp and marble- 
 like whiteness. 
 
 Her beautiful form was drawn upon the back- 
 ground of far-off mountains. Her face, with its 
 cheeks like pink roses and its mouth like a red rose, 
 was more than ever that of a pictured saint come down 
 from its frame. Seeing her neck, and then the be- 
 ginning of her shoulders, one thought of a Venus de 
 Milo with arms, but, it is true, with a corsage. 
 
102 WE OTHERS 
 
 I stammered a few words to her, commiserating 
 her that she had to live in the middle of illness. 
 
 "But I, too, I am very ill," she said. 
 
 She smiled at me her incomparable smile. 
 
 "Dr. Otto found a place for me here the first time 
 I spat blood." 
 
 Ah! I had started back, hardly stifling a hoarse 
 cry. I looked at her. I looked at her in spite of 
 myself, my dear friends with a joy voluptuous and 
 fierce. I stooped to the lips that were no longer in- 
 violable. Trembling, I touched with my eyes her con- 
 demned body, the hell that she was, and the heaven. 
 
THE FIRST LOVE 
 
 WHEN we received the invitation card announc- 
 ing the approaching marriage of Dr. Nixter 
 and Angette de la Vallee, we all felt heavy at heart. 
 It was worst for those among us who were intimate 
 friends, and must be present at the ceremony. 
 
 Both were young and good-looking. You could see 
 that they worshipped each other; but especially could 
 you see that she was infinitely fragile, and would soon 
 die. 
 
 Under her falling veil the young girl seemed to be 
 quite upright, though so slight, and leaning like a jet 
 of water. Her face? Exquisite as it was, it was 
 masked by a little too much pallor, hardened by a 
 slight excess of spareness, and the smile that floated 
 before her was fearfully, divinely faint. 
 
 All that snowiness in which she was made and clad 
 that perfect whiteness hardly stained by a weak 
 flush in the cheeks that each delicate approach of a 
 cough brought was already unnatural ; and really, as 
 soon as she ceased to move, one almost felt afraid, 
 and dared no longer think of her. 
 
 How she leaned on him, and how serious he was, 
 and immovable ! Jean Nixter offered one of the finest 
 types of mankind that could rise in the dreams or 
 brighten the eyes of lover or painter. His will and 
 his triumphant vitality expanded in his great height, 
 
 103 
 
104 WE OTHERS 
 
 his breadth of shoulder, the splendid regularity of his 
 features and still more in the trembling emotion 
 which inclined him towards her. 
 
 Yes, yes; looking at that couple, I understood at 
 last that gentleness and tenderness have something 
 masculine in them. 
 
 They had always, from the beginning, worshipped 
 each other. As children they had met each other dur- 
 ing several holidays on the beach at St. Just, where 
 there is a peaked fountain, a seat, a tree, and some- 
 times a passer-by. There they smiled at each other 
 before they knew who they were, sought and found 
 each other often, and then one evening kissed each 
 other before they knew what a kiss was. 
 
 In the days which followed, thanks to family prox- 
 imity in town and country, they did not leave each 
 other again. Jean confided to Angette (at the same 
 time as to himself) his ambitions in music, and glory, 
 and great masterpieces, and Angette learned from 
 him all that she could look forward to in life. 
 
 At the time when the young girl was stricken by 
 disease, at first gently and almost caressingly, and 
 then when her health became definitely impaired, she 
 was no orphan; and yet it was to him alone that she 
 faded, for him alone that she suffered. 
 
 Since she got no better, he decided to change his 
 plans for the future. He would not be a musician, 
 but a doctor, and instead of writing a masterpiece he 
 would cure her. 
 
 In that faith he laboured, fell furiously upon costly 
 books, and learned them as if they had been unending 
 prayers. As soon as he had got his physician's de- 
 
THE FIRST LOVE 105 
 
 gree, he sought to marry her. Angette had tried at 
 first not to wish it, knowing that she was condemned, 
 but she was so loving and so weak that she could not 
 long refuse. 
 
 He had said, to parents mournfully irresolute and 
 to friends uneasily reticent, "I shall save her !" 
 
 So now, in the little grey room at the town-hall 
 they both were passing, in such union, and so wrapped 
 up in each other, that when their looks turned upon 
 strangers they seemed to be blind. 
 
 Those strangers were the relations, and we their 
 friends. I remember that little Lambert was there, as 
 well. 
 
 Why had he had the idea of coming? A relation? 
 No! A friend? Well none of us was ignorant that 
 he had asked for Angette' s hand two years before. 
 He had been, and with reason, summarily bowed out. 
 After which, marriage with an heiress had made a 
 fashionable and triumphant doctor of him, a savant of 
 adoration in drawing-rooms. 
 
 Why was he there? Was it chivalrous courtesy or 
 spiteful cynicism? Who knows! Only is it certain 
 that his artistic face, his subduing chin, and the glit- 
 tering black locks that had won for him so many 
 patients of importance were resplendent against the 
 dismal wall of the registrar's room. 
 
 However, neither Jean nor Angette noticed him. 
 I have explained the reason to you. 
 
 From that moment Jean Nixter devoted himself 
 with scrupulous stubbornness to the healing of his 
 wife. One cannot describe the eagerness and patience, 
 the heroic ability he brought to bear, the sublime lies 
 
io6 WE OTHERS 
 
 he invented, his desperate effort to solve mysteries and 
 to see in the dark ! 
 
 And what happened ? At first she got worse. Then 
 she ceased to die. Then, very gently, very childishly, 
 she began again to live. 
 
 They say that he transfused his blood into her. I 
 can believe it, for I met him several times with an 
 extraordinary look, pale, and his movements almost 
 paralytic. They say, too, that he hynotised her, and 
 controlled her will. I can believe that, too, for it is 
 certain that he tried everything. 
 
 However it was, he saved her. 
 
 And what affection during that convalescence so 
 slow and so minute, when she was as completely 
 bound to her splendid friend as if he had been the 
 mother that he was! How their looks made fathom- 
 less exchange in those hours when the man's hands 
 enfolded those of his wife long hands, yet little and 
 white, like angel twins! 
 
 Soon she no longer need lean wholly and always 
 on him. She parted a little from her great shadow. 
 It was enough for her that he looked at her. Then 
 it sufficed her that the sun was shining. She began 
 to risk solitude, to make trial of it, as a young bird 
 tries itself in space. Once when Jean was away and 
 morning was arriving though it was gloomy and wet 
 she raised her head in ecstasy, and only because of 
 herself and life! 
 
 Restoration, metamorphosis! A sweet new being 
 had released itself from her and was taking her place. 
 Her body had won harmony and completeness, the 
 
THE FIRST LOVE 107 
 
 lines of her flesh were curved, she had expanded like 
 a ripe fruit! 
 
 When we caught sight of her that season, we won- 
 dered at her before we recognised her, so thoroughly 
 had she begun again. How she restored the balance 
 now with the strong and handsome husband who had 
 dowered her with a share of his life, his vitality, with 
 a part in the Paradise of life! 
 
 And the transformation went on, and continued to 
 shine upon her. Her eyes grew clearer ; their outlook 
 changed, and her movements, and her thoughts. 
 
 And at this moment the disturbing Lambert trav- 
 ersed their destiny. 
 
 Then then, she was fascinated by him. She tot- 
 tered, decided passionately, and threw herself at him. 
 
 A hideous and terrible instinct, maybe, but logical. 
 Had she not been changed from head to heels, even 
 to the shadows of her flesh? Had she not become a 
 real woman, and therefore another woman, in whom 
 another heart beat ? 
 
 In a flash, in a glance, she forgot not only her abid- 
 ing adoration of the other, but also her former dis- 
 like for this one. If she thought at all of those old 
 dreams, it was that she might scatter them, might de- 
 test them ! The past no longer mattered ; it was dead. 
 Better than that, it had been killed. Nothing was 
 left alive in front of the outrush of her whole being, 
 renewed and virginal, of the force of her first love. 
 
A LIBATION 
 
 GUS PACHECO and I had become incomparably 
 friends. 
 
 You see me I am tall, broad, and strong, and I 
 have big blue eyes. No doubt, therefore, you are ex- 
 pecting me to describe my faithful comrade of the 
 pampa as a little fellow, thin and weasel-faced, seeming 
 to sparkle all over with quick black eyes? For it is 
 unheard of, isn't it, that two boon companions should 
 not be at the physical antipodes of each other? Well, 
 it was not so. In spite of the unchanging conven- 
 tions of romance, tradition and literature, we were, 
 although perfect friends, perfectly alike in looks. 
 
 As I appear to your honourable observation, so my 
 alter ego (as bygone Italians used to say) appeared in 
 comparison with me on the stock-farms of Don Gre- 
 gorio at San Juan del Gato St. John of the Cat, if 
 you are anxious to know. And so he would appear 
 to-day even, if if I had not a drama to relate to you. 
 
 Ah, most certainly there had to be a big lot of gal- 
 lops together before we knew each other and joined 
 hands like that, so little loquacious as we were. There 
 had to be a mort of work in common, among our com- 
 panions and among the immense herds that surrounded 
 the farm like a scattered ocean, a mort of adventures 
 and combats shared, before we could thus rub off be- 
 
 108 
 
A LIBATION 109 
 
 tween us that solid mysterious armour in which every 
 man lives confined. 
 
 The cause of that friendship? I don't know it. I 
 can no more explain the reason of it than that of day 
 and night, which all the same I am forced to see and 
 not to see. I can only say one thing, at the risk of 
 saying it a hundred times, like a bigot we were ex- 
 tremely fond of each other. 
 
 At the beginning of spring Mahica came to the 
 farm along with the master and mistress. She was 
 one of the senora's servants. In point of fact, she 
 was the servant of no one on earth. With her beau- 
 tiful head held in unnatural haughtiness, she seemed 
 to rebel against everything, even against time as it 
 went by, and I imagine that when she reached the hour 
 of prayer, with the good Lord in person, it wouldn't 
 go off quite smoothly! 
 
 Mahica! She was like no other woman. That is 
 very certain, seeing that she was the most precious of 
 all that live, with her Indian eyes blacker than the 
 deeps, her hair blacker than night, her cheeks and her 
 arms of gold! I cannot recall her without feeling a 
 contrast of pallor overspread my face. 
 
 Yes, noble caballeros, love is tragic, and life is not 
 comic at all. And yet, if I pity all future men, it is 
 not so much that they have to begin over again our 
 use of time, as that they are certain never to see that 
 woman make her appearance in the daylight of a 
 winding path, or in the shadow of a doorway! 
 
 But how capricious she revealed herself, how dis- 
 concerting, how rudely mocking or hastily gloomy! 
 One used to see her come out of the little "Grey 
 
no WE OTHERS 
 
 House'* where she rested, leading her leopard in leash 
 with a ribbon. The latter, already as big as its father 
 and mother, was as harmless as the lamb called Pascal. 
 No doubt it had not tasted warm blood. That is the 
 rule for those beasts ; they only become savage on the 
 day when that savour is no longer a secret to them. 
 
 And then? Here I fall back completely among the 
 old traditional tags. I fell desperately in love with 
 this Mahica, so sumptuous to see. I loved her all the 
 more that the untamable savage bestowed ferocious 
 glances on me at the outset. This fierce rebellion, in 
 a being dowered with the visage of the rising sun, 
 maddened me to the highest degree, so that I hardly 
 noticed the grief that my adopted brother Gus felt, 
 through my gradual desertion of him. Lord! There 
 are cyclones in men's destinies that turn gentle mo- 
 notonies of sentiment upside down; and I even bore 
 my friend a mild grudge for not realising or admit- 
 ting that a passion of such dimensions as mine justi- 
 fied my negligence in his regard! 
 
 As for her, several signs enabled me soon to guess 
 that her bloodthirsty and raging coldness, if I may 
 put it that way, was only apparent. In particular I 
 saw several times, without being seen, that the starry 
 face which scowled at me in public was turned benevo- 
 lently towards the farm-building where I lodged alone 
 with Gus. 
 
 One day I ventured to speak to her about some- 
 thing or other; another day, of myself. She tried at 
 first to overawe me with a manner that in turns was 
 queer, haughty, and threatening. Then she lowered 
 her head and listened to me. At the end of the fol- 
 
A LIBATION in 
 
 lowing fortnight I obtained from her the promise of 
 a nocturnal rendezvous. 
 
 In the afternoon before that great evening I was 
 with Gus. He looked so sullen, and I felt so happy, 
 that I ended by telling him my good fortune. 
 
 And behold! my Gus begins to sigh, wanders this 
 way and that, and finally leans against a tree, with 
 dangling arms. There was reason the poor boy 
 loved Mahica! 
 
 By dint of shaking him, I made him confess it. And 
 as I continued to shake him, he added that Mahica 
 loved him, too or at least that she had sworn it to 
 him. 
 
 By all the saints in hell and all the fiends of para- 
 dise, I was completely bowled over! I clenched my 
 huge fist and dealt myself a formidable thump on 
 the chest. 
 
 The truth put my eyes out, as they stupidly say. 
 Yes, they loved each other. One detail after another 
 established it. And I I had only been the horrible 
 intruder between them! One thing puzzled me much 
 this positive, indisputable rendezvous that she had 
 granted me. But I had only the more shame that I 
 had intimidated her, and I said to Gus, "I forced a 
 rendezvous from her for to-night. Go in my place." 
 
 He looked at me, and then said, "I will." So say- 
 ing, we parted. 
 
 They who do not understand my action, neither 
 have they understood how deeply Gus was my friend 
 and I his. 
 
 I began to wander, alone, in the wood, and night 
 
ii2 WE OTHERS 
 
 fell. It seemed to fall like a storm, that was all the 
 more terrible for being silent. 
 
 Night; I was still wandering. Suddenly I start 
 there that is the Grey House! My steps had led me 
 to the place where she was waiting for me ; and by a 
 sort of miracle or dark genius of my being, it was 
 the actual time for the rendezvous. 
 
 Ah, no punishment was to be spared me ! Actually, 
 a man was gliding towards the house. The grey ghost 
 showed against the grey of the wall, and it resembled 
 me like a brother. It might have been I, but it was 
 he. He went in. 
 
 And while I moved backwards away, with a grimace 
 of torture, my clenched hands on my forehead, and 
 keeping silence only with all my strength, I heard a 
 horrible cry come from the house! 
 
 After that, I no longer know clearly the leopard! 
 
 When we had all, with our torches and our re- 
 volvers, pulled Gus away from the beast, he was only 
 a bloody ruin, his chest mangled, his neck gnawed. 
 
 In good sooth, during those moments I was like 
 him helpless and heart-torn. Then, little by little, 
 I understood; the ambush, to which fate had led him 
 in my stead and the wild beast let loose on me. 
 
 In my stupor, an obsessing thought fastened upon 
 me. How had it come about that an animal so inno- 
 cent till then had suddenly slain? I discovered that 
 secret. On the golden arm of the Indian I detected 
 a small laceration, hardly healed. And I had a night- 
 mare vision of the inhuman libation of warm blood 
 that she had cast to the monster before she waited 
 for me. 
 
A DREAM TOO GOOD 
 
 HP OWARDS the end of their stay at Park House 
 -* the games of the two children became more seri- 
 ous. They who had never been separated were some- 
 times surprised to see each other, and stared. 
 
 One evening his eyes sought her from the brink of 
 a room she had just entered. One could not see her 
 clearly in the shadow, and the whole room seemed to 
 smile. He stood rooted there, and said nothing 
 even his lips dared not stir but he felt that she had 
 become the only being in the world. 
 
 He lived the days that followed in the wonderment 
 of that evening. He shut up that souvenir in his large 
 and sensitive heart. He did not speak of it either 
 to others or to her hardly to himself, and quietly. 
 He became radiantly reserved, busily thinking of her, 
 even when she was there. 
 
 As for her, she seemed to be waiting for him to 
 speak. 
 
 The separation, which was to last a year, drew nigh. 
 Quickly the last day came and ended. 
 
 The last evening, as on the others, they wandered 
 together in the grounds, side by side. Then, as al- 
 ways, an old maternal voice called to them from the 
 house, and they went in. And while they came along 
 the main drive, he reflected that he would not see her 
 for a long time. He looked at her askance, leaning a 
 
H4 WE OTHERS 
 
 little forward as she walked, her face and hands so 
 dainty, drawn in light and fragile lines; and he re- 
 gretted that he had not spoken. There ought to have 
 been a word, something of decision against the uncer- 
 tainty of fate. But it was too late. Already they 
 could see the gleaming front of the house through 
 the rounded and bluish trees that looked like peacocks. 
 Up to the last, they were separated by everybody. 
 
 They said "Good-bye till the summer!" But un- 
 expected journeys and changed circumstances scat- 
 tered the important people on whom they relied. 
 
 One, two, three years went by. 
 
 He knew nothing about her. Only rarely, in con- 
 versation at long intervals, he heard her name go 
 singing by. 
 
 But he lived for her. After those hard-worked days 
 when so much time is lost in things essential, closing 
 his eyes, he saw her again, and all his weariness was 
 compensated. Truly, it was not a cruel separation for 
 him, for everywhere and always he made a paradise 
 again around her. 
 
 Less than ever he spoke of her. He could not be 
 otherwise than alone to think of her; his love was too 
 great and pure ; he had deified it overmuch. Invin- 
 cibly he enclosed within himself those confidences with 
 which others touch one's heart. 
 
 He wanted to write to her, but could not. Of what 
 use are words? The future was so splendid and so 
 sure ! When he was counting the days, at those weary 
 moments when everything seems precarious and 
 threatening, or when one is really forced to be anx- 
 ious, the sweetness of his dream removed his fears. 
 
A DREAM TOO GOOD 115 
 
 When the two families returned to Park House, he 
 was nineteen and she seventeen. 
 
 So great an event was it to see her again that he 
 delayed his arrival for several days. Yet when he saw 
 her, he had no surprise. 
 
 She was the same; as dainty and fair, but much 
 more developed. She had increased in beauty without 
 changing, being herself a miracle. And in the first 
 look they shared he recognised her still better. 
 
 The idyll made ready, exciting and grand. Every- 
 thing showed and proved to them everything around 
 them and on their own faces that they had chosen 
 each other. But although she sometimes seemed very 
 thoughtful, full of a caressing silence and an offering 
 of attentiveness, he said nothing to her. He would 
 speak to her some day and he would listen to her, but 
 words were still things too formal for the infinity of 
 their nearness to each other. 
 
 He saw little of her. It was not^so easy to be to- 
 gether as formerly. Little obstacles kept them apart, 
 hour after hour. Sometimes, in moments of reflection, 
 he would come to perceiving that time was passing. 
 Then this anxiety struck him as sacrilege; that was 
 only a detail, and he forgot it. 
 
 Once when she was surrounded by a group who 
 discussed the stars, she said, "I often open my win- 
 dow at night, my window on the ground floor, on the 
 edge of the road, and I look out, though I don't see 
 anything. Yes, almost every night." 
 
 And he, trembling in all his body while the talk 
 passed on elsewhere, asked himself if it had been for 
 him that she said it. 
 
n6 WE OTHERS 
 
 In himself, little by little, he dared to believe it; 
 he dared to hear the great appeal she had uttered. It 
 was for him, for him, that she opened her window in 
 the dark. Yes, the time had come. Yes, one evening 
 very soon he would go down there to the side of the 
 house. He pictured to himself the heavenly meeting, 
 and the words that would begin there, never again 
 to end. For nights on end he invented them, and 
 learned them like a poem, his heart throbbing, drunk 
 with glory. 
 
 He postponed the pilgrimage. Oh, not yet! Speak 
 to her, to her whom he only looked at with caution! 
 When on the point of coming so much nearer to her, 
 he said to himself, "Already!" and stopped, dazzled 
 by even the beauty of the action. 
 
 And then an unlooked-for circumstance curtailed 
 the stay of his people. One afternoon they^ said, "We 
 are going away to-morrow !" and suddenly, this was 
 the last evening. 
 
 In his room that night he was seized with terrible 
 distress. He had not spoken; he had done nothing, 
 and now it was too late. 
 
 Too late, he opened his eyes. Distinctly he saw his 
 fault, his disease, his weakness. What was the mat- 
 ter with him, that he had never acted, never spoken, 
 but obstinately vegetated in an empty dream, in an 
 illusion of existence? 
 
 At one moment he said to himself, "To-night?" He 
 half rose, trembling. This very evening? Suppose 
 she was still there, waiting? No! He rejected the 
 senseless notion at once, and fell back in his chair. 
 It was too late, he felt certain. No doubt she had 
 
A DREAM TOO GOOD 117 
 
 waited for a long time, but she must have given it up 
 days ago. j 
 
 He groaned, in hatred and scorn of himself, until 
 weariness took pity on him. 
 
 And long, long afterwards, in the first glimmering 
 of dawn, the other window, on the edge of the road, 
 was shut with a sob. 
 
 It is too late! That was the too brief litany in 
 which henceforth he cradled the mourning of his heart, 
 his return into the world. 
 
 But great news changed the appearance of things; 
 she was coming to Paris. 
 
 In the last month of autumn he saw her, visiting 
 friends. She was haughty, reserved very different. 
 So he looked away from her; she had regained her- 
 self, all was over, and although she was there, she 
 was lost for ever. 
 
 And in spite of all, he felt that the immense inno- 
 cence of his heart had been wounded. A fierce pride 
 sealed his lips. He was cold, distant, quivering, and 
 heart-rent. He left, and went up his street as up 
 Gethsemane. 
 
 Weeks went by. One day he heard by chance that 
 some one had proposed to her and been rejected. He 
 lifted his head again, rich in a poverty-stricken hope. 
 
 This time, as soon as he was alone with himself, he 
 came to strong decisions, without indulgence. He 
 would have an explanation with her; he would act. 
 It appeared so easy to him that his former hesitation 
 amazed him. He tried to see the meaning of it, and 
 lost himself, head in hands. 
 
ii8 WE OTHERS 
 
 To act ! To settle his position definitely at once. It 
 was only a matter of days. He busied himself with 
 it fiercely, and resumed the measures he had left in 
 abeyance. He made an appointment. He said to 
 himself, and repeated it aloud, "Now is the time. I 
 must speak. Yes, at once, to-morrow!" 
 
 But the next day he was informed that she had just 
 got engaged. 
 
 He had such a habit of silence and self -concealment 
 that no one saw how frightfully the revelation wounded 
 him. As soon as the door of his room was closed 
 upon him he cried in the low voice of despair, "Her !" 
 And standing but swaying, he saw himself in the mir- 
 ror make a sign of refusal! He did not consent. He 
 rejected the disaster with all the strength of his life. 
 Then, for the first time, he hurled himself into a per- 
 emptory decision to see her! With feverish and 
 shaking hand, he seized his hat and cloak. He went 
 out, leaving the door open, the room yawning. 
 
 He took the tram-cars, got down at some cross- 
 ways of black night, and ran. 
 
 It was she herself who opened the gate to him. He 
 saw her in the dark because of her voice. 
 
 "What do you want?" she said. 
 
 "To see you to speak to you/' he began at last. 
 "I I " 
 
 "It is too late to speak to me." In a gesture of 
 farewell she raised a hand, where for the first time 
 there shone a ring. He only saw the hand coming 
 out of the dark, and then he only saw the ring, that 
 real and final thing. 
 
A DREAM TOO GOOD 119 
 
 Against that, he found nothing to say. He recoiled 
 a few steps and went away, chanting a subdued but 
 groaning recitative "It is too late I knew it I al- 
 ways said so!" 
 
A TRUE JUDGE 
 
 TT was in the year of grace 1827, on the first of 
 December. As she had intimated, Priscilla Haw- 
 kins returned to the conjugal hearth in the evening. 
 In the midst of the noise of wheels which disappeared 
 along the paved street, she knocked. The servant 
 opened to her as before, and without speaking. She 
 ascended the steps in the porch, gently pushed open 
 the drawing-room door, and strange as it may ap- 
 pear she was there. 
 
 The judge had raised his proud white head. Since 
 the message she had sent him, he had waited for her 
 so passionately that he had to make a great effort to 
 hide his surprise on seeing her at last. 
 
 "It's you?" 
 
 It was a stammering whisper, either from emotion 
 or so that he would not frighten away the young 
 woman who stood, still hesitant, on the threshold. 
 With a tranquil air he rose and went towards her. 
 They shook hands and welcomed each other, using 
 customary phrases, but gravely and timidly, in spite 
 of all. 
 
 She looked round her. Nothing had changed since 
 she went away, six months before. The old gentle- 
 man had taken all measures to ensure that the erring 
 wife's return should pass off as a quite simple happen- 
 ing, and even customary a peaceful incident of an 
 
 1 20 
 
A TRUE JUDGE 121 
 
 evening and that there should be no sign of joy- 
 making or word of forgiveness, that there should be 
 nothing but a resumption of the times that had been 
 interrupted. 
 
 She sat down in the orange-coloured armchair. She 
 was wearing a hat with strings of periwinkle blue, a 
 dress with multiplied flounces of bright green, the 
 colour of sunny foliage, very like the one she wore 
 on the day she went away. Her blue eyes made her 
 ever-rosy face seem transparent, and the spiral curls 
 of her- hair were making the little movements which 
 the fashion of that time required. 
 
 She smiled faintly. And he smiled too, so as to 
 be like her. Both tried hard to look as if they were 
 not thinking of the only thing there was. The judge 
 was fidgety, and rubbed his hands together without 
 cause. He began a sentence, stopped, hesitated, and 
 then, having coughed, made up his mind: 
 
 "Would you like to have dinner, my dear?" 
 
 "Certainly," she said. She took off her hat, and 
 as she handed it to the old servant she looked at her, 
 and said in a kind sad way, "Good evening, Betty." 
 
 The old woman made no sign, as if she had not 
 heard ; she was carrying out too well her master's in- 
 structions. 
 
 They dined. The old gentleman told some fox- 
 hunting tales. She listened, and smiled politely, as 
 one does when making calls. Sometimes, with an ef- 
 fort, she said, "Ah, ah!" 
 
 After dinner they sat down opposite each other. 
 They talked for a few hours more, then words became 
 scarcer. Silence followed, nor could they repel it. 
 
122 WE OTHERS 
 
 They both dared at last to understand that their 
 life would never be what it had been; that to meet 
 again was not enough to bring them together, that the 
 past could not be healed. Possessed more and more 
 by this idea, soon they could no longer dissemble. He 
 shut his eyes, so that he could think. She wiped away 
 a tear. 
 
 When their silence had still more increased and 
 frozen, he raised his fine angular face from the black 
 silk that draped his neck, and said, "We must regret 
 nothing." 
 
 She replied with a sob, and forthwith fell into a 
 terrible paroxysm of tears, her hands pressed upon 
 her eyes. 
 
 The judge's face reddened a little, and his eyelids 
 winked. When she was a little more calm and sub- 
 dued, he urged her paternally to go and lie down. 
 She got up like a little girl. Just as she was going to 
 say "good-night," she hesitated, and was silent. Quite 
 gently, she was no longer there. 
 
 As long as she moved about the room where she 
 had gone to vanish,, as long as there filtered through 
 the ceiling the indistinct murmur, mingled and inno- 
 cent, of her movements, the good man listened. 
 
 Then, when the world was silent again, he took his 
 chin in hand, as he did in the courts. 
 
 Facing himself, he became the judge who seeks to 
 know what he must believe and what he should do. 
 He questioned himself, recalled memories and por- 
 traits; he listened to voices. 
 
 What was Priscilla? The lovely apparition which 
 the name evoked openly and at once declared she was 
 
A TRUE JUDGE 123 
 
 sweetness, weakness. And what else? Nothing else; 
 that only. Whatever her lot might be, she did not 
 deserve to be harmed. 
 
 She had married him innocently, in all sweetness 
 and weakness. He had known her as a child. When 
 she was taller, when she had reached the age that 
 angels seem to be, he had asked for her in wedlock, 
 and had got her. She had wished nothing and de- 
 cided nothing. He had selected her, he had, as he 
 would a rose. Her consent was only the grace that 
 comprised her, her smile was only the sweet scent of 
 her. For eight years, beside this man with white hair, 
 she had continued to be beautiful and to adorn all 
 about her. After that, she began to look sad, and she 
 had cried, loyally. He could not see that sadness at 
 first ; then he could not understand it ; then he did not 
 wish it. He did not try to get to know the other's 
 name. And she had gone away, in gala array in spite 
 of her tears, at the beginning of the spring. She re- 
 turned with the winter, in despair, in spite of the smile 
 in which she tried to disguise herself. 
 
 In all this, the judge tried to find something that 
 was a fault ; and he did not find it. He turned it over 
 again a long, long time and concluded at last that 
 it was he who must beg Priscilla's pardon. 
 
 In these tremors the night wore away. A little 
 grey light was creeping through the panes and becom- 
 ing slowly clearer, when the judge went stooping to 
 liis room. He saw and passed by that doorway 
 to life which divided their rooms. "Should he see her 
 asleep? No" not in fear of giving way, but in ter- 
 ror of awakening her. 
 
124 WE OTHERS 
 
 Having finished his toilet, he set off to his work. 
 At once he was recaptured by his habits, absorbed by 
 the accustomed scenes. The square had a carpet of 
 snow and was draped with fog. He crossed it en- 
 folded in the vast amplitude of a cloak that had capes 
 in tiers. 
 
 He met gentlemen who trod the snow with long 
 strides in all directions, whose faces smarted and their 
 eyes watered in the cold wind; and they also were 
 sunk in huge overcoats of a bluish colour, or like 
 cafe-au-lait, or Spanish tobacco. Snow was every- 
 where spreading the purity of white paper, with draw- 
 ings on it, here and there. It was making the scarlet 
 sign of the hotel look vivid as underdone sirloin, and 
 freshly restoring the bootmaker's green shop front. 
 Then a slight rain began to pencil the faded house- 
 fronts with thin and regular lines. A cab, sharp and 
 black as a pen drawing, was climbing Bessemer Lane, 
 where the pointed stones were set in white instead of 
 in black. 
 
 The judge plunged into a porch, passed along a cor- 
 ridor, where attendants made themselves small and 
 murmured, "My Lord/* and entered a huge hall, se- 
 verely paved with big black and white slabs. 
 
 He sat down at a table where heaps of papers were 
 arranged and began to examine the cases in which 
 judgment was to be delivered in that day's sitting. 
 
 He had completely shaken off his personal anxieties. 
 As duty required, he was now only a judge, bent upon 
 his office. He had regained his energetic precision of 
 mind, his searching glance, and behind the railings 
 of his wrinkles his inexorable air. 
 
A TRUE JUDGE 125 
 
 The first case was that of Fauke v. Fauke, a story 
 of adultery; a light-headed woman, a good man for- 
 saken. His eyebrows contracted. He reread the 
 circumstances. Whatever they were, the culprit had 
 transgressed of her own free will. Then there was 
 no excuse. The conclusion he had arrived at on the 
 first hearing was confirmed, and he decided that this 
 woman must be severely punished. 
 
THE THREE MAD-WOMEN 
 
 three patrons, having finished their accus- 
 tomed inspection, were conducted with much 
 bowing by the directors and managers of the asylum 
 as far as the door which overlooks the fields. 
 
 The marchioness begged them to return into the 
 institution where the miserable recluses required their 
 attention, and the three old ladies, left alone, sat down 
 on the stone seat to await their motor-car. 
 
 Evening was falling, and on the white walls of the 
 garden of the mad and on the last of the urban en- 
 closures it spread slight mourning. In deep reflection 
 on the dismal dormitories and the strangely animated 
 cells the three rich ladies contemplated the evening, 
 which comes miraculously, for you do not see it come. 
 
 They sighed together, nor was there anything sur- 
 prising in it, seeing that they were of the same age, 
 devoted themselves to the same work, resembled each 
 other, and had their minds full just then of the same 
 pictures all that tragic procession of accursed, of 
 shriekers, of martyrs, whose lot was allayed between 
 the committee's costly walls. 
 
 Escaped therefrom, the three patronesses sat in 
 wonder, with renewed visions of the poor restless 
 Marionette to whom God had been cruel in order to 
 punish her sons; of her next whose backward brain 
 left her a useless object in the cavern of a room ; and 
 
 126 
 
THE THREE MAD-WOMEN 127 
 
 of the melancholy mad, gnawed by her heart as by a 
 cancer. And if our visitors were too used to the 
 sights to be upset by them, none the less they remained 
 on the seat very soberly, like three little girls. 
 
 "The car isn't coming. Constant cannot have un- 
 derstood. He never understands," declared the 
 leader. 
 
 As she uttered these words, a couple came into sight 
 from the other end of the Rue des Ramparts, which 
 ended at their feet. It was the tax-collector and his 
 wife. They did not see the three ladies, and drew 
 closer to each other, tenderly, in the greyness of even- 
 ing. They came on into the shadow of a tall house 
 that towered above the street-wall, and drawing still 
 nearer, they kissed, under the wing of the house. 
 
 The president said "Ah !" as one sighs, and the two 
 other ladies heard her sighing. Their eyes followed 
 the lovers, and there was something a little curious in 
 the way they admired them, charitably disposed as 
 they were. When the young couple had passed along 
 the road so near, and yet wandering in another 
 world one of the ladies murmured, in a carefully low 
 voice, "God bless them!" 
 
 The two others at once said, "Yes," as if it had been 
 a question. 
 
 Thanks to the darkness, which continued infinitely 
 to fall from heaven or rise from earth, this corner of 
 the country grew smaller, smaller, till it was like a 
 confessional box, where one thinks aloud. 
 
 The marchioness's lips framed some explanation of 
 the chauffeur's remissness, some misunderstanding, 
 but it was not the moment for that sort of reflection. 
 
128 WE OTHERS 
 
 No doubt it was the vision of the mad-women, of the 
 two divinely blind beings, of the evening that draws 
 in all trifles, that had altered the face of things, for 
 instead of speaking of her chauffeur, she confessed: 
 "I have been young." She added, "I remember it 
 still." 
 
 She bowed her shoulders, and they trembled as 
 when touched in benediction. One noticed her white 
 hair, her cheeks, white also and soft, her cheeks of 
 cotton-wool. One even noticed how pink her eyelids 
 were, worn out by the days that had run away, drop 
 by drop. It was a moment when secrets can no longer 
 defend themselves, when silence can no longer conceal 
 all things, when one's heart is opened. 
 
 She who had just said suddenly, "I have been 
 young," now stammered : 
 
 "I have been mad, I have been mad! I have had 
 in my life an unspeakable crisis, which passed like a 
 great dream. Yes, I, such as I was, such as I am, mad 
 like those we saw just now. True, it is a long time 
 since. 
 
 "We had been settled some little time. Jacques had 
 just had his salary raised, and our Marthe was two 
 years old. Well, I wanted to finish with all, and go 
 after another man. One night I was stealing softly 
 through the house, to go away for ever. The little 
 one was crying in her cot while I was gliding towards 
 the door. 
 
 "Yes, I know ; I did not go. But that was a chance 
 because I could not open the wardrobe where all my 
 things were. That was the only reason, that trifle, 
 why I did not cross the threshold, why I continued to 
 
THE THREE MAD-WOMEN 129 
 
 stay at home. But for that silly detail, all would have 
 been upset. When I think of that error, pushed so 
 far, of that crime begun, of that abyss into which I 
 had actually thrown myself, I am stupefied and do not 
 understand. All seems insane to me, in that night- 
 mare which I had thought of for months, wished for 
 for weeks, and walked in for a night. I know no 
 more about it, only that it was. I cannot even regret 
 it, so far removed I am from the woman who was 
 tempted to the very brink. Long, long ago I became 
 myself again, beside my poor husband who is so 
 ill; and I have only one more hope on earth to die 
 before him." 
 
 The second lady very quickly took up the tale, in 
 the midst of the obscurity which more and more com- 
 pletely united their hearts, their poor infectious 
 hearts : 
 
 "I, too, I have been mad. Ah, when that young 
 man, when that Olivier who used to smile at me so 
 handsomely and proudly, began to seek my daughter's 
 company! She was seventeen and he twenty-five; it 
 was natural. But I, I would not have it, and I fought 
 against it, and I did all I could that I might not be 
 tortured. What did I not ask and contrive in my 
 prayers? What did I not dream of that was unjust 
 and merciless? He, he never knew anything of it. 
 He did not know how madly happy and unhappy he 
 had made me, when he came so near to me only to 
 turn away again. He thought he had to do with a 
 normal woman, even at the moments when I most 
 loved him. Ah, I have been mad I was free, and 
 yet imprisoned! They became more and more inti- 
 
i 3 o WE OTHERS 
 
 mate. They had a daughter; and now my prayer, 
 which will perhaps be granted, is only O my God ! 
 to have a great-grandchild!" 
 
 "And I too," the third patroness went on in a se- 
 date voice, "I have been something like them, like 
 you. It was also because of a man who came into 
 my life, a life already settled down, which really 
 means already ended. One day he spoke to me bru- 
 tally, before everybody. He had no right to do it 
 you understand me but what despairing gratitude I 
 dedicated to him, for having just a moment thought 
 of me! Later he grew a little sociable. It was ter- 
 rible. I heard abominable things about him that they 
 proved to me, and yet I could not believe them until 
 afterwards. But everything made me like him best. 
 Nothing happened between us. But I have been mad ; 
 I know it well, seeing I am no longer so, and some- 
 times I seem to remember yet how I then hated every- 
 body, and all my family. I hated them so much that 
 I was happier by hating than by loving. How could 
 I have changed so much how? I do not try to ex- 
 plain it to myself. There is no more accounting for 
 heart-disease than for the other sorts." 
 
 They were silent. 
 
 "Youth is a delirium that passes," the oldest of 
 the three friends concluded gently. "These are the 
 disordered dreams that one has, some night or other. 
 Next morning, in the daylight, one is older, and tran- 
 quil. You see it is not even difficult to talk about it ; 
 it is so completely done with." 
 
 She uttered these extraordinary words in an en- 
 tirely peaceful tone. She brushed some dust from 
 
THE THREE MAD-WOMEN 131 
 
 her gown of black satin, and stood up. Her compan- 
 ions got up too, and made their way towards the 
 principal gate, where the chauffeur, insufficiently in- 
 structed, was doubtless waiting. They became sil- 
 houettes, sumptuous and slender, which gave them an 
 air of imitating young women. They followed the 
 madhouse wall along, feeling themselves healed and 
 serene, and all three wearing the same smile of old 
 age and convalescence. 
 
THE SENSITIVE PLANT 
 
 HE had a name, said Jimmy, that might have 
 broken your jaw. I've forgotten what it was 
 exactly, although it belonged to my closest compan- 
 ion. The fact is that this was at a far-off and ex- 
 citing period quite damnably so of my existence, 
 and in that South Africa where such adventures be- 
 fell me that I regard myself as a romancer when I 
 recall them! 
 
 This damned pal, then, this pirate, this brigand, 
 this but we won't unload the story too quickly this 
 bankrupt skunk, then, started housekeeping with me 
 in a bush cabin somewhere near Griqualand, at about 
 the time of the Rush. 
 
 Those of you, gentlemen readers, who did not see 
 the commotion that then sent all the diamond-wanters 
 of the world crowding to the Cape, have seen hardly 
 anything, and even if a man has been a hangman or 
 convict-warder, he only has a very besugared idea 
 of what the human animal may become. 
 
 For myself, I was something of a blemish among 
 the crowd of my fellow animals. I have always been, 
 I admit, pretty well refined, not only in disposition 
 but in looks. Over yonder my correct English seemed 
 like a foreign language, and of course my youthful 
 face of that time had no sort of affinity with that 
 snout. 
 
 132 
 
THE SENSITIVE PLANT 133 
 
 My companion was let us speak plainly a brute. 
 A fierce, uncivilised giant he stood, with a head like 
 a rough chopping-block where thick fair hair grew like 
 a thatch, his huge features shining with sweat, his 
 nose red-painted with whiskey, his shoulders like a 
 travelling trunk. 
 
 This rascal, whose name, after torturing my gullet, 
 has finally escaped me, was not a bad sort at bottom, 
 but stupid my word! and foul-mouthed oh, wasn't 
 he ! Even when you caressed him, you had to be very- 
 careful you stroked him the right way. 
 
 But whatever the living antithesis we made, we got 
 on pretty well together, and we worked together I 
 with my head, he with his arms; I as a man, he as a 
 bear. 
 
 After months in which we saw no more precious 
 stones than if we had prospected between the stones 
 of Regent Street (though that's not always barren 
 work, if one can believe the gossip of your damned 
 modern newspapers), I decided to go, alone, a point 
 farther west, to get a smell of the news. 
 
 That was how I came to reach the Boer village 
 where the inn was kept by one Pickles. 
 
 Now this Pickles, a beastly personage whom I sus- 
 pected of having formerly hunted passers-by in the 
 bush, and his wife, a hideous slattern with a black 
 cape and a yellow nose these two monsters, I say, 
 had a daughter, a sort of dazzling vision, slight as 
 gossamer, airy as a song, and who was called Re- 
 becca to boot the most beautiful of names. 
 
 God damn me once more if I've ever seen, either 
 in gardens or museums, anything to compare with that 
 
134 WE OTHERS 
 
 Rebecca, so fair and so pink you would have sworn 
 that Noonday had dusted her hair with gold and pol- 
 ished her cheeks with rosy powder ! As for her eyes, 
 as for her smile, there's no way of telling you their 
 brilliance with my voice, nor with ink, either. 
 
 And she was also the most tender of sensitive 
 plants. Trembling, starting, of angelic fragility, she 
 blushed and stammered for nothing at all. A word 
 uttered louder than another brought a twitch of un- 
 easiness to her face. It seemed as if words touched 
 her like breath, and dimmed her hue a little. 
 
 Between this tender and touching gentleness and 
 my own temperament there was an affinity that drew 
 us near together. And one fine evening she replied 
 with the most adorable of silences to my first avowal, 
 offered in a low voice, a very low voice, and with my 
 face turned away, for fear of making her fly away. 
 Yes, she was silent for a very long time on that great 
 occasion. It was a way of saying "yes" with her 
 heart. 
 
 When my working partner came and joined me, my 
 affair with Rebecca had progressed a long way. 
 
 Without having exactly said it to each other, we 
 felt that it was going to be a question of proposal, 
 and betrothal, and all that sort of thing. 
 
 Now, my companion, as soon as he arrived, was 
 fascinated by the vision of Rebecca. I could not 
 help laughing when I saw, blissfully planted before 
 the little trembling flower, that great rough-hewn 
 block, greyish and huge, like the latter half of an ele- 
 phant. 
 
 And the idea of a wicked joke budded in my un- 
 
THE SENSITIVE PLANT 135 
 
 merciful mind the mind of a victorious lover. I 
 concealed from the nameless being ah, the absence 
 of that name annoys and pursues me as its presence 
 would! my idyll with Rebecca; and after hoodwink- 
 ing him by telling him I had found out that he was 
 as love-lorn as the devil, I advised him to reveal his 
 feelings to her. 
 
 Very confidingly, I urged him to take the fortiter 
 in re course. Yes, I had the ferocious cheek to tell 
 him a long rigmarole by way of showing that the only 
 qualities the young girl esteemed in men were energy, 
 rudeness, and even brutality ! In short, I piled up the 
 rudest of jests, without any notion God might bear 
 me witness, if He would deign to! that it might 
 have serious results. 
 
 The next evening I met my Rebecca, toddling 
 alongside a wall, with her head down. I stopped her 
 and we chatted. I uttered the name of my friend, 
 that frightful name forgotten to-day, enshrouded, 
 buried. 
 
 She jumped as if I had struck her. 
 
 Good, I said to myself; no doubt about it; my 
 numskull has seen her and has courted her in his 
 own way. 
 
 At that moment I was angry with myself for work- 
 ing the sorry joke. Seized with remorse, I forced my- 
 self to make excuses for the poor bungler. 
 
 But the young girl raised her clear eyes to mine 
 and interrupted me. "I am engaged to him," she 
 said. 
 
 "To whom?" I yelled. 
 
 ''Why," said Rebecca, "to " and the crystalline 
 
136 WE OTHERS 
 
 voice repeated that name so hard to swallow, that 
 accursed name, that name repulsive as physic. 
 
 Beside myself, I gesticulated: "You! He! But, 
 my dear, he's a brute! He's " 
 
 "That's just why I liked him," she said sweetly; 
 "he spoke to me with authority. Ah, how loud he 
 shouted ! If you knew all that he dared to say to me, 
 to me! It's inconceivable!" 
 
 She had lowered her head, and her nose had been 
 turned by bashfulness into a rose; and she piped 
 "It's been a revelation." 
 
 There! I sat down on a boulder, all of a heap. 
 What else could I do? 
 
 Yes, sirs, yes. My sensitive plant had been en- 
 tirely captivated by the huge blockhead. She had be- 
 gun, in the twinkling of an eye, and after all the in- 
 struction of her youth, to understand and to like 
 rudeness and ignominy. Why? For no reason at all 
 because she had begun to like them, and that's all. 
 
 Afterwards? Well, it didn't kill me, since here I 
 am. Like a lunatic I went away from that country of 
 lunatics, and naturally I've forgotten. 
 
 But I must say one thing: In the matter of senti- 
 mentality, one must not rely on anything nor on 
 what's left. When a man presumes to talk about love, 
 and to affirm this or that, he risks saying as many 
 foolish things as a doctor does as soon as he ven- 
 tures to relate the secrets of disease, or as an astrono- 
 mer when he takes it into his head to explain the 
 real reasons of the comedies of the sun and the moon. 
 
THE APPARITION 
 
 TALKING about this, said Etienne, do you know 
 that I'm getting a divorce ? No ? Well, it is so. 
 The proceedings are begun. Jeannine and I, we're 
 going to wait in ante-rooms, seated on forms; then 
 we shall go in and expose our private affairs to peo- 
 ple who will not know us any better than doctors do. 
 And as soon as those folks have made their way into 
 our life, we we shall go out of it. I do not know 
 what will become of her, and I know still less what 
 awaits me in those days, those evenings, when she 
 no longer does it. 
 
 Sir, if I am speaking of the affair to you with an 
 air of indifference, it is not only a way of showing 
 that I am upset. It is also because I am occupied 
 with the nasty future left to me, when I am a widower, 
 or rather, almost a widower no, more than a wid- 
 ower. 
 
 I am not accusing any one. It is nothing surprising 
 that this should happen to us as well, of course. Life 
 always finds a way of making everybody's affairs end 
 up badly, because it's the rule, and those that finish 
 well must be begun again. 
 
 How did it come about? It was settled suddenly 
 one evening, one great evening. I am going to tell 
 you how it happened, although it's not a very good 
 
 i37 
 
138 WE' OTHERS 
 
 story. It has no beginning and no end, and isn't in 
 the least amusing. 
 
 You know Jeannine. Even when quite young she 
 was surprising, because too pretty, with her eyes so 
 deeply so deeply blue, and that sunny hair which 
 would not let night quench it. For years she never 
 ceased to improve it had to be seen to be believed. 
 She I in short, we got married, and we have lived 
 together a good part of our lives that good part 
 which will be dead in a few days. 
 
 During those fifteen years nothing worth mention 
 happened in her life, in mine, in ours; nothing hap- 
 pened, not only nothing that called for reproof, but 
 nothing special. 
 
 She set things in order, came and went. I I 
 worked. I put myself to much trouble in trying to 
 spare her cares and worry. The damned bankruptcy 
 of my first employer has been the only secret I have 
 kept from her. We lived much retired. In the first 
 days we did not want to see any one we too much 
 preferred each other to other people; and then after- 
 wards we hardly thought of attracting friends. In 
 short, we were happy, weren't we? All that has gone 
 by like a dream, and now I can no longer recall those 
 days very well, now that I've awakened from them. 
 
 Then behold that happiness suddenly darkened, 
 about two years ago. Jeannine changed, and the first 
 symptoms of her malady were unaccountably queer. 
 She became absent-minded, nervous, dejected. She 
 began to speak of the things which had always been 
 so in a tone of complaint; for example, that we did 
 
THE APPARITION 139 
 
 nothing in the evenings, either of us, but just faced 
 each other. 
 
 We did nothing, forsooth, because I was stupefied 
 and tired out by the day's work; and then again a 
 reason which makes all the others unnecessary it 
 had been like that for three or four thousand nights. 
 
 I tried to reason kindly with her, although this in- 
 justice had slightly wounded me at heart. She was 
 silent at first; then she argued her condition becom- 
 ing worse and became quarrelsome and perverse. 
 She went so far as to name others to me weak- 
 minded friends or absurd neighbours, who worked, 
 she insisted, at least as hard as I did, and yet made 
 room for recreation. 
 
 The matter of our evenings is only an example. 
 Everything became an excuse to her for fault-finding ; 
 everything turned her poor little head upside down. 
 She used to get herself into a terrible state, while I, 
 open-mouthed, had hardly the time to realise what it 
 was about. 
 
 My distressful eyes marked the increasing progress 
 of these caprices. She had spells of silence that were 
 worth no more to me or herself than her shouts. 
 She emerged from those times with red eyes, or with 
 martyr-like contractions of her face that distorted it 
 for the rest of the day. 
 
 This was neurasthenia in all its horror. Doctor 
 Cazeneuve, whom I hurried to one morning before 
 going home, confirmed it, and prescribed bromide and 
 a life without shocks. In distraction I stammered 
 the word "insanity." He shook his spectacled head, 
 and then with a kindly smile advised me to be hope- 
 
140 WE OTHERS 
 
 ful, "granting the state of the poor child's general 
 health." 
 
 Bromide and a peaceful life brought no improve- 
 ment. Her mental malady got worse, and assumed 
 another shape. Besides her absorption in the corners 
 of the room, when she withdrew within herself as 
 behind a veil, she had now sudden fits of nervous 
 merriment, and moments of inspiration when she 
 stood upright with the face of a nun, and all trem- 
 bling. One summer morning, as she was opening the 
 window, she began to laugh magnificently and that 
 laugh hurt me. 
 
 I was very unhappy; I pitied her. Then, too, like 
 all sedate and matter-of-fact people, I had a horror of 
 all abnormal, morbid, and mysterious things. I would 
 rather have been trailing a broken leg about than a 
 woman whose reason faltered, and whose delusions 
 shook her like a rag. 
 
 Thus it was that the great evening in question came. 
 
 If that evening was an extraordinary one, it was 
 so, first, because there was nothing special about it. 
 It was exactly like the former ones, which all re- 
 sembled each other like drops of falling water. We 
 were sitting in our armchairs, at our respective cor- 
 ners of the fireplace. On the green wallpaper the 
 English engraving preserved its familiar immobility. 
 The chandelier hung there, with its trembling rattle 
 when a motor-bus went by; and the tick-tick of the 
 clock continued to be a noise and a silence at the 
 same time. 
 
 She was looking in front of her, with distant eye. 
 
 Then suddenly, as I followed her gaze, I felt I 
 
THE APPARITION 141 
 
 saw, my friends that there was some one facing 
 her. There was some one at whom she was looking. 
 
 Ah, what a discovery, what a theatrical happening 
 in the eternal set-piece of our room! 
 
 Some one a man, a rival, a sort of robber ! Though 
 she was alone with me, she was above all alone with 
 another ! 
 
 Yes, yes; no doubt about it. There were infinite 
 looks in her eyes, even when they rested on me; an 
 engrossed way of preserving silence, even when she 
 indicated yes or no to me with her head, which con- 
 fessed all. Some one! Some one opposite her, be- 
 side her, standing invisible like the gods of legends, 
 but a real man worse than a god ! A man precisely, 
 with his masculine, sensuous face ; I did not know him, 
 I did not invent him I believed in him, I believed in 
 him. 
 
 He had come to her, and he was there now. Every- 
 thing pointed him out to me more and more clearly. 
 She smiled weakly, and my wild eyes gathered the 
 entangled reflection ; she sighed, and I understood well 
 enough that the sigh spoke first to him. 
 
 Having begun to understand, I went on without 
 pause. 
 
 The timidity impressed upon her, her hesitating 
 ways, something chilly in her gestures, showed me 
 how near he was. Her eyes full of languor and 
 visions were half closed one moment, and I saw 
 clearly that she was growing bolder, and that he was 
 touching her. 
 
 Thus, nothing supernatural had happened. There 
 was no illness, no insanity. The only changed thing 
 
142 WE OTHERS 
 
 was a heart and one never has the right to say that 
 a heart is mad. All became clear and logical, by rea- 
 son of a newcomer unknown to me, and still deli- 
 ciously unknown to her, some one for whom she was 
 coming to life again. 
 
 All the former complication was unravelling itself; 
 all was being explained with fatal simplicity. The 
 faint glory that she seemed sometimes to wear, her 
 tremblings unformed confessions of longing, at first 
 unconscious and then unutterable the rapture that 
 stealthily caressed her face, these were right. And 
 her malice, her anger, her injustice were right. I who 
 had thought myself to be the strong-minded victim, 
 I had been the madman and the hangman. 
 
 So when, my friends, without any transition, with- 
 out any paving the way or explanation, I said, "Then 
 we must part," she replied, "Yes." 
 
 So saying, Etienne plunged the glance of his light- 
 less green eyes into a glass of absinthe, and, letting it 
 filter through his drooping moustache, he swallowed 
 the potion. 
 
THE LAST STEPS 
 
 HpOGETHER they were a century and a half old. 
 *- Their ages separately? Neither of them knew. 
 It was so long since they had ceased to make that 
 division in their years; their natural and reasonable 
 habit of being two years older together, every St. 
 Sylvester's Day, was too old. 
 
 So many days, so many seasons, so many years 
 had they lived side by side in the low-built farmhouse 
 whose roof overflowed like wings! It would have 
 astonished them for a moment had you told them they 
 had not always been married. 
 
 They each retained something of a shadowy mem- 
 ory, and were more like each other than a brother and 
 a sister. When the village folk saw them strolling, 
 so feeble, and yet so strongly united, they could not 
 help thinking that one of them would soon die, and 
 that then the other would not be able to remain alone. 
 
 Winter was unkind to the two ancients. It handled 
 their old windpipes roughly, broke down their backs 
 a little, hollowed their bony cheeks and their ruined 
 jaws. He could see a grey veil before his eyes; she 
 had attacks of dizziness. When May arrived, they 
 felt themselves less caressed by the shade, and less 
 bold in the sunshine. Life became hard of living, like 
 the time when they earned it. It was almost a labour 
 
144 WE OTHERS 
 
 to start out from the morning so as to arrive at the 
 evening. 
 
 One day when he was sitting in front of the house, 
 a little more motionless than the day before, she went 
 off to get some grass for the rabbits. As soon as she 
 was on the other side of the little gate contrived in 
 the fence, she stopped to take breath. That was the 
 first stage of the journey. Then she went on along 
 the road. From the seat where he was sitting, like 
 a child too well-behaved, the old man's hazy eyes could 
 not make her out, but he heard the sound of her steps. 
 He shut his eyes, so that he could see her going away. 
 
 When she arrived at the corner of the main street, 
 opposite the respectable house of the Guichet ladies, 
 the old woman opened her eyes wide and fell down, 
 with no cry and no gesture, neither in falling nor after. 
 
 A passer-by stopped, and a little girl came skipping 
 up. One good wife and then another appeared. They 
 carried her into a shop, and saw at once that she was 
 dead. 
 
 Houses emptied themselves ; the shop and its vicin- 
 ity became black with people. She was laid out on 
 three chairs; and her yellow face, slightly grimacing, 
 seemed like a terrible portrait of her they had known. 
 
 "The old man must be told/' some one said. 
 
 "No!" some voices cried; "not him his daughter- 
 in-law first. There she is. Hey, Marguerite!" 
 
 The woman came up, ugly and timid, with her dress 
 hanging loosely from her scanty shoulders, her cheeks 
 dried and grey as poor bread. Her calling she was 
 a washerwoman had boiled her hands, and she swung 
 them like parcels. 
 
THE LAST STEPS 145 
 
 When she saw the body of her man's mother he 
 too had been gone a long time and she was just be- 
 ginning to forget him Marguerite trembled from 
 head to foot. Her lips went white and her big eyes 
 rolled in her flat face. She sniffled, rubbed her nose 
 with her apron, and whispered, "Poor old man!" 
 
 She turned awkwardly to the crowd, without look- 
 ing at anybody. "No one must tell the old man; I'll 
 tell him myself." And she made a grimace of en- 
 treaty. 
 
 Then the black patch of the crowd broke up in all 
 directions, grew lighter, and faded away. 
 
 Marguerite had the corpse carried to her own bed. 
 When she had hastily arranged the room, she went 
 to the old man. Seated in front of his house, under 
 the wing-like edge of the roof, he was waiting. 
 
 As the wooden gate slammed, he started, and raised 
 his head. 
 
 "It's me," said Marguerite. He became again like 
 a statue. "Come, Victor, it's time to go in." 
 
 Then he groaned funnily, got up, and groaned again. 
 Upright, he stretched his arms out in front of him, 
 and swayed. There seemed to be something shining 
 in his face. 
 
 "Well, what is there?" she asked. 
 
 "I can't see, I can't see anything at all!" he said. 
 
 "Ah!" said Marguerite. It was the simplicity of 
 her soul, no doubt, that made her ready for all great 
 tragedies, for she said no more. She only took the 
 arm of the man who had gone blind at the very mo- 
 ment of his eternal comrade's disappearance. 
 
 Dragging his feet, he was led firmly into the 
 
146 WE OTHERS 
 
 kitchen ; he touched the back of a chair, and sat down. 
 But his breath came harshly; he sighed, grumbled, 
 and just when she was going to speak, to tell him 
 he groaned. 
 
 "They're done for my eyes! That, above all, 
 that!" he cried suddenly. 
 
 For several hours he could do nothing but grieve. 
 
 In a moment of intermission he asked for his wife. 
 "Where's the old lady? What's she doing, by God!" 
 Another time, between two attacks of melancholy, she 
 saw that he had gathered his wits and was waiting 
 for his wife. Then he uttered complaints, gripped 
 again by the fit, knowing only that he was ill and 
 afraid. 
 
 Several people came. Some went in ; others looked 
 through the window; but no one dared speak to him. 
 
 When the day had passed without his knowing the 
 truth, no one else dared come. 
 
 From time to time Marguerite left him, and locked 
 him in. She hurried, her face soiled with wiping tears 
 away. She went to see the dead woman again, who 
 was gradually disappearing in the night, in spite of 
 the two candles. Then she plunged into errands, and 
 making arrangements. She thought of everything, 
 always weary and always running, automatic and 
 heroic, overwhelmed yet insuperable. She knew well 
 enough what had to be done, she of mourning per- 
 petual, she who was so used to surviving! 
 
 She was once more beside him when, between eve- 
 ning and night, there came a lull in his grief, which 
 began weakly, and grew longer, and longer. 
 
 The woman lighted a little spirit-lamp and placed 
 
THE LAST STEPS 147 
 
 it on the high mantelpiece, and thought the moment 
 had come to tell the old man that she who had always 
 been was no more. She planted herself in front of 
 him, as fleshless and as trembling as a scarecrow in 
 a wintry gale. Her head drooped as in shame; and 
 summoning all her strength, as if to shout, she stam- 
 mered, "She won't come back any more she can't 
 she's gone away." 
 
 He did not speak. She looked at him then, and saw 
 that he was smiling and asleep. 
 
 She sidled off, and began to tidy things, very gently. 
 Suddenly he moved and called her. She went up so 
 near to him that he could touch her arm with his blind 
 fingers. 
 
 "Listen, my girl," he said, "come here; listen. The 
 old woman has come back. She's here. I saw her 
 there, just now, there where you are. I was asleep, 
 and suddenly I knew she was there. She arranged 
 things, and went away again. I didn't move, and I 
 didn't speak, on purpose. Listen ; I don't want her to 
 know that I can't see. I don't want it'll pain her 
 too much. I won't have it. Make her go away just 
 a little while, until I'm well again. Think of some 
 way, my girl." 
 
 He bestirred himself on the old seat, which groaned 
 and seemed to be speaking. 
 
 "Take her away. Let her go away for a day, or 
 more, if necessary. Tell her take her away." 
 
 "That's good, Victor; I'll see about it. I know. 
 She shan't know I swear it by the good Lord." 
 
 The oath affected the old man, and he said, "You're 
 a good girl," and fell upon religious silence. 
 
148 WE OTHERS 
 
 The next day she told him an unlikely story of re- 
 lations who had taken the old lady home with them. 
 He listened in wondering interest, like a very little 
 child. When she had finished, he said, "Then, too, I 
 know she's been back again, last night, while I was 
 asleep; I heard her." 
 
 "Yes; she came back," said Marguerite, softly. 
 
 Thus two days went by. The day after they had 
 buried the old woman, the doctor came to examine the 
 stricken man. 
 
 "Very good!" he said, against all expectations; 
 "there is hardly any fever, and the inflammation is 
 passing away. To-morrow he will see." 
 
 She had taken refuge in a corner, stupefied and 
 shrinking. "Yes. To-morrow to-morrow " 
 
 Down in her dark soul she repeated, very quietly, 
 "To-morrow!" 
 
 To-morrow he would open his eyes, and then, really 
 blind, he would not see her! To-morrow his lowly 
 relation would be punished in her heart for her silence, 
 as she would have been punished had she spoken. To- 
 morrow! It is always so in life. There is always a 
 morrow when all ends badly, and the day of peace or 
 of hope that one has sometimes is always only the 
 eve of another. 
 
THE PRESENCE 
 
 DID he kiss you?" Bertha asked her old friend. 
 "Yes, on the cheek." 
 
 "And what did he say?" 
 
 "He said, I'm going away, but I shall come back 
 to marry you, in spite of all, in spite of everybody. 
 I shall return famous.' ' 
 
 "He said nothing else?" 
 
 "Yes, vows, and desperate promises, and all one 
 can say. That was in my grandmother's house, in the 
 Rue Neuve. Yes, it was from there that he went 
 away, with his long golden hair. 
 
 "Then I began to wait. It was agreed that we 
 should not write to each other, since my parents for- 
 bade it. That didn't matter; we knew well enough 
 that we were thinking of each other. I awaited his 
 return one year, two, three, four. 
 
 "At the end of the fourth year we saw his por- 
 trait here, in an illustrated paper, which spoke of his 
 first excellent work and of his still brighter future. 
 
 "This first echo of fame, which showed me his 
 promise coming to reality, excited me. I thought our 
 meeting was near. I got ready for his sending for 
 me or his coming to me. I waited for a sign from 
 him. 
 
 "No doubt he, too, was waiting for a sign from 
 me, or perhaps there was something else. But little 
 
 149 
 
ISO WE OTHERS 
 
 by little the months and years went by. Our separa- 
 tion remained ; and little by little he never came back. 
 My great man, my wonderful fiance, I have only seen 
 him since in newspaper illustrations, on picture post- 
 cards, and in that statuette there, which they unveiled 
 three years after his death, three years ago." 
 
 Madame Louis lifted the falling cloud of the lace 
 curtain, and looked through the window at the public 
 square, embroidered with pointed roofs, and as grey 
 as if it were raining. Twilight was beginning peace- 
 fully to wash away the colours, leaving still intact only 
 the black silhouettes of roofs, drawn upon the sky. 
 In the middle of the square, upon a pedestal, one could 
 see the whitish bust projecting that the town had 
 erected in honour of its illustrious citizen. 
 
 The lady sank back into the feeble twilight of the 
 room. She was not quite old, and still retained traces 
 of coquettishness. Her hair, once fair, should have 
 been grey, but it was yellow. A lace collar encircled 
 her neck. 
 
 "When I understood that he would not come back 
 any more, I thought I should die. Then I married 
 the first that came, a gentleman of this town. Some 
 years after my marriage his fame increased, as you 
 know, so quickly, so quickly! It was unique. And 
 soon they talked of no one but him, here in the coun- 
 try of his birth, as they did all over the world. As 
 for me, it's now thirty-five years since I got married." 
 
 Bertha's cap nodded; on both sides of it, on the 
 rusty temples, were black bands that looked as if 
 marked on with ink. Eager, attentive, sympathetic, 
 and wearing a long black dress with stuff-covered but- 
 
THE PRESENCE 151 
 
 tons, she looked like a priest. She leaned forward, 
 so that she could see Madame Louis better, and take 
 in what she said. 
 
 "How sorry you must be not to have married such 
 a man!" 
 
 "No," said the lady. 
 
 "You are resigned to your lot?'* 
 
 Madame Louis' gesture meant "no" again. 
 
 "I have no cause to be resigned," she said; "I am 
 lucky in not having committed the folly of marrying 
 my first fiance." 
 
 "You were afraid that a great artist " 
 
 "It's not that. It's because he's dead. But the 
 other, mine, he who was not equal to him formerly, 
 he lives, he lives! We are alive! He has no talent; 
 he does not even understand what fame is ; he's almost 
 nothing. But he's there, and I have him. Our every- 
 day life is without attractiveness; it might be deaf 
 and blind ; it's useless ; it's whatever you like, but it is. 
 We are living, we continue to live, we are part of 
 reality. I am not all alone, walled up in a house too 
 big, with a frigid memory, shrouded with sorrow, 
 struck off the list of the living! 
 
 "Morning, evening, and night, some one lives beside 
 me, standing, sitting, lying. Every minute my poor 
 husband touches me, elbows me. At daybreak, when 
 a little light comes between the curtains into the heavy 
 night of our bedroom, if I wake up first, and if, among 
 the still shapeless furniture, I see him asleep by my 
 side, his big face all grey, and buried in the pillow, the 
 meaning of emptiness is revealed to me. I start and 
 stifle a cry. Then he moves, sighs, breathes, and sits 
 
152 WE OTHERS 
 
 up, stammering; and I realise that life is, after all, 
 everything; and that the rest past or otherwise 
 hardly counts. 
 
 "We exchange words from time to time never un- 
 usual good morning, thanks, yes, no but when one 
 thinks of the silence of death and of memory, those 
 words begin to assume a real significance which has 
 no end." 
 
 She shook her head: "Yes, yes, yes/' she said. 
 "Ah, those who have had life for a long time under- 
 stand it in the end, and in the end they become miserly 
 of it. And then they esteem the remainder of a poor 
 present creature more than dazzling phantoms, 
 dreamed of or disappeared. 
 
 "Why, it's his time the time when the house calls 
 him. There he is, down there, coming home." 
 
 At the other side of the square, on the edge of the 
 pavement, a human mass was standing, enveloped in 
 overcoats. The gentleman hesitated to cross over; 
 his stick trembled at the end of a stiffened arm. He 
 was looking to right and to left, to make sure that no 
 vehicle was approaching in the distance. 
 
 At last he ventured into the roadway, walking with 
 diligent, uncertain steps. In the middle of the square, 
 opposite the predominant monument so perfectly white 
 and dead, the big old man began to cough; a spasm 
 of coughing shook him from head to foot. A little 
 farther a sudden gust of wind seized him. He had 
 hard work to get himself -out of it. Then he suc- 
 ceeded in reaching the kind foot path, and drew near 
 his house. 
 
 They watched him finishing the last steps of his 
 
THE PRESENCE 153 
 
 daily walk, and now, when he reached the door, he 
 put his hand forth. Truly he had the importance and 
 sweetness nameless but limitless of survivors. It 
 was true that the coming of this dull old man brought 
 with it a kind of good news. 
 
 The sunset, diffusing itself colourlessly everywhere, 
 dominated and surpassed all the sunsets that had ever 
 shone upon the world, for, up till that moment, it was 
 the last sunset of all. Through the grimy clouds and 
 the biting wind, over all the damp and dirty scene, fell 
 the evening which, naturally, was the evening of all 
 evenings ; and the end of that pale winter's day shone 
 distinguished above the centuries. 
 
THE INNOCENT 
 
 ^ INHERE are some people, said Jean Brot, who 
 * gesticulate and run this way and that, in great 
 emergencies, like game surrounded ; while others, after 
 gaping, fall and keep silence in the first available cor- 
 ner. I was of the latter, at the time I am speaking of, 
 my good friends, and I gave way pitifully when my 
 beautiful Regina, driven to extremes by my meekness 
 and patience, had triumphantly exploded her infamy 
 upon me. 
 
 I can see again in detail the historic scene when the 
 fastidious child's vengeance burst upon my loyal trust. 
 Quivering all over, I went to find her. "Madame is 
 not here, but she is coming back soon." 
 
 "Very well !" I growled. I went like a gale of wind 
 into the boudoir, keeping my hat and overcoat on, and 
 crushing the terrible accusing letter in my shaking 
 hand. 
 
 Seated on the edge of a lacquered armchair, in the 
 nimbus of a rosy-skirted lamp, I waited shivering for 
 five hours and a half. Regina came back at one 
 o'clock in the morning. Muffled and flippant she came, 
 her cheeks pertly pink, and her big magnificent eyes 
 all shining. 
 
 At sight of me, her lips parted, as if to set up some 
 agreeable alibi. Without saying a word, I flourished 
 the letter. She seized it and ran through it. 
 
 154 
 
THE INNOCENT 155 
 
 I acknowledge the fortitude which that frail being 
 showed in the emergency. There was hardly the least 
 flutter of her beautiful eyelids, adorned with lashes as 
 long as the fringes of wings. She threw the unan- 
 swerable paper into her bag, held up her head, eyed 
 me from head to foot, and discovering that I was 
 wearing my hat, she called me a cad. 
 
 "Is it true, all that?" I stammered, pointing at the 
 letter with my trembling hand a slave's impotent 
 hand. 
 
 "Yes, it is !" she cried, in an extraordinary transport 
 of fury; "yes, it is, it's true; and besides that, there's 
 this as well, and that, and this " 
 
 And with all her might, with glittering eyes, and in- 
 domitable as a prima donna in full song, she related 
 to me in choice detail all her deceits and betrayals, be- 
 ginning at the end. 
 
 And having spoken, she dismissed me. I got up and 
 went towards the door, bent and staggering. She 
 called me back. Her hand fell on my shoulder, to 
 guide me into the drawing-room, where I went with 
 the shaking movements of the suit of clothes that 
 hangs outside the second-hand dealer's shop-front. 
 Then, with a defiant air, she provided me with supple- 
 mentary details of one of the most recent and most 
 cynical episodes of our mutual life if I may put it 
 so. Then she pushed me out, assuring me that I should 
 pay dearly for having treated her as I had, and that I 
 should hear from her. 
 
 I did and the way she did it! You could not 
 imagine the ingenuity, the cleverness, the genius that 
 that young woman displayed in order to make life 
 
156 WE OTHERS 
 
 impossible for me. She slandered me in all directions 
 with a naturalness and restraint that amounted almost 
 to a prodigy. 
 
 It was in vain that I had always been a man of 
 scrupulous propriety ; I became an ambiguous and sus- 
 picious character. As I came along, backs were turned 
 on me one after another, automatically; hands with- 
 drew themselves out of my reach like frightened birds. 
 
 I smiled disdainfully. Then I got angry. I even 
 reached the point of a duel; but the two bullets ex- 
 changed had no reaction on my moral position. 
 
 Therefore, two things happened. First, not only did 
 I cease to love Regina, but I began to dislike her a lit- 
 tle, then much, then fiercely. Second, I lost my situa- 
 tion, could not find another, and one fine morning saw 
 me crossing crestfallen the gangway of a steamer for 
 New York, my second-class ticket being my whole 
 fortune. 
 
 In the land of Yankees and redskins I started in the 
 humblest of callings. That is a good omen over there, 
 if one may believe the biographers of the multi-mil- 
 lionaires. As a matter of fact, I became rich. 
 
 Do you think that my hatred of the miserable crea- 
 ture whose animosity towards me had been so base 
 and so complete, died away? No; on the contrary, it 
 increased a hundredfold. I was racked by a revenge- 
 ful desire, all the fiercer that I now had the means to 
 gratify it. I tell you truthfully that some evenings 
 when I was alone in my Broadway office, I literally 
 cried out aloud upon a specious ghost, whose mouth 
 had at once the form of a cherry and a heart, and who 
 
THE INNOCENT 157 
 
 wore, under the darksome curve of her hat, a high 
 crown of copper and gold. 
 
 Different circumstances delayed the putting into ef- 
 fect of my campaign of revenge. But I was, you may 
 easily suppose, well informed of the movements and 
 acts of the fury who had so meticulously dishonoured 
 me. Why not acknowledge it? A special office in 
 my "skyscraper," under the pretext of inquiries into 
 the latest European processes in printed fabrics, was 
 actually and seriously engaged in keeping me minutely 
 informed in all matters concerning the Enemy. I fol- 
 lowed her with my eyes as do those necromancers in 
 fairy-tales, who at great distances see all they want 
 to see by virtue of the magic ointment rubbed on their 
 eyelids. 
 
 When I alighted in Paris, twelve years after slip- 
 ping away in such severe incognito, my plan was de- 
 termined to appear suddenly, to paralyse her with the 
 blunt revelation of my millions, and then to enumerate 
 all my frightful plans of vengeance, before putting 
 them mathematically into effect. 
 
 Ah, that evening! I jumped into a motor-car, over- 
 burdened, grinding my teeth, ready to shout aloud. 
 We went like lightning to the doorway of a mag- 
 nificent building. 
 
 "Madame Regina? Third courtyard, right through. 
 Fifth floor/' 
 
 I crossed the courtyards at full speed, and plunged 
 into a lift which deposited me, with French tardiness, 
 opposite a little door. The electric button received a 
 blow of my fist, and the door opened. 
 
 "Madame Regina?" 
 
158 WE OTHERS 
 
 "Come in, sir," said the maid. 
 
 With a sigh as from a forge, I went in on the maid's 
 heels, into a narrow corridor. I repeated in. a hollow 
 voice a shout controlled "Madame Regina?" 
 
 "I am she," calmly replied the woman whom I had 
 taken for the servant. 
 
 My mouth opened in silence. I looked at her and 
 she looked at me. That flabby face, weary and faded 
 in irritation I made a violent gesture of denial. I 
 roused myself, and managed to say, "There is some 
 mistake; there is " 
 
 Then she smiled at me, and that smile, like a pale 
 and mournful light, like a will-o'-th'-wisp, brought 
 back to me a light of bygone days. 
 
 My hand went over my eyes and my forehead: 
 "Regina? You? No, it is not you yes, it is yes, 
 it is you " 
 
 "I recognise you, Jean," said she, ever so tran- 
 quilly; "we are no longer angry?" 
 
 I did not answer, so much I was looking at her, so 
 much I was trying to remember her. 
 
 That was what she had become she! 
 
 She was entirely despoiled, wholly disarmed of her 
 beauty. Her eyelids were swollen, her mouth become 
 heavy, her face jumbled with lines. Her attire was 
 careless, her dress poor and thin. Her voice was 
 lower, sleepy and weak. 
 
 She coughed, embarrassed by the awkward silence. 
 No doubt she could see how, planted opposite her, it 
 was torturing me to know her and yet not know her. 
 She turned away; and the most awful thing of all, 
 my friends, is that that was the only moment when 
 
THE INNOCENT 159 
 
 my eyes, searching for her far away, were able really 
 to see her again. 
 
 I could only mutter, 'Twelve years it's not so very 
 long, after all not so very long." 
 
 Again she ventured her feeble smile towards me. 
 It was an answer, her only answer. When one looks 
 at and touches the truth, one is forced to believe that 
 there are in our deepest depths things impossible, but 
 which are, all the same. 
 
 Yes, it was a great deal, it was too much, for it 
 sufficed to turn her face into a sort of ghost of what 
 it had been, and to change it entirely, to the bottom 
 of her eyes and her voice! Yes, entirely, entirely. I 
 drew back, unable to utter a word. It seemed to me 
 that there was nothing like it in the world a drama 
 so simple. I went back down the dark stairway, feel- 
 ing my way with the outstretched hands of the poor 
 beggar who does not know what he is asking for. 
 
 It was not very complicated, as you see. I had not 
 found her whom I sought. She, the real Regina, the 
 fatal Circe whose resentment had disgraced me and 
 hunted me down I should never see her again. It 
 was ended; revenge had escaped me. All my dream 
 of passionate malice had faded away at the feet of a 
 stranger, of an innocent. 
 
AFFECTION 
 
 September 25th, 1893. 
 
 MY DEAR LITTLE LOUIS, 
 
 SO it's finished. We shall not see each other again ; 
 be as sure of that as I am. You did not wish it; 
 you would have submitted to everything for the sake 
 of going on, but we had to separate, so that you could 
 begin your life again. I am not sorry I opposed you 
 and myself, and us when you cried so much, with 
 your head buried in our bed, and also when you looked 
 up, twice, with your poor face all shining; and again, 
 when in the evening, in the dark, I could not see your 
 tears any more, though I could feel them, bleeding on 
 to my hands. 
 
 And now we are both of us suffering horribly. It 
 is like a nightmare to me. For a few days we shall 
 not be able to believe it. For several months there 
 will be the ache of it. Then convalescence will come. 
 
 Only at that moment shall I begin again to write 
 to you, since we have settled that I shall write to you 
 at long intervals. This bond between you and me will 
 be the only one for you will never know my address, 
 never ! but it will prevent our separation from being 
 wholly laceration. 
 
 I kiss you one last time, but so softly, and at so 
 great, peaceful, angelic a distance! 
 
 ****** 
 160 
 
AFFECTION 161 
 
 September 25th, 1894. 
 
 MY DEAR LITTLE LOUIS, 
 
 I am talking to you again as I promised. We have 
 not been "we" for a year already. I know well, mind, 
 that you have not forgotten me. We are still too 
 much blended for me not to feel your pain itself, 
 every time I think. 
 
 All the same, these twelve months have not been 
 quite unavailing; they have put a slight veil of mourn- 
 ing over the past. A veil already ! Already there are 
 little things that diminish, and even tiny details which 
 are dead. We notice that, don't we, when by chance 
 one of them comes to life again? 
 
 I have tried to recall the exact look that you had on 
 your face the first time I saw you, and I have not 
 quite been able to make it come. 
 
 Will you try to imagine my first looks? You will 
 realise how everything in the world fades away. 
 
 The other day I smiled. To whom, at what? At 
 no one; at nothing. It was a jolly beam of sunshine 
 along a lane that forced me to smile in spite of my 
 lips. 
 
 I had already for some time been trying to smile. 
 It had seemed to me impossible to learn again how. 
 And yet, as I said, I smiled one day, against myself. 
 I want you, too, more and more often, for the simple 
 reason of the fine weather or even of the future, to 
 raise your head and smile. 
 
 ****** 
 
 December I7th, 1899. 
 
 Here I am again by your side, my little Louis. Am 
 I not just like a dream, now that I come when I like, 
 
162 WE OTHERS 
 
 but always at the right moment, in the midst of the 
 empty darkness, now that I come and go quite near 
 and yet cannot be touched? 
 
 I am not unhappy. I have taken courage again, by 
 new mornings and new seasons repeated. The sun is 
 so friendly and confiding, and even simple daylight is 
 so sensible! 
 
 I have danced once. I have laughed often. At 
 first I used to count the times when I laughed and 
 then it became no longer possible to count them. 
 
 Yesterday I saw ., fete at sunset. The people were 
 lolling on the ground, like a beautiful garden; and I 
 thought myself happy to be there, while all that multi- 
 tude was happy too. 
 
 I am writing to tell you that, and that I am turning 
 to a new religion in you Affection. We used to talk 
 about it before, without really knowing it. Let us 
 pray together that we may believe in it, from the bot- 
 tom of our hearts. 
 
 July 6th, 1904. 
 
 The years are going by. Eleven years! I went 
 a long way off, I have come back. I am going away 
 again. 
 
 No doubt you have got a home, and no doubt, my 
 big Louis, a little family, to whom your life is mate- 
 rial. 
 
 And yourself, how are you? I fancy to myself 
 that your face is fuller, your shoulders broader. For 
 a certainty you have few white hairs, and for a cer- 
 
AFFECTION 163 
 
 tainty, too, your face has still the same way of light- 
 ing up before you smile. 
 
 And I ? I will not tell you how changed I am into 
 an old woman. Old ! Women age more quickly than 
 men, and if I could be by your side, I should look like 
 your mother, both by the look of years and by all that 
 I have got of you in my eyes. 
 
 You see how right we were to leave each other like 
 that, now that calm has returned, now that it was 
 almost heedlessly you recognised my writing on the 
 
 envelope a minute ago. 
 
 ****** 
 
 September 25th, 1893. 
 MY DEAR Louis, 
 
 It is twenty years now since we left each other. 
 
 My dear Louis, / have been dead for the same 
 period. If you live long enough to read this letter, 
 sent to you by the same reliable and conscientious 
 hands that posted the others all through the years, you 
 will have forgotten me, and you will forgive me for 
 having killed myself the day after our separation, in 
 my impotence, and not knowing how to live without 
 you. 
 
 Yesterday we parted. Look at the date again, at 
 the head of this letter which you did not see clearly. 
 It was yesterday that you were sobbing in our room, 
 your head buried in the bed, overcome by your weak- 
 ness and your huge childlike sorrow. Yesterday, near 
 the half-open window, when night had fallen, your 
 tears ran blindly over my hands. It was yesterday 
 that you protested, and that I I said nothing, with 
 all my might. 
 
164 WE OTHERS 
 
 And now to-day, in the company of all our things, 
 in our little sublime surroundings, on our table, I have 
 written the four letters you have received at long in- 
 tervals, and there I am finishing this one, which fin- 
 ishes all. 
 
 This evening I shall religiously make all the ar- 
 rangements for the letters to come to you on their 
 dates, and also for myself never to be found again. 
 
 Then I shall disappear from life. It is no use to 
 ask yourself how ; a precise detail of those ugly things 
 would leave a stain, and might cause you fresh pain, 
 even after so many years. 
 
 The chief thing is that I may succeed in detaching 
 you from me, not by the shock of wounds, but with 
 care and caresses. I want to outlive myself so that 
 I may do this for you. There will be no anguish ; you 
 could not stand it, perhaps, with your acute sensitive- 
 ness. So I shall come back to you, seldom enough and 
 often enough to obliterate myself little by little from 
 your eyes, and at the same time to spare your heart. 
 And when I do come to tell you the truth, I shall have 
 gained enough time to prevent you almost from un- 
 derstanding all that my death means. 
 
 Oh, my little Louis! It seems to me as if there 
 was something of a hideous miracle in this last talk 
 of to-day, in which we speak and hear each other so 
 quietly and so far away, I who am only you now, you 
 who hardly any longer know who I was to-day when 
 the word "now" has a prodigiously different meaning 
 on the lips of those who murmur it as they write it, 
 and those who murmur it as they read it ! 
 
 Now, across an immense space of time, across eter- 
 
AFFECTION 165 
 
 nity although that may seem absurd I am really 
 kissing you. And then I stop myself. For I dare 
 not confess to you, for fear of making myself sad, 
 which is naughty, all that one may madly dream of 
 about love, which is so great, and about Affection, 
 which is too great. 
 
BOOK III 
 PITY 
 
THE EVIL EYE 
 
 T IKE a curtain, evening was veiling the little 
 ' house on the edge of the village, the little house 
 with a hat of thatch and a feather of smoke in it. 
 
 People who passed that way had to open their eyes 
 wide to see three very small creatures on the seat in 
 front, three childish creatures, of whom two laughed 
 aloud, and the other in a very low tone. 
 
 The three whitish-grey things that so resembled 
 each other against the bluish cottage (which had two 
 round windows, like spectacles, and a flat doorway) 
 were a very old man, a very small child, and a doll. 
 
 That was all that was left of the family once dwell- 
 ing there, between the fields and the other houses. 
 Fate had in turn taken away the man, the woman, and 
 the grandmother. Jean- Jean x and Grandpa Pierrot 
 held on alone, at either end of a long series of sorrows. 
 Between the two of them a tremendous void. But 
 they were not of an age when one can see such a gap. 
 One of them no longer knew what the other did not 
 yet know, and they played together with all their 
 heart. 
 
 Now, that very evening, when all the people they 
 knew had gone by, two strange beings, with tapering 
 snouts and flashing eyes, turned into the cross-ways. 
 
 1 French babies give themselves the trouble of doubling the 
 single syllables with which they begin to speak. 
 
 169 
 
170 WE OTHERS 
 
 They were very disconcerting to see, by reason of their 
 long cloaks and bad looks, and above all because one 
 of them was crying. 
 
 The sparkling eyes settled on the night-dulled hut, 
 by the door of which a pleasing bush trembled with 
 little white faces. The sharp-featured phantoms signed 
 to each other, ringer on lip. 
 
 Then they came to a standstill, and buried them- 
 selves in the falling dark. When it was thick enough, 
 they exhumed themselves and crept towards the cot- 
 tage, now shut up and asleep. Touched in a mysteri- 
 ous fashion, the door opened. They entered without 
 making the least noise, like a nightmare in person. 
 
 They came out carrying something light-coloured, 
 left the door half open the devilish smell of a drug 
 breathed from it and both slipped away, their for- 
 midable heads pricked forward. 
 
 They descended a footpath, steep and perilous as 
 a rung-robbed ladder, and arrived on the edge of the 
 torrent. There, behind a clump of hazels, arose a sort 
 of quivering shanty no, a van. The horse's shoes 
 were wrapped up in grass, and the van bristled with 
 branches, no doubt so that it would look by day, 
 against the verdant background of the river's banks, 
 something like a bush. 
 
 By the light of a lantern suddenly opened four paws 
 unfolded the stolen bundle. Between the two stoop- 
 ing shadows shone a child of two years, asleep. They 
 undressed Jean-Jean. When he was white as an angel, 
 the creature that was crying just before smiled. They 
 slipped onto the child, who slept heavily, by reason of 
 the drug, some little many-coloured clothes which they 
 
THE EVIL EYE 171 
 
 got from a bundle of wearing apparel. It was a fine 
 costume; one, no doubt, which some other child as 
 limited as he had left behind when he started for the 
 queer paradise of the wild people. 
 
 Jean- Jean's bonnet was placed on the slippery edge 
 of the furious torrent, and the exotic river-poachers' 
 van resumed its muffled march across the world. 
 
 On the straw of the cart little Jean- Jean still slept, 
 not far from a net made of grass, and some trout 
 that shone like shillings. This lowly association made 
 at the same time a difference and a resemblance be- 
 tween the child Jesus in his manger and this new- 
 comer into the universe. 
 
 It was only at the end of the afternoon, in the cot- 
 tage with the door ajar, that old Pierrot awoke by 
 the side of the empty cradle. His dull head rolled 
 from right to left on the pillow, but at last he opened 
 the eyelids of yellow paper. 
 
 What shouts, what sobs, what dismay! All the 
 village was roused, such entreaties he made to one 
 and the other! 
 
 They found the bonnet on the steep bank, at the 
 foot of which the torrent raged without ceasing, and 
 shattered the stones. They understood everything. 
 The old man had not awakened as usual, and the 
 child had dragged itself outside, and all the way 
 there. They did not find the body, so there was no 
 funeral. 
 
 When he knew that the gentlemen's searches had 
 not worked a miracle, in spite of all the childish trust 
 he had put in them, the old fellow became mournfully 
 appeased. He stopped groaning and whimpering, re- 
 
172 WE OTHERS 
 
 turned very docile to the house, and sat down with 
 his hands on his knees, orphaned at last of everybody. 
 
 Theodore, the grandfather of the mill, who had for- 
 merly been it was so long before! his cousin, came 
 to see him and keep him company. To that end, he 
 sat down beside him and said nothing, his mouth and 
 his thoughts being occupied with his pipe. 
 
 But Pierrot, then, spoke a little. He humoured 
 himself, in presence of Theodore, by enumerating the 
 young ones and little ones that he had seen die round 
 about him. It began with Jeannot, Alexandrine, 
 Thibaut. He recited these names, in the same mo- 
 notonous eternal order, as others apply themselves to 
 a mournful song. 
 
 Once, as he filled his pipe, Theodore spoke, and 
 said: "Perhaps you've got the evil eye." 
 
 It was a burst of light. As soon as the sentence 
 was spoken, both men opened their mouths and wagged 
 their heads. Then Pierrot muttered: "I've got the 
 evil eye," and Theodore, who had resumed the silence 
 of his pipe, began softly to think about it, and did 
 not leave off again. 
 
 There was no more question of it. That accounted 
 for all Jeannot, Alexandrine, Thibaut, and the oth- 
 ers; and especially Jean- Jean. 
 
 Pierrot isolated himself at home. The schoolmas- 
 ter affirmed, to several people, that he would begin to 
 fret if left alone, and that he ought to see people. 
 
 Victorine came and said to him, "You must see 
 people so-and-so, and so-and-so." 
 
 He shook his head : "I've got the evil eye." 
 
THE EVIL EYE 173 
 
 "The evil eye that's true?" said the gossip, un- 
 easily. 
 
 "Yes," he replied. 
 
 "You never said so," she grumbled. 
 
 She went away, looking askance and sniffling. Be- 
 fore that, she used hardly to believe those stories. 
 But when one is getting old, one must not be so fas- 
 tidious, nor risk tempting Fate. 
 
 He shut himself up more and more in the twi- 
 light of his house and in the night of himself. He 
 kept his eyes shut, so that he could see the little dead 
 one, and so as not to do harm to little living ones by 
 seeing them. 
 
 He believed so deeply in the sorcery of his looks 
 that he held his hand over his eyes as soon as he 
 heard tiny footsteps approaching the window the 
 window where he waited for the coming of Death, 
 who is too big for one to see. And one day, even, 
 when he noticed Jean- Jean's doll in the depths of a 
 chair, he averted his eyes, and turned gingerly away. 
 
 People heard of the precautions he was taking, but 
 all the more they avoided passing near him with chil- 
 dren. 
 
 And he must have wanted to see them, all the same, 
 so that he would be better able to retain his recollec- 
 tions of the one who had disappeared. For those rec- 
 ollections, too, were disappearing. They were wear- 
 ing themselves out in the old and laborious, but un- 
 skilful, memory. 
 
 One fine morning he got the idea that he would go 
 a very long way off. He put some money in the mid- 
 
174 WE OTHERS 
 
 die of a bundle of clothes and departed from the vil- 
 lage, for he had the supreme ill-luck, at his age, to 
 be entirely free to do what he liked. 
 
 The old man, who could no longer lose himself, 
 went along roads and into villages, not allowing him- 
 self to see children, trying to retain in completeness 
 a divinely darling picture. 
 
 One evening, at the corner of a road which ran 
 beside a river, he saw something funnily shaped a 
 light van, quilted with leafy branches, and a horse 
 with enormous shoes. 
 
 Farther away, around the van, a little thing was 
 jumping about. It was a child, of the age that Jean- 
 Jean would have been by then. 
 
 So the old man began to turn on his heels and go 
 away, fearing the effect of his eye. So he did not see 
 that the child was made exactly in the same way as 
 Jean- Jean of a drop of sunshine on top of a shred 
 of shadow; nor did he see that the child looked un- 
 happy, nor that a big package was weighing him down. 
 
 Yet the bantling, as he trailed and whined under his 
 big burden, was hurrying exactly in the old man's 
 direction. He therefore hastened his steps to avoid 
 him. But after a few moments of this lamentably 
 comical chase, the old man, who no longer knew at all 
 how to walk quickly, stood aside on the edge of the 
 road, like a poor beggar, to let the child go by. 
 
 All the while the latter was coming near and then 
 going away, the grandfather leaned forward with 
 open ear and gaping heart, that he might gather as 
 much as he could of that dear childish passing which 
 
THE EVIL EYE 175 
 
 would help him to remember his own little one, but he 
 virtuously kept his hand pressed upon his face, and 
 his eyelids closed with all his might upon his evil 
 glances. 
 
THE STONE MAN 
 
 scarlet sun that was rising from the lake 
 dulled itself on that house-front whose stones 
 were as dark as the slates of the roof, and on the 
 rigid person who stood in the frame of the doorway, 
 whose eyes were hollow and his mouth shut as stiffly 
 closed as a scar. 
 
 The old man was concealing behind him, in the 
 house, a fair-haired child whom he frightened every 
 time he spoke to him in his frozen voice. Pastor Peter 
 Mosen loved Tobie, all the same, this son of his son, 
 but the man was strangely different from other people, 
 thanks to his severe infallibility. Never, on either 
 great or minor occasions, had Peter Mosen yielded to 
 the temptations of evil, nor to those of pity. He had 
 lived without sin, in accordance with the letter of 
 Holy Writ. 
 
 He had gradually broken away from all his rela- 
 tions, for he had never forgiven a fault, no matter 
 how light. He had driven his little Gasparine from 
 his house, guilty of loving a man whom he had not 
 appointed, and he had cursed her, naturally. 
 
 Nothing could make him reconsider that decision 
 and give way to forgiveness; neither the death of the 
 man who by the contagion of the bad marriage had 
 given his name to the sinner, nor the childish en- 
 
 176 
 
THE STONE MAN 177 
 
 treaties stammered by his own father, the very old 
 Mosen, during the death-struggle. 
 
 One evening, several years later, a little girl who 
 had dropped, at the turn in the road, the hand of a 
 woman in mourning, appeared before him and 
 stretched out her arms : "Mamma !" the little girl had 
 implored. 
 
 He had said to her coldly, as to some one big, "Be- 
 gone !" 
 
 The little girl, whose fair hair the lave of the light 
 was turning into an aureole and putting stars into her 
 tearful eyes, had sobbed out, "You are a bad man 
 you will be punished." 
 
 He had turned into the house, and shut and bolted 
 the door. True believers know that sin pollutes not 
 only the sinner, but the sinner's children, and those 
 who touch them. The punishment promised by the 
 Lord for whomsoever violates the law lies patiently 
 in wait to snatch away His eternal salvation on the 
 slightest failing; and one must take all precautions 
 against God's dreadful logic. 
 
 The old man was no longer capable of relenting. 
 His dread of disobedience had made of him an actual 
 and immovable statue of Duty. He was ready for the 
 Last Judgment, as though already dead. 
 
 Now, he was living in company with his grandson, 
 whose parents the Almighty had called away. He 
 loved him as dearly as Isaac did Jacob, but his affec- 
 tion had the demeanour of a secret. He only spoke to 
 the child in a voice lowered and composed, and it was 
 only when he was quite alone that he felt himself 
 smiling at him. 
 
178 WE OTHERS 
 
 Tobie increased in strength and comeliness. He 
 filled the gloomy house with laughter. 
 
 He was seventeen years old, and Peter, almost 
 come to the end of his earthly endeavour, was bear- 
 ing three-quarters of a century, when one midnight 
 the old man had a dream. 
 
 In that dream, a voice told him to go to Tobie' s 
 room. He got up and went, feeling his way. Tobie 
 was not in his room. His grandfather called him, and 
 there was no answer. The old man leaned against 
 the wall, seized by mysterious pangs. Through the 
 window-panes his wandering eyes saw pale moonlight 
 in the sky ; and his ears were humming. The dream's 
 supernatural voice bade him look in the garden. 
 
 He opened the door and saw the lawn, wrapped in 
 a winding-sheet by the moon. He waited. The gar- 
 den gate creaked. A creeping shadow appeared. It 
 was Tobie returning, and carrying a load. 
 
 The young man stumbled upon the old one, and 
 uttered a loud cry. What he was carrying fell on the 
 table with a sound of scattered money. 
 
 Suddenly broken and subdued, Tobie sank to the 
 ground, confessing in a voice of terror .that he had 
 been thieving. 
 
 His teeth chattered as he kept on saying, like a 
 lunatic, that he had robbed the people at the Grey 
 Farm. 
 
 The pastor shuddered, for there are cataclysms 
 which make rocks and the solid earth tremble. Hoarse 
 cries came from his throat "Devil ! Accursed ! Ac- 
 cursed!" 
 
THE STONE MAN 179 
 
 Then louder he bellowed, in a convulsion of hatred 
 and horror, "And I, too, am accursed I I!" 
 
 His head turned towards the door. The only pos- 
 sible rescue shone in the saint's eyes, in the disordered 
 shadows to go and denounce the criminal and pro- 
 claim his crime to get rid of him, to snatch himself 
 from him, to drive him with all his crime far away. 
 Yes, thus perhaps the stain that was spreading over 
 his house and race would be wiped out. 
 
 The old man moved to the door. But, lo, as he 
 reached the threshold, he raised his arms to heaven, 
 stood high and straight like a poplar, and then fell 
 forward with his face in the soil of the garden! 
 
 Tobie, glued to the tableful of gold, looked at the 
 long thunderstruck body, and did nothing. 
 
 At last a pallid illumination arose from the horizon 
 the dawn ! The dawn, with its touching promise of 
 golden day and all the riches of the sun ! 
 
 Then Tobie stood up, collected the golden pieces, 
 went and hid them in the depths of the house; and 
 with a rosy light shining on him he rushed along the 
 road, shouting that his grandfather was dead. 
 
 He came back with a doctor and several gabbling 
 women. They lifted the body up and wiped its face. 
 Peter Mosen's eyes were clear, and wide open. 
 
 After examining him the doctor said : "He is not 
 dead. He has had a paralytic stroke. He feels, he 
 sees, and he understands, but he cannot move his 
 limbs, or his tongue, or his eyelids." 
 
 So the grandson kept the shamefully gotten bag of 
 gold. He was not suspected. He became the master 
 
i8o WE OTHERS 
 
 of the house where the paralytic was lying, for ever 
 doubled up in his armchair. 
 
 Soon he brought a woman to the house, a woman 
 whose hair was counterfeit gold, her face bepowdered, 
 her lips painted. 
 
 He showed her his grandfather, petrified in his cor- 
 ner, with his open, far-seeing eyes, and his unfathom- 
 able thoughts. The woman started with aversion, and 
 blasphemed. But she did not go away, and lived in 
 the house from that moment. 
 
 After a little while they ceased to be afraid of the 
 old man ; they got used to the vacuity of his presence, 
 and continued, before his eyes and without restraint, 
 the execrable life which bound them together. They 
 quarrelled like heathen, were abominably reconciled, 
 gloried in their vices, and spent the stolen money. 
 
 One day Tobie told the story of the robbery, and 
 the woman with the befloured face laughed. Another 
 day, as he came into the room without a thought for 
 the banished and silent grandparent, he told her that 
 an innocent man had been sentenced in his stead. The 
 woman yelped with glee and relief, which increased 
 still more the evening when Tobie came to say that 
 the victims, ruined and turned out, had gone to beg 
 their way through France. 
 
 Mute as an open Bible, Peter Mosen witnessed the 
 scandals established in his house scenes from which 
 all decent passers-by turned away in astonishment, as 
 he heard and saw. He endured continuous contact 
 with the wretches, and even their attentions, and thus 
 the inevitable curse was conveyed to him, more and 
 more and every minute. Helpless accomplice, he 
 
THE STONE MAN 181 
 
 shared the stolen money with them. Like them and 
 with them, he was falling unchecked straight into per- 
 dition and the menace of eternity. Though he could 
 not budge, he was descending into hell. In the depth 
 of that corner wherein he was crucified, he wholly re- 
 sembled his heart of those bygone days, when so often 
 he breathed forth the sepulchral word : "Never !" He 
 resembled a statue, superhumanly established, of Duty 
 or of Shame. 
 
THE ELEVENTH 
 
 Master, who had a pale head with long 
 marble-like hair, and whose spectacles shone in 
 solemnity, came to a standstill on his morning round 
 opposite my little table at the door of Room 28, and 
 condescended to announce to me that I was hence- 
 forth appointed to let in the ten poor people who every 
 month were admitted to the hospitality of the House. 
 Then he went on, so tall and so white among the 
 assiduous flock of students that they seemed to be 
 carrying a famous statuette from room to room. 
 
 I stammered the thanks which he did not hear. 
 My 25-year-old heart felt a happy pride in reflecting 
 that I had been chosen to preside in one of the noblest 
 traditions of the House in which, a humble assistant, 
 I was wandering lornly among wealthy invalids. 
 
 On the first day of every month the luxurious 
 palace-hospital became the paradise of ten vagabonds. 
 One of its outer doors was opened to admit the first 
 ten who came, whoever they were, wherever they had 
 fallen from or escaped. And for a whole month those 
 ten human derelicts enjoyed the entire hospitality of 
 the comfortable institution, just as much so as the 
 Master's most valuable patients, as much as the arch- 
 dukes and multi-millionaires. For them, too, were 
 the lofty halls whose walls were not only white, but 
 glistening, the huge corridors like covered streets, 
 
 1 82 
 
THE ELEVENTH 183 
 
 which in summer or in winter had the coolness or the 
 mildness of spring. For them also, the immense gar- 
 den beds set among green velvet, like bunches of flow- 
 ers so enlarged by magic that one walked among them. 
 For them equally, the outer walls, far off but impass- 
 able, which shield one against wide-open Space, against 
 rambling roads, against the plains which come to an 
 end no more than the sky. For thirty days the refu- 
 gees busied themselves only with doing nothing, only 
 worked when they ate, and were no longer afraid of 
 the unknown or of the coming day. They who were 
 remorseful learned to forget things, and they who 
 were bereaved, to forget people. 
 
 When by chance they met each other, they simply 
 had to turn their heads away hurriedly. There was 
 not in all the House, by order of the Master, a mirror 
 in which they would have found their bad dream again. 
 At the day's end came the dormitory, peaceful as a 
 cemetery, a nice cemetery, where one is not dead, 
 where one waits where one lives, but without know- 
 ing it. 
 
 At eight o'clock on the first day of the following 
 month all ten of them went away, cast back into the 
 world one by one, as into the sea. Immediately after, 
 ten others entered, the first ten of the file which, since 
 the night before, had been washed up against the wall 
 of the house as upon the shores of an island. The 
 first ten, no more, no less, no favours, no exceptions, 
 no injustices; one rule only they who had already 
 been were never again admitted. The arrivals were 
 asked nothing else not even for the confession of 
 their names. 
 
184 WE OTHERS 
 
 And on the first day of the month, as soon as nine 
 o'clock had sounded, exactly together from the An- 
 glican church and the Catholic chapel of the House, 
 I opened the little Poor-door. 
 
 A crowd of beings was massed against the door- 
 wing and the wall. Hardly had the former turned in 
 the shadow when the tattered heap rushed forward 
 as though sucked in. 
 
 My helper had to throw himself forward to en- 
 force a little order upon the greedy invasion. We had 
 to detach by force, to tear away from the mass each 
 one of the besiegers, who were pressed side by side 
 and elbow to elbow, fastened to each other like fan- 
 tastic friends. The eight entered, the ninth, the tenth. 
 
 And then the door was quickly closed, but not so 
 quickly that it prevented me from seeing, only a step 
 from me, him upon whom it closed, the eleventh, the 
 unlucky one, the accursed. 
 
 He was a man of uncertain age; in his grey and 
 withered face lack-lustre eyes floated. He looked at 
 me so despairingly that he seemed to smile. The 
 touch of that extraordinary disappointment made me 
 start, of that face that was mute as a wound. I 
 glimpsed in a flash the time that the door took to 
 shut all the effort he had made to get there, even 
 if too late, and how much he too deserved to come in ! 
 
 Then I busied myself with the others; but a few 
 minutes later, still affected by the distress I had read 
 on the face of the outcast, I half opened the door to 
 see if he were still there. No one. He and the three 
 or four others uncertain rags that had fluttered be- 
 hind him had gone to the four winds of heaven, 
 
THE ELEVENTH 185 
 
 carried away along the roads like dead leaves. A lit- 
 tle shiver went through me, a shiver almost of mourn- 
 ing for the conquered. 
 
 At night, as I was falling asleep, my thoughts went 
 again to them, and I wondered why they stayed there 
 till the last moment, they who arrived only when ten 
 had already taken their places at the door. What 
 did they hope for? Nothing. Yet they were hoping 
 all the same, and therein was a mean miracle of the 
 heart 
 
 We had reached the month of March. On the last 
 day of the old month, towards nightfall, a rather 
 frightened murmur crept from the side of the high 
 road, close to the door. Leaning over a balcony, I 
 could make men out there, stirring like insects. These 
 were the suppliants. 
 
 The next morning we opened to these phantoms 
 whom the magical story of the house had called across 
 the world, who had awakened and unburied them- 
 selves from the lowest and most awful of depths to 
 get there. We welcomed the ten who first came for- 
 ward; we were obliged to drive back into life the 
 eleventh. 
 
 He was standing, motionless, and offering himself 
 from the other side of the door. I looked at him, and 
 then lowered my eyes. He had a terrible look, with 
 his hollow face and lashless eyelids. There breathed 
 from him a reproach of unbearable artlessness. 
 
 When the door divided us for ever, I regretted him, 
 and should have liked to see him again. I turned to- 
 wards the others, swarming in gladness on the flag- 
 stones, almost with resignation, wondering at my own 
 
186 WE OTHERS 
 
 firm conviction that the other, sooner than these, ought 
 to have come in with us. 
 
 And it was so every time. Every time I became 
 more indifferent to the crowd of admitted and satis- 
 fied, and devoted my gaze still more to him who was 
 refused salvation. And every time he seemed to me 
 the most pitiable case, and I felt that I was myself 
 smitten in the person of the one condemned. 
 
 In June, it was a woman. I saw her understand 
 and begin to cry. I trembled as I furtively scanned 
 her; to crown all, the weeper's eyelids were blood-red 
 as wounds. 
 
 In July, the appointed victim was incomparably re- 
 grettable by reason of his great age; and no living 
 being was so compassionable as he who was repulsed 
 the month after, so young was he. Another time, he 
 who had to be snatched from the group of the elect 
 besought me with his poor hands, encircled with the 
 remains of frayed linen, like lint. The one whom 
 Fate sacrificed the following month showed me a 
 menacing fist. The entreaty of the one made me 
 afraid, and the threat of the other pitiful. 
 
 I could almost have begged his pardon, the 
 "eleventh" of October. He drew himself up stiffly; 
 his neck was wrapped high in a greyish tie that looked 
 like a bandage; he was thin, and his coat fluttered in 
 the wind like a flag. But what could I have said to 
 the unfortunate who succeeded him thirty days later? 
 He blushed, stammered a nervous apology, and with- 
 drew after bowing with tragic politeness piteous 
 remnant of an earlier lot. 
 
 And thus a year passed. Twelve times I let in the 
 
THE ELEVENTH 187 
 
 vagrants whom the stones had worn out, the workmen 
 for whom all work was hopeless, the criminals sub- 
 dued. Twelve times I let in some of those who clung 
 to the stones of the wall as on to reefs of the sea coast. 
 Twelve times I turned others away, similar ones, 
 whom I confusedly preferred. 
 
 An idea beset me that I was taking part in an 
 abominable injustice. Truly there was no sense in 
 dividing all those poor folk like that into friends and 
 enemies. There was only one arbitrary reason ab- 
 stract, not admissible; a matter of a figure, a sign. 
 At bottom, this was neither just nor even logical. 
 
 Soon I could no longer continue in this series of 
 errors. I went to the Master, and begged him to give 
 me some other post, so that I should not have to do 
 the same evil deed again every month. 
 
THE BAD CUSTODIAN 
 
 UMBER One was fat ; Number Two was thin ; 
 Three was tall, and Number Four quite small. 
 
 These four numbers of the West Yard, who dif- 
 fered in appearance as much as four punctuation 
 marks, had this in common they had all been con- 
 victed for robbery at the county town court about Mid- 
 summer Day last. But their resemblance ended with 
 the period of their conviction. Their respective 
 crimes had been were as different as themselves, 
 for the men had plundered, the one a rich foreigner, 
 and the other a crowd of poor unimportant people; 
 while the two women had committed the abominable 
 deed, the one for love and the other in hatred. Never- 
 theless, the four did not know each other. Though 
 so close, they were separated by the obdurate dark- 
 ness of the partition walls, and neighboured each other 
 no more than they who are side by side in the grave- 
 yards. 
 
 One being only saw them all, the gaoler, and a slen- 
 der and colourless officer with grey hair and face, with 
 a neck so thin and dry in the middle of his high cloth 
 collar that it was like the stem of a potted plant, with 
 dried-in eyes under a forehead as knobbly as a shingle 
 beach. He was an old sailor; but in truth he was no 
 longer anything, his mind not having sufficient ex- 
 panse to be able to concern itself at the same time with 
 
 188 
 
THE BAD CUSTODIAN 189 
 
 both the present and the past. His lips were always 
 firmly joined together, and his features as rigid as 
 those one sees chalked on doors. 
 
 Yet he stood or moved about like a survivor among 
 the four intermittent and ludicrous travellers of the 
 round yard ; and such as he was, he was all they had 
 in the world. 
 
 But he paid no attention whatever to the four suc- 
 cessive derelicts. Not only did he not speak to them, 
 but he thought of nothing at all as he watched them 
 appear and then go round the yard for the appointed 
 time, like hands round a clock-face. 
 
 Was it weakness of mind on his part? Yes; but 
 it was above all because he believed that criminals are 
 of a monstrous race, infinitely different from that of 
 the rest, infinitely distant from them. The belief 
 which centuries had heaped up in him was no more 
 than a huge reproach, tranquil and silent, against those 
 who had preferred Satan to integrity, those whom it 
 was his business to keep out of the world. He knew 
 that there was an indelible stain on the faces and hands 
 of these mournful strangers. . These criminals 
 worse still, these convicted people who every morn- 
 ing came to life again from their cells for a quarter 
 of an hour, had the look of human beings, but they 
 were chiefly convicts. His eyes followed them as a 
 matter of duty, but with a sort of blindness, as they 
 made their daily eddy, slowly and sadly, at the foot 
 of the brick walls. 
 
 He had just opened a cell one day. A grey shape 
 had extracted itself and begun to walk in a circle, 
 
WE OTHERS 
 
 flimsily and hurriedly, but hesitating, like a piece of 
 paper in the wind. 
 
 Suddenly the gaoler felt a light little quiver in the 
 back of his neck, and a tickling beginning in his eyes. 
 Things looked as if they were rocking and capsizing. 
 
 "What the " he said. 
 
 His fingers relaxed, and the bunch of Keys fell 
 down. The old sailor leaned against the wall. But 
 there is no sort of inactivity to shield one against the 
 vast tempest towards which one moves as fast as one 
 lives. He felt himself falling, though he still re- 
 mained standing, and although he shouted with all his 
 strength, only a feeble groan came. 
 
 The prisoner walked on, nor did he see the gaoler ; 
 and when the walking-time was up, automatically he 
 went in and fell back again in his compartment. 
 Nothing remained in the paved courtyard but a but- 
 tressed shape with jerking hands. 
 
 They came at last. It was seen that something un- 
 usual was happening. The Keys were picked up, and 
 the contents of the cells verified. When they came to 
 the custodian, he roused himself, emerged at last from 
 his dismal nightmare. He stammered heavily, quite 
 wonder-struck. He let himself be led to the infirm- 
 ary, dragging his feet. 
 
 Several days later, notwithstanding a general low- 
 ering of his faculties, the doctor calculated that the 
 humble functionary had completely recovered from 
 his attack till the next came and he resumed his 
 duties. Nobody could remark the least change in him. 
 
 But nobody could see into him. He did not manage 
 to wake up completely from the great and extraordi- 
 
THE BAD CUSTODIAN 191 
 
 nary disorder, to extricate himself from the shipwreck 
 into which he had reeled. He retained the stupor of 
 his struggle and his saving. He retained, too, certain 
 delirious visions, fixed in his eyes. 
 
 He had seen himself quite little again, as he was 
 before he became ship's boy, before everything. Yes, 
 by the chance of his brief vertigo and the commotion 
 in his poor brain, he had glimpsed faces bent over him, 
 a supernatural distance away. 
 
 He had seen one evening many evenings on the 
 threshold of a door, a shade whose outstretched arms 
 sought for him; and in a Kitchen, a dress, by which 
 one was more peaceful than anywhere else. His 
 father, his mother. They had come back a little to 
 his side. And he had even seen again, in one dazzling 
 moment, a feminine form almost as big as he was 
 now, a form that was not his mother, that might have 
 been his sister had she not been some one more divine 
 and more incomprehensible. 
 
 Certainly he was beginning again to forget these 
 details, so strangely re-born in a flash of madness; 
 but there remained still some astonishment and hesi- 
 tation. He was disturbed by the confused impression 
 of all that he must have been. 
 
 When he began again to make the prisoners go 
 round, one by one, he set about looking at them for 
 the first time, those submerged uncertain shapes of 
 the yard. The springtime sun was venturing on to 
 the crest of the wall. Whether by reason of that glow 
 or for some other miracle behold, he saw them ! He 
 could not prevent himself from reflecting, at first tim- 
 idly, that those had been men, and these, women. 
 
192 WE OTHERS 
 
 And gradually the idea came to him that they had 
 remained, after all, men and women. 
 
 Some things that he had never noticed, some de- 
 tails formerly invisible, absorbed his thoughts. These 
 creatures began to assume shapes, in the eyes of that 
 petrified face which a mysterious organic disorder had 
 awakened and animated. And so they were still more 
 unlike each other to him, still more lonely and aban- 
 doned. 
 
 He wanted to know their names. At the office they 
 wrote them down for him on a scrap of paper. The 
 big one was called Mesmer; the thin one, Bazire; the 
 two women were Madame Popelin and Mile. Cordi- 
 bois. Enriched with this information, he asked a 
 clerk what they had done, learned it off, and said it 
 over to himself. As he saw each one of them, after- 
 wards, he wondered at their crime ; and then the more 
 he saw of them, the less he wondered. Everything 
 happens in the great earthly melodrama. He had 
 really been little, himself, and had crawled between 
 parents on whom Fate had long since been avenged! 
 
 As the taller of the two women was completing her 
 last round, he planted himself in front of her. She 
 stopped and straightened up, for she was walking bent 
 forward towards the middle of the smaller yard, on 
 account of her height. He opened his mouth to speak 
 to her. Was she afraid he was going to bite her? 
 She was seized with trembling, and stared at him in 
 terror, with her neck awry and her eyes askew. As 
 he did nothing, the long, weedy, and emaciated face 
 began to twitch; and she smiled. He also smiled. 
 At that moment some church clocks chimed faintly. 
 
THE BAD CUSTODIAN 193 
 
 He saw her flicker, and make a grimace. She sniffed, 
 stifling a sob. Then she looked at him with tears in 
 her eyes. He felt that there were in his also, and that 
 they had actually given look for look. 
 
 The other woman was tiny as a toy. He looked 
 at her and so attentively that, just as she was coming 
 in, she turned towards him. Standing out against the 
 shadows of the cell, he saw her pallid face and its red 
 cheek-bones and eyelids, a face all scarred and sore. 
 She guessed the weightiness of the silent moment that 
 followed, for instead of saying any casual thing to 
 him, she simply said, in a very low voice, "I've no 
 grudge against you." 
 
 "Ah!" he said. 
 
 She tossed her head, then lowered it, smiled and 
 blushed, and added at last, "I'm sorry " 
 
 "So am I," he murmured grandly. 
 
 There was never more between them than those few 
 great words. For that very day he corrected him- 
 self with a violent shock. He passed a terrible night 
 of fright at the thought of what he had done. 
 
 So he was forgetting his duty, prowling round the 
 accursed so as to draw nearer them ! He was becom- 
 ing a wretch to whom the difference between good and 
 evil was fading away, a madman who looked for in- 
 nocence and even for resemblance into the most in- 
 famous of people! 
 
 Accusingly he struck his forehead and contracted 
 his dry hand upon his heart the heart which was 
 coming back to life so beautifully.' Stretched on his 
 pallet, he saw himself as an evil-doer, henceforth in- 
 capable of understanding anything. 
 
194 WE OTHERS 
 
 "I can't I can't rely on myself any more." 
 But even while he groaned, he could not help open- 
 ing his eyes wide, as if in a supreme appeal, in the 
 night that was full of secret and infinite things, the 
 night that was contrary to law. 
 
THE CROSS OF HONOUR 
 
 I T was with a fine surprise stroke that we got into the 
 village of Karakou or some such name. There 
 were only women, children, and old men in it. All 
 the fighting men of the Lolobes it was something 
 like that that these marmosets called themselves, but 
 I don't vouch for it had by chance gone away hunt- 
 ing that evening. 
 
 We crept close up to the central space without giv- 
 ing the alarm, thanks to the heavy twilight and to the 
 fact that one of our men prudently felled a buffoon 
 whose wrinkled face was like an old polished shoe, and 
 who, squatting near the enclosure, believed he was 
 guarding the village. 
 
 Hidden behind huts, we loaded and propped up our 
 rifles, so as to shoot down all those unsuspecting shad- 
 ows, some sitting on stones or on the ground, others 
 going and coming. 
 
 Opposite me, on a seat against a wall, two blacka- 
 moors were sitting, motionless and silent, and quite 
 close to each other; and even while I took aim at the 
 one on the right, I wondered what they might be say- 
 ing to each other. 
 
 The signal ! From everywhere at once, the thunder 
 of our rifles burst forth. It was not a long job. All 
 those inky silhouettes were sent to Kingdom-come in- 
 
 195 
 
196 WE OTHERS 
 
 side two minutes. They seemed to plunge into the 
 ground, or fly away, or scatter like smoke. 
 
 Certainly, we then despatched rather roughly, I ad- 
 mit, the few survivors who had escaped our salvo and 
 had gone to earth in their huts like field-mice. This 
 violence, so natural and humane in time of war, was 
 condoned by the joy of victory, and because we were 
 drunk, having discovered in the principal hut a barrel 
 of rum, sold to the Lolobes in question by some miser- 
 able English agent. As for exonerating myself, I 
 must say that I have only retained an extremely con- 
 fused recollection of what then came to pass. Yes 
 there is one detail concerning the two savages who 
 were facing me while I was fixing my rifle and select- 
 ing one of them. I saw them again ; indeed, I almost 
 fell on them. They were hardly more than a single 
 corpse at the foot of the seat on which, a moment be- 
 fore, they had been so funnily quiet together. They 
 were a negro and a negress, rigidly clasping each 
 other, like two hands. Two lovers! The matter 
 stuck in my brain in spite of myself, so much so that 
 I could not help joking about it several times during 
 that historic evening. 
 
 Then my memory capsizes the orgy, our shouts 
 and dances, our grimaces and antics; and suddenly a 
 sharp pain in my skull I am falling and remember 
 no more. 
 
 I did not come to my senses until six weeks later in 
 the hospital at St. Louis. I opened my eyes one morn- 
 ing upon white surroundings, and a smell of iodoform. 
 
 Then they told me, in little doses, what had hap- 
 pened. Our column had recklessly lingered in the 
 
THE CROSS OF HONOUR 197 
 
 conquered village, and slept on the spot. So the Lo- 
 lobe warriors, returning, had massacred the lot of us, 
 all, to the last man. 
 
 "And what about me?" I said. 
 
 They explained that a chance had saved me the 
 collapse of a hut that had stunned but hidden me. 
 The next day the main force had retaken and razed 
 the village, had killed all the Lolobes at last, and had 
 dragged me feet first out of the protecting debris. 
 
 But there was better still. The Governor had been 
 to my bedside to announce to me himself that I had 
 been appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour. 
 
 All my comrades killed and myself decorated! I 
 fell asleep that day in emotion unutterable and beati- 
 tude unmingled. 
 
 I was not long in getting well I was in such a 
 hurry to go home with the cross I had won! I 
 dreamed dreams in which I saw the airs they would 
 all give themselves father, mother, and neighbours. 
 My quondam friends, still only paltry devils, would 
 not dare to speak to me; and the foremen at the fac- 
 tory would cotton to me. Who knew, even, if the 
 wealthy Mile. Mounier, in spite of her old age, would 
 not consent to marry me ! 
 
 The day so long awaited arrived. It was a morn- 
 ing in July when I alighted at Villeneuve, with one 
 trailing leg and my head held high, with my old great- 
 coat and my new cross. 
 
 What a reception, gentlemen ! The station was full 
 of music. There was a row of girls, the little ones in 
 their first-communion attire, and the big ones like 
 brides, with flags and bunches of flowers. A man, en- 
 
198 WE OTHERS 
 
 circled by a little frock-coat and red as a turkey-cock, 
 challenged me while I was still on the footboard, and 
 Monsieur the Count de Vilvert, to whom the castle 
 belonged and who was in sporting costume, smiled at 
 me. People jostled and pushed each other, saying, 
 "There he is!" just as they say "Long live the King!" 
 And in the crowd my parents were expanding, un- 
 recognisable in their Sunday clothes. 
 
 They led me away to lunch at the Town Hall. 
 There were speeches before, and speeches after, and 
 all of it was only about me. They called me "the 
 glorious survivor of Karakou" and the "hero of Sene- 
 gal." They related my exploit in twenty different 
 ways, with a certain trick of mixing into it at the same 
 time some things about France and civilisation. 
 
 Towards evening, when the luncheon was nearing 
 its end and people were calming down, a reporter came 
 up to my chair and asked me to relate to him myself, 
 for his newspaper, all the fine things I had done. 
 
 "Ah, well," I said, "there was II have " 
 
 But I could find nothing to add to this preface, and 
 could only look at him and gape. 
 
 My arm, which was gesticulating in space, came to 
 a standstill. "I can't remember any more!" I was 
 forced to confess. 
 
 "Well answered !" yelped the chap, "the brave fel- 
 low is not even pleased to recall his prowess!" 
 
 I smiled, and we rose from the table. There was 
 yet a procession to the end of the village, palavers, and 
 liqueur of honour, presented by Papa Barbat. Then, 
 after huge embracings, we scattered. Finally, I 
 found myself alone at dusk, near the factories. 
 
THE CROSS OF HONOUR 199 
 
 I took then the road that goes round the church, in 
 order to go home. Although night was falling, my 
 dazzled eyes blinked, and my feet were terribly heavy. 
 My mind was empty and wandering and yet some- 
 thing was troubling me. 
 
 Yes, the newspaper-maker's ridiculous question was 
 forcing itself into my poor skull like a nail "What 
 fine thing have you done?" Yes, what, after all, 
 what? Evidently I had done extraordinary things 
 the cross was proof but what? I stopped suddenly 
 in the middle of the darkened road, and remained 
 there ; searching, and sighing to find nothing. 
 
 Had they, with all their champagne and their com- 
 plicated arguments, had they muddled my thoughts? 
 However it was, I was like those people in novels who 
 forget a piece of their life. I had clean forgotten my 
 brilliant action, and it looked to me as if it were no 
 longer anything at all. 
 
 Uneasily, I resumed my walk home. 
 
 Then it was I perceived in the twilight, on a seat by 
 a farmhouse, two beings sitting close together. They 
 must have been clasping hands, and they were saying 
 nothing; but they seemed to apply themselves to this 
 mutual silence as to an occupation of importance. In 
 the obscurity of evening I could see nothing of them, 
 except that they had human shape, and that they were 
 exchanging something better than words. 
 
 "Ah !" I said, stopping once more. 
 
 And immediately, with my eyes fixed on that dark 
 corner of the village, I saw another village, one de- 
 stroyed now, wiped out with all its inhabitants, and 
 above all with the two black creatures who had 
 
200 WE OTHERS 
 
 throbbed together before me, revealing to me only 
 their human shape, and their interwoven silence. 
 And that black couple exactly resembled, through the 
 night's simplification, the two shadows here. 
 
 These shadows, those negroes; it was really stupid 
 to see an analogy, but I saw it. When one has 
 drunk too much, he becomes almost innocent and sim- 
 ple of understanding. And I must indeed have been 
 drunk, for instead of making me laugh, the comical 
 comparison made me cry. My hand went to my 
 cross; I took it away from my breast and hid it, 
 quickly, in the bottom of my pocket, like something 
 stolen. 
 
SAAR 
 
 SAAR was the finest of the big greyhounds of the 
 North. No other displayed as he did the clean 
 magnificent lines of that race which to-day has disap- 
 peared, after being the noblest that went upon the 
 earth save only the royal race of man. Some traces 
 of what the stirring sight of him may have been re- 
 mained for a long time among the coursers of East- 
 ern Scythia and those which grow ever inordinately 
 bigger among the eternal snow that covers the Isles of 
 Tin, Caledonia, and fabled Persia, and even in the 
 species of curved and long-drawn canine which the 
 flaming climate of Libya has contracted and stiffened 
 into arches. 
 
 He had fierce eyes, which were jet-black in day- 
 light, and became a more and more costly sapphire as 
 night was falling. He would run in circles round a 
 galloping horse. Birds only escaped him by rising 
 straight up into the sky; and when he leaped, his ef- 
 fort was so quiet that it seemed as if the earth itself 
 was rising to throw the wonderful projectile forward. 
 
 He knew how to take care of the woolly flocks of 
 the seafaring traders. This occupation was a sort of 
 obscure religion to him, and he observed it without a 
 falter, under the calm eye of the sovereign shepherd 
 who gave him his food. Confined in the farthest 
 
 201 
 
202 WE OTHERS 
 
 pastures of the peninsula, he dwelt there and endured 
 the malignant moisture of the morning and the snares 
 of the night-time he who might have overtaken the 
 sun and mown down all distances with the great scythe 
 of his head and his slender sword-like legs. 
 
 That year the winter began terribly. The rains 
 were such that in many places the layer of earth and 
 its verdant down slid off the flanks of the coast, and 
 one saw the bones of the land arise. 
 
 The shepherd and the dog continued regularly to 
 rescue the flock from famine, and while the pallid, ter- 
 ror-struck sheep sought for the drowned grass, both 
 of them remained on their feet, the man planted like 
 a sacred monolith, the dog like a doorway, a little way 
 from the twisted tree whose shelter they avoided, 
 knowing that the lightning aimed at it. 
 
 One night something appalling came to pass. At 
 the distance of a shout from the palisade where the 
 flock was sheltering, the flood of the tormented sea 
 submerged the natural roadway which connected the 
 pastures with the mainland. The sea established it- 
 self on that steep-ridged pass, and there remained 
 nothing of it, around the new abyss, save an indistinct 
 jawbone of reefs, whose half-drowned crests decoyed 
 little hollow whirlpools with each backwash of the 
 tide. That night the tempest roared so loudly that 
 Saar thought he was being called. He sprang for- 
 ward, fiercely assaulted by the storm, towards the shel- 
 ter where the one master used to sleep. He caught a 
 glimpse of him, sticking fast to a rock in the middle 
 of the blackened, raging azure of the night. Then 
 suddenly, without the dog's knowing why, the man 
 
SAAR 203 
 
 plunged into the abyss, his cloak rioting about him, as 
 though he was taking wings into the bowels of the 
 earth. 
 
 Big Saar waited, his muscles so tense that the rock 
 was held as in the hand of a god ; and the rain, beat- 
 ing on his sides, made the same sound as in falling on 
 stone. 
 
 Dawn came, hardly tempering this second Deluge. 
 The wind drove clouds of rain along the level of the 
 ground, like flames. Saar lowered his pointed bear's 
 head, and began to run about, whining and questing. 
 He found nothing but the overflowing of the sea, 
 mingled with the enormous absence of the master. 
 
 Then as daylight took supremacy, and since the 
 hours irresistibly bring actions, he drove the sheep out 
 from the enclosure where they huddled in terror on 
 the sponge-like soil against the partitions, now sticky 
 with mud. He steered them towards the fields at the 
 extremity of the promontory changed into an island, 
 now that the land had been conquered by the sea. 
 
 He utilised, as formerly, the effective words of com- 
 mand that one makes by barking. For instructions 
 of urgency, he mingled the various sounds that the 
 long and flexible throat of the northern greyhound is 
 capable of producing. He scolded. He went in one 
 jump over the flock to hustle into the right direction 
 a sheep that was unconsciously attracted by the sin- 
 ister slopes. 
 
 The climbing of the last undulation was rough 
 work. Fie had to direct a hard battle with the wind, 
 which hurled itself on the mass of timid woolly balls, 
 shook them, and tried to scatter them in all directions. 
 
204 WE OTHERS 
 
 Stubbornly, however, one by one, the dog recon- 
 structed a complete flock out of the defaulting horde, 
 by force of enfolding them within that speed that was 
 like a cord. 
 
 In this way the humble, bleating travellers sole 
 inhabitants of this corner of the world, henceforth 
 torn from the remainder arrived at their bourne, the 
 field of the day before. 
 
 Each ewe, each wether, each lamb lowered its head 
 and munched the grass. Saar lay down apart, as 
 usual, looking beyond the pale creatures whose indo- 
 lent lot was woven into his own. 
 
 Then a dull feeling inside him forced him to think, 
 and he reflected that he was hungry. 
 
 He set himself to wait imperiously for his master, 
 for him whose high, flat face shone more than any- 
 thing, momentous as the moon. 
 
 No one. Only the time went by, and that did not 
 let itself be seen. At a moment when a feeble gleam 
 blanched the drowned dome of the sky, the big dog 
 got up, dissatisfied and empty, confused by the desire 
 for food and drink. 
 
 As the succeeding hours only worsened that internal 
 wound, he moved about, yawned, and shivered. At 
 last he uttered a plaintive cry, a cry of appeal, a com- 
 mand to his master to help him. After that prayer, 
 he waited for the answer which should grant it. The 
 answer did not come, his master being no longer in a 
 place where one can hear the cry even of an abandoned 
 friend. No doubt, in some Valhalla where one quaffs 
 sunshine, he was guarding ideal flocks with an ex- 
 
SAAR 205 
 
 traordinary dog. So he no more came than a god 
 comes into his temple. 
 
 When Saar discovered that his cry had been in vain, 
 that the master would not obey it, he risked another 
 call. He heard Hunger murmuring and singing to it- 
 self in his sides; languidly he turned his great head 
 towards that naked voice. Then, whether by way of 
 caressing himself, whether to appease and console the 
 flesh that so highly deserved to be satisfied, he licked 
 the tense coat on the curved grating of his ribs. 
 
 The evening, however, was indicating that it was 
 above all necessary to return. For a dog impressed 
 with the duty of guarding living things, the end of 
 the day constitutes a command just as insuperable as 
 that of the morning. Saar collected the flock, and 
 with the same efforts as at dawn, the same distracted 
 attentions, he drove it in and set it cuddling against 
 their nocturnal palings. 
 
 Saar fell asleep. He dreamed that he had a wolf 
 by the throat. He woke up to the sound of the queer 
 muffled outcries of his nightmare. He stood up, 
 arched the spine that was notched like a mountain 
 chain, and then suddenly disappeared in the night to 
 look for a wolf. 
 
 But there was nothing stirring in the island. Only 
 could one feel passing in the air sterilised by the 
 briny cold the mad comings and goings of winds and 
 gales. 
 
 All at once he stood still ; his ears stiffened like those 
 of a horse, and his eyes blazed madly. But, still more 
 quickly, he breathed out a gentle little howl, and ran 
 
206 WE OTHERS 
 
 back to his sheep, whose scent he had picked up in 
 mistake. 
 
 The next day he began his task again a still more 
 severe and heroic task, for his belly was falling in, his 
 eyes were reddening, and his tongue drooped from his 
 gaping mouth. 
 
 But he could not, all the same, remain inactive. He 
 trotted unresting, as light in his passage over the 
 grass-broidered earth as a dry leaf that the breeze 
 leads in a garden. Once, aloof from the others the 
 eaters he extended his slim jaws with their white 
 teeth towards a blade of grass. But when he had in- 
 formed himself of the insipid and worthless taste of 
 the green stem, he left off chewing it, and kept it, wet 
 with the foam of his spittle, in his half-open mouth. 
 
 And on the evening of the third day, bristling with 
 emaciation, his flint-like sinews protruding from the 
 rock of his bones, he looked with hatred on the in- 
 dolent and cloudy creatures that he was tending. And 
 still he could not help protecting them ; he had done it 
 so much and so long. There was a booming vibration 
 in his skull, and he saw flashes of light under his blink- 
 ing eyelids. 
 
 At dawn on the fourth day he could hardly tear 
 himself out of the muddy soil and the sleep that bore 
 him down. He would only have had the strength to 
 act if the living prey of which he was so tragically 
 destitute had appeared to him. But since the only 
 living things were his flock, he stayed enshrouded in 
 the ground, and dropped one weak word to announce 
 that he could do no more. Towards the evening he 
 closed at last his beautiful, queenly eyes, and laid for 
 
SAAR 207 
 
 ever on the dark earth the head that was pointed like 
 a promontory. 
 
 Long months after, when the floods withdrew and 
 men hauled in to the island, they saw on the ransacked 
 pastures, stripped of the last blade of grass, the white 
 carcases of the sheep. They were like the frames of 
 boats, scattered here and there in the builder's yard, 
 their sides bristling with curved timbers. A huge 
 skeleton like that of an ocean-going ship dominated 
 the others. That was the big dog, who had been the 
 first to die of hunger, in the middle of the sheep. 
 
THE GREAT DEEDS OF LANTURLU 
 
 THE slender silhouette of the leading rider be- 
 came at last perceptible in the sunny distance. 
 Several cries burst forth, here and there, from the 
 stand that was bedecked with uniforms, and then they 
 melted into one shout "It's Gentil on Lanturlu! 
 Bravo, Lanturlu!" 
 
 And, in fact, so it was. Carrying his young and 
 elegant master like an ornament, the splendid horse 
 finished the race in a trot of marvellous suppleness, 
 while his rivals were still only dots of dust on the hori- 
 zon. In front of the official stand he stopped 
 abruptly, and his bronze figure reared so admirably 
 that he might have been a fixture on a pedestal. 
 
 The grand stands shook and overflowed. The 
 choicest of the spectators ladies in beautiful bright 
 colours, officers in beautiful dark colours, civilians col- 
 ourless but illustrious surrounded the victors. The 
 women, even the most elevated, even the prettiest, be- 
 trayed agitation. Their eyes went towards the lieu- 
 tenant who was rather pale, and dangling a smile to 
 right and to left but their gloved hands fluttered like 
 butterflies on the shining metallic neck of Lanturlu. 
 The general, especially resplendent in the heart of the 
 principal group, took a step in front of the senators 
 and diverse councillors, opened his mouth, congratu- 
 lated the officer, and then paid homage to the horse, 
 
 208 
 
THE GREAT DEEDS OF LANTURLU 209 
 
 addressing himself to its natural representative, the 
 rider. 
 
 When, led bridled but respectfully, the animal went 
 from the Champ-de-Mars, where his victory had been 
 established, to the ficole Militaire, where his box was 
 henceforth historical when he went forward be- 
 tween two human embankments that bristled with gap- 
 ing faces, cameras, and glances swift but ineffaceable, 
 he was welcomed with such an ovation that he seemed 
 to understand and to be listening confusedly. Al- 
 though his legs were trembling a little, his breast-strap 
 foam-splashed, and his eyes dazzled, he braced his 
 muscles, arched and lightened his steps, and made his 
 beautiful lines glisten. 
 
 In the depth of the wooden quadrangle that a nar- 
 row triangle of light burst into, in the depth of the 
 darksome thoughts in which he dwelt submerged, con- 
 scious only of shapeless fragments of pictures and 
 vague scraps of sound, the animal mused on the im- 
 pression of a great effort mingled with a great reward. 
 The while his long teeth were snatching at the hay, 
 the horse felt yes, he felt flickering in the vice of his 
 humble skull the understanding that he had patiently 
 and heroically obeyed his orders, that he had given, as 
 was necessary, his strength and his toil, that he had 
 given supernatural satisfaction. 
 
 Lanturlu's victory had been easy, although the con- 
 ditions of the race had been particularly severe. Peo- 
 ple had even found fault with the immoderate length 
 of the last stage, the one in which the victor had scat- 
 tered all his rivals broadcast behind him on the road 
 from the East. 
 
2io WE OTHERS 
 
 In those days the lieutenant his master was per- 
 fectly happy, and so was his young wife. And their 
 little Maurice, who was born on exactly the same day 
 as Lanturlu, three years before, set up a little pinkness 
 on his pale and delicate face. 
 
 Eventually the champion appropriated the Coupe 
 du Centre. This time he found more difficulties in 
 his way, and he had to put out an enormous expense 
 of energy to beat Kali, M. de St. Aulaine's filly, by a 
 length. 
 
 Two years went by. His master had to admit that 
 the horse, in spite of his breeding, could no longer 
 figure in the big ordeals. He was still famous, by 
 reason of his two championships; but it was his name, 
 it was no longer he, that was glorified. He passed 
 into the squadron, falling to the lot of a man who was 
 like so many others by the absence of stripes; and now 
 he was only called Turlu. "He's a famous horse!" 
 the adjutant announced to the admiring recruits, in 
 the first year. "He's been a famous horse," remarked 
 some one two years after, who remembered the fact 
 because Turlu, following on a wearying round in the 
 clay, had distinguished himself by a sort of resur- 
 rected fire, an incomparable final rush. 
 
 The time arrived when, after a sort of judgment, 
 after some removals and imprisonments in new 
 stables, they harnessed him to a cab. Still vigorous, 
 in spite of his ten years fully completed, he trotted 
 cheerfully through one season, and then another. 
 
 But age, that mournful malady which insufficient 
 nourishment was aggravating, began to make continu- 
 ous work arduous for him. 
 
THE GREAT DEEDS OF LANTURLU 211 
 
 The old champion still found, in snatches, enough 
 of the headstrong spirit of his noble race, of the ex- 
 asperated impulses of his "blood," to carry mean er- 
 rands in the labyrinthine streets through to the end. 
 To reach some dismal carriage-drive, he was now 
 more tenaciously wilful and heroically obstinate than 
 he had once been to trample the virgin sand around the 
 winning-post and the judges' stand. 
 
 His name, handed down carelessly and without in- 
 terest, had disappeared. His driver did not know it; 
 so that Lanturlu was really no longer anybody. 
 
 So many days fell on him then that in the long run 
 they bruised and wounded him, just as definitely as 
 blows. His body got out of shape and his move- 
 ments became ridiculous. His bones showed them- 
 selves more and more ; his skin was worn out in places, 
 and even bled. In spite of himself, he forgot how to 
 gallop, and only trotted by fits and starts during un- 
 expected little spasms of aggressive enthusiasm, of 
 sportive madness, which then left him astounded, so 
 that he hopped about on the rank. 
 
 Soon, harness-gripped and whip-worried, entangled 
 in the intricacy of the streets, there was not left him 
 enough of all the desperate physical obstinacy be- 
 queathed him by his pure ancestral line to walk with 
 a regular step as long as they wanted him to, to defend 
 himself daily against frightful weariness, to reach the 
 end of the day. 
 
 One morning they did not harness him ; but a man 
 arrived and bought him, and took him away, saying 
 to the grinning ostlers, "We'll try and get a bit more 
 
212 WE OTHERS 
 
 use out of him. I shall get my money's worth back 
 all right." 
 
 The horse was attached to a truck that slid on rails, 
 near a quarry. The truck almost went by itself, and 
 the work was really not work at all. 
 
 And yet, as early as the second hour, the animal 
 came to a stop between the rails, as much the prisoner 
 of the little vehicle as if it had had the roots of a wall ! 
 He shook and danced on his folded feet, cracked by 
 the endless and inevitable toil. They shouted at him. 
 He stiffened himself, trembling; his eye sparkled, and 
 fixed as if shipwrecked in the stormy earth of the 
 embankment, he struggled to move forward. And he 
 did ! When the truck, at the end of a few yards, came 
 to the hole where it would be emptied, the horse had 
 performed the most admirably sporting feat he had 
 ever done even in the historical and brilliant days of 
 his career. This one, in truth, was his obscure and 
 glorious record! 
 
 And yet this was not his most magnificent exploit. 
 He showed himself still braver and stronger three 
 days later, for a few minutes ; although, during those 
 minutes, he was carrying nothing, dragging nothing, 
 and a man was even pulling him along. 
 
 But he could no longer walk ; the mere job of mov- 
 ing himself had at last become beyond his strength. 
 
 And so just when there happened to go by, in the 
 alley and quite near him, a four-striped officer with a 
 full-blown and charming lady, neither of whom knew 
 him any more than he could know them, just in the 
 middle of that brief and tragic occurrence that no one 
 knew of he stopped dead in the street. 
 
THE GREAT DEEDS OF LANTURLU 213 
 
 By jerks his head drew nearer to the dark ground, 
 to all the darkness that the yawning chasms of his 
 great eyes were gazing at, and that he saw, blindly. 
 He was subsiding gently. He was going to yield to 
 the weight the fearful weight of himself, against 
 which his part on earth had been to struggle increas- 
 ingly, the weight which was now drawing the whole 
 of him towards the ground, into the ground. 
 
 "Gee up !" growled the dealer. 
 
 Then, at the eternal master's call, at man's divine 
 command, all the pugnacious fire and all the fierce 
 hatred for obstacles of which he was made up, all the 
 fatal necessity of reaching the end, started to life. 
 The noble horse tore himself from his supineness, 
 made one step, two steps away from nothingness, con- 
 tinued to go. 
 
 While thus he was staggering, forward and up- 
 right, he heard droning through the poor mad brain 
 that the narrow coffin of his skull enclosed, something 
 like a storm of applause. 
 
 And so, sublimely and by a sort of miracle recre- 
 ating his utterly finished strength, at the end of his 
 life contriving a new one, as prodigious as a statue 
 that walks away, he passed through the porch of the 
 slaughterhouse. 
 
THE MIRACLE 
 
 TT was in the open street and the open sunshine. 
 In expansive merriment, two little girls were sit- 
 ting on the seat of golden stone placed against the 
 golden house. 
 
 They shook with laughter; they were laughing 
 themselves hoarse. They had hair like tangled black 
 silk, shining eyes, and mouths as little and as moist 
 as pomegranate seeds. 
 
 "There's been a miracle, and I've seen it," asserted 
 Tomasita, with all the force of her bird-like voice. 
 
 "A miracle? And you saw it?" Conchita's voice 
 said, still more shrilly, as she straightened her little 
 bare neck, like a rosy collar, and raised her tiny 
 orange-coloured hands with their thin and entirely 
 black nails. 
 
 Tomasita, who had eleven times in her life seen 
 the month of May begin and end, again called the 
 most spotless Madonna to witness that she had seen 
 a miracle. 
 
 In face of such obstinacy, Conchita could only half 
 shut her eyes and half open her mouth, in expecta- 
 tion of supernatural explanations. 
 
 "It was one day just imagine yes, it was a very 
 sad thing there had been " 
 
 Embarrassed by the super-preciousness of the story, 
 assailed by all there was to say of the matter, the 
 
 214 
 
THE MIRACLE 215 
 
 child did not know how to begin. She shut her mouth 
 and wrinkled her forehead. She made a big effort, 
 among all the first words, to select some. 
 
 "She was a beautiful woman, my dovekin. She 
 was called Dolores, Dolores Malloca. But it's noth- 
 ing to tell her name ! One can't know how pretty she 
 was, without seeing her. She seemed to shine. 
 
 "I've told you, haven't I, that she came to stay with 
 us at Llassa, on the other side of the Mansanilla. 
 At Llassa it's like here, but it's whiter and redder 
 it's like here if all the days were Sundays. 
 
 "Her husband Daniel had gone on a journey for 
 all the summer. She'd come to us because of that, 
 and she was as beautiful as angels. She was so beau- 
 tiful that when she was coming I didn't dare go near 
 her, and when I was with her, I daren't go away. But 
 she was very different from other women I told you, 
 didn't I? She was serious too serious. She didn't 
 say much, only when it was necessary, and I believed 
 for a long time that she couldn't laugh. She had lots 
 of dresses. Well, at Easter she put on a grey dress." 
 
 "A grey dress!" 
 
 "Yes, she wore a grey dress on purpose. I know 
 why she was like that. It's because her husband was 
 a long way off, and wouldn't come back till after the 
 summer. She was thinking about him, and she used 
 to talk about him. One day she was murmuring some 
 sentences like one says a prayer and I saw that the 
 sentences were chaplets, made out of his name. If 
 you spoke to her about anything else, she looked at 
 you for*a minute, with eyes as big as a mouth, before 
 understanding and answering. Yes, it's because he 
 
216 WE OTHERS 
 
 wasn't there that she was sad, and wouldn't like red 
 and blue, nor violet, nor anything." 
 
 "And then?" said Conchita, whose eyes were set- 
 ting off her high colour like two drops of dew on the 
 pert face of a rose. 
 
 "And then there were two other things; the first, 
 that she went on being sad, and that it was too much, 
 and nobody understood it at all. And the other thing 
 was, that my brother Nemecio was gone on her, and 
 that he was looking for her always, and wanted her." 
 
 "Ah !" said Conchita, and she heard, lisping, in the 
 obscurity of her flesh too young and her life too lit- 
 tle, the eternal story of love. 
 
 "And she was more and more serious, more and 
 more white and silent, because of the absence of mas- 
 ter Daniel. It was like a little dead body in her, and 
 a little mourning on her. It was a disease of meek- 
 ness that was wearing her away. Even in the morn- 
 ing, when the day seems to make promises, or at noon, 
 when the country breathes in your face, or along the 
 street when it's as hot as anybody, and even when the 
 evening's leaning on you, she used to go, wrapped 
 up in her idea like a nun, without seeing anything, or 
 touching anything, or tasting anything. 
 
 "And Nemecio was very miserable. He rolled wild 
 eyes, and bit his fingers. He hid in corners like a 
 dog that's hurt. One day when I went up to him, and 
 he didn't see me because I'm little, I saw that he was 
 sobbing, and all his face streaming, as if his heart 
 was really bleeding. 
 
 "Another time, he was talking to her, and I was be- 
 hind. I saw his back and it was moving, and I saw 
 
THE MIRACLE 217 
 
 her, all straight and stiff like one of those ghosts that 
 seem like a long veil. He said to her, loud, 'I wish 
 you hated me !' 
 
 "She said nothing, not even 'No!' A minute after 
 I saw her face a statue worse than a statue like 
 the Madonna in the church, when you ask her for 
 something, you know. 
 
 "So then I understood what was the matter. There 
 was a spell yes, there was an evil spell that her hus- 
 band had cast on her when he went away. If she was 
 so cold, and still, and foreign, it's because he'd for- 
 bidden her, the sorcerer that he was, to come out of 
 remembering him. Then, you understand, dearie, she 
 couldn't think except about him, and she'd got the se- 
 cret of how not to smile at my brother when he was 
 crying quite close to her." 
 
 "And then, did the wicked Daniel come back?" 
 
 "No, not yet; listen: Then she went to the arena 
 with us. She followed us in the gala like a white 
 shadow, with her eyes open, and her mind always 
 taken up with the witchcraft of her husband. 
 
 "She sat down on one of the rows of seats, and 
 made quite a big part of the crowd more lovely. She 
 had let herself look forward, pale and lonely among 
 all those people so happy and red with the sun she 
 looked like the moon as a lady. I was near her, and 
 I watched her not moving. 
 
 "But all of a sudden she trembled. 
 
 "There was some blood in the arena. The bull was 
 a bad beast, and they'd punished him with the goads. 
 Blood was running from his nose, like a ribbon. 
 
2i8 WE OTHERS 
 
 "Then she watched, her eyes open with all their 
 might She leaned forward and stretched out, so as 
 to see, and see more still. Conchinetta, she was com- 
 ing to herself, she was waking up, at last, waking up ! 
 
 "A moment after, a horse was knocked down, and 
 the sun showed up its stomach, that was gored open. 
 Then, when all the women got up and clapped their 
 hands, she too, she turned into a woman again like 
 the others, and got up and began to cry out. 
 
 "When it came to the death-stroke, she said in 
 a choked voice, 'How far off we are, how far off we 
 are!' 
 
 "And when the espada's sword went in, I saw her 
 trembling hand, fine as silk, seizing and squeezing 
 Nemecio's arm, and she called him by his name, in a 
 voice like singing. She wasn't the same woman when 
 she got back, because she was like the others. The 
 spell was broken. She was rescued, she was rescued ! 
 Wasn't that a miracle of the Holy Virgin?" 
 
 "Yes," said Conchita. 
 
 She sighed, and her eyes wandered. Then, in en- 
 vious rapture, she said, "There'll come a day when I, 
 too, I shall go mad, like the others!" 
 
 "Yes, some day, you and me!" 
 
 Their faces became more prettily pink, their lips 
 more deeply red. They held their peace, in the same 
 obscure silence ; they lowered the lids over their bright 
 eyes. They shut their eyes up like the jewels that one 
 puts away for the grand galas of the future. It 
 seemed as if from that very moment they began to 
 wait for the universal emotion to seize upon them in 
 
THE MIRACLE 219 
 
 their turn; as if, like two bunches of grapes, they 
 were exposing their two young selves to the sun 
 which ripens little maids in their flesh and in their 
 hearts. 
 
THE OTHER WORLD 
 
 VERY time he went to fetch the slain bull, trot- 
 ting behind the two bell-adorned mules, he saw 
 in a flash the arena and the rising tiers of spectators. 
 
 It was a brief and blinding escape out of the bull- 
 den under the stands where for the rest of the show 
 and of his existence he laboured, where he only 
 straightened his bent back on the challenge of the 
 death-cry. 
 
 The old man had almost been born in that gloomy 
 retreat where the bellowing bulls were gathered like 
 storm-clouds in the night, the den whose doors slid 
 open under the grand stand, opposite the mountains 
 of spectators. 
 
 His passion for the great national game had driven 
 him there as soon as he had found his childish feet. 
 
 Through the frantic crowds he used to pick his way, 
 an impetuously silent youngster, like a pickpocket. 
 Between two agitated backs, beyond the enthralled 
 and crimson face of an old man or that of some pale 
 and shining young girl, his eyes espied the torero, 
 gesticulating in his flaming cape. 
 
 In those days he had dreamed of being a torero, 
 too. An orphan, he had dreamed it all by himself, 
 and he told himself about it in a low voice as soon as 
 his companions were no longer there to force him to 
 play, and prevent him from listening to himself. When 
 
 220 
 
THE OTHER WORLD 221 
 
 his arms had gathered strength, he prowled about the 
 sacred buildings and begged for a situation there. He 
 was taken among the drovers and drudges, the men 
 whose faces were like terra cotta, the lower half col- 
 oured blue by the razor. 
 
 He crept from one occupation to another, up to the 
 bull-den, on the very edge of the arena, underneath 
 the enormous assemblies that one sometimes saw com- 
 pletely shaking, like an earthquake. 
 
 He would never be a torero. They told him so; 
 and then he saw it himself. He was growing up 
 badly. Massive and sturdy. He was developing the 
 wrong way. He bore his solid shoulders like an awk- 
 ward burden, and one of his heavy hands swung lower 
 than the other. The Devil, further, who thinks of 
 everything, had put on his face an ugliness which 
 grew bigger and more obtrusive with age. This ugli- 
 ness first provoked little girls to loud laughter, and 
 then bigger ones to little exclamations. It was a mat- 
 ter of general discussion, a subject for the tender 
 discourse of lovers. One spoke of it as one did of 
 bad weather. When the good incumbent of La Roche 
 met the menial of the bull-den, the priest bowed his 
 head, somehow ashamed. 
 
 How, in such case, was it possible that he could 
 ever become one of those whose sword made red and 
 resplendent as a bonfire the bull in the sunshine? 
 
 He resigned himself to obscure vegetation in the 
 hole whence the brute emerged, invincible, where it 
 fell, vanquished. The immense disillusion gave him 
 no pain; his mind had gradually ceased to progress. 
 His somnolent thoughts were not capable of con- 
 
222 WE OTHERS 
 
 structing internal dramas. He forgot how to hope, 
 and then how to regret. But he had preserved his 
 youthful worship of the arena. It sufficed him to live 
 quite close to it, in the shadow of its sunshine, to 
 appear for a few minutes, after each death-blow, in 
 the middle of the plaza's crater. 
 
 The enclosure still rang with the applause hurled 
 down to the espada when he attached the draught- 
 rope to the bull to take it away from the battlefield, 
 and he picked up like crumbs the last shouts of the 
 victors around the last silence of the fallen beast. 
 
 'time went by. The obscure and deformed super 
 of the formal ceremony, of the sumptuous sacrifice, 
 hardly left the den where he was buried like a root. 
 He continued to grow old and be ugly. His eyes 
 blinked and shed tears when he went into the light; 
 and his cheeks and chin, once grimy, covered them- 
 selves with a grey powder. 
 
 Nothing had happened in his life. Nothing? Yes, 
 one thing, or rather one person a very little girl, who 
 looked at him from a long, long way off. 
 
 There had been a little girl, dainty as a jewel, that 
 he had held in his hands, on his knees, for a little 
 while one season, perhaps, or two seasons, of the 
 bull-fights and with her little violet eyes that made 
 her different from everybody, which caused her so 
 much to be pointed out, she looked at him. 
 
 Twenty years had gone by since the child had slipped 
 through his fingers and gone away to the other world. 
 
 The coming of the frail being lent to him by fate 
 had been preceded by a jumbled nightmare, full of 
 cries, full of a woman's sobs. He had no longer 
 
THE OTHER WORLD 223 
 
 dared to think of that woman through fear, or cau- 
 tion, through some holy or base feeling, or through 
 poverty of mind, and soon he was no longer capable 
 of it; but he had never prevented the childish face 
 from looking at him from the depths of death, from 
 smiling expressly at him. So that now he only saw 
 that image when, retired to his hole in the evening, 
 he closed his eyes, or when in the middle of the night 
 he opened them. 
 
 And this was the limit of his future, of the resur- 
 rection of his heart. More years went by. He was 
 still, as always, exclusively devoted to his duty as 
 keeper of the huge victims; and he remained conse- 
 crated in his heart to the soft picture of her who was 
 like the Madonna and the child Jesus at one and the 
 same time, since she was a little girl. 
 
 At last his ears hardened, his broad back took the 
 curve of a vault. When he came out, in order to con- 
 clude the resplendent tragedy of the arena, his head 
 turned more painfully towards the multitude staged 
 like gardens on the tiers, and he heard more indis- 
 tinctly the scraps of shouting that bespattered him. 
 Did he, perchance, imagine, in those days when the 
 universal light around him was slowly decreasing, that 
 the glory of the arena was dwindling among the multi- 
 tude grown old? Yet the spectators remain eternally 
 young, and belief in battles with the beasts is more 
 and more deeply anchored in the depths of the human 
 body. 
 
 One day his head weighed him down more than 
 ever, and he felt himself drunk with darkness as he 
 
224 WE OTHERS 
 
 came forward into the sheet of sunlight with unsteady 
 steps. 
 
 The bull? He looked for it with his hand shading 
 his eyes. He saw it and guided towards the helpless 
 mass his coupled animals, with the hook dangling 
 behind them. 
 
 There they stopped. The mules shook themselves. 
 The roars of the crowd had not yet died out, and sud- 
 denly at a gesture of the espada they were renewed. 
 
 At this moment the old man realised that every- 
 thing was turning upside down around him. He tot- 
 tered, tried madly to catch hold of space, his arms 
 beating like wings; he fell forward. 
 
 He fell in such a way that his head struck the 
 ground quite close to the monster's muzzle, quite close 
 to the enormous head which projected from the sand 
 of the arena like a dark reef. As he did not try to 
 rise, nor even think of it, nor even know who he was, 
 the man looked wildly at the head of the wild beast. 
 
 It was not yet quite dead, but it was dying. The great 
 eye, enormously open, like a deep wound oh, so 
 deep! was troubled and dull. And the passivity of 
 that head, soon to be mingled with all the nothingness 
 that ever was and will be, seemed to the miserable 
 man, whose head was brought equally low, as some- 
 thing immense and fantastic. He was dazzled by a 
 sort of terrible and measureless proof of the profun- 
 dity of a living being proof which one only discerns 
 on the shore of this world, as though it were in an- 
 other. He did not deign to notice that they were pull- 
 ing him away, and feeling him. He had the time, in a 
 thrill of supernatural emotion, to feel surprised how 
 
THE OTHER WORLD 225 
 
 blind men are to all that life means. Life Death. 
 Murder is an uncommon and easy miracle. The 
 drover's frightened eyes, as they lifted him up, were 
 seeking, seeking and settling on those others, so 
 equally, so divinely frightened, as if he had discovered 
 all in them. And it is in that simplicity of our death, 
 of the death of all of us, that his feeble spirit passed 
 away. 
 
 Far from the golden track where a new bout was 
 making ready, they laid him on some straw. 
 
 "He is dead," said the elegant doctor. 
 
 This doctor was rather in a hurry, like all young 
 people. The old man's throat was still trembling with 
 the echo of a rattle that one might have heard by 
 stooping over him. His heavy lips were gurgling in 
 a clumsy effort to hold the last breath back. 
 
 And all in a beautiful light, very different from the 
 light of this world, his eyes saw a darling little girl 
 with violet eyes, who was trying to put her embrac- 
 ing little arms round the big head of a bull. 
 
THE BROTHER 
 
 ^T^HE village of Resat is cut in two by the valley 
 * of the Gueusine. Out of the twenty-four pink- 
 ish roofs scattered in this lean corner of Auvergne, 
 a dozen pile themselves up on the grassy side of the 
 ravine and the other dozen on the bald side. If any 
 would venture to cross from one bank to the other, 
 the odds are on his losing his footing and rolling from 
 rock to rock down to the bed where the Gueusine ex- 
 tends itself. 
 
 It is human enough that the two groups of inhab- 
 itants, divided by the gulf as nations are by distance 
 or by the hideous significance of frontiers, do not like 
 each other. 
 
 But there were two, especially, who looked askance 
 at each other across the ferocious cavity where the 
 Gueusine is let loose Jacquinot and Quinquin. Their 
 houses exactly faced each other. One of the men had 
 a face yellow and moist as mastic, and the other a 
 beaming face, very brightly coloured, which diverted 
 the children. 
 
 It was related that a close friendship had united 
 them formerly one too good to last. One of them 
 grew jealous; that was Jacquinot. From him pro- 
 ceeded the hatred. Quinquin hardly did more than 
 follow suit and hate in his turn, resignedly- 
 stupidly, if you like. 
 
 226 
 
THE BROTHER 227 
 
 So an untiring enmity separated these two people. 
 Their duel consisted in trying to grow richer than 
 the other. That was enough. The success of either 
 affected the other like a defeat. 
 
 Luck was equal at first. In the autumn of '92 
 Jacquinot bought The fitablies meadow; but '93 had 
 not yet shown itself when Quinquin retorted by the 
 purchase of the Mansour slope. Several years later 
 Jacquinot had not had time to enjoy his acquisition 
 of a cow, a prolific milch-cow, fair and white, when 
 Quinquin became the possessor of an ass, called Remi. 
 
 From that time things changed, because Quinquin 
 changed. Former instincts of dreaminess and idleness 
 stole into him. He began by attaching himself too 
 much to this Remi, who had coarse grey hair, in- 
 finitely sensitive ears, and a look of probity. 
 
 The fonder he became of his obscure companion, the 
 less vigour he put into struggling, economising, 
 scourging himself with work, and getting more money 
 than Jacquinot. 
 
 The latter, on the other hand, did not lay down his 
 weapons for the satisfaction of his bellicose intent. 
 His vigour and his avarice brought their harvest. 
 When Marie Pesard's corner was sold by auction 
 it was splendid soil, through having been dunged for 
 fifty years Jacquinot got it. 
 
 In spite of this rude shock, which might have 
 awakened a dead man, a magic spell of indulgent in- 
 ertia took possession of Quinquin. He smiled at 
 passers-by like a drunkard, or at the ass Remi like 
 a madman. He talked when he was all alone, or, 
 
228 WE OTHERS 
 
 worse still, he addressed himself to Remi, in order to 
 make him wag his serious head. 
 
 From time to time he went out with no intention 
 of working; and once outside, he would gaze at the 
 fields, for no other reason than to see them! He 
 went about the country to no purpose, and it pleased 
 him to find that pollarded willows look like people, 
 all with the same thing to gossip about; that big 
 flights of pigeons, as they rise from the roofs, have 
 the movement and the sound of a fan ; with other such 
 imaginings in the matter of the woods, and the leaves, 
 and the little animals. 
 
 In that way, what was bound to happen came along 
 in the form of a bad debt, which went on and on, 
 and got bigger and complicated. Dates came round 
 with bills to meet, which he could wipe out per contra ; 
 then suddenly a last one, which could not be wiped 
 out. On the advice of a lawyer, as persuasive as a 
 priest, he had recourse to a little sale. Now, the 
 parcel of land that Quinquin tore away was knocked 
 down to Jacquinot. 
 
 What a victory ! From across the Gueusine he had 
 got right in among the enemy ! It was really affecting 
 to see, as you went by the enclosure carefully sur- 
 rounded by a very high fence, in the middle of Quin- 
 quin's clover. The latter's little homestead seemed to 
 have been mutilated. 
 
 Following that event, Quinquin lowered his head in 
 the street. Then spring came to comfort him, and 
 people heard him one morning singing like an in- 
 corrigible bird. 
 
 Then it was that he met Leontine, Leontine whom 
 
THE BROTHER 229 
 
 full daylight suited so well ! She had hair as fair as 
 the flame by which one keeps vigil ; and her bright eyes 
 were of richness incalculable. Quinquin was stupe- 
 fied at first by the appearance of this passer-by, whom 
 he used to look at and listen for equally when she 
 came near and when she had gone away. Then the 
 world became a beautiful palace, specially built around 
 her. One evening she stood still for a little while, 
 near to him, looking like a saint. Several evenings 
 after he dared to murmur a prayer before her. Then 
 a slight blush blossomed on her silky cheek, and the 
 miracle happened that she listened to him. 
 
 Yet June had not ended when she disappeared. He 
 waited for her, in distraction, till the day when he 
 saw her face shining and blooming on the other side 
 of the river, on the threshold of Jacquinot's house. 
 
 Jacquinot had taken his betrothed from him! The 
 unlucky man tried to compete, to meet her again. 
 But she avoided him; her father interposed and used 
 brutal and humiliating language to him. 
 
 While he sought tremblingly to recover the savour 
 of joy, or even only of peace, Jacquinot's luck in- 
 creased, while his own still dwindled. His face wrin- 
 kled and acquired so mournful an air that the little 
 girls began to be afraid. People turned away from 
 him. In return for his looks, there only remained 
 those of Remi, whose attachment increased patiently 
 every day. The man liked to put his arms round the 
 donkey's neck, and when the animal took a step nearer 
 him so that he could rub his head better on his chest, 
 that was his only compensation here on earth. 
 
 Protracted, perishing rains in the autumn sufficed 
 
230 WE OTHERS 
 
 to ruin him. All he possessed had to be sold, and as 
 the chastisements of fate never come singly, he took 
 cold, by the side of the empty fireplace, on the very 
 day the matter was decided. 
 
 He went to bed shivering. After a heavy night- 
 mare he opened his eyes. It was broad daylight, but 
 there was no one near him. He thought of calling, 
 but as no one could come he kept silent. Besides, 
 helpless and choking, was he capable of shouting? 
 
 The deserted man rolled distressful eyes. And lo, 
 the window, insecurely shut, opened, and a dark, un- 
 shapely silhouette appeared! 
 
 It was Remi that had come, attracted merely by the 
 presence of his master; Remi, out of his reckoning, 
 ignorant and artless, like the spirit of affection. 
 
 The man wanted to say, " You will not forsake me !" 
 but he stammered some formless sounds, as one's 
 throat does in dreams ; and he fancied he was stretch- 
 ing out his arms to Remi, and he thought from the 
 bottom of his heart, with all his might, that this was 
 his brother. 
 
 Remi, who was sparing in effusiveness, wagged his 
 honest face and withdrew. 
 
 Quinquin died that night or the following morning. 
 
 Jacquinot bought his house a final apotheosis, 
 rather spoiled, all the same, by the premature disap- 
 pearance of the conquered. 
 
 It was quite a big job to get Remi away. He seemed 
 to have decided to stay planted there, and he stiffened 
 himself obstinately on his feet. But they tugged him 
 and beat him in such a way that he was obliged to 
 trot where they wanted him to. By the road which 
 
THE BROTHER 231 
 
 descends along the Gueusine, by the distant bridge 
 of Garages, and by the other road which comes back 
 up the right bank, he arrived at Jacquinot's house. 
 On the same day they harnessed him to go to market 
 at Clamarande. 
 
 Leontine was laughing with the fame of having 
 a carriage ; Jacquinot was feeling pride and joy trem- 
 bling in the skin of his face. 
 
 Husband and wife wedged themselves in with diffi- 
 culty among the vegetables and baskets. Remi, being 
 whipped, set off. 
 
 But behold! Instead of following the road, he 
 turned sharply to the left and shot across the field 
 towards Quinquinas house you could see it facing 
 you, but it was on the other side of the ravine! 
 
 There Remi .was returning, quite straight, quite 
 plainly, in unconquerable hope. In the little carriage, 
 swept away and jolting about, Jacquinot scolded and 
 bellowed, Leontine uttered piercing cries. But Remi 
 cared neither for their shouts nor those of the peas- 
 ants who came running with upraised arms, nor for 
 the furiously shaken reins. With the perfect sim- 
 plicity of one being who loves another, he was anxious 
 to return to their house. There could not have been 
 anything beyond that in the perfection of so paltry 
 a heart. 
 
 Jacquinot straightened himself to jump, but Leon- 
 tine fastened on to him in terror and held him tight. 
 
 The carriage reached the edge of the precipice. It 
 happened that the ass, already falling, turned his head 
 towards his new masters, and they had the time to see 
 in his big eyes the shining angel of a soul. 
 
THE MORT 
 
 the seat which leans against my house I was 
 looking once more at my little domain before it 
 went to sleep in the twilight, at my fore-court, spread 
 out at my feet. On the right was my quickset hedge, 
 and in the wall opposite me my gate, which is always 
 open. 
 
 That gate looks on to the road that borders the 
 forest, and it showed me a cloud of leafy branches 
 gilded by the setting sun, gilded also by the autumn, 
 like a sun still more huge. 
 
 The day was ending gently and I thought care- 
 fully. The refined light on my hedge brought out 
 the tints in perfection, and applied itself to every 
 flower and even to every leaf. 
 
 Harshly, a blowing of horns burst forth. Some 
 turn-out of the old marchioness was going by in the 
 forest. 
 
 And behold, a great silhouette of strange design 
 appeared on the threshold of my gate, blocking up the 
 whole opening. Then the huge mass leaped forward, 
 recoiled, and wavered in the middle of the courtyard. 
 
 It was a stag, the one that the guests of the chateau 
 had been pursuing for hours. He stood there a mo- 
 ment, and we looked at each other. I could dimly 
 see that his coat was stained with mud and foam, his 
 
 232 
 
THE MORT 233 
 
 big eyes troubled, and his heart beating his sides like 
 a hammer. 
 
 He made another leap, and withdrew into the hol- 
 low of an angle, facing forward, but at the end of 
 his strength, motionless, silent, ignorant. But frantic 
 barks were surrounding the house. The hounds were 
 piling themselves up around the gate and howling 
 against the wall. 
 
 Behind them, breathless and excited children were 
 running up in increasing numbers. Soon all the in- 
 habitants of the village were about us. Triumphantly 
 they pointed at the stag with the huge antlers, as if 
 he had been a kind of savage king at last arrested in 
 his career. 
 
 A hurried backing of the spectators now; horsemen 
 and horsewomen turned the corner a whirlwind of 
 red coats and dust, a clatter and the cracking of whips, 
 the flashing of bright metal. 
 
 All came to a disorderly stand, and the huntsmen 
 drew up behind the discordant line of the dogs to 
 sound the mort. 
 
 And alone, infinitely alone, the obscure life which 
 had let itself be caught in the trap of my house did 
 not stir. In resignation he waited for the peace of 
 life or for the peace of death. I saw the excited 
 movements of the crowd that was after his blood; 
 and I saw him living, I felt that his flanks were heav- 
 ing and his throat trembling his throat, the object 
 of that desperate holiday. 
 
 A red horseman had nimbly dismounted. With a 
 slow movement he drew his hunting-knife from its 
 sheath, and one could see the blade was damascened. 
 
234 WE OTHERS 
 
 The dogs continued to give tongue; but everybody 
 had stopped talking and moving about, and each one 
 was watching, watching to the utmost. There were 
 stifled cries, mingled with some hysterical laughter. 
 
 The man prepared to come into the courtyard. 
 Questioning me with a movement of his head, he 
 shouted one had to shout to be heard above the up- 
 roar of the dogs 
 
 "You allow us, I suppose, monsieur?" 
 
 But I put out my arm to bar the way, and shouted 
 in my turn, "No, I will not allow you !" 
 
 He stopped dead, nonplussed. 
 
 "Eh? What, what? What did you say?" He 
 turned towards the newcomers. "He will not let us 
 go in!" 
 
 The announcement was received with a cry of 
 amazement, into which the shrill note of feminine 
 voices entered. 
 
 "The insolent fellow!" cried an old lady. She 
 spoke to one of her companions : "Offer him money !" 
 she said aloud. 
 
 "You will be paid for any damage, my good fel- 
 low!" 
 
 My eyebrows puckered, and he found nothing more 
 to say. 
 
 Then they all began to speak at once, asking me 
 questions, baffled and fevered, with a terrible anger 
 lighting up their eyes. 
 
 Buttressed against my threshold like a post, I looked 
 upon those besieging faces, those faces' that a strange 
 chance allowed me to see so nakedly near. 
 
 All of them bore the stamp of the same murderous 
 
THE MORT 235 
 
 instinct, suddenly let loose by my opposition. It 
 showed unmistakably on their features through all 
 the words and excuses and arguments. If they were 
 wanting to hurl themselves on me in rage and hatred, 
 it was not only in wounded pride, but hideous disap- 
 pointment. 
 
 They had run the flying beast to earth, and now 
 that the run was over, they wanted to cut its throat. 
 One of them tried to explain that to me, in broken 
 phrases, and while he spoke he turned his head towards 
 their prey, so as to inspect it. 
 
 An old man put out his hand, like clutching 
 claws, towards the hoped-for victim. Another, more 
 ferocious, gazed on it with longing. 
 
 And the women were uglier than the men. Shame 
 kept their actual words back in their throats, but they 
 were wholly in the throes of an extraordinary agita- 
 tion. One knew they had surrendered to a disgrace- 
 ful expectation, that all their bodies shook with it. 
 
 One of them, very young, with her plaited hair 
 dancing half -loosened on her back, had slid into the 
 front row in a sudden impulse, and lifting her charm- 
 ing eyes to me and clasping her hands, she said, "I 
 beg of you, monsieur!" 
 
 In comparison with the passionately discomfited 
 crowd, the baying of the hounds had assumed some- 
 thing of innocence. Dogs are slaves, and all they had 
 against the stag was human hatred. 
 
 And the country folk were now more aloof. It 
 seemed to me that they were separating themselves 
 from the others, as though they began to understand 
 that hunting was not what they thought. 
 
236 WE OTHERS 
 
 A humble woman, with a child in her arms, went 
 away hurriedly, as though she had suddenly feared 
 contagion. The village butcher, in the blood-stained 
 apron of his trade and with his arms majestically 
 crossed, was watching, and one read on the sombre 
 workman's face an expression of contempt and anger. 
 
 Yet the snarling and the menace were growing 
 fiercer. 
 
 I knew that we should both be overcome, that I 
 could not long defend the hunted beast, so great was 
 their desire to assassinate it. 
 
 My eyes rested on the huge animal, which was not 
 even wounded ; and dreams of kindness passed through 
 my head in hopeless hurry and disorder. The few 
 minutes of life that I had saved for it till then seemed 
 to me precious and almost affecting. Thinking of 
 the bloodthirsty shouts which beset me, I thought how 
 alike in their dying are the human being and the ani- 
 mal, which differ so prodigiously in life; and that all 
 living beings pass away in fraternity. 
 
 So I clenched my fists, and stammered, "I will not 
 allow it! Go away!" 
 
 But the crowd was overflowing, and ready for any- 
 thing. "We must have him !" panted a voice. "The 
 mort, the mort !" shouted the rest. 
 
 "I have it!" A little hand was waving: "We can 
 kill it from here with my carbine!" 
 
 "True! True! A good idea!" 
 
 "Let me! Let me!" 
 
 A young man cocked the carbine and measured the 
 distance with his eye. I seized the weapon by the 
 barrel and tore it from his grasp. 
 
THE MORT 237 
 
 "Clodhopper!" he sputtered. 
 
 Then it was that the pressure became everywhere 
 irresistible, and the mad crowd poured in. 
 
 Lifted up, hustled, and forced back, I still tried to 
 make myself heard : "Go away I will not permit it !" 
 
 But their furious glee would listen no longer; they 
 rushed towards the animal, which from the angle of 
 the wall opened his eyes with the great empty peace- 
 fulness of nature or of death. 
 
 And then I know that I hurled myself in front of 
 the condemned creature ; I know that I shouldered the 
 carbine and fired on the pack of men and women 
 and I know that I did right! 
 
REVENGE 
 
 I N the circus dressing-room, all among the poor 
 tinselled finery vainglorious posters and the rub- 
 bish of scenery the little lady lion-tamer was laid 
 out, cold and still. They had placed her on some wall- 
 hangings and drapery, as if on flags ; and I was keeping 
 vigil alone, still wearing my lion-tamer's costume. 
 
 My grief was in vain. She was dead, my compan- 
 ion, my wife, my child, she who had devised for me 
 so many good words and beautiful looks. All through 
 the hours of my sobbing, while the gleam of the can- 
 dle trembled on her, her little face was becoming more 
 and more motionless. 
 
 This was her last night on earth. This one night 
 more, although dead, she was there, by my side. This 
 one night more, although dead, she smiled at me. Her 
 restful features had regained their true form, their 
 habits, and so, naturally, she had begun to smile at 
 me. This one night more I might have touched her. 
 But to-morrow she would be in the ground, and then, 
 secret and solitary, she would change. 
 
 And all my mourning, all my impotence, were re- 
 iterated in a futile prayer, an insane invocation that I 
 uttered tremblingly: "Oh, that this tragedy had not 
 happened ! Oh, that she had not gone into the cage ! 
 
 Oh, my God, that " 
 
 238 
 
REVENGE 239 
 
 And my thought went in a frightful shudder to the 
 one that had killed her him the big lion. 
 
 In a corner of the cage I do not know how, for 
 the hideous thing was so swiftly over a mysterious 
 spasm of anger had thrown the huge monster on her, 
 and she was killed instantly. 
 
 Yet now she was so smiling and so sweet! It was 
 her smiles and sweetness that obsessed me most while 
 I remained there, not daring to look anywhere but at 
 her, so few were the moments left to us. The tor- 
 turing memory of the purity of her voice came to me, 
 the buoyancy of her walk, the smallness of her hands ; 
 and I writhed again. 
 
 The lion the lion ! It was towards midnight that 
 I was seized by a desperate and convulsive rage against 
 the big accursed lion. A fierce idea took root in my 
 brain to be revenged and slay him! 
 
 And I rose staggering, to go and kill him. 
 
 I went along a passage, around the slanting canvas 
 of the circus, and I came to the cages with my lantern 
 alight and my revolver. 
 
 I remember no more of the details. At the end, 
 wholly against the bars, moved the monumental 
 shape. Then, disturbed in the sovereignty of his slum- 
 ber, the lion rose and extended himself, hostile and 
 fierce; his claws tore the boards of the floor, and a 
 hoarse snarl came from the hell of his throat. 
 
 Mad fury arose to my head. I put out my arm. 
 Once, twice, six times I fired. 
 
 Hideous and huge the phantom rose to its full 
 height, like a house blown up by a mine. He shook 
 himself terribly. As in a hurricane, the cage and the 
 
240 WE OTHERS 
 
 whole show and, one would have said, the earth it- 
 self trembled. 
 
 Then he breathed a little plaintive mew, and I knew 
 it was a sound of inmost suffering. He sighed and 
 sank, and I heard him licking his wounds. 
 
 His heart must have been hacked by the bullets. 
 In an instant his blood filled the cage and dripped out- 
 side. 
 
 I was cold as ice, and stupefied ; I could do nothing 
 more. 
 
 But suddenly acute remorse, unlooked-for and har- 
 rowing, carried me away. I went into the cage and 
 up to him, and I heard my lips asking his forgiveness. 
 He ceased to lick himself, remained for a moment 
 motionless; then he leaned gently against me, reveal- 
 ing the huge wound whence his blood flowed like a 
 spring. 
 
 And we stayed thus, both of us, side by side, not 
 understanding. The great body continued to spread 
 its blood abroad and to utter a very faint rattle, veiled 
 and choked, as if meant for me alone. Ah, that too 
 little voice, that seemed to be speaking so quietly to 
 me! The gigantic face, bristling and full of dark- 
 ness, was declining slowly towards the ground, and I 
 could see the green beacons of his eyes waning like 
 lamps. 
 
 Stooping low, I looked at him closely, and a sort of 
 wonder smote me to see such a big, strong, and beau- 
 tiful work of creation. 
 
 I searched the emerald twilight of his gaze; I 
 scanned the lines of his body, gathered, piled up, and 
 sculptured under that heavy velvet; and all the won- 
 
REVENGE 241 
 
 derful organism put together for a career of extraor- 
 dinary adventures and victories. I put out my hand 
 and touched the enormous head helpless and ob- 
 scure, perhaps, but a world all the same. 
 
 I saw him better and better, more and more. My 
 gaze went down into him, as into a well. I looked 
 on him as one might upon treasure. I worshipped 
 his so innocent pride, his fire and his fierce love of 
 life, the menacing plenitude of his slumber, the supple 
 tension of the clusters of his flesh, the festival of his 
 banquets, and his tawny acquaintance, born of the 
 desert, with the mirage, the daylight, the oasis, the 
 night, and the stars. 
 
 I stroked the paw he had placed too gently on the 
 ground, and my fingers mingled with his half-extended 
 claws. His claws! He had killed her her, with 
 those claws. He had stained exquisite flesh with those 
 hideous, criminal claws. 
 
 Criminal? No innocent! There was but one 
 criminal myself ! 
 
 And as I almost lay on the body whose throbs came 
 less frequently and grew immense, I clasped the dying 
 giant in my arms, and trembled as I pressed him to 
 me, while he surrendered his head upon my heart. 
 
 Then, like a sleeper awakened, like a blind man 
 restored to sight, I saw Truth change her shape. I 
 began to unravel things more terrible and more de- 
 lightful than I had till then been capable of under- 
 standing the incalculable value of life and action, of 
 all that which my frail judgment's decision had cast 
 into the mud, into corruption, into dust. 
 
 I had added this supineness to the other to that of 
 
242 WE OTHERS 
 
 the little angel laid down yonder like a crucifix. I 
 had made death more pitiless and more infamous. 
 
 All was worse than it was before. The murder of 
 the child and the murder of the lion had no resem- 
 blance, none. With a prodigious effort, I tried to 
 reconcile these tragedies, to join them together, to 
 change them for each other, not merely to add them 
 to one another. I could not, I could not! 
 
 One must needs be mad to go after revenge. Why? 
 Because a calamity cannot wipe out a calamity. Why ? 
 I do not know ; but revenge is not a human thing. 
 
 And when he died, in spite of the immensity and 
 desperation of my regret, I, in a poor fevered night- 
 mare, could not help stammering to myself that he 
 had gone to Paradise! 
 
 Since then I have wandered through many years. 
 But, wretched as I have become, I have kept in me in- 
 comparable remorse. There is something profound 
 that I know, that I have seen. I who have slain some- 
 body no, not somebody yes, somebody! I hold 
 such a respect for life that I can no longer be misled 
 whenever the issue is somewhat wide; and when, hid- 
 ing in some field, motionless as a scarecrow, I see the 
 shooters, or even children let loose among the butter- 
 flies, or even the anglers, who do not know so much 
 about it as I, I pity the poor people. 
 
 Sometimes my belief turns me in another direction, 
 and I would like to cry out upon revenge, and be- 
 seech you all to burst that bond that you would fain 
 establish between one suffering and another. 
 
 This is a very heavy burden of mine to have ac- 
 quired the right to make such profound decisions. It 
 
REVENGE 243 
 
 is not given to all, by one chance in their lives, to 
 have regarded a living creature, if only an animal, 
 so perfectly that they can see how little real difference 
 there is between all those who can feel pain. 
 
 It is difficult to see the truth and to keep it within 
 sight. Preparation is necessary for that, and also a 
 coincidence of events. In the ordinary course of time 
 all things become confused; error hangs brutally 
 heavy, and we are so little that our little thoughts 
 hide infinity from us. 
 
THE NAME 
 
 /F two loose nerves in the neck of a dog are tightly 
 bound together, then, by the discontinuity of the 
 neuroplasma thus provoked, the dog must always die, 
 always. 
 
 He had often tested it by experiment, but in his 
 hurry to carry it out once more, he went through the 
 streets with long hasty steps, wrapped in the long over- 
 coat that looked like a priest's robe. 
 
 His studious face was poked forward. The light of 
 the lamps seemed to have taken the colour out of it; 
 arguments and reveries had fixed his features like 
 writing and wiped out the youth of it. 
 
 A great thought had settled itself in his mind and 
 haunted him for years: this theory of the nervous 
 system, was it true or false? Who was right? Of 
 those who defend it and those who deny it, who are 
 the victors and who the vanquished? 
 
 That day, the desire to find one more proof of his 
 conviction, under the scalpel that quivers in the flesh, 
 the desire to know still a little more infallibly what 
 he knew, was speeding his footsteps. 
 
 He arrived at the grey house, alone in the suburb's 
 wandering territory, aloof from the others because of 
 the experiments and the cries. 
 
 An old man opened the door to him. "Is every- 
 thing ready, Gervais?" 
 
 244 
 
THE NAME 245 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Good; I will join you in the laboratory/' 
 
 There they reappeared to each other, clad in long 
 white blouses. It was a wide, low room with a tiled 
 floor, and marble tables scattered about. One might 
 say that it was the skeleton of a room, and its white- 
 ness was soiled by the beginning of the evening. 
 
 One heard the dripping of a tap on the stone, and 
 some stifled lamentations that came from the foot of 
 the wall, where some holes were contrived, and closed 
 with bars. In the depth of these holes some dark 
 forms were moving, though they could be seen only 
 by stooping. 
 
 The servant arranged some phials and instruments. 
 The other man, with a label in his hand, was refresh- 
 ing his memory of a formula with a last glance. Then 
 he came to the central table, which was carefully 
 washed and supported a little trestle-stand, a sort of 
 diminutive bed, just big enough to take a child. 
 
 "Number 223!" the master commanded. 
 
 "Yes, sir." Hastening his step, which rheumatic 
 old age was making dilatory, Gervais approached one 
 of the niches, stooped over it, and opened the hatch. 
 
 Number 223 shot out of it so suddenly that he es- 
 caped the servant's outstretched hand, and set off at 
 full gallop round the laboratory. 
 
 The assistant stifled an oath, and the master a 
 growl. 
 
 Number 223 rushed and jumped, got round the ob- 
 stacles, held fast to the slippery floor and turned the 
 corners, all with incredible speed. He had big black 
 feet and they seemed to grow more numerous, and to 
 
246 WE OTHERS 
 
 be mixed together. He was long and high, quite black 
 and quite thin, his belly hollow and his back like a 
 saw. He uttered short barks of high spirits and de- 
 fiance. Drunk with liberty, he was playing, with all 
 his might, and he filled the mournful room with a 
 festival of gaiety and joy. 
 
 Gervais, abashed at the scandal, tried in vain to 
 catch the dog again, and the old man felt his clumsy 
 and futile hands trembling. He dreaded the wrath 
 that would certainly be gathering yonder under the 
 long blouse so still and straight, and the pale head 
 whose eyeglass was focussed on him. 
 
 Number 223 had come to a standstill three paces 
 from the man, but on the first movement of a hand 
 he was off like a shot to the other end of the room. 
 
 "Enough of that!" growled the angry master; "are 
 you going to get him, after all; yes or no?" 
 
 Then he turned his back with an irritated shrug of 
 his shoulders, and began nervously fumbling in his 
 instrument case, so as to keep himself in countenance 
 while waiting. 
 
 Gervais tried to approach the fugitive dog by de- 
 grees and by artifices ; but No. 223, inured to this sort 
 of exercise, dodged him every time, and clamorously. 
 
 When quite tired out, the assistant had an inspira- 
 tion: 
 
 "Here, Medor! Medor, come here!" he cried. 
 
 Number 223 understood that he was spoken to, 
 for he uttered a distinct bark and erected the sharp 
 triangle of his head. 
 
 "Come, Medor!" said Gervais again. But he 
 stopped dead, his mouth agape. The savant had struck 
 
THE NAME 247 
 
 the marble table with his lean fist, and his trembling 
 voice questioned him with astonishing violence, "Why 
 are you giving him a name, you old fool, you old 
 lunatic?" 
 
 Why was he? He spluttered in bewilderment, for 
 he did not know. To begin with, that was not his real 
 name, of course. Dogs were no longer given such 
 names. 
 
 The master knitted his brows. "Old lunatic!" he 
 growled. 
 
 But he had put his case down, and with empty 
 hands and hanging arms he watched the excited dog 
 run round, as he brought all his artless resources into 
 play to escape the executioners for a moment. The 
 master lingered over watching him live, surprised at 
 the importance he had assumed since a poor name 
 had by chance been cast at him. 
 
 He had become something else, all at once, as though 
 it had been a miracle. 
 
 Till then he had been Number 223, an obscure or- 
 ganism, only existing for experiments, his only fate 
 to yield the blood, the pain, and the problem of his 
 flesh to those who wanted them. Till then he was 
 jumbled with the two hundred and twenty- two whose 
 agony they had utilised to give life to formulas, to 
 sustain theories, and had then cast out the remains. 
 
 Now he was personified ; he had become an identity. 
 One was forced to see that he lived, quite as much as 
 the other living things. The name had pointed him 
 out, with all that he stood for his power of thinking 
 hazily, of desiring so many things and of being un- 
 
248 WE OTHERS 
 
 happy, and the humble treasure of his memories, too, 
 his friends and his past, divinely secret. 
 
 He had not changed, yet suddenly he had been rec- 
 ognised. No sort of argument could wipe out that 
 revelation. 
 
 After a little awkward silence, the lawmaker asked, 
 "Where does he come from?" 
 
 Gervais raised his arms no one knew! Not from 
 the town, in any case. From the country, no doubt; 
 perhaps from the suburbs. He was a sort of sheep- 
 dog, with hair like a goat. Yes, certainly they lived 
 in a village, they whom he had lost. 
 
 However, believing that he was forgotten, the con- 
 demned dog drew near. He came and sniffed at their 
 hands with infinite innocence, and as he lifted his eyes 
 towards theirs, they sparkled in his coaly face. 
 
 He uttered a tiny lament, and it was as though they 
 had spoken. Then he said nothing, meekly. He re- 
 mained standing there, steady as a statue. One could 
 only see the vibration of his breath, and the beating 
 of his heart. 
 
 Gervais dared not touch him; he awaited the mas- 
 ter's orders, who kept silence. Then Gervais timidly 
 risked saying, "There are people looking for him." 
 
 And the old man looked at the young scientist with 
 slight entreaty. 
 
 The theorist seemed to come out of a dream, and 
 said very quickly, in a clear and unaccustomed voice : 
 "I am no longer able to do anything with him. Take 
 him away. I don't want him any more. Not him!" 
 
 "Yes, sir, not him!" said Gervais, and his eye was 
 bright and his heart had become all glorified. 
 
THE NAME 249 
 
 They stood there several seconds longer, in the 
 deepening twilight. Darkness effaces details, and 
 helps us to come nearer each other. Among the 
 shadows one notices profundities that daylight dis- 
 guises; and one thinks, in a creative brotherliness 
 akin to genius, of the things one does not know, and 
 the rights one has not. And during that brief and 
 fleeting moment there was no difference between the 
 abashed scientist who had forgotten his science, the 
 humble workman who let his heart speak for itself, 
 and the other, who in comparison with them was 
 hardly more than a stranger. 
 
 And the old servant dared to murmur aloud, sym- 
 pathetically, "My dear sir!" 
 
THE ONE GROWN OLD 
 
 A T Compiegne, the post-chaise goes back. This is 
 -** the last stage. In the bus, now, I am shaken up, 
 and my brown curls are dancing round my oval face. 
 While I look mechanically through the window at the 
 driver's leather coat, tossing about like a sailor on 
 the waves, and at the road which hurries from the 
 front to the rear past its border of bushes, I am dream- 
 ing. 
 
 Wrapped up in this tasselled shawl of violet silk, 
 I certainly look old enough for a married woman. As 
 a matter of fact, I am twenty-three. It is six years 
 now since I went away from this country where I am 
 going back at full speed; six years since I left those 
 who brought me up my uncle Bertin and my aunt, 
 and my cousins Delphine and Dorothee, and my cousin 
 Florestan to go into the Convent of White Ladies 
 at Amiens. 
 
 I am returning, rich in experience, still thrilling 
 with the wise whisperings of the Mother Superior 
 and the sisters, and the serious and infrequent murmur 
 of Monseigneur. 
 
 But my convent memories are growing faint. This 
 is the last day of October. The red rays of the de- 
 clining sun glide over the ground like interminable 
 passers-by; the sound of the angelus-bell mingles with 
 those on our horses. 
 
 250 
 
THE ONE GROWN OLD 251 
 
 So I am looking again on that evening at the end 
 of October, 1840, six years ago, when I went away 
 along the trailing shafts of sunset, amidst the inter- 
 woven ringing of big bells and little ones. 
 
 That evening, after the tears and excitement of fare- 
 well, my family by adoption had grouped them- 
 selves on the moss-velvet of the old garden steps, 
 close to the grotto with the ornamental weeping willow 
 at the entry, so as to watch me going away on my god- 
 father's arm, the admiral. My cousins Delphine and 
 Dorothee, one eight years old and nursing her doll, 
 the other twelve and swinging her work-bag, showed 
 me in the sunset their faces golden as their hair, and 
 their mouths shining like cherries. Florestan was 
 shaking on his long legs, and my uncle was nodding 
 his fine lawyer-like head, a head like that of the King 
 of the French, and my aunt was standing as straight 
 and as pale as our statue of Pomona that was dressed 
 in ivy up to the chin. 
 
 And Fido, the black dog. He understood that I 
 was going away, and objected to it! He ran from the 
 others to me and from me to the others, speedy, pa- 
 tient, and obstinate. He tried to multiply himself, and 
 so make a chain between us! But he could not pre- 
 vent the separation. 
 
 All has changed. Because all things change. They 
 told me again and again, at Amiens. The good ladies 
 there prepared me for it, in affectionate a-n.d confi- 
 dential tones. One grows up quickly and grows old 
 very quickly. Six years are quite a remarkable space 
 of time. Besides, Messieurs de Chateaubriand and 
 de Lamartine, whom we secretly adored, disclose in 
 
252 WE OTHERS 
 
 a hundred tuneful ways the transformations that years 
 bring. 
 
 All things change, all things grow old. I have 
 changed. How I must have grown old ! I am sighing, 
 between the jolts of the diligence, whilst my arrival 
 draws near and oppresses me. 
 
 We stop Villevert, already! I have arrived and 
 climb down. We are early and there is no one to meet 
 me. I will go on alone into Senlis. The way, of 
 course, is by the bridge over the Nonette. 
 
 But I am not all abroad! On the contrary, I can 
 see everything familiarly and easily. The Senneliers' 
 meadow is coming into view, and seems to be speak- 
 ing gloriously to me. The shadows of the trees in the 
 avenue fall on me in a way I know well. I could al- 
 most believe that those trunks come forward, one by 
 one, and go with me a little way, without looking like 
 it. And at the bend there is the house ! 
 
 The red gate I recognise it so completely and so 
 sweetly that really we are recognising each other! 
 
 I push the gate, and in spite of its venerable hinges, 
 it opens without saying anything. I am dazzled with 
 trembling surprise there they are ! All my relations, 
 just there, gathered in the sunset on the steps all vel- 
 vety with moss. It is a chance that they are there, 
 since they are not expecting me yet. But it is so much 
 the same group as six years ago! Just as then, the 
 faces of Delphine, nursing a bunch of flowers instead 
 of a doll, and of Dorothee, who holds a book instead 
 of embroidery, are reflecting the evening light. Flore- 
 stan, his hands as timidly empty as when he was nine- 
 teen years old, is oscillating in the same way on those 
 
THE ONE GROWN OLD 253 
 
 long legs. Close by the grotto and the willow, my 
 uncle still looks like a statue of Louis-Philippe, and my 
 aunt a statue of a woman. 
 
 Well ! Six years have gone by ! And yet it seems 
 to me, in the flash of my first glance, as if I had just 
 said good-bye to them before catching the diligence for 
 Amiens. Yes, no doubt I have forgotten something 
 or other and am coming back, and no doubt my god- 
 father the admiral is waiting for me just outside the 
 gate, with his two hands crossed on the silver knob of 
 his stick, his chin nodding on his gaudy waistcoat a 
 waistcoat like West Indian birds. 
 
 "Noemie! Noemie !" 
 
 They have seen me and are hurrying towards me, 
 my uncle and aunt gently, my three cousins very 
 quickly. They seize me, and clap their hands, and 
 laugh. We shout, and all of us try to talk at once. 
 Affectionate tears are shining in the eyes of Delphine 
 and Dorothee, and I can feel them in mine, too. 
 
 We are the same! Although Delphine' s face is a 
 little longer, and Dorothea's skirt a little less short, 
 over those white stockings with the black ribbons of 
 her satin buskins wound round them, they are the 
 same. The loving smile of the parents and the awk- 
 ward smile of Florestan are identical with those I 
 took away with me once upon a time. All have stead- 
 ily remained true to the pictures kept in my memory. 
 And the grotto, and the willow, and Pomona in her 
 ivy costume have remained so, as if they were people. 
 As for me, I am exactly the Noemie of before. The 
 more I open my eyes, the more I recognise myself 
 everywhere. 
 
254 WE OTHERS 
 
 We are strolling in the last lustre of the evening. 
 
 No, we do not change! No, we do not grow old! 
 
 What was all that they told me yonder about the 
 mysterious menaces of time and human changes? 
 The good ladies were very wrong to put me so dread- 
 fully on my guard against the passing of time. Grow- 
 ing old? It is a sort of terrible legend made up by 
 nuns who have no acquaintance with life, and by poets 
 who sing, shut up in their poetry like noble foreigners. 
 
 As we turn out of the walk that is enclosed between 
 box hedges, trimmed and high, I say suddenly, "Ah! 
 What's that?" 
 
 A shape is trailing itself along the gleaming border 
 and coming towards us, lifting a sort of face from 
 time to time. It is a tottering dog, quite grey, with 
 tufts of woolly hair, and scars on its back. 
 
 "It's Fido," says Dorothee. 
 
 I shake my head hard : "No, it's not Fido !" 
 
 "Yes, it is Fido," my cousin replies; "but he's old." 
 
 The dog stops, a few steps in front of us, and stares 
 at me painfully, with eyes that are dull, and their lids 
 deformed and blood-shot. 
 
 "He was five years old when you went away," Del- 
 phine explains. "He's eleven now, and dogs only live 
 twelve." 
 
 Then I stop dead, and begin to tremble a little, and 
 bend over this living but worn-out and almost done- 
 for creature. 
 
 Yes, it is indeed Fido, he whom I had often played 
 with as if he had been a jolly toy, black and brotherly, 
 when his eyes were bright, his coat new, and his hap- 
 piness full-blown. I find some traces of him again 
 
THE ONE GROWN OLD 255 
 
 through the misery that clothes him, and at the bottom 
 of the poor grimace that disfigures him. 
 
 "Are you old, Fido? Are you old?" 
 
 He seems to move his dusty old head, and in that 
 way to say "yes," without understanding any more 
 than I. I stoop, very gently, to get nearer to him, and 
 on a level with him. I look at him face to face, and 
 then I see old age! 
 
 Because of the difference in length of time between 
 the lot of a dog and that of other people, he reveals 
 what we shall all be one of these days grown ugly, 
 sullied and collapsed, with hollow eyes that weep and 
 worse than weep, with the infirmity of a heart that has 
 hardly strength or good-nature enough left to go on 
 beating. Yes, condemned sooner than we are, he be- 
 stows that forecast on the transient young people that 
 we are as yet. He proves that they are right, the 
 beautiful books and the serious friends who warn us 
 of the tragic changes of life. 
 
 Cured in a moment of my youthful foolishness, I 
 stand convinced in face of this prophet, so simple, so 
 majestic. 
 
THE MOTHER 
 
 ON the day after the funeral she went back to the 
 hospital to get little Adelin's clothes. At dusk 
 she pushed open the right hand gate, where the notice- 
 board is, and went along the drive that the hearse had 
 taken, in the opposite direction, bearing a white cof- 
 fin, as little as a doll's cardboard box. 
 
 She went into the familiar entrance-hall. Madame 
 Isabelle, in a white apron, was going through, and 
 smiled at her awkwardly as she passed. She gave the 
 nurse a greeting that was short and restrained, so that 
 she would not cry. The effort made her almost stum- 
 ble at the entry into the corridor. She passed along 
 it and sat down in the waiting-room, rising when her 
 turn came. At last she received her parcel through a 
 little window. The man who handed it out dared not 
 raise his eyes to hers, and she did not think of looking 
 at him. Henceforth there was nothing in the world 
 for her but these few garments. It was very little to 
 possess, a paper parcel as big as a hand, and separately 
 the baby's light blue frock, washed and ironed. She 
 fled. 
 
 She had hardly reached the threshold of the prin- 
 cipal building when she must stop, unfold the dress, 
 and look at it. 
 
 Hanging at the end of her fingers, it was extraordi- 
 narily bright, for in the evening blue is more white 
 
 256 
 
THE MOTHER 257 
 
 than white itself. The woman was dazzled by the 
 apparition of the garment, the only living thing left of 
 the child who was now an orphan in Paradise. She 
 felt a frightful sob mounting from her heart. 
 
 There were people in the drive that led out to the 
 road. To avoid them, in that moment of keen dis- 
 tress, she turned aside and escaped in the direction of 
 the garden, along the big brick building, past the wings 
 and various outbuildings. The open air calmed her at 
 last and prevented the new convulsion of sorrow. 
 
 She stopped walking. Where was she? In what 
 section of the infirmary, that was big as a cemetery? 
 She could not make it out, decided to return the same 
 way, traversed many paved paths between grated win- 
 dows, and passing through a little yard, reached a 
 building isolated as an island. 
 
 "What's that?" 
 
 At the foot of the wall in front of her some strange 
 recumbent shapes were collected. She drew near; 
 dead bodies. 
 
 They were the remains of animals sacrificed in the 
 vivisection room. They cast out in that corner every 
 day the lowly remains that had served their purpose, 
 ransacked and emptied, smashed and mutilated, ac- 
 cording to the varying nature of lesson or research, 
 each one mournfully travestied by the particular need 
 of each experiment. 
 
 She shuddered and made a quick step aside to take 
 flight anew, then faltered towards the railing. 
 
 But there, in the very corner of the charnel-house, 
 stranded apart from the deathly heap, she saw a tiny 
 corpse, rigid and frightfully bloody. 
 
258 WE OTHERS 
 
 It was a kitten, not more than a few weeks old. It 
 lay on its back, and seemed drawn out and emaciated. 
 Its back legs were straight as two drumsticks, close 
 together upon the prolongation of the body ; the fore- 
 paws were folded upon a fragment of the chest. The 
 head, dappled with wounds, of which one was the half- 
 open jaws, was no bigger than a baby's fist. 
 
 The woman stopped dead. She had felt her heart 
 gashed, and her hand went up to the wound. She 
 went forward, bent lower, and looked closer. 
 
 One could make out the spiral marks of the bonds 
 that had spread the slender organism upon the mar- 
 tyr's table. The mouth, dislocated, revealed fine teeth 
 in pin-point rows; and the opened belly yawned also, 
 black and shiny, letting the light in upon entrails as 
 fine as skeins of thread. 
 
 She looked upon the abject creature, murdered with 
 such tenacity and care, and shook from head to foot. 
 Her eyes were drowned, she was stupefied by too many 
 unformed thoughts. 
 
 She was familiar with the affairs of the hospital, 
 for she had haunted it since the day when her precious 
 little Adelin had been carefully carried in on tip-toe, 
 hidden in a blanket. She had heard this one and that 
 one talking. She knew that even if the surgeons had 
 seized that brand-new, silky kitten in its full-blown 
 frolics and its toy-like fragility, and even if they had 
 torn it to pieces, it was for the best. The torture 
 which destroyed the animal had no doubt served to 
 substantiate medical science, to discover remedies and 
 cures for there were, it seemed, people whose good 
 luck it was to have diseases that they cured! but in 
 
THE MOTHER 259 
 
 spite of this knowledge, she shook her head, trembled 
 more and more, leaned against the railing and began 
 to sob, quite overcome. 
 
 When she had cried, when she had suffered yet a 
 little more pain than before, she leaned again over the 
 little cold body, anxious to know why she was so sorry 
 they had killed it. 
 
 She felt sure it was because of its littleness. 
 
 Against the bricks of the wall the tiny corpse lay 
 full length, in imitation of sleeping people; it even re- 
 called the frightfully good and quiet look of dead 
 babies. Seeing its paws almost crossed on its van- 
 ished chest, with their claws like ends of thread, any 
 woman would have thought, "What little arms!" 
 
 Ah, in spite of the reasons that the wise men would 
 give if they were asked for them (as God would give 
 His if one might at last question Him upon unhappi- 
 ness), how could they mangle, pierce, and shatter so 
 small a thing? Clad in their white blouses, they had 
 attacked the little animal overturned and contracted 
 on the table, its only chance of salvation the facility 
 with which it could yield up its breath! And they 
 had found some one extraordinary enough to give it 
 the first stab! At a time when cradles are furiously 
 set upon by monstrous diseases several surgeons were 
 found to torture this kitten to the end, this abject life, 
 this being so helpless that it could not even cry loudly ! 
 
 Yes, the condemned was really too little, that was 
 why a half-healed heart was opening again before it; 
 and above all, it was too new-born. Hardly had it 
 begun, when the torture came, to know how to gambol 
 and become familiar with life, frisking and purring in 
 
260 WE OTHERS 
 
 celebration. There had been in it the innocence and 
 the ignorance of an angel of a little angel. 
 
 Abruptly she cried out and shook her head, awak- 
 ened from a dream. All the same an animal and a 
 child what a difference there is! 
 
 But as the evening clouded all things with its in- 
 effaceable shade, weakening the lines which distinguish 
 one shape from another, stripping off the ornamenta- 
 tion of mankind, she paid less attention to that differ- 
 ence. She ignored it, in spite of herself, in the gloomy 
 reverie that held her there, opening her eyes wide, 
 trying to spell things out, so many things. 
 
 Very slowly she understood. Falling night was 
 darkening more and more the mourning mother, who 
 could not afford black during the day. She could no 
 longer take her eyes off the sorrowful remains laid so 
 close to her, but in death and eternity, nevertheless. 
 
 "Ah," she murmured, "it's dead!" 
 
 She said that "Ah, it's dead!" as if it were a reve- 
 lation ; and such it was in fact. 
 
 Cast on the charnel-heap, the animal was hardly 
 more than an endless, formless stain. The pretty 
 rhythmic creature was no more, nor the delicate de- 
 tails it had been so rich in. There was nothing but 
 a consummate, tragic apparition, as blood-black and 
 shapeless as one's own heart. 
 
 And the revelation was exactly that. That motion- 
 lessness was far more significant than its gracefulness 
 had been, which men profaned. The silence that stole 
 from the inexhaustible spring of its mouth was of far 
 greater moment than the weakling appeals it had scat- 
 tered during its life. So far removed from us as it 
 
THE MOTHER 261 
 
 was but lately, so silly, so little human, now it was just 
 as superhuman as any other dead thing. Is it not true 
 that while there are thousands and thousands of lives, 
 trifling and distinctive, complex and diverse, there is 
 only one death for all? 
 
 That is why little creatures are alike, in proportion 
 as they suffer pain, in proportion as they set up their 
 little divine resistance to torturers or to wrong; and 
 especially in proportion as they die; so much so that 
 all little dead things become relations. 
 
 And so, therefore, when one is a mother in deep 
 mourning, as this one was, one is liable to descry, here 
 and there, as it were, unknown children, strange and 
 pitiful; little bodies, of a kind, that one adopts. 
 
 The proof of it was that she recognised this one a 
 little bit, and that, before she left it, she tremblingly 
 took the blue frock the thing which was all in all to 
 her on earth and placed it on the frail corpse; and 
 the dress covered it exactly, as if it had been made on 
 purpose. 
 
THE GREAT MEMORY 
 
 HE used to wander, quite little and quite naked, 
 along the Cingalese shore, a shore perfumed by 
 the ocean and by the forest, where the trees and the 
 climbing roses select each other two by two and form 
 couples. The black and shapeless rocks, the grey 
 stones sculptured in the form of gods, stood there up- 
 right on the golden sand, between the sea, the forest, 
 and the edge of the cemetery, whence profound silence 
 overflowed. 
 
 His tiny bronze feet stirred like little tortoises in 
 the mottled water that the last wave fringed. The 
 sun laughed on his face and his neck, on his top-knot 
 like carved ebony, on his belly that bulged like a bronze 
 face. 
 
 As he grew up, he was dressed in white, and old 
 Mali, a venerable mummy whose innocent and feeble 
 breath still roamed within him, taught him the secrets 
 of the beginning and the end, taught him everything, 
 but notably the way and the tone in which one should 
 chant the ten incarnations of Vishnu. 
 
 When he was twelve years old his father began to 
 beat him. His mother, gentle as evening, collapsed 
 in a corner of a mud hut that summers had turned into 
 stone, respectfully suffered the man to strike the child. 
 
 Thus was he unhappy, even though he was spelling 
 out the causes of creation and the linking of human 
 
 262 
 
THE GREAT MEMORY 263 
 
 lots, in spite of the deep, submerging forest, in spite of 
 the odorous green waves, like bushes that tumble 
 down, weakly, humanly. 
 
 And when the old sage who had taught him was 
 snuffed out on the surface of the world and sprinkled 
 in the earth, the neophyte's mind, half -opened to the 
 truth, laboured alone. He was surprised one day to 
 see three young girls go by, brown and rounded, one 
 of whom was much more surprising than the others, 
 and could only be compared to the Virgin Viradja, 
 who fascinated Krishna. As soon as they had gone 
 by, he began again more than ever to be forlorn and 
 to enchant himself with dreams. He wanted the 
 things he did not know of. The allurement of new 
 things so engrossed him that one morning, when some 
 elevated English sailors were going along the shore, 
 performing some sacred dance and singing violent 
 hymns, he ventured to approach one of these cow- 
 eaters, and stammer to him in English that he wanted 
 to go away with them. 
 
 The questioned sailor laughed. Another, a chief, 
 laughed with a superior laugh. Then this chief tapped 
 hi > forehead and steered incontinently for the mud hut, 
 where the father was thinking about nothing, silent 
 as a tree-trunk, while in a corner abode a dark and 
 sighing mass of femininity. Soon, then, along with 
 the English ship on which he was engaged as cook's 
 boy, and in his nice Hindu dress, the youth left Ceylon. 
 
 In proportion as the coast faded away and became 
 as vague as the ocean horizon, in proportion as the 
 past changed itself into a future, one could see the 
 rapture in the black pupils of his white eyes and in 
 
264 WE OTHERS 
 
 his brown face, although he hardly knew what these 
 men to whom he had offered his life would do with 
 him after all. 
 
 Yet these sailors, who drank a sort of boiling water 
 quite opposite to water, and who ate masses of red 
 meat resembling their faces, used him harshly, and 
 even seemed to find diversion in his distress, as in a 
 game. He took fright and hid in corners, where they 
 used to go seeking him with shouts. Instinctively he 
 sought the aid of a yellow Maltese and a glistening 
 negro who were on the ship. But no one had pity on 
 him. Worse still, in the Mediterranean the sun be- 
 came cloudy, and it threw a gloom over him, still 
 deeper. But there were belated sunset gleams of his 
 hopes, as they called at one port after another. At 
 Palermo everything recalled to him the shores he had 
 left. But at Gibraltar there was nothing at all except 
 a frightful quarrel between sailors. 
 
 He arrived in London in the end, as one runs 
 aground. The sailor who had presided over his de- 
 parture from the island of his birth conducted him 
 to a bar in the City, on whose front window a painted 
 Buddha was beaming. 
 
 There he lived, as nipper and as ornament, to attract 
 people and to occupy himself with little menial tasks 
 which one does with all one's might, and with bowed 
 head. 
 
 They assigned a room to him in another locality, at 
 the top of a vast building furrowed with staircases, 
 with corridors and corners, where lighted gas-jets 
 showed up like poor ghosts. 
 
 He obeyed from morning till night, and then went 
 
THE GREAT MEMORY 265 
 
 to his room to sleep. He hardly knew any more who 
 he was. Going and returning, he felt himself spurned 
 and almost trampled underfoot by the black multitudes 
 in the streets. Above all was he confused by the fog, 
 in which he felt himself imprisoned. He put out his 
 hands, and collided gently with this mud in space, 
 which mixed morning and evening, and enclosed the 
 streets with a ceiling. 
 
 In the bar devilish faces followed each other, that 
 glowed like furnaces and smoked furious pipes; and 
 groups of men and women as well, whose jests were 
 incomprehensible, and their laughter and their pur- 
 poses impenetrable. Yet one rose-cheeked and queenly 
 lady appeared suddenly to him, like a true Hindu 
 flower in European disguise, and the vision of the for- 
 eigner lent him for a moment a reflection of the, splen- 
 dour he had known in the land from which he had 
 fled. 
 
 She came two days following, but never again. 
 When she did not return on the third day, he sighed 
 and shivered. He went home in the rain that night. 
 In the rolling life of the streets he looked more than 
 ever like a little white sail, venturing upon the high 
 seas. When he had climbed to his room, he opened 
 the skimpy window and looked out. 
 
 In spite of the monstrous fog, the street lamps could 
 be seen to left and right, like chains of stars trailing 
 on the ground. He was cold. Then he went hot, so 
 hot that he touched the iron bar of the sill with relief. 
 
 Then he saw his past again, through the dense, damp 
 night. He saw again the dark gulf of the forest, the 
 waves so hurried and so human, the jays and the green 
 
266 WE OTHERS 
 
 parrots and the grey crows, and the clear sky where 
 one's emancipated gaze takes wings infinite as a bird's, 
 or rather as the soul of a bird. He heaved a sigh of 
 consecrated sorrow. What sacrilege to have left the 
 riches of the past for the poor present ! And yet he 
 was obliged to remember it the last months that he 
 had spent wandering yonder between the black rocks 
 and the grey gods, his heart had been heavy, and his 
 father had hurt him. 
 
 He saw the past again, and farther, his childhood. 
 He saw his little bronze feet again, living in the 
 dappled water that embroiders the Indian Ocean. But 
 at that time he had sorrows that his mother never 
 found out, troubles deaf and dumb. 
 
 He saw farther still; an extraordinary day in that 
 time when he was hardly sundered from the mother 
 who was nursing him. He was wailing prayers to 
 her, which sometimes by a miracle she understood. 
 But that unceasing petition, although so frail and so 
 disjointed, was also anxiety and distress. 
 
 He leaned lower in the cavity of the window, and 
 saw farther yet before his tiny infancy, before his 
 birth. He saw again the times described to him by 
 old Mali, so infallibly informed. 
 
 Farther and farther yet he looked into the bosom 
 of the eternal past. There is light and warmth, and 
 a background takes shape. The fields and trees re- 
 spond to a passing breeze. There, a long-haired ban- 
 yan is trembling ; here, a palm more tardily undulates. 
 Every leaf is sun-adorned. The old temple on the 
 hill looks new ; the statues and pillars, ever since sepa- 
 rated like reefs, are regular and white. 
 
THE GREAT MEMORY 267 
 
 And himself? He is there. Yes, he recognises 
 himself there. He is moving forward with incredible 
 gentleness and repose. In his soul there reigns a 
 serenity which blends him with earth's profundity; in 
 his action, a patience which mingles him with time; 
 in his eye, a clearness which opens it wide and unites 
 him with space. 
 
 Every care and every difficulty, every consuming 
 desire and subtle deception, are at last uprooted from 
 him. He even feels himself restricted and immured 
 within a simple shape that holds and bows him, that 
 only lets him look on the ground and a little way in 
 front, and only see the sky as a silken scarf on the 
 horizon. 
 
 The doctrine of reincarnation explains all. If he 
 seems superhuman to himself in that prodigiously dis- 
 tant vision, it is because he is not yet a human being; 
 he is an animal. 
 
 He is a tranquil animal, lulled and contemplative. 
 He is walking. He goes up to the pool that is wait- 
 ing for him, hardly wrinkled and almost fraternally 
 peaceful. He leans over the water, and finds that his 
 face is the sacred face of an ox. 
 
 Those wide eyes are his, but more chaste and more 
 purely void. He bears an assurance more nakedly 
 open and liker to natural law than the troubled crea- 
 ture he will become, and that man will continue to be- 
 come until the day when Kalki shall destroy every- 
 thing, as the Supreme Soul of the Universe has 
 promised. 
 
 And thus the derelict lad with the fevered hands 
 appears face to face with himself, as a great sage ap- 
 
268 WE OTHERS 
 
 pears to a man. He recalls that he was formerly the 
 serious companion, pellucid and dignified, of the ele- 
 ments. He did not even care, then, that he was al- 
 ready more profound and more mad than the grey 
 stone carven in godlike form, which in its turn is less 
 worthy than the black rock, divinely shapeless. 
 
THE MISTAKE 
 
 WHEN I was quite young it was that I was over- 
 taken by that strange variety of sensitiveness 
 which was to lead me into crime. 
 
 I was a dreamy schoolboy, with a little pale face. 
 The natural surroundings of my tender years delighted 
 me the sky, the fields, and evening, which dawns in 
 the garden; but much better still I liked quivering 
 things. I had the emotion of life, and that was my 
 chief concern. I shared the sadness and the ill-luck 
 of the beggars who stood at the edge of the road, or, 
 worse still, of the street. * It was too easy for me to 
 feel compassion for others. When stories of poor 
 people were related in my presence justly or unjustly 
 struck down by fate I was seized with fits of crying; 
 and then in the night, before going to sleep, in my 
 momentous solitude, I whispered the stories over 
 again, so that I could cry better about them. 
 
 But lo, I began, little by little and in spite of myself, 
 to be more affected by the suffering of animals than 
 by that of men! 
 
 I remember the evening when that infirmity of my 
 heart began. We were sitting around the family 
 table, in the sunshine of the lamp. Engravings were 
 piled on the cloth, mournful and affecting scenes in 
 the lives of the lowly, and we were looking at them in 
 our turns, both the little ones and the grown-ups. 
 
 269 
 
270 WE OTHERS 
 
 Every picture made me shiver a little, but suddenly 
 there was one which lacerated me. It represented a 
 poor man's funeral; the only follower was a dog, 
 walking, and I almost groaned. One wondered what 
 would happen when once the coffin was hidden by the 
 grave, when once the dog knew. One wondered who 
 would look after him, he who alone followed the dead. 
 
 But it was not that anxiety only that pressed upon 
 me while I looked at the curly black dog following 
 with solemn step the carriage that enclosed his master. 
 It was the revelation of all the unhappiness there is. 
 Never had I understood, as that scene made me under- 
 stand, the momentousness of separation, the immense 
 tragedy of mourning, the frightful punishment to 
 which those who live together are liable. And I could 
 not help thinking that if the artist had shown a man 
 or a woman, or even a child or a greybeard, behind 
 that coffin en route for eternity, the scene would not 
 have called up in me the same world of distress and 
 imaginings. I tried to recover myself; I blamed my- 
 self for that misleading compassion. But I forbade 
 and alarmed myself in vain; I was obliged to submit 
 to it. 
 
 I grew up and went to work. My sensitiveness 
 was still as frail and juvenile, but it continued to se- 
 lect of all sorrows the lowliest, that it might throb in 
 sympathy. 
 
 No doubt I was affected by the news of wars and 
 the details of disaster; but there were other happen- 
 ings which marked eras at that time in my youthful 
 heart. 
 
 There were, for instance, the great stags that cow- 
 
THE MISTAKE 271 
 
 boys lassoed in the prairie, to saw off their antlers and 
 draw all their teeth, which might be doomed to deco- 
 rate the meeting-place of some society. An illustrated 
 paper had given a picture of one of these animals, its 
 forehead lopped and its toothless jaws shattered by 
 the hasty surgery. Again allowed to stand (for in 
 supreme mockery they restored their liberty to the 
 martyrs who could no longer eat), it was looking with 
 deep and infinite stupefaction upon him who had the 
 courage to photograph it. 
 
 There were the dogs of Constantinople, which they 
 heaped by hundreds into boats, and then took them in 
 big tongs to drop them in the sea, in sight of a rock 
 where they went to die and rot. One time it was a 
 wandering dog that children crucified in a quarry and 
 stoned to death. Another time it was a pregnant 
 bitch which some urchins tortured, to amuse them- 
 selves by causing the confinement. There were the 
 lambs on their way to the slaughter-house, who have 
 both legs on one side broken, so that they will not 
 gambol away, and who prop themselves against the 
 flock; and many other tragedies of the streets, the 
 laboratories, and elsewhere. There was the national 
 protest, piercing and frenzied, of the bull-ring's spec- 
 tators, against the cuirass for protecting the bellies 
 of the poor old horses of the picadors, which would 
 detract from the elegance of those sacred encounters; 
 and so many other demands and yearnings of the sort. 
 
 Yes ; in spite of the dreadful headlines of robberies, 
 murders, fire, and shipwreck, it was those different 
 deeds which in my eyes sullied my time above all else. 
 
 Certainly I was under no illusion concerning the 
 
272 WE OTHERS 
 
 real but restricted intelligence of animals. I knew 
 what they are, and what a man is, and the abyss which 
 divides us. Then why why? 
 
 I did not succeed in understanding it. Once or 
 twice only once, especially, when I was stared at by 
 an old shepherd and his old dog at the same time, and 
 the gaze of the latter seemed to me more beautiful in 
 the heart of it once or twice only could I surmise 
 that here was a sort of miracle of simplicity, just as 
 unintelligible as the divine miracles, and just as divine. 
 
 And then happened the tragedy that I have to con- 
 fess. I was then a soldier in an expeditionary column 
 in the depths of Southern Algeria. I had been put on 
 sentinel duty at the edge of a wood, near our camp. 
 I had orders to stop any one from passing, at all costs. 
 
 In the tepid grey of the dawn, a slight noise roused 
 me, and I saw in front of me an enemy horseman, 
 who had stopped twenty-five yards away. 
 
 Standing on his wide stirrups, with one hand" over 
 his grimacing and fiercely attentive face, the tall bar- 
 barian warrior scrutinised the road with no suspicion 
 of my presence. His white horse, rearing on his slen- 
 der, trembling legs, looked at me with the eyes of a 
 gazelle. 
 
 Suddenly they darted for the road I was guarding. 
 I levelled my rifle to obey my orders. I took aim 
 at the horse. But something stronger than I, stronger 
 than everything, made me raise the weapon and aim 
 higher. The shot rang out; the horse galloped' on, 
 but the man fell. 
 
 What matter the subsequent details? It remains 
 to me to say this: I know that I committed a crime, 
 
THE MISTAKE 273 
 
 for I might have spared the life of one of my fellows 
 without breaking my orders. 
 
 I know, I know all the reproaches I deserve, and 
 what may be said of me. I said it to myself aloud 
 the moment I saw that Arab reel, waving his arms as 
 though he would try to hold fast to space. 
 
 Then why why ? 
 
 Desperately as before., but with more hurry and 
 vigour, I seek to explain myself to my own eyes, to 
 know myself farther and better. 
 
 I am succeeding badly. Yet there is a little guiding 
 gleam. I believe that the reason of this inclination of 
 mine, always to find the lowliest sorrows more infec- 
 tious than the others, is the very innocence of those 
 lower creatures that I have loved to the point of crime, 
 their extraordinary innocence. 
 
 My brain and my heart, like yours, like those of all 
 of us, are not yet capable of understanding men pre- 
 cisely. Men are too complicated. 
 
 Too many things befog and benumb the first glance 
 one throws on them; they are self -concealing, too, 
 more than self -confessing. But animals let them- 
 selves be seen face to face. I myself can already spell 
 out the few infinite things they hold. Once in your 
 presence, they reveal nakedly the miracle of living, 
 and that of suffering. If the look in their eyes is af- 
 iecting, it is because they are wide open, and one dis- 
 covers in them sooner than anywhere else the deep 
 truths that are common to us. It is easily understand- 
 able, then, that our pity, still an infant, sometimes 
 goes urgently out to them before considering the 
 
274 WE OTHERS 
 
 others; for pity, the greatest of human feelings, is 
 made up of understanding and of light! 
 
 A day will come when our hearts will understand 
 rich ones as well as poor ones. I bless that future 
 which will be better than the present. But may my 
 mistake, atoned for by so much remorse, be forgiven 
 me. It was not the reverse of truth, but only the be- 
 ginning of it. 
 
 THE END 
 
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