Short Fiction

to sleep. The night passed, and the silence was only disturbed by the ticktack of the clock, while she, lying motionless, thought of her conjugal nights, and by the light of the Chinese lantern, she looked nearly heartbroken at the little fat man lying on his back, whose round stomach raised up the bedclothes, like a balloon filled with gas. He snored with the noise of a wheezy organ pipe, with prolonged snorts and comic chokings. His few hairs profited by his sleep to stand up in a very strange way, as if they were tired of having been fastened for so long to that pate, whose bareness they were trying to cover. And a thin stream of saliva ran from the corner of his half-opened mouth.

At last daylight appeared through the drawn blinds. She got up and dressed herself without making any noise, and had already half opened the door, when she made the lock creak, and he woke up and rubbed his eyes. He was some moments before he quite came to himself, and then, when he remembered all that had happened, he said:

“What! Are you going already?”

She remained standing, in some confusion, and then said, in a hesitating voice:

“Yes, of course; it is morning.”

Then he sat up, and said: “Look here, I have something to ask you, in my turn.” And as she did not reply, he went on: “You have surprised me most confoundedly since yesterday. Be open, and tell me why you did it all, for upon my word I cannot understand it in the least.”

She went close up to him, blushing like as if she had been a virgin, and said: “I wanted to know⁠—what⁠—what vice⁠—really was, and⁠—well⁠—well, it is not at all funny.”

And she ran out of the room, and downstairs into the street.

A number of sweepers were busy in the streets, brushing the pavements, the roadway, and sweeping everything on one side. With the same regular motion, the motion of mowers in a meadow, they pushed the mud in front of them in a semicircle. She met them in every street, like dancing puppets, walking automatically with a swaying motion, and it seemed to her as if something had been swept out of her; as if her overexcited dreams had been pushed into the gutter, or into the drain. So she went home, out of breath and very cold, and all that she could remember was the sensation of the motion of those brooms sweeping the streets of Paris in the early morning.

When she got into her room, she threw herself on to her bed, and cried.

A Christmas Eve Festival

I do not remember exactly what year it was.

For a whole month I had been hunting with the concentrated, savage joy that one has in a new passion.

I was in Normandy, at the house of a bachelor relative, Jules de Banneville, alone with him, a servant, a valet and a gamekeeper, in his manorial château.

The castle, an old, grey building surrounded with moaning pines and avenues of oak-trees, in which the wind howled, looked as if it had been deserted for centuries. The antique furniture was the only inhabitant of the spacious rooms and halls now closed, in which the people, whose portraits hung in a corridor as windy as avenues, used to receive their noble neighbours in solemn state.

We had taken shelter in the only habitable room, the kitchen, an immense kitchen, whose dim shadows were lit up when fresh wood was thrown into the vast fireplace. Then, every evening, after a cosy sleep in front of the fire, when our wet boots had steamed for some time, and our dogs, lying curled up between our legs, had dreamt of game and barked in their sleep, we used to go up to our room.

It was the only room that had been floored and plastered all over to keep out the mice. But it remained bare, having been simply whitewashed, with guns, whips, and hunting-horns hanging on the walls. And we used to slip into our beds shivering, in the two corners of that glacial chamber.

A mile away in front of the house precipitous cliffs fell down to the sea, and the powerful breath of the ocean day and night, made the great trees bend and sigh, made the roof and the weathercocks creak, and the whole building groan, as the wind entered through its loose slates, its wide chimneys, and its windows that would not shut.

It had been freezing hard that day and evening had come. We were going to sit down to dinner in front of the big fire where a hare and two partridges that smelt good, were roasting.

“It will be awfully cold going to bed tonight,” said my cousin, looking up.

“Yes, but there will be plenty of ducks tomorrow morning,” I replied indifferently.

The servant had set our plates at one end of the table and those of the servants at the other.

“Gentlemen, do you know it is Christmas Eve?” she asked.

We certainly did not; we never looked at the calendar.

“That accounts for the bells ringing all day,” said my companion. “There is midnight service tonight.”

“Yes, sir; but they also rang because old Fournel is dead.”

Fournel was an old shepherd, well known in the country. He was ninety-six years old and had never known a day’s sickness until a month ago, when he had taken cold by falling into a pool on a dark night. The next day he took to his bed, and had been declining ever since.

“If you like,” said my cousin, turning to me, “we will go and see these poor people after dinner.”

He referred to the old man’s family, consisting of his grandson, fifty-eight years old, and the latter’s wife, one year younger. His children had died years ago. They lived in a miserable hut on the right hand side, at the entrance of the village.

Perhaps it was the thought of Christmas in this solitude which put us in the humour