Short Fiction

wild impulse to succour her, comfort her, take away her pain. He stooped, took her in his arms, lifted her up, carried her to her bed, and while she continued to moan, he undressed her, taking off her bodice, her skirt, her petticoat. She was gnawing her fists to keep from screaming. Then he did for her all he was used to do for beasts, for cows and sheep and mares: he helped her and received between his hands a plump wailing child.

He washed it, wrapped it in a dishcloth that was drying before the fire and laid it on a pile of linen that was lying on the table to be ironed; then he went back to the mother.

He laid her on the floor again, changed the bed, and put her back in it. She stammered: “Thanks, Benoist, you’re a kind soul.” And she wept a few tears, as if she were regretting things a little.

As for him, he felt no love for her now, none at all. It was over. Why? How? He could not have said. The events of the last hour had cured him more effectually than ten years’ absence would have done.

Exhausted and fainting, she asked:

“What is it?”

He answered calmly:

“It’s a girl, and a very fine one.”

They were silent again. A few moments later, the mother spoke in a weak voice:

“Show her to me, Benoist.”

He went to bring the infant, and he was offering it to her as if he held the holy sacrament, when the door opened and Isidore Vallin appeared.

At first he did not understand; then, suddenly, realisation came to him.

Benoist, filled with dismay, stammered:

“I was going past, I was just going past, when I heard her screaming, and I came in⁠ ⁠… here’s your baby, Vallin.”

Tears in his eyes, the husband stooped towards him and took the tiny morsel the other held out to him, kissed it; a moment he stood, his emotion choking him; he laid his child back on the bed and, holding out both hands to Benoist:

“Put it there, Benoist, put it there: there’s nothing more for you and me to say now. We’ll be friends if you’re willing; eh, friends!”

And Benoist answered:

“I’m willing, I am; of course I’m willing.”

The Orient

Autumn is here! When I feel the first touch of winter I always think of my friend who lives down yonder on the Asiatic frontier. The last time I entered his house I knew that I should not see him again. It was towards the end of September, three years ago. I found him stretched out on his divan, dreaming under the influence of opium. Holding out his hand to me without moving, he said:

“Stay here. Talk and I will answer you, but I shall not move, for you know that when once the drug has been swallowed you must stay on your back.”

I sat down and began to tell him a thousand things about Paris and the boulevards.

But he interrupted me.

“What you are saying does not interest me in the least, for I am thinking only of countries under other skies. Oh, how poor Gautier must have suffered, always haunted by the longing for the Orient! You don’t know what that means, how that country takes hold of you, how it captivates you, penetrates you to your inmost being and will not let you go. It enters into you through the eye, through the skin, all its invisible seductions, and it holds you by an invisible thread, which is unceasingly pulling you, in whatever spot on earth chance may have flung you. I take the drug in order to muse on that land in the delicious torpor of opium.”

He stopped and closed his eyes.

“What makes it so pleasant to you to take this poison?” I asked. “What physical joy does it give, that people take it until it kills them?”

“It is not a physical joy,” he replied; “it is better than that, it is more. I am often sad; I detest life, which wounds me every day on all sides, with all its angles, its hardships. Opium consoles for everything, makes one resigned to everything. Do you know that state of mind that I might call gnawing irritation? I ordinarily live in that state. And there are two things that can cure me of it: opium or the Orient. As soon as I have taken opium I lie down and wait, perhaps one hour and sometimes two. Then, when it begins to take effect I feel first a slight trembling in the hands and feet, not a cramp, but a vibrant numbness; then little by little I have the strange and delicious sensation of feeling my limbs disappear. It seems to me as if they were taken off, and this feeling grows upon me until it fills me completely. I have no longer any body; I retain merely a kind of pleasant memory of it. Only my head is there, and it works. I dream. I think with an infinite, material joy, with unequalled lucidity, with a surprising penetration. I reason, I deduce, I understand everything. I discover ideas that never before have come to me; I descend to new depths and mount to marvellous heights; I float in an ocean of thought, and I taste the incomparable happiness, the ideal enjoyment of the chaste and serene intoxication of pure intelligence.”

Again he stopped and closed his eyes. I said: “Your longing for the Orient is due only to this constant intoxication. You are living in a state of hallucination. How can one long for that barbarous country, where the mind is dead, where the sterile imagination does not go beyond the narrow limits of life and makes no effort to take flight, to expand and conquer?”

“What does practical thought matter?” he replied. “What I love is dreaming. That only is good, and that only is sweet. Implacable reality would lead me to suicide, if dreaming did not permit me to wait.

“You say that the