Short Fiction

down her room barefoot two or three times, shaking the furniture till the vases and glasses sounded. Then at last she asked:

“Is it you, Alexander?”

“Yes, yes,” he replied; “make haste and open the door.”

As soon as she had done so she threw herself into his arms, exclaiming:

“Oh! what a fright! What a surprise! What a pleasure!”

He began to undress himself methodically, as he did everything, and from a chair he took his overcoat, which he was in the habit of hanging up in the hall. But, suddenly, he remained motionless, struck dumb with astonishment⁠—there was a red ribbon in the buttonhole!

“Why,” he stammered, “this⁠—this⁠—this overcoat has got the rosette in it!”

In a second his wife threw herself on him, and, taking it from his hands, she said:

“No! you have made a mistake⁠—give it to me.”

But he still held it by one of the sleeves, without letting it go, repeating, in a half-dazed manner:

“Oh! Why? Just explain. Whose overcoat is it? It is not mine, as it has the Legion of Honour on it.”

She tried to take it from him, terrified, and hardly able to say:

“Listen⁠—listen⁠—give it to me⁠—I must not tell you⁠—it is a secret⁠—listen to me.”

But he grew angry, and turned pale:

“I want to know how this overcoat comes to be here? It does not belong to me.”

Then she almost screamed at him:

“Yes it does; listen⁠—swear to me⁠—well⁠—you are decorated.”

She did not intend to joke at his expense.

He was so overcome that he let the overcoat fall, and dropped into an armchair.

“I am⁠—you say I am⁠—decorated?”

“Yes, but it is a secret, a great secret.”

She had put the glorious garment into a cupboard, and came to her husband pale and trembling.

“Yes,” she continued, “it is a new overcoat that I have had made for you. But I swore that I would not tell you anything about it, as it will not be officially announced for a month or six weeks, and you were not to have known till your return from your business journey. M. Rosselin managed it for you.”

“Rosselin!” he contrived to utter in his joy; “he has obtained the decoration for me? He⁠—Oh!”

And he was obliged to drink a glass of water.

A little piece of white paper had fallen to the floor out of the pocket of the overcoat. Sacrement picked it up; it was a visiting-card, and he read out:

“Rosselin⁠—Deputy.”

“You see how it is,” said his wife.

He wept with joy, and, a week later, it was announced in the Journal Officiel that M. Sacrement had been awarded the Legion of Honour on account of his exceptional services.

The Father

He was employed at the Ministry of Education, and as he lived in the Batignolles suburb he took the omnibus every morning in order to go to his office. And every morning he travelled to the centre of Paris facing a girl with whom he fell in love.

She went to her work in a shop at the same time every day. She was small and dark, one of those brunettes whose eyes are so dark that they are like pitch balls stuck in her face, and whose skin has the gleam of ivory. Every day he saw her appear at the corner of the same street; and she would start running to catch up the heavy vehicle. She ran with short, hurried steps, supple and graceful, and would jump on to the step before the horses had quite stopped. Then she would make her way into the inside, panting a little, and, sitting down, would glance all round her.

The first time that he saw her, François Tessier knew that her face gave him infinite pleasure. Sometimes we meet such women, women whom we desire to seize fiercely in our arms, at first sight, before we even know them. This girl answered all the intimate desires, the secret dreams, the very ideal of love, as it were, which we bear about with us in the subconscious depths of our hearts.

Against his will he stared obstinately at her. His gaze embarrassed her and she blushed. He noticed this, and tried to turn away his eyes, but time and again they returned to her in spite of his efforts to fix his gaze elsewhere.

At the end of a few days they were no longer strangers, although they had never spoken to each other. He gave her his seat when the omnibus was full and went up on the top, in spite of the torture of loss it inflicted upon him. She greeted him now with a little smile; and though she always lowered her eyes under his gaze, which she felt to be too eager, yet she no longer seemed angry at being watched.

At last they began to talk to each other. A sudden intimate friendship was established between them, an intimacy confined to half an hour each day. And certainly it was the most delightful half-hour of his day. He thought of her all the rest of the time, and never ceased to dwell on the vision of her during his long sojourns at the office, haunted, obsessed, and invaded by the changing, clinging image which the face of a beloved woman leaves with us. It seemed to him that complete possession of that little creature would be for him a wild happiness, almost beyond human realisation.

Every morning now she shook hands with him, and he retained until evening the sense of that contact, the memory in his flesh of the faint pressure of her small fingers; he imagined that he preserved the imprint of them on his skin.

Throughout the rest of his time he looked forward anxiously to the short omnibus journey. And his Sundays seemed heartbreaking.

Certainly she loved him, for one Saturday in the spring she consented to lunch with him the next day at Maisons-Laffitte.

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She arrived first at the station, and was waiting for him. He was surprised; but she said to him:

“Before we go, I’ve something to say. We’ve twenty minutes; that’s