Short Fiction

music.”

She understood, blushed, and declared:

“I don’t care for that sort of game, Monsieur Polyte.”

But he was in no way abashed, and repeated, with growing merriment:

“You’ll come to it some day, my beauty, a bit of sport for a lad and a lass!”

And since that day he had taken to asking her, each time that she paid her fare:

“Aren’t we going to have our bit of sport today?”

She, too, joked about it by this time, and replied:

“Not today, Monsieur Polyte, but Saturday, for certain!”

And amid peals of laughter he answered:

“Saturday then, my beauty.”

But inwardly she calculated that, during the two years the affair had been going on, she had paid Polyte forty-eight whole francs, and in the country forty-eight francs is not a sum which can be picked up on the roadside; she also calculated that in two more years she would have paid nearly a hundred francs.

To such purpose she meditated that, one spring day as they jogged on alone, when he made his customary inquiry: “Aren’t we going to have our bit of sport yet?” she replied:

“Yes, if you like, Monsieur Polyte.”

He was not at all surprised, and clambered over the back of his seat, murmuring with a complacent air:

“Come along, then. I knew you’d come to it some day.”

The old white horse trotted so gently that she seemed to be dancing upon the same spot, deaf to the voice which cried at intervals, from the depths of the vehicle: “Gee up, old girl! Gee up, then!”

Three months later Céleste discovered that she was going to have a child.

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All this she had told her mother in a tearful voice. Pale with fury, the old woman asked:

“Well, what did it cost?”

“Four months; that makes eight francs, doesn’t it?” replied Céleste.

At that the peasant woman’s fury was utterly unleashed, and, falling once more upon her daughter, she beat her a second time until she was out of breath. Then she rose and said:

“Have you told him about the baby?”

“No, of course not.”

“Why haven’t you told him?”

“Because very likely he’d have made me pay for all the free rides!”

The old woman pondered awhile, then picked up her milk pails.

“Come on, get up, and try to walk home,” she said, and, after a pause, continued:

“And don’t tell him as long as he doesn’t notice anything, and we’ll make six or eight months’ fares out of him.”

And Céleste, who had risen, still crying, dishevelled and swollen round the eyes, started off again with dragging steps, murmuring:

“Of course I won’t say a word.”

Fear

The train rushed through the shadows.

I was alone, facing an old gentleman who was looking out of the window. There was a strong smell of disinfectant in this P.L.M. carriage, which must have come from Marseilles.

It was a moonless, airless, burning night. There were no stars to be seen, and the wind of the leaping train blew in our faces, warm, soft, oppressive and stifling.

We had left Paris three hours before, and we were approaching the heart of France, without catching a glimpse of the country we were crossing.

All at once a fantastic apparition rushed into sight. There was a wood, and a big fire lit there, and two men standing round it.

We saw it for an instant: they looked like two tramps, in rags, reddened by the glare from the fire, with their bearded faces turned towards us, and all round them, like the setting of a play, rose the green trees; they were a bright and shining green, the vivid light reflected from the flames struck across the trunks, and the thick leafage was barred and stabbed and splashed by the light spreading through it.

Then the darkness swept back again.

It certainly was the strangest of visions. What were those two wanderers doing in that forest? Why a fire on this suffocating night?

My neighbour took out his watch and said:

“It is exactly midnight, sir: we have just seen a strange thing.”

I agreed; we fell into conversation and tried to imagine what these persons could be: criminals burning evidence or sorcerers preparing a philtre? You don’t light a fire in a forest at midnight, and in the height of summer, to boil soup. So what were they doing? We could not reach any likely explanation.

And my neighbour began to talk. He was an old man, whose profession I found it impossible to guess. He was certainly an eccentric, highly cultured, and he seemed perhaps a little mad.

But is it always possible to say who are the wise and who are the fools in this life where reason is often called stupidity and folly genius?

He said:

“I am glad to have seen that. For a brief space of time I experienced a forgotten sensation.

“How disturbing the world must have been in the old days when it was full of mystery!

“With each veil lifted from the unknown world, the human imagination is laid waste a little farther. You, sir, don’t feel that the night is very empty and filled with a tiresomely commonplace darkness, since it was robbed of its apparitions.

“ ‘No more fantasy,’ they say, ‘no more strange beliefs, all the inexplicable is explicable. The supernatural sinks like a lake emptied by a canal; day by day science narrows the boundaries of the marvellous.’

“I, sir, I belong to the old race, to those who love to believe. I belong to the old simple race that is used to being baffled, used to not investigating and to not knowing. That delights in being surrounded by mysteries and shrinks from the simple and brutal truth.

“Yes, sir, we have laid waste the imagination by suppressing the invisible. I see our earth today as a forsaken world, empty and bare. The beliefs that flung a veil of poetry over it are gone.

“How I should like⁠—when I go out at night⁠—to shiver with the mortal terror that makes old women cross themselves when they pass the graveyard wall and the last few superstitious folk run before the weird wandering lights and the strange mists from