like that of a forest. The mist was much lighter than at eleven. Perhaps it had rained: everything was wet.- Although he could see neither the boxwood nor the spindle-trees in the darkness, he guessed their dark foliage by their bitter fragrance. “It is r-remarkable,” he thought, “how people can say that the player's sensation is caused by his hope of winning! It's as if they said that men fight duels to become fencing champions. ” But the serenity of the night seemed to have put to flight, together with the fog, all the anxieties, all the griefs of men. And yet. volleys in the distance. “They've begun firing again. ”
He left the garden, making an effort not to think of Kyo, began to walk. Already there were fewer trees. Suddenly, through what was left of the mist, a lusterless moonlight appeared upon the surface of things. Clap- pique raised his eyes. The moon had just emerged from a tattered bank of dead clouds and was slowly drifting into an immense, dark and transparent hole like a lake with its depths full of stars. Its light, growing more intense, gave to all those sealed houses, to the complete desertion of the city, an extra-terrestrial life as if the moon's atmosphere had come and settled in the great sudden silence together with its light. Yet behind that scene of a dead planet there were men. Almost all were asleep, and the disquieting life of sleep was in harmony with the desolation of a buried city, as if this life too had belonged to another planet.
“In the Arabian Nights there are 1-little cities full of sleepers, abandoned for centuries with their mosques under the moon, sleeping-cities-of-the-desert. Which doesn't alter the fact I'm perhaps going to die.” Death, even his own death, was not very real in this atmosphere, so inhuman that he felt himself an intruder. And those who were not sleeping? “There are those who read. Those who are gnawed by their conscience. (Lovely phrase!) Those who make love.” The life of the future trembled behind all that silence. Mad humanity, which nothing could free from itself! The smell of corpses from the Chinese city was borne on the wind which was again rising. Clappique had to struggle for his breath: anguish was returning. He could endure the idea of death more easily than its smell. The latter, little by little, was taking possession of the scene which concealed the madness of the world beneath the appeasement of serenity; the wind still blowing without the slightest murmur, the moon reached the opposite bank, and all fell back into darkness. “Is it a dream?” But the terrific odor threw him back to life, to the anxious night in which the street-lights, just now blurred by mist, formed large tremulous circles on the sidewalks where the rain had blotted out the footprints.
Where now? He hesitated. He would be unable to forget Kyo if he tried to sleep. He was now passing through a street of small bars, tiny brothels with signs written in the languages of all the maritime nations. He entered the first one.
He sat down near the window. The three girls on duty-one half-breed, two white women-were sitting with clients, one of whom was getting ready to leave. Clappique waited, looked outside: nothing, not even a sailor. In the distance, rifle-shots. He started, on purpose: a squarely-built blond girl, disengaged, had just sat down beside him. “A Rubens,” he thought, “but not perfect: she must be by Jordaens. Not a word. ” He twirled his hat on his forefinger, rapidly, threw it up in the air,
caught it dexterously by the brim and placed it on the knees of the woman:
“Take good care of this 1-little hat, my dear girl. It’s the only one in Shanghai. What’s more, it’s tame. ” The woman’s face broadened into a smile: he was a funny guy. And gayety gave a sudden animation to her face, stolid up to this moment.
“Shall we have a drink, or go upstairs?” she asked. “Both.”
She brought some Schiedam. “It’s a specialty of the house.”
“No fooling?” said Clappique.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Do you suppose I give a God damn?”
“Are you in trouble?”
She looked at him. With the funny guys you had to be on your guard. However, he was alone, he wasn’t trying to show off; and he really didn’t seem to be making fun of her.
“What else can you expect, in this sort of life?”
“Do you smoke?”
“Opium is too high. You can use the needle, of course, but I’m afraid: with their dirty needles you get abscesses, and if you’ve got boils they throw you out of the house. There are ten women for every job. And besides. ” Flemish, he thought. He cut her short:
“You can get opium pretty cheap. I pay two dollars and seventy for this.”
“Are you from the North too?”
He gave her a box without answering. She was grateful to him-for being a compatriot, and for the gift.
“Even so it’s too much for me. But this one won’t have cost me much. I’ll chew some tonight.”
“You don’t like to smoke?”
“You think I’ve got a pipe? How do you get that way?”
She smiled bitterly, still pleased however. But the habitual suspicion returned:
“Why do you give me this?”
“Never mind. … I enjoy it. I’ve been ‘in the game.’ ” …
As a matter of fact, he didn’t look like a man who pays for his pleasures. But he surely hadn’t been “in the game” for a long time. (He occasionally felt the need of inventing whole biographies for himself, but rarely when a sexual adventure was involved.) She sidled over to him on the bench.
“Just try to be nice. It’ll be the last time I have a woman.”
“Why is that?”
She was slow, but not stupid. After having answered she understood: “You’re going to kill yourself?”
He wasn’t the first one. She took Clappique’s hand between her own, and kissed ^m, clumsily and almost maternally.
“That’s too bad. ”
“Do you want to go upstairs?”
She had heard that men sometimes had such an urge before death. But she didn’t dare to get up first: it would be like hastening his suicide. She had kept his hand in both of hers. Slumped on the bench, legs crossed and arms held tightly to his sides like a delicate insect, nose pushed forward, he looked at her from afar, in spite of the contact of their bodies. Although he had scarcely been drinking, he was drunk with his lie, with this heat, with the fictive world he was creating. When he said he would kill himself he did not believe what he was saying; but, since she believed it, he was entering a world where truth no longer existed. It was neither true nor false, but real. And since neither his past which he had just invented, nor the elementary gesture, presumably so close, upon which his relation to this woman was based-since neither of these existed, nothing existed. The world had ceased to weigh upon him. Liberated, he lived now only in the romantic universe which he had just created, strengthened by the bond which all human pity establishes before death. His intoxication was so strong that his hand trembled. The woman felt it and thought it was due to anguish:
“Isn’t there a way of-fixing it?”
“No.”
The hat, poised on the corner of the table, seemed to be looking at him ironically. He pushed it over on the bench so as not to see it.
“A love affair?” she went on asking.
A volley of shots burst in the distance. “As if there weren’t enough who are going to die tonight,” she thought.
He got up without answering. She thought her question brought up memories in him. In spite of her curiosity, she felt like begging his pardon, but did not dare. She got up, too. Slipping her hand under the bar, she pulled out a parcel (a syringe, towels) from between two glass jars. They went upstairs.
When he went out-he did not turn round, but knew she was following him with her eyes through the win- dow-neither his mind nor his sensuality had been quenched. The mist had returned. After walking fifteen minutes (the cool night air did not calm ^m) he stopped before a Portuguese bar. Its windows had not lost their polish. Standing apart from the clients, a slim brunette with very large eyes, her hands on her breasts as if to protect them, was looking out into the night. Oappique looked at her without moving. “I am like a woman who doesn’t know what a new lover is going to get out of her. Let’s go and commit suicide with this one.”