Journey to the Inverted World by Marcel Rouff & Brian Stableford

Author:Marcel Rouff & Brian Stableford [Rouff, Marcel & Stableford, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: French, Science Fiction
Amazon: B0068Z8A8K
Publisher: Black Coat Press
Published: 2011-11-16T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter XI

I left the public bathing-pool, rather wearily, and took the route to my domicile. As I was going through the western districts, planted with irises so tall that they almost hid the domes completely, I paused in front of the vast orchards of mulberries dedicated to the raising of silkworms. While I was contemplating the silvery and symmetrical leaves of the trees someone touched me lightly on the hand. Eumia was standing there, laughing at the surprise that she had given me.

To tell the truth, I had met her three times since they day when, before the eyes of her family, she had…but I’ve told the story of that scabrous scene. On none of those occasions had she paid my modest person the slightest sign of the attention that she had once accorded me in an exaggerated fashion, in public. Since that memorable moment, she had ignored me, addressing to me, at the most, a few of those smiling greetings that are no longer anything but indifference and at which, when they succeed certain effusions, one blushes as if slapped in the face. How did it come about that today, she was manifesting by this mischievousness the desire to keep company with me?

I soon found out.

“I’m pregnant by you, Brother,” she said, point-blank.

Then, without deigning to notice the expression of stupefaction that the circumstances bestowed upon me with such abundant generosity, she abandoned a subject that might have been worth the trouble of dwelling upon, and told me that she had been working for a month at the beehives buzzing at the foot of the Southern Hill, and that her sister, after two years of “trial” had left the father of her two children.

She left me rather abruptly, shaking my hand. That family, which nevertheless seemed to enjoy general esteem, had little luck with its nubile daughters. Two young women with stains on their character—and what stains!

For two days I examined the new situation that Eumia’s revelation had placed me in from every angle. Then I made my decision.

I went to the young woman’s dwelling with the firm intention of having a serious conversation with her father. I made him the only speech that can come to the mind of an honest man in such circumstances, gladly offering to take permanent responsibility for the young woman and the infant about to be born. I asked for his daughter’s hand, assuring him that I was not carrying out a heroic action and that my desire was perfectly in accord with my heart. Poor European fiancée! You would have recognized, in passing, words that you have heard—words that I have spoken to you too, with the same tears in my eyes.

That worthy father, in a calm tone in which nothing denoted that his daughter’s honor was involved in the adventure, replied: “I’m very touched, for my own part, by the intention that has inspired you, but you are under absolutely no obligation, because a child has been conceived by my daughter in your embrace, to enchain yourself to her or to the child.

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