Gaiete. He found the Metro entrance at the exit of the Gare
Montparnasse, took the train, and arrived, shortly afterwards, at the
Gare du Nord, very sober. Very sober and angry.

And when he reached his home in the provinces, he was still sober and
still angry. Nor did he know what he should do. He did not know
whether he should kill his wife or not. If he did, he must go back to
the Front. And he hated the Front. He hated his duties, sentry duty,
in the First Zone of the Armies. He could not report to his Colonel
again, and say, "Give me back my sentry box--let me serve my
country--that fifth child is not mine!" He was in a tight place,
surely. But at his home, his mood changed, his wife was very gentle.
She said she had been wrong.

"Ouk is dead," she said. "All those poor little men who come from the
Tropics die very soon in our cold, damp weather. They cannot stand it.
The khaki flannels we give them do not warm them. There is not much
wool in them. The cold penetrates into their bones. They catch cold
and die, all of them, sooner or later. It is an extravagance,
importing them."

Therefore he was mollified. "For your sake," said his wife. Maubert
looked down at the fifth child lying in its cradle. The child that
brought him release from the service of his country--release from
sentry duty, from looking at hastily shoved out, unintelligible
passports.

"For your sake," repeated his wife, slipping her arm through his arm.
"Very well," said Maubert stiffly. All the same, he thought to
himself, the child certainly looks like a Chinese.

MISUNDERSTANDING

V

MISUNDERSTANDING

I

They say out here, that one can never understand the native mind and
its workings. So primitive are they, these quiet, gentle,
brown-skinned men and women, crouching over their compound fires in
the evening, lazily driving the lumbering buffaloes in the rice
fields, living their facile life, here on the edge of the jungle. So
primitive are they, these gentle, simple forest people.

In the towns--oh, but they are not made for the towns, they are so
strangely out of place in the towns which the foreigner has contrived
for himself on the borders of their brown, sluggish rivers, towns
which he has created by pushing backward for a little the jungle,
while he builds his pink and yellow bungalows beneath the palm trees,
and spaces them between the banana trees, along straight tracks which
he calls roads. Wide, red roads, w