Tales of Unrest

He looked round the little cabin, at the painted beams, at the tarnished varnish of bulkheads; he looked round as if appealing to all its shabby strangeness, to the disorderly j...

The boatmen with uplifted faces shouted discordantly, “Arsat! O Arsat!” Nobody came. The white man began to climb the rude ladder giving access to the bamboo platform before the...

He pointed his whip at the tower--in which the big dial of the clock appeared high in the moonlight like a pallid face without eyes--and getting out carefully, fell down at once...

“She came no more. Never! Never once! I lived alone. She had forgotten. It was well. I did not want her; I wanted no one. I found an abandoned house in an old clearing. Nobody c...

It was only on board the schooner, when surrounded by white faces, by unfamiliar sights and sounds, that Karain seemed to forget the strange obsession that wound like a black th...

The big wheels of hansoms turned slowly along the edge of side-walks; a pale-faced youth strolled, overcome by weariness, by the side of his stick and with the tails of his over...

He heard something snap loudly in the fiery stillness. She had broken her fan. Two thin pieces of ivory fell, one after another, without a sound, on the thick carpet, and instin...

He came to himself with a slight start, and became aware of an oppressive, crushing desolation. It was only a feeling, it is true, but it produced on him a physical effect, as t...

“Ah! You see . . . you can’t . . .” he began, triumphantly, walking away; then suddenly, as though he had been flung back at her by something invisible he had met, he spun round...

At times Gobila came to see them. Gobila was the chief of the neighbouring villages. He was a gray-headed savage, thin and black, with a white cloth round his loins and a mangy...

That was the root of the trouble! There was nobody there; and being left there alone with their weakness, they became daily more like a pair of accomplices than like a couple of...

“Confound it! You might say something human,” he burst out. “It isn’t being truthful; it’s being brazen--if you want to know. Not a word to show you feel your position, and--and...

Of the five stories in this volume, “The Lagoon,” the last in order, is the earliest in date. It is the first short story I ever wrote and marks, in a manner of speaking, the en...

Thus Alvan Hervey and his wife for five prosperous years lived by the side of one another. In time they came to know each other sufficiently well for all the practical purposes...

Millot was stumbling, laughing, swearing meaninglessly out of pure satisfaction, pleased with himself for having run down that fly-by-night. “As if there were such things as gho...

He flung his arms wide open, let them fall along his body, then stood still with unmoved face and stony eyes, staring at the sun. The white man got down into his canoe. The pole...