Light
by Henri Barbusse · English · Gutenberg #12904 · 548,733 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Light
Author: Henri Barbusse
Translator: W. Fitzwater Wray
Release date: July 14, 2004 [eBook #12904]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12904
Credits: Produced by David S. Miller
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIGHT ***
LIGHT
BY
HENRI BARBUSSE
AUTHOR OF "UNDER FIRE" "WE OTHERS," ETC.
TRANSLATED BY
FITZWATER WRAY
1919
CONTENTS
I. MYSELF
II. OURSELVES
III. EVENING AND DAWN
IV. MARIE
V. DAY BY DAY
VI. A VOICE IN THE EVENING
VII. A SUMMARY
VIII. THE BRAWLER
IX. THE STORM
X. THE WALLS
XI. AT THE WORLD'S END
XII. THE SHADOWS
XIII. WHITHER GOEST THOU?
XIV. THE RUINS
XV. AN APPARITION
XVI. DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI
XVII. MORNING
XVIII. EYES THAT SEE
XIX. GHOSTS
XX. THE CULT
XXI. NO!
XXII. LIGHT
XXIII. FACE TO FACE
LIGHT
CHAPTER I
MYSELF
All the days of the week are alike, from their beginning to their end.
At seven in the evening one hears the clock strike gently, and then the
instant tumult of the bell. I close the desk, wipe my pen, and put it
down. I take my hat and muffler, after a glance at the mirror--a
glance which shows me the regular oval of my face, my glossy hair and
fine mustache. (It is obvious that I am rather more than a workman.)
I put out the light and descend from my little glass-partitioned
office. I cross the boiler-house, myself in the grip of the thronging,
echoing peal which has set it free. From among the dark and hurrying
crowd, which increases in the corridors and rolls down the stairways
like a cloud, some passing voices cry to me, "Good-night, Monsieur
Simon," or, with less familiarity, "Good-night, Monsieur Paulin." I
answer here and there, and allow myself to be borne away by everybody
else.
Outside, on the threshold of the porch which opens on the naked plain
and its pallid horizons, one sees the squares and triangles of the
factory, like a huge black background of the stage, and the tall
extinguished chimney, whose only crown now is the cloud of falling
night. Confusedly, the dark flood carries me away. Along the wall
which faces the porch, women are waiting, like a curtain of shadow,
which yields glimpses of their pale and expressionless faces. With nod
or word we recognize each other from the mass. Couples are formed by
the quick hooking of arms. All along the ghostly avenue one's eyes
follow the toilers' scrambling flight.
The avenue is a wan track cut across the open fields. Its course is
marked afar by lines of puny trees, sooty as snuffed candles; by
telegraph posts and their long spider-webs; by bushes or by fences,
which are like the skeletons of bushes. There are a few houses. Up
yonder a strip of sky still shows palely yellow above the meager suburb
where creeps the muddy crowd detached from the factory. The west wind
sets quivering their overalls, blue or black or khaki, excites the
woolly tails that flutter from muffled necks, scatters some evil odors,
attacks the sightless faces so deep-drowned beneath the sky.
There are taverns anon which catch the eye. Their doors are closed,
but their windows and fanlights shine like gold. Between the taverns
rise the fronts of some old houses, tenantless and hollow; others, in
ruins, cut into this gloomy valley of the homes of men with notches of
sky. The iron-shod feet all around me on the hard road sound like the
heavy rolling of drums, and then on the paved footpath like dragged
chains. It is in vain that I walk with head bent--my own footsteps are
lost in the rest, and I cannot hear them.
We hurry, as we do every evening. At that spot in the inky landscape
where a tall and twisted tree seems to writhe as if it had a soul, we
begin suddenly to descend, our feet plunging forward. Down below we
see the lights of Viviers sparkle. These men, whose day is worn out,
stride towards those earthly stars. One hope is like another in the
evening, as one weariness is like another; we are all alike. I, also.
I go towards my light, like all the others, as on every evening.
* * * * * *
When we have descended for a long time the gradient ends, the avenue
flattens out like a river, and widens as it pierces the town. Through
the latticed boughs of the old plane trees--still naked on this last
day of March--one glimpses the workmen's houses, upright in space, hazy
and fantastic chessboards, with squares of light dabbed on in places,
or like vertical cliffs in which our swarming is absorbed. Scattering
among the twilight colonnade of the trees, these people engulf
themselves in the heaped-up lodgings and rooms; they flow together in
the cavity of doors; they plunge into the houses; and there they are
vaguely turned into lights.
I continue to walk, surrounded by several companions who are foremen
and clerks, for I do not associate with the workmen. Then there are
handshakes, and I go on alone.
Some dimly seen wayfarers disappear; the sounds of sliding locks and
closing shutters are heard here and there; the houses have shut
themselves up, the night-bound town becomes a desert profound. I can
hear nothing now but my own footfall.
Viviers is divided into two parts--like many towns, no doubt. First,
the rich town, composed of the main street, where you find the Grand
Café, the elegant hotels, the sculptured houses, the church and the
castle on the hill-top. The other is the lower town, which I am now
entering. It is a system of streets reached by an extension of that
avenue which is flanked by the workmen's barracks and climbs to the
level of the factory. Such is the way which it has been my custom to
climb in the morning and to descend when the light is done, during the
six years of my clerkship with Messrs. Gozlan & Co. In this quarter I
am still rooted. Some day I should like to live yonder; but between
the two halves of the town there is a division--a sort of frontier,
which has always been and will always be.
In the Rue Verte I meet only a street lamp, and then a mouse-like
little girl who emerges from the shadows and enters them again without
seeing me, so intent is she on pressing to her heart, like a doll, the
big loaf they have sent her to buy. Here is the Rue de l'Etape, my
street. Through the semi-darkness, a luminous movement peoples the
hairdresser's shop, and takes shape on the dull screen of his window.
His transparent door, with its arched inscription, opens just as I
pass, and under the soap-dish,[1] whose jingle summons customers,
Monsieur Justin Pocard himself appears, along with a rich gust of
scented light. He is seeing a customer out, and improving the occasion
by the utterance of certain sentiments; and I had time to see that the
customer, convinced, nodded assent, and that Monsieur Pocard, the
oracle, was caressing his white and ever-new beard with his luminous
hand.
[Footnote 1: The hanging sign of a French barber.--Tr.]
I turn round the cracked walls of the former tinplate works, now bowed
and crumbling, whose windows are felted with grime or broken into black
stars. A few steps farther I think I saw the childish shadow of little
Antoinette, whose bad eyes they don't seem to be curing; but not being
certain enough to go and find her I turn into my court, as I do every
evening.
Every evening I find Monsieur Crillon at the door of his shop at the
end of the court, where all day long he is fiercely bent upon trivial
jobs, and he rises before me like a post. At sight of me the kindly
giant nods his big, shaven face, and the square cap on top, his huge
nose and vast ears. He taps the leather apron that is hard as a plank.
He sweeps me along to the side of the street, sets my back against the
porch and says to me, in a low voice, but with heated conviction, "That
Pétrarque chap, he's really a bad lot."
He takes off his cap, and while the crescendo nodding of his bristly
head seems to brush the night, he adds: "I've mended him his purse.
It had become percolated. I've put him a patch on that cost me thirty
centimes, and I've resewn the edge with braid, and all the lot.
They're expensive, them jobs. Well, when I open my mouth to talk about
that matter of his sewing-machine that I'm interested in and that he
can't use himself, he becomes congealed."
He recounts to me the mad claims of Trompson in the matter of his new
soles, and the conduct of Monsieur Becret, who, though old enough to
know better, had taken advantage of his good faith by paying for the
repair of his spout with a knife "that would cut anything it sees." He
goes on to detail for my benefit all the important matters in his life.
Then he says, "I'm not rich, I'm not, but I'm consentious. If I'm a
botcher, it's 'cos my father and my grandfather were botchers before
me. There's some that's for making a big stir in the world, there are.
I don't hold with that idea. What I does, I does."
Suddenly a sonorous tramp persists and repeats itself in the roadway,
and a shape of uncertain equilibrium emerges and advances towards us by
fits and starts; a shape that clings to itself and is impelled by a
force stronger than itself. It is Brisbille, the blacksmith, drunk, as
usual.
Espying us, Brisbille utters exclamations. When he has reached us he
hesitates, and then, smitten by a sudden idea, he comes to a
standstill, his boots clanking on the stones, as if he were a cart. He
measures the height of the curb with his eye, but clenches his fists,
swallows what he wanted to say, and goes off reeling, with an odor of
hatred and wine, and his face slashed with red patches.
"That anarchist!" said Crillon, in disgust; "loathsome notions, now,
aren't they? Ah! who'll rid us of him and his alcoholytes?" he adds,
as he offers me his hand. "Good-night. I'm always saying to the Town
Council, 'You must give 'em clink,' I says, 'that gang of Bolshevists,
for the slightest infractionment of the laws against drunkenness.'
Yes, indeed! There's that Jean Latrouille in the Town Council, eh?
They talk about keeping order, but as soon as it's a question of
a-doing of it, they seem like a cold draught."
The good fellow is angry. He raises his great fist and shakes it in
space like a medieval mace. Pointing where Brisbille has just plunged
floundering into the night, he says, "That's what Socialists are,--the
conquering people what can't stand up on their legs! I may be a
botcher in life, but I'm for peace and order. Good-night, good-night.
Is she well, Aunt Josephine? I'm for tranquillity and liberty and
order. That's why I've always kept clear of their crowd. A bit since,
I saw her trotting past, as vivacious as a young girl,--but there, I
talk and I talk!"
He enters his shop, but turns on his heel and calls me back, with a
mysterious sign. "You know they've all arrived up yonder at the
castle?" Respect has subdued his voice; a vision is absorbing him of
the lords and ladies of the manor, and as he leaves me he bows,
instinctively.
His shop is a narrow glass cage, which is added to our house, like a
family relation. Within I can just make out the strong, plebeian
framework of Crillon himself, upright beside a serrated heap of ruins,
over which a candle is enthroned. The light which falls on his
accumulated tools and on those hanging from the wall makes a decoration
obscurely golden around the picture of this wise man; this soul all
innocent of envious demands, turning again to his botching, as his
father and grandfather botched.
I have mounted the steps and pushed our door; the gray door, whose only
relief is the key. The door goes in grumblingly, and makes way for me
into the dark passage, which was formerly paved, though now the traffic
of soles has kneaded it with earth, and changed it into a footpath. My
forehead strikes the lamp, which is hooked on the wall; it is out,
oozing oil, and it stinks. One never sees that lamp, and always bangs
it.
And though I had hurried so--I don't know why--to get home, at this
moment of arrival I slow down. Every evening I have the same small and
dull disillusion.
I go into the room which serves us as kitchen and dining-room, where my
aunt is lying. This room is buried in almost complete darkness.
"Good evening, Mame."
A sigh, and then a sob arise from the bed crammed against the pale
celestial squares of the window.
Then I remember that there was a scene between my old aunt and me after
our early morning coffee. Thus it is two or three times a week. This
time it was about a dirty window-pane, and on this particular morning,
exasperated by the continuous gush of her reproaches, I flung an
offensive word, and banged the door as I went off to work. So Mame has
had to weep all the day. She has fostered and ruminated her spleen,
and sniffed up her tears, even while busy with household duties. Then,
as the day declined, she put out the lamp and went to bed, with the
object of sustaining and displaying her chagrin.
When I came in she was in the act of peeling invisible potatoes; there
are potatoes scattered over the floor, everywhere. My feet kick them
and send them rolling heavily among odds and ends of utensils and a
soft deposit of garments that are lying about. As soon as I am there
my aunt overflows with noisy tears.
Not daring to speak again, I sit down in my usual corner.
Over the bed I can make out a pointed shape, like a mounted picture,
silhouetted against the curtains, which slightly blacken the window.
It is as though the quilt were lifted from underneath by a stick, for
my Aunt Josephine is leanness itself.
Gradually she raises her voice and begins to lament. "You've no
feelings, no--you're heartless,--that dreadful word you said to
me,--you said, 'You and your jawing!' Ah! people don't know what I
have to put up with--ill-natured--cart-horse!"
In silence I hear the tear-streaming words that fall and founder in the
dark room from that obscure blot on the pillow which is her face.
I stand up. I sit down again. I risk saying, "Come now, come; that's
all done with."
She cries: "Done with? Ah! it will never be done with!"
With the sheet that night is begriming she muzzles herself, and hides
her face. She shakes her head to left and to right, violently, so as
to wipe her eyes and signify dissent at the same time.
"Never! A word like that you said to me breaks the heart forever. But
I must get up and get you something to eat. You must eat. I brought
you up when you were a little one,"--her voice capsizes--"I've given up
all for you, and you treat me as if I were an adventuress."
I hear the sound of her skinny feet as she plants them successively on
the floor, like two boxes. She is seeking her things, scattered over
the bed or slipped to the floor; she is swallowing sobs. Now she is
upright, shapeless in the shadow, but from time to time I see her
remarkable leanness outlined. She slips on a camisole and a jacket,--a
spectral vision of garments which unfold themselves about her
handle-like arms, and above the hollow framework of her shoulders.
She talks to herself while she dresses, and gradually all my
life-history, all my past comes forth from what the poor woman
says,--my only near relative on earth; as it were my mother and my
servant.
She strikes a match. The lamp emerges from the dark and zigzags about
the room like a portable fairy. My aunt is enclosed in a strong light.
Her eyes are level with her face; she has heavy and spongy eyelids and
a big mouth which stirs with ruminated sorrow. Fresh tears increase
the dimensions of her eyes, make them sparkle and varnish the points of
her cheeks. She comes and goes with undiminished spleen. Her wrinkles
form heavy moldings on her face, and the skin of chin and neck is so
folded that it looks intestinal, while the crude light tinges it all
with something like blood.
Now that the lamp is alight some items become visible of the dismal
super-chaos in which we are walled up,--the piece of bed-ticking
fastened with two nails across the bottom of the window, because of
draughts; the marble-topped chest of drawers, with its woolen cover;
and the door-lock, stopped with a protruding plug of paper.
The lamp is flaring, and as Mame does not know where to stand it among
the litter, she puts it on the floor and crouches to regulate the wick.
There rises from the medley of the old lady, vividly variegated with
vermilion and night, a jet of black smoke, which returns in parachute
form. Mame sighs, but she cannot check her continual talk.
"You, my lad, you who are so genteel when you like, and earn a hundred
and eighty francs a month,--you're genteel, but you're short of good
manners, it's that chiefly I find fault with you about. So you spat on
the window-pane; I'm certain of it. May I drop dead if you didn't.
And you're nearly twenty-four! And to revenge yourself because I'd
found out that you'd spat on the window, you told me to stop my jawing,
for that's what you said to me, after all. Ah, vulgar fellow that you
are! The factory gentlemen are too kind to you. Your poor father was
their best workman. You are more genteel than your poor father, more
English; and you preferred to go into business rather than go on
learning Latin, and everybody thought you quite right; but for hard
work you're not much good--ah, la, la! Confess that you spat on the
window.
"For your poor mother," the ghost of Mame goes on, as she crosses the
room with a wooden spoon in her hand, "one must say that she had good
taste in dress. That's no harm, no; but certainly they must have the
wherewithal. She was always a child. I remember she was twenty-six
when they carried her away. Ah, how she loved hats! But she had
handsome ways, for all that, when she said, 'Come along with us,
Josephine!' So I brought you up, I did, and sacrificed everything...."
Overcome by the mention of the past, Mame's speech and action both
cease. She chokes and wags her head and wipes her face with her
sleeve.
I risk saying, gently, "Yes, I know it well."
A sigh is my answer. She lights the fire. The coal sends out a
cushion of smoke, which expands and rolls up the stove, falls back, and
piles its muslin on the floor. Mame manipulates the stove with her
feet in the cloudy deposit; and the hazy white hair which escapes from
her black cap is also like smoke.
Then she seeks her handkerchief and pats her pockets to get the velvet
coal-dust off her fingers. Now, with her back turned, she is moving
casseroles about. "Monsieur Crillon's father," she says, "old Dominic,
had come from County Cher to settle down here in '66 or '67. He's a
sensible man, seeing he's a town councilor. (We must tell him nicely
to take his buckets away from our door.) Monsieur Bonéas is very rich,
and he speaks so well, in spite of his bad neck. You must show
yourself off to all these gentlemen. You're genteel, and you're
already getting a hundred and eighty francs a month, and it's vexing
that you haven't got some sign to show that you're on the commercial
side, and not a workman, when you're going in and out of the factory."
"That can be seen easily enough."
"I'd rather you had a badge."
Breathing damply and forcefully, she sniffs harder and quicker, and
looks here and there for her handkerchief; she prowls with the lamp.
As my eyes follow her, the room awakens more and more. My groping gaze
discovers the tiled floor, the conference of chairs backed side by side
against the wall, the motionless pallor of the window in the background
above the low and swollen bed, which is like a heap of earth and
plaster, the clothes lying on the floor like mole-hills, the protruding
edges of tables and shelves, pots, bottles, kettles and hanging clouts,
and that lock with the cotton-wool in its ear.
"I like orderliness so much," says Mame as she tacks and worms her way
through this accumulation of things, all covered with a downy layer of
dust like the corners of pastel pictures.
According to habit, I stretch out my legs and put my feet on the stool,
which long use has polished and glorified till it looks new. My face
turns this way and that towards the lean phantom of my aunt, and I lull
myself with the sounds of her stirring and her endless murmur.
And now, suddenly, she has come near to me. She is wearing her jacket
of gray and white stripes which hangs from her acute shoulders, she
puts her arm around my neck, and trembles as she says, "You can mount
high, you can, with the gifts that you have. Some day, perhaps, you
will go and tell men everywhere the truth of things. That _has_
happened. There have been men who were in the right, above everybody.
Why shouldn't you be one of them, my lad, _you_ one of these great
apostles!"
And with her head gently nodding, and her face still tear-stained, she
looks afar, and sees the streets attentive to my eloquence!
* * * * * *
Hardly has this strange imagining in the bosom of our kitchen passed
away when Mame adds, with her eyes on mine, "My lad, mind you, never
look higher than yourself. You are already something of a home-bird;
you have already serious and elderly habits. That's good. Never try
to be different from others."
"No danger of that, Mame."
No, there is no danger of that. I should like to remain as I am.
Something holds me to the surroundings of my infancy and childhood, and
I should like them to be eternal. No doubt I hope for much from life.
I hope, I have hopes, as every one has. I do not even know all that I
hope for, but I should not like too great changes. In my heart I
should not like anything which changed the position of the stove, of
the tap, of the chestnut wardrobe, nor the form of my evening rest,
which faithfully returns.
* * * * * *
The fire alight, my aunt warms up the stew, stirring it with the wooden
spoon. Sometimes there spurts from the stove a mournful flame, which
seems to illumine her with tatters of light.
I get up to look at the stew. The thick brown gravy is purring. I can
see pale bits of potato, and it is uncertainly spotted with the
mucosity of onions. Mame pours it into a big white plate. "That's for
you," she says; "now, what shall _I_ have?"
We settle ourselves each side of the little swarthy table. Mame is
fumbling in her pocket. Now her lean hand, lumpy and dark, unroots
itself. She produces a bit of cheese, scrapes it with a knife which
she holds by the blade, and swallows it slowly. By the rays of the
lamp, which stands beside us, I see that her face is not dry. A drop
of water has lingered on the cheek that each mouthful protrudes, and
glitters there. Her great mouth works in all directions, and sometimes
swallows the remains of tears.
So there we are, in front of our plates, of the salt which is placed on
a bit of paper, of my share of jam, which is put into a mustard-pot.
There we are, narrowly close, our foreheads and hands brought together
by the light, and for the rest but poorly clothed by the huge gloom.
Sitting in this jaded armchair, my hands on this ill-balanced
table,--which, if you lean on one side of it, begins at once to
limp,--I feel that I am deeply rooted where I am, in this old room,
disordered as an abandoned garden, this worn-out room, where the dust
touches you softly.
After we have eaten, our remarks grow rarer. Then Mame begins again to
mumble; once again she yields to emotion under the harsh flame of the
lamp, and once again her eyes grow dim in her complicated Japanese mask
that is crowned with cotton-wool, and something dimly shining flows
from them.
The tears of the sensitive old soul plash on that lip so voluminous
that it seems a sort of heart. She leans towards me, she comes so
near, so near, that I feel sure she is touching me.
I have only her in the world to love me really. In spite of her humors
and her lamentations I know well that she is always in the right.
I yawn, while she takes away the dirty plates and proceeds to hide them
in a dark corner. She fills the big bowl from the pitcher and then
carries it along to the stove for the crockery.
Antonia has given me an appointment for eight o'clock, near the Kiosk.
It is ten past eight. I go out. The passage, the court,--by night all
these familiar things surround me even while they hide themselves. A
vague light still hovers in the sky. Crillon's prismatic shop gleams
like a garnet in the bosom of the night, behind the riotous disorder of
his buckets. There I can see Crillon,--he never seems to stop,--filing
something, examining his work close to a candle which flutters like a
butterfly ensnared, and then, reaching for the glue-pot which steams on
a little stove. One can just see his face, the engrossed and heedless
face of the artificer of the good old days; the black plates of his
ill-shaven cheeks; and, protruding from his cap, a vizor of stiff hair.
He coughs, and the window-panes vibrate.
In the street, shadow and silence. In the distance are venturing
shapes, people emerging or entering, and some light echoing sounds.
Almost at once, on the corner, I see Monsieur Joseph Bonéas vanishing,
stiff as a ramrod. I recognized the thick white kerchief, which
consolidates the boils on his neck. As I pass the hairdresser's door
it opens, just as it did a little while ago, and his agreeable voice
says, "That's all there is to it, in business." "Absolutely," replies
a man who is leaving. In the oven of the street one can see only his
littleness--he must be a considerable personage, all the same.
Monsieur Pocard is always applying himself to business and thinking of
great schemes. A little farther, in the depths of a cavity, stoppered
by an iron-grilled window, I divine the presence of old Eudo, the bird
of ill omen, the strange old man who coughs, and has a bad eye, and
whines continually. Even indoors he must wear his mournful cloak and
the lamp-shade of his hood. People call him a spy, and not without
reason.
Here is the Kiosk. It is waiting quite alone, with its point in the
darkness. Antonia has not come, for she would have waited for me. I
am impatient first, and then relieved. A good riddance.
No doubt Antonia is still tempting when she is present. There is a
reddish fever in her eyes, and her slenderness sets you on fire. But I
am hardly in harmony with the Italian. She is particularly engrossed
in her private affairs, with which I am not concerned. Big Victorine,
always ready, is worth a hundred of her; or Madame Lacaille, the
pensively vicious; though I am equally satiated of her, too. Truth to
tell, I plunge unreflectingly into a heap of amorous adventures which I
shortly find vulgar. But I can never resist the magic of a first
temptation.
I shall not wait. I go away. I skirt the forge of the ignoble
Brisbille. It is the last house in that chain of low hills which is
the street. Out of the deep dark the smithy window flames with vivid
orange behind its black tracery. In the middle of that square-ruled
page of light I see transparently outlined the smith's eccentric
silhouette, now black and sharp, now softly huge. Spectrally through
the glare, and in blundering frenzy, he strives and struggles and
fumbles horribly on the anvil. Swaying, he seems to rush to right and
to left, like a passenger on a hell-bound ferry. The more drunk he is,
the more furiously he falls upon his iron and his fire.
I return home. Just as I am about to enter a timid voice calls
me--"Simon!"
It is Antonia. So much the worse for her. I hurry in, followed by the
weak appeal.
I go up to my room. It is bare and always cold; always I must shiver
some minutes before I shake it back to life. As I close the shutters I
see the street again; the massive, slanting blackness of the roofs and
their population of chimneys clear-cut against the minor blackness of
space; some still waking, milk-white windows; and, at the end of a
jagged and gloomy background, the blood-red stumbling apparition of the
mad blacksmith. Farther still I can make out in the cavity the cross
on the steeple; and again, very high and blazing with light on the
hill-top, the castle, a rich crown of masonry. In all directions the
eye loses itself among the black ruins which conceal their hosts of men
and of women--all so unknown and so like myself.
CHAPTER II
OURSELVES
It is Sunday. Through my open window a living ray of April has made
its way into my room. It has transformed the faded flowers of the
wallpaper and restored to newness the Turkey-red stuff which covers my
dressing-table.
I dress carefully, dallying to look at myself in the glass, closely and
farther away, in the fresh scent of soap. I try to make out whether my
eyes are little or big. They are the average, no doubt, but it really
seems to me that they have a tender brightness.
Then I look outside. It would seem that the town, under its misty
blankets in the hollow of the valley, is awaking later than its
inhabitants.
These I can see from up here, spreading abroad in the streets, since it
is Sunday. One does not recognize them all at once, so changed are
they by their unusual clothes;--women, ornate with color, and more
monumental than on week days; some old men, slightly straightened for
the occasion; and some very lowly people, whom only their cleanness
vaguely disguises.
The weak sunshine is dressing the red roofs and the blue roofs and the
sidewalks, and the tiny little stone setts all pressed together like
pebbles, where polished shoes are shining and squeaking. In that old
house at the corner, a house like a round lantern of shadow, gloomy old
Eudo is encrusted. It forms a comical blot, as though traced on an old
etching. A little further, Madame Piot's house bulges forth, glazed
like pottery. By the side of these uncommon dwellings one takes no
notice of the others, with their gray walls and shining curtains,
although it is of these that the town is made.
Halfway up the hill, which rises from the river bank, and opposite the
factory's plateau, appears the white geometry of the castle, and around
its pallors a tapestry of reddish foliage, and parks. Farther away,
pastures and growing crops which are part of the demesne; farther
still, among the stripes and squares of brown earth or verdant, the
cemetery, where every year so many stones spring up.
* * * * * *
We have to call at Brisbille's, my aunt and I, before Church. We are
forced to tolerate him thus, so as to get our twisted key put right. I
wait for Mame in the court, sitting on a tub by the shop, which is
lifeless to-day, and full of the scattered leavings of toil. Mame is
never ready in time. She has twice appeared on the threshold in her
fine black dress and velvet cape; then, having forgotten something, she
has gone back very quickly, like a mole. Finally, she must needs go up
to my room, to cast a last glance over it.
At last we are off, side by side. She takes my arm proudly. From time
to time she looks at me, and I at her, and her smile is an affectionate
grimace amid the sunshine.
When we have gone a little way, my aunt stops, "You go on," she says;
"I'll catch you up."
She has gone up to Apolline, the street-sweeper. The good woman, as
broad as she is long, was gaping on the edge of the causeway, her two
parallel arms feebly rowing in the air, an exile in the Sabbath
idleness, and awkwardly conscious of her absent broom.
Mame brings her along, and looking back as I walk, I hear her talking
of me, hastily, as one who confides a choking secret, while Apolline
follows, with her arms swinging far from her body, limping and
outspread like a crab.
Says Mame, "That boy's bedroom is untidy. And then, too, he uses too
many shirt-collars, and he doesn't know how to blow his nose. He
stuffs handkerchiefs into his pockets, and you find them again like
stones."
"All the same, he's a good young man," stammers the waddling street
cleanser, brandishing her broom-bereaved hands at random, and shaking
over her swollen and many-storied boots a skirt weighted round the hem
by a coat-of-mail of dry mud.
These confidences with which Mame is in the habit of breaking forth
before no matter whom get on my nerves. I call her with some
impatience. She starts at the command, comes up, and throws me a
martyr's glance.
She proceeds with her nose lowered under her black hat with green
foliage, hurt that I should thus have summoned her before everybody,
and profoundly irritated. So a persevering malice awakens again in the
depths of her, and she mutters, very low, "You spat on the window the
other day!"
But she cannot resist hooking herself again on to another interlocutor,
whose Sunday trousers are planted on the causeway, like two posts, and
his blouse as stiff as a lump of iron ore. I leave them, and go alone
into Brisbille's.
The smithy hearth befires a workshop which bristles with black objects.
In the middle of the dark bodies of implements hanging from walls and
ceiling is the metallic Brisbille, with leaden hands, his dark apron
rainbowed with file-dust,--dirty on principle, because of his ideas,
this being Sunday. He is sober, and his face still unkindled, but he
is waiting impatiently for the church-going bell to begin, so that he
may go and drink, in complete solitude.
Through an open square, in the ponderous and dirt-shaggy glazing of the
smithy, one can see a portion of the street, and a sketch, in bright
and airy tones, of scattered people. It is like the sharply cut field
of vision in an opera-glass, in which figures are drawn and shaded, and
cross each other; where one makes out, at times, a hat bound and
befeathered, swaying as it goes; a little boy with sky-blue tie and
buttoned boots, and tubular knickers hanging round his thin, bare
calves; a couple of gossiping dames in swollen and somber petticoats,
who tack hither and thither, meet, are mutually attracted and dissolve
in conversation, like rolling drops of ink. In the foreground of this
colored cinema which goes by and passes again, Brisbille, the sinister,
is ranting away, as always. He is red and lurid, spotted with
freckles, his hair greasy, his voice husky. For a moment, while he
paces to and fro in his cage, dragging shapeless and gaping shoes
behind him, he speaks to me in a low voice, and close to my face, in
gusts. Brisbille can shout, but not talk; there must be a definite
pressure of anger before his resounding huskiness issues from his
throat.
Mame comes in. She sits on a stool to get her breath again, all the
while brandishing the twisted key which she clasps to the prayer-book
in her hand. Then she unburdens herself and begins to speak in fits
and starts of this key, of the mishap which twisted it, and of all the
multiple details which overlap each other in her head. But the
slipshod, gloomy smith's attention is suddenly attracted by the hole
which shows the street.
"The lubber!" he roars.
It is Monsieur Fontan who is passing, the wine-merchant and
café-proprietor. He is an expansive and imposing man, fat-covered, and
white as a house. He never says anything and is always alone. A great
personage he is; he makes money; he has amassed hundreds of thousands
of francs. At noon and in the evening he is not to be seen, having
dived into the room behind the shop, where he takes his meals in
solitude. The rest of the time he just sits at the receipt of custom
and says nothing. There is a hole in his counter where he slides the
money in. His house is filling with money from morning till night.
"He's a money-trap," says Mame.
"He's rich," I say.
"And when you've said that," jeers Brisbille, "you've said all there is
to say. Why, you damned snob, you're only a poor drudge, like all us
chaps, but haven't you just got the snob's ideas?"
I make a sign of impatience. It is not true, and Brisbille annoys me
with the hatred which he hurls at random, hit or miss; and all the more
because he is himself visibly impressed by the approach of this man who
is richer than the rest. The rebel opens his steely eye and relapses
into silence, like the rest of us, as the big person grows bigger.
"The Bonéas are even richer," my aunt murmurs.
Monsieur Fontan passes the open door, and we can hear the breathing of
the corpulent recluse. As soon as he has carried away the enormous
overcoat that sheathes him, like the hide of a pachyderm, and is
disappearing, Brisbille begins to roar, "What a snout! Did you see it,
eh? Did you see the jaws he swings from his ears, eh? The exact
likeness of a hog!"
Then he adds, in a burst of vulgar delight, "Luckily, we can expect
it'll all burst before long!"
He laughs alone. Mame goes and sits apart. She detests Brisbille, who
is the personification of envy, malice and coarseness. And everybody
hates this marionette, too, for his drunkenness and his forward
notions. All the same, when there is something you want him to do, you
choose Sunday morning to call, and you linger there, knowing that you
will meet others. This has become a tradition.
"They're going to cure little Antoinette," says Benoît, as he frames
himself in the doorway.
Benoît is like a newspaper. He to whom nothing ever happens only lives
to announce what is happening to others.
"I know," cries Mame, "they told me so this morning. Several people
already knew it this morning at seven. A big, famous doctor's coming
to the castle itself, for the hunting, and he only treats just the
eyes."
"Poor little angel!" sighs a woman, who has just come in.
Brisbille intervenes, rancorous and quarrelsome, "Yes, they're always
going to cure the child, so they say. Bad luck to them! Who cares
about her?"
"Everybody does!" reply two incensed women, in the same breath.
"And meanwhile," said Brisbille, viciously, "she's snuffing it." And
he chews, once more, his customary saying--pompous and foolish as the
catchword of a public meeting--"She's a victim of society!"
Monsieur Joseph Bonéas has come into Brisbille's, and he does it
complacently, for he is not above mixing with the people of the
neighborhood. Here, too, are Monsieur Pocard, and Crillon, new shaved,
his polished skin taut and shiny, and several other people. Prominent
among them one marks the wavering head of Monsieur Mielvaque, who, in
his timidity and careful respect for custom, took his hat off as he
crossed the threshold. He is only a copying-clerk at the factory; he
wears much-used and dubious linen, and a frail and orphaned jacket
which he dons for all occasions.
Monsieur Joseph Bonéas overawes me. My eyes are attracted by his
delicate profile, the dull gloom of his morning attire, and the luster
of his black gloves, which are holding a little black rectangle,
gilt-edged.
He, too, has removed his hat. So I, in my corner discreetly remove
mine, too.
He is a young man, refined and distinguished, who impresses by his
innate elegance. Yet he is an invalid, tormented by abscesses. One
never sees him but his neck is swollen, or his wrists enlarged by a
ghastly outcrop. But the sickly body encloses bright and sane
intelligence. I admire him because he is thoughtful and full of ideas,
and can express himself faultlessly. Recently he gave me a lesson in
sociology, touching the links between the France of to-day and the
France of tradition, a lesson on our origins whose plain perspicuity
was a revelation to me. I seek his company; I strive to imitate him,
and certainly he is not aware how much influence he has over me.
All are attentive while he says that he is thinking of organizing a
young people's association in Viviers. Then he speaks to me, "The
farther I go the more I perceive that all men are afflicted with short
sight. They do not see, nor can they see, beyond the end of their
noses."
"Yes," say I.
My reply seems rather scanty, and the silence which follows repeats it
mercilessly. It seems so to him, too, no doubt, for he engages other
interlocutors, and I feel myself redden in the darkness of Brisbille's
cavern.
Crillon is arguing with Brisbille on the matter of the recent
renovation of an old hat, which they keep handing to each other and
examine ardently. Crillon is sitting, but he keeps his eyes on it.
Heart and soul he applies himself to the debate. His humble trade as a
botcher does not allow a fixed tariff, and he is all alone as he
vindicates the value of his work. With his fists he hammers the
gray-striped mealy cloth on his knees, and the hair, which grows
thickly round his big neck, gives him the nape of a wild boar.
"That felt," he complains, "I'll tell you what was the matter with it.
It was rain, heavy rain, that had drowned it. That felt, I tells you,
was only like a dirty handkerchief. What does _that_ represent--in
ebullition of steam, in gumming, and the passage of time?"
Monsieur Justin Pocard is talking to three companions, who, hat in
hand, are listening with all their ears. He is entertaining them in
his sonorous language about the great financial and industrial
combination which he has planned. A speculative thrill electrifies the
company.
"That'll brush business up!" says Crillon, in wonder, torn for a moment
from contemplation of the hat, but promptly relapsing on it.
Joseph Bonéas says to me, in an undertone,--and I am flattered,--"That
Pocard is a man of no education, but he has practical sense. That's a
big idea he's got,--at least if he sees things as I see them."
And I, I am thinking that if I were older or more influential in the
district, perhaps I should be in the Pocard scheme, which is taking
shape, and will be huge.
Meanwhile, Brisbille is scowling. An unconfessable disquiet is
accumulating in his bosom. All this gathering is detaining him at
home, and he is tormented by the desire for drink. He cannot conceal
his vinous longing, and squints darkly at the assembly. On a week day
at this hour he would already have begun to slake his thirst. He is
parched, he burns, he drags himself from group to group. The wait is
longer than he can stand.
Suddenly every one looks out to the street through the still open door.
A carriage is making its way towards the church; it has a green body
and silver lamps. The old coachman, whose great glove sways the
slender scepter of a whip, is so adorned with overlapping capes that he
suggests several men on the top of each other. The black horse is
prancing.
"He shines like a piano," says Benoît.
The Baroness is in the carriage. The blinds are drawn, so she cannot
be seen, but every one salutes the carriage.
"All slaves!" mumbles Brisbille. "Look at yourselves now, just look!
All the lot of you, as soon as a rich old woman goes by, there you are,
poking your noses into the ground, showing your bald heads, and growing
humpbacked."
"She does good," protests one of the gathering.
"Good? Ah, yes, indeed!" gurgles the evil man, writhing as though in
the grip of some one; "I call it ostentation--that's what _I_ call it."
Shoulders are shrugged, and Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, always
self-controlled, smiles.
Encouraged by that smile, I say, "There have always been rich people,
and there must be."
"Of course," trumpets Crillon, "that's one of the established thoughts
that you find in your head when you fish for 'em. But mark what I
says,--there's some that dies of envy. I'm _not_ one of them that dies
of envy."
Monsieur Mielvaque has put his hat back on his petrified head and gone
to the door. Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, also, turns his back and goes
away.
All at once Crillon cries, "There's Pétrarque!" and darts outside on
the track of a big body, which, having seen him, opens its long pair of
compasses and escapes obliquely.
"And to think," says Brisbille, with a horrible grimace, when Crillon
has disappeared, "that the scamp is a town councilor! Ah, by God!"
He foams, as a wave of anger runs through him, swaying on his feet, and
gaping at the ground. Between his fingers there is a shapeless
cigarette, damp and shaggy, which he rolls in all directions, patching
up and resticking it unceasingly.
Charged with snarls and bristling with shoulder-shrugs, the smith
rushes at his fire and pulls the bellows-chain, his yawning shoes
making him limp like Vulcan. At each pull the bellows send spouting
from the dust-filled throat of the furnace a cutting blue comet, lined
with crackling and dazzling white, and therein the man forges.
Purpling as his agitation rises, nailed to his imprisoning corner,
alone of his kind, a rebel against all the immensity of things, the man
forges.
* * * * * *
The church bell rang, and we left him there. When I was leaving I
heard Brisbille growl. No doubt I got my quietus as well. But what
can he have imagined against _me_?
We meet again, all mixed together in the Place de l'Eglise. In our
part of the town, except for a clan of workers whom one keeps one's eye
on, every one goes to church, men as well as women, as a matter of
propriety, out of gratitude to employers or lords of the manor, or by
religious conviction. Two streets open into the Place and two roads,
bordered with apple-trees, as well, so that these four ways lead town
and country to the Place.
It has the shape of a heart, and is delightful. It is shaded by a very
old tree, under which justice was formerly administered. That is why
they call it the Great Tree, although there are greater ones. In
winter it is dark, like a perforated umbrella. In summer it gives the
bright green shadow of a parasol. Beside the tree a tall crucifix
dwells in the Place forever.
The Place is swarming and undulating. Peasants from the surrounding
country, in their plain cotton caps, are waiting in the old corner of
the Rue Neuve, heaped together like eggs. These people are loaded with
provisions. At the farther end, square-paved, one picks out swarthy
outlines of the Epinal type, and faces as brightly colored as apples.
Groups of children flutter and chirrup; little girls with their dolls
play at being mothers, and little boys play at brigands. Respectable
people take their stand more ceremoniously than the common crowd, and
talk business piously.
Farther away is the road, which April's illumination adorns all along
the lines of trees with embroidery of shadow and of gold, where
bicycles tinkle and carriages rumble echoingly; and the shining
river,--those long-drawn sheets of water, whereon the sun spreads
sheets of light and scatters blinding points. Looking along the road,
on either side of its stone-hard surface, one sees the pleasant,
cultivated earth, the bits of land sewn to each other, and many-hued,
brown or green as the billiard cloth, then paling in the distance.
Here and there, on this map in colors, copses bulge forth. The
by-roads are pricked out with trees, which follow each other artlessly
and divide the infantile littleness of orchards.
This landscape holds us by the soul. It is a watercolor now (for it
rained a little last night), with its washed stones, its tiles
varnished anew, its roofs that are half slate and half light, its
shining pavements, water-jeweled in places, its delicately blue sky,
with clouds like silky paper; and between two house-fronts of yellow
ocher and tan, against the purple velvet of distant forests, there is
the neighboring steeple, which is like ours and yet different. Roundly
one's gaze embraces all the panorama, which is delightful as the
rainbow.
From the Place, then, where one feels himself so abundantly at home, we
enter the church. From the depths of this thicket of lights, the good
priest murmurs the great infinite speech to us, blesses us, embraces us
severally and altogether, like father and mother both. In the manorial
pew, the foremost of all, one glimpses the Marquis of Monthyon, who has
the air of an officer, and his mother-in-law, Baroness Grille, who is
dressed like an ordinary lady.
Emerging from church, the men go away; the women swarm out more
grudgingly and come to a standstill together; then all the buzzing
groups scatter.
At noon the shops close. The fine ones do it unassisted; the others
close by the antics of some good man who exerts himself to carry and
fit the shutters. Then there is a great void.
After lunch I wander in the streets. In the house I am bored, and yet
outside I do not know what to do. I have no friend and no calls to
pay. I am already too big to mingle with some, and too little yet to
associate with others. The cafés and licensed shops hum, jingle and
smoke already. I do not go to cafés, on principle, and because of that
fondness for spending nothing, which my aunt has impressed on me. So,
aimless, I walk through the deserted streets, which at every corner
yawn before my feet. The hours strike and I have the impression that
they are useless, that one will do nothing with them.
I steer in the direction of the fine gardens which slope towards the
river. A little enviously I look over the walls at the tops of these
opulent enclosures, at the tips of those great branches where still
clings the soiled, out-of-fashion finery of last summer.
Far from there, and a good while after, I encounter Tudor, the clerk at
the Modern Pharmacy. He hesitates and doubts, and does not know where
to go. Every Sunday he wears the same collar, with turned down
corners, and it is becoming gloomy. Arrived where I am, he stops, as
though it occurred to him that nothing was pushing him forward. A
half-extinguished cigarette vegetates in his mouth.
He comes with me, and I take his silence in tow as far as the avenue of
plane trees. There are several figures outspaced in its level peace.
Some young girls attract my attention; they appear against the dullness
of house-fronts and against shop fronts in mourning. Some of the
charming ones are accompanied by their mothers, who look like
caricatures of them.
Tudor has left me without my noticing it.
Already, and slowly everywhere, the taverns begin to shine and cry out.
In the grayness of twilight one discerns a dark and mighty crowd,
gliding therein. In them gathers a sort of darkling storm, and flashes
emerge from them.
* * * * * *
And lo! Now the night approaches to soften the stony streets.
Along the riverside, to which I have gone down alone, listless idylls
dimly appear,--shapes sketched in crayon, which seek and join each
other. There are couples that appear and vanish, strictly avoiding the
little light that is left. Night is wiping out colors and features and
names from both sorts of strollers.
I notice a woman who waits, standing on the river bank. Her silhouette
has pearly-gray sky behind it, so that she seems to support the
darkness. I wonder what her name may be, but only discover the beauty
of her feminine stillness. Not far from that consummate caryatid,
among the black columns of the tall trees laid against the lave of the
blue, and beneath their cloudy branches, there are mystic enlacements
which move to and fro; and hardly can one distinguish the two halves of
which they are made, for the temple of night is enclosing them.
The ancient hut of a fisherman is outlined on the grassy slope. Below
it, crowding reeds rustle in the current; and where they are more
sparse they fashion concentric orbs upon the gleaming, fleeing water.
The landscape has something exotic or antique about it. You are no
matter where in the world or among the centuries. You are on some
corner of the eternal earth, where men and women are drawing near to
each other, and cling together while they wrap themselves in mystery.
* * * * * *
Dreamily I ascend again towards the sounds and the swarming of the
town. There, the Sunday evening rendezvous,--the prime concern of the
men,--is less discreet. Desire displays itself more crudely on the
pavements. Voices chatter and laughter dissolves, even through closed
doors; there are shouts and songs.
Up there one sees clearly. Faces are discovered by the harsh light of
the gas jets and its reflection from plate-glass shop windows. Antonia
goes by, surrounded by men, who bend forward and look at her with
desire amid their clamor of conversation. She saw me, and a little
sound of appeal comes from her across the escort that presses upon her.
But I turn aside and let her go by.
When she and her harness of men have disappeared, I smell in their wake
the odor of Pétrolus. He is lamp-man at the factory. Yellow, dirty,
cadaverous, red-eyed, he smells rancid, and was, perhaps, nurtured on
paraffin. He is some one washed away. You do not see him, so much as
smell him.
Other women are there. Many a Sunday have I, too, joined in all that
love-making.
* * * * * *
Among these beings who chat and take hold of each other, an isolated
woman stands like a post, and makes an empty space around her.
It is Louise Verte. She is fearfully ugly, and she was too virtuous
formerly, at a time when, so they say, she need not have been. She
regrets this, and relates it without shame, in order to be revenged on
virtue. She would like to have a lover, but no one wants her, because
of her bony face and her scraped appearance; from a sort of eczema.
Children make sport of her, knowing her needs; for the disclosures of
their elders have left a stain on them. A five-year-old girl points
her tiny finger at Louise and twitters, "She wants a man."
In the Place is Véron, going about aimlessly, like a dead leaf--Véron,
who revolves, when he may, round Antonia. An ungainly man, whose tiny
head leans to the right and wears a colorless smile. He lives on a few
rents and does not work. He is good and affectionate, and sometimes he
is overcome by attacks of compassion.
Véron and Louise Verte see one another,--and each makes a détour of
avoidance. They are afraid of each other.
Here, also, on the margin of passion, is Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, very
compassionable, in spite of his intellectual superiority. Between the
turned-down brim of his hat and his swollen white kerchief,--thick as a
towel,--a mournful yellow face is stuck.
I pity these questing solitaries who are looking for themselves! I
feel compassion to see those fruitless shadows hovering there, wavering
like ghosts, these poor wayfarers, divided and incomplete.
Where am I? Facing the workmen's flats, whose countless windows stand
sharply out in their huge flat background. It is there that Marie
Tusson lives, whose father, a clerk at Messrs. Gozlan's, like myself,
is manager of the property. I steered to this place instinctively,
without confessing it to myself, brushing people and things without
mingling with them.
Marie is my cousin, and yet I hardly ever see her. We just say
good-day when we meet, and she smiles at me.
I lean against a plane tree and think of Marie. She is tall, fair,
strong and amiable, and she goes modestly clad, like a wide-hipped
Venus; her beautiful lips shine like her eyes.
To know her so near agitates me among the shadows. If she appeared
before me as she did the last time I met her; if, in the middle of the
dark, I saw the shining radiance of her face, the swaying of her
figure, traced in silken lines, and her little sister's hand in
hers,--I should tremble.
But that does not happen. The bluish, cold background only shows me
the two second-floor windows pleasantly warmed by lights, of which one
is, perhaps, she herself. But they take no sort of shape, and remain
in another world.
At last my eyes leave that constellation of windows among the trees,
that vertical and silent firmament. Then I make for my home, in this
evening which comes at the end of all the days I have lived.
* * * * * *
Little Antoinette,--how comes it that they leave her all alone like
this?--is standing in my path and holding a hand out towards me. It is
her way that she is begging for. I guide her, ask questions and
listen, leaning over her and making little steps. But she is too
little, and too lispful, and cannot explain. Carefully I lead the
child,--who sees so feebly that already she is blind in the evening, as
far as the low door of the dilapidated dwelling where she nests.
In my street, in front of his lantern-shaped house, with its
iron-grilled dormer, old Eudo is standing, darkly hooded, and pointed,
like the house.
I am a little afraid of him. Assuredly, he has not got a clean
conscience. But, however guilty, he is compassionable. I stop and
speak to him. He lifts to me out of the night of his hood a face
pallid and ruined. I speak about the weather, of approaching spring.
Heedless he hears, shapes "yes" with the tip of his lips, and says,
"It's twelve years now since my wife died; twelve years that I've been
utterly alone; twelve years that I've heard the last words she said to
me."
And the poor maniac glides farther away, hooded in his unintelligible
mourning; and certainly he does not hear me wish him good-night.
At the back of the cold downstairs room a fire has been lighted. Mame
is sitting on the stool beside it, in the glow of the flaming coal,
outstretching her hands, clinging to the warmth.
Entering, I see the bowl of her back. Her lean neck has a cracked look
and is white as a bone. Musingly, my aunt takes and holds a pair of
idle tongs. I take my seat. Mame does not like the silence in which I
wrap myself. She lets the tongs fall with a jangling shock, and then
begins vivaciously to talk to me about the people of the neighborhood.
"There's everything here. No need to go to Paris, nor even so much as
abroad. This part; it's a little world cut out on the pattern of the
others," she adds, proudly, wagging her worn-out head. "There aren't
many of them who've got the wherewithal and they're not of much
account. Puppets, if you like, yes. That's according to how one sees
it, because at bottom there's no puppets,--there's people that look
after themselves, because each of us always deserves to be happy, my
lad. And here, the same as everywhere, the two kinds of people that
there are--the discontented and the respectable; because, my lad,
what's always been always will be."
CHAPTER III
EVENING AND DAWN
Just at the moment when I was settling down to audit the Sesmaisons'
account--I remember that detail--there came an unusual sound of steps
and voices, and before I could even turn round I heard a voice through
the glass door say, "Monsieur Paulin's aunt is very ill."
The sentence stuns me. I am standing, and some one is standing
opposite me. A draught shuts the door with a bang.
Both of us set off. It is Benoît who has come to fetch me. We hurry.
I breathe heavily. Crossing the busy factory, we meet acquaintances
who smile at me, not knowing the turn of affairs.
The night is cold and nasty, with a keen wind. The sky drips with
rain. We jump over puddles as we walk. I stare fixedly at Benoît's
square shoulders in front of me, and the dancing tails of his coat as
the wind hustles them along the nocturnal way.
Passing through the suburban quarter, the wind comes so hard between
the infrequent houses that the bushes on either side shiver and press
towards us, and seem to unfurl. Ah, we are not made for the greater
happenings!
* * * * * *
I meet first in the room the resounding glare of a wood fire and an
almost repelling heat. The odors of camphor and ether catch my throat.
People that I know are standing round the bed. They turn to me and
speak all together.
I bend down to look at Mame. She is inlaid upon the whiteness of the
bed, which is motionless as marble. Her face is sunk in the cavity of
the pillow. Her eyes are half closed and do not move; her skin has
darkened. Each breath hums in her throat, and beyond that slight
stirring of larynx and lips her little frail body moves no more than a
doll's. She has not got her cap on and her gray hair is unraveled on
her head like flocks of dust.
Several voices at once explain to me that it is "double congestion, and
her heart as well." She was attacked by a dizziness, by prolonged and
terrible shivering. She wandered, mentioned me, then suddenly
collapsed. The doctor has no hope but is coming back. The Reverend
Father Piot was here at five.
Silence hovers. A woman puts a log in the fire, in the center of the
dazzling cluster of snarling flames, whose light throws the room into
total agitation.
* * * * * *
For a long time I look upon that face, where ugliness and goodness are
mingled in such a heartrending way. My eyes seek those already almost
shut, whose light is hardening. Something of darkness, an internal
shadow which is of herself, overspreads and disfigures her. One may
see now how outworn she was, how miraculously she still held on.
This tortured and condemned woman is all that has looked after me for
twenty years. For twenty years she took my hand before she took my
arm. She always prevented me from understanding that I was an orphan.
Delicate and small as I was for so long, she was taller and stronger
and better than I! And at this moment, which shows me the past again
in one glance, I remember that she beautified the affairs of my
childhood like an old magician; and my head goes lower as I think of
her untiring admiration for me. How she did love me! And she must
love me still, confusedly, if some glimmering light yet lasts in the
depths of her. What will become of me--all alone?
She was so sensitive, and so restless! A hundred details of her
vivacity come to life again in my eyes. Stupidly, I contemplate the
poker, the tongs, the big spoon--all the things she used to flourish as
she chattered. There they are--fallen, paralyzed, mute!
As in a dream I go back to the times when she talked and shouted, to
days of youth, to days of spring and of springtime dresses; and all the
while my gaze, piercing that gay and airy vision, settles on the dark
stain of the hand that lies there like the shadow of a hand, on the
sheet.
My eyes are jumbling things together. I see our garden in the first
fine days of the year; our garden--it is behind that wall--so narrow is
it that the reflected sunshine from our two windows dapples the whole
of it; so small that it only holds some pot-encaged plants, except for
the three currant bushes which have always been there. In the scarves
of the sun rays a bird--a robin--is hopping on the twigs like a rag
jewel. All dusty in the sunshine our red hound, Mirliton, is warming
himself. So gaunt is he you feel sure he must be a fast runner.
Certainly he runs after glimpsed rabbits on Sundays in the country, but
he never caught any. He never caught anything but fleas. When I lag
behind because of my littleness my aunt turns round, on the edge of the
footpath, and holds out her arms, and I run to her, and she stoops as I
come and calls me by my name.
* * * * * *
"Simon! Simon!"
A woman is here. I wrench myself from the dream which had come into
the room and taken solidity before me. I stand up; it is my cousin
Marie.
She offers me her hands among the candles which flutter by the bed. In
their poor starlight her face appears haggard and wet. My aunt loved
her. Her lips are trembling on her rows of sparkling teeth; the whole
breadth of her bosom heaves quickly.
I have sunk again into the armchair. Memories flow again, while the
sick woman's breathing is longer drawn, and her stillness becomes more
and more inexorable. Things she used to say return to my lips. Then
my eyes are raised, and look for Marie, and turn upon her.
* * * * * *
She has leaned against the wall, and remains so--overcome. She invests
the corner where she stands with something like profane and sumptuous
beauty. Her changeful chestnut hair, like bronze and gold, forms moist
and disordered scrolls on her forehead and her innocent cheeks. Her
neck, especially, her white neck, appears to me. The atmosphere is so
choking, so visibly heavy, that it enshrouds us as if the room were on
fire, and she has loosened the neck of her dress, and her throat is
lighted up by the flaming logs. I smile weakly at her. My eyes wander
over the fullness of her hips and her outspread shoulders, and fasten,
in that downfallen room, on her throat, white as dawn.
* * * * * *
The doctor has been again. He stood some time in silence by the bed;
and as he looked our hearts froze. He said it would be over to-night,
and put the phial in his hand back in his pocket. Then, regretting
that he could not stay, he disappeared.
And we stayed on beside the dying woman--so fragile that we dare not
touch her, nor even try to speak to her.
Madame Piot settles down in a chair; she crosses her arms, lowers her
head, and the time goes by.
At long intervals people take shape in the darkness by the door; people
who come in on tiptoe whisper to us and go away.
The moribund moves her hands and feet and contorts her face. A
gurgling comes from her throat, which we can hardly see in the cavity
that is like a nest of shadow under her chin. She has blenched, and
the skin that is drawn over the bones of her face like a shroud grows
whiter every moment.
Intent upon her breathing, we throng about her. We offer her our
hands--so near and so far--and do not know what to do.
I am watching Marie. She has sunk onto the little stool, and her
young, full-blooming body overflows it. Holding her handkerchief in
her teeth, she has come to arrange the pillow, and leaning over the
bed, she puts one knee on a chair. The movement reveals her leg for a
moment, curved like a beautiful Greek vase, while the skin seems to
shine through the black transparency of the stocking, like clouded
gold. Ah! I lean forward towards her with a stifled, incipient appeal
above this bed, which is changing into a tomb. The border of the
tragic dress has fallen again, but I cannot remove my eyes from that
profound obscurity. I look at Marie, and look at her again; and though
I knew her, it seems to me that I wholly discover her.
"I can't hear anything now," says a woman.
"Yes I can----"
"No, no!" the other repeats.
Then I see Crillon's huge back bending over. My aunt's mouth opens
gently and remains open. The eyelids fall back almost completely upon
the stiffened gleam of the eyes, which squint in the gray and bony
mask. I see Crillon's big hand hover over the little mummified face,
lowering the eyelids and keeping them closed.
Marie utters a cry when this movement tells her that our aunt has just
died.
She sways. My hand goes out to her. I take her, support, and enfold
her. Fainting, she clings to me, and for one moment I carry--gently,
heavily--all the young woman's weight. The neck of her dress is
undone, and falls like foliage from her throat, and I just saw the real
curve of her bosom, nakedly and distractedly throbbing.
Her body is agitated. She hides her face in her hands and then turns
it to mine. It chanced that our faces met, and my lips gathered the
wonderful savor of her tears!
* * * * * *
The room fills with lamentation; there is a continuous sound of deep
sighing. It is overrun by neighbors become friends, to whom no one
pays attention.
And now, in this sacred homelet, where death still bleeds, I cannot
prevent a heavy heart-beat in me towards the girl who is prostrated
like the rest, but who reigns there, in spite of me--of herself--of
everything. I feel myself agitated by an obscure and huge rapture--the
birth of my flesh and my vitals among these shadows. Beside this poor
creature who was so blended with me, and who is falling, falling,
through a hell of eternity, I am uplifted by a sort of hope.
I want to fix my attention on the fixity of the bed. I put my hand
over my eyes to shut out all thought save of the dead woman,
defenseless already, reclining on that earth into which she will sink.
But my looks, impelled by superhuman curiosity, escape between my
fingers to this other woman, half revealed to me in the tumult of
sorrow, and my eyes cannot come out of her.
Madame Piot has changed the candles and attached a band to support the
dead woman's chin. Framed in this napkin, which is knotted over the
skull in her woolly gray hair, the face looks like a hook-nosed mask of
green bronze, with a vitrified line of eyes; the knees make two sharp
summits under the sheet; one's eyes run along the thin rods of the
shins and the feet lift the linen like two in-driven nails.
Slowly Marie prepares to go. She has closed the neck of her dress and
hidden herself in her cloak. She comes up to me, sore-hearted, and
with her tears for a moment quenched she smiles at me without speaking.
I half rise, my hands tremble towards her smile as if to touch it,
above the past and the dust of my second mother.
Towards the end of the night, when the dead fire is scattering
chilliness, the women go away one by one. One hour, two hours, I
remain alone. I pace the room in one direction and another, then I
look, and shiver. My aunt is no more. There is only left of her
something indistinct, struck down, of subterranean color, and her place
is desolate. Now, close to her, I am alone! Alone--magnified by my
affliction, master of my future, disturbed and numbed by the newness of
the things now beginning. At last the window grows pale, the ceiling
turns gray, and the candle-flames wink in the first traces of light.
I shiver without end. In the depth of my dawn, in the heart of this
room where I have always been, I recall the image of a woman who filled
it--a woman standing at the chimney-corner, where a gladsome fire
flames, and she is garbed in reflected purple, her corsage scarlet, her
face golden, as she holds to the glow those hands transparent and
beautiful as flames. In the darkness, from my vigil, I look at her.
* * * * * *
The two nights which followed were spent in mournful motionlessness at
the back of that room where the trembling host of lights seemed to give
animation to dead things. During the two days various activities
brought me distraction, at first distressing, then depressing.
The last night I opened my aunt's jewel box. It was called "the little
box." It was on the dressing table, at the bottom of piled-up litter.
I found some topaz ear-rings of a bygone period, a gold cross, equally
outdistanced, small and slender--a little girl's, or a young girl's;
and then, wrapped in tissue paper, like a relic, a portrait of myself
when a child. Last, a written page, torn from one of my old school
copy-books, which she had not been able to throw wholly away.
Transparent at the folds, the worn sheet was fragile as lace, and gave
the illusion of being equally precious. That was all the treasure my
aunt had collected. That jewel box held the poverty of her life and
the wealth of her heart.
* * * * * *
It poured with rain on the day of the funeral. All the morning groups
of people succeeded each other in the big cavern of our room, a going
and coming of sighs. My aunt was laid in her coffin towards two
o'clock, and it was carried then into the passage, where visitors' feet
had brought dirt and puddles. A belated wreath was awaited, and then
the umbrellas opened, and under their black undulation the procession
moved off.
When we came out of the church it was not far off four o'clock. The
rain had not stopped and little rivers dashed down from either side of
the procession's sluggish flow along the street. There were many
flowers, so that the hearse made a blot of relief, beautiful enough.
There were many people, too, and I turned round several times. Always
I saw old Eudo, in his black cowl, hopping along in the mud,
hunchbacked as a crow. Marie was walking among some women in the
second half of the file, whose frail and streaming roof the hearse drew
along irregularly with jerks and halts. Her gait was jaded; she was
thinking only of our sorrow! All things darkened again to my eyes in
the ugliness of the evening.
The cemetery is full of mud under the muslin of fallen rain, and the
footfalls make a sticky sound in it. There are a few trees, naked and
paralyzed. The sky is marshy and sprinkled with crows.
The coffin, with its shapeless human form, is lowered from the hearse
and disappears in the fresh earth.
They march past. Marie and her father take their places beside me. I
say thanks to every one in the same tone; they are all like each other,
with their gestures of impotence, their dejected faces, the words they
get ready and pour out as they pass before me, and their dark costume.
No one has come from the castle, but in spite of that there are many
people and they all converge upon me. I pluck up courage.
Monsieur Lucien Gozlan comes forward, calls me "my dear sir," and
brings me the condolences of his uncles, while the rest watch us.
Joseph Bonéas says "my dear friend" to me, and that affects me deeply.
Monsieur Pocard says, "If I had been advised in time I would have said
a few words. It is regrettable----"
Others follow; then nothing more is to be seen in the rain, the wind
and the gloom but backs.
"It's finished. Let's go."
Marie lifts to me her sorrow-laved face. She is sweet; she is
affectionate; she is unhappy; but she does not love me.
We go away in disorder, along by the trees whose skeletons the winter
has blackened.
When we arrive in our quarter, twilight has invaded the streets. We
hear gusts of talk about the Pocard scheme. Ah, how fiercely people
live and seek success!
Little Antoinette, cautiously feeling her way by a big wall, hears us
pass. She stops and would look if she could. We espy her figure in
that twilight of which she is beginning to make a part, though fine and
faint as a pistil.
"Poor little angel!" says a woman, as she goes by.
Marie and her father are the only ones left near me when we pass
Rampaille's tavern. Some men who were at the funeral are sitting at
tables there, black-clad.
We reach my home; Marie offers me her hand, and we hesitate. "Come
in."
She enters. We look at the dead room; the floor is wet, and the wind
blows through as if we were out of doors. Both of us are crying, and
she says, "I will come to-morrow and tidy up. Till then----"
We take each other's hand in confused hesitation.
* * * * * *
A little later there is a scraping at the door, then a timid knock, and
a long figure appears.
It is Véron who presents himself with an awkward air. His tall and
badly jointed body swings like a hanging signboard. He is an original
and sentimental soul, but no one has ever troubled to find out what he
is. He begins, "My young friend--hum, hum--" (he repeats this formless
sound every two or three words, like a sort of clock with a sonorous
tick)--"One may be wanting money, you know, for something--hum, hum;
you need money, perhaps--hum, hum; all this expense--and I'd said to
myself 'I'll take him some----'"
He scrutinizes me as he repeats, "Hum, hum." I shake his hand with
tears in my eyes. I do not need money, but I know I shall never forget
that action; so good, so supernatural.
And when he has swung himself out, abashed by my refusal, embarrassed
by the unusual size of his legs and his heart, I sit down in a corner,
seized with shivering. Then I obliterate myself in another corner,
equally forlorn. It seems as if Marie has gone away with all I have.
I am in mourning and I am all alone, because of her.
CHAPTER IV
MARIE
The seat leans against the gray wall, at the spot where a rose tree
hangs over it, and the lane begins to slope to the river. I asked
Marie to come, and I am waiting for her in the evening.
When I asked her--in sudden decision after so many days of
hesitation--to meet me here this evening, she was silent, astonished.
But she did not refuse; she did not answer. Some people came and she
went away. I am waiting for her, after that prayer.
Slowly I stroll to the river bank. When I return some one is on the
seat, enthroned in the shadow. The face is indistinct, but in the
apparel of mourning I can see the neck-opening, like a faint pale
heart, and the misty expansion of the skirt. Stooping, I hear her low
voice, "I've come, you see." And, "Marie!" I say.
I sit down beside her, and we remain silent. She is there--wholly.
Through her black veils I can make out the whiteness of her face and
neck and hands--all her beauty, like light enclosed.
For me she had only been a charming picture, a passer-by, one apart,
living her own life. Now she has listened to me; she has come at my
call; she has brought herself here.
* * * * * *
The day has been scorching. Towards the end of the afternoon
storm-rain burst over the world and then ceased. One can still hear
belated drops falling from the branches which overhang the wall. The
air is charged with odors of earth and leaves and flowers, and wreaths
of wind go heavily by.
She is the first to speak; she speaks of one thing and another.
I do not know what she is saying; I draw nearer to see her lips; I
answer her, "I am always thinking of you."
Hearing these words, she is silent. Her silence grows greater and
greater in the shadows. I have drawn still nearer; so near that I feel
on my cheek the wing-beat of her breath; so near that her silence
caresses me.
Then, to keep myself in countenance, or to smoke, I have struck a
match, but I make no use of the gleam at my finger-tips. It shows me
Marie, quivering a little; it gilds her pale face. A smile arises on
her face; I have seen her full of that smile.
My eyes grow dim and my hands tremble. I wish she would speak.
"Tell me----" Her down-bent neck unfolds, and she lifts her head to
speak. At that moment, by the light of the flame that I hold, whose
great revealing kindness I am guarding, our eyes fall on an inscription
scratched in the wall--a heart--and inside it two initials, H-S. Ah,
that design was made by me one evening. Little Helen was lolling there
then, and I thought I adored her. For a moment I am overpowered by
this apparition of a mistake, bygone and forgotten. Marie does not
know; but seeing those initials, and divining a presence between us,
she dare not speak.
As the match is on the point of going out I throw it down. The little
flame's last flicker has lighted up for me the edge of the poor black
serge skirt, so worn that it shines a little, even in the evening, and
has shown me the girl's shoe. There is a hole in the heel of the
stocking, and we have both seen it. In quick shame, Marie draws her
foot under her skirt; and I--I tremble still more that my eyes have
touched a little of her maiden flesh, a fragment of her real innocence.
Gently she stands up in the grayness, and puts an end to this first
fate-changing meeting.
We return. The obscurity is outstretched all around and against us.
Together and alone we go into the following chambers of the night. My
eyes follow the sway of her body in her dress against the vaguely
luminous background of the wall. Amid the night her dress is night
also; she is there--wholly! There is a singing in my ears; an anthem
fills the world.
In the street, where there are no more wayfarers, she walks on the edge
of the causeway. So that my face may be on a level with hers, I walk
beside her in the gutter, and the cold water enters my boots.
And that evening, inflated by mad longing, I am so triumphantly
confident that I do not even remember to shake her hand. By her door I
said to her, "To-morrow," and she answered, "Yes."
On one of the days which followed, finding myself free in the
afternoon, I made my way to the great populous building of flats where
she lives. I ascended two dark flights of steps, closely encaged, and
followed a long elbowed corridor. Here it is. I knock and enter.
Complete silence greets me. There is no one, and acute disappointment
runs through me.
I take some hesitant steps in the tiny vestibule, which is lighted by
the glass door to the kitchen, wherein I hear the drip of water. I see
a room whose curtains invest it with broidered light. There is a bed
in it, with a cover of sky-blue satinette shining like the blue of a
chromo. It is Marie's room! Her gray silk hat, rose-trimmed, hangs
from a nail on the flowery paper. She has not worn it since my aunt's
death; and alongside hang black dresses. I enter this bright blue
sanctuary, inhabited only by a cold and snow-like light, and orderly
and chaste as a picture.
My hand goes out like a thief's. I touch, I stroke these dresses,
which are wont to touch Marie. I turn again to the blue-veiled bed.
On a whatnot there are books, and their titles invite me; for where her
thoughts dwell, the things which occupy her mind--but I leave them. I
would rather go near her bed. With a movement at once mad, frightened
and trembling, I lift the quilts that clothe it and my gaze enters it,
and my knees lean trembling on the edge of this great lifeless thing,
which, alone among dead things, is one of soft and supple flesh.
* * * * * *
My customary life continues and my work is always the same. I make
notes, by the way, of Crillon's honest trivialities; of Brisbille's
untimely outbursts; of the rumors anent the Pocard scheme, and the
progress of the Association of Avengers, a society to promote national
awakening, founded by Monsieur Joseph Bonéas. The same complex and
monotonous existence bears me along as it does everybody. But since
that tragic night when my sorrow was transformed into joy at the
lyke-wake in the old room, in truth the world is no longer what it was.
People and things appear to me shadowy and distant when I go out into
the current of the crowds; when I am dressing in my room and decide
that I look well in black; when I sit up late at my table in the
sunshine of hope. Now and again the memory of my aunt comes bodily
back to me. Sometimes I hear people pronounce the name of Marie. My
body starts when it hears them say "Marie," who know not what they say.
And there are moments when our separation throbs so warmly that I do
not know whether she is here or absent.
* * * * * *
During this walk that we have just had together the summer and the
sweetness of living have weighed more than ever on my shoulders. Her
huge home, which is such a swarming hive at certain times, is now
immensely empty in the labyrinth of its dark stairs and the landings,
whence issue the narrow closed streets of its corridors, and where in
the corners taps drip upon drain-stones. Our immense--our naked
solitude pervades us. An exquisite emotion takes hold of me while we
are slowly climbing the steep and methodical way. There is something
human in the stairway; in the inevitable shapes of its spiral and its
steps cut out of the quick, in the rhythmic repetition of its steps. A
round skylight pierces the sloping roof up there, and it is the only
light for this part of the people's house, this poor internal city.
The darkness which runs down the walls of the well, whence we are
striving to emerge step by step, conceals our laborious climb towards
that gap of daylight. Shadowed and secret as we are, it seems to me
that we are mounting to heaven.
Oppressed by a common languor, we at last sat down side by side on a
step. There is no sound in the building under the one round window
bending over us. We lean on each other because of the stair's
narrowness. Her warmth enters into me; I feel myself agitated by that
obscure light which radiates from her. I share with her the heat of
her body and her thought itself. The darkness deepens round us.
Hardly can I see the crouching girl there, warm and hollowed like a
nest.
I call her by her name, very quietly, and it is as though I made a loud
avowal! She turns, and it seems that this is the first time I have
seen her naked face. "Kiss me," she says; and without speaking we
stammer, and murmur, and laugh.
* * * * * *
Together we are looking at a little square piece of paper. I found it
on the seat which the rose-tree overhangs on the edge of the downward
lane. Carefully folded, it had a forgotten look, and it was waiting
there, detained for a moment by its timorous weight. A few lines of
careful writing cover it. We read it:
"I do not know how speaks the pious heart; nothing I know; th'
enraptured martyr I. Only I know the tears that brimming start, your
beauty blended with your smile to espy."
Then, having read it, we read it again, moved by a mysterious
influence. And we finger the chance-captured paper, without knowing
what it is, without understanding very well what it says.
* * * * * *
When I asked her to go with me to the cemetery that Sunday, she agreed,
as she does to all I ask her. I watched her arms brush the roses as
she came in through the gardens. We walked in silence; more and more
we are losing the habit of talking to each other. We looked at the
latticed and flower-decked square where our aunt sleeps--the garden
which is only as big as a woman. Returning from the cemetery by way of
the fields, the sun already low, we join hands, seized with triumphant
delight.
She is wearing a dress of black delaine, and the skirt, the sleeves and
the collar wave in the breeze. Sometimes she turns her radiant face to
me and it seems to grow still brighter when she looks at me. Slightly
stooping, she walks, though among the grass and flowers whose tints and
grace shine in reflection on her forehead and cheeks, she is a
giantess. A butterfly precedes us on our path and alights under our
eyes, but when we come up it takes wing again, and comes down a little
farther and begins all over again; and we smile at the butterfly that
thinks of us.
Inlaid with gold by the slanting sun we lead each other, hand in hand,
as far as the statue of Flora, which once upon a time a lord of the
manor raised on the fringe of the wood. Against the abiding background
of distant heights the goddess stands, half-naked, in the beautiful
ripe light. Her fair hips are draped with a veil of still whiter
stone, like a linen garment. Before the old moss-mellowed pedestal I
pressed Marie desperately to my heart. Then, in the sacred solitude of
the wood, I put my hands upon her, and so that she might be like the
goddess I unfastened her black bodice, lowered the ribbon
shoulder-straps of her chemise, and laid bare her wide and rounded
bosom.
She yielded to the adoration with lowered head, and her eyes
magnificently troubled, red-flushing with blood and sunshine.
I put my lips on hers. Until that day, whenever I kissed her, her lips
submitted. This time she gave me back my long caress, and even her
eyes closed upon it. Then she stands there with her hands crossed on
her glorious throat, her red, wet lips ajar. She stands there, apart,
yet united to me, and her heart on her lips.
She has covered her bosom again. The breeze is suddenly gusty. The
apple trees in the orchards are shaken and scatter bird-like jetsam in
space; and in that bright green paddock yonder the rows of out-hung
linen dance in the sunshine. The sky darkens; the wind rises and
prevails. It was that very day of the gale. It assaults our two
bodies on the flank of the hill; it comes out of infinity and sets
roaring the tawny forest foliage. We can see its agitation behind the
black grille of the trunks. It makes us dizzy to watch the swift
displacement of the gray-veiled sky, and from cloud to cloud a bird
seems hurled, like a stone. We go down towards the bottom of the
valley, clinging to the slope, an offering to the deepest breath of
heaven, driven forward yet holding each other back.
So, gorged with the gale and deafened by the universal concert of space
that goes through our ears, we find sanctuary on the river bank. The
water flows between trees whose highest foliage is intermingled. By a
dark footpath, soft and damp, under the ogive of the branches, we
follow this crystal-paved cloister of green shadow. We come on a
flat-bottomed boat, used by the anglers. I make Marie enter it, and it
yields and groans under her weight. By the strokes of two old oars we
descend the current.
It seems to our hearts and our inventing eyes that the banks take
flight on either side--it is the scenery of bushes and trees which
retreats. _We_--we abide! But the boat grounds among tall reeds.
Marie is half reclining and does not speak. I draw myself towards her
on my knees, and the boat quivers as I do. Her face in silence calls
me; she calls me wholly. With her prostrate body, surrendered and
disordered, she calls me.
I possess her--she is mine! In sublime docility she yields to my
violent caress. Now she is mine--mine forever! Henceforth let what
may befall; let the years go by and the winters follow the summers, she
is mine, and my life is granted me! Proudly I think of the great and
famous lovers whom we resemble. I perceive that there is no recognized
law which can stand against the might of love. And under the transient
wing of the foliage, amid the continuous recessional of heaven and
earth, we repeat "never"; we repeat "always"; and we proclaim it to
eternity.
* * * * * *
The leaves are falling; the year draws near to its end; the wedding is
arranged to take place about Christmas.
That decision was mine; Marie said "yes," as usual, and her father,
absorbed all the day in figures, would emerge from them at night, like
a shipwrecked man, seeing darkly, passive, except on rare occasions
when he had fits of mad obstinacy, and no one knew why.
In the early morning sometimes, when I was climbing Chestnut Hill on my
way to work, Marie would appear before me at a corner, in the pale and
blushing dawn. We would walk on together, bathed in those fresh fires,
and would watch the town at our feet rising again from its ashes. Or,
on my way back, she would suddenly be there, and we would walk side by
side towards her home. We loved each other too much to be able to
talk. A very few words we exchanged just to entwine our voices, and in
speaking of other people we smiled at each other.
One day, about that time, Monsieur the Marquis of Monthyon had the
kindly thought of asking us both to an evening party at the castle,
with several leading people of our quarter. When all the guests were
gathered in a huge gallery, adorned with busts which sat in state
between high curtains of red damask, the Marquis took it into his head
to cut off the electricity. In a lordly way he liked heavy practical
jokes--I was just smiling at Marie, who was standing near me in the
middle of the crowded gallery, when suddenly it was dark. I put out my
arms and drew her to me. She responded with a spirit she had not shown
before, our lips met more passionately than ever, and our single body
swayed among the invisible, ejaculating throng that elbowed and jostled
us. The light flashed again. We had loosed our hold. Ah, it was not
Marie whom I had clasped! The woman fled with a stifled exclamation of
shame and indignation towards him who she believed had embraced her,
and who had seen nothing. Confused, and as though still blind, I
rejoined Marie, but I was myself again with difficulty. In spite of
all, that kiss which had suddenly brought me in naked contact with a
complete stranger remained to me an extraordinary and infernal delight.
Afterwards, I thought I recognized the woman by her blue dress, half
seen at the same time as the gleam of her neck after that brief and
dazzling incident. But there were three of them somewhat alike. I
never knew which of those unknown women concealed within her flesh the
half of the thrill that I could not shake off all the evening.
* * * * * *
There was a large gathering at the wedding. The Marquis and
Marchioness of Monthyon appeared at the sacristy. Brisbille, by good
luck, stayed away. Good sectarian that he was, he only acknowledged
civil marriages. I was a little shamefaced to see march past, taking
their share of the fine and tranquil smile distributed by Marie, some
women who had formerly been my mistresses--Madame Lacaille, nervous,
subtle, mystical; big Victorine and her good-natured rotundity, who had
welcomed me any time and anywhere; and Madeleine Chaine; and slender
Antonia above all, with the Italian woman's ardent and theatrical face,
ebony-framed, and wearing a hat of Parisian splendor. For Antonia is
very elegant since she married Véron. I could not help wincing when I
saw that lanky woman, who had clung to me in venturesome rooms, now
assiduous around us in her ceremonious attire. But how far off and
obliterated all that was!
CHAPTER V
DAY BY DAY
We rearranged the house. We did not alter the general arrangement, nor
the places of the heavy furniture--that would have been too great a
change. But we cast out all the dusty old stuff, the fossilized and
worthless knick-knacks that Mame had accumulated. The photographs on
the walls, which were dying of jaundice and debility, and which no
longer stood for anybody, because of the greatness of time, we cleared
out of their imitation tortoiseshell and buried in the depths of
drawers.
I bought some furniture, and as we sniffed the odor of varnish which
hung about for a long time in the lower room, we said, "This is the
real thing." And, indeed, our home was pretty much like the
middle-class establishments of our quarter and everywhere. Is it not
the only really proud moment here on earth, when we can say, "I, too!"
Years went by. There was nothing remarkable in our life. When I came
home in the evening, Marie, who often had not been out and had kept on
her dressing-gown and plaits, used to say, "There's been nothing to
speak of to-day."
The aeroplanes were appearing at that time. We talked about them, and
saw photographs of them in the papers. One Sunday we saw one from our
window. We had heard the chopped-up noise of its engine expanding over
the sky; and down below, the townsfolk on their doorsteps, raised their
heads towards the ceiling of their streets. Rattling space was marked
with a dot. We kept our eyes on it and saw the great flat and noisy
insect grow bigger and bigger, silhouetting the black of its angles and
partitioned lines against the airy wadding of the clouds. When its
headlong flight had passed, when it had dwindled in our eyes and ears
amid the new world of sounds, which it drew in its train, Marie sighed
dreamily.
"I would like," she said, "to go up in an aeroplane, into the
wind--into the sky!"
One spring we talked a lot about a trip we would take some day. Some
railway posters had been stuck on the walls of the old tin works, that
the Pocard scheme was going to transfigure. We looked at them the day
they were freshly brilliant in their wet varnish and their smell of
paste. We preferred the bill about Corsica, which showed seaside
landscapes, harbors with picturesque people in the foreground and a
purple mountain behind, all among garlands. And later, even when
stiffened and torn and cracking in the wind, that poster attracted us.
One evening, in the kitchen, when we had just come in--there are
memories which mysteriously outlive the rest--and Marie was lighting
the fire, with her hat on and her hands wiped out in the twilight by
the grime of the coal, she said, "We'll make that trip later!"
Sometimes it happened that we went out, she and I, during the week. I
looked about me and shared my thoughts with her. Never very talkative,
she would listen to me. Coming out of the Place de l'Eglise, which
used to affect us so much not long ago, we often used to meet Jean and
Genevieve Trompson, near the sunken post where an old jam pot lies on
the ground. Everybody used to say of these two, "They'll separate,
you'll see; that's what comes of loving each other too much; it was
madness, I always said so." And hearing these things, unfortunately
true, Marie would murmur, with a sort of obstinate gentleness, "Love is
sacred."
Returning, not far from the anachronistic and clandestine Eudo's lair,
we used to hear the coughing parrot. That old bird, worn threadbare,
and of a faded green hue, never ceased to imitate the fits of coughing
which two years before had torn Adolphe Piot's lungs, who died in the
midst of his family under such sad circumstances. Those days we would
return with our ears full of the obstinate clamor of that recording
bird, which had set itself fiercely to immortalize the noise that
passed for a moment through the world, and toss the echoes of an
ancient calamity, of which everybody had ceased to think.
Almost the only people about us are Marthe, my little sister-in-law,
who is six years old, and resembles her sister like a surprising
miniature; my father-in-law, who is gradually annihilating himself; and
Crillon. This last lives always contented in the same shop while time
goes by, like his father and his grandfather, and the cobbler of the
fable, his eternal ancestor. Under his square cap, on the edge of his
glazed niche, he soliloquizes, while he smokes the short and juicy pipe
which joins him in talking and spitting--indeed, he seems to be
answering it. A lonely toiler, his lot is increasingly hard, and
almost worthless. He often comes in to us to do little jobs--mend a
table leg, re-seat a chair, replace a tile. Then he says, "There's
summat I must tell you----"
So he retails the gossip of the district, for it is against his
conscience, as he frankly avows, to conceal what he knows. And Heaven
knows, there is gossip enough in our quarter!--a complete network,
above and below, of quarrels, intrigues and deceptions, woven around
man, woman and the public in general. One says, "It _can't_ be true!"
and then thinks about something else.
And Crillon, in face of all this perversity, all this wrong-doing,
smiles! I like to see that happy smile of innocence on the lowly
worker's face. He is better than I, and he even understands life
better, with his unfailing good sense.
I say to him, "But are there not any bad customs and vices?
Alcoholism, for instance?"
"Yes," says Crillon, "as long as you don't exarrergate it. I don't
like exarrergations, and I find as much of it among the pestimists as
among the opticions. Drink, you say! It's chiefly that folks haven't
enough charitableness, mind you. They blame all these poor devils that
drink and they think themselves clever! And they're envious, too; if
they wasn't that, tell me, would they stand there in stony peterified
silence before the underhand goings-on of bigger folks? That's what it
is, at bottom of us. Let me tell you now. I'll say nothing against
Termite, though he's a poacher, and for the castle folks that's worse
than all, but if yon bandit of a Brisbille weren't the anarchist he is
and frightening everybody, I'd excuse him his dirty nose and even not
taking it out of a pint pot all the week through. It isn't a crime,
isn't only being a good boozer. We've got to look ahead and have a
broad spirit, as Monsieur Joseph says. Tolerantness! We all want it,
eh?"
"You're a good sort," I say.
"I'm a man, like everybody," proudly replies Crillon. "It's not that I
hold by accustomary ideas; I'm not an antiquitary, but I don't like to
single-arise myself. If I'm a botcher in life, it's cos I'm the same
as others--no less," he says, straightening up. And standing still
more erect, he adds, "_Nor_ no more, neither!"
When we are not chatting we read aloud. There is a very fine library
at the factory, selected by Madame Valentine Gozlan from works of an
educational or moral kind, for the use of the staff. Marie, whose
imagination goes further afield than mine, and who has not my
anxieties, directs the reading. She opens a book and reads aloud while
I take my ease, looking at the pastel portrait which hangs just
opposite the window. On the glass which entombs the picture I see the
gently moving and puffing reflection of the fidgety window curtains,
and the face of that glazed portrait becomes blurred with broken
streaks and all kinds of wave marks.
"Ah, these adventures!" Marie sometimes sighs, at the end of a chapter;
"these things that never happen!"
"Thank Heaven," I cry.
"Alas," she replies.
Even when people live together they differ more than they think!
At other times Marie reads to herself, quite silently. I surprise her
absorbed in this occupation. It even happens that she applies herself
thus to poetry. In her set and stooping face her eyes come and go over
the abbreviated lines of the verses. From time to time she raises them
and looks up at the sky, and--vastly further than the visible sky--at
all that escapes from the little cage of words.
And sometimes we are lightly touched with boredom.
* * * * * *
One evening Marie informed me that the canary was dead, and she began
to cry, as she showed me the open cage and the bird which lay at the
bottom, with its feet curled up, as rumpled and stark as the little
yellow plaything of a doll. I sympathized with her sorrow; but her
tears were endless, and I found her emotion disproportionate.
"Come now," I said, "after all, a bird's only a bird, a mere point that
moved a little in a corner of the room. What then? What about the
thousands of birds that die, and the people that die, and the poor?"
But she shook her head, insisted on grieving, tried to prove to me that
it was momentous and that she was right.
For a moment I stood bewildered by this want of understanding; this
difference between her way of feeling and mine. It was a disagreeable
revelation of the unknown. One might often, in regard to small
matters, make a multitude of reflections if one wished; but one does
not wish.
* * * * * *
My position at the factory and in our quarter is becoming gradually
stronger. By reason of a regular gratuity which I received, we are at
last able to put money aside each month, like everybody.
"I say!" cried Crillon, pulling me outside with him, as I was coming in
one evening; "I must let you know that you've been spoken of
spontanially for the Town Council at the next renewment. They're
making a big effort, you know. Monsieur the Marquis is going to stand
for the legislative elections--but we've walked into the other
quarter," said Crillon, stopping dead. "Come back, come back."
We turned right-about-face.
"This patriotic society of Monsieur Joseph," Crillon went on, "has done
a lot of harm to the anarchists. We've all got to let 'em feel our
elbows, that's necessential. You've got a foot in the factory, eh?
You see the workmen; have a crack of talk with 'em. You ingreasiate
yourself with 'em, so's some of 'em'll vote for you. For _them's_ the
danger."
"It's true that I am very sympathetic to them," I murmured, impressed
by this prospect.
Crillon came to a stand in front of the Public Baths. "It's the
seventeenth to-day," he explained; "the day of the month when I takes a
bath. Oh, yes! I know that _you_ go every Thursday; but I'm not of
that mind. You're young, of course, and p'raps you have good reason!
But you take my tip, and hobnob with the working man. We must bestir
ourselves and impell ourselves, what the devil! As for me, I've
finished my political efforts for peace and order. It's _your_ turn!"
He is right. Looking at the ageing man, I note that his framework is
slightly bowed; that his ill-shaven cheeks are humpbacked with little
ends of hair turning into white crystals. In his lowly sphere he has
done his duty. I reflect upon the mite-like efforts of the unimportant
people; of the mountains of tasks performed by anonymity. They are
necessary, these hosts of people so closely resembling each other; for
cities are built upon the poor brotherhood of paving-stones.
He is right, as always. I, who am still young; I, who am on a higher
level than his; I must play a part, and subdue the desire one has to
let things go on as they may.
A sudden movement of will appears in my life, which otherwise proceeds
as usual.
CHAPTER VI
A VOICE IN THE EVENING
I approached the workpeople with all possible sympathy. The toiler's
lot, moreover, raises interesting problems, which one should seek to
understand. So I inform myself in the matter of those around me.
"You want to see the greasers' work? Here I am," said Marcassin,
surnamed Pétrolus. "I'm the lamp-man. Before that I was a greaser.
Is that any better? Can't say. It's here that that goes on,
look--there. My place you'll find at night by letting your nose guide
you."
The truth is that the corner of the factory to which he leads me has an
aggressive smell. The shapeless walls of this sort of grotto are
adorned with shelves full of leaking lamps--lamps dirty as beasts. In
a bucket there are old wicks and other departed things. At the foot of
a wooden cupboard which looks like iron are lamp glasses in paper
shirts; and farther away, groups of oil-drums. All is dilapidated and
ruinous; all is dark in this angle of the great building where light is
elaborated. The specter of a huge window stands yonder. The panes
only half appear; so encrusted are they they might be covered with
yellow paper. The great stones--the rocks--of the walls are
upholstered with a dark deposit of grease, like the bottom of a
stewpan, and nests of dust hang from them. Black puddles gleam on the
floor, with beds of slime from the scraping of the lamps.
There he lives and moves, in his armored tunic encrusted with filth as
dark as coffee-grounds. In his poor claw he grips the chief implement
of his work--a black rag. His grimy hands shine with paraffin, and the
oil, sunk and blackened in his nails, gives them a look of wick ends.
All day long he cleans lamps, and repairs, and unscrews, and fills, and
wipes them. The dirt and the darkness of this population of appliances
he attracts to himself, and he works like a nigger.
"For it's got to be well done," he says, "and even when you're fagged
out, you must keep on rubbing hard."
"There's six hundred and sixty-three, monsieur" (he says "monsieur" as
soon as he embarks on technical explanations), "counting the smart ones
in the fine offices, and the lanterns in the wood-yard, and the night
watchmen. You'll say to me, 'Why don't they have electricity that
lights itself?' It's 'cos that costs money and they get paraffin for
next to nothing, it seems, through a big firm 'at they're in with up
yonder. As for me, I'm always on my legs, from the morning when I'm
tired through sleeping badly, from after dinner when you feel sick with
eating, up to the evening, when you're sick of everything."
The bell has rung, and we go away in company. He has pulled off his
blue trousers and tunic and thrown them into a corner--two objects
which have grown heavy and rusty, like tools. But the dirty shell of
his toil did upholster him a little, and he emerges from it gaunter,
and horribly squeezed within the littleness of a torturing jacket. His
bony legs, in trousers too wide and too short, break off at the bottom
in long and mournful shoes, with hillocks, and resembling crocodiles;
and their soles, being soaked in paraffin, leave oily footprints,
rainbow-hued, in the plastic mud.
Perhaps it is because of this dismal companion towards whom I turn my
head, and whom I see trotting slowly and painfully at my side in the
rumbling grayness of the evening exodus, that I have a sudden and
tragic vision of the people, as in a flash's passing. (I do sometimes
get glimpses of the things of life momentarily.) The dark doorway to
my vision seems torn asunder. Between these two phantoms in front the
sable swarm outspreads. The multitude encumbers the plain that
bristles with dark chimneys and cranes, with ladders of iron planted
black and vertical in nakedness--a plain vaguely scribbled with
geometrical lines, rails and cinder paths--a plain utilized yet barren.
In some places about the approaches to the factory cartloads of clinker
and cinders have been dumped, and some of it continues to burn like
pyres, throwing off dark flames and darker curtains. Higher, the hazy
clouds vomited by the tall chimneys come together in broad mountains
whose foundations brush the ground and cover the land with a stormy
sky. In the depths of these clouds humanity is let loose. The immense
expanse of men moves and shouts and rolls in the same course all
through the suburb. An inexhaustible echo of cries surrounds us; it is
like hell in eruption and begirt by bronze horizons.
At that moment I am afraid of the multitude. It brings something
limitless into being, something which surpasses and threatens us; and
it seems to me that he who is not with it will one day be trodden
underfoot.
My head goes down in thought. I walk close to Marcassin, who gives me
the impression of an escaping animal, hopping through the
darkness--whether because of his name,[1] or his stench, I do not know.
The evening is darkening; the wind is tearing leaves away; it thickens
with rain and begins to nip.
[Footnote 1: _Marcassin_--a young wild boar.--Tr.]
My miserable companion's voice comes to me in shreds. He is trying to
explain to me the law of unremitting toil. An echo of his murmur
reaches my face.
"And that's what one hasn't the least idea of. Because what's nearest
to us, often, one doesn't see it."
"Yes, that's true," I say, rather weary of his monotonous complaining.
I try a few words of consolation, knowing that he was recently married.
"After all, no one comes bothering you in your own little corner.
There's always that. And then, after all, you're going home--your wife
is waiting for you. You're lucky----"
"I've no time; or rather, I've no strength. At nights, when I come
home I'm too tired--I'm too tired, you understand, to be happy, you
see. Every morning I think I shall be, and I'm hoping up till noon;
but at night I'm too knocked out, what with walking and rubbing for
eleven hours; and on Sundays I'm done in altogether with the week.
There's even times that I don't even wash myself when I come in. I
just stay with my hands mucky; and on Sundays when I'm cleaned up, it's
a nasty one when they say to me, 'You're looking well.'"
And while I am listening to the tragicomical recital which he retails,
like a soliloquy, without expecting replies from me--luckily, for I
should not know how to answer--I can, in fact, recall those holidays
when the face of Pétrolus is embellished by the visible marks of water.
"Apart from that," he goes on, withdrawing his chin into the gray
string of his over-large collar; "apart from that, Charlotte, she's
very good. She looks after me, and tidies the house, and it's her that
lights _our_ lamp; and she hides the books carefully away from me so's
I can't grease 'em, and my fingers make prints on 'em like criminals.
She's good, but it doesn't turn out well, same as I've told you, and
when one's unhappy everything's favorable to being unhappy."
He is silent for a while, and then adds by way of conclusion to all he
has said, and to all that one can say, "_My_ father, he caved in at
fifty. And I shall cave in at fifty, p'raps before."
With his thumb he points through the twilight at that sort of indelible
darkness which makes the multitude, "Them others, it's not the same
with them. There's those that want to change everything and keep going
on that notion. There's those that drink and want to drink, and keep
going that way."
I hardly listen to him while he explains to me the grievances of the
different groups of workmen, "The molders, monsieur, them, it's a
matter of the gangs----"
Just now, while looking at the population of the factory, I was almost
afraid; it seemed to me that these toilers were different sorts of
beings from the detached and impecunious people who live around me.
When I look at this one I say to myself, "They are the same; they are
all alike."
In the distance, and together, they strike fear, and their combination
is a menace; but near by they are only the same as this one. One must
not look at them in the distance.
Pétrolus gets excited; he makes gestures; he punches in and punches out
again with his fist, the hat which is stuck askew on his conical head,
over the ears that are pointed like artichoke leaves. He is in front
of me, and each of his soles is pierced by a valve which draws in water
from the saturated ground.
"The unions, monsieur----" he cries to me in the wind, "why, it's
dangerous to point at them. You haven't the right to think any
more--that's what they call liberty. If you're in _them_, you've got
to be agin the parsons--(I'm willing, but what's that got to do with
labor?)--and there's something more serious," the lamp-man adds, in a
suddenly changed voice, "you've got to be agin the army,--the _army_!"
And now the poor slave of the lamp seems to take a resolution. He
stops and devotionally rolling his Don Quixote eyes in his gloomy,
emaciated face, he says, "_I'm_ always thinking about something. What?
you'll say. Well, here it is. I belong to the League of Patriots."
As they brighten still more, his eyes are like two live embers in the
darkness, "Déroulède!" he cries; "that's the man--he's _my_ God!"
Pétrolus raises his voice and gesticulates; he makes great movements in
the night at the vision of his idol, to whom his leanness and his long
elastic arms give him some resemblance. "He's for war; he's for
Alsace-Lorraine, that's what he's for; and above all, he's for nothing
else. Ah, that's all there is to it! The Boches have got to disappear
off the earth, else it'll be us. Ah, when they talk politics to _me_,
I ask 'em, 'Are you for Déroulède, yes or no?' That's enough! I got
my schooling any old how, and I know next to nothing but I reckon it's
grand, only to think like that, and in the Reserves I'm
adjutant[1]--almost an officer, monsieur, just a lamp-man as I am!"
[Footnote 1: A non-com., approximately equivalent to regimental
sergeant-major.--Tr.]
He tells me, almost in shouts and signs, because of the wind across the
open, that his worship dates from a function at which Paul Déroulède
had spoken to him. "He spoke to everybody, an' then he spoke to me, as
close to me as you and me; but it was _him_! I wanted an idea, and he
gave it to me!"
"Very good," I say to him; "very good. You are a patriot, that's
excellent."
I feel that the greatness of this creed surpasses the selfish demands
of labor--although I have never had the time to think much about these
things--and it strikes me as touching and noble.
A last fiery spasm gets hold of Pétrolus as he espies afar Eudo's
pointed house, and he cries that on the great day of revenge there will
be some accounts to settle; and then the fervor of this ideal-bearer
cools and fades, and is spent along the length of the roads. He is now
no more than a poor black bantam which cannot possibly take wing. His
face mournfully awakes to the evening. He shuffles along, bows his
long and feeble spine, and his spirit and his strength exhausted, he
approaches the porch of his house, where Madame Marcassin awaits him.
CHAPTER VII
A SUMMARY
The workmen manifest mistrust and even dislike towards me. Why? I
don't know; but my good intentions have gradually got weary.
One after another, sundry women have occupied my life. Antonia Véron
was first. Her marriage and mine, their hindrance and restriction,
threw us back upon each other as of yore. We found ourselves alone one
day in my house--where nothing ever used to happen, and she offered me
her lips, irresistibly. The appeal of her sensuality was answered by
mine, then, and often later. But the pleasure constantly restored,
which impelled me towards her, always ended in dismal enlightenments.
She remained a capricious and baffling egotist, and when I came away
from her house across the dark suburb among a host of beings vanishing,
like myself, I only brought away the memory of her nervous and
irritating laugh, and that new wrinkle which clung to her mouth like an
implement.
Then younger desires destroyed the old, and gallant adventures begot
one another. It is all over with this one and that one whom I adored.
When I see them again, I wonder that I can say, at one and the same
time, of a being who has not changed, "How I loved her!" and, "How I
have ceased to love her!"
All the while performing as a duty my daily task, all the while taking
suitable precautions so that Marie may not know and may not suffer, I
am looking for the happiness which lives. And truly, when I have a
sense of some new assent wavering and making ready, or when I am on the
way to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equal
to everything!
This fills my life. Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears
it. All my being is agog for chances to shine and to be shared. When
they say in my presence of some young woman that, "she is not happy," a
thrill of joy tears through me.
On Sundays, among the crowds, I have often felt my heart tighten with
distress as I watch the unknown women. Reverie has often held me all
day because of one who has gone by and disappeared, leaving me a clear
vision of her curtained room, and of herself, vibrating like a harp.
She, perhaps, was the one I should have always loved; she whom I seek
gropingly, desperately, from each to the next. Ah, what a delightful
thing to see and to think of a distant woman always is, whoever she may
be!
There are moments when I suffer, and am to be pitied. Assuredly, if
one could read me really, no one would pity me. And yet all men are
like me. If they are gifted with acceptable physique they dream of
headlong adventures, they attempt them, and our heart never stands
still. But no one acknowledges that, no one, ever.
Then, there were the women who turned me a cold shoulder; and among
them all Madame Pierron, a beautiful and genteel woman of twenty-five
years, with her black fillets and her marble profile, who still
retained the obvious awkwardness and vacant eye of young married women.
Tranquil, staid and silent, she came and went and lived, totally blind
to my looks of admiration.
This perfect unconcern aggravated my passion. I remember my pangs one
morning in June, when I saw some feminine linen spread upon the green
hedge within her garden. The delicate white things marshaled there
were waiting, stirred by the leaves and the breeze; so that Spring lent
them frail shape and sweetness--and life. I remember, too, a gaunt
house, scorching in the sun, and a window which flashed and then shut!
The window stayed shut, like a slab. All the world was silent; and
that splendid living being was walled up there. And last, I have
recollection of an evening when, in the bluish and dark green and
chalky landscape of the town and its rounded gardens, I saw that window
lighted up. A narrow glimmer of rose and gold was enframed there, and
I could distinguish, leaning on the sill that overhung the town, in the
heart of that resplendence, a feminine form which stirred before my
eyes in inaccessible forbearance. Long did I watch with shaking knees
that window dawning upon space, as the shepherd watches the rising of
Venus. That evening, when I had come in and was alone for a
moment--Marie was busy below in the kitchen--alone in our unattractive
room, I retired to the starry window, beset by immense thoughts. These
spaces, these separations, these incalculable durations--they all
reduce us to dust, they all have a sort of fearful splendor from which
we seek defense in our hiding.
* * * * * *
I have not retained a definite recollection of a period of jealousy
from which I suffered for a year. From certain facts, certain profound
changes of mood in Marie, it seemed to me that there was some one
between her and me. But beyond vague symptoms and these terrible
reflections on her, I never knew anything. The truth, everywhere
around me, was only a phantom of truth. I experienced acute internal
wounds of humiliation and shame, of rebellion! I struggled feebly, as
well as I could, against a mystery too great for me, and then my
suspicions wore themselves out. I fled from the nightmare, and by a
strong effort I forgot it. Perhaps my imputations had no basis; but it
is curious how one ends in only believing what one wants to believe.
* * * * * *
Something which had been plotting a long while among the Socialist
extremists suddenly produced a stoppage of work at the factory, and
this was followed by demonstrations which rolled through the terrified
town. Everywhere the shutters went up. The business people blotted
out their shops, and the town looked like a tragic Sunday.
"It's a revolution!" said Marie to me, turning pale, as Benoît cried to
us from the step of our porch the news that the workmen were marching.
"How does it come about that you knew nothing at the factory?"
An hour later we learned that a delegation composed of the most
dangerous ringleaders was preceding the army of demonstrators,
commissioned to extort outrageous advantages, with threats, from
Messrs. Gozlan.
Our quarter had a loose and dejected look. People went furtively,
seeking news, and doors half opened regretfully. Here and there groups
formed and lamented in undertones the public authority's lack of
foresight, the insufficient measures for preserving order.
Rumors were peddled about on the progress of the demonstration.
"They're crossing the river."
"They're at the Calvary cross-roads."
"It's a march against the castle!"
I went into Fontan's. He was not there, and some men were talking in
the twilight of the closed shutters.
"The Baroness is in a dreadful way. She's seen a dark mass in the
distance. Some young men of the aristocracy have armed themselves and
are guarding her. She says it's another Jacquerie[1] rising!"
[Footnote 1: A terrible insurrection of the French peasantry in
1358.--Tr.]
"Ah, my God! What a mess!" said Crillon.
"It's the beginning of the end!" asserted old Daddy Ponce, shaking his
grayish-yellow forehead, all plaited with wrinkles.
Time went by--still no news. What are they doing yonder? What shall
we hear next?
At last, towards three o'clock Postaire is framed in the doorway,
sweating and exultant. "It's over! It's all right, my lad!" he gasps;
"I can vouch for it that they all arrived together at the Gozlans'
villa. Messrs. Gozlan were there. The delegates, I can vouch for it
that they started shouting and threatening, my lad! 'Never mind that!'
says one of the Messrs. Gozlan, 'let's have a drink first; I'll vouch
for it we'll talk better after!' There was a table and champagne, I'll
vouch for it. They gave 'em it to drink, and then some more and then
some more. I'll vouch for it they sent themselves something down, my
lad, into their waistcoats. I can vouch for it that the bottles of
champagne came like magic out of the ground. Fontan kept always
bringing them as though he was coining them. Got to admit it was an
extra-double-special guaranteed champagne, that you want to go cautious
with. So then, after three-quarters of an hour, nearly all the
deputation were drunk. They spun round, tongue-tied, and embraced each
other,--I can vouch for it. There were some that stuck it, but they
didn't count, my lad! The others didn't even know what they'd come
for. And the bosses; they'd had a fright, and they didn't half wriggle
and roar with laughing--I'll vouch for it, my lad! An' then,
to-morrow, if they want to start again, there'll be troops here!"
Joyful astonishment--the strike had been drowned in wine! And we
repeated to each other, "To-morrow there'll be the military!"
"Ah!" gaped Crillon, rolling wonder-struck eyes, "That's clever! Good;
that's clever, that is! Good, old chap----"
He laughed a heavy, vengeful laugh, and repeated his familiar refrain
full-throated: "The sovereign people that can't stand on its own
legs!"
By the side of a few faint-hearted citizens who had already, since the
morning, modified their political opinions, a great figure rises before
my eyes--Fontan. I remember that night, already long ago, when a
chance glimpse through the vent-hole of his cellar showed me shiploads
of bottles of champagne heaped together, and pointed like shells. For
some future day he foresaw to-day's victory. He is really clever, he
sees clearly and he sees far. He has rescued law and order by a sort
of genius.
The constraint which has weighed all day on our gestures and words
explodes in delight. Noisily we cast off that demeanor of conspirators
which has bent our shoulders since morning. The windows that were
closed during the weighty hours of the insurrection are opened wide;
the houses breathe again.
"We're saved from that gang!" people say, when they approach each
other.
This feeling of deliverance pervades the most lowly. On the step of
the little blood-red restaurant I spy Monsieur Mielvaque, hopping for
joy. He is shivering, too, in his thin gray coat, cracked with
wrinkles, that looks like wrapping paper; and one would say that his
dwindled face had at long last caught the hue of the folios he
desperately copies among his long days and his short nights, to pick up
some sprigs of extra pay. There he stands, not daring to enter the
restaurant (for a reason he knows too well); but how delighted he is
with the day's triumph for society! And Mademoiselle Constantine, the
dressmaker, incurably poor and worn away by her sewing-machine, is
overjoyed. She opens wide the eyes which seem eternally full of tears,
and in the grayish abiding half-mourning of imperfect cleanliness, in
pallid excitement, she claps her hands.
Marie and I can hear the furious desperate hammering of Brisbille in
his forge, and we begin to laugh as we have not laughed for a long
time.
At night, before going to sleep, I recall my former democratic fancies.
Thank God, I have escaped from a great peril! I can see it clearly by
the terror which the workmen's menace spread in decent circles, and by
the universal joy which greeted their recoil! My deepest tendencies
take hold of me again for good, and everything settles down as before.
* * * * * *
Much time has gone by. It is ten years now since I was married, and in
that lapse of time there is hardly a happening that I remember, unless
it be the disillusion of the death of Marie's rich godmother, who left
us nothing. There was the failure of the Pocard scheme, which was only
a swindle and ruined many small people. Politics pervaded the scandal,
while certain people hurried with their money to Monsieur Boulaque,
whose scheme was much more safe and substantial. There was also my
father-in-law's illness and his death, which was a great shock to
Marie, and put us into black clothes.
I have not changed. Marie _has_ somewhat. She has got stouter; her
eyelids look tired and red, and she buries herself in silences. We are
no longer quite in accord in details of our life. She who once always
said "Yes," is now primarily disposed to say "No." If I insist she
defends her opinion, obstinately, sourly; and sometimes dishonestly.
For example, in the matter of pulling down the partition downstairs, if
people had heard our high voices they would have thought there was a
quarrel. Following some of our discussions, she keeps her face
contracted and spiteful, or assumes the martyr's air, and sometimes
there are moments of hatred between us.
Often she says, while talking of something else, "Ah, if we had had a
child, all would have been different!"
I am becoming personally negligent, through a sort of idleness, against
which I have not sufficient grounds for reaction. When we are by
ourselves, at meal times, my hands are sometimes questionable. From
day to day, and from month to month, I defer going to the dentist and
postpone the attention required. I am allowing my molars to get
jagged.
Marie never shows any jealousy, nor even suspicion about my personal
adventures. Her trust is almost excessive! She is not very
far-seeing, or else I am nothing very much to her, and I have a grudge
against her for this indifference.
And now I see around me women who are too young to love me. That most
positive of obstacles, the age difference, begins to separate me from
the amorous. And yet I am not surfeited with love, and I yearn towards
youth! Marthe, my little sister-in-law, said to me one day, "Now that
you're old----" That a child of fifteen years, so freshly dawned and
really new, can bring herself to pass this artless judgment on a man of
thirty-five--that is fate's first warning, the first sad day which
tells us at midsummer that winter will come.
One evening, as I entered the room, I indistinctly saw Marie, sitting
and musing by the window. As I came in she got up--it was Marthe! The
light from the sky, pale as a dawn, had blenched the young girl's
golden hair and turned the trace of a smile on her cheek into something
like a wrinkle. Cruelly, the play of the light showed her face faded
and her neck flabby; and because she had been yawning, even her eyes
were watery, and for some seconds the lids were sunk and reddened.
The resemblance of the two sisters tortured me. This little Marthe,
with her luxurious and appetizing color, her warm pink cheeks and moist
lips; this plump adolescent whose short skirt shows her curving calves,
is an affecting picture of what Marie was. It is a sort of terrible
revelation. In truth Marthe resembles, more than the Marie of to-day
does, the Marie whom I formerly loved; the Marie who came out of the
unknown, whom I saw one evening sitting on the rose-tree seat, shining,
silent--in the presence of love.
It required a great effort on my part not to try, weakly and vainly, to
approach Marthe--the impossible dream, the dream of dreams! She has a
little love affair with a youngster hardly molted into adolescence, and
rather absurd, whom one catches sight of now and again as he slips away
from her side; and that day when she sang so much in spite of herself,
it was because a little rival was ill. I am as much a stranger to her
girlish growing triumph and to her thoughts as if I were her enemy!
One morning when she was capering and laughing, flower-crowned, at the
doorstep, she looked to me like a being from another world.
* * * * * *
One winter's day, when Marie had gone out and I was arranging my
papers, I found a letter I had written not long before, but had not
posted, and I threw the useless document on the fire. When Marie came
back in the evening, she settled herself in front of the fire to dry
herself, and to revive it for the room's twilight; and the letter,
which had been only in part consumed, took fire again. And suddenly
there gleamed in the night a shred of paper with a shred of my
writing--"_I love you as much as you love me_!"
And it was so clear, the inscription that flamed in the darkness, that
it was not worth while even to attempt an explanation.
We could not speak, nor even look at each other! In the fatal
communion of thought which seized us just then, we turned aside from
each other, even shadow-veiled as we were. We fled from the truth! In
these great happenings we become strangers to each other for the reason
that we never knew each other profoundly. We are vaguely separated on
earth from everybody else, but we are mightily distant from our
nearest.
* * * * * *
After all these things, my former life resumed its indifferent course.
Certainly I am not so unhappy as they who have the bleeding wound of a
bereavement or remorse, but I am not so delighted with life as I once
hoped to be. Ah, men's love and women's beauty are too short-lived in
this world; and yet, is it not only thereby that we and they exist? It
might be said that love, so pure a thing, the only one worth while in
life, is a crime, since it is always punished sooner or later. I do
not understand. We are a pitiful lot; and everywhere about us--in our
movements, within our walls, and from hour to hour, there is a stifling
mediocrity. Fate's face is gray.
Notwithstanding, my personal position has established itself and
progressively improved. I am getting three hundred and sixty francs a
month, and besides, I have a share in the profits of the litigation
office--about fifty francs a month. It is a year and a half since I
was stagnating in the little glass office, to which Monsieur Mielvaque
has been promoted, succeeding me. Nowadays they say to me, "You're
lucky!" They envy me--who once envied so many people. It astonishes
me at first, then I get used to it.
I have restored my political plans, but this time I have a rational and
normal policy in view. I am nominated to succeed Crillon in the Town
Council. There, no doubt, I shall arrive sooner or later. I continue
to become a personality by the force of circumstances, without my
noticing it, and without any real interest in me on the part of those
around me.
Quite a piece of my life has now gone by. When sometimes I think of
that, I am surprised at the length of the time elapsed; at the number
of the days and the years that are dead. It has come quickly, and
without much change in myself on the other hand; and I turn away from
that vision, at once real and supernatural. And yet, in spite of
myself, my future appears before my eyes--and its end. My future will
resemble my past; it does so already. I can dimly see all my life,
from one end to the other, all that I am, all that I shall have been.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BRAWLER
At the time of the great military maneuvers of September, 1913, Viviers
was an important center of the operations. All the district was
brightened with a swarming of red and blue and with martial ardor.
Alone and systematically, Brisbille was the reviler. From the top of
Chestnut Hill, where we were watching a strategical display, he pointed
at the military mass. "Maneuvers, do they call them? I could die of
laughing! The red caps have dug trenches and the white-band caps have
bunged 'em up again. Take away the War Office, and you've only kids'
games left."
"It's war!" explained an influential military correspondent, who was
standing by.
Then the journalist talked with a colleague about the Russians.
"The Russians!" Brisbille broke in; "when they've formed a
republic----"
"He's a simpleton," said the journalist, smiling.
The inebriate jumped astride his hobby horse. "War me no war, it's all
lunacy! And look, look--look at those red trousers that you can see
miles away! They must do it on purpose for soldiers to be killed, that
they don't dress 'em in the color of nothing at all!"
A lady could not help breaking in here: "What?" Change our little
soldiers' red trousers? Impossible! There's no good reason for it.
They would never consent! They would rebel."
"Egad!" said a young officer; "why we should all throw up our
commissions! And any way, the red trousers are not the danger one
thinks. If they were as visible as all that, the High Command would
have noticed it and would have taken steps--just for field service, and
without interfering with the parade uniform!"
The regimental sergeant-major cut the discussion short as he turned to
Brisbille with vibrant scorn and said, "When the Day of Revenge comes,
_we_ shall have to be there to defend _you_!"
And Brisbille only uttered a shapeless reply, for the sergeant-major
was an athlete, and gifted with a bad temper, especially when others
were present.
The castle was quartering a Staff. Hunting parties were given for the
occasion in the manorial demesne, and passing processions of bedizened
guests were seen. Among the generals and nobles shone an Austrian
prince of the blood royal, who bore one of the great names in the
Almanach de Gotha, and who was officially in France to follow the
military operations.
The presence of the Baroness's semi-Imperial guest caused a great
impression of historic glamour to hover over the country. His name was
repeated; his windows were pointed out in the middle of the principal
front, and one thought himself lucky if he saw the curtains moving.
Many families of poor people detached themselves from their quarters in
the evenings to take up positions before the wall behind which he was.
Marie and I, we were close to him twice.
One evening after dinner, we met him as one meets any passer-by among
the rest. He was walking alone, covered by a great gray waterproof.
His felt hat was adorned with a short feather. He displayed the
characteristic features of his race--a long turned-down nose and a
receding chin.
When he had gone by, Marie and I said, both at the same time, and a
little dazzled, "An eagle!"
We saw him again at the end of a stag-hunt. They had driven a stag
into the Morteuil forest. The _mort_ took place in a clearing in the
park, near the outer wall. The Baroness, who always thought of the
townsfolk, had ordered the little gate to be opened which gives into
this part of the demesne, so that the public could be present at the
spectacle.
It was imperious and pompous. The scene one entered, on leaving the
sunny fields and passing through the gate, was a huge circle of dark
foliage in the heart of the ancient forest. At first, one saw only the
majestic summits of mountainous trees, like peaks and globes lost amid
the heavens, which on all sides overhung the clearing and bathed it in
twilight almost green.
In this lordly solemnity of nature, down among the grass, moss and dead
wood, there flowed a contracted but brilliant concourse around the
final preparations for the execution of the stag.
The animal was kneeling on the ground, weak and overwhelmed. We
pressed round, and eyes were thrust forward between heads and shoulders
to see him. One could make out the gray thicket of his antlers, his
great lolling tongue, and the enormous throb of his heart, agitating
his exhausted body. A little wounded fawn clung to him, bleeding
abundantly, flowing like a spring.
Round about it the ceremony was arranged in several circles. The
beaters, in ranks, made a glaring red patch in the moist green
atmosphere. The hunters, men and women, all dismounted, in scarlet
coats and black hats, crowded together. Apart, the saddle and tackle
horses snorted, with creaking of leather and jingle of metal. Kept at
a respectful distance by a rope extended hastily on posts, the
inquisitive crowd flowed and increased every instant.
The blood which issued from the little fawn made a widening pool, and
one saw the ladies of the hunt, who came to look as near as possible,
pluck up their habits so that they would not tread in it. The sight of
the great stag crushed by weariness, gradually drooping his branching
head, tormented by the howls of the hounds which the whipper-in held
back with difficulty, and that of the little one, cowering beside him
and dying with gaping throat, would have been touching had one given
way to sentiment.
I noticed that the imminent slaying of the stag excited a certain
curious fever. Around me the women and young girls especially elbowed
and wriggled their way to the front, and shuddered, and were glad.
They cut the throats of the beasts, the big and the little, amid
absolute and religious silence, the silence of a sacrament. Madame
Lacaille vibrated from head to foot. Marie was calm, but there was a
gleam in her eyes; and little Marthe, who was hanging on to me, dug her
nails into my arm. The prince was prominent on our side, watching the
last act of the run. He had remained in the saddle. He was more
splendidly red than the others--empurpled, it seemed, by reflections
from a throne. He spoke in a loud voice, like one who is accustomed to
govern and likes to discourse; and his outline had the very form of
bidding. He expressed himself admirably in our language, of which he
knew the intimate graduations. I heard him saying, "These great
maneuvers, after all, they're a sham. It's music-hall war, directed by
scene-shifters. Hunting's better, because there's blood. We get too
much unaccustomed to blood, in our prosaic, humanitarian, and bleating
age. Ah, as long as the nations love hunting, I shall not despair of
them!"
Just then, the crash of the horns and the thunder of the pack released
drowned all other sounds. The prince, erect in his stirrups, and
raising his proud head and his tawny mustache above the bloody and
cringing mob of the hounds, expanded his nostrils and seemed to sniff a
battlefield.
The next day, when a few of us were chatting together in the street
near the sunken post where the old jam-pot lies, Benoît came up, full
of a tale to tell. Naturally it was about the prince. Benoît was
dejected and his lips were drawn and trembling. "He's killed a bear!"
said he, with glittering eye; "you should have seen it, ah! a tame
bear, of course. Listen--he was coming back from hunting with the
Marquis and Mademoiselle Berthe and some people behind. And he comes
on a wandering showman with a performing bear. A simpleton with long
black hair like feathers, and a bear that sat on its rump and did
little tricks and wore a belt. The prince had got his gun. I don't
know how it came about but the prince he got an idea. He said, 'I'd
like to kill that bear, as I do in my own hunting. Tell me, my good
fellow, how much shall I pay you for firing at the beast? You'll not
be a loser, I promise you.' The simpleton began to tremble and lift
his arms up in the air. He loved his bear! 'But my bear's the same as
my brother!' he says. Then do you know what the Marquis of Monthyon
did? He just simply took out his purse and opened it and put it under
the chap's nose; and all the smart hunting folk they laughed to see how
the simpleton changed when he saw all those bank notes. And naturally
he ended by nodding that it was a bargain, and he'd even seen so many
of the rustlers that he turned from crying to laughing! Then the
prince loaded his gun at ten paces from the bear and killed it with one
shot, my boy; just when he was rocking left and right, and sitting up
like a man. You ought to have seen it! There weren't a lot there; but
_I_ was there!"
The story made an impression. No one spoke at first. Then some one
risked the opinion. "No doubt they do things like that in Hungary or
Bohemia, or where he reigns. You wouldn't see it here," he added,
innocently.
"He's from Austria," Tudor corrected.
"Yes," muttered Crillon, "but whether he's Austrian or whether he's
Bohemian or Hungarian, he's a grandee, so he's got the right to do what
he likes, eh?"
Eudo looked as if he would intervene at this point and was seeking
words. (Not long before that he had had the queer notion of sheltering
and nursing a crippled hind that had escaped from a previous run, and
his act had given great displeasure in high places.) So as soon as he
opened his mouth we made him shut it. The idea of Eudo in judgment on
princes!
And the rest lowered their heads and nodded and murmured, "Yes, he's a
grandee."
And the little phrase spread abroad, timidly and obscurely.
* * * * * *
When All Saints' Day came round, many of the distinguished visitors at
the castle were still there. Every year that festival gives us
occasion for an historical ceremony on the grand scale. At two o'clock
all the townsfolk that matter gather with bunches of flowers on the
esplanade or in front of the cemetery half-way up Chestnut Hill, for
the ceremony and an open air service.
Early in the afternoon I betook myself with Marie to the scene. I put
on a fancy waistcoat of black and white check and my new patent leather
boots, which make me look at them. It is fine weather on this Sunday
of Sundays, and the bells are ringing. Everywhere the hurrying crowd
climbs the hill--peasants in flat caps, working families in their best
clothes, young girls with faces white and glossy as the bridal satin
which is the color of their thoughts, young men carrying jars of
flowers. All these appear on the esplanade, where graying lime trees
are also in assembly. Children are sitting on the ground.
Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, in black, with his supremely distinguished air,
goes by holding his mother's arm. I bow deeply to them. He points at
the unfolding spectacle as he passes and says, "It is our race's
festival."
The words made me look more seriously at the scene before my eyes--all
this tranquil and contemplative stir in the heart of festive nature.
Reflection and the vexations of my life have mellowed my mind. The
idea at last becomes clear in my brain of an entirety, an immense
multitude in space, and infinite in time, a multitude of which I am an
integral part, which has shaped me in its image, which continues to
keep me like it, and carries me along its control; my own people.
Baroness Grille, in the riding habit that she almost always wears when
mixing with the people, is standing near the imposing entry to the
cemetery. Monsieur the Marquis of Monthyon is holding aloft his
stately presence, his handsome and energetic face. Solid and sporting,
with dazzling shirt cuffs and fine ebon-black shoes, he parades a
smile. There is an M.P. too, a former Minister, very assiduous, who
chats with the old duke. There are the Messrs. Gozlan and famous
people whose names one does not know. Members of the Institute of the
great learned associations, or people fabulously wealthy.
Not far from these groups, which are divided from the rest by a scarlet
barrier of beaters and the flashing chain of their slung horns, arises
Monsieur Fontan. The huge merchant and café-owner occupies an
intermediate and isolated place between principals and people. His
face is disposed in fat white tiers, like a Buddha's belly.
Monumentally motionless he says nothing at all, but he tranquilly spits
all around him. He radiates saliva.
And for this ceremony, which seems like an apotheosis, all the notables
of our quarter are gathered together, as well as those of the other
quarter, who seem different and are similar.
We elbow the ordinary types. Apolline goes crabwise. She is in new
things, and has sprinkled Eau-de-Cologne on her skin; her eye is
bright; her face well-polished; her ears richly adorned. She is always
rather dirty, and her wrists might be branches, but she has cotton
gloves. There are some shadows in the picture, for Brisbille has come
with his crony, Termite, so that his offensive and untidy presence may
be a protest. There is another blot--a working man's wife, who speaks
at their meetings; people point at her. "What's that woman doing
here?"
"She doesn't believe in God," says some one.
"Ah," says a mother standing by, "that's because she has no children."
"Yes, she's got two."
"Then," says the poor woman, "it's because they've never been ill."
Here is little Antoinette and the old priest is holding her hand. She
must be fifteen or sixteen years old by now, and she has not grown--or,
at least, one has not noticed it. Father Piot, always white, gentle
and murmurous, has shrunk a little; more and more he leans towards the
tomb. Both of them proceed in tiny steps.
"They're going to cure her, it seems. They're seeing to it seriously."
"Yes--the extraordinary secret remedy they say they're going to try."
"No, it's not that now. It's the new doctor who's come to live here,
and he says, they say, that he's going to see about it."
"Poor little angel!"
The almost blind child, whose Christian name alone one knows, and whose
health is the object of so much solicitude, goes stiffly by, as if she
were dumb also, and deaf to all the prayers that go on with her.
After the service some one comes forward and begins to speak. He is an
old man, an officer of the Legion of Honor; his voice is weak but his
face noble.
He speaks of the Dead, whose day this is. He explains to us that we
are not separated from them; not only by reason of the future life and
our sacred creeds, but because our life on earth must be purely and
simply a continuation of theirs. We must do as they did, and believe
what they believed, else shall we fall into error and utopianism. We
are all linked to each other and with the past; we are bound together
by an entirety of traditions and precepts. Our normal destiny, so
adequate to our nature, must be allowed to fulfill itself along the
indicated path, without hearkening to the temptations of novelty, of
hate, of envy--of envy above all, that social cancer, that enemy of the
great civic virtue--Discipline.
He ceases. The echo of the great magnificent words floats in the
silence. Everybody does not understand all that has just been said;
but all have a deep impression that the text is one of simplicity, of
moderation, of obedience, and foreheads move altogether in the breath
of the phrases like a field in the breeze.
"Yes," says Crillon, pensively, "he speaks to confection, that
gentleman. All that one thinks about, you can see it come out of his
mouth. Common sense and reverence, we're attached to 'em by
something."
"We are attached to them by orderliness," says Joseph Bonéas.
"The proof that it's the truth," Crillon urges, "is that it's in the
dissertions of everybody."
"To be sure!" says Benoît, going a bit farther, "since everybody says
it, and it's become a general repetition!"
The good old priest, in the center of an attentive circle, is
unstringing a few observations. "Er, hem," he says, "one should not
blaspheme. Ah, if there were not a good God, there would be many
things to say; but so long as there is a good God, all that happens is
adorable, as Monseigneur said. We shall make things better, certainly.
Poverty and public calamities and war, we shall change all that, we
shall set those things to rights, er, hem! But let us alone, above
all, and don't concern yourselves with it--you would spoil everything,
my children. _We_ shall do all that, but not immediately."
"Quite so, quite so," we say in chorus.
"Can we be happy all at once," the old man goes on; "change misery into
joy, and poverty into riches? Come now, it's not possible, and I'll
tell you why; if it had been as easy as all that, it would have been
done already, wouldn't it?"
The bells begin to ring. The four strokes of the hour are just falling
from the steeple which the rising mists touch already, though the
evening makes use of it last of all; and just then one would say that
the church is beginning to talk even while it is singing.
The important people get onto their horses or into their carriages and
go away--a cavalcade where uniforms gleam and gold glitters. We can
see the procession of the potentates of the day outlined on the crest
of the hill which is full of our dead. They climb and disappear, one
by one. _Our_ way is downward; but we form--they above and we
below--one and the same mass, all visible together.
"It's fine!" says Marie, "it looks as if they were galloping over us!"
They are the shining vanguard that protects us, the great eternal
framework which upholds our country, the forces of the mighty past
which illuminate it and protect it against enemies and revolutions.
And we, we are all alike, in spite of our different minds; alike in the
greatness of our common interests and even in the littleness of our
personal aims. I have become increasingly conscious of this close
concord of the masses beneath a huge and respect-inspiring hierarchy.
It permits a sort of lofty consolation and is exactly adapted to a life
like mine. This evening, by the light of the setting sun, I see it and
read it and admire it.
All together we go down by the fields where tranquil corn is growing,
by the gardens and orchards where homely trees are making ready their
offerings--the scented blossom which lends, the fruit which gives
itself. They form an immense plain, sloping and darkling, with brown
undulations under the blue which now alone is becoming green. A little
girl, who has come from the spring, puts down her bucket and stands at
the roadside like a post, looking with all her eyes. She looks at the
marching multitude with beaming curiosity. Her littleness embraces
that immensity, because it is all a part of Order. A peasant who has
stuck to his work in spite of the festival and is bent over the deep
shadows of his field, raises himself from the earth which is so like
him, and turns towards the golden sun the shining monstrance of his
face.
* * * * * *
But what is this--this sort of madman, who stands in the middle of the
road and looks as if, all by himself, he would bar the crowd's passage?
We recognize Brisbille, swaying tipsily in the twilight. There is an
eddy and a muttering in the flow.
"D'you want to know where all that's leading you?" he roars, and
nothing more can be heard but his voice. "It's leading you to hell!
It's the old rotten society, with the profiteering of all them that
can, and the stupidity of the rest! To hell, I tell you! To-morrow
look out for yourselves! To-morrow!"
A woman's voice cries from out of the shadows, in a sort of scuffle,
"Be quiet, wicked man! You've no right to frighten folks!"
But the drunkard continues to shout full-throated, "To-morrow!
To-morrow! D'you think things will always go on like that? You're fit
for killing! To hell!"
Some people are impressed and disappear into the evening. Those who
are marking time around the obscure fanatic are growling, "He's not
only bad, he's mad, the dirty beast!"
"It's disgraceful," says the young curate.
Brisbille goes up to him. "_You_ tell me, then, _you_, what'll happen
very soon--Jesuit, puppet, land-shark! We know you, you and your
filthy, poisonous trade!"
"_Say that again_!"
It was I who said that. Leaving Marie's arm instinctively I sprang
forward and planted myself before the sinister person. After the
horrified murmur which followed the insult, a great silence had fallen
on the scene.
Astounded, and his face suddenly filling with fear, Brisbille stumbles
and beats a retreat.
The crowd regains confidence, and laughs, and congratulates me, and
reviles the back of the man who is sinking in the stream.
"You were fine!" Marie said to me when I took her arm again, slightly
trembling.
I returned home elated by my energetic act, still all of a tremor,
proud and happy. I have obeyed the prompting of my blood. It was the
great ancestral instinct which made me clench my fists and throw myself
bodily, like a weapon, upon the enemy of all.
After dinner, naturally, I went to the military tattoo, at which, by an
unpardonable indifference, I have not regularly been present, although
these patriotic demonstrations have been organized by Monsieur Joseph
Bonéas and his League of Avengers. A long-drawn shudder, shrill and
sonorous, took flight through the main streets, filling the spectators
and especially the young folks, with enthusiasm for the great and
glorious deeds of the future. And Pétrolus, in the front row of the
crowd, was striding along in the crimson glow of the fairy-lamps--clad
in a visionary uniform of red.
I remember that I talked a great deal that evening in our quarter, and
then in the house. Our quarter is something like all towns, something
like all country-sides, something like it is everywhere--it is a
foreshortened picture of all societies in the old universe, as my life
is a picture of life.
CHAPTER IX
THE STORM
"There's going to be war," said Benoît, on our doorsteps in July.
"No," said Crillon, who was there, too, "I know well enough there'll be
war some day, seeing there's always been war after war since the world
was a world, and therefore there'll be another; but just now--at
once--a big job like that? Nonsense! It's not true. No."
Some days went by, tranquilly, as days do. Then the great story
reappeared, increased and branched out in all directions. Austria,
Serbia, the ultimatum, Russia. The notion of war was soon everywhere.
You could see it distracting men and slackening their pace in the going
and coming of work. One divined it behind the doors and windows of the
houses.
One Saturday evening, when Marie and I--like most of the French--did
not know what to think, and talked emptily, we heard the town crier,
who performs in our quarter, as in the villages.
"Ah!" she said.
We went out and saw in the distance the back of the man who was tapping
a drum. His smock was ballooned. He seemed pushed aslant by the wind,
stiffening himself in the summer twilight to sound his muffled roll.
Although we could not see him well and scarcely heard him, his progress
through the street had something grand about it.
Some people grouped in a corner said to us, "The mobilization."
No other word left their lips. I went from group to group to form an
opinion, but people drew back with sealed faces, or mechanically raised
their arms heavenwards. And we knew no better what to think now that
we were at last informed.
We went back into the court, the passage, the room, and then I said to
Marie, "I go on the ninth day--a week, day after to-morrow--to my depot
at Motteville."
She looked at me, as though doubtful.
I took my military pay book from the wardrobe and opened it on the
table. Leaning against each other, we looked chastely at the red page
where the day of my joining was written, and we spelled it all out as
if we were learning to read.
Next day and the following days everybody went headlong to meet the
newspapers. We read in them--and under their different titles they
were then all alike--that a great and unanimous upspringing was
electrifying France, and the little crowd that we were felt itself also
caught by the rush of enthusiasm and resolution. We looked at each
other with shining eyes of approval. I, too, I heard myself cry, "At
last!" All our patriotism rose to the surface.
Our quarter grew fevered. We made speeches, we proclaimed the moral
verities--or explained them. The echoes of vast or petty news went by
in us. In the streets, the garrison officers walked, grown taller,
disclosed. It was announced that Major de Trancheaux had rejoined, in
spite of his years, and that the German armies had attacked us in three
places at once. We cursed the Kaiser and rejoiced in his imminent
chastisement. In the middle of it all France appeared personified, and
we reflected on her great life, now suddenly and nakedly exposed.
"It was easy to foresee this war, eh?" said Crillon.
Monsieur Joseph Bonéas summarized the world-drama. We were all pacific
to the point of stupidity--little saints, in fact. No one in France
spoke any longer of revenge, nobody wished it, nobody thought of as
much as getting ready for war. We had all of us in our hearts only
dreams of universal happiness and progress, the while Germany secretly
prepared everything for hurling herself on us. "But," he added, he
also carried away, "she'll get it in the neck, and that's all about
it!"
The desire for glory was making its way, and one cloudily imagines
Napoleon reborn.
In these days, only the mornings and evenings returned as usual,
everything else was upside down, and seemed temporary. The workers
moved and talked in a desert of idleness, and one saw invisible changes
in the scenery of our valley and the cavity of our sky.
We saw the Cuirassiers of the garrison go away in the evening. The
massive platoons of young-faced horsemen, whose solemn obstruction
heavily hammered the stones of the street, were separated by horses
loaded with bales of forage, by regimental wagons and baggage-carts,
which rattled unendingly. We formed a hedgerow along the twilight
causeways and watched them all disappear. Suddenly we cheered them.
The thrill that went through horses and men straightened them up and
they went away bigger--as if they were coming back!
"It's magnificent, how warlike we are in France!" said fevered Marie,
squeezing my arm with all her might.
The departures, of individuals or groups, multiplied. A sort of
methodical and inevitable tree-blazing--conducted sometimes by the
police--ransacked the population and thinned it from day to day around
the women.
Increasing hurly-burly was everywhere--all the complicated measures so
prudently foreseen and so interdependent; the new posters on top of the
old ones, the requisitioning of animals and places, the committees and
the allowances, the booming and momentous gales of motor-cars filled
with officers and aristocratic nurses--so many lives turned inside out
and habits cut in two. But hope bedazzled all anxieties and stopped up
the gaps for the moment. And we admired the beauty of military
orderliness and France's preparation.
Sometimes, at windows or street-corners, there were apparitions--people
covered with new uniforms. We had known them in vain, and did not know
them at first. Count d'Orchamp, lieutenant in the Active Reserves, and
Dr. Bardoux, town-major, displaying the cross of the Legion of Honor,
found themselves surrounded by respectful astonishment. Adjutant
Marcassin rose suddenly to the eyes as though he had come out of the
earth; Marcassin, brand-new, rigid, in blue and red, with his gold
stripe. One saw him afar, fascinating the groups of urchins who a week
ago threw stones at him.
"The old lot--the little ones, and the middling ones and the big
ones--all getting new clothes!" says a triumphant woman of the people.
Another said it was the coming of a new reign.
* * * * * *
From the Friday onwards I was engrossed by my own departure. It was
that day that we went to buy boots. We admired the beautiful
arrangement of the Cinema Hall as a Red Cross hospital.
"They've thought of everything!" said Marie, examining the collection
of beds, furniture, and costly chests, rich and perfected material, all
arranged with delighted and very French animation by a team of
attendants who were under the orders of young Varennes, a pretty
hospital sergeant, and Monsieur Lucien Gozlan, superintendent officer.
A center of life had created itself around the hospital. An open air
buffet had been set up in a twinkling. Apolline came there--since the
confusion of the mobilization all days were Sundays for her--to provide
herself with nips. We saw her hobbling along broadwise, hugging her
half-pint measure in her short turtle-like arms, the carrot slices of
her cheek-bones reddening as she already staggered with hope.
On our way back, as we passed in front of Fontan's café, we caught a
glimpse of Fontan himself, assiduous, and his face lubricated with a
smile. Around him they were singing the Marseillaise in the smoke. He
had increased his staff, and he himself was making himself two, serving
and serving. His business was growing by the fatality of things.
When we got back to our street, it was deserted, as of yore. The
faraway flutterings of the Marseillaise were dying. We heard
Brisbille, drunk, hammering with all his might on his anvil. The same
old shadows and the same lights were taking their places in the houses.
It seemed that ordinary life was coming back as it had been into our
corner after six days of supernatural disturbance, and that the past
was already stronger than the present.
Before mounting our steps we saw, crouching in front of his shop door
by the light of a lamp that was hooded by whirling mosquitoes, the mass
of Crillon, who was striving to attach to a cudgel a flap for the
crushing of flies. Bent upon his work, his gaping mouth let hang the
half of a globular and shining tongue. Seeing us with our parcels, he
threw down his tackle, roared a sigh, and said, "That wood! It's
touchwood, yes. A butter-wire's the only thing for cutting that!"
He stood up, discouraged; then changing his idea, and lighted from
below by his lamp so that he flamed in the evening, he extended his
tawny-edged arm and struck me on the shoulder. "We said war, war, all
along. Very well, we've got war, haven't we?"
In our room I said to Marie, "Only three days left."
Marie came and went and talked continually round me, all the time
sewing zinc buttons onto the new pouch, stiff with its dressing. She
seemed to be making an effort to divert me. She had on a blue blouse,
well-worn and soft, half open at the neck. Her place was a great one
in that gray room.
She asked me if I should be a long time away, and then, as whenever she
put that question she went on, "Of course, you don't a bit know." She
regretted that I was only a private like everybody. She hoped it would
be over long before the winter.
I did not speak. I saw that she was looking at me secretly, and she
surrounded me pell-mell with the news she had picked up. "D'you know,
the curate has gone as a private, no more nor less, like all the
clergy. And Monsieur the Marquis, who's a year past the age already,
has written to the Minister of War to put himself at his disposition,
and the Minister has sent a courier to thank him." She finished
wrapping up and tying some toilet items and also some provisions, as if
for a journey. "All your bits of things are there. You'll be
absolutely short of nothing, you see."
Then she sat down and sighed. "Ah," she said, "war, after all, it's
more terrible than one imagines."
She seemed to be having tragic presentiments. Her face was paler than
usual; the normal lassitude of her features was full of gentleness; her
eyelids were rosy as roses. Then she smiled weakly and said, "There
are some young men of eighteen who've enlisted, but only for the
duration of the war. They've done right; that'll be useful to them all
ways later in life."
* * * * * *
On Monday we hung about the house till four o'clock, when I left it to
go to the Town Hall, and then to the station.
At the Town Hall a group of men, like myself, were stamping about.
They were loaded with parcels in string; new boots hung from their
shoulders. I went up to mix with my new companions. Tudor was topped
by an artilleryman's cap. Monsieur Mielvaque was bustling about,
embarrassed--exactly as at the factory--by the papers he held in his
hand; and he had exchanged his eyeglasses for spectacles, which stood
for the beginning of his uniform. Every man talked about himself, and
gave details concerning his regiment, his depot, and some personal
peculiarity.
"I'm staying," says the adjutant master-at-arms, who rises impeccably
in his active service uniform, amid the bustle and the neutral-tinted
groups; "I'm not going. I'm the owner of my rank, and they haven't got
the right to send me to join the army."
We waited long, and some hours went by. A rumor went round that we
should not go till the next day. But suddenly there was silence, a
stiffening up, and a military salute all round. The door had just
opened to admit Major de Trancheaux.
The women drew aside. A civilian who was on the lookout for him went
up, hat in hand, and spoke to him in undertones.
"But, my friend," cried the Major, quitting the importunate with a
quite military abruptness, "it's not worth while. In two months the
war will be over!"
He came up to us. He was wearing a white band on his cap.
"He's in command at the station," they say.
He gave us a patriotic address, brief and spirited. He spoke of the
great revenge so long awaited by French hearts, assured us that we
should all be proud, later, to have lived in those hours, thrilled us
all, and added, "Come, say good-by to your folks. No more women now.
And let's be off, for I'm going with you as far as the station."
A last confused scrimmage--with moist sounds of kisses and litanies of
advice--closed up in the great public hall.
When I had embraced Marie I joined these who were falling in near the
road. We went off in files of four. All the causeways were garnished
with people, because of us; and at that moment I felt a lofty emotion
and a real thrill of glory.
At the corner of a street I saw Crillon and Marie, who had run on ahead
to take their stand on our route. They waved to me.
"Now, keep your peckers up, boys! You're not dead yet, eh!" Crillon
called to us.
Marie was looking at me and could not speak.
"In step! One-two!" cried Adjutant Marcassin, striding along the
detachment.
We crossed our quarter as the day declined over it. The countryman who
was walking beside me shook his head and in the dusky immensity among
the world of things we were leaving, with big regular steps, fused into
one single step, he scattered wondering words. "Frenzy, it is," he
murmured. "_I_ haven't had time to understand it yet. And yet, you
know, there are some that say, I understand; well, I'm telling you,
that's not possible."
The station--but we do not stop. They have opened before us the long
yellow barrier which is never opened. They make us cross the labyrinth
of hazy rails, and crowd us along a dark, covered platform between iron
pillars.
And there, suddenly, we see that we are alone.
* * * * * *
The town--and life--are yonder, beyond that dismal plain of rails,
paths, low buildings and mists which surrounds us to the end of sight.
A chilliness is edging in along with twilight, and falling on our
perspiration and our enthusiasm. We fidget and wait. It goes gray,
and then black. The night comes to imprison us in its infinite
narrowness. We shiver and can see nothing more. With difficulty I can
make out, along our trampled platform, a dark flock, the buzz of
voices, the smell of tobacco. Here and there a match flame or the red
point of a cigarette makes some face phosphorescent. And we wait,
unoccupied, and weary of waiting, until we sit down, close-pressed
against each other, in the dark and the desert.
Some hours later Adjutant Marcassin comes forward, a lantern in his
hand, and in a strident voice calls the roll. Then he goes away, and
we begin again to wait.
At ten o'clock, after several false alarms, the right train is
announced. It comes up, distending as it comes, black and red. It is
already crowded, and it screams. It stops, and turns the platform into
a street. We climb up and put ourselves away--not without glimpses, by
the light of lanterns moving here and there, of some chalk sketches on
the carriages--heads of pigs in spiked helmets, and the inscription,
"To Berlin!"--the only things which slightly indicate where we are
going.
The train sets off. We who have just got in crowd to the windows and
try to look outside, towards the level crossing where, perhaps, the
people in whom we live are still watching for us; but the eye can no
longer pick up anything but a vague stirring, shaded with crayon and
jumbled with nature. We are blind and we fall back each to his place.
When we are enveloped in the iron-hammered rumble of advance, we fix up
our luggage, arrange ourselves for the night, smoke, drink and talk.
Badly lighted and opaque with fumes, the compartment might be a corner
of a tavern that has been caught up and swept away into the unknown.
Some conversation mixes its rumble with that of the train. My
neighbors talk about crops and sunshine and rain. Others, scoffers and
Parisians, speak of popular people and principally of music-hall
singers. Others sleep, lying somehow or other on the wood. Their open
mouths make murmur, and the oscillation jerks them without tearing them
from their torpor. I go over in my thoughts the details of the last
day, and even my memories of times gone by when there was nothing going
on.
* * * * * *
We traveled all night. At long intervals some one would let a window
drop at a station; a damp and cavernous breath would penetrate the
overdone atmosphere of the carriage. We saw darkness and some porter's
lantern dancing in the abyss of night.
Several times we made very long halts--to let the trains of regular
troops go by. In one station where our train stood for hours, we saw
several of them go roaring by in succession. Their speed blurred the
partitions between the windows and the huge vertebrae of the coaches,
seeming to blend together the soldiers huddled there; and the glance
which plunged into the train's interior descried, in its feeble and
whirling illumination, a long, continuous and tremulous chain, clad in
blue and red. Several times on the journey we got glimpses of these
interminable lengths of humanity, hurled by machinery from everywhere
to the frontiers, and almost towing each other.
CHAPTER X
THE WALLS
At daybreak there was a stop, and they said to us, "You're there."
We got out, yawning, our teeth chattering, and grimy with night, on to
a platform black-smudged by drizzling rain, in the middle of a sheet of
mist which was torn by blasts of distant whistling. Disinterred from
the carriages, our shadows heaped themselves there and waited, like
bales of goods in the dawn's winter.
Adjutant Marcassin, who had gone in quest of instructions, returned at
last. "It's that way."
He formed us in fours. "Forward! Straighten up! Keep step! Look as
if you had something about you."
The rhythm of the step pulled at our feet and dovetailed us together.
The adjutant marched apart along the little column. Questioned by one
of us who knew him intimately, he made no reply. From time to time he
threw a quick glance, like the flick of a whip, to make sure that we
were in step.
I thought I was going again to the old barracks, where I did my term of
service, but I had a sadder disappointment than was reasonable. Across
some land where building was going on, deeply trenched, beplastered and
soiled with white, we arrived at a new barracks, sinisterly white in a
velvet pall of fog. In front of the freshly painted gate there was
already a crowd of men like us, clothed in subdued civilian hues in the
coppered dust of the first rays of day.
They made us sit on forms round the guard room. We waited there all
the day. As the scorching sun went round it forced us to change our
places several times. We ate with our knees for tables, and as I undid
the little parcels that Marie had made, it seemed to me that I was
touching her hands. When the evening had fallen, a passing officer
noticed us, made inquiries, and we were mustered. We plunged into the
night of the building. Our feet stumbled and climbed helter-skelter,
between pitched walls up the steps of a damp staircase, which smelt of
stale tobacco and gas-tar, like all barracks. They led us into a dark
corridor, pierced by little pale blue windows, where draughts came and
went violently, a corridor spotted at each end by naked gas-jets, their
flames buffeted and snarling.
A lighted doorway was stoppered by a throng--the store-room. I ended
by getting in in my turn, thanks to the pressure of the compact file
which followed me, and pushed me like a spiral spring. Some barrack
sergeants were exerting themselves authoritatively among piles of
new-smelling clothes, of caps and glittering equipment. Geared into
the jerky hustle from which we detached ourselves one by one, I made
the tour of the place, and came out of it wearing red trousers and
carrying my civilian clothes, and a blue coat on my arm; and not daring
to put on either my hat or the military cap that I held in my hand.
We have dressed ourselves all alike. I look at the others since I
cannot look at myself, and thus I see myself dimly. Gloomily we eat
stew, by the miserable illumination of a candle, in the dull desert of
the mess room. Then, our mess-tins cleaned, we go down to the great
yard, gray and stagnant. Just as we pour out into it, there is the
clash of a closing gate and a tightened chain. An armed sentry goes up
and down before the gate. It is forbidden to go out under pain of
court-martial. To westward, beyond some indistinct land, we see the
buried station, reddening and smoking like a factory, and sending out
rusty flashes. On the other side is the trench of a street; and in its
extended hollow are the bright points of some windows and the radiance
of a shop. With my face between the bars of the gate, I look on this
reflection of the other life; then I go back to the black staircase,
the corridor and the dormitory, I who am something and yet am nothing,
like a drop of water in a river.
* * * * * *
We stretch ourselves on straw, in thin blankets. I go to sleep with my
head on the bundle of my civilian clothes. In the morning I find
myself again and throw off a long dream--all at once impenetrable.
My neighbor, sitting on his straw with his hair over his nose, is
occupied in scratching his feet. He yawns into tears, and says to me,
"I've dreamt about myself."
* * * * * *
Several days followed each other. We remained imprisoned in the
barracks, in ignorance. The only events were those related by the
newspapers which were handed to us through the gates in the morning.
The war got on very slowly; it immobilized itself, and we--we did
nothing, between the roll-calls, the parades, and from time to time
some cleaning fatigues. We could not go into the town, and we waited
for the evening--standing, sitting, strolling in the mess room (which
never seemed empty, so strong was the smell that filled it), wandering
about the dark stairs and the corridors dark as iron, or in the yard,
or as far as the gates, or the kitchens, which last were at the rear of
the buildings, and smelt in turns throughout the day of coffee-grounds
and grease.
We said that perhaps, undoubtedly indeed, we should stay there till the
end of the war. We moped. When we went to bed we were tired with
standing still, or with walking too slowly. We should have liked to go
to the front.
Marcassin, housed in the company office, was never far away, and kept
an eye on us in silence. One day I was sharply rebuked by him for
having turned the water on in the lavatory at a time other than
placarded. Detected, I had to stand before him at attention. He asked
me in coarse language if I knew how to read, talked of punishment, and
added, "Don't do it again!" This tirade, perhaps justified on the
whole, but tactlessly uttered by the quondam Pétrolus, humiliated me
deeply and left me gloomy all the day. Some other incidents showed me
that I no longer belonged to myself.
* * * * * *
One day, after morning parade, when the company was breaking off, a
Parisian of our section went up to Marcassin and asked him, "Adjutant,
we should like to know if we are going away."
The officer took it in bad part. "To know? Always wanting to know!"
he cried; "it's a disease in France, this wanting to know. Get it well
into your heads that you _won't_ know! We shall do the knowing for
you! Words are done with. There's something else beginning, and
that's discipline and silence."
The zeal we had felt for going to the front cooled off in a few days.
One or two well-defined cases of shirking were infectious, and you
heard this refrain again and again: "As long as the others are
dodging, I should be an ass not to do it, too."
But there was quite a multitude who never said anything.
At last a reinforcement draft was posted; old and young
promiscuously--a list worked out in the office amidst a seesaw of
intrigue. Protests were raised, and fell back again into the
tranquillity of the depot.
I abode there forty-five days. Towards the middle of September, we
were allowed to go out after the evening meal and Sundays as well. We
used to go in the evening to the Town Hall to read the despatches
posted there; they were as uniform and monotonous as rain. Then a
friend and I would go to the café, keeping step, our arms similarly
swinging, exchanging some words, idle, and vaguely divided into two
men. Or we went into it in a body, which isolated me. The saloon of
the café enclosed the same odors as Fontan's; and while I stayed there,
sunk in the soft seat, my boots grating on the tiled floor, my eye on
the white marble, it was like a strip of a long dream of the past, a
scanty memory that clothed me. There I used to write to Marie, and
there I read again the letters I received from her, in which she said,
"Nothing has changed since you were away."
One Sunday, when I was beached on a seat in the square and weeping with
yawns under the empty sky, I saw a young woman go by. By reason of
some resemblance in outline, I thought of a woman who had loved me. I
recalled the period when life was life, and that beautiful caressing
body of once-on-a-time. It seemed to me that I held her in my arms, so
close that I felt her breath, like velvet, on my face.
We got a glimpse of the captain at one review. Once there was talk of
a new draft for the front, but it was a false rumor. Then we said,
"There'll never be any war for us," and that was a relief.
My name flashed to my eyes in a departure list posted on the wall. My
name was read out at morning parade, and it seemed to me that it was
the only one they read. I had no time to get ready. In the evening of
the next day our detachment passed out of the barracks by the little
gate.
CHAPTER XI
AT THE WORLD'S END
"We're going to Alsace," said the well-informed. "To the Somme," said
the better-informed, louder.
We traveled thirty-six hours on the floor of a cattle truck, wedged and
paralyzed in the vice of knapsacks, pouches, weapons and moist bodies.
At long intervals the train would begin to move on again. It has left
an impression with me that it was chiefly motionless.
We got out, one afternoon, under a sky crowded with masses of darkness,
in a station recently bombarded and smashed, and its roof left like a
fish-bone. It overlooked a half-destroyed town, where, amid a foul
whiteness of ruin, a few families were making shift to live in the
rain.
"'Pears we're in the Aisne country," they said.
A downpour was in progress. Shivering, we busied ourselves with
unloading and distributing bread, our hands numbed and wet, and then
ate it hurriedly while we stood in the road, which gleamed with heavy
parallel brush-strokes of gray paint as far as the eye could see. Each
looked after himself, with hardly a thought for the next man. On each
side of the road were deserts without limits, flat and flabby, with
trees like posts, and rusty fields patched with green mud.
"Shoulder packs, and forward!" Adjutant Marcassin ordered.
Where were we going? No one knew. We crossed the rest of the village.
The Germans had occupied it during the August retreat. It was
destroyed, and the destruction was beginning to live, to cover itself
with fresh wreckage and dung, to smoke and consume itself. The rain
had ceased in melancholy. Up aloft in the clearings of the sky,
clusters of shrapnel stippled the air round aeroplanes, and the
detonations reached us, far and fine. Along the sodden road we met Red
Cross motor ambulances, rushing on rails of mud, but we could not see
inside them. In the first stages we were interested in everything, and
asked questions, like foreigners. A man who had been wounded and was
rejoining the regiment with us answered us from time to time, and
invariably added, "That's nothing; you'll see in a bit." Then the
march made men retire into themselves.
My knapsack, so ingeniously compact; my cartridge-bags so ferociously
full; my round pouches with their keen-edged straps, all jostled and
then wounded my back at each step. The pain quickly became acute,
unbearable. I was suffocated and blinded by a mask of sweat, in spite
of the lashing moisture, and I soon felt that I should not arrive at
the end of the fifty minutes' march. But I did all the same, because I
had no reason for stopping at any one second sooner than another, and
because I could thus always _do one step more_. I knew later that this
is nearly always the mechanical reason which accounts for soldiers
completing superhuman physical efforts to the very end.
The cold blast benumbed us, while we dragged ourselves through the
softened plains which evening was darkening. At one halt I saw one of
those men who used to agitate at the depot to be sent to the front. He
had sunk down at the foot of the stacked rifles; exertion had made him
almost unrecognizable, and he told me that he had had enough of war!
And little Mélusson, whom I once used to see at Viviers, lifted to me
his yellowish face, sweat-soaked, where the folds of the eyelids seemed
drawn with red crayon, and informed me that he should report sick the
next day.
After four marches of despairing length under a lightless sky over a
colorless earth, we stood for two hours, hot and damp, at the chilly
top of a hill, where a village was beginning. An epidemic of gloom
overspread us. Why were we stopped in that way? No one knew anything.
In the evening we engulfed ourselves in the village. But they halted
us in a street. The sky had heavily darkened. The fronts of the
houses had taken on a greenish hue and reflected and rooted themselves
in the running water of the street. The market-place curved around in
front of us--a black space with shining tracks, like an old mirror to
which the silvering only clings in strips.
At last, night fully come, they bade us march. They made us go forward
and then draw back, with loud words of command, in the tunnels of
streets, in alleys and yards. By lantern light they divided us into
squads. I was assigned to the eleventh, quartered in a village whose
still standing parts appeared quite new. Adjutant Marcassin became my
section chief. I was secretly glad of this; for in the gloomy
confusion we stuck closely to those we knew, as dogs do.
The new comrades of the squad--they lodged in the stable, which was
open as a cage--explained to me that we were a long way from the front,
over six miles; that we should have four days' rest and then go on
yonder to occupy the trenches at the glass works. They said it would
be like that, in shifts of four days, to the end of the war, and that,
moreover, one had not to worry.
These words comforted the newcomers, adrift here and there in the
straw. Their weariness was alleviated. They set about writing and
card-playing. That evening I dated my letter to Marie "at the Front,"
with a flourish of pride. I understood that glory consists in doing
what others have done, in being able to say, "I, too."
* * * * * *
Three days went by in this "rest camp." I got used to an existence
crowded with exercises in which we were living gear-wheels; crowded
also with fatigues; already I was forgetting my previous existence.
On the Friday at three o'clock we were paraded in marching order in the
school yard. Great stones, detached from walls and arches, lay about
the forsaken grass like tombs. Hustled by the wind, we were reviewed
by the captain, who fumbled in our cartridge-pouches and knapsacks with
the intention of giving imprisonment to those who had not the right
quantity of cartridges and iron rations. In the evening we set off,
laughing and singing, along the great curves of the road. At night we
arrived swaying with fatigue and savagely silent, at a slippery and
interminable ascent which stood out against stormy rain-clouds as heavy
as dung-hills. Many dark masses stumbled and fell with a crash of
accoutrements on that huge sloping sewer. As they swarmed up the chaos
of oblique darkness which pushed them back, the men gave signs of
exhaustion and anger. Cries of "Forward! Forward!" surrounded us on
all sides, harsh cries like barks, and I heard, near me, Adjutant
Marcassin's voice, growling, "What about it, then? It's for France's
sake!" Arrived at the top of the hill, we went down the other slope.
The order came to put pipes out and advance in silence. A world of
noises was coming to life in the distance.
A gateway made its sudden appearance in the night. We scattered among
flat buildings, whose walls here and there showed black holes, like
ovens, while the approaches were obstructed with plaster rubbish and
nail-studded beams. In places the recent collapse of stones, cement
and plaster had laid on the bricks a new and vivid whiteness that was
visible in the dark.
"It's the glass works," said a soldier to me.
We halted a moment in a passage whose walls and windows were broken,
where we could not make a step or sit down without breaking glass. We
left the works by sticky footpaths, full of rubbish at first, and then
of mud. Across marshy flats, chilly and sinister, obscurely lighted by
the night, we came to the edge of an immense and pallid crater. The
depths of this abyss were populated with glimmers and murmurs; and all
around a soaked and ink-black expanse of country glistened to infinity.
"It's the quarry," they informed me.
Our endless and bottomless march continued. Sliding and slipping we
descended, burying ourselves in these profundities and gropingly
encountering the hurly-burly of a convoy of carts and the advance guard
of the regiment we were relieving. We passed heaped-up hutments at the
foot of the circular chalky cliff that we could see dimly drawn among
the black circles of space. The sound of shots drew near and
multiplied on all sides; the vibration of artillery fire outspread
under our feet and over our heads.
I found myself suddenly in front of a narrow and muddy ravine into
which the others were plunging one by one.
"It's the trench," whispered the man who was following me; "you can see
its beginning, but you never see its blinking end. Anyway, on you go!"
We followed the trench along for three hours. For three hours we
continued to immerse ourselves in distance and solitude, to immure
ourselves in night, scraping its walls with our loads, and sometimes
violently pulled up, where the defile shrunk into strangulation by the
sudden wedging of our pouches. It seemed as if the earth tried
continually to clasp and choke us, that sometimes it roughly struck us.
Above the unknown plains in which we were hiding, space was
shot-riddled. A few star-shells were softly whitening some sections of
the night, revealing the excavations' wet entrails and conjuring up a
file of heavy shadows, borne down by lofty burdens, tramping in a black
and black-bunged impasse, and jolting against the eddies. When great
guns were discharged all the vault of heaven was lighted and lifted and
then fell darkly back.
"Look out! The open crossing!"
A wall of earth rose in tiers before us. There was no outlet. The
trench came to a sudden end--to be resumed farther on, it seemed.
"Why?" I asked, mechanically.
They explained to me: "It's like that." And they added, "You stoop
down and get a move on."
The men climbed the soft steps with bent heads, made their rush one by
one and ran hard into the belt whose only remaining defense was the
dark. The thunder of shrapnel that shattered and dazzled the air here
and there showed me too frightfully how fragile we all were. In spite
of the fatigue clinging to my limbs, I sprang forward in my turn with
all my strength, fiercely pursuing the signs of an overloaded and
rattling body which ran in front; and I found myself again in a trench,
breathless. In my passage I had glimpses of a somber field,
bullet-smacked and hole pierced, with silent blots outspread or
doubled, and a litter of crosses and posts, as black and fantastic as
tall torches extinguished, all under a firmament where day and night
immensely fought.
"I believe I saw some corpses," I said to him who marched in front of
me; and there was a break in my voice.
"_You've_ just left your village," he replied; "you bet there's some
stiffs about here!"
I laughed also, in the delight of having got past. We began again to
march one behind another, swaying about, hustled by the narrowness of
this furrow they had scooped to the ancient depth of a grave, panting
under the load, dragged towards the earth by the earth and pushed
forward by will-power, under a sky shrilling with the dizzy flight of
bullets, tiger-striped with red, and in some seconds saturated with
light. At forks in the way we turned sometimes right and sometimes
left, all touching each other, the whole huge body of the company
fleeing blindly towards its bourne.
For the last time they halted us in the middle of the night. I was so
weary that I propped my knees against the wet wall and remained
kneeling for some blissful minutes.
My sentry turn began immediately, and the lieutenant posted me at a
loophole. He made me put my face to the hole and explained to me that
there was a wooded slope, right in front of us, of which the bottom was
occupied by the enemy; and to the right of us, three hundred yards
away, the Chauny road--"They're there." I had to watch the black
hollow of the little wood, and at every star-shell the creamy expanse
which divided our refuge from the distant hazy railing of the trees
along the road. He told me what to do in case of alarm and left me
quite alone.
Alone, I shivered. Fatigue had emptied my head and was weighing on my
heart. Going close to the loophole, I opened my eyes wide through the
enemy night, the fathomless, thinking night.
I thought I could see some of the dim shadows of the plain moving, and
some in the chasm of the wood, and everywhere! Affected by terror and
a sense of my huge responsibility, I could hardly stifle a cry of
anguish. But they did not move. The fearful preparations of the
shades vanished before my eyes and the stillness of lifeless things
showed itself to me.
I had neither knapsack nor pouches, and I wrapped myself in my blanket.
I remained at ease, encircled to the horizon by the machinery of war,
surmounted by claps of living thunder. Very gently, my vigil relieved
and calmed me. I remembered nothing more about myself. I applied
myself to watching. I saw nothing, I knew nothing.
After two hours, the sound of the natural and complaisant steps of the
sentry who came to relieve me brought me completely back to myself. I
detached myself from the spot where I had seemed riveted and went to
sleep in the "grotto."
The dug-out was very roomy, but so low that in one place one had to
crawl on hands and knees to slip under its rough and mighty roof. It
was full of heavy damp, and hot with men. Extended in my place on
straw-dust, my neck propped by my knapsack, I closed my eyes in
comfort. When I opened them, I saw a group of soldiers seated in a
circle and eating from the same dish, their heads blotted out in the
darkness of the low roof. Their feet, grouped round the dish, were
shapeless, black, and trickling, like stone disinterred. They ate in
common, without table things, no man using more than his hands.
The man next me was equipping himself to go on sentry duty. He was in
no hurry. He filled his pipe, drew from his pocket a tinder-lighter as
long as a tapeworm, and said to me, "You're not going on again till six
o'clock. Ah, you're very lucky!"
Diligently he mingled his heavy tobacco-clouds with the vapors from all
those bodies which lay around us and rattled in their throats.
Kneeling at my feet to arrange his things, he gave me some advice, "No
need to get a hump, mind. Nothing ever happens here. Getting here's
by far the worst. On that job you get it hot, specially when you've
the bad luck to be sleepy, or it's not raining, but after that you're a
workman, and you forget about it. The most worst, it's the open
crossing. But nobody I know's ever stopped one there. It was other
blokes. It's been like this for two months, old man, and we'll be able
to say we've been through the war without a chilblain, we shall."
At dawn I resumed my lookout at the loophole. Quite near, on the slope
of the little wood, the bushes and the bare branches are broidered with
drops of water. In front, under the fatal space where the eternal
passage of projectiles is as undistinguishable as light in daytime, the
field resembles a field, the road resembles a road. Ultimately one
makes out some corpses, but what a strangely little thing is a corpse
in a field--a tuft of colorless flowers which the shortest blades of
grass disguise! At one moment there was a ray of sunshine, and it
resembled the past.
Thus went the days by, the weeks and the months; four days in the front
line, the harassing journey to and from it, the monotonous sentry-go,
the spy-hole on the plain, the mesmerism of the empty outlook and of
the deserts of waiting; and after that, four days of rest-camp full of
marches and parades and great cleansings of implements and of streets,
with regulations of the strictest, anticipating all the different
occasions for punishment, a thousand fatigues, each with as many harsh
knocks, the litany of optimist phrases, abstruse and utopian, in the
orders of the day, and a captain who chiefly concerned himself with the
two hundred cartridges and the reserve rations. The regiment had no
losses, or almost none; a few wounds during reliefs, and sometimes one
or two deaths which were announced like accidents. We only underwent
great weariness, which goes away as fast as it comes. The soldiers
used to say that on the whole they lived in peace.
Marie would write to me, "The Piots have been saying nice things about
you," or "The Trompsons' son is a second lieutenant," or "If you knew
all the contrivances people have been up to, to hide their gold since
it's been asked for so loudly! If you knew what ugly tales there are!"
or "Everything is just the same."
* * * * * *
Once, when we were coming back from the lines and were entering our
usual village, we did not stop there; to the great distress of the men
who were worn out and yielding to the force of the knapsack. We
continued along the road through the evening with lowered heads; and
one hour later we dropped off around dark buildings--mournful tokens of
an unknown place--and they put us away among shadows which had new
shapes. From that time onwards, they changed the village at every
relief, and we never knew what it was until we were there. I was
lodged in barns, into which one wriggled by a ladder; in spongy and
steamy stables; in cellars where undisturbed draughts stirred up the
moldy smells that hung the
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