LIGHT

BY

HENRI BARBUSSEAUTHOR OF "UNDER FIRE" "WE OTHERS, " ETC. 

TRANSLATED BYFITZWATER WRAY1919

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. MORNINGXVIII. EYES THAT SEE XIX. GHOSTS XX. THE CULT XXI. NO! XXII. LIGHTXXIII. 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 theinstant tumult of the bell. I close the desk, wipe my pen, and put itdown. I take my hat and muffler, after a glance at the mirror--aglance which shows me the regular oval of my face, my glossy hair andfine mustache. (It is obvious that I am rather more than a workman. )I put out the light and descend from my little glass-partitionedoffice. I cross the boiler-house, myself in the grip of the thronging, echoing peal which has set it free. From among the dark and hurryingcrowd, which increases in the corridors and rolls down the stairwayslike a cloud, some passing voices cry to me, "Good-night, MonsieurSimon, " or, with less familiarity, "Good-night, Monsieur Paulin. " Ianswer here and there, and allow myself to be borne away by everybodyelse. 

Outside, on the threshold of the porch which opens on the naked plainand its pallid horizons, one sees the squares and triangles of thefactory, like a huge black background of the stage, and the tallextinguished chimney, whose only crown now is the cloud of fallingnight. Confusedly, the dark flood carries me away. Along the wallwhich faces the porch, women are waiting, like a curtain of shadow, which yields glimpses of their pale and expressionless faces. With nodor word we recognize each other from the mass. Couples are formed bythe quick hooking of arms. All along the ghostly avenue one's eyesfollow the toilers' scrambling flight. 

The avenue is a wan track cut across the open fields. Its course ismarked afar by lines of puny trees, sooty as snuffed candles; bytelegraph posts and their long spider-webs; by bushes or by fences, which are like the skeletons of bushes. There are a few houses. Upyonder a strip of sky still shows palely yellow above the meager suburbwhere creeps the muddy crowd detached from the factory. The west windsets quivering their overalls, blue or black or khaki, excites thewoolly 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 tavernsrise the fronts of some old houses, tenantless and hollow; others, inruins, cut into this gloomy valley of the homes of men with notches ofsky. The iron-shod feet all around me on the hard road sound like theheavy rolling of drums, and then on the paved footpath like draggedchains. It is in vain that I walk with head bent--my own footsteps arelost in the rest, and I cannot hear them. 

We hurry, as we do every evening. At that spot in the inky landscapewhere a tall and twisted tree seems to writhe as if it had a soul, webegin suddenly to descend, our feet plunging forward. Down below wesee the lights of Viviers sparkle. These men, whose day is worn out, stride towards those earthly stars. One hope is like another in theevening, 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 avenueflattens out like a river, and widens as it pierces the town. Throughthe latticed boughs of the old plane trees--still naked on this lastday of March--one glimpses the workmen's houses, upright in space, hazyand fantastic chessboards, with squares of light dabbed on in places, or like vertical cliffs in which our swarming is absorbed. Scatteringamong the twilight colonnade of the trees, these people engulfthemselves in the heaped-up lodgings and rooms; they flow together inthe cavity of doors; they plunge into the houses; and there they arevaguely turned into lights. 

I continue to walk, surrounded by several companions who are foremenand clerks, for I do not associate with the workmen. Then there arehandshakes, and I go on alone. 

Some dimly seen wayfarers disappear; the sounds of sliding locks andclosing shutters are heard here and there; the houses have shutthemselves up, the night-bound town becomes a desert profound. I canhear 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 GrandCafé, the elegant hotels, the sculptured houses, the church and thecastle on the hill-top. The other is the lower town, which I am nowentering. It is a system of streets reached by an extension of thatavenue which is flanked by the workmen's barracks and climbs to thelevel of the factory. Such is the way which it has been my custom toclimb in the morning and to descend when the light is done, during thesix years of my clerkship with Messrs. Gozlan & Co. In this quarter Iam still rooted. Some day I should like to live yonder; but betweenthe 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-likelittle girl who emerges from the shadows and enters them again withoutseeing me, so intent is she on pressing to her heart, like a doll, thebig loaf they have sent her to buy. Here is the Rue de l'Etape, mystreet. Through the semi-darkness, a luminous movement peoples thehairdresser's shop, and takes shape on the dull screen of his window. His transparent door, with its arched inscription, opens just as Ipass, and under the soap-dish, [1] whose jingle summons customers, Monsieur Justin Pocard himself appears, along with a rich gust ofscented light. He is seeing a customer out, and improving the occasionby the utterance of certain sentiments; and I had time to see that thecustomer, convinced, nodded assent, and that Monsieur Pocard, theoracle, was caressing his white and ever-new beard with his luminoushand. 

[Footnote 1: The hanging sign of a French barber. --Tr. ]

I turn round the cracked walls of the former tinplate works, now bowedand crumbling, whose windows are felted with grime or broken into blackstars. A few steps farther I think I saw the childish shadow of littleAntoinette, whose bad eyes they don't seem to be curing; but not beingcertain enough to go and find her I turn into my court, as I do everyevening. 

Every evening I find Monsieur Crillon at the door of his shop at theend of the court, where all day long he is fiercely bent upon trivialjobs, and he rises before me like a post. At sight of me the kindlygiant nods his big, shaven face, and the square cap on top, his hugenose 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 theporch and says to me, in a low voice, but with heated conviction, "ThatPétrarque chap, he's really a bad lot. "

He takes off his cap, and while the crescendo nodding of his bristlyhead 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 thirtycentimes, 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 aboutthat matter of his sewing-machine that I'm interested in and that hecan't use himself, he becomes congealed. "

He recounts to me the mad claims of Trompson in the matter of his newsoles, and the conduct of Monsieur Becret, who, though old enough toknow better, had taken advantage of his good faith by paying for therepair of his spout with a knife "that would cut anything it sees. " Hegoes 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 abotcher, it's 'cos my father and my grandfather were botchers beforeme. 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 byfits and starts; a shape that clings to itself and is impelled by aforce stronger than itself. It is Brisbille, the blacksmith, drunk, asusual. 

Espying us, Brisbille utters exclamations. When he has reached us hehesitates, and then, smitten by a sudden idea, he comes to astandstill, his boots clanking on the stones, as if he were a cart. Hemeasures 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 ofhatred 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 TownCouncil, '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 ofa-doing of it, they seem like a cold draught. "

The good fellow is angry. He raises his great fist and shakes it inspace like a medieval mace. Pointing where Brisbille has just plungedfloundering into the night, he says, "That's what Socialists are, --theconquering people what can't stand up on their legs! I may be abotcher in life, but I'm for peace and order. Good-night, good-night. Is she well, Aunt Josephine? I'm for tranquillity and liberty andorder. 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, Italk and I talk!"

He enters his shop, but turns on his heel and calls me back, with amysterious sign. "You know they've all arrived up yonder at thecastle?" Respect has subdued his voice; a vision is absorbing him ofthe 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 afamily relation. Within I can just make out the strong, plebeianframework of Crillon himself, upright beside a serrated heap of ruins, over which a candle is enthroned. The light which falls on hisaccumulated tools and on those hanging from the wall makes a decorationobscurely golden around the picture of this wise man; this soul allinnocent of envious demands, turning again to his botching, as hisfather and grandfather botched. 

I have mounted the steps and pushed our door; the gray door, whose onlyrelief is the key. The door goes in grumblingly, and makes way for meinto the dark passage, which was formerly paved, though now the trafficof soles has kneaded it with earth, and changed it into a footpath. Myforehead strikes the lamp, which is hooked on the wall; it is out, oozing oil, and it stinks. One never sees that lamp, and always bangsit. 

And though I had hurried so--I don't know why--to get home, at thismoment of arrival I slow down. Every evening I have the same small anddull disillusion. 

I go into the room which serves us as kitchen and dining-room, where myaunt 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 palecelestial squares of the window. 

Then I remember that there was a scene between my old aunt and me afterour early morning coffee. Thus it is two or three times a week. Thistime it was about a dirty window-pane, and on this particular morning, exasperated by the continuous gush of her reproaches, I flung anoffensive word, and banged the door as I went off to work. So Mame hashad 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 theobject of sustaining and displaying her chagrin. 

When I came in she was in the act of peeling invisible potatoes; thereare potatoes scattered over the floor, everywhere. My feet kick themand send them rolling heavily among odds and ends of utensils and asoft deposit of garments that are lying about. As soon as I am theremy 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, formy Aunt Josephine is leanness itself. 

Gradually she raises her voice and begins to lament. "You've nofeelings, no--you're heartless, --that dreadful word you said tome, --you said, 'You and your jawing!' Ah! people don't know what Ihave to put up with--ill-natured--cart-horse!"

In silence I hear the tear-streaming words that fall and founder in thedark 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'sall done with. "

She cries: "Done with? Ah! it will never be done with!"

With the sheet that night is begriming she muzzles herself, and hidesher face. She shakes her head to left and to right, violently, so asto wipe her eyes and signify dissent at the same time. 

"Never! A word like that you said to me breaks the heart forever. ButI must get up and get you something to eat. You must eat. I broughtyou up when you were a little one, "--her voice capsizes--"I've given upall 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 onthe floor, like two boxes. She is seeking her things, scattered overthe bed or slipped to the floor; she is swallowing sobs. Now she isupright, shapeless in the shadow, but from time to time I see herremarkable leanness outlined. She slips on a camisole and a jacket, --aspectral vision of garments which unfold themselves about herhandle-like arms, and above the hollow framework of her shoulders. 

She talks to herself while she dresses, and gradually all mylife-history, all my past comes forth from what the poor womansays, --my only near relative on earth; as it were my mother and myservant. 

She strikes a match. The lamp emerges from the dark and zigzags aboutthe 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 anda big mouth which stirs with ruminated sorrow. Fresh tears increasethe dimensions of her eyes, make them sparkle and varnish the points ofher cheeks. She comes and goes with undiminished spleen. Her wrinklesform heavy moldings on her face, and the skin of chin and neck is sofolded that it looks intestinal, while the crude light tinges it allwith something like blood. 

Now that the lamp is alight some items become visible of the dismalsuper-chaos in which we are walled up, --the piece of bed-tickingfastened with two nails across the bottom of the window, because ofdraughts; 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 amongthe litter, she puts it on the floor and crouches to regulate the wick. There rises from the medley of the old lady, vividly variegated withvermilion and night, a jet of black smoke, which returns in parachuteform. Mame sighs, but she cannot check her continual talk. 

"You, my lad, you who are so genteel when you like, and earn a hundredand eighty francs a month, --you're genteel, but you're short of goodmanners, it's that chiefly I find fault with you about. So you spat onthe 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'dfound 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 youare! The factory gentlemen are too kind to you. Your poor father wastheir best workman. You are more genteel than your poor father, moreEnglish; and you preferred to go into business rather than go onlearning Latin, and everybody thought you quite right; but for hardwork you're not much good--ah, la, la! Confess that you spat on thewindow. 

"For your poor mother, " the ghost of Mame goes on, as she crosses theroom with a wooden spoon in her hand, "one must say that she had goodtaste in dress. That's no harm, no; but certainly they must have thewherewithal. She was always a child. I remember she was twenty-sixwhen they carried her away. Ah, how she loved hats! But she hadhandsome 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 bothcease. She chokes and wags her head and wipes her face with hersleeve. 

I risk saying, gently, "Yes, I know it well. "

A sigh is my answer. She lights the fire. The coal sends out acushion of smoke, which expands and rolls up the stove, falls back, andpiles its muslin on the floor. Mame manipulates the stove with herfeet in the cloudy deposit; and the hazy white hair which escapes fromher black cap is also like smoke. 

Then she seeks her handkerchief and pats her pockets to get the velvetcoal-dust off her fingers. Now, with her back turned, she is movingcasseroles about. "Monsieur Crillon's father, " she says, "old Dominic, had come from County Cher to settle down here in '66 or '67. He's asensible man, seeing he's a town councilor. (We must tell him nicelyto 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 showyourself off to all these gentlemen. You're genteel, and you'realready getting a hundred and eighty francs a month, and it's vexingthat you haven't got some sign to show that you're on the commercialside, 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, andlooks here and there for her handkerchief; she prowls with the lamp. As my eyes follow her, the room awakens more and more. My groping gazediscovers the tiled floor, the conference of chairs backed side by sideagainst the wall, the motionless pallor of the window in the backgroundabove the low and swollen bed, which is like a heap of earth andplaster, the clothes lying on the floor like mole-hills, the protrudingedges 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 waythrough this accumulation of things, all covered with a downy layer ofdust 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 faceturns this way and that towards the lean phantom of my aunt, and I lullmyself with the sounds of her stirring and her endless murmur. 

And now, suddenly, she has come near to me. She is wearing her jacketof gray and white stripes which hangs from her acute shoulders, sheputs her arm around my neck, and trembles as she says, "You can mounthigh, you can, with the gifts that you have. Some day, perhaps, youwill 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 greatapostles!"

And with her head gently nodding, and her face still tear-stained, shelooks afar, and sees the streets attentive to my eloquence!

* * * * * *

Hardly has this strange imagining in the bosom of our kitchen passedaway when Mame adds, with her eyes on mine, "My lad, mind you, neverlook higher than yourself. You are already something of a home-bird;you have already serious and elderly habits. That's good. Never tryto 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, andI 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 Ihope for, but I should not like too great changes. In my heart Ishould not like anything which changed the position of the stove, ofthe 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 woodenspoon. Sometimes there spurts from the stove a mournful flame, whichseems to illumine her with tatters of light. 

I get up to look at the stew. The thick brown gravy is purring. I cansee pale bits of potato, and it is uncertainly spotted with themucosity of onions. Mame pours it into a big white plate. "That's foryou, " she says; "now, what shall _I_ have?"

We settle ourselves each side of the little swarthy table. Mame isfumbling in her pocket. Now her lean hand, lumpy and dark, unrootsitself. She produces a bit of cheese, scrapes it with a knife whichshe holds by the blade, and swallows it slowly. By the rays of thelamp, which stands beside us, I see that her face is not dry. A dropof water has lingered on the cheek that each mouthful protrudes, andglitters there. Her great mouth works in all directions, and sometimesswallows the remains of tears. 

So there we are, in front of our plates, of the salt which is placed ona 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 togetherby the light, and for the rest but poorly clothed by the huge gloom. Sitting in this jaded armchair, my hands on this ill-balancedtable, --which, if you lean on one side of it, begins at once tolimp, --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 dusttouches you softly. 

After we have eaten, our remarks grow rarer. Then Mame begins again tomumble; once again she yields to emotion under the harsh flame of thelamp, and once again her eyes grow dim in her complicated Japanese maskthat is crowned with cotton-wool, and something dimly shining flowsfrom them. 

The tears of the sensitive old soul plash on that lip so voluminousthat it seems a sort of heart. She leans towards me, she comes sonear, 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 humorsand 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 themin a dark corner. She fills the big bowl from the pitcher and thencarries 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 allthese familiar things surround me even while they hide themselves. Avague light still hovers in the sky. Crillon's prismatic shop gleamslike a garnet in the bosom of the night, behind the riotous disorder ofhis buckets. There I can see Crillon, --he never seems to stop, --filingsomething, examining his work close to a candle which flutters like abutterfly ensnared, and then, reaching for the glue-pot which steams ona little stove. One can just see his face, the engrossed and heedlessface of the artificer of the good old days; the black plates of hisill-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 venturingshapes, 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, whichconsolidates the boils on his neck. As I pass the hairdresser's doorit opens, just as it did a little while ago, and his agreeable voicesays, "That's all there is to it, in business. " "Absolutely, " repliesa man who is leaving. In the oven of the street one can see only hislittleness--he must be a considerable personage, all the same. Monsieur Pocard is always applying himself to business and thinking ofgreat schemes. A little farther, in the depths of a cavity, stopperedby an iron-grilled window, I divine the presence of old Eudo, the birdof ill omen, the strange old man who coughs, and has a bad eye, andwhines continually. Even indoors he must wear his mournful cloak andthe lamp-shade of his hood. People call him a spy, and not withoutreason. 

Here is the Kiosk. It is waiting quite alone, with its point in thedarkness. Antonia has not come, for she would have waited for me. Iam impatient first, and then relieved. A good riddance. 

No doubt Antonia is still tempting when she is present. There is areddish fever in her eyes, and her slenderness sets you on fire. But Iam hardly in harmony with the Italian. She is particularly engrossedin her private affairs, with which I am not concerned. Big Victorine, always ready, is worth a hundred of her; or Madame Lacaille, thepensively vicious; though I am equally satiated of her, too. Truth totell, I plunge unreflectingly into a heap of amorous adventures which Ishortly find vulgar. But I can never resist the magic of a firsttemptation. 

I shall not wait. I go away. I skirt the forge of the ignobleBrisbille. It is the last house in that chain of low hills which isthe street. Out of the deep dark the smithy window flames with vividorange behind its black tracery. In the middle of that square-ruledpage of light I see transparently outlined the smith's eccentricsilhouette, now black and sharp, now softly huge. Spectrally throughthe glare, and in blundering frenzy, he strives and struggles andfumbles horribly on the anvil. Swaying, he seems to rush to right andto 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 callsme--"Simon!"

It is Antonia. So much the worse for her. I hurry in, followed by theweak appeal. 

I go up to my room. It is bare and always cold; always I must shiversome minutes before I shake it back to life. As I close the shutters Isee the street again; the massive, slanting blackness of the roofs andtheir population of chimneys clear-cut against the minor blackness ofspace; some still waking, milk-white windows; and, at the end of ajagged and gloomy background, the blood-red stumbling apparition of themad blacksmith. Farther still I can make out in the cavity the crosson the steeple; and again, very high and blazing with light on thehill-top, the castle, a rich crown of masonry. In all directions theeye loses itself among the black ruins which conceal their hosts of menand 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 madeits way into my room. It has transformed the faded flowers of thewallpaper and restored to newness the Turkey-red stuff which covers mydressing-table. 

I dress carefully, dallying to look at myself in the glass, closely andfarther away, in the fresh scent of soap. I try to make out whether myeyes are little or big. They are the average, no doubt, but it reallyseems to me that they have a tender brightness. 

Then I look outside. It would seem that the town, under its mistyblankets in the hollow of the valley, is awaking later than itsinhabitants. 

These I can see from up here, spreading abroad in the streets, since itis Sunday. One does not recognize them all at once, so changed arethey by their unusual clothes;--women, ornate with color, and moremonumental than on week days; some old men, slightly straightened forthe occasion; and some very lowly people, whom only their cleannessvaguely disguises. 

The weak sunshine is dressing the red roofs and the blue roofs and thesidewalks, and the tiny little stone setts all pressed together likepebbles, where polished shoes are shining and squeaking. In that oldhouse at the corner, a house like a round lantern of shadow, gloomy oldEudo is encrusted. It forms a comical blot, as though traced on an oldetching. A little further, Madame Piot's house bulges forth, glazedlike pottery. By the side of these uncommon dwellings one takes nonotice 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 thefactory's plateau, appears the white geometry of the castle, and aroundits pallors a tapestry of reddish foliage, and parks. Farther away, pastures and growing crops which are part of the demesne; fartherstill, among the stripes and squares of brown earth or verdant, thecemetery, where every year so many stones spring up. 

* * * * * *

We have to call at Brisbille's, my aunt and I, before Church. We areforced to tolerate him thus, so as to get our twisted key put right. Iwait for Mame in the court, sitting on a tub by the shop, which islifeless to-day, and full of the scattered leavings of toil. Mame isnever ready in time. She has twice appeared on the threshold in herfine black dress and velvet cape; then, having forgotten something, shehas gone back very quickly, like a mole. Finally, she must needs go upto my room, to cast a last glance over it. 

At last we are off, side by side. She takes my arm proudly. From timeto time she looks at me, and I at her, and her smile is an affectionategrimace 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, asbroad as she is long, was gaping on the edge of the causeway, her twoparallel arms feebly rowing in the air, an exile in the Sabbathidleness, and awkwardly conscious of her absent broom. 

Mame brings her along, and looking back as I walk, I hear her talkingof me, hastily, as one who confides a choking secret, while Apollinefollows, with her arms swinging far from her body, limping andoutspread like a crab. 

Says Mame, "That boy's bedroom is untidy. And then, too, he uses toomany shirt-collars, and he doesn't know how to blow his nose. Hestuffs handkerchiefs into his pockets, and you find them again likestones. "

"All the same, he's a good young man, " stammers the waddling streetcleanser, brandishing her broom-bereaved hands at random, and shakingover her swollen and many-storied boots a skirt weighted round the hemby a coat-of-mail of dry mud. 

These confidences with which Mame is in the habit of breaking forthbefore no matter whom get on my nerves. I call her with someimpatience. She starts at the command, comes up, and throws me amartyr's glance. 

She proceeds with her nose lowered under her black hat with greenfoliage, hurt that I should thus have summoned her before everybody, and profoundly irritated. So a persevering malice awakens again in thedepths of her, and she mutters, very low, "You spat on the window theother day!"

But she cannot resist hooking herself again on to another interlocutor, whose Sunday trousers are planted on the causeway, like two posts, andhis blouse as stiff as a lump of iron ore. I leave them, and go aloneinto 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 andceiling is the metallic Brisbille, with leaden hands, his dark apronrainbowed with file-dust, --dirty on principle, because of his ideas, this being Sunday. He is sober, and his face still unkindled, but heis waiting impatiently for the church-going bell to begin, so that hemay go and drink, in complete solitude. 

Through an open square, in the ponderous and dirt-shaggy glazing of thesmithy, one can see a portion of the street, and a sketch, in brightand airy tones, of scattered people. It is like the sharply cut fieldof vision in an opera-glass, in which figures are drawn and shaded, andcross each other; where one makes out, at times, a hat bound andbefeathered, swaying as it goes; a little boy with sky-blue tie andbuttoned boots, and tubular knickers hanging round his thin, barecalves; a couple of gossiping dames in swollen and somber petticoats, who tack hither and thither, meet, are mutually attracted and dissolvein conversation, like rolling drops of ink. In the foreground of thiscolored cinema which goes by and passes again, Brisbille, the sinister, is ranting away, as always. He is red and lurid, spotted withfreckles, his hair greasy, his voice husky. For a moment, while hepaces to and fro in his cage, dragging shapeless and gaping shoesbehind him, he speaks to me in a low voice, and close to my face, ingusts. Brisbille can shout, but not talk; there must be a definitepressure of anger before his resounding huskiness issues from histhroat. 

Mame comes in. She sits on a stool to get her breath again, all thewhile brandishing the twisted key which she clasps to the prayer-bookin her hand. Then she unburdens herself and begins to speak in fitsand starts of this key, of the mishap which twisted it, and of all themultiple details which overlap each other in her head. But theslipshod, gloomy smith's attention is suddenly attracted by the holewhich shows the street. 

"The lubber!" he roars. 

It is Monsieur Fontan who is passing, the wine-merchant andcafé-proprietor. He is an expansive and imposing man, fat-covered, andwhite as a house. He never says anything and is always alone. A greatpersonage he is; he makes money; he has amassed hundreds of thousandsof francs. At noon and in the evening he is not to be seen, havingdived into the room behind the shop, where he takes his meals insolitude. The rest of the time he just sits at the receipt of customand says nothing. There is a hole in his counter where he slides themoney 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 isto say. Why, you damned snob, you're only a poor drudge, like all uschaps, but haven't you just got the snob's ideas?"

I make a sign of impatience. It is not true, and Brisbille annoys mewith the hatred which he hurls at random, hit or miss; and all the morebecause he is himself visibly impressed by the approach of this man whois richer than the rest. The rebel opens his steely eye and relapsesinto 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 ofthe corpulent recluse. As soon as he has carried away the enormousovercoat that sheathes him, like the hide of a pachyderm, and isdisappearing, Brisbille begins to roar, "What a snout! Did you see it, eh? Did you see the jaws he swings from his ears, eh? The exactlikeness of a hog!"

Then he adds, in a burst of vulgar delight, "Luckily, we can expectit'll all burst before long!"

He laughs alone. Mame goes and sits apart. She detests Brisbille, whois the personification of envy, malice and coarseness. And everybodyhates this marionette, too, for his drunkenness and his forwardnotions. All the same, when there is something you want him to do, youchoose Sunday morning to call, and you linger there, knowing that youwill meet others. This has become a tradition. 

"They're going to cure little Antoinette, " says Benoît, as he frameshimself in the doorway. 

Benoît is like a newspaper. He to whom nothing ever happens only livesto announce what is happening to others. 

"I know, " cries Mame, "they told me so this morning. Several peoplealready knew it this morning at seven. A big, famous doctor's comingto the castle itself, for the hunting, and he only treats just theeyes. "

"Poor little angel!" sighs a woman, who has just come in. 

Brisbille intervenes, rancorous and quarrelsome, "Yes, they're alwaysgoing to cure the child, so they say. Bad luck to them! Who caresabout her?"

"Everybody does!" reply two incensed women, in the same breath. 

"And meanwhile, " said Brisbille, viciously, "she's snuffing it. " Andhe chews, once more, his customary saying--pompous and foolish as thecatchword of a public meeting--"She's a victim of society!"

Monsieur Joseph Bonéas has come into Brisbille's, and he does itcomplacently, for he is not above mixing with the people of theneighborhood. Here, too, are Monsieur Pocard, and Crillon, new shaved, his polished skin taut and shiny, and several other people. Prominentamong them one marks the wavering head of Monsieur Mielvaque, who, inhis timidity and careful respect for custom, took his hat off as hecrossed the threshold. He is only a copying-clerk at the factory; hewears much-used and dubious linen, and a frail and orphaned jacketwhich he dons for all occasions. 

Monsieur Joseph Bonéas overawes me. My eyes are attracted by hisdelicate profile, the dull gloom of his morning attire, and the lusterof his black gloves, which are holding a little black rectangle, gilt-edged. 

He, too, has removed his hat. So I, in my corner discreetly removemine, too. 

He is a young man, refined and distinguished, who impresses by hisinnate elegance. Yet he is an invalid, tormented by abscesses. Onenever sees him but his neck is swollen, or his wrists enlarged by aghastly outcrop. But the sickly body encloses bright and saneintelligence. I admire him because he is thoughtful and full of ideas, and can express himself faultlessly. Recently he gave me a lesson insociology, touching the links between the France of to-day and theFrance of tradition, a lesson on our origins whose plain perspicuitywas 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 ayoung people's association in Viviers. Then he speaks to me, "Thefarther I go the more I perceive that all men are afflicted with shortsight. They do not see, nor can they see, beyond the end of theirnoses. "

"Yes, " say I. 

My reply seems rather scanty, and the silence which follows repeats itmercilessly. It seems so to him, too, no doubt, for he engages otherinterlocutors, and I feel myself redden in the darkness of Brisbille'scavern. 

Crillon is arguing with Brisbille on the matter of the recentrenovation of an old hat, which they keep handing to each other andexamine ardently. Crillon is sitting, but he keeps his eyes on it. Heart and soul he applies himself to the debate. His humble trade as abotcher does not allow a fixed tariff, and he is all alone as hevindicates the value of his work. With his fists he hammers thegray-striped mealy cloth on his knees, and the hair, which growsthickly 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--inebullition of steam, in gumming, and the passage of time?"

Monsieur Justin Pocard is talking to three companions, who, hat inhand, are listening with all their ears. He is entertaining them inhis sonorous language about the great financial and industrialcombination which he has planned. A speculative thrill electrifies thecompany. 

"That'll brush business up!" says Crillon, in wonder, torn for a momentfrom contemplation of the hat, but promptly relapsing on it. 

Joseph Bonéas says to me, in an undertone, --and I am flattered, --"ThatPocard is a man of no education, but he has practical sense. That's abig 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 thedistrict, perhaps I should be in the Pocard scheme, which is takingshape, and will be huge. 

Meanwhile, Brisbille is scowling. An unconfessable disquiet isaccumulating in his bosom. All this gathering is detaining him athome, and he is tormented by the desire for drink. He cannot concealhis vinous longing, and squints darkly at the assembly. On a week dayat this hour he would already have begun to slake his thirst. He isparched, he burns, he drags himself from group to group. The wait islonger 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 bodyand silver lamps. The old coachman, whose great glove sways theslender scepter of a whip, is so adorned with overlapping capes that hesuggests several men on the top of each other. The black horse isprancing. 

"He shines like a piano, " says Benoît. 

The Baroness is in the carriage. The blinds are drawn, so she cannotbe 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 growinghumpbacked. "

"She does good, " protests one of the gathering. 

"Good? Ah, yes, indeed!" gurgles the evil man, writhing as though inthe grip of some one; "I call it ostentation--that's what _I_ call it. "

Shoulders are shrugged, and Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, alwaysself-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 thoughtsthat you find in your head when you fish for 'em. But mark what Isays, --there's some that dies of envy. I'm _not_ one of them that diesof envy. "

Monsieur Mielvaque has put his hat back on his petrified head and goneto the door. Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, also, turns his back and goesaway. 

All at once Crillon cries, "There's Pétrarque!" and darts outside onthe track of a big body, which, having seen him, opens its long pair ofcompasses and escapes obliquely. 

"And to think, " says Brisbille, with a horrible grimace, when Crillonhas 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, andgaping at the ground. Between his fingers there is a shapelesscigarette, damp and shaggy, which he rolls in all directions, patchingup and resticking it unceasingly. 

Charged with snarls and bristling with shoulder-shrugs, the smithrushes at his fire and pulls the bellows-chain, his yawning shoesmaking him limp like Vulcan. At each pull the bellows send spoutingfrom the dust-filled throat of the furnace a cutting blue comet, linedwith 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 manforges. 

* * * * * *

The church bell rang, and we left him there. When I was leaving Iheard Brisbille growl. No doubt I got my quietus as well. But whatcan he have imagined against _me_?

We meet again, all mixed together in the Place de l'Eglise. In ourpart of the town, except for a clan of workers whom one keeps one's eyeon, every one goes to church, men as well as women, as a matter ofpropriety, out of gratitude to employers or lords of the manor, or byreligious conviction. Two streets open into the Place and two roads, bordered with apple-trees, as well, so that these four ways lead townand country to the Place. 

It has the shape of a heart, and is delightful. It is shaded by a veryold tree, under which justice was formerly administered. That is whythey call it the Great Tree, although there are greater ones. Inwinter it is dark, like a perforated umbrella. In summer it gives thebright green shadow of a parasol. Beside the tree a tall crucifixdwells in the Place forever. 

The Place is swarming and undulating. Peasants from the surroundingcountry, in their plain cotton caps, are waiting in the old corner ofthe Rue Neuve, heaped together like eggs. These people are loaded withprovisions. At the farther end, square-paved, one picks out swarthyoutlines of the Epinal type, and faces as brightly colored as apples. Groups of children flutter and chirrup; little girls with their dollsplay at being mothers, and little boys play at brigands. Respectablepeople take their stand more ceremoniously than the common crowd, andtalk business piously. 

Farther away is the road, which April's illumination adorns all alongthe lines of trees with embroidery of shadow and of gold, wherebicycles tinkle and carriages rumble echoingly; and the shiningriver, --those long-drawn sheets of water, whereon the sun spreadssheets 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. Theby-roads are pricked out with trees, which follow each other artlesslyand divide the infantile littleness of orchards. 

This landscape holds us by the soul. It is a watercolor now (for itrained a little last night), with its washed stones, its tilesvarnished anew, its roofs that are half slate and half light, itsshining pavements, water-jeweled in places, its delicately blue sky, with clouds like silky paper; and between two house-fronts of yellowocher and tan, against the purple velvet of distant forests, there isthe neighboring steeple, which is like ours and yet different. Roundlyone's gaze embraces all the panorama, which is delightful as therainbow. 

From the Place, then, where one feels himself so abundantly at home, weenter the church. From the depths of this thicket of lights, the goodpriest murmurs the great infinite speech to us, blesses us, embraces usseverally and altogether, like father and mother both. In the manorialpew, the foremost of all, one glimpses the Marquis of Monthyon, who hasthe air of an officer, and his mother-in-law, Baroness Grille, who isdressed like an ordinary lady. 

Emerging from church, the men go away; the women swarm out moregrudgingly and come to a standstill together; then all the buzzinggroups scatter. 

At noon the shops close. The fine ones do it unassisted; the othersclose by the antics of some good man who exerts himself to carry andfit the shutters. Then there is a great void. 

After lunch I wander in the streets. In the house I am bored, and yetoutside I do not know what to do. I have no friend and no calls topay. I am already too big to mingle with some, and too little yet toassociate with others. The cafés and licensed shops hum, jingle andsmoke already. I do not go to cafés, on principle, and because of thatfondness for spending nothing, which my aunt has impressed on me. So, aimless, I walk through the deserted streets, which at every corneryawn before my feet. The hours strike and I have the impression thatthey are useless, that one will do nothing with them. 

I steer in the direction of the fine gardens which slope towards theriver. A little enviously I look over the walls at the tops of theseopulent enclosures, at the tips of those great branches where stillclings the soiled, out-of-fashion finery of last summer. 

Far from there, and a good while after, I encounter Tudor, the clerk atthe Modern Pharmacy. He hesitates and doubts, and does not know whereto go. Every Sunday he wears the same collar, with turned downcorners, and it is becoming gloomy. Arrived where I am, he stops, asthough it occurred to him that nothing was pushing him forward. Ahalf-extinguished cigarette vegetates in his mouth. 

He comes with me, and I take his silence in tow as far as the avenue ofplane trees. There are several figures outspaced in its level peace. Some young girls attract my attention; they appear against the dullnessof house-fronts and against shop fronts in mourning. Some of thecharming ones are accompanied by their mothers, who look likecaricatures 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 flashesemerge from them. 

* * * * * *

And lo! Now the night approaches to soften the stony streets. 

Along the riverside, to which I have gone down alone, listless idyllsdimly appear, --shapes sketched in crayon, which seek and join eachother. There are couples that appear and vanish, strictly avoiding thelittle light that is left. Night is wiping out colors and features andnames from both sorts of strollers. 

I notice a woman who waits, standing on the river bank. Her silhouettehas pearly-gray sky behind it, so that she seems to support thedarkness. I wonder what her name may be, but only discover the beautyof her feminine stillness. Not far from that consummate caryatid, among the black columns of the tall trees laid against the lave of theblue, and beneath their cloudy branches, there are mystic enlacementswhich move to and fro; and hardly can one distinguish the two halves ofwhich they are made, for the temple of night is enclosing them. 

The ancient hut of a fisherman is outlined on the grassy slope. Belowit, crowding reeds rustle in the current; and where they are moresparse they fashion concentric orbs upon the gleaming, fleeing water. The landscape has something exotic or antique about it. You are nomatter where in the world or among the centuries. You are on somecorner of the eternal earth, where men and women are drawing near toeach other, and cling together while they wrap themselves in mystery. 

* * * * * *

Dreamily I ascend again towards the sounds and the swarming of thetown. There, the Sunday evening rendezvous, --the prime concern of themen, --is less discreet. Desire displays itself more crudely on thepavements. Voices chatter and laughter dissolves, even through closeddoors; there are shouts and songs. 

Up there one sees clearly. Faces are discovered by the harsh light ofthe gas jets and its reflection from plate-glass shop windows. Antoniagoes by, surrounded by men, who bend forward and look at her withdesire amid their clamor of conversation. She saw me, and a littlesound 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 wakethe odor of Pétrolus. He is lamp-man at the factory. Yellow, dirty, cadaverous, red-eyed, he smells rancid, and was, perhaps, nurtured onparaffin. He is some one washed away. You do not see him, so much assmell him. 

Other women are there. Many a Sunday have I, too, joined in all thatlove-making. 

* * * * * *

Among these beings who chat and take hold of each other, an isolatedwoman stands like a post, and makes an empty space around her. 

It is Louise Verte. She is fearfully ugly, and she was too virtuousformerly, at a time when, so they say, she need not have been. Sheregrets this, and relates it without shame, in order to be revenged onvirtue. She would like to have a lover, but no one wants her, becauseof her bony face and her scraped appearance; from a sort of eczema. Children make sport of her, knowing her needs; for the disclosures oftheir elders have left a stain on them. A five-year-old girl pointsher 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 tinyhead leans to the right and wears a colorless smile. He lives on a fewrents and does not work. He is good and affectionate, and sometimes heis overcome by attacks of compassion. 

Véron and Louise Verte see one another, --and each makes a détour ofavoidance. They are afraid of each other. 

Here, also, on the margin of passion, is Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, verycompassionable, in spite of his intellectual superiority. Between theturned-down brim of his hat and his swollen white kerchief, --thick as atowel, --a mournful yellow face is stuck. 

I pity these questing solitaries who are looking for themselves! Ifeel compassion to see those fruitless shadows hovering there, waveringlike ghosts, these poor wayfarers, divided and incomplete. 

Where am I? Facing the workmen's flats, whose countless windows standsharply out in their huge flat background. It is there that MarieTusson 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 withoutmingling with them. 

Marie is my cousin, and yet I hardly ever see her. We just saygood-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-hippedVenus; her beautiful lips shine like her eyes. 

To know her so near agitates me among the shadows. If she appearedbefore me as she did the last time I met her; if, in the middle of thedark, I saw the shining radiance of her face, the swaying of herfigure, traced in silken lines, and her little sister's hand inhers, --I should tremble. 

But that does not happen. The bluish, cold background only shows methe two second-floor windows pleasantly warmed by lights, of which oneis, perhaps, she herself. But they take no sort of shape, and remainin 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 thisevening which comes at the end of all the days I have lived. 

* * * * * *

Little Antoinette, --how comes it that they leave her all alone likethis?--is standing in my path and holding a hand out towards me. It isher way that she is begging for. I guide her, ask questions andlisten, leaning over her and making little steps. But she is toolittle, and too lispful, and cannot explain. Carefully I lead thechild, --who sees so feebly that already she is blind in the evening, asfar as the low door of the dilapidated dwelling where she nests. 

In my street, in front of his lantern-shaped house, with itsiron-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 cleanconscience. But, however guilty, he is compassionable. I stop andspeak to him. He lifts to me out of the night of his hood a facepallid 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 beenutterly alone; twelve years that I've heard the last words she said tome. "

And the poor maniac glides farther away, hooded in his unintelligiblemourning; and certainly he does not hear me wish him good-night. 

At the back of the cold downstairs room a fire has been lighted. Mameis 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 lookand is white as a bone. Musingly, my aunt takes and holds a pair ofidle tongs. I take my seat. Mame does not like the silence in which Iwrap myself. She lets the tongs fall with a jangling shock, and thenbegins 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 asabroad. This part; it's a little world cut out on the pattern of theothers, " she adds, proudly, wagging her worn-out head. "There aren'tmany of them who've got the wherewithal and they're not of muchaccount. Puppets, if you like, yes. That's according to how one seesit, because at bottom there's no puppets, --there's people that lookafter themselves, because each of us always deserves to be happy, mylad. And here, the same as everywhere, the two kinds of people thatthere 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 stepsand voices, and before I could even turn round I heard a voice throughthe glass door say, "Monsieur Paulin's aunt is very ill. "

The sentence stuns me. I am standing, and some one is standingopposite 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 acquaintanceswho smile at me, not knowing the turn of affairs. 

The night is cold and nasty, with a keen wind. The sky drips withrain. We jump over puddles as we walk. I stare fixedly at Benoît'ssquare shoulders in front of me, and the dancing tails of his coat asthe wind hustles them along the nocturnal way. 

Passing through the suburban quarter, the wind comes so hard betweenthe infrequent houses that the bushes on either side shiver and presstowards us, and seem to unfurl. Ah, we are not made for the greaterhappenings!

* * * * * *

I meet first in the room the resounding glare of a wood fire and analmost repelling heat. The odors of camphor and ether catch my throat. People that I know are standing round the bed. They turn to me andspeak all together. 

I bend down to look at Mame. She is inlaid upon the whiteness of thebed, which is motionless as marble. Her face is sunk in the cavity ofthe pillow. Her eyes are half closed and do not move; her skin hasdarkened. Each breath hums in her throat, and beyond that slightstirring of larynx and lips her little frail body moves no more than adoll's. She has not got her cap on and her gray hair is unraveled onher head like flocks of dust. 

Several voices at once explain to me that it is "double congestion, andher heart as well. " She was attacked by a dizziness, by prolonged andterrible shivering. She wandered, mentioned me, then suddenlycollapsed. The doctor has no hope but is coming back. The ReverendFather Piot was here at five. 

Silence hovers. A woman puts a log in the fire, in the center of thedazzling cluster of snarling flames, whose light throws the room intototal agitation. 

* * * * * *

For a long time I look upon that face, where ugliness and goodness aremingled in such a heartrending way. My eyes seek those already almostshut, whose light is hardening. Something of darkness, an internalshadow which is of herself, overspreads and disfigures her. One maysee now how outworn she was, how miraculously she still held on. 

This tortured and condemned woman is all that has looked after me fortwenty years. For twenty years she took my hand before she took myarm. She always prevented me from understanding that I was an orphan. Delicate and small as I was for so long, she was taller and strongerand better than I! And at this moment, which shows me the past againin one glance, I remember that she beautified the affairs of mychildhood like an old magician; and my head goes lower as I think ofher untiring admiration for me. How she did love me! And she mustlove me still, confusedly, if some glimmering light yet lasts in thedepths of her. What will become of me--all alone?

She was so sensitive, and so restless! A hundred details of hervivacity come to life again in my eyes. Stupidly, I contemplate thepoker, the tongs, the big spoon--all the things she used to flourish asshe chattered. There they are--fallen, paralyzed, mute!

As in a dream I go back to the times when she talked and shouted, todays of youth, to days of spring and of springtime dresses; and all thewhile my gaze, piercing that gay and airy vision, settles on the darkstain of the hand that lies there like the shadow of a hand, on thesheet. 

My eyes are jumbling things together. I see our garden in the firstfine days of the year; our garden--it is behind that wall--so narrow isit that the reflected sunshine from our two windows dapples the wholeof it; so small that it only holds some pot-encaged plants, except forthe three currant bushes which have always been there. In the scarvesof the sun rays a bird--a robin--is hopping on the twigs like a ragjewel. All dusty in the sunshine our red hound, Mirliton, is warminghimself. So gaunt is he you feel sure he must be a fast runner. Certainly he runs after glimpsed rabbits on Sundays in the country, buthe never caught any. He never caught anything but fleas. When I lagbehind because of my littleness my aunt turns round, on the edge of thefootpath, and holds out her arms, and I run to her, and she stoops as Icome and calls me by my name. 

* * * * * *

"Simon! Simon!"

A woman is here. I wrench myself from the dream which had come intothe room and taken solidity before me. I stand up; it is my cousinMarie. 

She offers me her hands among the candles which flutter by the bed. Intheir poor starlight her face appears haggard and wet. My aunt lovedher. Her lips are trembling on her rows of sparkling teeth; the wholebreadth of her bosom heaves quickly. 

I have sunk again into the armchair. Memories flow again, while thesick woman's breathing is longer drawn, and her stillness becomes moreand more inexorable. Things she used to say return to my lips. Thenmy eyes are raised, and look for Marie, and turn upon her. 

* * * * * *

She has leaned against the wall, and remains so--overcome. She investsthe corner where she stands with something like profane and sumptuousbeauty. Her changeful chestnut hair, like bronze and gold, forms moistand disordered scrolls on her forehead and her innocent cheeks. Herneck, especially, her white neck, appears to me. The atmosphere is sochoking, so visibly heavy, that it enshrouds us as if the room were onfire, and she has loosened the neck of her dress, and her throat islighted up by the flaming logs. I smile weakly at her. My eyes wanderover 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, regrettingthat he could not stay, he disappeared. 

And we stayed on beside the dying woman--so fragile that we dare nottouch her, nor even try to speak to her. 

Madame Piot settles down in a chair; she crosses her arms, lowers herhead, and the time goes by. 

At long intervals people take shape in the darkness by the door; peoplewho come in on tiptoe whisper to us and go away. 

The moribund moves her hands and feet and contorts her face. Agurgling comes from her throat, which we can hardly see in the cavitythat is like a nest of shadow under her chin. She has blenched, andthe skin that is drawn over the bones of her face like a shroud growswhiter every moment. 

Intent upon her breathing, we throng about her. We offer her ourhands--so near and so far--and do not know what to do. 

I am watching Marie. She has sunk onto the little stool, and heryoung, full-blooming body overflows it. Holding her handkerchief inher teeth, she has come to arrange the pillow, and leaning over thebed, she puts one knee on a chair. The movement reveals her leg for amoment, curved like a beautiful Greek vase, while the skin seems toshine through the black transparency of the stocking, like cloudedgold. Ah! I lean forward towards her with a stifled, incipient appealabove this bed, which is changing into a tomb. The border of thetragic dress has fallen again, but I cannot remove my eyes from thatprofound obscurity. I look at Marie, and look at her again; and thoughI 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 opensgently and remains open. The eyelids fall back almost completely uponthe stiffened gleam of the eyes, which squint in the gray and bonymask. 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 justdied. 

She sways. My hand goes out to her. I take her, support, and enfoldher. Fainting, she clings to me, and for one moment I carry--gently, heavily--all the young woman's weight. The neck of her dress isundone, and falls like foliage from her throat, and I just saw the realcurve of her bosom, nakedly and distractedly throbbing. 

Her body is agitated. She hides her face in her hands and then turnsit to mine. It chanced that our faces met, and my lips gathered thewonderful savor of her tears!

* * * * * *

The room fills with lamentation; there is a continuous sound of deepsighing. It is overrun by neighbors become friends, to whom no onepays attention. 

And now, in this sacred homelet, where death still bleeds, I cannotprevent a heavy heart-beat in me towards the girl who is prostratedlike the rest, but who reigns there, in spite of me--of herself--ofeverything. I feel myself agitated by an obscure and huge rapture--thebirth of my flesh and my vitals among these shadows. Beside this poorcreature 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 handover 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 myfingers to this other woman, half revealed to me in the tumult ofsorrow, and my eyes cannot come out of her. 

Madame Piot has changed the candles and attached a band to support thedead woman's chin. Framed in this napkin, which is knotted over theskull in her woolly gray hair, the face looks like a hook-nosed mask ofgreen bronze, with a vitrified line of eyes; the knees make two sharpsummits under the sheet; one's eyes run along the thin rods of theshins and the feet lift the linen like two in-driven nails. 

Slowly Marie prepares to go. She has closed the neck of her dress andhidden herself in her cloak. She comes up to me, sore-hearted, andwith 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 scatteringchilliness, the women go away one by one. One hour, two hours, Iremain alone. I pace the room in one direction and another, then Ilook, and shiver. My aunt is no more. There is only left of hersomething indistinct, struck down, of subterranean color, and her placeis desolate. Now, close to her, I am alone! Alone--magnified by myaffliction, master of my future, disturbed and numbed by the newness ofthe things now beginning. At last the window grows pale, the ceilingturns 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 thisroom where I have always been, I recall the image of a woman who filledit--a woman standing at the chimney-corner, where a gladsome fireflames, and she is garbed in reflected purple, her corsage scarlet, herface golden, as she holds to the glow those hands transparent andbeautiful as flames. In the darkness, from my vigil, I look at her. 

* * * * * *

The two nights which followed were spent in mournful motionlessness atthe back of that room where the trembling host of lights seemed to giveanimation to dead things. During the two days various activitiesbrought me distraction, at first distressing, then depressing. 

The last night I opened my aunt's jewel box. It was called "the littlebox. " 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, equallyoutdistanced, small and slender--a little girl's, or a young girl's;and then, wrapped in tissue paper, like a relic, a portrait of myselfwhen a child. Last, a written page, torn from one of my old schoolcopy-books, which she had not been able to throw wholly away. Transparent at the folds, the worn sheet was fragile as lace, and gavethe illusion of being equally precious. That was all the treasure myaunt had collected. That jewel box held the poverty of her life andthe wealth of her heart. 

* * * * * *

It poured with rain on the day of the funeral. All the morning groupsof people succeeded each other in the big cavern of our room, a goingand coming of sighs. My aunt was laid in her coffin towards twoo'clock, and it was carried then into the passage, where visitors' feethad brought dirt and puddles. A belated wreath was awaited, and thenthe umbrellas opened, and under their black undulation the processionmoved off. 

When we came out of the church it was not far off four o'clock. Therain had not stopped and little rivers dashed down from either side ofthe procession's sluggish flow along the street. There were manyflowers, so that the hearse made a blot of relief, beautiful enough. There were many people, too, and I turned round several times. AlwaysI saw old Eudo, in his black cowl, hopping along in the mud, hunchbacked as a crow. Marie was walking among some women in thesecond half of the file, whose frail and streaming roof the hearse drewalong irregularly with jerks and halts. Her gait was jaded; she wasthinking only of our sorrow! All things darkened again to my eyes inthe ugliness of the evening. 

The cemetery is full of mud under the muslin of fallen rain, and thefootfalls make a sticky sound in it. There are a few trees, naked andparalyzed. The sky is marshy and sprinkled with crows. 

The coffin, with its shapeless human form, is lowered from the hearseand disappears in the fresh earth. 

They march past. Marie and her father take their places beside me. Isay thanks to every one in the same tone; they are all like each other, with their gestures of impotence, their dejected faces, the words theyget 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 manypeople and they all converge upon me. I pluck up courage. 

Monsieur Lucien Gozlan comes forward, calls me "my dear sir, " andbrings 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 saida few words. It is regrettable----"

Others follow; then nothing more is to be seen in the rain, the windand the gloom but backs. 

"It's finished. Let's go. "

Marie lifts to me her sorrow-laved face. She is sweet; she isaffectionate; she is unhappy; but she does not love me. 

We go away in disorder, along by the trees whose skeletons the winterhas blackened. 

When we arrive in our quarter, twilight has invaded the streets. Wehear gusts of talk about the Pocard scheme. Ah, how fiercely peoplelive and seek success!

Little Antoinette, cautiously feeling her way by a big wall, hears uspass. She stops and would look if she could. We espy her figure inthat twilight of which she is beginning to make a part, though fine andfaint 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 passRampaille's tavern. Some men who were at the funeral are sitting attables there, black-clad. 

We reach my home; Marie offers me her hand, and we hesitate. "Comein. "

She enters. We look at the dead room; the floor is wet, and the windblows through as if we were out of doors. Both of us are crying, andshe 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, anda long figure appears. 

It is Véron who presents himself with an awkward air. His tall andbadly jointed body swings like a hanging signboard. He is an originaland sentimental soul, but no one has ever troubled to find out what heis. He begins, "My young friend--hum, hum--" (he repeats this formlesssound every two or three words, like a sort of clock with a sonoroustick)--"One may be wanting money, you know, for something--hum, hum;you need money, perhaps--hum, hum; all this expense--and I'd said tomyself 'I'll take him some----'"

He scrutinizes me as he repeats, "Hum, hum. " I shake his hand withtears in my eyes. I do not need money, but I know I shall never forgetthat action; so good, so supernatural. 

And when he has swung himself out, abashed by my refusal, embarrassedby 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 treehangs over it, and the lane begins to slope to the river. I askedMarie to come, and I am waiting for her in the evening. 

When I asked her--in sudden decision after so many days ofhesitation--to meet me here this evening, she was silent, astonished. But she did not refuse; she did not answer. Some people came and shewent away. I am waiting for her, after that prayer. 

Slowly I stroll to the river bank. When I return some one is on theseat, enthroned in the shadow. The face is indistinct, but in theapparel of mourning I can see the neck-opening, like a faint paleheart, and the misty expansion of the skirt. Stooping, I hear her lowvoice, "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 andneck 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 mycall; she has brought herself here. 

* * * * * *

The day has been scorching. Towards the end of the afternoonstorm-rain burst over the world and then ceased. One can still hearbelated drops falling from the branches which overhang the wall. Theair is charged with odors of earth and leaves and flowers, and wreathsof 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; Ianswer her, "I am always thinking of you. "

Hearing these words, she is silent. Her silence grows greater andgreater in the shadows. I have drawn still nearer; so near that I feelon my cheek the wing-beat of her breath; so near that her silencecaresses me. 

Then, to keep myself in countenance, or to smoke, I have struck amatch, but I make no use of the gleam at my finger-tips. It shows meMarie, quivering a little; it gilds her pale face. A smile arises onher 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 tospeak. At that moment, by the light of the flame that I hold, whosegreat revealing kindness I am guarding, our eyes fall on an inscriptionscratched 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 therethen, and I thought I adored her. For a moment I am overpowered bythis apparition of a mistake, bygone and forgotten. Marie does notknow; 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 littleflame's last flicker has lighted up for me the edge of the poor blackserge skirt, so worn that it shines a little, even in the evening, andhas shown me the girl's shoe. There is a hole in the heel of thestocking, and we have both seen it. In quick shame, Marie draws herfoot under her skirt; and I--I tremble still more that my eyes havetouched 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 firstfate-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. Myeyes follow the sway of her body in her dress against the vaguelyluminous background of the wall. Amid the night her dress is nightalso; she is there--wholly! There is a singing in my ears; an anthemfills the world. 

In the street, where there are no more wayfarers, she walks on the edgeof the causeway. So that my face may be on a level with hers, I walkbeside her in the gutter, and the cold water enters my boots. 

And that evening, inflated by mad longing, I am so triumphantlyconfident that I do not even remember to shake her hand. By her door Isaid to her, "To-morrow, " and she answered, "Yes. "

On one of the days which followed, finding myself free in theafternoon, I made my way to the great populous building of flats whereshe lives. I ascended two dark flights of steps, closely encaged, andfollowed a long elbowed corridor. Here it is. I knock and enter. Complete silence greets me. There is no one, and acute disappointmentruns through me. 

I take some hesitant steps in the tiny vestibule, which is lighted bythe glass door to the kitchen, wherein I hear the drip of water. I seea room whose curtains invest it with broidered light. There is a bedin it, with a cover of sky-blue satinette shining like the blue of achromo. It is Marie's room! Her gray silk hat, rose-trimmed, hangsfrom a nail on the flowery paper. She has not worn it since my aunt'sdeath; and alongside hang black dresses. I enter this bright bluesanctuary, inhabited only by a cold and snow-like light, and orderlyand 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 herthoughts dwell, the things which occupy her mind--but I leave them. Iwould rather go near her bed. With a movement at once mad, frightenedand 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 makenotes, by the way, of Crillon's honest trivialities; of Brisbille'suntimely outbursts; of the rumors anent the Pocard scheme, and theprogress of the Association of Avengers, a society to promote nationalawakening, founded by Monsieur Joseph Bonéas. The same complex andmonotonous existence bears me along as it does everybody. But sincethat tragic night when my sorrow was transformed into joy at thelyke-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 intothe current of the crowds; when I am dressing in my room and decidethat I look well in black; when I sit up late at my table in thesunshine of hope. Now and again the memory of my aunt comes bodilyback to me. Sometimes I hear people pronounce the name of Marie. Mybody 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 donot know whether she is here or absent. 

* * * * * *

During this walk that we have just had together the summer and thesweetness of living have weighed more than ever on my shoulders. Herhuge home, which is such a swarming hive at certain times, is nowimmensely empty in the labyrinth of its dark stairs and the landings, whence issue the narrow closed streets of its corridors, and where inthe corners taps drip upon drain-stones. Our immense--our nakedsolitude pervades us. An exquisite emotion takes hold of me while weare slowly climbing the steep and methodical way. There is somethinghuman in the stairway; in the inevitable shapes of its spiral and itssteps cut out of the quick, in the rhythmic repetition of its steps. Around skylight pierces the sloping roof up there, and it is the onlylight for this part of the people's house, this poor internal city. The darkness which runs down the walls of the well, whence we arestriving to emerge step by step, conceals our laborious climb towardsthat gap of daylight. Shadowed and secret as we are, it seems to methat we are mounting to heaven. 

Oppressed by a common languor, we at last sat down side by side on astep. There is no sound in the building under the one round windowbending over us. We lean on each other because of the stair'snarrowness. Her warmth enters into me; I feel myself agitated by thatobscure light which radiates from her. I share with her the heat ofher body and her thought itself. The darkness deepens round us. Hardly can I see the crouching girl there, warm and hollowed like anest. 

I call her by her name, very quietly, and it is as though I made a loudavowal! She turns, and it seems that this is the first time I haveseen her naked face. "Kiss me, " she says; and without speaking westammer, and murmur, and laugh. 

* * * * * *

Together we are looking at a little square piece of paper. I found iton the seat which the rose-tree overhangs on the edge of the downwardlane. Carefully folded, it had a forgotten look, and it was waitingthere, detained for a moment by its timorous weight. A few lines ofcareful 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, yourbeauty blended with your smile to espy. "

Then, having read it, we read it again, moved by a mysteriousinfluence. And we finger the chance-captured paper, without knowingwhat 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 asshe came in through the gardens. We walked in silence; more and morewe are losing the habit of talking to each other. We looked at thelatticed and flower-decked square where our aunt sleeps--the gardenwhich is only as big as a woman. Returning from the cemetery by way ofthe fields, the sun already low, we join hands, seized with triumphantdelight. 

She is wearing a dress of black delaine, and the skirt, the sleeves andthe collar wave in the breeze. Sometimes she turns her radiant face tome and it seems to grow still brighter when she looks at me. Slightlystooping, she walks, though among the grass and flowers whose tints andgrace shine in reflection on her forehead and cheeks, she is agiantess. A butterfly precedes us on our path and alights under oureyes, but when we come up it takes wing again, and comes down a littlefarther and begins all over again; and we smile at the butterfly thatthinks 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 themanor raised on the fringe of the wood. Against the abiding backgroundof distant heights the goddess stands, half-naked, in the beautifulripe light. Her fair hips are draped with a veil of still whiterstone, like a linen garment. Before the old moss-mellowed pedestal Ipressed Marie desperately to my heart. Then, in the sacred solitude ofthe wood, I put my hands upon her, and so that she might be like thegoddess I unfastened her black bodice, lowered the ribbonshoulder-straps of her chemise, and laid bare her wide and roundedbosom. 

She yielded to the adoration with lowered head, and her eyesmagnificently troubled, red-flushing with blood and sunshine. 

I put my lips on hers. Until that day, whenever I kissed her, her lipssubmitted. This time she gave me back my long caress, and even hereyes closed upon it. Then she stands there with her hands crossed onher 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. Theapple trees in the orchards are shaken and scatter bird-like jetsam inspace; and in that bright green paddock yonder the rows of out-hunglinen dance in the sunshine. The sky darkens; the wind rises andprevails. It was that very day of the gale. It assaults our twobodies on the flank of the hill; it comes out of infinity and setsroaring the tawny forest foliage. We can see its agitation behind theblack grille of the trunks. It makes us dizzy to watch the swiftdisplacement of the gray-veiled sky, and from cloud to cloud a birdseems hurled, like a stone. We go down towards the bottom of thevalley, clinging to the slope, an offering to the deepest breath ofheaven, driven forward yet holding each other back. 

So, gorged with the gale and deafened by the universal concert of spacethat goes through our ears, we find sanctuary on the river bank. Thewater flows between trees whose highest foliage is intermingled. By adark footpath, soft and damp, under the ogive of the branches, wefollow this crystal-paved cloister of green shadow. We come on aflat-bottomed boat, used by the anglers. I make Marie enter it, and ityields and groans under her weight. By the strokes of two old oars wedescend the current. 

It seems to our hearts and our inventing eyes that the banks takeflight on either side--it is the scenery of bushes and trees whichretreats. _We_--we abide! But the boat grounds among tall reeds. Marie is half reclining and does not speak. I draw myself towards heron my knees, and the boat quivers as I do. Her face in silence callsme; she calls me wholly. With her prostrate body, surrendered anddisordered, she calls me. 

I possess her--she is mine! In sublime docility she yields to myviolent caress. Now she is mine--mine forever! Henceforth let whatmay befall; let the years go by and the winters follow the summers, sheis mine, and my life is granted me! Proudly I think of the great andfamous lovers whom we resemble. I perceive that there is no recognizedlaw which can stand against the might of love. And under the transientwing of the foliage, amid the continuous recessional of heaven andearth, we repeat "never"; we repeat "always"; and we proclaim it toeternity. 

* * * * * *

The leaves are falling; the year draws near to its end; the wedding isarranged 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, likea shipwrecked man, seeing darkly, passive, except on rare occasionswhen he had fits of mad obstinacy, and no one knew why. 

In the early morning sometimes, when I was climbing Chestnut Hill on myway to work, Marie would appear before me at a corner, in the pale andblushing 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 byside towards her home. We loved each other too much to be able totalk. A very few words we exchanged just to entwine our voices, and inspeaking of other people we smiled at each other. 

One day, about that time, Monsieur the Marquis of Monthyon had thekindly thought of asking us both to an evening party at the castle, with several leading people of our quarter. When all the guests weregathered in a huge gallery, adorned with busts which sat in statebetween high curtains of red damask, the Marquis took it into his headto cut off the electricity. In a lordly way he liked heavy practicaljokes--I was just smiling at Marie, who was standing near me in themiddle of the crowded gallery, when suddenly it was dark. I put out myarms and drew her to me. She responded with a spirit she had not shownbefore, our lips met more passionately than ever, and our single bodyswayed among the invisible, ejaculating throng that elbowed and jostledus. The light flashed again. We had loosed our hold. Ah, it was notMarie whom I had clasped! The woman fled with a stifled exclamation ofshame and indignation towards him who she believed had embraced her, and who had seen nothing. Confused, and as though still blind, Irejoined Marie, but I was myself again with difficulty. In spite ofall, that kiss which had suddenly brought me in naked contact with acomplete stranger remained to me an extraordinary and infernal delight. Afterwards, I thought I recognized the woman by her blue dress, halfseen at the same time as the gleam of her neck after that brief anddazzling incident. But there were three of them somewhat alike. Inever knew which of those unknown women concealed within her flesh thehalf of the thrill that I could not shake off all the evening. 

* * * * * *

There was a large gathering at the wedding. The Marquis andMarchioness of Monthyon appeared at the sacristy. Brisbille, by goodluck, stayed away. Good sectarian that he was, he only acknowledgedcivil marriages. I was a little shamefaced to see march past, takingtheir share of the fine and tranquil smile distributed by Marie, somewomen who had formerly been my mistresses--Madame Lacaille, nervous, subtle, mystical; big Victorine and her good-natured rotundity, who hadwelcomed me any time and anywhere; and Madeleine Chaine; and slenderAntonia above all, with the Italian woman's ardent and theatrical face, ebony-framed, and wearing a hat of Parisian splendor. For Antonia isvery elegant since she married Véron. I could not help wincing when Isaw that lanky woman, who had clung to me in venturesome rooms, nowassiduous around us in her ceremonious attire. But how far off andobliterated all that was!

CHAPTER V

DAY BY DAY

We rearranged the house. We did not alter the general arrangement, northe places of the heavy furniture--that would have been too great achange. But we cast out all the dusty old stuff, the fossilized andworthless knick-knacks that Mame had accumulated. The photographs onthe walls, which were dying of jaundice and debility, and which nolonger stood for anybody, because of the greatness of time, we clearedout of their imitation tortoiseshell and buried in the depths ofdrawers. 

I bought some furniture, and as we sniffed the odor of varnish whichhung about for a long time in the lower room, we said, "This is thereal thing. " And, indeed, our home was pretty much like themiddle-class establishments of our quarter and everywhere. Is it notthe 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 camehome in the evening, Marie, who often had not been out and had kept onher dressing-gown and plaits, used to say, "There's been nothing tospeak of to-day. "

The aeroplanes were appearing at that time. We talked about them, andsaw photographs of them in the papers. One Sunday we saw one from ourwindow. We had heard the chopped-up noise of its engine expanding overthe sky; and down below, the townsfolk on their doorsteps, raised theirheads towards the ceiling of their streets. Rattling space was markedwith a dot. We kept our eyes on it and saw the great flat and noisyinsect grow bigger and bigger, silhouetting the black of its angles andpartitioned lines against the airy wadding of the clouds. When itsheadlong flight had passed, when it had dwindled in our eyes and earsamid the new world of sounds, which it drew in its train, Marie sigheddreamily. 

"I would like, " she said, "to go up in an aeroplane, into thewind--into the sky!"

One spring we talked a lot about a trip we would take some day. Somerailway posters had been stuck on the walls of the old tin works, thatthe Pocard scheme was going to transfigure. We looked at them the daythey were freshly brilliant in their wet varnish and their smell ofpaste. We preferred the bill about Corsica, which showed seasidelandscapes, harbors with picturesque people in the foreground and apurple mountain behind, all among garlands. And later, even whenstiffened and torn and cracking in the wind, that poster attracted us. 

One evening, in the kitchen, when we had just come in--there arememories which mysteriously outlive the rest--and Marie was lightingthe fire, with her hat on and her hands wiped out in the twilight bythe 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. Ilooked about me and shared my thoughts with her. Never very talkative, she would listen to me. Coming out of the Place de l'Eglise, whichused to affect us so much not long ago, we often used to meet Jean andGenevieve Trompson, near the sunken post where an old jam pot lies onthe 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 wasmadness, I always said so. " And hearing these things, unfortunatelytrue, Marie would murmur, with a sort of obstinate gentleness, "Love issacred. "

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 coughingwhich two years before had torn Adolphe Piot's lungs, who died in themidst of his family under such sad circumstances. Those days we wouldreturn with our ears full of the obstinate clamor of that recordingbird, which had set itself fiercely to immortalize the noise thatpassed for a moment through the world, and toss the echoes of anancient 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 surprisingminiature; my father-in-law, who is gradually annihilating himself; andCrillon. This last lives always contented in the same shop while timegoes by, like his father and his grandfather, and the cobbler of thefable, his eternal ancestor. Under his square cap, on the edge of hisglazed niche, he soliloquizes, while he smokes the short and juicy pipewhich joins him in talking and spitting--indeed, he seems to beanswering it. A lonely toiler, his lot is increasingly hard, andalmost worthless. He often comes in to us to do little jobs--mend atable leg, re-seat a chair, replace a tile. Then he says, "There'ssummat I must tell you----"

So he retails the gossip of the district, for it is against hisconscience, as he frankly avows, to conceal what he knows. And Heavenknows, there is gossip enough in our quarter!--a complete network, above and below, of quarrels, intrigues and deceptions, woven aroundman, 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 lowlyworker's face. He is better than I, and he even understands lifebetter, 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'tlike exarrergations, and I find as much of it among the pestimists asamong the opticions. Drink, you say! It's chiefly that folks haven'tenough charitableness, mind you. They blame all these poor devils thatdrink and they think themselves clever! And they're envious, too; ifthey wasn't that, tell me, would they stand there in stony peterifiedsilence before the underhand goings-on of bigger folks? That's what itis, at bottom of us. Let me tell you now. I'll say nothing againstTermite, though he's a poacher, and for the castle folks that's worsethan all, but if yon bandit of a Brisbille weren't the anarchist he isand frightening everybody, I'd excuse him his dirty nose and even nottaking 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 abroad 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 Ihold by accustomary ideas; I'm not an antiquitary, but I don't like tosingle-arise myself. If I'm a botcher in life, it's cos I'm the sameas others--no less, " he says, straightening up. And standing stillmore erect, he adds, "_Nor_ no more, neither!"

When we are not chatting we read aloud. There is a very fine libraryat the factory, selected by Madame Valentine Gozlan from works of aneducational or moral kind, for the use of the staff. Marie, whoseimagination goes further afield than mine, and who has not myanxieties, directs the reading. She opens a book and reads aloud whileI take my ease, looking at the pastel portrait which hangs justopposite the window. On the glass which entombs the picture I see thegently moving and puffing reflection of the fidgety window curtains, and the face of that glazed portrait becomes blurred with brokenstreaks 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 herabsorbed in this occupation. It even happens that she applies herselfthus to poetry. In her set and stooping face her eyes come and go overthe abbreviated lines of the verses. From time to time she raises themand looks up at the sky, and--vastly further than the visible sky--atall 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 beganto cry, as she showed me the open cage and the bird which lay at thebottom, with its feet curled up, as rumpled and stark as the littleyellow plaything of a doll. I sympathized with her sorrow; but hertears were endless, and I found her emotion disproportionate. 

"Come now, " I said, "after all, a bird's only a bird, a mere point thatmoved a little in a corner of the room. What then? What about thethousands 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 thatit was momentous and that she was right. 

For a moment I stood bewildered by this want of understanding; thisdifference between her way of feeling and mine. It was a disagreeablerevelation of the unknown. One might often, in regard to smallmatters, make a multitude of reflections if one wished; but one doesnot wish. 

* * * * * *

My position at the factory and in our quarter is becoming graduallystronger. By reason of a regular gratuity which I received, we are atlast able to put money aside each month, like everybody. 

"I say!" cried Crillon, pulling me outside with him, as I was coming inone evening; "I must let you know that you've been spoken ofspontanially for the Town Council at the next renewment. They'remaking a big effort, you know. Monsieur the Marquis is going to standfor the legislative elections--but we've walked into the otherquarter, " said Crillon, stopping dead. "Come back, come back. "

We turned right-about-face. 

"This patriotic society of Monsieur Joseph, " Crillon went on, "has donea lot of harm to the anarchists. We've all got to let 'em feel ourelbows, that's necessential. You've got a foot in the factory, eh?You see the workmen; have a crack of talk with 'em. You ingreasiateyourself with 'em, so's some of 'em'll vote for you. For _them's_ thedanger. "

"It's true that I am very sympathetic to them, " I murmured, impressedby this prospect. 

Crillon came to a stand in front of the Public Baths. "It's theseventeenth to-day, " he explained; "the day of the month when I takes abath. Oh, yes! I know that _you_ go every Thursday; but I'm not ofthat 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 bestirourselves and impell ourselves, what the devil! As for me, I'vefinished my political efforts for peace and order. It's _your_ turn!"

He is right. Looking at the ageing man, I note that his framework isslightly bowed; that his ill-shaven cheeks are humpbacked with littleends of hair turning into white crystals. In his lowly sphere he hasdone his duty. I reflect upon the mite-like efforts of the unimportantpeople; of the mountains of tasks performed by anonymity. They arenecessary, these hosts of people so closely resembling each other; forcities are built upon the poor brotherhood of paving-stones. 

He is right, as always. I, who am still young; I, who am on a higherlevel than his; I must play a part, and subdue the desire one has tolet things go on as they may. 

A sudden movement of will appears in my life, which otherwise proceedsas usual. 

CHAPTER VI

A VOICE IN THE EVENING

I approached the workpeople with all possible sympathy. The toiler'slot, moreover, raises interesting problems, which one should seek tounderstand. 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 guideyou. "

The truth is that the corner of the factory to which he leads me has anaggressive smell. The shapeless walls of this sort of grotto areadorned with shelves full of leaking lamps--lamps dirty as beasts. Ina bucket there are old wicks and other departed things. At the foot ofa wooden cupboard which looks like iron are lamp glasses in papershirts; and farther away, groups of oil-drums. All is dilapidated andruinous; all is dark in this angle of the great building where light iselaborated. The specter of a huge window stands yonder. The panesonly half appear; so encrusted are they they might be covered withyellow paper. The great stones--the rocks--of the walls areupholstered with a dark deposit of grease, like the bottom of astewpan, and nests of dust hang from them. Black puddles gleam on thefloor, with beds of slime from the scraping of the lamps. 

There he lives and moves, in his armored tunic encrusted with filth asdark as coffee-grounds. In his poor claw he grips the chief implementof his work--a black rag. His grimy hands shine with paraffin, and theoil, 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, andwipes them. The dirt and the darkness of this population of applianceshe attracts to himself, and he works like a nigger. 

"For it's got to be well done, " he says, "and even when you're faggedout, you must keep on rubbing hard. "

"There's six hundred and sixty-three, monsieur" (he says "monsieur" assoon as he embarks on technical explanations), "counting the smart onesin the fine offices, and the lanterns in the wood-yard, and the nightwatchmen. You'll say to me, 'Why don't they have electricity thatlights itself?' It's 'cos that costs money and they get paraffin fornext to nothing, it seems, through a big firm 'at they're in with upyonder. As for me, I'm always on my legs, from the morning when I'mtired through sleeping badly, from after dinner when you feel sick witheating, up to the evening, when you're sick of everything. "

The bell has rung, and we go away in company. He has pulled off hisblue trousers and tunic and thrown them into a corner--two objectswhich have grown heavy and rusty, like tools. But the dirty shell ofhis toil did upholster him a little, and he emerges from it gaunter, and horribly squeezed within the littleness of a torturing jacket. Hisbony legs, in trousers too wide and too short, break off at the bottomin 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 myhead, and whom I see trotting slowly and painfully at my side in therumbling grayness of the evening exodus, that I have a sudden andtragic vision of the people, as in a flash's passing. (I do sometimesget glimpses of the things of life momentarily. ) The dark doorway tomy vision seems torn asunder. Between these two phantoms in front thesable swarm outspreads. The multitude encumbers the plain thatbristles with dark chimneys and cranes, with ladders of iron plantedblack and vertical in nakedness--a plain vaguely scribbled withgeometrical lines, rails and cinder paths--a plain utilized yet barren. In some places about the approaches to the factory cartloads of clinkerand cinders have been dumped, and some of it continues to burn likepyres, throwing off dark flames and darker curtains. Higher, the hazyclouds vomited by the tall chimneys come together in broad mountainswhose foundations brush the ground and cover the land with a stormysky. In the depths of these clouds humanity is let loose. The immenseexpanse of men moves and shouts and rolls in the same course allthrough the suburb. An inexhaustible echo of cries surrounds us; it islike hell in eruption and begirt by bronze horizons. 

At that moment I am afraid of the multitude. It brings somethinglimitless into being, something which surpasses and threatens us; andit seems to me that he who is not with it will one day be troddenunderfoot. 

My head goes down in thought. I walk close to Marcassin, who gives methe impression of an escaping animal, hopping through thedarkness--whether because of his name, [1] or his stench, I do not know. The evening is darkening; the wind is tearing leaves away; it thickenswith 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 toexplain to me the law of unremitting toil. An echo of his murmurreaches my face. 

"And that's what one hasn't the least idea of. Because what's nearestto 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 wifeis waiting for you. You're lucky----"

"I've no time; or rather, I've no strength. At nights, when I comehome I'm too tired--I'm too tired, you understand, to be happy, yousee. 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 foreleven 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. Ijust stay with my hands mucky; and on Sundays when I'm cleaned up, it'sa 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 Ishould not know how to answer--I can, in fact, recall those holidayswhen the face of Pétrolus is embellished by the visible marks of water. 

"Apart from that, " he goes on, withdrawing his chin into the graystring of his over-large collar; "apart from that, Charlotte, she'svery good. She looks after me, and tidies the house, and it's her thatlights _our_ lamp; and she hides the books carefully away from me so'sI 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, andwhen one's unhappy everything's favorable to being unhappy. "

He is silent for a while, and then adds by way of conclusion to all hehas said, and to all that one can say, "_My_ father, he caved in atfifty. And I shall cave in at fifty, p'raps before. "

With his thumb he points through the twilight at that sort of indelibledarkness which makes the multitude, "Them others, it's not the samewith them. There's those that want to change everything and keep goingon that notion. There's those that drink and want to drink, and keepgoing that way. "

I hardly listen to him while he explains to me the grievances of thedifferent groups of workmen, "The molders, monsieur, them, it's amatter of the gangs----"

Just now, while looking at the population of the factory, I was almostafraid; it seemed to me that these toilers were different sorts ofbeings 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 areall alike. "

In the distance, and together, they strike fear, and their combinationis a menace; but near by they are only the same as this one. One mustnot look at them in the distance. 

Pétrolus gets excited; he makes gestures; he punches in and punches outagain 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 frontof me, and each of his soles is pierced by a valve which draws in waterfrom the saturated ground. 

"The unions, monsieur----" he cries to me in the wind, "why, it'sdangerous to point at them. You haven't the right to think anymore--that's what they call liberty. If you're in _them_, you've gotto be agin the parsons--(I'm willing, but what's that got to do withlabor?)--and there's something more serious, " the lamp-man adds, in asuddenly 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. Hestops 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 thedarkness, "Déroulède!" he cries; "that's the man--he's _my_ God!"

Pétrolus raises his voice and gesticulates; he makes great movements inthe night at the vision of his idol, to whom his leanness and his longelastic arms give him some resemblance. "He's for war; he's forAlsace-Lorraine, that's what he's for; and above all, he's for nothingelse. Ah, that's all there is to it! The Boches have got to disappearoff 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 gotmy schooling any old how, and I know next to nothing but I reckon it'sgrand, only to think like that, and in the Reserves I'madjutant[1]--almost an officer, monsieur, just a lamp-man as I am!"

[Footnote 1: A non-com. , approximately equivalent to regimentalsergeant-major. --Tr. ]

He tells me, almost in shouts and signs, because of the wind across theopen, that his worship dates from a function at which Paul Déroulèdehad spoken to him. "He spoke to everybody, an' then he spoke to me, asclose to me as you and me; but it was _him_! I wanted an idea, and hegave it to me!"

"Very good, " I say to him; "very good. You are a patriot, that'sexcellent. "

I feel that the greatness of this creed surpasses the selfish demandsof labor--although I have never had the time to think much about thesethings--and it strikes me as touching and noble. 

A last fiery spasm gets hold of Pétrolus as he espies afar Eudo'spointed house, and he cries that on the great day of revenge there willbe some accounts to settle; and then the fervor of this ideal-bearercools and fades, and is spent along the length of the roads. He is nowno more than a poor black bantam which cannot possibly take wing. Hisface mournfully awakes to the evening. He shuffles along, bows hislong and feeble spine, and his spirit and his strength exhausted, heapproaches the porch of his house, where Madame Marcassin awaits him. 

CHAPTER VII

A SUMMARY

The workmen manifest mistrust and even dislike towards me. Why? Idon't know; but my good intentions have gradually got weary. 

One after another, sundry women have occupied my life. Antonia Véronwas first. Her marriage and mine, their hindrance and restriction, threw us back upon each other as of yore. We found ourselves alone oneday in my house--where nothing ever used to happen, and she offered meher lips, irresistibly. The appeal of her sensuality was answered bymine, 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 awayfrom her house across the dark suburb among a host of beings vanishing, like myself, I only brought away the memory of her nervous andirritating laugh, and that new wrinkle which clung to her mouth like animplement. 

Then younger desires destroyed the old, and gallant adventures begotone 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 sametime, of a being who has not changed, "How I loved her!" and, "How Ihave ceased to love her!"

All the while performing as a duty my daily task, all the while takingsuitable precautions so that Marie may not know and may not suffer, Iam looking for the happiness which lives. And truly, when I have asense of some new assent wavering and making ready, or when I am on theway to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equalto everything!

This fills my life. Desire wears the brain as much as thought wearsit. All my being is agog for chances to shine and to be shared. Whenthey say in my presence of some young woman that, "she is not happy, " athrill of joy tears through me. 

On Sundays, among the crowds, I have often felt my heart tighten withdistress as I watch the unknown women. Reverie has often held me allday because of one who has gone by and disappeared, leaving me a clearvision of her curtained room, and of herself, vibrating like a harp. She, perhaps, was the one I should have always loved; she whom I seekgropingly, desperately, from each to the next. Ah, what a delightfulthing to see and to think of a distant woman always is, whoever she maybe!

There are moments when I suffer, and am to be pitied. Assuredly, ifone could read me really, no one would pity me. And yet all men arelike me. If they are gifted with acceptable physique they dream ofheadlong adventures, they attempt them, and our heart never standsstill. But no one acknowledges that, no one, ever. 

Then, there were the women who turned me a cold shoulder; and amongthem all Madame Pierron, a beautiful and genteel woman of twenty-fiveyears, with her black fillets and her marble profile, who stillretained the obvious awkwardness and vacant eye of young married women. Tranquil, staid and silent, she came and went and lived, totally blindto my looks of admiration. 

This perfect unconcern aggravated my passion. I remember my pangs onemorning in June, when I saw some feminine linen spread upon the greenhedge within her garden. The delicate white things marshaled therewere waiting, stirred by the leaves and the breeze; so that Spring lentthem frail shape and sweetness--and life. I remember, too, a gaunthouse, scorching in the sun, and a window which flashed and then shut!The window stayed shut, like a slab. All the world was silent; andthat splendid living being was walled up there. And last, I haverecollection of an evening when, in the bluish and dark green andchalky landscape of the town and its rounded gardens, I saw that windowlighted up. A narrow glimmer of rose and gold was enframed there, andI could distinguish, leaning on the sill that overhung the town, in theheart of that resplendence, a feminine form which stirred before myeyes in inaccessible forbearance. Long did I watch with shaking kneesthat window dawning upon space, as the shepherd watches the rising ofVenus. That evening, when I had come in and was alone for amoment--Marie was busy below in the kitchen--alone in our unattractiveroom, I retired to the starry window, beset by immense thoughts. Thesespaces, these separations, these incalculable durations--they allreduce us to dust, they all have a sort of fearful splendor from whichwe seek defense in our hiding. 

* * * * * *

I have not retained a definite recollection of a period of jealousyfrom which I suffered for a year. From certain facts, certain profoundchanges of mood in Marie, it seemed to me that there was some onebetween her and me. But beyond vague symptoms and these terriblereflections on her, I never knew anything. The truth, everywherearound me, was only a phantom of truth. I experienced acute internalwounds of humiliation and shame, of rebellion! I struggled feebly, aswell as I could, against a mystery too great for me, and then mysuspicions wore themselves out. I fled from the nightmare, and by astrong effort I forgot it. Perhaps my imputations had no basis; but itis curious how one ends in only believing what one wants to believe. 

* * * * * *

Something which had been plotting a long while among the Socialistextremists suddenly produced a stoppage of work at the factory, andthis was followed by demonstrations which rolled through the terrifiedtown. Everywhere the shutters went up. The business people blottedout their shops, and the town looked like a tragic Sunday. 

"It's a revolution!" said Marie to me, turning pale, as Benoît cried tous 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 mostdangerous ringleaders was preceding the army of demonstrators, commissioned to extort outrageous advantages, with threats, fromMessrs. Gozlan. 

Our quarter had a loose and dejected look. People went furtively, seeking news, and doors half opened regretfully. Here and there groupsformed and lamented in undertones the public authority's lack offoresight, 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 inthe twilight of the closed shutters. 

"The Baroness is in a dreadful way. She's seen a dark mass in thedistance. Some young men of the aristocracy have armed themselves andare guarding her. She says it's another Jacquerie[1] rising!"

[Footnote 1: A terrible insurrection of the French peasantry in1358. --Tr. ]

"Ah, my God! What a mess!" said Crillon. 

"It's the beginning of the end!" asserted old Daddy Ponce, shaking hisgrayish-yellow forehead, all plaited with wrinkles. 

Time went by--still no news. What are they doing yonder? What shallwe 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 itthat they started shouting and threatening, my lad! 'Never mind that!'says one of the Messrs. Gozlan, 'let's have a drink first; I'll vouchfor it we'll talk better after!' There was a table and champagne, I'llvouch for it. They gave 'em it to drink, and then some more and thensome more. I'll vouch for it they sent themselves something down, mylad, into their waistcoats. I can vouch for it that the bottles ofchampagne came like magic out of the ground. Fontan kept alwaysbringing them as though he was coining them. Got to admit it was anextra-double-special guaranteed champagne, that you want to go cautiouswith. So then, after three-quarters of an hour, nearly all thedeputation were drunk. They spun round, tongue-tied, and embraced eachother, --I can vouch for it. There were some that stuck it, but theydidn't count, my lad! The others didn't even know what they'd comefor. And the bosses; they'd had a fright, and they didn't half wriggleand 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 werepeated 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 refrainfull-throated: "The sovereign people that can't stand on its ownlegs!"

By the side of a few faint-hearted citizens who had already, since themorning, modified their political opinions, a great figure rises beforemy eyes--Fontan. I remember that night, already long ago, when achance glimpse through the vent-hole of his cellar showed me shiploadsof bottles of champagne heaped together, and pointed like shells. Forsome future day he foresaw to-day's victory. He is really clever, hesees clearly and he sees far. He has rescued law and order by a sortof genius. 

The constraint which has weighed all day on our gestures and wordsexplodes in delight. Noisily we cast off that demeanor of conspiratorswhich has bent our shoulders since morning. The windows that wereclosed 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 eachother. 

This feeling of deliverance pervades the most lowly. On the step ofthe little blood-red restaurant I spy Monsieur Mielvaque, hopping forjoy. He is shivering, too, in his thin gray coat, cracked withwrinkles, that looks like wrapping paper; and one would say that hisdwindled face had at long last caught the hue of the folios hedesperately copies among his long days and his short nights, to pick upsome sprigs of extra pay. There he stands, not daring to enter therestaurant (for a reason he knows too well); but how delighted he iswith the day's triumph for society! And Mademoiselle Constantine, thedressmaker, incurably poor and worn away by her sewing-machine, isoverjoyed. She opens wide the eyes which seem eternally full of tears, and in the grayish abiding half-mourning of imperfect cleanliness, inpallid excitement, she claps her hands. 

Marie and I can hear the furious desperate hammering of Brisbille inhis forge, and we begin to laugh as we have not laughed for a longtime. 

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 bythe terror which the workmen's menace spread in decent circles, and bythe universal joy which greeted their recoil! My deepest tendenciestake 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 inthat lapse of time there is hardly a happening that I remember, unlessit be the disillusion of the death of Marie's rich godmother, who leftus nothing. There was the failure of the Pocard scheme, which was onlya 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 myfather-in-law's illness and his death, which was a great shock toMarie, and put us into black clothes. 

I have not changed. Marie _has_ somewhat. She has got stouter; hereyelids look tired and red, and she buries herself in silences. We areno longer quite in accord in details of our life. She who once alwayssaid "Yes, " is now primarily disposed to say "No. " If I insist shedefends her opinion, obstinately, sourly; and sometimes dishonestly. For example, in the matter of pulling down the partition downstairs, ifpeople had heard our high voices they would have thought there was aquarrel. Following some of our discussions, she keeps her facecontracted and spiteful, or assumes the martyr's air, and sometimesthere are moments of hatred between us. 

Often she says, while talking of something else, "Ah, if we had had achild, all would have been different!"

I am becoming personally negligent, through a sort of idleness, againstwhich I have not sufficient grounds for reaction. When we are byourselves, at meal times, my hands are sometimes questionable. Fromday to day, and from month to month, I defer going to the dentist andpostpone the attention required. I am allowing my molars to getjagged. 

Marie never shows any jealousy, nor even suspicion about my personaladventures. Her trust is almost excessive! She is not veryfar-seeing, or else I am nothing very much to her, and I have a grudgeagainst her for this indifference. 

And now I see around me women who are too young to love me. That mostpositive of obstacles, the age difference, begins to separate me fromthe amorous. And yet I am not surfeited with love, and I yearn towardsyouth! Marthe, my little sister-in-law, said to me one day, "Now thatyou're old----" That a child of fifteen years, so freshly dawned andreally new, can bring herself to pass this artless judgment on a man ofthirty-five--that is fate's first warning, the first sad day whichtells us at midsummer that winter will come. 

One evening, as I entered the room, I indistinctly saw Marie, sittingand musing by the window. As I came in she got up--it was Marthe! Thelight from the sky, pale as a dawn, had blenched the young girl'sgolden hair and turned the trace of a smile on her cheek into somethinglike a wrinkle. Cruelly, the play of the light showed her face fadedand her neck flabby; and because she had been yawning, even her eyeswere 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 moistlips; this plump adolescent whose short skirt shows her curving calves, is an affecting picture of what Marie was. It is a sort of terriblerevelation. In truth Marthe resembles, more than the Marie of to-daydoes, the Marie whom I formerly loved; the Marie who came out of theunknown, 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, toapproach Marthe--the impossible dream, the dream of dreams! She has alittle love affair with a youngster hardly molted into adolescence, andrather absurd, whom one catches sight of now and again as he slips awayfrom 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 hergirlish growing triumph and to her thoughts as if I were her enemy!One morning when she was capering and laughing, flower-crowned, at thedoorstep, she looked to me like a being from another world. 

* * * * * *

One winter's day, when Marie had gone out and I was arranging mypapers, I found a letter I had written not long before, but had notposted, and I threw the useless document on the fire. When Marie cameback in the evening, she settled herself in front of the fire to dryherself, and to revive it for the room's twilight; and the letter, which had been only in part consumed, took fire again. And suddenlythere gleamed in the night a shred of paper with a shred of mywriting--"_I love you as much as you love me_!"

And it was so clear, the inscription that flamed in the darkness, thatit was not worth while even to attempt an explanation. 

We could not speak, nor even look at each other! In the fatalcommunion of thought which seized us just then, we turned aside fromeach other, even shadow-veiled as we were. We fled from the truth! Inthese great happenings we become strangers to each other for the reasonthat we never knew each other profoundly. We are vaguely separated onearth from everybody else, but we are mightily distant from ournearest. 

* * * * * *

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 abereavement or remorse, but I am not so delighted with life as I oncehoped to be. Ah, men's love and women's beauty are too short-lived inthis world; and yet, is it not only thereby that we and they exist? Itmight be said that love, so pure a thing, the only one worth while inlife, is a crime, since it is always punished sooner or later. I donot understand. We are a pitiful lot; and everywhere about us--in ourmovements, within our walls, and from hour to hour, there is a stiflingmediocrity. Fate's face is gray. 

Notwithstanding, my personal position has established itself andprogressively improved. I am getting three hundred and sixty francs amonth, and besides, I have a share in the profits of the litigationoffice--about fifty francs a month. It is a year and a half since Iwas stagnating in the little glass office, to which Monsieur Mielvaquehas been promoted, succeeding me. Nowadays they say to me, "You'relucky!" They envy me--who once envied so many people. It astonishesme at first, then I get used to it. 

I have restored my political plans, but this time I have a rational andnormal policy in view. I am nominated to succeed Crillon in the TownCouncil. There, no doubt, I shall arrive sooner or later. I continueto become a personality by the force of circumstances, without mynoticing it, and without any real interest in me on the part of thosearound me. 

Quite a piece of my life has now gone by. When sometimes I think ofthat, I am surprised at the length of the time elapsed; at the numberof the days and the years that are dead. It has come quickly, andwithout much change in myself on the other hand; and I turn away fromthat vision, at once real and supernatural. And yet, in spite ofmyself, my future appears before my eyes--and its end. My future willresemble 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, Vivierswas an important center of the operations. All the district wasbrightened with a swarming of red and blue and with martial ardor. 

Alone and systematically, Brisbille was the reviler. From the top ofChestnut Hill, where we were watching a strategical display, he pointedat the military mass. "Maneuvers, do they call them? I could die oflaughing! The red caps have dug trenches and the white-band caps havebunged 'em up again. Take away the War Office, and you've only kids'games left. "

"It's war!" explained an influential military correspondent, who wasstanding by. 

Then the journalist talked with a colleague about the Russians. 

"The Russians!" Brisbille broke in; "when they've formed arepublic----"

"He's a simpleton, " said the journalist, smiling. 

The inebriate jumped astride his hobby horse. "War me no war, it's alllunacy! And look, look--look at those red trousers that you can seemiles away! They must do it on purpose for soldiers to be killed, thatthey don't dress 'em in the color of nothing at all!"

A lady could not help breaking in here: "What?" Change our littlesoldiers' 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 ourcommissions! And any way, the red trousers are not the danger onethinks. If they were as visible as all that, the High Command wouldhave noticed it and would have taken steps--just for field service, andwithout interfering with the parade uniform!"

The regimental sergeant-major cut the discussion short as he turned toBrisbille 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-majorwas an athlete, and gifted with a bad temper, especially when otherswere present. 

The castle was quartering a Staff. Hunting parties were given for theoccasion in the manorial demesne, and passing processions of bedizenedguests were seen. Among the generals and nobles shone an Austrianprince of the blood royal, who bore one of the great names in theAlmanach de Gotha, and who was officially in France to follow themilitary operations. 

The presence of the Baroness's semi-Imperial guest caused a greatimpression of historic glamour to hover over the country. His name wasrepeated; his windows were pointed out in the middle of the principalfront, and one thought himself lucky if he saw the curtains moving. Many families of poor people detached themselves from their quarters inthe 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 amongthe rest. He was walking alone, covered by a great gray waterproof. His felt hat was adorned with a short feather. He displayed thecharacteristic features of his race--a long turned-down nose and areceding chin. 

When he had gone by, Marie and I said, both at the same time, and alittle dazzled, "An eagle!"

We saw him again at the end of a stag-hunt. They had driven a staginto the Morteuil forest. The _mort_ took place in a clearing in thepark, near the outer wall. The Baroness, who always thought of thetownsfolk, had ordered the little gate to be opened which gives intothis part of the demesne, so that the public could be present at thespectacle. 

It was imperious and pompous. The scene one entered, on leaving thesunny fields and passing through the gate, was a huge circle of darkfoliage in the heart of the ancient forest. At first, one saw only themajestic summits of mountainous trees, like peaks and globes lost amidthe heavens, which on all sides overhung the clearing and bathed it intwilight almost green. 

In this lordly solemnity of nature, down among the grass, moss and deadwood, there flowed a contracted but brilliant concourse around thefinal preparations for the execution of the stag. 

The animal was kneeling on the ground, weak and overwhelmed. Wepressed round, and eyes were thrust forward between heads and shouldersto see him. One could make out the gray thicket of his antlers, hisgreat lolling tongue, and the enormous throb of his heart, agitatinghis exhausted body. A little wounded fawn clung to him, bleedingabundantly, flowing like a spring. 

Round about it the ceremony was arranged in several circles. Thebeaters, in ranks, made a glaring red patch in the moist greenatmosphere. The hunters, men and women, all dismounted, in scarletcoats and black hats, crowded together. Apart, the saddle and tacklehorses snorted, with creaking of leather and jingle of metal. Kept ata respectful distance by a rope extended hastily on posts, theinquisitive crowd flowed and increased every instant. 

The blood which issued from the little fawn made a widening pool, andone 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 ofthe great stag crushed by weariness, gradually drooping his branchinghead, tormented by the howls of the hounds which the whipper-in heldback with difficulty, and that of the little one, cowering beside himand dying with gaping throat, would have been touching had one givenway to sentiment. 

I noticed that the imminent slaying of the stag excited a certaincurious fever. Around me the women and young girls especially elbowedand wriggled their way to the front, and shuddered, and were glad. 

They cut the throats of the beasts, the big and the little, amidabsolute and religious silence, the silence of a sacrament. MadameLacaille vibrated from head to foot. Marie was calm, but there was agleam in her eyes; and little Marthe, who was hanging on to me, dug hernails into my arm. The prince was prominent on our side, watching thelast act of the run. He had remained in the saddle. He was moresplendidly red than the others--empurpled, it seemed, by reflectionsfrom a throne. He spoke in a loud voice, like one who is accustomed togovern and likes to discourse; and his outline had the very form ofbidding. He expressed himself admirably in our language, of which heknew the intimate graduations. I heard him saying, "These greatmaneuvers, after all, they're a sham. It's music-hall war, directed byscene-shifters. Hunting's better, because there's blood. We get toomuch unaccustomed to blood, in our prosaic, humanitarian, and bleatingage. Ah, as long as the nations love hunting, I shall not despair ofthem!"

Just then, the crash of the horns and the thunder of the pack releaseddrowned all other sounds. The prince, erect in his stirrups, andraising his proud head and his tawny mustache above the bloody andcringing mob of the hounds, expanded his nostrils and seemed to sniff abattlefield. 

The next day, when a few of us were chatting together in the streetnear the sunken post where the old jam-pot lies, Benoît came up, fullof a tale to tell. Naturally it was about the prince. Benoît wasdejected and his lips were drawn and trembling. "He's killed a bear!"said he, with glittering eye; "you should have seen it, ah! a tamebear, of course. Listen--he was coming back from hunting with theMarquis and Mademoiselle Berthe and some people behind. And he comeson a wandering showman with a performing bear. A simpleton with longblack hair like feathers, and a bear that sat on its rump and didlittle tricks and wore a belt. The prince had got his gun. I don'tknow how it came about but the prince he got an idea. He said, 'I'dlike to kill that bear, as I do in my own hunting. Tell me, my goodfellow, how much shall I pay you for firing at the beast? You'll notbe a loser, I promise you. ' The simpleton began to tremble and lifthis arms up in the air. He loved his bear! 'But my bear's the same asmy brother!' he says. Then do you know what the Marquis of Monthyondid? He just simply took out his purse and opened it and put it underthe chap's nose; and all the smart hunting folk they laughed to see howthe simpleton changed when he saw all those bank notes. And naturallyhe ended by nodding that it was a bargain, and he'd even seen so manyof the rustlers that he turned from crying to laughing! Then theprince loaded his gun at ten paces from the bear and killed it with oneshot, my boy; just when he was rocking left and right, and sitting uplike 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 onerisked the opinion. "No doubt they do things like that in Hungary orBohemia, 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'sBohemian or Hungarian, he's a grandee, so he's got the right to do whathe likes, eh?"

Eudo looked as if he would intervene at this point and was seekingwords. (Not long before that he had had the queer notion of shelteringand nursing a crippled hind that had escaped from a previous run, andhis act had given great displeasure in high places. ) So as soon as heopened his mouth we made him shut it. The idea of Eudo in judgment onprinces!

And the rest lowered their heads and nodded and murmured, "Yes, he's agrandee. "

And the little phrase spread abroad, timidly and obscurely. 

* * * * * *

When All Saints' Day came round, many of the distinguished visitors atthe castle were still there. Every year that festival gives usoccasion for an historical ceremony on the grand scale. At two o'clockall the townsfolk that matter gather with bunches of flowers on theesplanade or in front of the cemetery half-way up Chestnut Hill, forthe ceremony and an open air service. 

Early in the afternoon I betook myself with Marie to the scene. I puton a fancy waistcoat of black and white check and my new patent leatherboots, which make me look at them. It is fine weather on this Sundayof Sundays, and the bells are ringing. Everywhere the hurrying crowdclimbs the hill--peasants in flat caps, working families in their bestclothes, young girls with faces white and glossy as the bridal satinwhich is the color of their thoughts, young men carrying jars offlowers. All these appear on the esplanade, where graying lime treesare 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 atthe unfolding spectacle as he passes and says, "It is our race'sfestival. "

The words made me look more seriously at the scene before my eyes--allthis tranquil and contemplative stir in the heart of festive nature. Reflection and the vexations of my life have mellowed my mind. Theidea at last becomes clear in my brain of an entirety, an immensemultitude in space, and infinite in time, a multitude of which I am anintegral part, which has shaped me in its image, which continues tokeep me like it, and carries me along its control; my own people. 

Baroness Grille, in the riding habit that she almost always wears whenmixing with the people, is standing near the imposing entry to thecemetery. Monsieur the Marquis of Monthyon is holding aloft hisstately presence, his handsome and energetic face. Solid and sporting, with dazzling shirt cuffs and fine ebon-black shoes, he parades asmile. There is an M. P. Too, a former Minister, very assiduous, whochats with the old duke. There are the Messrs. Gozlan and famouspeople whose names one does not know. Members of the Institute of thegreat learned associations, or people fabulously wealthy. 

Not far from these groups, which are divided from the rest by a scarletbarrier of beaters and the flashing chain of their slung horns, arisesMonsieur Fontan. The huge merchant and café-owner occupies anintermediate and isolated place between principals and people. Hisface is disposed in fat white tiers, like a Buddha's belly. Monumentally motionless he says nothing at all, but he tranquilly spitsall around him. He radiates saliva. 

And for this ceremony, which seems like an apotheosis, all the notablesof our quarter are gathered together, as well as those of the otherquarter, who seem different and are similar. 

We elbow the ordinary types. Apolline goes crabwise. She is in newthings, and has sprinkled Eau-de-Cologne on her skin; her eye isbright; her face well-polished; her ears richly adorned. She is alwaysrather dirty, and her wrists might be branches, but she has cottongloves. There are some shadows in the picture, for Brisbille has comewith his crony, Termite, so that his offensive and untidy presence maybe a protest. There is another blot--a working man's wife, who speaksat their meetings; people point at her. "What's that woman doinghere?"

"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. Shemust 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, gentleand murmurous, has shrunk a little; more and more he leans towards thetomb. 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 whosehealth is the object of so much solicitude, goes stiffly by, as if shewere 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 anold man, an officer of the Legion of Honor; his voice is weak but hisface noble. 

He speaks of the Dead, whose day this is. He explains to us that weare not separated from them; not only by reason of the future life andour sacred creeds, but because our life on earth must be purely andsimply a continuation of theirs. We must do as they did, and believewhat they believed, else shall we fall into error and utopianism. Weare all linked to each other and with the past; we are bound togetherby an entirety of traditions and precepts. Our normal destiny, soadequate to our nature, must be allowed to fulfill itself along theindicated path, without hearkening to the temptations of novelty, ofhate, of envy--of envy above all, that social cancer, that enemy of thegreat civic virtue--Discipline. 

He ceases. The echo of the great magnificent words floats in thesilence. Everybody does not understand all that has just been said;but all have a deep impression that the text is one of simplicity, ofmoderation, of obedience, and foreheads move altogether in the breathof the phrases like a field in the breeze. 

"Yes, " says Crillon, pensively, "he speaks to confection, thatgentleman. All that one thinks about, you can see it come out of hismouth. Common sense and reverence, we're attached to 'em bysomething. "

"We are attached to them by orderliness, " says Joseph Bonéas. 

"The proof that it's the truth, " Crillon urges, "is that it's in thedissertions of everybody. "

"To be sure!" says Benoît, going a bit farther, "since everybody saysit, and it's become a general repetition!"

The good old priest, in the center of an attentive circle, isunstringing a few observations. "Er, hem, " he says, "one should notblaspheme. Ah, if there were not a good God, there would be manythings to say; but so long as there is a good God, all that happens isadorable, as Monseigneur said. We shall make things better, certainly. Poverty and public calamities and war, we shall change all that, weshall set those things to rights, er, hem! But let us alone, aboveall, 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 intojoy, and poverty into riches? Come now, it's not possible, and I'lltell you why; if it had been as easy as all that, it would have beendone already, wouldn't it?"

The bells begin to ring. The four strokes of the hour are just fallingfrom the steeple which the rising mists touch already, though theevening makes use of it last of all; and just then one would say thatthe church is beginning to talk even while it is singing. 

The important people get onto their horses or into their carriages andgo away--a cavalcade where uniforms gleam and gold glitters. We cansee the procession of the potentates of the day outlined on the crestof the hill which is full of our dead. They climb and disappear, oneby one. _Our_ way is downward; but we form--they above and webelow--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 eternalframework which upholds our country, the forces of the mighty pastwhich illuminate it and protect it against enemies and revolutions. 

And we, we are all alike, in spite of our different minds; alike in thegreatness of our common interests and even in the littleness of ourpersonal aims. I have become increasingly conscious of this closeconcord of the masses beneath a huge and respect-inspiring hierarchy. It permits a sort of lofty consolation and is exactly adapted to a lifelike mine. This evening, by the light of the setting sun, I see it andread 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 theirofferings--the scented blossom which lends, the fruit which givesitself. They form an immense plain, sloping and darkling, with brownundulations under the blue which now alone is becoming green. A littlegirl, who has come from the spring, puts down her bucket and stands atthe roadside like a post, looking with all her eyes. She looks at themarching multitude with beaming curiosity. Her littleness embracesthat immensity, because it is all a part of Order. A peasant who hasstuck to his work in spite of the festival and is bent over the deepshadows of his field, raises himself from the earth which is so likehim, and turns towards the golden sun the shining monstrance of hisface. 

* * * * * *

But what is this--this sort of madman, who stands in the middle of theroad and looks as if, all by himself, he would bar the crowd's passage?We recognize Brisbille, swaying tipsily in the twilight. There is aneddy and a muttering in the flow. 

"D'you want to know where all that's leading you?" he roars, andnothing 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 thatcan, and the stupidity of the rest! To hell, I tell you! To-morrowlook 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 fitfor killing! To hell!"

Some people are impressed and disappear into the evening. Those whoare marking time around the obscure fanatic are growling, "He's notonly 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 happenvery soon--Jesuit, puppet, land-shark! We know you, you and yourfilthy, poisonous trade!"

"_Say that again_!"

It was I who said that. Leaving Marie's arm instinctively I sprangforward and planted myself before the sinister person. After thehorrified murmur which followed the insult, a great silence had fallenon the scene. 

Astounded, and his face suddenly filling with fear, Brisbille stumblesand beats a retreat. 

The crowd regains confidence, and laughs, and congratulates me, andreviles the back of the man who is sinking in the stream. 

"You were fine!" Marie said to me when I took her arm again, slightlytrembling. 

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 thegreat ancestral instinct which made me clench my fists and throw myselfbodily, like a weapon, upon the enemy of all. 

After dinner, naturally, I went to the military tattoo, at which, by anunpardonable indifference, I have not regularly been present, althoughthese patriotic demonstrations have been organized by Monsieur JosephBonéas and his League of Avengers. A long-drawn shudder, shrill andsonorous, took flight through the main streets, filling the spectatorsand especially the young folks, with enthusiasm for the great andglorious deeds of the future. And Pétrolus, in the front row of thecrowd, was striding along in the crimson glow of the fairy-lamps--cladin a visionary uniform of red. 

I remember that I talked a great deal that evening in our quarter, andthen in the house. Our quarter is something like all towns, somethinglike all country-sides, something like it is everywhere--it is aforeshortened picture of all societies in the old universe, as my lifeis 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 bewar some day, seeing there's always been war after war since the worldwas a world, and therefore there'll be another; but just now--atonce--a big job like that? Nonsense! It's not true. No. "

Some days went by, tranquilly, as days do. Then the great storyreappeared, 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 goingand coming of work. One divined it behind the doors and windows of thehouses. 

One Saturday evening, when Marie and I--like most of the French--didnot 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 tappinga 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 progressthrough 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 anopinion, but people drew back with sealed faces, or mechanically raisedtheir arms heavenwards. And we knew no better what to think now thatwe were at last informed. 

We went back into the court, the passage, the room, and then I said toMarie, "I go on the ninth day--a week, day after to-morrow--to my depotat Motteville. "

She looked at me, as though doubtful. 

I took my military pay book from the wardrobe and opened it on thetable. Leaning against each other, we looked chastely at the red pagewhere the day of my joining was written, and we spelled it all out asif we were learning to read. 

Next day and the following days everybody went headlong to meet thenewspapers. We read in them--and under their different titles theywere then all alike--that a great and unanimous upspringing waselectrifying France, and the little crowd that we were felt itself alsocaught by the rush of enthusiasm and resolution. We looked at eachother with shining eyes of approval. I, too, I heard myself cry, "Atlast!" All our patriotism rose to the surface. 

Our quarter grew fevered. We made speeches, we proclaimed the moralverities--or explained them. The echoes of vast or petty news went byin us. In the streets, the garrison officers walked, grown taller, disclosed. It was announced that Major de Trancheaux had rejoined, inspite of his years, and that the German armies had attacked us in threeplaces at once. We cursed the Kaiser and rejoiced in his imminentchastisement. In the middle of it all France appeared personified, andwe 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 pacificto the point of stupidity--little saints, in fact. No one in Francespoke any longer of revenge, nobody wished it, nobody thought of asmuch as getting ready for war. We had all of us in our hearts onlydreams of universal happiness and progress, the while Germany secretlyprepared everything for hurling herself on us. "But, " he added, healso carried away, "she'll get it in the neck, and that's all aboutit!"

The desire for glory was making its way, and one cloudily imaginesNapoleon reborn. 

In these days, only the mornings and evenings returned as usual, everything else was upside down, and seemed temporary. The workersmoved and talked in a desert of idleness, and one saw invisible changesin the scenery of our valley and the cavity of our sky. 

We saw the Cuirassiers of the garrison go away in the evening. Themassive platoons of young-faced horsemen, whose solemn obstructionheavily hammered the stones of the street, were separated by horsesloaded with bales of forage, by regimental wagons and baggage-carts, which rattled unendingly. We formed a hedgerow along the twilightcauseways and watched them all disappear. Suddenly we cheered them. The thrill that went through horses and men straightened them up andthey 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 ofmethodical and inevitable tree-blazing--conducted sometimes by thepolice--ransacked the population and thinned it from day to day aroundthe women. 

Increasing hurly-burly was everywhere--all the complicated measures soprudently foreseen and so interdependent; the new posters on top of theold ones, the requisitioning of animals and places, the committees andthe allowances, the booming and momentous gales of motor-cars filledwith officers and aristocratic nurses--so many lives turned inside outand habits cut in two. But hope bedazzled all anxieties and stopped upthe gaps for the moment. And we admired the beauty of militaryorderliness and France's preparation. 

Sometimes, at windows or street-corners, there were apparitions--peoplecovered with new uniforms. We had known them in vain, and did not knowthem at first. Count d'Orchamp, lieutenant in the Active Reserves, andDr. Bardoux, town-major, displaying the cross of the Legion of Honor, found themselves surrounded by respectful astonishment. AdjutantMarcassin rose suddenly to the eyes as though he had come out of theearth; Marcassin, brand-new, rigid, in blue and red, with his goldstripe. One saw him afar, fascinating the groups of urchins who a weekago threw stones at him. 

"The old lot--the little ones, and the middling ones and the bigones--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 wasthat day that we went to buy boots. We admired the beautifularrangement of the Cinema Hall as a Red Cross hospital. 

"They've thought of everything!" said Marie, examining the collectionof beds, furniture, and costly chests, rich and perfected material, allarranged with delighted and very French animation by a team ofattendants who were under the orders of young Varennes, a prettyhospital sergeant, and Monsieur Lucien Gozlan, superintendent officer. 

A center of life had created itself around the hospital. An open airbuffet had been set up in a twinkling. Apolline came there--since theconfusion of the mobilization all days were Sundays for her--to provideherself with nips. We saw her hobbling along broadwise, hugging herhalf-pint measure in her short turtle-like arms, the carrot slices ofher cheek-bones reddening as she already staggered with hope. 

On our way back, as we passed in front of Fontan's café, we caught aglimpse of Fontan himself, assiduous, and his face lubricated with asmile. Around him they were singing the Marseillaise in the smoke. Hehad increased his staff, and he himself was making himself two, servingand serving. His business was growing by the fatality of things. 

When we got back to our street, it was deserted, as of yore. Thefaraway flutterings of the Marseillaise were dying. We heardBrisbille, drunk, hammering with all his might on his anvil. The sameold 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 ourcorner after six days of supernatural disturbance, and that the pastwas already stronger than the present. 

Before mounting our steps we saw, crouching in front of his shop doorby the light of a lamp that was hooded by whirling mosquitoes, the massof Crillon, who was striving to attach to a cudgel a flap for thecrushing of flies. Bent upon his work, his gaping mouth let hang thehalf of a globular and shining tongue. Seeing us with our parcels, hethrew down his tackle, roared a sigh, and said, "That wood! It'stouchwood, yes. A butter-wire's the only thing for cutting that!"

He stood up, discouraged; then changing his idea, and lighted frombelow by his lamp so that he flamed in the evening, he extended histawny-edged arm and struck me on the shoulder. "We said war, war, allalong. 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 timesewing zinc buttons onto the new pouch, stiff with its dressing. Sheseemed 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 onein that gray room. 

She asked me if I should be a long time away, and then, as whenever sheput that question she went on, "Of course, you don't a bit know. " Sheregretted that I was only a private like everybody. She hoped it wouldbe over long before the winter. 

I did not speak. I saw that she was looking at me secretly, and shesurrounded 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 theclergy. 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 finishedwrapping up and tying some toilet items and also some provisions, as iffor a journey. "All your bits of things are there. You'll beabsolutely short of nothing, you see. "

Then she sat down and sighed. "Ah, " she said, "war, after all, it'smore terrible than one imagines. "

She seemed to be having tragic presentiments. Her face was paler thanusual; the normal lassitude of her features was full of gentleness; hereyelids were rosy as roses. Then she smiled weakly and said, "Thereare some young men of eighteen who've enlisted, but only for theduration of the war. They've done right; that'll be useful to them allways later in life. "

* * * * * *

On Monday we hung about the house till four o'clock, when I left it togo 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 theirshoulders. I went up to mix with my new companions. Tudor was toppedby an artilleryman's cap. Monsieur Mielvaque was bustling about, embarrassed--exactly as at the factory--by the papers he held in hishand; and he had exchanged his eyeglasses for spectacles, which stoodfor the beginning of his uniform. Every man talked about himself, andgave details concerning his regiment, his depot, and some personalpeculiarity. 

"I'm staying, " says the adjutant master-at-arms, who rises impeccablyin his active service uniform, amid the bustle and the neutral-tintedgroups; "I'm not going. I'm the owner of my rank, and they haven't gotthe right to send me to join the army. "

We waited long, and some hours went by. A rumor went round that weshould not go till the next day. But suddenly there was silence, astiffening up, and a military salute all round. The door had justopened to admit Major de Trancheaux. 

The women drew aside. A civilian who was on the lookout for him wentup, hat in hand, and spoke to him in undertones. 

"But, my friend, " cried the Major, quitting the importunate with aquite military abruptness, "it's not worth while. In two months thewar 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 thegreat revenge so long awaited by French hearts, assured us that weshould all be proud, later, to have lived in those hours, thrilled usall, 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 ofadvice--closed up in the great public hall. 

When I had embraced Marie I joined these who were falling in near theroad. We went off in files of four. All the causeways were garnishedwith people, because of us; and at that moment I felt a lofty emotionand a real thrill of glory. 

At the corner of a street I saw Crillon and Marie, who had run on aheadto take their stand on our route. They waved to me. 

"Now, keep your peckers up, boys! You're not dead yet, eh!" Crilloncalled to us. 

Marie was looking at me and could not speak. 

"In step! One-two!" cried Adjutant Marcassin, striding along thedetachment. 

We crossed our quarter as the day declined over it. The countryman whowas walking beside me shook his head and in the dusky immensity amongthe world of things we were leaving, with big regular steps, fused intoone single step, he scattered wondering words. "Frenzy, it is, " hemurmured. "_I_ haven't had time to understand it yet. And yet, youknow, 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 longyellow barrier which is never opened. They make us cross the labyrinthof hazy rails, and crowd us along a dark, covered platform between ironpillars. 

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 ourperspiration and our enthusiasm. We fidget and wait. It goes gray, and then black. The night comes to imprison us in its infinitenarrowness. We shiver and can see nothing more. With difficulty I canmake out, along our trampled platform, a dark flock, the buzz ofvoices, the smell of tobacco. Here and there a match flame or the redpoint of a cigarette makes some face phosphorescent. And we wait, unoccupied, and weary of waiting, until we sit down, close-pressedagainst each other, in the dark and the desert. 

Some hours later Adjutant Marcassin comes forward, a lantern in hishand, and in a strident voice calls the roll. Then he goes away, andwe begin again to wait. 

At ten o'clock, after several false alarms, the right train isannounced. It comes up, distending as it comes, black and red. It isalready crowded, and it screams. It stops, and turns the platform intoa street. We climb up and put ourselves away--not without glimpses, bythe light of lanterns moving here and there, of some chalk sketches onthe carriages--heads of pigs in spiked helmets, and the inscription, "To Berlin!"--the only things which slightly indicate where we aregoing. 

The train sets off. We who have just got in crowd to the windows andtry to look outside, towards the level crossing where, perhaps, thepeople in whom we live are still watching for us; but the eye can nolonger pick up anything but a vague stirring, shaded with crayon andjumbled 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 upour luggage, arrange ourselves for the night, smoke, drink and talk. Badly lighted and opaque with fumes, the compartment might be a cornerof a tavern that has been caught up and swept away into the unknown. 

Some conversation mixes its rumble with that of the train. Myneighbors talk about crops and sunshine and rain. Others, scoffers andParisians, speak of popular people and principally of music-hallsingers. Others sleep, lying somehow or other on the wood. Their openmouths make murmur, and the oscillation jerks them without tearing themfrom their torpor. I go over in my thoughts the details of the lastday, and even my memories of times gone by when there was nothing goingon. 

* * * * * *

We traveled all night. At long intervals some one would let a windowdrop at a station; a damp and cavernous breath would penetrate theoverdone atmosphere of the carriage. We saw darkness and some porter'slantern dancing in the abyss of night. 

Several times we made very long halts--to let the trains of regulartroops go by. In one station where our train stood for hours, we sawseveral of them go roaring by in succession. Their speed blurred thepartitions between the windows and the huge vertebrae of the coaches, seeming to blend together the soldiers huddled there; and the glancewhich plunged into the train's interior descried, in its feeble andwhirling illumination, a long, continuous and tremulous chain, clad inblue and red. Several times on the journey we got glimpses of theseinterminable lengths of humanity, hurled by machinery from everywhereto 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 toa platform black-smudged by drizzling rain, in the middle of a sheet ofmist which was torn by blasts of distant whistling. Disinterred fromthe carriages, our shadows heaped themselves there and waited, likebales of goods in the dawn's winter. 

Adjutant Marcassin, who had gone in quest of instructions, returned atlast. "It's that way. "

He formed us in fours. "Forward! Straighten up! Keep step! Look asif 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 oneof us who knew him intimately, he made no reply. From time to time hethrew a quick glance, like the flick of a whip, to make sure that wewere in step. 

I thought I was going again to the old barracks, where I did my term ofservice, but I had a sadder disappointment than was reasonable. Acrosssome land where building was going on, deeply trenched, beplastered andsoiled with white, we arrived at a new barracks, sinisterly white in avelvet pall of fog. In front of the freshly painted gate there wasalready a crowd of men like us, clothed in subdued civilian hues in thecoppered dust of the first rays of day. 

They made us sit on forms round the guard room. We waited there allthe day. As the scorching sun went round it forced us to change ourplaces several times. We ate with our knees for tables, and as I undidthe little parcels that Marie had made, it seemed to me that I wastouching her hands. When the evening had fallen, a passing officernoticed us, made inquiries, and we were mustered. We plunged into thenight of the building. Our feet stumbled and climbed helter-skelter, between pitched walls up the steps of a damp staircase, which smelt ofstale tobacco and gas-tar, like all barracks. They led us into a darkcorridor, pierced by little pale blue windows, where draughts came andwent violently, a corridor spotted at each end by naked gas-jets, theirflames buffeted and snarling. 

A lighted doorway was stoppered by a throng--the store-room. I endedby getting in in my turn, thanks to the pressure of the compact filewhich followed me, and pushed me like a spiral spring. Some barracksergeants were exerting themselves authoritatively among piles ofnew-smelling clothes, of caps and glittering equipment. Geared intothe jerky hustle from which we detached ourselves one by one, I madethe tour of the place, and came out of it wearing red trousers andcarrying my civilian clothes, and a blue coat on my arm; and not daringto 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 Icannot look at myself, and thus I see myself dimly. Gloomily we eatstew, by the miserable illumination of a candle, in the dull desert ofthe mess room. Then, our mess-tins cleaned, we go down to the greatyard, gray and stagnant. Just as we pour out into it, there is theclash of a closing gate and a tightened chain. An armed sentry goes upand down before the gate. It is forbidden to go out under pain ofcourt-martial. To westward, beyond some indistinct land, we see theburied station, reddening and smoking like a factory, and sending outrusty flashes. On the other side is the trench of a street; and in itsextended hollow are the bright points of some windows and the radianceof a shop. With my face between the bars of the gate, I look on thisreflection 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 myhead on the bundle of my civilian clothes. In the morning I findmyself again and throw off a long dream--all at once impenetrable. 

My neighbor, sitting on his straw with his hair over his nose, isoccupied 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 thebarracks, in ignorance. The only events were those related by thenewspapers which were handed to us through the gates in the morning. The war got on very slowly; it immobilized itself, and we--we didnothing, between the roll-calls, the parades, and from time to timesome cleaning fatigues. We could not go into the town, and we waitedfor the evening--standing, sitting, strolling in the mess room (whichnever seemed empty, so strong was the smell that filled it), wanderingabout 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 ofthe buildings, and smelt in turns throughout the day of coffee-groundsand grease. 

We said that perhaps, undoubtedly indeed, we should stay there till theend of the war. We moped. When we went to bed we were tired withstanding still, or with walking too slowly. We should have liked to goto the front. 

Marcassin, housed in the company office, was never far away, and keptan eye on us in silence. One day I was sharply rebuked by him forhaving turned the water on in the lavatory at a time other thanplacarded. Detected, I had to stand before him at attention. He askedme in coarse language if I knew how to read, talked of punishment, andadded, "Don't do it again!" This tirade, perhaps justified on thewhole, but tactlessly uttered by the quondam Pétrolus, humiliated medeeply and left me gloomy all the day. Some other incidents showed methat I no longer belonged to myself. 

* * * * * *

One day, after morning parade, when the company was breaking off, aParisian 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 wellinto your heads that you _won't_ know! We shall do the knowing foryou! Words are done with. There's something else beginning, andthat'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 youheard this refrain again and again: "As long as the others aredodging, 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 youngpromiscuously--a list worked out in the office amidst a seesaw ofintrigue. Protests were raised, and fell back again into thetranquillity of the depot. 

I abode there forty-five days. Towards the middle of September, wewere allowed to go out after the evening meal and Sundays as well. Weused to go in the evening to the Town Hall to read the despatchesposted there; they were as uniform and monotonous as rain. Then afriend and I would go to the café, keeping step, our arms similarlyswinging, exchanging some words, idle, and vaguely divided into twomen. Or we went into it in a body, which isolated me. The saloon ofthe 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 onthe white marble, it was like a strip of a long dream of the past, ascanty memory that clothed me. There I used to write to Marie, andthere 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 withyawns under the empty sky, I saw a young woman go by. By reason ofsome resemblance in outline, I thought of a woman who had loved me. Irecalled the period when life was life, and that beautiful caressingbody of once-on-a-time. It seemed to me that I held her in my arms, soclose that I felt her breath, like velvet, on my face. 

We got a glimpse of the captain at one review. Once there was talk ofa 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. Myname was read out at morning parade, and it seemed to me that it wasthe only one they read. I had no time to get ready. In the evening ofthe next day our detachment passed out of the barracks by the littlegate. 

CHAPTER XI

AT THE WORLD'S END

"We're going to Alsace, " said the well-informed. "To the Somme, " saidthe better-informed, louder. 

We traveled thirty-six hours on the floor of a cattle truck, wedged andparalyzed in the vice of knapsacks, pouches, weapons and moist bodies. At long intervals the train would begin to move on again. It has leftan 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 afish-bone. It overlooked a half-destroyed town, where, amid a foulwhiteness of ruin, a few families were making shift to live in therain. 

"'Pears we're in the Aisne country, " they said. 

A downpour was in progress. Shivering, we busied ourselves withunloading and distributing bread, our hands numbed and wet, and thenate it hurriedly while we stood in the road, which gleamed with heavyparallel brush-strokes of gray paint as far as the eye could see. Eachlooked after himself, with hardly a thought for the next man. On eachside of the road were deserts without limits, flat and flabby, withtrees 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 wasdestroyed, and the destruction was beginning to live, to cover itselfwith fresh wreckage and dung, to smoke and consume itself. The rainhad ceased in melancholy. Up aloft in the clearings of the sky, clusters of shrapnel stippled the air round aeroplanes, and thedetonations reached us, far and fine. Along the sodden road we met RedCross motor ambulances, rushing on rails of mud, but we could not seeinside them. In the first stages we were interested in everything, andasked questions, like foreigners. A man who had been wounded and wasrejoining the regiment with us answered us from time to time, andinvariably added, "That's nothing; you'll see in a bit. " Then themarch made men retire into themselves. 

My knapsack, so ingeniously compact; my cartridge-bags so ferociouslyfull; my round pouches with their keen-edged straps, all jostled andthen wounded my back at each step. The pain quickly became acute, unbearable. I was suffocated and blinded by a mask of sweat, in spiteof the lashing moisture, and I soon felt that I should not arrive atthe end of the fifty minutes' march. But I did all the same, because Ihad no reason for stopping at any one second sooner than another, andbecause I could thus always _do one step more_. I knew later that thisis nearly always the mechanical reason which accounts for soldierscompleting superhuman physical efforts to the very end. 

The cold blast benumbed us, while we dragged ourselves through thesoftened plains which evening was darkening. At one halt I saw one ofthose men who used to agitate at the depot to be sent to the front. Hehad sunk down at the foot of the stacked rifles; exertion had made himalmost 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 mehis yellowish face, sweat-soaked, where the folds of the eyelids seemeddrawn with red crayon, and informed me that he should report sick thenext day. 

After four marches of despairing length under a lightless sky over acolorless earth, we stood for two hours, hot and damp, at the chillytop of a hill, where a village was beginning. An epidemic of gloomoverspread us. Why were we stopped in that way? No one knew anything. 

In the evening we engulfed ourselves in the village. But they haltedus in a street. The sky had heavily darkened. The fronts of thehouses had taken on a greenish hue and reflected and rooted themselvesin the running water of the street. The market-place curved around infront of us--a black space with shining tracks, like an old mirror towhich the silvering only clings in strips. 

At last, night fully come, they bade us march. They made us go forwardand then draw back, with loud words of command, in the tunnels ofstreets, in alleys and yards. By lantern light they divided us intosquads. I was assigned to the eleventh, quartered in a village whosestill standing parts appeared quite new. Adjutant Marcassin became mysection chief. I was secretly glad of this; for in the gloomyconfusion we stuck closely to those we knew, as dogs do. 

The new comrades of the squad--they lodged in the stable, which wasopen 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 onyonder to occupy the trenches at the glass works. They said it wouldbe 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 thestraw. Their weariness was alleviated. They set about writing andcard-playing. That evening I dated my letter to Marie "at the Front, "with a flourish of pride. I understood that glory consists in doingwhat others have done, in being able to say, "I, too. "

* * * * * *

Three days went by in this "rest camp. " I got used to an existencecrowded with exercises in which we were living gear-wheels; crowdedalso with fatigues; already I was forgetting my previous existence. 

On the Friday at three o'clock we were paraded in marching order in theschool yard. Great stones, detached from walls and arches, lay aboutthe forsaken grass like tombs. Hustled by the wind, we were reviewedby the captain, who fumbled in our cartridge-pouches and knapsacks withthe intention of giving imprisonment to those who had not the rightquantity of cartridges and iron rations. In the evening we set off, laughing and singing, along the great curves of the road. At night wearrived swaying with fatigue and savagely silent, at a slippery andinterminable ascent which stood out against stormy rain-clouds as heavyas dung-hills. Many dark masses stumbled and fell with a crash ofaccoutrements on that huge sloping sewer. As they swarmed up the chaosof oblique darkness which pushed them back, the men gave signs ofexhaustion and anger. Cries of "Forward! Forward!" surrounded us onall sides, harsh cries like barks, and I heard, near me, AdjutantMarcassin's voice, growling, "What about it, then? It's for France'ssake!" 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 ofnoises was coming to life in the distance. 

A gateway made its sudden appearance in the night. We scattered amongflat buildings, whose walls here and there showed black holes, likeovens, while the approaches were obstructed with plaster rubbish andnail-studded beams. In places the recent collapse of stones, cementand plaster had laid on the bricks a new and vivid whiteness that wasvisible 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. Weleft the works by sticky footpaths, full of rubbish at first, and thenof mud. Across marshy flats, chilly and sinister, obscurely lighted bythe night, we came to the edge of an immense and pallid crater. Thedepths of this abyss were populated with glimmers and murmurs; and allaround 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 wedescended, burying ourselves in these profundities and gropinglyencountering the hurly-burly of a convoy of carts and the advance guardof the regiment we were relieving. We passed heaped-up hutments at thefoot of the circular chalky cliff that we could see dimly drawn amongthe black circles of space. The sound of shots drew near andmultiplied on all sides; the vibration of artillery fire outspreadunder our feet and over our heads. 

I found myself suddenly in front of a narrow and muddy ravine intowhich the others were plunging one by one. 

"It's the trench, " whispered the man who was following me; "you can seeits beginning, but you never see its blinking end. Anyway, on you go!"

We followed the trench along for three hours. For three hours wecontinued to immerse ourselves in distance and solitude, to immureourselves in night, scraping its walls with our loads, and sometimesviolently pulled up, where the defile shrunk into strangulation by thesudden wedging of our pouches. It seemed as if the earth triedcontinually to clasp and choke us, that sometimes it roughly struck us. Above the unknown plains in which we were hiding, space wasshot-riddled. A few star-shells were softly whitening some sections ofthe night, revealing the excavations' wet entrails and conjuring up afile of heavy shadows, borne down by lofty burdens, tramping in a blackand black-bunged impasse, and jolting against the eddies. When greatguns were discharged all the vault of heaven was lighted and lifted andthen fell darkly back. 

"Look out! The open crossing!"

A wall of earth rose in tiers before us. There was no outlet. Thetrench 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 stoopdown and get a move on. "

The men climbed the soft steps with bent heads, made their rush one byone and ran hard into the belt whose only remaining defense was thedark. The thunder of shrapnel that shattered and dazzled the air hereand there showed me too frightfully how fragile we all were. In spiteof the fatigue clinging to my limbs, I sprang forward in my turn withall my strength, fiercely pursuing the signs of an overloaded andrattling 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 ordoubled, and a litter of crosses and posts, as black and fantastic astall torches extinguished, all under a firmament where day and nightimmensely fought. 

"I believe I saw some corpses, " I said to him who marched in front ofme; and there was a break in my voice. 

"_You've_ just left your village, " he replied; "you bet there's somestiffs about here!"

I laughed also, in the delight of having got past. We began again tomarch one behind another, swaying about, hustled by the narrowness ofthis furrow they had scooped to the ancient depth of a grave, pantingunder the load, dragged towards the earth by the earth and pushedforward by will-power, under a sky shrilling with the dizzy flight ofbullets, tiger-striped with red, and in some seconds saturated withlight. At forks in the way we turned sometimes right and sometimesleft, all touching each other, the whole huge body of the companyfleeing blindly towards its bourne. 

For the last time they halted us in the middle of the night. I was soweary that I propped my knees against the wet wall and remainedkneeling for some blissful minutes. 

My sentry turn began immediately, and the lieutenant posted me at aloophole. He made me put my face to the hole and explained to me thatthere was a wooded slope, right in front of us, of which the bottom wasoccupied by the enemy; and to the right of us, three hundred yardsaway, the Chauny road--"They're there. " I had to watch the blackhollow of the little wood, and at every star-shell the creamy expansewhich divided our refuge from the distant hazy railing of the treesalong the road. He told me what to do in case of alarm and left mequite alone. 

Alone, I shivered. Fatigue had emptied my head and was weighing on myheart. Going close to the loophole, I opened my eyes wide through theenemy night, the fathomless, thinking night. 

I thought I could see some of the dim shadows of the plain moving, andsome in the chasm of the wood, and everywhere! Affected by terror anda sense of my huge responsibility, I could hardly stifle a cry ofanguish. But they did not move. The fearful preparations of theshades vanished before my eyes and the stillness of lifeless thingsshowed 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 relievedand calmed me. I remembered nothing more about myself. I appliedmyself to watching. I saw nothing, I knew nothing. 

After two hours, the sound of the natural and complaisant steps of thesentry who came to relieve me brought me completely back to myself. Idetached myself from the spot where I had seemed riveted and went tosleep in the "grotto. "

The dug-out was very roomy, but so low that in one place one had tocrawl on hands and knees to slip under its rough and mighty roof. Itwas full of heavy damp, and hot with men. Extended in my place onstraw-dust, my neck propped by my knapsack, I closed my eyes incomfort. When I opened them, I saw a group of soldiers seated in acircle and eating from the same dish, their heads blotted out in thedarkness of the low roof. Their feet, grouped round the dish, wereshapeless, black, and trickling, like stone disinterred. They ate incommon, without table things, no man using more than his hands. 

The man next me was equipping himself to go on sentry duty. He was inno hurry. He filled his pipe, drew from his pocket a tinder-lighter aslong as a tapeworm, and said to me, "You're not going on again till sixo'clock. Ah, you're very lucky!"

Diligently he mingled his heavy tobacco-clouds with the vapors from allthose bodies which lay around us and rattled in their throats. Kneeling at my feet to arrange his things, he gave me some advice, "Noneed to get a hump, mind. Nothing ever happens here. Getting here'sby far the worst. On that job you get it hot, specially when you'vethe bad luck to be sleepy, or it's not raining, but after that you're aworkman, and you forget about it. The most worst, it's the opencrossing. But nobody I know's ever stopped one there. It was otherblokes. It's been like this for two months, old man, and we'll be ableto 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 slopeof the little wood, the bushes and the bare branches are broidered withdrops of water. In front, under the fatal space where the eternalpassage of projectiles is as undistinguishable as light in daytime, thefield resembles a field, the road resembles a road. Ultimately onemakes out some corpses, but what a strangely little thing is a corpsein a field--a tuft of colorless flowers which the shortest blades ofgrass disguise! At one moment there was a ray of sunshine, and itresembled the past. 

Thus went the days by, the weeks and the months; four days in the frontline, the harassing journey to and from it, the monotonous sentry-go, the spy-hole on the plain, the mesmerism of the empty outlook and ofthe deserts of waiting; and after that, four days of rest-camp full ofmarches and parades and great cleansings of implements and of streets, with regulations of the strictest, anticipating all the differentoccasions for punishment, a thousand fatigues, each with as many harshknocks, the litany of optimist phrases, abstruse and utopian, in theorders of the day, and a captain who chiefly concerned himself with thetwo hundred cartridges and the reserve rations. The regiment had nolosses, or almost none; a few wounds during reliefs, and sometimes oneor two deaths which were announced like accidents. We only underwentgreat weariness, which goes away as fast as it comes. The soldiersused to say that on the whole they lived in peace. 

Marie would write to me, "The Piots have been saying nice things aboutyou, " or "The Trompsons' son is a second lieutenant, " or "If you knewall the contrivances people have been up to, to hide their gold sinceit'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 ourusual village, we did not stop there; to the great distress of the menwho were worn out and yielding to the force of the knapsack. Wecontinued along the road through the evening with lowered heads; andone hour later we dropped off around dark buildings--mournful tokens ofan unknown place--and they put us away among shadows which had newshapes. From that time onwards, they changed the village at everyrelief, and we never knew what it was until we were there. I waslodged in barns, into which one wriggled by a ladder; in spongy andsteamy stables; in cellars where undisturbed draughts stirred up themoldy smells that hung there; in frail and broken hangars which seemedto brew bad weather; in sick and wounded huts; in villages remadeathwart their phantoms; in trenches and in caves--a world upside down. We received the wind and the rain in our sleep. Sometimes we were toobrutally rescued from the pressure of the cold by braziers, whosepoisonous heat split one's head. And we forgot it all at each changeof scene. I had begun to note the names of places we were going to, but I lost myself in the black swarm of words when I tried to recallthem. And the diversity and the crowds of the men around me were suchthat I managed only with difficulty to attach fleeting names to theirfaces. 

My companions did not look unfavorably on me, but I was no more thananother to them. In intervals among the occupations of the rest-camp, I wandered spiritless, blotted out by the common soldiers' miserableuniform, familiarly addressed by any one and every one, and stopping noglance from a woman, by reason of the non-coms. 

I should never be an officer, like the Trompsons' son. It was not soeasy in my sector as in his. For that, it would be necessary forthings to happen which never would happen. But I should have liked tobe taken into the office. Others were there who were not so clearlyindicated as I for that work. I regarded myself as a victim ofinjustice. 

* * * * * *

One morning I found myself face to face with Termite, Brisbille's cronyand accomplice, and he arrived in our company by voluntary enlistment!He was as skimpy and warped as ever, his body seeming to grimacethrough his uniform. His new greatcoat looked worn out and his bootson the wrong feet. He had the same ugly, blinking face andblack-furred cheeks and rasping voice. I welcomed him warmly, for byhis enlistment he was redeeming his past life. He took advantage ofthe occasion to address me with intimacy. I talked with him aboutViviers and even let him share the news that Marie had just written tome--that Monsieur Joseph Bonéas was taking an examination in order tobecome an officer in the police. 

But the poacher had not completely sloughed his old self. He looked atme sideways and shook in the air his grimy wrist and the brass identitydisk that hung from it--a disk as big as a forest ranger's, perhaps atrophy of bygone days. Hatred of the rich and titled appeared againupon his hairy, sly face. "Those blasted nationalists, " he growled;"they spend their time shoving the idea of revenge into folks' heads, and patching up hatred with their Leagues of Patriots and theirmilitary tattoos and their twaddle and their newspapers, and when theirwar does come they say '_Go_ and fight. '"

"There are some of them who have died in the first line. Those havedone more than their duty. "

With the revolutionary's unfairness, the little man would not admit it. "No--they have only done their duty, --no more. "

I was going to urge Monsieur Joseph's weak constitution but in presenceof that puny man with his thin, furry face, who might have stayed athome, I forebore. But I decided to avoid, in his company, thosesubjects in which I felt he was full of sour hostility and always readyto bite. 

Continually we saw Marcassin's eye fixed on us, though aloof. His newbestriped personality had completely covered up the comical picture ofPétrolus. He even seemed to have become suddenly more educated, andmade no mistakes when he spoke. He multiplied himself, wasattentiveness itself and found ways to expose himself to danger. Whenthere were night patrols in the great naked cemeteries bounded by thegraves of the living, he was always in them. 

But he scowled. We were short of the sacred fire, in his opinion, andthat distressed him. To grumbles against the fatigues which shatter, the waiting which exhausts, the disillusion which destroys, againstmisery and the blows of cold and rain, he answered violently, "Can'tyou see it's for France? Why, hell and damnation! As long as it's forFrance----!"

One morning when we were returning from the trenches, ghastly in aghastly dawn, during the last minutes of a stage, a panting soldier letthe words escape him, "I'm fed up, I am!"

The adjutant sprang towards him, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself, hog?Don't you think that France is worth your dirty skin and all ourskins?"

The other, strained and tortured in his joints, showed fight. "France, you say? Well, that's the French, " he growled. 

And his pal, goaded also by weariness, raised his voice from the ranks. "That's right! After all, it's the men that's there. "

"Great God!" the adjutant roared in their faces, "France is France andnothing else, and you don't count, nor you either!"

But the soldier, all the while hoisting up his knapsack with jerks ofhis hips, and lowering his voice before the non-com's aggressiveexcitement, clung to his notion, and murmured between his puffings, "Men--they're humanity. That's not the truth perhaps?"

Marcassin began to hurry through the drizzle along the side of themarching column, shouting and trembling with emotion, "To hell withyour humanity, and your truth, too; I don't give a damn for them. _I_know your ideas--universal justice and 1789[1]--to hell with them, too. There's only one thing that matters in all the earth, and that's theglory of France--to give the Boches a thrashing and get Alsace-Lorraineback, and money, that's where they're taking you, and that's all aboutit. Once that's done, all's over. It's simple enough, even for ablockhead like you. If you don't understand it, it's because you can'tlift your pig's head to see an ideal, or because you're only aSocialist and a confiscator!"

[Footnote 1: Outbreak of the French Revolution. --Tr. ]

Very reluctantly, rumbling all over, and his eye threatening, he wentaway from the now silent ranks. A moment later, as he passed near me, I noticed that his hands still trembled and I was infinitely moved tosee tears in his eyes!

He comes and goes in pugnacious surveillance, in furies with difficultyrestrained, and masked by a contraction of the face. He invokesDéroulède, and says that faith comes at will, like the rest. He livesin perpetual bewilderment and distress that everybody does not think ashe does. He exerts real influence, for there are, in the multitudes, whatever they may say, beautiful and profound instincts always near thesurface. 

The captain, who was a well-balanced man, although severe and prodigalof prison when he found the least gap in our loads, considered theadjutant animated by an excellent spirit, but he himself was not sofiery. I was getting a better opinion of him; he could judge men. Hehad said that I was a good and conscientious soldier, that many like mewere wanted. 

Our lieutenant, who was very young, seemed to be an amiable, good-natured fellow. "He's a good little lad, " said the grateful men;"there's some that frighten you when you speak to them, and they soldertheir jaws up. But _him_, he speaks to you even if you're stupid. When you talk to him about you and your family, which isn't, all thesame, very interesting, well, he listens to you, old man. "

* * * * * *

St. Martin's summer greatly warmed us as we tramped into a new village. I remember that one of those days I took Margat with me and went withhim into a recently shelled house. (Margat was storming against thelocal grocer, the only one of his kind, the inevitable and implacablerobber of his customers. ) The framework of the house was laid bare, itwas full of light and plaster, and it trembled like a steamboat. Weclimbed to the drawing-room of this house which had breathed forth allits mystery and was worse than empty. The room still showed remains ofluxury and elegance--a disemboweled piano with clusters of protrudingstrings; a cupboard, dislodged and rotting, as though disinterred; awhite-powdered floor, sown with golden stripes and rumpled books, andwith fragile débris which cried out when we trod on it. Across thewindow, which was framed in broken glass, a curtain hung by one cornerand fluttered like a bat. Over the sundered fireplace, only a mirrorwas intact and unsullied, upright in its frame. 

Then, become suddenly and profoundly like each other, we were bothfascinated by the virginity of that long glass. Its perfect integritylent it something like a body. Each of us picked up a brick and webroke it with all our might, not knowing why. We ran away down theshaking spiral stairs whose steps were hidden under deep rubbish. Atthe bottom we looked at each other, still excited and already ashamedof the fit of barbarism which had so suddenly risen in us and urged ourarms. 

"What about it? It's a natural thing to do--we're becoming men again, that's all, " said Margat. 

Having nothing to do we sat down there, commanding a view of the dale. The day had been fine. 

Margat's looks strayed here and there. He frowned, and disparaged thevillage because it was not like his own. What a comical idea to havebuilt it like that! He did not like the church, the singular shape ofit, the steeple in that position instead of where it should have been. 

Orango and Rémus came and sat down by us in the ripening sun ofevening. 

Far away we saw the explosion of a shell, like a white shrub. Wechuckled at the harmless shot in the hazy distance and Rémus made ajust observation. "As long as it's not dropped here, you might say asone doesn't mind, eh, s'long as it's dropped somewhere else, eh?"

At that moment a cloud of dirty smoke took shape five hundred yardsaway at the foot of the village, and a heavy detonation rolled up towhere we were. 

"They're plugging the bottom of the village, " Orango laconicallycertified. 

Margat, still ruminating his grievance, cried, "'Fraid it's not on thegrocers it's dropped, that crump, seeing he lives right at the otherend. More's the pity. He charges any old price he likes and then hesays to you as well, 'If you're not satisfied, my lad, you can go tohell. ' Ah, more's the pity!"

He sighed, and resumed. "Ah, grocers, they beat all, they do. You canstarve or you can bankrupt, that's their gospel; 'You don't matter tome, _I've_ got to make money!'"

"What do you want to be pasting the grocers for, " Orango asked, "aslong as they've always been like that? They're Messrs. Thief & Sons. "

After a silence, Rémus coughed, to encourage his voice, and said, "I'ma grocer. "

Then Margat said to him artlessly, "Well, what about it, old chap? Weknow well enough, don't we, that here on earth profit's the strongestof all. "

"Why, yes, to be sure, old man, " Rémus replied. 

* * * * * *

One day, while we were carrying our straw to our billets, one of mylowly companions came up and questioned me as he walked. "I'd like youto explain to me why there isn't any justice. I've been to the captainto ask for leave that I'd a right to and I shows him a letter to say myaunt's shortly deceased. 'That's all my eye and Betty Martin, ' hesays. And I says to myself, that's the blinking limit, that is. Now, then, tell me, you. When the war began, why didn't there begin fulljustice for every one, seeing they could have done it and seeing no onewouldn't have raised no objection just then. Why is it all just thecontrary? And don't believe it's only what's happened to me, butthere's big business men, they say, all of a sudden making a hundredfrancs a day extra because of the murdering, and them young men an'all, and a lot of toffed-up shirkers at the rear that's ten timesstronger than this pack of half-dead Territorials that they haven'tsent home even this morning yet, and they have beanos in the towns withtheir Totties and their jewels and champagne, like what Jusserand tellsus!"

I replied that complete justice was impossible, that we had to look atthe great mass of things generally. And then, having said this, Ibecame embarrassed in face of the stubborn inquisitiveness, clumsilystrict, of this comrade who was seeking the light all by himself!

Following that incident, I often tried, during days of monotony, tocollect my ideas on war. I could not. I am sure of certain points, points of which I have always been sure. Farther I cannot go. I relyin the matter on those who guide us, who withhold the policy of theState. But sometimes I regret that I no longer have a spiritualdirector like Joseph Bonéas. 

For the rest, the men around me--except when personal interest is inquestion and except for a few chatterers who suddenly pour out theorieswhich contain bits taken bodily from the newspapers--the men around meare indifferent to every problem too remote and too profound concerningthe succession of inevitable misfortunes which sweep us along. Beyondimmediate things, and especially personal matters, they are prudentlyconscious of their ignorance and impotence. 

One evening I was coming in to sleep in our stable bedroom. The menlying along its length and breadth on the bundles of straw had beentalking together and were agreed. Some one had just wound it up--"Fromthe moment you start marching, that's enough. "

But Termite, coiled up like a marmot on the common litter, was on thewatch. He raised his shock of hair, shook himself as though caught ina snare, waved the brass disk on his wrist like a bell and said, "No, that's not enough. You must think, but think with your own idea, notother people's. "

Some amused faces were raised while he entered into observations thatthey foresaw would be endless. 

"Pay attention, you fellows, he's going to talk about militarism, "announced a wag, called Pinson, whose lively wit I had already noticed. 

"There's the question of militarism----" Termite went on. 

We laughed to see the hairy mannikin floundering on the dim straw inthe middle of his big public-meeting words, and casting fantasticshadows on the spider-web curtain of the skylight. 

"Are you going to tell us, " asked one of us, "that the Boches aren'tmilitarists?"

"Yes, indeed, and in course they are, " Termite consented to admit. 

"Ha! That bungs you in the optic!" Pinson hastened to record. 

"For my part, old sonny, " said a Territorial who was a good soldier, "I'm not seeking as far as you, and I'm not as spiteful. I know thatthey set about us, and that we only wanted to be quiet and friends witheverybody. Why, where I come from, for instance in the Creuse country, I know that----"

"You know?" bawled Termite, angrily; "you know nothing about nothing!You're only a poor little tame animal, like all the millions of pals. They gather us together, but they separate us. They say what they liketo us, or they don't say it, and you believe it. They say to you, 'This is what you've got to believe in!' They----"

I found myself growing privately incensed against Termite, by the sameinstinct which had once thrown me upon his accomplice Brisbille. Iinterrupted him. "Who are they--your 'they'?"

"Kings, " said Termite. 

At that moment Marcassin's silhouette appeared in the gray of the alleywhich ended among us. "Look out--there's Marc'! Shut your jaw, " oneof the audience benevolently advised. 

"I'm not afeared not to say what I think!" declared Termite, instantlylowering his voice and worming his way through the straw that dividedthe next stall from ours. 

We laughed again. But Margat was serious. "Always, " he said, "there'll be the two sorts of people there's always been--the grousersand the obeyers. "

Some one asked, "What for did you chap 'list?"

"'Cos there was nothing to eat in the house, " answered the Territorial, as interpreter of the general opinion. 

Having thus spoken, the old soldier yawned, went on all fours, arrangedthe straw of his claim, and added, "We'll not worry, but just let himbe. 'Specially seeing we can't do otherwise. "

It was time for slumber. The shed gaped open in front and at thesides, but the air was not cold. 

"We've done with the bad days, " said Rémus; "shan't see them no more. "

"At last!" said Margat. 

We stretched ourselves out, elbow to elbow. The one in the dark cornerblew out his candle. 

"May the war look slippy and get finished!" mumbled Orango. 

"If only they'll let me transfer to the cyclists, " Margat replied. 

We said no more, each forming that same great wandering prayer and somelittle prayer like Margat's. Gently we wrapped ourselves up on thestraw, one with the falling night, and closed our eyes. 

* * * * * *

At the bottom of the village, in the long pink farmhouse, there was acharming woman, who smiled at us with twinkling eyes. As the daysemerged from the rains and fogs, I looked at her with all my soul, forshe was bathed in the youth of the year. She had a little nose and bigeyes and slight fair down on her lips and neck, like traces of gold. Her husband was mobilized and we paid attentions to her. She smiled atthe soldiers as she went by, and chattered willingly with the non-coms;and the passage of officers brought her to a standstill of vaguerespect. I used to think about her, and I forgot, through her, towrite to Marie. 

There were many who inquired, speaking of the farmer's wife, "Anychance?" But there were many who replied, "Nothing doing. "

One morning that was bright above all others, my companions were busyholding their sides around a tipsy comrade whom they were catechizingand ragging, and sprinkling now and then with little doses of wine, toentertain him, and benefit more by him. These innocent amusements, like those which Termite provoked when he discoursed on militarism andthe universe, did not detain me, and I gained the street. 

I went down the paved slope. In gardens and enclosures, the buds wereholding out a multitude of lilliputian green hands, all still closed, and the apple-trees had white roses. Spring was hastening everywhere. I came in sight of the pink house. She was alone in the road and shetook all the sunshine for herself. I hesitated, I went by--my stepsslackened heavily--I stopped, and returned towards the door. Almost inspite of myself I went in. 

At first--light! A square of sunshine glowed on the red tiled floor ofthe kitchen. Casseroles and basins were shining brightly. 

She was there! Standing by the sink she was making a streak of silverflow into a gleaming pail, amid the luminous blush of the polishedtiles and the gold of the brass pans. The greenish light from thewindow-glass was moistening her skin. She saw me and she smiled. 

I knew that she always smiled at us. But we were alone! I felt a madlonging arise. There was something in me that was stronger than I, that ravished the picture of her. Every second she became morebeautiful. Her plump dress proffered her figure to my eyes, and herskirt trembled over her polished sabots. I looked at her neck, at herthroat--that extraordinary beginning. A strong perfume that envelopedher shoulders was like the truth of her body. Urged forward, I wenttowards her, and I could not even speak. 

She had lowered her head a little; her eyebrows had come nearertogether under the close cluster of her hair; uneasiness passed intoher eyes. She was used to the boyish mimicry of infatuated men. Butthis woman was not for me! She dealt me the blow of an unfeelinglaugh, and disappearing, shut the door in my face. 

I opened the door. I followed her into an outhouse. Stammeringsomething, I found touch again with her presence, I held out my hand. She slipped away, she was escaping me forever--when a monstrous Terrorstopped her!

The walls and roof drew near in a hissing crash of thunder, a dreadfulhatch opened in the ceiling and all was filled with black fire. Andwhile I was hurled against the wall by a volcanic blast, with my eyesscorched, my ears rent, and my brain hammered, while around me thestones were pierced and crushed, I saw the woman uplifted in afantastic shroud of black and red, to fall back in a red and whiteaffray of clothes and linen; and something huge burst and naked, withtwo legs, sprang at my face and forced into my mouth the taste ofblood. 

I know that I cried out, hiccoughing. Assaulted by the horrible kissand by the vile clasp that bruised the hand I had offered to thewoman's beauty--a hand still outheld--sunk in whirling smoke and ashesand the dreadful noise now majestically ebbing, I found my way out ofthe place, between walls that reeled as I did. Bodily, the housecollapsed behind me. In my flight over the shifting ground I wasbrushed by the mass of maddened falling stones and the cry of theruins, sinking in vast dust-clouds as in a tumult of beating wings. 

A veritable squall of shells was falling in this corner of the village. A little way off some soldiers were ejaculating in front of a littlehouse which had just been broken in two. They did not go close to itbecause of the terrible whistling which was burying itself here andthere all around, and the splinters that riddled it at every blow. Within the shelter of a wall we watched it appear under a vault ofsmoke, in the vivid flashes of that unnatural tempest. 

"Why, you're covered with blood!" a comrade said to me, disquieted. 

Stupefied and still thunderstruck I looked at that house's bones andbroken spine, that human house. 

It had been split from top to bottom and all the front was down. In asingle second one saw all the seared cellules of its rooms, thegeometric path of the flues, and a down quilt like viscera on theskeleton of a bed. In the upper story an overhanging floor remained, and there we saw the bodies of two officers, pierced and spiked totheir places round the table where they were lunching when thelightning fell--a nice lunch, too, for we saw plates and glasses and abottle of champagne. 

"It's Lieutenant Norbert and Lieutenant Ferrière. "

One of these specters was standing, and with cloven jaws so enlargedthat his head was half open, he was smiling. One arm was raised aloftin the festive gesture which he had begun forever. The other, his finefair hair untouched, was seated with his elbows on a cloth now red as aTurkey carpet, hideously attentive, his face besmeared with shiningblood and full of foul marks. They seemed like two statues of youthand the joy of life framed in horror. 

"There's three!" some one shouted. 

This one, whom we had not seen at first, hung in the air with danglingarms against the sheer wall, hooked on to a beam by the bottom of histrousers. A pool of blood which lengthened down the flat plasterlooked like a projected shadow. At each fresh explosion splinters werescattered round him and shook him, as though the dead man was stillmarked and chosen by the blind destruction. 

There was something hatefully painful in the doll-like attitude of thehanging corpse. 

Then Termite's voice was raised. "Poor lad!" he said. 

He went out from the shelter of the wall. 

"Are you mad?" we shouted; "he's dead, anyway!"

A ladder was there. Termite seized it and dragged it towards thedisemboweled house, which was lashed every minute by broadsides ofsplinters. 

"Termite!" cried the lieutenant, "I forbid you to go there! You'redoing no good. "

"I'm the owner of my skin, lieutenant, " Termite replied, withoutstopping or looking round. 

He placed the ladder, climbed up and unhooked the dead man. Aroundthem, against the plaster of the wall, there broke a surge of deafeningshocks and white fire. He descended with the body very skillfully, laid it on the ground, and remaining doubled up he ran back to us--tofall on the captain, who had witnessed the scene. 

"My friend, " the captain said, "I've been told that you were ananarchist. But I've seen that you're brave, and that's already morethan half of a Frenchman. "

He held out his hand. Termite took it, pretending to be littleimpressed by the honor. 

When he returned to us he said, while his hand rummaged his hedgehog'sbeard, "That poor lad--I don't know why--p'raps it's stupid--but I wasthinking of his mother. "

We looked at him with a sort of respect. First, because he had gone upand then because he had passed through the hail of iron and won. Therewas no one among us who did not earnestly wish he had tried andsucceeded in what Termite had just done. But assuredly we did not abit understand this strange soldier. 

A lull had come in the bombardment. "It's over, " we concluded. 

As we returned we gathered round Termite and one spoke for the rest. 

"You're an anarchist, then?"

"No, " said Termite, "I'm an internationalist. That's why I enlisted. "

"Ah!"

He tried to throw light on his words. "You understand, I'm against allwars. "

"All wars! But there's times when war's good. There's defensive war. "

"No, " said Termite again, "there's only offensive war; because if therewasn't the offensive there wouldn't be the defensive. "

"Ah!" we replied. 

We went on chatting, dispassionately and for the sake of talking, strolling in the dubious security of the streets which were sometimesdarkened by falls of wreckage, under a sky of formidable surprises. 

"All the same, isn't it chaps like you that prevented France from beingprepared?"

"There's not enough chaps like me to prevent anything; and if there'dbeen more, there wouldn't have been any war. "

"It's not to us, it's to the Boches and the others that you must saythat. "

"It's to all the world, " said Termite; "that's why I'm aninternationalist. "

While Termite was slipping away somewhere else his questioner indicatedby a gesture that he did not understand. "Never mind, " he said to us, "that chap's better than us. "

Gradually it came about that we of the squad used to consult Termite onany sort of subject, with a simplicity which made me smile--andsometimes even irritated me. That week, for instance, some one askedhim, "All this firing--is it an attack they're getting ready?"

But he knew no more than the rest. 

CHAPTER XII

THE SHADOWS

We did not leave for the trenches on the day we ought to have done. Evening came, then night--nothing happened. On the morning of thefifth day some of us were leaning, full of idleness and uncertainty, against the front of a house that had been holed and bunged up again, at the corner of a street. One of our comrades said to me, "Perhaps weshall stay here till the end of the war. "

There were signs of dissent, but all the same, the little street we hadnot left on the appointed day seemed just then to resemble the streetsof yore!

Near the place where we were watching the hours go by--and fumbling inpackets of that coarse tobacco that has skeletons in it--the hospitalwas installed. Through the low door we saw a broken stream of poorsoldiers pass, sunken and bedraggled, with the sluggish eyes ofbeggars; and the clean and wholesome uniform of the corporal who ledthem stood forth among them. 

They were always pretty much the same men who haunted the inspectionrooms. Many soldiers make it a point of honor never to report sick, and in their obstinacy there is an obscure and profound heroism. Others give way and come as often as possible to the gloomy places ofthe Army Medical Corps, to run aground opposite the major's door. Among these are found real human remnants in whom some visible orsecret malady persists. 

The examining-room was contrived in a ground floor room whose furniturehad been pushed back in a heap. Through the open window came the voiceof the major, and by furtively craning our necks we could just see himat the table, with his tabs and his eyeglass. Before him, half-nakedindigents stood, cap in hand, their coats on their arms, or theirtrousers on their feet, pitifully revealing the man through thesoldier, and trying to make the most of the bleeding cords of theirvaricose veins, or the arm from which a loose and cadaverous bandagehung and revealed the hollow of an obstinate wound, laying stress ontheir hernia or the everlasting bronchitis beyond their ribs. Themajor was a good sort and, it seemed, a good doctor. But this time hehardly examined the parts that were shown to him and his monotonousverdict took wings into the street. "Fit to march--good--consultationwithout penalty. "[1]

[Footnote 1: As a precaution against "scrimshanking, " a penaltyattaches to "consultations" which are adjudged uncalled-for. --Tr. ]

"Consultations, " which merely send the soldier back into the rankscontinued indefinitely. No one was exempted from marching. Once weheard the husky and pitiful voice of a simpleton who was dressing againin recrimination. The doctor argued, in a good-natured way, and thensaid, his voice suddenly serious, "Sorry, my good man, but I cannotexempt you. I have certain instructions. Make an effort. You canstill do it. "

We saw them come out, one by one, these creatures of deformed body anddwindling movement, leaning on each other, as though attached, andmumbling, "Nothing can be done, nothing. "

Little Mélusson, reserved and wretched, with his long red nose betweenhis burning cheekbones, was standing among us in the idle file withwhich the morning seemed vaguely in fellowship. He had not been to theinspection, but he said, "I can carry on to-day still; but to-morrow Ishall knock under. To-morrow----"

We paid no attention to Mélusson's words. Some one near us said, "Those instructions the major spoke of, they're a sign. "

* * * * * *

On parade that same morning the chief, with his nose on a paper, readout: "By order of the Officer Commanding, " and then he stammered outsome names, names of some soldiers in the regiment brigaded with ours, who had been shot for disobedience. There was a long list of them. Atthe beginning of the reading a slight growl was heard going round. Then, as the surnames came out, as they spread out in a crowd aroundus, there was silence. This direct contact with the phantoms of theexecuted set a wind of terror blowing and bowed all heads. 

It was the same again on the days that followed. After parade orders, the commandant, whom we rarely saw, mustered the four companies underarms on some waste ground. He spoke to us of the military situation, particularly favorable to us on the whole front, and of the finalvictory which could not be long delayed. He made promises to us. "Soon you will be at home, " and smiled on us for the first time. Hesaid, "Men, I do not know what is going to happen, but when it shouldbe necessary I rely on you. As always, do your duty and be silent. Itis so easy to be silent and to act!"

We broke off and made ourselves scarce. Returned to quarters welearned there was to be an inspection of cartridges and reserve rationsby the captain. We had hardly time to eat. Majorat waxed wroth, andconfided his indignation to Termite, who was a good audience, "It's allthe fault of that unlucky captain--we're just slaves!"

He shook his fist as he spoke towards the Town Hall. 

But Termite shrugged his shoulders, looked at him unkindly, and said, "Like a rotten egg, that's how you talk. That captain, and all the redtabs and brass hats, it's not them that invented the rules. They'rejust gilded machines--machines like you, but not so cheap. If you wantto do away with discipline, do away with war, my fellow; that's a sighteasier than to make it amusing for the private. "

He left Majorat crestfallen, and the others as well. For my part Iadmired the peculiar skill with which the anti-militarist could giveanswers beside the mark and yet always seem to be in the right. 

During those days they multiplied the route-marches and the exercisesintended to let the officers get the men again in hand. Thesemaneuvers tired us to death, and especially the sham attacks on woodedmounds, carried out in the evening among bogs and thorn-thickets. Whenwe got back, most of the men fell heavily asleep just as they hadfallen, beside their knapsacks, without having the heart to eat. 

Right in the middle of the night and this paralyzed slumber, a cryechoed through the walls, "Alarm! Stand to arms!"

We were so weary that the brutal reveille seemed at first, to theblinking and rusted men, like the shock of a nightmare. Then, whilethe cold blew in through the open door and we heard the sentriesrunning through the streets, while the corporals lighted the candlesand shook us with their voices, we sat up askew, and crouched, and gotour things ready, and stood up and fell in shivering, with flabby legsand minds befogged, in the black-hued street. 

After the roll-call and some orders and counter-orders, we heard thecommand "Forward!" and we left the rest-camp as exhausted as when weentered it. And thus we set out, no one knew where. 

At first it was the same exodus as always. It was on the same roadthat we disappeared: into the same great circles of blackness that wesank. 

We came to the shattered glass works and then to the quarry, whichdaybreak was washing and fouling and making its desolation morecomplete. Fatigue was gathering darkly within us and abating our pace. Faces appeared stiff and wan, and as though they were seen throughgratings. We were surrounded by cries of "Forward!" thrown from alldirections between the twilight of the sky and the night of the earth. It took a greater effort every time to tear ourselves away from thehalts. 

We were not the only regiment in movement in these latitudes. Thetwilight depths were full. Across the spaces that surrounded thequarry men were passing without ceasing and without limit, their feetbreaking and furrowing the earth like plows. And one guessed that theshadows also were full of hosts going as we were to the four corners ofthe unknown. Then the clay and its thousand barren ruts, thesecorpse-like fields, fell away. Under the ashen tints of early day, fog-banks of men descended the slopes. From the top I saw nearly thewhole regiment rolling into the deeps. As once of an evening in thedays gone by, I had a perception of the multitude's immensity and thethreat of its might, that might which surpasses all and is impelled byinvisible mandates. 

We stopped and drew breath again; and on the gloomy edge of this gulfsome soldiers even amused themselves by inciting Termite to speak ofmilitarism and anti-militarism. I saw faces which laughed, throughtheir black and woeful pattern of fatigue, around the little man whogesticulated in impotence. Then we had to set off again. 

We had never passed that way but in the dark, and we did not recognizethe scenes now that we saw them. From the lane which we descended, holding ourselves back, to gain the trench, we saw for the first timethe desert through which we had so often passed--plains and lagoonsunlimited. 

The waterlogged open country, with its dispirited pools and theirsmoke-like islets of trees, seemed nothing but a reflection of theleaden, cloud-besmirched sky. The walls of the trenches, pallid asice-floes, marked with their long, sinuous crawling where they had beenslowly torn from the earth by the shovels. These embossings and canalsformed a complicated and incalculable network, smudged near at hand bybodies and wreckage; dreary and planetary in the distance. One couldmake out the formal but hazy stakes and posts, aligned in the distanceto the end of sight; and here and there the swellings and roundink-blots of the dugouts. In some sections of trench one couldsometimes even descry black lines, like a dark wall between otherwalls, and these lines stirred--they were the workmen of destruction. A whole region in the north, on higher ground, was a forest flown away, leaving only a stranded bristling of masts, like a quayside. There wasthunder in the sky, but it was drizzling, too, and even the flasheswere gray above that infinite liquefaction in which each regiment wasas lost as each man. 

We entered the plain and disappeared into the trench. The "opencrossing" was now pierced by a trench, though it was little more thanbegun. Amid the smacks of the bullets which blurred its edges we hadto crawl flat on our bellies, along the sticky bottom of this gully. The close banks gripped and stopped our packs so that we flounderedperforce like swimmers, to go forward in the earth, under the murder inthe air. For a second the anguish and the effort stopped my heart andin a nightmare I saw the cadaverous littleness of my grave closing overme. 

At the end of this torture we got up again, in spite of the knapsacks. The last star-shells were sending a bloody _aurora borealis_ into themorning. Sudden haloes drew our glances and crests of black smoke wentup like cypresses. On both sides, in front and behind, we heard thefearful suicide of shells. 

* * * * * *

We marched in the earth's interior until evening. From time to timeone hoisted the pack up or pressed down one's cap into the sweat of theforehead; had it fallen it could not have been picked up again in themechanism of the march; and then we began again to fight with thedistance. The hand contracted on the rifle-sling was tumefied by theshoulder-straps and the bent arm was broken. 

Like a regular refrain the lamentation of Mélusson came to me. He keptsaying that he was going to stop, but he did not stop, ever, and heeven butted into the back of the man in front of him when the whistlewent for a halt. 

The mass of the men said nothing. And the greatness of this silence, this despotic and oppressive motion, irritated Adjutant Marcassin, whowould have liked to see some animation. He rated and lashed us with avengeance. He hustled the file in the narrowness of the trench as heclove to the corners so as to survey his charge. But then he had noknapsack. 

Through the heavy distant noise of our tramping, through the funerealconsolation of our drowsiness, we heard the adjutant's ringing voice, violently reprimanding this or the other. "Where have you seen, swine, that there can be patriotism without hatred? Do you think one can lovehis own country if he doesn't hate the others?"

When some one spoke banteringly of militarism--for no one, exceptTermite, who didn't count, took the word seriously--Marcassin growleddespairingly, "French militarism and Prussian militarism, they're notthe same thing, for one's French and the other's Prussian!"

But we felt that all these wrangles only shocked and wearied him. Hewas instantly and gloomily silent. 

We were halted to mount guard in a part we had never seen before, andfor that reason it seemed worse than the others to us at first. We hadto scatter and run up and down the shelterless trench all night, toavoid the plunging files of shells. That night was but one great crashand we were strewn in the middle of it among black puddles, upon aghostly background of earth. We moved on again in the morning, bemused, and the color of night. In front of the column we still heardthe cry "Forward!" Then we redoubled the violence of our effort, weextorted some little haste from out us; and the soaked and frozencompany went on under cathedrals of cloud which collapsed in flames, victims of a fate whose name they had no time to seek, a fate whichonly let its force be felt, like God. 

During the day, and much farther on, they cried "Halt!" and thesmothered sound of the march was silent. From the trench in which wecollapsed under our packs, while another lot went away, we could see asfar as a railway embankment. The far end of the loophole-pipe enframedtumbledown dwellings and cabins, ruined gardens where the grass and theflowers were interred, enclosures masked by palings, fragments ofmasonry to which eloquent remains of posters even still clung--a cornerfull of artificial details, of human things, of illusions. The railwaybank was near, and in the network of wire stretched between it and usmany bodies were fast-caught as flies. 

The elements had gradually dissolved those bodies and time had wornthem out. With their dislocated gestures and point-like heads theywere but lightly hooked to the wire. For whole hours our eyes werefixed on this country all obstructed by a machinery of wires and fullof men who were not on the ground. One, swinging in the wind, stoodout more sharply than the others, pierced like a sieve a hundred timesthrough and through, and a void in the place of his heart. Anotherspecter, quite near, had doubtless long since disintegrated, while heldup by his clothes. At the time when the shadow of night began to seizeus in its greatness a wind arose, a wind which shook the desiccatedcreature, and he emptied himself of a mass of mold and dust. One sawthe sky's whirlwind, dark and disheveled, in the place where the manhad been; the soldier was carried away by the wind and buried in thesky. 

Towards the end of the afternoon the piercing whistle of the bulletswas redoubled. We were riddled and battered by the noise. Thewariness with which we watched the landscape that was watching usseemed to exasperate Marcassin. He pondered an idea; then came to asudden decision and cried triumphantly, "Look!"

He climbed to the parapet, stood there upright, shook his fist at spacewith the blind and simple gesture of the apostle who is offering hisexample and his heart, and shouted, "Death to the Boches!"

Then he came down, quivering with the faith of his self-gift. 

"Better not do that again, " growled the soldiers who were lined up inthe trench, gorgonized by the extraordinary sight of a living manstanding, for no reason, on a front line parapet in broad daylight, stupefied by the rashness they admired although it outstripped them. 

"Why not? Look!"

Marcassin sprang up once more. Lean and erect, he stood like a poplar, and raising both arms straight into the air, he yelled, "I believe onlyin the glory of France!"

Nothing else was left for him; he was but a conviction. Hardly had hespoken thus in the teeth of the invisible hurricane when he opened hisarms, assumed the shape of a cross against the sky, spun round, andfell noisily into the middle of the trench and of our cries. 

He had rolled onto his belly. We gathered round him. With a jerk heturned on to his back, his arms slackened, and his gaze drowned in hiseyes. His blood began to spread around him, and we drew our greatboots away, that we should not walk on that blood. 

"He died like an idiot, " said Margat in a choking voice; "but by Godit's fine!"

He took off his cap, saluted awkwardly and stood with bowed head. 

"Committing suicide for an idea, it's fine, " mumbled Vidaine. 

"It's fine, it's fine!" other voices said. 

And these little words fluttered down like leaves and petals onto thebody of the great dead soldier. 

"Where's his cap, that he thought so much of?" groaned his orderly, Aubeau, looking in all directions. 

"Up there, to be sure: I'll fetch it, " said Termite. 

The comical man went for the relic. He mounted the parapet in histurn, coolly, but bending low. We saw him ferreting about, frail as apoor monkey on the terrible crest. At last he put his hand on the capand jumped into the trench. A smile sparkled in his eyes and in themiddle of his beard, and his brass "cold meat ticket" jingled on hisshaggy wrist. 

They took the body away. The men carried it and a third followed withthe cap. One of us said, "The war's over for him!" And during thedead man's recessional we were mustered, and we continued to drawnearer to the unknown. But everything seemed to recede as fast as weadvanced, even events. 

* * * * * *

We wandered five days, six days, in the lines, almost without sleeping. We stood for hours, for half-nights and half-days, waiting for ways tobe clear that we could not see. Unceasingly they made us go back onour tracks and begin over again. We mounted guard in trenches, wefitted ourselves into some stripped and sinister corner which stood outagainst a charred twilight or against fire. We were condemned to seethe same abysses always. 

For two nights we bent fiercely to the mending of an old third-linetrench above the ruin of its former mending. We repaired the longskeleton, soft and black, of its timbers. From that dried-up drain webesomed the rubbish of equipment, of petrified weapons, of rottenclothes and of victuals, of a sort of wreckage of forest andhouse--filthy, incomparably filthy, infinitely filthy. We worked bynight and hid by day. The only light for us was the heavy dawn ofevening when they dragged us from sleep. Eternal night covered theearth. 

After the labor, as soon as daybreak began to replace night withmelancholy, we buried ourselves methodically in the depth of thecaverns there. Only a deadened murmur penetrated to them, but the rockmoved by reason of the earthquakes. When some one lighted his pipe, bythat gleam we looked at each other. We were fully equipped; we couldstart away at any minute; it was forbidden to take off the heavyjingling chain of cartridges around us. 

I heard some one say, "In _my_ country there are fields, and paths, andthe sea; nowhere else in the world is there that. "

Among these shades of the cave--an abode of the first men as itseemed--I saw the hand start forth of him who existed on the spectacleof the fields and the sea, who was trying to show it and to seize it;or I saw around a vague halo four card-players stubbornly bent uponfinding again something of an ancient and peaceful attachment in thefaces of the cards; or I saw Margat flourish a Socialist paper that hadfallen from Termite's pocket, and burst into laughter at the censoredblanks it contained. And Majorat raged against life, caressed hisreserve bottle with his lips till out of breath and then, appeased andhis mouth dripping, said it was the only way to alleviate hisimprisonment. Then sleep slew words and gestures and thoughts. I keptrepeating some phrase to myself, trying in vain to understand it; andsleep submerged me, ancestral sleep so dreary and so deep that it seemsthere had only and ever been one long, lone sleep here on earth, abovewhich our few actions float, and which ever returns to fill the fleshof man with night. 

Forward! Our nights are torn from us in lots. The bodies, invaded bycaressing poison, and even by confidences and apparitions, shakethemselves and stand up again. We extricate ourselves from the hole, and emerge from the density of buried breath; stumbling we climb intoicy space, odorless, infinite space. The oscillation of the march, assailed on both sides by the trench, brings brief and paltry halts, inwhich we recline against the walls, or cast ourselves on them. Weembrace the earth, since nothing else is left us to embrace. 

Then Movement seizes us again. Metrified by regular jolts, by theshock of each step, by our prisoned breathing, it loses its hold nomore, but becomes incarnate in us. It sets one small word resoundingin our heads, between our teeth--"Forward!"--longer, more infinite thanthe uproar of the shells. It sets us making, towards the east ortowards the north, bounds which are days and nights in length. Itturns us into a chain which rolls along with a sound of steel--themetallic hammering of rifle, bayonet, cartridges, and of the tin cupwhich shines on the dark masses like a bolt. Wheels, gearing, machinery! One sees life and the reality of things striking andconsuming and forging each other. 

We knew well enough that we were going towards some tragedy that thechiefs knew of; but the tragedy was above all in the going there. 

* * * * * *

We changed country. We left the trenches and climbed out upon theearth--along a great incline which hid the enemy horizon from us andprotected us against him. The blackening dampness turned the cold intoa thing, and laid frozen shudders on us. A pestilence surrounded us, wide and vague; and sometimes lines of pale crosses alongside our marchspelled out death in a more precise way. 

It was our tenth night; it was at the end of all our nights, and itseemed greater than they. The distances groaned, roared and growled, and would sometimes abruptly define the crest of the incline among thewinding sheets of the mists. The intermittent flutters of light showedme the soldier who marched in front of me. My eyes, resting in fixityon him, discovered his sheepskin coat, his waist-belt, straining at theshoulder-straps, dragged by the metal-packed cartridge pouches, by thebayonet, by the trench-tool; his round bags, pushed backwards; hisswathed and hooded rifle; his knapsack, packed lengthways so as not togive a handle to the earth which goes by on either side; the blanket, the quilt, the tentcloth, folded accordion-wise on the top of eachother, and the whole surmounted by the mess-tin, ringing like amournful bell, higher than his head. What a huge, heavy and mightymass the armed soldier is, near at hand and when one is looking atnothing else!

Once, in consequence of a command badly given or badly understood, thecompany wavered, flowed back and pawed the ground in disorder on thedeclivity. Fifty men, who were all alike by reason of their sheepskinsran here and there and one by one--a vague collection of evasive men, small and frail, not knowing what to do; while non-coms ran round them, abused and gathered them. Order began again, and against the whitishand bluish sheets spread by the star-shells I saw the pendulums of thestep once more fall into line under the long body of shadows. 

During the night there was a distribution of brandy. By the light oflanterns we saw the cups held out, shaking and gleaming. The libationdrew from our entrails a moment of delight and uplifting. The liquid'sfierce flow awoke deep impulses, restored the martial mien to us, andmade us grasp our rifles with a victorious desire to kill. 

But the night was longer than that dream. Soon, the kind of goddesssuperposed on our shadows left our hands and our heads, and that thrillof glory was of no use. 

Indeed, its memory filled our hearts with a sort of bitterness. "Yousee, there's no trenches anywhere about here, " grumbled the men. 

"And why are there no trenches?" said a wrongheaded man; "why, it'sbecause they don't care a damn for soldiers' lives. "

"Fathead!" the corporal interrupted; "what's the good of trenchesbehind, if there's one in front, fathead!"

* * * * * *

"Halt!"

We saw the Divisional Staff go by in the beam of a searchlight. Inthat valley of night it might have been a procession of princes risingfrom a subterranean palace. On cuffs and sleeves and collars badgeswagged and shone, golden aureoles encircled the heads of this group ofapparitions. 

The flashing made us start and awoke us forcibly, as it did the night. 

The men had been pressed back upon the side of the sunken hollow toclear the way; and they watched, blended with the solidity of the dark. Each great person in his turn pierced the fan of moted sunshine, andeach was lighted up for some paces. Hidden and abashed, theshadow-soldiers began to speak in very low voices of those who went bylike torches. 

They who passed first, guiding the Staff, were the company andbattalion officers. We knew them. The quiet comments breathed fromthe darkness were composed either of praises or curses; these were goodand clear-sighted officers; those were triflers or skulkers. 

"That's one that's killed some men!"

"That's one I'd be killed for!"

"The infantry officer who really does all he ought, " Pélican declared, "well, he get's killed. "

"Or else he's lucky. "

"There's black and there's white in the company officers. At bottomyou know, I say they're men. It's just a chance you've got whether youtumble on the good or the bad sort. No good worrying. It's justluck. "

"More's the pity for us. "

The soldier who said that smiled vaguely, lighted by a reflection fromthe chiefs. One read in his face an acquiescence which recalled to mecertain beautiful smiles I had caught sight of in former days ontoilers' humble faces. Those who are around me are saying tothemselves, "Thus it is written, " and they think no farther than that, massed all mistily in the darkness, like vague hordes of negroes. 

Then officers went by of whom we did not speak, because we did not knowthem. These unknown tab-bearers made a greater impression than theothers; and besides, their importance and their power were increasing. We saw rows of increasing crowns on the caps. Then, the shadow-menwere silent. The eulogy and the censure addressed to those whom onehad seen at work had no hold on these, and all those minor things fadedaway. These were admired in the lump. 

This superstition made me smile. But the general of the divisionhimself appeared in almost sacred isolation. The tabs andthunderbolts[1] and stripes of his satellites glittered at a respectfuldistance only. Then it seemed to me that I was face to face with Fateitself--the will of this man. In his presence a sort of instinctdazzled me. 

[Footnote 1: Distinctive badge for Staff officers and others. --Tr. ]

"Packs up! Forward!"

We took back upon our hips and neck the knapsack which had the shapeand the weight of a yoke, which every minute that falls on it weighsdown more dourly. The common march went on again. It filled a greatspace; it shook the rocky slopes with its weight. In vain I bent myhead--I could not hear the sound of my own steps, so blended was itwith the others. And I repeated obstinately to myself that one had toadmire the intelligent force which sets all this deep mass in movement, which says to us or makes us say, "Forward!" or "It has to be!" or "Youwill _not_ know!" which hurls the world we are into a whirlpool sogreat that we do not even see the direction of our fall, intoprofundities we cannot see because they are profound. We have need ofmasters who know all that we do not know. 

* * * * * *

Our weariness so increased and overflowed that it seemed as if we grewbigger at every step! And then one no longer thought of fatigue. Wehad forgotten it, as we had forgotten the number of the days and eventheir names. Always we made one step more, always. 

Ah, the infantry soldiers, the pitiful Wandering Jews who are alwaysmarching! They march mathematically, in rows of four numbers, or infile in the trenches, four-squared by their iron load, but separate, separate. Bent forward they go, almost prostrated, trailing theirlegs, kicking the dead. Slowly, little by little, they are wounded bythe length of time, by the incalculable repetition of movements, by thegreatness of things. They are borne down by their bones and muscles, by their own human weight. At halts of only ten minutes, they sinkdown. "There's no time to sleep!" "No matter, " they say, and they goto sleep as happy people do. 

* * * * * *

Suddenly we learned that nothing was going to happen! It was all overfor us, and we were going to return to the rest-camp. We said it overagain to ourselves. And one evening they said, "We're returning, "although they did not know, as they went on straight before them, whether they were going forward or backward. 

In the plaster-kiln which we are marching past there is a bit ofcandle, and sunk underneath its feeble illumination there are four men. Nearer, one sees that it is a soldier, guarding three prisoners. Thesight of these enemy soldiers in greenish and red rags gives us animpression of power, of victory. Some voices question them in passing. They are dismayed and stupefied; the fists that prop up their yellowcheekbones protrude triangular caricatures of features. Sometimes, atthe cut of a frank question, they show signs of lifting their heads, and awkwardly try to give vent to an answer. 

"What's he say, that chap?" they asked Sergeant Müller. 

"He says that war's none of their fault; it's the big people's. "

"The swine!" grunts Margat. 

We climb the hill and go down the other side of it. Meandering, westeer towards the infernal glimmers down yonder. At the foot of thehill we stop. There ought to be a clear view, but it isevening--because of the bad weather and because the sky is full ofblack things and of chemical clouds with unnatural colors. Storm isblended with war. Above the fierce and furious cry of the shells Iheard, in domination over all, the peaceful boom of thunder. 

They plant us in subterranean files, facing a wide plain of gentlegradient which dips from the horizon towards us, a plain with a rollingjumble of thorn-brakes and trees, which the gale is seizing by thehair. Squalls charged with rain and cold are passing over andimmensifying it; and there are rivers and cataclysms of clamor alongthe trajectories of the shells. Yonder, under the mass of the rust-redsky and its sullen flames, there opens a yellow rift where trees standforth like gallows. The soil is dismembered. The earth's covering hasbeen blown a lot in slabs, and its heart is seen reddish and linedwhite--butchery as far as the eye can see. 

There is nothing now but to sit down and recline one's back asconveniently as possible. We stay there and breathe and live a little;we are calm, thanks to that faculty we have of never seeing either thepast or the future. 

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XIII

WHITHER GOEST THOU?

But soon a shiver has seized all of us. 

"Listen! It's stopped! Listen!"

The whistle of bullets has completely ceased, and the artillery also. The lull is fantastic. The longer it lasts the more it pierces us withthe uneasiness of beasts. We lived in eternal noise; and now that itis hiding, it shakes and rouses us, and would drive us mad. 

"What's that?"

We rub our eyelids and open wide our eyes. We hoist our heads with noprecaution above the crumbled parapet. We question each other--"D'yousee?"

No doubt about it; the shadows are moving along the ground wherever onelooks. There is no point in the distance where they are not moving. 

Some one says at last:--

"Why, it's the Boches, to be sure!"

And then we recognize on the sloping plain the immense geographicalform of the army that is coming upon us!

* * * * * *

Behind and in front of us together, a terrible crackle bursts forth andmakes somber captives of us in the depth of a valley of flames, andflames which illuminate the plain of men marching over the plain. Theyreveal them afar, in incalculable number, with the first ranksdetaching themselves, wavering a little, and forming again, the chalkysoil a series of points and lines like something written!

Gloomy stupefaction makes us dumb in face of that living immensity. Then we understand that this host whose fountain-head is out of sightis being frightfully cannonaded by our 75's; the shells set off behindus and arrive in front of us. In the middle of the lilliputian ranksthe giant smoke-clouds leap like hellish gods. We see the flashes ofthe shells which are entering that flesh scattered over the earth. Itis smashed and burned entirely in places, and that nation advances likea brazier. 

Without a stop it overflows towards us. Continually the horizonproduces new waves. We hear a vast and gentle murmur rise. With theirtearing lights and their dull glimmers they resemble in the distance awhole town making festival in the evening. 

We can do nothing against the magnitude of that attack, the greatnessof that sum total. When a gun has fired short, we see more clearly thelittleness of each shot. Fire and steel are drowned in all that life;it closes up and re-forms like the sea. 

"Rapid fire!"

We fire desperately. But we have not many cartridges. Since we cameinto the first line they have ceased to inspect our load of ammunition;and many men, especially these last days, have got rid of a part of theburden which bruises hips and belly and tears away the skin. They whoare coming do not fire; and above the long burning thicket of our lineone can see them still flowing from the east. They are closely massedin ranks. One would say they clung to each other as though welded. They are not using their rifles. Their only weapon is the infinity oftheir number. They are coming to bury us under their feet. 

Suddenly a shift in the wind brings us the smell of ether. Thedivisions advancing on us are drunk! We declare it, we tell it toourselves frantically. 

"They're on fire! They're on fire!" cries the trembling voice of theman beside me, whose shoulders are shaken by the shots he is hurling. 

They draw near. They are lighted from below along the descent by theflashing footlights of our fire; they grow bigger, and already we canmake out the forms of soldiers. They are at the same time in order andin disorder. Their outlines are rigid, and one divines faces of stone. Their rifles are slung and they have nothing in their hands. They comeon like sleep-walkers, only knowing how to put one foot before theother, and surely they are singing. Yonder, in the bulk of theinvasion, the guns continue to destroy whole walls and whole structuresof life at will. On the edges of it we can clearly see isolatedsilhouettes and groups as they fall, with an extended line of figureslike torchlights. 

Now they are there, fifty paces away, breathing their ether into ourfaces. We do not know what to do. We have no more cartridges. We fixbayonets, our ears filled with that endless, undefined murmur whichcomes from their mouths and the hollow rolling of the flood thatmarches. 

A shout spreads behind us:

"Orders to fall back!"

We bow down and evacuate the trench by openings at the back. There arenot a lot of us, we who thought we were so many. The trench is soonempty, and we climb the hill that we descended in coming. We go uptowards our 75's, which are in lines behind the ridge and stillthundering. We climb at a venture, in the open, by vague paths andtracks of mud; there are no trenches. During the gray ascent it is alittle clearer than a while ago: they do not fire on us. If they firedon us, we should be killed. We climb in flagging jumps, in jerks, pounded by the panting of the following waves that push us before them, closely beset by their clattering, nor turning round to look again. Wehoist ourselves up the trembling flanks of the volcano that clamors upyonder. Along with us are emptied batteries also climbing, and horsesand clouds of steam and all the horror of modern war. Each man pushesthis retreat on, and is pushed by it; and as our panting becomes onelong voice, we go up and up, baffled by our own weight which tries tofall back, deformed by our knapsacks, bent and silent as beasts. 

From the summit we see the trembling inundation, murmuring andconfused, filling the trenches we have just left, and seeming alreadyto overflow them. But our eyes and ears are violently monopolized bythe two batteries between which we are passing; they are firing intothe infinity of the attackers, and each shot plunges into life. Neverhave I been so affected by the harrowing sight of artillery fire. Thetubes bark and scream in crashes that can hardly be borne; they go andcome on their brakes in starts of fantastic distinctness and violence. 

In the hollows where the batteries lie hid, in the middle of afan-shaped phosphorescence, we see the silhouettes of the gunners asthey thrust in the shells. Every time they maneuver the breeches, their chests and arms are scorched by a tawny reflection. They arelike the implacable workers of blast furnace; the breeches are reddenedby the heat of the explosions, the steel of the guns is on fire in theevening. 

For some minutes now they have fired more slowly--as if they werebecoming exhausted. A few far-apart shots--the batteries fire no more;and now that the salvos are extinguished, we see the fire in the steelgo out. 

In the abysmal silence we hear a gunner groan:--

"There's no more shell. "

The shadow of twilight resumes its place in the sky--henceforwardempty. It grows cold. There is a mysterious and terrible mourning. Around me, springing from the obscurity, are groans and gasps forbreath, loaded backs which disappear, stupefied eyes, and the gesturesof men who wipe the sweat from their foreheads. The order to retire isrepeated, in a tone that grips us--one would call it a cry of distress. There is a confused and dejected trampling; and then we descend, we goaway the way we came, and the host follows itself heavily and makesmore steps into the gulf. 

* * * * * *

When we have gone again down the slope of the hill, we find ourselvesonce more in the bottom of a valley, for another height begins. Beforeascending it, we stop to take breath, but ready to set off again shouldthe flood-tide appear on the ridge yonder. We find ourselves in themiddle of grassy expanses, without trenches or defense, and we areastonished not to see the supports. We are in the midst of a sort ofabsence. 

We sit down here and there; and some one with his forehead bowed almostto his knees, translating the common thought, says:--

"It's none of our fault. "

Our lieutenant goes up to the man, puts his hand on his shoulder, andsays, gently:--

"No, my lads, it's none of your fault. "

Just then some sections join us who say, "We're the rearguard. " Andsome add that the two batteries of 75's up yonder are already captured. A whistle rings out--"Come, march!"

We continue the retreat. There are two battalions of us in all--nosoldier in front of us; no French soldier behind us. I have neighborswho are unknown to me, motley men, routed and stupefied, artillery andengineers; unknown men who come and go away, who seem to be born andseem to die. 

At one time we get a glimpse of some confusion in the orders fromabove. A Staff officer, issuing from no one knew where, throws himselfin front of us, bars our way, and questions us in a tragic voice:--

"What are you miserable men doing? Are you running away? Forward inthe name of France! I call upon you to return. Forward!"

The soldiers, who would never have thought of retiring without orders, are stunned, and can make nothing of it. 

"We're going back because they told us to go back. "

But they obey. They turn right about face. Some of them have alreadybegun to march forward, and they call to their comrades:--

"Hey there! This way, it seems!"

But the order to retire returns definitely, and we obey once more, fuming against those who do not know what they say; and the ebb carriesaway with it the officer who shouted amiss. 

The march speeds up, it becomes precipitate and haggard. We are sweptalong by an impetuosity that we submit to without knowing whence itcomes. We begin the ascent of the second hill which appears in thefallen night a mountain. 

When fairly on it we hear round us, on all sides and quite close, aterrible pit-pat, and the long low hiss of mown grass. There is acrackling afar in the sky, and they who glance back for a second in theawesome storm see the cloudy ridges catch fire horizontally. It meansthat the enemy have mounted machine guns on the summit we have justabandoned, and that the place where we are is being hacked by theknives of bullets. On all sides soldiers wheel and rattle down withcurses, sighs and cries. We grab and hang on to each other, jostlingas if we were fighting. 

The rest at last reach the top of the rise; and just at that moment thelieutenant cries in a clear and heartrending voice:

"Good-by, my lads!"

We see him fall, and he is carried away by the survivors around him. 

From the summit we go a few steps down the other side, and lie on theground in silence. Some one asks, "The lieutenant?"

"He's dead. "

"Ah, " says the soldier, "and how he said good-by to us!"

We breathe a little now. We do not think any more unless it be that weare at last saved, at last lying down. 

Some engineers fire star-shells, to reconnoiter the state of things inthe ground we have evacuated. Some have the curiosity to risk a glanceover it. On the top of the first hill--where our guns were--the bigdazzling plummets show a line of bustling excitement. One hears thenoises of picks and of mallet blows. 

They have stopped their advance and are consolidating there. They arehollowing their trenches and planting their network of wire--which willhave to be taken again some day. We watch, outspread on our bellies, or kneeling, or sitting lower down, with our empty rifles beside us. 

Margat reflects, shakes his head and says:--

"Wire would have stopped them just now. But we had no wire. "

"And machine-guns, too! but where are they, the M. G. S?"

We have a distinct feeling that there has been an enormous blunder inthe command. Want of foresight--the reënforcements were not there;they had not thought of supports. There were not enough guns to bartheir way, nor enough artillery ammunition; with our own eyes we hadseen two batteries cease fire in mid-action--they had not thought ofshells. In a wide stretch of country, as one could see, there were nodefense work, no trenches; they had not thought of trenches. 

It is obvious even to the common eyes of common soldiers. 

"What could we do?" says one of us; "it's the chiefs. "

We say it and we should repeat it if we were not up again and sweptaway in the hustle of a fresh departure, and thrown back upon moreimmediate and important anxieties. 

* * * * * *

We do not know where we are. 

We have marched all night. More weariness bends our spines again, moreobscurity hums in our heads. By following the bed of a valley, we havefound trenches again, and then men. These splayed and squelchedalleys, with their fat and sinking sandbags, their props which rot likelimbs, flow into wider pockets where activity prevails--battalion H. Q. , or dressing-stations. About midnight we saw, through the golden lineof a dugout's half-open door, some officers seated at a white table--acloth or a map. Some one cries, "They're lucky!" The company officersare exposed to dangers as we are, but only in attacks and reliefs. Wesuffer long. They have neither the vigil at the loophole, nor theknapsack, nor the fatigues. What always lasts is greater. 

And now the walls of flabby flagstones and the open-mouthed caves havebegun again. Morning rises, long and narrow as our lot. We reach abusy trench-crossing. A stench catches my throat: some cess-pool intowhich these streets suspended in the earth empty their sewage? No, wesee rows of stretchers, each one swollen. There is a tent there ofgray canvas, which flaps like a flag, and on its fluttering wall thedawn lights up a bloody cross. 

* * * * * *

Sometimes, when we are high enough for our eyes to unbury themselves, Ican dimly see some geometrical lines, so confused, so desolated bydistance, that I do not know if it is our country or the other; evenwhen one sees he does not know. Our looks are worn away in looking. We do not see, we are powerless to people the world. We all havenothing in common but eyes of evening and a soul of night. 

And always, always, in these trenches whose walls run down like waves, with their stale stinks of chlorine and sulphur, chains of soldiers goforward endlessly, towing each other. They go as quickly as they can, as if the walls were going to close upon them. They are bowed as ifthey were always climbing, wholly dark under colossal packs which theycarry without stopping, from one place to another place, as they mightrocks in hell. From minute to minute we are filling the places of theobliterated hosts who have passed this way like the wind or have stayedhere like the earth. 

We halt in a funnel. We lean our backs against the walls, resting thepacks on the projections which bristle from them. But we examine thesethings coming out of the earth, and we smell that they are knees, elbows and heads. They were interred there one day and the followingdays are disinterring them. At the spot where I am, from which I haveroughly and heavily recoiled with all my armory, a foot comes out froma subterranean body and protrudes. I try to put it out of the way, butit is strongly incrusted. One would have to break the corpse of steel, to make it disappear. I look at the morsel of mortality. My thoughts, and I cannot help them, are attracted by the horizontal body that theworld bruises; they go into the ground with it and mold a shape for it. Its face--what is the look which rots crushed in the dark depth of theearth at the top of these remains? Ah, one catches sight of what thereis under the battlefields! Everywhere in the spacious wall there arelimbs, and black and muddy gestures. It is a sepulchral sculptor'sgreat sketch-model, a bas-relief in clay that stands haughtily beforeour eyes. It is the portal of the earth's interior; yes, it is thegate of hell. 

* * * * * *

In order to get here, I slept as I marched; and now I have an illusionthat I am hidden in this little cave, cooped up against the curve ofthe roof. I am no more than this gentle cry of the flesh--Sleep! As Ibegin to doze and people myself with dreams, a man comes in. He isunarmed, and he ransacks us with the stabbing white point of hisflash-lamp. It is the colonel's batman. He says to our adjutant assoon as he finds him:--

"Six fatigue men wanted. "

The adjutant's bulk rises and yawns:--

"Butsire, Vindame, Margat, Termite, Paulin, Rémus!" he orders as hegoes to sleep again. 

We emerge from the cave; and more slowly, from our drowsiness. We findourselves standing in a village street. But as soon as we touch theopen air, dazzling roars precede and follow us, mere handful of men aswe are, abruptly revealing us to each other. We hurl ourselves like apack of hounds into the first door or the first gaping hole, and thereare some who cry that: "We are marked. We're given away!"

After the porterage fatigue we go back. I settle myself in my corner, heavier, more exhausted, more buried in the bottom of everything. Iwas beginning to sleep, to go away from myself, lulled by a voice whichsought in vain the number of the days we had been on the move, and wasrepeating the names of the nights--Thursday, Friday, Saturday--when theman with the pointed light returns, demands a gang, and I set off withthe others. It is so again for a third time. As soon as we areoutside, the night, which seems to lie in wait for us, sends us asquall, with its thunderous destruction of space; it scatters us; thenwe are drawn together and joined up. We carry thick planks, two bytwo; and then piles of sacks which blind the bearers with a plasterydust and make them reel like masts. 

Then the last time, the most terrible, it was wire. Each of us takesinto his hands a great hoop of coiled wire, as tall as ourselves, andweighing over sixty pounds. When one carries it, the supple wheelstretches out like an animal; it is set dancing by the least movement, it works into the flesh of the shoulder, and strikes one's feet. Minetries to cling to me and pull me up and throw me to the ground. Withthis malignantly heavy thing, animated with barbarous and powerfulmovement, I cross the ruins of a railway station, all stones and beams. We clamber up an embankment which slips away and avoids us, we drag andpush the rebellious and implacable burden. It cannot be reached, thatreceding height. But we reach it, all the same. 

Ah, I am a normal man! I cling to life, and I have the consciousnessof duty. But at that moment I called from the bottom of my heart forthe bullet which would have delivered me from life. 

We return, with empty hands, in a sort of sinister comfort. Iremember, as we came in, a neighbor said to me--or to some one else:

"Sheets of corrugated iron are worse. "

The fatigues have to be stopped at dawn, although the engineers protestagainst the masses of stores which uselessly fill the depot. 

We sleep from six to seven in the morning. In the last traces of nightwe emigrate from the cave, blinking like owls. 

"Where's the juice?"[1] we ask. 

[Footnote 1: Coffee. ]

There is none. The cooks are not there, nor the mess people. And theyreply:--

"Forward!"

In the dull and pallid morning, on the approaches to a village, thereappear gardens, which no longer have human shape. Instead ofcultivation there are puddles and mud. All is burned or drowned, andthe walls scattered like bones everywhere; and we see the mottled andbedaubed shadows of soldiers. War befouls the country as it does facesand hearts. 

Our company gets going, gray and wan, broken down by the infamousweariness. We halt in front of a hangar:--

"Those that are tired can leave their packs, " the new sergeant advises;"they'll find them again here. "

"If we're leaving our packs, it means we're going to attack, " says anancient. 

He says it, but he does not know. 

One by one, on the dirty soil of the hangar, the knapsacks fall likebodies. Some men, however, are mistrustful, and prefer to keep theirpacks. Under all circumstances there are always exceptions. 

Forward! The same shouts put us again in movement. Forward! Come, get up! Come on, march! Subdue your refractory flesh; lift yourselvesfrom your slumber as from a coffin, begin yourselves again withoutceasing, give all that you can give--Forward! Forward! It has to be. It is a higher concern than yours, a law from above. We do not knowwhat it is. We only know the step we make; and even by day one marchesin the night. And then, one cannot help it. The vague thoughts andlittle wishes that we had in the days when we were concerned withourselves are ended. There is no way now of escaping from the wheelsof fate, no way now of turning aside from fatigue and cold, disgust andpain. Forward! The world's hurricane drives straight before themthese terribly blind who grope with their rifles. 

We have passed through a wood, and then plunged again into the earth. We are caught in an enfilading fire. It is terrible to pass in broaddaylight in these communication trenches, at right angles to the lines, where one is in view all the way. Some soldiers are hit and fall. There are light eddies and brief obstructions in the places where theydive; and then the rest, a moment halted by the barrier, sometimesstill living, frown in the wide-open direction of death, and say:--

"Well, if it's got to be, come on. Get on with it!"

They deliver up their bodies wholly--their warm bodies, that the bittercold and the wind and the sightless death touch as with women's hands. In these contacts between living beings and force, there is somethingcarnal, virginal, divine. 

* * * * * *

They have sent me into a listening post. To get there I had to wormmyself, bent double, along a low and obstructed sap. In the firststeps I was careful not to walk on the obstructions, and then I had to, and I dared. My foot trembled on the hard or supple masses whichpeopled that sap. 

On the edge of the hole--there had been a road above it formerly, orperhaps even a market-place--the trunk of a tree severed near theground arose, short as a grave-stone. The sight stopped me for amoment, and my heart, weakened no doubt by my physical destitution, kindled with pity for the tree become a tomb!

Two hours later I rejoined the section in its pit. We abide there, while the cannonade increases. The morning goes by, then theafternoon. Then it is evening. 

They make us go into a wide dugout. It appears that an attack isdeveloping somewhere. From time to time, through a breach contrivedbetween sandbags so decomposed and oozing that they seem to have lived, we go out to a little winterly and mournful crossing, to look about. We consult the sky to determine the tempest's whereabouts. We can knownothing. 

The artillery fire dazzles and then chokes up our sight. The heavensare making a tumult of blades. 

Monuments of steel break loose and crash above our heads. Under thesky, which is dark as with threat of deluge, the explosions throw lividsunshine in all directions. From one end to the other of the visibleworld the fields move and descend and dissolve, and the immense expansestumbles and falls like the sea. Towering explosions in the east, asquall in the south; in the zenith a file of bursting shrapnel likesuspended volcanoes. 

The smoke which goes by, and the hours as well, darken the inferno. Two or three of us risk our faces at the earthen cleft and look out, asmuch for the purpose of propping ourselves against the earth as forseeing. But we see nothing, nothing on the infinite expanse which isfull of rain and dusk, nothing but the clouds which tear themselves andblend together in the sky, and the clouds which come out of the earth. 

Then, in the slanting rain and the limitless gray, we see a man, oneonly, who advances with his bayonet forward, like a specter. 

We watch this shapeless being, this thing, leaving our lines and goingaway yonder. 

We only see one--perhaps that is the shadow of another, on his left. 

We do not understand, and then we do. It is the end of the attackingwave. 

What can his thoughts be--this man alone in the rain as if under acurse, who goes upright away, forward, when space is changed into ashrieking machine? By the light of a cascade of flashes I thought Isaw a strange monk-like face. Then I saw more clearly--the face of anordinary man, muffled in a comforter. 

"It's a chap of the 150th, not the 129th, " stammers a voice by my side. 

We do not know, except that it is the end of the attacking wave. 

When he has disappeared among the eddies, another follows him at adistance, and then another. They pass by, separate and solitary, delegates of death, sacrificers and sacrificed. Their great-coats flywide; and we, we press close to each other in our corner of night; wepush and hoist ourselves with our rusted muscles, to see that void andthose great scattered soldiers. 

We return to the shelter, which is plunged in darkness. Themotor-cyclist's voice obtrudes itself to the point that we think we cansee his black armor. He is describing the "carryings on" at Bordeauxin September, when the Government was there. He tells of thefestivities, the orgies, the expenditure, and there is almost a tone ofpride in the poor creature's voice as he recalls so many pompouspageants all at once. 

But the uproar outside silences us. Our funk-hole trembles and cracks. It is the barrage--the barrage which those whom we saw have gone tofight, hand to hand. A thunderbolt falls just at the opening, it castsa bright light on all of us, and reveals the last emotion of all, thebelief that all was ended! One man is grimacing like a malefactorcaught in the act; another is opening strange, disappointed eyes;another is swinging his doleful head, enslaved by the love of sleep, and another, squatting with his head in his hands, makes a luridentanglement. We have seen each other--upright, sitting orcrucified--in the second of broad daylight which came into the bowelsof the earth to resurrect our darkness. 

In a moment, when the guns chance to take breath, a voice at thedoor-hole calls us:

"Forward!"

"We shall be staying there, this time over!" growl the men. 

They say this, but they do not know it. We go out, into a chaos ofcrashing and flames. 

"You'd better fix bayonets, " says the sergeant; "come, get 'em on. "

We stop while we adjust weapon to weapon and then run to overtake therest. 

We go down; we go up; we mark time; we go forward--like the others. Weare no longer in the trench. 

"Get your heads down--kneel!"

We stop and go on our knees. A star-shell pierces us with itsintolerable gaze. 

By its light we see, a few steps in front of us, a gaping trench. Wewere going to fall into it. It is motionless and empty--no, it isoccupied--yes, it is empty. It is full of a file of slain watchers. The row of men was no doubt starting out of the earth when the shellburst in their faces; and by the poised white rays we see that theblast has staved them in, has taken away the flesh; and above the levelof the monstrous battlefield there is left of them only some fearfullydistorted heads. One is broken and blurred; one emerges like a peak, agood half of it fallen into nothing. At the end of the row, theravages have been less, and only the eyes are smitten. The holloworbits in those marble heads look outwards with dried darkness. Thedeep and obscure face-wounds have the look of caverns and funnels, ofthe shadows in the moon; and stars of mud are clapped on the faces inthe place where eyes once shone. 

Our strides have passed that trench. We go more quickly and trouble nomore now about the star-shells, which, among us who know nothing, say, "I know" and "I will. " All is changed, all habits and laws. We marchexposed, upright, through the open fields. Then I suddenly understandwhat they have hidden from us up to the last moment--we are attacking!

Yes, the counter-attack has begun without our knowing it. I applymyself to following the others. May I not be killed like the others;may I be saved like the others! But if I am killed, so much the worse. 

I bear myself forward. My eyes are open but I look at nothing;confused pictures are printed on my staring eyes. The men around meform strange surges; shouts cross each other or descend. Upon thefantastic walls of nights the shots make flicks and flashes. Earth andsky are crowded with apparitions; and the golden lace of burning stakesis unfolding. 

A man is in front of me, a man whose head is wrapped in linen. 

He is coming from the opposite direction. He is coming from the othercountry! He was seeking me, and I was seeking him. He is quitenear--suddenly he is upon me. 

The fear that he is killing me or escaping me--I do not knowwhich--makes me throw out a desperate effort. Opening my hands andletting the rifle go, I seize him. My fingers are buried in hisshoulder, in his neck, and I find again, with overflowing exultation, the eternal form of the human frame. I hold him by the neck with allmy strength, and with more than all my strength, and we quiver with myquivering. 

He had not the idea of dropping his rifle so quickly as I. He yieldsand sinks. I cling to him as if it were salvation. The words in histhroat make a lifeless noise. He brandishes a hand which has onlythree fingers--I saw it clearly outlined against the clouds like afork. 

Just as he totters in my arms, resisting death, a thunderous blowstrikes him in the back. His arms drop, and his head also, which isviolently doubled back, but his body is hurled against me like aprojectile, like a superhuman blast. 

I have rolled on the ground; I get up, and while I am hastily trying tofind myself again I feel a light blow in the waist. What is it? Iwalk forward, and still forward, with my empty hands. I see the otherspass, they go by in front of me. _I_, I advance no more. Suddenly Ifall to the ground. 

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XIV

THE RUINS

I fall on my knees, and then full length. I do what so many othershave done. 

I am alone on the earth, face to face with the mud, and I can no longermove. The frightful searching of the shells alights around me. Thehoarse hurricane which does not know me is yet trying to find the placewhere I am!

Then the battle goes away, and its departure is heartrending. In spiteof all my efforts, the noise of the firing fades and I am alone; thewind blows and I am naked. 

I shall remain nailed to the ground. By clinging to the earth andplunging my hands into the depth of the swamp as far as the stones, Iget my neck round a little to see the enormous burden that my backsupports. No--it is only the immensity on me. 

My gaze goes crawling. In front of me there are dark things all linkedtogether, which seem to seize or to embrace one another. I look atthose hills which shut out my horizon and imitate gestures and men. The multitude downfallen there imprisons me in its ruins. I am walledin by those who are lying down, as I was walled in before by those whostood. 

I am not in pain. I am extraordinarily calm; I am drunk withtranquillity. Are they dead, all--those? I do not know. The dead arespecters of the living, but the living are specters of the dead. Something warm is licking my hand. The black mass which overhangs meis trembling. It is a foundered horse, whose great body is emptyingitself, whose blood is flowing like poor touches of a tongue on to myhand. I shut my eyes, bemused, and think of a bygone merry-making; andI remember that I once saw, at the end of a hunt, against the operaticbackground of a forest, a child-animal whose life gushed out amidgeneral delight. 

A voice is speaking beside me. 

No doubt the moon has come out--I cannot see as high as the cloudescarpments, as high as the sky's opening. But that blenching light ismaking the corpses shine like tombstones. 

I try to find the low voice. There are two bodies, one above theother. The one underneath must be gigantic--his arms are thrownbackward in a hurricane gesture; his stiff, disheveled hair has crownedhim with a broken crown. His eyes are opaque and glaucous, like twoexpectorations, and his stillness is greater than anything one maydream of. On the other the moon's beams are setting points and linesa-sparkle and silvering gold. It is he who is talking to me, quietlyand without end. But although his low voice is that of a friend, hiswords are incoherent. He is mad--I am abandoned by him! No matter, Iwill drag myself up to him to begin with. I look at him again. Ishake myself and blink my eyes, so as to look better. He wears on hisbody a uniform accursed! Then with a start, and my hand claw-wise, Istretch myself towards the glittering prize to secure it. But I cannotgo nearer him; it seems that I no longer have a body. He has looked atme. He has recognized my uniform, if it is recognizable, and my cap, if I have it still. Perhaps he has recognized the indelible seal of myrace that I carry printed on my features. Yes, on my face he hasrecognized that stamp. Something like hatred has blotted out the facethat I saw dawning so close to me. Our two hearts make a desperateeffort to hurl ourselves on each other. But we can no more strike eachother than we can separate ourselves. 

But has he seen me? I cannot say now. He is stirred by fever as bythe wind; he is choked with blood. He writhes, and that shows me thebeaten-down wings of his black cloak. 

Close by, some of the wounded have cried out; and farther away onewould say they are singing--beyond the low stakes so twisted andshriveled that they look as if guillotined. 

He does not know what he is saying. He does not even know that he isspeaking, that his thoughts are coming out. The night is torn intorags by sudden bursts; it fills again at random with clusters offlashes; and his delirium enters into my head. He murmurs that logicis a thing of terrible chains, and that all things cling together. Heutters sentences from which distinct words spring, like the scatteredhasty gleams they include in hymns--the Bible, history, majesty, folly. Then he shouts:--

"There is nothing in the world but the Empire's glory!"

His cry shakes some of the motionless reefs. And I, like an invincibleecho, I cry:--

"There is only the glory of France!"

I do not know if I did really cry out, and if our words did collide inthe night's horror. His head is quite bare. His slender neck andbird-like profile issue from a fur collar. There are things like owlsshining on his breast. It seems to me as if silence is digging itselfinto the brains and lungs of the dark prisoners who imprison us, andthat we are listening to it. 

He rambles more loudly now, as if he bore a stifling secret; he callsup multitudes, and still more multitudes. He is obsessed bymultitudes--"Men, men!" he says. The soil is caressed by some soundsof sighs, terribly soft, by confidences which are interchanged withouttheir wishing it. Now and again, the sky collapses into light, andthat flash of instantaneous sunshine changes the shape of the plainevery time, according to its direction. Then does the night take allback again athwart the rolling echoes. 

"Men! Men!"

"What about them, then?" says a sudden jeering voice which falls like astone. 

"Men _must_ not awake, " the shining shadow goes on, in dull and hollowtones. 

"Don't worry!" says the ironical voice, and at that moment it terrifiesme. 

Several bodies arise on their fists into the darkness--I see them bytheir heavy groans--and look around them. 

The shadow talks to himself and repeats his insane words:--

"Men _must_ not awake. "

The voice opposite me, capsizing in laughter and swollen with a rattle, says again:--

"Don't worry!"

Yonder, in the hemisphere of night, comets glide, blending their criesof engines and owls with their flaming entrails. Will the sky everrecover the huge peace of the sun and the stainless blue?

A little order, a little lucidity are coming back into my mind. Then Ibegin to think about myself. 

Am I going to die, yes or no? Where can I be wounded? I have managedto look at my hands, one by one; they are not dead, and I saw nothingin their dark trickling. It is extraordinary to be made motionlesslike this, without knowing where or how. I can do no more on earththan lift my eyes a little to the edge of the world where I haverolled. 

Suddenly I am pushed by a movement of the horse on which I am lying. Isee that he has turned his great head aside; he is mournfully eatinggrass. I saw this horse but lately in the middle of the regiment--Iknow him by the white in his mane--rearing and whinnying like the truebattle-chargers; and now, broken somewhere, he is silent as the trulyunhappy are. Once again, I recall the red deer's little one, mutilatedon its carpet of fresh crimson, and the emotion which I had not on thatbygone day rises into my throat. Animals are innocence incarnate. This horse is like an enormous child, and if one wanted to point outlife's innocence face to face, one would have to typify, not a littlechild, but a horse. My neck gives way, I utter a groan, and my facegropes upon the ground. 

The animal's start has altered my place and shot me on my side, nearerstill to the man who was talking. He has unbent, and is lying on hisback. Thus he offers his face like a mirror to the moon's pallor, andshows hideously that he is wounded in the neck. I feel that he isgoing to die. His words are hardly more now than the rustle of wings. He has said some unintelligible things about a Spanish painter, andsome motionless portraits in the palaces--the Escurial, Spain, Europe. Suddenly he is repelling with violence some beings who are in hispast:--

"Begone, you dreamers!" he says, louder than the stormy sky where theflames are red as blood, louder than the falling flashes and theharrowing wind, louder than all the night which enshrouds us and yetcontinues to stone us. 

He is seized with a frenzy which bares his soul as naked as his neck:--

"The truth is revolutionary, " gasps the nocturnal voice; "get you gone, you men of truth, you who cast disorder among ignorance, you who strewwords and sow the wind; you contrivers, begone! You bring in the reignof men! But the multitude hates you and mocks you!"

He laughs, as if he heard the multitude's laughter. 

And around us another burst of convulsive laughter grows hugely biggerin the plain's black heart:--

"Wot's 'e sayin' now, that chap?"

"Let him be. You can see 'e knows more'n 'e says. "

"Ah, la, la!"

I am so near to him that I alone gather the rest of his voice, and hesays to me very quietly:--

"I have confidence in the abyss of the people. "

And those words stabbed me to the heart and dilated my eyes withhorror, for it seemed to me suddenly, in a flash, that he understoodwhat he was saying! A picture comes to life before my eyes--thatprince, whom I saw from below, once upon a time, in the nightmare oflife, he who loved the blood of the chase. Not far away a shell turnsthe darkness upside down; and it seems as if that explosion also hasconsidered and shrieked. 

Heavy night is implanted everywhere around us. My hands are bathed inblack blood. On my neck and cheeks, rain, which is also black, bleeds. 

The funeral procession of silver-fringed clouds goes by once more, andagain a ray of moonlight besilvers the swamp that has sunk us soldiers;it lays winding-sheets on the prone. 

All at once a swelling lamentation comes to life, one knows not where, and glides over the plain:--

"Help! Help!"

"Now then! _They're_ not coming to look for us! What about it?"

And I see a stirring and movement, very gentle, as at the bottom of thesea. 

Amid the glut of noises, upon that still tepid and unsubmissive expansewhere cold death sits brooding, that sharp profile has fallen back. The cloak is quivering. The great and sumptuous bird of prey is in theact of taking wing. 

The horse has not stopped bleeding. Its blood falls on me drop by dropwith the regularity of a clock, --as though all the blood that isfiltering through the strata of the field and all the punishment of thewounded came to a head in him and through him. Ah, it seems that truthgoes farther in all directions than one thought! We bend over thewrong that animals suffer, for them we wholly understand. 

Men, men! Everywhere the plain has a mangled outline. Below thathorizon, sometimes blue-black and sometimes red-black, the plain ismonumental!

CHAPTER XV

AN APPARITION

I have not changed my place. I open my eyes. Have I been sleeping? Ido not know. There is tranquil light now. It is evening or morning. My arms alone can tremble. I am enrooted like a distorted bush. Mywound? It is that which glues me to the ground. 

I succeed in raising my face, and the wet waves of space assail myeyes. Patiently I pick out of the earthy pallor which blends allthings some foggy shoulders, some cloudy angles of elbows, somehand-like lacerations. I discern in the still circle which enclosesme--faces lying on the ground and dirty as feet, faces held out to therain like vases, and holding stagnant tears. 

Quite near, one face is looking sadly at me, as it lolls to one side. It is coming out of the bottom of the heap, as a wild animal might. Its hair falls back like nails. The nose is a triangular hole and alittle of the whiteness of human marble dots it. There are no lipsleft, and the two rows of teeth show up like lettering. The cheeks aresprinkled with moldy traces of beard. This body is only mud andstones. This face, in front of my own, is only a consummate mirror. 

Water-blackened overcoats cover and clothe the whole earth around me. 

I gaze, and gaze----

I am frozen by a mass which supports me. My elbow sinks into it. Itis the horse's belly; its rigid leg obliquely bars the narrow circlefrom which my eyes cannot escape. Ah, it is dead! It seems to me thatmy breast is empty, yet still there is an echo in my heart. What I amlooking for is life. 

The distant sky is resonant, and each dull shot comes and pushes myshoulder. Nearer, some shells are thundering heavily. Though I cannotsee them, I see the tawny reflection that their flame spreads abroad, and the sudden darkness as well that is hurled by their clouds ofexcretion. Other shadows go and come on the ground about me; and thenI hear in the air the plunge of beating wings, and cries so fierce thatI feel them ransack my head. 

* * * * * *

Death is not yet dead everywhere. Some points and surfaces stillresist and budge and cry out, doubtless because it is dawn; and oncethe wind swept away a muffled bugle-call. There are some who stillburn with the invisible fire of fever, in spite of the frozen periodsthey have crossed. But the cold is working into them. The immobilityof lifeless things is passing into them, and the wind empties itself asit goes by. 

Voices are worn away; looks are soldered to their eyes. Wounds arestaunched; they have finished. Only the earth and the stones bleed. And just then I saw, under the trickling morning, some half-open butstill tepid dead that steamed, as if they were the blackeningrubbish-heap of a village. I watch that hovering dead breath of thedead. The crows are eddying round the naked flesh with their flappingbanners and their war-cries. I see one which has found some shiningrubies on the black vein-stone of a foot; and one which noisily drawsnear to a mouth, as if called by it. Sometimes a dead man makes amovement, so that he will fall lower down. But they will have no moreburial than if they were the last men of all. 

* * * * * *

There is one upright presence which I catch a glimpse of, so near, sonear; and I want to see it. In making the effort with my elbow on thehorse's ballooned body I succeed in altering the direction of my head, and of the corridor of my gaze. Then all at once I discover a quitenew population of bronze men in rotten clothes; and especially, erecton bended knees, a gray overcoat, lacquered with blood and pierced by agreat hole, round which is collected a bunch of heavy crimson flowers. Slowly I lift the burden of my eyes to explore that hole. Amid theshattered flesh, with its changing colors and a smell so strong that itputs a loathsome taste in my mouth, at the bottom of the cage wheresome crossed bones are black and rusted as iron bars, I can seesomething, something isolated, dark and round. I see that it is aheart. 

Placed there, too--I do not know how, for I cannot see the body's fullheight--the arm, and the hand. The hand has only three fingers--afork---- Ah, I recognize that heart! It is his whom I killed. Prostrate in the mud before him, because of my defeat and myresemblance, I cried out to the man's profundity, to the superhumanman. Then my eyes fell; and I saw worms moving on the edges of thatinfinite wound. I was quite close to their stirring. They are whitishworms, and their tails are pointed like stings; they curve and flattenout, sometimes in the shape of an "i, " and sometimes of a "u. " Theperfection of immobility is left behind. The human material iscrumbled into the earth for another end. 

I hated that man, when he had his shape and his warmth. We wereforeigners, and made to destroy ourselves. Yet it seems to me, in faceof that bluish heart, still attached to its red cords, that Iunderstand the value of life. It is understood by force, like acaress. I think I can see how many seasons and memories and beingsthere had to be, yonder, to make up that life, --while I remain beforehim, on a point of the plain, like a night watcher. I hear the voicethat his flesh breathed while yet he lived a little, when my ferocioushands fumbled in him for the skeleton we all have. He fills the wholeplace. He is too many things at once. How can there be worlds in theworld? That established notion would destroy all. 

This perfume of a tuberose is the breath of corruption. On the ground, I see crows near me, like hens. 

Myself! I think of myself, of all that I am. Myself, my home, myhours; the past, and the future, --it was going to be like the past!And at that moment I feel, weeping within me and dragging itself fromsome little bygone trifle, a new and tragical sorrow in dying, a hungerto be warm once more in the rain and the cold: to enclose myself inmyself in spite of space, to hold myself back, to live. I called forhelp, and then lay panting, watching the distance in desperateexpectation. "Stretcher-bearers!" I cry. I do not hear myself; but ifonly the others heard me!

Now that I have made that effort, I can do no more, and my head liesthere at the entrance to that world-great wound. 

There is nothing now. 

Yet there is that man. He was laid out like one dead. But suddenly, through his shut eyes, he smiled. He, no doubt, will come back here onearth, and something within me thanks him for his miracle. 

And there was that one, too, whom I saw die. He raised his hand, whichwas drowning. Hidden in the depths of the others, it was only by thathand that he lived, and called, and saw. On one finger shone awedding-ring, and it told me a sort of story. When his hand ceased totremble, and became a dead plant with that golden flower, I felt thebeginning of a farewell rise in me like a sob. But there are too manyof them for one to mourn them all. How many of them are there on allthis plain? How many, how many of them are there in all this moment?Our heart is only made for one heart at a time. It wears us out tolook at all. One may say, "There are the others, " but it is only asaying. "You shall not know; you shall _not_ know. "

Barrenness and cold have descended on all the body of the earth. Nothing moves any more, except the wind, that is charged with coldwater, and the shells, that are surrounded by infinity, and the crows, and the thought that rolls immured in my head. 

* * * * * *

They are motionless at last, they who forever marched, they to whomspace was so great! I see their poor hands, their poor legs, theirpoor backs, resting on the earth. They are tranquil at last. Theshells which bespattered them are ravaging another world. They are inthe peace eternal. 

All is accomplished, all has terminated there. It is there, in thatcircle narrow as a well that the descent into the raging heart of hellwas halted, the descent into slow tortures, into unrelenting fatigue, into the flashing tempest. We came here because they told us to comehere. We have done what they told us to do. I think of the simplicityof our reply on the Day of Judgment. 

The gunfire continues. Always, always, the shells come, and all thosebullets that are miles in length. Hidden behind the horizons, livingmen unite with machines and fall furiously on space. They do not seetheir shots. They do not know what they are doing. "You shall notknow; you shall _not_ know. "

But since the cannonade is returning, they will be fighting here again. All these battles spring from themselves and necessitate each other toinfinity! One single battle is not enough, it is not complete, thereis no satisfaction. Nothing is finished, nothing is ever finished. Ah, it is only men who die! No one understands the greatness ofthings, and I know well that I do not understand all the horror inwhich I am. 

* * * * * *

Here is evening, the time when the firing is lighted up. The horizonsof the dark day, of the dark evening, and of the illuminated nightrevolve around my remains as round a pivot. 

I am like those who are going to sleep, like the children. I amgrowing fainter and more soothed; I close my eyes; I dream of my home. 

Yonder, no doubt, they are joining forces to make the eveningstolerable. Marie is there, and some other women, getting dinner ready;the house becomes a savor of cooking. I hear Marie speaking; standingat first, then seated at the table. I hear the sound of the tablethings which she moves on the cloth as she takes her place. Then, because some one is putting a light to the lamp, having lifted itschimney, Marie gets up to go and close the shutters. She opens thewindow. She leans forward and outspreads her arms; but for a momentshe stays immersed in the naked night. She shivers, and I, too. Dawning in the darkness, she looks afar, as I am doing. Our eyes havemet. It is true, for this night is hers as much as mine, the samenight, and distance is not anything palpable or real; distance isnothing. It is true, this great close contact. 

Where am I? Where is Marie? What is she, even? I do not know, I donot know. I do not know where the wound in my flesh is, and how can Iknow the wound in my heart?

* * * * * *

The clouds are crowning themselves with sheaves of stars. It is anaviary of fire, a hell of silver and gold. Planetary cataclysms sendimmense walls of light falling around me. Phantasmal palaces ofshrieking lightning, with arches of star-shells, appear and vanish amidforests of ghastly gleams. 

While the bombardment is patching the sky with continents of flame, itis drawing still nearer. Volleys of flashes are plunging in here andthere and devouring the other lights. The supernatural army isarriving! All the highways of space are crowded. Nearer still, ashell bursts with all its might and glows; and among us all whom chancedefends goes frightfully in quest of flesh. Shells are following eachother into that cavity there. Again I see, among the things of earth, a resurrected man, and he is dragging himself towards that hole! He iswrapped in white, and the under-side of his body, which rubs theground, is black. Hooking the ground with his stiffened arms hecrawls, long and flat as a boat. He still hears the cry "Forward!" Heis finding his way to the hole; he does not know, and he is trailingexactly toward its monstrous ambush. The shell will succeed! At anysecond now the frenzied fangs of space will strike his side and go inas into a fruit. I have not the strength to shout to him to flyelsewhere with all his slowness; I can only open my mouth and become asort of prayer in face of the man's divinity. And yet, he is thesurvivor; and along with the sleeper, to whom a dream was whisperingjust now, he is the only one left to me. 

A hiss--the final blow reaches him; and in a flash I see the piebaldmaggot crushing under the weight of the sibilance and turning wild eyestowards me. 

No! It is not he! A blow of light--of all light--fills my eyes. I amlifted up, I am brandished by an unknown blade in the middle of a globeof extraordinary light. The shell----I! And I am falling, I fallcontinually, fantastically. I fall out of this world; and in thatfractured flash I saw myself again--I thought of my bowels and my hearthurled to the winds--and I heard voices saying again and again--far, far away--"Simon Paulin died at the age of thirty-six. "

CHAPTER XVI

DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI

I am dead. I fall, I roll like a broken bird into bewilderments oflight, into canyons of darkness. Vertigo presses on my entrails, strangles me, plunges into me. I drop sheer into the void, and my gazefalls faster than I. 

Through the wanton breath of the depths that assail me I see, farbelow, the seashore dawning. The ghostly strand that I glimpse while Icling to my own body is bare, endless, rain-drowned, and supernaturallymournful. Through the long, heavy and concentric mists that the cloudsmake, my eyes go searching. On the shore I see a being who wandersalone, veiled to the feet. It is a woman. Ah, I am one with thatwoman! She is weeping. Her tears are dropping on the sand where thewaves are breaking! While I am reeling to infinity, I hold out my twoheavy arms to her. She fades away as I look. 

For a long time there is nothing, nothing but invisible time, and theimmense futility of rain on the sea. 

* * * * * *

What are these flashes of light? There are gleams of flame in my eyes;a surfeit of light is cast over me. I can no longer cling toanything--fire and water!

In the beginning, there is battle between fire and water--the worldrevolving headlong in the hooked claws of its flames, and the expansesof water which it drives back in clouds. At last the water obscuresthe whirling spirals of the furnace and takes their place. Under theroof of dense darkness, timbered with flashes, there are triumphantdownpours which last a hundred thousand years. Through centuries ofcenturies, fire and water face each other; the fire, upright, buoyantand leaping; the water flat, creeping, gliding, widening its lines andits surface. When they touch, is it the water which hisses and roars, or is it the fire? And one sees the reigning calm of a radiant plain, a plain of incalculable greatness. The round meteor congeals intoshapes, and continental islands are sculptured by the water's boundlesshand. 

I am no longer alone and abandoned on the former battlefield of theelements. Near this rock, something like another is taking shape; itstands straight as a flame, and moves. This sketch-model thinks. Itreflects the wide expanse, the past and the future; and at night, onits hill, it is the pedestal of the stars. The animal kingdom dawns inthat upright thing, the poor upright thing with a face and a cry, whichhides an internal world and in which a heart obscurely beats. A lonebeing, a heart! But the heart, in the embryo of the first men, beatsonly for fear. He whose face has appeared above the earth, and whocarries his soul in chaos, discerns afar shapes like his own, he sees_the other_--the terrifying outline which spies and roams and turnsagain, with the snare of his head. Man pursues man to kill him andwoman to wound her. He bites that he may eat, he strikes down that hemay clasp, --furtively, in gloomy hollows and hiding-places or in thedepths of night's bedchamber, dark love is writhing, --he lives solelythat he may protect, in some disputed cave, his eyes, his breast, hisbelly, and the caressing brands of his hearth. 

* * * * * *

There is a great calm in my environs. 

From place to place, men have gathered together. There are companiesand droves of men, with watchmen, in the vapors of dawn; and in themiddle one makes out the children and the women, crowding together likefallow deer. To eastward I see, in the silence of a great fresco, thediverging beams of morning gleaming, through the intervening and somberstatues of two hunters, whose long hair is tangled like briars, and whohold each other's hand, upright on the mountain. 

Men have gone towards each other because of that ray of light whicheach of them contains; and light resembles light. It reveals that theisolated man, too free in the open expanses, is doomed to adversity asif he were a captive, in spite of appearances; and that men must cometogether that they may be stronger, that they may be more peaceful, andeven that they may be able to live. 

For men are made to live their life in its depth, and also in all itslength. Stronger than the elements and keener than all terrors are thehunger to last long, the passion to possess one's days to the very endand to make the best of them. It is not only a right; it is a virtue. 

Contact dissolves fear and dwindles danger. The wild beast attacks thesolitary man, but shrinks from the unison of men together. Around thehome-fire, that lowly fawning deity, it means the multiplication of thewarmth and even of the poor riches of its halo. Among the ambushes ofbroad daylight, it means the better distribution of the different formsof labor; among the ambushes of night, it stands for that of tender andidentical sleep. All lone, lost words blend in an anthem whose murmurrises in the valley from the busy animation of morning and evening. 

The law which regulates the common good is called the moral law. Nowhere nor ever has morality any other purpose than that; and if onlyone man lived on earth, morality would not exist. It prunes thecluster of the individual's appetites according to the desires of theothers. It emanates from all and from each at the same time, at oneand the same time from justice and from personal interest. It isinflexible and natural, as much so as the law which, before our eyes, fits the lights and shadows so perfectly together. It is so simplethat it speaks to each one and tells him what it is. The moral law hasnot proceeded from any ideal; it is the ideal which has whollyproceeded from the moral law. 

* * * * * *

The primeval cataclysm has begun again upon the earth. Myvision--beautiful as a fair dream which shows men's composed relianceon each other in the sunrise--collapses in mad nightmare. 

But this flashing devastation is not incoherent, as at the time of theconflict of the first elements and the groping of dead things. For itscrevasses and flowing fires show a symmetry which is not Nature's; itreveals discipline let loose, and the frenzy of wisdom. It is made upof thought, of will, of suffering. Multitudes of scattered men, fullof an infinity of blood, confront each other like floods. A visioncomes and pounces on me, shaking the soil on which I am doubtlesslaid--the marching flood. It approaches the ditch from all sides andis poured into it. The fire hisses and roars in that army as in water;it is extinguished in human fountains!

* * * * * *

It seems to me that I am struggling against what I see, while lying andclinging somewhere; and once I even heard supernatural admonitions inmy ear, _as if I were somewhere else_. 

I am looking for men--for the rescue of speech, of a word. How many ofthem I heard, once upon a time! I want one only, now. I am in theregions where men are earthed up, --a crushed plain under a dizzy sky, which goes by peopled with other stars than those of heaven, and tensewith other clouds, and continually lighted from flash to flash by adaylight which is not day. 

Nearer, one makes out the human shape of great drifts and hilly fields, many-colored and vaguely floral--the corpse of a section or of acompany. Nearer still, I perceive at my feet the ugliness of skulls. Yes, I have seen them--wounds as big as men! In this new cess-pool, which fire dyes red by night and the multitude dyes red by day, crowsare staggering, drunk. 

Yonder, that is the listening-post, keeping watch over the cycles oftime. Five or six captive sentinels are buried there in that cistern'sdark, their faces grimacing through the vent-hole, their skull-capsbarred with red as with gleams from hell, their mien desperate andravenous. 

When I ask them why they are fighting, they say:--

"To save my country. "

I am wandering on the other side of the immense fields where the yellowpuddles are strewn with black ones (for blood soils even mud), and withthickets of steel, and with trees which are no more than the shadows ofthemselves; I hear the skeleton of my jaws shiver and chatter. In themiddle of the flayed and yawning cemetery of living and dead, moonlikein the night, there is a wide extent of leveled ruins. It was not avillage that once was there, it was a hillside whose pale bones arelike those of a village. The other people--mine--have scooped fragileholes, and traced disastrous paths with their hands and with theirfeet. Their faces are strained forward, their eyes search, they sniffthe wind. 

"Why are you fighting?"

"To save my country. "

The two answers fall as alike in the distance as two notes of apassing-bell, as alike as the voice of the guns. 

* * * * * *

And I--I am seeking; it is a fever, a longing, a madness. I struggle, I would fain tear myself from the soil and take wing to the truth. Iam seeking the difference between those people who are killingthemselves, and I can only find their resemblance. I cannot escapefrom this resemblance of men. It terrifies me, and I try to cry out, and there come from me strange and chaotic sounds which echo into theunknown, which I almost hear!

They do not wear similar clothes on the targets of their bodies, andthey speak different tongues; but from the bottom of that which ishuman within them, identically the same simplicities come forth. Theyhave the same sorrows and the same angers, around the same causes. They are alike as their wounds are alike and will be alike. Theirsayings are as similar as the cries that pain wrings from them, asalike as the awful silence that soon will breathe from their murderedlips. They only fight because they are face to face. Against eachother, they are pursuing a common end. Dimly, they kill themselvesbecause they are alike. 

And by day and by night, these two halves of war continue to lie inwait for each other afar, to dig their graves at their feet, and I amhelpless. They are separated by frontiers of gulfs, which bristle withweapons and explosive snares, impassable to life. They are separatedby all that can separate, by dead men and still by dead men, and everthrown back, each into its gasping islands, by black rivers andconsecrated fires, by heroism and hatred. 

And misery is endlessly begotten of the miserable. 

There is no real reason for it all; there is no reason. I do not wishit. I groan, I fall back. 

Then the question, worn, but stubborn and violent as a solid thing, seizes upon me again. Why? Why? I am like the weeping wind. I seek, I defend myself, amid the infinite despair of my mind and heart. Ilisten. I remember all. 

* * * * * *

A booming sound vibrates and increases, like the fitful wing-beats ofsome dim, tumultuous archangel, above the heads of the masses that movein countless dungeons, or wheel round to furnish the front of the lineswith new flesh:--

"Forward! It has to be! You shall _not_ know!"

I remember. I have seen much of it, and I see it clearly. Thesemultitudes who are set in motion and let loose, --their brains and theirsouls and their wills are not in them, but outside them!

* * * * * *

Other people, far away, think and wish for them. Other people wieldtheir hands and push them and pull them, others, who hold all theircontrolling threads; in the distance, the people in the center of theinfernal orbits, in the capital cities, in the palaces. There is ahigher law; up above men there is a machine which is stronger than men. The multitude is at the same time power and impotence--and I remember, and I know well that I have seen it with my own eyes. War is themultitude--and it is not! Why did I not know it since I have seen it?

Soldier of the wide world, you, the man taken haphazard from among men, remember--there was not a moment when you were yourself. Never did youcease to be bowed under the harsh and answerless command, "It has tobe, it has to be. " In times of peace encircled in the law of incessantlabor, in the mechanical mill or the commercial mill, slave of thetool, of the pen, of your talent, or of some other thing, you weretracked without respite from morning to evening by the daily task whichallowed you only just to overcome life, and to rest only in dreams. 

When the war comes that you never wanted--whatever your country andyour name--the terrible fate which grips you is sharply unmasked, offensive and complicated. The wind of condemnation has arisen. 

They requisition your body. They lay hold on you with measures ofmenace which are like legal arrest, from which nothing that is poor andneedy can escape. They imprison you in barracks. They strip you nakedas a worm, and dress you again in a uniform which obliterates you; theymark your neck with a number. The uniform even enters into your flesh, for you are shaped and cut out by the stamping-machine of exercises. Brightly clad strangers spring up about you, and encircle you. Yourecognize them--they are not strangers. It is a carnival, then, --but afierce and final carnival, for these are your new masters, they theabsolute, proclaiming on their fists and heads their gilded authority. Such of them as are near to you are themselves only the servants ofothers, who wear a greater power painted on their clothes. It is alife of misery, humiliation and diminution into which you fall from dayto day, badly fed and badly treated, assailed throughout your body, spurred on by your warders' orders. At every moment you are thrownviolently back into your littleness, you are punished for the leastaction which comes out of it, or slain by the order of your masters. It is forbidden you to speak when you would unite yourself with thebrother who is touching you. The silence of steel reigns around you. Your thoughts must be only profound endurance. Discipline isindispensable for the multitude to be melted into a single army; and inspite of the vague kinship which is sometimes set up between you andyour nearest chief, the machine-like order paralyzes you first, so thatyour body may be the better made to move in accordance with the rhythmof the rank and the regiment--into which, nullifying all that isyourself, you pass already as a sort of dead man. 

"They gather us together but they separate us!" cries a voice from thepast. 

If there are some who escape through the meshes, it means that such"slackers" are also influential. They are uncommon, in spite ofappearances, as the influential are. You, the isolated man, theordinary man, the lowly thousand-millionth of humanity, you evadenothing, and you march right to the end of all that happens, or to theend of yourself. 

You will be crushed. Either you will go into the charnel house, destroyed by those who are similar to you, since war is only made byyou, or you will return to your point in the world, diminished ordiseased, retaining only existence without health or joy, a home-exileafter absences too long, impoverished forever by the time you havesquandered. Even if selected by the miracle of chance, if unscathed inthe hour of victory, you also, _you_ will be vanquished. When youreturn into the insatiable machine of the work-hours, among your ownpeople--whose misery the profiteers have meanwhile sucked dry withtheir passion for gain--the task will be harder than before, because ofthe war that must be paid for, with all its incalculable consequences. You who peopled the peace-time prisons of your towns and barns, begoneto people the immobility of the battlefields--and if you survive, payup! Pay for a glory which is not yours, or for ruins that others havemade with your hands. 

Suddenly, in front of me and a few paces from my couch--as if I were ina bed, in a bedroom, and had all at once woke up--an uncouth shaperises awry. Even in the darkness I see that it is mangled. I seeabout its face something abnormal which dimly shines; and I can see, too, by his staggering steps, sunk in the black soil, that his shoesare empty. He cannot speak, but he brings forward the thin arm fromwhich rags hang down and drip; and his imperfect hand, as torturing tothe mind as discordant chords, points to the place of his heart. I seethat heart, buried in the darkness of the flesh, in the black blood ofthe living--for only shed blood is red. I see him profoundly, with myheart. If he said anything he would say the words that I still hearfalling, drop by drop, as I heard them yonder--"Nothing can be done, nothing. " I try to move, to rid myself of him. But I cannot, I ampinioned in a sort of nightmare; and if he had not himself faded away Ishould have stayed there forever, dazzled in presence of his darkness. This man said nothing. He appeared like the dead thing he is. He hasdeparted. Perhaps he has ceased to be, perhaps he has entered intodeath, which is not more mysterious to him than life, which he isleaving--and I have fallen back into myself. 

* * * * * *

He has returned, to show his face to me. Ah, now there is a bandageround his head, and so I recognize him by his crown of filth! I beginagain that moment when I clasped him against me to crush him; when Ipropped him against the shell, when my arms felt his bones crackinground his heart! It was he!--It was I! He says nothing, from theeternal abysses in which he remains my brother in silence andignorance. The remorseful cry which tears my throat outstrips me, andwould find some one else. 

Who?

That destiny which killed him by means of me--has it no human faces?

"Kings!" said Termite. 

"The big people!" said the man whom they had snared, the close-croppedGerman prisoner, the man with the convict's hexagonal face, he who wasgreenish from top to toe. 

But these kings and majesties and superhuman men who are illuminated byfantastic names and never make mistakes--were they not done away withlong since? One does not know. 

One does not see those who rule. One only sees what they wish, andwhat they do with the others. 

Why have They always command? One does not know. The multitudes havenot given themselves to Them. They have taken them and They keep them. Their power is supernatural. It is, because it was. This is itsexplanation and formula and breath--"It has to be. "

As they have laid hold of arms, so they lay hold of heads, and make acreed. 

"They tell you, " cried he, whom none of the lowly soldiers would deignto listen to; "they say to you, 'This is what you must have in yourminds and hearts. '"

An inexorable religion has fallen from them upon us all, upholding whatexists, preserving what is. 

Suddenly I hear beside me, as if I were in a file of the executed, astammering death-agony; and I think I see him who struggled like astricken vulture, on the earth that was bloated with dead. And hiswords enter my heart more distinctly than when they were still alive;and they wound me like blows at once of darkness and of light. 

"Men _must_ not open their eyes!"

"Faith comes at will, like the rest!" said Adjutant Marcassin, as hefluttered in his red trousers about the ranks, like a blood-stainedpriest of the God of War. 

He was right! He had grasped the chains of bondage when he hurled thattrue cry against the truth. Every man is something of account, butignorance isolates and resignation scatters. Every poor man carrieswithin him centuries of indifference and servility. He is adefenseless prey for hatred and dazzlement. 

The man of the people whom I am looking for, while I writhe throughconfusion as through mud, the worker who measures his strength againsttoil which is greater than he, and who never escapes from hardships, the serf of these days--I see him as if he were here. He is coming outof his shop at the bottom of the court. He wears a square cap. Onemakes out the shining dust of old age strewn in his stubbly beard. Hechews and smokes his foul and noisy pipe. He nods his head; with afine and sterling smile he says, "There's always been war, so there'llalways be. "

And all around him people nod their heads and think the same, in thepoor lonely well of their heart. They hold the conviction anchored tothe bottom of their brains that things can never change any more. Theyare like posts and paving stones, distinct but cemented together; theybelieve that the life of the world is a sort of great stone monument, and they obey, obscurely and indistinctly, everything which commands;and they do not look afar, in spite of the little children. And Iremember the readiness there was to yield themselves, body and soul, toserried resignation. Then, too, there is alcohol which murders; wine, which drowns. 

One does not see the kings; one only sees the reflection of them on themultitude. 

There are bemusings and spells of fascination, of which we are theobject. I think, fascinated. 

My lips religiously recite a passage in a book which a young man hasjust read to me, while I, quite a child, lean drowsily on the kitchentable--"Roland is not dead. Through long centuries our splendidancestor, the warrior of warriors, has been seen riding over themountains and hills across the France of Charlemagne and Hugh theGreat. At all times of great national disaster he has risen before thepeople's eyes, like an omen of victory and glory, with his lustroushelmet and his sword. He has appeared and has halted like asoldier-archangel over the flaming horizon of conflagrations or thedark mounds of battle and pestilence, leaning over his horse's wingedmane, fantastically swaying as though the earth itself were inebriatewith pride. Everywhere he has been seen, reviving the ideals and theprowess of the Past. He was seen in Austria, at the time of theeternal quarrel between Pope and Emperor; he was seen above the strangestirrings of Scythians and Arabs, and the glowing civilizations whicharose and fell like waves around the Mediterranean. Great Roland cannever die. "

And after he had read these lines of a legend, the young man made meadmire them, and looked at me. 

He whom I thus see again, as precisely as one sees a portrait, just ashe was that evening so wonderfully far away, was my father. And Iremember how devoutly I believed--from that day now buried among themall--in the beauty of those things, because my father had told me theywere beautiful. 

In the low room of the old house, under the green and watery gleam ofthe diamond panes in the lancet window, the ancient citizen cries, "There are people mad enough to believe that a day will come whenBrittany will no longer be at war with Maine!" He appears in thevortex of the past, and so saying, sinks back in it. And an engraving, once and for a long time heeded, again takes life: Standing on thewooden boom of the ancient port, his scarred doublet rusted by wind andbrine, his old back bellied like a sail, the pirate is shaking his fistat the frigate that passes in the distance; and leaning over the tangleof tarred beams, as he used to on the nettings of his corsair ship, hepredicts his race's eternal hatred for the English. 

"Russia a republic!" We raise our arms to heaven. "Germany arepublic!" We raise our arms to heaven. 

And the great voices, the poets, the singers--what have the greatvoices said? They have sung the praises of the victor's laurelswithout knowing what they are. You, old Homer, bard of the lispingtribes of the coasts, with your serene and venerable face sculptured inthe likeness of your great childlike genius, with your three timesmillennial lyre and your empty eyes--you who led us to Poetry! Andyou, herd of poets enslaved, who did not understand, who lived beforeyou could understand, in an age when great men were only the domesticsof great lords--and you, too, servants of the resounding and opulentpride of to-day, eloquent flatterers and magnificent dunces, youunwitting enemies of mankind! You have all sung the laurel wreathwithout knowing what it is. 

There are dazzlings, and solemnities and ceremonies, to amuse andexcite the common people, to dim their sight with bright colors, withthe glitter of the badges and stars that are crumbs of royalty, toinflame them with the jingle of bayonets and medals, with trumpets andtrombones and the big drum, and to inspire the demon of war in theexcitable feelings of women and the inflammable credulity of the young. I see the triumphal arches, the military displays in the vastamphitheaters of public places, and the march past of those who go todie, who walk in step to hell by reason of their strength and youth, and the hurrahs for war, and the real pride which the lowly feel inbending the knee before their masters and saying, as their cavalcadetops the hill, "It's fine! They might be galloping over us!" "It'smagnificent, how warlike we are!" says the woman, always dazzled, asshe convulsively squeezes the arm of him who is going away. 

And another kind of excitement takes form and seizes me by the throatin the pestilential pits of hell--"They're on fire, they're on fire!"stammers that soldier, breathless as his empty rifle, as the flood ofthe exalted German divisions advances, linked elbow to elbow under agodlike halo of ether, to drown the deeps with their single lives. 

Ah, the intemperate shapes and unities that float in morsels above thepeopled precipices! When two overlords, jewel-set with glitteringGeneral Staffs, proclaim at the same time on either side of theirthrobbing mobilized frontiers, "We will save our country!" there is oneimmensity deceived and two victimized. There are two deceivedimmensities!

There is nothing else. That these cries can be uttered together in theface of heaven, in the face of truth, proves at a stroke themonstrosity of the laws which rule us, and the madness of the gods. 

I turn on a bed of pain to escape from the horrible vision ofmasquerade, from the fantastic absurdity into which all these thingsare brought back; and my fever seeks again. 

Those bright spells which blind, and the darkness which also blinds. Falsehood rules with those who rule, effacing Resemblance everywhere, and everywhere creating Difference. 

Nowhere can one turn aside from falsehood. Where indeed is there none?The linked-up lies, the invisible chain, the Chain!

Murmurs and shouts alike cross in confusion. Here and yonder, to rightand to left, they make pretense. Truth never reaches as far as men. News filters through, false or atrophied. On _this_ side--all isbeautiful and disinterested; yonder--the same things are infamous. "French militarism is not the same thing as Prussian militarism, sinceone's French and the other's Prussian. " The newspapers, the somberhost of the great prevailing newspapers, fall upon the minds of men andwrap them up. The daily siftings link them together and chain them up, and forbid them to look ahead. And the impecunious papers show blanksin the places where the truth was too clearly written. At the end of awar, the last things to be known by the children of the slain and bythe mutilated and worn-out survivors will be all the war-aims of itsdirectors. 

Suddenly they reveal to the people an accomplished fact which has beenworked out in the _terra incognita_ of courts, and they say, "Now thatit is too late, only one resource is left you--Kill that you be notkilled. "

They brandish the superficial incident which in the last hour hascaused the armaments and the heaped-up resentment and intrigues tooverflow in war; and they say, "That is the only cause of the war. " Itis not true; the only cause of war is the slavery of those whose fleshwages it. 

They say to the people, "When once victory is gained, agreeably to yourmasters, all tyranny will have disappeared as if by magic, and therewill be peace on earth. " It is not true. There will be no peace onearth until the reign of men is come. 

But will it ever come? Will it have time to come, while hollow-eyedhumanity makes such haste to die? For all this advertisement of war, radiant in the sunshine, all these temporary and mendacious reasons, stupidly or skillfully curtailed, of which not one reaches the loftyelevation of the common welfare--all these insufficient pretextssuffice in sum to make the artless man bow in bestial ignorance, toadorn him with iron and forge him at will. 

"It is not on Reason, " cried the specter of the battlefield, whosetorturing spirit was breaking away from his still gilded body; "it isnot on Reason that the Bible of History stands. Else are the law ofmajesties and the ancient quarrel of the flags essentially supernaturaland intangible, or the old world is built on principles of insanity. "

He touches me with his strong hand and I try to shake myself, and Istumble curiously, although lying down. A clamor booms in my templesand then thunders like the guns in my ears; it overflows me, --I drownin that cry----

"It must be! It has to be! You shall _not_ know!" That is thewar-cry, that is the cry of war. 

* * * * * *

War will come again after this one. It will come again as long as itcan be determined by people other than those who fight. The samecauses will produce the same effects, and the living will have to giveup all hope. 

We cannot say out of what historical conjunctions the final tempestswill issue, nor by what fancy names the interchangeable ideals imposedon men will be known in that moment. But the cause--that will perhapseverywhere be fear of the nations' real freedom. What we do know isthat the tempests will come. 

Armaments will increase every year amid dizzy enthusiasm. Therelentless torture of precision seizes me. We do three years ofmilitary training; our children will do five, they will do ten. We paytwo thousand million francs a year in preparation for war; we shall paytwenty, we shall pay fifty thousand millions. All that we have will betaken; it will be robbery, insolvency, bankruptcy. War kills wealth asit does men; it goes away in ruins and smoke, and one cannot fabricategold any more than soldiers. We no longer know how to count; we nolonger know anything. A billion--a million millions--the word appearsto me printed on the emptiness of things. It sprang yesterday out ofwar, and I shrink in dismay from the new, incomprehensible word. 

There will be nothing else on the earth but preparation for war. Allliving forces will be absorbed by it; it will monopolize all discovery, all science, all imagination. Supremacy in the air alone, the regularlevies for the control of space, will suffice to squander a nation'sfortune. For aerial navigation, at its birth in the middle of enviouscircles, has become a rich prize which everybody desires, a prey theyhave immeasurably torn in pieces. 

Other expenditure will dry up before that on destruction does, andother longings as well, and all the reasons for living. Such will bethe sense of humanity's last age. 

* * * * * *

The battlefields were prepared long ago. They cover entire provinceswith one black city, with a great metallic reservoir of factories, where iron floors and furnaces tremble, bordered by a land of forestswhose trees are steel, and of wells where sleeps the sharp blackness ofsnares; a country navigated by frantic groups of railway trains inparallel formation, and heavy as attacking columns. At whatever pointyou may be on the plain, even if you turn away, even if you takeflight, the bright tentacles of the rails diverge and shine, and cloudysheaves of wires rise into the air. Upon that territory of executionthere rises and falls and writhes machinery so complex that it has noteven names, so vast that it has not even shape; for aloft--above thebooming whirlwinds which are linked from east to west in the glow ofmolten metal whose flashes are great as those of lighthouses, or in thepallor of scattered electric constellations--hardly can one make outthe artificial outline of a mountain range, clapped upon space. 

This immense city of immense low buildings, rectangular and dark, isnot a city. They are assaulting tanks, which a feeble internal gesturesets in motion, ready for the rolling rush of their gigantic knee-caps. These endless cannon, thrust into pits which search into the fieryentrails of the earth, and stand there upright, hardly leaning so muchas Pisa's tower; and these slanting tubes, long as factory chimneys, solong that perspective distorts their lines and sometimes splays themlike the trumpets of Apocalypse--these are not cannon; they aremachine-guns, fed by continuous ribbons of trains which scoop out inentire regions--and upon a country, if need be--mountains ofprofundity. 

In war, which was once like the open country and is now wholly liketowns--and even like one immense building--one hardly sees the men. Onthe round-ways and the casemates, the footbridges and the movableplatforms, among the labyrinth of concrete caves, above the regimentechelonned downwards in the gulf and enormously upright, --one sees ahaggard herd of wan and stooping men, men black and trickling, menissuing from the peaty turf of night, men who came there to save theircountry. They earthed themselves up in some zone of the verticalgorges, and one sees them, in this more accursed corner than thosewhere the hurricane reels. One senses this human material, in thecavities of those smooth grottoes, like Dante's guilty shades. Infernal glimmers disclose ranged lines of them, as long as roads, slender and trembling spaces of night, which daylight and even sunshineleave befouled with darkness and cyclopean dirt. Solid clouds overhangthem and hatchet-charged hurricanes, and leaping flashes set fire everysecond to the sky's iron-mines up above the damned whose pale faceschange not under the ashes of death. They wait, intent on thesolemnity and the significance of that vast and heavy booming againstwhich they are for the moment imprisoned. They will be down foreveraround the spot where they are. Like others before them, they will beshrouded in perfect oblivion. Their cries will rise above the earth nomore than their lips. Their glory will not quit their poor bodies. 

I am borne away in one of the aeroplanes whose multitude darkens thelight of day as flights of arrows do in children's story-books, forminga vaulted army. They are a fleet which can disembark a million men andtheir supplies anywhere at any moment. It is only a few years since weheard the puling cry of the first aeroplanes, and now their voicedrowns all others. Their development has only normally proceeded, yetthey alone suffice to make the territorial safeguards demanded by thederanged of former generations appear at last to all people as comicaljests. Swept along by the engine's formidable weight, a thousand timesmore powerful than it is heavy, tossing in space and filling my fiberswith its roar, I see the dwindling mounds where the huge tubes stick uplike swarming pins. I am carried along at a height of two thousandyards. An air-pocket has seized me in a corridor of cloud, and I havefallen like a stone a thousand yards lower, garrotted by furious airwhich is cold as a blade, and filled by a plunging cry. I have seenconflagrations and the explosions of mines, and plumes of smoke whichflow disordered and spin out in long black zigzags like the locks ofthe God of War! I have seen the concentric circles by which thestippled multitude is ever renewed. The dugouts, lined with lifts, descend in oblique parallels into the depths. One frightful night Isaw the enemy flood it all with an inexhaustible torrent of liquidfire. I had a vision of that black and rocky valley filled to the brimwith the lava-stream which dazzled the sight and sent a dreadfulterrestrial dawn into the whole of night. With its heart aflame Earthseemed to become transparent as glass along that crevasse; and amid thelake of fire heaps of living beings floated on some raft, and writhedlike the spirits of damnation. The other men fled upwards, and piledthemselves in clusters on the straight-lined borders of the valley offilth and tears. I saw those swarming shadows huddled on the upperbrink of the long armored chasms which the explosions set tremblinglike steamships. 

All chemistry makes flaming fireworks in the sky or spreads in sheetsof poison exactly as huge as the huge towns. Against them no wallavails, no secret armor; and murder enters as invisibly as deathitself. Industry multiplies its magic. Electricity lets loose itslightnings and thunders--and that miraculous mastery which hurls powerlike a projectile. 

Who can say if this enormous might of electricity alone will not changethe face of war?--the centralized cluster of waves, the irresistibleorbs going infinitely forth to fire and destroy all explosives, liftingthe rooted armor of the earth, choking the subterranean gulfs withheaps of calcined men--who will be burned up like barren coal, --andmaybe even arousing the earthquakes, and tearing the central fires fromearth's depths like ore!

That will be seen by people who are alive to-day; and yet that visionof the future so near at hand is only a slight magnification, flittingthrough the brain. It terrifies one to think for how short a timescience has been methodical and of useful industry; and after all, isthere anything on earth more marvelously easy than destruction? Whoknows the new mediums it has laid in store? Who knows the limit ofcruelty to which the art of poisoning may go? Who knows if they willnot subject and impress epidemic disease as they do the livingarmies--or that it will not emerge, meticulous, invincible, from thearmies of the dead? Who knows by what dread means they will sink inoblivion this war, which only struck to the ground twenty thousand mena day, which has invented guns of only seventy-five miles' range, bombsof only one ton's weight, aeroplanes of only a hundred and fifty milesan hour, tanks, and submarines which cross the Atlantic? Their costshave not yet reached in any country the sum total of private fortunes. 

But the upheavals we catch sight of, though we can only and hardlyindicate them in figures, will be too much for life. The desperate andfurious disappearance of soldiers will have a limit. We may no longerbe able to count; but Fate will count. Some day the men will bekilled, and the women and children. And they also will disappear--theywho stand erect upon the ignominious death of the soldiers, --they willdisappear along with the huge and palpitating pedestal in which theywere rooted. But they profit by the present, they believe it will lastas long as they, and as they follow each other they say, "After us, thedeluge. " Some day all war will cease for want of fighters. 

The spectacle of to-morrow is one of agony. Wise men make laughableefforts to determine what may be, in the ages to come, the cause of theinhabited world's end. Will it be a comet, the rarefaction of water, or the extinction of the sun, that will destroy mankind? They haveforgotten the likeliest and nearest cause--Suicide. 

They who say, "There will always be war, " do not know what they aresaying. They are preyed upon by the common internal malady ofshortsight. They think themselves full of common-sense as they thinkthemselves full of honesty. In reality, they are revealing the clumsyand limited mentality of the assassins themselves. 

The shapeless struggle of the elements will begin again on the searedearth when men have slain themselves because they were slaves, becausethey believed the same things, because they were alike. 

I utter a cry of despair and it seems as if I had turned over andstifled it in a pillow. 

* * * * * *

All is madness. And there is no one who will dare to rise and say thatall is not madness, and that the future does not so appear--as fataland unchangeable as a memory. 

But how many men will there be who will dare, in face of the universaldeluge which will be at the end as it was in the beginning, to get upand cry "No!" who will pronounce the terrible and irrefutable issue:--

"No! The interests of the people and the interests of all theirpresent overlords are not the same. Upon the world's antiquity thereare two enemy races--the great and the little. The allies of the greatare, in spite of appearances, the great. The allies of the people arethe people. Here on earth there is one tribe only of parasites andringleaders who are the victors, and one people only who are thevanquished. "

But, as in those earliest ages, will not thoughtful faces arise out ofthe darkness? (For this is Chaos and the animal Kingdom; and Reasonbeing no more, she has yet to be born. )

"You must think; but with your own ideas, not other people's. "

That lowly saying, a straw whirling in the measureless hand-to-handstruggle of the armies, shines in my soul above all others. To thinkis to hold that the masses have so far wrought too much evil withoutwishing it, and that the ancient authorities, everywhere clinging fast, violate humanity and separate the inseparable. 

There have been those who magnificently dared. There have been bearersof the truth, men who groped in the world's tumult, trying to makeplain order of it. They discover what we did not yet know; chieflythey discover what we no longer knew. 

But what a panic is here, among the powerful and the powers that be!

"Truth is revolutionary! Get you gone, truth-bearers! Away with you, reformers! You bring in the reign of men!"

That cry was thrown into my ears one tortured night, like a whisperfrom deeps below, when he of the broken wings was dying, when hestruggled tumultuously against the opening of men's eyes; but I hadalways heard it round about me, always. 

In official speeches, sometimes, at moments of great public flattery, they speak like the reformers, but that is only the diplomacy whichaims at felling them better. They force the light-bearers to hidethemselves and their torches. These dreamers, these visionaries, thesestar-gazers, --they are hooted and derided. Laughter is let loosearound them, machine-made laughter, quarrelsome and beastly:--

"Your notion of peace is only utopian, anyway, as long as you never, any day, stopped the war by yourself!"

They point to the battlefield and its wreckage:--

"And you say that War won't be forever? Look, driveler!"

The circle of the setting sun is crimsoning the mingled horizon ofhumanity:--

"You say that the sun is bigger than the earth? Look, imbecile!"

They are anathema, they are sacrilegious, they are excommunicated, whoimpeach the magic of the past and the poison of tradition. And thethousand million victims themselves scoff at and strike those whorebel, as soon as they are able. All cast stones at them, all, eventhose who suffer and while they are suffering--even the sacrificed, alittle before they die. 

The bleeding soldiers of Wagram cry: "Long live the emperor!" And themournful exploited in the streets cheer for the defeat of those who aretrying to alleviate a suffering which is brother to theirs. Others, prostrate in resignation, look on, and echo what is said above them:"After us the deluge, " and the saying passes across town and country inone enormous and fantastic breath, for they are innumerable who murmurit. Ah, it was well said:

"I have confidence in the abyss of the people. "

* * * * * *

And I?

I, the normal man? What have I done on earth? I have bent the knee tothe forces which glitter, without seeking to know whence they came andwhither they guide. How have the eyes availed me that I had to seewith, the intelligence that I had to judge with?

Borne down by shame, I sobbed, "I don't know, " and I cried out soloudly that it seemed to me I was awaking for a moment out of slumber. Hands are holding and calming me; they draw my shroud about me andenclose me. 

It seems to me that a shape has leaned over me, quite near, so near;that a loving voice has said something to me; and then it seems to methat I have listened to fond accents whose caress came from a great wayoff:

"Why shouldn't _you_ be one of them, my lad, --one of those greatprophets?"

I don't understand. I? How could I be?

All my thoughts go blurred. I am falling again. But I bear away in myeyes the picture of an iron bed where lay a rigid shape. Around itother forms were drooping, and one stood and officiated. But thecurtain of that vision is drawn. A great plain opens the room, whichhad closed for a moment on me, and obliterates it. 

Which way may I look? God? "_Miserere_----" The vibrating fragmentof the Litany has reminded me of God. 

* * * * * *

I had seen Jesus Christ on the margin of the lake. He came like anordinary man along the path. There is no halo round his head. He isonly disclosed by his pallor and his gentleness. Planes of light drawnear and mass themselves and fade away around him. He shines in thesky, as he shone on the water. As they have told of him, his beard andhair are the color of wine. He looks upon the immense stain made byChristians on the world, a stain confused and dark, whose edge alone, down on His bare feet, has human shape and crimson color. In themiddle of it are anthems and burnt sacrifices, files of hooded cloaks, and of torturers, armed with battle-axes, halberds and bayonets; andamong long clouds and thickets of armies, the opposing clash of twocrosses which have not quite the same shape. Close to him, too, on acanvas wall, again I see the cross that bleeds. There are populations, too, tearing themselves in twain that they may tear themselves thebetter; there is the ceremonious alliance, "turning the needy out ofthe way, " of those who wear three crowns and those who wear one; and, whispering in the ear of Kings, there are gray-haired Eminences, andcunning monks, whose hue is of darkness. 

I saw the man of light and simplicity bow his head; and I feel hiswonderful voice saying:

"I did not deserve the evil they have done unto me. "

Robbed reformer, he is a witness of his name's ferocious glory. Thegreed-impassioned money-changers have long since chased Him from thetemple in their turn, and put the priests in his place. He iscrucified on every crucifix. 

Yonder among the fields are churches, demolished by war; and alreadymen are coming with mattock and masonry to raise the walls again. Theray of his outstretched arm shines in space, and his clear voice says:

"Build not the churches again. They are not what you think they were. Build them not again. "

* * * * * *

There is no remedy but in them whom peace sentences to hard labor, andwhom war sentences to death. There is no redress except among thepoor. 

* * * * * *

White shapes seem to return into the white room. Truth is simple. They who say that truth is complicated deceive themselves, and thetruth is not in them. I see again, not far from me, a bed, a child, agirl-child, who is asleep in our house; her eyes are only two lines. Into our house, after a very long time, we have led my old aunt. Sheapproves affectionately, but all the same she said, very quietly, asshe left the perfection of our room, "It was better in my time. " I amthrilled by one of our windows, whose wings are opened wide upon thedarkness; the appeal which the chasm of that window makes across thedistances enters into me. One night, as it seems to me, it was open toits heart. 

_I_--my heart--a gaping heart, enthroned in a radiance of blood. It ismine, it is _ours_. The heart--that wound which we have. I havecompassion on myself. 

I see again the rainy shore that I saw before time was, before earth'sdrama was unfolded; and the woman on the sands. She moans and weeps, among the pictures which the clouds of mortality offer and withdraw, amid that which weaves the rain. She speaks so low that I feel it isto me she speaks. She is one with me. Love--it comes back to me. Love is an unhappy man and unhappy woman. 

I awake--uttering the feeble cry of the babe new-born. 

All grows pale, and paler. The whiteness I foresaw through thewhirlwinds and clamors--it is here. An odor of ether recalls to me thememory of an awful memory, but shapeless. A white room, white walls, and white-robed women who bend over me. 

In a voice confused and hesitant, I say:

"I've had a dream, an absurd dream. "

My hand goes to my eyes to drive it away. 

"You struggled while you were delirious--especially when you thoughtyou were falling, " says a calm voice to me, a sedate and familiarvoice, which knows me without my knowing the voice. 

"Yes, " I say!

CHAPTER XVII

MORNING

I went to sleep in Chaos, and then I awoke like the first man. 

I am in a bed, in a room. There is no noise--a tragedy of calm, andhorizons close and massive. The bed which imprisons me is one of a rowthat I can see, opposite another row. A long floor goes in stripes asfar as the distant door. There are tall windows, and daylight wrappedin linen. That is all which exists. I have always been here, I shallend here. 

Women, white and stealthy, have spoken to me. I picked up the newsound, and then lost it. A man all in white has sat by me, looked atme, and touched me. His eyes shone strangely, because of his glasses. 

I sleep, and then they make me drink. 

The long afternoon goes by in the long corridor. In the evening theymake light; at night, they put it out, and the lamps--which are inrows, like the beds, like the windows, like everything--disappear. Just one lamp remains, in the middle, on my right. The peaceful ghostof dead things enjoins peace. But my eyes are open, I awake more andmore. I take hold of consciousness in the dark. 

A stir is coming to life around me among the prostrate forms aligned inthe beds. This long room is immense; it has no end. The enshroudedbeds quiver and cough. They cough on all notes and in all ways, loose, dry, or tearing. There is obstructed breathing, and gagged breathing, and polluted, and sing-song. These people who are struggling withtheir huge speech do not know themselves. I see their solitude as Isee them. There is nothing between the beds, nothing. 

Of a sudden I see a globular mass with a moon-like face oscillating inthe night. With hands held out and groping for the rails of thebedsteads, it is seeking its way. The orb of its belly distends andstretches its shirt like a crinoline, and shortens it. The mass iscarried by two little and extremely slender legs, knobbly at the knees, and the color of string. It reaches the next bed, the one which asingle ditch separates from mine. On another bed, a shadow is swayingregularly, like a doll. The mass and the shadow are a negro, whosebig, murderous head is hafted with a tiny neck. 

The hoarse concert of lungs and throats multiplies and widens. Thereare some who raise the arms of marionettes out of the boxes of theirbeds. Others remain interred in the gray of the bed-clothes. Now andagain, unsteady ghosts pass through the room and stoop between thebeds, and one hears the noise of a metal pail. At the end of the room, in the dark jumble of those blind men who look straight before them andthe mutes who cough, I only see the nurse, because of her whiteness. She goes from one shadow to another, and stoops over the motionless. She is the vestal virgin who, so far as she can, prevents them fromgoing out. 

I turn my head on the pillow. In the bed bracketed with mine on theother side, under the glow which falls from the only surviving lamp, there is a squat manikin in a heavy knitted vest, poultice-color. Fromtime to time, he sits up in bed, lifts his pointed head towards theceiling, shakes himself, and grasping and knocking together hisspittoon and his physic-glass, he coughs like a lion. I am so near tohim that I feel that hurricane from his flesh pass over my face, andthe odor of his inward wound. 

* * * * * *

I have slept. I see more clearly than yesterday. I no longer have theveil that was in front of me. My eyes are attracted distinctly byeverything which moves. A powerful aromatic odor assails me; I seekthe source of it. Opposite me, in full daylight, a nurse is rubbingwith a drug some gnarled and blackened hands, enormous paws which theearth of the battlefields, where they were too long implanted, hasalmost made moldy. The strong-smelling liquid is becoming a layer offrothy polish. 

The foulness of his hands appalls me. Gathering my wits with aneffort, I said aloud:

"Why don't they wash his hands?"

My neighbor on the right, the gnome in the mustard vest, seems to hearme, and shakes his head. 

My eyes go back to the other side, and for hours I devote myself towatching in obstinate detail, with wide-open eyes, the water-swollenman whom I saw floating vaguely in the night like a balloon. By nighthe was whitish. By day he is yellow, and his big eyes are glutted withyellow. He gurgles, makes noises of subterranean water, and minglessighs with words and morsels of words. Fits of coughing tan hisochreous face. 

His spittoon is always full. It is obvious that his heart, where hiswasted sulphurate hand is placed, beats too hard and presses his spongylungs and the tumor of water which distends him. He lives in thesettled notion of emptying his inexhaustible body. He is constantlyexamining his bed-bottle, and I see his face in that yellow reflection. All day I watched the torture and punishment of that body. His cap andtunic, no longer in the least like him, hang from a nail. 

Once, when he lay engulfed and choking, he pointed to the negro, perpetually oscillating, and said:

"He wanted to kill himself because he was homesick. "

The doctor has said to me--to _me_: "You're going on nicely. " Iwanted to ask him to talk to me about myself, but there was no time toask him!

Towards evening my yellow-vested neighbor, emerging from hismeditations and continuing to shake his head, answers my questions ofthe morning:

"They can't wash his hands--it's embedded. "

A little later that day I became restless. I lifted my arm--it wasclothed in white linen. I hardly knew my emaciated hand--that shadowstranger! But I recognized the identity disk on my wrist. Ah, then!that went with me into the depths of hell!

For hours on end my head remains empty and sleepless, and there arehosts of things that I perceive badly, which are, and then are not. Ihave answered some questions. When I say, Yes, it is a sigh that Iutter, and only that. At other times, I seem again to be half-sweptaway into pictures of tumored plains and mountains crowned. Echoes ofthese things vibrate in my ears, and I wish that some one would comewho could explain the dreams. 

* * * * * *

Strange footsteps are making the floor creak, and stopping there. Iopen my eyes. A woman is before me. Ah! the sight of her throws meinto infinite confusion! She is the woman of my vision. Was it true, then? I look at her with wide-open eyes. She says to me:

"It's me. "

Then she bends low and adds softly:

"I'm Marie; you're Simon. "

"Ah!" I say. "I remember. "

I repeat the profound words she has just uttered. She speaks to meagain with the voice which comes back from far away. I half rise. Ilook again. I learn myself again, word by word. 

It is she, naturally, who tells me I was wounded in the chest and hip, and that I lay three days forsaken--ragged wounds, much blood lost, alot of fever, and enormous fatigue. 

"You'll get up soon, " she says. 

I get up?--I, the prostrate being? I am astonished and afraid. 

Marie goes away. She increases my solitude, step by step, and for along time my eyes follow her going and her absence. 

In the evening I hear a secret and whispered conference near the bed ofthe sick man in the brown vest. He is curled up, and breathes humbly. They say, very low:

"He's going to die--in one hour from now, or two. He's in such a statethat to-morrow morning he'll be rotten. He must be taken away on themoment. "

At nine in the evening they say that, and then they put the lights outand go away. I can see nothing more but him. There is the one lamp, close by, watching over him. He pants and trickles. He shines asthough it rained on him. His beard has grown, grimily. His hair isplastered on his sticky forehead; his sweat is gray. 

In the morning the bed is empty, and adorned with clean sheets. 

And along with the man annulled, all the things he had poisoned havedisappeared. 

"It'll be Number Thirty-six's turn next, " says the orderly. 

I follow the direction of his glance. I see the condemned man. He iswriting a letter. He speaks, he lives. But he is wounded in thebelly. He carries his death like a fetus. 

* * * * * *

It is the day when we change our clothes. Some of the invalids manageit by themselves; and, sitting up in bed, they perform signalingoperations with arms and white linen. Others are helped by the nurse. On their bare flesh I catch sight of scars and cavities, and partsstitched and patched, of a different shade. There is even a case ofamputation (and bronchitis) who reveals a new and rosy stump, like anew-born infant. The negro does not move while they strip his thin, insect-like trunk; and then, bleached once more, he begins again torock his head, looking boundlessly for the sun and for Africa. Theyexhume the paralyzed man from his sheets and change his clothesopposite me. At first he lies motionless in his clean shirt, in alump. Then he makes a guttural noise which brings the nurse up. In acracked voice, as of a machine that speaks, he asks her to move hisfeet, which are caught in the sheet. Then he lies staring, arranged inrigid orderliness within the boards of his carcass. 

Marie has come back and is sitting on a chair. We both spell out thepast, which she brings me abundantly. My brain is workingincalculably. 

"We're quite near home, you know, " Marie says. 

Her words extricate our home, our quarter; they have endless echoes. 

That day I raised myself on the bed and looked out of the window forthe first time, although it had always been there, within reach of myeyes. And I saw the sky for the first time, and a gray yard as well, where it was visibly cold, and a gray day, an ordinary day, like life, like everything. 

Quickly the days wiped each other out. Gradually I got up, in themiddle of the men who had relapsed into childhood, and were awkwardlybeginning again, or plaintively complaining in their beds. I havestrolled in the wards, and then along a path. It is a matter offormalities now--convalescence, and in a month's time the MedicalBoard. 

At last Marie came one morning for me, to go home, for that interval. 

She found me on the seat in the yard of the hospital, which used to bea school, under the cloth--which was the only spot where a ray ofsunshine could get in. I was meditating in the middle of an assemblyof old cripples and men with heads or arms bandaged, with ragged andincongruous equipment, with sick clothes. I detached myself from themiracle-yard and followed Marie, after thanking the nurse and sayinggood-by to her. 

The corporal of the hospital orderlies is the vicar of our church--hewho said and who spread it about that he was going to share thesoldiers' sufferings, like all the priests. Marie says to me, "Aren'tyou going to see him?"

"No, " I say. 

We set out for life by a shady path, and then the high road came. Wewalked slowly. Marie carried the bundle. The horizons were even, theearth was flat and made no noise, and the dome of the sky no longerbanged like a big clock. The fields were empty, right to the end, because of the war; but the lines of the road were scriptural, turningnot aside to the right hand or to the left. And I, cleansed, simplified, lucid--though still astonished at the silence and affectedby the peacefulness--I saw it all distinctly, without a veil, withoutanything. It seemed to me that I bore within me a great new reason, unused. 

We were not far away. Soon we uncovered the past, step by step. Asfast as we drew near, smaller and smaller details introduced themselvesand told us their names--that tree with the stones round it, thoseforsaken and declining sheds. I even found recollections shut up inthe little retreats of the kilometer-stones. 

But Marie was looking at me with an indefinable expression. 

"You're icy cold, " she said to me suddenly, shivering. 

"No, " I said, "no. "

We stopped at an inn to rest and eat, and it was already evening whenwe reached the streets. 

Marie pointed out a man who was crossing over, yonder. 

"Monsieur Rampaille is rich now, because of the War. "

Then it was a woman, dressed in fluttering white and blue, disappearinground the corner of a house:

"That's Antonia Véron. She's been in the Red Cross service. She's gota decoration because of the War. "

"Ah!" I said, "everything's changed. "

Now we are in sight of the house. The distance between the corner ofthe street and the house seems to me smaller than it should be. Thecourt comes to an end suddenly; its shape looks shorter than it is inreality. In the same way, all the memories of my former life appeardwindled to me. 

The house, the rooms. I have climbed the stairs and come down again, watched by Marie. I have recognized everything; some things even whichI did not see. There is no one else but us two in the falling night, as though people had agreed not to show themselves yet to this man whocomes back. 

"There--now we're at home, " says Marie, at last. 

We sit down, facing each other. 

"What are we going to do?"

"We're going to live. "

"We're going to live. "

I ponder. She looks at me stealthily, with that mysterious expressionof anguish which gets over me. I notice the precautions she takes inwatching me. And once it seemed to me that her eyes were red withcrying. I--I think of the hospital life I am leaving, of the graystreet, and the simplicity of things. 

* * * * * *

A day has slipped away already. In one day all the time gone by hasreëstablished itself. I am become again what I was. Except that I amnot so strong or so calm as before, it is as though nothing hadhappened. 

But truth is more simple than before. 

I inquire of Marie after this one or the other and question her. 

Marie says to me:

"You're always saying Why?--like a child. "

All the same I do not talk much. Marie is assiduous; obviously she isafraid of my silence. Once, when I was sitting opposite her and hadsaid nothing for a long time, she suddenly hid her face in her hands, and in her turn she asked me, through her sobs:

"Why are you like that?"

I hesitate. 

"It seems to me, " I say at last, by way of answer, "that I am seeingthings as they are. "

"My poor boy!" Marie says, and she goes on crying. 

I am touched by this obscure trouble. True, everything is obviousaround me, but as it were laid bare. I have lost the secret whichcomplicated life. I no longer have the illusion which distorts andconceals, that fervor, that sort of blind and unreasoning bravery whichtosses you from one hour to the next, and from day to day. 

And yet I am just taking up life again where I left it. I am upright, I am getting stronger and stronger. I am not ending, but beginning. 

I slept profoundly, all alone in our bed. 

Next morning, I saw Crillon, planted in the living-room downstairs. Heheld out his arms, and shouted. After expressing good wishes, heinforms me, all in a breath:

"You don't know what's happened in the Town Council? Down yonder, towards the place they call Little January, y'know, there's a steephill that gets wider as it goes down an' there's a gaslamp and awatchman's box where all the cyclists that want to smash their faces, and a few days ago now a navvy comes and sticks himself in there and noone never knew his name, an' he got a cyclist on his head an' he's gonedead. And against that gaslamp broken up by blows from cyclists theyproposed to put a notice-board, although all recommendations would besuperfluent. You catch on that it's nothing less than a maneuver toget the mayor's shirt out?"

Crillon's words vanish. As fast as he utters them I detach myself fromall this poor old stuff. I cannot reply to him, when he has ceased, and Marie and he are looking at me. I say, "Ah!"

He coughs, to keep me in countenance. Shortly, he takes himself off. 

Others come, to talk of their affairs and the course of events in thedistrict. There is a regular buzz. So-and-so has been killed, butSo-and-so is made an officer. So-and-so has got a clerking job. Herein the town, So-and-so has got rich. How's the War going on?

They surround me, with questioning faces. And yet it is I, still morethan they, who am one immense question. 

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XVIII

EYES THAT SEE

Two days have passed. I get up, dress myself, and open my shutters. It is Sunday, as you can see in the street. 

I put on my clothes of former days. I catch myself paying spruceattention to my toilet, since it is Sunday, by reason of the compulsionone feels to do the same things again. 

And now I see how much my face has hollowed, as I compare it with theone I had left behind in the familiar mirror. 

I go out, and meet several people. Madame Piot asks me how many of theenemy I have killed. I reply that I killed one. Her tittle-tattleaccosts another subject. I feel the enormous difference there wasbetween what she asked me and what I answered. 

The streets are clad in the mourning of closed shops. It is still thesame empty and hermetically sealed face of the day of holiday. My eyesnotice, near the sunken post, the old jam-pot, which has not moved. 

I climb on to Chestnut Hill. No one is there, because it is Sunday. In that white winding-sheet, that widespread pallor of Sunday, all myformer lot builds itself again, house by house. 

I look outwards from the top of the hill. All is the same in the linesand the tones. The spectacle of yesterday and that of to-day are asidentical as two picture postcards. I see my house--the roof, andthree-quarters of the front. I feel a pleasant thrill. I feel that Ilove this corner of the earth, but especially my house. 

What, is everything the same? Is there nothing new, nothing? Is theonly changed thing the man that I am, walking too slowly in clothes toobig, the man grown old and leaning on a stick?

The landscape is barren in the inextricable simplicity of the daylight. I do not know why I was expecting revelations. In vain my gaze wanderseverywhere, to infinity. 

But a darkening of storm fills and agitates the sky, and suddenlyclothes the morning with a look of evening. The crowd which I seeyonder along the avenue, under cover of the great twilight which goesby with its invisible harmony, profoundly draws my attention. 

All those shadows which are shelling themselves out along the road arevery tiny, they are separated from one another, they are of the samestature. From a distance one sees how much one man resembles another. And it is true that a man is like a man. The one is not of a differentspecies from the other. It is a certainty which I am bringingforward--the only one; and the truth is simple, for what I believe Isee with my eyes. 

The equality of all these human spots that appear in the somber gleamsof storm, why--it is a revelation! It is a beginning of distinct orderin Chaos. How comes it that I have never seen what is so visible, howcomes it that I never perceived that obvious thing--that a man andanother man are the same thing, everywhere and always? I rejoice thatI have seen it as if my destiny were to shed a little light on us andon our road. 

* * * * * *

The bells are summoning our eyes to the church. It is surrounded byscaffolding, and a long swarm of people are gliding towards it, grouping round it, going in. 

The earth and the sky--but I do not see God. I see everywhere, everywhere, God's absence. My gaze goes through space and returns, forsaken. And I have never seen Him, and He is nowhere, nowhere, nowhere. 

No one ever saw Him. I know--I always knew, for that matter!--thatthere is no proof of God's existence, and that you must find, first ofall, believe in it if you want to prove it. Where does He showHimself? What does He save? What tortures of the heart, whatdisasters does He turn aside from all and each in the ruin of hearts?Where have we known or handled or embraced anything but His name?God's absence surrounds infinitely and even actually each kneelingsuppliant, athirst for some humble personal miracle, and each seekerwho bends over his papers as he watches for proofs like a creator; itsurrounds the spiteful antagonism of all religions, armed against eachother, enormous and bloody. God's absence rises like the sky over theagonizing conflicts between good and evil, over the tremblingheedfulness of the upright, over the immensity--still haunting me--ofthe cemeteries of agony, the charnel heaps of innocent soldiers, theheavy cries of the shipwrecked. Absence! Absence! In the hundredthousand years that life has tried to delay death there has beennothing on earth more fruitless than man's cries to divinity, nothingwhich gives so perfect an idea of silence. 

How does it come about that I have lasted till now withoutunderstanding that I did not see God? I believed because they had toldme to believe. It seems to me that I am able to believe something nolonger because they command me to, and I feel myself set free. 

I lean on the stones of the low wall, at the spot where I leaned ofold, in the time when I thought I was some one and knew something. 

My looks fall on the families and the single figures which are hurryingtowards the black hole of the church porch, towards the gloom of thenave, where one is enlaced in incense, where wheels of light and angelsof color hover under the vaults which contain a little of the greatemptiness of the heavens. 

I seem to stoop nearer to those people, and I get glimpses of certainprofundities among the fleeting pictures which my sight lends me. Iseem to have stopped, at random, in front of the richness of a singlebeing. I think of the "humble, quiet lives, " and it appears to mewithin a few words, and that in what they call a "quiet, lowly life, "there are immense expectations and waitings and weariness. 

I understand why they want to believe in God, and consequently why theydo believe in Him, since faith comes at will. 

I remember, while I lean on this wall and listen, that one day in thepast not far from here, a lowly woman raised her voice and said, "Thatwoman does not believe in God! It's because she has no children, orelse because they've never been ill. "

And I remember, too, without being able to picture them to myself, allthe voices I have heard saying, "It would be too unjust, if there wereno God!"

There is no other proof of God's existence than the need we have ofHim. God is not God--He is the name of all that we lack. He is ourdream, carried to the sky. God is a prayer, He is not some one. 

They put all His kind actions into the eternal future, they hide themin the unknown. Their agonizing dues they drown in distances whichoutdistance them; they cancel His contradictions in inaccessibleuncertainty. No matter; they believe in the idol made of a word. 

And I? I have awaked out of religion, since it was a dream. It had tobe that one morning my eyes would end by opening and seeing nothingmore of it. 

I do not see God, but I see the church and I see the priests. Anotherceremony is unfolding just now, in another direction--up at the castle, a Mass of St. Hubert. Leaning on my elbows the spectacle absorbs me. 

These ministers of the cult, blessing this pack of hounds, these gunsand hunting knives, officiating in lace and pomp side by side withthese wealthy people got up as warlike sportsmen, women and men alike, on the great steps of a castle and facing a crowd kept aloof byropes, --this spectacle defines, more glaringly than any words whatevercan, the distance which separates the churches of to-day from Christ'steaching, and points to all the gilded putridity which has accumulatedon those pure defaced beginnings. And what is here is everywhere; whatis little is great. 

The parsons, the powerful--all always joined together. Ah, certaintyis rising to the heart of my conscience. Religions destroy themselvesspiritually because they are many. They destroy whatever leans upontheir fables. But their directors, they who are the strength of theidol, impose it. They decree authority; they hide the light. They aremen, defending their interests as men; they are rulers defending theirsway. 

It has to be! You shall _not_ know! A terrible memory shuddersthrough me; and I catch a confused glimpse of people who, for the needsof their common cause, uphold, with their promises and thunder, the madunhappiness which lies heavy on the multitudes. 

* * * * * *

Footsteps are climbing towards me. Marie appears, dressed in gray. She comes to look for me. In the distance I saw that her cheeks werebrightened and rejuvenated by the wind. Close by I see that hereyelids are worn, like silk. She finds me sunk in reflection. Shelooks at me, like a frail and frightened mother; and this solicitudewhich she brings me is enough by itself to calm and comfort me. 

I point out to her the dressed-up commotion below us, and make somebitter remark on the folly of these people who vainly gather in thechurch, and go to pray there, to talk all alone. Some of them believe;and the rest say to them, "I do the same as you. "

Marie does not argue the basis of religion. "Ah, " she says, "I'venever thought clearly about it, never. They've always spoken of God tome, and I've always believed in Him. But--I don't know. I only knowone thing, " she adds, her blue eyes looking at me, "and that is thatthere must be delusion. The people must have religion, so as to put upwith the hardships of life, the sacrifices----"

She goes on again at once, more emphatically, "There must be religionfor the unhappy, so that they won't give way. It may be foolishness, but if you take that away from them, what have they left?"

The gentle woman--the normal woman of settled habits--whom I had lefthere repeats, "There must be illusion. " She sticks to this idea, sheinsists, she is taking the side of the unhappy. Perhaps she talks likethat for her own sake, and perhaps only because she is compassionatefor me. 

I said in vain, "No--there must never be delusion, never fallacies. There should be no more lies. We shall not know then where we'regoing. "

She persists and makes signs of dissent. 

I say no more, tired. But I do not lower my gaze before theall-powerful surroundings of circumstance. My eyes are pitiless, andcannot help descrying the false God and the false priests everywhere. 

We go down the footpath and return in silence. But it seems to me thatthe rule of evil is hidden in easy security among the illusions whichthey heap up over us. I am nothing; I am no more than I was before, but I am applying my hunger for the truth. I tell myself again thatthere is no supernatural power, that nothing has fallen from the sky;that everything is within us and in our hands. And in the inspirationof that faith my eyes embrace the magnificence of the empty sky, theabounding desert of the earth, the Paradise of the Possible. 

We pass along the base of the church. Marie says to me--as if nothinghad just been said, "Look how the poor church was damaged by a bombfrom an aeroplane--all one side of the steeple gone. The good oldvicar was quite ill about it. As soon as he got up he did nothing elsebut try to raise money to have his dear steeple built up again; and hegot it. "

People are revolving round the building and measuring its yawningmutilation with their eyes. My thoughts turn to all these passers-byand to all those who will pass by, whom I shall not see, and to otherwounded steeples. The most beautiful of all voices echoes within me, and I would fain make use of it for this entreaty, "Build not thechurches again! You who will come after us, you who, in the sharpdistinctness of the ended deluge will perhaps be able to see the orderof things more clearly, don't build the churches again! They did notcontain what we used to believe, and for centuries they have only beenthe prisons of the saviours, and monumental lies. If you are still ofthe faith have your temples within yourselves. But if you again bringstones to build up a narrow and evil tradition, that is the end of all. In the name of justice, in the name of light, in the name of pity, donot build the churches again!"

But I did not say anything. I bow my head and walk more heavily. 

I see Madame Marcassin coming out of the church with blinking eyes, weary-looking, a widow indeed. I bow and approach her and talk to hera little, humbly, about her husband, since I was under his orders andsaw him die. She listens to me in dejected inattention. She iselsewhere. She says to me at last, "I had a memorial service sinceit's usual. " Then she maintains a silence which means "There's nothingto be said, just as there's nothing to be done. " In face of thatemptiness I understand the crime that Marcassin committed in lettinghimself be killed for nothing but the glory of dying. 

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XIX

GHOSTS

We have gone out together and aimlessly; we walk straight forward. 

It is an autumnal day--gray lace of clouds and wind. Some dried leaveslie on the ground and others go whirling. We are in August, but it isan autumn day all the same. Days do not allow themselves to be set instrict order, like men. 

Our steps take us in the direction of the waterfall and the mill. Wehave seldom been there again since our engagement days. Marie iscovered in a big gray cloak; her hat is black silk with a little squareof color embroidered in front. She looks tired, and her eyes are red. When she walks in front of me I see the twisted mass of her beautifulfair hair. 

Instinctively we both looked for the inscriptions we cut, once upon atime, on trees and on stones, in foolish delight. We sought them likescattered treasure, on the strange cheeks of the old willows, near thetendrils of the fall, on the birches that stand like candles in frontof the violet thicket, and on the old fir which so often sheltered uswith its dark wings. Many inscriptions have disappeared. Some areworn away because things do; some are covered by a host of otherinscriptions or they are distorted and ugly. Nearly all have passed onas if they had been passers-by. 

Marie is tired. She often sits down, with her big cloak and hersensible air; and as she sits she seems like a statue of nature, ofspace, and the wind. 

We do not speak. We have gone down along the side of theriver--slowly, as if we were climbing--towards the stone seat of thewall. The distances have altered. This seat, for instance, we meet itsooner than we thought we should, like some one in the dark; but it isthe seat all right. The rose-tree which grew above it has witheredaway and become a crown of thorns. 

There are dead leaves on the stone slab. They come from the chestnutsyonder. They fell on the ground and yet they have flown away as far asthe seat. 

On this seat--where she came to me for the first time, which was onceso important to us that it seemed as if the background of things allabout us had been created by us--we sit down to-day, after we havevainly sought in nature the traces of our transit. 

The landscape is peaceful, simple, empty; it fills us with a greatquivering. Marie is so sad and so simple that you can see her thought. 

I have leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. I have contemplated thegravel at my feet; and suddenly I start, for I understand that my eyeswere looking for the marks of our footsteps, in spite of the stone, inspite of the sand. 

After the solemnity of a long silence, Marie's face takes on a look ofdefeat, and suddenly she begins to cry. The tears which fill her--forone always weeps in full, drop on to her knees. And through her sobsthere fall from her wet lips words almost shapeless, but desperate andfierce, as a burst of forced laughter. 

"It's all over!" she cries. 

* * * * * *

I have put my arm round her waist, and I am shaken by the sorrow whichagitates her chest and throat, and sometimes shakes her rudely, thesorrow which does not belong to me, which belongs to no one, and islike a divinity. 

She becomes composed. I take her hand. In a weak voice she calls somememories up--this and that--and "one morning----" She applies herselfto it and counts them. I speak, too, gently. We question each other. "Do you remember?"--"Oh, yes. " And when some more precise and intimatedetail prompts the question we only reply, "A little. " Our separationand the great happenings past which the world has whirled have made thepast recoil and shaped a deep ditch. Nothing has changed; but when welook we see. 

Once, after we had recalled to each other an enchanted summer evening, I said, "We loved each other, " and she answered, "I remember. "

I call her by her name, in a low voice, so as to draw her out of thedumbness into which she is falling. 

She listens to me, and then says, placidly, despairingly, "'_Marie_, '--you used to say it like that. I can't realize that I hadthe same name. "

A few moments later, as we talked of something else, she said to me atlast, "Ah, that day we had dreams of travel, about our plans--_you werethere_, sitting by my side. "

In those former times we lived. Now we hardly live any more, since wehave lived. They who we were are dead, for we are here. Her glancescome to me, but they do not join again the two surviving voids that weare; her look does not wipe out our widowhood, nor change anything. And I, I am too imbued with clear-sighted simplicity and truth toanswer "no" when it is "yes. " In this moment by my side Marie is likeme. 

The immense mourning of human hearts appears to us. We dare not nameit yet; but we dare not let it not appear in all that we say. 

* * * * * *

Then we see a woman, climbing the footpath and coming nearer to us. Itis Marthe, grown up, full-blown. She says a few words to us and thengoes away, smiling. She smiles, she who plays a part in our drama. The likeness which formerly haunted me now haunts Marie, too--both ofus, side by side, and without saying it, harbored the same thought, tosee that child growing up and showing what Marie was. 

Marie confesses all, all at once, "I was only my youth and my beauty, like all women. And _there_ go my youth and beauty--Marthe! Then, I----?" In anguish she goes on, "I'm not old yet, since I'm onlythirty-five, but I've aged very quickly; I've some white hairs that youcan see, close to; I'm wrinkled and my eyes have sunk. I'm here, inlife, to live, to occupy my time; but I'm nothing more than I am! Ofcourse, I'm still alive, but the future comes to an end before lifedoes. Ah, it's really only youth that has a place in life. All youngfaces are alike and go from one to the other without ever beingdeceived. They wipe out and destroy all the rest, and they make theothers see themselves as they are, so that they become useless. "

She is right! When the young woman stands up she takes, in fact, theother's place in the ideal and in the human heart, and makes of theother a returning ghost. It is true. I knew it. Ah, I did not knowit was so true! It is too obvious. I cannot deny it. Again a cry ofassent rises to my lips and prevents me from saying, "No. "

I cannot turn away from Marthe's advent, nor as I look at her, fromrecognizing Marie. I know she has had several little love-affairs. Just now she is alone. She is alone, but she will soon beleaning--yes, phantom or reality, man is not far from her. It isdazzling. Most certainly, I no longer think as I used to do that it isa sort of duty to satisfy the selfish promptings one has, and I havenow got an inward veneration for right-doing; but all the same, if thatbeing came to me, I know well that I should become, before all, and inspite of all, an immense cry of delight. 

Marie falls back upon her idea, obdurately, and says, "A woman onlylives by love and for love. When she's no longer good for that she'sno longer anything. "

She repeats, "You see--I'm nothing any more. "

Ah, she is at the bottom of her abyss! She is at the extremity of awoman's mourning! She is not thinking only of me. Her thought ishigher and vaster. She is thinking of all the woman she is, of allthat love is, of all possible things when she says, "I'm no longeranything. " And _I_--I am only he who is present with her just now, andno help whatever is left her to look for from any one. 

I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness andsimplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me withher presence--but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, Ican do nothing against her grief, her perfect, infallible grief. 

"Ah!" she cries, "if we came to life again!"

But she, too, has tried to cling to illusion. I see by the track ofher tears, and because I am looking at her--that she has powdered herface to-day and put rouge on her lips, perhaps even on her cheeks, asshe did in bygone days, laughing, to set herself off, in spite of me. This woman who tries to keep a good likeness of herself through passingtime, to be fixed upon herself, who paints herself, she is, to thatextent like what Rembrandt the profound and Titian the bold andexquisite did--make enduring, and save! But this time, a few tearshave washed away the fragile, mortal effort. 

She tries also to delude herself with words, and to discover somethingin them which would transform her. She asserts, as she did the othermorning, "There must be illusion. No, we must not see things as theyare. " But I see clearly that such words do not exist. 

Once, when she was looking at me distressfully, she murmured, "_You_--you've no more illusion at all. I pity you!"

At that moment, within the space of a flash, she was thinking of meonly, and she pities me! She has found something in her grief to giveme. 

She is silent. She is seeking the supreme complaint; she is trying tofind what there is which is more torturing and more simple; and shestammers--"The truth. "

The truth is that the love of mankind is a single season among so manyothers. The truth is that we have within us something much more mortalthan we are, and that it is this, all the same, which is all-important. Therefore we survive very much longer than we live. There are thingswe think we know and which yet are secrets. Do we really know what webelieve? We believe in miracles. We make great efforts to struggle, to go mad. We should like to let all our good deserts be seen. Wefancy that we are exceptions and that something supernatural is goingto come along. But the quiet peace of the truth fixes us. Theimpossible becomes again the impossible. We are as silent as silenceitself. 

We stayed lonely on the seat until evening. Our hands and faces shonelike gleams of storm in the entombment of the calm and the mist. 

We go back home. We wait and then have dinner. We live these fewhours. And we see ourselves alone in the house, facing each other, asnever we saw ourselves, and we do not know what to do! It is a realdrama of vacancy which is breaking loose. We are living together; ourmovements are in harmony, they touch and mingle. But all of it isempty. We do not long for each other, we can no longer expect eachother, we have no dreams, we are not happy. It is a sort of imitationof life by phantoms, by beings who, in the distance are beings, butclose by--so close--are phantoms!

Then bedtime comes. She is sleeping in the little bedroom oppositemine across the landing, less fine than mine and smaller, hung with anold and faded paper, where the patterned flowers are only an irregularrelief, with traces here and there of powder, of colored dust andashes. 

We are going to separate on the landing. To-day is not the first timelike that! but to-day we are feeling this great rending which is notone. She has begun to undress. She has taken off her blouse. I seeher neck and her breasts, a little less firm than before, through herchemise; and half tumbling on to the nape of her neck, the fair hairwhich once magnificently flamed on her like a fire of straw. 

She only says, "It's better to be a man than a woman. "

Then she replies to my silence, "You see, we don't know what to say, now. "

In the angle of the narrow doorway she spoke with a kind of immensity. 

She goes into her room and disappears. Before I went to the war weslept in the same bed. We used to lie down side by side, so as to beannihilated in unconsciousness, or to go and dream somewhere else. (Commonplace life has shipwrecks worse than in Shakespearean dramas. For man and wife--to sleep, to die. ) But since I came back we separateourselves with a wall. This sincerity that I have brought back in myeyes and mind has changed the semblances round about me into reality, more than I imagine. Marie is hiding from me her faded but disregardedbody. Her modesty has begun again; yes, she has ended by beginningagain. 

She has shut her door. She is undressing, alone in her room, slowly, and as if uselessly. There is only the light of her little lamp tocaress her loosened hair, in which the others cannot yet see the whiteones, the frosty hairs that she alone touches. 

Her door is shut, decisive, banal, dreary. 

Among some papers on my table I see the poem again which we once foundout of doors, the bit of paper escaped from the mysterious hands whichwrote on it, and come to the stone seat. It ended by whispering, "OnlyI know the tears that brimming rise, your beauty blended with yoursmile to espy. "

In the days of yore it had made us smile with delight. To-night thereare real tears in my eyes. What is it? I dimly see that there issomething more than what we have seen, than what we have said, thanwhat we have felt to-day. One day, perhaps, she and I will exchangebetter and richer sayings; and so, in that day, all the sadness will beof some service. 

CHAPTER XX

THE CULT

I have been to the factory. I felt as much lost as if I had foundmyself translated there after a sleep of legendary length. There aremany new faces. The factory has tripled--quadrupled in importance;quite a town of flimsy buildings has been added to it. 

"They've built seven others like it in three months!" says MonsieurMielvaque to me, proudly. 

The manager is now another young nephew of the Messrs. Gozlan. He wasliving in Paris and came back on the day of the general mobilization. Old Monsieur Gozlan looks after everything. 

I have a month to wait. I wait slowly, as everybody does. The housesin the lower town are peopled by absentees. When you go in they talkto you about the last letter, and always make the same huge and barrenreflections on the war. In my street there are twelve houses where thepeople no longer await anything and have nothing to say, like MadameMarcassin. In some others, the one who has disappeared will perhapscome back; and they go about in them in a sort of hope which leans onlyon emptiness and silence. There are women who have begun their livesagain in a kind of happy misery. The places near them of the dead orthe living they have filled up. 

The main streets have not changed, any more than the squares, exceptthe one which is encrusted with a collection of huts. The life in themis as bustling as ever, and of brighter color, and more amusing. Manyyoung men, rich or influential, are passing their wartime in theoffices of the depot, of the Exchange, of Food Control, of Enlistment, of the Pay Department, and other administrations whose names one cannotremember. The priests are swarming in the two hospitals; on the facesof orderlies, cyclist messengers, doorkeepers and porters you can readtheir origin. For myself, I have never seen a parson in the frontlines wearing the uniform of the ordinary fighting soldier, the uniformof those who make up the fatigue parties and fight as well againstperfect misery!

My thought turns to what the man once said to me who was by me amongthe straw of a stable, "Why is there no more justice?" By the littlethat I know and have seen and am seeing, I can tell what an enormousrush sprang up, at the same time as the war, against the equality ofthe living. And if that injustice, which was turning the heroism ofthe others into a cheat has not been openly extended, it is because thewar has lasted too long, and the scandal became so glaring that theywere forced to look into it. It seems that it is only through fearthat they have ended by deciding so much. 

* * * * * *

I go into Fontan's. Crillon is with me--I picked him up from thelittle glass cupboard of his shop as I came out. He is finding itharder and harder to keep going; he has aged a lot, and his frame, sopowerfully bolted together, cracks with rheumatism. 

We sit down. Crillon groans and bends so low in his hand-to-handstruggle with the pains which beset him that I think his forehead isgoing to strike the marble-topped table. 

He tells me in detail of his little business, which is going badly, andhow he has confused glimpses of the bare and empty future which awaitshim--when a sergeant with a fair mustache and eyeglasses makes hisentry. This personage, whose collar shows white thunderbolts, [1]instead of a number, comes and sits near us. He orders a port wine andVictorine serves it with a smile. She smiles at random, andindistinctly, at all the men, like Nature. 

[Footnote 1: Distinctive badge for Staff officers and others. --Tr. ]

The newcomer takes off his cap, looks at the windows and yawns. "I'mbored, " he says. 

He comes nearer and freely offers us his talk. He sets himselfchattering with spirited and easy grace, of men and things. He worksat the Town Hall and knows a lot of secrets which he lets us into. Hepoints to a couple of sippers at a table in the corner reserved forcommercial people. "The grocer and the ironmonger, " he says, "there'stwo that know how to go about it! At the beginning of the war therewas a business crisis by the force of things, and they had to tightentheir belts like the rest. Then they got their revenge and swept thedibs in and hoarded stuff up, and speculated, and they're stillrevenging themselves. You should see the stocks of goods they sit onin their cellars and wait for the rises that the newspapers foretell!They've got one excuse, it's true--there are others, bigger people, that are worse. Ah, you can say that the business people will havegiven a rich notion of their patriotism during the war!"

The fair young man stretches himself backward to his full length, withhis heels together on the ground, his arms rigid on the table, andopens his mouth with all his might and for a long time. Then he goeson in a loud voice, careless who hears him, "Why, I saw the other day, at the Town Hall, piles of the Declarations of Profits, required by theTreasury. I don't know, of course, for I've not read them, but I'm assure and certain as you are that all those innumerable piles ofdeclarations are just so many columns of cod and humbug and lies!"

Intelligent and inexhaustible, accurately posted through the clerk'sjob in which he is sheltering, the sergeant relates with carelessgestures his stories of scandals and huge profiteering, "while our goodfellows are fighting. " He talks and talks, and concludes by sayingthat after all _he_ doesn't care a damn as long as they let him alone. 

Monsieur Fontan is in the café. A woman leads up to him a totteringbeing whom she introduces to him. "He's ill, Monsieur Fontan, becausehe hasn't had enough to eat. "

"Well now! And I'm ill, too, " says Fontan jovially, "but it's becauseI eat too much. "

The sergeant takes his leave, touching us with a slight salute. "He'sright, that smart gentleman, " says Crillon to me. "It's always beenlike that, and it will always be like that, you know!"

Aloof, I keep silence. I am still tired and stunned by all thesesayings in the little time since I remained so long without hearinganything but myself. But I am sure they are all true, and thatpatriotism is only a word or a tool for many. And feeling the rags ofthe common soldier still on me, I knit my brows and realize that it isa disgrace and a shame for the poor to be deceived as they are. 

Crillon is smiling, as always! On his huge face, where every passingday now leaves some marks, on his round-eyed weakened face with itsmouth opened like a cypher, the old smile of yore is spread out. Iused to think then that resignation was a virtue; I see now that it isa vice. The optimist is the permanent accomplice of all evil-doers. This passive smile which I admired but lately--I find it despicable onthis poor face. 

* * * * * *

The café has filled up with workmen, either old or very young, from thetown and the country, but chiefly the country. 

What are they doing, these lowly, these ill-paid? They are dirty andthey are drinking. They are dark, although it is the forenoon, becausethey are dirty. In the light there is that obscurity which they carryon them; and a bad smell removes itself with them. 

I see three convalescent soldiers from the hospital join the plebeiangroups; they are recognized by their coarse clothes, their caps and bigboots, and because their gestures are soldered together and conform toa common movement. 

By force of "glasses all round, " these drinkers begin to talk in loudvoices; they get excited and shout at random; and in the end they dropvisibly into unconsciousness, into oblivion, into defeat. 

The wine-merchant is at his cash desk, which shines like silver. Hestands behind the center of it, colorless, motionless, like a bust on apedestal. His bare arms hang down, pallid as his face. He comes andwipes away some spilled wine, and his hands shine and drip, like abutcher's. 

* * * * * *

"I'm forgetting to tell you, " cried Crillon, "that they had news ofyour regiment a few days ago. Little Mélusson's had his head blown tobits in an attack. Here, y'know; he was a softy and an idler. Well, he was attacking like a devil. War remakes men like that!"

"Termite?" I asked. 

"Ah, yes! Termite the poacher! Why it's a long time since theyhaven't seen him. Disappeared, it seems. S'pose he's killed. "

Then he talks to me of this place. Brisbille, for instance, always thesame, a Socialist and a scandal. 

"There's him, " says Crillon, "and that dangerous chap Eudo as well, with his notorient civilities. Would you believe it, they've not beenable to pinch him for his spying proclensities! Nothing in his pastlife, nothing in his conductions, nothing in his expensiture, nothingto find fault with. Mustn't he be a deep one?"

I presume to think--suppose it was all untrue? Yet it seemed aformidable task to upset on the spot one of the oldest and most deeplyrooted creeds in our town. But I risk it. "Perhaps he's innocent. "

Crillon jumps, and shouts, "What! You suspect him of being innocent!"His face is convulsed and he explodes with an enormous laugh, a laughirresistible as a tidal wave, the laugh of all!

"Talking about Termite, " says Crillon a moment later, "it seems itwasn't him that did the poaching. "

The military convalescents are leaving the tavern. Crillon watchesthem go away with their parallel movements and their sticks. 

"Yes, there's wounded here and there's dead there!" he says; "all thosewho hadn't got a privilential situation! Ah, la, la! The poor devils, when you think of it, eh, what they must have suffered! And at thismoment, all the time, there's some dying. And we stand it very well, an' hardly think of it. They didn't need to kill so many, that'scertain--there's been faults and blunders, as everybody knows of. Butfortunately, " he adds, with animation, putting on my shoulder the handthat is big as a young animal, "the soldiers' deaths and the chief'sblunders, that'll all disappear one fine day, melted away and forgottenin the glory of the victorious Commander!"

* * * * * *

There has been much talk in our quarter of a Memorial Festival. 

I am not anxious to be present and I watch Marie set off. Then I feelmyself impelled to go there, as if it were a duty. 

I cross the bridge. I stop at the corner of the Old Road, on the edgeof the fields. Two steps away there is the cemetery, which is hardlygrowing, since nearly all those who die now are not anywhere. 

I lift my eyes and take in the whole spectacle together. The hillwhich rises in front of me is full of people. It trembles like a swarmof bees. Up above, on the avenue of trimmed limetrees, it is crownedby the sunshine and by the red platform, which scintillates with therichness of dresses and uniforms and musical instruments. 

Then there is a red barrier. On this side of that barrier, lower down, the public swarms and rustles. 

I recognize the great picture of the past. I remember this ceremony, spacious as a season, which has been regularly staged here so manytimes in the course of my childhood and youth, and with almost the samerites and forms. It was like this last year, and the other years, anda century ago and centuries since. 

Near me an old peasant in sabots is planted. Rags, shapeless andcolorless--the color of time--cover the eternal man of the fields. Heis what he always was. He blinks, leaning on a stick; he holds his capin his hand because what he sees is so like a church service. His legsare trembling; he wonders if he ought to be kneeling. 

And I, I feel myself diminished, cut back, returned through the cyclesof time to the little that I am. 

* * * * * *

Up there, borne by the flag-draped rostrum, a man is speaking. Helifts a sculptural head aloft, whose hair is white as marble. 

At my distance I can hardly hear him. But the wind carries me somephrases, louder shouted, of his peroration. He is preachingresignation to the people, and the continuance of things. He imploresthem to abandon finally the accursed war of classes, to devotethemselves forever to the blessed war of races in all its shapes. After the war there must be no more social utopias, but disciplineinstead, whose grandeur and beauty the war has happily revealed, theunion of rich and poor for national expansion and the victory of Francein the world, and sacred hatred of the Germans, which is a virtue inthe French. Let us remember!

Then another orator excites himself and shouts that the war has beensuch a magnificent harvest of heroism that it must not be regretted. It has been a good thing for France; it has made lofty virtues andnoble instincts gush forth from a nation which seemed to be decadent. Our people had need of an awakening and to recover themselves, andacquire new vigor. With metaphors which hover and vibrate he proclaimsthe glory of killing and being killed, he exalts the ancient passionfor plumes and scarlet in which the heart of France is molded. 

Alone on the edge of the crowd I feel myself go icy by the touch ofthese words and commands, which link future and past together andmisery to misery. I have already heard them resounding forever. Aworld of thoughts growls confusedly within me. Once I criednoiselessly, "No!"--a deformed cry, a strangled protest of all my faithagainst all the fallacy which comes down upon us. That first cry whichI have risked among men, I cast almost as a visionary, but almost as adumb man. The old peasant did not even turn his earthy, gigantic head. And I hear a roar of applause go by, of popular expanse. 

I go up to join Marie, mingling with the crowd; I divide serried knotsof them. Suddenly there is profound silence, and every one standsimmovable. Up there the Bishop is on his feet. He raises hisforefinger and says, "The dead are not dead. They are rewarded inheaven; but even here on earth they are alive. They keep watch in ourhearts, eternally preserved from oblivion. Theirs is the immortalityof glory and gratitude. They are not dead, and we should envy themmore than pity. "

And he blesses the audience, all of whom bow or kneel. I remainedupright, stubbornly, with clenched teeth. And I remember things, and Isay to myself, "Have the dead died for nothing? If the world is tostay as it is, then--yes!"

Several men did not bend their backs at first, and then they obeyed thegeneral movement; and I felt on my shoulders all the heavy weight ofthe whole bowing multitude. 

Monsieur Joseph Bonéas is talking within a circle. Seeing him again Ialso feel for one second the fascination he once had for me. He iswearing an officer's uniform of the Town Guard, and his collar hidesthe ravages in his neck. He is holding forth. What says he? He says, "We must take the long view. "

"We must take the long view. For my part, the only thing I admire inmilitarist Prussia is its military organization. After the war--for wemust not limit our outlook to the present conflict--we must takelessons from it, and just let the simple-minded humanitarians go onbleating about universal peace. "

He goes on to say that in his opinion the orators did not sufficientlyinsist on the necessity for tying the economic hands of Germany afterthe war. No annexations, perhaps; but tariffs, which would be muchbetter. And he shows in argument the advantages and prosperity broughtby carnage and destruction. 

He sees me. He adorns himself with a smile and comes forward withproffered hand. I turn violently away. I have no use for the hand ofthis sort of outsider, this sort of traitor. 

They lie. That ludicrous person who talks of taking the long viewwhile there are still in the world only a few superb martyrs who havedared to do it, he who is satisfied to contemplate, beyond the presentmisery of men, the misery of their children; and the white-haired manwho was extolling slavery just now, and trying to turn aside thedemands of the people and switch them on to traditional massacre; andhe who from the height of his bunting and trestles would have put aglamour of beauty and morality on battles; and he, the attitudinizer, who brings to life the memory of the dead only to deny with wordtrickery the terrible evidence of death, he who rewards the martyrswith the soft soap of false promises--all these people tell lies, lies, lies! Through their words I can hear the mental reservation they arechewing over--"Around us, the deluge; and after us, the deluge. " Orelse they do not even lie; they see nothing and they know not what theysay. 

They have opened the red barrier. Applause and congratulations crosseach other. Some notabilities come down from the rostrum, they look atme, they are obviously interested in the wounded soldier that I am, they advance towards me. Among them is the intellectual person whospoke first. He is wagging the white head and its cauliflower curls, and looking all ways with eyes as empty as those of a king of cards. They told me his name, but I have forgotten it with contempt. I slipaway from them. I am bitterly remorseful that for so long a portion ofmy life I believed what Bonéas said. I accuse myself of havingformerly put my trust in speakers and writers who--however learned, distinguished, famous--were only imbeciles or villains. I fly fromthese people, since I am not strong enough to answer and resistthem--or to cry out upon them that the only memory it is important topreserve of the years we have endured is that of their loathsome horrorand lunacy. 

* * * * * *

But the few words fallen from on high have sufficed to open my eyes, toshow me that the Separation I dimly saw in the tempest of my nights inhospital was true. It comes down from vacancy and the clouds, it takesform and it takes root--it is there, it is there; and the indictmentcomes to light, as precise and as tragic as that row of faces!

Kings? There they are. There are many different kinds of king, justas there are different gods. But there is one royalty everywhere, andthat is the very form of ancient society, the great machine which isstronger than men. And all the personages enthroned on thatrostrum--those business men and bishops, those politicians and greatmerchants, those bulky office-holders or journalists, those oldgenerals in sumptuous decorations, those writers in uniform--they arethe custodians of the highest law and its executors. 

It is those people whose interests are common and are contrary to thoseof mankind; and their interests are--above all and imperiously--letnothing change! It is those people who keep their eternal subjects ineternal order, who deceive and dazzle them, who take their brains awayas they take their bodies, who flatter their servile instincts, whomake shallow, resplendent creeds for them, and explain huge happeningsaway with all the pretexts they like. It is because of them that thelaw of things does not rest on justice and the moral law. 

If some of them are unconscious of it, no matter. Neither does itmatter that all of them do not always profit by the public's servitude, nor that some of them, sometimes, even happen to suffer from it. Theyare none the less, all of them, by their solid coalition, material andmoral, the defenders of lies above and delusion below. These are thepeople who reign in the place of kings, or at the same time, here aseverywhere. 

Formerly I used to see a harmony of interests and ideals on all thatfestive, sunlit hill. Now I see reality broken in two, as I did on mybed of pain. I see the two enemy races face to face--the victors andthe vanquished. 

Monsieur Gozlan looks like a master of masters--an aged collector offortune, whose speculations are famous, whose wealth increases unaided, who makes as much profit as he likes and holds the district in thehollow of his hand. His vulgar movements flash with diamonds, and abulky golden trinket hangs on his belly like a phallus. The generalsbeside him--those glorious potentates whose smiles are made of so manysouls--and the administrators and the honorables only look likesecondary actors. 

Fontan occupies considerable space on the rostrum. He drowses there, with his two spherical hands planted in front of him. The voluminoustrencherman digests and blows forth with his buttered mouth; and whathe has eaten purrs within him. As for Rampaille, the butcher, _he_ hasmingled with the public. He is rich but dressed with bad taste. It ishis habit to say, "I am a poor man of the people, I am; look at mydirty clothes. " A moment ago, when the lady who was collecting for theLest-we-Forget League suddenly confronted him and trapped him amidgeneral attention, he fumbled desperately in his fob and dragged threesous out of his body. There are several like him on this side of thebarrier, looking as though they were part of the crowd, but onlyattached to it by their trade. Kings do not now carry royaltyeverywhere on their sleeves; they obliterate themselves in the clothesof everybody. But all the hundred faces of royalty have the samesigns, all of them, and are distinctly repeated through their smiles ofcupidity, rapacity, ferocity. 

And there the dark multitude fidgets about. By footpaths and streetsthey have come from the country and the town. I see, gazing earnestly, stiff-set with attention, faces scorched by rude contact with theseasons or blanched by bad atmospheres; the sharp and mummified face ofthe peasant; faces of young men grown bitter before they have come ofage; of women grown ugly before they have come of age, who draw thelittle wings of their capes over their faded blouses and faded throats;the clerks of anemic and timorous career; and the little people withwhom times are so difficult, whom their mediocrity depresses; all thatstirring of backs and shoulders and hanging arms, in poverty dressed upor naked. Behold their numbers and immense strength. Behold, therefore, authority and justice. For justice and authority are nothollow formulas--they are life, the most of life there can be; they aremankind, they are mankind in all places and all times. These words, justice and authority, do not echo in an abstract sphere. They arerooted in the human being. They overflow and palpitate. When I demandjustice, I am not groping in a dream, I am crying from the depths ofall unhappy hearts. 

Such are they, that mountain of people heaped on the ground like metalfor the roads, overwhelmed by unhappiness, debased by charity andasking for it, bound to the rich by urgent necessity, entangled in thewheels of a single machine, the machine of frightful repetition. Andin that multitude I also place nearly all young people, whoever theyare, because of their docility and their general ignorance. Theselowly people form an imposing mass as far as one may see, yet each ofthem is hardly anything, because he is isolated. It is almost amistake to count them; what you see when you look at the multitude isan immensity made of nothing. 

And the people of to-day--overloaded with gloom and intoxicated withprejudice--see blood, because of the red hangings of rostrums; they arefascinated by the sparkle of diamonds, of necklaces, of decorations, ofthe eyeglasses of the intellectuals. They have eyes but they see not, ears but they hear not; arms which they do not use; and they arethoughtless because they let others do their thinking! And the otherhalf of this same multitude is yonder, looking for Man and looked forby Man, in the big black furrows where blood is scattered and the humanrace is disappearing. And still farther away, in another part of theworld, the same throne-like platforms are crushing into the sameimmense areas of men; and the same gilded servants of royalty arescattering broadcast words which are only a translation of those whichfell on us here. 

Some women in mourning are hardly stains on this gloomy unity. Theywander and turn round in the open spaces, and are the same as they werein ancient times. They are not of any age or any century, thesemurdered souls, covered with black veils; they are you and I. 

My vision was true from top to bottom. The evil dream has become aconcrete tragi-comedy which is worse. It is inextricable, heavy, crushing. I flounder from detail to detail of it; it drags me along. Behold what is. Behold, therefore, what will be--exploitation to thelast breath, to the limit of wearing out, to death perfected!

I have overtaken Marie. By her side I feel more defenseless than whenI am alone. While we watch the festival, the shining hurly-burly, murmuring and eulogistic, the Baroness espies me, smiles and signs tome to go to her. So I go, and in the presence of all she pays me somecompliment or other on my service at the front. She is dressed inblack velvet and wears her white hair like a diadem. Twenty-five yearsof vassalage bow me before her and fill me with silence. And I salutethe Gozlans also, in a way which I feel is humble in spite of myself, for they are all-powerful over me, and they make Marie an allowancewithout which we could not live properly. I am no more than a man. 

I see Tudor, whose eyes were damaged in Artois, hesitating and groping. The Baroness has found a little job for him in the castle kitchens. 

"Isn't she good to the wounded soldiers?" they are saying around me. "She's a real benefactor!"

This time I say aloud, "_There_ is the real benefactor, " and I point tothe ruin which the young man has become whom we used to know, to themiserable, darkened biped whose eyelids flutter in the daylight, wholeans weakly against a tree in face of the festive crowd, as if it werean execution post. 

"Yes--after all--yes, yes, " the people about me murmur, timidly; theyalso blinking as though tardily enlightened by the spectacle of thepoor benefactor. 

But they are not heard--they hardly even hear themselves--in the floodof uproar from a brass band. A triumphal march goes by with the strongand sensual driving force of its, "Forward! You shall _not_ know!"The audience fill themselves with brazen music, and overflow in cheers. 

The ceremony is drawing to a close. They who were seated on therostrum get up. Fontan, bewildered with sleepiness, struggles to puton a tall hat which is too narrow, and while he screws it round hegrimaces. Then he smiles with his boneless mouth. All congratulatethemselves through each other; they shake their own hands; they clingto themselves. After their fellowship in patriotism they are goingback to their calculations and gratifications, glorified in theiregotism, sanctified, beatified; more than ever will they blend theirown with the common cause and say, "_We_ are the people!"

Brisbille, seeing one of the orators passing near him, throws him aferocious look, and shouts, "Land-shark!" and other virulent insults. 

But because of the brass instruments let loose, people only see himopen his mouth, and Monsieur Mielvaque dances with delight. MonsieurMielvaque, declared unfit for service, has been called up again. Moremiserable than ever, worn and pared and patched up, more and moreparched and shriveled by hopelessly long labor--he blots out the shinyplaces on his overcoat with his pen--Mielvaque points to Brisbillegagged by the band, he writhes with laughter and shouts in my ear, "Hemight be trying to sing!"

Madame Marcassin's paralyzed face appears, the disappearance of whichshe unceasingly thinks has lacerated her features. She also applaudsthe noise and across her face--which has gone out like a lamp--thereshot a flash. Can it be only because, to-day, attention is fixed onher?

A mother, mutilated in her slain son, is giving her mite to theoffertory for the Lest-we-Forget League. She is bringing her poverty'shumble assistance to those who say, "Remember evil; not that it may beavoided, but that it may be revived, by exciting at random all causesof hatred. Memory must be made an infectious disease. " Bleeding andbloody, inflamed by the stupid selfishness of vengeance, she holds outher hand to the collector, and drags behind her a little girl who, nevertheless, will one day, perhaps, be a mother. 

Lower down, an apprentice is devouring an officer's uniform with hisgaze. He stands there hypnotized; and the sky-blue and beautifulcrimson come off on his eyes. At that moment I saw clearly that beautyin uniforms is still more wicked than stupid. 

Ah! That frightful prophecy locked up within me is hammering my skull, "I have confidence in the abyss of the people. "

* * * * * *

Wounded by everything I see, I sink down in a corner. Truth is simple;but the world is no longer simple. There are so many things! How willtruth ever change its defeat into victory? How is it ever going toheal all those who do not know! I grieve that I am weak andineffective, that I am only I. On earth, alas, truth is dumb, and theheart is only a stifled cry!

I look for support, for some one who does not leave me alone. I am toomuch alone, and I look eagerly. But there is only Brisbille!

There is only that tipsy automaton; that parody of a man. 

There he is. Close by he is more drunk than in the distance!Drunkenness bedaubs him; his eyes are filled with wine, his cheeks arelike baked clay, his nose like a baked apple, he is almost blinded byviscous tufts. In the middle of that open space he seems caught in awhirlpool. It happens that he is in front of me for a moment, and hehurls at my head some furious phrases in which I recognize, now andagain, the truths in which I believe! Then, with antics at oncedesperate and too heavy for him, he tries to perform some kind ofpantomime which represents the wealthy class, round-paunched as a bagof gold, sitting on the proletariat till their noses are crushed in thegutter, and proclaiming, with their eyes up to heaven and their handson their hearts, "And above all, no more class-wars!" There issomething alarming in the awkwardness of the grimacing object begottenby that obstructed brain. It seems as if real suffering is givingvoice through him with a beast's cry. 

When he has spoken, he collapses on to a stone. With his fist, whoseleather is covered with red hair, like a cow's, he hides the squalidface that looks as if it had been spat upon. "Folks aren't wicked, " hesays, "but they're stupid, stupid, stupid. "

And Brisbille cries. 

Just then Father Piot advances into the space, with his silver aureole, his benevolent smile, and the vague and continuous lisping whichtrickles from his lips. He stops in the middle of us, gives a nod toeach one and continuing his ingenuous reflections aloud, he murmurs, "Hem, hem! The most important thing of all, in war, is the return toreligious ideas. Hem!"

The monstrous calm of the saying makes me start, and communicates finalagitation to Brisbille. Throwing himself upright, the blacksmithflourishes his trembling fist, tries to hold it under the old priest'schin, and bawls, "You? Shall I tell you how _you_ make me feel, eh?Why----"

Some young men seize him, hustle him and throw him down. His headstrikes the ground and he is at last immobile. Father Piot raises hisarms to heaven and kneels over the vanquished madman. There are tearsin the old man's eyes. 

When we have made a few steps away I cannot help saying to Marie, witha sort of courage, that Brisbille is not wrong in all that he says. Marie is shocked, and says, "Oh!"

"There was a time, " she says, reproachfully, "when you set about him!"

I should like Marie to understand what I am wanting to say. I explainto her, that although he may be a drunkard and a brute, he is right inwhat he thinks. He stammers and hiccups the truth, but it was not hewho made it, and it is whole and pure. He is a degraded prophet, butthe relics of his dreams have remained accurate. And that saintly oldman, who is devotion incarnate, who would not harm a fly, he is only alowly servant of lies; but he brings his little link to the chain, andhe smiles on the side of the executioners. 

"One shouldn't ever confuse ideas with men. It's a mistake that does alot of harm. "

Marie lowers her head and says nothing; then she murmurs, "Yes, that'strue. "

I pick up the little sentence she has given me. It is the first timethat approval of that sort has brought her near to me. She hasintelligence within her; she understands certain things. Women, inspite of thoughtless impulses, are quicker in understanding than men. Then she says to me, "Since you came back, you've been worrying yourhead too much. "

Crillon was on our heels. He stands in front of me, and looksdispleased. 

"I was listening to you just now, " he says; "I must tell you that sinceyou came back you have the air of a foreigner--a Belgian or anAmerican. You say intolantable things. We thought at first your mindhad got a bit unhinged. Unfortunately, it's not that. Is it becauseyou've turned sour? Anyway, I don't know what advantage you're after, but I must cautionize you that you're anielating everybody. We mustput ourselves in these people's places. Apropos of this, and aproposof that, you make proposals of a tendicious character which doesn'tescape them. You aren't like the rest any more. If you go on you'lllook as silly as a giant, and if you're going to frighten folks, lookout for yourself!"

He plants himself before me in massive conviction. The full daylightreveals more crudely the aging of his features. His skin is stretchedon the bones of his head, and the muscles of his neck and shoulderswork badly; they stick, like old drawers. 

"And then, after all, what _do_ you want? We've got to carry the waron, eh? We must give the Boches hell, to sum up. "

With an effort, wearied beforehand, I ask, "And afterwards?"

"What--afterwards? Afterwards there'll be wars, naturally, butcivilized wars. Afterwards? Why, future posterity! Own up that you'dlike to save the world, eh, what? When you launch out into these greatmachinations you say enormities compulsively. The future? Ha, ha!"

I turn away from him. Of what use to try to tell him that the past isdead, that the present is passing, that the future alone is positive!

Through Crillon's paternal admonishment I feel the threat of theothers. It is not yet hostility around me; but it is already arupture. With this truth that clings to me alone, amid the world andits phantoms, am I not indeed rushing into a sort of tragedy impossibleto maintain? They who surround me, filled to the lips, filled to theeyes, with the gross acceptance which turns men into beasts, they lookat me mistrustfully, ready to be let loose against me. Little more waslacking before I should be as much a reprobate as Brisbille, who, inthis very place, before the war, stood up alone before the multitudeand tried to tell them to their faces that they were going into thegulf. 

* * * * * *

I move away with Marie. We go down into the valley, and then climbChestnut Hill. I like these places where I used so often to come inthe days when everything around me was a hell which I did not see. Nowthat I am a ghost returning from the beyond, this hill still draws methrough the streets and lanes. I remember it and it remembers me. There is something which we share, which I took away with me yonder, everywhere, like a secret. I hear that despoiled soldier who said, "Where I come from there are fields and paths and the sea; nowhere elsein the world is there that, " and amid my unhappy memories thatextraordinary saying shines like news of the truth. 

We sit down on the bank which borders the lane. We can see the town, the station and carts on the road; and yonder three villages makeharmony, sometimes more carefully limned by bursts of sunshine. Thehorizons entwine us in a murmur. The crossing where we are is the spotwhere four roads make a movement of reunion. 

But my spirit is no longer what it was. Vaguely I seek, everywhere. Imust see things with all their consequences, and right to their source. Against all the chains of facts I must have long arguments to bring;and the world's chaos requires an interpretation equally terrible. 

* * * * * *

There is a slight noise--a frail passer-by and a speck which jumpsround her feet. Marie looks and says mechanically, like a devoutwoman, making the sign of the cross, "Poor little angel!"

It is little Antoinette and her dog. She gropes for the edge of theroad with a stick, for she has become quite blind. They never lookedafter her. They were going to do it, unendingly, but they never didit. They always said, "Poor little angel, " and that was all. 

She is so miserably clad that you lower your eyes before her, althoughshe cannot see. She wanders and seeks, incapable of understanding thewrong they have done, they have allowed to be done, the wrong which noone remembers. Alas, to the prating indifference and the indolentnegligence of men there is only this poor little blind witness. 

She stops in front of us and puts out her hand awkwardly. She isbegging! No one troubles himself about her now. She is talking to herdog; he was born in the castle kennels--Marie told me about him. Hewas the last of a litter, ill-shaped, with a head too big, and badeyes; and the Baroness said, as they were going to drown him, andbecause she is always thinking of good things, "Give him to the littleblind girl. " The child is training him to guide her; but he is young, he wants to play when other dogs go by, he hears her with listless ear. It is difficult for him to begin serious work; and he plucks the stringfrom her hands. She calls to him; and waits. 

Then, during a long time, a good many passers-by appear and vanish. Wedo not look at all of them. 

But lo, turning the corner like some one of importance, here comes asleek and tawny mastiff, with the silvery tinkle of a trinket whichgleams on his neck. He is proclaiming and preceding his youngmistress, Mademoiselle Evelyn de Monthyon, who is riding her pony. Thelittle girl caracoles sedately, clad in a riding habit, and armed witha crop. She has been an orphan for a long time. She is the mistressof the castle. She is twelve years old and has millions. A mountedgroom in full livery follows her, looking like a stage-player or achamberlain; and then, with measured steps, an elderly governess, dressed in black silk, and manifestly thinking of some Court. 

Mademoiselle Evelyn de Monthyon and her pretty name set us thinking ofAntoinette, who hardly has a name; and it seems to us that these twoare the only ones who have passed before our eyes. The difference inthe earthly fates of these two creatures who have both the same fragileinnocence, the same pure and complete incapacity of childhood, plungesus into a tragedy of thought. The misery and the might which havefallen on those little immature heads are equally undeserved. It is adisgrace for men to see a poor child; it is also a disgrace for men tosee a rich child. 

I feel malicious towards the little sumptuous princess who has justappeared, already haughty in spite of her littleness; and I am stirredwith pity for the frail victim whom life is obliterating with all itsmight; and Marie, I can see, gentle Marie, has the same thoughts. Whowould not feel them in face of this twin picture of childhood which apassing chance has brought us, of this one picture torn in two?

But I resist this emotion; the understanding of things must be based, not on sentiment, but on reason. There must be justice, not charity. Kindness is solitary. Compassion becomes one with him whom we pity; itallows us to fathom him, to understand him alone amongst the rest; butit blurs and befogs the laws of the whole. I must set off with a clearidea, like the beam of a lighthouse through the deformities andtemptations of night. 

As I have seen equality, I am seeing inequality. Equality in truth;inequality in fact. We observe in man's beginning the beginning of hishurt; the root of the error is in inheritance. 

Injustice, artificial and groundless authority, royalty without reason, the fantastic freaks of fortune which suddenly put crowns on heads! Itis there, as far as the monstrous authority of the dead, that we mustdraw a straight line and clean the darkness away. 

The transfer of the riches and authority of the dead, of whatever kind, to their descendants, is not in accord with reason and the moral law. The laws of might and of possessions are for the living alone. Everyman must occupy in the common lot a place which he owes to his work andnot to luck. 

It is tradition! But that is no reason, on the other hand. Tradition, which is the artificial welding of the present with the mass of thepast, contrives a chain between them, where there is none. It is fromtradition that all human unhappiness comes; it piles _de facto_, truthson to the true truth; it overrides justice; it takes all freedom awayfrom reason and replaces it with legendary things, forbidding reason tolook for what may be inside them. 

It is in the one domain of science and its application, and sometimesin the technique of the arts, that experience legitimately takes thepower of law, and that acquired productions have a right to accumulate. But to pass from this treasuring of truth to the dynastic privilege ofideas or powers or wealth--those talismans--that is to make a senselessassimilation which kills equality in the bud and prevents human orderfrom having a basis. Inheritance, which is the concrete and palpableform of tradition, defends itself by the tradition of origins and ofbeliefs--abuses defended by abuses, to infinity--and it is by reason ofthat integral succession that here, on earth, we see a few men holdingthe multitude of men in their hands. 

I say all this to Marie. She appears to be more struck by thevehemence of my tone than by the obviousness of what I say. Shereplies, feebly, "Yes, indeed, " and nods her head; but she asks me, "But the moral law that you talk about, isn't it tradition?"

"No. It is the automatic law of the common good. Every time _that_finds itself at stake, it re-creates itself logically. It is lucid; itshows itself every time right to its fountain-head. Its source isreason itself, and equality, which is the same thing as reason. Thisthing is good and that is evil, _because_ it is good and because it isevil, and not because of what has been said or written. It is theopposite of traditional bidding. There is no tradition of the good. Wealth and power must be earned, not taken ready-made; the idea of whatis just or right must be reconstructed on every occasion and not betaken ready-made. "

Marie listens to me. She ponders, and then says, "We shouldn't work ifwe hadn't to leave what we have to our relations. "

But immediately she answers herself, "No. "

She produces some illustrations, just among our own surroundings. So-and-so, and So-and-so. The bait of gain or influence, or even theexcitement of work and production suffice for people to do themselvesharm. And then, too, this great change would paralyze the workers lessthan the old way paralyzes the prematurely enriched who pick up theirfortunes on the ground--such as he, for instance, whom we used to seego by, who was drained and dead at twenty, and so many other ignobleand irrefutable examples; and the comedies around bequests and heirsand heiresses, and their great gamble with affection and love--allthese basenesses, in which custom too old has made hearts go moldy. 

She is a little excited, as if the truth, in the confusion of thesecritical times, were beautiful to see--and even pleasant to detain withwords. 

All the same, she interrupts herself, and says, "They'll always findsome way of deceiving. " At last she says, "Yes, it would be just, perhaps; but it won't come. "

* * * * * *

The valley has suddenly filled with tumult. On the road which goesalong the opposite slope a regiment is passing on its way to thebarracks, a new regiment, with its colors. The flag goes on its way inthe middle of a long-drawn hurly-burly, in vague shouting, in plumes ofdust and a sparkling mist of battle. 

We have both mechanically risen on the edge of the road. At the momentwhen the flag passes before us, the habit of saluting it trembles in myarms. But, just as when a while ago the bishop's lifted hand did nothumble me, I stay motionless, and I do not salute. 

No, I do not bow in presence of the flag. It frightens me, I hate itand I accuse it. No, there is no beauty in it; it is not the emblem ofthis corner of my native land, whose fair picture it disturbs with itssavage stripes. It is the screaming signboard of the glory of blows, of militarism and war. It unfurls over the living surges of humanity asign of supremacy and command; it is a weapon. It is not the love ofour countries, it is their sharp-edged difference, proud andaggressive, which we placard in the face of the others. It is thegaudy eagle which conquerors and their devotees see flying in theirdreams from steeple to steeple in foreign lands. The sacred defense ofthe homeland--well and good. But if there was no offensive war therewould be defensive war. Defensive war has the same infamous cause asthe offensive war which provoked it; why do we not confess it? Wepersist, through blindness or duplicity, in cutting the question intwo, as if it were too great. All fallacies are possible when onespeculates on morsels of truth. But Earth only bears one single sortof inhabitant. 

It is not enough to put something on the end of a stick in publicplaces, to shake it on the tops of buildings and in the faces of publicassemblies, and say, "It is decided that this is the loftiest of allsymbols; it is decided that he who will not bend the knee before itshall be accursed. " It is the duty of human intelligence to examine ifthat symbolism is not fetish-worship. 

As for me, I remember it was said that logic has terrible chains andthat all hold together--the throne, the altar, the sword and the flag. And I have read, in the unchaining and the chaining-up of war, thatthese are the instruments of the cult of human sacrifices. 

Marie has sat down again, and I strolled away a little, musing. 

I recall the silhouette of Adjutant Marcassin, and him whom I quoted amoment ago--the sincere hero, barren and dogmatic, with his furiousfaith. I seem to be asking him, "Do you believe in beauty, inprogress?" He does not know, so he replies, "No! I only believe inthe glory of the French name!" "Do you believe in respect for life, inthe dignity of labor, in the holiness of happiness?" "No. " "Do youbelieve in truth, in justice?" "No, I only believe in the glory of theFrench name. "

The idea of motherland--I have never dared to look it in the face. Istand still in my walk and in my meditation. What, that also? But myreason is as honest as my heart, and keeps me going forward. Yes, thatalso. 

In the friendly solitude of these familiar spots on the top of thishill, at these cross-roads where the lane has led me like an unendingcompanion, not far from the place where the gentle slope waits for youto entice you, I quake to hear myself think and blaspheme. What, thatnotion of Motherland also, which has so often thrilled me with gladnessand enthusiasm, as but lately that of God did?

But it is in Motherland's name, as once in the name of God only, thathumanity robs itself and tries to choke itself with its own hands, asit will soon succeed in doing. It is because of motherland that thebig countries, more rich in blood, have overcome the little ones. Itis because of motherland that the overlord of German nationalismattacked France and let civil war loose among the people of the world. The question must be placed there where it is, that is to say, everywhere at once. One must see face to face, in one glance, allthose immense, distinct unities which each shout "I!"

The idea of motherland is not a false idea, but it is a little idea, and one which must remain little. 

There is only one common good. There is only one moral duty, only onetruth, and every man is the shining recipient and guardian of it. Thepresent understanding of the idea of motherland divides all these greatideas, cuts them into pieces, specializes them within impenetrablecircles. We meet as many national truths as we do nations, and as manynational duties, and as many national interests and rights--and theyare antagonistic to each other. Each country is separated from thenext by such walls--moral frontiers, material frontiers, commercialfrontiers--that you are imprisoned when you find yourself on eitherside of them. We hear talk of sanctified selfishness, of the adorableexpansion of one race across the others, of noble hatreds and gloriousconquests, and we see these ideals trying to take shape on all hands. This capricious multiplication of what ought to remain one leads thewhole of civilization into a malignant and thorough absurdity. Thewords "justice" and "right" are too great in stature to be shut up inproper nouns, any more than Providence can be, which every royaltywould fain take to itself. 

National aspirations--confessed or unconfessable--are contradictoryamong themselves. All populations which are narrowly confined andelbow each other in the world are full of dreams vaster than each ofthem. The nations' territorial ambitions overlap each other on the mapof the universe; economic and financial ambitions cancel each othermathematically. Then in the mass they are unrealizable. 

And since there is no sort of higher control over this scuffle oftruths which are not admissible, each nation realizes its own by allpossible means, by all the fidelity and anger and brute force she canget out of herself. By the help of this state of world-wide anarchy, the lazy and slight distinction between patriotism, imperialism andmilitarism is violated, trampled, and broken through all along theline, and it cannot be otherwise. The living universe cannot helpbecoming an organization of armed rivalry. And there cannot fail toresult from it the everlasting succession of evils, without any hope ofabiding spoils, for there is no instance of conquerors who have longenjoyed immunity, and history reveals a sort of balance of injusticesand of the fatal alternation of predominance. In all quarters the hopeof victory brings in the hope of war. It is conflict clinging toconflict, and the recurrent murdering of murders. 

The kings! We always find the kings again when we examine popularunhappiness right to the end! This hypertrophy of the national unitiesis the doing of their leaders. It is the masters, the rulingaristocracies--emblazoned or capitalist--who have created andmaintained for centuries all the pompous and sacred raiment, sanctimonious or fanatical, in which national separation is clothed, along with the fable of national interests--those enemies of themultitudes. The primeval centralization of individuals isolated in theinhabited spaces was in agreement with the moral law; it was theprecise embodiment of progress; it was of benefit to all. But thedecreed division, peremptory and stern, which was interposed in thatcentralization--that is the doom of man, although it is necessary tothe classes who command. These boundaries, these clean cuts, permitthe stakes of commercial conflict and of war; that is to say, thechance of big feats of glory and of huge speculations. _That_ is thevital principle of Empire. If all interests suddenly became again theindividual interests of men, and the moral law resumed its full andspacious action on the basis of equality, if human solidarity wereworld-wide and complete, it would no longer lend itself to certainsudden and partial increases which are never to the general advantage, but may be to the advantage of a few fleeting profiteers. That is whythe conscious forces which have hitherto directed the old world'sdestiny will always use all possible means to break up human harmonyinto fragments. Authority holds fast to all its national bases. 

The insensate system of national blocks in sinister dispersal, devouring or devoured, has its apostles and advocates. But thetheorists, the men of spurious knowledge, will in vain have heaped uptheir farrago of quibbles and arguments, their fallacies drawn fromso-called precedents or from so-called economic and ethnic necessity;for the simple, brutal and magnificent cry of life renders useless theefforts they make to galvanize and erect doctrines which cannot standalone. The disapproval which attaches in our time to the word"internationalism" proves together the silliness and meanness of publicopinion. Humanity is the living name of truth. Men are like eachother as trees! They who rule well, rule by force and deceit; but byreason, never. 

The national group is a collectivity within the bosom of the chief one. It is one group like any other; it is like him who knots himself tohimself under the wing of a roof, or under the wider wing of the skythat dyes a landscape blue. It is not the definite, absolute, mysticalgroup into which they would fain transform it, with sorcery of wordsand ideas, which they have armored with oppressive rules. Everywhereman's poor hope of salvation on earth is merely to attain, at the endof his life, this: To live one's life freely, where one wants to liveit; to love, to last, to produce in the chosen environment--just as thepeople of the ancient Provinces have lost, along with their separateleaders, their separate traditions of covetousness and reciprocalrobbery. 

If, from the idea of motherland, you take away covetousness, hatred, envy and vainglory; if you take away from it the desire forpredominance by violence, what is there left of it?

It is not an individual unity of laws; for just laws have no colors. It is not a solidarity of interests, for there are no material nationalinterests--or they are not honest. It is not a unity of race; for themap of the countries is not the map of the races. What is there left?

There is left a restricted communion, deep and delightful; theaffectionate and affecting attraction in the charm of a language--thereis hardly more in the universe besides its languages which areforeigners--there is left a personal and delicate preference forcertain forms of landscape, of monuments, of talent. And even thisradiance has its limits. The cult of the masterpieces of art andthought is the only impulse of the soul which, by general consent, hasalways soared above patriotic littlenesses. 

"But, " the official voices trumpet, "there is another magicformula--the great common Past of every nation. "

Yes, there is the Past. That long Golgotha of oppressed peoples; theLaw of the Strong, changing life's humble festival into useless andrecurring hecatombs; the chronology of that crushing of lives and ideaswhich always tortured or executed the innovators; that Past in whichsovereigns settled their personal affairs of alliances, ruptures, dowries and inheritance with the territory and blood which they owned;in which each and every country was so squandered--it is common to all. That Past in which the small attainments of moral progress, ofwell-being and unity (so far as they were not solely semblances) onlycrystallized with despairing tardiness, with periods of dolefulstagnation and frightful alteration along the channels of barbarism andforce; that Past of somber shame, that Past of error and disease whichevery old nation has survived, which we should learn by heart that wemay hate it--yes, that Past is common to all, like misery, shame andpain. Blessed are the new nations, for they have no remorse!

And the blessings of the past--the splendor of the French Revolution, the huge gifts of the navigators who brought new worlds to the old one, and the miraculous exception of scientific discoveries, which by asecond miracle were not smothered in their youth--are they not alsocommon to all, like the undying beauty of the ruins of the Parthenon, Shakespeare's lightning and Beethoven's raptures, and like love, andlike joy?

The universal problem into which modern life, as well as past life, rushes and embroils and rends itself, can only be dispersed by auniversal means which reduces each nation to what it is in truth; whichstrips from them all the ideal of supremacy stolen by each of them fromthe great human ideal; a means which, raising the human idealdefinitely beyond the reach of all those immoderate emotions, whichshout together "_Mine_ is the only point of view, " gives it at last itsdivine unity. Let us keep the love of the motherland in our hearts, but let us dethrone the conception of Motherland. 

I will say what there is to say: I place the Republic before France. France is ourselves. The Republic is ourselves and the others. Thegeneral welfare must be put much higher than national welfare, becauseit _is_ much higher. But if it is venturesome to assert, as they haveso much and so indiscriminately done, that such national interest is inaccord with the general interest, then the converse is obvious; andthat is illuminating, momentous and decisive--the good of all includesthe good of each; France can be prosperous even if the world is not, but the world cannot be prosperous and France not. The moving argumentreëstablishes, with positive and crowding certainties which touch ussoftly on all sides, that distracting stake which Pascal tried toplace, like a lever in the void--"On one side I lose; on the other Ihave all to gain. "

* * * * * *

Amid the beauty of these dear spots on Chestnut Hill, in the heart ofthese four crossing ways, I have seen new things; not that any newthings have happened, but because I have opened my eyes. 

I am rewarded, I the lowest, for being the only one of all to follow uperror to the end, right into its holy places; for I am at lastdisentangling all the simplicity and truth of the great horizons. Therevelation still seems to me so terrible that the silence of men, heaped under the roofs down there at my feet, seizes and threatens me. And if I am but timidly formulating it within myself, that is becauseeach of us has lived in reality more than his life, and because mytraining has filled me, like the rest, with centuries of shadow, ofhumiliation and captivity. 

It is establishing itself cautiously; but it is the truth, and thereare moments when logic seizes you in its godlike whirlwind. In thisdisordered world where the weakness of a few oppresses the strength ofall; since ever the religion of the God of Battles and of Resignationhas not sufficed by itself to consecrate inequality. Tradition reigns, the gospel of the blind adoration of what was and what is--God withouta head. Man's destiny is eternally blockaded by two forms oftradition; in time, by hereditary succession; in space, by frontiers, and thus it is crushed and annihilated in detail. It is the truth. Iam certain of it, for I am touching it. 

But I do not know what will become of us. All the blood poured out, all the words poured out, to impose a sham ideal on our bodies andsouls, will they suffice for a long time yet to separate and isolatehumanity in absurdity made real? History is a Bible of errors. I havenot only seen blessings falling from on high on all which supportedevil, and curses on all which could heal it; I have seen, here below, the keepers of the moral law hunted and derided, from little Termite, lost like a rat in unfolding battle, back to Jesus Christ. 

We go away. For the first time since I came back I no longer lean onMarie. It is she who leans on me. 

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XXI

NO!

The opening of our War Museum, which was the conspicuous event of thefollowing days, filled Crillon with delight. 

It was a wooden building, gay with flags, which the municipality haderected; and Room 1 was occupied by an exhibition of paintings anddrawings by amateurs in high society, all war subjects. Many of themwere sent down from Paris. 

Crillon, officially got up in his Sunday clothes, has bought thecatalogue (which is sold for the benefit of the wounded) and he isstruck with wonder by the list of exhibitors. He talks of titles, ofcoats of arms, of crowns; he seeks enlightenment in matters ofaristocratic hierarchy. Once, as he stands before the row of frames, he asks:

"I say, now, which has got most talent in France--a princess or aduchess?"

He is quite affected by these things, and with his eyes fixed on thelower edges of the pictures he deciphers the signatures. 

In the room which follows this shining exhibition of autographs thereis a crush. 

On trestles disposed around the wall trophies are arranged--peakedhelmets, knapsacks covered with tawny hair, ruins of shells. 

The complete uniform of a German infantryman has been built up withitems from different sources, some of them stained. 

In this room there was a group of convalescents from the overflowhospital of Viviers. These soldiers looked, and hardly spoke. Severalshrugged their shoulders. But one of them growled in front of theGerman phantom, "Ah the swine!"

With a view to propaganda, they have framed a letter from a woman foundin a slain enemy's pocket. A translation is posted up as well, andthey have underlined the passage in which the woman says, "When is thiscursed war going to end?" and in which she laments the increasing costof little Johann's keep. At the foot of the page, the woman hasdepicted, in a sentimental diagram, the increasing love that she feelsfor her man. 

How simple and obvious the evidence is! No reasonable person candispute that the being whose private life is here thrown to the windsand who poured out his sweat and his blood in one of these rags was notresponsible for having held a rifle, for having aimed it. In thepresence of these ruins I see with monotonous and implacable obstinacythat the attacking multitude is as innocent as the defending multitude. 

On a little red-covered table by the side of a little tacked labelwhich says, "Cold Steel: May 9, " there is a twisted French bayonet--abayonet, the flesh weapon, which has been twisted!

"Oh, it's fine!" says a young girl from the castle. 

"It isn't Fritz and Jerry, old chap, that bends bayonets!"

"No doubt about it, we're the first soldiers in the world, " saysRampaille. 

"We've set a beautiful example to the world, " says a sprightly Memberof the Upper House to all those present. 

Excitement grows around that bayonet. The young girl, who is beautifuland expansive, cannot tear herself away from it. At last she touchesit with her finger, and shudders. She does not disguise her pleasantemotion:--

"I confess _I'm_ a patriot! I'm more than that--I'm a patriot and amilitarist!"

All heads around her are nodded in approval. That kind of talk neverseems intemperate, for it touches on sacred things. 

And I, I see--in the night which falls for a moment, amid the tempestof dying men which is subsiding on the ground--I see a monster in theform of a man and in the form of a vulture, who, with the death-rattlein his throat, holds towards that young girl the horrible head that isscalped with a coronet, and says to her: "You do not know me, and youdo not know, but you are like me!"

The young girl's living laugh, as she goes off with a young officer, recalls me to events. 

All those who come after each other to the bayonet speak in the sameway, and have the same proud eyes. 

"They're not stronger than us, let me tell you! It's us that's thestrongest!"

"Our allies are very good, but it's lucky for them we're there on thejob. "

"Ah, la, la!"

"Why, yes, there's only the French for it. All the world admires them. Only we're always running ourselves down. "

When you see that fever, that spectacle of intoxication, these peoplewho seize the slightest chance to glorify their country's physicalforce and the hardness of its fists, you hear echoing the words of theorators and the official politicians:--

"There is only in our hearts the condemnation of barbarism and the loveof humanity. "

And you ask yourself if there is a single public opinion in the worldwhich is capable of bearing victory with dignity. 

I stand aloof. I am a blot, like a bad prophet. I hear thisdeclaration, which bows me like an infernal burden: It is only defeatwhich can open millions of eyes!

I hear some one say, with detestation, "German militarism----"

That is the final argument, that is the formula. Yes, Germanmilitarism is hateful, and must disappear; all the world is agreedabout that--the jack-boots of the Junkers, of the Crown Princes, of theKaiser, and their courts of intellectuals and business men, and thepan-Germanism which would dye Europe black and red, and thehalf-bestial servility of the German people. Germany is the fiercestfortress of militarism. Yes, everybody is agreed about that. 

But they who govern Thought take unfair advantage of that agreement, for they know well that when the simple folk have said, "Germanmilitarism, " they have said all. They stop there. They amalgamate thetwo words and confuse militarism with Germany--once Germany is throwndown there's no more to say. In that way, they attach lies to truth, and prevent us from seeing that militarism is in reality everywhere, more or less hypocritical and unconscious, but ready to seizeeverything if it can. They force opinion to add, "It is a crime tothink of anything but beating the German enemy. " But the right-mindedman must answer that it is a crime to think only of that, for the enemyis militarism, and not Germany. I know; I will no longer let myself becaught by words which they hide one behind another. 

The Liberal Member of the Upper House says, loud enough to be heard, that the people have behaved very well, for, after all, they have foundthe cost, and they must be given credit for their good conduct. 

Another personage in the same group, an Army contractor, spoke of "thegood chaps in the trenches, " and he added, in a lower voice, "As longas they're protecting us, we're all right. "

"We shall reward them when they come back, " replied an old lady. "Weshall give them glory, we shall make their leaders into Marshals, andthey'll have celebrations, and Kings will be there. "

"And there are some who won't come back. "

We see several new recruits of the 1916 class who will soon be sent tothe front. 

"They're pretty boys, " says the Member of the Upper House, good-naturedly; "but they're still a bit pale-faced. We must fatten'em up, we must fatten 'em up!"

An official of the Ministry of War goes up to the Member of the UpperHouse, and says:

"The science of military preparedness is still in its beginnings. We're getting clear for it hastily, but it is an organization whichrequires a long time and which can only have full effect in time ofpeace. Later, we shall take them from childhood; we shall make goodsound soldiers of them, and of good health, morally as well asphysically. "

Then the band plays; it is closing time, and there is the passion of amilitary march. A woman cries that it is like drinking champagne tohear it. 

The visitors have gone away. I linger to look at the beflagged frontof the War Museum, while night is falling. It is the Temple. It isjoined to the Church, and resembles it. My thoughts go to thosecrosses which weigh down, from the pinnacles of churches, the heads ofthe living, join their two hands together, and close their eyes; thosecrosses which squat upon the graves in the cemeteries at the front. Itis because of all these temples that in the future the sleep-walkingnations will begin again to go through the immense and mournful tragedyof obedience. It is because of these temples that financial andindustrial tyranny, Imperial and Royal tyranny--of which all they whomI meet on my way are the accomplices or the puppets--will to-morrowbegin again to wax fat on the fanaticism of the civilian, on theweariness of those who have come back, on the silence of the dead. (When the armies file through the Arc de Triomphe, who is there willsee--and yet they will be plainly visible--that six thousand miles ofFrench coffins are also passing through!) And the flag will continueto float over its prey, that flag stuck into the shadowy front of theWar Museum, that flag so twisted by the wind's breath that sometimes ittakes the shape of a cross, and sometimes of a scythe!

Judgment is passed in that case. But the vision of the future agitatesme with a sort of despair and with a holy thrill of anger. 

Ah, there are cloudy moments when one asks himself if men do notdeserve all the disasters into which they rush! No--I recovermyself--they do not deserve them. But _we_, instead of saying "I wish"must say "I will. " And what we will, we must will to build it, withorder, with method, beginning at the beginning, when once we have beenas far as that beginning. We must not only open our eyes, but ourarms, our wings. 

This isolated wooden building, with its back against a wood-pile, andnobody in it----

Burn it? Destroy it? I thought of doing it. 

To cast that light in the face of that moving night, which was crawlingand trampling there in the torchlight, which had gone to plunge intothe town and grow darker among the dungeon-cells of the bedchambers, there to hatch more forgetfulness in the gloom, more evil and misery, or to breed unavailing generations who will be abortive at the age oftwenty!

The desire to do it gripped my body for a moment. I fell back, and Iwent away, like the others. 

It seems to me that, in not doing it, I did an evil deed. 

For if the men who are to come free themselves instead of sinking inthe quicksands, if they consider, with lucidity and with the epic pityit deserves, this age through which I go drowning, they would perhapshave thanked me, even me! From those who will not see or know me, butin whom for this sudden moment I want to hope, I beg pardon for notdoing it. 

* * * * * *

In a corner where the neglected land is turning into a desert, andwhich lies across my way home, some children are throwing stones at amirror which they have placed a few steps away as a target. Theyjostle each other, shouting noisily; each of them wants the glory ofbeing the first to break it. I see the mirror again that I broke witha brick at Buzancy, because it seemed to stand upright like a livingbeing! Next, when the fragment of solid light is shattered intocrumbs, they pursue with stones an old dog, whose wounded foot trailslike his tail. No one wants it any more; it is ready to be finishedoff, and the urchins are improving the occasion. Limping, hispot-hanger spine all arched, the animal hurries slowly, and triesvainly to go faster than the pebbles. 

The child is only a confused handful of confused and superficialpropensities. _Our_ deep instincts--there they are. 

I scatter the children, and they withdraw into the shadows unwillingly, and look at me with malice. I am distressed by this maliciousness, which is born full-grown. I am distressed also by this old dog's lot. They would not understand me if I acknowledged that distress; theywould say, "And you who've seen so many wounded and dead!" All thesame, there is a supreme respect for life. I am not slightingintellect; but life is common to us along with poorer living thingsthan ourselves. He who kills an animal, however lowly it may be, unless there is necessity, is an assassin. 

At the crossing I meet Louise Verte, wandering about. She has gonecrazy. She continues to accost men, but they do not even know what shebegs for. She rambles, in the streets, and in her hovel, and on thepallet where she is crucified by drunkards. She is surrounded bygeneral loathing. "That a woman?" says a virtuous man who is going by, "that dirty old strumpet? A woman? A sewer, yes. " She is harmless. In a feeble, peaceful voice, which seems to live in some supernaturalregion, very far from us, she says to me:

"I am the queen. "

Immediately and strangely she adds, as though troubled by someforeboding:

"Don't take my illusion away from me. "

I was on the point of answering her, but I check myself, and just say, "Yes, " as one throws a copper, and she goes away happy. 

* * * * * *

My respect for life is so strong that I feel pity for a fly which Ihave killed. Observing the tiny corpse at the gigantic height of myeyes, I cannot help thinking how well made that organized speck of dustis, whose wings are little more than two drops of space, whose eye hasfour thousand facets; and that fly occupies my thought for a moment, which is a long time for it. 

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XXII

LIGHT

I am leaning this evening out of the open window. As in bygone nights, I am watching the dark pictures, invisible at first, taking shape--thesteeple towering out of the hollow, and broadly lighted against thehill; the castle, that rich crown of masonry; and then the massivesloping black of the chimney-peopled roofs, which are sharply outlinedagainst the paler black of space, and some milky, watching windows. The eye is lost in all directions among the desolation where themultitude of men and women are hiding, as always and as everywhere. 

That is what is. Who will say, "That is what must be!"

I have searched, I have indistinctly seen, I have doubted. Now, Ihope. 

I do not regret my youth and its beliefs. Up to now, I have wasted mytime to live. Youth is the true force, but it is too rarely lucid. Sometimes it has a triumphant liking for what is now, and thepugnacious broadside of paradox may please it. But there is a degreein innovation which they who have not lived very much cannot attain. And yet who knows if the stern greatness of present events will nothave educated and aged the generation which to-day forms humanity'seffective frontier? Whatever our hope may be, if we did not place itin youth, where should we place it?

Who will speak--see, and then speak? To speak is the same thing as tosee, but it is more. Speech perpetuates vision. We carry no light; weare things of shadow, for night closes our eyes, and we put out ourhands to find our way when the light is gone; we only shine in speech;truth is made by the mouths of men. The wind of words--what is it? Itis our breath--not all words, for there are artificial and copied oneswhich are not part of the speaker; but the profound words, the cries. In the human cry you feel the effort of the spring. The cry comes outof us, it is as living as a child. The cry goes on, and makes theappeal of truth wherever it may be, the cry gathers cries. 

There is a voice, a low and untiring voice, which helps those who donot and will not see themselves, a voice which brings them together, Books--the book we choose, the favorite, the book you open, which waswaiting for you!

Formerly, I hardly knew any books. Now, I love what they do. I havebrought together as many as I could. There they are, on the shelves, with their immense titles, their regular, profound contents; they arethere, all around me, arranged like houses. 

* * * * * *

Who will tell the truth? But it is not enough to say things in orderto let them be seen. 

Just now, pursued by the idea of my temptation at the War Museum, Iimagined that I had acted on it, and that I was appearing before thejudges. I should have told them a fine lot of truths, I should haveproved to them that I had done right. I should have made myself, theaccused, into the prosecutor. 

No! I should not have spoken thus, for I should not have known! Ishould have stood stammering, full of a truth throbbing within me, choking, unconfessable truth. It is not enough to speak; you must knowwords. When you have said, "I am in pain, " or when you have said, "Iam right, " you have said nothing in reality, you have only spoken toyourself. The real presence of truth is not in every word of truth, because of the wear and tear of words, and the fleeting multiplicity ofarguments. One must have the gift of persuasion, of leaving to truthits speaking simplicity, its solemn unfoldings. It is not I who willbe able to speak from the depths of myself. The attention of mendazzles me when it rises before me. The very nakedness of paperfrightens me and drowns my looks. Not I shall embellish that whitenesswith writing like light. I understand of what a great tribune's sorrowis made; and I can only dream of him who, visibly summarizing theimmense crisis of human necessity in a work which forgets nothing, which seems to forget nothing, without the blot even of a misplacedcomma, will proclaim our Charter to the epochs of the times in which weare, and will let us see it. Blessed be that simplifier, from whatevercountry he may come, --but all the same, I should prefer him, at thebottom of my heart, to speak French. 

Once more, he intervenes within me who first showed himself to me asthe specter of evil, he who guided me through hell. When thedeath-agony was choking him and his head had darkened like an eagle's, he hurled a curse which I did not understand, which I understand now, on the masterpieces of art. He was afraid of their eternity, of thatterrible might they have--when once they are imprinted on the eyes ofan epoch--the strength which you can neither kill nor drive in front ofyou. He said that Velasquez, who was only a chamberlain, had succeededPhilip IV, that he would succeed the Escurial, that he would succeedeven Spain and Europe. He likened that artistic power, which the Kingshave tamed in all respects save in its greatness, to that of apoet-reformer who throws a saying of freedom and justice abroad, a bookwhich scatters sparks among humanity somber as coal. The voice of theexpiring prince crawled on the ground and throbbed with secret blows:"Begone, all you voices of light!"

* * * * * *

But what shall _we_ say? Let us spell out the Magna Charta of which wehumbly catch sight. Let us say to the people of whom all peoples aremade: "Wake up and understand, look and see; and having begun againthe consciousness which was mown down by slavery, decide thateverything must be begun again!"

Begin again, entirely. Yes, that first. If the human charter does notre-create everything, it will create nothing. 

Unless they are universal, the reforms to be carried out are utopianand mortal. National reforms are only fragments of reforms. Theremust be no half measures. Half measures are laughter-provoking intheir unbounded littleness when it is a question for the last time ofarresting the world's roll down the hill of horror. There must be nohalf measures because there are no half truths. Do all, or you will donothing. 

Above all, do not let the reforms be undertaken by the Kings. That isthe gravest thing to be taught you. The overtures of liberality madeby the masters who have made the world what it is are only comedies. They are only ways of blockading completely the progress to come, ofbuilding up the past again behind new patchwork of plaster. 

Never listen, either, to the fine words they offer you, the letters ofwhich you see like dry bones on hoardings and the fronts of buildings. There are official proclamations, full of the notion of liberty andrights, which would be beautiful if they said truly what they say. Butthey who compose them do not attach their full meaning to the words. What they recite they are not capable of wanting, nor even ofunderstanding. The one indisputable sign of progress in ideas to-dayis that there are things which they dare no longer leave publiclyunsaid, and that's all. There are not all the political parties thatthere seem to be. They swarm, certainly, as numerous as the cases ofshort sight; but there are only two--the democrats and theconservatives. Every political deed ends fatally either in one or theother, and all their leaders have always a tendency to act in thedirection of reaction. Beware, and never forget that if certainassertions are made by certain lips, that is a sufficient reason whyyou should at once mistrust them. When the bleached old republicans[1]take your cause in their hands, be quite sure that it is not yours. Bewary as lions. 

[Footnote 1: The word is used here much in the sense of our word"Tories. "--Tr. ]

Do not let the simplicity of the new world out of your sight. Thesocial trust is simple. The complications are in what is overhead--theaccumulation of delusions and prejudice heaped up by ages of tyrants, parasites, and lawyers. That conviction sheds a real glimmer of lighton your duty and points out the way to accomplish it. He who would digright down to the truth must simplify; his faith must be brutallysimple, or he is lost. Laugh at the subtle shades and distinctions ofthe rhetoricians and the specialist physicians. Say aloud: "This iswhat is, " and then, "That is what must be. "

You will never have that simplicity, you people of the world, if you donot seize it. If you want it, do it yourself with your own hands. AndI give you now the talisman, the wonderful magic word--you _can_!

That you may be a judge of existing things, go back to their origins, and get at the endings of all. The noblest and most fruitful work ofthe human intelligence is to make a clean sweep of every enforcedidea--of advantages or meanings--and to go right through appearances insearch of the eternal bases. Thus you will clearly see the moral lawat the beginning of all things, and the conception of justice andequality will appear to you beautiful as daylight. 

Strong in that supreme simplicity, you shall say: I am the people ofthe peoples; therefore I am the King of Kings, and I will thatsovereignty flows everywhere from me, since I am might and right. Iwant no more despots, confessed or otherwise, great or little; I know, and I want no more. The incomplete liberation of 1789 was attacked bythe Kings. Complete liberation will attack the Kings. 

But Kings are not exclusively the uniformed ones among the trumperywares of the courts. Assuredly, the nations who have a King have moretradition and subjection than the others. But there are countrieswhere no man can get up and say, "My people, my army, " nations whichonly experience the continuation of the kingly tradition in morepeaceful intensity. There are others with the great figures ofdemocratic leaders; but as long as the entirety of things is notoverthrown--always the entirety, the sacred entirety--these men cannotachieve the impossible, and sooner or later their too-beautifulinclinations will be isolated and misunderstood. In the formidableurgency of progress, what do the proportions matter to you of theelements which make up the old order of things in the world? All thegovernors cling fatally together among themselves, and more solidlythan you think, through the old machine of chancelleries, ministries, diplomacy, and the ceremonials with gilded swords; and when they arebent on making war for themselves there is an unquenchable likenessbetween them all, of which you want no more. Break the chain; suppressall privileges, and say at last, "Let, there be equality. "

One man is as good as another. That means that no man carries withinhimself any privilege which puts him above the universal law. It meansan equality in principle, and that does not invalidate the legitimacyof the differences due to work, to talent, and to moral sense. Theleveling only affects the rights of the citizen; and not the man as awhole. You do not create the living being; you do not fashion theliving clay, as God did in the Bible; you make regulations. Individualworth, on which some pretend to rely, is relative and unstable, and noone is a judge of it. In a well-organized entirety, it cultivates andimproves itself automatically. But that magnificent anarchy cannot, atthe inception of the human Charter, take the place of the obviousnessof equality. 

The poor man, the proletarian, is nobler than another, but not moresacred. In truth, all workers and all honest men are as good as eachother. But the poor, the exploited, are fifteen hundred millions hereon earth. They are the Law because they are the Number. The moral lawis only the imperative preparation of the common good. It alwaysinvolves, in different forms, the necessary limitations of someindividual interests by the rest; that is to say, the sacrifice of oneto the many, of the many to the whole. The republican conception isthe civic translation of the moral law; what is anti-republican isimmoral. 

Socially, women are the equals of men, without restrictions. Thebeings who shine and who bring forth are not made solely to lend or togive the heat of their bodies. It is right that the sum total of workshould be shared, reduced and harmonized by their hands. It is justthat the fate of humanity should be grounded also in the strength ofwomen. Whatever the danger which their instinctive love of shiningthings may occasion, in spite of the facility with which they color allthings with their own feelings and the totality of their slightestimpulses--the legend of their incapacity is a fog that you willdissipate with a gesture of _your_ hands. Their advent is in the orderof things; and it is also in order to await with hopeful heart the daywhen the social and political chains of women will fall off, when humanliberty will suddenly become twice as great. 

People of the world, establish equality right up to the limits of yourgreat life. Lay the foundations of the republic of republics over allthe area where you breathe; that is to say, the common control in broaddaylight of all external affairs, of community in the laws of labor, ofproduction and of commerce. The subdivision of these high social andmoral arrangements by nations or by limited unions of nations(enlargements which are reductions) is artificial, arbitrary, andmalignant. The so-called inseparable cohesions of national interestsvanish away as soon as you draw near to examine them. There areindividual interests and a general interest, those two only. When yousay "I, " it means "I"; when you say "We, " it means Man. So long as asingle and identical Republic does not cover the world, all nationalliberations can only be beginnings and signals!

Thus you will disarm the "fatherlands" and "motherlands, " and you willreduce the notion of Motherland to the little bit of social importancethat it must have. You will do away with the military frontiers, andthose economic and commercial barriers which are still worse. Protection introduces violence into the expansion of labor; likemilitarism, it brings in a fatal absence of balance. You will suppressthat which justifies among nations the things which among individualswe call murder, robbery, and unfair competition. You will suppressbattles--not nearly so much by the direct measure of supervision andorder that you will take as because you will suppress the causes ofbattle. You will suppress them chiefly because it is _you_ who will doit, by yourself, everywhere, with your invincible strength and thelucid conscience that is free from selfish motives. You will not makewar on yourself. 

You will not be afraid of magic formulas and the churches. Your giantreason will destroy the idol which suffocates its true believers. Youwill salute the flags for the last time; to that ancient enthusiasmwhich flattered the puerility of your ancestors, you will say apeaceful and final farewell. In some corners of the calamities of thepast, there were times of tender emotion; but truth is greater, andthere are not more boundaries on the earth than on the sea!

Each country will be a moral force, and no longer a brutal force; whileall brutal forces clash with themselves, all moral forces make mightyharmony together. 

The universal republic is the inevitable consequence of equal rights inlife for all. Start from the principle of equality, and you arrive atthe people's international. If you do not arrive there it is becauseyou have not reasoned aright. They who start from the opposite pointof view--God, and the divine rights of popes and Kings and nobles, andauthority and tradition--will come, by fabulous paths but quitelogically, to opposite conclusions. You must not cease to hold thatthere are only two teachings face to face. All things are amenable toreason, the supreme Reason which mutilated humanity, wounded in theeyes, has deified among the clouds. 

* * * * * *

You will do away with the rights of the dead, and with heredity ofpower, whatever it may be, that inheritance which is unjust in all itsgradations, for tradition takes root there, and it is an outrage onequality, against the order of labor. Labor is a great civic deedwhich all men and all women without exception must share or go down. Such divisions will reduce it for each one to dignified proportions andprevent it from devouring human lives. 

You will not permit colonial ownership by States, which makes stains onthe map of the world and is not justified by confessable reasons; andyou will organize the abolition of that collective slavery. You willallow the individual property of the living to stand. It is equitablebecause its necessity is inherent in the circumstances of the living, and because there are cases where you cannot tear away the right ofownership without tearing right itself. Besides, the love of things isa passion, like the love of beings. The object of social organizationis not to destroy sentiment and pleasure, but on the contrary to allowthem to flourish, within the limit of not wronging others. It is rightto enjoy what you have clearly earned by your work. That focusedwisdom alone bursts among the old order of things like a curse. 

Chase away forever, everywhere, everywhere, the bad masters of thesacred school. Knowledge incessantly remakes the whole ofcivilization. The child's intelligence is too precious not to be underthe protection of all. The heads of families are not free to dealaccording to their caprices with the ignorance which each child bringsinto the daylight; they have not that liberty contrary to liberty. Achild does not belong body and soul to its parents; it is a person, andour ears are wounded by the blasphemy--a residue of despotic Romantradition--of those who speak of their sons killed in the war and say, "I have given my son. " You do not give living beings--and allintelligence belongs primarily to reason. 

There must no longer be a single school where they teach idolatry, where the wills of to-morrow grow bigger under the terror of a God whodoes not exist, and on whom so many bad arguments are thrown away orjustified. Nowhere must there be any more school-books where theydress up in some finery of prestige what is most contemptible anddebasing in the past of the nations. Let there be nothing butuniversal histories, nothing but the great lines and peaks, the lightsand shadows of that chaos which for six thousand years has been thefortune of two hundred thousand millions of men. 

You will suppress everywhere the advertising of the cults, you willwipe away the inky uniform of the parsons. Let every believer keep hisreligion for himself, and let the priests stay between walls. Toleration in face of error is a graver error. One might have dreamedof a wise and universal church, for Jesus Christ will be justified inHis human teaching as long as there are hearts. But they who havetaken His morality in hand and fabricated their religion have poisonedthe truth; more, they have shown for two thousand years that they placethe interests of their caste before those of the sacred law of what isright. No words, no figures can ever give an idea of the evil whichthe Church has done to mankind. When she is not the oppressor herself, upholding the right of force, she lends her authority to the oppressorsand sanctifies their pretenses; and still to-day she is closely unitedeverywhere with those who do not want the reign of the poor. Just asthe Jingoes invoke the charm of the domestic cradle that they may givean impulse to war, so does the Church invoke the poetry of the Gospels;but she has become an aristocratic party like the rest, in which everygesture of the sign of the Cross is a slap in the Face of Jesus Christ. Out of the love of one's native soil, they have made Nationalists; outof Jesus they have made Jesuits. 

Only international greatness will at last permit the rooting up of thestubborn abuses which the partition walls of nationality multiply, entangle and solidify. The future Charter--of which we confusedlyglimpse some signs and which has for its premises the great moralprinciples restored to their place, and the multitude at last restoredto theirs--will force the newspapers to confess all their resources. By means of a young language, simple and modest, it will unite allforeigners--those prisoners of themselves. It will mow down thehateful complexity of judicial procedure, with its booty for thesomebodies, and its lawyers as well, who intrude the tricks ofdiplomacy and the melodramatic usages of eloquence into the plain andsimple machinery of justice. The righteous man must go so far as tosay that clemency has not its place in justice; the logical majesty ofthe sentence which condemns the guilty one in order to frightenpossible evil-doers (and never for another reason) is itself beyondforgiveness. International dignity will close the taverns, forbid thesale of poisons, and will reduce to impotence the vendors who want torender abortive, in men and young people, the future's beauty and thereign of intelligence. And here is a mandate which appears before myeyes--the tenacious law which must pounce without respite on all publicrobbers, on all those, little and big, cynics and hypocrites, who, whentheir trade or their functions bring the opportunity, exploit miseryand speculate on necessity. There is a new hierarchy to make mistakes, to commit offenses and crimes--the true one. 

You can form no idea of the beauty that is possible! You cannotimagine what all the squandered treasure can provide, what can bebrought on by the resurrection of misguided human intelligence, successively smothered and slain hitherto by infamous slavery, by thedespicable infectious necessity of armed attack and defense, and by theprivileges which debase human worth. You can have no notion what humanintelligence may one day find of new adoration. The people's absolutereign will give to literature and the arts--whose harmonious shape isstill but roughly sketched--a splendor boundless as the rest. Nationalcliques cultivate narrowness and ignorance, they cause originality towaste away; and the national academies, to which a residue ofsuperstition lends respect, are only pompous ways of upholding ruins. The domes of those Institutes which look so grand when they tower aboveyou are as ridiculous as extinguishers. You must widen andinternationalize, without pause or limit, all which permits of it. With its barriers collapsed, you must fill society with broad daylightand magnificent spaces; with patience and heroism must you clear theways which lead from the individual to humanity, the ways which werestopped up with corpses of ideas and with stone images all along theirgreat curving horizons. Let everything be remade on simple lines. There is only one people, there is only one people!

If you do that, you will be able to say that, at the moment when youplanned your effort and took your decision, you saved the human speciesas far as it is possible on earth to do it. You will not have broughthappiness about. The fallacy-mongers do not frighten us when theypreach resignation and paralysis on the plea that no social change canbring happiness, thus trifling with these profound things. Happinessis part of the inner life, it is an intimate and personal paradise; itis a flash of chance or genius which comes sweetly to life among thosewho elbow each other, and it is also the sense of glory. No, it is notin your hands, and so it is in nobody's hands. But a balanced andheedful life is necessary to man, that he may build the isolated homeof happiness; and death is the fearful connection of the happeningswhich pass away along with our profundities. External things and thosewhich are hidden are essentially different, but they are held togetherby peace and by death. 

To accomplish the majestically practical work, to shape the wholearchitecture like a statue, base nothing on impossible modifications ofhuman nature; await nothing from pity. 

Charity is a privilege, and must disappear. For the rest, you cannotlove unknown people any more than you can have pity on them. The humanintelligence is made for infinity; the heart is not. The being whoreally suffers in his heart, and not merely in his mind or in words, bythe suffering of others whom he neither sees nor touches, is a nervousabnormality, and he cannot be argued from as an example. The repulseof reason, the stain of absurdity, torture the intelligence in a moreabundant way. Simple as it may be, social science is geometry. Do notaccept the sentimental meaning they give to the word "humanitarianism, "and say that the preaching of fraternity and love is vain; these wordslose their meaning amid the great numbers of man. It is in thisdisordered confusion of feelings and ideas that one feels the presenceof Utopia. Mutual solidarity is of the intellect--common-sense, logic, methodical precision, order without faltering, the ruthless inevitableperfection of light!

In my fervor, in my hunger, and from the depths of my abyss, I utteredthese words aloud amid the silence. My great reverie was blended withsong, like the Ninth Symphony. 

* * * * * *

I am resting on my elbows at the window. I am looking at the night, which is everywhere, which touches me, _me_, although I am only I, andit is infinite night. It seems to me that there is nothing else leftme to think about. Things cling together; they will save each other, and will do their setting in order. 

But again I am seized by the sharpest of my agonies--I am afraid thatthe multitude may rest content with the partial gratifications to begranted them everywhere by those who will use all their clinging, cunning power to prevent the people from understanding, and then fromwishing. On the day of victory, they will pour intoxication anddazzling deceptions into you, and put almost superhuman cries into yourmouths, "We have delivered humanity; we are the soldiers of the Right!"without telling you all that such a statement includes of gravity, ofimmense pledges and constructive genius, what it involves in respectfor great peoples, whoever they are, and of gratitude to those who aretrying to deliver themselves. They will again take up their eternalmission of stupefying the great conscious forces, and turning themaside from their ends. They will appeal for union and peace andpatience, to the opportunism of changes, to the danger of going tooquickly, or of meddling in your neighbor's affairs, and all the otherfallacies of the sort. They will try again to ridicule and strike downthose whom the newspapers (the ones in their pay) call dreamers, sectarians, and traitors; once again they will flourish all their oldtalismans. Doubtless they will propose, in the fashionable words ofthe moment, some official parodies of international justice, which theywill break up one day like theatrical scenery; they will enunciate somepopular right, curtailed by childish restrictions and monstrousdefinitions, resembling a brigand's code of honor. The wrong torn fromconfessed autocracies will hatch out elsewhere--in the sham republics, and the self-styled liberal countries who have played a hidden game. The concessions they will make will clothe the old rotten autocracyagain, and perpetuate it. One imperialism will replace the other, andthe generations to come will be marked for the sword. Soldier, wherever you are, they will try to efface your memory, or to exploitit, by leading it astray, and forgetfulness of the truth is the firstform of your adversity! May neither defeat nor victory be against you. You are above both of them, for you are all the people. 

The skies are peopled with stars, a harmony which clasps reason close, and applies the mind to the adorable idea of universal unity. Mustthat harmony give us hope or misgiving?

We are in a great night of the world. The thing is to know if we shallwake up to-morrow. We have only one succor--_we_ know of what thenight is made. But shall we be able to impart our lucid faith, seeingthat the heralds of warning are everywhere few, and that the greatestvictims hate the only ideal which is not one, and call it utopian?Public opinion floats over the surface of the peoples, wavering andsubmissive to the wind; it lends but fleeting conscience and convictionto the majority; it cries "Down with the reformers!" It cries"Sacrilege!" because it is made to see in its vague thoughts what itcould not itself see there. It cries that they are distorting it, whereas they are enlarging it. 

I am not afraid, as many are, and as I once was myself, of beingreviled and slandered. I do not cling to respect and gratitude formyself. But if I succeed in reaching men, I should like them not tocurse me. Why should they, since it is not for myself? It is onlybecause I am sure I am right. I am sure of the principles I see at thesource of all--justice, logic, equality; all those divinely humantruths whose contrast with the realized truth of to-day is soheart-breaking. And I want to appeal to you all; and that confidencewhich fills me with a tragic joy, I want to give it to you, at once asa command and as a prayer. There are not several ways of attaining itathwart everything, and of fastening life and the truth together again;there is only one--right-doing. Let rule begin again with the sublimecontrol of the intellect. I am a man like the rest, a man like you. You who shake your head or shrug your shoulders as you listen tome--why are we, we two, we all, so foreign to each other, when we arenot foreign?

I believe, in spite of all, in truth's victory. I believe in themomentous value, hereafter inviolable, of those few truly fraternal menin all the countries of the world, who, in the oscillation of nationalegoisms let loose, stand up and stand out, steadfast as the gloriousstatues of Right and Duty. To-night I believe--nay, I am certain--thatthe new order will be built upon that archipelago of men. Even if wehave still to suffer as far as we can see ahead, the idea can no morecease to throb and grow stronger than the human heart can; and the willwhich is already rising here and there they can no longer destroy. 

I proclaim the inevitable advent of the universal republic. Not thetransient backslidings, nor the darkness and the dread, nor the tragicdifficulty of uplifting the world everywhere at once will prevent thefulfillment of international truth. But if the great powers ofdarkness persist in holding their positions, if they whose clear criesof warning should be voices crying in the wilderness--O you people ofthe world, you the unwearying vanquished of History, I appeal to yourjustice and I appeal to your anger. Over the vague quarrels whichdrench the strands with blood, over the plunderers of shipwrecks, overthe jetsam and the reefs, and the palaces and monuments built upon thesand, I see the high tide coming. Truth is only revolutionary byreason of error's disorder. Revolution is Order. 

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XXIII

FACE TO FACE

Through the panes I see the town--I often take refuge at the windows. Then I go into Marie's bedroom, which gives a view of the country. Itis such a narrow room that to get to the window I must touch her tidylittle bed, and I think of her as I pass it. A bed is something whichnever seems either so cold or so lifeless as other things; it lives byan absence. 

Marie is working in the house, downstairs. I hear sounds of movedfurniture, of a broom, and the recurring knock of the shovel on thebucket into which she empties the dust she has collected. That societyis badly arranged which forces nearly all women to be servants. Marie, who is as good as I am, will have spent her life in cleaning, instooping amid dust and hot fumes, over head and ears in the greatartificial darkness of the house. I used to find it all natural. NowI think it is all anti-natural. 

I hear no more sounds. Marie has finished. She comes up beside me. We have sought each other and come together as often as possible sincethe day when we saw so clearly that we no longer loved each other!

We sit closely side by side, and watch the end of the day. We can seethe last houses of the town, in the beginning of the valley, low houseswithin enclosures, and yards, and gardens stocked with sheds. Autumnis making the gardens quite transparent, and reducing them to nothingthrough their trees and hedges; yet here and there foliage stillmagnificently flourishes. It is not the wide landscape in its entiretywhich attracts me. It is more worth while to pick out each of thehouses and look at it closely. 

These houses, which form the finish of the suburb, are not big, and arenot prosperous; but we see one adorning itself with smoke, and we thinkof the dead wood coming to life again on the hearth, and of the seatedworkman, whose hands are rewarded with rest. And that one, althoughmotionless, is alive with children--the breeze is scattering thelaughter of their games and seems to play with it, and on the sandyground are the crumbs of childish footsteps. Our eyes follow thepostman entering his home, his work ended; he has heroically overcomehis long journeyings. After carrying letters all day to those who werewaiting for them, he is carrying himself to his own people, who alsoawait him--it is the family which knows the value of the father. Hepushes the gate open, he enters the garden path, his hands are at lastempty!

Along by the old gray wall, old Eudo is making his way, the incurablewidower whose bad news still stubbornly persists, so that he bears italong around him, and it slackens his steps, and can be seen, and hetakes up more space than he seems to take. A woman meets him, and heryouth is disclosed in the twilight; it expands in her hurrying steps. It is Mina, going to some trysting-place. She crosses and presses herlittle fichu on her heart; we can see that distance dwindlesaffectionately in front of her. As she passes away, bent forward andsmiling with her ripe lips, we can see the strength of her heart. 

Mist is gradually falling. Now we can only see white thingsclearly--the new parts of houses, the walls, the high road, joined tothe other one by footpaths which straggle through the dark fields, thebig white stones, tranquil as sheep, and the horse-pond, whose gleamamid the far obscurity imitates whiteness in unexpected fashion. Thenwe can only see light things--the stains of faces and hands, thosefaces which see each other in the gloom longer than is logical andexceed themselves. 

Pervaded by a sort of serious musing, we turn back into the room andsit down, I on the edge of the bed, she on a chair in front of the openwindow, in the center of the pearly sky. 

Her thoughts are the same as mine, for she turns her face to me andsays:

"And ourselves. "

* * * * * *

She sighs for the thought she has. She would like to be silent, butshe must speak. 

"We don't love each other any more, " she says, embarrassed by thegreatness of the things she utters; "but we did once, and I want to seeour love again. "

She gets up, opens the wardrobe, and sits down again in the same placewith a box in her hands. She says:

"There it is. Those are our letters. "

"Our letters, our beautiful letters!" she goes on. "I could really saythey're more beautiful than all others. We know them by heart--butwould you like us to read them again? _You_ read them--there's stilllight enough--and let me see how happy we've been. "

She hands the casket to me. The letters we wrote each other during ourengagement are arranged in it. 

"That one, " she says, "is the first from you. Is it? Yes--no, itisn't; do you think it is?"

I take the letter, murmur it, and then read it aloud. It spoke of thefuture, and said, "In a little while, how happy we shall be!"

She comes near, lowers her head, reads the date and whispers:

"Nineteen-two; it's been dead for thirteen years--it's a long time. No, it isn't a long time--I don't know what it ought to be. Here'sanother--read it. "

I go on denuding the letters. We quickly find out what a mistake itwas to say we know them by heart. This one has no date--simply thename of a day--Monday, and we believed that would be enough! Now, itis entirely lost and become barren, this anonymous letter in the middleof the rest. 

"We don't know them by heart any more, " Marie confesses. "Rememberourselves? How could we remember all that?"

* * * * * *

This reading was like that of a book once already read in bygone days. It could not revive again the diligent and fervent hours when our penswere moving--and our lips, too, a little. Indistinctly it broughtback, with unfathomable gaps, the adventure lived in three days byothers, the people that we were. When I read a letter from her whichspoke of caresses to come, Marie stammered, "And she dared to writethat!" but she did not blush and was not confused. 

Then she shook her head a little, and said dolefully:

"What a lot of things we have hidden away, little by little, in spiteof ourselves! How strong people must be to forget so much!"

She was beginning to catch a glimpse of a bottomless abyss, and todespair. Suddenly she broke in:

"That's enough! We can't read them again. We can't understand what'swritten. That's enough--don't take my illusion away. "

She spoke like the poor madwoman of the streets, and added in awhisper:

"This morning, when I opened that box where the letters were shut up, some little flies flew out. "

We stop reading the letters a moment, and look at them. The ashes oflife! All that we can remember is almost nothing. Memory is greaterthan we are, but memory is living and mortal as well. These letters, these unintelligible flowers, these bits of lace and of paper, what arethey? Around these flimsy things what is there left? We are handlingthe casket together. Thus we are completely attached in the hollow ofour hands. 

* * * * * *

And yet we went on reading. 

But something strange is growing gradually greater; it grasps us, itsurprises us hopelessly--every letter speaks of the _future_. 

In vain Marie said to me:

"What about afterwards? Try another--later on. "

Every letter said, "In a little while, how we shall love each otherwhen our time is spent together! How beautiful you will be when youare always there. Later on we'll make that trip again; after a whilewe'll carry that scheme out, later on . . . "

"That's all we could say!"

A little before the wedding we wrote that we were wasting our time sofar from each other, and that we were unhappy. 

"Ah!" said Marie, in a sort of terror, "we wrote that! Andafterwards . . . "

After, the letter from which we expected all, said:

"Soon we shan't leave each other any more. At last we shall live!"And it spoke of a paradise, of the life that was coming. . . . 

"And afterwards?"

"After that, there's nothing more . . . It's the last letter. "

* * * * * *

There is nothing more. It is like a stage-trick, suddenly revealingthe truth. There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and theparadise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have notgot. We hope, and then we regret. We hope for the future, and then weturn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope forthe past! The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity isexactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live;we have not really the time to profit by what we are. Happiness, thatthing which never is--and which yet, for one day, is no longer!

I see her drawing breath, quivering, mortally wounded, sinking upon thechair. 

I take her hand, as I did before. I speak to her, rather timidly andat random: "Carnal love isn't the whole of love. "

"It's love!" Marie answers. 

I do not reply. 

"Ah!" she says, "we try to juggle with words, but we can't conceal thetruth. "

"The truth! I'm going to tell you what I have been truly, _I_. . . . "

* * * * * *

I could not prevent myself from saying it, from crying it in a loud andtrembling voice, leaning over her. For some moments there had beenoutlined within me the tragic shape of the cry which at last cameforth. It was a sort of madness of sincerity and simplicity whichseized me. 

And I, unveiling my life to her, though it slid away by the side ofhers, all my life, with its failings and its coarseness. I let her seeme in my desires, in my hungers, in my entrails. 

Never has a confession so complete been thrown off. Yes, among thefates which men and women bear together, one must be almost mad not tolie. I tick off my past, the succession of love-affairs multiplied byeach other, and come to naught. I have been an ordinary man, nobetter, no worse, than another; well, here I am, here is the man, hereis the lover. 

I can see that she has half-risen, in the little bedroom which has lostits color. She is afraid of the truth! She watches my words as youlook at a blasphemer. But the truth has seized me and cannot let mego. And I recall what was--both this woman and that, and all thosewhom I loved and never deigned to know what they brought me when theybrought their bodies; I recall the fierce selfishness which nothingexhausted, and all the savagery of my life beside her. I say itall--unable even to avoid the blows of brutal details--like a harshduty accomplished to the end. 

Sometimes she murmured, like a sigh, "I knew it. " At others, she wouldsay, almost like a sob, "That's true!" And once, too, she began aconfused protest, a sort of reproach. Then, soon, she listens nigher. She might almost be left behind by the greatness of my confession; and, gradually, I see her falling into silence, the twice-illumined woman onthat adorable side of the room, she still receives on her hair and neckand hands, some morsels of heaven. 

And what I am most ashamed of in those bygone days when I was mad afterthe treasure of unknown women is this: that I spoke to them of eternalfidelity, of superhuman enticements, of divine exaltation, of sacredaffinities which must be joined together at all costs, of beings whohave always been waiting for each other, and are made for each other, and all that one _can_ say--sometimes almost sincerely, alas!--just togain my ends. I confess all that, I cast it from me as if I was atlast ridding myself of the lies acted upon her, and upon the others, and upon myself. Instinct is instinct; let it rule like a force ofnature. But the Lie is a ravisher. 

I feel a sort of curse rising from me upon that blind religion withwhich we clothe the things of the flesh because they are strong, thoseof which I was the plaything, like everybody, always and everywhere. No, two sensuous lovers are not two friends. Much rather are they twoenemies, closely attached to each other. I know it, I know it! Thereare perfect couples, no doubt--perfection always exists somewhere--butI mean us others, all of us, the ordinary people! I know!--the humanbeing's real quality, the delicate lights and shadows of human dreams, the sweet and complicated mystery of personalities, sensuous loversderide them, both of them! They are two egoists, falling fiercely oneach other. Together they sacrifice themselves, utterly in a flash ofpleasure. There are moments when one would lay hold forcibly on joy, if only a crime stood in the way. I know it; I know it through allthose for whom I have successively hungered, and whom I have scornedwith shut eyes--even those who were not better than I. 

And this hunger for novelty--which makes sensuous love equallychangeful and rapacious, which makes us seek the same emotion in otherbodies which we cast off as fast as they fall--turns life into aninfernal succession of disenchantments, spites and scorn; and it ischiefly that hunger for novelty which leaves us a prey to unrealizablehope and irrevocable regret. Those lovers who persist in remainingtogether execute themselves; the name of their common death, which atfirst was Absence, becomes Presence. The real outcast is not he whoreturns all alone, like Olympio; they who remain together are moreapart. 

By what right does carnal love say, "I am your hearts and minds aswell, and we are indissoluble, and I sweep all along with my strokes ofglory and defeat; I am Love!"? It is not true, it is not true. Onlyby violence does it seize the whole of thought; and the poets andlovers, equally ignorant and dazzled, dress it up in a grandeur andprofundity which it has not. The heart is strong and beautiful, but itis mad and it is a liar. Moist lips in transfigured faces murmur, "It's grand to be mad!" _No_, you do not elevate aberration into anideal, and illusion is always a stain, whatever the name you lend it. 

By the curtain in the angle of the wall, upright and motionless I amspeaking in a low voice, but it seems to me that I am shouting andstruggling. 

When I have spoken thus, we are no longer the same, for there are nomore lies. 

After a silence, Marie lifts to me the face of a shipwrecked woman withlifeless eyes, and asks me:

"But if this love is an illusion, what is there left?"

I come near and look at her, to answer her. Against the window's stillpallid sky I see her hair, silvered with a moonlike sheen, and hernight-veiled face. Closely I look at the share of sublimity which shebears on it, and I reflect that I am infinitely attached to this woman, that it is not true to say she is of less moment to me because desireno longer throws me on her as it used to do. Is it habit? No, notonly that. Everywhere habit exerts its gentle strength, perhapsbetween us two also. But there is more. There is not only thenarrowness of rooms to bring us together. There is more, there ismore! So I say to her:

"There's you. "

"Me?" she says. "I'm nothing. "

"Yes, you are everything, you're everything to me. "

She has stood up, stammering. She puts her arms around my neck, butfalls fainting, clinging to me, and I carry her like a child to the oldarmchair at the end of the room. 

All my strength has come back to me. I am no longer wounded or ill. Icarry her in my arms. It is difficult work to carry in your arms abeing equal to yourself. Strong as you may be, you hardly suffice forit. And what I say as I look at her and see her, I say because I amstrong and not because I am weak:

"You're everything for me because you are you, and I love _all_ ofyou. "

And we think together, as if she were listening to me:

You are a living creature, you are a human being, you are the infinitythat man is, and all that you are unites me to you. Your suffering ofjust now, your regret for the ruins of youth and the ghosts ofcaresses, all of it unites me to you, for I feel them, I share them. Such as you are and such as I am. I can say to you at last, "I loveyou. "

I love you, you who now appearing truly to me, you who truly duplicatemy life. We have nothing to turn aside from us to be together. Allyour thoughts, all your likes, your ideas and your preferences have aplace which I feel within me, and I see that they are right even if myown are not like them (for each one's freedom is part of his value), and I have a feeling that I am telling you a lie whenever I do notspeak to you. 

I am only going on with my thought when I say aloud:

"I would give my life for you, and I forgive you beforehand foreverything you might ever do to make yourself happy. "

She presses me softly in her arms, and I feel her murmuring tears andcrooning words; they are like my own. 

It seems to me that truth has taken its place again in our little room, and become incarnate; that the greatest bond which can bind two beingstogether is being confessed, the great bond we did not know of, thoughit is the whole of salvation:

"Before, I loved you for my own sake; to-day, I love you for yours. "

When you look straight on, you end by seeing the immense event--death. There is only one thing which really gives the meaning of our wholelife, and that is our death. In that terrible light may they judgetheir hearts who will one day die. Well I know that Marie's deathwould be the same thing in my heart as my own, and it seems to me alsothat only within her of all the world does my own likeness wholly live. _We_ are not afraid of the too great sincerity which goes the length ofthese things; and we talk about them, beside the bed which awaits theinevitable hour when we shall not awake in it again. We say:--

"There'll be a day when I shall begin something that I shan't finish--awalk, or a letter, or a sentence, or a dream. "

I stoop over her blue eyes. Just then I recalled the black, openwindow in front of me--far away--that night when I nearly died. I lookat length into those clear eyes, and see that I am sinking into theonly grave I shall have had. It is neither an illusion nor an act ofcharity to admire the almost incredible beauty of those eyes. 

What is there within us to-night? What is this sound of wings? Areour eyes opening as fast as night falls? Formerly, we had the sensuallovers' animal dread of nothingness; but to-day, the simplest andrichest proof of our love is that the supreme meaning of death to usis--leaving each other. 

And the bond of the flesh--neither are we afraid to think and speak ofthat, saying that we were so joined together that we knew each othercompletely, that our bodies have searched each other. This memory, this brand in the flesh, has its profound value; and the preferencewhich reciprocally graces two beings like ourselves is made of all thatthey have and all that they had. 

I stand up in front of Marie--already almost a convert--and I trembleand totter, so much is my heart my master:--

"Truth is more beautiful than dreams, you see. "

It is simply the truth which has come to our aid. It is truth whichhas given us life. Affection is the greatest of human feelings becauseit is made of respect, of lucidity, and light. To understand the truthand make one's self equal to it is everything; and to love is the samething as to know and to understand. Affection, which I call alsocompassion, because I see no difference between them, dominateseverything by reason of its clear sight. It is a sentiment as immenseas if it were mad, and yet it is wise, and of human things it is theonly perfect one. There is no great sentiment which is not completelyheld on the arms of compassion. 

To understand life, and love it to its depths in a living being, thatis the being's task, and that his masterpiece; and each of us canhardly occupy his time so greatly as with one other; we have only onetrue neighbor down here. 

To live is to be happy to live. The usefulness of life--ah! itsexpansion has not the mystic shapes we vainly dreamed of when we wereparalyzed by youth. Rather has it a shape of anxiety, of shuddering, of pain and glory. Our heart is not made for the abstract formula ofhappiness, since the truth of things is not made for it either. Itbeats for emotion and not for peace. Such is the gravity of the truth. 

"You've done well to say all that! Yes, it is always easy to lie for amoment. You might have lied, but it would have been worse when we wokeup from the lies. It's a reward to talk. Perhaps it's the only rewardthere is. "

She said that profoundly, right to the bottom of my heart. Now she ishelping me, and together we make the great searchings of those who aretoo much in the right. Marie's assent is so complete that it isunexpected and tragic. 

"I was like a statue, because of the forgetting and the grief. Youhave given me life, you have changed me into a woman. "

"I was turning towards the church, " she goes on; "you hardly believe inGod so much when you've no need of Him. When you're without anything, you can easily believe in Him. But now, I don't want any longer. "

Thus speaks Marie. Only the idolatrous and the weak have need ofillusion as of a remedy. The rest only need see and speak. 

She smiles, vague as an angel, hovering in the purity of the eveningbetween light and darkness. I am so near to her that I must kneel tobe nearer still. I kiss her wet face and soft lips, holding her handin both of mine. 

Yes, there _is_ a Divinity, one from which we must never turn aside forthe guidance of our huge inward life and of the share we have as wellin the life of all men. It is called the truth. 

THE END