Ah, the intemperate shapes and unities that float in morsels above the peopled precipices! When two overlords, jewel-set with glittering General Staffs, proclaim at the same time on either side of their throbbing mobilized frontiers, "We will save our country!" there is one immensity deceived and two victimized. There are two deceived immensities!
There is nothing else. That these cries can be uttered together in the face of heaven, in the face of truth, proves at a stroke the monstrosity 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 of masquerade, from the fantastic absurdity into which all these things are 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 right and to left, they make pretense. Truth never reaches as far as men. News filters through, false or atrophied. Onthisside—all is beautiful and disinterested; yonder—the same things are infamous. "French militarism is not the same thing as Prussian militarism, since one's French and the other's Prussian." The newspapers, the somber host of the great prevailing newspapers, fall upon the minds of men and wrap them up. The daily siftings link them together and chain them up, and forbid them to look ahead. And the impecunious papers show blanks in the places where the truth was too clearly written. At the end of a war, the last things to be known by the children of the slain and by the mutilated and worn-out survivors will be all the war-aims of its directors.
Suddenly they reveal to the people an accomplished fact which has been worked out in theterra incognitaof courts, and they say, "Now that it is too late, only one resource is left you—Kill that you be not killed."
They brandish the superficial incident which in the last hour has caused the armaments and the heaped-up resentment and intrigues to overflow in war; and they say, "That is the only cause of the war." It is not true; the only cause of war is the slavery of those whose flesh wages it.
They say to the people, "When once victory is gained, agreeably to your masters, all tyranny will have disappeared as if by magic, and there will be peace on earth." It is not true. There will be no peace on earth until the reign of men is come.
But will it ever come? Will it have time to come, while hollow-eyed humanity 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 lofty elevation of the common welfare—all these insufficient pretexts suffice in sum to make the artless man bow in bestial ignorance, to adorn him with iron and forge him at will.
"It is not on Reason," cried the specter of the battlefield, whose torturing spirit was breaking away from his still gilded body; "it is not on Reason that the Bible of History stands. Else are the law of majesties and the ancient quarrel of the flags essentially supernatural and 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 I stumble curiously, although lying down. A clamor booms in my temples and then thunders like the guns in my ears; it overflows me,—I drown in that cry——
"It must be! It has to be! You shallnotknow!" That is the war-cry, that is the cry of war.
* * * * * *
War will come again after this one. It will come again as long as it can be determined by people other than those who fight. The same causes will produce the same effects, and the living will have to give up all hope.
We cannot say out of what historical conjunctions the final tempests will issue, nor by what fancy names the interchangeable ideals imposed on men will be known in that moment. But the cause—that will perhaps everywhere be fear of the nations' real freedom. What we do know is that the tempests will come.
Armaments will increase every year amid dizzy enthusiasm. The relentless torture of precision seizes me. We do three years of military training; our children will do five, they will do ten. We pay two thousand million francs a year in preparation for war; we shall pay twenty, we shall pay fifty thousand millions. All that we have will be taken; it will be robbery, insolvency, bankruptcy. War kills wealth as it does men; it goes away in ruins and smoke, and one cannot fabricate gold any more than soldiers. We no longer know how to count; we no longer know anything. A billion—a million millions—the word appears to me printed on the emptiness of things. It sprang yesterday out of war, and I shrink in dismay from the new, incomprehensible word.
There will be nothing else on the earth but preparation for war. All living forces will be absorbed by it; it will monopolize all discovery, all science, all imagination. Supremacy in the air alone, the regular levies for the control of space, will suffice to squander a nation's fortune. For aerial navigation, at its birth in the middle of envious circles, has become a rich prize which everybody desires, a prey they have immeasurably torn in pieces.
Other expenditure will dry up before that on destruction does, and other longings as well, and all the reasons for living. Such will be the sense of humanity's last age.
* * * * * *
The battlefields were prepared long ago. They cover entire provinces with one black city, with a great metallic reservoir of factories, where iron floors and furnaces tremble, bordered by a land of forests whose trees are steel, and of wells where sleeps the sharp blackness of snares; a country navigated by frantic groups of railway trains in parallel formation, and heavy as attacking columns. At whatever point you may be on the plain, even if you turn away, even if you take flight, the bright tentacles of the rails diverge and shine, and cloudy sheaves of wires rise into the air. Upon that territory of execution there rises and falls and writhes machinery so complex that it has not even names, so vast that it has not even shape; for aloft—above the booming whirlwinds which are linked from east to west in the glow of molten metal whose flashes are great as those of lighthouses, or in the pallor of scattered electric constellations—hardly can one make out the artificial outline of a mountain range, clapped upon space.
This immense city of immense low buildings, rectangular and dark, is not a city. They are assaulting tanks, which a feeble internal gesture sets in motion, ready for the rolling rush of their gigantic knee-caps. These endless cannon, thrust into pits which search into the fiery entrails of the earth, and stand there upright, hardly leaning so much as Pisa's tower; and these slanting tubes, long as factory chimneys, so long that perspective distorts their lines and sometimes splays them like the trumpets of Apocalypse—these are not cannon; they are machine-guns, fed by continuous ribbons of trains which scoop out in entire regions—and upon a country, if need be—mountains of profundity.
In war, which was once like the open country and is now wholly like towns—and even like one immense building—one hardly sees the men. On the round-ways and the casemates, the footbridges and the movable platforms, among the labyrinth of concrete caves, above the regiment echelonned downwards in the gulf and enormously upright,—one sees a haggard herd of wan and stooping men, men black and trickling, men issuing from the peaty turf of night, men who came there to save their country. They earthed themselves up in some zone of the vertical gorges, and one sees them, in this more accursed corner than those where the hurricane reels. One senses this human material, in the cavities 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 sunshine leave befouled with darkness and cyclopean dirt. Solid clouds overhang them and hatchet-charged hurricanes, and leaping flashes set fire every second to the sky's iron-mines up above the damned whose pale faces change not under the ashes of death. They wait, intent on the solemnity and the significance of that vast and heavy booming against which they are for the moment imprisoned. They will be down forever around the spot where they are. Like others before them, they will be shrouded in perfect oblivion. Their cries will rise above the earth no more than their lips. Their glory will not quit their poor bodies.
I am borne away in one of the aeroplanes whose multitude darkens the light of day as flights of arrows do in children's story-books, forming a vaulted army. They are a fleet which can disembark a million men and their supplies anywhere at any moment. It is only a few years since we heard the puling cry of the first aeroplanes, and now their voice drowns all others. Their development has only normally proceeded, yet they alone suffice to make the territorial safeguards demanded by the deranged of former generations appear at last to all people as comical jests. Swept along by the engine's formidable weight, a thousand times more powerful than it is heavy, tossing in space and filling my fibers with its roar, I see the dwindling mounds where the huge tubes stick up like swarming pins. I am carried along at a height of two thousand yards. An air-pocket has seized me in a corridor of cloud, and I have fallen like a stone a thousand yards lower, garrotted by furious air which is cold as a blade, and filled by a plunging cry. I have seen conflagrations and the explosions of mines, and plumes of smoke which flow disordered and spin out in long black zigzags like the locks of the God of War! I have seen the concentric circles by which the stippled multitude is ever renewed. The dugouts, lined with lifts, descend in oblique parallels into the depths. One frightful night I saw the enemy flood it all with an inexhaustible torrent of liquid fire. I had a vision of that black and rocky valley filled to the brim with the lava-stream which dazzled the sight and sent a dreadful terrestrial dawn into the whole of night. With its heart aflame Earth seemed to become transparent as glass along that crevasse; and amid the lake of fire heaps of living beings floated on some raft, and writhed like the spirits of damnation. The other men fled upwards, and piled themselves in clusters on the straight-lined borders of the valley of filth and tears. I saw those swarming shadows huddled on the upper brink of the long armored chasms which the explosions set trembling like steamships.
All chemistry makes flaming fireworks in the sky or spreads in sheets of poison exactly as huge as the huge towns. Against them no wall avails, no secret armor; and murder enters as invisibly as death itself. Industry multiplies its magic. Electricity lets loose its lightnings and thunders—and that miraculous mastery which hurls power like a projectile.
Who can say if this enormous might of electricity alone will not change the face of war?—the centralized cluster of waves, the irresistible orbs going infinitely forth to fire and destroy all explosives, lifting the rooted armor of the earth, choking the subterranean gulfs with heaps of calcined men—who will be burned up like barren coal,—and maybe even arousing the earthquakes, and tearing the central fires from earth's depths like ore!
That will be seen by people who are alive to-day; and yet that vision of the future so near at hand is only a slight magnification, flitting through the brain. It terrifies one to think for how short a time science has been methodical and of useful industry; and after all, is there anything on earth more marvelously easy than destruction? Who knows the new mediums it has laid in store? Who knows the limit of cruelty to which the art of poisoning may go? Who knows if they will not subject and impress epidemic disease as they do the living armies—or that it will not emerge, meticulous, invincible, from the armies of the dead? Who knows by what dread means they will sink in oblivion this war, which only struck to the ground twenty thousand men a day, which has invented guns of only seventy-five miles' range, bombs of only one ton's weight, aeroplanes of only a hundred and fifty miles an hour, tanks, and submarines which cross the Atlantic? Their costs have not yet reached in any country the sum total of private fortunes.
But the upheavals we catch sight of, though we can only and hardly indicate them in figures, will be too much for life. The desperate and furious disappearance of soldiers will have a limit. We may no longer be able to count; but Fate will count. Some day the men will be killed, and the women and children. And they also will disappear—they who stand erect upon the ignominious death of the soldiers,—they will disappear along with the huge and palpitating pedestal in which they were rooted. But they profit by the present, they believe it will last as long as they, and as they follow each other they say, "After us, the deluge." Some day all war will cease for want of fighters.
The spectacle of to-morrow is one of agony. Wise men make laughable efforts to determine what may be, in the ages to come, the cause of the inhabited world's end. Will it be a comet, the rarefaction of water, or the extinction of the sun, that will destroy mankind? They have forgotten the likeliest and nearest cause—Suicide.
They who say, "There will always be war," do not know what they are saying. They are preyed upon by the common internal malady of shortsight. They think themselves full of common-sense as they think themselves full of honesty. In reality, they are revealing the clumsy and limited mentality of the assassins themselves.
The shapeless struggle of the elements will begin again on the seared earth when men have slain themselves because they were slaves, because they believed the same things, because they were alike.
I utter a cry of despair and it seems as if I had turned over and stifled it in a pillow.
* * * * * *
All is madness. And there is no one who will dare to rise and say that all is not madness, and that the future does not so appear—as fatal and unchangeable as a memory.
But how many men will there be who will dare, in face of the universal deluge which will be at the end as it was in the beginning, to get up and cry "No!" who will pronounce the terrible and irrefutable issue:—
"No! The interests of the people and the interests of all their present overlords are not the same. Upon the world's antiquity there are two enemy races—the great and the little. The allies of the great are, in spite of appearances, the great. The allies of the people are the people. Here on earth there is one tribe only of parasites and ringleaders who are the victors, and one people only who are the vanquished."
But, as in those earliest ages, will not thoughtful faces arise out of the darkness? (For this is Chaos and the animal Kingdom; and Reason being 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-hand struggle of the armies, shines in my soul above all others. To think is to hold that the masses have so far wrought too much evil without wishing 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 bearers of the truth, men who groped in the world's tumult, trying to make plain order of it. They discover what we did not yet know; chiefly they 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 whisper from deeps below, when he of the broken wings was dying, when he struggled tumultuously against the opening of men's eyes; but I had always 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 which aims at felling them better. They force the light-bearers to hide themselves and their torches. These dreamers, these visionaries, these star-gazers,—they are hooted and derided. Laughter is let loose around 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 of humanity:—
"You say that the sun is bigger than the earth? Look, imbecile!"
They are anathema, they are sacrilegious, they are excommunicated, who impeach the magic of the past and the poison of tradition. And the thousand million victims themselves scoff at and strike those who rebel, as soon as they are able. All cast stones at them, all, even those who suffer and while they are suffering—even the sacrificed, a little before they die.
The bleeding soldiers of Wagram cry: "Long live the emperor!" And the mournful exploited in the streets cheer for the defeat of those who are trying 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 in one enormous and fantastic breath, for they are innumerable who murmur it. 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 to the forces which glitter, without seeking to know whence they came and whither they guide. How have the eyes availed me that I had to see with, the intelligence that I had to judge with?
Borne down by shame, I sobbed, "I don't know," and I cried out so loudly 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 and enclose 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 me that I have listened to fond accents whose caress came from a great way off:
"Why shouldn'tyoube one of them, my lad,—one of those great prophets?"
I don't understand. I? How could I be?
All my thoughts go blurred. I am falling again. But I bear away in my eyes the picture of an iron bed where lay a rigid shape. Around it other forms were drooping, and one stood and officiated. But the curtain of that vision is drawn. A great plain opens the room, which had closed for a moment on me, and obliterates it.
Which way may I look? God? "Miserere——" The vibrating fragment of the Litany has reminded me of God.
* * * * * *
I had seen Jesus Christ on the margin of the lake. He came like an ordinary man along the path. There is no halo round his head. He is only disclosed by his pallor and his gentleness. Planes of light draw near and mass themselves and fade away around him. He shines in the sky, as he shone on the water. As they have told of him, his beard and hair are the color of wine. He looks upon the immense stain made by Christians on the world, a stain confused and dark, whose edge alone, down on His bare feet, has human shape and crimson color. In the middle of it are anthems and burnt sacrifices, files of hooded cloaks, and of torturers, armed with battle-axes, halberds and bayonets; and among long clouds and thickets of armies, the opposing clash of two crosses which have not quite the same shape. Close to him, too, on a canvas wall, again I see the cross that bleeds. There are populations, too, tearing themselves in twain that they may tear themselves the better; there is the ceremonious alliance, "turning the needy out of the way," of those who wear three crowns and those who wear one; and, whispering in the ear of Kings, there are gray-haired Eminences, and cunning monks, whose hue is of darkness.
I saw the man of light and simplicity bow his head; and I feel his wonderful 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. The greed-impassioned money-changers have long since chased Him from the temple in their turn, and put the priests in his place. He is crucified on every crucifix.
Yonder among the fields are churches, demolished by war; and already men are coming with mattock and masonry to raise the walls again. The ray 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, and whom war sentences to death. There is no redress except among the poor.
* * * * * *
White shapes seem to return into the white room. Truth is simple. They who say that truth is complicated deceive themselves, and the truth is not in them. I see again, not far from me, a bed, a child, a girl-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. She approves affectionately, but all the same she said, very quietly, as she left the perfection of our room, "It was better in my time." I am thrilled by one of our windows, whose wings are opened wide upon the darkness; the appeal which the chasm of that window makes across the distances enters into me. One night, as it seems to me, it was open to its heart.
I—my heart—a gaping heart, enthroned in a radiance of blood. It is mine, it isours. The heart—that wound which we have. I have compassion on myself.
I see again the rainy shore that I saw before time was, before earth's drama 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 is to 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 the whirlwinds and clamors—it is here. An odor of ether recalls to me the memory 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 thought you were falling," says a calm voice to me, a sedate and familiar voice, which knows me without my knowing the voice.
"Yes," I say!
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, and horizons close and massive. The bed which imprisons me is one of a row that I can see, opposite another row. A long floor goes in stripes as far as the distant door. There are tall windows, and daylight wrapped in linen. That is all which exists. I have always been here, I shall end here.
Women, white and stealthy, have spoken to me. I picked up the new sound, and then lost it. A man all in white has sat by me, looked at me, 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 they make light; at night, they put it out, and the lamps—which are in rows, like the beds, like the windows, like everything—disappear. Just one lamp remains, in the middle, on my right. The peaceful ghost of dead things enjoins peace. But my eyes are open, I awake more and more. I take hold of consciousness in the dark.
A stir is coming to life around me among the prostrate forms aligned in the beds. This long room is immense; it has no end. The enshrouded beds 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 with their huge speech do not know themselves. I see their solitude as I see them. There is nothing between the beds, nothing.
Of a sudden I see a globular mass with a moon-like face oscillating in the night. With hands held out and groping for the rails of the bedsteads, it is seeking its way. The orb of its belly distends and stretches its shirt like a crinoline, and shortens it. The mass is carried by two little and extremely slender legs, knobbly at the knees, and the color of string. It reaches the next bed, the one which a single ditch separates from mine. On another bed, a shadow is swaying regularly, like a doll. The mass and the shadow are a negro, whose big, murderous head is hafted with a tiny neck.
The hoarse concert of lungs and throats multiplies and widens. There are some who raise the arms of marionettes out of the boxes of their beds. Others remain interred in the gray of the bed-clothes. Now and again, unsteady ghosts pass through the room and stoop between the beds, 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 and the 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 from going out.
I turn my head on the pillow. In the bed bracketed with mine on the other side, under the glow which falls from the only surviving lamp, there is a squat manikin in a heavy knitted vest, poultice-color. From time to time, he sits up in bed, lifts his pointed head towards the ceiling, shakes himself, and grasping and knocking together his spittoon and his physic-glass, he coughs like a lion. I am so near to him that I feel that hurricane from his flesh pass over my face, and the odor of his inward wound.
* * * * * *
I have slept. I see more clearly than yesterday. I no longer have the veil that was in front of me. My eyes are attracted distinctly by everything which moves. A powerful aromatic odor assails me; I seek the source of it. Opposite me, in full daylight, a nurse is rubbing with a drug some gnarled and blackened hands, enormous paws which the earth of the battlefields, where they were too long implanted, has almost made moldy. The strong-smelling liquid is becoming a layer of frothy polish.
The foulness of his hands appalls me. Gathering my wits with an effort, I said aloud:
"Why don't they wash his hands?"
My neighbor on the right, the gnome in the mustard vest, seems to hear me, and shakes his head.
My eyes go back to the other side, and for hours I devote myself to watching in obstinate detail, with wide-open eyes, the water-swollen man whom I saw floating vaguely in the night like a balloon. By night he was whitish. By day he is yellow, and his big eyes are glutted with yellow. He gurgles, makes noises of subterranean water, and mingles sighs with words and morsels of words. Fits of coughing tan his ochreous face.
His spittoon is always full. It is obvious that his heart, where his wasted sulphurate hand is placed, beats too hard and presses his spongy lungs and the tumor of water which distends him. He lives in the settled notion of emptying his inexhaustible body. He is constantly examining 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 and tunic, 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—tome: "You're going on nicely." I wanted to ask him to talk to me about myself, but there was no time to ask him!
Towards evening my yellow-vested neighbor, emerging from his meditations and continuing to shake his head, answers my questions of the morning:
"They can't wash his hands—it's embedded."
A little later that day I became restless. I lifted my arm—it was clothed in white linen. I hardly knew my emaciated hand—that shadow stranger! 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 are hosts of things that I perceive badly, which are, and then are not. I have answered some questions. When I say, Yes, it is a sigh that I utter, and only that. At other times, I seem again to be half-swept away into pictures of tumored plains and mountains crowned. Echoes of these things vibrate in my ears, and I wish that some one would come who could explain the dreams.
* * * * * *
Strange footsteps are making the floor creak, and stopping there. I open my eyes. A woman is before me. Ah! the sight of her throws me into 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 me again with the voice which comes back from far away. I half rise. I look 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, a lot 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 a long time my eyes follow her going and her absence.
In the evening I hear a secret and whispered conference near the bed of the 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 state that to-morrow morning he'll be rotten. He must be taken away on the moment."
At nine in the evening they say that, and then they put the lights out and 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 as though it rained on him. His beard has grown, grimily. His hair is plastered 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 have disappeared.
"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 is writing a letter. He speaks, he lives. But he is wounded in the belly. He carries his death like a fetus.
* * * * * *
It is the day when we change our clothes. Some of the invalids manage it by themselves; and, sitting up in bed, they perform signaling operations with arms and white linen. Others are helped by the nurse. On their bare flesh I catch sight of scars and cavities, and parts stitched and patched, of a different shade. There is even a case of amputation (and bronchitis) who reveals a new and rosy stump, like a new-born infant. The negro does not move while they strip his thin, insect-like trunk; and then, bleached once more, he begins again to rock his head, looking boundlessly for the sun and for Africa. They exhume the paralyzed man from his sheets and change his clothes opposite me. At first he lies motionless in his clean shirt, in a lump. Then he makes a guttural noise which brings the nurse up. In a cracked voice, as of a machine that speaks, he asks her to move his feet, which are caught in the sheet. Then he lies staring, arranged in rigid orderliness within the boards of his carcass.
Marie has come back and is sitting on a chair. We both spell out the past, which she brings me abundantly. My brain is working incalculably.
"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 for the first time, although it had always been there, within reach of my eyes. 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 the middle of the men who had relapsed into childhood, and were awkwardly beginning again, or plaintively complaining in their beds. I have strolled in the wards, and then along a path. It is a matter of formalities now—convalescence, and in a month's time the Medical Board.
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 be a school, under the cloth—which was the only spot where a ray of sunshine could get in. I was meditating in the middle of an assembly of old cripples and men with heads or arms bandaged, with ragged and incongruous equipment, with sick clothes. I detached myself from the miracle-yard and followed Marie, after thanking the nurse and saying good-by to her.
The corporal of the hospital orderlies is the vicar of our church—he who said and who spread it about that he was going to share the soldiers' sufferings, like all the priests. Marie says to me, "Aren't you going to see him?"
"No," I say.
We set out for life by a shady path, and then the high road came. We walked slowly. Marie carried the bundle. The horizons were even, the earth was flat and made no noise, and the dome of the sky no longer banged like a big clock. The fields were empty, right to the end, because of the war; but the lines of the road were scriptural, turning not aside to the right hand or to the left. And I, cleansed, simplified, lucid—though still astonished at the silence and affected by the peacefulness—I saw it all distinctly, without a veil, without anything. 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. As fast as we drew near, smaller and smaller details introduced themselves and told us their names—that tree with the stones round it, those forsaken and declining sheds. I even found recollections shut up in the 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 when we 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, disappearing round the corner of a house:
"That's Antonia Véron. She's been in the Red Cross service. She's got a decoration because of the War."
"Ah!" I said, "everything's changed."
Now we are in sight of the house. The distance between the corner of the street and the house seems to me smaller than it should be. The court comes to an end suddenly; its shape looks shorter than it is in reality. In the same way, all the memories of my former life appear dwindled 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 which I 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 who comes 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 expression of anguish which gets over me. I notice the precautions she takes in watching me. And once it seemed to me that her eyes were red with crying. I—I think of the hospital life I am leaving, of the gray street, and the simplicity of things.
* * * * * *
A day has slipped away already. In one day all the time gone by has reëstablished itself. I am become again what I was. Except that I am not so strong or so calm as before, it is as though nothing had happened.
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 is afraid of my silence. Once, when I was sitting opposite her and had said 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 seeing things as they are."
"My poor boy!" Marie says, and she goes on crying.
I am touched by this obscure trouble. True, everything is obvious around me, but as it were laid bare. I have lost the secret which complicated life. I no longer have the illusion which distorts and conceals, that fervor, that sort of blind and unreasoning bravery which tosses 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. He held out his arms, and shouted. After expressing good wishes, he informs 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 steep hill that gets wider as it goes down an' there's a gaslamp and a watchman'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 no one never knew his name, an' he got a cyclist on his head an' he's gone dead. And against that gaslamp broken up by blows from cyclists they proposed to put a notice-board, although all recommendations would be superfluent. You catch on that it's nothing less than a maneuver to get the mayor's shirt out?"
Crillon's words vanish. As fast as he utters them I detach myself from all 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 the district. There is a regular buzz. So-and-so has been killed, but So-and-so is made an officer. So-and-so has got a clerking job. Here in 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 more than they, who am one immense question.
* * * * * *
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 spruce attention to my toilet, since it is Sunday, by reason of the compulsion one feels to do the same things again.
And now I see how much my face has hollowed, as I compare it with the one I had left behind in the familiar mirror.
I go out, and meet several people. Madame Piot asks me how many of the enemy I have killed. I reply that I killed one. Her tittle-tattle accosts another subject. I feel the enormous difference there was between what she asked me and what I answered.
The streets are clad in the mourning of closed shops. It is still the same empty and hermetically sealed face of the day of holiday. My eyes notice, 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 my former lot builds itself again, house by house.
I look outwards from the top of the hill. All is the same in the lines and the tones. The spectacle of yesterday and that of to-day are as identical as two picture postcards. I see my house—the roof, and three-quarters of the front. I feel a pleasant thrill. I feel that I love this corner of the earth, but especially my house.
What, is everything the same? Is there nothing new, nothing? Is the only changed thing the man that I am, walking too slowly in clothes too big, 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 wanders everywhere, to infinity.
But a darkening of storm fills and agitates the sky, and suddenly clothes the morning with a look of evening. The crowd which I see yonder along the avenue, under cover of the great twilight which goes by with its invisible harmony, profoundly draws my attention.
All those shadows which are shelling themselves out along the road are very tiny, they are separated from one another, they are of the same stature. 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 different species from the other. It is a certainty which I am bringing forward—the only one; and the truth is simple, for what I believe I see with my eyes.
The equality of all these human spots that appear in the somber gleams of storm, why—it is a revelation! It is a beginning of distinct order in Chaos. How comes it that I have never seen what is so visible, how comes it that I never perceived that obvious thing—that a man and another man are the same thing, everywhere and always? I rejoice that I have seen it as if my destiny were to shed a little light on us and on our road.
* * * * * *
The bells are summoning our eyes to the church. It is surrounded by scaffolding, 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!—that there is no proof of God's existence, and that you must find, first of all, believe in it if you want to prove it. Where does He show Himself? What does He save? What tortures of the heart, what disasters 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 kneeling suppliant, athirst for some humble personal miracle, and each seeker who bends over his papers as he watches for proofs like a creator; it surrounds the spiteful antagonism of all religions, armed against each other, enormous and bloody. God's absence rises like the sky over the agonizing conflicts between good and evil, over the trembling heedfulness of the upright, over the immensity—still haunting me—of the cemeteries of agony, the charnel heaps of innocent soldiers, the heavy cries of the shipwrecked. Absence! Absence! In the hundred thousand years that life has tried to delay death there has been nothing on earth more fruitless than man's cries to divinity, nothing which gives so perfect an idea of silence.
How does it come about that I have lasted till now without understanding that I did not see God? I believed because they had told me to believe. It seems to me that I am able to believe something no longer 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 of old, 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 hurrying towards the black hole of the church porch, towards the gloom of the nave, where one is enlaced in incense, where wheels of light and angels of color hover under the vaults which contain a little of the great emptiness of the heavens.
I seem to stoop nearer to those people, and I get glimpses of certain profundities among the fleeting pictures which my sight lends me. I seem to have stopped, at random, in front of the richness of a single being. I think of the "humble, quiet lives," and it appears to me within 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 they do believe in Him, since faith comes at will.
I remember, while I lean on this wall and listen, that one day in the past not far from here, a lowly woman raised her voice and said, "That woman does not believe in God! It's because she has no children, or else because they've never been ill."
And I remember, too, without being able to picture them to myself, all the voices I have heard saying, "It would be too unjust, if there were no God!"
There is no other proof of God's existence than the need we have of Him. God is not God—He is the name of all that we lack. He is our dream, 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 them in the unknown. Their agonizing dues they drown in distances which outdistance them; they cancel His contradictions in inaccessible uncertainty. 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 to be that one morning my eyes would end by opening and seeing nothing more of it.
I do not see God, but I see the church and I see the priests. Another ceremony 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 guns and hunting knives, officiating in lace and pomp side by side with these wealthy people got up as warlike sportsmen, women and men alike, on the great steps of a castle and facing a crowd kept aloof by ropes,—this spectacle defines, more glaringly than any words whatever can, the distance which separates the churches of to-day from Christ's teaching, and points to all the gilded putridity which has accumulated on those pure defaced beginnings. And what is here is everywhere; what is little is great.
The parsons, the powerful—all always joined together. Ah, certainty is rising to the heart of my conscience. Religions destroy themselves spiritually because they are many. They destroy whatever leans upon their fables. But their directors, they who are the strength of the idol, impose it. They decree authority; they hide the light. They are men, defending their interests as men; they are rulers defending their sway.
It has to be! You shallnotknow! A terrible memory shudders through me; and I catch a confused glimpse of people who, for the needs of their common cause, uphold, with their promises and thunder, the mad unhappiness 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 were brightened and rejuvenated by the wind. Close by I see that her eyelids are worn, like silk. She finds me sunk in reflection. She looks at me, like a frail and frightened mother; and this solicitude which 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 some bitter remark on the folly of these people who vainly gather in the church, 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've never thought clearly about it, never. They've always spoken of God to me, and I've always believed in Him. But—I don't know. I only know one thing," she adds, her blue eyes looking at me, "and that is that there must be delusion. The people must have religion, so as to put up with the hardships of life, the sacrifices——"
She goes on again at once, more emphatically, "There must be religion for 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 left here repeats, "There must be illusion." She sticks to this idea, she insists, she is taking the side of the unhappy. Perhaps she talks like that for her own sake, and perhaps only because she is compassionate for 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're going."
She persists and makes signs of dissent.
I say no more, tired. But I do not lower my gaze before the all-powerful surroundings of circumstance. My eyes are pitiless, and cannot help descrying the false God and the false priests everywhere.
We go down the footpath and return in silence. But it seems to me that the rule of evil is hidden in easy security among the illusions which they 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 that there is no supernatural power, that nothing has fallen from the sky; that everything is within us and in our hands. And in the inspiration of that faith my eyes embrace the magnificence of the empty sky, the abounding desert of the earth, the Paradise of the Possible.
We pass along the base of the church. Marie says to me—as if nothing had just been said, "Look how the poor church was damaged by a bomb from an aeroplane—all one side of the steeple gone. The good old vicar was quite ill about it. As soon as he got up he did nothing else but try to raise money to have his dear steeple built up again; and he got it."
People are revolving round the building and measuring its yawning mutilation with their eyes. My thoughts turn to all these passers-by and to all those who will pass by, whom I shall not see, and to other wounded steeples. The most beautiful of all voices echoes within me, and I would fain make use of it for this entreaty, "Build not the churches again! You who will come after us, you who, in the sharp distinctness of the ended deluge will perhaps be able to see the order of things more clearly, don't build the churches again! They did not contain what we used to believe, and for centuries they have only been the prisons of the saviours, and monumental lies. If you are still of the faith have your temples within yourselves. But if you again bring stones 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, do not 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 her a little, humbly, about her husband, since I was under his orders and saw him die. She listens to me in dejected inattention. She is elsewhere. She says to me at last, "I had a memorial service since it's usual." Then she maintains a silence which means "There's nothing to be said, just as there's nothing to be done." In face of that emptiness I understand the crime that Marcassin committed in letting himself be killed for nothing but the glory of dying.
* * * * * *
We have gone out together and aimlessly; we walk straight forward.
It is an autumnal day—gray lace of clouds and wind. Some dried leaves lie on the ground and others go whirling. We are in August, but it is an autumn day all the same. Days do not allow themselves to be set in strict order, like men.
Our steps take us in the direction of the waterfall and the mill. We have seldom been there again since our engagement days. Marie is covered in a big gray cloak; her hat is black silk with a little square of 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 beautiful fair hair.
Instinctively we both looked for the inscriptions we cut, once upon a time, on trees and on stones, in foolish delight. We sought them like scattered treasure, on the strange cheeks of the old willows, near the tendrils of the fall, on the birches that stand like candles in front of the violet thicket, and on the old fir which so often sheltered us with its dark wings. Many inscriptions have disappeared. Some are worn away because things do; some are covered by a host of other inscriptions or they are distorted and ugly. Nearly all have passed on as if they had been passers-by.
Marie is tired. She often sits down, with her big cloak and her sensible air; and as she sits she seems like a statue of nature, of space, and the wind.
We do not speak. We have gone down along the side of the river—slowly, as if we were climbing—towards the stone seat of the wall. The distances have altered. This seat, for instance, we meet it sooner than we thought we should, like some one in the dark; but it is the seat all right. The rose-tree which grew above it has withered away and become a crown of thorns.
There are dead leaves on the stone slab. They come from the chestnuts yonder. They fell on the ground and yet they have flown away as far as the seat.
On this seat—where she came to me for the first time, which was once so important to us that it seemed as if the background of things all about us had been created by us—we sit down to-day, after we have vainly sought in nature the traces of our transit.
The landscape is peaceful, simple, empty; it fills us with a great quivering. 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 the gravel at my feet; and suddenly I start, for I understand that my eyes were looking for the marks of our footsteps, in spite of the stone, in spite of the sand.
After the solemnity of a long silence, Marie's face takes on a look of defeat, and suddenly she begins to cry. The tears which fill her—for one always weeps in full, drop on to her knees. And through her sobs there fall from her wet lips words almost shapeless, but desperate and fierce, 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 which agitates her chest and throat, and sometimes shakes her rudely, the sorrow which does not belong to me, which belongs to no one, and is like a divinity.
She becomes composed. I take her hand. In a weak voice she calls some memories up—this and that—and "one morning——" She applies herself to it and counts them. I speak, too, gently. We question each other. "Do you remember?"—"Oh, yes." And when some more precise and intimate detail prompts the question we only reply, "A little." Our separation and the great happenings past which the world has whirled have made the past recoil and shaped a deep ditch. Nothing has changed; but when we look 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 the dumbness 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 had the same name."
A few moments later, as we talked of something else, she said to me at last, "Ah, that day we had dreams of travel, about our plans—you were there, sitting by my side."
In those former times we lived. Now we hardly live any more, since we have lived. They who we were are dead, for we are here. Her glances come to me, but they do not join again the two surviving voids that we are; her look does not wipe out our widowhood, nor change anything. And I, I am too imbued with clear-sighted simplicity and truth to answer "no" when it is "yes." In this moment by my side Marie is like me.
The immense mourning of human hearts appears to us. We dare not name it 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. It is Marthe, grown up, full-blown. She says a few words to us and then goes away, smiling. She smiles, she who plays a part in our drama. The likeness which formerly haunted me now haunts Marie, too—both of us, side by side, and without saying it, harbored the same thought, to see 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. Andtherego my youth and beauty—Marthe! Then, I——?" In anguish she goes on, "I'm not old yet, since I'm only thirty-five, but I've aged very quickly; I've some white hairs that you can see, close to; I'm wrinkled and my eyes have sunk. I'm here, in life, to live, to occupy my time; but I'm nothing more than I am! Of course, I'm still alive, but the future comes to an end before life does. Ah, it's really only youth that has a place in life. All young faces are alike and go from one to the other without ever being deceived. They wipe out and destroy all the rest, and they make the others see themselves as they are, so that they become useless."
She is right! When the young woman stands up she takes, in fact, the other's place in the ideal and in the human heart, and makes of the other a returning ghost. It is true. I knew it. Ah, I did not know it was so true! It is too obvious. I cannot deny it. Again a cry of assent rises to my lips and prevents me from saying, "No."
I cannot turn away from Marthe's advent, nor as I look at her, from recognizing Marie. I know she has had several little love-affairs. Just now she is alone. She is alone, but she will soon be leaning—yes, phantom or reality, man is not far from her. It is dazzling. Most certainly, I no longer think as I used to do that it is a sort of duty to satisfy the selfish promptings one has, and I have now got an inward veneration for right-doing; but all the same, if that being came to me, I know well that I should become, before all, and in spite of all, an immense cry of delight.
Marie falls back upon her idea, obdurately, and says, "A woman only lives by love and for love. When she's no longer good for that she's no 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 a woman's mourning! She is not thinking only of me. Her thought is higher and vaster. She is thinking of all the woman she is, of all that love is, of all possible things when she says, "I'm no longer anything." AndI—I am only he who is present with her just now, and no help whatever is left her to look for from any one.
I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness and simplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me with her presence—but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, I can 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 of her tears, and because I am looking at her—that she has powdered her face to-day and put rouge on her lips, perhaps even on her cheeks, as she 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 passing time, to be fixed upon herself, who paints herself, she is, to that extent like what Rembrandt the profound and Titian the bold and exquisite did—make enduring, and save! But this time, a few tears have washed away the fragile, mortal effort.
She tries also to delude herself with words, and to discover something in them which would transform her. She asserts, as she did the other morning, "There must be illusion. No, we must not see things as they are." 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 me only, and she pities me! She has found something in her grief to give me.
She is silent. She is seeking the supreme complaint; she is trying to find what there is which is more torturing and more simple; and she stammers—"The truth."
The truth is that the love of mankind is a single season among so many others. The truth is that we have within us something much more mortal than 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 things we think we know and which yet are secrets. Do we really know what we believe? We believe in miracles. We make great efforts to struggle, to go mad. We should like to let all our good deserts be seen. We fancy that we are exceptions and that something supernatural is going to come along. But the quiet peace of the truth fixes us. The impossible becomes again the impossible. We are as silent as silence itself.
We stayed lonely on the seat until evening. Our hands and faces shone like 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 few hours. And we see ourselves alone in the house, facing each other, as never we saw ourselves, and we do not know what to do! It is a real drama of vacancy which is breaking loose. We are living together; our movements are in harmony, they touch and mingle. But all of it is empty. We do not long for each other, we can no longer expect each other, we have no dreams, we are not happy. It is a sort of imitation of life by phantoms, by beings who, in the distance are beings, but close by—so close—are phantoms!
Then bedtime comes. She is sleeping in the little bedroom opposite mine across the landing, less fine than mine and smaller, hung with an old and faded paper, where the patterned flowers are only an irregular relief, with traces here and there of powder, of colored dust and ashes.
We are going to separate on the landing. To-day is not the first time like that! but to-day we are feeling this great rending which is not one. She has begun to undress. She has taken off her blouse. I see her neck and her breasts, a little less firm than before, through her chemise; and half tumbling on to the nape of her neck, the fair hair which 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 we slept in the same bed. We used to lie down side by side, so as to be annihilated 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 separate ourselves with a wall. This sincerity that I have brought back in my eyes and mind has changed the semblances round about me into reality, more than I imagine. Marie is hiding from me her faded but disregarded body. Her modesty has begun again; yes, she has ended by beginning again.
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 to caress her loosened hair, in which the others cannot yet see the white ones, 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 found out of doors, the bit of paper escaped from the mysterious hands which wrote on it, and come to the stone seat. It ended by whispering, "Only I know the tears that brimming rise, your beauty blended with your smile to espy."
In the days of yore it had made us smile with delight. To-night there are real tears in my eyes. What is it? I dimly see that there is something more than what we have seen, than what we have said, than what we have felt to-day. One day, perhaps, she and I will exchange better and richer sayings; and so, in that day, all the sadness will be of some service.