"No, for two."
(Because he made a face at her.)
The lovely golden tints in the sky began to turn to brown. The deserted plain put on a disconsolate mask. Pierre asked Luce if she was not afraid in that solitude.
"No."
"When you get home late?"
"There is no danger. The Apaches don't come here. They have their own customs. They arebourgeois, too. Besides, we have over there an old ragpicker, and his dog. And besides, I have no fear. Oh, I'm not boasting about myself! I have no merit at all in it. I am not courageous naturally. Only, I have not as yet had any occasion to meet with real fear. The day I do see it, perhaps I shall be more of a poltroon than the next one. Does one ever know what one really is?"
"Well, I for my part know what you are," quoth Pierre.
"Ah, that is much easier. I myself likewise, I know ... as to you! One always knows better about another."
The moist chill of evening entered the room through the closed windows. Pierre felt a little shudder. Luce, who perceived it at once on his neck, ran to make him a cup of chocolate, which she heated on her spirit-lamp. They took a bit of food. Luce had thrown her shawl maternally over Pierre's shoulders; and he let her do it like a cat enjoying the warmth of the stuff. Once more the current of their thoughts brought them back to the family history which Luce had interrupted.
Pierre continued:
"Both of you all alone, so entirely alone, you and your mother: you must be deeply attached to one another."
"Yes," said Luce. "We were very much attached."
"Were?" repeated Pierre.
"Oh!" said Luce, "we always love each other;" still somewhat embarrassed by the word which had escaped her without thinking. (Why must she always tell him more than she meant to? And nevertheless he did not ask, he dared not ask her. But she saw that his heart was putting the question. And it's so nice to confide in someone when one has never had the chance! The silence of the house, the half-shade of the room encouraged her to confess.) She observed:
"There's no saying or knowing what has been going on for the last four years. The whole world is changed."
"You mean to say that your mother, or that you have changed?"
"The whole world," repeated she.
"In what respect?"
"That's hard to define. One feels everywhere among people who know each other, even in the family, that the relations are not the same. One is never sure of anything any more; in the morning one says to oneself: What is it I am going to experience this night? Shall I recognize it? One is as if on a plank in the water just about to upset."
"What is it that's happened?"
"I don't know," said Luce, "I can't explain it. But it has come since the war. There is something in the air. Everybody is troubled. In families one sees people who were not capable of doing without one another marching off today, each one in his own direction. And as if intoxicated each one runs along with nose on the trail."
"Where do they go?"
"I don't know. And I believe they don't either. Either pure chance or some desire spurs them. Women take lovers. Men forget their wives. And kindly people, too, who generally appear so calm and so orderly! Everywhere we hear of households broken up. It's the same between parents and children. My mother...."
She stopped, then ran on:
"My mother lives her own life."
She stopped again:
"Oh, it's perfectly natural! She is still young, and poor mama has not had much happiness; she has not poured out her sum of affection. She has a right to want to make her life over again."
Pierre inquired:
"She wants to marry again?"
Luce shook her head. One could hardly know very well.... Pierre dared not insist.
"She loves me well, still. But it's not the way it used to be. She is able to do without me at present.... Poor mama! She would be so sorry if she knew that her love for me is no longer in her heart as the first of all! She would never confess that, never.... O, how queer it is, this life!"
She wore a sweet smile, sorrowful and roguish. Upon her hands placed on the table Pierre put his hands tenderly, and sat without motion.
"We are poor creatures," he muttered.
Luce continued in a moment:
"We two, how tranquil we are!... The others have the fever. The war. The factories. People are in a hurry. They hustle. To work hard, to live, to enjoy themselves...."
"Yes," said Pierre, "the time is short."
"All the more reason not to run!" said Luce. "One gets too soon to the end. Let us walk slowly."
"But it's time that hurries along. Hold on to it well."
"I'm holding onto it; I'm holding," said Luce, grasping his hand.
Thus back and forward, tenderly, gravely, they talked like a pair of good old friends. But they took good care that the table should stay between them.
And behold, they perceived that the night had filled the room. Pierre rose hurriedly. Luce did nothing to retain him. The short hour had passed. They were afraid of the hour that might come. They saidau revoirto each other with the same constraint, the same low and choked voice as when he came in. On the threshold their hands scarcely dared to press each other.
But when the door was shut, just as he was about to leave the garden, as he turned his head toward the window of the ground floor, he saw in the last gleam of the copper-colored twilight, on the pane, the outline of Luce, who was following his departure into the uncertain depths of the gleam-filled obscurity with a face full of passion. And turning back to the window, he pressed his lips against the closed pane. Their lips kissed through the wall of glass. Then Luce moved back into the shadows of the room and the curtain fell.
Forthe past fortnight they had been unaware of anything that was going on in the world. In Paris people might make arrests and issue condemnations as hard as they could. Germany might make treaties and tear up those she had signed. Governments might lie, the press denounce and armies kill. They did not read the papers. They knew there was the war somewhere all about them, just as there is typhus or else influenza; but that did not touch them; they did not want to think about it.
The war recalled itself to them that night. They had already gone to bed (they spent their hearts so freely in those days that when evening came they were worn out). They heard the alarm signals, each in his or her respective quarter, and declined to get up. They hid their heads in their beds under the bedclothes as a child will during a thunder-storm—not at all from fear (they were positive that nothing could happen to them) but in order to dream. Listening to the air rumbling in the night, Luce thought:
"It would be delightful to listen to the storm as it passes, in his arms."
Pierre stopped his ears. Let nothing trouble his thoughts! He insisted on picking out on the piano of memory the song of the day passed, the melodious thread of the hours, from the first minute that he entered Luce's house, the slightest inflections of her voice and her gestures, the successive images which his eyes had hastily snapped up—a shadow under the eyelids, a wave of emotion that passed beneath the skin like a shiver across the water, a smile just brushing against the lips like a sun ray, and his palm pressed on, nestled against the nude softness of the two extended hands—these precious fragments that endeavored to reunite the magic fantasy of love in a single close embrace. He would not permit that noises from without should enter there. The outside was for him a tiresome visitor. The war? Oh, I know, I know. Has it come? Let it wait.... And the war did wait at the door, patiently. War knew that it would have its turn. He knew that also; that is why he had no shame in his egotism. The rising billow of death was about to seize him. So he owed death nothing in advance. Nothing. Let death come back again at the date of the contract! Up to that day let death be silent! Ah, up to then at least he did not want to lose anything of this marvelous time; each second was a golden grain and he the miser who paws over his treasure. It's mine, it's my property. Don't you dare touch my peace, my love! It's my own up to the hour.... And when will the hour come? Perhaps it will not come at all! A miracle? Why not?...
Meantime the stream of hours and days kept on flowing. At each new bend of the channel the roaring of the rapids drew nearer. Stretched out in their barque Pierre and Luce listened and heard. But they had no more fear. Even that enormous voice like the bass notes of an organ cradled their amorous dream. When the gulf should be there they would close their eyes, press closer together and all would be over in one blow. The gulf spared them the trouble of thinking about the life that was to be, that might possibly be, afterward, about the future without an issue. For Luce foresaw the obstacles that Pierre would have to encounter if he wished to marry her; and Pierre less clearly (he had less taste for clearness) feared them also. Let us not look so far ahead! Life beyond the gulf was like that "other life" they talked about in church. They tell you that we shall find each other again; but they are not so very sure. One sole thing is sure: the present. Our own present. Let's pour into it without any taking of stock the whole of our part in eternity!
Even less than Pierre did Luce inform herself about the news. The war did not interest her in the least. It was only one misery more amongst all the various miseries which form the web and woof of social existence. Those who can be astonished about it are those only who stand sheltered from naked realities. And the little girl with her precocious experience who understood the struggle for one's daily bread—panem quotidianum... (God does not grant it for nothing!)—revealed to herbourgeoisfriend the murderous war which, for poor folks and particularly for women, reigns cunningly deep and without a truce below the lie of peace. She did not talk too much about it, however, for fear of depressing him: on seeing the excitement into which her accounts threw him, she had an affectionate feeling of her own superiority. Like most women she did not entertain with regard to certain ugly facts of life the physical and moral disgust which upset the young fellow. There was nothing of the rebel in her. In still worse circumstances she would have been able to accept repugnant tasks without repugnance and quit them quite calm and natty, without a stain. Today she could not do that any more, for since she had come to know Pierre her love had caused her to be filled with the tastes and distastes of her friend; but that was not her fundamental nature. Calm and smiling by reason of her race, not pessimistic at all. Melancholy, and the grand detached airs of life were not her business. Life is as it is. Let us take it as it is! It might have been worse! The hazards of an existence which Luce had always known to be precarious, on the look-out for expedients—and particularly since the war—had taught her to be careless of the morrow. Add to this that every preoccupation concerning the beyond was a stranger to this free little French girl. Life was enough for her. Luce found life delightful, but it all hangs by a thread and it takes so little to make the thread break that really it is not worth the trouble to torment oneself about what may turn up tomorrow. Eyes of mine, drink in the daylight that bathes you as you pass! As to what may come after, O, my heart, abandon yourself in confidence to the stream!... And since anyhow we can not do otherwise!... And now that we love each other, isn't it just delicious? Luce well knew that it could not be for long. But neither her life nor she herself, either, would be for long....
She did not resemble much that little fellow who loved her and whom she loved, tender, ardent and nervous, happy and miserable, who always enjoyed and suffered to excess, who gave himself, who flew into a rage, always with passion, and who was dear to her just because he resembled her hardly at all. But both of them were in accord as to a mute resolve not to look into the future: the girl through the carelessness of the resigned rivulet that sings on its way—the other through that exalted negation which plunges into the gulf of the present and never desires to emerge again.
Thebig brother had come back again on furlough for a few days. During the first evening at home he perceived that there was something changed in the family atmosphere. What? He could not tell; but he was vexed. The mind possesses antennae which perceive at a distance before consciousness is able to touch and consider the object. And the finest of all antennae are those of vanity. Philip's agitated themselves, searched about and were surprised; they missed something.... Did he not have his circle of affection which rendered unto him the customary homage—the attentive audience to which in miserly fashion he doled out his stories—his parents who brooded him under their touched admiration—the young brother?... Stop there! It was he, exactly he who was missing to the appeal.
He was present of course but he did not exert himself about his big brother; he did not beg for confidences as was his wont, which the other used to take pleasure in denying. Pitiful vanity! Philip, who on former occasions affected in regard of the ardent questions of his younger brother a sort of protective and bantering lackadaisicalness, was hurt that he did not put them this time. It was he who tried to provoke them: he became more loquacious and he looked at Pierre as if he wished him to feel that his talk was meant for him. At another time Pierre would have thrilled with joy and caught on the fly the handkerchief that was tossed him. But he quietly permitted Philip to pick it up for himself if he had any desire to do so. Philip, feeling piqued, tried irony. Instead of being troubled, Pierre answered with composure in the same detached tone. Philip wanted to discuss, became agitated, harangued. After a few minutes he found that he was haranguing all by himself. Pierre looked on at his efforts wearing an air of saying:
"Go ahead, my dear boy! If that is any pleasure to you! Continue! I'm listening...."
That insolent little smile!... Their rôles were reversed.
Philip stopped talking, much mortified, and observed his young brother more attentively, who, however, did not occupy himself further with him. How he had changed! The parents, who saw him every day, had not noticed anything; but the penetrating and moreover jealous eyes of Philip did not find any more the well known expression after several months of absence. Pierre had a happy, languid, thoughtless, torpid air, indifferent as to persons, inattentive to what is about them, floating in an atmosphere of voluptuous dream, like a young girl. And Philip felt that he counted for nothing in the little brother's thoughts.
Since he was no less expert in analyzing himself than in observing others, he was quick to recover consciousness of his own vexation and laugh at it. Vanity thrust aside, he interested himself in Pierre and searched for the secret of his metamorphosis. He would have liked well to have solicited his confidence, but that was a business to which he was not habituated, and besides, little brother did not seem to have any need of confiding; with a careless and chaffing unconstraint he looked on while Philip attempted awkwardly to spread the net; and with his hands in his pockets, smiling, his thoughts elsewhere, whistling a little air, he answered vaguely, without listening carefully to what he was being asked—then, all of a sudden, turned off to his own regions. Good night! And he was no longer there. One caught only at his reflection in the water, which escaped from between one's fingers.—And Philip, like a lover disdained, felt all his value now and experienced the attraction of the mystery in this heart which he had lost.
The key to the enigma came to him by pure chance. As he was coming home in the evening by Boulevard Montparnasse, in the dark he passed Pierre and Luce. He was afraid they might have noticed him. But they cared little for what surrounded them. Closely pressed together, Pierre supporting his arm on the arm of Luce and holding her hand with fingers interlaced, they strolled along with short steps immersed in the hungry and gluttonous tenderness of Eros and Psyche as they lie at length on the nuptial couch in the Farnesina. The close embrace of their gaze fused them into a single being like a waxen group. Philip, leaning against a tree, looked upon them as they passed, stopped, went on and disappeared in the dark. And his heart was full of pity for the two children. He thought:
"My life is sacrificed. So be it! But it is not right to take those also. If at the least I could pay for their happiness!"
The next morning, in spite of his polite inattention, Pierre noticed vaguely—in actual fact not at once, but after some reflection—the affectionate tone of his brother with him. And, getting half awake, he perceived his kind eyes which he had not noticed before. Philip looked at him with such clarity that Pierre had an impression that this gaze was scrutinizing him; and awkwardly he hastened at once to push the shutter over his secret. But Philip smiled, rose, and putting his hand on his shoulder proposed that they should take a turn in the open. Pierre could not resist the new confidence which was tendered him and together they proceeded to the Luxembourg near at hand. The big brother had kept his hand on the shoulder of the younger and the latter felt himself proud of the re-established accord. His tongue was loosed. They talked animatedly of intellectual things, of books, their reflections on men, their new experiences—of everything except the subject both were thinking about. It was like a tacit convention. They were happy to feel themselves intimate, with a secret between them. While chatting Pierre inquired of himself:
"Does he know? But how could he know?"
Philip observed him as he chattered along and kept on smiling. Pierre ended by stopping short in the midst of a sentence.
"What's the matter with you?"
"Nothing. I'm just looking at you. I am delighted with you."
They shook hands. While they were returning Philip said:
"Are you happy?"
Without speaking Pierre nodded with his head—yes.
"You are right, my boy. A great, beautiful thing is happiness. Take my portion...."
In order not to trouble him, Philip during his furlough avoided making any allusion to the near incorporation of Pierre's class in the army. But on the day of his departure he could not prevent himself from expressing his anxiety at seeing his young brother exposed very soon to the trials which he knew only too well. Scarcely did a shadow cross the brow of the young lover. He drew his eyebrows a bit together, blinked with his eyes as if to drive off a troublesome vision, and said:
"Enough! Later on!Chi lo sa?"
"We know it only too well," said Philip.
"What in any case I do know," said Pierre, vexed that he should insist, "is that when I am down there I for my part shall do no killing."
Without contradicting him, Philip smiled sorrowfully, knowing well what the implacable power of the crowd does with weak souls and with their will.
Marchwas back again with a longer day and the first songs of birds. But along with the days increased the sinister flames of the war. The air was feverish with waiting for springtime—and waiting for the cataclysm. One heard the monstrous rumbling grow in intensity, the arms of millions of enemies clashing together, heaped up for the past months against the dyke of the trenches, and all ready to spill over like a tidal bore upon the Ile de France and the nave of La Cité. The shadow of frightful rumors preceded the plague; a fantastic report of poisoned gases, of deadly venom scattered through the air, which was about, so it was said, to descend on whole provinces and destroy everything like the asphyxiating overflow from Pelée Mountain. Finally the visits of bombing Gothas, coming oftener and oftener, cleverly kept up the nervousness of Paris.
Pierre and Luce continued to refuse to recognize anything about them, but the slow fever which they breathed in, whether they would or not, from that atmosphere heavy with menace, kindled the desire that glowed in their young bodies. Three years of war had propagated in European souls a freedom of morals which reached even the most honest and straight. And of the two children, neither one nor the other, had any religious beliefs. But they were protected by their delicacy of heart, their instinctive modesty. Only, in secret they had decided to give themselves completely one to the other before the blind cruelty of mankind should separate them. They had not spoken of this. They said it to themselves that evening.
Once or twice during the week Luce's mother was kept at the factory by her night work. On these nights Luce, in order not to stay alone in that desert quarter, slept in Paris with a girl friend. Nobody kept watch over her. The two lovers took advantage of this freedom to pass a portion of the evening together and sometimes they took a simple dinner in a little out-of-the-way restaurant. On leaving after dinner on this mid-March evening they heard the bomb-alert signal sound. They took refuge in the nearest place as if it were an affair of a rain shower, and for some time amused themselves observing their chance comrades. But the danger seeming distant or no longer there, although nothing had occurred to announce the end of the bomb-warning, Luce and Pierre, who did not want to get home too late, went on their way chatting gaily. They followed an old dark and narrow street near Saint Sulpice. They had just passed a hackney coach standing idle, both horse and driver asleep, near the gate of aporte cochère. They were twenty steps away and on the other sidewalk, when everything about them shuddered: a red, blinding flash, a roll of thunder, a rain of loosened tiles and broken windowpanes! Near the buttress of a house which made a sharp projection into the street they flattened themselves against the wall and their bodies interlaced. By the gleam of the explosion they had seen their own eyes full of love and dismay. And when the darkness fell again Luce's voice was saying:
"No, Pierre. I want no more."
And Pierre felt upon his own lips the lips and the teeth of the passionate girl. They remained palpitating in the darkness of the street. Some paces away some men, issuing from the houses, picked the dying coachman from among the remnants of the smashed vehicle; they passed quite close to them with the unfortunate man whose blood was falling drop by drop. Luce and Pierre remained petrified; so closely knit together that when consciousness revived in them it seemed as if their bodies had been naked in the pressure. They loosened their hands and lips grown together which drank of the loved one like roots. And, both of them, they began to tremble.
"Let us go home!" said Luce, invaded by a sacred terror.
She dragged him away.
"Luce! you will not let me leave this life before ...?"
"Oh, God," said Luce, squeezing his arm, "that thought would be worse than death!"
"My love, my love!" they kept repeating, one to the other.
Once more they came to a stop.
"When shall I be yours?" said Pierre.
(He could not have dared to ask: "When shall you be mine?")
Luce noticed this and was touched by it.
"Adored one," she said to him," ... very soon! Let's not hurry. You can not desire it more than I wish it!... Let us stay this way a little while.... It is splendid!... This month longer, right to the end!..."
"Until Easter?" he murmured.
(This year Easter was the last day in March.)
"Yes, at the Resurrection."
"Ah," quoth he, "there's the Death before Resurrection."
"Hush!" she interposed, closing his mouth with her own.
They drew away from each other.
"This night, it's our betrothal," whispered Pierre.
Huddled against each other while they walked in the shadows, they wept gently with tenderness. The ground crackled underfoot with the broken glass and the sidewalk was bloody. Death and the night were lying in ambush round about their love. But above their heads like a magic circle beyond the embrasure of the two black walls in the narrow street, as through a chimney, the heart of a star throbbed against the deep pulpy grain of the sky....
Lo and behold! The voices of the bells sing out, lights are rekindled and the streets are animate once more. The air is free of foes. Paris breathes again. Death has flown.
Theyhad come to the day preceding Palm Sunday. Every day they saw each other for hours together; and they did not even try to hide themselves any more. They no longer had any accounts to render the world. By such gossamer threads were they attached to it and so near to breaking!—Two days before, the German grand offensive had been started. The wave advanced along a front of nearly a hundred kilometers. Fast following emotions caused the City to vibrate: the explosion of Courneuve, which had shaken Paris like an earthquake; the incessant air-bomb alarms which broke in on sleep and wore out nerves. And on this morning of Saturday after a troubled night all those who were not able to close an eyelid until very late were roused again by the thunder of the mysterious cannon buried in the far distance, which, beyond the Somme, launched death in trial shots, as if from another planet. In the course of the earlier shots, which were attributed to the coming back of the aerial Gothas, people had taken refuge in a docile way inside their cellars; but a danger that continues becomes in time a habit to which life accommodates itself; and the peril is not far from turning out an attraction even, when the risks run are common to all and are not too great. Besides, the weather was too lovely; it was a pity to bury one's self alive: before noon all the world was out of doors; and the streets and gardens, the terraces of the cafés had a festival air on this radiant and burning afternoon.
It was this afternoon Pierre and Luce had selected to pass, far from the crowd, in the forest of Chaville. For the past ten days they had existed in an uplifted calm. Profound peace at the heart, and nerves on edge. They had a feeling like existing on an islet, about which rushed a frantic current: a vertigo of sight and hearing carried them away. But with eyelids lowered and hands on ears, when the bolt is pushed on the door, suddenly in one's inner deep there comes a silence, a blinding silence, the moveless summer day, when Joy invisible like a hidden bird sings its song, fresh and liquid, like a brook. O Joy! magical singer, warblings of happiness! I know too well it suffices that a slit should open between my lids or that my finger should cease to push a moment against my ear, and the foam and roar of the stream will follow in. Frail dyke! Just to know it so frail exalts the mood of Joy which I know is threatened. Peace and silence itself take on a passionate look!...
The woods once reached, they held each other by the hand. The first days of spring are a new wine that rises to the head. The youthful sun intoxicates with the purest juice of its vine. Light still floats over the leafless wood, and athwart the bare branches the blue eye of the sky fascinates the reason and lulls it to sleep.... Scarcely did they endeavor to exchange a few words. Their tongues declined to finish a phrase once started. Their legs were weak and they hated to walk. Under the sunshine and the silence of the woods they tottered. The earth drew them. Just to lie down in the path! Just to let themselves be carried along on the rim of the colossal wheel of the worlds....
They scrambled over the bank of the way-side, entered a thicket and, side by side on the old dead leaves through which violets showed their buds, they stretched themselves out. The first songs of the birds and the distant thuds of the guns mingled with the village bells that were proclaiming the festival of the morrow. The luminous air vibrated hope, faith, love, death. Notwithstanding the solitude they spoke in whispers. Their hearts were oppressed: by happiness? or by sorrow? They could not have told. They were submerged in their dream. Lucile, immobile, stretched out, her arms close to her body, her eyes open, absorbed and gazing at the sky, felt rising in her a hidden suffering which since the morning she forced herself to drive away in order not to mar the joy of the holiday. Pierre laid his head on Luce's knees in the hollow of her skirt like a child who goes to sleep with its face close couched against the warmth of the stomach. And Luce without a word caressed with her hands the ears and eyes, the nose and lips of her beloved one. Dear spiritual hands which seemed, as in the tales about fairies, to have little mouths at the finger-tips! And Pierre, a thinking piano, divined the meaning of the little waves that sped under the tips, the emotions that passed through the soul of his darling. He heard her sigh before she had begun to sigh. Luce had raised herself with her body leaning forward and, with breathing oppressed, she moaned in a whisper:
"Pierre, oh, Pierre!"
Pierre looked at her troubled.
"Oh, Pierre! What are we, anyway?... What is it they want of us?... What do we want?... What is this going on within us? These guns, these birds, this war, this love.... These hands, body, eyes.... Where am I?... and what am I?"
Pierre, who did not recognize this expression of bewilderment in her, wanted to take her in his arms. But she repulsed him.
"No! No!"
And hiding her face in her hands she thrust face and hands together into the grass. Pierre was upset and begged of her:
"Luce!..."
He thrust his head close to that of Luce.
"Luce," he repeated, "what's the matter with you? Is it against me?"
She raised her head.
"No!"
And he saw tears in her eyes.
"Are you in trouble?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
"Tell me...."
"Ah, I'm ashamed," she said....
"Ashamed? About what?"
"About everything."
She fell silent.
Since the morning she had been haunted by a sorrowful memory, painful and degrading; her mother, crazed by the poison that crept about in the promiscuous conditions of the factories made for luxury and for murder, in those human vats, no longer kept up any restraint upon herself. At home she had indulged in a scene of furious jealousy with her lover, without caring if her daughter heard; and Luce had learned that her mother was with child. For her this was like a blot that extended to herself, whose entire love, whose love for Pierre was polluted thereby. That is why when Pierre had approached her she had repulsed him; she was ashamed of herself and of him.... Ashamed of him? Poor Pierre!...
He remained there, humiliated, and not daring to budge any more. She was struck with remorse, smiled in the midst of tears and, resting her head on Pierre's knees, said:
"It is my turn!"
Still disquieted, Pierre smoothed her hair as one pets a cat. He murmured:
"Luce, what is all this? Tell me...."
"Nothing," she responded. "I've seen sorrowful things."
He had too much respect for her secrets to insist. But Luce went on a few minutes later:
"Ah, there are moments.... One is ashamed to belong to mankind."
Pierre trembled.
"Yes," said he.
And after a silence, bending over, he said very low:
"Forgive me!"
Luce sprang up impetuously, threw herself on Pierre's neck, repeating:
"Forgive me!"
And their mouths found each other.
The two children felt the need of consoling one another, both of them. Without saying it aloud they were thinking:
"Luckily we are going to die! The most frightful thing would be to become one of those men who are proud of being man—to destroy, to render vile...."
Lips touching lips, eyelashes brushing eyelashes, they plunged their gaze one in the other, smiling and with a tender pity. They did not tire of that divine sentiment which is the purest form of love. At last they tore themselves from their contemplation and Luce, with eyes again serene, perceived once more the gentle hue of the sky, the sweetness of the renewing trees and the breath of flowers.
"How lovely it all is!" she exclaimed.
She was thinking:
"Why are things so beautiful? And we so poor, so mediocre, so ugly! (unless it be you, my love, unless it be you!) ..."
She gazed at Pierre again:
"Pshaw! What are others to me?"
And with the magnificent illogicality of love she burst out laughing, sprang up with a leap, rushed into the wood and cried: "Catch me, catch me!"
They played like two children all the rest of the day. And when they were very tired they returned with slow steps toward the valley filled like a basket with the sheaves of the setting sun. Everything they savored seemed new to them—with one heart for two, with two bodies for one.
Theywere five friends about the same age, met together at the house of one of them, five young comrades at their studies whom a certain conformity of mind and a first sorting out of opinions had grouped together apart from the rest. And yet no two of them who thought the same way. Beneath the pretended unanimity of forty millions of Frenchmen there are forty million brains that keep right to themselves. Thought in France is like the country, a state composed of small properties. From one bit of farm to the other the five friends tried to exchange their ideas across the hedge. But they did that only to affirm themselves more imperatively in their several opinions, each for himself. Each one, for that matter, liberal in mind, and, if not all of them republicans, all foes of intellectual or social reaction, or any backward return.
Jacques Sée was the most blazingly in favor of the war. This generous young Jew had espoused all the passions the spirit of France contained. All through Europe his cousins in Israel espoused like him the causes and the ideas of their adopted countries. Moreover, according to their method, they even had a tendency toward an exaggeration of whatever they adopted. This fine fellow, with ardent but rather heavy voice and look, with his regular features as if marked with a stamp imposed, was more pronounced in his convictions than was needful, and violent in contradiction. According to him, all that was necessary was a crusade made by the democracies to deliver the nations and extinguish war. Four years of the philanthropic slaughterhouse had not convinced him. He was one of those who will never accept the flat contradiction of facts. He had a twofold pride, the secret pride of his race, which race he wished to rehabilitate, and his pride personal that wanted to prove itself right. He wished this all the more because he was not entirely sure of it. His sincere idealism served as a screen against exacting instincts too long suppressed and to a need for action and adventure, which was no less sincere.
Antoine Naudé, he too, was for the war. But that was because he could not do otherwise. This big honest youngbourgeois, with his rosy cheeks, placid and keen, who had a short breath and rolled hisrwith the pretty grace of the provinces of the Centre, contemplated with a quiet smile the enthusiastic transports of his friend Sée; or else he knew how on occasion to make him climb a tree with a careless word;—but the big, lazy fellow took precious care not to follow him up! What is the use of getting in a sweat for or against what does not depend upon ourselves? It is only in the tragedies that one finds the heroic and loquacious conflict between duty and one's pleasure. When we have no choice, we do our duty without wasting words. It was no jollier on that account. Naudé neither admired nor recriminated. His good sense told him that, once the train started and the war in motion, it was necessary to roll along with it; there was no other position to take. As for searching after the responsibilities, that was merely time lost. When I am forced to fight it gives me a gay outlook, a pretty consolation, to know that I might have not fought—if things had really been ... what they haven't been!
The responsibilities? Now for Bernard Saisset they were exactly the primordial question; he was obstinate in disentangling that knot of snakes; or rather, like a little Fury, he brandished the snakes above his head. A frail boy, distinguished looking, impassioned, too many nerves, burning with a too lively sensitiveness of the brain, belonging to the wealthybourgeoisieand an old republican family which had played a part in the highest offices of State, he professed, through reaction, all the ultra-revolutionary passions. He had inspected too near at hand the masters of the day and what they brought forth. He accused all the governments—and by preference his own. He talked of nothing any more but of syndicalists and bolsheviki; he had just made a discovery of them and he fraternized with them, as if he had known them from infancy. Without knowing too well which, he saw no remedy save in a total upset of society. He hated war; but he would have sacrificed himself with joy in a war between classes—a war against his own class, a war against himself.
The fourth in the group, Claude Puget, sat by at these jousts of words with a cold and somewhat disdainful attention. Coming from the very undermostbourgeoisie, poor, uprooted from his province by a passing inspector of schools who remarked his intelligence, prematurely deprived of the intimate influence of his family, this winner of aLycéescholarship, accustomed to depend upon himself alone, to live only with himself, merely lived by himself and for himself. An egotistic philosopher given to analysis of the soul, voluptuously immersed in his introspection like a big cat curled up in a ball, he was not moved at all by the agitation of the others. These three friends of his who never could agree among themselves he put in the same bag—with the "populars." Did not all three forfeit their social rank by wishing to partake in the aspirations of the mob? Truth to say, the mob was a different crowd for each of them. But for Puget the crowd, whatever it might be, was always wrong. The crowd was the enemy. The intellect should remain alone and follow its particular laws and found, apart from the vulgar crowd and the State, the small and closed kingdom of thought.
And Pierre, seated near the window, distractedly looked out of doors, and dreamed. Generally speaking, he mingled in these juvenile assaults with passion. But today it seemed to him a humming of idle words which he listened to from so far away, oh, so far away! in a bored and mocking demi-torpidity. Plunged in their discussions, the others were a long while in remarking his muteness. But at last Saisset, accustomed to find in Pierre an echo of his verbal bolshevisms, was astonished at failing to hear it reverberate any more and put the question to him.
Pierre waked up in a hurry, reddened, smiled and asked:
"What were you talking about?"
They were most indignant.
"Why, you haven't been listening to anything!"
"What, then, were you brooding about?" asked Naudé.
A little confused, a little impertinent, Pierre replied:
"About the springtide. It has come back all right without your permission. It will clear out without our help."
All of them crushed him with their disdain. Naudé taunted him as a "poet." And Jacques Sée as aposeur.
Puget alone fixed his eyes on him with curiosity and irony in them, his wrinkled eyes with their cold pupils.
"Flying ant!"
"What?" questioned Pierre, rather amused.
"Beware of the wings!" said Puget. "It's the nuptial flight. It only lasts one hour."
"Life does not last much more," said Pierre.
DuringPassion Week they saw one another every day. Pierre went to see Luce in her isolated house. The thin and hungry garden was waking up. They passed the afternoon there. They felt now an antipathy toward Paris and the crowd, against life also. At certain moments even, a moral paralysis kept them silent, immovable, one close to the other, without a wish to stir. A strange feeling was at work in both of them. They were afraid! Fear—in the measure that the day approached when they should give themselves the one to the other—fear through excess of love, through the purification of soul which the ugly things, the cruelties, the shameful facts of life frightened, and which, in an intoxication of passion and melancholy, dreamed of being delivered from it all.... They said nothing about it to each other.
The most of their time they passed in babbling gently about their future lodgings, their work in common, their little household. They arranged in advance, down to the smallest item of their installation, the furniture, the wall papers, the spot for each object. A true woman, the evocation of these tender nothings, intimate and familiar images of daily life, moved Luce sometimes to tears. They tasted the exquisite small joys of the hearth of the future.... They knew that nothing of that sort would occur—Pierre through the presentiment of his native pessimism—Luce through the clairvoyance of love which understood the practical impossibility of the marriage.... That is why they hasted to enjoy it in their dream. And each concealed from the other the certainty felt that it would not be anything else but a dream. Each one believed that this secret was personal and watched, deeply touched, over the other's illusion.
When they had exhausted the mournful delights of the impossible future they were overcome with fatigue, as if they had lived through all of it. Then they rested themselves, seated under the arbor with the dried-up vines, while the sun melted the congealed sap; and, Pierre's head on Luce's shoulder, they listened dreamily to the humming of the earth. Behind the passing clouds the young sun of March played bo-peep, laughed and disappeared. Clear sunrays, somber shadows ran across the plain as in a soul run joys and sorrows.
"Luce," said Pierre abruptly, "don't you recollect?... It was long, long ago.... Even then we were like this...."
"Yes," said Luce, "that's true. All of it, I remember all.... But where were we?..."
They amused themselves by trying to recall under what shapes they had known one another before. Already as human beings? Perhaps. But certainly at that time Pierre was the girl and Luce the lover.... Birds in the air? When she was a small child her mother told Luce that she had been a little wild goose that had fallen down the chimney; ah! she had thoroughly broken her wings!... But where particularly they enjoyed finding themselves again was in the elementary fluid forms that penetrate one another, twist about and untwist like the volutes of a dream or else of smoke: white clouds that dissolve in the gulf of the sky, little waves that play about, the rain on the soil, the dew on the bush, seeds of dandelion that swim at the beck of the air.... But the wind carries them away. Provided it does not begin to blow again and that we shall not lose each other any more for all eternity!...
But he decided:
"As for me, I believe that we never did quit one another; we were together just as we are now, lying against each other; only, we were asleep and we dreamed dreams. From time to time we awake.... With difficulty.... I feel your breath, your cheek against mine.... One makes a great effort; we bring our mouths together.... One falls back asleep.... Darling, darling, I am here, I hold your hand, don't let me go!... Now it is not quite yet the hour, spring hardly shows the end of his icy nose...."
"Like yours," said Luce.
"Very soon we shall awake on a fine summer's day...."
"We ourselves shall be that fine day of summer," says Luce.
"The warm shade of the limetrees, the sun through the branches, the bees that sing...."
"The peach on the warm wall and its perfumed pulp...."
"The noon spell of the harvesters and their golden sheaves...."
"The lazy cattle that chew their cud...."
"And at evensong, by the sunset like a flowerset pool, the liquid light that runs across the tops of the fields...."
"Yes, we shall be everything," quoth Luce, "everything that is good and sweet to see and to have, to kiss and to eat, to touch and inhale.... What's left over we shall leave to them," she added, pointing to the city and its smoke wreaths.
She laughed. Then, kissing her friend, she said:
"We have chanted our little duet well. What do you say, my friend Pierrot?"
"Yea, verily, Jessica," he replied.
"My poor Pierrot," she returned, "we are none too well equipped for this world, where people know how to sing nothing else but theMarseillaise!..."
"Good enough if they even knew how to sing that!"
"We have got off at the wrong station, we left the train too early."
"I'm afraid," said Pierre, "that the next station would have been still worse. Can you see us, my darling, in the social fabric of the future—the hive they promise us, where none will have the right to live except for the queen bee's service or for the republic?"
"Laying eggs from morning to night like amitrailleuseor from morning to night licking the eggs of others.... Thank you for that choice!" said Luce.
"Oh, Luce, little ugly one, how ugly you talk," said Pierre laughing.
"Yes, it's very bad, I know it. I am good for nothing. Nor you either, my friend. You are just as ill fitted for killing or maiming men as I am for sewing them up again, like those wretched horses when they are ripped up at the bullfights, so that they can serve again at the next affray. We two are useless beings and dangerous, who have the ridiculous, criminal pretention to live only in order to love those we do love, likewise my little lover lad and my friends, honest people and little children, the good light of the day, also good white bread and everything that is pretty and right for me to put in my mouth. It's shameful, it's shameful! Blush for me, Pierrot!... But we shall be well punished! There is going to be no place for us in that factory of the State, without rest and without truce, which the earth will be soon.... Luckily we shall not be here!"
"Yes, what happiness!" quoth Pierre.
"If in thine arms, O Lady of my heart,I die, to greater fame I'll not aspire,Content upon thy bosom to expireWhilst kissing thee and thus from living part...."
"Well, little darling, what sort of a fashion is that?"
"Nevertheless it is after a good old French mode. It's by Ronsard," said Pierre:
"...else I would only claimA century hence, sans glory and sans fameSlothful to die upon thy lap, Cassandra...."
"A hundred years!" sighed Luce. "He doesn't ask much!..."
"Or I mistake, or more delights are heapedIn death like that than all the honors reapedBy Caesar great or firebolt Alexander."
"Naughty, naughty, naughty little scamp! have you no shame? In this epoch of heroes!"
"There are too many," said Pierre. "I would rather be a little fellow who loves, a babe of a man."
"The babe of a woman who still has on his lips the milk from my breast," cried Luce, seizing him round the neck. "My babe, my own!"
Survivorsof those days who, since then, have been witness to the dazzling change of fortune, will have forgotten doubtless the menacing heavy flight of the dark wing which, during that week, covered the Ile de France and touched Paris with its shadow. Joy does not take further stock in past trials.—The German drive reached the line of its summit between Holy Monday and Holy Wednesday. The Somme traversed, Bapaume, Vesle, Guiscard, Roye, Noyon, Albert carried. Eleven hundred guns taken. Sixty thousand prisoners.... Symbol of the land of grace trampled upon, on Holy Tuesday died Debussy the harmonious. A lyre that is snapped.... "Poor little expiring Greece!" What will remain of it? A few chiseled vases, a few perfect stelae which the grass will invade from the Path of Tombs. Immortal vestiges of ruined Athens....
As from the height of a hill, Pierre and Luce watched the shadow that moved upon the town. Still wrapped in the rays of their love, they waited without fear for the end of the brief day. Now they would be two in the night. Like to the eveningAngelusthere rose up to them, conjured up, the voluptuous melancholy of the lovely chords of Debussy which they had so greatly loved. More than it had ever done in any other time, music responded to the need of their hearts. Music was the only art which rendered the voice of the delivered soul behind the screen of forms.
On Holy Thursday they walked, Luce on Pierre's arm and holding his hand, along the streets of the suburb, soused with the rain. Gusts of wind scurried over the moistened plain. They noted neither rain nor wind, neither the hideousness of the fields nor the muddy ways. They seated themselves on the low wall of a park, a section of which had recently fallen in. Under Pierre's umbrella, which scarcely protected her head and shoulders, Luce, her legs hanging down and her hands wet, her rubber coat all steeped, looked at the water dripping down. When the wind stirred the branches a little fire of drops sounded "clop, clop!" Luce was silent, smiling, tranquilly luminous. A profound joy bathed them.
"Why does one love so much?" said Pierre.
"Ah, Pierre, you do not love me so very much if you ask that."
"I ask you that," said Pierre, "in order to make you say what I know just as well as you."
"You want me to give you some compliments. But you'll be neatly caught. For if you know why I love you, I for my part do not know why."
"You don't know?" said Pierre in consternation.
"Why no!" (She was laughing in her sleeve.) "And there is no need at all why I should know. When one asks why something is, it means that one is not sure about it, that the thing is not good. Now that I do love, no more why! No more where or when or for, nor how either! My love is, my love is! All beside may exist if it cares to."
Their faces kissed each other. The rain took advantage of that, gliding under the awkward umbrella in order to brush with its fingers their hair and cheeks; between their lips they drank in a little cold drop.
Pierre remarked:
"But the others?"
"What others?" quoth Luce.
"The poor," answered Pierre. "All those who are not us?"
"Let them do as we do! Let them love!"
"And be loved? Luce, all the world can not do that."
"Why, yes!"
"Why, no. You don't realize the value of the gift you have made me."
"To give one's heart to love, one's lips to the beloved is to give one's eyes to the light; it isn't giving, it's taking."
"There are blind people."
"We cannot cure them, Pierrot. Let's do the seeing for them!"
Pierre remained silent.
"What are you thinking of?" asked she.
"I am thinking that on this day, very far from us, very near, He suffered the Passion, He who came on earth to cure the blind."
Luce took his hand:
"Do you believe in Him?"
"No, Luce, I believe no longer. But he remains always the friend of those he has accepted, even once, at his table. And you, do you know him?"
"Hardly," responded Luce. "They never talked to me about him. But without knowing him I love him.... For I know that he loved."
"Not as we do."
"Why not? We ourselves have a poor little heart that knows only how to love you, my love. But He; He loved all of us. But it's always the same love."
"Would you like we should go tomorrow," asked Pierre, much moved, "in honor of His death?... I was told that they will have fine music at Saint Gervais!"
"Yes, I would love well to go to church with you on that day. I am sure He will give us welcome. And being nearer to Him, one is nearer each to the other."
They fell silent.... Rain, rain, rain. The rain falls. The night falls.
"At this hour tomorrow," said she, "we shall be down there."
The fog was penetrating. She gave a little shudder.
"Darling, you are not cold?" he asked, disquieted.
She rose:
"No, no. Everything is love to me. I love everything and everything loves me. The rain loves me, the wind loves me, the gray sky and the cold—and my little greatly beloved...."
ForHoly Friday the heavens remained clothed in their long gray veils; but the air was soft and calm. In the streets one saw flowers, jonquils, stocks. Pierre took a few which she kept in her hand. They followed the peaceful Quai des Orfèvres and passed along the base of pure Notre-Dame. The charm of the Old City, clothed in a discreet light, surrounded them with its noble gentleness. On the Place Saint Gervais pigeons flew up under their feet. They followed them with their eyes about the façade of the church; one of the birds settled on the head of a statue. At the top of the steps to theparvisbefore the church, as they were about to enter, Luce turned about and perceived in the midst of the crowd a few steps away a little girl with reddish hair, about a dozen years old, leaning against the portal, both arms raised above her head, who was looking at them. She had the fine and somewhat archaic face of some little cathedral statue, with an enigmatic smile, graceful, shrewd and tender. Luce smiled also at her while calling Pierre's attention to her. But the little girl's gaze passed over her head and suddenly changed to fright. And hiding her face in her hands the child vanished.
"What is the matter with her?" asked Luce.
But Pierre did not look.
They entered. Above their heads the dove was cooing. Last noise from outside. The voices of Paris were quenched. The fresh air ceased. The hangings of the organ, the lofty vaultings, the curtain of stones and sounds parted them from the world.
They installed themselves in one of the side aisles between the second and the third chapel on the left as you enter. In the hollow of a pier both of them crouched, seated on some steps, hidden from the rest of the assembly. Turning their backs to the choir, on raising their eyes they saw the summit of the altar, the crucifix and the stained windows of a lateral chapel. The beautiful old chants wept out their pious melancholy. They were holding hands, the two little pagans, before the Great Friend, in the church all swathed in mourning. And both of them at the same time murmured in a low voice:
"Great Friend, before your face I take him, I take her. Unite us! You see our hearts."
And their fingers remained joined and interlaced like the straw of a basket. They were one single flesh which the waves of music passed through with their shivering notes. They took to dreaming, as if they lay in the same bed.
Luce saw again in her thought that little girl with reddish hair. And behold it seemed to her that she recalled how she had seen her before in a dream the past night. She could not reach the point of knowing whether that was actually true, or if she were projecting the vision of the present back to the past slumber. Then, weary of the effort, her thoughts allowed themselves to float.
Pierre pondered over the days of his short, expended life. The lark that rises from the misty plain to reach the sun.... How far it is! How high it is! Will it ever be reached?... The fog thickens. There is no earth any more, there are no heavens any more. And strength gives out.... Suddenly, while beneath the vault of the choir a Gregorianvocalisetrickled down, the jubilant song gushed forth, and out from the shadows emerges the little shivering form of the lark that swims on the sea of light without shore....
A pressure of their fingers recalled to them that they were swimming together. They found themselves again in the darkness of the church, closely pressed together, listening to the beautiful chants; their hearts melted with love and touched the summits of the purest joy. And both of them desired—they prayed—never to descend to earth again.
At that moment Luce, who had just kissed her dear little comrade with a passionate glance—(his eyes half closed and his lips parted, he appeared lost in an ecstasy of happiness and raised his head in a rush of thankful joy toward that supreme Power which we look for instinctively on high)—Luce saw with terror, in the red and gilded window of the chapel, the face of the reddish-haired child of theparviswho was smiling at her. And as she sat mute, frozen with astonishment, she saw once more on that strange visage the same expression of fright and of pity.
And at the same instant the great pier against which they leaned their backs moved, and down to its very base the entire church trembled. And Luce, whose heart beats deadened in her the crash of the explosion and the shrieks of the crowd, threw herself without having time to fear or to suffer upon Pierre, in order to cover him with her body like a hen with her brood—upon Pierre, who with closed eyes was smiling with happiness. With a maternal movement she clasped the dear head against her bosom and that with all her power; and, coiled upon him, her mouth on his neck, they shrank together to their utmost.
And the massive pier crumbled down upon them with one crash.
THE END