I think the thing that impelled me irresistibly to Mademoiselle Duvernoy was the directness and order of her character. I knew that as she was, she had always been, and that no future temptation could ever alter for a moment her clear perception of her own high ideals. In fact, I could not conceive of any such thing as temptation even entering her life. To me, in my own consciousness of my turbulent, shifting existence and my distrust of to-morrow, it brought me a sense of cathedral calm to be privileged to sit at her side and listen. I had not the slightest thought what was awakening in me, so simple, so natural and so unpremeditated was my impulse towards her. Gradually, a sense of well-being and light-heartedness came to me, for now, while I was still aware of her struggling against me, I was also aware of her yielding. With each morning’s greeting I felt the night’s determination to relegate me into the safe distance of the crowd. Yet I had but to conquer the disappointment of her first manner and possess my soul in patience, to have her turn to me in a new friendliness. At first I talked, and she listened, gravely and attentively. I spoke of impersonal things, of memories of trenches and hospital, of my intellectual unrest and philosophic speculations.She answered me shortly, or by a question led me to find my own solution, but it was not until we were three days from port that she revealed her own thoughts and Peter Magnus was the occasion. I had been speaking of my reluctance to return home and my fear of the indifference to war I should find.
“You are never very tolerant, are you?” she said pensively.
“No, I suppose not,” I said, rather surprised at her reading my character. “And yet you who are French surely must understand the longing I have to love my own country.”
“My country has been centuries in the making. Our memories are long. In every family some one has died that France might remain France. We are an old race. We have lived together, been proud together, suffered together, a long while. That does not come in a day.”
“No, of course not.”
I must have shown in my sudden abstraction something of the indecision in my mind for, to my surprise, a note of friendly sympathy came into her voice.
“Mr. Littledale, I am afraid you are going to be unhappy, just at first. You hope for too much. Don’t be impatient. How can your people know what we know? You will learn, as we learned, to stand together—by suffering.”
At this moment, the voice of Peter Magnus broke in on our new mood.
“Then, you are glorifying war; you’ve come to that. Admit it.”
Brinsmade rose from his rugs and stood before us with an expression of utter helplessness.
“Here is a man who has been three months in France and brings back nothing but war is horrible. What am I to do with him?”
Peter Magnus ensconced himself in Brinsmade’s chair, so that we formed a group. He took off his hat and ran his hands through his hair, which was like a mane.
“When you speak of the glory of war,” he said, addressing Mademoiselle Duvernoy directly, “I see only the women in black, the cripples, the men who will grope in blindness, the station filled with the agony of parting, the homes swept by sorrow. Glory! Where is the glory in it, if you do not wear a crown? No, no, war is horrible, unthinkable!”
“Yet war is as inevitable a condition to a nation as death is to a human being,” she said quietly. “And is death so horrible?”
We three, of differing degrees of agnosticism, looked at her, struck with the boldness of the thought. It was Magnus who broke out:
“Yes, horrible! Death is horrible!”
“That, Monsieur, is because you have not seen how men die: you are frightened by the mystery of the thing you do not know. And—perhaps, in a man like you, you see only your own death—do you not?”
Magnus stared at her. From the first he had been strongly attracted to her and never failed in deference.
“What can you know of such a thing?” he asked incredulously.
“Men have died by the hundreds about me.”
“You?”
She nodded.
“You have nursed in the Red Cross?”
“Yes. I do not like to speak of myself. I only mention it because we are discussing things seriously. Yes, I have seen men die by the hundreds. Monsieur Magnus, I have listened to many things you have said, and I wish to tell you where you are wrong, and where all your doctrineswill fall down. All you think of is to avoid suffering.”
“Yes, not only the suffering that comes from needless sacrifice, but the unending suffering that comes from those who must go on living. You know one thing. I know the great mass; the suffering of those who starve and suffocate.”
“You speak of the individual. I speak of the bigger thing,—the race.” A little color came into her face as she grew animated with her theme. “If a million men die to-day or to-morrow, what difference does that make to the nation, any more than the death of a single sparrow?”
“I can hardly believe it is you that says such a thing!” he said, astounded.
“Perhaps you don’t understand me. It is not how a million men die but how they live that is important.”
“You are arguing with an individualist,” said Brinsmade.
“The right to live your life as you wish is to me a far more important thing than whether half the world shall speak English or German,” said Magnus warmly. “I am looking from the bottom up. I know what they think who are striving,—not how best to enjoy life, but how to live. I know what the workers feel about such things.”
“If that is true in America,” she said, seeking to moderate the antagonism which his views aroused in her, “it is because the peasants and the workers who have emigrated are—how do you say?—déracinés; they have been uprooted; they have not yet fastened to your land; they do not love it more than they do themselves. What you say is not true of our French people. If you had seen our mobilization, you would have understood what it is,—the love of country.”
“I saw it in the city,” I said, breaking in, “and it is a memory I shall never forget.”
“But you should have seen it in the country! The quietness and the stillness of it all—only the tocsin ringing in the church towers, ringing all the afternoon. I saw it. I saw the women running to join the men in the fields; to be together, the first thought. And I can see the men leaving their reaping, sending back the women to make ready their uniforms while they went, silently—always silently—to register at themairies. And when they went off, that night, each woman brought down something from the store of the stockings,—a hundred, two hundred francs. Not a woman rebelled. They put out flower pots on the window sills and garlands of flowers on the great locomotives; and I myself saw a little child writing in chalk on the cars, ‘J’aime la France!’ There have been other moments—moments of doubt and weakness—but it is good to have seen that!” She stopped, a little embarrassed at having been carried away by her own enthusiasm. Then, she said more quietly: “That is how the people of France, the people you speak of, felt.”
Magnus was silent a moment.
“It is hard to answer you, Mademoiselle,” he said, gently. “I grant you that it is beautiful, but I maintain that the tragic thing is that it is all so unnecessary.”
“No, no, it is not unnecessary. I say that France is finer, nobler now than it was before. Sacrifice is the essence of life. Suffering is the test of the finest in us. Why won’t you admit that? Is it because you don’t believe in anything else?”
“No,” he said. “I cannot believe.”
“Yes, that is at the bottom of much of your Socialism and your internationalism and your individualism. It is the selfish conception of mankind. There, Mr. Magnus, there, we disagree. We are not afraid of death.”
“The Socialists and Freethinkers fought bravely, Mademoiselle,” he said quietly, flushing under the antagonism he felt in her voice.
“True,” she said, checked for a moment, “but one is not truly agnostic when one’s mother has had faith. It is not a question of bravery, though. That is not quite fair,” she admitted. “Yet, I am sure I am right. If there is no religious belief, you cannot have faith also for your nation, can you, Mr. Brinsmade?”
“I had not thought of it in your way,” he said slowly. “I am inclined to believe you are right.”
“I am. A Frenchman may have ceased to believe, but he can’t get away from what has been taught him back through his generations of ancestors. For we have taught him duty, not as something he rebels against, but as an ideal, something so beautiful that he is willing to sacrifice himself to that. Also, that is why we are a great nation; because our young men are brought up to think of France as something outside of themselves, that must go on, that must live,—an ideal that is not selfish. That is what we all feel, Messieurs, from top to bottom. What difference what happens to us, if France remains? Oh, I express myself badly,” she broke off. “I wish I could make you feel what we feel!”
“I understand your point of view, and I do respect it: yet, Mademoiselle, there is something that I believe is more important, and that is to see the truth. Don’t condemn too hastily. You have the gift of faith: it is a wonderful thing. We are unhappier, I grant you; but we cannot change our independence. Pardon me if I am not convinced.”
“In what way?”
“I still maintain that when the people’s eyes are open, they will see that they are the ones who are sacrificed. The nationality you speak of is a beautiful thing,—adramatically beautiful thing. I can understand how honor, glory, duty—those Middle Ages words—thrill your class. But the others,—the peasant, the workman; no, no, he fights without understanding, blindly, and he is the one who bears the burden. For is it not true that it is the great mass, the men in the fields and in the streets, that bears the burden and receives nothing?”
She started to answer and checked herself, but immediately, impelled by an impulse too strong to be mastered, she said:
“Monsieur Magnus, it is my right to answer that. At New Year’s, 1914, in my family, we sat down to table, fifteen of us: my mother, my father, my five brothers, uncles and cousins—fifteen. Five are left to-day: myself, a brother and two cousins at the front, and a brother who in another year will go to do his duty as a volunteer; and, if for any reason he should seek to avoid it, we would disown him though he were the last of our name.”
She said it quietly without change of voice. We looked at her, incapable of reply. Tears started to the eyes of Peter Magnus. He took off his hat and said solemnly:
“If all the world were like you, Mademoiselle Duvernoy, there would be no rebels like me.”
And, for that, I shall always maintain a respect for Peter Magnus.