he was taken out for a walk. In spite of her mourning, Paris again
wore a smiling face; poverty and pain were hidden at home, or at the
bottom of her proud heart; but the perpetual Fair in the streets and
in the press showed its mask of contentment.
The people in the cafés and the tea-rooms were ready to hold out for
twenty years, if necessary. Maxime and his family sat in a tea-shop at
a little table, gay chatter and the perfume of women all about
him. Through it he saw the trench where he had been bombarded for
twenty-six days on end, unable to stir from the sticky ditch full of
corpses which rose around him like a wall.... His mother laid her
hand on his, he woke, saw the affectionate questioning glances of his
people, and self-reproached for making them uneasy, he smiled and
began to look about and talk gaily. His boyish high spirits came back,
and the shadow cleared away from Clerambault's face; he glanced simply
and gratefully at Maxime.
His alarms were not at an end, however. As they left the tea-shop--he
leaning on the arm of his son--they met a military funeral. There were
wreaths and uniforms, a member of the Institute with his sword between
his legs, and brass instruments braying out an heroic lamentation.
The crowd drew respectfully to either side, Clerambault stopped and
pointedly took off his hat, while with his left hand he pressed
Maxime's arm yet closer to his side. Feeling him tremble, he turned
towards his son, and thought he had a strange look. Supposing that he
was overcome he tried to draw him away, but Maxime did not stir, he
was so much taken aback.
"A dead man," he thought. "All that for one dead man!... and out there
we walk over them. Five hundred a day on the roll, that's the normal
ration."
Hearing a sneering little laugh, Clerambault was frightened and pulled
him by the arm.
"Come away!" he said, and they moved on.
"If they could see," said Maxime to himself, "if they could only
see!... their whole society would go to pieces,... but they will
always be blind, they do not want to see ..."
His eyes, cruelly sharpened now, saw the adversary all around him,--in
the carelessness of the world, its stupidity, its egotism, its luxury,
in the "I don't give a damn!", the indecent profits of the war,
the enjoyment of it, the falseness down to the roots.... All these
sheltered people, shirkers, police, with their insolent autos that
looked like cannon, their women booted to the knee, with scarlet
mouths, and cruel little candy faces ... they are all satisfied ...
all is for the best!... "It will go on forever as it is!" Half the
world devouring the other half....
They went home. In the evening after dinner Clerambault was dying to
read his latest poem to Maxime. The idea of it was touching, if a
little absurd.--In his love for his son, he sought to be in spirit,
at least, the comrade of his glory and his sufferings, and he had
described them,--at a distance--in "Dawn in the Trenches." Twice he
got up to look for the MS., but with the sheets in his hand a sort of
shyness paralysed him, and he went back without them.
As the days went by they felt themselves closely knit together by ties
of the flesh, but their souls were out of touch. Neither would admit
it though each knew it well.
A sadness was between them, but they refused to see the real cause,
and preferred to ascribe it to the approaching reparation. From time
to time the father or the mother made a fresh attempt to re-open the
sources of intimacy, but each time came the same disappointment.
Maxime saw that he had no longer any way of communicating with them,
with anyone in the rear. They lived in different worlds ... could they
ever understand each other again?... Yet still he understood them, for
once he had himself undergone the influence which weighed on them,
and had only come to his senses "out there," in contact with real
suffering and death. But just because he had been touched himself, he
knew the impossibility of curing the others by process of reasoning;
so he let them talk, silent himself, smiling vaguely, assenting to be
knew not what. The preoccupations here behind the lines filled him
with disgust, weariness, and a profound pity for these people in
the rear--a strange race to him, with the outcries of the papers,
questions from such persons--old buffoons, worn-out, damaged
politicians!--patriotic braggings, written-up strategies, anxieties
about black bread, sugar cards, or the days when the confectioners
were shut. He took refuge in a mysterious silence, smiling and sad;
and only went out occasionally, when he thought of the short time he
had to be with these dear people who loved him. Then he would begin to
talk with the utmost animation about anything. The important thing was
to make a noise, since one could no longer speak one's real thoughts,
and naturally he fell back on everyday matters. Questions of general
interest and political news came first, but they might as well have
read the morning paper aloud. "The Crushing of the Huns," "The Triumph
of the Right," filled Clerambault's thoughts and speeches, while he
served as acolyte, and filled in the pauses with _cum spiritu tuo_.
All the time each was waiting for the other to begin to talk.
They waited so long that the end of his leave came. A little while
before he went, Maxime came into his father's study resolved to
explain himself:
"Papa, are you quite sure?" ...
The trouble painted on Clerambault's face checked the words on his
lips. He had pity on him and asked if his father was quite sure at
what time the train was to leave and Clerambault heard the end of the
question with an only too visible relief. When he had supplied all the
information--that Maxime did not listen to--he mounted his oratorical
hobby-horse again and started out with one of his habitual idealistic
declamations. Maxime held his peace, discouraged, and for the last
hour they spoke only of trifles. All but the mother felt that the
essential had not been uttered; only light and confident words, an
apparent excitement, but a deep sigh in the heart--"My God! my God!
why hast thou forsaken us?"
When Maxime left he was really glad to go back to the front. The gulf
that he had found between the front and rear seemed to him deeper than
the trenches, and guns did not appear to him as murderous as ideas.
As the railway carriage drew out of the station he leaned from the
window and followed with his eyes the tearful faces of his family
fading in the distance, and he thought:
"Poor dears, you are their victims and we are yours."
The day after his return to the front the great spring offensive was
let loose, which the talkative newspapers had announced to the enemy
several weeks beforehand. The hopes of the nation had been fed on it
during the gloomy winter of waiting and death, and it rose now, filled
with an impatient joy, sure of victory and crying out to it--"At
last!"
The first news seemed good; of course it spoke only of the enemy's
losses, and all faces brightened. Parents whose sons, women whose
husbands were "out there" were proud that their flesh and their love
had a part in this sanguinary feast; and in their exaltation they
hardly stopped to think that their dear one might be among the
victims. The excitement ran so high that Clerambault, an affectionate,
tender father, generally most anxious for those he loved, was actually
afraid that his son had not got back in time for "The Dance." He
wanted him to be there, his eager wishes pushed, thrust him into the
abyss, making this sacrifice, disposing of his son and of his life,
without asking if he himself agreed. He and his had ceased to belong
to themselves. He could not conceive that it should be otherwise with
any of them. The obscure will of the ant-heap had eaten him up.
Sometimes taken unawares, the remains of his self-analytical habit of
mind would appear; like a sensitive nerve that is touched,--a dull
blow, a quiver of pain, it is gone, and we forget it.
At the end of three weeks the exhausted offensive was still pawing the
ground of the same blood-soaked kilometres, and the newspapers began
to distract public attention, putting it on a fresh scent. Nothing had
been heard from Maxime since he left. They sought for the ordinary
reasons for delay which the mind furnishes readily but the heart
cannot accept. Another week went by. Among themselves each of the
three pretended to be confident, but at night, each one alone in his
room, the heart cried out in agony, and the whole day long the ear was
strained to catch every step on the stair, the nerves stretched to the
breaking point at a ring of the bell, or the touch of a hand passing
the door.
The first official news of the losses began to come in; several
families among Clerambault's friends already knew which of their men
were dead and which wounded. Those who had lost all, envied those who
could have their loved ones back, though bleeding, perhaps mutilated.
Many sank into the night of their grief; for them the war and life
were equally over. But with others the exaltation of the early days
persisted strangely; Clerambault saw one mother wrought up by her
patriotism and her grief to the point that she almost rejoiced at the
death of her son. "I have given my all, my all!" she would say, with
a violent, concentrated joy such as is felt in the last second before
extinction by a woman who drowns herself with the man she loves.
Clerambault however was weaker, and waking from his dizziness he
thought:
"I too have given all, even what was not my own."
He inquired of the military authorities, but they knew nothing as yet.
Ten days later came the news that Sergeant Clerambault was reported
as missing from the night of the 27-28th of the preceding month.
Clerambault could get no further details at the Paris bureaus;
therefore he set out for Geneva, went to the Red Cross, the Agency for
Prisoners,--could find nothing; followed up every clue, got permission
to question comrades of his son in hospitals or depots behind the
lines. They all gave contradictory information; one said he was a
prisoner, another had seen him dead, and both the next day admitted
that they had been mistaken.... Oh! tortures! God of vengeance!...
He came back after a fortnight from this Way of the Cross, aged,
broken-down, exhausted.
He found his wife in a paroxysm of frantic grief, which in this
good-natured creature had turned to a furious hatred of the enemy;
she cried out for revenge, and for the first time Clerambault did not
answer. He had not strength enough to hate, he could only suffer.
He shut himself into his room. During that frightful ten days'
pilgrimage he had scarcely looked his thoughts in the face, hypnotised
as he was, day and night by one idea, like a dog on a scent,--faster!
go faster! The slowness of carriages and trains consumed him, and
once, when he had taken a room for the night, he rushed away the same
evening, without stopping to rest. This fever of haste and expectation
devoured everything, and made consecutive thought impossible,--which
was his salvation. Now that the chase was ended, his mind, exhausted
and dying, recovered its powers.
Clerambault knew certainly that Maxime was dead. He had not told his
wife, but had concealed some information that destroyed all hope. She
was one of those people who absolutely must keep a gleam of falsehood
to lure them on, against all reason, until the first flood of grief is
over. Perhaps Clerambault himself had been one of them, but he was not
so now; for he saw where this lure had led him. He did not judge, he
was not yet able to form a judgment, lying in the darkness. Too weak
to rise, and feel about him, he was like someone who moves his crushed
limbs after a fall, and with each stab of pain recovers consciousness
of life, and tries to understand what has happened to him. The stupid
gulf of this death overcame him. That this beautiful child, who had
given them so much joy, cost them so much care, all this marvel of
hope in flower, the priceless little world that is a young man, a tree
of Jesse, future years ... all vanished in an hour!--and why?--why?--
He was forced to try to persuade himself at least that it was for
something great and necessary. Clerambault clung despairingly to this
buoy during the succeeding nights, feeling that if his hold gave way
he should go under. More than ever he insisted on the holiness of the
cause; he would not even discuss it; but little by little his fingers
slipped, he settled lower with every movement, for each new statement
of the justice of his cause roused a voice in his conscience which
said:
"Even if you were twenty thousand times more right in this struggle,
is your justification worth the disasters it costs? Does justice
demand that millions of innocents should fall, a ransom for the sins
and the errors of others? Is crime to be washed out by crime?
or murder by murder? And must your sons be not only victims but
accomplices, assassinated and assassins?..."
He looked back at the last visit of his son, and reflected on their
last talks together. How many things were clear to him now, which he
had not understood at the time! Maxime's silence, the reproach in his
eyes. The worst of all was when he recognised that he had understood,
at the time, when his son was there, but that he would not admit it.
This discovery, which had hung over him like a dark cloud for
weeks,--this realisation of inward falsehood,--crushed him to the
earth.
Until the actual crisis was upon them, Rosine Clerambault seemed
thrown into the shade. Her inward life was unknown to the others, and
almost to herself; even her father had scarcely a glimpse of it. She
had lived under the wing of the warm, selfish, stifling family life,
and had few friends or companions of her own age, for her parents
stood between her and the world outside, and she had grown up in their
shadow.
As she grew older if she had wished to escape she would not have
dared, would not have known how; for she was shy outside the
family circle, and could hardly move or talk; people thought her
insignificant. This she knew; it wounded her self-respect, and
therefore she went out as little as possible, preferring to stay at
home, where she was simple, natural and taciturn. This silence did not
arise from slowness of thought, but from the chatter of the others.
As her father, mother, and brother were all exuberant talkers, this
little person by a sort of reaction, withdrew into herself, where she
could talk freely.
She was fair, tall, and boyishly slender, with pretty hair, the locks
always straying over her cheeks. Her mouth was rather large and
serious, the lower lip full at the corners, her eyes large, calm and
vague, with fine well-marked eyebrows. She had a graceful chin, a
pretty throat, an undeveloped figure, no hips; her hands were large
and a little red, with prominent veins. Anything would make her blush,
and her girlish charm was all in the forehead and the chin. Her eyes
were always asking and dreaming, but said little.
Her father's preference was for her, just as her mother was drawn
towards the son by natural affinity. Without thinking much about it,
Clerambault had always monopolised his daughter, surrounding her from
childhood with his absorbing affection. She had been partly educated
by him, and with the almost offensive simplicity of the artist mind,
he had taken her for the confidante of his inner life. This was
brought about by his overflowing self-consciousness, and the little
response that he found in his wife, a good creature, who, as the
saying is, sat at his feet, in fact stayed there permanently,
answering yes to all that he said, admiring him blindly, without
understanding him, or feeling the lack; the essential to her was not
her husband's thought but himself, his welfare, his comfort, his food,
his clothing, his health. Honest Clerambault in the gratitude of his
heart did not criticise his wife, any more than Rosine criticised her
mother, but both of them knew how it was, instinctively, and were
drawn closer by a secret tie. Clerambault was not aware that in his
daughter he had found the real wife of his heart and mind. Nor did he
begin to suspect it, till in these last days the war had seemed to
break the tacit accord between them. Rosine's approval hitherto had
bound her to him, and now all at once it failed him. She knew many
things before he did, but shrank from the depths of the mystery; the
mind need not give warning to the heart, it knows.
Strange, splendid mystery of love between souls, independent of social
and even of natural laws. Few there be that know it, and fewer still
that dare to reveal it; they are afraid of the coarse world and its
summary judgments and can get no farther than the plain meaning
of traditional language. In this conventional tongue, which is
voluntarily inexact for the sake of social simplification, words are
careful not to unveil, by expressing them, the many shades of reality
in its multiple forms. They imprison it, codify it, drill it; they
press it into the service of the mind already domesticated; of that
reasoning power which does not spring from the depth of the
spirit, but from shallow, walled-in pools--like the basins at
Versailles--within the limits of constituted society.
In this somewhat legal phraseology love is bound to sex, age, and
social classes; it is either natural or unnatural, legitimate or the
reverse. But this is a mere trickle of water from the deep springs of
love, which is as the law of gravitation that keeps the stars in their
courses, and cares nothing for the ways that we trace for it. This
infinite love fulfils itself between souls far removed by time and
space; across the centuries it unites the thoughts of the living and
the dead; weaves close and chaste ties between old and young hearts;
through it, friend is nearer to friend, the child is closer in spirit
to the old man than are husband or wife in the whole course of
their lives. Between fathers and children these ties often exist
unconsciously, and "the world" as our forefathers used to say, counts
so little in comparison with love eternal, that the positions are
sometimes reversed, and the younger may not always be the most
childlike. How many sons are there who feel a devout paternal
affection for an old mother? And do we not often see ourselves small
and humble under the eyes of a child? The look with which the Bambino
of Botticelli contemplates the innocent Virgin is heavy with a sad
unconscious experience, and as old as the world.
The affection of Clerambault and Rosine was of this sort; fine,
religious, above the reach of reason. That is why, in the depths of
the troubled sea, below the pains and the conflicts of conscience
caused by the war, a secret drama went on, without signs, almost
without words, between these hearts united by a sacred love. This
unavowed sentiment explained the sensitiveness of their mutual
reactions. At first Rosine drew away in silence, disappointed in her
affection, her secret worship tarnished, by the effect of the war on
her father; she stood apart from him, like a little antique statue,
chastely draped. At once Clerambault became uneasy; his sensibility
sharpened by tenderness, felt instantly this _Noli me tangere_, and
from this arose an unexpressed estrangement between the father and
daughter. Words are so coarse, one would not dare to speak even in the
purest sense of disappointed love, but this inner discord, of which
neither ever spoke a word, was pain to both of them; made the young
girl unhappy, and irritated Clerambault. He knew the cause well
enough, but his pride refused to admit it; though little by little he
was not far from confessing that Rosine was right. He was ready to
humiliate himself, but his tongue was tied by false shame; and so the
difference between their minds grew wider, while in their hearts each
longed to yield.
In the confusion that followed Maxime's death, this inward prayer
pressed more on the one less able to resist. Clerambault was
prostrated by his grief, his wife aimlessly busy, and Rosine was out
all day at her war work. They only came together at meals. But it
happened that one evening after dinner Clerambault heard her mother
violently scolding Rosine, who had spoken of wounded enemies whom she
wanted to take care of. Madame Clerambault was as indignant as if
her daughter had committed a crime, and appealed to her husband. His
weary, vague, sad eyes had begun to see; he looked at Rosine who was
silent, her head bent, waiting for his reply.
"You are right, my little girl," he said.
Rosine started and flushed, for she had not expected this; she raised
her grateful eyes to his, and their look seemed to say: "You have come
back to me at last."
After the brief repast they usually separated; each to eat out his
heart in solitude. Clerambault sat before his writing-table and wept,
his face hidden in his hands. Rosine's look had pierced through to his
suffering heart; his soul lost, stifled for so long, had come to be as
it was before the war. Oh, the look in her eyes!...
He listened, wiping away his tears; his wife had locked herself into
Maxime's room as she did every evening, and was folding and unfolding
his clothes, arranging the things left behind.... He went into the
room where Rosine sat alone by the window, sewing. She was absorbed in
thought, and did not hear him coming till he stood before her; till he
laid his grey head on her shoulder and murmured: "My little girl."
Then her heart melted also. She took the dear old head between her
hands, with its rough hair, and answered:
"My dear father."
Neither needed to ask or to explain why he was there. After a long
silence, when he was calmer, he looked at her and said:
"It seems as if I had waked up from a frightful dream." ... But she
merely stroked his hair, without speaking.
"You were watching over me, were you not?... I saw it.... Were you
unhappy?" ...
She just bowed her head not daring to look at him. He stooped to kiss
her hands, and raising his head he whispered:
"My good angel. You have saved me!"
When he had gone back to his room she stayed there without moving,
filled with emotion, which kept her for long, still, with drooping
head, her hands clasped on her knees. The waves of feeling that flowed
through her almost took away her breath. Her heart was bursting with
love, happiness, and shame. The humility of her father overcame
her.... And all at once a passionate impulse of tender, filial piety
broke the bonds which paralysed her soul and body, as she stretched
out her arms towards the absent, and threw herself at the foot of her
bed, thanking God, beseeching Him to give all the suffering to her,
and happiness to the one she loved.
The God to whom she prayed did not give ear; for it was on the head of
this young girl that he poured the sweet sleep of forgetfulness; but
Clerambault had to climb his Calvary to the end.
Alone in his room, the lamp put out, in darkness, Clerambault looked
within himself. He was determined to pierce to the bottom of his
timid, lying soul which tried to hide itself. On his head he could
still feel the coolness of his daughter's hand, which had effaced all
his hesitation.
He would face this monster Truth, though he were torn by its claws
which never relax, once they have taken hold.
With a firm hand, in spite of his anguish, he began to tear off in
bleeding fragments the covering of mortal prejudices, passions, and
ideas foreign to his real nature, which clung to him.
First came the thick fleece of the thousand-headed beast, the
collective soul of the herd. He had hidden under it from fear and
weariness. It is hot and stifling, a dirty feather-bed; but once
wrapped in it, one cannot move to throw it off, or even wish to do so;
there is no need to will, or to think; one is sheltered from cold,
from responsibilities. Laziness, cowardice!... Come, away with it!...
Let the chilly wind blow through the rents. You shrink at first, but
already this breath has shaken the torpor; the enfeebled energy begins
to stagger to its feet. What will it find outside? No matter what, we
must see....