night-sweat of a hallucinated people, should look back at the rites
and beliefs of ancient history. Let him ask the quizzical Herodotus
to unroll for him the film of human wanderings, the long panorama of
social customs, sometimes ignoble or ridiculous, but always venerated;
of the Scythians, the Gatae, the Issedones, the Gindares, the
Nasamones, the Sauromates, the Lydians, the Lybians, and the
Egyptians; bipeds of all colours, from East to West and from North to
South. The Great King, who was a man of wit, asked the Greeks, who
burn their dead, to eat them; and the Hindoos, who eat them, to burn
them, and was much amused by their indignation. The wise Herodotus
who doffs his cap, though he may grin behind it, will not judge them
himself and does not think it fair to laugh at them. He says: 'If it
were proposed to all men to choose between the best laws of different
nations, each one would give the preference to his own; so true it is
that every man is convinced that his own country is the best. Nothing
can be truer than the words of Pindar: _Custom is the Sovereign of all
men_.'
"It is true everyone must drink out of his own trough, but you would
at least think that we would allow others to do likewise; but not
at all, we cannot enjoy our own without spitting in that of our
neighbours. It is the will of God,--for a god we must have in some
shape, in that of man or beast, or even of a thing, a black or red
line as in the Middle Ages,--a blackbird, a crow, a blazon of some
kind; we must have something on which to throw the responsibility of
our insanities.
"Now that the coat-of-arms has been superseded by the flag, we declare
that we are freed from superstitions! But at what time were they
darker than they are now? Under our new doctrine of equality we are
all obliged to smell exactly alike. We are not even free to say that
we are not free; that would be sacrilege! With the pack on our back we
must bawl out: 'Liberty forever!' Under the orders of her father, the
daughter of Cheops made herself a harlot that she might contribute by
her body to the building of the pyramid. And now to raise the pyramids
of our massive republics, millions of citizens prostitute their
consciences and themselves, body and soul, to falsehood and hate.
We have become past masters in the great art of lying. True, it was
always known, but the difference between us and our forefathers is
that they knew themselves to be liars, and were not far from admitting
it in their simple way; it was a necessity of nature--they relieved
themselves before the passers-by, as you see men do today in the
South.... 'I shall lie,' said Darius, innocently. One should not be
too scrupulous when it is useful to tell a lie. Those who speak the
truth want the same thing as those who tell falsehoods. We do so in
the hope of gaining some advantage, and we are truthful for the same
reason and that people may feel confidence in us. Thus, though we may
not follow the same road, we are all aiming at the same thing, for if
there were naught to gain, a truth-teller would be equally ready to
lie, and a liar to tell the truth.'--We, my dear contemporaries, are
more modest; we do not look on at each other telling falsehoods on the
curb. It must be done behind four walls. We lie to ourselves, and we
never confess it, not even to our innermost selves. No, we do not
lie, we 'idealise.' ... Come, let us see your eyes, and let them see
clearly, if you are free men!
"Free! What are you free from, and which of you is free in your
countries today? Are you free to act? No, since the State disposes of
your life, so that you must either assassinate others or be yourselves
assassinated. Are you free to speak or to write? No, for they imprison
you if you dare to speak your mind. Can you even think for yourselves?
Not unless it is _sub rosa_--and the bottom of a cellar is none too
secure.
"Be silent and wary, for there are sharp eyes on you.... To keep you
from action there are sentries, corporals with stripes on their arms,
and sentries, too, over your minds; churches and universities that
prescribe what you may believe, and what you may not.... What do you
complain of, they say, even if you are not complaining. You must not
fatigue your mind by thinking; repeat your catechism!
"Are we not told that this catechism was freely agreed to by the
sovereign people?--A fine sovereignty, truly! Idiots, who puff out
your cheeks over the word Democracy! Democracy is the art of usurping
the people's place, of shearing their wool off closely, in this holy
name, for the benefit of some of Democracy's good apostles. In peace
times the people only know what goes on through the press, which is
bought and told what to say by those whose interest it is to hoodwink
the public, while the truth is kept under lock and key. In war time it
is even better, for then it is the people themselves who are locked
up. Allowing that they have ever known what they wanted, it is no
longer possible for them to speak above their breath. Obey. _Perinde
ac cadaver_.... Ten millions of corpses.... The living are hardly
better off, depressed as they are by four years of sham patriotism,
circus-parades, tom-toms, threats, braggings, hatreds, informers,
trials for treason, and summary executions. The demagogues have called
in all the reserves of obscurantism to extinguish the last gleams
of good sense that lingered in the people, and to reduce them to
imbecility.
"It is not enough to debase them; they must be so stupefied that they
wish to be debased. The formidable autocracies of Egypt, Persia, and
Syria, made playthings of the lives of millions of men; and the secret
of their power lay in the supernatural light of their pseudo-divinity.
From the extreme limit of the ages of credulity, every absolute
monarchy has been a theocracy. In our democracies, however, it
is impossible to believe in the divinity of humbugs, shaky and
discredited, like some of our moth-eaten Ministers; we are too close
to them, we know their dirty tricks, so they have invented the idea of
concealing God behind their drop-curtain; God means the Republic,
the Country, Justice, Civilisation; the names are painted up on
the outside. Each booth at the fair displays in huge many-coloured
posters, the picture of its Beautiful Giantess; millions crowd around
to see it, but they do not tell us what they think when they come out.
Perhaps they found it difficult to think at all! Some stay inside and
others have seen nothing. But those who stand in front of the stage
gaping, they know God is there for they have seen His picture. The
wish that we have to believe in Him--that is the god of each one of
us.
"Why does this desire flame up so furiously? Because we do not want to
see the truth--and therefore _because we do see it_. Therein lies the
tragedy of humanity; it refuses to see and know. As a last resort, it
is forced to find divinity in the mire. Let us, on our part, dare to
look the truth in the face.
"The instinct of murder is deeply engraved in the heart of nature. It
is a truly devilish instinct, since it seems to have created beings
not only to eat, but to be eaten. One species of cormorants eats
fishes. The fishermen exterminate the birds. And the fish disappear,
because they fed on the excrement of the birds who devoured them. Thus
the chain of beings is like a serpent eating his own tail.... If only
we were not sentient beings, did not witness our own tortures, we
might escape from this hell. There are two ways only: that of Buddha,
who effaced within himself the painful illusion of life; and the
religious way, which throws the veil of a dazzling falsehood over
crime and sorrow. Those who devour others are said to be the chosen
people who work for God. The weight of sin, thrown into one of the
scales of life, finds its counterpoise beyond in the dream where all
wounds and sorrows are to be cured. The form of the beyond varies
from people to people and from time to time, and these variations are
called Progress, though it is always the same need of illusion. Our
terrible consciousness insists on seeing and reckoning with the unjust
law; for if we do not give it something to bite on, fill its maw
somehow, it will howl with hunger and fear, crying out: 'I must have
belief or death!' And that is why we go in flocks; for security, to
make a common certainty out of our individual doubts.
"What have we to do with truth? Most men think that truth is the
Adversary. Of course they do not say this, but by a tacit agreement
what they call truth is a sickening mixture of much falsehood and very
little truth, which serves to paint over the lie so that we get deceit
and eternal slavery. Not the monuments of faith and love are the most
durable, those of servitude last much longer. Rheims and the Parthenon
fall to ruins, but the Pyramids of Egypt defy the ages; all about them
is the desert, its mirages and its moving sand. When I think of the
millions of souls swallowed up by the spirit of slavery in the course
of centuries--heretics, revolutionists, rebels lay and clerical,--I am
no longer surprised at the mediocrity that spreads like greasy water
over the world.
"We who have so far kept our heads above the gloomy surface, what
are we to do in face of the implacable universe, where the stronger
eternally crushes the weaker, and is crushed by a stronger yet, in his
turn? Shall we resign ourselves to a voluntary sacrifice through pity
or weariness? Or shall we join in and cut the throats of the weak,
without the shadow of an illusion as to the blind cosmic cruelty?
What choice is left, but to try to keep out of the struggle through
selfishness--or wisdom, which is another form of the same thing?"
In the crisis of acute pessimism which had seized upon Clerambault
during these months of inhuman isolation, he could not contemplate
even the possibility of progress; that progress in which he had once
believed, as men do in God. The human species now appeared to him as
devoted to a murderous destiny. After having ravaged the planet and
exterminated other species, it was now to be destroyed by its own
hands. It is the law of justice. Man only became ruler of the world by
treachery and force (above all by treachery). Those more noble than he
have perhaps--or certainly--fallen under his blows; he has destroyed
some, degraded and brutalised others. During the thousands of years
in which he has shared life with other beings, he has
feigned--falsely--not to comprehend them, not to see them as brothers,
suffering, loving, and dreaming like himself. In order to exploit
them, to torture them without remorse, his men of thought have told
him that these creatures cannot think, that he alone possesses
this gift. And now he is not far from saying the same thing of his
fellow-men whom he dismembers and destroys. Butcher, murderer, you
have had no pity, why should you implore it for yourself today?...
Of all the old friendships that had once surrounded Clerambault, one
only remained, his friendship with Madame Mairet, whose husband had
been killed in the Argonne.
François Mairet was not quite forty years old when he met with an
obscure death in the trenches. He was one of the foremost French
biologists, an unpretending scholar and hard worker, a patient spirit.
But celebrity was assured to him before long, though he was in no
haste to welcome the meretricious charmer, as her favours have to be
shared with too many wire-pullers. The silent joys that intimacy with
science bestows on her elect were sufficient for him, with only
one heart on earth to taste them with him. His wife shared all his
thoughts. She came of a scholarly family, was rather younger than he;
one of those serious, loving, weak, yet proud hearts, that must give
but only give themselves once. Her existence was bound up in Mairet's
interests. Perhaps she would have shared the life of another man
equally well, if circumstances had been different, but she had married
Mairet with everything that was his. Like many of the best of women,
her intelligence was quick to understand the man whom her heart had
chosen. She had begun by being his pupil, and became his partner,
helping in his work and in his laboratory researches. They had
no children and had every thought in common, both of them being
freethinkers, with high ideals, destitute of religion, as well as of
any national superstition.
In 1914 Mairet was mobilised, and went simply as a duty, without any
illusions as to the cause that he was called upon to serve by the
accidents of time and country. His letters from the front were clear
and stoical; he had never ceased to see the ignominy of the war. But
he felt obliged to sacrifice himself in obedience to fate, which
had made him a part of the errors, the sufferings, and the confused
struggles of an unfortunate animal species slowly evolving towards an
unknown end.
His family and the Clerambaults had known each other in the country,
before either of them were transplanted to Paris; this acquaintance
formed the basis of an amicable intercourse, solid rather than
intimate--for Mairet opened his heart to no one but his wife--but
resting on an esteem that nothing could shake.
They had not corresponded since the beginning of the war; each had
been too much absorbed by his own troubles. Men who went to fight
did not scatter their letters among their friends, but generally
concentrated on one person whom they loved best, and to whom they told
everything. Mairet's wife, as always, was his only confidante. His
letters were a journal in which he thought aloud; and in one of the
last he spoke of Clerambault. He had seen extracts from his first
articles in some of the nationalist papers which were the only ones
allowed at the front, where they were quoted with insulting comments.
He spoke of them to his wife, saying what comfort he had found in
these words of an honest man driven to speak out, and he begged her to
let Clerambault know that his old friendship for him was now all
the warmer and closer. He also asked Madame Mairet to send him the
succeeding articles, but he died before they could reach him.
When he was gone the woman, who had lived only for him, tried to draw
nearer to the people who had been near to him in the last days of his
life. She wrote to Clerambault, and he, who was eating his heart
out in his provincial retreat, lacking even the energy to get away,
welcomed her letter as a deliverance. He returned at once to Paris;
and they both found a bitter joy in evoking together the image of the
absent. They formed the habit of meeting on one evening in the week,
when they would, so to speak, immerse themselves in recollections of
him. Clerambault was the only one of his friends who could understand
the tragedy, hidden under a sacrifice gilded by no patriotic illusion.
At first Madame Mairet seemed to find comfort in showing all that she
had received; she read his letters, full of disenchanted confidences;
they reflected on them with deep emotion, and she brought them into
the discussion of the problems that had caused the death of Mairet
and of millions of others. In this keen analysis, nothing stopped
Clerambault; and she was not a woman to hesitate in the search for
truth. But nevertheless....
Clerambault soon became aware that his words made her uneasy, though
he was only saying aloud things that she knew well and that were
strongly confirmed by Mairet's letters, namely, the criminal futility
of these deaths, and the sterility of all this heroism. She tried to
take back her confidences, or even to minimise the meaning of them,
with an eagerness that did not seem perfectly sincere. She brought
to mind sayings of her husband's which apparently showed him more in
sympathy with general opinion, and implied that he approved of it. One
day Clerambault was listening while she read a letter which she had
read to him before. He noticed that she skipped a phrase in which
Mairet expressed his heroic pessimism, and when he remarked on it
she appeared vexed. After this her manner became more distant, her
annoyance passed into coldness, then irritation, till it even grew
into a sort of smothered hostility, and finally she avoided him,
though without an open rupture. Clerambault felt that she had a grudge
against him and that he should see no more of her.
The truth was that, at the same time that Clerambault pursued his
relentless analysis which struck at the foundations of current
beliefs, an inverse process of reconstruction and idealisation was
going on in the mind of Madame Mairet. Her grief longed to convince
itself that after all there had been a holy cause, and the dead man
was no longer there to help her to bear the truth. Where two stand
together there may be joy in the most terrible truths, but when one is
alone they are mortal.
Clerambault understood it all, and his quick sympathies warned him of
the pain he caused and shared; for he made the suffering of this woman
his own. He nearly reached the point of approving her revolt against
himself, for he knew her deep hidden sorrow, and that the truth that
he brought was powerless to help it--still worse, it added one evil
more....
Insoluble problem! Those who are bereaved cannot dispense with the
murderous delusions of which they are the victims, and if these are
torn away their suffering becomes intolerable. Families that have lost
sons, husbands, and fathers, must needs believe that it was for a
just and holy cause, and statesmen are forced to continue to deceive
themselves and others. For if this were to cease, life would be
insupportable to themselves and to those whom they govern. How
unfortunate is Man; he is the prey of his own ideas, has given up
everything to them, and finds that each day he must continue to give
more, lest the gulf open under his feet and he be swallowed up in it.
After four years of unheard-of pain and ruin, can we possibly admit
that it was all for nothing? That not only our victory will be more
ruinous still, but that we ought not to have expected anything else;
that the war was absurd, and we, self-deceivers?... Never! we would
rather die to the last man. When one man finds that he has thrown away
his life, he sinks down in despair. What would it be in the case of a
nation, of ten nations, or of civilisation as a whole?...
Clerambault heard the cry that went up from the multitude: "Life, at
any cost! Save us, no matter how!"
"But, you do not know how to save yourselves. The road you follow only
leads on to fresh catastrophes, to an infinite mass of suffering."
"No matter how frightful they are, not as bad as what you offer us.
Let us die with our illusions, rather than live without them. Such a
life as that, is a death in life!"
* * * * *
"_He who has deciphered the secret of life and found the answer_,"
says the disenchanted, but harmonious voice of Amiel, "_is no longer
bound on the great wheel of existence, he has quitted the world of the
living. When illusion vanishes, nothingness resumes its eternal reign,
the bright bubble has burst in infinite space, and our poor thought is
dissolved in the immutable repose of the limitless void_."
* * * * *
Unluckily this repose in the void is the worst torture for a man of
the white race. He would rather endure any torment that life may
bring. "Do not tear them from me," he cries, "you kill me when you
destroy the cruel falsehoods by which I live."
Clerambault bitterly adopted the name that a nationalist paper had
given him in derision: "The one against all." Yes, he was the common
enemy, the destroyer of our life-giving illusions.
He could not bear this; the thought of making others suffer was
too painful to him. How then was he to get out of this tragic
no-thoroughfare? Wherever he turned, he found the same insolvable
dilemma; either a fatal illusion, or death without it.
"I will accept neither the one nor the other."
"Whether you accept it or no, you must yield--for the way is barred."
"Nevertheless, I shall pass through...."
PART FOUR
Clerambault was passing through a new danger-zone. His solitary
journey was like a mountain ascension, where a man finds himself
suddenly enveloped in fog, clinging to a rock, unable to advance a
step. He could see nothing in front of him, and, no matter to which
side he turned, he could hear beneath him the roar of the torrent of
suffering. Even so, he could not stand still; though he hung over the
abyss and his hold threatened to give way.
He had reached one of these dark turnings, and to make it worse, the
news that day, as barked out by the press, made the heart ache by its
insanity. Useless hecatombs, which the induced egotism of the world
behind the lines thought natural; cruelties on all sides, criminal
reprisals for crimes--for which these good people clamoured, and
loudly applauded. The horizon that surrounded the poor human creatures
in their burrow had never seemed so dark and pitiless.
Clerambault asked himself if the law of love that he felt within
himself had not been designed for other worlds, and different
humanities. The mail had brought him letters full of fresh threats;
and knowing that, in the tragic absurdity of the time, his life was
at the mercy of the first madman who happened to turn up, he hoped
secretly that he might not have long to wait. But being of good
stock, he kept on his way, his head up as usual, working steadily and
methodically at his daily task so as to gain the end, no matter what
that might be, of the path whereon he had set his feet.
He remembered that on this day he had promised to go and see his niece
Aline, who had just been confined. She was the daughter of a sister
who had died, and who had been very dear to him. A little older than
Maxime, she had been brought up with him. As she grew into girlhood
she developed a complicated character. Restless and discontented,
always thinking of herself, she wanted to be loved and to tyrannise.
She had also too much curiosity; dangerous experiences were an
attraction to her, and with all this she was rather dry, but
emotional, vindictive and high-tempered. Still, when she chose she
could be tender and attractive. Maxime and she had played the game
together, and carried it pretty far; so that it had been necessary to
watch them closely. In spite of his irony, Maxime had been caught by
the dark eyes that pierced through him with their electric thrill; and
Aline was irritated and attracted by Maxime's mockery. They had loved
and quarrelled furiously, and then they had both gone on to something
else. She had shot arrows into several other hearts; and then, when
she thought the right time had come,--there is always a time
for everything,--she had married, in the most reasonable way, a
successful, prosperous man of business, head of a firm which sold
artistic and ecclesiastical furniture in the Rue Bonaparte. She was
about to have a child when her husband was ordered to the front. There
could be no doubt of her ardent patriotism; for self-love includes
one's country. Clerambault would never have expected to find any
sympathy in her for his theories of fraternal pity. She had little
enough for her friends, but none at all for her enemies. She would
have ground them in a mortar with the same cold satisfaction that she
felt when she tormented hearts or teased insects because something or
somebody had vexed her.
As the fruit within her ripened, her attention was concentrated upon
it; all the strength of her heart seemed to flow inward. The war
receded; the cannon of Noyon sounded no longer in her ears. When she
spoke of the war,--which she did less and less every day,--you would
have thought that she was talking of some distant colonial expedition.
Of course she remembered the dangers that threatened her husband, and
pitied him naturally:--"Poor dear boy!" with a little smile as much as
to say, "He has not much luck. Not very clever, you know." ... But she
did not dwell on the subject, and, thank Heaven! it left no traces on
her mind. She had paid her score, she thought, and her conscience was
at rest; now she was in haste to go back to the world's most serious
task. One really would have supposed that the whole world hung on the
egg that she was about to lay.