to anything of the sort. His attitude was strange, for, instead of
stating the facts, he equivocated as if he had something to hide; it
almost looked as if he wished this to be noticed, which would have
aroused suspicions if he had not been so careful. Unfortunately these
suspicions seemed to glance at Clerambault, though he said nothing
against him or against anyone; in fact he refused to tell anything,
but he let it be understood that if he chose ... but he did not
choose. Clerambault was confronted with him, and his attitude was
perfect, really chivalrous. He laid his hand on his heart and declared
that be had the admiration of a son for the great "Master," and
"Friend," and when Clerambault, getting impatient, begged him to state
simply just what had passed between them, the other would do nothing
but protest his "undying devotion." He would rather say nothing more;
he had nothing to add to his testimony; it was all his fault.
He left with an increased reputation, while Clerambault was supposed
to have sheltered himself behind his devoted henchman. The press
unhesitatingly accused Clerambault of cowardice, and meanwhile the
case dragged on, Clerambault appearing every day to answer useless
questions, with no decision in sight. It might have been supposed that
a man accused without proofs, and subject for so long to injurious
suspicions, would have been entitled to the sympathy of the public;
but on the contrary everyone was more down on him than before; they
blamed him because he was not already convicted. All sorts of absurd
stories were in circulation about him; it was asserted that experts
had discovered through the shape of some letters misprinted in a
pamphlet of Clerambault's that it had come from a German press, and
this humbug was readily swallowed by men who were supposed to be
intelligent, before the war,--only four years ago, but it seemed
centuries.
So all these worthy folks passed sentence on a fellow-citizen on the
slightest information; it was not the first time, and it will not be
the last. The best opinion was indignant that he should still be at
liberty, and reactionary papers, fearing that their prey would escape,
tried to intimidate justice by loud accusations, and demanded that
the case should be removed from the civil court and brought before
a court-martial. This excitement soon developed into one of those
paroxysms which in Paris are generally brief but violent; for this
sensible people does go crazy periodically. It may be asked why
men who are kind for the most part, and naturally given to mutual
tolerance, not to say indifference, should have these explosions of
furious fanaticism, when they seem to lose all feeling as well as
common-sense. Some will tell you that this people is feminine in its
virtues, as well as in its vices, that the delicate nerves and fine
sensibility which cause it to excel in matters of taste and art also
make it susceptible to attacks of hysteria, but I am of opinion
that any people is manly only by accident, if by a man you mean a
reasonable creature--a flattering but baseless idea. Men only use
their reason from time to time, and are soon worn out by the effort of
thinking; so those do them a favour who act for them, encouraging them
in the direction of the least effort, and not much is required to hate
a new idea. Do not condemn them; the Friend of all who are persecuted
has said with His heroic indulgence: "They know not what they do."
An active nationalist newspaper was eager in stirring up the evil
instincts that lay below the surface. It lived on the exploitation of
hatred and suspicion, which it called "working for the regeneration
of France,"--France being reduced to this paper and its friends. It
published "Cleramboche," a collection of sanguinary articles, like
those which succeeded so well against Jaurés; it roused people by
declaring that the traitor owed his safety to occult influences, and
that he would make his escape, if he were not carefully watched; and
finally it appealed to popular justice.
Victor Vaucoux hated Clerambault; not that he knew him at all; it is
not necessary to know a man in order to hate him; but if he had known
him he would have detested him still more. He was his born enemy
before he even knew that Clerambault existed. There are races among
minds more antagonistic to each other, in all countries, than those
divided by a different skin or uniform.
He was a well-to-do _bourgeois_ from the west of France and belonged
to a family of former servants of the Empire who had been sulking for
the last forty years in a sterile opposition. He had a small property
in the Charente, where he spent the summer, and passed the rest of
the time in Paris. Having instincts for government which he could not
satisfy, he laid the blame for this on his family and on life, and
thus thwarted, his character had grown tyrannical so that he acted the
despot unconsciously to those nearest to him, as a right and duty that
could not be disputed. The word tolerance had no meaning for him; for
_he could not make a mistake_. Nevertheless he possessed intelligence,
and moral vigour; he even had a heart, but all wrapped about and
knotted like an old tree-trunk till such forces of expansion as he had
within him were stunted. He could absorb nothing from the outside;
when he read or travelled he saw everything with hostile eyes, his one
wish was to go home; and as the bark was too thick to be penetrated,
all his sap came from the foot of the tree--from the _dead_.
He was the type of that portion of the race which, stubborn but
outworn, has not life enough to spread itself abroad, and shrinks into
a sentiment of aggressive self-defence. This looks with suspicion and
antipathy on the young forces which overflow around it, at home and
abroad; growing nations and classes, all the passionate awkward
attempts at social and moral improvement. Like poor Barrès, and his
dwarfed hero,[1] such people want walls and barriers, frontiers, and
enemies. In this state of siege Vaucoux lived, and his family was
forced to live in the same way. His wife who was a sweet, sad, effaced
kind of person, found the only method of escape--and died. Left alone
with his grief--of which he made a kind of rampart, as of everything
about him--having only one son thirteen years of age, he had mounted
guard before his youth and brought him up to do the same; strange that
a man should bring a son into the world to fight against the future!
Perhaps the boy, if let alone, would have found out life by instinct,
but in the father's shut-up house, a sort of jail, he was his father's
prey. They had few friends, few books, few, or rather one, newspaper
whose petrified principles corresponded to Vaucoux' need for
conservation, in the corpse-like meaning of the word. As his son, or
his victim, could not get away from him, he inoculated him with all
his own mental diseases; like those insects which deposit their eggs
in the living bodies of others. And when the war broke out, he took
him at once to a recruiting station and made him enlist. For a man of
his sort, "Country" was the noblest of things--the holy of holies; he
did not need to breathe the thrilling suggestion of the crowd, his
head was already turned, and, besides, he never went with the crowds;
he carried "Country" about with him;--The Country and The Past,--The
Eternally Past.
[Footnote 1: "Simon and I then understood our hatred of strangers and
barbarians, and our egotism, in which we included ourselves and our
entire small moral family.--_The first care of him who would wish to
live must be to surround himself with high walls; but even in his
closed garden he must introduce only those who are guided by the same
feelings, and interests analogous to his own_." "A Free Man."
In three lines, three times, this "free man" expresses the idea of
"shutting-up," "closing," and "surrounding with walls."]
His son was killed, like Clerambault's son, and the sons of millions
of other fathers, for the faith and the ideals of those fathers in
which they did not believe.
Vaucoux had none of Clerambault's doubts; he did not know the meaning
of the word, and if he could have permitted himself such a feeling he
would have despised the idea. Hard man as he was, he had loved his son
passionately, though he had never shown it; and he could think of no
better way to prove it now than by a ferocious hatred for those who
had killed him; not, of course, reckoning himself among the number.
There were not many methods of revenge open to a man of his age,
rheumatic and stiff in one arm; but he tried to enlist and was
rejected. He felt that something must be done, and all that he had
left was his brain. Alone in his deserted house with the memory of his
dead wife and child, he sat for hours brooding on these vindictive
thoughts; and like a beast shaking the bars of its cage, waiting for
the chance to spring, his mind raged furiously against the inhibitions
the war put upon him with its iron circle of the trenches.
The clamours of the press drew his attention to Clerambault's articles
which were intensely distasteful to him. The idea of snatching
his precious hatred away from between his teeth! From the slight
acquaintance that he had with Clerambault before the war, he felt an
antipathy for him; as a writer, on account of the new form of his art,
and as a man for numerous reasons: his love of life, and other men,
his democratic ideals, his rather silly optimism, and his European
aspirations. At the very first glance, with the instinct of a
rheumatic in mind and body, Vaucoux had classed Clerambault as one of
those pestilent persons who open doors and windows and make a draught
in that closed house, his Country. That is, as he understood the term,
in his mind there could be no other. After this there was no need for
the vociferations of the papers; in the author of "The Appeal to the
Living," and the "Pardon from the Dead," he saw at once an agent of
the enemy, and with his thirst for revenge, he knew the opportunity
had come.
Nothing can be more convenient than to detest those who differ from
you, especially when you do not understand them; but poor Clerambault
had not this resource, for he did understand perfectly. These good
people had had to bear injuries from the enemy; of course because they
were struck by them, but also frankly, because of Injustice with a
capital I; for in their short-sightedness it filled the field of
vision. The capacity to feel and judge is very limited in an ordinary
man; submerged as he is in the species, he clings to any driftwood;
and just as he reduces the infinite number of shades in the river of
light to a few colours, the good and evil that flow in the veins
of the world are only perceptible to him when he has bottled a few
samples, chosen among those around him. All good and bad then he has
in his flask, and on these he can expend his whole power of liking or
repulsion; witness the fact that to millions of excellent people the
condemnation of Dreyfus, or the sinking of the "Lusitania," remains
the crime of the century. They cannot see that the path of social
life is paved with crime, and that they walk over it in perfect
unconsciousness, profiting by injustices that they make no effort to
prevent. Of all these, which are the worst? Those which rouse long
echoes in the conscience of mankind, or those which are known alone to
the stifled victim? Naturally, our worthy friends have not arms long
enough to embrace all the misery of the world; they can only reach one
perhaps, but that they press close to their heart; and when they have
chosen a crime, they pour out upon it all the pent-up hatred within
them;--when a dog has a bone to gnaw, it is wiser not to touch him.
Clerambault had tried to take his bone away from the dog, and if he
was bitten he had no right to complain; in point of fact he did not
do so. Men are in the right to fight injustice wherever they see it;
perhaps it is not their fault if they often see no more than its big
toe, like Gulliver's at Brobdignag. Well, we must each do what we can;
and these people could bite.
It was Good Friday, and the rising tide of invasion swept up towards
the Ile de France. Even this day of sacred sorrow had not stopped the
massacre, for the lay war knows nothing of the Truce of God. Christ
had been bombarded in one of His churches, and the news of the
murderous explosion at St. Gervais that afternoon spread at nightfall
through the darkened city, wrapped in its grief, its rage, and its
fear.
The sad little group of friends had gathered at Froment's house; each
one had come hoping to meet the others, without previous appointment.
They could see nothing but violence all about them; in the present as
well as in the future, in the enemy's camp, in their own, on the side
of revolutionists, and reactionaries as well. Their agony and their
doubts met in one thought. The sculptor was saying:
"Our holiest convictions, our faith in peace and human brotherhood
rest in vain on reason and love; is there any hope then that they can
conquer men? We are too weak."
Clerambault, half-unconsciously, as the words of Isaiah came to his
mind, uttered them aloud:
"Darkness covers the earth,
And the cloud envelops the people...."
He stopped, but from the faintly-lighted bed came Froment's voice,
continuing:
"Rise, for on the tops of the mountains
The light shineth forth...."
"Yes, the light will dawn," said Madame Froment; she was sitting on
the foot of the bed in the dark near Clerambault; he leaned forward
and took her hand. It was as if a thrill widened through the room,
like a ripple over water.
"Why do you say that?" asked the Count de Coulanges.
"Because I see _Him_ plainly."
"I can see _Him_ too," said Clerambault.
"Him? Whom do you mean?" asked Doctor Verrier. But before the answer
could come, they all knew the word that would be said:
"He who bears the light, the God who will conquer...."
"Are you waiting for a God?" said the old professor. "Do you believe
in miracles?"
"We are the miracle, for is it not one that in this world of perpetual
violence we have kept a constant faith in the love and the union of
men?"
"Christ is expected for centuries," said Coulanges bitterly, "and when
He comes, He is neglected, crucified, and then forgotten except by a
handful of poor ignorant wretches, good if you like, but narrow. The
handful grows larger, and for the space of a man's life, faith is
in flower, but afterwards it is spoiled and betrayed by success,
by ambitious disciples, by the Church; and so on for centuries ...
_Adveniat regnum tuum_ ... Where is the kingdom of God?"
"Within us," said Clerambault, "our trials and our hopes all go to
form the eternal Christ. It ought to make us happy to think of the
privilege that has been bestowed on us, to shelter in our hearts the
new God like the Babe in the manger."
"And what proof have we of His coming?" said the doctor.
"Our existence," said Clerambault.
"Our sufferings," said Froment.
"Our misunderstood faith," said the sculptor.
"The fact alone that we are," went on Clerambault. "We are a living
paradox thrown in the face of nature which denies it. A hundred times
must the flame be kindled and go out before it burns steadily. Every
Christ, every God is tried in advance through a series of forerunners;
they are everywhere, lost in space, lost in the ages; but though
widely-separated, all of these lonely souls see the same luminous
point on the horizon--the glance of the Saviour--who is coming."
"He is already come," said Froment.
When they separated, with a deep mutual feeling, but in silence,--for
they feared to break the religious charm which held them,--each found
himself alone in the dark street, but in each was the memory of a
vision which they could hardly understand. The curtain had fallen; but
they could never forget that they had seen it rise.
A few days after, Clerambault, who had been again summoned before the
magistrate, came home splashed with mud from head to foot. His hat
which he held in his hand, was a mere rag, and his hair was soaking.
The woman, who opened the door, exclaimed at the sight of him, but he
signed to her to keep still, and went into his room. Rosine was away,
so the husband and wife were alone in the flat, where they only met at
meals, saying as little to each other as possible. However, hearing
the exclamation of the servant, Madame Clerambault feared some new
misfortune and went to look for her husband. She too cried out when
she saw him:
"Good Lord! what have you been doing now?"
"I slipped and fell," said he, trying to wipe off the traces of the
accident.
"You fell?--turn round. What a state you are in!... One can't have a
moment's peace when you are around.... You never look where you are
going. There is mud up to your eyelids ... all over your face!"
"Yes, I must have struck myself there...."
"What unlucky people we are!... you 'think' that you struck your
cheek?... you tripped and fell?..." And looking him in the face, she
cried:
"It isn't true!...
"I did fall, I assure you...."
"No, I know it is not true ... tell me,... someone struck you ...?"
He did not answer. "They struck you, the brutes. My poor husband, to
think that anyone should strike you!... And you so good, who never did
harm to anyone in your life! How can people be so wicked?" and she
burst into tears as she threw her arms around him.
"My dear girl," said he, much touched. "It is not worth all these
tears. See, you are getting all muddy, you ought not to touch me."
"That does not matter," said she. "I have more spots than that on my
conscience. Forgive me!"
"Forgive you for what? Why do you say such things?"
"Because I have been wicked to you myself; I haven't understood
you--(I don't think I ever shall)--but I do know that whatever you do,
you only mean what is right. I ought to have stood up for you and I
have not done it. I was angry with your foolishness, but it is really
I that was the fool, and it vexed me too, when you got everyone down
on you. But now ... it is really too unjust! That a lot of men who are
not fit to tie your shoe ... that they should strike you! Let me kiss
your poor muddy face!"
It was so sweet to find each other again!--When she had had a good cry
on Clerambault's neck, she helped him to dress, then she bathed his
cheek with arnica, and carried off his clothes to brush them. At table
her eyes dwelt on him with the old affectionate care, while he tried
to calm her fears by talking of familiar things. To be alone together
without the children took them back to the old days, the early times
of their marriage. And the memory had a sad, quiet sweetness--as the
evening angelus spreads through the growing gloom a last softened
glory from the angelus of noon.
About ten o'clock the bell rang, and Moreau came in with his friend
Gillot. They had read the evening papers which gave an account of the
incident--from their point of view; some spoke of the "spontaneous"
indignation of the crowd and approved of the rebuke inflicted by
popular contempt. Others, and they were the more serious sheets,
deprecated lynch law in the public streets, as a matter of principle,
but blamed the weakness of the authorities, who were afraid to throw
light on all the facts.
It was not impossible that this mild criticism of the government was
inspired by the government itself; for politicians know how to manage
so that their hand may be forced, when they have an end in view of
which they are not exactly proud. The arrest of Clerambault seemed
imminent, and Moreau and his comrade were very uneasy; but Clerambault
signed to them to say nothing before his wife, and after a few words
on the event of the day, which they treated rather lightly, he took
them both into his study and asked them to tell him plainly what was
the matter.
They showed him a vicious article in the nationalist paper which had
been active against Clerambault for weeks, and which was so encouraged
by the manifestation of the day that it called on all its friends to
renew the attack the next morning. Moreau and Gillot foresaw that
there would be trouble when Clerambault went to the Palais, and they
had come to beg him to stay in the house. Knowing his timidity, they
thought that there would be no difficulty in persuading him to this,
but just as it had been the day Moreau had found him disputing in the
street, he did not now seem to grasp the situation.
"Stay at home, why? I am perfectly well."
"We think it would be more prudent."
"On the contrary, it would do me good to go out for a little while."
"You don't know what might happen."
"As to that one never knows; it will be time enough to worry when it
comes."
"To be perfectly frank then, you are in danger; the feeling has been
worked up against you for a long time, till now you are so hated that
people's eyes almost start out of their heads at the sound of your
name;--idiots! they know nothing about you but what they see in the
papers; but their leaders want a row, they have been so stupid that
your articles have had much more publicity than they intended; they
are afraid that your ideas will spread, and they want to make an
example of you that will discourage anyone who might be disposed to
follow you."
"If that is true," said Clerambault, "and I really have
followers,--something I did not know before,--this is not the moment
to keep out of the way; if they want to make an example of me, I
cannot balk them." This was said in so pleasant a way, that they asked
themselves if he really understood.
"You are taking a terrible risk," persisted Gillot.
"Well, my friend, everyone has to take risks nowadays."
"It ought, at least, to be of some use,--why play into their hands?
There is no need to throw yourself into the jaws of the wolves."
"It seems to me on the contrary, that it might be very useful," said
Clerambault, "and that the wolf would find himself in the wrong box
after all; let me explain to you. This will spread our ideas, for
violence always consecrates the persecuted cause. They want to
intimidate, and so they will. Everyone will be frightened--their own
side, all the hesitaters, and timorous folk. Let them be unjust, it
will rebound on their own heads." He seemed to forget that it might
also fall on his.
They saw that he had made up his mind, and felt an increased respect
for him, but they also felt much more anxious, and this led them to
say:
"If that is the case, we will get all our friends together, and go
with you."
"No, no, what a ridiculous idea!... nothing will happen after all."
Seeing that their remonstrances were useless, Moreau made a last
attempt: "You can't keep me from coming with you," said he. "I am an
obstinate man myself, you can't get rid of me; I will wait for you, if
I have to sit on that bench outside your door all night!"
"Go and spend the night in your bed, my dear fellow," said
Clerambault, "and sleep soundly. Come with me in the morning if you
like, but it will be time lost; nothing is going to happen;--but kiss
me, all the same!" After an affectionate hug, they went towards the
door, when Gillot paused a moment: "We must look after you a little,
you know," said he, "we feel as if you were a sort of father to us."
"So I am," said Clerambault with his beaming smile; his own boy was in
his mind. He closed the door, and stood for some minutes with the lamp
in his hand in the vestibule before he realised where he was. It was
nearly midnight and he was very tired, but, instead of going into
the bedroom, he mechanically turned again towards his study;--the
apartment, the house, the street were all asleep. Almost without
seeing it, he stared vaguely at the light shining on the frame of an
engraving of Rembrandt's, The Resurrection of Lazarus, which hung on
the opposite wall.... A dear figure seemed to enter the room; ... it
came in silently, and stood beside him.
"Are you satisfied now?" he thought. "Is this what you wished?" And
Maxime answered: "Yes," then added with meaning:
"I have found it very hard to teach you, Papa."
"Yes," said Clerambault, "there is much that we can learn from our
sons." And they smiled at each other in the silence.