But I may not live a year!
_Es muss sein!_
This struck him as humorous and ruefully he sang Beethoven's phase,
adding: All the avenues of life lead to that.
[Illustration]
_Es muss sein_. I should have stayed In China. (Here he fell silent for
a while, heaving deep sighs and staring at his yellow hands.) God has
chosen to take away my reason. I am an idiot, falling into every ditch.
Oh, that I had died long ago--and yet I cannot die until I have righted
myself. Hand me that red book behind you. There are two plays about old
men, Samuelino, that grow dearer every day to an old man. There is your
Lear, and--and opening _Oedipus at Colonus_ he translated slowly:
Generous son of Aegeus, to the gods alone old age and death come never.
But all else is confounded by all-mastering time. The strength of earth
decays and the strength of the body. Faith dies. Distrust is born. Among
friends the same spirit does not last true ... and bowing his head he
let the book fall to the floor. _Es muss sein_.
I did not go to that dinner. I dined alone with Miss Grier in the city,
but at about ten we drove out to Tivoli to sit with the company. As we
went I outlined to her discreetly the relations that now existed between
two of her best friends: Oh, how stupid he is, she cried. How cruel!
What a lot he has forgotten. Don't you see that the whole thing rests,
not on the abstract question as to whether her prayers may be answered,
but on the question as to whether ONE prayer may be answered? Her prayer
for France ... Doesn't he believe such things are real to other people?
He thinks that a little doubt will be good for her. He describes her as
the woman who has never suffered.
He is in his dotage. I am so angry I am ill.
At this moment our car drew aside to let pass another hurrying by
towards Rome. This was Mlle de Morfontaine's great ugly travelling car
and the Cardinal was in it.
There he is now, cried Miss Grier. They must have broken, up early.
Something's happened, I said.
Yes, something has very likely happened, God forgive us. If everything
were all right, Alix would be driving back with him. Our wonderful
company is dissolving. Alix no longer trusts us. Leda is losing her good
old commonsense. Astrée-Luce has quarrelled with the Cardinal. I'd
better leave Rome and go back to Greenwich.
As we approached the Villa we became aware that something indeed must
have happened. The front door was open. The servants were gathered in
the hall whispering in front of the closed doors of the drawing rooms.
As we entered these opened and Alix, Donna Leda and Mme Bernstein
appeared supporting a sobbing Astrée-Luce. They led her up the stairs
to her tower. Miss Grier without questioning the servants as to what had
happened, gently urged them to return to their rooms. We passed into the
drawing room just in time to see M. Bogard leaving by another door and
looking considerably shaken. We sat down in silence, our thoughts full
of foreboding. Simultaneously we became aware of a faint odor of powder
and smoke and glancing about my eye fell upon a rent near the ceiling
beneath which a little pile of white dust had collected on the floor.
Mme Bernstein hurried in and after closing the door carefully behind
her, came toward us:
Not a soul must hear of this. Oh, this must be kept so quiet. What a
thing to happen! Anything is possible after this. What a blessing that
no servants were in the room when ...
Miss Grier asked her several times what had happened.
I know nothing. I can hardly believe my own senses, she cried.
Astrée-Luce must have gone mad. Elizabeth, will you believe me when I
tell you that we were sitting here quietly over our coffee--Look, look!
I didn't see that hole in the ceiling before!--Isn't it all frightful?
Please, Anna, please tell us what happened!
I am.--There we were sitting over our coffee, talking in low voices of
this and that, when suddenly Astrée-Luce went over to the piano, picked
up a revolver from among the flowers and shot at the good Cardinal.
Anna! is he hurt?
No. It didn't even come near him. But what a thing to happen! What on
earth could have made her do such a thing! We were friends--we were all
such good friends. I do not understand anything.
Try and think, Anna: did she say anything when she fired at him, or
before she fired?
That's the strangest of all. You won't believe me. She called out: The
devil is here. The devil has come into this room. At the Cardinal!
What had he been saying?
Nothing! Merely everyday things. We had been telling stories about the
peasants. He had been telling us about some peasants he had come across
on his walks outside S. Pancrazio.
Suddenly Alix appeared: Elizabeth, go to her quickly. She wants to see
you. She is alone.
Miss Grier hurried out.
Alix turned to me:
Samuele, you know the majordomo better than we do. Will you go and tell
him that Astrée-Luce has had a nervous breakdown. That she thought she
saw a burglar at the window, and that she fired at him. It is so
important for the dear Father's sake that no hint of this gets about.
I went out and found Alviero. He knew the explanation was insufficient,
but utterly devoted to the whole Cabala he could be trusted to dress the
story at exactly the points that would most convince the other servants.
Alix did not understand what lay back of the shot, but she was able to
recall the conversation that had led up to it. The Cardinal had told the
following simple story, an incident he had witnessed in one of his walks
outside the city wall:
A farmer wished to break his six-year-old daughter of crying. One
afternoon he led her by the hand to the center of a marshy waste,
thickly grown with wiry reeds well above the child's head. There he had
suddenly flung away her hand, saying: Now are you going to cry any more?
The child, with a last rush of contrary pride and with a beginning of
fear, started to cry. All right, shouted the father, we don't want any
bad children in our house. I'm going to leave you here with the tigers.
Good bye. And jumping out of the child's sight, repaired to a wine shop
at the edge of the waste and sat down for an hour's cardplaying. The
child strayed about from hummock to hummock, wailing. In due time the
father reappeared and taking her affectionately by the hand led her
home.
That was all.
But Astrée-Luce had never learned, as the rest of us have, to harden
her heart slightly before stories of cruelty or injustice. She may have
had no losses of her own, but she had always been ready to expose her
imagination to the full force of other people's wrongs. Such an anecdote
would have drawn from others a sigh, a swift protective contraction of
the lips and a smile of gratitude for its safe conclusion. But to
Astrée-Luce it was the vividest reminder that the God whose business it
was to brood over the world ministering to the discouraged and the
mistreated, was no more. The Cardinal had killed him. There was no one
left to soothe the horse that has been beaten to death. The kittens that
the boys fling against the wall have no one to speak for them. The dog
in torment that keeps his eyes upon her face, and licks her hands even
while his eyes grow dim, shall have no comforter but her. This was not a
casual story the Cardinal was telling: it concealed a covert allusion to
their conversation of the preceding week. It was a taunt. It was a sort
of curse. Look at the world without God, he was saying. Get used to it.
If she had lost God, oh how clearly she had gained the Devil. Here he
was triumphing in this lacerating story. Astrée-Luce went over to the
piano, picked up a revolver from the flowers and shot at the Cardinal,
crying: The Devil has come into this room!
As the Cardinal drove back that night he kept repeating to himself the
words: Then these things are real! It had required Astrée-Luce's shot
to show him that belief had long since become for him a delectable game.
One piled syllogism on syllogism, but the foundations were diaphanous.
He strained to remember what faith was like when he had had it. He kept
dragging before his mind's eye the young priest in China exhorting the
families of the Mandarins. That was himself. Oh, to retrace the way. He
would go back to China. If he could look again on the faces that were
serene with a serenity he had given them, perhaps he could steal it
back. But side by side with this hope was a terrible knowledge: no words
could describe the conviction with which he saw himself guilty of the
greatest of all sins. Murder was child's play compared to what he had
done.
The firing of the shot had done as much for Astrée-Luce. On awaking,
her terror lest she had harmed him, later her fear that she had fallen
out of reach of his forgiveness was greater than had been her misery in
a world without faith. It was given to me to carry from each to the
other the first messages of anxious affection. When Astrée-Luce and the
Cardinal discovered that they were living in a world where such things
could be forgiven, that no actions were too complicated but that love
could understand, or dismiss them, on that day they began their lives
all over again. This reconciliation was never put into words, in fact it
remained to the end merely in a state of hope. They longed to see one
another again, but it would have been impossible. They dreamed of one of
those long conversations that one never has on earth, but which one
projects so easily at midnight, alone and wise; words are not rich
enough nor kisses sufficiently compelling to repair all our havoc.
He received permission to return to China, and sailed within a few
weeks. Several days after leaving Aden he fell ill of a fever and knew
that he was to die. He called the Captain and the ship's doctor to him
and told them that if they buried him at sea they would have to face the
indignation of the Church, but that they would be fulfilling his dearest
wish. He took what measures he could to shift upon himself the blame for
such an irregularity. Better, better to be tossing in the tides of the
Bengal Sea and to be nosed by a passing shark, than to lie, a sinner of
sinners, under a marble tomb with the inevitable _insignis fistate_, the
inescapable _ornatissimus_.