And what with all the changes that have been since then—! Well,
but it really seems to me, monsieur my father, that—just taking it
logically,—now that we have almost reached the eighteenth century, and
all the nations have signed that treaty at Ryswick to prevent there
ever being any more wars, and people are riding about peaceably in
sedan chairs, and are living in America, and even some of the peasants
have glass windows in their houses—”
“Undoubtedly,” said the Duke, “we live in an age of invention and of
such material luxury as the world has never known. All wonders of
science have been made our servants. War, yesterday our normal arbiter,
has now become irrational, even to the most unreflective, since one
army simply annihilates the other with these modern cannons that shoot
for hundreds of feet. To cross the trackless Atlantic is now but the
affair of a month or two in our swift sailing ships. And we trap and
slaughter even the huge whale to the end that we, ignoring the sun’s
whims, may loan to nights of feverish dissipation the brilliancy of
afternoon, with our oillamps. We have perhaps exhausted the secrets of
material nature. And in intellectual matters too we have progressed.
Yet all progress, I would have you note, is directed by wise persons
who discreetly observe the great law of living—”
“And what is that law, monsieur my father?”
“Thou shalt not offend,” the Duke replied, “against the notions of
thy neighbor. Now to the honoring of this law the wise person will
bring more of earnestness than he will bring to the weighing of
discrepancies between facts and well-thought-of ideas about these
facts. So, at most, he will laugh, he will perhaps cast an oblique jest
with studied carelessness: and he will then pass on, upon the one way
that is safe—for him,—without ever really considering the gaucherie of
regarding life too seriously. And his less daring fellows will follow
him by and by, upon the road which they were going to take in any
event. That is progress.”
“Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor!” Florian
repeated. “Yes, I remember. That was a part of my dream, too.” He was
silent for an instant, glancing eastward beyond the gardens of his
home. The thronged trees of Acaire, as Florian now saw them just beyond
that low red wall, seemed to have golden powder scattered over them, a
powder which they stayed too motionless to shake off. “But—in my dream,
you know,— that had been learned by living wickedly. And you have
always taught Little Brother and me to be very good and religious—”
“My son, my son! and have I reared an errant child, an actual atheist,
who doubts that in the next world also we have—a Neighbor?”
“Do you mean the good God, monsieur my father?”
“Eh,” said the Duke, “I would distinguish, I would avoid
anthropomorphology, I would speak here with exactness. I mean that
in this world we must live always in subjection to notions which a
moment’s thought shows always to be irrational; and that nothing
anywhere attests the designer of this world, however high His place or
whatever His proper title, to be swayed at all by what we describe as
justice and logic.”
“I can see that,” said Florian: “though I have been thinking about
another sort of high place—”
But the Duke was still speaking: and now, to Florian’s ear, his
father’s tone was somewhat of a piece with this sun-steeped and
tranquil and ineffably lazy October afternoon, which seemed to show the
world as over-satisfied with the done year’s achievements.
“So life, my son, must always display, to him who rashly elects to
think about it, just the incoherency and the inconclusiveness of
a child’s dreammaking. No doubt, this is to be explained by our
obtuseness: I design, in any event, no impiety, for to be impious is
unwise. I merely mean that I assume Someone also to be our neighbor,
in His high place, and that I think His notions also should be treated
with respect.”
“I see,” said Florian. But all that was youthful in him seemed to stir
in dim dissent from unambitious aims.
“I mean, in short, that the wise person will conform—with, it may be, a
permissible shrug,—to each and every notion that is affected by those
neighbors whose strength is greater than his. I would also suggest
that, if only for the sake of his own comfort, the wise person will
cultivate a belief that these notions, however incomprehensible, may
none the less be intelligent and well-meaning.”
“I see,” the boy said, yet again. He spoke abstractedly, for he was now
thinking of brown Janicot and of resplendent Monseigneur St. Michael,
in that queer dream. His father appeared in some sort to agree with
both of them.
And as the Duke continued, speaking slowly, and with something of the
languor of this surrounding autumnal world,—which seemed to strive
toward no larger upshots than the ripening of grains and fruits,—it
occurred to Florian, for the first time in Florian’s life, that this
always smiling father of his was, under so many graces, an uneasy and
baffled person.
The Duke said: “To submit is the great lesson. I too was once a
dreamer: and in dreams there are lessons. But to submit, without
dreaming any more, is the great lesson; to submit, without either
understanding or repining, and without demanding of life too much of
beauty or of holiness, and without shirking the fact that this universe
is under no least bond ever to grant us, upon either side of the grave,
our desires. To do that, my son, does not satisfy and probably will not
ever satisfy a Puysange. But to do that is wisdom.”
The boy for some while considered this. He considered, too, the
enigmatic, just half-serious face of his father, the face that was
at once the face of Michael and of Janicot. To accept things as they
were, in this world which was now going to sleep as if the providing
of food-stuffs and the fodder for people’s cattle were enough; and to
have faith without reasoning over-logically about it: all these grown
persons seemed enleagued to proffer him this stupid and unaspiring
advice.
But Florian, at ten, had learned to humor the notions of his elders. So
he said affably, if not quite without visible doubtfulness, “I see....”
EXPLICIT
It is gratifying to relate that, in a world wherein most moral lessons
go to waste, young Florian duly honored the teaching of his dream.
Therefore, as the boy grew toward maturity, he reduplicated in action
all the crimes he had committed in fancy, and was appropriately
grateful for his fore-knowledge that all would turn out well. But,
when he had reached the thirty-sixth year of his living and the fourth
chapter of this history, he then, at the conclusion of his talking
with Marie-Claire Cazaio, decorously crossed himself, and he shrugged.
“Let sleeping ideals lie,” said Florian: “for over-high and
over-earnest desires are inadvisable.”
Thereafter he rode, not into Acaire, but toward the Duardenez. He
forded this river uneventfully; and four days later, at Storisende,
was married, _en cinquièmes noces_, to Mademoiselle Louise de Nérac.
It is likewise pleasant to know that this couple lived together in
an amity sufficient to result in the begetting of three daughters,
and to permit, when the fourth Duke of Puysange most piously and
edifyingly quitted this life, in the November of 1736, the survival
of his widow.... The moral of all which seems to be that no word of
this book, after the fourth chapter, need anybody regard with any
least seriousness, unless you chance to be one of those discomfortable
folk who contend that a fact is something which actually, but only,
happens. A truth—so these will tell you,—does not merely “happen,”
because truth is unfortuitous and immortal. This rather sweeping
statement ought to be denied—outright—by none who believe that
immortals go about our world invisibly.