Da dank' i dir schön,
Und i wünsch', dass dir's anders wo
Besser mag geh'n...."_
"... For the time when thou did'st love me,
I do thank thee well;
And I hope that elsewhere
Thou may'st better fare...."
"Christophe!" said Olivier.
Christophe hugged him close.
"Come, old fellow," he said. "We have fared well."
The four of them sat near the sleeping child. They did not speak. And if
they had been asked what they were thinking,--_with the countenance of
humility, they would have replied only:_
"Love."
THE BURNING BUSH
I
Came calmness to his heart. No wind stirred. The air was still....
Christophe was at rest: peace was his. He was in a certain measure proud
of having conquered it: but secretly, in his heart of hearts, he was
sorry for it. He was amazed at the silence. His passions were
slumbering: in all good faith he thought that they would never wake
again.
The mighty, somewhat brutal force that was his was browsing listlessly
and aimlessly. In his inmost soul there was a secret void, a hidden
question: "What's the good?": perhaps a certain consciousness of the
happiness which he had failed to grasp. He had not force enough to
struggle either with himself or with others. He had come to the end of a
stage in his progress: he was reaping the fruits of all his former
efforts, cumulatively: too easily he was tapping the vein of music that
he had opened and while the public was naturally behindhand, and was
just discovering and admiring his old work, he was beginning to break
away from them without knowing as yet whether he would be able to make
any advance on them. He had now a uniform and even delight in creation.
At this period of his life art was to him no more than a fine instrument
upon which he played like a virtuoso. He was ashamedly conscious of
becoming a dilettante.
"_If_," said Ibsen, "_a man is to persevere in his art; he must
have something else, something more than his native genius: passions,
sorrows, which shall fill his life and give it a direction. Otherwise he
will not create, he will write books."_
Christophe was writing books. He was not used to it. His books were
beautiful. He would have rather had them less beautiful and more alive.
He was like an athlete resting, not knowing to what use to turn his
muscles, and, yawning in boredom like a caged wild beast, he sat looking
ahead at the years and years of peaceful work that awaited him. And as,
with his old German capacity for optimism, he had no difficulty in
persuading himself that everything was for the best, he thought that
such a future was no doubt the appointed inevitable end: he flattered
himself that he had issued from his time of trial and tribulation and
had become master of himself. That was not saying much.... Oh, well! A
man is sovereign over that which is his, he is what he is capable of
being.... He thought that he had reached his haven.
The two friends were not living together. After Jacqueline's flight,
Christophe had thought that Olivier would come back and take up his old
quarters with him. But Olivier could not. Although he felt keenly the
need of intimacy with Christophe, yet he was conscious of the
impossibility of resuming their old existence together. After the years
lived with Jacqueline, it would have seemed intolerable and even
sacrilegious to admit another human being to his most intimate
life,--even though he loved and were loved by that other a thousand
times more than Jacqueline.--There was no room for argument.
Christophe had found it hard to understand. He returned again and again
to the charge, he was surprised, saddened, hurt, and angry. Then his
instinct, which was finer and quicker than his intelligence, bade him
take heed. Suddenly he ceased, and admitted that Olivier was right.
But they saw each other every day: and they had never been so closely
united even when they were living under the same roof. Perhaps they did
not exchange their most intimate thoughts when they talked. They did not
need to do so. The exchange was made naturally, without need of words,
by grace of the love that was in their hearts.
They talked very little, for each was absorbed: one in his art, the other
in his memories. Olivier's sorrow was growing less: but he did
nothing to mitigate it, rather almost taking a pleasure in it: for a
long time it had been his only reason for living. He loved his child:
but his child--a puling baby--could occupy no great room in his life.
There are men who are more lovers than fathers, and it is useless to cry
out against them. Nature is not uniform, and it would be absurd to try
to impose identical laws upon the hearts of all men. No man has the
right to sacrifice his duty to his heart. At least the heart must be
granted the right to be unhappy where a man does his duty. What Olivier
perhaps most loved in his child was the woman of whose body it was made.
Until quite recently he had paid little attention to the sufferings of
others. He was an intellectual living too much shut up in himself. It
was not egoism so much as a morbid habit of dreaming. Jacqueline had
increased the void about him: her love had traced a magic circle about
Olivier to cut him off from other men, and the circle endured after love
had ceased to be. In addition he was a little aristocratic by temper.
From his childhood on, in spite of his soft heart, he had held aloof
from the mob for reasons rooted in the delicacy of his body and his
soul. The smell of the people and their thoughts were repulsive to him.
But everything had changed as the result of a commonplace tragedy which
he had lately witnessed.
* * * * *
He had taken a very modest lodging at the top of the Mont-rouge quarter,
not far from Christophe and Cécile. The district was rather common, and
the house in which he lived was occupied by little gentlepeople, clerks,
and a few working-class families. At any other time he would have suffered
from such surroundings in which he moved as a stranger: but now
it mattered very little to him where he was: he felt that he was a
stranger everywhere. He hardly knew and did not want to know who his
neighbors were. When he returned from his work--(he had gone into a
publishing-house)--he withdrew into his memories, and would only go out
to see his child and Christophe. His lodging was not home to him: it was
the dark room in which the images of the past took shape and dwelling:
the darker it was the more clearly did the inward images emerge. He
scarcely noticed the faces of those he passed on the stairs. And yet
unconsciously he was aware of certain faces that were impressed upon his
mind. There is a certain order of mind which only really sees things
after they have passed. But then, nothing escapes them, the smallest
details are graven on the plate. Olivier's was such a mind: he bore
within himself multitudes of the shadowy shapes of the living. With any
emotional shock they would come mounting up in crowds: and Olivier would
be amazed to recognize those whom he had never known, and sometimes he
would hold out his hands to grasp them.... Too late.
One day as he came out of his rooms he saw a little crowd collected in
front of the house-door round the housekeeper, who was making a
harangue. He was so little interested that he was for going his way
without troubling to find out what was the matter: but the housekeeper,
anxious to gain another listener, stopped him, and asked him if he knew
what had happened to the poor Roussels. Olivier did not even know who
"the poor Roussels" were, and he listened with polite indifference. When
he heard that a working-class family, father, mother, and five children,
had committed suicide to escape from poverty in the house in which he
lived, he stopped, like the rest, and looked up at the walls of the
building, and listened to the woman's story, which she was nothing loth
to begin again from the beginning. As she went on talking, old memories
awoke in him, and he realized that he had seen the wretched family: he
asked a few questions.... Yes, he remembered them: the man--(he used to
hear him breathing noisily on the stairs)--a journeyman baker, with a
pale face, all the blood drawn out of it by the heat of the oven, hollow
cheeks always ill shaven: he had had pneumonia at the beginning of the
winter: he had gone back to work only half cured: he had had a relapse:
for the last three weeks he had had no work and no strength. The woman
had dragged from childbirth to childbirth: crippled with rheumatism, she
had worn herself out in trying to make both ends meet, and had spent her
days running hither and thither trying to obtain from the Public Charity
a meager sum which was not readily forthcoming. Meanwhile the children
came, and went on coming: eleven, seven, three--not to mention two others
who had died in between:--and, to crown all, twins who had chosen
the very dire moment to make their appearance: they had been born only
the month before.
--On the day of their birth, a neighbor said, the eldest of the five, a
little girl of eleven, Justine--poor little mite!--had begun to cry and
asked how ever she could manage to carry both of them.
Olivier at once remembered the little girl,--a large forehead, with
colorless hair pulled back, and sorrowful, gray bulging eyes. He was
always meeting her, carrying provisions or her little sister: or she
would be holding her seven-year-old brother by the hand, a little
pinch-faced, cringing boy he was, with one blind eye. When they met on
the stairs Olivier used to say, with his absent courteous manner:
"Pardon, mademoiselle."
But she never said anything: she used to go stiffly by, hardly moving
aside: but his illusory courtesy used to give her a secret pleasure.
Only the evening before, at six o'clock, as he was going downstairs, he
had met her for the last time: she was carrying up a bucket of charcoal.
He had not noticed it, except that he did remark that the burden seemed
to be very heavy. But that is merely in the order of things for the
children of the people. Olivier had bowed, as usual, without looking at
her. A few steps lower down he had mechanically looked up to see her
leaning over the balustrade of the landing, with her little pinched
face, watching him go down. She turned away at once, and resumed her
climb upstairs. Did she know whither she was climbing?--Olivier had no
doubt that she did, and he was obsessed by the thought of the child
bearing death in the load that was too heavy for her, death the
deliverer--the wretched children for whom to cease to be meant an end of
suffering! He was unable to continue his walk. He went back to his room.
But there he was conscious of the proximity of the dead.... Only a few
thin walls between him and them.... To think that he had lived so near
to such misery!
He went to see Christophe. He was sick at heart: he told himself that it
was monstrous for him to have been so absorbed as he had been in vain
regrets for love while there were so many creatures suffering
misfortunes a thousand times more cruel, and it was possible to help and
save them. His emotion was profound: there was no difficulty In
communicating it. Christophe was easily impressionable, and he in his
turn was moved. When he heard Olivier's story he tore up the page of
music he had just been writing, and called himself a selfish brute to be
amusing himself with childish games. But, directly after, he picked up
the pieces. He was too much under the spell of his music. And his
instinct told him that a work of art the less would not make one happy
man the more. The tragedy of want was no new thing to him: from his
childhood on he had been used to treading on the edge of such abysmal
depths, and contriving not to topple over. But he was apt to judge
suicide harshly, being conscious as he was of such a fullness of force,
and unable to understand how a man, under the pressure of any suffering
whatsoever, could give up the struggle. Suffering, struggling, is there
anything more normal? These things are the backbone of the universe.
Olivier also had passed through much the same sort of experience: but he
had never been able to resign himself to it, either on his own account
or for others. He had a horror of the poverty in which the life of his
beloved Antoinette had been consumed. After his marriage with
Jacqueline, when he had suffered the softening influence of riches and
love, he had made haste to thrust back the memory of the sorrowful years
when he and his sister had worn themselves out each day in the struggle
to gain the right to live through the next, never knowing whether they
would succeed or no. The memories of those days would come to him now
that he no longer had his youthful egoism to preserve. Instead of flying
before the face of suffering he set out to look for it. He did not need
to go far to find it. In the state of mind in which he was he was prone
to find it everywhere. The world was full of it, the world, that
hospital.... Oh, the agony, the sorrow! Pains of the wounded body,
quivering flesh, rotting away in life. The silent torture of hearts
under gnawing grief. Children whom no one loves, poor hopeless girls,
women seduced or betrayed, men deceived in their friends, their loves,
their faith, the pitiable herd of the unfortunates whom life has broken
and forgotten!... Not poverty and sickness were the most frightful
things to see, but the cruelty of men one to another. Hardly had Olivier
raised the cover of the hell of humanity than there rose to his ears the
plaint of all the oppressed, the exploited poor, the persecuted peoples,
massacred Armenians, Finland crushed and stifled, Poland rent in pieces,
Russia martyred, Africa flung to the rapacious pack of Europe, all the
wretched creatures of the human race. It stifled him: he heard it
everywhere, he could no longer close his ears to it, he could no longer
conceive the possibility of there being people with any other thought.
He was for ever talking about it to Christophe. Christophe grew anxious,
and said:
"Be quiet! Let me work."
And as he found it hard to recover his balance he would lose his temper
and swear.
"Damnation! My day is wasted! And you're a deal the better for it,
aren't you?"
Olivier would beg his pardon.
"My dear fellow," said Christophe, "it's no good always looking down
into the pit. It stops your living."
"One must lend a hand to those who are in the pit."
"No doubt. But how? By flinging ourselves down as well? For that is what
you want. You've got a propensity for seeing nothing but the sad side of
life. God bless you! Your pessimism is charitable, I grant you, but it
is very depressing. Do you want to create happiness? Very well, then, be
happy."
"Happy! How can one have the heart to be happy when one sees so much
suffering? There can only be happiness in trying to lessen it and
fighting the evil."
"Very good. But I don't help the unfortunate much by lashing out blindly
in all directions. It means only one bad soldier the more. But I can
bring comfort by my art and spread force and joy. Have you any idea how
many wretched beings have been sustained in their suffering by the
beauty of an idea, by a winged song? Every man to his own trade! You
French people, like the generous scatterbrains that you are, are always
the first to protest against the injustice of, say, Spain or Russia,
without knowing what it is all about. I love you for it. But do you
think you are helping things along? You rush at it and bungle it and the
result is nil,--if not worse.... And, look you, your art has never been
more weak and emaciated than now, when your artists claim to be taking
part in the activities of the world. It is the strangest thing to see so
many little writers and artists, all dilettante and rather dishonest,
daring to set themselves up as apostles! They would do much better if
they were to give the people wine to drink that was not so
adulterated.--My first duty is to do whatever I am doing well, and to
give you healthy music which shall set new blood coursing in your veins
and let the sun shine in upon you."
* * * * *
If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first
of all have it within himself. Olivier had none of it. Like the best man
of to-day, he was not strong enough to radiate force by himself. But in
unison with others he might have been able to do so. But with whom could
he unite? He was free in mind and at heart religious, and he was
rejected by every party political and religious. They were all
intolerant and narrow and were continually at rivalry. Whenever they
came into power they abused it. Only the weak and the oppressed
attracted Olivier. In this at least he agreed with Christophe's opinion,
that before setting out to combat injustice in distant lands, it were as
well to fight injustice close at hand, injustice everywhere about,
injustice for which each and every man is more or less responsible.
There are only too many people who are quite satisfied with protesting
against the evil wrought by others, without ever thinking of the evil
that they do themselves.
At first he turned his attention to the relief of the poor. His friend,
Madame Arnaud, helped to administer a charity. Olivier got her to allow
him to help. But at the outset he had more than one setback: the poor
people who were given into his charge were not all worthy of interest,
or they were unresponsive to his sympathy, distrusted him, and shut
their doors against him. Besides, it is hard for a man of intellect to
be satisfied with charity pure and simple: it waters such a very small
corner of the kingdom of wretchedness! Its effects are almost always
piecemeal, fragmentary: it seems to move by chance, and to be engaged
only in dressing wounds as fast as it discovers them: generally it is
too modest and in too great a hurry to probe down to the roots of the
evil. Now it was just this probing that Olivier's mind found
indispensable.
He began to study the problem of social poverty. There was no lack of
guides to point the way. In those days the social question had become a
society question. It was discussed in drawing-rooms, in the theater, in
novels. Everybody claimed some knowledge of it. Some of the young men
were expending the best part of their powers upon it.
Every new generation needs to have some splendid mania or other. Even
the most selfish of young people are endowed with a superfluity of life,
a capital sum of energy which has been advanced to them and cannot be
left idle and unproductive: they are for ever seeking to expend it on a
course of action, or--(more prudently)--on a theory. Aviation or
Revolution, a muscular or intellectual exercise. When a man is young he
needs to be under the illusion that he is sharing in some great movement
of humanity and is renewing the life of the world. It is a lovely thing
when the senses thrill in answer to every puff of the winds of the
universe! Then a man is so free, so light! Not yet is he laden with the
ballast of a family, he has nothing, risks next to nothing. A man is
very generous when he can renounce what is not yet his. Besides, it is
so good to love and to hate, and to believe that one is transforming the
earth with dreams and shouting! Young people are like watch-dogs: they
are for ever howling and barking at the wind. An act of injustice
committed at the other end of the world will send them off their heads.
Dogs barking through the night. From one farm to another in the heart of
the forest they were yelping to one another, never ceasing. The night
was stormy. It was not easy to sleep in those days. The wind bore
through the air the echoes of so many acts of injustice!... The tale of
injustice is unnumbered: in remedying one there is danger of causing
others. What is injustice?--To one man it means a shameful peace, the
fatherland dismembered. To another it signifies war. To another it means
the destruction of the past, the banishment of princes: to another, the
spoliation of the Church: to yet another the stifling of the future to
the peril of liberty. For the people, injustice lies in inequality: for
the upper ten, in equality. There are so many different kinds of
injustice that each age chooses its own,--the injustice that it fights
against, and the injustice that it countenances.
At the present time the mightiest efforts of the world were directed
against social injustice,--and unconsciously were tending to the
production of fresh injustice.
And, in truth, such injustice had waxed great and plain to see since the
working-classes, growing in numbers and power, had become part of the
essential machinery of the State. But in spite of the declamations of
the tribunes and bards of the people, their condition was not worse, but
rather better than it had ever been in the past: and the change had come
about not because they suffered more, but because they had grown
stronger. Stronger by reason of the very power of the hostile ranks of
Capital, by the fatality of economic and industrial development which
had banded the workers together in armies ready for the fight, and, by
the use of machinery, had given weapons into their hands, and had turned
every foreman into a master with power over light, lightning, movement,
all the energy of the world. From this enormous mass of elementary
forces, which only a short time ago the leaders of men were trying to
organize, there was given out a white heat, electric waves gradually
permeating the whole body of human society.
It was not by reason of its justice, or its novelty, or the force of the
ideas bound up in it that the cause of the people was stirring the minds
of the intelligent middle-class, although they were fain to think so.
Its appeal lay in its vitality.
Its justice? Justice was everywhere and every day violated thousands of
times without the world ever giving a thought to it. Its ideas? Scraps
of truth, picked up here and there and adjusted to the interests and
requirements of one class at the expense of the other classes. Its creed
was as absurd as every other creed,--the Divine Right of Kings, the
Infallibility of the Popes, Universal Suffrage, the Equality of
Man,--all equally absurd if one only considers them by their rational
value and not in the light of the force by which they are animated. What
did their mediocrity matter? Ideas have never conquered the world as
ideas, but only by the force they represent. They do not grip men by
their intellectual contents, but by the radiant vitality which is given
off from them at certain periods in history. They give off as it were a
rich scent which overpowers even the dullest sense of smell. The
loftiest and most sublime idea remains ineffective until the day when it
becomes contagious, not by its own merits, but by the merits of the
groups of men in whom it becomes incarnate by the transfusion of their
blood. Then the withered plant, the rose of Jericho, comes suddenly to
flower, grows to its full height, and fills all the air with its
powerful aroma.--Some of the ideas which were now the flaming standard
under which the working-classes were marching on to the assault upon the
capitalistic citadel, emanated from the brains of dreamers of the
comfortable classes. While they had been left in their comfortable
books, they had lain dead: items in a museum, mummies packed away in
glass cases with no one to look at them. But as soon as the people laid
hands on them, they had become part and parcel of the people, they had
been given their feverish reality, which deformed them while it gave
them life, breathing into such abstract reason, their hallucinations,
and their hopes, like a burning wind of Hegira. They were quickly spread
from man to man. Men succumbed to them without knowing from whom they
came or how they had been brought. They were no respecters of persons.
The moral epidemic spread and spread: and it was quite possible for
limited creatures to communicate it to superior men. Every man was
unwittingly an agent in the transmission.