ever since they were children. To be quite accurate, Emmanuel only
rarely ventured to enter the house. Madame Alexandrine used to regard
him with an unfavorable eye as the grandson of an unbeliever and a
horrid little dwarf. But Rainette used to spend the day on a sofa near
the window on the ground floor. Emmanuel used to tap at the window as he
passed, and, flattening his nose against the panes, he would make a face
by way of greeting. In summer, when the window was left open, he would
stop and lean his arms on the windowsill, which was a little high for
him;--(he fancied that this attitude was flattering to himself and that,
his shoulders being shrugged up in such a pose of intimacy, it might
serve to disguise his actual deformity);--and they would talk. Rainette
did not have too many visitors, and she never noticed that Emmanuel was
hunchbacked. Emmanuel, who was afraid and mortified in the presence of
girls, made an exception in favor of Rainette. The little invalid, who
was half petrified, was to him something intangible and far removed,
something almost outside existence. Only on the evening when the fair
Berthe kissed him on the lips, and the next day too, he avoided Rainette
with an instinctive feeling of repulsion: he passed the house without
stopping and hung his head: and he prowled about far away, fearfully and
suspiciously, like a pariah dog. Then he returned. There was so little
woman in her! As he was passing on his way home from the works, trying
to make himself as small as possible among the bookbinders in their long
working-blouses like nightgowns--busy merry young women whose hungry
eyes stripped him as he passed,--how eagerly he would scamper away to
Rainette's window! He was grateful for his little friend's infirmity:
with her he could give himself airs of superiority and even be a little
patronizing. With a little swagger he would tell her about the things
that happened in the street and always put himself in the foreground.
Sometimes in gallant mood he would bring Rainette a little present,
roast chestnuts in winter, a handful of cherries in summer. And she used
to give him some of the multi-colored sweets that filled the two glass
jars in the shop-window: and they would pore over picture postcards
together. Those were happy moments: they could both forget the pitiful
bodies in which their childish souls were held captive.
But sometimes they would begin to talk, like their elders, of politics
and religion. Then they would become as stupid as their elders. It put
an end to their sympathy and understanding. She would talk of miracles
and the nine days' devotion, or of pious images tricked out with paper
lace, and of days of indulgence. He used to tell her that it was all
folly and mummery, as he had heard his grandfather say. But when he in
turn tried to tell her about the public meetings to which the old man
had taken him, and the speeches he had heard, she would stop him
contemptuously and tell him that all such folk were drunken sots.
Bitterness would creep into their talk. They would get talking about
their relations: they would recount the insulting things that her mother
and his grandfather had said of each other respectively. Then they would
talk about themselves. They tried to say disagreeable things to each
other. They managed that without much difficulty. They indulged in
coarse gibes. But she was always the more malicious of the two. Then he
would go away: and when he returned he would tell her that he had been
with other girls, and how pretty they were, and how they had joked and
laughed, and how they were going to meet again next Sunday. She would
say nothing to that: she used to pretend to despise what he said: and
then, suddenly, she would grow angry, and throw her crochet-work at his
head, and shout at him to go, and declare that she loathed him: and she
would hide her face in her hands. He would leave her on that, not at all
proud of his victory. He longed to pull her thin little hands away from
her face and to tell her that it was not true. But his pride would not
suffer him to return.
One day Rainette had her revenge.--He was with some of the other boys at
the works. They did not like him because he used to hold as much aloof
from them as possible and never spoke, or talked too well, in a naïvely
pretentious way, like a book, or rather like a newspaper article--(he
was stuffed with newspaper articles).--That day they had begun to talk
of the revolution and the days to come. He waxed enthusiastic and made a
fool of himself. One of his comrades brought him up sharp with these
brutal words:
"To begin with, you won't be wanted, you're too ugly. In the society of
the future, there won't be any hunchbacks. They'll be drowned at birth."
That brought him toppling down from his lofty eloquence. He stopped
short, dumfounded. The others roared with laughter. All that afternoon
he went about with clenched teeth. In the evening he was going home,
hurrying back to hide away in a corner alone with his suffering. Olivier
met him: he was struck by his downcast expression: he guessed that he
was suffering.
"You are hurt. Why?"
Emmanuel refused to answer. Olivier pressed him kindly. The boy
persisted in his silence: but his jaw trembled as though he were on the
point of weeping. Olivier took his arm and led him back to his rooms.
Although he too had the cruel and instinctive feeling of repulsion from
ugliness and disease that is in all who are not born with the souls of
sisters of charity, he did not let it appear.
"Some one has hurt you?"
"Yes."
"What did they do?"
The boy laid bare his heart. He said that he was ugly. He said that his
comrades had told him that their revolution was not for him.
"It is not for them, either, my boy, nor for us. It is not a single
day's affair. It is all for those who will come after us."
The boy was taken aback by the thought that it would be so long
deferred.
"Don't you like to think that people are working to give happiness to
thousands of boys like yourself, to millions of human beings?"
Emmanuel sighed and said:
"But it would be good to have a little happiness oneself."
"My dear boy, you mustn't be ungrateful. You live in the most beautiful
city, in an age that is most rich in marvels; you are not a fool, and
you have eyes to see. Think of all the things there are to be seen and
loved all around you."
He pointed out a few things.
The boy listened, nodded his head, and said:
"Yes, but I've got to face the fact that I shall always have to live in
this body of mine!"
"Not at all. You will quit it."
"And that will be the end."
"How do you know that?"
The boy was aghast. Materialism was part and parcel of his grandfather's
creed: he thought that it was only the priest-ridden prigs who believed
in an eternal life. He knew that his friend was not such a one: and he
wondered if Olivier could be speaking seriously. But Olivier held his
hand and expounded at length his idealistic faith, and the unity of
boundless life, that has neither beginning nor end, in which all the
millions of creatures and all the million million moments of time are
but rays of the sun, the sole source of it all. But he did not put it to
him in such an abstract form. Instinctively, when he talked to the boy,
he adapted himself to his mode of thought;--ancient legends, the
material and profound fancies of old cosmogonies were called to mind:
half in fun, half in earnest, he spoke of metempsychosis and the
succession of countless forms through which the soul passes and flows,
like a spring passing from pool to pool. All this was interspersed with
reminiscences of Christianity and images taken from the summer evening,
the light of which was cast upon them both. He was sitting by the open
window, and the boy was standing by his side, and their hands were
clasped. It was a Saturday evening. The bells were ringing. The earliest
swallows, only just returned, were skimming the walls of the houses. The
dim sky was smiling above the city, which was wrapped in shadow. The boy
held his breath and listened to the fairy-tale his man friend was
telling him. And Olivier, warmed by the eagerness of his young hearer,
was caught up by the interest of his own stories.
There are decisive moments in life when, just as the electric lights
suddenly flash out in the darkness of a great city, so the eternal fires
flare up in the darkness of the soul. A spark darting from another soul
is enough to transmit the Promethean fire to the waiting soul. On that
spring evening Olivier's calm words kindled the light that never dies in
the mind hidden in the boy's deformed body, as in a battered lantern. He
understood none of Olivier's arguments: he hardly heard them. But the
legends and images which were only beautiful stories and parables to
Olivier, took living shape and form in his mind, and were most real. The
fairy-tale lived, moved, and breathed all around him. And the view
framed in the window of the room, the people passing in the street, rich
and poor, the swallows skimming the walls, the jaded horses dragging
their loads along, the stones of the houses drinking in the cool shadow
of the twilight, and the pale heavens where the light was dying--all the
outside world was softly imprinted on his mind, softly as a kiss. It was
but the flash of a moment. Then the light died down. He thought of
Rainette, and said;
"But the people who go to Mass, the people who believe in God, are all
cracked, aren't they?"
Olivier smiled.
"They believe," he said, "as we do. We all believe the same thing. Only
their belief is less than ours. They are people who have to shut all the
shutters and light the lamp before they can see the light. They see God
in the shape of a man. We have keener eyes. But the light that we love
is the same."
The boy went home through the dark streets in which the gas-lamps were
not yet lit. Olivier's words were ringing in his head. He thought that
it was as cruel to laugh at people because they had weak eyes as because
they were hunchbacked. And he thought that Rainette had very pretty
eyes: and he thought that he had brought tears into them. He could not
bear that. He turned and went across to the stationer's. The window was
still a little open: and he thrust his head inside and called in a
whisper:
"Rainette."
She did not reply.
"Rainette. I beg your pardon."
From the darkness came Rainette's voice, saying:
"Beast! I hate you."
"I'm sorry," he said.
He stopped. Then, on a sudden impulse, he said in an even softer
whisper, uneasily, rather shamefacedly:
"You know, Rainette, I believe in God just as you do."
"Really?"
"Really."
He said it only out of generosity. But, as soon as he had said it, he
began to believe it.
They stayed still and did not speak. They could not see each other.
Outside the night was so fair, so sweet!... The little cripple murmured:
"How good it will be when one is dead!"
He could hear Rainette's soft breathing.
He said:
"Good-night, little one."
Tenderly came Rainette's voice:
"Good-night."
He went away comforted. He was glad that Rainette had forgiven him. And,
in his inmost soul, the little sufferer was not sorry to think that he
had been the cause of suffering to the girl.
* * * * *
Olivier had gone into retirement once more. It was not long before
Christophe rejoined him. It was very certain that their place was not
with the syndicalist movement: Olivier could not throw in his lot with
such people. And Christophe would not. Olivier flung away from them in
the name of the weak and the oppressed; Christophe in the name of the
strong and the independent. But though they had withdrawn, one to the
bows, the other to the stern, they were still traveling in the vessel
which was carrying the army of the working-classes and the whole of
society. Free and self-confident, Christophe watched with tingling
interest the coalition of the proletarians: he needed every now and then
to plunge into the vat of the people: it relaxed him: he always issued
from it fresher and jollier. He kept up his relation with Coquard, and
he went on taking his meals from time to time at Amélie's. When he was
there he lost all self-control, and would whole-heartedly indulge his
fantastic humor: he was not afraid of paradox: and he took a malicious
delight in pushing his companions to the extreme consequences of their
absurd and wild principles. They never knew whether he was speaking in
jest or in earnest: for he always grew warm as he talked, and always in
the end lost sight of the paradoxical point of view with which he had
begun. The artist in him was carried away by the intoxication of the rest.
In one such moment of esthetic emotion in Amélie's back-shop, he
improvised a revolutionary song, which was at once tried, repeated, and
on the very next day spread to every group of the working-classes. He
compromised himself. He was marked by the police. Manousse, who was in
touch with the innermost chambers of authority, was warned by one of his
friends, Xavier Bernard, a young official in the police department, who
dabbled in literature and expressed a violent admiration for
Christophe's music:--(for dilettantism and the spirit of anarchy had
spread even to the watchdogs of the Third Republic).
"That Krafft of yours is making himself a nuisance," said Bernard to
Manousse. "He's playing the braggart. We know what it means: but I tell
you that those in high places would be not at all sorry to catch a
foreigner--what's more, a German--in a revolutionary plot: it is the
regular method of discrediting the party and casting suspicion upon its
doings. If the idiot doesn't look out we shall be obliged to arrest him.
It's a bore. You'd better warn him."
Manousse did warn Christophe: Olivier begged him to be careful.
Christophe did not take their advice seriously.
"Bah!" he said. "Everybody knows there's no harm in me. I've a perfect
right to amuse myself. I like these people. They work as I do, and they
have faith, and so have I. As a matter of fact, it isn't the same faith;
we don't belong to the same camp.... Very well! We'll fight. Not that I
don't like fighting. What would you? I can't do as you do, and stay
curled up in my shell. I must breathe. I'm stifled by the comfortable
classes."
Olivier, whose lungs were not so exacting, was quite at his ease in his
small rooms with the tranquil society of his two women friends, though
one of them, Madame Arnaud, had flung herself into charitable work, and
the other, Cécile, was entirely taken up with looking after the baby, to
such an extent that she could talk of nothing else and to nobody else,
in that twittering, beatific tone which is an attempt to emulate the
note of a little bird, and to mold its formless song into human speech.
His excursion into working-class circles had left him with two
acquaintances. Two men of independent views, like himself. One of them,
Guérin, was an upholsterer. He worked when he felt so disposed,
capriciously, though he was very skilful. He loved his trade. He had a
natural taste for artistic things, and had developed it by observation,
work, and visits to museums. Olivier had commissioned him to repair an
old piece of furniture: it was a difficult job, and the upholsterer had
done it with great skill: he had taken a lot of time and trouble over
it: he sent in a very modest bill to Olivier because he was so delighted
with his success. Olivier became interested in him, questioned him about
his life, and tried to find out what he thought of the working-class
movement. Guérin had no thought about it: he never worried about it. At
bottom he did not belong to the working-class, or to any class. He read
very little. All his intellectual development had come about through his
senses, eyes, hands, and the taste innate in the true Parisian. He was a
happy man. The type is by no means rare among the working people of the
lower middle-class, who are one of the most intelligent classes in the
nation: for they realize a fine balance between manual labor and healthy
mental activity.
Olivier's other acquaintance was a man of a more original kind. He was a
postman, named Hurteloup. He was a tall, handsome creature, with bright
eyes, a little fair beard and mustache, and an open, merry expression.
One day he came with a registered letter, and walked into Olivier's
room. While Olivier was signing the receipt, he wandered round, looking
at the books, with his nose thrust close up to their backs:
"Ha! Ha!" he said. "You have the classics...."
He added:
"I collect books on history. Especially books about Burgundy."
"You are a Burgundian?" asked Olivier.
_"Bourguignon salé,
L'épée au côté,
La barbe au menton,
Sante Bourguignon,"_
replied the postman with a laugh. "I come from the Avallon country. I
have family papers going back to 1200 and something...."
Olivier was intrigued, and tried to find out more about him. Hurteloup
asked nothing better than to be allowed to talk. He belonged, in fact,
to one of the oldest families in Burgundy. One of his ancestors had been
on crusade with Philippe Auguste: another had been secretary of State
under Henri II. The family had begun to decay in the seventeenth
century. At the time of the Revolution, ruined and despairing, they had
taken the plunge into the ocean of the people. Now they were coming to
the surface again as the result of honest work and the physical and
moral vigor of Hurteloup the postman, and his fidelity to his race. His
greatest hobby had been collecting historical and genealogical documents
relating to his family and their native country. In off hours he used to
go to the Archives and copy out old papers. Whenever he did not
understand them he would go and ask one of the people on his beat, a
Chartist or a student at the Sorbonne, to explain. His illustrious
ancestry did not turn his head: he would speak of it laughingly, with
never a shade of embarrassment or of indignation at the hardness of
fate. His careless sturdy gaiety was a delightful thing to see. And when
Olivier looked at him he thought of the mysterious ebb and flow of the
life of human families, which for centuries flows burningly, for
centuries disappears under the ground, and then comes bubbling forth
again, having gathered fresh energy from the depths of the earth. And
the people seemed to him to be an immense reservoir into which the
rivers of the past plunge, while the rivers of the future spring forth
again, and, though they bear a new name, are sometimes the same as those
of old.
He was in sympathy with both Guérin and Hurteloup: but it is obvious
that they could not be company for him: between him and them there was
no great possibility of conversation. The boy Emmanuel took up more of
his time: he came now almost every evening. Since their magical talk
together a revolution had taken place in the boy. He had plunged into
reading with a fierce desire for knowledge. He would come back from his
books bewildered and stupefied. Sometimes he seemed even less
intelligent than before: he would hardly speak: Olivier could only get
him to answer in monosyllables: the boy would make fatuous replies to
his questions. Olivier would lose heart: he would try not to let it be
seen: but he thought he had made a mistake, and that the boy was
thoroughly stupid. He could not see the frightful fevered travail in
incubation that was going on in the inner depths of the boy's soul.
Besides, he was a bad teacher, and was more fitted to sow the good seed
at random in the fields than to weed the soil and plow the furrows.
Christophe's presence only served to increase the difficulty. Olivier
felt a certain awkwardness in showing his young protégé to his friend:
he was ashamed of Emmanuel's stupidity, which was raised to alarming
proportions when Jean-Christophe was in the room. Then the boy would
withdraw into bashful sullenness. He hated Christophe because Olivier
loved him: he could not bear any one else to have a place in his
master's heart. Neither Christophe nor Olivier had any idea of the love
and jealousy tugging at the boy's heart. And yet Christophe had been
through it himself in old days. But he was unable to see himself in the
boy who was fashioned of such different metal from that of which he
himself was made. In the strange obscure combination of inherited
taints, everything, love, hate, and latent genius, gave out an entirely
different sound.
* * * * *
The First of May was approaching. A sinister rumor ran through Paris.
The blustering leaders of the C.G.T. were doing their best to spread it.
Their papers were announcing the coming of the great day, mobilizing the
forces of the working-classes, and directing the word of terror upon the
point in which the comfortable classes were mostly sensitive--namely,
upon the stomach.... _Feri ventrem_.... They were threatening them
with a general strike. The scared Parisians were leaving for the country
or laying in provisions as against a siege. Christophe had met Canet, in
his motor, carrying two hams and a sack of potatoes: he was beside
himself: he did not in the least know to which party he belonged: he was
in turn an old Republican, a royalist, and a revolutionary. His cult of
violence was like a compass gone wrong, with the needle darting from
north to south and from south to north. In public he still played the
part of chorus to the wild speeches of his friends: but he would have
taken _in petto_ the first dictator who came along and swept away
the red spectre.
Christophe was tickled to death by such universal cowardice. He was
convinced that nothing would come of it all. Olivier was not so sure.
His birth into the burgess-class had given him something of the
inevitable and everlasting tremulation which the comfortable classes
always feel upon the recollection or the expectation of Revolution.
"That's all right!" said Christophe. "You can sleep in peace. Your
Revolution isn't going to happen to-morrow. You're all afraid. Afraid of
being hurt. That sort of fear is everywhere. In the upper-classes, in
the people, in every nation, in all the nations of the West. There's not
enough blood in the whole lot of them: they're afraid of spilling a
little. For the last forty years all the fighting has been done in words,
in newspaper articles. Just look at your old Dreyfus Affair. You
shouted loud enough: 'Death! Blood! Slaughter!'... Oh! you Gascons!
Spittle and ink! But how many drops of blood?"
"Don't you be so sure," said Olivier. "The fear of blood is a secret
instinctive feeling that on the first shedding of it the beast in man
will see red, and the brute will appear again under the crust of
civilization: and God knows how it will ever be muzzled! Everybody
hesitates to declare war: but when the war does come it will be a
frightful thing."
Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said that it was not for nothing
that the heroes of the age were lying heroes, Cyrano the braggart and
the swaggering cock, Chantecler.
Olivier nodded. He knew that in France bragging is the beginning of
action. However, he had no more faith than Christophe in an immediate
movement: it had been too loudly proclaimed, and the Government was on
its guard. There was reason to believe that the syndicalist strategists
would postpone the fight for a more favorable opportunity.
During the latter half of April Olivier had an attack of influenza: he
used to get it every winter about the same time, and it always used to
develop into his old enemy, bronchitis. Christophe stayed with him for a
few days. The attack was only a slight one, and soon passed. But, as
usual, it left Olivier morally and physically worn out, and he was in
this condition for some time after the fever had subsided. He stayed in
bed, lying still for hours without any desire to get up or even to move:
he lay there watching Christophe, who was sitting at his desk, working,
with his back towards him.