forever. The boy seemed to have forgotten them: his attention was
distracted by other things. But after this respite he returned to them
and never left them again. The horrible little boy had determined to
part his mother and Christophe. He resumed his play-acting. He did not
set about it upon any premeditated plan, but, from day to day, followed
the whimsies of his spite. He had no idea of the harm he might be doing:
he only wanted to amuse himself by boring other people. He never relaxed
his efforts until he had made Grazia promise to leave Paris and go on a
long journey. Grazia had no strength to resist him. Besides, the doctors
advised her to pay a visit to Egypt. She had to avoid another winter in
the northern climate. Too many things had tried her health: the moral
upheaval of the last few years, the perpetual anxiety about her son's
health, the long periods of uncertainty, the struggle that had taken
place in her without her giving any sign of it, the sorrow of sorrows
that she was inflicting on her friend. To avoid adding to the trouble he
divined in her, Christophe hid his own grief at the approach of the day
of parting: he made no effort to postpone it; and they were outwardly
calm, and, though inwardly they were very far from it, yet they
succeeded in forcing it upon each other.
The day came. A September morning. They had left Paris together in the
middle of July, and spent their last weeks in Switzerland in a mountain
hotel, near the place where they had met again six years ago.
They were unable to go out the last five days: the rain came down in
unceasing torrents: they were almost alone in the hotel, for all the
other travelers had fled. The rain stopped on their last morning, but
the mountains were still covered with clouds. The children went on ahead
with the servants in another carriage. She drove off. He accompanied her
to the place where the road began to descend in steep windings to the
plain of Italy. The mist came in under the hood of the carriage. They
were very close together, and they said no word: they hardly looked at
each other. A strange light, half-day, half-night, wrapped them
round.... Grazia's breath left little drops of water on her veil. He
pressed her little hand, warm under her cold glove. Their faces came
together. Through her wet veil he kissed her dear lips.
They came to the turn of the road. He got down, and the carriage plunged
on into the mist and disappeared. For a long time he could hear the
rumbling of the wheels and the horses' hoofs. Great masses of white mist
rolled over the fields. Through the close tracery of the branches the
dripping trees dropped water. Not a breath of wind. The mist was
stifling life. Christophe stopped, choking.... There was nothing now.
Everything had gone....
He took in a long breath, filling his lungs with the mist, and walked
on. Nothing passes for him who does not pass.
III
Absence adds to the power of those we love. The heart retains only what
is dear to us in them. The echo of each word coming through space from
the distant friend, rings out in the silence, faithfully answering.
The correspondence of Christophe and Grazia took on the serious and
restrained tone of a couple who are no longer in the dangerous period of
trial of love, but, having passed it, feel sure of the road and march on
hand in hand. Each was strong to sustain and direct the other, weak and
yielding to the other's support and direction.
Christophe returned to Paris. He had vowed never to go there again. But
what are such vows worth? He knew that he would find there the shade of
Grazia. And circumstances, conspiring with his secret desires against
his will, showed him a new duty to fulfil in Paris. Colette, well
informed as to society gossip, told Christophe that his young friend
Jeannin was making a fool of himself. Jacqueline, who had always been
weak in her dealings with her son, could not hold him in check. She
herself was passing through a strange crisis, and was too much occupied
with herself to pay much heed to him.
Since the unhappy adventure which had destroyed Olivier's marriage and
life, Jacqueline had lived a very worthy life. She withdrew from
Parisian society, which, after imposing on her a hypocritical sort of
quarantine, had made fresh advances to her, which she had rejected. She
was not at all ashamed of what she had done as far as these people were
concerned: she thought she had no reason to account to them for it, for
they were more worthless than she: what she had done openly, half the
women she knew did by stealth, under cover of their homes. She suffered
only from the thought of the wrong she had done her nearest and dearest,
the only man she had loved. She could not forgive herself for having, in
so poor a world, lost an affection like his.
Her regrets, and her sorrow, grew less acute with time. There were left
only a sort of mute suffering, a humiliated contempt for herself and
others, and the love of her child. This affection, into which she poured
all her need of love, disarmed her before him; she could not resist
Georges's caprices. To excuse her weakness she persuaded herself that
she was paying for the wrong she had done Olivier. She had alternate
periods of exalted tenderness and weary indifference: sometimes she
would worry Georges with her exacting, anxious love, and sometimes she
would seem to tire of him, and she let him do as he liked. She admitted
to herself that she was bringing him up badly, and she would torment
herself with the admission; but she made no change. When, as she rarely
did, she tried to model her principles of conduct on Olivier's way of
thinking, the result was deplorable. At heart she wished to have no
authority over her son save that of her affection. And she was not
wrong: for between these two, however similar they might be, there were
no bonds save those of the heart. Georges Jeannin was sensible of his
mother's physical charm: he loved her voice, her gestures, her
movements, her grace, her love. But in mind he was conscious of
strangerhood to her. She only saw it as he began to grow into a man,
when he turned from her. Then she was amazed and indignant, and
attributed the estrangement to other feminine influences: and, as she
tried awkwardly to combat them, she only estranged him more. In reality,
they had always lived, side by side, each preoccupied with totally
different interests, deceiving themselves as to the gulf that lay
between them, with the aid of their common surface sympathies and
antipathies, which disappeared when the man began to spring forth from
the boy (that ambiguous creature, still impregnated with the perfume of
womanhood). And bitterly Jacqueline would say to her son:
"I don't know whom you take after. You are not like your father or me."
So she made him feel all that lay between them; and he took a secret
pride that was yet feverish and uneasy.
The younger generation has always a keener sense than the elder of the
things that lie between them; they need to gain assurance of the
importance of their existence, even at the cost of injustice or of lying
to themselves. But this feeling varies in its acuteness from one period
to another. In the classic ages when, for a time, the balance of the
forces of a civilization are realized,--those high plateaux ending on
all sides with steep slopes--the difference in level is not so great
from one generation to another. But in the ages of renascence or
decadence, the young men climbing or plunging down the giddy slopes,
leave their predecessors far behind.--Georges, like the other young men
of his time, was ascending the mountain.
He was superior neither in character nor in mind: he had many aptitudes,
none of which rose above the level of elegant mediocrity. And yet,
without any effort on his part, he found himself at the outset of his
career several grades higher than his father, who, in his short life,
had expended an incalculable amount of intellect and energy.
Hardly were the eyes of his mind opened upon the light of day than he
saw all round him the heaped-up darkness, pierced by luminous gleams,
the masses of knowledge and ignorance, warring truths, contradictory
errors, in which his father and the men of his father's generation had
feverishly groped their way. But at the same time he became conscious of
a weapon in his power which they had never known: his force....
Whence did he have it?... Who can tell the mystery of the resurrections
of a race, sleeping, worn out, which suddenly awakes brimming like a
mountain torrent in the spring!... What would he do with his force? Use
it in his turn to explore the inextricable thickets of modern thought?
They had no attraction for him. He was oppressed by the menacing dangers
which lurked in them. They had crushed his father. Rather than renew
that experience and enter the tragic forest he would have set fire to
it. He had only to glance at the books of wisdom or sacred folly which
had intoxicated Olivier: the Nihilist pity of Tolstoi, the somber
destructive pride of Ibsen, the frenzy of Nietzsche, the heroic, sensual
pessimism of Wagner. He had turned away from them in anger and terror.
He hated the realistic writers who, for half a century, had killed the
joy of art. He could not, however, altogether blot out the shadows of
the sorrowful dream in which he had been cradled. He would not look
behind him, but he well knew that the shadow was there. He was too
healthy to seek a counter-irritant to his uneasiness in the lazy
skepticism of the preceding epoch: he detested the dilettantism of men
like Renan and Anatole France, with their degradation of the free
intellect, their joyless mirth, their irony without greatness: a
shameful method, fit for slaves, playing with the chains which they are
impotent to break.
He was too vigorous to be satisfied with doubt, too weak to create the
conviction which, with all his soul, he desired. He asked for it, prayed
for it, demanded it. And the eternal snappers-up of popularity, the
great writers, the sham thinkers at bay, exploited this imperious and
agonized desire, by beating the drums and shouting the clap-trap of
their nostrum. From trestles, each of these Hippocrates bawled that his
was the only true elixir, and decried all the rest. Their secrets were
all equally worthless. None of these pedlars had taken the trouble to
find a new recipe. They had hunted about among their old empty bottles.
The panacea of one was the Catholic Church: another's was legitimate
monarchy: yet another's, the classic tradition. There were queer fellows
who declared that the remedy for all evils lay in the return to Latin.
Others seriously prognosticated, with an enormous word which imposed on
the herd, the domination of the Mediterranean spirit. (They would have
been just as ready at some other time to talk of the Atlantic spirit.)
Against the barbarians of the North and the East they pompously set up
the heirs of a new Roman Empire.... Words, words, all second-hand. The
refuse of the libraries scattered to the winds.--Like all his comrades,
young Jeannin went from one showman to another, listened to their
patter, was sometimes taken in by it, and entered the booth, only to
come out disappointed and rather ashamed of having spent his time and
his money in watching old clowns buffooning in shabby rags. And yet,
such is youth's power of illusion, such was his certainty of gaining
certainty, that he was always taken in by each new promise of each new
vendor of hope. He was very French, of a hypercritical temper, and an
innate lover of order. He needed a leader and could bear none; his
pitiless irony always riddled them through and through.
While he was waiting for the advent of a leader who should give him the
key to the riddle ... he had no time to wait. He was not the kind of
man, like his father, to be satisfied with the lifelong search for
truth. With or without a motive, he needed always to make up his mind,
to act, to turn to account, to use his energy. Traveling, the delight of
art, and especially of music, with which he had gorged himself, had at
first been to him an intermittent and passionate diversion. He was
handsome, ardent, precocious, beset with temptations, and he early
discovered the outwardly enchanting world of love, and plunged into it
with an unbridled, poetic, greedy joy. Then this impertinently naïve and
insatiable cherub wearied of women: he needed action, so he gave himself
up uncontrollably to sport. He tried everything, practised everything.
He was always going to fencing and boxing matches: he was the French
champion runner and high-jumper, and captain of a football team. He
competed with a number of other crazy, reckless, rich young men like
himself in ridiculous, wild motor races. Finally he threw up everything
for the latest fad, and was drawn into the popular craze for flying
machines. At the Rheims meetings he shouted and wept for joy with three
hundred thousand other men; he felt that he was one with the whole
people in a religious jubilation; the human birds flying over their
heads bore them upwards in their flight: for the first time since the
dawn of the great Revolution the vast multitude had raised their eyes to
the heavens and seen them open.--To his mother's terror young Jeannin
declared that he was going to throw in his lot with the conquerors of
the air. Jacqueline implored him to give up his perilous ambition. She
ordered him to do so. He took the bit between his teeth. Christophe, in
whom Jacqueline thought she had found an ally, only gave the boy a
little prudent advice, which he felt quite sure Georges would not follow
(for, in his place, he would not have done so). He did not deem that he
had any right,--even had he been able to do so--to fetter the healthy
and normal expansion of the boy's vitality, which, if it had been forced
into inaction, would have been perverted to his destruction.
Jacqueline could not reconcile herself to seeing her son leave her. She
had vainly thought that she had renounced love, for she could not do
without the illusion of love; all her affections, all her actions were
tinged with it. There are so many mothers who expend on their sons all
the secret ardor which they have been unable to give forth in
marriage--or out of it! And when they see how easily their sons do
without them, when suddenly they understand that they are not necessary
to them, they go through the same kind of crisis as befalls them upon
the betrayal of a lover, or the disillusion of love.--Once more
Jacqueline's whole existence crumbled away. Georges saw nothing. Young
people never have any idea of the tragedies of the heart going on around
them: they have no time to stop and see them: and they do not wish to
see: a selfish instinct bids them march straight on without looking to
right or left.
Jacqueline was left alone to gulp down this new sorrow. She only emerged
from it when her grief was worn out, worn out like her love. She still
loved her son, but with a distant, disillusioned affection, which she
knew to be futile, and she lost all interest in herself and him. So she
dragged through a wretched, miserable year, without his paying her any
heed. And then, poor creature, since her heart could neither live nor
die without love, she was forced to find something to love. She fell
victim to a strange passion, such as often takes possession of women,
and especially, it would seem, of the noblest and most inaccessible,
when maturity comes and the fair fruit of life has not been gathered.
She made the acquaintance of a woman who, from their first meeting,
gained an ascendancy over her through her mysterious power of
attraction.
This woman was about her own age, and she was a nun. She was always busy
with charitable works. A tall, fine, rather stout woman, dark, with
rather bold, handsome features, sharp eyes, a big, sensitive,
ever-smiling mouth, and a masterful chin. She was remarkably
intelligent, and not at all sentimental; she had the malice of a
peasant, a keen business sense, and a southern imagination, which saw
everything in exaggeration, though always exactly to scale when
necessary: she was a strangely enticing mixture of lofty mysticism and
lawyer's cunning. She was used to domination, and the exercise of it was
a habit with her. Jacqueline was drawn to her at once. She became
enthusiastic over her work, or, at least, believed herself to be so.
Sister Angèle knew perfectly what was the object of her passion: she was
used to provoking them; and without seeming to notice them, she used
skilfully to turn them to account for her work and the glory of God.
Jacqueline gave up her money, her will, her heart. She was charitable,
so she believed, through love.
It was not long before her infatuation was observed. She was the only
person not to realize it. Georges's guardian became anxious. Georges was
too generous and too easy to worry about money matters, though he saw
his mother's subjection, and was shocked by it. He tried, too late in
the day, to resume his old intimacy with her, and saw that a veil was
drawn between them; he blamed the occult influence for it, and, both
against his mother and the nun, whom he called an intriguer, he
conceived a feeling of irritation which he made no attempt to disguise:
he could not admit a stranger to his place in a heart that he had
regarded as his natural right. It never occurred to him that his place
was taken because he had left it. Instead of trying patiently to win it
back, he was clumsy and cruel. Quick words passed between mother and
son, both of whom were hasty and passionate, and the rupture grew
marked. Sister Angèle established her ascendancy over Jacqueline, and
Georges rushed away and kicked over the traces. He plunged into a
restless, dissipated life; gambled, lost large sums of money; he put a
certain amount of exaggeration into his extravagances, partly for his
own pleasure and partly to counterbalance his mother's
extravagances.--He knew the Stevens-Delestrades. Colette had marked down
the handsome boy, and tried the effect on him of her charms, which she
never wearied of using. She knew of all Georges's freaks, and was vastly
entertained by them. But her sound common sense and the real kindness
concealed beneath her frivolity, helped her to see the danger the young
idiot was running. And, being well aware that it was beyond her to save
him, she warned Christophe, who came at once.
Christophe was the only person who had any influence over young Jeannin.
His influence was limited and very intermittent, but all the more
remarkable in that it was difficult to explain. Christophe belonged to
the preceding generation against which Georges and his companions were
violently in reaction. He was one of the most conspicuous
representatives of that period of torment whose art and ideas rouse in
them a feeling of suspicion and hostility. He was unmoved by the new
Gospels and the charms of the minor prophets and the old cheapjacks who
were offering the young men an infallible recipe for the salvation of
the world, Rome and France. He was faithful to the free faith, free of
all religion, free of all parties, free of all countries, which was no
longer the fashion--or had never been fashionable. Finally, though he
was altogether removed from national questions, he was a foreigner in
Paris at a time when all foreigners were regarded by the natives of the
country as barbarians.
And yet, young Jeannin, joyous, easy-going, instinctively hostile to
everything that might make him sad or uneasy, ardent in pursuit of
pleasure, engrossed in violent sports, easily duped by the rhetoric of
his time, in his physical vigor and mental indolence inclined to the
brutal doctrines of French action, nationalist, royalist,
imperialist--(he did not exactly know)--in his heart reflected only one
man: Christophe. His precocious experience and the delicate tact he had
inherited from his mother made him see (without being in the least
disturbed by it) how little worth was the world that he could not live
without, and how superior to it was Christophe. From Olivier he had
inherited a vague uneasiness, which visited him in sudden fits that
never lasted very long, a need of finding and deciding on some definite
aim for what he was doing. And perhaps it was from Olivier that he had
also inherited the mysterious instinct which drew him towards the man whom
Olivier had loved.
He used to go and see Christophe. He was expansive by nature, and of a
rather chattering temper, and he loved indulging in confidences. He
never troubled to think whether Christophe had time to listen to him.
But Christophe always did listen, and never gave any sign of impatience.
Only sometimes he would be rather absent-minded when Georges had
interrupted him in his work, but never for more than a few minutes, when
his mind would be away putting the finishing touches to its work: then
it would return to Georges, who never noticed its absence. He used to
laugh at the evasion, and come back like a man tiptoeing into the room,
so as not to be heard. But once or twice Georges did notice it, and then
he said indignantly:
"But you are not listening!"
Then Christophe was ashamed: and docilely he would listen to Georges's
story, and try to win his forgiveness by redoubled attention. The
stories were often very funny: and Christophe could not help laughing at
the tale of some wild freak: for Georges kept nothing back: his
frankness was disarming.
Christophe did not always laugh. Georges's conduct sometimes pained him.
Christophe was no saint: he knew he had no right to moralize over
anybody. Georges's love affairs, and the scandalous waste of his fortune
in folly, were not what shocked him most. What he found it most hard to
forgive was the light-mindedness with which Georges regarded his sins:
they were no burden to him: he thought them very natural. His conception
of morality was very different from Christophe's. He was one of those
young men who are fain to see in the relation of the sexes nothing more
than a game that has no moral aspect whatever. A certain frankness and a
careless kindliness were all that was necessary for an honest man. He
was not troubled with Christophe's scruples. Christophe would wax wrath.
In vain did he try not to impose his way of feeling upon others: he
could not be tolerant, and his old violence was only half tamed. Every
now and then he would explode. He could not help seeing how dirty were
some of Georges's intrigues, and he used bluntly to tell him so. Georges
was no more patient than he, and they used to have angry scenes, after
which they would not see each other for weeks. Christophe would realize
that his outbursts were not likely to change Georges's conduct, and that
it was perhaps unjust to subject the morality of a period to the moral
ideas of another generation. But his feeling was too strong for him, and
on the next opportunity he would break out again. How can one renounce
the faith for which one has lived? That were to renounce life. What is
the good of laboring to think thoughts other than one's own, to be like
one's neighbor or to meddle with his affairs? That leads to
self-destruction, and no one is benefited by it. The first duty is to be
what one is, to dare to say: "This is good, that bad." One profits the
weak more by being strong than by sharing their weakness. Be indulgent,
if you like, towards weakness and past sins. But never compromise with
any weakness....
Yes: but Georges never by any chance consulted Christophe about anything
he was going to do:--(did he know himself?).--He only told him about
things when they were done.--And then?... Then, what could he do but
look in dumb reproach at the culprit, and shrug his shoulders and smile,
like an old uncle who knows that he is not heeded?
On such occasions they would sit for several minutes in silence. Georges
would look up at Christophe's grave eyes, which seemed to be gazing at
him from far away. And he would feel like a little boy in his presence.
He would see himself as he was, in that penetrating glance, which was
shot with a gleam of malice: and he was not proud of it.