A few days after this scene, Armand sent Chazel a letter dated from
London in which he made his excuses for not shaking hands with his
friends before his final departure. To set foot again in the little
house in the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, to see again the two beings whose
lives he had broken, but who both had nevertheless only words of trust
or forgiveness for him, to be present once more at those moral throes
whose every sigh echoed in intolerable fashion to the very depths of his
soul--this effort had been beyond his actual energy. He had said to
himself when thinking on the one hand of Alfred's probable melancholy,
and on the other, of Helen and of the life that she would lead amid such
a bankruptcy of all modesty and feeling:
"It is horrible, but I cannot help it. I must forget it."
And to put petty facts, in accordance with one of his favourite maxims,
between himself and his grief, he had hastened his journey to England.
During the years of his cruelly idle and empty life, he had done his
best to beguile weariness by cosmopolitan wanderings. He had thus formed
three or four social centres for himself through Europe. In London,
especially, he had a life ready made, rooms in Bolton Street, off
Piccadilly, two clubs in which to find hospitality, and twenty houses in
which to be received as a friend. But this year, when settled as usual
in the three furnished apartments reserved for him, he felt incapable of
entering immediately upon the whirl of society. "I will leave my cards
in a few days," he said to himself.
The few days passed by, and he had the same repugnance to seeing his
acquaintances again. He allowed a week to glide away in this manner, two
weeks, three, and he continued to experience an unconquerable aversion
to all conversation and all friendly meeting, to all things and all
persons. He went so far as to walk only in the evening, the more surely
to evade the human face. If he went out in daylight, it was to take one
of those two-wheeled cabs, the driver of which is perched high up
behind, and the horse in which trots so quickly.
Without an object, he had himself driven at random through the
interminable streets of the huge city. Small, dark houses succeeded to
small, dark houses, squares with railings and miserable trees, open
spaces with discoloured statues, and boundless parks with herbage
browsed by flocks, opened up at distant intervals. Over the monstrous
ant-hill extended the vault of a sooty sky. Sometimes the said sky was
wholly drowned in a yellow fog; at other times the mist broke in pelting
rain, or else there was a dim, cold azure in which coal-dust seemed to
be floating. A population was hurrying along these streets, but Armand
did not recognise a single face, and he would go on thus for whole
hours, alone with his thought as when he awoke, and dressed, and
ate--with that thought which was always present and was always similar
to itself.
And what was it that was shown him by this fixed and torturing thought?
Unceasingly, unceasingly Helen, and the terrible confession during their
last interview showed itself in all its details, and he could see the
act which she had avowed in terms so pitilessly precise and clear. She
was evoked before him in the arms of De Varades; for he told himself
that after the first crisis of despair she must have relapsed again, and
the vision inflicted upon him a feeling which he again compared to a
weight upon his heart, crushing it with sadness.
This dull weight had descended upon it on the day when she had lamented
so tragically in the drawing-room in the Rue Lincoln. And, as on that
occasion, he endured an unbearable oppression in knowing himself to be
the cause of this woman's misery. After the present intrigue with De
Varades, doubtless she would have others. Is there ever a check on that
slippery incline which leads from the second lover to the tenth? When
the habit and power of self-respect, that unique principle of all
dignity, has been lost, what dike can be opposed to the invading flood
of temptation and curiosity? Helen was beautiful and would be courted.
Her successive falls occurred by anticipation now beneath his eyes, he
could do nothing to prevent them, and it was he, as she had exclaimed
through her tears, it was he who had ruined her.
In presence of the image of this woman's life, he felt as though set
over against a being for whom he had poured out poison with his own
hands. The mortal discomposure of the face, the cold sweat, the terrible
convulsions, how could these be prevented when the fatal drug was
flowing in her blood? The venom of adultery with which he had infected
this creature would accomplish its work of destruction. What excuse had
he for having done this? None, seeing that he had taken her without
loving her. Yes, if only he had loved her, if he had repaid her a little
happiness in exchange for the gift of her person!
But to the inevitable humiliation of guilt he had united another ground
of humiliation, namely, the most cruel disillusion. Of a child rich in
hopes, and led astray by a generous seeking after the most elevated
feelings, what had he made? One undeceived and in quest of
forgetfulness. What would she be in a year, and then in another year,
and in yet another? He repeated the celebrated phrase: "_All the
perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand._" And he bent
beneath the weight of remorse, a weight so heavy, ah! so cruelly heavy,
that he was rendered incapable of any experience save that overwhelming,
continuous crushing beneath the thought of the act committed.
"What an absurd machine man is," he thought, "and what contemptible
weakness this distress! To justify such remorse I should of necessity be
guilty, that is so say, responsible and free. Is not freedom an empty
word, as also in consequence good and evil, virtue and vice?"
He had thought much on these questions in his youth, and had allowed as
accurate the chief modern arguments against the freedom of the will. He
studied himself that, by applying them to his own case, he might destroy
the moral misery that affected him.
"What am I?" he went on; "the product of a certain heredity placed in a
certain environment. The circumstances once given, I could not but feel
as I felt, think as I thought, desire as I desired."
And he decomposed his own personality into its elements, as he had done
only too often in his periods of "Hamletism," as he called his analytic
crises of inward paralysis. He recognised the first beginning of his
egotism in the absence of family life; he took cognisance of the fact
that college life had too early polluted his imagination, and the sight
of the slaughter in the civil war too early awaked his misanthropy. He
could see himself losing his religious faith by precocious reading,
becoming uninterested in all ambition for lack of a cause in which he
could believe, and because he was rich enough to live without a
profession. Then he watched the long, useless, and fatal series of his
love experiences unfold itself down to the hour when he had met Madame
Chazel.
"How could I have judged of her otherwise than I did?" he went on. "She
in a measure threw herself at my head. Could I understand that this was
the madness of a romantic, irrational, but sincere nature? I thought she
was a woman like the rest. I thought so, and it was inevitable that I
should think so."
He thrust the words expressive of necessity--"it was inevitable"--into
his heart, like a lever wherewith he might raise the weight of his
remorse, but the weight continued there still. His striving was in vain;
something within him that was stronger than himself constrained him to
consider himself the author of this woman's ruin.
Then he exerted himself to devise some other process of alleviation. He
reverted in imagination to all the halting-places in their mutual
intrigue, and he passed along this road of perdition seeking for the
crossways, the moments when he might have entered and caused her to
enter upon a different route. Why during the first few weeks of the
Chazels' stay in Paris had he, when walking with Helen, taken pains to
assume a sentimental attitude towards her? That he might appeal to her
thoughts and influence them to curiosity. Could he have helped it? "No,"
he replied, angrily; "seduction is a part of my nature, as the chase is
of the nature of a greyhound."
A moment had come when he had perceived that Helen was beginning to love
him. Could he then have withdrawn himself from her life? Yes, if he had
believed himself to be her first love. But does a man command himself to
believe this or that, to think in one way or another? What would he not
now have given to judge of Helen as he formerly did, and this was
impossible just as it had been impossible that he should judge of her
during that period as he did now!
On the night before their first secret interview, he could again see
himself hesitating and on the point of writing her a truthful letter in
order to break with her before the irreparable hour had come. But could
he have prevented such or such an image from beleaguering his thought
and restraining his pen?
During the few months of their union he had not loved her, and his lack
of feeling had martyred her! But is emotion to be commanded, and
tenderness? If he had broken brutally with her, this was a further
effect of the potency of ideas over the human will. The perception
within him of his friend's sorrow had been stronger than that of his
mistress's. He grasped as through a magnifying glass the internal
mechanism of which his actions had been the visible sign, the final
result; he buried himself in this minute examination of his past.
It was all in vain. The weight of his remorse was still there. He
succeeded in convincing his intellect, and the conviction did not
relieve his heart. His conscience, as the vulgar phrase has it, was
tormenting him. But what is conscience other than an illusion? A stone
that has been thrown, and that feels itself rolling without even knowing
that a hand has thrown it, might also believe itself to be the cause of
its own motion. Its conscience might reproach it for the crushing of the
grass-blades in its path. Remorse might start up in it.
"If I had a spectre before my eyes in consequence of an hallucination,"
Armand concluded, "should I place credence in apparitions? I should tell
myself that I saw a spectre, an empty form, that the condition of my
bodily organs inflicted the obsession upon me, and that would be all.
Let me suffer from my spectre if it must be so, but let me not believe
in it."
Granted! Good, evil, remorse, conscience, freedom--all so many unreal
apparitions, so many bodiless shadows! But there was indisputable
reality in the ruin of a soul, and in the fact that a dreadful destiny
had made him the instrument of its ruin. A ruined soul? There are then a
life and a death of souls, something that fosters them and something
that destroys them, after the manner of spiritual damnation and
salvation. Then he thought of Helen's soul before the final disaster,
all the episodes of their common past recurred simultaneously to him,
and he interpreted and understood them.
Now that he knew the truth concerning her, and the extent to which he
had misjudged her, the pettiest facts in that past were possessed of
unlooked-for significance. The mute moments of his sad sweetheart, her
melancholy, her effusiveness, showed to him in turn, and each memory
revealed to him at once his own ingratitude and the strength of the
feeling that he had inspired. How living was then that woman's soul! How
noble even in guilt! What richness in its sensibility! What fulness in
its emotions! What depth in its sorrow, and what magnificence in its
striving after an inaccessible happiness! And now, in the same soul,
what ineffaceable pollution!
His reflections turned upon Alfred, and he recalled his last
conversation with the man he had so unworthily deceived. He too
possessed a living soul whence gushed, as from kindly springs,
tenderness and loyalty, all the forces of belief and love. Then Armand
directed his thought to himself: "Ah! It is I," he said, "I who have the
dead soul!"
He retraced the course of his youth. He saw himself young and incapable
of devoting his activity to an ideal faith, a libertine incapable of
steadying his heart upon a passion--powerless for self-surrender,
belief, love! He went over the fatal list which had been drawn up
certainly no less by his vanity as a seducer than by his curiosity as a
debauchee. He sought again the names and countenances of the women who
had given themselves to him, from those who had been his in rooms of
infamy, where the mirrors of alcove and ceiling multiply the whiteness
of naked charms, to those whom he had possessed in modesty and who
required that endearments should be shrouded in the shadow of lowered
curtains. What had he made of the first and of the second, of the
impassioned and of the venal, of the romantic and of the depraved, of
little Aline and of Juliette, of Madame de Rugle and of Helen?
Instruments of sensation and nothing more. Could he remember a single
one to whom he had been good and helpful, and who was the better for
having known him? The prostitutes he had caused to commit an act of
prostitution among a thousand others. The adulteresses had lied once
more for him. His soul had not only been dead; it had spread around it
the infection of its own essential death. With his keen intellect, his
rare imagination, and all the implements of superiority that fortune had
placed in his hands, what work had he been accomplishing since his
youth? And all was to end in the moral assassination of a woman who had
believed in him!
Then the weight increased in heaviness and he strove anew.
"Life and death of the soul! Words! Words! A trifling cerebral
alteration and the soul is changed. The microscope would reveal the
slight disposition of cells which has it that I have never loved. But
why," he added "does this soul live by means of certain ideas and die
through others? Why? I do not know, and there are many other things that
I do not know. I talk of the brain. What is the brain? It is matter. And
what is matter? No one knows, no one understands. What is the use of
asking: Why this or why that? There is but one question: Why anything?
And the only thing we really know is that we shall never be able to
answer that question."
He perceived the gulf of mystery, the abyss of the unknowable which
science shows to be at the basis of all thought and of all existence.
Beneath the problem of his own particular destiny, he touched upon the
problem of all destiny, and his moral pain was so intense that he felt a
temptation to interpret, in a consolatory sense, the mystery wherein he
felt drowned. Why should not the key to this enigma of life,
undecipherable by reason according to reason's own avowal, be one of
salvation, a key that should redeem the universal distress here below,
that should restore life to dead souls such as his own soul, and deep
peace to tortured consciences such as his own conscience? Why should
there not be a heart like to our own hearts and capable of pitying us at
the centre of that nature which has nevertheless produced us, us with
our bitter or tender manner of feeling, with our appetite for the ideal
and our infirmities, with our greatness and our depravity?
"But then," he reflected, "God would exist. I might throw myself upon my
knees now in this hour of suffering, and say, 'Our Father, which art in
heaven.' Our Father!"
When the young man had reached this stage in his reasonings, tears rose
to his eyes. He who had known neither father nor mother was caused
unspeakable emotion by this single phrase of the sublime prayer.
Then he immediately grew steady again. Thoughts came to him that were
stronger than such mystic effusion. He was disputing with his intellect
against his heart, and his intellect was always victorious. The
objections to a belief in God, drawn from the existence of evil, took
shape before him. How reconcile a Father's goodness with that law of
reversion which wills it that the sins of some shall fall ceaselessly
upon others? Of Helen and himself, which was guilty? Himself. Which of
the two had committed a crime in love? Himself, by seducing this woman
without loving her, solely to satisfy a whim of pride, weariness, and
sensuality. Who was punished? Helen. Of the latter and Alfred, who was
guilty? Helen. Who suffered? Alfred. Thus the sin of each, if there be
sin, bears its poisonous fruit in the soul of another, and the same
solidarity governs all the relations of men among themselves. The sons
atone for the fathers, the just for the wicked, the innocent for the
guilty! Ah! how is it possible, in presence of this uninterrupted
transmission of misery, to believe in the existence of a principle of
justice and goodness in that obscurity beyond the day?
"No," said Armand to himself, "just as errors are produced by the
combined necessities of circumstances and temperaments, so are the
consequences of these acts distributed at random--at least on earth."
The mystic effusion then returned: "On earth? Can there be then another
world whereof this is but the symbol or the preparation? But how can any
link subsist between this and that? How can any help come in hours of
distress? Ah! if He were a heavenly Father, would not all suffering be
in his sight a prayer?"
Through the tumult of all these contradictory thoughts, the unhappy man
perceived that grand, unique problem of human life which religion alone
can solve, that of knowing whether beyond our limited days, our brief
sensations, our fleeting actions, there be something which does not pass
away, and which can satisfy our hunger and thirst for the infinite.
Armand was perhaps to become religious again some day; at the present
moment he was not so, and he answered himself:
"If there be nothing, why this terrible remorse? If there be something,
why am I unable either to conceive it with my intellect or to feel it
with my heart? How can I put an end to this unbearable anguish? How
raise the weight that is stifling me?"
The principal incidents during these gloomy days were some letters from
Alfred, filled with affection and with complaints about his wife's
health, the sadness of his home, his anxieties for the future. Helen
therefore continued to be unhappy.
"Ah!" thought Armand, "it is possible that the words 'good' and 'evil,'
'soul' and 'God,' have no kind of meaning. For thousands of years
philosophers have been disputing inconclusively about them, and
religions have been succeeding to one another and crumbling away. I have
measured the impotence of reason and I have not faith. But there is need
neither of reason nor of faith to know whether human misery exists, and
to know that we ought to do everything to avoid being the cause of this
misery."
We ought! As though we were free! But free or not, let us be sensible of
this misery and pity it! When the young man entered upon the new path of
pity, he experienced, not absolute relief from his remorse, but a sort
of despairing tenderness which at last moistened his heart. He pictured
Helen to himself when quite a little girl in a past such as her
confidences had revealed to him, and he pitied her for her sad childhood
and her oppressed youth. He pitied her for her marriage and for the
moral divorce which had separated her from Alfred. He pitied her for
having known himself, Armand, for the words that he had uttered to her
and which she had believed, for the kisses which he had asked of her and
which she had given him. But especially for that second fall, for that
frenzy which had thrown her into the arms of Varades did he passionately
pity her, and for all the errors into which this first error would draw
her. He pitied her for her birth, for her existence, for her subjection
to an unconquerable fate!
He was now more sensible of her life than he had been in the days when
she had been his, lost in emotion on his breast. By a strange kind of
soul-transposition he suffered from the sorrows of a mistress whose joys
he had been unable to share. He abode in thought within that sick heart,
and the feeling of pity became so strong and full that it overflowed
from him upon all life.
When in the evening he walked along the streets and reached the sinister
corners of the Haymarket and Regent Street, the sight of the girls of
different nationalities wandering there in all weathers moved him to the
bottom of his soul. They walked in their dark toilets and accosted the
passers-by in every idiom. There were tall, heavy Germans, delicate
Frenchwomen, and Englishwomen recognisable by faces that had often
retained an expression of purity. The majority were old, with fierce
gleaming in their gaze. What lamentable adventures--criminal ones,
perhaps--had cast these foreigners, far from their native lands and
beneath an ever-gloomy sky, upon the pavement of these streets,
pitilessly traversed by the busy work of commerce? And the young, with
profiles as of angels--for there were some such--how melancholy to see
them pushing open the bar-doors, and drinking large glasses of brandy at
a draught! They came out with a little colour on their cheeks and
resumed their pilgrimage of infamy, warmed by the draught of alcohol
against the rude climate, the sudden showers, the penetrating fog.
Armand watched them going and coming, accosting this man, abusing that,
and talking among themselves. There was a whole populace of these lost
ones passing through the streets. Yes, lost ones, for nothing can save
them any more than the prostitutes of luxury who go in pursuit of men
with diamonds and horses, or the adulteresses, those victims of the
search for new sensations. Nothing can save them, for there is nothing
that can save! Sometimes, however, the young man chanced to pass in
front of temples and to remember that thousands of beings believe in a
Saviour.
"But if I do not believe in Him," he asked himself, "is it my fault? A
true Saviour would be one who saved even the incredulous, even the
renegades, even the rebellious, even those who do not repent, seeing
that they are most to be pitied! No, there is no redemption, and Christ
has died in vain!"
Then he perceived life as the work of blind and destructive necessity,
of an evil force impelling creatures to ruin one another. Prostitution
below, adultery above, such are the products of the noblest of human
feelings--love. Civilisation appeared to him as a huge orgie where the
dishes are more numerous, the wines more heating, the guests a larger
crowd; but on what mystic plate will the bread of ransom be found by
those hungering for forgiveness? Meanwhile the orgie hums and roars, the
women offer the fruit of their red lips, a colossal hymn of mirth
encompasses the intoxication, every moment one of those present rolls
beneath the table, thunder-smitten by death who takes his victims at
random; he is so quickly replaced by another that his disappearance is
not even noticed, and joy plays on every brow and laughs in every eye.
Joy? Yes, provided that no thought be given to one's own distress, and
further that one's own misery be endured with courage; but the misery of
another--when can we find courage to endure that when we are ourselves
its cause? And suddenly his visions would fade away, and his theories
and dreamings, to give place to the sole image of Helen in agony, or
else of Helen depraved, and of these two images Armand could not have
told which tortured his thought the most.
"Can I be in love with her?" he asked himself one morning as he was
rising, "and is what I am taking for remorse simply love?"
He found it impossible to answer this question. When a man loves, he
conceives happiness as coming from the woman he loves, and how could he
imagine a single minute of happiness as coming from Helen now? He might
return to Paris, try to renew relations with her, carry her off, take
her to a land where everything should be strange to them, and where they
might forget! He felt that the worst follies committed for her would
remove nothing of his present anguish. Therefore he did not love her.
But then, why this cruel throbbing of the heart at the mere thought of
the act to which despair had led her? Why this continual anxiety which
caused him at the sight of Chazel's letters to pause with trembling hand
before opening them, as though he were about to read some fresh intrigue
that had been at last discovered by the unhappy man? Why was he unable
to take a book, or sit down to table, or go out, or come in, without
having the spectre of this woman beside him. Yet he had not killed her,
he had not shed her blood with his hands. Why this unwearied recurrence
to their mutual relations with the everlasting reflection as a
despairing background: "If I had known?" If he had known the worth of
what she gave him when she was giving it to him, if he had felt as he
was feeling now when she used to come and rest so tenderly, so
sincerely, upon his heart, if he had had that in his heart towards her
which was in it now, then--then he would have loved her--he would have
loved her!
That impotence to arrive at complete emotion, the martyrdom of egotism
to which he had been a victim, his lack of feeling, his barren rancour,
his vexation of spirit in solitude and distress, all his moral miseries
would have been brought to an end if he had had a simpler heart, if he
had understood, if he had believed! He believed in her now, and it was
too late. He understood her when she had ceased to be pure. He loved her
when she had endured pollution from the endearments of another. He was
discovering that he had passed by the side of happiness, now that the
enchanted palace which he had traversed without seeing it was closed to
him for ever. He was beginning to cherish her, like one dead to whom he
could never speak more. But one that is dead remains sheltered from
pollutions, and Helen? "All the perfumes of Arabia," he repeated,
rubbing his hand like the blood-stained queen. The weight was again on
his heart. How could he ever remove it?
But what if this remorse were merely a mirage fostered by absence? When
children are afraid of a dim form at night, what remedy does their
father adopt? He leads them to the object of their terror, and by
touching it cures their panic. What if he, too, tried this remedy? What
if he saw Helen again, and with his own eyes measured the evil that he
had wrought her? "It is the only step that is left to try," he said to
himself one day, and he abruptly resolved to return to Paris. He had
spent more than six weeks in preying thus upon his heart.