It was a sunny morning at the end of February, 1871. Up the steep
Martheray Hill in Lausanne a young woman walked slowly, leaning on
the arm of a middle-aged man. She was far gone in pregnancy, and hung
heavily on her companion's arm. Her face was that of a girl, but it was
pale with care, and she was dressed in mourning. The man was not, from
which the passers-by concluded that he was not her husband. He seemed
in deep trouble, stooped down now and then to the little woman and
said a word or two to her, then seemed to be absorbed again in his own
thoughts. When they came to the old custom-house in front of the inn "A
l'Ours," they stood still.
"Is there another hill?" she asked.
"Yes, dear," he answered. "Let us sit down for a moment."
They sat down on a seat before the inn. Her heart beat slowly and her
breast heaved painfully, as though for want of air.
"I am sorry for you, poor brother," she said. "I see that you are
longing to be with your own family."
"Don't mention it, sister! Don't let us talk about it. Certainly my
heart is sometimes far away, and they need me at the sowing time, but
you are my sister, and one cannot disown one's flesh and blood."
"We shall see now," resumed Frau von Bleichroden, "whether this air and
this new treatment will help towards his cure. What do you think?"
"Certainly it will," her brother answered, but turned his head aside so
that she should not see the doubt in his face.
"What a winter I have passed through in Frankfort! To think that
Destiny can invent such tragedies! I think I could have borne his death
more easily than this living burial."
"But one must always hope," said her brother in a hopeless tone.
And his thoughts travelled far--to his children and his fields. But
immediately afterwards he felt ashamed of his selfishness, that he
could not sympathise fully with this grief, which was really not his
own but which he had to share, and he felt angry with himself.
Suddenly there sounded from the hill above a shrill, prolonged scream,
like the whistle of a locomotive, and then another.
"Does the train go so high up the mountain?" asked Frau von Bleichroden.
"Yes, it must be that," said her brother, and listened with wide-open
eyes.
The scream was repeated. But now it sounded as if someone were drowning.
"Let us go home again," said Herr Schantz, who had become quite pale;
"you cannot climb this hill to-day, and to-morrow we will be wiser and
take a carriage."
But his sister insisted on proceeding in spite of all. And so they
ascended the long hill to the hospital, though it was like a climb up
Calvary. Through the green hawthorn hedges on both sides of the way,
darted black thrushes with yellow beaks; grey lizards raced over the
ivy-grown walls and disappeared in the crevices. It was full spring,
for there had been no winter, and by the edges of the path bloomed
primroses and hellebores; but they did not arrest the attention of
the pilgrims. When they had got half-way up the hill, the mysterious
screaming was repeated. As though overcome by a sudden foreboding, Frau
von Bleichroden turned to her brother, looked in his eyes with her own,
which were clouding over, only to see her fears confirmed, then she
sank down on the path without being able to utter a cry, while a yellow
cloud of dust whirled over her. And there she remained lying.
Before her brother could collect himself a casual passer-by had run for
a carriage, and as the young woman was carried into it her work for the
coming generation had already begun, and now two cries were heard--the
cries of two human creatures from the depths of sorrow.
Her brother stood on the pathway looking up to the blue sky of spring,
and thought to himself, "If the cries could only be heard up there, but
it is certainly too high."
In the hospital which stood above them, Von Bleichroden had been lodged
in a room which had an open view towards the south. The walls were
padded and painted with flowing contours of landscapes in faint blue.
On the ceiling was painted an espalier with vine leaves. The floor was
carpeted, and under the carpet was a layer of straw. The furniture was
completely covered with horsehair and cushions, so that no corners or
edges of the wood were visible.
The situation of the door could not be discovered from within the room,
thereby diverting all the patient's thoughts of getting out and the
consciousness of being confined, the most dangerous of all to a mind
in a state of excitement. The windows, it is true, were grated, but the
gratings were elaborately wrought in the shape of lilies and leaves,
and so painted that their purpose was quite disguised.
Von Bleichroden's madness had taken the form of torments of conscience.
He imagined that he had murdered the keeper of a vineyard under
mysterious circumstances, which he could never bring himself to confess
for the simple reason that he could not remember them. Now he thought
himself condemned to death and sitting in prison awaiting the execution
of the sentence. But he had lucid intervals. Then he fastened large
sheets of paper on the walls of the room and wrote syllogisms on them
till they were covered. Then he remembered that he had caused some
franc-tireurs to be shot, but did not remember that he was married.
When his wife came to see him he received her visit like that of a
pupil to whom he was giving lessons in logic. He had written up as the
premise of his syllogisms, "All franc-tireurs are traitors and the
order is to shoot them." One day his wife, who was obliged to agree
with everything, had the rashness to shake his belief in the premise
that "all franc-tireurs are traitors," thereupon he tore down all the
syllogisms from the wall and said that he would spend twenty years in
proving the premise, for premises must first be proved.
Besides this, he cherished great projects for the good of mankind. What
is the object of all our striving here upon earth? he asked. Why does
the king reign, the priest preach, the poet write, the artist paint?
In order to procure nitrogen for the body. Nitrogen is the dearest
of all kinds of food, and that is why meat is so expensive. Nitrogen
is intelligence, for the rich who eat meat are more intelligent than
the others who only eat vegetable hydrates. Now (so ran his argument)
nitrogen was beginning to be scarce on the earth and this was why
there came wars, workmen's strikes, newspapers, pietists and _coups
d'état_. Therefore it was necessary to discover a new nitrogen mine.
Von Bleichroden had done so, and now all men would be equal; liberty,
equality and fraternity would arrive and be realised on earth. This
inexhaustible mine was--the air. It contained seventy-nine per cent
of nitrogen, and a means must be devised of inhaling it directly and
of using it for the nourishment of the body without the necessity of
it being first condensed into grass, corn and vegetables, and then
converted by an animal into flesh. That was the problem of the future
with which Von Bleichroden was busying himself; its solution would
render agriculture and cattle-breeding superfluous, and the golden age
would return on earth. But at intervals he again sank into dreams about
the murder he supposed himself to have committed, and was profoundly
miserable.
The same February morning on which his wife had been on her way to the
asylum and had been obliged to return, Von Bleichroden sat in his new
room and looked out of the window. At first he had contemplated the
vine painted on the ceiling and the landscape on the walls; then he
set himself in a comfortable chair opposite the window so that he had
a clear view in front of him. He felt quiet to-day, for he had taken a
cold bath the evening before and had slept well. He knew that the month
was February, but he did not know where he was. The first thing that
struck him was the absence of snow out of doors, and that surprised him
for he had never been in southern lands. Outside in front of the window
stood green bushes--the "laurier teint" quite covered with flowers,
the "laurier cerise" with its shining bright green leaves, green
through the whole winter. There was also a box tree and an elm quite
overgrown with ivy which concealed all the branches and gave the tree
the appearance of being in full leaf. Over the lawn, which was starred
with primroses, as though a shower of sulphur had fallen on it, a man
passed mowing the grass with a scythe, while a little girl was raking
the beds.
Von Bleichroden took an almanac and read "February." "Raking in
February! Where am I?" he asked himself. Then his eyes travelled beyond
the garden and he saw a deep valley which sank gradually but was as
green as a summer meadow. Little villages and churches stood here and
there, and he could see bright green weeping-willows. "In February!" he
said to himself again. And where the meadows ceased there lay a lake,
quite calm and clear blue as air. On the other side of the lake was a
landscape fading in azure tints, topped by a chain of hills. But above
the chain of hills were some other objects which resembled clouds. They
were of as delicate a white as fresh-washed wool, but they were pointed
and over them lay small thin clouds. He did not know where he was, but
it was so beautiful that it could not be on the earth. Was he dead, and
had he entered another world? He was certainly not in Europe. Perhaps
he was dead! He sank into quiet musing and sought to realise his new
situation.
But when he looked up again he saw that the whole sunny picture was
framed and crossed by the window-grating; the hammered iron lilies and
the leaf-work stood out in sharp relief as though they were floating
in the air. He was at first startled, but then he composed himself; he
contemplated the picture once more, especially the pointed rosy clouds
(as he thought them). Then he felt a wonderful joy and sensation of
relief in his head: it was as though the convolutions of his brain,
after having been hopelessly entangled, began to arrange and order
themselves. He was so glad that he began to sing, as he thought, but he
had never sung in his life and therefore he only uttered cries of joy.
It was these which had issued from the window and filled his wife with
grief and despair. After sitting thus for an hour, he had remembered an
old painting in a bowling alley near Berlin which represented a Swiss
landscape, and now he knew that he was in Switzerland and that the
pointed clouds were Alps.
When the doctor made his second round he found Von Bleichroden sitting
quietly in a chair before the window and humming to himself, and it was
not possible to divert his gaze from the beautiful scene. But he was
quite clear in his mind and fully realised his situation.
"Doctor," he said, pointing to the grated window, "why do you want to
spoil and fleur-de-lisify such a beautiful picture? Won't you let me
go into the open air? I think it would do me good, and I promise not to
run away."
The doctor took his hand in order to feel his pulse secretly with his
forefinger.
"My pulse is only seventy, doctor," said the patient, smiling, "and I
slept well last night. You have nothing to fear."
"I am glad," said the doctor, "that the treatment has really had some
effect on you. You can go out."
"Do you know, doctor," said the patient with an energetic gesture, "do
you know that I feel as though I had been dead and come to life in
another planet--so beautiful does it all seem. Never did I dream that
the earth could be so wonderful."
"Yes, sir, the earth is still beautiful where civilisation has not
spoilt it, and here nature is so strong that it resists the efforts of
men. Do you think that your own country was always so ugly as it now
is? No; where now there are waste sandy plains, which could not nourish
a goat, there formerly rustled noble woods of oak, beech and fir,
under whose shadow beasts of the chase fed, and where fat herds of the
Norse-men's best kine fattened themselves on acorns."
"You are a disciple of Rousseau, doctor," broke in the patient.
"Rousseau was a Genevese, sir. There on the margin of the lake, deep
in the bay which you see above the top of the elms, he was born and
suffered, and there his 'Emile' and 'Contrat Sociale,' the gospels of
nature, were burnt. There on the left, at the foot of the Valais Alps,
in little Clarens, he wrote the book of love, 'La Nouvelle Heloise,'
for it is the Lake of Geneva which you see."
"The Lake of Geneva!" repeated Von Bleichroden.
"In this quiet valley," continued the doctor, "where peaceful men
live, many wounded spirits have sought healing. See there to the
right, immediately above the little promontory with the tower and the
poplars, lies Ferney. Thither fled Voltaire when he had finished his
rôle of 'persifleur' in Paris, and there he cultivated the ground and
erected a temple to the Supreme Being. Farther on lies Coppet, where
lived Madame de Staël, the worst enemy of Napoleon, the betrayer of
the people, who dared to teach the French, her countrymen, that the
German nation was not France's barbarian enemy, for nations do not hate
each other. Look now to the left; hither to this quiet lake fled the
shattered Byron who, like a bound Titan, had torn himself loose from
the trammels by which a period of reaction had endeavoured to imprison
his strong soul, and here below he wrote the 'Prisoner of Chillon,'
to express his intense hatred of tyrants. There under the lofty Mount
Grammont he was nearly drowned one day before the little fishing
village St Gingolphe, but his life was not yet finished. Hither fled
all who could not tolerate the infected air which spread like a cholera
over Europe after the conspiracy of the Holy Alliance against the newly
won rights of the Revolution, that is, of mankind. Here, a thousand
feet below you, Mendelssohn composed his melancholy songs, and Gounod
wrote his 'Faust.' Can you not see whence he derived his inspiration
for the 'Witches' Night,'--there, in the precipices of the Savoy Alps?
Here Victor Hugo composed his fierce satires against the treachery of
Napoleon III.; and here (strange irony of fate!) below in little quiet
retired Vevey, where the north wind can never come, your own Kaiser
sought to forget the terrible scenes of Sadowa and Königgratz. There
the Russian Gortschakoff hid himself when he felt the ground shaking
beneath his feet; here Lord Russell washed off the dust of politics and
breathed pure unpolluted air; here Thiers sought to reduce to order
his inconsistent, but, as I believe, honest schemes, often confused by
political storms, and may he now, when he is to support the destinies
of his people, remember the innocent hours in which his spirit communed
with itself before the mild but solemn majesty of nature! And look over
to Geneva, sir! There dwells no king with his court, but there was born
a thought which is as great as Christianity, and whose apostles also
carry a cross, a red cross on their white flags. When the Mauser rifles
shot at the French eagle and the Chassepot at the German eagle, the red
cross was held sacred by those who did not bow before the black cross,
and in this sign, I believe, the future will conquer."
The patient, who had listened quietly to this strange speech which was
as emotional, not to say sentimental, as if it had come from a preacher
instead of a doctor, felt bored. "You are an enthusiast, doctor," he
said.
"So will you be when you have lived here three months," answered the
physician.
"You believe then in the treatment?" asked the patient somewhat less
sceptically than before.
"I believe in the inexhaustible power of nature to heal the sickness of
civilisation," he answered. "Do you feel strong enough to hear a good
piece of news?" he continued, watching his patient closely.
"Quite, doctor!"
"Well then, peace has been made!"
"God! What a happiness!" the patient burst out.
"Yes certainly," said the doctor; "but don't ask more, for you cannot
hear more to-day. Come out now, but be prepared for one thing. Your
recovery will not be so rapid as you think. You may have relapses.
Memory, you see, is our worst enemy,--but come with me now."
The doctor took his patient's arm and led him into the garden. There
were no railings and no walls to bar one's passage, but only green
hedges, which conducted the wanderer back by labyrinthine paths to his
starting-point; but behind the hedges were deep trenches which were
impossible to cross.
The lieutenant sought for familiar phrases with which to express his
delight, but he felt that they were so inadequate that he resolved to
be silent, listening to a wonderful soundless nerve music. He felt
as though all the strings of his soul were being tuned again, and he
experienced a calm such as he had not felt for a very long time.
"Do you doubt whether I am recovered?" he asked the doctor with a
melancholy smile.
"You are on the way to recovery, as I told you before, but you are not
quite well."
They found themselves now before a little arched stone door through
which patients, accompanied by keepers, were passing.
"Where are all these men going?" asked the lieutenant.
"Follow them and you will see," said the doctor. "You have my
permission."
Von Bleichroden entered, but the doctor beckoned to a keeper. "Go down
to the Hôtel Faucon to Frau von Bleichroden," he said. "Give her my
respects, and say that her husband is on the way to recovery but has
not yet asked after his wife. When he does that he is saved."
The keeper went, and the doctor followed his patient through the little
stone gate.
Von Bleichroden had entered a large hall which resembled no room that
he had even seen before. It was neither a church, nor a theatre, nor a
school, nor a town hall, but a little of all together. At the end of it
was an apse which opened in three windows filled with painted glass.
The colours harmonised with each other as though composed by a great
artist's hand, and the light which entered was resolved, as it were,
into one great harmonic major chord. It made the same impression on the
patient as the C Major chord with which Haydn disperses the darkness of
chaos, when at the creation the Lord, after the choir have been long
painfully toiling at disentangling the disordered forces of nature,
suddenly calls out "Let there be light!" and cherubim and seraphim join
in.
Under the window was a rock of stalactite formation, shaped like
an arch, from which trickled a little stream falling into a basin
overhung by two arum lilies whose cups were as white as angels' wings.
The pillars which enclosed the apse were constructed in no familiar
architectural style, and their shafts were covered up to the roof with
soft brown liver-wort. The lower panelling of the wall was covered
with fir twigs, and the walls themselves were decorated by leaves of
ever-green plants--laurel, holm-oak and mistletoe--arranged in designs
of no particular style. Sometimes they seemed about to form letters,
but lost themselves in faint fantastic flourishes, like Raphael's
arabesques. Under the window apertures hung large wreaths as if for a
May festival, and along the frieze of the ceiling there ran a design
which had nothing in common with the lotus borders of Egypt, the
meandering curves of Greece, the Acanthus decorations of Rome, or the
trefoil and crucifers of the Gothic style.
Von Bleichroden looked about him and found the place provided with
benches where the patients of the institute sat absorbed in silent
wonder. He took a seat on one of them and heard someone sighing near
him. Then he perceived a man about forty years old who had covered his
face with his hands and wept. He had an aquiline nose, moustache and
pointed beard, and his profile resembled those which Von Bleichroden
had seen on French coins. He was certainly a Frenchman. Here then they
were to meet, enemy with enemy, both somewhat tearful! Why? Because
they had fulfilled their duties towards their respective fatherlands!
Herr von Bleichroden felt excited and uneasy when he suddenly heard a
strain of faint music. The organ was playing a chorale, but a chorale
in the major key; it was neither Lutheran, nor Catholic, nor Calvinist,
nor Greek, yet it spoke a language, and the patient thought he heard
hopeful and comforting words. Then a man got up by the apsis and stood
there half hidden by the stalactite rock. Was he a priest? No, he was
dressed in a light grey coat, wore a bright blue cravat, and displayed
an open shirt-front. He had no book with him, but spoke gently and
simply as one speaks among friends. He spoke of the simple teaching
of Christianity--to love one's neighbour as oneself; to be patient,
tolerant, and forgiving towards enemies. He recalled how Christ had
conceived of humanity as one, but how the evil nature of man had
counteracted this great idea--how men had grouped themselves into
nations, sects and schools; but he also expressed his firm hope that
the principles of Christianity would soon be realised. He came down
after speaking for a quarter of an hour, and offering a short prayer to
God the Omnipotent without introducing any names which might remind his
hearers of a formal creed or rouse their passions.
Herr von Bleichroden awoke as though from a dream. He had, then, been
in church--he who, weary of all petty religious strifes, had not
been to a service for fifteen years! And here, in a lunatic asylum,
it was his fortune to find a Free Church fully realised. Here sat
Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians,
Anglicans side by side and worshipped the same God in common. What a
crushing criticism this church hall suggested for all those sects, born
of the selfishness of men, which massacred, burnt and despised each
other! What a handle did it supply for the attack of the "heretical"
church on this political and dynastic Christianity!
Herr von Bleichroden let his gaze wander over the beautiful hall in
order to drive away the terrible pictures which his imagination had
conjured up. His eye roamed about till it fastened on the wall opposite
the apse. There hung a colossal wreath, in the centre of which stood
a word whose letters were formed of fir twigs. It was the French word
"Noel," followed by the German "Weihnacht." What poet had arranged
this hall? What knower of men, what deep mind had so understood how
to awaken the most beautiful and purest of all recollections? Would
not an overclouded mind feel an eager longing for light and clearness
when it recollected the festival of light commemorating the end or,
at any rate, the beginning of the end of the dark days at the turn of
the year? Would not the recollection of childhood, when no religious
strifes, no political hatred, no ambitious empty dreams had obscured
the sense of right in a pure conscience--would it not stir a music in
the soul louder than all those wild-beast bowlings which one had heard
in life in the struggle for bread, or more often for honour?
He continued to meditate, and asked himself, how is it that man, so
innocent as a child, afterwards becomes so evil as he grows older? Is
it education and school, these lauded products of civilisation, which
teach us to be bad? What do our first school-books teach us? They teach
us that God is an Avenger Who punishes the sins of the fathers in the
children unto the third and fourth generation; they teach us that those
men are heroes who have roused nation against nation, and pillaged
lands and kingdoms; that those are great men who have succeeded in
obtaining honour the emptiness of which all see, but after which all
strive; and that true statesmen are those who accomplish great and not
high aims in a crafty manner, whose whole merit consists in want of
conscience, and who will always conquer in the struggle against those
who possess one. And in order that our children may learn all this,
parents make sacrifices and renunciation and suffer the great pain
of separation from their offspring. Surely the whole world must be a
lunatic asylum, if this place was the most reasonable one he had ever
been in!
Now he looked again at the only written word in the whole church, and
spelt it over again; then there began to rise in the secret recesses
of his memory a picture, as when a photographer washes a grey negative
plate with ferrous sulphate as soon as he has taken it out of the
camera. He thought he saw his last Christmas Eve represented before
him. The last? No! Then he was in Frankfort. Then it was the last but
one. It was the first evening he had spent in his fiancée's house,
for they had been betrothed the day before. Now he saw the home of
the old pastor, his father-in-law; he saw the low room with the white
sideboard, the piano, the chaffinch in the cage, the balsam plants
in the window, the cupboard with the silver jug on it, the tobacco
pipes--some of meerschaum, some of red clay--and the daughter of the
house going about hanging nuts and apples on the Christmas tree.
The daughter of the house! It was like a flash of lightning in the
darkness, but of beautiful, harmless summer lightning which one watches
from a veranda without any fear of being struck. He was betrothed, he
was married, he had a wife--his own wife who reunited him to life which
he had previously despised and hated. But where was she? He must see
and meet her now, at once! He must fly to her, otherwise he would die
of impatience.
He hastened out of the church, and immediately met the doctor who had
been waiting for him to see the effect of his visit to it. Herr von
Bleichroden seized him by the shoulders, looked him straight in the
eyes, and said with a kind of gasp, "Where is my wife? Take me to her
at once. At once! Where is she?"
"She and your daughter," said the doctor quietly, "are waiting for you
below in the Rue de Bourg."
"My daughter! I have a daughter!" interrupted the patient, and began
weeping.
"You are very emotional, Herr von Bleichroden," said the doctor,
smiling.
"Yes, doctor, one must be so here."
"Well, come and dress for going out," answered the doctor, and took his
arm. "In half an hour you will be with your family and then you will be
with yourself again." And they disappeared into the front hall of the
institute.
* * * * *
Herr von Bleichroden was a completely modern type. Great grandson
of the French Revolution, grandson of the Holy Alliance, son of the
year 1830, like an ill-starred sailor he had made shipwreck between
the cliffs of revolution and reaction. When between twenty and thirty
years of age his intellect awoke and he realised in what a tissue of
lies, both religious and political, he was involved, he felt as though
he were really awake for the first time, or as though he were the
only sane man shut up in a mad-house. And when he could not discover
a single aperture in the enclosing wall by which he might escape
without being confronted by a bayonet or the muzzle of a gun, he fell
into a state of despair. He ceased to believe in anything, even in the
possibility of deliverance, and betook himself to the opium dens of
pessimism, in order at any rate to benumb his pain since there was no
cure. Schopenhauer became his friend and later on he found in Hartmann
the most brutal teller of truth which the world has seen.
But society summoned him and demanded that he should enrol himself
somewhere in its ranks. Von Bleichroden plunged into scientific study
and chose one of the sciences which has the least to do with the
present--geology, or rather that branch of it, palaeontology, which had
to do with the animal and plant life of a past world. When he asked
himself, "Is this of any use to mankind?" he could only answer, "It
is useful solely to myself, as a kind of opiate." He could never read
a newspaper without feeling fanaticism rising up in him like incipient
madness, and therefore he held everything which could remind him of his
contemporaries and the present at arm's length. He began to hope that
he would be able to spend his days in a dearly earned state of mental
torpor, quietly and with his sanity preserved.
Then he married. He could not escape nature's inexorable law regarding
the preservation of the species. In his wife he had sought to regain
all those inner elements which he had succeeded in eliminating from
himself, and she became his old emotional "ego," over which he rejoiced
quietly without quitting his entrenchments. In her he found his
complement, and he began to collect himself; but he felt also that his
whole future life was based upon two corner-stones. One was his wife;
if she gave way, he and his whole edifice would collapse. When only two
months after their marriage he was torn from her side, he was no longer
himself. He felt as though he had lost one eye, one lung and one arm,
and therefore also he fell so quickly asunder when the blow struck him.
At the sight of his daughter, a new element seemed to be introduced
into what Von Bleichroden called his "natural soul" as distinguished
from his "society soul," which was the product of education. He felt
now that he was incorporated in the family, and that when he died he
would not really die, but that his soul would continue to live in his
child; he realised, in a word, that his soul was really immortal, even
though his body perished in the strife between chemical elements. He
felt himself all at once bound to live and to hope, though sometimes
he was seized with despair when he heard his fellow-countrymen, in
the natural intoxication of victory, ascribe the successful issue
of the war to certain individuals, who, seated in their carriages,
had contemplated the battle-field through their field-glasses. But
then his pessimism seemed to him culpable, because he was hindering
the development of the new epoch by a bad example, and he became
an optimist from a sense of duty. He did not, however, venture to
return home from fear of falling into despondency, but asked for his
discharge, realised his small property, and settled down in Switzerland.
* * * * *
It was a fine warm autumn evening in Vevey in the year 1872. The clock
in the little pension Le Cedre had given the signal for dinner by
striking seven. Round the large dinner-table were assembled the inmates
of the pension, who were all mutually acquainted and lived on terms of
intimacy, as those do who meet in a neutral country.
Herr von Bleichroden and his wife had as their companions at the table
the melancholy Frenchman whom we have already seen in the hospital
church, an English, two Russians, a German and his wife, a Spanish
family, and two Tyrolese ladies.
Conversation proceeded as usual, quietly and peacefully--sometimes
falling into an almost emotional tone, at others touching on the most
burning questions of the day, without however kindling a conflagration.
"Never did I believe that the earth could be so supernaturally
beautiful as here," said Herr von Bleichroden, entranced with the view
through the open veranda doors.
"Nature is beautiful elsewhere also," said the German, "but I believe
our eyes were not healthy."
"That is true," answered the Englishman; "but it really is more
beautiful here than anywhere else. Have you never heard, gentlemen, how
the barbarians felt (they were Alemanni or Hungarians, I think) when
they emerged on the Dent Jaman and looked down on the Lake of Geneva?
They thought that the sky had fallen down on the earth, and were so
alarmed that they turned back again. The guide-book says so positively."
"I believe," said one of the Russians, "that it is the pure air,
free from falsehood, which one breathes here which causes us to find
everything so beautiful, although I will not deny that the beauties
of nature have a reflex action upon our minds and prevent them being
entangled in all our old prejudices. But only wait; when the heirs of
the Holy Alliance are dead, when the highest trees have been truncated,
our little plants also will flourish in clear sunshine."
"You are right," said Herr von Bleichroden; "but we shall not need to
truncate the trees. There are other, more humane ways of proceeding.
There was once an author who had written a mediocre play the success of
which depended on the way in which the principal female part was acted.
He went to a _prima donna_ and asked if she would undertake the rôle.
She gave an evasive reply. Then he forgot himself so far as to remind
her that, according to the rules of the theatre, she could be compelled
to play the part. 'That is true,' she answered, 'but I can make
difficulties.' We can also circumvent our chief opposing falsities. In
England it is simply an affair of the budget. Parliament cuts down the
grant to royal personages, and they go their way. That is the method of
legal reform. Is it not, Mr Englishman?"
"Certainly!" answered the Englishman. "Our Queen has the right to play
croquet and tennis, but she cannot meddle in politics."
"But the wars--the wars--will they never stop?" objected the Spaniard.
"When women get the vote, armies will be reduced," said Herr von
Bleichroden. "Isn't it so, wife?"
His wife nodded assentingly.
"For," continued he, "what mother will permit her son, what wife her
husband, what sister her brother to go into these battles? And when
there is no one to excite men against one another, then the so-called
race-hatred will disappear. 'Man is good but men are bad' said our
friend Jean Jacques, and he was right. Why are men more peaceful
here in this beautiful country? Why do they look more contented than
elsewhere? Because they have not daily and hourly these schoolmasters
over them; they know that they themselves have settled who is to rule
them; above all things they have so little to envy and so little
to annoy them. No royal retinues, no military parades, no pompous
spectacles which tempt a weak man to admire what is ostentatious but
false. Switzerland is the little miniature model after which the Europe
of the future will be built up."
"You are an optimist, sir," said the Spaniard.
"Yes," answered Von Bleichroden; "formerly a pessimist."
"You believe then," continued the Spaniard, "that what is possible in
a little country like Switzerland, with three million inhabitants and
only three languages, is possible also for the whole of Europe?"
Von Bleichroden seemed to hesitate, when one of the Tyrolese spoke.
"Pardon me," she said to the Spaniard, "you doubt whether this is
possible for Europe with its six or seven languages. It is too bold
an experiment, you think, to answer with so many nationalities. But
suppose I were to show you a land with twenty nationalities, Chinese,
Japanese, Negroes, and representatives of all the nations of Europe
mingled--that would be the international kingdom of the future. Well! I
have seen it for I have been in--America."
"Bravo!" said the Englishman. "Our Spanish friend is defeated."
"And you, sir," continued the Tyrolese, turning to the Frenchman, "you
mourn over Alsace-Lorraine, I see! You regard a war of _revanche_ as
unavoidable, for you do not believe that Alsace-Lorraine can continue
to remain German--you think the problem is insoluble."
The Frenchman sighed by way of assent.
"Well, when Europe is one confederation of states, as Herr von
Bleichroden calls Switzerland, then Alsace-Lorraine will be neither
French nor German but just simply Alsace-Lorraine. Is the problem
solved?"
The Frenchman lifted his glass politely and thanked her, bowing his
head with a melancholy smile.
"You smile," the courageous maiden resumed. "We have smiled all too
long, the smile of despair and scepticism; let us cease doing so! You
see most of the countries of Europe represented among us here. Among
ourselves, where no cynic hears us, we can utter the thoughts of our
hearts, but in parliament, in newspapers, and in books--there we are
cowardly, there we dare not expose ourselves to ridicule, and so we
swim with the stream. What, after all, is the use of being cynical?
Cynicism is the weapon of cowardice. One is anxious about one's heart.
Yes, it is disgusting to see one's entrails exposed at a shop door,
but to see those of others lying on the battle-field, while music and
a rain of flowers await the returning conquerors--that is splendid!
Voltaire was cynical, because he was still anxious about his heart,
while Rousseau vivisected himself, tore his heart out of his breast,
and held it against the sun, as the old Aztec priests did when they
sacrificed--yes, there was method in their madness. And who has changed
human kind--who told us that we were all wrong? Rousseau! Geneva yonder
burnt his books, but modern Geneva has raised a memorial to him. What
each of us here thinks privately, all think privately. Give us only
freedom to say it aloud!"
The Russians raised their black tea-glasses and vociferated words in
their language which only they understood. The Englishman filled his
glass and was about to propose a toast, when the servant-maid came in
and handed him a telegram. The conversation stopped for a moment; the
Englishman read the telegram with visible emotion, folded it up, placed
it in his pocket, and sank in thought. Herr von Bleichroden sat silent,
absorbed in contemplation of the beautiful landscape outside. The
Mont Grammont and the Dent d'Oche were lit up by the afterglow of the
descended sun, which also dyed red the vineyards and chestnut-groves
on the Savoy shore; the Alps glimmered in the damp evening air, and
seemed as unsubstantial as the lights and shades; they stood there like
disembodied powers of nature, dark and terrible on their reverse side,
threatening and gloomy in their hollows, but on their sun-fronting
sides, bright, smiling and joyful. Von Bleichroden thought of the
concluding words of the Tyrolese, and fancied he saw in Mont Grammont
a colossal heart with its apex looking towards the sky--the wounded,
scarred, bleeding heart of humanity which turned itself towards the
sun in a concentrated ardour of sacrifice, prepared to give all,
its best and its dearest, in order to receive all. Then the dark,
steel-blue evening sky was cut through by a streak of light, and above
the low-lying Savoy shore there rose a rocket of enormous size. It
rose high, apparently as high as the Dent d'Oche; it hung suspended as
though it were looking round on the beautiful earth outspread beneath
it before it burst. Thus it hesitated for a few seconds and then began
the descent; but it had not gone many yards before it exploded with a
report which took two minutes to reach Vevey. Then there spread out
something like a white cloud which assumed a four-cornered rectangular
shape, a flag of white fire; a moment after there was another report,
and on the white flag appeared a red cross.
All the party sprang up and hastened into the veranda.
"What does that mean?" exclaimed Herr von Bleichroden, startled.
No one could or would answer, for now there rose a whole volley of
rockets as if discharged from a crater over the peaks of the Voirons,
and scattered a shower of fire which was reflected in the gigantic
mirror of the lake.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" said the Englishman, raising his voice, while
a waiter placed a tray with filled champagne glasses on the table.
"Ladies and gentlemen!" he repeated, "this means, according to the
telegram which I have just received, that the first International
Tribunal at Geneva has finished its work; this means that a war between
two nations, or what would have been worse--a war against the future,
has been prevented; that a hundred thousand Americans and as many
Englishmen have to thank this day that they are alive. The Alabama
Question has been settled not to the advantage of America, but of
justice, not to the injury of England, but for the good of future
generations. Does our Spanish friend still believe that wars are
unavoidable? When our French friend smiles again, let him smile with
the heart and not with the lips only. And you, my German pessimist
friend, do you believe now that the franc-tireur question can be
settled without franc-tireurs and fusillades, but also only in this
way? And you, Russian gentlemen, whom I do not know personally, do
you think your modern method of forestry by truncating trees is the
only correct one? Do you not think it is better to go to the roots?
It is certainly a safer and quieter way. To-day, as an Englishman, I
ought to feel depressed, but I feel proud on account of my country, as
an Englishman always does, you know; but to-day I have a right to be
so, for England is the first European Power which has appealed to the
verdict of honourable men, instead of to blood and iron. And I wish you
all many such defeats as we have had to-day, for that will teach us to
be victorious. Raise your glasses, ladies and gentlemen, for the Red
Cross, for in this sign we will certainly conquer."
* * * * *
Herr von Bleichroden remained in Switzerland. He could not tear himself
away from this wonderful scenery which had led him into another world
more beautiful than that which he had left behind.
Occasionally he had attacks of conscience, but this his doctor ascribed
to a nervousness which is only too common among cultivated people at
the present time. He resolved to elucidate the problem of conscience
in a little pamphlet which he proposed to publish. He had read it to
his friends and it contained some remarkable passages. With his German
gift of penetration, he had reached the heart of the matter, and
discovered that there are two kinds of conscience; first the natural,
and second the artificial. The first conscience, he maintained, was the
natural feeling of right. That was the conscience which had weighed on
him so heavily when he had the franc-tireurs shot. He could only free
himself from this by regarding himself persistently as a victim of the
upper classes. The artificial conscience again originated in the power
of habit and the authority of the upper classes. The power of habit
rested so heavily on Herr von Bleichroden that sometimes when he went
for a walk before noon he felt as though he had neglected his work in
the Geological Bureau, and became uneasy and restless, like a boy who
has played truant from school. He took incredible pains to exculpate
himself by the consideration that he had obtained lawful leave of
absence. But then he remembered vividly his room in the geological
department, his colleagues who kept a keen watch on each other in order
to discover a slip on another's part which might lead to their own
advancement; and the heads of the department anxiously on the look-out
for orders and distinction. He felt then as though he had absconded
from it all.
Sometimes too he was attacked by the official conscience which the
authority of the upper classes imposes on a man. He found it hard to
obey the first commandment--to love one's King and fatherland. The King
had plunged his fatherland into the misery of war in order to obtain
a new fatherland for a relative, i.e. to make a Spaniard out of a
Prussian.
Had the King shown love to his fatherland in this? Had kings, generally
speaking, loved their fatherland? England was ruled by a Hanoverian,
Russia was governed by a German Czar and would soon receive a Danish
empress, Germany had an English Crown-princess, France a Spanish
empress, Sweden a French king and a German queen.
If, following such high examples, people changed their nationality
like a coat, Herr von Bleichroden believed that cosmopolitanism would
have a brilliant future. But the commands of the authorities, which
did not accord with their practice, worried him. He loved his country
as a cat loves her warm place by the fire; but he did not love it as
an institution. Sovereigns find nations necessary to provide them with
conscript armies, as tax-payers and as supporters of the throne, for
without nations there would not be any royal houses.
After Herr von Bleichroden had resided two and a half years in
Switzerland, he received one day a summons from Berlin, for there
were rumours of war in circulation. This time it was Prussia against
Russia--the same Russia which three years previously had lent Prussia
its "moral support" against France. He did not think it conscientious
to march against his friends, and since he was quite sure that the two
nations wished each other no ill, he asked his wife's advice what he
should do in such a new dilemma, for he knew by experience that woman's
conscience is nearer the natural law of right than man's.
After a moment's reflection, she answered "To be a German is more than
to be a Prussian--that is why the German Confederation was formed; to
be a European is more than to be a German; to be a man is more than to
be a European. You cannot change your nation, for all 'nations' are
enemies, and one does not go over to the enemy unless one is a monarch
like Bernadotte or a field-marshal like Von Moltke. The only thing left
is to neutralise yourself. Let us become Swiss. Switzerland is not a
nation."
Herr von Bleichroden considered this such a happy and simple solution
of the difficulty that he at once set about making inquiries how he
could be neutralised. His surprise and delight can be imagined when
he found that he had already fulfilled all the conditions required to
become a Swiss citizen (for there are no underlings in that land!) as
he had resided two years there.
Herr von Bleichroden is now neutralised, and although he is very happy
he occasionally, though more seldom than before, has conflicts with his
conscience.