(unless it be you, my love, unless it be you!) ..."
She gazed at Pierre again:
"Pshaw! What are others to me?"
And with the magnificent illogicality of love she burst out laughing,
sprang up with a leap, rushed into the wood and cried: "Catch me, catch
me!"
They played like two children all the rest of the day. And when they
were very tired they returned with slow steps toward the valley filled
like a basket with the sheaves of the setting sun. Everything they
savored seemed new to them--with one heart for two, with two bodies for
one.
* * * * *
THEY were five friends about the same age, met together at the house of
one of them, five young comrades at their studies whom a certain
conformity of mind and a first sorting out of opinions had grouped
together apart from the rest. And yet no two of them who thought the
same way. Beneath the pretended unanimity of forty millions of Frenchmen
there are forty million brains that keep right to themselves. Thought in
France is like the country, a state composed of small properties. From
one bit of farm to the other the five friends tried to exchange their
ideas across the hedge. But they did that only to affirm themselves more
imperatively in their several opinions, each for himself. Each one, for
that matter, liberal in mind, and, if not all of them republicans, all
foes of intellectual or social reaction, or any backward return.
Jacques See was the most blazingly in favor of the war. This generous
young Jew had espoused all the passions the spirit of France contained.
All through Europe his cousins in Israel espoused like him the causes
and the ideas of their adopted countries. Moreover, according to their
method, they even had a tendency toward an exaggeration of whatever they
adopted. This fine fellow, with ardent but rather heavy voice and look,
with his regular features as if marked with a stamp imposed, was more
pronounced in his convictions than was needful, and violent in
contradiction. According to him, all that was necessary was a crusade
made by the democracies to deliver the nations and extinguish war. Four
years of the philanthropic slaughterhouse had not convinced him. He was
one of those who will never accept the flat contradiction of facts. He
had a twofold pride, the secret pride of his race, which race he wished
to rehabilitate, and his pride personal that wanted to prove itself
right. He wished this all the more because he was not entirely sure of
it. His sincere idealism served as a screen against exacting instincts
too long suppressed and to a need for action and adventure, which was no
less sincere.
Antoine Naude, he too, was for the war. But that was because he could
not do otherwise. This big honest young _bourgeois_, with his rosy
cheeks, placid and keen, who had a short breath and rolled his _r_ with
the pretty grace of the provinces of the Centre, contemplated with a
quiet smile the enthusiastic transports of his friend See; or else he
knew how on occasion to make him climb a tree with a careless word;--but
the big, lazy fellow took precious care not to follow him up! What is
the use of getting in a sweat for or against what does not depend upon
ourselves? It is only in the tragedies that one finds the heroic and
loquacious conflict between duty and one's pleasure. When we have no
choice, we do our duty without wasting words. It was no jollier on that
account. Naude neither admired nor recriminated. His good sense told him
that, once the train started and the war in motion, it was necessary to
roll along with it; there was no other position to take. As for
searching after the responsibilities, that was merely time lost. When I
am forced to fight it gives me a gay outlook, a pretty consolation, to
know that I might have not fought--if things had really been ... what
they haven't been!
The responsibilities? Now for Bernard Saisset they were exactly the
primordial question; he was obstinate in disentangling that knot of
snakes; or rather, like a little Fury, he brandished the snakes above
his head. A frail boy, distinguished looking, impassioned, too many
nerves, burning with a too lively sensitiveness of the brain, belonging
to the wealthy _bourgeoisie_ and an old republican family which had
played a part in the highest offices of State, he professed, through
reaction, all the ultra-revolutionary passions. He had inspected too
near at hand the masters of the day and what they brought forth. He
accused all the governments--and by preference his own. He talked of
nothing any more but of syndicalists and bolsheviki; he had just made a
discovery of them and he fraternized with them, as if he had known them
from infancy. Without knowing too well which, he saw no remedy save in a
total upset of society. He hated war; but he would have sacrificed
himself with joy in a war between classes--a war against his own class,
a war against himself.
The fourth in the group, Claude Puget, sat by at these jousts of words
with a cold and somewhat disdainful attention. Coming from the very
undermost _bourgeoisie_, poor, uprooted from his province by a passing
inspector of schools who remarked his intelligence, prematurely deprived
of the intimate influence of his family, this winner of a _Lycee_
scholarship, accustomed to depend upon himself alone, to live only with
himself, merely lived by himself and for himself. An egotistic
philosopher given to analysis of the soul, voluptuously immersed in his
introspection like a big cat curled up in a ball, he was not moved at
all by the agitation of the others. These three friends of his who never
could agree among themselves he put in the same bag--with the
"populars." Did not all three forfeit their social rank by wishing to
partake in the aspirations of the mob? Truth to say, the mob was a
different crowd for each of them. But for Puget the crowd, whatever it
might be, was always wrong. The crowd was the enemy. The intellect
should remain alone and follow its particular laws and found, apart from
the vulgar crowd and the State, the small and closed kingdom of thought.
And Pierre, seated near the window, distractedly looked out of doors,
and dreamed. Generally speaking, he mingled in these juvenile assaults
with passion. But today it seemed to him a humming of idle words which
he listened to from so far away, oh, so far away! in a bored and mocking
demi-torpidity. Plunged in their discussions, the others were a long
while in remarking his muteness. But at last Saisset, accustomed to find
in Pierre an echo of his verbal bolshevisms, was astonished at failing
to hear it reverberate any more and put the question to him.
Pierre waked up in a hurry, reddened, smiled and asked:
"What were you talking about?"
They were most indignant.
"Why, you haven't been listening to anything!"
"What, then, were you brooding about?" asked Naude.
A little confused, a little impertinent, Pierre replied:
"About the springtide. It has come back all right without your
permission. It will clear out without our help."
All of them crushed him with their disdain. Naude taunted him as a
"poet." And Jacques See as a _poseur_.
Puget alone fixed his eyes on him with curiosity and irony in them, his
wrinkled eyes with their cold pupils.
"Flying ant!"
"What?" questioned Pierre, rather amused.
"Beware of the wings!" said Puget. "It's the nuptial flight. It only
lasts one hour."
"Life does not last much more," said Pierre.
* * * * *
DURING Passion Week they saw one another every day. Pierre went to see
Luce in her isolated house. The thin and hungry garden was waking up.
They passed the afternoon there. They felt now an antipathy toward Paris
and the crowd, against life also. At certain moments even, a moral
paralysis kept them silent, immovable, one close to the other, without a
wish to stir. A strange feeling was at work in both of them. They were
afraid! Fear--in the measure that the day approached when they should
give themselves the one to the other--fear through excess of love,
through the purification of soul which the ugly things, the cruelties,
the shameful facts of life frightened, and which, in an intoxication of
passion and melancholy, dreamed of being delivered from it all.... They
said nothing about it to each other.
The most of their time they passed in babbling gently about their
future lodgings, their work in common, their little household. They
arranged in advance, down to the smallest item of their installation,
the furniture, the wall papers, the spot for each object. A true woman,
the evocation of these tender nothings, intimate and familiar images of
daily life, moved Luce sometimes to tears. They tasted the exquisite
small joys of the hearth of the future.... They knew that nothing of
that sort would occur--Pierre through the presentiment of his native
pessimism--Luce through the clairvoyance of love which understood the
practical impossibility of the marriage.... That is why they hasted to
enjoy it in their dream. And each concealed from the other the certainty
felt that it would not be anything else but a dream. Each one believed
that this secret was personal and watched, deeply touched, over the
other's illusion.
When they had exhausted the mournful delights of the impossible future
they were overcome with fatigue, as if they had lived through all of it.
Then they rested themselves, seated under the arbor with the dried-up
vines, while the sun melted the congealed sap; and, Pierre's head on
Luce's shoulder, they listened dreamily to the humming of the earth.
Behind the passing clouds the young sun of March played bo-peep, laughed
and disappeared. Clear sunrays, somber shadows ran across the plain as
in a soul run joys and sorrows.
"Luce," said Pierre abruptly, "don't you recollect?... It was long, long
ago.... Even then we were like this...."
"Yes," said Luce, "that's true. All of it, I remember all.... But where
were we?..."
They amused themselves by trying to recall under what shapes they had
known one another before. Already as human beings? Perhaps. But
certainly at that time Pierre was the girl and Luce the lover.... Birds
in the air? When she was a small child her mother told Luce that she had
been a little wild goose that had fallen down the chimney; ah! she had
thoroughly broken her wings!... But where particularly they enjoyed
finding themselves again was in the elementary fluid forms that
penetrate one another, twist about and untwist like the volutes of a
dream or else of smoke: white clouds that dissolve in the gulf of the
sky, little waves that play about, the rain on the soil, the dew on the
bush, seeds of dandelion that swim at the beck of the air.... But the
wind carries them away. Provided it does not begin to blow again and
that we shall not lose each other any more for all eternity!...
But he decided:
"As for me, I believe that we never did quit one another; we were
together just as we are now, lying against each other; only, we were
asleep and we dreamed dreams. From time to time we awake.... With
difficulty.... I feel your breath, your cheek against mine.... One makes
a great effort; we bring our mouths together.... One falls back
asleep.... Darling, darling, I am here, I hold your hand, don't let me
go!... Now it is not quite yet the hour, spring hardly shows the end of
his icy nose...."
"Like yours," said Luce.
"Very soon we shall awake on a fine summer's day...."
"We ourselves shall be that fine day of summer," says Luce.
"The warm shade of the limetrees, the sun through the branches, the bees
that sing...."
"The peach on the warm wall and its perfumed pulp...."
"The noon spell of the harvesters and their golden sheaves...."
"The lazy cattle that chew their cud...."
"And at evensong, by the sunset like a flowerset pool, the liquid light
that runs across the tops of the fields...."
"Yes, we shall be everything," quoth Luce, "everything that is good and
sweet to see and to have, to kiss and to eat, to touch and inhale....
What's left over we shall leave to them," she added, pointing to the
city and its smoke wreaths.
She laughed. Then, kissing her friend, she said:
"We have chanted our little duet well. What do you say, my friend
Pierrot?"
"Yea, verily, Jessica," he replied.
"My poor Pierrot," she returned, "we are none too well equipped for this
world, where people know how to sing nothing else but the
_Marseillaise_!..."
"Good enough if they even knew how to sing that!"
"We have got off at the wrong station, we left the train too early."
"I'm afraid," said Pierre, "that the next station would have been still
worse. Can you see us, my darling, in the social fabric of the
future--the hive they promise us, where none will have the right to live
except for the queen bee's service or for the republic?"
"Laying eggs from morning to night like a _mitrailleuse_ or from morning
to night licking the eggs of others.... Thank you for that choice!" said
Luce.
"Oh, Luce, little ugly one, how ugly you talk," said Pierre laughing.
"Yes, it's very bad, I know it. I am good for nothing. Nor you either,
my friend. You are just as ill fitted for killing or maiming men as I am
for sewing them up again, like those wretched horses when they are
ripped up at the bullfights, so that they can serve again at the next
affray. We two are useless beings and dangerous, who have the
ridiculous, criminal pretention to live only in order to love those we
do love, likewise my little lover lad and my friends, honest people and
little children, the good light of the day, also good white bread and
everything that is pretty and right for me to put in my mouth. It's
shameful, it's shameful! Blush for me, Pierrot!... But we shall be well
punished! There is going to be no place for us in that factory of the
State, without rest and without truce, which the earth will be soon....
Luckily we shall not be here!"
"Yes, what happiness!" quoth Pierre.
"If in thine arms, O Lady of my heart,
I die, to greater fame I'll not aspire,
Content upon thy bosom to expire
Whilst kissing thee and thus from living part...."
"Well, little darling, what sort of a fashion is that?"
"Nevertheless it is after a good old French mode. It's by Ronsard," said
Pierre:
"...else I would only claim
A century hence, sans glory and sans fame
Slothful to die upon thy lap, Cassandra...."
"A hundred years!" sighed Luce. "He doesn't ask much!..."
"Or I mistake, or more delights are heaped
In death like that than all the honors reaped
By Caesar great or firebolt Alexander."
"Naughty, naughty, naughty little scamp! have you no shame? In this
epoch of heroes!"
"There are too many," said Pierre. "I would rather be a little fellow
who loves, a babe of a man."
"The babe of a woman who still has on his lips the milk from my breast,"
cried Luce, seizing him round the neck. "My babe, my own!"
* * * * *
SURVIVORS of those days who, since then, have been witness to the
dazzling change of fortune, will have forgotten doubtless the menacing
heavy flight of the dark wing which, during that week, covered the Ile
de France and touched Paris with its shadow. Joy does not take further
stock in past trials.--The German drive reached the line of its summit
between Holy Monday and Holy Wednesday. The Somme traversed, Bapaume,
Vesle, Guiscard, Roye, Noyon, Albert carried. Eleven hundred guns taken.
Sixty thousand prisoners.... Symbol of the land of grace trampled upon,
on Holy Tuesday died Debussy the harmonious. A lyre that is snapped....
"Poor little expiring Greece!" What will remain of it? A few chiseled
vases, a few perfect stelae which the grass will invade from the Path
of Tombs. Immortal vestiges of ruined Athens....
As from the height of a hill, Pierre and Luce watched the shadow that
moved upon the town. Still wrapped in the rays of their love, they
waited without fear for the end of the brief day. Now they would be two
in the night. Like to the evening _Angelus_ there rose up to them,
conjured up, the voluptuous melancholy of the lovely chords of Debussy
which they had so greatly loved. More than it had ever done in any other
time, music responded to the need of their hearts. Music was the only
art which rendered the voice of the delivered soul behind the screen of
forms.
On Holy Thursday they walked, Luce on Pierre's arm and holding his hand,
along the streets of the suburb, soused with the rain. Gusts of wind
scurried over the moistened plain. They noted neither rain nor wind,
neither the hideousness of the fields nor the muddy ways. They seated
themselves on the low wall of a park, a section of which had recently
fallen in. Under Pierre's umbrella, which scarcely protected her head
and shoulders, Luce, her legs hanging down and her hands wet, her rubber
coat all steeped, looked at the water dripping down. When the wind
stirred the branches a little fire of drops sounded "clop, clop!" Luce
was silent, smiling, tranquilly luminous. A profound joy bathed them.
"Why does one love so much?" said Pierre.
"Ah, Pierre, you do not love me so very much if you ask that."
"I ask you that," said Pierre, "in order to make you say what I know
just as well as you."
"You want me to give you some compliments. But you'll be neatly caught.
For if you know why I love you, I for my part do not know why."
"You don't know?" said Pierre in consternation.
"Why no!" (She was laughing in her sleeve.) "And there is no need at all
why I should know. When one asks why something is, it means that one is
not sure about it, that the thing is not good. Now that I do love, no
more why! No more where or when or for, nor how either! My love is, my
love is! All beside may exist if it cares to."
Their faces kissed each other. The rain took advantage of that, gliding
under the awkward umbrella in order to brush with its fingers their hair
and cheeks; between their lips they drank in a little cold drop.
Pierre remarked:
"But the others?"
"What others?" quoth Luce.
"The poor," answered Pierre. "All those who are not us?"
"Let them do as we do! Let them love!"
"And be loved? Luce, all the world can not do that."
"Why, yes!"
"Why, no. You don't realize the value of the gift you have made me."
"To give one's heart to love, one's lips to the beloved is to give one's
eyes to the light; it isn't giving, it's taking."
"There are blind people."
"We cannot cure them, Pierrot. Let's do the seeing for them!"
Pierre remained silent.
"What are you thinking of?" asked she.
"I am thinking that on this day, very far from us, very near, He
suffered the Passion, He who came on earth to cure the blind."
Luce took his hand:
"Do you believe in Him?"
"No, Luce, I believe no longer. But he remains always the friend of
those he has accepted, even once, at his table. And you, do you know
him?"
"Hardly," responded Luce. "They never talked to me about him. But
without knowing him I love him.... For I know that he loved."
"Not as we do."
"Why not? We ourselves have a poor little heart that knows only how to
love you, my love. But He; He loved all of us. But it's always the same
love."
"Would you like we should go tomorrow," asked Pierre, much moved, "in
honor of His death?... I was told that they will have fine music at
Saint Gervais!"
"Yes, I would love well to go to church with you on that day. I am sure
He will give us welcome. And being nearer to Him, one is nearer each to
the other."
They fell silent.... Rain, rain, rain. The rain falls. The night falls.
"At this hour tomorrow," said she, "we shall be down there."
The fog was penetrating. She gave a little shudder.
"Darling, you are not cold?" he asked, disquieted.
She rose:
"No, no. Everything is love to me. I love everything and everything
loves me. The rain loves me, the wind loves me, the gray sky and the
cold--and my little greatly beloved...."
* * * * *
FOR Holy Friday the heavens remained clothed in their long gray veils;
but the air was soft and calm. In the streets one saw flowers, jonquils,
stocks. Pierre took a few which she kept in her hand. They followed the
peaceful Quai des Orfevres and passed along the base of pure Notre-Dame.
The charm of the Old City, clothed in a discreet light, surrounded them
with its noble gentleness. On the Place Saint Gervais pigeons flew up
under their feet. They followed them with their eyes about the facade of
the church; one of the birds settled on the head of a statue. At the top
of the steps to the _parvis_ before the church, as they were about to
enter, Luce turned about and perceived in the midst of the crowd a few
steps away a little girl with reddish hair, about a dozen years old,
leaning against the portal, both arms raised above her head, who was
looking at them. She had the fine and somewhat archaic face of some
little cathedral statue, with an enigmatic smile, graceful, shrewd and
tender. Luce smiled also at her while calling Pierre's attention to her.
But the little girl's gaze passed over her head and suddenly changed to
fright. And hiding her face in her hands the child vanished.
"What is the matter with her?" asked Luce.
But Pierre did not look.
They entered. Above their heads the dove was cooing. Last noise from
outside. The voices of Paris were quenched. The fresh air ceased. The
hangings of the organ, the lofty vaultings, the curtain of stones and
sounds parted them from the world.
They installed themselves in one of the side aisles between the second
and the third chapel on the left as you enter. In the hollow of a pier
both of them crouched, seated on some steps, hidden from the rest of the
assembly. Turning their backs to the choir, on raising their eyes they
saw the summit of the altar, the crucifix and the stained windows of a
lateral chapel. The beautiful old chants wept out their pious
melancholy. They were holding hands, the two little pagans, before the
Great Friend, in the church all swathed in mourning. And both of them at
the same time murmured in a low voice:
"Great Friend, before your face I take him, I take her. Unite us! You
see our hearts."
And their fingers remained joined and interlaced like the straw of a
basket. They were one single flesh which the waves of music passed
through with their shivering notes. They took to dreaming, as if they
lay in the same bed.
Luce saw again in her thought that little girl with reddish hair. And
behold it seemed to her that she recalled how she had seen her before in
a dream the past night. She could not reach the point of knowing whether
that was actually true, or if she were projecting the vision of the
present back to the past slumber. Then, weary of the effort, her
thoughts allowed themselves to float.
Pierre pondered over the days of his short, expended life. The lark that
rises from the misty plain to reach the sun.... How far it is! How high
it is! Will it ever be reached?... The fog thickens. There is no earth
any more, there are no heavens any more. And strength gives out....
Suddenly, while beneath the vault of the choir a Gregorian _vocalise_
trickled down, the jubilant song gushed forth, and out from the shadows
emerges the little shivering form of the lark that swims on the sea of
light without shore....
A pressure of their fingers recalled to them that they were swimming
together. They found themselves again in the darkness of the church,
closely pressed together, listening to the beautiful chants; their
hearts melted with love and touched the summits of the purest joy. And
both of them desired--they prayed--never to descend to earth again.
At that moment Luce, who had just kissed her dear little comrade with a
passionate glance--(his eyes half closed and his lips parted, he
appeared lost in an ecstasy of happiness and raised his head in a rush
of thankful joy toward that supreme Power which we look for
instinctively on high)--Luce saw with terror, in the red and gilded
window of the chapel, the face of the reddish-haired child of the
_parvis_ who was smiling at her. And as she sat mute, frozen with
astonishment, she saw once more on that strange visage the same
expression of fright and of pity.