Part 13 (1/2)

This improved state, however, brought no advantage to Clerambault's family; his wife's share of the struggle was only the unpleasantness, a general animosity that finally made itself felt even among the small tradespeople of the neighbourhood. Rosine drooped; her secret heart-ache wore upon her all the more because of her silence; but if she said nothing her mother complained enough for two. She made no distinction between the fools who affronted her and the imprudent Clerambault who caused all the trouble; so that at every meal there were awkward remarks meant to induce him to keep still. All this was of no use, reproaches whether spoken or silent, pa.s.sed over his head; he was sorry, of course, but he had thrown himself into the thick of the fight, and with a somewhat childish egotism he thrust aside anything that interfered with this new interest.

Circ.u.mstances, however, came to Madame Clerambault's a.s.sistance; an old relation who had brought her up died, leaving her little property in Berry to the Clerambaults. The mourning was a good excuse for quitting Paris, which had now become detestable, and for tearing the poet from his dangerous surroundings. There was also the question of money and of Rosine, who would be better for change of air.

Clerambault gave in, and they all three went to take possession of their small inheritance, and remained in Berry during the rest of the summer and autumn. It was in the country, a respectable old house just outside a village. From the agitation of Paris Clerambault pa.s.sed at once to a stagnant calm, and in the long silent days all that broke the monotony was a c.o.c.k crowing in a farm-yard or a cow lowing in the meadow. Clerambault was too much wrought up to adapt himself to the slow and placid rhythm of nature; formerly he had adored it and was in harmony with the country people from whom his family had come. Now, however, the peasants with whom he tried to talk seemed to him creatures from another planet. Certainly, they were not infected by the virus of war; they showed no emotion, and no hatred for the enemy; but then they had no animosity either against war, which they accepted as a fact. Certain keen, good-natured observations showed that they were not taken in as to the merits of the case, but since the war was there they made the most they could out of it. They might lose their sons, but they did not mean to lose money; not that they were heartless, grief had marked them deeply, though they spoke little of it; but after all, men pa.s.s away,--the land is always there. They at least had not, like the _bourgeois_ in cities, sent their children to death through national fanaticism. Only they knew how to get something in exchange for what they gave; and it is probable that their sons would have thought this perfectly natural. Because you have lost someone you love, must you lose your head too? Our peasants did not lose theirs; it is said that in the country districts of France more than a million new proprietors have been made by the war.

The mind of Clerambault was alien to all this; he and these people did not speak the same language. They exchanged some vague condolences, but when he is talking to a _bourgeois_ a peasant always complains; it is a habit, a way of defending himself against a possible appeal to his pocketbook; they would have talked in the same way about an epidemic of fever. Clerambault was always the Parisian in their eyes; he belonged to another tribe, and if they had thoughts, they would not tell them to him.

This lack of response stifled Clerambault's words; impressionable as he was, he could no longer hear himself. All was silence; he had friends unknown, and at a distance, who tried to communicate with him, but their voices were intercepted by postal spies--one of the disgraces of our time. On the pretext of suppressing foreign espionage, our Government made spies of its own citizens, and not content with a watch on politics, it violated a man's thoughts, and taught its agents how to listen at doors like lackeys. The premium thus put on baseness filled this country--and all the others--with volunteer detectives, gentlemen, men of letters, many of them slackers, who bought their own security with the safety of others, calling their denunciations by the name of patriotism.

Thanks to these informers, those of liberal opinions could not get in touch with one another; that great monster, the State--p.r.i.c.ked by its bad conscience--suspected and feared half a dozen liberal-minded people, alone, weak, and dest.i.tute; and each one of these liberals surrounded by spies, ate his heart out in his jail, and ignorant that others suffered with him, felt himself slowly dying, freezing in the polar ice of his despair.

Clerambault was too hot-blooded to let himself be buried under this snowy shroud; but the soul is not all, the body is a plant which needs human soil, Deprived of sympathy, reduced to feed on itself, it perishes. In vain did Clerambault try to prove to himself that millions of other minds were in agreement with his own; it could not replace the actual contact with one living heart. Faith is sufficient for the spirit, but the heart is like Thomas, it must touch to be convinced.

Clerambault had not foreseen this physical weakness; he felt stifled, his body seemed on fire, his skin burning, his life seemed to be drying up at the source. It was as if he were under an exhausted vacuum-bell. A wall kept him from the air.

One evening, like a consumptive after a bad day, he had been wandering about the house from room to room, as if in search of a breath of fresh air, when a letter came that had somehow slipped through the meshes of the net. An old man like himself, a village schoolmaster in a remote valley of Dauphiny wrote thus:

”The war has taken everything from me; of those whom I used to know, some have been killed, and the rest are so altered that I hardly recognise them. They have trampled on all that made life worth having to me; my hope of progress, my faith in a future of brotherly reason.

”I was ready to die in my despair, when a paper in which you were spoken of insultingly, drew my attention to your articles: _To the Dead_ and _To Her Whom We Loved_. I wept with joy as I read them; I am not then left alone to suffer? I am not solitary?--You do believe; then, my dear Sir, tell me that you still have faith in these things.

They really exist, and cannot be destroyed? I must tell you how much good it does me to know that; for I had begun to doubt. You must forgive me, but I am old and alone and very weary.... G.o.d bless you, Sir! I can die in peace, now that, thanks to you, I know that I have not been deceived.”

Instantly it was as if a window had been opened to the air; Clerambault's lungs were filled, his heart beat strongly again, life seemed to be renewed, and to flow once more in a full channel. How deep is the need we have of love from one another!... A hand stretched out in the hour of my agony makes me feel that I am not a branch torn from the tree, but a living part of it; we save each other. I give my strength, which would be nothing if it were not taken. Truth alone is like a spark struck from a stone; dry, harsh, ephemeral. Will it die out? No, for it has kindled another soul, and a new star has risen on the horizon.

The new star was seen but for a few moments, then a cloud covered it, and it vanished forever.

Clerambault wrote the same day to his unknown friend, telling him effusively of all his trials and dangerous opinions, but no answer came. Some weeks later, Clerambault wrote again, but without success.

Such was his longing for a friend with whom to share his troubles and his hopes that he took the train to Gren.o.ble, and from there made his way on foot to the village of which he had the address; but when, joyful with the surprise he brought, he knocked at the door of the schoolhouse, the man who opened it evidently understood nothing of his errand. After some explanation it appeared that this was a newcomer in the village; that his predecessor had been dismissed in disgrace a month before and ordered to a distance, but that the trouble of the journey had been spared him, for he had died of pneumonia the day before he was to have left the place where he had lived for thirty years. He was there still, but under the ground. Clerambault saw the cross over the newly-made mound, but he never knew if his lost friend had at least received his words of sympathy. It was better for him to remain in doubt, for the letters had never reached their destination; even this gleam of light had been denied to the poor old schoolmaster.

The end of this summer in Berry was one of the most arid periods in Clerambault's life. He talked with no one, he wrote nothing and he had no way of communicating directly with the working people. He had always made himself liked on the rare occasions on which he had come into contact with them--in a crowd, on holidays, or in the workingmen's schools; but shyness on both sides held him back. Each felt his inferiority; with pride on the one hand, and awkwardness on the other, for Clerambault knew that in many essential respects he was inferior to the intelligent workman. He was right; for from their ranks will be recruited the leaders of the future. The best cla.s.s of these men contained many honest and virile minds able to understand Clerambault. With an untouched idealism they still kept a firm hold on reality, and though their daily life had accustomed them to struggles, disappointments, and treachery, they were trained to patience; young as some of them were, they were veterans of the social war, and there was much that they could have taught Clerambault. They knew that everything is for sale, that nothing is to be had for nothing, that those who desire the future happiness of men must pay the price now, in their own sufferings; that the smallest progress is gained step by step and is lost often twenty times before it is finally conquered.

There is nothing final in this world. These men, solid and patient as the earth, would have been of great use to Clerambault, and his vivid intelligence would have been like a ray of suns.h.i.+ne to them.

Unfortunately both he and they had to bear the results of the archaic caste system; injurious as it is and fatal to the community not less than to the individual, raising between the pretended equals of our so-called ”democracies” the excessive inequality of fortune, education, and life. Journalists supply the only means of communication between caste and caste, and they form a caste by themselves, representing neither the one side nor the other. The voice of the newspapers alone now broke the silence that surrounded Clerambault, and nothing could stop their ”Brekekekex, coax, coax.”

The disastrous results of a new offensive found them, as always, bravely at their post. Once more the optimist oracles of the pontiffs of the rear-guard were proved to be wrong, but no one seemed to notice it. Other prophecies succeeded, and were given out and swallowed with the same a.s.surance. Neither those who wrote, nor those who read, saw that they had deceived themselves; in all sincerity they did not know it; they did not remember what they had written the day before. What can you expect from such feather-headed creatures who do not know if they are on their heads or their heels? But it must be allowed that they know how to fall on their feet after one of their somersaults.

One conviction a day is enough for them; and what does the quality matter, since they are fresh every hour?

Towards the end of the autumn, in order to keep up the morale which sank before the sadness of the coming winter, the press started a new propaganda against German atrocities; it ”went across” perfectly, and the thermometer of public opinion rose to fever heat. Even in the placid Berry village for several weeks all sorts of cruel things were said; the cure took part and preached a sermon on vengeance.

Clerambault heard this from his wife at breakfast and said plainly what he thought of it before the servant who was waiting at table. The whole village knew that he was a boche before night; and every morning after that he could read it written up on his front door. Madame Clerambault's temper was not improved by this, and Rosine, who had taken to religion in the disappointment of her young love, was too much occupied with her unhappy soul and its experiences to think of the troubles of others. The sweetest natures have times when they are simply and absolutely selfish.

Left to himself alone, deprived of the means of action, Clerambault turned his heated thoughts back on himself. Nothing now held him from the path of harsh truth; there was nothing between him and its cold light. His soul was shrivelled like those _fuorusciti_ who, thrown from the walls of the cruel city, gaze at it from without with faithless eyes. It was no longer the sad vision of the first night of his trials, when his bleeding wounds still linked him with other men; all ties were now broken, as with open eyes his spirit sank down whirling into the abyss; the slow descent into h.e.l.l, from circle to circle, alone in the silence.

”I see you, you myriads of herded peoples, hugging together perforce in shoals to sp.a.w.n and to think! Each group of you, like the bees, has a special sacred odour of its own. The stench of the queen-bee makes the unity of the hive and gives joy to the labour of the bees. As with the ants, whosoever does not stink like me, I kill! O you bee-hives of men! each of you has its own peculiar smell of race, religion, morals and approved tradition; it impregnates your bodies, your wax, the brood-comb of your hives; it permeates your entire lives from birth to death; and woe to him who would wash himself clean of it.

”He who would sense the mustiness of this swarm-thinking, the night-sweat of a hallucinated people, should look back at the rites and beliefs of ancient history. Let him ask the quizzical Herodotus to unroll for him the film of human wanderings, the long panorama of social customs, sometimes ign.o.ble or ridiculous, but always venerated; of the Scythians, the Gatae, the Issedones, the Gindares, the Nasamones, the Sauromates, the Lydians, the Lybians, and the Egyptians; bipeds of all colours, from East to West and from North to South. The Great King, who was a man of wit, asked the Greeks, who burn their dead, to eat them; and the Hindoos, who eat them, to burn them, and was much amused by their indignation. The wise Herodotus who doffs his cap, though he may grin behind it, will not judge them himself and does not think it fair to laugh at them. He says: 'If it were proposed to all men to choose between the best laws of different nations, each one would give the preference to his own; so true it is that every man is convinced that his own country is the best. Nothing can be truer than the words of Pindar: _Custom is the Sovereign of all men_.'