Part 14 (1/2)

At first Madame Mairet seemed to find comfort in showing all that she had received; she read his letters, full of disenchanted confidences; they reflected on them with deep emotion, and she brought them into the discussion of the problems that had caused the death of Mairet and of millions of others. In this keen a.n.a.lysis, nothing stopped Clerambault; and she was not a woman to hesitate in the search for truth. But nevertheless....

Clerambault soon became aware that his words made her uneasy, though he was only saying aloud things that she knew well and that were strongly confirmed by Mairet's letters, namely, the criminal futility of these deaths, and the sterility of all this heroism. She tried to take back her confidences, or even to minimise the meaning of them, with an eagerness that did not seem perfectly sincere. She brought to mind sayings of her husband's which apparently showed him more in sympathy with general opinion, and implied that he approved of it. One day Clerambault was listening while she read a letter which she had read to him before. He noticed that she skipped a phrase in which Mairet expressed his heroic pessimism, and when he remarked on it she appeared vexed. After this her manner became more distant, her annoyance pa.s.sed into coldness, then irritation, till it even grew into a sort of smothered hostility, and finally she avoided him, though without an open rupture. Clerambault felt that she had a grudge against him and that he should see no more of her.

The truth was that, at the same time that Clerambault pursued his relentless a.n.a.lysis which struck at the foundations of current beliefs, an inverse process of reconstruction and idealisation was going on in the mind of Madame Mairet. Her grief longed to convince itself that after all there had been a holy cause, and the dead man was no longer there to help her to bear the truth. Where two stand together there may be joy in the most terrible truths, but when one is alone they are mortal.

Clerambault understood it all, and his quick sympathies warned him of the pain he caused and shared; for he made the suffering of this woman his own. He nearly reached the point of approving her revolt against himself, for he knew her deep hidden sorrow, and that the truth that he brought was powerless to help it--still worse, it added one evil more....

Insoluble problem! Those who are bereaved cannot dispense with the murderous delusions of which they are the victims, and if these are torn away their suffering becomes intolerable. Families that have lost sons, husbands, and fathers, must needs believe that it was for a just and holy cause, and statesmen are forced to continue to deceive themselves and others. For if this were to cease, life would be insupportable to themselves and to those whom they govern. How unfortunate is Man; he is the prey of his own ideas, has given up everything to them, and finds that each day he must continue to give more, lest the gulf open under his feet and he be swallowed up in it.

After four years of unheard-of pain and ruin, can we possibly admit that it was all for nothing? That not only our victory will be more ruinous still, but that we ought not to have expected anything else; that the war was absurd, and we, self-deceivers?... Never! we would rather die to the last man. When one man finds that he has thrown away his life, he sinks down in despair. What would it be in the case of a nation, of ten nations, or of civilisation as a whole?...

Clerambault heard the cry that went up from the mult.i.tude: ”Life, at any cost! Save us, no matter how!”

”But, you do not know how to save yourselves. The road you follow only leads on to fresh catastrophes, to an infinite ma.s.s of suffering.”

”No matter how frightful they are, not as bad as what you offer us.

Let us die with our illusions, rather than live without them. Such a life as that, is a death in life!”

”_He who has deciphered the secret of life and found the answer_,”

says the disenchanted, but harmonious voice of Amiel, ”_is no longer bound on the great wheel of existence, he has quitted the world of the living. When illusion vanishes, nothingness resumes its eternal reign, the bright bubble has burst in infinite s.p.a.ce, and our poor thought is dissolved in the immutable repose of the limitless void_.”

Unluckily this repose in the void is the worst torture for a man of the white race. He would rather endure any torment that life may bring. ”Do not tear them from me,” he cries, ”you kill me when you destroy the cruel falsehoods by which I live.”

Clerambault bitterly adopted the name that a nationalist paper had given him in derision: ”The one against all.” Yes, he was the common enemy, the destroyer of our life-giving illusions.

He could not bear this; the thought of making others suffer was too painful to him. How then was he to get out of this tragic no-thoroughfare? Wherever he turned, he found the same insolvable dilemma; either a fatal illusion, or death without it.

”I will accept neither the one nor the other.”

”Whether you accept it or no, you must yield--for the way is barred.”

”Nevertheless, I shall pa.s.s through....”

PART FOUR

Clerambault was pa.s.sing through a new danger-zone. His solitary journey was like a mountain ascension, where a man finds himself suddenly enveloped in fog, clinging to a rock, unable to advance a step. He could see nothing in front of him, and, no matter to which side he turned, he could hear beneath him the roar of the torrent of suffering. Even so, he could not stand still; though he hung over the abyss and his hold threatened to give way.

He had reached one of these dark turnings, and to make it worse, the news that day, as barked out by the press, made the heart ache by its insanity. Useless hecatombs, which the induced egotism of the world behind the lines thought natural; cruelties on all sides, criminal reprisals for crimes--for which these good people clamoured, and loudly applauded. The horizon that surrounded the poor human creatures in their burrow had never seemed so dark and pitiless.

Clerambault asked himself if the law of love that he felt within himself had not been designed for other worlds, and different humanities. The mail had brought him letters full of fresh threats; and knowing that, in the tragic absurdity of the time, his life was at the mercy of the first madman who happened to turn up, he hoped secretly that he might not have long to wait. But being of good stock, he kept on his way, his head up as usual, working steadily and methodically at his daily task so as to gain the end, no matter what that might be, of the path whereon he had set his feet.

He remembered that on this day he had promised to go and see his niece Aline, who had just been confined. She was the daughter of a sister who had died, and who had been very dear to him. A little older than Maxime, she had been brought up with him. As she grew into girlhood she developed a complicated character. Restless and discontented, always thinking of herself, she wanted to be loved and to tyrannise.

She had also too much curiosity; dangerous experiences were an attraction to her, and with all this she was rather dry, but emotional, vindictive and high-tempered. Still, when she chose she could be tender and attractive. Maxime and she had played the game together, and carried it pretty far; so that it had been necessary to watch them closely. In spite of his irony, Maxime had been caught by the dark eyes that pierced through him with their electric thrill; and Aline was irritated and attracted by Maxime's mockery. They had loved and quarrelled furiously, and then they had both gone on to something else. She had shot arrows into several other hearts; and then, when she thought the right time had come,--there is always a time for everything,--she had married, in the most reasonable way, a successful, prosperous man of business, head of a firm which sold artistic and ecclesiastical furniture in the Rue Bonaparte. She was about to have a child when her husband was ordered to the front. There could be no doubt of her ardent patriotism; for self-love includes one's country. Clerambault would never have expected to find any sympathy in her for his theories of fraternal pity. She had little enough for her friends, but none at all for her enemies. She would have ground them in a mortar with the same cold satisfaction that she felt when she tormented hearts or teased insects because something or somebody had vexed her.