Part 16 (1/2)

These young people welcomed Clerambault with great affection and esteem, hoping to make him one of themselves. Some of them read in his ideas a reflection of their own, while others saw in him just a sincere old _bourgeois_ whose heart had been hitherto his only guide--a rather insufficient, though generous one. They hoped that he would let himself be taught by their science, and like them, would follow to their extreme limits the logical consequences of the principles laid down. Clerambault resisted feebly, for he knew that nothing can be done to convince a young man who has made himself part of a system. Discussion is hopeless at that age. Earlier there is some chance to act on him, when, as it were, the hermit-crab is looking for his sh.e.l.l; and later something may be done when the sh.e.l.l begins to wear and be uncomfortable; but when the coat is new, the only thing is to let him wear it while it fits him. If he grows, or shrinks, he will get another. We will force no one, but let no one try to put force on us!

No one in this circle, at least in the early days, thought of constraining Clerambault, but sometimes it seemed to him that his ideas were strangely habited in the fas.h.i.+on of his hosts. What unexpected echoes he heard on their lips! He let his friends talk, while he himself said but little, but when he had left them, he would feel troubled and rather ironical. ”Are those my thoughts?” he would say to himself. It is terribly difficult for one soul to communicate with another, impossible perhaps, and who knows?... Nature is wiser than we ... it may be that this is for our good.

Is it right, is it even possible for us to utter all our thoughts? We reach a conclusion slowly, painfully, through a series of trials; it is the formula of the delicate equilibrium between the inward elements. Change the elements, their proportions, their nature, the formula is no longer accurate and will produce different results, and if you suddenly communicate your whole thought to another, you run the risk of alarming, not helping him. There are cases in which, if he had understood, it might have killed him. Nature, however, is prudent and takes precautions. Your friend does not comprehend you, because he cannot, his instinct will not let him; all that he gets from your thought is the shock when it touches his; the ball glances off, but it is not so easy to tell in what direction.

Men do not listen with their brains alone, but with their dispositions and their pa.s.sions, and out of what you offer them, each chooses his own and rejects the rest, through a deep instinct of self-defence. Our minds do not throw open the door to every new idea, but rather keep a wary eye on new-comers through a peep-hole. The lofty thoughts of the sages, of Jesus, of Socrates; how were they received? In those days men who spoke such things were killed; twenty years later they were treated as G.o.ds--another way of killing them, in fact, by placing their thoughts at a distance, in the kingdom of heaven. The world would indeed come to an end if such ideas were to be put in practice here and now; and their authors knew this well. Perhaps they showed the greatness of their souls more by what they did not say than by what they did; how eloquent were the pathetic silences of Jesus! The golden veil of the ancient symbols and myths, made to s.h.i.+eld our weak timid sight! Too often, what is for one the breath of life, is for another death, or worse, murder!

What are we to do, if our hands are full of verities? Shall we spread them broadcast?--Suppose the seed of thought may spring up in weeds or poisonous plants ...?

Poor thinker, there is no need to tremble, you are not the master of Fate, but you form part of it, you are one of its voices. Speak, then; that is the law of your being. Speak out your whole thought, but with kindness; be like a good mother. It may not be given to her to make men of her children, but she can patiently teach them how to make men of themselves if they will.

You cannot set others free, in spite of them, and from the outside; and even if it were possible, what good would it do? If they do not free themselves, tomorrow they will fall back into slavery. All you can do is to set a good example, and say: ”There is the road, follow it and you will find Freedom.” ...

In spite of his resolution to do the best he could and leave the rest to the G.o.ds, it was fortunate for Clerambault that he could not see all the consequences of his ideas. His thought aspired to the reign of Peace; and very probably it would contribute in some degree to the stirring up of social struggles, like all true pacifism, however paradoxical this may seem. For true pacifism is a condemnation of the present.

Clerambault had no suspicion of the terrible forces that would one day make use of his name. With a wholly opposite effect, his spirit produced a harmony among his young a.s.sociates by reacting against their violence. He felt the value of life all the more, because they held it in such light esteem; and in this respect they were not different from the Nationalists whom he opposed. Very few prefer life to their ideals--which is, we are told, one of Man's n.o.blest qualities.

In spite of all this, it was a pleasure to Clerambault when he met a man who loved life for its own sake. This was a comrade of Moreau's, who had also been severely wounded. His name was Gillot, and in civil life he had been an industrial designer. A sh.e.l.l had plastered him from head to foot; he had lost a leg and his ear-drum was broken, but he had re-acted more energetically against his fate than Moreau. He was small and dark, with bright eyes full of gaiety, in spite of all that he had gone through. Though he agreed with Moreau in general as to the war and the crimes of the social order, he viewed the same events and the same men with different eyes; from which arose many discussions between the two young men.

One day Moreau had just been telling Clerambault of some gloomy experience of the trenches: ”Yes,” said Gillot, ”it did happen like that and the worst of it was, that it had no effect on us, not the least little bit.” And when Moreau protested indignantly: ”Well, perhaps you, and one or two more may have minded a little,--but most of them did not even notice it.” He kept on to stop further remonstrances from his friend: ”I am not trying to make out that you were better than the rest, old man, there is no need for that; I only say it because it is so. Look here,” he added, turning to Clerambault, ”those who have come back and written about all this, they tell us, of course, what they felt. But they felt more than ordinary mortals because they were artists, and naturally everything got on their nerves, while the rest of us were tougher. Now that I think of it, that makes it more terrible; when you read these stories that sicken you, and make the hair stand up on your head, you don't get the full effect. Think of fellows looking on, smoking, chaffing, busy with something else. You have to, you know, or you would go all to pieces....

All the same, it is astonis.h.i.+ng what human creatures can get used to! I believe they could make themselves comfortable at the bottom of a sewer. It really disgusts a man, for I was just the same myself. You mustn't suppose that I was like this chap here, always staring at a death's head. Like everybody else, I thought the whole thing was idiotic; but life is like that, as far as I can see! ... We did what we had to do, and let it go at that;--the end? Well, one is as good as another, whether you lose your own skin or the war comes to an end, it finishes it up all the same; and in the meantime you are alive, you eat, you sleep, your bowels--excuse me, one must tell things as they are!... Do you want to know what is at the bottom of it all, Sir? The real truth is that we do not care for life, or not enough. In one of your articles you say very truly that life is the great thing;--only you wouldn't think so to see most people at this minute! Not much life about them; they all seem drowsy, waiting for the last sleep; it looks as if they said to themselves: 'We are flat on our backs now, no need to stir an inch.' No, we don't make enough out of life. And then people are always trying to spoil it for you. From the time you are a child they keep on telling you about the beauty of death, or about dead folks. In the catechism, in the history books, they are always shouting: '_Mourir pour la Patrie!_' It is either popery or patriotism, whichever you please; and then this life of the present day is a perfect nuisance; it looks as if it was made expressly to take the backbone out of a man. There is no more initiative. We are all nothing but machines, but with no real system; we only do pieces of work, never knowing where our work will fit in; most often it doesn't fit at all. It is all a mess, with no good in it for anyone; we are thrown in on top of one another like herrings in a barrel, no one knows why;--but then we don't know either why we live at all; it is not life, we are just there.

”They tell us about some time in the dark ages when our grandfathers took the Bastille. Well, you would think to hear the fakers talk who run things now that there was nothing left to do, that we were all in heaven; you can see it carved on the monuments. We know that it is not so; there is another pot boiling, another revolution on the way; but the old one did not do such great things for us after all! It's hard to see plain, hard to trust anybody; there is no one to show us the way, to point to something grand and fine above all these swamps full of toads.... People are always doing something to confuse the issue, nowadays; talking about Right, Justice, Liberty. But that trick is played out. Good enough to die for, but you can't live for things like that.”

”How about the present?” asked Clerambault.

”Now? There is no going, back, but I often think that if I had to begin over again--”

”When did you change your mind about all these things?”

”That was the funniest thing of all. It was as soon as I was wounded.

It was like getting out of bed in the morning. I had hardly slipped a leg out of life than I wanted to draw it in again. I had been so well off, and never thought of it, a.s.s that I was! I can still see myself, as I came to. The ground was all torn up around me, worse even than the bodies themselves lying in heaps, mixed pell-mell like a lot of jack-straws; the ground simply reeked, as if it was itself bleeding.

It was pitch dark, and at first I did not feel anything but the cold, except that I knew I was. .h.i.t, all right.... I didn't know exactly what piece of me was missing, but I was not in a hurry to find out; I was afraid to know, afraid to stir, there was only one thing I was sure of, that I was alive. If I had only a minute left, I meant to hold on to it.... There was a rocket in the sky; I never thought what it meant, I didn't care, but the curve it made, and the light, like a bright flower.... I can't tell you how lovely it seemed. I simply drank it in.... I remembered when I was a child, one night near La Samaritaine. There were fireworks on the river. That child seemed to be someone else, who made me laugh, and yet I was sorry for him; and then I thought that it was a good thing to be alive, and grow up, and have something, somebody, no matter who to love ... even that rocket; and then the pain came on, and I began to howl, and didn't know any more till I found myself in the ambulance. There wasn't much fun in living then; it felt as if a dog was gnawing my bones ... might as well have stayed at the bottom of the hole ... but even then how fine it seemed to live the way I used to, just live on every day without pain ... think of that! and we never notice it,--without any pain at all ... none!... it seemed like a dream, and when it did let up for a second, just to taste the air on your tongue, and feel light all over your body--G.o.d Almighty! to think that it was like that all the time before, and I thought nothing of it.... What fools we are to wait till we lose a thing before we understand it! And when we do want it, and ask pardon because we did not appreciate it before, all we hear is: 'Too late!'”

”It is never too late,” said Clerambault.

Gillot was only too ready to believe this; as an educated workman he was better armed for the fray than Moreau or Clerambault himself.

Nothing depressed him for long; ”fall down, pick yourself up again, and try once more,” he would say, and he always believed he could surmount any obstacle that barred his way. He was ready to march against them on his one leg, the quicker the better. Like the others, he was devoted to the idea of revolution and found means to reconcile it with his optimism; everything was to pa.s.s off quietly according to him, for he was a man without rancour.

It would not have been safe, however, to trust him too much in this respect; there are many surprises in these plebeian characters, for they are very easily moved and apt to change. Clerambault heard him one day talking with a friend named Lagneau on leave from the front; they said the poilus meant to knock everything to pieces when the war was over, maybe before. A man of the lower cla.s.ses in France is often charming, quick to seize on your idea before you have had a chance to explain it thoroughly; but good Lord! how soon he forgets. He forgets what was said, what he answered, what he saw, what he believed, what he wanted; but he is always sure of what he says, and sees, and thinks now. When Gillot was talking to Lagneau, his arguments were exactly contrary to those he had advanced on the previous day to Clerambault.

It was not only that his ideas had changed, but apparently his whole disposition. One morning there would be nothing violent enough for his thirst for action and destruction, and the next he would talk about going into a little business with lots of money, the best of food, a tribe of children to bring up, and to h.e.l.l with the rest! Though they all called themselves sincere internationalists, there were few among these poilus who had not preserved the old French prejudice of superiority of race over the rest of the world, enemies or friends; and even in their own country over the other provinces, or if they were Parisians, over the rest of France. This idea was firmly embedded in their minds, and they boasted of it, not maliciously but by way of a joke. Uncomplaining, willing, always ready to go, like Gillot, they were certainly capable of making a revolution and then un-making it, starting another, and so on--tra-la-la--till all was upset and they were ready to be the prey of the first adventurer who happened along.

Our political foxes know well enough that the best way to check a revolution is, at the right moment, to let it blow over while the people are amused.

It looked then as if the hour was at hand. A year before the end of the war in both camps there were months and weeks when the infinite patience of the martyrised people seemed on the point of giving way; when a great cry was ready to go up, ”Enough.” For the first time there was the universal impression of a b.l.o.o.d.y deception. It is easy to understand the indignation of the people seeing billions thrown away on the war when before it their leaders had haggled over a few hundred thousand for social betterments. There were figures that exasperated them more than any speeches on the subject. Someone had calculated that it cost 75,000 francs to kill a man; that made ten millions of corpses, and for the same sum we could have had ten millions of stockholders. The stupidest could see the immense value of the treasure, and the horrible, the shameful, waste for an illusion.

There were things more abject still; from one end of Europe to the other, there were vermin fattening on death, war-profiteers, robbers of corpses.