Light

I proclaim the inevitable advent of the universal republic. Not the transient backslidings, nor the darkness and the dread, nor the tragic difficulty of uplifting the world everywhere at once will prevent the fulfillment of international truth. But if the great powers of darkness persist in holding their positions, if they whose clear cries of warning should be voices crying in the wilderness—O you people of the world, you the unwearying vanquished of History, I appeal to your justice and I appeal to your anger. Over the vague quarrels which drench the strands with blood, over the plunderers of shipwrecks, over the jetsam and the reefs, and the palaces and monuments built upon the sand, I see the high tide coming. Truth is only revolutionary by reason of error's disorder. Revolution is Order.

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XXIII

FACE TO FACE

Through the panes I see the town—I often take refuge at the windows. Then I go into Marie's bedroom, which gives a view of the country. It is such a narrow room that to get to the window I must touch her tidy little bed, and I think of her as I pass it. A bed is something which never seems either so cold or so lifeless as other things; it lives by an absence.

Marie is working in the house, downstairs. I hear sounds of moved furniture, of a broom, and the recurring knock of the shovel on the bucket into which she empties the dust she has collected. That society is badly arranged which forces nearly all women to be servants. Marie, who is as good as I am, will have spent her life in cleaning, in stooping amid dust and hot fumes, over head and ears in the great artificial darkness of the house. I used to find it all natural. Now I think it is all anti-natural.

I hear no more sounds. Marie has finished. She comes up beside me. We have sought each other and come together as often as possible since the day when we saw so clearly that we no longer loved each other!

We sit closely side by side, and watch the end of the day. We can see the last houses of the town, in the beginning of the valley, low houses within enclosures, and yards, and gardens stocked with sheds. Autumn is making the gardens quite transparent, and reducing them to nothing through their trees and hedges; yet here and there foliage still magnificently flourishes. It is not the wide landscape in its entirety which attracts me. It is more worth while to pick out each of the houses and look at it closely.

These houses, which form the finish of the suburb, are not big, and are not prosperous; but we see one adorning itself with smoke, and we think of the dead wood coming to life again on the hearth, and of the seated workman, whose hands are rewarded with rest. And that one, although motionless, is alive with children—the breeze is scattering the laughter of their games and seems to play with it, and on the sandy ground are the crumbs of childish footsteps. Our eyes follow the postman entering his home, his work ended; he has heroically overcome his long journeyings. After carrying letters all day to those who were waiting for them, he is carrying himself to his own people, who also await him—it is the family which knows the value of the father. He pushes the gate open, he enters the garden path, his hands are at last empty!

Along by the old gray wall, old Eudo is making his way, the incurable widower whose bad news still stubbornly persists, so that he bears it along around him, and it slackens his steps, and can be seen, and he takes up more space than he seems to take. A woman meets him, and her youth is disclosed in the twilight; it expands in her hurrying steps. It is Mina, going to some trysting-place. She crosses and presses her little fichu on her heart; we can see that distance dwindles affectionately in front of her. As she passes away, bent forward and smiling with her ripe lips, we can see the strength of her heart.

Mist is gradually falling. Now we can only see white things clearly—the new parts of houses, the walls, the high road, joined to the other one by footpaths which straggle through the dark fields, the big white stones, tranquil as sheep, and the horse-pond, whose gleam amid the far obscurity imitates whiteness in unexpected fashion. Then we can only see light things—the stains of faces and hands, those faces which see each other in the gloom longer than is logical and exceed themselves.

Pervaded by a sort of serious musing, we turn back into the room and sit down, I on the edge of the bed, she on a chair in front of the open window, in the center of the pearly sky.

Her thoughts are the same as mine, for she turns her face to me and says:

"And ourselves."

* * * * * *

She sighs for the thought she has. She would like to be silent, but she must speak.

"We don't love each other any more," she says, embarrassed by the greatness of the things she utters; "but we did once, and I want to see our love again."

She gets up, opens the wardrobe, and sits down again in the same place with a box in her hands. She says:

"There it is. Those are our letters."

"Our letters, our beautiful letters!" she goes on. "I could really say they're more beautiful than all others. We know them by heart—but would you like us to read them again? You read them—there's still light enough—and let me see how happy we've been."

She hands the casket to me. The letters we wrote each other during our engagement are arranged in it.

"That one," she says, "is the first from you. Is it? Yes—no, it isn't; do you think it is?"

I take the letter, murmur it, and then read it aloud. It spoke of the future, and said, "In a little while, how happy we shall be!"

She comes near, lowers her head, reads the date and whispers:

"Nineteen-two; it's been dead for thirteen years—it's a long time. No, it isn't a long time—I don't know what it ought to be. Here's another—read it."

I go on denuding the letters. We quickly find out what a mistake it was to say we know them by heart. This one has no date—simply the name of a day—Monday, and we believed that would be enough! Now, it is entirely lost and become barren, this anonymous letter in the middle of the rest.

"We don't know them by heart any more," Marie confesses. "Remember ourselves? How could we remember all that?"

* * * * * *

This reading was like that of a book once already read in bygone days. It could not revive again the diligent and fervent hours when our pens were moving—and our lips, too, a little. Indistinctly it brought back, with unfathomable gaps, the adventure lived in three days by others, the people that we were. When I read a letter from her which spoke of caresses to come, Marie stammered, "And she dared to write that!" but she did not blush and was not confused.

Then she shook her head a little, and said dolefully:

"What a lot of things we have hidden away, little by little, in spite of ourselves! How strong people must be to forget so much!"

She was beginning to catch a glimpse of a bottomless abyss, and to despair. Suddenly she broke in:

"That's enough! We can't read them again. We can't understand what's written. That's enough—don't take my illusion away."

She spoke like the poor madwoman of the streets, and added in a whisper:

"This morning, when I opened that box where the letters were shut up, some little flies flew out."

We stop reading the letters a moment, and look at them. The ashes of life! All that we can remember is almost nothing. Memory is greater than we are, but memory is living and mortal as well. These letters, these unintelligible flowers, these bits of lace and of paper, what are they? Around these flimsy things what is there left? We are handling the casket together. Thus we are completely attached in the hollow of our hands.

* * * * * *

And yet we went on reading.

But something strange is growing gradually greater; it grasps us, it surprises us hopelessly—every letter speaks of the future.

In vain Marie said to me:

"What about afterwards? Try another—later on."

Every letter said, "In a little while, how we shall love each other when our time is spent together! How beautiful you will be when you are always there. Later on we'll make that trip again; after a while we'll carry that scheme out, later on . . ."

"That's all we could say!"

A little before the wedding we wrote that we were wasting our time so far from each other, and that we were unhappy.

"Ah!" said Marie, in a sort of terror, "we wrote that! And afterwards . . ."

After, the letter from which we expected all, said:

"Soon we shan't leave each other any more. At last we shall live!" And it spoke of a paradise, of the life that was coming. . . .

"And afterwards?"

"After that, there's nothing more . . . it's the last letter."

* * * * * *

There is nothing more. It is like a stage-trick, suddenly revealing the truth. There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the paradise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have not got. We hope, and then we regret. We hope for the future, and then we turn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope for the past! The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live; we have not really the time to profit by what we are. Happiness, that thing which never is—and which yet, for one day, is no longer!

I see her drawing breath, quivering, mortally wounded, sinking upon the chair.

I take her hand, as I did before. I speak to her, rather timidly and at random: "Carnal love isn't the whole of love."

"It's love!" Marie answers.

I do not reply.

"Ah!" she says, "we try to juggle with words, but we can't conceal the truth."

"The truth! I'm going to tell you what I have been truly, I. . . ."

* * * * * *

I could not prevent myself from saying it, from crying it in a loud and trembling voice, leaning over her. For some moments there had been outlined within me the tragic shape of the cry which at last came forth. It was a sort of madness of sincerity and simplicity which seized me.

And I, unveiling my life to her, though it slid away by the side of hers, all my life, with its failings and its coarseness. I let her see me in my desires, in my hungers, in my entrails.

Never has a confession so complete been thrown off. Yes, among the fates which men and women bear together, one must be almost mad not to lie. I tick off my past, the succession of love-affairs multiplied by each other, and come to naught. I have been an ordinary man, no better, no worse, than another; well, here I am, here is the man, here is the lover.

I can see that she has half-risen, in the little bedroom which has lost its color. She is afraid of the truth! She watches my words as you look at a blasphemer. But the truth has seized me and cannot let me go. And I recall what was—both this woman and that, and all those whom I loved and never deigned to know what they brought me when they brought their bodies; I recall the fierce selfishness which nothing exhausted, and all the savagery of my life beside her. I say it all—unable even to avoid the blows of brutal details—like a harsh duty accomplished to the end.

Sometimes she murmured, like a sigh, "I knew it." At others, she would say, almost like a sob, "That's true!" And once, too, she began a confused protest, a sort of reproach. Then, soon, she listens nigher. She might almost be left behind by the greatness of my confession; and, gradually, I see her falling into silence, the twice-illumined woman on that adorable side of the room, she still receives on her hair and neck and hands, some morsels of heaven.

And what I am most ashamed of in those bygone days when I was mad after the treasure of unknown women is this: that I spoke to them of eternal fidelity, of superhuman enticements, of divine exaltation, of sacred affinities which must be joined together at all costs, of beings who have always been waiting for each other, and are made for each other, and all that one can say—sometimes almost sincerely, alas!—just to gain my ends. I confess all that, I cast it from me as if I was at last ridding myself of the lies acted upon her, and upon the others, and upon myself. Instinct is instinct; let it rule like a force of nature. But the Lie is a ravisher.

I feel a sort of curse rising from me upon that blind religion with which we clothe the things of the flesh because they are strong, those of which I was the plaything, like everybody, always and everywhere. No, two sensuous lovers are not two friends. Much rather are they two enemies, closely attached to each other. I know it, I know it! There are perfect couples, no doubt—perfection always exists somewhere—but I mean us others, all of us, the ordinary people! I know!—the human being's real quality, the delicate lights and shadows of human dreams, the sweet and complicated mystery of personalities, sensuous lovers deride them, both of them! They are two egoists, falling fiercely on each other. Together they sacrifice themselves, utterly in a flash of pleasure. There are moments when one would lay hold forcibly on joy, if only a crime stood in the way. I know it; I know it through all those for whom I have successively hungered, and whom I have scorned with shut eyes—even those who were not better than I.

And this hunger for novelty—which makes sensuous love equally changeful and rapacious, which makes us seek the same emotion in other bodies which we cast off as fast as they fall—turns life into an infernal succession of disenchantments, spites and scorn; and it is chiefly that hunger for novelty which leaves us a prey to unrealizable hope and irrevocable regret. Those lovers who persist in remaining together execute themselves; the name of their common death, which at first was Absence, becomes Presence. The real outcast is not he who returns all alone, like Olympio; they who remain together are more apart.

By what right does carnal love say, "I am your hearts and minds as well, and we are indissoluble, and I sweep all along with my strokes of glory and defeat; I am Love!"? It is not true, it is not true. Only by violence does it seize the whole of thought; and the poets and lovers, equally ignorant and dazzled, dress it up in a grandeur and profundity which it has not. The heart is strong and beautiful, but it is mad and it is a liar. Moist lips in transfigured faces murmur, "It's grand to be mad!" No, you do not elevate aberration into an ideal, and illusion is always a stain, whatever the name you lend it.

By the curtain in the angle of the wall, upright and motionless I am speaking in a low voice, but it seems to me that I am shouting and struggling.

When I have spoken thus, we are no longer the same, for there are no more lies.

After a silence, Marie lifts to me the face of a shipwrecked woman with lifeless eyes, and asks me:

"But if this love is an illusion, what is there left?"

I come near and look at her, to answer her. Against the window's still pallid sky I see her hair, silvered with a moonlike sheen, and her night-veiled face. Closely I look at the share of sublimity which she bears on it, and I reflect that I am infinitely attached to this woman, that it is not true to say she is of less moment to me because desire no longer throws me on her as it used to do. Is it habit? No, not only that. Everywhere habit exerts its gentle strength, perhaps between us two also. But there is more. There is not only the narrowness of rooms to bring us together. There is more, there is more! So I say to her:

"There's you."

"Me?" she says. "I'm nothing."

"Yes, you are everything, you're everything to me."

She has stood up, stammering. She puts her arms around my neck, but falls fainting, clinging to me, and I carry her like a child to the old armchair at the end of the room.

All my strength has come back to me. I am no longer wounded or ill. I carry her in my arms. It is difficult work to carry in your arms a being equal to yourself. Strong as you may be, you hardly suffice for it. And what I say as I look at her and see her, I say because I am strong and not because I am weak:

"You're everything for me because you are you, and I love all of you."

And we think together, as if she were listening to me:

You are a living creature, you are a human being, you are the infinity that man is, and all that you are unites me to you. Your suffering of just now, your regret for the ruins of youth and the ghosts of caresses, all of it unites me to you, for I feel them, I share them. Such as you are and such as I am. I can say to you at last, "I love you."

I love you, you who now appearing truly to me, you who truly duplicate my life. We have nothing to turn aside from us to be together. All your thoughts, all your likes, your ideas and your preferences have a place which I feel within me, and I see that they are right even if my own are not like them (for each one's freedom is part of his value), and I have a feeling that I am telling you a lie whenever I do not speak to you.

I am only going on with my thought when I say aloud:

"I would give my life for you, and I forgive you beforehand for everything you might ever do to make yourself happy."

She presses me softly in her arms, and I feel her murmuring tears and crooning words; they are like my own.

It seems to me that truth has taken its place again in our little room, and become incarnate; that the greatest bond which can bind two beings together is being confessed, the great bond we did not know of, though it is the whole of salvation:

"Before, I loved you for my own sake; to-day, I love you for yours."

When you look straight on, you end by seeing the immense event—death. There is only one thing which really gives the meaning of our whole life, and that is our death. In that terrible light may they judge their hearts who will one day die. Well I know that Marie's death would be the same thing in my heart as my own, and it seems to me also that only within her of all the world does my own likeness wholly live. We are not afraid of the too great sincerity which goes the length of these things; and we talk about them, beside the bed which awaits the inevitable hour when we shall not awake in it again. We say:—

"There'll be a day when I shall begin something that I shan't finish—a walk, or a letter, or a sentence, or a dream."

I stoop over her blue eyes. Just then I recalled the black, open window in front of me—far away—that night when I nearly died. I look at length into those clear eyes, and see that I am sinking into the only grave I shall have had. It is neither an illusion nor an act of charity to admire the almost incredible beauty of those eyes.

What is there within us to-night? What is this sound of wings? Are our eyes opening as fast as night falls? Formerly, we had the sensual lovers' animal dread of nothingness; but to-day, the simplest and richest proof of our love is that the supreme meaning of death to us is—leaving each other.

And the bond of the flesh—neither are we afraid to think and speak of that, saying that we were so joined together that we knew each other completely, that our bodies have searched each other. This memory, this brand in the flesh, has its profound value; and the preference which reciprocally graces two beings like ourselves is made of all that they have and all that they had.

I stand up in front of Marie—already almost a convert—and I tremble and totter, so much is my heart my master:—

"Truth is more beautiful than dreams, you see."

It is simply the truth which has come to our aid. It is truth which has given us life. Affection is the greatest of human feelings because it is made of respect, of lucidity, and light. To understand the truth and make one's self equal to it is everything; and to love is the same thing as to know and to understand. Affection, which I call also compassion, because I see no difference between them, dominates everything by reason of its clear sight. It is a sentiment as immense as if it were mad, and yet it is wise, and of human things it is the only perfect one. There is no great sentiment which is not completely held on the arms of compassion.

To understand life, and love it to its depths in a living being, that is the being's task, and that his masterpiece; and each of us can hardly occupy his time so greatly as with one other; we have only one true neighbor down here.

To live is to be happy to live. The usefulness of life—ah! its expansion has not the mystic shapes we vainly dreamed of when we were paralyzed by youth. Rather has it a shape of anxiety, of shuddering, of pain and glory. Our heart is not made for the abstract formula of happiness, since the truth of things is not made for it either. It beats for emotion and not for peace. Such is the gravity of the truth.

"You've done well to say all that! Yes, it is always easy to lie for a moment. You might have lied, but it would have been worse when we woke up from the lies. It's a reward to talk. Perhaps it's the only reward there is."

She said that profoundly, right to the bottom of my heart. Now she is helping me, and together we make the great searchings of those who are too much in the right. Marie's assent is so complete that it is unexpected and tragic.

"I was like a statue, because of the forgetting and the grief. You have given me life, you have changed me into a woman."

"I was turning towards the church," she goes on; "you hardly believe in God so much when you've no need of Him. When you're without anything, you can easily believe in Him. But now, I don't want any longer."

Thus speaks Marie. Only the idolatrous and the weak have need of illusion as of a remedy. The rest only need see and speak.

She smiles, vague as an angel, hovering in the purity of the evening between light and darkness. I am so near to her that I must kneel to be nearer still. I kiss her wet face and soft lips, holding her hand in both of mine.

Yes, there is a Divinity, one from which we must never turn aside for the guidance of our huge inward life and of the share we have as well in the life of all men. It is called the truth.

THE END

1

The hanging sign of a French barber.—Tr.

2

Marcassin—a young wild boar.—Tr.

3

A non-com., approximately equivalent to regimental sergeant-major.—Tr.

4

A terrible insurrection of the French peasantry in 1358.—Tr.

5

A terrible insurrection of the French peasantry in 1358.—Tr.

6

As a precaution against "scrimshanking," a penalty attaches to "consultations" which are adjudged uncalled-for.—Tr.

7

Distinctive badge for Staff officers and others.—Tr.

8

Coffee.

9

Distinctive badge for Staff officers and others.—Tr.

10

The word is used here much in the sense of our word "Tories."—Tr.