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.

As the fruit within her ripened, her attention was concentrated upon it; all the strength of her heart seemed to flow inward. The war receded; the cannon of Noyon sounded no longer in her ears. When she spoke of the war,--which she did less and less every day,--you would have thought that she was talking of some distant colonial expedition.

Of course she remembered the dangers that threatened her husband, and pitied him naturally:--"Poor dear boy!" with a little smile as much as to say, "He has not much luck. Not very clever, you know." ... But she did not dwell on the subject, and, thank Heaven! it left no traces on her mind. She had paid her score, she thought, and her conscience was at rest; now she was in haste to go back to the world"s most serious task. One really would have supposed that the whole world hung on the egg that she was about to lay.

Clerambault had been so absorbed by his struggles that he had not seen Aline for months, and had therefore been unable to follow the change in her mood. Rosine might have spoken of it before him, but he had paid no attention. Within the last twenty-four hours he had heard in quick succession of the birth of the baby and of the fact that Aline"s husband was missing, like Maxime, and he immediately pictured to himself the suffering of the young mother. He thought of her as he had always known her--vibrating between pleasure and pain, but always feeling the latter more keenly, giving herself up to it, and even when she was happy, finding reasons for distress. She was violent too, bitter, agitated, fighting against fate, and apt to be vexed with everyone around her. He was not sure that she was not angry with him personally, on account of his ideas about reconciliation now that she must be breathing out vengeance. He knew that his att.i.tude was a scandal in the family, and that no one would be less disposed to tolerate it than Aline. But no matter how she received him, he felt that he must go to her and help her in any way that his affection could suggest. Expecting a storm, but resigned to it, he climbed up the stairs and rang the bell at his niece"s door.

He found her lying in bed with the infant, which she had had placed by her side. She looked calm and young, with a sweet expression of beaming happiness on her face. She was like the blooming older sister of the tiny baby, at whom she looked with adoring laughter, as he lay there waving his little spidery legs, his mouth open, hardly alive as yet, still dreaming of the dark warm place from which he had come. She greeted Clerambault with a cry of triumph:

"Oh, Uncle dear, how sweet of you to come! Do look at him! Did you ever see such a darling?"

She was so proud of her wonderful masterpiece that she was positively grateful to anyone who would look at him. Clerambault had never seen her so pretty and so sweet. He hardly saw the child, though he went through all the antics that politeness required, making inarticulate admiring noises which the mother expected and snapped up like a bird.

He saw only her happy face, her lovely smiling eyes, and heard her charming childish laughter. How good it is to see anyone so happy! All the things that he had come prepared to say to her went clean out of his head--all useless and out of place. The only thing necessary was to gaze on the infant wonder, and share the delight of the hen over her chick, joining in her delicious cluck of innocent vanity.

The shadow of the war, however, did pa.s.s before his eyes for a moment, the thought of the brutal, useless carnage, the dead son, the missing husband; and as he bent over the child he could not help thinking with a sad smile:

"Why bring children into the world, if it is to butcher them like this? I wonder what will happen to this poor little chap twenty years hence?"

Thoughts like these did not trouble the mother. They could not dim her sunshine. All cares seemed far away. She could see nothing but the "joy that a man was born into the world."

This man-child is to each mother in turn the incarnation of all the hope of humanity. The sadness and folly of the present day, what do they matter? It is _he_ perhaps who will put an end to them. He is for every mother the miracle, the promised Messiah!...

Just as he was going, Clerambault ventured a word of sympathy as to her husband. She sighed deeply:

"Poor Armand! I"m sure that he was taken prisoner."

"Have you had any news?" asked Clerambault.

"No, no, but it is more than probable.... I am almost certain. If not, you know, I should have heard...."

She seemed to brush away the disagreeable thought, as if it were a fly. (Go away! How did it get in here?)

Then she added, the smile coming back into her eyes:

"It will be much better for him, he can rest. I am easier about him there, than when he was in the trenches...." And then, her mind springing back to her world"s wonder:

"Won"t he be glad when he sees the treasure the good G.o.d has sent me?"...

It was when Clerambault stood up to go that she condescended to remember that there were sorrows still in the world. She thought of Maxime"s death, and did drop a word of pretty sympathy. But how clear it was that at bottom she was completely indifferent! Absolutely so ... though full of good-will, which was something with her. More surprising still, softened by her new happiness, she had a glimpse of the tired face and sad heart of the old man. She had a vague recollection that he had done something foolish, and had trouble in consequence. And instead of scolding him as he deserved, she forgave him tacitly, with a magnanimous smile, like a little princess. "Dear Uncle," she said, with an affectionate if slightly patronising tone: "you must not worry yourself, it will all come out right.... Give me a kiss!"

As Clerambault went away he was amused by the consolation he had received from her whom he had gone to console. He realised how slight our suffering must appear in the eyes of indifferent Nature. All her concern is for the bloom of the coming spring. Let the dead leaves fall now to the ground, the tree will grow all the better and put forth fresh foliage in due season.... Lovely, beloved Spring!

Those who can never bloom again find you very cruel, gentle Spring!

Those who have lost all that they loved, their hopes, their strength, their youth--everything that made life worth living to them....