Pierre And Luce

Pierre and Luce.

by Romain Rolland.

PIERRE plunged into the subway. A feverish, a brutal crowd. On his feet near the door, closely pressed in a bank of human bodies and sharing the heavy atmosphere pa.s.sing in and out of their mouths, he stared without seeing them at the black and rumbling vaults over which flickered the shining eyes of the train. The same heavy shadows lay in his mind, the same gleams, hard and tremulous. Suffocating in the raised collar of his overcoat, his arms jammed against his sides and his lips compressed, his forehead damp with perspiration momentarily cooled by a current from outside when the door opened, he tried hard not to see, he tried not to breathe, he tried not to live. The heart of this young fellow of eighteen, still almost a child, was full of a dull despair. Above his head, above the shadows of these long vaulted ways, of this rat-run through which the monster of metal whirled, all swarming with human masks--was Paris, the snow, the cold January darkness, the nightmare of life and of death--the war.

The war! Four years ago it was, the war had come to stay. It had weighed heavily on his adolescent years. It had caught him by surprise in that morally critical period when the growing boy, disquieted by the awakening of his feelings, discovers with a shock the existence of blind, b.e.s.t.i.a.l, crushing forces in life whose prey he is and that without having asked to live at all. And if he happens to be delicate in character, tender of heart and frail as to body in the way Pierre was, he experiences a disgust and horror which he does not dare confide to others for all these brutalities, these nastinesses, all this nonsense of fruitful and devouring nature--this breeding sow that gobbles up her litter of pigs.

In every growing youth between sixteen and eighteen there is a bit of the soul of Hamlet. Don"t ask him to understand the war! (All right for you men, who have had your fill!) He has all he can do to understand life and forgive its existence. As a rule he digs himself in with his dream and with the arts, until the time comes when he has got used to his incarnation, and the grub has achieved its agonizing pa.s.sage from larva to winged insect. What a need he has for peace and meditation during these April days so full of the trouble of maturing life! But they come after him to the bottom of his burrow, look him up, drag him from the dark while still so tender in his new-made skin. They toss him into the raw air amongst the hard human race whose follies and hatreds he is expected at the very first moment to accept without understanding them and, not understanding, to atone for them.

Pierre had been called to military service along with those of his own cla.s.s, boys of sixteen to eighteen. Within six months his country would be needing his flesh. The war claimed him. Six months of respite. Six months! Oh, if one could only stop thinking at all from this time to that! Just to stay in this underground tunnel! Never see cruel daylight any more!...

He plunged deeper into his gloom along with the flying train and closed his eyes....

When he opened them again--a few steps away, but separated by the bodies of two strangers, stood a young girl who had just entered. At first all he saw of her was a delicate profile under the shadow of her hat, one blonde curl on a somewhat thin cheek, a highlight perched upon the smooth cheekbone, the fine line of nose and lifted upper lip, and her mouth, slightly parted, still quivering a little from her sudden rush into the car. Through the portals of his eyes into his heart she entered, she entered all complete; and the door closed. Noises from without fell to nothing. Silence. Peace. She was there.

She did not look at him. In fact she did not even know as yet of his existence. And yet she was there inside him. He held her image there, speechless, crushed in his arms, and he dared not breathe for fear that his breath might ruffle her.

A jostling at the next station. Noisily talking, the crowd threw themselves into the already packed carriage. Pierre found himself shoved and carried along by the human wave. Above the tunnel vault, in the city up there, certain dull reports. The train started up again. At that moment a man quite out of his senses, who covered up his face with his hands, came running down the stairway of the station and rolled down on the floor at the bottom. There was just enough time to catch sight of the blood that trickled through his fingers.... Then the tunnel and darkness again. In the car frightened outcries: "The Gothas are at it again!" During the general excitement which fused these closely packed bodies into one, his hand had seized the hand that touched him. And when he raised his eyes he saw it was She.

She did not pull her hand away. At the pressure of his fingers hers replied in a sympathy of emotion, drawing together a bit, and then letting themselves go, soft and burning, without budging. Thus the two remained in the protective darkness, their hands like two birds hid in the same nest; and the blood from their hearts ran in a single flood through the warmth of their palms. They said no word to one another. His mouth almost touched the curl on her cheek and the tip of her ear. They did not make a gesture. She did not look at him. Two stations beyond, she loosed her hand from his, which did not keep her, slipped between the bodies and left without having looked at him.

When she had vanished it occurred to him to follow.... Too late. The train was in motion. At the next stop he ran up to the surface. There he found the nocturnal cold, the unseen touches of some flakes of snow and the City, frightened and amused at its fright; above it very high in the air circled the warlike birds. But he saw only her, the one who was within him; and he reached home holding the hand of the unknown girl.

PIERRE AUBIER lived with his parents near Cluny Square. His father was a munic.i.p.al judge; his brother, older than he by six years, had volunteered at the beginning of the war. A good sound family of the _bourgeois_ cla.s.s, excellent folks, affectionate and human, never having dared to think for themselves and very probably never imagining that such a thing could be. Profoundly honest and with a lofty sense of the duties of his office, Judge Aubier would have rejected with indignation as a supreme insult the suspicion even that the verdicts he announced could have been dictated by any other considerations than those of equity and his own conscience. But the voice of his conscience had never spoken--let us better say whispered--against the government. For that conscience was born a functionary. It registered thoughts as a State function--variable but infallible. Established powers were invested by him with a sacred truth. He admired sincerely those souls of iron, the great free and unbending magistrates of the past; and perhaps secretly believed himself to be of their stock. He was a very small edition of Michel de l"Hospital over whom a century of republican slavery had pa.s.sed.

As to Madame Aubier she was as good a Christian as her husband was a good republican. Just as sincerely and honestly as he made himself a docile instrument of the government against any form of liberty which was not official, so did she mingle her prayers, and that in perfect purity of heart, with the homicidal vows which were made about the war in every country of Europe by the Catholic priests, the Protestant ministers, the rabbis and the popes, the newspapers and the right-minded thinkers of the time. And both of them, father and mother, adored their children and, like true French people, had for them only a profound, essential affection, would have sacrificed everything for them, and yet, in order to do as others, would sacrifice them without hesitation. To whom? Why, to the unknown G.o.d. In every epoch Abraham has led Isaac to the funeral pile. And his magnificent folly still remains an example for poor human beings.

As often is the case, at this family hearth affection was great and intimacy null. How should thoughts communicate freely from one to the other when each one forbore a look into the bottom of his own mind?

Whatever one may feel, one knows that certain dogmas at any rate must be blinked, set aside; and if it already amounts to an embarra.s.sment when the dogmas are discreet enough to stay within the limits traced for them (that was the case, to sum all up, of those belonging to the beyond) what is to be said when they pretend to mix themselves with life, to rule life entirely as our laical and obligatory dogmas actually do? Just you try to forget the dogma of your country! The new religion compelled a return to the Old Testament. It was not to be made comfortable with lip devotion and innocent rituals, hygienic and ridiculous, like confession, Friday fasting, rest on Sunday, which once upon a time incited the racy spirit of our "philosophers" during the period when the people were free--under the kings. The new religion wanted all, was not satisfied with less; all the man complete, his body, his blood, his life and his thinking mind. Above all his blood. Since the time of the Aztecs of Mexico never was there a divinity so gorged with blood. It would be deeply unjust to say that the believers did not suffer from this. They suffered, but they believed. Alas my poor brother men, for whom suffering itself is a proof positive of the divine!...

Mr. and Mrs. Aubier suffered like the others, and like the others adored. But from a growing boy one could not demand such abnegation of heart, feeling and good sense. Pierre would have liked to comprehend at least what it was that oppressed him. What a lot of questions burned within which he could not utter! For the very first word of all was, "But what if I don"t believe in it at all!"--a blasphemy just to start with. No, he could not speak out. They would have gazed at him in a stupor, frightened, indignant--with sorrow and shame. And since he was at that plastic age when the soul, with a bark still too tender, wrinkles up at the slightest breeze that comes from outside and under its furtive fingers molds its form shudderingly, he felt himself beforehand sorrowful and ashamed. Ah! how they believed, all of them!

(But did they really all of them believe?) How was it they managed it then?--One did not dare to ask. Not to believe, standing all alone among all those who do believe, is like one who lacks some organ, superfluous perchance, but one that all the others possess; and so, blushing, one hides one"s nudity from the public.

The only one who was able to comprehend the tortures of the young fellow was his elder brother. Pierre had for Philip that adoration which the younger ones often have (but which they jealously conceal) for the older brother or sister, some stranger comrade, at times merely the vision of an hour and lost again--who realizes in their eyes the dream at once of what they could wish to be and of what they would like to love: chaste ardors and troublesome, of the future, formed of mixing currents. The big brother was aware of this nave homage and was flattered by it. Not so long ago he had tried to read the heart of the little brother, and explain things to him with discretion; for, although more robust, like him he was molded of that fine clay which, among the better sort of men, retains a little of the woman and does not blush to own it. But the war had come and torn him away from his hard working career, from his study of the sciences, from his twenty-year-old dream and from his intimacy with his young brother. He had dropped everything in the intoxicating idealism of the moment, like a big crazy bird that launches out into s.p.a.ce with the heroic and absurd illusion that his beak and his talons will put an end to the war and restore to earth the reign of peace.

Since then the big bird had returned two or three times to the nest; each time, alas, a little more worn in plumage. He had come back denuded of many of his illusions, but he found himself too much mortified about them to acknowledge it. He was ashamed to have believed in them. Folly, not to have known how to see life as it is! Now he set his heart upon dissipating its enchantment and accepting it stoically, whatsoever it might turn out. Not himself alone did he punish; a wretched suffering urged him to punish his illusions in the heart of his young brother, where he found that they held their own. At his first coming back, when Pierre had run up to him burning in his walled-up heart, he had been frozen at once by the welcome his elder gave him, affectionate certainly, always affectionate, but with a certain harsh irony in his tone hard to fathom. Questions that pressed forward to his lips were pushed back on the instant. Philip had seen them coming and cut them down with a word, with a look. After two or three attempts Pierre drew back with an aching heart. He did not recognize his brother any more. The other recognized him only too well. He perceived in him what he himself had been not so long ago and what never he could be again. He made him pay for it. It caused him regret afterward, but of that he showed no sign and just began over again. Both of them suffered and, through a too common misunderstanding, their suffering, so much alike, so near, which ought to have brought them together, only separated them. The sole difference between them was that the elder knew that it was near while Pierre believed himself alone in his suffering with n.o.body to whom he could open his soul.

Then why did he not turn toward those of his own age, his companions at school? It might seem as if these growing youths ought to have come close to one another and mutually given one another support. But nothing of the kind. On the contrary, a sorrowful fatality kept them separate, scattered in little groups, and even in the inner circle of these minim groups kept them distant and reserved. The commoner sort had plunged, eyes closed, head foremost into the current of the war. The larger number drew themselves away and did not feel any connection with the generations that preceded them; they did not partake in any way of their pa.s.sions, their hopes and their hatreds; they were bystanders beside all the frantic goings-on like men who are sober looking on at those who are drunk. But what could they do in opposition? Many had started little magazines, reviews whose ephemeral lives were snuffed out after the first numbers for lack of air; the censorship produced a vacuum; the entire thought of France was under the pneumatic exhausting bell. Among these young fellows the most distinguished ones, too feeble to rebel and too proud to complain, knew beforehand that they were delivered up to the sword of war. While they waited for their turn at the slaughterhouse they looked on and made their judgments in silence, each one by himself, with a little surprise and a great deal of irony.

Through a disdainful reaction against the mental condition of the herd they fell back into a kind of egotism, intellectual and artistic egotism, an idealistic sensualism, where the tracked and hunted ego vindicated its rights against human fellowship. Laughable fellowship, which made itself manifest to these adolescents only in the shape of finished murder, one undergone in common! A precocious experience had shriveled their illusions: they had seen how much those same illusions were worth in their elders and how those who did not believe in them paid for them with their lives. Even as to those of their own age and as to man in general their confidence was shaken. And besides, at such a time it cost something to confide in people! Every day one learned of some denunciation of thoughts and intimate conversations by a patriotic spy whose zeal the government honored and stimulated. So it was that these young people, through discouragement, through disdain, through prudence, through a stoical sense of their solitude in thought, gave themselves very little indeed the one to the other.

Pierre could not find among them that Horatio whom little eighteen-year-old Hamlets seek. If he had a horror of estranging his thought from public opinion (that public woman) he did feel the need of joining it freely with souls of his own choosing. He was too tender to be able to content himself with himself. He suffered from the universal suffering. That crushed him by the amount of its pain, which he exaggerated:--for if humanity does support it in spite of everything, that is because humanity has a harder hide than is the delicate skin of a frail boy. But what he did not exaggerate and what weighed him down much more than the suffering of the world was the imbecility of it all.

It is nothing to undergo pain, it is nothing to die, if only one can see a reason for it. Sacrifice is a good thing when one understands why it is made. But what is this why? What is the sense of this world and its harrowings for a youth? If he be sincere and sound of mind, in what way can he interest himself in the coa.r.s.e medley of nations standing head to head like stupid rams on the brink of an abyss, into which all are about to tumble? And yet the road was broad enough for all. Why then this madness to destroy oneself? Why these countries given over to pride, these States devoted to rapine, these peoples to whom is taught murder, as if murder were their duty? But wherefore this butchery everywhere among living beings? Why this world that devours itself? To what purpose the nightmare of that monstrous and endless chain of life, each one of whose links sets its jaws into the neck of the other, feasts on its flesh, delights in its suffering and lives through its death? Why the conflict and why the pain? Why death? Why life? Why? Why?...

That night when the boy got home the why had ceased its cry.

NEVERTHELESS nothing had changed. There he was in his own room littered with papers and books. All about the familiar sounds. In the street the trumpet sounding the close of the warning against air-bombs. On the house stairs the rea.s.sured gossip of the tenants coming up from the cellar. In the story overhead the crazy marching to and fro of the old neighbor who for months had been waiting for his vanished son.

But here in his own chamber lay no longer those cares of his in ambush which he had left there....

Sometimes it happens that an incomplete accord in music sounds raucous in a way; it leaves the mind disquieted, up to the moment when some note is added which procures a fusion of the hostile or coldly alien elements, like visitors who do not know one another and wait to be introduced. At once the ice is broken and harmony spreads from one member of the group to another. This moral chemistry had just been put in operation by a warm and furtive contact of hands. Pierre was not conscious of the reason for the change; he never dreamed of a.n.a.lyzing.

But he felt that the habitual hostility of things in general had suddenly softened. A shooting pain takes possession of your head for hours; of a sudden you perceive it is no longer there: how was it that it went? Scarcely a feeling of buzzing about the temples to recall it.... Pierre was a bit suspicious of this new-found calm. He suspected that it concealed under a pa.s.sing truce a much worse return of the pain which was merely taking breath. Already was he acquainted with the respites that are obtained through the arts. When into our eyes penetrate the divine proportions of lines and colors, or into the voluptuous windings of the sonorous ear-sh.e.l.l the lovely, varied play of accords which combine and interlock in obedience to the laws of harmonious numbers, peace takes possession of us and joy inundates our souls. But that is a radiance which comes from outside; one would say from a sun, the distant fires of which hold us in suspense fascinated, lifted high above our life. It endures only a moment and then one falls again. Art is never more than a pa.s.sing forgetfulness of the actual, the real. Pierre was afraid and fully expected the same deception.--But this time the radiation came from within. Nothing that belongs to life was forgot. But everything fell into harmony. His recollections, his new thoughts. Even to the familiar objects about him: the books and papers in his chamber sprang alive and took on an interest which they had lost.

For months past his intellectual growth had been compressed like a young tree which is struck in full blossoming by the "saints of the ice." He did not belong to those practical boys who profit by the indulgence offered at universities to the younger cla.s.ses just about to be called to the colors in order to pull out hastily a diploma from under the indulgent eyes of the examiners. Nor was he one to feel the despairing eagerness of the young man who sees death approaching and so takes double mouthfuls and devours the arts and sciences which he will never have a chance to test and verify in life. That perpetual feeling of emptiness at the end, emptiness that is underneath and everywhere hidden beneath the cruel and absurd illusion of the world--this it was that swept aside all his enthusiasms. He would throw himself on a book, on a thought--then he stopped, discouraged. Whither would that lead? What the use of learning? What is the point of getting riches if it be necessary to lose everything, leave everything, if nothing really belongs to you?

In order that activity, in order that science should have any sense, it is necessary that life should have some. This sense no effort of the mind, no supplication from the heart had been able to produce for him.--And yet, lo and behold, all of itself, this sense had come....

Life had some sense....

What then?--And seeking to find whence came this inner smile--he beheld the parted lips upon which his mouth was burning to press itself.

IN ordinary times, no doubt, this wordless fascination would not have persisted. At that period of upgrowth when one is a lover of love, one sees love in every eye; the greedy and uncertain heart gathers it flitting from one to the other, and nothing forces it to settle down; the heart is just beginning its day.

But the day at the present period will be a short one: it is necessary to hurry up.

The heart of this young fellow was in a hurry all the greater because it was so much behindhand. Great cities which from a distance appear like the smoking solfataras of sensuality really harbor fresh souls and ingenuous bodies. How many young men and young girls there are who respect love and keep their senses virgin up to the marriage day! Even in the refined circles where mental curiosity is precociously excited, what singular ignorances conceal themselves under the free talk of some young worldly girl or of some student who knows everything and understands nothing! In the heart of Paris there are provinces most nave, little gardens as of cloisters, pure existences as of springs.

Paris permits herself to be betrayed by her literature. Those who speak in her name are the most soiled of all. And besides, one only knows too well that a false human consideration often prevents the pure from avowing their innocence.--Pierre did not yet understand love; and he was delivered up to the first appeal love made.

This also added to the enchantment of his thought: that love had been born under the wing of death. In that moment of emotion when they felt the menace of the bombs pa.s.s over their heads, when the bloodstained apparition of the wounded man contracted their hearts, then it was their fingers groped toward each other; and both of them had read therein, at the same time with the quivering of the flesh that was frightened, the loving consolation of an unknown friend. Fleeting pressure! One of the two hands, that of the man, says: "Lean upon me!" And the other, the maternal one, pushes aside her own fear in order to say: "My little dear!"

Nothing of all this was uttered or heard. But that inward murmur filled the soul far better than words, that curtain of foliage which masks our thought. Pierre allowed himself to be cradled by this humming. Such the song of a golden wasp that floats through the chiaroscuro of one"s thought. His days became numb things in this new languor. That solitary and naked heart dreamed of the warmth of a nest.

During these first weeks of February, Paris was counting her ruins from the last raid and licking her wounds. The press, locked up in its kennel, was barking for reprisals. And, according to the statement of "the Man who put the fetters on," the government was making war on the French. The open season for suits at law for treasonable acts commenced.

The spectacle of a wretched creature who was defending his own head, bitterly demanded by the public accuser, was a matter of amus.e.m.e.nt for _Tout-Paris_, whose appet.i.te for the theatre had not yet been satisfied by four years of war and ten millions of dead men dissolving behind the flies.

But the youth remained completely and solely absorbed in the mysterious guest who had just come to make him a visit. Strange intensity of these visions of love printed on the very floor of his thought and nevertheless lacking in contour! Pierre would have been incapable of saying what was the form of her features or what the color of her eyes or the modeling of her lips. All he could bring back was the emotion already in himself. All his attempts to give precision to the image merely ended in deforming it. He was no more successful when he went to work to find her in the streets of Paris. At every turn he believed he had seen her. It was either a smile or a white young neck or a gleam in some eyes. And then the blood shook in his heart. There was no resemblance, none whatever, between these flying images and the real image which he sought and which he believed he loved. Well, then, he did not love her? Surely he loved her; and that is why he saw her everywhere and under every shape. For she just is every smile, each radiance, all life. And the exact form would be a limitation.--But one longs for that limitation in order to clasp love and to possess it.

Though he might never see her again he knew that she existed, she existed, and that she was the nest. In the hurricane a port. A lighthouse in the night. _Stella Maris, Amor._ Oh, Love, watch over us at the hour of death!...

ALONG the quay of the Seine beside the Inst.i.tute he wandered, looking with little attention at the shelves of the few _bouquinistes_ who had stuck to their posts. He found himself at the foot of the steps of the Pont des Arts. Raising his eyes he perceived her for whom he had waited.