"About everything."
She fell silent.
Since the morning she had been haunted by a sorrowful memory, painful and degrading; her mother, crazed by the poison that crept about in the promiscuous conditions of the factories made for luxury and for murder, in those human vats, no longer kept up any restraint upon herself. At home she had indulged in a scene of furious jealousy with her lover, without caring if her daughter heard; and Luce had learned that her mother was with child. For her this was like a blot that extended to herself, whose entire love, whose love for Pierre was polluted thereby.
That is why when Pierre had approached her she had repulsed him; she was ashamed of herself and of him.... Ashamed of him? Poor Pierre!...
He remained there, humiliated, and not daring to budge any more. She was struck with remorse, smiled in the midst of tears and, resting her head on Pierre"s knees, said:
"It is my turn!"
Still disquieted, Pierre smoothed her hair as one pets a cat. He murmured:
"Luce, what is all this? Tell me...."
"Nothing," she responded. "I"ve seen sorrowful things."
He had too much respect for her secrets to insist. But Luce went on a few minutes later:
"Ah, there are moments.... One is ashamed to belong to mankind."
Pierre trembled.
"Yes," said he.
And after a silence, bending over, he said very low:
"Forgive me!"
Luce sprang up impetuously, threw herself on Pierre"s neck, repeating:
"Forgive me!"
And their mouths found each other.
The two children felt the need of consoling one another, both of them.
Without saying it aloud they were thinking:
"Luckily we are going to die! The most frightful thing would be to become one of those men who are proud of being man--to destroy, to render vile...."
Lips touching lips, eyelashes brushing eyelashes, they plunged their gaze one in the other, smiling and with a tender pity. They did not tire of that divine sentiment which is the purest form of love. At last they tore themselves from their contemplation and Luce, with eyes again serene, perceived once more the gentle hue of the sky, the sweetness of the renewing trees and the breath of flowers.
"How lovely it all is!" she exclaimed.
She was thinking:
"Why are things so beautiful? And we so poor, so mediocre, so ugly!
(unless it be you, my love, unless it be you!) ..."
She gazed at Pierre again:
"Pshaw! What are others to me?"
And with the magnificent illogicality of love she burst out laughing, sprang up with a leap, rushed into the wood and cried: "Catch me, catch me!"
They played like two children all the rest of the day. And when they were very tired they returned with slow steps toward the valley filled like a basket with the sheaves of the setting sun. Everything they savored seemed new to them--with one heart for two, with two bodies for one.
THEY were five friends about the same age, met together at the house of one of them, five young comrades at their studies whom a certain conformity of mind and a first sorting out of opinions had grouped together apart from the rest. And yet no two of them who thought the same way. Beneath the pretended unanimity of forty millions of Frenchmen there are forty million brains that keep right to themselves. Thought in France is like the country, a state composed of small properties. From one bit of farm to the other the five friends tried to exchange their ideas across the hedge. But they did that only to affirm themselves more imperatively in their several opinions, each for himself. Each one, for that matter, liberal in mind, and, if not all of them republicans, all foes of intellectual or social reaction, or any backward return.
Jacques See was the most blazingly in favor of the war. This generous young Jew had espoused all the pa.s.sions the spirit of France contained.
All through Europe his cousins in Israel espoused like him the causes and the ideas of their adopted countries. Moreover, according to their method, they even had a tendency toward an exaggeration of whatever they adopted. This fine fellow, with ardent but rather heavy voice and look, with his regular features as if marked with a stamp imposed, was more p.r.o.nounced in his convictions than was needful, and violent in contradiction. According to him, all that was necessary was a crusade made by the democracies to deliver the nations and extinguish war. Four years of the philanthropic slaughterhouse had not convinced him. He was one of those who will never accept the flat contradiction of facts. He had a twofold pride, the secret pride of his race, which race he wished to rehabilitate, and his pride personal that wanted to prove itself right. He wished this all the more because he was not entirely sure of it. His sincere idealism served as a screen against exacting instincts too long suppressed and to a need for action and adventure, which was no less sincere.
Antoine Naude, he too, was for the war. But that was because he could not do otherwise. This big honest young _bourgeois_, with his rosy cheeks, placid and keen, who had a short breath and rolled his _r_ with the pretty grace of the provinces of the Centre, contemplated with a quiet smile the enthusiastic transports of his friend See; or else he knew how on occasion to make him climb a tree with a careless word;--but the big, lazy fellow took precious care not to follow him up! What is the use of getting in a sweat for or against what does not depend upon ourselves? It is only in the tragedies that one finds the heroic and loquacious conflict between duty and one"s pleasure. When we have no choice, we do our duty without wasting words. It was no jollier on that account. Naude neither admired nor recriminated. His good sense told him that, once the train started and the war in motion, it was necessary to roll along with it; there was no other position to take. As for searching after the responsibilities, that was merely time lost. When I am forced to fight it gives me a gay outlook, a pretty consolation, to know that I might have not fought--if things had really been ... what they haven"t been!
The responsibilities? Now for Bernard Saisset they were exactly the primordial question; he was obstinate in disentangling that knot of snakes; or rather, like a little Fury, he brandished the snakes above his head. A frail boy, distinguished looking, impa.s.sioned, too many nerves, burning with a too lively sensitiveness of the brain, belonging to the wealthy _bourgeoisie_ and an old republican family which had played a part in the highest offices of State, he professed, through reaction, all the ultra-revolutionary pa.s.sions. He had inspected too near at hand the masters of the day and what they brought forth. He accused all the governments--and by preference his own. He talked of nothing any more but of syndicalists and bolsheviki; he had just made a discovery of them and he fraternized with them, as if he had known them from infancy. Without knowing too well which, he saw no remedy save in a total upset of society. He hated war; but he would have sacrificed himself with joy in a war between cla.s.ses--a war against his own cla.s.s, a war against himself.
The fourth in the group, Claude Puget, sat by at these jousts of words with a cold and somewhat disdainful attention. Coming from the very undermost _bourgeoisie_, poor, uprooted from his province by a pa.s.sing inspector of schools who remarked his intelligence, prematurely deprived of the intimate influence of his family, this winner of a _Lycee_ scholarship, accustomed to depend upon himself alone, to live only with himself, merely lived by himself and for himself. An egotistic philosopher given to a.n.a.lysis of the soul, voluptuously immersed in his introspection like a big cat curled up in a ball, he was not moved at all by the agitation of the others. These three friends of his who never could agree among themselves he put in the same bag--with the "populars." Did not all three forfeit their social rank by wishing to partake in the aspirations of the mob? Truth to say, the mob was a different crowd for each of them. But for Puget the crowd, whatever it might be, was always wrong. The crowd was the enemy. The intellect should remain alone and follow its particular laws and found, apart from the vulgar crowd and the State, the small and closed kingdom of thought.
And Pierre, seated near the window, distractedly looked out of doors, and dreamed. Generally speaking, he mingled in these juvenile a.s.saults with pa.s.sion. But today it seemed to him a humming of idle words which he listened to from so far away, oh, so far away! in a bored and mocking demi-torpidity. Plunged in their discussions, the others were a long while in remarking his muteness. But at last Saisset, accustomed to find in Pierre an echo of his verbal bolshevisms, was astonished at failing to hear it reverberate any more and put the question to him.
Pierre waked up in a hurry, reddened, smiled and asked:
"What were you talking about?"
They were most indignant.
"Why, you haven"t been listening to anything!"
"What, then, were you brooding about?" asked Naude.
A little confused, a little impertinent, Pierre replied:
"About the springtide. It has come back all right without your permission. It will clear out without our help."
All of them crushed him with their disdain. Naude taunted him as a "poet." And Jacques See as a _poseur_.
Puget alone fixed his eyes on him with curiosity and irony in them, his wrinkled eyes with their cold pupils.
"Flying ant!"
"What?" questioned Pierre, rather amused.
"Beware of the wings!" said Puget. "It"s the nuptial flight. It only lasts one hour."
"Life does not last much more," said Pierre.