Jean-Christophe Journey's End

Came calmness to his heart. No wind stirred. The air was still....

Christophe was at rest: peace was his. He was in a certain measure proud of having conquered it: but secretly, in his heart of hearts, he was sorry for it. He was amazed at the silence. His passions were slumbering: in all good faith he thought that they would never wake again.

The mighty, somewhat brutal force that was his was browsing listlessly and aimlessly. In his inmost soul there was a secret void, a hidden question: "What's the good?": perhaps a certain consciousness of the happiness which he had failed to grasp. He had not force enough to struggle either with himself or with others. He had come to the end of a stage in his progress: he was reaping the fruits of all his former efforts, cumulatively: too easily he was tapping the vein of music that he had opened and while the public was naturally behindhand, and was just discovering and admiring his old work, he was beginning to break away from them without knowing as yet whether he would be able to make any advance on them. He had now a uniform and even delight in creation. At this period of his life art was to him no more than a fine instrument upon which he played like a virtuoso. He was ashamedly conscious of becoming a dilettante.

"If," said Ibsen, "a man is to persevere in his art; he must have something else, something more than his native genius: passions, sorrows, which shall fill his life and give it a direction. Otherwise he will not create, he will write books."

Christophe was writing books. He was not used to it. His books were beautiful. He would have rather had them less beautiful and more alive. He was like an athlete resting, not knowing to what use to turn his muscles, and, yawning in boredom like a caged wild beast, he sat looking ahead at the years and years of peaceful work that awaited him. And as, with his old German capacity for optimism, he had no difficulty in persuading himself that everything was for the best, he thought that such a future was no doubt the appointed inevitable end: he flattered himself that he had issued from his time of trial and tribulation and had become master of himself. That was not saying much.... Oh, well! A man is sovereign over that which is his, he is what he is capable of being.... He thought that he had reached his haven.

The two friends were not living together. After Jacqueline's flight, Christophe had thought that Olivier would come back and take up his old quarters with him. But Olivier could not. Although he felt keenly the need of intimacy with Christophe, yet he was conscious of the impossibility of resuming their old existence together. After the years lived with Jacqueline, it would have seemed intolerable and even sacrilegious to admit another human being to his most intimate life,-even though he loved and were loved by that other a thousand times more than Jacqueline.-There was no room for argument.

Christophe had found it hard to understand. He returned again and again to the charge, he was surprised, saddened, hurt, and angry. Then his instinct, which was finer and quicker than his intelligence, bade him take heed. Suddenly he ceased, and admitted that Olivier was right.

But they saw each other every day: and they had never been so closely united even when they were living under the same roof. Perhaps they did not exchange their most intimate thoughts when they talked. They did not need to do so. The exchange was made naturally, without need of words, by grace of the love that was in their hearts.

They talked very little, for each was absorbed: one in his art, the other in his memories. Olivier's sorrow was growing less: but he did nothing to mitigate it, rather almost taking a pleasure in it: for a long time it had been his only reason for living. He loved his child: but his child-a puling baby-could occupy no great room in his life. There are men who are more lovers than fathers, and it is useless to cry out against them. Nature is not uniform, and it would be absurd to try to impose identical laws upon the hearts of all men. No man has the right to sacrifice his duty to his heart. At least the heart must be granted the right to be unhappy where a man does his duty. What Olivier perhaps most loved in his child was the woman of whose body it was made.

Until quite recently he had paid little attention to the sufferings of others. He was an intellectual living too much shut up in himself. It was not egoism so much as a morbid habit of dreaming. Jacqueline had increased the void about him: her love had traced a magic circle about Olivier to cut him off from other men, and the circle endured after love had ceased to be. In addition he was a little aristocratic by temper. From his childhood on, in spite of his soft heart, he had held aloof from the mob for reasons rooted in the delicacy of his body and his soul. The smell of the people and their thoughts were repulsive to him.

But everything had changed as the result of a commonplace tragedy which he had lately witnessed.

* * * * *

He had taken a very modest lodging at the top of the Mont-rouge quarter, not far from Christophe and Cécile. The district was rather common, and the house in which he lived was occupied by little gentlepeople, clerks, and a few working-class families. At any other time he would have suffered from such surroundings in which he moved as a stranger: but now it mattered very little to him where he was: he felt that he was a stranger everywhere. He hardly knew and did not want to know who his neighbors were. When he returned from his work-(he had gone into a publishing-house)-he withdrew into his memories, and would only go out to see his child and Christophe. His lodging was not home to him: it was the dark room in which the images of the past took shape and dwelling: the darker it was the more clearly did the inward images emerge. He scarcely noticed the faces of those he passed on the stairs. And yet unconsciously he was aware of certain faces that were impressed upon his mind. There is a certain order of mind which only really sees things after they have passed. But then, nothing escapes them, the smallest details are graven on the plate. Olivier's was such a mind: he bore within himself multitudes of the shadowy shapes of the living. With any emotional shock they would come mounting up in crowds: and Olivier would be amazed to recognize those whom he had never known, and sometimes he would hold out his hands to grasp them.... Too late.

One day as he came out of his rooms he saw a little crowd collected in front of the house-door round the housekeeper, who was making a harangue. He was so little interested that he was for going his way without troubling to find out what was the matter: but the housekeeper, anxious to gain another listener, stopped him, and asked him if he knew what had happened to the poor Roussels. Olivier did not even know who "the poor Roussels" were, and he listened with polite indifference. When he heard that a working-class family, father, mother, and five children, had committed suicide to escape from poverty in the house in which he lived, he stopped, like the rest, and looked up at the walls of the building, and listened to the woman's story, which she was nothing loth to begin again from the beginning. As she went on talking, old memories awoke in him, and he realized that he had seen the wretched family: he asked a few questions.... Yes, he remembered them: the man-(he used to hear him breathing noisily on the stairs)-a journeyman baker, with a pale face, all the blood drawn out of it by the heat of the oven, hollow cheeks always ill shaven: he had had pneumonia at the beginning of the winter: he had gone back to work only half cured: he had had a relapse: for the last three weeks he had had no work and no strength. The woman had dragged from childbirth to childbirth: crippled with rheumatism, she had worn herself out in trying to make both ends meet, and had spent her days running hither and thither trying to obtain from the Public Charity a meager sum which was not readily forthcoming. Meanwhile the children came, and went on coming: eleven, seven, three-not to mention two others who had died in between:-and, to crown all, twins who had chosen the very dire moment to make their appearance: they had been born only the month before.

-On the day of their birth, a neighbor said, the eldest of the five, a little girl of eleven, Justine-poor little mite!-had begun to cry and asked how ever she could manage to carry both of them.

Olivier at once remembered the little girl,-a large forehead, with colorless hair pulled back, and sorrowful, gray bulging eyes. He was always meeting her, carrying provisions or her little sister: or she would be holding her seven-year-old brother by the hand, a little pinch-faced, cringing boy he was, with one blind eye. When they met on the stairs Olivier used to say, with his absent courteous manner:

"Pardon, mademoiselle."

But she never said anything: she used to go stiffly by, hardly moving aside: but his illusory courtesy used to give her a secret pleasure. Only the evening before, at six o'clock, as he was going downstairs, he had met her for the last time: she was carrying up a bucket of charcoal. He had not noticed it, except that he did remark that the burden seemed to be very heavy. But that is merely in the order of things for the children of the people. Olivier had bowed, as usual, without looking at her. A few steps lower down he had mechanically looked up to see her leaning over the balustrade of the landing, with her little pinched face, watching him go down. She turned away at once, and resumed her climb upstairs. Did she know whither she was climbing?-Olivier had no doubt that she did, and he was obsessed by the thought of the child bearing death in the load that was too heavy for her, death the deliverer-the wretched children for whom to cease to be meant an end of suffering! He was unable to continue his walk. He went back to his room. But there he was conscious of the proximity of the dead.... Only a few thin walls between him and them.... To think that he had lived so near to such misery!

He went to see Christophe. He was sick at heart: he told himself that it was monstrous for him to have been so absorbed as he had been in vain regrets for love while there were so many creatures suffering misfortunes a thousand times more cruel, and it was possible to help and save them. His emotion was profound: there was no difficulty In communicating it. Christophe was easily impressionable, and he in his turn was moved. When he heard Olivier's story he tore up the page of music he had just been writing, and called himself a selfish brute to be amusing himself with childish games. But, directly after, he picked up the pieces. He was too much under the spell of his music. And his instinct told him that a work of art the less would not make one happy man the more. The tragedy of want was no new thing to him: from his childhood on he had been used to treading on the edge of such abysmal depths, and contriving not to topple over. But he was apt to judge suicide harshly, being conscious as he was of such a fullness of force, and unable to understand how a man, under the pressure of any suffering whatsoever, could give up the struggle. Suffering, struggling, is there anything more normal? These things are the backbone of the universe.

Olivier also had passed through much the same sort of experience: but he had never been able to resign himself to it, either on his own account or for others. He had a horror of the poverty in which the life of his beloved Antoinette had been consumed. After his marriage with Jacqueline, when he had suffered the softening influence of riches and love, he had made haste to thrust back the memory of the sorrowful years when he and his sister had worn themselves out each day in the struggle to gain the right to live through the next, never knowing whether they would succeed or no. The memories of those days would come to him now that he no longer had his youthful egoism to preserve. Instead of flying before the face of suffering he set out to look for it. He did not need to go far to find it. In the state of mind in which he was he was prone to find it everywhere. The world was full of it, the world, that hospital.... Oh, the agony, the sorrow! Pains of the wounded body, quivering flesh, rotting away in life. The silent torture of hearts under gnawing grief. Children whom no one loves, poor hopeless girls, women seduced or betrayed, men deceived in their friends, their loves, their faith, the pitiable herd of the unfortunates whom life has broken and forgotten!... Not poverty and sickness were the most frightful things to see, but the cruelty of men one to another. Hardly had Olivier raised the cover of the hell of humanity than there rose to his ears the plaint of all the oppressed, the exploited poor, the persecuted peoples, massacred Armenians, Finland crushed and stifled, Poland rent in pieces, Russia martyred, Africa flung to the rapacious pack of Europe, all the wretched creatures of the human race. It stifled him: he heard it everywhere, he could no longer close his ears to it, he could no longer conceive the possibility of there being people with any other thought. He was for ever talking about it to Christophe. Christophe grew anxious, and said:

"Be quiet! Let me work."

And as he found it hard to recover his balance he would lose his temper and swear.

"Damnation! My day is wasted! And you're a deal the better for it, aren't you?"

Olivier would beg his pardon.

"My dear fellow," said Christophe, "it's no good always looking down into the pit. It stops your living."

"One must lend a hand to those who are in the pit."

"No doubt. But how? By flinging ourselves down as well? For that is what you want. You've got a propensity for seeing nothing but the sad side of life. God bless you! Your pessimism is charitable, I grant you, but it is very depressing. Do you want to create happiness? Very well, then, be happy."

"Happy! How can one have the heart to be happy when one sees so much suffering? There can only be happiness in trying to lessen it and fighting the evil."

"Very good. But I don't help the unfortunate much by lashing out blindly in all directions. It means only one bad soldier the more. But I can bring comfort by my art and spread force and joy. Have you any idea how many wretched beings have been sustained in their suffering by the beauty of an idea, by a winged song? Every man to his own trade! You French people, like the generous scatterbrains that you are, are always the first to protest against the injustice of, say, Spain or Russia, without knowing what it is all about. I love you for it. But do you think you are helping things along? You rush at it and bungle it and the result is nil,-if not worse.... And, look you, your art has never been more weak and emaciated than now, when your artists claim to be taking part in the activities of the world. It is the strangest thing to see so many little writers and artists, all dilettante and rather dishonest, daring to set themselves up as apostles! They would do much better if they were to give the people wine to drink that was not so adulterated.-My first duty is to do whatever I am doing well, and to give you healthy music which shall set new blood coursing in your veins and let the sun shine in upon you."

* * * * *

If a man is to shed the light of the sun upon other men, he must first of all have it within himself. Olivier had none of it. Like the best man of to-day, he was not strong enough to radiate force by himself. But in unison with others he might have been able to do so. But with whom could he unite? He was free in mind and at heart religious, and he was rejected by every party political and religious. They were all intolerant and narrow and were continually at rivalry. Whenever they came into power they abused it. Only the weak and the oppressed attracted Olivier. In this at least he agreed with Christophe's opinion, that before setting out to combat injustice in distant lands, it were as well to fight injustice close at hand, injustice everywhere about, injustice for which each and every man is more or less responsible. There are only too many people who are quite satisfied with protesting against the evil wrought by others, without ever thinking of the evil that they do themselves.

At first he turned his attention to the relief of the poor. His friend, Madame Arnaud, helped to administer a charity. Olivier got her to allow him to help. But at the outset he had more than one setback: the poor people who were given into his charge were not all worthy of interest, or they were unresponsive to his sympathy, distrusted him, and shut their doors against him. Besides, it is hard for a man of intellect to be satisfied with charity pure and simple: it waters such a very small corner of the kingdom of wretchedness! Its effects are almost always piecemeal, fragmentary: it seems to move by chance, and to be engaged only in dressing wounds as fast as it discovers them: generally it is too modest and in too great a hurry to probe down to the roots of the evil. Now it was just this probing that Olivier's mind found indispensable.

He began to study the problem of social poverty. There was no lack of guides to point the way. In those days the social question had become a society question. It was discussed in drawing-rooms, in the theater, in novels. Everybody claimed some knowledge of it. Some of the young men were expending the best part of their powers upon it.

Every new generation needs to have some splendid mania or other. Even the most selfish of young people are endowed with a superfluity of life, a capital sum of energy which has been advanced to them and cannot be left idle and unproductive: they are for ever seeking to expend it on a course of action, or-(more prudently)-on a theory. Aviation or Revolution, a muscular or intellectual exercise. When a man is young he needs to be under the illusion that he is sharing in some great movement of humanity and is renewing the life of the world. It is a lovely thing when the senses thrill in answer to every puff of the winds of the universe! Then a man is so free, so light! Not yet is he laden with the ballast of a family, he has nothing, risks next to nothing. A man is very generous when he can renounce what is not yet his. Besides, it is so good to love and to hate, and to believe that one is transforming the earth with dreams and shouting! Young people are like watch-dogs: they are for ever howling and barking at the wind. An act of injustice committed at the other end of the world will send them off their heads.

Dogs barking through the night. From one farm to another in the heart of the forest they were yelping to one another, never ceasing. The night was stormy. It was not easy to sleep in those days. The wind bore through the air the echoes of so many acts of injustice!... The tale of injustice is unnumbered: in remedying one there is danger of causing others. What is injustice?-To one man it means a shameful peace, the fatherland dismembered. To another it signifies war. To another it means the destruction of the past, the banishment of princes: to another, the spoliation of the Church: to yet another the stifling of the future to the peril of liberty. For the people, injustice lies in inequality: for the upper ten, in equality. There are so many different kinds of injustice that each age chooses its own,-the injustice that it fights against, and the injustice that it countenances.

At the present time the mightiest efforts of the world were directed against social injustice,-and unconsciously were tending to the production of fresh injustice.

And, in truth, such injustice had waxed great and plain to see since the working-classes, growing in numbers and power, had become part of the essential machinery of the State. But in spite of the declamations of the tribunes and bards of the people, their condition was not worse, but rather better than it had ever been in the past: and the change had come about not because they suffered more, but because they had grown stronger. Stronger by reason of the very power of the hostile ranks of Capital, by the fatality of economic and industrial development which had banded the workers together in armies ready for the fight, and, by the use of machinery, had given weapons into their hands, and had turned every foreman into a master with power over light, lightning, movement, all the energy of the world. From this enormous mass of elementary forces, which only a short time ago the leaders of men were trying to organize, there was given out a white heat, electric waves gradually permeating the whole body of human society.

It was not by reason of its justice, or its novelty, or the force of the ideas bound up in it that the cause of the people was stirring the minds of the intelligent middle-class, although they were fain to think so. Its appeal lay in its vitality.

Its justice? Justice was everywhere and every day violated thousands of times without the world ever giving a thought to it. Its ideas? Scraps of truth, picked up here and there and adjusted to the interests and requirements of one class at the expense of the other classes. Its creed was as absurd as every other creed,-the Divine Right of Kings, the Infallibility of the Popes, Universal Suffrage, the Equality of Man,-all equally absurd if one only considers them by their rational value and not in the light of the force by which they are animated. What did their mediocrity matter? Ideas have never conquered the world as ideas, but only by the force they represent. They do not grip men by their intellectual contents, but by the radiant vitality which is given off from them at certain periods in history. They give off as it were a rich scent which overpowers even the dullest sense of smell. The loftiest and most sublime idea remains ineffective until the day when it becomes contagious, not by its own merits, but by the merits of the groups of men in whom it becomes incarnate by the transfusion of their blood. Then the withered plant, the rose of Jericho, comes suddenly to flower, grows to its full height, and fills all the air with its powerful aroma.-Some of the ideas which were now the flaming standard under which the working-classes were marching on to the assault upon the capitalistic citadel, emanated from the brains of dreamers of the comfortable classes. While they had been left in their comfortable books, they had lain dead: items in a museum, mummies packed away in glass cases with no one to look at them. But as soon as the people laid hands on them, they had become part and parcel of the people, they had been given their feverish reality, which deformed them while it gave them life, breathing into such abstract reason, their hallucinations, and their hopes, like a burning wind of Hegira. They were quickly spread from man to man. Men succumbed to them without knowing from whom they came or how they had been brought. They were no respecters of persons. The moral epidemic spread and spread: and it was quite possible for limited creatures to communicate it to superior men. Every man was unwittingly an agent in the transmission.

Such phenomena of intellectual contagion are to be observed in all times and in all countries: they make themselves felt even in aristocratic States where there is the endeavor to maintain castes hermetically sealed one against the other. But nowhere are they more electric than in democracies which preserve no sanitary barrier between the elect and the mob. The elect are contaminated at once whatever they do to fight against it. In spite of their pride and intelligence they cannot resist the contagion; for the elect are much weaker than they think. Intelligence is a little island fretted by the tides of humanity, crumbling away and at last engulfed. It only emerges again on the ebb of the tide.-One wonders at the self-denial of the French privileged classes when on the night of August 4 they abdicated their rights. Most wonderful of all, no doubt, is the fact that they could not do otherwise. I fancy a good many of them when they returned home must have said to themselves: "What have I done? I must have been drunk...." A splendid drunkenness! Blessed be wine and the vine that gives it forth! It was not the privileged classes of old France who planted the vine whose blood brought them to drunkenness. The wine was extracted, they had only to drink it. He who drank must lose his wits. Even those who did not drink turned dizzy only from the smell of the vat that caught them as they passed. The vintages of the Revolution!... Hidden away in the family vaults there are left only a few empty bottles of the wine of '89: but our grandchildren's children will remember that their great-grandfathers had their heads turned by it.

It was a sourer wine but a wine no less strong that was mounting to the heads of the comfortable young people of Olivier's generation. They were offering up their class as a sacrifice to the new God, Deo ignoto:-the people.

* * * * *

To tell the truth, they were not all equally sincere. Many of them were only able to see in the movement an opportunity of rising above their class by affecting to despise it. For the majority it was an intellectual pastime, an oratorical enthusiasm which they never took altogether seriously. There is a certain pleasure in believing that you believe in a cause, that you are fighting, or will fight, for it,-or at least could fight. There is a by no means negligible satisfaction in the thought that you are risking something. Theatrical emotions.

They are quite innocent so long as you surrender to them simply without any admixture of interested motive.-But there were men of a more worldly type who only played the game of set purpose: the popular movement was to them only a road to success. Like the Norse pirates, they made use of the rising tide to carry their ships up into the land: they aimed at reaching the innermost point of the great estuaries so as to be left snugly ensconced in the conquered cities when the sea fell back once more. The channel was narrow and the tide was capricious: great skill was needed. But two or three generations of demagogy have created a race of corsairs who know every trick and secret of the trade. They rushed boldly in with never even so much as a glance back at those who foundered on the way.

This piratical rabble is made up of all parties: thank Heaven, no party is responsible for it. But the disgust with which such adventurers had inspired the sincere and all men of conviction had led some of them to despair of their class. Olivier came in contact with rich young men of culture who felt very strongly that the comfortable classes were moribund and that they themselves were useless. He was only too much inclined to sympathize with them. They had begun by believing in the reformation of the people by the elect, they had founded Popular Universities, and taken no account of the time and money spent upon them, and now they were forced to admit the futility of their efforts: their hopes had been pitched too high, their discouragement sank too low. The people had either not responded to their appeal or had run away from it. When the people did come, they understood everything all wrong, and only assimilated the vices and absurdities of the culture of the superior classes. And in the end more than one scurvy knave had stolen into the ranks of the burgess apostles, and discredited them by exploiting both people and apostles at the same time. Then it seemed to honest men that the middle-class was doomed, that it could only infect the people who, at all costs, must break free and go their way alone. So they were left cut off from all possibility of action, save to predict and foresee a movement which would be made without and against themselves. Some of them found in this the joy of renunciation, the joy of deep disinterested human sympathy feeding upon itself and the sacrifice of itself. To love, to give self! Youth is so richly endowed that it can afford to do without repayment: youth has no fear of being left despoiled. And it can do without everything save the art of loving.-Others again found in it a pleasurable rational satisfaction, a sort of imperious logic: they sacrificed themselves not to men so much as to ideas. These were the bolder spirits. They took a proud delight in deducing the fated end of their class from their reasoned arguments. It would have hurt them more to see their predictions falsified than to be crushed beneath the weight of circumstance. In their intellectual intoxication they cried aloud to those outside: "Harder! Strike harder! Let there be nothing left of us!"-They had become the theorists of violence.

Of the violence of others. For, as usual, these apostles of brute force were almost always refined and weakly people. Many of them were officials of the State which they talked of destroying, industrious, conscientious, and orderly officials.

Their theoretical violence was the throwback from their weakness, their bitterness, and the suppression of their vitality. But above all it was an indication of the storms brewing all around them. Theorists are like meteorologists: they state in scientific terms not what the weather will be, but what the weather is. They are weathercocks pointing to the quarter whence the wind blows. When they turn they are never far from believing that they are turning the wind.

The wind had turned.

Ideas are quickly used up in a democracy, and the more quickly they are propagated, the more quickly are they worn out. There are any number of Republicans in France who in less than fifty years have grown disgusted with the Republic, with Universal Suffrage, with all the manifestations of liberty won with such blind intoxication! After the fetish worship of numbers, after the gaping optimism which had believed in the sanctity of the majority and had looked to it for the progress of humanity, there came the wind of brute force: the inability of the majority to govern themselves, their venality, their corruption, their base and fearful hatred of all superiority, their oppressive cowardice, raised the spirit of revolt: the minorities of energy-every kind of minority-appealed from the majority to force. A queer, yet inevitable alliance was brought about between the royalists of the Action Fran?aise and the syndicalists of the C. G. T. Balzac speaks somewhere of the men of his time who "though aristocrats by inclination, yet became Republicans in spite, of themselves, only to find many inferiors among their equals."-A scant sort of pleasure. Those who are inferior must be made to accept themselves as such: and to bring that about there is nothing to be done but to create an authority which shall impose the supremacy of the elect-of either class, working or burgess-upon the oppressive majority. Our young intellectuals, being proud and of the better class, became royalists or revolutionaries out of injured vanity and hatred of democratic equality. And the disinterested theorists, the philosophers of brute force, like good little weathercocks, reared their heads above them and were the oriflammes of the storm.

Last of all there was the herd of literary men in search of inspiration-men who could write and yet knew not what to write: like the Greeks at Aulis, they were becalmed and could make no progress, and sat impatiently waiting for a kindly wind from any quarter to come and belly out their sails.-There were famous men among them, men who had been wrenched away from their stylistic labors and plunged into public meetings by the Dreyfus affair. An example which had found only too many followers for the liking of those who had set it. There was now a mob of writing men all engrossed in politics, and claiming to control the affairs of the State. On the slightest excuse they would form societies, issue manifestoes, save the Capitol. After the intellectuals of the advance guard came the intellectuals of the rear: they were much of a muchness. Each of the two parties regarded the other as intellectual and themselves as intelligent. Those who had the luck to have in their veins a few drops of the blood of the people bragged about it: they dipped their pens into it, wrote with it.-They were all malcontents of the burgess class, and were striving to recapture the authority which that class had irreparably lost through its selfishness. Only in rare instances were these apostles known to keep up their apostolic zeal for any length of time. In the beginning the cause meant a certain amount of success to them, success which in all probability was in no wise due to their oratorical gifts. It gave them a delicious flattery for their vanity. Thereafter they went on with less success and a certain secret fear of being rather ridiculous. In the long-run the last feeling was apt to dominate the rest, being increased by the fatigue of playing a difficult part for men of their distinguished tastes and innate skepticism. But they waited upon the favor of the wind and of their escort before they could withdraw. For they were held captive both by wind and escort. These latter-day Voltaires and Joseph de Maistres, beneath their boldness in speech and writing, concealed a dread uncertainty, feeling the ground, being fearful of compromising themselves with the young men, and striving hard to please them and to be younger than the young. They were revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries merely as a matter of literature, and in the end they resigned themselves to following the literary fashion which they themselves had helped to create.

The oddest of all the types with which Olivier came in contact in the small burgess advance guard of the Revolution was the revolutionary who was so from timidity.

The specimen presented for his immediate observation was named Pierre Canet. He was brought up in a rich, middle-class, and conservative family, hermetically sealed against any new idea: they were magistrates and officials who had distinguished themselves by crabbing authority or being dismissed: thick-witted citizens of the Marais who flirted with the Church and thought little, but thought that little well. He had married, for want of anything better to do, a woman with an aristocratic name, who had no great capacity for thought, but did her thinking no less well than he. The bigoted, narrow, and retrograde society in which he lived, a society which was perpetually chewing the cud of its own conceit and bitterness, had finally exasperated him,-the more so as his wife was ugly and a bore. He was fairly intelligent and open-minded, and liberal in aspiration, without knowing at all clearly in what liberalism consisted: there was no likelihood of his discovering the meaning of liberty in his immediate surroundings. The only thing he knew for certain was that liberty did not exist there: and he fancied that he had only to leave to find it. On his first move outwards he was lucky enough to fall in with certain old college friends, some of whom had been smitten with syndicalistic ideas. He was even more at sea in their company than in the society which he had just quitted: but he would not admit it: he had to live somewhere: and he was unable to find people of his own cast of thought (that is to say, people of no cast of thought whatever), though, God knows, the species is by no means rare in France! But they are ashamed of themselves: they hide themselves, or they take on the hue of one of the fashionable political colors, if not of several, all at once. Besides, he was under the influence of his friends.

As always happens, he had particularly attached himself to the very man who was most different from himself. This Frenchman, French, burgess and provincial to his very soul, had become the fidus Achates of a young Jewish doctor named Manousse Heimann, a Russian refugee, who, like so many of his fellow-countrymen, had the twofold gift of settling at once among strangers and making himself at home, and of being so much at his ease in any sort of revolution as to rouse wonder as to what it was that most interested him in it: the game or the cause. His experiences and the experiences of others were a source of entertainment to him. He was a sincere revolutionary, and his scientific habit of mind made him regard the revolutionaries and himself as a kind of madmen. His excited dilettantism and his extreme instability of mind made him seek the company of men the most opposite. He had acquaintances among those in authority and even among the police: he was perpetually prying and spying with that morbid and dangerous curiosity which makes so many Russian revolutionaries seem to be playing a double game, and sometimes reduces the appearance to reality. It is not treachery so much as versatility, and it is thoroughly disinterested. There are so many men of action to whom action is a theater into which they bring their talents as comedians, quite honestly prepared at any moment to change their part! Manousse was as faithful to the revolutionary part as it was possible for him to be: it was the character which was most in accord with his natural anarchy, and his delight in demolishing the laws of the countries through which he passed. But yet, in spite of everything, it was only a part. It was always impossible to know how much was true and how much invented in what he said, and even he himself was never very sure. He was intelligent and skeptical, endowed with the psychological subtlety of his twofold nationality, could discern quite marvelously the weaknesses of others, and his own, and was extremely skilful in playing upon them, so that he had no difficulty in gaining an ascendancy over Canet. It amused him to drag this Sancho Panza into Quixotic pranks. He made no scruple about using him, disposing of his will, his time, his money,-not for his own benefit, (he needed none, though no one knew how or in what way he lived),-but in the most compromising demonstrations of the cause. Canet submitted to it all: he tried to persuade himself that he thought like Manousse. He knew perfectly well that this was not the case: such ideas scared him: they were shocking to his common sense. And he had no love for the people. And, in addition, he had no courage. This big, bulky, corpulent young man, with his clean-shaven pinkish face, his short breathing, his pleasant, pompous, and rather childish way of speaking, with a chest like the Farnese Hercules, (he was a fair hand at boxing and singlestick), was the most timid of men. If he took a certain pride in being taken for a man of a subversive temper by his own people, in his heart of hearts he used to tremble at the boldness of his friends. No doubt the little thrill they gave him was by no means disagreeable as long as it was only in fun. But their fun was becoming dangerous. His fervent friends were growing aggressive, their hardy pretensions were increasing: they alarmed Canet's fundamental egoism, his deeply rooted sense of propriety, his middle-class pusillanimity. He dared not ask: "Where are you taking me to?" But, under his breath, he fretted and fumed at the recklessness of these young men who seemed to love nothing so much as breaking their necks, and never to give a thought as to whether they were not at the same time running a risk of breaking other people's.-What was it impelled him to follow them? Was he not free to break with them? He had not the courage. He was afraid of being left alone, like a child who gets left behind and begins to whimper. He was like so many men: they have no opinions, except in so far as they disapprove of all enthusiastic opinion: but if a man is to be independent he must stand alone, and how many men are there who are capable of that? How many men are there, even amongst the most clear sighted, who will dare to break free of the bondage of certain prejudices, certain postulates which cramp and fetter all the men of the same generation? That would mean setting up a wall between themselves and others. On the one hand, freedom in the wilderness, on the other, mankind. They do not hesitate: they choose mankind, the herd. The herd is evil smelling, but it gives warmth. Then those who have chosen pretend to think what they do not in fact think. It is not very difficult for them: they know so little what they think!... "Know thyself!"... How could they, these men who have hardly a Me to know? In every collective belief, religious or social, very rare are the men who believe, because very rare are the men who are men. Faith is an heroic force: its fire has kindled but a very few human torches, and even these have often flickered. The apostles, the prophets, even Jesus have doubted. The rest are only reflections,-save at certain hours when their souls are dry and a few sparks falling from a great torch set light to all the surface of the plain: then the fire dies down, and nothing gleams but the glowing embers beneath the ashes. Not more than a few hundred Christians really believe in Christ. The rest believe that they believe, or else they only try to believe.

Many of these revolutionaries were like that. Our friend Canet tried hard to believe that he was a revolutionary: he did believe it. And he was scared at his own boldness.

All these comfortable people invoked divers principles: some followed the bidding of their hearts, others that of their reason, others again only their interests: some associated their way of thinking with the Gospel, others with M. Bergson, others, again, with Karl Marx, with Proudhon, with Joseph de Maistre. with Nietzsche, or with M. Sorel. There were men who were revolutionaries to be in the fashion, some who were so out of snobbishness, and some from shyness: some from hatred, others from love: some from a need of active, hot-headed heroism: and some in sheer slavishness, from the sheeplike quality of their minds. But all, without knowing it, were at the mercy of the wind. All were no more than those whirling clouds of dust which are to be seen like smoke in the far distance on the white roads in the country, clouds of dust foretelling the coming of the storm.

Olivier and Christophe watched the wind coming. Both of them had strong eyes. But they used them in different ways. Olivier, whose clear gaze, in spite of himself, pierced to the very inmost thoughts of men, was saddened by their mediocrity: but he saw the hidden force that sustained them: he was most struck by the tragic aspect of things. Christophe was more sensible of their comic aspect. Men interested him, ideas not at all. He affected a contemptuous indifference towards them. He laughed at Socialistic Utopias. In a spirit of contradiction and out of instinctive reaction against the morbid humanitarianism which was the order of the day, he appeared to be more selfish than he was: he was a self-made man, a sturdy upstart, proud of his strength of body and will, and he was a little too apt to regard all those who had not his force as shirkers. In poverty and alone he had been able to win through: let others do the same! Why all this talk of a social question? What question? Poverty?

"I know all about that," he would say. "My father, my mother, I myself, we have been through it. It's only a matter of getting out of it."

"Not everybody can," Olivier would reply. "What about the sick and the unlucky?"

"One must help them, that's all. But that is a very different thing from setting them on a pinnacle, as people are doing nowadays. Only a short while ago people were asserting the odious doctrine of the rights of the strongest man. Upon my word, I'm inclined to think that the rights of the weakest are even more detestable: they're sapping the thought of to-day, the weakest man is tyrannizing over the strong, and exploiting them. It really looks as though it has become a merit to be diseased, poor, unintelligent, broken,-and a vice to be strong, upstanding, happy in fighting, and an aristocrat in brains and blood. And what is most absurd of all is this, that the strong are the first to believe it.... It's a fine subject for a comedy, my dear Olivier!"

"I'd rather have people laugh at me than make other people weep."

"Good boy!" said Christophe. "But, good Lord, who ever said anything to the contrary? When I see a hunchback, my back aches for him.... We're playing the comedy, we won't write it."

He did not suffer himself to be bitten by the prevalent dreams of social justice. His vulgar common sense told him and he believed that what had been would be.

"But if anybody said that to you about art you'd be up in arms against him."

"May be. Anyhow, I don't know about anything except art. Nor do you. I've no faith in people who talk about things without knowing anything about them."

Olivier's faith in such people was no greater. Both of them were inclined to push their distrust a little too far: they had always held aloof from politics. Olivier confessed, not without shame, that he could not remember ever having used his rights as an elector: for the last ten years he had not even entered his name at the mairie.

"Why," he asked, "should I take part in a comedy which I know to be futile? Vote? For whom should I vote? I don't see any reason for choosing between two candidates, both of whom are unknown to me, while I have only too much reason to expect that, directly the election is over, they will both be false to all their professions of faith. Keep an eye on them? Remind them of their duty? It would take up the whole of my life, with no result. I have neither time, nor strength, nor the rhetorical weapons, nor sufficient lack of scruple, nor is my heart steeled against all the disgust that action brings. Much better to keep clear of it all. I am quite ready to submit to the evil. But at least I won't subscribe to it."

But, in spite of his excessive clear-sightedness, Olivier, to whom the ordinary routine of politics was repulsive, yet preserved a chimerical hope in a revolution. He knew that it was chimerical: but he did not discard it. It was a sort of racial mysticism in him. Not for nothing does a man belong to the greatest destructive and constructive people of the Western world, the people who destroy to construct and construct to destroy,-the people who play with ideas and life, and are for ever making a clean sweep so as to make a new and better beginning, and shed their blood in pledge.

Christophe was endowed with no such hereditary Messianism. He was too German to relish much the idea of a revolution. He thought that there was no changing the world. Why all these theories, all these words, all this futile uproar?

"I have no need," he would say, "to make a revolution-or long speeches about revolution-in order to prove to my own satisfaction that I am strong. I have no need, like these young men of yours, to overthrow the State in order to restore a King or a Committee of Public Safety to defend me. That's a queer way of proving your strength! I can defend myself. I am not an anarchist: I love all necessary order and I revere the laws which govern the universe. But I don't want an intermediary between them and myself. My will knows how to command, and it knows also how to submit. You've got the classics on the tip of your tongue. Why don't you remember your Corneille: 'Myself alone, and that is enough.' Your desire for a master is only a cloak for your weakness. Force is like the light: only the blind can deny it. Be strong, calmly, without all your theories, without any act of violence, and then, as plants turn to the sun, so the souls of the weak will turn to you."

But even while he protested that he had no time to waste on political discussions, he was much less detached from it all than he wished to appear. He was suffering, as an artist, from the social unrest. In his momentary dearth of strong passion he would sometimes pause to look around and wonder for what people he was writing. Then he would see the melancholy patrons of contemporary art, the weary creatures of the upper-classes, the dilettante men and women of the burgess-class, and he would think:

"What profits it to work for such people as these?" In truth there was no lack of men of refinement and culture, men sensitive to skill and craft, men even who were not incapable of appreciating the novelty or-(it is all the same)-the archaism of fine feeling. But they were bored, too intellectual, not sufficiently alive to believe in the reality of art: they were only interested in tricks,-tricks of sound, or juggling with ideas; most of them were distraught by other worldly interests, accustomed to scattering their attention over their multifarious occupations, none of which was "necessary." It was almost impossible for them to pierce the outer covering of art, to feel its heart deep down: art was not flesh and blood to them; it was literature. Their critics built up their impotence to issue from dilettantism into a theory, an intolerant theory. When it happened that a few here and there were vibrant enough to respond to the voice of art, they were not strong enough to bear it, and were left disgruntled and nerve-ridden for life. They were sick men or dead. What could art do in such a hospital?-And yet in modern society he was unable to do without these cripples: for they had money, and they ruled the Press: they only could assure an artist the means of living. So then he must submit to such humiliation: an intimate and sorrowful art, music in which is told the secret of the artist's inmost life, offered up as an amusement-or rather as a palliative of boredom, or as another sort of boredom-in the theaters or in fashionable drawing-rooms, to an audience of snobs and worn-out intellectuals.

Christophe was seeking the real public, the public which believes in the emotions of art as in those of life, and feels them with a virgin soul. And he was vaguely attracted by the new promised world-the people. The memories of his childhood, Gottfried and the poor, who had revealed to him the living depths of art, or had shared with him the sacred bread of music, made him inclined to believe that his real friends were to be found among such people. Like many another young man of a generous heart and simple faith, he cherished great plans for a popular art, concerts, and a theater for the people, which he would have been hard put to it to define. He thought that a revolution might make it possible to bring about a great artistic renascence, and he pretended that he had no other interest in the social movement. But he was hoodwinking himself: he was much too alive not to be attracted and drawn onward by the sight of the most living activity of the time.

In all that he saw he was least of all interested in the middle-class theorists. The fruit borne by such trees is too often sapless: all the juices of life are wasted in ideas. Christophe did not distinguish between one idea and another. He had no preference even for ideas which were his own when he came upon them congealed in systems. With good-humored contempt he held aloof from the theorists of force as from the theorists of weakness. In every comedy the one ungrateful part is that of the raisonneur. The public prefers not only the sympathetic characters to him, but the unsympathetic characters also. Christophe was like the public in that. The raisonneurs of the social question seemed tiresome to him. But he amused himself by watching the rest, the simple, the men of conviction, those who believed and those who wanted to believe, those who were tricked and those who wanted to be tricked, not to mention the buccaneers who plied their predatory trade, and the sheep who were made to be fleeced. His sympathy was indulgent towards the pathetically absurd little people like fat Canet. Their mediocrity was not offensive to him as it was to Olivier. He watched them all with affectionate and mocking interest: he believed that he was outside the piece they were playing: and he did not see that little by little he was being drawn into it. He thought only of being a spectator watching the wind rush by. But already the wind had caught him, and was dragging him along into its whirling cloud of dust.

* * * * *

The social drama was twofold. The piece played by the intellectuals was a comedy within a comedy; the people hardly heeded it. The real drama was that of the people. It was not easy to follow it: the people themselves did not always know where they were in it. It was all unexpected, unforeseen.

It was not only that there was much more talk in it than action. Every Frenchman, be he burgess or of the people, is as great an eater of speeches as he is of bread. But all men do not eat the same sort of bread. There is the speech of luxury for delicate palates, and the more nourishing sort of speech for hungry gullets. If the words are the same, they are not kneaded into the same shape: taste, smell, meaning, all are different.

The first time Olivier attended a popular meeting and tasted of the fare he lost his appetite: his gorge rose at it, and he could not swallow. He was disgusted by the platitudinous quality of thought, the drab and uncouth clumsiness of expression, the vague generalizations, the childish logic, the ill-mixed mayonnaise of abstractions and disconnected facts. The impropriety and looseness of the language were not compensated by the raciness and vigor of the vulgar tongue. The whole thing was compounded of a newspaper vocabulary, stale tags picked up from the reach-me-downs of middle-class rhetoric. Olivier was particularly amazed at the lack of simplicity. He forgot that literary simplicity is not natural, but acquired: it is a thing achieved by the people of the elect. Dwellers in towns cannot be simple: they are rather always on the lookout for far-fetched expressions.

Olivier did not understand the effect such turgid phrases might have on their audience. He had not the key to their meaning. We call foreign the languages of other races, and it never occurs to us that there are almost as many languages in our nation as there are social grades. It is only for a limited few that words retain their traditional and age-old meaning: for the rest they represent nothing more than their own experience and that of the group to which they belong. Many of such words, which are dead for the select few and despised by them, are like an empty house, wherein, as soon as the few are gone, new energy and quivering passion take up their abode. If you wish to know the master of the house, go into it.

That Christophe did.

* * * * *

He had been brought into touch with the working-classes by a neighbor of his who was employed on the State Railways. He was a little man of forty-five, prematurely old, with a pathetically bald head, deep-sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, a prominent nose, fleshy and aquiline, a clever mouth, and malformed ears with twisted lobes: the marks of degeneracy. His name was Alcide Gautier. He was not of the people, but of the lower middle-class.

He came of a good family who had spent all they had on the education of their only son, but, for want of means, had been unable to let him go through with it. As a very young man he had obtained one of those Government posts which seem to the lower middle-class a very heaven, and are in reality death,-living death.-Once he had gone into it, it had been impossible for him to escape. He had committed the offense-(for it is an offense in modern society)-of marrying for love a pretty workgirl, whose innate vulgarity had only increased with time. She gave him three children and he had to earn a living for them. This man, who was intelligent and longed with all his might to finish his education, was cramped and fettered by poverty. He was conscious of latent powers in himself which were stifled by the difficulties of his existence: he could not take any decisive step. He was never alone. He was a bookkeeping clerk and had to spend his days over purely mechanical work in a room which he had to share with several of his colleagues who were vulgar chattering creatures: they were for ever talking of idiotic things and avenged themselves for the absurdity of their existence by slandering their chiefs and making fun of him and his intellectual point of view which he had not been prudent enough to conceal from them. When he returned home it was to find an evil-smelling charmless room, a noisy common wife who did not understand him and regarded him as a humbug or a fool. His children did not take after him in anything: they took after their mother. Was it just that it should be so? Was it just? Nothing but disappointment and suffering and perpetual poverty, and work that took up his whole day from morning to night, and never the possibility of snatching an hour for recreation, an hour's silence, all this had brought him to a state of exhaustion and nervous irritability.-Christophe, who had pursued his acquaintance with him, was struck by the tragedy of his lot: an incomplete nature, lacking sufficient culture and artistic taste, yet made for great things and crushed by misfortune. Gautier clung to Christophe as a weak man drowning grasps at the arm of a strong swimmer. He felt a mixture of sympathy and envy for Christophe. He took him to popular meetings, and showed him some of the leaders of the syndicalist party to which he belonged for no other reason than his bitterness against society. For he was an aristocrat gone wrong. It hurt him terribly to mix with the people.

Christophe was much more democratic than he-the more so as nothing forced him to be so-and enjoyed the meetings. The speeches amused him. He did not share Olivier's feeling of repulsion: he was hardly at all sensible of the absurdities of the language. In his eyes a windbag was as good as any other man. He affected a sort of contempt for eloquence in general. But though he took no particular pains to understand their rhetoric, he did feel the music which came through the man who was speaking and the men who were listening. The power of the speaker was raised to the hundredth degree by the echo thrown back from hie hearers. At first Christophe only took stock of the speakers, and he was interested enough to make the acquaintance of some of them.

The man who had the most influence on the crowd was Casimir Joussier,-a little, pale, dark man, between thirty and thirty-five, with a Mongolian cast of countenance, thin, puny, with cold burning eyes, scant hair, and a pointed beard. His power lay not so much in his gesture, which was poor, stilted, and rarely in harmony with the, words,-not so much in his speech, which was raucous and sibilant, with marked pauses for breathing,-as in his personality and the emphatic assurance and force of will which emanated from it. He never seemed to admit the possibility of any one thinking differently from himself: and as what he thought was what his audience wanted to think they had no difficulty in understanding one another. He would go on saying thrice, four times, ten times, the things they expected him to say: he never stopped hammering the same nail with a tenacious fury: and his audience, following his example, would hammer, hammer, hammer, until the nail was buried deep in the flesh.-Added to this personal ascendancy was the confidence inspired by his past life, the prestige of many terms in prison, largely deserved by his violent writings. He breathed out an indomitable energy: but for the seeing eye there was revealed beneath it all an accumulated fund of weariness, disgust with so much continual effort, anger against fate. He was one of those men who every day spend more than their income of vitality. From his childhood on he had been ground down by work and poverty. He had plied all sorts of trades: journeyman glass-blower, plumber, printer: his health was ruined: he was a prey to consumption, which plunged him into fits of bitter discouragement and dumb despair of the cause and of himself: at other times it would raise him up to a pitch of excitement. He was a mixture of calculated and morbid violence, of policy and recklessness. He was educated up to a certain point: he had a good knowledge of many things, science, sociology, and his various trades: he had a very poor knowledge of many others: and he was just as cocksure with both: he had Utopian notions, just ideas, ignorance in many directions, a practical mind, many prejudices, experience, and suspicion and hatred of burgess society. That did not prevent his welcoming Christophe. His pride was tickled by being sought out by a well-known artist. He was of the race of leaders, and, whatever he did, he was brusque with ordinary workmen. Although in all good faith he desired perfect equality, he found it easier to realize with those above than with those beneath him.

Christophe came across other leaders of the working-class movement. There was no great sympathy between them. If the common fight-with difficulty-produced unity of action, it was very far from creating unity of feeling. It was easy to see the external and purely transitory reality to which the distinction between the classes corresponded. The old antagonisms were only postponed and marked: but they continued to exist. In the movement were to be found men of the north and men of the south with their fundamental scorn of each other. The trades were jealous of each other's wages, and watched each other with an undisguised feeling of superiority to all others in each. But the great difference lay-and always will lie-in temperament. Foxes and wolves and horned beasts, beasts with sharp teeth, and beasts with four stomachs, beasts that are made to eat, and beasts that are made to be eaten, all sniffed at each other as they passed in the herd that had been drawn together by the accident of class and common interest: and they recognized each other: and they bristled.

Christophe sometimes had his meals at a little creamery and restaurant kept by a former colleague of Gautier's, one Simon, a railway clerk who had been dismissed for taking part in a strike. The shop was frequented by syndicalists. There were five or six of them who used to sit in a room at the back, looking on to an inclosed courtyard, narrow and ill-lit, from which there arose the never-ceasing desperate song of two caged canaries straining after the light. Joussier used to come with his mistress, the fair Berthe, a large coquettish young woman, with a pale face, and a purple cap, and merry, wandering eyes. She had under her thumb a good-looking boy, Léopold Graillot, a journeyman mechanic, who was clever and rather a poseur: he was the esthete of the company. Although he called himself an anarchist, and was one of the most violent opponents of the burgess-class, his soul was typical of that class at its very worst. Every morning for years he had drunk in the erotic and decadent news of the halfpenny literary papers. His reading had given him a strongly addled brain. His mental subtlety in imagining the pleasures of the senses was allied in him with an absolute lack of physical delicacy, indifference to cleanliness, and the comparative coarseness of his life. He had acquired a taste for an occasional glass of such adulterated wine-the intellectual alcohol of luxury, the unwholesome stimulants of unhealthy rich men. Being unable to take these pleasures in the flesh, he inoculated his brain with them. That means a bad tongue in the morning and weakness in the knees. But it puts you on an equality with the rich. And you hate them.

Christophe could not bear him. He was more in sympathy with Sebastien Coquard, an electrician, who, with Joussier, was the speaker with the greatest following. He did not overburden himself with theories. He did not always know where he was going. But he did go straight ahead. He was very French. He was heavily built, about forty, with a big red face, a round head, red hair, a flowing beard, a bull neck, and a bellowing voice. Like Joussier, he was an excellent workman, but he loved drinking and laughter. The sickly Joussier regarded his superabundant health with the eyes of envy: and, though they were friends, there was always a simmering secret hostility between them.

Amélie, the manageress of the creamery, a kind creature of forty-five, who must have been pretty once, and still was, in spite of the wear of time, used to sit with them, with some sewing in her hands, listening to their talk with a jolly smile, moving her lips in time to their words: every now and then she would drop a remark into the discussion, and she would emphasize her words with a nod of her head as she worked. She had a married daughter and two children of seven and ten-a little girl and a boy-who used to do their home lessons at the corner of a sticky table, putting out their tongues, and picking up scraps of conversations which were not meant for their ears.

On more than one occasion Olivier tried to go with Christophe. But he could not feel at ease with these people. When these working-men were not tied down by strict factory hours or the insistent scream of a hooter, they seemed to have an incredible amount of time to waste, either after work, or between jobs, in loafing or idleness. Christophe, being in one of those periods when the mind has completed one piece of work and is waiting until a new piece of work presents itself, was in no greater hurry than they were: and he liked sitting there with his elbows on the table, smoking, drinking, and talking. But Olivier's respectable burgess instincts were shocked, and so were his traditional habits of mental discipline, and regular work, and scrupulous economy of time: and he did not relish such a waste of so many precious hours. Besides that, he was not good at talking or drinking. Above all there was his physical distaste for it all, the secret antipathy which raises a physical barrier between the different types of men, the hostility of the senses, which stands in the way of the communion of their souls, the revolt of the flesh against the heart. When Olivier was alone with Christophe he would talk most feelingly about the duty of fraternizing with the people: but when he found himself face to face with the people, he was impotent to do anything, in spite of his good will. Christophe, on the other hand, who laughed at his ideas, could, without the least effort, meet any workman he chanced to come across in brotherhood. It really hurt Olivier to find himself so cut off from these men. He tried to be like them, to think like them, to speak like them. He could not do it. His voice was dull, husky, had not the ring that was in theirs. When he tried to catch some of their expressions the words would stick in his throat or sound queer and strange. He watched himself; he was embarrassed, and embarrassed them. He knew it. He knew that to them he was a stranger and suspect, that none of them was in sympathy with him, and then, when he was gone, everybody would sigh with relief: "Ouf!" As he passed among them he would notice hard, icy glances, such hostile glances as the working-classes, embittered by poverty, cast at any comfortable burgess. Perhaps Christophe came in for some of it too: but he never noticed it.

Of all the people in that place the only ones who showed any inclination to be friendly with Olivier were Amélie's children. They were much more attracted by their superior in station than disposed to hate him. The little boy was fascinated by the burgess mode of thought: he was clever enough to love it, though not clever enough to understand it: the little girl, who was very pretty, had once been taken by Olivier to see Madame Arnaud, and she was hypnotized by the comfort and ease of it all: she was silently delighted to sit in the fine armchairs, and to feel the beautiful clothes, and to be with lovely ladies: like the little simpleton she was, she longed to escape from the people and soar upwards to the paradise of riches and solid comfort. Olivier had no desire or taste for the cultivation of these inclinations in her: and the simple homage she paid to his class by no means consoled him for the silent antipathy of her companions. Their ill-disposition towards him pained him. He had such a burning desire to understand them! And in truth he did understand them, too well, perhaps: he watched them too closely, and he irritated them. It was not that he was indiscreet in his curiosity, but that he brought to bear on it his habit of analyzing the souls of men and his need of love.

It was not long before he perceived the secret drama of Joussier's life: the disease which was undermining his constitution, and the cruelty of his mistress. She loved him, she was proud of him: but she had too much vitality: he knew that she was slipping away from him, would slip away from him: and he was aflame with jealousy. She found his jealousy diverting: she was for ever exciting the men about her, bombarding them with her eyes, flinging around them her sensual provocative atmosphere: she loved to play with him like a cat. Perhaps she deceived him with Graillot. Perhaps it pleased her to let him think so. In any case if she were not actually doing so, she very probably would. Joussier dared not forbid her to love whomsoever she pleased: did he not profess the woman's right to liberty equally with the man's? She reminded him of that slyly and insolently one day when he was upbraiding her. He was delivered up to a terrible struggle within himself between his theories of liberty and his violent instincts. At heart he was still a man like the men of old, despotic and jealous: by reason he was a man of the future, a Utopian. She was neither more nor less than the woman of yesterday, to-morrow, and all time.-And Olivier, looking on at their secret duel, the savagery of which was known to him by his own experience, was full of pity for Joussier when he realized his weakness. But Joussier guessed that Olivier was reading him: and he was very far from liking him for it.

There was another interested witness, an indulgent spectator of this game of love and hate. This was the manageress, Amélie. She saw everything without seeming to do so. She knew life. She was an honest, healthy, tranquil, easy-going woman, and in her youth had been free enough. She had been in a florist's shop: she had had a lover of the class above her own: she had had other lovers. Then she had married a working-man. She had become a good wife and mother. But she understood everything, all the foolish ways of the heart, Joussier's jealousy, as well as the young woman's desire for amusement. She tried to help them to understand each other with a few affectionate words:

"You must make allowances: it is not worth while creating bad blood between you for such a trifle...."

She was not at all surprised when her words produced no result....

"That's the way of the world. We must always be torturing ourselves...."

She had that splendid carelessness of the people, from which misfortune of every sort seems harmlessly to glide. She had had her share of unhappiness. Three months ago she had lost a boy of fifteen whom she dearly loved: it had been a great grief to her: but now she was once more busy and laughing. She used to say:

"If one were to think of these things one could not live."

So she ceased to think of it. It was not selfishness. She could not do otherwise: her vitality was too strong: she was absorbed by the present: it was impossible for her to linger over the past. She adapted herself to things as they were, and would adapt herself to whatever happened. If the revolution were to come and turn everything topsy-turvy she would soon manage to be standing firmly on her feet, and do everything that was there to do; she would be in her place wherever she might be set down. At heart she had only a modified belief in the revolution. She had hardly any real faith in anything whatever. It is hardly necessary to add that she used to consult the cards in her moments of perplexity, and that she never failed to make the sign of the cross when she met a funeral. She was very open-minded and very tolerant, and she had the skepticism of the people of Paris, that healthy skepticism which doubts, as a man breathes, joyously. Though she was the wife of a revolutionary, nevertheless she took up a motherly and ironical attitude towards her husband's ideas and those of his party-and those of the other parties,-the sort of attitude she had towards the follies of youth-and of maturity. She was never much moved by anything. But she was interested in everything. And she was equally prepared for good and bad luck. In fine, she was an optimist.

"It's no good getting angry.... Everything settles itself so long as your health is good...."

That was clearly to Christophe's way of thinking. They did not need much conversation to discover that they belonged to the same family. Every now and then they would exchange a good-humored smile, while the others were haranguing and shouting. But, more often, she would laugh to herself as she looked at Christophe, and saw him being caught up by the argument to which he would at once bring more passion than all the rest put together.

* * * * *

Christophe did not observe Olivier's isolation and embarrassment. He made no attempt to probe down to the inner workings of his companions. But he used to eat and drink with them, and laugh and lose his temper. They were never distrustful of him, although they used to argue heatedly enough. He did not mince his words with them. At bottom he would have found it very hard to say whether he was with or against them. He never stopped to think about it. No doubt if the choice had been forced upon him he would have been a syndicalist as against Socialism and all the doctrines of the State-that monstrous entity, that factory of officials, human machines. His reason approved of the mighty effort of the cooperative groups, the two-edged ax of which strikes at the same time at the dead abstractions of the socialistic State, and at the sterility of individualism, that corrosion of energy, that dispersion of collective force in individual frailties,-the great source of modern wretchedness for which the French Revolution is in part responsible.

But Nature is stronger than reason. When Christophe came in touch with the syndicates-those formidable coalitions of the weak-his vigorous individuality drew back. He could not help despising those men who needed to be linked together before they could march on-to the fight; and if he admitted that it was right for them to submit to such a law, he declared that such a law was not for him. Besides, if the weak and the oppressed are sympathetic, they cease altogether to be so when they in their turn become oppressors. Christophe, who had only recently been shouting out to the honest men living in isolation: "Unite! Unite!" had a most unpleasant sensation when for the first time he found himself in the midst of such unions of honest men, all mixed up with other men who were less honest, and yet were endowed with their force, their rights, and only too ready to abuse them. The best people, those whom Christophe loved, the friends whom he had met in The House, on every floor, drew no sort of profit from these fighting combinations. They were too sensitive at heart and too timid not to be scared: they were fated to be the first to be crushed out of existence by them. Face to face with the working-class movement they were in the same position as Olivier and the most warmly generous of the young men of the middle-class. Their sympathies were with the workers organizing themselves. But they had been brought up in the cult of liberty: now liberty was exactly what the revolutionaries cared for least of all. Besides, who is there nowadays that cares for liberty? A select few who have no sort of influence over the world. Liberty is passing through dark days. The Popes of Rome proscribe the light of reason. The Popes of Paris put out the light of the heavens. And M. Pataud puts out the lights of the streets. Everywhere imperialism is triumphant: the theocratic imperialism of the Church of Rome: the military imperialism of the mercantile and mystic monarchies: the bureaucratic imperialism of the republics of Freemasonry and covetousness: the dictatorial imperialism of the revolutionary committees. Poor liberty, thou art not in this world!... The abuse of power preached and practised by the revolutionaries revolted Christophe and Olivier. They had little regard for the blacklegs who refuse to suffer for the common cause. But it seemed abominable to them that the others should claim the right to use force against them.-And yet it is necessary to take sides. Nowadays the choice in fact lies not between imperialism and liberty, but between one imperialism and another. Olivier said:

"Neither. I am for the oppressed."

Christophe hated the tyranny of the oppressors no less. But he was dragged into the wake of force in the track of the army of the working-classes in revolt.

He was hardly aware that it was so. He would tell his companions in the restaurant that he was not with them.

"As long as you are only out for material interests," he would say, "you don't interest me. The day when you march out for a belief then I shall be with you. Otherwise, what have I to do with the conflict between one man's belly and another's? I am an artist; it is my duty to defend art; I have no right to enroll myself in the service of a party. I am perfectly aware that recently certain ambitious writers, impelled by a desire for an unwholesome popularity, have set a bad example. It seems to me that they have not rendered any great service to the cause which they defended in that way: but they have certainly betrayed art. It is our, the artists', business to save the light of the intellect. We have no right to obscure it with your blind struggles. Who shall hold the light aloft if we let it fall? You will be glad enough to find it still intact after the battle. There must always be workers busy keeping up the fire in the engine, while there is fighting on the deck of the ship. To understand everything is to hate nothing. The artist is the compass which, through the raging of the storm, points steadily to the north."

They regarded him as a maker of phrases, and said that, if he were talking of compasses, it was very clear that he had lost his: and they gave themselves the pleasure of indulging in a little friendly contempt at his expense. In their eyes an artist was a shirker who contrived to work as little and as agreeably as possible.

He replied that he worked as hard as they did, harder even, and that he was not nearly so afraid of work. Nothing disgusted him so much as sabotage, the deliberate bungling of work, and skulking raised to the level of a principle.

"All these wretched people," he would say, "afraid for their own skins!... Good Lord! I've never stopped working since I was eight. You people don't love your work; at heart you're just common men.... If only you were capable of destroying the Old World! But you can't do it. You don't even want to. No, you don't even want to. It is all very well for you to go about shrieking menace and pretending you're going to exterminate the human race. You have only one thought: to get the upper hand and lie snugly in the warm beds of the middle-classes. Except for a few hundred poor devils, navvies, who are always ready to break their bones or other people's bones for no particular reason,-just for fun-or for the pain, the age-old pain with which they are simply bursting, the whole lot of you think of nothing but deserting the camp and going over to the ranks of the middle-classes on the first opportunity. You become Socialists, journalists, lecturers, men of letters, deputies, Ministers.... Bah! Bah! Don't you go howling about so-and-so! You're no better. You say he is a traitor?... Good. Whose turn next? You'll all come to it. There is not one of you who can resist the bait. How could you? There is not one of you who believes in the immortality of the soul. You are just so many bellies, I tell you. Empty bellies thinking of nothing but being filled."

Thereupon they would all lose their tempers and all talk at once. And in the heat of the argument it would often happen that Christophe, whirled away by his passion, would become more revolutionary than the others. In vain did he fight against it: his intellectual pride, his complacent conception of a purely esthetic world, made for the joy of the spirit, would sink deep into the ground at the sight of injustice. Esthetic, a world in which eight men out of ten live in nakedness and want, in physical and moral wretchedness? Oh! come! A man must be an impudent creature of privilege who would dare to claim as much. An artist like Christophe, in his inmost conscience, could not but be on the side of the working-classes. What man more than the spiritual worker has to suffer from the immorality of social conditions, from the scandalously unequal partition of wealth among men? The artist dies of hunger or becomes a millionaire for no other reason than the caprice of fashion and of those who speculate on fashion. A society which suffers its best men to die or gives them extravagant rewards is a monstrous society: it must be swept and put in order. Every man, whether he works or no, has a right to a living minimum.

Every kind of work, good or mediocre, should be rewarded, not according to its real value-(who can be the infallible judge of that?)-but according to the normal legitimate needs of the worker. Society can and should assure the artist, the scientist, and the inventor an income sufficient to guarantee that they have the means and the time yet further to grace and honor it. Nothing more. The Gioconda is not worth a million. There is no relation between a sum of money and a work of art: a work of art is neither above nor below money: it is outside it. It is not a question of payment: it is a question of allowing the artist to live. Give him enough to feed him, and allow him to work in peace. It is absurd and horrible to try to make him a robber of another's property. This thing must be put bluntly: every man who has more than is necessary for his livelihood and that of his family, and for the normal development of his intelligence, is a thief and a robber. If he has too much, it means that others have too little. How often have we smiled sadly to hear tell of the inexhaustible wealth of France, and the number of great fortunes, we workers, and toilers, and intellectuals, and men and women who from our very birth have been given up to the wearying task of keeping ourselves from dying of hunger, often struggling in vain, often seeing the very best of us succumbing to the pain of it all,-we who are the moral and intellectual treasure of the nation! You who have more than your share of the wealth of the world are rich at the cost of our suffering and our poverty. That troubles you not at all: you have sophistries and to spare to reassure you: the sacred rights of property, the fair struggle for life, the supreme interests of that Moloch, the State and Progress, that fabulous monster, that problematical Better to which men sacrifice the Good,-the Good of other men.-But for all that, the fact remains, and all your sophistries will never manage to deny it: "You have too much to live on. We have not enough. And we are as good as you. And some of us are better than the whole lot of you put together."

* * * * *

So Christophe was affected by the intoxication of the passions with which he was surrounded. Then he was astonished at his own bursts of eloquence. But he did not attach any importance to them. He was amused by such easily roused excitement, which he attributed to the bottle. His only regret was that the wine was not better, and he would belaud the wines of the Rhine. He still thought that he was detached from revolutionary ideas. But there arose the singular phenomenon that Christophe brought into the discussion, if not the upholding of them, a steadily increasing passion, while that of his companions seemed in comparison to diminish.

As a matter of fact, they had fewer illusions than he. Even the most violent leaders, the men who were most feared by the middle-classes, were at heart uncertain and horribly middle-class. Coquard, with his laugh like a stallion's neigh, shouted at the top of his voice and made terrifying gestures: but he only half believed what he was saying: it was all for the pleasure of talking, giving orders, being active: he was a braggart of violence. He knew the cowardice of the middle-classes through and through, and he loved terrorizing them by showing that he was stronger than they: he was quite ready to admit as much to Christophe, and to laugh over it. Graillot criticized everything, and everything anybody tried to do: he made every plan come to nothing. Joussier was for ever affirming, for he was unwilling ever to be in the wrong. He would be perfectly aware of the inherent weakness of his line of argument, but that would make him only the more obstinate in sticking to it: he would have sacrificed the victory of his cause to his pride of principle. But he would rush from extremes of bullet-headed faith to extremes of ironical pessimism, when he would bitterly condemn the lie of all systems of ideas and the futility of all efforts.

The majority of the working-classes were just the same. They would suddenly relapse from the intoxication of words into the depths of discouragement. They had immense illusions: but they were based upon nothing: they had not won them in pain or forged them for themselves: they had received them ready-made, by that law of the smallest effort which led them for their amusements to the slaughter-house and the blatant show. They suffered from an incurable indolence of mind for which there were only too many excuses: they were like weary beasts asking only to be suffered to lie down and in peace to ruminate over their end and their dreams. But once they had slept off their dreams there was nothing left but an even greater weariness and the doleful dumps. They were for ever flaring up to a new leader: and very soon they became suspicious of him and spurned him. The sad part of it all was that they were never wrong: one after another their leaders were dazzled by the bait of wealth, success, or vanity: for one Joussier, who was kept from temptation by the consumption under which he was wasting away, a brave crumbling to death, how many leaders were there who betrayed the people or grew weary of the fight! They were victims of the secret sore which was devouring the politicians of every party in those days: demoralization through women and money, women and money,-(the two scourges are one and the same).-In the Government as in the ministry there were men of first-rate talent, men who had in them the stuff of which great statesmen are made-(they, might have been great statesmen in the days of Richelieu, perhaps);-but they lacked faith and character: the need, the habit, the weariness of pleasure, had sapped them: when they were engaged upon vast schemes they fumbled into incoherent action, or they would suddenly fling up the whole thing, while important business was in progress, desert their country or their cause for rest and pleasure. They were brave enough to meet death in battle: but very few of the leaders were capable of dying in harness, at their posts, never budging, with their hands upon the rudder and their eyes unswervingly fixed upon the invisible goal.

The revolution was hamstrung by the consciousness of the fundamental weakness. The leaders of the working-classes spent part of their time in blaming each other. Their strikes always failed as a result of the perpetual dissensions between the leaders and the trades-unions, between the reformers and the revolutionaries-and of the profound timidity that underlay their blustering threats-and of the inherited sheepishness that made the rebels creep once more beneath the yoke upon the first legal sentence,-and of the cowardly egoism and the baseness of those who profited by the revolt of others to creep a little nearer the masters, to curry favor and win a rich reward for their disinterested devotion. Not to speak of the disorder inherent in all crowds, the anarchy of the people. They tried hard to create corporate strikes which should assume a revolutionary character: but they were not willing to be treated as revolutionaries. They had no liking for bayonets. They fancied that it was possible to make an omelette without eggs. In any case, they preferred the eggs to be broken by other people.

Olivier watched, observed, and was not surprised. From the very outset he had recognized the great inferiority of these men to the work which they were supposed to be accomplishing: but he had also recognized the inevitable force that swept them on: and he saw that Christophe, unknown to himself, was being carried on by the stream. But the current would have nothing to do with himself, who would have asked nothing better than to let himself be carried away.

It was a strong current: it was sweeping along an enormous mass of passions, interest, and faith, all jostling, pushing, merging into each other, boiling and frothing and eddying this way and that. The leaders were in the van; they were the least free of all, for they were pushed forward, and perhaps they had the least faith of all: there had been a time when they believed: they were like the priests against whom they had so loudly railed, imprisoned by their vows, by the faith they once had had, and were forced to profess to the bitter end. Behind them the common herd was brutal, vacillating, and short-sighted. The great majority had a sort of random faith, because the current had now set in the direction of Utopia: but a little while, and they would cease to believe because the current had changed. Many believed from a need of action, a desire for adventure, from romantic folly. Others believed from a sort of impertinent logic, which was stripped of all common sense. Some believed from goodness of heart. The self-seeking only made use of ideas as weapons for the fight: their eye was for the main chance: they were fighting for a definite sum as wages for a definite number of hours' work. The worst of all were nursing a secret hope of wreaking a brutal revenge for the wretched lives they had led.

But the current which bore them all along was wiser than they: it knew where it was going. What did it matter that at any moment it might dash up against the dyke of the Old World! Olivier foresaw that a social revolution in these days would be squashed. But he knew also that revolution would achieve its end through defeat as well as through victory: for the oppressors only accede to the demands of the oppressed when the oppressed inspire them with fear. And so the violence of the revolutionaries was of no less service to their cause than the justice of that cause. Both violence and justice were part and parcel of the plan of that blind and certain force which moves the herd of human kind....

"For consider what you are, you whom the Master has summoned. If the body be considered there are not many among you who are wise, or strong, or noble. But He has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and He has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the strong: and He has chosen the vile things of the world and the despised things, and the things that are not, to the destruction of those things that are...."

And yet, whatever may be the Master who orders all things,-(Reason or Unreason),-and although the social organization prepared by syndicalism might constitute a certain comparative stage in progress for the future, Olivier did not think it worth while for Christophe and himself to scatter the whole of their power of illusion and sacrifice in this earthy combat which would open no new world. His mystic hopes of the revolution were dashed to the ground. The people seemed to him no better and hardly any more sincere than the other classes: there was not enough difference between them and others. In the midst of the torrent of interests and muddy passions, Olivier's gaze and heart were attracted by the little islands of independent spirits, the little groups of true believers who emerged here and there like flowers on the face of the waters. In vain do the elect seek to mingle with the mob: the elect always come together,-the elect of all classes and all parties,-the bearers of the fire of the world. And it is their sacred duty to see to it that the fire in their hands shall never die down.

Olivier had already made his choice.

A few houses away from that in which he lived was a cobbler's booth, standing a little below the level of the street,-a few planks nailed together, with dirty windows and panes of paper. It was entered by three steps down, and you had to stoop to stand up in it. There was just room for a shelf of old shoes, and two stools. All day long, in accordance with the classic tradition of cobbling, the master of the place could be heard singing. He used to whistle, drum on the soles of the boots, and in a husky voice roar out coarse ditties and revolutionary songs, or chaff the women of the neighborhood as they passed by. A magpie with a broken wing, which was always hopping about on the pavement, used to come from a porter's lodge and pay him a visit. It would stand on the first step at the entrance to the booth and look at the cobbler. He would stop for a moment to crack a dirty joke with the bird in a piping voice, or he would insist on whistling the Internationale. The bird would stand with its beak in the air, listening gravely: every now and then it would bob with its beak down by way of salutation, and it would awkwardly flap its wings in order to regain its balance: then it would suddenly turn round, leaving the cobbler in the middle of a sentence, and fly away with its wing and a bit on to the back of a bench, from whence it would hurl defiance at the dogs of the quarter. Then the cobbler would return to his leather, and the flight of his auditor would by no means restrain him from going through with his harangue.

He was fifty-six, with a jovial wayward manner, little merry eyes under enormous eyebrows, with a bald top to his head rising like an egg out of the nest of his hair, hairy ears, a black gap-toothed mouth that gaped like a well when he roared with laughter, a very thick dirty beard, at which he used to pluck in handfuls with his long nails that were always filthy with wax. He was known in the district as Daddy Feuillet, or Feuillette, or Daddy la Feuillette-and to tease him they used to call him La Fayette: for politically the old fellow was one of the reds: as a young man he had been mixed up in the Commune, sentenced to death, and finally deported: he was proud of his memories, and was always rancorously inclined to lump together Badinguet, Galliffet, and Foutriquet. He was a regular attendant at the revolutionary meetings, and an ardent admirer of Coquard and the vengeful idea that he was always prophesying with much beard-wagging and a voice of thunder. He never missed one of his speeches, drank in his words, laughed at his jokes with head thrown back and gaping mouth, foamed at his invective, and rejoiced in the fight and the promised paradise. Next day, in his booth, he would read over the newspaper report of the speeches: he would read them aloud to himself and his apprentice: and to taste their full sweetness he would have them read aloud to him, and used to box his apprentice's ears if he skipped a line. As a consequence he was not always very punctual in the delivery of his work when he had promised it: on the other hand, his work was always sound: it might wear out the user's feet, but there was no wearing out his leather....

The old fellow had in his shop a grandson of thirteen, a hunchback, a sickly, rickety boy, who used to run his errands, and was a sort of apprentice. The boy's mother had left her family when she was seventeen to elope with a worthless fellow who had sunk into hooliganism, and before very long had been caught, sentenced, and so disappeared from the scene. She was left alone with the child, deserted by her family, and devoted herself to the upbringing of the boy Emmanuel. She had transferred to him all the love and hatred she had had for her lover. She was a woman of a violent and jealous character, morbid to a degree. She loved her child to distraction, brutally ill-treated him, and, when he was ill, was crazed with despair. When she was in a bad temper she would send him to bed without any dinner, without so much as a piece of bread. When she was dragging him along through the streets, if he grew tired and would not go on and slipped down to the ground, she would kick him on to his feet again. She was amazingly incoherent in her use of words, and she used to pass swiftly from tears to a hysterical mood of gaiety. She died. The cobbler took the boy, who was then six years old. He loved him dearly: but he had his own way of showing it, which consisted in bullying the boy, battering him with a large assortment of insulting names, pulling his ears, and clouting him over the head from morning to night by way of teaching him his job: and at the same time he grounded him thoroughly in his own social and anti-clerical catechism.

Emmanuel knew that his grandfather was not a bad man: but he was always prepared to raise his arm to ward off his blows: the old fellow used to frighten him, especially on the evenings when he got drunk. For Daddy la Feuillette had not come by his nickname for nothing: he used to get tipsy twice or thrice a month: then he used to talk all over the place, and laugh, and act the swell, and always in the end he used to give the boy a good thrashing. His bark was worse than his bite. But the boy was terrified: his ill-health made him more sensitive than other children: he was precociously intelligent, and he had inherited a fierce and unbalanced capacity for feeling from his mother. He was overwhelmed by his grandfather's brutality, and also by his revolutionary harangues,-(for the two things went together: it was particularly when the old man was drunk that he was inclined to hold forth).-His whole being quivered in response to outside impressions, just as the booth shook with the passing of the heavy omnibuses. In his crazy imagination there were mingled, like the humming vibrations of a belfry, his day-to-day sensations, the wretchedness of his childhood, his deplorable memories of premature experience, stories of the Commune, scraps of evening lectures and newspaper feuilletons, speeches at meetings, and the vague, uneasy, and violent sexual instincts which his parents had transmitted to him. All these things together formed a monstrous grim dream-world, from the dense night, the chaos and miasma of which there darted dazzling rays of hope.

The cobbler used sometimes to drag his apprentice with him to Amélie's restaurant. There it was that Olivier noticed the little hunchback with the voice of a lark. Sitting and never talking to the workpeople, he had had plenty of time to study the boy's sickly face, with its jutting brow and shy, humiliated expression: he had heard the coarse jokes that had been thrown at the boy, jokes which were met with silence and a faint shuddering tremor. During certain revolutionary utterances he had seen the boy's soft brown eyes light up with the chimerical ecstasy of the future happiness,-a happiness which, even if he were ever to realize it, would make but small difference in his stunted life. At such moments his expression would illuminate his ugly face in such a way as to make its ugliness forgotten. Even the fair Berthe was struck by it; one day she told him of it, and, without a word of warning, kissed him on the lips. The boy started back: he went pale and shuddering, and flung away in disgust. The young woman had no time to notice him: she was already quarreling with Joussier. Only Olivier observed Emmanuel's uneasiness: he followed the boy with his eyes, and saw him withdraw into the shadow with his hands trembling, head down, looking down at the floor, and darting glances of desire and irritation at the girl. Olivier went up to him, spoke to him gently and politely and soothed him.... Who can tell all that gentleness can bring to a heart deprived of all consideration? It is like a drop of water falling upon parched earth, greedily to be sucked up. It needed only a few words, a smile, for the boy Emmanuel in his heart of hearts to surrender to Olivier, and to determine to have Olivier for his friend. Thereafter, when he met him in the street and discovered that they were neighbors, it seemed to him to be a mysterious sign from Fate that he had not been mistaken. He used to watch for Olivier to pass the booth, and say good-day to him: and if ever Olivier were thinking of other things and did not glance in his direction, then Emmanuel would be hurt and sore.

It was a great day for him when Olivier came into Daddy Feuillette's shop to leave an order. When the work was done Emmanuel took it to Olivier's rooms; he had watched for him to come home so as to be sure of finding him in. Olivier was lost in thought, hardly noticed him, paid the bill, and said nothing: the boy seemed to wait, looked from right to left, and began reluctantly to move away. Olivier, in his kindness, guessed what was happening inside the boy: he smiled and tried to talk to him in spite of the awkwardness he always felt in talking to any of the people. But now he was able to find words simple and direct. An intuitive perception of suffering made him see in the boy-(rather too simply)-a little bird wounded by life, like himself, seeking consolation with his head under his wing, sadly huddled up on his perch, dreaming of wild flights into the light. A feeling that was something akin to instinctive confidence brought the boy closer to him: he felt the attraction of the silent soul, which made no moan and used no harsh words, a soul wherein he could take shelter from the brutality of the streets; and the room, thronged with books, filled with bookcases wherein there slumbered the dreams of the ages, filled him with an almost religious awe. He made no attempt to evade Olivier's questions: he replied readily, with sudden gasps and starts of shyness and pride: but he had no power of expression. Carefully, patiently, Olivier unswathed his obscure stammering soul: little by little he was able to read his hopes and his absurdly touching faith in the new birth of the world. He had no desire to laugh, though he knew that the dream was impossible, and would never change human nature. The Christians also have dreamed of impossible things, and they have not changed human nature. From the time of Pericles to the time of M. Fallières when has there been any moral progress?... But all faith is beautiful: and when the light of an old faith dies down it is meet to salute the kindling of the new: there will never be too many. With a curious tenderness Olivier saw the uncertain light gleaming in the boy's mind. What a strange mind it was!... Olivier was not altogether able to follow the movement of his thoughts, which were incapable of any sustained effort of reason, progressing in hops and jerks, and lagging behind in conversation, unable to follow, clutching in some strange way at an image called up by a word spoken some time before, then suddenly catching up, rushing ahead, weaving a commonplace thought or an ordinary cautious phrase into an enchanted world, a crazy and heroic creed. The boy's soul, slumbering and waking by fits and starts, had a puerile and mighty need of optimism: to every idea in art or science thrown out to it, it would add some complacently melodramatic tag, which would link it up with and satisfy its own chimerical dreams.

As an experiment Olivier tried reading aloud to the boy on Sundays. He thought that he was most likely to be interested by realistic and familiar stories: he read him Tolstoy's Memories of Childhood. They made no impression on the boy: he said:

"That's quite all right. Things are like that. One knows that."

And he could not understand why anybody should take so much trouble to write about real things....

"He's just a boy," he would say disdainfully, "just an ordinary little boy."

He was no more responsive to the interest of history: and science bored him: it was to him no more than a tiresome introduction to a fairy-tale: the invisible forces brought into the service of man were like terrible genii laid low. What was the use of so much explanation? When a man finds something it is no good his telling how he found it, he need only tell what it is that he has found. The analysis of thought is a luxury of the upper-classes. The souls of the people demand synthesis, ideas ready-made, well or ill, or rather ill-made than well, but all tending to action, and composed of the gross realities of life, and charged with electricity. Of all the literature open to Emmanuel that which most nearly touched him was the epic pathos of certain passages in Hugo and the fuliginous rhetoric of the revolutionary orators, whom he did not rightly understand, characters who no more understood themselves than Hugo did. To him as to them the world was not an incoherent collection of reasons or facts, but an infinite space, steeped in darkness and quivering with light, while through the night there passed the beating of mighty wings all bathed in the sunlight. Olivier tried in vain to make him grasp his cultivated logic. The boy's rebellious and weary soul slipped through his fingers: and it sank back with a sigh of comfort and relief into the indeterminate haze and the chafing of its own sensation and hallucinations, like a woman in love giving herself with eyes closed to her lover.

Olivier was at once attracted and disconcerted by the qualities in the child so much akin to his own:-loneliness, proud weakness, idealistic ardor,-and so very different,-the unbalanced mind, the blind and unbridled desires, the savage sensuality which had no idea of good and evil, as they are defined in ordinary morality. He had only a partial glimpse of that sensuality which would have terrified him had he known its full extent. He never dreamed of the existence of the world of uneasy passions stirring and seething in the heart and mind of his little friend. Our bourgeois atavism has given us too much wisdom. We dare not even look within ourselves. If we were to tell a hundredth part of the dreams that come to an ordinary honest man, or of the desires which come into being in the body of a chaste woman, there would be a scandal and an outcry. Silence such monsters! Bolt and bar their cage! But let us admit that they exist, and that in the souls of the young they are insecurely fettered.-The boy had all the erotic desires and dreams which we agree among ourselves to regard as perverse: they would suddenly rise up unawares and take him by the throat: they would come in gusts and squalls: and they only gained in intensity and heat through the irritation set up by the isolation to which his ugliness condemned him. Olivier knew nothing of all this. Emmanuel was ashamed in his presence. He felt the contagion of such peace and purity. The example of such a life was a taming influence upon him. The boy felt a passionate love for Olivier. And his suppressed passions rushed headlong into tumultuous dreams of human happiness, social brotherhood, fantastic aviation, wild barbaric poetry-a whole heroic, erotic, childish, splendid, vulgar world in which his intelligence and his will were tossed hither and thither in mental loafing and fever.

He did not have much time for indulging himself in this way, especially in his grandfather's booth, for the old man was never silent for a minute on end, but was always whistling, hammering, and talking from morning to night; but there is always room for dreams. How many voyages of the mind one can make standing up with wide-open eyes in the space of a second!-Manual labor is fairly well suited to intermittent thought. The working-man's mind would be hard put to it without an effort of the will to follow a closely reasoned chain of argument: if he does manage to do so he is always certain to miss a link here and there: but in the intervals of rhythmic movement ideas crop up and mental images come floating to the surface: the regular movements of the body send them flying upwards like sparks under the smith's bellows. The thought of the people! It is just smoke and fire, a shower of glittering sparks fading away, glowing, then fading away once more! But sometimes a spark will be carried away by the wind to set fire to the dried forests and the fat ricks of the upper-classes....

Olivier procured Emmanuel a place in a printing house. It was the boy's wish, and his grandfather did not oppose it; he was glad to see his grandson better educated than himself, and he had a great respect for printer's ink. In his new trade the boy found his work more exhausting than in the old: but he felt more free to think among the throng of workers than in the little shop where he used to sit alone with his grandfather.

The best time of day was the dinner hour. He would escape and get right away from the horde of artisans crowding round the little tables on the pavement and into the wineshops of the district, and limp along to the square hard by: and there he would sit astride a bench under a spreading chestnut-tree, near a bronze dancing faun with grapes in his hands, and untie his brown-paper parcel of bread and meat, and munch it slowly, surrounded by a little crowd of sparrows. Over the green turf little fountains spread the trickling web of their soft rain. Round-eyed, slate-blue pigeons cooed in a sunlit tree. And all about him was the perpetual hum of Paris, the roar of the carriages, the surging sea of footsteps, the familiar street-cries, the gay distant whistle of a china-mender, a navvy's hammer ringing out on the cobblestones, the noble music of a fountain-all the fevered golden trappings of the Parisian dream.-And the little hunchback, sitting astride his bench, with his mouth full, never troubling to swallow, would drowse off into a delicious torpor, in which he lost all consciousness of his twisted spine and his craven soul, and was all steeped in an indeterminate intoxicating happiness.

"... Soft warm light, sun of justice that art to shine for us to-morrow, art thou not shining now? It is all so good, so beautiful! We are rich, we are strong, we are hale, we love ... I love, I love all men, all men love me.... Ah! How splendid it all is! How splendid it will be to-morrow!..."

* * * * *

The factory hooters would sound: the boy would come to his senses, swallow down his mouthful, take a long drink at the Wallace fountain near by, slip back into his hunchbacked shell, and go limping and hobbling back to his place in the printing works in front of the cases of magic letters which would one day write the Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, of the Revolution.

Daddy Feuillet had a crony, Trouillot, the stationer on the other side of the street. He kept a stationery and haberdashery shop, in the windows of which were displayed pink and green bonbons in green bottles, and pasteboard dolls without arms or legs. Prom either side of the street, one standing on his doorstep, the other in his shop, the two old men used to exchange winks and nods and a whole elaborate code of pantomimic gesture. At intervals, when the cobbler was tired of hammering, and had, as he used to say, the cramp in his buttocks, they would hail each other, La Feuillette in his shrill treble, Trouillot with a muffled roar, like a husky calf; and they would go off together and take a nip at a neighboring bar. They were never in any hurry to return. They were both infernally loquacious. They had known each other for half a century. The stationer also had played a little walking-on part in the great melodrama of 1871. To see the fat placid creature with his black cap on his head and his white blouse, and his gray, heavy-dragoon mustache, and his dull light-blue bloodshot eyes with heavy pouches under the lids, and his flabby shining cheeks, always in a perspiration, slow-footed, gouty, out of breath, heavy of speech, no one would ever have thought it. But he had lost none of the illusions of the old days. He had spent some years as a refugee in Switzerland, where he had met comrades of all nations, notably many Russians, who had initiated him in the beauties of anarchic brotherhood. On that point he disagreed with La Feuillette, who was a proper Frenchman, an adherent of the strong line and of absolutism in freedom. For the rest, they were equally firm in their belief in the social revolution and the working-class salente of the future. Each was devoted to a leader in whose person he saw incarnate the ideal man that each would have liked to be. Trouillot was for Joussier, La Feuillette for Coquard. They used to engage in interminable arguments about the points on which they were divided, being quite confident that the thoughts upon which they agreed were definitely decided;-(and they were so sure of their common ground that they were never very far from believing, in their cups, that it was a matter of hard fact).-The cobbler was the more argumentative of the two. He believed as a matter of reason: or at least he flattered himself that he did, for, Heaven knows, his reason was of a very peculiar kind, and could have fitted the foot of no other man. However, though he was less skilled in argument than in cobbling, he was always insisting that other minds should be shod to his own measure. The stationer was more indolent and less combative, and never worried about proving his faith. A man only tries to prove what he doubts himself. He had no doubt. His unfailing optimism always made him see things as he wanted to see them, and not see things or forget them immediately when they were otherwise. Whether he did so wilfully or from apathy he saved himself from trouble of any sort: experience to the contrary slipped off his hide without leaving a mark.-The two of them were romantic babies with no sense of reality, and the revolution, the mere sound of the name of which was enough to make them drunk, was only a jolly story they told themselves, and never knew whether it would ever happen, or whether it had actually happened. And the two of them firmly believed in the God of Humanity merely by the transposition of the habits they had inherited from their forbears, who for centuries had bowed before the Son of Man.-It goes without saying that both men were anti-clerical.

The amusing part of it was that the honest stationer lived with a very pious niece who did just what she liked with him. She was a very dark little woman, plump, with sharp eyes and a gift of volubility spiced with a strong Marseilles accent, and she was the widow of a clerk in the Department of Commerce. When she was left alone with no money, with a little girl, and received a home with her uncle, the common little creature gave herself airs, and was more than a little inclined to think that she was doing her shop-keeping relation a great favor by serving in his shop: she reigned there with the airs of a fallen queen, though, fortunately for her uncle's business and his customers, her arrogance was tempered by her natural exuberance and her need of talking. As befitted a person of her distinction, Madame Alexandrine was royalist and clerical, and she used to parade her feelings with a zeal that was all the more indiscreet as she took a malicious delight in teasing the old miscreant in whose house she had taken up her abode. She had set herself up as mistress of the house, and regarded herself as responsible for the conscience of the whole household: if she was unable to convert her uncle-(she had vowed to capture him in extremis),-she busied herself to her heart's content with sprinkling the devil with holy water. She fixed pictures of Our Lady of Lourdes and Saint Anthony of Padua on the walls: she decorated the mantelpiece with little painted images in glass cases: and in the proper season she made a little chapel of the months of Mary with little blue candles in her daughter's bedroom. It was impossible to tell which was the predominant factor in her aggressive piety, real affection for the uncle she desired to convert or a wicked joy in worrying the old man.

He put up with it apathetically and sleepily: he preferred not to run the risk of rousing the tempestuous ire of his terrible niece: it was impossible to fight against such a wagging tongue: he desired peace above all things. Only once did he lose his temper, and that was when a little Saint Joseph made a surreptitious attempt to creep into his room and take up his stand above his bed: on this point he gained the day: for he came very near to having an apoplectic fit, and his niece was frightened: she did not try the experiment again. For the rest he gave in, and pretended not to see: the odor of sanctity made him feel very uncomfortable: but he tried not to think of it. On the other hand they were at one in pampering the girl, little Reine, or Rainette.

She was twelve or thirteen, and was always ill. For some months past she had been on her back with hip disease, with the whole of one side of her body done up in plaster of Paris like a little Daphne in her shell. She had eyes like a hurt dog's, and her skin was pallid and pale like a plant grown out of the sun: her head was too big for her body, and her fair hair, which was very soft and very tightly drawn back, made it appear even bigger: but she had an expressive and sweet face, a sharp little nose, and a childlike expression. The mother's piety had assumed in the child, in her sickness and lack of interest, a fervid character. She used to spend hours in telling her beads, a string of corals, blessed by the Pope: and she would break off in her prayers to kiss it passionately. She did next to nothing all day long: needlework made her tired: Madame Alexandrine had not given her a taste for it. She did little more than read a few insipid tracts, or a stupid miraculous story, the pretentious and bald style of which seemed to her the very flower of poetry,-or the criminal reports illustrated in color in the Sunday papers which her stupid mother used to give her. She would perhaps do a little crochet-work, moving her lips, and paying less attention to her needle than to the conversation she would hold with some favorite saint or even with God Himself. For it is useless to pretend that it is necessary to be Joan of Are to have such visitations: every one of us has had them. Only, as a rule, our celestial visitors leave the talking to us as we sit by the fireside: and they say never a word. Rainette never dreamed of taking exception to it: silence gives consent. Besides, she had so much to tell them that she hardly gave them time to reply: she used to answer for them. She was a silent chatterer: she had inherited her mother's volubility: but her fluency was drawn off in inward speeches like a stream disappearing underground.-Of course she was a party to the conspiracy against her uncle with the object of procuring his conversion: she rejoiced over every inch of the house wrested by the spirit of light from the spirit of darkness: and on more than one occasion she had sewn a holy medallion on to the inside of the lining of the old man's coat or had slipped into one of his pockets the bead of a rosary, which her uncle, in order to please her, had pretended not to notice.-This seizure by the two pious women of the bitter foe of the priests was a source of indignation and joy to the cobbler. He had an inexhaustible store of coarse pleasantries on the subject of women who wear breeches: and he used to jeer at his friend for letting himself be under their thumb. As a matter of fact he had no right to scoff: for he had himself been afflicted for twenty years with a shrewish cross-grained wife, who had always regarded him as an old scamp and had taken him down a peg or two. But he was always careful not to mention her. The stationer was a little ashamed, and used to defend himself feebly, and in a mealy voice profess a Kropotkinesque gospel of tolerance.

Rainette and Emmanuel were friends. They had seen each other every day ever since they were children. To be quite accurate, Emmanuel only rarely ventured to enter the house. Madame Alexandrine used to regard him with an unfavorable eye as the grandson of an unbeliever and a horrid little dwarf. But Rainette used to spend the day on a sofa near the window on the ground floor. Emmanuel used to tap at the window as he passed, and, flattening his nose against the panes, he would make a face by way of greeting. In summer, when the window was left open, he would stop and lean his arms on the windowsill, which was a little high for him;-(he fancied that this attitude was flattering to himself and that, his shoulders being shrugged up in such a pose of intimacy, it might serve to disguise his actual deformity);-and they would talk. Rainette did not have too many visitors, and she never noticed that Emmanuel was hunchbacked. Emmanuel, who was afraid and mortified in the presence of girls, made an exception in favor of Rainette. The little invalid, who was half petrified, was to him something intangible and far removed, something almost outside existence. Only on the evening when the fair Berthe kissed him on the lips, and the next day too, he avoided Rainette with an instinctive feeling of repulsion: he passed the house without stopping and hung his head: and he prowled about far away, fearfully and suspiciously, like a pariah dog. Then he returned. There was so little woman in her! As he was passing on his way home from the works, trying to make himself as small as possible among the bookbinders in their long working-blouses like nightgowns-busy merry young women whose hungry eyes stripped him as he passed,-how eagerly he would scamper away to Rainette's window! He was grateful for his little friend's infirmity: with her he could give himself airs of superiority and even be a little patronizing. With a little swagger he would tell her about the things that happened in the street and always put himself in the foreground. Sometimes in gallant mood he would bring Rainette a little present, roast chestnuts in winter, a handful of cherries in summer. And she used to give him some of the multi-colored sweets that filled the two glass jars in the shop-window: and they would pore over picture postcards together. Those were happy moments: they could both forget the pitiful bodies in which their childish souls were held captive.

But sometimes they would begin to talk, like their elders, of politics and religion. Then they would become as stupid as their elders. It put an end to their sympathy and understanding. She would talk of miracles and the nine days' devotion, or of pious images tricked out with paper lace, and of days of indulgence. He used to tell her that it was all folly and mummery, as he had heard his grandfather say. But when he in turn tried to tell her about the public meetings to which the old man had taken him, and the speeches he had heard, she would stop him contemptuously and tell him that all such folk were drunken sots. Bitterness would creep into their talk. They would get talking about their relations: they would recount the insulting things that her mother and his grandfather had said of each other respectively. Then they would talk about themselves. They tried to say disagreeable things to each other. They managed that without much difficulty. They indulged in coarse gibes. But she was always the more malicious of the two. Then he would go away: and when he returned he would tell her that he had been with other girls, and how pretty they were, and how they had joked and laughed, and how they were going to meet again next Sunday. She would say nothing to that: she used to pretend to despise what he said: and then, suddenly, she would grow angry, and throw her crochet-work at his head, and shout at him to go, and declare that she loathed him: and she would hide her face in her hands. He would leave her on that, not at all proud of his victory. He longed to pull her thin little hands away from her face and to tell her that it was not true. But his pride would not suffer him to return.

One day Rainette had her revenge.-He was with some of the other boys at the works. They did not like him because he used to hold as much aloof from them as possible and never spoke, or talked too well, in a na?vely pretentious way, like a book, or rather like a newspaper article-(he was stuffed with newspaper articles).-That day they had begun to talk of the revolution and the days to come. He waxed enthusiastic and made a fool of himself. One of his comrades brought him up sharp with these brutal words:

"To begin with, you won't be wanted, you're too ugly. In the society of the future, there won't be any hunchbacks. They'll be drowned at birth."

That brought him toppling down from his lofty eloquence. He stopped short, dumfounded. The others roared with laughter. All that afternoon he went about with clenched teeth. In the evening he was going home, hurrying back to hide away in a corner alone with his suffering. Olivier met him: he was struck by his downcast expression: he guessed that he was suffering.

"You are hurt. Why?"

Emmanuel refused to answer. Olivier pressed him kindly. The boy persisted in his silence: but his jaw trembled as though he were on the point of weeping. Olivier took his arm and led him back to his rooms. Although he too had the cruel and instinctive feeling of repulsion from ugliness and disease that is in all who are not born with the souls of sisters of charity, he did not let it appear.

"Some one has hurt you?"

"Yes."

"What did they do?"

The boy laid bare his heart. He said that he was ugly. He said that his comrades had told him that their revolution was not for him.

"It is not for them, either, my boy, nor for us. It is not a single day's affair. It is all for those who will come after us."

The boy was taken aback by the thought that it would be so long deferred.

"Don't you like to think that people are working to give happiness to thousands of boys like yourself, to millions of human beings?"

Emmanuel sighed and said:

"But it would be good to have a little happiness oneself."

"My dear boy, you mustn't be ungrateful. You live in the most beautiful city, in an age that is most rich in marvels; you are not a fool, and you have eyes to see. Think of all the things there are to be seen and loved all around you."

He pointed out a few things.

The boy listened, nodded his head, and said:

"Yes, but I've got to face the fact that I shall always have to live in this body of mine!"

"Not at all. You will quit it."

"And that will be the end."

"How do you know that?"

The boy was aghast. Materialism was part and parcel of his grandfather's creed: he thought that it was only the priest-ridden prigs who believed in an eternal life. He knew that his friend was not such a one: and he wondered if Olivier could be speaking seriously. But Olivier held his hand and expounded at length his idealistic faith, and the unity of boundless life, that has neither beginning nor end, in which all the millions of creatures and all the million million moments of time are but rays of the sun, the sole source of it all. But he did not put it to him in such an abstract form. Instinctively, when he talked to the boy, he adapted himself to his mode of thought;-ancient legends, the material and profound fancies of old cosmogonies were called to mind: half in fun, half in earnest, he spoke of metempsychosis and the succession of countless forms through which the soul passes and flows, like a spring passing from pool to pool. All this was interspersed with reminiscences of Christianity and images taken from the summer evening, the light of which was cast upon them both. He was sitting by the open window, and the boy was standing by his side, and their hands were clasped. It was a Saturday evening. The bells were ringing. The earliest swallows, only just returned, were skimming the walls of the houses. The dim sky was smiling above the city, which was wrapped in shadow. The boy held his breath and listened to the fairy-tale his man friend was telling him. And Olivier, warmed by the eagerness of his young hearer, was caught up by the interest of his own stories.

There are decisive moments in life when, just as the electric lights suddenly flash out in the darkness of a great city, so the eternal fires flare up in the darkness of the soul. A spark darting from another soul is enough to transmit the Promethean fire to the waiting soul. On that spring evening Olivier's calm words kindled the light that never dies in the mind hidden in the boy's deformed body, as in a battered lantern. He understood none of Olivier's arguments: he hardly heard them. But the legends and images which were only beautiful stories and parables to Olivier, took living shape and form in his mind, and were most real. The fairy-tale lived, moved, and breathed all around him. And the view framed in the window of the room, the people passing in the street, rich and poor, the swallows skimming the walls, the jaded horses dragging their loads along, the stones of the houses drinking in the cool shadow of the twilight, and the pale heavens where the light was dying-all the outside world was softly imprinted on his mind, softly as a kiss. It was but the flash of a moment. Then the light died down. He thought of Rainette, and said;

"But the people who go to Mass, the people who believe in God, are all cracked, aren't they?"

Olivier smiled.

"They believe," he said, "as we do. We all believe the same thing. Only their belief is less than ours. They are people who have to shut all the shutters and light the lamp before they can see the light. They see God in the shape of a man. We have keener eyes. But the light that we love is the same."

The boy went home through the dark streets in which the gas-lamps were not yet lit. Olivier's words were ringing in his head. He thought that it was as cruel to laugh at people because they had weak eyes as because they were hunchbacked. And he thought that Rainette had very pretty eyes: and he thought that he had brought tears into them. He could not bear that. He turned and went across to the stationer's. The window was still a little open: and he thrust his head inside and called in a whisper:

"Rainette."

She did not reply.

"Rainette. I beg your pardon."

From the darkness came Rainette's voice, saying:

"Beast! I hate you."

"I'm sorry," he said.

He stopped. Then, on a sudden impulse, he said in an even softer whisper, uneasily, rather shamefacedly:

"You know, Rainette, I believe in God just as you do."

"Really?"

"Really."

He said it only out of generosity. But, as soon as he had said it, he began to believe it.

They stayed still and did not speak. They could not see each other.

Outside the night was so fair, so sweet!... The little cripple murmured:

"How good it will be when one is dead!"

He could hear Rainette's soft breathing.

He said:

"Good-night, little one."

Tenderly came Rainette's voice:

"Good-night."

He went away comforted. He was glad that Rainette had forgiven him. And, in his inmost soul, the little sufferer was not sorry to think that he had been the cause of suffering to the girl.

* * * * *

Olivier had gone into retirement once more. It was not long before Christophe rejoined him. It was very certain that their place was not with the syndicalist movement: Olivier could not throw in his lot with such people. And Christophe would not. Olivier flung away from them in the name of the weak and the oppressed; Christophe in the name of the strong and the independent. But though they had withdrawn, one to the bows, the other to the stern, they were still traveling in the vessel which was carrying the army of the working-classes and the whole of society. Free and self-confident, Christophe watched with tingling interest the coalition of the proletarians: he needed every now and then to plunge into the vat of the people: it relaxed him: he always issued from it fresher and jollier. He kept up his relation with Coquard, and he went on taking his meals from time to time at Amélie's. When he was there he lost all self-control, and would whole-heartedly indulge his fantastic humor: he was not afraid of paradox: and he took a malicious delight in pushing his companions to the extreme consequences of their absurd and wild principles. They never knew whether he was speaking in jest or in earnest: for he always grew warm as he talked, and always in the end lost sight of the paradoxical point of view with which he had begun. The artist in him was carried away by the intoxication of the rest. In one such moment of esthetic emotion in Amélie's back-shop, he improvised a revolutionary song, which was at once tried, repeated, and on the very next day spread to every group of the working-classes. He compromised himself. He was marked by the police. Manousse, who was in touch with the innermost chambers of authority, was warned by one of his friends, Xavier Bernard, a young official in the police department, who dabbled in literature and expressed a violent admiration for Christophe's music:-(for dilettantism and the spirit of anarchy had spread even to the watchdogs of the Third Republic).

"That Krafft of yours is making himself a nuisance," said Bernard to Manousse. "He's playing the braggart. We know what it means: but I tell you that those in high places would be not at all sorry to catch a foreigner-what's more, a German-in a revolutionary plot: it is the regular method of discrediting the party and casting suspicion upon its doings. If the idiot doesn't look out we shall be obliged to arrest him. It's a bore. You'd better warn him."

Manousse did warn Christophe: Olivier begged him to be careful.

Christophe did not take their advice seriously.

"Bah!" he said. "Everybody knows there's no harm in me. I've a perfect right to amuse myself. I like these people. They work as I do, and they have faith, and so have I. As a matter of fact, it isn't the same faith; we don't belong to the same camp.... Very well! We'll fight. Not that I don't like fighting. What would you? I can't do as you do, and stay curled up in my shell. I must breathe. I'm stifled by the comfortable classes."

Olivier, whose lungs were not so exacting, was quite at his ease in his small rooms with the tranquil society of his two women friends, though one of them, Madame Arnaud, had flung herself into charitable work, and the other, Cécile, was entirely taken up with looking after the baby, to such an extent that she could talk of nothing else and to nobody else, in that twittering, beatific tone which is an attempt to emulate the note of a little bird, and to mold its formless song into human speech.

His excursion into working-class circles had left him with two acquaintances. Two men of independent views, like himself. One of them, Guérin, was an upholsterer. He worked when he felt so disposed, capriciously, though he was very skilful. He loved his trade. He had a natural taste for artistic things, and had developed it by observation, work, and visits to museums. Olivier had commissioned him to repair an old piece of furniture: it was a difficult job, and the upholsterer had done it with great skill: he had taken a lot of time and trouble over it: he sent in a very modest bill to Olivier because he was so delighted with his success. Olivier became interested in him, questioned him about his life, and tried to find out what he thought of the working-class movement. Guérin had no thought about it: he never worried about it. At bottom he did not belong to the working-class, or to any class. He read very little. All his intellectual development had come about through his senses, eyes, hands, and the taste innate in the true Parisian. He was a happy man. The type is by no means rare among the working people of the lower middle-class, who are one of the most intelligent classes in the nation: for they realize a fine balance between manual labor and healthy mental activity.

Olivier's other acquaintance was a man of a more original kind. He was a postman, named Hurteloup. He was a tall, handsome creature, with bright eyes, a little fair beard and mustache, and an open, merry expression. One day he came with a registered letter, and walked into Olivier's room. While Olivier was signing the receipt, he wandered round, looking at the books, with his nose thrust close up to their backs:

"Ha! Ha!" he said. "You have the classics...."

He added:

"I collect books on history. Especially books about Burgundy."

"You are a Burgundian?" asked Olivier.

"Bourguignon salé,

L'épée au c?té,

La barbe au menton,

Sante Bourguignon,"

replied the postman with a laugh. "I come from the Avallon country. I have family papers going back to 1200 and something...."

Olivier was intrigued, and tried to find out more about him. Hurteloup asked nothing better than to be allowed to talk. He belonged, in fact, to one of the oldest families in Burgundy. One of his ancestors had been on crusade with Philippe Auguste: another had been secretary of State under Henri II. The family had begun to decay in the seventeenth century. At the time of the Revolution, ruined and despairing, they had taken the plunge into the ocean of the people. Now they were coming to the surface again as the result of honest work and the physical and moral vigor of Hurteloup the postman, and his fidelity to his race. His greatest hobby had been collecting historical and genealogical documents relating to his family and their native country. In off hours he used to go to the Archives and copy out old papers. Whenever he did not understand them he would go and ask one of the people on his beat, a Chartist or a student at the Sorbonne, to explain. His illustrious ancestry did not turn his head: he would speak of it laughingly, with never a shade of embarrassment or of indignation at the hardness of fate. His careless sturdy gaiety was a delightful thing to see. And when Olivier looked at him he thought of the mysterious ebb and flow of the life of human families, which for centuries flows burningly, for centuries disappears under the ground, and then comes bubbling forth again, having gathered fresh energy from the depths of the earth. And the people seemed to him to be an immense reservoir into which the rivers of the past plunge, while the rivers of the future spring forth again, and, though they bear a new name, are sometimes the same as those of old.

He was in sympathy with both Guérin and Hurteloup: but it is obvious that they could not be company for him: between him and them there was no great possibility of conversation. The boy Emmanuel took up more of his time: he came now almost every evening. Since their magical talk together a revolution had taken place in the boy. He had plunged into reading with a fierce desire for knowledge. He would come back from his books bewildered and stupefied. Sometimes he seemed even less intelligent than before: he would hardly speak: Olivier could only get him to answer in monosyllables: the boy would make fatuous replies to his questions. Olivier would lose heart: he would try not to let it be seen: but he thought he had made a mistake, and that the boy was thoroughly stupid. He could not see the frightful fevered travail in incubation that was going on in the inner depths of the boy's soul. Besides, he was a bad teacher, and was more fitted to sow the good seed at random in the fields than to weed the soil and plow the furrows. Christophe's presence only served to increase the difficulty. Olivier felt a certain awkwardness in showing his young protégé to his friend: he was ashamed of Emmanuel's stupidity, which was raised to alarming proportions when Jean-Christophe was in the room. Then the boy would withdraw into bashful sullenness. He hated Christophe because Olivier loved him: he could not bear any one else to have a place in his master's heart. Neither Christophe nor Olivier had any idea of the love and jealousy tugging at the boy's heart. And yet Christophe had been through it himself in old days. But he was unable to see himself in the boy who was fashioned of such different metal from that of which he himself was made. In the strange obscure combination of inherited taints, everything, love, hate, and latent genius, gave out an entirely different sound.

* * * * *

The First of May was approaching. A sinister rumor ran through Paris. The blustering leaders of the C.G.T. were doing their best to spread it. Their papers were announcing the coming of the great day, mobilizing the forces of the working-classes, and directing the word of terror upon the point in which the comfortable classes were mostly sensitive-namely, upon the stomach.... Feri ventrem.... They were threatening them with a general strike. The scared Parisians were leaving for the country or laying in provisions as against a siege. Christophe had met Canet, in his motor, carrying two hams and a sack of potatoes: he was beside himself: he did not in the least know to which party he belonged: he was in turn an old Republican, a royalist, and a revolutionary. His cult of violence was like a compass gone wrong, with the needle darting from north to south and from south to north. In public he still played the part of chorus to the wild speeches of his friends: but he would have taken in petto the first dictator who came along and swept away the red spectre.

Christophe was tickled to death by such universal cowardice. He was convinced that nothing would come of it all. Olivier was not so sure. His birth into the burgess-class had given him something of the inevitable and everlasting tremulation which the comfortable classes always feel upon the recollection or the expectation of Revolution.

"That's all right!" said Christophe. "You can sleep in peace. Your Revolution isn't going to happen to-morrow. You're all afraid. Afraid of being hurt. That sort of fear is everywhere. In the upper-classes, in the people, in every nation, in all the nations of the West. There's not enough blood in the whole lot of them: they're afraid of spilling a little. For the last forty years all the fighting has been done in words, in newspaper articles. Just look at your old Dreyfus Affair. You shouted loud enough: 'Death! Blood! Slaughter!'... Oh! you Gascons! Spittle and ink! But how many drops of blood?"

"Don't you be so sure," said Olivier. "The fear of blood is a secret instinctive feeling that on the first shedding of it the beast in man will see red, and the brute will appear again under the crust of civilization: and God knows how it will ever be muzzled! Everybody hesitates to declare war: but when the war does come it will be a frightful thing."

Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said that it was not for nothing that the heroes of the age were lying heroes, Cyrano the braggart and the swaggering cock, Chantecler.

Olivier nodded. He knew that in France bragging is the beginning of action. However, he had no more faith than Christophe in an immediate movement: it had been too loudly proclaimed, and the Government was on its guard. There was reason to believe that the syndicalist strategists would postpone the fight for a more favorable opportunity.

During the latter half of April Olivier had an attack of influenza: he used to get it every winter about the same time, and it always used to develop into his old enemy, bronchitis. Christophe stayed with him for a few days. The attack was only a slight one, and soon passed. But, as usual, it left Olivier morally and physically worn out, and he was in this condition for some time after the fever had subsided. He stayed in bed, lying still for hours without any desire to get up or even to move: he lay there watching Christophe, who was sitting at his desk, working, with his back towards him.

Christophe was absorbed in his work. Sometimes, when he was tired of writing, he would suddenly get up and walk over to the piano: he would play, not what he had written, but just whatever came into his mind. Then there came to pass a very strange thing. While the music he had written was conceived in a style which recalled that of his earlier work, what he played was like that of another man. It was music of a world raucous and uncontrolled. There were in it a disorder and a violence, and incoherence which had no resemblance at all to the powerful order and logic which were everywhere present in his other music. These unconsidered improvizations, escaping the scrutiny of his artistic conscience, sprang, like the cry of an animal, from the flesh rather than from the mind; and seemed to reveal a disturbance of the balance of his soul, a storm brewing in the depths of the future. Christophe was quite unconscious of it: but Olivier would listen, look at Christophe, and feel vaguely uneasy. In his weak condition he had a singular power of penetration, a far-seeing eye: he saw things that no other man could perceive.

Christophe thumped out a final chord and stopped all in a sweat, and looking rather haggard: he looked at Olivier, and there was still a troubled expression in his eyes; then he began to laugh, and went back to his desk. Olivier asked him:

"What was that, Christophe?"

"Nothing," replied Christophe. "I'm stirring the water to attract my fish."

"Are you going to write that?"

"That? What do you mean?"

"What you've just said."

"What did I say? I don't remember."

"What were you thinking of?"

"I don't know," said Christophe, drawing his hand across his forehead.

He went on writing. Silence once mere filled the room. Olivier went on looking at Christophe. Christophe felt that he was looking, and turned. Olivier's eyes were upon him with such a hunger of affection!

"Lazy brute!" he said gaily.

Olivier sighed.

"What's the matter?" asked Christophe.

"Oh! Christophe! To think there are so many things in you, sitting there, close at hand, treasures that you will give to others, and I shall never be able to share!..."

"Are you mad? What's come to you?"

"I wonder what your life will be. I wonder what peril and sorrow you have still to go through.... I would like to follow you. I would like to be with you.... But I shan't see anything of it all. I shall be left stuck stupidly by the wayside."

"Stupid? You are that. Do you think that I would leave you behind even if you wanted to be left?"

"You will forget me," said Olivier.

Christophe got up and went and sat on the bed by Olivier's side: he took his wrists, which were wet with a clammy sweat of weakness. His nightshirt was open at the neck, showing his weak chest, his too transparent skin, which was stretched and thin like a sail blown out by a puff of wind to rending point. Christophe's strong fingers fumbled as he buttoned the neckband of Olivier's nightshirt. Olivier suffered him.

"Dear Christophe!" he said tenderly. "Yet I have had one great happiness in my life!"

"Oh! what on earth are you thinking of?" said Christophe. "You're as well as I am."

"Yes," said Olivier.

"Then why talk nonsense?"

"I was wrong," said Olivier, ashamed and smiling. "Influenza is so depressing."

"Pull yourself together, though! Get up."

"Not now. Later on."

He stayed in bed, dreaming. Next day he got up. But he was only able to sit musing by the fireside. It was a mild and misty April. Through the soft veil of silvery mist the little green leaves were unfolding their cocoons, and invisible birds were singing the song of the hidden sun. Olivier wound the skein of his memories. He saw himself once more as a child, in the train carrying him away from his native town, through the mist, with his mother weeping. Antoinette was sitting by herself at the other end of the carriage.... Delicate shapes, fine landscapes, were drawn in his mind's eye. Lovely verses came of their own accord, with every syllable and charming rhythm in due order. He was near his desk: he had only to reach out his hand to take his pen and write down his poetic visions. But his will failed him: he was tired: he knew that the perfume of his dreams would evaporate so soon as he tried to catch and hold them. It was always so: the best of himself could never find expression: his mind was like a little valley full of flowers: but hardly a soul had access to it: and as soon as they were picked the flowers faded. No more than just a few had been able languidly to survive, a few delicate little tales, a few pieces of verse, which all gave out a fragrant, fading scent. His artistic impotence had for a long time been one of Olivier's greatest griefs. It was so hard to feel so much life in himself and to be able to save none of it!...-Now he was resigned. Flowers do not need to be seen to blossom. They are only the more beautiful in the fields where no hand can pluck them. Happy, happy fields with flowers dreaming in the sun!-Here in the little valley there was hardly any sun; but Olivier's dreams flowered all the better for it. What stories he wove for his own delight in those days, stories sad and tender and fantastic! They came he knew not whence, sailing like white clouds in a summer sky, melted into thin air, and others followed them: he was full of them. Sometimes the sky was clear: in the light of it Olivier would sit drowsily until once more, with all sail set, there would come gliding the silent ships of dreams.

In the evening the little hunchback would come in. Olivier was so full of stories that he told him one, smiling, eager and engrossed in the tale. Often he would go on talking to himself, with the boy breathing never a word. In the end he would altogether forget his presence.... Christophe arrived in the middle of the story, and was struck by its beauty, and asked Olivier to begin all over again. Olivier refused:

"I am in the same position as yourself," he said. "I don't know anything about it."

"That is not true," said Christophe. "You're a regular Frenchman, and you always know exactly what you are doing and saying. You never forget anything."

"Alas!" said Olivier.

"Begin again, then."

"I'm too tired. What's the good?"

Christophe was annoyed.

"That's all wrong," he said. "What's the good of your having ideas? You throw away what you have. It's an utter waste." "Nothing is ever lost," said Olivier.

The little hunchback started from the stillness he had maintained during Olivier's story-sitting with his face towards the window, with eyes blankly staring, and a frown on his face and a fierce expression so that it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. He got up and said:

"It will be fine to-morrow."

"I bet," said Christophe to Olivier, "that he didn't even listen."

"To-morrow, the First of May," Emmanuel went on, while his morose expression lighted up.

"That is his story," said Olivier. "You shall tell it me tomorrow."

"Nonsense!" said Christophe.

Next day Christophe called for Olivier to take him for a walk in Paris. Olivier was better: but he still had the same strange feeling of exhaustion: he did not want to go out, he had a vague fear, he did not like mixing with the crowd. His heart and mind were brave: but the flesh was weak. He was afraid of a crush, an affray, brutality of all sorts: he knew only too well that he was fated to be a victim, that he could not, even would not, defend himself: for he had as great a horror of giving pain as of suffering it himself. Men who are sick in body shudder away from physical suffering more readily than others, because they are more familiar with it, because they have less power to resist, and because it is presented more immediately and more poignantly to their heated imagination. Olivier was ashamed of this physical cowardice of his which was in entire contradiction to the stoicism of his will: and he tried hard to fight it down. But this morning the thought of human contact of any sort was painful to him, and he would gladly have remained indoors all day long. Christophe scolded him, rallied him, absolutely insisted on his going out and throwing off his stupor: for quite ten days he had not had a breath of air. Olivier pretended not to pay any attention. Christophe said:

"Very well. I'll go without you. I want to see their First of May. If I don't come back to-night, you will know that I have been locked up."

He went out. Olivier caught him up on the stairs. He would not leave

Christophe to go alone.

There were very few people in the streets. A few little work-girls wearing sprays of lily-of-the-valley. Working-people in their Sunday clothes were walking about rather listlessly. At the street corners, and near the Métro stations were groups of policemen in plain clothes. The gates of the Luxembourg were closed. The weather was still foggy and damp. It was a long, long time since the sun had shown himself!... The friends walked arm in arm. They spoke but little, but they were very glad of each other. A few words were enough to call up all their tender memories of the intimate past. They stopped in front of a mairie to look at the barometer, which had an upward tendency.

"To-morrow," said Olivier, "I shall see the sun."

They were quite near the house where Cécile lived. They thought of going in and giving the baby a hug.

"No. We can do it when we come back."

On the other side of the river they began to fall in with more people. Just ordinary peaceful people taking a walk, wearing their Sunday clothes and faces; poor people with their babies: workmen loafing. A few here and there wore the red eglantine in their buttonholes: they looked quite inoffensive: they were revolutionaries by dint of self-persuasion: they were obviously quite benevolent and optimistic at heart, well satisfied with the smallest opportunities for happiness: whether it were fine or merely passable for their holiday, they were grateful for it ... they did not know exactly to whom ... to everything and everybody about them. They walked along without any hurry, expansively admiring the new leaves of the trees and the pretty dresses of the little girls who went by: they said proudly:

"Only in Paris can you see children so well dressed as that."

Christophe made fun of the famous upheaval that had been predicted.... Such nice people!... He was quite fond of them, although a little contemptuous.

As they got farther along the crowd thickened. Men with pale hangdog faces and horrible mouths slipped into the stream of people, all on the alert, waiting for the time to pounce on their prey. The mud was stirred up. With every inch the river grew more and more turbid. Now it flowed slowly thick, opaque, and heavy. Like air-bubbles rising from the depths to the greasy surface, there came up calling voices, shrill whistles, the cries of the newsboys, piercing the dull roar of the multitude, and made it possible to take the measure of its strata. At the end of a street, near Amélie's restaurant, there was a noise like that of a mill-race. The crowd was stemmed up against several ranks of police and soldiers. In front of the obstacles a serried mass was formed, howling, whistling, singing, laughing, and eddying this way and that.... The laughter of the people is the only means they have of expressing a thousand obscure and yet deep feelings which cannot find an outlet in words!...

The multitude was not hostile. The people did not know what they wanted. Until they did know they were content to amuse themselves-after their own nervous, brutal fashion, still without malice-to amuse themselves with pushing and being pushed, insulting the police and each other. But little by little, they lost their ardor. Those who came up from behind got tired of being able to see nothing, and were the more provocative inasmuch as they ran little risk behind the shelter of the human barricade in front of them. Those in front, being crushed between those who were pushing and those who were offering resistance, grew more and more exasperated as their position became more and more intolerable: the force of the current pushing them on increased their own force an hundredfold. And all of them, as they were squeezed closer and closer together, like cattle, felt the warmth of the whole herd creeping through their breasts and their loins: and it seemed to them then that they formed a solid block: and each was all, each was a giant with the arms of Briareus. Every now and then a wave of blood would surge to the heart of the thousand-headed monster: eyes would dart hatred, murderous cries would go up. Men cowering away in the third and fourth row began to throw stones. Whole families were looking down from the windows of the houses: it was like being at the play: they excited the mob and waited with a little thrill of agonized impatience for the troops to charge.

Christophe forced his way through the dense throng with elbows and knees, like a wedge. Olivier followed him. The living mass parted for a moment to let them pass and closed again at once behind them. Christophe was in fine fettle. He had entirely forgotten that only five minutes ago he had denied the possibility of an upheaval of the people. Hardly had he set foot inside the stream than he was swept along: though he was a foreigner in this crowd of Frenchmen and a stranger to their demands, yet he was suddenly engulfed by them: little he cared what they wanted: he wanted it too: little he cared whither they were going: he was going too, drinking in the breath of their madness.

Olivier was dragged along after him, but it was no joy to him; he saw clearly, he never lost his self-consciousness, and was a thousand times more a stranger to the passions of these people who were his people than Christophe, and yet he was carried away by them like a piece of wreckage. His illness, which had weakened him, had also relaxed everything that bound him to life. How far removed he felt from these people!... Being free from the delirium that was in them and having all his wits at liberty, his mind took in the minutest details. It gave him pleasure to gaze at the bust of a girl standing in front of him and at her pretty, white neck. And at the same time he was disgusted by the sickly, thick smell that was given off from the close-packed heap of bodies.

"Christophe!" he begged.

Christophe did not hear him.

"Christophe!"

"Eh?"

"Let's go home."

"You're afraid?" said Christophe.

He pushed on. Olivier followed him with a sad smile.

A few rows in front of them, in the danger zone where the people were so huddled together as to form a solid barricade, he saw his friend the little hunchback perched on the roof of a newspaper kiosk. He was clinging with both hands, and crouching in a most uncomfortable position, and laughing as he looked over the wall of soldiers: and then he would turn again and look back at the crowd with an air of triumph. He saw Olivier and beamed at him: then once more he began to peer across the soldiers, over the square, with his eyes wide staring in hope and expectation ... of what?-Of the thing which was to come to pass.... He was not alone. There were many, many others all around him waiting for the miracle! And Olivier, looking at Christophe, saw that he too was expecting it.

He called to the boy and shouted to him to come down. Emmanuel pretended not to hear and looked away. He had seen Christophe. He was glad to be in a position of peril in the turmoil, partly to show his courage to Olivier, partly to punish him for being with Christophe.

Meanwhile they had come across some of their friends in the crowd,-Coquard, with his golden beard, who expected nothing more than a little jostling and crushing, and with the eye of an expert was watching for the moment when the vessel would overflow. Farther on they met the fair Berthe, who was slanging the people about her and getting roughly mauled. She had succeeded in wriggling through to the front row, and she was hurling insults at the police. Coquard came up to Christophe. When Christophe saw him he began to chaff him:

"What did I tell you? Nothing is going to happen."

"That remains to be seen!" said Coquard. "Don't you be too sure. It won't be long before the fun begins."

"Rot!" said Christophe.

At that very moment the cuirassiers, getting tired of having stones flung at them, marched forward to clear the entrances to the square: the central body came forward at a double. Immediately the stampede began. As the Gospel has it, the first were last. But they took good care not to be last for long. By way of covering their confusion the runaways yelled at the soldiers following them and screamed: "Assassins!" long before a single blow had been struck. Berthe wriggled through the crowd like an eel, shrieking at the top of her voice. She rejoined her friends; and taking shelter behind Coquard's broad back, she recovered her breath, pressed close up against Christophe, gripped his arm, in fear or for some other reason, ogled Olivier, and shook her fist at the enemy, and screeched. Coquard took Christophe's arm and said:

"Let's go to Amélie's,"

They had very little way to go. Berthe had preceded them with Graillot and a few workmen. Christophe was on the point of entering followed by Olivier. The street had a shelving ridge. The pavement, by the creamery, was five or six steps higher than the roadway. Olivier stopped to take a long breath after his escape from the crowd. He disliked the idea of being in the poisoned air of the restaurant and the clamorous voices of these fanatics. He said to Christopher:

"I'm going home."

"Very well, then, old fellow," said Christophe. "I'll rejoin you in an hour from now."

"Don't run any risks, Christophe!"

"Coward!" said Christophe, laughing.

He turned into the creamery.

Olivier walked along to the corner of the shop. A few steps more and he would be in a little by-street which would take him out of the uproar. The thought of his little protege crossed his mind. He turned to look for him. He saw him at the very moment when Emmanuel had slipped down from his coign of vantage and was rolling on the ground being trampled underfoot by the rabble: the fugitives were running over his body: the police were just reaching the spot. Olivier did not stop to think: he rushed down the steps and ran to his aid. A navvy saw the danger, the soldiers with drawn sabers. Olivier holding out his hand to the boy to help him up, the savage rush of the police knocked them both over. He shouted out, and in his turn rushed in. Some of his comrades followed at a run. Others rushed down from the threshold of the restaurant, and, on their cries, came those who had already entered. The two bodies of men hurled themselves at each other's throats like dogs. And the women, standing at the top of the steps, screamed and yelled.-So Olivier, the aristocrat, the essentially middle-class nature, released the spring of the battle, which no man desired less than he.

Christophe was swept along by the workmen and plunged into the fray without knowing who had been the cause of it. Nothing was farther from his thoughts than that Olivier had taken part in it. He thought him far away in safety. It was impossible to see anything of the fight. Every man had enough to do in keeping an eye on his opponent. Olivier had disappeared in the whirlpool like a foundered ship. He had received a jab from a bayonet, meant for some one else, in his left breast: he fell: the crowd trampled him underfoot. Christophe had been swept away by an eddy to the farthest extremity of the field of battle. He did not fight with any animosity: he jostled and was jostled with a fierce zest as though he was in the throng at a village fair. So little did he think of the serious nature of the affair that when he was gripped by a huge, broad-shouldered policeman and closed with him, he saw the thing in grotesque and said:

"My waltz, I think."

But when another policeman pounced on to his back, he shook himself like a wild boar, and hammered away with his fists at the two of them: he had no intention of being taken prisoner. One of his adversaries, the man who had seized him from behind, rolled down on the ground. The other lost his head and drew his sword. Christophe saw the point of the saber come within a hand's breadth of his chest: he dodged, and twisted the man's wrist and tried to wrench his weapon from him. He could not understand it: till then it had seemed to him just a game. They went on struggling and battering at each other's faces. He had no time to stop to think. He saw murder in the other man's eyes: and murderous desire awoke in him. He saw that the man would slit him up like a sheep. With a sudden movement he turned the man's hand and sword against himself: he plunged the sword into his breast, felt that he was killing him, and killed him. And suddenly the whole thing was changed: he was mad, intoxicated, and he roared aloud.

His yells produced an indescribable effect. The crowd had smelt blood. In a moment it became a savage pack. On all sides swords were drawn. The red flag appeared in the windows of the houses. And old memories of Parisian revolutions prompted them to build a barricade. The stones were torn up from the street, the gas lamps were wrenched away, trees were pulled up, an omnibus was overturned. A trench that had been left open for months in connection with work on the Métropolitain was turned to account. The cast-iron railings round the trees were broken up and used as missiles. Weapons were brought out of pockets and from the houses. In less than an hour the scuffle had grown into an insurrection: the whole district was in a state of siege. And, on the barricade, was Christophe, unrecognizable, shouting his revolutionary song, which was taken up by a score of voices. Olivier had been carried to Amélie's. He was unconscious. He had been laid on a bed in the dark back-shop. At the foot of the bed stood the hunchback, numbed and distraught. At first Berthe had been overcome with emotion: at a distance she had thought it was Graillot who had been wounded, and, when she recognized Olivier, her first exclamation had been:

"What a good thing! I thought it was Léopold."

But now she was full of pity.. And she kissed Olivier and held his head on the pillow. With her usual calmness Amélie had undone his clothes and dressed his wound. Manousse Heimann was there, fortunately, with his inseparable Canet. Like Christophe they had come out of curiosity to see the demonstration: they had been present at the affray and seen Olivier fall. Canet was blubbering like a child: and at the same time he was thinking:

"What on earth am I doing here?"

Manousse examined Olivier: at once he saw that it was all over. He had a great feeling for Olivier: but he was not a man to worry about what can't be helped: and he turned his thoughts to Christophe. He admired Christophe though he regarded him as a pathological case. He knew his ideas about the Revolution: and he wanted to deliver him from the idiotic danger he was running in a cause that was not his own. The risk of a broken head in the scuffle was not the only one: if Christophe were taken, everything pointed to his being used as an example and getting more than he bargained for. Manousse had long ago been warned that the police had their eye on Christophe: they would saddle him not only with his own follies but with those of others. Xavier Bernard, whom Manousse had just encountered, prowling through the crowd, for his own amusement as well as in pursuit of duty, had nodded to him as he passed and said:

"That Krafft of yours is an idiot. Would you believe that he's putting himself up as a mark on the barricade! We shan't miss him this time. You'd better get him out of harm's way."

That was easier said than done. If Christophe were to find out that Olivier was dying he would become a raging madman, he would go out to kill, he would be killed. Manousse said to Bernard:

"If he doesn't go at once, he's done for. I'll try and take him away."

"How?"

"In Canet's motor. It's over there at the corner of the street."

"Please, please...." gulped Canet.

"You must take him to Laroche," Manousse went on. "You will get there in time to catch the Pontarlier express. You must pack him off to Switzerland."

"He won't go."

"He will. I'll tell him that Jeannin will follow him, or has already gone."

Without paying any attention to Canet's objections Manousse set out to find Christophe on the barricade. He was not very courageous, he started every time he heard a shot: and he counted the cobble-stones over which he stepped-(odd or even), to make out his chances of being killed. He did not stop, but went through with it. When he reached the barricade he found Christophe, perched on a wheel of the overturned omnibus, amusing himself by firing pistol-shots into the air. Round the barricade the riff-raff of Paris, spewed up from the gutters, had swollen up like the dirty water from a sewer after heavy rain. The original combatants were drowned by it. Manousse shouted to Christophe, whose back was turned to him. Christophe did not hear him. Manousse climbed up to him and plucked at his sleeve. Christophe pushed him away and almost knocked him down. Manousse stuck to it, climbed up again, and shouted:

"Jeannin...."

In the uproar the rest of the sentence was lost. Christophe stopped short, dropped his revolver, and, slipping down from his scaffolding, he rejoined Manousse, who started pulling him away.

"You must clear out," said Manousse.

"Where is Olivier?"

"You must clear out," repeated Manousse.

"Why?" said Christophe.

"The barricade will be captured in an hour. You will be arrested to-night."

"What have I done?"

"Look at your hands.... Come!... There's no room for doubt, they won't spare you. Everybody recognized you. You've not got a moment to lose."

"Where is Olivier?"

"At home."

"I'll go and join him."

"You can't do that. The police are waiting for you at the door. He sent me to warn you. You must cut and run."

"Where do you want me to go?"

"To Switzerland. Canet will take you out of this in his car."

"And Olivier?"

"There's no time to talk...."

"I won't go without seeing him."

"You'll see him there. He'll join you to-morrow. He'll go by the first train. Quick! I'll explain."

He caught hold of Christophe. Christophe was dazed by the noise and the wave of madness that had rushed through him, could not understand what he had done and what he was being asked to do, and let himself be dragged away. Manousse took his arm, and with his other hand caught hold of Canet, who was not at all pleased with the part allotted to him in the affair: and he packed the two of them into the car. The worthy Canet would have been bitterly sorry if Christophe had been caught, but he would have much preferred some one else to help him to escape. Manousse knew his man. And as he had some qualms about Canet's cowardice, he changed his mind just as he was leaving them and the car was getting into its stride and climbed up and sat with them.

Olivier did not recover consciousness. Amélie and the little hunchback were left alone in the room. Such a sad room it was, airless and gloomy! It was almost dark.... For one instant Olivier emerged from the abyss. He felt Emmanuel's tears and kisses on his hand. He smiled faintly, and painfully laid his hand on the boy's head. Such a heavy hand it was!... Then he sank back once more....

By the dying man's head, on the pillow, Amélie had laid a First of May nosegay, a few sprays of lily-of-the-valley. A leaky tap in the courtyard dripped, dripped into a bucket. For a second mental images hovered tremblingly at the back of his mind, like a light flickering and dying down ... a house in the country with glycine on the walls: a garden where a child was playing: a boy lying on the turf: a little fountain plashing in its stone basin: a little girl laughing....

Christophe loses count of the fleeting years. Drop by drop life ebbs away. But his life is elsewhere. It has no history. His history lies wholly in his creative work. The unceasing buzzing song of music fills his soul, and makes him insensible to the outward tumult.

Christophe has conquered. His name has been forced upon the world. He is ageing. His hair is white. That is nothing to him, his heart is ever young: he has surrendered none of his force, none of his faith. Once more he is calm, but not as he was before he passed by the Burning Bush. In the depths of his soul there is still the quivering of the storm, the memory of his glimpse into the abyss of the raging seas. He knows that no man may boast of being master of himself without the permission of the God of battle. In his soul there are two souls. One is a high plateau swept by winds and shrouded with, clouds. The other, higher still, is a snowy peak bathed in light. There it is impossible to dwell; but, when he is frozen by the mists on the lower ground, well he knows the path that leads to the sun. In his misty soul Christophe is not alone. Near him he ever feels the presence of an invisible friend, the sturdy Saint Cecilia, listening with wide, calm eyes to the heavens; and, like the Apostle Paul,-in Raphael's picture,-silent and dreaming, leaning on his sword, he is beyond exasperation, and has no thought of fighting: he dreams, and forges his dreams into form.

During this period of his life he mostly wrote piano and chamber music. In such work he was more free to dare and be bold: it necessitated fewer intermediaries between his ideas and their realization; his ideas were less in danger of losing force in the course of their percolation. Frescobaldi, Couperin, Schubert, and Chopin, in their boldness of expression and style, anticipated the revolutionaries in orchestral music by fifty years. Out of the crude stuff shaped by Christophe's strong hands came strange and unknown agglomerations of harmony, bewildering combinations of chords, begotten of the remotest kinships of sounds accessible to the senses in these days; they cast a magical and holy spell upon the mind.-But the public must have time to grow accustomed to the conquests and the trophies which a great artist brings back with him from his quest in the deep waters of the ocean. Very few would follow Christophe in the temerity of his later works. His fame was due to his earlier compositions. The feeling of not being understood, which is even more painful in success than in the lack of it, because there seems to be no way out of it, had, since the death of his only friend, aggravated in Christophe his rather morbid tendency to seek isolation from the world.

However, the gates of Germany were open to him once more. In France the tragic brawl had been forgotten. He was free to go whithersoever he pleased. But he was afraid of the memories that would lie in wait for him in Paris. And, although he had spent a few months in Germany and returned there from time to time to conduct performances of his work, he did not settle there. He found too many things which hurt him. They were not particular to Germany: he found them elsewhere. But a man expects more of his own country than any other, and he suffers more from its foibles. It was true, too, that Germany was bearing the greatest burden of the sins of Europe. The victor incurs the responsibility of his victory, a debt towards the vanquished: tacitly the victor is pledged to march in front of them to show them the way. The conquests of Louis XIV. gave Europe the splendor of French reason. What light has the Germany of Sedan given to the world? The glitter of bayonets? Thought without wings, action without generosity, brutal realism, which has not even the excuse of being the realism of healthy men; force and interest: Mars turned bagman. Forty years ago Europe was led astray into the night, and the terrors of the night. The sun was hidden beneath the conqueror's helmet. If the vanquished are too weak to raise the extinguisher, and can claim only pity mingled with contempt, what shall be given to the victor who has done this thing?

A little while ago, day began to peep: little shafts of light shimmered through the cracks. Being one of the first to see the rising of the sun, Christophe had come out of the shadow of the helmet: gladly he returned to the country in which he had been a sojourner perforce, to Switzerland. Like so many of the spirits of that time, spirits thirsting for liberty, choking in the narrowing circle of the hostile nations, he sought a corner of the earth in which he could stand above Europe and breathe freely. Formerly, in the days of Goethe, the Rome of the free Popes was the island upon which all the winged thought of divers nations came to rest, like birds taking shelter from the storm. Now what refuge is there? The island has been covered by the sea. Rome is no more. The birds have fled from the Seven Hills.-The Alps only are left for them. There, amid the rapacity of Europe, stands (for how long?) the little island of twenty-four cantons. In truth it has not the poetic radiance and glamor of the Eternal City: history has not filled its air with the breath of gods and heroes; but a mighty music rises from the naked Earth; there is an heroic rhythm in the lines of the mountains, and here, more than anywhere else, a man can feel himself in contact with elemental forces. Christophe did not go there in search of romantic pleasure. A field, a few trees, a stream, the wide sky, were enough to make him feel alive. The calm aspect of his native country was sweeter and more companionable to him than the gigantic grandeur of the Alps. But he could not forget that it was here that he had renewed his strength: here God had appeared to him in the Burning Bush; and he never returned thither without a thrill of gratitude and faith. He was not the only one. How many of the combatants of life, ground beneath life's heel, have on that soil renewed their energy to turn again to the fight, and believe once more in its purpose!

Living in that country he had come to know it well. The majority of those who pass through it see only its excrescences: the leprosy of the hotels which defiles the fairest features of that sturdy piece of earth, the stranger cities, the monstrous marts whither all the fatted people of the world come to browse, the table d'h?te meals, the masses of food flung into the trough for the nosing beasts: the casino bands with their silly music mingling with the noise of the little horses, the Italian scum whose disgusting uproar makes the bored wealthy idiots wriggle with pleasure, the fatuous display of the shops-wooden bears, chalets, silly knick-knacks, always the same, repeated time and again, over and over again, with no freshness or invention; the worthy booksellers with their scandalous pamphlets,-all the moral baseness of those places whither every year the idle, joyless millions come who are incapable of finding amusement in the smallest degree finer than that of the multitude, or one tithe as keen.

And they know nothing of the people in whose land they stay. They have no notion of the reserves of moral force and civic liberty which for centuries have been hoarded up in them, coals of the fires of Calvin and Zwingli, still glowing beneath the ashes; they have no conception of the vigorous democratic spirit which will always ignore the Napoleonic Republic, of the simplicity of their institutions, or the breadth of their social undertakings, or the example given to the world by these United States of the three great races of the West, the model of the Europe of the future. Even less do they know of the Daphne concealed beneath this rugged bark, the wild, flashing dreams of Boecklin, the raucous heroism of Hodler, the serene vision and humor of Gottfried Keller, the living tradition of the great popular festivals, and the sap of springtime swelling the trees,-the still young art, sometimes rasping to the palate, like the hard fruits of wild pear-trees, sometimes with the sweetish insipidity of myrtles black and blue, but at least something smacking of the earth, is the work of self-taught men not cut off from the people by an archaic culture, but, with them, reading in the same book of life.

Christophe was in sympathy with these men who strive less to seem than to be, and, under the recent veneer of an ultramodern industrialism, keep clearly marked the most reposeful features of the old Europe of peasants and townsmen. Among them he had found a few good friends, grave, serious, and faithful, who hold isolated and immured in them regrets for the past; they were looking on at the gradual disappearance of the old Switzerland with a sort of religious fatalism and Calvinistic pessimism; great gray souls. Christophe seldom saw them. His old wounds were apparently healed: but they had been too deep wholly to be cured. He was fearful of forming new ties with men. It was something for this reason that he liked to dwell in a country where it was easy to live apart, a stranger amid a throng of strangers. For the rest he rarely stayed long in any one place; often he changed his lair: he was like an old migratory bird which needs space, and has its country in the air ... "Mein Reich ist in der Luft."

An evening in summer.

He was walking in the mountains above a village. He was striding along with his hat in his hand, up a winding road. He came to a neck where the road took a double turn, and passed into shadow between two slopes; on either side were nut-trees and pines. It was like a little shut-in world. On either hand the road seemed to come to an end, cut off at the edge of the void. Beyond were blue distance and the gleaming air. The peace of evening came down like a gentle rain.

They came together each at the same moment turning the bend at either end of the neck. She was dressed in black, and stood out against the clear sky: behind her were two children, a boy and a girl, between six and eight, who were playing and picking flowers. They recognized each other at a distance of a few yards. Their emotion was visible in their eyes; but neither brought it into words; each gave only an imperceptible movement. He was deeply moved: she ... her lips trembled a little. They stopped. Almost in a whisper:

"Grazia!"

"You here!"

They held out their hands and stood without a word. Grazia was the first to make an effort to break the silence. She told him where she lived, and asked him where he was staying. Question and answer were mechanical, and they hardly listened, heard later, when their hands had parted: they were absorbed in gazing at each other. The children came back to her. She introduced them. He felt hostile towards them, and looked at them with no kindness, and said nothing: he was engrossed with her, occupied only in studying her beautiful face that bore some marks of suffering and age. She was embarrassed by his gaze, and said:

"Will you come, this evening?"

And she gave the name of her hotel.

He asked her where her husband was. She pointed to her black dress. He was too much moved to say more, and left her awkwardly. But when he had taken a few strides he came back to the children, who were picking strawberries, and took them roughly in his arms and kissed them, and went away.

In the evening he went to the hotel, and found her on the veranda, with the blinds drawn. They sat apart. There were very few people about, only two or three old people. Christophe was irritated by their presence. Grazia looked at him, and he looked at her, and murmured her name over and over again.

"Don't you think I have changed?" she asked.

His heart grew big.

"You have suffered," he said.

"You too," she answered pityingly, scanning the deep marks of agony and passion in his face.

They were at a loss for words.

"Please," he said, a moment later, "let us go somewhere else. Could we not find somewhere to be alone and talk?"

"No, my dear. Let us stay here. It is good enough here. No one is heeding us at all."

"I cannot talk freely here."

"That is all the better."

He could not understand why. Later, when in memory he went over their conversation, he thought she had not trusted him. But she was instinctively afraid of emotional scenes: unconsciously she was seeking protection from any surprise of their hearts: the very awkwardness of their intimacy in a public room, so sheltering the modesty of her secret emotions, was dear to her.

In whispers, with long intervals of silence, they sketched their lives in outline. Count Berény had been killed in a duel a few months ago; and Christophe saw that she had not been very happy with him. Also, she had lost a child, her first-born. She made no complaint, and turned the conversation from herself to question Christophe, and, as he told her of his tribulations, she showed the most affectionate compassion. Bells rang. It was Sunday evening. Life stood still.

She asked him to come again next day but one. He was hurt that she should be so little eager to see him again. In his heart happiness and sorrow were mingled.

Next day, on some pretext, she wrote and asked him to come. He was delighted with her little note. This time she received him in her private room. She was with her two children. He looked at them, still a little uneasily, but very tenderly. He thought the little girl-the elder of the two-very like her mother: but he did not try to match the boy's looks. They talked about the country, the times, the books lying open on the table:-but their eyes spoke of other things. He was hoping to be able to talk more intimately when a hotel acquaintance came in. He marked the pleasure and politeness with which Grazia received the stranger: she seemed to make no difference between her two visitors. He was hurt by it, but could not be angry with her. She proposed that they should all go for a walk and he accepted; the presence of the other woman, though she was young and charming, paralyzed him: his day was spoiled.

He did not see Grazia again for two days. During that time he lived but for the hours he was to spend with her.-Once more his efforts to speak to her were doomed to failure. While she was very gentle and kind with him, she could not throw off her reserve. All unconsciously Christophe added to her difficulty by his outbursts of German sentimentality, which embarrassed her and forced her instinct into reaction.

He wrote her a letter which touched her, saying that life was so short! Their lives were already so far gone! Perhaps they would have only a very little time in which to see each other, and it was pitiful, almost criminal, not to employ it in frank converse.

She replied with a few affectionate words, begging him to excuse her for her distrust, which she could not avoid, since she had been so much hurt by life: she could not break her habitual reserve: any excessive display, even of a genuine feeling, hurt and terrified her. But well she knew the worth of the friendship that had come to her once more: and she was as glad of it as he. She asked him to dine with her that evening.

His heart was brimming with gratitude. In his room, lying on his bed, he sobbed. It was the opening of the flood-gates of ten years of solitude: for, since Olivier's death, he had been utterly alone. Her letter gave the word of resurrection to his heart that was so famished for tenderness. Tenderness!... He thought he had put it from him: he had been forced to learn how to do without it! Now he felt how sorely he needed it, and the great stores of love that had accumulated in him....

It was a sweet and blessed evening that they spent together.... He could only speak to her of trivial subjects, in spite of their intention to hide nothing from each other. But what goodly things he told her through the piano, which with her eyes she invited him to use to tell her what he had to say! She was struck by the humility of the man whom she had known in his violence and pride. When he went away the silent pressure of their hands told them that they had found each other, and would never lose what they had regained.-It was raining, and there was not a breath of wind. His heart was singing.

She was only able to stay a few days longer, and she did not postpone her departure for an hour. He dared not ask her to do so, nor complain. On their last day they went for a walk with the children; there came a moment when he was so full of love and happiness that he tried to tell her so: but, with a very gentle gesture, she stopped him and smiled:

"Hush! I feel everything that you could say."

They sat down at the turn of the road where they had met. Still smiling she looked down into the valley below: but it was not the valley that she saw. He looked at the gentle face marked with the traces of bitter suffering: a few white tresses showed in her thick black hair. He was filled with a pitying, passionate adoration of this beloved creature who had travailed and been impregnated with the suffering of the soul. In every one of the marks of time upon her the soul was visible.-And, in a low, trembling voice, he craved, as a precious favor, which she granted him, a white hair from her head.

* * * * *

She went away. He could not understand why she would not have him accompany her. He had no doubt of her feeling for him, but her reserve disconcerted him. He could not stay alone in that place, and set out in another direction. He tried to occupy his mind with traveling and work. He wrote to Grazia. She answered him, two or three week later, with very brief letters, in which she showed her tranquil friendship, knowing neither impatience nor uneasiness. They hurt him and he loved them. He would not admit that he had any right to reproach her; their affection was too recent, too recently renewed. He was fearful of losing it. And yet every letter he had from her breathed a calm loyalty which should have made him feel secure. But she was so different from him!...

They had agreed to meet in Rome, towards the end of the autumn. Without the thought of seeing her, the journey would have had little charm for Christophe. His long isolation had made him retiring: he had no taste for that futile hurrying from place to place which is so dear to the indolence of modern men and women. He was fearful of a change of habit, which is dangerous to the regular work of the mind. Besides, Italy had no attractions for him. He knew it only in the villainous music of the Verists and the tenor arias to which every now and then the land of Virgil inspires men of letters on their travels. He felt towards Italy the hostility of an advanced artist, who has too often heard the name of Rome invoked by the worst champions of academic routine. Finally, the old leaven of instinctive antipathy which ever lies fermenting in the hearts of the men of the North towards the men of the South, or at least towards the legendary type of rhetorical braggart which, in the eyes of the men of the North, represents the men of the South. At the mere thought of it Christophe disdainfully curled his lip.... No, he had no desire for the more acquaintance of the musicless people-(for, in the music of modern Europe, what is the place of their mandolin tinkling and melodramatic posturing declamation?).-And yet Grazia belonged to this people. To join her again, whither and by what devious ways would Christophe not have gone? He would win through by shutting his eyes until he came to her.

* * * * *

He was used to shutting his eyes. For so many years the shutters of his soul had been closed upon his inward life. Now, in this late autumn, it was more necessary than ever. For three weeks together it had rained incessantly. Then a gray pall of impenetrable mists had hung over the valleys and towns of Switzerland, dripping and wet. His eyes had forgotten the sunlight. To rediscover in himself its concentrated energy he had to begin by clothing himself in night, and, with his eyes closed, to descend to the depths of the mine, the subterranean galleries of his dreams. There in the seams of coal slept the sun of days gone by. But as the result of spending his life crouching there, digging, he came out burned, stiff in back and knees, with limbs deformed, half petrified, dazed eyes, that, like a bird's, could see keenly in the night. Many a time Christophe had brought up from the mine the fire he had so painfully extracted to warm the chill of heart. But the dreams of the North smack of the warmth of the fireside and the closed room. No man notices it while he lives in it: dear is that heavy air, dear the half-light and the soul's dreams in the drowsy head. We love the things we have. We must be satisfied with them!...

When, as he passed the barrier of the Alps, Christophe, dozing in a corner of the carriage, saw the stainless sky and the limpid light falling upon the slopes of the mountains, he thought he must be dreaming. On the other side of the wall he had left a darkened sky and a fading day. So sudden was the change that at first he felt more surprise than joy. It was some time before his drowsy soul awoke and began slowly to expand and burst the crust that was upon it, and his heart could free itself from the shadows of the past. But as the day wore on, the mellow light took his soul into its arms, and, wholly forgetting all that had been, he drank greedily of the delight of seeing.

Through the plains of Milan. The eye of day mirrored in the blue canals, a network of veins through the downy rice fields. Mountains of Vinci, snowy Alps soft in their brilliance, ruggedly encircling the horizon, fringed with red and orange and greeny gold and pale blue. Evening falling on the Apennines. A winding descent by little sheer hills, snakelike curving, in a repeating, involved rhythm like a farandole.-And suddenly, at the bottom of the slope, like a kiss, the breath of the sea and the smell of orange-trees. The sea, the Latin sea and its opal light, whereon, swaying, were the sails of little boats like wings folded back....

By the sea, at a fishing-village, the train stopped for a while. It was explained to the passengers that there had been a landslip, as a result of the heavy rains, in a tunnel between Genoa and Pisa: all the trains were several hours late. Christophe, who was booked through to Rome, was delighted by the accident which provoked the loud lamentations of his fellow-passengers. He jumped down to the platform and made use of the stoppage to go down to the sea, which drew him on and on. The sea charmed him so that when, a few hours later, the engine whistled as it moved on, Christophe was in a boat, and, as the train passed, shouted: "Good-by!" In the luminous night, on the luminous sea, he sat rocking in the boat, as it passed along the scented coast with its promontories fringed with tiny cypress-trees. He put up at a village and spent there five days of unbroken joy. He was like a man issuing from a long fast, hungrily eating. With all his famished senses he gulped down the splendid light.... Light, the blood of the world, that flows in space like a river of life, and through our eyes, our lips, our nostrils, every pore of our skins, filters through to the depths of our bodies, light, more necessary to life than bread,-he who sees thee stripped of thy northern veils, pure, burning, naked, marvels how ever he could have lived without knowing thee, and deeply feels that he can never live more without possessing thee....

For five days Christophe was drunk with the sun. For five days he forgot-for the first time-that he was a musician. The music of his soul was merged into light. The air, the sea, the earth: the brilliant symphony played by the sun's orchestra. And with what innate art does Italy know how to use that orchestra! Other peoples paint from Nature: the Italians collaborate with her: they paint with sunlight. The music of color. All is music, everything sings. A wall by the roadside, red, fissured with gold: above it, two cypress-trees with their tufted crests: and all around the eager blue of the sky. A marble staircase, white, steep, narrow, climbing between pink walls against the blue front of a church. Any one of their many-colored houses, apricot, lemon, cedrate, shining among the olive-trees, has the effect of a marvelous ripe fruit among the leaves. In Italy seeing is sensual: the eyes enjoy color, as the palate and the tongue delight in a juicy, scented fruit. Christophe flung himself at this new repast with eager childlike greed: he made up for the asceticism of the gray visions to which till then he had been condemned. His abounding nature, stifled by Fate, suddenly became conscious of powers of enjoyment which he had never used: they pounced on the prey presented to them; scents, colors, the music of voices, bells and the sea, the kisses of the air, the warm bath of light in which his ageing, weary soul began to expand.... Christophe had no thought of anything. He was in a state of beatific delight, and only left it to share his joy with those he met: his boatman, an old fisherman, with quick eyes all wrinkled round, who wore a red cap like that of a Venetian senator;-his only fellow-boarder, a Milanese, who ate macaroni and rolled his eyes like Othello: fierce black eyes filled with a furious hatred; an apathetic, sleepy man;-the waiter in the restaurant, who, when he carried a tray, bent his neck, and twisted his arms and his body like an angel of Bernini;-the little Saint John, with sly, winking eyes, who begged on the road, and offered the passers-by an orange on a green branch. He would hail the carriage-drivers, sitting huddled on their seats, who every now and then would, in a nasal, droning, throaty voice, intone the thousand and one couplets. He was amazed to find himself humming Cavalleria Rusticana. He had entirely forgotten the end of his journey. Forgotten, too, was his haste to reach the end and Grazia....

Forgotten altogether was she until the day when the beloved image rose before him. Was it called up by a face seen on the road or a grave, singing note in a voice? He did not know. But a time came when, from everything about him, from the circling, olive-clad hills, from the high, shining peaks of the Apennines, graven by the dense shadows and the burning sun, and from the orange-groves heavy with flowers and fruit, and the deep, heaving breath of the sea, there shone the smiling face of the beloved. Through the countless eyes of the air, her eyes were upon him. In that beloved earth she flowered, like a rose upon a rose-tree.

Then he regained possession of himself. He took the train for Rome and never stopped. He had no interest in the old memories of Italy, or the cities of the art of past ages. He saw nothing of Rome, nor wanted to: and what he did see at first, in passing, the styleless new districts, the square blocks of buildings, gave him no desire to see more.

As soon as he arrived he went to see Grazia. She asked him:

"How did you come? Did you stop at Milan or Florence?"

"No," he said. "Why should I?"

She laughed.

"That's a fine thing to say! And what do you think of Rome?"

"Nothing," he said. "I haven't seen it!"

"Not yet?"

"Nothing. Not a single monument. I came straight to you from my hotel."

"You don't need to go far to see Rome.... Look at that wall opposite....

You only need to see its light."

"I only see you," he said.

"You are a barbarian. You only see your own ideas. When did you leave

Switzerland?"

"A week ago."

"What have you been doing since then?"

"I don't know. I stopped, by chance, at a place by the sea. I never noticed its name. I slept for a week. Slept, with my eyes open. I do not know what I have seen, or what I have dreamed. I think I was dreaming of you. I know that it was very beautiful. But the most lovely part of it all is that I forgot everything...."

"Thank you!" she said.

(He did not listen.)

"... Everything," he went on. "Everything that was then, everything that had been before. I am a new man. I am beginning to live again."

"It is true," she said, looking into his laughing eyes. "You have changed since we last met."

He looked at her, too, and found her no less different from his memory of her. Not that she had changed in two months, but he was seeing her with new eyes. Yonder, in Switzerland, the image of old days, the faint shadow of the girl Grazia, had flitted between his gaze and this new actual beloved. Now, in the sun of Italy, the dreams of the North had melted away: in the clear light of day he saw her real soul and body. How far removed she was from the little, wild, imprisoned girl of Paris, how far from the woman with the smile like Saint John, whom he had met one evening, shortly after her marriage, only to lose her again! Out of the little Umbrian Madonna had flowered a lovely Roman lady:

Color verus, corpus solidum et succi plenum.

Her figure had taken on an harmonious fullness: her body was bathed in a proud languor. The very genius of tranquillity hovered in her presence. She had that greed of sunny silence, and still contemplation, the delightful joy in the peace of living which the people of the North will never really know. What especially she had preserved out of the past was her great kindness which inspired all her other feelings. But in her luminous smile many new things were to be read: a melancholy indulgence, a little weariness, much knowledge of the ways of men, a fine irony, and tranquil common sense. The years had veiled her with a certain coldness, which protected her against the illusions of the heart; rarely could she surrender herself; and her tenderness was ever on the alert, with a smile that seemed to know and tell everything, against the passionate impulses that Christophe found it hard to suppress. She had her weaknesses, moments of abandonment to the caprice of the minute, a coquetry at which she herself mocked but never fought against. She was never in revolt against things, nor against herself: she had come to a gentle fatalism, and she was altogether kind, but a little weary.

* * * * *

She entertained a great deal, and-at least, in appearance-not very selectively: but as, for the most part, her intimates belonged to the same world, breathed the same atmosphere, had been fashioned by the same habits, they were homogeneous and harmonious enough, and very different from the polite assemblages that Christophe had known in France and Germany. The majority were of old Italian families, vivified here and there by foreign marriages; they all had a superficial cosmopolitanism and a comfortable mixture of the four chief languages, and the intellectual baggage of the four great nations of the West. Each nation brought into the pool its personal characteristic, the Jews their restlessness and the Anglo-Saxons their phlegm, but everything was quickly absorbed in the Italian melting-pot. When centuries of great plundering barons have impressed on a race the haughty and rapacious profile of a bird of prey, the metal may change, but the imprint remains the same. Many of the faces that seemed the most pronouncedly Italian, with a Luini smile, or the voluptuous, calm gaze of a Titian, flowers of the Adriatic, or the plains of Lombardy, had blossomed on the shrubs of the North transplanted to the old Latin soil. Whatever colors be spread on the palette of Rome, the color which stands out is always Roman.

Christophe could not analyze his impressions, but he admired the perfume of an age-old culture, an ancient civilization exhaled by these people, who were often mediocre, and, in some cases, less than mediocre. It was a subtle perfume, springing from the smallest trifles. A graceful courtesy, a gentleness of manners that could be charming and affectionate, and at the same time malicious and consciously superior, an elegant finesse in the use of the eyes, the smile, the alert, nonchalant, skeptical, diverse, and easy intelligence. There was nothing either stiff or familiar. Nothing literary. Here there was no fear of meeting the psychologues of a Parisian drawing-room, ensconced behind their eyeglasses, or the corporalism of a German pedant. They were men, quite simply, and very human men, such as were the friends of Terence and Scipio the ?milian....

Homo sum....

It was fine to see. It was a life more of appearance than reality. Beneath it lay an incurable frivolity which is common to the polite society of every country. But what made this society characteristic of its race was its indolence. The frivolity of the French is accompanied by a fever of the nerves-a perpetual agitation of the mind, even when it is empty. The brain of the Italian knows how to rest. It knows it only too well. It is sweet to sleep in the warm shadows, on the soft pillow of a padded Epicureanism, and a very supple, fairly curious, and, at bottom, prodigiously indifferent intelligence.

All the men of this society were entirely lacking in decided opinions. They dabbled in politics and art in the same dilettante fashion. Among them were charming natures, handsome, fine-featured patrician, Italian faces, with soft, intelligent eyes, men with gentle, quiet manners, who, with exquisite taste and affectionate hearts, loved Nature, the old masters, flowers, women, books, good food, their country, music.... They loved everything. They preferred nothing. Sometimes one felt that they loved nothing. Love played so large a part in their lives, but only on condition that it never disturbed them. Their love was indolent and lazy, like themselves; even in their passion it was apt to take on a domestic character. Their solid, harmonious intelligence was fitted with an inertia in which all the opposites of thought met without collision, were tranquilly yoked together, smiling, cushioned, and rendered harmless. They were afraid of any thorough belief, of taking sides, and were at their ease in semi-solutions and half-thoughts. They were conservative-liberal in temper of mind. They needed politics and art half-way up the hill, like those health resorts where there is no danger of asthma or palpitations. They recognized themselves in the lazy plays of Goldoni, or the equally diffused light of Manzoni. Their amiable indifference was never disturbed. Never could they have said like their great ancestors: "Primum vivere ..." but rather "Dapprima, quieto vivere."

To live in peace. That was the secret vow, the aim of even the most energetic of those who controlled politics. A little Machiavelli, master of himself and others, with a heart as cold as his head, a lucid, bored intelligence, knowing how and daring to use all means to gain his ends, ready to sacrifice all his friends to his ambition, would be capable of sacrificing his ambition to one thing only: his quieto vivere. They needed long periods of absolute lassitude. When they issued from them, as from a good sleep, they were fresh and ready: these grave men, these tranquil Madonnas would be taken with a sudden desire to talk, to be gay, to plunge into social life; then they would break out into a profusion of gestures and words, paradoxical sallies, burlesque humor: they were always playing an opera bouffe. In that gallery of Italian portraits rarely would you find the marks of thought, the metallic brilliance of the eyes, faces stained with the perpetual labor of the mind, such as are to be found in the North. And yet, here, as elsewhere, there was no lack of souls turned in upon themselves, to feed upon themselves, concealing their woes, and desires and cares seething beneath the mask of indifference, and, voluptuously, drawing on a cloak of torpor. And, in certain faces there would peep out, queerly, disconcertingly, indications of some obscure malady of the spirit peculiar to very ancient races-like the excavations in the Roman Campagna.

There was great charm in the enigmatic indifference of these people, and their calm, mocking eyes, wherein there slumbered hidden tragedy. But Christophe was in no humor to recognize it. He was furious at seeing Grazia surrounded by worldly people with their courteous, witty, and empty manners. He hated them for it, and he was angry with her. He sulked at her just as he sulked at Rome. His visits to her became less and less frequent, and he began to make up his mind to go.

* * * * *

He did not go. Unknown to himself, he was beginning to feel the attraction of Italian society, though it irritated him so much.

For the time being, he isolated himself and lounged about Rome and the environment. The Roman light, the hanging gardens, the Campagna, encircled, as by a golden scarf, by the sunlit sea, little by little delivered up to him the secret of the enchanted land. He had sworn not to move a step to see the monuments of the dead, which he affected to despise: he used grumblingly to declare that he would wait until they came to look for him. They came; he happened on them by chance on his rambling through the City of many hills. Without having looked for it, he saw the Forum red under the setting sun, and the half-ruined arches of the Palatine and behind them the deep azure vault of heaven, a gulf of blue light. He wandered in the vast Campagna, near the ruddy Tiber, thick with mud, like moving earth,-and along the ruined aqueducts, like the gigantic vertebrae of antediluvian monsters. Thick masses of black clouds rolled across the blue sky. Peasants on horseback goaded across the desert great herds of pearly-gray cattle with long horns; and along the ancient road, straight, dusty, and bare, goat-footed shepherds, clad in thick skins, walked in silence. On the far horizon, the Sabine Chain, with its Olympian lines, unfolded its hills; and on the other edge of the cup of the sky the old walls of the city, the front of Saint John's Church, surmounted with statues which danced in black silhouette.... Silence.... A fiery sun.... The wind passed over the plain.... On a headless, armless statue, almost inundated by the waving grass, a lizard, with its heart beating tranquilly, lay motionless, absorbed, drinking in its fill of light. And Christophe, with his head buzzing with the sunshine (sometimes also with the Castelli wine), sitting on the black earth near the broken statue, smiling, sleepy, lost in forgetfulness, breathed in the calm, tremendous force of Rome.-Until nightfall.-Then, with his heart full of a sudden anguish, he fled from the gloomy solitude in which the tragic light was sinking.... O earth, burning earth, earth passionate and dumb! Beneath thy fevered peace I still can hear the trumpeting of the legions. What a fury of life is shining in thy bosom! What a mighty desire for an awakening!

Christophe found men in whose souls there burned brands of the age-old fire. Beneath the ruse of the dead they had been preserved. It might be thought that the fire had died down with the closing of Mazzini's eyes. It was springing to life again. It was the same. Very few wished to see it. It troubled the quiet of those who were asleep. It gave a clear and brutal light. Those who bore it aloft,-young men (the eldest was not thirty-five), a little band of the elect come from every point of the horizon, men of free intellect who were all different in temperament, education, opinions, and faith-were all united in worship of this flame of the new life. The etiquette of parties, systems of thought, mattered not to them: the great thing was to "think with courage." To be frank, to be brave, in mind and deed. Rudely they disturbed the sleep of their race. After the political resurrection of Italy, awakened from death by the summons of her heroes, after her recent economic resurrection, they had set themselves to pluck Italian thought from the grave. They suffered, as from an insult, from the indolent and timid indifference of the elect, their cowardice of mind and verbolatry. Their Voices rang hollow in the midst of rhetoric and the moral slavery which for centuries had been gathering into a crust upon the soul of their country. They breathed into it their merciless realism and their uncompromising loyalty. Though upon occasion they were capable of sacrificing their own personal intellectual preferences to the duty of discipline which national life imposes on the individual, yet they reserved their highest altar and their purest ardor for the truth. They loved truth with fiery, pious hearts. Insulted by his adversaries, defamed, threatened, one of the leaders of these young men replied, with grand, calm dignity:

"Respect the truth. I speak to you now, from my heart, with no shade of bitterness. I forget the ill I have received at your hands and the evil that I may have done you. Be true. There is no conscience, there is no noble life, there is no capacity for sacrifice where there is not a religious, a rigid, and a rigorous respect for truth. Strive, then, to fulfil this difficult duty. Untruth corrupts whoever makes use of it before it overcomes him against whom it is used. What does it matter that you gain an immediate success? The roots of your soul will remain withered in the air above the soil that is crumbled away with untruth. We are on a plane superior to our disagreements, even though on your lips your passion brings the name of our country. There is one thing greater than a man's country, and that is the human conscience. There are laws which you must not violate on pain of being bad Italians. You see before you now only a man who is a seeker after truth: you must hear his cry. You have before you now only a man who ardently desires to see you great and pure, and to work with you. For, whether you will or no, we all work in common with all those who in this world work truthfully. That which comes out of our labors (and we cannot foresee what it will be) will bear our common mark, the mark of us all, if we have labored with truth. The essence of man lies in this, in his marvelous faculty for seeking truth, seeing it, loving it, and sacrificing himself to it.-Truth, that over all who possess it spends the magic breath of its puissant health!..." [Footnote: The hymn to Truth here introduced is an abridgment of an article by Giuseppe Prezzolini (La Voce, April 13, 1911).]

The first time Christophe heard these words they seemed to him like an echo of his own voice: and he felt that these men and he were brothers. The chances of the conflict of the nations and ideas might one day fling them into the position of adversaries in the mêlée; but, friends or enemies, they were, and would always be, members of the same human family. They knew it, even as he. They knew it, before he did. They knew him before he knew them, for they had been friends of Olivier's. Christophe discovered that his friend's writings-(a few volumes of verse and critical essays)-which had only been read by a very few in Paris, had been translated by these Italians, and were as familiar to them as to himself.

Later on he was to discover the impassable distance which divided these men from Olivier. In their way of judging others they were entirely Italian, incapable of the effort necessary to see beyond themselves, rooted in the ideas of their race. At bottom, in all good faith, in foreign literature they only sought what their national instinct was willing to find in it; often they only took out of it what they themselves had unconsciously read into it. Mediocre as critics, and as psychologists contemptible, they were too single-minded, too full of themselves and their passions, even when they were the most enamored of truth. Italian idealism cannot forget itself: it is not interested in the impersonal dreams of the North; it leads everything back to itself, its desires, its pride of race, and transfigures them. Consciously or unconsciously, it is always toiling for the terza Roma. It must be said that for many centuries it has not taken much trouble to realize it. These splendid Italians, who are cut out for action, only act through passion, and soon weary of it: but when the breath of passion rushes in their veins it raises them higher than all other nations; as has been seen, for example, in their Risorgimento.-Some such great wind as that had begun to pass over the young men of Italy of all parties: nationalists, socialists, neo-Catholics, free idealists, all the unyielding Italians, all, in hope and will, citizens of Imperial Rome, Queen of the universe.

At first Christophe saw only their generous ardor and the common antipathies which united him and them. They could not but join with him in their contempt for the fashionable society, against which Christophe raged on account of Grazia's preferences. More than he they hated the spirit of prudence, the apathy, the compromise, and buffoonery, the things half said, the amphibious thoughts, the subtle dawdling of the mind between all possibilities, without deciding on any one, the fine phrases, the sweetness of it all. They were all self-taught men who had pieced themselves together with everything they could lay their hands on, but had had neither means nor leisure to put the finishing touch to their work, and they were prone to exaggerate their natural coarseness and their rather bitter tone fitting to rough contadini. They wished to provoke active hostility. Anything rather than indifference. In order to rouse the energy of their race they would gladly have consented to be among the first victims to it.

Meanwhile they were not liked, and they did nothing to gain liking. Christophe met with but small success when he tried to talk to Grazia of his new friends. They were repugnant to her order-loving, peace-loving nature. He had to recognize when he was with her that they had a way of upholding the best of causes which sometimes provoked a desire in the best of people to declare themselves hostile to it. They were ironical and aggressive, in criticism harsh to the point of insult, even with people whom they had no desire to hurt. Having reached the sphere of publication before they had come to maturity, they passed with equal intolerance from one infatuation to another. Passionately sincere, giving themselves unreservedly, without stint or thought of economy, they were consumed by their excessive intellectuality, their precocious and blindly obstinate endeavors. It is not well for young ideas, hardly out of the pod, to be exposed to the raw sunlight. The soul is scorched by it. Nothing is made fruitful save with time and silence. Time and silence these men had not allowed themselves. It is the misfortune of only too many Italian talents. Violent, hasty action is an intoxicant. The mind that has once tasted it is hard put to it to break the habit; and its normal growth is then in great peril of being forced and forever twisted.

Christophe appreciated the acid freshness of such green frankness in contrast with the insipidity of the people who frequented the middle way, the via di mezzo, who are in perpetual fear of being compromised, and have a subtle talent for saying neither "Yes" nor "No." But very soon he came to see that such people also, with their calm, courteous minds, have their worth. The perpetual state of conflict in which his new friends lived was very tiring. Christophe began by thinking it his duty to go to Grazia's house to defend them. Sometimes he went there to forget them. No doubt he was like them, too much like them. They were now what he had been twenty years ago. And life never goes back. At heart Christophe well knew that, for his own part, he had forever said good-by to such violence, and that he was going towards peace, whose secret seemed to lie for him in Grazia's eyes. Why, then, was he in revolt against her?... Ah! In the egoism of his love he longed to be the only one to enjoy her peace. He could not bear Grazia to dispense its benefits without marking how to all comers she extended the same prodigally gracious welcome.

* * * * *

She read his thoughts, and, with her charming frankness, she said to him one day:

"You are angry with me for being what I am? You must not idealize me, my dear. I am a woman, and no better than another. I don't go out of my way for society; but I admit that I like it, just as I like going sometimes to an indifferent play, or reading foolish books, which you despise, though I find them soothing and amusing. I cannot refuse anything."

"How can you endure these idiots?"

"Life has taught me not to be too nice. One must not ask too much. It is a good deal, I assure you, when one finds honest people, with no harm in them, kindly people.... (naturally, of course, supposing one expects nothing of them; I know perfectly well that if I had need of them, I should not find many to help me...). And yet they are fond of me, and when I find a little real affection, I hold the rest cheap. You are angry with me? Forgive me for being an ordinary person. I can at least see the difference between what is best and what is not so good in myself. And what you have is the best."

"I want everything," he said gloweringly.

However, he felt that what she said was true. He was so sure of her affection that, after long hesitation, over many weeks, he asked her one day:

"Will you ever...?"

"What is it?"

"Be mine."

He went on:

"... and I yours."

She smiled:

"But you are mine, my dear."

"You know what I mean."

She was a little unhappy: but she took his hands and looked at him frankly:

"No, my dear," she said tenderly.

He could not speak. She saw that he was hurt.

"Forgive me. I have hurt you. I knew that you would say that to me. We must speak out frankly and in all truth, like good friends."

"Friends," he said sadly. "Nothing more?"

"You are ungrateful. What more do you want? To marry me?... Do you remember the old days when you had eyes only for my pretty cousin? I was sad then because you would not understand what I felt for you. Our whole lives might have been changed. Now I think it was better as it has been; it is better that we should never expose our friendship to the test of common life, the daily life, in which even the purest must be debased...."

"You say that because you love me less."

"Oh no! I love you just the same."

"Ah! That is the first time you have told me."

"There must be nothing hidden from us now. You see, I have not much faith in marriage left. Mine, I know, was not a very good example. But I have thought and looked about me. Happy marriages are very rare. It is a little against nature. You cannot bind together the wills of two people without mutilating one of them, if not both, and it does not even bring the suffering through which it is well and profitable for the soul to pass."

"Ah!" he said. "But I can see in it a fine thing-the union of two sacrifices, two souls merged into one."

"A fine thing, in your dreams. In reality you would suffer more than any one."

"What! You think I could never have a wife, a family, children?... Don't say that! I should love them so! You think it impossible for me to have that happiness?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. Perhaps with a good woman, not very intelligent, not very beautiful, who would be devoted to you, and would not understand you."

"How unkind of you!... But you are wrong to make fun of it. A good woman is a fine thing, even if she has no mind."

"I agree. Shall I find you one?"

"Please! No. You are hurting me. How can you talk like that?"

"What have I said?"

"You don't love me at all, not at all. You can't if you can think of my marrying another woman."

"On the contrary, it is because I love you that I should be happy to do anything which could make you happy."

"Then, if that is true...."

"No, no. Don't go back to that. I tell you, it would make you miserable."

"Don't worry about me. I swear to you that I shall be happy! Speak the truth: do you think that you would be unhappy with me?"

"Oh! Unhappy? No, my dear. I respect and admire you too much ever to be unhappy with you.... But, I will tell you: I don't think anything could make me very unhappy now. I have seen too much. I have become philosophical.... But, frankly-(You want me to? You won't be angry?)-well. I know my own weakness. I should, perhaps, be foolish enough, after a few months, not to be perfectly happy with you; and I will not have that, just because my affection for you is the most holy thing in the world, and I will not have it tarnished."

Sadly, he said:

"Yes, you say that, to sweeten the pill. You don't like me. There are things in me which are odious to you."

"No, no. I assure you. Don't look so hang-dog. You are the dearest, kindest man...."

"Then I don't understand. Why couldn't we agree?"

"Because we are too different-both too decided, too individual."

"That is why I love you."

"I too. But that is why we should find ourselves conflicting."

"No." "Yes. Or, rather, as I know that you are bigger than I, I should reproach myself with embarrassing you with my smaller personality, and then I should be stifled. I should say nothing, and I should suffer."

Tears came to Christophe's eyes.

"Oh! I won't have that. Never! I would rather be utterly miserable than have you suffering through my fault, for my sake."

"My dear, you mustn't feel it like that.... You know, I say all that, but I may be flattering myself.... Perhaps I should not be so good as to sacrifice myself for you."

"All the better."

"But, then, I should sacrifice you, and that would be misery for me.... You see, there is no solving the difficulty either way. Let us stay as we are. Could there be anything better than our friendship?"

He nodded his head and smiled a little bitterly.

"Yes. That is all very well. But at bottom you don't love me enough."

She smiled too, gently, with a little melancholy, and said, with a sigh:

"Perhaps. You are right. I am no longer young. I am tired. Life wears one out unless one is very strong, like you.... Oh! you, there are times when I look at you and you seem to be a boy of eighteen."

"Alas! With my old face, my wrinkles, my dull skin!"

"I know that you have suffered as much as I-perhaps more. I can see that. But sometimes you look at me with the eyes of a boy, and I feel you giving out a fresh stream of life. I am worn out. When I think of my old eagerness, then-alas! As one said, 'Those were great days. I was very unhappy!' I hold to life only by a thread. I should never be bold enough to try marriage again. Ah! Then! Then!... If you had only given a sign!..."

"Well, then, well, tell me...."

"No. It is not worth the trouble."

"Then, if in the old days, if I had...."

"Yes. If you had...? I said nothing."

"I understood. You are cruel."

"Take it, then, that in the old days I was a fool."

"You are making it worse and worse."

"Poor Christophe! I can't say a word but it hurts you. I shan't say any more."

"You must.... Tell me.... Tell me something."

"Something?"

"Something kind."

She laughed.

"Don't laugh."

"Then you must not be sad."

"How can I be anything else?"

"You have no reason to be sad, I assure you."

"Why?"

"Because you have a friend who loves you."

"Truly?"

"If I tell you so, won't you believe me?"

"Tell me, then."

"You won't be sad any longer? You won't be insatiable? You will be content with our dear friendship?"

"I must."

"Oh! Ungrateful! And you say you love me? Really, I think I love you better than you love me."

"Ah! If it were possible."

He said that with such an outburst of lover's egoism that she laughed.

He too. He insisted:

"Tell me!..."

For a moment she was silent, looking at him, then suddenly she brought her face close to Christophe's and kissed him. It was so unexpected! His heart leaped within him. He tried to take her in his arms. But she had escaped. At the door of the little room she laid her finger on her lips.-"Hush!"-and disappeared.

* * * * *

From that moment on he did not again speak to her of his love, and he was less awkward in his relation with her. Their alternations of strained silence and ill-suppressed violence were succeeded by a simple restful intimacy. That is the advantage of frankness in friendship. No more hidden meanings, no more illusions, no more fears. Each knew the other's innermost thoughts. Now when Christophe was with Grazia in the company of strangers who irritated him and he lost patience at hearing her exchange with them the empty remarks usual in polite society, she would notice it and look at him and smile. It was enough to let him know that they were together, and he would find his peace restored.

The presence of the beloved robs the imagination of its poisoned dart: the fever of desire is cooled: the soul becomes absorbed in the chaste possession of the loved presence.-Besides, Grazia shed on all about her the silent charm of her harmonious nature. Any exaggeration of voice or gesture, even if it were involuntary, wounded her, as a thing that was not simple and beautiful. In this way she influenced Christophe little by little. Though at first he tugged at the bridle put upon his eagerness, he slowly gained the mastery of himself, and he was all the stronger since his force was not wasted in useless violence.

Their souls met and mingled. Grazia, who had smilingly surrendered to the sweetness of living, was awaked from her slumber by contact with Christophe's moral energy. She took a more direct and less passive interest in the things of the mind. She used to read very little, preferring to browse indolently over the same old books, but now she began to be curious about new ideas, and soon came to feel their attraction. The wealth of the world of modern ideas, which was not unknown to her though she had never cared to adventure in it alone, no longer frightened her now that she had a companion and guide. Insensibly she suffered herself, while she protested against it, to be drawn on to an understanding of the young Italians, whose ardent iconoclasm had always been distasteful to her.

But Christophe profited the more by this mutual perception. It has often been observed in love that the weaker of the two gives the most: it is not that the other loves less, but, being stronger, must take more. So Christophe had already been enriched by Olivier's mind. But this new mystic marriage was far more fruitful; for Grazia brought him for her dowry the rarest treasure, that Olivier had never possessed-joy. The joy of the soul and of the eyes. Light. The smile of the Latin sky, that loves the ugliness of the humblest things, and sets the stones of the old walls flowering, and endows even sadness with its calm radiance.

The budding spring entered into alliance with her. The dream of new life was teeming in the warmth of the slumbering air. The young green was wedding with the silver-gray of the olive-trees. Beneath the dark red arches of the ruined aqueducts flowered the white almond-trees. In the awakening Campagna waved the seas of grass and the triumphant flames of the poppies. Down the lawns of the villas flowed streams of purple anemones and sheets of violets. The glycine clambered up the umbrella-shaped pines, and the wind blowing over the city brought the scent of the roses of the Palatine.

They went for walks together. When she was able to shake off the almost Oriental torpor, in which for hours together she would muse, she became another creature: she loved walking; she was tall, with a fine length of leg, and a strong, supple figure, and she looked like a Diana of Primatice.-Most often they would go to one of the villas, left like flotsam from the shipwreck of the Splendid Rome of the setticento under the assault of the flood of the Piedmontese barbarians. They preferred, above all, the Villa Mattei, that promontory of ancient Rome, beneath which the last waves of the deserted Campagna sink and die. They used to go down the avenue of oaks that, with its deep vault, frames the blue, the pleasant chains of the Alban hills, softly swelling like a beating heart. Along the path through the leaves they could see the tombs of Roman husbands and wives, lying sadly there, with hands clasped in fidelity. They used to sit down at the end of the avenue, under an arbor of roses against a white sarcophagus. Behind them the desert. Profound peace. The murmuring of a slow-dropping fountain, trickling languidly, so languidly that it seemed on the point of dying. They would talk in whispers. Grazia's eyes would trustfully gaze into the eyes of her friend. Christophe would tell her of his life, his struggles, his past sorrows; and there was no more sadness in them. In her presence, with her eyes upon him, everything was simple, everything seemed inevitable.... She, in her turn, would tell of her life. He hardly heard what she said, but none of her thoughts were lost upon him. His soul and hers were wedded. He saw with her eyes. Everywhere he saw her eyes, her tranquil eyes, in the depths of which there burned an ardent fire; he saw them in the fair, mutilated faces of the antique statues and in the riddle of their silent gaze: he saw them in the sky of Rome, lovely laughing around the matted crests of the cypress-trees and through the fingers of the lecci, black, shining, riddled with the sun's arrows.

Through Grazia's eyes the meaning of Latin art reached his heart. Till then Christophe had been entirely indifferent to the work of the Italians. The barbarian idealist, the great bear from the German forests, had not yet learned to taste the delicious savor of the lovely gilded marbles, golden as honey. The antiques of the Vatican were frankly repulsive to him. He was disgusted by their stupid faces, their effeminate or massive proportions, their banal, rounded modeling, all the Gitons and gladiators. Hardly more than a few portrait-statues found favor in his sight, and the originals had absolutely no interest for him. He was no more kindly towards the pale, grimacing Florentines and their sick Madonnas and pre-Raphaelite Venuses, anaemic, consumptive, affected, and tormented. And the bestial stupidity of the red, sweating bullies and athletes let loose upon the world by the example of the Sistine Chapel made him think of cast-iron. Only for Michael Angelo did he have a secret feeling of pious sympathy with his tragic sufferings, his divine contempt, and the loftiness of his chaste passions. With a pure barbaric love, like that of the master, he loved the religious nudity of his youths, his shy, wild virgins, like wild creatures caught in a trap, the sorrowful Aurora, the wild-eyed Madonna, with her Child biting at her breast, and the lovely Lia, whom he would fain have had to wife. But in the soul of the tormented hero he found nothing more than the echo of his own.

Grazia opened the gates of a new world of art for him. He entered into the sovereign serenity of Raphael and Titian. He saw the imperial splendor of the classic genius, which, like a lion, reigns over the universe of form conquered and mastered. The flashing vision of the great Venetian which goes straight to the heart of life, and with its lightning cleaves the hovering mists that veil it, the masterful might of these Latin minds that cannot only conquer, but also conquer themselves, and in victory impose upon themselves the straitest discipline, and, on the field of battle, have the art exactly to choose their rightful booty from among the spoils of the enemy overthrown-the Olympian portraits and the stanze of Raphael filled Christophe's heart with music richer than Wagner's, the music of serene lives, noble architecture, harmonious grouping, the music which shines forth from the perfect beauty of face, hands, feet, draperies, and gestures. Intelligence. Love. The stream of love which springs from those youthful souls and bodies. The might of the spirit and delight. Young tenderness, ironic wisdom, the warm obsessing odor of amorous bodies, the luminous smile in which the shadows are blotted out and passion slumbers. The quivering force of life rearing and reined in, like the horses of the Sun, by the sturdy hand of the master....

And Christophe wondered:

"Is it impossible to unite, as they have done, the force and the peace of the Romans? Nowadays the best men aspire only to force or peace, one to the detriment of the other. Of all men the Italians seem most utterly to have lost the sense of harmony which Poussin, Lorraine, and Goethe understood. Must a stranger once more reveal to them its work?... And what man shall teach it to our musicians? Music has not yet had its Raphael. Mozart is only a child, a little German bourgeois, with feverish hands and sentimental soul, who uses too many words, too many gestures, and chatters and weeps and laughs over nothing. And neither the Gothic Bach nor the Prometheus of Bonn, struggling with the vulture, nor his offspring of Titans piling Pelion on Ossa, and hurling imprecations at the Heavens, have ever seen the smile of God...."

After he had seen it, Christophe was ashamed of his own music; his vain agitation, his turgid passions, his indiscreet exclamations, his parade of himself, his lack of moderation, seemed to him both pitiable and shameful. A flock of sheep without a shepherd, a kingdom without a king.-A man must be the king of his tumultuous soul....

During these months Christophe seemed to have forgotten music. He hardly wrote at all, feeling no need for it. His mind, fertilized by Rome, was in a period of gestation. He spent days together in a dreamy state of semi-intoxication. Nature, like himself, was in the early spring-time, when the languor of the awakening is mixed with a voluptuous dizziness. Nature and he lay dreaming, locked in each other's arms, like lovers embracing in their sleep. The feverish enigma of the Campagna was no longer hostile and disturbing to him; he had made himself master of its tragic beauty; in his arms he held Demeter, sleeping.

* * * * *

During April he received an invitation from Paris to go there and conduct a series of concerts. Without troubling to think it over, he decided to refuse, but thought it better to mention it to Grazia. It was very sweet to him to consult her about his life, for it gave him the illusion that she shared it.

This time she gave him a shock of disillusion. She made him explain the whole matter to her, and advised him to accept. He was very hurt, and saw in her advice the proof of her indifference.

Probably Grazia was sorry to give him such advice. But why did Christophe ask her for it? The more he turned to her and asked her to decide for him, the more she thought herself responsible for her friend's actions. As a result of their interchange of ideas she had gained from Christophe a little of his will-power: he had revealed to her duty and the beauty of action. At least she had recognized duty as far as her friend was concerned, and she would not have him fail in it. Better than he, she knew the power of languor given off by the Italian soil, which, like the insidious poison of its warm scirocco, creeps into the veins and sends the will to sleep. How often had she not felt its maleficent charm, and had no power to resist it! All her friends were more or less tainted by this malaria of the soul. Stronger men than they had in old days fallen victim to it: it had rusted away the brass of the Roman she-wolf. Rome breathes forth death: it is too full of graves. It is healthier to stay there for a little time than to live there. Too easily does one slip out of one's own time, a dangerous taste for the still young forces that have a vast duty to accomplish. Grazia saw clearly that the society about her had not a life-giving air for an artist. And although she had more friendship for Christophe than for any other ... (dared she confess it?) ... she was not, at heart, sorry for him to go. Alas! He wearied her with the very qualities that she most loved in him, his overflowing intelligence, his abundance of vitality, accumulated for years, and now brimming over: her tranquillity was disturbed by it. And he wearied her, too, perhaps, because she was always conscious of the menace of his love, beautiful and touching, but ever-present: so that she had always to be on her guard against it; it was more prudent to keep him at a distance. She did not admit it to herself, and thought she had no consideration for anything but Christophe's interests.

There was no lack of sound reasons at hand. In Italy just then it was difficult for a musician to live: the air was circumscribed. The musical life of the country was suppressed and deformed. The factory of the theater scattered its heavy ashes and its burning smoke upon the soil, whose flowers in old days had perfumed all Europe. If a man refused to enroll himself in the train of the brawlers, and could not, or would not, enter the factory, he was condemned to exile or a stifled existence. Genius was by no means dried up. But it was left to stagnate unprofitably and to go to ruin. Christophe had met more than one young musician in whom there lived again the soul of the melodious masters of the race and the instinct of beauty which filled the wise and simple art of the past. But who gave a thought to them? They could neither get their work played nor published. No interest was taken in the symphony. There were no ears for music except it were presented with a painted face!... So discouraged, they sang for themselves, and soon sang no more. What was the good of it? Sleep....-Christophe would have asked nothing better than to help them. While they admitted that he could do so, their umbrageous pride would not consent to it. Whatever he did, he was a foreigner to them; and for Italians of long descent, in spite of the warm welcome they will give him, every foreigner is really a barbarian. They thought that the wretched condition of their art was a question to be threshed out among themselves, and while, they extended all kind of friendly tributes to Christophe, they could not admit him as one of themselves.-What could he do? He could not compete with them and dispute with them their meager place in the sun, where they were by no means secure!...

Besides, genius cannot do without its food. The musician must have music-music to hear, music to make heard. A temporary withdrawal is valuable to the mind by forcing it to recuperate. But this can only be on condition that it will return. Solitude is noble, but fatal to an artist who has not the strength to break out of it. An artist must live the life of his own time, even if it be clamorous and impure: he must forever be giving and receiving, and giving, and giving, and again receiving.-Italy, at the time of Christophe's sojourn, was no longer the great market of the arts that once it was, and perhaps will be again. Nowadays the meeting-place of ideas, the exchange of the thought and spirit of the nations, are in the North. He who has the will to live must live in the North.

Left to himself, Christophe would have shuddered away from the rout. But Grazia felt his duty more clearly than he could see it. And she demanded more of him than of herself: no doubt because she valued him more highly, but also because it suited her. She delegated her energy upon him, and so maintained her tranquillity.-He had not the heart to be angry with her for it. Like Mary, hers was the better part. Each of us has his part to play in life. Christophe's was action. For her it was enough to be. He asked no more of her.

He asked nothing but to love her, if it were possible, a little less for himself, and a little more for her. For he did not altogether like her having so little egoism in her friendship as to think only of the interests of her friend-who asked only to be allowed to give no thought to them.

* * * * *

He went away from her. And yet he did not leave her. As an old trouvère says: "The lover does not leave his beloved but with the sanction of his soul."

He was sick at heart as he reached Paris. It was the first time he had been there since the death of Olivier. He had wished never to see the city again. In the cab which took him from the station to his hotel he hardly dared look out of the window; for the first few days he stayed in his room and could not bring himself to go out. He was fearful of the memories lying in wait for him outside.

But what exactly did he dread? Did he really know? Was it, as he tried to believe, the terror of seeing the dead spring to life again exactly as they had been? Or was it-the greater sorrow of being forced to know that they were dead?... Against this renewal of grief all the half-unconscious ruses of instinct had taken up arms. It was for this reason-(though perhaps he knew it not)-that he had chosen a hotel in a district far removed from that in which he had lived. And when for the first time he went out into the streets, having to conduct rehearsals at the concert-hall, when once more he came in contact with the life of Paris, he walked for a long time with his eyes closed, refusing to see what he did see, insisting on seeing only what he had seen in old days. He kept on saying to himself:

"I know that. I know that...."

In art as in politics there was the same intolerant anarchy. The same Fair in the market-place. Only the actors had changed their parts. The revolutionaries of his day had become bourgeois, and the supermen had become men of fashion. The old independents were trying to stifle the new independents. The young men of twenty years ago were now more conservative than the old conservatives whom they had fought, and their critics refused the newcomers the right to live. Apparently nothing was different.

But everything had changed....

* * * * *

"My dear, forgive me. It is good of you not to be angry with me for my silence. Your letter has helped me greatly. I have been through several weeks of terrible distress. I had nothing. I had lost you. Here I was feeling terribly the absence of those whom I have lost. All my old friends of whom I used to tell you have disappeared-Philomela-(you remember the singing voice that dear, sad night when, as I wandered through a gay crowd, I saw your eyes in a mirror gazing at me)-Philomela has realized her very reasonable dream: she inherited a little money, and has a farm in Normandy. M. Arnaud has retired and gone back to the provinces with his wife, to a little town near Angers. Of the famous men of my day many are dead or gone under; none are left save the same old puppets who twenty years ago were playing the juvenile lead in art and politics, and with the same false faces are still playing it. Outside these masks there are none whom I recognize. They seem to me to be grimacing over a grave. It is a terrible feeling.-More than this: during the first few days after my arrival I suffered physically from the ugliness of things, from the gray light of the North after your golden sun: the masses of dull houses, the vulgar lines of certain domes and monuments, which had never struck me before, hurt me cruelly. Nor was the moral atmosphere any more to my taste.

"And yet I have no complaint to make of the Parisians. They have given me a welcome altogether different from that which I received before. In my absence I seem to have become a kind of celebrity. I will say nothing of that, for I know what it is worth. I am touched by all the pleasant things which these people say and write of me, and am obliged to them. But what shall I say to you? I felt much nearer the people who attacked me in old days than I do to the people who laud me now.... It is my own fault, I know. Don't scold me. I had a moment of uneasiness. It was to be expected. It is done now. I understand. Yes. You are right to have sent me back among men. I was in a fair way to be buried in my solitude. It is unhealthy to play at Zarathustra. The flood of life moves on, moves on away from us. There comes a time when one is as a desert. Many weary days in the burning sun are needed to dig a new channel in the sand, to dig down to the river.-It has been done. I am no longer dizzy. I am in the current again. I look and see.

"My dear, what a strange people are the French! Twenty years ago I thought they were finished.... They are just beginning again. My dear comrade, Jeannin, foretold it. But I thought he was deceiving himself. How could one believe it then! France was, like their Paris, full of broken houses, plaster, and holes. I said: 'They have destroyed everything.... What a race of rodents!'-a race of beavers. Just when you think them prostrate on their ruins, lo, they are using the ruins to lay the foundations of a new city. I can see it now in the scaffoldings which are springing up on all sides....

"Wenn ein Ding geschehen Selbst die Narren es verstehen,..." [Footnote: "When a thing has happened, even the fools can see it."]

"In truth there is just the same French disorder. One needs to be used to it to see in the rout seething up from all directions, the bands of workmen, each going about his appointed task. There are also people who can do nothing without vilifying what their neighbors are doing. All this is calculated to upset the stoutest head. But when you have lived, as I have, nearly ten years with them, you cannot be deceived by their uproar. You see then that it is their way of spurring themselves on to work. They talk, but they work, and as each builder's yard sets about building a house, in the end you find that the city has been re-builded. What is most remarkable is that, taken together, all these buildings are not discordant. They may maintain opposing theses, but all their minds are cast in the same mold. So that, beneath their anarchy, there are common instincts, a racial logic which takes the place of discipline, and this discipline is, when all is told, probably more solid than that of a Prussian regiment.

"Everywhere the same enthusiasm, the same constructive fever: in politics, where Socialists and Nationalists vie with one another in tightening up the wheels of slackened power; in art, which some wish to make into an old aristocratic mansion for the privileged few, and others a vast hall open to the people, a hall where the collective soul can sing; they are reconstructors of the past, or constructors of the future. But whatever they do, these ingenious creatures are forever building the same cells. They have the instincts of beavers or bees, and through the ages are forever doing the same things, returning to the same forms. The most revolutionary among them are perhaps those who most closely cling, though they may not know it, to the most ancient traditions. Among the syndicates and the most striking of the young writers I have found purely medieval souls.

"Now that I have grown used to their tumultuous ways, I can watch them working with pleasure. Let us be frank: I am too old a bear ever to feel at ease in any of their houses: I need the open air. But what good workers they are! That is their highest virtue. It laves the most mediocre and the most corrupt: and then, in their artists, what a sense of beauty! I remarked that much less in the old days. You taught me to see. My eyes were opened in the light of Rome. Your Renaissance men have helped me to understand these. A page of Debussy, a torso of Rodin, a phrase of Suarès, these are all in the direct line from your cinquecestenti.

"Not that there is not much that is distasteful to me here. I have found my old friends of the market-place, who used to drive me to fury. They have not changed. But, alas! I have changed. I cannot be severe. When I feel myself wanting to judge one of them harshly I say to myself: 'You have no right. You have done worse than these men, though you thought yourself so strong.' Also, I have learned that nothing exists in vain, and that even the vilest have their place in the scheme of the tragedy. The depraved dilettantists, the foetid amoralists, have accomplished their termitic task; the tottering ruins must be brought down before they can be built up again. The Jews have been true to their sacred mission, which is, in the midst of other races, to be a foreign race, the race which, from end to end of the world, is to link up the network of human unity. They break down the intellectual barriers between the nations, to give Divine Reason an open field. The worst agents of corruption, the ironic destroyers who ruin our old beliefs and kill our well-beloved dead, toil, unwittingly, in the holy work of new life. So the ferocious self-interest of the cosmopolitan bankers, whose labors are attended with such and so many disasters, build, whether they will or no, the future peace of the world, side by side with the revolutionaries who combat them, far more surely than the idiotic pacifists.

"You see, I am getting old. I have lost my bite. My teeth have lost their sharpness. When I go to the theater I am now only one of those simple spectators who apostrophize the actors and cry shame on the traitor.

"My tranquil Grace, I am only talking about myself: and yet I think only of you. If you knew how importunate is my ego! It is oppressive and absorbing. It is like a millstone that God has tied round my neck. How I should have loved to lay it at your feet! But what would you have done with it? It is a poor kind of present.... Your feet were made to tread the soft earth and the sand sinking beneath the tread. I see your feet carelessly passing over the lawns dappled with anemones.... (Have you been again to the Villa Doria?)... And you are tired! I see you now half-reclining in your favorite retreat, in your drawing-room, propped up on your elbow, holding a book which you do not read. You listen to me kindly, without paying much attention to what I say; for I am tiresome, and, for patience, you turn every now and then to your own thoughts; but you are courteous, and, taking care not to upset me, when a chance word brings you back from your distant journeying, your eyes, so absent before, quickly take on an expression of interest. And I am as far from what I am saying as you: I, too, hardly hear the sound of my words: and while I follow their reflection in your lovely face, in my heart I listen to other words which I do not speak to you. Those words, my tranquil Grace, unlike the others, you hear quite clearly, but you pretend not to hear them.

"Adieu. I think you will see me again in a little while, I shall not languish here. What should I do now that my concerts are over?-I kiss your children on their little cheeks. They are yours and you. I must be content!...

"CHRISTOPHE."

* * * * *

"Tranquil Grace" replied:

"My dear,

"I received your letter in the little corner of the drawing-room that you remember so well, and I read it, as I am clever at reading, by letting your letter fall every now and then and resting. Don't laugh at me. I did that to make it last a long time. In that way we spent a whole afternoon together. The children asked me what it was I kept on reading. I told them it was a letter from you. Aurora looked at the paper pityingly and said: 'How tiresome it must be to write such a long letter!' I tried to make her understand that it was not an imposition I had set you, but a conversation we were having together. She listened without a word, then ran away with her brother to play in the next room, and a little later, when Lionello began to shout, I heard Aurora say: 'You mustn't make such a noise: mamma is talking to M. Christophe.'

"What you tell me about the French interests me, but it does not surprise me. You remember that I often used to reproach you with being unjust towards them. It is impossible to like them. But what an intelligent people they are! There are mediocre nations who are preserved by their goodness of heart or their physical vigor. The French are saved by their intelligence. It laves all their weaknesses, and regenerates them. When you think they are down, beaten, perverted, they find new youth in the ever-bubbling spring of their minds.

"But I must scold you. You ask my pardon for speaking only of yourself. You are an ingannatore. You tell me nothing about yourself. Nothing of what you have been doing. Nothing of what you have been seeing. My cousin Colette-(why did not you go and see her?)-had to send me press-cuttings about your concerts, or I should have known nothing of your success. You only mentioned it by the way. Are you so detached from everything?... It is not true. Tell me that it pleased you.... It must please you, if only because it pleases me. I don't like you to have a disillusioned air. The tone of your letter is melancholic. That must not be.... It is good that you are more just to others. But that is no reason why you should abase yourself, as you do, by saying that you are worse than the worst of them. A good Christian would applaud you. I tell you it is a bad thing. I am not a good Christian. I am a good Italian, and I don't like you tormenting yourself with the past. The present is quite enough. I don't know exactly what it was that you did. You told me the story in a very few words, and I think I guessed the rest. It was not a nice story, but you are none the less dear to me for it. My poor, dear Christophe, a woman does not reach my age without knowing that an honest man is often very weak. If one did not know his weakness one would not love him so much. Don't think any more about what you have done. Think of what you are going to do. Repentance is quite useless. Repentance means going back. And in good as in evil, we must always go forward. Sempre avanti, Savoia!... So you think I am going to let you come back to Rome! You have nothing to do here. Stay in Paris, work, do: play your part in its artistic life. I will not have you throw it all up. I want you to make beautiful things, I want them to succeed, I want you to be strong and to help the new young Christophes who are setting out on the same struggles, and passing through the same trials. Look for them, help them, be kinder to your juniors than your seniors were to you.-In fine, I want you to be strong because I know that you are strong: you have no idea of the strength that gives me.

"Almost every day I go with the children to the Villa Borghese. Yesterday we drove to Ponte Molle, and walked round the tower of Monte Mario. You slander my powers of walking and my legs cry out against you: 'What did the fellow mean by saying at the Villa Doria that we get tired in ten paces? He knows nothing about it. If we are not prone to give ourselves trouble, it is because we are lazy, and not because we cannot....' You forget, my dear, that I am a little peasant....

"Go and see my cousin Colette. Are you still angry with her? She is a good creature at heart, and she swears by you! Apparently the Parisian women are crazy about your music. (Perhaps they were in the old days.) My Berne bear may, and he will, be the lion of Paris. Have you had letters? And declarations? You don't mention any woman. Can you be in love? Tell me. I am not jealous. Your friend,

"G."

* * * * *

"... So you think I am likely to be pleased with your last sentence! I would to God you were jealous! But don't look to me to make you so. I have no taste for these mad Parisiennes, as you call them. Mad? They would like to be so. But they are nothing like it. You need not hope that they will turn my head. There would be more chance of it perhaps if they were indifferent to my music. But it is only too true that they love it; and how am I to keep my illusions? When any one tells you that he understands you, you may be very sure that he will never do so....

"Don't take my joking too seriously. The feeling I have for you does not make me unjust to other women. I have never had such true sympathy for them as I have now since I ceased to look at them with lover's eyes. The tremendous effort they have been making during the last thirty years to escape from the degrading and unwholesome semi-domesticity, to which our stupid male egoism condemned them, to their and our unhappiness, seems to me to be one of the most splendid facts of our time. In a town like this one learns to admire the new generation of young women, who, in spite of so many obstacles, with so much fresh ardor rush on to the conquest of knowledge and diplomas,-the knowledge, the diplomas which, they think, must liberate them, open to them the arcana of the unknown world and make them the equals of men....

"No doubt their faith is illusory and rather ridiculous. But progress is never realized as we expect it to be: it is none the less realized because it takes entirely different paths from those we have marked out for it. This effort of the women will not be wasted. It will make women completer and more human, as they were in the great ages. They will no longer be without interest in the living questions of the world, as most scandalously and monstrously they have been, for it is intolerable that a woman, though she be never so careful in her domestic duties, should think herself absolved from thinking of her civic duties in the modern city. Their great-great-grandmothers of the time of Joan of Arc and Catherine Sforza were not of this way of thinking. Woman has withered. We have refused her air and sun. She is taking them from us again by force. Ah! the brave little creatures!... Of course, many of those who are now struggling will die and many will be led astray. It is an age of crisis. The effort is too violent for those whose strength has too much gone to seed. When a plant has been for a long time without water, the first shower of rain is apt to scald it. But what would you? It is the price of progress. Those who come after will flourish through their sufferings. The poor little warlike virgins of our time, many of whom will never marry, will be more fruitful for posterity than the generations of matrons who gave birth before them; for, at the cost of their sacrifices, there will issue from them the women of a new classic age.

"I have not found these working bees in your cousin Colette's drawing-room. What whim was it made you send me to her? I had to obey you; but it is not well: you are abusing your power. I had refused three of her invitations, left two of her letters unanswered. She came and hunted me up at one of my rehearsals-(they were going through my sixth symphony). I saw her, during the interval, come in with her nose in the air, sniffing and crying: 'That smacks of love! Ah! How I love such music!...'

"She has changed, physically; only her cat-like eyes with their bulging pupils, and her fantastic nose, always wrinkling up and never still, are the same. But her face is wider, big-boned, highly colored, and coarsened. Sport has transformed her. She gives herself up to sport of all kinds. Her husband, as you know, is one of the swells at the Automobile Club and the Aero Club. There is not an aviation meeting, nor a race by air, land, or water, but the Stevens-Delestrades think themselves compelled to be present at it. They are always out on the highways and byways. Conversation is quite impossible; they talk of nothing but Racing, Rowing, Rugby, and the Derby. They belong to a new race of people. The days of Pelléas are forever gone for the women. Souls are no longer in fashion. All the girls hoist a red, swarthy complexion, tanned by driving in the open air and playing games in the sun: they look at you with eyes like men's eyes: they laugh and their laughter is a little coarse. In tone they have become more brutal, more crude. Every now and then your cousin will quite calmly say the most shocking things. She is a great eater, where she used to eat hardly anything. She still complains about her digestion, merely out of habit, but she never misses a mouthful for it. She reads nothing. No one reads among these people. Only music has found favor in their sight. Music has even profited by the neglect of literature. When these people are worn out, music is a Turkish bath to them, a warm vapor, massage, tobacco. They have no need to think. They pass from sport to love, and love also is a sport. But the most popular sport among their esthetic entertainments is dancing. Russian dancing, Greek dancing, Swiss dancing, American dancing, everything is set to a dance in Paris: Beethoven's symphonies, the tragedies of ?schylus, the Clavecin bien Tempéré, the antiques of the Vatican, Orpheus, Tristan, the Passion, and gymnastics. These people are suffering from vertigo.

"The queer thing is to see how your cousin reconciles everything, her estheticism, her sport, and her practical sense (for she has inherited from her mother her sense of business and her domestic despotism). All these things ought to make an incredible mixture, but she is quite at her ease with them all: her most foolish eccentricities leave her mind quite clear, just as she keeps her eyes and hands sure when she goes whirling along in her motor. She is a masterful woman: her husband, her guests, her servants, she leads them all, with drums beating and colors flying. She is also busy with politics: she is for 'Monseigneur'; not that I believe her to be a royalist, but it is another excuse for bestirring herself. And although she is incapable of reading more than ten pages of a book, she arranges the elections to the Academies.-She set about extending her patronage to me. You may guess that that was not at all to my liking. What is most exasperating is that the fact of my having visited her in obedience to you has absolutely convinced her of her power over me. I take my revenge in thrusting home truths at her. She only laughs, and is never at a loss for a reply. 'She is a good creature at heart....' Yes, provided she is occupied. She admits that herself: if the machine has nothing to grind she is capable of anything and everything to keep it going.-I have been to her house twice. I shall not go again. Twice is enough to prove my obedience to you. You don't want me to die? I leave her house broken, crushed, cramped. Last time I saw her I had a frightful nightmare after it: I dreamed I was her husband, all my life tied to that living whirlwind.... A foolish dream, and it need not trouble her real husband, for of all who go to the house he is the last to be seen with her, and when they are together they only talk of sport. They get on very well.

"How could these people make my music a success? I try not to understand. I suppose it shocked them in a new way. They liked it for brutalizing them. For the time being they like art with a body to it. But they have not the faintest conception of the soul in the body: they will pass from the infatuation of to-day to the indifference of to-morrow, from the indifference of to-morrow to the abuse of the day after, without ever having known it. That is the history of all artists. I am under no illusion as to my success, and have not been for a long time: and they will make me pay for it.-Meanwhile I see the most curious things going on. The most enthusiastic of my admirers is ... (I give him you among a thousand) ... our friend Lévy-Coeur. You remember the gentleman with whom I fought a ridiculous duel? Now he instructs those who used not to understand me. He does it very well too. He is the most intelligent of all the men talking about me. You may judge what the others are worth. There is nothing to be proud of, I assure you.

"I don't want to be proud of it. I am too humiliated when I hear the work for which I am belauded. I see myself in it, and what I see is not beautiful. What a merciless mirror is a piece of music to those who can see into it! Happily they are blind and deaf. I have put so much of my troubles and weaknesses into my work that sometimes it seems to me wicked to let loose upon the world such hordes of demons. I am comforted when I see the tranquillity of the audience: they are trebly armored: nothing can reach them: were it not so, I should be damned.... You reproach me with being too hard on myself. You do not know me as I know myself. They see what we are: they do not see what we might have been, and we are honored for what is not so much the effect of our qualities as of the events that bear us along, and the forces which control us. Let me tell you a story....

"The other evening I was in one of the cafés where they play fairly good music, though in a queer way: with five or six instruments, filled out with a piano, they play all the symphonies, the masses, the oratorios. It is just like the stonecutters in Rome, where they sell the Medici chapel as an ornament for the mantelpiece. Apparently this is useful to art, which, if it is to circulate among men, must be turned into base coin. For the rest there is no deception in these concerts. The programs are copious, the musicians conscientious. I found a violoncellist there and entered into conversation with him: his eyes reminded me strangely of my father's; he told me the story of his life. He was the grandson of a peasant, the son of a small official, a clerk in a mairie in a village in the North. They wanted to make him a gentleman, a lawyer, and he was sent to school in the neighboring town. He was a sturdy country boy, not at all fitted for being cooped up over the small work of a notary's office, and he could not stay caged in: he used to jump over the wall, and wander through the fields, and run after the girls, and spend his strength in brawling: the rest of the time he lounged and dreamed of things he would never do. Only one thing had any attraction for him: music. God knows why! There was not a single musician in his family, except a rather cracked great-uncle, one of those odd, provincial characters, whose often remarkable intelligence and gifts are spent, in their proud isolation, on whims, and cranks, and trivialities. This great-uncle had invented a new system of notation-(yet another!)-which was to revolutionize music; he even claimed to have found a system of stenography by which words, tune, and accompaniment could be written simultaneously; but he never managed to transcribe it correctly himself. They just laughed at the old man in the family, but all the same, they were proud of him. They thought: 'He is an old madman. Who knows? Perhaps he is a genius.'-It was no doubt from him that the grandnephew had his mania for music. What music could he hear in the little town?... But bad music can inspire a love as pure as good music.

"The unhappy part of it was that there seemed no possibility of confessing to such a passion in such surroundings: and the boy had not his great-uncle's cracked brains. He hid away to read the old lunatic's lucubrations which formed the basis of his queer musical education. Vain and fearful of his father and of public opinion, he would say nothing of his ambitions until he had succeeded. He was crushed by his family, and did as so many French people of the middle-class have to do when, out of weakness or kindness, they dare not oppose the will of their relations: they submit to all appearance, and live their true life in perpetual secrecy. Instead of following his bent, he struggled on, against his inclination, in the work they had marked out for him. He was as incapable of succeeding in it as he was of coming to grief. Somehow or other he managed to pass the necessary examinations. The main advantage to him was that he escaped from the spying of his father and the neighbors. The law crushed him: he was determined not to spend his life in it. But while his father was alive he dared not declare his desire. Perhaps it was not altogether distasteful to him to have to wait a little before he took the decisive step. He was one of those men who all their lives long dazzle themselves with what they will do later on, with the things they could do. For the moment he did nothing. He lost his bearings, and, intoxicated by his new life in Paris, gave himself up with all his young peasant brutality to his two passions, woman and music; he was crazed with the concerts he went to, no less than with pleasure. He wasted years doing this without even turning to account the means at hand of completing his musical education. His umbrageous pride, his unfortunate independent and susceptible character kept him from taking any course of lessons or asking anybody's advice.

"When his father died he sent Themis and Justinian packing. He began to compose without having had the courage to acquire the necessary technique. His inveterate habit of idle lounging and his taste for pleasure had made him incapable of any serious effort. He felt keenly: but his idea, and its form, would at once slip away: when all was told he expressed nothing but the commonplace. The worst of all was that there was really something great in this mediocrity. I read two of his old compositions. Here and there were striking ideas, left in the rough and then deformed. They were like fireflies over a bog.... And what a strange mind he had! He tried to explain Beethoven's sonatas to me. He saw them as absurd, childish stories. But such passion as there was in him, such profound seriousness! Tears would come to his eyes as he talked. He would die for the thing he loves. He is, touching and grotesque. Just as I was on the point of laughing in his face, I wanted to take him to my arms.... He is fundamentally honest, and has a healthy contempt for the charlatanry of the Parisian groups and their sham reputations,-(though at the same time he cannot help having the bourgeois admiration for successful men)....

"He had a small legacy. In a few months it was all gone, and, finding himself without resources, he had, like so many others of his kind, the criminal honesty to marry a girl, also without resources, whom he had seduced; she had a fine voice, and played music without any love for it. He had to live on her voice and her mediocre talent until he had learned how to play the 'cello. Naturally it was not long before they saw their mediocrity, and could not bear each other. They had a little girl. The father transferred his power of illusion to the child, and thought that she would be what he had failed to be. The little girl took after her mother: she was made to play the piano, though she had not a shadow of talent; she adored her father, and applied herself to her work to please him. For several years they plied the hotels in the watering-places, picking up more insults than money. The child was ailing and overworked, and died. The wife grew desperate, and became more shrewish every day. So his life became one of endless misery, with no hope of escape, brightened only by an ideal which he knew himself to be incapable of attaining....

"And, my dear, when I saw that poor broken devil, whose life has been nothing but a series of disappointments, I thought: 'That is what I might have been.' There was much in common in our boyhood, and certain adventures in our two lives are the same; I have even found a certain kinship in some of our musical ideas: but his have stopped short. What is it that has kept me from foundering as he has done? My will, no doubt. But also the chances of life. And even taking my will, is that due only to my merits? Is it not rather due to my descent, my friends, and God who has aided me?... Such thoughts make a man humble. With such thoughts he feels brotherly to all who love his art, and suffer for it.

"Prom lowest to highest the distance is not so great....

"On that I thought of what you said in your letter. You are right: an artist has no right to hold aloof, so long as he can help others. So I shall stay: I shall force myself to spend a few months in every year here, or in Vienna, or Berlin, although it is hard for me to grow accustomed to these cities again. But I must not abdicate. If I do not succeed in being of any great service, as I have good reason to think I shall not, perhaps my sojourn in these cities will be useful to me, myself. And I shall console myself with the thought that it was your wish. Besides ... (I will not lie)... I am beginning to find it pleasant. Adieu, tyrant. You have triumphed. I am beginning not only to do what you want me to do, but to love doing it.

"CHRISTOPHE."

* * * * *

So he stayed, partly to please her, but also because his artistic curiosity was reawakened, and was drawn on to contemplation of the renewal of art. Everything that he saw and did he presented for Grazia's scrutiny in his letters. He knew that he was deceiving himself as to the interest she would take in it all; he suspected her of a certain indifference. But he was grateful to her for not letting him see it too clearly.

She answered him regularly once a fortnight. Affectionate, composed letters, like her gestures. When she told him of her life she never discarded her tender, proud reserve. She knew the violence with which her words went resounding through Christophe's heart. She preferred that he should think her cold, rather than to send him flying to heights whither she did not wish to follow him. But she was too womanly not to know the secret of not discouraging her friend's love, and of, at once, by gentle words, soothing the dismay and disappointment caused by her indifferent words. Christophe soon divined her tactics, and by a counter-trick tried in his turn to control his warmth and to write more composedly, so that Grazia's replies should not be so studiously restrained.

The longer he stayed in Paris the greater grew his interest in the new activity stirring in that gigantic ant-heap. He was the more interested in it all as in the young ants he found less sympathy with himself. He was not deceived: his success was a Pyrrhic victory. After an absence of ten years his return had created a sensation in Parisian society. But by an ironic turn of events, such as is by no means rare, he found himself patronized by his old enemies the snobs, and people of fashion: the artists were either mutely hostile or distrustful of him. He won his way by his name, which already belonged to the past, by his considerable accomplishment, by his tone of passionate conviction, and the violence of his sincerity. But if people were forced to reckon with him, to admire or respect him, they did not understand or love him. He was outside the art of the time. A monster, a living anachronism. He had always been that. His ten years of solitude had accentuated the contrast. During his absence in Europe, and especially in Paris, a great work of reconstruction had been carried through. A new order was springing to life. A generation was arising, desirous rather of action than of understanding, hungry rather for happiness than for truth. It wished to live, to grasp life, even at the cost of a lie. Lies of pride-all manner of pride: pride of race, pride of caste, pride of religion, pride of culture and art-all were food to this generation, provided that they were armor of steel, provided that they could be turned to sword and buckler, and that, sheltered by them, they could march on to victory.

So to this generation it was distasteful to hear the great voice of torment reminding it of the existence of sorrow and doubt, those whirlwinds that had troubled the night that was hardly gone, and, in spite of its denials, went on menacing the universe, the whirlwinds that it wished to forget. These young people turned away in despite, and they shouted at the top of their voices to deafen themselves. But the voice was heard above them all. And they were angry.

Christophe, on the other hand, regarded them with a friendly eye. He hailed the upward movement of the world towards happiness. The deliberate narrowness of its impulse affected him not at all. When a man wishes to go straight to his goal, he must look straight in front of him. For his part, sitting at the turning of the world, he was rejoiced to see behind him the tragic splendor of the night, and, in front of him, the smile of young hope, the uncertain beauty of the fresh, fevered dawn. And he was at the stationary point of the axis of the pendulum while the clock was beginning to go again. Without following its onward march, he listened joyfully to the beating of the rhythm of life. He joined in the hope of those who denied his past agonies. What would be, would be, as he had dreamed. Ten years before, in night and suffering, Olivier-the little Gallic cock-had with his frail song announced the distant day. The singer was no more; but his song was coming to pass. In the garden of Prance the birds were singing. And, above all the singing, clearer, louder, happier, Christophe suddenly heard the voice of Olivier come to life again.

* * * * *

He was absently reading a book of poems at a bookstall. The name of the author was unknown to him. Certain words struck him and he went on reading. As he read on between the uncut pages he seemed to recognize a friendly voice, the features of a friend.... He could not define his feeling, nor could he bring himself to put the book down, and so he bought it. When he reached his room he resumed his reading. At once the old obsession descended on him. The impetuous rhythm of the poem evoked, with a visionary precision, the universe and age-old souls-the gigantic trees of which we are all the leaves and the fruit-the nations. From the pages there arose the superhuman figure of the Mother-she who was before us, she who will be after us. She who reigns, like the Byzantine Madonnas, lofty as the mountains, at whose feet kneel and pray ant-like human beings. The poet was hymning the homeric struggle of the great goddesses, whose lances had clashed together since the beginning of the ages: the eternal Iliad which is to that of Troy what the Alps are to the little hills of Greece.

Such an epic of warlike pride and action was far removed from the ideas of a European soul like Christophe's. And yet, in gleams, in the vision of the French soul-the graceful virgin, who bears the Aegis, Athena, with blue eyes shining through the darkness, the goddess of work, the incomparable artist, sovereign reason, whose glittering lance hurls down the tumultuously shouting barbarians-Christophe perceived an expression, a smile that he knew and had loved. But just as he was on the point of fixing it the vision died away. And while he was exasperated by this vain pursuit, lo! as he turned a page, he came on a story which Olivier had told him a few days before his death....

He was struck dumb. He ran to the publishers, and asked for the poet's address. It was refused, as is the custom. He lost his temper. In vain. Finally he remembered that he could find what he wanted in a year-book. He did find it, and went at once to the author's house. When he wanted anything he found it impossible to wait.

It was in the Batignolles district on the top floor. There were several doors opening on to a common landing. Christophe knocked at the door which had been pointed out to him. The next door opened. A young woman, not at all pretty, very dark, with low-growing hair and a sallow complexion-a shriveled face with very sharp eyes-asked what he wanted. She looked suspicious. Christophe told her why he had come, and, in answer to her next question, gave his name. She came out of her room and opened the other door with a key which she had in her pocket. But she did not let Christophe enter immediately. She told him to wait in the corridor, and went in alone, shutting the door in his face. At last Christophe reached the well-guarded sanctum. He crossed a half-empty room which served as a dining-room and contained only a few shabby pieces of furniture, while near the curtainless window several birds were twittering in an aviary. In the next room, on a threadbare divan, lay a man. He sat up to welcome Christophe. At once Christophe recognized the emaciated face, lit up by the soul, the lovely velvety black eyes burning with a feverish flame, the long, intelligent hands, the misshapen body, the shrill, husky voice.... Emmanuel! The little cripple boy who had been the innocent cause.... And Emmanuel, suddenly rising to his feet, had also recognized Christophe.

They stood for a moment without speaking. Both of them saw Olivier.... They could not bring themselves to shake hands. Emmanuel had stepped backward. After ten long years, an unconfessed rancor, the old jealousy that he had had of Christophe, leaped forth from the obscure depths of instinct. He stood still, defiant and hostile.-But when he saw Christophe's emotion, when on his lips he read the name that was in their thoughts: "Olivier"-it was stronger than he: he flung himself into the arms held out towards him.

Emmanuel asked:

"I knew you were in Paris. But how did you find me?"

Christophe said: "I read your last book: through it I heard his voice."

"Yes," said Emmanuel. "You recognized it? I owe everything that I am now to him."

(He avoided pronouncing the name.)

After a moment he went on gloomily:

"He loved you more than me."

Christophe smiled:

"If a man loves truly there is neither more nor less: he gives himself to all those whom he loves."

Emmanuel looked at Christophe: the tragic seriousness of his stubborn eyes was suddenly lit up with a profound sweetness. He took Christophe's hand and made him sit on the divan by his side.

Each told the story of his life. From fourteen to twenty-five Emmanuel had practised many trades: printer, upholsterer, pedlar, bookseller's assistant, lawyer's clerk, secretary to a politician, journalist.... In all of them he had found the means of learning feverishly, here and there finding the support of good people who were struck by the little man's energy, more often falling into the hands of people who exploited his poverty and his gifts, turning his worst experiences to profit, and succeeding in fighting his way through without too much bitterness, leaving behind him only the remains of his feeble health. His singular aptitude for the dead languages (not so rare as one is inclined to believe in a race imbued with humanistic traditions) gained him the interest and support of an old Hellenizing priest. These studies, which he had no time to push very far, served him as mental discipline and a school of style. This man, who had risen from the dregs of the people, whose whole education had been won by his own efforts, haphazard, so that there were great gaps in it, had acquired a gift of verbal expression, a mastery of thought over form, such as ten years of a university education cannot give to the young bourgeois. He attributed it all to Olivier. And yet others had helped him more effectively. But from Olivier came the spark which in the night of this man's soul had lighted the eternal flame. The rest had but poured oil into the lamp.

He said:

"I only began to understand him from the moment when he passed away. But everything he ever said had become a part of me. His light never left me."

He spoke of his work and the task which he declared had been left to him by Olivier; the awakening of the French, the kindling of that torch of heroic idealism of which Olivier had been the herald: he wished to make himself the resounding voice which should hover above the battlefield and declare the approaching victory: he sang the epic of the new-birth of his race.

His poems were the product of that strange race that, through the ages, has so strongly preserved its old Celtic aroma, while it has ever taken a bizarre pride in clothing its ideas with the cast-off clothes and laws of the Roman conqueror. There were to be found in it absolutely pure the Gallic audacity, the spirit of heroic reason, of irony, the mixture of braggadocio and crazy bravura, which set out to pluck the beards of the Roman senators, and pillaged the temple of Delphi, and laughingly hurled its javelins at the sky. But this little Parisian dwarf had had to shape his passions, as his periwigged grandfathers had done, and as no doubt his great-grandnephews would do, in the bodies of the heroes and gods of Greece, two thousand years dead. It is a curious instinct in these people which accords well with their need of the absolute: as they impose their ideas on the remains of the ages, they seem to themselves to be imposing them on the ages. The constraint of his classic form only gave Emmanuel's passions a more violent impulse. Olivier's calm confidence in the destinies of France had been transformed in his little protégé into a burning faith, hungering for action and sure of triumph. He willed it, he said it, he clamored for it. It was by his exalted faith and his optimism that he had uplifted the souls of the French public. His book had been as effective as a battle. He had made a breach in the ranks of skepticism and fear. The whole younger generation had thronged to follow him towards the new destiny....

He grew excited as he talked: his eyes burned, his pale face glowed pink in patches, and his voice rose to a scream. Christophe could not help noticing the contrast between the devouring fire and the wretched body that was its pyre. He was only half-conscious of the irony of this stroke of fate. The singer of energy, the poet who hymned the generation of intrepid sport, of action, war, could hardly walk without losing his breath, was extremely temperate, lived on a strict diet, drank water, could not smoke, lived without women, bore every passion in his body, and was reduced by his health to asceticism.

Christophe watched Emmanuel, and he felt a mixture of admiration and brotherly pity. He tried not to show it: but no doubt his eyes betrayed his feeling. Emmanuel's pride, which ever kept an open wound in his side, made him think he read commiseration in Christophe's eyes, and that was more odious to him than hatred. The fire in him suddenly died down. He stopped talking. Christophe tried in vain to win back his confidence. His soul had closed up. Christophe saw that he was wounded.

The hostile silence dragged on. Christophe got up. Emmanuel took him to the door without a word. His step declared his infirmity: he knew it: it was a point of pride with him to appear indifferent: but he thought Christophe was watching him, and his rancor grew.

Just as he was coldly shaking hands with his guest, and saying good-by, an elegant young lady rang at the door. She was escorted by a pretentious nincompoop whom Christophe recognized as a man he had seen at theatrical first-nights, smiling, chattering, waving his hand, kissing the hands of the ladies, and from his stall shedding smiles all over the theater: not knowing his name, he had called him "the buck."-The buck and his companion, on seeing Emmanuel, flung themselves on the "cher ma?tre" with obsequious and familiar effusiveness. As Christophe walked away he heard Emmanuel in his dry voice saying that he was too busy to see any one. He admired the man's gift of being disagreeable. He did not know Emmanuel's reasons for scowling at the rich snobs who came to gratify him with their indiscreet visits; they were prodigal of fine phrases and eulogy; but they no more thought of helping him in his poverty than the famous friends of César Franck ever dreamed of releasing him from the piano-lessons which he had to give up to the last to make a living.

Christophe went several times again to see Emmanuel. He never succeeded in restoring the intimacy of his first visit. Emmanuel showed no pleasure in seeing him, and maintained a suspicious reserve. Every now and then he would be carried away by the generous need of expansion of his genius: a remark of Christophe's would shake him to the very roots of his being: then he would abandon himself to a fit of enthusiastic confidence: and over his secret soul his idealism would cast the glowing light of a flashing poetry. Then, suddenly, he would fall back: he would shrivel up into sulky silence: and Christophe would find him hostile once more.

They were divided by too many things. Not the least was the difference in their ages. Christophe was on the way to full consciousness and mastery of himself. Emmanuel was still in process of formation and more chaotic than Christophe had ever been. The originality of his face came from the contradictory elements that were at grips in him; a mighty stoicism, struggling to tame a nature consumed by atavistic desires,-(he was the son of a drunkard and a prostitute);-a frantic imagination which tugged against the bit of a will of steel; an immense egoism, and an immense love for others, and of the two it were impossible to tell which would be the conqueror; an heroic idealism and a morbid thirst for glory which made him impatient of other superiorities. If Olivier's ideas, and his independence, and his disinterestedness were in him, if Emmanuel was superior to his master by his plebeian vitality which knew not disgust in the face of action, by his poetic genius and his thicker skin, which protected him from disgust of all kinds, yet he was very far from reaching the serenity of Antoinette's brother: his character was vain and uneasy: and the restlessness of other people only augmented his own.

He lived in a stormy alliance with a young woman who was his neighbor, the woman who had received Christophe on his first visit. She loved Emmanuel, and was jealously busy over him, looked after his house, copied out his work, and wrote to his dictation. She was not beautiful, and she bore the burden of a passionate soul. She came of the people, and for a long time worked in a bookbinding workshop, then in the post-office. Her childhood had been spent in the stifling atmosphere common to all the poor workpeople of Paris: souls and bodies all huddled together, harassing work, perpetual promiscuity, no air, no silence, never any solitude, no opportunity for recuperation or of defending the inner sanctuary of the heart. She was proud in spirit, with her mind ever seething with a religious fervor for a confused ideal of truth. Her eyes were worn out with copying out at night, sometimes without a lamp, by moonlight, Les Misérables of Hugo. She had met Emmanuel at a time when he was more unhappy than she, ill and without resources; and she had devoted herself to him. This passion was the first, the only living love of her life. So she attached herself to him with a hungry tenacity. Her affection was a terrible trial to Emmanuel, who rather submitted to than shared it. He was touched by her devotion: he knew that she was his best friend, the only creature to whom he was everything, who could not do without him. But this very feeling overwhelmed him. He needed liberty and isolation; her eyes always greedily beseeching a look obsessed him: he used to speak harshly to her, and longed to say: "Go!" He was irritated by her ugliness and her clumsy manners. Though he had seen but little of fashionable society, and though he heartily despised it,-(for he suffered at appearing even uglier and more ridiculous there),-he was sensitive to elegance, and alive to the attraction of women who felt towards him (he had no doubt of it) exactly as he felt towards his friend. He tried to show her an affection which he did not possess or, at least, which was continually obscured by gusts of involuntary hatred. He could not do it: he had a great generous heart in his bosom, hungering to do good, and also a demon of violence, capable of much evil. This inward struggle and his consciousness of his inability to end it to his advantage plunged him into a state of acute irritation, which he vented on Christophe.

Emmanuel could not help feeling a double antipathy towards Christophe; firstly because of his old jealousy (one of those childish passions which still subsist, though we may forget the cause of them): secondly, because of his fierce nationalism. In France he had embodied all the dreams of justice, pity, and human brotherhood conceived by the best men of the preceding age. He did not set France against the rest of Europe as an enemy whose fortune is swelled by the ruin of the other nations, but placed her at their head, as the legitimate sovereign who reigns for the good of all-the sword of the ideal, the guide of the human race. Rather than see her commit an injustice he would have preferred to see her dead. But he had no doubt of her. He was exclusively French in culture and in heart, nourished wholly by the French tradition, the profound reasons of which he found in his own instinct. Quite sincerely he ignored foreign thought, for which he had a sort of disdainful condescension,-and was exasperated if a foreigner did not accept his lowly position.

Christophe saw all that, but, being older and better versed in life, he did not worry about it. If such pride of race could not but be injurious, Christophe was not touched by it: he could appreciate the illusions of filial love, and never dreamed of criticising the exaggerations of a sacred feeling. Besides, humanity is profited by the vain belief of the nations in their mission. Of all the reasons at hand for feeling himself estranged from Emmanuel only one hurt him: Emmanuel's voice, which at times rose to a shrill, piercing scream. Christophe's ears suffered cruelly. He could not help making a face when it happened. He tried to prevent Emmanuel's seeing it. He endeavored to hear the music and not the instrument. There was such a beauty of heroism shining forth from the crippled poet when he evoked the victories of the mind, the forerunners of other victories, the conquest of the air, the "flying God" who should upraise the peoples, and, like the star of Bethlehem, lead them in his train, in ecstasies, towards far distant spaces or near revenge. The splendor of these visions of energy did not prevent Christophe's seeing their danger, and foreknowing whither this change and the growing clamor of the new Marseillaise would lead. He thought, with a little irony, (with no regret for past or fear of the future), that the song would find an echo that the singer could not foresee, and that a day would come when men would sigh for the vanished days of the Market-Place.-How free they were then! The golden age of liberty! Never would its like be known again. The world was moving on to the age of strength, of health, of virile action, and perhaps of glory, but also of harsh authority and narrow order. We shall have called it enough with our prayers, the age of iron, the classic age! The great classic ages-Louis XIV. or Napoleon-seem now at a distance the peaks of humanity. And perhaps the nation therein most victoriously realized its ideal State. But go and ask the heroes of those times what they thought of them! Your Nicolas Poussin went to live and die in Rome; he was stifled in your midst. Your Pascal, your Racine, said farewell to the world. And among the greatest, how many others lived apart in disgrace, and oppressed! Even the soul of a man like Molière hid much bitterness.-For your Napoleon, whom you so greatly regret, your fathers do not seem to have had any doubt as to their happiness, and the master himself was under no illusion; he knew that when he disappeared the world would say: "Ouf!"... What a wilderness of thought surrounds the Imperator! Over the immensity of the sands, the African sun....

Christophe did not say all that was in his mind. A few hints were enough to set Emmanuel in a fury, and he did not try the experiment again. But it was in vain that he kept his thoughts to himself: Emmanuel knew what he was thinking. More than that, he was obscurely conscious that Christophe saw farther than he. And he was only irritated by it. Young people never forgive their elders for forcing them to see what they will see in twenty years' time.

Christophe read his heart, and said to himself:

"He is right. Every man his own faith. A man must believe what he believes. God keep me from disturbing his confidence in the future!"

But his mere presence upset Emmanuel. When two personalities are together, however hard they try to efface themselves, one always crushes the other, and the other always feels rancor and humiliation. Emmanuel's pride was hurt by Christophe's superiority in experience and character. And perhaps also he was keeping back the love which he felt growing in himself for him.

He became more and more shy. He locked his door, and did not answer letters.-Christophe had to give up seeing him.

* * * * *

During the first days of July Christophe reckoned up what he had gained by his few months' stay in Paris: many new ideas, but few friends. Brilliant and derisory successes, in which he saw his own image and the image of his work weakened or caricatured in mediocre minds; and there is but scant pleasure in that. And he failed to win the sympathy of those by whom he would have loved to be understood; they had not welcomed his advances; he could not throw in his lot with them, however much he desired to share their hopes and to be their ally; it was as though their uneasy vanity shunned his friendship and found more satisfaction in having him for an enemy. In short, he had let the tide of his own generation pass without passing with it, and the tide of the next generation would have nothing to do with him. He was isolated, and was not surprised, for all his life he had been accustomed to it. But now he thought he had won the right, after this fresh attempt, to return to his Swiss hermitage, until he had realized a project which for some time past had been taking shape. As he grew older he was tormented with the desire to return and settle down in his own country. He knew nobody there, and would find even less intellectual kinship than in this foreign city: but none the less it was his country: you do not ask those of your blood to think your thoughts: between them and you there are a thousand secret ties; the senses learned to read in the same book of sky and earth, and the heart speaks the same language.

He gaily narrated his disappointments to Grazia, and told her of his intention of returning to Switzerland: jokingly he asked her permission to leave Paris, and assured her that he was going during the following week. But at the end of the letter there was a postscript saying:

"I have changed my mind. My departure is postponed."

Christophe had entire confidence in Grazia: he gave into her hands the secret of his inmost thoughts. And yet there was a room in his heart of which he kept the key: it contained the memories which did not belong only to himself, but to those whom he had loved. He kept back everything concerning Olivier. His reserve was not deliberate. The words would not come from his lips whenever he tried to talk to Grazia about Olivier. She had never known him....

Now, on the morning when he was writing to his friend, there came a knock on the door. He went to open it, cursing at being interrupted. A boy of fourteen or fifteen asked for M. Krafft. Christophe gruffly bade him come in. He was fair, with blue eyes, fine features, not very tall, with a slender, erect figure. He stood in front of Christophe, rather shyly, and said not a word. Quickly he pulled himself together, and raised his limpid eyes, and looked at him with keen interest. Christophe smiled as he scanned the boy's charming face, and the boy smiled too.

"Well?" said Christophe. "What do you want?"

"I came," said the boy....

(And once more he became confused, blushed, and was silent.)

"I can see that you have come," said Christophe, laughing. "But why have you come? Look at me. Are you afraid of me?"

The boy smiled once more, shook his head, and said:

"No."

"Bravo! Then tell me who you are."

"I am...." said the boy.

He stopped once more. His eyes wandered curiously round the room, and lighted on a photograph of Olivier on the mantelpiece.

"Come!" said Christophe. "Courage!"

The boy said:

"I am his son."

Christophe started: he got up from his chair, took hold of the boy's arm, and drew him to him; he sank back into his chair and held him in a close embrace: their faces almost touched; and he gazed and gazed at him, saying:

"My boy.... My poor boy...."

Suddenly he took his face in his hands and kissed his brow, eyes, cheeks, nose, hair. The boy was frightened and shocked by such a violent demonstration, and broke away from him. Christophe let him go. He hid his face in his hand, and leaned his brow against the wall, and sat so for the space of a few moments. The boy had withdrawn to the other end of the room. Christophe raised his head. His face was at rest: he looked at the boy with an affectionate smile.

"I frightened you," he said. "Forgive me.... You see, I loved him."

The boy was still frightened, and said nothing.

"How like you are to him!" said Christophe.... "And yet I should not have recognized you. What is it that has changed?..."

He asked:

"What is your name?"

"Georges."

"Oh! yes. I remember. Christophe Olivier Georges.... How old are you?"

"Fourteen."

"Fourteen! Is it so long ago?... It is as though it were yesterday-or far back in the darkness of time.... How like you are to him! The same features. It is the same, and yet another. The same colored eyes, but not the same eyes. The same smile, the same lips, but not the same voice. You are stronger. You hold yourself more erect: your face is fuller, but you blush just as he used to do. Come, sit down, let us talk. Who sent you to me?"

"No one."

"You came of your own accord? How do you know about me?"

"People have talked to me about you."

"Who?"

"My mother."

"Ah!" said Christophe. "Does she know that you came to see me?"

"No."

Christophe said nothing for a moment; then he asked:

"Where do you live?"

"Near the Parc Mon?eau."

"You walked here? Yes? It is a long way. You must be tired."

"I am never tired."

"Good! Show me your arms."

(He felt them.)

"You are a strong boy.... What put it into your head to come and see me?"

"My father loved you more than any one."

"Did she tell you so?"

(He corrected himself.)

"Did your mother tell you so?"

"Yes."

Christophe smiled pensively. He thought: "She too!... How they all loved him! Why did they not let him see it?..."

He went on:

"Why did you wait so long before you came?"

"I wanted to come sooner. But I thought you would not want to see me."

"I!"

"I saw you several weeks ago at the Chevillard concerts: I was with my mother, sitting a little away from you: I bowed to you: you looked through me, and frowned, and took no notice."

"I looked at you?... My poor boy, how could you think that?... I did not see you. My eyes are tired. That is why I frown.... You don't think me so cruel as that?"

"I think you could be cruel too, if you wanted to be."

"Really?" said Christophe. "In that case, if you thought I did not want to see you, how did you dare to come?"

"Because I wanted to see you."

"And if I had refused to see you?"

"I shouldn't have let you do that." He said this with a little decided air, at once shy and provoking.

Christophe burst out laughing, and Georges laughed too.

"You would have sent me packing! Think of that! You rogue!... No, decidedly, you are not like your father."

A shadow passed over the boy's mobile face.

"You think I am not like him? But you said, just now...? You don't think he would have loved me? You don't love me?"

"What difference does it make to you whether I love you or not?"

"A great deal of difference."

"Because...?"

"Because I love you."

In a moment his eyes, his lips, all his features, took on a dozen different expressions, like the shadows of the clouds on an April day chasing over the fields before the spring winds. Christophe had the most lovely joy in gazing at him and listening to him; it seemed to him that all the cares of the past were washed away; his sorrowful experiences, his trials, his sufferings and Olivier's sufferings, all were wiped out: he was born again in this young shoot of Olivier's life.

They talked on. Georges knew nothing of Christophe's music until the last few months, but since Christophe had been in Paris, he had never missed a concert at which his work was played. He spoke of it with an eager expression, his eyes shining and laughing, with the tears not far behind: he was like a lover. He told Christophe that he adored music, and that he wanted to be a composer. But after a question or two, Christophe saw that the boy knew not even the elements of music. He asked about his work. Young Jeannin was at the lycée; he said cheerfully that he was not a good scholar.

"What are you best at? Literature or science?"

"Very much the same."

"What? What? Are you a dunce?"

The boy laughed frankly and said:

"I think so."

Then he added confidentially:

"But I know that I am not, all the same."

Christophe could not help laughing.

"Then why don't you work? Aren't you interested in anything?"

"No. I'm interested in everything."

"Well, then, why?"

"Everything is so interesting that there is no time...."

"No time? What the devil do you do?"

He made a vague gesture:

"Many things. I play music, and games, and I go to exhibitions. I read...."

"You would do better to read your school-books."

"We never read anything interesting in school.... Besides, we travel.

Last month I went to England to see the Oxford and Cambridge match."

"That must help your work a great deal!"

"Bah! You learn much more that way than by staying at the lycée."

"And what does your mother say to that?"

"Mother is very reasonable. She does whatever I want."

"You bad boy!... You can thank your stars I am not your father...."

"You wouldn't have had a chance...."

It was impossible to resist his banter.

"Tell me, you traveler," said Christophe. "Do you know my country?"

"Yes."

"I bet you don't know a word of German."

"Yes, I do. I know it quite well."

"Let us see."

They began to talk German. The boy jabbered on quite ungrammatically with the most droll coolness; he was very intelligent and wide awake, and guessed more than he understood: often he guessed wrong; but he was the first to laugh at his mistakes. He talked eagerly about his travels and his reading. He had read a great deal, hastily, superficially, skipping half the pages, and inventing what he had left unread, but he was always urged on by a keen curiosity, forever seeking reasons for enthusiasm. He jumped from one subject to another, and his face grew animated as he talked of plays or books that had moved him. There was no sort of order in his knowledge. It was impossible to tell how he could read right through a tenth-rate book, and yet know nothing of the greatest masterpieces.

"That is all very well," said Christophe. "But you will never do anything if you do not work."

"Oh! I don't need to. We are rich."

"The devil! Then it is a very serious state of things. Do you want to be a man who does nothing and is good for nothing?"

"No. I should like to do everything. It is stupid to shut yourself up all your life in a profession."

"But it is the only means yet discovered of doing any good."

"So they say!"

"What do you mean? 'So they say!'... I say so. I've been working at my profession for forty years, and I am just beginning to get a glimmer of it."

"Forty years, to learn a profession! When can you begin to practise it?"

Christophe began to laugh.

"You little disputatious Frenchman!"

"I want to be a musician," said Georges.

"Well, it is not too early for you to begin. Shall I teach you?"

"Oh! I should be so glad!"

"Come to-morrow. I'll see what you are worth. If you are worth nothing, I shall forbid you ever to lay hands on a piano. If you have a real inclination for it, we'll try and make something of you.... But, I warn you, I shall make you work."

"I will work," said Georges delightedly.

They said good-by until the morrow. As he was going, Georges remembered that he had other engagements on the morrow, and also for the day after. Yes, he was not free until the end of the week. They arranged day and hour.

But when the day and hour came, Christophe waited in vain. He was disappointed. He had been looking forward with childlike glee to seeing Georges again. His unexpected visit had brightened his life. It had made him so happy, and moved him so much that he had not slept the night after it. With tender gratitude he thought of the young friend who had sought him out for his friend's sake. His natural grace, his malicious and ingenuous frankness had delighted him: he sank back into the mute intoxication, the buzzing of happiness, which had filled his ears and his heart during the first days of his friendship with Olivier. It was allied now with a graver and almost religious feeling which, through the living, saw the smile of the past.-He waited all the next day and the day after. Nobody came. Not even a letter of excuse. Christophe was very mournful, and cast about for excuses for the boy. He did not know where to write to him, and he did not know his address. Had he had it he would not have dared to write. When the heart of an older man is filled with love for a young creature, he feels a certain modesty about letting him see the need he has of him: he knows that the young man has not the same need: they are not evenly matched: and nothing is so much dreaded as to seem to be imposing oneself on a person who cares not a jot.

The silence dragged on. Although Christophe suffered under it, he forced himself to take no step to hunt up the Jeannins. But every day he expected the boy, who never came. He did not go to Switzerland, but stayed through the summer in Paris. He thought himself absurd, but he had no taste for traveling. Only when September came did he decide to spend a few days at Fontainebleau.

About the end of October Georges Jeannin came and knocked at his door. He excused himself calmly, without being in the least put out by his long silence.

"I could not come," he said. "And then we went away to stay in

Brittany."

"You might have written to me," said Christophe.

"Yes. I did try. But I never had the time.... Besides," he said, laughing, "I forgot all about it."

"When did you come back?"

"At the beginning of October."

"And it has taken you three weeks to come?... Listen. Tell me frankly:

Did your mother prevent you?... Does she dislike your seeing me?"

"No. Not at all. She told me to come to-day."

"What?"

"The last time I saw you before the holidays I told her everything when I got home. She told me I had done right, and she asked about you, and pestered me with a great many questions. When we came home from Brittany, three weeks ago, she made me promise to go and see you again. A week ago she reminded me again. This morning, when she found that I had not been, she was angry with me, and wanted me to go directly after breakfast, without more ado."

"And aren't you ashamed to tell me that? Must you be forced to come and see me?"

"No. You mustn't think that.... Oh! I have annoyed you. Forgive me.... I am a muddle-headed idiot.... Scold me, but don't be angry with me. I love you. If I did not love you I should not have come. I was not forced to come. I can't be forced to do anything but what I want to do."

"You rascal!" said Christophe, laughing in spite of himself. "And your musical projects, what about them?"

"Oh! I am still thinking about it."

"That won't take you very far."

"I want to begin now. I couldn't begin these last few months. I have had so much to do! But now you shall see how I will work, if you still want to have anything to do with me...."

(He looked slyly at Christophe.)

"You are an impostor," said Christophe.

"You don't take me seriously."

"No, I don't."

"It is too dreadful. Nobody takes me seriously. I lose all heart."

"I shall take you seriously when I see you working."

"At once, then."

"I have no time now. To-morrow."

"No. To-morrow is too far off. I can't bear you to despise me for a whole day."

"You bore me."

"Please!..."

Smiling at his weakness, Christophe made him sit at the piano, and talked to him about music. He asked him many questions, and made him solve several little problems of harmony. Georges did not know much about it, but his musical instinct supplied the gaps of his ignorance; without knowing their names, he found the chords Christophe wanted; and even his mistakes in their awkwardness showed a curiosity of taste and a singularly acute sensibility. He did not accept Christophe's remarks without discussion; and the intelligent questions he asked in his turn bore witness to the sincerity of a mind that would not accept art as a devout formula to be repeated with the lips, but desired to live it for its own sake.-They did not only talk of music. In reference to harmony Georges would summon up pictures, the country, people. It was difficult to hold him in check: it was constantly necessary to bring him back to the middle of the road: and Christophe had not always the heart to do so. It amused him to hear the boy's joyous chatter, so full of wit and life. What a difference there was between his nature and Olivier's! With the one life was a subterranean river that flowed silently; with the other all was above ground: a capricious stream disporting itself in the sun. And yet it was the same lovely, pure water, like their eyes. With a smile, Christophe recognized in Georges certain instinctive antipathies, likings and dislikings, which he well knew, and the na?ve intolerance, the generosity of heart which gives itself entirely to whatsoever it loves.... Only Georges loved so many things that he had no time to love any one thing for long.

He came back the next day and the days following. He was filled with a youthful passion for Christophe, and he worked enthusiastically at his lessons....-Then his enthusiasm palled, his visits grew less frequent. He came less and less often. Then he came no more, and disappeared for weeks.

He was light-hearted, forgetful, na?vely selfish, and sincerely affectionate; he had a good heart and a quick intelligence which he expended piecemeal day by day. People forgave him everything because they were so glad to see him; he was happy....

Christophe refused to judge him. He did not complain. He wrote to Jacqueline to thank her for having sent her son to him. Jacqueline replied with a short letter filled with restrained emotion: she expressed a hope that Christophe would be interested in Georges and help him in his life. Through shame and pride she could not bring herself to see him again. And Christophe thought he could not visit her without being invited.-So they stayed apart, seeing each other at a distance at concerts, bound together only by the boy's infrequent visits.

The winter passed. Grazia wrote but seldom. She was still faithful in her friendship for Christophe. But, like a true Italian, she was hardly at all sentimental, attached to reality, and needed to see people if she were, perhaps not to think of them, but certainly to take pleasure in talking to them. Her heart's memory needed to be supported by having her sight's memory refreshed from time to time. Her letters became brief and distant. She was as sure of Christophe as Christophe was of her. But their security gave out more light than warmth.

Christophe did not feel his new disappointments very keenly. His musical activity was enough to fill his life. When he reaches a certain age a vigorous artist lives much more in his art than in his life; his life has become the dream, his art the reality. His creative powers had been reawakened by contact with Paris. There is no stronger stimulant in the world than the sight of that city of work. The most phlegmatic natures are touched by its fever. Christophe, being rested by years of healthy solitude, brought to his work an enormous accumulation of force. Enriched by the new conquests forever being made in the fields of musical technique by the intrepid curiosity of the French, he hurled himself in his turn along the road to discovery: being more violent and barbarous than they, he went farther. But nothing in his new audacities was left to the hazardous mercies of his instinct. Christophe had begun to feel the need of clarity; all his life his genius had obeyed the rhythm of alternate currents: it was its law to pass from one pole to the other, and to fill everything between them. Having greedily surrendered in his last period to "the eyes of chaos shining through the veil of order," even to rending the veil so as to see them more clearly, he was now striving to tear himself away from their fascination, and once more to throw over the face of the sphinx the magic net of the master mind. The imperial inspiration of Rome had passed over him. Like the Parisian art of that time, by the spirit of which he was infected, he was aspiring to order. But not-like the reactionaries who spent what was left of their energies in protecting their slumber-to order in Varsovia; the good people who are always going back to Brahms-the Brahmses of all the arts, the thematics, the insipid neo-classics, in search of solace! Might one not say that they are enfeebled with passion! You are soon done for, my friends.... No, it is not of your order that I speak. Mine has no kinship with yours. Mine is the order in harmony of the free passions and the free will.... Christophe was studying how in his art to maintain the just balance between the forces of life. These new chords, the new musical daimons that he had summoned from the abyss of sounds, were used to build clear symphonies, vast, sunlit buildings, like the Italian cupola'd basilicas.

These plays and battles of the mind occupied him all winter. And the winter passed quickly, although, in the evening, as he ended his day's work and looked behind him at the tale of days, he could not have told whether it had been long or short, or whether he was still young or very old.

Then a new ray of human sunshine pierced the veil of his dreams, and once more brought in the springtime. Christophe received a letter from Grazia, telling him that she was coming to Paris with her two children. For a long time she had planned to do so. Her cousin Colette had often invited her. Her dread of the effort necessary to interrupt her habits and to tear herself away from her careless tranquillity and the home she loved in order to plunge into the Parisian whirligig that she knew so well, had made her postpone the journey from year to year. This spring she was filled with melancholy, perhaps with a secret disappointment-(how many unspoken romances there are in the heart of a woman, unknown to others, often unconfessed to herself!)-and she longed to go right away from Rome. A threatened epidemic gave her an excuse for hurrying on her children's departure. She followed her letter to Christophe in a very few days.

Christophe hastened to her as soon as he heard she was at Colette's. He found her still absorbed and distant. He was hurt, but did not show it. By now he was almost rid of his egoism, and that gave him the insight of affection. He saw that she had some grief which she wished to conceal, and he suppressed his longing to know its nature. Only he strove to keep her amused by giving her a gay account of his misadventures and sharing with her his work and his plans, and he wrapped her round with his affection. Her mournful heart rested in the heart of her friend, and he spoke to her always of things other than that which was in both their minds. And gradually he saw the shadow of melancholy fade from her eyes, and their expression became nearly, and ever more nearly, intimate. So much so, that one day, as he was talking to her, he stopped suddenly, and in silence looked at her.

"What is it?" she asked.

"To-day," he said, "you have come back to me."

She smiled, and in a low voice she replied:

"Yes."

It was not easy for them to talk quietly together. They were very rarely alone. Colette gave them the pleasure of her presence more often than they wished. In spite of her eccentricities she was extremely kind and sincerely attached to Grazia and Christophe; but she never dreamed that she could be a nuisance to them. She had, of course, noticed-(for her eyes saw everything)-what she was pleased to call Christophe's flirtation with Grazia; flirtation was her element, and she was delighted, and asked nothing better than to encourage it. But that was precisely what she was not required to do; she was only desired not to meddle with things that did not concern her. It was enough for her to appear or to make an (indiscreet) discreet allusion to their friendship to one of them, to make Christophe and Grazia freeze and turn the conversation. Colette cast about among all the possible reasons, except one, and that the true one, for their reserve. Fortunately for them, she could never stay long. She was always coming and going, coming in, going out, superintending everything in her house, doing a dozen things at a time. In the intervals between her appearances Christophe and Grazia, left alone with the children, would resume the thread of their innocent conversation. They never spoke of the feelings that bound them together. Unrestrainedly they confided to each other their little daily happenings. Grazia, with feminine interest, inquired into Christophe's domestic affairs. They were in a very bad way: he was always having ruptures with his housekeepers; he was continually being cheated and robbed by his servants. She laughed heartily but very kindly, and with motherly compassion for the great child's small practical sense. One day, when Colette left them after a longer visitation than usual, Grazia sighed:

"Poor Colette! I love her dearly.... But how she bores me!"

"I love her too," said Christophe, "if you mean by that that she bores us."

Grazia laughed:

"Listen. Will you let me ... (it is quite impossible for us to talk in peace here) ... will you let me come to your house one day?"

He could hardly speak.

"To my house! You will come?"

"If you don't mind?"

"Mind! Mercy, no!"

"Well, then, will you let me come on Tuesday?"

"Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, any day you like."

"Tuesday, at four. It is agreed?"

"How good of you! How good of you!"

"Wait. There is a condition."

"A condition? Why? Anything you like. You know that I will do it, condition or no condition."

"I would rather make a condition."

"I promise."

"You don't know what it is."

"I don't care. I promise. Anything you like."

"But listen. You are so obstinate."

"Tell me!"

"The condition is that between now and then you make no change in your rooms-none, you understand; everything must be left exactly as it is."

Christophe's face fell. He looked abject.

"Ah! That's not playing the game."

"You see, that's what comes of giving your word too hastily! But you promised."

"But why do you want-?

"But I want to see you in your rooms as you are, every day, when you are not expecting me."

"Surely you will let me-"

"Nothing at all. I shall allow nothing."

"At least-"

"No, no, no! I won't listen to you, or else I won't come, if you prefer it-"

"You know I would agree to anything if you will only come."

"Then you promise."

"Yes."

"On your word of honor?"

"Yes, you tyrant."

"A good tyrant."

"There is no such thing as a good tyrant: there are tyrants whom one loves and tyrants whom one detests."

"And I am both?"

"No. You are one of the first."

"It is very humiliating."

On the appointed day she came. With scrupulous loyalty Christophe had not dared even to arrange the smallest piece of paper in his untidy rooms: he would have felt dishonored had he done so. But he was in torture. He was ashamed of what his friend would think. Anxiously he awaited her arrival. She came punctually, not more than four or five minutes after the hour. She climbed up the stairs with her light, firm step. She rang. He was at the door and opened it. She was dressed with easy, graceful elegance. Through her veil he could see her tranquil eyes. They said "Good-day" in a whisper and shook hands; she was more silent than usual: he was awkward and emotional and said nothing, to avoid showing his feeling. He led her in without uttering the sentence he had prepared by way of excusing the untidiness of his room. She sat down in the best chair, and he sat near her.

"This is my work-room."

It was all he could find to say to her.

There was a silence. She looked round slowly, with a kindly smile, and she, too, was much moved, though she would not admit it to herself. (Later she told him that when she was a girl she had thought of coming to him, but had been afraid as she reached the door.) She was struck by the solitary aspect and the sadness of the place: the dark, narrow hall, the absolute lack of comfort, the visible poverty, all went to her heart: she was filled with affectionate pity for her old friend, who, in spite of all his work and his sufferings and his celebrity, was unable to shake free of material anxiety. And at the same time she was amused at the absolute indifference revealed by the bareness of the room that had no carpets, no pictures, no bric-a-brac, no armchair; no other furniture than a table, three hard chairs, and a piano: and papers, papers everywhere, mixed up with books, on the table, under the table, on the floor, on the piano, on the chairs-(she smiled as she thought how conscientiously he had kept his word).

After a minute or two she asked him, pointing to his place at the table:

"Is that where you work?"

"No," he said. "There."

He pointed to the darkest corner of the room, where there stood a low chair with its back to the light. She went and sat in it quietly, without a word. For a few minutes they were silent, for they knew not what to say. He got up and went to the piano. He played and improvised for half an hour; all around him he felt the presence of his beloved and an immense happiness filled his heart; with eyes closed he played marvelous things. Then she understood the beauty of the room, all furnished with divine harmonies: she heard his loving, suffering heart as though it were beating in her own bosom.

When the music had died away, he stopped for a little while, quite still, at the piano; then he turned as he heard the breath of his beloved and knew that she was weeping. She came to him.

"Thank you!" she murmured, and took his hand.

Her lips were trembling a little. She closed her eyes. He did the same. For a few seconds they remained so, hand in hand; and time stopped; it seemed to them that for ages, ages, they had been lying pressed close together.

She opened her eyes, and to shake off her emotion, she asked:

"May I see the rest of the flat?"

Glad also to escape from his emotions, he opened the door into the next room; but at once he was ashamed. It contained a narrow, hard iron bed.

On the wall there was a cast of the mask of Beethoven, and near the bed, in a cheap frame, photographs of his mother and Olivier. On the dressing-table was another photograph: Grazia herself as a child of fifteen. He had found it in her album in Rome, and had stolen it. He confessed it, and asked her to forgive him. She looked at the face, and said:

"Can you recognize me in it?"

"I can recognize you, and remember you."

"Which of the two do you love best?" she asked, pointing to herself.

"You are always the same. I love you always just the same. I recognize you everywhere. Even in the photograph of you as a tiny child. You do not know the emotion I feel as in this chrysalis I discern your soul. Nothing so clearly assures me that you are eternal. I loved you before you were born, and I shall love you ever after...."

He stopped. She stood still and made no answer: she was filled with the sweet sorrow of love. When she returned to the work-room, and he had shown her through the window his little friendly tree, full of chattering sparrows, she said:

"Now, do you know what we will do? We will have a feast. I brought tea and cakes because I knew you would have nothing of the kind. And I brought something else. Give me your overcoat."

"My overcoat?"

"Yes. Give it me."

She took needles and cotton from her bag.

"What are you going to do?"

"There were two buttons the other day which made me tremble for their fate. Where are they now?"

"True. I never thought of sewing them on. It is so tiresome!"

"Poor boy! Give it me."

"I am ashamed."

"Go and make tea."

He brought the kettle and the spirit-lamp into the room, so as not to miss a moment of his friend's stay. As she sewed she watched his clumsy ways stealthily and maliciously. They drank their tea out of cracked cups, which she thought horrible, dodging the cracks, while he indignantly defended them, because they reminded him of his life with Olivier.

Just as she was going, he asked:

"You are not angry with me?"

"Why should I be?"

"Because of the litter here?"

She laughed.

"I will make it tidy."

As she reached the threshold and was just going to open the door, he knelt and kissed her feet.

"What are you doing?" she said. "You foolish, foolish dear! Good-by!"

They agreed that she should come once a week on a certain day. She had made him promise that there should be no more outbursts, no more kneelings, no more kissing of her feet. She breathed forth such a gentle tranquillity, that even when Christophe was in his most violent mood, he was influenced by it; and although when he was alone, he often thought of her with passionate desire, when they were together they were always like good comrades. Never did word or gesture escape him which could disturb his friend's peace.

On Christophe's birthday she dressed her little girl as she herself had been when they first met in the old days; and she made the child play the piece that Christophe used to make her play.

But all her grace and tenderness and sweet friendship were mingled with contradictory feelings. She was frivolous, and loved society, and delighted in being courted, even by fools; she was a coquette, except with Christophe,-even with Christophe. When he was very tender with her, she would be deliberately cold and reserved. When he was cold and reserved she would become tender and tease him affectionately. She was the most honest of women. But even in the most honest and the best of women there is always a girl. She insisted on standing well with the world, and conformed to the conventions. She had fine musical gifts, and understood Christophe's work; but she was not much interested in it-(and he knew it).-To a true Latin woman, art is of worth only in proportion as it leads back to life, to life and love.... The love which is forever seething, slumbering, in the depths of the voluptuous body.... What has she to do with the tragic meditations, the tormented symphonies, the intellectual passions of the North? She must have music in which her hidden desires can unfold, with the minimum of effort, an opera, which is passionate life without the fatigue of the passions, a sentimental, sensual, lazy art.

She was weak and changing: she could only apply herself intermittently to any serious study: she must have amusement; rarely did she do on the morrow what she had decided to do the night before. She had so many childish ways, so many little disconcerting caprices! The restless nature of woman, her morbid and periodically unreasonable character. She knew it and then tried to isolate herself. She knew her weaknesses, and blamed herself for her failure to resist them, since they distressed her friend; sometimes, without his knowing it, she made real sacrifices for him; but, when all was told, her nature was the stronger. For the rest, Grazia could not bear Christophe to seem to be commanding her; and, once or twice, by way of asserting her independence, she did the opposite of what he asked her. At once she regretted it; at night she would be filled with remorse that she could not make Christophe happier; she loved him more than she would let him see; she felt that her friendship with him was the best part of her life. As usually happens with two very different people, they were more united when they were not together. In truth, if they had been thrust apart by a misunderstanding, the fault was not altogether Christophe's, as he honestly believed. Even when in the old days Grazia most dearly loved Christophe, would she have married him? She would perhaps have given him her life; but would she have so given herself as to live all her life with him? She knew (though she did not confess it to Christophe) that she had loved her husband, and, even now, after all the harm he had done her, loved him as she had never loved Christophe.... The secrets of the heart, the secrets of the body, of which one is not very proud, and hides from those dear to one, as much out of respect for them, as in complacent pity for oneself.... Christophe was too masculine to divine them: but every now and then, in flashes, he would see how little the woman he most dearly loved, who truly loved him, belonged to him-and that he could not wholly count on any one, on any one, in life. His love was not quenched by this perception. He even felt no bitterness. Grazia's peace spread over him. He accepted everything. O life why should I reproach thee for that which thou canst not give? Art thou not very beautiful and very blessed as thou art? I must fain love thy smile, Gioconda....

Christophe would gaze at his beloved's beautiful face, and read in it many things of the past and the future. During the long years when he had lived alone, traveling, speaking little but seeing much, he had acquired, almost unconsciously, the power of reading the human face, that rich and complex language formed by the ages. It is a thousand times richer and more complex than the spoken language. The spirit of the race is expressed in it.... There are perpetual contrasts between the lines of the face and the words that come from it. Take the profile of a girl, clear-cut, a little hard, in the Burne-Jones style, tragic, consumed by a secret passion, jealousy, a Shakespearian sorrow.... She speaks: and, behold, she is a little bourgeois creature, as stupid as an owl, a selfish, commonplace coquette, with no idea of the terrible forces inscribed upon her body. And yet such passion, such violence are in her. In what shape will they one day spring forth? Will it be in the lust of gain, conjugal jealousy, or splendid energy, or morbid wickedness? There is no knowing. It may be that she will transmit them to another creature of her blood before the time comes for the eruption. But it is an element with which we have to reckon as, like a fatality, it hovers above the race.

Grazia also bore the weight of that uneasy heritage, which, of all the patrimony of ancient families, is the least in danger of being dissipated in transit. She, at least, was aware of it. It is a great source of strength to know our weakness, to make ourselves, if not the masters, the pilots of the soul of the race to which we are bound, which bears us like a vessel upon its waters,-to make fate our instrument, to use it as a sail which we furl or clew up according to the wind. When Grazia closed her eyes, she could hear within herself more than one disturbing voice, of a tone familiar to her. But in her healthy soul even the dissonances were blended to form a profound, soft music, under the guiding hand of her harmonious reason.

Unhappily it is not within our power to transmit the best of our blood to the creatures of our blood.

Of Grazia's two children, the little girl, Aurora, who was eleven years old, was like her mother; she was not so pretty, being a little coarser in fiber; she had a slight limp; she was a good little girl, affectionate and gay, with splendid health, abundant good nature, few natural gifts, except idleness, a passion for doing nothing. Christophe adored her. When he saw her with Grazia he felt the charm of a twofold creature, seen at two ages of life, two generations together.... Two flowers upon one stem; a Holy Family of Leonardo, the Virgin and Saint Anne, different shades of the same smile. With one glance he could take in the whole blossoming of a woman's soul; and it was at once fair and sad to see: he could see whence it came and whither it was going. There is nothing more natural than for an ardent, chaste heart to love two sisters at one and the same time, or mother and daughter. Christophe would have loved the woman of his love through all her descendants, just as in her he loved the stock of which she came. Her every smile, her every tear, every line in her face, were they not living beings, the memories of a life which was before her eyes opened to the light, the forerunners of a life which was to come, when her eyes should be forever closed?

The little boy, Lionello, was nine. He was much handsomer than his sister, of a finer stock, too fine, worn out and bloodless, wherein he was like his father. He was intelligent, well-endowed with bad instincts, demonstrative, and dissembling. He had big blue eyes, long, girlish, fair hair, a pale complexion, a delicate chest, and was morbidly nervous, which last, being a born comedian and strangely skilled in discovering people's weaknesses, he upon occasion turned to good account. Grazia was inclined to favor him, with the natural preference of a mother for her least healthy child,-and also through the attraction which all kindly, good women feel for the sons who are neither well nor ill (for in them a part of their life which they have suppressed finds solace). In such attraction there is something of the memory of the husbands who have made them suffer, whom they loved even while they despised them, or the strange flora of the soul, which wax strong in the dark, humid hot-house of conscience.

In spite of Grazia's care equally to bestow her tenderness upon her children, Aurora felt the difference, and was a little hurt by it. Christophe divined her feeling, and she divined Christophe's: they came together instinctively; while between Christophe and Lionello there was an antipathy which the boy covered up with exaggerated, lisping, charming ways,-and Christophe thrust from him as a shameful feeling. He wrestled with himself and forced himself to cherish this other man's child as though he were the child whom it would have been ineffably sweet for him to have had by the beloved. He would not allow himself to see Lionello's bad nature or anything that could remind him of the "other man": he set himself to find in him only Grazia. She, more clear-sighted, was under no illusions about her son, and she only loved him the more.

However, the disease which for years had been lying dormant in the boy broke out. Consumption supervened. Grazia resolved to go and shut herself up in a sanatorium in the Alps with Lionello, Christophe begged to be allowed to go with her. To avoid scandal she dissuaded him. He was hurt by the excessive importance which she attached to the conventions. She went away and left her daughter with Colette. It was not long before she began to feel terribly lonely among the sick people who talked of nothing but their illness, surrounded by the pitiless mountains rising above the rags and tatters of men. To escape from the depressing spectacle of the invalids with their spittoons spying upon each other and marking the progress of death over each one of them, she left the Palace hospital, and took a chalet, where she lived aloof with her own little invalid. Instead of improving Lionello's condition, the high altitude aggravated it. His fever waxed greater. Grazia spent nights of anguish. Christophe knew it by his keen intuition, although she told him nothing: for she was growing more and more rigid in her pride; she longed for Christophe to be with her, but she had forbidden him to follow her, and she could not bring herself to confess: "I am too weak, I need you...."

One evening, as she stood in the veranda of the chalet in the twilight hour, which is so bitter for hearts in agony, she saw ... she thought she saw coming up from the station of the funicular railway ... a man walking hurriedly: he stopped, hesitating, with his back a little bowed. She went indoors to avoid his seeing her: she held her hands over her heart, and, quivering with emotion, she laughed. Although she was not at all religious she knelt down, hid her face in her hands; she felt the need of thanking some one.... But he did not come. She went back to the window, and, hiding behind the curtains, looked out. He had stopped, leaning against a fence round a field, near the gate of the chalet. He dared not enter. And, even more perturbed than he, she smiled, and said in a low voice:

"Come...."

At last he made up his mind and rang the bell. Already she was at the door, and she opened it. His eyes looked at her like the eyes of a faithful dog, who is afraid of being beaten. He said:

"I came.... Forgive me...."

She said:

"Thank you."

Then she confessed how she had expected him. Christophe helped her to nurse the boy, whose condition was growing worse. His heart was in the task. The boy treated him with irritable animosity: he took no pains now to conceal it: he said many malicious things to him. Christophe put it all down to his illness. He was extraordinarily patient. He passed many painful days by the boy's bedside, until the critical night, on passing through which, Lionello, whom they had given up for lost, was saved. And they felt then such pure happiness-watching hand in hand over the little invalid-that suddenly she got up, took her cloak and hood, and led Christophe out of doors, along the road, in the snow, the silence and the night, under the cold stars. Leaning on his arm, excitedly breathing in the frozen peace of the world, they hardly spoke at all. They made no allusion to their love. Only when they returned, on the threshold, she said: "My dear, dear friend!..."

And her eyes were lit up by the happiness of having saved her child. That was all. But they felt that the bond between them had become sacred.

On her return to Paris after Lionello's long convalescence, she took a little house at Passy, and did not worry any more about "avoiding scandal": she felt brave enough to dare opinion for her friend's sake. Their life henceforth was so intimately linked that it would have seemed cowardly to her to conceal the friendship which united them at the-inevitable-risk of having it slandered. She received Christophe at all hours of the day, and was seen with him out walking and at the theater: she spoke familiarly to him in company. Colette thought they were making themselves too conspicuous. Grazia would stop her hints with a smile, and quietly go her way.

And yet she had given Christophe no new right over her. They were nothing more than friends: he always addressed her with the same affectionate respect. But they hid nothing from each other: they consulted each other about everything: and insensibly Christophe assumed a sort of paternal authority in the house: Grazia listened to and followed his advice. She was no longer the same woman since the winter she had spent in the sanatorium; the anxiety and fatigue had seriously tried her health, which, till then, had been sturdy. Her soul was affected by it. In spite of an occasional lapse into her old caprices, she had become mysteriously more serious, more reflective, and was more constantly desirous of being kind, of learning and not hurting any one. Every day saw her more softened by Christophe's affection, his disinterestedness, and the purity of his heart: and she was thinking of one day giving him the great happiness of which he no longer dared to dream, that of becoming his wife.

He had never broached the subject again after her first refusal, for he thought he had no right to do so. But regretfully he clung to his impossible hope. Though he respected what his friend had said, he was not convinced by her disillusioned attitude towards marriage: he persisted in believing that the union of two people who love each other, profoundly and devotedly, is the height of human happiness.-His regrets were revived by coming in contact once more with the Arnauds.

Madame Arnaud was more than fifty. Her husband was sixty-five or sixty-six. Both seemed to be older. He had grown stout: she was very thin and rather shrunken: spare though she had been in the old days, she was now just a wisp of a woman. After Arnaud's retirement they had gone to live in a house in the country. They had no link with the life of the time save the newspaper, which in the torpor of their little town and their drowsy life brought them the tardy echo of the voice of the world. Once they saw Christophe's name. Madame Arnaud wrote him a few affectionate, rather ceremonious words, to tell him how glad they were of his fame. He took the train at once without letting them know.

He found them in the garden, dozing under the round canopy of an ash, on a warm summer afternoon. They were like Boecklin's old couple, sleeping hand in hand, in an arbor. Sun, sleep, old age overwhelm them: they are falling, they are already half-buried in the eternal dream. And, as the last gleam of their life, their tenderness persists to the end. The clasp of their hands, the dying warmth of their bodies....-They were delighted to see Christophe, for the sake of all the memories of the past he brought with him. They talked of the old days, which at that distance seemed brilliant and full of light.

Arnaud loved talking, but he had lost his memory for names. Madame Arnaud whispered them to him. She liked saying nothing and preferred listening to talking: but the image of the old times had been kept alive and clear in her silent heart: in glimmers they would appear sharply before her like shining pebbles in a stream. There was one such memory that Christophe more than once saw reflected in her eyes as she looked at him with affectionate compassion: but Olivier's name was not pronounced. Old Arnaud plied his wife with touching, awkward little attentions; he was fearful lest she should catch cold, or be too hot; he would gaze hungrily with anxious love at her dear, faded face, and with a weary smile she would try to reassure him. Christophe watched them tenderly, with a little envy.... To grow old together. To love in the dear companion even the wear of time. To say: "I know those lines round her eyes and nose. I have seen them coming. I know when they came. Her scant gray hair has lost its color, day by day, in my company, something because of me, alas! Her sweet face has swollen and grown red in the fires of the weariness and sorrow that have consumed us. My soul, how much better I love thee for that thou hast suffered and grown old with me. Every one of thy wrinkles is to me as music from the past...." The charm of these old people, who, after the long vigil of life, spent side by side, go side by side to sleep in the peace of the night! To see them was both sweet and profitable and sorrowful for Christophe. Oh! How lovely had life and death been thus!...

When he next saw Grazia, he could not help telling her of his visit. He did not tell her of the thoughts roused in him by his visit. But she divined them. He was tender and wistful as he spoke. He turned his eyes away from her and was silent every now and then. She looked at him and smiled, and Christophe's unease infected her.

That evening, when she was alone in her room, she lay dreaming. She went over the story Christophe had told her; but the image she saw through it was not that of the old couple sleeping under the ash: it was the shy, ardent dream of her friend. And her heart was filled with love for him. She lay in the dark and thought:

"Yes. It is absurd, criminal and absurd, to waste the opportunity for such happiness. What joy in the world can equal the joy of making the man you love happy?... What! Do I love him?..."

She was silent, deeply moved, listening to the answer of her heart.

"I love him."

Just then a dry, hard, hasty cough came from the next room where the children were sleeping. Grazia pricked her ears: since the boy's illness she had always been anxious. She called out to him. He made no reply, and went on coughing. She sprang from her bed and went to him. He was irritated, and moaned, and said that he was not well, and broke out coughing again.

"What is the matter?"

He did not reply, but only groaned that he was ill.

"My darling, please tell me what is the matter?"

"I don't know."

"Is it here?"

"Yes. No. I don't know. I am ill all over."

On that he had a fresh fit of coughing, violent and exaggerated. Grazia was alarmed: she had a feeling that he was forcing himself to cough: but she was ashamed of her thought, as she saw the boy sweating and choking for breath. She kissed him and spoke to him tenderly: he seemed to grow calmer; but as soon as she tried to leave him he broke out coughing again. She had to stay shivering by his bedside, for he would not even allow her to go away to dress herself, and insisted on her holding his hand; and he would not let her go until he fell asleep again. Then she went to bed, chilled, uneasy, harassed. And she found it impossible to gather up the threads of her dreams.

The boy had a singular power of reading his mother's thoughts. This instinctive genius is often-though seldom in such a high degree-to be found in creatures of the same stock: they hardly need to look at each other to know each other's thoughts: they can guess them by the breathing, by a thousand imperceptible signs. This natural aptness, which is fortified by living together, was in Lionello sharpened and refined by his ever wakeful malevolence. He had the insight of the desire to hurt. He detested Christophe. Why? Why does a child take a dislike to a person who has never done him any harm? It is often a matter of chance. It is enough for a child to have begun by persuading himself that he detests some one, for it to become a habit, and the more he is argued with the more desperately he will cling to it. But often, again, there are deeper reasons for it, which pass the child's understanding: he has no idea of them.... From the first moment when he saw Christophe, the son of Count Berény had a feeling of animosity towards the man whom his mother had loved. It was as though he had instinctively felt the exact moment when Grazia began to think of marrying Christophe. From that moment on he never ceased to spy upon them. He was always between them, and refused to leave the room whenever Christophe came; or he would manage to burst in upon them when they were sitting together. More than that, when his mother was alone, thinking of Christophe, he seemed to divine her thoughts. He would sit near her and watch her. His gaze would embarrass her and almost make her blush. She would get up to conceal her unease.-He would take a delight in saying unkind things about Christophe in her presence. She would bid him be silent, but he would go on. And if she tried to punish him, he would threaten to make himself ill. That was the strategy he had always used successfully since he was a child. When he was quite small, one day when he had been scolded, he had, out of revenge, undressed himself and lain naked on the floor so as to catch cold.-Once, when Christophe brought a piece of music that he had composed for Grazia's birthday, the boy took the manuscript and hid it. It was found in tatters in a wood-box. Grazia lost her patience and scolded him severely. Then he wept and howled, and stamped his feet, and rolled on the ground, and had an attack of nerves. Grazia was terrified, and kissed and implored him, and promised to do whatever he wanted.

From that day on he was the master: for he knew it: and very frequently he had recourse to the weapon with which he had succeeded. There was never any knowing how far his attacks were natural and how far counterfeit. Soon he was not satisfied with using them vengefully when he was opposed in any way, but took to using them out of spite whenever his mother and Christophe planned to spend the evening together. He even went so far as to play his dangerous game out of sheer idleness, or theatricality, to discover the extent of his power. He was extraordinarily ingenious in inventing strange, nervous accidents; sometimes in the middle of dinner he would be seized with a convulsive trembling, and upset his glass or break his plate; sometimes, as he was going upstairs, he would clutch at the banisters with his hand: his fingers would stiffen: he would pretend that he could not open them again; or he would have a sharp pain in his side and roll about, howling; or he would choke. Of course, in the end he developed a genuine nervous illness. Christophe and Grazia were at their wits' end. Their peaceful meetings-their quiet talks, their readings, their music, which were as a festival to them-all their humble happiness was henceforth disturbed.

Every now and then, however, the little imp would, give them a respite, partly because he was tired of his play-acting, partly because his child's nature took possession of him again, and made him think of something else. (He was sure now that he had won the day.)

Then, quickly, quietly, they would seize their opportunity. Every hour that they could steal in this way was the more precious to them as they could never be sure of enjoying it to the end. How near they felt to each other! Why could they not always be so!... One day Grazia herself confessed to her regret. Christophe took her hand.

"Yes. Why?" he asked.

"You know why, my dear," she said, with a miserable smile.

Christophe knew. He knew that she was sacrificing their happiness to her son: he knew that she was not deceived by Lionello's lies, that she still adored him: he knew the blind egoism of such domestic affections which make the best pour out their reserves of devotion to the advantage of the bad or mediocre creatures of their blood, so that there is nothing left for them to give to those who would be more worthy, whom they love best, but who are not of their blood. And although he was irritated by it, although there were times when he longed to kill the little monster who was destroying their lives, yet he bowed his head in silence, and understood that Grazia could not do otherwise.

So they renounced their life without vain recrimination. But if the happiness which was their right could be snatched from them, nothing could prevent the union of their hearts. Their very renunciation, their common sacrifice, held them by bonds stronger than those of the flesh. Each confided the sorrow of it all to the other, passed over the burden of it, and took on the other's suffering: so even their sorrow became joy. Christophe called Grazia "his confessor." He did not hide from her the weaknesses from which his pride had to suffer: rather he accused himself with too great contrition, and she would smilingly soothe his boyish scruples. He even confessed to her his material poverty; but he could only bring himself to do that after it had been agreed between them that she should neither offer him, nor he accept from her, any help. It was the last barrier of pride which he upheld and she respected. In place of the well-being which she could not bring into her friend's life, she found many ways of filling it with what was infinitely more precious to him-namely, her tenderness. He felt the breath of it all about him, during every hour of the day: he never opened his eyes in the morning, never closed them at night, without a prayer of love and adoration. And when she awoke, or at night, as often happened, lay for hours without sleeping, she thought:

"My dear is thinking of me."

And a great peace came upon them and surrounded them.

* * * * *

However, her health had given way. Grazia was constantly in bed, or had to spend the day lying on a sofa. Christophe used to go every day and read to her, and show her his new work. Then she would get up from the chair, and limp to the piano, for her feet were swollen. She would play the music he had brought. It was the greatest joy she could give him. Of all his pupils she and Cécile were the most gifted. But while Cécile had an instinctive feeling for music, with hardly any understanding of it, to Grazia it was a lovely harmonious language full of meaning for her. The demoniac quality in life and art escaped her altogether: she brought to bear on it the clarity of her intelligence and heart. Christophe's genius was saturated with her clarity. His friend's playing helped him to understand the obscure passions he had expressed. With closed eyes he would listen, and follow her, and hold her by the hand, as she led him through the maze of his own thoughts. By living in his music through Grazia's soul, he was wedded to her soul and possessed it. Prom this mysterious conjugation sprang music which was the fruit of the mingling of their lives. One day, as he brought her a collection of his works, woven of his substance and hers, he said:

"Our children."

Theirs was an unbroken communion whether they were together or apart; sweet were the evenings spent in the peace and quiet of the old house, which was a fit setting for the image of Grazia, where the silent, cordial servants, who were devoted to Christophe, extended to him a little of the respectful affection they had for their mistress. Joyous was it to listen to the song of the fleeting hours, and to see the tide of life ebbing away.... A shadow of anxiety was thrown on their happiness by Grazia's failing health. But, in spite of her little infirmities, she was so serene that her hidden sufferings did but heighten her charm. She was his "liebe, leidende, und doch so rührende, heitre Freundin" ("his dear, suffering, touching friend, always so bright and cheerful"). And sometimes, in the evening, when he left her with his heart big with love so that he could not wait until the morrow, he would write:

"Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Grazia...."

Their tranquillity lasted for months. They thought it would last forever. The boy seemed to have forgotten them: his attention was distracted by other things. But after this respite he returned to them and never left them again. The horrible little boy had determined to part his mother and Christophe. He resumed his play-acting. He did not set about it upon any premeditated plan, but, from day to day, followed the whimsies of his spite. He had no idea of the harm he might be doing: he only wanted to amuse himself by boring other people. He never relaxed his efforts until he had made Grazia promise to leave Paris and go on a long journey. Grazia had no strength to resist him. Besides, the doctors advised her to pay a visit to Egypt. She had to avoid another winter in the northern climate. Too many things had tried her health: the moral upheaval of the last few years, the perpetual anxiety about her son's health, the long periods of uncertainty, the struggle that had taken place in her without her giving any sign of it, the sorrow of sorrows that she was inflicting on her friend. To avoid adding to the trouble he divined in her, Christophe hid his own grief at the approach of the day of parting: he made no effort to postpone it; and they were outwardly calm, and, though inwardly they were very far from it, yet they succeeded in forcing it upon each other.

The day came. A September morning. They had left Paris together in the middle of July, and spent their last weeks in Switzerland in a mountain hotel, near the place where they had met again six years ago.

They were unable to go out the last five days: the rain came down in unceasing torrents: they were almost alone in the hotel, for all the other travelers had fled. The rain stopped on their last morning, but the mountains were still covered with clouds. The children went on ahead with the servants in another carriage. She drove off. He accompanied her to the place where the road began to descend in steep windings to the plain of Italy. The mist came in under the hood of the carriage. They were very close together, and they said no word: they hardly looked at each other. A strange light, half-day, half-night, wrapped them round.... Grazia's breath left little drops of water on her veil. He pressed her little hand, warm under her cold glove. Their faces came together. Through her wet veil he kissed her dear lips.

They came to the turn of the road. He got down, and the carriage plunged on into the mist and disappeared. For a long time he could hear the rumbling of the wheels and the horses' hoofs. Great masses of white mist rolled over the fields. Through the close tracery of the branches the dripping trees dropped water. Not a breath of wind. The mist was stifling life. Christophe stopped, choking.... There was nothing now. Everything had gone....

He took in a long breath, filling his lungs with the mist, and walked on. Nothing passes for him who does not pass.