It was a week before Clerambault could go out again. The terrible crisis through which he had passed had left him weak but resolved, and though the exaltation of his despair had quieted down, he was stoically determined to follow the truth even to the end. The remembrance of the errors in which his mind had delighted, and the half-truths on which it had fed made him humble; he doubted his own strength, and wished to advance step by step. He was ready to welcome the advice of those wiser than himself. He remembered how Perrotin listened to his former confidences with a sarcastic reserve that irritated him at the time, but which now attracted him. His first visit of convalescence was to this wise old friend.

Perrotin was rather short-sighted and selfish, and did not take the trouble to look carefully at things that were not necessary to him, being a closer observer of books than of faces, but he was none the less struck by the alteration in Clerambault's expression.

"My dear friend," said he, "have you been ill?"

"Yes, ill enough," answered Clerambault, "but I have pulled myself together again, and am better now."

"It is the cruelest blow of all," said Perrotin, "to lose at our age, such a friend as your poor boy was to you …"

"The most cruel is not his loss," said the father, "it is that I contributed to his death."

"What do you mean, my good friend?" said Perrotin in surprise. "How can you imagine such things to add to your trouble?"

"It was I who shut his eyes," said Clerambault bitterly, "and he has opened mine."

Perrotin pushed aside the work, which according to his habit he had continued to ruminate upon during the conversation, and looked narrowly at his friend, who bent his head, and began his story in an indistinct voice, sad and charged with feeling. Like a Christian of the early times making public confession, he accused himself of falsehood towards his faith, his heart, and his reason.

When the Apostle saw his Lord in chains, he was afraid and denied Him; but he was not brought so low as to offer his services as executioner. He, Clerambault, had not only deserted the cause of human brotherhood, he had debased it; he had continued to talk of fraternity, while he was stirring up hatred. Like those lying priests who distort the Scriptures to serve their wicked purposes, he had knowingly altered the most generous ideas to disguise murderous passions.

He extolled war, while calling himself a pacifist; professed to be humanitarian, previously putting the enemy outside humanity…. Oh, how much franker it would have been to yield to force than to lend himself to its dishonouring compromises! It was thanks to such sophistries as his that the idealism of young men was thrown into the arena. Those old poisoners, the artists and thinkers, had sweetened the death-brew with their honeyed rhetoric, which would have been found out and rejected by every conscience with disgust, if it had not been for their falsehoods….

"The blood of my son is on my head," said Clerambault sadly. "The death of the youth of Europe, in all countries, lies at the door of European thought. It has been everywhere a servant to the hangman."

Perrotin leaned over and took Clerambault's hand. "My poor friend," said he, "you make too much of this. No doubt you are right to acknowledge the errors of judgment into which you have been drawn by public opinion, and I may confess to you now that I was sorry to see it; but you are wrong to ascribe to yourself and other thinkers so much responsibility for the events of today. One man speaks, another acts; but the speakers do not move the others to action; they are all drifting with the tide. This unfortunate European thought is a bit of drift-wood like the rest, it does not make the current, it is carried along by it."

"It persuades people to yield to it," said Clerambault, "instead of helping the swimmers, and bidding them struggle against it; it says: Let yourself go…. No, my friend, do not try to diminish its responsibility, it is the greatest of all. Our thought had the best place from which to see; its business was to keep watch, and if it saw nothing, it was through lack of good-will, for it cannot lay the blame on its eyes, which are clear enough. You know it and so do I, now that I have come to my senses. The same intelligence which darkened my eyes, has now torn away the bandage; how can it be, at the same time, a power for truth and for falsehood?"

Perrotin shook his head.

"Yes, intelligence is so great and so high that she cannot put herself at the service of any other forces without derogation; for if she is no longer mistress and free, she is degraded. It is a case of Roman master debasing the Greek, his superior, and making him his purveyor—Graeculus, sophist, Laeno…. To the vulgar the intelligence is a sort of maid-of-all-work, and in this position she displays the sly, dishonest cleverness of her kind. Sometimes she is employed by hatred, pride, or self-interest, and then she flatters these little devils, dressing them up as Idealism, Love, Faith, Liberty, and social generosity; for when a man does not love his neighbour, he says he loves God, his Country, or even Humanity. Sometimes the poor master is himself a slave to the State. Under threat of punishment, the social machine forces him to acts which are repugnant, but the complaisant intelligence persuades him that these are fine and glorious, and performed by him of his own free will. In either case the intelligence knows what she is about, and is always at our disposition if we really want her to tell us the truth; but we take good care to avoid it, and never to be left alone with her. We manage so as to meet her only in public when we can put leading questions as we please…. When all is said, the earth goes round none the less, e pur se muove;—the laws of the world are obeyed, and the free mind beholds them. All the rest is vanity; the passions, faith, sincere or insincere, are only the painted face of that necessity which rules the world, without caring for our idols: family, race, country, religion, society, progress…. Progress indeed! The great illusion! Humanity is like water that must find its level, and when the cistern brims over a valve opens and it is empty again…. A catastrophic rhythm, the heights of civilisation, and then downfall. We rise, and are cast down …"

Thus Perrotin calmly unveiled his Thought. She was not much accustomed to going naked; but she forgot that she had a witness, and undressed as if she were alone. She was extremely bold, as is often the thought of a man of letters not obliged to suit the action to the word, but who much prefers, on the contrary, not to do so. The alarmed Clerambault listened with his mouth open; certain words revolted him, others pierced him to the heart; his head swam, but he overcame his weakness, for he was determined to lose nothing of these profundities. He pressed Perrotin with questions: and he, on his part, flattered and smiling, complaisantly unrolled his pyrrhonian visions, as peaceable as they were destructive.

The vapours of the pit were rising all about them; and Clerambault was admiring the ease of this free spirit perched on the edge of the abyss and enjoying it, when the door opened, and the servant came in with a card which he gave to Perrotin.

At once the terrible phantoms of the brain vanished; a trap-door shut out the emptiness, and an official drawing-room rug covered it. Perrotin roused himself and said eagerly: "Certainly, show him in at once." Turning to Clerambault he added:

"Pardon me, my dear friend, it is the Honourable Under-Secretary of
State for Public Instruction."

He was already on his feet and went to meet his visitor, a stage-lover looking fellow, with the blue clean-shaven chin of a priest or a Yankee, who held his head very high, and wore in the grey cut-a-way which clothed his well-rounded figure, the rosette which is displayed alike by our heroes and our lackeys. The old gentleman presented Clerambault to him with cheerful alacrity: "Mr. AgÉnor Clerambault—Mr. Hyacinth MonchÉri," and asked the Honourable Under-Secretary of State to what he owed the honour of his visit. The Honourable Under-Secretary, not in the least surprised by the obsequious welcome of the old scholar, settled himself in his armchair with the lofty air of familiarity suitable to the superior position he held over the two representatives of French letters. He represented the State.

Speaking haughtily through his nose, and braying like a dromedary, he extended to Perrotin an invitation from the Minister to preside over a solemn contest of embattled intellectuals from ten nations, in the great amphitheatre of the Sorbonne—"an imprecatory meeting," he called it. Perrotin promptly accepted, and professed himself overcome by the honour. His servile tone before this licensed government ignoramus made a striking contrast with his bold statements a few moments before, and Clerambault, somewhat taken aback, thought of the Graeculus.

Mr. "ChÉri" walked out with his head in the air, like an ass in a sacred procession, accompanied by Perrotin to the very threshold, and when the friends were once more alone, Clerambault would have liked to resume the conversation, but he could not conceal that he was a little chilled by what had passed. He asked Perrotin if he meant to state in public the opinions he had just professed, and Perrotin refused, naturally, laughing at his friend's simplicity. What is more, he cautioned him affectionately against proclaiming such ideas from the house-tops. Clerambault was vexed and disputed the point, but in order to make the situation clear to him, and with the utmost frankness, Perrotin described his surroundings, the great minds of the higher University, which he represented officially: historians, philosophers, professors of rhetoric. He spoke of them politely but with a deep half-concealed contempt, and a touch of personal bitterness; for in spite of his prudence, the less intelligent of his colleagues looked on him with suspicion; he was too clever. He said he was like an old blind man's dog in a pack of barking curs; forced to do as they did and bark at the passers-by.

Clerambault did not quarrel with him, but went away with pity in his heart.

He stayed in the house for several days, for this first contact with the outside world had depressed him, and the friend on whom he had relied for guidance had failed him miserably. He was much troubled, for Clerambault was weak and unused to stand alone. Poet as he was, and absolutely sincere, he had never felt it necessary to think independently of others; he had let himself be carried along by their thought, making it his own, becoming its inspired voice and mouth-piece. Now all was suddenly changed. Notwithstanding that night of crisis, his doubts returned upon him; for after fifty a man's nature cannot be transformed at a touch, no matter how much the mind may have retained the elasticity of youth. The light of a revelation does not always shine, like the sun in a clear summer sky, but is more like an arc-light, which often winks and goes out before the current becomes strong. When these irregular pulsations fade out, the shadows appear deeper, and the spirit totters and then—. It was hard for Clerambault to get along without other people.

He decided to visit all his friends, of whom he had many, in the literary world, in the University, and among the intelligent bourgeoisie. He was sure to find some among them who, better than he, could divine the problems which beset him, and help him in their solution.

Timidly, without as yet betraying his own mind, he tried to read theirs, to listen and observe; but he had not realised that the veil had fallen from his eyes; and the vision that he saw of a world, once well-known to him, seemed strange and cold.

The whole world of letters was mobilised; so that personalities were no longer to be distinguished. The universities formed a ministry of domesticated intelligence; its functions were to draw up the acts of the State, its master and patron; the different departments were known by their professional twists.

The professors of literature were above all skilful in developing moral arguments oratorically under the three terms of the syllogism. Their mania was an excessive simplification of argument; they put high-sounding words in the place of reason, and made too much of a few ideas, always the same, lifeless for lack of colour or shading. They had unearthed these weapons of a so-called classic antiquity, the key to which had been jealously guarded throughout the ages by academic Mamelukes, and these eloquent antiquated ideas were falsely called Humanities, though in many respects they offended the common-sense and the heart of humanity as it is today. Still they bore the hall-mark of Rome, prototype of all our modern states, and their authorised exponents were the State rhetoricians.

The philosophers excelled in abstract constructions; they had the art of explaining the concrete by the abstract, the real by its shadow. They systematised some hasty partial observations, melted them in their alembics, and from them deduced laws to regulate the entire world. They strove to subject life, multiple and many-sided, to the unity of the mind, that is, to their mind. The time-serving trickeries of a sophistical profession facilitated this imperialism of the reason; they knew how to handle ideas, twisting, stretching, and tying them together like strips of candy; it would have been child's play for them to make a camel pass through the eye of a needle. They could also prove that black was white, and could find in the works of Emanuel Kant the freedom of the world, or Prussian militarism, just as they saw fit.

The historians were the born scribes, attorneys, and lawyers of the Government, charged with the care of its charters, its title-deeds, and cases, and armed to the teeth for its future quarrels…. What is history after all? The story of success, the demonstration of what has been done, just or unjust. The defeated have no history. Be silent, you Persians of Salamis, slaves of Spartacus, Gauls, Arabs of Poitiers, Albigenses, Irish, Indians of both Americas, and colonial peoples generally!… When a worthy man revolting against the injustices of his day, puts his hope in posterity by way of consolation, he forgets that this posterity has but little chance to learn of former events. All that can be known is what the advocates of official history think favourable to the cause of their client, the State. A lawyer for the adverse party may possibly intervene—someone of another nation, or of an oppressed social or religious group; but there is small chance for him; the secret is kept too well!

Orators, sophists, and pleaders, the three corporations of the Faculty of Letters,—Letters of State, signed and patented!

The studies of the "scientifics" ought to have protected them better from the suggestions and contagions of the outside world—that is, if they confined themselves to their trade. Unfortunately they have been tempted from it, for the applied sciences have taken so large a place in practical affairs that experts find themselves thrown into the foremost ranks of action, and exposed to all the infections of the public mind. Their self-respect is directly interested in the victory of the community, which can as easily assimilate the heroism of the soldier as the follies and falsehoods of the publicist. Few scientific men have had the strength to keep themselves free; for the most part they have only contributed the rigour, the stiffness of the geometrical mind, added to professional rivalries, always more acute between learned bodies of different nationalities.

The regular writers, poets, and novelists, who have no official ties, they, at least should have the advantages of their independence; but unfortunately few of them are able to judge for themselves of events which are beyond the limits of their habitual preoccupations, commercial or aesthetic. The greater number, and not the least known, are as ignorant as fishes. It would be best for them to stick to their shop, according to their natural instinct; but their vanity has been foolishly tickled, and they have been urged to mix themselves up with public affairs, and give their opinion on the universe. They can naturally have but scattering views on such subjects, and in default of personal judgment, they drift with the current, reacting with extreme quickness to any shock, for they are ultra-sensitive, with a morbid vanity which exaggerates the thoughts of others when it cannot express their own. This is the only originality at their disposal, and God knows they make the most of it!

What remains? the Clergy? It is they who handle the heaviest explosives; the ideas of Justice, Truth, Right, and God; and they make this artillery fight for their passions. Their absurd pride, of which they are quite unconscious, causes them to lay claim to the property of God, and to the exclusive right to dispose of it wholesale and retail.

It is not so much that they lack sincerity, virtue, or kindness, but they do lack humility; they have none, however much they may profess it. Their practice consists in adoring their navel as they see it reflected in the Talmud, or the Old and New Testaments. They are monsters of pride, not so very far removed from the fool of legend who thought himself God the Father. Is it so much less dangerous to believe oneself His manager, or His secretary?

Clerambault was struck by the morbid character of the intellectual species. In the bourgeois caste the power of organisation and expression of ideas has reached almost monstrous proportions. The equilibrium of life is destroyed by a bureaucracy of the mind which thinks itself much superior to the simple worker. Certainly no one can deny that it has its uses; it collects and classifies thoughts in its pigeon-holes and puts them to various purposes, but the idea rarely occurs to it to examine its material and renew the content of thought.

It remains the vain guardian of a demonetised treasure. If only this mistake were a harmless one; but ideas that are not constantly confronted with reality, which are not frequently dipped into the stream of experience, grow dry, and take on a toxic character. They throw a heavy shadow over the new life, bring on the night and produce fever. What a stupid thraldom to abstract words! Of what use is it to dethrone kings and by what right do we jeer at those who die for their masters, if it is only to put tyrannic entities in their places, which we adorn with their tinsel? It is much better, to have a flesh and blood monarch, whom you can control—suppress if necessary—than these abstractions, these invisible despots, that no one knows now, nor ever has known. We deal only with the head Eunuchs, the priests of the hidden Crocodile, as Taine calls him, the wire-pulling ministers who speak in the idol's name.—Ah! let us tear away the veil and know the creature hidden inside of us. There is less danger when man shows frankly as a brute than when he drapes himself in a false and sickly idealism. He does not eliminate his animal instincts, he only deifies and tries to explain them, but as this cannot be done without excessive simplification—according to the law of the mind which in order to grasp must let go an equal amount—he disguises and intensifies them in one direction. Everything that departs from the straight line or that interferes with the strict logic of his mental edifice, he denies; worse he pulls it up by the roots, and commands that it be destroyed in the name of sacred principles. It therefore follows that he cuts down much of the infinite growth of nature, and allows to stand only the trees of the mind that he chooses—generally those that flourish in deserts and ruins and which there grow abnormally. Of such is the crushing predominance of one single tyrannous form of the Family, of Country, and of the narrow morality which serves them. The poor creature is proud of it all; and it is he who is the victim.

Humanity does not dare to massacre itself from interested motives. It is not proud of its interests, but it does pride itself on its ideas which are a thousand times more deadly. Man sees his own superiority in his ideas, and will fight for them; but herein I perceive his folly, for this warlike idealism is a disease peculiar to him, and its effects are similar to those of alcoholism; they add enormously to wickedness and criminality. This sort of intoxication deteriorates the brain, filling it with hallucinations, to which the living are sacrificed.

What an extraordinary spectacle, seen from the interior of our skulls! A throng of phantoms rising from our overexcited brains: Justice, Liberty, Right, Country…. Our poor brains are all equally honest, but each accuses the other of insincerity. In this fantastic shadowy struggle, we can distinguish nothing but the cries and the convulsions of the human animal, possessed by devils…. Below are clouds charged with lightnings, where great fierce birds are fighting; the realists, the men of affairs, swarm and gnaw like fleas in a skin; with open mouths, and grasping hands, secretly exciting the folly by which they profit, but in which they do not share….

O Thought! monstrous and splendid flower springing from the humus of our time-honoured instincts!… In truth, thou art an element penetrating and impregnating man, but thou dost not spring from him, thy source is beyond him, and thy strength greater than his. Our senses are fairly well-adapted to our needs but our thought is not, it overflows and maddens us. Very, very few among us men can guide themselves on this torrent; the far greater number are swept along, at random, trusting to chance. The tremendous power of thought is not under man's control; he tries to make it serve him, and his greatest danger is that he believes that it does so; but he is like a child handling explosives; there is no proportion between these colossal engines and the purpose for which his feeble hands employ them. Sometimes they all blow up together….

How guard against this danger? Shall we stifle thought, uproot living ideas? That would mean the castration of man's brain, the loss of his chief stimulus in life; but nevertheless the eau-de-vie of his mind contains a poison which is the more to be dreaded because it is spread broadcast among the masses, in the form of adulterated drugs…. Rouse thee, Man, and sober thyself! Look about; shake off ideas. Free thyself from thine own thoughts and learn to govern thy gigantic phantoms which devour themselves in their rage…. And begin by taking the capitals from the names of those great goddesses, Country, Liberty, Right. Come down from Olympus into the manger, and come without ornaments, without arms, rich only in your beauty, and our love…. I do not know the gods of Justice and Liberty; I only know my brother-man, and his acts, sometimes just, sometimes unjust; and I also know of peoples, all aspiring to real liberty but all deprived of it, and who all, more or less, submit to oppression.

The sight of this world in a fever-fit would have filled a sage with the desire to withdraw until the attack was over; but Clerambault was not a sage. He knew this, and he also knew that it was vain to speak; but none the less he felt that he must, that he should end by speaking. He wished to delay the dangerous moment, and his timidity, which shrank from single combat with the world, sought about him for a companion in thought. The fight would not be so hard if there were two or three together.

The first whose feeling he cautiously sounded were some unfortunate people who, like him, had lost a son. The father, a well-known painter, had a studio in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. His name was Omer Calville and the Clerambaults were neighbourly with him and his wife, a nice old couple of the middle class, devoted to each other. They had that gentleness, common to many artists of their day, who had known CarriÈre, and caught remote reflections of TolstoÏsm, which, like their simplicity, appeared a little artificial, for though it harmonised with their real goodness of heart, the fashion of the time had added a touch of exaggeration.

Those artists who sincerely profess their religious respect for all that lives, are less capable than anyone else of understanding the passions of war. The Calvilles had held themselves outside the struggle; they did not protest, they accepted it, without acquiescing, as one accepts sickness, death, or the wickedness of men, with a dignified sadness.

When Clerambault read them his burning poems they listened politely and made little response—but strangely enough, at the very time that Clerambault, cured of his warlike illusions, turned to them, he found that they had changed places with him. The death of their son had produced on them the opposite effect. And now they were awkwardly taking part in the conflict, as if to replace their lost boy. They snuffed up eagerly all the stench in the papers, and Clerambault found them actually rejoicing, in their misery, over the assertion that the United States was prepared to fight for twenty years.

"What would become of France, of Europe, in twenty years?" he tried to say, but they hastily put this thought away from them with much irritation, almost as if it were improper to mention, or even to think of such a thing.

The question was to conquer; at what price? That could be settled afterwards.—Conquer? Suppose there were no more conquerors left in France? Never mind, so long as the others are beaten. No, it should not be that the blood of their son had been shed in vain.

"And to avenge his death, must other innocent lives also be sacrificed?" thought Clerambault, and in the hearts of these good people he read the answer: "Why not?" The same idea was in the minds of all those who, like the Calvilles, had lost through the war what they held dearest—a son, a husband, or a brother….

"Let the others suffer as we have, we have nothing left to lose." Was there nothing left? In truth there was one thing only, on which the fierce egotism of these mourners kept jealous guard; their faith in the necessity of these sacrifices. Let no one try to shake that, or doubt that the cause was sacred for which these dear ones fell. The leaders of the war knew this, and well did they understand how to make the most of such a lure. No, by these sad fire-sides there was no place for Clerambault's doubts and feelings of pity.

"They had no pity on us," thought the unhappy ones, "why should we pity them?"

Some had suffered less, but what characterised nearly all of these bourgeois was the reverence they had for the great slogans of the past: "Committee of Public Safety," "The Country in Danger," "Plutarch," "De Viris," "Horace,"—it seemed impossible for them to look at the present with eyes of today; perhaps they had no eyes to see with. Outside of the narrow circle of their own affairs, how many of our anemic bourgeoisie have the power to think for, themselves, after they have reached the age of thirty? It would never cross their minds; their thoughts are furnished to them like their provisions, only more cheaply. For one or two cents a day they get them from their papers. The more intelligent, who look for thought in books, do not give themselves the trouble to seek it also in life, and think that one is the reflection of the other. Like the prematurely aged, their members become stiff, and their minds petrified.

In the great flock of those ruminating souls who fed on the past, the group of bigots pinning its faith to the French Revolution was easily distinguished. Among the backward bourgeoisie they were reckoned incendiary in former days;—about the time of the 16th of May, or a little later. Like quinquagenarians grown stolid and settled, they looked back with pride to their wild conduct, and lived on the memory of the emotions of by-gone days. If their mirror showed them no change, the world had altered around them without their suspecting it, while they continued to copy their antiquated models. It is a curious imitative instinct, a slavery of the brain, to remain hypnotised by some point in the past, instead of trying to follow Proteus in his course—the life of change. One picks up the old skin which the young snake has thrown off long ago, and tries to sew it together again. These pedantic admirers of old revolutions believe that those of the future will be made on the same lines. They will not see that the new liberty must have a gait of its own, and will overleap barriers before which its grandmother of ninety-three stopped, out of breath. They are also much more vexed by the disrespect of the young people who have gone by them, than they are by the spiteful yelping of the old whom they have left behind; this is only natural, for these young folks make them feel their age, and then it is their turn to yelp.

So it ever shall be; as they grow older there are very few men willing to let life take its own course, and who are generous enough to look at the future through the eyes of their juniors, as their own sight grows dim. The greater number of those who loved liberty in their youth, want to make a case of it now for the new broods, because they can no longer fly themselves.

The followers of the national revolutionary cult—in the style of Danton, or of Robespierre—were the bitterest adversaries of the internationalism of today; though they did not always agree perfectly amongst themselves, and the friends of Danton and Robespierre, with the shadow of the guillotine between them, hurled the epithet of heretic at each other with the deadliest threats. They did, however, all agree on one point, and devoted to destruction those who did not believe that Liberty is shot out of the mouth of cannon, those who dared to feel the same aversion towards violence, whether it was exerted by Caesar, Demos, or his satellites, or even if it was in the name of right and liberty itself. The face underneath is the same, no matter what mask may be worn.

Clerambault knew several of these fanatics, but there was no point in discussing with them whether the right, or its counterfeit, were only on one side in war; it would have been equally sensible to argue about the Holy Inquisition with a Manichee. Lay religions have their great seminaries and secret societies where they deposit their doctrinal treasures with great pride. He who departs from these is excommunicated—until he in turn belongs to the past, when he becomes a god, and can excommunicate in future himself.

* * * * *

If Clerambault was not tempted to convert these hardened intellectuals with their stiff helmet of truth, he knew others who had not the same proud certainty; far from it. Those who sinned rather through softness and pure dilettantism—ArsÈne Asselin was one of these, an amiable Parisian, unmarried, a man of the world, clever and sceptical; and as much shocked by a defect in sentiment as in expression. How could he like extremes of thought, which are the cultures in which the germs of war develop? His critical and sarcastic spirit inclined him towards doubt; so there was no reason why he should not have understood Clerambault's point of view, and he came within an ace of doing so. His choice depended on some fortuitous circumstances, but from the moment that he turned his face in the other direction, it was impossible for him to go back; and the more he stuck in the mud, the more obstinate he grew. French self-respect cannot bear to admit its mistakes; it would rather die in defence of them…. But French or not, how many are there in the world who would have the strength of mind to say: "I have made a mistake, we must begin all over again." Better deny the evidence … "To the bitter end" … And then break down.

Alexandre Mignon was a before-the-war pacifist and an old friend of Clerambault's. He was a bourgeois of about his own age, intellectual, a member of the University, and justly respected for the dignity of his life. He should not be confounded with those parlour pacifists covered with official decorations and grand cordons of international orders, for whom peace is a gilt-edged investment in quiet times. For thirty years he had sincerely denounced the dangerous intrigues of the dishonest politicians and speculators of his country; he was a member of the League for the Rights of Man, and loved to make speeches for either cause, as it might happen. It was enough if his client purported to be oppressed; it did not matter if the victim had been a would-be oppressor himself. His blundering generosity sometimes made him ridiculous, but he was always liked. He did not object to the ridicule, nor did he dread a little unpopularity, as long as he was surrounded by his own group, whose approbation was necessary to him. As a member of a group which was independent when they all held together, he thought that he was an independent person, but this was not the case. Union is strength they say, but it accustoms us to lean upon it, as Alexandre Mignon found to his cost.

The death of JaurÈs had broken up the group; and lacking one voice—the first to speak—all the others failed. They waited for the password that no one dared to give. When the torrent broke over them these generous but weak men were uncertain, and were carried away by the first rush. They did not understand nor approve of it, but they could make no resistance. From the beginning desertions began in their ranks, produced largely by the terrible speech-makers who then governed the country—demagogue lawyers, practised in all the sophistries of republican idealogy: "War for Peace, Lasting Peace at the End …" (Requiescat) … In these artifices the poor pacifists saw a way to get out of their dilemma; it was not a very brilliant way and they were not proud of it, but it was their only chance. They hoped to reconcile their pacific principles with the fact of violence by means of "big talk" which did not sound to them as outrageous as it really was. To refuse would have been to give themselves up to the war-like pack, which would have devoured them.

Alexandre Mignon would have had courage to face the bloody jaws if he had had his little community at his back, but alone it was beyond his strength. He let things go at first, without committing himself, but he suffered, passing through agonies something like those of Clerambault, but with a different result. He was less impulsive and more intellectual. In order to efface his last scruples he hid them under close reasoning, and with the aid of his colleagues he laboriously proved by a + b that war was the duty of consistent pacifism. His League had every advantage in dwelling on the criminal acts of the enemy; but did not dwell on those in its own camp. Alexandre Mignon had occasional glimpses of the universal injustice; an intolerable vision, on which he closed his shutters….

In proportion as he was swaddled in his war arguments, it became more difficult for him to disentangle himself, and he persisted more and more. Suppose a child carelessly pulls off the wing of an insect; it is only a piece of nervous awkwardness, but the insect is done for, and the child ashamed and irritated, tears the poor creature to pieces to relieve his own feelings.

The pleasure with which he listened to Clerambault's mea culpa may be imagined; but the effect was surprising. Mignon, already ill at ease, turned on Clerambault, whose self-accusations seemed to point at him, and treated him like an enemy. In the sequel no one was more violent than Mignon against this living remorse.

* * * * *

There were some politicians who would have understood Clerambault better, for they knew as much as he did and perhaps more; but it did not keep them awake at night. They had been used to mental trickery ever since they cut their first teeth, and were expert at combinazione; they had the illusion of serving their party, cheaply gained by a few compromises here and there!… To think and walk straightforwardly was the one thing impossible to these flabby shufflers, who backed, or advanced in spirals, who dragged their banner in the mud, by way of assuring its triumph, and who, to reach the Capitol, would have crawled up the steps on their stomachs.

* * * * *

Here and there some clear-sighted spirits were hidden, but they were easier to guess at than to see; they were melancholy glow-worms who had put out their lanterns in their fright, so that not a gleam was visible. They certainly had no faith in the war, but neither did they believe in anything against it;—fatalists, pessimists all.

It was clear to Clerambault that when personal energy is lacking, the highest qualities of head and heart only increase the public servitude. The stoicism which submits to the laws of the universe prevents us from resisting those which are cruel, instead of saying to destiny: "No, thus far, and no farther!" … If it pushes on you will see the stoic stand politely aside, as he murmurs: "Please come in!"—Cultivated heroism, the taste for the superhuman, even the inhuman, chokes the soul with its sacrifices, and the more absurd they are, the more sublime they appear—Christians of today, more generous than their Master, render all to Caesar; a cause seems sacred to them from the moment that they are asked to immolate themselves to it. To the ignominy of war they piously kindle the flame of their faith, and throw their bodies on the altar. The people bend their backs, and accept with a passive, ironic resignation…. "No need to borrow trouble." Ages and ages of misery have rolled over this stone, but in the end stones do wear down and become mud.

Clerambault tried to talk with one and another of these people but found himself everywhere opposed by the same hidden, half-unconscious resistance. They were armed with the will not to hear, or rather with a remarkable not-will to hear. Their minds were as impervious to contrary arguments as a duck's feathers to water. Men in general are endowed, for their comfort, with a precious faculty; they can make themselves blind and deaf when it does not suit them to see and hear, and when by chance they pick up some inconvenient object, they drop it quickly, and forget it as soon as possible. How many citizens in any country knew the truth about the divided responsibility for the war, or about the ill-omened part played by their politicians, who, themselves deceived, pretended with great success to be ignorant!

If everyone is trying to escape from himself, it is clear, that a man will run faster from someone who, like Clerambault, would help him to recover himself. In order to avoid their own conscience, intelligent, serious, honourable men do not blush to employ the little tricks of a woman or a child trying to get its own way; and dreading a discussion which might unsettle them, they would seize on the first awkward expression used by Clerambault. They would separate it from the context, dress it up if necessary, and with raised voices and eyes starting from their heads, feign an indignation which they ended by feeling sincerely. They would repeat "mordicus," even after the proof, and if obliged to admit it, would rush off, banging the door after them: "Can't stand any more of that!" But two, or perhaps ten days after, they would come back and renew the argument, as if nothing had happened.

Some treacherous ones provoked Clerambault to say more than he intended, and having gained their point, exploded with rage. But even the most good-natured told him that he lacked good sense—"good," of course, meaning "my way of thinking."

There were the clever talkers also who, having nothing to fear from a contest of words, began an argument in the flattering hope that they could bring the wandering sheep back to the fold. It was not his main idea that they disputed, so much as its desirability; they would appeal to Clerambault's better side:

"Certainly, of course, I think as you do, or almost as you do; I understand what you mean; … but you ought to be cautious, my dear friend, not to trouble the consciences of those who have to fight. You cannot always speak the truth, at least not all at once. These fine things may come about … in fifty years, perhaps. We must wait and not go too fast for nature …"

"Wait, until the appetites of the exploiter, and the folly of the exploited are equally exhausted? When the thinking of clear-sighted, better sort gives way to the blindness of coarser minds, it goes directly contrary to that nature which it professes to follow, and against the historical destiny which they themselves make it a point of honour to obey. For do we respect the plans of Nature when we stifle one part of its thought, and the higher, at that? The theory which would lop off the strongest forces from life, and bend it before the passions of the multitude, would result in suppressing the advance-guard, and leaving the army without leaders…. When the boat leans over, must I not throw my weight on the other side to keep an even keel? Or must we all sit down to leeward? Advanced ideas are Nature's weights, intended to counter-balance the heavy stubborn past; without them the boat will upset…. The welcome they will receive is a side issue. Their advocates can expect to be stoned, but whoever has these things in his mind and does not speak them, is a dishonoured man. He is like a soldier in battle, to whom a dangerous message is entrusted; is he free to shirk it?… Why does not everyone understand these things?"

When they saw that persuasion had no effect on Clerambault, they unmasked their batteries and violently taxed him with absurd, criminal pride. They asked him if he thought himself cleverer than anyone else, that he set himself up against the entire nation? On what did he found this overweening self-confidence? Duty consists in being humble, and keeping to one's proper place in the community; when it commands, our duty is to bow to it, and, whether we agree or not, we must carry out its orders. Woe to the rebel against the soul of his country! To be in the right and in opposition to her is to be wrong, and in the hour of action wrong is a crime. The Republic demands obedience from her sons.

"The Republic or death," said Clerambault ironically. "And this is a free country? Free, yes, because there have always been, and always will be some souls like mine, which refuse to bend to a yoke which their conscience disavows. We are become a nation of tyrants. There was no great advantage in taking the Bastille. In the old days one ran the risk of perpetual imprisonment if one made so bold as to differ from the Prince—the fagot, if you did not agree with the Church; but now you must think with forty millions of men and follow them in their frantic contradictions. One day you must scream: "Down with England!" Tomorrow it will be: "Down with Germany!" and the next day it may be the turn of Italy; and da capo in a week or two. Today we acclaim a man or an idea, tomorrow we shall insult him; and anyone who refuses risks dishonour—or a pistol bullet. This is the most ignoble and shameful servitude of all!… By what right do a hundred, a thousand, one or forty millions of men, demand that I shall renounce my soul? Each of them has one, like mine. Forty millions of souls together often make only one, which has denied itself forty millions of times…. I think what I think. Go you and do likewise. The living truth can be re-born only from the equilibrium of opposing thoughts. To make the citizen respect the city, it must be reciprocal; each has his soul. It is his right and his first duty is to be true to it…. I have no illusions, and in this world of prey I do not attribute an exaggerated importance to my own conscience, but however small we may be or little we may do, we must exist. We are all liable to err, but deceived or not, a man should be sincere; an honest mistake is not a lie, but a stage on the road to truth. The real lie is to fear the truth and try to stifle it. Even if you were a thousand times right, if you resort to force to crush a sincere mistake, you commit the most odious crime against reason itself. If reason is persecutor, and error persecuted, I am for the victim, for error has rights as well as truth…. Truth—the real truth, is to be always seeking what is true, and to respect the efforts of those who suffer in the pursuit. If you insult a man who is striving to hew out his path, if you persecute him who wishes, and perhaps fails, to find less inhuman roads for human progress, you make a martyr of him. Your way is the best, the only one, you say? Follow it then, and let me follow mine. I do not oblige you to come with me, so why are you angry? Are you afraid lest I should prove to be in the right?"

The impression left on Clerambault's mind by his last interview with Perrotin, was one of sadness and pity; but on the whole he decided to go again to see him, having by now arrived at a better understanding of his ironical and prudent attitude towards the world. If he had retained but small esteem for Perrotin's character, on the other hand the great intelligence of the old scholar continued to command his highest admiration; he still saw in him a guide towards the light.

Perrotin was not exactly delighted to see Clerambault again. The other day he had been obliged to commit a little cowardly act; he did not mind that, for he was used to it, but it was under the eyes of an incorruptible witness, and he was too clever not to have retained a disagreeable memory of the incident. He foresaw a discussion, and he hated to discuss with people who had convictions—there is no fun in it, they take everything so seriously—however, he was courteous, weak, good-natured, and unable to refuse when anyone attacked him vigorously. He tried at first to avoid serious questions; but when he saw that Clerambault really needed him, and that perhaps he might save him from some imprudence, he consented, with a sigh, to give up his morning.

Clerambault related to him all that he had done, and the result. He realised that the world around served other gods than his; for he had shared the same faith, and even now was impartial enough to see a certain grandeur and beauty in it. Since these last trials, however, he had also seen its horror and absurdity; he had abandoned it for a new ideal, which would certainly bring him into conflict with the old. With brief and passionate touches, Clerambault explained this new ideal, and called on Perrotin to say if to him it seemed true or false; entreating his friend to lay aside considerations of tact or politeness, to speak clearly and frankly. Struck by Clerambault's tragic earnestness, Perrotin changed his tone, and answered in the same key.

"It amounts to this, that you think I am wrong?" asked Clerambault, distressed. "I see that I am alone in this, but I cannot help it. Do not try to spare me now, but tell me, am I wrong to think as I do?"

"No, my friend," replied Perrotin gravely, "you are right."

"Then you agree that I ought to fight against these murderous mistakes?"

"Ah, that is another matter."

"Ought I to betray the truth, when it is clear to me?"

"Truth, my poor friend! No, don't look at me like that, I shall not follow Pilate's example, and ask: What is Truth? Like you, and longer than you perhaps, I have loved her. But Truth, my dear Sir, is higher than you, than I, than all those that ever have, or ever will inhabit the earth. We may believe that we obey the Great Goddess, but in fact we serve only the DÎ minores, the saints in the side chapels, alternately adored and neglected by the crowd. The one in honour of whom men are now killing and mutilating themselves in a Corybantic frenzy, can evidently be no longer yours nor mine. The ideal of the Country is a god, great and cruel, who will leave to the future the image of a sort of bugaboo Cronos, or of his Olympian son whom Christ superseded. Your ideal of humanity is the highest rung of the ladder, the announcement of the new god—who will be dethroned later on by one higher still, who will embrace more of the universe. The ideal and life never cease to evolve, and this continual advance forms the genuine interest of the world to the liberal mind; but if the mind can constantly rise without rest or interruption, in the world of fact progress is made step by step, and a scant few inches are gained in the whole of a lifetime. Humanity limps along, and your mistake, the only one, is that you are two or three days' journey ahead of it, but—perhaps with good reason—that is one of the mistakes most difficult to forgive. When an ideal, like that of Country, begins to age with the form of society to which it is strongly bound, the slightest attack makes it ferocious, and it will blaze out furiously in its exasperation. The reason is that it has already begun to doubt itself. Do not deceive yourself; these millions of men who are slaughtering each other now in the name of patriotism, have no longer the early enthusiasm of 1792, or 1813, even though there is more noise and ruin today. Many of those who die, and those who send them to their death, feel in their hearts the horrible touch of doubt; but entangled as they are, too weak to escape, or even to imagine a way of salvation, they proclaim their injured faith with a kind of despair, and throw themselves blindly into the abyss. They would like to throw in also those who first raised doubts in them by words or actions. To wish to destroy the dream of those who are dying for its sake, is to wish to kill twice over."

Clerambault held out his hand to stop him:—"Ah! you have no need to tell me that, and it tortures me. Do you think I am insensible to the pain of these poor souls whose faith I undermine? Respect the beliefs of others; offend not one of these little ones…. My God! what can I do? Help me to get out of this dilemma; shall I see wrong done, let men go to ruin,—or risk injuring them, wound their faith, draw hatred upon myself when I try to save them?… Show me the law!"

"Save yourself."

"But that would be to lose myself, if the price is the life of others, if we do nothing. You and I, no effort would be too great,—the ruin of Europe, of the whole world, is imminent."

Perrotin sat quietly, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his hands folded over his Buddha-like belly. He twirled his thumbs, looking kindly at Clerambault, shook his head, and replied: "Your generous heart, and your artistic sensibilities urge you too far, my friend, but fortunately the world is not near its end. This is not the first time. And there will be many others. What is happening today is painful, certainly, but not in the least abnormal. War has never kept the earth from turning on its axis, nor prevented the evolution of life; it is even one of the forms of its evolution. Let an old scholar and philosopher oppose his calm inhumanity to your holy Man of Sorrows. In spite of all it may bring you some benefit. This struggle, this crisis which alarms you so much, is no more than a simple case of systole, a cosmic contraction, tumultuous, but regulated, like the folding of the earth crust accompanied by destructive earthquakes. Humanity is tightening. And war is its seismos. Yesterday, in all countries, provinces were at war with each other. Before that, in each province, cities fought together. Now that national unity has been reached, a larger unity develops. It is certainly regrettable that it should take place by violence, but that is the natural method. Of the explosive mixture of conflicting elements in conflict, a new chemical body will be born. Will it be in the East, or in Europe? I cannot tell; but surely what results will have new properties, more valuable than its parts. The end is not yet. The war of which we are now witnesses is magnificent … (I beg your pardon; I mean magnificent to the mind, where suffering does not exist) … Greater, finer conflicts still are preparing. These poor childish peoples who imagine that they can disturb the peace of eternity with their cannon shots!… The whole universe must first pass through the retort. We shall have a war between the two Americas, one between the New World and the Yellow Continent, then the conquerors and the rest of the world…. That is enough to fill up a few centuries. And I may not have seen all, my eyes are not very good. Naturally each of these shocks will lead to social struggles.

"It will all be accomplished in about a dozen centuries. (I am rather inclined to think that it will be more rapid than it seems by comparison with the past, for the movement becomes accelerated as it proceeds.) No doubt we shall arrive at a rather impoverished synthesis, for many constituent elements, some good, some bad, will be destroyed in the process, the one being too delicate to resist the hostile environment, the other injurious and impossible to assimilate. Then we shall have the celebrated United States of the whole world; and this union will be all the more solid, because, as is probable, man will be menaced by a common danger. The canals of Mars, the drying-up or cooling-off of the planet, some mysterious plague, the pendulum of Poe, in short, the vision of an inevitable death overwhelming the human race…. There will be great things to behold! The Genius of the race, stretched to the uttermost, in its last agonies.

"There will be, on the other hand, very little liberty; human multiplicity when near its end will fuse itself into a Unity of Will. Do we not see the beginnings already? Thus, without abrupt mutations, will be effected the reintegration of the complex in the one, of old Empedocles' Hatred in Love."

"And what then?"

"After that? A rest, and then it will all begin over again, there can be no doubt. A young cycle. The new Kalpa. The world will turn once more, on the re-forged wheel."

"And what is the answer to the riddle?"

"The Hindoos would tell you Siva. Siva, who creates and destroys; destroys and creates."

"What a hideous dream."

"That is an affair of temperament. Wisdom liberates. To the Hindoos,
Buddha is the deliverer. As for me, curiosity is a sufficient reward."

"It would not be enough for me, and I cannot content myself either with the wisdom of a selfish Buddha, who sets himself free by deserting the rest. I know the Hindoos as you do, and I love them, but even among them, Buddha has not said the last word of wisdom. Do you remember that Bodhisattva, the Master of Pity, who swore not to become Buddha, never to find freedom in Nirvana, until he had cured all pain, redeemed all crimes, consoled all sorrows?"

Perrotin smiled and patted Clerambault's hand affectionately as he looked at his troubled face.

"Dear old Bodhisattva," he said, "what do you want to do? And whom would you save?"

"Oh, I know well enough," said Clerambault, hanging his head. "I know how small I am, how little I can do, the weakness of my wishes and protestations. Do not think me so vain; but how can I help it, if I feel it is my duty to speak?"

"Your duty is to do what is right and reasonable; not to sacrifice yourself in vain."

"Do you certainly know what is in vain? Can you tell beforehand which seed will germinate and which will turn out sterile and perish? But you sow seed nevertheless. What progress would ever have been made, if those who bore the germ of it had stopped terrified before the enormous mass of accumulated routine which hung ready to crush them, above their heads."

"I admit that a scholar is bound to defend the Truth that he has discovered, but is this social question your mission? You are a poet; keep to your dreams, and may they prove a defence to you!"

"Before considering myself as a poet, I consider myself as a man, and every honest man has a mission."

"A mind like yours is too precious and valuable to be sacrificed, it would be murder."

"Yes, you are willing to sacrifice people who have little to lose." He was silent for a moment, and then went on:

"Perrotin, I have often thought that we, men of thought, artists, all of us, we do not live up to our obligations. Not only now, but for a long time, perhaps always. We are custodians of the portion of Truth that is in us, a little light, which we have prudently kept for ourselves. More than once this has troubled me, but I shut my eyes to it then; now they have been unsealed by suffering. We are the privileged ones, and that lays duties upon us which we have not fulfilled; we are afraid of compromising ourselves. There is an aristocracy of the mind, which claims to succeed to that of blood; but it forgets that the privileges of the old order were first purchased with blood. For ages mankind has listened to words of wisdom, but it is rare to see the wise men offer themselves as a sacrifice, though it would do no harm if the world should see some of them stake their lives on their doctrines, as in the heroic days. Sacrifice is the condition of fecundity. To make others believe, you must believe first yourself, and prove it. Men do not see a truth simply because it exists, it must have the breath of life; and this spirit which is ours, we can and ought to give. If not, our thoughts are only amusements of dilettanti—a play, which deserves only a little applause. Men who advance the history of the world make stepping-stones of their own lives. How much higher than all our great men was the Son of the carpenter of Galilee. Humanity knows the difference between them and the Saviour."

"But did He save it?

"'When Jahveh speaks: "'Tis my desire,"
His people work to feed the fire.'"

"Your circle of flame is the last terror, and Man exists only to break through, that he may come out of it free."

"Free?" repeated Perrotin with his quiet smile.

"Yes, free! It is the highest good, but few reach it, although the name is common enough. It is as exceptional as real beauty, or real goodness. By a free man I mean one who can liberate himself from himself, his passions, his blind instincts, those of his surroundings, or of the moment. It is said that he does this in obedience to the voice of reason; but reason in the sense that you give it, is a mirage. It is only another passion, hardened, intellectualised, and therefore fanatical. No, he must put himself out of sight, in order to get a clear view over the clouds of dust raised by the flock on the road of today, to take in the whole horizon, so as to put events in their proper place in the scheme of the universe."

"Then," said Perrotin, "he must accommodate himself to the laws of that universe."

"Not necessarily," said Clerambault, "he can oppose them with a clear conscience if they are contrary to right and happiness. Liberty consists in that very thing, that a free man is in himself a conscious law of the universe, a counter-balance to the crushing machine, the automaton of Spitteler, the bronze AnankÉ. I see the universal Being, three parts of him still embedded in the clay, the bark, or the stone, undergoing the implacable laws of the matter in which he is encrusted. His breath and his eyes alone are free; "I hope," says his look. And his breath declares, "I will!" With the help of these he struggles to release himself. We are the look and the breath, that is what makes a free man."

"The look is enough for me," said Perrotin gently.

"And without the breath I should die!" exclaimed Clerambault.

In a man of thought there is a wide interval between the word and the deed. Even when a thing is decided upon, he finds pretexts for putting it off to another day, for he sees only too clearly what will follow; what pains and troubles. And to what end? In order to calm his restless soul he pours out a flood of energetic language on his intimate friends, or to himself alone, and in this way gains the illusion of action cheaply enough. In the bottom of his heart he does not believe in it, but like Hamlet, he waits till circumstances shall force his hand.

Clerambault was brave enough when he was talking to the indulgent Perrotin, but he had scarcely got home when he was seized again by his hesitations. Sharpened by his sorrow, his sensitiveness anticipated the emotions of those around him; he imagined the discord that his words would cause between himself and his wife, and worse, without exactly knowing why, he was not sure of his daughter's sympathy, and shrank from the trial. The risk was too great for an affectionate heart like his.

Matters stood thus, when a doctor of his acquaintance wrote that he had a man dangerously wounded in his hospital who had been in the great Champagne offensive, and had known Maxime. Clerambault went at once to see him.

On the bed he saw a man who might have been of any age. He lay still on his back, swathed like a mummy, his thin peasant-face all wrinkled and brown, with the big nose and grey beard emerging from the white bandages. Outside the sheet you could see his right hand, rough and work-worn; a joint of the middle-finger was missing—but that did not matter, it was a peace injury. His eyes looked out calmly under the bushy eyebrows; their clear grey light was unexpected in the burned face.

Clerambault came close and asked him how he did, and the man thanked him politely, without giving details, as if it were not worth the trouble to talk about oneself.

"You are very good, Sir. I am getting on all right." But Clerambault persisted affectionately, and it did not take long for the grey eyes to see that there was something deeper than curiosity in the blue eyes that bent over him.

"Where are you wounded?" asked Clerambault.

"Oh, a little of everywhere; it would take too long to tell you, Sir."
But as his visitor continued to press him:

"There is a wound wherever they could find a place. Shot up, all over. I never should have thought there would have been room enough on a little man like me."

Clerambault found out at last that he had received about a score of wounds; seventeen, to be exact. He had been literally sprinkled—he called it "interlarded"—with shrapnel.

"Wounded in seventeen places!" cried Clerambault.

"I have only a dozen left," said the man.

"Did they cure the others?"

"No, they cut my legs off." Clerambault was so shocked that he almost forgot the object of his visit. Great Heaven! What agonies! Our sufferings, in comparison, are a drop in the ocean…. He put his hand over the rough one, and pressed it. The calm grey eyes took in Clerambault from his feet to the crape on his hat.

"You have lost someone?"

"Yes," said Clerambault, pulling himself together, "you must have known Sergeant Clerambault?"

"Surely," said the man, "I knew him."

"He was my son."

The grey eyes softened.

"Ah, Sir! I am sorry for you. I should think I did know him, poor little chap! We were together for nearly a year, and a year like that counts, I can tell you! Day after day, we were like moles burrowing in the same hole…. We had our share of trouble."

"Did he suffer much?"

"Well, Sir, it was pretty bad sometimes; hard on the boy, just at the first. You see he wasn't used to it, like us."

"You come from the country?"

"I was labourer on a farm. You have to live with the beasts, and you get to be like 'em. But it is the truth I tell you now, Sir, that men do treat each other worse than the beasts. 'Be kind to the animals.' That was on a notice a joker stuck up in our trench…. But what isn't good enough for them is good enough for us. All right; I'm not kicking. Things are like that. We have to take it as it comes. But you could see that the little Sergeant had never been up against it before; the rain and the mud, and the meanness; the dirt worst of all, everything that you touch, your food, your skin, full of vermin…. He came close to crying, I could see, once or twice, when he was new to it. I wouldn't let on that I noticed, for the boy was proud, didn't want any help, but I would jolly him, try to cheer him up, lend him a hand sometimes; he was glad to get it. You see you have to get together. But before long he could stick it out as well as anybody; then it was his turn to help me. I never heard him squeal, and we had gay times together—must have a joke now and then, no matter what happens. It keeps off bad luck."

Clerambault sat and listened with a heavy heart.

"Was he happier towards the last?" he asked.

"Yes, Sir, I think he was what you call resigned, just like we all were. I don't know how it is, but you all seem to start out with the same foot in the morning. We are all different, but somehow, after a while it seems as if we were growing alike. It's better, too, that way. You don't mind things so much all in a bunch…. It's only when you get leave, and after you come back—it's bad, nothing goes right any more. You ought to have seen the little Sergeant that last time."

Clerambault felt a pang as he said quickly:

"When he came back?"

"He was very low. I don't know as I ever saw him so bad before."

An agonised expression came over Clerambault's face, and at his gesture, the wounded man who had been looking at the ceiling while he talked, turned his eyes and understood, for he added at once:

"He pulled himself together again, after that."

"Tell me what he said to you, tell me everything," said Clerambault again taking his hand.

The sick man hesitated and answered.

"I don't think I just remember what he said." Then he shut his eyes, and lay still, while Clerambault bent over him and tried to see what was before those eyes under their closed lids.

* * * * *

An icy moonless night. From the bottom of the hollow boyau one could see the cold sky and the fixed stars. Bullets rattled on the hard ground. Maxime and his friend sat huddled up in the trench, smoking with their chins on their knees. The lad had come back that day from Paris. He was depressed, would not answer questions, shut himself up in a sulky silence. The other had left him all the afternoon to bear his trouble alone. Now here in the darkness he felt that the moment had come, and sat a little closer, for he knew that the boy would speak of his own accord. A bullet over their heads glanced off, knocking down a lump of frozen turf.

"Hullo, old gravedigger," said the other, "don't get too fresh."

"Might as well make an end of it now," said Maxime. "That's what they all seem to want."

"Give the boche your skin for a present? I'll say you're generous!"

"It's not only the boches; they all have a hand in it."

"Who, all?"

"All of them back there where I come from, in Paris, friends and relations; the people on the other side of the grave, the live ones.—As for us, we are as good as dead."

In the long silence that followed they could hear the scream of a shell across the sky. Maxime's comrade blew out a mouthful of smoke. "Well, youngster," he said, "it didn't go right, back there this time, did it?—I guessed as much!"

"I don't know why."

"When one is hurt, and the other isn't, they haven't much to say to one another."

"Oh, they suffer too."

"Not the same. You can't make a man know what a toothache is unless he feels it. Can't be done. Go to them all snuggled up in their beds, and make them understand how it is out here!… It's nothing new to me. I didn't have to wait for the war. Always have lived like this. But do you believe when I was working in the soil, sweating all the fat off my bones, that any of them bothered their heads about me? I don't mean that there's any harm in them, nor much good, either, but like anybody else, they don't see how it is. To understand a thing properly you've got to take hold of it yourself, take the work, and the hurt. If not, and that's what it is, you know—might as well make up your mind—no use trying to explain. That's the way things are, and we can't do anything about it."

"Life would not be worth living, if it were as bad as that."

"Why not, by gosh? I've stuck it out all this time, and you're just as good as me, better, because you've got more brains and can learn. That's the way to get on, the harder it is the more it teaches you. And then when you're together, like us here, and things are rocky, it's not a pleasure, exactly, but it ain't all pain. The worst is to be off by yourself; and you're not lonesome, are you, boy?" Maxime looked him in the face, as he answered:

"I was back there, but I don't feel it here with you."

* * * * *

The man who lay on the bed said nothing of what had been passing before his closed eyes. He turned them tranquilly on the father, whose agonised look seemed to implore him to speak. And then, with an awkward kindness, he tried to explain that if the boy was down-hearted it was probably because he had just left home, but they had cheered him up as well as they could; they knew how he felt. He had never known what it was to have a father himself, but when he was a kid he used to think what luck it would be to have one…. "So I thought I might try. I spoke to him, Sir, like you would yourself,… and he soon quieted down. He said, all the same, there was one thing we got out of this blooming war; that there were lots of poor devils in the world who don't know each other, but are all made alike. Sometimes we call 'em our brothers, in sermons and places like that, but no one takes much stock in it. If you want to know it's true, you have to slave together like us—He kissed me then, Sir."

Clerambault rose, and bending over the bandaged face, kissed the wounded man's rough cheek.

"Tell me something that I can do for you," he said.

"You are very good, Sir, but there's not much you can do now. I am so used up. No legs, and a broken arm. I'm no good,—what could I work at? Besides, it's not sure yet that I shall pull through. We'll have to leave it at that. If I go out, good-bye. If not, can't do anything but wait. There are plenty of trains."

As Clerambault admired his patience, he repeated his refrain: "I've got the habit. There's no merit in being patient when there's nothing else to do…. A little more or less, what does it matter?… It's like life, this war is."

Clerambault saw that in his egotism he had asked the man nothing about himself. He did not even know his name.

"My name? It's a good fit for me,—Courtois AimÉ is what they call me—AimÉ, that's the Christian name, fine for an unlucky fellow like me, and Courtois on the top of it. Queer enough, isn't it?… I never had a family, came out of an Orphan Asylum; my foster-father, a farmer down in Champagne, offered to bring me up; and you can bet he did it! I had all the training I wanted; but anyhow it learned me what I had to expect. I've had all that was coming to me!"

Thereupon he told in a few brief dry phrases, without emotion, of the series of bad luck which had made up his life. Marriage with a girl as poor as himself—"hunger wedding thirst," as they say, sickness and death, the struggle with nature,—it would not be so bad if men would only help…. Homo, homini … homo…. All the social injustice weighs on the under dog. As he listened Clerambault could not keep down his indignation, but AimÉ Courtois took it as a matter of course; that's the way it always has been, and always will be; some are born to suffer, others not. You can't have mountains without valleys. The war seemed perfectly idiotic to him, but he would not have lifted a finger to prevent it. He had in his way the fatalist passivity of the people, which hides itself, on Gallic soil, behind a veil of ironic carelessness. The "no use in getting in a sweat about it," of the trenches. Then there is also that false pride of the French, who fear nothing so much as ridicule, and would risk death twenty times over for something they know to be absurd, rather than be laughed at for an act of unusual common-sense. "You might as well try to stop the lightning as talk against war." When it hails there is nothing to do but to cover over your cold-frames if you can, and when it's over go round and see how much is left of your crop. And they will keep on doing this until the next hailstorm, the next war, to the end of time. "No use getting in a sweat." … It would never occur to them that Man can change Man.

This stupid heroic resignation irritated Clerambault profoundly. The upper classes are charmed with it, no doubt, for they owe their existence to it,—but it makes a DanaÏd's sieve of the human race, and its age-long effort, since all its courage, its virtues, and its labours, are spent in learning how to die…. But when he looked at the fragment of a man before him, his heart was pierced with an infinite pity. What could this wretched man do, symbol as he was, of the mutilated, sacrificed people? For so many centuries he has bled and suffered under our eyes, while we, his more fortunate brothers, have only encouraged him to persevere, throwing him some careless word of praise from a distance, which cost us nothing. What help have we ever given him? Nothing at all in action, and little enough in words. We owe to his sacrifices the leisure to think; but all the fruit of our thought we have kept for ourselves; we have not given him a taste of it. We are afraid of the light, of impudent opinion and the rulers of the hour who call to us saying: "Put it out! You who have the Light, hide it, if you wish to be pardoned…." Oh, let us be cowards no more. For who will speak, if we do not? The others are gagged and must die without a word.

A wave of pain passed over the features of the wounded man. With eyes fixed on the ceiling, his big mouth twisted, his teeth obstinately clenched, he could say no more.—Clerambault went away, his mind was made up. The silence of this soldier on his bed of agony had brought him to a decision. He would speak.

his hands with a groan.

"What is the matter?" said Moreau, "are you ill?"

"You remind me of all the harm that I did."

"You? No, it was other people that did the harm."

"Yes, I, as much as the others. You must try to forgive us all."

"You are the last who ought to say so."

"If the truth were known, I should be among the first. For I am one of the few who see clearly how wicked I was." He began to inveigh against his generation, but broke off with a discouraged gesture:

"None of that does any good…. Tell me about yourself."

His voice was so humble that Moreau was really touched to see the older man blame himself so severely. All his distrust melted away, and he threw wide the door of his bitter, wounded spirit, confessing that he had come several times as far as the house, but could not make up his mind to leave his letter. He never did consent to show it. Since he came out of the hospital he had not been able to talk to anyone; these people back here sickened him with their little preoccupations, their business, their pleasures, the restrictions to their pleasures, their selfishness, their ignorance and lack of comprehension. He felt like a stranger among them, more than if he were with African savages. Besides,—he stopped, the angry words seemed to stick in his throat—it was not only these people—he felt a stranger to all the world, cut off from normal life, from the pleasures and work of other men by his infirmities. He was a mere wreck, blind and maimed. The poor fellow was absurdly ashamed of it; he blushed at the pitying glances that people threw at him in passing—like a penny that you give, turning away your head at the same time from the unpleasant sight. For in his sensitiveness he exaggerated his ugliness and was disgusted by his deformity. He dwelt on his lost joys and ruined youth; when he saw couples in the street, he could not help feeling jealous; the tears would come into his eyes.

Even this was not all, and when he had poured out the bitterness of his heart—and Clerambault's compassion encouraged him to speak further—he got down to the worst of the trouble, which he and his comrades felt like a cancer that one does not dare to look at. Through his obscure, violent, and miserable talk, Clerambault at last made out what it was that tore the hearts of these young men. It is easy enough for dried-up egotists, withered intellectuals, to sneer at this love of life in the young, and their despair at the loss of it; but it was not alone their ruined, blasted youth that pressed on these poor soldiers,—though that was terrible enough—the worst was not to know the reason for this sacrifice, and the poisonous suspicion that it was all in vain. The pain of these victims could not be soothed by the gross appeal of a foolish racial supremacy, nor by a fragment of ground fought for between States. They knew now how much earth a man needs to die on, and that the blood of all races is part of the same stream of life.

Clerambault felt that he was a sort of elder brother to these young men; the sense of this and his duty towards them gave him a strength that he would not otherwise have had, and he charged their messenger with words of hope and consolation.

"Your sufferings are not thrown away," he said. "It is true that they are the fruit of a cruel error, but the errors themselves are not all lost. The scourge of today is the explosion of evils which have ravaged Europe for ages; pride and cupidity. It is made up of conscienceless States, the disease of capitalism, and is become the monstrous machine called Civilisation, full of intolerance, hypocrisy, and violence. Everything is breaking up; all must be done over again; it is a tremendous task, but do not speak of discouragement, for yours is the greatest work that has ever been offered to a generation. The fire of the trenches and the asphyxiating gases that blind you come as much from agitators in the rear as from the enemy; you must strive to see clearly, to see where the real fight lies. It is not against a people but against an unhealthy society founded on exploitation and rivalry between nations, on the subordination of the free conscience to the Machine-State. The peoples, resigned or sceptical, would not have seen this with the tragical clearness in which it now appears, without the painful disturbance of the war. I do not bless this pain; leave that to the bigots of our old religions! We do not love sorrow and we all want happiness, but if sorrow must come, at least let it be of some use! Do not let your sufferings add to those of others. You must not give way. You are taught in the army that when the order to advance is once given in a battle it is more dangerous to fall back than to go on; so do not look back; leave your ruins behind you, and march on towards the new world."

As he spoke the eyes of his young auditor seemed to say: "Tell me more, more yet, more even than hopes, give me certainties, tell of the victory which will come soon."

Men need to be tempted and decoyed, even the best of them. In exchange for any sacrifice they make for an ideal, you have to promise them, if not immediate realisation, at least an eternal compensation, as all the religions do. Jesus was followed because they thought that He would give them victory here or hereafter.—But he who would speak the truth cannot promise or assure men of victory; the risks are not to be ignored; perhaps it will never come, in any case it will be a long time. To disciples, such a thought is crushingly pessimistic; not so for the master, who has the serenity of a man who, having reached the mountain top, can see over all the surrounding country, while they can only see the steep hill-side which they must climb. How is he to communicate his calm to them? If they cannot look through the eyes of the master, they can always see his eyes from which are reflected the vision denied to them; there they can read the assurance that he who knows the truth (as they believe) is delivered from all their trials.

The eyes of Julian Moreau sought in Clerambault's eyes for this security of soul, this inward harmony; and poor anxious Clerambault had it not. But was he sure that it was not there?… Looking at Julian humbly, he saw,… he saw that Julian had found it in him. And as a man climbing up through a fog suddenly finds himself in the light, he saw that the light was in him, and that it had come to him because he needed it to shine upon another.

After the wounded man had gone away, somewhat comforted, Clerambault felt slightly dazed, and sat drinking in the strange happiness that the heart feels when, however unfortunate itself, it has been able to help another now or in the future. How profound is the instinct for happiness, the plenitude of being! All aspire to it, but it is not the same for all. There are some that wish only to possess; to others, sight is possession, and to others yet, faith is sight. We are links of a chain and this instinct unites us; from those who only seek their own good, or that of their family, or their country, up to the being which embraces millions of beings and desires the good of all. There are those who, having no joy of their own, can almost unconsciously bestow it on others, as Clerambault had done; for they can see the light on his face while his own eyes are in shadow.

The look of his young friend had revealed an unknown treasure to poor Clerambault, and the knowledge of the divine message with which he was entrusted re-established his lost union with other men. He had only contended with them because he was their hardy pioneer, their Christopher Columbus forcing his way across the desert ocean, that he might open the road to the New World. They deride, but follow him; for every true idea, whether understood or not, is a ship under weigh, and the souls of the past are drawn after in its wake.

From this day onward he averted his eyes from the irreparable present of the war and its dead, and looked towards the living, and the future which is in our hands. We are hypnotised, obsessed by the thought of those that we have lost, and the morbid temptation to bury our hearts in their graves, but we must tear ourselves away from the baleful vapours that rise, as in Rome, from The Way of the Tombs. March on! This is no time to halt. We have not yet earned the right to rest with them, for there are others who need us. There, like the wrecks of the Grand Army, you can see in the distance those who drag themselves along, searching on the dreary plain for the half-effaced path.

The thought of the sombre pessimism which threatened to overwhelm these young men after the war was a grave anxiety to Clerambault. The moral danger was a serious one, of which the Governments took no notice at all. They were like bad coachmen who flog their horses up a steep hill at a gallop; it is true that the horse reaches the top, but as the road goes on he stumbles and falls, foundered for life. With what a gallant spirit our young men rushed to the assault in the beginning of the war! And then their ardour gradually diminished. But the horse was still in harness, and the shafts held him up. A factitious excitement was kept up all around him, his daily ration was seasoned with glittering hopes; and though the strength went out of it little by little, the poor creature could not fall down, could not even complain, he had not the strength to think. The countersign all about these victims was to hear nothing, to stop the ears and to lie.

Day after day the battle-tide ebbed, and left wrecks on the sand, men wounded and maimed; and through them the depths of this human ocean were brought to the light. These poor wretches, ruthlessly torn from life, moved helplessly in the void, too feeble to cling to the passions of yesterday or dreams of tomorrow. Some asked themselves blindly, and others with a cruelly clear insight, why they had been born, what life meant….

"Since he who is destroyed, suffers, and he who destroys has no pleasure, and is shortly destroyed himself, tell me what no philosopher can explain; whom does it please, and to whose profit is this unfortunate life of the universe, which is only preserved by the injury or death of all the creatures which compose it?"[1] …

[Footnote 1: Leopardi.]

It is necessary to answer these men, to give them a reason for living, but there is no such need for a man of Clerambault's age; his life is over, and all he requires is to free his conscience as a sort of public bequest.

To young people who have all their life before them, it is not enough to contemplate truth across a heap of corpses; whatever the past may have been, the future alone counts for them. Let us clear away the ruins!

What causes them the most pain? Their own suffering?

No, it is their lack of faith in the altar on which this suffering was laid—(does a man regret if he sacrifices himself for the woman he loves, or for his child?)—This doubt poisons them, takes away the courage to pursue their way, because they fear to find only despair at the end. This is why people say to you: "Never shake the ideal of Country, it ought rather to be built up." What a derision! As if it were possible to restore a lost faith by force of will! We deceive ourselves; we know it in the bottom of our hearts, and this consciousness kills courage and joy.

Let us be brave enough to reject that in which we no longer believe. The trees drop their leaves in the autumn in order that they may put forth new leaves in the spring. Out of your past illusions, make fires as the peasants do with the fallen leaves; the fresh grass, the new faith, will grow all the more thickly, for it is there waiting. Nature does not die, it changes shape continually; like her, let us cast off the garment of the past.

Look carefully, and reckon up these hard years. You have fought and suffered for your country, and what have you gained by it? You have discovered the brotherhood of the men who fight and suffer. Is the price too high? No, if you will listen to your heart, if you will dare to open it to the new faith which has come to you when you least expected it.

The thing that disappoints and drives us to despair is that we cling to what we had at the beginning; and when we no longer trust that, we feel that all is lost. A great nation has never reached the object sought; and so much the better, for almost always what is reached is superior to what was sought, though different. It is not wise to start out with our wisdom ready made, but to gather it sincerely as we go along.

You are not the same men that you were in 1914. If you dare admit it, then dare to act it also! That will be the chief gain—perhaps the only one—of the war. But do you really care? So many things conspire to intimidate you; the weariness of these years, old habits, dread of the effort needed to examine yourself, to throw away what is dead, and stand for what is living. We have, we do not know what respect for the old, a lazy preference for what we are accustomed to, even if it is bad, fatal. Then there is the indolent need for what is easy which makes us take a trodden path rather than hew out a new one for ourselves. Is it not the ideal of most Frenchmen to accept their plan of life ready-made in childhood and never change it? If only this war, which has destroyed so many of your hearths, could force you to come out from your ashes, to found other healths, to seek other truths!

The wish to break with the past, and adventure themselves in unknown regions was not lacking to these young men. They would rather have preferred to go ahead without stopping, and they had scarcely left the Old World when they expected to take possession of the New.—No hesitation, no middle course; they wanted absolute solutions, either the docile servitude of the past, or revolution.

These were Moreau's views; he looked upon Clerambault's hope of social revolution as a certainty, and in the exhortation to win truth patiently step by step he heard an appeal to violent action which would conquer it at once.

He introduced Clerambault to two or three groups of young intellectuals with revolutionary tendencies. They were not very numerous, for here and there you would see the same faces, but they gained an importance which they would not otherwise have had, from the watch which was kept on them by the authorities. Silly people in power, armed to the teeth with millions of bayonets, police and courts of justice at their command, yet uneasy and afraid to let a dozen freethinkers meet to discuss them!

These circles had not the air of conspiracies, and though they rather invited persecution, their activities were confined to words. What else was there for them to do but talk? They were separated from the mass of their fellow thinkers, who had been drawn into the army or the war-machine, which would only give them up when they were past service. What of the youth of Europe remained behind the lines? There were the slackers, who often descended to the lowest depths of meanness to make others fight, so that it should be forgotten that they did not fight themselves. Setting these aside, the representatives—rari nantes—of the younger generation in civil life were those discharged from the army for physical incapacity, and a few broken-down wrecks of the war, like Moreau. In these mutilated or diseased bodies the spirit was like a candle lighted behind broken windows. Twisted and smoky, it seemed as if a breath would extinguish it. But it was all the more ardent for knowing what to expect from life.

Sudden changes from extreme pessimism to an equally extreme optimism would occur, and these violent oscillations of the barometer did not always correspond with the course of events. Pessimism was easily explained, but its contrary was more remarkable, and it would have been difficult to account for it. They were just a handful of people without means of action, and every day seemed to give the lie to their ideas, but they appeared more contented as things grew worse. Their hope was in the worst, that mad belief proper to fanatical and oppressed minorities; Anti-Christ was to bring back Christ; the new order would rise when the crimes of the old had brought it to ruin; and it did not disturb them that they and their dreams might be swept away also. These young irreconcilables wished above all to prevent the partial realisation of their dreams in the old order of things. All or nothing! How foolish to try to make the world better; let it be perfect, or go to pieces. It was a mysticism of the Great Overturning, of the Revolution, and it affected the minds of those least religious; they even went farther than the churches. Foolish race of man! Always this faith in the absolute, which leads ever to the same intoxication, but the same disasters. Always mad for the war between nations, for the war of classes, for universal peace. It seems as if when humanity stuck its nose out of the boiling mud of the Creation, it had a sun-stroke from which it has never recovered, and which, at intervals, subjects it to a recurrence of delirium.

Perhaps these mystical revolutionaries are forerunners of mutations that are brooding in the race—which may brood for centuries and perhaps never burst forth. For there are millions of latent possibilities in nature, for one realised in the time allotted to our humanity. And it is perhaps this obscure sentiment of what might be, but will not come to pass, which sometimes gives to this sort of mysticism another form, rarer, more tragical—an exalted pessimism, the dangerous attraction of sacrifice. How many of these revolutionists have we seen secretly convinced of the overwhelming force of evil, and the certain defeat of their cause, and yet transported with love for a lost cause "… sed victa Catoni" … and filled with the hope of dying for her, destroying or being destroyed. The crushed Commune gave rise to many aspirations, not for its victory, but for a similar annihilation!—In the hearts of the most materialistic there burns forever a spark of that eternal fire, that hope so often buffeted and denied, but still maintained, of an imperishable refuge for all the oppressed in some better Hereafter.

These young people welcomed Clerambault with great affection and esteem, hoping to make him one of themselves. Some of them read in his ideas a reflection of their own, while others saw in him just a sincere old bourgeois whose heart had been hitherto his only guide—a rather insufficient, though generous one. They hoped that he would let himself be taught by their science, and like them, would follow to their extreme limits the logical consequences of the principles laid down. Clerambault resisted feebly, for he knew that nothing can be done to convince a young man who has made himself part of a system. Discussion is hopeless at that age. Earlier there is some chance to act on him, when, as it were, the hermit-crab is looking for his shell; and later something may be done when the shell begins to wear and be uncomfortable; but when the coat is new, the only thing is to let him wear it while it fits him. If he grows, or shrinks, he will get another. We will force no one, but let no one try to put force on us!

No one in this circle, at least in the early days, thought of constraining Clerambault, but sometimes it seemed to him that his ideas were strangely habited in the fashion of his hosts. What unexpected echoes he heard on their lips! He let his friends talk, while he himself said but little, but when he had left them, he would feel troubled and rather ironical. "Are those my thoughts?" he would say to himself. It is terribly difficult for one soul to communicate with another, impossible perhaps, and who knows?… Nature is wiser than we … it may be that this is for our good.

Is it right, is it even possible for us to utter all our thoughts? We reach a conclusion slowly, painfully, through a series of trials; it is the formula of the delicate equilibrium between the inward elements. Change the elements, their proportions, their nature, the formula is no longer accurate and will produce different results, and if you suddenly communicate your whole thought to another, you run the risk of alarming, not helping him. There are cases in which, if he had understood, it might have killed him. Nature, however, is prudent and takes precautions. Your friend does not comprehend you, because he cannot, his instinct will not let him; all that he gets from your thought is the shock when it touches his; the ball glances off, but it is not so easy to tell in what direction.

Men do not listen with their brains alone, but with their dispositions and their passions, and out of what you offer them, each chooses his own and rejects the rest, through a deep instinct of self-defence. Our minds do not throw open the door to every new idea, but rather keep a wary eye on new-comers through a peep-hole. The lofty thoughts of the sages, of Jesus, of Socrates; how were they received? In those days men who spoke such things were killed; twenty years later they were treated as gods—another way of killing them, in fact, by placing their thoughts at a distance, in the kingdom of heaven. The world would indeed come to an end if such ideas were to be put in practice here and now; and their authors knew this well. Perhaps they showed the greatness of their souls more by what they did not say than by what they did; how eloquent were the pathetic silences of Jesus! The golden veil of the ancient symbols and myths, made to shield our weak timid sight! Too often, what is for one the breath of life, is for another death, or worse, murder!

What are we to do, if our hands are full of verities? Shall we spread them broadcast?—Suppose the seed of thought may spring up in weeds or poisonous plants …?

Poor thinker, there is no need to tremble, you are not the master of Fate, but you form part of it, you are one of its voices. Speak, then; that is the law of your being. Speak out your whole thought, but with kindness; be like a good mother. It may not be given to her to make men of her children, but she can patiently teach them how to make men of themselves if they will.

You cannot set others free, in spite of them, and from the outside; and even if it were possible, what good would it do? If they do not free themselves, tomorrow they will fall back into slavery. All you can do is to set a good example, and say: "There is the road, follow it and you will find Freedom." …

In spite of his resolution to do the best he could and leave the rest to the gods, it was fortunate for Clerambault that he could not see all the consequences of his ideas. His thought aspired to the reign of Peace; and very probably it would contribute in some degree to the stirring up of social struggles, like all true pacifism, however paradoxical this may seem. For true pacifism is a condemnation of the present.

Clerambault had no suspicion of the terrible forces that would one day make use of his name. With a wholly opposite effect, his spirit produced a harmony among his young associates by reacting against their violence. He felt the value of life all the more, because they held it in such light esteem; and in this respect they were not different from the Nationalists whom he opposed. Very few prefer life to their ideals—which is, we are told, one of Man's noblest qualities.

In spite of all this, it was a pleasure to Clerambault when he met a man who loved life for its own sake. This was a comrade of Moreau's, who had also been severely wounded. His name was Gillot, and in civil life he had been an industrial designer. A shell had plastered him from head to foot; he had lost a leg and his ear-drum was broken, but he had re-acted more energetically against his fate than Moreau. He was small and dark, with bright eyes full of gaiety, in spite of all that he had gone through. Though he agreed with Moreau in general as to the war and the crimes of the social order, he viewed the same events and the same men with different eyes; from which arose many discussions between the two young men.

One day Moreau had just been telling Clerambault of some gloomy experience of the trenches: "Yes," said Gillot, "it did happen like that and the worst of it was, that it had no effect on us, not the least little bit." And when Moreau protested indignantly: "Well, perhaps you, and one or two more may have minded a little,—but most of them did not even notice it." He kept on to stop further remonstrances from his friend: "I am not trying to make out that you were better than the rest, old man, there is no need for that; I only say it because it is so. Look here," he added, turning to Clerambault, "those who have come back and written about all this, they tell us, of course, what they felt. But they felt more than ordinary mortals because they were artists, and naturally everything got on their nerves, while the rest of us were tougher. Now that I think of it, that makes it more terrible; when you read these stories that sicken you, and make the hair stand up on your head, you don't get the full effect. Think of fellows looking on, smoking, chaffing, busy with something else. You have to, you know, or you would go all to pieces…. All the same, it is astonishing what human creatures can get used to! I believe they could make themselves comfortable at the bottom of a sewer. It really disgusts a man, for I was just the same myself. You mustn't suppose that I was like this chap here, always staring at a death's head. Like everybody else, I thought the whole thing was idiotic; but life is like that, as far as I can see! … We did what we had to do, and let it go at that;—the end? Well, one is as good as another, whether you lose your own skin or the war comes to an end, it finishes it up all the same; and in the meantime you are alive, you eat, you sleep, your bowels—excuse me, one must tell things as they are!… Do you want to know what is at the bottom of it all, Sir? The real truth is that we do not care for life, or not enough. In one of your articles you say very truly that life is the great thing;—only you wouldn't think so to see most people at this minute! Not much life about them; they all seem drowsy, waiting for the last sleep; it looks as if they said to themselves: 'We are flat on our backs now, no need to stir an inch.' No, we don't make enough out of life. And then people are always trying to spoil it for you. From the time you are a child they keep on telling you about the beauty of death, or about dead folks. In the catechism, in the history books, they are always shouting: 'Mourir pour la Patrie!' It is either popery or patriotism, whichever you please; and then this life of the present day is a perfect nuisance; it looks as if it was made expressly to take the backbone out of a man. There is no more initiative. We are all nothing but machines, but with no real system; we only do pieces of work, never knowing where our work will fit in; most often it doesn't fit at all. It is all a mess, with no good in it for anyone; we are thrown in on top of one another like herrings in a barrel, no one knows why;—but then we don't know either why we live at all; it is not life, we are just there.

"They tell us about some time in the dark ages when our grandfathers took the Bastille. Well, you would think to hear the fakers talk who run things now that there was nothing left to do, that we were all in heaven; you can see it carved on the monuments. We know that it is not so; there is another pot boiling, another revolution on the way; but the old one did not do such great things for us after all! It's hard to see plain, hard to trust anybody; there is no one to show us the way, to point to something grand and fine above all these swamps full of toads…. People are always doing something to confuse the issue, nowadays; talking about Right, Justice, Liberty. But that trick is played out. Good enough to die for, but you can't live for things like that."

"How about the present?" asked Clerambault.

"Now? There is no going, back, but I often think that if I had to begin over again—"

"When did you change your mind about all these things?"

"That was the funniest thing of all. It was as soon as I was wounded. It was like getting out of bed in the morning. I had hardly slipped a leg out of life than I wanted to draw it in again. I had been so well off, and never thought of it, ass that I was! I can still see myself, as I came to. The ground was all torn up around me, worse even than the bodies themselves lying in heaps, mixed pell-mell like a lot of jack-straws; the ground simply reeked, as if it was itself bleeding. It was pitch dark, and at first I did not feel anything but the cold, except that I knew I was hit, all right…. I didn't know exactly what piece of me was missing, but I was not in a hurry to find out; I was afraid to know, afraid to stir, there was only one thing I was sure of, that I was alive. If I had only a minute left, I meant to hold on to it…. There was a rocket in the sky; I never thought what it meant, I didn't care, but the curve it made, and the light, like a bright flower…. I can't tell you how lovely it seemed. I simply drank it in…. I remembered when I was a child, one night near La Samaritaine. There were fireworks on the river. That child seemed to be someone else, who made me laugh, and yet I was sorry for him; and then I thought that it was a good thing to be alive, and grow up, and have something, somebody, no matter who to love … even that rocket; and then the pain came on, and I began to howl, and didn't know any more till I found myself in the ambulance. There wasn't much fun in living then; it felt as if a dog was gnawing my bones … might as well have stayed at the bottom of the hole … but even then how fine it seemed to live the way I used to, just live on every day without pain … think of that! and we never notice it,—without any pain at all … none!… it seemed like a dream, and when it did let up for a second, just to taste the air on your tongue, and feel light all over your body—God Almighty! to think that it was like that all the time before, and I thought nothing of it…. What fools we are to wait till we lose a thing before we understand it! And when we do want it, and ask pardon because we did not appreciate it before, all we hear is: 'Too late!'"

"It is never too late," said Clerambault.

Gillot was only too ready to believe this; as an educated workman he was better armed for the fray than Moreau or Clerambault himself. Nothing depressed him for long; "fall down, pick yourself up again, and try once more," he would say, and he always believed he could surmount any obstacle that barred his way. He was ready to march against them on his one leg, the quicker the better. Like the others, he was devoted to the idea of revolution and found means to reconcile it with his optimism; everything was to pass off quietly according to him, for he was a man without rancour.

It would not have been safe, however, to trust him too much in this respect; there are many surprises in these plebeian characters, for they are very easily moved and apt to change. Clerambault heard him one day talking with a friend named Lagneau on leave from the front; they said the poilus meant to knock everything to pieces when the war was over, maybe before. A man of the lower classes in France is often charming, quick to seize on your idea before you have had a chance to explain it thoroughly; but good Lord! how soon he forgets. He forgets what was said, what he answered, what he saw, what he believed, what he wanted; but he is always sure of what he says, and sees, and thinks now. When Gillot was talking to Lagneau, his arguments were exactly contrary to those he had advanced on the previous day to Clerambault. It was not only that his ideas had changed, but apparently his whole disposition. One morning there would be nothing violent enough for his thirst for action and destruction, and the next he would talk about going into a little business with lots of money, the best of food, a tribe of children to bring up, and to hell with the rest! Though they all called themselves sincere internationalists, there were few among these poilus who had not preserved the old French prejudice of superiority of race over the rest of the world, enemies or friends; and even in their own country over the other provinces, or if they were Parisians, over the rest of France. This idea was firmly embedded in their minds, and they boasted of it, not maliciously but by way of a joke. Uncomplaining, willing, always ready to go, like Gillot, they were certainly capable of making a revolution and then un-making it, starting another, and so on—tra-la-la—till all was upset and they were ready to be the prey of the first adventurer who happened along. Our political foxes know well enough that the best way to check a revolution is, at the right moment, to let it blow over while the people are amused.

It looked then as if the hour was at hand. A year before the end of the war in both camps there were months and weeks when the infinite patience of the martyrised people seemed on the point of giving way; when a great cry was ready to go up, "Enough." For the first time there was the universal impression of a bloody deception. It is easy to understand the indignation of the people seeing billions thrown away on the war when before it their leaders had haggled over a few hundred thousand for social betterments. There were figures that exasperated them more than any speeches on the subject. Someone had calculated that it cost 75,000 francs to kill a man; that made ten millions of corpses, and for the same sum we could have had ten millions of stockholders. The stupidest could see the immense value of the treasure, and the horrible, the shameful, waste for an illusion. There were things more abject still; from one end of Europe to the other, there were vermin fattening on death, war-profiteers, robbers of corpses.

"Do not talk to us any more," said these young men to themselves, "of the struggle of democracies against autocracies;—they are all tarred with the same brush. In all countries the war has pointed out the leaders to the vengeance of the people; that unworthy middle class, political, financial, intellectual, that in a single century of power has heaped on the world more exactions, crimes, ruins and follies, than kings and churches had inflicted in ten centuries."

This is why when the axes of those heroic woodsmen, Lenine and Trotzky, were heard in the forest, many oppressed hearts thrilled with joy and hope, and in every country there was sharpening of hatchets. The leading classes rose up against the common danger, all over Europe, in both opposing camps. There was no negotiation needed for them to reach an agreement on this subject, for their instinct spoke loudly. The fiercest enemies of Germany, through the organs of the bourgeoisie, tacitly gave a free hand to the Kaiser to strangle Russian liberty which struck at the root of that social injustice on which they all lived. In the absurdity of their hatred, they could not conceal their delight when they saw Prussian Militarism—that monster who afterwards turned on them—avenge them on these daring rebels. Naturally this only increased the admiration for these excommunicated defiers of the world, on the part of the down-trodden masses and the small number of independent spirits.

The pot began to boil with a vengeance, and to stop it the governments of Europe shut down the lid and sat on it. The stupid class in control kept throwing fuel on the flame, and then wondered at the alarming rumblings. This revolt of the elements was attributed to the wicked designs of some free speakers, to mysterious intrigues, to the enemy's gold, to the pacifists; and none of them saw—though a child would have known it—that, if they wanted to prevent an explosion, the first thing to do was to put out the fire. The god of all these powers was force; no matter what they were called, empires, or republics, it was the mailed fist, disguised, gloved but hard and sure of itself. It became also, like a rising tide, the law of the oppressed, a dark struggle between two contrary pressures. Where the metal had worn thin—in Russia first—the boiler had burst. Where there were cracks in the cover—as in neutral countries—the hissing steam escaped, but a deceitful calm reigned over the countries at war, kept down by oppression. To the oppressors this calm was reassuring; they were armed equally against the enemy or their own citizens. The machine of war is double-ended, the cover strong, made of the best steel, and firmly screwed down; that, at least, cannot be torn off—no, but suppose the whole thing blows up together!

Repressed, like everyone else, Clerambault saw rebellion gathering around him. He understood it, thought it inevitable; but that was not a reason for loving it. He did not believe in the Amor Fati. It was enough to understand; the tyrant has no claim to be loved.

Clerambault's young friends were not sparing of their ideas, and it surprised them to see how little warmth he showed towards the new idol from the North: the rule of the proletariat. They had no timorous scruples or half-measures, they meant to make the world happy in their way—perhaps not in its own. At one stroke they decreed the suppression of all liberties in opposition to theirs; the fallen middle classes were not to be allowed to meet, or to vote, or to have the freedom of the press.

"This is all very well," said Clerambault, "but at this rate they will be the new proletariat, tyranny will merely change places."

"Only for a time," was the answer, "the last oppression, which will kill tyranny."

"Yes, the same old war for right and liberty; which is always going to be the war to end war; but in the meantime it is stronger than ever, and rights like liberty are trampled under foot."

Of course they all protested indignantly against this comparison; in their eyes war and those who waged it were equally infamous.

"None the less," said Clerambault gently, "many of you have fought, and nearly all of you have believed in it … no, do not deny it! Besides, the feeling that inspired you had its noble side; a great wickedness was shown to you, and you threw yourselves upon it to root it out, in a very fine spirit. Only you seem to think that there is only one wickedness in the world, and, that when that has been purged away, we shall all return to the Golden Age. The same thing happened at the time of the Dreyfus Case; all the well-meaning people of Europe—I among them—seemed never to have heard before of the condemnation of an innocent man. They were terribly upset by it, and they turned the world inside out to wash off the impurity. Alas! this was done, but both washers and washed grew discouraged in the process, and when it was all over, lo,—the world was just as black as ever! It seems as if man were incapable of grasping the whole of human misery; he dreads to see the extent of the evil, and in order not to be overwhelmed by it, he fixes on some one point, where he localises all the trouble, and will see nothing further. All this is human nature, and easy enough to understand, my friends; but we should have more courage, and acknowledge the truth that the evil is everywhere; among ourselves, as well as with the enemy. You have found this out little by little in our own country, and seeing the tares in the wheat, you want to throw yourselves against your governments with the same fury that made you see incarnate evil in the person of the enemy. But if ever you recognise that the tares are in you also, then you may turn on yourselves in utter despair. Is not this much to be feared, after the revolutions we have seen, where those who came to bring justice found themselves, without knowing why, with soiled hands and hearts? You are like big children. When will you cease to insist on the absolute good?"

They might have replied that you must will the absolute, in order to arrive at the real; the mind can dally with shades of meaning, which are impossible to action, where it must be all or nothing. Clerambault had the choice between them and their adversaries; there was no other.

Yes, he knew it well enough; there was no other choice in the field of action, where all is determined in advance. Just as the unjust victory leads inevitably to the revenge which in its turn will be unjust, so capitalistic oppression will provoke the proletarian revolution, which will follow the bad example and oppress, when it has the power—an endless chain. Here is a stern Greek justice which the mind can accept and even honour as the rule of the universe. But the heart cannot submit, cannot accept it. Its mission is to break the law of universal warfare. Can it ever come to pass? Who can tell! But in any case it is clear that the hopes and wishes of the heart are outside the order of nature; her mission is rather above nature, and in its essence religious.

Clerambault, who was filled with this spirit, did not as yet dare to avow it; or at least he did not venture to use the word "religious," that word which the religions, that have so little of its spirit, have discredited in the eyes of today.

If Clerambault himself could not see clearly into his own thought, it was hardly to be expected that his young friends should do so, and even if they had seen, they would never have understood. They could not bear the idea that a man who condemned the present state of things as bad and destructive, should hesitate at the most energetic methods for its suppression. They were not wrong from their point of view, which was that of immediate action, but the field of the mind is greater, its battles cover a wider space; it does not waste its energies in bloody skirmishes. Even admitting the methods advocated by his friends, Clerambault could not accept their axiom, that "the end justifies the means." For, on the contrary, he believed that the means are even more important to real progress than the end … what end? Will there ever be such a thing?

This idea was irritating and confusing to these young minds; it served to increase a dangerous hostility, which had arisen in the last five years among the working class, against the intellectuals. No doubt the latter had richly deserved it; how far away seemed the time when men of thought marched at the head of revolutions! Whereas now they were one with the forces of reaction. Even the limited number of those who had kept aloof, while blaming the mistakes of the ring, were, like Clerambault, unable to give up their individualism, which had saved them once, but now held them prisoners, outside the new movement of the masses. This conclusion once reached by the revolutionists, it was but one step to a declaration that the intellectuals must fall, and not a very long step. The pride of the working class already showed itself in articles and speeches, while waiting for the moment when, as in Russia, it could pass to action; and it demanded that the intellectuals should submit servilely to the proletarian leaders. It was even remarkable how some of the intellectuals were among the most eager in demanding this lowering of the position of their group. One would have thought that they did not wish it to be supposed that they belonged to it. Perhaps they had forgotten that they did.

Moreau, however, had not forgotten it; he was all the more bitter in repudiating this class, whose shirt of Nessus still clung to his skin, and it made him extremely violent.

He now began to display singularly aggressive sentiments towards Clerambault; during a discussion he would interrupt him rudely, with a kind of sarcastic and bitter irritation. It almost seemed as if he meant to wound him.

Clerambault did not take offence; he rather felt great pity for Moreau; he knew what he suffered, and he could imagine the bitterness of a young life spoiled like his. Patience and resignation, the moral nourishment on which stomachs fifty years old subsist, were not suited to his youth.

One evening Moreau had shown himself particularly disagreeable, and yet he persisted in walking home with Clerambault, as if he could not make up his mind to leave him. He walked along by his side, silent and frowning. All at once Clerambault stopped, and putting his hand through Moreau's arm with a friendly gesture said with a smile:

"It's all wrong, isn't it, old fellow?"

Moreau was somewhat taken aback, but he pulled himself together and asked drily what made anyone think that things were "all wrong."

"I thought so because you were so cross tonight," said Clerambault good naturally, and in answer to a protesting murmur. "Yes, you certainly were trying to hurt me,—just a little … I know of course that you would not really,—but when a man like you tries to inflict pain on others it is because he is suffering himself … isn't that true?"

"Yes, it is true," said Moreau, "you must forgive me, but it hurts me when I see that you are not in sympathy with our action."

"And are you?" demanded Clerambault. Moreau did not seem to understand. "You yourself," repeated Clerambault, "do you believe in it?"

"Of course I do! What a question!" said Moreau indignantly.

"I doubt it," said Clerambault gently. Moreau seemed to be on the point of losing his temper, but in a moment he said more quietly: "You are mistaken." Clerambault turned to walk on. "All right," said he, "you know your own thoughts better than I do."

For some minutes they continued in silence; then Moreau seized his old friend's arm, and said excitedly:

"How did you know it?"—and his resistance having broken down, he confessed the despair hidden under his aggressive determination to believe and act. He was eaten up with pessimism, a natural consequence of his excessive idealism which had been so cruelly disappointed. The religious souls of former times were tranquil enough; they placed the kingdom of God so far away that no event could touch it; but those of today have established it on earth, by the work of human love and reason, so that when life deals a blow at their dream all life seems horrible to them. There were days when Moreau was tempted to cut his throat! Humanity seemed made of rotteness; he saw with despair the defeats, failures, flaws carved on the destiny of the race from the very beginning—the worm in the bud—and he could not endure the idea of this absurd and tragic fate, which man can never escape. Like Clerambault, he recognized the poison which is in the intelligence, since he had it in his veins, but unlike his elder, who had passed the crisis and only saw danger in the irregularity of thought and not in its essence, Moreau was maddened by the idea that the poison was a necessary part of intelligence. His diseased imagination tortured him by all sorts of bugbears; thought appeared to him as a sickness, setting an indelible mark on the human race; and he pictured to himself in advance all the cataclysms to which it led. Already, thought he, we behold reason staggering with pride before the forces that science has put at her disposal—demons of nature, obedient to the magical formulas of chemistry and distracted by this suddenly-acquired power, turning to self-destruction.

Nevertheless Moreau was too young to remain in the grip of these terrors. He wanted action at any price, anything sooner than to be left alone with them. Why not urge him to act, instead of trying to hold him back?

"My dear boy," said Clerambault, "it is not right to urge another man to a dangerous act, unless you are ready to share it. I have no use for agitators, even if they are sincere, who send others to the stake and do not set the example of martyrdom themselves. There is but one truly sacred type of revolutionary, the Crucified; but very few men are made for the aureole of the cross. The trouble is that we always assign duties to ourselves which are superhuman or inhuman. It is not good for the ordinary man to strive after the "Uebermenschheit," and it can only prove to him a source of useless suffering; but each man can aspire to shed light, order, peace, and kindness around him in his little circle; and that should be happiness enough."

"Not quite enough for me," said Moreau. "Doubt would creep in; it must be all or nothing."

"I know. Your revolution would leave no place for doubt. Your hearts are hard and burning; your brains like geometric patterns. Everything or nothing. No shading! But what would life be without it? It is its greatest charm and its chief merit as well; fragile beauty and goodness, weakness everywhere. We must offer love and help; day by day, and step by step. The world is not transformed by force, or by a miracle, in the twinkling of an eye; but second by second it moves forward in infinity and the humblest who feels it partakes of infinity. Patience, and let us not think that one wrong effaced will save humanity; it will only make one day bright, but other days and more light will come; each will bring its sun. You would not wish to stay its course?"

"We have not the time to wait for all this," said Moreau. "Every day brings us frightful problems which must be decided on the spot. If we are not to be the masters, then we shall be victims; … we, do I say? Not ourselves alone, we are already victimised, but all that is dear to us, all that holds us to life, hope in the future, the salvation of humanity. See the things that press upon us, the agonising questions as to those who will come after us, and those who have children. This war is not yet over, and it is only too evident that its crimes and falsehoods have sown the seeds of new wars, near at hand. Why do we have children? For what do they grow up? To be butchered like this? Look where you will, there is no answer. Are we to leave these crazy countries, this old continent, and emigrate? But where? Are their fifty acres of ground on the globe where independent honest people can take refuge? We must be on one side or the other; you see well enough that we have to choose between patriotism and revolution. If not, what remains? Non-resistance? Is that what you would have? But there is nothing in that unless you have religious faith; otherwise it is only the resignation of the lamb led to the slaughter. Unfortunately, the greater number decide on nothing, prefer not to think, turn their eyes away from the future, blinded by the hope that what they have seen and suffered will not recur. That is why we must decide for them, whether they want it or not, make them quicken their step, save them in spite of themselves. Revolution means a few men who will for all humanity."

"I do not think that I should like it," said Clerambault, "if another decided for me. And on the other hand, I should not want to usurp another man's will; I should prefer to leave each one free, and not interfere with the liberty of others. But I know that I am asking too much."

"Only what is impossible," said Moreau. "When you begin to will, you cannot stop halfway. There are just two sorts of men, those who have too great will-power—like Lenine, and a couple of dozen men in the whole course of history—and those who have too little, who can decide nothing, like us, me, if you like. It is clear enough, despair is all that drives me to will anything…."

"Why despair?" said Clerambault. "A man's fate is made every day by himself, and none knows what it will be; it is what we are. If you are cast down, so also is your fate."

"We shall never have strength enough," answered Moreau sadly. "Don't you believe that I see what infinitely small chances of success a revolution would have now in our country, under present conditions? Think of all the destruction, the economic losses, the demoralisation, the fatal lassitude caused by the war." And he added: "It was not true what I told you the first time we met, about all my comrades feeling as I did, rebelling against the suffering. Gillot told you there are only a few of us, and the others are good fellows for the most part but weak as water! They can see how things are, clearly enough, but sooner than run their heads against a wall they would rather not think about it, or pass it off with a joke. We French are always ready to laugh, it is our treasure and our ruin. It is a fine thing, but what a hold it gives to our oppressors. 'Let them sing as long as they are willing to pay,' as the Italian said. 'Let us laugh, so long as we are ready to die.' … we might say. And then this terrible force of habit, that Gillot was talking about. A man will get used to no matter what ridiculous or painful conditions, provided they last long enough, and that he has company. He becomes habituated to cold, to heat, to death, and to crime. His whole force for resistance is used in adapting himself; and then he curls up in his corner and does not dare to stir, for fear that any change will bring back the pain. We are all so terribly tired! When the soldiers come back, they will have only one thought—to sleep and forget."

"How about the excitable Lagneau, who talks about blowing everything to pieces?"

"I have known Lagneau since the beginning of the war, and he has been in succession, royalist, "revanchard," annexationist, internationalist, socialist, anarchist, bolshevist, and I-don't-give-a damnist. He will finish as a reactionary, and will be sent to make food for cannon against the enemy that our government will pick out among our adversaries or our friends of today. Do you suppose that the people are of our way of thinking? Perhaps, or they may agree with the others. They will take up all opinions one after the other."

"You are a revolutionary then because you are discouraged?" said
Clerambault, laughing.

"There are plenty like that among us."

"Gillot came out of the war more optimistic than he went in."

"Gillot is the forgetful sort, but I don't envy him that," said Moreau bitterly.

"But you ought not to upset him," said Clerambault.

"Gillot needs all the help you can give him."

"Help from me?" said Moreau incredulously.

"He is not naturally strong, and if you would make him so, you must let him see that you believe in him."

"Do you think belief comes by willing to have it?"

"You know whether that is true! No, I think, is the answer. Belief comes through love."

"By love of those who believe?"

"Is it not always through love, and only in that way, that we learn to trust?"

Moreau was touched; he had been a clever youth, eaten up by the craving for knowledge, and like the rest of his class, he had suffered for lack of brotherly affection. True human intercourse is banished from the education of today, but this vital sentiment, hitherto repressed, had revived in the trenches, filled with living, suffering flesh thrown together. At first it was hard to let oneself go; the general hardening, the fear of sentimentality or of ridicule, tended to put barriers between hearts; but when Moreau was laid up, his sheath of pride began to give way, and Clerambault had little difficulty in breaking through it. The best thing about this man was that false pride melted before him, for he had none of his own; people showed to him as he to them their real selves, their weakness and their troubles, which we are taught to hide from a silly idea of self-respect. Moreau had unconsciously learned to recognise at the front the superiority of men who were his social inferiors, brother-soldiers or "Non-Coms." Among these he had been much drawn to Gillot. He was glad that Clerambault should have appealed to him on behalf of his friend, for his secret wish always was to be of some use to another man.

At the next opportunity Clerambault whispered to Gillot that he ought to be optimistic for two, and cheer Moreau up; and thus each found help in the need of helping the other, according to the great principle of life: "Give, and it shall be given unto you."

No matter in what time one lives, nor what misfortunes overtake one, all is not lost as long as there remains in the heart of the race a spark of manly friendship. Blow it into a flame! Draw closer these cold solitary hearts! If only one of the fruits of this war of nations could be the fusion of the best among all classes, the union of the youth of many countries—of the manual labourers and the thinkers—the future would be re-born through their mutual aid.

But if unity is not one wanting to dominate the other, neither is it that one prefers to be dominated. But this was precisely, however, what these young revolutionaries thought, and insisted upon, with a curious sort of self-will. They snubbed Clerambault, on the principle that intelligence should be at the service of the proletariat … "Dienen, dienen …" which was the last word even of the proud Wagner. More than one lofty spirit brought low has said the same; if they could not rule supreme, they would serve.

Clerambault reflected: "The rarest thing is to find honest people who want to be simply my equals; but if we must choose, tyranny for tyranny, I prefer that which held the bodies of Aesop and Epictetus in slavery but left their minds free, to that which promises only material liberty and enslaves the soul."

This intolerance made him feel that he could never attach himself to any party, no matter what it was. Between the two sides, war or revolution, he could frankly state his preference for one, revolution. For it alone offered some hope for the future, which the war could only destroy. But to prefer a party does not mean that you yield to it all independence of thought. It is the error and abuse of democracies that they wish that all should have the same duties, and impose the same tasks on all; but in an advancing community there are multiple tasks. While the main body fights to gain an immediate advantage in progress, there are others who should maintain eternal values far above the victors of tomorrow or yesterday and which are beyond all the rest and throw light on the way above the smoke of battle. Clerambault had allowed himself to be too long blinded by this smoke; he could not plunge into a fresh fight; but in this short-sighted world it is an impropriety, almost a fault to see more clearly than your neighbours.

This sardonic truth was brought home to him in a discussion with these young St. Justs. They pointed out his mistakes, impertinently enough, by comparing him to the "Astrologer who fell into the Pit":

… "They said, poor creature, if your eye
What lies beneath can hardly spy,
Think you your gaze can pierce the sky?"

He had enough sense of humour to see the justice of the comparison; yes, he was of the number of:

"Those whom phantoms alarm
While some serious harm
Threatens them or their farm."

"Even so," he said, "do you think that your republic will have no need of astronomers, just as the first one could get along without chemists? Or are they all to be mobilised? In that case there would be a good chance of your all finding yourselves together at the bottom of the well! Is that what you want? I should not object so much if it were only a question of sharing your fate, but when it comes to joining in your hatreds!"

"You have some of your own, from what I have heard," said one of the young men. Just at this moment another man came in with a newspaper in his hand and called to Clerambault:

"Congratulations, old boy, I see your enemy Bertin is dead."

The irascible journalist had died in a few hours from an attack of pneumonia. For the last six months he had pursued with fury anyone whom he suspected of working for peace, or even of wishing for it. From one step to another he had come to look upon, not only the country, as sacred, but the war also, and among those whom he attacked most fiercely, Clerambault had a foremost place. Bertin could not pardon the resistance to his onslaughts; Clerambault's replies had at first only irritated him, but the disdainful silence with which his latest invectives had been met drove him beside himself. His swollen vanity was deeply wounded, and nothing would have satisfied him but the total annihilation of his adversary. To him Clerambault was not only a personal enemy, but a foe to the public; and in the endeavour to prove this, he made him the centre of a great pacifist plot. At any other time, this would have seemed absurd in everyone's eyes, but now no one had eyes to see with. During the last weeks Bertin's fury and violence had gone beyond anything that he had written before; they were a threat against anyone who was convicted or suspected of the dangerous heresy of Peace.

In this little reunion the news of his death was received with noisy satisfaction; and his funeral oration was preached with an energy that yielded nothing in this line to the efforts of the most famous masters. But Clerambault, absorbed in the newspaper account, scarcely seemed to hear. One of the men standing near, tapped him on the shoulder, and said:

"This ought to be a pleasure to you."

Clerambault started: "Pleasure," he said, "pleasure?"—he took his hat and went out. It was pitch dark in the street outside, all the lights having been out on account of an air-raid. Before his mind there flowered the fine clear-cut face of a boy of sixteen, with its warm pale skin and dark soft eyes, the curling hair, the mobile, smiling mouth, the tone of the sweet voice—Bertin, as he was when they first met at about the same age. Their long evening talks, the tender confidences, the discussions, the dreams … for in those days Bertin too was a dreamer, and even his common-sense, his precocious irony did not protect him from impossible hopes and generous schemes for the renovation of the human race. How fair the future had appeared to their youthful eyes! And in those moments of ecstatic vision how their hearts had seemed to melt together in loving friendship …

And now to see what life had made of them both! This rancorous struggle, Bertin's insane determination to trample under foot those early dreams, and the friend who still cherished them;—and he, too, Clerambault, who had let himself be carried away by the same murderous impulse, trying to render blow for blow, to draw blood from his adversary. Could it be that at the first moment, when he heard of the death of his former friend—he was horrified at himself—but did he not feel it as a relief? What is it that possesses us all? What wicked insanity that turns us against our better selves?…

Lost in these thoughts, he had wandered from the road, and now perceived that he was walking in the wrong direction. He could see the long arms of the search-lights stretching across the sky, hear the tremendous explosions of the Zeppelin bombs over the city, and the distant growlings of the forts in the aerial fight. The enraged people tearing each other to pieces! And to what end? That they all might be as Bertin was now, reach the extinction which awaited all men, and all countries. And those rebels who were planning more violence, other sanguinary idols to set up against the old ones, new gods of carnage that man carves for himself, in the vain hope of ennobling his deadly instincts!

Good God! Why do they not see the imbecility of their conduct, in face of the gulf that swallows up each man that dies, all humanity with him? These millions of creatures who have but a moment to live, why do they persist in making it infernal by their atrocious and absurd quarrels about ideas; like wretches who cut each other's throats for a handful of spurious coins thrown to them? We are all victims, under the same sentence, and instead of uniting, we fight among ourselves. Poor fools! On the brow of each man that passes I can see the sweat of agony; efface it by the kiss of peace!

As he thought this, a crowd of people rushed by—men and women, shrieking with joy. "There's one of them down! One gone! The brutes are burning up!"

And the birds of prey, in the air, rejoiced in their turn over every handful of death that they scattered on the town, like gladiators dying in the arena for the pleasure of some invisible Nero.

Alas, my poor fellow-prisoners!

o much suffering, because it had witnessed the reluctant spiritual departure of too many Blackburns.

Katherine shrank a little from the black entrance of the corridor, but her anxiety centred on the door ahead. She was about to call when a stirring beyond it momentarily reassured her.

The door opened and her uncle stepped out. He wore an untidy dressing-gown. His hair was disordered. His face appeared grayer and more haggard than it had downstairs. A lighted candle shook in his right hand.

"What are you doing up here, Katy?" he quavered.

She broke down before the picture of his increased fear. He shuffled closer.

"What you crying for, Katy?"

She controlled herself. She begged him for an answer to her doubts.

"You make me afraid."

He laughed scornfully.

"You! What you got to be afraid of?"

"I'm afraid because you are," she urged. "You've got to tell me. I'm all alone. I can't stand it. What are you afraid of?"

He didn't answer. He shuffled on toward the disused wing. Her hand tightened on the banister.

"Where are you going?" she whispered.

He turned at the entrance to the corridor.

"I am going to the old bedroom."

"Why? Why?" she asked hysterically. "You can't sleep there. The bed isn't even made."

He lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper:

"Don't you mention I've gone there. If you want to know, I am afraid. I'm afraid to sleep in my own room any longer."

She nodded.

"And you don't think they'd look for you there. What is it? Tell me what it is. Why don't you send for some one—a man?"

"Leave me alone," he mumbled. "Nothing for you to be worried about, except Bobby."

"Yes, there is," she cried. "Yes, there is."

He paid no attention to her fright. He entered the corridor. She heard him shuffling between its narrow walls. She saw his candle disappear in its gloomy reaches.

She ran to her own room and locked the door. She hurried to the window and leaned out, her body shaking, her teeth chattering as if from a sudden chill. The quiet, assured tread of disaster came nearer.

The two wings, stretching at right angles from the main building, formed a narrow court. Clouds harrying the moon failed quite to destroy its power, so that she could see, across the court, the facade of the old wing and the two windows of the large room through whose curtains a spectral glow was diffused. She heard one of the windows opened with a grating noise. The court was a sounding board. It carried to her even the shuffling of the old man's feet as he must have approached the bed. The glow of his candle vanished. She heard a rustling as if he had stretched himself on the bed, a sound like a long-drawn sigh.

She tried to tell herself there was no danger—that these peculiar actions sprang from the old man's fancy—but the house, her surroundings, her loneliness, contradicted her. To her over-acute senses the thought of Blackburn in that room, so often consecrated to the formula of death, suggested a special and unaccountable menace. Under such a strain the supernatural assumed vague and singular shapes.

She slept for only a little while. Then she lay awake, listening with a growing expectancy for some message to slip across the court. The moon had ceased struggling. The wind cried. The baying of a dog echoed mournfully from a great distance. It was like a remote alarm bell which vibrates too perfectly, whose resonance is too prolonged.

She sat upright. She sprang from the bed and, her heart beating insufferably, felt her way to the window. From the wing opposite the message had come—a soft, shrouded sound, another long-drawn sigh.

She tried to call across the court. At first no response came from her tight throat. When it did at last, her voice was unfamiliar in her own ears, the voice of one who has to know a thing but shrinks from asking.

"Uncle!"

The wind mocked her.

"It is nothing," she told herself, "nothing."

But her vigil had been too long, her loneliness too complete. Her earlier impression of the presence of death in the decaying house tightened its hold. She had to assure herself that Silas Blackburn slept untroubled. The thing she had heard was peculiar, and he hadn't answered across the court. The dark, empty corridors at first were an impassable barrier, but while she put on her slippers and her dressing-gown she strengthened her courage. There was a bell rope in the upper hall. She might get Jenkins.

When she stood in the main hall she hesitated. It would probably be a long time, provided he heard at all, before Jenkins could answer her. Her candle outlined the entrance to the musty corridor. Just a few running steps down there, a quick rap at the door, and, perhaps, in an instant her uncle's voice, and the blessed power to return to her room and sleep!

While her fear grew she called on her pride to let her accomplish that brief, abhorrent journey.

Then for the first time a different doubt came to her. As she waited alone in this disturbing nocturnal intimacy of an old house, she shrank from no thought of human intrusion, and she wondered if her uncle had been afraid of that, too, of the sort of thing that might lurk in the ancient wing with its recollections of birth and suffering and death. But he had gone there as an escape. Surely he had been afraid of men. It shamed her that, in spite of that, her fear defined itself ever more clearly as something indefinable. With a passionate determination to strangle such thoughts she held her breath. She tried to close her mind. She entered the corridor. She ran its length. She knocked at the locked door of the old bedroom. She shrank as the echoes rattled from the dingy walls where her candle cast strange reflections. There was no other answer. A sense of an intolerable companionship made her want to cry out for brilliant light, for help. She screamed.

"Uncle Silas! Uncle Silas!"

Through the silence that crushed her voice she became aware finally of the accomplishment of its mission by death in this house. And she fled into the main hall. She jerked at the bell rope. The contact steadied her, stimulated her to reason. One slender hope remained. The oppressive bedroom might have driven Silas Blackburn through the private hall and down the enclosed staircase. Perhaps he slept on the lounge in the library.

She stumbled down, hoping to meet Jenkins. She crossed the hall and the dining room and entered the library. She bent over the lounge. It was empty. Her candle was reflected in the face of the clock on the mantel. Its hands pointed to half-past two.

She pulled at the bell cord by the fireplace. Why didn't the butler come? Alone she couldn't climb the enclosed staircase to try the other door. It seemed impossible to her that she should wait another instant alone—

The butler, as old and as gray as Silas Blackburn, faltered in. He started back when he saw her.

"My God, Miss Katherine! What's the matter? You look like death."

"There's death," she said.

She indicated the door of the enclosed staircase. She led the way with the candle. The panelled, narrow hall was empty. That door, too, was locked and the key, she knew, must be on the inside.

"Who—who is it?" Jenkins asked. "Who would be in that room? Has Mr.
Bobby come back?"

She descended to the library before answering. She put the candle down and spread her hands.

"It's happened, Jenkins—whatever he feared."

"Not Mr. Silas?"

"We have to break in," she said with a shiver. "Get a hammer, a chisel, whatever is necessary."

"But if there's anything wrong," the butler objected, "if anybody's been there, the other door must be open."

She shook her head. Those two first of all faced that extraordinary puzzle. How had the murderer entered and left the room with both doors locked on the inside, with the windows too high for use? They went to the upper story. She urged the butler into the sombre corridor.

"We have to know," she whispered, "what's happened beyond those locked doors."

She still vibrated to the feeling of unconformable forces in the old house. Jenkins, she saw, responded to the same superstitious misgivings. He inserted the chisel with maladroit hands. He forced the lock back and opened the door. Dust arose from the long-disused room, flecking the yellow candle flame. They hesitated on the threshold. They forced themselves to enter. Then they looked at each other and smiled with relief, for Silas Blackburn, in his dressing-gown, lay on the bed, his placid, unmarked face upturned, as if sleeping.

"Why, miss," Jenkins gasped. "He's all right."

Almost with confidence Katherine walked to the bed.

"Uncle Silas—" she began, and touched his hand.

She drew back until the wall supported her. Jenkins must have read everything in her face, for he whimpered:

"But he looks all right. He can't be—"

"Cold—already! If I hadn't touched—"

The horror of the thing descended upon her, stifling thought. Automatically she left the room and told Jenkins what to do. After he had telephoned police headquarters in the county seat and had summoned Doctor Groom, a country physician, she sat without words, huddled over the library fire.

The detective, a competent man named Howells, and Doctor Groom arrived at about the same time. The detective made Katherine accompany them upstairs while he questioned her. In the absence of the coroner he wouldn't let the doctor touch the body.

"I must repair this lock," he said, "the first thing, so nothing can be disturbed."

Doctor Groom, a grim and dark man, had grown silent on entering the room. For a long time he stared at the body in the candle light, making as much of an examination as he could, evidently, without physical contact.

"Why did he ever come here to sleep?" he asked in his rumbling bass voice. "Nasty room! Unhealthy room! Ten to one you're a formality, policeman. Coroner's a formality."

He sneered a little.

"I daresay he died what the hard-headed world will call a natural death.
Wonder what the coroner'll say."

The detective didn't answer. He shot rapid, uneasy glances about the room in which a single candle burned. After a time he said with an accent of complete conviction:

"That man was murdered."

Perhaps the doctor's significant words, added to her earlier dread of the abnormal, made Katherine read in the detective's manner an apprehension of conditions unfamiliar to the brutal routine of his profession. Her glances were restless, too. She had a feeling that from the shadowed corners of the faded, musty room invisible faces mocked the man's stubbornness.

All this she recited to Bobby when, under extraordinary circumstances neither of them could have foreseen, he arrived at the Cedars many hours later.

Of the earlier portion of the night of his grandfather's death Bobby retained a minute recollection. The remainder was like a dim, appalling nightmare whose impulse remains hidden.

When he went to his apartment to dress for dinner he found the letter of which Silas Blackburn had spoken to Katherine. It mentioned the change in the will as an approaching fact nothing could alter. Bobby fancied that the old man merely craved the satisfaction of terrorizing him, of casting him out with all the ugly words at his command. Still a good deal more than a million isn't to be relinquished lightly as long as a chance remains. Bobby had an engagement for dinner. He would think the situation over until after dinner, then he might go.

It was, perhaps, unfortunate that at his club he met friends who drew him in a corner and offered him too many cocktails. As he drank his anger grew, and it wasn't all against his grandfather. He asked himself why during the last few months he had avoided the Cedars, why he had drifted into too vivid a life in New York. It increased his anger that he hesitated to give himself a frank answer. But always at such moments it was Katherine rather than his grandfather who entered his mind. He had cared too much for her, and lately, beyond question, the bond of their affection had weakened.

He raised his glass and drank. He set the glass down quickly as if he would have liked to hide it. A big man, clear-eyed and handsome, walked into the room and came straight to the little group in the corner. Bobby tried to carry it off.

"'Lo, Hartley, old preacher. You fellows all know Hartley Graham? Sit down. We're going to have a little cocktail."

Graham looked at the glasses, shaking his head.

"If you've time, Bobby, I'd like a word with you."

"No preaching," Bobby bargained. "It isn't Sunday."

Graham laughed pleasantly.

"It's about money. That talks any day."

Bobby edged a way out and followed Graham to an unoccupied room. There the big man turned on him.

"See here, Bobby! When are you going out to the Cedars?"

Bobby flushed.

"You're a dear friend, Hartley, and I've always loved you, but I'm in no mood for preaching tonight. Besides, I've got my own life to lead"—he glanced away—"my own reasons for leading it."

"I'm not going to preach," Graham answered seriously, "although it's obvious you're raising the devil with your life. I wanted to tell you that I've had a note from Katherine to-day. She says your grandfather's threats are taking too much form; that the new will's bound to come unless you do something. She cares too much for you, Bobby, to see you throw everything away. She's asked me to persuade you to go out."

"Why didn't she write to me?"

"Have you been very friendly with Katherine lately? And that's not fair. You're both without parents. You owe Katherine something on that account."

Bobby didn't answer, because it was clear that while Katherine's affection for him had weakened, her friendship for Graham had grown too fast. Looking at the other he didn't wonder.

"There's another thing," Graham was saying. "The gloomy old Cedars has got on Katherine's nerves, and she says there's been a change in the old man the last few days—wanders around as if he were afraid of something."

Bobby laughed outright.

"Him afraid of something! It's always been his system to make everybody and everything afraid of him. But you're right about Katherine. We have always depended on each other. I think I'll go out after dinner."

"Then come have a bite with me," Graham urged. "I'll see you off afterward. If you catch the eight-thirty you ought to be out there before half-past ten."

Bobby shook his head.

"An engagement for dinner, Hartley. I'm expecting Carlos Paredes to pick me up here any minute."

Graham's disapproval was belligerent.

"Why, in the name of heaven, Bobby, do you run around with that damned Panamanian? Steer him off to-night. I've argued with you before. It's unpleasant, I know, but the man carries every mark of crookedness."

"Easy with my friends, Hartley! You don't understand Carlos. He's good fun when you know him—awfully good fun."

"So," Graham said, "is this sort of thing. Too many cocktails, too much wine. Paredes has the same pleasant, dangerous quality."

A club servant entered.

"In the reception room, Mr. Blackburn."

Bobby took the card, tore it into little bits, and dropped them one by one into the waste-paper basket.

"Tell him I'll be right out." He turned to Graham.

"Sorry you don't like my playmates. I'll probably run out after dinner and let the old man terrorize me as a cure for his own fear. Pleasant prospect! So long."

Graham caught at his arm.

"I'm sorry. Can't we forget to-night that we disagree about Paredes? Let me dine with you."

Bobby's laugh was uncomfortable.

"Come on, if you wish, and be my guardian angel. God knows I need one."

He walked across the hall and into the reception room. The light was not brilliant there. One or two men sat reading newspapers about a green-shaded lamp on the centre table, but Bobby didn't see Paredes at first. Then from the obscurity of a corner a form, tall and graceful, emerged with a slow monotony of movement suggestive of stealth. The man's dark, sombre eyes revealed nothing. His jet-black hair, parted in the middle, and his carefully trimmed Van Dyke beard gave him an air of distinction, an air, at the same time, a trifle too reserved. For a moment, as the green light stained his face unhealthily, Bobby could understand Graham's aversion. He brushed the idea aside.

"Glad you've come, Carlos."

The smile of greeting vanished abruptly from Paredes's face. He looked with steady eyes beyond Bobby's shoulder. Bobby turned. Graham stood on the threshold, his face a little too frank. But the two men shook hands.

"I'd an idea until I saw Bobby," Graham said, "that you'd gone back to Panama."

Paredes yawned.

"Each year I spend more time in New York. Business suggests it. Pleasure demands it."

His voice was deep and pleasant, but Bobby had often remarked that it, like Paredes's eyes, was too reserved. It seemed never to call on its obvious powers of expression. Its accent was noticeable only in a pleasant, polished sense.

"Hartley," Bobby explained, "is dining with us."

Paredes let no disapproval slip, but Graham hastened to explain.

"Bobby and I have an engagement immediately after dinner."

"An engagement after dinner! I didn't understand—"

"Let's think of dinner first," Bobby said. "We can talk about engagements afterward. Perhaps you'll have a cocktail here while we decide where we're going."

"The aperitif I should like very much," Paredes said. "About dinner there is nothing to decide. I have arranged everything. There's a table waiting in the Fountain Room at the C—— and there I have planned a little surprise for you."

He wouldn't explain further. While they drank their cocktails Bobby watched Graham's disapproval grow. The man glanced continually at his watch. In the restaurant, when Paredes left them to produce, as he called it, his surprise, Graham appraised with a frown the voluble people who moved intricately through the hall.

"I'm afraid Paredes has planned a thorough evening," he said, "for which he'll want you to pay. Don't be angry, Bobby. The situation is serious enough to excuse facts. You must go to the Cedars to-night. Do you understand? You must go, in spite of Paredes, in spite of everything."

"Peace until train time," Bobby demanded.

He caught his breath.

"There they are. Carlos has kept his word. See her, Hartley. She's glorious."

A young woman accompanied the Panamanian as he came back through the hall. She appeared more foreign than her guide—the Spanish of Spain rather than of South America. Her clothing was as unusual and striking as her beauty, yet one felt there was more than either to attract all the glances in this room, to set people whispering as she passed. Clearly she knew her notoriety was no little thing. Pride filled her eyes.

Paredes had first introduced her to Bobby a month or more ago. He had seen her a number of times since in her dressing-room at the theatre where she was featured, or at crowded luncheons in her apartment. At such moments she had managed to be exceptionally nice to him. Bobby, however, had answered merely to the glamour of her fame, to the magnetic response her beauty always brought in places like this.

"Paredes," Graham muttered, "will have a powerful ally. You won't fail me, Bobby? You will go?"

Bobby scarcely heard. He hurried forward and welcomed the woman. She tapped his arm with her fan.

"Leetle Bobby!" she lisped. "I haven't seen very much of you lately. So when Carlos proposed—you see I don't dance until late. Who is that behind you? Mr. Graham, is it not? He would, maybe, not remember me. I danced at a dinner where you were one night, at Mr. Ward's. Even lawyers, I find, take enjoyment in my dancing."

"I remember," Graham said. "It is very pleasant we are to dine together." He continued tactlessly: "But, as I've explained to Mr. Paredes, we must hurry. Bobby and I have an early engagement."

Her head went up.

"An early engagement! I do not often dine in public."

"An unavoidable thing," Graham explained. "Bobby will tell you."

Bobby nodded.

"It's a nuisance, particularly when you're so condescending, Maria."

She shrugged her shoulders. With Bobby she entered the dining-room at the heels of Paredes and Graham.

Paredes had foreseen everything. There were flowers on the table. The dinner had been ordered. Immediately the waiter brought cocktails. Graham glanced at Bobby warningly. He wouldn't, as an example Bobby appreciated, touch his own. Maria held hers up to the light.

"Pretty yellow things! I never drink them."

She smiled dreamily at Bobby.

"But see! I shall place this to my lips in order that you may make pretty speeches, and maybe tell me it is the most divine aperitif you have ever drunk."

She passed the glass to him, and Bobby, avoiding Graham's eyes, wondering why she was so gracious, emptied it. And afterward frequently she reminded him of his wine by going through the same elaborate formula. Probably because of that, as much as anything else, constraint grasped the little company tighter. Graham couldn't hide his anxiety. Paredes mocked it with sneering phrases which he turned most carefully. Before the meal was half finished Graham glanced at his watch.

"We've just time for the eight-thirty," he whispered to Bobby, "if we pick up a taxi."

Maria had heard. She pouted.

"There is no engagement," she lisped, "as sacred as a dinner, no entanglement except marriage that cannot be easily broken. Perhaps I have displeased you, Mr. Graham. Perhaps you fancy I excite unpleasant comment. It is unjust. I assure you my reputation is above reproach"—her dark eyes twinkled—"certainly in New York."

"It isn't that," Graham answered. "We must go. It's not to be evaded."

She turned tempestuously.

"Am I to be humiliated so? Carlos! Why did you bring me? Is all the world to see my companions leave in the midst of a dinner as if I were plague-touched? Is Bobby not capable of choosing his own company?"

"You are thoroughly justified, Maria," Paredes said in his expressionless tones. "Bobby, however, has said very little about this engagement. I did not know, Mr. Graham, that you were the arbiter of Bobby's actions. In a way I must resent your implication that he is no longer capable of caring for himself."

Graham accepted the challenge. He leaned across the table, speaking directly to Bobby, ignoring the others:

"You've not forgotten what I told you. Will you come while there's time?
You must see. I can't remain here any longer."

Bobby, hating warfare in his present mood, sought to temporize:

"It's all right, Hartley. Don't worry. I'll catch a later train."

Maria relaxed.

"Ah! Bobby still chooses for himself."

"I'll have enough rumpus," Bobby muttered, "when I get to the Cedars.
Don't grudge me a little peace here."

Graham arose. His voice was discouraged.

"I'm sorry. I'll hope, Bobby."

Without a word to the others he walked out of the room.

So far, when Bobby tried afterward to recall the details of the evening, everything was perfectly distinct in his memory. The remainder of the meal, made uncomfortable by Maria's sullenness and Paredes's sneers, his attempt to recapture the earlier gayety of the evening by continuing to drink the wine, his determination to go later to the Cedars in spite of Graham's doubt—of all these things no particular lacked. He remembered paying the check, as he usually did when he dined with Paredes. He recalled studying the time-table and finding that he had just missed another train.

Maria's spirits rose then. He was persuaded to accompany her and Paredes to the music hall. In her dressing-room, while she was on the stage, he played with the boxes of make-up, splashing the mirror with various colours while Paredes sat silently watching.

The alteration, he was sure, came a little later in the cafe at a table close to the dancing floor. Maria had insisted that Paredes and he should wait there while she changed.

"But," he had protested, "I have missed too many trains."

She had demanded his time-table, scanning the columns of close figures.

"There is one," she had said, "at twelve-fifteen—time for a little something in the cafe, and who knows? If you are agreeable I might forgive everything and dance with you once, Bobby, on the public floor."

So he sat for some time, expectant, with Paredes, watching the boisterous dancers, listening to the violent music, sipping absent-mindedly at his glass. He wondered why Paredes had grown so quiet.

"I mustn't miss that twelve-fifteen," he said, "You know, Carlos, you weren't quite fair to Hartley. He's a splendid fellow. Roomed with me at college, played on same team, and all that. Only wanted me to do the right thing. Must say it was the right thing. I won't miss that twelve-fifteen."

"Graham," Paredes sneered, "is a wonderful type—Apollo in the flesh and
Billy Sunday in the conscience."

Then, as Bobby started to protest, Maria entered, more dazzling than at dinner; and the dancers swayed less boisterously, the chatter at the tables subsided, the orchestra seemed to hesitate as a sort of obeisance.

A man Bobby had never seen before followed her to the table. His middle-aged figure was loudly clothed. His face was coarse and clean shaven. He acknowledged the introductions sullenly.

"I've only a minute," Bobby said to Maria.

He continued, however, to raise his glass indifferently to his lips. All at once his glass shook. Maria's dark and sparkling face became blurred. He could no longer define the features of the stranger. He had never before experienced anything of the kind. He tried to account for it, but his mind became confused.

"Maria!" he burst out. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

Her contralto laugh rippled.

"Bobby looks so funny! Carlos! Leetle Bobby looks so queer! What is the matter with him?"

Bobby's anger was lost in the increased confusion of his senses, but through that mental turmoil tore the thought of Graham and his intention of going to the Cedars. With shaking fingers he dragged out his watch. He couldn't read the dial. He braced his hands against the table, thrust back his chair, and arose. The room tumbled about him. Before his eyes the dancers made long nebulous bands of colour in which nothing had form or coherence. Instinctively he felt he hadn't dined recklessly enough to account for these amazing symptoms. He was suddenly afraid.

"Carlos!" he whispered.

He heard Maria's voice dimly:

"Take him home."

A hand touched his arm. With a supreme effort of will he walked from the room, guided by the hand on his arm. And always his brain recorded fewer and fewer impressions for his memory to struggle with later.

At the cloak room some one helped him put on his coat. He was walking down steps. He was in some kind of a conveyance. He didn't know what it was. An automobile, a carriage, a train? He didn't know. He only understood that it went swiftly, swaying from side to side through a sable pit. Whenever his mind moved at all it came back to that sensation of a black pit in which he remained suspended, swinging from side to side, trying to struggle up against impossible odds. Once or twice words flashed like fire through the pit: "Tyrant!—Fool to go."

From a long immersion deeper in the pit he struggled frantically. He must get out. Somehow he must find wings. He realized that his eyes were closed. He tried to open them and failed. So the pit persisted and he surrendered himself, as one accepts death, to its hateful blackness.

Abruptly he experienced a momentary release. There was no more swaying, no more movement of any kind. He heard a strange, melancholy voice, whispering without words, always whispering with a futile perseverance as if it wished him to understand something it could not express.

"What is it trying to tell me?" he asked himself.

Then he understood. It was the voice of the wind, and it tried to tell him to open his eyes, and he found that he could. But in spite of his desire they closed again almost immediately. Yet, from that swift glimpse, a picture outlined itself later in his memory.

In the midst of wild, rolling clouds, the moon was a drowning face. Stunted trees bent before the wind like puny men who strained impotently to advance. Over there was one more like a real man—a figure, Bobby thought, with a black thing over its face—a mask.

"This is the forest near the Cedars," Bobby said to himself. "I've come to face the old devil after all."

He heard his own voice, harsh, remote, unnatural, speaking to the dim figure with a black mask that waited half hidden by the straining trees.

"Why am I here in the woods near the Cedars?"

And he thought the thing answered:

"Because you hate your grandfather."

Bobby laughed, thinking he understood. The figure in the black mask that accompanied him was his conscience. He could understand why it went masked.

The wind resumed its whispering. The figures, straining like puny men, fought harder. The drowning face disappeared, wet and helpless. Bobby felt himself sinking back, back into the sable pit.

"I don't want to go," he moaned.

A long time afterward he heard a whisper again, and he wondered if it was the wind or his conscience. He laughed through the blackness because the words seemed so absurd.

"Take off your shoes and carry them in your hand. Always do that. It is the only safe way."

He laughed again, thinking:

"What a careful conscience!"

He retained only one more impression. He was dully aware that some time had passed. He shivered. He thought the wind had grown angry with him, for it no longer whispered. It shrieked, and he could make nothing of its wrath. He struggled frantically to emerge from the pit. The quality of the blackness deepened. His fright grew. He felt himself slipping, slowly at first then faster, faster down into impossible depths, and there was nothing at all he could do to save himself.

* * * * *

"Go away! For God's sake, go away!"

Bobby thought he was speaking to the sombre figure in the mask. His voice aroused him to one more effort at escape, but he felt that there was no use. He was too deep.

Something hurt his eyes. He opened them and for a time was blinded by a narrow shaft, of sunlight resting on his face. With an effort he moved his head to one side and closed his eyes again, at first merely thankful that he had escaped from the black hell, trying to control his sensations of physical evil. Subtle curiosity forced its way into his sick brain and stung him wide awake. This time his eyes remained open, staring about him, dilating with a wilder fright than he had experienced in the dark mazes of his nightmare adventure.

He had never seen this place before. He lay on the floor of an empty room. The shaft of sunlight that had aroused him entered through a crack in one of the tightly drawn blinds. There were dust and grime on the wails, and cobwebs clustered in the corners.

In the silent, deserted room the beating of his heart became audible. He struggled to a sitting posture. He gasped for breath. He knew it was very cold in here, but perspiration moistened his face. He could recall no such suffering as this since, when a boy, he had slipped from the crisis of a destructive fever.

Had he been drugged? But he had been with friends. There was no motive.

What house was this? Was it, like this room, empty and deserted? How had he come here? For the first time he went through that dreadful process of trying to draw from the black pit useful memories.

He started, recalling the strange voice and its warning, for his shoes lay near by as though he might have dropped them carelessly when he had entered the room and stretched himself on the floor. Damp earth adhered to the soles. The leather above was scratched.

"Then," he thought, "that much is right. I was in the woods. What was I doing there? That dim figure! My imagination."

He suffered the agony of a man who realizes that he has wandered unawares in strange places, and retains no recollection of his actions, of his intentions. He went back to that last unclouded moment in the cafe with Maria, Paredes, and the stranger. Where had he gone after he had left them? He had looked at his watch. He had told himself he must catch the twelve-fifteen train. He must have gone from the restaurant, proceeding automatically, and caught the train. That would account for the sensation of motion in a swift vehicle, and perhaps there had been a taxicab to the station. Doubtless in the woods near the Cedars he had decided it was too late to go in, or that it was wiser not to. He had answered to the necessity of sleeping somewhere. But why had he come here? Where, indeed, was he?

At least he could answer that. He drew on his shoes—a pair of patent leather pumps. He fumbled for his handkerchief, thinking he would brush the earth from them. He searched each of his pockets. His handkerchief was gone. No matter. He got to his feet, lurching for a moment dizzily. He glanced with distaste at his rumpled evening clothing. To hide it as far as possible he buttoned his overcoat collar about his neck. On tip-toe he approached the door, and, with the emotions of a thief, opened it quietly. He sighed. The rest of the house was as empty as this room. The hall was thick with dust. The rear door by which he must have entered stood half open. The lock was broken and rusty.

He commenced to understand. There was a deserted farmhouse less than two miles from the Cedars. Since he had always known about it, it wasn't unusual he should have taken shelter there after deciding not to go in to his grandfather.

He stepped through the doorway to the unkempt yard about whose tumbled fences the woods advanced thickly. He recognized the place. For some time he stood ashamed, yet fair enough to seek the cause of his experience in some mental unhealth deeper than any reaction from last night's folly.

He glanced at his watch. It was after two o'clock. The mournful neighbourhood, the growing chill in the air, the sullen sky, urged him away. He walked down the road. Of course he couldn't go to the Cedars in this condition. He would return to his apartment in New York where he could bathe, change his clothes, recover from this feeling of physical ill, and remember, perhaps, something more.

It wasn't far to the little village on the railroad, and at this hour there were plenty of trains. He hoped no one he knew would see him at the station. He smiled wearily. What difference did that make? He might as well face old Blackburn, himself, as he was. By this time the thing was done. The new will had been made. He was penniless and an outcast. But his furtive manner clung. He didn't want Katherine to see him like this.

From the entrance of the village it was only a few steps to the station. Several carriages stood at the platform, testimony that a train was nearly due. He prayed that it would be for New York. He didn't want to wait around. He didn't want to risk Katherine's driving in on some errand.

His mind, intent only on escaping prying eyes, was drawn by a man who stepped from behind a carriage and started across the roadway in his direction, staring at him incredulously. His quick apprehension vanished. He couldn't recall that surprised face. There was no harm being seen, miserable as he was, dressed as he was, by this stranger. He looked at him closer. The man was plainly clothed. He had small, sharp eyes. His hairless face was intricately wrinkled. His lips were thin, making a straight line.

To avoid him Bobby stepped aside, thinking he must be going past, but the stranger stopped and placed a firm hand on Bobby's shoulder. He spoke in a quick, authoritative voice:

"Certainly you are Mr. Robert Blackburn?"

For Bobby, in his nervous, bewildered condition, there was an ominous note in this surprise, this assurance, this peremptory greeting.

"What's amazing about that?" he jerked out.

The stranger's lips parted in a straight smile.

"Amazing! That's the word I was thinking of. Hoped you might come in from New York. Seemed you were here all the time. That's a good one on me—a very good one."

The beating of Bobby's heart was more pronounced than it had been in the deserted house. He asked himself why he should shrink from this stranger who had an air of threatening him. The answer lay in that black pit of last night and this morning. Unquestionably he had been indiscreet. The man would tell him how.

"You mean," he asked with dry lips, "that you've been looking for me? Who are you? Please take your hand off."

The stranger's grasp tightened.

"Not so fast, Mr. Robert Blackburn. I daresay you haven't just now come from the Cedars?"

"No, no. I'm on my way to New York. There's a train soon, I think."

His voice trailed away. The stranger's straight smile widened. He commenced to laugh harshly and uncouthly.

"Sure there's a train, but you don't want to take it. And why haven't you been at the Cedars? Grandpa's death grieved you too much to go near his body?"

Bobby drew back. The shock robbed him for a moment of the power to reason.

"Dead! The old man! How—"

The stranger's smile faded.

"Here it is nearly three o'clock in the afternoon, and you're all dressed up for last night. That's lucky."

Bobby couldn't meet the narrow eyes.

"Who are you?"

The stranger with his free hand threw back his coat lapel.

"My name's Howells. I'm a county detective. I'm on the case, because your grandfather died very strangely. He was murdered, very cleverly murdered. Queerest case I've ever handled. What do you think?"

In his own ears Bobby's voice sounded as remote and unreal as it had through the blackness last night.

"Why do you talk to me like this?"

"Because I tell you I'm on the case, and I want you to turn about and go straight to the Cedars."

"This is—absurd. You mean you suspect—You're placing me under arrest?"

The detective's straight smile returned.

"How we jump at conclusions! I'm simply telling you not to bother me with questions. I'm telling you to go straight to the Cedars where you'll stay. Understand? You'll stay there until you're wanted—Until you're wanted."

The merciless repetition settled it for Bobby. He knew it would be dangerous to talk or argue. Moreover, he craved an opportunity to think, to probe farther into the black pit. He turned and walked away. When he reached the last houses he glanced back. The detective remained in the middle of the road, staring after him with that straight and satisfied smile.

Bobby walked on, his shaking hands tightly clenched, muttering to himself:

"I've got to remember. Good God! I've got to remember. It's the only way
I can ever know he's not right, that I'm not a murderer."

itting the methods advocated by his friends, Clerambault could not accept their axiom, that "the end justifies the means." For, on the contrary, he believed that the means are even more important to real progress than the end … what end? Will there ever be such a thing?

This idea was irritating and confusing to these young minds; it served to increase a dangerous hostility, which had arisen in the last five years among the working class, against the intellectuals. No doubt the latter had richly deserved it; how far away seemed the time when men of thought marched at the head of revolutions! Whereas now they were one with the forces of reaction. Even the limited number of those who had kept aloof, while blaming the mistakes of the ring, were, like Clerambault, unable to give up their individualism, which had saved them once, but now held them prisoners, outside the new movement of the masses. This conclusion once reached by the revolutionists, it was but one step to a declaration that the intellectuals must fall, and not a very long step. The pride of the working class already showed itself in articles and speeches, while waiting for the moment when, as in Russia, it could pass to action; and it demanded that the intellectuals should submit servilely to the proletarian leaders. It was even remarkable how some of the intellectuals were among the most eager in demanding this lowering of the position of their group. One would have thought that they did not wish it to be supposed that they belonged to it. Perhaps they had forgotten that they did.

Moreau, however, had not forgotten it; he was all the more bitter in repudiating this class, whose shirt of Nessus still clung to his skin, and it made him extremely violent.

He now began to display singularly aggressive sentiments towards Clerambault; during a discussion he would interrupt him rudely, with a kind of sarcastic and bitter irritation. It almost seemed as if he meant to wound him.

Clerambault did not take offence; he rather felt great pity for Moreau; he knew what he suffered, and he could imagine the bitterness of a young life spoiled like his. Patience and resignation, the moral nourishment on which stomachs fifty years old subsist, were not suited to his youth.

One evening Moreau had shown himself particularly disagreeable, and yet he persisted in walking home with Clerambault, as if he could not make up his mind to leave him. He walked along by his side, silent and frowning. All at once Clerambault stopped, and putting his hand through Moreau's arm with a friendly gesture said with a smile:

"It's all wrong, isn't it, old fellow?"

Moreau was somewhat taken aback, but he pulled himself together and asked drily what made anyone think that things were "all wrong."

"I thought so because you were so cross tonight," said Clerambault good naturally, and in answer to a protesting murmur. "Yes, you certainly were trying to hurt me,—just a little … I know of course that you would not really,—but when a man like you tries to inflict pain on others it is because he is suffering himself … isn't that true?"

"Yes, it is true," said Moreau, "you must forgive me, but it hurts me when I see that you are not in sympathy with our action."

"And are you?" demanded Clerambault. Moreau did not seem to understand. "You yourself," repeated Clerambault, "do you believe in it?"

"Of course I do! What a question!" said Moreau indignantly.

"I doubt it," said Clerambault gently. Moreau seemed to be on the point of losing his temper, but in a moment he said more quietly: "You are mistaken." Clerambault turned to walk on. "All right," said he, "you know your own thoughts better than I do."

For some minutes they continued in silence; then Moreau seized his old friend's arm, and said excitedly:

"How did you know it?"—and his resistance having broken down, he confessed the despair hidden under his aggressive determination to believe and act. He was eaten up with pessimism, a natural consequence of his excessive idealism which had been so cruelly disappointed. The religious souls of former times were tranquil enough; they placed the kingdom of God so far away that no event could touch it; but those of today have established it on earth, by the work of human love and reason, so that when life deals a blow at their dream all life seems horrible to them. There were days when Moreau was tempted to cut his throat! Humanity seemed made of rotteness; he saw with despair the defeats, failures, flaws carved on the destiny of the race from the very beginning—the worm in the bud—and he could not endure the idea of this absurd and tragic fate, which man can never escape. Like Clerambault, he recognized the poison which is in the intelligence, since he had it in his veins, but unlike his elder, who had passed the crisis and only saw danger in the irregularity of thought and not in its essence, Moreau was maddened by the idea that the poison was a necessary part of intelligence. His diseased imagination tortured him by all sorts of bugbears; thought appeared to him as a sickness, setting an indelible mark on the human race; and he pictured to himself in advance all the cataclysms to which it led. Already, thought he, we behold reason staggering with pride before the forces that science has put at her disposal—demons of nature, obedient to the magical formulas of chemistry and distracted by this suddenly-acquired power, turning to self-destruction.

Nevertheless Moreau was too young to remain in the grip of these terrors. He wanted action at any price, anything sooner than to be left alone with them. Why not urge him to act, instead of trying to hold him back?

"My dear boy," said Clerambault, "it is not right to urge another man to a dangerous act, unless you are ready to share it. I have no use for agitators, even if they are sincere, who send others to the stake and do not set the example of martyrdom themselves. There is but one truly sacred type of revolutionary, the Crucified; but very few men are made for the aureole of the cross. The trouble is that we always assign duties to ourselves which are superhuman or inhuman. It is not good for the ordinary man to strive after the "Uebermenschheit," and it can only prove to him a source of useless suffering; but each man can aspire to shed light, order, peace, and kindness around him in his little circle; and that should be happiness enough."

"Not quite enough for me," said Moreau. "Doubt would creep in; it must be all or nothing."

"I know. Your revolution would leave no place for doubt. Your hearts are hard and burning; your brains like geometric patterns. Everything or nothing. No shading! But what would life be without it? It is its greatest charm and its chief merit as well; fragile beauty and goodness, weakness everywhere. We must offer love and help; day by day, and step by step. The world is not transformed by force, or by a miracle, in the twinkling of an eye; but second by second it moves forward in infinity and the humblest who feels it partakes of infinity. Patience, and let us not think that one wrong effaced will save humanity; it will only make one day bright, but other days and more light will come; each will bring its sun. You would not wish to stay its course?"

"We have not the time to wait for all this," said Moreau. "Every day brings us frightful problems which must be decided on the spot. If we are not to be the masters, then we shall be victims; … we, do I say? Not ourselves alone, we are already victimised, but all that is dear to us, all that holds us to life, hope in the future, the salvation of humanity. See the things that press upon us, the agonising questions as to those who will come after us, and those who have children. This war is not yet over, and it is only too evident that its crimes and falsehoods have sown the seeds of new wars, near at hand. Why do we have children? For what do they grow up? To be butchered like this? Look where you will, there is no answer. Are we to leave these crazy countries, this old continent, and emigrate? But where? Are their fifty acres of ground on the globe where independent honest people can take refuge? We must be on one side or the other; you see well enough that we have to choose between patriotism and revolution. If not, what remains? Non-resistance? Is that what you would have? But there is nothing in that unless you have religious faith; otherwise it is only the resignation of the lamb led to the slaughter. Unfortunately, the greater number decide on nothing, prefer not to think, turn their eyes away from the future, blinded by the hope that what they have seen and suffered will not recur. That is why we must decide for them, whether they want it or not, make them quicken their step, save them in spite of themselves. Revolution means a few men who will for all humanity."

"I do not think that I should like it," said Clerambault, "if another decided for me. And on the other hand, I should not want to usurp another man's will; I should prefer to leave each one free, and not interfere with the liberty of others. But I know that I am asking too much."

"Only what is impossible," said Moreau. "When you begin to will, you cannot stop halfway. There are just two sorts of men, those who have too great will-power—like Lenine, and a couple of dozen men in the whole course of history—and those who have too little, who can decide nothing, like us, me, if you like. It is clear enough, despair is all that drives me to will anything…."

"Why despair?" said Clerambault. "A man's fate is made every day by himself, and none knows what it will be; it is what we are. If you are cast down, so also is your fate."

"We shall never have strength enough," answered Moreau sadly. "Don't you believe that I see what infinitely small chances of success a revolution would have now in our country, under present conditions? Think of all the destruction, the economic losses, the demoralisation, the fatal lassitude caused by the war." And he added: "It was not true what I told you the first time we met, about all my comrades feeling as I did, rebelling against the suffering. Gillot told you there are only a few of us, and the others are good fellows for the most part but weak as water! They can see how things are, clearly enough, but sooner than run their heads against a wall they would rather not think about it, or pass it off with a joke. We French are always ready to laugh, it is our treasure and our ruin. It is a fine thing, but what a hold it gives to our oppressors. 'Let them sing as long as they are willing to pay,' as the Italian said. 'Let us laugh, so long as we are ready to die.' … we might say. And then this terrible force of habit, that Gillot was talking about. A man will get used to no matter what ridiculous or painful conditions, provided they last long enough, and that he has company. He becomes habituated to cold, to heat, to death, and to crime. His whole force for resistance is used in adapting himself; and then he curls up in his corner and does not dare to stir, for fear that any change will bring back the pain. We are all so terribly tired! When the soldiers come back, they will have only one thought—to sleep and forget."

"How about the excitable Lagneau, who talks about blowing everything to pieces?"

"I have known Lagneau since the beginning of the war, and he has been in succession, royalist, "revanchard," annexationist, internationalist, socialist, anarchist, bolshevist, and I-don't-give-a damnist. He will finish as a reactionary, and will be sent to make food for cannon against the enemy that our government will pick out among our adversaries or our friends of today. Do you suppose that the people are of our way of thinking? Perhaps, or they may agree with the others. They will take up all opinions one after the other."

"You are a revolutionary then because you are discouraged?" said
Clerambault, laughing.

"There are plenty like that among us."

"Gillot came out of the war more optimistic than he went in."

"Gillot is the forgetful sort, but I don't envy him that," said Moreau bitterly.

"But you ought not to upset him," said Clerambault.

"Gillot needs all the help you can give him."

"Help from me?" said Moreau incredulously.

"He is not naturally strong, and if you would make him so, you must let him see that you believe in him."

"Do you think belief comes by willing to have it?"

"You know whether that is true! No, I think, is the answer. Belief comes through love."

"By love of those who believe?"

"Is it not always through love, and only in that way, that we learn to trust?"

Moreau was touched; he had been a clever youth, eaten up by the craving for knowledge, and like the rest of his class, he had suffered for lack of brotherly affection. True human intercourse is banished from the education of today, but this vital sentiment, hitherto repressed, had revived in the trenches, filled with living, suffering flesh thrown together. At first it was hard to let oneself go; the general hardening, the fear of sentimentality or of ridicule, tended to put barriers between hearts; but when Moreau was laid up, his sheath of pride began to give way, and Clerambault had little difficulty in breaking through it. The best thing about this man was that false pride melted before him, for he had none of his own; people showed to him as he to them their real selves, their weakness and their troubles, which we are taught to hide from a silly idea of self-respect. Moreau had unconsciously learned to recognise at the front the superiority of men who were his social inferiors, brother-soldiers or "Non-Coms." Among these he had been much drawn to Gillot. He was glad that Clerambault should have appealed to him on behalf of his friend, for his secret wish always was to be of some use to another man.

At the next opportunity Clerambault whispered to Gillot that he ought to be optimistic for two, and cheer Moreau up; and thus each found help in the need of helping the other, according to the great principle of life: "Give, and it shall be given unto you."

No matter in what time one lives, nor what misfortunes overtake one, all is not lost as long as there remains in the heart of the race a spark of manly friendship. Blow it into a flame! Draw closer these cold solitary hearts! If only one of the fruits of this war of nations could be the fusion of the best among all classes, the union of the youth of many countries—of the manual labourers and the thinkers—the future would be re-born through their mutual aid.

But if unity is not one wanting to dominate the other, neither is it that one prefers to be dominated. But this was precisely, however, what these young revolutionaries thought, and insisted upon, with a curious sort of self-will. They snubbed Clerambault, on the principle that intelligence should be at the service of the proletariat … "Dienen, dienen …" which was the last word even of the proud Wagner. More than one lofty spirit brought low has said the same; if they could not rule supreme, they would serve.

Clerambault reflected: "The rarest thing is to find honest people who want to be simply my equals; but if we must choose, tyranny for tyranny, I prefer that which held the bodies of Aesop and Epictetus in slavery but left their minds free, to that which promises only material liberty and enslaves the soul."

This intolerance made him feel that he could never attach himself to any party, no matter what it was. Between the two sides, war or revolution, he could frankly state his preference for one, revolution. For it alone offered some hope for the future, which the war could only destroy. But to prefer a party does not mean that you yield to it all independence of thought. It is the error and abuse of democracies that they wish that all should have the same duties, and impose the same tasks on all; but in an advancing community there are multiple tasks. While the main body fights to gain an immediate advantage in progress, there are others who should maintain eternal values far above the victors of tomorrow or yesterday and which are beyond all the rest and throw light on the way above the smoke of battle. Clerambault had allowed himself to be too long blinded by this smoke; he could not plunge into a fresh fight; but in this short-sighted world it is an impropriety, almost a fault to see more clearly than your neighbours.

This sardonic truth was brought home to him in a discussion with these young St. Justs. They pointed out his mistakes, impertinently enough, by comparing him to the "Astrologer who fell into the Pit":

… "They said, poor creature, if your eye
What lies beneath can hardly spy,
Think you your gaze can pierce the sky?"

He had enough sense of humour to see the justice of the comparison; yes, he was of the number of:

"Those whom phantoms alarm
While some serious harm
Threatens them or their farm."

"Even so," he said, "do you think that your republic will have no need of astronomers, just as the first one could get along without chemists? Or are they all to be mobilised? In that case there would be a good chance of your all finding yourselves together at the bottom of the well! Is that what you want? I should not object so much if it were only a question of sharing your fate, but when it comes to joining in your hatreds!"

"You have some of your own, from what I have heard," said one of the young men. Just at this moment another man came in with a newspaper in his hand and called to Clerambault:

"Congratulations, old boy, I see your enemy Bertin is dead."

The irascible journalist had died in a few hours from an attack of pneumonia. For the last six months he had pursued with fury anyone whom he suspected of working for peace, or even of wishing for it. From one step to another he had come to look upon, not only the country, as sacred, but the war also, and among those whom he attacked most fiercely, Clerambault had a foremost place. Bertin could not pardon the resistance to his onslaughts; Clerambault's replies had at first only irritated him, but the disdainful silence with which his latest invectives had been met drove him beside himself. His swollen vanity was deeply wounded, and nothing would have satisfied him but the total annihilation of his adversary. To him Clerambault was not only a personal enemy, but a foe to the public; and in the endeavour to prove this, he made him the centre of a great pacifist plot. At any other time, this would have seemed absurd in everyone's eyes, but now no one had eyes to see with. During the last weeks Bertin's fury and violence had gone beyond anything that he had written before; they were a threat against anyone who was convicted or suspected of the dangerous heresy of Peace.

In this little reunion the news of his death was received with noisy satisfaction; and his funeral oration was preached with an energy that yielded nothing in this line to the efforts of the most famous masters. But Clerambault, absorbed in the newspaper account, scarcely seemed to hear. One of the men standing near, tapped him on the shoulder, and said:

"This ought to be a pleasure to you."

Clerambault started: "Pleasure," he said, "pleasure?"—he took his hat and went out. It was pitch dark in the street outside, all the lights having been out on account of an air-raid. Before his mind there flowered the fine clear-cut face of a boy of sixteen, with its warm pale skin and dark soft eyes, the curling hair, the mobile, smiling mouth, the tone of the sweet voice—Bertin, as he was when they first met at about the same age. Their long evening talks, the tender confidences, the discussions, the dreams … for in those days Bertin too was a dreamer, and even his common-sense, his precocious irony did not protect him from impossible hopes and generous schemes for the renovation of the human race. How fair the future had appeared to their youthful eyes! And in those moments of ecstatic vision how their hearts had seemed to melt together in loving friendship …

And now to see what life had made of them both! This rancorous struggle, Bertin's insane determination to trample under foot those early dreams, and the friend who still cherished them;—and he, too, Clerambault, who had let himself be carried away by the same murderous impulse, trying to render blow for blow, to draw blood from his adversary. Could it be that at the first moment, when he heard of the death of his former friend—he was horrified at himself—but did he not feel it as a relief? What is it that possesses us all? What wicked insanity that turns us against our better selves?…

Lost in these thoughts, he had wandered from the road, and now perceived that he was walking in the wrong direction. He could see the long arms of the search-lights stretching across the sky, hear the tremendous explosions of the Zeppelin bombs over the city, and the distant growlings of the forts in the aerial fight. The enraged people tearing each other to pieces! And to what end? That they all might be as Bertin was now, reach the extinction which awaited all men, and all countries. And those rebels who were planning more violence, other sanguinary idols to set up against the old ones, new gods of carnage that man carves for himself, in the vain hope of ennobling his deadly instincts!

Good God! Why do they not see the imbecility of their conduct, in face of the gulf that swallows up each man that dies, all humanity with him? These millions of creatures who have but a moment to live, why do they persist in making it infernal by their atrocious and absurd quarrels about ideas; like wretches who cut each other's throats for a handful of spurious coins thrown to them? We are all victims, under the same sentence, and instead of uniting, we fight among ourselves. Poor fools! On the brow of each man that passes I can see the sweat of agony; efface it by the kiss of peace!

As he thought this, a crowd of people rushed by—men and women, shrieking with joy. "There's one of them down! One gone! The brutes are burning up!"

And the birds of prey, in the air, rejoiced in their turn over every handful of death that they scattered on the town, like gladiators dying in the arena for the pleasure of some invisible Nero.

Alas, my poor fellow-prisoners!