IT was night in Pere Lachaise. Night rested on the tombs and cypresses, on the marbles whose silent faces were written over with grief, on the flowers lying in sad sleep in their beds, on the little wild gardens; marking the older graves. Pere Lachaise stirred in the night of life which enveloped it, as if it were aware of the trees and the wind and the moonlight in its midst.
Night rested on the most beautiful and poignant thing in that home of beauty and of death, the monimient dedicated to all the dead which stood on the top of the atenue facing the main gate, the epic in stone carved out of the heart of universal and eternal sorrow. Night played about those forms of youth and age which were advancing in every posture of agony, with every gesture of anguish, to a door leading straight upon the End, weeping, stumbling, shrouding their faces, stretching out their hands. Night wrapped in shadow the last figure of the group, the woman kneeling with head turned from the conunon goal and eyes fastened on her past which but a moment ago was the present. Her fingers pressed to her lips were throwing a farewell kiss to the hills and valleys of existence. Formidable and compelling was her hesitation and reluctance, so that death lost some of its absoluteness, and f oimd itself contradicted and defied, suggesting an immortality that no human heart had yet believed in, no mind had conceived. For not death itself could conquer a loathing so deep. Here, at least, if never anywhere before, death halted and failed of its prey.
Yet her lips were pale and were framed in a kiss which was an unconsiunmated dying. On the threshold that she was approaching a voice arrested her. Love and sorrow hailed her, memories heckoned, and her tears grew stilled, while she pressed one hand to her heart, and threw that kiss with the other. Thus she passed into death, a flower snapped in two, not hy a zephyr, hut hy a wind that had known the sea, and at first had rippled gently its surface in heautiful laughter, and then in angry revulsion had lashed it to foam.
Violette, who knew the nights of Pere Lachaise almost as well as the days, had looked long on that statue of the woman lingering. It taught her the way to die, greeting life from death's threshold, at the end imahle to forget or he forgotten of life.
THE day Violette and her grandfather moved into the street facing the cemetery, Pere Lachaise, she stood in the window of her room above the little florist shop and watched a carriage disappear through the gate. It was drawn by horses draped in black, and was followed by men and women. She wondered why those sad people went where it was so sad. She knew that it was sad there among the trees, that something important and terrible went on there. She turned and looked at her grand-father dozing in his chair, and she felt that in some way he was the key to the mystery of what she had just seen, in some way his weakness and age were related to the place, in some way his form abandoned to sleep answered her question. She was afraid.
That day her grandfather told her the story of Pere Lachaise, and she rehearsed it to herself at night when she heard the whispering of its trees. In the morning she went there, and turned the door-knobs of the iron-grated tombs, bent over the urns, smelt the flowers, and lifted the wreaths from their hooks. She walked far up the long avenues, thinking that sometimes the dead must rise and lay ghostly hands on the door-knobs, press their faces against the railings and nod to the children playing on the steps. She walked on and on until she felt tired. It began to seem to her that the Place drowsed, or held its breath, and she obeyed a prompting that came as much from the air and the stillness as from within her, and lay down on the cool grass to fall asleep.
This was the beginning of her intimacy with Pere Lachaise. Sometimes its trees swayed in the wind, beckoned to her, saddened her, at other times it was a fair garden, stretching sweet in the sun, garlanded with rose and myrtle. She lay in bed at night wondering, questioning, fearing, and in the daytime she walked and played there, or bent her head above the flowers and pursued vague, fleeting thoughts. She had a sense of recent loss, a feeling of loneliness, a consciousness that she had no one in the world besides her grandfather.
Her grandfather, too, had only her, but at one time there had been many others. Once they had been alive! Time, wonderful time, that went on forever and began with the beginning, never gave back what it took away. Time had robbed her grandfather—year by year he had been made poorer, weaker, more desolate, but to her time was giving—she did not know what. She saw no resemblance between her own life and his, nor did she think that her life like his was running out like the sand in a glass.
Often she mounted a hill and looked at the city in the distance, and wondered where the dead lying at her feet had lived, whether they had been happy, whether their people surviving them had known that they would die and never return to them except as memories. She wondered if they had been taken by surprise, or if they had sunk back gently into death, drifted out upon its shores as though forgetting every one, everything, as though relieved.
There were times when she fled from Pere Lachaise—it was whenever she came upon an open grave, with the red earth lying in fresh heaps aroimd it and a spade just out of the digger's hand stuck carelessly at the side of it. The brighter the day was, the more smiling the sky above it, the more sweet and tender the song of the birds in the cypresses, the more she was frightened by such a sight in that still place. She fled from Pere Lachaise when she happened upon a fimeral and saw the group of mourners assembled about a bier. It was not enough then to go farther into the cemetery; she must leave Pere Lachaise altogether and seek the living, walk long hours through the streets of Paris, or sit with her grandfather at the counter.
Yet she would return there the next day. She would go back to that loveliness, those spaces, that stillness and peace which yet resounded with a music not to be heard elsewhere; always she would go there and find thoughts trooping into her mind, dreams and fancies one by one filling her heart. She loved Pere Lachaise, and she came to know better and better the people that lay sleeping there. There was an old grave on a hill with a tree at the head and another at the foot, and a little wild garden over it—an old grave because the time when her mother lived must have been long ago, it seemed to her. There she often sat and looked out upon the city with its towers and domes, and her heart rioted. If she had a mother, how every one would know, seeing them together, that she was loved better than any mother in the world, that she was a mother wrapped all around by her child's level If she had a mother what a dream and a wonder life would be—a mother all her ownl Why could she not come back again? Was there no power to fulfil the heart's wildest desires and deepest needs ? Such questions clamouring for impossible answers shut the door of Pere Lachaise in her face, placed her suddenly a stranger at its gates, and veiled as with a pall all its gentle beauty.
Violette was hardly aware that her life was different from that of other children. She only felt that it was wonderful and full, that it was good to have a grandfather like hers, though sad and terrible that he must be so old, good their home fragrant with flowers, though so desolate, good the neighbourhood of Pere Lachaise, good the meetings to which she was taken and the books she read, since both gave her something that extended beyond the present, that was as large as the world.
She felt it to be even better than she knew. Never was a child more conscious of the fewness of her years, and the length of years before her. What could she not achieve, what could not happen to her ? What marvels on the long, long road before her! She would not be a year older for worlds 1 She was just old enough, it seemed to her. She was not an hour late, had not an hour to spare. She did not hoard the days as her grandfather did, with miserly dread, but she had a keen and an exaggerated sense of their flight. She could not grow reconciled to the law that youth must fade to age, that every beginning must have an end, that growth itself must lead to death. She sought out poems that dealt with youth and learned them by heart.
Her grandfather listened to her, and wondered that a child should love her childhood, should treasure her inestimable possession!
She had been told by some one that in the beginning there was only one man and one woman in the world, and they did not know of death. Nothing informed them of it— not the moon and the stars that shone so peacefully down on them, not the warm and brilliant rays of the smi that up to that time had never caused the withering of a flower, the crumbling of a leaf, not the stream that rippled and murmured at their feet, not the great ocean that had never known the wreck of a himian life upon its stormy but loving bosom, or the preying of one of its myriad inhabitants upon another. Nothing told them, for death was not and had never been. Then this man and woman partook of an apple that they plucked from a tree. For this death was sent into life for all time— death to all their race, so that whoever was bom must die, death to all the races of creature or plant, death to whatever lived. It was the impossible revenge of an executioner judge. With the credulousness of a child she believed and was horrified.
How was it reconcilable with another story—of a Father who created the Earth and the Heavens, who lived everywhere and watched over all, who loved everything and everybody without end? Her mind from the first time she had heard of God had become impassioned. She tried hard to pierce the blue of the sky in the hope that she would get a glimpse of him where he hung somewhere above the whitest and highest cloud. She thought she knew quite well how he looked—a long white beard, large wonderful eyes, for the rest a good deal like her grandfather, only taller and stronger, with a face smooth from wrinkles, and lips smiling happily and kindly.
That was before they came to live near Pre Lachaise. Now there vanished from her mind both stories, now reality lured her, truth called, and her spirit spread itself in untrammelled freedom and scope. For the old man and the child had in common an insistence on the knowledge of evil as well as of good—a revulsion from superstition and falsehood which she had by instinct, he by conviction. When she sat on his knees and he talked to her, he told her stories of happy children living with their parents among other children in beautiful garden-surrounded houses. He described the music and laughter, the brilliant and loving teachers, the wise and inspiring books. He told her how there was also travel to distant parts, with the joys of meeting strangeness and becoming intimate with it, the delight of going abroad in the world and making oneself at home in its thought and its ways, converting the romance of the alien into the romance of the famiUar and understood.
He told her also of desolation and neglect, of poverty that is penury, of hunger and nakedness and utter ignorance, of clouded minds, natures made hideous by hideous conditions. He told her of tyranny, oppression and bloodshed on the part of the strong, of murder, and robbery, on the part of the weak. He dared speak to her of everything; he reasoned that nothing that was true and known could terrorise or hurt her. It was only the unknown that was terrible, and with the unknown, fair or foul, he had no dealing. He taught her only what was true, what the mind craved and had a right to know.
In the little shop fragrant with the scent of its flowers and ferns, the old man sat mending tinsel wreaths and wiring baskets, and at his feet crouched Violette, her face almost hidden by her curls, her eyes fixed lovingly on his, her hands resting on his knees, her whole attitude one of breathless interest in his movements and his speech.
HER grandfather was an object of romance. He had known her mother and father, and then* little child born and lost before her birth. He was at the source of Ihings 1 Everything that had happened to him was hidden behind a mist of years. He had been a child once. What he told her of that childhood seemed sad to her, for she fomid it easy to pity another, and hard to pity herself, and she wished the books for which he had hungered in that past could have been his, and that the school he had longed to go to had been open to him. She wished he had not always had to forego what his heart was set on. All her love could not avail, and not with all her future could she restore to him anything he had ever needed and did not have. It was a terrible and inexorable law.
She thought of him, always, and when playing in Pere Lachaise she stopped to run back to him with sudden homesickness for the sight of his face. Age, the spirit which brooded over her, was not far away from death, and, though not wholly conscious of it, she went from one to the other.
There was also the law of silence. Of the deepest and most searching things it was impossible to speak—not even to one she loved as she did her grandfather. What she shared with him was that which had concerned her a little while back and had become utterable only because something else was now inexpressible. The reserve of childhood oppressed her as it does all children, and like all children when she suffered she suffered alone.
She played in Pere Lachaise, the Champs Elysees of the poor who live in its neighbourhood, but she could not say even to herself how terrifying at times that playground was. Again and again it occurred to her that in passing the gate and entering its hushed stillness she had gone over to the dead, had made a journey impossibly long, though her own home was but a few steps awayl At times it was as if Pere Lachaise was telling her a story, sweet but awful, entrusting her with a prophecy, unfolding before her the Future. Yet at other times Pere Lachaise was terrible because it was so different from life, and in no way part of it, and yet it was instinct with life, woven in and out with its pattern and its mark. Life was of it but it was not of life, and that was why she was afraid. It seemed constantly to say "No" to her dreams, to her love, to her hopes. Pere Lachaise was too strong for her, and she was possessed with a fear she could not name even to her grandfather.
Only when he took her by the hand and walked with her, at the end of a hot day, and lingered with her among the tombs until the moon came out with all her retinue of stars, was the sorrow and the fear dispelled, and it seemed to her as if the place resounded with beautiful, stately music. Death, and the thought of death fell from her—leaving her alone with the facts of the world that were beginning to crowd themselves on the young heart, for the most important of which she could find no explanation.
There was much that was wrong. Many people, her grandfather told her, beUeved that everything would come right, and she believed it too. But what of those who suffer to-day, who have suffered and gone under in the past ? What reparation is there for them? She was tortured by a sense of outraged justice. She forgot Paris, the living, and Pere Lachaise, the dead, in her contemplation of forces which she could not understand, but which she knew that she must combat. To the whispering trees of Pere Lachaise, to the nodding grass over the older graves she imparted wordlessly her indictment framed so early, felt so deeply— her conviction that what was wrong was wrong, that the world, no matter how it changed, could never catch up with itself for having stood still so long, though change it must from beginning to end, and the new must bear no resemblance to the old I.
It was at this time that she realised more fully how very old her grandfather was, how slowly he moved, how his hands trembled, how httle he read when the shutters were drawn across the one window of the shop. He was very old—yet she felt he had bought something precious with his age, that he was different from the old men she saw sitting on the benches at the entrance to Pere Lachaise, or hobbling aimlessly along the streets. He was dijfferent from everybody—that was why he was able to care for her as he did, to mother her, and talk to her at length when he sat with her at the deal table in the room behind the shop. If he were not diflferent from others he would not have taken her to meetings where people spoke from their seats or from a little platform in front. He never addressed the gatherings, and they were not noticed as they came and went, yet she felt he belonged there perhaps more than those who talked stormily and were interrupted by applause in which she timidly joined.
She had an extraordinary feeling about these gatherings, as if they who were present at them were people set apart from the rest of the world, crusaders, inspired lovers of mankind, fired by a wonderful mission. Her heart beat violently on entering the hall, her cheeks flamed. She saw there people of different nationalities, men who spoke different tongues, but whose eyes shone as they listened to the speakers, and whose faces bore the same expression of zeal and enthusiasm. There were girls and women who came from far away, but who had also something in their faces that made them strangely alike to every one in that company. She did not call it civic sorrow, idealism; she did not know it for love and for revolt—she only felt that something united them, that something big and portentous made them one.
She bought the little paper-covered books they sold at the entrances to the halls, read them, and found their matter ponderous and complicated. Yet their gist was something which concerned her far beyond anything else—they dealt with the matter of making over the foundations of the world 1.
Pere Lachaise saw her seated under a tree with these thin little books open on her lap, and her brows meeting in puzzled concentra-tion as she read through long afternoons until light failed. Before her were unrolled movements, organisations, concepts like The People and Humanity, forces modern and all-embracing. She did not press them upon her grandfather, as she did the books and poems she drew out of public libraries. She thought that his heart was too tired, that he had lived too long in the old world to wander forth on a dusty and difficult pilgrimage towards the new that was not yet bom. Yet she never forgot that it was through him that she came upon it all— ' through him, so wonderfully diflFerent from every one else.
SHE began to read when she was very little, and the first story told of a lover who returns to his beloved just as she is being married to another. It was in spring. The river was swollen, little rills ran down the slopes of the hills, bubbled and frothed as with excess of life, the grass was greener than he had ever seen it, the cupolas of the churches of that country shone out green and gold in the bright clear sunlight. Ever afterwards, in all the springs that her life contained, there was something sad to her in the very fulness of that season, something that she distrusted in the clearness of its skies, and yet loved the more, abandoned herself to their beauty the more wholly for distrusting. Happiness everywhere, the birds sang, the gentle winds breathed, happiness everywhere and joy beyond measure —but in the heart of man I For something greater than happiness spring existed—for a destiny greater than quiet surrender to love and peace, for something great, heartrending, inspiring—for something sweet and terrible I.
She read another book again and again, the story of a white boy among Indians, and what she remembered afterwards of it was a blurred sense of romance, of mysterious depths among trees so thick the sunlight never filtered through them, of torrential rivers, of wildness and vastness. It was remote, fantastic, with beauties and wonders impossible to extricate or to know one from the other, a tangled web of fancies like the forest itself. Thus was Nature, exuberant, tropical, elemental, brought into her consciousness—thus was her mark laid for life upon the city child.
There remained to her a definite impression of one other book—the story of the sufferings of a little child her own age. She was mistaken, this mother, to have let her baby go from her arms; she should have known that evil would befall her despite the love which from a distance she would send on, despite her prayers, her tears, the blood she would pour out for her—evil must befall a child separated from her mother! Thus reasoned Violette, and she wept and exulted in the fact that a Fantine existed in the world, she like to whom all mothers, fortunate or unfortunate, were made.
So from her earliest days she had read, and also from her earliest days she had known the theatre. She would never forget the impression made upon her by the first play she ever saw. Tier upon tier of people, music, light, and Violette clinging to her grandfather's hand, impatient at the interval between the playing of the orchestra and the rising of the curtain. She was inspired by the heroine. The love the heroine felt for her husband she could only compare to the majesty and the purity of the sky, to something greater, more passionate, more wonderful than anything she had ever conceived. And this love, this purity, this passion was distrusted, denied, murdered before her eyes by the unfortunate, half-sane man! She pitied him more than the strangled Desde-mona. She saw the pink and white silk dress of the wife, retiring in her sadness, thrown carelessly across a chair, and it haunted her, this dress that outlived the wearer, this dress that looked as though it must be put on again and worn in happiness and joy, as though it clamoured that the irreparable deed be undone.
After that they went often to the theatre, and Violette either read the plays before or after seeing them, and soon w:as able to speak the principal parts of the characters, to vary them from the way she had seen them given, and sometimes to construct in her mind other plays she had neither read nor seen.
She sat before the curtained stage, waited for the tinkling of the little silver bell, wondered what the scene would be, what spectacle of life would face the audience, her heart bounding with something different from pleasure or joy, but elated as with both of these. To drink in the voice and personality of a supreme artist, and to watch her appear, disappear, and appear again before the footlights, this was herself to be an artist, —in her abandon there was something in itself creative and dramatic. For days after a visit to the theatre she walked about as in a dream, every detail vivid before her mind, living over again everything that had there moved and thrilled her.
SHE knew children. She watched them on the streets and on the green banks of Pere Lachaise. They seemed to her to be apart from the rest of the world, something fairer, fresher, only slightly related to the adults about them; they seemed to be a world within a world. Each child was different from every other she perceived, as grown people were different, yet, as with grown people, they had some things in common which made them all alike. So she felt herself a child, felt that her thoughts, her questions were a child's thoughts and questions, her feelings the feelings of a child. What was it to be a child? Was it simply not to be yet grown, or something different from this, and more? If it was not to understand things, if it was to go about questioning, wondering, then surely the same was true of her elders—what was a child?
She gloried in the fact of her childhood, and reached out tenderly towards all the children she gathered about her. Her grandfather and she went on Simday mornings to the gardens to watch them. Their health, the colour, of their cheeks, their eyes, their laughter—that more than anything else—transported her; that, she thought later, was what led her to become infatuated with the idea of happiness. They suggested to her into what a miracle one could turn hf e if one were resolved to do sol She mingled with them, conscious that they were children together, that they were members of her generation, that they were those with whom she would have to deal later when she grew up, that they were the material out of which would be constructed her future.
She liked to read to them. In one girl she thought she saw something which made her different from the rest, another the everyday type, and she loved her none the less. In the little boy Hving two doors away she seemed to see a speaker at the meetings she and her grandfather attended. In another she thought she recognised their grocer. She could not discriminate between them. It was different with grown people—there she discriminated; some were friends, and others were strangers—but with children, there was the promise, the sincerity, the sweetness and pathos which made all of them dear.
She thought much when in the company of children, as much even as when at the theatre, or when reading her books, or when sitting with her grandfather at the meetings or walking by herself or with him in Pere Lachaise. She thought much, and they were thoughts that led her far away to new realms where laughter and merriment abounded, to lands of fair, sunlit slopes, where a brightness and a fulness as of spring prevailed.
The first verses she wrote were about children. It was on a winter day, when flowers were few in the shop, when the grandfather sat lost in himself, struggling to conceal his ailments and his sadness. Some children came to pass the late afternoon with her. They played with the baskets and wreaths, they chattered, they romped all over the place. Violette took part in their games, taught them new ones, threw herself into her part of hostess, and all the time she looked on as if she were an older sister, or as if a mother gazed on those playmates through her eyes. They broke up for home after the first star appeared, which they watched for a moment together from her window.
Then she composed an apostrophe to the Star. She invoked it to look down upon the children, and see them where they stood with their faces turned upwards to the sky. Her grandfather knew that something unusual was taking place by the scattered pages on the table, the flushed cheeks, the tumbled curls. She left her chair to place herself at the window and look at Pere Lachaise through whose trees many stars now sparkled and shone.
Older people were too harassed, too taken up with the matter of keeping alive, too hard-pressed,—but the children—about them she could weave dreams and hopes, as one wound flowers into a wreath or put rose by rose in a bouquet! Them she could fit into that future which so early had dawned on her horizon.
She sometimes forsook everjrthing and went in search of children, and abandoned herself to their play, telling them stories inspired by her reading and her theatre-going, singing songs, making up dances, inducing each of them to contribute to these performances. But her grandfather noticed that while playing with the children, she was able to get better acquainted with the elders.
The mother of one enjoyed a book and made her promise to come some night to read it before her man. Often Violette sat writing, for one or the other of their neighbours, letters seeking employment, or entrance into a hospital, or admission for some child into a school or institution. Violette was thus forced to become familiar with the needs and the sufferings of the world surrounding her, to take part in its battles, to go out daily in search of some paltry and mean benefit.
This was the school of which her grandfather approved and he let her stay long at her tasks, and sat watching her as she bent over them, and gathered up and treasured the laboured copies with which the table was strewn. It seemed natural to him that Violette should be called upon to do such things. It was right, he thought, that whatever vision of the future transfixed her soul, it should grow out of her reahties.
VIOLETTE as a child was conscious of her childhood. There were no old wounds, no half-forgotten joys; there were no eras or epochs, so swiftly did events and conditions follow upon one another, in that period before the sense of time was born! Every day was a finished thing, unrelated to the day before or after.
Whenever she looked back upon it after it was past, it seemed to her that it had been something full of sunlight and warmth, something even gay. There it lay, under a golden haze, in an illimitable distance, and it seemed to her as if from the very first she had been placed at the heart of hfe, had heard voices and seen a thousand hands stretched out to her in welcome, forcing doors for her that she might walk forth towards the free spaces. She would not have exchanged her childhood for any other, since the mass of impressions for which it stood left her only with a sense of its marvels, its scope, its precious accidents, as romantic and exceptional as everything else.that characterised the morning hour of her existence.
A different aspect indeed her childhood bore to her grandfather, who could span the few years of her life as though their beginning were yesterday! To him their two lives, hers just opening, and his drawing to an end, seemed cut off and placed apart from all others. She and he were real. They were real in their isolation, their poverty, in their love for each other, in their thoughts and questions. It was the others who were insubstantial, fantastic, to whom it was not possible to relate oneself.
There had been enough sadness and fear in their lives. He could not forget the time she clamoured for bread and was held tight in his arms instead, and bathed in tears. It was when she was very little, before they had come to sell flowers in the shop in the Rue de Repos, opposite Pere Lachaise, when he was searching for work. In the evening he went to a friend who borrowed something for him from another. Violette's childhood—was it not those hours when he sat waiting in his friend's house till he return with the aid he had gone to seek? Was it not his frantic search with the money in his hand for a place where he could buy food at that late hour? Would he ever forget how he bent over her, gazed at her flushed cheeks, at her little hands and arms tossing above the covers, how he raised her and squeezed the juice of an orange between her lips, fearing to let her sleep longer without breaking her fast? Such was her childhood, and his memory of it not time itself could soften. She could forget, who was young, could look back kindly on the past, not he who was old, and had been old then.
Violette remembered her intense interest in the people that came to the shop, with their grave faces and sad manner and lowered voices, and how she watched them cross the street till they passed beyond the Gate, where they carried their offerings and their tears. She wondered what need called them there, what sorrow drove them, what hope they f omid, what they heard in the silence of that place. It was in her childhood that her heart opened itself to others, that strangers became friends, it was then she discovered that everybody was threatened in the same way, that all knew that sorrow and anguish might arrive to all, must be shared by all. That was what made everybody one, what underlay everybody's love, she thought. There was bom in her then, as she sat at the counter sorting ferns for her grandfather, as she bent over the pails in which the cut roses were kept, that sympathy for her kind which never left her. She thought she could remember through what processes her heart grew gentler and gentler, how her mind followed those she so briefly met, how she suffered their sorrow, loved them for their tenderness, and how the poetry of himaan life spoke to her and inspired her.
Her childhood gave her Pere Lachaise, stretched Pere Lachaise as a garden at her feet, as a street to traverse, as a miraculous room of her house, built of sky and sod and whispering trees, with ages of buried lives to right and to left, of people sleeping forever in the arms of eternal time! Mystery was then her daily bread—mystery of the place in the presence of which she had come to live. She learned everything from Pere Lachaise —her love for her grandfather even, for she fled from the place as from an enemy and clung to him whenever its air seemed filled with a threat against him. She learned her love of life, in this way too, from the early knowledge which she gleaned of death. Life was priceless, an imrestorable gift, because all that lives must die. Feelings profound oceanic, glorious, were hers, as in revenge on Pere Lachaise. So from the ashes of death were created in her the spark and the flame of hfel So the pictures of possible tragedies, the crowd of sad fancies that were the heritage of her childhood ended always in something eloquent of the good of life, in a tiding of happiness. So when there rose in her mind the thought of a mother at whose side a laughing, blue-eyed wonder of a baby stood pleading for a tussle and a game, and Violette saw that baby denied because of some duty of the moment, she thought if the mother met her death that day, how her heart must have remembered at her dying moment, with a regret that seared and burned worse than a fatal bolt, the love she might have given and had withheld. It was from such thoughts as these that there was born in her her passionate devotion to life, her reverence for life's possibilities, her standards for perfection of feeling and the expression of it in deed and word and gesture. Life was brief, was full of hazards! Who could trust it ? Who could forget that the place waited, that it was near, ever-present, ever-beckoning with starry eyes and soothing, peace-promising voice, ever-waiting like a mother the home-returning of her children? Who could forget? Who, remembering, could deal with it lightly?
Yet her grandfather feared her familiarity with death, and he thought her childhood a premature old age, and looked upon the influence of Pere Lachaise upon her life with dread.
The same was true of her school-days. She remembered the happiness of contact with other children, her love of teachers, her idealisation of the classroom, with its chalky atmosphere, its blackboards, its formidable, straight-backed benches. She could not remember learning anything there—and she remembered struggling with sleep in the close air, irking for the bell to ring that would release her, yet to her it had been a happy and important time. He thought only of how little she received in return for what she spent there, how he had sighed as he started her off to school or as he waited outside the shop for the moment when she would turn the corner and run to meet him with her kiss and her account of the day.
To such an extent did they diflFer in their estimate of those years! Perhaps they were both right—perhaps it was not necessary for Violette to live in order to feel. It was perhaps possible for her innately to understand life, to bear it a wild enthusiasm, to have a vital hold upon the forces of existence. It was perhaps possible for her to have a foretaste of death, a vision of the greatness of love, a flash into mysteries, tragedies of being, wonders greater than the heart can support, than the mind bear to contemplate.
She knew with certainty that not with any one on earth would she have exchanged that childhood, no more than she would have wished to be some one diflFerent from herself, to bear a diflFerent name. It was not that her life was perfect—but it was her life, and she loved it. She never doubted her past, and she believed in the years ahead of her. How could she doubt ? Had she not known isolation, tragedy, death, stood with them face to face? Had she not met books and men? The foundation was laid, and the rest would be reared, the whole structure, to its last turret and spire, to the utmost beauty and grandeur. All would be fulfilled, and before it was done her life would stand miraculous, symbolic. Out of the bounty of the future it would be built for her, vibrant with love, deep and still with peace, full of energy and action, boimdless, yet harmonised to one purpose, marked by an integrity so great that she could not herself understand or be aware of it. She personified the waiting years. They would of themselves let loose torrents of strength. They themselves were the source of wonderful things— the waiting years, her life's unminted gold, the inestimable treasure that was youth's inheritance.
If her grandfather's life was grey, it was because no endless journey through years stretched ahead of him. She sought her course as though her eyes, open wide with the look of childhood, were dazzled by the sudden sunlight of existence, were still forming, perhaps, and not yet able to see and distinguish. This gave to her the attitude of one studying and seeking, and she glided among her days full of peace and health, steering herself by the light that the child-soul within her radiated, thinking it came all from without, from her grandfather and Pere Lachaise—whom she found so compelling and so vast.
IF to her grandfather her childhood was sad, he knew and could never forget that for him there was greater happiness those first few years of her life than he had ever known up to that time. Her loveliness was something he strove to fathom and could not. He worshipped at her little rosy feet, held her baby palms, and pressed them to his eyes, laid his head against her tiny shoulder, feeling that ever afterwards he would be incapable of a small thought, of a feeling of cowardice before life, or people. If he were a vassal of old, with the lowliness and fanaticism of one, he could not bow his knee before his king should he appear before him, could not humble himself before the representative of God, or Empire, were a little child like Violette sleeping under the roof of his hut, partaking of his hunger and his nakedness.
He was proud, he was happy, and he bore a responsibility towards her such as some feel for a cause that calls for every drop of their blood. He had invoked her, years and years ago he had willed that she should come to pass. In her voice, in her eyes there was a little of that which had died too soon in him, of what is alive in everybody at the beginning. Waking and sleeping he was aware of her. He tried to imagine and could not how it would have been for him without her. He had a confused sense that before her coming there had been emptiness and stillness, that he had watched age creep on him at times stealthily, at times apace, and it seemed to him he had not sought to ward it off, had not asserted his strength, as now he was doing, had never found himself imtil Violette found him, a grey-haired, broken old man, and claimed the protection of his weakness, the companionship of his loneliness, the comfort of his poverty, Violette, himianity in its babyhood, child beyond words beautiful, alluring, prophetic,—Violette fell to his lot in the midnight of his hfe I.
Did ever a child come to a man in this way, at the end, when all was spent, and call him back from the threshold of death, take him by the hand, and lead him gently and lovingly back into the heart of life? Violette's first battlefield (and before she was done she fared forth on many) was the spirit of her grandfather which she wrested from death, a desert which she made blossom hke a garden. He feared she would pay for what she did for him. She would give him her grace, and get the manner of his stimabling gait, the droop of his head, the doubt and hesitation of his eyes. She would exchange her youth for the sombreness and weariness of his age.
He had been born among poor people, and he saw life from the angle of privation and misery. The world bore the same aspect to him as to his grandchild, only he was not torn from the breast of his mother, from the arms of his father, he was not left to be reared by the trembling hands of an aged and helpless man, he was not bereft of companionship with his own. He had had brothers and sisters among whom there existed that intense love which only people who suffer in common feel for one another, and this early training in love underlay his fraternity with his kind, his pity for all people and his pride in them. What he felt for his family, the price he saw them pay, in health, in mind, in the sacrifice of talents, in defeat, he felt also for the larger family, called society.
The world was sad, but life led on beyond the world, with its obstructions, its tortures, its grinding of people underfoot. Life whispered what was true and sweet above the noise and confusion. Life held out her hands filled with gifts.
This Violette seemed to say in that voice of hers, every time she addressed him where he sat bent above his work at the table, or standing behind the comiter at the wall, sadly behung with wreaths and crowns, this he read in her beauty every time his eyes rested on her, this he saw in her gestures. He watched her as she slept. Oh, the curly head, the flush on the cheeks, the little hands folded under the perfect chin! He stood over her as milhons of mothers have done since the world began, as fathers have failed to do only to their loss! This child would grow up, and the sun and the stars and the earth would have a hand in her—everything great would contribute to her. Time would carry her aloft through years that she shared with a generation and a universe! She would grow up, and she would never be beautiful and wonderful as she was then. She would grow up to love—a trace of the same smile, the same laughter, the same kiss that more often than not lost itself in mid-air, would be left for her lover. But he would never know what she had been and was not— she would be a little like other people when he came along, but now she was the folded bud of herself, the exquisite beginning of something that life must alter, must to some extent harm. O wonderful baby!
Tears fell on the child over whom he was bending. How had it faded away into mist, that sense of the length of a lifetime that he had had those centuries ago, when he was young I He had slept away his time, dulled by over-work, by worry, his strength sapped by his struggle with the wolves of need that were always pursuing him. So most men live, by living not at all. So they wake up at the end to a sense of beauty and glory, and weep.
What good fortune it was to be awake at all after so long a sleep, to be able to raise the eyes to an expanse of blue, to a loveliness and brightness unequalled by anything he had dreamed of in his youth! For a little while only, but what matters it for how long? He felt beginning in him the desire to live, despite age and illness, at first for her sake, and soon for his own. He was like one who, wandering throughout a night of storm and terror, comes suddenly upon his destination at sunrise.
THE mind of her grandfather fixed itself on her future, leaped ahead in an effort to see her a woman among women and men. It was a habit of his. It might be that the passions gathering in her, like clouds for a storm, the fires of love and of revolt, would break out only to consume her. It might be that she would find no direction or outlet, that she would wander among men and women tortured by a power of second sight, by a clearness of vision, a standard so high as to find herself unable to attach herself to any movement, to undertake for long any task. It might be she would prove a victim of her own strength and her own idealism, would soar and get beyond her goal, would leap forward perilously, following none and being followed by none, would be to the last what she never meant to be, an individual, not merged with the forces of her time.
So much the grandfather, in the nervousness of his love, conceded as possible. No one could foretell what life would do with her. He was certain only that if there were a definite expression of her in some work, that it would of necessity be of a high order, for her work would be herself, the voice of her heart speaking through its hopes and dreams and sorrows, the music of her heart, inspired by her knowledge of life as seen through Pere Lachaise, by her vision of the world gained from drinking of the beauties of the human mind, by her faith in mankind which came straight from the soul of man which she read with the eyes of love. Whatever her effort, it would have to be large and instinct with the spirit of a new world and a new civilisation.
Often he had other thoughts. She was so little, and the years were overtaking him, were rendering him more helpless, more filled with unspoken fears, with a tremulous love that spilled itself in shining tears over her young life. She was so little, and the years ahead held decay for him, but for her the beauty of the rose. He was possessed by a feeling of the sacredness of time, by a passion to hoard every minute left to him. He clamoiued for time, for a respite from death. He demanded it as he would demand a right held from God.
Violette shared his fear. He felt it in her kisses, in the way she clung to him, and he held her in his arms and asked himself if it were not wrong to let a childhood dwell under the shadow of age and death. He looked at her with frightened eyes, pressed close to her and implored Life for life.
He had other fears, too. When he saw how love flowed from her towards everybody in the world, how love flowed towards her. so that not one who entered the shop but lingered to speak with her, he began to see in her as in a mirror the vision of other lives. There had been her mother who was about to be married when her lover had come and talked about spent passion, about feelings that age prematurely, about promises that because they are promises are false from their birth. When he had gone away she walked as in a dream to Pere Lachaise, and sat for many hours there, then staggered home. Later she had found a friend, and they had turned to each other and joined their lives.
There was himself. How he had loved, and yet how easily he had lost the love of the woman he worshipped! But he married. The old man, in his chair facing Pere Lachaise, remembered how he had married to humble his heart, to thwart his destiny I He thought of Therese, Violette's aunt, who did not marry, who laid herself down in death at the end of her twenty-five years—Therese, who loved life like a poet and like a poet knew how to surrender it.
And here was Violette. More than later in her girlhood, more than later still when her whole life stood threatened by love, her grandfather was obsessed by a thousand fears for her. Already in the loving and beloved child he saw the possibly tormented soul of a woman.
He could not say when, in Violette's childhood, he had begun to feel that she was exceptional, that she did not belong to herself or to him at all, but to the whole world; that she had something to offer that the world would be glad of and better for having. Perhaps it began in her infancy, when he heard her name the stars with names taken from the flowers; perhaps it was when he overheard the ditties she crooned to herself at night. Perhaps it was when she was most a child and hurt him with all a child's cruelty, when she envied other children and pictured how they lived in a world all crystal and gold, a world, alas! so different from her own! Perhaps it was when he learned how deep was her need for the mother she had never known, and when he saw how sometimes she turned away from Pere La-chaise as from some monstrous thing.
There was the time she discovered poverty. Like a Columbus of the spirit she adventured over the sea of human existence where storms and wrecks abound, where people lie famishing, eaten in and out with want so that the very texture of their spirits shrinks together, becomes grey and deathlike. She discovered it from the children of her street, who were hungry and ragged; from the woman next door, whose breasts, as so often happens with the poor, dried up through lack of food, and who came borrowing sous with which to buy milk for her infant. She discovered poverty as a fact, not only in her own world, but in the world beyond her world, in the world which she would enter and storm when she grew up. She saw the prison walls it built up around people to keep out the daylight. The real martyrdom of poverty was not the suffering of hunger and cold—it was that so much of life was turned to death, so much shut away from the heart's desire, so much kept hidden from the mind. That was where the robbery and the mvu-der of it lay. She saw inequalities of life, so incalculable and infinite that they led to inequalities of death! People died when they might have lived, people went down too soon into their graves, away from the long road which led all aroimd the earth till it came to a vast sea!
That people should be poor and be resigned—that was terrible. That they should range themselves into classes, and not believe that a legacy of joy and power was theirs!
It lay in her power to refuse to be poor— to free herself from everything that had ever limited her. She would not be denied—she would not let life forsake her.
She would rove in the world, she would plunge forward to find what there was worth knowing and being. There were books. She would read. There were people. She would meet them—the best should not afford to overlook her, or to refuse what she had to give. That was the way not to be poor—it was a way of seeking to establish the last democracy in one's life, and she came upon that way in a flash of imaginative wisdom. It was now in her power to try to think whatever she wished to think, to try to be whatever she wished to be. From that moment she was free.
SUCH was the manner in which the shadows of that childhood lifted, in which Violette became more and more a creature of life. It was a long childhood, for she had the subtlety of a woman at its beginning and the simplicity of a child at the end. Yet it passed like all childhood, in a day, in an hour, in a breath of spring, in the sweep of a wing across the summer sky. Genius sprang out of that early hour, genius that stood not for any one art, but for personality, for richness of spirit, for flashing intuitive intellect, genius that found its first expression in an insistence on freedom and scope, in the extraordinary demand that she made upon life. There was a gaiety in her speech and bearing, as if she had grown old enough to taste the sweetness of her youth. She had a practical ambition, too. She would seat herself at the banquet of happiness with her grandfather. He who had had nothing should sit and behold his life reborn, refashioned. He should have all the happiness and peace he had ever prayed for for her,—she would make his old age brilliant.
There was the same passion in her demand for herself that there was in the progranune that she drew up for the future of the world. She wanted life, more and more life. Whatever life held of good that she would have, and life at bottom, deep down in its very nature, was good—even its sorrows, even its eternal tragedies. Out of the narrowness of her existence, out of her isolation, out of her utter poverty, sprang this brilliant desire for all that was good and large and free, this miraculous faith in the treasures hidden somewhere near at hand.
So the dream came and went in her mind, as she sat in the room the floor of which was strewn with scraps of ferns and tinsel. She looked at her grandfather bent over his work, and wondered if he guessed how beautiful their destiny loomed before her even as they sat chilled, underfed, tired, alone. She wound her arms around his neck and pressed her face to his, and looked into his eyes. It would be like a play—years of sadness, hemmed in by age and death, and then the world would lie before them in splendour, inviting then- feet and then- hearts! How? When? She did not ask, she did not know. It was enough that it was possible.
They approached each other more closely now. Avenues of expression opened up between them, thoughts and ideas flowed easily from one to the other. They spoke together of the movement which extended beyond boundaries of nation and race, a movement that, child though she was, she understood to be historic. She believed that it was possible for her, as well as for everybody, to play a part in bringing about the change.
Violette, cradled by Pere Lachaise, wept over and yearned over so long by her grandfather, could grow into radiant, perfect womanhood, could grow into all that is symbolic of human development, human aspiration and achievement, could become a wonderful expression of the beauty and the power of the human spirit. As far as it was possible for an individual to take part in the drama of social revolution, she would find her role.
In this way it was decided in that little shop that here was to be nurtured a complete personality, here was to be incarnated womanhood, youth, life, art. Love was to sit at the banquet. The world was to be stretched out at their feet for their use and delight. Henceforth, there was but one thing to do—to free the nightingale in her, to transplant her from the desert into the world's garden. To herself and to her grandfather she was destined for the happiness of genius.