AH, swaying grain in the broad fields, studded with cornflowers and flaming poppies—Violette has borrowed of your grace, Violette is singing down the long furrows, looking with glad eyes to the right and left, and up at the clear sky. Violette is harbouring an hour to be remembered in chill, grey winters, long after, when her heart gets a little sedate and numb after the tumult of the full years. Violette is becoming acquainted with the earth as she walks in the fields and along the river banks. She begins to understand why it is called Mother, this tender earth. It has an almost simple loveliness at times, but at night when the stars flash all around it, it takes on a limitless grandeur.
Is it this that keeps you happy, Violette?
This, that the earth is beautiful, the morning alluring? Do bright clouds and the blue river winding among tree-clad banks, and flower-studded grain fields inspire you with the throbbing happiness you now feel, with the winged thoughts that carry you to the unbounded future?
No, not these alone,—the earth and its beauty are but the reflex and the expression of life itself, that force which is behind all the forces of existence. Its beauty is but a testimony of the genius of that which is behind it all, the nature which has breathed spirit into it and a meaning beyond any meaning, and a purpose so vital as to seem purposeless and accidental. Ah, the romance of the beautiful earth cried Violette,—upon whose bosom our Uves begin, where also we end! Ah, the surpassing, the exquisite beauty of this earth.
Speak softly, O heart, lest sorrow awake! Hush your exultation, O soul! Dream, but utter no word—lest sorrow fiwake! For the heart may not bear for long unbroken happiness. The sky becomes overcast, the smiling prospect grows dim; suddenly something recalls the end of all things, the end that comes so soon, that waits always at the close of the brief day, the fleeting moment which is human existence.
Steep your heart in the gentle beauties of this morning, Violette, drown your eyes in this freshness, breathe deep of this air, perfumed by flowers and new-mown grass, won-drously broken by humming of insects and whirring wings of birds, fling out your arms to the morning as it greets you—in this way will you gather strength for the work which seeks you out of the world's terrible need. In this way will you gird up the years before you with memories of happiness that shall become weapons; in this way will you lift your spirit to a deeper faith, an adoration of life which not all the combined foes of the world could quell. Embrace the wonders of this morning, Violette, as you have that of a hundred others since you were a child, as you will again and again before night folds you in her arms forever, but sing not your joy too loudly, name not the beauties as they flood your being, vaunt not your riches, lest sorrow awake—that sorrow of which you were never free, which will not free you before it frees the last of your fellowmen.
IT was more like a thin mist than rain, and the air was warm. Violette had visited all her old haunts. It was on her part a kind of farewell, for she felt that after to-morrow, when she would in reality have begun her career, she would never again be the same. She was on the threshold of a new epoch. She had left the house depressed, possibly through nervousness at what was before her, and had kissed her grandfather tenderly and hovered over him so long before leaving that he laughed at her and asked if she meant to return.
She was now walking rapidly towards home because evening had come and the lamps were lit on the bridges. She fancied their red reflection was the blood of suicides, those pitiful hosts who to-day find a welcome only in the sombre depths of the river.
She looked up and met the eyes of a man standing on the quay. She stopped. Was it her fancy brooding upon violent death that invested his face with tragic purpose? His pale, drawn features bore a melancholy so settled that Violette felt she had no words to utter before such grief.
But she stood spellbound, motionless, and insistent.
Suddenly she said, "I do not want you to die."
"Why? Why?" he murmured.
They remembered afterwards that she had taken his hands, and that slowly they had moved away. Her human presence had penetrated the isolation of his soul. Together they went to the home where her grandfather waited.
Violette forgot her art, her grandfather, her vision of the better world that lay like a flower on her soul. With all the impetuosity of her youth she tried to reach Gervais. For she took him, and his sorrow, his memories, the broken promise of his genius, his shaken faith. She loved him.
How did it begin? Not because of anything that she could name or otherwise express, did this feeling rise in her at his presence, or at the mere thought of him. He haunted her. He was practically the first man she had ever met in her youth, the first man of her own generation, and from the first, she told herself, she had loved him. But why? How? Why must it be he, of the millions and millions of people in the world, and when she looked at him she sometimes asked herself, how can it be he? Surely, off in the future was another—some one else, some one nearer, some one far more like herself. This was just a trick of the Spring, a trick of the boimty of youth, to seize upon this man and say that it was he!
If Gervais did not love her, then there might in the future be some one else whom she would love and by whom she would be loved. She admitted it, and yet—it had no meaning for her. She resented the thought of such a possibility, resented the existence of that other personality that waited somewhere behind the years. He would not be Gervais. He would bring her happiness, love, but he would not be this man whom she loved without knowing why or how, from whom she asked nothing, and everything, this man who was thrown across her path at this particular time, when she was yoxmg, and free, and alone—as never before nor after.
For before anything else Violette was a lover of love. Underlying everything all through her youth, beginning even in childhood, was her infatuation with the idea of love. It was because she asserted the existence of love that she could afford to be gay, could afford to be an artist, could afford to drift happily and joyously on the bosom of life, looking about her with almost wild eyes at the beauties to right and left, the soft dales, the green pine-clad hills, beautiful in the morning sunlight or flaming copper-like at sunset.
As she grew older Violette began to see a face somewhere behind all the other faces in the world. It was that of a man who had freed himself from the weight of superstitions and fears that oppress people from their birth, and adventured far into untried ways of thinking, conserving his own life, never yielding his right over himself, not knowing how to halt, how to lessen himself. It was that of a man created in struggle, in a transitional time in the world's history. It was the face of a great man, and of one who might be educated or imeducated, rich or poor, for before all it was a xmiversal face, marked deep with the wisdom and love that belong to all mankind.
When love came all things might happen to her—she might have to think new thoughts, she might become different altogether in some subtle, strange way. Love would plunge her into new worlds, would be another birth. She would feel what she did for her friend and more, what she felt for the striking new faces she encountered in her work and more—more and differently. For it would come with a conviction that here was a force that changed her life, that compelled everything to begin all over again, that drew her to itself irresistibly for all time.
Perhaps not all people were able to feel such love, or, being able to feel it, were fortunate enough to encoxmter it. She did not know how it was with her, or how it would he; only her faith was sure that such things happen, that it is life's greatest miracle, that to hold the heart in readiness for it was in itself good.
He had loved, and she whom he loved had died. He did not think there was anything more.
If he had said this in weakness or weariness—but he said it with a face glowing with strength, and with a mind open, a spirit flooded with light. His suffering was hidden beneath something deeper than Suffering. Violette had never met any one so master of himself, and yet this man had been about to die!
His beloved had been the soul of a group of people who believed themselves pioneers of a new time. When a crisis came and the people were starving, she helped organise a demonstration which was scattered by the militia charging on the people with the bayonet. She and he were well towards the front, and he saw her fall. He described how he leaned up against a human wall, and how he tried to open his eyes to see if she had risen, and how he caught, through a rain of blood, a flash of sunshine, a stretch of blue sky before night closed over him.
Yet it was not the wanton murder of his beloved that brought him to the brink of death. It was something more terrible than that, and he tried to tell Violette of the despair which laid hold on him the day of the funeral when they buried her and the other slain comrades and dispersed to their homes, beaten, helpless, without strength to retaliate, and seemingly without a plan of ever meeting again in an organised form. The conditions that he saw in the world called for something more than pleading or complaint. They called for action. They called for revolution. They must be replaced by others, human, civilised, natural— they must be replaced at great cost, by the consecration of a whole generation of men and women. That was all. That was a programme simple and easily understood, easily undertaken. But now there was no longer a movement dedicated to the carrying out of this progranmie. That is why he had grown suddenly tired and why he had sought in vain for an impulse or a reason to go on with an aimless life. He had found himself suddenly bereft of social hope and yet all his life and even his love was based on this hope upon which he had spent himself.
VIOLETTE ministered to Gervais. She wanted more than that he should be willing to live because she had found him; he must live again as he was before death and disillusionment and defeat destroyed him. This would be a miracle, but Violette believed that miracles could come to pass.
She went to see her friend. He led her to her old seat opposite the portrait of Rachel; then he looked at her. The sun was setting over Paris, gilding the green of the Madeline and throwing long shadows over chimneys and roofs. From below faintly the murmur of the street stole up. It seemed to her friend that she had grown more beautiful, her expression had more subtlety, her smile and look were, as always, brilliant and tremulous as though half-afraid to reveal the longing of the soul, the unmeasured delight she took in life and people. To-day there was something mystic about her, haunting. "You overtake us who are older," he said, and looked so kindly at her that the tears rushed to her eyes. He understood that she loved, and he feared for her, for of all the artists of her day no one seemed younger than she.
Gervais too had never known that any one could be as young and free as she. He was drawn by the simple and obvious facts about her, her brilliance, her sensitiveness, her hungry-heartedness, her thoughtfulness hke that of a serious and beautiful child. Before long he ceased analysing and appraising and felt that they could really continue their life together. With her he might still reach the heights of which he had despaired.
This he discovered one night when Violette was very beautiful, as beautiful as she was when she first appeared to him. Her grandfather was in the room, and he put a shaking hand on his shoulder and looked into his face. Violette was impelled to rush forward to thwart the purpose of the unspoken prayer he was making to the man she loved. She saw her grandfather step aside, saw Gervais approach her. Her hands flew to his; in another moment she was returning kiss for kiss, and before her closed eyes there passed grey tombs and trees, vast audiences, her mother, whom she fancied she saw clearly for an instant, her grandfather, and lastly and always Gervais's face bending above her, his eyes that had gone beyond the grave and had returned to her, his spirit that had died the better to reach and love her.
OH, my love, I cannot believe in your reality. It is too good to last in this implacable world. What if the time should come when you would not be here where my eyes fall on you, my arms reach towards you where you sit within the sound of my voice ? Oh, my love, come and comfort me. Can not we two defy time and death?" How her wild heart, casting such shadows and asking such questions, paid for her joy!
At first she felt the humility of love—a deep humility beneath all her pride. A glorious star was shining over their life, but who could say it would never fade from their sight? Yet should it be so, she could not live, she thought.
She felt that in her fear itself lay danger to their love. If only she were more confident I To be loved she must have a faith in herself that even surpassed his. She must take herself for granted, take him for granted, and the inevitableness of his love for her. But as yet her love was all dread and fear, every cloud that passed over his face, every change in his voice when he spoke affected her. She who did not know how to compromise, who could never resign herself to a modification of love, who would be the first one to say love was dead, when it was only a little tired perhaps, how was she to meet the eternal fact, so often drilled into the patient and sad hearts of people, of love's satiety, love's disillusionment?
But as the months succeeded one another, her peace became deeper. The pride of love replaced love's himiility. She dared many things now, herself not conscious that there was any change in her conduct towards him, though she felt vibrantly her greater happiness, looked clad as with splendour because of it, felt strong as it seemed to her no human being on earth could ever have felt because of the inspiration of their love. She dared now appear just as she was, no longer with the instinctive desire to be better in his eyes.
"Violette," Gervais asked one day, "how can you love me so wonderfully? Why, Violette? Why?" It was an old question. A tremulous smile played over her face. "My mother gave me this legacy," she said; "this love of mine began perhaps when love was bom in her."
She felt for him almost the intimacy that comes from marriage—he was hers, she understood him, so much so that she was astonished every time she looked at him that he was objective at all. It was a time when she drank deep from the sources of life, when she was at the height of her power, and always there was the feeling that there was more to be felt and had, more to be given. The strange sad thoughts that had often lain like a weight on her heart were dissipated like mist before the sun. She was beginning to understand not only the courage to live but the courage to perpetuate life. There was the dim foreshadowing of vital things. She felt the subterranean sea which tossed beneath life and she wanted to go out into the world, proclaiming, "Let us free youth! Let us free age." Her feeling was that life could be lived so much more fully—there was so much more to be had, to be felt, to be explored. She felt the loneliness of the eternal feminine.
The time would come of her grandfather's death,'—the time would come when she would be waiting for the new-born,—the time would come when natural laws and forces would hold her in their grasp. All the more must she love then I It took wisdom and experience, she thought, to understand happiness, not the cheap happiness of contentment and success, but real happiness, the happiness of achievement which often looks like failure. If she had not known sorrow, she thought, she could not have been so ready for happiness, so eager for it as the parched soil for rain, the flower for sunshine.
Neither her grandfather nor her friend could feel that Violette would have joy of her first love. He had been weary unto death—would he not grow mortally ill again and forsake her when she had forgotten how to live without him ? They thought this even when they saw Violette, under the spell of that rarest of all happiness—triumphant first love—going with Gervais for their walk in Pere Lachaise, her white veil fluttering in the wind, a smile playing on her lips; when they heard her call herself a captive of Spring; and when they saw her stretch her arms out wide to the skies above her; when she told them how she had stayed with him at the tomb of Rachel and had asked, "Do you see me with my love, oh, elder sister?"
But for him love and death had already been; and if all the happiness of life were placed in his hands, they thought, he would not know what to do with it. As some strong natures are prepared for death, so he seemed to them prepared to forego her, for hfe to him was neither a banquet nor a spectacle—it was warfare. What had he to do with love, they asked in anguish of heart.
So the dream went on and people wondered about Violette who now sat with the great and was wooed and courted, and she revelled in her good fortune with a heart half-surprised, half-expectant. Critics wrote extensively about her. Artists and sculptors sought her. "It must be half divine," wrote a celebrated man about her, "to be young, to be beautiful, and to be devoted to a great cause I'' The world adopted the orphan, returned her. love a thousandfold, but her renown did not cross her consciousness. She was taken up entirely with other things. Somewhere she knew a free world existed— if only in the minds of a few. Better than she loved her art she loved a certain ideal of hers concerning the world at large, a dream that had come to her when twining the wire for wreaths—that every one in the world should have a chance for happiness and growth. This thought laid a spell on her which never lifted. It was because of this that she became an actress or fell in love or did any of the things that really expressed her. She could not have cared to live had not this thought of human betterment been present. It was a vision and a prophecy that she carried in her heart, and when she got older, she found that others confirmed her hope and strove to make it true, laying all on its altar gladly, and even going down in darkness to the grave in order to prove it.
VIOLETTE and Gervais were walking arm in arm in Pere Lachaise. It was spring. Every blade of grass seemed sentient, every tree proud of its green, the perfimied air hummed of mystic beginnings, of deep stirrings and passions.
Her eyes met the eyes of her lover, and it seemed to her that she was lost in him, that meanings became fathomless, and time and space receded, and she stood held by joy. But he exclaimed, "I shall never forget your love I" and she had the foreboding of doom that she had often felt in her happiest moments with him.
There was a barrier between him and her.
But love itself creates a barrier, she thought,—love which leads one to contemplate one's love in silence, which makes one unable to impart one's feeling to the other, which makes one live a separate existence just at the point where the divided life is ended forever, love which is the most individual experience of the soul.
Their love was her achievement. She had held out her hands to him, had rushed out to him; at the most terrible moment in his night she had been present; she had chosen him, she had compelled him to choose her—by all the subtle and mighty power of her youth she had drawn him to her heart. To her he was the ineffable soul, the ideal face behind all the faces.
But he had loved before I The deathless memory of another possessed him. He could not repeat his experience of love. Nature's economy would not permit it. Was this the barrier that she felt? Some day she would be brave enough to ask him and he would answer her with his unfailing courage and truth.
Beyond the faces applauding and approving her Violette saw always his face. She knew that he also saw a face—her face—but she was aware that he saw faces behind it. Behind her stood victims, and behind those, others and still others—pinched, pale women, despairing men, ragged and sickly children. They pressed round her on every side, almost effaced her. She thought she saw him reach his arms to the multitude and cry he was coming, and she thought she saw how her own face faded from his sight. The sick man she had made whole was using his strength against her.
She could not misunderstand or overlook anything about him, since only large forces played a part in his life. She could see him away from her, arid of love, sterile of hunger and yearning, barren of need. She could feel that he looked upon her beautiful youth as pure delight, and that because of this he shut his heart to her. In fancy she pleaded with him: "The cemetery is my background—do you blame me for not having let it swallow me up? Was it not well that I struggled up from the abyss? I am not a breath of spring, a flush of dawn, a feather fallen from the wing of night—I am a human being. I am not a shadow, not a reflex of some beauty of a passing season, not an echo of nature, but a human being.
"You are afraid of my eagerness, afraid of my happiness, but I am only a simple girl, and I too have the strength to siu'-render my happiness. I can lay down everything if the moment arrives. I may not always remain brilliant, I may grow listless, disheartened. You can not bear my youth—try to imagine my age, and see if you cannot love me as I may be when I am older, or when I am old. See if you cannot love me when my heart breaks.
"I am like everybody else. Everybody lives within hailmg distance of Pere Lachaise. All are children, nursed in the lap of age, potentially artists, potentially lovers.
"People have snatched moments from the scaffold for love, have loved when they had but an hour of life to live, an hour of measured death."
She understood why he was able to resist her inward happiness. She could not have wished him to be different, and yet how unalterably different from him she was in the consecration of her whole life to personal expression, and personal development. In her love of love how different she was from him I When she pictured herself living for him, he for her, their lives a paean sung for each other, an interplay of drama, their eyes meeting across all possible human experiences—how different she was I Was it the difference of man and woman? she asked, or was it the difference of vouth and maturity? She could not wish him to be like herself, nor could she wish herself to change.
It came upon Gervais hke an illness of the body that he must flee Violette, that he must go away and take up the burden where he had laid it down a year ago on the quay. With the end of spring came an end of the dream. It died out suddenly, so without struggle of any kind that for a while Violette did not believe it was gone, did not trust the uneasiness that assailed her, the clamoto'ing hunger that tore through her for something that Gervais had given her and was now withholding from her. She felt a change.
In a certain sense Violette was not strong. She could not have fought for herself. Her mind would see clearly what was to be said and demanded, but so gently had she brought herself up, dwelt so long on the history of himian folk, lingered on the threshold of other people's lives with such sympathy, that, when attacked, she was incapable of defence. What mattered it if in her heart she was a stoic? What mattered it if she said that no one but herself could ever put an affront upon her, what mattered it if her pride as an individual forestalled even that possibility of any one invading the precincts of her nature as long as there was lacking in her the power to hurt people when they hurt her, the talent to strike back, to meet hardness with hardness ?
Pere Lachaise had imfitted her for this. Others might be hasty and shortsighted, might act rashly as if they had all eternity with which to make amends; others might forget, but not she I.
"I do not need happiness," she said. "It was a fantasy of my youth to imagine that I did. I can live as the millions and millions of people do who have little happiness, or who perhaps have never had any, upon whom no one leans, for whom no one yearns. I can be all alone, although for a long time now I had supposed myself to be two in one, to be mystically united in love with another. I do not need happiness, but something tells me that happiness is possible just the same."
THE day rose in humid heat and grew more oppressive every hour. Paris lay under a glaring sun, inert, hardly breathing, in cruel suspense for the evening's cool.
Violette awaited Gervais.
"We will not have the strength. It will be impossible," she reiterated to herself, and she did not try to fight oflF the languor which oppressed her. "Why could we not go on as before? What has happened?" But in another moment came a poignant sense of desertion, of one-sided love; for the first time in her life it seemed wiser to her to die than to live, and she started up in anguish, frightened, shaken. "I must not succimib to the first misery," she told herself.
And it was with this thought that she came into the room where he waited.
"Geivais," she began, "Vhere are you go-mg?"
"When I stood on the quay, Violette, I thought I saw the starved of all the world gather about me. They were not a clamorous lot, and I wondered at their silence. I wondered at their empty hands, for I knew that if the fate which has created the soul I possess had also made me a beggar, I should beg with a knife in my hands! Violette, that night I crossed the threshold of my personal existence. For a little while I forgot—through you—Violette."
Violette was at his side.
"So much I could say to you if I were older, stronger; so much perhaps that would be truer too than it now can be. You come to me with your doctrines and theories, but I come with my whole life, with my thoughts, with my heart. The days in my childhood when I suflFered himger, the isolation, the nights of torture seeking in my own thoughts answers that I knew existed somewhere—is it all as nothing?"
"You are meant for happiness, Violette," he said.
For a long time they sat silent, their hands in each other's, and then they arose and passed into the inner room to her grandfather.
"Friend," the old man said, looking long at Gervais, "you will yearn to come again. But the way is long."
Gervais turned to Violette, but she could not speak, for her soul seemed to call to him. With blinded eyes he passed through the door.
VIOLETTE thought she was in her bed at home looking out upon the stars through the open window facing her, but when she saw the tombs and the rows of nodding trees she remembered. It was Pere Lachaise. She sighed and sank back on the green bank. The night was warm.
She wondered if any girl as alive as she had ever spent the night in Pere Lachaise. Never had Violette been more alive—not even in the spring when she had sat on this spot with Jervais. The smell of the grass on which she lay was sweet to her, the flowers, the far starlight, the little cloud toward the east. It was wonderful to be there in the still beauty of the night and think bravely in the silence, and gather the hopes like flowers and count them as one would count stars, aware only that they were innumerable, that they were brilliant and distant. No, Vio-lette was never quite so happy I If only she could find some way to tell Gervais that it was well with her, but in time he would know. He would hear how she had fulfilled her destiny, and been an artist from beginning to end. Perhaps he would be there some day, sitting in the gloom of the theatre, the face beyond the faces, and he would guess that she saw him and played to him, and be no longer sorry that he had been unable to take her gift of herself, and sit dreaming of fair days, of a promised spring, of starlit nights, and sweetness and passion and converse. Perhaps he would yet come to know how wonderful a thing it was to live—when it would be too late for happiness.
Her heart beat painfully and she raised herself slowly and looked past the trees far into the night. She walked towards the tomb of Rachel lying to the left. She would come like a younger sister to Rachel and speak with her. Violette's feet gleamed on the grass. Dew hung on them like gems, dew glistened in her hair that swept downwards to her waist, dew was on her eyes and cheeks. She stopped and threw her arms out towards the sky, and her face changed as with a sudden memory of pain, and "Gervais" fell from her lips. Then she went on.
"There is no one here," she said.
Violette's eyes sought the window of her room across the street. She saw it by the faint glimmer of candle light that burned behind it. Perhaps the candle was at that moment in the hand of her grandfather.
The night grew deeper, darker.
Here in Pere Lachaise, she thought, was surcease without interruption, peace past understanding. Here there was no love which woke and tortured you throughout the night.
The stars hung high above her, the leaves fell like tears on her head, the silence was impenetrable as death. She stood by the tomb of Abelard and Heloise. "Their sleep is dreamless," said Violette. "Her spirit went out hke a candle when Abelard left her for the cold preferment of the church. She was able to let him leave her because he had already left her." And then she thought, "What is this love for which we are sick to death and which yet makes us so strong? I have forgotten. What do I want with Gervais? What did I want with his love? I cannot remember."
Pere Lachaise lay white in the starUght. It took on a deeper silence with the advancing homs. Violette wondered whether the dead grew weary and rose to stretch their arms and to look upon the night. "It is sad," she thought, "that it should be easier to find death than love," and suddenly her thought deserted Gervais. He no longer stood for love. It was love itself she saw, not the half-tortured, strangled thing he turned it into—love as she felt it before his coming, added to her riper knowledge of it since his leaving. And now, she, a lover of love, lay there bleeding.
Violette went to the farther end of the cemetery, where suddenly she came upon Rachel, who stood and played to all the dead of Pere Lachaise. If ever Violette met Gervais again (and she knew that it could not be), she would tell him how Rachel played in the starlight to herself and all the dead. About her heart cold as ice the words of the actress leaped like flames of joy. Violette remembered her grandfather, and she was overcome by the greatness of his love for her as by the grandeur of Gk)d. She remembered her whole childhood—it flowed like a river at her feet. She went back into rooms of her vanished life, opening door upon door. She remembered Gervais. Mirrored in Rachel's luminous eyes she saw rain and storm and sunshine, and she loved these things for themselves as she did when she was a child. From Rachel's voice, her tears, her laughter, there came to her a vague wonder which soon turned into a feeling, an assertion. She wanted to live. She wanted to wander forth into the mazes of life, secme in her knowledge that she could endure the unendurable.
The dawn crept up from the east. The stars paled. A httle cloud drifted towards her. The breaking day called her. But it seemed to her that Rachel pitied her weari-ness and detained her, prevailing upon her to lie down on the grass beside her and crooning a lullaby over her of such sweetness that she could not help but sleep.
At dawn when she stole back to her room, she had a poignant sense of having escaped from some inmiinent tragedy. How if she had never waked? How if her grandfather had found her there stark on the grass at the foot of the sepulchre? How if he had simk down by her side striving to reach with his remaining strength the source of the sorrow that had carried her past his age to an early death—what could he have done but died? Always there had been this thing or that of importance but now it could be only death. Ah, but she had not succumbed. How could she succumb when the mother survives her baby, the wife her husband? It was happiness merely to give love, in fancy to bear Gervais her tenderness through voice and look and touch, to carry him fervour and glowing thought, to give him every heart-beat of her youth, every ray of her smile, all the dew of her tears. Even though he feared her free gifts, her thoughts would seek him, her life would seek to share its brief hours with him. Sometime she would find him again, and he her, sometime when they were both old, in the barren years I And then she prayed: "I throw myself on the heart of the Wind, in the arms of the Sea; I strain my eyes towards the face of the Night. Life, I am in your hands."
She knew now the aspiration of the heart for the eternal persistence of that which is dear and beloved. It was not possible that Gervais should die. That in him which strove towards the world, which bore relation to his kind, would always live in in-eflfable but certain ways, carrying its message to generations and generations of men, merging itself with the life of the future— even after she who bore him in her heart was herself laid away, even after the last memory of him had perished, a voice of his spirit, as incarnated in his work, his speech, his groping feelings, his silent thought, would still be heard somewhere in the recesses of the world. He would be immortal. He would bridge the past and the future. He would be universal, a flash of life to the end.
"He will come back," said her grandfather. But Violette knew that he would not come back. Whatever else life held for her, it did not hold him. Long hours dragged their weight across her heart, and she knew that just so would it be throughout the years—long nights of long years, in which she would lie thinking of Gervais.
It seemed to her as if all the crises of her life were swallowed up in oblivion. Only yesterday she had had a need to speak of them to her friend. Now she herself consigned them to forgetfulness—she let the soul of them perish. At last she understood what age was.
But there was another age too, an age of pleasant valleys, or reminiscence. That was the age she had believed in when she was young. But now she let everything go— her hope, her sorrow, her wildest, bravest aspiration. The past claimed them. She opened her fingers and let them fall like violets into an open grave.
But why? she asked, since she knew that as long as he lived there could be no separation between them. There was something beyond the close contact, the walking hand in hand through the charmed mazes of life, the being within hourly reach of each other's presence. Something beyond the nearness of love, which seemed the ultimate bliss of existence, the last, dearest sweetness. There was something left beyond this, and that was the colossal idea that they were both alive together in the world.
"We will meet in the air we breathe, in the work we do, in the exigencies of the social forces that inspire us; we will meet in the achievements of the future; we will meet in the culminating events of our own individual existences—in whatever triumph of personal development awaits us, in whatever latent strength life will evolve in us, in whatever moment of inspiration will be vouchsafed us; we will meet, if not during our lives, then at the end, in a glorious consummation of all we have ever been."
Violette smiled tearfully as she thought this. "What is such consolation?" she wondered. "It is as if already I had grown old, already become resigned to the possession of a millionth part of that for which my soul yearned."
Violette thought of the attitude of the old to Pere Lachaise. To them, too, life passes like a dream, life passes, yet it is not short! They look back upon the years, and it seems as if they had come a long way, as if the road had been interminable, as if the end they saw in sight in their youth as far away, was far away still. The old are not afraid of Pere Lachaise. They think with strange serenity about it. It is not a terrible commentary upon life to them that it exists. Sometimes they think it even desirable, not because they are tired, but because they see in it a harmony, a lyrical and loving law of the universe, an explanation of mystery, a marriage of cause and eflFect. The old go to Pere Lachaise bravely, smilingly, and if they have never known gladness before, they know it then. To them it is a final step in which there cannot be failure or wrong. They achieve rest.
How diflFerent from her, who had stood shivering in her youth before the spectacle of Pere Lachaise, had feared it, as though from behind its tombs something might leap out and strike her doivn, had gazed at her grandfather with anguish and terror, had let dread of death fill her heart from her earliest childhood.
She had thought of the destiny of the people from the standpoint of Pere Lachaise, that those who were bereft of the fulness of life in their one lifetime could never be compensated, that the wrong done them was mi-forgivable because irreparable. Whenever she had thought of death by law, by war, by want, she had thought of something so im-natural that it poisoned the air she breathed, darkened the sun, made her hate a world where it existed, made her think with rapture of a chance to give her life, with all it held, in the eflFort to destroy it. She had thought of art from the standpoint of Pere Lachaise. It was an eflFort to invest this short duration of existence which leads only to the grave with beauty, to discover its dignity, to find where it was most intense. Her love, too, was inspired by Pere Lachaise, marked deep by its sign. She had loved her lover as if he were a child whose flickering life she was nursing on her breast. For death had struck at him and crushed him, death might again attack some one he loved, to whom he belonged. Death might slay him before her eyes. She had thought always of how short a time at best they would be together.
Life was but a span, and she rebelled against its brevity, against the terrible fact that it had to end, that it had to sink together and crumble up, become ashes scattered to the winds—life which was so sweet, so full of plan and purpose, of passionate endeavour, passionate courage and hope and love—life which was so true and real that it was hard to believe in it, and one could only feel it as a dream, be borne aloft on its tossing waves as in a gentle sleep—life had an endl.
Her heart could not bear it, her mind refused to grasp it.
She must gather the roses immediately, tragically she must abandon herself to an intense enjoyment of life, making sure she did not let one drop of the cup go imdrained.
Now her soul was filled with a new valor, now when life sought to crush her by robbing her of her dream of love, she grew at home in life, fell deeply in love with it. Now that she met life in collision, seemingly at cross purposes with it, she loved and honoured it in a thousand new ways. Her courage was at last tested. Now she imderstood inspiration—it was the exalted attitude of the spirit before the spectacle of Ufe, the final union with existence, the complete harmony. And the end of inspiration was to give oneself, and yet to remain oneself, to be an individual, never to become a replica of old and preceding forms, but to be a life not before beheld in nature—a romantic, new, free type, a spirit at once like every other that has ever lived, and diflFerent from every other, an original himaan being. This was the harvest she reaped from her ordeal, that she no longer looked at life from the standpoint of Pere Lachaise, but at Pere Lachaise from the standpoint of life.
Death was not a part of life—it was an alien, an intruder, so unlike to life, so strange and out of place in her eternity that she could see it and live amidst it and yet go on as if it did not exist. Yet she could not conceive of life without death, and she did not want fadeless jflowers, ageless youth, dawns that did not bring forth the days of which the nights in turn were bom. She could not think of her love enduring timelessly in her unchanging heart.
Death was the theatre in which all existence played its drama, the stage upon which life was set. But death, at this time, stood to her not for death, but for the sorrow of death, the weeping through long, blind nights, the torturing memories, the wending of weary feet, and wearier heart, toward a far grave. It stood for unendurable and unutterable suflFering, the heart crying murder at life itself.
Sometimes she would go to her grandfather's room when he was asleep, terrified by the thought that he would suddenly be snatched from her. She would stand in the window that looked out on Pere Lachaise. The trees would nod in the night, the dark beckon to her—Pere Lachaise, lit with stars, would seem to be waiting. Then she felt that life was an oasis in the midst of death, and she craved to extend her life, to join those who belonged to her and to whom she belonged; she wanted to huddle together with comrades as before a storm. She was still a lonely child, who had too early made the acquaintance of death.
For many months all her thoughts were of Gervais. He was wandering somewhere in the world, homeless, detached, self-forsaken. Why had she not been able to persuade him that love with her need not have meant a surrender of principle and idealism, only a ixiere happiness of two, only a hearth, a shelter against the world, something circumscribed, personal, and abstracted from life? Why could she not have convinced him that she would live as he did, without thought of self or art; would live as he, the wanderer, the lost one, was living now. Ah, but the young do not speak, she thought. They stand abashed, silent, they do not know how to defend themselves. Later, she could have made him see that her way was better, that to live and to build up happiness upon happiness even for one person in the world is also worth striving for. Had she been older, stronger, she could have taught him to be happy. What was her art if it was not the expression of an avid hunger for life, of suffering, too, of enthusiasm and inspiration? What was her youth but hunger? Because she was young and an artist he had not been able to believe that she could immolate herself! Had she remained a simple child of the people, in the shadow of Pere Lachaise, with her artist's soul hidden within her like a seed that had not germinated, she could have held him—his voice, his mind, his weary heart, all for her own.
She would live a long time in the world and later, years later, she felt there would be no face beyond the faces for her, but something graver, something that would take the place of the personal need and the personal appeal. And she would continue to refuse to be the conservator of traditional feelings and ideas, to refuse to be the guardian of the past. She must ever be an adventurer toward the new and untried, an explorer of the future. She would continue to insist on her right to conquest in new fields, new doctrines, new faiths, new tactics, new programmes of action; she would continue to dare venture forth with a few or alone, to the ends of the earth, wherever the truth might lead her. Before being a woman she would be a human being. In this way, though hurt and suflFering, she would school herself not to miss him, never to wish to look into his eyes, never to long to press her lips to his, never to think of him, her constant thought. A vibrant consciousness of the universality of life was upon her—a democracy of race and nation and time—as in childhood she had felt that she was a child and had infinite years to live. The human world when it attained maturity would attain to freedom. She absolved people. She did not hold them responsible for the wrongs they suflFered or inflicted; she warred upon conditions but never upon people themselves, for they were guiltless. She had learned this basic truth at the meetings and in the pamphlets when she was a child, and it was a philosophy of tolerance which suited her nature well. "How could I bring my art to people if I thought them guilty of their own misfortunes ? How could I forgive them enough to play before them, whoever they were—the unknown audiences I face and adore!" To her they all at least wished to be apostles of love and freedom, whether they were the oppressed or the oppressors. They had been created by forces that transcended them. Individually, they were helpless. It was only when they saw how to unite themselves with their kind, which was the purpose and the inspiration of life, that they would become invincible. Then they would have freedom to soar, to love, to create—freedom to conceive higher and higher human experiences, new forms of social and individual existences.
Violette, walking home from the Academy to the narrow crowded street and half-decayed house in which she still lived, passing hundreds of such where dwelt families as poor as her own had been, was accompanied by such thoughts. Her eyes dwelt on the children playing about her. She saw in them the race, the future, immortality on earth, to whom all things belonged.
The movement for human emancipation-— it existed somewhere. It had no boundaries. Wherever the idea dwelt, there it lived and sought to incarnate itself as a social force. Everywhere throughout the world, hosts of unknown men and women were ready for the freer and richer life, and were preparing the ground that others might become so. She was one of them. She felt she could trust herself. Her passionate, romantic affirmation of life led her straight to them, to those who insisted that all must live freely, greatly, as no one has ever lived before.
Gervais had been quick to leave her. She had a life apart from the movement, which to him made her like the rest of the people in the world. But he was wrong. She was one with him. She felt as invincible as the idea which inspired them. She and he were there in the world, transitional characters, giving proof to the present that the future from which they hailed and which their lives akeady expressed, could indeed come to pass.
The friend of her childhood was also one of these—a man beyond time, beyond nation, beyond race, wholly emancipated from the spell of the past. He came every night to the theatre, if not to see the performance, then at the end to take her home, and again as in her childhood, their speech was always of the movement, the movement which held her ardent faith, and which she knew existed, but the sources of which she had not yet been able to find. Now, though she thrilled with her ever-growing power in her art, and was made happy by the recognition she received—a recognition which was to her in itself dramatic—her mind sought work with the people, work that should incarnate the truth by which she lived, the love with which she had become infatuated.
As she looked into the future she saw her own future unroll itself before her. There was a deep and intimate relation between her life and that other world life about which her thoughts revolved. Her years would be shaped by the forces with which she was already allied, her whole life would take their stamp. Already she foresaw acts that carried her far, deeds that would be expressive of the struggle of the classes in which she would take a direct part. Dimly she foresaw that she would be called upon to play her part in this greatest of all dramas. She wished it to be so. But it would not mean abdication of her own personal existence; it must augment everything that had ever begun in her; it must always mean the full jflowering of her whole personality. Out of it would be created her love and her motherhood.
When another autumn came she watched the fall of leaves—the crimson whirl in the air, the brilliant maples grouped about the white birch trees which were being stripped before her eyes by the breeze. Never did anything seem so beautiful, so right. She had looked at the marvellous foliage for a season of two weeks, nature had decorated herself, was celebrating some sacred approaching event—death, perhaps, and now she stood rapt and spellbound by the flaming vistas before her, feeling that all life was something more than she had known, that glories and splendours were the daily bread of existence. In a passionate downpour of leaves, the advance of death began, and she felt how right it was, how timely—she had no regrets, would not impede the fall of one of them.
Why could not all death be beautiful like this? When her time came, she too could deck herself out marvellously 1 She could summon more thoughts from out the recesses of her mind, memories that should be more than memories, charged with a vital force to persist, to act; she could array herself at the end in the full jflowering of all that had ever begun in her. Feelings from the heart, warm, palpitant, red as the sap in these leaves, could mount to her cheeks and eyes, make them jflash and shine, could curve her lips with smiles of transcendent tenderness; then, thoughts, memories, and feelings would circle gloriously in a rhythmic dance above her head, visions and people better than visions would press close to her, her heart would leap and flutter, her hands would search and find, and gladly, joyously, beauteously, she would surrender all, let them be carried out by gentle winds to impregnable regions while she herself sank to the ground, a symbol, a token, a pledge of love and life, like each brilliant leaf then descending.
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY RBFERBNGB DEPARTMENT
сopyright 1915
September 1916