Light

CHAPTER XX
THE CULT

I have been to the factory. I felt as much lost as if I had found myself translated there after a sleep of legendary length. There are many new faces. The factory has tripled—quadrupled in importance; quite a town of flimsy buildings has been added to it.

"They've built seven others like it in three months!" says Monsieur Mielvaque to me, proudly.

The manager is now another young nephew of the Messrs. Gozlan. He was living in Paris and came back on the day of the general mobilization. Old Monsieur Gozlan looks after everything.

I have a month to wait. I wait slowly, as everybody does. The houses in the lower town are peopled by absentees. When you go in they talk to you about the last letter, and always make the same huge and barren reflections on the war. In my street there are twelve houses where the people no longer await anything and have nothing to say, like Madame Marcassin. In some others, the one who has disappeared will perhaps come back; and they go about in them in a sort of hope which leans only on emptiness and silence. There are women who have begun their lives again in a kind of happy misery. The places near them of the dead or the living they have filled up.

The main streets have not changed, any more than the squares, except the one which is encrusted with a collection of huts. The life in them is as bustling as ever, and of brighter color, and more amusing. Many young men, rich or influential, are passing their wartime in the offices of the depot, of the Exchange, of Food Control, of Enlistment, of the Pay Department, and other administrations whose names one cannot remember. The priests are swarming in the two hospitals; on the faces of orderlies, cyclist messengers, doorkeepers and porters you can read their origin. For myself, I have never seen a parson in the front lines wearing the uniform of the ordinary fighting soldier, the uniform of those who make up the fatigue parties and fight as well against perfect misery!

My thought turns to what the man once said to me who was by me among the straw of a stable, "Why is there no more justice?" By the little that I know and have seen and am seeing, I can tell what an enormous rush sprang up, at the same time as the war, against the equality of the living. And if that injustice, which was turning the heroism of the others into a cheat has not been openly extended, it is because the war has lasted too long, and the scandal became so glaring that they were forced to look into it. It seems that it is only through fear that they have ended by deciding so much.

* * * * * *

I go into Fontan's. Crillon is with me—I picked him up from the little glass cupboard of his shop as I came out. He is finding it harder and harder to keep going; he has aged a lot, and his frame, so powerfully bolted together, cracks with rheumatism.

We sit down. Crillon groans and bends so low in his hand-to-hand struggle with the pains which beset him that I think his forehead is going to strike the marble-topped table.

He tells me in detail of his little business, which is going badly, and how he has confused glimpses of the bare and empty future which awaits him—when a sergeant with a fair mustache and eyeglasses makes his entry. This personage, whose collar shows white thunderbolts,⁹ instead of a number, comes and sits near us. He orders a port wine and Victorine serves it with a smile. She smiles at random, and indistinctly, at all the men, like Nature.

The newcomer takes off his cap, looks at the windows and yawns. "I'm bored," he says.

He comes nearer and freely offers us his talk. He sets himself chattering with spirited and easy grace, of men and things. He works at the Town Hall and knows a lot of secrets which he lets us into. He points to a couple of sippers at a table in the corner reserved for commercial people. "The grocer and the ironmonger," he says, "there's two that know how to go about it! At the beginning of the war there was a business crisis by the force of things, and they had to tighten their belts like the rest. Then they got their revenge and swept the dibs in and hoarded stuff up, and speculated, and they're still revenging themselves. You should see the stocks of goods they sit on in their cellars and wait for the rises that the newspapers foretell! They've got one excuse, it's true—there are others, bigger people, that are worse. Ah, you can say that the business people will have given a rich notion of their patriotism during the war!"

The fair young man stretches himself backward to his full length, with his heels together on the ground, his arms rigid on the table, and opens his mouth with all his might and for a long time. Then he goes on in a loud voice, careless who hears him, "Why, I saw the other day, at the Town Hall, piles of the Declarations of Profits, required by the Treasury. I don't know, of course, for I've not read them, but I'm as sure and certain as you are that all those innumerable piles of declarations are just so many columns of cod and humbug and lies!"

Intelligent and inexhaustible, accurately posted through the clerk's job in which he is sheltering, the sergeant relates with careless gestures his stories of scandals and huge profiteering, "while our good fellows are fighting." He talks and talks, and concludes by saying that after all he doesn't care a damn as long as they let him alone.

Monsieur Fontan is in the café. A woman leads up to him a tottering being whom she introduces to him. "He's ill, Monsieur Fontan, because he hasn't had enough to eat."

"Well now! And I'm ill, too," says Fontan jovially, "but it's because I eat too much."

The sergeant takes his leave, touching us with a slight salute. "He's right, that smart gentleman," says Crillon to me. "It's always been like that, and it will always be like that, you know!"

Aloof, I keep silence. I am still tired and stunned by all these sayings in the little time since I remained so long without hearing anything but myself. But I am sure they are all true, and that patriotism is only a word or a tool for many. And feeling the rags of the common soldier still on me, I knit my brows and realize that it is a disgrace and a shame for the poor to be deceived as they are.

Crillon is smiling, as always! On his huge face, where every passing day now leaves some marks, on his round-eyed weakened face with its mouth opened like a cypher, the old smile of yore is spread out. I used to think then that resignation was a virtue; I see now that it is a vice. The optimist is the permanent accomplice of all evil-doers. This passive smile which I admired but lately—I find it despicable on this poor face.

* * * * * *

The café has filled up with workmen, either old or very young, from the town and the country, but chiefly the country.

What are they doing, these lowly, these ill-paid? They are dirty and they are drinking. They are dark, although it is the forenoon, because they are dirty. In the light there is that obscurity which they carry on them; and a bad smell removes itself with them.

I see three convalescent soldiers from the hospital join the plebeian groups; they are recognized by their coarse clothes, their caps and big boots, and because their gestures are soldered together and conform to a common movement.

By force of "glasses all round," these drinkers begin to talk in loud voices; they get excited and shout at random; and in the end they drop visibly into unconsciousness, into oblivion, into defeat.

The wine-merchant is at his cash desk, which shines like silver. He stands behind the center of it, colorless, motionless, like a bust on a pedestal. His bare arms hang down, pallid as his face. He comes and wipes away some spilled wine, and his hands shine and drip, like a butcher's.

* * * * * *

"I'm forgetting to tell you," cried Crillon, "that they had news of your regiment a few days ago. Little Mélusson's had his head blown to bits in an attack. Here, y'know; he was a softy and an idler. Well, he was attacking like a devil. War remakes men like that!"

"Termite?" I asked.

"Ah, yes! Termite the poacher! Why it's a long time since they haven't seen him. Disappeared, it seems. S'pose he's killed."

Then he talks to me of this place. Brisbille, for instance, always the same, a Socialist and a scandal.

"There's him," says Crillon, "and that dangerous chap Eudo as well, with his notorient civilities. Would you believe it, they've not been able to pinch him for his spying proclensities! Nothing in his past life, nothing in his conductions, nothing in his expensiture, nothing to find fault with. Mustn't he be a deep one?"

I presume to think—suppose it was all untrue? Yet it seemed a formidable task to upset on the spot one of the oldest and most deeply rooted creeds in our town. But I risk it. "Perhaps he's innocent."

Crillon jumps, and shouts, "What! You suspect him of being innocent!" His face is convulsed and he explodes with an enormous laugh, a laugh irresistible as a tidal wave, the laugh of all!

"Talking about Termite," says Crillon a moment later, "it seems it wasn't him that did the poaching."

The military convalescents are leaving the tavern. Crillon watches them go away with their parallel movements and their sticks.

"Yes, there's wounded here and there's dead there!" he says; "all those who hadn't got a privilential situation! Ah, la, la! The poor devils, when you think of it, eh, what they must have suffered! And at this moment, all the time, there's some dying. And we stand it very well, an' hardly think of it. They didn't need to kill so many, that's certain—there's been faults and blunders, as everybody knows of. But fortunately," he adds, with animation, putting on my shoulder the hand that is big as a young animal, "the soldiers' deaths and the chief's blunders, that'll all disappear one fine day, melted away and forgotten in the glory of the victorious Commander!"

* * * * * *

There has been much talk in our quarter of a Memorial Festival.

I am not anxious to be present and I watch Marie set off. Then I feel myself impelled to go there, as if it were a duty.

I cross the bridge. I stop at the corner of the Old Road, on the edge of the fields. Two steps away there is the cemetery, which is hardly growing, since nearly all those who die now are not anywhere.

I lift my eyes and take in the whole spectacle together. The hill which rises in front of me is full of people. It trembles like a swarm of bees. Up above, on the avenue of trimmed limetrees, it is crowned by the sunshine and by the red platform, which scintillates with the richness of dresses and uniforms and musical instruments.

Then there is a red barrier. On this side of that barrier, lower down, the public swarms and rustles.

I recognize the great picture of the past. I remember this ceremony, spacious as a season, which has been regularly staged here so many times in the course of my childhood and youth, and with almost the same rites and forms. It was like this last year, and the other years, and a century ago and centuries since.

Near me an old peasant in sabots is planted. Rags, shapeless and colorless—the color of time—cover the eternal man of the fields. He is what he always was. He blinks, leaning on a stick; he holds his cap in his hand because what he sees is so like a church service. His legs are trembling; he wonders if he ought to be kneeling.

And I, I feel myself diminished, cut back, returned through the cycles of time to the little that I am.

* * * * * *

Up there, borne by the flag-draped rostrum, a man is speaking. He lifts a sculptural head aloft, whose hair is white as marble.

At my distance I can hardly hear him. But the wind carries me some phrases, louder shouted, of his peroration. He is preaching resignation to the people, and the continuance of things. He implores them to abandon finally the accursed war of classes, to devote themselves forever to the blessed war of races in all its shapes. After the war there must be no more social utopias, but discipline instead, whose grandeur and beauty the war has happily revealed, the union of rich and poor for national expansion and the victory of France in the world, and sacred hatred of the Germans, which is a virtue in the French. Let us remember!

Then another orator excites himself and shouts that the war has been such a magnificent harvest of heroism that it must not be regretted. It has been a good thing for France; it has made lofty virtues and noble instincts gush forth from a nation which seemed to be decadent. Our people had need of an awakening and to recover themselves, and acquire new vigor. With metaphors which hover and vibrate he proclaims the glory of killing and being killed, he exalts the ancient passion for plumes and scarlet in which the heart of France is molded.

Alone on the edge of the crowd I feel myself go icy by the touch of these words and commands, which link future and past together and misery to misery. I have already heard them resounding forever. A world of thoughts growls confusedly within me. Once I cried noiselessly, "No!"—a deformed cry, a strangled protest of all my faith against all the fallacy which comes down upon us. That first cry which I have risked among men, I cast almost as a visionary, but almost as a dumb man. The old peasant did not even turn his earthy, gigantic head. And I hear a roar of applause go by, of popular expanse.

I go up to join Marie, mingling with the crowd; I divide serried knots of them. Suddenly there is profound silence, and every one stands immovable. Up there the Bishop is on his feet. He raises his forefinger and says, "The dead are not dead. They are rewarded in heaven; but even here on earth they are alive. They keep watch in our hearts, eternally preserved from oblivion. Theirs is the immortality of glory and gratitude. They are not dead, and we should envy them more than pity."

And he blesses the audience, all of whom bow or kneel. I remained upright, stubbornly, with clenched teeth. And I remember things, and I say to myself, "Have the dead died for nothing? If the world is to stay as it is, then—yes!"

Several men did not bend their backs at first, and then they obeyed the general movement; and I felt on my shoulders all the heavy weight of the whole bowing multitude.

Monsieur Joseph Bonéas is talking within a circle. Seeing him again I also feel for one second the fascination he once had for me. He is wearing an officer's uniform of the Town Guard, and his collar hides the ravages in his neck. He is holding forth. What says he? He says, "We must take the long view."

"We must take the long view. For my part, the only thing I admire in militarist Prussia is its military organization. After the war—for we must not limit our outlook to the present conflict—we must take lessons from it, and just let the simple-minded humanitarians go on bleating about universal peace."

He goes on to say that in his opinion the orators did not sufficiently insist on the necessity for tying the economic hands of Germany after the war. No annexations, perhaps; but tariffs, which would be much better. And he shows in argument the advantages and prosperity brought by carnage and destruction.

He sees me. He adorns himself with a smile and comes forward with proffered hand. I turn violently away. I have no use for the hand of this sort of outsider, this sort of traitor.

They lie. That ludicrous person who talks of taking the long view while there are still in the world only a few superb martyrs who have dared to do it, he who is satisfied to contemplate, beyond the present misery of men, the misery of their children; and the white-haired man who was extolling slavery just now, and trying to turn aside the demands of the people and switch them on to traditional massacre; and he who from the height of his bunting and trestles would have put a glamour of beauty and morality on battles; and he, the attitudinizer, who brings to life the memory of the dead only to deny with word trickery the terrible evidence of death, he who rewards the martyrs with the soft soap of false promises—all these people tell lies, lies, lies! Through their words I can hear the mental reservation they are chewing over—"Around us, the deluge; and after us, the deluge." Or else they do not even lie; they see nothing and they know not what they say.

They have opened the red barrier. Applause and congratulations cross each other. Some notabilities come down from the rostrum, they look at me, they are obviously interested in the wounded soldier that I am, they advance towards me. Among them is the intellectual person who spoke first. He is wagging the white head and its cauliflower curls, and looking all ways with eyes as empty as those of a king of cards. They told me his name, but I have forgotten it with contempt. I slip away from them. I am bitterly remorseful that for so long a portion of my life I believed what Bonéas said. I accuse myself of having formerly put my trust in speakers and writers who—however learned, distinguished, famous—were only imbeciles or villains. I fly from these people, since I am not strong enough to answer and resist them—or to cry out upon them that the only memory it is important to preserve of the years we have endured is that of their loathsome horror and lunacy.

* * * * * *

But the few words fallen from on high have sufficed to open my eyes, to show me that the Separation I dimly saw in the tempest of my nights in hospital was true. It comes down from vacancy and the clouds, it takes form and it takes root—it is there, it is there; and the indictment comes to light, as precise and as tragic as that row of faces!

Kings? There they are. There are many different kinds of king, just as there are different gods. But there is one royalty everywhere, and that is the very form of ancient society, the great machine which is stronger than men. And all the personages enthroned on that rostrum—those business men and bishops, those politicians and great merchants, those bulky office-holders or journalists, those old generals in sumptuous decorations, those writers in uniform—they are the custodians of the highest law and its executors.

It is those people whose interests are common and are contrary to those of mankind; and their interests are—above all and imperiously—let nothing change! It is those people who keep their eternal subjects in eternal order, who deceive and dazzle them, who take their brains away as they take their bodies, who flatter their servile instincts, who make shallow, resplendent creeds for them, and explain huge happenings away with all the pretexts they like. It is because of them that the law of things does not rest on justice and the moral law.

If some of them are unconscious of it, no matter. Neither does it matter that all of them do not always profit by the public's servitude, nor that some of them, sometimes, even happen to suffer from it. They are none the less, all of them, by their solid coalition, material and moral, the defenders of lies above and delusion below. These are the people who reign in the place of kings, or at the same time, here as everywhere.

Formerly I used to see a harmony of interests and ideals on all that festive, sunlit hill. Now I see reality broken in two, as I did on my bed of pain. I see the two enemy races face to face—the victors and the vanquished.

Monsieur Gozlan looks like a master of masters—an aged collector of fortune, whose speculations are famous, whose wealth increases unaided, who makes as much profit as he likes and holds the district in the hollow of his hand. His vulgar movements flash with diamonds, and a bulky golden trinket hangs on his belly like a phallus. The generals beside him—those glorious potentates whose smiles are made of so many souls—and the administrators and the honorables only look like secondary actors.

Fontan occupies considerable space on the rostrum. He drowses there, with his two spherical hands planted in front of him. The voluminous trencherman digests and blows forth with his buttered mouth; and what he has eaten purrs within him. As for Rampaille, the butcher, he has mingled with the public. He is rich but dressed with bad taste. It is his habit to say, "I am a poor man of the people, I am; look at my dirty clothes." A moment ago, when the lady who was collecting for the Lest-we-Forget League suddenly confronted him and trapped him amid general attention, he fumbled desperately in his fob and dragged three sous out of his body. There are several like him on this side of the barrier, looking as though they were part of the crowd, but only attached to it by their trade. Kings do not now carry royalty everywhere on their sleeves; they obliterate themselves in the clothes of everybody. But all the hundred faces of royalty have the same signs, all of them, and are distinctly repeated through their smiles of cupidity, rapacity, ferocity.

And there the dark multitude fidgets about. By footpaths and streets they have come from the country and the town. I see, gazing earnestly, stiff-set with attention, faces scorched by rude contact with the seasons or blanched by bad atmospheres; the sharp and mummified face of the peasant; faces of young men grown bitter before they have come of age; of women grown ugly before they have come of age, who draw the little wings of their capes over their faded blouses and faded throats; the clerks of anemic and timorous career; and the little people with whom times are so difficult, whom their mediocrity depresses; all that stirring of backs and shoulders and hanging arms, in poverty dressed up or naked. Behold their numbers and immense strength. Behold, therefore, authority and justice. For justice and authority are not hollow formulas—they are life, the most of life there can be; they are mankind, they are mankind in all places and all times. These words, justice and authority, do not echo in an abstract sphere. They are rooted in the human being. They overflow and palpitate. When I demand justice, I am not groping in a dream, I am crying from the depths of all unhappy hearts.

Such are they, that mountain of people heaped on the ground like metal for the roads, overwhelmed by unhappiness, debased by charity and asking for it, bound to the rich by urgent necessity, entangled in the wheels of a single machine, the machine of frightful repetition. And in that multitude I also place nearly all young people, whoever they are, because of their docility and their general ignorance. These lowly people form an imposing mass as far as one may see, yet each of them is hardly anything, because he is isolated. It is almost a mistake to count them; what you see when you look at the multitude is an immensity made of nothing.

And the people of to-day—overloaded with gloom and intoxicated with prejudice—see blood, because of the red hangings of rostrums; they are fascinated by the sparkle of diamonds, of necklaces, of decorations, of the eyeglasses of the intellectuals. They have eyes but they see not, ears but they hear not; arms which they do not use; and they are thoughtless because they let others do their thinking! And the other half of this same multitude is yonder, looking for Man and looked for by Man, in the big black furrows where blood is scattered and the human race is disappearing. And still farther away, in another part of the world, the same throne-like platforms are crushing into the same immense areas of men; and the same gilded servants of royalty are scattering broadcast words which are only a translation of those which fell on us here.

Some women in mourning are hardly stains on this gloomy unity. They wander and turn round in the open spaces, and are the same as they were in ancient times. They are not of any age or any century, these murdered souls, covered with black veils; they are you and I.

My vision was true from top to bottom. The evil dream has become a concrete tragi-comedy which is worse. It is inextricable, heavy, crushing. I flounder from detail to detail of it; it drags me along. Behold what is. Behold, therefore, what will be—exploitation to the last breath, to the limit of wearing out, to death perfected!

I have overtaken Marie. By her side I feel more defenseless than when I am alone. While we watch the festival, the shining hurly-burly, murmuring and eulogistic, the Baroness espies me, smiles and signs to me to go to her. So I go, and in the presence of all she pays me some compliment or other on my service at the front. She is dressed in black velvet and wears her white hair like a diadem. Twenty-five years of vassalage bow me before her and fill me with silence. And I salute the Gozlans also, in a way which I feel is humble in spite of myself, for they are all-powerful over me, and they make Marie an allowance without which we could not live properly. I am no more than a man.

I see Tudor, whose eyes were damaged in Artois, hesitating and groping. The Baroness has found a little job for him in the castle kitchens.

"Isn't she good to the wounded soldiers?" they are saying around me. "She's a real benefactor!"

This time I say aloud, "There is the real benefactor," and I point to the ruin which the young man has become whom we used to know, to the miserable, darkened biped whose eyelids flutter in the daylight, who leans weakly against a tree in face of the festive crowd, as if it were an execution post.

"Yes—after all—yes, yes," the people about me murmur, timidly; they also blinking as though tardily enlightened by the spectacle of the poor benefactor.

But they are not heard—they hardly even hear themselves—in the flood of uproar from a brass band. A triumphal march goes by with the strong and sensual driving force of its, "Forward! You shall not know!" The audience fill themselves with brazen music, and overflow in cheers.

The ceremony is drawing to a close. They who were seated on the rostrum get up. Fontan, bewildered with sleepiness, struggles to put on a tall hat which is too narrow, and while he screws it round he grimaces. Then he smiles with his boneless mouth. All congratulate themselves through each other; they shake their own hands; they cling to themselves. After their fellowship in patriotism they are going back to their calculations and gratifications, glorified in their egotism, sanctified, beatified; more than ever will they blend their own with the common cause and say, "We are the people!"

Brisbille, seeing one of the orators passing near him, throws him a ferocious look, and shouts, "Land-shark!" and other virulent insults.

But because of the brass instruments let loose, people only see him open his mouth, and Monsieur Mielvaque dances with delight. Monsieur Mielvaque, declared unfit for service, has been called up again. More miserable than ever, worn and pared and patched up, more and more parched and shriveled by hopelessly long labor—he blots out the shiny places on his overcoat with his pen—Mielvaque points to Brisbille gagged by the band, he writhes with laughter and shouts in my ear, "He might be trying to sing!"

Madame Marcassin's paralyzed face appears, the disappearance of which she unceasingly thinks has lacerated her features. She also applauds the noise and across her face—which has gone out like a lamp—there shot a flash. Can it be only because, to-day, attention is fixed on her?

A mother, mutilated in her slain son, is giving her mite to the offertory for the Lest-we-Forget League. She is bringing her poverty's humble assistance to those who say, "Remember evil; not that it may be avoided, but that it may be revived, by exciting at random all causes of hatred. Memory must be made an infectious disease." Bleeding and bloody, inflamed by the stupid selfishness of vengeance, she holds out her hand to the collector, and drags behind her a little girl who, nevertheless, will one day, perhaps, be a mother.

Lower down, an apprentice is devouring an officer's uniform with his gaze. He stands there hypnotized; and the sky-blue and beautiful crimson come off on his eyes. At that moment I saw clearly that beauty in uniforms is still more wicked than stupid.

Ah! That frightful prophecy locked up within me is hammering my skull, "I have confidence in the abyss of the people."

* * * * * *

Wounded by everything I see, I sink down in a corner. Truth is simple; but the world is no longer simple. There are so many things! How will truth ever change its defeat into victory? How is it ever going to heal all those who do not know! I grieve that I am weak and ineffective, that I am only I. On earth, alas, truth is dumb, and the heart is only a stifled cry!

I look for support, for some one who does not leave me alone. I am too much alone, and I look eagerly. But there is only Brisbille!

There is only that tipsy automaton; that parody of a man.

There he is. Close by he is more drunk than in the distance! Drunkenness bedaubs him; his eyes are filled with wine, his cheeks are like baked clay, his nose like a baked apple, he is almost blinded by viscous tufts. In the middle of that open space he seems caught in a whirlpool. It happens that he is in front of me for a moment, and he hurls at my head some furious phrases in which I recognize, now and again, the truths in which I believe! Then, with antics at once desperate and too heavy for him, he tries to perform some kind of pantomime which represents the wealthy class, round-paunched as a bag of gold, sitting on the proletariat till their noses are crushed in the gutter, and proclaiming, with their eyes up to heaven and their hands on their hearts, "And above all, no more class-wars!" There is something alarming in the awkwardness of the grimacing object begotten by that obstructed brain. It seems as if real suffering is giving voice through him with a beast's cry.

When he has spoken, he collapses on to a stone. With his fist, whose leather is covered with red hair, like a cow's, he hides the squalid face that looks as if it had been spat upon. "Folks aren't wicked," he says, "but they're stupid, stupid, stupid."