Pierre and Luce/2
Pierre Aubier lived with his parents near Cluny Square. His father was a municipal judge; his brother, older than he by six years, had volunteered at the beginning of the war. A good sound family of the bourgeois class, excellent folks, affectionate and human, never having dared to think for themselves and very probably never imagining that such a thing could be. Profoundly honest and with a lofty sense of the duties of his office, Judge Aubier would have rejected with indignation as a supreme insult the suspicion even that the verdicts he announced could have been dictated by any other considerations than those of equity and his own conscience. But the voice of his conscience had never spoken—let us better say whispered—against the government. For that conscience was born a functionary. It registered thoughts as a State function—variable but infallible. Established powers were invested by him with a sacred truth. He admired sincerely those souls of iron, the great free and unbending magistrates of the past; and perhaps secretly believed himself to be of their stock. He was a very small edition of Michel de l'Hospital over whom a century of republican slavery had passed.
As to Madame Aubier she was as good a Christian as her husband was a good republican. Just as sincerely and honestly as he made himself a docile instrument of the government against any form of liberty which was not official, so did she mingle her prayers, and that in perfect purity of heart, with the homicidal vows which were made about the war in every country of Europe by the Catholic priests, the Protestant ministers, the rabbis and the popes, the newspapers and the right-minded thinkers of the time. And both of them, father and mother, adored their children and, like true French people, had for them only a profound, essential affection, would have sacrificed everything for them, and yet, in order to do as others, would sacrifice them without hesitation. To whom? Why, to the unknown god. In every epoch Abraham has led Isaac to the funeral pile. And his magnificent folly still remains an example for poor human beings.
As often is the case, at this family hearth affection was great and intimacy null. How should thoughts communicate freely from one to the other when each one forbore a look into the bottom of his own mind? Whatever one may feel, one knows that certain dogmas at any rate must be blinked, set aside; and if it already amounts to an embarrassment when the dogmas are discreet enough to stay within the limits traced for them (that was the case, to sum all up, of those belonging to the beyond) what is to be said when they pretend to mix themselves with life, to rule life entirely as our laical and obligatory dogmas actually do? Just you try to forget the dogma of your country! The new religion compelled a return to the Old Testament. It was not to be made comfortable with lip devotion and innocent rituals, hygienic and ridiculous, like confession, Friday fasting, rest on Sunday, which once upon a time incited the racy spirit of our "philosophers" during the period when the people were free—under the kings. The new religion wanted all, was not satisfied with less; all the man complete, his body, his blood, his life and his thinking mind. Above all his blood. Since the time of the Aztecs of Mexico never was there a divinity so gorged with blood. It would be deeply unjust to say that the believers did not suffer from this. They suffered, but they believed. Alas my poor brother men, for whom suffering itself is a proof positive of the divine! . . .
Mr. and Mrs. Aubier suffered like the others, and like the others adored. But from a growing boy one could not demand such abnegation of heart, feeling and good sense. Pierre would have liked to comprehend at least what it was that oppressed him. What a lot of questions burned within which he could not utter! For the very first word of all was, "But what if I don't believe in it at all!"—a blasphemy just to start with. No, he could not speak out. They would have gazed at him in a stupor, frightened, indignant—with sorrow and shame. And since he was at that plastic age when the soul, with a bark still too tender, wrinkles up at the slightest breeze that comes from outside and under its furtive fingers molds its form shudderingly, he felt himself beforehand sorrowful and ashamed. Ah! how they believed, all of them! (But did they really all of them believe?) How was it they managed it then?—One did not dare to ask. Not to believe, standing all alone among all those who do believe, is like one who lacks some organ, superfluous perchance, but one that all the others possess; and so, blushing, one hides one's nudity from the public.
The only one who was able to comprehend the tortures of the young fellow was his elder brother. Pierre had for Philip that adoration which the younger ones often have (but which they jealously conceal) for the older brother or sister, some stranger comrade, at times merely the vision of an hour and lost again—who realizes in their eyes the dream at once of what they could wish to be and of what they would like to love: chaste ardors and troublesome, of the future, formed of mixing currents. The big brother was aware of this naïve homage and was flattered by it. Not so long ago he had tried to read the heart of the little brother, and explain things to him with discretion; for, although more robust, like him he was molded of that fine clay which, among the better sort of men, retains a little of the woman and does not blush to own it. But the war had come and torn him away from his hard working career, from his study of the sciences, from his twenty-year-old dream and from his intimacy with his young brother. He had dropped everything in the intoxicating idealism of the moment, like a big crazy bird that launches out into space with the heroic and absurd illusion that his beak and his talons will put an end to the war and restore to earth the reign of peace. Since then the big bird had returned two or three times to the nest; each time, alas, a little more worn in plumage. He had come back denuded of many of his illusions, but he found himself too much mortified about them to acknowledge it. He was ashamed to have believed in them. Folly, not to have known how to see life as it is! Now he set his heart upon dissipating its enchantment and accepting it stoically, whatsoever it might turn out. Not himself alone did he punish; a wretched suffering urged him to punish his illusions in the heart of his young brother, where he found that they held their own. At his first coming back, when Pierre had run up to him burning in his walled-up heart, he had been frozen at once by the welcome his elder gave him, affectionate certainly, always affectionate, but with a certain harsh irony in his tone hard to fathom. Questions that pressed forward to his lips were pushed back on the instant. Philip had seen them coming and cut them down with a word, with a look. After two or three attempts Pierre drew back with an aching heart. He did not recognize his brother any more. The other recognized him only too well. He perceived in him what he himself had been not so long ago and what never he could be again. He made him pay for it. It caused him regret afterward, but of that he showed no sign and just began over again. Both of them suffered and, through a too common misunderstanding, their suffering, so much alike, so near, which ought to have brought them together, only separated them. The sole difference between them was that the elder knew that it was near while Pierre believed himself alone in his suffering with nobody to whom he could open his soul.
Then why did he not turn toward those of his own age, his companions at school? It might seem as if these growing youths ought to have come close to one another and mutually given one another support. But nothing of the kind. On the contrary, a sorrowful fatality kept them separate, scattered in little groups, and even in the inner circle of these minim groups kept them distant and reserved. The commoner sort had plunged, eyes closed, head foremost into the current of the war. The larger number drew themselves away and did not feel any connection with the generations that preceded them; they did not partake in any way of their passions, their hopes and their hatreds; they were bystanders beside all the frantic goings-on like men who are sober looking on at those who are drunk. But what could they do in opposition? Many had started little magazines, reviews whose ephemeral lives were snuffed out after the first numbers for lack of air; the censorship produced a vacuum; the entire thought of France was under the pneumatic exhausting bell. Among these young fellows the most distinguished ones, too feeble to rebel and too proud to complain, knew beforehand that they were delivered up to the sword of war. While they waited for their turn at the slaughterhouse they looked on and made their judgments in silence, each one by himself, with a little surprise and a great deal of irony. Through a disdainful reaction against the mental condition of the herd they fell back into a kind of egotism, intellectual and artistic egotism, an idealistic sensualism, where the tracked and hunted ego vindicated its rights against human fellowship. Laughable fellowship, which made itself manifest to these adolescents only in the shape of finished murder, one undergone in common! A precocious experience had shriveled their illusions: they had seen how much those same illusions were worth in their elders and how those who did not believe in them paid for them with their lives. Even as to those of their own age and as to man in general their confidence was shaken. And besides, at such a time it cost something to confide in people! Every day one learned of some denunciation of thoughts and intimate conversations by a patriotic spy whose zeal the government honored and stimulated. So it was that these young people, through discouragement, through disdain, through prudence, through a stoical sense of their solitude in thought, gave themselves very little indeed the one to the other.
Pierre could not find among them that Horatio whom little eighteen-year-old Hamlets seek. If he had a horror of estranging his thought from public opinion (that public woman) he did feel the need of joining it freely with souls of his own choosing. He was too tender to be able to content himself with himself. He suffered from the universal suffering. That crushed him by the amount of its pain, which he exaggerated:—for if humanity does support it in spite of everything, that is because humanity has a harder hide than is the delicate skin of a frail boy. But what he did not exaggerate and what weighed him down much more than the suffering of the world was the imbecility of it all.
It is nothing to undergo pain, it is nothing to die, if only one can see a reason for it. Sacrifice is a good thing when one understands why it is made. But what is this why? What is the sense of this world and its harrowings for a youth? If he be sincere and sound of mind, in what way can he interest himself in the coarse medley of nations standing head to head like stupid rams on the brink of an abyss, into which all are about to tumble? And yet the road was broad enough for all. Why then this madness to destroy oneself? Why these countries given over to pride, these States devoted to rapine, these peoples to whom is taught murder, as if murder were their duty? But wherefore this butchery everywhere among living beings? Why this world that devours itself? To what purpose the nightmare of that monstrous and endless chain of life, each one of whose links sets its jaws into the neck of the other, feasts on its flesh, delights in its suffering and lives through its death? Why the conflict and why the pain? Why death? Why life? Why? Why? . . .
That night when the boy got home the why had ceased its cry.