Light

* * * * * *

The leaves are falling; the year draws near to its end; the wedding is arranged to take place about Christmas.

That decision was mine; Marie said "yes," as usual, and her father, absorbed all the day in figures, would emerge from them at night, like a shipwrecked man, seeing darkly, passive, except on rare occasions when he had fits of mad obstinacy, and no one knew why.

In the early morning sometimes, when I was climbing Chestnut Hill on my way to work, Marie would appear before me at a corner, in the pale and blushing dawn. We would walk on together, bathed in those fresh fires, and would watch the town at our feet rising again from its ashes. Or, on my way back, she would suddenly be there, and we would walk side by side towards her home. We loved each other too much to be able to talk. A very few words we exchanged just to entwine our voices, and in speaking of other people we smiled at each other.

One day, about that time, Monsieur the Marquis of Monthyon had the kindly thought of asking us both to an evening party at the castle, with several leading people of our quarter. When all the guests were gathered in a huge gallery, adorned with busts which sat in state between high curtains of red damask, the Marquis took it into his head to cut off the electricity. In a lordly way he liked heavy practical jokes—I was just smiling at Marie, who was standing near me in the middle of the crowded gallery, when suddenly it was dark. I put out my arms and drew her to me. She responded with a spirit she had not shown before, our lips met more passionately than ever, and our single body swayed among the invisible, ejaculating throng that elbowed and jostled us. The light flashed again. We had loosed our hold. Ah, it was not Marie whom I had clasped! The woman fled with a stifled exclamation of shame and indignation towards him who she believed had embraced her, and who had seen nothing. Confused, and as though still blind, I rejoined Marie, but I was myself again with difficulty. In spite of all, that kiss which had suddenly brought me in naked contact with a complete stranger remained to me an extraordinary and infernal delight. Afterwards, I thought I recognized the woman by her blue dress, half seen at the same time as the gleam of her neck after that brief and dazzling incident. But there were three of them somewhat alike. I never knew which of those unknown women concealed within her flesh the half of the thrill that I could not shake off all the evening.

* * * * * *

There was a large gathering at the wedding. The Marquis and Marchioness of Monthyon appeared at the sacristy. Brisbille, by good luck, stayed away. Good sectarian that he was, he only acknowledged civil marriages. I was a little shamefaced to see march past, taking their share of the fine and tranquil smile distributed by Marie, some women who had formerly been my mistresses—Madame Lacaille, nervous, subtle, mystical; big Victorine and her good-natured rotundity, who had welcomed me any time and anywhere; and Madeleine Chaine; and slender Antonia above all, with the Italian woman's ardent and theatrical face, ebony-framed, and wearing a hat of Parisian splendor. For Antonia is very elegant since she married Véron. I could not help wincing when I saw that lanky woman, who had clung to me in venturesome rooms, now assiduous around us in her ceremonious attire. But how far off and obliterated all that was!

CHAPTER V
DAY BY DAY

We rearranged the house. We did not alter the general arrangement, nor the places of the heavy furniture—that would have been too great a change. But we cast out all the dusty old stuff, the fossilized and worthless knick-knacks that Mame had accumulated. The photographs on the walls, which were dying of jaundice and debility, and which no longer stood for anybody, because of the greatness of time, we cleared out of their imitation tortoiseshell and buried in the depths of drawers.

I bought some furniture, and as we sniffed the odor of varnish which hung about for a long time in the lower room, we said, "This is the real thing." And, indeed, our home was pretty much like the middle-class establishments of our quarter and everywhere. Is it not the only really proud moment here on earth, when we can say, "I, too!"

Years went by. There was nothing remarkable in our life. When I came home in the evening, Marie, who often had not been out and had kept on her dressing-gown and plaits, used to say, "There's been nothing to speak of to-day."

The aeroplanes were appearing at that time. We talked about them, and saw photographs of them in the papers. One Sunday we saw one from our window. We had heard the chopped-up noise of its engine expanding over the sky; and down below, the townsfolk on their doorsteps, raised their heads towards the ceiling of their streets. Rattling space was marked with a dot. We kept our eyes on it and saw the great flat and noisy insect grow bigger and bigger, silhouetting the black of its angles and partitioned lines against the airy wadding of the clouds. When its headlong flight had passed, when it had dwindled in our eyes and ears amid the new world of sounds, which it drew in its train, Marie sighed dreamily.

"I would like," she said, "to go up in an aeroplane, into the wind—into the sky!"

One spring we talked a lot about a trip we would take some day. Some railway posters had been stuck on the walls of the old tin works, that the Pocard scheme was going to transfigure. We looked at them the day they were freshly brilliant in their wet varnish and their smell of paste. We preferred the bill about Corsica, which showed seaside landscapes, harbors with picturesque people in the foreground and a purple mountain behind, all among garlands. And later, even when stiffened and torn and cracking in the wind, that poster attracted us.

One evening, in the kitchen, when we had just come in—there are memories which mysteriously outlive the rest—and Marie was lighting the fire, with her hat on and her hands wiped out in the twilight by the grime of the coal, she said, "We'll make that trip later!"

Sometimes it happened that we went out, she and I, during the week. I looked about me and shared my thoughts with her. Never very talkative, she would listen to me. Coming out of the Place de l'Eglise, which used to affect us so much not long ago, we often used to meet Jean and Genevieve Trompson, near the sunken post where an old jam pot lies on the ground. Everybody used to say of these two, "They'll separate, you'll see; that's what comes of loving each other too much; it was madness, I always said so." And hearing these things, unfortunately true, Marie would murmur, with a sort of obstinate gentleness, "Love is sacred."

Returning, not far from the anachronistic and clandestine Eudo's lair, we used to hear the coughing parrot. That old bird, worn threadbare, and of a faded green hue, never ceased to imitate the fits of coughing which two years before had torn Adolphe Piot's lungs, who died in the midst of his family under such sad circumstances. Those days we would return with our ears full of the obstinate clamor of that recording bird, which had set itself fiercely to immortalize the noise that passed for a moment through the world, and toss the echoes of an ancient calamity, of which everybody had ceased to think.

Almost the only people about us are Marthe, my little sister-in-law, who is six years old, and resembles her sister like a surprising miniature; my father-in-law, who is gradually annihilating himself; and Crillon. This last lives always contented in the same shop while time goes by, like his father and his grandfather, and the cobbler of the fable, his eternal ancestor. Under his square cap, on the edge of his glazed niche, he soliloquizes, while he smokes the short and juicy pipe which joins him in talking and spitting—indeed, he seems to be answering it. A lonely toiler, his lot is increasingly hard, and almost worthless. He often comes in to us to do little jobs—mend a table leg, re-seat a chair, replace a tile. Then he says, "There's summat I must tell you–"

So he retails the gossip of the district, for it is against his conscience, as he frankly avows, to conceal what he knows. And Heaven knows, there is gossip enough in our quarter!—a complete network, above and below, of quarrels, intrigues and deceptions, woven around man, woman and the public in general. One says, "It can't be true!" and then thinks about something else.

And Crillon, in face of all this perversity, all this wrong-doing, smiles! I like to see that happy smile of innocence on the lowly worker's face. He is better than I, and he even understands life better, with his unfailing good sense.

I say to him, "But are there not any bad customs and vices? Alcoholism, for instance?"

"Yes," says Crillon, "as long as you don't exarrergate it. I don't like exarrergations, and I find as much of it among the pestimists as among the opticions. Drink, you say! It's chiefly that folks haven't enough charitableness, mind you. They blame all these poor devils that drink and they think themselves clever! And they're envious, too; if they wasn't that, tell me, would they stand there in stony peterified silence before the underhand goings-on of bigger folks? That's what it is, at bottom of us. Let me tell you now. I'll say nothing against Termite, though he's a poacher, and for the castle folks that's worse than all, but if yon bandit of a Brisbille weren't the anarchist he is and frightening everybody, I'd excuse him his dirty nose and even not taking it out of a pint pot all the week through. It isn't a crime, isn't only being a good boozer. We've got to look ahead and have a broad spirit, as Monsieur Joseph says. Tolerantness! We all want it, eh?"

"You're a good sort," I say.

"I'm a man, like everybody," proudly replies Crillon. "It's not that I hold by accustomary ideas; I'm not an antiquitary, but I don't like to single-arise myself. If I'm a botcher in life, it's cos I'm the same as others—no less," he says, straightening up. And standing still more erect, he adds, "Nor no more, neither!"

When we are not chatting we read aloud. There is a very fine library at the factory, selected by Madame Valentine Gozlan from works of an educational or moral kind, for the use of the staff. Marie, whose imagination goes further afield than mine, and who has not my anxieties, directs the reading. She opens a book and reads aloud while I take my ease, looking at the pastel portrait which hangs just opposite the window. On the glass which entombs the picture I see the gently moving and puffing reflection of the fidgety window curtains, and the face of that glazed portrait becomes blurred with broken streaks and all kinds of wave marks.

"Ah, these adventures!" Marie sometimes sighs, at the end of a chapter; "these things that never happen!"

"Thank Heaven," I cry.

"Alas," she replies.

Even when people live together they differ more than they think!

At other times Marie reads to herself, quite silently. I surprise her absorbed in this occupation. It even happens that she applies herself thus to poetry. In her set and stooping face her eyes come and go over the abbreviated lines of the verses. From time to time she raises them and looks up at the sky, and—vastly further than the visible sky—at all that escapes from the little cage of words.

And sometimes we are lightly touched with boredom.

* * * * * *

One evening Marie informed me that the canary was dead, and she began to cry, as she showed me the open cage and the bird which lay at the bottom, with its feet curled up, as rumpled and stark as the little yellow plaything of a doll. I sympathized with her sorrow; but her tears were endless, and I found her emotion disproportionate.

"Come now," I said, "after all, a bird's only a bird, a mere point that moved a little in a corner of the room. What then? What about the thousands of birds that die, and the people that die, and the poor?" But she shook her head, insisted on grieving, tried to prove to me that it was momentous and that she was right.

For a moment I stood bewildered by this want of understanding; this difference between her way of feeling and mine. It was a disagreeable revelation of the unknown. One might often, in regard to small matters, make a multitude of reflections if one wished; but one does not wish.

* * * * * *

My position at the factory and in our quarter is becoming gradually stronger. By reason of a regular gratuity which I received, we are at last able to put money aside each month, like everybody.

"I say!" cried Crillon, pulling me outside with him, as I was coming in one evening; "I must let you know that you've been spoken of spontanially for the Town Council at the next renewment. They're making a big effort, you know. Monsieur the Marquis is going to stand for the legislative elections—but we've walked into the other quarter," said Crillon, stopping dead. "Come back, come back."

We turned right-about-face.

"This patriotic society of Monsieur Joseph," Crillon went on, "has done a lot of harm to the anarchists. We've all got to let 'em feel our elbows, that's necessential. You've got a foot in the factory, eh? You see the workmen; have a crack of talk with 'em. You ingreasiate yourself with 'em, so's some of 'em'll vote for you. For them's the danger."

"It's true that I am very sympathetic to them," I murmured, impressed by this prospect.

Crillon came to a stand in front of the Public Baths. "It's the seventeenth to-day," he explained; "the day of the month when I takes a bath. Oh, yes! I know that you go every Thursday; but I'm not of that mind. You're young, of course, and p'raps you have good reason! But you take my tip, and hobnob with the working man. We must bestir ourselves and impell ourselves, what the devil! As for me, I've finished my political efforts for peace and order. It's your turn!"

He is right. Looking at the ageing man, I note that his framework is slightly bowed; that his ill-shaven cheeks are humpbacked with little ends of hair turning into white crystals. In his lowly sphere he has done his duty. I reflect upon the mite-like efforts of the unimportant people; of the mountains of tasks performed by anonymity. They are necessary, these hosts of people so closely resembling each other; for cities are built upon the poor brotherhood of paving-stones.

He is right, as always. I, who am still young; I, who am on a higher level than his; I must play a part, and subdue the desire one has to let things go on as they may.

A sudden movement of will appears in my life, which otherwise proceeds as usual.

CHAPTER VI
A VOICE IN THE EVENING

I approached the workpeople with all possible sympathy. The toiler's lot, moreover, raises interesting problems, which one should seek to understand. So I inform myself in the matter of those around me.

"You want to see the greasers' work? Here I am," said Marcassin, surnamed Pétrolus. "I'm the lamp-man. Before that I was a greaser. Is that any better? Can't say. It's here that that goes on, look—there. My place you'll find at night by letting your nose guide you."

The truth is that the corner of the factory to which he leads me has an aggressive smell. The shapeless walls of this sort of grotto are adorned with shelves full of leaking lamps—lamps dirty as beasts. In a bucket there are old wicks and other departed things. At the foot of a wooden cupboard which looks like iron are lamp glasses in paper shirts; and farther away, groups of oil-drums. All is dilapidated and ruinous; all is dark in this angle of the great building where light is elaborated. The specter of a huge window stands yonder. The panes only half appear; so encrusted are they they might be covered with yellow paper. The great stones—the rocks—of the walls are upholstered with a dark deposit of grease, like the bottom of a stewpan, and nests of dust hang from them. Black puddles gleam on the floor, with beds of slime from the scraping of the lamps.

There he lives and moves, in his armored tunic encrusted with filth as dark as coffee-grounds. In his poor claw he grips the chief implement of his work—a black rag. His grimy hands shine with paraffin, and the oil, sunk and blackened in his nails, gives them a look of wick ends. All day long he cleans lamps, and repairs, and unscrews, and fills, and wipes them. The dirt and the darkness of this population of appliances he attracts to himself, and he works like a nigger.

"For it's got to be well done," he says, "and even when you're fagged out, you must keep on rubbing hard."

"There's six hundred and sixty-three, monsieur" (he says "monsieur" as soon as he embarks on technical explanations), "counting the smart ones in the fine offices, and the lanterns in the wood-yard, and the night watchmen. You'll say to me, 'Why don't they have electricity that lights itself?' It's 'cos that costs money and they get paraffin for next to nothing, it seems, through a big firm 'at they're in with up yonder. As for me, I'm always on my legs, from the morning when I'm tired through sleeping badly, from after dinner when you feel sick with eating, up to the evening, when you're sick of everything."

The bell has rung, and we go away in company. He has pulled off his blue trousers and tunic and thrown them into a corner—two objects which have grown heavy and rusty, like tools. But the dirty shell of his toil did upholster him a little, and he emerges from it gaunter, and horribly squeezed within the littleness of a torturing jacket. His bony legs, in trousers too wide and too short, break off at the bottom in long and mournful shoes, with hillocks, and resembling crocodiles; and their soles, being soaked in paraffin, leave oily footprints, rainbow-hued, in the plastic mud.

Perhaps it is because of this dismal companion towards whom I turn my head, and whom I see trotting slowly and painfully at my side in the rumbling grayness of the evening exodus, that I have a sudden and tragic vision of the people, as in a flash's passing. (I do sometimes get glimpses of the things of life momentarily.) The dark doorway to my vision seems torn asunder. Between these two phantoms in front the sable swarm outspreads. The multitude encumbers the plain that bristles with dark chimneys and cranes, with ladders of iron planted black and vertical in nakedness—a plain vaguely scribbled with geometrical lines, rails and cinder paths—a plain utilized yet barren. In some places about the approaches to the factory cartloads of clinker and cinders have been dumped, and some of it continues to burn like pyres, throwing off dark flames and darker curtains. Higher, the hazy clouds vomited by the tall chimneys come together in broad mountains whose foundations brush the ground and cover the land with a stormy sky. In the depths of these clouds humanity is let loose. The immense expanse of men moves and shouts and rolls in the same course all through the suburb. An inexhaustible echo of cries surrounds us; it is like hell in eruption and begirt by bronze horizons.

At that moment I am afraid of the multitude. It brings something limitless into being, something which surpasses and threatens us; and it seems to me that he who is not with it will one day be trodden underfoot.

My head goes down in thought. I walk close to Marcassin, who gives me the impression of an escaping animal, hopping through the darkness—whether because of his name,² or his stench, I do not know. The evening is darkening; the wind is tearing leaves away; it thickens with rain and begins to nip.

My miserable companion's voice comes to me in shreds. He is trying to explain to me the law of unremitting toil. An echo of his murmur reaches my face.

"And that's what one hasn't the least idea of. Because what's nearest to us, often, one doesn't see it."

"Yes, that's true," I say, rather weary of his monotonous complaining.

I try a few words of consolation, knowing that he was recently married. "After all, no one comes bothering you in your own little corner. There's always that. And then, after all, you're going home—your wife is waiting for you. You're lucky–"

"I've no time; or rather, I've no strength. At nights, when I come home I'm too tired—I'm too tired, you understand, to be happy, you see. Every morning I think I shall be, and I'm hoping up till noon; but at night I'm too knocked out, what with walking and rubbing for eleven hours; and on Sundays I'm done in altogether with the week. There's even times that I don't even wash myself when I come in. I just stay with my hands mucky; and on Sundays when I'm cleaned up, it's a nasty one when they say to me, 'You're looking well.'"

And while I am listening to the tragicomical recital which he retails, like a soliloquy, without expecting replies from me—luckily, for I should not know how to answer—I can, in fact, recall those holidays when the face of Pétrolus is embellished by the visible marks of water.

"Apart from that," he goes on, withdrawing his chin into the gray string of his over-large collar; "apart from that, Charlotte, she's very good. She looks after me, and tidies the house, and it's her that lights our lamp; and she hides the books carefully away from me so's I can't grease 'em, and my fingers make prints on 'em like criminals. She's good, but it doesn't turn out well, same as I've told you, and when one's unhappy everything's favorable to being unhappy."

He is silent for a while, and then adds by way of conclusion to all he has said, and to all that one can say, "My father, he caved in at fifty. And I shall cave in at fifty, p'raps before."

With his thumb he points through the twilight at that sort of indelible darkness which makes the multitude, "Them others, it's not the same with them. There's those that want to change everything and keep going on that notion. There's those that drink and want to drink, and keep going that way."

I hardly listen to him while he explains to me the grievances of the different groups of workmen, "The molders, monsieur, them, it's a matter of the gangs–"

Just now, while looking at the population of the factory, I was almost afraid; it seemed to me that these toilers were different sorts of beings from the detached and impecunious people who live around me. When I look at this one I say to myself, "They are the same; they are all alike."

In the distance, and together, they strike fear, and their combination is a menace; but near by they are only the same as this one. One must not look at them in the distance.

Pétrolus gets excited; he makes gestures; he punches in and punches out again with his fist, the hat which is stuck askew on his conical head, over the ears that are pointed like artichoke leaves. He is in front of me, and each of his soles is pierced by a valve which draws in water from the saturated ground.

"The unions, monsieur–" he cries to me in the wind, "why, it's dangerous to point at them. You haven't the right to think any more—that's what they call liberty. If you're in them, you've got to be agin the parsons—(I'm willing, but what's that got to do with labor?)—and there's something more serious," the lamp-man adds, in a suddenly changed voice, "you've got to be agin the army,—the army!"

And now the poor slave of the lamp seems to take a resolution. He stops and devotionally rolling his Don Quixote eyes in his gloomy, emaciated face, he says, "I'm always thinking about something. What? you'll say. Well, here it is. I belong to the League of Patriots."

As they brighten still more, his eyes are like two live embers in the darkness, "Déroulède!" he cries; "that's the man—he's my God!"

Pétrolus raises his voice and gesticulates; he makes great movements in the night at the vision of his idol, to whom his leanness and his long elastic arms give him some resemblance. "He's for war; he's for Alsace-Lorraine, that's what he's for; and above all, he's for nothing else. Ah, that's all there is to it! The Boches have got to disappear off the earth, else it'll be us. Ah, when they talk politics to me, I ask 'em, 'Are you for Déroulède, yes or no?' That's enough! I got my schooling any old how, and I know next to nothing but I reckon it's grand, only to think like that, and in the Reserves I'm adjutant³—almost an officer, monsieur, just a lamp-man as I am!"

He tells me, almost in shouts and signs, because of the wind across the open, that his worship dates from a function at which Paul Déroulède had spoken to him. "He spoke to everybody, an' then he spoke to me, as close to me as you and me; but it was him! I wanted an idea, and he gave it to me!"

"Very good," I say to him; "very good. You are a patriot, that's excellent."

I feel that the greatness of this creed surpasses the selfish demands of labor—although I have never had the time to think much about these things—and it strikes me as touching and noble.

A last fiery spasm gets hold of Pétrolus as he espies afar Eudo's pointed house, and he cries that on the great day of revenge there will be some accounts to settle; and then the fervor of this ideal-bearer cools and fades, and is spent along the length of the roads. He is now no more than a poor black bantam which cannot possibly take wing. His face mournfully awakes to the evening. He shuffles along, bows his long and feeble spine, and his spirit and his strength exhausted, he approaches the porch of his house, where Madame Marcassin awaits him.