Chapter 41

Since the unhappy adventure which had destroyed Olivier's marriage and life, Jacqueline had lived a very worthy life. She withdrew from Parisian society, which, after imposing on her a hypocritical sort of quarantine, had made fresh advances to her, which she had rejected. She was not at all ashamed of what she had done as far as these people were concerned: she thought she had no reason to account to them for it, for they were more worthless than she: what she had done openly, half the women she knew did by stealth, under cover of their homes. She suffered only from the thought of the wrong she had done her nearest and dearest, the only man she had loved. She could not forgive herself for having, in so poor a world, lost an affection like his.

Her regrets, and her sorrow, grew less acute with time. There were left only a sort of mute suffering, a humiliated contempt for herself and others, and the love of her child. This affection, into which she poured all her need of love, disarmed her before him; she could not resist Georges's caprices. To excuse her weakness she persuaded herself that she was paying for the wrong she had done Olivier. She had alternate periods of exalted tenderness and weary indifference: sometimes she would worry Georges with her exacting, anxious love, and sometimes she would seem to tire of him, and she let him do as he liked. She admitted to herself that she was bringing him up badly, and she would torment herself with the admission; but she made no change. When, as she rarely did, she tried to model her principles of conduct on Olivier's way of thinking, the result was deplorable. At heart she wished to have no authority over her son save that of her affection. And she was not wrong: for between these two, however similar they might be, there were no bonds save those of the heart. Georges Jeannin was sensible of his mother's physical charm: he loved her voice, her gestures, her movements, her grace, her love. But in mind he was conscious of strangerhood to her. She only saw it as he began to grow into a man, when he turned from her. Then she was amazed and indignant, and attributed the estrangement to other feminine influences: and, as she tried awkwardly to combat them, she only estranged him more. In reality, they had always lived, side by side, each preoccupied with totally different interests, deceiving themselves as to the gulf that lay between them, with the aid of their common surface sympathies and antipathies, which disappeared when the man began to spring forth from the boy (that ambiguous creature, still impregnated with the perfume of womanhood). And bitterly Jacqueline would say to her son:

"I don't know whom you take after. You are not like your father or me."

So she made him feel all that lay between them; and he took a secret pride that was yet feverish and uneasy.

The younger generation has always a keener sense than the elder of the things that lie between them; they need to gain assurance of the importance of their existence, even at the cost of injustice or of lying to themselves. But this feeling varies in its acuteness from one period to another. In the classic ages when, for a time, the balance of the forces of a civilization are realized,--those high plateaux ending on all sides with steep slopes--the difference in level is not so great from one generation to another. But in the ages of renascence or decadence, the young men climbing or plunging down the giddy slopes, leave their predecessors far behind.--Georges, like the other young men of his time, was ascending the mountain.

He was superior neither in character nor in mind: he had many aptitudes, none of which rose above the level of elegant mediocrity. And yet, without any effort on his part, he found himself at the outset of his career several grades higher than his father, who, in his short life, had expended an incalculable amount of intellect and energy.

Hardly were the eyes of his mind opened upon the light of day than he saw all round him the heaped-up darkness, pierced by luminous gleams, the masses of knowledge and ignorance, warring truths, contradictory errors, in which his father and the men of his father's generation had feverishly groped their way. But at the same time he became conscious of a weapon in his power which they had never known: his force....

Whence did he have it?... Who can tell the mystery of the resurrections of a race, sleeping, worn out, which suddenly awakes brimming like a mountain torrent in the spring!... What would he do with his force? Use it in his turn to explore the inextricable thickets of modern thought? They had no attraction for him. He was oppressed by the menacing dangers which lurked in them. They had crushed his father. Rather than renew that experience and enter the tragic forest he would have set fire to it. He had only to glance at the books of wisdom or sacred folly which had intoxicated Olivier: the Nihilist pity of Tolstoi, the somber destructive pride of Ibsen, the frenzy of Nietzsche, the heroic, sensual pessimism of Wagner. He had turned away from them in anger and terror. He hated the realistic writers who, for half a century, had killed the joy of art. He could not, however, altogether blot out the shadows of the sorrowful dream in which he had been cradled. He would not look behind him, but he well knew that the shadow was there. He was too healthy to seek a counter-irritant to his uneasiness in the lazy skepticism of the preceding epoch: he detested the dilettantism of men like Renan and Anatole France, with their degradation of the free intellect, their joyless mirth, their irony without greatness: a shameful method, fit for slaves, playing with the chains which they are impotent to break.

He was too vigorous to be satisfied with doubt, too weak to create the conviction which, with all his soul, he desired. He asked for it, prayed for it, demanded it. And the eternal snappers-up of popularity, the great writers, the sham thinkers at bay, exploited this imperious and agonized desire, by beating the drums and shouting the clap-trap of their nostrum. From trestles, each of these Hippocrates bawled that his was the only true elixir, and decried all the rest. Their secrets were all equally worthless. None of these pedlars had taken the trouble to find a new recipe. They had hunted about among their old empty bottles. The panacea of one was the Catholic Church: another's was legitimate monarchy: yet another's, the classic tradition. There were queer fellows who declared that the remedy for all evils lay in the return to Latin. Others seriously prognosticated, with an enormous word which imposed on the herd, the domination of the Mediterranean spirit. (They would have been just as ready at some other time to talk of the Atlantic spirit.) Against the barbarians of the North and the East they pompously set up the heirs of a new Roman Empire.... Words, words, all second-hand. The refuse of the libraries scattered to the winds.--Like all his comrades, young Jeannin went from one showman to another, listened to their patter, was sometimes taken in by it, and entered the booth, only to come out disappointed and rather ashamed of having spent his time and his money in watching old clowns buffooning in shabby rags. And yet, such is youth's power of illusion, such was his certainty of gaining certainty, that he was always taken in by each new promise of each new vendor of hope. He was very French, of a hypercritical temper, and an innate lover of order. He needed a leader and could bear none; his pitiless irony always riddled them through and through.

While he was waiting for the advent of a leader who should give him the key to the riddle ... he had no time to wait. He was not the kind of man, like his father, to be satisfied with the lifelong search for truth. With or without a motive, he needed always to make up his mind, to act, to turn to account, to use his energy. Traveling, the delight of art, and especially of music, with which he had gorged himself, had at first been to him an intermittent and passionate diversion. He was handsome, ardent, precocious, beset with temptations, and he early discovered the outwardly enchanting world of love, and plunged into it with an unbridled, poetic, greedy joy. Then this impertinently naïve and insatiable cherub wearied of women: he needed action, so he gave himself up uncontrollably to sport. He tried everything, practised everything. He was always going to fencing and boxing matches: he was the French champion runner and high-jumper, and captain of a football team. He competed with a number of other crazy, reckless, rich young men like himself in ridiculous, wild motor races. Finally he threw up everything for the latest fad, and was drawn into the popular craze for flying machines. At the Rheims meetings he shouted and wept for joy with three hundred thousand other men; he felt that he was one with the whole people in a religious jubilation; the human birds flying over their heads bore them upwards in their flight: for the first time since the dawn of the great Revolution the vast multitude had raised their eyes to the heavens and seen them open.--To his mother's terror young Jeannin declared that he was going to throw in his lot with the conquerors of the air. Jacqueline implored him to give up his perilous ambition. She ordered him to do so. He took the bit between his teeth. Christophe, in whom Jacqueline thought she had found an ally, only gave the boy a little prudent advice, which he felt quite sure Georges would not follow (for, in his place, he would not have done so). He did not deem that he had any right,--even had he been able to do so--to fetter the healthy and normal expansion of the boy's vitality, which, if it had been forced into inaction, would have been perverted to his destruction.

Jacqueline could not reconcile herself to seeing her son leave her. She had vainly thought that she had renounced love, for she could not do without the illusion of love; all her affections, all her actions were tinged with it. There are so many mothers who expend on their sons all the secret ardor which they have been unable to give forth in marriage--or out of it! And when they see how easily their sons do without them, when suddenly they understand that they are not necessary to them, they go through the same kind of crisis as befalls them upon the betrayal of a lover, or the disillusion of love.--Once more Jacqueline's whole existence crumbled away. Georges saw nothing. Young people never have any idea of the tragedies of the heart going on around them: they have no time to stop and see them: and they do not wish to see: a selfish instinct bids them march straight on without looking to right or left.

Jacqueline was left alone to gulp down this new sorrow. She only emerged from it when her grief was worn out, worn out like her love. She still loved her son, but with a distant, disillusioned affection, which she knew to be futile, and she lost all interest in herself and him. So she dragged through a wretched, miserable year, without his paying her any heed. And then, poor creature, since her heart could neither live nor die without love, she was forced to find something to love. She fell victim to a strange passion, such as often takes possession of women, and especially, it would seem, of the noblest and most inaccessible, when maturity comes and the fair fruit of life has not been gathered. She made the acquaintance of a woman who, from their first meeting, gained an ascendancy over her through her mysterious power of attraction.

This woman was about her own age, and she was a nun. She was always busy with charitable works. A tall, fine, rather stout woman, dark, with rather bold, handsome features, sharp eyes, a big, sensitive, ever-smiling mouth, and a masterful chin. She was remarkably intelligent, and not at all sentimental; she had the malice of a peasant, a keen business sense, and a southern imagination, which saw everything in exaggeration, though always exactly to scale when necessary: she was a strangely enticing mixture of lofty mysticism and lawyer's cunning. She was used to domination, and the exercise of it was a habit with her. Jacqueline was drawn to her at once. She became enthusiastic over her work, or, at least, believed herself to be so. Sister Angèle knew perfectly what was the object of her passion: she was used to provoking them; and without seeming to notice them, she used skilfully to turn them to account for her work and the glory of God. Jacqueline gave up her money, her will, her heart. She was charitable, so she believed, through love.

It was not long before her infatuation was observed. She was the only person not to realize it. Georges's guardian became anxious. Georges was too generous and too easy to worry about money matters, though he saw his mother's subjection, and was shocked by it. He tried, too late in the day, to resume his old intimacy with her, and saw that a veil was drawn between them; he blamed the occult influence for it, and, both against his mother and the nun, whom he called an intriguer, he conceived a feeling of irritation which he made no attempt to disguise: he could not admit a stranger to his place in a heart that he had regarded as his natural right. It never occurred to him that his place was taken because he had left it. Instead of trying patiently to win it back, he was clumsy and cruel. Quick words passed between mother and son, both of whom were hasty and passionate, and the rupture grew marked. Sister Angèle established her ascendancy over Jacqueline, and Georges rushed away and kicked over the traces. He plunged into a restless, dissipated life; gambled, lost large sums of money; he put a certain amount of exaggeration into his extravagances, partly for his own pleasure and partly to counterbalance his mother's extravagances.--He knew the Stevens-Delestrades. Colette had marked down the handsome boy, and tried the effect on him of her charms, which she never wearied of using. She knew of all Georges's freaks, and was vastly entertained by them. But her sound common sense and the real kindness concealed beneath her frivolity, helped her to see the danger the young idiot was running. And, being well aware that it was beyond her to save him, she warned Christophe, who came at once.

Christophe was the only person who had any influence over young Jeannin. His influence was limited and very intermittent, but all the more remarkable in that it was difficult to explain. Christophe belonged to the preceding generation against which Georges and his companions were violently in reaction. He was one of the most conspicuous representatives of that period of torment whose art and ideas rouse in them a feeling of suspicion and hostility. He was unmoved by the new Gospels and the charms of the minor prophets and the old cheapjacks who were offering the young men an infallible recipe for the salvation of the world, Rome and France. He was faithful to the free faith, free of all religion, free of all parties, free of all countries, which was no longer the fashion--or had never been fashionable. Finally, though he was altogether removed from national questions, he was a foreigner in Paris at a time when all foreigners were regarded by the natives of the country as barbarians.

And yet, young Jeannin, joyous, easy-going, instinctively hostile to everything that might make him sad or uneasy, ardent in pursuit of pleasure, engrossed in violent sports, easily duped by the rhetoric of his time, in his physical vigor and mental indolence inclined to the brutal doctrines of French action, nationalist, royalist, imperialist--(he did not exactly know)--in his heart reflected only one man: Christophe. His precocious experience and the delicate tact he had inherited from his mother made him see (without being in the least disturbed by it) how little worth was the world that he could not live without, and how superior to it was Christophe. From Olivier he had inherited a vague uneasiness, which visited him in sudden fits that never lasted very long, a need of finding and deciding on some definite aim for what he was doing. And perhaps it was from Olivier that he had also inherited the mysterious instinct which drew him towards the man whom Olivier had loved.

He used to go and see Christophe. He was expansive by nature, and of a rather chattering temper, and he loved indulging in confidences. He never troubled to think whether Christophe had time to listen to him. But Christophe always did listen, and never gave any sign of impatience. Only sometimes he would be rather absent-minded when Georges had interrupted him in his work, but never for more than a few minutes, when his mind would be away putting the finishing touches to its work: then it would return to Georges, who never noticed its absence. He used to laugh at the evasion, and come back like a man tiptoeing into the room, so as not to be heard. But once or twice Georges did notice it, and then he said indignantly:

"But you are not listening!"

Then Christophe was ashamed: and docilely he would listen to Georges's story, and try to win his forgiveness by redoubled attention. The stories were often very funny: and Christophe could not help laughing at the tale of some wild freak: for Georges kept nothing back: his frankness was disarming.

Christophe did not always laugh. Georges's conduct sometimes pained him. Christophe was no saint: he knew he had no right to moralize over anybody. Georges's love affairs, and the scandalous waste of his fortune in folly, were not what shocked him most. What he found it most hard to forgive was the light-mindedness with which Georges regarded his sins: they were no burden to him: he thought them very natural. His conception of morality was very different from Christophe's. He was one of those young men who are fain to see in the relation of the sexes nothing more than a game that has no moral aspect whatever. A certain frankness and a careless kindliness were all that was necessary for an honest man. He was not troubled with Christophe's scruples. Christophe would wax wrath. In vain did he try not to impose his way of feeling upon others: he could not be tolerant, and his old violence was only half tamed. Every now and then he would explode. He could not help seeing how dirty were some of Georges's intrigues, and he used bluntly to tell him so. Georges was no more patient than he, and they used to have angry scenes, after which they would not see each other for weeks. Christophe would realize that his outbursts were not likely to change Georges's conduct, and that it was perhaps unjust to subject the morality of a period to the moral ideas of another generation. But his feeling was too strong for him, and on the next opportunity he would break out again. How can one renounce the faith for which one has lived? That were to renounce life. What is the good of laboring to think thoughts other than one's own, to be like one's neighbor or to meddle with his affairs? That leads to self-destruction, and no one is benefited by it. The first duty is to be what one is, to dare to say: "This is good, that bad." One profits the weak more by being strong than by sharing their weakness. Be indulgent, if you like, towards weakness and past sins. But never compromise with any weakness....

Yes: but Georges never by any chance consulted Christophe about anything he was going to do:--(did he know himself?).--He only told him about things when they were done.--And then?... Then, what could he do but look in dumb reproach at the culprit, and shrug his shoulders and smile, like an old uncle who knows that he is not heeded?

On such occasions they would sit for several minutes in silence. Georges would look up at Christophe's grave eyes, which seemed to be gazing at him from far away. And he would feel like a little boy in his presence. He would see himself as he was, in that penetrating glance, which was shot with a gleam of malice: and he was not proud of it.

Christophe hardly ever made use of Georges's confidences against him; it was often as though he had not heard them. After the mute dialogue of their eyes, he would shake his head mockingly, and then begin to tell a story without any apparent bearing on the story he had just been told, some story about his life, or some one else's life, real or fictitious. And gradually Georges would see his double (he recognized it at once) under a new light, grotesquely, ridiculously postured, passing through vagaries similar to his own. Christophe never added any commentary. The extraordinary kindliness of the story-teller would produce far more effect than the story. He would speak of himself just as he spoke of others, with the same detachment, the same jovial, serene humor. Georges was impressed by his tranquillity. It was for this that he came. When he had unburdened himself of his light-hearted confession, he was like a man stretching out his limbs and lying at full length in the shade of a great tree on a summer afternoon. The dazzling fever of the scorching day would fall away from him. Above him he would feel the hovering of protecting wings. In the presence of this man who so peacefully bore the heavy burden of his life, he was sheltered from his own inward restlessness. He found rest only in hearing him speak. He did not always listen: his mind would wander, but wheresoever it went, it was surrounded by Christophe's laughter.

However, he did not understand his old friend's ideas. He used to wonder how Christophe could bear his soul's solitude, and dispense with being bound to any artistic, political, or religious party, or any group of men. He used to ask him: "Don't you ever want to take refuge in a camp of some sort?"

"Take refuge?" Christophe would say with a laugh. "It is much too good outside. And you, an open-air man, talk of shutting yourself up?"

"Ah!" Georges would reply. "It is not the same thing for body and soul. The mind needs certainty: it needs to think with others, to adhere to the principles admitted by all the men of the time. I envy the men of old days, the men of the classic ages. My friends are right in their desire to restore the order of the past."

"Milksop!" said Christophe. "What have I to do with such disheartened creatures?"

"I am not disheartened," protested Georges indignantly. "None of us is that."

"But you must be," said Christophe, "to be afraid of yourselves. What! You need order and cannot create it for yourselves? You must always be clinging to your great-grandmother's skirts! Dear God! You must walk alone!"

"One must take root," said Georges, proudly echoing one of the pontiffs of the time.

"But do you think the trees need to be shut up in a box to take root? The earth is there for all of us. Plunge your roots into it. Find your own laws. Look to yourself."

"I have no time," said Georges.

"You are afraid," insisted Christophe.

Georges indignantly denied it, but in the end he agreed that he had no taste for examining his inmost soul: he could not understand what pleasure there could be in it: there was the danger of falling over if you looked down into the abyss.

"Give me your hand," said Christophe.

He would amuse himself by opening the trap-door of his realistic, tragic vision of life. Georges would draw away from it, and Christophe would shut it down again, laughing:

"How can you live like that?" Georges would ask.

"I am alive, and I am happy," Christophe would reply.

"I should die if I were forced to see things like that always."

Christophe would slap him on the shoulder: