Part 12
"So it is true," he continued, "that he did not know that he was dying? Ah! Landri, may the good Lord preserve us from ending so, without being able to make our last sacrifice! I dread but one form of death--that is, sudden death. Jaubourg did not deserve it. But Charlus was quite right--he was not religious. Still, if I had been here, I would have sent for a priest; but Joseph did not dare to go beyond his orders. I should have paid no heed to that, and who can say if God would not have granted him the privilege of recovering consciousness for a moment! But God is the nobleman of heaven, as somebody said, I don't know who. I imagine that the amplitude of his indulgence surpasses our poor feeble judgments. He pardons much to one who has always been sincere and kind; and Jaubourg was so kind! How many times your mother has told me of secret charitable deeds of his, and of his considerate words! And she was rather prejudiced against him.--My dear Landri, it does me good to have you here! I understand, you came back on my account. You wanted to be posted, so that you could prepare me for the worst at need. I know that you and Charles didn't always understand each other. However, I assure you that he was very fond of you. But he was of another generation, and he didn't enjoy himself much with the newcomers. 'It makes me feel too old,' he used to say to me.--'It makes me younger,' I always said.--He was never reconciled to being more than thirty years old. You see, he had been such a pretty fellow, such a dandy, and so fashionable! And it didn't spoil him. I can see him now, in '73, when I made his acquaintance. It was at the Élysée, in the poor Marshal's day. That was yesterday, and it was the time of promise. We hoped for so many things that have never come to pass, and we hoped for them joyously, too joyously perhaps.--Too joyously," he repeated, and added: "And now look."
He pointed to the bedroom door, then put his hand over his eyes. But in a moment, manfully shaking his head as if determined not to abandon himself to these melancholy recollections, he continued:--
"I return to Grandchamp by the ten o'clock train. You take the nine o'clock. Our stations are not far apart, and I'll see you on board. We will dine on the way.--Let us walk a little, to recover our equilibrium,--what do you say? How many times I have called for Charles at this time in the afternoon, when chance brought me to this quarter! Why, only last Wednesday he spoke to me about this project of marriage with the Charlus girl. It was in this room that he said to me: 'I am entrusted with a message to you. It's about Landri.'--But let us go. Joseph will let me know the precise hour of the funeral ceremony. It will depend on the distant cousins he has left. You must ask for leave of absence. I must have you with me."
"I don't know whether I can get it," Landri replied. The prospect of that fresh trial, of following that funeral procession under the eyes of so many people who would surely know the truth, made his flesh creep. At all events he had a pretext for avoiding it. "Our new colonel isn't very obliging in that respect. And then, you know, he's of the Left, very strong, and not very well disposed to us."
"When shall you make up your mind to shut the door in the face of those rascals?" asked M. de Claviers. They were going downstairs, he first, so that he could not see the intensity of distress depicted on his companion's face while he persisted: "I am not disturbed; they'll drive you to it, and, it may be, before very long. On the train Bressieux showed me a newspaper in which something was said about resuming the taking of inventories in the Saint-Mihiel region.--'What will Landri do, if he gets into that?' he asked me.--'What you would do,' I replied.--I confess that I should be happy to see you take your leave with a fine gesture. Besides it's high time that a gentleman should say something that hasn't yet been said. Among the officers who have resigned as a protest against shameful orders there have been several of noble birth. They have all talked about their consciences, their religious principles.--Conscience? I don't care much for that word. It has served too often as a solemn label for anarchy.--Religious principles? That's better. That's an appeal to a discipline that does not adapt itself to people's whims. But for the noble there's still another duty, that of not disregarding the call of honor. And one does disregard it when one acts in opposition to the will of the ancestors from whom he is descended, of those deceased ancestors who in their lifetime served a Catholic France. We, their progeny, owe it to them to serve the same France. France without the Church is not the France of which our houses are a part. For a noble to serve this France is to renounce his nobility. Such renunciations are the suicide of honor, of that honor which a great bishop called the safeguard of justice, the glorious supplement of the laws. That is what I would like to hear proclaimed to the faces of those curs, by a Claviers-Grandchamp."
They were in the street now. The marquis gazed at his supposititious son with those piercing blue eyes which were no longer dimmed by a tear. It was the very climax of tragedy,--of the internal tragedy which life evolves simply by the interplay of its secret contrasts,--this quasi-feudal profession of faith, enounced upon that threshold, before the child born of treachery, by the bitterly outraged nobleman who knew nothing of the outrage.
The arrival of one of their club friends, who came to inscribe his name at Jaubourg's, and who stopped a moment on the sidewalk to exchange a few words of condolence with them, enabled Landri to avoid replying. When, three hours later, he at last found himself alone in his compartment of the Saint-Mihiel train, he was sorely exhausted, terribly broken by that murderous day, the hardest of his whole life. Before, during and after the dinner, which they ate tête-à-tête, M. de Claviers had said many other things the unconscious cruelty of which had kept the young man on the rack. But as he lay back in the carriage, lulled by the monotonous clamor of the train, which translated itself into distinct syllables, it was those declarations on the stairway, those words concerning the inventories, which recurred to his mind, endlessly. In them were combined his melancholy premonitions of the hours preceding the terrible crisis and the drama which was already resulting from that crisis itself.
"But wherein has anything changed in my situation, so far as that possibility is concerned?" he asked himself. "Didn't I know how he felt on that point, and that he would be immovable? But yes, there is a difference. Before I learned what I have learned, his theory of the duty of the noble had some meaning to me. It has none now. I am not a Claviers-Grandchamp, I am not a noble. The things that are valuable to them have no value to the son of a Jaubourg! He talked to me about honor! Honor! To me! But what I ought most of all to long for, is to be mixed up in one of these affairs, to have to execute an order contrary to all his ideas, and to act as I had made up my mind to act--before. He will curse me? So much the better! So much the better! We shall never meet again? So much the better! I could not stand such conversations as that of this evening. I should betray myself. Indeed, this one went beyond my strength. I love him too dearly! And who wouldn't love him? He is so worthy of being loved!"
The physical and moral personality of the marquis was reproduced before his mind with the accuracy and distinctness which long-continued familiar intercourse produces. Handsome, intellectual, generous, affectionate, entertaining, so kindly-natured and so perfect a type of the _grand seigneur_, the "Émigré" had prestige, he had charm, and he had been subjected to the atrocious outrage! That infamous deed provoked an outburst of revolt from the son of the culprit.
"How could any one betray such a man? And prefer to him--whom? O mother! mother!"
Landri was alone now. He could give free vent to the emotion that was suffocating him. Lying prone on the cushions of the carriage, he wept at last, and for a long, long while. All the tears that he had not shed during the day he shed now,--those that he had forced back in Valentine's presence, by an heroic effort of his will; those that he had forbade himself to display to the indifferent curiosity of the passers-by during his mad rush across Paris, and those that he had not let fall when he was talking with M. de Claviers, within two yards of the death-bed and later at the restaurant. And at the same time that his heart found relief in tears a reaction took place in his mind. For the first time since the dying man had begun to speak to him, he tried to doubt.
"But she is my mother!" he sobbed. "And I believed that of her instantly! Instantly, without inquiry, without proof!"
Inquiry! Alas! is there need of inquiry to make one believe what is visible, what is before one's eyes?--Proof?--But a fact is itself a proof, and the dying man was that evidence, that proof, that fact. His face, his movements, his voice returned to Landri's memory. As plainly as he saw the cushions of that commonplace compartment in their gray coverings, the lamp in the ceiling, and the nocturnal landscape flitting past the windows, he had seen a father die, bidding his son a despairing farewell. He had seen a woman's lover haunted, possessed, deluded by the memory of that woman. The dying man's outcries were not evidence: they were reality, unquestionable, undeniable,--the fact, the indestructible fact.--Doubt? No, Landri could not doubt. One by one he reviewed the details of that scene, which had been so short--as short as the time required to swallow a glass of poison, which, once it has passed into the veins, freezes the very well-spring of life.
Among these details there was one, the threatening nature of which had not made itself manifest to him until that moment, adding a new terror to his agony. "The child shall have everything, everything," the sick man had groaned; and, addressing his imaginary enemies: "You sha'n't prevent that. I have found a way." Did these words mean that Jaubourg had left Landri his whole fortune by his will? It was not possible that that man, prudent as he was, and so intent upon concealing his paternity that he had forbidden himself ever to embrace his son, should have contradicted the whole tenor of his life, in cold blood, by such a step! Was the way that he had found, a gift through a third person?
"Whatever it may be," said the young man to himself, "I shall refuse it, that's all. I, too, shall know how to find a way to avoid touching that money. It's quite enough that I am obliged to share in their falsehood, in spite of myself, quite enough to inflict on a man I love and admire and revere this daily affront. I take his name, his affection, when I am not entitled to either. It is this sort of rebound that makes certain forms of treachery so culpable. They fall too heavily on the innocent. For, after all, I am innocent of this sin, and now it strikes at me after thirty years. And I must deceive as they did, renew and prolong their perfidy, conceal the truth from their victim, even at the price of my blood!"
And as the names of the stations succeeded one another in the darkness, interrupting with their unfeeling summons this inward lamentation--Châlons--Vitry--Bar-le-Duc:--"How unfortunate I deemed myself when I travelled over this road day before yesterday!" he reflected. "And I should be so happy to go back to that night! One would say that I had a presentiment of the catastrophe toward which I was going, when I tried so hard to concentrate all my thoughts, all my reasons for living, upon those two ideas: Valentine and the Army, the Army and Valentine. I did not foresee, however, that I should so very soon have nothing else, really, to live for. Now is the time when I could honestly say to her: 'You and my profession, my profession and you.'--To her, at least, I am bound, from this day, forever. We have exchanged promises. We should be no more firmly bound to each other if we were married.--The Army is my refuge. If I should leave it now, where should I go?"
His refuge! That word, which represented the only succor that he could expect from life at that moment, returned to the poor fellow's lips, when, at the end of that sorrowful night, he saw through the carriage windows about five o'clock the dark and mist-enfolded mass of the houses of Saint-Mihiel against a sky in which the stars shone feebly. They were crowded about the ancient abbey church, where, in the baptismal chapel, may be seen the two children playing with skulls, the chef-d'œuvre wherein Ligier Richier has represented, by that simple symbolism, the whole destiny of man. The flame of the lamps barely lighted the waters of the Meuse, winding rapidly through the damp shadows. The platform of the station, when the young man alighted, was deserted and gloomy. So of the streets through which passed the rickety, jolting vehicle found at the station. But for him there issued from those shuttered houses the sensation which is produced in us by the return to a round of daily habits after a violent moral shock.
As his cab turned into Rue du Rempart he recognized the wall of the garden where, on one of the paths, he had told Madame Olier of his love three years before. His heart, exhausted by excess of grief, was amazed to feel a sort of painful relaxation of its tension at sight of those streets where he had so often fed upon his lover's dreams, had performed for so many months his military duties. So he had guessed aright. He could live--a hard and bitter life, it is true--by fastening himself upon, by clinging desperately to those two last resources, hope and activity, which fate had left to him; and it was with an impatience, not happy surely but very manful, that, having donned his uniform, he awaited the hour to go to headquarters and resume his daily occupations.
Although he had hardly slept during the night, his step was brisk as he walked toward the barracks. If he was no longer conscious of what he had called in his conversation with Valentine the joy of the uniform,--that word joy would have no meaning to him for a long, long time!--he felt its manly courage. He gazed at the high gateway with a strange excitement in his eyes, ringed by tears and sleeplessness.
"I still have this, too," he said, using precisely the same form of words as on the day before, when he left his dear friend on Rue Monsieur; and as if in haste to resume the actual contact with that stern but healthy and manly life, he quickened his pace, to enter the courtyard the sooner.
It was barely eight o'clock. Gusts of a cold wind, the bitter northeast wind that constantly sweeps the high plateaus between the Meuse and the Moselle, lashed the white caps of the men engaged in grooming horses before the stable doors. Subaltern officers, wrapped in their cloaks, were overlooking them. In a corner, at the door of the kitchen, other men, sheltered under an awning, were peeling potatoes. Others were marching off in a squad to perform some task. Everything spoke of the energetic and organized activity which makes a well-ordered barracks a very noble human thing.
There, Landri was no longer, as at Grandchamp, the sole heir of a nobleman on parade, himself a nobleman. He was Lieutenant de Claviers, who was obeyed, but who obeyed. It will be remembered that he had called that sensation too a joy. In what fashion he exerted his authority, the glances of the men who saluted him according to rule, touching the vizor with the open hand, told clearly enough. And he looked at them with the watchful and kindly eye of the leader to whom every detail has its importance. He noticed one whose slightly unhealthy pallor indicated recent illness.
"So you have come back to duty, Teilhard? Since when?"
"Since yesterday, lieutenant."
"You are quite sure it was not too soon? Are you entirely cured of your bronchitis?"
"Entirely cured, lieutenant."
"And your father? Did you spend your furlough with him?"
"Yes, lieutenant. In fact, I meant to come to see you, to tell you that his business has picked up. He expects to pay a little of his debt next month."
"Write him that there's no hurry, my good Teilhard," replied Landri affectionately, motioning to the dragoon to move on. He saw a captain in undress uniform approaching--no other than Despois, the husband of Madame Olier's friend.
"So you were talking with your miraculous work?" said Despois laughingly to his subordinate. "Why, yes--why, yes--it's a genuine miracle. To have made a good soldier out of a blockhead like that animal. Don't blame any one but yourself if I entrust the desperate cases to you. I have taken advantage of your absence to turn over Baudoin to you. He still rides badly. I commend him to your very particular attention."
"I will attend to him at once," said Landri. "I'll take him alone before my drill." And when the captain had passed on, he said to the quartermaster, who was waiting at the door of the riding-school with several men and horses: "Saddle Panther for me, and call Baudoin."
Ten minutes later the mare he had asked for arrived, all saddled, with a simple snaffle in her mouth which she was already champing nervously, and led by the head by a youth of unkempt aspect with very black eyes glowing like coals in a grayish face. Simply from the way in which he wore his képi on one side, one divined in him the insolent vagabond; and from the brusque movement with which he put his hand to it to salute the officer, the smouldering revolt, the mere brute all ready to sing or think the obscene quatrain which we must never weary of citing to the smug optimists who refuse to recognize the ferocities hidden beneath the humanitarian mirage of socialism--those forerunners of a Terror which will be worse than the other, being better organized, and more degraded, being the work of a more degenerate race:--
S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales, À faire de nous des héros, Ils saurent bientôt que nos balles Sont pour nos propres généraux.[4]
The beautiful beast led by that creature with the face of an Apache of the faubourgs presented a striking contrast to him by virtue of the dainty grace of her whole frame. She had the elevated tail, the short and supple loins, the long shoulder, legs like a stag's, and a small head. She had been in the regiment five days. The dealer, to improve her appearance for purposes of sale, had clipped her. The hair on her legs and that which showed under the flaps of the saddle was of a brown-bay color; the rest of her body, recently clipped, seemed to be iron-gray. As soon as she entered the riding-school she began to paw the ground impatiently.
"Well, mount her, Baudoin," said the officer; "let's see if she'll behave any better than she did the first day. I kept her for a good rider; and I know that you're one."
Baudoin, apparently insensible to this compliment, mounted Panther, who started off at the restrained trot of a beast who does not abdicate her free will. It was evident that she obeyed neither the pressure of the heel nor that of the rein. In this way she made the circuit of the ring four times, turning her head from side to side, making little attempts to escape when she came near the closed door--a ravishingly beautiful object in that vast empty space where she seemed to wander almost at will.
"She doesn't try any tricks," said Landri. "Let's try her at a gallop.--She won't, eh?--A touch of the whip."
Despite Baudoin's efforts Panther did not even condescend to quicken her trot. The quartermaster, who had the whip in his hand, begun to run, shaking it at the mare. Instead of breaking into a gallop she, taking fright, executed a series of violent sheep-like bounds, in rapid succession, which unhorsed her rider. He tried to remount. The mare, sure of her means of defence, started off again at a trot, then repeated her leaps at a second threat of the lash. Again the man fell. He remounted. A third fall. This time he was thrown against the wall rather hard. Anger turned his face green. A brutal exclamation escaped him, and he said savagely:--
"I don't mount again. I won't ride her any more. I've had enough of breaking my bones so that the officers can have well-trained horses."
He cast an evil glance at the lieutenant, with his hands in his pockets, his clothes all covered with sawdust; and he did not brush himself, or pick up his képi, or follow the mare, who had gone on at a walk, then stopped. She was nibbling, with the ends of her teeth, a tall post, with holes bored in it, intended to hold the jumping-bar.
"Well," said Landri pleasantly, as if he had not heard that outburst of insubordination, "I'll ride her now. You can take her again afterward."
Time to adjust the stirrups to his height, and he was astride the beast, whom he launched at a trot first, then at a gallop. She tried hard to unseat him by leaps and bounds even more out of rule than those which had succeeded so well just before. But Landri had been put in the saddle at the age of six by M. de Claviers, and he too was of the school of those who do not recognize divorce, as the marquis would say jocosely. He held his seat. Panther, the well-named, tried another device. She set off at a gallop, then turned abruptly, end for end. Landri still held his seat. More leaps. Another abrupt turn. The rider did not fall. Weary of the struggle, the mare trots; she gallops; she begins to obey the leg; she obeys the hand.
"Take her again, Baudoin," said the officer, jumping to the ground. "She hasn't broken my bones and she won't break yours."
The dragoon flushed. He looked at the lieutenant, who looked him squarely in the eye, calmly and coolly. Self-esteem aiding, this hint was efficacious with the rebel. He remounted and the session ended without further incident. The conquered beast behaved as well with her new rider as with the other.
"Now," said Landri to the quartermaster, "bring in the others."
"You were in luck," said the quartermaster to Baudoin a few moments later. "With another man, you'd have had a curry-combing, and a good one."
"And the other man, too, perhaps," retorted Baudoin with a leer. "But this one didn't put a gag in my mouth, that's true enough."
"I have not wasted my morning," Landri reflected, as he left the riding-school. Awaiting the hour for the foot-drill, he entered the small room used by the officers as a library and gathering-place. It was very simply furnished, with a divan, a few easy-chairs, and a large table, all covered with coarse blue stuff with a red border. On two sides were book-shelves. On the other walls were engravings, some of which represented the early days of the 32nd Dragoons. First, there was a Cavalier de Lévis, with the date 1703, in three-cornered hat and white tunic, with red lapels and trimmings. Another Cavalier de Lévis, in a very similar uniform, bore this inscription: 1724. Then came two troopers of the Royal-Normandie, dated 1768 and 1784. They wore blue tunics with amaranth-colored lapels, and white cockades in their hats. A trooper of the 19th Cavalry, in a blue coat _à la française_, with a tri-colored plume in his shako, marked the beginning of modern times.