Had she not met books and men? The foundation was laid, and the rest would be reared, the whole structure, to its last turret and spire, to the utmost beauty and grandeur. All would be fulfilled, and before it was done her life would stand miraculous, symbolic. Out of the bounty of the future it would be built for her, vibrant with love, deep and still with peace, full of energy and action, boimdless, yet harmonised to one purpose, marked by an integrity so great that she could not herself understand or be aware of it. She personified the waiting years. They would of themselves let loose torrents of strength. They themselves were the source of wonderful things— the waiting years, her life's unminted gold, the inestimable treasure that was youth's inheritance.
If her grandfather's life was grey, it was because no endless journey through years stretched ahead of him. She sought her course as though her eyes, open wide with the look of childhood, were dazzled by the sudden sunlight of existence, were still forming, perhaps, and not yet able to see and distinguish. This gave to her the attitude of one studying and seeking, and she glided among her days full of peace and health, steering herself by the light that the child-soul within her radiated, thinking it came all from without, from her grandfather and Pere Lachaise—whom she found so compelling and so vast.
VII. The Grandfather
IF to her grandfather her childhood was sad, he knew and could never forget that for him there was greater happiness those first few years of her life than he had ever known up to that time. Her loveliness was something he strove to fathom and could not. He worshipped at her little rosy feet, held her baby palms, and pressed them to his eyes, laid his head against her tiny shoulder, feeling that ever afterwards he would be incapable of a small thought, of a feeling of cowardice before life, or people. If he were a vassal of old, with the lowliness and fanaticism of one, he could not bow his knee before his king should he appear before him, could not humble himself before the representative of God, or Empire, were a little child like Violette sleeping under the roof of his hut, partaking of his hunger and his nakedness.
He was proud, he was happy, and he bore a responsibility towards her such as some feel for a cause that calls for every drop of their blood. He had invoked her, years and years ago he had willed that she should come to pass. In her voice, in her eyes there was a little of that which had died too soon in him, of what is alive in everybody at the beginning. Waking and sleeping he was aware of her. He tried to imagine and could not how it would have been for him without her. He had a confused sense that before her coming there had been emptiness and stillness, that he had watched age creep on him at times stealthily, at times apace, and it seemed to him he had not sought to ward it off, had not asserted his strength, as now he was doing, had never found himself imtil Violette found him, a grey-haired, broken old man, and claimed the protection of his weakness, the companionship of his loneliness, the comfort of his poverty, Violette, himianity in its babyhood, child beyond words beautiful, alluring, prophetic,—Violette fell to his lot in the midnight of his hfe I.
Did ever a child come to a man in this way, at the end, when all was spent, and call him back from the threshold of death, take him by the hand, and lead him gently and lovingly back into the heart of life? Violette's first battlefield (and before she was done she fared forth on many) was the spirit of her grandfather which she wrested from death, a desert which she made blossom hke a garden. He feared she would pay for what she did for him. She would give him her grace, and get the manner of his stimabling gait, the droop of his head, the doubt and hesitation of his eyes. She would exchange her youth for the sombreness and weariness of his age.
He had been born among poor people, and he saw life from the angle of privation and misery. The world bore the same aspect to him as to his grandchild, only he was not torn from the breast of his mother, from the arms of his father, he was not left to be reared by the trembling hands of an aged and helpless man, he was not bereft of companionship with his own. He had had brothers and sisters among whom there existed that intense love which only people who suffer in common feel for one another, and this early training in love underlay his fraternity with his kind, his pity for all people and his pride in them. What he felt for his family, the price he saw them pay, in health, in mind, in the sacrifice of talents, in defeat, he felt also for the larger family, called society.
The world was sad, but life led on beyond the world, with its obstructions, its tortures, its grinding of people underfoot. Life whispered what was true and sweet above the noise and confusion. Life held out her hands filled with gifts.
This Violette seemed to say in that voice of hers, every time she addressed him where he sat bent above his work at the table, or standing behind the comiter at the wall, sadly behung with wreaths and crowns, this he read in her beauty every time his eyes rested on her, this he saw in her gestures. He watched her as she slept. Oh, the curly head, the flush on the cheeks, the little hands folded under the perfect chin! He stood over her as milhons of mothers have done since the world began, as fathers have failed to do only to their loss! This child would grow up, and the sun and the stars and the earth would have a hand in her—everything great would contribute to her. Time would carry her aloft through years that she shared with a generation and a universe! She would grow up, and she would never be beautiful and wonderful as she was then. She would grow up to love—a trace of the same smile, the same laughter, the same kiss that more often than not lost itself in mid-air, would be left for her lover. But he would never know what she had been and was not— she would be a little like other people when he came along, but now she was the folded bud of herself, the exquisite beginning of something that life must alter, must to some extent harm. O wonderful baby!
Tears fell on the child over whom he was bending. How had it faded away into mist, that sense of the length of a lifetime that he had had those centuries ago, when he was young I He had slept away his time, dulled by over-work, by worry, his strength sapped by his struggle with the wolves of need that were always pursuing him. So most men live, by living not at all. So they wake up at the end to a sense of beauty and glory, and weep.
What good fortune it was to be awake at all after so long a sleep, to be able to raise the eyes to an expanse of blue, to a loveliness and brightness unequalled by anything he had dreamed of in his youth! For a little while only, but what matters it for how long? He felt beginning in him the desire to live, despite age and illness, at first for her sake, and soon for his own. He was like one who, wandering throughout a night of storm and terror, comes suddenly upon his destination at sunrise.
VIII. Inner Freedom
THE mind of her grandfather fixed itself on her future, leaped ahead in an effort to see her a woman among women and men. It was a habit of his. It might be that the passions gathering in her, like clouds for a storm, the fires of love and of revolt, would break out only to consume her. It might be that she would find no direction or outlet, that she would wander among men and women tortured by a power of second sight, by a clearness of vision, a standard so high as to find herself unable to attach herself to any movement, to undertake for long any task. It might be she would prove a victim of her own strength and her own idealism, would soar and get beyond her goal, would leap forward perilously, following none and being followed by none, would be to the last what she never meant to be, an individual, not merged with the forces of her time.
So much the grandfather, in the nervousness of his love, conceded as possible. No one could foretell what life would do with her. He was certain only that if there were a definite expression of her in some work, that it would of necessity be of a high order, for her work would be herself, the voice of her heart speaking through its hopes and dreams and sorrows, the music of her heart, inspired by her knowledge of life as seen through Pere Lachaise, by her vision of the world gained from drinking of the beauties of the human mind, by her faith in mankind which came straight from the soul of man which she read with the eyes of love. Whatever her effort, it would have to be large and instinct with the spirit of a new world and a new civilisation.
Often he had other thoughts. She was so little, and the years were overtaking him, were rendering him more helpless, more filled with unspoken fears, with a tremulous love that spilled itself in shining tears over her young life. She was so little, and the years ahead held decay for him, but for her the beauty of the rose. He was possessed by a feeling of the sacredness of time, by a passion to hoard every minute left to him. He clamoiued for
