sleep.
At dawn when she stole back to her room, she had a poignant sense of having escaped from some inmiinent tragedy. How if she had never waked? How if her grandfather had found her there stark on the grass at the foot of the sepulchre? How if he had simk down by her side striving to reach with his remaining strength the source of the sorrow that had carried her past his age to an early death—what could he have done but died? Always there had been this thing or that of importance but now it could be only death. Ah, but she had not succumbed. How could she succumb when the mother survives her baby, the wife her husband? It was happiness merely to give love, in fancy to bear Gervais her tenderness through voice and look and touch, to carry him fervour and glowing thought, to give him every heart-beat of her youth, every ray of her smile, all the dew of her tears. Even though he feared her free gifts, her thoughts would seek him, her life would seek to share its brief hours with him. Sometime she would find him again, and he her, sometime when they were both old, in the barren years I And then she prayed: 'I throw myself on the heart of the Wind, in the arms of the Sea; I strain my eyes towards the face of the Night. Life, I am in your hands.'
She knew now the aspiration of the heart for the eternal persistence of that which is dear and beloved. It was not possible that Gervais should die. That in him which strove towards the world, which bore relation to his kind, would always live in in-eflfable but certain ways, carrying its message to generations and generations of men, merging itself with the life of the future— even after she who bore him in her heart was herself laid away, even after the last memory of him had perished, a voice of his spirit, as incarnated in his work, his speech, his groping feelings, his silent thought, would still be heard somewhere in the recesses of the world. He would be immortal. He would bridge the past and the future. He would be universal, a flash of life to the end.
VII. Prophecy
'He will come back,' said her grandfather. But Violette knew that he would not come back. Whatever else life held for her, it did not hold him. Long hours dragged their weight across her heart, and she knew that just so would it be throughout the years—long nights of long years, in which she would lie thinking of Gervais.
It seemed to her as if all the crises of her life were swallowed up in oblivion. Only yesterday she had had a need to speak of them to her friend. Now she herself consigned them to forgetfulness—she let the soul of them perish. At last she understood what age was.
But there was another age too, an age of pleasant valleys, or reminiscence. That was the age she had believed in when she was young. But now she let everything go— her hope, her sorrow, her wildest, bravest aspiration. The past claimed them. She opened her fingers and let them fall like violets into an open grave.
But why? she asked, since she knew that as long as he lived there could be no separation between them. There was something beyond the close contact, the walking hand in hand through the charmed mazes of life, the being within hourly reach of each other's presence. Something beyond the nearness of love, which seemed the ultimate bliss of existence, the last, dearest sweetness. There was something left beyond this, and that was the colossal idea that they were both alive together in the world.
'We will meet in the air we breathe, in the work we do, in the exigencies of the social forces that inspire us; we will meet in the achievements of the future; we will meet in the culminating events of our own individual existences—in whatever triumph of personal development awaits us, in whatever latent strength life will evolve in us, in whatever moment of inspiration will be vouchsafed us; we will meet, if not during our lives, then at the end, in a glorious consummation of all we have ever been.'
Violette smiled tearfully as she thought this. 'What is such consolation?' she wondered. 'It is as if already I had grown old, already become resigned to the possession of a millionth part of that for which my soul yearned.'
Violette thought of the attitude of the old to Pere Lachaise. To them, too, life passes like a dream, life passes, yet it is not short! They look back upon the years, and it seems as if they had come a long way, as if the road had been interminable, as if the end they saw in sight in their youth as far away, was far away still. The old are not afraid of Pere Lachaise. They think with strange serenity about it. It is not a terrible commentary upon life to them that it exists. Sometimes they think it even desirable, not because they are tired, but because they see in it a harmony, a lyrical and loving law of the universe, an explanation of mystery, a marriage of cause and eflFect. The old go to Pere Lachaise bravely, smilingly, and if they have never known gladness before, they know it then. To them it is a final step in which there cannot be failure or wrong. They achieve rest.
How diflFerent from her, who had stood shivering in her youth before the spectacle of Pere Lachaise, had feared it, as though from behind its tombs something might leap out and strike her doivn, had gazed at her grandfather with anguish and terror, had let dread of death fill her heart from her earliest childhood.
She had thought of the destiny of the people from the standpoint of Pere Lachaise, that those who were bereft of the fulness of life in their one lifetime could never be compensated, that the wrong done them was mi- forgivable because irreparable. Whenever she had thought of death by law, by war, by want, she had thought of something so im-natural that it poisoned the air she breathed, darkened the sun, made her hate a world where it existed, made her think with rapture of a chance to give her life, with all it held, in the eflFort to destroy it. She had thought of art from the standpoint of Pere Lachaise. It was an eflFort to invest this short duration of existence which leads only to the grave with beauty, to discover its dignity, to find where it was most intense. Her love, too, was inspired by Pere Lachaise, marked deep by its sign. She had loved her lover as if he were a child whose flickering life she was nursing on her breast. For death had struck at him and crushed him, death might again attack some one he loved, to whom he belonged. Death might slay him before her eyes. She had thought always of how short a time at best they would be together.
Life was but a span, and she rebelled against its brevity, against the terrible fact that it had to end, that it had to sink together and crumble up, become ashes scattered to the winds—life which was so sweet, so full of plan and purpose, of passionate endeavour, passionate courage and hope and love—life which was so true and real that it was hard to believe in it, and one could only feel it as a dream, be borne aloft on its tossing waves as in a gentle sleep—life had an endl.
Her heart could not bear it, her mind refused to grasp it.
She must gather the roses immediately, tragically she must abandon herself to an intense enjoyment of life, making sure she did not let one drop of the cup go imdrained.
Now her soul was filled with a new valor, now when life sought to crush her by robbing her of her dream of love, she grew at home in life, fell deeply in love with it. Now that she met life in collision, seemingly at cross purposes with it, she loved and honoured it in a thousand new ways. Her courage was at last tested. Now she imderstood inspiration—it was the exalted attitude of the spirit before the spectacle of Ufe, the final union with existence, the complete harmony. And the end of inspiration was to give oneself, and yet to remain oneself, to be an individual, never to become a replica of old and preceding forms, but to be a life not before beheld in nature—a romantic, new, free type, a spirit at once like every other that has ever lived, and diflFerent from every other, an original himaan being. This was the harvest she reaped from her ordeal, that she no longer looked at life from the standpoint of Pere Lachaise, but at Pere Lachaise from the standpoint of life.
Death was not a part of life—it was an alien, an intruder, so unlike to life, so strange and out of place in her eternity that she could see it and live amidst it and yet go on as if it did not exist. Yet she could not conceive of life without death, and she did not want fadeless jflowers, ageless youth, dawns that did not bring forth the days of which the nights in turn were bom. She could not think of her love enduring timelessly in her unchanging heart.
Death was the theatre in which all existence played its drama, the stage upon which life was set. But death, at this time, stood to her not for death, but for the sorrow of death, the weeping through long, blind nights, the torturing memories, the wending of weary feet, and wearier heart, toward a far grave. It stood for unendurable and unutterable suflFering, the heart crying murder at life itself.
Sometimes she would go to her grandfather's room when he was asleep, terrified by the thought that he would suddenly be snatched from her. She would stand in the window that looked out on Pere Lachaise. The trees would nod in the night, the dark beckon to her—Pere Lachaise, lit with stars, would seem to be waiting. Then she felt that life was an oasis in the midst of death, and she craved to extend her life, to join those who belonged to
