the meetings to which she was taken and the books she read, since both gave her something that extended beyond the present, that was as large as the world.
She felt it to be even better than she knew. Never was a child more conscious of the fewness of her years, and the length of years before her. What could she not achieve, what could not happen to her ? What marvels on the long, long road before her! She would not be a year older for worlds 1 She was just old enough, it seemed to her. She was not an hour late, had not an hour to spare. She did not hoard the days as her grandfather did, with miserly dread, but she had a keen and an exaggerated sense of their flight. She could not grow reconciled to the law that youth must fade to age, that every beginning must have an end, that growth itself must lead to death. She sought out poems that dealt with youth and learned them by heart.
Her grandfather listened to her, and wondered that a child should love her childhood, should treasure her inestimable possession!
She had been told by some one that in the beginning there was only one man and one woman in the world, and they did not know of death. Nothing informed them of it— not the moon and the stars that shone so peacefully down on them, not the warm and brilliant rays of the smi that up to that time had never caused the withering of a flower, the crumbling of a leaf, not the stream that rippled and murmured at their feet, not the great ocean that had never known the wreck of a himian life upon its stormy but loving bosom, or the preying of one of its myriad inhabitants upon another. Nothing told them, for death was not and had never been. Then this man and woman partook of an apple that they plucked from a tree. For this death was sent into life for all time— death to all their race, so that whoever was bom must die, death to all the races of creature or plant, death to whatever lived. It was the impossible revenge of an executioner judge. With the credulousness of a child she believed and was horrified.
How was it reconcilable with another story—of a Father who created the Earth and the Heavens, who lived everywhere and watched over all, who loved everything and everybody without end? Her mind from the first time she had heard of God had become impassioned. She tried hard to pierce the blue of the sky in the hope that she would get a glimpse of him where he hung somewhere above the whitest and highest cloud. She thought she knew quite well how he looked—a long white beard, large wonderful eyes, for the rest a good deal like her grandfather, only taller and stronger, with a face smooth from wrinkles, and lips smiling happily and kindly.
That was before they came to live near Pre Lachaise. Now there vanished from her mind both stories, now reality lured her, truth called, and her spirit spread itself in untrammelled freedom and scope. For the old man and the child had in common an insistence on the knowledge of evil as well as of good—a revulsion from superstition and falsehood which she had by instinct, he by conviction. When she sat on his knees and he talked to her, he told her stories of happy children living with their parents among other children in beautiful garden-surrounded houses. He described the music and laughter, the brilliant and loving teachers, the wise and inspiring books. He told her how there was also travel to distant parts, with the joys of meeting strangeness and becoming intimate with it, the delight of going abroad in the world and making oneself at home in its thought and its ways, converting the romance of the alien into the romance of the famiUar and understood.
He told her also of desolation and neglect, of poverty that is penury, of hunger and nakedness and utter ignorance, of clouded minds, natures made hideous by hideous conditions. He told her of tyranny, oppression and bloodshed on the part of the strong, of murder, and robbery, on the part of the weak. He dared speak to her of everything; he reasoned that nothing that was true and known could terrorise or hurt her. It was only the unknown that was terrible, and with the unknown, fair or foul, he had no dealing. He taught her only what was true, what the mind craved and had a right to know.
In the little shop fragrant with the scent of its flowers and ferns, the old man sat mending tinsel wreaths and wiring baskets, and at his feet crouched Violette, her face almost hidden by her curls, her eyes fixed lovingly on his, her hands resting on his knees, her whole attitude one of breathless interest in his movements and his speech.
III. The Long Road
HER grandfather was an object of romance. He had known her mother and father, and then* little child born and lost before her birth. He was at the source of Ihings 1 Everything that had happened to him was hidden behind a mist of years. He had been a child once. What he told her of that childhood seemed sad to her, for she fomid it easy to pity another, and hard to pity herself, and she wished the books for which he had hungered in that past could have been his, and that the school he had longed to go to had been open to him. She wished he had not always had to forego what his heart was set on. All her love could not avail, and not with all her future could she restore to him anything he had ever needed and did not have. It was a terrible and inexorable law.
She thought of him, always, and when playing in Pere Lachaise she stopped to run back to him with sudden homesickness for the sight of his face. Age, the spirit which brooded over her, was not far away from death, and, though not wholly conscious of it, she went from one to the other.
There was also the law of silence. Of the deepest and most searching things it was impossible to speak— not even to one she loved as she did her grandfather. What she shared with him was that which had concerned her a little while back and had become utterable only because something else was now inexpressible. The reserve of childhood oppressed her as it does all children, and like all children when she suffered she suffered alone.
She played in Pere Lachaise, the Champs Elysees of the poor who live in its neighbourhood, but she could not say even to herself how terrifying at times that playground was. Again and again it occurred to her that in passing the gate and entering its hushed stillness she had gone over to the dead, had made a journey impossibly long, though her own home was but a few steps awayl At times it was as if Pere Lachaise was telling her a story, sweet but awful, entrusting her with a prophecy, unfolding before her the Future. Yet at other times Pere Lachaise was terrible because it was so different from life, and in no way part of it, and yet it was instinct with life, woven in and out with its pattern and its mark. Life was of it but it was not of life, and that was why she was afraid. It seemed constantly to say 'No' to her dreams, to her love, to her hopes. Pere Lachaise was too strong for her, and she was possessed with a fear she could not name even to her grandfather.
Only when he took her by the hand and walked with her, at the end of a hot day, and lingered with her among the tombs until the moon came out with all her retinue of stars, was the sorrow and the fear dispelled, and it seemed to her as if the place resounded with beautiful, stately music. Death, and the thought of death fell from her—leaving her alone with the facts of the world that were beginning to crowd themselves on the young heart, for the most important of which she could find no explanation.
There was much that was wrong. Many people, her grandfather told her, beUeved that everything would come right, and she believed it too. But what of those who suffer to-day, who have suffered and gone under in the past ? What reparation is there for them? She was tortured by a sense of outraged justice. She forgot Paris, the living, and Pere Lachaise, the dead, in her contemplation of forces which she could not understand, but which she knew that she must combat. To the whispering trees of Pere Lachaise, to the nodding grass over the older graves she imparted wordlessly her indictment framed so early, felt so deeply— her conviction that what was wrong was wrong, that the world, no matter how it changed, could never catch up with itself for having stood still so long, though change it must from beginning to end, and the new must bear no resemblance to the old I.
It was at this time that she realised more fully how very old her grandfather was, how slowly he moved, how his hands trembled, how httle he read when the shutters were drawn across the one window of the shop. He was very old—yet she felt he had bought something precious with his age, that he was different from the old men she saw sitting on the benches at the entrance to Pere Lachaise, or hobbling aimlessly along the streets. He was dijfferent from everybody—that was why he was able to care for her as he did, to mother her, and talk to her at length when he sat with her at the deal table in the room behind the shop. If he were not diflferent from others he would not have taken her to meetings where people spoke from their seats or from a little platform in front. He never addressed the gatherings, and they were not noticed as they came and went, yet she felt he belonged there perhaps more than those who talked stormily and were interrupted by applause in which she timidly joined.
She had an extraordinary feeling about these gatherings, as if they who were present at them were people set apart from the rest of the world, crusaders, inspired lovers of mankind, fired by a wonderful mission. Her heart beat violently on entering the hall, her cheeks flamed. She saw there people of different nationalities, men who
