"Hello! the Paris papers not come yet?" "Just what I was saying to these gentlemen."
"You don't know when they ought to get here?"
"We know nothing about it, sir."
"Have you any left from last night...?"
The saleswoman looked through the rows.
"Not a single one, sir."
I left the station, thinking what a sell! I had hardly gone a hundred yards before I heard myself called.
"Halloa there! Signor Dreher!"
I turned round:
"Oh! It's you!"
"I say, pretty bad, the news, what!"
"Really, let's hear it?"
"I've just glanced through the Tribune de Lausanne. Berlin announces that war is imminent; Austria is mobilising; they say we're going to do the same thing."
"No?"
I was dumbfounded for a moment; then, "Oh come! You'll see that affairs will settle themselves yet."
He shook his head:
"It's quite true; nobody wants to fight. What[Pg 12] about you, would it convey anything to you to go and get your skin punctured?"
I shrugged my shoulders:
"Those are all journalists' tales! As copy is scarce in summer, they start rumours of tension, of possible rupture, at this season, every year...."
"Suppose it should be serious, this time...?"
"Nonsense! Can you see the French and Germans breaking each other's heads ... for Serbia?"
We followed the dusty road, ascending from Ballaigues; then in the high path to La Ferrière, I persuaded my companion to bear me company on the way to Jougne.
Cipollina was the only Frenchman of my age whom I had met at the hotel. He was a dark-haired youth, slight and elegant, with refined features, but a crooked nose, a blemish which, according to Jeannine, gave him an expression of incredible falseness. The ladies had not allowed him to meddle with them at all; the cold manner in which they had acknowledged his greetings sometimes made me ill at ease, as I was a friend of his.
A friend! Well, hardly. But for Laquarrière I had no intimate friend, and no wish for any; I made use of Cipollina to fill up the intervals when convention forbade my intruding upon the Landrys.
His society, moreover, was not devoid of interest. He had travelled so much, rubbed up against so many people, seen so many things. Having entered, at the age of fourteen, a big silk firm managed by one of his uncles, whose counting houses were to be found all over the world, he had been successively a sojourner in very varied latitudes, from Colombo to Boston, from Rio Janeiro to Yokohama. An intelligent observer, he owed to his wanderings and to his early contact[Pg 13] with the different races of merchants, a dry and caustic turn of mind not unakin to my own. Thence sprang our speedy understanding, which resembled real harmony, without either of us feeling much liking or esteem for the other. As cynics we agreed in our scornful verdicts on others and on ourselves. I must say that he did not flatter himself that he was in any way an intellectual. Each time I sketched some generalisation, or laid the foundations of a system, he escaped me, sneering:
"Oh, that's literature."
Then, irritated, I inwardly dubbed him a "counter-jumper."
"Have you been to see the Landrys off?" he asked abruptly.
"Yes."
"Shall you see them again in Paris?"
"Before that perhaps. They expect to come back here."
"I thought you were going to leave?"
"I don't know now. That will depend!"
He gave a little laugh which annoyed me.
"Oh, so things are getting on?"
"What's getting on?"
"Your schemes."
"What schemes?"
"To do with the girl of course."
I did not deign to seem vexed, and put on a joking tone.
"My dear fellow, after all I've said to you on that subject!"
"It's possible to change one's mind."
"No. It would never even enter my head to change my mind about that."
[Pg 14]
I summed up, in a few words, one of my favourite theses: marriage in our state of civilisation is an absurdity; it would be ridiculous to chain oneself for the rest of one's life to a woman—and such a woman, a girl, a creature still in germ, who had revealed nothing of her secret. It would certainly need an artlessness to which I was no longer susceptible, or a faculty for enthusiasm still more extinct in me. Each time a friend told me of his happy engagement I gazed at him in astonishment as at a being fallen from another planet. I concluded:
"This little Landry girl is right enough to flirt with in the holidays! She's not displeasing or stupid, but I beg you to believe that there is nothing, and never will be anything between us...."
Had I convinced him? He continued after a moment's silence.
"They say ... she's well off!"
"That doesn't tempt me either."
He protested:
"My dear chap, you're very much like the rest of the world!"
I shrugged my shoulders and assured him that I was perfectly happy.
"No ambitions?"
"None."
At his look of unbelief I set myself to sing the praises of the dilettante's life I was leading. Some question he asked led me to go into certain details to illustrate the way in which everything had always gone well with me.
I had not drifted for long when my legal studies were over. An old family friend, the manager of the Abyssinian Railway Company, had asked me to become his[Pg 15] private secretary. I accepted the post. Another had soon fallen vacant, that of General Secretary. Suggested as a stop-gap, I had acquitted myself to everyone's satisfaction. I was good at interviewing visitors, and wrote with a certain amount of style. My appointment was confirmed. The business was a sound one, when the time for exploitation came, it would be excellent. I had put some capital into it. I had not much work, only four hours a day to put in. I earned ample to live on. What more could I have wished for?
Cipollina slyly urged me to enumerate what he called my positive joys. I demurred, none too good-naturedly.
"We have so few tastes in common."
But, privately, I invoked my customary amusements: dinner in a restaurant on the boulevards, where I used to meet Laquarrière: it was there that we exchanged our stock of ill-natured sallies: then there would be bridge, poker, or billiards: and often a theatre, though it did not appeal to us much; from time to time a boxing match, or on Sunday, in the Parc des Princés, a sensational football tie. These last shows held the most interest for me. They reminded me of the still recent time when I myself excelled in these games, and I still continued, though somewhat irregularly, to frequent a school of physical culture.
I had scratched sentiment out of my life once and for all. Paris offers an inexhaustible fund of sensual attractions to those possessed of time and money. I had both, but I dreaded nothing so much as being tied to one person, and as I also detested the flat period of preliminary gallantries, I came to content myself with a wise and banal voluptuousness. More restricted[Pg 16] still was the balance-sheet of family obligations and satisfactions. I would not have missed dining with my father on Sunday evening. At long intervals I wrote a few lines on a card to my married brother, an officer at St. Mihiel.
I have spoken of my dilettantism: the word gratified my vanity and was just, in the main, as certain artistic tendencies distinguished me from the herd of vulgar pleasure-seekers. I read a great deal. I bought novels and philosophies, and had a weakness for pretty editions. I made a point of being well up in matters concerning painting and music. I owned some admirable eighteenth-century prints, a small series by Daumier, an oil-painting by Pissarro. I vaguely cherished the hope of making a sort of collection of which my friends would one day be jealous. That was all. I might ransack my mind indefinitely but I should not find a possibility of joy beyond these few instances.
Oh! this reckoning. I had made it so often, anxious to ascertain what I loved, and what I was worth. I generally congratulated myself on the fact that an equal balance was maintained between the desires and pleasures. Why did everything taste so flat to-day, I thought. What beauty is incarnate to me? What virtue worthy of existence? What was I good for? Might I not have been eliminated without loss to others or even to myself?
This impression did not last long. I smiled. What was I worrying about? To proclaim oneself happy was to be happy. I could do it. I was never anything but an object of envy. A doubt crossed my mind, however. Certain moralists, I thought, consider life bearable only when supported by some passion. I only know of two: Love? With all her train of folly[Pg 17] and suffering. Her victims are spoken of more than all else. Real good fortune to be emancipated from it. Ambition? Is not this insatiable by its very nature? There are so few chief parts, and all great destinies go hand-in-hand with an assurance which I lacked ... and then, did I not appreciate the highest pinnacle of fortune at its paltry worth! Did not true wisdom lie in admitting that one is nothing but a man lost in the mass of men, to order one's life so as to glide in peace through this indifferent term, lacking a morrow; without cherishing a thousand longings above one's state, or na?vely spurring oneself to sterile enthusiasms?
I pondered over these familiar reflections for my comfort. To my surprise the shadow of melancholy which had hovered over my head did not dissipate so easily. I had difficulty in picturing to myself without bitterness and fatigue my life to come, similar to millions of others, void of deep sorrows as of sublime joys, this dreary life which in ten years or in forty would end in solitude, sickness, and suffering, in the clutches of that cursed enemy, Boredom, whose first treacherous onslaught I thought I could feel....
We had just crossed the frontier, and were skirting some meagre plantations of firs hanging to the ridge. My companion had begun to talk to me of Japan: he never allowed himself to be carried away by his enthusiasm but he admired this warlike and trading nation, at last recovered after the necessary trial, gifted with a colossal power of expansion, and who, one of these days would take Indo-China from us at a move. He added:
"My dear fellow, the prestige of France in the Far East has declined to such an extent that in order to[Pg 18] do business we have to pose as an English firm. Out there I called myself Smith."
I noted this detail with interest as a sign of our decadence.