The Enemies of Women Part 62

He already has an occupation to fill his hours. He wants to be a contemplator of life. He is glad to have been born in the most interesting of periods.

Something is going to happen; something new in history.

The smoke has not yet cleared away from the battlefields. It is a mist in which people lose their way and which does not allow them to see the complete outline of things. The very actors in the recent drama are blind. Years will pa.s.s, before the mist rises and vanishes, leaving the new world visible.

Will it be the same stage setting as of yore, merely with a few lines changed? Will all these b.l.o.o.d.y efforts to suppress violence, selfishness, and pre-historic ferocity as the chief bases of society, turn out to have been in vain?

The Prince thinks bitterly of the possible disillusionment. How terrible to see primitive b.e.s.t.i.a.lity rise again unharmed after a cataclysm which has been accepted as a regeneration! How terrible to contemplate the failure of so many generous spirits, of so many n.o.ble minds, aspiring toward the triumph of good, anxious for peace among men, and the sweet a.s.sociation of people, working against war as medical societies labor to exterminate diseases!

Faith in the future suddenly animates him. The world cannot always be the same; great convulsions, when they have pa.s.sed, never leave the soil the same as they found it. Will children always be annihilating each other just because their fathers and grandfathers did so? Must they look on each other with hostility because they were born on different sides of a mountain, a river, or a wood, which politics calls a frontier?

We all have two native lands! The place where we were born, and the State to which we belong. Why not generously broaden this conception to include a third country? Will not a blessed time come in which men will talk as fellow being to fellow being, without thinking whether or not History commands them to hate and kill each other? With deep love for one's land of birth, cannot they be at the same time citizens of the world?

The Prince is leaning on the bal.u.s.trade, above the terraces and the harbor. His pensive walk has brought him thither, without his realizing it.

He turns his back on the sea and on the crowd which, after the concert, is beginning to thin out there below. The American musicians are pa.s.sing close to him, followed by a swarm of small boys accompanying their retirement.

He looks at a gap on the horizon, between the Alps and the promontory of Monaco, where the sun has just gone down. Above the reddish expanse a star is shining with the brilliancy and luminous facets of a precious stone.

Lubimoff is thinking of the ancient fathers of poetry who sang about it three thousand years ago. Homer called it _Kalistos_. Sometimes the morning star and at other times the evening star, Lucifer, Vesperus, or the "Shepherds' Star," it finally received the name of Venus, because of its shining whiteness, like that of a diamond on a woman's breast.

The Prince feels the sweet caress in his eyes as he gazes on the soft glow of the planet. Its name symbolizes beauty and love. He imagines the people who inhabit that celestial point of light lost in s.p.a.ce. They must be of a purer essence than ours, entirely free from a past of primitive animality--ethereal beings, like the angels of all religions.

Then he smiles bitterly.

There is another star shining in the sky, more beautiful and larger than that one. It is blue instead of white, a soft blue: the color of poetry and dreams. It sparkles, in the dark depths of s.p.a.ce, with the mysterious glow of the enormous bluish diamonds which Oriental monarchs place in their tiaras. Those who contemplate it feel in their eyes the velvety dew of divine mystery. Perhaps the poets of other worlds sing of it as a chosen refuge and a place of eternal beauty, where only the souls of the pure and the elect may go to rest. Perhaps it has given rise to religions and is the object of cults, having its altars, as the sun had in former times.

And this blue diamond of s.p.a.ce, this world of soft light, which the populations of other planets contemplate as a poetic star, and as one in which all creatures lead a purely spiritual life, is the Earth, our poor globe, where twelve millions of men have just died on the battlefield, where as many more millions died of the emotion and plagues, which are the consequence of war; and where six hundred thousand millions of francs have been consumed in smoke, fire, and bursting steel.

Lubimoff remembers his impressions, a few hours before, standing beside a tomb which was beginning to be changed at the first halting words of Spring. The Infinite does not know us, nor does the very earth which maintains us know us either.

We are alone in the infinite, without other support than that of our own lives, our own illusions, and our own hopes. Man can rely only on man.

And he repeats what he had said of the earth that morning.

The sky knows nothing of our sorrows.

He slowly turns toward the square.

From all the cafes, restaurants, and hotels, comes the musical rise and fall of the cadenced violins. Behind the great windows, reddened by an inner light, he see couples pa.s.sing intertwined, following the rhythm of the music. They are dancing, dancing, dancing.

Youth does nothing else. Dancing is a sort of sacred rite, prohibited during the war; and people are all devoting themselves in dancing now, with the fervor of zealots finally celebrating the triumphs of their persecuted religion.

The Prince recalls his recent pa.s.sage through Paris. He had never seen the women better dressed, with so manifest a hunger for pleasure and luxury. The tango of the violins on the Boulevard is answered like an echo by the tango of the violins all along the Riviera, and at the summer resorts which are beginning to open. Woman's dearest wish, at the moment, is to dance the latest dance with a fighter from the United States!

The nightmare of war has vanished; everything has been forgotten. For many people nothing remains to recall the conflict save the uniforms, more numerous than formerly in the _thes dansants_.

Michael confines his meditation to this coast, which was always the domain of the blessed! For four long years war has turned Monaco upside down and filled it with darkness.

His imagination runs up and down the gulfs and promontories. There is a cemetery on each. In Mentone thousands and thousands of negroes lie under the earth. The combatants from Africa, whose fathers knew only the lance and the breech-clout, have chanced to perish like gladiators on this sh.o.r.e of European millionaires. In Cap-Martin the English have left their dead; in Monaco, there are some of every nationality; in Cap-Ferrat, the Belgians sleep, under wreaths already old; in Nice, are the bodies of the Americans; and everywhere, from Esterel to the Italian frontier, there are Frenchmen, Frenchmen, Frenchmen.

The dead are innumerable. Were they all to rise together, those who come to prolong their lives under the palm tree and the olive on the sh.o.r.es of the Violet Sea, would flee aghast.

But the aim of life is to live. Life is an endless Springtime, and covers everything it touches with the eager moss of pleasure, with the swiftly creeping ivy of dreams.

The cemeteries, strikingly white, seem to take on a duller tone, and are lost in the smiling landscape, like an unessential note in a song. The softness of the skies and the surrounding country changes them to gardens. A body occupies so little s.p.a.ce and the earth is so large!...

The hotels which were hospitals, are regilding their signs, disinfecting their rooms and sending advertis.e.m.e.nts to the great newspapers of the world. Already people may come and dream between the walls which just now shook with cries of pain, or the rattle of death agonies. Music is beginning sweetly to moan along the happy coast, amid the murmur of the waves and the rustling of the orange trees, of epithalamial perfume. The old shepherd of the Alps, who, after sixty years, has not yet recovered from his amazement at the Monte Carlo which has arisen there below on the once deserted tableland, will see it grow with new palaces and new towers, further expanding its opulence like a city of dreams.

The pa.s.sage of death has made love of life more keen. Every one, seeing the black banner of the Adversary vanish in the darkness, finds new zest in pleasure.

Lubimoff stops in the middle of the square. It is beginning to grow dark. With one ear he hears the musical swing of a dance invented by the negroes of North America for the enjoyment of the whites; and with the other he hears other negro music, the South American tango. In the adjoining streets new orchestras are playing wherever there is a public place, cafe, hotel, or restaurant--with a sign in English at the door, to attract the heroes of the hour: _Dancing_.

He gazes at the mountain which forms a background for the square and watches over the graves on its slopes. Then he looks on high....

The earth and the sky know nothing of our sorrows.

And neither does life.

THE END