The Grip of Desire Part 5

XIII.

THE RESOLUTION.

"My life was blighted, my universe was changed; I had entangled myself without knowing it in an inextricable drama. I must get out of it at any cost, and I had no way of unravelling it. I resolved by all means to find one."

J. JANIN (_L'Ans morte_).

He sat by his desolate hearth and began to think with terror of the eternal solitude of that hearth. Alone! always alone! Already he had said to himself very often that he had chosen the wrong road, that this arid and desolate path was not the one needful to his ardent soul, that the hopes with which he had formerly been deluded, were falsehoods in reality, and that the G.o.d whom they had made him believe that he loved with such ardour, left his soul empty and barren.

To love G.o.d! The love of G.o.d! High-sounding, hollow words which enable hypocrites to take advantage of the common people; fantastic pa.s.sion kindled in the heart of fools for the amazement of the simple!

Ah! how willingly would he have replaced the worn-out vision of this chimerical phantom with the likeness of some young girl, with sweet look and smile, full of promise.

And the burning memory of the wanton player came and blended with the fresh and radiant memory of the charming pupil of Saint-Denis.

"But why, priest, dost thou permit thy fevered guilty imagination to wander thus? Pursue thy course, pursue it without stopping, without looking back; henceforth it is too late to retrace thy path; anyhow be chaste, be chaste under pain of shame and infamy.

"Thou must not be chaste in view of recompense like a slave, thou must be chaste without expectance."[1]

He took up a book, his sovereign remedy in hours of temptation. It was the life of St. Antony, written by his companion, St. Athanasius.

"The demons presented to his mind thoughts of impurity, but Antony repulsed them by prayer. The devil excited his senses, but Antony blushed with shame, as though the fault were his own, and strengthened his body by faith, by prayer and by vigil. The devil, seeing himself vanquished thus, took the shape of a young and lovely woman and imitated the most lascivious actions in order to beguile him, but Antony raising his thoughts towards heaven and considering the loftiness and excellence of the soul which is given to us, extinguished these burning coals by which the devil hoped to inflame his heart through this deception, and drove away the devilish creature."

Marcel shrugged his shoulders and closed the book. How many times already he had tried all those means without success.

He leant his burning forehead on his hands and, in self-contemplation, tried to see to the bottom of his soul.

Chaste! always chaste! What! Was the flower of his youth wasted away thus, in incessant, barren struggles? If only peace of heart, and a quiet conscience remained to him; if quietude sat by his hearth, as his masters many a time had promised him! But no, alone with himself, he felt himself to be with an enemy.

For many years, it had been so, and a lying voice had cried to him without ceasing: "Wait for happiness, for sweet pure joys, wait for it till to-morrow: to-morrow all this fury will have pa.s.sed away, these raging blasts which rise to thy brain will have vanished; thy vanquished senses will leave thee in peace, and calm and strong, thou shalt rejoice over an untroubled conscience and over the satisfaction of duty fulfilled."

And he had waited in vain. Now he had reached ripe age, and the future is visible ever more gloomy; to-morrow has come, as sad, as empty, and as desolate as yesterday.

He was tired at last of waiting, patiently, humbly, resigned like the beast of burden which awaits the slaughterhouse. Beasts of burden! Are we not that, all we who with brow bent under humiliation, injustice, thankless toil; with the heart embittered by tedious deception and tedious despair, miseries of heart and miseries of body, wait, wait ever, wait vainly for a more brilliant sun to shine at last, until at the end of the day there rises before us the only guest we have never expected, on whom we counted not,--the solution of the great problem, the radical cure for all our ills--DEATH.

Death, which with its brutal hand, seizes us at the moment when perhaps at last we are going to rest ourselves and rejoice.

No, that shall not be. He will not continue to vegetate without happiness in these dull, common-place surroundings; to walk at random in this road bristling with thorns; to pursue his disheartening career, enclosed by miserable vices.

Nothing around him but stupid, vulgar prosiness, foolish moral annihilation. No poetry, no golden ray, no rainbow! Everything most low, unsightly, pitiful. Such was his lot as priest.

Complaints of the soul, wandering flashes of the imagination, criminal aspirations of the heart, sinful desires ... these ... that was all.

Was this then life?

Was it for this that G.o.d had created him, that his mother had drawn him painfully forth from her entrails, that nature had one day counted one intelligent being the more?

Ah! he felt full well it was not so. He felt full well it was not so by his thirst for emotions and enjoyment, by his altered lips, by his aspirations for an unknown world. He was in haste to strip off for once at least this old man's sh.e.l.l which enveloped him, this black, hideous, hardened covering of the bad priest, beneath which he felt his vitality, his youth, his strength, his heart of thirty, bounding, boiling, roaring, like burning lava.

The next day be remembered that though it was nearly six months since he had taken possession of his cure, his pastoral visits were not yet completed.

In fact, he had gone everywhere, even to Captain Durand's. Only, he had found the door closed and, after the information he received, he had fully resolved not to go there again.

[Footnote 1: The Antigone of Soto.]

XIV.

THE CAPTAIN.

"The disposition of a man of sixty is nearly always the happy or sad reflection of his life. Young people are such as Nature has made them; old men have been fashioned by the often awkward hands of society."

ED. ABOUT (_Trente et Quarante_).

The old Captain was in fact a bad parishioner, as his servant had told him, and had only one good quality in the eyes of that careful housekeeper, "that he was always shining like a new halfpenny."

Durand, in fact, was what is called in a regiment "a smart soldier," which means to say "a clean soldier." And still, one of his most important occupations was to brush his things. The son of peasants, without patronage, fortune or backstairs influence, he had raised himself, a rare and difficult thing nowadays; therefore he was proud of himself, and would say to anyone who would listen to him: "I am the son of my own deeds."

He had been one of those serious-minded officers of whom Jules Noriac speaks, who instead of dividing their many spare hours between the G.o.ddess of play and the G.o.ddess of the bar, employ themselves in regimental reforms.

The dimensions of a spur-rowel, the length and thickness of a trouser-strap, the improvement of a whitening for belts which does not fall off, were questions which had more importance and interest for him than a question of State.

The slave of his duties, he was excessively severe in the service, and this stiffness and severity he had brought, it was said, into his household.

With these military qualities; pa.s.sive obedience, scrupulous cleanliness and the vulgar courage necessary for a son of Mars, Durand, with a good reputation and full of zeal, had had when very young, a rapid advance. At one moment he had foreseen a brilliant future, but his ambitious hopes had been quickly deceived. He saw the Baron de Chipotier, the Comte de Boisflottant, and the son of Pillardin, the lucky millionaire, successively come into the regiment, and these sprigs of lofty lineage, full of brilliancy and loquacity, naturally eclipsed the modest qualities of the obscure upstart soldier. Spending their life in cafes, overwhelmed with debt, loved by the women, they laughed among themselves at all the _minutiae_ of the service, which they treated as beneath their notice, ridiculed their superiors, and especially the serious-minded officers.

Everything was forgiven them, they were rich. Durand was filled with indignation; he saw everything he had respected become an object of sarcasm to these young men, and his most cherished convictions turned into ridicule. He was like those devout persons who, when they hear an unseemly oath or an impious word, tremble and pray heaven not to cast its avenging lightning; he asked himself if social order was not overthrown, if the army was not marching to its ruin. He began to talk of his apprehensions, of this pitiable state of things, and they laughed in his face. But when these frivolous, turbulent, incapable officers became his chiefs, chiefs over him, the studious, model officer, the upright man, the slave to the regulations, he began to mistrust everything, society, France, the empire, the justice of G.o.d, and himself. It was from this period that the crabbed character dated, by which he was known.

He pa.s.sed a long season thus, full of anger and jealousy: then the time for his retirement arrived, that time to which all the forgotten, the obscure, the pariahs of the army look forward during long years, and which casts them forth into the social world, ignorant and strangers.

Then he had retired to his own village, dividing his time between the tending of his garden, and the cares which were occasioned him by his daughter Suzanne.

XV.

MEMORIES.

"Often risen from humble origin, he has gained the respect of all and the public esteem; but this cannot prevent his having a restless spirit; he misses the duty which has called him for so long at the appointed hour. Around him are scattered the memorials of his regiment, his eye catches them and a mist comes over it."

ERNEST BILLAUDEL (_Les Hommes d'epee_).

He was up by dawn, and the villagers on their way to their fields sometimes stopped to cast an inquisitive look over his garden palings. They saw him dressed in a linen jacket, with the glorious ribbon adorning his b.u.t.ton-hole, weeding his flower-garden, turning up his walks, pruning his trees, clearing his flowers of caterpillars, watering his borders, with great drops of sweat pouring down, bending over his labour like a negro under the lash.