“What is the matter?” asked his sister uneasily.
But he did not reply. The little square room, hung with light paper, seemed to him dark with the unknown future. He entered with a slow and fearful step as though he were entering upon a hidden destiny. Then, measuring on the floor the position of his work-table, he said:
“I shall sit there. It is a mistake to be too sentimental over the past and the future. They are nothing but abstract ideas, which were not originally possessed by primitive man; he acquired them only after long effort, to his great misfortune. The thought of the past in itself is sufficiently painful. I do not think anyone would be willing to begin life again if he had to go over precisely the same ground. That there are delightful hours and exquisite moments I do not deny, but they are pearls and precious stones sparsely sprinkled on the harsh and dismal web of life. The course of the years is, for all its brevity, of tedious slowness, and if it be sometimes sweet to remember it is because we are able to make our minds dwell upon certain moments. And even then the sweetness is pale and melancholy. As for the future, we dare not look it in the face, so threatening is its gloomy countenance. And when you told me a moment since, Zoe, that this was to be my study, I saw myself in the future, and I could not bear the sight. I am not without courage, I think, but I am given to reflection, and reflection and fearlessness are not the best of friends.”
“The most difficult thing of all,” put in Zoe, “was to find three bedrooms.”
“It is certain,” rejoined Monsieur Bergeret, “that humanity, in its youth, did not conceive of the future and the past as we do. Now these ideas that devour us have no reality outside ourselves. We know nothing of life, and the theory of its development through time is pure illusion. It is by some infirmity of our senses that we do not see to-morrow realized as we see yesterday. We can very well conceive of beings so organized as to be capable of the simultaneous perception of phenomena which to us appear to be separated from one another by an appreciable interval of time. We ourselves do not perceive light and sound in the order of time. We ourselves take in at a single glance, when we raise our eyes to the sky, aspects which are by no means contemporaneous. The beams of light from the stars seem indistinguishable to our eyes, yet they mingle in them, in a fraction of a second, centuries and thousands of centuries. With instruments other than those we now possess we might see ourselves lying dead in the very midst of our own life. For, as time does not in reality exist, and as the succession of facts is only an appearance, all facts are realized simultaneously and there is no such thing as the future. The future has already been; we merely discover it. Now, perhaps, you have some idea, Zoe, why I stopped short at the door of the room where I am to live. Time is a pure idea, and space is no more real than time.”
“That may be,” remarked Zoe, “but it is very expensive in Paris at any rate. You must have noticed that while you were house-hunting. I don’t expect you care to see my room; come, Pauline’s will interest you more.”
“Let us go and see them both,” said Monsieur Bergeret, as he obediently promenaded his animal mechanism through the little square rooms hung with flowered paper, pursuing the course of his reflections the while.
“The savages,” he said, “make no distinction between past, present and future. Languages, which are undoubtedly the oldest monuments of the human race, permit us to go back to the days when our ancestors had not yet accomplished this metaphysical operation. Monsieur Michel Bréal, who has just published an admirable essay on the subject, shows that the verb, so rich to-day in its resources for marking the priority of an action, had originally no means of expressing the past, and in order to perform this function forms were employed which implied a double affirmation of the present.”
As he spoke, he returned to the room which was to be his study, which had at first sight seemed, in its emptiness, to be filled with the shadows of the ineffable future.
Mademoiselle Bergeret opened the window.