Last year, during the hard summer months on the Aisne, I used to escape each day, for a second, toward the end of the afternoon, from the overheated tent where we carried on the bloody work of the ambulance. One of my comrades was in the habit of eating an apple at this hour. I used to ask him to be good enough to lend it to me for a moment. I loved to breathe its delicate, penetrating perfume which, every day, changed with the fruit. That was indeed a rare, a beautiful moment amid the fatigues of that concert of suffering and death.
I requisitioned this imponderable part of another’s wealth; then I returned the apple to my comrade. I could have wished that you had all been with me to taste that poignant little joy.
When peace comes again, if you wish to see me in May, I will take you out under the great sycamore that is turning green at the bottom of the meadow. And there as you listen to the flying, the humming, the loving and the living of the millions of creatures that people its cool foliage, we shall set out together on a journey so rare that you will leave your heaviest sorrows along the way.
IX
Some years ago, a magazine undertook to ask a number of writers in what chosen spot they would like to pass a few beautiful hours. Emile Verhaeren answered:
“In a certain corner of the harbor of Hamburg.”
Verhaeren is among those who have revealed to us the mournful grandeur of city views, of factory towns, those places that seem accursed and from which one might think that happiness was forever exiled.
The aspirations of our souls are so plentiful, so tenacious, so fertile that we find something to console us, satisfy us, exalt us in those very spots where suffering rules tyrannically, where the valley of Gehenna is most precipitous.
I visited the docks of Liverpool with a sort of horror. There were tall brick buildings, their roofs lost in the smoke, windows covered with grime, their interiors nothing but monstrous heaps of cotton bales. Men were climbing about there like flies. Everything smelt of fog and mould. Narrow pavements, slimy with rain, ran along by the dry-docks where the steamers, like immense corpses, were being assailed by the frantic crowd. The workers toiled amid a bombardment of hammers, a whirl of sparks. The drills snarled like whipped cats. A hideous light, smothered by the smoke and the mist of the Mersey, drowned everything in its fetid flood.
And yet, since then, I have often dreamed of that terrible spot and felt the need of living there.