I
What man, tell me, what man, were he suddenly delivered from disgust with himself, from terror of the world, from the sadness of an age that is without pity, from remorse for a thing he has done, from the fear of things he has to do, what man, suffering from one of these evils, or from several of them or from all at once, would not experience an immense relief, would not feel a certain absolution for the errors of the universe, a certain alleviation of his own in the contemplation of this little osier-bed which I descry this evening, at the turning of a lane?
What is there so profound, so divine in that scene?
Nothing, nothing, no doubt. Everything, perhaps. For who would venture to maintain that there is anything in the world that might not be a sign for my heart and yet be nothing more? I was following a stone wall, an indecipherable wall at present, without significance, without compassion, an enemy. It shut in my view and my thoughts, it was covered with cold mosses and all the dampness of winter. And then, all at once, the wall ended and there was a little valley crowned with these osiers. Yes, I mean crowned, for it seemed as if all its desires had been granted, all its aspirations satisfied, all its prayers fulfilled.
Thousands of crimson branches rose in a chorus toward heaven, like clusters of some smooth, straight, up-springing coral. All the branches rose together, with one brotherly impulse, like the desires of a world freed from ambitions and vowed to the one, the noblest ambition of all. But why seek for words, why strive to paint it? Surely it was not the flaming sap of the young shoots any more than the little rivulets smoking like censers at their feet,—it was neither of these things that promised relief and deliverance. It was the entire world that manifested itself in this, its smallest fragment, just as the most secretive man will betray himself by the trembling of his little finger or the flutter of an eyelash.
II
I was once saved by the tarpaulin of a humble delivery wagon. That tarpaulin certainly knew no more about it than did the men who owned it, or had the use of it here below. There are, in every object, qualities we are ignorant of and that are precisely those through which this object fulfils its most beautiful rôle in the universe, those to which it inclines as if toward some miraculous purpose, which are indeed its vocation and its true destiny.
I remember it was a morning in February, one of those hopeless mornings which we feel do not deserve the evening and will hardly attain it. I do not know what I had done to myself or to my men to have so completely lost all courage and purpose; but that morning I was certainly the most destitute of beings and the least worthy of an act of grace.
Yet for all that, grace was shown me, for that marvelous tarpaulin appeared. It was of heavy canvas, yellow and green. Its color, its folds, its whole appearance, the form it concealed, in fact I know not what element in it, showed me that I still could live, that my faults were forgiven me, that nothing about me was irremediable.
I am willing to pass for a man who is eager for forgiveness, a man who is satisfied with little. We wish to set our own value on everything, as if the things of the spirit meant the same thing as money, as if they did not depend upon quite another spirit than that of the accountants and geometricians.