Wherein we skip down the Highway of Youth
Saturday night.
The Boule Miche was ablaze with light of frequent cafés; its roadway vexed with roar of wheeled traffic; its pavements astir with shuffle of many feet.
From the Place Saint Michel, where the black waters of the stealthy river washed her quays in darkling passage to the far sea, the broad thoroughfare of the Boule Miche, the students’ highway, flaring in the black reek, swept upwards to the shadowy gardens of the Luxembourg, topped the hill, and was lost amongst the stars. Riverwards, where the Ile de la Cité, with sombre hint of law-courts and hospital, arose from out the flood in the pitchy murk of the night, loomed the dark cathedral towers of Notre Dame, gloomy with threat of eternal punishment to transgressors—and low down and afar gleamed the weeping lights of the Morgue, where sleep, after their last violence, the disowned and discarded dead.
But neither above on the limitless blue, where are the stars, nor below on the unthinking litanies of an outworn creed, nor upon the rude death that ends alike the abstemious nun and the dizzy jig of Folly and Crime, were bent the thoughts of the multitudinous students who ranged the highway, making holiday—indeed, their eager eyes were wholly set upon living the conventional unconventionalities of youth, skipping down the highway of life with shout and laughter and song and merry riot, arm in arm, in rollicking mood, reckless of the flitting years, careless of the eternities.
It was midnight, and the Bal Bullier being at an end, its frantic dancings done, and its doors closed, the youths were pouring into the Boule Miche with much rustle of prettily dressed young women who hung upon their arms—and were hovering about the lighted spaces where the cafés blazed into the street.
The sombre academics enwrapped in the darkness of the alleys at either hand, and the professors who snored in their staid beds—what mattered they? Away with pompous thinking, when the blood’s jigging. And if they were awake even the most learned of the old gentlemen, with fullest sprinkling of dandruff on collar, shall he explain the thrill that is in the kiss of a woman’s lips, or add a tittle to the glory of it in the explaining, for all his learned researches? It is there, for the getting, and it holds none the more magnificence for the dissecting of it. Youth is theirs but for a fleeting too little while—and the blood is a-jumping—and there is life—and the love of woman—and the laughter of wine—and the joy of song—and pleasant comradeship. Revelry if you will; but the dear earth is for the enjoying. Tush! youth is not for the denying. And there is no time for arguments, or the gladness of life is flown almost before the rubbing of bewildered eyes.
God! what it is to breathe! to love God’s design by living it.
What hath philosophy done but make the world yawn, thou numbskull dreamer of dreams that shouldst be living dreams?
This is life. The miracle is given to you. What is changing water into wine to this? Take it in both hands. Grasp it. Live it. All the thinking of all the academies cannot give you this. Grown old in mere thinking upon life, you shall not call back the blithe days of your youth. Dig your hands deep into the grave of your dead self, and you shall not find the splendid years of the joy of life. Get you up to the uttermost mountains’ tops, dive you to the bottom of the uttermost deeps, you shall not find it. It was yours. Whilst you brooded hesitant how to spend it, it hath slipped your fingers, passed like a sunlit merriment, and become part of a sigh in the eternal mystery. The lordship over vasty continents shall not yield you the glory of it—neither ambition nor riches nor learning nor immortality shall yield you a shred of that which, wholly unasked for, was yours.