He was feeling very lonely now.... Oh, to think of the passing years with their millions of meetings, so many men and women just brushing against one another, in that casual passing, just looking into one another’s eyes, with the indifferent look of non-recognition, and then passing one another again, never seeing one another after!... And perhaps among them the one had passed, her eyes looking indifferently into his eyes, a bit of her body or dress brushing against his body or dress ... and she was gone, gone, lost altogether forever. Was that how it had happened in his life? Or not? Was life sometimes merciful at the eleventh hour, giving the one, the individual soul, as a consolation, as a reward for that love for the many?
Now he felt quite lonely, he who was a dreamer as well as a thinker and a man of action. And an irresistible wish to be no longer lonely made him come down suddenly from that ring of glittering peaks. There was nothing waiting for him in Holland, nothing to draw him towards those low lands of his birth, into the swarm of utterly indifferent people, full of petty insignificance, save alone, perhaps, that it was there—in the same house where the vision had been conjured up—there that the soul was waiting, there that the one individual soul would bide his coming.
“It is only a fancy,” he now thought. “A fancy ... at my age! No, if any such thing had to happen, it would have happened in the years of youth in which we have the right to feel, to dream, to seek ... to seek for the one. Now that so many years, silent, dead years, lie heaped up around her and around me ... and between us, now it becomes absurd to feel, to dream, to seek those sweet solaces which we feel, dream and seek only when we are very young, but not when we have lost even our right to the remembrance of our youth, the reflection of our childish memories....”
Still he came down from the mountains....
Chapter XXIV
It was not until he was standing in front of her, at the Hague, that he knew, in his innermost soul, that he had come back to Holland because of her and of her alone. It struck him at once that her eyes were brighter, her movements younger, that her voice sounded clearer.
“I have read your book!” was the first thing that she said to him, radiantly.
“Well?” he asked, while his deep, almost sombre eyes laughed in his rough, bronzed face.
She would not tell him that the book, Peace, written in his clear, luminous style, prophesying in ringing tones the great watchword of the future, had consoled her for his three months’ absence. She managed to speak of it in terms of quiet appreciation, betraying no sign of her enthusiasm except by an added brightness in her eyes and a curious lilt in her voice, with its echo of summer and of carolling birds. The book was a great success, written as it were in one breath, as though he had uttered it in a single sentence of quiet knowledge, warning them of the coming changes in the world; in a single sentence of quiet consolation, foretelling its future destinies. There was in his words, in that one long sentence of prophetic consolation, an irresistible sweetness, a magic charm which affected for a moment even the most sceptical of his readers, even though they scoffed at it immediately afterwards; something wonderful, inspired ... and so simple that the word was spoken almost without art, only with a note that sounded strangely clear, as though echoing from some higher plane. He had thought out the book during his lecturing-period in Holland and Germany; he had written it up there, high up in the Alps, with his eyes roaming over the ice-bound horizons; and it had often seemed to him as if Peace were waving her argent banners in the pure air, her joyous processions descending from the eternal snows of the upper air to the pollution of the lower, to trumpet forth with blithe clarions the holy tidings, the fair, unfaltering prophecy.... The book had comforted her; she had read it in the Woods, on the dunes, by the sea; and, in the warm summer air, with its tang of salt, she had sat with the book in her hands and felt him with her, though absent.... She knew the sentences by heart; but she tempered her enthusiasm, lest she should betray herself. And, when she had spoken of the book and was silent for a moment, he said: