When they sat together in the evening, talking and dreaming of new forms of beauty which might come into being on the earth, there would come a hush as the blind man spoke of his gods: Life and Love, and Mankind. His fervent words sowed faith in the young hearts of his hearers.
So the days passed, and the night in which he lived was no longer tragic as at first; but sweet, peaceful, and alive with familiar voices. For him there gleamed little familiar stars in the depths of that all-enveloping darkness.
Weeks and months passed; and the last days of July arrived in a tragic year, feverish days when War stepped into the scene and claimed every conversation wherever a group gathered. The sirens of the newspaper buildings gave the news which set moving through the city crowds sick with dread, bewildered, obsessed by images of war, delirious. Newspaper headlines, infected by the general madness, grew to enormous size, quivering before the eyes of their troubled readers; and the familiar world was clad in the terrible strangeness of a bad dream.
Monsalvat could not escape learning the monstrous news. His face drawn and pale, he listened to the reading of newspapers, countless newspapers; and in the squares and public places he heard the distress and horror of the throng. Yet even then his hard-won serenity did not abandon him.
The Great War began, and one afternoon in August the students brought in the news that the German cavalry was invading France. Most of the students were already at the dinner-table. Those who came in cried out from the doorway:
"It's begun. Germany has invaded French soil!"
The brutal news was a whip-lash to all those gathered there. They were silent a moment, and then came a flood of words, words of amazement, of imprecation, or of sympathy. One student jumped to his feet with a cry of "Vive la France!"
But the blind man said nothing. He seemed lost in his own thoughts. At last, at a chance word, he began to speak, and his voice betrayed his distress, though serenity, optimism, illusion, still possessed him.
"This war is a monstrous crime," he said, "the greatest crime ever yet committed on this earth. Not so much on account of the millions of human beings it will destroy, as because it tears to shreds one of the finest illusions ever dreamed by generous hearts."
A shadow passed over his face: