"If there be nothing, why this terrible remorse? If there be something, why am I unable either to conceive it with my intellect or to feel it with my heart? How can I put an end to this unbearable anguish? How raise the weight that is stifling me?"
The principal incidents during these gloomy days were some letters from Alfred, filled with affection and with complaints about his wife's health, the sadness of his home, his anxieties for the future. Helen therefore continued to be unhappy.
"Ah!" thought Armand, "it is possible that the words 'good' and 'evil,' 'soul' and 'God,' have no kind of meaning. For thousands of years philosophers have been disputing inconclusively about them, and religions have been succeeding to one another and crumbling away. I have measured the impotence of reason and I have not faith. But there is need neither of reason nor of faith to know whether human misery exists, and to know that we ought to do everything to avoid being the cause of this misery."
We ought! As though we were free! But free or not, let us be sensible of this misery and pity it! When the young man entered upon the new path of pity, he experienced, not absolute relief from his remorse, but a sort of despairing tenderness which at last moistened his heart. He pictured Helen to himself when quite a little girl in a past such as her confidences had revealed to him, and he pitied her for her sad childhood and her oppressed youth. He pitied her for her marriage and for the moral divorce which had separated her from Alfred. He pitied her for having known himself, Armand, for the words that he had uttered to her and which she had believed, for the kisses which he had asked of her and which she had given him. But especially for that second fall, for that frenzy which had thrown her into the arms of Varades did he passionately pity her, and for all the errors into which this first error would draw her. He pitied her for her birth, for her existence, for her subjection to an unconquerable fate!
He was now more sensible of her life than he had been in the days when she had been his, lost in emotion on his breast. By a strange kind of soul-transposition he suffered from the sorrows of a mistress whose joys he had been unable to share. He abode in thought within that sick heart, and the feeling of pity became so strong and full that it overflowed from him upon all life.
When in the evening he walked along the streets and reached the sinister corners of the Haymarket and Regent Street, the sight of the girls of different nationalities wandering there in all weathers moved him to the bottom of his soul. They walked in their dark toilets and accosted the passers-by in every idiom. There were tall, heavy Germans, delicate Frenchwomen, and Englishwomen recognisable by faces that had often retained an expression of purity. The majority were old, with fierce gleaming in their gaze. What lamentable adventures—criminal ones, perhaps—had cast these foreigners, far from their native lands and beneath an ever-gloomy sky, upon the pavement of these streets, pitilessly traversed by the busy work of commerce? And the young, with profiles as of angels—for there were some such—how melancholy to see them pushing open the bar-doors, and drinking large glasses of brandy at a draught! They came out with a little colour on their cheeks and resumed their pilgrimage of infamy, warmed by the draught of alcohol against the rude climate, the sudden showers, the penetrating fog.
Armand watched them going and coming, accosting this man, abusing that, and talking among themselves. There was a whole populace of these lost ones passing through the streets. Yes, lost ones, for nothing can save them any more than the prostitutes of luxury who go in pursuit of men with diamonds and horses, or the adulteresses, those victims of the search for new sensations. Nothing can save them, for there is nothing that can save! Sometimes, however, the young man chanced to pass in front of temples and to remember that thousands of beings believe in a Saviour.
"But if I do not believe in Him," he asked himself, "is it my fault? A true Saviour would be one who saved even the incredulous, even the renegades, even the rebellious, even those who do not repent, seeing that they are most to be pitied! No, there is no redemption, and Christ has died in vain!"
Then he perceived life as the work of blind and destructive necessity, of an evil force impelling creatures to ruin one another. Prostitution below, adultery above, such are the products of the noblest of human feelings—love. Civilisation appeared to him as a huge orgie where the dishes are more numerous, the wines more heating, the guests a larger crowd; but on what mystic plate will the bread of ransom be found by those hungering for forgiveness? Meanwhile the orgie hums and roars, the women offer the fruit of their red lips, a colossal hymn of mirth encompasses the intoxication, every moment one of those present rolls beneath the table, thunder-smitten by death who takes his victims at random; he is so quickly replaced by another that his disappearance is not even noticed, and joy plays on every brow and laughs in every eye. Joy? Yes, provided that no thought be given to one's own distress, and further that one's own misery be endured with courage; but the misery of another—when can we find courage to endure that when we are ourselves its cause? And suddenly his visions would fade away, and his theories and dreamings, to give place to the sole image of Helen in agony, or else of Helen depraved, and of these two images Armand could not have told which tortured his thought the most.
"Can I be in love with her?" he asked himself one morning as he was rising, "and is what I am taking for remorse simply love?"