"Even if you were twenty thousand times more right in this struggle, is your justification worth the disasters it costs? Does justice demand that millions of innocents should fall, a ransom for the sins and the errors of others? Is crime to be washed out by crime? or murder by murder? And must your sons be not only victims but accomplices, assassinated and assassins?…"
He looked back at the last visit of his son, and reflected on their last talks together. How many things were clear to him now, which he had not understood at the time! Maxime's silence, the reproach in his eyes. The worst of all was when he recognised that he had understood, at the time, when his son was there, but that he would not admit it.
This discovery, which had hung over him like a dark cloud for weeks,—this realisation of inward falsehood,—crushed him to the earth.
Until the actual crisis was upon them, Rosine Clerambault seemed thrown into the shade. Her inward life was unknown to the others, and almost to herself; even her father had scarcely a glimpse of it. She had lived under the wing of the warm, selfish, stifling family life, and had few friends or companions of her own age, for her parents stood between her and the world outside, and she had grown up in their shadow.
As she grew older if she had wished to escape she would not have dared, would not have known how; for she was shy outside the family circle, and could hardly move or talk; people thought her insignificant. This she knew; it wounded her self-respect, and therefore she went out as little as possible, preferring to stay at home, where she was simple, natural and taciturn. This silence did not arise from slowness of thought, but from the chatter of the others. As her father, mother, and brother were all exuberant talkers, this little person by a sort of reaction, withdrew into herself, where she could talk freely.
She was fair, tall, and boyishly slender, with pretty hair, the locks always straying over her cheeks. Her mouth was rather large and serious, the lower lip full at the corners, her eyes large, calm and vague, with fine well-marked eyebrows. She had a graceful chin, a pretty throat, an undeveloped figure, no hips; her hands were large and a little red, with prominent veins. Anything would make her blush, and her girlish charm was all in the forehead and the chin. Her eyes were always asking and dreaming, but said little.
Her father's preference was for her, just as her mother was drawn towards the son by natural affinity. Without thinking much about it, Clerambault had always monopolised his daughter, surrounding her from childhood with his absorbing affection. She had been partly educated by him, and with the almost offensive simplicity of the artist mind, he had taken her for the confidante of his inner life. This was brought about by his overflowing self-consciousness, and the little response that he found in his wife, a good creature, who, as the saying is, sat at his feet, in fact stayed there permanently, answering yes to all that he said, admiring him blindly, without understanding him, or feeling the lack; the essential to her was not her husband's thought but himself, his welfare, his comfort, his food, his clothing, his health. Honest Clerambault in the gratitude of his heart did not criticise his wife, any more than Rosine criticised her mother, but both of them knew how it was, instinctively, and were drawn closer by a secret tie. Clerambault was not aware that in his daughter he had found the real wife of his heart and mind. Nor did he begin to suspect it, till in these last days the war had seemed to break the tacit accord between them. Rosine's approval hitherto had bound her to him, and now all at once it failed him. She knew many things before he did, but shrank from the depths of the mystery; the mind need not give warning to the heart, it knows.
Strange, splendid mystery of love between souls, independent of social and even of natural laws. Few there be that know it, and fewer still that dare to reveal it; they are afraid of the coarse world and its summary judgments and can get no farther than the plain meaning of traditional language. In this conventional tongue, which is voluntarily inexact for the sake of social simplification, words are careful not to unveil, by expressing them, the many shades of reality in its multiple forms. They imprison it, codify it, drill it; they press it into the service of the mind already domesticated; of that reasoning power which does not spring from the depth of the spirit, but from shallow, walled-in pools—like the basins at Versailles—within the limits of constituted society.
In this somewhat legal phraseology love is bound to sex, age, and social classes; it is either natural or unnatural, legitimate or the reverse. But this is a mere trickle of water from the deep springs of love, which is as the law of gravitation that keeps the stars in their courses, and cares nothing for the ways that we trace for it. This infinite love fulfils itself between souls far removed by time and space; across the centuries it unites the thoughts of the living and the dead; weaves close and chaste ties between old and young hearts; through it, friend is nearer to friend, the child is closer in spirit to the old man than are husband or wife in the whole course of their lives. Between fathers and children these ties often exist unconsciously, and "the world" as our forefathers used to say, counts so little in comparison with love eternal, that the positions are sometimes reversed, and the younger may not always be the most childlike. How many sons are there who feel a devout paternal affection for an old mother? And do we not often see ourselves small and humble under the eyes of a child? The look with which the Bambino of Botticelli contemplates the innocent Virgin is heavy with a sad unconscious experience, and as old as the world.
The affection of Clerambault and Rosine was of this sort; fine, religious, above the reach of reason. That is why, in the depths of the troubled sea, below the pains and the conflicts of conscience caused by the war, a secret drama went on, without signs, almost without words, between these hearts united by a sacred love. This unavowed sentiment explained the sensitiveness of their mutual reactions. At first Rosine drew away in silence, disappointed in her affection, her secret worship tarnished, by the effect of the war on her father; she stood apart from him, like a little antique statue, chastely draped. At once Clerambault became uneasy; his sensibility sharpened by tenderness, felt instantly this Noli me tangere, and from this arose an unexpressed estrangement between the father and daughter. Words are so coarse, one would not dare to speak even in the purest sense of disappointed love, but this inner discord, of which neither ever spoke a word, was pain to both of them; made the young girl unhappy, and irritated Clerambault. He knew the cause well enough, but his pride refused to admit it; though little by little he was not far from confessing that Rosine was right. He was ready to humiliate himself, but his tongue was tied by false shame; and so the difference between their minds grew wider, while in their hearts each longed to yield.