The First of May was approaching. A sinister rumor ran through Paris. The blustering leaders of the C.G.T. were doing their best to spread it. Their papers were announcing the coming of the great day, mobilizing the forces of the working-classes, and directing the word of terror upon the point in which the comfortable classes were mostly sensitive—namely, upon the stomach…. Feri ventrem…. They were threatening them with a general strike. The scared Parisians were leaving for the country or laying in provisions as against a siege. Christophe had met Canet, in his motor, carrying two hams and a sack of potatoes: he was beside himself: he did not in the least know to which party he belonged: he was in turn an old Republican, a royalist, and a revolutionary. His cult of violence was like a compass gone wrong, with the needle darting from north to south and from south to north. In public he still played the part of chorus to the wild speeches of his friends: but he would have taken in petto the first dictator who came along and swept away the red spectre.
Christophe was tickled to death by such universal cowardice. He was convinced that nothing would come of it all. Olivier was not so sure. His birth into the burgess-class had given him something of the inevitable and everlasting tremulation which the comfortable classes always feel upon the recollection or the expectation of Revolution.
"That's all right!" said Christophe. "You can sleep in peace. Your Revolution isn't going to happen to-morrow. You're all afraid. Afraid of being hurt. That sort of fear is everywhere. In the upper-classes, in the people, in every nation, in all the nations of the West. There's not enough blood in the whole lot of them: they're afraid of spilling a little. For the last forty years all the fighting has been done in words, in newspaper articles. Just look at your old Dreyfus Affair. You shouted loud enough: 'Death! Blood! Slaughter!'… Oh! you Gascons! Spittle and ink! But how many drops of blood?"
"Don't you be so sure," said Olivier. "The fear of blood is a secret instinctive feeling that on the first shedding of it the beast in man will see red, and the brute will appear again under the crust of civilization: and God knows how it will ever be muzzled! Everybody hesitates to declare war: but when the war does come it will be a frightful thing."
Christophe shrugged his shoulders and said that it was not for nothing that the heroes of the age were lying heroes, Cyrano the braggart and the swaggering cock, Chantecler.
Olivier nodded. He knew that in France bragging is the beginning of action. However, he had no more faith than Christophe in an immediate movement: it had been too loudly proclaimed, and the Government was on its guard. There was reason to believe that the syndicalist strategists would postpone the fight for a more favorable opportunity.
During the latter half of April Olivier had an attack of influenza: he used to get it every winter about the same time, and it always used to develop into his old enemy, bronchitis. Christophe stayed with him for a few days. The attack was only a slight one, and soon passed. But, as usual, it left Olivier morally and physically worn out, and he was in this condition for some time after the fever had subsided. He stayed in bed, lying still for hours without any desire to get up or even to move: he lay there watching Christophe, who was sitting at his desk, working, with his back towards him.
Christophe was absorbed in his work. Sometimes, when he was tired of writing, he would suddenly get up and walk over to the piano: he would play, not what he had written, but just whatever came into his mind. Then there came to pass a very strange thing. While the music he had written was conceived in a style which recalled that of his earlier work, what he played was like that of another man. It was music of a world raucous and uncontrolled. There were in it a disorder and a violence, and incoherence which had no resemblance at all to the powerful order and logic which were everywhere present in his other music. These unconsidered improvizations, escaping the scrutiny of his artistic conscience, sprang, like the cry of an animal, from the flesh rather than from the mind; and seemed to reveal a disturbance of the balance of his soul, a storm brewing in the depths of the future. Christophe was quite unconscious of it: but Olivier would listen, look at Christophe, and feel vaguely uneasy. In his weak condition he had a singular power of penetration, a far-seeing eye: he saw things that no other man could perceive.
Christophe thumped out a final chord and stopped all in a sweat, and looking rather haggard: he looked at Olivier, and there was still a troubled expression in his eyes; then he began to laugh, and went back to his desk. Olivier asked him:
"What was that, Christophe?"