Chapter 40

THE SPIRIT OF EARTH

All that winter from the passing of the investing army to the time when the siege guns began to shake earth and sky with their ceaseless roar and from then to the spring, we remained at the Pavilion, Joubert and I, unhindered, almost unvisited by the enemy. The Château drew them off. We had left the doors open to prevent them from being broken in; perhaps it was for this reason that so little mischief was done by the troops that quartered themselves there.

The coincidence of Winter and War, the leafless trees, the eternal roaring of Paris like a tiger at bay, the darkness and death in my heart, all these are in my life away back there, forming a picture or rather a dark mirror, reflecting the forms of Despair, Apathy and Ruin, just as the dark water of the moat reflects the fern fronds of the bank and the dark green plumage of those pine-trees.

Nothing could ever come right in the world again. The gloomy skies, shaken winter long by the cannon said that, and the woods, leafless and sad and sombre, where the squirrels and the hundred other wood creatures seemed banished for ever with the birds. So the winter passed, till one day—I had not been in the woods for a week—one day, following a path near the round pond I came across a troop of ghosts; violets growing right before me on the path side; and to the left amidst the trees, gem-like blue, and dim amidst the brown last autumn leaves—violets. Led by a few days' warmth a million violets had invaded the old forest, grouped themselves amidst the trees and along the paths, heedless of Death or the Prussians.

Even as I looked a breath of wind bent the tree branches like a warm hand, showing a patch of blue sky above and casting a ray of sunshine on the blue flowers below. The Drums of War, the trampling of armies at grip with one another, proclamations, treaties, the pageantry of victory, the sorrows of defeat, all in a moment were banished before that touch of spring and the vision of these lovely and immortal flowers.

Since then I have seen them growing amidst the ruins of Mycenae, in Vallombrosa, at the tomb of Virgil; poets, lovers, warriors, and kings, wherever sun may light or spring may touch their tombs, call to us again through the blue violets of spring, but never have these flowers of God brought the past to man so freshly, so strangely or with such poignancy as they brought it to me there, growing absolutely in the footsteps of Ruin, yet unruined and with not a dewdrop brushed from their leaves.

Ah, yes, there are times when the commonest man becomes a poet, as on that day when dreaming of the death of a woman and the dragon of war, I found spring hiding in the forest of Sénart just like some enchanting ghost of long ago, half-child, half-woman, and answering to my unspoken question, "War, Death, I have not seen them—I do not know whom you mean; they passed, mayhap, when I was asleep. Monsieur, do you not admire my violets?"

The sublime and heavenly cynicism of that artless question, the question itself, these combined to form the germs of a philosophy which has clung to me since then, a philosophy which, combined with love, has slain in me the remains of what was once Philippe de Saluce.

Then day by day and week by week the forest, the fields, the hills, became slowly overspread with the quiet, assured and triumphant beauty of spring. Just as long ago, I fancied that I could hear the forest awakening from sleep, so now I fancied I could hear the world awakening from war and night. Communards might fight in Paris, kings and captains assemble at Versailles, Alsace might go or Alsace might remain, what was all that toy and trumpery business to the great business of Life, to the preparation of the blossom, the building of the butterflies in the aerial shipyards, the letting slip of the dragon-fly on his dazzling voyage? What a hubbub they were making in the Courts of Europe as Von der Tann's army, the King of Saxony's army, all those other triumphant armies turned from Paris with bugles blowing, drums beating, and colours flying, laden with tumbrils of gold and the spoils of war!

"France will never arise again!" said the drums and the bugles, "never again," echoed Europe. "Ah, wait," said spring.

Behind the veils of sunshine and April rain, heedless of Von der Tann's drums or the Saxon bugles, or the vanquished men or the vanquished treasure; viewless and unvanquished, the Spirit of Earth was preparing the future for a new and more beautiful France. Each bee passing from blossom to blossom that spring was labouring for the greater France of the future, each acorn forming in its cup, each wheat grain sprouting in the dark, each grape globing in the vineyards of the Côte d'Or; each and all were labouring for the motherland, to fill again her granaries and her treasure house. Folly had brought her under the knee of Force; drained of blood, half dying, wholly vanquished; in tears, in madness, in despair, she lay forsaken by all the Olympians but Demeter.

Had I but known, those first violets in the forest of Sénart held in their beauty all the future splendour and beauty of the New France.

In my life I have seen many a wonderful thing, but my memory carries with it nothing more miraculous than those flowers of promise seen as I saw them in the forest of Despair.

ENVOI

I am writing these lines in the rose garden of Saluce, ghostly, even on this warm June day, with the memories and the pictures and the perfumes of the past. How good summer is to the old! And how much kinder even than summer is love.

Down the garden path towards me is coming the form of a woman. Once long ago with the romantic extravagance of youth I pictured this garden, haunted by the forms of lovely women long dead; but not one of those forms was as romantic as this living woman, coming towards me between the bushes of the amber and crimson roses.

How slowly she walks, and, see, she stops now and hesitates—ah, now, she has seen me, and she smiles. Age has not touched her sight, yet she is blind—for she is the only person in the world who cannot see that my hands are tremulous and that my hair is grey.

THE END.