Part IV
I
The main destination of my journey was Paris, where I hoped to meet old friends, well acquainted with my eccentricities; congenial spirits who understood my moods, knew all about my whims, admired my courage, and were consequently in a position to gauge accurately the temporary state of my mind. In addition to this some of the foremost of the Scandinavian poets had just taken up a permanent abode in Paris; I meant to claim their protection and with their help defy Marie’s sinister schemes; for she intended to have me shut up in a lunatic asylum.
During the whole journey she continued her hostilities and treated me as a person altogether beneath contempt, whenever we were without witnesses. She was always lost in thought, absent-minded, indifferent. In vain I took her sight-seeing in the towns where we were forced to spend the nights; she took no interest in anything, saw nothing, hardly listened to me. My attentions bored her; she seemed to be fretting for something. But for what? For the country where she had suffered, in which she had not left one single friend, but—a lover, perhaps?
During the whole time she behaved like the most unpractical and ignorant of women; she displayed none of the qualities of the organiser and manager of which she had boasted so much. She insisted on staying at the most expensive hotels, and for the sake of one night she often had the whole furniture rearranged; a badly served cup of tea provoked interviews with the hotel proprietor; the noise which she made in the corridors drew unflattering comments upon us. We missed the best trains because she would lie in bed until dinner-time; through her carelessness our luggage went astray; and when we left, her tips to the servants were of the meanest.
“You are a coward!” she said in reply to one of my remonstrances.
“And you are ill-bred and slovenly!”
It was a charming pleasure-trip, indeed.
As soon as we had arrived in Paris and settled down among my friends, who were proof against her spells, she found that I had got the better of her, and felt like a wild animal caught in a trap. She was furious because the leading Norwegian poet received me warmly, and overwhelmed me with kindness. She promptly detested him, for she sensed in him a friend who might some day raise his voice in my favour.
One evening, at a dinner given to artists and writers, he proposed my health, calling me the chief representative of modern Swedish literature. Marie, poor martyr by reason of her marriage with the “notorious pamphleteer,” was present. The applause of the diners depressed her to a degree which excited my compassion, and when the speaker tried to make me promise to stay for at least two years in France, I could no longer resist the wistful expression of her eyes. To comfort her, to give her pleasure, I replied that I never took an important decision without consulting with my wife. My reward was a grateful look and the sympathy of all the women present.
But my friend remained obdurate. He urged me to prolong my stay, and with a fine flourish of oratory asked all those present to support his proposition. All raised their glasses in response.
My friend’s obstinacy always remained inexplicable to me, although I quite well understood at the time that a secret struggle was being fought between my wife and him, the motive of which I could not guess. Maybe he was better informed than I, and had penetrated my secret with the clear-sightedness which frequently accompanies first impressions; moreover, he was himself married to a woman of strange morals.
Marie did not feel at home in Paris, where her husband’s genius was generally acknowledged, and after three months’ stay she hated the beautiful city. She was indefatigable in warning me of “the false friends who would one day bring me misfortune.”
She was again expecting to become a mother, and again life with her was unbearable. But this time I had no reason to doubt the paternity of the expected baby.
Our stay in Paris came to an end; we broke up our tents and slowly made our way to Switzerland.
Isn’t It Enough?
It does not matter very much that the wealthy man did not ask Jesus what he should do in order to solve the problem of life, for Jesus would very likely have replied in the same way in which He replied to the question relating to the Kingdom of Heaven: “Go and sell all thou hast and give it to the poor.” But it is a pity that the wealthy man did not carry out this suggestion, and above all things that he did not live to see a scorching day in June in the year 1885 in the humble form of a sixty-year-old coster who pushed a heavy barrow down the Avenue de Neuilly, ceaselessly calling out in a voice trembling with hunger and increasing age—
“Cresson de fontaine!
La santé du corps!
Quatre liards la botte!
Quatre liards la botte!”
He went down on the left side of the avenue, halting before every door; but everywhere the porters’ wives shook their heads, for the younger and stronger ones had stolen a march on the old man, and had already supplied the necessary requirements for the day. He reached Porte Mailot and gazed down the avenue which stretched before him, apparently endlessly, down towards the Seine. He took off his black cotton cap and with the sleeve of his blue blouse wiped the perspiration off his forehead. Should he turn round and walk up on the right side, or should he go to Paris to try his luck there? the wonderful luck to earn the few pence by virtue of which he could keep up sufficient strength to push his barrow along when to-morrow had dawned? Should he invest his last shilling in the payment of the toll and go on to meet the unknown fate awaiting him? He took the risk, paid the octroi and trudged along the Avenue de la Grande Armée.
The sun had risen higher in the sky, and the pavements were still warm from the previous day; the gay town smelled like the close, fetid atmosphere of the bedroom, which streamed through the open windows and hung heavily in the still air. The sunbeams heated the dust which rose in clouds from the carpets beaten against the doorsteps; showy advertisements flashed from privies and news-stalls, and a suffocating smell of ammonia penetrated through the half-open doors; cigar ends, tobacco, manure, orange skins, celery stalks, pieces of paper from forgotten refuse heaps were carried away by the rushing stream which gushed from the main and swept everything towards the gratings of the gutter.
The old man cried his wares, but carts and omnibuses drowned his voice, and no one bought. Tired, forsaken by every one, he sat down on a seat under the plane trees. But the sunbeams found him out, and scorched him in spite of the dusty leaves. How dismal the sun appeared to the worn-out traveller, who longed for an overcast sky and a downpour to relieve the unbearable heat, which robbed his nerves of their strength and shrivelled up his muscles.
Yet the torture of the excessive heat did not make him insensible to the torture of hunger and the dread of the morrow. He rose, seized the shafts of his barrow, and toiled up the steep incline which leads to the Arc de Triomphe, shouting incessantly—
“Quatre liards la botte!”
At the last street corner a little dressmaker bought two bunches.
He dragged himself through the Champs Elysées, and met the wealthy man, seated in his carriage behind his English coachman, on his way to the Bois de Boulogne, there to brood over the problem of life. The palaces and large restaurants bought nothing; the fierce rays of the sun dried up the water-cress, and the long green leaves of his cauliflowers hung limp, so that he was obliged to sprinkle them with water at the fountain near the Rond-Point.
It was noon when he passed the Place de la Concorde and arrived at the Quays. Before the restaurants men were sitting and lunching; some of them had already arrived at the coffee. They looked well-fed, but bored, as if they were fulfilling a melancholy and painful duty by keeping alive. But to the old man they were happy mortals who had staved off death for a few hours, while he felt his soul shrinking like a dried apple.
The barrow rattled past the Pont-Neuf, and every stone against which the wheels pushed shook the muscles and nerves of his tired arms. He had not broken his fast since the early morning; his voice sounded thin like the voice of a consumptive, so that his cries were more like cries for help now, with little preliminary sighs caused by want of breath.
His feet were burning and his hands trembled; he felt as if the marrow in his spine were melting with the heat, and the thin blood hammered in his temples as he turned towards the city, seeking the shade of the Quai de l’Horloge. He halted for a moment before a wine-shop in the Place de Parvis, half inclined to spend his few pennies on a glass of wine. But he pulled himself together and trudged on, past Notre-Dame, towards the Morgue.
He could not drag himself away from this mysterious little house, where so many problems of life have been solved, and he entered. How cool and beautiful it was inside, where the dead lay on marble slabs, the hoar-frost on their hair and beards sparkling as on a beautiful, bright winter day. Some of them looked distressed, because the rush of the water into their lungs, or the stab of the knife into the heart, had given them pain; one of them smiled as if he were glad that all was over; one lay there with an expression of indifference on his face, as if nothing mattered; the problem was solved, at any rate: he had lived until he died. No more clothes required, no more food, no shelter! No sorrow, no cares. All held in their grasp the greatest boon life has to bestow: a calm which neither want, failure of crops, sickness, death, war or famine, American wheat or the hard laws which regulate wages, could disturb. Sleep without dreams, how gentle a sleep! And without an awakening, how splendid!
The old man must have envied the sleepers, for he turned his head on leaving, to feast his eyes once more on the sight of those blessed ones, who slept in cool seclusion behind the large glass panes.
He plodded on to the other side of the church and stopped at the principal entrance. He asked the dealer in relics to keep an eye on his barrow, and entered. He stirred the holy water with his right hand and cooled lips and brow. Inside the church it was cool, for the sunbeams were powerless to penetrate the stained-glass windows. The pulpit was occupied by a little abbé, freshly shaved, with traces of powder still visible on his bluish skin; he was speaking, and the old man listened.
“‘Consider the lilies in the field,’” said the abbé, “‘how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like any one of these! Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have store-houses nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls!’”
“How much more are we better than the fowls!” sighed the old man.
“But rather seek ye the Kingdom of God,” concluded the abbé, “and all else will be added, to you.”
“All else,” sighed the old man, “all else! First the Kingdom of God, and then all else.”
Leaning against a pillar in the side aisle, the wealthy man, holding a Baedeker in his hand, tried to solve the problem of the essence and origin of life by means of a careful study of the architecture of the past. He did not believe in the Kingdom of God, but he brooded over the purpose of life, and could not understand why a man should go to so much trouble to kill time until he was seventy or at the most eighty years old. Had it not been against all conventions, he would have gone to the old man and said to him who had already passed his allotted time—
“Give me your solution of the problem of life!”
And the old man, unless he had been too exhausted with hunger and thirst, would have answered—
“The problem of life, as I understood it, is the maintenance of one’s own life.”
“Is that all?” the wealthy man would have answered, astonished.
“All? Isn’t it enough? All?”
“We do not understand one another.”
“No, we do not understand one another; we have never understood one another.”
“Because you are a selfish old man, who has lived but for himself. But humanity....”
“Sir, I too have lived for humanity, for I have brought up and educated four children, a problem which was more difficult perhaps to solve than yours, the solution of which you can buy at any bookseller’s. Yes, go, sell all you have and give it to the poor, then you will see whether there is room in life for anything else!”
But the wealthy man preferred to leave the problem unsolved and keep his gold; therefore he continued to study his Baedeker, and did not ask the poor coster for his opinion.
The old man, with faith unshaken, left the church, the abbé’s comforting words ringing in his ears: “Take no heed of to-morrow,” and crossed to the left shore of the river.
At the corner of the Boulevard St. Michel he was fortunate enough to sell six centimes’ worth of his stuff at a reduced price. And on he trudged and turned into the Rue Bonaparte.
It was afternoon, that saddest time of the day when the sun is setting, but darkness has not yet fallen, darkness which brings in its train peace for the weary souls who long to rest and play for a while before they are compelled to face torturing dreams and memories.
He sat down on a stone step and counted his money: eighty centimes; that was twenty centimes less than the franc which he had spent at the gate. How could he pay six francs to the nursery gardener? How could he buy food and drink, how return before nightfall to Suresnes? He saw in imagination the endless Champs Elysées, the long Avenue de la Grande Armée, the terrible Avenue Neuilly. No, it was too far to go back, too far.
He looked about searchingly, and his dim eyes were dazzled by the gleam of the blue and red glass bottles in the chemist’s shop on the other side of the street, which sparkled in the rays of the setting sun. They stood on long shelves, filled with bottles and boxes; patent medicines for indigestion; appetite restoratives; powders to calm feverish brains which had brooded too long over the riddle of life; means of protection from over-population or increasing poverty; headache pencils for those who tried to solve social problems; rouge for night-birds, tabloids for nervous ailments and financially independent people. All these things could be bought there.
The old man rose hastily, as if a buyer had beckoned to him, and entered the chemist’s shop.
“Six centimes’ worth of laudanum, please,” he said. “My wife is suffering from convulsions.”
And as if to prove his words, he lifted his right hand to show the ring on his third finger. But there was only a white line and a groove in the brown skin.
But the chemist, who, perhaps, had also been waiting for a buyer, took no notice of his gesture; he filled a small bottle with the required liquid, licked a label, bit a cork, took the money, and resumed the study of his pharmacopoeia. What business was it of his?
The old man, the bottle in his pocket, staggered out of the shop, once again seized the shafts, and wandered up the street. He stopped at a bookseller’s, and as if to make one more bid for good fortune, he called out for the last time—
“Quatre liards la botte!
Quatre liards la botte!”
Afraid that somebody might beckon to him in reply, he put the bottle to his lips and greedily drank the dark-red liquid, as if to quench a burning thirst. The pupils of his eyes contracted as if he were staring into the sun; a vivid scarlet flame shot across his cheeks, his knees bent, and he fell on the edge of the gutter. He snored loudly like a man in a sound sleep; the perspiration stood in large drops on his face, and there was a quivering movement of his legs.
By the time the police had arrived he lay quite still, but the expression of his face plainly betrayed his last conscious thoughts—
“Life was sometimes good, evil every now and then, but the best thing came last. I solved the problem as well as I could, and it was not easy, although the rich man found that it was not enough. But we did not understand one another. It is a pity that men are not meant to understand one another.”