f/vJ 
 
 "LI E> R.AR.Y 
 
 OF THE 
 UN IVERSITY 
 
 or ILLINOIS 
 
 Tom Turner Collection 
 
 OoEc 

 
 Return this book on or before the 
 Latest Date stamped below. 
 
 University of Illinois Library 
 
 
 FEB07 
 
 JUL24 
 
 991 
 
 1991 
 
 L161 H41
 
 THE YOKE OF PITY
 
 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 ( L'O RDINA TION) 
 
 BY 
 
 JULIEN BENDA 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 
 GILBERT CANNAN 
 
 LONDON 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN 
 
 ADELPHI TERRACE
 
 Copyright, London 1913, by T. Fisher Unwin 
 and Washington, U.S.A., by Henry Holt and Company
 
 
 - ASCENT . 
 
 ^ 
 
 DOWNFALL 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE . 
 S 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 
 PART II 
 
 PAGK 
 
 1 
 
 . 95 
 
 , 173
 
 PART I 
 ASCENT
 
 THE boy, Pierre, went up to bed and they 
 were left alone, as they had been on several 
 evenings before, at the bottom of the garden. 
 They talked a little about their afternoon's 
 excursion and the beauty of the night and 
 then were silent. 
 
 They were silent for a long time. . . . They 
 began to feel increasingly conscious of the 
 oppression of their mutual acquiescence in the 
 silence. . . . The lights of the hotel were put 
 out. Each was aware that the other had 
 seen them go out and made no move to return. 
 They felt that they were sinking down into 
 complicity. . . . Their hands touched and 
 their eyes met in mingled love and reproach, 
 as though each of the lovers were reproaching 
 the other with the eternity of time during 
 which they had not recognised each other. 
 
 He took her back to the door of the hotel, 
 feeling and respecting her desire for inward
 
 4 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 preparation in delay for their utter union. 
 He loved her desire and the respect he had 
 for it, for he loved rather the elegancy of love 
 than love itself. 
 
 Next day, they were walking together on 
 the hill, thrilling with the kiss which they 
 made no attempt to recall, drinking in their 
 profound communion through the most trivial 
 acts of sharing, happy in their promise of love, 
 happy, yet not joyous. 
 
 They passed down the slope leading to the 
 garden and sat halfway up the hill. For sev- 
 eral minutes together she mused. Then she 
 said: 
 
 " I am afraid, Felix ... I am afraid lest 
 I should not satisfy you. . . . You belong to 
 a brilliant world. . . . Your mother, your sis- 
 ters, are smart women . . . the women who 
 loved you before were like them. . . . But I 
 am just an ordinary bourgeoise. . . ." 
 
 He said: 
 
 "I hate all that, my heart is not in it. I 
 have found only lies in it: lies of talent, lies
 
 ASCENT 5 
 
 of beauty, lies of love. . . . Only during the 
 past month have I found truth, Madeleine, 
 only since I have known you. I love your 
 modest way of dressing. It is so true. . . ." 
 So, it seemed to him, his will overcame his 
 habits and fervently he came to the religion 
 of the humble. 
 
 That day she told him all her life. She 
 told him of her sad childhood : her cold, proud 
 mother: her elder sister's jealousy, her father, 
 who alone had loved her, her father whom she 
 had lost so soon. . . . She told him of her 
 marriage to a man much older than herself, 
 a pompous disillusioned man, who was galled 
 by any kind of happiness and resentful at 
 her youth. . . . Then of her first child, still- 
 born. . . . Then of the boy Pierre, and the 
 perpetual irritation he was to her in his re- 
 semblance to his father . . . and of the hos- 
 tility of her husband's relations. . . . She told 
 him of the silence, the emptiness, the fast 
 captivity of her life. 
 
 She raised her eyes:
 
 6 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 "Ah!" she said, laying her hand on his 
 arm, " You are the only creature in the whole 
 world who has ever shed a tear for me." 
 
 He made her tell him more and began to 
 discover the charm of compassion. 
 
 At night, when all were asleep, she stood 
 trembling behind her door, waiting for him. 
 . . . He came. . . . She fell into his arms. 
 He pressed her to him, and not the grace and 
 beauty of her body moved him so much as its 
 surrender. . . . 
 
 He looked round her room. . . . He loved 
 her simple things lying folded on a chair, her 
 little common watch hanging above the bed. 
 
 So, until morning, they drank the poison. 
 
 Each night he came to her. . . . They 
 laughed at the pains they now took to be to- 
 gether less during the daytime. . . . Their 
 attraction for each other gained with use.
 
 ASCENT 7 
 
 He felt that, and, making Madeleine feel it 
 too, he attached her to himself. 
 
 Often they would talk of their first kiss, 
 their first coming together. They would say 
 how they had never thought of it as a new 
 thing, or as a surprise, or as marking any dif- 
 ference in themselves. . . . Their love had 
 wished to have no beginning. . . . And their 
 hands had joined: neither had taken the 
 other. . . . 
 
 So they tried to do away with the idea of 
 a definite act, to lose consciousness in the 
 indeterminate. 
 
 The boy, Pierre, fell ill. She did not go 
 out for two days. He asked after him almost 
 hourly. . . . Together with hands clasped 
 they leaned over the child as he lay asleep. 
 . . . He enjoyed the absence in himself of 
 male egoism, and sharing in the sorrows of the 
 woman he had taken. He took his taste for 
 this elegancy for love.
 
 8 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 They returned to Paris. 
 
 Gravely, piously he set about binding rela- 
 tions with her and arranging for the con- 
 struction of the intrigue. 
 
 He began by breaking as much as possible 
 with everything that was not related to 
 Madeleine. 
 
 He held more aloof than ever from his 
 own people, avoiding their dinners and teas 
 and jests and chatter about actors and tailors. 
 . . . He hated his sisters and their craze for 
 pleasure and being seen in society. . . . He 
 thought he detested their luxury. He tried 
 not to see how Madeleine's simplicity discon- 
 certed him even more in the town than in the 
 hills. 
 
 There was a woman waiting for him to 
 whom he had not written all summer. He 
 broke with her, brutally, against all tradition, 
 without even taking the trouble to keep her 
 friendly towards him. As she was rich and
 
 ASCENT 9 
 
 popular he told himself that she could not 
 suffer. 
 
 He left his friends. Their ambition worried 
 him. Their love-making disgusted him. 
 
 He flung aside his papers, his would-be 
 serious books, and lost all interest in public 
 life and society. Such things seemed to him 
 to be but a theft from love. He wanted to 
 believe that love is nothing if it be not every- 
 thing. . . . How he despised the worldly 
 love that does not engross the whole of a 
 man's mind and heart! . . . 
 
 He gave up a flat he had outside Paris, for 
 other women had been to it. He wished to 
 receive her in a new setting. . . . On the few 
 days when she could not come to him he went 
 and lived there, wrote there, dreamed there, 
 sought to find her in the choice of a piece of 
 stuff, the arrangement of the flowers. . . . 
 And on the days when she had visited him, 
 sometimes in the evening he would return 
 alone, once more in the disordered room to 
 taste the mingling of their souls, to sleep
 
 10 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 where she had lain, to feel still that she was 
 there. So afraid was he of too soon return- 
 ing to consciousness of himself apart from 
 her. 
 
 He bound her to him by the joys she had 
 in him, the joys he desired her to find, by the 
 need she had of him, the need he desired her 
 to have. She was bound to him by the su- 
 preme surrender to which she agreed and by 
 her own betrayal of her sex in the confession 
 of her desires. She was bound to him by her 
 immodesty, by her desire to taste the fulness 
 of it. ... He aggravated the binding power 
 of the audacities of love, by his subtlety in 
 finding meanings in them. . . . Also they ex- 
 plored and exploited the eternity of Love; 
 and they did not escape the feeling of its 
 likeness to Death. . . . 
 
 She allowed him to come to her house. 
 . . . He tried to ignore the awkwardness of 
 his first visit; he tried to persuade himself 
 that he loved the little, dark, low-ceilinged
 
 ASCENT 11 
 
 flat, and the little people who lived their nar- 
 row existence in it. ... For her her prison 
 was flooded with sunlight. She could not en- 
 dure it unless he came often. . . . He calmly 
 accepted the need she had of him and knew 
 perfectly how his calmness bound her to him. 
 
 She preserved a certain amount of coquetry, 
 a certain taste for feeling her power over 
 men . . . and also she kept to herself a cer- 
 tain secret, a few little old love-passages of 
 which she told him nothing. . . . Gently, with- 
 out asking her for anything, he led her to sur- 
 render of all these things. . . . So he stripped 
 her of her pride, the one thing that could 
 support her if ever he should cease to love 
 her; so he left her with no corner of her soul 
 that she could call her own, and crept into 
 and filled her whole being. ..." Think," 
 she would say, tremblingly, " think what it 
 would be if you were to come to me one day 
 and tell me that I must fall back into my- 
 self. . . ." He was aware of his responsi- 
 bility. He loved it.
 
 12 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 What amazing skill he had in his fidelity 
 to her! With what artistry he indulged in 
 self-denunciation for his acts of omission, his 
 little thefts from his beloved, thefts concern- 
 ing which he knew cowardly that she could 
 say nothing, having no power of analysis, 
 no mastery of words, thefts also which one 
 knows must hurt her! With what artistry 
 he denied himself the least pleasure in pleas- 
 ing others! . . . All other men, all other 
 women seemed unfaithful to him. 
 
 He enjoyed the sensation of being insensi- 
 ble to all other women. He cultivated his 
 absolute absorption in the Only One. 
 
 With what subtle ingenuity did he free 
 himself altogether of independence! He told 
 her everything he did, everything he thought. 
 . . . And in the evenings he would see men 
 and women asking those whom they believed 
 to be their lovers what they had been doing 
 during the day! Poor men and women! As
 
 ASCENT 13 
 
 if your lover ever waited to be asked to tell 
 his doings! 
 
 Often she would deplore the fact that he 
 was so young hardly two years older than 
 she and she would worry about the future. 
 ... In ten years she would be thirty-five. 
 . . . But he would love her still! And he 
 would always succeed in making her share 
 his faith. And he loved the feeling that this 
 faith of his own creation bound him more 
 closely to her than ever. 
 
 So he sank deep into fidelity, into depend- 
 ence, into an insoluble relationship. 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
 Summer came. She went to stay with her 
 boy in a village in the forest of * * *. He 
 stayed a few miles away to throw his people 
 off the scent. ... In the evening, at curfew, 
 he would steal out and go across the forest 
 and sit down under the trees: at a given sig- 
 nal he would go up to her house and she
 
 14 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 would open her window. . . . He would re- 
 turn at dawn and sleep until midday, sunk 
 deep into a drowsiness that still bathed him 
 in her atmosphere. 
 
 Ah! the first time he came to her! How 
 joyful he was walking along the open road, 
 far, far away from casinos and palatial hotels 
 to feel that through her he was discovering 
 space, the wide air, the open sky, his own 
 strength, his youth, the upward impulse of 
 his being! How joyful he was hastening to 
 the woman through the mighty forest, seem- 
 ing mightier in its darkness and silence to 
 feel that through her he was discovering a 
 kind of new consciousness, unknown in the 
 polite world, the consciousness of love linked 
 to the ordering of the universe! And, when 
 he reached her room, and in enchantment 
 moved about the little room that she had 
 made so living with such little things a piece 
 of stuff on the table or a fan on the wall 
 how joyful he was to feel that through her 
 he was discovering woman, her art, her skill
 
 ASCENT 15 
 
 in invention. . . . What could he know of 
 the genius of woman from the women of his 
 world who found everything ready to their 
 hands? . . . How much more closely were 
 they drawn together on that night of re- 
 union. They were more dear to each other 
 in the audacity of their meeting, in their un- 
 usual surroundings, in their defiance of the 
 world: they were more united in the mystery 
 of it all, in their adoration of that mystery 
 . . . above all they were bound in the worship 
 of the Bond. 
 
 Fearful at heart she would watch him go 
 away in the morning, in the cold and the 
 rain. . . . One evening he came two hours 
 late. He had lost his way. A pile of wood 
 that marked a turning had been removed. 
 He found her almost beside herself. . . . He 
 was more nearly drawn to her through the 
 anxiety he caused her. 
 
 How thoroughly he felt, and wished to feel, 
 the peculiar conjunction that binds lovers in
 
 16 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 the presence of nature; the abolition of their 
 social personalities, the eternal reminder of 
 their duality; the truth of their mutual at- 
 traction, now that it was freed from the ex- 
 citements of the town; and how he felt the 
 fleeting nature of their union and its eternity 
 ... a simple flashing into consciousness of 
 the infinite desire that was written in every- 
 thing about them. 
 
 One day, a short time after their arrival 
 she was able to escape. She came to meet 
 him in the woods. . . . They sat side by side 
 on the great trunk of a dead tree lying by the 
 road. She put her arm round her lover's 
 neck: 
 
 "Darling," she said softly, "You don't 
 find this life boring? Alone all day long! . . . 
 And you don't dislike the little room you have 
 taken over there, do you? It is such a change 
 for you. . . . You used to spend the summer 
 in such gay places. . . ." 
 
 He said: 
 
 " I am happy. I am not alone during the
 
 ASCENT 17 
 
 day. I live in memory and in expectation. 
 ... I love my little room and my simple 
 life. . . . And love can only grow strong in 
 austerity." 
 
 She adored the memory of their smallest 
 happiness, and would piously preserve a scrap 
 of paper or a flower that they had gathered 
 together. ' You understand," she would 
 say. ..." Other men laugh at our childish- 
 ness! " And he would scorn such men. 
 
 She fell ill, and was forced to keep indoors, 
 and to take the greatest care of herself. He 
 would come in the evening, when she was left 
 alone, and sit by her bedside, and console 
 her and tend her, and watch himself rising 
 from love to devotion, and take a subtle, 
 proud joy in forgetting the attraction of her 
 body and helping her and setting up their 
 communion in sorrow above their sex-antag- 
 onism. Often she would ask him to lie down 
 by her side and she would sleep in his arms. 
 . . . And more strongly than ever he was
 
 18 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 bound to her by the veneration which he 
 found in himself for her frailty, her slumber; 
 by the acrid delight he was able to find in 
 living without her for her sake. 
 
 November. They were still in the country. 
 He came to her now over the river of dead 
 leaves. . . . They clung to each other more 
 closely to defy the death of their woods. 
 
 They had great fires which lit up all the 
 room. . . . And, pressed close together, they 
 would dream how yonder, in the town, there 
 were dinners and theatres, and triumph and 
 hatred. 
 
 Came their last night. The last time that 
 he would come to her room. . . . She had 
 packed up. There was no gay cloth on 
 the table, no fan on the wall. . . . He clung 
 to her. So " their " room was dead, their 
 room that had held five months of their youth. 
 . . . Their youth would stay there, lost in 
 the forest, eternally, while they they would 
 be elsewhere, would pass and die . . . and
 
 ASCENT 19 
 
 coarse peasants would sleep in the room 
 to-morrow. . . . And next year it would be 
 let to others. . . . 
 
 He clung to her to suppress his doubts. 
 . . . What proof had he that it had ever 
 been? 
 
 He clung to her to ward off the future, 
 for protection against himself. . . . Some- 
 thing told him that their happiness would 
 never come again, that he would not wish it 
 to return. 
 
 He had to go. Slowly she opened the win- 
 dow. He went out. Away. Often he turned 
 and threw kisses to her. . . . Then he walked 
 on for a long time without turning. . . . As 
 he came to the corner he turned once more. 
 She was still there at the window. Then 
 blindly he rushed to her, kissed her madly, 
 went away at a run, stifling his sobs, and 
 never turned again. 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
 They returned to the town. He resumed
 
 20 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 the mode of living of the past winter; never 
 going into society, staying alone or with her 
 in their flat, going to see her at her house. . . . 
 He became conscious of the monotony of his 
 life. He loved it. It seemed to him to have 
 something of the quality of a great work of 
 art. And he was happy in Madeleine's hap- 
 piness. And he was proud of his love. Proud 
 of his seriousness. Of his faithfulness. Proud 
 of being necessary. . . .
 
 II 
 
 ONE morning Felix woke up about six 
 o'clock. It was June. He thought of the ap- 
 pointment he had made with Madeleine for 
 the day. . . . He thought that in a few days 
 she would be leaving for the country, and 
 how he would go and lodge near her and 
 resume the old mode of living that they had 
 adopted during the previous summer: living 
 alone with her, for several months, far away 
 from the world. . . . But now his thoughts 
 brought him none of the joy that he expected. 
 Only a strange feeling. A vague uneasiness. 
 A feeling that he did not understand, while 
 it persisted and disturbed him. Suddenly, in 
 a flash, the idea of his liaison stifled him with 
 a feeling of anguish; it seemed to him to be 
 like an absolute, everlasting captivity. In 
 terror he sat up in his bed. Did he love 
 Madeleine less? Was his life with her op- 
 pressing him? . . . As in a flash of lightning 
 
 21
 
 22 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 he saw the hugeness of such a calamity and 
 dismissed the idea, not without perceiving 
 that his chief reason for doing so was that 
 it was too horrible. ... It was insane! Can 
 a man cease to love like that? Suddenly? 
 For no reason? Oh, come! He was still the 
 same. He was happy. . . . Now he was 
 calm again. . . . Quite calm. . . . He began 
 to smile at the thought of his beloved, still 
 sleeping. She would soon be awake. And 
 when she awoke she too would think of their 
 meeting. . . . And suddenly he was once 
 more filled with anguish. He had just be- 
 come conscious of a frightful discord between 
 Madeleine's eagerness for the meeting and his 
 own feeling of repugnance. 
 
 Then, extremely agitated, he got up, drew 
 on his clothes fumblingly in a sort of semi- 
 consciousness which terrified him. Then he 
 went out. He walked blindly on, swiftly, 
 mechanically, haggardly, like a man who has 
 just heard that some terrible misfortune has 
 befallen him, the full extent of which he does 
 not yet know, though know it he inevitably
 
 ASCENT 23 
 
 must. . . . Yes. His life with her had op- 
 pressed him, had been oppressing him for a 
 long time. He could no longer disguise it 
 from himself. What had just happened to 
 him was the breaking of a calamity which 
 for many months had lain dormant to his un- 
 conscious suffering, which he had refused to 
 admit to himself. . . . But what he now felt 
 and with what anguish! was the impossi- 
 bility of changing his life, the vast network 
 of subtle and firm ties in which he had en- 
 meshed himself, while he had cut himself off 
 from the power to break free, or the right to 
 do so; the utter need of himself that it had 
 delighted him to create in the woman, and 
 the entire confidence, the absolute depend- 
 ence, the disintegration of her pride, the dis- 
 gust with the world, the eternal love which 
 he had taught her, love making no provision 
 for change, and the terrible union of souls 
 that of the past two years he had forced upon 
 her, an union which she could not do without, 
 and could not look for in any other man. . . . 
 And he must smile and smile in such a prison,
 
 24 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 appear as happy in it as on their first day. . . . 
 And this was to go on for the rest of his life. 
 For never, never would he dare to speak. . . . 
 And he went on walking frenziedly, either be- 
 cause he was trying to divert his thoughts by 
 movement or because in it he found some 
 solace for his sense of captivity. 
 
 He walked on and on. ... And the idea 
 of being in prison waxed greater and greater, 
 increased and multiplied, became absolute, his 
 one idea, the thought of the approaching 
 meeting, of dining at her house on the mor- 
 row, of some other engagement in two days' 
 time. . . . And the same thing all over again 
 during the following week. . . . Then the 
 summer. Alone with her. Only with her, 
 hypnotised, stationary, with her. For months 
 together. . . . And nature solemnising every- 
 thing! . . . And the nights with her! Silence 
 and the night! The tedious oppressive love 
 of the woman he no longer loved, made over- 
 whelming, made eternal, by the silence and 
 the night! Absolute bondage! It was too 
 frightful. He would find some excuse. He
 
 ASCENT 25 
 
 would not go. Then he thought of the 
 dresses she had made for the summer, for 
 him. She had shown him them. She had 
 been so happy. . . . He would go ! He knew 
 that he would go! ... More frenziedly still 
 he walked on and on, as though he hoped to 
 wear out the power of his uneasiness by mov- 
 ing, moving. . . . 
 
 He walked on and on. . . . For a moment, 
 worn out, he sank on to a seat. Having less 
 capacity for suffering, life seemed just toler- 
 able to him. He would cling to his life with 
 her! . . . Then, suddenly, he called to mind 
 the image of Madeleine dressing, doing her 
 hair, happy, gay, confiding. . . . And he 
 could no longer bear to sit still. 
 
 He walked on and on. . . . Every now 
 and then he would suddenly feel reassured. 
 . . . It was idiotic! He loved her just the 
 same! . . . Were there not a thousand rea- 
 sons why he should love her? . . . But he 
 knew the vanity of his belief. And the mere 
 fact of his clinging to his love was sufficient 
 assurance that it was slipping away from
 
 26 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 him. And it seemed to him that it was slip- 
 ping away from minute to minute with ever- 
 increasing rapidity. . . . Ah! How horrible, 
 horrible it is, he said to himself later on (for 
 he never forgot that morning) for a man to 
 feel that his heart is being drained dry, under 
 his very eyes, and him to be unable to do 
 anything. 
 
 He went walking on and on. Ten o'clock. 
 In four hours he would see Madeleine again. 
 Never had he been so impatient, so eager to 
 see her again. The reason was (so he told 
 himself) that he was thinking how, as soon 
 as he saw her again, he would feel that he 
 loved her just as much as ever and his night- 
 mare would be gone. . . . The real reason 
 as he had to admit later on was that he had 
 a vague feeling that in spite of himself the 
 fading of his love would be clear to the eyes 
 of his beloved and he would at once feel a 
 certain solace and relief from lying and de- 
 ception. 
 
 He reached a horrible desolate place and
 
 ASCENT 27 
 
 sank down by the roadside. . . . He wished 
 to die. So he would avoid what had always 
 been to him the most dreadful element in 
 death ; that it might come when he was happy. 
 . . . When he was happy! ... So he still 
 thought that he could be happy? . . . He 
 groaned under the feeling that he was still 
 used to the idea of happiness. 
 
 He thought of all the men he knew. . . . 
 He heard them saying, as men have done 
 since the beginning of time: " What a pother 
 about nothing! You don't love her any more? 
 Let her go." . . . And he was overcome with 
 a new distress: the certain knowledge that 
 he was alone in his misery, that he could talk 
 of it to no one; and the idea that he was in 
 some sort singular in his sorrow. 
 
 And he kept on saying to himself : " Why 
 do I no longer love her? Why do I no longer 
 love her? . . ." But he was acutely conscious 
 of the puerility of his stupor and his belief 
 in a "mystery"; he knew that there were
 
 28 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 reasons why he no longer loved her, and that 
 they were not very subtle and could easily be 
 discovered if he would dare to look for them. 
 
 He went home, sat down to lunch but ate 
 hardly anything. He marked the astonish- 
 ment of his people and the servants. He 
 understood that a fresh torment lay in wait 
 for him, the effort to conceal his suffering 
 from them. . . . He hated them for their 
 solicitude, which was as a mirror to show him 
 his unhappiness. 
 
 Two o'clock. He lay back on the divan, 
 as worn out as though he had been waiting, 
 watching for ten days, irritated by the furni- 
 ture, awake, anxiously expecting Madeleine. 
 She came in joyfully. He took her in his 
 arms, embraced her desperately in his obscure 
 consciousness of the hurt he was bound to 
 deal her. She was vaguely surprised at it, 
 for a moment. . . . She thought him pale 
 and looking so tired! . . . He invented ex- 
 cuses. She sat down by his side and told him
 
 ASCENT 29 
 
 what she had been doing during the last two 
 days how bored she had been, and what she 
 had enjoyed, her smallest thought. He lis- 
 tened, with his arm round her waist, his eyes 
 gazing into hers, filled with a sweet tenderness 
 for the confidence she gave him, and he was 
 resolved to suffer everything rather than fail 
 her. . . . Lovingly, tenderly, she desired 
 more. Ardently, piously he kissed her over 
 and over again. . . . 
 
 Never had he been so passionate. But she 
 looked at him gravely and, for the first time 
 since she had known him, she said: 
 
 "Do you love me?" 
 
 From that day on, in revolt or acquies- 
 cence, stinging or heart-breaking, the idea of 
 being imprisoned never left him. 
 
 Sometimes in the country he would see a 
 happy couple, escaping from the world, blithe
 
 30 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 and gay in their beloved bondage; sometimes 
 in society he would see a lover, the untroubled 
 possessor of some beautiful smart woman, 
 obviously independent of any need for ten- 
 derness; sometimes in a book he would find 
 some fictitious character who went straight 
 to his appointed end absolutely absolved from 
 affection. . . . Anything and everything 
 served to make him feel his slavery. . . . And 
 he had no other consciousness except as a 
 prisoner. And he dated all the other events 
 of his life by that consciousness; of anything 
 that he read or heard he always thought: It 
 was before, or after. . . . 
 
 He tried to cheat his malady. And some- 
 times he escaped it. But he could not escape 
 the sorrow of knowing that he was cheat- 
 ing. . . . Could he make himself believe : " I 
 do not love her less, but differently " ? He 
 recognised his ingenuousness. . . . And again, 
 when he saw other men, he would think: 
 " They have all known their affections to 
 change. And they have been able to bear it.
 
 ASCENT 31 
 
 . . . Well, I will do as they have done." But 
 he knew how dishonest he was in trying to 
 believe himself to be " like them." 
 
 Every day it was a frightful torment for 
 him to wake up. 
 
 He would awake in the happy conscious- 
 ness of being young and fresh, light-hearted, 
 free from hate, living a soft, pleasant, com- 
 fortable life. . . . And then suddenly he 
 would feel that there was something in life 
 that he had forgotten, that would come back 
 to him again, that poisoned all the rest. . . . 
 Ah, yes! I am in prison! . . . And the si- 
 lence of the morning, the warm comfort of 
 his bed, his solitude, gave him a feeling that 
 it was absolute, that this thing would never 
 change. 
 
 Then he would go out and restore his sense 
 of proportion in the company of men. . . . 
 He no longer had the spasms of sorrow that 
 had crazed him on the first coming of the 
 idea of his bondage. Now his sorrow was 
 dull and monotonous, a thing that seemed
 
 32 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 essentially enduring, like wretched surround- 
 ings, horribly, horribly bearable. 
 
 That day she came to him and lay in his 
 arms, worn out, with eyes closed. . . . Hag- 
 gardly he looked at her, terrified by the hap- 
 piness she found in him. 
 
 Sometimes he tried to accept his bondage. 
 . . . He would sacrifice himself! What did 
 his life matter? . . . He used to go to church 
 and try to learn the art of self-immolation. 
 . . . He mistook his liking for the peace, the 
 austere resonance, the great placid arches, 
 for a disposition for self-sacrifice. 
 
 Often he accused himself of exaggeration, 
 of romanticism, in his belief that he was 
 " buried " and " in prison." Could he not 
 escape, in work or through pleasure? . . . 
 Then he would have a feeling of retrogres- 
 sion. For he had dreamed of the singularity 
 of love. . . . Then he would summon up his 
 old ideal, and, with bowed head, he would
 
 ASCENT S3 
 
 acknowledge the necessity of desolemnising 
 love. 
 
 Sometimes he would really escape from 
 his unhappiness by judging it. He would 
 think of his first tenderness with her, his first 
 tears, the slow weaving of the net that bound 
 him. And he would think: " None of it was 
 true. I did not love the bond. I did 
 not love my tears. I was following old 
 models." 
 
 And he would dream: 
 
 " Any young man who is sensitive to all 
 the examples of love would do as I did. 
 He would bind fetters on himself and he 
 would weep. The aesthetic of love is al- 
 ways the aesthetic of tears and bondage. 
 ... So much the worse for those who are 
 not fit for it. They act on it just the same. 
 . . . For there is no other way. Love that 
 is free and joyous is still unpopular and de- 
 spised. . . . And perhaps it is better so. ... 
 The aesthetic of love was made for women. 
 They have made it for themselves. . . ."
 
 34 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 And suddenly he would think that the de- 
 light of tears and bondage existed apart from 
 all that, and that he had known it, that he was 
 still enslaved by it. 
 
 Then he tried to discover why he no longer 
 loved her. . . . Since when? . . . He probed 
 back and back. . . . 
 
 He was overcome by a sort of dull dizzi- 
 ness: it seemed to him then that he had never 
 loved her. . . . 
 
 And every day brought fresh uneasiness. 
 . . . He was bored by the little people whom 
 she made him meet: they hurt him now and 
 gave him a feeling that he was unclassed. 
 . . . He was disquieted by Madeleine's truth- 
 fulness, her honesty in not appearing to be 
 anything but what she was, her lack of the 
 kind of polite bluff to which he had always 
 been accustomed. . . . 
 
 And again he was irritated by the frugality 
 of Madeleine's life, the frugality of her house,
 
 ASCENT 35 
 
 her furniture, her establishment, her clothes. 
 . . . And yet he knew many others like hers, 
 people living frugal lives and they amused 
 him artists and working people. . . . But 
 in their houses there were gaiety, carelessness, 
 liberty. . . . While in hers there were sad- 
 ness, worry, slavery . . . and her need of 
 clinging to some one happier than herself. 
 . . . But for the moment he did not analyse 
 it all. He only saw that he was drifting 
 away from the woman because of her humble 
 life, and, as he tried to fight down his growing 
 consciousness of the truth, so horrible in its 
 simplicity, mad with grief and shame, he 
 cried: "I am not going to leave her because 
 she is not rich! " 
 
 However he was forcing his way back to 
 freedom. Silently, laboriously, the secret 
 process of destruction of all that bound him 
 to her set in. He returned to society, the 
 theatres, his friends, his books. . . .
 
 36 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 He told her that he had been to the theatre 
 and said that he had been taken. She forced 
 herself to take it lightly. 
 
 She found him changed but could not say 
 exactly how. She thought she was attaching 
 too much importance to " impressions." 
 
 Alone with her, at her house, he would talk 
 to her now about the plays he had seen, and 
 about the people he knew and their gossip: 
 he would talk about Pierre and children's 
 minds: he would talk about music, poetry, 
 colour, dress, and decoration. . . . 
 
 She forced herself to think that his ceasing 
 to talk of love meant nothing. 
 
 When he was alone with her in their flat 
 he no longer desired darkness and silence. . . . 
 Rather he wanted daylight, the noise coming 
 up from the street, as faint gusts of liberty. 
 . . . Now he wished their union to be an act 
 and not a condition. . . . And at once he 
 would begin to talk of outside things as
 
 ASCENT 37 
 
 though he wished at once to put their in- 
 timacy behind him. She was dying under 
 it all, slowly. . . . She tried to think that she 
 was attaching too much importance to " little 
 things." 
 
 Often, when she came, she would find him 
 reading. He would draw her to him, and 
 made her read too, and talk, or play the piano. 
 ... So the day would pass. . . . And he 
 would take her home. . . . 
 
 She tried to remember what she had been 
 told, that the union of the body was a little 
 thing. And their souls had met! 
 
 She would remind him of little ways he 
 had had and had no longer: his pleasure in 
 furnishing and in her clothes. . . . He would 
 reply: "What would you? One can't go on 
 being eighteen for ever. . . ." She felt that 
 all was lost. 
 
 One day she asked him:
 
 38 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 "You still love me just the same?" He 
 took her in his arms and covered her with 
 kisses. . . . 
 
 In her heart she remembered that he had 
 not been at all surprised that she should ask 
 him that. 
 
 . . . They would lie side by side, sinking 
 with the dying day, each absorbed in thought, 
 so sundered soul from soul as to make the 
 intimacy of their bodies a mockery cruel and 
 hard to bear. . . . 
 
 One day in the country they were sitting 
 on a little stone bridge at the end of a day 
 which she had wanted to be happy though it 
 had never been one of friendliness. Night 
 was falling. He said: 
 
 ' We must go home. ... I am dining with 
 my sister-in-law. . . . You know, she is giv- 
 ing a series of them." 
 
 "Ah!" she said, "You are going to all 
 of them?" 
 
 They said no more. During the past year
 
 ASCENT 39 
 
 he had not been to any. And he knew that 
 she was thinking of that. 
 
 They went home slowly, silently, horribly 
 in accord, bound together, as though they 
 were carrying between them the coffin of their 
 child. 
 
 He had no doubt now: she knew. 
 
 Then there began for him the worst tor- 
 ment of all. His heart, marvellously pre- 
 pared by two years of tenderness for any out- 
 pouring, any disordered emotion, became a 
 prey to the sharpest, the completest, the most 
 passionate pity. He wandered through the 
 streets the whole day long now, immured in 
 the fixed idea of Madeleine in distress and 
 striving to overcome her misery by the most 
 frantic self-abasement. 
 
 He saw her sitting with her family, forced 
 to control herself, to say something, anything, 
 to keep back her tears, while he himself was
 
 40 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 able to find solace for his grief in movement, 
 in the open air, in the free flow of his tears. 
 . . . Ah! the eternal inequality in the divi- 
 sion of suffering, the eternal excess of misery 
 that awaits the woman, with her more tender 
 soul, the less adequate equipment of her mind, 
 which is for ever turned in upon herself: her 
 more barbarous desire: her more sensitive 
 body: her solitude, her religious heart, her 
 immobility, her duties, her duties, always her 
 duties. . . . Did any man ever feel all this 
 more acutely than he! What a contempt 
 he felt for the sufferings of men with their 
 inherited hardness, their multiple interests, 
 their liberty. . . . He had a sort of feeling 
 of shame at being a man. 
 
 Women passed him, working women, 
 slowly going home to their gloomy homes at 
 the end of a joyless day like all their days. 
 . . . But, at least, in their poor rooms, they 
 will be by themselves, they will be able to 
 weep. . . . All women seemed to him to be 
 happier than Madeleine. . . . Besides, these 
 women had not her sensibility, her education.
 
 ASCENT 4,1 
 
 . . . Madeleine seemed to him to be the sym- 
 bol of unhappiness, sheer unhappiness, the 
 only unhappiness in the world. ... It seemed 
 to him that for two thousand years nature 
 and the ways of men had been working 
 together with no other end than to as- 
 sure the unhappiness of that one wretched 
 woman. 
 
 He saw her sitting with her family, forced 
 to control herself, to say something, anything, 
 to keep back her tears. . . . And in the writ- 
 ings of authors of alleged " profundity " he 
 had read that a forced abstention from the 
 physical expression of grief keeps back grief. 
 And current morality also assured him that 
 " they were made to suffer," that " they were 
 used to it," that " all is well and for the best." 
 . . . How he girded at such base methods of 
 avoiding the need to pity. How he detested 
 those who urged such methods upon him. 
 How he crushed them with the saying of 
 the master: " The truth is that it is impossible 
 to pity a woman enough." 1 
 
 1 Nietzsche.
 
 42 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 And he saw Madeleine growing thinner 
 and paler, with her poor, sunken, pinched, 
 drawn face. And all these mental images 
 which would have repelled a strong heart, 
 jealous of its strength, bound him by his 
 horrible need of growing weaker. He melted 
 at the sight of her tears. And the mere sight 
 of Madeleine apart altogether from her 
 grief with her childlike eyes, her sweet face, 
 her gentle ways, made him sink and yield: 
 her poor yearning heart could not even bear 
 suffering without giving forth the idea of 
 gentleness and ingenuousness. 
 
 And to think how young the poor creature 
 was! . . . Ah! Indeed he pitied the martyr- 
 dom of a poor creature, left to fade away, 
 sewn up alive in the shroud of her last ecstasy. 
 . . . But at least she is old and suffering 
 becomes her. . . . But the suffering of a 
 young woman, a woman keyed up to the de- 
 light of living, a creature in the bud, of 
 whom men say that she is meant to grow 
 and to expand, is revolting, horrible, inju- 
 rious.
 
 ASCENT 43 
 
 And to think of her gentleness, her tact 
 in her suffering! ... If only she had re- 
 proached him, made demands on him, threat- 
 ened him. . . . That would have given him 
 the strength deliberately to hurt her and 
 make an end. . . . But no, there she was, 
 looking at him with the eyes of an affection- 
 ate dog, holding out her throat for him to 
 cut. . . . He hated her for not defending 
 herself. 
 
 And he would think of her in the evening, 
 after dinner, alone in her little room with 
 her son, holding back her tears in his pres- 
 ence. . . . And the boy looking at her, sur- 
 prised that she too could know suffering as 
 he did, and respecting her less for it. ... 
 Oh! the infamy of forcing tears upon those 
 who should remain great. . . . Shame, shame, 
 he cried, upon those who have humiliated 
 the mothers! . . . 
 
 And he would see her at night, sitting up 
 in her bed, thinking, thinking. . . . Ah! it is 
 an unique kind of misery that of the woman 
 who feels that she is loved less, the imprisoned
 
 44 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 creature wondering: "Where is he? What 
 is he doing? What is he thinking? What 
 will he be like to-morrow? " Knowing her 
 own impotence and thinking: " What can I 
 do if he wants to leave me!" the woman's 
 nightmare, her lover's liberty. And then 
 the night, in its solemnity telling her how 
 from all time eternally women have clung to 
 the same dream as herself, and how eternally 
 they have come to shipwreck; and then the 
 dawning day bringing with it the ideal of the 
 dull, eternally dull, life, lit up by no single 
 ray of love. . . . How truly and exactly he 
 felt all that! That and so many other pecu- 
 liarly feminine sorrows: the utter devastation 
 of the ruin of love: the nausea of the return 
 to reason, independence, an undivided heart: 
 and the image of the lover, appearing charm- 
 ing, unique, irreplaceable, as he fades away 
 into the distance: and the doom of living 
 in the places where everything tells of 
 him, with people who will speak his name, 
 . . . how precisely he was conscious of all 
 that!
 
 ASCENT 45 
 
 And he would walk on breathlessly. Crazed 
 with pity, not thinking only of the woman, 
 not feeling only through her, but putting 
 himself in her place, in a condition of real 
 altruism, in the submission, the submissiveness 
 of the ego. A condition of sentimental 
 alienation. . . . And he thought of those 
 who have made fun of these things : " People 
 always have strength enough to bear the ills 
 of others." Idiot! As if pity did not con- 
 sist precisely in the ills of others becoming 
 our own. And he thought of the " psycho- 
 logue " the dramaturgist of " love " who 
 stops and paints the sufferings of a man who 
 is too much loved, a fatuous fool! who had 
 seen only irritation and not pity. . . . Some- 
 times he would sit down with his hands on his 
 heart as though he were trying to check its 
 disaffection. And he would sigh: " Shall I 
 never get away from my pity for her? Shall 
 I never return to consciousness of myself, of 
 myself alone, utterly alone? Will it always 
 be contaminated with the consciousness of 
 another? " And he would think of those who
 
 46 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 have preached the gospel of pity. . . . Fools! 
 Fools! They have never felt it! 
 
 Sometimes he would escape. He would 
 think : " She is young. She will repair her 
 life. She will have other lovers. . . ." And 
 suddenly he would feel something pierce his 
 heart: " They will make her suffer." 
 
 And he would rend himself with the thought 
 of the woman's sorrows as a man rends him- 
 self with the thought of a child's troubles 
 making himself responsible for all her suffer- 
 ing. He would scourge himself with the re- 
 flection that she had no connections, no for- 
 tune, no amusement. . . . As if he were to 
 blame for that. . . . He pitied her far more 
 than her suffering under these disadvantages 
 called for, attributing to her his own needs 
 and forgetting that she had been brought up 
 like that. 
 
 At times he would think of making a work 
 of art of their adventure. And suddenly he
 
 ASCENT 47 
 
 would think: "Yes, that's it. I will escape 
 into fiction and succeed and be a great 
 man. . . ." And he saw the Beatrices, the 
 Lauras, the Elviras abandoned and growing 
 old while their poets were celebrated by the 
 world. And he would detest all poets. 
 
 And his unease grew. He sank deeper 
 and deeper into pity for women. He based 
 his pity on the misfortunes of the whole sex, 
 the passage from childhood to virginity, from 
 virginity to womanhood. . . . On their en- 
 slaved condition, slaves whom men feed and 
 clothe. . . . He pitied even their beauty, 
 their victimisation, their living under the 
 necessity of giving pleasure. . . . Naturally 
 he refused to see their compensations, their 
 power, their triumphs, their insolence. He 
 detested the men who saw these things. . . . 
 What a contempt he had for all those who 
 made fun of women! 
 
 And everywhere he found food for his 
 malady. . . . The sight of women in the 
 street old before their time, coarsened in spite
 
 48 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 of themselves; in gardens, of young resigned 
 mothers dragging their children in their train ; 
 or, in music-halls, of so-called smart women, 
 blazoning their husbands, slaves in silk and 
 pearl necklaces. Everywhere he found the 
 slaves' prison of women. In flashes he would 
 think: "And their ferocity? And their de- 
 light in torturing men? " His heart would 
 leap on that: " So much the better if they 
 avenge themselves!" 
 
 Sometimes in a train he would see a com- 
 fortable, large, red-faced woman whose hus- 
 band would call her : " Mummy." And he 
 would think: " That is a happy woman. . . . 
 That is their lot: either brutalisation or mis- 
 ery in soul." 
 
 And it would seem to him that no one 
 had any pity for women. And it would 
 seem to him that no one had any pity for 
 any one. How amusing of people to pro- 
 scribe pity! As if there were any to pro- 
 scribe! As if all the unhappy people were 
 not the enemies of the rest! As if any- 
 body could bear for long the use that they
 
 ASCENT 49 
 
 make of one " Stay a little. You are in 
 no great hurry" in the hope of escaping 
 their misery! . . . Ah! But we are too clever 
 for them ! ' You must be reasonable. Come, 
 come. Everything turns in time." And we 
 push them back into the morass. 
 
 One evening he went out walking, torn by 
 the memory of the day, torn by the memory 
 of the slow cruelty he had inflicted on her 
 with his ill-feigned joys, his clumsily con- 
 cealed evasions, his cunningly awkward lies. 
 . . . And now, in her bed, she would be think- 
 ing of it all. . . . And he walked on, tor- 
 mented by the thought of her. He went 
 along by the river : far from the sight of rela- 
 tive, indulgent men: he was drunk with con- 
 fession, drunk with preening himself in his 
 absolute shame, drunk with a blight that only 
 nature or the dead can give. . . . He thought 
 of Madeleine's father who had so loved her. 
 And it seemed to him that her father would 
 call him to account for the fate of the child 
 whom only they two had loved. . . . And
 
 50 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 suddenly he called up the image of Made- 
 leine as a little girl, Madeleine sleeping in 
 her little brass bed, as she had described it 
 to him, with her hands clasped under her 
 cheek, and her lips parted, in the twilight. 
 . . . And it seemed to him that, if there were 
 any justice in the world, it should demand 
 that life should bring only gentleness and 
 tenderness to the adorable sleeping child. 
 And life had brought only bitterness and 
 harshness, giving a wryness to the expression 
 of her lips, as though she were suffering un- 
 der some dreadful dream that she did not 
 understand. . . . And now that fate had 
 justly granted her dear, beloved creature 
 a little love, and a little happiness, it was 
 only to lay her low! . . . Then he could con- 
 tain himself no longer, and with all his soul 
 yearning towards her innocence and fragility, 
 he ran on through the night, crying through 
 his sobs : " Never, never, will I do anything to 
 injure her. . . ." 
 
 And, clinging to his desire to love, fortified
 
 ASCENT 51 
 
 by his tears, he cried again in fierce self- 
 castigation: "I love her still! . . . Surely a 
 man must love a woman if he can weep for 
 her like that. . . ." 
 
 The unhappy wretch was wearing himself 
 out with trying to pretend that his crazy pity 
 was love. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 Meanwhile together with his pity, and be- 
 cause of it, his feeling of being bound and 
 his longing for freedom only increased. He 
 had terrible gusts of independence. Made- 
 leine suffered them, though they prostrated 
 her. He was surfeited with pity for her and 
 detested her for it. ... He was most hor- 
 ribly torn between the worst kind of egoism 
 and the craziest tenderness. 
 
 In her tactless confidence she went on tell- 
 ing him everything more precisely than ever. 
 She told him of her household troubles, of 
 her strained relations with her husband and 
 his family, of her disappointments in her 
 boy, Pierre. ... In his heart he revolted. 
 
 UBP.ARY 
 
 IMUVPPCrrv ne at i
 
 52 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 Why could she not keep all these things to 
 herself? In truth she found much pleasure 
 in touching him to pity. . . . He had not 
 been born into the world for that. . . . All 
 because she "loved" him! A woman's in- 
 vention, that conception of love with its con- 
 fusion between love and the solace that comes 
 from telling all that stultifies it. ... He 
 would answer her curtly. When she left 
 him she would weep over it. He knew that. 
 . . . And he wept at the thought of her 
 tears. 
 
 Often he would feel a genuine anger at 
 the marks of suffering which were beginning 
 to appear in her. " As if it were not sad 
 enough that I do not love her any more, 
 without her forcing me to see how she is 
 wasting away and how hard lines are settling 
 about her lips! . . ." 
 
 One day she told him about her first con- 
 finement, the stillborn child, which had had 
 to be cut in pieces before they could bring it
 
 ASCENT 63 
 
 forth, while they had been unable to make 
 any anaesthetic take effect. . . . She told him 
 the story quite simply, as though it were the 
 most ordinary matter in the world. He 
 listened stupidly. He thought of the ac- 
 cumulation of suffering that women bear, and 
 how the idea of tribulation never repelled 
 them. . . . He seemed to himself to be rather 
 foolish to have so much consideration for her. 
 
 He watched her perishing for lack of love, 
 and springing to life again at a caress; she 
 was made for feeling, only for feeling, for 
 nothing but feeling. ... It seemed to him 
 that in refusing to allow her to suffer he was 
 committing the supreme offence the offence 
 contemned by the poet, of having pity on 
 those whom God has doomed. 1 
 
 And still she was as attentive to him as in 
 their early days, brought him trifles that he had 
 desired, flowers that he loved. . . . He was 
 incensed against her for forcing a tender 
 welcome upon him, accused her of doing it 
 
 1 Dante, Inferno, xz. SO.
 
 54 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 deliberately, of knowing that she was forc- 
 ing it upon him. 
 
 And now he was careful to avoid noticing 
 a number of small desires that she expressed, 
 to keep her waiting, not always to be free on 
 the days she appointed. . . . With horrible 
 skill and cunning he gradually accustomed 
 her to the idea of being loved less. 
 
 When they left their flat, if it were already 
 dark, he would take her home. They would 
 stop the carriage some distance away from 
 her house. ... In the old days she used to 
 leave him at once and take her happiness in 
 his caresses back with her into her prison. 
 Now she hesitated before returning to the 
 house the emptiness of which, lying in wait for 
 her, was now augmented by her thoughts. 
 She would linger with her hand in his. . . . 
 And he would feel her then, in the dark, si- 
 lent and restive, with the tragic restiveness of 
 a woman in the face of her inward thoughts, 
 like a dog on the way to its cart, or a lamb 
 nearing the slaughter-house: he would feel
 
 ASCENT 55 
 
 her clinging to him, fully conscious that she 
 was disturbing him, obsessing him, that he 
 would soon throw her aside, that she would 
 suffer more the more she clung, and still 
 clinging. . . . Meanwhile he would think: 
 " In five minutes I shall be free, I shall read 
 the papers. ... I can hold out till then. . . ." 
 And she would guess his calculated patience: 
 she would be conscious of the relief he would 
 feel a moment later. She would try to de- 
 lay. . . . But the moment would come and 
 she would sigh: "Well, I must go in." . . . 
 And all night he would be haunted by the 
 thought of her going back to her melancholy 
 house, turning back towards him, and him- 
 self smiling at her with a forced smile 
 through the window of the carriage as it bore 
 him away. . . . 
 
 And now she began to struggle. 
 
 As she began to feel her lover's love slip- 
 ping away from her she strove desperately to
 
 56 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 give it the air of an established thing, either 
 in the hope of making herself believe it by 
 so doing, or because she was trying to en- 
 slave the man by the faith she showed in 
 him. ..." You are rude to me," she would 
 write, " and yet you love me." " Why do 
 you hurt me so, when you love me ? " ' You 
 love me more than you say, more perhaps 
 than you think," etc. ... In his heart he 
 rebelled. What I All that because he was 
 absently gentle with her, absent in his ca- 
 resses, because he replied " Yes " when she 
 said, "Do you love me? " As if there were 
 any choice in the matter! As if the tone were 
 not everything! . . . No! She would never 
 understand. . . . She would force him to 
 say: " I don't love you any longer." And she 
 knew perfectly well that he no longer loved 
 her! . . . But she kept on saying to herself: 
 "As long as he does not speak I will ignore 
 it: I will keep him. . . ." Then he would 
 respond with a similar exploitation of mascu- 
 line dues, a similar lack of honesty. . . . 
 Then, suddenly, he would see only one thing,
 
 ASCENT 57 
 
 one single fixed idea: the vast extent of their 
 distress that it could bring them to such hu- 
 miliation, to acceptance of such humiliation. 
 . . . And once more he would sink back into 
 his crazy sympathy. 
 
 She would write: 
 
 " Darling, your love is changing. You 
 feel it: and you are suffering. You dare not 
 tell me, dare not confess it to yourself. . . . 
 Why dare you not? . . . Well, you will love 
 me differently, tenderly, etc. . . ." He 
 crumpled the letter up. As if love could 
 "change"! As if its only change were not 
 in death! As if she did not know that! . . . 
 Then, suddenly, he would feel how wretched 
 she must be to come and beg for the ashes of 
 love, knowing them to be ashes. . . . And 
 once more he would sink back into his crazy 
 sympathy. 
 
 And again: 
 
 " I am mad with impatience. . . . And I 
 shan't see you until to-morrow! . . . Yester- 
 day, when you left me, your expression was
 
 58 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 ominous: your voice, your eyes, everything 
 condemned me. ... I cried all night. . . . 
 I wrote you a letter, but burned it. You 
 would have thought me mad. ... I fancied 
 that you wanted to leave me and go away. 
 . . . Ah! It was mad of me, wasn't it? I 
 know that you love me. . . . But the idea 
 was too frightful! ... I have nothing but 
 you in the world, etc. . . ." That made him 
 long to break, and make an end. His sense 
 of justice protested: No, you have no right 
 to inflict such a responsibility on another 
 human being, to let your whole life depend 
 on her frown. . . . And yet he had never so 
 rawly felt the impossibility of leaving her: 
 he thought of her as a drowning woman 
 clinging to a boat; should he take an axe and 
 hack off her hands? 
 
 She felt that she was obsessing him with 
 her love. And she tried hard to talk to him 
 about other things, the day's doings, the 
 passers-by. . . . But it was embarrassing and 
 tedious for him. She only knew how to love:
 
 ASCENT 59 
 
 she had no ideas, no mind. . . . And then 
 she was forcing her voice, her figure, the ex- 
 pression in her eyes, her joy in being with 
 him, her clinging to him, and always, always, 
 her love, upon his attention. . . . He became 
 unjust, brutal, and hated her for making him 
 so, and became more so. ... And at night, 
 when she was gone, he would call up her poor 
 miserable face and he would have given years 
 of his life to be able to drink her tears and 
 see her smile once more. 
 
 Sometimes she would come and sit in a cor- 
 ner with a book, or a piece of sewing, and 
 wish him to go on with what he was doing 
 without bothering about her. . . . He would 
 write, or, even, work! . . . And out of the 
 corner of his eye he would see her fixing him 
 with a long worshipping look. . . . And he 
 would think peevishly: " Just another woman's 
 trick not to let a man go, to deify him ! " And 
 he would hate her for making him ridiculous. 
 
 She loved his delicate hands and his long 
 5
 
 60 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 eyelashes. It exasperated him to be forced 
 to play the cherubin for her. ... As if men 
 needed to be loved! 
 
 At last he came to detest woman with her 
 childish mind, her childish desires, her childish 
 eyes, her childish features, and her way of 
 dragging a man into her childish tricks, and 
 forcing him to see the greatest things in a 
 sensual, tender, pretty aspect; her brutali- 
 sation of man in base intercourse, in exclu- 
 sive preoccupation with the things next to 
 hand, things immediate, things directly felt. 
 . . . He reached such a point that when he 
 was with her in her house he used to long for 
 her husband's presence. A dogmatic, pon- 
 derous, tiresome man! But that did not mat- 
 ter: he was at any rate a man, a being pos- 
 sessed of a few general ideas. 
 
 And he detested women for the lewdness of 
 their hearts, always ready to give, to devote 
 themselves, without reserve. . . . And people 
 admire them for it! As if they had anything
 
 ASCENT 61 
 
 else to do but to give themselves to others, 
 being, as they are, nothing by themselves ! As 
 if it were not a form of egoism in them! . . . 
 And he detested their horrible power which 
 is also admired of losing sight of reason for 
 a moment's joy! . . . And the dreadful at- 
 mosphere of demoralisation which they cast 
 about love, the terrible savour of death that 
 they can instil into a kiss! And their easy 
 delight in it! How thoroughly he now ap- 
 proved of the men whom women call brutes, 
 the men who send them packing with their 
 " poetry," take, enjoy them and pass on. 
 
 And he was overcome by horror, horror 
 of the woman, horror of her tenderness, hor- 
 ror of her presence. Now when she came to 
 him he would suddenly have a violent palpita- 
 tion in his heart, which he took for a spasm 
 of pity, though it was fear: recognition of 
 the presence of the enemy. ... In their flat 
 he could still bear her: his horror of her was 
 blurred into the desire to take . . . ; he would 
 forget his hatred in his joy in her. . . . But
 
 62 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 elsewhere ... in her house, in their friends' 
 houses, he suffered agonies of terror lest 
 they should be left alone! When they were 
 left together he would avoid her eyes: he 
 would carefully construct his sentences to avoid 
 having to say " tu "; he would carefully dis- 
 guise any expression that might lead back to 
 love. Meanwhile he would see her leaning 
 back in her chair, with her eyes fixed on him, 
 patient and determined. . . . 
 
 Then, in the evening, he would walk on 
 and on. . . . He would find some means of 
 defending himself. . . . He would not endure 
 it. ... Other men did not endure it. ... 
 There was no reason why he should act dif- 
 ferently from other men. . . . Yes, but other 
 men do not understand 1 . . . And he did 
 understand! . . . His intelligence imposed 
 certain duties on him. . . . But what duties? 
 To allow himself to be swallowed up by the 
 unhappy? No. What, then? To fling them 
 back into the water and go his way? That 
 was just literary nonsense! As if it were
 
 ASCENT 63 
 
 possible. . . . But provision has been made 
 for everything. There exist people especially 
 for them: priests, doctors, natural consolers. 
 . . . Yes, ready-made pity! They don't want 
 it! They want pity cut to measure. Pity 
 made expressly for them. . . . They want 
 some one to devour! . . . But I am mad! I 
 am dramatising the whole thing! She is not 
 asking so much as that! She is asking for no 
 great thing. ... I can easily give it her. . . . 
 No, no! I cannot! Whatever she asks me, 
 it is too much. 
 
 And he would walk on, dogged, at bay, 
 seeking any and every promise of a way out, 
 but finding every issue closed. . . . Every 
 now and then, in flashes, he would realise that 
 he was wishing for her death. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 He was waiting for her in their flat, sitting 
 deep in an arm-chair, worn out with beating 
 for the last two days against the walls of his
 
 64 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 blind-alley. . . . She came in. He felt his 
 heart thump, and it went on thumping, never 
 stopped. . . . For some time he managed to 
 contain himself and show a good front. . . . 
 But soon he could do it no longer and he 
 begged her to open a window. She did so 
 and then came swiftly and sat on the arm of 
 his chair and asked him what was the matter. 
 He looked at her with an angry expression 
 which said clearly: "Don't you see that you 
 are the matter with me? " . . . She made him 
 a posset. He refused it and his eyes said: 
 " Don't you see that what I want is my lib- 
 erty, and for you to go? " And she seemed 
 to reply with a tragic obstinacy in seeming 
 not to see his looks: "I will not give you 
 that," while she tried to make herself as 
 small as possible, to assuage his anxiety, and 
 to make him tolerate her. 
 
 And now he reached the crisis of his mad- 
 ness and despair, the beating of his heart 
 would not be still, and he had a growing cer- 
 tainty that such a state of things could not
 
 ASCENT 65 
 
 be endured, that he must desire and demand 
 his right to live, his freedom ; and as he strug- 
 gled, breathlessly contemplating the hurt he 
 was about to deal her, his heart precisely be- 
 cause of the commotion in it and its furious 
 beating was absolutely, desperately exposed 
 to every kind of pity and to every kind of 
 fear. 
 
 . . . He had met her in a garden at night- 
 fall. . . . He dragged after her, with his 
 head bowed, with no strength left even to 
 pretend to enjoy anything, answering her 
 in short, gentle, weary sentences. She walked 
 by his side, tragically forcing herself to say 
 something, anything, trying not to be too 
 tender in her dread of irritating him, and 
 above all in her dread of having to ask him 
 what was the matter with him. . . . He 
 dragged along by her side. She walked along 
 with him. . . . And so they went, in the 
 empty garden, conscious of the oppression of 
 their silence, feeling it gathering weight from 
 moment to moment, and the impending neces-
 
 66 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 sity, growing up bewilderingly, surely, in 
 them, the necessity of explanation, obedient 
 to the logic of the world, and utterly inde- 
 pendent of their wills. . . . 
 
 They took a carriage and stopped it at the 
 usual place. . . . They were silent. She 
 could not bring herself to get out. She sat 
 there gloomily with her hand in his. . . . 
 Neither spoke a word. . . . Slowly she took 
 up her bag and got ready to go. . . . Trem- 
 blingly she said: 
 
 " I will come to-morrow. . . . About three 
 o'clock. . . ." 
 
 He said faintly: 
 
 " Very well." 
 
 Still trembling, more than ever now: 
 
 " Perhaps ... it will upset your plans. 
 . . . Perhaps you would prefer Thurs- 
 day " 
 
 " As you please. . . . No. . . . Very well. 
 . . . To-morrow." 
 
 Almost on the point of collapse, gathering 
 all her forces, she said: 
 
 " Listen, Felix. ... I can't go on living
 
 ASCENT 67 
 
 like this. . . . Answer me. . . . Don't you 
 . . . don't you love me any longer? " 
 
 Cowardly he muttered: 
 
 "Am I to tell you ... that? And then 
 to let you go back to your prison! . . ." 
 
 She withdrew her hand, her whole being 
 shrinking away from him, and she turned 
 pale and answered: 
 
 "Ah! . . . You have answered me. . . ." 
 
 He took her in his arms. He told her that 
 he was mad and did not know what he was 
 saying. . . . She did not hear him nor see 
 him. . . . The power of thought oozed away 
 in the presence of the malevolent, uncom- 
 prehended and sacred force that was shatter- 
 ing her happiness, and numbed with wretched- 
 ness and her impotence to understand she 
 said very simply: 
 
 ;< Why don't you love me any longer?" 
 
 She opened the door and he saw her dis- 
 appear among the passers-by and the shop- 
 keepers putting up their shutters. 
 
 He hurried towards the centre of the town
 
 68 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 and the busy, thronged streets; in a real 
 frenzy. . . . Oh! It was no longer the frantic 
 dread of the future! His mind was made 
 up: to-morrow morning, as soon as possible, 
 he would go to her; he would make some ex- 
 cuse; he would win her back, reassure her, 
 tell her that they must . . . ; as far as he him- 
 self was concerned, with the awful palpita- 
 tions of his heart, he would contrive as best 
 he could. . . . For now he knew one thing 
 only, that it was beyond his strength to leave 
 her. . . . No, his horror was at the thought 
 of the coming night, which he would have to 
 spend with his fixed idea, the fixed image of 
 the woman, seeing the carriage again, the 
 fatal scene, her pitiful cry, and the woman 
 herself, at home, thinking that everything was 
 at an end. ... A whole night spent like 
 that! And it was only seven o'clock! He 
 went into a bar, and out again and into an- 
 other where he began to talk to the women. 
 He left that too and went elsewhere. . . . He 
 was haunted by the sight of the staring eyes 
 of the unhappy woman feeling that every-
 
 ASCENT 69 
 
 thing cried her doom, refusing to take the 
 fatal step, clinging to uncertainty . . . , by 
 her terror when she was forced to ask . . . , 
 and afterwards by the utter helplessness 
 of the creature of love lacking love, the sud- 
 den deathlike despair which suddenly came 
 into her childlike face, her sudden solitude, 
 her surprise, her surprise like that of some 
 gentle wounded beast asking " Why? " her still 
 loving stupefaction under the blow that crushed 
 her. . . . Oh! all the tortures of eternal 
 bondage, all the tremors of the heart of 
 eternal servitude, all at once, with joy, rather 
 than live again through such a moment. . . . 
 He drove right across Paris. . . . He passed 
 the stations. If he had gone at once he would 
 have already been far away. ... It would all 
 be over by now. . . . Sooner or later he would 
 have to go. . . . But now he saw her in her 
 room, sitting up in her bed, waking alone in 
 the house where all were asleep, watching in 
 silence; she was thinking that he was going, 
 being borne away from her by a train, that 
 she would never see him again, that he was
 
 70 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 taking her heart with him, and that she would 
 be left doomed to life-long emptiness, to 
 memory, doomed for the whole of her life, 
 and that soon, at dawn, the first day of her 
 doom would begin. . . . And it was he who 
 had inflicted such a night of torment upon 
 another human being! His whole life would 
 not be a sufficient price to pay for it. ... 
 There were still eight hours before he could 
 go to her. . . . The cafes were closed, the 
 lights put out, the streets emptied . . . , and 
 he thought: " Night defers the distraction of 
 sorrow; if only it were deferring sorrow!" 
 Suddenly he was possessed by the idea that 
 she had killed herself. He hurried in the 
 direction of her house. He tried to think 
 that he was only idiotically inventing things 
 to frighten himself. . . . He found himself 
 standing in front of her house. . . . People 
 were coming and going. . . . Suppose she 
 had not come home; suppose she had thrown 
 herself under a train. . . . He was conscious 
 of the egoism of his fears that she would kill 
 herself. , As if it would not have been
 
 ASCENT 71 
 
 better for her. . . . He went home, flung 
 himself fully dressed on his bed, could find 
 no rest, went out again at dawn, and began 
 to wander about until nine o'clock should 
 come. He regained a certain measure of 
 tranquillity as he felt the hour approaching 
 when he would be able to console her. He 
 cried to her through space: "Do not weep, 
 my love. I am here. I will stay. I am 
 coming. I love you." At the same time he 
 thought that no doubt she was beginning to 
 get used to the idea of separation, and that 
 it was horrible of him to return to disturb 
 her new mastery of herself, . . . only to 
 leave her in a little while. 
 
 He bought a popular novel and cut the 
 pages of it. ... He rang at Madeleine's 
 door. . . . His fears returned to him. . . . 
 The maid opened to him. He breathed again. 
 There was nothing ominous in her appear- 
 ance. . . . He said that he had brought back 
 a book he had borrowed, which Madeleine 
 had particularly asked for. . . . He was
 
 7 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 asked to wait in the drawing-room. It ex- 
 cited him to be there at such a time sym- 
 bolical of his malady. . . . She came in, pale, 
 erect, in a long black gown; she was dejected 
 and composed. He took her in his arms and 
 pressed her to him with a warmth which he 
 took for love and pity, though it came from 
 the coward's veneration for the creature of 
 courage who had been able to retain her self- 
 control through her unhappiness. . . . She 
 suffered him and kissed him gently; she was 
 distant and consoled him for the wretched 
 night he had spent. . . . She knew that he 
 would come again, that he was not callous or 
 cruel. . . . She promised to come to him in 
 the afternoon. . . . He left her comforted; 
 he thought his reassurance came from the re- 
 turn of their love, but it came from the knowl- 
 edge that their union was doomed, that he had 
 confessed and she had heard and understood. 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 She had understood him. . . . She no
 
 ASCENT 73 
 
 longer thought their love eternal. It was 
 now a human thing, something which would 
 " last as long as these things do," a long 
 time, perhaps for ever, but at the mercy of 
 chance, and not of its own essence. . . . She 
 saw her lover now in a human light egoistic, 
 apt to tire. She still loved him, but she no 
 longer admired him. . . . And she became 
 practical: she ceased to mourn for that which 
 was no longer, and tried to keep that which 
 still existed. 
 
 She strove to give him more liberty. . . . 
 She busied herself with her boy and her 
 household. . . . She attended lectures! Vis- 
 ited museums! The poor creature of ten- 
 derness was striving to " understand " ! . . . 
 Sometimes she would refuse to come to him 
 on the plea of some " interesting " lecture or 
 some " amusing " tea-party. She was trying 
 to make him believe that she was the cause 
 of their meeting less often. . . . He was con- 
 scious of her effort and her suffering through 
 it. ... And he was finding it easier to bear.
 
 74 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 . . . He was beginning to see the coming of 
 the day when he would cease to pity her and 
 would find himself free. 
 
 She tried to make him believe that she had 
 returned to coquetry, thinking to make him 
 feel more free ! . . . She hinted at " flirta- 
 tions " and her renewed pleasure in attract- 
 ing attention. . . . He was cowardly enough 
 to pretend to believe her. 
 
 And yet she was no longer the same. She 
 was no longer his chattel; she was endeavour- 
 ing to cope with him . . . ; and, further, she 
 had a few shadowy interests outside him. . . . 
 Though he was considerably relieved, yet he 
 had a sort of masculine irritation at being 
 frustrated. He became aware of a strange 
 feeling in himself, a feeling which he had 
 often derided in other men, a feeling of re- 
 sentment against the woman for regaining 
 her self-possession after he had thrown every- 
 thing over in order to win her. 
 
 Gradually he returned to consciousness of
 
 ASCENT 75 
 
 his need of luxury, and he fed it. He no 
 longer condemned his sisters. 
 
 He visualised the first night when he had 
 gone to Madeleine's room with her poor 
 little corsets hanging over the back of a chair. 
 And he thought: " I did not love her poverty. 
 I forced myself to love it. I was full of re- 
 gret for the luxury of the other women. ..." 
 
 And he mused: 
 
 "It is odd: all middle-class people are 
 ashamed of their middle-class tastes. . . . 
 They would like to have the tastes of the 
 poor . . . because only the tastes of the poor 
 are supposed to be beautiful. I wonder who 
 will write the aesthetic of the middle-classes?" 
 
 And he returned to the aesthetic of bond- 
 age. . . . How fine, he thought, would be 
 the union of two strong creatures coming 
 together in the simple consciousness of the 
 meeting of their force, with no base desire 
 to bind, or to seek support. . . . 
 
 Meanwhile he gave her less and less. 
 6
 
 76 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 He saw her at their flat at increasingly 
 long intervals. He came to her cruelly free 
 in spirit, with a love that was entirely con- 
 scious of its relativeness, a reluctant and de- 
 liberately calculated ardour of possession. 
 . . . And she responded with a nicely meas- 
 ured happiness, cut exactly to sort with his, 
 obviously determined not to exceed the 
 bounds he set. . . . He would take her home, 
 chatting gaily and amicably, with never a 
 reference to their intimacy. . . . And she 
 would leave him, slowly, miserably, disillu- 
 sioned, in a sort of shame for their reasoned 
 love. 
 
 Came the anniversary of their first coming 
 together. . . . Six o'clock. He had never 
 mentioned it. ... They went out. She still 
 hoped. . . . Not a flower. Not a word. . . . 
 They parted. 
 
 She tried hard to think that he was right, 
 that she ought to cure herself of such child- 
 ishness. . . . 
 
 She would tell herself that he ought not
 
 ASCENT 77 
 
 to feel enslaved by their meetings, or be 
 forced for her sake to leave his work or some 
 pleasant gathering. . . . Sometimes she would 
 go to their flat and read or play the piano, 
 and he would come or not, as he pleased. 
 
 One day he was out walking in lovely April 
 weather. . . . She waited for him. . . . He 
 did not come. . . . Purposely to make her 
 used to it. ... He was haunted by the idea 
 of her counting the minutes, opening the door 
 at every sound on the stairs, watching the 
 day dying like her hopes, going out shame- 
 facedly past the porter, and coming back 
 again, discountenanced. . . . 
 
 Next day she told him that he had acted 
 quite rightly. 
 
 Often, as he sat in some empty street, he 
 would catch a glimmering of the day when 
 he would leave her in the dim future, and 
 he would see the reproachful expression with 
 which all her life she would think of him, with 
 which even now she faced him. He would 
 think: " It is odd how resentful they are, as
 
 78 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 though it were a man's own fault. We can't 
 help it if we don't love them any longer. . . ." 
 He felt that there was a false ring in his 
 defence. . . . And he came to this : " It is 
 not a matter of loving. She must have known 
 for a long time that I don't love her. And 
 she accepts that. But what a woman asks in 
 such a case is that the man should go on 
 seeming to love, pretending enough for her 
 to be able to keep him without too much in- 
 dignity, and that he should be there and go 
 on seeing her occasionally. . . . And the man 
 knows perfectly well that that is all she asks 
 of him. . . . And he could quite easily do it. 
 . . . But he does not want to. ... Oh! 
 Well! Women have a perfect right to be 
 resentful. . . ." 
 
 And he discovered his own utter helpless- 
 ness: 
 
 " If I stay, I shall die. If I go, she will 
 die. . . . One of us must kill the other. . . . 
 And as I am the stronger, I shall kill her. 
 . . . Well then! no more thinking, no more
 
 ASCENT 79 
 
 phrase-making; it is war at its most cow- 
 ardly: the stronger is out to kill the weaker." 
 
 And he thought of those who say: " What 
 could I do if she were unhappy, wretchedly 
 married, or deceived by her children? . . ." 
 And he answered himself: "I could comfort 
 her, hear her plaint. . . . That would be some- 
 thing. ... I can't get it out of my head 
 that that would be something. . . . It's just 
 nonsense, a fad on the part of the * thinkers ' 
 who know nothing whatever of life, to say 
 that it would not be something and that it 
 would feed her unhappiness. . . ." 
 
 One evening he put his arm in Madeleine's 
 and said: " You see. All is well. You are no 
 longer anxious. You are sure of me. . . . 
 Let me go away for a fortnight, or perhaps 
 less. I shan't go far. I want to be alone 
 for a little, to think over all the things that 
 have been upsetting us during the last three 
 months. . . ." She understood. . . . He was 
 to go away on the next day but one. She
 
 80 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 came to the station. . . . The train began to 
 move. . . . He remained standing at the car- 
 riage window for a long time. She smiled at 
 him.
 
 Ill 
 
 HE took a room in the Grand Hotel at 
 F * * *, which at this season of the year was 
 empty. . . . He was born again. He took 
 a new delight in seeing, breathing, being. . . . 
 He was absolutely free. . . . True, he still 
 had ties. But they were lightly to be borne, 
 and gradually they would be loosened. 
 
 He had been there for two days, but she 
 had not written. He found reasons why she 
 had not done so, but he was astonished. 
 
 Four days. . . . Five days. . . . She did 
 not write. 
 
 It seemed to him that an immeasurable 
 space of time and distance was stretching be- 
 tween them. 
 
 He was quivering with his independence. 
 
 The sixth day came. 
 
 It ended. 
 
 She did not write. 
 
 81
 
 82 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 Her silence was terrible: more overwhelm- 
 ing than all her complaints. One thing was 
 clear, that as soon as she had dared to look 
 things in the face and had been forced to 
 admit that she was no longer loved, she had 
 determined to withdraw into her own life. 
 . . . He saw the grim mockery of her resolu- 
 tion. . . . He saw the woman grimly setting 
 herself to the checking of her impulse, the 
 confinement of her love, the stifling of her 
 affection . . .; her mute indignation at hav- 
 ing no one left to love; her gloomy gibing 
 at love and love's vows; her frightful resolve 
 never to believe in anything again; and her 
 silent hatred. . . . He saw all that. And at 
 the same time her silence hurt him like a blow 
 and it seemed to him that she was flinging his 
 liberty in his face. 
 
 He waited yet a day. Then he left. 
 He wanted to see her. He wanted to 
 know. . . . He wanted first of all to know 
 what she was like alone, when he was no 
 longer with her, to see her without her 
 knowing it.
 
 ASCENT 83 
 
 Towards nightfall, at the hour when he 
 knew she would be returning home, he went 
 and took up his position in a corner where he 
 could see her without being seen. . . . He 
 stood thus for some time, excited and agi- 
 tated. Soon, some distance away, he saw 
 her coming gravely towards him through the 
 hurrying throng of people, with her eyes fixed 
 on the ground, holding her little boy by the 
 hand. He trembled. At once he recognised 
 her, exactly as he had felt she would be, 
 gloomy, sad, in travail to regain the solitude 
 of her heart. She came towards him; every 
 line in her figure expressed heaviness and yet 
 she was thinner, had lost her lissomeness. She 
 raised her head; he saw that her childlike 
 features had in a week become sharply defined, 
 had lost their play and lightness, and that 
 they were disfigured not so much by the 
 marks of suffering as by the marks of her 
 will; he saw that her eyes were glassy and 
 staring, as though they had lost their energy, 
 and looked for nothing, expected nothing. 
 . . . Now she was at the foot of the slope
 
 84. THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 which led to her house, and she went slowly 
 up it, as though she were dragging with her 
 the burden of her servitude that day by day 
 would weigh upon her whole existence. And 
 he thought: " Every night of her life she will 
 go up that slope in exactly the same way!" 
 Then he could not contain himself. He 
 wanted to cry out : " Madeleine, you are not 
 alone. ... I will not leave you. I love you." 
 He wanted to rush out of his hiding-place 
 and go to her. . . . He could easily contrive 
 to make her hear him. . . . He stopped. His 
 heart was like to break. It was a supreme 
 moment. What! With the poor woman 
 trying to gather the fragments of her life! 
 . . . Should he go and upset her as he had 
 done before, only to leave her again? . . . 
 For he did not love her. . . . Now she was 
 quite close to him. . . . Only a word, a look, 
 and she would be restored to life. . . . Oh, 
 come! She knew what his words were worth! 
 And besides she asked nothing of him. She 
 asked only to be left in peace, to win back 
 to serenity. . . . Not for her sake would he
 
 ASCENT 85 
 
 speak, but for his own, being too cowardly 
 to bear his own cruelty. . . . Come, come! 
 A truce to such cowardice. . . . Breathlessly 
 he leaned back against the wall and swore 
 that he would not move. . . . He let her 
 pass. . . . 
 
 He let her pass. . . . When she had gone, 
 he came out of his hiding-place and went 
 down a street to the right, up the hill. He 
 walked on, still agitated. . . . He knew that 
 it was for shabby, cowardly reasons that he 
 had made himself believe that she was so well 
 on the road to recovery and would be dis- 
 tressed if he had troubled her again. . . . He 
 went on and on. ... He came to a great 
 empty square, looking down on the quarter, 
 where there were several seats. He sat down 
 on one of them. 
 
 Night came. He felt the last gusts of his 
 emotion dying down with the light of day. 
 . . . The whole world was sinking into rest. 
 . . . Now he was calm. . . . And his calm-
 
 86 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 ness endured. . . . Then he ventured to call 
 to mind the image of Madeleine returning 
 home, to her misery, yearning towards her 
 lover, and yet with all her force suppressing 
 her yearning. . . . And her image did not 
 bring him so much agony as he had feared. 
 He considered it more fixedly, more deliber- 
 ately, more searchingly. . . . And he found 
 that he could bear it. ... Then he called to 
 mind the image of Madeleine as she would 
 be in five years, ten years, going up the street 
 just as he had seen her now. . . . And he could 
 bear that too. . . . Then he was visited by a 
 mortal sadness. He understood that he had 
 suffered and groaned for the last time. . . . 
 For almost two years he had been weeping 
 over this woman. He had exhausted his ca- 
 pacity for pity. No longer would he have 
 any but the gentlest tears. It was fin- 
 ished. 
 
 He remained sitting on the seat and could 
 not bring himself to leave, or to take action. 
 He stayed, dully contemplating his empty
 
 ASCENT 87 
 
 heart, gazing down at the ruins of three years 
 of his life. He stayed. Dull. . . . 
 
 Then in the solemn silence of the night he 
 saw quite clearly and simply the whole course 
 of the adventure: 
 
 He had been living free, happy and lustily, 
 when he had met an unhappy woman. And 
 he had stooped to her and he had wept. And, 
 mad with love and gratitude, she had taken 
 him to her arms. And at first he had enjoyed 
 it and acquiesced. Then when the tie between 
 them and his tenderness had weakened and 
 he had wished to move on and had tried to 
 return to the high road of freedom he had 
 been too late, his veins had been filled with 
 the poison of pity. . . . And he had almost 
 died of it. ... 
 
 Then, in the solemn silence of the night, 
 clearly and simply the meaning of his adven- 
 ture appeared to him: 
 
 Madeleine was no longer the poor pretty
 
 88 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 little fair-haired woman who dined miserably 
 in her stuffy room with her stupid husband 
 and the child to whom she was indiffer- 
 ent . . . ; she was all women, the highest and 
 the lowliest, she stood for all the creatures of 
 weakness and servitude. And what she had 
 done was what they would all have done, 
 what they would always do. Always madly, 
 fiercely they would cling to the free, strong 
 man, who, alone among men, would regard 
 them as other than a prey, and give them a 
 little gentleness, a little love. And always, 
 at the same time, in obedience to a secret in- 
 stinct, they would strive surreptitiously to 
 abolish in him the springs of force and lib- 
 erty the worship of the Idea, and the taste 
 for the things of the polite world and to 
 develope in him the worship of the heart, to 
 give free play in it for the powers of weak- 
 ness and vassalage. . . . And always in his 
 happiness the man would at first submit, 
 unsuspectingly, disarmedly; more than thatl 
 he would at first himself set about destroying 
 his strength and enthroning his weakness be-
 
 ASCENT 89 
 
 cause he had been strong though he was 
 because he had been free though he was 
 brought up in the aesthetic of the weak and 
 the servile; because there is no other aesthetic. 
 . . . And always in his happiness the man 
 would come near to death because in his en- 
 joyment he had exhausted his infinite sensi- 
 bility, because he had chosen to weep with the 
 unhappy without being accustomed, as they 
 are, to tears; because, in fine, he would feel 
 pity. . . . 
 
 For pity is death: that is what he had 
 learned, what he now knew, what he would 
 never forget. . . . But if he knew it, it was 
 because he had really felt pity, because his 
 heart had been cleft by the unhappy woman's 
 misery, and had blindly yielded to their real 
 communion and hour by hour, through the 
 wound made in its integrity, had suffered all 
 its power of life and all its desire to ebb 
 away. And then he dreamed of another 
 kind of pity, no doubt equally sincere, that 
 should not prevent those who practise it from
 
 90 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 going and coming, and seeking amusement, 
 and looking after their affairs and bringing 
 up their children. . . . And again he dreamed 
 of another kind of pity which should gently 
 raise the wretched kneeling suppliants, but 
 should not prevent the Redeemer who ex- 
 pounds it from uttering fine phrases, and 
 making grand gestures, and thinking of lay- 
 ing low the proud ones of the earth. . . . Ah ! 
 such kinds of pity can be practised, can be 
 propagated, can be taught. . . . They do not 
 lead to death! . 
 
 And he hypnotised himself with reiteration 
 of this truth: " Pity is death. Pity is death." 
 . . . And he wished to live. . . . Then? . . . 
 Then? . . . 
 
 He shrank for a long time before the 
 answer which now faced him, logical, thun- 
 derous, implacable. . . . He shrank from it 
 for a long time. . . . Then, slowly, he came 
 to it, like a child coming to the estate of
 
 ASCENT 91 
 
 manhood, with all the solemn simplicity of 
 an ordination. . . . 
 
 Then. . . . He would be hard. . . . With- 
 out a word, with never a look he would pass 
 by all such dramas, such distress, the sight 
 of human beings walled up alive in their 
 inward life, all the women crucified on the 
 marriage bed, turning their lips away from 
 their tyrants. . . . And they would call to 
 him, they would hold out their arms to him, 
 guessing that he understood, that his hardness 
 was feigned; and the world would cry shame 
 upon him How cold he is! How hard! 
 What a cruel nature! He would let them 
 say and think what they liked. . . . And he 
 would go to the strong, to men, to the think- 
 ers, the creators, to those who never expect 
 anything of a man. . . . And perhaps one 
 day he would be strong enough to dare to 
 face the weak and the unhappy and come to 
 their aid. . . . But his heart was breaking 
 as he felt that he could have no tenderness 
 for them. For he was naturally tender: and
 
 92 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 he wept there in the darkness and said to 
 himself: "They talk of the tears of pity. 
 But who shall tell of the tears of those who 
 have stifled their pity in order to make them- 
 selves hard. . . ." 
 
 But at least his hardness was a thing 
 which he had bought and paid for with the 
 suffering of unhappy pity. . . . His hard- 
 ness was sad, silent, resigned. . . . He wished 
 to suffer from it, out of respect, as it were, 
 for those whom he would not help. And 
 from his calvary he cried to the apostles of 
 hardness in happiness : " Shame, shame on 
 those who rejoice in their hardness." 
 
 For a long time he remained in silent 
 prayer at the feet of that hard God who had 
 made the strong; the masters; the real mas- 
 ters, those who can check their tears in order 
 to understand them. . . . For a long time 
 he stayed thus. . . . Day came, and lit up 
 the street where Madeleine lived and the 
 little house where she lay asleep. . . . And
 
 ASCENT 93 
 
 the street seemed to him to be very much 
 like any other street. . . . And the little 
 house was much less distinctive than it had 
 been before. . . . Then he understood that 
 during the night the outline of his love had 
 faded away into eternal lines. Then he col- 
 lapsed and desperately he held out his arms 
 as though he wished to clutch and hold in his 
 trembling hands those beloved fleeting things 
 which had been his life, his tears, his youth. 
 . . . And his arms fell by his sides once more 
 ... in the last convulsion of his dying love. 
 . . . He left the seat and walked down into 
 the town.
 
 PART II 
 DOWNFALL
 
 Until thou shalt be dead to all 
 Created love, thou shalt not know me. 
 
 (Imitation, III. xlii.)
 
 "On! sir," said the nurse indignantly, 
 ' You are not even looking at Suzanne's 
 splendid tunnel." 
 
 " Very fine," said Felix, turning " But 
 
 we'll make an even better one than that." 
 
 He put two chairs back to back and 
 laid a large atlas across the space between 
 them. 
 
 The child clapped her hands: 
 
 " Look out! " she cried. " Get out of the 
 way! The train is coming. . . ." 
 
 She went to the end of the passage to get 
 a good run. Then she came with a rush, 
 working her arms like a crank, whistling and 
 puffing, gathering speed until she dashed 
 through the improvised tunnel into the arms 
 of her father and mother. 
 
 " Now," she said, " I'll go and fetch my 
 biplane." 
 
 But Clemence stopped her: 
 
 97
 
 98 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 " No, no. You are out of breath. . . . And 
 you know your father doesn't like you to 
 turn his study into a circus. . . . Let us look 
 at some pictures and then you can go to 
 bed." 
 
 "Come!" said Felix, " Suzanne shall look 
 at the new picture post-cards Mamma has 
 put in the album." 
 
 " Oh, yes," said the little girl. 
 
 Felix went and fetched the album. He 
 took the child on his knee and Clemence 
 came and sat on the arm of his chair. They 
 turned the pages and the child delighted their 
 hearts by the freshness of her questions, and 
 her delight in their play, and the sureness of 
 her sovereignty over her father and mother. 
 . . . Soon her questions grew less eager, her 
 little hands clutched the book less tightly, her 
 head nodded and she fell asleep on her father's 
 shoulder. . . . He was afraid of waking her 
 by handing her over to the two women, and 
 they stood smiling at his embarrassment. . . . 
 Gently they took her from him and Clemence, 
 feeling a little tired, held out her cheek to her
 
 DOWNFALL 99 
 
 husband and the two women went out slowly 
 with the child. 
 
 Felix stayed in his chair in front of the 
 fire. It was too early for him to begin to 
 work. ... In the street outside all was si- 
 lent. . . . About him was the dying noise 
 of his household preparing for sleep, the 
 closing of a door, the last Sittings to and 
 fro of the servants finishing their work. . . . 
 With his chin in his hand and his eyes fixed 
 on the flames he dreamed. . . . He thought 
 of that queer little creature, the child, and 
 the young woman, who were his child, his 
 wife: the family that he had begotten. . . . 
 He looked round at the study where he spent 
 his life, at the tea which was made for him to 
 drink during the night while he was sitting 
 up alone: he marked the comfort of it all, 
 the kind of return to his own element that 
 he felt every evening when they left him and 
 went to bed; was it all not a sufficient indi- 
 cation of his real nature an old solitary 
 student, a celibate philosopher? . . . And he
 
 100 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 had founded a family! . . . And it was 
 turning out very well. . . . He was very 
 happy. . . . He could not do without them 
 now. . . . How odd! . . . 
 
 He thought of how it had all come about. 
 ... It would soon be ten years ago now. 
 ... It had happened after a violent crisis of 
 feeling (How long ago that crisis seemed! 
 It seemed impossible that a man could get 
 into such a condition over a woman's whim- 
 perings!) : he had just discovered the in- 
 tellectual life the real life of the intellect, 
 not the dallying with ideas that had been 
 familiar to him as to all the men of his class 
 on leaving college, not the fluttering of doc- 
 trines between a call and a dinner-party, but 
 a passionate, permanent, exclusive possession, 
 spending weeks together in unearthing a con- 
 cept with never a thought for anything else 
 the fevered toil of such research, and the 
 agony of being baffled, and the joys of 
 triumph, and the breathless fructifying of 
 one idea by another, with his whole being 
 at stretch to discover whether such and
 
 DOWNFALL 101 
 
 such an idea would beget such and such 
 another or its opposite; and he had just 
 then discovered that such a life was his 
 law, his order, the one thing that bound 
 him to himself, his means of full self-realisa- 
 tion, and that every other kind of activity 
 was for him a sham, a lie, boredom. . . . But 
 at the same time he had discovered that if 
 he was to have his intellectual life fully he 
 must provide for the question of love; he 
 must bring to an end the adventure which, 
 however little sentimental it might be, took 
 up his time, upset him, and, above all, forced 
 him to be conscious in his love. . . . His 
 mind demanded freedom from his body: the 
 idea of marriage dogged him. . . . And he 
 felt that it was impossible. . . . 
 
 True, it would be quite easy to find 
 women who would let him work and would 
 respect his independence, women who would 
 not desire to monopolise " all his thoughts." 
 . . . But what kind of women? Little pro- 
 vincial misses, admirably brought up to be 
 negative by their families or the priests, who
 
 102 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 would not be embarrassing only because they 
 were nothing. Or cold women. Or " intellec- 
 tuals " with theories about mutual independ- 
 ence. Or a mystical woman, infatuated with 
 self-sacrifice, who would force upon him the 
 monstrous spectacle of a creature delighting 
 in its own self-mutilation. ... As for the 
 woman he was seeking, a woman who would 
 let him be quiet and would be neither nega- 
 tive nor inhuman, even supposing such an 
 one existed, he had no reason to think that 
 he would ever find her. . . . 
 
 And then he found her. . . . He found her 
 during a stay with some friends, buried in an 
 old country-house in Brittany, living with 
 her father and younger brother, the very 
 woman, one who was at the same time human, 
 desirous of companionship and love and 
 clearly tolerant of a man's liberty, not as a 
 matter of "principle" (he had still to hear 
 Clemence propound a " principle "), still less 
 from any religious tenet or scruple (she was 
 hardly at all pious), but from a sort of in- 
 born diffidence before the inmost lives of
 
 DOWNFALL 103 
 
 others, an instinctively aristocratic temperate- 
 ness in her desire to taste the human soul. 
 . . . He remembered the strange impression 
 of reasonable tenderness that he had had at 
 first sight of the tall girl with the clear af- 
 fectionate expression in her eyes, and her 
 sensitive laughing mouth and her fine healthy 
 figure; she was gentle to all who surrounded 
 her, and the fury of giving was entirely for- 
 eign to her; she was happy in her garden, but 
 by no means greedy to " take nature to her 
 bosom " ; she delighted in art and every ex- 
 pression of the soul, but in measured expres- 
 sion, preferring Mozart to Schumann. . . . 
 In everything she took up she was moderate, 
 in everything she felt she was reasonable: to 
 him she was as though she had strayed into 
 the vulgar age, like one of those Greek fig- 
 ures, that with love in their hearts, skilfully 
 weave their web with a golden shuttle. . . . 
 He had tried to test her and had revealed 
 to her the fervour of the modern soul, the 
 literature of "absolute" love (she had ac- 
 cepted the idea of the fact of love in the
 
 104 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 spirit of the pagan virgins bathing the young 
 warriors), the music of passionate conjunc- 
 tion, " the indiscriminate " " union of souls." 
 . . . He watched her to see whether she would 
 like these things and be false to her real nature ! 
 . . . But she did not even read through the 
 books and she would close the music and 
 begin to play by heart some " movement " of 
 Schubert. . . . 
 
 Then one evening he spoke of a friend who 
 had met the woman of his desire, and how 
 his friend wished to live apart from the world 
 and bury himself in abstract thought, so that 
 he hesitated about offering so young a crea- 
 ture a share in such an austere life. . . . And, 
 quite simply, she told him that she would ac- 
 cept such a life. 
 
 And he had married her. . . . And the 
 marriage had made no change in him: she 
 had proved herself the wife he had thought 
 she would be : loving, never intruding, tranquil 
 and collected in her love. . . . And then, de- 
 livered from chance, removed from the tur- 
 bulence of the flesh, he had attained the ex-
 
 DOWNFALL 105 
 
 alted life of the mind: and he had begun the 
 composition of a great work. 
 
 Only on one evening two years after their 
 marriage; she used to sit near him, reading, 
 while he worked had she laid down her book 
 and put her arms round his neck and said: 
 " Why don't you try to let me understand 
 what you are doing? " And he had mur- 
 mured : " It is very dry. ... I am no good 
 as a teacher." Then she had turned away 
 and sat down. . . . That was seven years 
 ago. . . . She had never returned to the sub- 
 ject. 
 
 And she had desired a child. . . . They 
 had had a child. . . . And she was an ex- 
 quisite little creature, subtle, intelligent, 
 bringing a note of youth and flowers into 
 his rather grey life. . . . 
 
 So he had these two creatures in his life. 
 And, living with them, never disturbed by 
 them, he went on with his work. For a few 
 hours every day he shared in their existence, 
 but once he passed into his own room his life 
 was his own and he could escape into his own
 
 106 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 thoughts. ... So he had realised the fab- 
 ulous dream: the integrity of his own per- 
 sonality though he lived with a woman and 
 a child, and the exalted life of the mind in 
 the state of marriage. . . . 
 
 Sometimes, however, he would be oppressed 
 by fear. ... It seemed to him that there 
 was a sort of legerdemain in his life. A man 
 must pay for having taken to himself a 
 family. . . . One day they would force them- 
 selves upon his attention and he would have 
 to give his mind to the two creatures who 
 were sleeping upstairs while he was working. 
 . . . Bah! That was just the conclusion of 
 a mathematician wanting life to be an exact 
 equation! . . . 
 
 And now, as he stood by his fire, looking 
 at his books, his papers, his drawers, his 
 shelves, he began to think of his work, the 
 strange intellectual activity to which, sitting 
 alone in that room, he had devoted himself 
 for almost ten years: the probing into his 
 own thoughts, the sifting of his real thoughts
 
 DOWNFALL 107 
 
 about great problems, the determination of 
 his philosophic entity; and, at the same time, 
 as at every step he observed that what he 
 believed to be thought was not thought, that 
 the terms which he combined in his mind (the 
 " simple " terms which need no definition be- 
 cause everybody is agreed about them) had 
 at bottom no really clear meaning for him, 
 at the same time the analysis of the " sim- 
 plest," the most fundamental ideas of philo- 
 sophic thought. ... It was the work of his 
 flesh and blood: nights and nights of fevered 
 effort to make such and such a thought clear, 
 to arrive at such and such a distinction. . . . 
 And they say that analysis is a dead thing! 
 It was a unique work, which no one had done 
 at least with any firmness of purpose, which 
 no one would do in the future since men have 
 become contemptuous of pure ideas and taken 
 to a pathetic philosophy, which things will 
 only wax great in the democratic heaven. . . . 
 And now he thought of what he had already 
 done, of those elements of his ideas which he 
 
 had already disentangled; his ideas about the 
 
 8
 
 108 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 origin of the world and how its infinity was 
 only the result of a taste for the seduction 
 of infinity; his ideas about that Being which 
 could only be thought of in terms of quality, 
 and how impossible it was for a finite being 
 to think such a thing. . . . Now he had come 
 to the idea of movement; he would soon have 
 established the two profoundly distinct ideas 
 of dynamism and continuity which are 
 confounded under one name. Then he would 
 elucidate his ideas about the appearance of 
 life, as to whether or no he thought it a dis- 
 continuity: and how discontinuity does not 
 necessarily entail a miracle; his ideas concern- 
 ing the appearance of the concept, the appear- 
 ance of social feelings, and sympathy between 
 human beings and how it has nothing to do 
 with the return to God. . . . He would say all 
 these things. He was still young. . . . He 
 saw his work finished. . . . He dreamed of 
 the day when, concerning all these great 
 problems, while men were still wrangling 
 because none of them at bottom really knew 
 what he thought, he would say calmly: "On
 
 DOWNFALL 109 
 
 that point I know perfectly clearly what I 
 think; and if my ideas only originate in some 
 preference, I know that too." And with all 
 the might of his love and pride, as others hug 
 their children or as the originators of great 
 schemes hug the idea of their power, he 
 hugged the idea of the work upon which he 
 was engaged, wherein he should tell men to 
 what a fierce desire to rise above his being 
 to the idea of his being, to what a thirst for 
 consciousness, to what a pitch of morality, 
 one man had soared. 
 
 He threw a block of wood on the fire and 
 plunged into his work. . . . And he gave 
 hardly a thought to the woman and the child 
 sleeping upstairs.
 
 II 
 
 IT was on a Sunday morning, on her way 
 home from the Bois, that Suzanne first com- 
 plained of a slight pain in her hip: it hurt 
 her a little when she ran too fast, or went 
 upstairs too quickly, or stood for too long. 
 Oh! It did not hurt very much. . . . She 
 complained again the next day. ... A slight 
 weakness in her knee. As a matter of form 
 they sent for the doctor. He examined her, 
 probed her, questioned her. . . . Then he 
 said that it was nothing, just a growing-pain 
 very common at her age, and advised them 
 to keep her from running too much for the 
 time being, and to make her lie down for a 
 few hours every day, just for a few days. . . . 
 
 She lay down for two hours after lunch, 
 every day. Then again towards the end of 
 the day. She was very tractable and reason- 
 able and gave up playing. . . . They took to 
 
 no
 
 DOWNFALL 111 
 
 reading her stories and giving her pictures to 
 look at. ... And her little friends would 
 come and see her. . . . 
 
 Felix used to come in at five and take tea 
 with them. Then he would go back to his 
 study, not without noticing that there was 
 less noise in the passages. 
 
 . . . Felix had at last perfectly distin- 
 guished the two ideas of movement which 
 were universally confounded. Now he was 
 busy with the history of the confusion, show- 
 ing the various forms which it had taken in 
 the minds of the greatest thinkers. . . . 
 
 One night he had just finished a memoir 
 of Descartes and had written several pages 
 to expound the form the confusion had taken 
 in his mind. . . . 
 
 Now, sunk deep in his arm-chair, in a dark 
 corner of his study, he was drifting off into a
 
 112 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 reverie about what he had been reading. . . . 
 He thought of Descartes at the moment of 
 his life when he had written his famous an- 
 swer. ... It was at the time when he had 
 quarrelled with the Fathers of Clermont. 
 He remembered the account of the quarrel in 
 the biography: the philosopher's wrath be- 
 cause the Fathers had distorted his ideas in 
 order to prove themselves right, as if he 
 ought not to have remembered, said Baillet, 
 that every master is obliged to forge chimeras 
 for his pupils to give them practice in dis- 
 putation. ... It was at the time when he 
 was preparing his Philosophy for publication. 
 ... It was also the year when he had lost 
 his little girl, " his beloved Francine. ..." 
 Her death had given him, " the greatest sor- 
 row he had ever felt in his life. . . . He 
 wrote the story of Francine on the fly-leaf 
 of a book. . . . He wept for her most ten- 
 derly. . . ." He visualised the great thinker, 
 already an old man, bending over his dying 
 child. . . . He liked why? the image of 
 the suffering child, cradled in the verses of
 
 DOWNFALL 113 
 
 a gentle poet on the death of a very dear little 
 girl. . . . And, not without a certain pride, 
 he thought of his own little girl, the charm of 
 his life and work, smiling and happy, suffer- 
 ing a little for the moment, lying down to 
 ward off a passing fatigue. ... It would 
 soon go. ... He lingered over her im- 
 age 
 
 Suddenly an idea sprang to life in his mind, 
 swamping every other: the idea that Suzanne 
 was really ill: the pains in her hip, the weak- 
 ness in her knees, were symptoms of hip-dis- 
 ease . . . the " growing-pains " were just the 
 doctor's nonsense by way of reassuring the 
 child's parents! 
 
 He leaped to his feet, took down an en- 
 cyclopaedia and feverishly turned over the 
 pages. He read breathlessly, devouring the 
 words. . . . Everything confirmed his fears. 
 Each sentence as he read it forced him into 
 certainty. It was as though the article had 
 been written about Suzanne. . . . He did 
 not finish it. He was certain. . . . Yes, yes. 
 Of course: people always believe they have
 
 114 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 every disease when they read about them. 
 But sometimes they are right. . . . How 
 could he for one moment have listened to the 
 doctor's humbug? . . . But then, it was in- 
 evitable that she should be stricken down, that 
 some great misfortune should come to him. 
 It was a punishment for his egoism, for his 
 monstrous life of the mind. His life for the 
 past ten years had been a defiance of the 
 laws of humanity. God was punishing him. 
 It seemed to him that the bond of human love, 
 the spiritual accord of those who were joined 
 together and lived one for another, was rising 
 about him, crying shame upon his life and 
 demanding his expiation of it. ... He was 
 appalled by his certainty. . . . He did not 
 know what he was doing. . . . He lit a lamp. 
 . . . Why? . . . Because he wanted to go 
 and look at his child, to gaze and gaze at 
 her: he would see her, he would know. . . . 
 
 He went down the passage on tiptoe, see- 
 ing himself, with deep emotion, objectively, 
 a man walking through the darkness trem- 
 bling for his sleeping dear ones, trembling
 
 DOWNFALL 115 
 
 at the oppressive silence of the house, trem- 
 bling at the thought of the dreadful stillness 
 and tranquillity of those in the house who 
 did not yet know. . . . 
 
 He entered the room. On a chair were her 
 little garments neatly folded up: in an arm- 
 chair were her favourite toys. . . . He went 
 up to the bed, and, screening the light with 
 his hands, he bent over the child, and trem- 
 bled. She was asleep in her little bed as in 
 a sanctuary, with her lips a little open, her 
 breathing relaxed, her fists closed, seemingly 
 deep in unconsciousness, as though she were 
 gathering all her strength in absolute trust. 
 . . . He almost swooned. . . . However, he 
 pulled himself together, and, concentrating 
 all his powers on the will to see and under- 
 stand, as though he suddenly believed that the 
 will to knowledge gives knowledge, he fixed 
 his eyes on the sleeping child. ... So he 
 stood, bending over her. . . . 
 
 Then, for the first time, gradually he was 
 overcome by a feeling that the little body 
 lying there, pulsating with life, was his power
 
 116 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 of living incarnate and become conscious, his 
 zest for life, his will . . . ; himself living be- 
 fore his own eyes. . . . Then love wrought 
 its miracle: slowly, gently, surely, the little 
 sleeping thing that he felt to be himself swept 
 him out of himself. . . . Slowly, deliciously, 
 he felt every demarcation between himself and 
 her being obliterated. . . . Everything in him 
 that was properly or solely himself was blotted 
 out, blotted out. . . . His desire for knowl- 
 edge that had brought him to her bedside, 
 his anxiety for the child, his suffering be- 
 cause of her and yet exterior to her, all had 
 left him. . . . He had become one with the 
 little sleeping creature, weak, trustful, sick. 
 . . . Now it was she who suffered in him, she 
 who in him pitied her: he felt with her and 
 no longer because of her; his self-interest 
 melted away in love. . . . And now the 
 miracle was fully accomplished: he lived 
 wholly in her. . . . But at the same time, 
 strangely, it seemed to him that he had gained 
 and grown in ceasing to be himself; it was as 
 though his consciousness was reaching out,
 
 DOWNFALL 117 
 
 reaching out, deliriously expanding, and at 
 the same time finding self-denial in this ex- 
 pansion and extension; the more fully he at- 
 tained consciousness, the more was his con- 
 sciousness in her. . . . And he never wearied, 
 could not conceive of wearying of this melting 
 into her soul. . . . He blessed her for sleep- 
 ing so that he could cleave to her undisturb- 
 edly, unreasoningly, boundlessly. . . . And 
 he stood there, bending over her, tasting to 
 the full the delight of this merging of his 
 entity into hers. . . . 
 
 He stood up at last and his mind was as 
 confused as a drunken man's. What was 
 happening to him? . . . What! He had come 
 with a very definite object. . . . What was 
 this intoxication that had overcome him and 
 still possessed him? . . . He looked round 
 him to try to collect himself, to find his bear- 
 ings again. . . . Yes, that was the door 
 there . . . , the passage . . . , yonder his wife 
 was sleeping. . . . His wife! The woman 
 through whom he had begotten his child! 
 . . . The woman whom he had impregnated
 
 118 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 with his being . . . who, also, she too, was 
 himself! . . . And once more he was intoxi- 
 cated with the feeling that he was himself in 
 another than himself. 
 
 Then he understood : his family was absorb- 
 ing him; the entity which was his own was 
 stripping him of the identity of his own 
 being; his body was robbing him of his mind 
 . . . then in a flash he saw his whole life 
 crumbling away, his whole being confiscated 
 by love, the activity of his intellect rendered 
 impossible, all the ideas seething in him just 
 left, for ever; his beloved work crushed in the 
 embryo. . . . No. That should not be. ... 
 So much could not be asked of him. ... If 
 the child were ill, she would be looked after. 
 He would do all that was necessary. . . . 
 Surely his whole life, his happiness were not 
 asked of him. . . . He would not love them. 
 He would not. He would not. ... So on 
 a desperate defensive impulse, which instantly 
 horrified him, he ran to his study, back to his 
 writings and his ideas. These things were his 
 life, his passion, his desire. They would be
 
 DOWNFALL 119 
 
 his defence. And with a frenzy that terrified 
 him, for he knew that his old frenzy was a 
 passion which was slipping away from him, 
 he plunged into his papers. . . . 
 
 But he read not a word. . . . He had 
 never a thought. . . . And all the things he 
 had written down seemed to him to be dead 
 things. The only reality was yonder, in the 
 child's room. . . . And already he found the 
 limitation of himself in himself, which he had 
 felt on reading a few lines, a heavy burden 
 to bear. 
 
 Then he was seized with a feeling of dizzi- 
 ness: there was no doubt about it: it was the 
 ruin of his intellect, the collapse of his dreams, 
 a declension into the most violent, the richest, 
 the most sorrowful love. . . . Then, as be- 
 fore, he was filled with a desire to wear out 
 his agitation by movement, to go out, to run, 
 to go walking blindly on and on. ... But 
 now he was compelled to stay, to stay with 
 those whom he had created, for whom he was 
 responsible. . . . And, in his heart of hearts, 
 he wished to stay. He wished to suffer with
 
 120 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 them; to stay, wounded by them, near those 
 whom he had wounded. And, sinking back 
 into his chair, he murmured with the Master: 
 " I am crucified to the world, as the world in 
 me is crucified. . . ." 
 
 And he sat there, waiting for the dawn, 
 trying to think that it was all an evil dream, 
 that to-morrow he would be told that all was 
 well, that he would come back to himself; 
 but, even so, he felt convinced that he would 
 never be the same again, that he would love 
 them, that he wished to love them, that he 
 would never again recover the distinct sense 
 of demarcation between himself and them, 
 which only a few hours ago he had had as 
 he sat at his desk. . . . And he looked at his 
 papers his worshipful effort to win to a 
 clear idea of his being which in one night 
 had slipped back into the world of inanimate 
 things. . . . What then was this passion of 
 his for the idea? What was this " passion " 
 which the mere sight of the lips of a sleeping 
 child had been enough to dissipate? . . . 
 And yet this passion was his, it was the first
 
 DOWNFALL 181 
 
 condition of his existence, and he was con- 
 scious of the truth of his distress at the 
 thought of losing it. ... 
 
 And he sat there with bowed head, trem- 
 bling in his impotence to understand what he 
 was. . . . He understood then those who, 
 under the stress of such a night of torment, 
 fall on their knees before Him who knows. . . . 
 
 * 
 * * 
 
 Day came. He hurried to the doctor's. 
 . . . Hip-disease! He must be mad to think 
 such a thing. . . . The diagnosis was very 
 simple. . . . They would have told him the 
 truth at once. . . . No, no. It was just the 
 exhaustion of a child who has grown too 
 fast. . . . 
 
 He went home. They were at breakfast. 
 . . . He explained his lateness as best he 
 could and made some story to account for his 
 going out so early and sat down between 
 them.
 
 122 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 . . . He was filled with a profoundly new 
 feeling for the two of them. As he looked 
 at the little creature by his side, eating, drink- 
 ing, talking, thinking, willing, how strangely 
 he felt that it was himself living there by his 
 side ! . . . Ah ! Often and often, in intellectual 
 amusement, he had said to himself at meals 
 as he looked at her: "Her life is really my 
 life." But to-day he felt it! And it seemed 
 to him that no father could feel it as he did. 
 For other fathers it is only an idea. . . . 
 And, as for the woman sitting opposite him, 
 he was filled with a profound feeling this 
 morning a feeling such as he had never had 
 (except perhaps once, when she was preg- 
 nant) that she was a child whom he had 
 taken away from her own people, her own 
 home, her own consciousness, and that he had 
 penetrated into her consciousness, and at the 
 same time had been interpenetrated by her. 
 . . . Oh! He had not been wrong that night; 
 no, never again would he return to the sense 
 of demarcation between himself and them 
 that he had had yesterday, never again would
 
 DOWNFALL 123 
 
 he win back to the independence of his con- 
 sciousness, or the purity of his heart, or to 
 the clarity of the heart which is necessary for 
 the intellect. . . . 
 
 He spent the whole of the afternoon with 
 Suzanne, making her play, and telling her 
 stories. . . . Clemence watched him in amaze- 
 ment. 
 
 Next day, after lunch, he went into his 
 study, intending to return to his work. . . . 
 There was nothing to prevent him. . . . 
 Come! What was the profound meaning of 
 that page of Descartes? What was its sig- 
 nificance in the master's scheme of thought 
 at that particular period of his life? . . . He 
 probed into it. ... Yes, he carefully ex- 
 amined it. ... As before. . . . He worked 
 through to his idea, and he hugged it to him. 
 . . . But he was fully aware that his real 
 power of absorption and intensive concentra- 
 tion was no longer with his ideas, but, in the 
 next room, directed upon the sofa where lay 
 the flesh of his flesh, the blood of his blood.
 
 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 . . . And feverishly he paced up and down 
 and round his room; and he was conscious of 
 the fact that his fever was not the fever of 
 thought, but the fever of fear: that he was 
 clinging to his love for his work, willing him- 
 self to will it, forcing himself to attach an 
 importance to the idea shaping in his mind, 
 and that now the smallest trifle was enough 
 to distract him from it all. . . . And yet 
 there was a profound something, very pro- 
 found, but profound in a different way from 
 his judgment, which bound him to his work. 
 "Ah!" he wept in his heart, "It is too 
 frightful, too appalling, in the full tide of life 
 to be dispossessed of faith." 
 
 . . . He read the poem of an old writer: 
 how, according to his school of thought, the 
 world was made, the birth of the world, the 
 grandeur of the sun, the movement of the 
 stars, planets, and animals. . . . And from 
 that he passed to the thought of the suffering 
 of the child. And, tremblingly, he felt that
 
 DOWNFALL 125 
 
 out of that had just welled his real power 
 of interest. . . . 
 
 . . . That day several little friends had 
 come to play with Suzanne and they had all 
 romped about. Then came the time for Su- 
 zanne to lie down. She had been stopped at 
 the most thrilling moment of the game, and 
 the rest cruelly went on playing. And she 
 looked at them with sad wisdom in her eyes. 
 . . . Oh! How entirely he was filled with 
 love, with the fierce joy of sharing, with a 
 sudden added sense of being swept out of 
 himself, with a feeling of the impotence of 
 the mind! . 
 
 * 
 
 # 
 
 The disease gained ground. The doctors 
 held a long consultation. . . . Men came with 
 bands and cords and plaster to imprison the 
 child's limbs in a monstrous sheath, while, in 
 agony, horribly gay, her parents amused her 
 and deceived her " It is only for a few days.
 
 126 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 Suzanne shall play again on Sunday " and 
 she looked up at them with her eyes wide in 
 surprise and confidence. . . . And the men 
 went away. And she was left there, crucified, 
 resigned, terribly human. . . . 
 
 Then, rudely, violently torn away from 
 his ideas, the unhappy man felt himself re- 
 lapsing into the blindest, the most desperate 
 love, the most utter devotion, the completest 
 absorption of the heart that he had ever 
 known. What was the fusion of himself with 
 a suffering creature that he had known years 
 ago and taken for a tremendous thing com- 
 pared now with this fusion of himself with 
 a creature who was his very being, blood of 
 his blood, his will become flesh and suffering! 
 Now it was through his inmost being, through 
 the extension of his own nature, and not 
 through any outward cause, that his soul had 
 become one with the soul of another; it was 
 the profoundest depths of himself, his utter- 
 most self, that now projected him outside 
 himself, bound him to another human being,
 
 DOWNFALL 127 
 
 with the most marvellously perfect adjust- 
 ment, the most wonderful adhesive power, the 
 most complete alienation from himself! Ah! 
 He knew now what it was to become one 
 with another soul, with its most secret places, 
 where almost it were impossible to believe 
 that another soul could penetrate, and wholly 
 to lose consciousness of self, the ultimate 
 self, which marks the ultimate cleavage 
 between one entity and another. . . . And 
 now everything was crumbling, crumbling 
 away: all his mental activity, all his power 
 of taking and understanding. And he strug- 
 gled: he tried to raise himself above this 
 mighty sea of love, once more to hug to him- 
 self his beloved power of thought: twenty 
 times a day he would go into his study and 
 fling himself into his ideas for he had, had 
 he not?, still the right to desire his own life, 
 his own happiness! Surely he had not to 
 give everything! And twenty times his ideas 
 would elude him, like a piece of wreckage 
 slipping away from his frozen fingers. And 
 from his violent resistance, in despair at his
 
 128 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 impotence, he would sink back into the ful- 
 ness of his love. 
 
 And he detested his love. He found in it 
 the things he most detested: the love of " hu- 
 man suffering," the love of " sensibility," the 
 love of the flesh in travail. . . . And this love 
 was the love of Ms flesh. . . . And all the 
 love of man, and all man's "charity," and 
 all that man sanctifies, were the love of his 
 flesh . . . the love of his " kin and kind." 
 . . . Ah! How subtle, how eternal is that 
 religion which bids man seek his divinity in 
 the adulation of his own suffering flesh upon 
 the cross. 
 
 For that is what this Christian religion 
 amounts to: it is Man's worship of his own 
 suffering flesh. ... It is because it is that 
 that it has conquered the world and become 
 universal. . . . And indeed there are men 
 who have proclaimed Christ to be the great- 
 est of " thinkers " x and declare that he would 
 
 1 " Christum ait fuisse summum philosophum." (Tschirnhaus, 
 on Spinoza.)
 
 DOWNFALL 129 
 
 have been just as great without his crucifix- 
 ion, and that he should be loved not only on 
 Gerazim or Golgotha but in mind and truth. 
 What men are these? Philosophers, learned 
 men, " semi-Christians," who have no weight 
 with the people or are ignored by them. . . . 
 But " Pascal in sickness showing his sensi- 
 bility of the physical sufferings of Jesus " is 
 the true Christian, and all men cross them- 
 selves in him. 
 
 And his was the love of his flesh wounded. 
 Oh! Could he hate the love of the One who 
 suffered, the One who was buried and 
 wounded, enough! Does not suffering mean 
 feeling, compassion, feeling with another? 
 Why should we always " feel sorrow "? By 
 what blasphemy, by what base reduction of 
 life to the level of your wretchedness have you 
 decided that human means suffering? And 
 you who are "compassionate," you who 
 " commune " with your God, why must it 
 always be communion in His sorrow? Why 
 is there no communion in His smile, when He
 
 130 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 was at Magdala, happy and simple in the 
 company of the two young women? Why 
 and through what sadism I do not only mean 
 you, the dreadful modern comedians, the ex- 
 ploiters of the quivering flesh, those who 
 parade Sebastian and Amfortas, but you too, 
 the stern doctors of the ages of restraint: " O 
 blood that flowest from the pierced head, or 
 from the galled eyes, or from the body bruised 
 and broken! O precious blood, let me gather 
 thee drop by drop ..." x through what 
 sadism do you commune with the One who 
 was broken and destroyed? . . . And he too, 
 like all the rest, was a party to such sadism. 
 Had he been one with his child when she was 
 happy and playing about in the gardens? 
 Had he even felt that he was kin with her 
 in those days? Was it not also, in his case, 
 the suffering human being that had called 
 forth his pity? . . . With bowed head he 
 thought: " Will ever a man be human enough 
 wholly, in compassion, to share in happi- 
 ness? " 
 
 1 Bossuet.
 
 DOWNFALL 131 
 
 And his was the love of a human being 
 hurt and laid low by himself. For he was 
 beginning to discover hideous feelings in 
 himself: a delight in her suffering because it 
 was his work, because it was the proof of his 
 power to create suffering. . . . The horrible 
 love of man for his power of cruelty. . . . 
 
 And suddenly he perceived the meaning of 
 Christianity: the love of men for Him who 
 had suffered not for them, but through them, 
 who would never have suffered if they had 
 not sinned. . . . 
 
 And love beset him on all sides: now, be- 
 neath states of soul which he thought 
 " reasonable " he would suddenly recognise 
 it; now, at the most unexpected places, new 
 forms of love would spring up and close in 
 upon him like furies. 
 
 Sometimes in his desire to feel himself 
 alone, he would go as far as to visit the re- 
 sponsibility of her illness upon the child her-
 
 132 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 self. It was madness to believe that he had 
 done everything: the creation of a human 
 being by itself without any reference to its 
 ascendants "autogenesis" did exist! So 
 much the worse for her if she had played 
 her part in the creation of herself badly. . . . 
 And at once in addition to his horror of 
 the solitude to which he was abandoning the 
 little creature he would become conscious 
 of regret for the share in her creation which 
 he had just granted her, of grudging her the 
 smallest independence, of wishing her to be 
 only, wholly and solely, himself. . . . And, 
 in terror, he would see that his " responsi- 
 bility " came not from his " reason " or his 
 " morality " but from the most organic ele- 
 ment of his being, from the instinctive desire 
 to create, from some obscure and unknown 
 need of carnal interest. . . . And he would 
 be overwhelmed by the consciousness of a 
 profound tie that bound him. 
 
 And, at such moments, he would not share 
 his interest even with Clemence. He told 
 himself that the father was the only begetter
 
 DOWNFALL 133 
 
 and parent, that the man alone was respon- 
 sible. . . . Ah! The wiseacres who declared 
 that, if Eve alone had sinned, the human race 
 would never have fallen, had seen deep into 
 the human heart. 
 
 And he understood now the meaning of the 
 desire for responsibility, the desire to reach 
 consciousness remotely, entirely remote from 
 self; and that the great responsible men are 
 the men of power, of will, of force and action. 
 . . . Those who live by weakness, women and 
 children, have no desire for responsibility. 
 
 At other times, when he had once more be- 
 come " reasonable," he would blame Cle- 
 mence. The mother's nature also played its 
 part in the shaping of the child! (And who 
 knows whether among her kindred, whatever 
 they may say, there may not be some taint or 
 other?) . . . And it was she who had made 
 the child: he remembered that now: it was 
 her woman's passion, it was she. . . . No, no. 
 
 It was he, it was he 
 
 And suddenly, as he looked at the child, he
 
 134- THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 knew that it was neither she nor he, but their 
 indivisible bond, the mysterious union in 
 which their separate individualities and wills 
 were merged. . . . Then in a flash he began 
 to understand why this mystery was made 
 holy, and marriage a sacrament; he under- 
 stood how and why it is monstrous for two 
 wills which have created another being, the 
 living symbol of their perfect conjunction, 
 afterwards to be so bold as to declare them- 
 selves sundered, strangers to one another, 
 divorced from one another. . . . And it 
 seemed to him that yet another mystic bond, 
 heightened by the splendour which men con- 
 fer on it, a splendour which he had just begun 
 to feel, had taken possession of his heart. . . . 
 He thought of the millions of human beings 
 who recite these dogmas. . . . Their lives 
 would become impossible if they began to feel 
 them. . . . 
 
 And yet again he would sink back reso- 
 lutely and utterly into consciousness of the 
 evil he had done as though he wished to drain
 
 DOWNFALL 135 
 
 it of its bitterness. As with a dagger he 
 stabbed himself with this truth : " My will 
 has produced this suffering creature. ... It 
 is false to say: I willed the existence of this 
 creature. And afterwards it came to suffer- 
 ing. Rather must I say: At the moment 
 when I willed her existence, through the fact 
 of my willing it, she suffered. . . . My will, 
 being this poor little creature, was a suffering 
 thing. ... I was, I am, suffering in her. ..." 
 So, in a roundabout way, he came back to 
 the idea of communion; once more his re- 
 sponsibility was turned into love. . . . And 
 he regretted his first feelings which did at 
 least give him the right to believe in a cer- 
 tain amount of liberty. . . . 
 
 He would look down at the little creature 
 who was revealing to him his own suffering. 
 ... It would seem to him that the Father 
 adored the Son for having discovered for 
 Him His own humanity. . . . 
 
 And yet, how bitterly, beneath such com- 
 munion, did he feel the implacable independ-
 
 136 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 ence of human creatures, and how impotent 
 is a man to do anything for that other crea- 
 ture which is himself, which must yet work out 
 its own salvation! . . . How the doctors hurt 
 him merely by saying: " She will pull 
 through"! 
 
 And at other times his " common sense " 
 would intervene and declare that it was all 
 literature, all metaphor, to talk about one 
 consciousness merged with another and say- 
 ing: "I am ill in your lungs"! . . . Could 
 anything be more personal than consciousness ? 
 He was himself, alone. A being had issued 
 from him which was another entity, entirely 
 separate from himself. . . . But it was enough 
 for him to give one glance at his child to 
 know in his heart that he was both himself 
 and she. . . . He would ponder long this 
 state of his heart: to be both himself and not 
 himself! . . . Then, fully, clearly, he would 
 admit the frightful law of love: its frightful 
 contradiction. Its frightful contradiction 
 the Idea's worst enemy; he detested it and
 
 DOWNFALL 137 
 
 seeing all men grovelling under it with their 
 patheticism, their outpouring of emotion, their 
 " musicality " ; and it was there, firmly seated 
 in himself, and he could feel it, while all the 
 rest were gushing about it, all the professors 
 of a Pascalian ecstasy, wretched scribblers, 
 glued to their desks, thinking of nothing but 
 their fame, while, never having loved any one, 
 they had preserved their identity intact. . . . 
 And he would think of the "Effect which is 
 only a form of the Cause," and he would 
 think of the Father " consubstantial " with 
 the Son, of the three Persons who are but one 
 Person, of all the things which are them- 
 selves and something other than themselves, 
 to the eternal perplexity of men. And all 
 their " follies " seemed to him to be very 
 serious things. And the councils which de- 
 bated them seemed to him to be sublime. . . . 
 And he was entirely submerged by contra- 
 diction, now swollen with his past and the 
 religion he had come by through it. ... 
 
 And then, lost in this absolute contradic-
 
 138 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 tion, this perfect dislocation from himself, he 
 was entirely deserted by his power of thought. 
 . . . Indeed it was still possible for him to 
 observe, to read, to deduct ; to approach ideas, 
 to come in contact with their external form, 
 to follow all the miserable processes which 
 are called Intelligence, by way of crushing 
 them. . . . But the real power of thought, 
 the possession of the Idea, the occupation of 
 it, the penetration to its inmost, the erethis- 
 mus of the mind which men pretend to con- 
 fuse with the emotion of the heart, and the 
 quickened idea, the abstract made flesh (men 
 believe that the abstract is a dead thing!), 
 and the " grip " of which he was so proud, 
 the fierce tension of the mind in its grasp of 
 an idea, in holding it against the hundred 
 ideas which would gather round it and try to 
 beat him back, all these cherished powers of 
 his were now for ever lost and submerged 
 in the action of his heart. . . . And he saw 
 them sinking. . . . And he knew how low 
 he had fallen. Oh! He had so often in 
 others girded at such impotence to grasp an
 
 DOWNFALL 139 
 
 idea, such disparities of mind, such cow- 
 ardice of thought, as were now his! ... And 
 the " liberal " style, as he had called it in his 
 contempt, the style which leaves room for 
 what it does not mean, the style which does 
 not absolutely convey the thought behind it, 
 would now be his if he were not too ashamed 
 to write. . . . 
 
 And in his growing impotence, in face of 
 the increasingly certain collapse of his work, 
 overwhelmed with sorrow like the man who 
 thought himself abandoned by his God as 
 he would have been if he had really believed 
 he cried aloud to the God whom he loved: 
 " Why hast thou deserted me! " . . . 
 
 But he knew that he deserved such deser- 
 tion, that he had committed a crime, that he 
 was doomed. And, shuddering at his punish- 
 ment, he took to heart the words of Science 
 to the man who was damned and wept: 
 'With the first dart thou shouldest raise 
 
 thy eyes towards me, and not droop thy wings 
 
 10
 
 140 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 and go out to meet the blows of some little 
 girl or any other such small thing." 
 
 And, gazing back at the Eden which he 
 was losing through his heart, he sighed: 
 "Who shall deliver us from charity 1" 
 
 * 
 * 
 
 . . . He thought of the woman whom he 
 had made to suffer in his youth, the woman 
 whom he had loved so much. . . . He ven- 
 tured to write to her. On several evenings he 
 wandered round her house . . . : 
 
 "Madeleine. . . . Forgive me! ... I 
 wanted to see you again. . . . Only for a 
 moment. ... I am very unhappy. . . . My 
 child is ill. ... I understand now all the 
 suffering I caused you. . . . How is your boy, 
 Pierre? . . ." 
 
 She listened, silent and reserved. . . . She 
 remembered the crumbling away of the dream 
 she had made with him, and in the bitterness 
 
 1 Dante, Purgatorio, zxzi. 55.
 
 DOWNFALL 14?1 
 
 of her heart there was no room for pity for 
 others. . . . She said a few commonplace 
 words, broke off their conversation, and al- 
 most lightly walked back towards her home, 
 which at least had not betrayed her. . . . 
 
 They went to Berck. He marked the 
 child's distress when she found that there 
 existed a whole world of little people like 
 herself all strapped down to their carriages; 
 and how, suddenly, her disease became a 
 solemn thing to her, and how horribly con- 
 scious she became of being subject to a defi- 
 nite disease, and the object of so many words, 
 so many consultations, an illness so frequent 
 that a place had been consecrated to it, and 
 so serious that her parents had to leave their 
 affairs for a long time . . . ; and her realisa- 
 tion, horrible to see, that she was now more 
 firmly strapped to her bed, and her new 
 expression, as of her inmost soul gazing 
 through at them. . . . And in face of this 
 renewed crucifixion he suffered a wild acces-
 
 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 sion of love, of removal from himself, an orgy 
 of communion. . . . 
 
 And in that perfect unity, through its very 
 perfection, he tried to liberate himself. . . . 
 He had the right to despise what he felt to be 
 himself, his own flesh and its mutilation! 
 He had the right to dispose of himself! . . . 
 But at once the image of the child would 
 arise before him, separate from him, with a 
 soul of her own, lacerated and broken by 
 such desertion. . . . Ah, yes! She ceases to 
 be herself if I think of her in myself, but she 
 becomes herself again when I try to dispose 
 of myself. . . . We are one, but we are 
 two. . . . 
 
 And once more the unhappy wretch who 
 desired nothing but a clear idea, would sink 
 back into the absolute contradiction, of which 
 he had the most horribly clear idea. 
 
 And there was much more to torture him! 
 The complaisance of these people in the 
 things he detested, the things which dragged
 
 DOWNFALL 143 
 
 him down. . . . Their complacent acceptance 
 of suffering. . . . The litters put side by 
 side the little cripples laughing and playing 
 together and their parents reading gently 
 the while, or sewing, or drinking tea or play- 
 ing cards. . . . Their acceptance of misfor- 
 tune. . . . Their acquiescence in degradation. 
 . . . Acquiescence, do I say? . . . Their 
 pride. . . . Their feeling of being a cor- 
 porate entity, of being humanity, " moral " 
 humanity, the only kind of humanity deserv- 
 ing of interest! Their silent contempt for 
 healthy humanity, for those whose children 
 thrive and go and make holiday happily by 
 the sea! . . . The arrogance of unhappiness. 
 . . . And their comfortable delight in living 
 only through the heart: their hatred of those 
 who keep to themselves, their hatred of those 
 who think. . . . Their pretension that the 
 loftiest thoughts are not the equal of the love 
 which they expend on their children. . . . 
 And their familiarity with himself, their be- 
 lief that he was like themselves. 
 
 They were symbolical to him of the mod-
 
 144 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 ern world, of what the world has been for 
 two thousand years. . . . The religion of the 
 heart, of sentiment, of tears. . . . The pyre 
 of the Idea. ... Of course! A moral at- 
 mosphere entirely created by women! Ah! 
 How great was the ancient agony : " Away 
 with women," He said to His disciples. And 
 then when they burst into tears : " It is not 
 worth while getting rid of women to avoid 
 these inconveniences. . . ." And to think of 
 the modern agony: women at the foot of a 
 cross! . . . Women. . . . Women everywhere. 
 . . . All the ordering of the soul left to 
 women. And then the heart, the heart, al- 
 ways and everywhere the heart. Art turned 
 to " sentiment." Justice turned to " love." 
 Morality turned to " kindness." ... So that, 
 if a man were alone in the world, he could 
 not be moral. . . . This thing reaches even 
 unto God, who is a heart, for their Jesus 
 Christ comes from the heart of God, from 
 the heart of His Father; only with the great 
 pagans do the children of the Gods arise from 
 their father's brain! .
 
 DOWNFALL 145 
 
 And now, in this new accession of love, in 
 the renewed exactions of his heart, even a 
 superficial grasp of ideas became impossible 
 for him, and the last remaining powers of 
 his mind surrendered. Like a father in de- 
 spair hugging to his breast a slowly dying 
 child whom he adores, and covering it with 
 mad kisses, he would for hours together wan- 
 der about the dunes, fiercely clinging to the 
 idea of the old life which had been his joy 
 and his pride, and was now vanishing for 
 ever. . . . Oh! The days spent wholly in de- 
 velopment: the joy of being conscious of see- 
 ing clearly, of seeing more and more clearly, 
 of making everything distinct and ordered, 
 of God-like calling forth light out of dark- 
 ness, and order out of chaos; and of under- 
 standing the disturbance of the heart, which 
 others are content to feel and their anger at 
 being understood, and their denials : " The 
 heart has its reasons "... as if it were im- 
 possible to know them! ; the joy in such 
 consciousness of slowly, surely, breaking 
 away from other men and creating another
 
 146 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 species. . . . All that was gone from him 
 for ever! . . . And, instead of it, he had only 
 love, the adoration of his own flesh, the de- 
 bauch of his own heart. . . . Love, to which 
 all men may come. . . . Love, in which the 
 basest are the most apt . . . with their dread- 
 ful sophistry in assuring us that love is light, 
 that love is developement. . . . That love has 
 led to the creation of the greatest works! As 
 if it were not the truth that those who created 
 them did so when they had passed beyond 
 love, and had won back to mastery of them- 
 selves in order to reflect upon their love. As 
 if love, by itself, had ever discovered any- 
 thing! . . . And they say that love purifies! 
 That love uplifts! As if it did not uplift 
 exactly in proportion as it ceases to be love 
 and is tinged with ideas. . . . Love, by which 
 I live without understanding my life. . . . 
 Love, which ceases to be love as soon as it 
 attains self-knowledge and self -judgment. 
 . . . Love, which brings us back to " tend- 
 ency," to blind will, to the " vital impulse." 
 . . . Love, which drags us down to the level
 
 DOWNFALL 147 
 
 of the beasts. . . . Love, which degrades us. 
 . . . And it is all very fine for me to hurl 
 insults at love, since even as I do so I sink 
 deeper into it than ever, since, no sooner do 
 I know that my child is awake than breath- 
 lessly I hasten to her bed, to catch and absorb 
 her first thought. . . . Are you satisfied, ye 
 brutish lovers? For I know your malicious 
 delight, I know your abominable sniggering. 
 "He is not so bad as all that. . . . He is 
 no different from the rest. . . . At heart he 
 is a sentimentalist . . ." whenever Intelli- 
 gence falls headlong into the mire in which 
 you are all wallowing. . . . 
 
 And he would rush back to the house, 
 drunk with love, and hate, and despair at his 
 downfall. . . . 
 
 * 
 
 * * 
 
 And there lay in wait for him aggravations 
 of love which he had not foreseen and which 
 grew greater every day; from day to day the
 
 148 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 child became more human, more purely a soul, 
 passing beyond mere feeling and rising to 
 moral suffering: and the more the little crea- 
 ture became a human creature, the more pro- 
 foundly she would touch his heart, and the 
 more strongly she would draw him to herself. 
 . . . But how he wept over her precocious 
 humanity! . . . 
 
 . . . They were in the garden. The sun 
 was sinking over the still sea and night was 
 slowly veiling the earth as with a shroud of 
 darkness. In the distance they could hear the 
 faint sound of the waves heaving gently up 
 and dying at the foot of the dunes, as though 
 they were worn out by the heat of the day. 
 On the road the cattle were being driven 
 home, wearied by the long heat, longing for 
 shade and rest. . . . Everything was droop- 
 ing and faint, overcome: sounds, scents, col- 
 ours. . . . Ah! How she sank into the death 
 of the day, the abjuration of things. . . . 
 How keenly she felt the languor of nature, 
 which she at least did not put to shame. . . .
 
 DOWNFALL 149 
 
 How clear it was to see that her eyes, gazing 
 into space, ignored the amusement of form, 
 and went straight, searchingly, to meet the 
 soul of things. . . . And, how mightily, as 
 he sat by her side there in the shadow, how 
 mightily, with what utter oblation, what vo- 
 tive purity, he was wedded to her soul, a 
 soul of such solemn serenity. . . . 
 
 One evening Clemence had gone to the 
 piano. The litter had been brought up and the 
 child was listening in her father's arms. . . . 
 Clemence went through a few romantic pieces, 
 and then she opened a volume of Beethoven 
 and began the largo of the Fourth Sonata. . . . 
 Felix gazed at the child. How solemnly she 
 listened! How indifferent she was to the 
 movement of the fingers, the working of 
 the hands, to the obvious things, the sudden 
 flashes and decorative passages! She was 
 entirely indifferent to the sound, and wholly 
 absorbed in the soul which they expressed! 
 And, during the great passages which demand 
 the closest attention from many grown men
 
 150 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 and women, her heart would follow as though 
 it desired to grasp their full achievement; 
 their profoundest development, their final at- 
 tainment of peace. . . . And now Clemence 
 reached a sort of exaltation; she played by 
 heart with consummate expression. . . . The 
 child's eyes saw nothing now; she did not 
 even hear the notes and chords, but was ter- 
 ribly absorbed, as though she had reached out 
 to meet the soul which had created the music 
 to tell the sorrow of mutilation and laceration. 
 . . . Then, through the broken rhythms, the 
 breathlessness, the interrogations, the changes 
 of key, which might have distracted and dis- 
 turbed her, he saw her following the soul of 
 the music and with a tear melting into its 
 ultimate feeling: consolation through the in- 
 ward life. . . . Then, as he bent over her, he 
 cleaved to her soul, so tragically human, in 
 an agony of hunger for something he had 
 never yet known. . . . 
 
 * 
 
 *
 
 DOWNFALL 151 
 
 The child had been lying for nearly a year 
 so bound and shackled. . . . Came a day 
 when the doctors were to come to see if they 
 could release her. . . . They removed her 
 bonds, made her stand up and walk. Stand- 
 ing side by side her father and mother 
 watched the expression on the doctors' faces. 
 The servants did not leave the room. . . . 
 Very seriously the doctors examined the child, 
 and all those present trembled lest they 
 should not yet be able to consent to the child's 
 release. . . . The doctors exchanged a few 
 whispered words. . . . Felix understood; all 
 was lost. ..." Still a little patience." . . . 
 Horrible words of encouragement. . . . The 
 child was laid on the bed again. . . . There 
 was silence. 
 
 They had dinner. . . . They tried to main- 
 tain their usual demeanour. . . . 
 
 He let Clemence go to bed and then went 
 into his study. . . . For some time he kept 
 control of himself: he read and wrote. . . . 
 He walked about the room clutching at the
 
 152 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 semblance of hope. . . . Then he thought 
 that he was alone, that everybody was asleep, 
 that he was free . . . ; then, sinking into his 
 chair, he laid his arms on the table and hid 
 his face in them, and let loose the flood of his 
 mighty grief. . . . He wept in the despair 
 of his love, and through his tears he mur- 
 mured : " Poor little Suzanne, poor little Su- 
 zanne. . . ." And his grief was heightened 
 by being given rein. . . . He wept and 
 wept. . . . 
 
 Suddenly he shivered: a hand was laid on 
 his shoulder. He raised his head. It was 
 Clemence. . . . She was standing by his side 
 in her white dressing-gown, gazing into his 
 eyes with a long pleading look, infinitely pro- 
 found, and big with reproach and love and the 
 desire to bring consolation. . . . 
 
 " Felix," she said softly, restraining her 
 emotion, " why don't you tell me of your 
 suffering? . . . Your grief is breaking my 
 heart. ... I feel that I could ease and 
 assuage it for you. . . ." 
 
 He bowed his head, and gulped for breath,
 
 DOWNFALL 153 
 
 and avoided her eyes, like a beast at bay. . . . 
 He was consternated by her presence there: 
 not once during the eleven years of their life 
 together under the same roof, had she vio- 
 lated his nightly retreat where she knew that 
 he withdrew into himself. Not one night 
 had she come. And there she stood! . . . 
 And it was she, she whom for eleven years he 
 had kept at a distance, whom he had harshly 
 repelled one day when she had come to him 
 in a burst of confidence surely she remem- 
 bered it it was she who had now come to 
 offer to share in his grief! . . . She must be 
 very sure, to have dared to do so, sure that 
 he was weak and ripe for surrender. . . . He 
 felt her hand on his shoulder, loving, firm, 
 intent upon tenderness. . . . She had watched 
 him. . . . Worst of all, she was right in her 
 certainty; he desired the communion, the 
 right to share, which she had come to wrest 
 from him; he longed to lay bare his fatherly 
 grief in the arms of his accomplice, to weep 
 over his child in the arms in which he had 
 begotten her, to complete in the arms of the
 
 154- THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 mother the alienation of his being in those 
 who were his being. She had done well to 
 come. He was expecting her. . . . And, 
 desperately, he felt that the last rampart 
 of his identity was crumbling away at 
 her coming and also that he was glad of 
 it. ... 
 
 His first impulse was to shrink back, and 
 he dried his tears and murmured : 
 
 " It was a moment of weakness. . . . 
 I gave way . . . gave way . . . weak- 
 ly. ... It will pass. ... I shall be 
 strong. . . ." 
 
 She was brave enough to persist. Trem- 
 blingly she stooped affectionately over him 
 and said: 
 
 ' You know, you often say that I too am 
 strong . . . a ' child of the fields ' . . . that 
 I don't suffer from nerves like you. . . . Do 
 you think I could not bear your grief with 
 you? . . ." 
 
 " Yes. . . . You are brave . . . ," he said, 
 putting his arm round her waist. ' You al- 
 ways show a bold front. . . . But, though
 
 DOWNFALL 155 
 
 you are able to contain your grief . . . , yet 
 you suffer none the less. ... I can see that 
 . . . and it is shameful of me to add to what 
 you have to bear. . . ." 
 
 She came nearer to him and said: 
 " And you often say that I can see things 
 more clearly than you . . . , that I see things 
 as they are. ... I am sure you are seeing 
 more trouble than there is. ... Did you 
 think she would be able to get up to- 
 day . . .? ... But I agree that it is very 
 sad that we should have to wait for another 
 six months. . . ." 
 
 " Six months! " All his sorrow came back 
 to him now, he could no longer contain it, 
 and, having found a meet channel for it, he 
 let it loose in full flood " Six months! Do 
 you think I am to be taken in by what they 
 say? Do you think I didn't see the way in 
 which they looked at each other? Their 
 anxious manner? That there is no improve- 
 ment? Do you want me to believe that you 
 did not see it too? . . . Did you not see how, 
 
 this evening, our little darling, who has al- 
 
 11
 
 156 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 ways been so gentle, so terribly considerate, 
 in trying to hide her suffering from us did 
 you not see how she tried to be gay and cheer- 
 ful? because she sees that it hurts us too 
 much, because we are not strong enough to 
 hide our suffering from her. . . . Don't you 
 find something horrible in a child of her age 
 being as human as that? . . . Six months! 
 . . . She will spend years cooped up like that. 
 . . . Years. . . . And when she is released, 
 she will be a cripple. . . . And then, how- 
 ever much we watch over her, and take care 
 of her, and thrust aside everything that might 
 hurt her, her life will be a thing of constant 
 grief, from one moment to another. . . . 
 Think of her in the gardens. . . . Yes, I 
 know. People are human and will tell their 
 children: 'You must not refuse to play with 
 little Suzanne because she is a cripple.' And 
 they will let her take part in their games 
 ' like any other child,* considerately. . . . 
 Children are like us: it gives them a mo- 
 ment's flattery not to be brutal. . . . Then 
 they will suddenly begin a running game
 
 DOWNFALL 157 
 
 children always run they will run races, 
 ' who'll get there first? ' . . . And she will 
 be in their way. . . . And they will make 
 her feel it. ... And she will cry. . . . And 
 then think of the children's parties. ... Oh! 
 She will dance too! . . . The bigger girls will 
 come and dance with her, and they will make 
 room for her in the round dances. . . . But 
 when they get excited, and lose their heads 
 and become really gay, when all the children 
 begin to feel that they are moving in a giddy 
 whirligig, going faster and faster, wilder and 
 wilder, a crazy whirligig of which they are to 
 be the creators and the creatures, when they 
 reach a triumphant height of mastery, then 
 she will creep out of the whirling throng, and 
 she will come and sit by us and watch them, 
 and she will say nothing, so as not to 
 hurt us and we too will talk of something 
 else " 
 
 v J >l . 
 
 " Stop, stop," cried Clemence, holding him 
 pressed close to her, and weeping. ' You 
 are breaking my heart. ..." 
 
 But implacably he went on, torturing her,
 
 158 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 making her his own, impregnating her with 
 his fatherly grief : 
 
 " But all that is nothing. . . . The worst 
 is yet to come, when she sees her girl friends 
 disappear one by one down the paths in the 
 gardens, hand in hand with their lovers, meet- 
 ing in trust and love and troth-plight. . . . 
 Oh! Think of the niceness and the elaborate 
 care with which her friends will come and 
 tell her of their joys. . . . And they will 
 never be able to conceal their joy. . . . And 
 she will have to rejoice with them. . . . And 
 she too will have longed to give her life in 
 trust and love: she too might have been able 
 to win a lover's pledge, to leave her home, 
 plight her troth and cleave to her lover. . . . 
 But men will not marry an invalid. . . . And 
 she will go to the houses of her young married 
 friends. She will be intimate with them. She 
 will be their friend, their real friend, the 
 friend of whom none of them will be afraid, 
 the friend to whom they will ' tell every- 
 thing ' except the ultimate secrets of 
 womanhood and marriage. . . . And she will
 
 DOWNFALL 159 
 
 see their nurseries and their lovely children 
 sleeping. . . . And she will think of the 
 children she might have had, and how she 
 would have loved them. ... It will be her 
 lot to nurse the children of other women. . . ." 
 
 " Stop, stop." 
 
 " And we two will still be by her side to 
 stay her hurt, to give her the illusion of love. 
 . . . But when we are gone, she will be left 
 all alone by the fireside, with some old maid, 
 with nothing left, with no interest in the 
 world. . . . Hers will have been a life of 
 unbroken misery, humiliation, absolute nega- 
 tion. . . . And we shall be responsible for 
 it. . . ." 
 
 Then he burst out sobbing and let his head 
 fall on Clemence's bosom: he clung to her, 
 pressed close, body to body, they who to- 
 gether had brought this misery to pass and 
 together wept over it; and he felt in that 
 embrace, and in the warm response she made, 
 that everything that yet remained distinct 
 and clear in him, the last vestiges of his lib- 
 erty and his intellect, melted away; he clung
 
 160 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 to her in the frenzy of his supreme surrender, 
 and drank his fill of self-forgetfulness. And 
 she, even as she wept over the picture he had 
 drawn for her, pressed his dear head against 
 her heart, holding him so for the first time, 
 for the first time knowing that he was 
 hers: broken and in despair she knew not 
 whether her tears came from her sorrow as a 
 mother or from her happiness as a wife; 
 through her sobs she thought of the wasted 
 days, and like another wife finding her hus- 
 band again in the evening of her youth, she 
 cried from the depths of her heart: " God has 
 not suffered us to enjoy together the days of 
 our youth." . . . They stood so for a long 
 time, weeping, clasped in each other's arms, 
 feeling the impiety of meeting in such a pas- 
 sionate embrace through the sufferings of 
 their child. . . . 
 
 Their emotion ebbed. . . . Keeping her 
 arm round her husband's neck, gently slip- 
 ping away from his embrace, she sat down 
 on the arm of the chair. She took up the 
 handkerchief which he had left on his desk
 
 DOWNFALL 161 
 
 and, mopping her eyes with it, she said 
 through her tears: 
 
 " How cruel you are. . . . And how you 
 exaggerate. . . . You seem to take a delight 
 in hurting us. ... How do you know that 
 she will be a cripple? . . . And even if she 
 were, ... it would only be very slight. . . . 
 Very slight. . . . She will meet with humilia- 
 tion! Other people meet with it too, each af- 
 ter their kind . . . , because they are ugly . . . , 
 because they are poor . . . , and their hu- 
 miliation may be worse than hers. . . . She 
 will have a lovely face . . . , she will be a 
 charming girl. . . . Just think how people 
 love her : strangers . . . , servants . . . , every- 
 body. . . . Did you ever know a charming 
 creature not be loved because she is slightly 
 crippled? . . . You are always living in 
 theories. . . ." 
 
 He listened to her and his being melted 
 into hers. . . . What she was saying was the 
 ruin of all that he respected; it was the ac- 
 ceptance of happiness in mutilation, the ac- 
 ceptance of the relative. . . . He let her go
 
 162 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 on and offered no further resistance. . . . 
 She dried the last vestiges of her tears and 
 went on: 
 
 " Besides ... I don't understand you. 
 . . . You sit there considering the child's life 
 and you attach certain names to it . . . , 
 names which hurt you horribly: humiliation, 
 negation! . . . Why do you always want to 
 find names for things? Why do you always 
 want to judge everything? ..." 
 
 "It is true," he muttered. ' That is our 
 mania, the obsession from which we ' think- 
 ers ' suffer. . . ." 
 
 But this perpetual substitution of the idea 
 for the reality was also his greatness. He 
 knew that. . . . And he renounced his great- 
 ness. " I am not like that. ... I take her 
 life quite humbly, without asking what it is. 
 . . . Every day I try to bring the dear child 
 a little happiness. . . . And next day, too, 
 if I can, I try again. . . . Believe me. Help 
 her instead of judging her. . . . Come. Yes- 
 terday I read about a toy that would give 
 her pleasure. ... I went to Paris and
 
 DOWNFALL 163 
 
 bought it. ... Come, let us go and put it 
 on her bed, so that she may smile when she 
 wakes up. . . . To-morrow we will find some- 
 thing else. . . ." 
 
 She led him towards her room. He fol- 
 lowed her tottering like a drunken man, with 
 a confused consciousness of the immensity 
 of his fall, and of sinking, sinking into real- 
 ity . . . , into the narrow confines of family 
 life. . . . She took a large plush bear out of 
 a cardboard box. . . . Then they crept along 
 the passage . . . and stole up to the child's 
 bedside. . . . She held his hand, as if to sup- 
 port him in this approach of love, unprotected 
 by pride. ... So they stood, bending over 
 the child. . . . She opened her eyes, saw the 
 toy and the two of them standing there close 
 together, looking at her, beseeching her, im- 
 ploring her. . . . She smiled at them in for- 
 gireness. . . . 
 
 From that day on he gave up the strug- 
 gle. He was entirely filled with love, aban-
 
 164 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 doned thought and every exercise of the 
 mind. . . . 
 
 He neither despised nor honoured his sur- 
 render of these things, for he had so utterly 
 fallen that he had sworn henceforth never to 
 seek knowledge, and to live his life without 
 judging it. 
 
 Sometimes in the newspapers or in conver- 
 sation he would hap on the words " evolution," 
 or God, or " liberty." . . . And would think: 
 " I used to have ideas about these things, 
 about the ideas of these things. ... It is no 
 good thinking about them! ..." 
 
 Often, as he looked at Suzanne, he would 
 think of that " desire " in him which had be- 
 come a " thing," and that " tendency " which 
 had become " flesh." . . . And he would dis- 
 cover in his mind a new delight in those 
 " mysterious " things, before which a man 
 can only stand amazed, and towards which 
 the mind of its very essence cannot approach. 
 He accepted his downfall.
 
 DOWNFALL 165 
 
 Sometimes, as he watched Clemence sit- 
 ting enigmatically with the corners of her 
 mouth turned up, so serene now in her hap- 
 piness with Suzanne and himself he would 
 begin to think that she was secretly glad of 
 the child's illness which had brought her hus- 
 band back to her and robbed him of his in- 
 tellect. . . . And he bore her no ill-will. 
 
 They returned to Berck. . . . He could 
 now tolerate the people there. . . . He was 
 amazed to find himself thinking that sickness 
 and disease comprised humanity, and how 
 
 The infinite sadness of Golgotha's bitter cry 
 
 Had in itself contained sufficient agony 
 
 To express humanity! 
 
 . . . They were talking one day of a dis- 
 covery which might transform the whole of 
 man's ideas concerning the nature of matter. 
 
 " All that sort of thing," said the father 
 of one of the children to Felix, " is not worth 
 a kiss from one of these little people! . . ." 
 
 " No doubt," he said, " no doubt.
 
 Ill 
 
 WITH her delicate profile turned towards 
 him, sitting under the light of the lamp, 
 Clemence was plying her needle. On the 
 other side of the table, biting her lip, busily 
 drawing lines with her ruler she had been 
 two years at school Suzanne was " doing 
 her lessons." And at the back of the room, 
 in the shadow, sunk deep in his chair, Felix 
 was watching them. . . . After all, the child 
 was happy. . . . Most of the sufferings in- 
 herent in her infirmity had been abolished by 
 the tenderness he gave her, by the subtle skill 
 in consolation which he found in his love for 
 her. . . . He would be able also to wipe out the 
 sufferings that lay in wait for the child as 
 she grew older. . . . He would find the right 
 words to say. . . . He would live long enough 
 to be able to help her through to an age when 
 no more trials would lie before her. . . . And 
 Clemence also was happy in the close affec- 
 
 166
 
 DOWNFALL 167 
 
 tion which he now gave her. ... It was a 
 fine thing that he had done, or would have 
 done, to have created happiness for these two, 
 and the atmosphere of charity in which he 
 now lay at his ease. ... It was beautiful. 
 ... It was not only sweet. It was beauti- 
 ful. . . . Beautiful. ... So he had at last 
 reached the love which had entirely absorbed 
 him; he had reached the point, not only of 
 living sweetly in that love, unresistingly and 
 without regret, but also of admiring and 
 honouring it. ... So then he would no 
 longer live his life without daring to con- 
 sider it, but would find purpose and order 
 in his being, the conjunction of his soul in 
 
 the life he was living 
 
 So, fortified by the peace of it all, in his 
 heart he suffered a supreme hope to spring 
 into being; the hope that the old life 
 of the mind, which he had worshipped and 
 had so bitterly deplored, would now, from the 
 lofty height of his love, be scorned and seen 
 to be base and ugly. ... If that could be, 
 then he would find consummate peace. . . .
 
 168 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 Then, for the first time for two years, he ven- 
 tured to call to mind his old way of living, 
 when he used to leave them in the evening and 
 go and work. . . . Trembling like a sick man 
 just risen from his bed, he began slowly to 
 discover these relics of his heart; he saw him- 
 self after dinner, kissing them both on the 
 brow and then going back into his study to 
 be alone with himself, unveiling his thought, 
 rising from his being to the idea of his being. 
 . . . And it all seemed beautiful to him. . . . 
 But he wished to flout it . . . ; and now he 
 called to mind the vision of a life which 
 would have consisted in pursuing that exist- 
 ence in spite of the child's illness, leaving the 
 two women to their misery, throwing them a 
 kind word now and then, then withdrawing 
 into his own life, keeping his heart intact, and 
 still soaring from Being into Consciousness. 
 . . . Ah! Such a life would have been odious. 
 . . . But he did not flout it. ... And now he 
 felt that in his heart of hearts he thought 
 it more beautiful, more courageous, more 
 holy. . . .
 
 DOWNFALL 169 
 
 He wrestled with himself. . . . Yes. It 
 would have been more beautiful to leave all 
 that misery for the study of Ethics or Criti- 
 cism. . . . But what had he to gain by doing 
 so? ... But he knew that it is the effort of 
 thinking and not its success which is comely 
 in the sight of the God he honoured. . . . 
 
 And he wrestled with himself. . . . What! 
 Should he have left the two unhappy crea- 
 tures alone in their misery, and deprived them 
 of the smile which he could bring to their faces 
 by doing so little, merely by staying with 
 them! . . . But he felt, in the torment which 
 he suffered at the idea of leaving them, that 
 that would have been the real sacrifice and 
 that he had only done what he preferred. . . . 
 
 Then he abandoned his resistance ; accepting 
 the sorrowful consciousness of his love for 
 what he now knew to be lost for ever, in his 
 heart he suffered to spring forth the worship 
 that was welling up in it of the life wherein 
 the mind would have triumphed over love. 
 And from the profoundest and most religious 
 depths of his being, not with the fervour with
 
 170 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 which a man embraces the creatures of his 
 blood, but with that different and deep-seated 
 fervour with which a man cleaves to those 
 who are of his moral race, he took to his 
 heart, knowing that he would see them no 
 more, the few rare men he could find, who 
 through the ages had really broken free of all 
 human love and had burned for the Idea; 
 such men as you, O mighty thinkers of 
 Greece, not you, who, strolling in pleasant 
 gardens, discourse amiably of things human, 
 the only subject of your conversations, in the 
 sweet humours of friendship, but you, O 
 mighty solitaries, who, dead to the world in 
 your towers in Crete and Sicily, scan the 
 nature of Numbers and Movement; and you, 
 O great thinker of Rome, from your birth 
 dedicated to all the joys of the heart, and yet 
 in the darkness pondering upon the nature 
 of things; and you, O Master of Ravenna, 
 communing with him whom neither the love 
 of a son nor the tears of his Penelope could 
 keep from his desire to stride through the 
 world and knowledge; and you, above all, O
 
 DOWNFALL 171 
 
 great monks, not you, the great men of 
 prayer, swooning away in your cloistered 
 cells over the wounds of a human body, not 
 you, the consolers and comforters, drinking 
 human love from the lips of the dying, nor 
 you, the gospellers and preachers, fiercely 
 and in joy striving to mould the human 
 race . . . , but you, O great contemplatives, 
 living alone in your cells at Oxford or Con- 
 stance, brotherless, without penitents, or poor, 
 or disciples, truly dead to all " created love," 
 whose Faith, unacquainted with Charity, 
 sought ever the meaning of God and not His 
 love. . . . And I have failed to become one 
 of you! ... I have fallen into the toils of 
 the flesh. ... I have loved my child, even as 
 the beasts of the forest, even as the beasts of 
 the field. . . . And now all is at an end. . . . 
 Even my worship of you will leave me. . . . 
 To-morrow I shall only be a thing that 
 loves. 
 
 The child for some moments past had been 
 
 sitting on his knee. . . . And as he chanted 
 
 12
 
 172 THE YOKE OF PITY 
 
 inwardly his hymn to the God of the Idea, 
 he pressed her to his heart with an embrace, 
 a warmth that seemed to him to come from 
 his desire to protect her from the vengeance 
 of the God whom he was deriding, while it 
 came indeed from his desire to associate with 
 his misery the creature whom in all the 
 world he loved the most. ... So he sat, 
 bending over his beloved burden, gazing up- 
 ward to the heaven of the elect from which 
 she had driven him, the heaven which he 
 would never enter, the heaven which would 
 soon be for ever hidden from his sight. . . . 
 All there were silent. . . . Clemence smiled 
 and went on with her sewing. . . . Slowly, 
 with her eyes cast down, in a penetrating 
 voice that seemed to come from far away, 
 the child said: "Father, what are you 
 thinking? "
 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 (To THE 1STH FRENCH EDITION) 
 
 AMONG the criticisms of this book there has been 
 one so unanimous that it is impossible for me to 
 refrain from meeting it. 
 
 This criticism is directed towards the second part 
 and, in substance, amounts to this : I am told that the 
 conflict I have set up between intellectual activity 
 and the life of the heart, and my declaration of the 
 impossibility of their co-existence, is purely arbi- 
 trary, artificial, " contrived," and that it is quite 
 possible to live an intellectual life and at the same 
 time to love a sick child, etc., etc. . . . 
 
 My answer is simple and brief: Such criticism 
 is a condemnation of half-pressure intellectual activ- 
 ity and what I was dealing with was intellectual 
 activity at the highest pressure. 
 
 It is very sure that half-pressure intellectual ac- 
 tivity like that of most of our doctors, lawyers, 
 professors (to accept the examples produced for 
 my benefit) is compatible with love for a sick child. 
 
 (But even so, such a love must not be too violent.) 
 
 173
 
 174 AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 Obviously every one will admit that intellectual activ- 
 ity at the highest pressure like that of a seeker, 
 or an active contemplation of any kind demands 
 the entire absorption of the soul wherein it dwells 
 and cannot co-exist with any passion of the heart. 
 Now, let me say again, that it is this and no other 
 kind of intellectual activity which I have here treated. 
 
 One of my critics (in the Action Frtmfaise, 
 15 December, 1912) declares that as a student of 
 philosophy he indulges in a certain amount of mental 
 activity concerning philosophic questions and fails to 
 see why it should disappear because of some illness 
 befalling one of his children. ... I am perfectly 
 willing to believe that the philosophic activity of this 
 excellent person is compatible with love for a sick 
 child : but of such I have not written. 
 
 May I be permitted to recall the words in which 
 I defined my hero's mental application? (Page 100) : 
 " He had just discovered the intellectual life the 
 real life of the intellect, not the dallying with ideas 
 that had been familiar to him as to all the men of 
 his class on leaving college, not the fluttering of 
 doctrines between a call and a dinner-party, but a 
 passionate, permanent, exclusive possession, spend- 
 ing weeks together in unearthing a concept, with 
 never a thought for anything else the fevered toil
 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE 175 
 
 of such research, and the agony of being baffled, and 
 the joys of triumph, and the breathless fructifying 
 of one idea by another, with his whole being at 
 stretch to discover whether such and such an idea 
 would beget such and such another or its opposite." 
 And again (page 138) : " Indeed it was still possible 
 for him to observe, to read, to deduct; to approach 
 ideas, to come in contact with their external form, 
 to follow all the miserable processes which are called 
 Intelligence, by way of crushing them. . . . But 
 the real power of thought, the possession of the Idea, 
 the occupation of it, the penetration to its inmost, 
 the erethismus of the mind which men pretend to 
 confuse with the emotion of the heart, and the quick- 
 ened idea, the abstract made flesh, and the * grip ' 
 of which he was so proud, the fierce tension of the 
 mind in its grasp of an idea, in holding it against 
 the hundred ideas which would gather round it and 
 try to beat him back, all these cherished powers of 
 his were now for ever lost and submerged in the 
 action of his heart. ..." Dare I also remind my 
 critics that the problems attacked by my hero (page 
 106ff. ; the distinction between two ideas of move- 
 ment confounded under one appellation, the distinc- 
 tion between the idea of the miraculous and the idea 
 of the discontinuous, etc. . . . ) are not, as certain
 
 176 AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 persons (for whom there is every excuse in their 
 scant knowledge of these things) have said, " scraps 
 of college jargon " or " pages from text-books," but 
 questions which are left unconsidered for the very 
 good reason that the mind which tackles them must 
 of necessity rise to a really inventive activity ? That 
 should be enough, to my way of thinking, to make 
 every sincere reader agree that the intellectual 
 activity here in question is of the kind which de- 
 mands the supremest concentration and tension from 
 the man who is possessed by it and cannot fail to 
 disappear when his soul is absorbed by another 
 passion. 1 
 
 These passages also seem to me to meet the re- 
 proach which has been levelled at my work that I 
 admit of no degrees in the activity of the mind and 
 refuse to allow Felix, after he has been seduced by 
 his love for his child, to return, in a less degree, to 
 that activity; but when it is remembered that we 
 
 1 Some of the critics, let me hasten to say, have understood this 
 perfectly : " Can a man," says M. Leon Werter, " at once love 
 his daughter and systematically seek the truth ? No. Not if he 
 is possessed by an absolute and carnal love for the abstract." 
 And the same critic on this point quotes the words of Mme. Perier 
 about her brother, Blaise Pascal : " So it was that he made it 
 plain that there was nothing to bind him to those he loved . . . 
 and that we did not see that in cherishing and suffering such ties 
 we were occupying a heart which should belong to God alone."
 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE 177 
 
 are dealing here with inventive activity, I am inclined 
 to think that every one will agree that there can be 
 no question of degrees. Of course it is understood 
 that Felix would be able to go on reading and taking 
 notes and being interested in problems, and that he 
 might even produce pleasant little accounts of his 
 studies and agreeable review articles ; but such activ- 
 ity as that is by no means a " degree " of his former 
 activity, nor will it in any way soften, but must 
 rather accentuate, his lasting grief at the loss of 
 it. ... Finally, it is also admitted that, as I 
 have been assured, if his intellectual passion had 
 really been so strong, it would master his love and 
 he would go on with his work: but his passion is 
 not strong enough, as is made perfectly clear ("I 
 have not been able to become one of you."), and it is 
 precisely in that failure that the drama consists. 
 
 And now I am not so simple as to believe that 
 I shall disarm my adversaries by pointing out to 
 them that we are here dealing with intellectual pas- 
 sion. On the contrary, I am persuaded that it is 
 precisely because I have described this singularly 
 unpopular passion 1 that I have incurred their hos- 
 
 1 One of the forms which this unpopularity takes is the brand- 
 ing of intellectual passion by calling it absolutism and intolerance, 
 terms which in these days are so generously lavished upon passion 
 of any kind.
 
 178 AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 tility, except it is because I have described my hero's 
 religious worship of the passion which slips away 
 from him. It may be the only merit of this book 
 that it has brought into the clear light of day the 
 extraordinary detestation which nowadays is felt for 
 the religion of the mind, and that an author who 
 has delighted in its description is therefore, in this 
 year of grace, treated by supposedly cultured people 
 as though he had written an apologia of robbery or 
 murder. 
 
 BNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GREBHAM PRESS, WOKINQ AND LONDON.
 
 UNtVERWTY Of JJNO-URBANA 
 
 * * II 
 
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