Redemption (De toute son âme)

Front matter

FQ

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Cornell Aniversity Library

Chapter I

Ir was closing time at Ville-en-Bois; men and women were trooping out of the factories and workshops, their hands and faces discoloured with smoke, and with clinging particlés of iron, brass, tan, and the dust that swirled continuously around the pulleys in motion. The more dilatory clocks had not yet sounded the last stroke of seven. The month of May was drawing to its close, and a warm softness filled the evening air. Work was over: the roar of the machinery was gradually subsiding; the spiral clouds of coal dust above the brick chimneys were growing less; voices began to be heard between the walls of the Rue de la Hautiére, and those of the old road to Couéron, as well as in the higher quarter of Nantes where the town adjoined Chantenay.

There was something impressive in this hour of the day, when toil let loose her army of workers on the streets. Recruits, veterans, women married and unmarried, and dwarfed figures whom one would have thought ten years old at most, if

- the tone of their voices, and the precocious per- 1 versity of their language, had not revealed their manhood—these once outside the factory doors went their several ways, uphill or downhill, and along side cuts, to the home or lodging where shelter and soup awaited them. The crowd separated by degrees into groups. Wives rejoined their husbands, brothers, or lovers, and fellowlodgers leisurely sought each other out, evincing no particular sign of pleasure when at last they met. Something sad and weary dulled the brightness of their glance, even among the younger workers; the burden of the day weighed heavily on all alike, and hunger was uppermost in each. An occasional dull coarse remark, a spiritless joke, or a hasty good-night, was all that passed between them. Yet still among them could be seen, here and there, the rosy cheeks of a young girl, or the beardless and characterless face of a Breton youth from Auray or Quimper who had so far escaped the contamination of the workshop; the uplifted eyes of one who passed along, as in a dream; aged men, rugged as old soldiers, walking in silence, leading little children by the hand, in a mute and weary happiness. The wind from the distant sea was blowing across the waters of the Loire; over the tops of the walls, bunches of lilac hung down at intervals above the heads of the dun-coloured procession of workers.

The married members of this population of workers, and those who lived with their families, leaving the others to distribute themselves about the lower quarters of the town, took the road which led upward to the hills of Chantenay, whence similar groups were descending toward Nantes. In the midst of these cross currents of blouses, jackets, and badly fitting cotton bodices on the top of shabby skirts, a man, evidently of a better class, had drawn up his dog-cart where the road of la Hautiére began to descend. He was tall, his face, though young, was already beginning to fill out, a pointed black beard adding somewhat to its length. He was dressed in a wellcut suit of ordinary cloth; this and his manner of handling the reins, together with the good taste displayed in the harness and the sober panelling of the cart, betokened a family which had been well-to-do for fifteen or twenty years at least. What could have brought this young man among a crowd of factory hands whom those of his class, as a rule, were only too glad if possible to avoid, although they might have found it difficult to explain the reason for their dislike? He could easily have taken one of the quieter side roads; but no, there he sat, leaning forward a little on the blue cloth cushion with gloved hands, the whip laid across the slackened reins, looking fixedly ahead down the steep narrow street. The men and women stared at him as they passed, some with surly looks, others with indifference; only now and then a hat was raised with a show of reluctance, while the women, with their uncovered heads, pointed their fingers at him and then bent forward and laughed in malicious envy of the shining buckles and glittering harness which attracted their gaze. But the object of these attentions watched the passing stream of figures with the impassive countenance of the master who has grown familiar with crowds. Only a quick eye could have detected the slight shade of pity and of sadness that flitted across the calm, unmoved face, when some of those who passed close to his carriage wheels, pointedly abstained from saluting him, or turned to those behind, saying, ‘‘It’s Lemarié’s son!” The news ran like an electric shock along the road that was dark with moving figures; it was passed from one to another, and then back again, and whispered in every variety of tone of astonishment, of indifference, or of smothered anger. ‘‘ Lemarié’s son! Lemarié’s son!”

The man himself was evidently looking for some one. Suddenly the hand which held the whip went up and made a sign. A young man about twenty years old, walking up the hill, arm in arm with two others of his own age, turned his head toward him. His companions, with a barely intentional insolence, playfully tried to hold him back, but he escaped from their grasp, and going up to the side of the dog-cart, touched his old felt hat. His keen gray eyes, with their shifting colour, had caught those of his master’s son as the latter signed to him to approach, and he now stood waiting and looking up with his weasel-like face, barred on either side with short, straight whiskers, a face full of eager alertness, on which was reflected the agitation of an ever-surging passion, of which the billows seemed continually to be rising and falling within the depths of his eyes.

“Is your uncle any better, Antoine?” asked M. Lemarié, in a quiet voice.

“No, he is not getting on at all.”

“His hand is as bad as ever? Has he tried the remedies my mother sent him?”

‘He cries out at times during the night. And then the trembling fits disturb him.”

“Poor man!”

“Yes, indeed! Remedies—of what use are they to a man, when his hand has been crushed to pieces? No one believes that he will ever have the use of it again. It’s a farce to talk of remedies. He ought to have his pension, Monsieur Lemarié.”

A troubled expression came into the latter’s face, and he continued to look before him down the road, as he answered:

‘What would you have? He had better try again, but let him go himself! And mind, above all, no letter, no foolish threats! That sort of thing does not answer with my father, as you know well enough, Antoine.”

“He will go, you may be sure of that,” replied the young man, as his lips straightened in a bitter laugh. ‘‘He will go, and be hustled out of the house as I was. And yet he has worked in the factory for thirty years. You owe him a good share of your horses and carriages.”

Victor Lemarié, seeing that Antoine’s friends were listening, lifted his gloved hand and made a Sign to him to go on.

“You forget,” he said, coldly, ‘‘that for thirty years my father has provided him with the means of living. I only wished to ask after Madiot; as regards other matters, I am not the master.”

The man walked on a step or two and then returned, this time half lifting his hat. ‘And what if you were that master, Monsieur Lemarié?”

Victor Lemarié pretended not to hear, and again looked down at the road up which some scattered groups of men and women might still be seen climbing. Clouds of dust were now rising above the trampled highway, turning to golden haze as the rays of the sun, which had sunk to the level of the house-tops, shot through them.

The man waited a second to see if his master’s son would answer him, or if he would whip up his horse, then he turned on his heel and was soon lost again among the mass of his companions who had already gone on ahead, and who were being continually pressed forward by others coming up from below.

By this time the weary line of figures was beginning to look grayer and more mournful even than at first, in the declining light of day. Victor Lemarié was no longer on the lookout for any one in particular; he sat gazing abstractedly at the passing throng of men and women, all strangers to him, all alike, who followed one another at regular intervals, like the links of a chain. He was not a bad-hearted man, and both his feelings and his self-love were wounded by the conscious sense of the proximity of so much unmerited illfeeling toward him. It seemed to enfold him, to hold him in a grip of pain. He still sat upright and immovable, apparently wrapped in contemplation of some distant scene, so that many seeing him turned to look back toward the lower road, where the factory stood; but it was on no particular figure or object that his gaze was fixed; the multitude of human beings that passed before him formed but a single image to his eyes: that of a gray mass with one face and one name—the factory worker—who brushed past him, and went on, conscious of two feelings alone, the weariness of toil and hatred of the rich.

“What have I done to them?” he thought; “why should they extend their enmity to me, who am not their employer, and who have nothing to do with my father’s work-people? One of the things that has reconciled me to taking no part in the active life of the factory, was the false belief that I should thus escape their distrust. And instead they treat me as if I was their born enemy. What a hideous conflict it is that thus separates us into two camps, with no wish on our side that it should be so! There must have been sin indeed on the part of those who went before us to have brought matters to such a pass! And what a bitter fate it is to be hated in this way here, there, and everywhere, just because I wear this coat and drive this horse!”’

And still the workers came climbing up the hill. Their ranks, however, wére growing thinner, and a few old women, dragging their tired limbs, betokened that the rearguard was filing past. All below was now plunged in darkness; only the top branches of the trees, the points of the gables, - and the chimneys caught some remains of light from the tawny globe of the sun that was sinking into the green bed of the fields behind Chantenay; and hidden by the nearer houses, there were no doubt brigs and schooners sailing up the Loire, with their sails, just tipped with white, swelling before the refreshing breeze. The little that could be seen of the town between the factory roofs at the lower end of the road was now veiled in a mist that had not lost the transparency of the blue waters of the river from which it rose. Far off a window sparkled as it caught the low rays of the sun. Victor noticed also that the high factory chimneys had ceased to vomit their smoke, and that from the smaller ones around him it was rising in small gray plumes, that curled, and spread and vanished in the air, a sure sign that the worker had returned home, that the family were together again, that for one short sweet waking hour the mother had all her children round her. The day’s work was over. And as he realised this restored harmony, and remembered for how short a time it lasted, and then thought of that further harmony, equally necessary, which had been destroyed perhaps forever, he was conscious of a feeling of sadness, mingled with anger, against those who had gone before. He belonged to a generation that had to suffer for the rancour accumulated by others. Moreover, he was aware that his pity was greater than his courage, and this added to his gloom and humiliation.

He little guessed that a few paces off from him an aged priest, well known in the parish of Saint Anne, was walking in the shelter of some bushes and a cedar tree which formed his garden, gazing toward the same horizon, and thinking the same thoughts. Outside this quarter of the town he was as little known as the poor people whom he succoured. Every evening, as the army of factory workers came toiling up the hill, this old and unwearying friend, in return for no human recompense, went out to the bare mound under his cedar tree, between the branches of which he could get a glimpse of the town, and there stood listening to that tramp of poverty which he knew so well, passing along on the farther side of the wall. He had heard it now for twelve years, always with the same emotion, and to-night as usual he uttered the prayer that he had himself composed in the simplicity of his heart.

‘Lord bless the earth that now hides itself in darkness, bless the town and its outskirts, the rich down there that they may have pity, the poor here that they may love one another: above all, the poor, my God, and let the father as he returns home be met by the children with the angel that makes them smile. Keep husbands and wives from quarrelling; let brothers live together in peace; make happy for all the only hour when they are together, young and old, so that not one among them may curse Thee, but rather that they may love Thee, Lord! I pray to Thee for all those who will not pray to Thee to-night, I love Thee for all those who love Thee not, I give my life to Thee that theirs may be better and less hard. Take it, if it please Thee. Amen.”

God did not take him. He knew that he was of use.

Chapter II

THE road was now in darkness and almost deserted. Victor Lemarié gathered up the reins, and began driving at a foot pace down toward the town. He turned off shortly along a street which led through the outskirts to the Avenue de Launay, whence by a short cut he reached the boulevard Delorme, where he lived. The gas was already lighted in the dim streets; few passers-by were to be seen, for it was already the dinner hour. Victor Lemarié was now going at a good pace; just as he turned the corner of one of the streets a young girl, who was in the act of crossing, drew back with a start and stepped again on to the pavement. She looked up and bowed slightly as he took off his hat to her. In his salute there was the alacrity natural to a young man finding himself face to face with a young and good-looking woman, and also some surprise, which might be translated: ‘‘Can this charming girl really be the sister of the workman who was speaking to me up there?”

In the quick, hardly perceptible bow of Henriette Madiot there was no trace of coquetry or of surprise, or even of any particular interest in him. She was one of the slender, lithe, young working girls, whom one meets hurrying along every morning at eight o’clock, two or three at a time, making their way to the workrooms of some dress-maker or milliner. They look well dressed in any scrap of clothing, for they are young— what becomes of the old women of that class? — but this scrap has been delightfully made up, for they have the fingers of artistes and twenty models to copy from. They lend a charm to the street which it misses when they pass on. Among them are girls who cough and laugh. They are of the people,—occasionally by their gestures, and always by their pricked fingers, by the feverish excitement and strenuousness of their life; but not by their trade, nor by the dreams awakened in them by their contact with a world with which they grow familiar in spirit. Poor girls! whose tasks are refined, and whose imaginations are quickened by the fashions they serve; who, in order to become good workwomen, must have a taste for luxury, and are thereby rendered less capable of resisting its temptation; for whom men lie in wait, as they leave their workrooms, and look upon as an easy prey, on account of their graceful poverty and enforced liberty; who hear everything, who see the evil among the lower classes and divine that of the upper; who return home at night to face afresh the poverty of their condition, and who, whether they will or no, are continually comparing the world they clothe with the world to which they belong. The trial is hard, almost too hard, for they are young, delicate, affectionate, and more sensitive than most to the caress of soft words. Those who resist soon acquire a dignity of their own, and put on an air of studied indifference, which is a protection to them, as is also their quick manner of walking. Henriette Madiot was one of these. She had been the object of considerable homage, and had grown mistrustful of it.

Her bow was therefore but a slight one. She was in a hurry. They were working late that evening at the work rooms of Madame Clémence. She drew the folds of her dress more tightly round her with her gray-gloved hand, and with her eyes directed somewhat above the heads of the other foot-passengers she lightly crossed the road.

On entering the drawing-room of his father’s house in the boulevard Delorme, Victor Lamarié found a small company assembled. Besides his mother, there were two old business men, M. Tomaire and M. Mourieux, and an unmarried woman of thirty, Estelle Pirmil, who had won the second prize at the Conservatoire, gave lessons, knew everybody in the town, and passed for an original character.

His mother kissed him as he was making excuses for his late return.

“Are we not a nice family party? Mourieux and Tomaire are both cousins of a kind; is it not so, Mourieux?”’

“TI am honoured to think so,” replied the stout man, with a bow.

“You are forgetting that I am here,” said Mademoiselle Pirmil.

“I do not count you, my dear, you are at home, as you know.”

Fortunately M. Lemarié had not yet appeared.

He was a great stickler for punctuality. A moment later he entered the room, a small, thin man, with bristly white hair, and a long tuft of beard under his short moustaches. Accustomed evidently. on entering any place to sum up at a glance the number of people who happened to be present, he counted the guests, saw that no one was missing, and then stepped forward with extended hand. M. Lemarié never lost his selfcontrol, and he talked well. He had the peculiar rigidity of mind and body which distinguishes the man who has fought his way up, and is still obliged to fight to maintain his position. As he shook his son’s hand, he remarked, speaking with his lips only:

“Had a nice drive to-day? Was the air pleasant?”

“Only tolerably so.”

“That was a pity. I have been in a rush all day myself.”

Dinner being over, and the evening fine, they went into the garden—large, square-shaped, damp, and surrounded by high walls, its neglected condition contrasting with the comfort of the well-kept house. The path which led round the lawn was overgrown with moss, the branches of the trees, planted along three sides of the enclosures, straggled in unpruned disorder over the clumps of withered geraniums.

The conversation, which had been kept up pretty briskly until this moment, seemed suddenly to receive a check. The men grouped themselves on one of the seats at the bottom of the garden under the acacia trees, and the two women on another close beside it. The lawn, funereal in colour, lay in front of them, and beyond it, far away, as it seemed, could be seen the three steps, yellow with age, leading to the dining-room, and just now brilliantly illumined by the lamps and candles which were still alight. Silhouetted against this luminous background, which attracted and fatigued the eye, could be seen at intervals the dark figure of a servant, passing across it like a puff of smoke. Far overhead, visible between the leaves of the trees, so far that no one gave them a thought, the stars, shining with a pale, blue light, lay sleeping.

A long sharp whistle broke the silence.

“‘Moll’s workpeople only just going off,” said M. Lemarié. ‘‘They have been working late for the last month, owing to the large orders that have come in for the Chilian Navy.”

“It’s hard upon them,” remarked Victor.

“You pity them?”

“Most sincerely.”

The four men—M. Lamarié, M. Tomaire, M. Mourieux, and Victor—were sitting in a row on the garden-seat, watching the smoke that curled up from their cigars and formed a little cloud on a level with their eyes. M. Lemarié remained silent for a moment or two, and drew a few strong whiffs from his cigar. His features stiffened into an expression of stubborn determination at the first word of contradiction. The lines round his mouth and between his eyes grew deeper. It was again the face of the factory owner, prompt and dictatorial in the defence of his own interests. This diversity of opinion between him and his son, due to the difference in their education, the age in which they were born, and their surroundings, was displeasing to him. Any allusion to the sufferings of the working class he took as a personal injury, since his conscience as an employer was without reproach, for had he not always been just, always shown respect to the law, and always been unpopular? He replied, in a combative tone and with a touch of irony:

“The Eight-hours Day—that’s it, I suppose.”

ce No.”’

“Well, it will be all the same to me if it’s ten. Look at me, I work fourteen hours a day, and I do not complain. If you think the position of an employer is an enviable one nowadays, it’s because you are not one yourself. We make very little profit, we risk everything; we are always liable to absurd claims being made upon us by those who have no knowledge at all of the business, to say nothing of those put forward by the workpeople, who understand too much. Is it not so, Tomaire? Is it not so, Mourieux?”

“It's true enough,” said Tomaire.

‘Not entirely true,” said Mourieux.

‘Oh, I know you have a tender heart, Mourieux, and it’s proved by the manner in which you treat your hands. You find them places, you help them in every way, you would give up your own house to them to live in. But one is not obliged to do all this. And do they ever give you anything in return? You are not simple enough to believe they do. They only laugh at you.”

‘Some of them,” replied Mourieux, quietly.

“TI am not fond of people laughing at me. I would not put up with it in my work rooms. Nor will I have anything to do with journalists and theorists, who have never even had a single person under them, or with those who are always weeping over other people’s poverty,—and there has been a plague of them for the last ten years,— who want to come and interfere with the employer and sympathize with the working people. If Victor sees a man in a blouse, he is overcome with emotion at once.”

‘Not because of the blouse.”

‘He would like him to have an income of his own. If they knew how to economize, they could get an income in time from what we pay them; but they are always wanting more money and more leisure, and to have retiring pensions, so that they may be spared the trouble of saving. Do you tell me——?”’

“T am not prepared to dispute with you. These things are a matter of feeling with me. All I know is that there is a growing feeling of unrest, and that a new need has arisen.”

“Not at all, my dear boy; there has always been the same talk about everything, and about this question of living, more or less acute according to the age. Nothing is new.”

“Yes, there is something new.”

‘And what is that?”

‘The absence of love, of fraternity, if you prefer it. Nearly all the existing evil arises from that, and everything would soon be set right if we only loved one another. I have just been watching some thousands of these working people file past; they all appeared to look upon me as their enemy. My birth alone makes them suspicious of me. They do not know me, and yet they hate me. They never come inside my house and I do not go inside theirs.”

‘They come inside my house, assuredly.”?

‘Pardon me, not inside your house. Inside your factory, if you like, but that is a very different thing. From one year’s end to the other those men see only two representatives of their master: his money and his foremen. They are not likely to find much to affect them in those. In the case of a dismissal the employer, it is true, does the business himself! But where is there any bond, any pleasure in common, any daily, or even occasional mark of friendship, or good-will, to counteract the jealousy springing up afresh at every turn, and the continual clashing of interests? Can you see a sign of these anywhere?—I cannot. As to others of our class, like myself, who manufacture nothing and sell nothing, they seldom enter the poorer districts, since it is understood now that the rich and the poor have their separate quarters in the towns. They are born, and spend their lives, laugh or cry, within a stone’s throw of one another. And yet the two classes never show the slightest sign of any relationship with, or consideration for, one another. I tell you that this sort of thing gives rise at times to suffering, and that I myself suffer from it. The hatred they bear us is born of this indifference far more than from any positive grievances.”

“Bravo!” cried Mademoiselle Estelle Pirmil, wishing to bring about a diversion. ‘You know how to preach well, Victor; you missed your vocation.”

The young man, who as he spoke had become animated in a way which was unusual with him, and who was now scraping the gravel with the toes of his boots, answered with some temper:

“I dare say.”

“T must confess,” added the little woman, who had caught nothing of the conversation except the word “love,” ‘I do not understand you, Victor. No love? The poor people do not appear to me to deprive themselves of that. You have only to count the children swarming in the suburbs: why, my baker’s wife has seven!”

She laughed as she finished speaking, and her shrill voice was, for a moment, the only sound that rose above the deep silence of the night.

“People like that ought not to have more than one or two children. That would be a reasonable number. What do you say?”

Madame Lemarié, the mother, whose heavy, ordinary face rarely betrayed any emotion, moved her lips without speaking, while she put out her hand and touched the arm of the second prize-winner of the Conservatoire in order to stop her. The latter did not understand the hint, but left off speaking.

This empty-headed chatter provoked no reply, and the silence that followed was rendered the more painful from the consciousness of those present that the discussion between the father and son, although carried on with apparent courtesy, hid a deeper misunderstanding.

M. Lemarié, continuing to lean back in his seat, threw away his cigar, which lay shining like a glowworm upon the grass. Everybody began looking toward this luminous spot in the midst of the dark circle of lawn. And so they continued sitting and gazing. Neither Mourieux nor M. Lemarié’s other friend had any wish to begin a quarrel—the first, because he knew that quarrels were of no avail; the second, for hygienic reasons, and for fear of disturbing his feelings. But their very presence and their silence were in themselves aggravating.

M. Lemarié took up the conversation:

“It is charming to hear you talking of the love of the people. But it would be well to add an example of it. Can you do so?”

“Not one,” replied Victor, raising his head. “T am perfectly useless, and I know it. What is more, I shall probably remain so.”

‘And then?”

“T might have had a different life altogether. I asked you to let me come into the factory, and you refused.”

“T should think so! I have too much trouble as it is to keep the factory going in these days of competition. And I do it for the sake of my workpeople, whatever you may think. You, my dear son, would let it go to ruin.”

“Thank you.”

“T am so sure of it, that, when my time is over, the factory doors will be closed. It is my wish that it should be so, and I shall take care that my wish is carried out.”