Chapter II (1)

It was a sunny morning at the end of February, 1871. Up the steep Martheray Hill in Lausanne a young woman walked slowly, leaning on the arm of a middle-aged man. She was far gone in pregnancy, and hung heavily on her companion's arm. Her face was that of a girl, but it was pale with care, and she was dressed in mourning. The man was not, from which the passers-by concluded that he was not her husband. He seemed in deep trouble, stooped down now and then to the little woman and said a word or two to her, then seemed to be absorbed again in his own thoughts. When they came to the old custom-house in front of the inn "A l'Ours," they stood still.

"Is there another hill?" she asked.

"Yes, dear," he answered. "Let us sit down for a moment."

They sat down on a seat before the inn. Her heart beat slowly and her breast heaved painfully, as though for want of air.

"I am sorry for you, poor brother," she said. "I see that you are longing to be with your own family."

"Don't mention it, sister! Don't let us talk about it. Certainly my heart is sometimes far away, and they need me at the sowing time, but you are my sister, and one cannot disown one's flesh and blood."

"We shall see now," resumed Frau von Bleichroden, "whether this air and this new treatment will help towards his cure. What do you think?"

"Certainly it will," her brother answered, but turned his head aside so that she should not see the doubt in his face.

"What a winter I have passed through in Frankfort! To think that Destiny can invent such tragedies! I think I could have borne his death more easily than this living burial."

"But one must always hope," said her brother in a hopeless tone. And his thoughts travelled far--to his children and his fields. But immediately afterwards he felt ashamed of his selfishness, that he could not sympathise fully with this grief, which was really not his own but which he had to share, and he felt angry with himself.

Suddenly there sounded from the hill above a shrill, prolonged scream, like the whistle of a locomotive, and then another.

"Does the train go so high up the mountain?" asked Frau von Bleichroden.

"Yes, it must be that," said her brother, and listened with wide-open eyes.

The scream was repeated. But now it sounded as if someone were drowning.

"Let us go home again," said Herr Schantz, who had become quite pale; "you cannot climb this hill to-day, and to-morrow we will be wiser and take a carriage."

But his sister insisted on proceeding in spite of all. And so they ascended the long hill to the hospital, though it was like a climb up Calvary. Through the green hawthorn hedges on both sides of the way, darted black thrushes with yellow beaks; grey lizards raced over the ivy-grown walls and disappeared in the crevices. It was full spring, for there had been no winter, and by the edges of the path bloomed primroses and hellebores; but they did not arrest the attention of the pilgrims. When they had got half-way up the hill, the mysterious screaming was repeated. As though overcome by a sudden foreboding, Frau von Bleichroden turned to her brother, looked in his eyes with her own, which were clouding over, only to see her fears confirmed, then she sank down on the path without being able to utter a cry, while a yellow cloud of dust whirled over her. And there she remained lying.

Before her brother could collect himself a casual passer-by had run for a carriage, and as the young woman was carried into it her work for the coming generation had already begun, and now two cries were heard--the cries of two human creatures from the depths of sorrow.

Her brother stood on the pathway looking up to the blue sky of spring, and thought to himself, "If the cries could only be heard up there, but it is certainly too high."

In the hospital which stood above them, Von Bleichroden had been lodged in a room which had an open view towards the south. The walls were padded and painted with flowing contours of landscapes in faint blue. On the ceiling was painted an espalier with vine leaves. The floor was carpeted, and under the carpet was a layer of straw. The furniture was completely covered with horsehair and cushions, so that no corners or edges of the wood were visible.

The situation of the door could not be discovered from within the room, thereby diverting all the patient's thoughts of getting out and the consciousness of being confined, the most dangerous of all to a mind in a state of excitement. The windows, it is true, were grated, but the gratings were elaborately wrought in the shape of lilies and leaves, and so painted that their purpose was quite disguised.

Von Bleichroden's madness had taken the form of torments of conscience. He imagined that he had murdered the keeper of a vineyard under mysterious circumstances, which he could never bring himself to confess for the simple reason that he could not remember them. Now he thought himself condemned to death and sitting in prison awaiting the execution of the sentence. But he had lucid intervals. Then he fastened large sheets of paper on the walls of the room and wrote syllogisms on them till they were covered. Then he remembered that he had caused some franc-tireurs to be shot, but did not remember that he was married. When his wife came to see him he received her visit like that of a pupil to whom he was giving lessons in logic. He had written up as the premise of his syllogisms, "All franc-tireurs are traitors and the order is to shoot them." One day his wife, who was obliged to agree with everything, had the rashness to shake his belief in the premise that "all franc-tireurs are traitors," thereupon he tore down all the syllogisms from the wall and said that he would spend twenty years in proving the premise, for premises must first be proved.

Besides this, he cherished great projects for the good of mankind. What is the object of all our striving here upon earth? he asked. Why does the king reign, the priest preach, the poet write, the artist paint? In order to procure nitrogen for the body. Nitrogen is the dearest of all kinds of food, and that is why meat is so expensive. Nitrogen is intelligence, for the rich who eat meat are more intelligent than the others who only eat vegetable hydrates. Now (so ran his argument) nitrogen was beginning to be scarce on the earth and this was why there came wars, workmen's strikes, newspapers, pietists and _coups d'état_. Therefore it was necessary to discover a new nitrogen mine. Von Bleichroden had done so, and now all men would be equal; liberty, equality and fraternity would arrive and be realised on earth. This inexhaustible mine was--the air. It contained seventy-nine per cent of nitrogen, and a means must be devised of inhaling it directly and of using it for the nourishment of the body without the necessity of it being first condensed into grass, corn and vegetables, and then converted by an animal into flesh. That was the problem of the future with which Von Bleichroden was busying himself; its solution would render agriculture and cattle-breeding superfluous, and the golden age would return on earth. But at intervals he again sank into dreams about the murder he supposed himself to have committed, and was profoundly miserable.

The same February morning on which his wife had been on her way to the asylum and had been obliged to return, Von Bleichroden sat in his new room and looked out of the window. At first he had contemplated the vine painted on the ceiling and the landscape on the walls; then he set himself in a comfortable chair opposite the window so that he had a clear view in front of him. He felt quiet to-day, for he had taken a cold bath the evening before and had slept well. He knew that the month was February, but he did not know where he was. The first thing that struck him was the absence of snow out of doors, and that surprised him for he had never been in southern lands. Outside in front of the window stood green bushes--the "laurier teint" quite covered with flowers, the "laurier cerise" with its shining bright green leaves, green through the whole winter. There was also a box tree and an elm quite overgrown with ivy which concealed all the branches and gave the tree the appearance of being in full leaf. Over the lawn, which was starred with primroses, as though a shower of sulphur had fallen on it, a man passed mowing the grass with a scythe, while a little girl was raking the beds.

Von Bleichroden took an almanac and read "February." "Raking in February! Where am I?" he asked himself. Then his eyes travelled beyond the garden and he saw a deep valley which sank gradually but was as green as a summer meadow. Little villages and churches stood here and there, and he could see bright green weeping-willows. "In February!" he said to himself again. And where the meadows ceased there lay a lake, quite calm and clear blue as air. On the other side of the lake was a landscape fading in azure tints, topped by a chain of hills. But above the chain of hills were some other objects which resembled clouds. They were of as delicate a white as fresh-washed wool, but they were pointed and over them lay small thin clouds. He did not know where he was, but it was so beautiful that it could not be on the earth. Was he dead, and had he entered another world? He was certainly not in Europe. Perhaps he was dead! He sank into quiet musing and sought to realise his new situation.

But when he looked up again he saw that the whole sunny picture was framed and crossed by the window-grating; the hammered iron lilies and the leaf-work stood out in sharp relief as though they were floating in the air. He was at first startled, but then he composed himself; he contemplated the picture once more, especially the pointed rosy clouds (as he thought them). Then he felt a wonderful joy and sensation of relief in his head: it was as though the convolutions of his brain, after having been hopelessly entangled, began to arrange and order themselves. He was so glad that he began to sing, as he thought, but he had never sung in his life and therefore he only uttered cries of joy. It was these which had issued from the window and filled his wife with grief and despair. After sitting thus for an hour, he had remembered an old painting in a bowling alley near Berlin which represented a Swiss landscape, and now he knew that he was in Switzerland and that the pointed clouds were Alps.

When the doctor made his second round he found Von Bleichroden sitting quietly in a chair before the window and humming to himself, and it was not possible to divert his gaze from the beautiful scene. But he was quite clear in his mind and fully realised his situation.

"Doctor," he said, pointing to the grated window, "why do you want to spoil and fleur-de-lisify such a beautiful picture? Won't you let me go into the open air? I think it would do me good, and I promise not to run away."

The doctor took his hand in order to feel his pulse secretly with his forefinger.

"My pulse is only seventy, doctor," said the patient, smiling, "and I slept well last night. You have nothing to fear."

"I am glad," said the doctor, "that the treatment has really had some effect on you. You can go out."

"Do you know, doctor," said the patient with an energetic gesture, "do you know that I feel as though I had been dead and come to life in another planet--so beautiful does it all seem. Never did I dream that the earth could be so wonderful."

"Yes, sir, the earth is still beautiful where civilisation has not spoilt it, and here nature is so strong that it resists the efforts of men. Do you think that your own country was always so ugly as it now is? No; where now there are waste sandy plains, which could not nourish a goat, there formerly rustled noble woods of oak, beech and fir, under whose shadow beasts of the chase fed, and where fat herds of the Norse-men's best kine fattened themselves on acorns."

"You are a disciple of Rousseau, doctor," broke in the patient.

"Rousseau was a Genevese, sir. There on the margin of the lake, deep in the bay which you see above the top of the elms, he was born and suffered, and there his 'Emile' and 'Contrat Sociale,' the gospels of nature, were burnt. There on the left, at the foot of the Valais Alps, in little Clarens, he wrote the book of love, 'La Nouvelle Heloise,' for it is the Lake of Geneva which you see."

"The Lake of Geneva!" repeated Von Bleichroden.

"In this quiet valley," continued the doctor, "where peaceful men live, many wounded spirits have sought healing. See there to the right, immediately above the little promontory with the tower and the poplars, lies Ferney. Thither fled Voltaire when he had finished his rôle of 'persifleur' in Paris, and there he cultivated the ground and erected a temple to the Supreme Being. Farther on lies Coppet, where lived Madame de Staël, the worst enemy of Napoleon, the betrayer of the people, who dared to teach the French, her countrymen, that the German nation was not France's barbarian enemy, for nations do not hate each other. Look now to the left; hither to this quiet lake fled the shattered Byron who, like a bound Titan, had torn himself loose from the trammels by which a period of reaction had endeavoured to imprison his strong soul, and here below he wrote the 'Prisoner of Chillon,' to express his intense hatred of tyrants. There under the lofty Mount Grammont he was nearly drowned one day before the little fishing village St Gingolphe, but his life was not yet finished. Hither fled all who could not tolerate the infected air which spread like a cholera over Europe after the conspiracy of the Holy Alliance against the newly won rights of the Revolution, that is, of mankind. Here, a thousand feet below you, Mendelssohn composed his melancholy songs, and Gounod wrote his 'Faust.' Can you not see whence he derived his inspiration for the 'Witches' Night,'--there, in the precipices of the Savoy Alps? Here Victor Hugo composed his fierce satires against the treachery of Napoleon III.; and here (strange irony of fate!) below in little quiet retired Vevey, where the north wind can never come, your own Kaiser sought to forget the terrible scenes of Sadowa and Königgratz. There the Russian Gortschakoff hid himself when he felt the ground shaking beneath his feet; here Lord Russell washed off the dust of politics and breathed pure unpolluted air; here Thiers sought to reduce to order his inconsistent, but, as I believe, honest schemes, often confused by political storms, and may he now, when he is to support the destinies of his people, remember the innocent hours in which his spirit communed with itself before the mild but solemn majesty of nature! And look over to Geneva, sir! There dwells no king with his court, but there was born a thought which is as great as Christianity, and whose apostles also carry a cross, a red cross on their white flags. When the Mauser rifles shot at the French eagle and the Chassepot at the German eagle, the red cross was held sacred by those who did not bow before the black cross, and in this sign, I believe, the future will conquer."

The patient, who had listened quietly to this strange speech which was as emotional, not to say sentimental, as if it had come from a preacher instead of a doctor, felt bored. "You are an enthusiast, doctor," he said.

"So will you be when you have lived here three months," answered the physician.

"You believe then in the treatment?" asked the patient somewhat less sceptically than before.

"I believe in the inexhaustible power of nature to heal the sickness of civilisation," he answered. "Do you feel strong enough to hear a good piece of news?" he continued, watching his patient closely.

"Quite, doctor!"

"Well then, peace has been made!"

"God! What a happiness!" the patient burst out.

"Yes certainly," said the doctor; "but don't ask more, for you cannot hear more to-day. Come out now, but be prepared for one thing. Your recovery will not be so rapid as you think. You may have relapses. Memory, you see, is our worst enemy,--but come with me now."

The doctor took his patient's arm and led him into the garden. There were no railings and no walls to bar one's passage, but only green hedges, which conducted the wanderer back by labyrinthine paths to his starting-point; but behind the hedges were deep trenches which were impossible to cross.

The lieutenant sought for familiar phrases with which to express his delight, but he felt that they were so inadequate that he resolved to be silent, listening to a wonderful soundless nerve music. He felt as though all the strings of his soul were being tuned again, and he experienced a calm such as he had not felt for a very long time.

"Do you doubt whether I am recovered?" he asked the doctor with a melancholy smile.

"You are on the way to recovery, as I told you before, but you are not quite well."

They found themselves now before a little arched stone door through which patients, accompanied by keepers, were passing.

"Where are all these men going?" asked the lieutenant.

"Follow them and you will see," said the doctor. "You have my permission."

Von Bleichroden entered, but the doctor beckoned to a keeper. "Go down to the Hôtel Faucon to Frau von Bleichroden," he said. "Give her my respects, and say that her husband is on the way to recovery but has not yet asked after his wife. When he does that he is saved."

The keeper went, and the doctor followed his patient through the little stone gate.

Von Bleichroden had entered a large hall which resembled no room that he had even seen before. It was neither a church, nor a theatre, nor a school, nor a town hall, but a little of all together. At the end of it was an apse which opened in three windows filled with painted glass. The colours harmonised with each other as though composed by a great artist's hand, and the light which entered was resolved, as it were, into one great harmonic major chord. It made the same impression on the patient as the C Major chord with which Haydn disperses the darkness of chaos, when at the creation the Lord, after the choir have been long painfully toiling at disentangling the disordered forces of nature, suddenly calls out "Let there be light!" and cherubim and seraphim join in.

Under the window was a rock of stalactite formation, shaped like an arch, from which trickled a little stream falling into a basin overhung by two arum lilies whose cups were as white as angels' wings. The pillars which enclosed the apse were constructed in no familiar architectural style, and their shafts were covered up to the roof with soft brown liver-wort. The lower panelling of the wall was covered with fir twigs, and the walls themselves were decorated by leaves of ever-green plants--laurel, holm-oak and mistletoe--arranged in designs of no particular style. Sometimes they seemed about to form letters, but lost themselves in faint fantastic flourishes, like Raphael's arabesques. Under the window apertures hung large wreaths as if for a May festival, and along the frieze of the ceiling there ran a design which had nothing in common with the lotus borders of Egypt, the meandering curves of Greece, the Acanthus decorations of Rome, or the trefoil and crucifers of the Gothic style.

Von Bleichroden looked about him and found the place provided with benches where the patients of the institute sat absorbed in silent wonder. He took a seat on one of them and heard someone sighing near him. Then he perceived a man about forty years old who had covered his face with his hands and wept. He had an aquiline nose, moustache and pointed beard, and his profile resembled those which Von Bleichroden had seen on French coins. He was certainly a Frenchman. Here then they were to meet, enemy with enemy, both somewhat tearful! Why? Because they had fulfilled their duties towards their respective fatherlands! Herr von Bleichroden felt excited and uneasy when he suddenly heard a strain of faint music. The organ was playing a chorale, but a chorale in the major key; it was neither Lutheran, nor Catholic, nor Calvinist, nor Greek, yet it spoke a language, and the patient thought he heard hopeful and comforting words. Then a man got up by the apsis and stood there half hidden by the stalactite rock. Was he a priest? No, he was dressed in a light grey coat, wore a bright blue cravat, and displayed an open shirt-front. He had no book with him, but spoke gently and simply as one speaks among friends. He spoke of the simple teaching of Christianity--to love one's neighbour as oneself; to be patient, tolerant, and forgiving towards enemies. He recalled how Christ had conceived of humanity as one, but how the evil nature of man had counteracted this great idea--how men had grouped themselves into nations, sects and schools; but he also expressed his firm hope that the principles of Christianity would soon be realised. He came down after speaking for a quarter of an hour, and offering a short prayer to God the Omnipotent without introducing any names which might remind his hearers of a formal creed or rouse their passions.

Herr von Bleichroden awoke as though from a dream. He had, then, been in church--he who, weary of all petty religious strifes, had not been to a service for fifteen years! And here, in a lunatic asylum, it was his fortune to find a Free Church fully realised. Here sat Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Anglicans side by side and worshipped the same God in common. What a crushing criticism this church hall suggested for all those sects, born of the selfishness of men, which massacred, burnt and despised each other! What a handle did it supply for the attack of the "heretical" church on this political and dynastic Christianity!

Herr von Bleichroden let his gaze wander over the beautiful hall in order to drive away the terrible pictures which his imagination had conjured up. His eye roamed about till it fastened on the wall opposite the apse. There hung a colossal wreath, in the centre of which stood a word whose letters were formed of fir twigs. It was the French word "Noel," followed by the German "Weihnacht." What poet had arranged this hall? What knower of men, what deep mind had so understood how to awaken the most beautiful and purest of all recollections? Would not an overclouded mind feel an eager longing for light and clearness when it recollected the festival of light commemorating the end or, at any rate, the beginning of the end of the dark days at the turn of the year? Would not the recollection of childhood, when no religious strifes, no political hatred, no ambitious empty dreams had obscured the sense of right in a pure conscience--would it not stir a music in the soul louder than all those wild-beast bowlings which one had heard in life in the struggle for bread, or more often for honour?

He continued to meditate, and asked himself, how is it that man, so innocent as a child, afterwards becomes so evil as he grows older? Is it education and school, these lauded products of civilisation, which teach us to be bad? What do our first school-books teach us? They teach us that God is an Avenger Who punishes the sins of the fathers in the children unto the third and fourth generation; they teach us that those men are heroes who have roused nation against nation, and pillaged lands and kingdoms; that those are great men who have succeeded in obtaining honour the emptiness of which all see, but after which all strive; and that true statesmen are those who accomplish great and not high aims in a crafty manner, whose whole merit consists in want of conscience, and who will always conquer in the struggle against those who possess one. And in order that our children may learn all this, parents make sacrifices and renunciation and suffer the great pain of separation from their offspring. Surely the whole world must be a lunatic asylum, if this place was the most reasonable one he had ever been in!

Now he looked again at the only written word in the whole church, and spelt it over again; then there began to rise in the secret recesses of his memory a picture, as when a photographer washes a grey negative plate with ferrous sulphate as soon as he has taken it out of the camera. He thought he saw his last Christmas Eve represented before him. The last? No! Then he was in Frankfort. Then it was the last but one. It was the first evening he had spent in his fiancée's house, for they had been betrothed the day before. Now he saw the home of the old pastor, his father-in-law; he saw the low room with the white sideboard, the piano, the chaffinch in the cage, the balsam plants in the window, the cupboard with the silver jug on it, the tobacco pipes--some of meerschaum, some of red clay--and the daughter of the house going about hanging nuts and apples on the Christmas tree. The daughter of the house! It was like a flash of lightning in the darkness, but of beautiful, harmless summer lightning which one watches from a veranda without any fear of being struck. He was betrothed, he was married, he had a wife--his own wife who reunited him to life which he had previously despised and hated. But where was she? He must see and meet her now, at once! He must fly to her, otherwise he would die of impatience.

He hastened out of the church, and immediately met the doctor who had been waiting for him to see the effect of his visit to it. Herr von Bleichroden seized him by the shoulders, looked him straight in the eyes, and said with a kind of gasp, "Where is my wife? Take me to her at once. At once! Where is she?"

"She and your daughter," said the doctor quietly, "are waiting for you below in the Rue de Bourg."

"My daughter! I have a daughter!" interrupted the patient, and began weeping.

"You are very emotional, Herr von Bleichroden," said the doctor, smiling.

"Yes, doctor, one must be so here."

"Well, come and dress for going out," answered the doctor, and took his arm. "In half an hour you will be with your family and then you will be with yourself again." And they disappeared into the front hall of the institute.

* * * * *

Herr von Bleichroden was a completely modern type. Great grandson of the French Revolution, grandson of the Holy Alliance, son of the year 1830, like an ill-starred sailor he had made shipwreck between the cliffs of revolution and reaction. When between twenty and thirty years of age his intellect awoke and he realised in what a tissue of lies, both religious and political, he was involved, he felt as though he were really awake for the first time, or as though he were the only sane man shut up in a mad-house. And when he could not discover a single aperture in the enclosing wall by which he might escape without being confronted by a bayonet or the muzzle of a gun, he fell into a state of despair. He ceased to believe in anything, even in the possibility of deliverance, and betook himself to the opium dens of pessimism, in order at any rate to benumb his pain since there was no cure. Schopenhauer became his friend and later on he found in Hartmann the most brutal teller of truth which the world has seen.

But society summoned him and demanded that he should enrol himself somewhere in its ranks. Von Bleichroden plunged into scientific study and chose one of the sciences which has the least to do with the present--geology, or rather that branch of it, palaeontology, which had to do with the animal and plant life of a past world. When he asked himself, "Is this of any use to mankind?" he could only answer, "It is useful solely to myself, as a kind of opiate." He could never read a newspaper without feeling fanaticism rising up in him like incipient madness, and therefore he held everything which could remind him of his contemporaries and the present at arm's length. He began to hope that he would be able to spend his days in a dearly earned state of mental torpor, quietly and with his sanity preserved.

Then he married. He could not escape nature's inexorable law regarding the preservation of the species. In his wife he had sought to regain all those inner elements which he had succeeded in eliminating from himself, and she became his old emotional "ego," over which he rejoiced quietly without quitting his entrenchments. In her he found his complement, and he began to collect himself; but he felt also that his whole future life was based upon two corner-stones. One was his wife; if she gave way, he and his whole edifice would collapse. When only two months after their marriage he was torn from her side, he was no longer himself. He felt as though he had lost one eye, one lung and one arm, and therefore also he fell so quickly asunder when the blow struck him.

At the sight of his daughter, a new element seemed to be introduced into what Von Bleichroden called his "natural soul" as distinguished from his "society soul," which was the product of education. He felt now that he was incorporated in the family, and that when he died he would not really die, but that his soul would continue to live in his child; he realised, in a word, that his soul was really immortal, even though his body perished in the strife between chemical elements. He felt himself all at once bound to live and to hope, though sometimes he was seized with despair when he heard his fellow-countrymen, in the natural intoxication of victory, ascribe the successful issue of the war to certain individuals, who, seated in their carriages, had contemplated the battle-field through their field-glasses. But then his pessimism seemed to him culpable, because he was hindering the development of the new epoch by a bad example, and he became an optimist from a sense of duty. He did not, however, venture to return home from fear of falling into despondency, but asked for his discharge, realised his small property, and settled down in Switzerland.

* * * * *

It was a fine warm autumn evening in Vevey in the year 1872. The clock in the little pension Le Cedre had given the signal for dinner by striking seven. Round the large dinner-table were assembled the inmates of the pension, who were all mutually acquainted and lived on terms of intimacy, as those do who meet in a neutral country.

Herr von Bleichroden and his wife had as their companions at the table the melancholy Frenchman whom we have already seen in the hospital church, an English, two Russians, a German and his wife, a Spanish family, and two Tyrolese ladies.

Conversation proceeded as usual, quietly and peacefully--sometimes falling into an almost emotional tone, at others touching on the most burning questions of the day, without however kindling a conflagration.

"Never did I believe that the earth could be so supernaturally beautiful as here," said Herr von Bleichroden, entranced with the view through the open veranda doors.

"Nature is beautiful elsewhere also," said the German, "but I believe our eyes were not healthy."

"That is true," answered the Englishman; "but it really is more beautiful here than anywhere else. Have you never heard, gentlemen, how the barbarians felt (they were Alemanni or Hungarians, I think) when they emerged on the Dent Jaman and looked down on the Lake of Geneva? They thought that the sky had fallen down on the earth, and were so alarmed that they turned back again. The guide-book says so positively."

"I believe," said one of the Russians, "that it is the pure air, free from falsehood, which one breathes here which causes us to find everything so beautiful, although I will not deny that the beauties of nature have a reflex action upon our minds and prevent them being entangled in all our old prejudices. But only wait; when the heirs of the Holy Alliance are dead, when the highest trees have been truncated, our little plants also will flourish in clear sunshine."

"You are right," said Herr von Bleichroden; "but we shall not need to truncate the trees. There are other, more humane ways of proceeding. There was once an author who had written a mediocre play the success of which depended on the way in which the principal female part was acted. He went to a _prima donna_ and asked if she would undertake the rôle. She gave an evasive reply. Then he forgot himself so far as to remind her that, according to the rules of the theatre, she could be compelled to play the part. 'That is true,' she answered, 'but I can make difficulties.' We can also circumvent our chief opposing falsities. In England it is simply an affair of the budget. Parliament cuts down the grant to royal personages, and they go their way. That is the method of legal reform. Is it not, Mr Englishman?"

"Certainly!" answered the Englishman. "Our Queen has the right to play croquet and tennis, but she cannot meddle in politics."

"But the wars--the wars--will they never stop?" objected the Spaniard.

"When women get the vote, armies will be reduced," said Herr von Bleichroden. "Isn't it so, wife?"

His wife nodded assentingly.

"For," continued he, "what mother will permit her son, what wife her husband, what sister her brother to go into these battles? And when there is no one to excite men against one another, then the so-called race-hatred will disappear. 'Man is good but men are bad' said our friend Jean Jacques, and he was right. Why are men more peaceful here in this beautiful country? Why do they look more contented than elsewhere? Because they have not daily and hourly these schoolmasters over them; they know that they themselves have settled who is to rule them; above all things they have so little to envy and so little to annoy them. No royal retinues, no military parades, no pompous spectacles which tempt a weak man to admire what is ostentatious but false. Switzerland is the little miniature model after which the Europe of the future will be built up."

"You are an optimist, sir," said the Spaniard.

"Yes," answered Von Bleichroden; "formerly a pessimist."

"You believe then," continued the Spaniard, "that what is possible in a little country like Switzerland, with three million inhabitants and only three languages, is possible also for the whole of Europe?"

Von Bleichroden seemed to hesitate, when one of the Tyrolese spoke. "Pardon me," she said to the Spaniard, "you doubt whether this is possible for Europe with its six or seven languages. It is too bold an experiment, you think, to answer with so many nationalities. But suppose I were to show you a land with twenty nationalities, Chinese, Japanese, Negroes, and representatives of all the nations of Europe mingled--that would be the international kingdom of the future. Well! I have seen it for I have been in--America."

"Bravo!" said the Englishman. "Our Spanish friend is defeated."

"And you, sir," continued the Tyrolese, turning to the Frenchman, "you mourn over Alsace-Lorraine, I see! You regard a war of _revanche_ as unavoidable, for you do not believe that Alsace-Lorraine can continue to remain German--you think the problem is insoluble."

The Frenchman sighed by way of assent.

"Well, when Europe is one confederation of states, as Herr von Bleichroden calls Switzerland, then Alsace-Lorraine will be neither French nor German but just simply Alsace-Lorraine. Is the problem solved?"

The Frenchman lifted his glass politely and thanked her, bowing his head with a melancholy smile.

"You smile," the courageous maiden resumed. "We have smiled all too long, the smile of despair and scepticism; let us cease doing so! You see most of the countries of Europe represented among us here. Among ourselves, where no cynic hears us, we can utter the thoughts of our hearts, but in parliament, in newspapers, and in books--there we are cowardly, there we dare not expose ourselves to ridicule, and so we swim with the stream. What, after all, is the use of being cynical? Cynicism is the weapon of cowardice. One is anxious about one's heart. Yes, it is disgusting to see one's entrails exposed at a shop door, but to see those of others lying on the battle-field, while music and a rain of flowers await the returning conquerors--that is splendid! Voltaire was cynical, because he was still anxious about his heart, while Rousseau vivisected himself, tore his heart out of his breast, and held it against the sun, as the old Aztec priests did when they sacrificed--yes, there was method in their madness. And who has changed human kind--who told us that we were all wrong? Rousseau! Geneva yonder burnt his books, but modern Geneva has raised a memorial to him. What each of us here thinks privately, all think privately. Give us only freedom to say it aloud!"

The Russians raised their black tea-glasses and vociferated words in their language which only they understood. The Englishman filled his glass and was about to propose a toast, when the servant-maid came in and handed him a telegram. The conversation stopped for a moment; the Englishman read the telegram with visible emotion, folded it up, placed it in his pocket, and sank in thought. Herr von Bleichroden sat silent, absorbed in contemplation of the beautiful landscape outside. The Mont Grammont and the Dent d'Oche were lit up by the afterglow of the descended sun, which also dyed red the vineyards and chestnut-groves on the Savoy shore; the Alps glimmered in the damp evening air, and seemed as unsubstantial as the lights and shades; they stood there like disembodied powers of nature, dark and terrible on their reverse side, threatening and gloomy in their hollows, but on their sun-fronting sides, bright, smiling and joyful. Von Bleichroden thought of the concluding words of the Tyrolese, and fancied he saw in Mont Grammont a colossal heart with its apex looking towards the sky--the wounded, scarred, bleeding heart of humanity which turned itself towards the sun in a concentrated ardour of sacrifice, prepared to give all, its best and its dearest, in order to receive all. Then the dark, steel-blue evening sky was cut through by a streak of light, and above the low-lying Savoy shore there rose a rocket of enormous size. It rose high, apparently as high as the Dent d'Oche; it hung suspended as though it were looking round on the beautiful earth outspread beneath it before it burst. Thus it hesitated for a few seconds and then began the descent; but it had not gone many yards before it exploded with a report which took two minutes to reach Vevey. Then there spread out something like a white cloud which assumed a four-cornered rectangular shape, a flag of white fire; a moment after there was another report, and on the white flag appeared a red cross.

All the party sprang up and hastened into the veranda.

"What does that mean?" exclaimed Herr von Bleichroden, startled.

No one could or would answer, for now there rose a whole volley of rockets as if discharged from a crater over the peaks of the Voirons, and scattered a shower of fire which was reflected in the gigantic mirror of the lake.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" said the Englishman, raising his voice, while a waiter placed a tray with filled champagne glasses on the table. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he repeated, "this means, according to the telegram which I have just received, that the first International Tribunal at Geneva has finished its work; this means that a war between two nations, or what would have been worse--a war against the future, has been prevented; that a hundred thousand Americans and as many Englishmen have to thank this day that they are alive. The Alabama Question has been settled not to the advantage of America, but of justice, not to the injury of England, but for the good of future generations. Does our Spanish friend still believe that wars are unavoidable? When our French friend smiles again, let him smile with the heart and not with the lips only. And you, my German pessimist friend, do you believe now that the franc-tireur question can be settled without franc-tireurs and fusillades, but also only in this way? And you, Russian gentlemen, whom I do not know personally, do you think your modern method of forestry by truncating trees is the only correct one? Do you not think it is better to go to the roots? It is certainly a safer and quieter way. To-day, as an Englishman, I ought to feel depressed, but I feel proud on account of my country, as an Englishman always does, you know; but to-day I have a right to be so, for England is the first European Power which has appealed to the verdict of honourable men, instead of to blood and iron. And I wish you all many such defeats as we have had to-day, for that will teach us to be victorious. Raise your glasses, ladies and gentlemen, for the Red Cross, for in this sign we will certainly conquer."

* * * * *

Herr von Bleichroden remained in Switzerland. He could not tear himself away from this wonderful scenery which had led him into another world more beautiful than that which he had left behind.

Occasionally he had attacks of conscience, but this his doctor ascribed to a nervousness which is only too common among cultivated people at the present time. He resolved to elucidate the problem of conscience in a little pamphlet which he proposed to publish. He had read it to his friends and it contained some remarkable passages. With his German gift of penetration, he had reached the heart of the matter, and discovered that there are two kinds of conscience; first the natural, and second the artificial. The first conscience, he maintained, was the natural feeling of right. That was the conscience which had weighed on him so heavily when he had the franc-tireurs shot. He could only free himself from this by regarding himself persistently as a victim of the upper classes. The artificial conscience again originated in the power of habit and the authority of the upper classes. The power of habit rested so heavily on Herr von Bleichroden that sometimes when he went for a walk before noon he felt as though he had neglected his work in the Geological Bureau, and became uneasy and restless, like a boy who has played truant from school. He took incredible pains to exculpate himself by the consideration that he had obtained lawful leave of absence. But then he remembered vividly his room in the geological department, his colleagues who kept a keen watch on each other in order to discover a slip on another's part which might lead to their own advancement; and the heads of the department anxiously on the look-out for orders and distinction. He felt then as though he had absconded from it all.

Sometimes too he was attacked by the official conscience which the authority of the upper classes imposes on a man. He found it hard to obey the first commandment--to love one's King and fatherland. The King had plunged his fatherland into the misery of war in order to obtain a new fatherland for a relative, i.e. to make a Spaniard out of a Prussian.

Had the King shown love to his fatherland in this? Had kings, generally speaking, loved their fatherland? England was ruled by a Hanoverian, Russia was governed by a German Czar and would soon receive a Danish empress, Germany had an English Crown-princess, France a Spanish empress, Sweden a French king and a German queen.

If, following such high examples, people changed their nationality like a coat, Herr von Bleichroden believed that cosmopolitanism would have a brilliant future. But the commands of the authorities, which did not accord with their practice, worried him. He loved his country as a cat loves her warm place by the fire; but he did not love it as an institution. Sovereigns find nations necessary to provide them with conscript armies, as tax-payers and as supporters of the throne, for without nations there would not be any royal houses.

After Herr von Bleichroden had resided two and a half years in Switzerland, he received one day a summons from Berlin, for there were rumours of war in circulation. This time it was Prussia against Russia--the same Russia which three years previously had lent Prussia its "moral support" against France. He did not think it conscientious to march against his friends, and since he was quite sure that the two nations wished each other no ill, he asked his wife's advice what he should do in such a new dilemma, for he knew by experience that woman's conscience is nearer the natural law of right than man's.

After a moment's reflection, she answered "To be a German is more than to be a Prussian--that is why the German Confederation was formed; to be a European is more than to be a German; to be a man is more than to be a European. You cannot change your nation, for all 'nations' are enemies, and one does not go over to the enemy unless one is a monarch like Bernadotte or a field-marshal like Von Moltke. The only thing left is to neutralise yourself. Let us become Swiss. Switzerland is not a nation."

Herr von Bleichroden considered this such a happy and simple solution of the difficulty that he at once set about making inquiries how he could be neutralised. His surprise and delight can be imagined when he found that he had already fulfilled all the conditions required to become a Swiss citizen (for there are no underlings in that land!) as he had resided two years there.

Herr von Bleichroden is now neutralised, and although he is very happy he occasionally, though more seldom than before, has conflicts with his conscience.

OVER-REFINEMENT

Sten Ulffot, a youth of twenty years, the last scion of the ancient family of Ulffot, who possessed property in Wäringe, Hofsta and Löfsala, awoke one sunny May morning towards the end of the year 1460 in his bedroom at Hofsta in Upland. After some hours of dreamless sleep his rested brain began to review the events of the previous day, which had been of such decisive importance for him that, still benumbed by the blow, be stood as it were outside the whole affair and regarded it with wonder. The bailiff and sheriff's officer had been there, had shown mortgage-deeds of the house and estate, had read various parchment documents, and the upshot of it all was that Sten, because of his father's and his own debts, was reduced to abject poverty. And since his father in his lifetime had not been a merciful man, the young man must leave the old house, which was no longer his, the very next day.

Sten, who had never taken life seriously, for the simple reason that life had always been an easy matter for him, took this also very easily. Poverty for him was simply an uttered word which as yet lacked any corresponding reality. With a light heart he sprang out of bed, and put on his only but handsome velvet jacket and his only pair of breeches of Brabant cloth. He counted his few gold coins, and hid them carefully in his bosom, for he had now caught some idea of their importance. Then he went into the castle-room, which was quite empty.

The only impression this spacious room made on him was that he could breathe more easily in it. Upon a table fastened to the wall were to be seen damp rings--the traces left by the tankards of beer which the two functionaries had used the day before; it occurred to him that there would have been more rings if he had been with them himself--it looked so stingy!

The sun threw the reflections of the painted windows on the floor, so that they resembled beautiful mosaic work. His coat of arms, the wolf's foot on a red ground, was repeated six times; he amused himself by treading on the black foot, expecting to hear the wolf howl, but every time he did so the reflection of the wolf's foot merely lay on his yellow leather boots. When he took a step forward the reflection of the foot flew up to his breast and on his white jacket the red shield lay like a bleeding heart torn by the black paw with its outspread claws. He felt his heart beat violently and left the room.

He climbed the narrow stone stairs to the upper story, which his parents had occupied in their lifetime. There every possible movable which makes a house into a home for living beings had been swept off and carried away. The rooms looked like a series of burial chambers, hewn out of one rock, intended for souls without bodies and without corporeal needs. But signs of the life which had been there were still remaining. Two grey spots on the floor showed where a bed had stood; there were two dark lines where the table had been', and between them were marks and scratches left by boots; a dark, irregular stain on the white-washed wall showed where his father had been accustomed to rest his head when he raised it from his work which lay on the table. Some coals from the fire-place had fallen into the room and left dark spots on the floor like those on a panther-skin.

In his mother's room was a stone image of the Virgin and Child fixed to the wall; she regarded her Son with a look full of hope and without any foreboding that she held a future condemned prisoner upon her knees. Young Sten felt a vague depression and went on. Through a secret door he mounted up into the attic and went out upon the roof. Underneath him he saw the whole wide-stretching expanse of land which till lately he had called his own: these green fields which once formed the bottom of the sea, surrounded by small green hills once islands, but lately wore their verdure on his account--to support the poor who clothed him, brushed him, prepared his food, and tended his horses, his hounds, his falcons and his cattle. In the previous autumn he had stood here and watched them sow his corn; now others would come and cut and gather it in. A little while ago it was his to decide when the fishes in the streams should die, when the firs in the wood should be felled, and when the game should be shot. Even the birds in this huge space of air belonged to him, although they had flown hither from the realm of the Emperor of Austria.

He could not yet grasp the fact that he possessed nothing more of all this, for he had never missed anything and therefore did not know what possession was; he only felt a huge emptiness and thought that the landscape had a melancholy look. The swallows which had come that very day flew screaming about him and sought their old nests in the eaves; some found them, and others did not--the rains of autumn and snows of winter had destroyed their little clay dwellings so that they had fallen into the castle-moat.