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Page 19
'Here is the fruit of the tree of life,' he went on, extending his
open hand. 'The respectable man but smells its rind; I eat deep, taste
the core. The smell is sweet, perhaps; the taste is deathly bitter.
But even so? He that eats of the fruit of the tree of life shares the
vision of the gods. He gazes upon the naked face of truth. I don't
pretend that the face of truth is beautiful. It is hideous beyond
imagination. All hate, all savagery, all evil, glare from it, and all
uncleanness is upon it. But it is the face of truth; the sight of it
gives an ultimate, a supreme satisfaction.
'Say what you will, at the end of life the important thing is to have
lived. Well, when all is over, and the prosperous man and I lie equal
in the article of death, our fortunes, conditions, outlooks at last
for once the same, our results the same, I shall have lived, I shall
have seen, I shall have understood, a thousandfold more than he. I
shall have known life in her intimacy; he will have had but a polite
acquaintance with her.'
The hour for Bibi to put this philosophy to the test was nearer than
he suspected. He used to describe himself as 'thoroughly cured and
seasoned,' and to predict that he would 'last a good while yet.' But,
one day in December, a subject of remark in the Boul' Miche was Bibi's
absence; and before nightfall the news went abroad that he had been
found on the turf, under a tree, in the Avenue de l'Observatoire, dead
from a _coup de sang_, and that he was now lying exposed to the gaze
of the curious in the little brick house behind Notre Dame.
A meeting of students was called, at which it was resolved to give
Bibi a decent funeral; and in order that his friends who had crossed
the river might have an opportunity of assisting at it, a _lettre de
faire part_ was published in the newspapers. The Committee who had
these matters in charge made an attempt to get a Pope from the Russian
Church to officiate; but the holy men were scandalised by the request,
and refused it with contumely. So a civil funeral was the best that
could be achieved.
On a drizzling, dismal December morning, then, we formed ourselves in
a procession of two abreast, and starting from the Place St. Michel,
followed Bibi up his familiar Boulevard to the Cemetery of
Montparnasse; and men who would have spurned him yesterday, bared
their heads as he passed, and women crossed themselves and muttered
prayers. We must have been about a hundred strong, and quite a quarter
of our numbers came from beyond the bridges, responsive to our _lettre
de faire part_. A student was told off to march with each visitor; and
this arrangement proved the means of my being able to supply the
missing chapter of Bibi's story.
The person to whom I found myself assigned was an elderly,
military-looking man, with the red rosette in his buttonhole;
extremely well-dressed and groomed; erect, ruddy, bright-eyed; with
close-cropped white hair, and a drooping white moustache: the picture
of a distinguished, contented, fine old French gentleman: whom I
marvelled a good deal to see in this conjunction.
On our way to the graveyard we spoke but little. Our business there
over, however, he offered me a seat in his carriage, a brougham that
had sauntered after us, for the return. And no sooner was the carriage
door closed upon us than he began--
'I am an old man. I want to talk. Will you listen?
'This death, this funeral, have stirred me deeply. I knew Kasghine
years ago in Russia, when we were both young men, he an officer in the
Russian army, I an attach� to the French Embassy.
'His career has been a very sad one. It illustrates many sad truths.
'Sometimes--it is trite to say so--an act of baseness, a crime of some
sort, may be the beginning, the first cause, of a man's salvation. It
pulls him up, wakes his conscience. Aghast at what he has done, he
reflects, repents, reforms. That is a comforting circumstance, a token
of God's goodness.
'But what shall we say when the exact opposite happens? When it is an
act of nobility, of splendid heroism, of magnificent self-devotion,
that brings to pass a man's moral downfall? It is horrible to admit
such a thing as possible, is it not? And yet, the same man who may be
capable of one sudden immense act of heroism, may be quite incapable
of keeping up the prolonged, daily, yearly struggle with adversity
which that act may entail upon him.
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