It was a more complex impulse which, not so long ago, in Peking, had occasionally made him come and stretch out on oid Gisors’ couch. The pleasure of scandalizing, to begin with. And then, he did not want to be mereiy the President of the Consortium, he wanted to be distinct from his activity-a way of considering himseif superior to it. His aimost aggressive iove of art, of thought, of the cynicism which he called iucidity, was a defense: Ferral had the backing neither of the “families" of the great credit estabiishments, nor of the Ministry of Finance. The Ferral dynasty was too closeiy linked to the history of the Republic to make it possibie to consider him as a mere upstart; but he remained an amateur, no matter how great his authority. Too ciever to attempt to fil the ditch that surrounded him, he widened it. Gisors’ great culture, his inteiiigence which was always at the service of anyone who sought him out, his disdain of conventions, his aimost aiways singuiar “points of view,” which Ferral did not hesitate to pass off as his o^wn when he had left ^m, brought them together more than all the rest separated them; with Ferral, Gisors talked politics only on the philosophical level. Ferral said he needed intelligence, and, when it was not the kind that offended him, this was true.
He looked around: at the very moment he sat do^, almost aU eyes turned away. Tonight he would gladly have married his cook, for no other reason than to force this crowd to accept her. It exasperated him to have all those idiots pass judgment on what he was doing; the less he saw them, the better: he suggested to Gisors that they go out for a drink on the terrace overlooking the garden. In spite of the coolness the “boys” had brought out a few tables.
“Do you think it is possible to know-really know- a human being?” he asked Gisors. They sat down near a small lamp. Its halo of light was absorbed by the darkness which was gradually filling with mist.
Gisors looked at him. “He would have no taste for psychology if he could impose his will.”
“Awoman?” he asked.
“What difference does it make?”
“There is something erotic about a mind which applies itself to elucidating a woman. To want to know a woman, it seems to me, is always a way of possessing her or of taking revenge on her. ”
A little tart at the next table was saying to another: “They can’t fool me that easy. I’ll tell you: the woman is jealous of my style.”
“I think,” Gisors went on, “that recourse to the mind is an attempt to compensate for this: the knowle.dge of a person is a negative feeling: the positive feeling, the reality, is the torment of being always a stranger to what one loves.”
“Does one ever love?” “Time occasionaHy causes this anguish to disappear, ^rne alone. One never knows a human being, but one occasionally ceases to feel that one does not know him. (I am thinking of my son, of course, and also of. another lad.) To know with one’s intelligence is the futile attempt to dispense with time. "
“The function of intelligence is not to dispense with things."
Gisors looked at him:
“What do you mean by ‘intelligence’?”
“In general?"
“Yes.”
Ferral reflected:
“The possession of the means of coercing things or men.”
Gisors smiled imperceptibly. Each time he asked this question the other person, no matter who he was, would answer by producing the image of his desire. But Ferral suddenly became more intense.
“Do you know what was the torture ^flicted on women for infidelity to their masters in this country during the first empires?" he asked.
“WeU, there were several, weren’t there? The most common one, apparendy, consisted in tying them to a raft, their hands cut off at the wrists, eyes gouged, and in.
While he was speaking, Gisors noticed the growing attention and, it seemed, the satisfaction with which Ferral listened.
“. letting them drift down those endless rivers, til they died of hunger or exhaustion, their lover bound beside them on the same raft. ”
“Their lover?"
How was it possible to reconcile such a slip with his concentrated attention, with his look? Gisors could not guess that, in Ferral’s mind, there was no lover; but the latter had already caught himself.
“The most curious thing about it,” Gisors went on, “is that those brutal codes seem to have been drawn up, until the fourth century, by men who were wise, humane and gentle, from all we know of the private lives. ”
“Yes, they were undoubtedly wise.”
Gisors looked at his sharp face. The eyes were closed; the little lamp cast its light upon him from below, little gleams catching in his mustache. Shots in the distance. How many lives were being destroyed out there in the night mist? He was looking at Ferral’s countenance, tense with bitterness over some humiliation that rose from the depth of his being, defending itself with the derisive force of human rancor; the hatred of the sexes hovered over his h^^^tion, as though the oldest hatreds were being reborn from the blood that continued to flow upon the already gorged earth.
New shots, very near this time, caused the glares on the table to tremble.
Gisors had grown used to those shots that came daily from the Chinese city. In spite of Kyo’s telephone caU these, suddenly, made anxious. He did not know the extent of the political role played by Ferral, but he knew this role could be used only in the service of Chiang Kai-shek. He considered it natural to be sitting next to him-he never found himself “compromised,” even in his own eyes-but he no longer wished to be of help to him. New shots, farther away.
“^What’s going on?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The Blue and the Red leaders have made a great proclamation of union. Things seem to be straightening out.”
“He lies,” thought Gisors: “he is at least as well informed as I am.”
“Red or Blue,” said Ferral, “the coolies will continue to be coolies just the same; unless they have been killed off. Don’t you consider it a stupidity characteristic of the human race that a man who has only one life should be willing to lose it for an idea?”
“It is very rare for a man to be able to endure-how shall I say it? — his condition, his fate as a man. ”
He thought of one of Kyo's ideas: all that men are willing to die for, beyond self-interest, tends more or less obscurely to justify that fate by giving it a foundation in dignity: Christianity for the slave, the nation for the citizen, Communism for the worker. But he had no desire to discuss Kyo’s ideas with Ferral. He came back to the latter:
“There is always a need for intoxication: this country has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman. Perhaps love is above all the means which the Occidental uses to free himself from man’s fate. ”
Under his words flowed an obscure and hidden counter-current of figures: Ch’en and murder, Clappique and his madness, Katov and the Revolution, May and love, himself and opium. Kyo alone, in his eyes, resisted these categories.
“Far fewer women would indulge in copulation,” answered Ferral, “if they could obtain in the vertical posture the words of admiration which they need and which demand a bed.”
“And how many men?”
“But man can and must deny woman: action, action alone justifies life and satisfies the white man. What would we think if we were told of a painter who makes no paintings? A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do. Nothing else. I am not what such and such an encounter with a man or woman may have done to shape my life; I am my roads, my.