Michael stood now beside Janicot. Michael also was looking at Florian, not unkindlily.
“Yes,” Michael said. “Yes, that is true. He is yet a child.”
Then the two faces which bent over Florian were somehow blended into one face, and Florian knew that these two beings had melted into one person, and that this person was prodding him very gently.
30. The Errant Child
HIS father, after all these years, was still wearing the blue stockings with gold clocks. Florian noted that first, because his father’s foot was gently prodding Florian into wakefulness, as Florian’s father sat there under the little tree from the East. Beyond the Duke’s smiling countenance, beyond the face which was at once the face of Michael and of Janicot, Florian could now see a criss-crossery of stripped boughs, each one of which was tipped with a small bud of green.
“Come, lazibones, but you will get your death of cold, sleeping here on the bare ground, at harvest-time.”
“At harvest-time— I have been dreaming—” Florian sat erect, rubbing at his eyes with a hand whose smallness he instantly noted with wonder. The ground, too, seemed surprisingly close to him, the grass blades looked bigger than was natural. He could feel sinking away from him such childish notions about God and wickedness, and about being a grown man, as the little boy—who was he, as he now recollected,—had blended in his callow dreaming: and Florian sat there blinking innocent and puzzled eyes. He was safe back again, he reflected, in the seventeenth century: Louis Quatorze was King once more: and all the virtues were again modish. And this really must be harvest-time, for the sleek country of Poictesme appeared inexpressibly asleep, wrapped in a mellowing haze.
Florian said, “It was a very queer dream, monsieur my father—”
“A pleasant dream, however, I hope, my son. No other sort of dream is worth inducing by sleeping under what, they used to tell me, is a charmed tree, and by using for your pillow a book that at least is charming.”
And the Duke pointed to the book by Monsieur Perrault of the Academy, in which Florian had that .very morning read with approving interest about the abominable Bluebeard and about the Cat with Boots and about the Sleeping Beauty and about Cendrillon and about a variety of other delightful persons.
But Florian just now was not for fairy tales, rather all his thoughts still clung to his queer dream. And the child said, frowning:
“It was pleasant enough. But it was puzzling. For there were beautiful ladies that nobody could stand living with, and a saint that was an out-and-out fraud, and”—Florian slightly hesitated,—“and a wicked man, as bad almost as Komorre the Cursed, that did everything he wanted to, without ever being exactly punished, or satisfied either—”
“Behold now,” Monsieur de Puysange lamented, “how appalling are the advances of this modern pessimism! My own child, at ten, advises me that beauty and holiness are delusions, and that not even in untrammeled wickedness is to be found contentment.”
“No: that was not the moral of my dream. That is what bothers me, monsieur my father. There was not any moraclass="underline" and nothing seemed to be leading up to anything else in particular. I seemed to live a long while, monsieur my father, I had got to be thirty-six and over, without finding any logic and reasonableness anywhere—”
“Doubtless, at that advanced age, your faculties were blunted, and you had become senile—”
“—And the people that wanted things did not want them any longer once they had got them. They seemed rather to dislike them—”
“From your pronominal disorder,” the Duke stated, “I can deduce fancies which are not a novelty here in Poictesme. Such was the crying, in a somewhat more poetic and grammatical version, of our reputed begetters, men say,—of Dom Manuel and of Jurgen also,—in the old days before there was ever a Puysange.”
“Yes, but that was so long ago! when people were hardly civilised. And what with all the changes that have been since then—! Well, but it really seems to me, monsieur my father, that—just taking it logically,—now that we have almost reached the eighteenth century, and all the nations have signed that treaty at Ryswick to prevent there ever being any more wars, and people are riding about peaceably in sedan chairs, and are living in America, and even some of the peasants have glass windows in their houses—”
“Undoubtedly,” said the Duke, “we live in an age of invention and of such material luxury as the world has never known. All wonders of science have been made our servants. War, yesterday our normal arbiter, has now become irrational, even to the most unreflective, since one army simply annihilates the other with these modern cannons that shoot for hundreds of feet. To cross the trackless Atlantic is now but the affair of a month or two in our swift sailing ships. And we trap and slaughter even the huge whale to the end that we, ignoring the sun’s whims, may loan to nights of feverish dissipation the brilliancy of afternoon, with our oil lamps. We have perhaps exhausted the secrets of material nature. And in intellectual matters too we have progressed. Yet all progress, I would have you note, is directed by wise persons who discreetly observe the great law of living—”
“And what is that law, monsieur my father?”
“Thou shalt not offend,” the Duke replied, “against the notions of thy neighbor. Now to the honoring of this law the wise person will bring more of earnestness than he will bring to the weighing of discrepancies between facts and well-thought-of ideas about these facts. So, at most, he will laugh, he will perhaps cast an oblique jest with studied carelessness: and he will then pass on, upon the one way that is safe—for him,—without ever really considering the gaucherie of regarding life too seriously. And his less daring fellows will follow him by and by, upon the road which they were going to take in any event. That is progress.”
“Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor!” Florian repeated. “Yes, I remember. That was a part of my dream, too.” He was silent for an instant, glancing eastward beyond the gardens of his home. The thronged trees of Acaire, as Florian now saw them just beyond that low red wall, seemed to have golden powder scattered over them, a powder which they stayed too motionless to shake off. “But—in my dream, you know,—that had been learned by living wickedly. And you have always taught Little Brother and me to be very good and religious—”
“My son, my son! and have I reared an errant child, an actual atheist, who doubts that in the next world also we have—a Neighbor?”
“Do you mean the good God, monsieur my father?”
“Eh,” said the Duke, “I would distinguish, I would avoid anthropomorphology, I would speak here with exactness. I mean that in this world we must live always in subjection to notions which a moment’s thought shows always to be irrational; and that nothing anywhere attests the designer of this world, however high His place or whatever His proper title, to be swayed at all by what we describe as justice and logic.”
“I can see that,” said Florian: “though I have been thinking about another sort of high place—”
But the Duke was still speaking: and now, to Florian’s ear, his father’s tone was somewhat of a piece with this sun-steeped and tranquil and ineffably lazy October afternoon, which seemed to show the world as over-satisfied with the done year’s achievements.
“So life, my son, must always display, to him who rashly elects to think about it, just the incoherency and the inconclusiveness of a child’s dream-making. No doubt, this is to be explained by our obtuseness: I design, in any event, no impiety, for to be impious is unwise. I merely mean that I assume Someone also to be our neighbor, in His high place, and that I think His notions also should be treated with respect.”