Max Brauws was a thinker as well as a man of action; and each of these two personalities insisted on having its period of domination. After his college days, he had wandered over Europe for years, vaguely seeking an object in life. Deep down in himself, notwithstanding all his restless activity, he, remained a dreamer, as he had been in his childhood and boyhood. It seemed as if that which he had sought in his dreams when playing as a boy on the fir-clad hills and over the moors went on beckoning him, darkly and elusively, a mystic, nebulous veil on the dim horizons of the past; and, when he ran towards them, those far horizons, they receded more and more into the distance, fading little by little; and the veil was like a little cloud, melting into thin air. . . . He had wandered about for years, his soul oppressed by a load of knowledge, by the load of knowing all that men had thought, planned, believed, dreamed, worshipped, achieved. An almost mechanically accurate memory had arranged those loads in his brain in absolute order; and, if he had not been above all things driven by the unrest of his imagination, with its eternal dreaming and its eternal yearning to find what it sought, he would have become a quiet scholar, living in the country, far from cities, with a great library around him; for very often, when spent with weariness, he had a vision of an ideal repose. But the unrest and the yearning had always driven him on, driven him through the world; and they had both made him seek, for himself as well as for others, because, if he had found for others, he would also have found for himself. They, the unrest and the yearning, had driven him on towards the great centres of life, towards the black gloom of the English and German manufacturing-towns, towards the unhappy moujiks in Russia, towards the famine-stricken villages of Sicily, all in a heart-rending passion to know, to have seen, penetrated and experienced all the misery of the world. And the capitals had risen up around him like gigantic Babels of fevered pride, accumulations of egotisms; the smoke of the manufacturing-towns had smeared along the horizon of his life the soot-black clouds through which he could not see and in which the days remained eternally defiled; the Russian snow-landscapes had spread out as eternal, untraversable steppes—steppes and steppes and steppes—of absolutely colourless despair; in Italy he had beheld an appalling contrast between the magnificence of the country—the glory of its scenery, the melancholy of its art—and the sorrows of the afflicted nation, which, as in a haze of gold, against a background of sublime ruins and shimmering blue, along rows of palaces full of noble treasures, uttered its cry of hunger, shook its threatening fist, because the old ground brought forth not another olive, not one, after the excesses of the past, exhausted by the birth-pangs of the untold glories of old. . . .
His mind, schooled in book-lore, also read life itself, learnt to know it, fathomed it with a glance. He saw the world, saw its wickedness, its selfishness, saw especially its awful, monstrous hypocrisy. Like so many leering, grinning masks, with treacherous honeyed smiles, contradicting the furtive glances of the diabolical eyes, he saw the powers of the world above the world itself: a huge nightmare of compact distress, the greedy, covetous, grasping fingers hidden as though ready to clutch at the folds of the majestic purple, ready to strike like vultures' claws. And he saw—O terrible vision!—the world as a helpless, quivering mass lying for centuries under that eternal menace. He saw it everywhere. Then he wanted to free himself with a gigantic effort from the sphinx-like domination of his impotence, with its eternally unseeing eyes, its eternally silent lips, its undivining mind; and his movement was as that of one who lies crushed under granite, the granite of that omnipotent sphinx of impotence, who, with her eternal immovability, seemed to be saying nothing but this:
"I am unchangeable, eternally; against me everything is eternally dashing itself to pieces; against me your dreams scatter into mist. I alone am, but I am that which is unchangeable: human impotence, your own impotence. Lie still at my feet, do not move: I alone am."
That was the vision of his hopeless eyes. But desperation drove him on, wandering ever on and on to other lands, to other capitals, to other towns black with smoke: the smoke through which nothing shone, not a single gleam of hope. And for years it was the same: wandering, seeking, not finding; only seeing, knowing, realizing. But the more he saw, knew and realized, the more terrible it was to him that he could not find the very first word of the solution, the more terrible it became to him that only the sphinx remained, the immovable granite impotence; and her blank gaze seemed to utter her solitary revelation:
"I alone am. I am impotence; but I am immovable, I am omnipotent."
Then he had felt in himself the need to do still more, to be really a doer, a common workman, as they all were, everywhere, the poor and wretched. And he went to America, in order no longer to think, read, ponder, dream, see or know, but to do what they were all doing, the poor and wretched. And it was as he had succeeded in telling Constance at last, after so many hesitations: everything that was atavistic in him had prevented him from becoming a brother, a fellow-worker. But he was scarcely back in Europe before he felt the air around him full of noble aims, passionate hopes; and Peace had shone before his eyes. He spoke; and his words were as the words of one inspired; and everybody went to hear him. He had spoken in Holland; he now went to Germany and spoke there. He wrote his book there: Peace. He went on doing and moving, until he was laid low not only with the fatigue of thinking and meditating, but also with the strain of constantly travelling hither and thither, of constantly appearing in overcrowded halls, of speaking in a clear, resonant voice to thousands of people. For a moment he said to himself that he was doing something, something even greater and better than his manual labour in America had been. For a moment he said to himself that he had found, if not everything, at least something, an atom of absolute good, and that he was imparting that atom to the world. But dull discouragement came and smote him, as well as physical strain, and left him saying to himself:
"They cheer and applaud, but nothing is changed. Everything remains as it is, as if I had never spoken."
His impatience demanded an immediate realization and the sight of the ideal flashing across the horizon. And then he lost all hope even for the future, for the brighter ages that were dawning. A mocking laugh, a sarcastic word in a report on his lectures was enough to shatter him for weeks. He hid himself like a leper, or allowed himself to be luxuriously lapped in the leafy melancholy of the German mountain-forests, or went, farther and higher, into the Alps, made reckless ascents, just himself and a guide, as though, along the pure world of the slippery glaciers, he hoped to find what he had sought in vain in the Old World and the New, in the world of all and of himself.
Then he remained for weeks lingering on in a lonely little village in Switzerland, high up among the eternal snows, as though he wished to purify himself of all the dust of his humanity. Merely through breathing the exquisite rareness of the air, especially at night, when in the higher heavens the stars shone nearer to him, twinkling out their living rays, it seemed as if the pure cold were cleansing him to his marrow, to his soul. He gazed back almost peacefully upon his life as a man of thought and action, thought and action being two things in which a man is able to indulge only if he be willing to live, for others and for himself. If anything of his thought, of his action remained drifting in those lower atmospheres of the suffering world, he was certain that this would be so little, so infinitesimally small, that he himself did not perceive it, like an atom of dust floating in the immensity of the future. Perhaps then the atom would prove to be a little grain and, as such, be built into the substance of the ideal. But, even if this were so, his thought and his action and their possible results seemed to him so small, so slight that he was filled with humility. And in this humility there was a pride in being humble; for did he not remember all the complacency, the dogmatism, the conviction, the assurance, the self-consciousness, all the pedantry that battened down there?
Amid the serenity of the mountains, as he sent his gaze roaming over the frost-bound horizons, all within him became pure and crystal-clear, his soul a very prism. He saw its colours lying there plainly, shining, glittering, with none of the foulness of that lower world. And these weeks were weeks of the deepest and most health-giving rest that he had ever known.
He now felt very lonely. He was not the man to give himself up to the simple enjoyment of this healing rest. He loved best to feel the multitude around him, to fling out his strong arms wide towards humanity, feeling his most ardent and happiest glow when embracing humanity. But, after his discouragements, he seemed to have thrust it gently, though kindly, a little farther from him, had abandoned it, had sequestered himself, in order to recover from himself and from humanity in the ample, restful silence of utter solitude. He now felt very lonely. And a longing awoke in him, stirring but feebly as yet, for love to come towards him now, because hitherto love had always gone out from him, eager and passionate; a longing to be sought himself, for once in his life; to see arms opened to him this time, waiting to embrace him, to press him to a loving heart. . . . A feeling of melancholy softened him, made him small and human, while the mountain-wind swept past on giant wings. . . .
He looked back upon his life. That was one thing which it had never known: that concentration of all feeling on an individual. With him, any whole-hearted feeling had always been for the many. When he looked back, he saw spectres wandering through the past: the individual, the unit, just a faint blur here and there; he had never felt that all-devouring passion for them, the individuals. And yet, as a child, as a boy, playing his dream-game amid woods, fields, heather and stream, for whom had his longing been? To find all of them, humanity, or the one individual soul? He did not know, but a dreamer he had always remained, for all his thinking and doing. And now, after the many had brought him sorrow, he began to dream, for the first time, of the one . . .
Of the one . . . the one individual soul that would open wide arms to him and approach him with a loving embrace . . . one individual soul. . . . Had his quest always been the self-deception of impotence and was it possible that now that quest had become a search for the one individual soul? Suddenly, through his longing, he remembered an evening: a table with flowers and candles; men talking amid the smoke of their cigars; the burly figure of a fair-haired officer; and some strange words which that officer had just uttered as though unconsciously, in the course of ordinary conversation: a vision calling up early years of childhood, childish play, a little girl, fair, with red flowers at her temples, dressed in white, running barefoot over great boulders in a river full of rocks, under the heavy foliage of the tropical trees, and beckoning, beckoning with her little hand to the two elder brothers who were playing with her, fascinated by their little sister. . . .
There, in that room, through the smoke of the cigars, amid the hum of indifferent talk, in three or four sentences, no more, that big, fair-haired man had said it, said it just casually, with a softening of his rough, noisy voice:
"It was wonderful, the way she had of playing. She would run over the rocks and pluck the flowers. Lord, how adorable she looked, the little witch! And we boys used to run with her, run after her, as far as ever she pleased. She only had to beckon to us . . . the damned, adorable little witch!"
And the oath sounded like a caress; and the whole thing was only a picture lasting two or three seconds, no more; and then they returned to the smell of coffee and liqueurs, the cigar-smoke, the noisy voice growing rough again, becoming coarse and jovial as the burly, fair-haired soldier told some mess-room tale immediately afterwards, after that reminiscence. But in him, Brauws, the reminiscence had lingered, as though always visible: the picture shining in the tenderness with which the brother had spoken of his sister; and it seemed to him as though he himself had seen, but more vaguely and dimly, once in his life, on those Dutch horizons of his childhood, a blur like that of the little figure, the bright, fair-faced child, even the little red note of her flowers. . . . Oh, how vague it was, how visionary! You thought of it . . . and it had gone, all of it, leaving hardly the memory of a perfume, nay, hardly the reflection of a memory! Really, it was nothing, nothing, too airy for thought and impossible to describe in words, however tenderly chosen. It was nothing: if he thought about it for more than the one second that the reflection flashed across him, it was gone, quite lost. . . .
He was feeling very lonely now. . . . Oh, to think of the passing years with their millions of meetings, so many men and women just brushing against one another, in that casual passing, just looking into one another's eyes, with the indifferent look of non-recognition, and then passing one another again, never seeing one another after! . . . And perhaps among them the one had passed, her eyes looking indifferently into his eyes, a bit of her body or dress brushing against his body or dress . . . and she was gone, gone, lost altogether forever. Was that how it had happened in his life? Or not? Was life sometimes merciful at the eleventh hour, giving the one, the individual soul, as a consolation, as a reward for that love for the many?
Now he felt quite lonely, he who was a dreamer as well as a thinker and a man of action. And an irresistible wish to be no longer lonely made him come down suddenly from that ring of glittering peaks. There was nothing waiting for him in Holland, nothing to draw him towards those low lands of his birth, into the swarm of utterly indifferent people, full of petty insignificance, save alone, perhaps, that it was there—in the same house where the vision had been conjured up—there that the soul was waiting, there that the one individual soul would bide his coming.
"It is only a fancy," he now thought. " A fancy . . . at my age! No, if any such thing had to happen, it would have happened in the years of youth in which we have the right to feel, to dream, to seek . . . to seek for the one. Now that so many years, silent, dead years, lie heaped up around her and around me . . . and between us, now it becomes absurd to feel, to dream, to seek those sweet solaces which we feel, dream and seek only when we are very young, but not when we have lost even our right to the remembrance of our youth, the reflection of our childish memories. . . ."
Still he came down from the mountains. . . .