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III
BAD NEWS
1
FOR more than four years,
evil tidings passed night and day over almost half the world of men. Never
since our earth came into being were they known to spread in crowds so dense
and busy and commanding. In the happy days of peace, we would come upon the
gloomy visitants here and there, travelling over hill and dale, nearly always
alone, sometimes in couples, rarely in companies of three, timid and shy,
seeking to pass unnoticed and humbly undertaking the smallest messages of
sorrow that destiny confided to their charge. Now they go with heads erect;
they are almost arrogant; and swollen with their importance, they neglect any
misfortunes that are not deathly. They encumber the roads, cross the seas and
rivers, invade the streets, do not forget the by-ways and climb the most rugged
and stony tracks. There is not a hovel cowering in the dingiest and most
obscure suburb of a great city, not a cottage hidden in the recesses of the
poorest hamlet of the most inaccessible mountain, which escapes their search
and towards which one of them, detached from the sinister band, does not hasten
with its little footstep, eager, pitiless and sure. Each has its goal whence
nothing can divert it. Through time and space, over rocks and walls they press
onward, swift and determined, blind and deaf to all that would retard them,
thinking only of fulfilling their duty, which is to announce as soon as may be
to the most sensitive and defenceless heart the greatest sorrow that can fall
upon it.
2
We watch them pass as
emissaries of destiny. To us they seem as fatal as the very misfortune of which
they are but the heralds; and no one dreams of barring the way before them. So
soon as one of them arrives, all unexpected, in our midst, we leave everything,
we rush forward, we gather round it. Almost a religious fear compasses it
about; we whisper reverently; and we should bow no lower in the presence of a
messenger of God. Not only would no one dare to contradict it, or advise it, or
beg it to be patient, to grant a few hours of respite, to hide in the darkness
or to arrive by a longer road; on the contrary, all compete in offering it
zealous if humble service. The most compassionate, the most pitiful are the
most assiduous and obsequious, as though there were no duty more unmistakable,
no act of charity more meritorious than to lead the dark envoy by the shortest
and the quickest way to the heart which it is to strike.
3
Once again, we are here
confounding that which belongs to destiny with that which belongs to ourselves.
The misfortune was perhaps not to be avoided; but a great part of the sorrows
that attend it remain in our power. It is for us to be careful of them, to
direct them, to subdue them, disarm them, delay them, turn them aside and
sometimes even to stop them altogether.
In effect, we hardly yet
know the psychology of sorrow, which is as deep, as complex and as worthy of
study as the passions to which we devote so much of our time. In everyday life,
it is true, great sorrows, though not so rare as we could have wished, were
nevertheless too widely scattered for us to study them easily, step by step.
To-day, alas, they are the ground of all our thoughts; and we are learning at
last that, even as love or happiness or vanity, they have their secrets, their
habits, their illusions, their sophistries, their dark corners, their baffling
mazes and their unforeseen abysses; for man, whether he love or rejoice or
weep, remains ever constant to himself!
It is not true, as we too
willingly agree, that, since unhappiness must be known sooner or later, our
only duty is to reveal it at the earliest moment, for the sorrow that is yet
green is very different from the sorrow that is already fading. It is not true,
as we admit without question, that anything is better than ignorance or
uncertainty and that there is a sort of cowardice in not forthwith announcing
the bad news which we know to those whom it must prostrate in the dust. On the
contrary, cowardice lies in ridding ourselves of the bad news as quickly as we
may and in not bearing its whole burden, secretly and alone, as long as we are
able. When the bad news arrives, our first duty is to set it apart, to prevent
it from spreading, to master it as we would a malefactor or a stalking
pestilence, to close all means of escape, to mount guard over it, so that it
cannot break forth and do harm. Our duty is not merely, as the best of us and
the most prudent seem to believe, to usher in the bad news with a thousand
precautions, with short and muffled, sidelong and measured steps, by the
back-door, into the dwelling which it is to devastate; rather is it our duty
definitely to forbid its entrance and to have the courage to chain it in our
own dwelling, which it will fill with unjust and insupportable reproaches and
upbraidings. Instead of making ourselves the easy echo of its cries, we should
think only of stifling its voice. Each hour that we thus pass in restless and
painful intimacy with the hateful prisoner is an hour of suffering which we
accept for ourselves and which we spare the victim of fate. It is almost
certain that the malignant recluse will end by escaping our vigilance; but here
the very minutes have their value and there is no gain, however small, that we
are entitled to neglect. The hourglass that measures the phases of sorrow is
much finer and truer than that which marks the stages of pleasure. The time
that passes between the death of one whom we love and the moment when we hear
of his death is as full of pain as it is of days. Most to be feared of all is
the first blow of misfortune; it is then that the heart is smitten and torn
with a wound that will never heal. But this blow has not its shattering and
sometimes mortal force unless it strike its victim at once and, so to speak,
fresh from the event. Every hour that is interposed deadens the sting and
lessens its virulence. A death already some weeks old no longer wears the same
face as that which is made known on the very day when it occurs; and, if a few
months have covered it, it is no longer a death, it has become a memory. The
days that divide us from it have almost the same value whether they pass before
we hear of it or afterwards. They remove beforehand from the eyes and heart the
blinding horror of the loss; they step forward and draw it out of the clutch of
madness into a past like that which softens regret. They weave a sort of
retrospective memory which stretches into the past and grants straightway all
that true memory would have given little by little, hour by hour, during the
long months that part the first despair from the sorrow which grows wise and
reconciled and ready to hope anew.
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