Fabien’s wife telephoned.
Each night she calculated the progress of the homing Patagonia mail. “He’s leaving Trelew now,” she murmured. Then went to sleep again Presently: “He’s getting near San Antonio, he has its lights in view.” Then she got out of bed, drew back the curtains and summed up the sky. “All those clouds will worry him.” Sometimes the moon was wandering like a shepherd and the young wife was heartened by the faithful moon and stars, the thousand presences that watched her husband. Toward one o’clock she felt him near her. “Not far to go, Buenos Aires is in sight.” Then she got up again, prepared a meal for him, a nice steaming cup of coffee. “It’s so cold up there!” She always welcomed him as if he had just descended from a snow peak. “You must be cold!” “Not a bit.” “Well, warm yourself anyhow!” She had everything ready at a quarter past one. Then she telephoned. Tonight she asked the usual question.
The clerk at the other end grew flustered. “Who’s speaking?”
“Simone Fabien.”
“Ah! A moment, please....”
Afraid to answer, he passed the receiver to the head clerk.
“Who’s that?”
“Simone Fabien.”
“Yes. What can I do for you?”
“Has my husband arrived?”
After a silence which must have baffled her, there came a monosyllable. “No.”
“Is he delayed?”
“Yes.”
Another silence. “Yes, he is delayed.”
“Ah!”
The cry of a wounded creature. A little delay, that’s nothing much, but when it lasts, when it lasts....
“Yes. And when—when is he expected in?”
“When is he expected? We ... we don’t know exactly
A solid wall in front of her, a wall of silence, which only gave her back the echo of her questions.
“Do please tell me, where is he now?”
“Where is he? Wait....”
This suspense was like a torture. Something was happening there, behind that wall.
At last, a voice! “He left Commodoro at seven thirty this evening.”
“Yes? And then?”
“Then—delayed, seriously delayed by stormy weather.”
“Ah! A storm!”
The injustice of it, the sly cruelty of that moon up there, that lazing moon of Buenos Aires! Suddenly she remembered that it took barely two hours to fly from Commodoro to Trelew.
“He’s been six hours on the way to Trelew! But surely you’ve had messages from him. What does he say?”
“What does he say? Well, you see, with weather like that ... it’s only natural ... we can’t hear him.”
“Weather like—?”
“You may rest assured, madame, the moment we get news of him, we will ring you up.”
“Ah! You’ve no news.”
“Good night, madame.”
“No! No! I want to talk to the director.”
“I’m sorry, he’s very busy just now; he has a meeting on—”
“I can’t help that. That doesn’t matter. I insist on speaking to him.”
The head clerk mopped his forehead. “A moment, please.”
He opened Rivière’s door.
“Madame Fabien wants to speak to you, sir.”
“Here,” thought Rivière, “is what I was dreading.” The emotional elements of the drama were coming into action. His first impulse was to thrust them aside; mothers and women are not allowed in an operating theater. And all emotion is bidden to hold its peace on a ship in peril; it does not help to save the crew. Nevertheless he yielded.
No sooner did he hear that far off, quavering voice, than he knew his inability to answer it. It would be futile for both alike, worse than futile, to meet each other.
“Do not be alarmed, madame, I beg you. In our calling it so often happens that a long while passes without news.”
He had reached a point where not the problem of a small personal grief but the very will to act was in itself an issue. Not so much Fabien’s wife as another theory of life confronted Rivière now. Hearing that timid voice, he could but pity its infinite distress—and know it for an enemy! For action and individual happiness have no truck with each other; they are eternally at war. This woman, too, was championing a self-coherent world with its own rights and duties, that world where a lamp shines at nightfall on the table, flesh calls to mated flesh, a homely world of love and hopes and memories. She stood up for her happiness and she was right. And Rivière, too, was right, yet he found no words to set against this woman’s truth. He was discovering the truth within him, his own inhuman and unutterable truth bv an humble light the lamplight of a little home!
“Madame...!”
She did not hear him. Her hands were bruised with beating on the wall and she lay fallen, or so it seemed to him, almost at his feet.
***
One day an engineer had remarked to Rivière, as they were bending above a wounded man, beside a bridge that was being erected: “Is the bridge worth a man’s crushed face?” Not one of the peasants using the road would ever have wished to mutilate this face so hideously just to save the extra walk to the next bridge. “The welfare of the community,” the engineer had continued, “is just the sum of individual welfares and has no right to look beyond them.” “And yet,” Rivière observed on a subsequent occasion, “even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life But what thing?”
Thinking of the lost airmen, Rivière felt his heart sink. All man’s activity, even the building of a bridge, involves a toll of suffering and he could no longer evade the issue—“Under what authority?”
These men, he mused, who perhaps are lost, might have led happy lives. He seemed to see as in a golden sanctuary the evening lamplight shine on faces bending side by side. “Under what authority have I taken them from all this?” he wondered. What was his right to rob them of their personal happiness? Did not the highest of all laws ordain that these human joys should be safeguarded? But he destroyed them. And yet one day, inevitably, those golden sanctuaries vanish like mirage. Old age and death, more pitiless than even he, destroy them. There is, perhaps, some other thing, something more lasting, to be saved; and, perhaps, it was to save this part of man that Rivière was working. Otherwise there could be no defense for action.
To love, only to love, leads nowhere. Rivière knew a dark sense of duty, greater than that of love. And deep within it there might lie another emotion and a tender one, but worlds away from ordinary feelings. He recalled a phrase that he once had read: “The one thing is to make them everlasting.... That which you seek within yourself will die.” He remembered a temple of the sun god, built by the ancient Incas of Peru. Tall menhirs on a mountain. But for these what would be left of all that mighty civilization which with its massive stones weighs heavy, like a dark regret, on modern man? Under the mandate of what strange love, what ruthlessness, did that primeval leader of men compel his hordes to drag this temple up the mountainside bidding them raise up their eternity? And now another picture rose in Rivière’s mind; the people of the little towns strolling bv nights around their bandstands. That form of happiness, those shackles ... he thought. The leader of those ancient races may have had scant compassion for man’s sufferings, but he had a boundless pity for his death. Not for his personal death, but pity for his race, doomed to be blotted out beneath a sea of sand. And so he bade his folk set up these stones at least, something the desert never would engulf.