Page:Rolland - Clerambault, tr. Miller, 1921.djvu/46



One of the most curious effects of the war on the mind, was that it aroused new affinities between individuals. People who up to this time had not a thought in common discovered all at once that they thought alike; and this resemblance drew them together. It was what people called "the Sacred Union." Men of all parties and temperaments, the choleric, the phlegmatic, monarchists, anarchists, clericals, Calvinists, suddenly forgot their everyday selves, their passions, their fads and their antipathies,--shed their skins. And there before you were now creatures, grouped in an unforeseen manner, like metal filings round an invisible magnet. All the old categories had momentarily disappeared, and no one was astonished to find himself closer to the stranger of yesterday than to a friend of many years' standing. It seemed as if, underground, souls met by secret roots that stretched through the night of instinct, that unknown region, where observation rarely ventures. For our psychology stops at that part of self which emerges from the soil, noting minutely individual differences, but forgetting that this is only the top of the plant, that nine-tenths are buried, the feet held by those of other plants. This profound, or lower, region of the soul is ordinarily below the threshold of consciousness, the mind feels nothing of it; but the war, by waking up this underground life, revealed moral relationships which no one had suspected. A sudden intimacy showed itself between Clerambault and a brother of his wife whom he had looked upon until now, and with good reason, as the type of a perfect Philistine.

Leo Camus was not quite fifty years old. He was tall, thin, and stooped a little; his skin was grey, his beard black, not much hair on his head,--you could see the bald