With Zola in England Part 8

One day, it must have been I suppose the 31st of August, a rather strange telegram in French reached me for transmission to M. Zola. It came from Paris, and was, so far as I remember, to this effect: 'Be prepared for a great success.'

A name I was acquainted with followed; but what the telegram might mean I knew not. There was absolutely nothing in the newspapers with reference to any great success achieved at that moment by the Revisionist party; but possibly the message might refer to one or another of M. Zola's lawsuits, such as that with the 'Pet.i.t Journal' or that with the handwriting experts. I re-telegraphed it to M. Zola, and that day, at all events, I thought no more of the matter.

But I afterwards learnt that the telegram had perplexed him quite as much as it perplexed me. A great success? What could it be? He racked his mind in vain. He reviewed all the phases and aspects of the Dreyfus case, wondering whether this or that had happened, but not suspecting the public revelations which were then impending, the tragedy which was being enacted.

For a while he walked up and down, feverish and anxious (he was at the time in poor health), and then he would fling himself on a sofa, still and ever indulging in his surmises. With that kind of prescience which he had so frequently displayed in the Dreyfus affair, he felt certain that something very important had occurred, for otherwise such a mysterious telegram would never have been sent him. This lasted the whole evening.

My daughter Violette was with him at the time, and his feverishness doubtless gained on her. At last she retired to rest, while M. Zola, according to his wont, carried a lamp into his own room to sit there a while and read some French newspapers which had reached him, via Wareham, by the evening delivery. There was nothing in them of a nature to explain the mysterious telegram; still he read on and on in the hope, as it were, of quieting himself.

It was, I believe, between eleven o'clock and midnight when he rose to go to bed, and as he did so he heard some loud exclamations, followed by a cry. At first he fancied that the calls came from one of the servants'

rooms, and he paused on the landing. Then, however, as they were repeated, he found that they came from my daughter's apartment. With fatherly solicitude he waited and listened. Violette was calling in her sleep.

Practical enough in matters of everyday life, this girl of mine has literary partialities of a somewhat gruesome kind, and her avowed ambition (I quote her own words) is to write, some day, stories full of witches and wizards, that shall make people's flesh creep. For this reason I keep such of Anne Radcliffe's uncanny novels as I possess carefully locked up.

I can well remember my daughter telling me at times of strange things dreamt by her in her sleep; but not of being of a romantic or a mystical turn myself, I have usually pooh-poohed all this as nonsense. And such I believe is the course which fathers usually adopt if their daughters'

imaginations begin to run riot.

As for M. Zola, when he heard Violette calling in her sleep, his first impulse was to rouse her, but all suddenly became still again. The girl had probably sunk into a more peaceful slumber. And so, after waiting a few minutes longer, he thought it best to leave her as she was.

Nothing further disturbed M. Zola that night; but on the following morning, when he met Violette downstairs, he asked her how she felt, and told her that he had heard her calling in her sleep. He had probably formed the same opinion as I should have formed under the circ.u.mstances, namely, that it was a case of indigestion or a little excitement.

But she turned to him and replied, 'Oh! I had such a frightful dream. . .

I was in a big black place, and there was a man on the ground covered with blood, and people were crowding round him, talking with great excitement. And I saw you, Monsieur Zola, and you came up looking like a giant and waved your arms again and again, and seemed well pleased.'

M. Zola was dumbfounded. He could make nothing of it. A man in a pool of blood and others round him; and he, Zola, waving his arms and looking well pleased! It was nonsense; and he was disposed to laugh at the girl and chide her. But a little later, with the arrival of some morning newspapers, the position suddenly changed.

Here I should mention that as the Paris journals only reached M. Zola with a delay of twelve or four-and-twenty hours, it had just been arranged that he should be supplied with two or three London papers every morning, and that he and Violette between them should put the telegrams concerning the Dreyfus business into French.

He opened one of these English newspapers--which it was I do not recollect--and there he saw a whole column dealing with the arrest and confession of Colonel Henry. The heading to the telegrams, the very words 'arrest' and 'confession,' made everything intelligible to M. Zola; and beneath all this came a brief wire headed, I think, 'Paris, midnight,'

and worded much to this effect: 'Colonel Henry has been found dead in his cell at Mont Valerien.'

So that was the man whom Violette, in her dream, had seen weltering in a pool of blood, surrounded by his custodians, who had rushed in full of excitement! M. Zola's presence in that vision was, so to say, symbolical.

'He had waved his arms and had seemed well pleased'--so the girl had put it in her frank, artless way. 'Well pleased' may perhaps appear to be scarcely the correct expression. At all events, it needs to be interpreted. Most certainly Zola never desired the death of a sinner; but, on the other hand, he could only feel some satisfaction at knowing that Henry's crime was at last divulged to the world.

This, then, is how my daughter dreamt Henry's death. I do not wish to insist unduly on the incident, and I have no intention of appealing to the Psychical Research Society to test, corroborate, or disprove the case.

There was one rather curious feature that I have not yet mentioned. My daughter has a.s.sured me that during the same night she dreamt the same thing over and over again. She tried to banish the vision, but ever and ever it returned, as if to impress itself indelibly upon her mind. And ever did she see M. Zola waving his arms as he hovered round the scene.

At that time the girl knew nothing of Colonel Henry; she understood very little about the Dreyfus case; and all she had to go upon was the enigmatical telegram and M. Zola's talk during the evening, when he was expressing his thoughts aloud. But at that moment he had foreseen no death, murder, or suicide, and if the possibility of any arrest had occurred to him it was that of M. du Paty de Clam, which the Revisionist papers were then demanding.

It is true that in infancy my daughter had often seen Mont Valerien, as I lived for some years at Boulogne-sur-Seine, and the hill and fortress towering across the river were then familiar objects to us all. But the girl was little more than a baby at the time, and so this circ.u.mstance can have exercised no influence upon her. Moreover, she has told me that she had no notion as to what might be the actual scene of her dream; it merely appeared to her that she was in France, because the people she saw raised e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns in French.

Pa.s.sing from this incident, I may point out that the telegram sent to M.

Zola through me was explained by the news in the English newspapers. It was evident that the 'great success' referred to in the message was the discovery of Henry's forgery and possibly his arrest.

Directly I saw the news in a London newspaper I hurried off to M. Zola's, and when I reached his abode about noon I found him expecting me. We then went over matters together, the press telegrams, my daughter's dream and the probable outcome of the whole affair.

As was natural, M. Zola was quite excited. First, the doc.u.ment which Henry had confessed to having forged was the very one that General de Pellieux had imported into the Zola trial in Paris as convincing proof of Dreyfus's guilt. At that time already its effect had been very great; it had destroyed all chance of M. Zola's acquittal. Then, too, it had been solemnly brought forward in the Chamber of Deputies by War Minister Cavaignac, who had vouched for its authenticity. And now, as previously alleged by Colonel Picquart, it was shown to be a forgery of the clumsiest kind.

Here at least was 'a new fact' warranting the revision of the whole Dreyfus case. Surely the blindest bigot could not resist such evidence of the machinations of those who had sent Dreyfus to Devil's Island; truth and justice would speedily triumph, and in a week or two he, Zola, would be able to return to France again.

But he did not take sufficient account of human obstinacy and vileness.

His friends, to whom he appealed on the subject of his return, urged him to remain where he was, for the battle, they said, was by no means over, and his name was still like the red scarf of the matador that goads the bull to fury. The advice proved good, for again were pa.s.sions stirred.

Henry, the ign.o.ble forger, was raised to the position of martyr, and Cavaignac and Zurlinden and Chanoine in turn strove to impede the course of justice. 'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,' and thus M. Zola, finding so many difficulties in the way of his return, abandoned for a time all work and fell into brooding melancholy.

XI

THROUGH THE AUTUMN

Important events were now taking place in Paris. Cavaignac resigned the position of War Minister and was succeeded by Zurlinden; Du Paty de Clam was turned out of the army; Esterhazy, who had likewise been 'retired,'

fled from France, Mme. Dreyfus addressed to the Minister of Justice a formal application for the revision of her unfortunate husband's case; and that application was in the first instance referred to a Commission of judges and functionaries. Then General Zurlinden resigned his Ministerial office, and again becoming Governor of Paris, apprehended the gallant Picquart on a ridiculous charge of forgery, and cast him into close confinement in a military prison. There was talk, too, of a military plot in Paris, and again and again were attempts made to prevent the granting of Revision.

Throughout those days of alternate hope and fear M. Zola suffered keenly.

It was, too, about this time that he heard of the death of his favourite dog--an incident to which I have previously referred as coming like a blow of fate in the midst of all his anxiety.

When he rallied he spoke to me of his desire to familiarise himself in some degree with the English language, with the object princ.i.p.ally of arriving at a more accurate understanding of the telegrams from Paris which he found in the London newspapers. A dictionary, a conversation manual, and an English grammar for French students were then obtained; and whenever he felt that he needed a little relaxation, he took up one or another of these books and read them, as he put it to me, 'from a philosophical point of view.'

Later I procured him a set of Messrs. Nelson's 'Royal Readers' for children, when he greatly praised, declaring them to be much superior to the similar cla.s.s of work current in France. Afterwards he himself purchased a prettily ill.u.s.trated edition of the cla.s.sic 'Vicar of Wakefield' (the work to which all French young ladies are put when learning our language), but he found portions difficult to understand, and a French friend then procured him an edition in which the text is printed in French and English on alternate pages.

One day when he had been dipping into English papers and books he tackled me on rather a curious point. 'Why is it,' said he, 'that the Englishman when he writes of himself should invariably use a capital letter? That tall "I" which recurs so often in a personal narrative strikes me as being very arrogant. A Frenchman, referring to himself, writes _je_ with a small _j_; a German, though he may gratify all his substantives with capital letters, employs a small _i_ in writing _ich_; a Spaniard, when he uses the personal p.r.o.noun at all, bestows a small _y_ on his _yo_, while he honours the person he addresses with a capital _V_. I believe, indeed--though I am not sufficiently acquainted with foreign languages to speak with certainty on the point--that the Englishman is the only person in the world who applies a capital letter to himself. That "I" strikes me as the triumph of egotism. It is tall, commanding, and so brief! "I"--and that suffices. How did it originate?'

It was difficult for me to answer M. Zola on the point; I am a very poor scholar in such a matter, and I could find nothing on the subject in any work of reference I had by me. I surmised, however, that the capital I, as a personal p.r.o.noun, was a survival of the time when English, whether written or printed, was studded with capitals, even as German is to-day.

If I am wrong, perhaps some one who knows better will correct me. One thing I have often noticed is that a child's first impulse is to write 'i,' and that it is only after admonition that the aggressive and egotistical 'I' supplants the humbler form of the letter. This did not surprise M. Zola, since vanity, like most other vices, is acquired, not inherent in our natures. But in a chaffing way he suggested that one might write a very humorous essay on the English character by taking as one's text that tall, stiff, and self-a.s.sertive letter 'I.'

How far M. Zola actually carried his study of English I could hardly say, but during the last months of his exile he more than once astonished me by his knowledge of an irregular verb or of the correct comparative and superlative of an adjective. And if he seldom attempted to speak English, he at least made considerable progress in reading it. By the time he returned to France he could always understand any Dreyfus news in the English papers. Of course the language in which the news was couched was of great help to him, as in three instances out of four it was simply direct translation from the French.

In this connection, while praising many features of the English Press, M.

Zola more than once expressed to me his surprise that so much of the Paris news printed in London should be simply taken from Paris journals.

Some correspondents, said he, never seemed to go anywhere or to see anybody themselves. They purely and simply extracted everything from newspapers. This he was able to check by means of the many Paris prints which he received regularly.

'Here,' he would say, 'this paragraph is taken verbatim from "Le Figaro"; this other appeared in "Le Temps," this other in "Le Siecle,"' and so forth. And he was not alluding to extracts from editorials, but to descriptive matter--accounts of demonstrations and ceremonies, fas.h.i.+onable weddings and other social functions, interviews, and so forth. The practice upset all his ideas of a foreign correspondent's duties, which should be to obtain first-hand and not second-hand information.

In principle this is of course correct, but a correspondent cannot be everywhere at the same time; and nowadays, moreover, English journalists in Paris do not enjoy quite the same facilities as formerly. As regards more particularly the Dreyfus business, the French, with a sensitiveness that can be understood, have all along deprecated anything in the way of foreign interference, and the English Pressman of inquiring mind on the subject has more than once met with a rebuff from those in a position to give information. Again, the political difficulties between the two countries of recent years have often placed the Paris correspondents in a very invidious position.

This brings me to the Fashoda trouble, which arose last autumn while M.

Zola was still in his country retreat. The great novelist's enemies have often alleged that he was no true Frenchman; but for my part, after thirty years' intimacy with the French, I would claim for him that his country counts no better patriot. He is on principle opposed to warfare, but there is a higher patriotism than that which consists in perpetually beating the big drum, and that higher patriotism is Zola's.

The Fashoda difficulties troubled him sorely, and directly it seemed likely that the situation might become serious he told me that it would be impossible for him to remain in England. The progress of the negotiations between France and Great Britain was watched with keen vigilance, and M. Zola was ready to start at the first sign of those negotiations collapsing. As all his friends were opposed to his return to France (they had again virtually forbidden it late in September when the Brisson Ministry finally submitted the case for revision to the Criminal Chamber of the Cour de Ca.s.sation), he would probably have gone to Belgium, but I doubt whether he would have remained long in that country.

I have said that M. Zola is opposed to warfare on principle. His views in this respect have long been shared by me. Life's keenest impressions are those acquired in childhood and youth. And in my youth--I was but seventeen, though already acting as a war correspondent, the youngest, I suppose, on record--I witnessed war attended by every horror:--A city, Paris, starved by the foreigner and subsequently in part fired by some of its own children. And between those disasters, having pa.s.sed through the hostile lines, I saw an army of 125,000 men with 350 guns, that of Chanzy, irretrievably routed after battling in a snowstorm of three days'

duration, cast into highways and byways, with thousands of barefooted stragglers begging their bread, with hundreds of farmers bewailing their crops, their cattle, and their ruined homesteads, with mothers innumerable weeping for their sons, and fair girls in the heyday of their youth lamenting the lads to whom their troth was plighted. And in that 'Retraite Infernale,' as one of its historians has called it, I saw want, hunger, cupidity, cruelty, disease, stalking beside the war fiend; so no wonder that, like Zola, I regard warfare as the greatest of abominations that fall upon the world. I often regret that, short of actual war itself and its disaster and misery, there should be no means of bringing the whole horror of the thing home to those silly, arm-chair, jingo journalists of many countries, our own included, who, viewing war simply as a means of imposing the will of the stronger upon the weaker, and losing sight of all that attends it, save martial pomp and individual heroism, ever clamour for the exercise of force as soon as any difficulty arises between two governments.

Ties of affection, bonds of marriage, as well as long years of intimacy, link me moreover to the French people; and more keenly, perhaps, than even the master himself, did I realise what war between France and England might mean; thus we both had an anxious time during the Fashoda trouble. Fortunately for the general peace hostilities were averted, and M. Zola was thus able to remain in his secluded English home, and to continue the writing of his novel.

The weather was still very fine, and now and again he ventured upon a little excursion. The princ.i.p.al one was to Virginia Water, where he strolled round the lake, then drove through part of the Great Park, and thence on to Windsor Castle, where he saw all the sights, the State apartments, St. George's Hall and Chapel, the Albert Memorial Chapel, and so forth. And, as he had brought his hand camera with him, he was able to take a few snapshots of what he saw. I was not present on that occasion; his companions were a French gentleman, a very intimate friend, and my daughter, but I was pleased to hear that he had, at all events, seen Windsor. As a rule, it was extremely difficult to induce him to emerge from his solitude. When he took a walk or a bicycle ride his destination was simply some sleepy Surrey village or deserted common.

He appreciated English scenery. Around Oatlands he had been much struck by the beauty of the trees, and was greatly astonished to find such lofty and perfect hedges of holly running at times for a mile almost without a break on either side of the roads. I suppose that some of the finest holly hedges in England are to be found in that district. Then, too, the rookeries surprised and interested him. There was one he could see from his window at the last half of his country residences, and many an idle half-hour was spent by him in watching the flight of the birds or their occasional parliaments.