THELESS nothing had changed. There he was in his own room littered
with papers and books. All about the familiar sounds. In the street the
trumpet sounding the close of the warning against air-bombs. On the
house stairs the reassured gossip of the tenants coming up from the
cellar. In the story overhead the crazy marching to and fro of the old
neighbor who for months had been waiting for his vanished son.

But here in his own chamber lay no longer those cares of his in ambush
which he had left there....

Sometimes it happens that an incomplete accord in music sounds raucous
in a way; it leaves the mind disquieted, up to the moment when some note
is added which procures a fusion of the hostile or coldly alien
elements, like visitors who do not know one another and wait to be
introduced. At once the ice is broken and harmony spreads from one
member of the group to another. This moral chemistry had just been put
in operation by a warm and furtive contact of hands. Pierre was not
conscious of the reason for the change; he never dreamed of analyzing.
But he felt that the habitual hostility of things in general had
suddenly softened. A shooting pain takes possession of your head for
hours; of a sudden you perceive it is no longer there: how was it that
it went? Scarcely a feeling of buzzing about the temples to recall
it.... Pierre was a bit suspicious of this new-found calm. He suspected
that it concealed under a passing truce a much worse return of the pain
which was merely taking breath. Already was he acquainted with the
respites that are obtained through the arts. When into our eyes
penetrate the divine proportions of lines and colors, or into the
voluptuous windings of the sonorous ear-shell the lovely, varied play of
accords which combine and interlock in obedience to the laws of
harmonious numbers, peace takes possession of us and joy inundates our
souls. But that is a radiance which comes from outside; one would say
from a sun, the distant fires of which hold us in suspense fascinated,
lifted high above our life. It endures only a moment and then one falls
again. Art is never more than a passing forgetfulness of the actual, the
real. Pierre was afraid and fully expected the same deception.--But this
time the radiation came from within. Nothing that belongs to life was
forgot. But everything fell into harmony. His recollections, his new
thoughts. Even to the familiar objects about him: the books and papers
in his cha