Light by Henri Barbusse (smallest ebook reader .TXT) 📖

Brisbille is scowling. An unconfessable disquiet is accumulating in his bosom. All this gathering is detaining him at home, and he is tormented by the desire for drink. He cannot conceal his vinous longing, and squints darkly at the assembly. On a week day at this hour he would already have begun to slake his thirst. He is parched, he burns, he drags himself from group to group. The wait is longer than he can stand.

Suddenly every one looks out to the street through the still open door.

A carriage is making its way towards the church; it has a green body and silver lamps. The old coachman, whose great glove sways the slender scepter of a whip, is so adorned with overlapping capes that he suggests several men on the top of each other. The black horse is prancing.

"He shines like a piano," says Benoît.

The Baroness is in the carriage. The blinds are drawn, so she cannot be seen, but every one salutes the carriage.

"All slaves!" mumbles Brisbille. "Look at yourselves now, just look! All the lot of you, as soon as a rich old woman goes by, there you are, poking your noses into the ground, showing your bald heads, and growing humpbacked."

"She does good," protests one of the gathering.

"Good? Ah, yes, indeed!" gurgles the evil man, writhing as though in the grip of some one; "I call it ostentation--that's what _I_ call it."

Shoulders are shrugged, and Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, always self-controlled, smiles.

Encouraged by that smile, I say, "There have always been rich people, and there must be."

"Of course," trumpets Crillon, "that's one of the established thoughts that you find in your head when you fish for 'em. But mark what I says,--there's some that dies of envy. I'm _not_ one of them that dies of envy."

Monsieur Mielvaque has put his hat back on his petrified head and gone to the door. Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, also, turns his back and goes away.

All at once Crillon cries, "There's Pétrarque!" and darts outside on the track of a big body, which, having seen him, opens its long pair of compasses and escapes obliquely.

"And to think," says Brisbille, with a horrible grimace, when Crillon has disappeared, "that the scamp is a town councilor! Ah, by God!"

He foams, as a wave of anger runs through him, swaying on his feet, and gaping at the ground. Between his fingers there is a shapeless cigarette, damp and shaggy, which he rolls in all directions, patching up and resticking it unceasingly.

Charged with snarls and bristling with shoulder-shrugs, the smith rushes at his fire and pulls the bellows-chain, his yawning shoes making him limp like Vulcan. At each pull the bellows send spouting from the dust-filled throat of the furnace a cutting blue comet, lined with crackling and dazzling white, and therein the man forges.

Purpling as his agitation rises, nailed to his imprisoning corner, alone of his kind, a rebel against all the immensity of things, the man forges.

* * * * * *


The church bell rang, and we left him there. When I was leaving I heard Brisbille growl. No doubt I got my quietus as well. But what can he have imagined against _me_?

We meet again, all mixed together in the Place de l'Eglise. In our part of the town, except for a clan of workers whom one keeps one's eye on, every one goes to church, men as well as women, as a matter of propriety, out of gratitude to employers or lords of the manor, or by religious conviction. Two streets open into the Place and two roads, bordered with apple-trees, as well, so that these four ways lead town and country to the Place.

It has the shape of a heart, and is delightful. It is shaded by a very old tree, under which justice was formerly administered. That is why they call it the Great Tree, although there are greater ones. In winter it is dark, like a perforated umbrella. In summer it gives the bright green shadow of a parasol. Beside the tree a tall crucifix dwells in the Place forever.

The Place is swarming and undulating. Peasants from the surrounding country, in their plain cotton caps, are waiting in the old corner of the Rue Neuve, heaped together like eggs. These people are loaded with provisions. At the farther end, square-paved, one picks out swarthy outlines of the Epinal type, and faces as brightly colored as apples. Groups of children flutter and chirrup; little girls with their dolls play at being mothers, and little boys play at brigands. Respectable people take their stand more ceremoniously than the common crowd, and talk business piously.

Farther away is the road, which April's illumination adorns all along the lines of trees with embroidery of shadow and of gold, where bicycles tinkle and carriages rumble echoingly; and the shining river,--those long-drawn sheets of water, whereon the sun spreads sheets of light and scatters blinding points. Looking along the road, on either side of its stone-hard surface, one sees the pleasant, cultivated earth, the bits of land sewn to each other, and many-hued, brown or green as the billiard cloth, then paling in the distance. Here and there, on this map in colors, copses bulge forth. The by-roads are pricked out with trees, which follow each other artlessly and divide the infantile littleness of orchards.

This landscape holds us by the soul. It is a watercolor now (for it rained a little last night), with its washed stones, its tiles varnished anew, its roofs that are half slate and half light, its shining pavements, water-jeweled in places, its delicately blue sky, with clouds like silky paper; and between two house-fronts of yellow ocher and tan, against the purple velvet of distant forests, there is the neighboring steeple, which is like ours and yet different. Roundly one's gaze embraces all the panorama, which is delightful as the rainbow.

From the Place, then, where one feels himself so abundantly at home, we enter the church. From the depths of this thicket of lights, the good priest murmurs the great infinite speech to us, blesses us, embraces us severally and altogether, like father and mother both. In the manorial pew, the foremost of all, one glimpses the Marquis of Monthyon, who has the air of an officer, and his mother-in-law, Baroness Grille, who is dressed like an ordinary lady.

Emerging from church, the men go away; the women swarm out more grudgingly and come to a standstill together; then all the buzzing groups scatter.

At noon the shops close. The fine ones do it unassisted; the others close by the antics of some good man who exerts himself to carry and fit the shutters. Then there is a great void.

After lunch I wander in the streets. In the house I am bored, and yet outside I do not know what to do. I have no friend and no calls to pay. I am already too big to mingle with some, and too little yet to associate with others. The cafés and licensed shops hum, jingle and smoke already. I do not go to cafés, on principle, and because of that fondness for spending nothing, which my aunt has impressed on me. So, aimless, I walk through the deserted streets, which at every corner yawn before my feet. The hours strike and I have the impression that they are useless, that one will do nothing with them.

I steer in the direction of the fine gardens which slope towards the river. A little enviously I look over the walls at the tops of these opulent enclosures, at the tips of those great branches where still clings the soiled, out-of-fashion finery of last summer.

Far from there, and a good while after, I encounter Tudor, the clerk at the Modern Pharmacy. He hesitates and doubts, and does not know where to go. Every Sunday he wears the same collar, with turned down corners, and it is becoming gloomy. Arrived where I am, he stops, as though it occurred to him that nothing was pushing him forward. A half-extinguished cigarette vegetates in his mouth.

He comes with me, and I take his silence in tow as far as the avenue of plane trees. There are several figures outspaced in its level peace. Some young girls attract my attention; they appear against the dullness of house-fronts and against shop fronts in mourning. Some of the charming ones are accompanied by their mothers, who look like caricatures of them.

Tudor has left me without my noticing it.

Already, and slowly everywhere, the taverns begin to shine and cry out. In the grayness of twilight one discerns a dark and mighty crowd, gliding therein. In them gathers a sort of darkling storm, and flashes emerge from them.

* * * * * *


And lo! Now the night approaches to soften the stony streets.

Along the riverside, to which I have gone down alone, listless idylls dimly appear,--shapes sketched in crayon, which seek and join each other. There are couples that appear and vanish, strictly avoiding the little light that is left. Night is wiping out colors and features and names from both sorts of strollers.

I notice a woman who waits, standing on the river bank. Her silhouette has pearly-gray sky behind it, so that she seems to support the darkness. I wonder what her name may be, but only discover the beauty of her feminine stillness. Not far from that consummate caryatid, among the black columns of the tall trees laid against the lave of the blue, and beneath their cloudy branches, there are mystic enlacements which move to and fro; and hardly can one distinguish the two halves of which they are made, for the temple of night is enclosing them.

The ancient hut of a fisherman is outlined on the grassy slope. Below it, crowding reeds rustle in the current; and where they are more sparse they fashion concentric orbs upon the gleaming, fleeing water. The landscape has something exotic or antique about it. You are no matter where in the world or among the centuries. You are on some corner of the eternal earth, where men and women are drawing near to each other, and cling together while they wrap themselves in mystery.

* * * * * *


Dreamily I ascend again towards the sounds and the swarming of the town. There, the Sunday evening rendezvous,--the prime concern of the men,--is less discreet. Desire displays itself more crudely on the pavements. Voices chatter and laughter dissolves, even through closed doors; there are shouts and