The Inferno by Henri Barbusse (whitelam books TXT) 📖

with beliefs, with ideas that I had to struggle, it was with myself.

"Then I found the remedy!"

She almost cried, hoarsely, ecstatically:

"Sin, sin! To rid myself of boredom by committing a crime, to break up monotony by deceiving. To sin in order to be a new person, another person. To hate life worse than it hated me. To sin so as not to die.

"I met you. You wrote verses and books. You were different from the rest. Your voice vibrated and gave the impression of beauty, and above all, you were there, in my existence, in front of me! I had only to hold out my arms. Then I loved you with all my heart, if you can call it love, my poor little friend!"

She spoke now in a low quick voice, both oppressed and enthusiastic, and she played with her companion's hand as if it were a child's toy.

"And you, too, you loved me, naturally. And when we slipped into a hotel one evening, the first time, it seemed to me as if the door opened of itself, and I was grateful for having rebelled and having broken my destiny. And then the deceit--from which we suffer sometimes, but which, after reflection, we no longer detest--the risks, the dangers that give pleasure to each minute, the complications that add variety to life, these rooms, these hiding-places, these black prisons, which have fled from the sunlight I once knew!

"Ah!" she said.

It seemed to me that she sighed as if, now that her aspiration was realized, she had nothing so beautiful to hope for any more.

. . . . .


She thought a moment, and then said:

"See what we are. I too may have believed at first in a sort of thunderbolt, a supernatural and fatal attraction, because of your poetry. But in reality I came to you--I see myself now--with clenched fists and closed eyes."

She added:

"We deceive ourselves a good deal about love. It is almost never what they say it is.

"There may be sublime affinities, magnificent attractions. I do not say such a love may not exist between two human beings. But we are not these two. We have never thought of anything but ourselves. I know, of course, that I am in love with you. So are you with me. There is an attraction for you which does not exist for me, since I do not feel any pleasure. You see, we are making a bargain. You give me a dream, I give you joy. But all this is not love."

He shrugged his shoulders, half in doubt, half in protest. He did not want to say anything. All the same, he murmured feebly:

"Even in the purest of loves we cannot escape from ourselves."

"Oh," she said with a gesture of pious protest, the vehemence of which surprised me, "that is not the same thing. Don't say that, don't say that!"

It seemed to me there was a vague regret in her voice and the dream of a new dream in her eyes.

She dispelled it with a shake of her head.

"How happy I was! I felt rejuvenated, like a new being. I had a sense of modesty again. I remember that I did not dare to show the tip of my foot from under my dress. I even had a feeling about my face, my hands, my very name."

. . . . .


Then the man continued the confession from the point where she had left off, and spoke of their first meetings. He wished to caress her with words, to win her over gradually with phrases and with the charm of memories.

"The first time we were alone--"

She looked at him.

"It was in the street, one evening," he said. "I took your arm. You leaned more and more upon my shoulder. People swarmed around us, but we seemed to be quite alone. Everything around us changed into absolute solitude. It seemed to me that we were both walking on the waves of the sea."

"Ah!" she said. "How good you were! That first evening your face was like what it never was afterwards, even in our happiest moments."

"We spoke of one thing and another, and while I held you close to me, clasped like a bunch of flowers, you told me about people we knew, you spoke of the sunlight that day and the coolness of the evening. But really you were telling me that you were mine. I felt your confession running through everything you said, and even if you did not express it, you actually gave me a confession of love.

"Ah, how great things are in the beginning! There is never any pettiness in the beginning.

"Once when we met in the public garden, I took you back at the end of the afternoon through the suburbs. The road was so peaceful and quiet that our footsteps seemed to disturb nature. Benumbed by emotion, we slackened our pace. I leaned over and kissed you."

"There," she said.

She put her finger on his neck.

"Gradually the kiss grew warmer. It crept toward your lips and stopped there. The first time it went astray, the second time it pretended it went astray. Soon I felt against my mouth"--he lowered his voice--"your mouth."

She bowed her head, and I saw her rosy mouth.

"It was all so beautiful in the midst of the watchfulness imprisoning me," she sighed, ever returning to her mild, pathetic preoccupation.

How she needed the stimulus of remembering her emotions, whether consciously or not! The recalling of these little dramas and former perils warmed her movements, renewed her love. That was the reason why she had had the whole story told her.

And he encouraged her. Their first enthusiasm returned, and now they tried to evoke the most exciting memories.

"It was sad, the day after you became mine, to see you again at a reception in your own home--inaccessible, surrounded by other people, mistress of a regular household, friendly to everybody, a bit timid, talking commonplaces. You bestowed the beauty of your face on everybody, myself included. But what was the use?

"You were wearing that cool-looking green dress, and they were teasing you about it. I did not dare to look at you when you passed me, and I thought of how happy we had been the day before."

"Ah," she sighed, as the beauty widened before her of all her memories, her thoughts, of all her soul, "love is not what they say it is. I, too, was stirred with anguish. How I had to conceal it, dissimulating every sign of my happiness, locking it hastily away within the coffer of my heart. At first I was afraid to go to sleep for fear of saying your name in a dream, and often, fighting against the stealthy invasion of sleep, I have leaned on my elbow, and remained with wide-open eyes, watching heroically over my heart.

"I was afraid of being recognised. I was afraid people would see the purity in which I was bathed. Yes, purity. When in the midst of life one wakes up from life, and sees a different brilliance in the daylight, and recreates everything, I call that purity.

. . . . .


"Do you remember the day we lost our way in the cab in Paris--the day he thought he recognised us from a distance, and jumped into another cab to follow us?"

She gave a start of ecstasy.

"Oh, yes," she murmured, "that was the great day!"

His voice quivered as if shaken by the throbbing of his heart, and his heart said:

"Kneeling on the seat, you looked out of the little window in the back of the cab and cried to me, 'He is nearer! He is further off! He will catch us. I do not see him any more. He has lost us.' Ah!"

And with one and the same movement their lips joined.

She breathed out like a sigh:

"That was the one time I enjoyed."

"We shall always be afraid," he said.

These words interlaced and changed into kisses. Their whole life surged into their lips.

Yes, they had to revive their past so as to love each other, they had constantly to be reassembling the pieces so as to keep their love from dying through staleness, as if they were undergoing, in darkness and in dust, in an icy ebbing away, the ruin of old age, the impress of death.

They clasped each other.

They were drowned in the darkness. They fell down, down into the shadows, into the abyss that they had willed.

He stammered:

"I will love you always."

But she and I both felt that he was lying again. We did not deceive ourselves. But what matter, what matter?

Her lips on his lips, she murmured like a thorny caress among the caresses:

"My husband will soon be home."

How little they really were at one! How, actually, there was nothing but their fear that they had in common, and how they stirred their fear up desperately. But their tremendous effort to commune somehow was soon to be over.

They stopped talking. Words had already accomplished the work of reviving their love. She merely murmured:

"I am yours, I am yours. I give myself to you. No, I do not give myself to you. How can I give myself when I do not belong to myself?"

"Are you happy?" she asked again.

"I swear you are everything in the world to me."

* * * * * * * * *


Now, she felt, their bliss had already become a mere memory, and she said almost plaintively:

"May God bless the bit of pleasure one has."

A doleful lament, the first signal of a tremendous fall, a prayer blasphemous yet divine.

I saw him look at the clock and at the door. He was thinking of leaving. He turned his face gently away from a kiss she was about to give him. There was a suggestion of uneasiness, almost disgust, in his expression.

"No," she said, "you are not going to love me always. You are going to leave me. But I regret nothing. I never will regret anything. Afterwards, when I return from--/this/--for good, to the great sorrow that will never leave me again, I shall say, 'I have had a lover,' and I shall come out from my nothingness to be happy for a moment."

He did not want to answer. He could not answer any more. He stammered:

"Why do you doubt me?"

But they turned their eyes toward the window. They were afraid, they were cold. They looked down at the space between the two houses and saw a vague remnant of twilight slip away like a ship of glory.

It seemed to me that the window beside them