Light by Henri Barbusse (good novels to read in english txt) 📕

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Strange footsteps are making the floor creak, and stopping there. I open my eyes. A woman is before me. Ah! the sight of her throws me into infinite confusion! She is the woman of my vision. Was it true, then? I look at her with wide-open eyes. She says to me:

"It's me."

Then she bends low and adds softly:

"I'm Marie; you're Simon."

"Ah!" I say. "I remember."

I repeat the profound words she has just uttered. She speaks to me again with the voice which comes back from far away. I half rise. I look again. I learn myself again, word by word.

It is she, naturally, who tells me I was wounded in the chest and hip, and that I lay three days forsaken--ragged wounds, much blood lost, a lot of fever, and enormous fatigue.

"You'll get up soon," she says.

I get up?--I, the prostrate being? I am astonished and afraid.

Marie goes away. She increases my solitude, step by step, and for a long time my eyes follow her going and her absence.

In the evening I hear a secret and whispered conference near the bed of the sick man in the brown vest. He is curled up, and breathes humbly. They say, very low:

"He's going to die--in one hour from now, or two. He's in such a state that to-morrow morning he'll be rotten. He must be taken away on the moment."

At nine in the evening they say that, and then they put the lights out and go away. I can see nothing more but him. There is the one lamp, close by, watching over him. He pants and trickles. He shines as though it rained on him. His beard has grown, grimily. His hair is plastered on his sticky forehead; his sweat is gray.

In the morning the bed is empty, and adorned with clean sheets.

And along with the man annulled, all the things he had poisoned have disappeared.

"It'll be Number Thirty-six's turn next," says the orderly.

I follow the direction of his glance. I see the condemned man. He is writing a letter. He speaks, he lives. But he is wounded in the belly. He carries his death like a fetus.

* * * * * *


It is the day when we change our clothes. Some of the invalids manage it by themselves; and, sitting up in bed, they perform signaling operations with arms and white linen. Others are helped by the nurse. On their bare flesh I catch sight of scars and cavities, and parts stitched and patched, of a different shade. There is even a case of amputation (and bronchitis) who reveals a new and rosy stump, like a new-born infant. The negro does not move while they strip his thin, insect-like trunk; and then, bleached once more, he begins again to rock his head, looking boundlessly for the sun and for Africa. They exhume the paralyzed man from his sheets and change his clothes opposite me. At first he lies motionless in his clean shirt, in a lump. Then he makes a guttural noise which brings the nurse up. In a cracked voice, as of a machine that speaks, he asks her to move his feet, which are caught in the sheet. Then he lies staring, arranged in rigid orderliness within the boards of his carcass.

Marie has come back and is sitting on a chair. We both spell out the past, which she brings me abundantly. My brain is working incalculably.

"We're quite near home, you know," Marie says.

Her words extricate our home, our quarter; they have endless echoes.

That day I raised myself on the bed and looked out of the window for the first time, although it had always been there, within reach of my eyes. And I saw the sky for the first time, and a gray yard as well, where it was visibly cold, and a gray day, an ordinary day, like life, like everything.

Quickly the days wiped each other out. Gradually I got up, in the middle of the men who had relapsed into childhood, and were awkwardly beginning again, or plaintively complaining in their beds. I have strolled in the wards, and then along a path. It is a matter of formalities now--convalescence, and in a month's time the Medical Board.

At last Marie came one morning for me, to go home, for that interval.

She found me on the seat in the yard of the hospital, which used to be a school, under the cloth--which was the only spot where a ray of sunshine could get in. I was meditating in the middle of an assembly of old cripples and men with heads or arms bandaged, with ragged and incongruous equipment, with sick clothes. I detached myself from the miracle-yard and followed Marie, after thanking the nurse and saying good-by to her.

The corporal of the hospital orderlies is the vicar of our church--he who said and who spread it about that he was going to share the soldiers' sufferings, like all the priests. Marie says to me, "Aren't you going to see him?"

"No," I say.

We set out for life by a shady path, and then the high road came. We walked slowly. Marie carried the bundle. The horizons were even, the earth was flat and made no noise, and the dome of the sky no longer banged like a big clock. The fields were empty, right to the end, because of the war; but the lines of the road were scriptural, turning not aside to the right hand or to the left. And I, cleansed, simplified, lucid--though still astonished at the silence and affected by the peacefulness--I saw it all distinctly, without a veil, without anything. It seemed to me that I bore within me a great new reason, unused.

We were not far away. Soon we uncovered the past, step by step. As fast as we drew near, smaller and smaller details introduced themselves and told us their names--that tree with the stones round it, those forsaken and declining sheds. I even found recollections shut up in the little retreats of the kilometer-stones.

But Marie was looking at me with an indefinable expression.

"You're icy cold," she said to me suddenly, shivering.

"No," I said, "no."

We stopped at an inn to rest and eat, and it was already evening when we reached the streets.

Marie pointed out a man who was crossing over, yonder.

"Monsieur Rampaille is rich now, because of the War."

Then it was a woman, dressed in fluttering white and blue, disappearing round the corner of a house:

"That's Antonia Véron. She's been in the Red Cross service. She's got a decoration because of the War."

"Ah!" I said, "everything's changed."

Now we are in sight of the house. The distance between the corner of the street and the house seems to me smaller than it should be. The court comes to an end suddenly; its shape looks shorter than it is in reality. In the same way, all the memories of my former life appear dwindled to me.

The house, the rooms. I have climbed the stairs and come down again, watched by Marie. I have recognized everything; some things even which I did not see. There is no one else but us two in the falling night, as though people had agreed not to show themselves yet to this man who comes back.

"There--now we're at home," says Marie, at last.

We sit down, facing each other.

"What are we going to do?"

"We're going to live."

"We're going to live."

I ponder. She looks at me stealthily, with that mysterious expression of anguish which gets over me. I notice the precautions she takes in watching me. And once it seemed to me that her eyes were red with crying. I--I think of the hospital life I am leaving, of the gray street, and the simplicity of things.

* * * * * *


A day has slipped away already. In one day all the time gone by has reëstablished itself. I am become again what I was. Except that I am not so strong or so calm as before, it is as though nothing had happened.

But truth is more simple than before.

I inquire of Marie after this one or the other and question her.

Marie says to me:

"You're always saying Why?--like a child."

All the same I do not talk much. Marie is assiduous; obviously she is afraid of my silence. Once, when I was sitting opposite her and had said nothing for a long time, she suddenly hid her face in her hands, and in her turn she asked me, through her sobs:

"Why are you like that?"

I hesitate.

"It seems to me," I say at last, by way of answer, "that I am seeing things as they are."

"My poor boy!" Marie says, and she goes on crying.

I am touched by this obscure trouble. True, everything is obvious around me, but as it were laid bare. I have lost the secret which complicated life. I no longer have the illusion which distorts and conceals, that fervor, that sort of blind and unreasoning bravery which tosses you from one hour to the next, and from day to day.

And yet I am just taking up life again where I left it. I am upright, I am getting stronger and stronger. I am not ending, but beginning.

I slept profoundly, all alone in our bed.

Next morning, I saw Crillon, planted in the living-room downstairs. He held out his arms, and shouted. After expressing good wishes, he informs me, all in a breath:

"You don't know what's happened in the Town Council? Down yonder, towards the place they call Little January, y'know, there's a steep hill that gets wider as it goes down an' there's a gaslamp and a watchman's box where all the cyclists that want to smash their faces, and a few days ago now a navvy comes and sticks himself in there and no one never knew his name, an' he got a cyclist on his head an' he's gone dead. And against that gaslamp broken up by blows from cyclists they proposed to put a notice-board, although all recommendations would be superfluent. You catch on that it's nothing less than a maneuver to get the mayor's shirt out?"

Crillon's words vanish. As fast as he utters them I detach myself from all this poor old stuff. I cannot reply to him,