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

and they make the others see themselves as they are, so that they become useless."

She is right! When the young woman stands up she takes, in fact, the other's place in the ideal and in the human heart, and makes of the other a returning ghost. It is true. I knew it. Ah, I did not know it was so true! It is too obvious. I cannot deny it. Again a cry of assent rises to my lips and prevents me from saying, "No."

I cannot turn away from Marthe's advent, nor as I look at her, from recognizing Marie. I know she has had several little love-affairs. Just now she is alone. She is alone, but she will soon be leaning--yes, phantom or reality, man is not far from her. It is dazzling. Most certainly, I no longer think as I used to do that it is a sort of duty to satisfy the selfish promptings one has, and I have now got an inward veneration for right-doing; but all the same, if that being came to me, I know well that I should become, before all, and in spite of all, an immense cry of delight.

Marie falls back upon her idea, obdurately, and says, "A woman only lives by love and for love. When she's no longer good for that she's no longer anything."

She repeats, "You see--I'm nothing any more."

Ah, she is at the bottom of her abyss! She is at the extremity of a woman's mourning! She is not thinking only of me. Her thought is higher and vaster. She is thinking of all the woman she is, of all that love is, of all possible things when she says, "I'm no longer anything." And _I_--I am only he who is present with her just now, and no help whatever is left her to look for from any one.

I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness and simplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me with her presence--but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, I can do nothing against her grief, her perfect, infallible grief.

"Ah!" she cries, "if we came to life again!"

But she, too, has tried to cling to illusion. I see by the track of her tears, and because I am looking at her--that she has powdered her face to-day and put rouge on her lips, perhaps even on her cheeks, as she did in bygone days, laughing, to set herself off, in spite of me. This woman who tries to keep a good likeness of herself through passing time, to be fixed upon herself, who paints herself, she is, to that extent like what Rembrandt the profound and Titian the bold and exquisite did--make enduring, and save! But this time, a few tears have washed away the fragile, mortal effort.

She tries also to delude herself with words, and to discover something in them which would transform her. She asserts, as she did the other morning, "There must be illusion. No, we must not see things as they are." But I see clearly that such words do not exist.

Once, when she was looking at me distressfully, she murmured, "_You_--you've no more illusion at all. I pity you!"

At that moment, within the space of a flash, she was thinking of me only, and she pities me! She has found something in her grief to give me.

She is silent. She is seeking the supreme complaint; she is trying to find what there is which is more torturing and more simple; and she stammers--"The truth."

The truth is that the love of mankind is a single season among so many others. The truth is that we have within us something much more mortal than we are, and that it is this, all the same, which is all-important. Therefore we survive very much longer than we live. There are things we think we know and which yet are secrets. Do we really know what we believe? We believe in miracles. We make great efforts to struggle, to go mad. We should like to let all our good deserts be seen. We fancy that we are exceptions and that something supernatural is going to come along. But the quiet peace of the truth fixes us. The impossible becomes again the impossible. We are as silent as silence itself.

We stayed lonely on the seat until evening. Our hands and faces shone like gleams of storm in the entombment of the calm and the mist.

We go back home. We wait and then have dinner. We live these few hours. And we see ourselves alone in the house, facing each other, as never we saw ourselves, and we do not know what to do! It is a real drama of vacancy which is breaking loose. We are living together; our movements are in harmony, they touch and mingle. But all of it is empty. We do not long for each other, we can no longer expect each other, we have no dreams, we are not happy. It is a sort of imitation of life by phantoms, by beings who, in the distance are beings, but close by--so close--are phantoms!

Then bedtime comes. She is sleeping in the little bedroom opposite mine across the landing, less fine than mine and smaller, hung with an old and faded paper, where the patterned flowers are only an irregular relief, with traces here and there of powder, of colored dust and ashes.

We are going to separate on the landing. To-day is not the first time like that! but to-day we are feeling this great rending which is not one. She has begun to undress. She has taken off her blouse. I see her neck and her breasts, a little less firm than before, through her chemise; and half tumbling on to the nape of her neck, the fair hair which once magnificently flamed on her like a fire of straw.

She only says, "It's better to be a man than a woman."

Then she replies to my silence, "You see, we don't know what to say, now."

In the angle of the narrow doorway she spoke with a kind of immensity.

She goes into her room and disappears. Before I went to the war we slept in the same bed. We used to lie down side by side, so as to be annihilated in unconsciousness, or to go and dream somewhere else. (Commonplace life has shipwrecks worse than in Shakespearean dramas. For man and wife--to sleep, to die.) But since I came back we separate ourselves with a wall. This sincerity that I have brought back in my eyes and mind has changed the semblances round about me into reality, more than I imagine. Marie is hiding from me her faded but disregarded body. Her modesty has begun again; yes, she has ended by beginning again.

She has shut her door. She is undressing, alone in her room, slowly, and as if uselessly. There is only the light of her little lamp to caress her loosened hair, in which the others cannot yet see the white ones, the frosty hairs that she alone touches.

Her door is shut, decisive, banal, dreary.

Among some papers on my table I see the poem again which we once found out of doors, the bit of paper escaped from the mysterious hands which wrote on it, and come to the stone seat. It ended by whispering, "Only I know the tears that brimming rise, your beauty blended with your smile to espy."

In the days of yore it had made us smile with delight. To-night there are real tears in my eyes. What is it? I dimly see that there is something more than what we have seen, than what we have said, than what we have felt to-day. One day, perhaps, she and I will exchange better and richer sayings; and so, in that day, all the sadness will be of some service.


CHAPTER XX


THE CULT

I have been to the factory. I felt as much lost as if I had found myself translated there after a sleep of legendary length. There are many new faces. The factory has tripled--quadrupled in importance; quite a town of flimsy buildings has been added to it.

"They've built seven others like it in three months!" says Monsieur Mielvaque to me, proudly.

The manager is now another young nephew of the Messrs. Gozlan. He was living in Paris and came back on the day of the general mobilization. Old Monsieur Gozlan looks after everything.

I have a month to wait. I wait slowly, as everybody does. The houses in the lower town are peopled by absentees. When you go in they talk to you about the last letter, and always make the same huge and barren reflections on the war. In my street there are twelve houses where the people no longer await anything and have nothing to say, like Madame Marcassin. In some others, the one who has disappeared will perhaps come back; and they go about in them in a sort of hope which leans only on emptiness and silence. There are women who have begun their lives again in a kind of happy misery. The places near them of the dead or the living they have filled up.

The main streets have not changed, any more than the squares, except the one which is encrusted with a collection of huts. The life in them is as bustling as ever, and of brighter color, and more amusing. Many young men, rich or influential, are passing their wartime in the offices of the depot, of the Exchange, of Food Control, of Enlistment, of the Pay Department, and other administrations whose names one cannot remember. The priests are swarming in the two hospitals; on the faces of orderlies, cyclist messengers, doorkeepers and porters you can read their origin. For myself, I have never seen a parson in the front lines wearing the uniform of the ordinary fighting soldier, the uniform of those who make up the fatigue parties and fight as well against perfect misery!

My thought turns to what the man once said to me who was by me among the straw of a stable, "Why is there no more justice?" By the little that I know and have seen and am seeing, I can tell what an enormous rush sprang up, at the same time as the war, against the equality of the living. And if that injustice, which was turning the heroism of the others into a cheat has not been openly extended, it is because the war has lasted too long, and the scandal became so glaring that they were forced to look into it. It seems that it is only through fear that they have ended by deciding so much.

* * * * * *


I go into Fontan's. Crillon is with me--I picked him up from