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

see one adorning itself with smoke, and we think of the dead wood coming to life again on the hearth, and of the seated workman, whose hands are rewarded with rest. And that one, although motionless, is alive with children--the breeze is scattering the laughter of their games and seems to play with it, and on the sandy ground are the crumbs of childish footsteps. Our eyes follow the postman entering his home, his work ended; he has heroically overcome his long journeyings. After carrying letters all day to those who were waiting for them, he is carrying himself to his own people, who also await him--it is the family which knows the value of the father. He pushes the gate open, he enters the garden path, his hands are at last empty!

Along by the old gray wall, old Eudo is making his way, the incurable widower whose bad news still stubbornly persists, so that he bears it along around him, and it slackens his steps, and can be seen, and he takes up more space than he seems to take. A woman meets him, and her youth is disclosed in the twilight; it expands in her hurrying steps. It is Mina, going to some trysting-place. She crosses and presses her little fichu on her heart; we can see that distance dwindles affectionately in front of her. As she passes away, bent forward and smiling with her ripe lips, we can see the strength of her heart.

Mist is gradually falling. Now we can only see white things clearly--the new parts of houses, the walls, the high road, joined to the other one by footpaths which straggle through the dark fields, the big white stones, tranquil as sheep, and the horse-pond, whose gleam amid the far obscurity imitates whiteness in unexpected fashion. Then we can only see light things--the stains of faces and hands, those faces which see each other in the gloom longer than is logical and exceed themselves.

Pervaded by a sort of serious musing, we turn back into the room and sit down, I on the edge of the bed, she on a chair in front of the open window, in the center of the pearly sky.

Her thoughts are the same as mine, for she turns her face to me and says:

"And ourselves."

* * * * * *


She sighs for the thought she has. She would like to be silent, but she must speak.

"We don't love each other any more," she says, embarrassed by the greatness of the things she utters; "but we did once, and I want to see our love again."

She gets up, opens the wardrobe, and sits down again in the same place with a box in her hands. She says:

"There it is. Those are our letters."

"Our letters, our beautiful letters!" she goes on. "I could really say they're more beautiful than all others. We know them by heart--but would you like us to read them again? _You_ read them--there's still light enough--and let me see how happy we've been."

She hands the casket to me. The letters we wrote each other during our engagement are arranged in it.

"That one," she says, "is the first from you. Is it? Yes--no, it isn't; do you think it is?"

I take the letter, murmur it, and then read it aloud. It spoke of the future, and said, "In a little while, how happy we shall be!"

She comes near, lowers her head, reads the date and whispers:

"Nineteen-two; it's been dead for thirteen years--it's a long time. No, it isn't a long time--I don't know what it ought to be. Here's another--read it."

I go on denuding the letters. We quickly find out what a mistake it was to say we know them by heart. This one has no date--simply the name of a day--Monday, and we believed that would be enough! Now, it is entirely lost and become barren, this anonymous letter in the middle of the rest.

"We don't know them by heart any more," Marie confesses. "Remember ourselves? How could we remember all that?"

* * * * * *


This reading was like that of a book once already read in bygone days. It could not revive again the diligent and fervent hours when our pens were moving--and our lips, too, a little. Indistinctly it brought back, with unfathomable gaps, the adventure lived in three days by others, the people that we were. When I read a letter from her which spoke of caresses to come, Marie stammered, "And she dared to write that!" but she did not blush and was not confused.

Then she shook her head a little, and said dolefully:

"What a lot of things we have hidden away, little by little, in spite of ourselves! How strong people must be to forget so much!"

She was beginning to catch a glimpse of a bottomless abyss, and to despair. Suddenly she broke in:

"That's enough! We can't read them again. We can't understand what's written. That's enough--don't take my illusion away."

She spoke like the poor madwoman of the streets, and added in a whisper:

"This morning, when I opened that box where the letters were shut up, some little flies flew out."

We stop reading the letters a moment, and look at them. The ashes of life! All that we can remember is almost nothing. Memory is greater than we are, but memory is living and mortal as well. These letters, these unintelligible flowers, these bits of lace and of paper, what are they? Around these flimsy things what is there left? We are handling the casket together. Thus we are completely attached in the hollow of our hands.

* * * * * *


And yet we went on reading.

But something strange is growing gradually greater; it grasps us, it surprises us hopelessly--every letter speaks of the _future_.

In vain Marie said to me:

"What about afterwards? Try another--later on."

Every letter said, "In a little while, how we shall love each other when our time is spent together! How beautiful you will be when you are always there. Later on we'll make that trip again; after a while we'll carry that scheme out, later on . . ."

"That's all we could say!"

A little before the wedding we wrote that we were wasting our time so far from each other, and that we were unhappy.

"Ah!" said Marie, in a sort of terror, "we wrote that! And afterwards . . ."

After, the letter from which we expected all, said:

"Soon we shan't leave each other any more. At last we shall live!" And it spoke of a paradise, of the life that was coming. . . .

"And afterwards?"

"After that, there's nothing more . . . it's the last letter."

* * * * * *


There is nothing more. It is like a stage-trick, suddenly revealing the truth. There is nothing between the paradise dreamed of and the paradise lost. There is nothing, since we always want what we have not got. We hope, and then we regret. We hope for the future, and then we turn to the past, and then we begin slowly and desperately to hope for the past! The two most violent and abiding feelings, hope and regret, both lean upon nothing. To ask, to ask, to have not! Humanity is exactly the same thing as poverty. Happiness has not the time to live; we have not really the time to profit by what we are. Happiness, that thing which never is--and which yet, for one day, is no longer!

I see her drawing breath, quivering, mortally wounded, sinking upon the chair.

I take her hand, as I did before. I speak to her, rather timidly and at random: "Carnal love isn't the whole of love."

"It's love!" Marie answers.

I do not reply.

"Ah!" she says, "we try to juggle with words, but we can't conceal the truth."

"The truth! I'm going to tell you what I have been truly, _I_. . . ."

* * * * * *


I could not prevent myself from saying it, from crying it in a loud and trembling voice, leaning over her. For some moments there had been outlined within me the tragic shape of the cry which at last came forth. It was a sort of madness of sincerity and simplicity which seized me.

And I, unveiling my life to her, though it slid away by the side of hers, all my life, with its failings and its coarseness. I let her see me in my desires, in my hungers, in my entrails.

Never has a confession so complete been thrown off. Yes, among the fates which men and women bear together, one must be almost mad not to lie. I tick off my past, the succession of love-affairs multiplied by each other, and come to naught. I have been an ordinary man, no better, no worse, than another; well, here I am, here is the man, here is the lover.

I can see that she has half-risen, in the little bedroom which has lost its color. She is afraid of the truth! She watches my words as you look at a blasphemer. But the truth has seized me and cannot let me go. And I recall what was--both this woman and that, and all those whom I loved and never deigned to know what they brought me when they brought their bodies; I recall the fierce selfishness which nothing exhausted, and all the savagery of my life beside her. I say it all--unable even to avoid the blows of brutal details--like a harsh duty accomplished to the end.

Sometimes she murmured, like a sigh, "I knew it." At others, she would say, almost like a sob, "That's true!" And once, too, she began a confused protest, a sort of reproach. Then, soon, she listens nigher. She might almost be left behind by the greatness of my confession; and, gradually, I see her falling into silence, the twice-illumined woman on that adorable