The Inferno

by Henri Barbusse

  But she went out. That was the end of her. Nothing had happened, and now it was over. All this was too simple, too hard, too true.

  A gentle despair that I had never experienced before troubled me. Since the previous day I had changed. Human life, its living truth, I knew it as we all know it. I had been familiar with it all my life. I believed in it with a kind of fear now that it had appeared to me in a divine form.

  CHAPTER IV

  I went for several days without seeing anything. Those days were frightfully warm. At first the sky was grey and rainy. Now September was flaming to a close. Friday! Why, I had been in that house a week already.

  One sultry morning I sat in my room and sank into dreamy musings and thought of a fairy tale.

  The edge of a forest. In the undergrowth on the dark emerald carpet, circles of sunlight. Below, a hill rising from the plain, and above the thick yellow and dark-green foliage, a bit of wall and a turret as in a tapestry. A page advanced dressed like a bird. A buzzing. It was the sound of the royal chase in the distance. Unusually pleasant things were going to happen.

  ***

  The next afternoon was also hot and sunny. I remembered similar afternoons, years before and the present seemed to be that past, as if the glowing heat had effaced time and had stifled all other days beneath its brooding wings.

  The room next to mine was almost dark. They had closed the shutters. Through the double curtains made out of some thin material I saw the window streaked with shining bars, like the grating in front of a fire.

  In the torrid silence of the house, in the large slumber it enclosed, bursts of laughter mounted and broke, voices died away, as they had the day before and as they always would.

  From out of these remoter sounds emerged the distinct sound of footsteps, coming nearer and nearer. I propped myself up against the wall and looked. The door of the Room opened, as if pushed in by the flood of light that streamed through it, and two tiny shadows appeared, engulfed in the brightness.

  They acted as though they were being pursued. They hesitated on the threshold, the doorway making a frame around those little creatures. And then they entered.

  The door closed. The Room was now alive. I scrutinised the newcomers. I saw them indistinctly through the dark red and green spots dancing in front of my eyes, which had been dazzled by the flood of light. A little boy and a little girl, twelve or thirteen years old.

  They sat down on the sofa, and looked at each other in silence. Their faces were almost alike.

  ***

  The boy murmured:

  “You see, Helene, there is no one here.”

  And a hand pointed to the uncovered bed, and to the empty table and empty clothes-racks – the careful denudation of unoccupied rooms.

  Then the same hand began to tremble like a leaf. I heard the beating of my heart. The voices whispered:

  “We are alone. They did not see us.”

  “This is about the first time we've ever been alone together.”

  “Yet we have always known each other.”

  A little laugh.

  They seemed to need solitude, the first step to a mystery toward which they were travelling together. They had fled from the others. They had created for themselves the forbidden solitude. But you could clearly tell that now that they had found solitude, they did not know what else to look for.

  ***

  Then I heard one of them stammer and say sadly, with almost a sob:

  “We love each other dearly.”

  Then a tender phrase rose breathlessly, groping for words, timidly, like a bird just learning to fly:

  “I'd like to love you more.”

  To see them thus bent toward each other, in the warm shadow, which bathed them and veiled the childishness of their features, you would have thought them two lovers meeting.

  Two lovers! That was their dream, though they did not yet know what love meant.

  One of them had said “the first time.” It was the time that they felt they were alone, although these two cousins had been living close together.

  No doubt it was the first time that the two had sought to leave friendship and childhood behind them. It was the first time that desire had come to surprise and trouble two hearts, which until now had slept.

  ***

  Suddenly they stood up, and the slender ray of sunlight, which passed over them and fell at their feet, revealed their figures, lighted up their faces and hair, so that their presence brightened the room.

  Were they going away? No, they sat down again. Everything fell back into shadow, into mystery, into truth.

  In beholding them, I felt a confused mingling of my past and the past of the world. Where were they? Everywhere, since they existed. They were on the banks of the Nile, the Ganges, or the Cydnus, on the banks of the eternal river of the ages. They were Daphnis and Chloë, under a myrtle bush, in the Greek sunshine, the shimmer of leaves on their faces, and their faces mirroring each other. Their vague little conversation hummed like the wings of a bee, near the freshness of fountains and the heat that consumed the meadows, while in the distance a chariot went by, laden with sheaves.

  The new world opened. The panting truth was there. It confused them. They feared the brusque intrusion of some divinity. They were happy and unhappy. They nestled as close together as they could. They brought to each other as much as they could. But they did not suspect what it was that they were bringing. They were too small, too young. They had not lived long enough. Each was to self a stifling secret.

  Like all human beings, like me, like us, they wished for what they did not have. They were beggars. But they asked themselves for charity. They asked for help from their own persons.

  The boy, a man already, impoverished already by his feminine companion, turned, drawn towards her, and held out his awkward arms, without daring to look at her.

  The girl, a woman already, leaned her face on the back of the sofa, her eyes shining. Her cheeks were plump and rosy, tinted and warmed by her heart. The skin of her neck, taut and satiny, quivered. Half-blown and waiting, a little voluptuous because voluptuousness already emanated from her, she was like a rose inhaling sunlight.

  And I – I could not tear my eyes from them.

  ***

  After a long silence, he murmured:

  “Shall we stop calling each other by our first names?”

  “Why?”

  He seemed absorbed in thought.

  “So as to begin over again,” he said at last.

  “Shall we, Miss Janvier?” he asked again.

  She gave a visible start at the touch of this new manner of address, at the word “Miss,” as if it were a kind of embrace.

  “Why, Mr. Lecoq,” she ventured hesitatingly, “it is as though something had covered us, and we were removing–”

  Now, he became bolder.

  “Shall we kiss each other on our mouths?”

  She was oppressed, and could not quite smile.

  “Yes,” she said.

  They caught hold of each other's arms and shoulders and held out their lips, as if their mouths were birds.

  “Jean!” “Hélène!” came softly.

  It was the first thing they had found out. To embrace the embracer, is it not the tiniest caress and the least sort of a bond? And yet it is so sternly prohibited.

  Again they seemed to me to be without age.

  They were like all lovers, while they held hands, their faces joined, trembling and blind, in the shadow of a kiss.

  ***

  They broke off, and disengaged themselves from their embrace, whose meaning they had not yet learned.

  They talked with their innocent lips. About what? About the past, which was so near and so short.

  They were leaving their paradise of childhood and ignorance. They spoke of a house and a garden where they had both lived.

  The house absorbed them. It was surrounded by a garden wall, so that from the road all you could see was the tip of the eaves, and you
couldn't tell what was going on inside of it.

  They prattled:

  “The rooms, when we were little and they were so big–”

  “It was easier to walk there than anywhere else.”

  To hear the children talk, you would have thought there was something benevolent and invisible, something like the good God of the past, behind those walls. She hummed an air she had heard there, and said that music was easier to remember than people. They dropped back into the past easily and naturally. They wrapped themselves up in their memories as though they were cold.

  “The other day, just before we left, I took a candle and walked alone through the rooms, which scarcely woke up to watch me pass.”

  In the garden, so prim and well kept, they thought only of the flowers, and little else. They saw the pool, the shady walk, and the cherry tree, which, in winter when the lawn was white, they made believe had too many blossoms – snow blossoms.

  The day before they had still been in the garden, like brother and sister. Now life seemed to have grown serious all at once, and they no longer knew how to play. I saw that they wanted to kill the past. When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill it.

  She sat up straight.

  “I don't want to remember any more,” she said.

  And he:

  “I don't want us to be like each other any more. I don't want us to be brother and sister any more.”

  Gradually their eyes opened.

  “To touch nothing but each other's hands,” he muttered, trembling.

  “Brother – sister – that's nothing.”

  It had come – the hour of beautiful, troubled decisions, of forbidden fruits. They had not belonged to each other before. The hour had come when they sought to be all in all to each other.

  They were a little self-conscious, a little ashamed of themselves already. A few days before, in the evening, it had given them profound pleasure to disobey their parents and go out of the garden although they had been forbidden to leave it.

  “Grandmother came to the top of the steps and called to us to come in.”

  “But we were gone. We had slipped through the hole in the hedge where a bird always sang. There was no wind, and scarcely any light. Even the trees didn't stir. The dust on the ground was dead. The shadows stole round us so softly that we almost spoke to them. We were frightened to see night coming on. Everything had lost its colour. But the night was clear, and the flowers, the road, even the wheat were silver. And it was then that my mouth came closest to your mouth.”

  “The night,” she said, her soul carried aloft on a wave of beauty, “the night caresses the caresses.”

  “I took your hand, and I knew that you would live life whole. When I used to say 'Hélène,' I did not know what I was saying. Now, when I shall say 'she,' it will be everything.”

  Once more their lips joined. Their mouths and their eyes were those of Adam and Eve. I recalled the ancestral lesson from which sacred history and human history flow as from a fountain. They wandered in the penetrating light of paradise without knowledge. They were as if they did not exist. When – through triumphant curiosity, though forbidden by God himself – they learned the secret, the sky was darkened. The certainty of a future of sorrow had fallen upon them. Angels pursued them like vultures. They grovelled on the ground from day to day, but they had created love, they had replaced divine riches by the poverty of belonging to each other.

  The two little children had taken their parts in the eternal drama. By talking to each other as they did they had restored to their first names their full significance.

  “I should like to love you more. I should like to love you harder. How could I?”

  ***

  They said no more, as though there were no more words for them. They were completely absorbed in themselves, and their hands trembled.

  Then they rose, and as they did so, the door opened. There stood the old stooping grandmother. She came out of the grey, out of the realm of phantoms, out of the past. She was looking for them as if they had gone astray. She called them in a low voice. She put into her tone a great gentleness, almost sadness, strangely harmonising with the children's presence.

  “You are here, children?” she said, with a kind little laugh. “What are you doing here? Come, they are looking for you.”

  She was old and faded, but she was angelic, with her gown fastened up to her neck. Beside these two, who were preparing for the large life, she was, thenceforth, like a child, inactive, useless.

  They rushed into her arms, and pressed their foreheads against her saintly mouth. They seemed to be saying good-by to her forever.

  ***

  She went out. And a moment afterwards they followed her, hastily, as they had come, united now by an invisible and sublime bond. On the threshold, they looked at each other once more.

  And now that the room was empty like a deserted sanctuary, I thought of their glance, their first glance of love, which I had seen.

  No one before me had ever seen a first glance of love. I was beside them, but, far away. I understood and read it without being part of the infatuation myself, without being lost in the sensation. That is why I saw that glance. They did not know when it began, they did not know that it was the first. Afterwards they would forget. The urgent flowering of their hearts would destroy those preludes. We can no more know our first glance of love than our last. I shall remember it when they will have forgotten it.

  I do not recall my own first glance of love, my own first gift of love. Yet it happened. Those divine simplicities are erased from my heart. Good God, then what do I retain that is of value? The little boy that I was is dead forever, before my eyes. I survived him, but forgetfulness tormented me, then overcame me, the sad process of living ruined me, and I scarcely know what he knew. I remember things at random only, but the most beautiful, the sweetest memories are gone.

  Well, this tender canticle that I overheard, full of infinity and overflowing with fresh laughter, this precious song, I take and hold and cherish. It pulses in my heart. I have stolen, but I have preserved truth.

  CHAPTER V

  For a day, the Room remained vacant. Twice I had high hopes, then disillusionment.

  Waiting had become a habit, an occupation. I put off appointments, delayed my walks, gained time at the risk of losing my position. I arranged my life as for a new love. I left my room only to go down to dinner, where nothing interested me any more.

  The second day, I noticed that the Room was ready to receive a new occupant. It was waiting. I had a thousand dreams of who the guest would be, while the Room kept its secret, like some one thinking.

  Twilight came, then evening, which magnified the room but did not change it. I was already in despair, when the door opened in the darkness, and I saw on the threshold the shadow of a man.

  ***

  He was scarcely to be distinguished in the evening light.

  Dark clothing, milky white cuffs from which his grey tapering hands hung down; a collar a little whiter than the rest. In his round greyish face I could see the dusky hollows of his eyes and mouth, under the chin a cavity of shadow. The yellow of his forehead shone unclearly. His cheekbone made an obscure bar in the dusk. You would have called him a skeleton. What was this being whose physiognomy was so monstrously simple?

  He came nearer, and his face kindled, assumed life. I saw that he was handsome.

  He had a charming serious face, fringed with a fine black beard, a high forehead and sparkling eyes. A haughty grace guided and refined his movements.

  He came forward a step or two, then returned to the door, which was still open. The shadow of the door trembled, a silhouette appeared and took shape. A little black-gloved hand grasped the knob, and a woman stole into the room, with a questioning face.

  She must have been a few steps behind him in the street. They had not wished to enter the room together, in which they both sought refuge to escape pursuit.

  She closed
the door, and leaned her whole weight against it, to close it still tighter. Slowly she turned her head to him, paralysed for a moment, it seemed to me, with fear that it was not he. They stared into each other's faces. A cry burst from them, passionate, restrained, almost mute, echoing from one to the other. It seemed to open up their wound.

  “You!”

  “You!”

  She almost fainted. She dropped on his breast as though swept by a storm. She had just strength enough to fall into his arms. I saw the man's two large pale hands, opened but slightly crooked, resting on the woman's back. A sort of desperate palpitation seized them, as if an immense angel were in the Room, struggling and making vain efforts to escape. And it seemed to me that the Room was too small for this couple, although it was full of the evening.

  “They didn't see us!”

  It was the same phrase which had come the other day from the two children.

  He said, “Come!” leading her over to the sofa, near the window, and they seated themselves on the red velvet. I saw their arms joined together as though by a cord. They remained there, engrossed, gathering about them all the shadow of the world, reviving, beginning to live again in their element of night and solitude.

  What an entry, what an entry! What an irruption of anathema!

  I had thought, when this form of sin presented itself before me, when the woman appeared at the door, plainly driven toward him, that I should witness bliss in its plenitude, a savage and animal joy, as momentous as nature. On the contrary, I found that this meeting was like a heart-rending farewell.

  “Then we shall always be afraid?”

  She seemed just a little more tranquil, and said this with an anxious glance at him, as if really expecting a reply.