Light - Henri Barbusse (short novels to read .txt) 📗

adds, her blue eyes looking at me, "and that is that there must be delusion. The people must have religion, so as to put up with the hardships of life, the sacrifices----"

She goes on again at once, more emphatically, "There must be religion for the unhappy, so that they won't give way. It may be foolishness, but if you take that away from them, what have they left?"

The gentle woman--the normal woman of settled habits--whom I had left here repeats, "There must be illusion." She sticks to this idea, she insists, she is taking the side of the unhappy. Perhaps she talks like that for her own sake, and perhaps only because she is compassionate for me.

I said in vain, "No--there must never be delusion, never fallacies. There should be no more lies. We shall not know then where we're going."

She persists and makes signs of dissent.

I say no more, tired. But I do not lower my gaze before the all-powerful surroundings of circumstance. My eyes are pitiless, and cannot help descrying the false God and the false priests everywhere.

We go down the footpath and return in silence. But it seems to me that the rule of evil is hidden in easy security among the illusions which they heap up over us. I am nothing; I am no more than I was before, but I am applying my hunger for the truth. I tell myself again that there is no supernatural power, that nothing has fallen from the sky; that everything is within us and in our hands. And in the inspiration of that faith my eyes embrace the magnificence of the empty sky, the abounding desert of the earth, the Paradise of the Possible.

We pass along the base of the church. Marie says to me--as if nothing had just been said, "Look how the poor church was damaged by a bomb from an aeroplane--all one side of the steeple gone. The good old vicar was quite ill about it. As soon as he got up he did nothing else but try to raise money to have his dear steeple built up again; and he got it."

People are revolving round the building and measuring its yawning mutilation with their eyes. My thoughts turn to all these passers-by and to all those who will pass by, whom I shall not see, and to other wounded steeples. The most beautiful of all voices echoes within me, and I would fain make use of it for this entreaty, "Build not the churches again! You who will come after us, you who, in the sharp distinctness of the ended deluge will perhaps be able to see the order of things more clearly, don't build the churches again! They did not contain what we used to believe, and for centuries they have only been the prisons of the saviours, and monumental lies. If you are still of the faith have your temples within yourselves. But if you again bring stones to build up a narrow and evil tradition, that is the end of all. In the name of justice, in the name of light, in the name of pity, do not build the churches again!"

But I did not say anything. I bow my head and walk more heavily.

I see Madame Marcassin coming out of the church with blinking eyes, weary-looking, a widow indeed. I bow and approach her and talk to her a little, humbly, about her husband, since I was under his orders and saw him die. She listens to me in dejected inattention. She is elsewhere. She says to me at last, "I had a memorial service since it's usual." Then she maintains a silence which means "There's nothing to be said, just as there's nothing to be done." In face of that emptiness I understand the crime that Marcassin committed in letting himself be killed for nothing but the glory of dying.

* * * * * *


CHAPTER XIX


GHOSTS

We have gone out together and aimlessly; we walk straight forward.

It is an autumnal day--gray lace of clouds and wind. Some dried leaves lie on the ground and others go whirling. We are in August, but it is an autumn day all the same. Days do not allow themselves to be set in strict order, like men.

Our steps take us in the direction of the waterfall and the mill. We have seldom been there again since our engagement days. Marie is covered in a big gray cloak; her hat is black silk with a little square of color embroidered in front. She looks tired, and her eyes are red. When she walks in front of me I see the twisted mass of her beautiful fair hair.

Instinctively we both looked for the inscriptions we cut, once upon a time, on trees and on stones, in foolish delight. We sought them like scattered treasure, on the strange cheeks of the old willows, near the tendrils of the fall, on the birches that stand like candles in front of the violet thicket, and on the old fir which so often sheltered us with its dark wings. Many inscriptions have disappeared. Some are worn away because things do; some are covered by a host of other inscriptions or they are distorted and ugly. Nearly all have passed on as if they had been passers-by.

Marie is tired. She often sits down, with her big cloak and her sensible air; and as she sits she seems like a statue of nature, of space, and the wind.

We do not speak. We have gone down along the side of the river--slowly, as if we were climbing--towards the stone seat of the wall. The distances have altered. This seat, for instance, we meet it sooner than we thought we should, like some one in the dark; but it is the seat all right. The rose-tree which grew above it has withered away and become a crown of thorns.

There are dead leaves on the stone slab. They come from the chestnuts yonder. They fell on the ground and yet they have flown away as far as the seat.

On this seat--where she came to me for the first time, which was once so important to us that it seemed as if the background of things all about us had been created by us--we sit down to-day, after we have vainly sought in nature the traces of our transit.

The landscape is peaceful, simple, empty; it fills us with a great quivering. Marie is so sad and so simple that you can see her thought.

I have leaned forward, my elbows on my knees. I have contemplated the gravel at my feet; and suddenly I start, for I understand that my eyes were looking for the marks of our footsteps, in spite of the stone, in spite of the sand.

After the solemnity of a long silence, Marie's face takes on a look of defeat, and suddenly she begins to cry. The tears which fill her--for one always weeps in full, drop on to her knees. And through her sobs there fall from her wet lips words almost shapeless, but desperate and fierce, as a burst of forced laughter.

"It's all over!" she cries.

* * * * * *


I have put my arm round her waist, and I am shaken by the sorrow which agitates her chest and throat, and sometimes shakes her rudely, the sorrow which does not belong to me, which belongs to no one, and is like a divinity.

She becomes composed. I take her hand. In a weak voice she calls some memories up--this and that--and "one morning----" She applies herself to it and counts them. I speak, too, gently. We question each other. "Do you remember?"--"Oh, yes." And when some more precise and intimate detail prompts the question we only reply, "A little." Our separation and the great happenings past which the world has whirled have made the past recoil and shaped a deep ditch. Nothing has changed; but when we look we see.

Once, after we had recalled to each other an enchanted summer evening, I said, "We loved each other," and she answered, "I remember."

I call her by her name, in a low voice, so as to draw her out of the dumbness into which she is falling.

She listens to me, and then says, placidly, despairingly, "'_Marie_,'--you used to say it like that. I can't realize that I had the same name."

A few moments later, as we talked of something else, she said to me at last, "Ah, that day we had dreams of travel, about our plans--_you were there_, sitting by my side."

In those former times we lived. Now we hardly live any more, since we have lived. They who we were are dead, for we are here. Her glances come to me, but they do not join again the two surviving voids that we are; her look does not wipe out our widowhood, nor change anything. And I, I am too imbued with clear-sighted simplicity and truth to answer "no" when it is "yes." In this moment by my side Marie is like me.

The immense mourning of human hearts appears to us. We dare not name it yet; but we dare not let it not appear in all that we say.

* * * * * *


Then we see a woman, climbing the footpath and coming nearer to us. It is Marthe, grown up, full-blown. She says a few words to us and then goes away, smiling. She smiles, she who plays a part in our drama. The likeness which formerly haunted me now haunts Marie, too--both of us, side by side, and without saying it, harbored the same thought, to see that child growing up and showing what Marie was.

Marie confesses all, all at once, "I was only my youth and my beauty, like all women. And _there_ go my youth and beauty--Marthe! Then, I----?" In anguish she goes on, "I'm not old yet, since I'm only thirty-five, but I've aged very quickly; I've some white hairs that you can see, close to; I'm wrinkled and my eyes have sunk. I'm here, in life, to live, to occupy my time; but I'm nothing more than I am! Of course, I'm still alive, but the future comes to an end before life does. Ah, it's really only youth that has a place in life. All young faces are alike and go from one to the other without ever being deceived. They wipe out and destroy all the rest,