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

doesn't escape them. You aren't like the rest any more. If you go on you'll look as silly as a giant, and if you're going to frighten folks, look out for yourself!"

He plants himself before me in massive conviction. The full daylight reveals more crudely the aging of his features. His skin is stretched on the bones of his head, and the muscles of his neck and shoulders work badly; they stick, like old drawers.

"And then, after all, what _do_ you want? We've got to carry the war on, eh? We must give the Boches hell, to sum up."

With an effort, wearied beforehand, I ask, "And afterwards?"

"What--afterwards? Afterwards there'll be wars, naturally, but civilized wars. Afterwards? Why, future posterity! Own up that you'd like to save the world, eh, what? When you launch out into these great machinations you say enormities compulsively. The future? Ha, ha!"

I turn away from him. Of what use to try to tell him that the past is dead, that the present is passing, that the future alone is positive!

Through Crillon's paternal admonishment I feel the threat of the others. It is not yet hostility around me; but it is already a rupture. With this truth that clings to me alone, amid the world and its phantoms, am I not indeed rushing into a sort of tragedy impossible to maintain? They who surround me, filled to the lips, filled to the eyes, with the gross acceptance which turns men into beasts, they look at me mistrustfully, ready to be let loose against me. Little more was lacking before I should be as much a reprobate as Brisbille, who, in this very place, before the war, stood up alone before the multitude and tried to tell them to their faces that they were going into the gulf.

* * * * * *


I move away with Marie. We go down into the valley, and then climb Chestnut Hill. I like these places where I used so often to come in the days when everything around me was a hell which I did not see. Now that I am a ghost returning from the beyond, this hill still draws me through the streets and lanes. I remember it and it remembers me. There is something which we share, which I took away with me yonder, everywhere, like a secret. I hear that despoiled soldier who said, "Where I come from there are fields and paths and the sea; nowhere else in the world is there that," and amid my unhappy memories that extraordinary saying shines like news of the truth.

We sit down on the bank which borders the lane. We can see the town, the station and carts on the road; and yonder three villages make harmony, sometimes more carefully limned by bursts of sunshine. The horizons entwine us in a murmur. The crossing where we are is the spot where four roads make a movement of reunion.

But my spirit is no longer what it was. Vaguely I seek, everywhere. I must see things with all their consequences, and right to their source. Against all the chains of facts I must have long arguments to bring; and the world's chaos requires an interpretation equally terrible.

* * * * * *


There is a slight noise--a frail passer-by and a speck which jumps round her feet. Marie looks and says mechanically, like a devout woman, making the sign of the cross, "Poor little angel!"

It is little Antoinette and her dog. She gropes for the edge of the road with a stick, for she has become quite blind. They never looked after her. They were going to do it, unendingly, but they never did it. They always said, "Poor little angel," and that was all.

She is so miserably clad that you lower your eyes before her, although she cannot see. She wanders and seeks, incapable of understanding the wrong they have done, they have allowed to be done, the wrong which no one remembers. Alas, to the prating indifference and the indolent negligence of men there is only this poor little blind witness.

She stops in front of us and puts out her hand awkwardly. She is begging! No one troubles himself about her now. She is talking to her dog; he was born in the castle kennels--Marie told me about him. He was the last of a litter, ill-shaped, with a head too big, and bad eyes; and the Baroness said, as they were going to drown him, and because she is always thinking of good things, "Give him to the little blind girl." The child is training him to guide her; but he is young, he wants to play when other dogs go by, he hears her with listless ear. It is difficult for him to begin serious work; and he plucks the string from her hands. She calls to him; and waits.

Then, during a long time, a good many passers-by appear and vanish. We do not look at all of them.

But lo, turning the corner like some one of importance, here comes a sleek and tawny mastiff, with the silvery tinkle of a trinket which gleams on his neck. He is proclaiming and preceding his young mistress, Mademoiselle Evelyn de Monthyon, who is riding her pony. The little girl caracoles sedately, clad in a riding habit, and armed with a crop. She has been an orphan for a long time. She is the mistress of the castle. She is twelve years old and has millions. A mounted groom in full livery follows her, looking like a stage-player or a chamberlain; and then, with measured steps, an elderly governess, dressed in black silk, and manifestly thinking of some Court.

Mademoiselle Evelyn de Monthyon and her pretty name set us thinking of Antoinette, who hardly has a name; and it seems to us that these two are the only ones who have passed before our eyes. The difference in the earthly fates of these two creatures who have both the same fragile innocence, the same pure and complete incapacity of childhood, plunges us into a tragedy of thought. The misery and the might which have fallen on those little immature heads are equally undeserved. It is a disgrace for men to see a poor child; it is also a disgrace for men to see a rich child.

I feel malicious towards the little sumptuous princess who has just appeared, already haughty in spite of her littleness; and I am stirred with pity for the frail victim whom life is obliterating with all its might; and Marie, I can see, gentle Marie, has the same thoughts. Who would not feel them in face of this twin picture of childhood which a passing chance has brought us, of this one picture torn in two?

But I resist this emotion; the understanding of things must be based, not on sentiment, but on reason. There must be justice, not charity. Kindness is solitary. Compassion becomes one with him whom we pity; it allows us to fathom him, to understand him alone amongst the rest; but it blurs and befogs the laws of the whole. I must set off with a clear idea, like the beam of a lighthouse through the deformities and temptations of night.

As I have seen equality, I am seeing inequality. Equality in truth; inequality in fact. We observe in man's beginning the beginning of his hurt; the root of the error is in inheritance.

Injustice, artificial and groundless authority, royalty without reason, the fantastic freaks of fortune which suddenly put crowns on heads! It is there, as far as the monstrous authority of the dead, that we must draw a straight line and clean the darkness away.

The transfer of the riches and authority of the dead, of whatever kind, to their descendants, is not in accord with reason and the moral law. The laws of might and of possessions are for the living alone. Every man must occupy in the common lot a place which he owes to his work and not to luck.

It is tradition! But that is no reason, on the other hand. Tradition, which is the artificial welding of the present with the mass of the past, contrives a chain between them, where there is none. It is from tradition that all human unhappiness comes; it piles _de facto_, truths on to the true truth; it overrides justice; it takes all freedom away from reason and replaces it with legendary things, forbidding reason to look for what may be inside them.

It is in the one domain of science and its application, and sometimes in the technique of the arts, that experience legitimately takes the power of law, and that acquired productions have a right to accumulate. But to pass from this treasuring of truth to the dynastic privilege of ideas or powers or wealth--those talismans--that is to make a senseless assimilation which kills equality in the bud and prevents human order from having a basis. Inheritance, which is the concrete and palpable form of tradition, defends itself by the tradition of origins and of beliefs--abuses defended by abuses, to infinity--and it is by reason of that integral succession that here, on earth, we see a few men holding the multitude of men in their hands.

I say all this to Marie. She appears to be more struck by the vehemence of my tone than by the obviousness of what I say. She replies, feebly, "Yes, indeed," and nods her head; but she asks me, "But the moral law that you talk about, isn't it tradition?"

"No. It is the automatic law of the common good. Every time _that_ finds itself at stake, it re-creates itself logically. It is lucid; it shows itself every time right to its fountain-head. Its source is reason itself, and equality, which is the same thing as reason. This thing is good and that is evil, _because_ it is good and because it is evil, and not because of what has been said or written. It is the opposite of traditional bidding. There is no tradition of the good. Wealth and power must be earned, not taken ready-made; the idea of what is just or right must be reconstructed on every occasion and not be taken ready-made."

Marie listens to me. She ponders, and then says, "We shouldn't work if we hadn't to leave what we have to our relations."

But immediately she answers herself, "No."

She produces some illustrations, just among our own surroundings. So-and-so, and So-and-so. The bait of gain or influence, or even the excitement of work and production suffice for people to do themselves harm. And then, too, this great change would paralyze the workers less than the old way paralyzes the prematurely enriched who pick up their fortunes on the ground--such as he,