The Inferno

by Henri Barbusse

  She shuddered, huddled in the shadows, feverishly stroking and pressing the man's hand, sitting upright, stiffly. I saw her throat rising and falling like the sea. They stayed there, touching one another; but a lingering terror mingled with their caresses.

  “Always afraid – always afraid, always. Far from the street, far from the sun, far from everything. I who had so much wanted full daylight and sunlight!” she said, looking at the sky.

  They were afraid. Fear moulded them, burrowed into their hearts. Their eyes, their hearts were afraid. Above all, their love was afraid.

  A mournful smile glided across the man's face. He looked at his friend and murmured:

  “You are thinking of him.”

  She was sitting with her cheeks in her hands and her elbows on her knees and her face thrust forward. She did not reply.

  She was thinking of him. Doubled up, small as a child, she gazed intently into the distance, at the man who was not there. She bowed to this image like a suppliant, and felt a divine reflection from it falling upon her – from the man who was not there, who was being deceived, from the offended man, the wounded man, from the master, from him who was everywhere except where they were, who occupied the immense outside, and whose name made them bow their heads, the man to whom they were a prey.

  Night fell, as if shame and terror were in its shadows, over this man and woman, who had come to hide their embraces in this room, as in a tomb where dwells the Beyond.

  ***

  He said to her:

  “I love you!”

  I distinctly heard those grand words.

  I love you! I shuddered to the depths of my being on hearing the profound words which came from those two human beings. I love you! The words which offer body and soul, the great open cry of the creature and the creation. I love you! I beheld love face to face.

  Then it seemed to me that sincerity vanished in the hasty incoherent things he next said while clasping her to him. It was as though he had a set speech to make and was in a hurry to get through with it.

  “You and I were born for each other. There is a kinship in our souls which must triumph. It was no more possible to prevent us from meeting and belonging to each other than to prevent our lips from uniting when they came together. What do moral conventions or social barriers matter to us? Our love is made of infinity and eternity.”

  “Yes,” she said, lulled by his voice.

  But I knew he was lying or was letting his words run away with him. Love had become an idol, a thing. He was blaspheming, he was invoking infinity and eternity in vain, paying lip service to it by daily prayer that had become perfunctory.

  They let the banality drop. The woman remained pensive for a while, then she shook her head and she – she pronounced the word of excuse, of glorification; more than that, the word of truth:

  “I was so unhappy!”

  ***

  “How long ago it was!” she began.

  It was her work of art, her poem and her prayer, to repeat this story, low and precipitately, as if she were in the confessional. You felt that she came to it quite naturally, without transition, so completely did it possess her whenever they were alone.

  She was simply dressed. She had removed her black gloves and her coat and hat. She wore a dark skirt and a red waist upon which a thin gold chain was hanging.

  She was a woman of thirty, perhaps, with regular features and smooth silken hair. It seemed to me that I knew her, but could not place her.

  She began to speak of herself quite loudly, and tell of her past which had been so hard.

  “What a life I led! What monotony, what emptiness! The little town, our house, the drawing-room with the furniture always arranged just so, their places never changed, like tombstones. One day I tried to put the table that stood in the centre in another place. I could not do it.”

  Her face paled, grew more luminous.

  He listened to her. A smile of patience and resignation, which soon was like a pained expression of weariness, crept across his handsome face. Yes, he was really handsome, though a little disconcerting, with his large eyes, which women must have adored, his drooping moustache, his tender, distant air. He seemed to be one of those gentle people who think too much and do evil. You would have said that he was above everything and capable of everything. Listening to her with a certain remoteness, but stirred by desire for her, he had the air of waiting.

  And suddenly the veil fell from my eyes, and reality lay stripped before me. I saw that between these two people there was an immense difference, like an infinite discord, sublime to behold because of its depths, but so painful that it bruised my heart.

  He was moved only by his longing for her; she, by her need of escaping from her ordinary life. Their desires were not the same. They seemed united, but they dwelt far apart.

  They did not talk the same language. When they spoke of the same things, they scarcely understood each other, and to my eyes, from the very first, their union appeared to be broken more than if they had never known each other.

  But he did not say what was really in his mind. You felt it in the sound of his voice, the very charm of his intonation, his lyrical choice of words. He thought to please her, and he lied. He was evidently her superior, but she dominated him by a kind of inspired sincerity. While he was master of his words, she offered her whole self in her words.

  She described her former life.

  “From the windows in my room and the dining-room, I could look out on the square. The fountain in the centre, with its shadow at its base. I watched the day go round there, on that little, white, round place, like a sundial.

  “The postman crossed it regularly, without thinking. At the arsenal gate stood a soldier doing nothing. Nobody else ever came there. When noon rang like a knell, still no one. What I remember best of all was the way noon rang like a knell – the middle of the day, absolute ennui.

  “Nothing ever happened to me, nothing ever would happen to me. There was nothing for me. The future no longer existed for me. If my days were to go on like that, nothing would separate me from my death – nothing! Not a thing! To be bored is to die! My life was dead, and yet I had to live. It was suicide. Others killed themselves with poison or with a revolver. I killed myself with minutes and hours.”

  “Amy!” said the man.

  “Then, by dint of seeing the days born in the morning and miscarrying in the evening, I became afraid to die, and this fear was my first passion.

  “Often, in the middle of a visit I was paying, or in the night, or when I came home after a walk, the length of the convent wall, I shuddered with hope because of this passion.

  “But who would free me from it? Who would save me from this invisible shipwreck, which I perceived only from time to time? Around me was a sort of conspiracy, composed of envy, meanness and indifference. Whatever I saw, whatever I heard, tended to throw me back into the narrow road, that stupid narrow road along which I was going.

  “Madame Martet, the one friend with whom I was a little bit intimate, you know, only two years older than I am, told me that I must be content with what I had. I replied, 'Then, that is the end of everything, if I must be content with what I have. Do you really believe what you say?' She said she did. Oh, the horrid woman!

  “But it was not enough to be afraid. I had to hate my ennui. How did I come to hate it? I do not know.

  “I no longer knew myself. I no longer was myself. I had such need of something else. In fact, I did not know my own name any more.

  “One day, I remember (although I am not wicked) I had a happy dream that my husband was dead, my poor husband who had done nothing to me, and that I was free, free, as large as the world!

  “It could not last. I couldn't go on forever hating monotony so much. Oh, that emptiness, that monotony! Of all the gloomy things in the world monotony is the darkest, the gloomiest. In comparison night is day.

  “Religion? It is not with religion that we fill the emptiness of our days, it is wit
h our own life. It was not with beliefs, with ideas that I had to struggle, it was with myself.

  “Then I found the remedy!”

  She almost cried, hoarsely, ecstatically:

  “Sin, sin! To rid myself of boredom by committing a crime, to break up monotony by deceiving. To sin in order to be a new person, another person. To hate life worse than it hated me. To sin so as not to die.

  “I met you. You wrote verses and books. You were different from the rest. Your voice vibrated and gave the impression of beauty, and above all, you were there, in my existence, in front of me! I had only to hold out my arms. Then I loved you with all my heart, if you can call it love, my poor little friend!”

  She spoke now in a low quick voice, both oppressed and enthusiastic, and she played with her companion's hand as if it were a child's toy.

  “And you, too, you loved me, naturally. And when we slipped into a hotel one evening, the first time, it seemed to me as if the door opened of itself, and I was grateful for having rebelled and having broken my destiny. And then the deceit – from which we suffer sometimes, but which, after reflection, we no longer detest – the risks, the dangers that give pleasure to each minute, the complications that add variety to life, these rooms, these hiding-places, these black prisons, which have fled from the sunlight I once knew!

  “Ah!” she said.

  It seemed to me that she sighed as if, now that her aspiration was realized, she had nothing so beautiful to hope for any more.

  ***

  She thought a moment, and then said:

  “See what we are. I too may have believed at first in a sort of thunderbolt, a supernatural and fatal attraction, because of your poetry. But in reality I came to you – I see myself now – with clenched fists and closed eyes.”

  She added:

  “We deceive ourselves a good deal about love. It is almost never what they say it is.

  “There may be sublime affinities, magnificent attractions. I do not say such a love may not exist between two human beings. But we are not these two. We have never thought of anything but ourselves. I know, of course, that I am in love with you. So are you with me. There is an attraction for you which does not exist for me, since I do not feel any pleasure. You see, we are making a bargain. You give me a dream, I give you joy. But all this is not love.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, half in doubt, half in protest. He did not want to say anything. All the same, he murmured feebly:

  “Even in the purest of loves we cannot escape from ourselves.”

  “Oh,” she said with a gesture of pious protest, the vehemence of which surprised me, “that is not the same thing. Don't say that, don't say that!”

  It seemed to me there was a vague regret in her voice and the dream of a new dream in her eyes.

  She dispelled it with a shake of her head.

  “How happy I was! I felt rejuvenated, like a new being. I had a sense of modesty again. I remember that I did not dare to show the tip of my foot from under my dress. I even had a feeling about my face, my hands, my very name.”

  ***

  Then the man continued the confession from the point where she had left off, and spoke of their first meetings. He wished to caress her with words, to win her over gradually with phrases and with the charm of memories.

  “The first time we were alone–”

  She looked at him.

  “It was in the street, one evening,” he said. “I took your arm. You leaned more and more upon my shoulder. People swarmed around us, but we seemed to be quite alone. Everything around us changed into absolute solitude. It seemed to me that we were both walking on the waves of the sea.”

  “Ah!” she said. “How good you were! That first evening your face was like what it never was afterwards, even in our happiest moments.”

  “We spoke of one thing and another, and while I held you close to me, clasped like a bunch of flowers, you told me about people we knew, you spoke of the sunlight that day and the coolness of the evening. But really you were telling me that you were mine. I felt your confession running through everything you said, and even if you did not express it, you actually gave me a confession of love.

  “Ah, how great things are in the beginning! There is never any pettiness in the beginning.

  “Once when we met in the public garden, I took you back at the end of the afternoon through the suburbs. The road was so peaceful and quiet that our footsteps seemed to disturb nature. Benumbed by emotion, we slackened our pace. I leaned over and kissed you.”

  “There,” she said.

  She put her finger on his neck.

  “Gradually the kiss grew warmer. It crept toward your lips and stopped there. The first time it went astray, the second time it pretended it went astray. Soon I felt against my mouth” – he lowered his voice – “your mouth.”

  She bowed her head, and I saw her rosy mouth.

  “It was all so beautiful in the midst of the watchfulness imprisoning me,” she sighed, ever returning to her mild, pathetic preoccupation.

  How she needed the stimulus of remembering her emotions, whether consciously or not! The recalling of these little dramas and former perils warmed her movements, renewed her love. That was the reason why she had had the whole story told her.

  And he encouraged her. Their first enthusiasm returned, and now they tried to evoke the most exciting memories.

  “It was sad, the day after you became mine, to see you again at a reception in your own home – inaccessible, surrounded by other people, mistress of a regular household, friendly to everybody, a bit timid, talking commonplaces. You bestowed the beauty of your face on everybody, myself included. But what was the use?

  “You were wearing that cool-looking green dress, and they were teasing you about it. I did not dare to look at you when you passed me, and I thought of how happy we had been the day before.”

  “Ah,” she sighed, as the beauty widened before her of all her memories, her thoughts, of all her soul, “love is not what they say it is. I, too, was stirred with anguish. How I had to conceal it, dissimulating every sign of my happiness, locking it hastily away within the coffer of my heart. At first I was afraid to go to sleep for fear of saying your name in a dream, and often, fighting against the stealthy invasion of sleep, I have leaned on my elbow, and remained with wide-open eyes, watching heroically over my heart.

  “I was afraid of being recognised. I was afraid people would see the purity in which I was bathed. Yes, purity. When in the midst of life one wakes up from life, and sees a different brilliance in the daylight, and recreates everything, I call that purity.

  ***

  “Do you remember the day we lost our way in the cab in Paris – the day he thought he recognised us from a distance, and jumped into another cab to follow us?”

  She gave a start of ecstasy.

  “Oh, yes,” she murmured, “that was the great day!”

  His voice quivered as if shaken by the throbbing of his heart, and his heart said:

  “Kneeling on the seat, you looked out of the little window in the back of the cab and cried to me, 'He is nearer! He is further off! He will catch us. I do not see him any more. He has lost us.' Ah!”

  And with one and the same movement their lips joined.

  She breathed out like a sigh:

  “That was the one time I enjoyed.”

  “We shall always be afraid,” he said.

  These words interlaced and changed into kisses. Their whole life surged into their lips.

  Yes, they had to revive their past so as to love each other, they had constantly to be reassembling the pieces so as to keep their love from dying through staleness, as if they were undergoing, in darkness and in dust, in an icy ebbing away, the ruin of old age, the impress of death.

  They clasped each other.

  They were drowned in the darkness. They fell down, down into the shadows, into the abyss that they had willed.

  He stammered:

  “I will love you
always.”

  But she and I both felt that he was lying again. We did not deceive ourselves. But what matter, what matter?

  Her lips on his lips, she murmured like a thorny caress among the caresses:

  “My husband will soon be home.”

  How little they really were at one! How, actually, there was nothing but their fear that they had in common, and how they stirred their fear up desperately. But their tremendous effort to commune somehow was soon to be over.

  They stopped talking. Words had already accomplished the work of reviving their love. She merely murmured:

  “I am yours, I am yours. I give myself to you. No, I do not give myself to you. How can I give myself when I do not belong to myself?”

  “Are you happy?” she asked again.

  “I swear you are everything in the world to me.”

  ***

  Now, she felt, their bliss had already become a mere memory, and she said almost plaintively:

  “May God bless the bit of pleasure one has.”

  A doleful lament, the first signal of a tremendous fall, a prayer blasphemous yet divine.

  I saw him look at the clock and at the door. He was thinking of leaving. He turned his face gently away from a kiss she was about to give him. There was a suggestion of uneasiness, almost disgust, in his expression.

  “No,” she said, “you are not going to love me always. You are going to leave me. But I regret nothing. I never will regret anything. Afterwards, when I return from – this – for good, to the great sorrow that will never leave me again, I shall say, 'I have had a lover,' and I shall come out from my nothingness to be happy for a moment.”

  He did not want to answer. He could not answer any more. He stammered:

  “Why do you doubt me?”

  But they turned their eyes toward the window. They were afraid, they were cold. They looked down at the space between the two houses and saw a vague remnant of twilight slip away like a ship of glory.

  It seemed to me that the window beside them entered the scene. They gazed at it, dim, immense, blotting out everything around it. After the brief interval of sinful passion, they were overwhelmed as if, looking at the stainless azure of the window, they had seen a vision. Then their eyes met.