Light. Henri Barbusse

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СКАЧАТЬ the eternal earth, where men and women are drawing near to each other, and cling together while they wrap themselves in mystery.

      * * * * * *

      Dreamily I ascend again towards the sounds and the swarming of the town. There, the Sunday evening rendezvous—the prime concern of the men—is less discreet. Desire displays itself more crudely on the pavements. Voices chatter and laughter dissolves, even through closed doors; there are shouts and songs.

      Up there one sees clearly. Faces are discovered by the harsh light of the gas jets and its reflection from plate-glass shop windows. Antonia goes by, surrounded by men, who bend forward and look at her with desire amid their clamor of conversation. She saw me, and a little sound of appeal comes from her across the escort that presses upon her. But I turn aside and let her go by.

      When she and her harness of men have disappeared, I smell in their wake the odor of Pétrolus. He is lamp-man at the factory. Yellow, dirty, cadaverous, red-eyed, he smells rancid, and was, perhaps, nurtured on paraffin. He is some one washed away. You do not see him, so much as smell him.

      Other women are there. Many a Sunday have I, too, joined in all that love-making.

      * * * * * *

      Among these beings who chat and take hold of each other, an isolated woman stands like a post, and makes an empty space around her.

      It is Louise Verte. She is fearfully ugly, and she was too virtuous formerly, at a time when, so they say, she need not have been. She regrets this, and relates it without shame, in order to be revenged on virtue. She would like to have a lover, but no one wants her, because of her bony face and her scraped appearance; from a sort of eczema. Children make sport of her, knowing her needs; for the disclosures of their elders have left a stain on them. A five-year-old girl points her tiny finger at Louise and twitters, "She wants a man."

      In the Place is Véron, going about aimlessly, like a dead leaf—Véron, who revolves, when he may, round Antonia. An ungainly man, whose tiny head leans to the right and wears a colorless smile. He lives on a few rents and does not work. He is good and affectionate, and sometimes he is overcome by attacks of compassion.

      Véron and Louise Verte see one another—and each makes a détour of avoidance. They are afraid of each other.

      Here, also, on the margin of passion, is Monsieur Joseph Bonéas, very compassionable, in spite of his intellectual superiority. Between the turned-down brim of his hat and his swollen white kerchief—thick as a towel—a mournful yellow face is stuck.

      I pity these questing solitaries who are looking for themselves! I feel compassion to see those fruitless shadows hovering there, wavering like ghosts, these poor wayfarers, divided and incomplete.

      Where am I? Facing the workmen's flats, whose countless windows stand sharply out in their huge flat background. It is there that Marie Tusson lives, whose father, a clerk at Messrs. Gozlan's, like myself, is manager of the property. I steered to this place instinctively, without confessing it to myself, brushing people and things without mingling with them.

      Marie is my cousin, and yet I hardly ever see her. We just say good-day when we meet, and she smiles at me.

      I lean against a plane tree and think of Marie. She is tall, fair, strong and amiable, and she goes modestly clad, like a wide-hipped Venus; her beautiful lips shine like her eyes.

      To know her so near agitates me among the shadows. If she appeared before me as she did the last time I met her; if, in the middle of the dark, I saw the shining radiance of her face, the swaying of her figure, traced in silken lines, and her little sister's hand in hers—I should tremble.

      But that does not happen. The bluish, cold background only shows me the two second-floor windows pleasantly warmed by lights, of which one is, perhaps, she herself. But they take no sort of shape, and remain in another world.

      At last my eyes leave that constellation of windows among the trees, that vertical and silent firmament. Then I make for my home, in this evening which comes at the end of all the days I have lived.

      * * * * * *

      Little Antoinette—how comes it that they leave her all alone like this?—is standing in my path and holding a hand out towards me. It is her way that she is begging for. I guide her, ask questions and listen, leaning over her and making little steps. But she is too little, and too lispful, and cannot explain. Carefully I lead the child—who sees so feebly that already she is blind in the evening, as far as the low door of the dilapidated dwelling where she nests.

      In my street, in front of his lantern-shaped house, with its iron-grilled dormer, old Eudo is standing, darkly hooded, and pointed, like the house.

      I am a little afraid of him. Assuredly, he has not got a clean conscience. But, however guilty, he is compassionable. I stop and speak to him. He lifts to me out of the night of his hood a face pallid and ruined. I speak about the weather, of approaching spring. Heedless he hears, shapes "yes" with the tip of his lips, and says, "It's twelve years now since my wife died; twelve years that I've been utterly alone; twelve years that I've heard the last words she said to me."

      And the poor maniac glides farther away, hooded in his unintelligible mourning; and certainly he does not hear me wish him good-night.

      At the back of the cold downstairs room a fire has been lighted. Mame is sitting on the stool beside it, in the glow of the flaming coal, outstretching her hands, clinging to the warmth.

      Entering, I see the bowl of her back. Her lean neck has a cracked look and is white as a bone. Musingly, my aunt takes and holds a pair of idle tongs. I take my seat. Mame does not like the silence in which I wrap myself. She lets the tongs fall with a jangling shock, and then begins vivaciously to talk to me about the people of the neighborhood. "There's everything here. No need to go to Paris, nor even so much as abroad. This part; it's a little world cut out on the pattern of the others," she adds, proudly, wagging her worn-out head. "There aren't many of them who've got the wherewithal and they're not of much account. Puppets, if you like, yes. That's according to how one sees it, because at bottom there's no puppets—there's people that look after themselves, because each of us always deserves to be happy, my lad. And here, the same as everywhere, the two kinds of people that there are—the discontented and the respectable; because, my lad, what's always been always will be."

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      EVENING AND DAWN

      Just at the moment when I was settling down to audit the Sesmaisons' account—I remember that detail—there came an unusual sound of steps and voices, and before I could even turn round I heard a voice through the glass door say, "Monsieur Paulin's aunt is very ill."

      The sentence stuns me. I am standing, and some one is standing opposite me. A draught shuts the door with a bang.

      Both of us set off. It is Benoît who has come to fetch me. We hurry. I breathe heavily. Crossing the busy factory, we meet acquaintances who smile at me, not knowing the turn of affairs.

      The night is cold and nasty, with a keen wind. The sky drips with rain. We jump over puddles as we walk. I stare fixedly at Benoît's square shoulders in front of me, and the dancing tails of his coat as the wind hustles them along СКАЧАТЬ