Free The Inferno by Henri Barbusse

more. I am crying because I shall surely die. There is an invincible nothingness in everything and everybody. So when one thinks of that, dear, one smiles and forgives. One does not bear grudges. But goodness won in that way is worse than anything else."
    . . . . .
    He bent over and kissed her hands. He enveloped her in a warm, respectful silence, but, as always, I felt he was master of himself.
    "I have always thought of death," she continued in a changed voice. "One day I confessed to my husband how it haunted me. He launched out furiously. He told me I was a neurasthenic and that he must look after me. He made me promise to be like himself and never think of such things, to be healthy and well-balanced, as he was.
    "That was not true. It was he who suffered from the disease of tranquillity and indifference, a paralysis, a grey malady, and his blindness was an infirmity, and his peace was that of a dog who lives for the sake of living, of a beast with a human face.
    "What was I to do? Pray? No. That eternal dialogue in which you are always alone is crushing. Throw yourself into some occupation? Work? No use. Doesn't work always have to be done over again? Have children and bring them up? That makes you feel both that you are done and finished and that you are beginning over again to no purpose. However, who knows?"
    It was the first time that she softened.
    "I have not been given the chance to practise the devotion, the submission, the humiliation of a mother. Perhaps that would have guided me in life. I was denied a little child."
    For a moment, lowering her eyes, letting her hands fall, yielding to the maternal impulse, she only thought of loving and regretting the child that had not been vouchsafed to her--without perceiving that if she considered it her only possible salvation, it was because she did not have it.
    "Charity? They say that it makes us forget everything. Oh, yes, to go distributing alms on the snowy streets, in a great fur cloak," she murmured and made a tired gesture, while the lover and I felt the shiver of the cold rainy evening and of all the winters past and yet to come.
    "All that is diversion, deception. It does not alter the truth a particle. We shall die, we are going to die."
    She stopped crying, dried her eyes and assumed a tone so positive and calm that it gave the impression that she was leaving the subject.
    "I want to ask you a question. Answer me frankly. Have you ever dared, dear, even in the depths of your heart, to set a date, a date relatively far off, but exact and absolute, with four figures, and to say, 'No matter how old I shall live to be, on that day I shall be dead--while everything else will go on, and little by little my empty place will be destroyed or filled again?'"
    The directness of her question disturbed him. But it seemed to me that he tried most to avoid giving her a reply that would heighten her obsession.
    And all at once, she remembered something he had once said to her, and cleverly reminded him of it so as to close his mouth in advance and torture herself still more.
    "Do you remember? One evening, by lamplight. I was looking through a book. You were watching me. You came to me, you knelt down and put your arms around my waist, and laid your head in my lap. There were tears in your eyes. I can still hear you. 'I am thinking,' you said, 'that this moment will never come again. I am thinking that you are going to change, to die, and go away. I am thinking so truly, so hotly, how precious these moments are, how precious you are, you who will never again be just what you are now, and I adore your ineffable presence as it is now.' You looked at my hand, you found it small and white, and you said it was an extraordinary treasure, which would disappear. Then you repeated, 'I adore you,' in a voice which trembled so, that I have never heard anything truer or more beautiful, for you were right as a god is right.
    "Alas!" he said.
    He saw the tears in her eyes. Then he bowed