Free The Inferno by Henri Barbusse Page A

his head. When he lifted it again, I had a vague intuition that he would know what to answer, but had not yet formulated how to say it.
    "Poor creatures, a brief existence, a few stray thoughts in the depths of a room--that is what we are," she said, lifting her head and looking at him, hoping for an impossible contradiction, as a child cries for a star.
    He murmured:
    "Who knows what we are?"
    . . . . .
    She interrupted him with a gesture of infinite weariness.
    "I know what you are going to say. You are going to talk to me about the beauty of suffering. I know your noble ideas. I love them, my love, your beautiful theories, but I do not believe in them. I would believe them if they consoled me and effaced death."
    With a manifest effort, as uncertain of himself as she was of herself, feeling his way, he replied:
    "They would efface it, perhaps, if you believed in them."
    She turned toward him and took one of his hands in both of hers. She questioned him with inexorable patience, then she slipped to her knees before him, like a lifeless body, humbled herself in the dust, wrecked in the depths of despair, and implored him:
    "Oh, answer me! I should be so happy if you could answer me. I feel as though you really could!"
    He bent over her, as if on the edge of an abyss of questioning: "Do you know what we are?" he murmured. "Everything we say, everything we think, everything we believe, is fictitious. We know nothing. Nothing is sure or solid."
    "You are wrong," she cried. "There /is/ something absolute, our sorrow, our need, our misery. We can see and touch it. Deny everything else, but our beggary, who can deny that?"
    "You are right," he said, "it is the only absolute thing in the world."
    . . . . .
    "Then, /we/ are the only absolute thing in the world," he deduced.
    He caught at this. He had found a fulcrum. "We--" he said. He had found the cry against death, he repeated it, and tried again. "We--"
    It was sublime to see him beginning to resist.
    "It is we who endure forever."
    "Endure forever! On the contrary, it is we who pass away."
    "We see things pass, but we endure."
    She shrugged her shoulders with an air of denial. There almost was hatred in her voice as she said:
    "Yes--no--perhaps. After all, what difference does it make to me? That does not console me."
    "Who knows--maybe we need sadness and shadow, to make joy and light."
    "Light would exist without shadow," she insisted.
    "No," he said gently.
    "That does not console me," she said again.
    . . . . .
    Then he remembered that he had already thought out all these things.
    "Listen," he said, in a voice tremulous and rather solemn as if he were making a confession. "I once imagined two beings who were at the end of their life, and were recalling all they had suffered."
    "A poem!" she said, discouraged.
    "Yes," he said, "one of those which might be so beautiful."
    It was remarkable to see how animated he became. For the first time he appeared sincere--when abandoning the living example of their own destiny for the fiction of his imagination. In referring to his poem, he had trembled. You felt he was becoming his genuine self and that he had faith. She raised her head to listen, moved by her tenacious need of hearing something, though she had no confidence in it.
    "The man and the woman are believers," he began. "They are at the end of their life, and they are happy to die for the reasons that one is sad to live. They are a kind of Adam and Eve who dream of the paradise to which they are going to return. The paradise of purity. Paradise is light. Life on earth is obscurity. That is the motif of the song I have sketched, the light that they desire, the shadow that they are."
    "Like us," said Amy.
    He told of the life of the man and the woman of his poem. Amy listened to him, and accepted what he was saying. Once she put her hands on her heart and said, "Poor people!" Then she got a little excited. She felt he was going too far. She did not wish so much darkness, maybe