The Inferno by Henri Barbusse Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    "See, we stay here," she said, "looking at each other like two
miserable curs."
    They separated. He seated himself on a chair, a sorry figure in the
dusk.
    His mouth was open, his face was contracted. His eyes and his jaw were self-condemnatory. You expected that in a few moments he would become emaciated, and you would see the eternal skeleton.
    And at last both were alike in their setting, made so as much by their misery as by their human form. The night swallowed them up. I no longer saw them.
    . . . . .
    Then, where is God, where is God? Why