The Inferno Part 8

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 rea.s.sembling 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 th.o.r.n.y 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 G.o.d 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sion, 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 G.o.d, where is G.o.d? Why does He not intervene in this frightful, regular crisis? Why does He not prevent, by a miracle, that fearful miracle by which one who is adored suddenly or gradually comes to be hated? Why does he not preserve man from having to mourn the loss of all his dreams? Why does he not preserve him from the distress of that sensuousness which flowers in his flesh and falls back on him again like spittle?

Perhaps because I am a man like the man in the room, like all other men, perhaps because what is b.e.s.t.i.a.l engrosses my attention now, I am utterly terrified by the invincible recoil of the flesh.

"It is everything in the world," he had said. "It is nothing," he had also said, but later. The echo of those two cries lingered in my ears.

Those two cries, not shouted but uttered in a low scarcely audible voice, who shall declare their grandeur and the distance between them?

Who shall say? Above all, who shall know?

The man who can reply must be placed, as I am, above humanity, he must be both among and apart from human beings to see the smile turn into agony, the joy become satiety, and the union dissolve. For when you take full part in life you do not see this, you know nothing about it.

You pa.s.s blindly from one extreme to the other. The man who uttered the two cries that I still hear, "Everything!" and "Nothing!" had forgotten the first when he was carried away by the second.

Who shall say? I wish some one would tell. What do words matter or conventions? Of what use is the time-honoured custom of writers of genius or mere talent to stop at the threshold of these descriptions, as if full descriptions were forbidden? The thing ought to be sung in a poem, in a masterpiece. It ought to be told down to the very bottom, if the purpose be to show the creative force of our hopes, of our wishes, which, when they burst into light, transform the world, overthrow reality.

What richer alms could you bestow on these two lovers, when again love will die between them? For this scene is not the last in their double story. They will begin again, like every human being. Once more they will try together, as much as they can, to seek shelter from life's defeats, to find ecstasy, to conquer death. Once more they will seek solace and deliverance. Again they will be seized by a thrill, by the force of sin, which clings to the flesh like a shred of flesh.

Yet once again, when once again they see that they put infinity into desire all in vain, they will be punished for the grandeur of their aspiration.

I do not regret having surprised this simple, terrible secret. Perhaps my having taken in and retained this sight in all its breadth, my having learned that the living truth is sadder and more sublime than I had ever believed, will be my sole glory.

CHAPTER VI

All was silent. They were gone. They had hidden elsewhere. The husband was coming. I gathered that from what they had said. But did I really know what they had said?