Kitabı oku: «The Inferno», sayfa 5

CHAPTER VIII

The window was wide open. In the dusty rays of the sunset I saw three people with their backs to the long reddish-brown beams of light. An old man, with a care-worn, exhausted appearance and a face furrowed with wrinkles, seated in the armchair near the window. A tall young woman with very fair hair and the face of a madonna. And, a little apart, a woman who was pregnant.

She held her eyes fixed in front of her, seeming to contemplate the future. She did not enter into the conversation, perhaps because of her humbler condition, or because her thoughts were bent upon the event to come. The two others were conversing. The man had a cracked, uneven voice. A slight feverish tremour sometimes shook his shoulders, and now and then he gave a sudden involuntary jerk. The fire had died out of his eyes and his speech had traces of a foreign accent. The woman sat beside him quietly. She had the fairness and gentle calm of the northern races, so white and light that the daylight seemed to die more slowly than elsewhere upon her pale silver face and the abundant aureole of her hair.

Were they father and daughter or brother and sister? It was plain that he adored her but that she was not his wife.

With his dimmed eyes he looked at the reflection of the sunlight upon her.

"Some one is going to be born, and some one is going to die," he said.

The other woman started, while the man's companion cried in a low tone, bending over him quickly.

"Oh, Philip, don't say that."

He seemed indifferent to the effect he had produced, as though her protest had not been sincere, or else were in vain.

Perhaps, after all, he was not an old man. His hair seemed to me scarcely to have begun to turn grey. But he was in the grip of a mysterious illness, which he did not bear well. He was in a constant state of irritation. He had not long to live. That was apparent from unmistakable signs—the look of pity in the woman's eyes mingled with discreetly veiled alarm, and an oppressive atmosphere of mourning.

. . . .

With a physical effort he began to speak so as to break the silence. As he was sitting between me and the open window, some of the things he said were lost in the air.

He spoke of his travels, and, I think, also of his marriage, but I did not hear well.

He became animated, and his voice rose painfully. He quivered. A restrained passion enlivened his gestures and glances and warmed his language. You could tell that he must have been an active brilliant man before his illness.

He turned his head a little and I could hear him better.

He told of the cities and countries that he had visited. It was like an invocation to sacred names, to far-off different skies, Italy, Egypt, India. He had come to this room to rest, between two stations, and he was resting uneasily, like an escaped convict. He said he would have to leave again, and his eyes sparkled. He spoke of what he still wanted to see. But the twilight deepened, the warmth left the air, and all he thought of now was what he had seen in the past.

"Think of everything we have seen, of all the space we bring with us."

They gave the impression of a group of travellers, never in repose, forever in flight, arrested for a moment in their insatiable course, in a corner of the world which you felt was made small by their presence.

. . . .

"Palermo—Sicily."

Not daring to advance into the future, he intoxicated himself with these recollections. I saw the effort he was making to draw near to some luminous point in the days gone by.

"Carpi, Carpi," he cried. "Anna, do you remember that wonderful brilliant morning? The ferryman and his wife were at table in the open air. What a glow over the whole country! The table, round and pale like a star. The stream sparkling. The banks bordered with oleander and tamarisk. The sun made a flower of every leaf. The grass shone as if it were full of dew. The shrubs seemed bejewelled. The breeze was so faint that it was a smile, not a sigh."

She listened to him, placid, deep, and limpid as a mirror.

"The whole of the ferryman's family," he continued, "was not there. The young daughter was dreaming on a rustic seat, far enough away not to hear them. I saw the light-green shadow that the tree cast upon her, there at the edge of the forest's violet mystery.

"And I can still hear the flies buzzing in that Lombardy summer over the winding river which unfolded its charms as we walked along the banks."

"The greatest impression I ever had of noonday sunlight," he continued, "was in London, in a museum. An Italian boy in the dress of his country, a model, was standing in front of a picture which represented a sunlight effect on a Roman landscape. The boy held his head stretched out. Amid the immobility of the indifferent attendants, and in the dampness and drabness of a London day, this Italian boy radiated light. He was deaf to everything around him, full of secret sunlight, and his hands were almost clasped. He was praying to the divine picture."

"We saw Carpi again," said Anna. "We had to pass through it by chance in November. It was very cold. We wore all our furs, and the river was frozen."

"Yes, and we walked on the ice."

He paused for a moment, then asked:

"Why are certain memories imperishable?"

He buried his face in his nervous hands and sighed:

"Why, oh, why?"

"Our oasis," Anna said, to assist him in his memories, or perhaps because she shared in the intoxication of reviving them, "was the corner where the lindens and acacias were on your estate in the government of Kiev. One whole side of the lawn was always strewn with flowers in summer and leaves in winter."

"I can still see my father there," he said. "He had a kind face. He wore a great cloak of shaggy cloth, and a felt cap pulled down over his ears. He had a large white beard, and his eyes watered a little from the cold."

"Why," he wondered after a pause, "do I think of my father that way and no other way? I do not know, but that is the way he will live in me. That is the way he will not die."

. . . .

The day was declining. The woman seemed to stand out in greater relief against the other two and become more and more beautiful.

I saw the man's silhouette on the faded curtains, his back bent, his head shaking as in a palsy and his neck strained and emaciated.

With a rather awkward movement he drew a case of cigarettes from his pocket and lit a cigarette.

As the eager little light rose and spread like a glittering mask, I saw his ravaged features. But when he started to smoke in the twilight, all you could see was the glowing cigarette, shaken by an arm as unsubstantial as the smoke that came from it.

It was not tobacco that he was smoking. The odour of a drug sickened me.

He held out his hand feebly toward the closed window, modest with its half-lifted curtains.

"Look—Benares and Allahabad. A sumptuous ceremony—tiaras—insignia, and women's ornaments. In the foreground, the high priest, with his elaborate head-dress in tiers—a vague pagoda, architecture, epoch, race. How different we are from those creatures. Are /they/ right or are /we/ right?"

Now he extended the circle of the past, with a mighty effort.

"Our travels—all those bonds one leaves behind. All useless. Travelling does not make us greater. Why should the mere covering of ground make us greater?"

The man bowed his wasted head.

. . . .

He who had just been in ecstasy now began to complain.

"I keep remembering—I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me."

"Ah," he mourned, a moment afterwards, with a gesture of resignation, "we cannot say good-by to everything."

The woman was there, but she could do nothing, although so greatly adored. She was there with only her beauty. It was a superhuman vision that he evoked, heightened by regret, by remorse and greed. He did not want it to end. He wanted it back again. He loved his past.

Inexorable, motionless, the past is endowed with the attributes of divinity, because, for believers as well as for unbelievers, the great attribute of God is that of being prayed to.

. . . .

The pregnant woman had gone out. I saw her go to the door, softly with maternal carefulness of herself.

Anna and the sick man were left alone. The evening had a gripping reality. It seemed to live, to be firmly rooted, and to hold its place. Never before had the room been so full of it.

"One more day coming to an end," he said, and went on as if pursuing his train of thought:

"We must get everything ready for our marriage."

"Michel!" cried the young woman instinctively, as if she could not hold the name back.

"Michel will not be angry at us," the man replied. "He knows you love him, Anna. He will not be frightened by a formality, pure and simple— by a marriage /in extremis,"/ he added emphatically, smiling as though to console himself.

They looked at each other. He was dry, feverish. His words came from deep down in his being. She trembled.

With his eyes on her, so white and tall and radiant, he made a visible effort to hold himself in, as if not daring to reach her with a single word. Then he let himself go.

"I love you so much," he said simply.

"Ah," she answered, "you will not die!"

"How good you were," he replied, "to have been willing to be my sister for so long!"

"Think of all you have done for me!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands and bending her magnificent body toward him, as if prostrating herself before him.

You could tell that they were speaking open-heartedly. What a good thing it is to be frank and speak without reticence, without the shame and guilt of not knowing what one is saying and for each to go straight to the other. It is almost a miracle.

They were silent. He closed his eyes, though continuing to see her, then opened them again and looked at her.

"You are my angel who do not love me."

His face clouded. This simple sight overwhelmed me. It was the infiniteness of a heart partaking of nature—this clouding of his face.

I saw with what love he lifted himself up to her. She knew it. There was a great gentleness in her words, in her attitude toward him, which in every little detail showed that she knew his love. She did not encourage him, or lie to him, but whenever she could, by a word, by a gesture, or by some beautiful silence, she would try to console him a little for the harm she did him by her presence and by her absence.

After studying her face again, while the shadow drew him still nearer to her in spite of himself, he said:

"You are the sad confidante of my love of you."

He spoke of their marriage again. Since all preparations had been made, why not marry at once?

"My fortune, my name, Anna, the chaste love that will be left to you from me when—when I shall be gone."

He wanted to transform his caress—too light, alas—into a lasting benefit for the vague future. For the present all he aspired to was the feeble and fictitious union implied in the word marriage.

"Why speak of it?" she said, instead of giving a direct answer, feeling an almost insurmountable repugnance, doubtless because of her love for Michel, which the sick man had declared in her stead. While she had consented in principle to marrying him and had allowed the preliminary steps to be taken, she had never replied definitely to his urgings.

But it looked to me as if she were about to make a different decision, one contrary to her material interests, in all the purity of her soul, which was so transparent—the decision to give herself to him freely.

"Tell me!" he murmured.

There was almost a smile on her mouth, the mouth to which supplications had been offered as to an altar.

The dying man, feeling that she was about to accept, murmured:

"I love life." He shook his head. "I have so little time left, so little time that I do not want to sleep at night any more."

Then he paused and waited for her to speak.

"Yes," she said, and lightly touched—hardly grazed—the old man's hand with her own.

And in spite of myself, my inexorable, attentive eye could not help detecting the stamp of theatrical solemnity, of conscious grandeur in her gesture. Even though devoted and chaste, without any ulterior motive, her sacrifice had a self-glorifying pride, which I perceived—I who saw everything.

. . . .

In the boarding-house, the strangers were the sole topic of conversation. They occupied three rooms and had a great deal of baggage, and the man seemed to be very rich, though simple in his tastes. They were to stay in Paris until the young woman's delivery, in a month or so. She expected to go to a hospital nearby. But the man was very ill, they said. Madame Lemercier was extremely annoyed. She was afraid he would die in her house. She had made arrangements by correspondence, otherwise she would not have taken these people in—in spite of the tone that their wealth might give to her house. She hoped he would last long enough to be able to leave. But when you spoke to her, she seemed to be worried.

When I saw him again, I felt he was really going to die soon. He sat in his chair, collapsed, with his elbows on the arms of the chair and his hands drooping. It seemed difficult for him to look at things, and he held his face bowed down, so that the light from the window did not reveal his pupils, but only the edge of the lower lids, which gave the impression of his eyes having been put out. I remembered what the poet had said, and I trembled before this man whose life was over, who reviewed almost his entire existence like a terrible sovereign, and was wrapped in a beauty that was of God.

CHAPTER IX

Some one knocked at the door.

It was time for the doctor. The sick man raised himself uncertainly in awe of the master.

"How have you been to-day?"

"Bad."

"Well, well," the doctor said lightly.

They were left alone together. The man dropped down again with a slowness and awkwardness that would have seemed ridiculous if it had not been so sad. The doctor stood between us.

"How has your heart been behaving?"

By an instinct which seemed tragic to me, they both lowered their voices, and in a low tone the sick man gave his daily account of the progress of his malady.

The man of science listened, interrupted, and nodded his head in approval. He put an end to the recital by repeating his usual meaningless assurances, in a raised voice now and with his usual broad gesture.

"Well, well, I see there's nothing new."

He shifted his position and I saw the patient, his drawn features and wild eyes. He was all shaken up by this talking about the dreadful riddle of his illness.

He calmed himself, and began to converse with the doctor, who let himself down squarely into a chair, with an affable manner. He started several topics, then in spite of himself returned to the sinister thing he carried within him, his disease.

"Disgusting!" he said.

"Bah!" said the doctor, who was blasé.

Then he rose.

"Well, till to-morrow!"

"Yes, for the consultation."

"Yes. Well, good-by!"

The doctor went out, lightly carrying the burden of misery and cruel memories, the weight of which he had ceased to feel.

. . . .

Evidently the consulting physicians had just finished their examination of the patient in another room. The door opened, and two doctors entered.

Their manner seemed to me to be stiff. One of them was a young man, the other an old man.

They looked at each other. I tried to penetrate the silence of their eyes and the night in their heads. The older man stroked his beard, leaned against the mantelpiece, and stared at the ground.

"Hopeless," he said, lowering his voice, for fear of being overheard by the patient.

The other nodded his head—in sign of agreement—of complicity, you might say. Both men fell silent like two guilty children. Their eyes met again.

"How old is he?"

"Fifty-three."

"Lucky to live so long," the young doctor remarked.

To which the old man retorted philosophically:

"Yes, indeed. But his luck won't hold out any longer."

A silence. The man with the grey beard murmured:

"I detected sarcoma." He put his finger on his neck. "Right here."

The other man nodded—his head seemed to be nodding continually—and muttered:

"Yes. There's no possibility of operating."

"Of course not," said the old specialist, his eyes shining with a kind of sinister irony. "There's only one thing that could remove it—the guillotine. Besides, the malignant condition has spread. There is pressure upon the submaxillary and subclavicular ganglia, and probably the axillary ganglia also. His respiration, circulation and digestion will soon be obstructed and strangulation will be rapid."

He sighed and stood with an unlighted cigar in his mouth, his face rigid, his arms folded. The young man sat down, leaning back in his chair, and tapped the marble mantelpiece with his idle fingers.

"What shall I tell the young woman?"

"Put on a subdued manner and tell her it is serious, very serious, but no one can tell, nature is infinitely resourceful."

"That's so hackneyed."

"So much the better," said the old man.

"But if she insists on knowing?"

"Don't give in."

"Shall we not hold out a little hope? She is so young."

"No. For that very reason we mustn't. She'd become too hopeful. My boy, never say anything superfluous at such a time. There's no use. The only result is to make them call us ignoramuses and hate us."

"Does he realise?"

"I do not know. While I examined him—you heard—I tried to find out by asking questions. Once I thought he had no suspicion at all. Then he seemed to understand his case as well as I did."

"Sarcoma forms like the human embryo," said the younger doctor.

"Yes, like the human embryo," the other assented and entered into a long elaboration of this idea.

"The germ acts on the cell, as Lancereaux has pointed out, in the same way as a spermatozoon. It is a micro-organism which penetrates the tissue, and selects and impregnates it, sets it vibrating, gives it /another life./ But the exciting agent of this intracellular activity, instead of being the normal germ of life, is a parasite."

He went on to describe the process minutely and in highly scientific terms, and ended up by saying:

"The cancerous tissue never achieves full development. It keeps on without ever reaching a limit. Yes, cancer, in the strictest sense of the word, is infinite in our organism."

The young doctor bowed assent, and then said:

"Perhaps—no doubt—we shall succeed in time in curing all diseases. Everything can change. We shall find the proper method for preventing what we cannot stop when it has once begun. And it is then only that we shall dare to tell the ravages due to the spread of incurable diseases. Perhaps we shall even succeed in finding cures for certain incurable affections. The remedies have not had time to prove themselves. We shall cure others—that is certain—but we shall not cure him." His voice deepened. Then he asked:

"Is he a Russian or a Greek?"

"I do not know. I see so much into the inside of people that their outsides all look alike to me."

"They are especially alike in their vile pretense of being dissimilar and enemies."

The young man seemed to shudder, as if the idea aroused a kind of passion in him. He rose, full of anger, changed.

"Oh," he said, "what a disgraceful spectacle humanity presents. In spite of its fearful wounds, humanity makes war upon humanity. We who deal with the sores afflicting mankind are struck more than others by all the evil men involuntarily inflict upon one another. I am neither a politician nor a propagandist. It is not my business to occupy myself with ideas. I have too much else to do. But sometimes I am moved by a great pity, as lofty as a dream. Sometimes I feel like punishing men, at other times, like going down on my knees to them."

The old doctor smiled sadly at this vehemence, then his smile vanished at the thought of the undeniable outrage.

"Unfortunately you are right. With all the misery we have to suffer, we tear ourselves with our own hands besides—the war of the classes, the war of the nations, whether you look at us from afar or from above, we are barbarians and madmen."

"Why, why," said the young doctor, who was getting excited, "why do we continue to be fools when we recognise our own folly?"

The old practitioner shrugged his shoulders, as he had a few moments before when they spoke of incurable diseases.

"The force of tradition, fanned by interested parties. We are not free, we are attached to the past. We study what has always been done, and do it over again—war and injustice. Some day perhaps humanity will succeed in ridding itself of the ghost of the past. Let us hope that some day we shall emerge from this endless epoch of massacre and misery. What else is there to do than to hope?"

The old man stopped at this. The young man said:

"To will."

The other man made a gesture with his hand.

"There is one great general cause for the world's ulcer," the younger one kept on. "You have said it—servility to the past, prejudice which prevents us from doing things differently, according to reason and morality. The spirit of tradition infects humanity, and its two frightful manifestations are—"

The old man rose from his chair, as if about to protest and as if to say, "Don't mention them!"

But the young man could not restrain himself any more.

"—inheritance from the past and the fatherland."

"Hush!" cried the old man. "You are treading on ground on which I cannot follow. I recognise present evils. I pray with all my heart for the new era. More than that, I believe in it. But do not speak that way about two sacred principles."

"You speak like everybody else," said the young man bitterly. "We must go to the root of the evil, you know we must. /You/ certainly do." And he added violently, "Why do you act as if you did not know it? If we wish to cure ourselves of oppression and war, we have a right to attack them by all the means possible—all!—the principle of inheritance and the cult of the fatherland."

"No, we haven't the right," exclaimed the old man, who had risen in great agitation and threw a look at his interlocutor that was hard, almost savage.

"We have the right!" cried the other.

All at once, the grey head drooped, and the old man said in a low voice:

"Yes, it is true, we have the right. I remember one day during the war. We were standing beside a dying man. No one knew who he was. He had been found in the debris of a bombarded ambulance—whether bombarded purposely or not, the result was the same. His face had been mutilated beyond recognition. All you could tell was that he belonged to one or other of the two armies. He moaned and groaned and sobbed and shrieked and invented the most appalling cries. We listened to the sounds that he made in his agony, trying to find one word, the faintest accent, that would at least indicate his nationality. No use. Not a single intelligible sound from that something like a face quivering on the stretcher. We looked and listened, until he fell silent. When he was dead and we stopped trembling, I had a flash of comprehension. I understood. I understood in the depths of my being that man is more closely knit to man than to his vague compatriots.

"Yes, we have a right to attack oppression and war, we have a right to. I saw the truth several times afterward again, but I am an old man, and I haven't the strength to stick to it."

"My dear sir," said the young man, rising, with respect in his voice. Evidently he was touched.

"Yes, I know, I know," the old scientist continued in an outburst of sincerity. "I know that in spite of all the arguments and the maze of special cases in which people lose themselves, the absolute, simple truth remains, that the law by which some are born rich and others poor and which maintains a chronic inequality in society is a supreme injustice. It rests on no better basis than the law that once created races of slaves. I know patriotism has become a narrow offensive sentiment which as long as it lives will maintain war and exhaust the world. I know that neither work nor material and moral prosperity, nor the noble refinements of progress, nor the wonders of art, need competition inspired by hate. In fact, I know that, on the contrary, these things are destroyed by arms. I know that the map of a country is composed of conventional lines and different names, that our innate love of self leads us closer to those that are like-minded than to those who belong to the same geographical group, and we are more truly compatriots of those who understand and love us and who are on the level of our own souls, or who suffer the same slavery than of those whom we meet on the street. The national groups, the units of the modern world, are what they are, to be sure. The love we have for our native land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate, as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism, and militarism. The monstrous distortion of the patriotic sentiment, which is increasing, is killing off humanity. Mankind is committing suicide, and our age is an agony."

The two men had the same vision and said simultaneously:

"A cancer, a cancer!"

The older scientist grew animated, succumbing to the evidence.

"I know as well as you do that posterity will judge severely those who have made a fetich of the institutions of oppression and have cultivated and spread the ideas supporting them. I know that the cure for an abuse does not begin until we refuse to submit to the cult that consecrates it. And I, who have devoted myself for half a century to the great discoveries that have changed the face of the world, I know that in introducing an innovation one encounters the hostility of everything that is.

"I know it is a vice to spend years and centuries saying of progress, 'I should like it, but I do not want it.' But as for me, I have too many cares and too much work to do. And then, as I told you, I am too old. These ideas are too new for me. A man's intelligence is capable of holding only a certain quantum of new, creative ideas. When that amount is exhausted, whatever the progress around you may be, one refuses to see it and help it on. I am incapable of carrying on a discussion to fruitful lengths. I am incapable of the audacity of being logical. I confess to you, my boy, I have not the strength to be right."

"My dear doctor," said the young man in a tone of reproach, meeting his older colleague's sincerity with equal sincerity, "you have publicly declared your disapproval of the men who publicly fought the idea of patriotism. The influence of your name has been used against them."

The old man straightened himself, and his face coloured.

"I will not stand for our country's being endangered."

I did not recognise him any more. He dropped from his great thoughts and was no longer himself. I was discouraged.

"But," the other put in, "what you just said—"

"That is not the same thing. The people you speak of have defied us. They have declared themselves enemies and so have justified all outrages in advance."

"Those who commit outrages against them commit the crime of ignorance," said the young man in a tremulous voice, sustained by a kind of vision. "They fail to see the superior logic of things that are in the process of creation." He bent over to his companion, and, in a firmer tone, asked, "How can the thing that is beginning help being revolutionary? Those who are the first to cry out are alone, and therefore ignored or despised. You yourself just said so. But posterity will remember the vanguard of martyrs. It will hail those who have cast a doubt on the equivocal word 'fatherland,' and will gather them into the fold of all the innovators who went before them and who are now universally honoured."

"Never!" cried the old man, who listened to this last with a troubled look. A frown of obstinacy and impatience deepened in his forehead, and he clenched his fists in hate. "No, that is not the same thing. Besides, discussions like this lead nowhere. It would be better, while we are waiting for the world to do its duty, for us to do ours and tell this poor woman the truth."