The Inferno Part 13

"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 pa.s.s away."

"We see things pa.s.s, 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 because she was tired or because the picture when painted by some one else seemed exaggerated.

Dream and reality here coincided. The woman of the poem also protested at this point.

I was carried away by the poet's voice, as he recited, swaying slightly, in the spell of the harmony of his own dream:

"At the close of a life of pain and suffering the woman still looked ahead with the curiosity she had when she entered life. Eve ended as she had begun. All her subtle eager woman's soul climbed toward the secret as if it were a kind of kiss on the lips of her life. She wanted to be happy."

Amy was now more interested in her companion's words. The curse of the lovers in the poem, sister to the curse she felt upon herself, gave her confidence. But her personality seemed to be shrinking. A few moments before she had dominated everything. Now she was listening, waiting, absorbed.

"The lover reproached the woman for contradicting herself in claiming earthly and celestial happiness at the same time. She answered him with profundity, that the contradiction lay not in herself, but in the things she wanted.

"The lover then seized another healing wand and with desperate eagerness, he explained, he shouted, 'Divine happiness has not the same form as human happiness. Divine happiness is outside of ourselves.'

"The woman rose, trembling.

"'That is not true! That is not true!' she exclaimed. 'No, my happiness is not outside of me, seeing it is /my/ happiness. The universe is G.o.d's universe, but I am the G.o.d of my own happiness. What I want,' she added, with perfect simplicity, 'is to be happy, I, just as I am, and with all my suffering.'"

Amy started. The woman in the poem had put her problem in a clearer and deeper manner, and Amy was more like that woman than herself.

"'I, with all my suffering,' the man repeated.

"Suffering--important word! It leads us to the heart of reality. Human suffering is a positive thing, which requires a positive answer, and sad as it is, the word is beautiful, because of the absolute truth it contains. 'I, with all my suffering!' It is an error to believe that we can be happy in perfect calm and clearness, as abstract as a formula. We are made too much out of shadow and some form of suffering. If everything that hurts us were to be removed, what would remain?

"And the woman said, 'My G.o.d, I do not wish for heaven!'"

"Well, then," said Amy, trembling, "it follows that we can be miserable in paradise."

"Paradise is life," said the poet.

Amy was silent and remained with her head lifted, comprehending at last that the whole poem was simply a reply to her question and that he had revived in her soul a loftier and a juster thought.

"Life is exalted to perfection as it ends," the poet went on. "'It is beautiful to reach the end of one's days,' said the lover. 'It is in this way that we have lived paradise.'

"There is the truth," the poet concluded. "It does not wipe out death.

It does not diminish s.p.a.ce, nor halt time. But it makes us what we are in essential. Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth. 'Just as I am!' Remember that. We are a great mixture. We are more than we believe. Who knows what we are?"

On the woman's face, which the terror of death had rigidly contracted, a smile dawned. She asked with childish dignity:

"Why did you not tell me this right away when I asked you?"

"You would not have understood me then. You had run your dream of distress into a blind alley. I had to take the truth along a different way so as to present it to you anew."

After that they fell silent. For a fraction of time they had come as close to each other as human beings can come down here below--because of their august a.s.sent to the lofty truth, to the arduous truth (for it is hard to understand that happiness is at the same time happy and unhappy). She believed him, however, she, the rebel, she, the unbeliever, to whom he had given a true heart to touch.

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.