The Daily Worker Newspaper, January 16, 1926, Page 12

THE BEYOND—2y Henri Barbusse (TRANSLATED BY LYDIA GIBSON.) (Synopsis of the first instalment.) The story opens with Hubert Allen, a young aviator, speeding back to the city from the palace of the Baron de Ghest, where a great bal! is in progress, the height of luxury and splendor. The baron, a very powerful financier, tad chosen Allen to undertake an air raid on China after the altitude contest for the Zenith Cup, which is to take Place in two days. The scene is the Riviera, a winter resort, on the southern coast of France. Allen is excited about the air raid, believing that it will bring him fame and money, and about the winning of the Zenith Cup, which wlil make it possible for him to marry Carla, a young girl, before leaving for China. He goes at dawn to the flying field to inspect his plane, and sees the work- ers coming wearily to work in the baron’s factories, in terrible contrast to the beauty and tuxury of the. ball. Later, he calls upon Mark, the chemist, who is carrying on experiments in poisosn gas and high explosives in the laboratories of the baron’s factories. Mark mentions his new asphyxiating gas. Alien then goes to see his old aunt who is harmlessly insane in an asylum. She warns him mysteriously of the “race to death’? and of ‘Moloch, the man of steel and gold.” . . . e (Continued From. Last Saturday) V. JAMS IS , THe day of the altitude contest—the Zenith Cup. Fine weather. All is well. Hight o’clock. I am on my way to the fly- ing, field, where my plane awaits me, and I have a notion to arrive at the last minute. The city, fairy-like in the limpid light, is animated. Busy, noisy in the full happy sun- light which bathes everything. Ocean Avenue, planted with plane-trees, seems to squirm un- der its shell of automobiles. The vast hotels and the scintillating shop-fronts, trimmed with gold, filled with every Parisian luxury, rush by on either hand. Behind the plate glass enormous cargoes of candied fruits decked out in ribbons overwhelm the stomach of the passer-by, and drug-stores bring back one’s thoughts to the skeleton of invalidism in this winter resort. The Casino, manufactury of new fortunes is silhouetted against_the sky. And then the edge of the sea, dense azure. Rocks, aloes, palm-trees and umbrella-pines: the smell of eucalyptus, at the.same time gamey and medicinal, the myrtle and mastic bushes. as solid-and dry as lamps, the heavy smells of vegetation outlined in space, a sort of cubism of odors. ~“Sumptuous -villas -with columns, flocks.of_|- : i a ; gulls in great crowds like fans, the endless pa omtenraempnepe say sa bells of the larks. A wall where the morning sunlight sketches a tapestry of black leaves with the shadows of neighboring trees. A cabin and a field transfigured in the sun: a salad field half salad and half silver. A barbarous shell of posters one on top of the other covers the vast wooden gateway: a gigantic funnel of automobiles and crowds: the flying-field. On foot I worm my way through the crowd, elbowed by friendliness. ‘The grand-stand that grew out of the ground in two days is crowded with personages, beaded gowns, red draperies, and the flags of all nations. Carla...there she is, with her mother, in’ the first row. She comes to me and we talk to each other awhile, a little apart from the others. Nothing exists for me but Carla dur- ing that moment beside the hangar. All the rest around us, nothing but a neat picture: out of an illustrated weekly. She is exquisite, timid. Her gaze comes up to me with an ap- pealing fervor. My hand rests on her gracious that it darkens space, and I am beaten, like a naked bather, by the hollow substance of emptiness, At six hundred metres, in the cataract of wind, the ground is nothing but a card. Three Square little boxes on the flying-field. The town is one house, melted into a cloth on the geographic contour of the. country.’ The sea is the sea, i Little spots: the other contestants starting at intervals,of.one minute... Atoms of airplanes leaping toward me as though I drew them along the cavernous miles.. These mosquitoes have the same organs and the same hopes as I. ‘VI HOR. a long time I climb higher. There comés * the moment of monotony, when dishearten- ment fastens me in its vise. ¥ nevér éscape it. Then it passes, drowned’ in~ mounting space. I rise higher. . ; tater a ; ' But the earth rises with me! What is it?) Ah, ah! what’s the matter? Absurd. Everything has become dark down below. A fantastic floor of clouds is built in the twinkling of an eye, and bright points Bleam in it. Here I am-transported above a planet of night and storm: Good God! I dis- tinctly see the planes of Jean Minor, Ralph Tuck and Cartesimo capsize in a furious and fiery mist! I am lifted up, tossed, even though I am well above the universal inky pall which hag leapt up from below in a flash. I navigate in a tangled torrent of wind. A scattering of light- enings. Then silence, and a calm which sets me again in equilbrium. The thick fog falls again, hiding from view the terrestrial depths, like a swamp of mud. My plane descends like a corpse. There is something wrong with it, something isn’t working. Help!... No, it’s taking hold... Be- tween two moments of’ cramping anguish, I have time to think: “Too bad, I had a good start.” q ; ‘After falling kilometers,’Icsee the earth. It My eyes search the scene... The great han- gar ‘is shattered. The grand-stand is burning. The crowd? I do not see it yet.. I do not see it. All the time I am falling straight down, dizzily, I see the trees growing. There is: no- body. I land fairly easily, in an absolute silence. An earthquake! They have had them here in the past. And then a panic, the people have disappeared. I land two hundred yards behind the wooden grand-stand, a corner of which is going up in flames and black plumes of smoke. I round the corner of the high flag-trimmed structure. It is full of people, walled with heads! Men, women, standing in groups, sitting in their places, conversing, turned toward one another. Anguish, like. a solid thing, seizes upon my stomach. I approach and nobody moves. Someone is standing in front of me, cane in hand. I speak to him as I come nearer—my voice breathless, hoarse. ~ “Eh! you there. ..Pardon me!” What, is the fellow deaf? I go up to him. shoulder, a kiss coming at the same moment | He doesn’t move, is looking the other way. I from myself and from her, a kiss abated into a gesture. She does not speak, but in her throat there is a cooing sound. There isn’t any doubt that lam more excited today ‘than usual: The final hustle of departure passes like a dream—I can’t remember how— put my hand on his arm. He doesn’t move... he doesn’t move. “A little harder...he falls over backward. Dead, dead! He was stand- ing there, but he was dead. Iturn my haggard ‘eyes here, there, in the thick crowd..:not the slightest movement and here I am hurled into the air: Ringing | anywhere. in my head, shrill as little bells, are my last words with my mechanic: “Goodby, | little Renaud!”, “Thanks, boss, good-by!”, and Carla’s lifted face which falls, falls into. the depths, drowned by the harsh wind gushing past me, and the loud noise of the engine. All the while that I take in in a flash of the ‘These are not people; these are mannikins. .. these are CorpseSiici}occeb ay cine Killed, every one of them, killed instanta- neously by the explosion. .. .... .. I take faltering steps,,attracted, repulsed, by each figure...The nearest now, there, in the blue coat within reach of my hand: Morel, eye the ant-hill that is the flying-field, the flags | the mechanic.. He lobks.up in the air, leaning of many colors already fading in the distance, and the white and rose town spread out in one view, I think about the engine. It is every- thing. Itisin me. I am all around my engine. I sense it deeply, deeply, as I sense my lungs and heart—in the oblique tunnel of the hur- ricane, I must make the maximum of height in the total time, two hours. I stretch out invisible spires, dizzy aspirations, I fall toward the ron- dure of the sky as if the world were upside down. Through the smallest crack in my armor the sharp wind claws its way and chills on the balustrade,. I slap him on the shoulder. His fixed and blinded eye, this tranquil eternal grimace, the stubborn rigidity of his shoulder which yields and comes back to its place. I stride up the steps of the building, search- ing for some-one who still breathes. But no one here is breathing any more. And very soon I recoil from these rows of bodies that keep all the appearance of life. In the fraction of a second, death has immobilized them in whatever attitude it met. Death has traced and petrified with their bodies the passing ges- ture, and has made massive photographs! Ex- me to the bone. The propeller turns so fast ! quisitely dressed, charming scarecrows, with black satin or blue silk eyes. . .if I try to talk to them I shall go mad. Z | Several have fallen forward or backward— | their gestures have overbalanced them—but the mechanical immobilization was so quick, so hard and so complete, that almost all, evn | standing and without outside support, are b@l- anced, stiffened like trees or crosses, | Immobility is a most terrible thing. It is a/| thing that goes crescendo, that grows, that drags itself out, that exasperates the beholder. Immobility drives me mad, and not only now: even a statue, even a drawing, a caricature, ends by frightening me if I look too long. My knees melt under me with terror, I kneel on. the ground in this abominable desert, my hands desperate. .My head is whirling in a nausea of fright.....I know that I cannot any longer see what I see, this rich harvest of death upon the earth. I cannot grasp the size of the catastrophe. shse They casey I groan. Ah, good god, better the welter of bodies of the damned (such as I imagined’ the next war) than this crowd of carnal phantoms peacefully copying life with one single never-| to-be-finished gesture: Enough? This’ whl | destroy my reason: I run straight ahead) Then I stop, suddenly thinking of the tele- phone. -I run to the booth, I ring, I ring, I ring again: nothing. Why doesn’t someone answer? they doing, the others? Suddenly an idea, like a blow: Carla. She wasn’t in the grand-stand. Am I sure? I rush back. By the force of my will alone I bear again the sight of that terrible inumer- able spectacle. I explore again the ranks of the spectators. I look quickly, quickly I turn away my eyes; my eyes are like a wound in my head from the sight. She is not on that stage scrawled with gestures, spotted with white dresses, so horribly empty. ...All these people must have been electro- cuted: I remember the zig-zags of lightning above which my plane staggered. Ah,-ah, it’s simpler than that....I get it! ‘There—one of the workshops—the experimental laboratory— is replaced by a smoking crater. What do I want with my earthquakes and electrocutions: romantic and ridiculous hypothesis! It’s more crudely simple than that:° It's the invention: ithe military invention “has breathed“on-these ‘hundreds of people.’ The explosives and the gas that Mark was talking about. The acci- dental firing of some gigantic new explosive has plowed this crater and has unloosed the new poison gas, the infernal gas, when the storage tanks were shattered. This is the reason of the interminable immobility of this multitude. Carla... she has gone back to the hotel, of course. I breathe again. As for me, I must get away from this ac- cursed place. I run toward the automobiles I don’t want to see anything except what is just in front of me. I avoid creatures sid- ing like card-houses, bodies that have tumied to the ground, killed and stiffened before tifey had time to fall, and these are in strange fan- tastic poses like overturned statues after a riot. Others are crushed and broken in wreck- ed automobiles, or under them, or beside them. That’s logical: the breath of death and the driverless machine smashed itself against the first obstacles, But they didn’t know; all of them, even the most mangled, even those torn open to show the threads and sponges of their insides, Have calm faces that seem to smile and speak... Near the gate, a long row of automobiles, I throw myself in one, I tear it from the earth. I flee like the wind. At the board fence by the gate, I see a group of workingmen... “Hep. I grind on the brakes. (I who never use pees what are I'skid and barely touch one—who falls down. wax dummies... I.jam on the accel e car leaps forward. I hurl myself away ! the stony motionlessness of all these images. Villas... shall I go into them? Yes...no ... I pass them. I want to reach the town. I engulf myself in Ocean Avenue, high valley perpendicular to the sun, all sparkling at the lower end with shops. Silence on the sunlit town, speckled in the distance with sunshades and white silhouettes. But nothing that moves. Nothing... I jump out of the car that I have in the middle of the street. I plunge into the first door. Nobody in this shop. Yes, a man lifting a blind. I go to him, speak to him, touch him. He trembles and goes down, with his arms still raised, and the reflection of the sunlight outside runs over his enamelled eyes. ~—eenser!