The Daily Worker Newspaper, January 23, 1926, Page 10

THE BEYOND=—By HENRI BARBUSSE| TRANSLATED BY LYDIA GIBSON (Synopsis of previous instalments.) The scene is the Riviera, a luxurious resort where the.idle rich spend their winter on the south- ern coast of France. There we find Hubert Allen, a young aviator, and Carla, a beautiful girl whom he B intends to marry. There also is the Baron de Ghest, an enormously wealthy financier and industrial cap- italist whose factories aré nearby. In the baron’s fac- tories are many workers who live in misery and poverty. Mark, a very shrewd chemist, is employed ‘ in the baron’s laboratory in experiments with a ter- rible new. poison gas and new explosives for warfare. Baron-de Gest engages Allen, the young aviator, to make ‘a mysterioug air-raid on China. Before the time for his intended flight to China, Allen enters into an altitude contest to win the Zenith Cup. if he can win the cup, Allen expects to marry Carla before leaving France. The contest starts. Allen is the first to go up. After he has mounted high into the air, suddenly all becomes dark beneath him. He sees tongues of flame thru heavy clouds of smoke be- low and his airplane is tossed about in a severe dis- turbance of the airs Bringing his plane back to earth, Allen discovers the hangar and factories in ruins and the grandstand of the flying-field in flames. But the strahgest of sights meets His eye—all the people in the grandstand and on the flying-field are sitting or standing about, apparently undisturbed in the strange postures of wax dummies. He finds that every human being in sight has been struck dead, so suddenly that they still stand or sit in attitudes exactly as tho they were alive. The poisoned gas has been turned lose by an explosion in the factory and everyone has been instantaneously killed. Allen, alone, was too high above the explosion to be killed. ' The ghastly sight strikes terror into his heart. 8 Looking for Carla he rushes into the great fash- ionable hotel, finding many people in their rooms in » attitudes of real life, but all dead. Carla has disap- . § peared. ~. CONTINUATION OF CHAPTER VI. (Continued from last Saturday) nen hell begins. . . \ I advance on the thick carpet that muffles the sound of my footsteps. I throw myself in- to the rooms of this sumptuous dwelling, to surprise life in death. What were they think- ing, what were they doing, these people, pro- tected by walls, by servants, by all the mechan- ical and electric perfection of living, caged in the tapestries and the network of nerves of this architectural labyrinth, imagining them- selves perfectly sheltered? What was going on in the intimate chapels of the town, at the be- ginning of the day, in one moment of time? I shall seize it, I, myself. .No man of flesh ever possessed so great a power to plunge himself into the destinies of others! , But 1.did not know what'I was attempting. To see them in their rooms, is not the same’ as in the theatre of the open air; it is. more sepulchral and more terrible. I draw near someone who is doing something; I don’t in- terrupt the solitary one in the eternal atten- tion that he pays to a detail. It is he who is the master, and I must submit. Death is upon him. The first room that I enter. Death, in flesh and bones, dominates me. It has the form of a seated man. As I advance, I see the re- flection of a man before his mirror in the full glare of daylight. He looks at himself and he sees—-as I see—the marks of age: the writing of wrinkles, the scratches, the rings of skin which surround and dull his eyes, the folds around his mouth like clenched fingers—that imitation by which age replaces our faces— and his eyes are desperate. I do not know him, but.J can hear what he was saying to himself under his breath at the moment that he be- came eternal. He has shameful reason for his desperation. I see two enlaced in death upon a bed. From these the odor of death assails my nostrils as I come near: they have been dead a long time. In spite of the disfiguring grimances, their names leap to my lips. Jean Niollis and “La Fornarina.” It was gossiped about them: “They disappeared to share a perfect love, ‘in spite of papa’s opposition!” I see on the sheets, soiled by the flesh, the black revolver, square, efficient, the frenzied motor of a string of bullets. Even while they were being gos- siped about in the drawing rooms, their bodies were two tombs; they rotted, so far away from | | everything, so far from each other. J ...:», In another room, a man sits meditat- ing, his head bowed. His figure seems familiar /to me. ..: I lean over to look up in his face. An expression of insatiable suffering wrenches his dead features. His eyes are still wet. He wept beside the bare table alone in this room. Mark, the brilliant, the gay; the engineer who concentrated like a machine upon his work; the reflection of the great gay world, | Mark was crying here alone a little while ago. lation is so strong that the words catch in my throat. We know only strangers—and I am afraid. These ordinary tragedies—he whose gayety nourished a secret gnawing, those who were too skillful/in life to be able to stand up to it, he to whom old-age had shown the secret strings of his being—these daily tragedies, that I touch because a wind tore loose the veils that covered them, are more than beautiful and more than moving, only because of that un- covering. They bare my eyes to an abyss: Beings struggle as they can, playthings of their de- sires and of their passions, of the inclination of their hearts, ever since the multitude has been passing pell mell before the thin line of sages. They are unlike, but in the depths of each one alike weighs the anguish of the living thing. One glimpses this, but one does not see it. One has pity, but one can give only scraps of pity, because one does not know.. Know, who? I? No. I thought I was inside the cages, but there are other cages around the real secret of each one. In reality 1 am—ccnfronted with the petrified surface of tragedy—a blind man. Dead love, dead suffering. I have only the beginning or the end. The crowd that I pass by is as flat as a picture. Ifeel this deeply before the splendor of an unclothed woman standing before the mirror. White and bending back, this admirable thing bends its arms like the handles of a vase. The splendid body curves itself, the humid thres- hold of its nudity half revealed. In the bewilderment of the moment, I touch her. My hands wonder, is she still warm? My hands weigh upon her shoulders, and she comes toward me. She seems to lean upon me! { thrust her back, I feel the ribs, the full cage of this heavy spectre. Her sight, a rigid line com- ing from her pale eyes, a lance that blinds me, erosses mine, and passes to one side. There is a supernatural barrier between this magnifi- sence and myself. I cry it aloud, and with a burning ardor I push away from myself this flesh of another: world; sHe falls across the d;1igid, ih one csolid black, “Withoiit’ Having even told“me°whether she is yét' cold; arid’ I flee from the terrible idol.. I cannot peer thru a single mystery, and I cannot read death. Everything escapes my understanding! N°: no, not quite everything escapes me. I do not know why, but for some obscure reason I continue by sheer force of will, with squared shoulders, in my labor of looking. Some rooms are empty. In others, I see. I see. I must se¢ more, and my drunken rage for knowledge grows and grows. I break doors that will not open, I enter, I come out, I violate all privacy. Of this flotsam. heaped up in their sepulchral shells after the ebbing of the sea, there are some who sleep, or dress themselves, or eat with one eye on a newspaper, or do nothing at all, with all their might. I am acquainted with almost all of them; I have elbowed them at parties, or chatted with them, while they were yet actors and actresses of life. But the immobility, that infinite immobility, torments me when I look even a few moments at one of: these bodies, with all its gestures stopped like a clock. The immobility throws over these stupidities a solemn horror; truly - is the climax of this masterpiece of desola- on. ~ I laughed the other day when I heard that a grand duke, stuck in bed in his room, made a duty of absorbing a bottle of sherry brandy every morning, that had been left on his night- table. But. here he is, and the contact is ter- rifying. At sight of the haggard eyes and the} sear-like grin of this personage of the imperial species—sallow as the picture post cards of himself—contemplating the ruby of his wine-' glass on the stained sheet, I am harrowed by the weight of the reality. But I think desperately that I am not. profit- ing by the power which is mine at this mo- ment: To see in the large, in numbers, to see all—to be the first man who has done so. I, the aviator who is used to seeing my vision enlarge itself in world-waves, the pieces of the country and the towns all spread out, to read at a glance the writing spread out like tatters of newspaper on the ground; I who am used And that reputed prince of the blood, impris- ‘oned in isolation, writing a check. And the I throw myself from one to the other. The obscene gesture of that impeccably proper Englishman, the smutty gesture of that exotic around whom, in drawing-rooms, heads | wif used to bow like wheat in the wind. The pros- perous merchant fondling a youth—and bank- |i notes on the table. Those women whose moist |< smiles meet—one incredibly rich, with gray, | Me untidy hair and teeth so new that they make a white spot. The thin hips of the little whip- ped girl, stretched out like a vivisection experi- |i ment on the carpet! Lord and Lady Melborune—that old couple of legendary respectibility—hairy, Aipsy, un- buttoned, as alike as two old witches, threaten each other, with bruises on their faces. And the gentleman with the historic French name, locked and bolted in his room, looks with burn- ing eyes at the famous ring in his hand, stolen i two weeks ago from the Marquise de Palerme. jeweled and sparkling hand of the pretty young poet with the blond varnished hair has just written clearly: ‘I warn you, my dear girl, that in that. case I shall make the facts pub- lic. .’ His head is lifted over the paper. He stares blindly at me with great long-lashed eyes whose brilliance is a little tarnished, whose pupils are a little dimmed. He takes me as witness to his right to plunder. To see all. Something comes to my aid as I grope toward totality: a growing repulsion. Horror clutches me and pushes me onward. They are ugly. impression of their dreadful ugliness, all of them. I know they are much uglier than‘! believed. I surprise them in an ugliness that soils my eyes, in its morning nakedness. They are crude. They are still—most of them—shape- less, swollen with sleep and age. They need cleaning, the action of water and razors, soap, the industrious activities of the toilet. Others need the rag of cocaine, or some other hide- ous remedy, to pulb.them together. Only, very, very young are not, in.the. state ‘of, me ture, caricatures of themselves. Another ugliness, another ugliness... . On my face a laugh begins, but breaks: The old general in his flannel undershirt, but .| with his brilliant kepi on his head, is playing with lead soldiers. his coagulated eye, his eye of painted iron, englobes the metal in- sects. For several years his retirement has .|prevented his playing with living flesh. But during the war he made tragic history with dis- astrous unprepared assaults, and -inexorable ried out. The first time I saw him I though he was like the Devil, then later I said: ‘He's only an old clown!” But I look at the old maniac with his toy soldiers, and I think of the soldiers swallowed up through his incom- petent mania, and I say again: yes, he‘is the Devil! aa ae The rich American at his neat and polished desk, his scraped face of a high-class manager, and his mentality of a telephone. He I cannot rid myself ‘of the |, ; orders given to his council of war—and car- | - ot — > Lg has more money than all the rest put together. | .. : He is blond. The thin golden calf frightens me half out of my senses. Everything escapes me? No, not every- thing. 2. : : min" I was sorry for them a little while ago, at every step I grieved, at each ruin I said: “How terrible! Destroyed forces, lost possibilities. - + + Who knows but they might have done something good, something beautiful, some- thing great. . .” ; a be Something good, something great: But I answer myself: “Something good! Not i go on repeating, groaning that endless prayer. \i they!”—because now I begin to understand, /2° dreadfully to understand, things and e. But I also begin to feel Gunsauaa Fatigue cramps my belly and climbs up my legs, from running from niche to niche in this enormous museum where the statues wait for the end of time. — ; Sl I. become hardened. “Is it because satiety = fag 4 head mp ota Isn’t it rather be- use I respond more and more strongly, I sa almost aloud: 4 ot fad “They would never have done a single good Why? What desolation buried him in this|to seeing geography running under me as tho room that was not ‘his? I do not know. Ij|I were immobile, and the earth turning, I want only know one thing: Mark was not what I}to break open these particular cases, traps that |stubbornly, one, another, another, I see their) | thought him. I was mistaken every time I|have caught my fingers. To see everything. |resemblance. They are all’ marked with the |)" talked to him; he was a stranger, The reve-'. . . ‘ ; same brand. They are all of the same species: d° " ‘ 5 ed th or great thing!” ‘ They begin to be all alike. I look-at them