The Inferno Read Online Free PDF Page A

faces and hair, so that their presence brightened the room.
    Were they going away? No, they sat down again. Everything fell back into shadow, into mystery, into truth.
    In beholding them, I felt a confused mingling of my past and the past of the world. Where were they? Everywhere, since they existed. They were on the banks of the Nile, the Ganges, or the Cydnus, on the banks of the eternal river of the ages. They were Daphnis and Chloë, under a myrtle bush, in the Greek sunshine, the shimmer of leaves on their faces, and their faces mirroring each other. Their vague little conversation hummed like the wings of a bee, near the freshness of fountains and the heat that consumed the meadows, while in the distance a chariot went by, laden with sheaves.
    The new world opened. The panting truth was there. It confused them. They feared the brusque intrusion of some divinity. They were happy and unhappy. They nestled as close together as they could. They brought to each other as much as they could. But they did not suspect what it was that they were bringing. They were too small, too young. They had not lived long enough. Each was to self a stifling secret.
    Like all human beings, like me, like us, they wished for what they did not have. They were beggars. But they asked /themselves/ for charity. They asked for help from their /own/ persons.
    The boy, a man already, impoverished already by his feminine companion, turned, drawn towards her, and held out his awkward arms, without daring to look at her.
    The girl, a woman already, leaned her face on the back of the sofa, her eyes shining. Her cheeks were plump and rosy, tinted and warmed by her heart. The skin of her neck, taut and satiny, quivered. Half-blown and waiting, a little voluptuous because voluptuousness already emanated from her, she was like a rose inhaling sunlight.
    And I--I could not tear my eyes from them.
    . . . . .
    After a long silence, he murmured:
    "Shall we stop calling each other by our first names?"
    "Why?"
    He seemed absorbed in thought.
    "So as to begin over again," he said at last.
    "Shall we, Miss Janvier?" he asked again.
    She gave a visible start at the touch of this new manner of address, at the word "Miss," as if it were a kind of embrace.
    "Why, Mr. Lecoq," she ventured hesitatingly, "it is as though something had covered us, and we were removing--"
    Now, he became bolder.
    "Shall we kiss each other on our mouths?"
    She was oppressed, and could not quite smile.
    "Yes," she said.
    They caught hold of each other's arms and shoulders and held out their lips, as if their mouths were birds.
    "Jean!" "Hélène!" came softly.
    It was the first thing they had found out. To embrace the embracer, is it not the tiniest caress and the least sort of a bond? And yet it is so sternly prohibited.
    Again they seemed to me to be without age.
    They were like all lovers, while they held hands, their faces joined, trembling and blind, in the shadow of a kiss.
    . . . . .
    They broke off, and disengaged themselves from their embrace, whose meaning they had not yet learned.
    They talked with their innocent lips. About what? About the past, which was so near and so short.
    They were leaving their paradise of childhood and ignorance. They spoke of a house and a garden where they had both lived.
    The house absorbed them. It was surrounded by a garden wall, so that from the road all you could see was the tip of the eaves, and you couldn't tell what was going on inside of it.
    They prattled:
    "The rooms, when we were little and they were so big--"
    "It was easier to walk there than anywhere else."
    To hear the children talk, you would have thought there was something benevolent and invisible, something like the good God of the past, behind those walls. She hummed an air she had heard there, and said that music was easier to remember than people. They dropped back into the past easily and naturally. They wrapped themselves up in their memories as though they were cold.
    "The other