But when they went to her little study afterwards together, they both were very silent.
There was a fire burning, but all the windows were open.
And as they sat there, almost silently together, they heard the first frogs singing in the castle moat. He laughed, and would have her tell him the story of the Frog Princess, that he never had cared for her to tell him when he was a little boy.
She knew that she would never listen to the frogs again without remembering that night.
She wondered if the memory would become an agony to her. It seemed to her strange that, caring so much, she could not know.
Thursday, April 27th
Under the walls of St. Germain des Prés, and the chestnut trees in their spring misty leaf of amber and topaz and ruby, a vendor of, I don't know what, had set up a little booth and shaded it with an indigo blue bit of canvas. The shade was deep purple under the blue canvas, and brass and bronze and copper and rust-red things had vague shapes in the shadow.
It was so beautiful that I was happy for all of a minute, passing in the tram on my way to the cantine.
The Boy with Almond Eyes
They tell me that when they suffer I make little growling noises in my throat. They laugh and say, "Now the little Madame is angry!"
I am angry, I am furious. I am furious against suffering. I hate suffering.
If they scream I do not mind so much, but when they suffer silently, it is terrible.
Once the ward doctor thought I was going to cry.
I was holding the stump of a boy's leg while they dressed it. The leg had been cut off at the Front, hurriedly, anyhow, and the nerves left exposed.
The boy shuddered and quivered all over, and would not make a sound, and grew rigid with pain, stiff, and quite cold, and never made a sound.
The doctor, with the probe in his rubber-gloved hands, looked at me, and said, "You are going to cry! You must not cry before the wounded, it unnerves them."
And then I heard myself growling, with dreadful big words of the patronne's smothered under the growls.
And the little boy laughed out, through everything, just like a mischievous bad little boy.
Monday, May 1st
To-day is so beautiful, many people must have been happy for a moment just in waking. It is so difficult not to be happy. It is such a wonderful thing to open one's blinds to a sunshiny May morning. And then there has to be the next moment.
May 3rd
In other years also the spring was sad. There was always that exquisite lovely poignant sadness of spring.
These days are too beautiful. It seems as if one could not bear them.
I think it is because so much beauty makes one want happiness.
One cannot understand, in such loveliness, why one is not happy.
Something is asked of us that we cannot answer.
I remember Roselyne's saying, long before there was war, one sunset, down by the sea in the south—
"So much happiness would be needed to fill the beauty of the day."
May 4th
Yet perhaps in this cruel year spring is less cruel. Not to be happy is, in this year, the inevitable thing. One is less lonely in each his own special lack of happiness. And each one may think he would be happy, perfectly, if only there were no war.
Hospital, Friday, May 5th
They have taken away all my little soldiers. I did not know at all. I came just as usual, and did not notice any unusual confusion. I heard much noise as I ran up the stairs, but there is always noise in the corridors.
When I got to the top of the stairs, there was the last batch of them, in their patched faded old uniforms, with their crutches and bandages and their bundles, all packed into the lift that was just started down. I could not even see who they were.
Some one called "Madame, oh, Madame!"
I think it was Barbet, the little 4.
I turned to run down the stairs to catch them up at the bottom, as they would get out of the lift, but Madame Marthe came out of the patronne's room, with a huge jar, of I don't know what, in her arms, and called to me, "Quick, the new ones will be arriving. Fetch our sheets from Madame Bayle!"
Twenty-six beds and ten stretcher beds all left empty.
Every one is gone, except little Charles who is dying, and 14, whose arm has just been amputated. I don't know where they are gone. Some to the Maison Blanche and some to St. Maurice, some to their dépôts, some to country hospitals. The patronne has had no time to tell me where they are gone. When she has time she will have forgotten, and cannot trouble to look up the lists of them. Madame Marthe does not know. She does not care. She is used to it.
But I—I am not used to it. I have loved them. I had nursed them so long, and done so many odds and ends of things for them, silly things and tragic things. I had helped them to get well. Really and truly I had helped them to get well. I had been so happy to have helped them. And now I do not know what has become of them.
Hospital—Arrival, Saturday, 6th
They are very tired. They want to be let alone. They do not care what happens to them, or to the little queer odds and ends of things in their bundles.
They were bathed in the admission room; Madame Marthe and Madame Alice were called there. Madame Madeline threw out their dirty torn clothes, and the boots of those who had boots, to Madame Bayle in the hall.
Madame Bayle made Joseph take all that away, and gave me each man's own little things to put on the night table of his bed, his képi and his béret, if it were not lost, a pipe, a tobacco pouch, perhaps a big nickel watch, some letters, the photograph of a girl or an old woman, a purse with a few sous in it. Several of them have medals, the Croix de Guerre and the military medal, and one had a chaplet that I had to hide under the photograph of an old woman in her best bonnet. "Number 9," says Madame Bayle, "Number 16, Number 8," and dumps the poor little handfuls of things into my apron.
"All your things are here," I say to the men, "look, Monsieur 8, I have put them so on the table. I will move the table to the other side because of your arm. Little Alpin, here is your béret hung on the knob at the top of the bed, waiting for you to go out into Paris. And you, my little one, here are your two medals, I pin them to the edge of your chart. How proud you must be!"
But he does not care at all. He is a little young child, of the class 16. He has a round, boy face and big, round, blue eyes like a child's. He only wants to lie with his eyes shut. He is the number 3. His right leg is amputated, and his left foot is in plaster.
They are all men from Verdun, wounded eight or fifteen days ago, who have been moved from one to another hospital of the Front. They do not want to talk about it. They want to just lie still with their eyes closed—except the one who screams, the 24.
The 24 screams and screams. He also has had a leg amputated. He is perhaps twenty years old. He is a big blonde boy. He clutches the bars of the top of the bed with his two hands, and drags all his rigid weight upon his hands, and screams, with wide-open eyes that stare and stare.
Also the man wounded in the head, the Number 6, lies with his eyes wide staring open and like glass. He has a colonial medal that I do not know, and the Croix de Guerre. They do not yet know if he can speak or not. Madame Marthe told me while she was washing her hands at the chariot that he may live quite long.
She said, "The chief is coming to see the wounds, we must cut all the dressings. Take your scissors, and begin to the right of the door."
The Chéchia, Monday, May 15th
I suppose because to-day the sunshine is happy, Charles, the little 11, who has been in his bed in the corner since the days of the Marne, has taken a fancy to have all his things got ready for him in case he wants to go out. He says that any day now he may be wanting to go out.
He is of the ler Zouaves, and it is a red cap he must have, a chéchia. Nobody knows what became of his, it is so long since he had worn it. He never thought of it himself until to-day. But to-day he thinks of nothing else.
Number 10 and Number 12—new these last days—say he waked them up talking about it. When Madame Marthe came on at six o'clock he beckoned to her at the door, and when she came, he whispered—did she think he might ask the American for it?
He was very red when he asked me, and then very white, and his hands clasped and unclasped.
Did I think I could have it to-morrow? Did I think I could have it this afternoon? And did I think that possibly, possibly I could get a tassel for it: a big lavender tassel that would hang down all at one side.
Monday, May 29th
I went this afternoon to the Pré Catelan, for the first time in very long. I went in by the gate near the stone column.
There were quite a lot of motors waiting at the gate; it did not look war as it did last year. Last year, in May, the gates were always almost shut, and when people came they had to push through. Last year the little park was very empty. We used to wander as we pleased across the lawns and gather primroses that grew for nobody. But now there were people in the paths; especially Nounou with her broad ribbons and her campstool, and the baby, and Monsieur l'Abbé, playing blind man's buff with the bigger children.
Green lawns, bright as live green fire, the trees all in delicate misty leaf, light greens and dark greens and copper and amber and gold, filmy and drifting, as veils, about the trunks and boughs and branches.
The flower-beds were full of hyacinths and forget-me-nots.
Never, never, surely has spring meant so much as in these two years of war.
All the birds of spring were singing. All of them. The grass of the lawns was full of little starry pink and white daisies.
By the little watercourse there was a bank of blue flowers. They were reflected in the water, very, very blue. I do not know what they were. They were of a much more intense blue than the myosotis. I did not go to see what they were; I thought they might be the blue flowers of happiness, and that it was better I did not go too near.
The hideous, huge restaurant is a hospital. The paths and the road to it, and the lawns and garden beds about it are corded off that people may not go and look. From the distance, you see vague, white shapes of things, and figures all in white, moving about inside the great plateglass windows!
What wonderful people used to sit at the tables, in those windows!
What is there now on the raised platform of the music? The music used to be so gay. Did people ever really dance there?
How queer pain and grief seem to be, in this place that they have taken over. Was this really ever a place so gay and brilliant, that no other place of the world symbolized quite as fragile a thing?
Thursday, June 1st
Verdun, Verdun, Verdun. The great bells, that are not really bells, are still ringing and ringing. One hears them ringing through the streets of Paris, up and down, all night long. Out in the country they must be ringing, and ringing across all the fields and forests, and through the hills, and along all the roads and rivers, and to all the edges of the land.
Even if they were dirges, tolling, they would yet always have been triumphant bells.
The Queen: To her
A beautiful thing has happened in a beautiful hospital. Going to that hospital from mine, what seems most beautiful about it, and very strange, is its peace. It is so quiet. The little gentle nuns move softly and have sweet low voices. The women who work there are all of them women who choose to serve, and they serve lovingly. One feels there quietness and sympathy, and something that I think must be just the love of God. My hospital seems like a nightmare in that beautiful place.
One day there came to visit that beautiful hospital a very gentle lady, than whose story there is none more tragic in the whole world.
She is a queen who lives in exile. She has known every sorrow that a woman can know, and that a queen can know, every one. And she lives, with the memory of her sorrows, in exile.
She may come to France at times for visits of which few people are aware; and those are the times that are most nearly happy for her, for she loves France, and the France that knows her, that is so truly her own, loves her greatly.
The little soldiers of France might have been her soldiers. If they realized, how they would love to be her soldiers! What would it not mean to them to have such a queen to fight for?
The soldiers in the beautiful hospital were not told at first that it was a queen who came that day to see them. They only knew that it was a very lovely lady. She understood just how to talk to them, just how to look at them. They were men who had given everything they had to give for the country that she loved, that was indeed her country, and she loved them, every one of them, and her love for them was in her eyes and on her lips and in her voice. She had known so much of suffering that she could take the suffering of each man for her own to bear with him.
There was a man who was dying. He was not a beautiful young boy, but one of those older little soldiers who touch one's heart so. The thin, worn, stooping little soldier type who has his wife and the children and the old people to be anxious about while he serves his France. The bearded, anxious-eyed little soldier type who knows just what it all means, and who has the flame of the spirit of France shining in his always rather haggard eyes.
This little soldier was dying; there was no hope at all. He knew quite well. His wife and babies were far away and could not come to him. And he was glad of that, he wanted his wife to be spared all she might be spared of pain. He was glad she would not have to remember his suffering so. The nurse had promised to tell his wife always that he had not suffered at all. His nurse had promised him that she would always keep sight of his wife and the babies, and be sure that no harm came to the old people. She had comforted him in everything. And she, and the good little sisters, had so beautiful a faith in God, that he was sure they knew, and that it all would be quite well.
He had won his Croix de Guerre and Médaille Militaire; they had been sent, but the officer had not yet come from the President of the Republic to give them to him. It seemed very sad to the people of the hospital that his medals should not be given to him before he died. His nurse had been very troubled about it, and the chief doctor also. They had sent messages twice to the authorities, but no one had come.
Then, when the queen was there the nurse who herself was a great lady of the world, thought of a beautiful thing and asked the chief doctor if it could not be. That the queen should give his decorations to the man who was dying, and that they should tell him, and all the others, that it was the queen. She knew what pleasure it would give him. She knew it would be like a dream to him, a lovely dream thing to happen to him, just at the end. Of course, it would not be official, but what did that signify—now? The man was dying.
The doctor and the queen spoke together for a minute.
The queen had never cried for her own sorrows, but she had tears in her eyes then, and did not mind that every one saw.
When all of those people of the hospital who could come were assembled in the ward, the hospital staff, and all of the wounded who could walk or be carried, the doctor told them, very simply, his voice a little hoarse, that it was the Queen of —— who was there among them, and that she was going to give his decorations to their comrade. A thrill passed through all the ward as the doctor's voice dropped into silence. No one spoke at all.
The little soldier who was to be so honoured turned his head and looked at the queen.
She was crying very much, but she smiled, and said to him, "You see, my little one, I cry because it is so great an honour for me that I may give his decorations to a soldier of France." She would not have him know that she cried because he was dying. She smiled down at him.
Then she took his papers from the doctor and read his citations out aloud, quite steadily, to all the ward.
She bent down over him and pinned the two medals on his poor nightshirt. "The honour is all mine," she said.
And then she took his head between her hands, as if he had been a child—as if he had been her own son who was so cruelly dead—and kissed his forehead.
They say that royalty must go away out of the world. But how can any one say that who knows beautiful things? There is something so beautiful that belongs only to kingship, something of ideal and dream. It was there, in the hospital ward, when the great lady in the plain, almost poor, dress, her eyes full of tears, was honoured by the honour she might do a little soldier. Only a queen could have made it all seem so beautiful. Only a queen could have kissed a little soldier of the people, who really were her people, so quite as if he had been her child, or have made of kneeling by his bed for a minute quite so simple and proud and symbolic a thing.
The little soldier never said one word. His eyes followed her with the worship that is quite different from any other worship, the worship that can be given only to a queen.
Afterwards he said to his nurse—it was the only time he spoke, for in that night he died—"You will tell my wife, will you not? You will tell her all about my queen?"
Questions and Answers
The wounds in the road are kept filled up. As the road is wounded, every day, they fill the wounds up and smooth them over. Because, in case of an advance or a retreat, the way must be kept open and clear.
This I have been told, for I cannot go to see.
They tell me how the work of the fields goes on around the wounds of the fields. There is no need, of course, to tend the wounds of the fields. Sometimes in the ploughing the blade of the plough strikes against an unexploded shell that the grass had hidden, and the old horse is killed, or the yoke of oxen, and the old peasant.
Sometimes the soldiers, back at repose, help with the work of the fields.
I ask, are the larks singing over the fields? But, of course. And are there magpies in the road? Why, yes.
When a shell bursts in the fields, they say, it is scarcely frightful at all, the spaces are so wide. It seems far from you, and you think of it as just something of the world's—scream of wind, lightning, that strikes perhaps; not an enemy thing at all.
Do the bees drone on just the same in the clover? They say they are absurd things that I want to know.
But I think of the clover growing tall and sweet about the little tilted wooden crosses, of which the fields are so full; and of the bees droning their golden, sleepy song, there, like that.
The Dead Town
They say that the grass is growing everywhere in the empty streets of the town. The streets are kept cleared of the ruins of the houses that fall into them, and their wounds are carefully healed, like the wounds of the road. The stones of the broken houses are piled up quite neatly at the edge of the streets. There is no glass left of the windows of those houses that still stand—except for that—unhurt. Many of the houses are terribly hurt, the roof gone, great gaps in the walls.
I ask, do you see the paper of the walls in broken rooms? Are there pretty little wall-papers, with flowers and ribbons, that you see through the wounds of the houses? Are there left rags of curtain, tattered and rain-washed and faded, in some of the windows? Do you see people's little loved things, abandoned in the broken ruins, betrayed to strangers?
They tell me that vines are grown across to bar the doors so long unopened, or the doors left so long open, sagging; and I suppose that there are cobwebs also.
They say that here and there you see a sign scrawled up over a door, or over the break in a wall, that says, "En cas de bombardement il y a ici une cave."
I ask, is the signboard of Monsieur Pigot's, the pastrycook, still hung out over his door?
The Grass Road
You can keep on for a short distance beyond the town, on the other side of it. The great road leads on between its poplar trees, white and straight. Here it has been less wounded because the hills shelter it. The trees have not been hurt here; they lift their grey-green plumes, light and proud as ever, above the road.
I remember to ask: Is there much passing along the road, that terrible grey passing of war things? Do you see many blue troops along the road? They say: Oh, yes, of course, as far as the old octroi.
What is it like now at the octroi under the edge of the hill?
Just beyond the octroi there is a barbed-wire entanglement across the road. No one can go farther. There are soldiers in the yellow little house of the octroi. The sentinel comes out.
They tell me that the road beyond the barbed-wire entanglement leads straight on, between the poplar trees, as far as any one can see, deep grown in grass. Nearly two years deep in grass. It is nearly two years since any one, yes, any one, has gone a step along that road.
They tell me a thing the sentinel said, that is a hideous thing. I do not know why I want to tell it. I know just how he said it, with bitterness and irony, but as if it were a thing of small matter that would be soon arranged for.
He said, "Just along there, about half-way as far as we can see, begins Germany."
Fifteen Days
Just before the end of the world they were together at the château.
They thought it was to have been for the last time. There had been many things they needed to talk over and arrange together, and why not quietly. They were "done with passion, pain, and anger." They thought to bid one another good-bye when everything was arranged, wishing one another well, and go their different ways.
There were no children, they were hurting no one. They had been hurting one another too long, for ten years—they were both still so young that it seemed to them half a lifetime—and now they thought they would never hurt one another any more. It was an immense relief to each of them to feel that it was over, quite over, dead and done with. But it was not over.
From the first moment of talk of war his one idea was to get himself taken for the army. When he was a boy, a fall in hunting had hurt his spine seriously; he had never been able to do his military service. The trouble had grown worse, and now, with his crooked back and halting step, there was nothing, exactly nothing, it seemed, he could do.
She stayed with him through those days of the utmost nervous tension. How could she leave him then? She understood him so well in his moods, now in despair, now hopeful, now in despair again; disgraced, he would say, worthless, ashamed before his peasants, before the castle servants, who were, all of them, going to join the colours; angry against everything, he had such need of her to tell it all to. He exhausted himself with hurried, futile journeys hither and yonder to find some one whose influence might get him "taken." He spent his nights walking the wide floors up and down, and writing letters to people he thought might "do something." But none of it was of any use. He worried himself ill. He fainted twice in one day, the day the papers told of the taking of the first German flag. It was a flaming white hot day in their country of the Aisne.
There were days of the passing through of their own troops. For days the valley was one deep, endlessly drawn-out trail of dust, from which came unceasingly the turmoil of hoofs and wheels and men's shouting, the horns and rush of motors, bugle-calls, the hot beating of drums.
Night after night the village took in the men billeted upon it, lodged them somehow, fed them somehow. The château received the officers, and did what it could for them.
Those were days of great enthusiasm. Trains passed full of flowers, of men laughing and singing. Trainloads of great dust-coloured cannon passed, covered with flowers.
Claire started a canteen at the station, the little country station by the river, in the fields of August wheat and poppies.
Those were exalted, wonderful days for her. She knew how agonizing they were for Rémy, and she felt about him very tenderly.
She was a beautiful, strong creature, her beauty and strength for years now had annoyed and been a grievance to him. But now he seemed to have need of her strength and quietness. She pitied him for what she meant to him in those days.
But when bad news came, everything changed for him.
There were so many things for him to do. He was maire of the village—the village counted on him, he was not useless any more. He had been really ill with grieving, but now that he was of use, he was as well as she had ever seen him before. All his small nervous ways fell from him; she did not understand him any more than if he had been a child grown up suddenly beyond her; but she was immensely pleased with him. She was so glad to be able to feel him stronger than she. It was very good to be able to turn to him now for help and comfort.
Her canteen at the station served trains that were full of wounded. Some of the wounded were so bad that they had to be taken out of the trains. She got a hospital arranged as well as she could in the château. For days it was so full that the wounded and dying lay on beds of straw on the floor of the great salons, not a scrap of linen in the château but was used for dressings and bandages.
Then the refugees from the villages of the north and the east began to pour through, telling of ghastly things. And then came the troops in retreat.
The hospital had to be evacuated in dreadful haste. It was more dreadful than anything she had ever imagined. There was a day when the old town-crier went through the streets, beating a drum, and calling out the warning to evacuate. All the people who could do so fled. They fled, and left everything they possessed behind them.
It was said that when the troops were passed, the bridge at the bend of the river must be blown up after them, and so the village would be cut off and left to the enemy.
Rémy made the villagers give him the keys of their houses, and he put up a notice in the Grand' Place that any one wishing to enter the houses must apply for the keys to the château; he wrote the notice in German.
Claire was proud that he did not suggest that she should go away, that he took for granted she was at least as strong as he.
The explosion of the blowing up of the old bridge was like the final note of all the things that used to be. The dust of the valley settled down for an hour, and things seemed strangely quiet.
All the people of the village who had not been able to get away came to the château, the very old people and the sick, and some women with babies, begging shelter for the night.
Three wounded men, whom it had been impossible to remove, were left behind in the great Salle des Miroirs. Claire was with them all night. The curé had stayed, and the sage-femme of the village had also remained to help her; the doctor and the chemist were both fled.
One of the men died in the night.
Another, who was delirious, kept singing all the time, "Auprès de ma Blonde."
It frightened Claire. There was a moment when she was uncontrollably afraid. She was afraid, not of the things that were coming to pass, but with a nightmare panic of the wounded man, singing, "Auprès de ma Blonde."
She could not bear it. She rushed in desperate panic to find Rémy.
It was in the moment before dawn; the birds in the garden and park were waking; the halls and stairs were still dark. She thought she never would find him; then she thought he must be in the kitchen, where the village people were huddled together.
She found him there, talking to them quietly.
There was a girl who had St. Vitus dance; she sat by the big kitchen table, one of her hands, that would not keep still, thumping and thumping the table. Claire was afraid to go into the kitchen.
Rémy came out into the passage to her, and shut the kitchen door behind him.
The lamp was still burning in the passage.
She caught his hands; and suddenly she had buried her face in his shoulder and was crying.
"There, there," he said, patting her hair.
She sobbed, clinging to him.
"You have been so brave," he said, "poor child."
She could have cried for a long time with his arms around her.
But he said, "You must not let them find you like this, you know; they might think you were afraid."
They came, very shortly after.
There was a galloping of hoofs into the château courts, and a shouting.
Then came the mass of them, surging into the court, greenish-yellow, with their loud, snarling voices.
Claire saw them from the windows over the court; Rémy had gone down to meet them.
She came down to the great central hall, not afraid any more. She had dressed carefully, and arranged her hair specially well. Tall and fine, she came slowly down the curving staircase, and stopped half-way to look on what was passing below.
The German officers seemed to her to be all gigantic creatures; Rémy looked more than ever small and frail among them. They were commanding, this way and that, roughly. Rémy stood silent, watching them. His look was so high and cool, so proud in the bitterness of the moment, that she drew herself up with pride in him.
The colonel was speaking with him, and moved toward the door of the Salle des Miroirs. Rémy stepped before him. "Not there," he said, "two men are dying in that room."
Claire came down into the hall and crossed between the officers and went to stand beside her husband. She was very proud to stand beside him. Something in her bearing seemed to carry weight with the officers; they drew back, less insistent before her, from the door of the Salle des Miroirs.
Again and again, in the fifteen days that followed, she felt that same effect of her presence upon them, and knew that it was a help to Rémy.
In the fifteen days he and she had opportunity for very few words together, the Germans always watching them suspiciously.
All the days were full of confusion; Rémy was kept constantly about with the German officers to arrange for the billeting of the men in the village, the stabling of horses and motors, interpreting, explaining. No one but he could get the frightened people, the few there were of them remaining, to go back to their houses and do the things required of them. No one but he could protect them, and at the same time see to it that they gave no offence. The least rousing of the Germans' anger would, he knew, have to be paid for dreadfully. Their demands were made at the point of the bayonet. They were angry because the bridge had been destroyed, and only Rémy's cool, quiet strength of insistence kept them from carrying out the threat to burn the village in reprisal. To hold his own, the while obeying as he must obey, yielding this point and that, submitting, and yet faithfully defending all that depended on him, was no easy matter of accomplishment. He must keep faith and dignity, and yet he must not give offence.
There were very desperate moments when the Germans would be asking for information, about the telephones and telegraphs, and about the country, the roads, and the marble quarries, the rebuilding of the bridge. Such help he could not give them, and there were moments when his refusal to talk, like his refusal to take a cigarette, risked everything.
Claire came to have a special dread of the colonel's fat leather cigarette-case. Rémy must wave it aside saying, so that his meaning was quite clear and yet courteous, that he had given up smoking for the time. The little scene of it was repeated night after night.
At first the Germans would have him always stand up in their presence. They would send for him while they dined, and have him stand there while they questioned and commanded. Then they realized that it was his wish to stand, that few things would have been more hateful for him than to have sat down with them.
After that they would have him and Claire dine with them. They sent for Claire to come down to the dining-room, where they were already seated at table and Rémy was standing. She must sit on the colonel's right, and drink a glass of champagne with him.
One of the officers called to her down the table, "There is yet left many a toast we can drink together, the brave and the fair!"
She thought that Rémy's fury would get the better of him, and she spoke quickly, before he could speak. She moved quickly between him and the colonel.
The colonel, sitting at the head of the table, under the portraits of generations of Rémy's people, glared up at her as she stood, very tall.
"You will do as I command you, madame," he said.
There seemed to be no escape. Desperately chancing it, she said, "But you will not stoop to command so idly. You know that we have no help but to obey you. Of what value could be forced obedience to you in so petty a thing? I know you will not command a thing so trivial and poor."
And he did not ask it of them.
Her days as well as Rémy's were crowded. The Germans required so many things, and there was no one left to serve them. She had only a few peasant servants to help her. The Germans demanded food, and there was scarcely anything to give them. Very little could be got in the emptied village; there was no more meat or bread. These people must eat, or they would become ugly. She must manage it somehow. She had to get the bakery started again, and make the villagers understand that they must give what they had in their little gardens, and their chickens and the rabbits. Old Jantot at the castle was quite unable to do the work of the kitchen-gardens and dairies. She worked hard helping him.
All the day of the arrival of the Germans she had been pitching hay from the stable loft to make bedding for the men quartered there; she scarcely left her work that day, except to go to the funeral of the soldier who had died in the Salle des Miroirs.
The curé helped old Jantot to carry him, and she followed them out through the courts, and past the German guard.
The two other wounded men in the Salle des Miroirs died while the strange alien life of the château went on. Three or four people of the village were ill; one woman and her newly born child died; there was no one but Claire to help the sage-femme.
The Germans accused the old curé of signalling from the church tower. They took him into the market-place, with a rope tied round his neck, to hang him, they said, under the plane-tree by the fountain. Rémy stood by him, risking everything to make them delay a few minutes.
Claire found the colonel; she never could remember what she said, how she pleaded. But the colonel said, "If we find these things true against him, then it will be your husband who will hang for it."
In one of the rare moments when they were alone together, Rémy said something which gave her more pleasure to hear than anything that had ever been told her before. He told her that but for her he did not think he could possibly endure it, that only her presence there, so brave and strong, the one thing left in the world, gave him strength to go on.
He had come up to her room, a small tower room she had withdrawn to when the Germans arrived. It was late in the evening, the room was almost dark, and she had lighted two candles on the little table, by the window, where she was having bread and soup on a tray. He had had scarcely anything to eat all day, and she made him share the soup and the bread. They laughed because he was really hungry. Cut off from the world, completely alone together in the most intense isolation, having no one, nothing, left, either of them, but each the other, in a world terrible beyond belief, they laughed together because he was so absurdly hungry.
They knew nothing but what the Germans told them of things that were happening in the world.
How could they believe such things? They did not believe, and yet to hear them said!
Fifteen days passed, that they could not have lived through if there had not been so much for them to do in every moment, and if they had not had each of them the comfort and support of the other's presence. Fifteen days passed, of helplessness and dread, almost despair.
Then, in one day, something was changed for the Germans; there was no knowing what it was; their mood took on a new ugliness.
It was that day that some of the men hanged Claire's St. Bernard puppy. They hanged him on the terrace from the branch of the big chestnut tree and left him there. Claire came up through the park from the village and found him. They never knew why the men had done it; it seemed so small and useless a thing to have done.
For two days she and Rémy were kept as prisoners, allowed to leave their rooms only attended by a soldier, and not to go to the village at all. There seemed to be a great confusion and commotion in the village and in the castle, but no explanation was given them.
Then, in one night, the Germans were gone.
Village and castle were left empty for scarcely a morning, and then came French troops, in hot pursuit from the victory of the Marne.
From the victory of the Marne—there had been a victory, a great victory! What a thing to hear, after their almost hopeless days! Hopelessness had been so black and close about them. And now it was lifted, dispersed, in a moment, by a word. Here come their own people crying victory. In their own tongue, their own men, dressed in blue, told them of victory.
Those things the Germans had said were not true. They had never believed, but now they knew. To think of looking into the faces of friends, of talking with friends! The humblest little soldier was a friend, the most wonderful of all things.
Rémy, who had all his life been distant and cold, was inexpressibly happy to wring a friend's hand, and sit with him, or pace the floor with him, and smoke with him.
What a pleasure to give all one had to friends!
How happy Claire was to help scrub and cook for friends!
It was a madness of relief and joy.
There was little time for thinking about it though. The new possession of the château was a desperately risky thing.
But these were friends, to suffer with and die with, if need be. Nothing could be as terrible as in those past days of isolation among enemies. Among friends they met what came.
In a few hours death and destruction were upon everything. And then, day after day, day after day, the battle raged along the river and under the edge of the hills; the sound of the cannon grew to be a familiar part of the nights and days; the screech of a shell was no longer strange.
The Germans had withdrawn to the strongholds of the marble quarries, just above the village. The village was crossed by the two fires. The poor people were killed in their little houses.
Men who went up on the château roofs to reconnoitre, were brought back dead. An officer was killed by a shell on the terrace, under the big chestnut tree.
Claire had to leave her tower room, and next day it had fallen with all the roofs of the east wing of the castle. Two men were killed in the fall of the east wing roofs, and the chestnut tree of the terrace, that had shaded generations of pleasant dreaming, was struck down under falling of tiles and stone.
They established the staff of the Etat-Major for greater safety in the cellars.
More than half the village was destroyed in those days. Claire and her husband lodged the homeless people as best they could in the dairy, the ground floor of the château was already crowded with the officers, and the stables and farm-buildings with the men.
For Rémy and Claire there was left one room, not too exposed, on the first floor.
From the window of it, together, one night, they watched the burning of a village over across the valley. It was a village of nearly all thatched roofs: it must have caught fire from the shells, and in that one night it was burnt to the ground.
As she and Rémy stood in the window, with nothing left about them but ruin and death, she remembered how, just before all this, they had thought they were come to the end of their life together; they had thought they were nothing to one another any more. And then suddenly they had come to be everything to each other. How could they either of them have borne it without the other?
Now their intense, their desperate solitude, together, was at an end. Others had come to share with them the burden of these things. There were others to whom they could turn now for comradeship. All of it was horrible, but now the world was again about them, life was opening its ways again.
She wondered, standing there by him, if, when some day the dreadful sounds of war were ceased and there was given them a chance to take up what they might of life again and go on with it—would they go on with it together? She wondered if he knew of what she was thinking as they stood there side by side? They had now become used to feeling one another's thoughts.
She was thinking that surely, after this, whatever happened they would have to go on with it together? They had gone through too much together ever again to break away. She would not have it otherwise, oh, not for all the world would she have had it otherwise. But she was wondering, if the great need passed, and life became small again, would they be changed enough? Would all this they had gone through have given them greatness enough to face, down length of days, the little things together?
Hospital, Monday, June 12th
We never see them well. As soon as they are better at all they send them downstairs to the convalescent ward, and from there they are marked for other hospitals, and in a day or two, one morning, I come to find them gone. The men who were evacuated at the beginning of Verdun did not even make the halt of the ward downstairs. And now those first Verdun men are gone, all but the very worst of them, to make place for men from, we don't know where.
The boy with the almond-shaped eyes is one of those who are left. He was much better for days, and now he has gone down again. He is tuberculous, and that is why he never will get well. He lies sunk down in the bed, a very small heap with closed eyes and one cheek always bright red. His father and mother have come up from the country, from somewhere in Normandy; they sit together beside his bed and look at him. His mother wears a dress of the richest black silk, that must have been the gala dress of her family for two or three generations, and a cap of lace that the smartest lady in Paris would be proud of. His father wears a black satin Sunday smock, of which the yoke is embroidered wonderfully. They have dressed themselves in their very best to come and sit by their boy, who scarcely notices them.
I like to think how happily the new Number 4—we call them all new since Verdun began—went off, with his one leg. He will have a wooden stick leg and be able to get about splendidly in his meadows of the High Loire. To-day he showed me a little photograph of his wife, in close-bound muslin cap and folded neckerchief. Her face is like the face of the Madonna in the simple calm pure paintings of the old masters. I said, "She is perfectly beautiful." He said, "Oh, no, madame, she is only a peasant, and not young. It is not even a good photograph. And it is all cracked and rubbed, madame sees, because I have worn it all the time of the war, sewn in my coat."
Little Charles is always left—poor little Charles, well used to the confusion of departures and arrivals.
As I was leaving to-day at noon, the mother and father of the boy with the almond-shaped eyes got up from beside his bed and stopped me. The father, who has almond-shaped eyes too, asked if they might have a word with me when no one could hear. Their gala finery made them the more pathetic, confused, and timid, strangers in such strange times and place.
We went out into the corridor, the three of us, and stood by the door of Madame Bayle's linen-room.
The father asked me, whispering, if I thought that the people of the hospital were fond of the boy? He said that he and the mother were obliged to go back that night to the farm, and did I think that these people they must leave their boy with were fond of him?
Saturday, June 24th
The boy with the almond-shaped eyes is dead. He died day before yesterday. I have been ill and not at the hospital these days, and I did not know. I went back to the hospital only this afternoon.
His father and mother arrived too late, this morning. They had had scarcely time to reach the farm in Normandy, when one of the house doctors, a kind man, wrote to tell them to come back. At the bureau they made a mistake in the address they gave the doctor, and his letter was returned to him in the post the day before the boy died. The doctor telegraphed then, but it was too late.
I do not know who told the father and mother when they came this morning. I do not know where they are to-day—this day so terrible for them in the great strange city. I would have liked to find them. Madame Marthe says they were surely allowed to go and see their boy, where he is, but not to stay with him.
I think of them, peasant people, confused and strange in city streets, frightened, belonging to no one, terribly alone, with nowhere to go in their grief. Where are they gone in their grief? They, to whom nothing has ever been explained, who are so unable to tell or to ask.
Sunday, June 25th
I was going to the chapel with my flowers, but I met Madame Marthe in the archway of our court, and she told me it was not there that I would find him. We went together around behind the chapel and past buildings that I had never seen before, of the immense world of the hospital. What a dreadful world in this June sunshiny morning!
A steep, dusty road goes up past outbuildings of the hospital, workshops, and yards, where there were some green things growing, and at the top there were a lot of our soldiers waiting at the door of a low, long house. My poor little hobbling, lopsided blue soldiers, with their bandages and slings and canes and crutches! I think they are so beautiful.
The doors of the house were open. Up two steps, and there were the father and mother, in their black silk and satin, standing beside the boy. They were perfectly quiet. The strange thing about the grief one sees in these days, everywhere, is that always it is so perfectly quiet. The boy looked just as one had seen him so often, sleeping, with his almond eyes closed. Only there was no fever in his cheeks any more.
The black hearse came up the road with several croquemorts and eight Republican Guards; they had two crossed palms for the boy, and the flag to cover him, and the black wooden cross that was to mark his grave.
We followed down the road and across the courts and out of the hospital gates.
The Sunday morning market was busy and noisy outside in the street, but a silence seemed to form itself around us as we went between the barrows and booths of summer country things. Then we went along a wide avenue that was empty, where the sound of the wheels of the hearse and of the horses' hoofs seemed solemn and monotonous, and as if it were something that never would cease. The boy's father and mother trudged ahead sturdily, with the strong gait of peasants from the fields, and my wounded dragged along, already tired. It was a long way from the hospital to the church.
There were many people in the street of the church, and on the church steps, and the church inside was crowded. It is the church of an irreligious quarter, but it was crowded.
A big Suisse with his mace led us along the aisle, through the throng of people who stood back from us, to the chapel of Our Lady, behind the high altar. Many of the Suisses of the churches of this quarter are gendarmes, needed because the roughs who come into the church would often make disturbance. The big Suisse had the air of a gendarme, ordering us.
But now the boy's mother and father were in a place they understood. There was no need to order them. They knew just what to do. They had been uncertain elsewhere, timid and bewildered, in the hospital, in the streets, but in the church they were at home.
The boy's mother motioned me into a chair behind hers. She and I were the only women: Madame Marthe had had to go back to her work in the ward. I knelt where she told me to kneel. The boy's father helped the wounded into the chairs across the chapel aisle from us, and took his place in front of them. In the aisle, between his father and mother, the boy had his four lighted tapers and his crossed palms and the flag of his country.
The priest who said the office was old, and fumbled and murmured. I was glad that he was slow. It gave a longer time for the father and mother to rest and be comforted.
The Suisse was rather in a hurry at the end of it, perhaps there was another funeral waiting. He would have had us follow the priest out quickly.
But the boy's mother would stop to kneel by the boy for a little moment, there before the altar of the Blessed Virgin. The boy's father came and knelt also, on the floor of the aisle.
Two calm figures, they knelt there, the Suisse could not hurry them. Those who would have carried their boy away stood and waited. We stood back and waited. The stir up and down of people outside the chapel gates went on, and all the stirs of the church and the streets and the world.
The two calm figures knelt, for the moment they were, with their sorrow, at peace; not strangers here, but at home in the house of that which did not confuse or frighten them.
The Stain
The maid, who had been Giselle's nurse so short a time ago, opened the library door and announced, unwillingly, one could see, "Madame la Marquise de St. Agnan, Madame la Comtesse."
Giselle, in her heavy mourning, stood up from the chair by the window. She did not go forward to meet Paule.
"It is sweet of you to see me," said Paule, crossing the room to her, slender and tall and lovely.
The baby-boy and girl who had been playing with some wooden toy soldiers on the floor in a corner, both scrambled up and trotted over to their mother.
Paule had never seen them before. She wanted to take them both in her arms and hold them tight. She thought she could never have let the boy go.
But Giselle said to the maid, "Honorine, please take the children to Miss."
They went out with the old woman, who closed the door.
"It was very sweet of you to let me come," repeated Paule, because she had to say something. It was harder than she had thought possible.
"I have seen no one at all," said Giselle. "But your letter—I don't know—I wondered——"
They stood looking at one another. Of course, they did not touch one another's hands.
Suddenly the room seemed to swim about Paule, there was a surging in her ears. She said, "May I sit down?"
"But I beg you! I am sorry, I can't seem to think of things. Here in the window?"
Paule dragged the chair out of the light of the sunshiny June morning into the shadow of the curtain. She was wearing a heavy white lace veil, but she did not want to face the sunshine.
Giselle threw herself into the chair where she had been sitting before. Her crape and the traces of many tears upon her face only made her look the more pathetically young.
"You wondered," said Paule, "if my letter were true, really; if it were possible that I could honestly write like that of him?"
Giselle nodded her head, not speaking.
Paule saw that it would not have been possible for her to speak. She saw, what she had been sure she would see, that the younger woman was suffering intensely. She realized, more than ever what the thing meant to her Bernard's wife; how for her everything of her memory of him, the memory she was to keep with her all her life, depended on what she was to learn in this hour. All the memory she was to keep of her dead husband depended on it. That she might remember him with tenderness and solace and peace; or that it must be always with uncertainty and restlessness, and bitter thoughts. To be able to mourn him fully, fearlessly; or to go on always tormenting herself with doubt. It was of desperate importance to her. Paule saw that. She knew that the younger woman kept silent because she could not speak, not because of any realization she had of the advantage silence gave her.
Giselle, silent, waited.
The older woman, braving the silence, took the thing up.
"You are going to believe what I tell you. I don't know why you should believe me, but you will. They all talk of it, but I am the only one who really knows. And I have got to tell you. The things they say are true, but with such a difference. I must make you understand the difference. Since the moment Dolly told me that you knew, I have known that I must make you understand. I cannot let you misunderstand him when he is dead."
She was holding her parasol across her knees, her hands in their soft tan gloves clutching the two ends of it very tight.
"It is rather terribly hard for me to tell you," she said, "harder even than for you to listen. Remember that, if I seem to go over it cruelly." She stopped, and Giselle nodded again.
"I must go over it," Paule went on, speaking very fast now, "so that we can have it all clear between us. Don't you see? He came home here for six days' leave. He told you he had six days' leave. When he went, at the end of those six days, you thought it was back to the front he was gone. Then, three days after he left you, he was killed in a bayonet charge. And his colonel, and some of his friends, said, writing to you and to other people of him, that it was especially sad to think he had been killed the very day he came back from his leave. So you knew that his leave had been of eight days, that he had had two days' extra leave of which he had not told you, spent, you did not know where, or with whom. And then it happened Dolly spoke to you of seeing him with me in Evreux the very day before he was killed. And so you knew. She had spoken of it to lots of people—the way people always say, you know, 'and I saw him only the day before.' And so every one knew. And you knew. But I have got to make you understand."
She let go her parasol and, leaning forward into the sunshine, threw her veil back from her face with her two hands. "I will let you see how I have suffered," she said, "it is written for you in my face." She was glad to have the younger woman see how much of her beauty was gone. "And that I loved him. You know—I must let you know—that I loved him. I loved him when you were a little schoolroom girl. And he did love me then." She drew herself up with a sudden flaming of pride. "I will give myself the comfort of saying that he loved me before he knew you, Giselle." The flame died down instantly, and she leaned forward, almost beseechingly. The parasol had fallen to the floor. "But he never loved me afterwards. From the moment he saw you—I was with him at somebody's dance the first time he saw you—I knew that for me everything was finished. Everything was swept away by his love of you. You know that, don't you?"
"I believed it then," said Giselle, speaking at last, "then, and all the time, in spite of all the things that people said, until this."
"There was one thing I never let go," Paule went on; "it was the pitying, protecting tenderness a man who is good like Bernard always continues to feel for the woman he once loved and who goes on loving him. I kept that alive, I kept him being sorry for me. There's reason enough in my life for any one to be sorry for me. And I kept him feeling that he must protect me, protect me from the blackness of sorrow that, I let him know always, there was in my heart."
Giselle had turned from her, as if she could not look at her, and sat staring out of the window to the tops of the trees in the avenue. Her cheeks were burning, as if the shame of the miserable confession were her own.
"Do you not see, oh, do you not see?" begged the other woman.
There was a dreadful silence.
Paule took it up again. "And the last thing was the accumulation of the shame and misery of years. I wish I could make you see, a little, what it meant to me, that you might not quite despise me. I suppose there is no excuse. But it had been so dreadful, down there in the country, with my husband, as he is, you know, ill, needing me, hating me, wanting me every moment. And all these terrible months of war, nearly two years, never seeing Bernard, scarcely hearing of him. I made him come. I made him come by telling him that I was in desperate trouble, that if he did not come I could not face it. I told him he must tell no one, not even you: that my trouble was a thing I must keep secret. Against his will, just by abuse of his kindness I made him give me those two days. I want you to quite, quite understand that it was only that I loved him, that he loved you. And that those two days were my theft of time he wanted to give all to you."
"Oh, don't, don't!" cried Giselle, breaking into it. "You need not tell me any more." She covered her face with her hands, as if it were she who was ashamed.
"Some day you will wonder why I have told you," Paule said, "why any woman should so humiliate herself down to the dust. It is because you have the right to a beautiful memory of him. You must keep that beautiful memory of him for yourself and for his children. It belongs to you, and to his home, and to his children. Never doubt him, Giselle, and let your sorrow be a beautiful sorrow, because he loved you as you loved him, perfectly. And in death he is yours. That is all."
She stopped and picked up her parasol. It was a green parasol. She looked from its bright colour to Giselle's black dress. She shivered a little and stood up.
Giselle took her hands away from her eyes and stood up, too.
Paule would have turned and gone out of the room, but Giselle caught her hands and held her, and lifted up her young face from which the tortured look was gone. She was crying, but tenderly.
For an instant it seemed as if Paule would have drawn away from her. But then she bent from her lovely height and kissed the younger woman. Then she went away.
Giselle did not go to the door with her. Old Honorine let her out of the apartment.
She went down the stairs and out into the avenue, where the leaves of the trees made large shadows.
As she walked very wearily, she did not know where, she was telling herself that it was over, that she had done what she could. She had made poor little Giselle believe her. She had given him to Giselle.
The avenue ahead of her seemed very, very long. She wondered if she would ever get to the end of it. Her thoughts seemed confused. She wondered what there was so cruel about Giselle's black dress and her own green parasol with the parrot handle. She would manage somehow to make the world believe that story she had told Giselle. She had given him to Giselle to mourn for. Perhaps that would wipe out some of it.