Autos were rumbling by, some of them covered, others displaying to the light of day a heap of men, motionless, bandaged, covered with clay, an agglutinated mass of flesh in which all individuality if not all life seemed to be held in suspense, a cart-load of humanity: not a single man but a mass of bloody pulp in which the suffering that it covered must be a common suffering. Then came a truck, two trucks, three. They were great drays across which were placed stretchers, and on these stretchers were extended what they call the bedded wounded, those whose legs are broken, or already amputated, or dreadfully crushed, those fever-stricken from projectiles received in the body, those with cloven skulls, hastily bound together. They were marine gunners, foot-soldiers, blacks; tall, handsome, Moroccans with brown skins. Distinguished from all the others by excess of ill fortune, they were stretched out, straight and rigid like corpses placed in order, at equal distances, upon the marble slabs of a morgue. The trucks going at a walk and carrying the most seriously wounded, at each check, each halt, each starting again, one could hear hollow moans; sometimes the outcry of a Moroccan, sharp like the voice of a child or a woman, would make you catch your breath, and the country folk, crowded along the sidewalks, would whimper as if they themselves were being tortured.
Amelia, who in the beginning had been chattering without ceasing, was now suffocated with sobs, and her elbows upon the window-ledge was weeping silently over this procession. Odette, hidden at another window, wept like her servant, incapable either of tearing herself away from the sight or of controlling her emotion.
At length, having closed the windows, the two women found themselves face to face with wet eyes. Amelia said:
"It is better to be dead than alive."
Never had they experienced such emotions in Paris, where they thought themselves nearer the war because of the number of kilometres between them and the front, or because they heard men deemed well informed telling contradictory news from morning to night. Here in this remote and quiet corner they had now touched the very relics of the hecatomb. The eyes alone tell the truth; words are a small matter.
Amelia could not remain still; she ran to the hospital after the procession. Never in her life had she seen anything so exciting.
On her return she said that she could hardly recognize the entrance of the Grand Hotel, whither she had gone a few months before to carry notes from Monsieur or Madame to M. X or M. Y who were dead now, like Monsieur.
She brought back much information. The wounded who came that morning were from the Department of the North, where a frightful battle had been raging for weeks. "Some of them talk, madame; some of them say nothing; their eyes break your heart, like poor, sick dogs that glance at you as if ashamed and pretend to be asleep." "I could see from where I was," she went on after a little, "the surgeon as he appeared to be, all in white, with a cap like a cook and bare arms; he received them at the door and sorted them out, sending them up-stairs, down-stairs, to the right, the left, pestered by the nurses, who begged for them."
But Odette had not seen them entering the hospital, and this did not interest her. She was pursuing her own thoughts.
"There was one in the procession," she said, "one that was lying down, who was so pale, poor boy! He will not go far."
She had vowed to herself that she would not go out; she would remain with her grief the whole day, the whole week. But immediately after luncheon she put on her hat and went to wander around the hospital.
A hedge separated the street from the great court in which there was still a circular clump of trees surrounded with withered summer flowers; opposite, above another hedge, the vines in a charming flower-garden were reddening on the pergolas. Everything bore the impress of a time of display and enjoyment, and she felt that decorations like these were henceforth antiquated, absurd.
Odette knew already, through Amelia, the disposition of each part of the hospital, whose interior hum she could hear from without. She knew that one flight up, at the first turn, were the typhoids, nursed by a Sister who for twelve years past, wherever she might be sent, had done nothing else than care for typhoids, and go to the nearest church to put up a little prayer. She knew the situation of the staircase leading to the basements, where the food was brought in and the dead carried out. She knew that at a corner of the building looking upon the sea was the operating-theatre, visible from without. And in fact, passing by it, she perceived a group of white-robed men and women, their sleeves turned back, leaning over something or some one. Then she fled toward the sea like a coward and was ashamed. In reality, this assemblage of suffering creatures at once repelled and attracted her, producing a complex sentiment, unfamiliar and incongruous.
From afar she looked at the building and its surroundings. At the sight of this countryside, these villas, these hotels, the memory of the past summer overpowered her, and at the same time she experienced a cruel dispelling of her memories of the past summer. Meanwhile she stood there as if hypnotized by the great house of suffering. On the ground floor, through the glazed verandas she discerned a constant coming and going of white caps. And she thought of the labors which those hundred and fifty new arrivals of the morning must necessitate. She was seized with timidity at the thought of approaching this august place. Before it she seemed to herself a profane person, idle, gloved, parasol in hand, her one interest her personal grief.
An unknown power held her motionless, kept her from going toward the sea, where she had hoped to meet her cruel and too-much loved memories, and yet forbidding her to return to that place of common suffering which she had not made her own. While she stood there, hesitating on the levelled dune, she was shot through with an unaccustomed shiver, which frightened her.
As a pretext for again drawing near the place she told herself that she desired to see once more the poor boy whom she had seen lying so pale on his stretcher. Had they revived him? Sincerely, she would have loved to know. But how set about it? No sooner had she returned to the road that surrounded the glazed verandas than she lost courage to present herself as a curious stranger; men in bed, others sitting up, would stare at the newcomer, young and perhaps pretty under her crape veil.
She returned to her house much more agitated than if she had met any one, and let Amelia talk to her of all that she had learned concerning not only that hospital, but all the hospitals of the region. She remembered of all she heard only the name of a lady whom she had met in August at the Hôtel de Normandie, and who, it appeared, was nursing the wounded in the neighboring hospital, Madame de Calouas.
She shut herself up again, distrustful of the strange attraction that the city of suffering exercised over her. She talked to Jean's photograph, saying to it: "I will be only yours, think of nothing but of you." She read over again the books that they had read together; or rather, she pleased herself by telling herself that she had read these books with Jean. Or she walked in her little garden, making forty turns over the tour of the hedge-bordered alley, strewn with golden flakes which the poplars shed like rain. Sometimes she would pause before the latticed gate upon the road, amusing herself with counting the minutes that one might stand there without seeing a single passer-by. One day she thought she recognized Mme. de Calouas hastening past on a bicycle, light and fleet as a dragon-fly. And she felt a desire to see her again, not on her own account, for she had left upon her only a vague impression, but to talk to her or hear her talk of Jean.
Vainly she watched for her. She even permitted herself to walk out, in the hope of meeting Mme. de Calouas.
"But, madame," said Amelia, "it is very easy. Every one knows when these ladies come back and forth to the hospital. Madame has only to walk up and down before the great court."
It was not till the following Sunday, at eleven o'clock mass, that Odette met Mme. de Calouas and spoke to her.
"What!" exclaimed Mme. de Calouas, "you here! What hospital do you belong to?"
Odette thought that the nurse had made a mistake, intending to say: "Where are you staying?"
"I am at the Elizabeth pavilion."
"Is that the new auxiliary post opened for contagious diseases?"
"It is just a little villa," said Odette simply. "It is large enough for me alone."
"And what are you doing there, good God?"
"I came here," said Odette, "that I might mourn for my husband in peace."
Mme. de Calouas assumed a suitable expression, but made no reply. Odette continued:
"He was killed in the end of September, at the head of his company, going out from the village——"
"Yes, I heard," said Mme. de Calouas. "I ought to have sent you a card; but in times like these——"
"You yourself are in mourning," observed Odette.
"Oh—I! I have lost my husband, my two brothers, my uncle the colonel, several cousins—" She waved her hand with a gesture which signified: "They are past counting!" Before leaving Odette she added:
"Come to see me at the hospital, from eight o'clock to noon, and from two to four. From four to six I have another service at the Red Cross, close by. I will show you things. Come."
For a long time Odette hesitated. Again she shut herself up with her adored memories. She was irritated that Mme. de Calouas had not said a word about that exquisite man who was her Jean, and whom she had met at the hotel. When she went out it was precisely at an hour when she knew Mme. de Calouas to be at her hospitals. When the sea-wind was too strong she would walk in the dull streets of the deserted summer city, a pleasure resort in which the word "pleasure" had become strange and unfitting. The streets crossed at right angles; nearly all of them were bordered by hedges beyond which one could see a garden, the wire cage of a tennis-court, a Norman villa, and no one. Often, the whole length of her walk she met only one human being, a big man, almost impotent, whose duty it was to sweep up the dead leaves—an absurd duty since the wind scattered them as fast as he swept, and the trees shed down behind him another layer of little golden, rolling, dead things.
Sometimes, walking daringly, Odette crossed the long terrace, and braving the wind went as far as to the sea.
At certain hours the beach was covered with men under treatment. You recognized them by the slings that supported their arms, by their crutches, their bandaged heads, not often by their uniforms, of which they preserved only odd parts. They wore old jackets, knitted waistcoats, trousers brought forth from old Norman wardrobes. Some of the men limped, others wearily dragged their feet along the sand; those who had legs wrestled with one another, ran races, played like children. They delighted in the edge of the sea, gathering shells, and regaling themselves with the slimy flesh of cockles. Some of them cast a too expressive glance upon the young woman, with an awkward word which at another time would have made her smile. It was an amazing group of tatterdemalions; within the memory of man no eye had ever looked upon such a sight. It excited compassion; and yet almost every man in particular had gained, without trying, the manly merit of always seeming to be in good humor.
Whenever she saw them Odette felt moved, and at the same time somewhat jealous. He had not been washed, bandaged, ministered to, nor even clothed in rags; he had not been able to drag his mangled limbs along the seashore; he had been killed outright. She would say to herself: "Perhaps one of these soldiers knew him, perhaps he saw him fall; he could tell me the details, could describe his last days, his last hour, his last minute." And she grew faint at the possibility of asking them, of learning.
The low tide, the stormy sky, the wind, the grayish hillsides, the transports on the horizon, always this immense deserted beach, these wretched relics of the war, and she, disconsolate widow, imploring the wind to snatch her away and destroy her in its eddies! The constant reminders of the past, the sight of these same places, natural background of all the pleasant things of life! The thought of that water which had bathed the limbs of Jean, and of the August sun, and the restless multitude, gay and elegant, whom the many-colored sweaters set off like a profusion of tulips; the movement of automobiles, the music of the orchestra! Her heart ached at these contrasts even more than it had done in Paris. The solitude, the approaching winter, and the near contact with suffering aroused in her an unwelcome agitation. The restless air, dark with cawing crows, brought a bitter taste to her lips, and yet aroused in her an indescribable sense of splendor.
VII
Nothing less than the thought of meeting Mme. de Calouas at church on the following Sunday before she had paid her promised visit could have induced Odette to cross the threshold of the hospital.
She went on Saturday, between two and four o'clock. An orderly wearing a corporal's bands detained her as if her hand-bag might conceal incendiary bombs, but was softened on hearing the name of Mme. de Calouas, and led her to room 74. Odette was kept a long time standing at the door of room 74; at last a doctor came out, carrying a case of instruments. He was followed by Mme. de Calouas, who said:
"It is too bad, dear madame! I beg you to excuse me; one of my patients detained me. But now I am at your service; just let me change my blouse before taking you to see the wards."
Her change of costume was soon made, and she took Odette to a neighboring room where a very young nurse and two military orderlies were with great difficulty holding down a patient in an attack of tetanus. The sick man's head with its contracted jaws and inflexible neck reminded her of certain "attractions" of the waxworks; the upheaved body, forming an arc from head to heels, was as rigid and unyielding as the arch of a bridge. Odette turned pale, and Mme. de Calouas said:
"You lack training. See this child who is nursing him! She isn't twenty years old—a mere girl."
They passed into another room, from which exhaled a pestilential odor.
"Gangrene from the gas," said Mme. de Calouas. "It is not a perfume for the pocket-handkerchief, far from it! But one gets accustomed to anything. With assiduous care and absolute asepsis we have saved a certain number of wounded who suffer from this complication. We are so fortunate here as to have a surgeon who is not in haste to use the knife."
In the long corridor nurses, for the most part young, were gliding or running. A priest, wearing his alb, was hastening to one of the rooms. Carried along by his speed, Mme. de Calouas entered after him, and Odette followed her.
It was a comfortable hotel bedroom, hung with brightly colored paper; there were two women in white, and on a clean white bed lay a tall young man, uncovered, almost as white as the bed, from whose lips poured a stream of blood. He had received a fragment of shell in the sinus, had been operated upon that morning, and hemorrhage had set in—a stream white and red, unlike anything she had ever seen; it overwhelmed her with horror.
"You should apply a tampon," said Mme. de Calouas.
"The doctor is coming," replied one of the nurses.
They were both leaning over the white body; one was injecting serum into the stomach, the other was applying a syringe with ipecac to the thigh. The priest was standing at the cadaverous feet, anointing them with the sacred oil. The doctor arrived and applied the proper tampons.
To Mme. de Calouas this was one of the normal cases which one meets on visiting a military hospital. Odette was making every effort to stand upright. She begged to go out in the air. Mme. de Calouas smiled.
"It is war! And we are only in one of the rear hospitals. There is no rain of shells here. Shall we visit the wards down-stairs, if you please?"
The vast wards were almost vacant at this hour, for many of the patients were out-of-doors.
"They recover rapidly, if you only knew! One can see the new flesh grow."
"And they return to the firing-line?" asked Odette.
"They must, indeed!"
A group of four convalescents was playing a game of cards on a bed. Others, stretched at length, were reading; several were sleeping, some were receiving friends. A photographer in a corner was taking pictures.
Beds and beds, and torn flesh, and perforated limbs, and members sawn off, and trepanned skulls! And the tetanus, the gangrene, the typhus, and that red torrent by which the soul of a man was taking flight, amid all that whiteness!
Odette felt as if she should die, and left the hospital. During all her visit one question had been upon her lips: "Shall I find here any one who knew my husband?" What was it that kept her from uttering it? She could not have told how it was, but she had not so much as pronounced her husband's name. A weight had seemed to be crushing her during the whole time. She had felt overwhelmed by the new horror. The worst was that when at last she reached home she felt ashamed to weep for her own sorrow.
The fact also that all that human flesh had been ravaged for the same cause; that of those unhappy ones who were groaning, not one thought of blaming the cause; and that other fact that one part of humanity, upright and able, was bending with help over the other, gasping part, forced her to gather up her disordered thoughts and in the midst of her confusion to exclaim:
"Something is changed!"
That evening, at six o'clock, instead of wandering about the streets in heavy sadness, she went, as Mme. de Calouas had begged her to do, to evening prayer at the Chapel of the Orphanage, in which the Red Cross was now installed. It was a convent chapel, reserved for nuns, the public being admitted only behind a sort of screen of carved wood, through which could be seen the orderly rows of Sisters and orphans, the altar and the lights. She found herself in the midst of valid soldiers; that is to say, such as by one means or another could move from place to place. There were bandaged heads, arms in slings, stiff or deformed legs, crutches. Odette was moved by the singing more than she could have believed. Suddenly sobs choked her, and she wept. The men turned toward this young woman in mourning whom they could hardly have helped noticing, and who kept on wiping her eyes. She was weeping from a natural need of weeping. She was weeping for Jean, but also she wept with great pity for all those lacerated bodies; and for the first time she realized that these men, or these fragments of men, had come from places where death and pain were of all things the most usual.
Mme. de Calouas heard and saw her, and knew that Odette had come here to weep for her husband. As they went out she said to her:
"You loved him much, then?"
And by these words Odette realized that she had been weeping for an immeasurable loss, which had left her in a sense benumbed.
VIII
This did not last long, and as soon as she reached home she made honorable amends to Jean. She drove from her every thought except of him, denouncing the universal conspiracy against her beloved memories. What could she do to mitigate the misfortunes of others, however great and innumerable they might be? Those women who seemed to deny their own griefs filled her with a sort of dismay.
She passed hours of sleeplessness revolving these ideas, determining at whatever cost to master herself, and forget the whole distracted world. She fell asleep vowing henceforth to belong wholly to the memory of Jean.
Yet the next morning, Sunday, coming out of church, she found no rest till she had met Mme. de Calouas and asked her:
"Could I be of use to you at the hospital?"
"I was expecting you," Mme. de Calouas replied. "I would do nothing to bring you before the time; but I am glad that you wish to come. I will begin by taking you under my wing; for your initiation you shall be my helper. Does that suit you?"
"Of course. I do not know how to do anything."
"When will you come?"
"When you please."
"Well, I will leave you your Sunday. Or rather, come with me now, that I may at once get you received by the head doctor, and find a provisional cap and blouse for you. The rest will be for to-morrow morning."
Odette saw the head doctor; she tried on the nurse's costume which her friend would lend to her until she could procure one; and at eight o'clock the next morning, after having signed an engagement, she entered the hospital, almost as if she was entering a convent.
At that hour the hired women were sponging the floors with wet cloths, and through the wards resounded the click of buckets set down, the metal handle falling against their sides. The floors exhaled moisture. The sea air, entering by the open windows, swept out the odor of the sick-room. Convalescent men were going to the lavatories; others were helping comrades with helpless arms to wash themselves upon their cots.
Odette asked for Mme. de Calouas, and found her before the twenty beds allotted to her. A dozen of them were occupied by seriously wounded men, who gazed upon the newcomer with embarrassing steadfastness. Mme. de Calouas led Odette to the room where dressings were done, passing through the whole ward, where sixty men were exchanging the morning greetings of the soldier, now rough, now amusing. She was, above all, surprised that the nurses paid them no attention.
While giving instructions to her pupil Mme. de Calouas was busy disinfecting mugs, unrolling pieces of cotton and tearing them into bits, counting piles of compresses, tubes, drains. The room exhaled an odor of antiseptics, sweet and insipid.
They returned to the ward, and Mme. de Calouas made known to her each patient by name, with certain indications as to his case; she begged Odette to wash this or that one, to make the bed of an unfortunate who, with only one arm, could not do it alone.
"Be careful what you say to them," she whispered in her ear. "Remember that their estimate of you will depend upon your first words."
Odette observed that the patients gazed at her without once turning away their eyes. She won their approval by the first words she uttered, and by the gentleness with which she washed the faces of two or three helpless men, and she saw their expressions change. Those eyes so full of agony, which make unpractised fingers tremble, were softened. Her hands were dexterous, her face attractive. There was one poor fellow whom she had to wash from head to foot, like a new-born baby, a difficult task for a beginner. When all was finished and he was wrapped in clean linen she was about to pass to another bed, when the patient said: "Wait, madame!" And she saw him painfully turn in his bed, raise his sheet, awkwardly stretch out a suffering arm in the attempt at any cost to reach the case that hung at the head of the bed. She held the linen bag within his reach, and he, hesitating, fumbling, blindly feeling among a litter of things, a knife, letters, bits of bread, succeeded in extracting two photographs, those of his wife and his two little children. He desired to reward the new nurse for her kind offices, and he did his best by introducing her to his little family. Deeply touched, Odette praised the wife and the two children, and thenceforward the poor fellow was her friend.
Mme. de Calouas came to say that the stretcher-bearers were coming to carry "the thigh" to be dressed. Odette followed "the thigh." The new nurse was asked to cut the dressing. She broke into a cold perspiration; she thought the scissors were defective, and her remark provoked a smile from all the experts around; only the patient looked at her with an apprehension which seemed to paralyze her.
"You must learn to cut dressings," said Mme. de Calouas. "You will get used to it; just a knack."
Finally the steel succeeded in biting through the damp compresses. When they fell apart the wound appeared. It was an open fracture of the leg, whence exhaled the special sickening smell of osseous pus. The large wound spread open like a nightmare flower with thick petals, soft and viscid, covered with a creamy layer of dull old-rose color. They washed it; the patient gritted his teeth; now and again a cry escaped from the thin little brown face. When they looked at him he was brave enough to smile and say, "That's all right."
Odette was more ill than the wounded man. As on the previous evening, she asked that she might go out into the air, and when she stumbled at the door, turned pale, and was about to faint, the orderly, who understood these phenomena, with the help of a valid patient laid her all along upon a marble slab. It was only for a moment, and she returned to the room, saying, like the wounded man: "That's all right." The uninterrupted process of dressing made even her forget the incident. A kindly woman drew her into an embrasure and gave her a drop of cordial.
At that moment a man was being carried to the operating-room. He blustered a little as he addressed to his comrades the classic au revoir which may so well be an adieu: "I am going to my game of billiards!"
"Try to win, old fellow," they answered from all parts of the ward.
And, without flinching, Odette was present at "her" first operation.
She returned home at half past twelve, exhausted, but lighter in heart and satisfied with herself.
"Madame is pale," said Amelia. "Madame is the color of the lamp-shade when the lamp is lighted."
After luncheon she slept heavily for half an hour, and returned to the hospital. The afternoon was more calm, at least until the second visit of the head physician, before the men's six-o'clock meal. She made further acquaintance with her patients; she heard them talk about the war. She found occasion to say, "My poor husband was killed on the 22d of September," but it produced no great effect, none of those soldiers having known Lieutenant Jacquelin. Each told about what he had seen, and nothing else seemed to him to have a real existence. She was disappointed, but by their various touching stories of what they had been through, she was introduced to that war of which she had determined to know nothing since her husband was dead. The battles of the Yser, the sufferings of the combatants who had passed day after day in freezing water, the grotesque onslaughts of the Germans, the piles of dead under the ominous skies, set her imagination to work. Always thinking of her husband, she saw him all alone in the face of those infuriated enemies, trampled down by them.... He had gone out with drawn sabre from his little village, at the head of his company, and he had been killed outright. Before the survivors of the Yser she no longer dared speak of the circumstance of the lieutenant's death, beautiful though it was. This war seemed to be enlarging, growing beyond measure great.
They were beginning to organize the hospital for the winter; certain persons insisted that the war would not be over in six months; others said with conviction: "Nor in eighteen months either!" But these were suspected of sowing demoralization. Yet the English were making preparations for three years! From her friend La Villaumer, who was still in Paris, Odette received letters in which he wrote:
"We are like children, sometimes gay, laughing and gamboling, at others howling, no one knows why. My dear friend, busy yourself with your work, and don't read the papers. As for me, there is something which impresses me more than the monstrous movements of the German colossus: it is the soul of the colossus. It is one; it has only one purpose, which is the greatness of the German nation. It is a rudimentary sentiment, savage, primitive, barbarous, but how strong! We ourselves are fighting because we have been attacked, and also to defend ideas which do us the greatest honor: liberty, justice, and the like. We are animated by a very lively sentiment of the rights of man. We love humanity; they, the Germans, love Germany. How much more simple it is, and how it relieves them of all the scruples that hold us back! And yet, in the final issue, it is he who shall have triumphed by force who will lay down the moral values of the future."
Thus, uncertainty, admiration, confidence, scepticism, and a state of alarm were concurrently implanted in minds, and Odette, affected by them, like every one else, began from that day to be infected, as with the odor of the hospital, with this irritating compound.
Little by little it seemed to her that she no longer upheld herself, but that she let herself be carried away, borne along and guided by the life of the hospital. It was at once horrible and almost laughable. A place of pain, the perpetual reminder of enormities which the human brain could never have conceived, it was also an assemblage dominated by youth, which saves all. In the gaze of those prostrate wounded, gaze which had become of so much importance to her who passed and repassed along the bedsides, burned a flame disturbing and alluring, result of the burning away of something that could not be named. At times, one felt as if in certain of those wounded men one saw beings returned from the beyond. They had seen what nothing had prepared them to see, something that confused them, both their senses and their judgment. Some of them said: "It was hell!" Others, much more simple-minded, merely said: "One must have been there!" Certain of them, without imagination or memory, living entirely in the present moment, shut up within themselves an unconscious gravity which was in strange contrast with their youthful natures. But in a general way a new nurse like Odette could aver:
"But the wounded are not sad!"
"Because," some one would reply, "they are all happy at not being dead."
Thus, day succeeded day, without softening Odette's personal sorrow, but as if shrouding it behind a mourning veil which covered all that she could imagine of earth's surface. Everything made her think of Jean, but she had not time to appear to be thinking of him, and she shrank from speaking of him.
She led a very active life. It would happen that just as she sat down at table, all alone in the evening in the Elizabeth pavilion, the door-bell would ring. It would be one of the volunteer employees, passing along on his bicycle to notify the nurses that a train of one hundred and twenty wounded men was announced to reach the station at eleven o'clock. By half past ten Odette, who would not take a nap, and who knew not what to do at home, was already at the hospital, in her cap and blouse. The more zealous ones were there, and the more indolent ones as well, welcoming the opportunity to get together and gossip. The head physician was coming and going, opening and shutting doors; the doctors were arriving one by one; the surgeon, all in white, his sleeves turned back to the elbows, was talking with the women. The telephone-bell rang; it was the police commissioner sending word that the train was an hour late. A few persons were in despair; there were some whom the matter moved to laughter. Every one waited. And sometimes the train, instead of one hour, was two or three hours late. Resignation became general in proportion as reasons for impatience accumulated. In the great hall where they were all assembled some seated themselves on anything they could find, others lay down upon stretchers. Bright conversation grew dim with the lights. White-robed women, going up or down stairs on tiptoe, seemed like angelic apparitions. Through the partitions came the heavy breathing of sleeping men. Suddenly the ringing of a bell startled every one; the train was drawing into the station at last. The lights were turned up. Ten minutes later the first automobiles were sounding in the court. The double-leaved doors were thrown wide, notwithstanding the cold, the stretcher-bearers rushed out, and in a moment, contrasting with their rapid bounds, came slowly the wounded soldiers, bleeding, bearded, covered with earth, wan, exhausted; some of them half-naked, some with frozen feet, upheld or carried by sturdy fifteen-year-old lads. All were silent, a religious respect hushed the words upon the lips. This torn flesh, these rags of French uniform, wrought in the mind of every being not utterly insensible a change in his idea of the pathetic; something of the atmosphere of the firing-line entered and asepticized every heart.
The next morning the sense of familiarity returned. But in that one hour of the dark winter night, while the surgeon, bending over each victim, was asking him almost tenderly: "And you, my child?"—something august, an exhalation of the colossal human sacrifice, penetrated into this commonplace old hotel hall, sanctifying it for all time to come. And not one of those men or women who had been there, however advanced the hour of the night, however visible the fatigue on all their faces, but was glad for having been there.
Whence came these wounded men? From Ypres, from Arras, from Notre-Dame de Lorette. The names called up all that any one knew, through newspapers and private talk, of those charnel-houses whose image the imagination refuses to harbor, upon which those who have escaped from them keep silence.
Odette, soapy brush in hand, forcing back all repugnance, doing as others did, was helping to soothe agonies which humanity seems never before to have known or dreamed of. The most shocking duties no longer repelled her. The very effort which she was compelled to make, by the contrast between what she was seeing and doing and what life had formerly offered her, pressed the character of the catastrophe to her mind which lacked capacity to conceive of it. "Is it, then, so great?" she would wonder. And even: "Is there after all anything great?" For no soul in the world had taught her this. The inevitable contrast with her past life, all for herself, for her individual satisfaction, seemed to dishonor her memories, even of happiness, making them almost trivial. This, indeed, was the opinion of Mme. de Calouas, but not that of Amelia, whom in her solitude it became sometimes necessary to oppose.
"Madame adopts the ideas of those around her," the maid would say; "it is all very well, but Madame may believe me: the good time, and the true time, was before all this, when the poor men were not preparing to be made into hash."
IX
Who would have believed it a year ago? Odette took the inclination to follow to the cemetery the pitiful funerals of dead soldiers, not because it offered her a pretext for a walk into the country in the free air, for she had done that—she, so susceptible to cold—all through the black winter. But before everything else she was thinking that she had not followed her husband to the grave. After all that she had endured, still reverent of century-old rites, not to have followed the body of her husband in a funeral car to his last abode seemed to her to have failed in a sovereign duty. Alas! her husband's body had been carried in no funeral car, no one had followed him to the grave! She did not permit herself to dwell upon these heartrending details, but in accompanying the mortal remains of the soldiers she felt that she was to a certain degree acquitting herself of an indispensable duty that had not been rendered to Jean. Then the ceremony at the church moved her. The panoply of war mingling with hymns and words of peace, the tumult of battle set over against the sacerdotal acts of the priest, and the prayers for the eternal rest of the soul that had known to the uttermost the horror of earthly chaos, combined in some way to deaden the pain of mind, senses, and heart.
The funeral train would climb the narrow, serpentine road which led to the old town on the hill. Wounded comrades, hobbling along, their feet ill defended from the rough ground by straw slippers, some of them lacking an arm and others an eye, would follow the hearse of the poor, covered with the tricolor, behind the old parents or the young widow in tears; then would come delegates from the municipality and the hospital, then kindly disposed followers, pious people, idlers. The hedges would be growing green; the farms, with flocks of children at the doors and lowing cattle, would be awaking from the sleep of the long winter; one could hear the click of the milk-pail as it was set down upon the ground, the apple-trees in the fields were great tufts of unsullied flowers. When the procession, having climbed the hillside, turned toward the right the town came into view, its hotels and casinos transformed into hospitals with the floating red cross, its church-towers, its long white beach, the boundless sea with its line of English transports, untiringly through all the months, bringing from afar British troops to the land of France. The whole picture melted away into the national flag that covered the body of the little soldier, shot through by a ball on the plains of Picardy. In all this there was a new and incomparable poetry; the self-sacrifice of a man to something that he hardly understands, a notable act in which all desired to participate; and by contract the everlasting unconcern, the utter indifference, of nature.
Every one, without exception, was thinking of the end of the war. It was an illusion wrought by the spring, the renaissance of all that lives, the urgent need of peace and happiness that all creatures and plants cry out for beneath the returning sun. Those behind the hearse shook their heads, saying: "What a calamity!" But all were thinking: "It will surely soon be over." They sighed: "My God, grant that this may be the last to go!" Alas, it was only the first springtide of the war! If a prophetic voice should have cried: "In the spring of next year, in the spring of another year, and still of another, this same ceremony will take place, the same hopes will be uttered, the same illusions cherished! For season shall follow upon season, year upon year, only the horror and unhappiness shall be changed, for they shall increase and time shall know them out of all proportions that are called reasonable"—assuredly these good people would have been crushed.
As they went down the hill they gathered flowers along the roadside. The soldiers stopped in the wine-shops where they were given cider, and all returned to their places at once moved, saddened, and enriched by hopes, as is always the case when a new victim has succumbed.
Spring passed, and summer, and autumn.
Odette never spoke of her husband's death, though she was always thinking of it. She had found neither officer nor soldier who had known him. The death of Lieutenant Jacquelin in the early days of the war was a disappearance like so many others, in a chain of events that had no common measure. A man would fall, another man would take his place; nearly all the officers by profession were dead, and there were officers still.
"What is a man?" a common soldier asked her one day on the beach.
X
Early in the following spring, when the gardens that surrounded the villas of Surville were gay with flowering plums, and the countryside was again covered with those lovely trees of rosy snow that it is a pain to look at when men are killing one another, when the woods were venturing to confide to the brisk air their new-born foliage, Odette was obliged to make a visit to Paris.
During the journey, in company with convalescents and men on furlough, old men, and women in mourning, she was astonished to find herself so much attached to the hospital which she had entered almost against her will, drawn by something which seemed not to belong to her real self.
"Most of the women that I have met there," she reflected, "are of an unlovely pettiness, and one would say that they strive to transform the most innocent act into a shameful offense, from a desire to believe that there are traitors, guilty persons everywhere, and by a strange inclination to find the presence of the devil in every corner! And yet their service is excellent." Cunning malice, destructive backbiting, scandal set on foot by inconsiderate comments on trivial acts, often meaningless and that might well have been left unnoticed, open jealousy, absurd vanity, the most insidious intrigues to work up to distinction; to sum up, utter triviality—all these composed a body of customs recognized, admitted, in no respect casting a blot upon respectability. Only one thing led up to the mark of infamy: anything which nearly or remotely might resemble love.
How surprising this had appeared in the eyes of a Parisian woman of twenty-seven, who had lived in the world of society during the years between 1905 and 1914!
Odette mused upon that social circle, young, cheerful, given to sports, relatively kindly and prosperous, who before the war had surrounded her.
What had become of Simone de Prans, Rose Misson, Clotilde Avvogade, Germaine Le Gault, and M. de La Villaumer? She had received brief missives from them, postal-cards rather than letters. On her part, had Odette perhaps disconcerted her friends by the accounts she sent them; had she perhaps wearied them by her persistent grief? Simone and Rose still had their husbands, the former grievously wounded, the other still whole, running about in his car as usual; Avvogade was attached to Great Headquarters. Can any one understand the sorrow from which he does not himself suffer?
On reaching Paris Odette was singularly impressed. When she had gone to Surville in 1914, to forget the war and think only of her dead, she had been surprised to find herself on the contrary all the nearer to the war. The trains of wounded, life among the wounded, the almost sole society of men but recently escaped from death; all this was far different from her recluse life in the apartment of the Rue de Balzac, which had indeed recalled the memory of Jean, but had also recalled the memory of the time of peace. Monotony of occupation, the continual living-over of the same emotions, at last dulls the sensibilities. The war as it appeared to her after eighteen months of hospital experience was a state of things to which her organism and her thought had become moulded. The long daily weariness, the constantly renewed effort, dulled her senses and confused her perception of events.
Paris in March, 1916, seemed to her much more like war than Surville. The battle of Verdun was at its height, and all Paris was ringing with its echoes wherever one might be. Newspapers, conversations, the tramways, the metro, the taxi chauffeur who gave you change, the woman who sold you a magazine, servants, masters, the rich, the poor, bank employees, even to the sellers of violets in the streets, all brought to mind the war and Verdun, yet mutely, less by outcries than by quiet words, less by words than by changed color, the graying of the hair or of the beard, faded eyes, new wrinkles, and a certain indefinable manner. The whole earth and everything that it bears, every creature moving upon it, were a single sensitiveness, raised to its most acute degree. Acts and gestures apparently most remote from the war, receptions, dinners, the crowd at the entrance of the moving-picture shows, of classical concerts, of the few remaining music-halls, only showed the necessity for certain temperaments to tear themselves away from the nightmare of Verdun. Every one was affected by it, and so much the more as they were forced to tell themselves: "There are those who are suffering infinitely more than we."
Odette, in her apartment, was once again overwhelmed by her personal sorrow. She had lived in Surville with her grief buried in the depths of her heart, for though everything she saw reminded her of Jean she had no leisure to give herself to dwelling upon the past. In the Rue de Balzac all her sorrow came to meet her entire as on the first day. It seemed as if her stay at Surville had done nothing for her. When Simone de Prans came to welcome her, it seemed to Odette that her friend had just arrived with the terrible news, and she melted into tears. Her tears surprised Simone, who dared not reproach her with exaggerating her sorrow, but who yet brought herself to give her to understand that so long and so violent a grief was not fitting, that no one any longer wept like that. Odette, made docile by eighteen months of punctual obedience to orders, did not resist, made no objection. "No one any longer wept like that"; it was a custom, one of those sovereign customs, which a Parisian woman instinctively accepts. Simone had said: "You understand, there are too many!" Which signified, such misfortunes are too numerous; they are raining down on everybody. The human heart would not be equal to its task if it must be always sympathizing; each woman in mourning would herself die of it, creating a new and superfluous pain. She spoke with the greatest ease of her Pierrot, one leg paralyzed, one arm five centimetres shorter than the other and with shattered nerves. He was at the Ministry of War, and was content. She told of a ceremony which she had accidentally witnessed that morning, passing the Madeleine on her way back from the Flower Market. "A fine marriage, you know; red carpet on the steps, a crowd to right and left. Just as I was passing the doors opened, and up above I saw the young couple."
"There are still men to marry?"
"Listen; she, who appeared to be pretty, a lovely girl, a brunette, tall, leaning, as if enamoured, on her husband's arm; he in uniform, his decorations flashing on his breast. Oh, the handsome fellow, not thirty years old! He held himself upright, splendid, not looking at his feet; two large eyes wide open and fixed, as if he were speaking to a superior. She seemed to be indicating the steps by a gentle pressure of the arm, that he might not lose an inch of his fine height. Behind them one could hear the swellings of the great organ. There was an impulse to applaud, for he was evidently a hero, unmaimed and superb. Every one was glad in the happiness of his charming wife, though pitying her in the midst of admiration, for to-morrow her handsome officer must return to the firing-line, and the war is endless. Suddenly there was a movement in the crowd, murmurs, whisperings, faces turned pale; the handsome officer had just missed falling, my dear, notwithstanding the care of his young wife to hide his infirmity, for he was blind!"
"It's frightful, frightful," exclaimed Odette.
She had seen and nursed most grievously wounded soldiers; but unconsciously a sort of convention had been established in her mind by which nothing that she saw, or that happened in the hospital at Surville, should move her. This first result of the war which had faced her elsewhere than at Surville, and under another aspect, impressed her almost intolerably. On the other hand, Simone had become accustomed to the dramatic scenes which at times occur in Paris, where everything is perhaps all the more sad because the war drama is close at hand, aping normal life. This juxtaposition of the manners of a time of peace and these shadows of the pit which mingle with the life of every day, more like a prolonged dream than like reality, produce surprising effects upon reflective minds.
Simone de Prans, who for a time had taken up work in a model hospital, an American hospital, was no longer a nurse. That was no longer done.
"What about our good Rose?" asked Odette.
"Rose Misson has arranged her life. She has resolved not to yield to things; she has been too much teased about her old husband, always going about in his automobile. Neither Rose nor her husband is disturbed by that; he remains on his seat; she dresses, visits the shops as in former times and receives the few friends who are not indignant because her husband has not lost two or three limbs. Between ourselves, I think she is a woman who is doing a great deal of good."
"Only she does not cry it upon the housetops?"
"No; they will be upbraided for it all their lives, she and her husband; he, free from all military obligation, for having 'ambushed' himself in his automobile, she for having retained her placid manner, her good humor."
"I thought that optimism was in fashion."
"Optimism, yes, but not naturalness. The approved sort of optimism consists in unendingly predicting victory, with the jaw of a tigress, and in determinedly transforming all bad news into a presage of success. But those who maintain a quiet confidence without talking about it, and make life around them more pleasant by their usual good temper, are suspected of indifference."
"And in all this, what about you, Simone?"
"Me? I have a husband deep in government councils, haven't I? It is a power in these days. People leave me alone."
"And Germaine?" asked Odette.
Simone appeared somewhat embarrassed. People hardly dared to talk of Germaine Le Gault. Germaine Le Gault had lost her husband at about the same time with Odette, and almost under the same circumstances. Like Odette, Germaine adored her husband. Germaine had taken the loss even more deeply to heart than Odette; her life had even been in danger. Germaine, like Odette, still wore her deep widow's mourning. And Germaine was now in love; in love beyond the possibility of concealment, in love with a head physician in whose service she had worked. He was a married man and a father.
"La Villaumer insists," said Simone, "that in her case it is simply a lack of imagination, and that no one should blame her. He says, you understand, that she is unable to bring before herself, as you do, for example, a vision of her husband. If she had been capable of bearing about with her a persistent picture of him, she would have been faithful, if it were only to a picture; but she has no imagination; it is necessary to her that her mind should rest upon an object. It is one explanation—probably a paradox."
At that moment they heard in the neighboring apartment the playing of an excellent pianist which had formerly lulled the reveries of Odette when she was waiting for Jean. That neighboring apartment, into which the Jacquelins had never set foot, was separated from theirs only by a thin partition and a door. The music had often fretted Jean, but when Odette was alone she had loved to hear it.
"Listen!" said Odette. "Oh, it is more than eighteen months since I have heard music!"
"That is so," said Simone; "in Paris one finds a little of everything that one used to love; it is that that hurts."
"What is she playing?" asked Simone after a moment.
It was a revery; two lovers who are seeking one another, groping in the darkness of a garden on a lovely summer night; you hear their hesitating footsteps, you suspect their vexed and feverish gestures, their eager lips that call one another without imprudently pronouncing a name; though their footsteps creak upon the gravel and a fountain drops its slow pearls into the basin. Suddenly the music of a waltz attracts them separately to the lighted house, and they exchange kisses on the steps of the entrance, before being swallowed up in the intoxicating motion.
"Oh!" exclaimed Odette, thrilled, "do you remember, do you remember?"
"What?" asked Simone.
"Why, everything! Everything that happened before, before this end of the world that never ends!"
Odette, overcome by the harmonious reminder of the waltz of a possible festival, of the joy of living, of being pretty, young, beloved, could only repeat:
"I haven't heard ... anything ... for more than eighteen months, Simone! Do you remember that evening at Mme. Sormellier's, at Bellevue, where both our husbands were so beautiful?"
"And we, too, Odette! We shall be old after the war. We shall have had hardly five or six years of youth. I will confess to you that sometimes I juggle with fate. I go to see Clotilde, who refuses to permit herself to be touched by events. She says: 'I can do nothing about it; I am good for nothing. Let the world let me alone as I let it alone! Till my last hour I will stay with my flowers, my books, and my music.'"
"Ah! Clotilde, yes; do you know, I had forgotten her!"
"Everybody is forgetting her, and she forgets everybody. Her husband is at Great Headquarters; he often comes. She is a privileged person, and she says: 'Why should I not accept all the good that is offered me?'"
"Yes," said Odette, "it is tempting, but I could not do it.—No, I could not.—See, I tried to shut myself up with my grief. Well, I could not. It is too great—this universal sorrow—too absorbing. Listen!"
The pianist next door, still devoted to her Chopin, which she performed in a remarkable manner, was beginning the First Nocturne, the one that contains that phrase of lamentation, heartrending in its sober scheme and its sustained phrasing, without outcry or burst of passion, leaving the soul to the lasting sense of human woe.
"Oh, listen—listen!"
The pianist was accompanying herself with her grave, finely cadenced voice, following without words the sinuous course of the thrice-repeated utterance of sorrow. Odette began to sob; her nerves were unstrung by the apparent return to things of former days, while yet acutely conscious of the dreadful present.
"I must give up this apartment, after all," she said between her sobs.
"Yes, you will have to," replied Simone; "you would be overwhelmed with your sense of loss."
"For that matter I must give up everything."
"Everything? What more, do tell me!"
"Myself! See, I cannot delude myself longer."
"My poor Odette! You are hardly four days out of your hospital, and you go to pieces! We are only kept up by the presence of those who have suffered a thousand times more than we. You can't imagine what it is for me that my Pierrot has miraculously escaped death, with his body half destroyed. It is he who saves me from unhappiness. Those who have looked death in the face and yet have returned to life find it beautiful, whatever it is, and their wonder at it spreads to all around them."
"Yes, yes. I have felt that. If I had my poor Jean, even all broken to pieces, I should think only of the joy of having him safe. But I have him no longer, and the past draws me, at times, as if some one much stronger than I were taking me by the arms and drawing me backward with irresistible power. Do you remember Isadora dancing among her children and throwing flowers in one of the motives of the ballet of "Armida"? And that great fool Antoine Laloire behind us, crying: 'When one has seen that one may well say, "Thank you," to God and close one's eyes forever!' He had no idea how well he was speaking. They say he had a splendid death."
"Yes. All our admiration must from this time forward be given to the beauty of our warriors. Harmonious forms, enchantment—we are done with them all, my poor child, done with them!"
"Done with them! So they say. So I thought, too, when I saw those men coming in by the hundreds, reduced to a mass of bleeding pulp; I still think so when I think of the long line of devastation which is spreading over Europe, of all those human beings who are every day dying around their torpedoed vessels; but think! The moment the art of our former days is able to realize itself anywhere, beyond a partition, it rises upon us like the sun that has been two days hidden. It will rise again, Simone! If only a few individuals are left who can hear a note, a shepherd will be found to invent the flute once again, by bringing reeds together."
"You say that because the art of which you are speaking only increases your sadness. You are cultivating your sadness, and loving it still. If you were less melancholy, like me, you would consent to accept the new life just as it offers itself; but you will always see it irremediably disfigured, poisoned by an overwhelming horror. Life from henceforth is a Lady Macbeth with red and horrific hands, marking with a bloody spot everything that it touches. What fine art could flourish except by means of men not yet born, men who will not come into the world until after this horror is no longer spoken about?"
"Remember what those poor friends of ours used to say when they talked so well in our gatherings of former days: the flowers that bloom on graves are as fresh and the harvests that grow on battlefields are more abundant than those on fields that have never known crime and death; they are innocent, divinely innocent of all the past. The souls of artists are like flowers; and they purify the imaginations that have been soiled."
"And the conclusion is that you and I both, my dear, have after all a good share of optimism, otherwise called a reserve strength upon which we can draw for a certain time. Let us hope it may be for a long time. And we find the same thing under the distress of nearly all men. Ah, how strong life is!"
XI
Odette began a round of visits.
For the most part they were visits of condolence. She went first to Mme. de Blauve, who had lately lost her young son, that charming boy of seventeen whom Odette had seen for a second in the Avenue d'Iena flying to the recruiting-office, to take the place of his father, who had been killed in the second month of the war. Mme. de Blauve had come back from Rheims, where at that time she had been a nurse, under unceasing bombardments; she had returned to her daughters, who were now growing up. Odette found the family no more crushed or morose than at the first time. The father, Commandant de Blauve, adored by all, was dead; the elder son, in his nineteenth year, was dead.
"Happily," said Mme. de Blauve, "I have one left."
"How old is he?" asked Odette anxiously.
"He is about to enlist," said Mme. de Blauve simply. "Through him, I hope that our name will be represented to the end."
Every one knew that this last son was her Benjamin, petted more than all her other children. Her present anxiety was for her daughters; she would fain have married them at once.
"Marry them!" cried Odette; "but to whom, at such a time as this?"
"To good young soldiers, that they may soon have children."
Not the slightest emotion, though the family was truly affectionate; one single idea—to come to the defense of the country, by whatever means. Odette could not but admire, though at the same time she trembled.
"How far advanced is your mourning?" asked Mme. de Blauve almost severely.
"What?" asked Odette.
"I mean, how long is it since you lost you dear husband?"
"Just eighteen months," replied Odette.
"You are young," said Mme. de Blauve; "my child, you still have duties to perform."
"But," said Odette, bewildered, "I am doing what I can."
"We will speak again of it in a few months," said Mme. de Blauve. "I shall not lose sight of you. I count you among the good ones."
She dwelt upon the word "good" as she bade Odette good-by.
Odette did not in the least grasp Mme. de Blauve's meaning. Did she find her "good" because she had for a long time been conscientiously doing a nurse's duties, and did she think of sending her to some difficult post, requiring courage and constancy? She was cheerfully ready for anything. Only one thing troubled her; it was that the memory of Jean seemed to be relegated to so distant a past, seemed to hold so small a place in the thoughts of the people whom she was about to see, she being still in deep mourning, and having been away only seventeen months, to mourn for Jean.
Why did Odette go directly from the Avenue d'Iena to see Clotilde? Not in the least by reason of the love of contrast, or the need for it, but because she was passing the Place of the United States, which attracted her with its trees adorned with their young leafage.
She found Clotilde as she had always found her, extended upon an ancient couch, amid twenty cushions, a dozen books and magazines, in an elegant room, with a bunch of carnations flaunting their glory, and hyacinths in pots surrounding the young woman with a fragrant suggestion of spring.
"Ah!" exclaimed Odette as she entered, without quite perceiving the significance of her exclamation.
Clotilde, perfumed and her tall figure clothed in a Babani robe, kissed her joyfully.
"You haven't fallen off much, Odette. Tell me, are these your cheeks? No more rouge than in the old days? Oh, how often I think of your loss, my dear!"
She was the first person, except La Villaumer, who had spoken to her of her loss. Then there was still some one who remembered what had been her happiness, her extraordinary happiness.
"I haven't written to you, Odette, because I was too lazy, and because I need to imagine the face of the person to whom I write. So far away, under your nurse's cap, I couldn't tell—you are pretty; I love you always. Oh, how sorry I am for you!"
Odette, surprised, embarrassed, still under the influence of the life she had been leading, spoke as every one did:
"There are so many of us who deserve to be pitied."
"No, Odette, no; I am not saying that. No doubt there are many widows and many young women whose husbands or lovers are maimed, disfigured, ruined. But there are not many who, before all that, have truly enjoyed life and love. You have known love. You have had a few years that are worth being regretted."
Tears rose to Odette's eyes. They were tears that gave no pain, which rather comforted her. It seemed that she had long been waiting to shed such tears. She had so constantly heard conventional words, forced expressions, the result of a strained situation which there was surely no reason to criticise; but, except from her wounded soldiers, she had not before heard words simply human.
Clotilde was not afraid to talk persistently of Jean, not because she felt that at bottom she was giving pleasure to her friend, but because her thoughts naturally turned to attractive things, and she loved to remember that charming couple of perfect lovers that Jean and Odette had been. Never having checked her instinct, it now told her that Odette, in spite of her tears, enjoyed the revival of these memories. It was not Jean the soldier, Jean the hero, whose praises Clotilde sang. Odette had heard so many praises of heroes! She had handled so many with her own hands! There had never been but one Jean. He was Jean, just Jean, a fine, good, and handsome fellow who had nothing military, nothing surprising about him, except just that he was beloved. Who had dared to talk to her of that Jean since the war? No one. Clotilde was doing it in the unconsciousness of a woman who was still what she had been before. And Odette had felt some apprehension about seeing Clotilde again, just because she had feared that Clotilde had really not changed enough!
The interview was soothing, even delightful to her. Clotilde seemed almost to have forgotten the war—a little more and she would have made her forget it. She talked of the books that she was reading; books written earlier than the present time; she talked, too, laughingly of her clothes, on the pretext of the diminished resources of the family; she spoke of certain middle-aged and even old men, saying that they had not been appreciated in the days when there had been plenty of young fellows. She offered her friend a cigarette; she smoked, and the two women looked at each other through curls of long, light clouds, as if in a dream.
Odette went out somewhat amazed at the incredible ivory tower which Clotilde had succeeded in building around her youth, her beauty, and her selfishness.
"Is Clotilde selfish?" she asked herself, as she turned from the Square of the United States. "And yet how she asked about my Jean! Clotilde is like every one else; she is interested in just one thing, has a passion for it. She has kept as by a miracle the one thing that she had before the war, and that is love. Everything that represents love captivates her; one feels that she gives herself up to it. The others yield to a different passion which, by the conditions of our time, takes on a more sympathetic form. Mme. de Blauve with sacred fury throws all her family into the jaws of Moloch; Mme. de Calouas, in Surville, has a passion only for the wounded, exclusively for wounded soldiers; I have seen her utterly insensible to an accident to a civilian; most of those women in the hospital had a passion for their duties there, thought themselves degraded when they had not the number of beds that satisfied their pride, lamented as if for a public misfortune when, by chance, fewer wounded soldiers came. There are even people whose passion it is to have no passions—and they are the most to be dreaded. Why should Clotilde deprive herself of her bouquet of carnations, her pot of hyacinths, her perfumed cigarettes, while they serve to create around her the illusion by which she lives, and of which, when the occasion comes, she gives her weary friends the benefit for a whole hour? Yet, could I do like her? No; decidedly not. Did not I, then, love love as she does? I do not know, I loved Jean. Then I am less simple than she; everything affects me. And everything is shaken. I am not flattering myself when I recognize that I am alive to more than one thing. I wanted to be wholly devoted to one—to my sorrow. I believe that I am alive only to my grief, and yet sometimes I think that in this I am mistaken."
That day she felt an overwhelming lassitude. Clotilde had lapped her in "soft odors." As she was asking herself how she could finish the day she bethought her that she had been told that Mme. Leconque was another Clotilde, that is to say, a fairy capable of drawing one out of the war mood, though she belonged to a social set that was just now holding it as a great honor to give to it unstintingly both life and fortune.
"I must not fail of seeing her," said Odette to herself, "and just now I prefer another Clotilde to a second Mme. de Blauve, who makes me shudder." She took a taxi to the end of the Avenue du Bois.
Mme. Leconque was at home and alone. Muffled up in an ermine coverlet, in a room brightened by a wood-fire large enough to warm an assembly-room in the city hall, and surrounded by objects of art, ancient trinkets, Watteaux, Fragonards, she lay on a couch near a majestic bed, high and royal, covered with Venetian point, determinedly knitting, amid yawns, little stockings of coarse wool, for refugee children.
"You, at least, have had enough of this butchery," she said.
Odette, under her mourning-veil, admitted that for her part she found no pleasure in it.
"I should be glad to know," went on Mme. Leconque, "what sort of a life they are giving us."
Odette looked around at the great wood-fire, the walls of the room, a perfect museum, and at the silky fleece that enwrapped the form of the dissatisfied woman.
"They have just telephoned me," Mme. Leconque went on, "that we have evacuated Malancourt. Just look at my stockings, if you call them stockings! I admit that I never paid seventy-five francs a pair for mine—I always sent to London for them and got them at thirty-five francs. And to-day I am wearing stockings at 3 francs 95!"
"Why do you?" asked Odette.
"You would despise me if I paid more for them, in these days. You are in mourning, my poor dear; you don't think about these matters. Do you know where we are all getting our clothes? In the Rue d'Alesia, my child, in a store where they sell ribbons on the main floor for eight sous a metre, and up-stairs you find models of all the great Paris dressmakers at a third of the regular price. You might go there out of curiosity; I'll take you, if you like. You will find ten autos at the door, lined up before the tin-shop, the general shops, the house-painters, and the wine-shops. And where do you think we try on? Anywhere, no matter where. On the staircase, in the corridors, in the shop itself, three women together, not to speak of the old husbands and the men on leave, in a little parlor decorated with two opposite mirrors! Absolute promiscuity, a mob that reminds you of the old Neuilly fair; broken windows, no heat, and drafts of air that pierce through the lungs! My dear, I bought a charmeuse gown there for one hundred and seventy-five francs that would have cost seven hundred and fifty at Lanvin's! The Duchess of Chateauruque goes there; the wife of the ambassador from X. goes, too. Can you imagine such a thing? Oh! we run against picturesque things during this war! Do you believe that life can go on this way?"
"I don't think so, indeed," said Odette.
"I see that you aren't pitying us. Well, for my part I tell you that I have had enough of this war, and that I despise it! Do you understand? I despise it. Ugh! ugh! and ugh!"
Odette returned home along the darkening streets, thinking of Mme. de Blauve, the terrible. She felt much indulgence for Mme. de Blauve, the terrible.
XII
Odette had bought a newspaper. During the night the Germans had made a series of massed attacks, debouching upon Malancourt from three directions at once. Our troops had evacuated the devastated village "while keeping its outlets."
Once again she tried to take refuge in her memories of love. But this evening the portraits of Jean that she saw around her did not speak to her of love. She felt that Jean, if he were there, would not talk of love that evening, but would turn away like an overwrought man to whom the beloved one insists upon saying: "Kiss me!" She could distinctly see the gesture which, however, she had seldom known. She could almost hear Jean saying: "My little love, I am anxious.... It is not that I lack confidence, but they are advancing step by step; it is disquieting, disquieting. You will think me cruel, but I should be glad to go back there. I would rather be there, do you see?" If he had been with her on permission he would have gone back! What torture! And she said to herself: "If he had not been killed the second month he would have been killed since then: twenty months without respite under the shells!"
Days passed; the German attack upon Verdun wrought upon the great public of France a great silence. No noise, not an exclamation, no excesses in Paris; an imposing calm; a quiet crowd upon the boulevards, perfect order even on Sunday; almost gayety around the men who were home on leave who went about surrounded by young women in short skirts, Anamite caps or toques borrowed from the Palais, painfully walking on extravagantly high heels! Between four o'clock and seven every one was reading the newspaper. They were sold all through the city, not with loud shouts as if all Europe had been put to fire and sword, as when celebrated trials were going on; now that Europe actually was put to fire and sword, with less uproar than after the Auteuil races. In almost every heart the sublimity of the French struggle, the universal respect which it evoked throughout the world, overcame apprehension, stifled the sense of uncounted losses, and dominated that crater on the banks of the Meuse, in eruption over an extent of thirty-five kilometres, its lava overwhelming a whole countryside.