Odette was invited to dine with officers who had returned from that hell, who were going back to it; and these men talked futilities like every one else: partly from kindliness, partly for their own pleasure, or in courteous resumption of the decorum of former days. Between two witticisms they would relate an episode such as no story of the age of fable could offer. Many of them were men who two years before had danced the tango, whom strait-laced old twaddlers had in those days held up to opprobrium. Thus Odette met again a young fellow of twenty-four, a captain, an officer of the Legion of Honor, lacking several fingers, wounded in the leg and the breast. He had the same simplicity, the same childlike grace, as in the old time at the Casino in Surville, and yet he had taken part in actions infinitely more grand than those of the Homeric heroes or of the wars of Cæsar or Alexander.
He kissed a lady's hand, and that same evening went back to the jaws of the volcano. And that same week the word came that after having been three times buried alive in the undermined earth, his young body had been blown to atoms on Hill 304.
XIII
The next morning, her friend La Villaumer having come to see her, she introduced a subject which had been tormenting her.
"The individuality of the soldier is not obliterated," said La Villaumer. "Either he expects to come through safe, believing himself to be a privileged person among the unlucky, or else he says to himself, 'I shall die, but it will be for something worth while,' and that even exalts his individuality. When that disappears or becomes attenuated it is by excess of suffering, of hoping against hope for the end of all that he is enduring—mud, cold, the incessant wooing of death, and ills without number, have annihilated in him all power of thought and feeling. And still it would be speaking too strongly to say that he goes deliberately to meet death. Never has any living being failed to pay to death the honor of a particular deference."
"Do you think," asked Odette, "that one's individuality can be suddenly lost, or is it not rather unconsciously modified from day to day? You see, in the latter case no one can tell how far the metamorphosis may go! I see many people who have changed in the last eighteen months, and who seem not to be aware of it. I feel very clearly that I myself am different. I find only one part of myself unchanged; the part which binds me to the memory of my poor husband; nothing there is modified even in the very slightest degree—nothing; when I have leisure to think intently of him, I become again precisely the woman I used to be."
"Yes, but with grief in addition."
"That is true."
"It is that which modifies us. It broadens us when it finds a heart in us, and for that matter it exists only so far as it finds a heart. It holds within itself many possibilities. Your grief began with embracing your personal calamity; that alone; and it still hugs it to itself, that is most natural; but it has unconsciously taken a further step, embracing the sorrows of others, a change which you never looked for. And that is making of you another person."
"Will every one like me find themselves a tone above or below what they used to be—as if the whole keyboard had been transposed?"
"I do not think so," said La Villaumer. "Nature changes little. Only sensitive souls are modified, and they are rare. It is they who at last, at the long last, act upon and change those around them. Characters change little, never fear! Yet this war will have been so intense that those at least who have had a part in it will retain something of it, like a strong leaven which will cause new things to germinate. We must expect new things; but we must not look to see the human race thrown off its centre. Historians, sociologists will have their work to do, while philosophers, moralists, the general run of writers may go on as they have done. The word 'democracy,' for instance, will cover much paper——"
"Do you believe in such a thing, yourself?"
"I believe in the word as I believe in all words. It is a mistake to disdain the old-fashioned verbalism—rhetoric, eloquence. The majority of words are hollow—yes, but they are hollow like bells whose sonorousness may by itself shake the whole world. Those who use words are inspired by various things, and generally by sentiments that they cannot acknowledge; yet the word touches the finest chords in the soul of men whom one wants to win over. 'Democracy' has a tone——"
"Which will work good?—or evil?"
"Alas! The popular instinct and an inevitable necessity urge men, in spite of words, to enslave themselves, and they will of their own accord submit to the tyranny of new leaders, new groups representing interests of which the crowd will know nothing. Almost all my pessimism is founded on the irresistible character of this law. Men must be commanded, and no one can be sure that those who command will not abuse their authority or the confidence which is freely granted to them. However, the official programme of democracy will be to devote all its effort to the well-being of poor humans who have not an average of fifty years to live in this world, who no longer believe in another world, and who in truth have some legitimate aspirations to live their few years for their own benefit, and with as little pain as possible."
"Poor men!"
"Yes, 'poor men!' That expresses the immense pity that will well up in every breast, throughout the entire universe. Fate will have demanded much of the human race. No doubt man has suffered through all time; but in a manner so prolonged and so scientifically cruel—no! At all events, never have men suffered in such great numbers; never have they been so acutely conscious of their sufferings. And then, in former times men who suffered had not been learnedly informed that the world had come to the end of suffering. Those who are suffering now believed themselves to have reached the highest point of a period of progress in every direction. Never had man more firmly believed himself to be on the border of the Promised Land, than at the very moment when he stumbled into the infernal pit! What an aggravation of torment! Men may have been sacrificed for far-off ends which too often have not been attained; they may have been obliged, merely for their own preservation as living beings, to obliterate their own intelligence, and to become through long years—they themselves have said it—a sort of brute. Those who will survive will not ask the meaning of subtleties, or will not be in a condition to understand them. They will have only one thought: 'And now, what of me, me, me?'"
"A revival of individuality, then?"
"Yes, but of a fierce individuality, in which all that has for so long a time been stifled within them will urge them on to mistaken acts; or else of an exhausted individuality which will be the prey of exploiters never known before."
"Then you do not believe in a general betterment after this upheaval?"
"I only believe in more or less prolonged periods during which faith in betterment is possible."
"But, after all, man has goodness within him! He carries an ideal in his breast!"
"That is to say that he carries within himself—nowhere but in himself—that small portion of happiness which he may ever hope to attain. In fact, I hold him to be truly happy only as he exercises goodness, or as he aspires to what he deems the best. Man, the child, the savage, very clearly recognizes justice, much less clearly the beautiful; but the idea of the beautiful, however imperfect it may be in him, moves and may make him better. If he permits himself to slide down those inclines which deviate from these ideas, he may experience a dizzy joy of a bad kind. He may work himself up to enjoy strange pleasures, but seldom without at the same time perceiving that he is duping himself, and that pure and deep joy is not in these things. Yes, it is in himself that man finds his sole source of felicity, as the glowworm his light. It may be that justice is entirely inapplicable and the beautiful wholly conventional, but what we may be sure of is that the inclination toward the just and the beautiful is most fruitful in happy results, though they will perhaps never find absolute realization."
"That is all very well; but in fact you believe neither in beauty nor in justice!"
"I believe in the passionate endeavor of man toward beauty and justice."
"Which he will never attain?"
La Villaumer suddenly changed his tone, and gazing smilingly upon the young woman said:
"That would be paradise, my dear friend; be reasonable!"
XIV
It was the last hour of an April afternoon; budding foliage on the trees, the Arc de Triomphe, upon which every saunterer who looks to-day, looks with the vision of the triumphal procession to come, and the Champs-Elysées, unequalled promenade, which Odette and La Villaumer had so often seen crowded and joyful, in the days when the world was happy.
"Do you remember? Oh, you were a little girl, loving to hang around Guignol and trail after the goat-carts. But I was then no longer very young. Do you remember the time when there were no automobiles, and when the victorias used to go slowly down the street bearing beautifully dressed women whom one had time to admire, to criticise, to recognize, and salute? The auto is perfect, but the best it can do is to rush from one place to another, and that has by no means the interest of the daily procession, when it seemed that every one still had time to live. Excuse my capricious imagination, but it seems to me that these machines were made just to bring us with all the more haste to the frightful time in which we are living. I dare say this to you because I know that you are not going to remind me that autos are rendering admirable service to the war, especially at this very time. You think, like me, that they also render service to our enemies, and that all these rapid means of reaching the battlefield coincide with a war without a conceivable end. In a general way, scientific inventions—don't confuse them with the sciences, which merit all veneration—conspire to give to this war a character of atrocity to which no armed conflict has ever attained, and I wish that it could be proved to me that they alleviate it in equal proportion. Think only of the horror which this 'progress' in the art of extermination inspires. How many brains are unable to resist it? Civilians are dying every day, and the best of them, who go to pieces merely from imagining the war. We see them fall like the hollow bark which still seems to support a tree. You yourself did not know in your childhood the amazement that Jules Verne's 'Nautilus' caused. But you witnessed the crazy conduct of your contemporaries the first time they saw an airship sailing about in the air. It was pretty, to be sure, and the audacity of the early pilots roused us all to enthusiasm. Recall to mind the saying that was current on the greensward at Deauville when twelve airplanes arrived from Havre, three hundred metres above the earth, all rosy in the sunset rays. 'The flying Peace,' some one said. I shrugged my shoulders sorrowfully, because I know that in the face of an astounding invention one must always think of the homicidal use to which man may put it. Man has once again stolen the fire of heaven; a new Zeus will punish him for it. Humanity will blindly and with ecstasy invent the instrument of its own destruction. By means of an admirable scientific instrument it will commit wholesale suicide with a beatific smile. Man has already abdicated in favor of a machine. The war that is being waged is a war no longer of men but of material. Man is belittled; the machine surpasses him! A rudimentary intelligence suffices to set the true force in motion. We are still believers in the ancient saying that the true force is manly virtue, the fine, old-fashioned bravery. We have belittled the only thing in the world which might be wholly great—man. Do we profess to worship that bravery of man which all the past has justified? Why, by the scientific character of war it has become—one dares permit himself the blasphemy—almost a sign of inferiority. We reckon upon the mystical value of our bravery, and we send our men by the thousands against an army of tools! By virtue of our century-old prejudices we honor only the man who exposes himself, sacrifices himself, furnishes, however uselessly, his proofs of courage, when the glory of our arms will belong to him who shall most securely have sheltered his divisions behind gigantic steam-hammers! The applied sciences have caused a moral revolution. By riveting man, who is before all else a soul, to material elements, they have destroyed whatever might be justifiable in the great contests of humanity. A paltry little engineer behind his disguised heavy cannon, or with his mitrailleuse under thirty metres of cement, counts for more than our superb heroes with their courage, their loyalty, and their white gloves. Man, chained like a galley-slave to a machine, to a chemical substance, is forced to unlearn what it is to be a man. He appears very intelligent when he is equipped with algebra and terminology; yes, we must grant to matter all that it can give, but pause a little: have you not an impression that something superior is lacking in so abnormal a compound? They have domesticated the forces of nature; they believe themselves Titans; and there they stand glowering at one another like beasts; they cannot distinguish themselves from these material fabrics that surprise and overwhelm them. They call themselves masters of matter, and matter is all the time jeering at them. Engineering genius is probably not the result of a knowledge of matter, but of a knowledge of man."
XV
At that period people were still dulling their senses with words and stupefying their minds with discussions, if so they might divert them from that one place which for the time being was as the pivot of the world, upon which they had for six months felt that all depended, as two years before all had for ten days depended upon the battle of the Marne.
La Villaumer went to his club; his lip curled with an almost wicked smile at the thought of the ridiculously false news which that evening, as every other, he was about to hear. Then he reflected that the charming Odette, whom he had just quitted was very young, and asked himself whom she might marry.
Odette, still carried away with the life at Surville, sick at heart with those friends of hers who were doing nothing but dying of ennui and so demoralizing those around them, found comfort in frequenting such hives of activity as the Franco-Belgian headquarters and its numerous annexes, all congregated in the same building on the Champs-Elysées, where it seemed that all the misery of the world was perpetually going up and down its staircases, without respite and without end. She would go there as if in answer to a summons. So many, so many unfortunates who had lost their dearest possessions, their house, their village church! Meeting them on the muddy steps, she seemed to see, reflected in their startled eyes, a bit of countryside, a poplar-bordered road, a bit of garden, a hillside, fields of beets or of wheat. She had travelled, she knew all those sights which are the natural companions of the life of men. The odor of the hamlets came back to her, the warm breath of stables, the noisome scent of stagnant pools, the sharp smell of the tanneries in the north, the balsamic fragrance of cedar smoke from the bakeries, the appetizing aroma of warm bread, so little known in Paris. Then she would picture to herself the bewilderment of all these folk who had found refuge in a great, strange city to which they were not born, of these families who would never, never again see anything but the ruins of their villages, their countryside made unrecognizable by the absence of every elm, every bit of woods! She could have embraced them as they passed her; she longed to give them everything she possessed, things which, alas! could not replace what they had lost!
She thought to herself: "What have they done? Of what are these people guilty? Why are these men tortured? Why were they captured and their poor homes and little fields destroyed, and the sons of their blood, who alone gave a moral meaning to their lives? Why were not these people masters of themselves? Why were they the prey of bandits who consider even their own people as puppets, created to serve their vainglory as soldiers, and who care less for the existence of thousands of living creatures than a child for his tin soldiers?" Her heart throbbed, her soul revolted. She reached the top of the stairs.
To this building she had come without invitation to see an American woman who was freely and calmly consecrating her fortune, her intelligence, and her time to the unfortunates of the war. She came to ask if there was not something that she could do. The American woman looked at her with a smile.
"You have something better to do for your country."
"What?" asked Odette.
"Oh, we will speak of that later."
This answer had already been made to her. It had been said to her even at Surville, in the hospital, and with a mysterious air.
She was disturbed by it, and spoke of it, on a venture, to Simone de Prans, whom she saw that evening.
Simone and her husband both smiled as the American lady had done.
"What do you all mean?"
"Don't be disturbed," said Pierre de Prans seriously; "take care of yourself. A woman like you has services to give."
"Well, I must do something," said Odette, trembling under her veil, "and as it is, I am doing absolutely nothing with my ten fingers!"
XVI
"Whenever the cloud of anguish rises even a little from the sky of Paris," said La Villaumer, "this city, so marvellously alive, clasps to itself life, of whatever kind, with a simple, natural impulse, without immoderation, but with a secret smile, always ready. Yet this power of life, on the whole so beautiful, has something that brings a frown to the brow of the onlooker; for it has within it insensibility and forgetfulness.
"How disconcerting it is to see this new, mutilated humanity, pass in the streets almost without attracting attention. Young men in uniform, or returned to civil life minus a leg, on crutches, with an artificial limb, leaning on a cane like an old man, with an empty coat sleeve, an eye gone, nothing left of the nose but two breathing-holes, the jaw moulded over like a lump of potter's clay—or led along, sightless! They hardly arouse compassion, seldom even curiosity. There are so many of them! You can see the like in any place. War crosses, military medals, the Legion of Honor on the breast of a mere youth, which at one time would have attracted admiring glances and brought tears to women's eyes, are now hardly noticed. There are so many who have received or have deserved them! Most of those who possess them now wear only the ribbon on their jackets like civilians. The long duration and the barbarism of the war have spoiled everything. Men whose exploits cast into the shade the most famous examples of history with which the memory of school children is crammed, refuse to be called heroes. Heroes! There are so many of them! It was not to distinguish themselves, nor to cover their families with honor, nor even to set a noble example, that so many men have wrought prodigies; they did them modestly, because they had to be done in order to put an end to an abomination. With many the idea even of the country is attenuated in favor of something which makes much less appeal to the heart, the motive of which is only the cold persuasion that militarism must be destroyed; one must fight for very hatred of fighting. And here is something new, this vast uprising for war is producing no enthusiasm for war; it is animated only by hatred of war. All these brave men, riddled like sieves, rescued from an ordeal without precedent, are cherishing no ambition to march in a procession of victors, under waving flags, amid the acclamations of women, children, and old men; they had the rudimentary purpose of the peasant who struggles with a mad dog, and who having downed him digs a hole, buries the carrion, washes his hands at the pump, and goes in to dinner.
"Germany has robbed man of his divine childhood. In less than two years all these men have grown old; that charming faculty of innocent enthusiasm which had often deceived him, but which had given him joys never to be replaced, has been withered. The most deplorable ruins which the monster has spread abroad over our land are perhaps not so much the splendid monuments of Belgium and France, as the youth of humanity, that had seemed eternal, that was bearing it on to a great outburst of a common hope—faith in Fraternity, faith in Liberty, faith in Justice, potent religion of Progress. Cold reason, like the German gas, has poisoned all this fresh and ebullient vigor. The whole world has become allied, only to strangle a jackal. No man who has come back from the too severe ordeal will ever again feel the desire to enjoy the days that yet remain to him. Scepticism, which used to seem only a way of looking at things, cherished by very distinguished gentlemen, has now taken possession of the mass. But it has become commonplace, and so has ceased all relations with its brother, dilettantism. You will see what sort of thing realistic scepticism will become."
"People will always dream," said Odette.
XVII
Odette returned to Surville in the beginning of August. It was a time of great heat. The second anniversary of mobilization had been observed. War had become an accepted condition. Many already found it difficult to remember a state of peace. At the hospital there were even discussions as to how things had been there before the war. There were those who, though they had then been living in Surville, could not recall them to mind. "You remember the inaugural address of the head doctor, the 16th of August, before the first train of wounded came?" Some of the women insisted that he had given an antimilitarist lecture; others that he had spoken only against alcohol; others that he had given an eloquently patriotic address; some said that it was not he who had spoken, but the surgeon, a very handsome man; and still others that the address was given on another date. One lady could only remember the first time she had posed to the photographer in white blouse and cap. The first arrival of wounded, who had come from Charleroi on August 25, were confused with those who had come in September. Two years! What a long time when one has seen only wretchedness upon wretchedness! Nothing pleasant for twenty-four months! The communiqué of the battle of the Marne? Yes, that counted for something; but at the time no one understood its full importance; there had been no public rejoicing. Our later long and magnificent victories that merely held back the enemy presented to the mind nothing like what is generally thought of as military success; it was only after a while that their importance was recognized, when new misfortunes had touched us elsewhere. Two years of dull, black weariness, of constant apprehension, of bereavement upon bereavement.
This year a good many foreigners had invaded the beach. The tennis-courts were occupied by young men from beyond the sea, bringing up the memory of former days; the crowd was enlivened by a profusion of multicolored Japanese lanterns; the sea dashed against the glossy flesh of women who seemed as natural as Aphrodite; automobiles were almost as much in the way as in happier days; and between the rows of tents among the manifold tints of colored stuffs, beside the waves where so many beautiful limbs were disporting themselves, was a race of beings that might have been deemed peculiar, coming, going, or remaining motionless; they were the men who had escaped from the fire. They wore nondescript garments, they lacked one limb or even two, they hobbled, their armpits strained by crutches, or lay at length on the warm sand, smoking, timid of appearance, exchanging remarks hardly comprehensible, keeping silent, too, thinking—of what?
This last spectacle alone seemed in Odette's eyes to merit consideration. She had lived the greater part of the time among the wounded, she had also lived in Paris with the social world. "All is over," she would say to herself; "nothing will heal all this; it is mere mummery to ape the life of other days; all that is blotted out; La Villaumer was right when he said: 'Men have suffered too much.'"
It was in this very place—there, opposite, at the hotel—that she had become acquainted with Jean. They were pleased with one another at the first glance, carried out of themselves, even. She remembered how mad with love she had been in those garden walks, between those tennis-screens, on that beach, and along that terrace which now she was treading overwhelmed with despair, a despair that she could not name, greater than herself, greater than the broad horizon of the sea, greater than all things.
She had forgotten nothing. She recalled all the preludes of marriage, then those first vacations, their dual solitude in the midst of the throng; kisses exchanged on these dunes, along these roadsides, in some charming farm orchard, or on certain evenings before the fairylike spectacle of the phosphorescent sea; she remembered that room in the Hôtel de Normandie where he had left her a few days before the 2d of August! And she recalled to mind the beautiful sky of that day, and the tocsin pealing from all the church-towers of the countryside, and the rolling of the drum, and the young men raising their hats. How many of them were alive to-day?
XVIII
She had hardly finished luncheon when she heard the jingling of the little bell at the wooden gate of her garden. Mme. de Calouas came in.
Mme. de Calouas found Odette surrounded by photographs of Jean. They were on the walls, the chimneypiece, the tables, the desk, the piano. Odette had taken the opportunity of her journey to carry to the photographer every film that she possessed; she had had them enlarged, and she was surrounded by Jean as if Jean had become a whole people; she saw him in every room of her cottage and in all places; she felt somewhat tranquil only when she could see him. If she seldom or never spoke of him elsewhere, as soon as she returned home she belonged only to him. She talked to him, consulted him, and heard the replies which, in accordance with his character, he would have made her to-day, if he had lived, if he had known what was taking place.
Mme. de Calouas looked about her at all these likenesses.
Mme. de Calouas was not among the number of hospital nurses who had been rewarded by the epidemic medal, although she had not absented herself for forty-eight hours since the outbreak of the war, and though her position in the hospital was a most important one; but neglect of this sort was either indifferent to her or it flattered her pride. She belonged to a family of which every member professed absolute indifference to rewards, especially to any that might come from the public powers, and this although it was the tradition of the family to addict themselves constantly to the highest duties. The magistrates among them had retired some thirty-five years previously; the officers remained fixed in the rank of captain. In the Morbihan the expression "the Captains de Calouas" had become a common locution. At the outbreak of the war "the Captains de Calouas" had shown themselves to be men of the old-fashioned kind who considered that the finest part one can play in the face of the enemy is to be killed by him. Their unanimous and hardy bravery had, indeed, crowned nearly every one of them with the halo of sacrifice. Those with whom death would have absolutely nothing to do had this time risen in rank, and had received the cross after a succession of actions and for exceptional valor even amidst so many astonishing deeds. Of seven of them, only one was left, recently named lieutenant-colonel, with an artificial arm and a damaged lung.
Mme. de Calouas excused herself for coming so early, but said that she had felt an irresistible desire to talk freely with a friend in whom she had discerned "a choice soul."
"In the sort of convent in which we lived so long side by side," she said, "I consider myself somewhat as a mother to you, if you will permit me to say so, seeing that I had the responsibility of opening its door to you. Will you let me talk to you as a mother?"
"I have great need of it," said Odette;
"I have no mother, and I am a widow——"
She pointed around to the photographs of the dead. It was as if she were in a cemetery, herself living in one of its vaults. Her eyes filled with sudden tears.
"I love him as on the day he died; as on that other day, that dreadful day when he left me—I cannot cry all this upon the housetops. You, madame, have suffered like me, more even than me, the pain of this horrible war; we can no longer speak of our dead! We have no right to show our grief! There are too many griefs, too many dead. I have never been able to talk about him; I have found only one person who would consent to recall him with kindliness, and she is a Parisian, a self-centred woman who has managed not to permit herself to be touched by the war, a young woman, like me, but already a woman of former days. Who is there, henceforth, who can dwell on her personal sorrow?"
"It remains to be seen, my poor dear," said Mme. de Calouas, "whether what you say is an evil. I mean an evil for the time in which we live, during this war which has no end, and during the many years after this war; in a word, during all our lives—even yours. You know, my child, that I am a woman bound to all the old customs. In our family widowhood is a serious thing, and usually a thing for life. But this war has modified even our most firmly established customs. Great necessities, painful new duties, lie before us. We have been obliged to put down, with a strong hand, many of our feelings; we are bound to subordinate our personality and its most sacred traditions to the common weal. To mourn a beloved husband—what is more touching and more worthy in a young woman? But, my little friend, let me confide to you a cruel truth, of which you are already beginning to be aware. You were just saying to me that we can no longer talk about our dead husbands, however gloriously they may have been killed; it is equally the case of both of us. Well, forgive me for what I am going to say—it is one of the most cruel features of this time that has no name—to mourn our husbands is a sort of self-indulgence, it is a personal civility, it is almost a delight! I shall startle you, but I must say it to you, I who am twenty years older than you, because I recognize in you a noble heart, broadened rather than belittled by this storm. My poor child, you have no right to remain surrounded by these likenesses of the dead. If we belonged to ourselves, we would give ourselves up to what our hearts would prefer—weak, human creatures that we are! We would choose to remember and to mourn. But we are no longer our own! Let us imitate our husbands! They would certainly have preferred to live. To assert the contrary is mere boasting. But without hesitating they accepted death. They understood, every one of them, that they were not their own. Nor are we our own. I give you my word of honor—and you can never imagine the object of reverence or the cause of joy that for twenty years my husband was to me—if I were still young enough to have children I would marry again to-morrow! I am too old, and this is why you see me take so much pains in other directions. What the country asks of you is not work like what I am doing——"
"I prefer that work," said Odette.
"You are not your own."
"What the world asks of me is worse than death."
"Our husbands endured the sufferings of hell, and died only afterward——"
Odette burst into sobs.
"My child, my dear little friend," said Mme. de Calouas, "I beg you not to give way to despondency of any sort. Believe what I say, and do not think me hard, as I may appear to be. I am not hard. I have simply covered myself with a shell, because we are engaged in a merciless conflict. Let us not permit ourselves to be weakened whether by catastrophe or painful loss or bitter trial. To give way to grief is to grow less strong. For the time, we can be sure only of suffering. Each grief should give us the opportunity not to weep, but to do more than before. There is only one aim. How that simplifies things! We look toward it, and toward it alone. We direct our eyes neither to the right nor the left. Anything may happen: we are ready, we will not fail. We may be asked for more than is in reason, but we have offered our services. No hesitation, no boasting; above all, no consideration of ourselves; let us leave all that to women of petty minds, since it is the only motive that can move them. We who know better must set them an example."
XIX
Odette went to her room to bathe her eyes, but it was all in vain; she began again to weep; she had an invincible desire for tears; she wept until the hour for going to the hospital.
She had photographs of Jean in her bed-room as in her drawing-room. And now it seemed to her that to give way to her grief was, indeed, "a delight"! She was in the habit of giving herself up to sorrow; who would have believed that it was a way of giving herself up to pleasure? Yet in comparison with the excessive sadness of the present time, to wrap herself up, weeping, in the memory of happy days, was to set herself apart, to abstract herself in herself, to intoxicate herself with the fragrance of the incense on her own private altar, to divest herself of strength for the great common act which it had given her so much pain to accept, but the imperious command of which she could not now deny.
"It is still a pleasure," she repeated to herself. What chaos must have been wrought that her most acute sufferings, recalled to her by imagination, should take on the form of felicity!
Mme. de Calouas had affirmed that, for her part, had she fewer years, she would not hesitate to marry again!—Ah, no, that was too much! Anything, anything, but that! "'They endured the pains of hell, and did not die until afterward?' Yes, their martyrdom, their death, I would gladly accept for myself; but I refuse to be false to my adored memories——"
Another burst of grief overwhelmed her in which her whole tortured personality resisted and asserted itself. She seized Jean's photographs and kissed them frantically. She would fain detest all the rest of the world and give herself wholly to this one sacred memory. For the moment she spurned the opinion of Mme. de Calouas: "If it is a self-indulgence, let it be so! I yield myself to this self-indulgence! I love Jean, I have never loved any one but Jean!"
In the old days she used to bicycle with Jean, and the two, side by side, often exchanging glances, sometimes throwing kisses, would roll breathlessly along the Norman roads, between the high, thick hedges where they were as if enclosed, with only one way out, where they had nothing to do but roll along. An auto would appear; Jean would go first, Odette following in his track, breathing his perfume until the cloud of dust and the smell of oil or of gasolene choked her. Sometimes, going slowly, they would take one another by the hand. She was flexible, slight, and lightly clothed; she would play acrobatic tricks on her machine, and her joyful agility would fill Jean with delight. Suddenly he would jump down, she would follow his example, and they would exchange a kiss, folded lingeringly in one another's arms. There was a little wayside inn where, under the arbor, they would call for cider with bread and white cheese. They had never met any one there; the wind would ruffle the foliage around them, the dog would gaze at them with a twinkle in his eye, the hostess would serve them with a smile. More often than elsewhere they used to go to the orchard, the incomparable orchard of the farm at the foot of the ruins of Saint-Gingolph, where they were welcomed as friends, both so young, so beautiful, so radiant with happiness. There in the autumn they would walk in the little paths bordered with sorrel and thyme; where dahlias were growing beside onions, where there were currant-bushes loaded with rubies, in a corner a fig-tree whose fruit never ripened, under which they must bend to go to the pear-trees. There Odette would bite into a pear as she passed it, and this would make Jean scold; he would gather the pear, nibble at the place which her teeth had damaged, and carry it to the good-natured farmer's wife, saying: "Just see what mischief we have done!"
"Oh!" the farmer's wife would simply reply, "Madame seems to enjoy it so!"
Delicious and terrible memories! Odette could not endure again to visit those places, so near, yet which would now have given her so much pain!
Nor could she again go in the evening, at nightfall, to the edge of the sea, where in each vague shadow she would have thought she saw the shadow of Jean. They used to love to wander there in the warm obscurity of August. The long-drawn moan of the sea was to them a cradle-song composed by a musician of genius. No doubt Odette used to see in those days fewer large waves than to-day; but in those days all things blended with her love and seemed marvellous to her. Sometimes Jean, who had his boyish ways, would amuse himself by leaving her, suddenly disappearing from her eyes in the darkness. She would call him in an anxious voice, "Jean!" And she would always recognize his shadow as he drew near by his extending his arms in the form of a cross, and throwing them around her, to press her to him the moment he met her. In those days they would hear afar off the music of the violins, and would see above the dune the dark villas and the illuminated hotels. Now she knew that in those hotels were lying a thousand men swathed in bandages, poisoned by pus and gangrene, and the sea was holding up a long chaplet of buoys from which were hanging nets to ward off submarines. How could she go back there?
The summer wore away in a manner almost satisfactory, and with great hopes in the military operations. A wave of optimism passed over the country. Rumanian colors were floated from the town-hall; the battle of the Somme had freed Verdun and was itself beginning to slacken. In the beginning of October the wounded in the hospital were almost few. Odette, with too little to do, reduced to solitude, began to droop. She found the conversation of Mme. de Calouas very fine, but it did not touch her. Why not?
She would have her lay aside her mourning—the two years being now a long month over past. Other widows had almost joyfully put off their crape in the late summer heat. Odette considered it a profanation. "Time was passing." No doubt it was. It was long—without measure long. But to her Jean had died yesterday, nothing in her feelings had been changed by what she had seen. She thought of all those bodily wounds which she had dressed with her own hands, and which had healed. The great wound within herself remained open. At times she would forget the war, the sorrows of which at other times would crush her, and think only of the beloved being to whom she was bound for eternity.
One afternoon she dragged herself, on foot and alone, along the road to Saint-Gingolph, between the brook, the fields, and the hillock that separates two valleys. The weather was fine, underfoot were leaves of plane-trees, some decaying, others rolling along the ground, driven by the autumn wind. She had not the courage to go to the farm; the orchard came down to the roadside. She sat down upon the grass of the ditch and reflected that this was the third autumn that she had been there, since the war! She recalled to mind the first one, when people were beginning to find the hostilities very long; when every evening, passing by the post-office, one hoped to read the news of some event which would bring about its sudden end. She thought of the little soldiers whom she used to follow to the cemetery, and of whom every one insisted upon thinking: "He is the last one!"
Before her, on the crest of the hillock, like a fantastic screen whose edge has been clumsily cut by a child, a long avenue of very ancient elms broke in upon the view. They bore scattered clusters of foliage, still golden; a dense cloud of crows rose up and lighted with sinister croakings upon their ragged tops. These birds with their lugubrious cries seemed about to give battle for the possession of a notable charnel-house. And suddenly they plunged into the branches and disappeared, and nothing remained of them but the wound inflicted by the rasping voices upon the motionless air. Then the black cloud uprose again, as if the avenue of old elms, mown down at the roots by shells, had upheaved itself before its final downfall. It seemed as if the heart of the hillock were painfully throbbing. The raucous croaking of these thousands of birds grated upon her nerves and aroused all her powers of mournful revery.
Odette resumed her walk back to the town. Evening was falling. Lush meadows along the brookside, a gray steeple almost hidden in foliage of rose ochre, the racecourse—relic of a brilliant worldliness—two or three pretty villas, whose reddening hopvines were flaunting themselves derisively before closed windows, reminded her too painfully of a past era—a lost paradise. Among the persons whom she met, already half hidden in the shadow, some were laughing. Then people could laugh? Why, yes! Life, diverse as it is, has ever its source in the waters of a Fountain of Youth.
The darkness and the croakings of the crows haunted her. When she reached the cottage she threw herself upon a divan, and remained there, overcome, until Amelia came to call her to her solitary dinner.
The evening mail brought her tidings of the death of the last de Blauve boy, who had voluntarily gone to the firing-line in advance of those of his age, and had been killed outright in the very hour when he first set foot in the trench. Almost mechanically, and as a daily duty, she read two newspapers, line by line. She seemed to feel a great inward emptiness; she felt herself going to pieces. She must make a change, at whatever cost. There was just now no necessity for her presence in the hospital. She resolved to return to Paris, without other reason than the impossibility of remaining in Surville. How many feverish changes she had made, since the beginning of this war, with no more serious motive than this!
XX
Arrived in Paris, she went at once to see Mme. de Blauve. This woman, who had lost a much-loved husband and two sons hardly old enough to be soldiers, was not weeping, was not feeling dull, had no hard words to say about the war. She gave full evidence of tenderness toward her family, but, above all, she knew how to live, and that, in a time of war, means total forgetfulness of self and of all whom one loves. She was not sending her daughters into the hospitals, where they were not needed; she had herself given up her work as nurse, in order to give special attention to preparing them for marriage.
"Marriage is the civic duty of women," she said; "at sixteen and a half one can very well have a child. Marriage is a difficult matter in a time like this, but I am willing to pay the price!" She was thinking only of this, the oldest girl having passed her fifteenth year.
To Odette, Mme. de Blauve was another Mme. de Calouas in Paris. She felt at ease with neither of them, and yet both of them attracted her inexplicably. She felt herself at a distance from them while yet being influenced by them, to a degree that surprised some indefinable part of herself. Both of them shocked her, wounded her, even; she was appalled before their stoicism. She looked at them darkly, almost malevolently, when they seemed to gaze with reprobation upon the mourning garments which she persisted in wearing. These women, brought up to worship the dead, uprose like spectres from the depths of the past which was their element, and uttered a word unfamiliar to their lips: "Forward!" The impression was most disturbing.
Not that she envied them, under the pretext that both appeared to have adjusted themselves to the sorrows of the time. Odette had no desire thus to adjust herself. On the contrary, she implored to be left alone, to bury herself in unending grief. And yet she felt a secret sympathy with these unavowed foes of the perpetuation of her love.
XXI
Crossing the Champs-Elysées on her homeward way, Odette met two groups of blinded soldiers, each one led by a woman who helped him to pass from refuge to refuge. A blinded soldier invariably caused Odette to shudder with dismay. Of all the wounded by the war, such as he most painfully touched her sympathies. She stood on the first refuge as if petrified, gazing at these men led by the hand by young women, a third clinging to his comrade's coat, groping in the air with a timid arm.
In the face of distress like this, coachmen and chauffeurs, however much in haste, stopped short as before a funeral procession, which all Paris respects. The double stream of circulation was arrested in both directions recalling pictures of the waters of the Red Sea. The crowded foot-passengers formed a rampart with their bodies. No one saluted, for that is not the custom, but the seriousness of all faces spoke of the impulse, almost the need, thus to act. Veneration, such as has never before been seen on French faces, was stamped upon the features of men and women, even of children. That which was taking place was almost nothing, simply a group of soldiers whose organs of sight had been destroyed, with charitable women serving them as guides. For two minutes they interrupted the movement of the Champs-Elysées. Yet it was a moral influence, an unrecognized, unclassified power, poor and even lamentable of aspect, which had suddenly arrested the prosperous physical movement of a great city. Odette felt her heart throb; her eyes were so blurred that as she reached the sidewalk she almost failed to recognize her friend La Villaumer, who was standing there, gazing at that simple, pathetic transit.
After the first greeting he said to Odette:
"I have often imagined Jesus returning among us; I thought just now that I saw him at the head of that group, motioning with his gentle hand to the crowd of busy mortals, 'Pause, travellers!' He had come back as the God of justice and of love, just when the demon was making his most determined attack upon his beloved, just when each one of us is obliged to look into the inmost recesses of his heart and ask himself: 'What is going to be left?' And he was replying to us, 'Verily, I say unto you, henceforth cherish, all of you, a concern for human distress.' I thought, too, that I heard him whisper—pardon the blasphemy if it shocks you!—I heard him whisper softly: 'My sufferings have been surpassed; the sufferings of my martyrs have been surpassed.'"
"Oh!"
"Yes, they and he, while suffering, had the assurance of entering the Kingdom of God, and that within a relatively short time. The majority of these poor fellows are without that assurance; many of them are without hope, and their martyrdom has already lasted for twenty-eight months! They are about to endure a third winter, and some of them will last for a fourth! And who knows? From all this will be born into the world, my friend, a 'religion of mankind.' It is not simply the human blood shed, it is the indefinitely prolonged torture of men, millions and millions of men, which will create a new mystic element upon which the religions of the future will draw. It is a dangerous vision; the salvation of humanity lies at the present time in nothing that in the least resembles humanitarianism.
"But I have something to tell you, my friend; Misson, the husband of our good Rose, whom we have so often ridiculed because he stuck to his automobile— Well, he has been killed, the good fellow, blown to pieces by the bursting of a shell, as he was driving some officers——"
"Oh, my dear Rose! I must hasten to her!"
"Do not go yet. It happened on the road to Rheims. She has obtained leave to go for his body— Do you know what Mme. Leconque said, when she learned that Misson's body had been blown to fragments by a bursting shell? She said: 'In his auto?—What a stupid death!' The death that one receives in an automobile, you see, is not noble. It was, we now learn, the one-hundred-and-fourth time that a shell has fallen within less than thirty metres of his machine, and the ninth machine that has been struck in the course of his journeys. He will forever be unrecognized."
Odette could not refrain from wiping her eyes.
La Villaumer, who lost nothing of her actions, said to her:
"You are weeping for another sorrow than your own?"
"Is that what you think?" asked Odette; "it is still my sorrow; it is he who makes me more alive to the sorrows of others."
"Yes, but from the moment when you can thus weep for others your own grief becomes more tolerable."
"I would not wish to suffer less."
"You are not suffering less; there is room in your heart for a still greater sorrow."
"You always make me afraid when you say that."
"Odette, you must not be afraid of anything."
As they went up the avenue La Villaumer went on:
"I remember, last spring, regretting in your presence the marvellous aspect of the Champs-Elysées in the days of prosperity. And yet not one of those beautiful old days ever aroused in me so much feeling as the crossing over of those ten war-blinded soldiers. I do not cease to regret the time when these poor young fellows enjoyed the light; but I am asking myself by what mystery the greatest suffering uplifts us above the greatest pleasure. I even believe that the stimulus of the greatest pleasure is short-lived and degenerates rapidly, while the other lasts long and is endlessly purified."
"You are being converted, La Villaumer!"
"You know that there is no more convinced sceptic than I, and you know my predilection for the simple life, frank, wholesome, normally developing; one may say, happy in the pagan manner. But this mode of life does not exhaust life, though I believe it to conform most perfectly to the destiny of man. Life has acquired other dispositions, other tendencies. And this does not prevent asceticism, for instance, attractive as it is, from having at its base an incontestable psychological truth. In the present state of civilization we are not permitted to allow inconsistencies of which nevertheless the world is composed. If you so much as mention two contradictory propositions you are accused of instability, if not of dishonesty. Each of us remains shut up in his little, partial, incomplete truth; that is why the human race seems to one inconsequential and sometimes stupid."
"Come, explain yourself a little; how, for example, can one at the same time love pleasure and that which forbids it?"
"The problem does appear to be insoluble; but observe that there are none like the greatly self-indulgent to recognize the importance of an event which consists in renouncing all pleasure. It is those who most intensely enjoy the exquisite things of life who are thrilled to their inmost souls at the sight of a voluntary death. I have been present, as a relative, or as a mere onlooker, at more than one taking of the veil. Think what the taking of the veil must be to a beautiful young girl! Well, fathers excepted, I have never seen tears in the eyes of men professing the same faith as the novice, but I have seen robust artists almost faint at the sight. They were wholly indifferent to the person who was thus leaving the world, but they adored beauty and love. They believed in nothing else than beauty and love, and they were the only ones in the company to be overwhelmed by the power of the motive that can tear a human being away from the attraction of such a magnet. These unbelievers, these intruders in the temple, experienced such a shock that they came nearer to fervent adherence to a God to them unknown than the men of tranquil faith, who looked upon the ceremony as something usual and in conformity with the order of things. Ardent converts are not recruited from among the friends of religion, but from among its declared enemies or those totally ignorant of it."
XXII
Odette must leave a card with a word of sympathy at the door of the bereaved Rose, and see her, stand by her, try, however vainly, to console her.
Fortunately Simone overpowered both Rose and Odette with her chatter. She was as well-informed, as in the time of peace, of everything that went on in private life. Mathilde Aviron—another Germaine Le Gault—was in love with a deputy.
"But," said Odette, "she lost her husband only four weeks after me."
"That is two years and two months ago, my dear!"
"That is true."
"It all depends on circumstances. They are going to be married, it appears.—And that poor Ogivier is slowly wasting away, in solitary misery, because his wife believes herself called to be heroic in the hospitals! Opinions differ; some say: 'She is doing right. What would you have? Ogivier is fifty-five years old; he is useless——'"
"But after all, he is her husband. Are her services indispensable in the hospitals?"
"No one is indispensable, every one says."
"Well, then?"
"Well, then, it is war. Some forget their duties, others don't know where they are. Mme. de Gaspari is absolutely bent upon making shells. She used to shed perfume at fifteen paces; she had her hair waved by X., and the beautiful hands that you remember—Some one has given her a chance in a factory! And how many things are happening that no one talks about! There are husbands who were in love with their wives, and who after the wives have been doing service in the hospitals, no longer feel the same toward them. It is not their fault! I know some who did not in the least object to it; but love is what it can be; many love in their wives only an illusion pleasing to themselves, such, for example, as that a wife should come physically near only to her husband. When their wives come back after having spent whole days—perhaps nights—in those hospital rooms—what would you hear? Every one cannot get over a painful impression simply by the aid of reason."
"And what about the girls who do the same?"
"Yes, it is evident that men will have to accept new ideas."
"Say, that unlucky Gendron has had an attack."
"What, at his age?"
"Yes, he is still young; and he was so healthy! He was by no means a useless man. Here he is cut down; he cannot endure the idea of the war. War perhaps seems worse to him at a distance than if he were in the trenches. 'My head is splitting; it seems as if a petard had been fired into my ear. I would rather explode than watch for it.'"
"He is a singular man."
"He didn't 'explode' as he said. He is 'watching for it' with his mouth drawn to one side and an arm and a leg paralyzed—his intellect intact. People's lots are different. We see all sorts."
"There are unfortunate people; here and there are some who, whether they will or no, find the war turning to their advantage; and then there are many who really do not know what they are going through; they are as if possessed."
"What do you think of La Villaumer?" asked Simone.
"I hope that you don't propose to have him exorcised," said Odette.
"No, but has he told you that he is trying to sell all his property, his collections, his books? He wants to realize on all that he owns, and give it for the war."
"He is very much touched by it."
"But, my dear friends, who is there who is not?"
"Mme. de Boulainvilliers has distributed her entire fortune among war works; she has mortgaged her house to enable her to support an auxiliary hospital which she has opened in it; she is already begging right and left. She will come to be a charge upon the public charities. All her sons have been killed; but her relatives are furious."
"Little do I care about relatives," said Odette; "she is doing a good thing, and all the more because every one knows that she isn't in the least pretentious. 'There is no great merit in what I am doing,' the old lady says modestly. 'Why, I shall soon be seventy years old; if I do not take care of my wounded the state will have to do it, and that would impair the fortune of my relatives as well as of everybody else.' But she does not say everything that she thinks. What she thinks is much simpler than that; she enjoys, above all things, making little creams for her soldiers. 'But for my hospital,' she says, 'they wouldn't get any!'"
"Have you heard of Clotilde's adventure?" asked Simone.
"My goodness! has Clotilde too been touched by the war?"
"Oh, in the most unexpected way. You know that she vowed to keep the war away from her. Her husband is at General Headquarters; when she sees him she forbids him to speak about the war. But Avvogade had a friend of his childhood, a school comrade—a man whom one never met at their house in the old days—a modest employee in a Trust Company, but a tall, well-made fellow. The poor fellow lost his sight as the result of trepanning. His condition produced a great effect upon Avvogade; Avvogade suddenly felt all the old friendship for his comrade revive; he goes to him as often as he can, takes him out to walk, brings him home to lunch. Clotilde dares not object, but she is simply aghast. The mutilated man's conversation does not interest her and the sight of him horrifies her. 'We don't talk about the war,' says her husband. 'I am not breaking our agreement.' They don't talk about the war, but this man with his closed eyes embodies the war to her, and thus the war has entered her house. And no one has anything to say to her but: 'You can't escape it, my dear.' If Clotilde was not such a dear every one would laugh, for, after all, her trouble is not a great one and there is something absurd in the adventure."
XXIII
As she went about among her friends Odette perceived that she was regarded in Paris as one of the women who during the war was sacrificing herself for the public good. One must have a "war" reputation at all costs. No one said a word as to her conduct as a widow, or as to her moral ideas. But because she had been absent and was known to have been for a long time a hospital nurse, every one ascribed to her that spirit of self-abnegation which gives reason to expect all things from certain exceptional persons, born for sublimities. The compliments that she received were not ironical. Her profound and unalterable grief for her husband's death, the very discretion which she observed in making no lamentation before her friends, were not lost upon them. Odette, sad and silent, enjoyed what might be called "a good press." The praises bestowed upon her simply transformed into extraordinary virtue what was only natural to her. At first she found it stupid; then it disturbed her.
"But what am I, after all?" she would ask.
"You are an exquisite woman! Your conduct is admirable!"
And every one present would acquiesce. It was in a drawing-room which might have been supposed to be the seat of the War Committee, where were young women, women on the further verge of youth, poetesses, princesses; through which passed generals, convalescent heroes, ministers, men of all shades of politics, literary celebrities, and the sad relics of before-the-war æstheticism. The secrets of military operations were known there, whether carried out or simply planned, the underside of diplomacy, future declarations of war, historic nights, scandals unknown to the public. News was handed about, discredited, misconstrued, torn to pieces. An apparition from another world, like Odette, felt herself facing all Europe in arms, or some world-congress; rising from the modest tomb in which she had been living she was dazzled, her head was turned with it all. She rose to return to her solitude.
On the staircase she met La Villaumer, his smile scornful at the thought of the foolishness which he was about to hear.
"What do they expect of me?" she asked. "Imagine, there are those up-stairs who were ready to swear that I, all by myself, directed the battle of the Somme!"
"Not at all," he replied. "It is simply that you are a very worthy woman; you honor the house."
"All very well! But they frighten me. They seem to be expecting something of me——"
"That you will do the house still greater honor! Receptions of this sort would fain be taken as pictures of the country, in the small."
"Tell me about yourself, La Villaumer; how much truth is there in what they tell me—that you are going to distribute all your property and live in a garret?"
"Oh, it is a naturally erroneous paraphrase of an expression of which, like you, like many others, I have often made use. I have said: 'I no longer count. None of us any longer counts.' Which means: 'Whatever our value may formerly have been, the common cause is too grand for us to indulge in the fatuity of putting a value upon ourselves. Whoever we may be, we are reduced to nothingness by something superior to ourselves.' It is a rather stern assertion, and just because it is so it sets imaginations to work. Our amiable gossips immediately translate it into a child's picture, impressive by its crude coloring, in which they see me shivering on a pallet."
"And the story of Mme. de Boulainvilliers?"
"So they have told you the story of Mme. de Boulainvilliers as well? She is a truly generous woman, but not an imprudent one. She so well knows what a snare there is for her in the pleasure of coddling her hundred and twenty soldiers, that, having no direct heirs, she has put a part of her property into an annuity, in order to become a charge upon no one as long as she may live. All the rest she gives away. She detests her relations and delights in frustrating them. No one would talk about her, perhaps, if it were not for the cream of the end of the story, a little detail which happens to be true, and which does good."
"Let us have done with our good women and our special cases. But you, yourself, what do you think, on the whole, of sacrifice?"
"The general opinion is that men are without exception ruled by base personal interests; but this view only takes into consideration the calm level of the human ocean; in reality it has its tempests, which are the passions, and man in a state of passion no longer thinks of his interests. In the depths of my soul I believe that sacrifice may very well cause the greatest happiness."
XXIV
Some little time later Odette went to see Clotilde. It was early in a mortally cold winter; for two months already cold weather had raged, bitter and uninterrupted. The question of fuel was beginning to be serious; there were rumors of restrictions in many things. Paris was uneasy, though the newspapers, with their miracle-working ink, turned adversity into beauty.
Odette found Clotilde in her usual atmosphere, a happy accident having permitted her apartment to be warmed. She was surrounded by books and flowers, and wore a robe of some silken fabric which moulded itself to her sinuous form. She at once exclaimed:
"Do you notice anything changed here?"
"Not you, certainly!"
"I have had the rooms done over; how do you like this gray?"
"It's lovely! With the cherry color of the curtains it is really perfect."
"Ah! I was sure that you would think so! The others go through the rooms as if they were daft; they don't notice anything."
"You have a new photograph of your husband. It is wonderfully good."
"Doesn't he grow handsome? And yet the dear fellow is overworking. It isn't a sinecure, I assure you, his position at General Headquarters! But I feel sure that I amuse him; I divert him from his worries. Without flattering myself I please him, these days. And I love him, Oh, how I love him!"
"You are two lucky people."
"Forgive me, dear Odette, I am almost ashamed to dwell upon my happiness before you. But you are the only person who understands; you, who have truly loved."
"Who love still, Clotilde."
Clotilde opened her eyes wide, thinking that she had not heard aright. She knew what love was, surely, but it was difficult for her to admit that after two years and a half one could love a dead man, as she loved her strong and handsome husband. Yet she certainly could entertain no suspicion concerning Odette, and she at once resolved to make the most of her friend's enduring sentiments to talk to her about her own personal love. She overwhelmed her with it as with a flood. Her love had reached an intensity which it had never known in times of peace. The seclusion which she had chosen in order to avoid hearing any talk of war had built around her an ivory tower; and no longer meeting any one but her husband, her pleasures ministered to only by him, she had found him taking a place of unusual importance in her life; in himself he embodied all the delights of which the war had deprived her, and which she had learned to forget.
Odette herself began to speak of love. The subject was painful to her, and yet she enjoyed it. Clotilde was the only creature with whom, since the war, she had been able to converse on the subject without diffidence. Letting herself go along the lines of her memories and her habitual reveries, she began to taste the joy of a prisoner shut up in a dark cell, who finds an opportunity to mention the brook that flows through the sun-bathed field below his father's house.
"After all," she concluded, "the things that we have been saying, if they could be noted down, would interest the world more, fifty or a hundred years hence, than all the terrible events that are taking place."
Clotilde would hear nothing about "terrible events." Love alone was worth considering.
"We meet love everywhere," said Odette. "I find it springing up under my feet wherever I go; in the operating-room, at the bedside of the wounded and the dying. The towns nearest to the front are fuller of it than any others, it would seem. They say that it has never caused such a stir."
"It represents life, which must be perpetuated, whatever happens. In your case, my dear Odette, love is joined to death, but in general, no; it severs itself from death. Those of our day who sing of love and practise it are more surely serving the future than those who conceive of restraint as the sole virtue."
In spite of herself, these unpremeditated words brought a sudden light into the perplexed thoughts with which Odette's persistent sorrow and her natural disposition as a loving young woman inspired Clotilde. She felt impelled to cry out to her: "You think you are loving a dead man, my poor dear! but you are not twenty-eight years old; you are in love with love; it is always here, and is waiting for you!"
Both of them were equally incapable of disguising the truth as it appeared to them. Odette, bound by a tie whose almost inconceivable strength kept down every other sort of desire; Clotilde simply deep in love to the point of hardly being able to imagine a case different from her own. By chance she had not uttered words which deeply wound a bleeding heart, but Odette's acute senses at once perceived that there is hardly any conversation possible even upon the dearest subject that they may have in common, between two creatures, one of whom is happy and the other in sorrow.
She at least observed this: that Clotilde, from an absolutely opposite point of view, was at one with Mme. de Blauve, with Mme. de Calouas, with La Villaumer, with each and every one, in saying to her: "My dear friend, you should not always mourn."
And her grief, so genuine, was increased tenfold.
But Clotilde, self-indulgent, egotistic, and thinking only of her own pleasure or of sparing herself pain, was saying to Odette:
"See here, my dear; will you do me a great service? Will you come to lunch with us to-morrow? Would that bore you?"
"Why should it bore me? Why do you call it doing you a service?"
"It is settled, then. See here; I must tell you a secret. You know how I love my husband, how happy I am. There is only one dark spot: my husband has a friend, a blinded officer—Captain Dessaud. He brings him two or three times a week to lunch, on the pretext that he is lonely, with no family, and desperate. Of course I cannot object, you understand; but the sight of that man is painful to me to a degree that you would never believe. I have to talk to him, and I have nothing to say to a fellow who has lost his sight, who hopes for nothing, who has no motive for being happy. I am sick with it. Come to my help—you are used to wretchedness, you know!"
"Yes indeed, yes indeed, I will come."
XXV
Once at home, Odette thought more about Clotilde's conversation than about the coming meeting with the blinded man, which she dreaded. On the other side of the thin partition of her little drawing-room, her neighbor, the musician, who was sometimes reinforced by a 'cellist, was filling all space with enamoured, passionate, and agitating sounds, enough to rend the heart. Love, love, everywhere and always love! For the first time in her life Odette, who adored love, who but now had been delighting in talking freely of love, who even admitted the justice of some of Clotilde's assertions on the superlatively beneficent office of love, Odette felt that in thinking of love and talking of love with her friend she had lost tone, and now she had only one thought, heard only the one voice from beyond the tomb. "When I am talking with my friend," she said to herself, "I seem to be taking part in what is said, or is laughed at; yes, but I take part in it like the dead to whom it is given to perceive earthly things once more. The war, when it robbed me of my Jean, crushed the vitality of my body. My heart has become forever insensible. I am carried along in the whirlwind of present events like the threshed straw which might float above the standing harvest, thinking to recognize in it stalks like itself, without realizing that the iron has cut it off, separated it forever from the earth."
The moaning of the violoncello, the influence of the music, gave a sort of lyric inclination to her usually modest thought and contributed to increase her agitation.
"The times are so hard," she continued, "that I have not had, for two years, the slight consolation of talking with any one of my love-sorrow. I could hope to do so with one alone, because her love is, so to speak, apart from the war. But when she speaks to me of love I perceive that her idea of love is not mine, or is no longer mine. The love that I bear within me is no longer accessible to any human creature!"
The musician in the next room took up, as usual, her favorite Nocturne, accompanying it with her voice, wordlessly, until the grand, inspired utterance of desolation, thrice repeated, enwrapped the hearer like the long dark locks of night itself.
Then Odette, solitary amidst the pictures of her well-beloved, fell into a long fit of weeping, as she had so often done before.