Title: You no longer count
Author: Boylesve, René
Language: English
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_YOU_ NO LONGER
COUNT

(TU N'ES PLUS RIEN!)



BY



RENÉ BOYLESVE



TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH

BY

LOUISE SEYMOUR HOUGHTON



NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1918



CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI



_YOU_ NO LONGER COUNT



I


From the swoon into which the sudden, agonizing shock had thrown her,
her soul escaped, shook itself free, as the mind shakes off a nightmare.
There is first a sensation of relief from discomfort, then a cheering
sense of safety, and one slips contentedly into a half-slumber. Then it
all begins again, for one no longer believes that it answers to any
reality.

Was she still asleep? Was it memory, was it imagination that unrolled
before her vision pictures of the past which yet her musings had never
till then evoked, and which suddenly presented themselves with annoying
vividness? There were whisperings, murmuring voices in the next room.
She was aware of them, yet to the unwonted sounds she paid no attention;
the gentle, persistent pressure of an invisible hand turned back her
thoughts to days gone by.

A hushed step upon the carpet, a finger questioning her pulse, no more
disturbed her than the familiar cry of the huckster in the street. She
did not wonder: "What, am I ill? Are they anxious about me? Why am I in
bed, in broad daylight, I so young, so unused to illness of any kind?"
She was recalling a certain time, days that seemed far remote, a period
of her life that seemed to have been acted before her eyes, like a play
in the theatre.

A summer month of one of the previous years. She saw again the last days
in her suburban home, just outside of Paris, the sloping garden and the
vista through the leafage over far-distant hills, splendid and ethereal.
Every one was getting ready for the summer holiday; some of the men were
going to the training-camps. What a world of talk! What discussions with
friends who had been invited to the country for an afternoon of
farewells! They were a world by themselves--young, alert, fond of
pleasure, and of all things beautiful and adventurous, care-free, and
charming. The oldest of the men was M. de la Villaumer, whose hair was
beginning to turn gray, but who enjoyed himself only among kindly faces.
Several were artists--musicians or painters. They loved the beautiful
things of life and that life of the intellect which easily adapts itself
to the beautiful. Love was king in their circle, a love rather kindly
than passionate, whose ravages they had learned how to conceal. Yet many
admirable couples were found among them. Odette Jacquelin and her
husband were always cited as the most enamoured pair of the group. After
them came Clotilde and George Avvogade, who cooed like turtle-doves, but
were lovers only "for a curtain-raiser," it used to be said. Rose
Misson, whom they called "good Rose," Simone de Prans, Germaine Le
Gault, were all women who adored their husbands and asked for no other
happiness, having no idea of anything else than happiness.

Why, they used to ask, was Jean Jacquelin an officer of reserves? What
was the sense of that biennial war-game for a chap who had nothing
military in him, whether by tradition, education, or belief? The old
father had made a point of it, because he held to the ineradicable
prejudices of his time. As for Jean himself, he made light of it; he was
a young fellow well on the way to make a fortune and give Odette all the
luxuries that in their circle were considered not superfluities, but
things indispensable. It never occurred to him that any other purpose
could seriously occupy a man's mind. Without entering into the thousand
and one interests of certain of his more cultivated friends who were
given to reasoning and theorizing, he simply found that the uniform of a
sublieutenant was becoming, and that, when he was obliged to wear it, it
was simply an opportunity to make himself fit; physical fatigue was
nothing to him; he might be inclined to think the Grand Manœuvres a
superannuated exercise; he might even smile at them and amuse himself by
enumerating the blunders of such and such a commander; but something
always kept him from ever making light of the thing itself. For that
matter, being a reserve officer was perhaps one of the many whims of
society, but it was what is called decent; in certain circles it was
done. So he let them talk and harangue, opposing no arguments but
continuing to be a reserve officer, carrying through his period of
instruction when he was called.

This time the young wife had gone with him as far as Tours, to be with
him a few hours longer and after that to receive his letters more
promptly. How long the time had seemed, all alone in the Hôtel de
l'Univers! And yet she had a pretty room! She had amused herself with
piquing public curiosity on the Rue Nationale, with her little
walking-suit of the latest cut, and her simple canoe hat--quite the
"Parisienne on a holiday"--and the elegance of her manners, at once
independent and circumspect, as were all her ways. It was generally
agreed that she was pretty. Who was not asking questions about her in
the hotel, at the restaurant? It had amused her to see a family of
tourists inventing pretexts for changing places at their small table,
this one in order to face her, that one in order that the grown-up son
might not face her. And how they had stared at her!

Telegrams had come from the sublieutenant. "Be at Pont-de-Piles
to-morrow, darling," or "Ligueil, such a day for lunch," or "Loches,
Hôtel de France, after breaking up." And she had sometimes waited a
long while in wayside inns or beside dusty highways.

Conversations at table began to come back to her. Every one had been
talking of the manœuvres, discussing the names of generals, the
communes that were being occupied. The presence of the President of the
Republic was an event in the countryside. There had been old men who
would consent to speak of nothing nearer than 1870; others, of fewer
years, would recall the magnificent condition of the reconstituted army
at the time of Gambetta's death, or at the period of the Schnaebele
affair, when the country was so near to seeing it in action. A
politician of the neighborhood--not more stupid, after all, than most of
his contemporaries--rubicund, his eyes bloodshot at the end of dinner,
had fallen foul of all these memories, regrets, would-be warlike
emotions, and turned them upside down like eggs in a frying-pan.
According to him, war was the scourge of bygone ages. France, the nation
of progress, still consented to carry on a semblance of it, by way of
facilitating necessary transitions, but it was a mere play of protocols,
a final concession to the past. War was destructive; modern society was
interested wholly in production; to believe in war was to turn back the
clock of history. For that matter, every well-informed person was aware
that scientific means of destruction had become such that a fratricidal
conflict had been rendered impossible, im-pos-si-ble! One must be an
idiot not to perceive that everything would be reduced to fragments in
the twinkling of an eye. The manœuvres! ah, you made him laugh with
your manœuvres! The manœuvres were no more like war than a toy pistol
was like a German mortar. War, should it ever break out, would not last
the time it would take to concentrate your army corps; the first of two
adversaries who should be half a day ahead would bring the other to cry
mercy.

"Well, say," some one had interrupted, "it wouldn't be a bad plan, then,
to do one's best to get that half-day's advance?"

"Useless! Count your population, consider your aspirations. Think of the
finances. Finances! There is not a country of great armaments that could
maintain war for six weeks, nor one that could even endure three years'
preparation for war.... Ask the great banks, which have the world in
leading-strings, emperors and kings as well as peoples; don't deceive
yourselves; war is impossible, im-pos-si-ble! We are witnessing, with
your manœuvres, the final deeds of a prehistoric age.... Turn your eyes
to the future, gentlemen, and all this bedizened and vociferous gang
will seem to you like children's toys!"

"But Germany--the militant party--the Pangermanists?"

"Germany is a pacific nation, industrial and commercial, which uses its
cannon as an advertising dodge. What we lack--don't you know?--is
precisely business sense. And Germany has business sense. The military
party? A drop of water in a lake. The Pangermanists? Advertising men in
the pay of the national industry. In the first place, the Emperor, as
every one says who has seen him near at hand, is a secret friend of
France ... and I will add, the most republican of us all. Socialism,
that's his enemy! ... The army that we need is not a rabble of soldiers,
but a group of men bent upon keeping the peace. Humanity is on the
march--it can never be repeated too often--toward a future of liberty,
equality, fraternity. Ah, you must reckon with economic rivalry; that is
the law of life."

"Precisely so."

Memory, quickened no doubt by her feverish condition, brought back to
the young wife with extraordinary precision, even to the least of them,
these utterances overheard at her solitary little table. True, she had
amused herself with repeating them to the sublieutenant, her
husband--she even recalled the moment--he was splashing in his bath,
soaping himself, on his return from the manœuvres. He had laughed with
all his heart, for when Jean had come back from the manœuvres he was
another man from what he had been when going to them. Only a few days of
presence with the corps, among his military comrades, had transformed
him or, more correctly, had restored him to his normal disposition; or,
in any case, had made him victor over the indolence with which he
usually replied to the fine talkers of Paris.

As for Odette, she had attached not the slightest importance to any of
these ideas, by whomever enunciated. Brought up in the one religion of
happiness, she held that happiness through love was the sole boon to be
asked of fate. What was the use of arguing? Why think about calamity?
Did not certain of her friends, those most reputed for intelligence,
insist that it was the honor of civilized man not even to think of acts
of barbarism, that man raised himself in dignity as he neglected to
prepare himself to make use of arms? Among many other sayings the
oft-repeated, if somewhat cynical, pronouncement of M. de la Villaumer
came back to her: "We are not in a condition to make war. We are unaware
how far we are not in a condition to make war, because we do not in the
least know what war is. If war is made upon us, as there is reason to
fear--as well the deluge."

And yet, that day, on coming out of his bath, Jean had become so wrought
up in talking of the army that he had almost made his wife afraid! She
had thrown her arms around him as he wrapped himself in his bathrobe,
saying:

"Don't talk so, Jean! Oh, imagine, if even you were to be so much as
disfigured by an ugly wound! Your lovely eyes, my darling! Your
beautiful teeth!--No, that would drive me wild!"

And because he had laughed, laughed heartily, so as completely to close
his lovely eyes, she had at once thought of something else.

Without ever thinking of going even slightly into subjects of this sort,
she had been buoyed up by a great credulity, born of optimism; not,
indeed, as to war, which interested her not the least, but as to Jean,
who alone was of consequence, and who, as a "reserve officer," she was
sure could not be called to take part in a campaign. It was an artless
idea, rooted in her mind by the pressure of her exuberant happiness. For
nothing in the world would she have tried to get at the root of it, lest
the result should prove uncomfortable. It was the same self-indulgent,
mental indolence which, for example, had withheld her from asking
herself the meaning of words that dropped from her husband's lips:

"Well, here I am, attached to the covering troops. You and I will not be
able to go into Touraine." Well, they would not be able to go into
Touraine; they would go somewhere else.

Then memory carried her on to the beginning of last season, at the
seashore. The weather had been so fine! Jean had been so lucky as to get
his vacation from his commercial house by the 15th of July; they had
gone to Surville. The Hotel de Normandie was already well filled, the
Casino was crowded, sports were humming, the Little Theatre was
exhibiting Parisian vedettes, a row of autos was sending vile smells up
to the terrace where every one sat of afternoons imbibing soft drinks
and roasting in the sun to the music of the gypsy orchestra; elegant
young men were displaying khaki costumes, martingales, and broad-brimmed
hats. In the evening every one had danced the tango in the hall. The
great stir of the watering-place had begun--futile doings without
number, comings and goings, from bar to bar, from casino to casino, from
luncheon to luncheon.

"Oh, say, are you coming? Look here, Jean! Aren't you tiresome, always
reading despatches! One would say that you were expecting something to
happen. What concern is it of yours?"

Every evening, on their way to the great hall of the Casino through the
gallery that looked out upon the sea, whether going to the theatre or
the music-hall, or simply intending to sit down and drink their coffee
or their camomile, they had found a crowd of, men in tuxedos standing
before the frame that hung on the right of the door, on which despatches
from Paris and quotations of the Bourse were posted. Odette could still
hear the reproaches she had addressed to her husband as he returned with
unwonted seriousness from reading them.

"Well, what about it all?" she had asked. Jean had kept back some of the
more sensational news, but one evening he had added:

"There is an ultimatum to Serbia."

"What of that?"

Nothing more had been said. But Jean had risen twice from his chair to
speak to men whom he knew, conferring with them in the lobby, then
returning to his wife.

"Oh, nothing will happen yet," he had said.

This had gone on for several evenings. It had become necessary to
explain some things. Then Odette herself had become anxious; she would
go with her husband to read the despatches; she would go to them by
herself in the daytime. But the number of readers was increasing, and
the silence, or the few words that would escape from the group, troubled
her; she would go down to the beach to read the despatches at the
_Figaro_ kiosk. Threats of war? ... European war? ... War? ... No,
surely that was not likely. The idea was finding extreme difficulty in
penetrating people's skulls. Despatch was succeeding despatch, twice a
day, now reassuring, now disturbing; but whenever one contained matter
for alarm, it was always better founded than that of the previous day.

Odette had at last asked her husband:

"Well, if by any chance there should be war, would that affect
you--yourself?"

"Don't be in a hurry, my darling; war has not yet been declared."

"But--but--if it should be?"

"Well, if it should be, I am a reserve officer."

"What is the reserve? Is it when there are no more active soldiers?"

He had kissed her, laughing. Not long before a relative of one of the
most influential bankers in Paris had declared, at a neighboring table,
that "All was arranged!" But the next morning a rumor had been spread at
the Casino that the news was so discouraging it had not been posted.
Jean had gone to ascertain. The rumor had been confirmed. Then he had
said to his wife: "It is time to take precautions. Listen, my darling, I
shall go to Paris this evening. I will set my business in order, I will
see La Villaumer, who knows everything, and Avvogade, who lunches with
the President of the Council. I shall learn what can be learned, and I
shall try to return by night."

Once again she could hear all these words, could see again his slightest
actions, could imagine La Villaumer, so far--seeing, and Clotilde
Avvogade, surrounded by her flowers in her almost too delicious
apartment, making a face when she heard her husband talking of
disagreeable things. She lived over again the sad night that she had
passed alone, sleepless, and the bat that had flown into her room like a
little devil, and the faces next morning at the Casino, on the beach,
everywhere! And the departures, the almost empty hotel, ever since that
evening when she had been expecting her husband--the evening when he did
not come!

He did not come because he had found in Paris an order to "join
immediately for a period of instruction." He had telegraphed to her:
"Don't leave; all will be well; will write."

A period of instruction! So suddenly decided upon! What did that mean?
Was it war? She had asked the people around her. Some had seemed stunned
by her question; others had said: "A period of instruction? Nothing is
more usual."

"As a matter of fact, they are mobilizing," some one had remarked. A
gentleman had said: "No, madame, mobilization cannot be other than
general. It may be that certain officers have been summoned
individually, but that is merely a measure of precaution; the situation
is evidently strained."

"But why should he be called and not others? He is only an officer of
reserves."

"That depends upon the locality of his depot, no doubt. Do you know
where it is?"

"I know that he formerly belonged to the Eleventh Corps, but I think he
has been passed over to Nancy."

"Covering troops. Ah--ah!"

"That is it precisely, sir; he is attached to the covering troops."

"Oh, very well! Oh, very well!"

She had found another woman in the same case as herself, or nearly so.
But the husband of this one, who also had been individually called, was
a captain in active service, and in garrison at Pont-à-Mousson.

"That one," Odette had said to herself; "it is all over with him."

The difference had seemed to be to her own advantage, and her courage
had risen correspondingly. Jean was only a sublieutenant; he belonged
only to the reserves. She was absorbed in compassion for the other
woman, so different in character from herself, bravely prepared for the
war and ready to sacrifice everything; who had said: "I regret that my
boys are not grown; they would be so many more defenders of the
country."

Odette had been as ill prepared as possible for such an utterance.
Everything about it surprised her; she could not understand it in the
least.

A lady had arrived from Paris, the wife of a deputy. She had said to any
who would listen:

"I may as well tell you; mobilization will be ordered to-morrow."

The weather had been ideally fine, though there had been a suggestion of
thunderstorms in the west. Children were playing on the beach; the sea,
under a cloudless sky, was calm even to torpor. One could see Havre
stretched along in the sunlight, like a greyhound panting with heat; in
the distance were noble passenger-ships, and tiny sails apparently
motionless. Never had the sky, the sea, the land, appeared so much to
long for peace; never, perhaps, had the joy of existence been more
imperious. Whatever might be the subjects of alarm, everything cried
aloud that to believe in coming misfortune was impossible.

The next day, Saturday, August I, Odette, distressed by vague talk that
gave no definite information, had gone to the post with a letter to her
dear Jean. She had addressed it to Paris, since she had no knowledge
where to reach him. It was about four o'clock. She had seen a group
forming before the mayor's office, and the town drummer arriving, with a
long retinue of street urchins at his heels. The drummer was a tall
youth, lean and wan, grave with a gravity not usual in a town drummer
who has to announce that a little, long-haired, bright-gray dog is lost.
The crowd had gathered around him with frantic eagerness, while he
executed his preliminary performance. Then, drawing a paper from his
pocket, he had unfolded it and read at the top of his voice, without the
slightest change of countenance:

"General mobilization is declared! The first day of mobilization is
Sunday, August 2. No man may set out without first consulting the bill
which will be immediately posted." And the drummer had beaten the ban.

With a single impulse, as if under orders, the crowd, mainly composed of
young men, had raised their hats, crying: "_Vive la France_!" One lad
had said: "_Vive la guerre_!" And the drummer had departed to repeat his
message at another crossroads.

It had seemed a perfectly simple event, something almost usual, at the
junction of these four streets of the little town. A deed done; the
pattering of dispersing feet; silence! And this simple act, repeated
hundreds of thousands of times at this same hour, was the most tragic
alarm-cry in the history of man, reverberating at the same moment of
time over all the terrestrial globe. Little noise, almost no words, and
all these men, raising their hats to pronounce a word suddenly become
sacred, had made the sacrifice of their lives. Imagination loses itself
in picturing the multitude of points upon this earth on which a like
gift of self had just been made. For if the man who goes hopes to be
spared, he who learns that he is called to go, for the moment gives
himself, body and soul.

Almost instantaneously the church-bells had broken out with the tocsin,
as if the town had been on fire. Every church; then, on the hills,
throughout the countryside, the same signal of distress spread like an
epidemic. It had been too recent to be utterly terrifying; many heard it
and did not think. No one realized the tragedy to which these humble
little bells were sorrowfully calling the world. It is the salvation of
men that they always limit their thoughts to the most immediate duty.
The thought of a pair of shoes, of the place where one's _livret_ is
hidden, of saying good-by to this one or that one, checks the vertigo
which the enormity of the event might well produce.

At first Odette had felt oppressed and wept like a nervous child who
hears a sudden alarm. She had been unable, for her tears, to see the
letter-box into which she dropped that letter to Jean which no longer
signified anything and would doubtless never reach him to whom it was
addressed. And all around her, at the doors, in the streets, on the
beach, at the hotel, women had been weeping.

Odette had gone up to her room. She had said to her maid:

"What about you, Amelia?"

"Me? Mine must join on the second day. I thought of asking Madame if I
might take this evening's train; to-morrow there will be no room for
civilians. That way I might kiss him good-by----"

"Go, Amelia."

She had seated herself at the window that looked out upon the
flower-garden, the deserted tennis-courts, the sea. She was alone. There
was nothing for her to do but think and wait.

Everything around her had seemed stunned, congealed. It was as if there
was no longer any one anywhere. The smoke of three great transatlantics
in the Havre roadstead--sole perceptible movement--was rising straight
up in the motionless air. A few fair-weather clouds on the horizon were
turning a fleecy rose color. One or two fishing-smacks, all sails
spread, were idling as on a lake. In ordinary times one would have said:
"What a glorious sunset we shall have!" And Odette thought: "The men in
those boats, at this moment, _do not know_!"

An involuntary change had instantaneously taken place in her mind. She
had transported herself to a time like that which still reigned in the
boats, a time when "_They did not know_!" A time when there was nothing
unusual in the world, when life, smiling, had sung to her, when the hope
of a yet lovelier life had lulled thought to sleep. That time--already
so far distant--was only an hour ago. And everything had been
changed--changed as nothing had ever been changed before. Were they
living on the same planet as in that former time? Who could have
dreamed, at that time, of what was taking place now? She tried to
foresee the morrow, but she could imagine nothing--nothing. Only La
Villaumer's saying came back to her: "We are not in condition.... As
well the deluge!"

And for all that, deep down, very deep within herself, she had not at
all believed in the horror that had come.

She had remained sitting there, at her window, until the hour for
dinner, living over her past life with Jean--thrilling with his first
caresses. She had never loved any one but Jean before her marriage;
since her marriage, only him. It was no longer the war which seemed to
her unimaginable, but the power of her love for Jean. And instead of
imagining chaos, her natural inclination had impelled her to summon up
the loveliest pictures of the past. She had smiled, her body had
relaxed, her fingers had quivered as if in anticipation of a caress, and
in the empty air her lips had made the motion of a kiss.

A man's voice on the balcony next her own had said:

"It is absurd to think of nature as taking note of our affairs; but just
for curiosity look at that sky: I have never seen anything like it."

The words had been spoken to some one in the next room, who drew near to
the window, and she had heard a woman's voice exclaiming, with a moan or
in desperate appeal, such as one seldom hears.

Odette had risen, and she too had looked out. She had never been
superstitious, and was especially not inclined to doleful
prognostications. She had always been happy; her life had flowed along,
so to speak, like one continued festival. Being alone in her room, she
did not speak; but all her flesh quivered.

It may well be that similar phenomena occur sometimes without attracting
our attention; yet, on that day, to three persons occupying neighboring
rooms in a hotel, to others also, who had spoken of it at dinner or in
the evening, that sunset appeared utterly unusual, and such as might
justify all gossiping conjectures as to the relations of the earth with
the marvellous changes, stupendous in their nature, which take place in
the vault of heaven. Above the quiet sea the whole horizon was a fiery
furnace, blazing with intense fervency, across which were spread, like
fragments of slashed flesh, long clouds of a livid bluish red. Before
long the intense fire died down, as if all the combustible matter had
been devoured by the fury of the flames. Then the disk of the sun
appeared in outline, like a gigantic blood-blister, like a crystal bowl
so overful that the viscous liquid was escaping by some fissure and
spreading to right and left into a marsh, a lake, an ocean of human
serum, flowing in every direction toward rivers with contracted banks,
which upheaved against it a formidable tide. Suddenly the sinister
blister burst of itself and was absorbed in the mass of burning matter,
or of thick waters, heavy and foul, and became thin streams like those
that trickle from a slaughter-house.

No, truly, it was no vertigo of the imagination, no hallucination of the
vision, no compliant romance; it was a real picture, symbolic of aspect,
preceding, like an inadequate vignette, the flaming pages of the great
book of history that had just been opened.

In Odette's soul it had been like a curtain that falls before a new act;
once the curtain is raised, one's expectation is fixed; no more light
comedy, no more pleasant extravaganzas, no more ballet! The tragedy is
about to begin.

With a bound her fevered memory overleaped several months of war. They
had entered an atmosphere of fire; it was hard, but they endured it.
Alsace: a breath of wild hope, penultimate moment of Old France;
Belgium: enthusiasm first, horror afterward; alliances:
prognostications, so-called assured, as to the "final result"; invasion:
a march to the scaffold in which the condemned cling to a hope of the
improbable; the Marne: the improbable realized, for which no one had
dared to hope; the enemy grappled with and hurled back; the fall of
Antwerp, of which so many folk, who will appear again in the end, insist
that "it has not the least importance."

Odette had received letters from Jean. How could Jean be in such a fiery
furnace? And how had she been able to endure the thought? But many
things once believed impossible were beginning to be recognized as
possible. Jean was enduring his fatigues, and everything in him was
taking on a new character. She had found him not such as he had been on
his return from the manœuvres, but a man exalted above himself, who
seemed to have transcended his own height, however he might try to
appear simply his usual charming self. She could divine his sufferings,
and yet she felt him to be happy. Odette had even come to think: "How
little he needs me!" She had returned to Paris that she might receive
his letters more promptly. But he appeared no longer to have any notion
of time. That was because he was no longer master of his time. Odette
was always writing to him as to an isolated being, who could do with
himself as he liked. Without intending it, he would reply to her letters
as if he were one who had no individual existence, a man carried away by
something greater than himself, something which alone counted. She had
not yet been able to understand, and she had gently reproached Jean for
neglecting her.

And yet Odette's perpetual anxiety had been gradually growing less; she
was already gaining confidence. Jean had passed through so many dangers!
She had begun to believe in a possible immunity. How many men had been
in the midst of wars through all a long life, and yet had died in bed,
surrounded by their families!

Then, suddenly, one fine morning in the second fortnight of September
Odette, still in bed, had heard the door-bell at an hour when seldom any
one came to the front door. Amelia, her own maid, who had answered the
bell, had rushed, breathless, to her mistress:

"Madame! it is Madame de Prans who insists upon seeing Madame!"

From her bed Odette had called out: "Come in, Simone, come right in!"

Simone de Prans had brought tidings of Jean. She had received them from
dear Pierrot, her husband, who had been sent to Paris for twenty-four
hours on a mission.

Tidings of Jean? But, to begin with, they were satisfactory?
How?--satisfactory? Well, she could say that they were not bad. But "not
bad" is not good! No, but one must not exaggerate things. In short,
half-admissions, denials, returns upon the question, openings left for
hope, equivocal utterances, embarrassments of which Odette soon ceased
to be the dupe. And she had had courage to say, suddenly:

"My little Simone, you dare not acknowledge that the greatest of
calamities has befallen me."

It was at that moment of half-wakefulness during which all these
previous events had passed before her memory, that Odette suddenly came
broad awake. She uttered a great cry, and every one in the next room
came running.

But now, after all, Odette refused to believe the dreadful fact which
she herself had divined! She declared that it could not be, it was "too
unjust."

Why should Jean be killed and not another? With fierce anger she
revolted against her lot, crying out and struggling in her bed like a
mad woman.

"It is not true! it is not true! you all have a grudge against me! you
are jealous of me because of Jean! ... Jean, my Jean, I shall yet
embrace you, or there is no God!"--until suddenly, vociferating and
shrieking, she again lost consciousness.



II


Her doctor was there, in a major's uniform. They had found him as by a
miracle: he happened to be at home, at the telephone, the very moment
when Amelia called him. As he could not remain he gave his instructions
to Simone de Prans, to Germaine Le Gault, to Rose Misson, the last two,
notified by Simone, having dressed in all haste and rushed to her. The
door-bell was constantly ringing. The news of Odette's affliction was
spreading through Paris. True, the war had already caused many
bereavements, but among this intimate group, Lieutenant Jacquelin was
the first to fall.

Odette, recovering her senses, found herself in the position of an
exceptional victim among her friends, both women and men.

But the women, while encompassing her with compassion, had in their
eyes, their voices, something other than bereavement usually inspires.
When they tried to utter consoling words, all, without exception, spoke
of "pride," of the "honor" which was reflected upon Odette. Odette
accepted the words as a part of the phraseology of condolence; but she
considered only one thing--Jean no longer existed. Her Jean, her lover,
her happiness, her preoccupation, her days, her nights, her revery of
yesterday, her hope for to-morrow; Jean, caresses, kisses, tenderness,
sweetness, perfume, foolishness and wisdom, the beloved master and yet
the child, to be cradled in her arms; Jean--a thousand times more than
her own life--was no longer numbered among men! She could see him again,
from head to foot, in the minutest physical details, and in the same
moment she was certain that he was no longer anything other than a
phantom; that never again her arms of flesh would press to her his
flesh, that her lips would never again kiss his lips. Tears did not come
in the torrents that bring solace to the sharpest griefs. The period of
yielding to a cruel fate, when one pities oneself, had not come to her.
Rebellion still persisted. Odette raged, uttered bitter words. The
honeyed soothings of her friends only exasperated her. Other friends
were continually coming up to see her. She fell into hysterics. The
doctor had gone. The most determined of those present, "good" Rose
Misson and Mme. de Blauve, a woman who inspired respect, took upon
themselves to turn all the others out of the room and to close the front
door against every one.

Rose Misson was a little woman, plump and mild, whose husband, some
fifteen years older than herself, and free of all military obligation,
had entered the service as chauffeur at the beginning of the war. Misson
was somewhat criticised for this step. Therefore Rose, who felt the
power of public opinion, was full of admiration of the lot of her friend
Odette. Private griefs are nothing in comparison with the special
consciousness which public opinion arouses in us. Notwithstanding her
real love for him, at the present moment Rose would have preferred her
husband dead rather than ill appreciated. Rose's sentiment with regard
to her friend might have been thus expressed:

"Yes, my dear, your grief is immense; your existence as a wife is
shattered. But everybody feels that your lot is beautiful. You will grow
greater among us all, will eclipse us, each and every one. From this day
you have gained universal veneration; your name is pronounced with
reverence; you are changed in our eyes; your presence brings even to us
a meaning which we never knew before; the memory of your husband, his
glorious name, is something august which is penetrating a circle in
which such a quality has never been known."

Rose said nothing of all this to her friend, because the language of
their circle did not lend itself to such thoughts; perhaps also, even
while thinking them, she had no wish to utter them.

For the first time since the outbreak of war Odette did not ask for the
evening paper. To read the news--the _communiqué_? How indifferent she
was to all that! There was nothing more for her to learn. Her husband
was dead; for her the war was ended. The war had been him, anxiety for
his special fate. Him disappeared, what did the rest matter?

And the sense of nothingness which had seized her by the throat that
morning touched her again, more glacial than before. Nothing! No longer
anything! Yes, the war was an unheard-of misfortune; but the war had
captivated one like a drama of unequalled interest. The drama might go
on henceforth; she would not go to witness it. She had gone to it only
for one actor, who, having played his part, had disappeared. She too
would disappear.

Odette slept and spoke as in a dream. She fell into delirium; insisted
on going with her husband, saying: "_If I had known_, I would not have
let you go one step." He seemed to reply to her, alluding to a grave
wound which the commandant had received. She would repeat: "The
commandant's leg? ... Oh, let them touch you once, you! I am here.... I
am here to care for you, my love...." And she awoke with a start.

"He is dead, Rose! Ah, Rose, how fortunate you are!"

"But my husband is fifty years old, Odette!"

"Oh, if my husband had only been sixty!"

Simone de Prans and Mme. de Blauve came again in the afternoon.

"Your husband, Odette, fell like a hero; there is no more beautiful
death."

"There is no beautiful death."

"Yes, there is!"

"It is easy for you to talk."

"No, Odette, you don't consider that everything is changed."

"One's heart, too?"

"Yes, one's heart, too. Many among us pass for hard-hearted and inhuman,
but everything now appears from another point of view."

"Love is always love."

Odette, whose sense of hearing was extremely acute, overheard a
low-voiced conversation in which Simone was saying how well her dear
Pierrot was looking, and she swooned again.

The rest of the day was only one lamentation, an inarticulate and
continuous moaning.

The following days were no better. The physician dreaded meningitis.

Human beings are often weak in the face of great catastrophes when they
are governed only by their natural sentiments. Yet Rose, who was in all
things natural, remained completely devoted to Odette.

"It is easier," said Mme. de Blauve, "to nurse a gravely wounded man
than a woman distracted with grief, for whom there is nothing to do, to
whom there is nothing to say."

The first two days of Odette's grief were as nothing in comparison with
those that followed. She uttered no sound except to moan; she fell into
delirious slumbers, had hours of furious insomnia, nightmares,
hallucinations, attacks of hysterics. At last came the period of
confidences, with torrents of tears.

Among Odette's friends, some had not been pleased because they had not
been admitted to her room the first day; others were forgetting
everything in their dominant desire to obtain a place as nurse in a
hospital. Some of these, having succeeded in compassing their wishes,
came at last, and were not denied entrance to the sick-room, by reason
of the costume that they wore. At first it seemed as if they might harm
Odette by the lamentable scenes which they described. These nurses
delighted in employing new, technical words, which they had taken pains
to learn by heart, like so many schoolgirls. But Odette would murmur:
"All your unhappy ones, with their surgical operations--they are alive,
after all." And she would think to herself: "Mine is dead." What answer
could be made to that?

Odette received heaps of letters, whose eloquence overwhelmed without
touching her. She deemed all their expressions exaggerated, and yet she
could not say that they rang false; they spoke of France, of glory and
honor; hardly did they make allusion to her love, which to her was all.

She was beginning to get up, to come and go about her apartment. It made
things worse. Every place, every article, reminded her of Jean. He used
to sit in that chair; he had loved to play with that little ornament.
Before his photographs, in the drawing-room, she succumbed once more.
Here he was in tennis-costume, so graceful, so lithe, so beautiful;
there in house dress, that velvet jacket that she had so often encircled
with her arms. She would walk through the rooms trying to breathe the
faint odors of a perfume which he might have left there. She would sink
down upon the divan where once there had been room for him.... And she
started with a sudden thrill when the shadow of Amelia formed a
halo-surrounded image against the fixed curtain of the glass door. In
the old days, when he came in, a great shadow would spread thus behind
the yellow silk, and suddenly his tall form would rise above the
curtain, and his kind smile would appear through the glass.... Then she
would listen for the sound of a key in the door. No one would ever again
enter that door by means of a key....

As she was opening, in a drawer, the box of his favorite cigars and
would fain have lost herself in the odor which brought before her the
image of her man, a telegram was brought to her. She tore it open
mechanically, all news being indifferent to her. It was from Mlle. de
Blauve, a girl of fourteen, and announced that her father, Commandant de
Blauve, had died upon the field of honor. Her mother had been for the
last few days a nurse at Rheims, her natal city, under bombardment. The
three little De Blauve girls were alone at home with the governess, the
two older brothers being in Jersey at school.

For the first time since her bereavement Odette was obliged to think of
others. She closed the box of cigars, and thought of that house in the
Avenue d'Iena that she knew so well, of those charming little girls,
henceforth orphaned, the eldest of whom was so calmly acquitting herself
of the duties of courtesy.

"I must go there," she said, and called her maid to dress her. Her
mourning dress had been brought home the day before yesterday, but she
had not so much as tried it on. Now for the first time she put on her
clothes without a thought of her appearance. She took a carriage and
went to the Avenue d'Iena.



III


She was expecting to find consternation in a family crushed by their
fate, and during the drive she reflected with astonishment that it was
not altogether painful to her to visit people in grief; in her inmost
heart she would rather meet the little de Blauve girls mourning,
unhappy, than her consolatory friends, overflowing with kind and
beautiful words, but not personally sorrowing. "It is not the sight of
happiness that consoles us in our sorrows," she said to herself, "but to
come into touch with a grief that is like our own."

The little de Blauves were not yet in black. The eldest wept a little
when Odette kissed her with flowing tears--for Odette was thinking of
her own grief--but the little girls were not at all prostrated, and
there was even something radiant in their expression.

"What is it all about, dear children?" asked Odette.

Then they clapped their hands and said that their brother had just
landed from his island and was up-stairs washing himself, and that he
had received his mother's permission to enlist.

"To enlist!" exclaimed Odette. "Why, how old is he, the poor little
fellow?"

"He is almost seventeen," said the eldest girl. "Papa is dead, he must
replace him."

"And what does the big brother say to that?"

"Oh, he is delighted. He had begged to enlist as soon as mobilization
was declared, but papa would not consent; he said: 'You will go with
your class, when the time comes; it will not be long.'"

The big brother appeared, coming down-stairs. He was a fine boy,
delicate, surprisingly like his mother's portrait, painted in her youth,
which hung above the great sofa. He rushed past like a bomb, exclaiming:
"I must hurry to the recruiting-office!" No more was said about the dead
father, and yet Odette knew that he was adored by all his family. Only
to the governess, a confidential person well on in years, did Odette say
a word about the event.

"It is a great honor," said the governess.

"Do they know how he was killed?"

"A bomb, which at the same time killed seventeen men who were near him."

It was fearlessly said in the presence of the children. Not one of the
little ones showed the least emotion, while Odette shuddered through her
whole body. She asked after the mother.

"Mama writes that the mortars send a regular hail; she is almost
deafened with them. The noise disturbs her in her work. They jump, at
times, as over a skipping-rope, she writes.... She has also some Boches
to wait upon her; did you know?"

And that was all. Odette looked at the dead man's portrait, opposite
that of the Red Cross nurse, who was jumping, at this moment, at the
sound of the marmites, and had just sent her young son to the
firing-line, casting at least one more de Blauve into the furnace that
had consumed his father. Monsieur de Blauve had not been painted in
uniform; he showed only the good face of a clever and kindly man. It
must have been in all tranquillity, without uttering a single grand
word, that he had prepared his whole family for the eventualities of
war; and his children, to the last one, were as ready to die as to go on
a walk, or to church.



IV


Odette went away disconcerted. Not a word had been said about her Jean,
who also had died heroically. But what had they said about the other
hero, Commandant de Blauve, whose death had brought her there? Men
disappear; they are replaced; a memory of them remains, which is
henceforth called "honor," and which does not admit of emotion. That was
precisely what certain of her friends had already said to her. They had
seemed to know that in advance, but Odette--no. She thought, as she
returned home, of that bloody sunset over the sea, upon which she had
gazed at Surville on August I, and during which she had had the
impression that she was entering a new world.

She found three letters in the vestibule; one, belated, from a friend in
the country, who had only just heard of the death of Lieutenant
Jacquelin, and who "complimented" her, basing her consolation upon "the
honor with which she saw her adorned." The others were from strangers
charged to announce to her that the husband of a friend who lived in
Versailles, and that of another in Bourg-la-Reine, had just been killed.

Odette sank down upon the divan, her head feeling bruised as if she had
bumped it against the wall; killed, killed--then there were dead men
everywhere? And she felt a dark rancor toward all those fatal events
that fell upon her so furiously to disturb her grief, her personal
grief.

She saw again those three men of whose loss she had been told that very
day--in a single half-day--Commandant de Blauve, a magnificent man, a
man without a blot, "a type of Plutarch" as he had been called, always
with the added words, "characters such as his were no longer made"; then
Jacques Graveur, him of Versailles, a good comrade of Jean's, one who
never made an ado about anything, and passed for none too serious; it
appeared that he had saved his whole company by coolness and the
sacrifice of himself; Louis Silvain, he of Bourg-la-Reine, had brought
his captain in upon his shoulders, across two hundred metres of open
ground under a hail of grape-shot, had come within three metres of his
trench, when a ball passed through his body--but the officer was saved.
He had been, in ordinary life, a big fellow, with no other occupation
than to haunt the theatres, play at the races, and drink cocktails at
the bars.... Such different figures, suddenly united in a similar act,
for which some of them had from all time been prepared, the others not
at all--the strangeness, the incomprehensibility of it all!

She must write letters of condolence--she, who had received so many!
While she was writing to the others she was thinking especially of her
Jean; she felt a certain fascination in writing of grief; she dwelt upon
it too much at length; it would be apparent to the wives to whom she
wrote that she was thinking only of herself.... But each of them would
have done the same, and would forgive her.

All through the day the memory of Jean shook off from her the haunting
thought of the three other dead men. She consulted a map of the Touring
Club of which she had sometimes made use with her husband in their
automobile drives. The spot where Jean had fallen was not far from a
highway over which they had often driven. "Perhaps I saw one day the
very spot where his body is lying to-day...." Then followed endless
despairing reveries. How had she not foreseen the possibility of the
event--of the war, at least? Yet war had often been discussed in her
presence, at the time of the alarms of Agadir, of Casablanca, even of
Tangier, when she was a young girl. Then things were possible, things
which perhaps might happen to-morrow, of which people were talking
to-day, and to which her mind had been hermetically closed? War, war!
She used to know old people who talked about it; yes, because they had
seen it. And they were tiresome. Young people didn't believe in such
things. She tried to excuse herself; then she pronounced herself guilty.
Why had they usually avoided people who talked of serious things? And
why had they considered as clever those who ridiculed everything?
Suddenly she thought of "Monsieur's linen," "Monsieur's wardrobe," of
all those belongings of _his_ which would never again be used, never....
Should she go on leaving them all in their places? Should she do away
with them? Or should she put them all away in a closet, a reliquary?

She was at that point in her reflections when Amelia entered, in tears:

"The son of the concierge, madame!"

"Well, what?"

"He too, madame!"

Then the details; the unlucky fellow had been buried alive in an
upheaval caused by a bomb, and had been dug out only too late. And
Amelia began to talk of her husband, as if it had been he who was buried
alive.

When a few days passed without tidings of more deaths, all the women
grew calm and began to hope. When a man whom they knew was killed, each
one saw in him her husband, her father, her cousin, her son; all the men
were wept for in advance in the person of the one who had fallen. If any
one had said to these women: "But there are thousands falling every day,
thousands!" they would have opened their eyes wide, only partly
terrorized, for they had not yet become accustomed to the new condition
of things. The one who should maintain that the war would not be over in
a few weeks would be considered a bad patriot, or an ill-timed jester.

The next morning a new catastrophe; Pierre de Prans, otherwise Pierrot,
he who had brought the news of Jean's death, had been brought to
Val-de-Grâce hospital in a very alarming condition. His orderly, a fine
fellow, who was wounded at the same time, was as good as dead. Pierrot
had a bullet in the breast, one lung laid bare, and a broken arm. His
orderly had stanched his wounds under a violent bombardment, filling up
the enormous cavity with bandages snatched from the dead who surrounded
them, then both had remained for six hours, their heads in a
vile-smelling hole under a paving-stone, their bodies hidden by bushes.
In the course of the night, hearing the French language spoken, they had
kicked with their feet and the stretcher-bearers had drawn them out,
both still living.

The narrative of these particulars produced a worse effect upon Odette
than tidings of death; the more as some one had the lightness to say in
her presence: "Much better to be shot dead at an unexpected moment than
to endure such long and cruel agony."

"That is a fine idea!" retorted Odette. "Much better to be alive than
dead."

Notwithstanding the sadness of these visits of friends when there was
always some new death to weep for, deaths which had occurred under the
most frightful circumstances, Odette felt that no other sorrow was equal
to her sorrow; and she detested them all, not as losses hateful to
endure, not as making part of a national calamity the like of which had
never been before, but as unwelcome events intruding themselves between
her and her own grief. She desired to be alone with her sorrow, and she
resolved henceforth to know nothing of all the rest.

One idea possessed her during several days: to see the place where Jean
lay buried. Oh! if she could also see that where he received his
death-blow! She appealed to three or four influential persons of her
acquaintance, hung over the telephone. What she asked was to the last
degree impossible. Word came to her from the Minister that it would be
easier for her to go to Berlin, passing through Switzerland after
procuring the necessary papers, than to reach her husband's tomb, near
as it was. Then it seemed to her that the government, even more than
death, had robbed her of her husband by means never practised before,
the refined cruelty of which had been invented for her alone.



V


Her old friend, La Villaumer, had come to make her a brief visit of
condolence. He was the only man of their former group of intimates left
in Paris, because of his years. Now he came to see her again.

"I do not come seeking to console you, my friend. If I am making a
mistake, turn me to the door. In my mind there is no consolation for
you; you are an unfortunate woman. You must not ask much of life, do you
see? You have known happiness. To most people happiness is unknown. Let
those to whom it is a stranger deceive themselves with words and
attitudes; as for you, weep for all you have lost; weep; what you have
lost is worth all tears."

"Thank you, my friend; do not feel that you are obliged to make a
heroine of me, you of all others! You know, of all others, that I am not
a heroic soul, but simply a woman who loves."

"You are the purest woman whom I have known, in the sense that you are
the most natural. You were born in a terrestrial paradise, and until now
you have lived in one. You have not been put outside the gate for some
misdeed by the angel with the fiery sword; a hurricane has arisen and
devastated the garden."

"But I am none the less outside of the gate!"

"I recognize that. There would be no use in seeking to deny it, and it
is all in vain to say to you that if others are less vividly aware of
being outside the gate it is because they never lived in the garden,
like you."

"But they tell me that everything is changed."

"They are right, and you see it clearly because you are outside of Eden,
which you had never left before. It is only that some of them accept the
change quickly because they were prepared for it, and others because
they are less sensitive than you."

"Then, if such a change exists, does that mean that I should cease to
mourn my husband?"

"No; but the day will come when you will mourn him more. Remember what I
say: you will mourn him more. That is the way in which you will take
your part in the change."

"More!" ejaculated Odette. "Is it possible? I do not understand you."

"I mean by 'more' another manner of mourning, which you will doubtless
find more endurable. Let us not talk more about it now, but keep in mind
what I have said."

She shrank more and more from society, till she could endure neither
news nor the face of a friend. She caused herself to be denied at the
door--forbade her maid to speak to her of the war, even to bring in the
newspapers. She wished to hear nothing.

Then Paris became odious to her because she could not keep herself
sufficiently in retirement. Since she was not permitted to go and
stretch herself upon Jean's tomb, like a faithful dog, she decided to
seek a refuge where she could think only of Jean, weep for him in
solitude, live only in his memory, stun herself with her own grief, give
herself body and soul to this grief from which no earthly power had the
right to tear her.

She thought of returning to Surville, where Jean had bidden her good-by,
where she had spent those last weeks with him, those beloved days of the
end of the world. To find herself there in present circumstances would
be atrocious pain; so much the better! There was only one sort of
torture that she feared; that which should forbid her to live in
intimate union with the memory of Jean. To suffer, to suffer even to
martyrdom, to the martyrdom which Jean's death was causing her, this was
the greatest good for which she could ask.

Odette set out for Surville.



VI


It was the end of October. The war, still violent and deadly along all
that line of conflict which was called the battle of the Aisne, was
becoming more terrible in the north, and was being carried over into
Belgium, as at the beginning. Universal anguish, for a time checked by
the victory of the Marne, was as acute as in the first days. Surville,
on the seashore, could not but be deserted and sad at this season. The
Hôtel de Normandie closed, the public houses that were open far from
comfortable, the best way to be alone and not hear war talk from morning
till night was to rent a small villa. A pavilion was recommended; it was
separated from the street by a row of poplars with yellowing foliage and
a narrow grass-plot where two pergolas were in summer covered with
climbing roses. At this season the dull melancholy of this abode was
accentuated by the silence of the dead town. Odette found that it suited
her. No sooner had she arrived than she had made a pilgrimage under the
closed windows and drawn-down blinds of the room that she had occupied
with Jean. The wind was blowing from the country, driving the heavy
clouds out to sea; the old Casino, once so gay, was boarded up; at the
door there still hung a poster announcing the races. Odette followed the
alley, passed over the dunes between the deserted tennis-courts, and
went down to the beach, where she could indulge in the bitterness of
unmingled grief.

This was where she had planted her tent and lived with Jean through a
fortnight of sunny days, in utter abandonment to a delight that arose
from the earth or fell down from the magnificent sky. Children had been
playing about; excited little dogs had been barking to coax them to
throw a pebble into the sea. They had ceased their indolent repose only
to plunge into the sea, swimming side by side with delight.

To-day the beach was abandoned, and seemed to stretch away, gray and
monotonous, to the end of the world. Odette seated herself under the
shelter of the dune and uttered the beloved name of Jean. The raging
wind carried it, like a flake of foam, toward that distant Havre where a
number of transports were lying in the roadstead. The coachman who
brought her from the train had pointed them out to her: they had brought
over British troops; an average of fifty to fifty-five vessels was
arriving every day. The war! Here, too, here again, when she had hardly
left the train, she had been reminded of it.

Nevertheless, the hours passed and no one spoke of it, to her at least.
The monotonous sound of the sea soothed her, and the sea,
notwithstanding the troop-ships over there, seemed like something grand,
entirely foreign to all the human butchery. Odette rested her eyes on
the limitless plain, ever restless and sad. But this sadness was allied
to her own, and at the same time something immense, majestic, and
superhuman seemed to enter the depths of her still rudimentary
consciousness of the dawn of a new time. She would have remained there
for hours if the approach of evening had not rendered intolerable the
sense of despair suggested by the scene, and if the rain had not begun
to fall in torrents.

Odette took one of the paths leading back to the town.

Hardly had she reached it when she was surprised to see through the
driving wind and rain that buffeted her, many illuminated buildings
where she had expected only the shadows of a sleeping city. That was the
Casino, which she had lately seen shut up by boards! And that was the
Grand Hotel, all twinkling with light! She had to round the corner of
the latter to reach her cottage, and by degrees as she approached it she
saw a swarm of human beings, became aware of a commotion in the vast
building which had seemed so funereal. Men with bandaged heads, with
arms in slings, men walking on crutches; and the white head-dresses and
red crosses of nurses; it was a hospital. The wind brought its odors to
her--the smell of tincture of iodine, of cooking and an indescribable
unsavoriness.

She drew near, passed beneath the windows. The sight was not so
heart-breaking as she would have expected. The nurses, some of them
young, wore a smile; if certain wounded men were stretched out, inert,
others, seated on their beds, were quietly chatting, calling across to
one another; a great burst of boyish laughter took her by surprise,
while at the same moment she saw, close-pressed to the window-pane,
directly under the electric light, the pitiful, waxen face of a sort of
Lazarus rising from the tomb. She became aware that the other building,
opposite, was equally crowded; she saw at the door an orderly in
uniform, and the inscription on white linen: "Supplementary Hospital."
She had thought to flee from the war; everything was bringing it to her.
The pavilion that she had selected, with its green lawns, its poplars,
its pergolas, was situated not far from these hospitals. All day long
she would see only men who had been in the war!

Somewhat disheartened, she returned home. It was not what she had
expected to find here. Two telegrams were awaiting her; she opened them
listlessly--no news could be of serious moment to her. Both of them
announced the death of young men whom she knew intimately, old friends
of her husband; the first, an aviator crushed under his machine; the
second, killed on the banks of the Yser.

The next morning several letters brought to her details of this twofold
loss. The first of these young men, whom she remembered to have had at
her house not three months before, had joined in aerial conflict with an
enemy machine, at an altitude of two thousand metres; despairing of
overcoming it by shots of grape, he had dashed upon it, crushing his own
screw, but had also seen his adversary wrecked as they fell to earth
together. It was one of the first exploits of the kind; its effect upon
the imagination was great. The other victim of the day, an officer by
profession, after having his shoulder crushed and his useless arm bound
to his body by withes, had continued for an hour to command his company,
until a bomb had scattered him in fragments.

Odette shuddered. The heroism touched her, as it touched every one; but
these fine deeds, these multiplied deaths, overshadowed the case of her
husband, blotted it out; the death of Lieutenant Jacquelin was fading
from the general memory; other deaths were making more of a stir than
his; as the war became more and more furious it seemed to relegate its
earlier stages to a long-past time, somewhat inferior to the later
tragedy. Lieutenant Jacquelin had been killed in the first days of the
war, of a war still fought in old-fashioned way. The miseries of the
trenches under the autumn rains was another sort of war, one which alone
seemed to be true war. The headlong rush of the enemy on the Yser, of
which people were better informed than of the earlier invasion at the
Marne, arrested and absorbed the public mind. Odette felt this, and
though she was determined that no thought of glory should mingle with
her grief, the idea of glory and of the gigantic struggle that was going
on did penetrate her mind in spite of herself, by reason of the
diminution which the prestige of her own hero was suffering. She had
never dreamed of finding a cause of pride in what he had done; one
single thought had absorbed her: that her Jean, her love, was dead. In
her wounded pride she was hurried into saying to herself: "He died
nobly, he had a beautiful death, he too!" Yet the universal chorus
seemed to reply: "Since him, others have done better."

She wrote to her newly widowed friends in words of exaggerated praise,
affecting not to speak at all of her personal sorrow. It was a
gratuitous effusion of temper, for the widows did not find her praises
at all extravagant, and never observed Odette's reserve as to her own
case.

She decided not to leave the house, that she might see nothing, hear
nothing, learn nothing. For a while she even thought of notifying the
post-office not to forward her correspondence; but she was always hoping
that the Minister would send her a permit to visit Jean's grave.
Jealously she shut herself up with the memory of her husband.

Everything irritated her; everything was odious to her; everything
seemed to conspire to raise between her and the beloved memory a barrier
of bleeding corpses, a screen upon which were portrayed horrors invented
by a satanic imagination, together with sentences of exalted morality
unknown to her and whose new radiance blinded her.

Stamping her foot, tearing the handkerchief with which she was stanching
her tears, she declared to herself that she would henceforth live only
for Jean and by him. She kissed the photographs that she had brought
with her. She stretched herself upon a lounge, engulfing herself in the
torturing memory of him. For one day, several days, a week, perhaps
longer, she would be able to live upon only the thought of him. She
would open neither letters nor despatches that might come; if she was
late with her condolences, her congratulations, what did it matter?

The idea of military glory entered her mind and suggested to her the
hope of erecting a monument to her husband. She was caressing the
thought when her maid entered her room like a gust of wind.

"Madame, the wounded! the wounded! Swarms of them! In automobiles, on
trucks; it appears that there are twice as many for Sousville, and the
train has carried as many more to Houlgate and Cabourg!"

Amelia threw open the windows. The train of wounded men was passing the
house. Odette dared not forbid herself to look at it.

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.

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.



XXVI


She found Clotilde alone next day at the lunch-hour, her husband being
almost always late, especially when he had to go to fetch the blinded
man. At last she recognized the voice of the handsome George in the
anteroom, and saw him pushing before him, as a ventriloquist guides his
automaton, a tall young man, neither handsome nor plain, in the uniform
of a captain of light infantry, and with closed eyes. The blinded man
bowed, and clasped the hand that Clotilde laid within his own; George
explained to him that one of their friends was with them, a young
war-widow, Mme. Jacquelin. The blind man also pressed the hand that
Odette extended to him.

He already knew the apartment with minute exactness. He walked to the
table without aid, almost without feeling his way; and recognized each
flower by its perfume; they directed his fingers to the primroses which
have no perfume, and one would have said that his eager fingers
recognized the table decorations as strange little mute personages.
After a brief touch he knew the precise situation of each object; with
the blade of his knife he recognized the nature of the food on his
plate, and cut it adroitly. Possibly he might have been able to help
himself, like others, from the dish presented by the servant, but he was
spared the necessity of this feat by the question: "What do you prefer,
captain?"

He talked freely, almost gayly, though with an evident effort. He
appeared to be intelligent without ever having been cultivated; but
neither his person nor his mind revealed anything remarkable. He would
doubtless have been a man like any other if he had not been blinded.

Odette shuddered on looking at those closed eyelids on the face of a man
in whom one divined, notwithstanding his effort to conceal it, a secret
suffering. Yet his voice was not that of a man who bore a mystery about
with him; his suffering probably did not attain to those higher regions
which a rich imagination transforms into torture-chambers for men
unhappily deprived of the light of day; he did not dream of romantic
sunsets, of the contemplation of the celestial vault, or of Correggio's
sunlight, nor even of the beauty of houris.

As George was offering to his touch the cigars in a box, he whispered in
his ear:

"You have been lunching with a pretty-woman, old fellow, don't you
know?"

"Your wife? I should think so!"

"My wife, yes, but the other one, young, very pretty!"

The blind man seemed to reflect, shook his head and said:

"That always gives pleasure."

"Her husband," George went on, "was killed in the early days----"

"Has she children?" asked the blinded man.

"They had only been married three or four years; they would have
had----"

"Perhaps she loved him too much? That sometimes happens, it appears."

"Yes," said George.

The blinded man turned his closed eyes, like an extinguished lighthouse,
in Odette's direction. He experienced a curious feeling, almost envy, of
the dead man who had been so much beloved.

He became more interested in Odette. It appeared that she had nursed one
of his comrades through a bad affair at Surville. Men cut to pieces,
gaping wounds, sensational operations, and the agonized resignation of
those young men did not produce in her one-quarter of the pitying revolt
which was caused her by the eternal privation from light which a living,
healthy being might suffer by her side.

In his presence she recovered something of her manner of speaking with
the wounded, but her natural frankness was not animated by that smiling
perspective of a still possible future which a woman perceives at the
bedside of a soldier, even one who has lost a limb. The nurse speaks no
falsehood when she says: "My little friend, when you are well, when you
once more see your home, your village--" But when she is constrained to
omit from her vocabulary the radiant word see, how constrained and
powerless she is!

Blinded men always awoke in her extreme compassion when she met them in
the street, when they were spoken of in her presence. She remembered how
tears had risen to her eyes, how her throat had contracted, when Simone
had described that wedding at the Madeleine, the handsome couple coming
down the steps, the bridegroom all adorned with decorations, in the face
of an admiring crowd who suddenly perceived that he could not see. But
she had never before been obliged to carry on a conversation with one of
those beings whom the deprivation of a sense makes more different from
ourselves than the loss of many limbs. She instinctively managed it very
well, though she was moved to the last degree; she knew at once how to
speak to one who had been greatly afflicted--as she would have done to
a normal man, without appearing to notice his condition. The captain was
grateful to her for it, and it was evident that he was much more at ease
with Odette, on this first meeting, than he had ever succeeded in being
with Clotilde, whom he had known a long time. Clotilde, incapable of
dominating her selfishness, could have been brought by no human power to
the point of forcing herself to an act not agreeable to herself. Her
husband, who was pained by her attitude, said to her: "See how gracious
Odette is!"

The blinded man went away with his friend, evidently happy for having
chatted with a pretty and afflicted woman, for having been able to
induce her to act as if neither she nor he had been touched by
misfortune.

"Judge," said Clotilde when the two men had gone out, "to what point I
am stupid and benumbed, and what a service you have rendered me! But I
beg pardon for having inflicted it upon you."

"When a thing of this sort pains me," said Odette, "I do not know what I
feel. I have noticed that at the hospital, especially in the early days.
I don't deny that it seems as if I were being rubbed the wrong way, but
there is a sort of miraculous cure that acts of itself, penetrating like
a drop of balm, to the very depths of the wound."

"I don't understand you at all," said Clotilde; "a thing that bores me
bores me, and when anything hurts me I simply must push it away or go
away myself."

"I used to be like you," said Odette; "I am still, in all that concerns
my grief. For that there is no balm; nothing will ever heal it. Perhaps
there is something exceptional in love; it takes possession of us, it
makes us happy to an extent that blinds us to everything besides, or it
wounds us to death. But all that is not love, and what tries to embitter
us must carry its antidote within itself."

"When we love," said Clotilde, "nothing else can seriously affect us."

"Notwithstanding which, I assure you that I have often within the past
two years been painfully affected, and I have not ceased to love."

"You think so, my poor Odette! But if Jean had continued to be with you,
you would have had no feeling but for him."

"Clotilde, you are spoiled by happiness; you understand nothing!"

Clotilde shook her head. She felt that she had somewhat nettled her
friend in unveiling her thought to her.

"You will come again all the same, Odette? Even to face my blind man?"

"If you wish," said Odette sadly.



XXVII


Clotilde's state of mind, which she had until now rather enjoyed, began
to trouble Odette. She had thought herself entirely in harmony with
Clotilde, just as Clotilde had imagined herself to think in unison with
Odette, because both of them loved, and because until then nothing had
seemed to come between them. But to-day Odette was repelled by
Clotilde's attitude, her ivory tower, her aversion to suffering, and her
lack of suavity. "I used to be like her," Odette said to herself. "Am I
different now because events have taken me by storm? Or is it indeed, as
she says, because Jean, whom I surely do not love less, is not here to
engross me?"

She was terrorized by this idea, which nevertheless she felt to be
false. She was overwhelmed with remorse and accused herself of having
grown cool in the worship of her husband. It was true that too many
things were conspiring to lead her away from the thought which ought to
be her only one. She returned once more to her mortuary chapel, her
relics, her portraits. To guard against her sorrow being frittered away
by the many sympathies with which her walks inspired her, she shut
herself up at home. The winter, aggravated by the hostile cold, was so
depressing, the news from without was so gloomy, that Odette fell into a
sort of neurasthenia. She, who had never known illness, was constrained
to call in a physician. He ordered, not medicine, but diversion at any
cost.

"There are still many theatres open," he said; "I don't ask you to go to
see 'gay pieces,' which are cruder than anything else, but go to
something good. A woman of your years," he added, "has no right to let
herself die of inanition."

She obeyed the doctor, not to save her health, but because she was
touched with shame. Here was another who said to her: "You have no
right." It was a middle-aged physician of great celebrity, and even
intelligent; he had lost his two sons in the war; his wife had died of
grief, he himself was mobilized and was working hard in the hospitals.

She went once to a benefit performance. _Carmen_ was given. She had
adored that work whose obscure and brilliant genius had often benumbed
her like a bunch of dark carnations with their pungent fragrance. But
her attention was captured by the presence at her side of a
sublieutenant whose sleeve hung empty by his side, and when the young
man, all on fire, turned to his neighbor on the other side, who must
have been his mother, or to some friends behind him, the soft,
superfluous cloth, with its short gold braid brushed Odette's knee. The
officer became aware of it and, excusing himself, gathered up the cloth
with his right hand. More than this, from one of the boxes broke out, at
almost regular and too frequent intervals, a man's laugh, abrupt,
uncontrollable, and without the least relation to the dramatic work that
was being given. Several persons turned that way, indignant at first,
even angry, until one of them perceived that this ill-timed gayety came
from an officer who was listening with the utmost seriousness, but who
was affected by the results of a cerebral shock. Word was whispered
about, no head was again turned; every one was universally commiserating
the infirmity whose tragic character equalled that of the masterpiece to
which they were listening.

"'You must be diverted at any cost,'" thought Odette.

"In the matter of therapeutics," her friend La Villaumer said to her,
not long after this experience, "for my part I believe in a very old
rule, which says: 'For great evils great remedies.' In times like ours,
for any one who has greatly suffered, diversions are less appropriate
than strenuous tasks."



XXVIII


Odette went occasionally to lunch with Clotilde to help her entertain
her blinded man. In general she went about fitfully, now here, now
there, to offer her small services. She was welcomed at sales, for she
pleased people.

She even inspired, at her booths, what people call passions--sudden and
burning--which, however, manifested themselves indirectly and
discreetly, so much did even the boldest man dread to approach a young
widow universally known to be so proper, and so faithful to her grief.

The first was a commandant of infantry who had been wounded three or
four times, and who had a long convalescent leave; he was barely
thirty-four years old, and was one of the finest types of soldier in the
present war. After having conversed with Odette he sent a friend to ask
her if later, strictly speaking, much later, she would consent to become
his wife. She declined the request as if it had been insane; could any
one suppose that she would ever marry again?

The second was a man about fifty years of age, well known about town, a
member of the Jockey Club, enjoying, as the novels say, an immense
fortune and unquestionably holding a very prominent position in society.
He was the organizer of most of the war charities in which Odette's help
had been sought. He loaned for them his buildings and what remained to
him of his staff of servants, gave to them his time and his purse.
Odette had touched him with one of those lightning strokes which reach
only men of that age, and after her refusal he fell violently ill,
remained depressed, downcast, aged, incapable of managing his business,
obliged to retire to one of his country-places, where he became
oblivious of everything, even of the war and its evils, of which up to
this time he had thought only to seek a remedy, thinking now only of the
cruel Odette.

She was as indifferent to this adventure as to the other,
notwithstanding the friendly remonstrances that poured in upon her. The
latter offer had been made to her through Mme. de Blauve, and this
friend, while bowing to the sentiment of fidelity which bound Odette to
a beloved memory, took courage to point out to her that in the midst of
her married happiness she had failed to found a family. Odette, with all
her intelligence, her sincere devotion, did not understand. She had
loved one man; she continued to love his memory. No other idea, with
whatever importance it might be clothed, commanded her respect; she
understood only her own heart, which simply clung like an ivy to the
tree, however dried up it might be, and to which no power could prevent
her clinging.

All Odette's friends shared Mme. de Blauve's opinion, however unlike
they might be to this noble woman--ail of them, even to Clotilde.

Yes, even Clotilde blamed her for not having at least accepted the young
commandant. Odette was amazed at this, the result being that these two
loving women fell out.

La Villaumer, to whom Odette confided this trouble, said to her:

"If your friend Clotilde were to be so unfortunate as to lose her
husband, whom she adores, the chances are sixty to a hundred that after
a certain time she would love another as much or almost as much as him,
while you judge such a transferrence of love inadmissible."

"But, after all, one loves or one does not love; that is perfectly
simple!"

"No, indeed, it is not so simple as that. One loves and one can love as
Clotilde does, or as you do, yourself. We do not easily distinguish
differences so long as lovers, being united, are happy."

"You frighten me. Are there then loves that are not love? Is not
sentiment the finest thing in love? And can there be a fine sentiment
that is not lasting?"

"In the first place, my dear friend, permit me to believe that you do
not profess your sentiment because it is fine, nor does it last with you
because you find it beautiful. You find your sentiment beautiful because
it is yours. You look upon it as lasting indefinitely because your eyes
are incapable of looking as far as its end; that is all. In your case
there is no constraint, no submission to any law, aesthetic or moral.
You feel that way. Your friend Clotilde loves in her way, and she finds
it beautiful, believe me."

"All the same! All the same, there is an almost general consent to
consider that love superior which is adorned with sentiment, and does
not consent to be short-lived."

"Yes; and this is in conformity with the morality which has ruled us
thus far. This morality is all delicacy. But, reduced to this degree of
purity, will it suffice to keep alive a struggle as ardent as the one
which we are now witnessing, for the possession of a part of the outside
of the world, or even for the supremacy of certain ideas? It must
concede provisionally a preponderance to material, mortal life, since it
is evident that the morality of the just will triumph only on condition
that it has force on its side. Do you follow me, my poor friend? All
this is very dry. But this is my way of telling you that these
crystalline sentiments, that are an 'ornament' in ordinary times, become
a luxury in our age of iron and fire. Luxury is no longer permissible.
The time has come when all refinements must give way to a very stern
reality. As you have been very well told: 'We are not our own.' General
consent? It should be given to the best good of the cause which unites
us all, and carries us all away with itself. Forgive me, my very dear
friend. I am going to commit a rudeness which gives me pain--and you
know that only the extremity of an unheard-of calamity could bring me to
that--yes, your sentiment, with its persistence, is beautiful in itself,
most beautiful; but we are no longer at leisure to look at things 'in
themselves.' Well, if your friend Clotilde had lost her husband in your
place and at the same time, and if she were to-day the wife of another
who had made her a mother, for example, we ought really to hold her case
in higher esteem than yours!"

A sob choked Odette. They were walking along the Champs-Elysées. She
sought for a chair and sank upon it.

"I am not vexed with you," she said as soon as she could speak;
"something in my inmost being understands you-- It has already been said
to me-- But it is hard!"

"The time is exceptional."



XXIX


Odette spent much of her time in consoling poor Rose. Her husband's
death had passed almost unnoticed. But other and very dramatic deaths
had also passed unnoticed. When men were brought home in fragments it
made a sensation, but once they were dead the sad equality of the earth
obscured their memory. Indescribable episodes had attained such a
character, and had reached such numbers, that people hardly dared speak
of them. Minds were saturated and automatically closed against any new
sensation. Many were unable to endure any story of the war, whether in
the newspapers or in books. Odette recalled to mind the impression which
the wounded had formerly made. They were already saying "formerly" when
speaking of the present war! Now there were wounded everywhere. It was
rather the unscathed men upon whom one looked as if to say to them: "See
here, you! what are you doing with your arms, with your legs?" Certain
persons, with a strong revulsion of the instinct of self-preservation,
refused, like Clotilde, even to think about the war; others, on the
other hand, buried themselves in it with passionate intensity.

Mme. de Blauve, who had become fond of Odette and occasionally came to
see her, now came to announce the marriage of her eldest daughter. She
told the news almost as if saying: "At last!" as if it were the case of
an old maid whom she had despaired of marrying off. Mlle. de Blauve was
barely sixteen, she was attractive and endowed with much charm, had been
most carefully educated, and promised to be really beautiful. She was to
marry a wounded sublieutenant.

"Ah!" said Odette; "does she love him?"

"He is a young man of good family," said Mme. de Blauve, "and he has
behaved admirably."

"But he will return to the front! You will be in perpetual anxiety!"

"Not that," replied Mme. de Blauve. "To be sure, my daughter would have
liked to be the wife of a soldier who remained a soldier, like her
father. But soldiers in active service will always find some one to
marry them, and wives must be found for those less favored, who have
been checked in their career----"

"Has her fiancé been retired?" asked Odette. "Don't tell me that he is
badly----"

"Oh, this is not the time to think about things that girls used to care
for; the question is to save our men by giving them wives, so that they
may be in a position to found a family. This young man is from the
devastated regions. He has lost all his family--some of them have been
shot, others have died during the occupation of the enemy--and it is
entirely impossible for him to earn a decent living. We ourselves have
sacrificed more blood than money; my daughter will still have a certain
amount of fortune, therefore----"

"But what is the matter with him? What has he lost?" asked Odette,
thinking only of that absolute union of two beings which had illuminated
her own life.

"Oh, it is very sad," said Mme. de Blauve; "my future son-in-law is one
of those most deserving of interest, who have received face wounds. His
face--how can I tell you?--lacks almost everything except the passages
that are necessary for eating and breathing----"

Odette uttered an inarticulate exclamation and rang the bell. But she
did not faint until Mme. de Blauve was gone.


The case of Mlle. de Blauve evoked more criticism than admiration.
According to some it was absolutely too terrible and not to be thought
about. In most cases, however, sensitiveness had been so dulled by the
constant hearing of war-stories that very little attention was paid to
this act of superhuman devotion. Some said: "The mother is crazy and the
young girl does not realize what she is doing. One may do violence to
nature, or may dupe it for a short time; this is a time when we ought to
resolve upon any sacrifice, even to throwing ourselves into the arms of
death; but death is either the end or the beginning of the unknown. The
idea of marrying a superb girl of sixteen to a man without a face!"

Yet every one knew that far from bringing pressure to bear upon her
daughter, Mme. de Blauve had made every possible effort to prevent her
marrying another wounded man, an unlucky fellow who, approaching a
trench with a grenade in each hand, had had both eyes burned at the very
moment when a bursting shell had set off the two grenades and shattered
both hands. What she was now doing was a slight thing in comparison with
the thing that she had prevented.

Odette felt that she must know La Villaumer's opinion on this matter.
They had no regular engagement for meeting, and met only by chance. She
decided to go to his house shortly before the luncheon hour. An old
servant ushered her into a room where, to her great surprise, she heard
the tones of a harmonium mingled with a man's voice entirely untrained.
It proceeded from the neighboring room, separated from her by a glass
door partly screened by a curtain of Chinese silk. The thing was so
unusual and so puzzling that she could not refrain from peeping around
the edge of the curtain. She saw at the instrument an organist whom she
knew, and standing beside him a man bereft of both arms, and the pose of
whose head was that of a blind man trying to catch the notes which the
teacher was patiently repeating. All around them were soldiers wearing
black glasses, with closed eyes or with bandaged faces, and Villaumer in
his dressing-gown coming and going among them. He suddenly disappeared
and came into the room where Odette was standing.

"I have caught you!" said she. "Try now to convince me that what I have
been told of you is not true! You are no longer in your own home!"

"My good friend," he replied, "I am having lessons given to the most
unfortunate of those unhappy ones whom evil fortune and inaction are
driving to despair. They are being taught the rudiments of music; they
are trying to sing; it occupies them."

"I knew that you were kind----"

"I am not kind; I am generally severe upon men. But the sight of
misfortune is intolerable to me; and for men like these, who have been
three-quarters destroyed for the sake of saving us, yes, I confess that
I could give my last shirt; I would wait upon them at table-- Will you
take luncheon with us?"

Through the half-open door into the dining-room she could see a table
spread for twelve.

"Do you take lunch with them?" asked Odette.

"I permit myself that honor-- It is my last self-indulgence. Well, will
you take advantage of it?"

"I cannot, my friend, I cannot. I should weep through the whole meal.
That is not what they need."

"No. One must have the courage to bestow upon them the gayety--which we
don't possess. Social hypocrisy has not been practised all this time in
vain, if it has taught this to some of us."

"I am ashamed of my weakness," said Odette. "I should not flinch before
any sort of wound, but the thought that the war has deprived a man of
the light of day forces me to ask myself whether I myself have a right
to look upon these beautiful silks, this sunlight----"

"Take pleasure in the silks, in objects of art, and in sunlight, you who
are made to charm that portion of humanity that remains intact. You
would not, on the pretext that millions of men have been plunged into
darkness or death, irritate them gratuitously by an ill-regulated
sympathy? Innumerable lives have, alas, been shattered, but life
remains, the light is brilliant, plants are growing, animals and even
men still swarm upon the earth. Recall to mind the tragic and
paradoxical truth that human life, which is the highest work and appears
to have been the purpose of the creation of the world, is that for
which, on the whole, that great work appears to care the least. Whatever
part man may be called to play, his destiny is to pass away. That horror
of war with which we are inspired by the extermination of men is in the
long run kept up and perpetuated by material depredations; the memory of
an illustrious building destroyed will last longer than that of a
hundred thousand young men mown down in their youth."

"And meanwhile you are throwing overboard all you possess to rescue men
who are only half alive. That is all that I wanted to know."



XXX


Odette spent several days in bed as a consequence of the marriage of the
little de Blauve girl--which took place in the strictest privacy, and
which she had not attended. But her imagination was lively, and she
pictured things to herself.

She sought out her friend La Villaumer, as it were, now that she had
detected him in an act of kindness. As for him, in her presence he took
less pains to conceal his acts, now that she understood him better.

"I have always loved men," he said. "Why should I not love them since I
have always professed to criticise them? Have I misunderstood them?
Remember how indulgent I was for all that in them is so far removed from
the only thing that I really prize--intelligence. How vulnerable I have
been to their instincts! How I have smiled at their innumerable follies!
I simply enjoyed studying them, without the slightest partiality,
notwithstanding my secret reverence for reason, which seems to me to be
a torch lighted at the altar of a god and carefully transmitted by
certain privileged beings to certain privileged beings, while yet the
chain that they form never succeeds--no one can tell why--in producing
an illumination. Therefore, I have never believed that the world
belonged to what we have learned to venerate under the name of
intelligence. Intelligence is a divine part which no doubt gives us
notions of what there is on high, but which has almost no application to
things here below. The world is not governed by intelligence. Sometimes
intelligence makes converts, and we believe that its reign has come.
Illusion! It is precisely then that we are upon the point of falling
again into blessed ignorance, and going back to the age of barbarism. Do
you know, I am tempted to believe that the age of barbarism is the
normal period of humanity! We probably need cruelty, absurdity,
injustice, superstition, torrents of bloodshed, in order that the
mystery which we admire under the name of life may exist and perpetuate
itself. Our bodies can be fed only by offensive means. The majority of
human pleasures are unfathomably stupid. The great masses obey certain
elementary formulas, sayings of which they have never weighed the
meaning, and which often have no meaning. Governments are not carried on
by luminous reasoning, but by the allurement of sounding words that
flatter the senses. In order to hold our own in a large and influential
social group, my poor friend, are we going to be called to admit the
timeliness of belief in prophets, in wonder-workers, in ghosts, in the
platitudes of 'apparitions,' in the genius of simple minds? Is a torrent
of puerility about to inundate the surface of the globe? May it be that
this is the indispensable element of reparation? Intelligence, reduced
to its own resources, has in fact no power of expansion, no means of
action. It is enough to make one die of shame and vexation! Law,
justice, liberty--we can imagine men shrugging their shoulders when they
hear the words, for the words are efficacious only when they are emptied
of their significance and travestied into elementary ideas which
naturally lead to the violation of law, liberty, justice. In the matter
of ideas men believe only in their tutelary virtue; they are protecting
divinities; and the idea is nothing but a word that men symbolize on
their flagstaffs, like a fetich. We are as credulous as Homer's
warriors. Minerva fights with us. For that matter, I do not think that
there ever was a better opportunity for adopting the theocratic
conception of the world, for men are at this moment given over to the
elements, and the greatest political genius imaginable would probably be
powerless so long as the convulsions with which the world is attacked
are not quieted of themselves. In these conditions there is no room in
the home of a poor fellow for any but the virtues of pity and affection.
I confess the fact, my dear Odette, I can no longer control my heart."

"To be moved to compassion is to be weakened, I have been told."

"There is truth in that opinion so far as those persons are concerned
who are more especially called by circumstances to act, and especially
to direct the actions of others; such must put on blinders and look only
to the immediate purpose which demands all their energies. But it is
desirable that in the midst of this tempest-tossed world a few
contemplative persons shall devote themselves to pity as to the
conservation of a 'precious blood'; if only for the sake of the
efficacy, or at least of the beauty of the thing. And the worshippers at
this altar will need to contend--do you know with whom?--with humanity
itself, which has little remembrance of its own ills, and which, like a
kitten, hastens to play with the first ray of sunshine. It is true that
the dead keep a great silence."



XXXI


Odette was at home one evening, and alone. Stretched out upon a lounge,
she was gazing at the photographs of Jean on little tables or within her
reach upon the walls, hypnotizing herself with the sight of them,
kissing them as she always did.

Amelia came in saying that the next apartment was "crammed full."

"Madame, if there aren't twenty men six feet high in that room, my own
poor husband isn't a prisoner with the Boches!"

In fact there was a great commotion on the other side of the partition.
Furniture and chairs were being moved about, and as all sounds
penetrated through the cracks of the door, the syllables of an
unfamiliar language could be heard, perhaps Rumanian or Russian. The
neighbor was a foreigner.

Suddenly there was silence. Amelia had withdrawn. It was an imposed,
perhaps a concerted, silence. "It is a musical recital," said Odette to
herself. In fact she almost immediately recognized the sprightly touch
of the pianist, mellow, languishing, melting into the keyboard as into a
tender flesh, by turns nervous, light, cruel as a hammer, heavy as a
pile-driver, seeming to crush the instrument, then suddenly soft,
fluttering on the keys like the wing of a dying bird. Though the woman
often played for herself alone, this was not the first time that many
people had gathered around her to hear her music.

A chorus of men's voices burst forth. It was strange, weird, enough to
make one catch one's breath. Odette listened. That sensitiveness to
music which often reached depths in her unknown to herself, was suddenly
wrought up to its utmost pitch. She did not know the chorus, and sought
in vain for an author to whom to ascribe it. It might be a popular song,
perhaps very ancient, to judge by its artless simplicity, its pure
rhythm, and its wild, sweet accent. At times a soprano voice uprose in a
solo, and the chorus, a third below, responded softly in whisperings
that grew nearer and nearer, quickly spreading like oil upon the sea, or
as if transmitted from man to man over immense plains and endlessly
flowing rivers. Suddenly two or three raucous or strident cries gathered
up all the voices to a sharp point directed toward the heavens. Then all
sound ceased, and one felt as if falling from a superb altitude into the
depths of an abyss.

Then the fingers of the enchantress executed a ballad of Balakireff,
or Dvorak's hymn, "On the Death of a Hero." And then, after a pause,
another chorus broke forth.

There was in it all a melancholy which no words could so much as
suggest, in which amid the uniformly plaintive murmur one discerned such
lifelike wailings that one could have stretched out the hands to succor
these vague, unrecognized, and multiplied sufferings. They swelled,
spread abroad, took on so mighty an extension that in spite of oneself
one saw the surface of the suffering world, heard the feeble and
resigned voice of man, of man always the sport of fate, always in
leading-strings, always sacrificed like cattle to gods whose secret he
could not fathom. It was the lament of the ancient earth of humanity,
timid, uncouth, and despairing, issuing from bruised hearts, from torn
flesh, from souls robbed of their innocent ideals, a disturbing lament
issuing from the borders of marshes, from forests, from glacial plains,
from desert steppes, from nameless villages, prisons, palaces,
battlefields, tombs, and stoically, pathetically, and yet childishly
addressed to--no one!

Odette had often been on the verge of sentiments corresponding to this
music, primitive, barbarous, perhaps divine, but when music comes to be
mingled with our sentiments it reveals them to themselves and amplifies
them without measure. Odette saw what she had never dared to see; for
the first time she was transported outside of herself, or at least she
felt the conviction that she was. It produced in her such an overturning
of her points of view as almost to make her dizzy. She suddenly
discovered how completely she had considered everything with reference
to herself, even in her seemingly most generous moments. At this instant
she thought of herself in relation to the incalculable number of persons
who were not she. It was not that the moans of humanity were now
reaching her for the first time, but it was the first time that the sobs
of others came to her ears with a tone of majestic sadness which forced
her to grovel upon the earth, saying: "I no longer count; I am only the
servant of grief."

It was a painful sentiment if there is one, and yet, by a curious
contradiction, a sentiment in the same degree joyful. A boundless
commiseration caused her heart to throb and tears to come to her eyes,
and yet this painful sympathy, far from being cruel or depressing,
wrought in her soul an unsuspected outflowering, like an outburst of
inconceivable elation in which was mingled bitterness and pity.

There is no compensation for the personal suffering that we may
experience. On the contrary, in a close and complete union with the
sufferings of others is hidden a joy of mutual pain; an active desire to
give aid impels to the beginning of a helpful act, provokes to so
fervent a prayer for heavenly mercy that the heart no longer knows
whether it lies prone in utter distress or has attained to a radiant
phase of existence incomparably higher than its paltry estate as an
isolated being. The word "love" presents itself to a soul thus
irradiated without any sustaining form which might limit its character;
it is without extent as without form; as to the source that feeds it,
springing up no one knows where, one is convinced that there is no fear
that it will ever be exhausted.

Odette often wept, but to-day it was with other tears. She took up one
of Jean's photographs and found but one word to say to it:

"Forgive me!"

She understood neither what she felt nor what she was doing, but she was
conscious of failing Jean. Not of failing Jean in favor of another, but
for the sake of a multitude of others among whom no one man could be
discerned. When she was able to formulate a thought, she said to
herself: "I was pitying." She might have said: "Charity has taken
possession of me."



XXXII


There was no sign that any event had occurred that evening. Odette had
spent it alone in her little drawing-room. The chorus in the next
apartment was stilled. But that evening was made up of the most
important hours which the young wife had experienced since the death of
her husband.

Odette was aware that something had been revealed within herself, but
she was ill adapted to analyze herself, and the phenomenon was still
wrapped in mist. It had manifested its reality only by a single act of
hers--an act which she remembered, which abode with her: the prayer for
forgiveness addressed to the picture of her beloved Jean. She returned
continually to this material fact; she had seized the photograph and had
kissed it as if she had been at fault. Thanks to this fact, the
spiritual operations of which it was the conclusion were not arrested,
did not vanish like smoke, and pursued her that night, on the morrow,
and during the following days.

So sudden a burst of light might indeed have been ephemeral in
character. We are all subject, especially under an exterior influence
acting upon the senses, to similar spasms of enthusiasm, or to dreams of
a like generosity which may be only a passing impulse. They die away and
we return to a condition which we call reasonable, that is to say,
lucid, calm, well-balanced, and tame.

With Odette this illumination had not the character of a sudden impulse,
but was rather the outcome of a long and almost unconscious preparation.
How many words, how many tidings, how many hints registered in her
memory, how many puzzling suggestions, how many dramatic scenes, how
many ideas had been as so many arrows of direction, guiding her toward
the place where she had received the divine spark! How many books read,
how many musings, apparently without result, had determined the
direction that had brought her here! Odette was like a clay which during
two and a half years had been continually receiving the touches of a
thumb or chisel, powerless to give her the form which an invisible
artist desired her to take, and the last touch, removing an encumbering
bit, had produced precisely the shape desired.

Odette awoke next morning in the same condition in which she had fallen
asleep, with the one difference that she no longer wept. But the tears
of the evening had had their sweetness. She found herself in an almost
grateful tranquillity. She went and came in the midst of Jean's
photographs, and Jean did not reproach her for her new state of mind.
His memory seemed to be in nowise outraged. And yet Odette did not
forget that she had begged his forgiveness, as if it had been possible
that she had failed him. This fact marked a well-determined date in the
perturbations of her soul. But it seemed to her that she had received to
her "Forgive me!" a gentle, calming reply, a loving approbation.



XXXIII


Yet the moment came when it seemed to her that she was losing her
reason. She had seen many cases of cerebral disturbance since the war;
they had been more or less apparent. Some persons of her acquaintance
had been duly shut up in insane asylums, but there were many at large
who showed the almost imperceptible wound by which the microbe had
penetrated.

By way of discovering whether or no she was mentally affected, she
imposed upon herself the test of behaving for a while like a woman who
has decided to lead the usual life until the end. She said to herself:
"I am not insane, for I think it requires more courage to adopt, every
day and every hour, the attitude of ordinary life, as if the war did not
exist--seeing that the majority of people who act thus have been crushed
or tortured by it--than to give oneself up to the monster bound hand and
foot. I am the less strong in not being able to endure the commingling
of both interests and throwing myself into these horrors. I should be
senseless if I deemed my own actions alone to be good, beautiful, and
worthy. But I am judging myself. I am therefore not demented."

Out of curiosity she went one day to see Clotilde, still by way of test.
"To measure myself," she said to herself.

Clotilde's undue self-satisfaction made her friends really
uncomfortable, a discomfort which from the first they had sought to hide
or refused to recognize, which until now such a friend as Odette had
even refused to admit, but which to-day she could not endure. Clotilde,
surrounded by flowers, bathed in a perfumed atmosphere, talked only of a
change she had made in the decoration of her rooms, of her clothes, or
of matters so utterly foreign to current events that it seemed as if for
her the latter had no existence. She never went out, lest she should be
obliged to see or hear disagreeable things, and yet never had she bought
so many hats and gowns as since the war. On her earlier visits Odette
had slightly shrugged her shoulders as if amused and not wholly
displeased. By degrees, the disproportion between such interests and the
wound with which the whole world was bleeding overmastered her ability
to make allowances.

Odette reminded her friend that she had not of late called upon her for
help, and asked if she had lost her blind man. Clotilde was amazingly
frank in her reply:

"My darling, 'my blind man,' as you call him, continues to exist and to
charm my husband. But what would you have? It is not that I am lost to
all sense of humanity, but you can imagine how the presence of this man
annoys me. He cannot see me, I am nothing to him, and it is necessary
for me to please----"

"But one may please even those who don't see us. One can try to amuse
these unfortunates, to make time pass pleasantly for them----"

"You speak as if you possessed some gift in which I am lacking. It is
only that you like them, and know how to please them----"

"Oh!"

"You succeed in pleasing them! This man who visits us, with whom you
took lunch, is always asking for you. He never so much as speaks of me.
And yet it is I who permit him to come!"

"A man who cannot see you in your place at the head of the table, and to
whom you never give any proof that you are there, may naturally forget
you."

"You find it all right because he doesn't forget you. He dotes upon you,
by what George says; he asks for news of you, he longs to hear your
voice! He annoys me. In fact, child, it was precisely on your account,
I admit, that I was obliged to turn him away; he was falling in love
with you. Can you imagine it? You ought to thank me!"

"In love with me! If that were true I should be all the more sorry for
him, poor man! But he must have heard about me? He knows that I am not
to be had?"

"He hasn't gone as far as that; he only feels happy in your company.
When you are not there he misses you. That is all."

"Well, where is the love in that? He is like the wounded men whom I have
nursed; they were happy in my company; when I went away, I suppose they
missed me. If I had concluded from that that they were in love with
me----"

"You didn't conclude it, on your part, but as for them, what do you
know? Perhaps you broke their hearts!"

"You are romantic and think only of love! Men who have suffered as they
have, prefer to think of their own comfort, and of those who make them
comfortable. I knew a nurse seventy years old for whom her patients
clamored like children. Were they in love with her?"

"That proves nothing. A blind man feels very clearly whether the woman
near him is one who charms."

"Then he ought also to feel the compassion that he inspires, and that
does not lead to love."

"Are you uncomfortable in the presence of a blind man?"

"It is an undefinable emotion; my head turns. I lose my self-command."

"You didn't seem to, here."

"One does almost involuntarily the thing that costs the most, if one is
determined to comfort those whose misfortunes arouse your emotions."

And they talked of other things.



XXXIV


Odette would no doubt have forgotten "her" blind man if a visit which
Mme. de Blauve paid her had not recalled him to mind in the most
unexpected manner.

Mme. de Blauve, whose calmness had always impressed every one, from the
time when she was living under the bombardment of Rheims through the
days in which she had made the sacrifice of her husband, her two sons,
and, one may say, her daughter, now appeared unnerved. She had grown
thin; her eyes were sunken; she was evidently suffering.

With her habitual resolution she opened to Odette the purpose of her
visit. She had heard--it was rumored--that her dear friend, having amply
and worthily overpassed the period of her widowhood, was purposing--not
by inclination, but in order to accomplish a great act of charity--to
become the wife of a blinded officer. People were talking about it. She
herself had been extremely moved by the news, and all the more because
she feared that she had incurred a certain responsibility in the matter,
having probably been one of the first to urge upon the young widow the
duty of a second marriage.

Odette was amazed. What were people about? Never had she had the
slightest idea of such a thing. Startled at first, she went on, almost
laughing, to hear what Mme. de Blauve had to say.

"It is untrue, you say," said Mme. de Blauve; "but, my little friend,
experience has taught me that there is always a grain of truth at the
bottom of a wide-spread rumor. Whether good or bad, such plants do not
grow out of nothing."

Odette told her upon how slight a fact this rumor might possibly have
been based. She had lunched at Clotilde Avvogade's with a blinded
officer, and Clotilde insisted that she had pleased him.

"Nothing more would be needed!" said Mme. de Blauve, "and your friend
has probably told the story all around. It must be so, for I have heard
the name of the man, the institution where he has been re-educated; I
even know all about his circumstances; he is a widower without fortune
of any sort, and father of two little children about whom he feels great
anxiety."

"Well," said Odette, "for my part I knew nothing of these last
particulars, and this is surely a proof that my romance has not gone
very far."

Mme. de Blauve was lost in apologies. Nevertheless, she did not go so
far as to regret the step she had taken. If it proved to have no reason
in the present case, an analogous case might arise; she knew Odette's
susceptibility, the noble impulses of her soul, and it was her duty to
warn her against impressions and impulses----

"What!" interrupted Odette; "you, madame, whose daughter----"

"Yes, yes, precisely I, 'whose daughter'--It is because my daughter has
made a marriage--beautiful, surely, from the moral point of view, but,
after all, a marriage--how shall I say it--somewhat daring, that I
believe myself to be authorized to say to you: 'My very dear child, be
careful, reflect!' Understand me; I regret nothing that has occurred; I
congratulate myself on the happiness which my daughter is assuring to a
victim of the war, who is a hundred times deserving of it. Let me tell
you, by way of parenthesis, that my daughter has hope of a child, and I
trust that God will bring everything out right, although----"

"Although," repeated Odette anxiously.

"Although--oh, the dear child is lacking neither in love nor in
admiration for her husband, who is a hero; but our poor human nature has
strange revulsions--I tell you, you alone, in confidence; since my
daughter has reason for hope of becoming a mother, she feels--alas! it
is frightful, let me whisper it to you--she feels a sort of apprehension
at the sight of her husband, whose terrible affliction you know of!-- We
must, at all costs, prevent her husband having the slightest suspicion
of the--temporary--feeling that he inspires, and the young wife is
obliged to put the strongest restraint upon herself in order to show
nothing. Just how far this incessant constraint is consistent with the
happy maintenance of her condition, and with hope for its normal
outcome, who shall say? This is what we are asking ourselves, this is
our anxiety."

"Oh, dear, dear madame, how sorry I am for you!"

"You understand that I would not wish to have to be sorry for you, in my
turn, for a reason like this. It was to avoid it that I came here, as
much humiliated by my apprehensions as I was proud on the day of the
marriage. You have no plan of the sort, you tell me, my child? So much
the better! But I have become excessively apprehensive; I am afraid of
characters like yours, which may be inclined to do too well. Sometimes a
little pride enters into the good or the noble things that we do. Do you
understand?"



XXXV


Mme. de Blauve had taken her leave with these words, and Odette, still
breathless at the thought that there could be any question of her
marrying, a little ruffled, even, remembered only the secret
discomfiture confessed to by the mother of the poor little bride. It was
one more cause of horror added to all those of which she was the daily
witness. Her calamity had doubtless shaken Mme. de Blauve's spirit to
the point of causing in her mind a sort of hallucination as to the fate
which might be threatening the young widow. Or else Mme. de Blauve had
made the most of slight rumors with no basis of truth, as a pretext for
coming to confess her own anxiety. Or else--a conjecture which barely
touched Odette's mind--Mme. de Blauve, as she had herself intimated,
always erring through pride, felt a frightful satisfaction in the
dangers with which she and her family were perpetually menaced,
jealously guarding this bitter eminence, lest it might be seized upon by
others! For one can come even to such a point.

What analogy could there be between the marriage of the little de Blauve
girl, an ignorant child, with one of the most horribly mutilated of
soldiers, and an imaginary marriage between her, Odette, who was going
on to her thirtieth year, with a blinded man who was not disfigured?
Young girls, women, were marrying blinded men every day; many more of
them would do so, one must hope! The case might indeed be peculiarly
delicate for her, a widow still in love with her husband, and who was
peculiarly sensitive to blindness; but if the case ever occurred it was
she alone who had the right to judge of it. No one knew either the
lasting nature of her grief or her personal repugnances; the matter in
no slightest degree deserved attention.

In fact, at the point that Odette had reached, she could imagine no
limit to devotion. In the marriages now in question, there was no
mention of anything that had formerly been called happiness; the only
thought was of kindliness toward most deserving beings who were
suffering under the greatest of misfortunes, and the greater their
misfortune, the greater, it appeared, ought to be the pleasure of
alleviating it. She did not approve of Mme. de Blauve, if it was she who
had urged her daughter to a marriage of charity, but she could perfectly
understand the daughter's having made such a marriage. If a temporary
check now and then occurred, it was due to a pathological condition
which would eventually cease. She recalled to mind one of her friends, a
perfectly well-balanced girl, married to a very fine man whom she
adored, who had taken a dislike to her husband during the whole period
of her pregnancy, without in the least knowing why.

A few days later Odette received a letter from Mme. de Calouas, still in
Surville, alluding to the prospect of her marriage to a blinded officer.
So the utterly unfounded rumor had made its way to the depths of
Normandy! And Mme. de Calouas, who was wisdom itself, and utterly
removed from any suggestion that might have acted upon Mme. de Blauve,
wrote to her as Mme. de Blauve had spoken: "Yes, dear friend, marry; I
have never concealed from you that it is almost your duty. But beware of
an excess of zeal! Take care not to undertake more than a woman of your
temperament, brought up as you have been, attached to a beloved memory
as you still are, will be able to endure. Remember that many of us can
be heroic for a few seconds, a few hours, a few days, but that is very
different from a whole lifetime."

Odette smiled, not only at the thought of what people were thinking of
her, but at the solicitude which they expressed for her, and that sort
of obsession for heroic acts which every one seemed to cherish. Odette
had not the slightest intention of performing a heroic act. Nothing in
her character had ever inclined her in that direction. Her heart was
made for loving. She loved, she was sure that she loved. The one whom
she loved was her husband--her Jean. She could ill analyze the character
of the tenderness which at the same time she felt for every suffering
creature on earth. And that was all. What would they have of her?



XXXVI


Nevertheless she continued to be disturbed by the strange rumor which
had been set afloat, which was still afloat, and she promised herself to
speak about it to Clotilde, who without doubt had been the cause of its
diffusion.

On drawing near to the house in which Clotilde lived, she met Lieutenant
Avvogade guiding his blinded man by the arm. She had not so much as
thought of avoiding such an encounter.

When the blind man recognized Odette's voice his whole face was
transfigured. He turned pale; he hardly had courage to speak. But she
felt the effort with which his closed eyelids were directed toward the
point in space from which her voice had come; her perfume had been
wafted to him. This blinded man was looking at her, was seeing her in
his imagination; perhaps he was seeing her much more beautiful, more
alluring, than he had dreamed! He had been disturbed because
opportunities to be with her had no longer been afforded him, and he did
not know that it was not she herself who had prevented them. But an
inward instinct, stronger than he had yet known, filled him with ecstasy
in that moment of the young woman's presence. He inhaled her like a
flower, he listened to her, was saturated with her. Believing himself to
be behind the veil which hid the daylight from him, as behind a screen,
he neglected to keep a watch on himself, to impose constraint upon
himself. His emotion was evident to those who saw him, and the agitation
of a man so much to be pitied impressed her profoundly.

Odette told him that she had learned that he had two little children.
Then the blinded man extended his hand to her; his throat contracted; he
could not utter a word. Without hesitation Odette took the hand of this
man, so good-hearted and so wretched, and let her own be enfolded in
his. Not a word had been added to those alluding to the children, yet
she felt that she had never heard from human lips such an expression of
gratitude.

                *
               * *

They were there, under the trees of the Square of the United States, one
of the beauty spots of opulent, worldly Paris, where so many
conventional words and actions must have been exchanged; and this
agitated silence, those clasped hands, result of the universal woe,
seemed to embody as in marble the symbol of a new beauty which effaced
all that had before been known.

As the blind man made a motion to relinquish her hand, Odette said:

"_Au revoir_, messieurs"; and left them. The blind man remained
motionless, either because he could not think it possible that she
should go, or because he waited for his friend, who hesitated to urge
him to leave the place.

                *
               * *

Odette did not go up to Clotilde, even at the risk of permitting her
lack of protestation to be accepted as acquiescence. She felt herself
incapable of talking with any one whose heart was not overflowing. She
did not disdain the sight of her flowers, her preoccupation with
personal pleasures; she would despise nothing, these were tastes which
inspired her rather with pity. Toward those who have greatly suffered it
was not pity that she felt, but _attraction_; an irresistible
attraction.

                *
               * *

She was soon joined by one who greeted her. It was La Villaumer,
returning from a visit to a sick man in the Rue Bizet. He turned toward
the two men who were going away and asked Odette:

"Then it is true? They told me----"

"Only one single thing is true," said Odette, "and that is that they
told you."

"There is only one single thing true," replied La Villaumer, "and that
is that you feel as imperative a need to do good, as most poor mortals
of good being done to them. If I had not seen--I should say to you, as
others will say to you: 'My friend, take care, keep yourself in hand!'
But I have just seen the face of this man who is deprived of light, and
who perhaps feels the lack of you more than of the beauty of the light,
and I tremble-- It seems to me that I see you, my poor dear friend,
reaching the last stage of an evolution which I have watched as if it
had been my own. Many will look upon this acme of your self-sacrifice as
an immolation. But I recall to mind the words that I have so often
spoken to myself: 'You no longer Count!' The individual is dead--
Provisionally, but for a time which we cannot estimate, the individual
is dead-- In fact, you yourself have perceived that you no longer have
any rights, not even the right to mourn your unending grief. The moment
has come to mourn more largely, more grandly, with the only grief that
can save a soul like yours. The only hope of a resurrection lies in
giving oneself to the common need, and losing oneself in it with love."



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