The man's hand is thrown over one of her little ones. She tries to draw
it back, and shakes it to free herself. Her intensely fair hair falls
loose, flaming. He draws her to him. His head bends towards her, and
his lips are ready. His desire--the wish of all his strength and all
his life--is to caress her. He would die that he might touch her with
his lips. But she struggles, and utters a choking cry. She is
trembling, and her beautiful face is disfigured with abhorrence.
I go up and put my hand on my friend's shoulder, but my intervention is
not needed. Lamuse recoils and growls, vanquished.
"Are you taken that way often?" cries Eudoxie.
"No!" groans the miserable man, baffled, overwhelmed, bewildered.
"Don't do it again, vous savez!" she says, and goes off panting, and he
does not even watch her go. He stands with his arms hanging, gazing at
the place whence she has gone, tormented to the quick, torn from his
dreams of her, and nothing left him to desire.
I lead him away and he comes in dumb agitation, sniffling and out of
breath, as though he had run a long way. The mass of his big head is
bent. In the pitiless light of eternal spring, he is like the poor
Cyclops who roamed the shores of ancient Sicily in the beginnings of
time--like a huge toy, a thing of derision, that a child's shining
strength could subdue.
The itinerant wine-seller, whose barrow is hunchbacked with a barrel,
has sold several liters to the men on guard duty. He disappears round
the bend in the road, with his face flat and yellow as a Camembert, his
scanty, thin hair frayed into dusty flakes, and so emaciated himself
that one could fancy his feet were fastened to his trunk by strings
through his flopping trousers.
And among the idle poilus of the guard-room at the end of the place,
under the wing of the shaking and rattling signboard which serves as
advertisement of the village, [note 3] a conversation is set up on the
subject of this wandering buffoon.
"He has a dirty neb," says Bigornot; "and I'll tell you what I
think--they've no business to let civvies mess about at the front with
their pretty ringlets, and especially individuals that you don't know
where they come from."
"You're quite crushing, you portable louse," replies Cornet.
"Never mind, shoe-sole face," Bigornot insists; "we trust 'em too much.
I know what I'm saying when I open it."
"You don't," says Canard. "Pepere's going to the rear."
"The women here," murmurs La Mollette, "they're ugly; they're a lot of
frights."
The other men on guard, their concentrated gaze roaming in space, watch
two enemy aeroplanes and the intricate skeins they are spinning. Around
the stiff mechanical birds up there that appear now black like crows
and now white like gulls, according to the play of the light, clouds of
bursting shrapnel stipple the azure, and seem like a long flight of
snowflakes in the sunshine.
As we are going back, two strollers come up--Carassus and Cheyssier.
They announce that mess-man Pepere is going to the rear, to be sent to
a Territorial regiment, having come under the operation of the Dalbiez
Act.
"That's a hint for Blaire," says Carassus, who has a funny big nose in
the middle of his face that suits him ill.
In the village groups of poilus go by, or in twos, joined by the
crossing bonds of converse. We see the solitary ones unite in couples,
separate, then come together again with a new inspiration of talk,
drawn to each other as if magnetized.
In the middle of an excited crowd white papers are waving. It is the
newspaper hawker, who is selling for two sous papers which should be
one sou. Fouillade is standing in the middle of the road, thin as the
legs of a hare. At the corner of a house Paradis shows to the sun face
pink as ham.
Biquet joins us again, in undress, with a jacket and cap of the police.
He is licking his chops: "I met some pals and we've had a drink. You
see, to-morrow one starts scratching again, and cleaning his old rags
and his catapult. But my greatcoat!--going to be some job to filter
that! It isn't a greatcoat any longer--it's armor-plate."
Montreuil, a clerk at the office, appears and hails Biquet: "Hey,
riff-raff! A letter! Been chasing you an hour. You're never to be
found, rotter!"
"Can't be both here and there, looney. Give us a squint." He examines
the letter, balances it in his hand, and announces as he tears the
envelope, "It's from the old woman."
We slacken our pace. As he reads, he follows the lines with his finger,
wagging his head with an air of conviction, and his lips moving like a
woman's in prayer.
The throng increases the nearer we draw to the middle of the village.
We salute the commandant and the black-skirted padre who walks by the
other's side like his nurse. We are questioned by Pigeon, Guenon, young
Escutenaire, and Chasseur Clodore. Lamuse appears blind and deaf, and
concerned only to walk.
Bizouarne, Chanrion, and Roquette arrive excitedly to announce big
news--"D'you know, Pepere's going to the rear."
"Funny," says Biquet, raising his nose from his letter, "how people kid
themselves. The old woman's bothered about me!" He shows me a passage
in the maternal epistle: "'When you get my letter,'" he spells out,
"'no doubt you will be in the cold and mud, deprived of everything, mon
pauvre Eugene'" He laughs: "It's ten days since she put that down for
me, and she's clean off it. We're not cold, 'cos it's been fine since
this morning; and we're not miserable, because we've got a room that's
good enough. We've had hard times, but we're all right now."
As we reach the kennel in which we are lodgers, we are thinking that
sentence over. Its touching simplicity affects me, shows me a soul--a
host of souls. Because the sun has shown himself, because we have felt
a gleam and a similitude of comfort, suffering exists no longer, either
of the past or the terrible future. "We're all right now." There is no
more to say.
Biquet establishes himself at the table, like a gentleman, to write a
reply. Carefully he lays abroad his pen ink, and paper, and examines
each, then smilingly traces the strictly regular lines of his big
handwriting across the meager page.
"You'd laugh," he says, "if you knew what I've written to the old
woman." He reads his letter again, fondles it, and smiles to himself.
------------
[note 1:] Pity to spoil this jest by translation, but Biquet's primary
meaning was "You're cross because you've a throat like a lime-kiln."
His secondary or literal meaning is obvious.--Tr.
[note 2:] See p. 34 ante; [chapter 5, note 3] another reference to the
famous phrase. "Pourvu que les civils tiennent."--Tr.
[note 3:] Every French village has a plaque attached to the first house
on each road of approach, giving its name and the distance to the
next.--Tr.