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."