RENÉ BOYLESVE (continued 2)

At that moment a man was being carried to the operating-room. He blustered a little as he addressed to his comrades the classic au revoir which may so well be an adieu: "I am going to my game of billiards!"

"Try to win, old fellow," they answered from all parts of the ward.

And, without flinching, Odette was present at "her" first operation.

She returned home at half past twelve, exhausted, but lighter in heart and satisfied with herself.

"Madame is pale," said Amelia. "Madame is the color of the lamp-shade when the lamp is lighted."

After luncheon she slept heavily for half an hour, and returned to the hospital. The afternoon was more calm, at least until the second visit of the head physician, before the men's six-o'clock meal. She made further acquaintance with her patients; she heard them talk about the war. She found occasion to say, "My poor husband was killed on the 22d of September," but it produced no great effect, none of those soldiers having known Lieutenant Jacquelin. Each told about what he had seen, and nothing else seemed to him to have a real existence. She was disappointed, but by their various touching stories of what they had been through, she was introduced to that war of which she had determined to know nothing since her husband was dead. The battles of the Yser, the sufferings of the combatants who had passed day after day in freezing water, the grotesque onslaughts of the Germans, the piles of dead under the ominous skies, set her imagination to work. Always thinking of her husband, she saw him all alone in the face of those infuriated enemies, trampled down by them.... He had gone out with drawn sabre from his little village, at the head of his company, and he had been killed outright. Before the survivors of the Yser she no longer dared speak of the circumstance of the lieutenant's death, beautiful though it was. This war seemed to be enlarging, growing beyond measure great.

They were beginning to organize the hospital for the winter; certain persons insisted that the war would not be over in six months; others said with conviction: "Nor in eighteen months either!" But these were suspected of sowing demoralization. Yet the English were making preparations for three years! From her friend La Villaumer, who was still in Paris, Odette received letters in which he wrote:

"We are like children, sometimes gay, laughing and gamboling, at others howling, no one knows why. My dear friend, busy yourself with your work, and don't read the papers. As for me, there is something which impresses me more than the monstrous movements of the German colossus: it is the soul of the colossus. It is one; it has only one purpose, which is the greatness of the German nation. It is a rudimentary sentiment, savage, primitive, barbarous, but how strong! We ourselves are fighting because we have been attacked, and also to defend ideas which do us the greatest honor: liberty, justice, and the like. We are animated by a very lively sentiment of the rights of man. We love humanity; they, the Germans, love Germany. How much more simple it is, and how it relieves them of all the scruples that hold us back! And yet, in the final issue, it is he who shall have triumphed by force who will lay down the moral values of the future."

Thus, uncertainty, admiration, confidence, scepticism, and a state of alarm were concurrently implanted in minds, and Odette, affected by them, like every one else, began from that day to be infected, as with the odor of the hospital, with this irritating compound.

Little by little it seemed to her that she no longer upheld herself, but that she let herself be carried away, borne along and guided by the life of the hospital. It was at once horrible and almost laughable. A place of pain, the perpetual reminder of enormities which the human brain could never have conceived, it was also an assemblage dominated by youth, which saves all. In the gaze of those prostrate wounded, gaze which had become of so much importance to her who passed and repassed along the bedsides, burned a flame disturbing and alluring, result of the burning away of something that could not be named. At times, one felt as if in certain of those wounded men one saw beings returned from the beyond. They had seen what nothing had prepared them to see, something that confused them, both their senses and their judgment. Some of them said: "It was hell!" Others, much more simple-minded, merely said: "One must have been there!" Certain of them, without imagination or memory, living entirely in the present moment, shut up within themselves an unconscious gravity which was in strange contrast with their youthful natures. But in a general way a new nurse like Odette could aver:

"But the wounded are not sad!"

"Because," some one would reply, "they are all happy at not being dead."

Thus, day succeeded day, without softening Odette's personal sorrow, but as if shrouding it behind a mourning veil which covered all that she could imagine of earth's surface. Everything made her think of Jean, but she had not time to appear to be thinking of him, and she shrank from speaking of him.

She led a very active life. It would happen that just as she sat down at table, all alone in the evening in the Elizabeth pavilion, the door-bell would ring. It would be one of the volunteer employees, passing along on his bicycle to notify the nurses that a train of one hundred and twenty wounded men was announced to reach the station at eleven o'clock. By half past ten Odette, who would not take a nap, and who knew not what to do at home, was already at the hospital, in her cap and blouse. The more zealous ones were there, and the more indolent ones as well, welcoming the opportunity to get together and gossip. The head physician was coming and going, opening and shutting doors; the doctors were arriving one by one; the surgeon, all in white, his sleeves turned back to the elbows, was talking with the women. The telephone-bell rang; it was the police commissioner sending word that the train was an hour late. A few persons were in despair; there were some whom the matter moved to laughter. Every one waited. And sometimes the train, instead of one hour, was two or three hours late. Resignation became general in proportion as reasons for impatience accumulated. In the great hall where they were all assembled some seated themselves on anything they could find, others lay down upon stretchers. Bright conversation grew dim with the lights. White-robed women, going up or down stairs on tiptoe, seemed like angelic apparitions. Through the partitions came the heavy breathing of sleeping men. Suddenly the ringing of a bell startled every one; the train was drawing into the station at last. The lights were turned up. Ten minutes later the first automobiles were sounding in the court. The double-leaved doors were thrown wide, notwithstanding the cold, the stretcher-bearers rushed out, and in a moment, contrasting with their rapid bounds, came slowly the wounded soldiers, bleeding, bearded, covered with earth, wan, exhausted; some of them half-naked, some with frozen feet, upheld or carried by sturdy fifteen-year-old lads. All were silent, a religious respect hushed the words upon the lips. This torn flesh, these rags of French uniform, wrought in the mind of every being not utterly insensible a change in his idea of the pathetic; something of the atmosphere of the firing-line entered and asepticized every heart.

The next morning the sense of familiarity returned. But in that one hour of the dark winter night, while the surgeon, bending over each victim, was asking him almost tenderly: "And you, my child?"—something august, an exhalation of the colossal human sacrifice, penetrated into this commonplace old hotel hall, sanctifying it for all time to come. And not one of those men or women who had been there, however advanced the hour of the night, however visible the fatigue on all their faces, but was glad for having been there.

Whence came these wounded men? From Ypres, from Arras, from Notre-Dame de Lorette. The names called up all that any one knew, through newspapers and private talk, of those charnel-houses whose image the imagination refuses to harbor, upon which those who have escaped from them keep silence.

Odette, soapy brush in hand, forcing back all repugnance, doing as others did, was helping to soothe agonies which humanity seems never before to have known or dreamed of. The most shocking duties no longer repelled her. The very effort which she was compelled to make, by the contrast between what she was seeing and doing and what life had formerly offered her, pressed the character of the catastrophe to her mind which lacked capacity to conceive of it. "Is it, then, so great?" she would wonder. And even: "Is there after all anything great?" For no soul in the world had taught her this. The inevitable contrast with her past life, all for herself, for her individual satisfaction, seemed to dishonor her memories, even of happiness, making them almost trivial. This, indeed, was the opinion of Mme. de Calouas, but not that of Amelia, whom in her solitude it became sometimes necessary to oppose.

"Madame adopts the ideas of those around her," the maid would say; "it is all very well, but Madame may believe me: the good time, and the true time, was before all this, when the poor men were not preparing to be made into hash."

IX

Who would have believed it a year ago? Odette took the inclination to follow to the cemetery the pitiful funerals of dead soldiers, not because it offered her a pretext for a walk into the country in the free air, for she had done that—she, so susceptible to cold—all through the black winter. But before everything else she was thinking that she had not followed her husband to the grave. After all that she had endured, still reverent of century-old rites, not to have followed the body of her husband in a funeral car to his last abode seemed to her to have failed in a sovereign duty. Alas! her husband's body had been carried in no funeral car, no one had followed him to the grave! She did not permit herself to dwell upon these heartrending details, but in accompanying the mortal remains of the soldiers she felt that she was to a certain degree acquitting herself of an indispensable duty that had not been rendered to Jean. Then the ceremony at the church moved her. The panoply of war mingling with hymns and words of peace, the tumult of battle set over against the sacerdotal acts of the priest, and the prayers for the eternal rest of the soul that had known to the uttermost the horror of earthly chaos, combined in some way to deaden the pain of mind, senses, and heart.

The funeral train would climb the narrow, serpentine road which led to the old town on the hill. Wounded comrades, hobbling along, their feet ill defended from the rough ground by straw slippers, some of them lacking an arm and others an eye, would follow the hearse of the poor, covered with the tricolor, behind the old parents or the young widow in tears; then would come delegates from the municipality and the hospital, then kindly disposed followers, pious people, idlers. The hedges would be growing green; the farms, with flocks of children at the doors and lowing cattle, would be awaking from the sleep of the long winter; one could hear the click of the milk-pail as it was set down upon the ground, the apple-trees in the fields were great tufts of unsullied flowers. When the procession, having climbed the hillside, turned toward the right the town came into view, its hotels and casinos transformed into hospitals with the floating red cross, its church-towers, its long white beach, the boundless sea with its line of English transports, untiringly through all the months, bringing from afar British troops to the land of France. The whole picture melted away into the national flag that covered the body of the little soldier, shot through by a ball on the plains of Picardy. In all this there was a new and incomparable poetry; the self-sacrifice of a man to something that he hardly understands, a notable act in which all desired to participate; and by contract the everlasting unconcern, the utter indifference, of nature.

Every one, without exception, was thinking of the end of the war. It was an illusion wrought by the spring, the renaissance of all that lives, the urgent need of peace and happiness that all creatures and plants cry out for beneath the returning sun. Those behind the hearse shook their heads, saying: "What a calamity!" But all were thinking: "It will surely soon be over." They sighed: "My God, grant that this may be the last to go!" Alas, it was only the first springtide of the war! If a prophetic voice should have cried: "In the spring of next year, in the spring of another year, and still of another, this same ceremony will take place, the same hopes will be uttered, the same illusions cherished! For season shall follow upon season, year upon year, only the horror and unhappiness shall be changed, for they shall increase and time shall know them out of all proportions that are called reasonable"—assuredly these good people would have been crushed.

As they went down the hill they gathered flowers along the roadside. The soldiers stopped in the wine-shops where they were given cider, and all returned to their places at once moved, saddened, and enriched by hopes, as is always the case when a new victim has succumbed.

Spring passed, and summer, and autumn.

Odette never spoke of her husband's death, though she was always thinking of it. She had found neither officer nor soldier who had known him. The death of Lieutenant Jacquelin in the early days of the war was a disappearance like so many others, in a chain of events that had no common measure. A man would fall, another man would take his place; nearly all the officers by profession were dead, and there were officers still.

"What is a man?" a common soldier asked her one day on the beach.

X

Early in the following spring, when the gardens that surrounded the villas of Surville were gay with flowering plums, and the countryside was again covered with those lovely trees of rosy snow that it is a pain to look at when men are killing one another, when the woods were venturing to confide to the brisk air their new-born foliage, Odette was obliged to make a visit to Paris.

During the journey, in company with convalescents and men on furlough, old men, and women in mourning, she was astonished to find herself so much attached to the hospital which she had entered almost against her will, drawn by something which seemed not to belong to her real self.

"Most of the women that I have met there," she reflected, "are of an unlovely pettiness, and one would say that they strive to transform the most innocent act into a shameful offense, from a desire to believe that there are traitors, guilty persons everywhere, and by a strange inclination to find the presence of the devil in every corner! And yet their service is excellent." Cunning malice, destructive backbiting, scandal set on foot by inconsiderate comments on trivial acts, often meaningless and that might well have been left unnoticed, open jealousy, absurd vanity, the most insidious intrigues to work up to distinction; to sum up, utter triviality—all these composed a body of customs recognized, admitted, in no respect casting a blot upon respectability. Only one thing led up to the mark of infamy: anything which nearly or remotely might resemble love.

How surprising this had appeared in the eyes of a Parisian woman of twenty-seven, who had lived in the world of society during the years between 1905 and 1914!

Odette mused upon that social circle, young, cheerful, given to sports, relatively kindly and prosperous, who before the war had surrounded her.

What had become of Simone de Prans, Rose Misson, Clotilde Avvogade, Germaine Le Gault, and M. de La Villaumer? She had received brief missives from them, postal-cards rather than letters. On her part, had Odette perhaps disconcerted her friends by the accounts she sent them; had she perhaps wearied them by her persistent grief? Simone and Rose still had their husbands, the former grievously wounded, the other still whole, running about in his car as usual; Avvogade was attached to Great Headquarters. Can any one understand the sorrow from which he does not himself suffer?

On reaching Paris Odette was singularly impressed. When she had gone to Surville in 1914, to forget the war and think only of her dead, she had been surprised to find herself on the contrary all the nearer to the war. The trains of wounded, life among the wounded, the almost sole society of men but recently escaped from death; all this was far different from her recluse life in the apartment of the Rue de Balzac, which had indeed recalled the memory of Jean, but had also recalled the memory of the time of peace. Monotony of occupation, the continual living-over of the same emotions, at last dulls the sensibilities. The war as it appeared to her after eighteen months of hospital experience was a state of things to which her organism and her thought had become moulded. The long daily weariness, the constantly renewed effort, dulled her senses and confused her perception of events.

Paris in March, 1916, seemed to her much more like war than Surville. The battle of Verdun was at its height, and all Paris was ringing with its echoes wherever one might be. Newspapers, conversations, the tramways, the metro, the taxi chauffeur who gave you change, the woman who sold you a magazine, servants, masters, the rich, the poor, bank employees, even to the sellers of violets in the streets, all brought to mind the war and Verdun, yet mutely, less by outcries than by quiet words, less by words than by changed color, the graying of the hair or of the beard, faded eyes, new wrinkles, and a certain indefinable manner. The whole earth and everything that it bears, every creature moving upon it, were a single sensitiveness, raised to its most acute degree. Acts and gestures apparently most remote from the war, receptions, dinners, the crowd at the entrance of the moving-picture shows, of classical concerts, of the few remaining music-halls, only showed the necessity for certain temperaments to tear themselves away from the nightmare of Verdun. Every one was affected by it, and so much the more as they were forced to tell themselves: "There are those who are suffering infinitely more than we."

Odette, in her apartment, was once again overwhelmed by her personal sorrow. She had lived in Surville with her grief buried in the depths of her heart, for though everything she saw reminded her of Jean she had no leisure to give herself to dwelling upon the past. In the Rue de Balzac all her sorrow came to meet her entire as on the first day. It seemed as if her stay at Surville had done nothing for her. When Simone de Prans came to welcome her, it seemed to Odette that her friend had just arrived with the terrible news, and she melted into tears. Her tears surprised Simone, who dared not reproach her with exaggerating her sorrow, but who yet brought herself to give her to understand that so long and so violent a grief was not fitting, that no one any longer wept like that. Odette, made docile by eighteen months of punctual obedience to orders, did not resist, made no objection. "No one any longer wept like that"; it was a custom, one of those sovereign customs, which a Parisian woman instinctively accepts. Simone had said: "You understand, there are too many!" Which signified, such misfortunes are too numerous; they are raining down on everybody. The human heart would not be equal to its task if it must be always sympathizing; each woman in mourning would herself die of it, creating a new and superfluous pain. She spoke with the greatest ease of her Pierrot, one leg paralyzed, one arm five centimetres shorter than the other and with shattered nerves. He was at the Ministry of War, and was content. She told of a ceremony which she had accidentally witnessed that morning, passing the Madeleine on her way back from the Flower Market. "A fine marriage, you know; red carpet on the steps, a crowd to right and left. Just as I was passing the doors opened, and up above I saw the young couple."

"There are still men to marry?"

"Listen; she, who appeared to be pretty, a lovely girl, a brunette, tall, leaning, as if enamoured, on her husband's arm; he in uniform, his decorations flashing on his breast. Oh, the handsome fellow, not thirty years old! He held himself upright, splendid, not looking at his feet; two large eyes wide open and fixed, as if he were speaking to a superior. She seemed to be indicating the steps by a gentle pressure of the arm, that he might not lose an inch of his fine height. Behind them one could hear the swellings of the great organ. There was an impulse to applaud, for he was evidently a hero, unmaimed and superb. Every one was glad in the happiness of his charming wife, though pitying her in the midst of admiration, for to-morrow her handsome officer must return to the firing-line, and the war is endless. Suddenly there was a movement in the crowd, murmurs, whisperings, faces turned pale; the handsome officer had just missed falling, my dear, notwithstanding the care of his young wife to hide his infirmity, for he was blind!"

"It's frightful, frightful," exclaimed Odette.

She had seen and nursed most grievously wounded soldiers; but unconsciously a sort of convention had been established in her mind by which nothing that she saw, or that happened in the hospital at Surville, should move her. This first result of the war which had faced her elsewhere than at Surville, and under another aspect, impressed her almost intolerably. On the other hand, Simone had become accustomed to the dramatic scenes which at times occur in Paris, where everything is perhaps all the more sad because the war drama is close at hand, aping normal life. This juxtaposition of the manners of a time of peace and these shadows of the pit which mingle with the life of every day, more like a prolonged dream than like reality, produce surprising effects upon reflective minds.

Simone de Prans, who for a time had taken up work in a model hospital, an American hospital, was no longer a nurse. That was no longer done.

"What about our good Rose?" asked Odette.

"Rose Misson has arranged her life. She has resolved not to yield to things; she has been too much teased about her old husband, always going about in his automobile. Neither Rose nor her husband is disturbed by that; he remains on his seat; she dresses, visits the shops as in former times and receives the few friends who are not indignant because her husband has not lost two or three limbs. Between ourselves, I think she is a woman who is doing a great deal of good."

"Only she does not cry it upon the housetops?"

"No; they will be upbraided for it all their lives, she and her husband; he, free from all military obligation, for having 'ambushed' himself in his automobile, she for having retained her placid manner, her good humor."

"I thought that optimism was in fashion."

"Optimism, yes, but not naturalness. The approved sort of optimism consists in unendingly predicting victory, with the jaw of a tigress, and in determinedly transforming all bad news into a presage of success. But those who maintain a quiet confidence without talking about it, and make life around them more pleasant by their usual good temper, are suspected of indifference."

"And in all this, what about you, Simone?"

"Me? I have a husband deep in government councils, haven't I? It is a power in these days. People leave me alone."

"And Germaine?" asked Odette.

Simone appeared somewhat embarrassed. People hardly dared to talk of Germaine Le Gault. Germaine Le Gault had lost her husband at about the same time with Odette, and almost under the same circumstances. Like Odette, Germaine adored her husband. Germaine had taken the loss even more deeply to heart than Odette; her life had even been in danger. Germaine, like Odette, still wore her deep widow's mourning. And Germaine was now in love; in love beyond the possibility of concealment, in love with a head physician in whose service she had worked. He was a married man and a father.

"La Villaumer insists," said Simone, "that in her case it is simply a lack of imagination, and that no one should blame her. He says, you understand, that she is unable to bring before herself, as you do, for example, a vision of her husband. If she had been capable of bearing about with her a persistent picture of him, she would have been faithful, if it were only to a picture; but she has no imagination; it is necessary to her that her mind should rest upon an object. It is one explanation—probably a paradox."

At that moment they heard in the neighboring apartment the playing of an excellent pianist which had formerly lulled the reveries of Odette when she was waiting for Jean. That neighboring apartment, into which the Jacquelins had never set foot, was separated from theirs only by a thin partition and a door. The music had often fretted Jean, but when Odette was alone she had loved to hear it.

"Listen!" said Odette. "Oh, it is more than eighteen months since I have heard music!"

"That is so," said Simone; "in Paris one finds a little of everything that one used to love; it is that that hurts."

"What is she playing?" asked Simone after a moment.

It was a revery; two lovers who are seeking one another, groping in the darkness of a garden on a lovely summer night; you hear their hesitating footsteps, you suspect their vexed and feverish gestures, their eager lips that call one another without imprudently pronouncing a name; though their footsteps creak upon the gravel and a fountain drops its slow pearls into the basin. Suddenly the music of a waltz attracts them separately to the lighted house, and they exchange kisses on the steps of the entrance, before being swallowed up in the intoxicating motion.

"Oh!" exclaimed Odette, thrilled, "do you remember, do you remember?"

"What?" asked Simone.

"Why, everything! Everything that happened before, before this end of the world that never ends!"

Odette, overcome by the harmonious reminder of the waltz of a possible festival, of the joy of living, of being pretty, young, beloved, could only repeat:

"I haven't heard ... anything ... for more than eighteen months, Simone! Do you remember that evening at Mme. Sormellier's, at Bellevue, where both our husbands were so beautiful?"

"And we, too, Odette! We shall be old after the war. We shall have had hardly five or six years of youth. I will confess to you that sometimes I juggle with fate. I go to see Clotilde, who refuses to permit herself to be touched by events. She says: 'I can do nothing about it; I am good for nothing. Let the world let me alone as I let it alone! Till my last hour I will stay with my flowers, my books, and my music.'"

"Ah! Clotilde, yes; do you know, I had forgotten her!"

"Everybody is forgetting her, and she forgets everybody. Her husband is at Great Headquarters; he often comes. She is a privileged person, and she says: 'Why should I not accept all the good that is offered me?'"

"Yes," said Odette, "it is tempting, but I could not do it.—No, I could not.—See, I tried to shut myself up with my grief. Well, I could not. It is too great—this universal sorrow—too absorbing. Listen!"

The pianist next door, still devoted to her Chopin, which she performed in a remarkable manner, was beginning the First Nocturne, the one that contains that phrase of lamentation, heartrending in its sober scheme and its sustained phrasing, without outcry or burst of passion, leaving the soul to the lasting sense of human woe.

"Oh, listen—listen!"

The pianist was accompanying herself with her grave, finely cadenced voice, following without words the sinuous course of the thrice-repeated utterance of sorrow. Odette began to sob; her nerves were unstrung by the apparent return to things of former days, while yet acutely conscious of the dreadful present.

"I must give up this apartment, after all," she said between her sobs.

"Yes, you will have to," replied Simone; "you would be overwhelmed with your sense of loss."

"For that matter I must give up everything."

"Everything? What more, do tell me!"

"Myself! See, I cannot delude myself longer."

"My poor Odette! You are hardly four days out of your hospital, and you go to pieces! We are only kept up by the presence of those who have suffered a thousand times more than we. You can't imagine what it is for me that my Pierrot has miraculously escaped death, with his body half destroyed. It is he who saves me from unhappiness. Those who have looked death in the face and yet have returned to life find it beautiful, whatever it is, and their wonder at it spreads to all around them."

"Yes, yes. I have felt that. If I had my poor Jean, even all broken to pieces, I should think only of the joy of having him safe. But I have him no longer, and the past draws me, at times, as if some one much stronger than I were taking me by the arms and drawing me backward with irresistible power. Do you remember Isadora dancing among her children and throwing flowers in one of the motives of the ballet of "Armida"? And that great fool Antoine Laloire behind us, crying: 'When one has seen that one may well say, "Thank you," to God and close one's eyes forever!' He had no idea how well he was speaking. They say he had a splendid death."

"Yes. All our admiration must from this time forward be given to the beauty of our warriors. Harmonious forms, enchantment—we are done with them all, my poor child, done with them!"

"Done with them! So they say. So I thought, too, when I saw those men coming in by the hundreds, reduced to a mass of bleeding pulp; I still think so when I think of the long line of devastation which is spreading over Europe, of all those human beings who are every day dying around their torpedoed vessels; but think! The moment the art of our former days is able to realize itself anywhere, beyond a partition, it rises upon us like the sun that has been two days hidden. It will rise again, Simone! If only a few individuals are left who can hear a note, a shepherd will be found to invent the flute once again, by bringing reeds together."

"You say that because the art of which you are speaking only increases your sadness. You are cultivating your sadness, and loving it still. If you were less melancholy, like me, you would consent to accept the new life just as it offers itself; but you will always see it irremediably disfigured, poisoned by an overwhelming horror. Life from henceforth is a Lady Macbeth with red and horrific hands, marking with a bloody spot everything that it touches. What fine art could flourish except by means of men not yet born, men who will not come into the world until after this horror is no longer spoken about?"

"Remember what those poor friends of ours used to say when they talked so well in our gatherings of former days: the flowers that bloom on graves are as fresh and the harvests that grow on battlefields are more abundant than those on fields that have never known crime and death; they are innocent, divinely innocent of all the past. The souls of artists are like flowers; and they purify the imaginations that have been soiled."

"And the conclusion is that you and I both, my dear, have after all a good share of optimism, otherwise called a reserve strength upon which we can draw for a certain time. Let us hope it may be for a long time. And we find the same thing under the distress of nearly all men. Ah, how strong life is!"

XI

Odette began a round of visits.

For the most part they were visits of condolence. She went first to Mme. de Blauve, who had lately lost her young son, that charming boy of seventeen whom Odette had seen for a second in the Avenue d'Iena flying to the recruiting-office, to take the place of his father, who had been killed in the second month of the war. Mme. de Blauve had come back from Rheims, where at that time she had been a nurse, under unceasing bombardments; she had returned to her daughters, who were now growing up. Odette found the family no more crushed or morose than at the first time. The father, Commandant de Blauve, adored by all, was dead; the elder son, in his nineteenth year, was dead.

"Happily," said Mme. de Blauve, "I have one left."

"How old is he?" asked Odette anxiously.

"He is about to enlist," said Mme. de Blauve simply. "Through him, I hope that our name will be represented to the end."

Every one knew that this last son was her Benjamin, petted more than all her other children. Her present anxiety was for her daughters; she would fain have married them at once.

"Marry them!" cried Odette; "but to whom, at such a time as this?"

"To good young soldiers, that they may soon have children."

Not the slightest emotion, though the family was truly affectionate; one single idea—to come to the defense of the country, by whatever means. Odette could not but admire, though at the same time she trembled.

"How far advanced is your mourning?" asked Mme. de Blauve almost severely.

"What?" asked Odette.

"I mean, how long is it since you lost you dear husband?"

"Just eighteen months," replied Odette.

"You are young," said Mme. de Blauve; "my child, you still have duties to perform."

"But," said Odette, bewildered, "I am doing what I can."

"We will speak again of it in a few months," said Mme. de Blauve. "I shall not lose sight of you. I count you among the good ones."

She dwelt upon the word "good" as she bade Odette good-by.

Odette did not in the least grasp Mme. de Blauve's meaning. Did she find her "good" because she had for a long time been conscientiously doing a nurse's duties, and did she think of sending her to some difficult post, requiring courage and constancy? She was cheerfully ready for anything. Only one thing troubled her; it was that the memory of Jean seemed to be relegated to so distant a past, seemed to hold so small a place in the thoughts of the people whom she was about to see, she being still in deep mourning, and having been away only seventeen months, to mourn for Jean.

Why did Odette go directly from the Avenue d'Iena to see Clotilde? Not in the least by reason of the love of contrast, or the need for it, but because she was passing the Place of the United States, which attracted her with its trees adorned with their young leafage.

She found Clotilde as she had always found her, extended upon an ancient couch, amid twenty cushions, a dozen books and magazines, in an elegant room, with a bunch of carnations flaunting their glory, and hyacinths in pots surrounding the young woman with a fragrant suggestion of spring.

"Ah!" exclaimed Odette as she entered, without quite perceiving the significance of her exclamation.

Clotilde, perfumed and her tall figure clothed in a Babani robe, kissed her joyfully.

"You haven't fallen off much, Odette. Tell me, are these your cheeks? No more rouge than in the old days? Oh, how often I think of your loss, my dear!"

She was the first person, except La Villaumer, who had spoken to her of her loss. Then there was still some one who remembered what had been her happiness, her extraordinary happiness.

"I haven't written to you, Odette, because I was too lazy, and because I need to imagine the face of the person to whom I write. So far away, under your nurse's cap, I couldn't tell—you are pretty; I love you always. Oh, how sorry I am for you!"

Odette, surprised, embarrassed, still under the influence of the life she had been leading, spoke as every one did:

"There are so many of us who deserve to be pitied."

"No, Odette, no; I am not saying that. No doubt there are many widows and many young women whose husbands or lovers are maimed, disfigured, ruined. But there are not many who, before all that, have truly enjoyed life and love. You have known love. You have had a few years that are worth being regretted."

Tears rose to Odette's eyes. They were tears that gave no pain, which rather comforted her. It seemed that she had long been waiting to shed such tears. She had so constantly heard conventional words, forced expressions, the result of a strained situation which there was surely no reason to criticise; but, except from her wounded soldiers, she had not before heard words simply human.

Clotilde was not afraid to talk persistently of Jean, not because she felt that at bottom she was giving pleasure to her friend, but because her thoughts naturally turned to attractive things, and she loved to remember that charming couple of perfect lovers that Jean and Odette had been. Never having checked her instinct, it now told her that Odette, in spite of her tears, enjoyed the revival of these memories. It was not Jean the soldier, Jean the hero, whose praises Clotilde sang. Odette had heard so many praises of heroes! She had handled so many with her own hands! There had never been but one Jean. He was Jean, just Jean, a fine, good, and handsome fellow who had nothing military, nothing surprising about him, except just that he was beloved. Who had dared to talk to her of that Jean since the war? No one. Clotilde was doing it in the unconsciousness of a woman who was still what she had been before. And Odette had felt some apprehension about seeing Clotilde again, just because she had feared that Clotilde had really not changed enough!

The interview was soothing, even delightful to her. Clotilde seemed almost to have forgotten the war—a little more and she would have made her forget it. She talked of the books that she was reading; books written earlier than the present time; she talked, too, laughingly of her clothes, on the pretext of the diminished resources of the family; she spoke of certain middle-aged and even old men, saying that they had not been appreciated in the days when there had been plenty of young fellows. She offered her friend a cigarette; she smoked, and the two women looked at each other through curls of long, light clouds, as if in a dream.

Odette went out somewhat amazed at the incredible ivory tower which Clotilde had succeeded in building around her youth, her beauty, and her selfishness.

"Is Clotilde selfish?" she asked herself, as she turned from the Square of the United States. "And yet how she asked about my Jean! Clotilde is like every one else; she is interested in just one thing, has a passion for it. She has kept as by a miracle the one thing that she had before the war, and that is love. Everything that represents love captivates her; one feels that she gives herself up to it. The others yield to a different passion which, by the conditions of our time, takes on a more sympathetic form. Mme. de Blauve with sacred fury throws all her family into the jaws of Moloch; Mme. de Calouas, in Surville, has a passion only for the wounded, exclusively for wounded soldiers; I have seen her utterly insensible to an accident to a civilian; most of those women in the hospital had a passion for their duties there, thought themselves degraded when they had not the number of beds that satisfied their pride, lamented as if for a public misfortune when, by chance, fewer wounded soldiers came. There are even people whose passion it is to have no passions—and they are the most to be dreaded. Why should Clotilde deprive herself of her bouquet of carnations, her pot of hyacinths, her perfumed cigarettes, while they serve to create around her the illusion by which she lives, and of which, when the occasion comes, she gives her weary friends the benefit for a whole hour? Yet, could I do like her? No; decidedly not. Did not I, then, love love as she does? I do not know, I loved Jean. Then I am less simple than she; everything affects me. And everything is shaken. I am not flattering myself when I recognize that I am alive to more than one thing. I wanted to be wholly devoted to one—to my sorrow. I believe that I am alive only to my grief, and yet sometimes I think that in this I am mistaken."

That day she felt an overwhelming lassitude. Clotilde had lapped her in "soft odors." As she was asking herself how she could finish the day she bethought her that she had been told that Mme. Leconque was another Clotilde, that is to say, a fairy capable of drawing one out of the war mood, though she belonged to a social set that was just now holding it as a great honor to give to it unstintingly both life and fortune.

"I must not fail of seeing her," said Odette to herself, "and just now I prefer another Clotilde to a second Mme. de Blauve, who makes me shudder." She took a taxi to the end of the Avenue du Bois.

Mme. Leconque was at home and alone. Muffled up in an ermine coverlet, in a room brightened by a wood-fire large enough to warm an assembly-room in the city hall, and surrounded by objects of art, ancient trinkets, Watteaux, Fragonards, she lay on a couch near a majestic bed, high and royal, covered with Venetian point, determinedly knitting, amid yawns, little stockings of coarse wool, for refugee children.

"You, at least, have had enough of this butchery," she said.

Odette, under her mourning-veil, admitted that for her part she found no pleasure in it.

"I should be glad to know," went on Mme. Leconque, "what sort of a life they are giving us."

Odette looked around at the great wood-fire, the walls of the room, a perfect museum, and at the silky fleece that enwrapped the form of the dissatisfied woman.

"They have just telephoned me," Mme. Leconque went on, "that we have evacuated Malancourt. Just look at my stockings, if you call them stockings! I admit that I never paid seventy-five francs a pair for mine—I always sent to London for them and got them at thirty-five francs. And to-day I am wearing stockings at 3 francs 95!"

"Why do you?" asked Odette.

"You would despise me if I paid more for them, in these days. You are in mourning, my poor dear; you don't think about these matters. Do you know where we are all getting our clothes? In the Rue d'Alesia, my child, in a store where they sell ribbons on the main floor for eight sous a metre, and up-stairs you find models of all the great Paris dressmakers at a third of the regular price. You might go there out of curiosity; I'll take you, if you like. You will find ten autos at the door, lined up before the tin-shop, the general shops, the house-painters, and the wine-shops. And where do you think we try on? Anywhere, no matter where. On the staircase, in the corridors, in the shop itself, three women together, not to speak of the old husbands and the men on leave, in a little parlor decorated with two opposite mirrors! Absolute promiscuity, a mob that reminds you of the old Neuilly fair; broken windows, no heat, and drafts of air that pierce through the lungs! My dear, I bought a charmeuse gown there for one hundred and seventy-five francs that would have cost seven hundred and fifty at Lanvin's! The Duchess of Chateauruque goes there; the wife of the ambassador from X. goes, too. Can you imagine such a thing? Oh! we run against picturesque things during this war! Do you believe that life can go on this way?"

"I don't think so, indeed," said Odette.

"I see that you aren't pitying us. Well, for my part I tell you that I have had enough of this war, and that I despise it! Do you understand? I despise it. Ugh! ugh! and ugh!"

Odette returned home along the darkening streets, thinking of Mme. de Blauve, the terrible. She felt much indulgence for Mme. de Blauve, the terrible.

XII

Odette had bought a newspaper. During the night the Germans had made a series of massed attacks, debouching upon Malancourt from three directions at once. Our troops had evacuated the devastated village "while keeping its outlets."

Once again she tried to take refuge in her memories of love. But this evening the portraits of Jean that she saw around her did not speak to her of love. She felt that Jean, if he were there, would not talk of love that evening, but would turn away like an overwrought man to whom the beloved one insists upon saying: "Kiss me!" She could distinctly see the gesture which, however, she had seldom known. She could almost hear Jean saying: "My little love, I am anxious.... It is not that I lack confidence, but they are advancing step by step; it is disquieting, disquieting. You will think me cruel, but I should be glad to go back there. I would rather be there, do you see?" If he had been with her on permission he would have gone back! What torture! And she said to herself: "If he had not been killed the second month he would have been killed since then: twenty months without respite under the shells!"

Days passed; the German attack upon Verdun wrought upon the great public of France a great silence. No noise, not an exclamation, no excesses in Paris; an imposing calm; a quiet crowd upon the boulevards, perfect order even on Sunday; almost gayety around the men who were home on leave who went about surrounded by young women in short skirts, Anamite caps or toques borrowed from the Palais, painfully walking on extravagantly high heels! Between four o'clock and seven every one was reading the newspaper. They were sold all through the city, not with loud shouts as if all Europe had been put to fire and sword, as when celebrated trials were going on; now that Europe actually was put to fire and sword, with less uproar than after the Auteuil races. In almost every heart the sublimity of the French struggle, the universal respect which it evoked throughout the world, overcame apprehension, stifled the sense of uncounted losses, and dominated that crater on the banks of the Meuse, in eruption over an extent of thirty-five kilometres, its lava overwhelming a whole countryside.

Odette was invited to dine with officers who had returned from that hell, who were going back to it; and these men talked futilities like every one else: partly from kindliness, partly for their own pleasure, or in courteous resumption of the decorum of former days. Between two witticisms they would relate an episode such as no story of the age of fable could offer. Many of them were men who two years before had danced the tango, whom strait-laced old twaddlers had in those days held up to opprobrium. Thus Odette met again a young fellow of twenty-four, a captain, an officer of the Legion of Honor, lacking several fingers, wounded in the leg and the breast. He had the same simplicity, the same childlike grace, as in the old time at the Casino in Surville, and yet he had taken part in actions infinitely more grand than those of the Homeric heroes or of the wars of Cæsar or Alexander.

He kissed a lady's hand, and that same evening went back to the jaws of the volcano. And that same week the word came that after having been three times buried alive in the undermined earth, his young body had been blown to atoms on Hill 304.

XIII

The next morning, her friend La Villaumer having come to see her, she introduced a subject which had been tormenting her.

"The individuality of the soldier is not obliterated," said La Villaumer. "Either he expects to come through safe, believing himself to be a privileged person among the unlucky, or else he says to himself, 'I shall die, but it will be for something worth while,' and that even exalts his individuality. When that disappears or becomes attenuated it is by excess of suffering, of hoping against hope for the end of all that he is enduring—mud, cold, the incessant wooing of death, and ills without number, have annihilated in him all power of thought and feeling. And still it would be speaking too strongly to say that he goes deliberately to meet death. Never has any living being failed to pay to death the honor of a particular deference."

"Do you think," asked Odette, "that one's individuality can be suddenly lost, or is it not rather unconsciously modified from day to day? You see, in the latter case no one can tell how far the metamorphosis may go! I see many people who have changed in the last eighteen months, and who seem not to be aware of it. I feel very clearly that I myself am different. I find only one part of myself unchanged; the part which binds me to the memory of my poor husband; nothing there is modified even in the very slightest degree—nothing; when I have leisure to think intently of him, I become again precisely the woman I used to be."

"Yes, but with grief in addition."

"That is true."

"It is that which modifies us. It broadens us when it finds a heart in us, and for that matter it exists only so far as it finds a heart. It holds within itself many possibilities. Your grief began with embracing your personal calamity; that alone; and it still hugs it to itself, that is most natural; but it has unconsciously taken a further step, embracing the sorrows of others, a change which you never looked for. And that is making of you another person."

"Will every one like me find themselves a tone above or below what they used to be—as if the whole keyboard had been transposed?"

"I do not think so," said La Villaumer. "Nature changes little. Only sensitive souls are modified, and they are rare. It is they who at last, at the long last, act upon and change those around them. Characters change little, never fear! Yet this war will have been so intense that those at least who have had a part in it will retain something of it, like a strong leaven which will cause new things to germinate. We must expect new things; but we must not look to see the human race thrown off its centre. Historians, sociologists will have their work to do, while philosophers, moralists, the general run of writers may go on as they have done. The word 'democracy,' for instance, will cover much paper——"

"Do you believe in such a thing, yourself?"

"I believe in the word as I believe in all words. It is a mistake to disdain the old-fashioned verbalism—rhetoric, eloquence. The majority of words are hollow—yes, but they are hollow like bells whose sonorousness may by itself shake the whole world. Those who use words are inspired by various things, and generally by sentiments that they cannot acknowledge; yet the word touches the finest chords in the soul of men whom one wants to win over. 'Democracy' has a tone——"

"Which will work good?—or evil?"

"Alas! The popular instinct and an inevitable necessity urge men, in spite of words, to enslave themselves, and they will of their own accord submit to the tyranny of new leaders, new groups representing interests of which the crowd will know nothing. Almost all my pessimism is founded on the irresistible character of this law. Men must be commanded, and no one can be sure that those who command will not abuse their authority or the confidence which is freely granted to them. However, the official programme of democracy will be to devote all its effort to the well-being of poor humans who have not an average of fifty years to live in this world, who no longer believe in another world, and who in truth have some legitimate aspirations to live their few years for their own benefit, and with as little pain as possible."

"Poor men!"

"Yes, 'poor men!' That expresses the immense pity that will well up in every breast, throughout the entire universe. Fate will have demanded much of the human race. No doubt man has suffered through all time; but in a manner so prolonged and so scientifically cruel—no! At all events, never have men suffered in such great numbers; never have they been so acutely conscious of their sufferings. And then, in former times men who suffered had not been learnedly informed that the world had come to the end of suffering. Those who are suffering now believed themselves to have reached the highest point of a period of progress in every direction. Never had man more firmly believed himself to be on the border of the Promised Land, than at the very moment when he stumbled into the infernal pit! What an aggravation of torment! Men may have been sacrificed for far-off ends which too often have not been attained; they may have been obliged, merely for their own preservation as living beings, to obliterate their own intelligence, and to become through long years—they themselves have said it—a sort of brute. Those who will survive will not ask the meaning of subtleties, or will not be in a condition to understand them. They will have only one thought: 'And now, what of me, me, me?'"

"A revival of individuality, then?"

"Yes, but of a fierce individuality, in which all that has for so long a time been stifled within them will urge them on to mistaken acts; or else of an exhausted individuality which will be the prey of exploiters never known before."

"Then you do not believe in a general betterment after this upheaval?"

"I only believe in more or less prolonged periods during which faith in betterment is possible."

"But, after all, man has goodness within him! He carries an ideal in his breast!"

"That is to say that he carries within himself—nowhere but in himself—that small portion of happiness which he may ever hope to attain. In fact, I hold him to be truly happy only as he exercises goodness, or as he aspires to what he deems the best. Man, the child, the savage, very clearly recognizes justice, much less clearly the beautiful; but the idea of the beautiful, however imperfect it may be in him, moves and may make him better. If he permits himself to slide down those inclines which deviate from these ideas, he may experience a dizzy joy of a bad kind. He may work himself up to enjoy strange pleasures, but seldom without at the same time perceiving that he is duping himself, and that pure and deep joy is not in these things. Yes, it is in himself that man finds his sole source of felicity, as the glowworm his light. It may be that justice is entirely inapplicable and the beautiful wholly conventional, but what we may be sure of is that the inclination toward the just and the beautiful is most fruitful in happy results, though they will perhaps never find absolute realization."

"That is all very well; but in fact you believe neither in beauty nor in justice!"

"I believe in the passionate endeavor of man toward beauty and justice."

"Which he will never attain?"

La Villaumer suddenly changed his tone, and gazing smilingly upon the young woman said:

"That would be paradise, my dear friend; be reasonable!"

XIV

It was the last hour of an April afternoon; budding foliage on the trees, the Arc de Triomphe, upon which every saunterer who looks to-day, looks with the vision of the triumphal procession to come, and the Champs-Elysées, unequalled promenade, which Odette and La Villaumer had so often seen crowded and joyful, in the days when the world was happy.

"Do you remember? Oh, you were a little girl, loving to hang around Guignol and trail after the goat-carts. But I was then no longer very young. Do you remember the time when there were no automobiles, and when the victorias used to go slowly down the street bearing beautifully dressed women whom one had time to admire, to criticise, to recognize, and salute? The auto is perfect, but the best it can do is to rush from one place to another, and that has by no means the interest of the daily procession, when it seemed that every one still had time to live. Excuse my capricious imagination, but it seems to me that these machines were made just to bring us with all the more haste to the frightful time in which we are living. I dare say this to you because I know that you are not going to remind me that autos are rendering admirable service to the war, especially at this very time. You think, like me, that they also render service to our enemies, and that all these rapid means of reaching the battlefield coincide with a war without a conceivable end. In a general way, scientific inventions—don't confuse them with the sciences, which merit all veneration—conspire to give to this war a character of atrocity to which no armed conflict has ever attained, and I wish that it could be proved to me that they alleviate it in equal proportion. Think only of the horror which this 'progress' in the art of extermination inspires. How many brains are unable to resist it? Civilians are dying every day, and the best of them, who go to pieces merely from imagining the war. We see them fall like the hollow bark which still seems to support a tree. You yourself did not know in your childhood the amazement that Jules Verne's 'Nautilus' caused. But you witnessed the crazy conduct of your contemporaries the first time they saw an airship sailing about in the air. It was pretty, to be sure, and the audacity of the early pilots roused us all to enthusiasm. Recall to mind the saying that was current on the greensward at Deauville when twelve airplanes arrived from Havre, three hundred metres above the earth, all rosy in the sunset rays. 'The flying Peace,' some one said. I shrugged my shoulders sorrowfully, because I know that in the face of an astounding invention one must always think of the homicidal use to which man may put it. Man has once again stolen the fire of heaven; a new Zeus will punish him for it. Humanity will blindly and with ecstasy invent the instrument of its own destruction. By means of an admirable scientific instrument it will commit wholesale suicide with a beatific smile. Man has already abdicated in favor of a machine. The war that is being waged is a war no longer of men but of material. Man is belittled; the machine surpasses him! A rudimentary intelligence suffices to set the true force in motion. We are still believers in the ancient saying that the true force is manly virtue, the fine, old-fashioned bravery. We have belittled the only thing in the world which might be wholly great—man. Do we profess to worship that bravery of man which all the past has justified? Why, by the scientific character of war it has become—one dares permit himself the blasphemy—almost a sign of inferiority. We reckon upon the mystical value of our bravery, and we send our men by the thousands against an army of tools! By virtue of our century-old prejudices we honor only the man who exposes himself, sacrifices himself, furnishes, however uselessly, his proofs of courage, when the glory of our arms will belong to him who shall most securely have sheltered his divisions behind gigantic steam-hammers! The applied sciences have caused a moral revolution. By riveting man, who is before all else a soul, to material elements, they have destroyed whatever might be justifiable in the great contests of humanity. A paltry little engineer behind his disguised heavy cannon, or with his mitrailleuse under thirty metres of cement, counts for more than our superb heroes with their courage, their loyalty, and their white gloves. Man, chained like a galley-slave to a machine, to a chemical substance, is forced to unlearn what it is to be a man. He appears very intelligent when he is equipped with algebra and terminology; yes, we must grant to matter all that it can give, but pause a little: have you not an impression that something superior is lacking in so abnormal a compound? They have domesticated the forces of nature; they believe themselves Titans; and there they stand glowering at one another like beasts; they cannot distinguish themselves from these material fabrics that surprise and overwhelm them. They call themselves masters of matter, and matter is all the time jeering at them. Engineering genius is probably not the result of a knowledge of matter, but of a knowledge of man."

XV

At that period people were still dulling their senses with words and stupefying their minds with discussions, if so they might divert them from that one place which for the time being was as the pivot of the world, upon which they had for six months felt that all depended, as two years before all had for ten days depended upon the battle of the Marne.

La Villaumer went to his club; his lip curled with an almost wicked smile at the thought of the ridiculously false news which that evening, as every other, he was about to hear. Then he reflected that the charming Odette, whom he had just quitted was very young, and asked himself whom she might marry.

Odette, still carried away with the life at Surville, sick at heart with those friends of hers who were doing nothing but dying of ennui and so demoralizing those around them, found comfort in frequenting such hives of activity as the Franco-Belgian headquarters and its numerous annexes, all congregated in the same building on the Champs-Elysées, where it seemed that all the misery of the world was perpetually going up and down its staircases, without respite and without end. She would go there as if in answer to a summons. So many, so many unfortunates who had lost their dearest possessions, their house, their village church! Meeting them on the muddy steps, she seemed to see, reflected in their startled eyes, a bit of countryside, a poplar-bordered road, a bit of garden, a hillside, fields of beets or of wheat. She had travelled, she knew all those sights which are the natural companions of the life of men. The odor of the hamlets came back to her, the warm breath of stables, the noisome scent of stagnant pools, the sharp smell of the tanneries in the north, the balsamic fragrance of cedar smoke from the bakeries, the appetizing aroma of warm bread, so little known in Paris. Then she would picture to herself the bewilderment of all these folk who had found refuge in a great, strange city to which they were not born, of these families who would never, never again see anything but the ruins of their villages, their countryside made unrecognizable by the absence of every elm, every bit of woods! She could have embraced them as they passed her; she longed to give them everything she possessed, things which, alas! could not replace what they had lost!

She thought to herself: "What have they done? Of what are these people guilty? Why are these men tortured? Why were they captured and their poor homes and little fields destroyed, and the sons of their blood, who alone gave a moral meaning to their lives? Why were not these people masters of themselves? Why were they the prey of bandits who consider even their own people as puppets, created to serve their vainglory as soldiers, and who care less for the existence of thousands of living creatures than a child for his tin soldiers?" Her heart throbbed, her soul revolted. She reached the top of the stairs.

To this building she had come without invitation to see an American woman who was freely and calmly consecrating her fortune, her intelligence, and her time to the unfortunates of the war. She came to ask if there was not something that she could do. The American woman looked at her with a smile.

"You have something better to do for your country."

"What?" asked Odette.

"Oh, we will speak of that later."

This answer had already been made to her. It had been said to her even at Surville, in the hospital, and with a mysterious air.

She was disturbed by it, and spoke of it, on a venture, to Simone de Prans, whom she saw that evening.

Simone and her husband both smiled as the American lady had done.

"What do you all mean?"

"Don't be disturbed," said Pierre de Prans seriously; "take care of yourself. A woman like you has services to give."

"Well, I must do something," said Odette, trembling under her veil, "and as it is, I am doing absolutely nothing with my ten fingers!"

XVI

"Whenever the cloud of anguish rises even a little from the sky of Paris," said La Villaumer, "this city, so marvellously alive, clasps to itself life, of whatever kind, with a simple, natural impulse, without immoderation, but with a secret smile, always ready. Yet this power of life, on the whole so beautiful, has something that brings a frown to the brow of the onlooker; for it has within it insensibility and forgetfulness.

"How disconcerting it is to see this new, mutilated humanity, pass in the streets almost without attracting attention. Young men in uniform, or returned to civil life minus a leg, on crutches, with an artificial limb, leaning on a cane like an old man, with an empty coat sleeve, an eye gone, nothing left of the nose but two breathing-holes, the jaw moulded over like a lump of potter's clay—or led along, sightless! They hardly arouse compassion, seldom even curiosity. There are so many of them! You can see the like in any place. War crosses, military medals, the Legion of Honor on the breast of a mere youth, which at one time would have attracted admiring glances and brought tears to women's eyes, are now hardly noticed. There are so many who have received or have deserved them! Most of those who possess them now wear only the ribbon on their jackets like civilians. The long duration and the barbarism of the war have spoiled everything. Men whose exploits cast into the shade the most famous examples of history with which the memory of school children is crammed, refuse to be called heroes. Heroes! There are so many of them! It was not to distinguish themselves, nor to cover their families with honor, nor even to set a noble example, that so many men have wrought prodigies; they did them modestly, because they had to be done in order to put an end to an abomination. With many the idea even of the country is attenuated in favor of something which makes much less appeal to the heart, the motive of which is only the cold persuasion that militarism must be destroyed; one must fight for very hatred of fighting. And here is something new, this vast uprising for war is producing no enthusiasm for war; it is animated only by hatred of war. All these brave men, riddled like sieves, rescued from an ordeal without precedent, are cherishing no ambition to march in a procession of victors, under waving flags, amid the acclamations of women, children, and old men; they had the rudimentary purpose of the peasant who struggles with a mad dog, and who having downed him digs a hole, buries the carrion, washes his hands at the pump, and goes in to dinner.

"Germany has robbed man of his divine childhood. In less than two years all these men have grown old; that charming faculty of innocent enthusiasm which had often deceived him, but which had given him joys never to be replaced, has been withered. The most deplorable ruins which the monster has spread abroad over our land are perhaps not so much the splendid monuments of Belgium and France, as the youth of humanity, that had seemed eternal, that was bearing it on to a great outburst of a common hope—faith in Fraternity, faith in Liberty, faith in Justice, potent religion of Progress. Cold reason, like the German gas, has poisoned all this fresh and ebullient vigor. The whole world has become allied, only to strangle a jackal. No man who has come back from the too severe ordeal will ever again feel the desire to enjoy the days that yet remain to him. Scepticism, which used to seem only a way of looking at things, cherished by very distinguished gentlemen, has now taken possession of the mass. But it has become commonplace, and so has ceased all relations with its brother, dilettantism. You will see what sort of thing realistic scepticism will become."

"People will always dream," said Odette.

XVII

Odette returned to Surville in the beginning of August. It was a time of great heat. The second anniversary of mobilization had been observed. War had become an accepted condition. Many already found it difficult to remember a state of peace. At the hospital there were even discussions as to how things had been there before the war. There were those who, though they had then been living in Surville, could not recall them to mind. "You remember the inaugural address of the head doctor, the 16th of August, before the first train of wounded came?" Some of the women insisted that he had given an antimilitarist lecture; others that he had spoken only against alcohol; others that he had given an eloquently patriotic address; some said that it was not he who had spoken, but the surgeon, a very handsome man; and still others that the address was given on another date. One lady could only remember the first time she had posed to the photographer in white blouse and cap. The first arrival of wounded, who had come from Charleroi on August 25, were confused with those who had come in September. Two years! What a long time when one has seen only wretchedness upon wretchedness! Nothing pleasant for twenty-four months! The communiqué of the battle of the Marne? Yes, that counted for something; but at the time no one understood its full importance; there had been no public rejoicing. Our later long and magnificent victories that merely held back the enemy presented to the mind nothing like what is generally thought of as military success; it was only after a while that their importance was recognized, when new misfortunes had touched us elsewhere. Two years of dull, black weariness, of constant apprehension, of bereavement upon bereavement.

This year a good many foreigners had invaded the beach. The tennis-courts were occupied by young men from beyond the sea, bringing up the memory of former days; the crowd was enlivened by a profusion of multicolored Japanese lanterns; the sea dashed against the glossy flesh of women who seemed as natural as Aphrodite; automobiles were almost as much in the way as in happier days; and between the rows of tents among the manifold tints of colored stuffs, beside the waves where so many beautiful limbs were disporting themselves, was a race of beings that might have been deemed peculiar, coming, going, or remaining motionless; they were the men who had escaped from the fire. They wore nondescript garments, they lacked one limb or even two, they hobbled, their armpits strained by crutches, or lay at length on the warm sand, smoking, timid of appearance, exchanging remarks hardly comprehensible, keeping silent, too, thinking—of what?

This last spectacle alone seemed in Odette's eyes to merit consideration. She had lived the greater part of the time among the wounded, she had also lived in Paris with the social world. "All is over," she would say to herself; "nothing will heal all this; it is mere mummery to ape the life of other days; all that is blotted out; La Villaumer was right when he said: 'Men have suffered too much.'"

It was in this very place—there, opposite, at the hotel—that she had become acquainted with Jean. They were pleased with one another at the first glance, carried out of themselves, even. She remembered how mad with love she had been in those garden walks, between those tennis-screens, on that beach, and along that terrace which now she was treading overwhelmed with despair, a despair that she could not name, greater than herself, greater than the broad horizon of the sea, greater than all things.

She had forgotten nothing. She recalled all the preludes of marriage, then those first vacations, their dual solitude in the midst of the throng; kisses exchanged on these dunes, along these roadsides, in some charming farm orchard, or on certain evenings before the fairylike spectacle of the phosphorescent sea; she remembered that room in the Hôtel de Normandie where he had left her a few days before the 2d of August! And she recalled to mind the beautiful sky of that day, and the tocsin pealing from all the church-towers of the countryside, and the rolling of the drum, and the young men raising their hats. How many of them were alive to-day?

XVIII

She had hardly finished luncheon when she heard the jingling of the little bell at the wooden gate of her garden. Mme. de Calouas came in.

Mme. de Calouas found Odette surrounded by photographs of Jean. They were on the walls, the chimneypiece, the tables, the desk, the piano. Odette had taken the opportunity of her journey to carry to the photographer every film that she possessed; she had had them enlarged, and she was surrounded by Jean as if Jean had become a whole people; she saw him in every room of her cottage and in all places; she felt somewhat tranquil only when she could see him. If she seldom or never spoke of him elsewhere, as soon as she returned home she belonged only to him. She talked to him, consulted him, and heard the replies which, in accordance with his character, he would have made her to-day, if he had lived, if he had known what was taking place.

Mme. de Calouas looked about her at all these likenesses.

Mme. de Calouas was not among the number of hospital nurses who had been rewarded by the epidemic medal, although she had not absented herself for forty-eight hours since the outbreak of the war, and though her position in the hospital was a most important one; but neglect of this sort was either indifferent to her or it flattered her pride. She belonged to a family of which every member professed absolute indifference to rewards, especially to any that might come from the public powers, and this although it was the tradition of the family to addict themselves constantly to the highest duties. The magistrates among them had retired some thirty-five years previously; the officers remained fixed in the rank of captain. In the Morbihan the expression "the Captains de Calouas" had become a common locution. At the outbreak of the war "the Captains de Calouas" had shown themselves to be men of the old-fashioned kind who considered that the finest part one can play in the face of the enemy is to be killed by him. Their unanimous and hardy bravery had, indeed, crowned nearly every one of them with the halo of sacrifice. Those with whom death would have absolutely nothing to do had this time risen in rank, and had received the cross after a succession of actions and for exceptional valor even amidst so many astonishing deeds. Of seven of them, only one was left, recently named lieutenant-colonel, with an artificial arm and a damaged lung.

Mme. de Calouas excused herself for coming so early, but said that she had felt an irresistible desire to talk freely with a friend in whom she had discerned "a choice soul."

"In the sort of convent in which we lived so long side by side," she said, "I consider myself somewhat as a mother to you, if you will permit me to say so, seeing that I had the responsibility of opening its door to you. Will you let me talk to you as a mother?"

"I have great need of it," said Odette;

"I have no mother, and I am a widow——"

She pointed around to the photographs of the dead. It was as if she were in a cemetery, herself living in one of its vaults. Her eyes filled with sudden tears.

"I love him as on the day he died; as on that other day, that dreadful day when he left me—I cannot cry all this upon the housetops. You, madame, have suffered like me, more even than me, the pain of this horrible war; we can no longer speak of our dead! We have no right to show our grief! There are too many griefs, too many dead. I have never been able to talk about him; I have found only one person who would consent to recall him with kindliness, and she is a Parisian, a self-centred woman who has managed not to permit herself to be touched by the war, a young woman, like me, but already a woman of former days. Who is there, henceforth, who can dwell on her personal sorrow?"

"It remains to be seen, my poor dear," said Mme. de Calouas, "whether what you say is an evil. I mean an evil for the time in which we live, during this war which has no end, and during the many years after this war; in a word, during all our lives—even yours. You know, my child, that I am a woman bound to all the old customs. In our family widowhood is a serious thing, and usually a thing for life. But this war has modified even our most firmly established customs. Great necessities, painful new duties, lie before us. We have been obliged to put down, with a strong hand, many of our feelings; we are bound to subordinate our personality and its most sacred traditions to the common weal. To mourn a beloved husband—what is more touching and more worthy in a young woman? But, my little friend, let me confide to you a cruel truth, of which you are already beginning to be aware. You were just saying to me that we can no longer talk about our dead husbands, however gloriously they may have been killed; it is equally the case of both of us. Well, forgive me for what I am going to say—it is one of the most cruel features of this time that has no name—to mourn our husbands is a sort of self-indulgence, it is a personal civility, it is almost a delight! I shall startle you, but I must say it to you, I who am twenty years older than you, because I recognize in you a noble heart, broadened rather than belittled by this storm. My poor child, you have no right to remain surrounded by these likenesses of the dead. If we belonged to ourselves, we would give ourselves up to what our hearts would prefer—weak, human creatures that we are! We would choose to remember and to mourn. But we are no longer our own! Let us imitate our husbands! They would certainly have preferred to live. To assert the contrary is mere boasting. But without hesitating they accepted death. They understood, every one of them, that they were not their own. Nor are we our own. I give you my word of honor—and you can never imagine the object of reverence or the cause of joy that for twenty years my husband was to me—if I were still young enough to have children I would marry again to-morrow! I am too old, and this is why you see me take so much pains in other directions. What the country asks of you is not work like what I am doing——"

"I prefer that work," said Odette.

"You are not your own."

"What the world asks of me is worse than death."

"Our husbands endured the sufferings of hell, and died only afterward——"

Odette burst into sobs.

"My child, my dear little friend," said Mme. de Calouas, "I beg you not to give way to despondency of any sort. Believe what I say, and do not think me hard, as I may appear to be. I am not hard. I have simply covered myself with a shell, because we are engaged in a merciless conflict. Let us not permit ourselves to be weakened whether by catastrophe or painful loss or bitter trial. To give way to grief is to grow less strong. For the time, we can be sure only of suffering. Each grief should give us the opportunity not to weep, but to do more than before. There is only one aim. How that simplifies things! We look toward it, and toward it alone. We direct our eyes neither to the right nor the left. Anything may happen: we are ready, we will not fail. We may be asked for more than is in reason, but we have offered our services. No hesitation, no boasting; above all, no consideration of ourselves; let us leave all that to women of petty minds, since it is the only motive that can move them. We who know better must set them an example."

XIX

Odette went to her room to bathe her eyes, but it was all in vain; she began again to weep; she had an invincible desire for tears; she wept until the hour for going to the hospital.

She had photographs of Jean in her bed-room as in her drawing-room. And now it seemed to her that to give way to her grief was, indeed, "a delight"! She was in the habit of giving herself up to sorrow; who would have believed that it was a way of giving herself up to pleasure? Yet in comparison with the excessive sadness of the present time, to wrap herself up, weeping, in the memory of happy days, was to set herself apart, to abstract herself in herself, to intoxicate herself with the fragrance of the incense on her own private altar, to divest herself of strength for the great common act which it had given her so much pain to accept, but the imperious command of which she could not now deny.

"It is still a pleasure," she repeated to herself. What chaos must have been wrought that her most acute sufferings, recalled to her by imagination, should take on the form of felicity!

Mme. de Calouas had affirmed that, for her part, had she fewer years, she would not hesitate to marry again!—Ah, no, that was too much! Anything, anything, but that! "'They endured the pains of hell, and did not die until afterward?' Yes, their martyrdom, their death, I would gladly accept for myself; but I refuse to be false to my adored memories——"

Another burst of grief overwhelmed her in which her whole tortured personality resisted and asserted itself. She seized Jean's photographs and kissed them frantically. She would fain detest all the rest of the world and give herself wholly to this one sacred memory. For the moment she spurned the opinion of Mme. de Calouas: "If it is a self-indulgence, let it be so! I yield myself to this self-indulgence! I love Jean, I have never loved any one but Jean!"

In the old days she used to bicycle with Jean, and the two, side by side, often exchanging glances, sometimes throwing kisses, would roll breathlessly along the Norman roads, between the high, thick hedges where they were as if enclosed, with only one way out, where they had nothing to do but roll along. An auto would appear; Jean would go first, Odette following in his track, breathing his perfume until the cloud of dust and the smell of oil or of gasolene choked her. Sometimes, going slowly, they would take one another by the hand. She was flexible, slight, and lightly clothed; she would play acrobatic tricks on her machine, and her joyful agility would fill Jean with delight. Suddenly he would jump down, she would follow his example, and they would exchange a kiss, folded lingeringly in one another's arms. There was a little wayside inn where, under the arbor, they would call for cider with bread and white cheese. They had never met any one there; the wind would ruffle the foliage around them, the dog would gaze at them with a twinkle in his eye, the hostess would serve them with a smile. More often than elsewhere they used to go to the orchard, the incomparable orchard of the farm at the foot of the ruins of Saint-Gingolph, where they were welcomed as friends, both so young, so beautiful, so radiant with happiness. There in the autumn they would walk in the little paths bordered with sorrel and thyme; where dahlias were growing beside onions, where there were currant-bushes loaded with rubies, in a corner a fig-tree whose fruit never ripened, under which they must bend to go to the pear-trees. There Odette would bite into a pear as she passed it, and this would make Jean scold; he would gather the pear, nibble at the place which her teeth had damaged, and carry it to the good-natured farmer's wife, saying: "Just see what mischief we have done!"

"Oh!" the farmer's wife would simply reply, "Madame seems to enjoy it so!"

Delicious and terrible memories! Odette could not endure again to visit those places, so near, yet which would now have given her so much pain!

Nor could she again go in the evening, at nightfall, to the edge of the sea, where in each vague shadow she would have thought she saw the shadow of Jean. They used to love to wander there in the warm obscurity of August. The long-drawn moan of the sea was to them a cradle-song composed by a musician of genius. No doubt Odette used to see in those days fewer large waves than to-day; but in those days all things blended with her love and seemed marvellous to her. Sometimes Jean, who had his boyish ways, would amuse himself by leaving her, suddenly disappearing from her eyes in the darkness. She would call him in an anxious voice, "Jean!" And she would always recognize his shadow as he drew near by his extending his arms in the form of a cross, and throwing them around her, to press her to him the moment he met her. In those days they would hear afar off the music of the violins, and would see above the dune the dark villas and the illuminated hotels. Now she knew that in those hotels were lying a thousand men swathed in bandages, poisoned by pus and gangrene, and the sea was holding up a long chaplet of buoys from which were hanging nets to ward off submarines. How could she go back there?

The summer wore away in a manner almost satisfactory, and with great hopes in the military operations. A wave of optimism passed over the country. Rumanian colors were floated from the town-hall; the battle of the Somme had freed Verdun and was itself beginning to slacken. In the beginning of October the wounded in the hospital were almost few. Odette, with too little to do, reduced to solitude, began to droop. She found the conversation of Mme. de Calouas very fine, but it did not touch her. Why not?

She would have her lay aside her mourning—the two years being now a long month over past. Other widows had almost joyfully put off their crape in the late summer heat. Odette considered it a profanation. "Time was passing." No doubt it was. It was long—without measure long. But to her Jean had died yesterday, nothing in her feelings had been changed by what she had seen. She thought of all those bodily wounds which she had dressed with her own hands, and which had healed. The great wound within herself remained open. At times she would forget the war, the sorrows of which at other times would crush her, and think only of the beloved being to whom she was bound for eternity.

One afternoon she dragged herself, on foot and alone, along the road to Saint-Gingolph, between the brook, the fields, and the hillock that separates two valleys. The weather was fine, underfoot were leaves of plane-trees, some decaying, others rolling along the ground, driven by the autumn wind. She had not the courage to go to the farm; the orchard came down to the roadside. She sat down upon the grass of the ditch and reflected that this was the third autumn that she had been there, since the war! She recalled to mind the first one, when people were beginning to find the hostilities very long; when every evening, passing by the post-office, one hoped to read the news of some event which would bring about its sudden end. She thought of the little soldiers whom she used to follow to the cemetery, and of whom every one insisted upon thinking: "He is the last one!"

Before her, on the crest of the hillock, like a fantastic screen whose edge has been clumsily cut by a child, a long avenue of very ancient elms broke in upon the view. They bore scattered clusters of foliage, still golden; a dense cloud of crows rose up and lighted with sinister croakings upon their ragged tops. These birds with their lugubrious cries seemed about to give battle for the possession of a notable charnel-house. And suddenly they plunged into the branches and disappeared, and nothing remained of them but the wound inflicted by the rasping voices upon the motionless air. Then the black cloud uprose again, as if the avenue of old elms, mown down at the roots by shells, had upheaved itself before its final downfall. It seemed as if the heart of the hillock were painfully throbbing. The raucous croaking of these thousands of birds grated upon her nerves and aroused all her powers of mournful revery.

Odette resumed her walk back to the town. Evening was falling. Lush meadows along the brookside, a gray steeple almost hidden in foliage of rose ochre, the racecourse—relic of a brilliant worldliness—two or three pretty villas, whose reddening hopvines were flaunting themselves derisively before closed windows, reminded her too painfully of a past era—a lost paradise. Among the persons whom she met, already half hidden in the shadow, some were laughing. Then people could laugh? Why, yes! Life, diverse as it is, has ever its source in the waters of a Fountain of Youth.

The darkness and the croakings of the crows haunted her. When she reached the cottage she threw herself upon a divan, and remained there, overcome, until Amelia came to call her to her solitary dinner.

The evening mail brought her tidings of the death of the last de Blauve boy, who had voluntarily gone to the firing-line in advance of those of his age, and had been killed outright in the very hour when he first set foot in the trench. Almost mechanically, and as a daily duty, she read two newspapers, line by line. She seemed to feel a great inward emptiness; she felt herself going to pieces. She must make a change, at whatever cost. There was just now no necessity for her presence in the hospital. She resolved to return to Paris, without other reason than the impossibility of remaining in Surville. How many feverish changes she had made, since the beginning of this war, with no more serious motive than this!

XX

Arrived in Paris, she went at once to see Mme. de Blauve. This woman, who had lost a much-loved husband and two sons hardly old enough to be soldiers, was not weeping, was not feeling dull, had no hard words to say about the war. She gave full evidence of tenderness toward her family, but, above all, she knew how to live, and that, in a time of war, means total forgetfulness of self and of all whom one loves. She was not sending her daughters into the hospitals, where they were not needed; she had herself given up her work as nurse, in order to give special attention to preparing them for marriage.

"Marriage is the civic duty of women," she said; "at sixteen and a half one can very well have a child. Marriage is a difficult matter in a time like this, but I am willing to pay the price!" She was thinking only of this, the oldest girl having passed her fifteenth year.

To Odette, Mme. de Blauve was another Mme. de Calouas in Paris. She felt at ease with neither of them, and yet both of them attracted her inexplicably. She felt herself at a distance from them while yet being influenced by them, to a degree that surprised some indefinable part of herself. Both of them shocked her, wounded her, even; she was appalled before their stoicism. She looked at them darkly, almost malevolently, when they seemed to gaze with reprobation upon the mourning garments which she persisted in wearing. These women, brought up to worship the dead, uprose like spectres from the depths of the past which was their element, and uttered a word unfamiliar to their lips: "Forward!" The impression was most disturbing.