YOU NO LONGER
COUNT

(TU N'ES PLUS RIEN!)

BY

RENÉ BOYLESVE

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH

BY

LOUISE SEYMOUR HOUGHTON

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1918

CONTENTS

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

YOU NO LONGER COUNT

[I]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Precisely so."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There is an ultimatum to Serbia."

"What of that?"

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

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

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

Odette had at last asked her husband:

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

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

"But—but—if it should be?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Covering troops. Ah—ah!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What about you, Amelia?"

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

"Go, Amelia."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[II]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There is no beautiful death."

"Yes, there is!"

"It is easy for you to talk."

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

"One's heart, too?"

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

"Love is always love."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[III]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do they know how he was killed?"

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

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

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

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

[IV]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The son of the concierge, madame!"

"Well, what?"

"He too, madame!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[V]

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But they tell me that everything is changed."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Odette set out for Surville.

[VI]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autos were rumbling by, some of them covered, others displaying to the light of day a heap of men, motionless, bandaged, covered with clay, an agglutinated mass of flesh in which all individuality if not all life seemed to be held in suspense, a cart-load of humanity: not a single man but a mass of bloody pulp in which the suffering that it covered must be a common suffering. Then came a truck, two trucks, three. They were great drays across which were placed stretchers, and on these stretchers were extended what they call the bedded wounded, those whose legs are broken, or already amputated, or dreadfully crushed, those fever-stricken from projectiles received in the body, those with cloven skulls, hastily bound together. They were marine gunners, foot-soldiers, blacks; tall, handsome, Moroccans with brown skins. Distinguished from all the others by excess of ill fortune, they were stretched out, straight and rigid like corpses placed in order, at equal distances, upon the marble slabs of a morgue. The trucks going at a walk and carrying the most seriously wounded, at each check, each halt, each starting again, one could hear hollow moans; sometimes the outcry of a Moroccan, sharp like the voice of a child or a woman, would make you catch your breath, and the country folk, crowded along the sidewalks, would whimper as if they themselves were being tortured.

Amelia, who in the beginning had been chattering without ceasing, was now suffocated with sobs, and her elbows upon the window-ledge was weeping silently over this procession. Odette, hidden at another window, wept like her servant, incapable either of tearing herself away from the sight or of controlling her emotion.

At length, having closed the windows, the two women found themselves face to face with wet eyes. Amelia said:

"It is better to be dead than alive."

Never had they experienced such emotions in Paris, where they thought themselves nearer the war because of the number of kilometres between them and the front, or because they heard men deemed well informed telling contradictory news from morning to night. Here in this remote and quiet corner they had now touched the very relics of the hecatomb. The eyes alone tell the truth; words are a small matter.

Amelia could not remain still; she ran to the hospital after the procession. Never in her life had she seen anything so exciting.

On her return she said that she could hardly recognize the entrance of the Grand Hotel, whither she had gone a few months before to carry notes from Monsieur or Madame to M. X or M. Y who were dead now, like Monsieur.

She brought back much information. The wounded who came that morning were from the Department of the North, where a frightful battle had been raging for weeks. "Some of them talk, madame; some of them say nothing; their eyes break your heart, like poor, sick dogs that glance at you as if ashamed and pretend to be asleep." "I could see from where I was," she went on after a little, "the surgeon as he appeared to be, all in white, with a cap like a cook and bare arms; he received them at the door and sorted them out, sending them up-stairs, down-stairs, to the right, the left, pestered by the nurses, who begged for them."

But Odette had not seen them entering the hospital, and this did not interest her. She was pursuing her own thoughts.

"There was one in the procession," she said, "one that was lying down, who was so pale, poor boy! He will not go far."

She had vowed to herself that she would not go out; she would remain with her grief the whole day, the whole week. But immediately after luncheon she put on her hat and went to wander around the hospital.

A hedge separated the street from the great court in which there was still a circular clump of trees surrounded with withered summer flowers; opposite, above another hedge, the vines in a charming flower-garden were reddening on the pergolas. Everything bore the impress of a time of display and enjoyment, and she felt that decorations like these were henceforth antiquated, absurd.

Odette knew already, through Amelia, the disposition of each part of the hospital, whose interior hum she could hear from without. She knew that one flight up, at the first turn, were the typhoids, nursed by a Sister who for twelve years past, wherever she might be sent, had done nothing else than care for typhoids, and go to the nearest church to put up a little prayer. She knew the situation of the staircase leading to the basements, where the food was brought in and the dead carried out. She knew that at a corner of the building looking upon the sea was the operating-theatre, visible from without. And in fact, passing by it, she perceived a group of white-robed men and women, their sleeves turned back, leaning over something or some one. Then she fled toward the sea like a coward and was ashamed. In reality, this assemblage of suffering creatures at once repelled and attracted her, producing a complex sentiment, unfamiliar and incongruous.

From afar she looked at the building and its surroundings. At the sight of this countryside, these villas, these hotels, the memory of the past summer overpowered her, and at the same time she experienced a cruel dispelling of her memories of the past summer. Meanwhile she stood there as if hypnotized by the great house of suffering. On the ground floor, through the glazed verandas she discerned a constant coming and going of white caps. And she thought of the labors which those hundred and fifty new arrivals of the morning must necessitate. She was seized with timidity at the thought of approaching this august place. Before it she seemed to herself a profane person, idle, gloved, parasol in hand, her one interest her personal grief.

An unknown power held her motionless, kept her from going toward the sea, where she had hoped to meet her cruel and too-much loved memories, and yet forbidding her to return to that place of common suffering which she had not made her own. While she stood there, hesitating on the levelled dune, she was shot through with an unaccustomed shiver, which frightened her.

As a pretext for again drawing near the place she told herself that she desired to see once more the poor boy whom she had seen lying so pale on his stretcher. Had they revived him? Sincerely, she would have loved to know. But how set about it? No sooner had she returned to the road that surrounded the glazed verandas than she lost courage to present herself as a curious stranger; men in bed, others sitting up, would stare at the newcomer, young and perhaps pretty under her crape veil.

She returned to her house much more agitated than if she had met any one, and let Amelia talk to her of all that she had learned concerning not only that hospital, but all the hospitals of the region. She remembered of all she heard only the name of a lady whom she had met in August at the Hôtel de Normandie, and who, it appeared, was nursing the wounded in the neighboring hospital, Madame de Calouas.

She shut herself up again, distrustful of the strange attraction that the city of suffering exercised over her. She talked to Jean's photograph, saying to it: "I will be only yours, think of nothing but of you." She read over again the books that they had read together; or rather, she pleased herself by telling herself that she had read these books with Jean. Or she walked in her little garden, making forty turns over the tour of the hedge-bordered alley, strewn with golden flakes which the poplars shed like rain. Sometimes she would pause before the latticed gate upon the road, amusing herself with counting the minutes that one might stand there without seeing a single passer-by. One day she thought she recognized Mme. de Calouas hastening past on a bicycle, light and fleet as a dragon-fly. And she felt a desire to see her again, not on her own account, for she had left upon her only a vague impression, but to talk to her or hear her talk of Jean.

Vainly she watched for her. She even permitted herself to walk out, in the hope of meeting Mme. de Calouas.

"But, madame," said Amelia, "it is very easy. Every one knows when these ladies come back and forth to the hospital. Madame has only to walk up and down before the great court."

It was not till the following Sunday, at eleven o'clock mass, that Odette met Mme. de Calouas and spoke to her.

"What!" exclaimed Mme. de Calouas, "you here! What hospital do you belong to?"

Odette thought that the nurse had made a mistake, intending to say: "Where are you staying?"

"I am at the Elizabeth pavilion."

"Is that the new auxiliary post opened for contagious diseases?"

"It is just a little villa," said Odette simply. "It is large enough for me alone."

"And what are you doing there, good God?"

"I came here," said Odette, "that I might mourn for my husband in peace."

Mme. de Calouas assumed a suitable expression, but made no reply. Odette continued:

"He was killed in the end of September, at the head of his company, going out from the village——"

"Yes, I heard," said Mme. de Calouas. "I ought to have sent you a card; but in times like these——"

"You yourself are in mourning," observed Odette.

"Oh—I! I have lost my husband, my two brothers, my uncle the colonel, several cousins—" She waved her hand with a gesture which signified: "They are past counting!" Before leaving Odette she added:

"Come to see me at the hospital, from eight o'clock to noon, and from two to four. From four to six I have another service at the Red Cross, close by. I will show you things. Come."

For a long time Odette hesitated. Again she shut herself up with her adored memories. She was irritated that Mme. de Calouas had not said a word about that exquisite man who was her Jean, and whom she had met at the hotel. When she went out it was precisely at an hour when she knew Mme. de Calouas to be at her hospitals. When the sea-wind was too strong she would walk in the dull streets of the deserted summer city, a pleasure resort in which the word "pleasure" had become strange and unfitting. The streets crossed at right angles; nearly all of them were bordered by hedges beyond which one could see a garden, the wire cage of a tennis-court, a Norman villa, and no one. Often, the whole length of her walk she met only one human being, a big man, almost impotent, whose duty it was to sweep up the dead leaves—an absurd duty since the wind scattered them as fast as he swept, and the trees shed down behind him another layer of little golden, rolling, dead things.

Sometimes, walking daringly, Odette crossed the long terrace, and braving the wind went as far as to the sea.

At certain hours the beach was covered with men under treatment. You recognized them by the slings that supported their arms, by their crutches, their bandaged heads, not often by their uniforms, of which they preserved only odd parts. They wore old jackets, knitted waistcoats, trousers brought forth from old Norman wardrobes. Some of the men limped, others wearily dragged their feet along the sand; those who had legs wrestled with one another, ran races, played like children. They delighted in the edge of the sea, gathering shells, and regaling themselves with the slimy flesh of cockles. Some of them cast a too expressive glance upon the young woman, with an awkward word which at another time would have made her smile. It was an amazing group of tatterdemalions; within the memory of man no eye had ever looked upon such a sight. It excited compassion; and yet almost every man in particular had gained, without trying, the manly merit of always seeming to be in good humor.

Whenever she saw them Odette felt moved, and at the same time somewhat jealous. He had not been washed, bandaged, ministered to, nor even clothed in rags; he had not been able to drag his mangled limbs along the seashore; he had been killed outright. She would say to herself: "Perhaps one of these soldiers knew him, perhaps he saw him fall; he could tell me the details, could describe his last days, his last hour, his last minute." And she grew faint at the possibility of asking them, of learning.

The low tide, the stormy sky, the wind, the grayish hillsides, the transports on the horizon, always this immense deserted beach, these wretched relics of the war, and she, disconsolate widow, imploring the wind to snatch her away and destroy her in its eddies! The constant reminders of the past, the sight of these same places, natural background of all the pleasant things of life! The thought of that water which had bathed the limbs of Jean, and of the August sun, and the restless multitude, gay and elegant, whom the many-colored sweaters set off like a profusion of tulips; the movement of automobiles, the music of the orchestra! Her heart ached at these contrasts even more than it had done in Paris. The solitude, the approaching winter, and the near contact with suffering aroused in her an unwelcome agitation. The restless air, dark with cawing crows, brought a bitter taste to her lips, and yet aroused in her an indescribable sense of splendor.

[VII]

Nothing less than the thought of meeting Mme. de Calouas at church on the following Sunday before she had paid her promised visit could have induced Odette to cross the threshold of the hospital.

She went on Saturday, between two and four o'clock. An orderly wearing a corporal's bands detained her as if her hand-bag might conceal incendiary bombs, but was softened on hearing the name of Mme. de Calouas, and led her to room 74. Odette was kept a long time standing at the door of room 74; at last a doctor came out, carrying a case of instruments. He was followed by Mme. de Calouas, who said:

"It is too bad, dear madame! I beg you to excuse me; one of my patients detained me. But now I am at your service; just let me change my blouse before taking you to see the wards."

Her change of costume was soon made, and she took Odette to a neighboring room where a very young nurse and two military orderlies were with great difficulty holding down a patient in an attack of tetanus. The sick man's head with its contracted jaws and inflexible neck reminded her of certain "attractions" of the waxworks; the upheaved body, forming an arc from head to heels, was as rigid and unyielding as the arch of a bridge. Odette turned pale, and Mme. de Calouas said:

"You lack training. See this child who is nursing him! She isn't twenty years old—a mere girl."

They passed into another room, from which exhaled a pestilential odor.

"Gangrene from the gas," said Mme. de Calouas. "It is not a perfume for the pocket-handkerchief, far from it! But one gets accustomed to anything. With assiduous care and absolute asepsis we have saved a certain number of wounded who suffer from this complication. We are so fortunate here as to have a surgeon who is not in haste to use the knife."

In the long corridor nurses, for the most part young, were gliding or running. A priest, wearing his alb, was hastening to one of the rooms. Carried along by his speed, Mme. de Calouas entered after him, and Odette followed her.

It was a comfortable hotel bedroom, hung with brightly colored paper; there were two women in white, and on a clean white bed lay a tall young man, uncovered, almost as white as the bed, from whose lips poured a stream of blood. He had received a fragment of shell in the sinus, had been operated upon that morning, and hemorrhage had set in—a stream white and red, unlike anything she had ever seen; it overwhelmed her with horror.

"You should apply a tampon," said Mme. de Calouas.

"The doctor is coming," replied one of the nurses.

They were both leaning over the white body; one was injecting serum into the stomach, the other was applying a syringe with ipecac to the thigh. The priest was standing at the cadaverous feet, anointing them with the sacred oil. The doctor arrived and applied the proper tampons.

To Mme. de Calouas this was one of the normal cases which one meets on visiting a military hospital. Odette was making every effort to stand upright. She begged to go out in the air. Mme. de Calouas smiled.

"It is war! And we are only in one of the rear hospitals. There is no rain of shells here. Shall we visit the wards down-stairs, if you please?"

The vast wards were almost vacant at this hour, for many of the patients were out-of-doors.

"They recover rapidly, if you only knew! One can see the new flesh grow."

"And they return to the firing-line?" asked Odette.

"They must, indeed!"

A group of four convalescents was playing a game of cards on a bed. Others, stretched at length, were reading; several were sleeping, some were receiving friends. A photographer in a corner was taking pictures.

Beds and beds, and torn flesh, and perforated limbs, and members sawn off, and trepanned skulls! And the tetanus, the gangrene, the typhus, and that red torrent by which the soul of a man was taking flight, amid all that whiteness!

Odette felt as if she should die, and left the hospital. During all her visit one question had been upon her lips: "Shall I find here any one who knew my husband?" What was it that kept her from uttering it? She could not have told how it was, but she had not so much as pronounced her husband's name. A weight had seemed to be crushing her during the whole time. She had felt overwhelmed by the new horror. The worst was that when at last she reached home she felt ashamed to weep for her own sorrow.

The fact also that all that human flesh had been ravaged for the same cause; that of those unhappy ones who were groaning, not one thought of blaming the cause; and that other fact that one part of humanity, upright and able, was bending with help over the other, gasping part, forced her to gather up her disordered thoughts and in the midst of her confusion to exclaim:

"Something is changed!"

That evening, at six o'clock, instead of wandering about the streets in heavy sadness, she went, as Mme. de Calouas had begged her to do, to evening prayer at the Chapel of the Orphanage, in which the Red Cross was now installed. It was a convent chapel, reserved for nuns, the public being admitted only behind a sort of screen of carved wood, through which could be seen the orderly rows of Sisters and orphans, the altar and the lights. She found herself in the midst of valid soldiers; that is to say, such as by one means or another could move from place to place. There were bandaged heads, arms in slings, stiff or deformed legs, crutches. Odette was moved by the singing more than she could have believed. Suddenly sobs choked her, and she wept. The men turned toward this young woman in mourning whom they could hardly have helped noticing, and who kept on wiping her eyes. She was weeping from a natural need of weeping. She was weeping for Jean, but also she wept with great pity for all those lacerated bodies; and for the first time she realized that these men, or these fragments of men, had come from places where death and pain were of all things the most usual.

Mme. de Calouas heard and saw her, and knew that Odette had come here to weep for her husband. As they went out she said to her:

"You loved him much, then?"

And by these words Odette realized that she had been weeping for an immeasurable loss, which had left her in a sense benumbed.

[VIII]

This did not last long, and as soon as she reached home she made honorable amends to Jean. She drove from her every thought except of him, denouncing the universal conspiracy against her beloved memories. What could she do to mitigate the misfortunes of others, however great and innumerable they might be? Those women who seemed to deny their own griefs filled her with a sort of dismay.

She passed hours of sleeplessness revolving these ideas, determining at whatever cost to master herself, and forget the whole distracted world. She fell asleep vowing henceforth to belong wholly to the memory of Jean.

Yet the next morning, Sunday, coming out of church, she found no rest till she had met Mme. de Calouas and asked her:

"Could I be of use to you at the hospital?"

"I was expecting you," Mme. de Calouas replied. "I would do nothing to bring you before the time; but I am glad that you wish to come. I will begin by taking you under my wing; for your initiation you shall be my helper. Does that suit you?"

"Of course. I do not know how to do anything."

"When will you come?"

"When you please."

"Well, I will leave you your Sunday. Or rather, come with me now, that I may at once get you received by the head doctor, and find a provisional cap and blouse for you. The rest will be for to-morrow morning."

Odette saw the head doctor; she tried on the nurse's costume which her friend would lend to her until she could procure one; and at eight o'clock the next morning, after having signed an engagement, she entered the hospital, almost as if she was entering a convent.

At that hour the hired women were sponging the floors with wet cloths, and through the wards resounded the click of buckets set down, the metal handle falling against their sides. The floors exhaled moisture. The sea air, entering by the open windows, swept out the odor of the sick-room. Convalescent men were going to the lavatories; others were helping comrades with helpless arms to wash themselves upon their cots.

Odette asked for Mme. de Calouas, and found her before the twenty beds allotted to her. A dozen of them were occupied by seriously wounded men, who gazed upon the newcomer with embarrassing steadfastness. Mme. de Calouas led Odette to the room where dressings were done, passing through the whole ward, where sixty men were exchanging the morning greetings of the soldier, now rough, now amusing. She was, above all, surprised that the nurses paid them no attention.

While giving instructions to her pupil Mme. de Calouas was busy disinfecting mugs, unrolling pieces of cotton and tearing them into bits, counting piles of compresses, tubes, drains. The room exhaled an odor of antiseptics, sweet and insipid.

They returned to the ward, and Mme. de Calouas made known to her each patient by name, with certain indications as to his case; she begged Odette to wash this or that one, to make the bed of an unfortunate who, with only one arm, could not do it alone.

"Be careful what you say to them," she whispered in her ear. "Remember that their estimate of you will depend upon your first words."

Odette observed that the patients gazed at her without once turning away their eyes. She won their approval by the first words she uttered, and by the gentleness with which she washed the faces of two or three helpless men, and she saw their expressions change. Those eyes so full of agony, which make unpractised fingers tremble, were softened. Her hands were dexterous, her face attractive. There was one poor fellow whom she had to wash from head to foot, like a new-born baby, a difficult task for a beginner. When all was finished and he was wrapped in clean linen she was about to pass to another bed, when the patient said: "Wait, madame!" And she saw him painfully turn in his bed, raise his sheet, awkwardly stretch out a suffering arm in the attempt at any cost to reach the case that hung at the head of the bed. She held the linen bag within his reach, and he, hesitating, fumbling, blindly feeling among a litter of things, a knife, letters, bits of bread, succeeded in extracting two photographs, those of his wife and his two little children. He desired to reward the new nurse for her kind offices, and he did his best by introducing her to his little family. Deeply touched, Odette praised the wife and the two children, and thenceforward the poor fellow was her friend.

Mme. de Calouas came to say that the stretcher-bearers were coming to carry "the thigh" to be dressed. Odette followed "the thigh." The new nurse was asked to cut the dressing. She broke into a cold perspiration; she thought the scissors were defective, and her remark provoked a smile from all the experts around; only the patient looked at her with an apprehension which seemed to paralyze her.

"You must learn to cut dressings," said Mme. de Calouas. "You will get used to it; just a knack."

Finally the steel succeeded in biting through the damp compresses. When they fell apart the wound appeared. It was an open fracture of the leg, whence exhaled the special sickening smell of osseous pus. The large wound spread open like a nightmare flower with thick petals, soft and viscid, covered with a creamy layer of dull old-rose color. They washed it; the patient gritted his teeth; now and again a cry escaped from the thin little brown face. When they looked at him he was brave enough to smile and say, "That's all right."

Odette was more ill than the wounded man. As on the previous evening, she asked that she might go out into the air, and when she stumbled at the door, turned pale, and was about to faint, the orderly, who understood these phenomena, with the help of a valid patient laid her all along upon a marble slab. It was only for a moment, and she returned to the room, saying, like the wounded man: "That's all right." The uninterrupted process of dressing made even her forget the incident. A kindly woman drew her into an embrasure and gave her a drop of cordial.

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

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

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

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

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

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