Chapter VII: Part III: Paris (4)

Paule saw that it would not have been possible for her to speak. She saw, what she had been sure she would see, that the younger woman was suffering intensely. She realized, more than ever what the thing meant to her Bernard's wife; how for her everything of her memory of him, the memory she was to keep with her all her life, depended on what she was to learn in this hour. All the memory she was to keep of her dead husband depended on it. That she might remember him with tenderness and solace and peace; or that it must be always with uncertainty and restlessness, and bitter thoughts. To be able to mourn him fully, fearlessly; or to go on always tormenting herself with doubt. It was of desperate importance to her. Paule saw that. She knew that the younger woman kept silent because she could not speak, not because of any realization she had of the advantage silence gave her.

Giselle, silent, waited.

The older woman, braving the silence, took the thing up.

"You are going to believe what I tell you. I don't know why you should believe me, but you will. They all talk of it, but I am the only one who really knows. And I have got to tell you. The things they say are true, but with such a difference. I must make you understand the difference. Since the moment Dolly told me that you knew, I have known that I must make you understand. I cannot let you misunderstand him when he is dead."

She was holding her parasol across her knees, her hands in their soft tan gloves clutching the two ends of it very tight.

"It is rather terribly hard for me to tell you," she said, "harder even than for you to listen. Remember that, if I seem to go over it cruelly." She stopped, and Giselle nodded again.

"I must go over it," Paule went on, speaking very fast now, "so that we can have it all clear between us. Don't you see? He came home here for six days' leave. He told you he had six days' leave. When he went, at the end of those six days, you thought it was back to the front he was gone. Then, _three days after he left you_, he was killed in a bayonet charge. And his colonel, and some of his friends, said, writing to you and to other people of him, that it was especially sad to think he had been killed the _very day he came back from his leave_. So you knew that his leave had been of eight days, that he had had two days' extra leave of which he had not told you, spent, you did not know where, or with whom. And then it happened Dolly spoke to you of seeing him with me in Evreux the _very_ day before he was killed. And so you knew. She had spoken of it to lots of people--the way people always say, you know, 'and I saw him only the day before.' And so every one knew. And you knew. But I have got to make you understand."

She let go her parasol and, leaning forward into the sunshine, threw her veil back from her face with her two hands. "I will let you see how I have suffered," she said, "it is written for you in my face." She was glad to have the younger woman see how much of her beauty was gone. "And that I loved him. You know--I must let you know--that I loved him. I loved him when you were a little schoolroom girl. And he did love me then." She drew herself up with a sudden flaming of pride. "I will give myself the comfort of saying that he loved me before he knew you, Giselle." The flame died down instantly, and she leaned forward, almost beseechingly. The parasol had fallen to the floor. "But he never loved me afterwards. From the moment he saw you--I was with him at somebody's dance the first time he saw you--I knew that for me everything was finished. Everything was swept away by his love of you. You know that, don't you?"

"I believed it then," said Giselle, speaking at last, "then, and all the time, in spite of all the things that people said, until this."

"There was one thing I never let go," Paule went on; "it was the pitying, protecting tenderness a man who is good like Bernard always continues to feel for the woman he once loved and who goes on loving him. I kept that alive, I kept him being sorry for me. There's reason enough in my life for any one to be sorry for me. And I kept him feeling that he must protect me, protect me from the blackness of sorrow that, I let him know always, there was in my heart."

Giselle had turned from her, as if she could not look at her, and sat staring out of the window to the tops of the trees in the avenue. Her cheeks were burning, as if the shame of the miserable confession were her own.

"Do you not see, oh, do you not see?" begged the other woman.

There was a dreadful silence.

Paule took it up again. "And the last thing was the accumulation of the shame and misery of years. I wish I could make you see, a little, what it meant to me, that you might not quite despise me. I suppose there is no excuse. But it had been so dreadful, down there in the country, with my husband, as he is, you know, ill, needing me, hating me, wanting me every moment. And all these terrible months of war, nearly two years, never seeing Bernard, scarcely hearing of him. I made him come. I made him come by telling him that I was in desperate trouble, that if he did not come I could not face it. I told him he must tell no one, not even you: that my trouble was a thing I must keep secret. Against his will, just by abuse of his kindness I made him give me those two days. I want you to quite, quite understand that it was only that I loved him, that he loved you. And that those two days were my theft of time he wanted to give all to you."

"Oh, don't, don't!" cried Giselle, breaking into it. "You need not tell me any more." She covered her face with her hands, as if it were she who was ashamed.

"Some day you will wonder why I have told you," Paule said, "why any woman should so humiliate herself down to the dust. It is because you have the right to a beautiful memory of him. You must keep that beautiful memory of him for yourself and for his children. It belongs to you, and to his home, and to his children. Never doubt him, Giselle, and let your sorrow be a beautiful sorrow, because he loved you as you loved him, perfectly. And in death he is yours. That is all."

She stopped and picked up her parasol. It was a green parasol. She looked from its bright colour to Giselle's black dress. She shivered a little and stood up.

Giselle took her hands away from her eyes and stood up, too.

Paule would have turned and gone out of the room, but Giselle caught her hands and held her, and lifted up her young face from which the tortured look was gone. She was crying, but tenderly.

For an instant it seemed as if Paule would have drawn away from her. But then she bent from her lovely height and kissed the younger woman. Then she went away.

Giselle did not go to the door with her. Old Honorine let her out of the apartment.

She went down the stairs and out into the avenue, where the leaves of the trees made large shadows.

As she walked very wearily, she did not know where, she was telling herself that it was over, that she had done what she could. She had made poor little Giselle believe her. She had given him to Giselle.

The avenue ahead of her seemed very, very long. She wondered if she would ever get to the end of it. Her thoughts seemed confused. She wondered what there was so cruel about Giselle's black dress and her own green parasol with the parrot handle. She would manage somehow to make the world believe that story she had told Giselle. She had given him to Giselle to mourn for. Perhaps that would wipe out some of it.

From Verdun

He was grown so used to his mud-hole, and the straw, and the mushrooms, and rats, that when he was come into the salon of the house in the Parc Monceau, and the butler he never had seen before had closed the door behind him saying, in odd French, that he would go and tell Madame la Comtesse, he just stood there in the middle of the room and laughed. He stood there, just as he had come out of the trenches, a most disreputable figure that once had been blue, and laughed to think that it was to this, all this, he really belonged. This was his house, and his wife would be coming in a moment into the room.

The room smelled of sandal-wood and amber. Things in it were of black lacquer and mauve velvet and dull gold. There were lots of books about on low tables, and Dolly's gold and amber cigarette things, and white roses, just the heads broken off, floating in flat bowls of smoky jade. How like Dolly to have cut off the long stems of the roses and their lovely thorns and leaves! He really must not laugh. There was one flame-red vase with a white spirit orchid in it.

Then Dolly came in, as fragile and pale and lovely as the orchid. It was ten months since he had seen her. How delightfully her hair was done, and her fingers, rose-tipped like sea-shells! She came to him, her flower-face lifted.

He said, "Oh, my dear, I am so dirty."

Some one had followed her into the room, a woman in deep mourning. It was the little Juriac, Lisette de Juriac, and she was quite unchanged. Not even her heavy crape changed her. How was it possible that she was not changed? How could she still be beautiful?

She came forward saying, "I was here with Dolly; I could not go, and not see you. I must stop just a moment to speak to you."

He took her hand and held it, and did not know what to say to her. He was seeing again that which he had seen not six weeks ago. He had seen many men die horribly, horribly. But if he thought too much of how his friend, her husband, had died, kept too vividly, too long, seeing it, he would go mad. Why was she not gone mad? She had loved her husband, who had loved her. They had been happy together.

He had a sudden hatred of her because she was not gone mad. Because there was some becoming white thing about her face to soften the harshness of the crape, and because there were pearls around her throat; he had a crazy desire to take her, his two hands clutching her shoulders, and tell her how René died, tell her the horror, burnt, burnt, burnt, make her see what he could not stop seeing. Because of the white frill and the pearls, he wanted to make her see it and feel it, and go down crushed under the realization of it. He would have made her ugly, as suffering makes ugly. When she was ugly he would believe she suffered. He could not move or speak, for he would have seized her and told her.

She was saying, "You were with him in the attack, you saw him fall, and you went back and tried to save him." She had her black gloves and parasol in her hand, and a little black bag, soft, like the gloves. She was trying to open the little black bag to get something out of it. She was beginning to cry.

Dolly, saying, "Poor dear, poor dear," took the gloves and parasol from her and found a scrap of a handkerchief for her in the bag. "Poor dear, poor dear." She put her arm around Lisette and patted her eyes with the tiny handkerchief. "Darling, it was a glorious death, you know, like that, in action, beautiful, the death he would have chosen. Jacques, tell her."

Tell her? He was trying not to tell her. He stood there looking at his friend's wife and trying not to tell her of the hands that had moved and moved, beating and beating the air.

"Tell her how fearless he was," Dolly was saying, "and how proud she must be of him."

Oh, yes, there was that. He thought of the words they always use. He said, "He died for his country."

She was crying only a little, but with really piteous tears. He knew that after a while, when he was himself a little farther from it, he would be sorry for her. Her dimpled chin quivered and her throat throbbed under the pearls. She looked at him, her eyes big with tears, and, half sobbing, said, "You were with him just before the attack, the last to speak with him."

"Yes, we were together."

She was waiting for him to tell her something. But there was nothing to tell her. He had again that other craziness. Now he was afraid that he would laugh. They had been crouching behind a heap of dead men, in the terrible dusk of cannon smoke and the noise that never ceased. He remembered they had been eating something. There had risen a wild, strange shriek through the noise of the cannon, and they had leaped up, had shrieked, and been over the sandbags.

Lisette was waiting, and while he tried to think, she said, "Was he speaking of me? Were his last words for me?"

"He was always thinking of you, I know, Lisette." That he could say eagerly, intensely--only why need she have it put into words? "You were his whole life, Lisette."

She lifted her head with a quite perfect gesture, and smiled, her eyes bright, the tears gone from them. "I was his whole life," she said, "and he died for his country." There was no more sob in her voice. She said, "He was so young and splendid, and he had always been so happy. He had so much to live for. He gave up so much with his life for his country. He leaves such a beautiful memory. I can say, 'His life was the woman who loved him, and for his country he died.' It is beautiful. That is the only comfort of it all, that it is beautiful." She broke off and began again, "I'm glad I saw you, Jacques, you have helped me, I'm so unhappy." She put the little handkerchief back in the bag, and took up her gloves and parasol. "Now I will leave you," she said. "Poor boy, you must be too tired to talk. How wonderful for Dolly to have you! Perhaps you will come with her to-morrow--they have persuaded me to lend my ballroom for just a little music for the blind. Dolly dear, you'll not fail me? You know I count on you to look after people. I am going to hide away in some little corner. Isn't it strange," she said to Jacques, "how life goes on?"

Dolly and he went to the door with her. There was no one in the big hall.

Dolly said, "That man is really too stupid."

Lisette said, "You are lucky to have a man-servant at all."

"What a lovely sunset!" said Dolly in the open door.

"Yes," said Lisette, "isn't it?"

"Your car is there?"

"Yes; good-bye, Dolly darling; good-bye, Jacques, and thank you."

As they turned back from the door, Dolly said, "Poor little thing, isn't she lovely in her mourning?"

She put her arm through his as they went across the hall together. "I'm so glad to have you, Jacques," she said, "you can't imagine, and I'm so proud of you. You don't forget me there, Jacques; you love me just as you always did?"

He was thinking. Six days' leave, perhaps two days extended. In nine days Dolly might be wearing a little white frill inside a veil of heavy crape, and just her pearls. And she would say to people that he had been all her life, and that it was the death he would have chosen. And in six weeks she would let the salon be used for just a little music for the blind.

"Do you know," she said as they went up the stairs together, "it was most beautiful, that thing Lisette said, her little summing up of it: 'His whole life was the woman who loved him, and for his country he died.' It made me think, you know, of Dante, those four lines of Pia dei Tolomei."

At the top of the stairs she turned to him, a step or two above him, standing higher than he. "Look at me, Jacques, and tell me I have not changed, and that you love me. What are you laughing at?"

"Nothing." He came up the steps and took her hands, and kissed the fingers of first one hand then the other. "These last weeks I have been always laughing; you must not mind. And, dear, I'm so glad you do your hair like that, and remember things from Dante, and play with the tips of roses, and that you do not understand."

Sunday, July 2nd

Last night Paris streets heard the cannon of the great prelude. The breeze, that was fresh and sweet from the country, brought in the sound of the cannon. In the silence of the night the streets listened. It was a sound regular and even. If Time were a great clock the sound of its ticking would be like that, on and on. If there were one great pulse that beat for all the life of the world, its throb would be like that, unceasing, relentless. It seemed like something that had always been, that always would be. It seemed as if one were used to it, had always been accustomed to the burden of sound that, the whole night through, the sweet fresh breeze brought in to Paris, and would have to go on bearing it always.

But when the city stopped listening, and took up its way again with the morning, the sound of the battle was lost in the small immediate sounds of the day's life.

In the trees I look to from my window, there was a great disturbance of birds, field birds and forest birds, driven into the city by the smoke and thunder that possess their land.

My hospital is almost empty. In all the wards there are waiting rows of empty beds, a nightshirt folded on each pillow. Rows of empty beds waiting----

Monday, July 3rd

This is a dark day, the colour of battles, for battles are not of scarlet and gold, only dark.

It is as if the darkness of the day and the darkness of the smoke of battle are terribly mingled together.

Tuesday, July 4th

The people who went to that church were proud, they were very proud of him, he had died so beautifully. Each one of them was proud to say, "He was my friend," or "I knew his people," or "I saw him once," or just, "He was an American." He had died for an ideal they all had sight of.

It was only a memorial service. There were only the two flags, the flag of France and the Stars and Stripes, in the aisle before the altar. He was lying somewhere inside the enemy lines, as he had fallen.

They of the air, they go so far; and if they fall, it is perhaps a little more sad and lonely because it may be where no one of their own can go to them. Perhaps the enemy have laid a wreath there on the place where he fell, as they do sometimes, those men of the air, to honour one another's memory. They say on the inscription of the wreaths sometimes: "To our enemy who died for his country." For this boy they would need to say another thing, "To our enemy who died for his ideal." I think that we, in the church, were not sorry, but were glad for him, that we were envying him--we who only live.

Invaded Town, Wednesday, July 5th

To-day I was shown a letter that came--I was not told by what means--from one of the invaded towns of the North. It was the letter of a girl who with her father kept an old book-shop in the Place de l'Eglise. It was written to her sister, married in Paris, from whom they had had no news since the war began, but to whom they had managed to get word through--I do not know how--once or twice.

The letter, received only yesterday, was dated January 16. It told of a thing that had been vaguely rumoured here, that the papers had not mentioned, and that had passed for the most part unbelieved. The girl supposed her sister would have heard, and would be terrified for them, and was anxious to let her know that they were safe. I imagine the girl with a smooth blonde head and grave blue eyes, and the father, thin and stooping, with delicate white features and white hair, and a black skull-cap.

The letter began by saying that they were very well, and that the house was but slightly damaged. Aunt Emeline was with them, as her house was quite in ruins: she had been got out from behind the falling of the stair wall. It was impossible to go to the house of Cousine Thérèse, but she was safe with the children at the neighbour Payen's. The whole family had escaped miraculously. The girl said that in the midst of such terrible suffering they were ashamed to have suffered scarcely at all. It seemed as if they were not bearing their part of the sacrifice.

She had thought, that night, it was the house falling, and she had leaped out of bed, thinking she must go to her father. The shock had lasted ten seconds. She had had time to get in the dark half-way across the rocking floor, and to realize it was not only the house but the whole city that was rent and sundered. She had had time to think, "It must be an earthquake."

"That is what _they_ tried, at first, to say it was," she wrote, "an earthquake. _But we know that it was an explosion brought about by one of us._ It was the Arsenal and the casemates of the eighteen bridges full of powder, between the three chief gates of the town, that were blown up. It was one of their most important depôts of munitions, where they had stored enough powder and high explosives to feed their Northern army for ten months. No one knows who did it. They have posted up offers of high reward for any one who finds the author of what they now call 'the criminal accident.'

"In all the towns of the North, where windows were broken and doors torn out of their frames, and where it was at first thought to be an earthquake, they have now put up posters on the walls, in their language and ours, demanding information about the 'criminal.'

"But even if there are some who know, not one will betray. Moreover, he is surely safe from betrayal, dead and buried somewhere under the ruins he himself caused for the sake of his country."

The letter went on to tell of the town so sacrificed: streets and quarters destroyed entirely, not a house anywhere but was more or less injured, the least harmed streets deep in broken glass and blocked with fallen tiles and stones. The whole town was become a place of homeless and wounded and dead.

The young girl kept repeating that no one complained; it was for the sake of their country. The homeless people in the streets said to one another, "It is less than our soldiers suffer in the trenches."

She wrote of things she had seen in that night: a father carrying his boy, of perhaps fifteen years, in his arms, not believing he was dead; a woman they could not get near, under the ruins, alive, her child killed beside her; a woman gone mad, running in the streets, shrieking a man's name; another woman, running also, with her baby in her arms, begging every one she met to mend it, for its head had been cut off.

All the less unhappy people had taken in the homeless; of the inhabitants of all the ruined houses, by the next night less than fifty were left to the care of the town.

The girl wrote: "The people of the town are admirable, the homeless with the rest; we know that the sacrifice is for our country, and we make it gladly. The terrible suffering of the town is offered up for victory and peace."

She went on to tell of little things: "Your room we have given to a mother with three babies; I have Aunt Emeline with me, sleeping in father's room, for mine is not safe--the roof of the next house has fallen against its roof. Father sleeps in the room behind the shop, and in the shop we have found place to take in ten of the destitute. The shock threw most of the books out of their cases, and loosened the cases from the walls, so that we have had to prop them up. The books are heaped out of the way of the mattresses of the homeless. I thought father would worry about the books; you know, he has always felt them to be live things; but he has no thought for them. He is in the Place all day, trying to help clear away the glass and stones. The tower of the church has fallen all across the Place. All the windows in the town are broken, and there is no glass to be had for mending them. We live behind paper windows, in a gloom that does depress one."

The letter went from one subject to another, nervously and rather confusedly. She told of immense blocks of stone, hurled from great distances into the streets; of the fronts of houses ripped out, and the stories dropped or sagging; of Aunt Emeline's poor little belongings all lost--the portrait of great-grandfather; how the enormous factories of ---- and ---- had served as a screen to protect the town, or else it had been destroyed completely; of one of the little homeless children in the book-shop who kept all the time saying her prayers, "Little Jesus, stay with us; little Jesus, stay with us," and how her name was Cecilette; of the bitter cold that made it all more cruel; and, always, how they were proud to offer up the sacrifice for their country. She sent her love, and her father's, always more and more tenderly. It seemed as if their love for Mariette, of whom they had no word, increased every day. She kept saying over and over how proud the town was, to have made the sacrifice; and what a brave thing for, perhaps, one man alone to have brought about.

That Naughty Little Boy

It was that naughty little boy who was killed, to whose funeral she went this morning in the church of St. Augustin. That naughty little boy--grown up, wandered far, always a "bad case," come home because there was war, and gone out with the rest--is dead magnificently.

He was shot down leading an attack upon the works of Thiaumont; they say his men would have followed him anywhere. Think of that naughty little boy, grown up to become a leader men were proud to follow unto death!

He used to pull her hair, and pinch her, and make faces to frighten her until she cried. His Miss never could manage him. His Miss and hers were friends, as were his mother and her mother, and she was obliged to play with him. She was terrified of him, but he had wonderful toys that she adored, especially the popgun and rocking-horses. Sometimes when he was being punished, she was left alone with his toys, and was happy. Sometimes he would be nice for a minute, and want to kiss and make up, and let her ride the big rocking-horse.

She was remembering it all this morning in the church.

Through all the years between she had never seen him, and for her he was still the bad little boy. It was the big rocking-horse she was particularly remembering in the church.

There was a crowd in the church. There was a whole firmament of candles; the church was hung with flags, and full of flowers. The tricolour and the palms were laid upon his bier. And upon the bier also there was laid his blue cap and jacket, stained and faded and torn by shell, and his Croix de Guerre and Légion d'Honneur.

There were all his people in the church, mourning for him. For years none of them had seen him or spoken of him. But now they were all come to do him honour. The world, that had turned a cold shoulder on him, was come to kneel beside his blue jacket and his medals.

She remembered vaguely hearing something about some woman he had loved, and who had loved him, for whom he had been exiled. She wondered if that woman had been in the church, that woman who could have no place among his people. If she were there, it must have been in the dusk of some aisle chapel, apart and alone.

Naughty little boy, despair of every governess; mauvais sujet, who had erred so far out of the paths of his world; soldier of France, who fought and led and fell--there he had lain in state, honoured of all, under his flag and palms.

Now it is over, the bad and the good of it, and of all is left only the blue cap and jacket, and the medals of war.

Little Mild Gentleman

The little mild gentleman of teacups and cakes--so useful when there were people who simply had to be asked--always ready to fill a place, considerate of old ladies--of course, they did not want him at the Front. He had rather bad lungs, or something, and was shortsighted at that; it was absurd of him even to try to get out--no army doctor would pass him.

After months and months of effort, he at last succeeded in getting himself taken on for ammunition work and the making of poison gases.

Somebody met him the other day, strutting along in his blue coat and red trousers. Very hurried and important, he had yet to stop and tell all about it, his tea-party manner quite vanished away, his shortsighted eyes no longer mild.

"It is I who tell you," he said, "I who know well, there will not a single one of them be left alive within miles and miles of this new stuff we are making."

Gossip

Since his death she has been nursing in a typhus hospital, somewhere just behind the lines. It is now more than ten months. No one has seen her, scarcely any one has heard from her. Some people say that she is doing "wonderful work" and some people say that it is all pose, and some people say that she has an affair with the chief doctor of the hospital, or is it with the maire of the town? No one has seen her, but every one says she has lost her looks.

She used to be very pretty, and a great favourite in the world. She looked absurdly like her two babies.

The babies are at the château with their grandmother, his mother, who is an invalid--two lovely cherubs at the age of Russian blouses.

The house off the Avenue du Bois, that used to be one of the most charming in Paris, has been closed since the war.

He enlisted when the war broke out, as a common soldier of infantry. It certainly was chic of him, for he was réformé because of some grave enough trouble of the heart, and he might easily have kept out of it all, or have got something showy but not dangerous. However, he took a humble place, and his share of great hardship. He had been accustomed all his life to everything that belongs to wealth and rank, and his share of the burden must have been very heavy for him.

People said: How proud of him she must be. He had always been thought a little dull, a dear boy, but perhaps a little dull; one would not have dreamed he had it in him.

People said: They had always been such a devoted couple, an ideal young couple. How sad it would be if anything happened to him.

In spite of the difficulties due to his being réformé, he got out at last to the Front. He was wounded only a short time after, not in any attack, or with any glory, but in bringing up the comrades' soup to the trenches. It was a shell wound in the thigh, not especially dangerous. He was invalided straight through to Paris, to one of the big city hospitals, and put, of course, in the ward with other common soldiers.

It was a moment of terrible crowding of the hospitals: doctors and nurses were overworked; there was necessarily much confusion. It was no one's fault, perhaps, only the inevitableness of things, that for three days the Surgeon Major had no time himself to attend to the less badly wounded.

The man with the wound in the thigh asked nothing of any one. He did not even ask, they say, to have his people sent for.

They were all down at the château; it was only after forty-eight hours that they got word of what had happened to him and where he was.

His wife came up to town. His mother, of course, was not able to come, and it had not seemed worth while to bring the little boys.

That was when he had been for two days in the hospital.

Here is a part of the thing that people say they do not understand.

It seems as if his wife might have had him moved out of the common ward. It is a little dreadful to think of him there, who had always been used to so much luxury--among the grey blankets, the coarse grey sheets, the beds and stretcher-beds crowded together, a bottle of the hospital champagne on the night-table, the black man in the next bed screaming. She might, it would seem, have had in their own doctor, or any one of the big doctors. She surely might have got permission to stay in the ward and sit by him the night he died.

He died the night after the operation. They had amputated too late. It was only the third day that the chief saw him. They amputated next morning, and he died in the night.

In that hospital they do not put a screen about the bed of one who dies.

If only some one had done something while there was time. It seems such a sad waste of a life, and such a dreary end. You see he had had no glory. It was for bringing up the comrades' soup that he had died. There were no medals to be left after him, with his blue coat and his cap. I suppose there was just one of those coarse grey sheets drawn up over him till they carried him out of the ward.

Some people say he did not want to live. But then he was probably too ill to concern himself much about anything. Some people say his wife did not want him to live. But then she may have been too confused and stunned to be able to concern herself about anything. Some people say she loved another man, and some people say he loved another woman.

Well, from him no one will ever know. It appears also as if no one were likely ever to know from her.

And now, no one sees her or hears from her any more.

His mother, who for a time would not speak of her, says now only that her devotion in the typhus hospital is wonderful, and her self-sacrifice; that she renders incalculable service there, and is above all praise.

That much is true.

And people give all sorts of different, amazing reasons for it.

They all agree, however, upon one point--that she has lost her looks completely.

Smoke

Suddenly, as the motor was passing the Place de la Concorde, Valérie said, "Would you mind if we just went home? I should like to go home."

Of course Nanette could only say that she did not mind.

Valérie had invited her to drive in the Bois and have tea at the little chalet of gaufres, by the gate of the Pré Catelan; she had her mother's motor car for the afternoon, and they need not take anybody with them. Nanette had thought it would be such fun, just the two of them, without governesses or maids. She had been looking forward to it for days.

Nanette was still in the schoolroom, whereas Valérie, nearly two years older, had escaped from all that. The younger girl admired Valérie immensely. They had seen a good deal of one another three years before in a summer at Dinard. Then the difference between their ages had mattered less; but now, dividing the schoolroom girl with her hair just tied back from the girl who would have been going out if war had not ended the world, it invested Valérie with a glamour of romance for the little Nanette. The romance, moreover, was heightened by the fact that people talked rather much of the older girl and coupled her name most unhappily with that of a man she never could marry, who was proving himself to be one of the heroes of the war.

Nanette would have been very proud to have had tea in the Bois with her beautiful friend. She said she did not mind turning back, but she did mind rather. She thought it odd indeed of Valérie to change like that. And Valérie's way of saying it was so odd, as if she had been all the time trying to keep it back and could not.

Valérie spoke through the tube to the chauffeur, and he turned the car.

She, Valérie, talked much and fast as they went back to the rue de Varennes, but she did not tell why she had changed her mind so suddenly.

The court of the old hôtel seemed more than usually boring and solemn to Nanette, and also the dim grave stairway. She would rather have had tea in the salon of the peacock tapestries, but Valérie told the old man-servant to bring it up to her little sitting-room.

She went in at her own door ahead of Nanette, and looked about her as if for something she expected to find in the room. She seemed so odd that Nanette just stood back against the door watching her.

After quite a minute Valérie turned to her and said, "Tell me, does it not seem to you that there is smoke in the room?"

The room was full of the afternoon July sunshine. The window that gave on to the garden was open. There were some arum lilies in a vase, and their fragrance was heavy in the sunshine.

"Why, no," said Nanette, "there is no smoke here."

Valérie began moving about the room aimlessly. As she moved here and there she was taking off her long suède gloves that Nanette admired.

"It is very queer," she said, never looking at Nanette, "but for days, three days, it has seemed to me all the time that my room was full of smoke. I see it and smell it. At first I thought something must be burning somewhere. But there was nothing. Besides, it is not that sort of smoke. It is the smoke of gunpowder."

She had thrown her gloves down on a chair, and was taking off her hat. She pulled the pins out of it, one after the other, and took it off, and thrust the pins back into it. "It is quite different from other smoke," she said, "there is no doubting what it is."

"Gunpowder smoke! Oh, but Valérie----"

Valérie went on, "Sometimes the smoke is so thick in the room that I cannot make my way about; it burns my eyes most dreadfully, it gets into my throat and chokes me, it makes me cry." She tossed her hat into the chair with her gloves, and turned to the mirror over the mantelpiece, and stood with her hands up, fluffing out her lovely gold hair. "It is not only that I cry because I am frightened," she said, "it is also that the smoke actually hurts my throat and eyes."

Nanette, standing behind her, could see her face in the mirror and thought it was become curiously stiff and dull. Valérie's lovely face, usually so full of expression, had become quite blank.

It was dreadful. The younger girl was afraid of--she did not know what. She could think of nothing that would have been of any use to say. She knew the older girl was telling her this thing only because she had to tell it to some one.

"You see," Valérie continued, "that is why I wanted to come home. I cannot bear to be long away from my room, because I am so afraid of missing the moment." She had turned back from the mirror, and stood looking past Nanette.

"The moment?" Nanette repeated, as she did not go on.

"Yes, the moment when the smoke will lift. It is every time more dense. There will be a time when it quite, quite blinds me, and then I shall see." She sat down in the chair that was nearest her. She sat limply, leaning back against the cushions, her hands lying loosely together in her lap.

Nanette had been standing all the time just inside the door. Now she came nearer, but not quite close, and she did not sit down. It was as if there were something encircling Valérie and keeping every one and everything apart from her. Nanette thought of the spells cast about fairy-tale princesses, a circle of magic drawn around, that no one could step across.

Valérie sat rigid, her eyes staring. The clock on the chimney began to strike five.

Nanette sprang forward. "Valérie, Valérie, what is the matter?" But Valérie did not hear her.

Nanette caught her hand. It was icy cold. "Valérie, Valérie!" She let the cold hand go, and touched her cheek.

But Valérie did not feel the touch.

Nanette flew to the door and opened it and called into the passage, "Jeanne-Marie, Jeanne-Marie!"

The old Bretonne nurse came instantly out from her door down the passage.

"Jeanne-Marie, quick, something has happened to mademoiselle."

The old woman passed her, and was beside Valérie. "God and the saints! It has came again!" she cried. She put her arms about Valérie and the girl fell stiffly against her shoulder. "Oh, my lamb, my little lamb!"

"Is she dead?" implored Nanette. "Jeanne-Marie, is she dead?"

"No, no, it has happened before. Go call Francine, quick."

The maid was already at the door; she must have heard the excited voices.

The old nurse said to the maid, "Help me get her to the sofa." To Nanette she said, "Go away, mademoiselle; you must go away."

Nanette besought, "No, oh, no!"

But the maid said, "Please, mademoiselle, Jeanne-Marie knows," and pushed her out of the room as if she had been a child.

Nanette, terribly frightened, waited outside in the passage, walking up and down.

After a long while Francine came and told her that mademoiselle was herself again, but very tired and must rest.

From her own home, an hour later, Nanette telephoned, and was told that mademoiselle was asleep.

The next day Valérie sent asking her to come about five o'clock.

Nanette was taken first to Valérie's mother, in the drawing-room.

The marquise was as stately and frigid as usual, dressed for the street, rather hurried and most difficult to talk to.

She told Nanette that she was troubled about the fright she must have had yesterday, and asked her not to speak to any one of what had occurred. She looked at Nanette through her tortoiseshell lorgnon, and asked if Valérie had been talking to her of anything in particular before she fainted. "Had she been agitating herself with any special confidences?" she asked.

"No," faltered Nanette, wondering.

The marquise went on to explain that Valérie was very much run down just now and nervous, and, in these last days, had had one or two fainting spells, such as that of yesterday, but less grave. She again asked Nanette not to speak of it. She appeared more concerned about people knowing of it, and about something she evidently feared Nanette might have imagined, than about what had happened to Valérie.

Nanette was anxious only to get to Valérie, who wanted her.

She found a little white Valérie snuggled down in the pillows of the big rose-hung bed. She seemed very quiet and rested, not strange as she had been yesterday, only tired. Her brown eyes looked bigger than ever, dark-circled, and her golden hair was very soft and curly about her face, like a child's hair.

She made Nanette sit close to her, and held her hand while she told her strange things, as if they were not strange at all.

When she spoke of yesterday it was as if she were speaking of something that happened very long ago. "I ought not to have brought you home with me," she said, "but you see I was afraid then. I was afraid to be alone. I knew the smoke was going to lift, I knew I was going to be shown something, and I was afraid to go through it alone. Old Jeanne-Marie is a darling, but she is different, of course. And mother would have been so annoyed if I had spoken of him. Mother has known all the time how unhappy we were, you see, and was always awfully annoyed about it."

Nanette, half understanding, could only say, as Valérie paused, "I am so frightened about you."

"Poor Nanette! You must not be frightened, for I am not frightened any more. It is all going to be well, very soon. Only I have got to tell you about it, because I am so lonely. I must tell some one. I am not a bit unhappy any more, but just to-day lonely. I have got to tell you, though it is selfish of me."

"I love you to tell me, please, Valérie."

"I was terribly unhappy," Valérie went on, "when I thought it was only he who would die. I knew, the moment I realized it was gunpowder smoke, that he was going to be killed. I knew that the smoke would lift for me when the moment came, and that then I should see him die."

"Valérie, oh, Valérie!"

"But you need not be sad for me, Nanette, because there is a thing I know that makes it all quite beautiful and right." She lifted herself up from the pillows, still holding Nanette's hand; the two heavy gold braids of her hair fell over her shoulders. "You see, we never could have been happy together, he and I," she said, "there would have been nothing but unhappiness for us both, always. I must tell you what I saw. I must have some one know, and you seem to understand things. You will not speak of it, till afterwards. And now, as I am telling you, you will not interrupt me, will you? You will not say any of the things most people would say, to break into my peace?" She stopped and waited, looking at Nanette intensely.

Nanette could not speak at all.

But Valérie must have understood, for she told it. She told it always quietly, as if she had passed beyond any shock or grief or sense of its strangeness: "The smoke was all about him, and about them; he and they had to fight blindly. They fought with bayonets. It was in the street of a village; I saw the cobbles under his feet, and a broken doorstep. He fought and fought. It seemed very long; he was quite alone to fight against so many of them. There were blue heaps behind him on the cobbles; I could make out just vaguely through the smoke. I think they were his comrades, wounded and dead. The others, the grey ones, were too many. I saw their grey shapes and their bayonets, and his wounds. I saw his face, just as he went down. His face was all alight, as it was the last time I saw him." Her own eyes were shining when she stopped, and her voice was like a singing.

In the quiet of the room Nanette waited, as if there were some spell she was afraid to break.

Valérie told her: "The last time I saw him was when he went out, nearly two years ago. I knew the station he would be passing through, with just some minutes there; and I went, and waited for him. I did not care if people knew. I ran to him in the crowd, and he saw me, and he said, 'Why, my Valérie, it is you!' as if there were a miracle. In my vision, his face was just as it had been then. There was no sound at all in my vision, but from his face, as he died, I knew he was saying, 'Why, my Valérie, it is you!'" Her warm, live hand held Nanette's hand steadily. "I know that I shall go to meet him, that I shall be waiting for him when he dies; I _know_, Nanette. I know because of the look there was in his face. I shall be waiting there, and he shall see me. And so I have no grief or fear." She was patting Nanette's hand to comfort her. "Is not it strange, Nanette; to-day I have a letter from him, a sad letter. And I have written him a happy one, and he will not understand why at all. He does not know how soon we will be together. I cannot tell him. And I am lonely waiting, now I know. Nanette, I am so glad that it is I who will go first."

Perhaps, when she is older, Nanette will have to wonder if there was something she might have done.

But nothing would have made any difference.

In the next days they had many doctors. But none of the doctors knew what it was, or could do anything.

A week from the day when the smoke had lifted, Nanette sent arum lilies for old Jeanne-Marie to put into Valérie's hands.

And three days after that, the man Valérie never could have married was killed.

He had gone down, it was known afterwards, in house-to-house fighting, in a street of the village of X----.

Hospital, Saturday, July 8th

Some new ones are arrived from the Somme, only ten for my ward, the orderly told me at the gate. They were brought in at four o'clock this morning. The orderly, Hamond, said, "They are nothing so bad as the Verduns."

When I came to the top of the stairs, Madame Marthe was in the corridor, waiting for Madame Bayle to come and unlock the linen-press. She looked very tired already, at the beginning of the day, and she was walking up and down between the stairs and the door of our ward, not able to keep still for a minute.

She told them off on her small fine fingers, stained with iodine: "Two heads, one of them has a bad leg-wound also; one amputé of the arm, infected; two of the leg, infected both of them; two faces; a bad chest-wound, bullet; other two slight. Zut! that Madame Bayle, will she never come! Run over to the store-house and tell them I have got to have tubes and funnels to feed the 9 and 14. See that they give them to you, whatever fuss they make, tell them it is for very bad faces. Quick now, the chief has been around, and they are going to trepan the worst head this morning."

Hospital, Sunday, July 9th