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."