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.