Monday, July 24th—5.30 of the morning
Pérot has just gone.
He was noiselessly creeping down the outside stairs from his attic room. But I was waiting at the door on the landing, and made him come in for a minute to the apartment.
He sat, loaded down with all his campaign things, in the little yellow chair, and I sat in the big yellow chair, and we looked at one another.
It is odd how one never can say any of the things to them; and how, always, they understand perfectly all the things one would say if one could.
He looked very ill, poor boy. Ten days' leave of convalescence after five months in the hospital has really not given him enough time to pick up. And he worries so. He can try to eat, but he cannot sleep at all. All night he thinks and thinks.
I know so very well just what he thinks.
He has never had many words with which to tell me, for he has had all his short life to work so hard that he could get little time for learning to express himself. But sometimes he says, "If I knew they were dead——"
They are his two little sisters. The mother died five years ago, the father several years before that. He helped his mother when he was still a schoolboy to take care of the little sisters, Célestine and Marie; and when the mother was dead he took care of them alone. Now he is twenty-four years old, and Célestine is seventeen and Marie sixteen.
Since the day he left, two years less just eleven days ago, he has had no word of them at all.
Others from those invaded countries have had perhaps messages, a postal card, some sort of a letter; but he had had no word.
An application we got through for him to the maire of the nearest large town has had only the answer that the farm exists no more and that nothing has been known of the two young girls.
It was the "le mauvais sang qu'il faisait," as Madame Marthe said, that kept him so long from getting well. His wound in the shoulder was pretty bad, but what was worse was his unceasing grief and dread. He would have died, of the wound and that, if he had not been so young and northern and strong.
His wound got itself well. The new ones needed his place in the hospital. He was given ten days' sick leave, and came to spend it in the room upstairs, because he had nowhere else to go.
Now his leave has come to an end, and he is going back to his depôt, and then to the Front. I may never see him again, my poor boy, whose face goes white and red, and white and red, and whose blue northern eyes fill with tears if one speaks kindly to him.
He sat in the little yellow chair and I sat in the big yellow chair, and we looked at each other in the wet grey early morning.
I said, "They gave you a good breakfast?"
"Oh, yes, madame."
"And your little package, for lunch in the train?"
"Oh, yes, madame, and the cigarettes."
"Some letter-paper to write to me on?"
"Yes, madame."
"You have all the money you need, you are sure, my child?"
"Oh, yes, madame, much more than I need. I still have that twenty francs."
"You promise to let me know if I can do anything for you?"
"Yes, madame."
"And you will take care of yourself, please, Pérot."
"Yes, madame."
The clock struck once, the first quarter hour past five.
"You must go, my child."
He stood up.
I went to the door with him.
"You would not have liked me to come to the train, Pérot?"
"No, madame, because I should have cried; I am so stupid, madame."
"I would have cried too. And so, my child—until a less sad day."
"Madame—thank you."
"No, I thank you, little soldier."