CHAPTER XVII

MORNING

I went to sleep in Chaos, and then I awoke like the first man.

I am in a bed, in a room. There is no noise—a tragedy of calm, and horizons close and massive. The bed which imprisons me is one of a row that I can see, opposite another row. A long floor goes in stripes as far as the distant door. There are tall windows, and daylight wrapped in linen. That is all which exists. I have always been here, I shall end here.

Women, white and stealthy, have spoken to me. I picked up the new sound, and then lost it. A man all in white has sat by me, looked at me, and touched me. His eyes shone strangely, because of his glasses.

I sleep, and then they make me drink.

The long afternoon goes by in the long corridor. In the evening they make light; at night, they put it out, and the lamps—which are in rows, like the beds, like the windows, like everything—disappear. Just one lamp remains, in the middle, on my right. The peaceful ghost of dead things enjoins peace. But my eyes are open, I awake more and more. I take hold of consciousness in the dark.

A stir is coming to life around me among the prostrate forms aligned in the beds. This long room is immense; it has no end. The enshrouded beds quiver and cough. They cough on all notes and in all ways, loose, dry, or tearing. There is obstructed breathing, and gagged breathing, and polluted, and sing-song. These people who are struggling with their huge speech do not know themselves. I see their solitude as I see them. There is nothing between the beds, nothing.

Of a sudden I see a globular mass with a moon-like face oscillating in the night. With hands held out and groping for the rails of the bedsteads, it is seeking its way. The orb of its belly distends and stretches its shirt like a crinoline, and shortens it. The mass is carried by two little and extremely slender legs, knobbly at the knees, and the color of string. It reaches the next bed, the one which a single ditch separates from mine. On another bed, a shadow is swaying regularly, like a doll. The mass and the shadow are a negro, whose big, murderous head is hafted with a tiny neck.

The hoarse concert of lungs and throats multiplies and widens. There are some who raise the arms of marionettes out of the boxes of their beds. Others remain interred in the gray of the bed-clothes. Now and again, unsteady ghosts pass through the room and stoop between the beds, and one hears the noise of a metal pail. At the end of the room, in the dark jumble of those blind men who look straight before them and the mutes who cough, I only see the nurse, because of her whiteness. She goes from one shadow to another, and stoops over the motionless. She is the vestal virgin who, so far as she can, prevents them from going out.

I turn my head on the pillow. In the bed bracketed with mine on the other side, under the glow which falls from the only surviving lamp, there is a squat manikin in a heavy knitted vest, poultice-color. From time to time, he sits up in bed, lifts his pointed head towards the ceiling, shakes himself, and grasping and knocking together his spittoon and his physic-glass, he coughs like a lion. I am so near to him that I feel that hurricane from his flesh pass over my face, and the odor of his inward wound.

* * * * * *

I have slept. I see more clearly than yesterday. I no longer have the veil that was in front of me. My eyes are attracted distinctly by everything which moves. A powerful aromatic odor assails me; I seek the source of it. Opposite me, in full daylight, a nurse is rubbing with a drug some gnarled and blackened hands, enormous paws which the earth of the battlefields, where they were too long implanted, has almost made moldy. The strong-smelling liquid is becoming a layer of frothy polish.

The foulness of his hands appalls me. Gathering my wits with an effort, I said aloud:

"Why don't they wash his hands?"

My neighbor on the right, the gnome in the mustard vest, seems to hear me, and shakes his head.

My eyes go back to the other side, and for hours I devote myself to watching in obstinate detail, with wide-open eyes, the water-swollen man whom I saw floating vaguely in the night like a balloon. By night he was whitish. By day he is yellow, and his big eyes are glutted with yellow. He gurgles, makes noises of subterranean water, and mingles sighs with words and morsels of words. Fits of coughing tan his ochreous face.

His spittoon is always full. It is obvious that his heart, where his wasted sulphurate hand is placed, beats too hard and presses his spongy lungs and the tumor of water which distends him. He lives in the settled notion of emptying his inexhaustible body. He is constantly examining his bed-bottle, and I see his face in that yellow reflection. All day I watched the torture and punishment of that body. His cap and tunic, no longer in the least like him, hang from a nail.

Once, when he lay engulfed and choking, he pointed to the negro, perpetually oscillating, and said:

"He wanted to kill himself because he was homesick."

The doctor has said to me—to me: "You're going on nicely." I wanted to ask him to talk to me about myself, but there was no time to ask him!

Towards evening my yellow-vested neighbor, emerging from his meditations and continuing to shake his head, answers my questions of the morning:

"They can't wash his hands—it's embedded."

A little later that day I became restless. I lifted my arm—it was clothed in white linen. I hardly knew my emaciated hand—that shadow stranger! But I recognized the identity disk on my wrist. Ah, then! that went with me into the depths of hell!

For hours on end my head remains empty and sleepless, and there are hosts of things that I perceive badly, which are, and then are not. I have answered some questions. When I say, Yes, it is a sigh that I utter, and only that. At other times, I seem again to be half-swept away into pictures of tumored plains and mountains crowned. Echoes of these things vibrate in my ears, and I wish that some one would come who could explain the dreams.

* * * * * *

Strange footsteps are making the floor creak, and stopping there. I open my eyes. A woman is before me. Ah! the sight of her throws me into infinite confusion! She is the woman of my vision. Was it true, then? I look at her with wide-open eyes. She says to me:

"It's me."

Then she bends low and adds softly:

"I'm Marie; you're Simon."

"Ah!" I say. "I remember."

I repeat the profound words she has just uttered. She speaks to me again with the voice which comes back from far away. I half rise. I look again. I learn myself again, word by word.

It is she, naturally, who tells me I was wounded in the chest and hip, and that I lay three days forsaken—ragged wounds, much blood lost, a lot of fever, and enormous fatigue.

"You'll get up soon," she says.

I get up?—I, the prostrate being? I am astonished and afraid.

Marie goes away. She increases my solitude, step by step, and for a long time my eyes follow her going and her absence.

In the evening I hear a secret and whispered conference near the bed of the sick man in the brown vest. He is curled up, and breathes humbly. They say, very low:

"He's going to die—in one hour from now, or two. He's in such a state that to-morrow morning he'll be rotten. He must be taken away on the moment."

At nine in the evening they say that, and then they put the lights out and go away. I can see nothing more but him. There is the one lamp, close by, watching over him. He pants and trickles. He shines as though it rained on him. His beard has grown, grimily. His hair is plastered on his sticky forehead; his sweat is gray.

In the morning the bed is empty, and adorned with clean sheets.

And along with the man annulled, all the things he had poisoned have disappeared.

"It'll be Number Thirty-six's turn next," says the orderly.

I follow the direction of his glance. I see the condemned man. He is writing a letter. He speaks, he lives. But he is wounded in the belly. He carries his death like a fetus.

* * * * * *

It is the day when we change our clothes. Some of the invalids manage it by themselves; and, sitting up in bed, they perform signaling operations with arms and white linen. Others are helped by the nurse. On their bare flesh I catch sight of scars and cavities, and parts stitched and patched, of a different shade. There is even a case of amputation (and bronchitis) who reveals a new and rosy stump, like a new-born infant. The negro does not move while they strip his thin, insect-like trunk; and then, bleached once more, he begins again to rock his head, looking boundlessly for the sun and for Africa. They exhume the paralyzed man from his sheets and change his clothes opposite me. At first he lies motionless in his clean shirt, in a lump. Then he makes a guttural noise which brings the nurse up. In a cracked voice, as of a machine that speaks, he asks her to move his feet, which are caught in the sheet. Then he lies staring, arranged in rigid orderliness within the boards of his carcass.

Marie has come back and is sitting on a chair. We both spell out the past, which she brings me abundantly. My brain is working incalculably.

"We're quite near home, you know," Marie says.

Her words extricate our home, our quarter; they have endless echoes.

That day I raised myself on the bed and looked out of the window for the first time, although it had always been there, within reach of my eyes. And I saw the sky for the first time, and a gray yard as well, where it was visibly cold, and a gray day, an ordinary day, like life, like everything.

Quickly the days wiped each other out. Gradually I got up, in the middle of the men who had relapsed into childhood, and were awkwardly beginning again, or plaintively complaining in their beds. I have strolled in the wards, and then along a path. It is a matter of formalities now—convalescence, and in a month's time the Medical Board.

At last Marie came one morning for me, to go home, for that interval.

She found me on the seat in the yard of the hospital, which used to be a school, under the cloth—which was the only spot where a ray of sunshine could get in. I was meditating in the middle of an assembly of old cripples and men with heads or arms bandaged, with ragged and incongruous equipment, with sick clothes. I detached myself from the miracle-yard and followed Marie, after thanking the nurse and saying good-by to her.

The corporal of the hospital orderlies is the vicar of our church—he who said and who spread it about that he was going to share the soldiers' sufferings, like all the priests. Marie says to me, "Aren't you going to see him?"

"No," I say.

We set out for life by a shady path, and then the high road came. We walked slowly. Marie carried the bundle. The horizons were even, the earth was flat and made no noise, and the dome of the sky no longer banged like a big clock. The fields were empty, right to the end, because of the war; but the lines of the road were scriptural, turning not aside to the right hand or to the left. And I, cleansed, simplified, lucid—though still astonished at the silence and affected by the peacefulness—I saw it all distinctly, without a veil, without anything. It seemed to me that I bore within me a great new reason, unused.

We were not far away. Soon we uncovered the past, step by step. As fast as we drew near, smaller and smaller details introduced themselves and told us their names—that tree with the stones round it, those forsaken and declining sheds. I even found recollections shut up in the little retreats of the kilometer-stones.

But Marie was looking at me with an indefinable expression.

"You're icy cold," she said to me suddenly, shivering.

"No," I said, "no."

We stopped at an inn to rest and eat, and it was already evening when we reached the streets.

Marie pointed out a man who was crossing over, yonder.

"Monsieur Rampaille is rich now, because of the War."

Then it was a woman, dressed in fluttering white and blue, disappearing round the corner of a house:

"That's Antonia Véron. She's been in the Red Cross service. She's got a decoration because of the War."

"Ah!" I said, "everything's changed."

Now we are in sight of the house. The distance between the corner of the street and the house seems to me smaller than it should be. The court comes to an end suddenly; its shape looks shorter than it is in reality. In the same way, all the memories of my former life appear dwindled to me.

The house, the rooms. I have climbed the stairs and come down again, watched by Marie. I have recognized everything; some things even which I did not see. There is no one else but us two in the falling night, as though people had agreed not to show themselves yet to this man who comes back.

"There—now we're at home," says Marie, at last.

We sit down, facing each other.

"What are we going to do?"

"We're going to live."

I ponder. She looks at me stealthily, with that mysterious expression of anguish which gets over me. I notice the precautions she takes in watching me. And once it seemed to me that her eyes were red with crying. I—I think of the hospital life I am leaving, of the gray street, and the simplicity of things.

* * * * * *

A day has slipped away already. In one day all the time gone by has reëstablished itself. I am become again what I was. Except that I am not so strong or so calm as before, it is as though nothing had happened.

But truth is more simple than before.

I inquire of Marie after this one or the other and question her.

Marie says to me:

"You're always saying Why?—like a child."

All the same I do not talk much. Marie is assiduous; obviously she is afraid of my silence. Once, when I was sitting opposite her and had said nothing for a long time, she suddenly hid her face in her hands, and in her turn she asked me, through her sobs:

"Why are you like that?"

I hesitate.

"It seems to me," I say at last, by way of answer, "that I am seeing things as they are."

"My poor boy!" Marie says, and she goes on crying.

I am touched by this obscure trouble. True, everything is obvious around me, but as it were laid bare. I have lost the secret which complicated life. I no longer have the illusion which distorts and conceals, that fervor, that sort of blind and unreasoning bravery which tosses you from one hour to the next, and from day to day.

And yet I am just taking up life again where I left it. I am upright,
I am getting stronger and stronger. I am not ending, but beginning.

I slept profoundly, all alone in our bed.

Next morning, I saw Crillon, planted in the living-room downstairs. He held out his arms, and shouted. After expressing good wishes, he informs me, all in a breath:

"You don't know what's happened in the Town Council? Down yonder, towards the place they call Little January, y'know, there's a steep hill that gets wider as it goes down an' there's a gaslamp and a watchman's box where all the cyclists that want to smash their faces, and a few days ago now a navvy comes and sticks himself in there and no one never knew his name, an' he got a cyclist on his head an' he's gone dead. And against that gaslamp broken up by blows from cyclists they proposed to put a notice-board, although all recommendations would be superfluent. You catch on that it's nothing less than a maneuver to get the mayor's shirt out?"

Crillon's words vanish. As fast as he utters them I detach myself from all this poor old stuff. I cannot reply to him, when he has ceased, and Marie and he are looking at me. I say, "Ah!"

He coughs, to keep me in countenance. Shortly, he takes himself off.

Others come, to talk of their affairs and the course of events in the district. There is a regular buzz. So-and-so has been killed, but So-and-so is made an officer. So-and-so has got a clerking job. Here in the town, So-and-so has got rich. How's the War going on?

They surround me, with questioning faces. And yet it is I, still more than they, who am one immense question.

* * * * * *