III
I am becoming horribly accustomed to going about the empty apartment alone. I find I no longer think of the scowling walls, the dumb silence, the dim windows. They wrap me in a vague acquiescence. Habit is exerting its awful power.
I seem to be gliding down a slope where there is no one at the bottom to warn me that there may be a precipice ahead or tell me whither this strange existence leads.
My days are regulated according to the rules I myself have made to apply only to myself; I go, I come, I turn the key in the lock; I loiter; then I rush at my work. Sometimes the mirror casts a sudden image which runs away busily at my approach. My shadow and the creaking under my tread are all I have for company.
Yet this is not the first time I have lived alone. There once was a room with a flowered quilt, a moth-eaten carpet and a rickety door which opened like the lid of a devil-in-the-bandbox on the mahogany wig and scarlet smile of Mme. Noël. But everything was so different! I brought nothing to that virgin space except the desire to fill it; my body knew nothing; my inner being cried out for too many things to be able to hold any of them, and had I dared, I would have stretched my arms out through the window to embrace the air of life....
My solitude now is like rotten fruit; it scorches my entrails like a fiery drink. It is a strange solitude.
Two men peopled my life and fertilized and vivified it. But wasn't that very long ago and somewhere else? Come, try to remember....
I do not know; they are neither dead nor alive. To be sure they are hungry and thirsty and get bored as living people do, but they are locked up in the earth's carcass like the real dead; and it may be that at this very moment when I am imagining them warm and active, they are already stiff and cold. To be absolutely truthful, to go down to the bottom of things, there is scarcely anything in common between the two men who went to war and me who stayed behind.
Sometimes when I am alone, I lean over, way over, to touch the very bottom of things so as to feel the pain of it.
Yes, letters pass between us. When I read their letters I try to imagine their surroundings and the crass details of their life; the fir-trees of the Argonne, the name of a regiment which I know by heart like a prayer, frost-bitten feet, the incessant thunder, and the arrival of the postman which draws us a little closer together. Then there is Carency—the place makes no difference—the light cavalry.... Attack, formation, the first rank mowed down, the second, the third; he alone standing upright in the front of the fourth rank, a struggle lasting a century, the confused subsidence, and my portrait snug under his blue jacket. And that night last week when he was nearly dying of thirst and crawled out over the open field, groping for something to drink. A miracle, a pool! He fills his mess cup and empties it at one draught. He spits out thick threads, they hang from his mouth—bits of brains.... A pool of human blood from which he has quenched his thirst.
I receive a letter nearly every morning. The envelope burns in my fingers: the written lines make a pretense of talking and telling you things, as if I were not standing in front of him as you stand in front of a window-pane which you frost with your breath so that you can't see what's on the other side.
I write to them before I go to bed. Nothing important ever turns up, so I make a lot of the little everyday affairs—what happens at the office or at lunch in the restaurant where the people discuss and wrangle and the smells turn you sick. I tell them how forlorn the house looks, and how well the child is getting along in the country, that I do some work after dinner to make a little more money. Besides, there's always some anecdote to relate.... Twelve strokes cutting into the metallic night.... Sometimes when I fold my letter I have a sense of having written about somebody else.
Nevertheless, the thought of them is an obsession; it is a red point about which I develop and revolve and add to myself.
And sometimes, too, when I shut my eyes, bizarre notions swoop down on me, a horrid swarm of bats. "How many women are there to-night," I wonder, "who are tossing about in the thin warmth of their beds, distracted creatures, tormented, empty-armed, who, however, are the bigger for all this, easy in their minds and free already in their bitter freedom?"
Yes there are many women to-night without husbands or lovers who wonder as they lie in bed; then they sit up and lean on their elbows ... they don't know yet or suspect anything ... but they don't sleep, they can't sleep; it's too absurd to think that a woman can live all alone, sleep alone, even breathe. And then it might be that the closest union is a prison after all.
At last I fall asleep, and in the morning, in the bald, shivering twilight, I go back to my doings of the day before, somewhat cowardly doings. Dull habit, which greases the machinery of life, leads me blindly along the streets to the office.
Was it only two months ago that with despair in my heart I passed this corner where the chestnut-stand sends up its whistling steam? His letter in my bosom had told of the night attack and of his possible death; a brief, heart-rending farewell. Is he in less danger this morning, is he less cold, less hungry? I just passed the same corner worried for fear I might be late. The whole way I had been thinking of my dress and winter hat.
That's how you get used to the martyrdom of others.
Even if it is the flesh of your flesh that undergoes the martyrdom, even if it is the man of your love—ah, don't say no—you get used to it. In suffering one person cannot take the place of another, and pain cannot be shared. The first day, because grief turns your head, you think you are sharing the other person's pain, but the other days, all the other days?
Why not have the courage to look crude reality crudely in the face? There are no people who are inseparable, there are no couples who are inseparable.
He is in the trenches, the men are in the trenches, engulfed in misery, exposed to danger, plagued by vermin, and I am here alive and untouched, grazing this large wall patched with three-colored placards. "Women ... your noble rôle ... noble work ... honor...."
Honor? What honor? I work. Isn't that natural? He is suffering, he is going to die. Didn't I see my own dormant energies wake up? And if he has given all, have I not taken all?
Five minutes to nine! I hurry, raising my coat collar in a shiver and clasping my hands inside my soft muff.
At the end of the street a dusty gust driving a handful of people along like dead leaves, women with billowing skirts, a tramping, whistling gang of blue-lipped street boys, and old Noël with his breath frozen on his beard.
They have left. Even if they return, they have left. That's the whole thing. There will have been a space of time when they were wiped off the face of the earth, and life went forward without them, was lived without them, and women actually continued without them....