She found herself talking a great deal, in a quavering, excited voice, gone back to her old exuberance of expression. It seemed to her that she finally asked André how it could have happened, his coming, and that he explained across the children’s clamor that his regiment had gone down to the gates of hell in the offensive and that what was left of them had been given a twenty-four hours’ leave of absence.
Oh, yes, she understood with no further words, she who knew by heart every way of communication between his sector on the front and her door; he had reached Paris by the 3.20 train, had hurriedly changed stations, had caught the 4.40 train out and reached Méru at twenty minutes of seven. And oh, she had not been at the station to meet him! But of course he had not had time to telegraph. So, if it were only a twenty-four hour leave, he would need to take the midnight train back. He had come so far, so far, for five hours with her.
She thought this all out while flying to get him some food, to open the can of meat, preciously kept for just such a golden chance, to heat the potatoes which were left, to set Jacques to grinding some coffee, real coffee, such as they never used, to uncover the sacred little store of sugar, wide, to his hand! And at the same time to talk to the children. How unresponsive children are, she thought; how quickly they outgrow whatever is not immediately present. It is hard to remember that four years, so long in the life of a child, is all eternity to a young child; his utmost imagination cannot compass it. She said all this to André, to explain the children. How absurd to try to explain them to André, smiling his deep understanding of them and of her, far deeper than she could ever fathom!
Then she was driving them all upstairs to bed, leaving the kitchen to André, the big tin bathtub and the clean underclothes which she had always ready for the first ceremony of every return from the trenches. If only there were more hot water! But she always let the fire go down toward night, to save coal. For her there was no need of fire. She could put a blanket around her shoulders and wrap her legs in a rug of an evening as she sat writing her letter to André by the poor light of the one lamp, filled with war kerosene, which smoked and glimmered uncertainly.
She hardly knew what she was doing as she hurried the children into their beds in the cold rooms. Hurry as she might, there were six of them; and many, many, of the priceless, counted-out moments had passed before she ran down the stairs, as madly as any girl racing to meet her lover.
André was there, at table, washed, shaven, a little color in his lean, deeply lined cheeks under their warlike bronze. When he heard her step flying down the hall, he pushed back from the table and, his napkin across his knees, a good light of laughter in his eyes, he held out his arms to her again, crying like the traditional bridegroom, “Alone at last!”
So it began on the light note, that incredible good fortune of their evening together, she perching on his knee, watching him eat, filling his plate, pouring out more coffee, talking, laughing—yes, really laughing as she only did when André was there on permission. When he had finished she cleared the table, made up the fire, recklessly putting in lump after lump of the sticky resinous coal and opening all the drafts. They sat down together before the stove, beside the surly ill-conditioned lamp, and their tongues were loosened for much talk—light, deep, sad, hopeful, brave, depressed, casual, tragic. They poured out to each other all the thousand things which do not go into letters, even daily ones. She heard of the unreasonable irritability of his captain, and the plain, restoring good faith of the old colonel; the heroism of the men, the cowardly slinking back to a clerical position at the rear by young Montverdier, the son of their député. He heard of her struggles with the boys’ Latin and mathematics, and with the little ones’ alphabet. “Just think, André, Annette, the obstinate little thing, will not admit that B’s name is B. She says it is ‘loof’ and she knows it is because she dreamed it was—haven’t children the most absurd ideas?”
She spoke out with a Frenchwoman’s frankness of her moments of horror, of despair, of doubt of the war’s meaning, of revulsion from the industrial system which had made the war possible. There deep answered deep; he brought to her the envenomed hatred of war which fills the trenches to the brim. “It is not glorious; it is infamous. I am not a hero; I am a murderer. But there are worse things. It would be worse to have peace, with the German ideas ruling the world. No, every one of us would better die than allow that to happen. Yes, I have had too—who hasn’t?—moments of doubt, moments when the horror of our stupidity was too great, when I have thought that any other way would be better than war. But not since the Russian affair, not since the Germans marched into defenseless Russia. Russian children will be brought up in German schools to form a new generation of Germans. I would kill my children with my own hands before having them added to those ranks. No, since Russia, there seems no other way but to go on to the end, and to make that end an end to war forever.” The worn phrases, dubious and tarnished on the facile tongues of public orators, repeated there in that dimly lighted room by that worn man and suffering woman, became new, became sacramental.
They clung to each other for a moment again, and gradually felt the tension of the spirit melt away in the old cure of simple bodily nearness. His cheek against hers—at the sensation she became just a woman again.
She stirred, she smiled; she told an amusing story of their queer old neighbor,—she interrupted herself to say reproachfully, “But I do love little Maurice! I don’t love him as I love the other children, but just because of that I love him more, because I pity him so.”