One young woman in particular his look dwelt on—a dark girl in a becoming dress—both because she was so pleasant to see, and because there was such assurance in her serenity that she did not have to constrain her lips and eyes, but could trust them to be what she wished. Yet he saw by the way she clung to the young artilleryman from whom she was parting that hers were no sisterly farewells.
An immense hum of voices filled the vast glazed enclosure. Campton caught the phrases flung up to the young faces piled one above another in the windows—words of motherly admonishment, little jokes, tender names, mirthful allusions, last callings out: “Write often! Don’t forget to wrap up your throat.... Remember to send a line to Annette.... Bring home a Prussian helmet for the children! On les aura, pas, mon vieux?” It was all bright, brave and confident. “If Berlin could only see it!” Campton thought.
He tried to remember what his own last words to George had been, but could not; yet his throat felt dry and thirsty, as if he had talked a great deal. The train vanished in a roar, and he leaned against a pier to let the crowd flood by, not daring to risk his lameness in such a turmoil.
Suddenly he heard loud sobs behind him. He turned, and recognized the hat and hair of the girl whose eyes had struck him. He could not see them now, for they were buried in her hands and her whole body shook with woe. An elderly man was trying to draw her away—her father, probably.
“Come, come, my child——”
“Oh—oh—oh,” she hiccoughed, following blindly.
The people nearest stared at her, and the faces of other women grew pale. Campton saw tears on the cheeks of an old body in a black bonnet who might have been his own Mme. Lebel. A pale lad went away weeping.
But they were all afraid, then, all in immediate deadly fear for the lives of their beloved! The same fear grasped Campton’s heart, a very present terror, such as he had hardly before imagined. Compared to it, all that he had felt hitherto seemed as faint as the sensations of a looker-on. His knees failed him, and he grasped a transverse bar of the pier.
People were leaving the station in groups of two or three who seemed to belong to each other; only he was alone. George’s mother had not come to bid her son goodbye; she had declared that she would rather take leave of him quietly in her own house than in a crowd of dirty people at the station. But then it was impossible to conceive of her being up and dressed and at the Gare de l’Est at five in the morning—and how could she have got there without her motor? So Campton was alone, in that crowd which seemed all made up of families.
But no—not all. Ahead of him he saw one woman moving away alone, and recognized, across the welter of heads, Adele Anthony’s adamantine hat and tight knob of hair.