It is now a year since all this happened. I often think of the explanations that Cousin never gave me—that he will never give me.
THE LADY IN GREEN
I do not know why I loved Rabot. Every morning as I went to and fro at my usual work in the ward, I saw Rabot, or rather Rabot’s head, or less still Rabot’s eye, hiding in a hurly-burly of sheets. He was a little like a guinea-pig that rubs its nose in the straw and watches you anxiously.
Every time I passed I made a familiar sign to Rabot. This sign consisted in shutting the left eye energetically and pressing the lips together. At once Rabot’s eye shut itself, digging a thousand little wrinkles in the withered face of the sick man. And that was all; we had exchanged our salutations and our confidences.
Rabot never laughed. He had spent his babyhood in a foundling hospital and had not had enough milk. This under-feeding in infancy can never be made up for afterwards.
Rabot was sandy-haired, with a pale complexion splashed with freckles. He had so little brain that he looked like a rabbit or a bird. Directly a stranger spoke to him his underlip began to tremble and his chin wrinkled all over like a walnut. You had first of all to explain to him that you were not going to beat him.
Poor Rabot! I would have given anything to see him laugh. Everything, on the contrary, seemed to conspire to make him cry: there were the terrible endless dressings that had to be renewed every day for months; then he was compelled to lie so quiet and motionless that he was never able to play with his comrades. And after all, the fact remained that Rabot had never learned to play at all, and really was not much interested in anything.
I was, I think, the only one who became at all intimate with him; and, as I said before, this intimacy consisted chiefly in shutting my left eye when I passed near his bed.
Rabot did not smoke. When cigarettes were handed round he would join in with the others and play with them for a moment, moving his great thin fingers, deformed and emaciated. Long illness seems to rob the fingers of manual labourers of all beauty and significance: directly they lose their hardness and their healthy appearance they look like nothing at all in the world.