Mery, once a handsome country lad with a splendid body, looked at his dead limbs and sighed:
“It is quite possible, Madame. I can’t feel what’s going on.”
But Revaud was delighted. All the morning he cried, “It isn’t only me! It isn’t only me!” And no one grudged him his joy, for when you are in the depths of despair you are glad to have companions in your misery.
The most happy phrases have only a short-lived success. Revaud, who had a sense of humour, soon felt the moment coming when he would no longer find comfort in the remark that “he wasn’t like that before he joined up.” It was then he received a letter from his father. It came unexpectedly one morning. Revaud’s face had just been washed, and his great Gallic moustache had been cut—from caprice—according to the American pattern. All the hospital filed past at the corner of the door in order to see Revaud who looked like a very sick “English gentleman.”
He turned the letter over with his fingers that were deformed by misery and toil; then he said uneasily, “What does the letter mean? Do they still want to kick up a row?”
Revaud was a married man; but during the six months in which he had remained without news from his wife he had got used to his loneliness. He was in his room, behind the door, and sought no quarrels with anyone. Then why had a letter been sent to him?
“It must be they want to make a row,” he repeated; and he handed the letter to Mme. Baugan, for her to read.
The letter came from Revaud’s father. In ten lines written in a painstaking hand, with thick downstrokes and fine upstrokes, with flourishes and a dashing signature, the old man announced that he was going to visit him one day in the near future.
Laughter came back again to Revaud, and with laughter a final justification for living. All day he toyed with the letter, and used gladly to show it and say:
“We are going to have a visit. My father is coming to see us.”