Without looking at me, she said, "I—I stay here." She stood close, close to the hole and looked at the little pine box, and said again, quite quietly, "I stay here."
I said, "You cannot stay," stupidly, as if we were discussing any ordinary coming or going.
Her little sister, pulling at her skirt, said, "Say then, ask thou the lady to let thee go to supper at the cantine."
"The cantine is for those who have babies," Alice answered. Then she looked at me for the first time, her great wild eyes, in her face that was stained and streaked where the black from the wet crape had run.
Gégène's Croix de Guerre, One Thursday
When Gégène went to the Invalides to receive his Croix de Guerre, in the great Court of Honour, there was no one to go with him except Madame Marthe and me.
Gégène belongs to nobody. He is an "enfant de l'Assistance Publique." There is nobody nearer to him than the peasants he was hired out to work for, somewhere down in Brittany.
I do not know whether or not they were kind to him, whether or not they cared about his going off to war, or would take interest in the honours he has won. We know nothing but what the Assistance knows about him; and he himself can tell us nothing, for he cannot speak at all. His wound was in the head; he has been trepanned twice. He may live a long time, he is such a strong young boy, but he will never be able to speak. His right side is stiffened, he cannot use that hand, and the foot drags. Except for that, and not being able to speak, he is quite well.
Nobody knows how much he understands of it all, or what he thinks and feels. Sometimes he looks very sad. His boyish face, refined by pain, haunts me when I am away from the hospital. But sometimes he seems quite content, happy to be just well housed and fed and petted by us. We do not know what will become of him when he can no longer stay in the hospital.