The father asked me, whispering, if I thought that the people of the hospital were fond of the boy? He said that he and the mother were obliged to go back that night to the farm, and did I think that these people they must leave their boy with were fond of him?
Saturday, June 24th
The boy with the almond-shaped eyes is dead. He died day before yesterday. I have been ill and not at the hospital these days, and I did not know. I went back to the hospital only this afternoon.
His father and mother arrived too late, this morning. They had had scarcely time to reach the farm in Normandy, when one of the house doctors, a kind man, wrote to tell them to come back. At the bureau they made a mistake in the address they gave the doctor, and his letter was returned to him in the post the day before the boy died. The doctor telegraphed then, but it was too late.
I do not know who told the father and mother when they came this morning. I do not know where they are to-day—this day so terrible for them in the great strange city. I would have liked to find them. Madame Marthe says they were surely allowed to go and see their boy, where he is, but not to stay with him.
I think of them, peasant people, confused and strange in city streets, frightened, belonging to no one, terribly alone, with nowhere to go in their grief. Where are they gone in their grief? They, to whom nothing has ever been explained, who are so unable to tell or to ask.
Sunday, June 25th
I was going to the chapel with my flowers, but I met Madame Marthe in the archway of our court, and she told me it was not there that I would find him. We went together around behind the chapel and past buildings that I had never seen before, of the immense world of the hospital. What a dreadful world in this June sunshiny morning!
A steep, dusty road goes up past outbuildings of the hospital, workshops, and yards, where there were some green things growing, and at the top there were a lot of our soldiers waiting at the door of a low, long house. My poor little hobbling, lopsided blue soldiers, with their bandages and slings and canes and crutches! I think they are so beautiful.
The doors of the house were open. Up two steps, and there were the father and mother, in their black silk and satin, standing beside the boy. They were perfectly quiet. The strange thing about the grief one sees in these days, everywhere, is that always it is so perfectly quiet. The boy looked just as one had seen him so often, sleeping, with his almond eyes closed. Only there was no fever in his cheeks any more.