PART III
Paris
Monday, October 11th
I was thinking all night in the train—how can I look at them, how can I speak to them in their depth of grief? I was thinking—when the old woman comes to open the door, what can I say to her? When the old man comes to take my big dressing-case and my little dressing-case, and my strap of books, how can I face him? Their son is dead.
The son of our concierge is dead. "Mort au Champ d'Honneur."
They were so proud of him. They did so worship him. He was such a clever boy that he had gone beyond anything they had ever imagined. If you just in passing saw him with them, you thought he did not belong to them at all. You thought he was a gentleman who was waiting a minute for some reason, there in the loge. But you would have known, if you had had time for it, how he worshipped them and was proud of them; they had worked so hard, his little fat slow sweet mother in the neat black dress, and his little stumpy cross father, who made it a point to come to the door in his shirt sleeves.
In those wonderful first days the son of our concierge went away.