I must have kept a clear brain and steady legs, because I ran straight home.... What street, what hell, where was I?... I had no eyes for the street nor ears for the humming in my head, nor consciousness even of the daze that was driving me on.
We met in front of the house whose quiet walls still enclosed our happiness. We passed under the porte-cochère heavily, passively, like beasts driven to slaughter, and the staircase was an ascent to Calvary. I do not think we exchanged a single word. When the door closed upon us we embraced without kissing, and my cheek against his shoulder was wet with tears that were not of my shedding.
It had occurred to me that he might leave for the war, but like every other thought this one too was promptly chilled and crushed. Nor can I say that it was the idea of his going that made me suffer the most. I was stupefied beyond the power to suffer. I was just as ready to burst out laughing or tear off my arms. I let myself be touched, handled, and moved like a stone thrown into space. But contact with him restored me a little, a very little, to the realization of what I was going to lose.
The days succeeding were spat from a volcano; nothing remains of them but ashes. You learned new words; a whole language born of the moment slipped from your tongue; countries became persons with distinct individualities, gestures and features. You actually fed on what appeared in the newspapers, picking up items like grains of manna. Men alone counted—men, men. Life was in their hands, life and the fate of the world. So and so many killed—abstractions with which the world juggled in figures. Death, a human divinity after all, settled down familiarly. Nothing was like anything that had gone before.
People began to talk of glory....
A day came: his departure.
I got his things ready as I always did before a trip, from a list, with my usual mania for taking along too many things. After filling his bag with all the necessaries, I stowed a tiny bottle of my perfume in it, a cigarette-case, his last birthday gift, some dried flowers, and our baby's photograph. I childishly pictured his exclamation of delighted surprise when he would remove his shirts and the picture would fall out.
Before he left the house, hardly recognizable in his uniform, he kissed his son savagely and pressed him long and hard, bending low to hide his tears.... On the way he spoke mostly of the child—commonplaces to deaden his pain. "Don't let him be too much of a bother. You must be strict with him, you know." I saw he was entrusting his share in his survival to me, and it was better to avoid reference to a parting that marched on to death.
Regiments were springing up on all sides, troops of men with innocent eyes and faces shining with pride; sons, brothers, lovers, changed into statues of men, in a confusion of brass bands, cheers, red and gold, clashing of arms, and tramping of feet.
If only this were hell in its completeness! But he was not there. He had left six days before without my being able to say good-bye to him.