“Let us compel Death to remember us, since even Death forgets us!” René murmured once in his despair to her.
But Lili had pressed her famished lips to his: “Nay, dear, wait; God will remember us even yet, I think.”
It was her faith. And of her faith she was justified at last.
There came a ghastlier season yet, a time of horror insupportable—of ceaseless sound beside which the roar of the mere traffic of the streets would have seemed silence—a stench beside which the sulphur smoke and the gas fumes of a previous time would have been as some sweet, fresh woodland air—a famine beside which the daily hunger of the poor was remembered as the abundance of a feast—a cold beside which the chillness of the scant fuel and empty braziers of other winters were recalled as the warmth of summer—a darkness only lit by the red flame of burning houses—a solitude only broken by the companionship of woe and sickness and despair—a suffocation only changed by a rush of air strong with the scent of blood, of putridity, of the million living plague-stricken, of the million dead lying unburied.
For there was war.
Of year or day or hour I knew nothing. It was always the same blackness as of night; the same horror of sound, of scent, of cold; the same misery; the same torture. I suppose that the sun was quenched, that the birds were dumb, that the winds were stilled forever—that all the world was dead; I do not know. They called it War. I suppose that they meant—Hell!
Yet Lili lived, and I; in that dead darkness we had lost René—we saw his face no more. Yet he could not be in his grave, I knew, for Lili, clasping my barren branches to her breast, would murmur: “Whilst he still lives I will live—yes, yes, yes!”
And she did live—so long, so long!—on a few draughts of water and a few husks of grain.
I knew that it was long, for full a hundred times she muttered aloud: “Another day? O God!—how long? how long?”
At last in the darkness a human hand was stretched to her, once, close beside me. A foul, fierce light, the light of flame, was somewhere on the air about us, and that moment glowed through the horrid gloom we dwelt in in the bowels of the earth. I saw the hand and what it held to her; it was a stranger’s, and it held the little colorless dead rose, my sweetest blossom, that had lain ever upon René’s heart.