The first two days of Odette's grief were as nothing in comparison with those that followed. She uttered no sound except to moan; she fell into delirious slumbers, had hours of furious insomnia, nightmares, hallucinations, attacks of hysterics. At last came the period of confidences, with torrents of tears.
Among Odette's friends, some had not been pleased because they had not been admitted to her room the first day; others were forgetting everything in their dominant desire to obtain a place as nurse in a hospital. Some of these, having succeeded in compassing their wishes, came at last, and were not denied entrance to the sick-room, by reason of the costume that they wore. At first it seemed as if they might harm Odette by the lamentable scenes which they described. These nurses delighted in employing new, technical words, which they had taken pains to learn by heart, like so many schoolgirls. But Odette would murmur: "All your unhappy ones, with their surgical operations—they are alive, after all." And she would think to herself: "Mine is dead." What answer could be made to that?
Odette received heaps of letters, whose eloquence overwhelmed without touching her. She deemed all their expressions exaggerated, and yet she could not say that they rang false; they spoke of France, of glory and honor; hardly did they make allusion to her love, which to her was all.
She was beginning to get up, to come and go about her apartment. It made things worse. Every place, every article, reminded her of Jean. He used to sit in that chair; he had loved to play with that little ornament. Before his photographs, in the drawing-room, she succumbed once more. Here he was in tennis-costume, so graceful, so lithe, so beautiful; there in house dress, that velvet jacket that she had so often encircled with her arms. She would walk through the rooms trying to breathe the faint odors of a perfume which he might have left there. She would sink down upon the divan where once there had been room for him.... And she started with a sudden thrill when the shadow of Amelia formed a halo-surrounded image against the fixed curtain of the glass door. In the old days, when he came in, a great shadow would spread thus behind the yellow silk, and suddenly his tall form would rise above the curtain, and his kind smile would appear through the glass.... Then she would listen for the sound of a key in the door. No one would ever again enter that door by means of a key....
As she was opening, in a drawer, the box of his favorite cigars and would fain have lost herself in the odor which brought before her the image of her man, a telegram was brought to her. She tore it open mechanically, all news being indifferent to her. It was from Mlle. de Blauve, a girl of fourteen, and announced that her father, Commandant de Blauve, had died upon the field of honor. Her mother had been for the last few days a nurse at Rheims, her natal city, under bombardment. The three little De Blauve girls were alone at home with the governess, the two older brothers being in Jersey at school.
For the first time since her bereavement Odette was obliged to think of others. She closed the box of cigars, and thought of that house in the Avenue d'Iena that she knew so well, of those charming little girls, henceforth orphaned, the eldest of whom was so calmly acquitting herself of the duties of courtesy.
"I must go there," she said, and called her maid to dress her. Her mourning dress had been brought home the day before yesterday, but she had not so much as tried it on. Now for the first time she put on her clothes without a thought of her appearance. She took a carriage and went to the Avenue d'Iena.
[III]
She was expecting to find consternation in a family crushed by their fate, and during the drive she reflected with astonishment that it was not altogether painful to her to visit people in grief; in her inmost heart she would rather meet the little de Blauve girls mourning, unhappy, than her consolatory friends, overflowing with kind and beautiful words, but not personally sorrowing. "It is not the sight of happiness that consoles us in our sorrows," she said to herself, "but to come into touch with a grief that is like our own."
The little de Blauves were not yet in black. The eldest wept a little when Odette kissed her with flowing tears—for Odette was thinking of her own grief—but the little girls were not at all prostrated, and there was even something radiant in their expression.