Never had they experienced such emotions in Paris, where they thought themselves nearer the war because of the number of kilometres between them and the front, or because they heard men deemed well informed telling contradictory news from morning to night. Here in this remote and quiet corner they had now touched the very relics of the hecatomb. The eyes alone tell the truth; words are a small matter.
Amelia could not remain still; she ran to the hospital after the procession. Never in her life had she seen anything so exciting.
On her return she said that she could hardly recognize the entrance of the Grand Hotel, whither she had gone a few months before to carry notes from Monsieur or Madame to M. X or M. Y who were dead now, like Monsieur.
She brought back much information. The wounded who came that morning were from the Department of the North, where a frightful battle had been raging for weeks. "Some of them talk, madame; some of them say nothing; their eyes break your heart, like poor, sick dogs that glance at you as if ashamed and pretend to be asleep." "I could see from where I was," she went on after a little, "the surgeon as he appeared to be, all in white, with a cap like a cook and bare arms; he received them at the door and sorted them out, sending them up-stairs, down-stairs, to the right, the left, pestered by the nurses, who begged for them."
But Odette had not seen them entering the hospital, and this did not interest her. She was pursuing her own thoughts.
"There was one in the procession," she said, "one that was lying down, who was so pale, poor boy! He will not go far."
She had vowed to herself that she would not go out; she would remain with her grief the whole day, the whole week. But immediately after luncheon she put on her hat and went to wander around the hospital.
A hedge separated the street from the great court in which there was still a circular clump of trees surrounded with withered summer flowers; opposite, above another hedge, the vines in a charming flower-garden were reddening on the pergolas. Everything bore the impress of a time of display and enjoyment, and she felt that decorations like these were henceforth antiquated, absurd.
Odette knew already, through Amelia, the disposition of each part of the hospital, whose interior hum she could hear from without. She knew that one flight up, at the first turn, were the typhoids, nursed by a Sister who for twelve years past, wherever she might be sent, had done nothing else than care for typhoids, and go to the nearest church to put up a little prayer. She knew the situation of the staircase leading to the basements, where the food was brought in and the dead carried out. She knew that at a corner of the building looking upon the sea was the operating-theatre, visible from without. And in fact, passing by it, she perceived a group of white-robed men and women, their sleeves turned back, leaning over something or some one. Then she fled toward the sea like a coward and was ashamed. In reality, this assemblage of suffering creatures at once repelled and attracted her, producing a complex sentiment, unfamiliar and incongruous.
From afar she looked at the building and its surroundings. At the sight of this countryside, these villas, these hotels, the memory of the past summer overpowered her, and at the same time she experienced a cruel dispelling of her memories of the past summer. Meanwhile she stood there as if hypnotized by the great house of suffering. On the ground floor, through the glazed verandas she discerned a constant coming and going of white caps. And she thought of the labors which those hundred and fifty new arrivals of the morning must necessitate. She was seized with timidity at the thought of approaching this august place. Before it she seemed to herself a profane person, idle, gloved, parasol in hand, her one interest her personal grief.