Nor could she again go in the evening, at nightfall, to the edge of the sea, where in each vague shadow she would have thought she saw the shadow of Jean. They used to love to wander there in the warm obscurity of August. The long-drawn moan of the sea was to them a cradle-song composed by a musician of genius. No doubt Odette used to see in those days fewer large waves than to-day; but in those days all things blended with her love and seemed marvellous to her. Sometimes Jean, who had his boyish ways, would amuse himself by leaving her, suddenly disappearing from her eyes in the darkness. She would call him in an anxious voice, "Jean!" And she would always recognize his shadow as he drew near by his extending his arms in the form of a cross, and throwing them around her, to press her to him the moment he met her. In those days they would hear afar off the music of the violins, and would see above the dune the dark villas and the illuminated hotels. Now she knew that in those hotels were lying a thousand men swathed in bandages, poisoned by pus and gangrene, and the sea was holding up a long chaplet of buoys from which were hanging nets to ward off submarines. How could she go back there?
The summer wore away in a manner almost satisfactory, and with great hopes in the military operations. A wave of optimism passed over the country. Rumanian colors were floated from the town-hall; the battle of the Somme had freed Verdun and was itself beginning to slacken. In the beginning of October the wounded in the hospital were almost few. Odette, with too little to do, reduced to solitude, began to droop. She found the conversation of Mme. de Calouas very fine, but it did not touch her. Why not?
She would have her lay aside her mourning—the two years being now a long month over past. Other widows had almost joyfully put off their crape in the late summer heat. Odette considered it a profanation. "Time was passing." No doubt it was. It was long—without measure long. But to her Jean had died yesterday, nothing in her feelings had been changed by what she had seen. She thought of all those bodily wounds which she had dressed with her own hands, and which had healed. The great wound within herself remained open. At times she would forget the war, the sorrows of which at other times would crush her, and think only of the beloved being to whom she was bound for eternity.
One afternoon she dragged herself, on foot and alone, along the road to Saint-Gingolph, between the brook, the fields, and the hillock that separates two valleys. The weather was fine, underfoot were leaves of plane-trees, some decaying, others rolling along the ground, driven by the autumn wind. She had not the courage to go to the farm; the orchard came down to the roadside. She sat down upon the grass of the ditch and reflected that this was the third autumn that she had been there, since the war! She recalled to mind the first one, when people were beginning to find the hostilities very long; when every evening, passing by the post-office, one hoped to read the news of some event which would bring about its sudden end. She thought of the little soldiers whom she used to follow to the cemetery, and of whom every one insisted upon thinking: "He is the last one!"
Before her, on the crest of the hillock, like a fantastic screen whose edge has been clumsily cut by a child, a long avenue of very ancient elms broke in upon the view. They bore scattered clusters of foliage, still golden; a dense cloud of crows rose up and lighted with sinister croakings upon their ragged tops. These birds with their lugubrious cries seemed about to give battle for the possession of a notable charnel-house. And suddenly they plunged into the branches and disappeared, and nothing remained of them but the wound inflicted by the rasping voices upon the motionless air. Then the black cloud uprose again, as if the avenue of old elms, mown down at the roots by shells, had upheaved itself before its final downfall. It seemed as if the heart of the hillock were painfully throbbing. The raucous croaking of these thousands of birds grated upon her nerves and aroused all her powers of mournful revery.
Odette resumed her walk back to the town. Evening was falling. Lush meadows along the brookside, a gray steeple almost hidden in foliage of rose ochre, the racecourse—relic of a brilliant worldliness—two or three pretty villas, whose reddening hopvines were flaunting themselves derisively before closed windows, reminded her too painfully of a past era—a lost paradise. Among the persons whom she met, already half hidden in the shadow, some were laughing. Then people could laugh? Why, yes! Life, diverse as it is, has ever its source in the waters of a Fountain of Youth.
The darkness and the croakings of the crows haunted her. When she reached the cottage she threw herself upon a divan, and remained there, overcome, until Amelia came to call her to her solitary dinner.
The evening mail brought her tidings of the death of the last de Blauve boy, who had voluntarily gone to the firing-line in advance of those of his age, and had been killed outright in the very hour when he first set foot in the trench. Almost mechanically, and as a daily duty, she read two newspapers, line by line. She seemed to feel a great inward emptiness; she felt herself going to pieces. She must make a change, at whatever cost. There was just now no necessity for her presence in the hospital. She resolved to return to Paris, without other reason than the impossibility of remaining in Surville. How many feverish changes she had made, since the beginning of this war, with no more serious motive than this!
[XX]
Arrived in Paris, she went at once to see Mme. de Blauve. This woman, who had lost a much-loved husband and two sons hardly old enough to be soldiers, was not weeping, was not feeling dull, had no hard words to say about the war. She gave full evidence of tenderness toward her family, but, above all, she knew how to live, and that, in a time of war, means total forgetfulness of self and of all whom one loves. She was not sending her daughters into the hospitals, where they were not needed; she had herself given up her work as nurse, in order to give special attention to preparing them for marriage.