"Yes indeed, yes indeed, I will come."
[XXV]
Once at home, Odette thought more about Clotilde's conversation than about the coming meeting with the blinded man, which she dreaded. On the other side of the thin partition of her little drawing-room, her neighbor, the musician, who was sometimes reinforced by a 'cellist, was filling all space with enamoured, passionate, and agitating sounds, enough to rend the heart. Love, love, everywhere and always love! For the first time in her life Odette, who adored love, who but now had been delighting in talking freely of love, who even admitted the justice of some of Clotilde's assertions on the superlatively beneficent office of love, Odette felt that in thinking of love and talking of love with her friend she had lost tone, and now she had only one thought, heard only the one voice from beyond the tomb. "When I am talking with my friend," she said to herself, "I seem to be taking part in what is said, or is laughed at; yes, but I take part in it like the dead to whom it is given to perceive earthly things once more. The war, when it robbed me of my Jean, crushed the vitality of my body. My heart has become forever insensible. I am carried along in the whirlwind of present events like the threshed straw which might float above the standing harvest, thinking to recognize in it stalks like itself, without realizing that the iron has cut it off, separated it forever from the earth."
The moaning of the violoncello, the influence of the music, gave a sort of lyric inclination to her usually modest thought and contributed to increase her agitation.
"The times are so hard," she continued, "that I have not had, for two years, the slight consolation of talking with any one of my love-sorrow. I could hope to do so with one alone, because her love is, so to speak, apart from the war. But when she speaks to me of love I perceive that her idea of love is not mine, or is no longer mine. The love that I bear within me is no longer accessible to any human creature!"
The musician in the next room took up, as usual, her favorite Nocturne, accompanying it with her voice, wordlessly, until the grand, inspired utterance of desolation, thrice repeated, enwrapped the hearer like the long dark locks of night itself.
Then Odette, solitary amidst the pictures of her well-beloved, fell into a long fit of weeping, as she had so often done before.
[XXVI]
She found Clotilde alone next day at the lunch-hour, her husband being almost always late, especially when he had to go to fetch the blinded man. At last she recognized the voice of the handsome George in the anteroom, and saw him pushing before him, as a ventriloquist guides his automaton, a tall young man, neither handsome nor plain, in the uniform of a captain of light infantry, and with closed eyes. The blinded man bowed, and clasped the hand that Clotilde laid within his own; George explained to him that one of their friends was with them, a young war-widow, Mme. Jacquelin. The blind man also pressed the hand that Odette extended to him.
He already knew the apartment with minute exactness. He walked to the table without aid, almost without feeling his way; and recognized each flower by its perfume; they directed his fingers to the primroses which have no perfume, and one would have said that his eager fingers recognized the table decorations as strange little mute personages. After a brief touch he knew the precise situation of each object; with the blade of his knife he recognized the nature of the food on his plate, and cut it adroitly. Possibly he might have been able to help himself, like others, from the dish presented by the servant, but he was spared the necessity of this feat by the question: "What do you prefer, captain?"