Part 5

“I am a dealer in _objets d’art_,” he told me. “It’s a profitable business when one understands it. I trade mostly in candelabras and chandeliers. I work with Cohen and Co., with Marguillé, with Smithson, with all the great houses. Now, I have my own special way of working: I keep my client to myself, and I undertake to make him understand what he wants and to deliver the goods.

“Suppose that a M. Barnabé comes and asks me for a drawing-room chandelier. I say, ‘Right! I see what you want’; and I jump into a taxi. I get to Messrs. Cohen’s. ‘It’s 25 per cent. commission. Is that understood?’ Let us imagine that Cohen makes difficulties. Right! I run downstairs, jump into the taxi again, and go to Smithson’s.... Certainly it can be an expensive game. Supposing that Barnabé goes back on me--well, then, I am left with the taxi to pay for.... But it’s interesting! It’s a trade that keeps you going; it amuses you; you need to have discrimination.”

Looking at the animated face of Cousin, I smiled. His cheeks were like imitation marble, not very good; he had the swollen eyes of a man who had lain too long in bed with fever, and whose “inside” was not very healthy. At forty one may feel one’s heart young, but one’s flesh does not react from the effects of a torpedo as it does at twenty. I looked at the legless Cousin with astonishment while he explained to me how, in his trade, one rushed upstairs at Cohen’s; how one jumped about at Marguillé’s; how one ran down Smithson’s stairs.

A day came when Cousin’s leg began to bleed. The blood filtered through the bandage in great drops, like scarlet sweat, or like morning dew on the leaves of a cabbage. During four or five days Cousin’s wound bled nearly every day. Every time he was carried away in haste; they put all sorts of things into his wound, and the blood ceased to flow. Every time Cousin came back to his bed a little paler, and he said to me as he passed:

“There, you see ... one never gets any peace.”

One morning I went to sit beside Cousin, who was making his toilette. He was out of breath. In spite of the puffiness of his face, one felt it had grown thin, formless, devoured by an internal malady. Really, it reminded one of a fruit rotten with vermin.

“I have,” he told me, “good news of my boys--twelve and thirteen years old. They’re getting on! Didn’t I tell you? I am thinking of taking on, as well as the candelabras, clocks and chimneypieces. With the connection that I have, I mean to do great things. One must always aim high. _Dame!_ I shall have to get a move on. But I’ll manage, I’ll manage. What one needs is to know the styles....”

I tried to smile, without being able to control a contraction of the heart. Cousin seemed uplifted by a sort of lyrical ecstasy. He brandished his towel in one hand, and his soap in the other. He described his great future career as if he saw it spread out, written in big letters on the whiteness of the sheets.

On the sheet, which I was just looking at, there appeared suddenly a blot--a red blot which enlarged itself rapidly into a terrifying and splendid stain.

“Oh, dear!” murmured Cousin, “it’s bleeding again. One never gets any peace.”

I had called for help. A waterproof sheet was folded round Cousin’s thigh.

He said, “It’s all right; it’s all right. No need to worry.”

He said this in a voice that was emphatic but very weak--a voice made with the lips alone.

The blood ceased to flow, and they carried Cousin once again to the operating-table. There, he had a moment’s peace. The surgeons were washing their hands. I heard them consulting in low voices on Cousin’s case, and this made my heart beat and dried the tongue in my mouth.

Cousin saw me a long way off, and made me a little sign with his eyelids. I came close to him. He said to me:

“One never gets any peace. Ah! what was it I was saying to you? Yes, I was talking to you about styles. My strong point is that I understand the different styles--the Louis XV, the Empire, the Dutch, the Modern, and all the others. But it’s difficult. I want to explain to you----”

“Go to sleep, Cousin,” said the surgeon softly.

“I will explain all that to you when these gentlemen have done with me, when I wake up.”

Then, submissively, he began to breathe in the ether.

* * * * *

It is now a year since all this happened. I often think of the explanations that Cousin never gave me--that he will never give me.

THE LADY IN GREEN

I do not know why I loved Rabot. Every morning as I went to and fro at my usual work in the ward, I saw Rabot, or rather Rabot’s head, or less still Rabot’s eye, hiding in a hurly-burly of sheets. He was a little like a guinea-pig that rubs its nose in the straw and watches you anxiously.

Every time I passed I made a familiar sign to Rabot. This sign consisted in shutting the left eye energetically and pressing the lips together. At once Rabot’s eye shut itself, digging a thousand little wrinkles in the withered face of the sick man. And that was all; we had exchanged our salutations and our confidences.

Rabot never laughed. He had spent his babyhood in a foundling hospital and had not had enough milk. This under-feeding in infancy can never be made up for afterwards.

Rabot was sandy-haired, with a pale complexion splashed with freckles. He had so little brain that he looked like a rabbit or a bird. Directly a stranger spoke to him his underlip began to tremble and his chin wrinkled all over like a walnut. You had first of all to explain to him that you were not going to beat him.

Poor Rabot! I would have given anything to see him laugh. Everything, on the contrary, seemed to conspire to make him cry: there were the terrible endless dressings that had to be renewed every day for months; then he was compelled to lie so quiet and motionless that he was never able to play with his comrades. And after all, the fact remained that Rabot had never learned to play at all, and really was not much interested in anything.

I was, I think, the only one who became at all intimate with him; and, as I said before, this intimacy consisted chiefly in shutting my left eye when I passed near his bed.

Rabot did not smoke. When cigarettes were handed round he would join in with the others and play with them for a moment, moving his great thin fingers, deformed and emaciated. Long illness seems to rob the fingers of manual labourers of all beauty and significance: directly they lose their hardness and their healthy appearance they look like nothing at all in the world.

I think that Rabot would have willingly offered his good cigarettes to his neighbours; but it is so difficult to talk sometimes, especially to give something to some one. The cigarettes got slowly covered with dust on the table, and Rabot lay flat on his back, quite thin and straight, like a bit of straw carried away by the torrent of war, and understanding nothing of what was happening all around him.

One day a staff officer came into the ward and went up to Rabot.

“That is the man,” he said. “Well, I have brought him the Military Medal and the Croix de Guerre.”

He made Rabot sign a little paper and left him alone with his playthings. Rabot did not laugh. He put the case out on the bedclothes in front of him, and he looked at it from nine o’clock in the morning till three in the afternoon.

At three the officer returned, and said:

“I made a mistake. The decorations were not for Rabot, but for Raboux.”

Then he took the jewel-case, tore up the receipt, and went away.

Rabot cried from three o’clock in the afternoon till nine o’clock in the evening. Then he went to sleep. The next morning he began to cry again. M. Gossin, who is a good Director, went to Headquarters and came back with a medal and a cross just like the last; he even made Rabot sign another paper.

Rabot stopped crying. But his face was still haunted by a shadow--the shadow of a constant dread, as if he feared that one day or other they would come and take away all his treasures.

Some weeks passed. I often looked at Rabot’s face, and I tried to imagine what laughter would make of it. I imagined and looked in vain; it was obvious that Rabot did not know how to laugh, and that his face was not made that way.

It was then that the lady in green arrived.

She came in one fine morning through one of the doors, like everybody else. On the other hand, she was not like everybody else: she was more like an angel, a queen, or a doll. She was not dressed like the nurses who worked in the wards, or like the mothers and wives who came to visit their wounded husbands and sons. She was not even like the women one meets in the streets. She was much more beautiful, much more majestic. She made one think of the fairies of one’s childhood, or of those splendid forms one sees on great coloured calendars under which the artist has written “Reveries,” or “Melancholy,” or “Poetry.” She was surrounded by well-dressed, good-looking officers, who attended to her slightest word, and who lavished on her the most extravagant compliments.

“Come in, then, Madame,” said one of them, “since you wish to see some of our wounded.”...

She made two steps into the room, stopped short, and said in a deep voice:

“The poor things!”

Every one in the ward opened his eyes and pricked up his ears. Mery put down his pipe; Tarrissant changed his crutches from one hand to the other, which, with him, is a sign of emotion; Domenge and Burnier stopped playing and pressed their cards against their bodies to hide them. Poupot did not move, because he is paralysed, but one could easily see that he was listening with all his might.

The lady in green went first to Sorri, the negro.

“Your name is Sorri?” she asked, reading his card.

The negro moved his head; the lady in green went on in a voice as sweet and melodious as an actress:

“You have come to fight for France, Sorri; and you have left your beautiful country--the fresh and smiling oasis in an ocean of burning sand. Ah, Sorri! how beautiful are the African evenings, at the hour when the young woman returns along the avenue of palm trees, carrying on her head an aromatic pitcher full of honey and cocoanut milk!”

The officers murmured their appreciation, and Sorri, who understands French, repeated, nodding his head, “Cocoa! cocoa!”

Already the lady in green was gliding away over the tiled floor. She came to Rabot, and sat down on the end of his bed, like a swallow on a telegraph wire.

“Rabot,” she said, “you are a brave man!”

Rabot did not answer; but in his usual way he blinked his eyes, like a child who fears a blow.

“Ah, Rabot!” said the lady in green, “what gratitude do we not owe you, who have guarded safely for us our dear France! But, Rabot, you have already gained the great reward. Glory! The joy of battle! The exquisite agony of plunging forward, your bayonet shining in the sun! The pleasure of plunging the iron of vengeance into the bleeding side of the enemy! And then the suffering--divine suffering to be endured for the sake of all; the sacred wound which, of a hero, makes a god! Ah! wonderful memories, Rabot!”

The lady in green ceased, and a religious silence reigned in the ward.

Then something unexpected happened.

Rabot stopped looking like himself. All his features contracted, changing in an almost tragic way. A hoarse noise burst forth in spasms from his fleshless chest, and all the world realised that Rabot was laughing.

He laughed for over three-quarters of an hour. Long after the lady in green had gone, Rabot was still laughing--in fits, as one coughs, with a rattling noise.

After that the life of Rabot changed a little. When he was on the verge of tears and misery one could sometimes distract his attention and get a little laugh out of him if one said at the right moment:

“Rabot! they are going to bring the lady in green to see you.”

IN THE VINEYARD

Between Epernay and Château-Thierry, the Marne flows through an exquisite valley, whose gay hills are rich in orchards and vine plantations, and crowned with verdure like woodland goddesses, and abundantly adorned with those plants which have made France a country without price, beautiful and noble.

It is the valley of rest. Jaulgonne, Dormans, Châtillons, Œuilly, Port-à-Binson--those old smiling villages can never be repaid for lavishing such hours of forgetful repose, that refresh like spring water, on the exhausted troops leaving Verdun for the once quiet sectors of the Aisne.

During the summer of 1916 the ---- Corps was once again concentrated on the Marne, ready to take its share in the immense and bloody sacrifice on the Somme front. Our battalion was patiently waiting the word which would send them up the line; as they waited, they passed the time in calculating, from the top of the hills, the number of waggons that could be seen struggling along far down in the valley, and as usual they made all sorts of conjectures.

Most of the time we passed in the fields with our friends, avoiding serious thought as much as possible, and letting the body enjoy to the full the repose which offered itself far from the murderous struggles on the front.

There had been a few days of dazzling heat, then the storm had come with a thundering sky, the clouds wildly charging, and a wide sweeping wind carrying along with it the dust or the mist.

Late one afternoon we happened to be on the road which rises gently from Chavenay to the copses of the south.

There were three of us. Conversation flagged, and, imperceptibly, we had each fallen back on our secret thoughts--thoughts that were full of pain, and which the climbing road seemed to make harder to bear.

“Let’s sit down on this bank,” said a voice softly.

Without replying, we found ourselves all at once lying in the silver-weed. We tore it up abstractedly, like men who are obliged to work their muscles in order to think more freely.

A little grape-vine was growing at our feet and reached, with two graceful efforts, a ridge of earth gleaming with the freshness of wet grass. It was a neat, pure little vine of Champagne, bursting with juice, cared for like a divine and sacred thing. No wild plants; nothing but the stubbly vine-stock and the soil--that rich soil which the rains wash away and which, each season, the peasants carry up again, on their backs, right to the summit of the hills.

From amid this blend of green herbage we saw suddenly emerging an old thin woman, with a rusty complexion and hair white and disordered. In one hand she held a pail full of ashes, and with the other scattered handfuls of it on the feet of the vines.

On seeing us, she stopped, and adjusted with a dusty finger a coil of hair blown about by the wind. She stared at us. Then she spoke:

“What’s your regiment, you others?”

“The 110th line, Madame.”

“Mine did not belong to that regiment.”

“You have boys in the army?”

“Ah! I had once.”

There was silence, broken by the cry of animals, the gusts of the high wind, and the hissing murmur of the shaken foliage. The old woman scattered a few handfuls of the ashes, and then came near and began in a stumbling voice that often lost itself in the wind:

“I once had boys in the army. Now I have none. The two youngest are dead. I have one remaining--a poor wretch, who is hardly a soldier now.”

“He is wounded, perhaps?”

“Yes, he is wounded. He has lost both arms.”

The old woman put her bucket of ashes on the ground, removed some grass from her waist-belt and tied a wayward vine branch to a supporting stick, and, standing erect again, she exclaimed:

“He has been wounded as few have been. He has lost his two arms, and in his thigh there is a hole big enough to contain a small bowl of milk. For ten days he was on the verge of death. I went to see him, and I said to him:

“‘Clovis, you are not going to leave me all alone?’--for I must tell you they had been for a long while without a father.

“And he always used to reply:

“‘I’ll be better to-morrow.’

“No one was gentler than this boy.”

We remained silent. One of us at length murmured:

“Your boy is brave, Madame!”

The old woman, who was looking at her grape-vine, turned her dim eyes towards us and said in an abrupt tone:

“Brave! of course! My boys could not be anything else!”

A laugh escaped her--a laugh almost of pride, a strangled laugh that lost itself at once in the wind. Then she appeared to talk absently:

“My poor unfortunate son will some day be able to look forward to marriage, for there is no one so gentle as he is. But my two youngest, my two little ones! It’s too much! Oh, God, it’s too much!”

We could find nothing to say. There was nothing to say. With hair flying in the wind, she began again to scatter the ashes, like a sower of death. Her lips were compressed, and in her face there was a mixture of despair, bewilderment and defiance.

“What are you doing this for, Madame?” I asked, somewhat at random.

“You see, I’m mixing the ashes with the sulphate. It’s the season. I shall never finish: I’ve too much to do, too much to do.”

We had got up, as if we felt ashamed of disturbing this tireless worker in her task. Moved by a common impulse, we took off our hats to her.

“Good-night,” she said, “and good luck, too, you others.”

We climbed up the hill to the very edge of the wood without saying a word. Then we turned round and had a last look at the valley.

There on the hillside, in a mosaic of plots, as it were, the vine plantation could be seen, with the old woman, ever so small, who was still sowing the ashes in the wind heavy with rain clouds. The gentle country maintained in face of the stormy heavens an attitude of innocence and resignation. Here and there, humble villages that glistened seemed to be set like coloured jewels in the earth. And right in the fields that were dressed for the needs of August, small specks that moved could be seen: a race of old men were at grips with the soil.

THE RAILWAY JUNCTION

To die is simple enough; only you should have the good taste to die in some selected spot--unless, of course, you are in China, where the dead are supreme and exercise almost more authority than the living. But in our country you have got to die properly, otherwise the living will look askance at you and say, “What does this corpse want? There’s no room for it here.”

In 1915 I was going through a kind of probation period at the railway junction of X., and I went on duty two or three times a week. Going on duty meant being on the spot and doing small insignificant jobs, being on guard or making a note of what was passing. Usually the man in charge used to be found in some gloomy place leading to the lamp-room. There he endured the long weary hours without interruption, and watched the military trains passing, full of men who had undergone six months’ campaigning. They sang while they journeyed from one hell to another, because in war men do not let their thoughts travel far; as soon as they have got away from the guns they abandon themselves without restraint to the joy of being alive.

One Saturday night I was lying on a thick mattress which served as a bed. It was alive with mice. I felt these amiable little beasts at a finger’s length from my ears, and I listened with wandering attention to the noises coming from the junction. They were the sounds of a great railway station: whistles, shrieks, puffing engines, cries of the winches and the cranes, the vibrations of the taut iron rails, the sharp clatter of the signals, the repeated clash of the buffers of colliding trucks; and in the midst of it all, the clamour and the rhythm of military movements, the swing of a detachment on the march, the challenges of the sentries, commands, bell-ringings--all those things which indicate the forcible possession by armed might of the industrial organism.

My thoughts were running along these lines when I saw Corporal Bonardent entering my dug-out, blinding me with the flare of his acetylene lamp.

“Lieutenant!”

“I’m all attention, Bonardent.”

“Some poor devil in the food transport has just got himself done in, on the semi-permanent way 17. I’m told it’s a dreadful----”

“Let’s go there at once, Corporal!”

Two men were waiting for me outside with a stretcher. It was a glorious night, upon which the pale and flickering lights of the station hardly made an impression.

“It’s at La Folie,” said Bonardent: “it’s rather far from here.”

La Folie is a road-crossing, about a mile off. I asked a porter how to get there, and we started.

What is really amazing, in a large station, is that the organising imperative will which directs the rush of moving things lies hidden behind an apparent state of chaos and entanglement. We began to walk along lines of trucks that never ended. They seemed to have been left there and forgotten since the beginning of the war--rolling-stock that appeared to have had its day, with stiffened axles and couplings devoured by rust; but suddenly our lamp would light up an open door, and some soldiers were seen in a heap, sleeping on the straw, or there were cattle with stupefied looks. A few compartments had been turned into travelling offices, where clerks drudged through a mass of papers in a light reflected from a drawing-room lamp-shade; one felt that the terrible grasp of the administration had closed over the railways, just as its monstrous grip was in possession from the deep-dug trenches to the outfitting shops far away in the Pyrenees. Sometimes, crossing wide, dark spaces, we slipped between two trains that seemed petrified with eternal sleep; but all at once, though no one could be seen, the trains began to move towards each other, their ends clashing with a terrific clatter. Farther on we had to stop while hospital trains were passing. They afforded little comfort then, and there came to us, as the trains went by, a broadside of heart-rending coughs and puffs of the saturated chloride air with which the hospitals reeked. In addition, there were masses of fat mortars lashed on trucks, heaps of kitchens on wheels, and machinery whose uses one could not possibly guess, and all sorts of munitions of war, which night made fantastic. Heavy circular armour protected the cowering engines snorting in the pale light of the arc lamps. There were also, reminding one of former times, suburban trains that bore along drowsy passengers and express trains that swept over the intricate lines swift as a lash of the whip. In a word, a tumultuous roar, in which military movements clashed with the routine of civilian life.

At last we arrived at La Folie. It was an inextricable network of railways, discs, switches and metal cables. Three aged railway workers were living there in a shed. They were in shirt sleeves, and were turning the cranks, pulling the switches, directing with an orderly calm born of experience all the whirling forces which accumulated in that spot. They made me think of the foremen in past times who used to carry on when the managing directors were indulging in the pleasures of social life.

Above the rumbling noises a telegraph bell could be heard patiently ringing.

“We have come for the A.S.C. man,” said Bonardent.

“Oh! for that poor devil. He is there, under the sack and all around. My God!”

We entered the zone occupied by the corpse. I say “zone” deliberately, for the poor wretch had been cut up and scattered like a handful of grain at seed-time.

“God in Heaven!” said a railwayman with white hair; “why did the poor man come off the truck without looking round first? He made a terrible mistake. Here there is too much traffic for anyone to leave one’s post.”

The face of the dead man was intact, but sixty trucks had passed over his body, splitting it diagonally from the feet to the shoulders. We picked up, in one place and another, the remains--bleeding pieces of flesh, intestines, and, as I well remember, a hand clutching a piece of cheese. Death had struck the man as he was eating.