Read Ebook: You no longer count (Tu n'es plus rien!) by Boylesve Ren Houghton Louise Seymour Translator

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Ebook has 693 lines and 49376 words, and 14 pages

The weather had been ideally fine, though there had been a suggestion of thunderstorms in the west. Children were playing on the beach; the sea, under a cloudless sky, was calm even to torpor. One could see Havre stretched along in the sunlight, like a greyhound panting with heat; in the distance were noble passenger-ships, and tiny sails apparently motionless. Never had the sky, the sea, the land, appeared so much to long for peace; never, perhaps, had the joy of existence been more imperious. Whatever might be the subjects of alarm, everything cried aloud that to believe in coming misfortune was impossible.

The next day, Saturday, August I, Odette, distressed by vague talk that gave no definite information, had gone to the post with a letter to her dear Jean. She had addressed it to Paris, since she had no knowledge where to reach him. It was about four o'clock. She had seen a group forming before the mayor's office, and the town drummer arriving, with a long retinue of street urchins at his heels. The drummer was a tall youth, lean and wan, grave with a gravity not usual in a town drummer who has to announce that a little, long-haired, bright-gray dog is lost. The crowd had gathered around him with frantic eagerness, while he executed his preliminary performance. Then, drawing a paper from his pocket, he had unfolded it and read at the top of his voice, without the slightest change of countenance:

"General mobilization is declared! The first day of mobilization is Sunday, August 2. No man may set out without first consulting the bill which will be immediately posted." And the drummer had beaten the ban.

It had seemed a perfectly simple event, something almost usual, at the junction of these four streets of the little town. A deed done; the pattering of dispersing feet; silence! And this simple act, repeated hundreds of thousands of times at this same hour, was the most tragic alarm-cry in the history of man, reverberating at the same moment of time over all the terrestrial globe. Little noise, almost no words, and all these men, raising their hats to pronounce a word suddenly become sacred, had made the sacrifice of their lives. Imagination loses itself in picturing the multitude of points upon this earth on which a like gift of self had just been made. For if the man who goes hopes to be spared, he who learns that he is called to go, for the moment gives himself, body and soul.

At first Odette had felt oppressed and wept like a nervous child who hears a sudden alarm. She had been unable, for her tears, to see the letter-box into which she dropped that letter to Jean which no longer signified anything and would doubtless never reach him to whom it was addressed. And all around her, at the doors, in the streets, on the beach, at the hotel, women had been weeping.

Odette had gone up to her room. She had said to her maid:

"What about you, Amelia?"

"Go, Amelia."

She had seated herself at the window that looked out upon the flower-garden, the deserted tennis-courts, the sea. She was alone. There was nothing for her to do but think and wait.

And for all that, deep down, very deep within herself, she had not at all believed in the horror that had come.

She had remained sitting there, at her window, until the hour for dinner, living over her past life with Jean--thrilling with his first caresses. She had never loved any one but Jean before her marriage; since her marriage, only him. It was no longer the war which seemed to her unimaginable, but the power of her love for Jean. And instead of imagining chaos, her natural inclination had impelled her to summon up the loveliest pictures of the past. She had smiled, her body had relaxed, her fingers had quivered as if in anticipation of a caress, and in the empty air her lips had made the motion of a kiss.

A man's voice on the balcony next her own had said:

"It is absurd to think of nature as taking note of our affairs; but just for curiosity look at that sky: I have never seen anything like it."

The words had been spoken to some one in the next room, who drew near to the window, and she had heard a woman's voice exclaiming, with a moan or in desperate appeal, such as one seldom hears.

Odette had risen, and she too had looked out. She had never been superstitious, and was especially not inclined to doleful prognostications. She had always been happy; her life had flowed along, so to speak, like one continued festival. Being alone in her room, she did not speak; but all her flesh quivered.

It may well be that similar phenomena occur sometimes without attracting our attention; yet, on that day, to three persons occupying neighboring rooms in a hotel, to others also, who had spoken of it at dinner or in the evening, that sunset appeared utterly unusual, and such as might justify all gossiping conjectures as to the relations of the earth with the marvellous changes, stupendous in their nature, which take place in the vault of heaven. Above the quiet sea the whole horizon was a fiery furnace, blazing with intense fervency, across which were spread, like fragments of slashed flesh, long clouds of a livid bluish red. Before long the intense fire died down, as if all the combustible matter had been devoured by the fury of the flames. Then the disk of the sun appeared in outline, like a gigantic blood-blister, like a crystal bowl so overful that the viscous liquid was escaping by some fissure and spreading to right and left into a marsh, a lake, an ocean of human serum, flowing in every direction toward rivers with contracted banks, which upheaved against it a formidable tide. Suddenly the sinister blister burst of itself and was absorbed in the mass of burning matter, or of thick waters, heavy and foul, and became thin streams like those that trickle from a slaughter-house.

No, truly, it was no vertigo of the imagination, no hallucination of the vision, no compliant romance; it was a real picture, symbolic of aspect, preceding, like an inadequate vignette, the flaming pages of the great book of history that had just been opened.

In Odette's soul it had been like a curtain that falls before a new act; once the curtain is raised, one's expectation is fixed; no more light comedy, no more pleasant extravaganzas, no more ballet! The tragedy is about to begin.

With a bound her fevered memory overleaped several months of war. They had entered an atmosphere of fire; it was hard, but they endured it. Alsace: a breath of wild hope, penultimate moment of Old France; Belgium: enthusiasm first, horror afterward; alliances: prognostications, so-called assured, as to the "final result"; invasion: a march to the scaffold in which the condemned cling to a hope of the improbable; the Marne: the improbable realized, for which no one had dared to hope; the enemy grappled with and hurled back; the fall of Antwerp, of which so many folk, who will appear again in the end, insist that "it has not the least importance."

Odette had received letters from Jean. How could Jean be in such a fiery furnace? And how had she been able to endure the thought? But many things once believed impossible were beginning to be recognized as possible. Jean was enduring his fatigues, and everything in him was taking on a new character. She had found him not such as he had been on his return from the manoeuvres, but a man exalted above himself, who seemed to have transcended his own height, however he might try to appear simply his usual charming self. She could divine his sufferings, and yet she felt him to be happy. Odette had even come to think: "How little he needs me!" She had returned to Paris that she might receive his letters more promptly. But he appeared no longer to have any notion of time. That was because he was no longer master of his time. Odette was always writing to him as to an isolated being, who could do with himself as he liked. Without intending it, he would reply to her letters as if he were one who had no individual existence, a man carried away by something greater than himself, something which alone counted. She had not yet been able to understand, and she had gently reproached Jean for neglecting her.

And yet Odette's perpetual anxiety had been gradually growing less; she was already gaining confidence. Jean had passed through so many dangers! She had begun to believe in a possible immunity. How many men had been in the midst of wars through all a long life, and yet had died in bed, surrounded by their families!

Then, suddenly, one fine morning in the second fortnight of September Odette, still in bed, had heard the door-bell at an hour when seldom any one came to the front door. Amelia, her own maid, who had answered the bell, had rushed, breathless, to her mistress:

"Madame! it is Madame de Prans who insists upon seeing Madame!"

From her bed Odette had called out: "Come in, Simone, come right in!"

Simone de Prans had brought tidings of Jean. She had received them from dear Pierrot, her husband, who had been sent to Paris for twenty-four hours on a mission.

Tidings of Jean? But, to begin with, they were satisfactory? How?--satisfactory? Well, she could say that they were not bad. But "not bad" is not good! No, but one must not exaggerate things. In short, half-admissions, denials, returns upon the question, openings left for hope, equivocal utterances, embarrassments of which Odette soon ceased to be the dupe. And she had had courage to say, suddenly:

"My little Simone, you dare not acknowledge that the greatest of calamities has befallen me."

It was at that moment of half-wakefulness during which all these previous events had passed before her memory, that Odette suddenly came broad awake. She uttered a great cry, and every one in the next room came running.

But now, after all, Odette refused to believe the dreadful fact which she herself had divined! She declared that it could not be, it was "too unjust."

Why should Jean be killed and not another? With fierce anger she revolted against her lot, crying out and struggling in her bed like a mad woman.

"It is not true! it is not true! you all have a grudge against me! you are jealous of me because of Jean! ... Jean, my Jean, I shall yet embrace you, or there is no God!"--until suddenly, vociferating and shrieking, she again lost consciousness.

Her doctor was there, in a major's uniform. They had found him as by a miracle: he happened to be at home, at the telephone, the very moment when Amelia called him. As he could not remain he gave his instructions to Simone de Prans, to Germaine Le Gault, to Rose Misson, the last two, notified by Simone, having dressed in all haste and rushed to her. The door-bell was constantly ringing. The news of Odette's affliction was spreading through Paris. True, the war had already caused many bereavements, but among this intimate group, Lieutenant Jacquelin was the first to fall.

Odette, recovering her senses, found herself in the position of an exceptional victim among her friends, both women and men.

But the women, while encompassing her with compassion, had in their eyes, their voices, something other than bereavement usually inspires. When they tried to utter consoling words, all, without exception, spoke of "pride," of the "honor" which was reflected upon Odette. Odette accepted the words as a part of the phraseology of condolence; but she considered only one thing--Jean no longer existed. Her Jean, her lover, her happiness, her preoccupation, her days, her nights, her revery of yesterday, her hope for to-morrow; Jean, caresses, kisses, tenderness, sweetness, perfume, foolishness and wisdom, the beloved master and yet the child, to be cradled in her arms; Jean--a thousand times more than her own life--was no longer numbered among men! She could see him again, from head to foot, in the minutest physical details, and in the same moment she was certain that he was no longer anything other than a phantom; that never again her arms of flesh would press to her his flesh, that her lips would never again kiss his lips. Tears did not come in the torrents that bring solace to the sharpest griefs. The period of yielding to a cruel fate, when one pities oneself, had not come to her. Rebellion still persisted. Odette raged, uttered bitter words. The honeyed soothings of her friends only exasperated her. Other friends were continually coming up to see her. She fell into hysterics. The doctor had gone. The most determined of those present, "good" Rose Misson and Mme. de Blauve, a woman who inspired respect, took upon themselves to turn all the others out of the room and to close the front door against every one.

Rose Misson was a little woman, plump and mild, whose husband, some fifteen years older than herself, and free of all military obligation, had entered the service as chauffeur at the beginning of the war. Misson was somewhat criticised for this step. Therefore Rose, who felt the power of public opinion, was full of admiration of the lot of her friend Odette. Private griefs are nothing in comparison with the special consciousness which public opinion arouses in us. Notwithstanding her real love for him, at the present moment Rose would have preferred her husband dead rather than ill appreciated. Rose's sentiment with regard to her friend might have been thus expressed:

"Yes, my dear, your grief is immense; your existence as a wife is shattered. But everybody feels that your lot is beautiful. You will grow greater among us all, will eclipse us, each and every one. From this day you have gained universal veneration; your name is pronounced with reverence; you are changed in our eyes; your presence brings even to us a meaning which we never knew before; the memory of your husband, his glorious name, is something august which is penetrating a circle in which such a quality has never been known."

Rose said nothing of all this to her friend, because the language of their circle did not lend itself to such thoughts; perhaps also, even while thinking them, she had no wish to utter them.

And the sense of nothingness which had seized her by the throat that morning touched her again, more glacial than before. Nothing! No longer anything! Yes, the war was an unheard-of misfortune; but the war had captivated one like a drama of unequalled interest. The drama might go on henceforth; she would not go to witness it. She had gone to it only for one actor, who, having played his part, had disappeared. She too would disappear.

"He is dead, Rose! Ah, Rose, how fortunate you are!"

"But my husband is fifty years old, Odette!"

"Oh, if my husband had only been sixty!"

Simone de Prans and Mme. de Blauve came again in the afternoon.

"Your husband, Odette, fell like a hero; there is no more beautiful death."

"There is no beautiful death."

"Yes, there is!"

"It is easy for you to talk."

"No, Odette, you don't consider that everything is changed."

"One's heart, too?"

"Yes, one's heart, too. Many among us pass for hard-hearted and inhuman, but everything now appears from another point of view."

"Love is always love."

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