In whom should I confide the secret which made my heart leap? Could I hesitate when Guillaumin was beside me!
Lively, hearty, and full of go, he was an incomparable companion. He fought as if he had been born to it.... He was in for it, and would stick to it. He had thought it would only be a short business. He realised that it would be a long one. Couldn't be helped! Why grouse about it? He preferred to save his breath. Not for an instant did he dream that we could negotiate for peace as losers. One felt that he would march on patiently counting always on revenge, sooner or later, as long as he had the legs to march on; that he would fight as long as he had the arms to fight with.
How fond I was of him! How worthy he was of my confidence!
I hesitated, all the same, for a long time. It was the effect of my rooted suspicion of my fellow-beings—I swear that I lacked the courage. One day, however, when we were marching—he was talking to me about his sister who was a musician—I made some allusion to Jeannine, also a musician. He looked at me, and I made up my mind to it, I so much wanted him to know. But my tone played me false in the most[Pg 331] bizarre manner, cloaking itself in false irony. I seemed to be giving an account of a casual flirtation. What would this unimportant intrigue end in? I pretended to have no idea of it. And the word, the delicious word, which was ready to blossom on my lips, was never pronounced.
Hypocritical trifling! How I cursed it, on looking back at it. How thankful I was to Claude for not adopting the same frivolous tone in his turn. If he had done so, that would have been the end of it. I should have retired within myself, embittered by the idea that I had been misunderstood or, worse still, we should have continued to make meaningless remarks on the subject, which would have done violence to my love. Instead of which Guillaumin guessed that I was, in spite of myself, the victim of an absurd timidity; it was he who, by insensible degrees directed our conversation into a more cordial and sincere channel. He made his interest clear to me. My confidence touched him, he refused to treat it as an insignificant sentiment. Then I took the final step, and knew the sweetness of self-abandonment.
Without a blush, since I was sure that no chaffing threatened me, I was able to describe to him in detail the progress of the sweet seduction right up to the glorious ecstasy. He listened to me unwearyingly, encouraging me by a strange word or nod. The next day he gave me an opening, which I had vaguely desired, to return to my subject. He smiled at me, when my next letters came, and his eyes shone. His friendship performed the miracle of making him happy because I was.
De Valpic had stayed with us. I had pressed him[Pg 332] in vain to report sick. Guillaumin, and the captain too had urged him to. Circumstances robbed our exhortation of all efficacy. He said repeatedly that it was a time when the country claimed the determined effort of all her sons. If I insisted, he cut me short with:
"Dreher, you wouldn't desert us!..."
So he went on, and refused to give in. He valiantly accomplished the terrible marches, and bore the sleepless nights, and the days without rest. We sometimes found him sitting down panting, during the halts, without even the strength to wipe his forehead. His appearance then would terrify us, his hollow eyes, and flaming cheek-bones. In a few days his features had become peaked, his face emaciated; his poor shoulders were bowed. One would never have expected him to go down hill so rapidly. His cough was growing more rasping. He expectorated freely, but always—with touching consideration—into a little spittoon, concealed until then in his pack. We hardly dared to ask him how he was. He had asked me lightly not to refer to the subject again.
"I am better, I assure you, since I've given up thinking about it!"
"But what about your temperature?"
"I'm not feverish now. I've thrown away my thermometer. I ought to have begun by doing that!"
He did not let a day go by without writing, any more than I did. He was always on the lookout for ways of despatching his letters, and was usually obliging enough to allow me to profit by them.
I was totally ignorant of anything concerning the object of his love, her name and age and everything.[Pg 333] The one question he had pronounced had been enough to make me understand his devotion for her. She too, I guessed, must love him, if she was willing to wait till he recovered.
I used to wonder about this girl—a stranger to me. I imagined her as the bearer of a great name, endowed with beauty and every fascination. What a couple they would make! Alas, and that would never be! Would she recognise her fiancé, when the war gave him back to her, battered, and at the end of his strength, destined to fade away? I pictured him on a long chair shivering and pulling his rug over his knees. The idea obsessed me. Like imaginations must harry him ceaselessly. With a vague eye, and a far-away look he must often be thinking of her, whom he would see............