This same yearning was inspiring Marguerite when she came away from her lessons. She was advancing from one overpowering dread to another, accepting the first rudiments of surgery as the greatest of scientific marvels. At the same time, she was astonished at the avidity with which she was assimilating these hitherto unsuspected mysteries. Sometimes with a funny assumption of assurance, she would even believe she had mistaken her vocation.
"Who knows but what I was born to be a famous doctor?" she would exclaim.
Her great fear was that she might lose her self-control when the time came to put her newly acquired knowledge into practice. To see herself before the foul odors of decomposing flesh, to contemplate the flow of blood--a horrible thing for her who had always felt an invincible repugnance toward all the unpleasant conditions of ordinary life! But these hesitations were short, and she was suddenly animated by a dashing energy. These were times of sacrifice. Were not the men snatched every day from the comforts of sensuous existence to endure the rude life of a soldier? . . . She would be, a soldier in petticoats, facing pain, battling with it, plunging her hands into putrefaction, flashing like a ray of sunlight into the places where soldiers were expecting the approach of death.
She proudly narrated to Desnoyers all the progress that she was making in the training school, the complicated bandages that she was learning to adjust, sometimes over a mannikin, at others over the flesh of an employee, trying to play the part of a sorely wounded patient. She, so dainty, so incapable in her own home of the slightest physical effort, was learning the most skilful ways of lifting a human body from the ground and carrying it on her back.
Who knew but that she might render this very service some day on the battlefield! She was ready for the greatest risks, with the ignorant audacity of women impelled by flashes of heroism. All her admiration was for the English army nurses, slender women of nervous vigor whose photographs were appearing in the papers, wearing pantaloons, riding boots and white helmets.
Julio listened to her with astonishment. Was this woman really Marguerite? . . . War was obliterating all her winning vanities.
She was no longer fluttering about in bird-like fashion. Her feet were treading the earth with resolute firmness, calm and secure in the new strength which was developing within. When one of his caresses would remind her that she was a woman, she would always say the same thing, "What luck that you are a foreigner! . . . What happiness to know that you do not have to go to war!"
In her anxiety for sacrifice, she wanted to go to the battlefields, and yet at the same time, she was rejoicing to see her lover exempt from military duty. This preposterous lack of logic was not gratefully received by Julio but irritated him as an unconscious offense.
"One might suppose that she was protecting me!" he thought. "She is the man and rejoices that I, the weak comrade, should be protected from danger. . . . What a grotesque situation!" . . .
Fortunately, at times when Marguerite presented herself at the studio, she was again her old self, making him temporarily forget his annoyance. She would arrive with the same joy in a vacation that the college student or the employee feels on a holiday.
Responsibility was teaching her to know the value of time.
"No classes to-day!" she would call out on entering; and tossing her hat on a divan, she would begin a dance-step, retreating with infantile coquetry from the arms of her lover.
But in a few minutes she would recover her customary gravity, the serious look that had become habitual with her since the outbreak of hostilities. She spoke often of her mother, always sad, but striving to hide her grief and keeping herself up in the hope of a letter from her son; she spoke, too, of the war, commenting on the latest events with the rhetorical optimism of the official dispatches. She could describe the first flag taken from the enemy as minutely as though it were a garment of unparalleled elegance.
From a window, she had seen the Minister of War. She was very much affected when repeating the story of some fugitive Belgians recently arrived at the hospital. They were the only patients that she had been able to assist until now. Paris was not receiving the soldiers wounded in battle; by order of the Government, they were being sent from the front to the hospitals in the South.
She no longer evinced toward Julio the resistance of the first few days. Her training as a nurse was giving her a certain passivity.
She seemed to be ignoring material attractions, stripping them of the spiritual importance which she had hitherto attributed to them.
She wanted to make Julio happy, although her mind was concentrated on other matters.
One afternoon, she felt the necessity of communicating certain news which had been filling her mind since the day before. Springing up from the couch, she hunted for her handbag which contained a letter.
She wanted to read it again to tell its contents to somebody with that irresistible impulse which forestalls confession.
It was a letter which her brother had sent her from the Vosges. In it he spoke of Laurier more than of himself. They belonged to different batteries, but were in the same division and had taken part in the same combats. The officer was filled with admiration for his former brother-in-law. Who could have guessed that a future hero was hidden within that silent and tranquil engineer! . . . But he was a genuine hero, just the same! All the officials had agreed with Marguerite's brother on seeing how calmly he fulfilled his duty, facing death with the same coolness as though he were in his factory near Paris.
