Yesterday when I went to say good-bye to him at the end of the day he was crying there in his corner, quietly, all by himself. His long eyelashes were all wet. I said, "Oh, little Charles, oh, little Charles!" and kept saying it over and over, and had nothing else in all the world to say. I patted his hands, that always lie both of them together upon the strap which is fastened round the bar at the foot of the bed, by which he is sometimes able to pull himself up.
His hands are white and thin and crooked, like the roots of things that belong in the earth; while I patted his hands I was thinking that they did not seem to belong in the light and air at all.
This morning I thought, "How absurd to have brought him a little pot of cream!" A little pot of cream for a man who is dying.
Hautiquet has gone back to the front. He would not let them tell me he was going. I never saw him to say good-bye. Last night, I said, as usual, "Bon soir, tout le monde, au revoir à demain!" And Hautiquet said with the rest, "A demain, Madame." He left a little package to be given to me after he was gone.
He was one of the older ones. He had been ill in the first winter with rheumatism and pleurisy. He went back and fought all summer, and all through the Champagne, and till Christmas. Then he got rheumatism again, this time in his eyes. He has been nearly blind since then, here in the hospital.
He was a clumsy peasant who never talked much. And of what he did say I could only understand about half. I did not know that he thought about me at all.
But in the little package he left for me there was an aluminum heart, made out of the aluminum from a shell. Madame Marthe says he had been nearly all the time working at it, because he had clumsy hands and could scarcely see. He had had much trouble getting the shape right. He had cut my initials on one side of it and his on the other, crookedly, because he was so nearly blind.
He had curly yellow hair and big blue eyes. He got well terribly fast. I was wishing all the time that he would take longer about it. He was so young.
His eyes were so blue, and round, and had seen all the horrors of the great retreat. The look of those things had stayed in his round young blue eyes.