But when they sat together at one corner of the big shining table, he did not seem to know what to say. He tried to eat, but it seemed as if he could not eat. He pushed the plate away and leaned his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.
She thought she would like to do something for him, but did not know what to do. Again she said, "It must have been dreadful in the train."
"It was wonderful," he said. Then, sitting still with his face hidden, he went on: "We were singing all the time. Wherever the train stopped people gave us flowers; the whole train was full of flowers, you know. They were most of them boys of the young classes in the train. We sang the most absurd things--nursery rhymes, and old cannons, 'Frères Jacques' and 'Coeur de Lise,' and those, you know. What is the one about 'Papa Lapin'? None of us could remember the one about 'Papa Lapin,' you know."
"I don't know," she replied. It had always annoyed her, his trick of saying, "You know." She sat playing with something on the table.
He said again, "The whole train was full of flowers. 'Papa Lapin,' 'Papa Lapin'--how irritating, you know, when one can't remember."
He sat up suddenly erect, and said, "You'll take the boys and go down to the old place and look after things. It has always bored you, but after all it is for Zizi. And be good to my mother, will you, though you don't like her--she, she remembers '70. And I've not been of much use to her. I've not been of much use to you, nor to any one." He stopped short.
It was odd that suddenly she, who never had thought much about him, or felt things at all about him, should have known this thing. She had known as she sat there with him, alone in the dining-room, by the untouched things on the table, that he never would come back. He was one of those who never come back.
Often I am sad because I cannot worry enough about the 11, Charles. I forget him even when I am in the ward. His is the bed I see first when I look through the holes of the paint in the glass-topped door, opposite, away at the far end of the ward. There he has been, always, every day, through all the endless months since the Marne, propped up against a table board and two pillows and a sheet of black rubber. He breathes always more and more painfully, and coughs always more and more. The fever lines on his chart zigzag up and down, in long dreadful points. He has become very cross and exacting. He scolds us in little feeble gasps, with little feeble gestures. He is twenty-one years old, and has very long eyelashes.
