The Day of Glory

As far as Jeanne’s personal life was concerned, what little was left of it ebbed and flowed to the daily rhythm of the mail. She felt it begin to sink lower with the fatigue of preparing and serving the lunch for the six noisy children, always too hungry for the small portions, so that at the last she divided most of her own part among them. It ebbed lower and lower during the long hours of the afternoon when she strove desperately to keep the little ones cheerful and occupied and at the same time to mend and bake and darn and clean and iron and carry ashes out and coal in; her long slim pianist’s fingers reddened and roughened till they bled, because cold cream was far too costly a luxury. It sank to its stagnant lowest during the tired end of the day when the younger children, fretful with too much indoors, disputed and quarreled; and when, as she prepared the evening meal, she tried to help the older ones with their Latin declensions and Greek verbs so that they might be worthy sons of their father. And oh, the nights, the long nights, when she woke again and again, dreaming that she saw André wounded, dreaming that some one called to her in a loud voice that he had been killed at the head of his men.

But after midnight she felt the turn of the tide. In less than twelve hours there might be a letter. She dozed, woke to make the round of the children’s beds to be sure that they were covered, and noted that it was three o’clock. In seven hours she might have news again. She slept, and woke to hear the church clock clang out five, and knew that if she could but live through five hours more—

In the morning, the countless minor agitations; the early rising in the cold; the smoky kindling of the fire; the hurried expedition for the milk through the empty streets, dripping with the clammy fog of the region; the tumultuous awakening of the children, some noisily good-natured, some noisily bad-tempered; the preparation of the meager breakfast in the intervals of buttoning up blouses and smoothing tousled hair; then, as school time approached, the gradual crescendo of all the noise and confusion into the climax of the scampering departure of the three older ones, blue-nosed and shivering in their worn, insufficient wraps; the gradual decrescendo as she dressed the thin, white bodies of the younger ones, and strove to invent some game for them which would keep them active and yet allow her to do the morning housework—all these tossing, restless waves were the merest surface agitation. Beneath their irregular, capricious rhythm she felt physically the steady, upward swelling of her expectation as the clock-hands swung towards ten.

Till then she knew nothing, nothing of what might have happened during the portentous night behind her, for every night, like every day, was portentous. There was no calamity which was impossible. The last four years had proved that. Anything might have happened since the last news had come in from the outer world—anything, that is, except the end of the war. That alone had come to seem impossible.

And yet, in spite of that great flooding tide of her expectancy, when the ring at the door finally came, it always gave Jeanne an instant’s violent shock. Her heart flared up like a torch with hope and fear, its reflection flickering on her thin cheeks as she hurried to the front of the house and, her delicate work-worn hands shaking, opened the door on Fate.