He coughs, to keep me in countenance.  Shortly, he takes himself off.

Others come, to talk of their affairs and the course of events in the district.  There is a regular buzz.  So-and-so has been killed, but So-and-so is made an officer.  So-and-so has got a clerking job.  Here in the town, So-and-so has got rich.  How’s the War going on?

They surround me, with questioning faces.  And yet it is I, still more than they, who am one immense question.

* * * * * *

CHAPTER XVIII

EYES THAT SEE

Two days have passed.  I get up, dress myself, and open my shutters.  It is Sunday, as you can see in the street.

I put on my clothes of former days.  I catch myself paying spruce attention to my toilet, since it is Sunday, by reason of the compulsion one feels to do the same things again.

And now I see how much my face has hollowed, as I compare it with the one I had left behind in the familiar mirror.

I go out, and meet several people.  Madame Piot asks me how many of the enemy I have killed.  I reply that I killed one.  Her tittle-tattle accosts another subject.  I feel the enormous difference there was between what she asked me and what I answered.

The streets are clad in the mourning of closed shops.  It is still the same empty and hermetically sealed face of the day of holiday.  My eyes notice, near the sunken post, the old jam-pot, which has not moved.

I climb on to Chestnut Hill.  No one is there, because it is Sunday.  In that white winding-sheet, that widespread pallor of Sunday, all my former lot builds itself again, house by house.

I look outwards from the top of the hill.  All is the same in the lines and the tones.  The spectacle of yesterday and that of to-day are as identical as two picture postcards.  I see my house—­the roof, and three-quarters of the front.  I feel a pleasant thrill.  I feel that I love this corner of the earth, but especially my house.

What, is everything the same?  Is there nothing new, nothing?  Is the only changed thing the man that I am, walking too slowly in clothes too big, the man grown old and leaning on a stick?

The landscape is barren in the inextricable simplicity of the daylight.  I do not know why I was expecting revelations.  In vain my gaze wanders everywhere, to infinity.

But a darkening of storm fills and agitates the sky, and suddenly clothes the morning with a look of evening.  The crowd which I see yonder along the avenue, under cover of the great twilight which goes by with its invisible harmony, profoundly draws my attention.

All those shadows which are shelling themselves out along the road are very tiny, they are separated from one another, they are of the same stature.  From a distance one sees how much one man resembles another.  And it is true that a man is like a man.  The one is not of a different species from the other.  It is a certainty which I am bringing forward—­the only one; and the truth is simple, for what I believe I see with my eyes.