Captain Ware felt singularly young, boyishly exhilarated, as he walked
out early next morning for his first view of Paris. It was not yet eight
o’clock, but the day was beautiful, promising warmth; the skies were
clear; the whole appearance of things one of perfect peace and quiet.
The city did not seem one threatened by war. The streets, as he walked
up the rue de Rivoli, were almost deserted. It was early for Parisians
to be abroad.
The city astounded him, captivated him, gave him a feeling of humility.
He was familiar with Detroit, had seen Chicago and New York, but
Paris—Paris was different. His experience gave him nothing with which to
compare it. Chicago and New York were unsightly upheavals; the fantastic
work of tremendous industrial forces in irresistible motion. They
reared. Paris did not rear; it reposed; it had not been upheaved
tumultuously—it had been dreamed and dreamed by genius which
comprehended beauty.
The city affected him almost to breathlessness as it opened before him
when he passed the ancient grayness of the Louvre. He turned to the left
and stood between the wide jaws of the Louvre, the mouth of the Place du
Carrousel, and, standing there, looked westward through the reaches of
the Tuileries and beyond to where, silhouetted with massive grandeur,
uprose Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe.... It was impossible—incredibly
magnificent. At that instant began the first great change in his life.
He might not consciously have dated it from that instant, and possibly
he never dated it at all, but Paris had set the hand of her beauty upon
him; her spell had touched him with its magic.
“Why,” he said to himself, “anything could happen here!” And presently,
“The Germans drop bombs on this ... they try to destroy this.”
For the first time came an appreciation, not yet a full appreciation,
but far more than an inkling, that a great event had overtaken him: he
had left the Middle West behind him; he felt that he was not only about
to see, but to be a part of, a new and wonderful mode of life and of
thought. There came to him a hint that there might be something to life
besides merely living it. Though he did not know the phrase, he felt
something of the meaning it bears—_Joie de vivre_. Later he would,
perhaps, appreciate a remark made to him by a French officer. “It is not
_savoir faire_ that is the great knowledge, it is _savoir vivre_.” It is
not so important to know how to conduct oneself as it is to know how to
make the most of life....
He retraced his steps to the rue de Rivoli, stopped to regard the golden
Jeanne d’Arc about which he said to himself that he would have liked it
better if it had been bronze or marble, and that the sculptor had made
Jeanne “huskier” than he had pictured her to himself. That was the word
he used—“huskier.” Somehow he had always conceived Jeanne d’Arc—what
slight conception he had of her—as rather anemic and thin and
fragile.... His conception of Jeanne was like the conception many good
Americans have made for themselves of France. Two millions of them would
soon be on French soil to see for themselves that it was not an anemic,
fragile country, but robust, healthy, capable not only of visions, but
of battles....
He walked on to pause again in the Place de la Concorde and to marvel at
such prodigality of open space in the very heart of a great city. He
even tried to calculate to himself the money worth of so many acres in
the retail section of New York, say along Fifth Avenue from
Thirty-fourth Street north and west.... It was a typical American
calculation. Beyond him the Champs Élysées reached on, climbing its
little gradient to the Arc dc Triomphe. It was splendid and beautiful.
It “got under his skin,” as he phrased it.
He stood there looking off across the river toward the Chamber of
Deputies, over the roof of which could be seen the dome of Napoleon’s
Tomb. Then he turned and surveyed the path he had just traversed, that
reach of low, symmetrical buildings facing the Jardin des Tuileries. He
was not exactly inarticulate, but he was not eloquent. “I’ll be damned,”
he said under his breath. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Now he was hungry, and, walking more rapidly, he returned to the
University Union to find the dining-room open and a few American
officers at _petit déjeuner_. For the most part they were eating bread
and confiture and washing it down with chocolate. A few were taking the
American breakfast, actually eating _two eggs_ and other food—a thing to
convince the Parisian that these visitors were indeed mad, or at least
barbarians.
“Yea, _boy_!” said a loud voice, just as Captain Ware was endeavoring to
give his order to one of the two pretty French girls who were the
waitresses. It was his first sight of the Parisienne, and it had rather
surprised him. They did not wear short skirts and high-heeled slippers,
with more than enough black-stockinged ankle to regard. They had not
saucy eyes and _rétroussé_ noses, nor did they whisk about
flirtatiously. They were pretty, indeed they were charming, but they
were quiet, even subdued, and they looked _nice_. That was a good
American word he could apply to them. He liked their looks, even if they
failed to come up to his ideas of what a French waitress should be.
He looked up from the pad on which he had been checking off the _petit
déjeuner_, to see facing him across the table, in a captain’s uniform
and Sam Brown belt which made him almost unrecognizable, a man with whom
he had been more than friendly through four years in Ann Arbor.
“Bert Stanley!” he exclaimed, jumping to his feet and extending his
hand.
“They all come here,” said Stanley to himself, “all of them—if you just
wait long enough.... When did you land?”
“Day before yesterday.”
“And got to Paris so soon? How did you work that?”
“Ordered.... What are you doing here?”
“Making marks on pieces of paper. That’s what I got for knowing anything
about architectural engineering. I’m in the Signal Corps and I’m drawing
plans for aeroplane-sheds.... What are you?” He looked down at Kendall’s
collar markings.
“Intelligence! I’m one of the fellows who find out everything about
everything in the world and tell it to the army for its good.”
“Stationed here?”
“Don’t know. Report this morning.”
“Fix it, son, fix it.... It’s a great _guerre_, and this battle of
Paris—”
“_Beurre, monsieur?_” asked the waitress.
“Eh? What’s that?”
“She wants to know,” explained Stanley, with exaggerated patience, “if
you want butter. It’s extra.”
Kendall signified his desire for butter. “I’ve just been out looking at
the town,” he said. “The fellows that built it knew what they were
doing, didn’t they?”
“They knew how to do a lot of things. Staying here, of course.”
“Didn’t know where else to go. You, too?”
“Have been a month, but if I’m going to live here for the duration, and
it looks as if I were, I’d like to get somebody and take a little
apartment somewhere.... Over in the Quartier Latin or up on one of the
streets off the Étoile. Have some comfort. Live cheaper, too. Get a cook
for sixty or seventy francs, and be regular people.... Say, if you’re
set down in Paris, come on in with me.”
“Sounds reasonable,” said Kendall, tentatively. “Haven’t the least idea
what they’ll do with me, though.”
“Well, you run up and see, and, whatever happens, meet me here at half
past six and I’ll take you to a regular place to eat, and then we’ll go
out and look at the sights.”
“You’re on,” said Kendall, “bigger than a house.”
Captain Ware had hoped to be assigned to active duty with a combat unit.
He had studied and trained himself for the duties of an intelligence
officer at the front, and for months had looked forward with enthusiasm
to those interesting and invaluable duties which such an officer
performs. He was not a young man to welcome a desk job or to be
contented with a position in the Safety of the Service of Supplies
region. In that he resembled thousands of other young officers whose
fortune it would never be to hear a cannon fired in battle, to take part
in a charge, or to be nearer to the front than some small town in the
interior of France. None of them had chosen their places. They had been
sent where they were most needed and where their work was essential to
the victories to be won against the enemy.... Captain Ware, like these
others, must perform the task set for him, wherever it might lie—hoping
always for a new assignment that should carry him to the dugout and to
the trench. It was, therefore, with grievous disappointment that he
learned he was to be stationed in Paris, apparently in permanence. He
could still hope, for in the army in France no man can tell what
to-morrow will bring him. Orders come and men go.... Somehow it did not
seem possible to him that he would thus go to war without going to war;
that he should journey across the ocean to this mightiest of all
conflicts without the experience of battle....
At half after six he was again at the Union, where he found Bert Stanley
waiting for him in the lounge, whiling away the time very pleasantly in
conversation with charming Annette of the pert face, white teeth, and
busy chatter—a chatter made up in very large part of excellent American
idiom learned from the patrons of the cigar-and-candy case of which she
was custodian. Hundreds of American officers will return to their
country after the war with pleasant memories of wise little Annette, the
little French girl who sold cigarettes and candy and wrist watches and
post-cards at the stand in the Union.
Kendall ascended to his room in the queer little elevator whose
conductor was a tiny Belgian boy, proud of a few words of American, and
presently walked down the five flights—for in France it is not
considered good manners in war-time to use an elevator for descent—and
rejoined Stanley.
“Well,” said Stanley, “what luck?”
“It looks like Paris for mine,” said Kendall, still depressed by his
disappointment.
“Might be worse.... Might have been Chaumont.”
They walked north on the rue de Richelieu, past the Molière fountain,
and by the door of Marty’s which Kendall was to know very well later on.
At the rue St.-Marc they turned to the left until the Opéra Comique
uprose before them, and then made their way into the up-stairs
dining-room of the Café Poccardi on rue Favart.
“It’s early. The crowd doesn’t show up before seven-thirty, so we can
get a table up front where we can see the show,” said Stanley. “Besides,
there’s a waiter there who speaks English.”
They found seats with their backs toward the windows, a point of vantage
from which they could view the large, mirrored room with its rows of
small, closely set tables. Only a few were occupied, but gradually the
patrons straggled in—a truly Parisian gathering. There were handsome men
in officers’ uniforms with many gold service stripes on the sleeve, and
some with two, three, or even four wound chevrons on the opposite
sleeve. They were accompanied by well-dressed women, mostly young,
always very neat.... It was their shoes that demanded Kendall’s
attention. This was a matter that had been impressing itself upon him
through the day—that the Parisienne knew how to dress her feet. There
were _poilus_ on leave, each with his girl, or even with two girls.
There were one or two old but immaculate men with women young enough to
be their granddaughters. A few women entered alone and seated themselves
quietly at tables to await their partners—perhaps the café was their
place of rendezvous.... Two women, beautifully dressed in black, with
widows’ veils, occupied a table just across from Kendall and his
companion. They were very young, and one was remarkably lovely.... The
sight rather depressed Kendall. This was one of the meanings of war—this
youthful widowhood! Here was the cruelty of it, the bitterness of it!
“France must be filled with widows,” he said to Stanley.
Bert grinned. “Camouflage,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“If you’re thinking about our friends opposite, don’t get too
sympathetic. They’re no more widows than I am. Camouflage. It’s the
style. But they’re overdoing it. Everybody’s next, now, even us
Americans. Bait, sonny, bait, that’s what it is.”
Bert looked over at the widows and smiled, and the lovelier one smiled
in reply, not brazenly, not with the red-lipped, painted-cheeked smile
of the Anglo-Saxon siren, but demurely, pleasantly, as if she were
merely returning his smile out of courtesy and from an abundance of
gentle good nature.
“See?” said Bert.
“But they look _nice_.” Again Kendall used that word.
“They are nice.... This isn’t Terre Haute, son.”
Everybody was drinking wine, Kendall noticed. It was universal, and as
the meal progressed he spoke about it.
“Everybody is going to the wine,” he said, “but nobody gets noisy.”
“Nobody does,” said Bert. “Do we get noisy at home when we drink
coffee?”
Kendall watched. He saw a man half fill his companion’s glass with red
wine, then pour in as much water as there was wine. This, he saw, was
almost universally done.... Conversation was animated. There was gay
laughter and lightness, but it was not the gaiety of wine.
At a table well within view sat two _poilus_ with their wives or
sweethearts. Kendall watched them, for it was by far the jolliest, least
restrained party in the room.... And then he saw the larger soldier
throw his arm around the neck of his buxom companion and kiss her
soundly.... It rather shocked him. The idea of demonstrative affection
in, for instance, the dining-room of the McAlpin, or in one of the
better-class cafés of Detroit, was impossible to entertain. He watched
for a waiter to protest, perhaps to eject the couple from the place....
But there were only tolerant smiles when any notice whatever was taken
of the event.... And it was an event which was repeated—the sound of
hearty smacks coming even to Kendall’s ear.... He saw other men come in,
and before they sat down beside waiting companions they would stoop to
salute with a kiss.... The thing was not universal, not even general,
but there was enough of it for him to become aware that it was not
exceptional.... But for all that, it made him feel embarrassed and
uncomfortable. Apparently, if people had kissing to do they simply did
it.... He was to recognize this later as one manifestation of the frank,
unaffected genuineness of the people. Now it seemed rather gross to him,
gross and exotic. The idea did not occur to him then that it was he with
his American notions and antecedents, with his inheritances from
Plymouth Rock, that was exotic.
He wondered who all these people were; he wondered if they were
_married_. Were these men and women husbands and wives, or were the
women those mysterious, very French, somewhat exciting persons whom he
had read about in novels and who were called _mistresses_?
He did not put the question to Stanley because he was afraid of
appearing provincial. He might as well have done so, for in all
probability Stanley, with all of his month’s experience in Paris, was
pondering the same matter.... Anyhow, he felt that he was seeing life;
that he was beholding things which he could tell about later to
interested audiences.... It is a peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind
that everything which is strange to it appears to it as necessarily
tinged with naughtiness.
At another table, over to Kendall’s left, two girls were eating alone,
and he watched them with interest and considerable curiosity, wondering
who and what they were. One of them attracted him particularly. She was
young, in the neighborhood of twenty, he judged. She was dressed in
white, a suit of some knit material that reminded him of a light jersey,
and on her very black and wavy hair was a shapeless white cap of the
tam-o-’shanter variety. Her skin was a delightful olive, and her eyes
black, with shadows under them. She was not beautiful, unless her eyes
made her so. She was small and almost thin. She addressed herself to her
food in a very business-like manner, not often looking up from her
plate, but once in a while she smiled as she replied to some comment of
her companion, and her teeth were very white and regular. There was no
appearance of wealth about her, but every feature spoke of
intelligence—indeed, of a certain keenness.... She was very attractive.
“Look,” he said to Bert. “I wonder who she is. She looks as if she had
‘class.’”
“Pretty kid,” said Bert, who, just then, was more interested in _poule
au riz_ than in Parisiennes.
He continued to stare, unconscious of his rudeness, until she lifted her
eyes to his. For a moment she regarded him, with no especial interest,
certainly with no sign which could be interpreted as provocative, and
dropped her eyes again to her plate.... Kendall was conscious at once of
disappointment and satisfaction. Here was another girl that he had
estimated as “nice,” and this time, apparently, he was right.
In a moment he heard her name, for her companion uttered it. “Andree.”
Somehow it suited her, Kendall thought, and he thought, too, that it was
a decidedly pretty name ... “Andree.”
From time to time, as he was finishing his dinner, Kendall glanced at
Andree. But he did not meet her eyes again. She was not interested in
him, apparently, and even when he walked past her table on his way out
she did not look up or manifest by a sign that she was conscious of his
existence.
“Where now?” he said as they debouched onto the broad Boulevard des
Italiens.
“Might as well take in the ‘Folies Bergère.’ It’s one of the sights.”
They walked along in silence, crossing the boulevard and turning up a
narrow street toward the theater. Kendall continued to think about the
little girl with the black eyes. Somehow she had made an impression of
some sort upon him. He could not have described it nor estimated it. All
he knew was that he liked her looks immensely and was curious about her.
Probably he would never see her again, but he found himself hoping that
he might.
They bought tickets for the “Folies” and entered, traversing the large
hall filled with tables at which the audience was expected to refresh
itself between the acts, or even during the performance, and, after
buying programs, were conducted to their seats by a girl usher who stood
sternly by until she received her tip—a tip that she would have
suggested if it had not been tendered.
Then the performance began—a very disappointing performance to a
Middle-Western young man who had heard tales of the naughtiness of the
French stage. It turned out to be a rather clumsy musical comedy which
was more vaudeville than either music or comedy. It was not naughty at
all, he said to himself—but perhaps that was because he failed to
understand the dialogue. Anyhow, he had seen much franker costumes and
much more suggestive incident in Mr. Ziegfeld’s “Follies” or at the
Winter Garden.
The audience was more than half American; the music was adapted from
American shows, and between the acts a jazz orchestra, “straight from
Broadway,” made the ears ring. Everybody got up between the acts and
promenaded or sat at the little tables.... Girls wandered about and
spoke to one, and made Kendall feel uncomfortable and embarrassed again.
He was glad when they returned to their seats.
The performance rather bored him, and he suggested leaving. Bert was
ready, too, so they sauntered out onto the dark streets, making their
way to the Avenue de l’Opéra and past the huge bulk of that wonderful
building which France had erected even while she was paying to Germany
the billion-franc indemnity exacted after 1870. Once or twice soft
voices accosted them out of the darkness, but they walked on toward the
Union, and presently were ordering ice-cream and listening to a
lieutenant play ragtime on the piano.
Then, suddenly, the air was rent by a startling, metallic shriek, a
long-sustained, nerve-twanging, raucous blast.
“Raid!” said Stanley, getting to his feet.
“Bomb raid?” asked Kendall, instantly excited.
“Yes. Let’s go out and take a look.”
So, with characteristic foolhardiness, they sallied out and hurried up
the rue de Rivoli to the Place de la Concorde, where they sat on a stone
balustrade and waited. They were not alone. About that open space were
scattered a dozen Americans impelled by absurd curiosity—a curiosity
they would discard very shortly and become more circumspect in their
behavior as well as more respectful toward the _Gothas_.
Still the _alerte_ sounded, more terrifying than the sound of the
barrage which was presently to begin. Sirens mounted on fire-engines
were giving the alarm, tearing madly through the black streets, and with
horrid voice commanding Paris to seek sanctuary in _abri_ or in the
tunnels of the Metropolitan.
Kendall was not frightened; he was hardly apprehensive. Even when the
guns opened toward the north and he could see bright star-flashes as
shrapnel burst high above, he was only exhilarated and very interested.
The thing did not seem serious to him. But it _was_ serious, he knew. It
was war, and such barbarous war as held the world in a spell of horror.
Presently the air was filled with the crashes of cannon, and one could
trace the course of the enemy by the spreading of the ring of fire about
the city.... Once in a while would come a deep, dull, thunderous _boom_,
as a bomb, released by a _Gotha_, would fall in the distant suburbs,
perhaps upon the home of some laborer, burying himself with his wife and
babies in the ruins, or destroying them utterly so that no trace of
their human shell would ever be discovered.... The firing moved
westward, and then swung around to the south as the hostile aeroplanes
strove vainly to penetrate the city.... This continued for half an hour.
Then there was a time of quietness, after which came the pleasant voices
of bugles notifying a cowering population that all was clear.... The
raid had been abortive—it had succeeded in killing only half a dozen
defenseless civilians!
Kendall and Stanley walked back to the Union—to have another dish of
ice-cream. As they walked up-stairs in the darkness Kendall said to his
friend: “I wonder who that girl was ... the one in the restaurant. Her
name was Andree.”