Paris awoke to the 14th of July—Bastille Day—without knowing that, as it
had marked the beginning of the end of the _ancien régime_, it was now
to mark the last hour of the peril of France. It was fitting that this
great national fête should bring to an end the days when the _boche_ was
to be feared, and that to-morrow was to see the beginning of the end.
But Paris did not know. The air was heavy with portent; events
impended.... There was present in every heart the apprehension that the
unthinkable might happen, and that their beloved city might, within a
period of days, fall into the hands of the enemy.... Bastille Day was
the last day of the reign of fear.... The event was still on the knees
of the gods; Paris could not read the future, but it could make holiday
with destruction at its door. The heart of Paris was steadfast.... Its
fortitude was on the eve of its reward.
Paris did not know that to-morrow the boche would lunge at its throat,
throwing a weight into the thrust that it had never been able to throw
before; nor did Paris know that its armies and its allies would receive
that thrust without faltering, and would hurl upon it such rain of fire
and steel as would crush it to the ground futile and staggering....
Paris did not know, nor did the brain of any human being know, that but
three days must pass before that man of infinite patience and courage
who was generalissimo of the forces which barred the path of the Hun
would make his first mighty stride toward victory, a stride which should
become a steady march, never flagging, never stopping, until his armies
should have won the precious right to march with heads erect under that
great pile which dominates their city—the Arc de Triomphe.
It was such events which impended on this 14th of July....
Kendall Ware and Andree had chosen the Place des Ternes as the most
advantageous point from which to see the parade, and though it was
raining a trifle when they started out, with skies which promised a
drizzly day, they were not to be deterred. The little concrete oval
which is the meeting-place of the Boulevard de Courcelles, the Avenue de
Wagram, the Avenue des Ternes, and the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré was
already crowded. People splashed about in its shallow puddles and
jostled one another between its flower-booths, which were doing a
thriving business. The parade was already passing with martial music and
amid much clapping of hands, but less shouting than would have obtained
in an American city.
Ken edged Andree as near to the street as he could. For him it was easy
to look over the heads of the people and to see the marching soldiers,
but little Andree might as well have been at home across the river. She
could see nothing, and there was no box nor chair to be had.
“Shall I lift you up?” he asked.
“_Mais non._ You cannot. I am of such a largeness!... But I shall see.”
“I’ll sit you on my shoulder and tell folks you are my granddaughter,”
he said.
“_Regardez!_” She took a small rectangular mirror from her _sac_ and
held it before his eyes. Then she turned her back on the parade and,
holding the mirror at an angle above her head, looked into it with
quaint intentness.
“Oh, I see!” she exclaimed. “Behol’, the parade it marches in the
glass.”
Ken laughed, but he was a trifle annoyed and embarrassed. Andree
herself, he thought, was so natural, so herself, that she would have not
the least thought in the world of making herself ridiculous or
conspicuous, but this absurd makeshift of hers would certainly attract
the attention of the crowd—and nobody knew what a Parisian crowd might
do. He hesitated, looked about him uncomfortably, and decided to hold
his peace. It was well, for within a radius of thirty feet a dozen men
and women were doing exactly as Andree did. They had come prepared. Each
of them stood facing away from the procession, a mirror held above the
heads of the crowd, and it was with difficulty Kendall restrained his
laughter. Their expressions were all so eager, so interested. It was
absurd. With all that was going on behind them, they peered as if
bewitched into rectangles of glass, and shouted, or lowered their
mirrors to clap their hands just as if they were seeing living soldiers
instead of tiny reflections....
The crowd interested him more than the marching men. There was a
good-natured simplicity, a lack of reserve, a childishness about them,
yet there were a bigness, a pathos, and a grandeur in their bearing....
Boys and young men mounted into trees; couples carrying bouquets
scurried up and down the line, seeking a point where they might
penetrate to the street; here was a woman weeping and smiling at once.
She was in black.... And everywhere flowers! Now and then a girl would
run out from the curb to hand a blossom to some _poilu_ or Italian or
Englishman or Portuguese.... Every French soldier marched with a smile
and with a posy nodding from the muzzle of his gun. The street was thick
with flowers and the air rained flowers.
The Americans passed. In their guns were no blossoms, on their tunics
were no bouquets. They marched very stiffly, erect, business-like, with
eyes to the front. The French had shuffled by jovially with nods and
smiles. One could tell they had seen the war and were marching men, but
there was no stiffness, no rigidity. They were like the defense of their
great general—elastic. The Italians grinned cheerfully; so did the
Portuguese; even the English were somewhat relaxed—but all these had
known four years of war.... The Americans, marching like one man, like a
splendid machine, seemed, somehow, sterner, of more warlike stuff. They
struck the eye and won the applause of the multitude.... But they were
of no sterner stuff, nor would they have asserted themselves to be
better fighting-men than the sturdy _poilus_ or the wiry Tommies....
They were younger—that was what impressed one. Their youth cried
aloud.... Amid those soldiers of France and England and Italy and
Belgium they looked like boys—and yet their age might not have been
greater than these others—for the others had seen four years of war....
But they were splendid, these young men from another world, and the
heart of Paris went out to them....
A hand touched Kendall’s arm and he turned.
“Why, Maude!” he exclaimed, and shot a startled glance toward Andree.
She had not seen, but was peering into her mirror.
“How glad you are to see me!” She laughed. “Really, I’ve nothing
catching. What’s the matter?...” She glanced about and saw Andree. “Oh!”
she said. “I’m glad. I wanted to know her.”
“I told you—” he began; but it was Andree who interrupted.
“_Bon jour_, Mademoiselle Knox,” she said, gravely. “We have met one
little time.”
“Yes, indeed, and I have wanted so much to meet you again. I have told
Mr. Ware....”
“And I, too, have wanted to know you. I have said it to him, yes, many
times. I have said that I shall to know thees Miss Maude Knox—but”—she
shrugged her shoulders—“_les Américains_ are droll.... He would not.”
“He can’t help himself now, can he? Now that we know we want to be
acquainted with each other, there’s nothing he can do about it.”
“Oh, I do not onderstan’. You speak _trop vite, mademoiselle_. My
English it is of the worst.”
“And my French is non-existent. But that doesn’t matter in the least,
does it? We shall get on.”
For those girls there was now something of much greater importance than
the parade, and they promptly forgot it. Maude moved over to Andree’s
side and they began the sort of conversation that women use when they
are appraising each other with serious intention. Ken listened uneasily.
There was nothing he could do. This thing that he had desired not to
happen _had_ happened, and that was all there was to it. He pretended to
watch the parade, but his mind was concentrated on what the girls were
saying. The girls appeared to have forgotten him as well as the marching
men.
Ken was acutely apprehensive, but of what he was apprehensive he did not
know. The thought that Andree and Maude were together, chatting,
becoming acquainted, seemed to him very threatening. He had been in a
holiday humor, but that humor was gone. He frowned and was conscious of
both irritation and depression. It was not right for them to meet.
Something was sure to come of it.
It was not at all that he felt that Andree was not a fit companion for
Maude Knox. That was not it. He was not ashamed of Andree, and,
strangely enough, when one considers his temperament and the hereditary
impulses which stirred within him, he was not ashamed of his relations
with her. It was an intangible apprehension, a feeling that one woman
whom he knew he loved and another woman with whom he might be in love
could not meet without unpleasant results to him.
There was curiosity, too, which grew stronger. More than once he had
compared Andree with Maude Knox when neither was present, but now they
were together, at his side, under his eyes.... He edged away a trifle
with elaborate unconsciousness, and presently reached a point from which
he could study the girls with covert glances.
It was not so much their appearances that he compared as it was their
_selves_ as he knew them, and as they were indicated by what met the
eye. He was trying to arrive at a knowledge of what each girl meant in
his life, what she could contribute to his life. Perhaps this was wholly
selfish, but choice must ever be selfish. It is after choice is made
that one may be generous and self-denying.
The contrast between Andree and Maude was so extreme that they seemed to
have nothing in common but their sex, and as Ken considered he saw they
had not even this in common. At least their conception of it and of its
duties and possibilities and obligations and uses were as different as
the color of their eyes or the expressions of their faces. One could not
see Andree without being conscious that she was a woman, of the
femininity of her, and that the chief business of her life was to be the
complement of some man. The first emotion that Andree excited was
tenderness.... As one looked at Maude Knox his first thought was
comradeship, followed by a mental note that she would be reliable,
capable of taking care of herself. Maude was not beautiful, but she was
pretty, with a clean-cut, boyish prettiness that spoke of health of mind
and of body. She was not the sort a man would fall in love with at first
sight, but rather one who would first be admired and then loved....
Andree would be loved first, then admired as the sweetness of herself
unfolded under the urging of love. Andree was fragile. Ken looked at her
lips, perfectly drawn, delicate, sensitive—her most eloquent feature.
They were lips to kiss, lips to give kisses. There, perhaps, stood the
chief difference between these girls and their attitude toward life:
that Andree would give, give, give—asked no other happiness but to give
of herself and her sweetness and her tenderness and her love—while Maude
would demand an exchange. She, too, could love, but always there would
be inhibitions and reservations. She would take thought of practical
matters, be efficient in love and marriage. Not that she would be
selfish, Ken felt sure, but that she would see to it her relations with
the man she loved would be well organized and stabilized. She would be a
wife and a comrade to the man she married, and perhaps a dominant force;
Andree would be wife and sweetheart, with no thought of dominating, but
only of giving, of adding to the happiness of the man she loved.
If love were cruel to Andree, and the man she worshiped unkind, she
would fade silently, withdraw into herself, and suffer; Maude would have
suffered, but she would have faced the matter and held her own. It would
be possible for Maude to go through life alone; that Andree should do so
was utterly unthinkable. This was, perhaps, because Andree thought of
herself only as a woman, and as a woman whose life must be bound up with
the life of some man. Maude Knox thought of herself as an individual, a
distinct entity with rights and purposes which must not be invaded or
interfered with.
A man might expect help, encouragement, even dynamic career from Maude
Knox. He might expect a wonderful fidelity from her. She would take an
interest in his life and would want to have a finger in the shaping of
his destiny. Andree would play her part in his life less obtrusively,
but perhaps as powerfully by keeping alive his love and by lavishing her
love upon him. She would ask nothing, demand nothing except a
continuance of love and a lavishment of tenderness. So long as love
endured she would follow him to the highest success without taking any
great thought of that success, or she would have descended with him to
the depths of failure without bewailing that failure—for success to her
meant but one thing, and that thing was love.
Maude was the ideal wife in a partnership of man and wife as Americans
have come to look upon that relation. The vestibule of the Presbyterian
church would receive Maude with fulsome compliments and would
congratulate Ken upon making a wise selection. Everybody would say that
he had won a splendid wife ... and it would be true. She was a typical
American wife—that is to say, she embodied those things which Americans
have set as their ideals of wifehood.... He wondered what the vestibule
would say of Andree, even granting that Andree’s conception of virtue
were the American conception. He could not imagine, though he could well
imagine the stir she would create. She would be too beautiful—so
beautiful as to excite righteous suspicion. She would be beautiful in a
foreign sort of way, and therefore a sinful sort of way. The vestibule
would never forgive her because she had lived in Paris and because she
did not pronounce English as well as it did—through its nose. They would
never be able to see into her heart nor to understand the marvel of her
goodness.... She was as far outside their experience as she was actually
outside Ken’s experience, who studied her hourly, but never understood
her and never would understand her.... She would always be a mystery and
an anomaly to him. She would always be to him a creature who was guilty
according to his inherited conscience and yet escaped the accusation or
the stain of guilt. She was bad, yet she was wholly good.
He said this to himself, and then hotly denied it. She was not bad. In
his heart he knew she was not bad, and he knew as well that he had never
approached a soul which was as clean, as unselfish, as purely tender as
hers.... Maude Knox was good, too, capable of unselfishness and fine
tenderness. But she could never accomplish what Andree had accomplished.
She could never do as Andree did and retain her purity.... He did not
realize that this was because Maude herself would have believed herself
to have lost her purity.
For Kendall the matter marched back to the attitude he had absorbed from
his mother—that relations between the sexes were wicked in themselves
and could never be anything else, but that by some miraculous quality
belonging to a formula pronounced by a parson it became permissible for
designated couples to practise wickedness without fear of punishment.
The wickedness remained, but the formula remitted the punishment. That
was his mother’s belief.... She had been bitterly ashamed when Kendall
became evident, because he was testimony to the world that she had been
guilty....
Ken realized that he was getting himself into a state of mind, that he
was reviving those disturbing thoughts which had such power to make him
miserable ... and he had been very happy with Andree. He had loved his
happiness, and now he wanted it to persist. It had been something new in
his life, very precious, very wonderful ... and he was not willing that
it should be dimmed.
He stepped behind the girls and spoke.
Andree turned and smiled. “You shall go away,” she said. “We do not need
you. You shall watch the parade while Miss Knox and myself make thees
ver’ interesting talk. Yes?”
“What are you and Miss Knox talking about?”
“What should we be talking about?” asked Maude. “About ourselves, of
course.”
“It is ver’ nice subjec’,” said Andree, with an impish twinkle.
“Let me come in. Talk about me, and I’ll listen.”
“_Pouf!..._ You! If we talk about you, then you are ver’ angry.”
“Why?”
“Bicause we shall say the truth, and men want only to be praised.
_N’est-ce pas?..._ Oh, all men are greedy for praise. _Oh, là là là
là._”
“There, Captain Ware. Will you behave now?”
Ken laughed. “Andree is always very disagreeable. I don’t see how I
endure her.”
She nodded. “Yes. I am mos’ disagree-able.” She accented the last
syllable quaintly. “It is bicause I do not like you.”
“Mademoiselle is very much interested in America,” said Maude.
“And _Monsieur le capitaine_ he tell me so ver’ leetle.”
“America is a large country. It has a hundred million of population. The
Woolworth Building is sixty stories high. Everybody owns an automobile
and goes to the movies. Baseball is the national game....”
“And ever’ man ees marry and ees faithful to his wife,” interrupted
Andree, “and all are ver’ _sérieux_ and mos’ religious, and they are
asham’ when they love. I know! I have study monsieur.” She laughed with
childish gaiety. “Oh, mademoiselle, it mus’ be ver’ droll.... Regard
them—they are born, these Americans, they become ver’ rich, they marry,
they die—but they never live. It is that I believe they are afraid to
live....”
“Yes, mademoiselle,” said Maude, “you have hit on something there. We
are afraid to live, all of us. We want to live. We want a great
happiness, but we are afraid of it. You can’t understand us better than
we can understand you.... You have learned to live and be unafraid. We
have not learned to get the best out of life, and our greatest terror is
of our neighbors’ tongues.... It has been wonderful for me to come to
your country and to see....”
“And has mademoiselle really seen?” asked Andree, her eyes on Maude’s
face.
Maude hesitated. “I have tried to see, and I think I have understood a
little. I have changed. I am not the same.... No, I am not the same girl
at all who landed in France a few months ago.”
“May one ask what mademoiselle have see’?”
Maude answered, speaking slowly and feeling her way: “When I left
America I thought I was broad-minded and tolerant. My father had brought
me up to be less narrow-minded than most girls.... He is a professor of
philosophy. But I have found out that I was very narrow-minded indeed. I
could see only one side, and that was the viewpoint of those among whom
I was brought up. The thing I have come to see is that my home town was
right in setting up its own standards and in maintaining them—because
those standards were best for my home town.... But I have found out that
other towns and countries have an equal right to set up their own
standards and arrange their own modes of living. I think I can believe
now that a thing which is very wrong in Terre Haute, Indiana, may be
right in Paris or London or Rome, and that a thing which may be right in
Terre Haute may be wrong in Venice.”
“I onderstan’,” said Andree, gravely. “The theeng you mean to say is
thees, is it not? That an act it become’ wrong when we theenk it is
wrong? But if one city theenk it is right, then it is right for that
city? _N’est-ce pas?_”
“Yes, something very like that.”
“Is that an answer to the question I asked you at dinner a few days
ago?” Ken asked.
Andree looked at him quickly.
Maude paused a moment before she replied; then she shook her head. “No,”
she said, “that is more complex.... If you were a Parisian I think I
could answer, yes, without hesitation. But you are an American, who,
possibly, should cling to American standards, no matter where you find
yourself.... It is different.... No, I don’t know what the answer
is—yet.”
“And thees question?” asked Andree, directly.
It was something like this that Kendall had feared from a meeting
between Andree and Maude, that some subject such as this would spring
up, that he would be subjected to embarrassment and discomfort. He was
embarrassed now because he fancied Maude would be embarrassed and
because he feared Andree, in her child-like frankness, might say
something which would shock Maude’s American prudery. He did not make
use of the word _prudery_, but the state of mind for which it stood was
in his thoughts. He flushed and was about to attempt some stammered
diversion, but Maude answered, perfectly calm and without hesitation.
“Captain Ware asked me if I would ever marry a man who had had an affair
with another girl.”
“Ah....” said Andree. Then: “And why not, mademoiselle? What has that to
do weeth the marriage? It was a silly question, was it not?”
Ken regarded her anxiously, but she gave no sign that she had attached
any significance to his question other than a faint note in the
long-drawn “Ah....” with which she had heard it stated.
“Yes, it was a ver’ silly question,” Andree repeated, “for if it ees not
then there shall nevair be any marriages at all.”
“I don’t know....” said Maude.
“Perhaps it ees bicause mademoiselle ees ver’ yo’ng and does not know
the worl’,” said Andree, with an air of age and wisdom.
“No. It is something in myself. I resent the idea.”
“Then there is but one hope for mademoiselle.... She mus’ marry the
monk.”
“Now, listen here,” said Ken, bruskly. “This—this—Oh, darn it all, let’s
talk about something else.”
Andree laughed gaily and pointed a finger of ridicule at him. “Oh, see!
We have frighten’ him.... He is ver’ droll. Sometime’ he is same theeng
as yo’ng girl jus’ from the convent.... But he is ver’ good,
mademoiselle,” she said, suddenly and seriously. “He is mos’ good and
gentle and kind, and I love him ver’ much.”
Maude touched Andree’s hand, and her eyes were not guiltless of
moisture. “I am sure you do, dear,” she said, “and he must love you very
dearly, too.”
Ken felt that the situation demanded something of him; that if he did
not prove himself adequate to the demand he would sink in his own
estimation and take a lower place in the regard of both the girls. It
was awkward. No situation could be more awkward, but a thing was
required of him if he desired to be true to himself and worthy of the
love that Andree had given him.
“By God! I do!” he said, desperately, and had his reward in the depths
of the smile which came into Andree’s eyes....
There threatened to come an uncomfortable pause, but Andree averted it.
“Monsieur Ken and I go soon for the _déjeuner_. Mademoiselle, of course,
comes also.”
“I wish I might,” said Maude, her voice a trifle dulled and her eyes not
altogether happy. “But I promised to help out in the club on the Avenue
Montaigne.... And I must be going.” She looked at her wrist watch.
“Indeed I must. I can cross the street now.... Good-by, Captain Ware.
Good-by, mademoiselle.”
“_Au revoir_,” said Andree, holding out her hand. “We mus’ meet again.
There are many theengs we mus’ speak of.”
Maude looked down into Andree’s dark-shadowed black eyes and smiled.
“Yes,” she said, “we must speak of many things....”