Kendall Ware went to his office on September 1st just as he went to it
on any other day, anticipating a day like a hundred of its predecessors
had been. He enjoyed the walk through the clear sunny air of Paris and
felt not the slightest foreboding of heavy events to come. Fifteen
minutes after his arrival the day had taken upon itself the importance
of marking the close of an epoch in his life.... He was ordered to
report himself in Brest on the morning of September 4th to board the
first returning transport for America.
The order partook of the essentials of a calamity. It came so
unexpectedly, with such sudden shock, that he did not sense immediately
the full meaning of it nor what it involved. In the beginning he saw
only the misfortune of being sent home, of being removed from proximity
to the war. That alone was enough to give him keenest distress, but as
he returned to his desk and sat staring gloomily at the wall before him
this first effect was swallowed up and lost forever by the inrush of
cold dread of the major consequences of his enforced departure.
“_Andree!..._”
He was face to face with the inexorability of the postponed decision.
There was no time to work matters out gradually now, to hope for some
miraculous solution. He must decide; he must answer yes or no.... What
should he do about Andree?... Within twenty-four hours he must determine
if she was to remain in his life, or if they had reached a point in the
journey where one must turn to the right and one to the left to follow
roads that never joined again on earth. He must determine whether or not
he should marry Andree and take her home. It would be possible. There
was time. He felt sure he could obtain the necessary permission to have
her accompany him on the transport because he knew women were constantly
returning on transports. Even failing that, she could demand her
passport as his wife as a newly made citizen of the United States and go
to America by way of Bordeaux and the French line.... But only as his
wife could she cross the ocean; in no other way could she obtain the
essential passport....
So that became the one question—to marry or not to marry!
If he did not take her with him, then what? How could he tell her?...
What would she do if she discovered that she had lost him? There came to
him a vision of the bridges crossing the Seine ... and it was harrowing!
The breaking of evil news is, perhaps, the most feared task that can
fall to man. He fears it as he fears no other demand that can be made
upon him.... It was inevitable that Ken should consider eluding such a
black responsibility. Why not? It would be perfectly simple.... He was
to see Andree to-morrow night. Well, there was no need to see her, and
the night after that he would be on the train for Brest. He could step
out of her life without a word, abandon her without farewell.... It
would remove all complications—except the complication of conscience. It
was a temptation which did not persist. Kendall Ware was no hero, but he
was immeasurably above such an act of black cowardice. Besides, he could
not bear to go without seeing her again ... if the decision were to
leave her.
He must decide....
It was a sentence from which there could be no reprieve, implacable,
inevitable. He had arrived at the most critical, the most momentous
crisis in his life ... and nowhere could he turn for help. He stood
alone, sole judge and executioner. There was no jury to pronounce
verdict, no expert who could advise. He—Kendall Ware—must speak the
word.... Never had he been so conscious of himself as an individual, of
his existence as a distinct entity, of _himself_. It frightened him—that
idea of himself as a responsible thing, of which life could require
decisions. For the first time he realized the meaning of the words “free
will” and he resented them. God had endowed him with the perilous gift
of freedom to mold his own life, and he felt a cowardly resentment
toward God.... But the stark fact was there. There was no avoiding it.
There _must_ be a choice, _some_ choice ... and the combined populations
of the earth could not take it out of his hands....
He was thankful for some minor matters of routine which would demand his
attention until noon. After that he would be relieved from duty, with no
occupation but to make ready for his departure.... It was a trifling
postponement and he welcomed it eagerly. At eleven-thirty he left the
office and walked down the Champs Élysées, almost for the last time. He
pretended that he was walking aimlessly, but it was not true. He had a
destination, and that destination was 12 rue d’Aguesseau and Maude Knox.
It was not that he felt the necessity of seeing Maude Knox, but that he
wanted to talk to somebody, to talk to somebody who might have some
understanding of his plight. It was not advice he sought so much as
sympathy. Maude was the sort of person he could talk to, and talk was
necessary.... He waited in the archway of the building until she came
down.
“Well?” she said, in some surprise.
“I’m waiting for you. Can you lunch with me?”
“What has happened?” she countered. “I can tell by your face that
something has happened.”
“I’ve been ordered home.”
She did not reply for a moment, for his announcement brought her also
face to face with a climax in her life. _He was going home!_ The _status
quo_ which had been endurable, if difficult, was to be altered. While he
was there and she was there their relations might go on as they were,
somewhat anomalous, but requiring no immediate decisions or
arrangements. They could drift and allow events to take care of
themselves.... But now he was going, and she realized that she did not
want him to go. She realized what she had repressed and concealed was
now insisting upon recognition—that Kendall Ware was very important to
her, that his presence was very important to her, and that for a time to
which she was unable to set an exact limit she had been hoping that
their relations would be determined in a manner satisfactory to
herself.... She was bolder in facing the fact than Kendall had been. She
faced it promptly and adjusted herself to it ... and the fact was that
she loved him....
“Where shall we lunch?” she asked, and it would have been impossible to
tell from her tone that in the brief pause that came before her question
she had withstood a shock and mastered a crisis.
“The Oasis is quiet and we can talk.”
“But they’re so slow!”
“That doesn’t matter to-day. There’s—there’s so much to say.”
“To me?”
He nodded. “I’ve got to talk it out with you ... because you are the
only person who can do any good. The same things are behind both of us.
We know the same sort of people back home.... Don’t you see?”
“I think so. But, remember, I’ve been here as long as you have. I’m not
the same. I’ve seen things, too.... I can’t judge anything the way I
would have judged it back home. I’ll never be able to again.”
They walked to the rue St.-Honoré and presently turned up the rue
Boissy-d’Anglas to the quaint, quiet little English tea-room with its
soft lights and absurdly carved fireplace and decorations. That
fireplace, Bert had once said, looked like the life-work of a lazy man
who loved to whittle. There they found a table—there were but three or
four—and gave their orders to the thin, very serious Englishwoman who
was the only member of the staff of the place who ever became visible.
Nobody knew if she were the proprietress or merely a waitress—and nobody
cared especially.
“It’s rotten luck,” said Ken.
“Yes.”
“I’ll be stuck at some desk job in Washington. It wouldn’t have been so
bad if they had given me a few months at the front—”
“Or if they never had sent you to France at all.”
He looked at her a moment, then shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t have
missed these months over here. I’ve really lived; really appreciated
being alive. No.... Whatever happens now, nobody can take this away from
me....”
“It has been wonderful,” she agreed.
“Just to see it—Paris, the people, the war going on—would be
wonderful.... But I believe I’ve done more than merely _see_. I’ve
_felt_.”
“You’ve seen and felt, Ken, but how much has it changed you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what has seeing and feeling done to you? Has it made any
permanent changes in you? Your experiences here have impressed you a
great deal—but how long will the effect last when you get home?... When
Paris is just a memory—and a subject for conversation? In ten years will
you be any different as a result of all this than you would have been if
you had never come?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said, slowly. “What do _you_ think?”
“I think,” she said, “that we will get back into the old environments
and the old habits and will become just what we would have been. If we
were to stay here, then we might change, broaden, really profit by our
experiences. But we go home. We see the same faces, hear the same sort
of talk, and are tied by the same sort of prejudices and theories and
narrownesses that we used to accept without question. We will know
better for a while, and then we will revert.... It takes something
pretty big and startling to change a person forever.”
“Big and startling.... You mean something in his own life and
experience—something personal to him—that is big and startling?”
“Yes.”
“Like—”
“Oh, like committing a crime, or making some supreme decision or
sacrifice.... Anything that strains the very soul of a person so that it
can never get back into its former shape.”
“Love?”
“Not love itself, but something wonderful or terrible that comes as the
result of a love.”
“Then you don’t think experiences change people, that it is—well, just
making decisions that grow out of the experiences. It is reaching a
crisis and then making a choice of which way you will go.”
“I think that is it. I don’t see how any event can change a person if he
remains merely a spectator. I don’t think any sort of happening will
really alter a person for good and all unless it has compelled him to
use every bit of his will and courage and intelligence to make up his
mind what he will do about it. If he chooses the right way, then he
becomes stronger; if he chooses the wrong way or dodges the decision, he
becomes weaker.”
“There’s no dodging the choice,” he said.
“And that is what’s the matter with you, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And the choice?” She knew very well what problem he was laboring over.
“Is Andree,” he said.
“She was bound to be the problem. Couldn’t you see that from the
beginning?”
“That doesn’t matter now—what I saw at the beginning. All that has
happened has happened”—he paused and stared down at the table-cloth—“and
I’m glad it did happen.... But now I’ve got to settle the bill.”
“And you want my advice?” She looked at him queerly. “You have come to
_me_ for advice about this?”
“Not for advice. I just want to know what you think.”
“About what—definitely?”
“Whether I should marry Andree?”
“Why shouldn’t you?”
“So many reasons.... There’s my mother. There’s the vestibule of the
Presbyterian church, if you know what I mean.” She nodded her
understanding. “There are all the things that have come down from
Plymouth Rock.... There is something in me, something I can’t get rid
of, that is a result of all these things, which makes me hold back from
marrying a girl who—with whom I have—who has been to me what Andree has
been.... And there is _you_.” He uttered the last sentence defiantly.
“That isn’t fair—it isn’t _fair_! You have no business to say such a
thing to me.... You’re the most tremendously selfish man I have ever
met.”
“Selfish!”
“In this whole thing you are thinking of nobody but yourself. You
haven’t thought of Andree—and then you—you say such things
without—considering me.”
“I do think of Andree,” he said, quickly. “I’m afraid—for her. I can’t
bear to think of making her unhappy.... And you—It’s a confused mess,
Maude!...” He leaned across the table. “Maude, if there was no other
woman in my life—if Andree were a thing of the past—would you marry me?”
She stared at him, biting her lips. “Ken Ware,” she said, “that is the
most impertinent—and selfish—question a man ever asked.... Don’t ever do
it again! Don’t ever mention such a thing again! The idea! You want to
have your cake and eat it, too. You’re always at it—carrying on a sort
of left-handed courtship with me.... Always hinting—and—and playing
safe. If you decide you don’t want this other girl, then you want to
have me all prepared to fall into your arms.... I won’t stand it. Never
dare speak of it again—until you can come to me honestly and say that
you _love_ me—and that there is no other woman in your life—and that you
want me to marry you. Then I’ll tell you whether I will or not.... Do
you understand?”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been clumsy ... and selfish.”
“You have.”
“But you’ll tell me what you think—how this whole thing over here
affects you? Don’t think about my case in particular if that is
offensive, but about the whole system, the whole idea of the relations
between men and women as we see them here.”
“I will, because I would like to find out just how I _have_ been
affected....” Suddenly she laughed. “I used to have an uncle who spent
his life arguing abstractions. I remember he took the stand once that
there was no reason why women should not smoke as well as men, that
there was nothing inherently masculine about smoking and nothing
immoral. He declared that women had as much right to smoke as men. My
aunt listened to it until she got tired, so one evening she waited until
uncle lighted a cigar and then took out a cigarette and put it between
her lips.... Uncle stared at her and _roared_. He fairly snatched that
cigarette, and it looked as if he was going to put my aunt out of the
house.... Smoking for women was all right as an abstract question, but
when it touched him personally it was quite another matter.... I think I
am a little like him. I can sit down and say that these girls are within
their rights. I can even see that they are good.... I believe your
Andree is wonderfully good.... I can even say that if so many Americans
were killed in this war that I would never be able to find a husband I
might do the same thing—and I believe it would be _right_ and moral for
me to do it ... in the _abstract_. I can feel these things in Paris. But
as soon as I come to a concrete instance and one which touches me
personally—why, I’m Middle West and Plymouth Rock again.... One can
never tell. Things can happen here—even to an American girl like me—that
never could happen in America in normal conditions. With this war going
on, with this horrible state of affairs, nothing else seems to matter
much. Personal moral considerations seem to be so minute and unimportant
as not to count at all.... There is something in the very air.... You
see we don’t know France—only a small section of it that we see about
the streets. We don’t know how the classes of France who stay in their
homes and are never seen on the boulevards look at this matter. They may
be as straitlaced as we are ... and we’ve been judging all of Paris by
the Champs Élysées....”
“That doesn’t decide the thing that’s worrying me.... It doesn’t even
help.... I wonder if this war and everything connected with it won’t
change people back home.”
“So that they would tolerate—Andree?”
He nodded.
“Never—if they found out that Andree had violated their laws.”
“But you—what do you think about her?”
“Is that fair?”
“I don’t see why it isn’t. You’ve met her and talked with her. What do
you think of her?”
“Ken, she is one individual, and I can tell you what I think about her
... but that doesn’t make her stand for the whole code of ethics. The
other thousands of girls may not be like Andree at all—they may be bad.
Don’t you see? It comes down to a matter of personal, concrete
experience again.... But Andree....” She looked at him gravely. “I
should hate to feel that I had broken faith with Andree or been unfair
to her or caused her grief. She is very sweet and childlike—and _good_.
She has no consciousness of having been other than virtuous because she
has loved you.... I had lunch with her the other day. It was the first
time I had ever lunched with a woman whom I knew to be violating our
standard ... and it didn’t hurt me in the least. I felt no repulsion or
disgust ... but that was because I couldn’t help feeling that she was
good....”
“Then you think—”
“I think this: that all of us come to fit into our environment very
readily. We come over here, and soon we are being absorbed by the things
around us.... Presently we will go home, more or less in the frame of
mind created by Paris ... and then the environment of home will begin to
work. In no time at all we will have adjusted ourselves again and Paris
will be almost as if it never had been.... I believe that is exactly
what will happen. If we stayed here we should become as nearly Parisian
as we could be made, but, going home, Paris will very rapidly be
eradicated.”
“And all that has happened here?”
“Will be part of a memory—something in a dream.”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe that. I know I shall never be just
the same as I was before. I see your point of view, but it doesn’t help
me ... and I don’t believe you are right.”
“You don’t want to believe it.”
“I know—Andree makes all the difference. If you were a man and there had
been an Andree you would have felt as I have. Somehow France means
Andree to me. I never dreamed of any one like her. You don’t know
her—what a quaint, childlike, womanly, fairy kind of a girl she is. When
I think of her she doesn’t seem real, but like some mysterious being out
of a magical country who has come to visit for a little while—to make me
happy.... She does come from a mysterious country. Do you know that I
don’t know her name—just Andree? I have never asked. I don’t know where
she lives or how she lives. I don’t know anything about her except that
she appears and is with me a little while—and then disappears again....
That has made a difference—that quality.”
“I would hardly have suspected you of being so romantic.”
“It isn’t sentimentality, at any rate.... And nobody can ever convince
me that I’ve done wrong or that I’ve taken any harm from her.... Even if
this should prove to be only an episode, it has been a beautiful episode
with nothing but good in it.... But this mystery, this fairy element,
has somehow kept the realities at a distance. I have simply gone along
and _lived_.... Why, I have hardly thought of such a thing as marriage
in connection with her. Possibly you won’t understand that, but I
understand it perfectly.... To marry Andree would be to make her real,
material. The mystery would be gone.”
“I think I understand.”
“But to marry her and take her to Detroit!... Suppose I should take her
home and then this story should come out—and it _would_ come out
somehow. What then?... When I think of that smug, gossiping crowd in the
church vestibule, and of their looking at her and pointing at her and
whispering about her—it seems like a profanation. I couldn’t bear it....
And then—well, I’ve inherited some of it myself. I belong to that crowd.
I’ve their ideas of marriage ... and the vestibule doesn’t marry a girl
who—has lived with a man....”
“You’re afraid of them.”
“I am,” he said, and flushed.
“But if you loved her—really loved her—”
“I do,” he said, quickly, “but can’t one love without wanting to marry?
That is a thing that puzzles me.”
“I don’t believe anybody can love and be willing under any circumstances
to part with the person one loves.”
“I don’t know.... Isn’t it, possibly, better to love and to be a part of
a beautiful, rather mysterious, glowing episode and to have it end while
it is beautiful and mysterious?... Then something always
remains—something dreamlike and lovely. To come down to actualities, to
marry, to take this mystery into the land of grocers’ bills and
house-cleaning and the every-day problems of marriage—why, it wouldn’t
be the same thing at all.”
“I don’t think you believe that. You’re arguing with yourself and trying
to salve your conscience.... You’re afraid to marry Andree and take her
home—”
“That is part of it. I admit it. But—and I am sincere when I say it—I
don’t know whether I want to marry her. I love her and she loves me....
She would be a wonderful wife—and yet, love and all, I don’t know
whether I want to marry her.”
“You are just trying to deceive yourself. Either you don’t love her at
all....”
“Would you marry a woman who had done what Andree has done?”
“It would depend on the woman—and upon how much I loved her.... You
can’t generalize about that. It is a matter that nobody can decide
except for himself in a particular instance. I do think, if I were a
man, that I could marry your Andree without a thought....”
“But to take her out of her world—away from Paris where she is as
natural and unconscious as the birds in the trees—and set her down for
life in Detroit ... to be stared at and lied about and suspected ... it
would make her miserable.”
“Would it make her as miserable as to lose you altogether? If she had
you and your love, no matter what unpleasant things were about, wouldn’t
that be better than to be left behind here alone?”
“Yes,” he said, honestly. “Yes.”
She looked at him a moment, studying his face, which was set and anxious
and overcast, his eyes, which were dull and brooding, and a wave of
compassion surged up within her.
“It has made you miserable,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I deserve to be miserable.”
“Possibly not. Nobody can judge, but—this affair has been almost
inevitable. It wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t Andree’s fault.... The
circumstances were here, and you two got tangled up in them....” She
glanced at her watch. “I must go now. I’m sorry I haven’t helped
you—for—I wish I might help you.... Shall I see you again before you
go?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then this is good-by.” She held out her hand steadily. “I hope matters
turn out for—for your happiness.... Good-by.”
“I shall write you.”
She looked at him and smiled queerly, but made no rejoinder. “No, don’t
come with me,” she said, as he walked to the door. “I’d rather go
alone.... Good-by and a safe voyage.”
And so the first of the two women with whom his life had become involved
stepped out of his life....