FEBRUARY

FEBRUARY dusk on the Seine. The boats are plying again, but they

stop at nightfall, and the river is inky-smooth, with the same long

weed-like reflections as in August. Only the reflections are fewer

and paler; bright lights are muffled everywhere. The line of the

quays is scarcely discernible, and the heights of the Trocadero are

lost in the blur of night, which presently effaces even the firm

tower-tops of Notre-Dame. Down the damp pavements only a few street

lamps throw their watery zigzags. The shops are shut, and the

windows above them thickly curtained. The faces of the houses are

all blind.

In the narrow streets of the Rive Gauche the darkness is even

deeper, and the few scattered lights in courts or "cites" create

effects of Piranesi-like mystery. The gleam of the chestnut-roaster's

brazier at a street corner deepens the sense of an old adventurous

Italy, and the darkness beyond seems full of cloaks and conspiracies.

I turn, on my way home, into an empty street between high garden

walls, with a single light showing far off at its farther end. Not a

soul is in sight between me and that light: my steps echo endlessly

in the silence. Presently a dim figure comes around the corner ahead

of me. Man or woman? Impossible to tell till I overtake it. The

February fog deepens the darkness, and the faces one passes are

indistinguishable. As for the numbers of the houses, no one thinks

of looking for them. If you know the quarter you count doors from

the corner, or try to puzzle out the familiar outline of a balcony

or a pediment; if you are in a strange street, you must ask at the

nearest tobacconist's--for, as for finding a policeman, a yard off

you couldn't tell him from your grandmother!

Such, after six months of war, are the nights of Paris; the days are

less remarkable and less romantic.

Almost all the early flush and shiver of romance is gone; or so at

least it seems to those who have watched the gradual revival of

life. It may appear otherwise to observers from other countries,

even from those involved in the war. After London, with all her

theaters open, and her machinery of amusement almost unimpaired,

Paris no doubt seems like a city on whom great issues weigh. But to

those who lived through that first sunlit silent month the streets

to-day show an almost normal activity. The vanishing of all the

motorbuses, and of the huge lumbering commercial vans, leaves many a

forgotten perspective open and reveals many a lost grace of

architecture; but the taxi-cabs and private motors are almost as

abundant as in peace-time, and the peril of pedestrianism is kept at

its normal pitch by the incessant dashing to and fro of those

unrivalled engines of destruction, the hospital and War Office

motors. Many shops have reopened, a few theatres are tentatively

producing patriotic drama or mixed programmes seasonal with

sentiment and mirth, and the cinema again unrolls its eventful

kilometres.

For a while, in September and October, the streets were made

picturesque by the coming and going of English soldiery, and the

aggressive flourish of British military motors. Then the fresh faces

and smart uniforms disappeared, and now the nearest approach to

"militarism" which Paris offers to the casual sight-seer is the

occasional drilling of a handful of _piou-pious_ on the muddy

reaches of the Place des Invalides. But there is another army in

Paris. Its first detachments came months ago, in the dark September

days--lamentable rear-guard of the Allies' retreat on Paris. Since

then its numbers have grown and grown, its dingy streams have

percolated through all the currents of Paris life, so that wherever

one goes, in every quarter and at every hour, among the busy

confident strongly-stepping Parisians one sees these other people,

dazed and slowly moving--men and women with sordid bundles on their

backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes,

children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies pressed

against their shoulders: the great army of the Refugees. Their faces

are unmistakable and unforgettable. No one who has ever caught that

stare of dumb bewilderment--or that other look of concentrated

horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins--can shake off

the obsession of the Refugees. The look in their eyes is part of the

look of Paris. It is the dark shadow on the brightness of the face

she turns to the enemy. These poor people cannot look across the

borders to eventual triumph. They belong mostly to a class whose

knowledge of the world's affairs is measured by the shadow of their

village steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causation

than the thousands overwhelmed at Avezzano. They were ploughing and

sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when

suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them.

And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces

and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory

of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to

slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by

drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying.

These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the

doors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, in

return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet, or

intelligible, or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a

meal-ticket--and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes...

What are the Parisians doing meanwhile? For one thing--and the sign

is a good one--they are refilling the shops, and especially, of

course, the great "department stores." In the early war days there

was no stranger sight than those deserted palaces, where one strayed

between miles of unpurchased wares in quest of vanished salesmen. A

few clerks, of course, were left: enough, one would have thought,

for the rare purchasers who disturbed their meditations. But the few

there were did not care to be disturbed: they lurked behind their

walls of sheeting, their bastions of flannelette, as if ashamed to

be discovered. And when one had coaxed them out they went through

the necessary gestures automatically, as if mournfully wondering

that any one should care to buy. I remember once, at the Louvre,

seeing the whole force of a "department," including the salesman I

was trying to cajole into showing me some medicated gauze, desert

their posts simultaneously to gather about a motor-cyclist in a

muddy uniform who had dropped in to see his pals with tales from the

front. But after six months the pressure of normal appetites has

begun to reassert itself--and to shop is one of the normal appetites

of woman. I say "shop" instead of buy, to distinguish between the

dull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiring

things one might do without. It is evident that many of the

thousands now fighting their way into the great shops must be

indulging in the latter delight. At a moment when real wants are

reduced to a minimum, how else account for the congestion of the

department store? Even allowing for the immense, the perpetual

buying of supplies for hospitals and work-rooms, the incessant

stoking-up of the innumerable centres of charitable production,

there is no explanation of the crowding of the other departments

except the fact that woman, however valiant, however tried, however

suffering and however self-denying, must eventually, in the long

run, and at whatever cost to her pocket and her ideals, begin to

shop again. She has renounced the theatre, she denies herself the

teo-rooms, she goes apologetically and furtively (and economically)

to concerts--but the swinging doors of the department stores suck

her irresistibly into their quicksand of remnants and reductions.

No one, in this respect, would wish the look of Paris to be changed.

It is a good sign to see the crowds pouring into the shops again,

even though the sight is less interesting than that of the other

crowds streaming daily--and on Sunday in immensely augmented

numbers--across the Pont Alexandre III to the great court of the

Invalides where the German trophies are displayed. Here the heart of

France beats with a richer blood, and something of its glow passes

into foreign veins as one watches the perpetually renewed throngs

face to face with the long triple row of German guns. There are few

in those throngs to whom one of the deadly pack has not dealt a

blow; there are personal losses, lacerating memories, bound up with

the sight of all those evil engines. But personal sorrow is the

sentiment least visible in the look of Paris. It is not fanciful to

say that the Parisian face, after six months of trial, has acquired

a new character. The change seems to have affected the very stuff it

is moulded of, as though the long ordeal had hardened the poor human

clay into some dense commemorative substance. I often pass in the

street women whose faces look like memorial medals--idealized images

of what they were in the flesh. And the masks of some of the

men--those queer tormented Gallic masks, crushed-in and squat and a

little satyr-like--look like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, burnt

and twisted from their baptism of fire. But none of these faces

reveals a personal preoccupation: they are looking, one and all, at

France erect on her borders. Even the women who are comparing

different widths of Valenciennes at the lace-counter all have

something of that vision in their eyes--or else one does not see the

ones who haven't.

It is still true of Paris that she has not the air of a capital in

arms. There are as few troops to be seen as ever, and but for the

coming and going of the orderlies attached to the War Office and the

Military Government, and the sprinkling of uniforms about the doors

of barracks, there would be no sign of war in the streets--no sign,

that is, except the presence of the wounded. It is only lately that

they have begun to appear, for in the early months of the war they

were not sent to Paris, and the splendidly appointed hospitals of

the capital stood almost empty, while others, all over the country,

were overcrowded. The motives for the disposal of the wounded have

been much speculated upon and variously explained: one of its

results may have been the maintaining in Paris of the extraordinary

moral health which has given its tone to the whole country, and

which is now sound and strong enough to face the sight of any

misery.

And miseries enough it has to face. Day by day the limping figures

grow more numerous on the pavement, the pale bandaged heads more

frequent in passing carriages. In the stalls at the theatres and

concerts there are many uniforms; and their wearers usually have to

wait till the hall is emptied before they hobble out on a supporting

arm. Most of them are very young, and it is the expression of their

faces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the very

essence of what I have called the look of Paris. They are grave,

these young faces: one hears a great deal of the gaiety in the

trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad,

however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured.

It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness,

meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of

character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that

substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a

long time to come Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy of

the look on their faces.