"Heaps!" She attempted to smile back at me, but her lower lip quivered.
"Yours has always been my favorite face, you know, Ambo. Phil's is
wiser--somehow, and stronger, too; and Jimmy's is sunnier, healthier,
and--yes, handsomer, dear! Nobody could call you handsome, could they?
But you're not ugly, either. Sister was adorably ugly. It was a daily
miracle to see the lamp in her suddenly glow through and glorify
everything. I used to wait for it. It's the only thing that has ever
made me feel--humble; I never feel that way with you. I just feel
satisfied, content."
"Like putting on an old pair of slippers," I ventured.
"That's it," sighed Susan happily, and closed her eyes.
"That's it!" echoed my familiar demon, "but no one but Susan would have
admitted it."
As usual, I found it wiser to cut him dead.
"Well, dear," I said to Susan, "there's one good thing: you'll be able
to use the old pair of slippers any time you need them now. I'm to be
held in Paris, I find, for a three-months' job."
She opened her eyes again; disapprovingly, I felt.
"You shouldn't have done that, Ambo! You're needed at Evian; I know you
are. It's bad enough to be out of things myself, but I won't drag you
out of them! How could you imagine that would please me?"
"I hoped it would, a little," I replied, "but it hasn't any of it been
my doing--Chatworth's wife's expecting a baby in a few weeks, and he
wants to run home to welcome it; I'm to take on his executive work till
he gets back. God knows he needs a rest!"
"As if you didn't, too!" protested Susan, inconsistently enough. Her
eyes fell shut again; her hands slipped from mine. "Ambo," she asked
presently, in a thread of voice that I had to lean down to her to hear,
"have they told you I can never have a baby now?... Wasn't it lucky if
that had to happen to some woman--it happened to me?"
No, they had not told me; and for the moment I could not answer her.
"Jimmy's wife is going to have a baby soon," added Susan.
"Jimmy's--_what_!" I shrieked. Yes, shrieked--for, to my horror, I heard
my voice crack and soar, strident, incredulous.
Susan was staring at me, wide-eyed, her face aquiver with excitement;
two deep spots of color flaming on her thin cheeks.
"Didn't you _know_?"
The white door opened as she spoke, and Susan's Norman nurse hurried in,
her sparrow eyes transformed to stiletto points of indignation. "_Ah,
m'sieu--c'est trop fort!_ When I told you expressly to do nothing to
excite the poor little one!" I rose, self-convicted, before her.
"_Tais-toi, Annette!_" exclaimed Susan sharply, her eyes too gleaming
with indignation. "It is not your place to speak so to m'sieu, a man old
enough to be your father--and more than a father to me! For shame! His
surprise was unavoidable! I have just given him a shock--unexpected
news! Good news, however, I am glad to say. Now leave us!"
"On the contrary," replied Nurse Annette, four feet eleven of
uncompromising and awful dignity, "I am in charge here, and it is m'sieu
who will leave--_tout court_! But I regret my _vivacite_, _m'sieu_!"
"It is nothing, mademoiselle. You have acted as you should. It is for me
to offer my regrets. But--when may I return?"
"To-morrow, m'sieu," said Nurse Annette.
"Naturally," said Susan. "Now sit down, please, Ambo, and listen to me."
For an instant the stiletto points glinted dangerously; then Nurse
Annette giggled. That is precisely what Nurse Annette did; she giggled.
Then she twirled about on her toes and left us--very quietly, yet not
without a certain malicious ostentation, closing the door.
The French are a brave people, an intelligent and industrious people;
but they exhibit at times a levity almost childlike in the descendants
of so ancient and so deeply civilized a race....
"I knew nothing about it myself, Ambo," Susan was saying, "until I was
beginning to feel a little stronger, after my operations at Dunkirk.
Then Mona brought me letters--three from you, dear, and one long one
from Jimmy. But no letter from Phil. I'd hoped, foolishly I suppose, for
that. Jimmy's was the dearest, funniest letter I've ever read; it made
me laugh and cry all at once. It wasn't a bit good for me, Ambo. It used
me all up! And I kept wondering what you must be thinking. You see, he
said in it he had written you."
"I've had no letter from Jimmy for at least five or six months," I
replied.
"So many letters start bravely off over here," sighed Susan, "and then
just vanish--like Phil. How many heartbreaks they must have caused, all
those vanished letters--and men. And how silly of me to think about it!
There must be some fatal connection, Ambo, between being sick and being
sentimental. I suppose sentimentality's always one symptom of weakness.
I've never been so disgustingly maudlin as these past weeks--never!"
"So Jimmy's married," I repeated stupidly, for at least the third time.
"Yes," smiled Susan, "to little Jeanne-Marie Valerie Josephine Aulard. I
haven't seen her, of course, but I feel as if I knew her well. They've
been married now almost a year." She paused again. "Why don't you look
gladder, Ambo? Why don't you ask questions? You must be dying to know
why Jimmy kept it a secret from us so long."
I had not dared to ask questions, for I believed I could guess why Jimmy
had kept it a secret from us so long. For the first time in his life, I
thought, Jimmy had been a craven. He had been afraid to tell Susan of an
event which he must know would be like a knife in her heart.
"I suppose I'm foolishly hurt about it," I mumbled.
How bravely she was taking it all, in spite of her physical exhaustion!
Poor child, poor child! But in God's name what then was the meaning of
my vision back there in the hotel room at Evian? Jimmy entering this
room where I now sat, tiptoeing to this very bedside, stooping down and
kissing Susan--and her hand lifted, overcoming an almost mortal
weakness, to touch his hair....
"You mustn't be hurt at all," Susan gently rebuked me. "Jimmy kept his
marriage a secret from us for a very Jimmyesque reason. There was
nothing specially exciting or romantic about the courtship itself,
though. Little Jeanne-Marie's father--he was a notary of Soissons who
had made a nice, comfy little fortune for those parts--died just before
the war. So the Widow Aulard retired with Jeanne-Marie to a
brand-spandy-new, very ugly little country house--south of the Aisne,
Ambo, not far from Soissons; the canny old notary had just completed it
as a haven for his declining years when he up and died. Well then,
during the first German rush, Widow Aulard--being a good extra-stubborn
_bourgeoise_--refused to leave her home--refused, Jeanne-Marie told
Jimmy, even to believe the Boches would ever really be permitted to come
so far. That was foolish, of course--but doesn't it make you like her,
and _see_ her--mustache and all?
"But the deluge was too much, even for her. One morning, after a night
of terror, she found herself compulsory housekeeper, and little
Jeanne-Marie compulsory servant, to a kennel of Bavarian officers. Then,
three weeks or so later, the orderly of one of these officers, an
Alsatian, was discovered to be a spy and was shot--and the Widow Aulard
was shot, too, for having unwittingly harbored him. Jeanne-Marie wasn't
shot, though; the kennel liked her cooking. So, like the true daughter
of a French notary, she used her wits, made herself indispensable to the
comfort of the officers, preserved her dignity under incredible insults,
and her virtue under conditions I needn't tell you about, Ambo--and
bided her time.
"It nearly killed her; but she lived through it, and finally the French
returned and helped her patch up and clean up what was left of the
kennel. And a month or so later Jimmy's _esquadrille_ made
Jeanne-Marie's battered little house their headquarters and treated its
mistress like the staunch little heroine she is. Of course, Jimmy wasn't
attached to the _esquadrille_ then; it was more than a year later that
he arrived on the scene; but it didn't take him long after getting there
to decide on an international alliance. Bless him! he says Jeanne-Marie
isn't very pretty, he guesses; she's just--wonderful! She couldn't make
up her mind to the international alliance, though. She loved Jimmy, but
the match didn't strike her as prudent. An orphan must consider these
things. Her property had been swept away, and Jimmy admitted he had
nothing. And being her father's daughter, Jeanne-Marie very wisely
pointed out that he was in hourly peril of being killed or crippled for
life. To marry under such circumstances would be to make her father turn
in his grave. How can anything so sad be so funny, Ambo? Well, anyway,
Jimmy, being Jimmy, saw the point, agreed with her completely, and seems
to have felt thoroughly ashamed of himself for trying to persuade her
into so crazy a match!
"Then little Jeanne-Marie came down with typhoid; her life was
despaired of, a priest was summoned. In the presence of death, she
managed to tell the priest that it would seem less lonely and terrible
to her if she could meet it as the wife 'M'sieu Jee-mee.' So the good
priest managed somehow to slash through yards of official red tape in no
time--you know how hard it is to get married in France, Ambo!--and the
sacrament of marriage preceded the last rites; and then, dear,
Jeanne-Marie faced the Valley of Shadow clinging to M'sieu Jee-mee's
hand. The whole _esquadrille_ was unstrung--naturally; even their famous
ace, Boisrobert. Jimmy says he absolutely refused to fly for three
days." Tears were pouring from Susan's eyes.
"Oh, what a fool I am!" she protested, mopping at them with a corner of
the top sheet. "She didn't die, of course. She rallied at the last
moment and got well--and found herself safely married after all, and
quite ready to take her chances of living happily with M'sieu Jee-mee
ever afterward! There--isn't that a nice story, Ambo? Don't you like
pretty-pie fairy tales when they happen to be true?"
That she could ask me this with her heart breaking! Again I could not
trust myself to speak calmly, and I saw that she was worn out with the
effort she had made to overcome her weakness, and what I believed to be
a living pain in her breast. I rose.
"Ambo!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed, "still you don't ask me why Jimmy
didn't tell us! How stupid of you to take it all like this!"
"I've stayed too long, dear," I mumbled; "far too long. I've let you
talk too much. Why, it's almost dark! To-morrow----"
"No, _now_," she insisted, with a little frown of displeasure. "I won't
have you thinking meanly of Jimmy! It's too absurdly unfair! I'm ashamed
of you, Ambo."
How she idealized him! How she had always idealized that normal,
likable, essentially commonplace Irish boy--pouring out, wasting for him
treasures of unswerving loyalty! It was damnable. But these things were
the final mysteries of life, these instinctive bonds, yielding no clue
to reason. One could only accept them, bitterly, with a curse or a groan
withheld. Accept them--since one must....
"Well, dear," broke from me with a touch, almost, of impatience, "I
confess I'm more interested in your health than in Jimmy's psychology!
But I see you won't sleep a wink if you don't tell me!"
"I've never known you to be so horrid," she said faintly, all the
weariness of body and soul returning upon her for a moment, till she
fought it back. She did so, to my amazement, with an entirely unexpected
chuckle, a true sharp, clear Birch Street gleam. "You don't deserve it,
Ambo, but I'm going to make you smile a little, whether you feel like it
or not! The reason Jimmy didn't tell us was because--after Jeanne-Marie
got well--he spent weeks trying to persuade her that a marriage made
exclusively for eternity oughtn't to be considered binding on this side!
She had been entirely certain, he kept pointing out to her, that she
ought not to marry him in this world, and she had only done so when she
thought she was being taken from it." Susan chuckled again. "Can't you
hear him, Ambo--and her? Jimmy, feeling he had won something precious
through an unfair advantage and so refusing his good fortune--or trying
to; and practical Jeanne-Marie simply nonplussed by his sudden lack of
all common sense! Besides which, wasn't marriage a sacrament, and wasn't
M'sieu Jee-mee a good Catholic? Was he going back on his faith--or
asking her to trifle with hers? And, anyway, they were married--that was
the end of it! And of course, Ambo, it was--really. There! I knew sooner
or later you'd have to smile!"
"Did he give in gracefully?" I asked.
"Oh, things soon settled themselves, I imagine, when Jeanne-Marie was
well enough to leave. Naturally, she had to as soon as she could. A
soldier's wife can't live with him at the Front, you know--even to keep
house for his _esquadrille_. She's living here now, in Paris, with a
distant cousin, an old lady who runs a tiny shop near St.-Sulpice--sells
pious pamphlets and pink-and-blue plaster Virgins--you know the sort of
thing, Ambo. You must call on her at once in due form, dear. You must.
I'm so eager to--when I can." She paused on a breath, then added slowly,
her eyes closing, "The baby's expected in February--Jimmy's baby."
The look on her face had puzzled me as I left her; a look of quiet
happiness, I must have said--if I had not known.
And my vision at Evian----?
I walked back toward the barrier down endless darkening avenues of
suburban Neuilly; walked by instinct, though quite unconscious of
direction, straight to the Porte Maillot, through the emotional
nightmare of what my old childhood nurse, Maggie, used always to call "a
great state of mind."
V
And that night--it was, I think, the thirtieth of January, or was it the
thirty-first?--fifty or sixty Boche aeroplanes came by detached
squadrons over Paris and, for the first time since the Zeppelins of
1916, dropped a shower of bombs on the _agglomeration Parisienne_. It
was an entirely successful raid, destructive of property and life; for
the German flyers in their powerful Gothas had caught Paris napping,
impotently unprepared.
I had dined that evening with an old acquaintance, doing six-months'
time, as it amused him to put it, with the purchasing department of the
Red Cross; a man who had long since turned the silver spoon he was born
with to solid gold, and who could see no reason why, just because for
the first time in his life he was giving something for nothing, he
should deprive himself while doing so of the very high degree of
creature comfort he had always enjoyed. He was stationed in Paris, and
it was his invariable custom to dine sumptuously at one of the more
expensive restaurants.
This odd combination of service and sybaritism was not much to my
liking, seeming to indicate a curious lack of imaginative sympathy with
the victims of that triumphing Misery he was enlisted to combat;
nevertheless, I had properly appreciated my dinner. It is impossible not
to appreciate a well-ordered dinner, _chez_ Durant, where wartime
limitations seemed never to weigh very heavily upon the delicately
imagined good cheer. True, the cost of this good cheer was fantastic,
and I shuddered a little as certain memories of refugee hordes at Evian
intruded themselves between our golden mouthfuls; but the bouquet of a
fine mellowed Burgundy was in my nostrils and soon proved anaesthetic to
conscience. And Arthur Dalton is a good table companion; his easy flow
of conversation quite as mellow often as the wine he knows so well how
to select. But that night, though I did my poor best to emulate him, I
fear he did not find an equal combination of the soothing and the
stimulating in me.
Perhaps it was because I had bored him that I was destined before we
parted to catch a rather startling glimpse of a new Arthur Dalton, new
at least to me; a person wholly different from the amusing man of the
world I had long, but so casually, known.
"Hunt," he said unexpectedly, over a final glass of old yellow
Chartreuse, a liquor almost unobtainable at any price, "you've changed a
lot since our days here together." We had seen something of each other
once in Paris, years before, during a fine month of spring weather; it
was the year after my wife had left me. "A lot," he repeated; "and I
wish I could say for the better. You've aged, man, before you're old.
You've let life, somehow, get on your nerves, depress you. Suffered your
genial spirits to rot, as the poet says. That's foolish. It's a kind of
defeat--acceptance of defeat. Now my philosophy is always to stay on
top--where the cream lies. Somebody's going to get it if you and I
don't, eh? Well, I'm having my share. I don't want more and I'm damned
if I'll take less. Anything wrong with that point of view, old man? I'd
be willing to swear it used to be yours!"
"Never quite, I think," was my answer; "at least I never formulated it
that way. I took things pretty easily as they came, Dalt, and didn't
worry about reasons. I've never been a philosophical person, never lived
up to any consciously organized plan. If I had any God in those days I
suppose I named him 'Culture'; or worse still 'Good Taste.' Not much of
a god for these times," I added.
"Oh, I don't know," Dalton struck in; "I'm not so sure of that! I can't
see that these times differ much from any others. There's a big war on,
yes; but that's nothing new, is it? Looks to me pretty much like the
same old planet, right now. Never was much of a planet for the great
majority; never will be. A few of us get all the prizes--always have.
Some of us partly deserve 'em, but most of us just happen to be lucky. I
don't see anything that's likely to change that arrangement. Do you?"
"They've changed it in Russia," I suggested.
"Not a bit!" exclaimed Dalton. "Some different people have taken their
big chance and climbed on top, that's all! I doubt if they stay there
long; still, they may. That fellow Lenine, now; he has a kind of
well-up-in-the-saddle feel to him. Quite a boy, I've no doubt; and if he
sticks, I congratulate him! It's the one really amusing place to be."
"You sound like a Junker war-lord," I smiled. "Fortunately, I know your
bark, and I've never seen you bite."
"My dear Hunt," said Dalton, lowering his voice, "my teeth are
perfectly sound, I assure you; and I've always used 'em when I had to,
believe _me_. It's the law of life, as I read it. And just here between
ourselves, eh--cutting out all the nonsense we've learned to babble--do
you see any difference between a Junker war-lord and a British Tory
peer--or an American capitalist? Any real difference, I mean? I'm all
for licking Germany if we can, because if we don't she'll control the
cream supply of the world. But I can't blame her for wanting to, and if
she gets away with it--which the devil forbid!--we'll all mighty soon
forget all the nasty things we've been saying about her and begin trying
to lick her Prussian boots instead of her armies! That's so, and you
know it! Why, the most sickening thing about this war, Hunt, isn't the
loss of life--that may be a benefit to us all in the end; no sir, it's
the moral buncombe it's let loose! That man Wilson simply sweats the
stuff day and night, drenches us with it--till we stink like a church of
Easter lilies. Come now! Doesn't it all, way down in your tummy
somewhere, give you a good honest griping pain?"
I stared at him. Yes; the man was evidently in earnest; was even, I
could see, expecting me to smile--however deprecatingly, for form's
sake--and in the main agree with him, as became my situation in life; my
class. I had supposed myself incapable of moral shock, but found now
that the sincerity of his cynicism had unquestionably shocked me; I felt
suddenly embarrassed, awkward, ashamed.
"Dalt," I finally managed, pretty lamely, "it's absurd, I admit; but if
I try to answer you, I shall lose my temper. I mean it. And as I've
dined wonderfully at your expense, that's something I don't care to do."
It was his turn to stare at me.
"Do you mean to say, Hunt, you've been caught by all this sentimental
parson's palaver? Brotherhood, peace on earth, all the rest of it?"
My nerves snapped. "If you insist on a straight answer," I said, "you
can have it: I've no use for a world that spiritually starves its poets
and saints, and physically fattens its hyenas and hogs! And if that
isn't sentimental enough for you, I can go farther!"
"Oh, that'll do," he laughed, uncomfortably however. "I'm always
forgetting you're a scribbler, of sorts. You scribblers are all
alike--emotionally diseased. If you'd only stick to your real job of
amusing the rest of us, it wouldn't matter. It's when you try to reform
us that I draw the line; have to. I can't afford to grow
brainsick--abnormal. Well," he added, pushing back his chair, "come
along anyway! We've just time to get over to the Casino and have a look
at the only Gaby. Been there? It's a cheap show, after Broadway, but it
does well enough to pass the time."
From this unalluring suggestion I begged off, justly pleading a hard day
of work ahead. "And if you don't mind, Dalt, I'll walk home."
"Oh, all right," he agreed; "I'll walk along with you, if you'll take it
easy. I'm not much for exercise, you know. But it's a perfect night."
I had hoped ardently to be rid of him, but I managed to accept his
company with apparent good grace, and we strolled down the Avenue Victor
Hugo toward the Triumphal Arch, bathed now in clearest moonlight,
standing forth to all Paris as a cruelly ironic symbol of Hope, never
relinquished, but endlessly deferred. Turning there, the Champs-Elysees,
all but deserted at that hour in wartime Paris, stretched on before us
down a gentle slope, half dusky, half glimmering, and wholly silent
except for our lonesome-sounding footfalls and the distant faint
plopping of a lame cab-horse's stumbling heels.
"Not much like the old town we knew once, eh, Hunt?" asked Dalton.
But conversation soon faded out between us, as we made our way through
etched mysteries of black and silver under thickset leafless branches.
An occasional light beckoned us from far ahead down our pavement vista;
for Paris had not yet fully become that city--not of dreadful--but of
majestic and beautiful night we were later to know, and to love with so
changed and grave a passion.
It was just after we had crossed the Rond-Point that the first seven or
eight bombs in swift even succession shatteringly fell. They were not
near enough to us to do more than root us to the spot with amazement.
"What the _hell_?" muttered Dalton, holding my eyes....
Then, very far off, a curious thin wailing noise began, increasing
rapidly, rising to an eerie scream which doubled and redoubled in volume
as it was taken up in other quarters and came to us in intricately
rhythmic waves.
"Sirens," said Dalton. "The _pompiers_ are out. I guess they've come,
damn them, eh?"
"Seems so," I answered. "Yes; there go the lights. I must get to Neuilly
at once--a sick friend. So long, old man."
"Hold on!" he called after me. "Don't be an ass!"
To my impatient annoyance, for they impeded my progress, knots of people
had sprung everywhere from the darkness and were standing now in open
spots, in the full moonlight, murmuring together, as they stared with
backward-craned necks up into the spotless sky....
So, with crashing, sinister, unresolved chords, began the Straussian
overture to the great Boche symphony, _Gott Strafe Paris_, played to its
impotent conclusion throughout those bitter spring months of the year of
our wonderment, 1918! Ninety-one bombs were dropped that night within
the old fortifications; more than two hundred were showered on the
_banlieue_. No subsequent raid was to prove equally destructive of
property or life, and it was disturbingly evident that, for the time
being at least, the shadowy air lanes to Paris lay broadly open to the
foe.
Yet, for some reason unexplained, the Gothas did not immediately or
soon return. Followed a hush of rather more than a month, during which
Paris worked breathlessly to improve its air defenses and protect its
more precious monuments. Comically ugly little sausage-balloons--gorged
caterpillars, they seemed, raw yellow with pale green articulations and
loathsome, floppy appendages--were moored in the squares and public
gardens; mountains of sand bags were heaped about the Triumphal Arch and
before the portals of Notre Dame; spies were hunted out, proclamations
issued, the entrance ways to deep cellars were placarded; and Night,
that long-exiled princess, came back to us, royally, in full mourning
robes. In her honor all windows were doubly curtained, all street lamps
extinguished, or dimmed with paint to a heavy blue. We invoked the
august amplitude of darkness and would gladly have banished the trivial
prying moon, seeing her at last in true colors for the sinister corpse
light of heaven which she is. No one, I think, was deceived by this
lengthening interval of calm. Why the Gothas did not at once return,
what restrained them from following up their easy triumph, we could not
guess; but we knew they would come again, would come many times....
Meanwhile, for most of us who dwelt there, life went on as before,
busily enough; but for one of us--as for how many another--this no
longer mattered.
Brave little Jeanne-Marie Valerie Josephine Aulard, on that night of
anguish, died in giving premature birth to Jimmy's son, James Aulard
Kane--as Susan later named him: for this wizened, unready morsel of
man's flesh, in spite of every disadvantage attending his debut and
first motherless weeks on earth, clung with the characteristic tenacity
of his parents to his one obvious line of duty, which was merely to keep
alive in despite of fortune: a duty he somehow finally accomplished to
his own entire satisfaction and to the blessed relief of Susan and of
me. But I shall never forget my first pitiful introduction to James
Aulard Kane.
After leaving Dalton, that night, I had finally made my way to Susan's
hospital on foot, which I had soon found to be the one practicable means
of locomotion. It was a long walk, and it brought me in due course into
the Avenue de la Grande Armee, just in time to receive the full
stampeding effect of the three bombs which fell there, the nearest of
them not four hundred yards distant from me. I am by no means
instinctively intrepid; quite the contrary; I shy like a skittish horse
in the presence of danger, and my first authentic impulse is always to
cut and run. On this occasion, by the time I had mastered this impulse,
I had placed a good six hundred yards between me and that ill-fated
building, whose stone-faced upper floors had been riven and hurled down
to the broad avenue below. Then, shamefacedly enough, I turned and
forced myself back toward that smoking ruin.
Our American ambulances from Neuilly were already arriving--the
_pompiers_ came later--and the police lines were being drawn. A civilian
spectator, even though a captain of the Red Cross, could render no real
assistance; so much, after certain futile efforts on my part, was made
clear to me, profanely, in a Middle Western accent, by a young
stretcher-bearer whose course I had clumsily impeded. Clouds of
lung-choking dust, milk-white as the moon's full rays played upon them,
rolled over us--the subdued crowd that gathered slowly, oblivious of
further danger. The air was full of whispered rumor--throughout Paris
hundreds--thousands, said some--had already died. We were keyed to
believe the wildest exaggerations, to accept the worst that excited
imaginations could invent for us. Yet there was no panic; no one gave
way to hysterical outcry; and the fall of more distant bombs brought
only a deep common groan, compounded of growling imprecations--a groan
truly of defiance and loathing, into which neither fear nor pity for the
victims of this frightfulness could find room to enter. I cursed with
the rest, instinctively, from the pit of my stomach, and turned raging
away; my whole being ached, was congested with rage. For the first time
in my life I then felt in its full hell-born fury that passion so often
named, but so seldom experienced by civilized--or what we call
civilized--man: the passion of _hate_.
By the time I had reached the hospital the raid was over; the air was
droning from the bronze vibrations of hundreds of bells, all the
church-bells of Paris, full-throated, calling forth their immediate
surface messages of cheer, their deeper message of courage and
constancy.
Though it was very late, I found a silent group of four nurses standing
in the heavily shadowed street before the shut doors of this small
civilian hospital; they were still staring up fixedly at the
silver-bright sky. They proved to be day-nurses off duty, and among them
was Mademoiselle Annette. She greeted me now as an old friend, and
brushing rules and regulations aside like a true Frenchwoman took me at
once to Susan. I found that Susan had risen from bed and was seated at
her window, which looked out across the winter-bare hospital garden.
"Ambo," she exclaimed impatiently, "why did you come here! I'm so used
to all this. But Jeanne-Marie, Ambo--in her condition! I've been hoping
so you would think of her--go to her!"
Then what fatuous devil--was it my old familiar demon?--put it into my
heart to say: "So you haven't been worrying, dear, about me?"
"About you!" she cried. "Good God, no! What does it matter about you--or
me! This generation's done for, Ambo. Only the children count now--the
children. We must save them--all of them--somehow. It's up to them--to
Jimmy's son with the rest! They've got to wipe us out, clear the slate
of us and all our insanities! They've got to pass over the wreck of us
and rebuild a happy, intelligible world!"
She rose, seized my arm, and summoning all her strength thrust me from
her toward the door....