On the night of the eighth of March the Gothas, so long expected,
returned; to be met this time by a persistent _barrage_ fire from massed
75's, which proved, however, little more than the good beginnings of a
really competent defense. Many bombs fell within the fortifications, and
we who dwelt there needed no other proof that the problem of the defense
of Paris against air raids had not yet successfully been solved.
There were thickening rumors, too, of an imminent German attack in
force. Things were not going well at the Front. It was common gossip
that there was division among the Allies; the British and French
commands were pulling at cross purposes; Italy seemed impotent; Russia
had collapsed; the Americans were unknown factors, and slow to arrive.
It began to seem possible--to the disaffected or naturally pessimistic,
more than possible--that the Prussian mountebank might make good his
anachronistic boast to wear down and conquer the world.
Even the weather seemed to fight for his pinchbeck empire; it was
continuously dry, and for the season in Northern France extraordinarily
clear. By its painful contrast with our common anxieties, the
unseasonable beauty of those March days and nights weighted as if with
lead the sense of threat, of impending calamity, that pressed upon us
and chilled us and made desperate our hearts.
I saw Susan daily. She did not avoid me and was never unkind, but I
felt that she took little comfort or pleasure from my society. Mona
Leslie, rather huffed than chastened, I fear, by Susan's quiet
aloofness, had returned to her duties at Dunkirk. I was glad to have her
go, to be rid of the embarrassment of her explanations and counsel--to
be rid, above all, of the pointedly sympathetic and pitying pressure of
her hand. Except for a slight limp, Susan now got about freely and was
busily engaged with our Red Cross directors on plans for a nursing-home
for the children of repatriated refugees--a home where these little
victims of frightfulness and malnutrition could be built up again into
happy soundness of body and mind, into the vigorous life-stuff needed
for the future of France and of the world. A too-medieval chateau at
----, in Provence, had been offered; and plans for its immediate
alteration and modernization were being drawn.
The whole thing, from the first, had been Susan's idea, and she was to
have charge of it all--once the required plant was ready--as became its
creator. But indeed, in the interim, she had simply taken charge of our
Red Cross architects and buyers and builders and engineers, and was
sweeping things forward with a tactful but exceedingly high hand. She
meant that the interim should be, if possible, brief.
"I want results," said Susan; "we can discuss the rules we've broken
afterward. The children are fading out _now_, and some of them will be
dead or hopelessly withered before we can aid them. Let's get some kind
of home and get it running; with a couple of good doctors, an
orthopedist, a dental expert, and the right nurses--and I'll pick
_them_, please!--we can make out somehow, 'most anywhere."
There was no standing against her. It was presently plain to all of us
in the Paris headquarters that this nursing home was to be put through,
in record time, Germans or no Germans, and no matter who fell by the
wayside! And, in spite of my natural anxiety, I was soon convinced that
whoever fell, it would not be Susan--not, at least, till the clear flame
of her spirit had burned out the oil of her energy to its last granted
drop.
In the rare intervals of these labors, she was arranging for the legal
adoption of James Aulard Kane. No step of this kind is easily arranged
in bureaucratic France. It is a difficult land to be legally born in or
married in, or to die in--if one wishes to do these things, at least,
with a certain decency, _en regle_.
Susan complained to me of this, wittily scornful, as we left the Red
Cross headquarters together on the evening of March eleventh, and
started toward her hotel down the dusky colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli.
"I'm worn out with them all!" she exclaimed. "All I want is to take care
of Jimmy's baby, and you'd think I was plotting to upset the government.
I shall, too, if some of these French officials don't presently exhibit
more common sense. It _ought_ to be upset--and simplified. Oh, I wish I
lived in a woman's republic, Ambo! Things would happen there, even if
they were wrong! No woman has patience enough to be bureaucratic."
"True," I chimed; "and you're right about men, all round. We're hopeless
incompetents at statecraft and such things, at running a reasonable
world--but we _can_ cook! And what you need for a change from all this
is a good dinner--a real dinner! It will renew your faith in the eternal
masculine--and we haven't had a bat, Susan, or talked nonsense, for
years and years! Come on, dear! Let's have a perfectly shameless bat
to-night and damn the consequences! What do you say?"
"I say--damn the consequences, Ambo! Let's! Why, I'd forgotten there was
such a thing as a bat left in the world!"
"But there is! Look--there's even a taxi to begin on!"
I hailed it; I even secured it; and we were presently clanking and
grinding on our way--in what must have been an authentic relic from the
First Battle of the Marne--toward the one restaurant in Paris. Unto each
man, native or alien, who knows his Paris, God grants but one, though it
is never the same. Well, I make no secret about it; my passion is deep
and openly proclaimed. For me, the one restaurant in Paris is
_Laperouse_; I am long past discussing the claims of rivals. It
is--simply and finally--_Laperouse_....
We descended before an ancient, dingy building on the Quai des
Grands-Augustins, passed through a cramped doorway into a tiny, ill-lit
foyer, climbed a steep narrow stairs, and were presently installed in a
corner of the small corner dining-room, with our backs neighborly
against the wall. In this room there happened that night to be but one
other diner; a small, bloated, bullet-headed civilian, with prominent
staring eyes; a man of uncertain age, but nearing fifty at a guess. We
paid little attention to him at first, though it soon became evident to
us that he was enjoying a Pantagruelian banquet in lonely state,
deliberately gorging himself with the richest and most incongruously
varied food. _Comme boissons_, he had always before him two bottles, one
of _Chateau Yquem_ and one of _Fine Champagne_; and he alternated gulps
of thick yellow sweetness with drams of neat brandy. Neither seemed to
produce upon him any perceptible effect, though he emitted from time to
time moist porcine snufflings of fleshy satisfaction. Rather a
disgusting little man, we decided; and so dismissed him....
To the ordering of our own dinner I gave a finicky care which greatly
amused Susan, for whom food, I regret to say, has always remained an
indifferent matter; it is the one aesthetic flaw in her otherwise so
delicately organized being. In spite of every effort on my part to
educate her palate, five or six nibbles at almost anything edible
remains her idea of a banquet--provided the incidental talk prove
sufficiently companionable or stimulating.
That night, however, do what we would, our talk together was neither
precisely the one nor the other. We both, rather desperately, I think,
made a supreme effort to approximate the free affectionate chatter of
old days; but such things never come of premeditation, and there were
ghosts at the table with us. It would not work.
"Oh, what's the use, Ambo!" Susan finally exclaimed, with a weary sigh.
"We can't do it this way! Sister's here, and Jeanne-Marie--as close to
me as if I had seen her and known her always; and maybe--Phil. But
Jimmy's here most of all! There's no use pretending we're forgetting,
when we're not. You and I aren't built for forgetting, Ambo. We'll never
forget."
"No, dear; we'll never forget."
"Let's _remember_, then," said Susan; "remember all we can."
For a long hour thereafter we rather mused together than conversed.
Constraint slipped from us, as those we had best loved came back to us,
warm and near and living in our thoughts of them. No taint of false
sentiment, of sorrow willfully indulged, marred these memories. Trying
to be happy we had failed; now, strangely, we came near to joy.
"We haven't lost them!" exclaimed Susan. "Not any part of them; we never
can."
"They haven't lost us, then?"
"No"--she pondered it--"they haven't lost us."
"You mean it, Susan--literally? You believe they still live--_out
there_?"
"And you?"
"I don't know."
"Poor Ambo," murmured Susan; then, with a quick, dancing gleam: "But as
Jimmy'd say, dear, you can just take it from _me_!"
She spoke of him as if present beside her. A silence fell between us and
deepened.
The small, bullet-headed man had just paid his extravagant bill,
distributed his largesse, and was about to depart. He was being helped
into a sumptuous overcoat, with a deep collar of what I took to be
genuine Russian sables. There was nothing in his officiously tended
leave-taking to stir my interest; my eyes rested on him idly for a
moment, that was all. The head waiter, two under-waiters, and a solemn
little buttons followed him out to the stair-head, with every expression
of gratitude and esteem. Passing from sight, he passed from my thoughts,
leaving with me only a vague physical repulsion that barely outlasted
his departure.
"Do you know what I think Phil has done?" Susan was asking.
"Phil?" The name had startled me back to attention.
"I believe he's made himself one of them--the peasants, I mean--in some
remote, dirty, half-starved Russian village."
"Why? That's an odd fancy, dear. And it isn't much like him. Phil's too
clear-headed, or stiff-headed, for such mysticism."
"How little you really know him, then," she replied. "He's been steering
since birth, I feel, toward some great final renunciation. I believe
he's made it, now. You'll see, Ambo. Some day we'll hear of a new
prophet, away there in the East--where all our living dreams come from!
You'll see!"
"'In Vishnu-land what Avatar?'" I quoted, smiling sadly enough; and
Susan's smile wistfully echoed mine, even while she raised a warning
finger at me.
"Oh, you of little faith!" she said quite simply.
X
We had barely stepped out from the narrow doorway of the restaurant into
a tenuous, moon-saturated mist, a low-lying diaphaneity that left the
upper air-lanes openly clear, when the sirens were wailing again from
every quarter of the city....
"They're coming early to-night!" I exclaimed. "Well, that ends all hope
for a taxi home! We must find an _abri_."
"Nonsense! We'll walk quietly back along the river. Unless"--she teased
me--"you really _are_ afraid, Ambo?"
I tucked her arm firmly into mine. "So you won't stumble, _Mlle. la
Reformee_!"
"But it is a nuisance to be lame!" she protested: "I do envy you your
two good legs, _M. le Capitaine_."
We made our way slowly along the embankment, passing the Pont des Arts,
and two shadowy lovers paced on before us, blotted together, oblivious
of the long, eerie rise and fall of the sirens; every twenty yards or so
they stopped in their tracks, as by a common impulsion, and were
momentarily lost to time in a passionate embrace.
Neither Susan nor I spoke of these lovers, who turned aside to pass
under the black arches of the Institute, into the Rue de Seine....
As we neared the Pont du Carrousel the _barrage_ began, at first distant
and muffled--the outer guns; then suddenly and grimly nearer. An
incessant twinkle of tiny star-white points--the bursts of
high-explosive shells--drifted toward us from the north. So light was
the mist, it did not obscure them; it barely dimmed the moon.
"Hold on!" I said, checking Susan; "this is something new! They're
firing to-night straight across Paris." The glitter of star-points
seemed in a moment to fill all the northern sky; the noise of the
_barrage_ trebled, trebled again.
"Why, it's drum fire!" cried Susan. "Oh, how beautiful!"
"Yes; but we'll get on faster, all the same! I'll help you! Come!"
I put my arm firmly about her waist and almost lifted her along with me.
By the time we had reached the Pont Royal, the high-explosive bursts
were directly over us; the air rocked with them. I detected, too, at
intervals, another more ominous sound--that deep, pulsing growl which no
one having once heard it could ever mistake.
"Gothas," I growled back at them, "flying low. They've ducked under the
guns!"
And instantly I swung Susan across the open _quai_ to the left and
plunged with her up an inky defile, the Rue du Bac.
"Where are you taking me?" she demanded, half breathless, dragging
against my arm.
"To the first available _abri_," I cried at her, under the sky's
reckless tumult. "Don't stop to argue about it!"
But she halted me right by the corner of the Rue de Lille. "If it's
going to be a bad raid, Ambo, I must get to Jimmy's baby--I _must_!"
"Impossible! It's at least two miles--and this isn't going to be a
picnic, Susan! You're coming with _me_!" I tightened my arm about her;
every instant now I expected the shattering climax of the bombs.
Then, just as we crossed the Rue de Lille, something halted me in my
turn. About a hundred yards at my right, down toward the Gare D'Orsay,
and from the very middle of the black street-chasm, a keen, bladelike
ray of light flashed once and again--sharp, vertical
rapier-thrusts--straight up through the thin mist-veil into the
treacherous sky. Followed, doubtless from a darkened upper window, a
woman's frantic shriek: "_Espion--espion!_"
Pistol shots next--and rough cries--and a pounding charge of feet....
Right into my arms he floundered, and I tackled him and fell with him to
the cobbles and fought him there blindly, feeling for his throat. This
lasted but a moment. Gendarmes tore us apart, in a brief crossing flash
of electric-torches--and I caught just one glimpse of a bare
bullet-head, of a bloated, discolored face, of prominent staring eyes,
maddened by fear. There could be no mistake. It was our little man of
the Pantagruelian banquet. We had watched him eating his last fabulous
meal--his farewell to Egypt.
And that is all I just then clearly remember.... I am told that nine
bombs fell in a sweeping circle throughout this district; one of them,
in the very courtyard of the War Office; one of them--of 300
kilos--perhaps a square from where we stood. There was a rush past of
hurtling fragments--glass, chimney-tiles, chips of masonry, _que
sais-je_?--and even this I report only because I have been credibly so
informed.
What next I experienced was pain, unlocalized at first, yet somehow
damnably concentrated: pure, white-hot essence of pain. And through the
stiff hell of it I was, and was not, aware of someone--some one--some
_one_--murmuring love and pity and mortal anguish....
"Ambo--you wouldn't leave me--not you! Not you, Ambo--not alone...."
The pain dimmed off from me in an ebbing, dull-red wave; great coils of
palpable darkness swirled down upon me to smother me; I struggled to
rise from beneath them--fling them off.... From an infinite distance, a
woman's cry threaded through them, like a needle through mufflings of
wool, and pricked me to an instant, a single instant, of clear
consciousness. I opened my eyes on Susan's; I strove to answer them,
tell her I understood. Susan says that I did answer them--that I even
smiled. But I can feel back now only to a vast sinking away, depth under
depth under depth, down--down--down--down....