I

PHIL FARMER and Jimmy Kane stayed on in New Haven that summer of 1914; Phil to be near his precious sources in the Yale library; Jimmy to be near his new job. As soon as his examinations were over he had gone to work in a factory in a very humble capacity; but he was not destined to remain there long in any capacity, nor was it written in the stars that he was to complete his education at Yale.

My own reasons for clinging to New Haven were less definite. Sheer physical inertia had something to do with it, no doubt; but chiefly I stayed because New Haven in midsummer is a social desert; and in those days my most urgent desire was to be alone. Apart from all else, the breaking out of almost world-wide war had drastically, as if by an operation for spiritual cataract, opened my inner eye, no longer a bliss in solitude, to much that was trivial and self-satisfied and ridiculous in one Ambrose Hunt, Esq. That Susan should be in the smoke of that spreading horror brought it swiftly and vividly before me. I lived the war from the first.

For years, with no felt discomfort to myself, I had been a pacifist. I was a contributing member of several peace societies, and in one of my slightly better-known essays I had expounded with enthusiasm Tolstoy’s doctrine which, in spite of much passionate argument to the contrary these troublous times, was assuredly Christ’s of nonresistance to evil. I was, in fact, though in a theoretical, parlor sense a proclaimed Tolstoyan, a Christian anarchist lacking, however, the essential groundwork for Tolstoy’s doctrine: faith. Faith in God as a person, as a father, I could not confess to; but the higher anarchist vision of humanity freed from all control save that of its own sweet reasonableness, of men turned unfailingly gentle, mutually helpful, content to live simply if need be, but never with unuplifted hearts well, I could and did confess publicly that no other vision had so strong an attraction for me!

I liked to dwell in the idea of such a world, to think of it as a possibility less remote, perhaps, than mankind in general supposed. Having lived through the Spanish War, the Boer War, and Russia’s war with Japan; and in a world constantly strained to the breaking point by national rivalries, commercial expansion, and competition for markets; by class struggles everywhere apparent; by the harsh, discordant energies of its predatory desires I, nevertheless, had been able to persuade myself that the darkest days of our dust-speck planet were done with and recorded; Earth and its graceless seed of Adam were at last, to quote Jimmy, “on their way” well on their way, I assured myself, toward some inevitable region of abiding and beneficent light!

Pouf!... And then?

Stricken in solitude, I went down into dark places and fumbled like a starved beggar amid the detritus of my dreams. Dust and shadow.... Was there anything real there, anything worth the pain of spiritual salvage? Had I been, all my life, merely one more romanticist, one more sentimental trifler in a universe whose ways were not those of pleasantness, nor its paths those of peace? Surely, yes; for my heart convicted me at once of having wasted all my days hitherto in a fool’s paradise. The rough fabric of human life was not spun from moonshine. So much at least was certain. And nothing else was left me. Hurled from my private, make-believe Eden, I must somehow begin anew.

“Brief beauty, and much weariness....”

Susan’s line haunted me throughout the first desperate isolation of those hours. I saw no light. I was broken in spirit. I was afraid.

Morbidity, you will say. Why, yes; why not? To be brainsick and heartsick in a cruel and unfamiliar world is to be morbid. I quite agree. Below the too-thin crust of a dilettante’s culture lies always that hungry morass. A world had been shaken; the too-thin crust beneath my feet had crumbled; I must slither now in slime, and either sink there finally, be swallowed up in that sucking blackness, or by some miracle of effort win beyond, set my feet on stiff granite, and so survive.

It is most probable that I should never have reached solid ground unaided. It was Jimmy, of all people, who stretched forth a vigorous, impatient hand.

Shortly after the First Battle of the Marne had dammed we knew not how precariously, or how completely the deluge pouring through Belgium and Luxemburg and Northern France, Jimmy burst in on me one evening. He had just received a brief letter from Susan. She was stationed then at Furnes; Mona Leslie was with her; but their former hostess, the young pleasure-loving Comtesse de Bligny, was dead. The cause of her death Susan did not even stop to explain.

“Mona,” she hurried on, “is magnificent. Only a few months ago I pitied her, almost despised her; now I could kiss her feet. How life had wasted her! She doesn’t know fear or fatigue, and she has just put her entire fortune unreservedly at the service of the Belgian Government to found field hospitals, ambulances, and so on. The king has decorated her. Not that she cares has time to think about it, I mean. In a sense it irritated her; she spoke of it all to me as an unnecessary gesture. Oh, Jimmy, come over we need you here! Bring all America over with you if you can! Setebos invented neutrality; I recognize his workmanship! Bring Ambo bring Phil! Don’t stop to think about it come!”

“I’m going of course,” said Jimmy. “So’s Prof. Farmer. How about you, sir?”

“Phil’s going?”

“Sure. Just as soon as he can arrange it.”

“His book’s finished?”

“What the hell has that ” began Jimmy; then stopped dead, blushing. “Excuse me, Mr. Hunt; but books, somehow just now they don’t seem so important as see?”

“Not quite, Jimmy. After all, the real struggle’s always between ideas, isn’t it? We can’t perfect the world with guns and ambulances, Jimmy.”

“Maybe not,” said Jimmy dryly.

“It’s quite possible,” I insisted, “that Phil’s book might accomplish more for humanity, in the long run, than anything he could do at his age in Flanders.”

“Susan could come home and write plays,” said Jimmy; “good ones, too. But she won’t. You can bet on that, sir.”

“I’ve never believed in war, Jimmy; never believed it could possibly help us onward.”

“Maybe it can’t,” interrupted Jimmy. “I’ve never believed in cancer, either; it’s very painful and kills a lot of people. You’d better come with us, sir. You’ll be sorry you didn’t if you don’t.”

“Why? You know my ideas on nonresistance, Jimmy.”

“Oh, ideas!” grunted Jimmy. “I know you’re a white man, Mr. Hunt. That’s enough for me. I’m not worrying much about your ideas.”

“But whatever we do, Jimmy, there’s an idea behind it; there must be.”

“Nachur’ly,” said Jimmy. “Those are the only ones that count! I can’t see you letting Susan risk her life day in an’ out to help people who are being wronged, while you sit over here and worry about what’s going to happen in a thousand years or so after we’re all good and dead! Not much I can’t! The point is, there’s the rotten mess and Susan’s in it, trying to make it better and we’re not. Prof. Farmer got it all in a flash! He’ll be round presently to make plans. Well how about it, sir?”

Granite! Granite at last, unshakable, beneath my feet!

Then, too, Susan was over there, and Jimmy and Phil were going, without a moment’s hesitation, at her behest! But I have always hoped, and I do honestly believe, that it was not entirely that.

No; romanticist or not, I will not submit to the assumption that of two possible motives for any decently human action, it is always the lower motive that turns the trick. La Rochefoucauld to the contrary, self-interest is not the inevitable mainspring of man; though, sadly I admit, it seems to be an indispensable cog-wheel in his complicated works....

II

And now, properly apprehensive reader whom, in the interests of objectivity, which has never interested me, I should never openly address are you not unhappy in the prospect of another little tour through trench and hospital, of one more harrowing account of how the Great War made a Great Man of him at last?

Be comforted! One air raid I cannot spare you; but I can spare you much. To begin with, I can spare you, or all but spare you, a month or so over three whole years.

You may think it incredible, but it is merely true, that I had been in Europe for more than three years and I had not as yet seen Susan. Phil had seen her, just once; Jimmy had seen her many times; and I had run into them singly, never together off and on, here and there, during those slow-swift days of unremitting labor. If to labor desperately in a heartfelt cause be really to pray, the ear of Heaven has been besieged! But, in common humanity, there was always more crying to be done than mortal brains or hands or accumulated wealth could compass. Once plunged into that glorious losing struggle against the appalling hosts of Misery, one could only fight grimly on on on to the last hoarded ounce of strength and determination.

But the odds were hopeless, fantastic! Those Titan forces of human suffering and degradation, so half-wittedly let loose throughout Europe, grew ever vaster, more terrible in maleficent power. They have ravaged the world; they have ravaged the soul. An armistice has been signed, a peace treaty is being drafted, a League of Nations is being formed or deformed but those Titan forces still mock our poor efforts with calamitous laughter. They are still in fiercely, stubbornly disputed, but unquestionable possession of the field insolent conquerors to this hour. The real war, the essential war, the war against the unconsciously self-willed annihilation of earth’s tragic egoist, Man, has barely begun. Its issue is ever uncertain; and it will not be ended in our days....

Phil and Jimmy had gone over on the same boat, via England, about the middle of October, 1914. At that time organized American relief-work in Europe was really nonexistent, and in order to obtain some freedom of movement on the other side, and a chance to study out possible opportunities for effective service, Phil had persuaded Heywood Sampson to appoint him continental correspondent for the new review; and Jimmy went with him, ostensibly as his private secretary.

It was all the merest excuse for obtaining passports and permission to enter Belgium, if that should prove immediately advisable after reaching London. It did not. Once in London, Phil had very soon found himself up to the eyes in work. Through Mr. Page, the American Ambassador so lately dead he was introduced to Mr. Herbert C. Hoover, and after a scant twenty minutes of conversation was seized by Mr. Hoover and plunged, with barely a gasp for breath, into that boiling sea of troubles the organization of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. It does not take Mr. Hoover very long to size up the worth and stability of any man; but in Phil he had found and he knew he had found a peculiar treasure. Phil’s unfailing patience, his thoroughness and courtesy, quickly endeared him to all his colleagues and did much to make possible the successful launching of the vastest and most difficult project for relief ever undertaken by mortal men. Thus, almost overnight, Jimmy’s private secretaryship became anything but a sinecure. For nearly three months their labors held them in London; then they were sent not unadventurously to Brussels; there to arrange certain details of distribution with Mr. Whitlock, the American Minister, and with the directors of the Belgian Comite National.

But from Brussels their paths presently diverged. Jimmy, craving activity, threw himself into the actual work of food distribution in the stricken eastern districts; while Phil passed gravely on to Herculean labors at the shipping station of the “C. R. B.” in Rotterdam. He remained in Rotterdam for upward of a year. Susan, meanwhile, had been driven with the Belgian Army from Furnes, and was now attached to the operating-room of a small field or receiving-hospital, which squatted amphibiously in a waterlogged fragment of village not far from the Yser and the flooded German lines. It was a post of danger, constantly under fire; and she was the one woman who clung to it who insisted upon being permitted to cling to it, and carried her point; and, under conditions fit neither for man nor beast, unflinchingly carried on. Mona Leslie was no longer beside her. She had retired to Dunkirk to aid in the organization of relief for ever-increasing hordes of civilian refugees.

And where, meanwhile, was one Ambrose Hunt, sometime dilettante at large?

It had proved impossible for me to sail with Phil and Jimmy. Just as the preliminary arrangements were being made, Aunt Belle was stricken down by apoplexy, while walking among the roses of her famous Spanish gardens in Santa Barbara, and so died, characteristically intestate, and, to my astonishment, I found that I had become the sole inheritor of her estate; all of “Hyena Parker’s” tainted millions had suddenly poured their burdensome tide of responsibilities needlessly and unwelcomely upon me. There was nothing for it. Out to California, willy-nilly, I must go, and waste precious weeks there with lawyers and house agents and other tiresome human necessities.

The one cheering thought in all this annoying pother was and it was a thought that grew rapidly in significance to me as I journeyed westward that fate had now made it possible for me to purify Hyena Parker’s millions by putting them to work for mankind. Well, they have since done their part, to the last dollar; they have spent themselves in the losing battle against Misery, and are no more. Nothing became their lives like the ending of them. But for all that, the world, you see, is as it is and the battle goes on.

Phil kept in touch with me from the other side, in spite of his difficulties as did Jimmy and Susan and he had prepared the way for me when at length I could free myself and sail. I was instructed to go to Paris, direct, and fulfill certain duties there in connection with the ever-increasing burdens and exasperations of the “C. R. B.” I did so. Six months later my activities were transferred to Berne; and not to trace in detail the evolution of my career, such as it was; for though useful, I hope, it was never, like Phil’s, exceptionally brilliant I had become, about the period of America’s entry into the war, a modest captain in the Red Cross, stationed at Evian, in connection with the endless, heartbreaking task of repatriating refugees from the invaded districts. And there my job rooted me until January of that dark winter of our unspeakable depression, 1918.

With the beginning of America’s entry into the war Phil had gone to Petrograd for the American Red Cross, his commission being to save the lives of as many Russian babies as possible by the distribution of canned milk. Then, one evening early in September, 1917, it must have been he started alone for Moscow, to lay certain wider plans for disinterested relief-work before the sinister, the almost mythical Lenine. That is the last that has ever been seen of him, and no word has ever come forth directly from him out of the chaos men still call Russia. The Red Cross and the American and French Governments have done their utmost to discover his whereabouts, without avail. There are reasons for believing he is not dead, nor even a prisoner. The dictators of the soviet autocracy have been unable to find a trace of him, so they affirm; and there are reasons also for believing that this is true.

As for Jimmy, you will not be surprised to learn that Jimmy had not long been content with relief-work of any kind. He was young; and he had seen things there, in the eastern districts. By midsummer of 1915 he had resigned from the “C. R. B.,” had made a difficult way to Paris, via Holland and England, had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, and had succeeded in getting himself transferred to the French Flying Corps. Thus, months before we had officially abandoned our absurd neutrality, he was flying over the lines bless him! If Jimmy never became a world-famous ace, well there was a reason for that, too; the best of reasons. He was never assigned to a combat squadron, for no one brought home such photographs as Jimmy; taken tranquilly, methodically, at no great elevation, and often far back of the German lines. His quiet daring was the admiration of his comrades; anti-aircraft batteries had no terrors for him; his luck was proverbial, and he grew to trust it implicitly, seeming to bear a charmed life.

But Susan’s luck had failed her, at last. On Thanksgiving Day of 1917 she was wounded in the left thigh by a fragment of shrapnel, a painful wound whose effects were permanent. She will always walk slowly, with a slight limp, hereafter. Mona Leslie got her down as far as Paris by January 20, 1918, meaning to take her on to Mentone, where she had rented a small villa for three months of long-overdue rest and recuperation for them both. But on reaching Paris, Susan collapsed; the accumulated strain of the past years struck her down. She was taken to the comfortable little Red Cross hospital for civilians at Neuilly and put to bed. A week of dangerous exhaustion and persistent insomnia followed.

I knew nothing of it directly, at the moment. I knew only that on a certain day Miss Leslie had planned to start with Susan from Dunkirk for Mentone; I was waiting eagerly for word of their safe arrival in that haven of rest and beauty; and I was scheming like a junior clerk for my first vacation, for two weeks off, perhaps even three, that I might run down to them there. But no word came. Throughout that first week in Paris, Miss Leslie in her hourly anxiety neglected to drop me a line.

And then one night, as I sat vacantly on the edge of my bed in my hotel room at Evian, almost too weary to begin the tedious sequence of undressing and tumbling into it, came the second of my psychic reels, my peculiar visions; briefer, this one, than my first; but no less authentic in impression, and no less clear.

III

I saw, this time, the interior of a small white room, almost bare of furniture, evidently a private room in some thoroughly appointed modern hospital. The patient beneath the white coverlet of the single white-enamelled iron bed was Susan or the wraith of Susan, so wasted was she, so still. My breath stopped: I thought it had been given me to see her at the moment of death; or already dead. Then the door of the small white room opened, and Jimmy in his smart horizon-blue uniform with its coveted shoulder loop, the green-and-red fouragere that bespoke the bravery of his entire esquadrille came in, treading carefully on the balls of his feet. As he approached the bedside Susan opened her eyes great shadows, gleamless soot-smudges in her pitifully haggard face. It seemed that she was too weak even to greet him or smile; her eyes closed again, and Jimmy bent down to her slowly and kissed her. Then Susan lifted her right hand from the coverlet I could feel the effort it cost her and touched Jimmy’s hair. There was no strength in her to prolong the caress. The hand slipped from him to her breast.... And my vision ended.

Its close found me on my knees on the tiled floor of my bedroom, as if I too had tried to go nearer, to bring myself close to her bedside, perhaps to bury my face in my hands against the white coverlet, her shroud; to weep there....

I sprang up, wildly enough now, with a harsh shudder, the terrified gasp of a brute suddenly stricken from ambush, aware only of rooted claws and a last crushing fury of deep-set fangs.

Susan was dying. I knew not where. I could not reach her. But Jimmy had reached her. He had been summoned. He had not been too late.

There are moments of blind anguish not to be reproduced for others. Chaos is everything and nothing. It cannot be described.

There was nothing really useful I could do that night, not even sleep. In those days, it was impossible to move anywhere on the railroads of France without the proper passes and registrations of intention with the military authorities and the local police. I could, of course, suffer that is always a human possibility and I could attempt, muzzily enough, to think, to make plans. Where was it most likely that Susan would be? Was the hospital room that I had seen in Dunkirk, or in Nice, or at some point between perhaps at Paris? It could hardly, I decided, be at Dunkirk; that stricken city, whose inhabitants were forced to dive like rats into burrows at any hour of the day or night. There was nothing to suggest the atmosphere of Dunkirk in that quiet, white-enamelled room. Nice, then or Mentone? Hardly, I again reasoned; for Jimmy could not easily have reached them there. A day’s leave; a flight from the lines, so comfortlessly close to Paris that was always possible to the air-men, who were in a sense privileged characters, being for the most part strung with taut nerves that chafed and snapped under too strict a discipline. And in Paris there must be many such quiet, white-enamelled rooms. I decided for Paris.

Then I threw five or six articles and a bar of chocolate into my musette, a small water-proof pouch to sling over the shoulder three years had taught me at least the needlessness of almost all Hillhouse necessities and waited for dawn. It came, as all dawns come at last even in January, even in France. And with it came a gulp of black coffee in the little deserted cafe down-stairs and a telegram. I dared not open the telegram. It lay beside my plate while I stained the cloth before me and scalded my throat and furred my tongue. It was from Paris. So my decision was justified, and now quite worthless.... I have no memory of the interval; but I had got with it somehow back to my room that accursed blue envelope! Well

“Susan at Red Cross hospital for civilians, Neuilly. All in, but no cause for real worry. Is sleeping now for first time in nearly a week. I must leave by afternoon. Come up to her if you possibly can. She needs you.

“JIMMY.”

Four hours later all my exasperatingly complicated arrangements for a two-weeks’ absence were made the requisite motions had been the purest somnambulism and by the ample margin of fifty seconds I had caught an express to do it that courtesy moving with dignity, at decent intervals, toward all that I lived by and despaired of and held inviolably dear. But the irony of Jimmy’s last three words went always with me, a monotonous ache blurring every impulse toward hope and joy. Susan was not dead, was not dying! “No cause for real worry.” Jimmy would not have said that if he had feared the worst. It was not his way to shuffle with facts; he was by nature direct and sincere. No; Susan would recover thank God for it! Thank and then, under all, through all, over and over, that aching monotony: “She needs you. Jimmy. She needs you. Jimmy.”

“Needs me!” I groaned aloud.

“Plait-il?” politely murmured the harassed-looking little French captain, my vis-a-vis.

“Mille pardons, monsieur,” I murmured back. “On a quelquefois des griefs particuliers, vous savez.”

“Ah dame, oui!” he sighed. “Par lé temps qui court!”

“Et ce pachyderme de train qui ne court jamais!” I smiled.

“Ah, pour ca ca repose!” murmured the little French captain, and shut his eyes.

“She needs you. Jimmy. She needs you. Jimmy. She needs ”

Then, miraculously, for two blotted hours I slept. But I woke again, utterly unrefreshed, to the old refrain: She needs you needs you needs you....

The little French captain was still asleep, snoring now but softly in his corner. Ah, lucky little French captain! Ca repose!

IV

One afternoon, five or six days later, I was seated by the white-enamelled iron bed in the small white room. Susan had had a long, quiet, normal nap, and her brisk sparrow-eyed Norman nurse, in her pretty costume of the French Red Cross, had come to me in the little reception-room of the hospital, where I had been sitting for an hour stupidly thumbing over tattered copies of ancient American magazines, and had informed me with rather an ambiguous twinkle of those sparrow eyes that her patient had asked to see me as soon as she had waked, was evidently feeling stronger, and that it was to be hoped M. lé Capitaine would be discreet and say nothing to excite or fatigue the poor little one. “Je me sauve, m’sieu,” she had added, mischievously grave; “on ne peut avoir l’oeil a tout, maïs je compte sur vous.”

So innocently delighted had she been by her pleasant suspicions, it was impossible to let her feel how sharply her raillery had pained me. But I could not reply in kind. I had merely bowed, put down the magazine in my hand, and so left her to inevitable reflections, I presume, upon the afflicting reticence of these otherwise so agreeable allies d’outre mer. Their education was evidently deplorable. One never knew when they would miss step, inconveniently, and so disarrange the entire social rhythm of a conversation.

“Ambo,” said Susan, putting her hand in mine, “do you know at all how terribly I’ve missed you?” She turned her head weakly on her pillow and looked at me. “You’re older, dear. You’ve changed. I like your face better now than I ever did.”

I wrinkled my nose at her. “Is that saying much?” I grimaced.

“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 vivacité, 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 anæsthetic 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....

VI

It was well on toward three o’clock in the morning when at last I stood before the black, close-shuttered shop-front of the Vve. Guyot. I was desperately weary, having of necessity walked all the way. It was, as I had fully realized while almost stumbling along toward my goal, a crazy errand. I should find a dark, silent house, and I should then stumble back through dark, silent streets to my dark, silent hotel. The shop of the Widow Guyot was a very little shop on a very narrow street, a mere slit between high, ancient buildings a slit filled now with the dense river-mist that shrouds from the experience of Parisians all the renewing wonders of clear-eyed dawn. The moon had set, or else hung too veiled and low for this pestilent alley; in spite of a thick military overcoat I shivered with cold; the flat, sour smell of ill-flushed gutters caught at my throat. To this abomination of desolation I had, with no little difficulty, found my way. Thank God I could turn now, with a good conscience, and fumble back to the warm oblivion of bed.

I paused a moment, however, to draw up the collar of my overcoat to my ears and fasten it securely; and, doing so, I was aware of the scrape and clink of metal on metal; then the shop-door right before me was shaken and jarred open from within. The fluttering rays of a candle, tremulously held, surprised and for an instant blinded me; faintly luminous green and red balloons wheeled swiftly in contracting circles, then coalesced to a flickering point of light. The candle was held by an old, stout woman with a loose-jowled, bruised-looking face; a face somehow sensual and hard in spite of its bloated antiquity. A shrunken, thin-bearded man in a long black coat stood beside her, holding a black hand-bag. The two were conversing in tones deliberately muted, but broke off and stared outward as the candle-light discovered me in the narrow street.

“Ah, M’sieu, one sees, is American; he has perhaps lost his way?” piped the thin-bearded man, pretty sharply. He, too, was old.

“But no,” I replied; “I am here precisely on behalf of my friend, Lieutenant Kane.”

At this name the old woman began, only to check, a half-startled squawk, lifting her candle as she did so and peering more intently at me. “At this hour, m’sieu?” she demanded huskily. “What could bring you at such an hour?”

“Do I address the Widow Guyot?” I was quick to respond.

“Oui, m’sieu.”

“Then, permit me to explain.” As briefly as possible I told her who I was; that I had but very recently learned of the presence of Jimmy’s wife in Paris, with a relative learned that she was awaiting the birth of her first child at the house of this excellent woman. “It was my intention to call soon, madame, in any case, and make myself known feeling there might prove to be many little services a friend would be only too happy to render. But, after this terrible raid, I found it impossible to retire with an easy mind at least, until I had assured myself that all was well with you here.”

On this there came a pause, and the thin-bearded man cleared his throat diligently several times.

“The truth is, m’sieu,” he finally hazarded, “that your apprehension was only too just. You arrive at a house of mourning, m’sieu. You arrive, as I did, alas too late! This poor Madame Kane you would inquire for is dead. The child, on the contrary, still lives.”

“Enter, m’sieu,” said the Widow Guyot. “We can discuss these things more commodiously within. Doubtless, otherwise, we shall receive attentions from the police; they are nervous to-night. Naturally.” She seemed, I thought in the utter blank depression which had seized me with the doctor’s words offensively calm. Whether, had a doctor been more quickly obtainable, or a more skillful practitioner at last obtained, little Jeanne-Marie’s life might have been spared, I am unable to say. I feel certain, however, that the Widow Guyot under difficult, not to say terrifying circumstances had kept a cool head, done her best. I exonerate her from all blame. But I add this: Never in my life have I met elsewhere a woman who seemed to me to possess such cold-blooded possibilities for evil. Yet, so far as I know to this hour, her life has always been and now continues industrious and thrifty; harmless before the law. I have absolutely “nothing on her” nothing but an impression I shall never be rid of, which even now returns to chill me in nights of insomnia: a sense of having met in life one woman whose eyes may now and then have watered from dust or wind, but could never under any circumstances conceivably human have known tears. Other women, too many of them, have bored or exasperated me with maudlin or trivial tears; but never before or since have I met a woman who could not weep. It is a fixed idea with me that the Widow Guyot could not; and the idea haunts and troubles me strangely though why it should, I am too casual a psychologist even to guess.

At her heels, I crossed a small cluttered shop, following the tremulous flame of the candle through a fantastic shadow dance; Doctor Pollain who had given me his name with the deprecating cough of one who knows himself either unpleasantly notorious or hopelessly obscure shuffled behind us. Madame Guyot opened an inner door. Light from the room beyond tempered a little the vagueness about me and ghostily revealed a huddle of ecclesiastical trumpery rows of thin, pale-yellow tapers; small crucifixes of plaster or base-metal gilded; a stand of picture post-cards; a table littered with lesser gimcracks. The direct rays from Madame Guyot’s candle, as she turned a moment in the doorway, wanly illuminated the blue-coiffed, vapid face of a bisque Virgin; gave for that instant a half-flicker, as of just-stirring life, to her mannered, meaningless smile.

The room beyond proved to be a good-sized bedroom, its one window muffled by heavy stuff-curtains of a dull magenta red. A choking, composite odor I detected the sick pungency of chloroform emerged from it. I plunged to enter, and for a second instinctively held my breath. On the great walnut double-bed lay a still figure covered with a sheet; the proper candles twinkled at head and foot. But it is needless to describe these things....

It was in a smaller room beyond, a combined living-and-dining room, stodgily ugly, but comfortable enough as well, that I first made the acquaintance of James Aulard Kane. What I saw was a great roll of blankets in a deep boxlike cradle, and in the depths of a deeply dented feather pillow a tiny, wrinkled monkey-face, a miniature grotesque. The small knife-slit that served him for mouth opened and shut slowly and continuously, as if feebly gasping for difficult breath. He gave not even one faint encouraging cry. I turned to Doctor Pollain, shaking my head.

“But no!” he exclaimed. “For an eight-months child, look you he has vigor! I am sure he will live.”

“Then, for his father’s sake,” I replied, “we must take no chances! Isn’t there a maternity hospital in the neighborhood where he can receive the close attention that you, madame, at your age, with your responsibilities, ought not to be expected to give? I make myself fully responsible for any and all charges involved. Understand me, madame, and you, M. lé Médecin, I insist that no stone shall be left unturned!”

These words produced, at once a grateful change in the atmosphere hitherto, I had felt, ever so slightly hostile. It is unnecessary to follow our further negotiations to their entirely amicable close. Half an hour later I left the shop of the Widow Guyot, satisfied that Doctor Pollain would assist her to make all needful arrangements, and promising to get into communication as soon as it could be managed with “M. Jee-mee.” I should return, I told them, certainly, before noon.

But for Jimmy’s sake, on leaving, I raised a corner of the sheet covering the face of Jeanne-Marie. It was a peaceful face. If she had lately suffered, death now had quietly smoothed from her all but a lasting restfulness. A good little woman, I mused, of the best type provincial France offers; sensible, yet ardent; practical, yet kind. As I looked down at her, the meaningless smile of the bisque Madonna in the shop without returned to me, simpered for a half-second before me.... The symbols men made and sold commercial symbols! The Mother of Sorrows, a Chinese toy! Well....

“One thing troubles me,” said the Widow Guyot at my elbow, in her husky, passionless voice: “She did not receive the last rites, m’sieu. When the bad turn came, it was not possible for us to leave her. You will understand that. There was a new life, was there not? Assuredly, though, I am troubled; I regret that this should have happened to me. It will be a great cause for scandal, m’sieu when you consider my connections the nature of my little affairs. But, name of God, that will pass; one explains these things with a certain success, and my age favors me. I bear, God be praised, a good name; and in the proper quarters, m’sieu. But the poor little one! Observe m’sieu, that she clasps a crucifix on her breast. Be so good as to remember that I placed it in her hands an instant before she died.”

VII

It is an artistic fault in real life that it deals so frequently in coincidence, to the casting of suspicion upon those who report it veraciously. On the very night that Jeanne-Marie died, probably within the very hour that she died, Jimmy was shot down, while taking part in a bombing expedition; the plane he was conducting was seen, by crews of the two other bombing-planes in the formation, to burst into flames after a direct hit from an anti-aircraft battery, which had been firing persistently, though necessarily at haphazard, up toward the bumble-bee hum of French motors so betrayingly unlike the irregular guttural growl of the German machines.

Throughout the following morning I had been attempting, with the indispensable aid of my old friend, Colonel , of the French war office, to get into telegraphic communication with the commander of Jimmy’s esquadrille; but it was noon, or very nearly, before this unexpected word came to us. And when it came, I found myself unable to believe it.

In the very spirit of Assessor Brack, “Things don’t happen like that!” I kept insisting. “It’s too improbable. I must wait for further verification. We shall see, colonel, there’s been an error in names; some mistake.” I was stubborn about it. Simply, for Susan’s sake, I could not admit the possibility that Jimmy was dead.

During the midday pause I hurriedly made my way to the Widow Guyot’s little shop. The baby had already been taken to the Hospice de la Maternité the old Convent of Port Royal, near the cemetery of Montparnasse. He had stood the trip well, Madame Guyot assured me, and would undoubtedly win through to a ripe old age. A priest was present. I told Madame Guyot to arrange with him for a proper funeral and interment for Jeanne-Marie, and was at once informed that the skilled assistants of a local director of pompes funèbres were even then at work, embalming her mortal remains.

“So much, at least, m’sieu,” said Madame Guyot, “I knew her husband would desire; and I relied on your suggestion that no expense need be spared. I have stipulated for a funeral of the first class” a specific thing in France; so many carriages with black horses, so many plumes of such a quality, and so on “it only remains to acquire a site for the poor little one’s grave. This, too, M’sieu lé Capitaine, you may safely leave to my discretion; but we must together fix on a day and hour for the ceremonies. Is it yet known when this poor Lieutenant Kane will arrive in Paris?”

No, it was not yet known; I should be able to inform her, I hazarded, before nightfall; and I thanked her for the pains she was taking, and again assured her that the financial question was of no importance. As I said this, the priest, a dry wisp of manhood, softly drew nearer and slightly moistened his thin-set lips; but he did not speak. Possibly Madame Guyot spoke for him.

“At such times, m’sieu,” she replied, “one does what one can. But naturally that is understood. One is not an only relative for nothing, m’sieu. The heart speaks. True, I have hitherto been put to certain expenses for which the poor little one had promised to reimburse me ”

I hastened to assure her that she had only to present this account to me in full, and we parted with mutual though secret contempt, and with every sanctified expression of esteem. Then I returned to the cabinet of my friend, Colonel .

By three o’clock in the afternoon a brief telegram from Jimmy’s commander was brought to us; it removed every possibility of doubt, even from my obdurate mind. Jimmy had “gone West” once for all, and this time “West” was not even a geographical expression.... I sat silent for perhaps five slowly passing minutes in the presence of Colonel , until I was aware of a somewhat amazed scrutiny from tired, heavily pouched blue eyes.

“You feel this deeply,” he observed, “and I I feel nothing, except a vague sympathy for you, mon ami. Accept, without phrases, I beg you, all that a sad old man has left to give.”

I rose, thanked him warmly for the trouble he had taken on my behalf, and left him to his endless, disheartening labors. France was in danger; he knew that France was in danger. What to him, in those days, was one young life more or less? He himself had lost three sons in the war....

But how was I to let fall this one blow more, this heaviest blow of all, upon Susan? It was that which had held me silent in my chair, inhibiting all will to rise and begin the next needful step. Yes, it was that; I was thinking of Susan, not of Jimmy. For me in those days, I fear, the world consisted of Susan, and of certain negligible phantoms the remainder of the human race. It is not an état d’ame that Susan admires, or that I much admire; but in those days it was certainly mine. And this is the worst of a lonely passion: the more one loves in secret, without fulfillment and however unselfishly the more one excludes. Life contracts to a vivid, hypnotizing point; all else is shadow. In the name of our common humanity, there is a good deal to be said for those who are fickle or frankly pagan, who love more lightly, and more easily forget. But enough of all this! Phil with his steady wisdom might philosophize it to some purpose; not I.

In my uncertainty of mind, then, the first step that I took was an absurdly false one. There was just one thing for me to do, and I did not do it. I should have gone straight to Susan and told her about Jimmy and Jeanne-Marie; above all, about James Aulard Kane. Even if Susan, as I then supposed, loved Jimmy, and had always loved him knowing her as I did, loving her as I did, I should have felt instinctively that this was the one wise and kind, the one possible thing to do. Yet a sudden weakness, born of innate cowardice, betrayed me.

I went, instead, direct to the Hotel Crillon and sent up my card to Miss Leslie; it struck me as fortunate that I found her just returned to her rooms from a visit to Susan. It was really a calamity. I had seen her several times there, at the hospital; I liked her; and I knew that Susan had now no more devoted friend. She received me cordially, and I at once laid all the facts before her and with an entirely sincere humbleness asked her advice. But God, in the infinite variety of his creations, had never intended Mona Leslie to shine by reason of insight or common sense; she had other qualities! And this, too, I should easily have discerned. Why I did not, can only be explained by a sort of prostration of all my faculties, which had come upon me with the events of the night and morning just past. I was inert, body and soul; I could not think; I felt like a child in the sweep of dark forces it cannot struggle against and does not understand; in effect, I was for the time being a stricken, credulous child. Perhaps no grown man, not definitely insane, has ever touched a lower stratum of spiritual debility than I then sank to resting there, grateful, fatuously content, as if on firm ground. In short, I was a plain and self-damned fool.

It seemed to me, I remember, during our hour’s talk together, that Miss Leslie was one of the two or three wisest, most understanding, and sympathetic persons I had ever met. Sympathetic, she genuinely was; very gracious and interestingly melancholy, in her Belgian nurse’s costume, with King Albert’s decoration pinned to her breast. It seemed to me that she divined my thoughts before I uttered them; as perhaps she did for to call them thoughts is to dignify vague sensations with a misleading name. Miss Leslie had had always, I am now aware, an instinctive response for vague sensations; she had always vibrated to them like a harp, thus surrounding herself with an odd, whispering music. A strange woman; not without nobility and force when the appropriate vague sensations played upon her. The sufferings of war had already wrung from her a wild, aeolian masterpiece, more moving perhaps than a consciously ordered symphony. And Susan, though she had never so much as guessed at Susan, was one of her passions! Susan played on us both that day: though the mawkish music we made would have disgusted her did disgust her in its final effects, as it has finally disgusted me.

What these effects were can be briefly told, but not briefly enough to comfort me. There is no second page of this record I should be so happy not to write.

Miss Leslie had long suspected, she told me, that Susan like Viola’s hypothetical sister was pining in thought for a secret, unkind lover, and she at once accepted as a certainty my suggestion that so gallant a young aviator as Jimmy had been what “glorious Jane” always calls her “object.”

“This must be kept from her, Mr. Hunt, at all costs for the next few weeks, I mean! She’s simply not strong enough yet, not poised enough, to bear it with all the rest! It would be cruelty to tell her now, and might prove murderous. Oh, believe me, Mr. Hunt I know!”

Her cocksure intensity could not fail to impress me in my present state of deadness; I listened as if to oracles. Then we conspired together.

“My lease of the villa at Mentone runs on till May,” said Miss Leslie. “Susan’s physically able for the journey now, I think; we must take that risk anyway. I’ll get the doctors to order her down there with me, at once. She needs the change, the peace; above all the beauty of it. She’s starved for beauty, poor soul! And there’s the possibility of further raids, too; she mustn’t in her condition be exposed to that. When she’s stronger, Mr. Hunt after she’s had a few happy weeks then I’ll tell her everything, in my own way. Women can do these things, you know; they have an instinct for the right moment, the right words.”

“You are proving that now,” I said. Every word she had spoken was balm to me. Everything could be put off put off.... To put things off indefinitely, hide them out of sight, dodge them somehow! Why, she was voicing the one weary cry of my soul!

And so, within three days, this supreme folly was accomplished. Mona Leslie and I stole across the river in secret to little Jeanne-Marie’s meagerly attended “funeral of the first class,” and with Madame Guyot, Doctor Pollain, and a few casual neighbors, we followed her coffin from the vast drafty dreariness of St. Sulpice to the wintry, crowded alleys of the cemetery of Montparnasse. That very evening Susan left with Miss Leslie for Mentone.

She was glad enough to go, she said, for a week or two. “But Ambo what shall I say to Jimmy? Will he ever forgive me for not having been able to make friends, first, with Jeanne-Marie? And it’s all your fault, dear; you must tell him that say you’ve been downright cross with me about it. I wish now I hadn’t listened to you; I feel perfectly well to-night; I’ve no business to be starting on a holiday. But I shan’t stay long, Ambo. I’ll be back in Paris before little Jimmy arrives; I promise you that. And here’s a letter to post, dear; I’ve said so in it to Jeanne-Marie.”

A dark train drew out of a dark station. With it went Hope, the shadow, silently, from my heart....

VIII

The days passed. Mentone, Miss Leslie wrote me, was doing everything for Susan that we had desired. “But she is determined,” she added, “to be back in Paris by the last week of February when the baby was expected. She begins to be bothered that you write so scrappily and vaguely, and that she hears nothing directly from Lieutenant Kane or Jeanne-Marie. I shall have to tell her soon now, in any case. It seems more difficult as I come nearer to it, but I still feel sure we have done the right thing. I’m certain now that Susan will be able to face and bear it. Already she’s full of plans for the future wonderful! Possibly, if an opportunity offers, I shall tell her to-night.”

The next afternoon my telephone rang. When I answered it, Susan spoke to me. “Ambo,” she said, “I’m at the France-et-Choiseul. Please come over at once, no matter how busy you are. You owe that much to me, I think.” She had hung up the receiver before I could stammer a reply.

But nothing more was necessary. I went to her as a criminal goes to confession, knowing at last how hideously in her eyes I had sinned.

“You meant well, Ambo,” she said with a gentleness that yielded nothing “you and Mona. Meaning well’s what I feel now I can never quite forgive you. You, Ambo. Poor Mona doesn’t count in this. But you I thought I was safe with you. No matter.”

Later she said: “I’ve seen Madame Guyot a horrible woman; and the baby. He’s a nice baby. You did just right about him, Ambo. Thank you for that.” She mused a moment. “I suppose it’s absurd to think he looks like Jimmy? But to me he does. I’m going to adopt him, Ambo. You see” her smile was wistful “I am going to have a baby of my own, after all.”

“I’d thought of adopting him, myself,” I babbled; “but of course ”

“Of course,” said Susan.

In so many subtle ways she had made it clear to me. I had disappointed her; revealed a blindness, a weakness, she would never be able to forget. In my hotel room that night I faced it out and accepted my punishment as just. Just but terrible.... There is nothing in life so terrible as to know oneself utterly and finally alone.

IX

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 règle.

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. lé 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: “Espión espión!”

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 saïs-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....

XI

The rest, however, I thank God, is not yet silence; though it is high time to make an end of this long and all too faulty record.

They did various things to me at the hospital, from time to time; they removed hard substances from me that were distinctly out of place in my interior; they also removed certain portions of my authentic anatomy three fingers of my left hand, among others, and my left leg to the knee. This was not in itself agreeable, and I shall always regret their loss; yet those weeks of progressive operation and tardy recuperation were, up to that period, the happiest, the most fulfilled weeks of my life. And surely egotism can go no farther! For these weeks of my triumphant happiness were altogether the darkest, saddest, cruellest weeks of the war. In a world without light, my heart sang in my breast, sang hallelujahs, and would not be cast down. Susan loved me me had always loved me! Rheims soon might fall, Amiens might fall, the channel ports, Paris, London, the Seven Seas the World! What did it matter! Susan loved me loved me!

And even now though Susan is ashamed for me that I can say it though I feel that I ought to be ashamed that I can say it though I wonder that I am not though I try to be well, I am not ashamed!

Final Note, by Susan insisted upon: “But all the same, secretly, he is ashamed. For there’s nobody in the world like Ambo, whether for dearness or general absurdity. Why shouldn’t he have been a little happy, if he could manage it, throughout those interminable weeks of physical pain? He suffered day and night, preferring not to be kept under morphine too constantly. I won’t say he was a hero; he was, but there’s nothing to be puffed up about nowadays in that. If the war has proved anything, it is that in nearly every man, when his particular form of Zero Hour sounds for him, some kind of a self-despising hero is waiting, and ready to act or endure or be broken and cast away. We all know that now. It’s the cornerstone for a possible Utopia: no, it’s more than that it’s the whole foundation. But I didn’t mean to say so when I started this note.

“All I meant to say was that you must never take Ambo au pied de la lettre. I’m not in the least as he’s hymned me but that, surely, you’ve guessed between the lines. What is much more important is that he’s not in the least as he has painted himself. But unless I were to rewrite his whole book for him which wouldn’t be tactful in an otherwise spoiled and contented wife I could never make this clear, or do my strange, too sensitive man the full justice he deserves. He’s oh, but what’s the use! There isn’t anybody in the world like Ambo.”

XII

More than a year has already passed since those dark-bright days, the spring of 1918. Down here in quiet, silvery Provence, at our nursing-home for children I call it ours the last of the cherry blossoms are falling now in our walled orchard close. As I write, James Aulard Kane sits none too steadily among a snow of petals, and sweeps them together in miniature drifts with two very grubby little hands. He is a likely infant and knows definitely what he wants from life, which is mostly food. He talks nothing but French that is, he emits the usual baby grunts and snortings in a funny harsh accent caught from his Marseillaise nurse. Susan is far too busy to improve this accent as she would like to do: perhaps it would be simpler to say that she is far too busy. She is the queen-bee of this country hive; and I I am a harmless enough drone. They let me dawdle about here and do this and that; but the sun grows more powerful daily, and I sleep a good deal now through the warmer hours. I am haunted by fewer mysterious twinges, here and there, when I sleep....

Meanwhile, the world-cauldron bubbles, and the bubbles keep bursting, and I read of their bursting and shake my head. When a man begins shaking his head over the news of the day, he is done for; a back number. Susan never shakes her head; and it’s rather hard on her, I think, to be the wife of a back number. But she’s far too thoughtful of me ever to seem to mind.

Only yesterday I quoted some lines to her, from Coventry Patmore. Susan doesn’t like Coventry Patmore; the mystical Unknown Eros he celebrates strikes her as well, perhaps I had better not go into that. But the lines I quoted they had been much in my mind lately were these:

For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
When all its work is done the lie shall rot;
The truth is great and shall prevail
When none cares whether it prevail or not.

“Stuff! We do care!” said Susan. “And it won’t prevail, either, unless we make it. Who’s working harder than you to make it prevail, I should like to know!”

You see how she includes me.... So this book is my poor tribute to her thoughtfulness, this Book of Susan.

But sometimes I sit and wonder. Shall we ever, I wonder, go back to my ancestral mansion on Hillhouse Avenue and quietly settle down there to the old securities, the old, slightly disdainful calm? I doubt it. Tumps, ancient valetudinarian, softened by age; Togo, rheumatic, but steeped in his deeply racial, his Oriental indifferentism they are the inheritors of that august tradition, and they become it worthily. For them it exists and is enough; for us it is shattered. Phil, a later Waring, is lost in Russia. Jimmy is gone. But Susan will do, I know, more than one woman’s part to help in creating a more livable world for his son, and I shall gain some little strength for that coming labor, spending it as I can. It will be an interesting world for those who survive; a dusk chaos just paling eastward. I shall hardly see even the beginnings of dawn. But with Susan beside me I shall have lived.

Farewell, then, Hillhouse Avenue!... Make way for Birch Street!