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 château 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 Lapérouse; I am long past discussing the claims of rivals. It is—simply and finally—Lapérouse. . . .
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 Château 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 æsthetic 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.