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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 Réformée!"
"But it is a nuisance to be lame!" she protested: "I do envy you your two good legs, M. le Capitaine."
We made our way slowly along the embankment, passing the Pont des Arts, and two shadowy lovers paced on before us, blotted together, oblivious of the long, eerie rise and fall of the sirens; every twenty yards or so they stopped in their tracks, as by a common impulsion, and were momentarily lost to time in a passionate embrace.
Neither Susan nor I spoke of these lovers, who turned aside to pass under the black arches of the Institute, into the Rue de Seine. . . .
As we neared the Pont du Carrousel the barrage began, at first distant and muffled—the outer guns; then suddenly and grimly nearer. An incessant twinkle of tiny star-white points—the bursts of high-explosive shells—drifted toward us from the north. So light was the mist, it did not obscure them; it barely dimmed the moon.
"Hold on!" I said, checking Susan; "this is something new! They're firing to-night straight across Paris." The glitter of star-points seemed in a moment to fill all the northern sky; the noise of the barrage trebled, trebled again.
"Why, it's drum fire!" cried Susan. "Oh, how beautiful!"
"Yes; but we'll get on faster, all the same! I'll help you! Come!"
I put my arm firmly about her waist and almost lifted her along with me. By the time we had reached the Pont Royal, the high-explosive bursts were directly over us; the air rocked with them. I detected, too, at intervals, another more ominous sound—that deep, pulsing growl which no one having once heard it could ever mistake.
"Gothas," I growled back at them, "flying low. They've ducked under the guns!"
And instantly I swung Susan across the open quai to the left and plunged with her up an inky defile, the Rue du Bac.
"Where are you taking me?" she demanded, half breathless, dragging against my arm.
"To the first available abri," I cried at her, under the sky's reckless tumult. "Don't stop to argue about it!"
But she halted me right by the corner of the Rue de Lille. "If it's going to be a bad raid, Ambo, I must get to Jimmy's baby—I must!"
"Impossible! It's at least two miles—and this isn't going to be a picnic, Susan! You're coming with me!" I tightened my arm about her; every instant now I expected the shattering climax of the bombs.
Then, just as we crossed the Rue de Lille, something halted me in my turn. About a hundred yards at my right, down toward the Gare D'Orsay, and from the very middle of the black street-chasm, a keen, bladelike ray of light flashed once and again—sharp, vertical rapier-thrusts—straight up through the thin mist-veil into the treacherous sky. Followed, doubtless from a darkened upper window, a woman's frantic shriek: "Espion—espion!"
Pistol shots next—and rough cries—and a pounding charge of feet. . . . Right into my arms he floundered, and I tackled him and fell with him to the cobbles and fought him there blindly, feeling for his throat. This lasted but a moment. Gendarmes tore us apart, in a brief crossing flash of electric-torches—and I caught just one glimpse of a bare bullet-head, of a bloated, discolored face, of prominent staring eyes, maddened by fear. There could be no mistake. It was our little man of the Pantagruelian banquet. We had watched him eating his last fabulous meal—his farewell to Egypt.
And that is all I just then clearly remember. . . . I am told that nine bombs fell in a sweeping circle throughout this district; one of them, in the very courtyard of the War Office; one of them—of 300 kilos—perhaps a square from where we stood. There was a rush past of hurtling fragments—glass, chimney-tiles, chips of masonry, que sais-je?—and even this I report only because I have been credibly so informed.
What next I experienced was pain, unlocalized at first, yet somehow damnably concentrated: pure, white-hot essence of pain. And through the stiff hell of it I was, and was not, aware of someone—some one—some one—murmuring love and pity and mortal anguish. . . .
"Ambo—you wouldn't leave me—not you! Not you, Ambo—not alone. . . ."
The pain dimmed off from me in an ebbing, dull-red wave; great coils of palpable darkness swirled down upon me to smother me; I struggled to rise from beneath them—fling them off. . . . From an infinite distance, a woman's cry threaded through them, like a needle through mufflings of wool, and pricked me to an instant, a single instant, of clear consciousness. I opened my eyes on Susan's; I strove to answer them, tell her I understood. Susan says that I did answer them—that I even smiled. But I can feel back now only to a vast sinking away, depth under depth under depth, down—down—down—down. . . .