The Little Moment of Happiness

by Clarence Budington Kelland

He was making another discovery—namely, that one can theorize very comfortably, but that when one transmutes theory into accomplished fact, theory has become practice, and speculations upon its results may be exceedingly unpleasant. Within the last twenty-four hours Kendall had translated one theory into a fact, and another fact had arrived, needing no transmutation. The theory was the little-moment-of-happiness theory, and the fact was a letter from his mother.

That morning after he had left Andree he was rather disappointed to find that he suffered no remorse, experienced no sense of having done what he should have left undone. Andree was Andree, sweet, good, lovable. Because she was so, and because of his certainty of her cleanness of soul, he felt no sense of degradation or of having transgressed. He was even happy, rejoicing, boylike, in the sweetness of the gift of her love.... He found his mother’s letter at the office and, having read it, his romance was smirched with sordidness, its beauty was dulled by the intrusion of harsh, unsparing, cold convention. The Middle West had intruded upon Paris, and he was discovering that there was much Middle West remaining alive in him.

His mother’s letter had said, and he could visualize her face as she wrote, severe, unyielding, harsh, forbidding:

I am sorry to hear that you are stationed in Paris. They say that Paris is a wicked city. Everybody says the French are loose and immoral, which makes me worry about all our young men who are thrown with them. Your letter says that Paris is beautiful. It is not a good beauty, I have heard. Some one told me there were statues of naked women all over in the parks. I cannot understand how they allow such things; they must be bad, passionate men to allow it. I hope you will be very careful. You are young, and sometimes you are like your father, who is easily taken in. I am glad you do not speak that language, because you cannot get acquainted with French people. Those women have no morals; they are nasty creatures who just want to get hold of every penny you get. Some day you will want to marry a nice, clean American girl, and you have got to think about that. I don’t see why the war couldn’t have been some place else. Don’t ever look at one of them. They’re all atheists and that accounts for it....

There was more to the same effect. It reflected his mother perfectly, and the sentiments of the people among whom his mother lived; it represented, in extreme terms, the sentiment of his home community.... And over against it all stood Andree! That such words should be used to apply to her was sacrilege!... Yet ... yet ... she was—no matter what he might argue in her favor—in the language of his people, Andree was not an honest woman....

The effect of the letter upon him, however, had been uncanny. While he read he was again in Detroit. His sensations were almost exactly those which he always felt as he entered the Presbyterian church with his father and mother—not as he sat down in the accustomed pew, but as he passed through the crowded little vestibule where bald, smug elders and bearded, smug deacons and severe-faced chairwomen of missionary boards held their court before the service, shaking hands with all who entered with that religious affability, that hushed and somber and severe welcome, which strove to counterfeit open-heartedness.... It was that vestibule, and not the church, not the sermon, not the hymns nor the songs, which personified Kendall’s religion and what his religion meant.... He had grown up among those elders and deacons and chairwomen, and he knew them—in the church. It was incomprehensible to him that they could have any interests or activities outside the church. The practice of religion in that place seemed to him to be the sole occupations of their lives, and when he met one of them in the secular world of a week-day in the act of selling goods, or of handling money in a bank, or of anything else which savored of business and earning a living, Ken had the sort of feeling one has when he detects a person in something unusual and a bit discreditable. Why, those persons were the church!... And the thoughts of those persons were the thoughts of Kendall’s home world, thoughts among which he had been raised from babyhood.... So, as he read, he was transported to that vestibule—and that vestibule’s occupants smugly set the stain of guilt upon him and rolled eyes of horror at Andree.... He had been seeing Paris with something that approximated the eyes of Paris—now he was seeing it with the eyes of the vestibule of the Presbyterian church.

Before him stretched the magnificent avenue, crowded, as dusk descended, with pleasure-seeking Parisians: he regarded it—regarded it as a spectator, an utter outsider. It was as if he looked at the scene from a window in the Presbyterian church. The two worlds stood starkly facing each other, challenging each other—the civilization that was Paris and the civilization that had its expression in the occupants of the church vestibule. Kendall saw, with something very like to fear, that they could not be reconciled, that neither contained a starting-point which would lead to understanding of the other.... And yet he, springing from the one, felt that he understood both. He was drawn to the one while the other clung to him tenaciously.

It was not that his mother’s letter made him feel guilt; it was rather that it made him feel as if he ought to be conscious of wrong-doing. He ought to feel wicked and degraded, but he could not, and the fact that he could not seemed in itself to convict him of sin.... It was only when he thought of Andree that any semblance of stability came upon his thinking. There could be no argument about Andree. He had studied her, known her, loved her—and she was good. No church vestibule, no dogmatic elder, not even his mother, should say Andree was anything but good. He got some happiness out of that thought; Andree was an oasis of safety for him. He was capable of distinguishing between evil and virtue, he thought, and he had studied Andree as he had never studied any other living being. From the first moment of their acquaintance he had not perceived in her one quality, one emotion, one tendency that was not sweet, womanly, kindly, lovable, springing from a heart of purity.... How could a girl, proved to his intelligence to be good, be otherwise than good? How was it that any act of hers might be brought into question? Why was he questioning his righteousness because of his relations with her when her righteousness because of her relations with him were not open to question? It was very confusing. Could two individuals share an act and one of them be good and the other bad because of it? That sounded like a violation of some natural law as, for instance, that two solids cannot occupy the same space at the same instant.... Or was he wholly wrong? Could his judgment of her and of Paris and of the whole French nation be mistaken?... It might even be that Paris was not beautiful, as he had seen it beautiful, or that the French nation was not really sturdy, glowing with virility, heroic, as its deeds had seemed to prove it to be, but squalid, decadent....

He began to walk rapidly, as was his custom when in mental difficulty, and as he walked he knew the keen discomfort of a soul in turmoil.... He tried not to think about it, to put it out of his mind, and to find pleasure in the evening and in the dusk-softened beauties of the city, but his mind would not obey. He had a sensation of being terribly awake, of the blinding glow as of a tremendously powerful white light inside his head. His thoughts seemed to function independently of him, and himself to be an audience present to observe and listen to their activities. There was something ghastly about it, something unreal....

He strode around the Arc de Triomphe and thence down the Champs Élysées until he reached the Palais des Beaux-Arts, and there he turned to his right, crossing the Pont Alexandre III, marvelously beautiful in the half-light. He did not pause to admire the river and the city’s sky-line as he had so often done, but turned again, this time to his left, and followed the Quai d’Orsay, clinging to the bank of the Seine until he was opposite the Cité and in the familiar open space of the Place St.-Michel.