So, with characteristic foolhardiness, they sallied out and hurried up the rue de Rivoli to the Place de la Concorde, where they sat on a stone balustrade and waited. They were not alone. About that open space were scattered a dozen Americans impelled by absurd curiosity—a curiosity they would discard very shortly and become more circumspect in their behavior as well as more respectful toward the Gothas.
Still the alerte sounded, more terrifying than the sound of the barrage which was presently to begin. Sirens mounted on fire-engines were giving the alarm, tearing madly through the black streets, and with horrid voice commanding Paris to seek sanctuary in abri or in the tunnels of the Metropolitan.
Kendall was not frightened; he was hardly apprehensive. Even when the guns opened toward the north and he could see bright star-flashes as shrapnel burst high above, he was only exhilarated and very interested. The thing did not seem serious to him. But it was serious, he knew. It was war, and such barbarous war as held the world in a spell of horror. Presently the air was filled with the crashes of cannon, and one could trace the course of the enemy by the spreading of the ring of fire about the city.... Once in a while would come a deep, dull, thunderous boom, as a bomb, released by a Gotha, would fall in the distant suburbs, perhaps upon the home of some laborer, burying himself with his wife and babies in the ruins, or destroying them utterly so that no trace of their human shell would ever be discovered.... The firing moved westward, and then swung around to the south as the hostile aeroplanes strove vainly to penetrate the city.... This continued for half an hour. Then there was a time of quietness, after which came the pleasant voices of bugles notifying a cowering population that all was clear.... The raid had been abortive—it had succeeded in killing only half a dozen defenseless civilians!
Kendall and Stanley walked back to the Union—to have another dish of ice-cream. As they walked up-stairs in the darkness Kendall said to his friend: “I wonder who that girl was ... the one in the restaurant. Her name was Andree.”
CHAPTER III
Kendall Ware had been two weeks in Paris; he had learned many things, absorbed many things, but as his observations grew he discovered depths to his ignorance that were not apparent to him on the day of his arrival. The greatest advance he made in those first weeks was in arriving at a knowledge of how little he understood or was equipped to understand of France—and when he said France he did not mean a country, but the people who inhabited the country. Continually he was amused by superficialities; daily he was impressed by profundities. Gradually he came to perceive that one cannot know France by looking at the surface any more than one can gather a knowledge of what is transpiring in the ocean by sailing a little boat over its waves.
A people which can produce Joan of Arc and Robespierre, a St. Louis and a Louis the Eleventh, a Madame Roland and a Madame du Barry, a Clemenceau and a Calliaux; which is capable of an 1870 and of a 1914, of the Terror and of Verdun—is not one whose complexities can be solved by a twenty-six-year-old American in fourteen days.... The American will make no impression on France, but France will make a profound impression on the American.
From being interested in a city, in its buildings and its beauties, Kendall became interested in its people.
His first reaction to the people was rather romantic. He saw romance in every one. Hotel porters with one arm, wearing the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur, and perhaps the Médaille Militaire excited him. Each one was, in truth, a hero. These men had seen and done. Now they worked at menial tasks, still wearing uniforms, and with those medals on the breast which raised them into the aristocracy of manhood. It was strange to him that a man could be at once an honored hero and a porter.... Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité were inscribed on every public building. This was one of the manifestations of Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood. These things really existed, and so a porter could be a decorated hero.
If one addressed a taxi-driver one called him Monsieur, just as if one were addressing the President of the Republic itself. One addressed the gendarmes as Monsieur. One addressed even the turbaned and besashed and betrousered Moroccan street-sweepers as Monsieur if one addressed them at all. Monsieur Poincaré or Monsieur Clemenceau would have given them the same salutation. It was not an affectation; it was not what strangers have called French politeness. It was but a manifestation of Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood. At first it had seemed rather absurd to Kendall, American and republican though he was, but he grew to like it, and somewhat to understand it.