The Little Moment of Happiness

by Clarence Budington Kelland

Kendall regarded her. She was a little thing with clear eyes and a rather pretty face, whose cheeks, as she pointed out, were guiltless of paint. She was not well dressed, though she was neat, chic. And she was so young.... It was apparent to him that she told the truth, and his manner changed toward her.

They talked. It was a conversation which would have aroused the mirth of a listener ... but it was remarkable how well each made the other understand; she with slowly pronounced French and a few words of quaint English—he with his small stock of atrociously articulated French.... She worked in a chocolate-shop. She was a refugee from Soissons and an orphan. Her two brothers had been killed at Verdun and her mother and father had died of the war.

“Now I must make to work,” she said, simply. “But I am very solitaire, monsieur.... Oui, je suis trés-solitaire—trés-solitaire.”

“Poor kid!” said Kendall.

She shrugged her shoulders and said, with that calm resignation which is so much to be met with, “C’est la guerre.... It is the war.” That is a phrase which explains everything, excuses anything in France to-day. “C’est la guerre.” One offers it to explain the lateness of trains, the price of cheese, poverty, the lack of sugar, morale, everything great or small. “C’est la guerre” is the countersign of the epoch. It embraces everything.

After an hour she arose, offered her hand charmingly, and said good night and “Merci.” Kendall sat looking after her, feeling the first life movements of a comprehension of the womankind of France. From that moment they assumed a higher place in his thoughts, not yet so high as they deserved, but one rung nearer to the truth. He did not even begin to understand them—not their philosophy of life nor their conception of the relations between the sexes; but he began to ask himself questions to which his education and prejudices and narrownesses could provide no answer. He began to wonder if all he had heard were true; he began to consider, if it were true, was it then necessarily evil. He had been brought up to regard the drinking of any beverage containing alcohol as inherently wicked and as something to be done surreptitiously and with a sort of “devilish” feeling. Here everybody drank wine, and wine contained alcohol, and they did it with no concealment and with no thought that it could be other than normal and perfectly respectable. He considered that, and from it attempted to form a judgment of other things which to him seemed not as they should be. Apparently drinking in France was not a thing of moral turpitude, done as it was done by the French.... Perhaps, then, other matters were the same: evil in Detroit because custom and inherited moral conceptions had made them so; right in Paris because custom and inherited moral conceptions had made them so.... Dimly he was feeling for the conception that an act in itself is not a sin, but the manner of the performance of that act.... This may have been sophistry; it may have been alarmingly faulty moral philosophy, but it marked a step ahead for a young man come of such parentage as Kendall came of. It marked a willingness to listen to argument and to maintain an open mind. His mother, he considered, had never maintained an open mind. She had been dogmatic. To inquire into things was a sin to her. Nothing had been so quick to arouse her anger as an impulse on his part to look for the reasons of things, particularly religious things.... His father had not been like this. True, he had not been of an inquiring turn of mind, but he had seen no especial reason why somebody who wanted to inquire should not be allowed to do so. There was a certain sweetness about his father, a tolerant attitude toward life in general and toward transgressions in particular, that came nearer to the attitude of Jesus Christ than did the hard, unbending, dogmatic almost cruel religion of his mother.... He had inherited from both parents; each had given him something distinctly traceable to each, and both had joined to give him other qualities which were a strange composite of both of them. He was inclined to judge at first sight like his mother, harshly and dogmatically; he was inclined, on second thought, to look for excuses and to forgive what must be judged as evil, like his father. It was a quality composite of the characters of his parents that he placed the abstraction of goodness on a lofty throne, but was inclined to apply its laws with gentleness and mercy rather than with narrowness and hardness.... There were days when he was inclined to narrowness and dogmatism; there were days when he bent quite in the other direction and became over-indulgent.

Following his first experience in conversation with a casually encountered girl, and finding himself to have come off none the worse for it, he repeated the experience several times, and enjoyed it, and came to look forward to the evenings because of the possibility of a pleasant and instructive talk with some girl he would never see again, but from whom he would learn some French and considerable of France.... It was rarely that his sense of propriety was offended or that the attitude of one of his chance companions was other than “nice.” He made no effort to follow up any of these casual meetings, or to centralize his attention upon a single girl. He preferred matters as they were. But he was learning that the ordinary French girl did not resent being accosted by an American, and that when he was lonely he might find charming company without fear of being rebuffed.

On his third Sunday in Paris he was sitting among the trees that border the Champs Élysées. He was lonesome, for Bert Stanley had been absent on a mission for several days. He and Bert were sharing a room at the Union now, a room with two beds, which cost them jointly ten francs a day—and he missed Bert. He had lunched alone that noon and now did not know what to do with himself. It was the first time he had been really homesick, but now he was homesick and uneasy and rather at loose ends. He wished something would happen; that some friend would appear with an entertaining suggestion. So he sat and smoked and watched the passage of the colorful crowd.

Presently he stiffened to interest. In the distance he saw approaching a girl dressed in white. It was the white tam-o’-shanter that had caught his eye. It was familiar. For a moment he could not remember where he had seen it, or why it stirred him to interest, and then he recalled the little girl of the Café Poccardi. He even remembered her name—“Andree.” She came abreast of him and he identified her certainly. It was she, and really more attractive than he had remembered her to be. She walked along with little steps, her body very straight, her bearing very staid. As she walked her eyes remained straight in front of her, as though her mind were on some interest at her destination.... Her profile was prettier than his first picture of her full face had been; there was a daintiness about her lips and her straight little nose, and about the whole of her. If one had been compelled to limit himself to a single word in describing her, he would have been forced to use that word “dainty.”

She passed, and his eyes followed her. Suddenly he stood up with a resolution half formed, a resolution to speak to her. Then he hesitated. She did not look like a person one speaks to without permission or presentation. But it was a chance.... He was lonely and this was rather an adventure, and, besides, he had learned that one is not often rebuffed when making a casual advance. Still Kendall was a bit apprehensive. He walked along behind her irresolute, wondering if he dared, and keying up his courage to dare. At any rate, he would wait until they were out of the crowd; he did not wish the embarrassment of being rebuffed too publicly.