The Little Moment of Happiness

by Clarence Budington Kelland

“Just walking around,” said Kendall. Some young men would have wanted to tell about Andree and to discuss her, but not he.

“Let’s split a bottle of beer.... Say, I heard about an apartment to let—up near the Étoile. What say to having a look at it to-morrow?”

“How much?”

“I heard it was three hundred francs—and we’re paying that much here for one room with two beds.”

“Sounds good, but I don’t know. Anyhow, we can look it over.”

“’Tisn’t far from the office. We can walk over at noon.”

Kendall yawned. “Let’s go to bed,” he suggested.

“What’s the use? There’ll be an air raid to-night. Better to sit up than just to get nicely asleep and have to roll out. I never get to sleep again.”

Kendall persisted and walked up to his room, where he was soon in bed, but not to sleep. He was excited and restless. He wanted to sleep, not to think, but his mind persisted in its activity, and his thoughts became incisive, whitely clear as one’s thoughts do of sleepless nights. It was rather the sensation of being subjected to a blinding light which hurt the brain.... It was not alone of Andree that he thought. He could concentrate on nothing, but kept running down cul-de-sacs of memories and speculations and plans which overlapped and confused one another maddeningly. He would shut his eyes and try to curtain off his mind so that no thought could penetrate, but it was not to be done, so he tossed and rolled and submitted.... Just around the corner of every avenue his thoughts followed Andree, lay in wait. Before he knew it he was building air-castles about her....

It was really a relief to him when the alerte sounded. He said to himself that he would not get up, and composed himself to wait. In a quarter of an hour the barrage started, sporadically at first, then worked itself up to a fury of sound such as he had never heard before. It sounded nearer, more menacing. Really, cannon might have been going off in the street below his window. So imminent did the sound become that Kendall got out of bed, not frightened, exactly, but impressed. He considered that there was nothing above his head but the roof. Half determined to dress and go down, he fumbled for the light-button and turned it before he remembered that there would be no light, that all light was turned off at its source with the sounding of the alerte.... In his pajamas he went to the windows which opened out on the little balcony which overlooked the Palais Royal, and stood there looking off toward the east, where the firing was most furious.... Over his head he could hear the angry humming of aeroplanes, and wondered uneasily if they were defenders or hostile bombers. Tremendous detonations rattled the windows and rocked the buildings, and these, he fancied, were falling bombs. The sky was alight with up-leaping flares from the mouths of the cannon and from shells bursting high above the city, searching the heavens for flitting Gothas.... Then came a series of tremendous upheavals which seemed to his tingling nerves to be almost at hand.... And then the sky was red with flames which uprose and spread and glanced and billowed over the tops of the buildings. Metallic fragments rattled on the roof of the Palais Royal, fifty feet away, and on the roof of his hotel and in the streets below. Kendall ducked inside, for he knew this was falling shrapnel from the defensive barrage.... For the first time he was seeing a real air raid, a serious raid, and one that was meeting with success. Already a tremendous fire had been started, and what might not follow?... It was enough to shake one’s nerves, for the individual is so helpless! All one can do at such a time is to hope and to argue that Paris is large and a bomb small; that the chances of a bomb falling where one happens to be are almost infinitesimal.