The Little Moment of Happiness

by Clarence Budington Kelland

They finished breakfast and went down the four flights of stairs, Bert and Madeleine chatting gaily, Kendall following apprehensively, for they must pass the omniscient eye of the concierge. He was inclined to make an excuse to go back to the apartment so that he would not be compelled to take part in the scene he feared.

Bert and Madeleine passed out of the big doors into the concrete-floored passageway that led to the street, and Kendall drew himself together as he saw the concierge busily sweeping between them and the outer doors. She looked up and nodded and smiled. Madeleine stopped and they chatted! Actually chatted as if—why, as if there was no reason why they should not chat. And that concierge was a gray-haired, motherly soul who in Detroit would have gone to foreign missionary meetings! Kendall could not follow the conversation, but he caught fragments of it. It was just casual chatter, with here and there a question dropped in to make for a better acquaintance. Then they bade each other good-by in the most friendly way imaginable and the trio went out to the street.

Kendall was suspended in mid-air, feet off the ground, nothing solid within reach. He was in an element that was not his, in a universe where two solids could occupy the same place at the same time, or where the shortest distance between two points was a curve. All his rules and axioms were useless.... He began to realize that the years he had lived were more or less useless to him, and that if he wished to judge his present life and the people among whom he lived he must start at the beginning with an open mind. As an American he could never comprehend them; he could not think their thoughts nor understand their mental language. The part of him inherited from his mother could never get into rapport with France; the part inherited from his father never could quite comprehend, though it might tolerate with a kindly toleration, and say: “Well, I don’t understand this way of doing things at all.... But maybe it’s all right—for the French.”

He kept glancing at Madeleine. Every glance reassured him. She was a nice girl. He liked her. There was nothing reprehensible about her, but, on the contrary, she was charming as he liked to see a girl charming, and modest, and good. He felt instinctively that she was good, just as he had felt that Andree was good.... Somewhere there must be an explanation. Somehow the thing was reconcilable.

They left Madeleine at the Metro and walked to their offices. Neither boy referred to the situation; Bert, because he saw no reason for it; Kendall, because he dared not. Strangely, it was not Madeleine and Bert that troubled him; it was himself. He was not accustomed to studying himself, but he was doing so now. He had rather fancied himself a man capable of thought and understanding, a man who could look at the world and comprehend it. He had regarded himself as wise in his generation, not blatantly so, but with a certainty born of inherited dogmas and local dogmas. For the first time he saw dimly that one may understand the world from the Detroit point of view and be utterly at a loss in New York; that he may understand life from the American point of view and be grossly ignorant of the French. He even asked himself this question:

“Is one who lives up to his code of ethics, his moral conceptions, good and moral, even if those ethics and conceptions are utterly at variance with some other code of behavior?”

Could it be that a thing abominable in America because America’s code was set against it could be perfectly proper in Persia because Persia’s code permitted it? That there was an abstract good he believed, and that there was an abstract evil. But could a definite act be made universally evil by legislation or by the custom of only a part of the world? It was deeper reasoning than he had ever essayed before, and he limped sadly as he traveled toward no conclusion at all. The result was multiplied bewilderment....

One conclusion he reached: If Madeleine had been an American girl he would have been shocked, outraged.... This led him to think of Maude Knox, and suddenly he wanted to see her, to talk to her, to be with her because she was American as he was American. He wanted to get his feet on solid earth and to tread accustomed paths for a while. He determined he would see her.

At noon he told Bert he would not be at home for dinner, and then at six o’clock he hurried to the Hôtel Wagram and telephoned Miss Knox’s room. She was in, and would be delighted to dine with him if he would wait twenty minutes. He sat down in the spacious lobby and smoked and waited.

She came down the stairs very trim and American and pleasing to the eye. He noted the little swagger—the rather charming swagger—to her walk. It was accentuated by the fact that she carried her hands in the side pockets of her coat. She was not in uniform; had left it off for the evening as the women in the various services love to do. He arose and walked to the stairway to meet her, and they shook hands in the frank American way.