The little moments of happiness! Kendall’s mind seized on that phrase and held it.... It was the essence of the whole matter. These women, shut out from the Banquet of Life, were seizing hungrily the crumbs of happiness that were brushed from the table.
In the pause that followed an American soldier and a French girl sat down in the chairs at the right of Maude and Kendall and talked jerkily, half in French, half in English. They tried so hard to talk to each other, because each was lonesome.... And then, as Kendall and Maude eavesdropped shamelessly, the siren sounded—the Gothas were coming!
People started to their feet and began scurrying away to seek for shelter, but Maude and Kendall did not move, nor did the boy and girl next them. Presently Kendall heard the boy ask, “Ain’t you afraid of the bombs, mademoiselle?”
“Non.... Non....” She shrugged her shoulders and then said, in a hopeless voice, a pitiful voice: “I have not the fear, because what does it matter?... There is nothing in life for me. If I am kill—pouf!... So.... There is an end, and it will be well....”
Kendall felt Maude’s fingers on his arm, felt their sudden pressure. “There,” she whispered. “There it is.... She knows. They all know.... Who has a right to say they sha’n’t have their little moments?...”
Kendall stood up. It seemed as if movement were necessary, any sort of movement, of physical action. This sudden, close contact with terrible reality had seared through to his consciousness with a terrible, burning depression.... The thing was unbearable.... And this, he thought, is what war means!...
“Come,” he said, almost roughly.
She arose obediently and they walked rapidly toward the Étoile.
“We have fifteen minutes,” he said. “If we walk fast we can almost make your hotel.”
As they walked the now almost deserted streets, deserted except for stragglers and for taxicabs which went scurrying about as they always do, not oblivious to bomb raids, but in defiance of them, they saw huge, mysterious bodies arising from the shrubbery, great grub-shapes that appeared from nowhere and mounted high into the heavens—the sausage balloons which in time of raid stretch in interminable line across the sky down the path of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne and the Champs Élysées and the Jardin des Tuileries. They were so silent, so mysterious, such ghostly-gray blots against the sky!