“That,” he said with conviction, “must be true because nobody but you would be capable of such mixed language and emotions.”
She had laughed at this and, remembering suddenly that she had a box of cigarettes for him, jumped up to get it. He was amazed. Where, in Heaven’s name, had she been able to get cigarettes in France in 1918? Ah, that was her little secret. She had her ways of doing things! She teased him for an instant and then said she had begged it for him from an American Red Cross camion driver who had stopped there to get water for his radiator. The recollection brought to mind something painful, which she poured out before him like all the rest. “Oh but, André, what do you think the woman in uniform sitting by him said? Of course she couldn’t have known that I understand English, but even so— She looked at me hard, and she said, ‘These heroic Frenchwomen people make so much fuss about, I notice you don’t see any of them turning out to run cars or distribute clothes to refugees. Much they bother themselves for France. They stay right inside their comfortable homes and do fancywork as usual.’ Yes, she said that. Oh, André, it hurt! I was ashamed that I could be hurt so cruelly by anything but the war.”
This led to talk of America. “All our hope is with them, Jeanne. You mustn’t mind what one woman said—very likely a tired woman too, fretted by being in a country where she doesn’t speak the language. All the future is in their hands, and, by God, Jeanne, I begin to believe they realize it! They are really coming, you know; they are really here. I see them with my own eyes, not just doctors and nurses and engineers and telegraphists, as at first, but real fighting men. They are in the sector next to ours now. They fight. They fight with a sort of exuberance, as though it were a game they were playing and meant to win. And they all say that their country is back of them as France is back of us, to the last man, woman, and child. They’re queer fellows. They remind me a little of our Normans and a little of our Gascons, if you can imagine the combination. Whenever there is a difficulty they have a whimsical, bragging little phrase, that they drawl out in their sharp, level voices, ‘Never you mind, the Yanks are coming.’ It made me smile at first, at their presumption, at their young ignorance. But there is something hypnotizing about the way they say that jerky, unlovely phrase, like the refrain of a popular song that sticks in your mind. It sticks in mine. ‘The Yanks are coming!’ The Russians have gone, or rather the Russians never were there, but ‘the Yanks are coming!’”
Jeanne had been looking at him hard, scarcely hearing what he said, drawing in a new conviction from his eyes, his accent, the carriage of his head. “Why, André! you are really hoping that it may end as it ought!” she interrupted him suddenly, “You are really hoping—” He nodded soberly. “Yes, my darling, I really hope.”
He was silent, smiled, drew her to him with a long breath, his arm strong and hard about her. They might have been eighteen and twenty again. “And I know,” he whispered, “that you are the loveliest and the best and the bravest woman in the world.”
The tears ran down her cheeks at this—happy tears which he kissed away. When she could speak she protested, saying brokenly that she was weak, she was helpless in the face of the despair which so often overcame her, that she was perilously poised on the edge of hysteria. “Ah, who isn’t near that edge?” he told her. “Not to go over the edge, that is the most that can be done by even the strongest in these days.” “No, no,” she told him. “You don’t know how weak I am, how cowardly, how I must struggle every day, every hour, not to give up altogether, to abandon the struggle and sink into the abyss with the children.” “But you don’t give it up,” he murmured, his lips on her cheek. “You do go on with the struggle. I always find the children alive, well, happy. You weak! You cowardly! You are the bravest of the brave.”
They went upstairs hand in hand to look at the sleeping children and to try to plan some future for them. Jeanne told of her anxieties about Michel, the oldest, who had silent, morose fits of brooding. “He’s old enough to feel it all. The littler ones only suffer physically.” André put his father’s hand on the sleeping boy’s forehead and looked down at him silently, the deep look of strength and comprehension which was like the wine of life to his wife. She thought it was a benediction to the boy which no priest could better. André took his watch out of his pocket and laid it on the table. “See here,” he said, “I’m going to leave this here for Michel when he wakes in the morning. I only use the old wrist watch nowadays. It may please the little fellow to know I think him big enough to have my watch.”
“He’ll make it a talisman—it’s the very thing!” she agreed, touched by his divining sympathy for the boy’s nature.
They roamed then through the cold deserted rooms of the much-loved little home, unused because of lack of fuel, but the wan, clustering memories were too thick even for their tried and disciplined hearts. They went back into the smoky kitchen, shivering.