“Heaven knows I hear you,” Fair assured him with ominous calm. “I should think that they could hear you in Paris!”
“Well, then, I tell you that we, his men, we who followed him, we would have given the blood out of our hearts for him to shine his boots with—we knew him, we. You know why they call him Philippe le Gai?”
“I know that there’s some story about an old troubadour called Philippe le Gai——”
“About a very great soldier who was also a very great singer, Mademoiselle, long years ago in Provence. Philippe is of his race; one of those who meet Death itself with a song. That other Philippe died eight hundred years ago, and they say that he died singing. And we—we who followed this Philippe and gave to him our souls—we know that he could face worse than death—and still sing.”
“There isn’t the slightest necessity of making a curtain speech to me about courage,” replied the last of the fighting Carters, and the velvet voice rang as cold and hard as drawn steel. “I know quite a good deal about it, thank you. I may not have had any old ancestor that went rampaging around singing songs about how gay and brave and wonderful he was, but I had three great-uncles and a grandfather who were killed in the Civil War and a brother who was killed in the Spanish War, and—and a father——” Her voice failed her, but she swallowed hard and pushed on relentlessly: “And a father who died for his country just as much as any of them, because he went right on working for it when he knew that it would kill him—and who didn’t even let me know that he was dying, because I couldn’t help him, and he thought that I might help America, and I was the only one of the Carters left to fight for America. And I kept on fighting, even though it just about killed me, too; I went into Germany with my men, because I knew that he wouldn’t think the war was over until we got what we fought for—until we really got it—and I’d be there yet if it hadn’t been for those idiotic doctors. Nervous breakdown! For gracious sakes, I’d like to hear what they’d say if one of their old colonels started to have a nervous breakdown. This isn’t any kind of a world to sit and twirl your thumbs and pet your nerves in—and I can’t see that singing about it makes it much nobler—or laughing, either.”
“There are many things, perhaps, that you cannot see,” commented young De Chartreuil, and at the tone in his voice there was one thing that Fair did see, and that was red.
“Well, I can see this,” she cried in a voice shaken with sheer fury, “I can see that it’s possible to be just as much of a slacker after the war as during it.”
“Mademoiselle!”
“In America men work,” stormed Fair. “They——”
“In America you save your generosity for your own faults, it seems.” He raised a commanding hand, and Fair stood voiceless, literally transfixed with rage. “No, wait, I beg you; I have not yet finished. Perhaps in your great country you forget that work is the means—that it is not the end; no, no, believe me, it is not the end. It is also not very wise to condemn utterly that which may differ only in kind, not in degree. To you courage may be a dark and stern thing—a duty—but to some—to one at least, Mademoiselle—it is a shining and gay and splendid gift; it is a joy.”