One morning, during the last week in October, she was called upon in the ordinary course of business to sit by the bedside of a young officer who had just been wheeled from the operating-room, until such time as he should “come out of the ether.” And the young officer was Boone Cruttenden. Hence the foregoing appreciative reference to the workings of Providence.
Boone duly emerged from one form of oblivion to enter upon another, hardly less complete. In the first, he had been oblivious to everything. In the second, he was oblivious to everything and everybody save Frances. The malady proved catching, and both patients imagined, as usual, that their symptoms were undetected by the outside world. So the War had to take care of itself for a while.
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year nineteen-eighteen these twain found themselves wandering side by side—with Frances on the right, ferociously interposing her slim person between Boone’s strapped and bandaged arm and the rest of humanity—through the congested Boulevards; waiting, waiting, like every one else, for Something Official to be announced.
During the previous day tout Paris, in Sabbath attire, had roamed restlessly, silently, expectantly, about the streets. Night had fallen, and the throng had not abated. The great city was as murky as ever. Peace might be hovering in the air, but War precautions still prevailed on earth. Small, ghostly, electric lights, encased in dark-blue glass, still indicated rather than illuminated the wayfarer’s path. At intervals a discreet, faintly luminous sign, bearing the legend Abri, proffered a refuge from the terror that flies by night. Through this gross darkness, silently, furtively, the great concourse drifted and groped. Only over La Place de la Concorde, like the promise of victorious Dawn, the sky was bright with the lights newly unveiled to illuminate the great array of trophies—German guns, German aeroplanes, festoons of German helmets—set up for the advancement of the latest War Loan—“The Loan of the Last Quarter of an Hour,” as the posters happily described it.
On Monday morning the crowd was still there. It had contrived to slip home and put on its working-clothes, but that was all. The shops were open, but no one appeared to be buying anything. There was little sound. Occasionally the most unlikely-looking persons were accosted and asked, “On a signé?” But it did not matter, as no one ever stayed for an answer. Paris was waiting.
Then in a moment, about the stroke of eleven, the electric discharge came. Cries arose from various parts of the city. The newspaper offices and information bureaux broke into simultaneous, preconcerted animation.
In the Boulevard des Italiens, Boone and Frances, standing amid a vast throng facing the office of Le Matin, suddenly became aware, between two intervals of whispered confidences, that the huge map of the Western Front which covered the outer wall of the building, upon whose surface, through months of alternate agony and triumph, the ebb and flow of battle had been recorded by an undulating array of tiny flags, was being obliterated by a series of great printed slips, set one above another. The first of these had already been put in position. It said:
L’ARMISTICE EST SIGNÉE!
There came a buzz of excitement from the crowd, but little noise. The second slip was going up:—