"Oh, things soon settled themselves, I imagine, when Jeanne-Marie was well enough to leave. Naturally, she had to as soon as she could. A soldier's wife can't live with him at the Front, you know—even to keep house for his esquadrille. She's living here now, in Paris, with a distant cousin, an old lady who runs a tiny shop near St.-Sulpice—sells pious pamphlets and pink-and-blue plaster Virgins—you know the sort of thing, Ambo. You must call on her at once in due form, dear. You must. I'm so eager to—when I can." She paused on a breath, then added slowly, her eyes closing, "The baby's expected in February—Jimmy's baby."
The look on her face had puzzled me as I left her; a look of quiet happiness, I must have said—if I had not known.
And my vision at Evian——?
I walked back toward the barrier down endless darkening avenues of suburban Neuilly; walked by instinct, though quite unconscious of direction, straight to the Porte Maillot, through the emotional nightmare of what my old childhood nurse, Maggie, used always to call "a great state of mind."
V
And that night—it was, I think, the thirtieth of January, or was it the thirty-first?—fifty or sixty Boche aëroplanes came by detached squadrons over Paris and, for the first time since the Zeppelins of 1916, dropped a shower of bombs on the agglomération Parisienne. It was an entirely successful raid, destructive of property and life; for the German flyers in their powerful Gothas had caught Paris napping, impotently unprepared.
I had dined that evening with an old acquaintance, doing six-months' time, as it amused him to put it, with the purchasing department of the Red Cross; a man who had long since turned the silver spoon he was born with to solid gold, and who could see no reason why, just because for the first time in his life he was giving something for nothing, he should deprive himself while doing so of the very high degree of creature comfort he had always enjoyed. He was stationed in Paris, and it was his invariable custom to dine sumptuously at one of the more expensive restaurants.
This odd combination of service and sybaritism was not much to my liking, seeming to indicate a curious lack of imaginative sympathy with the victims of that triumphing Misery he was enlisted to combat; nevertheless, I had properly appreciated my dinner. It is impossible not to appreciate a well-ordered dinner, chez Durant, where wartime limitations seemed never to weigh very heavily upon the delicately imagined good cheer. True, the cost of this good cheer was fantastic, and I shuddered a little as certain memories of refugee hordes at Evian intruded themselves between our golden mouthfuls; but the bouquet of a fine mellowed Burgundy was in my nostrils and soon proved anæsthetic to conscience. And Arthur Dalton is a good table companion; his easy flow of conversation quite as mellow often as the wine he knows so well how to select. But that night, though I did my poor best to emulate him, I fear he did not find an equal combination of the soothing and the stimulating in me.
Perhaps it was because I had bored him that I was destined before we parted to catch a rather startling glimpse of a new Arthur Dalton, new at least to me; a person wholly different from the amusing man of the world I had long, but so casually, known.
"Hunt," he said unexpectedly, over a final glass of old yellow Chartreuse, a liquor almost unobtainable at any price, "you've changed a lot since our days here together." We had seen something of each other once in Paris, years before, during a fine month of spring weather; it was the year after my wife had left me. "A lot," he repeated; "and I wish I could say for the better. You've aged, man, before you're old. You've let life, somehow, get on your nerves, depress you. Suffered your genial spirits to rot, as the poet says. That's foolish. It's a kind of defeat—acceptance of defeat. Now my philosophy is always to stay on top—where the cream lies. Somebody's going to get it if you and I don't, eh? Well, I'm having my share. I don't want more and I'm damned if I'll take less. Anything wrong with that point of view, old man? I'd be willing to swear it used to be yours!"