My nerves snapped. "If you insist on a straight answer," I said, "you can have it: I've no use for a world that spiritually starves its poets and saints, and physically fattens its hyenas and hogs! And if that isn't sentimental enough for you, I can go farther!"
"Oh, that'll do," he laughed, uncomfortably however. "I'm always forgetting you're a scribbler, of sorts. You scribblers are all alike—emotionally diseased. If you'd only stick to your real job of amusing the rest of us, it wouldn't matter. It's when you try to reform us that I draw the line; have to. I can't afford to grow brainsick—abnormal. Well," he added, pushing back his chair, "come along anyway! We've just time to get over to the Casino and have a look at the only Gaby. Been there? It's a cheap show, after Broadway, but it does well enough to pass the time."
From this unalluring suggestion I begged off, justly pleading a hard day of work ahead. "And if you don't mind, Dalt, I'll walk home."
"Oh, all right," he agreed; "I'll walk along with you, if you'll take it easy. I'm not much for exercise, you know. But it's a perfect night."
I had hoped ardently to be rid of him, but I managed to accept his company with apparent good grace, and we strolled down the Avenue Victor Hugo toward the Triumphal Arch, bathed now in clearest moonlight, standing forth to all Paris as a cruelly ironic symbol of Hope, never relinquished, but endlessly deferred. Turning there, the Champs-Élysées, all but deserted at that hour in wartime Paris, stretched on before us down a gentle slope, half dusky, half glimmering, and wholly silent except for our lonesome-sounding footfalls and the distant faint plopping of a lame cab-horse's stumbling heels.
"Not much like the old town we knew once, eh, Hunt?" asked Dalton.
But conversation soon faded out between us, as we made our way through etched mysteries of black and silver under thickset leafless branches. An occasional light beckoned us from far ahead down our pavement vista; for Paris had not yet fully become that city—not of dreadful—but of majestic and beautiful night we were later to know, and to love with so changed and grave a passion.
It was just after we had crossed the Rond-Point that the first seven or eight bombs in swift even succession shatteringly fell. They were not near enough to us to do more than root us to the spot with amazement.
"What the hell?" muttered Dalton, holding my eyes. . . .
Then, very far off, a curious thin wailing noise began, increasing rapidly, rising to an eerie scream which doubled and redoubled in volume as it was taken up in other quarters and came to us in intricately rhythmic waves.