By the time I had reached the hospital the raid was over; the air was droning from the bronze vibrations of hundreds of bells, all the church-bells of Paris, full-throated, calling forth their immediate surface messages of cheer, their deeper message of courage and constancy.
Though it was very late, I found a silent group of four nurses standing in the heavily shadowed street before the shut doors of this small civilian hospital; they were still staring up fixedly at the silver-bright sky. They proved to be day-nurses off duty, and among them was Mademoiselle Annette. She greeted me now as an old friend, and brushing rules and regulations aside like a true Frenchwoman took me at once to Susan. I found that Susan had risen from bed and was seated at her window, which looked out across the winter-bare hospital garden.
"Ambo," she exclaimed impatiently, "why did you come here! I'm so used to all this. But Jeanne-Marie, Ambo—in her condition! I've been hoping so you would think of her—go to her!"
Then what fatuous devil—was it my old familiar demon?—put it into my heart to say: "So you haven't been worrying, dear, about me?"
"About you!" she cried. "Good God, no! What does it matter about you—or me! This generation's done for, Ambo. Only the children count now—the children. We must save them—all of them—somehow. It's up to them—to Jimmy's son with the rest! They've got to wipe us out, clear the slate of us and all our insanities! They've got to pass over the wreck of us and rebuild a happy, intelligible world!"
She rose, seized my arm, and summoning all her strength thrust me from her toward the door. . . .
VI
It was well on toward three o'clock in the morning when at last I stood before the black, close-shuttered shop-front of the Vve. Guyot. I was desperately weary, having of necessity walked all the way. It was, as I had fully realized while almost stumbling along toward my goal, a crazy errand. I should find a dark, silent house, and I should then stumble back through dark, silent streets to my dark, silent hotel. The shop of the Widow Guyot was a very little shop on a very narrow street, a mere slit between high, ancient buildings—a slit filled now with the dense river-mist that shrouds from the experience of Parisians all the renewing wonders of clear-eyed dawn. The moon had set, or else hung too veiled and low for this pestilent alley; in spite of a thick military overcoat I shivered with cold; the flat, sour smell of ill-flushed gutters caught at my throat. To this abomination of desolation I had, with no little difficulty, found my way. Thank God I could turn now, with a good conscience, and fumble back to the warm oblivion of bed.
I paused a moment, however, to draw up the collar of my overcoat to my ears and fasten it securely; and, doing so, I was aware of the scrape and clink of metal on metal; then the shop-door right before me was shaken and jarred open from within. The fluttering rays of a candle, tremulously held, surprised and for an instant blinded me; faintly luminous green and red balloons wheeled swiftly in contracting circles, then coalesced to a flickering point of light. The candle was held by an old, stout woman with a loose-jowled, bruised-looking face; a face somehow sensual and hard in spite of its bloated antiquity. A shrunken, thin-bearded man in a long black coat stood beside her, holding a black hand-bag. The two were conversing in tones deliberately muted, but broke off and stared outward as the candle-light discovered me in the narrow street.
"Ah, M'sieu, one sees, is American; he has perhaps lost his way?" piped the thin-bearded man, pretty sharply. He, too, was old.