The Book of Susan: A Novel

by Lee Wilson Dodd

In so many subtle ways she had made it clear to me. I had disappointed her; revealed a blindness, a weakness, she would never be able to forget. In my hotel room that night I faced it out and accepted my punishment as just. Just—but terrible. . . . There is nothing in life so terrible as to know oneself utterly and finally alone.

IX

On the night of the eighth of March the Gothas, so long expected, returned; to be met this time by a persistent barrage fire from massed 75's, which proved, however, little more than the good beginnings of a really competent defense. Many bombs fell within the fortifications, and we who dwelt there needed no other proof that the problem of the defense of Paris against air raids had not yet successfully been solved.

There were thickening rumors, too, of an imminent German attack in force. Things were not going well at the Front. It was common gossip that there was division among the Allies; the British and French commands were pulling at cross purposes; Italy seemed impotent; Russia had collapsed; the Americans were unknown factors, and slow to arrive. It began to seem possible—to the disaffected or naturally pessimistic, more than possible—that the Prussian mountebank might make good his anachronistic boast to wear down and conquer the world.

Even the weather seemed to fight for his pinchbeck empire; it was continuously dry, and for the season in Northern France extraordinarily clear. By its painful contrast with our common anxieties, the unseasonable beauty of those March days and nights weighted as if with lead the sense of threat, of impending calamity, that pressed upon us and chilled us and made desperate our hearts.

I saw Susan daily. She did not avoid me and was never unkind, but I felt that she took little comfort or pleasure from my society. Mona Leslie, rather huffed than chastened, I fear, by Susan's quiet aloofness, had returned to her duties at Dunkirk. I was glad to have her go, to be rid of the embarrassment of her explanations and counsel—to be rid, above all, of the pointedly sympathetic and pitying pressure of her hand. Except for a slight limp, Susan now got about freely and was busily engaged with our Red Cross directors on plans for a nursing-home for the children of repatriated refugees—a home where these little victims of frightfulness and malnutrition could be built up again into happy soundness of body and mind, into the vigorous life-stuff needed for the future of France and of the world. A too-medieval château at ——, in Provence, had been offered; and plans for its immediate alteration and modernization were being drawn.

The whole thing, from the first, had been Susan's idea, and she was to have charge of it all—once the required plant was ready—as became its creator. But indeed, in the interim, she had simply taken charge of our Red Cross architects and buyers and builders and engineers, and was sweeping things forward with a tactful but exceedingly high hand. She meant that the interim should be, if possible, brief.

"I want results," said Susan; "we can discuss the rules we've broken afterward. The children are fading out now, and some of them will be dead or hopelessly withered before we can aid them. Let's get some kind of home and get it running; with a couple of good doctors, an orthopedist, a dental expert, and the right nurses—and I'll pick them, please!—we can make out somehow, 'most anywhere."

There was no standing against her. It was presently plain to all of us in the Paris headquarters that this nursing home was to be put through, in record time, Germans or no Germans, and no matter who fell by the wayside! And, in spite of my natural anxiety, I was soon convinced that whoever fell, it would not be Susan—not, at least, till the clear flame of her spirit had burned out the oil of her energy to its last granted drop.

In the rare intervals of these labors, she was arranging for the legal adoption of James Aulard Kane. No step of this kind is easily arranged in bureaucratic France. It is a difficult land to be legally born in or married in, or to die in—if one wishes to do these things, at least, with a certain decency, en règle.