“My battery,” said Callendar, “lay just back of Hill 408, in the curve of the road beyond Jouy....”
“It was at Jouy,” interrupted Fergus, his good-natured face flushing with interest, “that we broke up a German escadrille ... four of them shot down.”
“Did you ever see Reymont?” asked Callendar.... “The general of our division?... A pompous ass!”
“He was at St. Pol while I was there. He reviewed the division when it came in from the east.... I saw him on a balcony....”
And so on, talking of this spectacle which Ellen despised as much because she could have no part in it as for any other reason. She would, at that moment, have preferred the spectacle to all the success, all the triumph; but it was no good. She was, for all her strength, all her power, simply a woman, thrust outside the experience which had enkindled Callendar and her brother. They had slipped away from her into a world of which she knew nothing.
At last, turning in pique from their talk, she went out and herself fetched them whiskey and soda, and when she had interrupted them long enough to pour out a glass for each she turned to the piano and fell to playing softly, as if to draw them quietly back to her. It was a plan which proved successful, for presently their talk abated a little and finally ceased; the war was put to rout and it was Ellen once more who held the center of the stage. The two men leaned back in their chairs, scrupulously silent, listening while she played for them in a fashion she had not done in years. And for a time she recaptured a little of the joy that had escaped so quickly.
She played the things she knew would please Fergus, the music which he had loved in the days of the house in Sycamore Street and the flat in the Babylon Arms, music she had played for him alone at the moments when Clarence was not there to disturb her with the silent, unrelieved pleading of his dim eyes. She played the simple old March from The Ruins of Athens, and one or two Chopin waltzes and the Marche Funèbre, which to Hattie would always be McKinley’s Funeral March and which to Fergus invoked memories of Shane’s Castle and Ellen in shirtwaist and skirt wearing at her belt a jingling thing they called a chatelaine. And she wooed them with such success that, hypnotized by the spell, they did not hear the first screams of the sirens rushing through distant streets nor the faint popping of the guns far away on the summit of Montmartre.
It was not until she paused, her hands resting thoughtfully on the ivory keys, that Callendar stirred himself and murmured in French, “The Boches are here.... Listen. The siren!”
And from the street nearby—perhaps from the Place Passy—the shriek of a fire engine penetrated the room, even through the heavy brocade curtains that muffled the windows. There was one more scream and then another and another, and then the faint, distant popping of guns, like a barrage of tiny fire-crackers. Fergus stood up and glanced at his wrist.
“I must go,” he said. “I’m late already.”