“Evidently not.”
“Come with me. We’ll dine at La Mère Argentine’s,—a couple of red bottles and—to hell with the rest! Moi, je suis philosophre.”
Which, after all, was the best thing I could do. And so, out for a last dinner with Coustic and Valentin and then no more. Quick friends and open hearts,—but when you haven’t the time, as Coustic says, to smell a man over, it must be open-handed and open-hearted at once. Besides, one man is as good as another, to smoke with, to dine with, and to damn the politicians.—I drank my two bottles and sang with the loudest, but it cured nothing. To-night I feel the dead weight of homesickness as never before. The prospect of Paris brings no pleasure.
VI
Paris
At the Quai d’Orsay, where I debarked three nights ago, the old days came back to me with a vividness of pain which I had not expected; the old careless days of another world which has been snuffed out. I walked out alone, being en permission, feeling my way along the black banks of the hidden Seine. The street where she had lived was close at hand and habit was so strong that despite my reason I felt the tug of old instinct. Where was now that light, reckless crowd, so indefatigable in the scampering pursuit of pleasure? Scattered to the four winds of heaven. Most of the women have drifted away,—some to London, some to America; one, a fortune’s favorite, died in an air raid; another, a suicide after her lover’s death, one whom I had not thought capable of a real passion. The test of war has redeemed some of the men—there were the good with the bad—by some spark of a saving ancestry, perhaps simply from a gambler’s love of a new hazard. Those who were born to fight have found a purpose; the rest,—well, it does not much matter what has become of the froth: all that matters is that a man or two, whom once we despised, has redeemed himself with an heroic death. All these memories are inseparably bound up with the experience which, I suppose, was bound to come into my life,—that I believed erased from my memory, but which to-day remains a haunting, ominous specter which sooner or later must be faced.
The memory that obtrudes is of a clouded page in my life—a chapter which I fatuously hoped had been closed and laid aside forever—something to be regretted, to stand as a warning in the future, and yet inclining me to a greater charity. This I know is the experience of many men. That in my case, by some malignant turn of the fates, it should remain in tragic permanence, is something against which I rebel.
* * * * *
I think that I can now look back dispassionately upon the David Littledale of 1913 and recognize the impulses which led me into an infatuation which, without the outbreak of the great war, would in all probability have left me a moral wreck.
Even as I write this severe judgment, I react against it. Perhaps I am too harsh upon myself. It may be that of my own will I would have found the strength to free myself of the humiliating bondage—perhaps—but I am not sure.