All this, which would have disappointed or amused many a Frenchwoman, captivated Madeleine, and in the taxi she gave up her lips to him with rich joy at the unmistakable warmth of his feelings. The moment, however, the taxi stopped at the restaurant she had indicated, she made herself prim and aloof. She had not wasted her time since she had been in Paris, and knew her way about. The restaurant dated from the period of those great Exhibitions that had served to rehabilitate Paris after 1870. Originally the home of the sort of people who gave some shadowy substance to Murger’s bohemian Paris, it had long become the classic rendezvous of English and American visitors and of Frenchmen who wanted to sacrifice style to price. It still had the red-plush benches and gaily frescoed walls of romance, but the service and cooking were what Frenchmen call “serious.” The place had just been worth preserving on a commercial basis in the commercial era, and consequently had been preserved.
Madeleine had lost nothing of her idea of celebrating an occasion. She ate heartily and did not refuse to drink with Skene. He was, of course, ravenous, and in the state in which drink had no effect on him. She smiled demurely across the table at him, more at home every moment. He was also amused at something. He had only known Paris fifteen years earlier, as a young architect half-way through his A.R.I.B.A., and was marveling at the change—at the figure she cut in those surroundings that had for him such different associations: she almost bourgeois—he in the fancy dress of his uniform. Her manner with the waiter was perfect, and perfect her assumption of respectability. He loved it, felt almost at home, too. For in their secret hearts both of them were domesticated, conventional to the core. Both of them loathed the War and all it had brought. It was the queerest of contradictions that forced them to comfort their ultra-respectable aspirations in such a place and such a manner, both spoken of even in war-time by many people, as “irregular.”
* * * *
The meal at an end, they went, as a matter of course, to a cinema. One did, in war-time. Skene, who at home would hardly have walked to the end of the street with such an object—Madeleine, who had hardly heard of such a thing before she went to Amiens—went to the nearest cinema because it was war-time and no one wanted to think. Walking in the brisk air of a Parisian winter evening, good meat and drink within them, they enjoyed themselves prodigiously, Skene because he had existed in dubious snatches of comfort for a long time, and was likely to so exist for an indefinite period—Madeleine because of the reality of a man at her side. He was making jokes about the Place Clichy being the Place Cliché! She did not understand in the least, but laughed because he was happy beside her. And so to the gaping portico of one of those establishments which advertise what is known in France as “spectacle de famille.” This last was being loudly cried by a person, paid to do so, at the door—who added in stentorian tones that soldiers went in free, and nursemaids half-price. It was typical of Skene that he paid for two of the most expensive seats, and placed Madeleine in the one that gave him the best view of her profile. The film, unfortunately, was a French one, not an American. That is to say, instead of being confronted with the improbable adventures of a man looking somewhat like Skene, Madeleine realized with a start that she was watching a love story in which the principal character was a tolerable travesty of Georges d’Archeville, and behaved with just his perverse petulance. She turned her head, smiled at Skene, played with her program, smoothed her gloves, and arranged herself with minute care for her costume and the possible effect of the seat on it. It was no good. Cinema screens are insistent. It is difficult to avoid that great glare of white, with its intriguing figures in motion. It revealed to her what she would never have invented for herself—the idea that, like the hero of the film, Georges neglected her because he was engrossed by some other woman. She could not dismiss the idea; did not try, perhaps. She felt suddenly more wounded than she had ever felt since August, 1914. That Georges might be hurt at her sharing an English officer’s week of Leave never occurred to her. To her practical soul, with its incapacity for flights of imagination, things seemed all too readily what they appeared to the eye. Suddenly she rose.
“This representation is rasant,” she said to Skene, and marveled a moment, as they threaded their way out, at his docile good temper. Not a grumble, not a protest. He just followed her and snapped up a taxi. In it he was more solicitous than ever, gentle, kind, with a Mid-Victorian kindness she had never known—the manners of one whose boyhood has been unspoiled by bitter thoughts about money.
They reached the little hotel at which they had dropped their baggage, and he handed her in. By this time his way with her was having the queerest effect. Had he been thoughtless, brutal, she would easily have braced herself to meet it. As it was, she felt something slowly dissolving in her. She held herself in yet a little, approving the place he had chosen, clean and reasonable in price. But when the door of their little room was bolted, and she stood in front of the mirror by the rose-colored curtains, unpinning her hat, he came gently behind her and slipped his hands under her arms. It was just Georges’ way. She burst into tears. The moment the first sob had shaken itself free—for she did nothing by halves, and when, rarely, she cried, she cried bitterly—she knew she would feel better. Skene let her droop on to the bed and sat beside her, one arm round her, making very small comforting remarks in French and English alternately, but no inquiries. She kept her handkerchief tight pressed upon her eyes with both hands, but her sobs were lessening, and with every moment the agonizing vision of Georges with some one else grew smaller and fainter. She leaned ever so gently against Skene, who tended her as a woman might a child, did every little service for her, amazing her, who had never been so treated since she was four years old. Gradually she slipped down into the comfort of those hard hands, whose fingers kept something of the skill and discrimination of such as have been used for wise, gentle occupations. But only when she was at ease, with dry bright eyes and braided hair, did he seem to think of himself, and then only to ask so humbly for what he wanted. She gave him all herself, fiercely, as if for ever to prevent any of her from escaping again into those other hands that had neglected her so. More, when they two swam slowly back to the surface of normal existence again, in the quiet of the night only broken by the discreet bubbling of the calorifère in the corner, she told him the stark truth of herself and Georges, with a bareness of exposure of her very soul she had never before permitted, of which, perhaps, she had never before been capable. And when at last they slept, in each other’s arms, it was the deep sleep of emotional reaction, for no less than she, Skene had looked for years past on utter shipwreck—obliteration of his individuality in the dark mud of Flemish trenches—and knew from a different point of view all she suffered, and what comfort she clutched at.
* * * *
The next day passed in that atmosphere known to English honeymooners. Not a trace remained of the emotions of the evening before—nothing but two healthy young people out for a holiday, both in the most incurious state of mind, and easily amused. The things they missed seeing far out-numbered those they noticed, as is the case with honeymooners.
Madeleine was so used to the English that she hardly smiled when he turned the little hotel upside down in order to have a hot bath and an egg for breakfast. The establishment, at length conceding these recondite advantages, ceased to interest them. They went out into the busy streets, in the frosty air, Skene’s hands in the pockets of his “British warm,” Madeleine with one hand tucked into his arm, the other holding her fur tippet close across her throat, as she saw other girls doing. To Skene, a free morning in Paris could only, by habit and association, mean one thing:—pictures. To Madeleine it could only mean another:—shops. As they descended into the roaring heart of the city, never busier than in mid-war, they found some of the galleries were still open, and Skene took her from room to room, pointing out old favorites, lamenting new gaps left by careful storage of some of the more valuable masterpieces. She moved beside him, confused, uncertain whether to blush or look away in front of many a splendid nudity, but drawn by the spirit that was on both, to squeeze his arm a little. In the mood of the moment she unconsciously identified herself with all feminine beauty, and he acquiesced. But he was not less in holiday mind than she, stood patiently for half an hour at a time in big shops, watching her wringing out to the uttermost centime the best value from scowling shop-girls. Skene begged to give her what she wanted—he had managed to visit three field cashiers and get francs from each—he had a pocket full of money. She accepted, loyally keeping herself within limits and wasting nothing. Both of them had their shocks. In one of the turnings off the rue de Rivoli they met a tall fresh-cheeked young man, scented and glittering, in a gray-green uniform Skene identified as Russian. Skene fell into a growling condemnation of all “Base Pups,” “Head-quarter people,” etc., etc., incomprehensible to her, save its long-stored ill-humor. But she was after all only saying the same thing in French, when a frail, fair, over-arranged lady kept her waiting in the glove department of the Bon Marché, when Skene heard her grind her white teeth, with: “That sort of animal doesn’t know what time’s worth!”
* * * *