“It will perhaps be better for London, certainly better for me, if we both make a fresh start,” she answered. “I’m rather tired of it all.”
“Of London in war? Naturally!,” Lucien persisted. “And for the first months after the war, when we look for the familiar faces and have to tell ourselves that they will not come back . . . Later on . . .”
“Later on, we must see how we feel,” I said; and the conversation swung on to a less dangerous tack.
Though we never discussed her adventures in the days before our marriage, I felt that Barbara was thinking less of the familiar faces, which she would not see again, than of those which would inevitably reappear in London when each man returned to his own place. Among our distressingly free-spoken friends it was commonly reported that she was half engaged at the beginning of the war to young Jack Waring; and, though she never pretended to be in love with him, the engagement—according to the Crawleighs—kept her from marrying Eric Lane, with whom she was in love beyond all shadow of doubt. Jack was in England looking for work. Eric had been lecturing and travelling in America and Japan; he would be coming to England as soon as he had a new play to produce. I did not want Barbara to be reminded, I did not want to be reminded myself, that she only married me when Eric vanished from her world.
“We want to begin our married life in some place with no associations,” she went on, half to herself. Then, as though to protest that she was not thinking of Eric, she looked up with a smile and took my arm. “George and I have had no honeymoon yet; and my beloved parents didn’t make things very comfortable for us when I married without a dispensation. Perhaps they’ll be more reconciled if we give them a holiday. . . . How soon will peace be signed?”
“That depends how soon the conference opens,” Lucien answered with a shrug. “You are to have your general election first; and we . . . you will not find we are in any hurry. There are nearly five lost years to make up. France too is tired.”
The lost years were being recovered when we reached Paris in the last days of November. We had seen the war ending in London; here we watched it being buried. Every one who could get a passport and a ticket seemed, like us, to be heading for the Riviera and spending a week in Paris on the way. Every one, too, seemed to share our vagueness and indifference to what lay ahead of this holiday. For the first time in four years, our time was our own; for the first time in four years Paris could dine and dance without fear of being bombed or shelled. Barbara bought frocks; Lucien arranged parties; and I added the hall of the Ritz to the brief list—headed by Port Said and Charing Cross—of the places where a man, without waiting unduly long, can be sure of meeting every one who has ever crossed his path before.
I doubt if in any other single week I have eaten so many meals or spent so much money. From time to time Lucien grumbled half-heartedly at all this waste of time: he had been recalled from the embassy in London to assist in drafting the agenda for the conference, and I felt he owed a grumble to his conscience. For myself, I blessed every hour of delay that enabled us to shed the memories of the last five years and to forget the acerbities of the last five months. Lucien had long been an old enough friend to drop his diplomatic reserve in talking to me; and there were times, before and after the expeditions to Gallipoli and Salonica, before and after the United States entered the war, before and after the Italian reverse and the Russian collapse, when the alliance would have been severed if we had been responsible for it. Now, as I told him, this brief spell of dissipation had saved us from becoming stale. With Victor Boscarelli, from the Italian embassy, and Clifford van Oss, from the American Red Cross, we formed a private international alliance, each entertaining the others by turn and all swearing friendships that death itself would be powerless to sunder. A critic might have been puzzled to say whether Clifford’s Italian was worse than my French; but our radiant good-will transcended the halting interpretation of words, and I felt a warmer liking for my neighbours than I had ever, in my pitiable insularity, been able to achieve before with men of another race.
“At last,” I pointed out to Lucien, “we can talk amicably without discussing whether one country did all the work and another made all the money. There’s a real understanding. France, England, America: all are at the very top of their prestige. If we can pull together, we can make what we like of the peace.”
“I still think we ought to have gone on to Berlin,” he persisted. “However, if you back us up and if we can get what we want without it, I shan’t complain.”