One Man's Initiation-1917 Part 9

"It's something really romantic, you see."

"The young are always lucky." She rolled her eyes in sympathetic admiration. "This will be the fourth night this week that I have not made a sou.... I'll chuck myself into the river soon."

Martin felt himself softening towards her. He slipped a twenty-franc note in her hand.

"Oh, you are too good. You are really galant homme, you."

Martin buried his face in his hands, dreaming of the woman he would like to love to-night. She should be very dark, with red lips and stained cheeks, like Randolph's girl; she should have small b.r.e.a.s.t.s and slender, dark, dancer's thighs, and in her arms he could forget everything but the madness and the mystery and the intricate life of Paris about them.

He thought of Montmartre, and Louise in the opera standing at her window singing the madness of Paris....

One of the Australians had gone away with a little woman in a pink negligee. The other Australian and the Englishman were standing unsteadily near the table, each supported by a sleepy-looking girl.

Leaving the fat woman sadly finis.h.i.+ng the remains of the chicken, large tears rolling from her eyes, they left the house and walked for a long time down dark streets, three men and two women, the Englishman being supported in the middle, singing in a desultory fas.h.i.+on.

They stopped under a broken sign of black letters on greyish gla.s.s, within which one feeble electric light bulb made a red glow. The pavement was wet, and glimmered where it slanted up to the lamp-post at the next corner.

"Here we are. Come along, Janey," cried the Australian in a brisk voice.

The door opened and slammed again. Martin and the other girl stood on the pavement facing each other. The Englishman collapsed on the doorstep, and began to snore.

"Well, there's only you and me," she said.

"Oh, if you were only a person, instead of being a member of a profession----" said Martin softly.

"Come," she said.

"No, dearie. I must go," said Martin.

"As you will. I'll take care of your friend." She yawned.

He kissed her and strode down the dark street, his nostrils full of the smell of the rouge on her lips.

He walked a long while with his hat off, breathing deep of the sharp night air. The streets were black and silent. Intemperate desires prowled like cats in the darkness.

He woke up and stretched himself stiffly, smelling gra.s.s and damp earth.

A pearly lavender mist was all about him, through which loomed the square towers of Notre Dame and the row of kings across the facade and the sculpture about the darkness of the doorways. He had lain down on his back on the little gra.s.s plot of the Parvis Notre Dame to look at the stars, and had fallen asleep.

It must be nearly dawn. Words were droning importunately in his head.

"The poor beggar said 'Thank you' with a funny German accent and the grenade blew him to h.e.l.l." He remembered the man he had once helped to pick up in whose pocket a grenade had exploded. Before that he had not realised that torn flesh was such a black-red, like sausage meat.

"Get up, you can't lie there," cried a gendarme.

"Notre Dame is beautiful in the morning," said Martin, stepping across the low rail on to the pavement.

"Ah, yes; it is beautiful."

Martin Howe sat on the rail of the bridge and looked. Before him, with nothing distinct yet to be seen, were two square towers and the tracery between them and the row of kings on the facade, and the long series of flying b.u.t.tresses of the flank, gleaming through the mist, and, barely visible, the dark, slender spire soaring above the crossing. So had the abbey in the forest gleamed tall in the misty moonlight; like mist, only drab and dense, the dust had risen above the tall apse as the sh.e.l.ls tore it to pieces.

Amid a smell of new-roasted coffee he sat at a table and watched people pa.s.s briskly through the ruddy sunlight. Waiters in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves were rubbing off the other tables and putting out the chairs. He sat sipping coffee, feeling languid and nerveless. After a while Tom Randolph, looking very young and brown with his hat a little on one side, came along. With him, plainly dressed in blue serge, was the girl. They sat down and she dropped her head on his shoulder, covering her eyes with her dark lashes.

"Oh, I am so tired."

"Poor child! You must go home and go back to bed."

"But I've got to go to work."

"Poor thing." They kissed each other tenderly and languidly.

The waiter came with coffee and hot milk and little crisp loaves of bread.

"Oh, Paris is wonderful in the early morning!" said Martin.

"Indeed it is.... Good-bye, little girl, if you must go. We'll see each other again."

"You must call me Yvonne." She pouted a little.

"All right, Yvonne." He got to his feet and pressed her two hands.

"Well, what sort of a time did you have, Howe?"

"Curious. I lost our friends one by one, left two women and slept a little while on the gra.s.s in front of Notre Dame. That was my real love of the night."

"My girl was charming.... Honestly, I'd marry her in a minute." He laughed a merry laugh.

"Let's take a cab somewhere."

They climbed into a victoria and told the driver to go to the Madeleine.

"Look, before I do anything else I must go to the hotel."

"Why?"

"Preventives."

"Of course; you'd better go at once."

The cab rattled merrily along the streets where the early suns.h.i.+ne cast rusty patches on the grey houses and on the thronged fantastic chimney-pots that rose in cl.u.s.ters and hedges from the mansard roofs.

CHAPTER VI

The lamp in the hut of the road control casts an oblong of light on the white wall opposite. The patch of light is constantly crossed and scalloped and obscured by shadows of rifles and helmets and packs of men pa.s.sing. Now and then the shadow of a single man, a nose and a chin under a helmet, a head bent forward with the weight of the pack, or a pack alone beside which slants a rifle, shows up huge and fantastic with its loaf of bread and its pair of shoes and its pots and pans.

Then with a jingle of harness and clank of steel, train after train of artillery comes up out of the darkness of the road, is thrown by the lamp into vivid relief and is swallowed again by the blackness of the village street, short bodies of seventy-fives sticking like ducks' tails from between their large wheels; caisson after caisson of ammunition, huge waggons hooded and unhooded, filled with a chaos of equipment that catches fantastic lights and throws huge muddled shadows on the white wall of the house.