The Book of Susan Part 38

"They've changed it in Russia," I suggested.

"Not a bit!" exclaimed Dalton. "Some different people have taken their big chance and climbed on top, that's all! I doubt if they stay there long; still, they may. That fellow Lenine, now; he has a kind of well-up-in-the-saddle feel to him. Quite a boy, I've no doubt; and if he sticks, I congratulate him! It's the one really amusing place to be."

"You sound like a Junker war-lord," I smiled. "Fortunately, I know your bark, and I've never seen you bite."

"My dear Hunt," said Dalton, lowering his voice, "my teeth are perfectly sound, I a.s.sure you; and I've always used 'em when I had to, believe _me_. It's the law of life, as I read it. And just here between ourselves, eh--cutting out all the nonsense we've learned to babble--do you see any difference between a Junker war-lord and a British Tory peer--or an American capitalist? Any real difference, I mean? I'm all for licking Germany if we can, because if we don't she'll control the cream supply of the world. But I can't blame her for wanting to, and if she gets away with it--which the devil forbid!--we'll all mighty soon forget all the nasty things we've been saying about her and begin trying to lick her Prussian boots instead of her armies! That's so, and you know it! Why, the most sickening thing about this war, Hunt, isn't the loss of life--that may be a benefit to us all in the end; no sir, it's the moral buncombe it's let loose! That man Wilson simply sweats the stuff day and night, drenches us with it--till we stink like a church of Easter lilies. Come now! Doesn't it all, way down in your tummy somewhere, give you a good honest griping pain?"

I stared at him. Yes; the man was evidently in earnest; was even, I could see, expecting me to smile--however deprecatingly, for form's sake--and in the main agree with him, as became my situation in life; my cla.s.s. I had supposed myself incapable of moral shock, but found now that the sincerity of his cynicism had unquestionably shocked me; I felt suddenly embarra.s.sed, awkward, ashamed.

"Dalt," I finally managed, pretty lamely, "it's absurd, I admit; but if I try to answer you, I shall lose my temper. I mean it. And as I've dined wonderfully at your expense, that's something I don't care to do."

It was his turn to stare at me.

"Do you mean to say, Hunt, you've been caught by all this sentimental parson's palaver? Brotherhood, peace on earth, all the rest of it?"

My nerves snapped. "If you insist on a straight answer," I said, "you can have it: I've no use for a world that spiritually starves its poets and saints, and physically fattens its hyenas and hogs! And if that isn't sentimental enough for you, I can go farther!"

"Oh, that'll do," he laughed, uncomfortably however. "I'm always forgetting you're a scribbler, of sorts. You scribblers are all alike--emotionally diseased. If you'd only stick to your real job of amusing the rest of us, it wouldn't matter. It's when you try to reform us that I draw the line; have to. I can't afford to grow brainsick--abnormal. Well," he added, pus.h.i.+ng back his chair, "come along anyway! We've just time to get over to the Casino and have a look at the only Gaby. Been there? It's a cheap show, after Broadway, but it does well enough to pa.s.s the time."

From this unalluring suggestion I begged off, justly pleading a hard day of work ahead. "And if you don't mind, Dalt, I'll walk home."

"Oh, all right," he agreed; "I'll walk along with you, if you'll take it easy. I'm not much for exercise, you know. But it's a perfect night."

I had hoped ardently to be rid of him, but I managed to accept his company with apparent good grace, and we strolled down the Avenue Victor Hugo toward the Triumphal Arch, bathed now in clearest moonlight, standing forth to all Paris as a cruelly ironic symbol of Hope, never relinquished, but endlessly deferred. Turning there, the Champs-elysees, all but deserted at that hour in wartime Paris, stretched on before us down a gentle slope, half dusky, half glimmering, and wholly silent except for our lonesome-sounding footfalls and the distant faint plopping of a lame cab-horse's stumbling heels.

"Not much like the old town we knew once, eh, Hunt?" asked Dalton.

But conversation soon faded out between us, as we made our way through etched mysteries of black and silver under thickset leafless branches.

An occasional light beckoned us from far ahead down our pavement vista; for Paris had not yet fully become that city--not of dreadful--but of majestic and beautiful night we were later to know, and to love with so changed and grave a pa.s.sion.

It was just after we had crossed the Rond-Point that the first seven or eight bombs in swift even succession shatteringly fell. They were not near enough to us to do more than root us to the spot with amazement.

"What the _h.e.l.l_?" muttered Dalton, holding my eyes....

Then, very far off, a curious thin wailing noise began, increasing rapidly, rising to an eerie scream which doubled and redoubled in volume as it was taken up in other quarters and came to us in intricately rhythmic waves.

"Sirens," said Dalton. "The _pompiers_ are out. I guess they've come, d.a.m.n them, eh?"

"Seems so," I answered. "Yes; there go the lights. I must get to Neuilly at once--a sick friend. So long, old man."

"Hold on!" he called after me. "Don't be an a.s.s!"

To my impatient annoyance, for they impeded my progress, knots of people had sprung everywhere from the darkness and were standing now in open spots, in the full moonlight, murmuring together, as they stared with backward-craned necks up into the spotless sky....

So, with cras.h.i.+ng, sinister, unresolved chords, began the Straussian overture to the great Boche symphony, _Gott Strafe Paris_, played to its impotent conclusion throughout those bitter spring months of the year of our wonderment, 1918! Ninety-one bombs were dropped that night within the old fortifications; more than two hundred were showered on the _banlieue_. No subsequent raid was to prove equally destructive of property or life, and it was disturbingly evident that, for the time being at least, the shadowy air lanes to Paris lay broadly open to the foe.

Yet, for some reason unexplained, the Gothas did not immediately or soon return. Followed a hush of rather more than a month, during which Paris worked breathlessly to improve its air defenses and protect its more precious monuments. Comically ugly little sausage-balloons--gorged caterpillars, they seemed, raw yellow with pale green articulations and loathsome, floppy appendages--were moored in the squares and public gardens; mountains of sand bags were heaped about the Triumphal Arch and before the portals of Notre Dame; spies were hunted out, proclamations issued, the entrance ways to deep cellars were placarded; and Night, that long-exiled princess, came back to us, royally, in full mourning robes. In her honor all windows were doubly curtained, all street lamps extinguished, or dimmed with paint to a heavy blue. We invoked the august amplitude of darkness and would gladly have banished the trivial prying moon, seeing her at last in true colors for the sinister corpse light of heaven which she is. No one, I think, was deceived by this lengthening interval of calm. Why the Gothas did not at once return, what restrained them from following up their easy triumph, we could not guess; but we knew they would come again, would come many times....

Meanwhile, for most of us who dwelt there, life went on as before, busily enough; but for one of us--as for how many another--this no longer mattered.

Brave little Jeanne-Marie Valerie Josephine Aulard, on that night of anguish, died in giving premature birth to Jimmy's son, James Aulard Kane--as Susan later named him: for this wizened, unready morsel of man's flesh, in spite of every disadvantage attending his debut and first motherless weeks on earth, clung with the characteristic tenacity of his parents to his one obvious line of duty, which was merely to keep alive in despite of fortune: a duty he somehow finally accomplished to his own entire satisfaction and to the blessed relief of Susan and of me. But I shall never forget my first pitiful introduction to James Aulard Kane.

After leaving Dalton, that night, I had finally made my way to Susan's hospital on foot, which I had soon found to be the one practicable means of locomotion. It was a long walk, and it brought me in due course into the Avenue de la Grande Armee, just in time to receive the full stampeding effect of the three bombs which fell there, the nearest of them not four hundred yards distant from me. I am by no means instinctively intrepid; quite the contrary; I shy like a skittish horse in the presence of danger, and my first authentic impulse is always to cut and run. On this occasion, by the time I had mastered this impulse, I had placed a good six hundred yards between me and that ill-fated building, whose stone-faced upper floors had been riven and hurled down to the broad avenue below. Then, shamefacedly enough, I turned and forced myself back toward that smoking ruin.

Our American ambulances from Neuilly were already arriving--the _pompiers_ came later--and the police lines were being drawn. A civilian spectator, even though a captain of the Red Cross, could render no real a.s.sistance; so much, after certain futile efforts on my part, was made clear to me, profanely, in a Middle Western accent, by a young stretcher-bearer whose course I had clumsily impeded. Clouds of lung-choking dust, milk-white as the moon's full rays played upon them, rolled over us--the subdued crowd that gathered slowly, oblivious of further danger. The air was full of whispered rumor--throughout Paris hundreds--thousands, said some--had already died. We were keyed to believe the wildest exaggerations, to accept the worst that excited imaginations could invent for us. Yet there was no panic; no one gave way to hysterical outcry; and the fall of more distant bombs brought only a deep common groan, compounded of growling imprecations--a groan truly of defiance and loathing, into which neither fear nor pity for the victims of this frightfulness could find room to enter. I cursed with the rest, instinctively, from the pit of my stomach, and turned raging away; my whole being ached, was congested with rage. For the first time in my life I then felt in its full h.e.l.l-born fury that pa.s.sion so often named, but so seldom experienced by civilized--or what we call civilized--man: the pa.s.sion of _hate_.

By the time I had reached the hospital the raid was over; the air was droning from the bronze vibrations of hundreds of bells, all the church-bells of Paris, full-throated, calling forth their immediate surface messages of cheer, their deeper message of courage and constancy.

Though it was very late, I found a silent group of four nurses standing in the heavily shadowed street before the shut doors of this small civilian hospital; they were still staring up fixedly at the silver-bright sky. They proved to be day-nurses off duty, and among them was Mademoiselle Annette. She greeted me now as an old friend, and brus.h.i.+ng rules and regulations aside like a true Frenchwoman took me at once to Susan. I found that Susan had risen from bed and was seated at her window, which looked out across the winter-bare hospital garden.

"Ambo," she exclaimed impatiently, "why did you come here! I'm so used to all this. But Jeanne-Marie, Ambo--in her condition! I've been hoping so you would think of her--go to her!"

Then what fatuous devil--was it my old familiar demon?--put it into my heart to say: "So you haven't been worrying, dear, about me?"

"About you!" she cried. "Good G.o.d, no! What does it matter about you--or me! This generation's done for, Ambo. Only the children count now--the children. We must save them--all of them--somehow. It's up to them--to Jimmy's son with the rest! They've got to wipe us out, clear the slate of us and all our insanities! They've got to pa.s.s over the wreck of us and rebuild a happy, intelligible world!"

She rose, seized my arm, and summoning all her strength thrust me from her toward the door....

VI

It was well on toward three o'clock in the morning when at last I stood before the black, close-shuttered shop-front of the Vve. Guyot. I was desperately weary, having of necessity walked all the way. It was, as I had fully realized while almost stumbling along toward my goal, a crazy errand. I should find a dark, silent house, and I should then stumble back through dark, silent streets to my dark, silent hotel. The shop of the Widow Guyot was a very little shop on a very narrow street, a mere slit between high, ancient buildings--a slit filled now with the dense river-mist that shrouds from the experience of Parisians all the renewing wonders of clear-eyed dawn. The moon had set, or else hung too veiled and low for this pestilent alley; in spite of a thick military overcoat I s.h.i.+vered with cold; the flat, sour smell of ill-flushed gutters caught at my throat. To this abomination of desolation I had, with no little difficulty, found my way. Thank G.o.d I could turn now, with a good conscience, and fumble back to the warm oblivion of bed.

I paused a moment, however, to draw up the collar of my overcoat to my ears and fasten it securely; and, doing so, I was aware of the sc.r.a.pe and clink of metal on metal; then the shop-door right before me was shaken and jarred open from within. The fluttering rays of a candle, tremulously held, surprised and for an instant blinded me; faintly luminous green and red balloons wheeled swiftly in contracting circles, then coalesced to a flickering point of light. The candle was held by an old, stout woman with a loose-jowled, bruised-looking face; a face somehow sensual and hard in spite of its bloated antiquity. A shrunken, thin-bearded man in a long black coat stood beside her, holding a black hand-bag. The two were conversing in tones deliberately muted, but broke off and stared outward as the candle-light discovered me in the narrow street.

"Ah, M'sieu, one sees, is American; he has perhaps lost his way?" piped the thin-bearded man, pretty sharply. He, too, was old.

"But no," I replied; "I am here precisely on behalf of my friend, Lieutenant Kane."

At this name the old woman began, only to check, a half-startled squawk, lifting her candle as she did so and peering more intently at me. "At this hour, m'sieu?" she demanded huskily. "What could bring you at such an hour?"

"Do I address the Widow Guyot?" I was quick to respond.

"_Oui, m'sieu._"

"Then, permit me to explain." As briefly as possible I told her who I was; that I had but very recently learned of the presence of Jimmy's wife in Paris, with a relative--learned that she was awaiting the birth of her first child at the house of this excellent woman. "It was my intention to call soon, madame, in any case, and make myself known--feeling there might prove to be many little services a friend would be only too happy to render. But, after this terrible raid, I found it impossible to retire with an easy mind--at least, until I had a.s.sured myself that all was well with you here."

On this there came a pause, and the thin-bearded man cleared his throat diligently several times.

"The truth is, m'sieu," he finally hazarded, "that your apprehension was only too just. You arrive at a house of mourning, m'sieu. You arrive, as I did, alas--too late! This poor Madame Kane you would inquire for is dead. The child, on the contrary, still lives."

"Enter, m'sieu," said the Widow Guyot. "We can discuss these things more commodiously within. Doubtless, otherwise, we shall receive attentions from the police; they are nervous to-night. Naturally." She seemed, I thought--in the utter blank depression which had seized me with the doctor's words--offensively calm. Whether, had a doctor been more quickly obtainable, or a more skillful pract.i.tioner at last obtained, little Jeanne-Marie's life might have been spared, I am unable to say. I feel certain, however, that the Widow Guyot--under difficult, not to say terrifying circ.u.mstances--had kept a cool head, done her best. I exonerate her from all blame. But I add this: Never in my life have I met elsewhere a woman who seemed to me to possess such cold-blooded possibilities for evil. Yet, so far as I know to this hour, her life has always been and now continues industrious and thrifty; harmless before the law. I have absolutely "nothing on her"--nothing but an impression I shall never be rid of, which even now returns to chill me in nights of insomnia: a sense of having met in life one woman whose eyes may now and then have watered from dust or wind, but could never under any circ.u.mstances conceivably human have known tears. Other women, too many of them, have bored or exasperated me with maudlin or trivial tears; but never before or since have I met a woman who _could_ not weep. It is a fixed idea with me that the Widow Guyot could not; and the idea haunts and troubles me strangely--though why it should, I am too casual a psychologist even to guess.

At her heels, I crossed a small cluttered shop, following the tremulous flame of the candle through a fantastic shadow dance; Doctor Pollain--who had given me his name with the deprecating cough of one who knows himself either unpleasantly notorious or hopelessly obscure--shuffled behind us. Madame Guyot opened an inner door. Light from the room beyond tempered a little the vagueness about me and ghostily revealed a huddle of ecclesiastical trumpery--rows of thin, pale-yellow tapers; small crucifixes of plaster or base-metal gilded; a stand of picture post-cards; a table littered with lesser gimcracks. The direct rays from Madame Guyot's candle, as she turned a moment in the doorway, wanly illuminated the blue-coiffed, vapid face of a bisque Virgin; gave for that instant a half-flicker, as of just-stirring life, to her mannered, meaningless smile.

The room beyond proved to be a good-sized bedroom, its one window m.u.f.fled by heavy stuff-curtains of a dull magenta red. A choking, composite odor--I detected the sick pungency of chloroform--emerged from it. I plunged to enter, and for a second instinctively held my breath.

On the great walnut double-bed lay a still figure covered with a sheet; the proper candles twinkled at head and foot. But it is needless to describe these things....