30

What really mattered to Guillaume, she was divining, as she hung over the forward rail, - and it seemed that she had made the most delicate, most precious discovery - was that he had given his full self to love. Not to *get* the girl - to love the girl and dare say it, he so poor and proud - that had been his reward..

Was it loving itself that mattered - not getting your girl?

Guillaume was too logical she felt - he took her word for anything, like the Delphic oracle, whereas she was really very confused at the time this all happened and so aware of his pain that she'd said no, like a surgeon, lopping off something.

He was also so drastic, and scolded her so often for being at the mercy of what he called "trivial" people. Why waste time, on social doings that was needed for the study of great books, for the secret life?

Guillaume knew, he knew that she had a secret life, and that it was more important than anything else.

Yet any day even the day she reached Paris, she might hear from his Uncle that he had been killed in action. If so she would probably never marry, never.

A tear dropped on her hand as she opened his letter, the one she'd found in her cabin and stuck in her pocket.

"Ma chère amie: So you are coming. I knew you would end by realising that France is something apart in the world."

* * * * * *

31

"He's impossible," groaned her Aunt. The cabin fairly swam in Tantine's luxurious effects. Sabia could not see a single hook or toothmug that was waiting empty for the second rightful owner.

"Who is - you mean the steward?"

"He won't take the fruit to the ice box, - this appalling smell of stale Florida, Sab - and he fairly flung the life preser-
vers in, saying all was closed and darkened at night. War Now!"

"We're on French soil," responded young Sabia thought-
fully. The French never did have refrigeration or respect. "Does
it matter - dear?" (she added the last with a "thank you, Mother"
feeling).

Her eyes were devouring letters, as she sat there on the
edge of the lower berth (Tantine's naturally) one from Verne, off
on a Maine cruise, and very down-hearted because he had, as he said,
to "Bear the Brunt of Family Life!" Poor kid. One from Beth,
from an elaborate Long Island estate where she had been tutoring
children.

"My God - Beth has been proposed to by the older Cope
brother.."

"Good for Beth - she should marry money. She's just a
natural professional beauty. Those Copes are very smart, gay people."

Sabia sighed heavily, and her Aunt inquired if there was
anything from Max?

"Nothing." It was just too much to be studied so narrowly -
with that sentimental, proprietary air - as if she were still the

32

sweet little tot who used to climb into the four poster bed in
Tantine's room, in the big square house, to hear fairy stories.
She had always gone eagerly, but Verne would only make the con-
cession if his nurse gave him a nickel. Once he asked Jennie for
a dime - how Jennie had laughed about that.

"What are you smiling about?" asked Miss Howe suspiciously. "My question was because Max's wife wrote me recently that there was some chance of his being transferred to Pershing's staff as liaison officer with French G. Q. G. So wise, if true - I've used a bit of influence to that end myself." The smile that her niece and nephew called "backstage" hovered over her Madonna cheeks. Her jobs with men were rather undefined but they were always influential.

"Last I heard from Max was months back." That seemed to settle it for the present.

* * * * * * * * *

The interval between the solemn moment when two Seniors walked down a corridor, clasping arms under their flowing gown sleeves counting off the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and years compressed into a white parchment roll, tied with yellow ribbon (now stowed away under the windowseat in a "down river" farm house, along with childish wildflower collections, seaweeds, queer corals from Bermuda, and a big bundle of college notebooks) and that other, poignant hour when the _Rochambeau_ cast off her moorings had been packed and superlatively active for young Sabia.

33

This had been the "last summer", and naturally she had wanted to fit in, belong, be the girl at home, the sister, to a brother whom the draft (which had eliminated his elders) had suddenly elevated to a share in the picnics, the bathing, racing, sailing with "her crowd" on Narragansett waters. Then there had been that canoe and camping trip, down the meandering Connecticut, when between green New Hampshire and greener Vermont she shared dawns and sunsets, yet also had heard so much of a man's business worries. To squeeze in a First Aid course and a course in typing, stenography and filing at a Providence business school - for her French Orphans - had been essential; to clip newspapers and write up her historical journal; to get on with Taine and Michelet. A bit of poetry writing in apple trees, on top of haystacks, and face down in blueberry pastures, (she usually sent the foolish result to Seb Cole) when she returned with a mouth blue as a Negro's about completed the list.

So naturally she had looked forward, almost with bliss, to the sea voyage, to being embroiled with briny winds, salt water and stars, fogs that enclosed her secret life from the world and gave a shy and moody nature a chance to get its bearings, itsЛАССА pass-taking done on the summer, before the next adventure, the next age of woman. Pregnant it looked, possibly dangerous, for War to Americans was no longer just an idea.

There seemed to be people - for instance, her Aunt and her Father - who could just keep on living, running abreast of life,

34

without losing a sense of direction, or asking what it is all about. Sabia could not. When one inquires, What is Life, The Meaning, the Purpose? The whole universe takes on a slower motion. On this point, Guillaume's letter to the ship fairly burned the reefer pocket where she was keeping it safe.

Guillaume enjoined upon her a stern, stark duty: to form a personal *weltanschauung* out of the diverse professor - digested courses in Science, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, Psychology and English Poetry (among many others) with which Athenia College had crammed her head. He thought American colleges were too much like mills - ground out too fast, and too much. "Don't forget to reread - with your own impulse - Pascal, Bergson, and Nietazche's *Zarathoustra*. If you could see a battlefield, and across it tried to contemplate the world of the future, you would realise how much *for us* are these great mystical and intuitive guides."

Sitting beside Tantine, who looked so smart and inviting, social and delightful, in her crisp and pink-cheeked way, in the most bright and exclusive corner of the deck brought much in new acquaintance - notably Jim Bolton, the Nevada aviator boy, who simply worshipped at Tantine's feet. But no progress was made with a *weltanschauung* inner conclusions. Fortunately, between her Mother's hint and her business text books she was able to speak up for quiet afternoons on the cold, windy unpopular side of the deck, where people less quick to claim the best or lovers of greyness were stranded. Radicals maybe, Quakers, Jews, experts who were working, as she was,

36

his dictation (she typed it at night in the cabin) with a friendly nod of encouragement.

"You think they will try to get ahead of us?"

"You've said it, kid. The Boches aren't stupid." When Sec got excited he wiggled his toes violently in the open sandals he had bought in Mexico, when there in Pershing's Border troubles, some time back. And with a very yellowed thumb and forefinger pulled his stiff, long greyish hair into peaks that blew in the wind, for, likewise Sec wore no hat.

"You have to expect an Offensive somewhere, kid," he said, over and over, fixing her severely yet humorously with his impatient black eyes, one of which turned out, so that he always seemed to be looking in two directions - at you and at the cosmos which might be producing some event a journalist had to take note of. Sec was both watchful and negligent, expansive and taciturn, intense and detached.

The high point of the voyage was a night when they had orders to be on the alert, with life preservers handy by: they would be traversing the Submarine Zone. Sabia wrapped herself up thoroughly, for she had resolved to sleep on deck - sleep being a euphemism for lying awake and feeling War gnaw your midriff in rather terrifying fashion. But why not face it, instead of getting up rubbers of Bridge in the muffled smoking-saloon? She pitied her Aunt, dealing hands to a batch of Red Cross colonels, while she had that vasty and tangy dark, where the absent and very

37

dear were with her, and pictures floated through her mind so
clearly that it seemed she was in two places at the same time.

* * * * *

She had gone to see Jennie, just before she left the
farm - driven up in her own rackety Ford, late on a cool August
afternoon, to Jennie and Ben's farm, under its maple trees with
its wide view. Jennie was forty-five when she nursed Sabia through
Scarlet Fever, now she was seventy and living with her old man
who was nearly eighty but still on his pins, in a shaky way.
Jennie, too, had suffered a stroke, but she had got the better of
it, with one arm not very good, as she said, if asked. Her frame,
tall and broad-beamed, like an Indian's, was scarcely stooped.

Jennie had been putting up corn and beans when her
nurseling arrived, for winter use, and the fine ripe jars stood
on the kitchen table, as well as the green-apple pie she had made
for Sabie to share.

"Oh Jennie - I love your kitchen." No wonder with the
apple-trees at one window and the valley falling away to the wind-
ings of the river at the other two.

"It's my palace, Sabby - the only one I know. Some folks
would not understand. But here I ruled." The noble, high-cheek-
boned face, mystically chiselled to the Indian symbolic form, the
hollow eyes looked at her for insight, and something passed between
them of real love - love with no restrictions, no queries, just
there and true as steel.

38

Jennie is the noblest person I know. Ben did not like to have his wife credited with Indian blood but it was there. Jennie's mother had been a real medicine woman, an herb doctor and Jennie had the gift, and the nursing gift, and had practised it through her youth. LIFETIME

"Jennie - shall I be happy in France?" They were setting out the "lunch" together.

"I'd not be looking ahead, if I was you - just live it out." She changed the subject quickly, as Big Ben came in almost touching the ceiling and in his milking clothes as his wife complained, instead of his company ones.

"Once he's in his pants, I can't git him out for the day," she jeered affectionately.

"Our hearts is all O. K. anyhow -" said Big Ben, and declared they'd be remembering her visit when the snow flew and hoping for a letter in the box below.

"That's Sabby for you," said Jennie, "she loves folks for good like her Grandma and her Ma - don't you, dear?" The reference was to the Darcies.

"Climbing up the hill takes longer than going down, Jen and I says," Ben commented, in only a half-cheerful voice.

"But we got good neighbors," Jennie broke in. "When we two got married, and come here, we was the young folks. We had good old neighbors who looked to us for cheer. Now we're the old neighbors..." She could not go on, tears were in her great visionary eyes.

39

What would they do in winter - war-time winter, no
telephone?

"We got the old hoss - only a spilt mile to the Warren
farm. Ed he looks in and says, now Jen, don't you forget, I'm
there when you need me."

"Sabby", said Ben, "would you know sommun'd like our
high pasture - to buy? Landpoor, we be."

"Sabby - we got money put away for our old age, like
anyone else," said Jennie with pride. "But we think we ain't
old yit." They joked one another, about their ages and infirm-
ities, as the best way out.

The kitchen had grown almost dark, it was like hearing
the ancestors of the race, great big people with big heart and
bodies, talking to themselves. She kissed them both goodby and
went, remembering Ben's hug, that smelled of cows and fields, and
Jennie's almost silent whisper of fond love. And as she drove
along the dusky scented roads and through the woods she could
hear nothing but

The dying of day. The dying of day.

The sea smelled so good, so good. Would Max remember
the dark sea-pools with the waving weed, the hard, wet purple
sand where they ran races barefoot, after swimming in the surf,
the hot white sand where they stretched out to dry, side by side,-
so innocently at least I was and talk about History - his

41

"The news is terrible, isn't it?" she said going in.

But something intervened, the picture faded - where had she been?

"Hey, Sabby, vive Bonaparte!"

This at least wasn't inner voice. Sec, glass in hand,
was caterpillaring himself into the next chair.

"Lasht of the Napoleon brandy," he explained. "Wantsh
some?"

She did not.

Sec smelled disagreeably alcoholic and his converse,
usually so clear-cut and bluff, verged on the sweet and silly.
When a giant swell, which first rolled the rail down till they
saw the whole spangled heaven then tossed them back on a crest
that tilted their chairs together, Sec planted a rather muggy,
sloppy and certainly casual kiss on her nose.

The result was startling and automatic. With an arm
strengthened by basket-ball young Sabia gave him a punch that sent
him back into his chair and cracked his head so hard on the cabin
wall that poor Sec gave a loud cry of pain and annoyance.

"Oh <u>Sec</u> - I'm so --"

"Shut up..."

"You're <u>drunk</u>," she said, with honest disgust.

"What of it?" muttered Sec. He rose with a certain

42

hauteur, and staggered off into the dark leaving her feeling
exceedingly small and miserable.

If people you admired did things you could not respect,
what was the answer?

## IV

Paris received the two Miss Howes very, very gently.
In this early Autumn of 1917, with its fitful sunchine, you could
see a great grey city, the most beloved of ancient-modern cities,
in an enduring mood. Sabia did not know how to write home about
the great stillness of Paris - the martial note so lacking, to those
whose temper was keyed to trumpets and camps and Liberty loans.
There were almost no French soldiers on the streets of Paris, al-
most no men at all - just women, women in shabby mourning, women
whose sternly quiet faces, stripped of joy, revealed that they
had given the son, the husband, the brother, the cousin, to la
patrie. And how quickly the irongrey and ironblue uniforms of
the American women which had seemed rather dashing on the Rochambeau,
took on the color of the rain, the fog, the downcast heart,- the
protective coloration of war-time France.

The first thing, of course, was to find a home "for the
duration" as the British put it, and then to dig into your day's
work, learn your job. The geographical centre of American women
relief workers in war-time Paris had been largely determined for

43

them by the American Red Cross, which occupied a famous old noble
building with a Corinthian colonnade on the north side of the Place
de la Concorde - a hotel, built in the Eighteenth Century, to
lodge royal ambassadors and strangers of distinction. That the
Crillon Hotel was next door, literally so, in the same edifice,
was convenient, Miss Sabia thought, for the New York bankers who
were amongst the most important ambassadors of 1917. Miss Sabia
was all for impressing the French Government with the wealth and
power of the United States. Young Sabia did not dare repeat
Guillaume's caustic comment (in a letter) on so grandiose a resi-
dence for an organisation devoted to deeds of mercy.

Miss Howe was entirely cold to her niece's plea to live
on the Left Bank, under the shadow of the Pantheon, in some intel-
lectual family like the Boncoeurs, with no central heating and no
desserts. The Left Bank was too far off, in fact, and Tantine had
always felt most at home, still did, in the quarter of **grand tour**-
**risme** and **grand luxe**, region of banks, big dressmakers, fine res-
taurants, (now somewhat fallen into desuetude) which stretched
East from the Concorde toward the Place Vendôme and the Opera.

After some hunting, she decided the most comfortable
and cosy little war-nest they could find to be the Hotel Touraine,
on the rue St. Honore. The Drews were there, and others of their
shipboard acquaintance, and it was an old well-frequented hos-
telry, shabby but not without distinction. French provincial
gentry used to stop here and be served upstairs and so could the
two Miss Howes, when they pleased.

44

The out was that the cook was Belgian. But there was a
heady "petit vin" which came from the vineyard of the Owner,
tempting her hoped to the American officers who happened in with
varying views of the serious situation that seemed in the making
on the Western Front. The "Gin C", as they called General Pershing,
had now retired with his little staff from the Constantine, where
he had been working his head off all summer, to the American General
Headquarters at Chaumont in the northeast, though one must not say
so. Great things were under way. Young soldiers like Jim Bolton,
two Miss Howes,
could pick up a lot from them, and bring a lot, too, when his
aviator's easy leaves took him to the Ritz for a night in good
sheets.

"But our spoiled cousin Max prefers to telephone,"
Miss Sabia would say, crossly.

When this reference to Max as "spoiled" came again, on
a certain fine October Sunday afternoon, young Sabia took it up,
belligerently.

"Why is Max 'spoiled'?"

Miss Howe, according to her Sunday afternoon custom, was
lying on the chaise longue, in a beautiful Paris creation of a tea
gown, reading a yellow-backed novel, which in her present annoyance,
she dropped on the floor.

"He became spoiled, in my opinion, when he gave up banking
and took up historical research - he could never have done it if he
hadn't married a rich woman who could finance his work."

45

"What a mean interpretation - to accuse Max of a marriage de convenance."

"You don't know Max and Marthe as a team - I do. Don't be so unsophisticated, Sabby dear!"

Young Sabia ducked to pick up the novel. Courteous gestures towards elders were second nature, but she was ready to fly out of her skin. Sundays were hard to get through, in the double bedroom and petit salon she shared with Aunt Sabia.

"Why are your eyelids so swollen and purple? Reading in bed!"

What really ran her ragged was that Max Pons had not, in the whole time since they landed, been to see her. If for God's sake he only would, Sabby would know whose friend he was: hers or her Aunt's.

She had received one or two of Max's brief, pointed notes. Tantine had had a telephone call from G. H. Q. Alors quoi? Yet one might surmise that the two Sabia Howes might not even be here in Paris, in the misty autumn of 1917, if a Providence belle and beauty - Gracie Howe, her Great Grandfather Howe's first cousin - had not married, long ago, Max's Grandfather, Marcel Pons, of the highly regarded Pons Bank.

Like a piece of tapestry, in petit point, kept in a work-table drawer, the connection between the two families seemed to have a hidden pattern,- a new leaf, a woman's face emerged as stitches were added by the generations. Gracie and her cousin were

46

fast friends, they exchanged sons from time to time - Henri went to Providence and Henry to Paris. When serving his apprenticeship to the great American house of Morgan, Max the son of Henri, naturally sought out his third cousins ASA and Sabia. But the intriguing creature insisted on spending his time, bathing and racing with a child with two long black braids.

Putting on her reefers another sailor hat, in the cold dark bedroom, Sabby felt gloomy enough. Everything had happened to Max (except children) in the six years since they'd met. Why should he still be interested in a girl to whom nothing had happened?

The break with his father, to get out of the Bank and into Military History; the reconciliation, after he'd married Marthe Estey, a girl his parents approved; the wedding trip around the globe, which had by great ill luck coincided so exactly with her stay at the Boncoeurs, that she'd not had a whiff of the bridal blossoms. Then Max's grave wounds on the Marne, his hospital months, his recuperation, his transfer to work on the French General Staff, and finally his liaison duties with General Pershing.

"I wish I did know Marthe," she said to her Aunt, when she emerged in her out-door things. "Don't you think she'll come to Paris?" Marthe was directing a soldiers' hospital on her father's estate on the Riviera.

"Who knows? Your sailor is crooked." Miss Howe had

47

glanced up from her page. Getting no response in action: "You
are as stubborn as your Father."

"My braids tilt my hat, but nobody will notice. Tantine,
why do you suppose we don't hear from Seb Colà? He's somewhere
in France. You don't think he could have been at Caporetto?"

Miss Howe was sure no Americans had fought at Caporetto.
The American share of the military forces was still hypothetical,
or call it embryonic: there was nothing for them - for us the
Americans - to feel elated about. In fact, hard to keep one's
chin up. The fall of Riga, the Russian collapse, and now the Aus-
trian victory.

Miss Howe was thinking, as she observed her niece, who
looked sweet as a rose, that she devoutly hoped Sebastian Cole
would keep himself and his troubles out of their ken. Sabby had
been so absorbed in his and Topsy's marriage, you would think it
was her own. She was too young to be such a confidant, to mercur-
ial, tempestuous lovers.

But Sabia, looking down severely at the pretty woman on
the couch, once so romantic to her, had no intention whatever of
conforming to whatever it was that Tantine was cogitating, with
that half sentimental, half-demanding look. A rose with little
scent now, poor Tantine!

"Too bad you're going out, - lamb. From what he said on
the telephone from G. H. Q. I think Max may turn up at last."

Sabia's heart skipped a beat and a hot anger began to

48

burn. Tantine hadn't announced this till she was on her way -
she wanted Max to herself. All right. Her niece needed a good
crisp walk.

At the front door of the old Hotel, stood a taxi, into
which Sec Drew was stepping, holding a tiny battered suitease,
hardly big enough for a toothbrush, plastered over with hotel
labels. He was wild-eyed and his wife, who stood on the curb,
had been crying. Angela was the worst possible sport about being
left behind, yet what could she expect?

"Hello kid - off to la bella Italia!" He rarely said
more since she had cracked his head on the cabin wall and she felt
sick about it. Perhaps he thought she had betrayed him - if so
how little he understood her.

Sabby zipped down the rue Castiglione, across the rue de
Rivoli and into the Tuileries Gardens, pondering Tantine's dupli-
city, and crunching the word "unsophisticated" in her teeth. No
use getting mad, when one really knew one hundred per cent more
about the dark side of life than one's Aunt.

As if to illumine the point, as she turned into the
Grande Allee to face the exquisite vista of the Louvre and the
Place du Carrousel, out from behind one of the innumerable marble
ladies, Venus probably, there came bounding (no other word ex-
pressed it) a rather moth-eaten, ruffled, heaving, elderly American
in the Red Cross uniform - surely in his home town a pillar of
society-chasing a pretty little painted cocotte, brazen enough.

49

The shrieks, the ear-pinchings, the fleshly slaps, that followed, made Sabby Howe cringe and blush for American manhood - so utterly inept as to choose an Eighteenth Century garden, meant for soft glances, tender meanings and a play of witty words, for such a travesty of l'Amour.

Yet, somehow, she looked again. From one standpoint, the Rabelaisian, it was *tordant* - a French word for a laugh with a twist to it.

Sabby was learning a lot - day by day, in every way, growing older and older. One did not want to be in a lady's room when a gentleman bounded in (did American males on the loose always bound, *sail-like*?) especially if one knew them both. Yet this had happened at the *Touraine*. From the sheltered world of women, her college world, from sheltered monogamous family life, she had emerged into a universe where men and women seemed embattled.

Poor little Sabby, ridiculous small and plain little Sabby, wishing she could sit on a marble bench, in the midst of dying rose leaves and pungent chrysanthemums, with her hands in someone's. But there was Noone. She was alone.

Alone with monumental France, solemn and classic, and profoundly reassuring to a girl who spent most of her time fitting black cotton stockings to war orphans and writing out tragic case histories of German-ravaged children.

Yet how helpless are these noble buildings and institutions created by the mind of man to save us: they are fragile, they

50

fall, before a brutal shell, as a man or a child does. It had taken Sabia Howe only a month of the Enfants Refugie to realise what France was suffering from the terrible intruder, whose fangs violated her breast.

The yellow fog that the Boncoeurs ascribed to the guns of the Front was gathering, half hiding the springing grace of the Seine bridges. It made Sabia shiver and she deserted the Carrousel for the Quai, where she walked rapidly under poplars still shedding yellow leaves, toward the Pont de la Concorde. Somewhere in the middle of the sculptured stone bridge, she saw an American private, gazing mournfully at the Seine, and the left Rive side which contained more cherished Paris landmarks - below, in the mists, the towers of Notre Dame, and the little thin fleche of the Sainte Chapelle. Then the dome of the Institut de France, of which Professor Boncoeur was an honored member. Straight across the river, the Invalides, with the tomb of Napoleon and the Chambre des Deputes.

Six changes of ministers in the French Parliament since War started, and how many of Generals? What would happen now?

Approaching the private, she saw he had red hair; it was not Seb Cole, she turned away.

* * * * * * * * *

Sabby opened the salon door with cramped fingers, and found Captain Pons drinking tea with her Aunt, whose face was radiant and pretty, too. She was glad he did not kiss her hand,

51

but shook hands a L'Américain, looking at her very straight with
a look that seemed to say:

Aha. So you're a woman now, my little friend. We'll see.

What Max actually said was: "It's long since this girl gave me my sailing orders." The reference was to the summer when he acted as her crew, racing.

"Was I very stupid?" Max mocked.

"Fair," she mocked back. Max wasn't raised by the sea, as she had been, but rather with horses, and yet his looks had an interesting gleam of "Howe". The high country-gentleman color, the fair frizzled head, the clear blue eyes and sort of bluff, engaging yet rather courtly way had something of their ancestral pattern.

She was glad he had kept, though so seriously wounded, his thin springy elegance. He'd always been athletic, Max loved _le sport_, especially riding to hounds. His _horizon bleu_ uniform was cut by a smart tailor - she feared Max was too worldly for a historian and told him so, to his amusement.

"Well, my two Sabias - will you dine with me?" he said affectionately. Max's French accent in English still was there. "Shall we go to Prunier's little fish-place and have _langoustes_, and _soufflé au chocolat?_ Or would _mes cousines_ prefer _canard a l'orange_, at La Rue's? On the other hand, Captain Pons continued with precision - "if you prefer partridge and wood strawberries creme fonée?" How about it little Sabia?" He named a very

52

expensive and reputed place on the corner of the rue Cambon, which
scorned to put out a sign.

"Always an epicure, Max," Tantine reproached.

"Toujours - pourquoi pas? So long as there is in Paris
good food, I shall eat it, <u>quoi!</u> If the Boche starve us out,
I'll eat rats I suppose, as they did during the Commune."

could

Miss Howe still demurred, said they not offer much but
would he share the Belgian cook's dinner, for this first meeting?
She laid her hand on Max's arm, and Sabia wrinkled her brow and
turned away.

* * * * * * * * *

Max's influence on young Sabia was, she felt, in the realm
of the spirit. As a talker and thinker, he was almost uncannily
fascinating. Even with her Aunt setting a block between, there
was something of give and take between them, that evening, which
developed into a real "inside talk" about the War and military
events, in which Max was so undoubtedly an authority.

Balancing a tiny glass of *eau de vie*, before their fire,
he had described his life under the eaves of the successive *chateaux*,
occupied by the French General Stafr, over the war years. He made
this queer Staff life very amusing and very sombre and significant.
The flock of cars and trucks in which the Staff and its aides, like
himself, suddenly moved when the Germans advanced. And the changes
in the actual pattern and method of War as a new kind of conflict

53

developed, and the trenches filled up with soldiers, stuck in the
ground for months and years.

It would have been more satisfying in many ways to be
in the fighting forces. But one could not choose - he had been
kept busy *thinking* by a whole series of Generals, Joffre, Nivelle,
and finally Petain, who it seems was reluctant to hand him on to
Pershing.

Max's light satirical touch about Generals gave Tantine
gooseflesh, but it was clear that Max was popular with our Commander-
in-Chief. Tantine feared Max backed Pershing up altogether too
much in informality - in being late to French official dinners and
shaving in his evening coat, just as he was to get off his special
train to meet Clemenceau.

The old Tiger was down on Pershing (so Max said the gossip
ran) because he was so stubborn. Maybe the Tiger had met his
match! Pershing was a Dictator, too, - The American Secretary of
War, Newton D. Baker, gave him his full confidence, and Wilson was
behind Baker. It was the greatest delegation of authority in
American history.

Max had an idea that Clemenceau had done as much as the
French Army to save France - by clapping Caillaux and his Germano-
phile bunch into prison for instance. Clemenceau had claimed
(Max said) he had the incriminating documents in his safe, but
nobody had dared ask him to open the safe, and only History would

54

show if he were bluffing. If so, good, said Max - you have to be
a dictator to steer a republic in time of War! Clemenceau had
saved national unity, Max felt.

"Many of my people are crazy with siege fever," Max had said.

Siege fever was this sense that you had to attack and
could not, because the Enemy had the numbers.

And now the French, turned wolves, too, were waiting,
waiting in the trenches for the Americans to be fully trained in
offensive warfare.

A sombre but magnificent evening. But when it was over,
Sabia could not even guess whose friend Max was.

V

She still felt a bit queer, next morning, as she lagged
along to the office. Lagged and lagged. All she asked of Fate
was that Max would doff the mask he'd been wearing on that visit -
the rather punctilious mask, which concealed his real feelings.⁷

But here was the humble and inconvenient building where
the Enfants Refugies were lodged, and where the Family, that mon-
umental institution about which the rest of life moved on its
axis, was entrenched. Just as much so as in Providence, Rhode
Island.

18.

The ground floor was devoid of daylight, for it opened on the dim court, and at the back, on the storerooms devoted to the Vestiaire of the Committee. Rooms with veiled high windows, shut off by a church wall, and endless shelves where childrens' garments were neatly piled. Even the shoes were "made in America", and the shirts and underwear had been cut and sewed by society women - expensively dressed French sympathisers, who, from Fifty-Seventh Street, N.Y.C. stretched on to Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago and points West.

"Hello there, Sab - where in the dickens have you been?"

"Been? Am I late?" She peered into the Vestiaire and saw her friend and co-worker Marian, (from Vassar) fitting out two pathetic little boys who seemed to be wearing nothing under their gingham aprons. But at least they had with them a **poilu** Father, with a patch over one eye and a **Croix de Guerre**.

"Late!" mocked Marian, holding underdrawers against the skinny, rickety-looking legs to measure them - "late, is it? Madame even telephoned the **Hotel Touraine**."

"For God's sake! Tantine is gone, so I guess I just forgot myself in a bout of freedom!"

"The Superior of Petitbourg wired they wanted you to take the new children out this morning - too late now."

"Oh - hang!" She nodded at her good comrade and dashed upstairs. The second floor held the main **bureaux**, and everything was already in full swing - the doctor's office overflowing with

19.

kids, wrapped in sheets or on the scales or with sticks or cotton
up their noses. The specialist from the University of California
was a crackerjack, and Miss Hopkins, his nurse, who never forgot
to be gentle and patient with children scared of the simplest pro-
ceedings - kids on whom life had gone back.

In the big waiting room the usual comotose rows of French
peasant folk, female relatives generally, sat against the walls,
under the big War maps, which showed the regions, perhaps the very
hometowns, from which a skinny little French boy, dank-haired, and
grey-faced, had been driven by a big blonde German soldier. The
inequality of the French child's battle against his Fate was here
fully revealed.

And every one of these ravaged people, waiting patiently
or grouchily to ask aid for a child, might well learn that, even
here, succor there was none. The Comite could care for no more
than two thousand children and two hundred thousand had been evac-
uated or were still in occupied France. Sad, sad.

Jane, another volunteer, from Detroit and from Smith
College, was in the midst of taking down one of those histories,
so much alike and yet so personal.

"I lived in Pont-Feu," a woman was saying, "and the sales
Boches came, and my grandfather, poor old man, was killed in the
cabbages. We ran away, with my two boys, and hid in a haystack,
but one Boche soldier came after me, and I had to run again, leav-
ing the boys momentarily. I found the German Colonel and he was
honest and disciplined the soldier, and I found my sons and escaped

57
XX.

in a boat with some neighbors. But below, the Boches were placing
a bridge and they took my big boy to work for them. They did not
want to nourish me and the little one so they left us through the
lines." Sabry

"Oh well - good, Madame wants you," Jane interrupted to
call out. Sabry

But as Sabry moved towards the office of the Directrice,
the soldier from downstairs overtook her,-- he wanted her to tell
"La Direction" that he would claim the boys after the Victory.

"But, of course, Monsieur,-- that's always understood."

He still seemed anxious and just stood there.

"For what else do I expose my breast to the Enemy? My
patrie, it's my two boys."

Madame Desprez, herself a war widow, and ruthless, thought,
with her smooth, oily, narrow black head - her hair was
sparse, like most Frenchwomens' and brushed straight back from her
keen, strong-featured face - did not lift from her writing immediately.
Madame had the distinction of ugliness, Courbet should
have painted her.

Sabry

I was never late before! Molly wanted to exclaim, cry
out as Madame's pen scratched on. She loved to please, to be one
of the group, but for an hour's lateness Madame was making her
feel dislocated,

Sabry

When the elder woman did look up, blotting her page and
folding it with care, her glance was coldly appraising. She hesitated, then said:

58

"Unfortunately, my child, the work redoubles. I want you to take the afternoon train to Petitbourg with the ten orphans. Meanwhile, please to spend the remainder of the morning in finding in the files some striking stories for American publicity."

Madame was so hard-boiled! All French people seemed hard-boiled about the U. S. A. - even Max had talked of "filling holes" with her brothers, the doughboys. Still it was a fact that five hundred new American godmothers were needed at once.

The filing room where she usually worked was under the dormers of the roof. A nasty little kerosene stove (like Max's at Compiegne) had been her companion here all winter.

She bent stormily over her wire basket of work, piled high with letters mostly on ruled paper, and in uneducated hands.

Mon Histoire de la Guerre, par Genevieve Pasteur, 12 ans.

Her Mother was raped and had a Boche baby. Is that right for publicity?

Or this one, from a Father who signs himself: "Family Man of humble position."

No, little Jean Norbert - that's the best one for U. S. A.

The mayor of a town (already retaken by the Boches) wrote about Jean:

"This boy, whose father is in the --th Infantry has known great hardship. The home now beyond the German lines, was destroyed by bombardment last year. The older brother was taken prisoner by the Enemy. Mother and son managed to escape to another town where lived the grandmother. But during an advance and a new bombardment, the mother was killed by a shell in her bed, and the boy blown out of the same bed, had his leg shattered. The grandmother managed by the pity of friends with a wagon to bring the child to the hospital, of the British army, in my region, where the leg was amputated and the officers now suggest your Committee take the child. I can feed the old woman a small relief allowance but the boy needs better food and with a German advance would be helpless. The family is worthy."

Then the Grandmother's letter dictated to a nurse:

"Mesdames et messieurs: Please be patient with my grand-
son Jean who is a good boy but a little innocent, since the war.
Before he was an intelligent child. Is it the bombs mesdames
et messieurs? He heard them for so long, and even now the
bombardments are troublesome. For sure his head is not quite
right, but I think with your good care will recover his sense.

"I send him with all my excuses for his condition. Life
is so hard now, one hardly arrives at it at all. Boys easily
fall into vagabondage in this region but my son, a good soldier

60

wants the boy back after the Victory. God bless you, mesdames
et messieurs, for coming to our aid. I shall pray for you and
beg you to send me word of my little boy. I can earn a bit by
washing for the Brittaniques, but my eyes are bad, and I don't
earn much.

Madame Morin Mere."

The all tube whistled sharply, and she ran to listen:
"Come down at once, to take dictation."

But when she got there, with her sheaf of "publicity",
it was noon and Madame had gone out to lunch. "Really, Jane,
what a fool I be!

"One would think you in love, darling!"

"Do you think I'd have time to go to Philippe's to have
my hair washed?" she asked, confused. There were two hours off
at noon.

"Oh - _don't_, it's too risky. Madame might turn up. I'd
just eat something near by and come back, to wait till she sends
you to the train."

"Guess I'll just buy some chocolate downstairs and go on
with my publicity. Or write a letter to Father - that's what I'll
do."

"Dear Father: About your last cable: it came four days
ago - the one asking me to make inquiries through the Red
Cross and in the Paris hospitals, about the French Canadian
boy from the mills who volunteered in the French Army last
year - well, I have not got far yet, more soon!

"Father - do you remember the row we got into on Commence-
ment about what kind of American opinions I should send Max?
I have wanted to recommend to you a story of Anatole France's
you'll find in my bookcase at home:- you love France, so read
it, like a dear. The one in the volume called _Le Puits de
Sainte-Claire._

61

about the monk who was searching for Truth, and had a vision
of a wheel of many rainbow colors - all the colors of the
spectrum he saw as it started turning, and finally it was
whirling so fast all colors were merged in one - white.
La Verite est blanche, he cried, it is the color that contains
and blends all colors. Get me? We saw Max for the first time
last night. He is a good deal changed, but still a swell
talker. I hardly know yet what he does think.

"Paris in war time is new, in a way. I often feel I'm
floating between two worlds, which bump into one another,
with a jolting motion, instead of smoothly circling on a twin
axis.

"The point at issue between Pershing and Clemenceau
seems to be that we want our separate army and the French and
British wantman power, and mistrust our ability to command an
army. Just hurry, hurry and get the infantry over, is their
cry.

"The Boncoeurs, though terse and non-committal about
Caporetto, were, when I saw them last, just lyrical about a
truckload of American doughboys they'd met on the Boulevard -
everyone shouted and threw roses to their cheerful grins,
their bone and brawn.

"The fact that France and Britain have to hold through
another cold hard winter alone is alleviated. Spring looks
ominous. The Germans are moving divisions from Russia to the
Western Front already.

"Even Professor Boncoeur pulls his long black beard and
says logic requires that Americans inexperienced in war (by
their geographical good fortune) submit themselves to the
French Army, best known teacher of the military art.

"Divergencies on major war policies aren't funny. They
could be fatal to the world! France, even this intellectual
France which declared itself so grateful for our American gener-
osity, has failed to realise that in coming way over her to
fight, America has had to bring herself along.

"And that means - not just shiploads and shiploads of
infantrymen, does it Father? It means a genius for pioneer
building and a very touchy shrewd independence of action.

"I miss you all so. Are you and Verne getting good
shooting?

Your loving Sabia."

The third class compartment had a strong disinfectant smell, and the train was bumpy. The children, all boys under ten, coughed terribly. Thick rivulets of green mucous ran from their noses to be wiped off on sleeves if the young lady didn't get out her handkerchief in time. They were dazed, cowed, but loved the crackers and chocolate bars she had brought. Her role of efficient secretary was not shaken till a little boy with a crutch, and half a leg, began to cry with pain. She took him in her arms and he soon fell asleep, against her shoulder.

He had been bathed and deloused, of course, but he smelled - partly just of Child, feverish Child. All Mothers must know the smell, but she had never known it before, and it seemed a revelation.

At the Convent the kid still clung to her, seemed afraid of the Sisters, in their rigid black and whiteness, would not eat his watery broth bubbled with fat, at the long table, unless she coaxed down lumps of onion and potato. And when the distant grumbling thunder of the war guns came, shaking the tight-closed Gothic windows of the stuffy Refectoire, the boy began to shriek hysterically, knocking over his soup, calling for his Father - "Papa, Papa!" She had seen by a hasty glance at his papers of identification, that he came from a village taken by the Germans. His Mother had been killed. His Father was in the army. It was a similar case to the one of Jean Norbert.

One of the fat stern Sisters lifted him right up and carried him away, his good leg thrashing at the silver cross on her starched breast, his fists pounding desperately, and tearing at her

64

Terrible, truly, to leave behind a child that had clung to one, a child whose hysteria one could hold in check by a touch, a warmth, a secret message from the heart. Her Aunt said, "War is a job, an impersonal job, just do your bit as well as you can." Sometimes Yantine could be right!

There was no one else in the carriage, and Sabby sat on the hard bench next the little window and let down the pane, so she could breathe in more deeply the fertile, stinging breath of the wide French cabbage fields, planted in long rows to the horizon. Dusk bore down on their calm indifference to War and violence, and here and there the bent figures of peasant women were gathering the purple cabbages into baskets, in a dumb acceptant way, that made her feel her own job more real, - not a thing to talk about or write home about but to do.

She had not rebelled against her portion of war work today, wanted time to dream which was her minor portion - yet out of the grind had come a sort of miracle: the sense that she was a Mother. You don't have to bear a child to know the needs of a sick child,- if the need is there the instinct rises to meet it. Right out of the fields now flowed to her this current of living instinct, strong and vital and sustaining, shared with all mature women.

Nobody can tell you what experience is - it just happens and then you have something. But nobody would believe you!

65

VI

There were Paris days, as winter came on, when Fate wore
a dark, glum, furrowed and most enigmatic face. One woke to a world
of almost total blackness, compounded of northern latitude, rain
and chill. Sabia Howe, like all girls of her age, regarded happi-
ness as something "out there" in space and time, hanging to the tree
of life, which only needed to be plucked. But what if the tree were
blasted from crown to foot? The world's desertion of peace and
prosperity, the whole movement of History, and Sociology, as mirrored
in the broken lives of the little war orphans of devastated France,
looked ominous, from the standpoint of a young woman whose instincts
urge her towards founding her own little family group. Could one
even bear to have a child, to be delivered up in his maturity to
the warriors?

Emerging on such morbid mornings, into streets where the
mansard roofs of the grey, wet buildings were wreathed in wisps of
stygian fog, smoky and burning to the throat, the mourning French
female figures looked still more tragic. Yet the earnest, cheerful,
*bonvivant* Americans with whom one marched along were complaining
bitterly that there was no butter for the "little breakfast" (or
any other time) and that the *chauffage centrale* did not "chauff."

Sabia felt nothing less than shame-faced about the priv-
ileges and immunities enjoyed by herself and her countrymen in the
hotels and rich restaurants of embattled Paris. She never visited
the Boncoeurs, where she dined at least once a fortnight, without

66

wearing an extra sweater and taking them some little offering of
fruit or a box of sweets she could get - for an American price -
on the rue Royale. A French professor's household, ascetic enough
by bourgeois standards in peacetime, now lived indeed meagrely,
and warmed itself with poor lumps of rationed coal that was mostly
slag.

On a late November day when she was to see the Boncoeurs
in the evening, Sabia found herself trying between every task at
the office, to formulate her *weltanschauung*, her philosophy, as
Guillaume had adjured her to do. French intellectuals pushed one
to such formulations but American war workers did not. French
relief workers and French orphans did not either - most of the
ingenuity of Sabby Howe in her job went into trying inconspicuously
to provide system in an unsystematized organisation of which human
sympathy was the moving force; in trying to accord Franco-American
misunderstanding - by feeling into both sides and tactfully explain-
ing one to the other; and in using her own imagination - in following
clues which would connect the little war victims with their missing
or distant relatives. In this field, even Madame Desprez had begun
to rely on young Sabia. She had good hunches about things.

Guillaume, the dear fellow, the obscure corporal, somewhere
on the Western Front, she could tell from his pointed letters was
full of illusions about her still. He imagined her as following
ardently the lead of the intellect; and in the emotional realm as

67

a white liquid pure and candid. Whereas her mind was foggy and her emotional color was undergoing a real transformation from white to a more shadowy hue; if not coal-black she was at the very least dark-red, violet or purple. And War had done it - the alchemy of War. How could she let Guillaume know this in a letter? What was needed was to meet and talk again. For the longer they corresponded, the more of a pure spirit, hovering in space, her friend became.

As she jogged in a crowded bus toward the Pantheon, that slimy evening, after a long wait at a corner bus station, for her number to be called, Sabia was reading Guillaume's last letter:

> "Do you know, my real, my greatest ambition, chere amie?
> It is to write, at sixty, thirty pages that please me."

What young American could even conceive such an ambition?

Even the unworldly Sebastian, who had recently turned up, in the most extraordinary unsuitable spot for his talents, the Quartermasters Corp, aspired to be a "really good" painter at forty. And the standard of "goodness" did not reside only in himself: he wanted the public to agree. But Guillaume felt his own conscience the ultimate arbiter. If he satisfied that exacting guide, as to his own style and thought, he would not have lived sixty years for nothing.

It was a pity to come to this exquisite adored Quartier in the dark, Sabia felt: she would have loved a turn in the Luxembourg Gardens, or visit to the Pantheon itself. In War there was no time to gaze at old favorites. The Boncoeurs steep apartment

68

house stairs were as dim as Hades, but a lively, well-shod American
foot hit something on the fourth floor landing and she picked up a
shabby black pocketbook, and impulsively rushed on up with it to
the professorial door, where so many illuminated students had sought
admittance before their eyes had dimmed forever, at Verdun and on
the Somme.

Sabia always hoped, though not quite consciously, when
the bell set in the middle of the Boncoeur door whirred loudly, that
it would open on her tall gaunt friend, the younger Boncoeur, with
his intent, concentrated and adoring look. Even Guillaume might get
a leave. But as usual, it was not he, it was his Aunt, his Uncle's
wife, who opened to the guest, dressed always these days in a black
crocheted shoulder-cape, over a worn greyish gown. Sabia, with a
pleases smile, handed her the pocketbook.

"What a misfortune," Madame exclaimed, regarding the object
as if it were a grenade which might explode, "why pick up someone
else's purse? I have found from experience that it is wise to leave
such things exactly as they are."

"But Madame - someone might steal it.."

"Is that your responsibility of mine, - no! Leave it just
where you found it, please." Shivering she held the door open a
crack while her young friend skipped down and back again. Then she
closed the door firmly on damp stair carpeting, on others' kitchen
odors and others' concerns.

Sabia, as she took off her hat and coat among the stiff

69

salon chairs, felt tempted to suggest that if America had considered
only her own concerns, there would be no A. E. F. But she thought
better of saying so: Madame had been so tremendously cheered by the
American doughboys, and she needed cheering for her only son was
killed long since and her daughter was nursing not too far from the
Front. Besides, there seemed rather more asperity in Madame's cool,
detached correction than there had been in there had been in the
old days, and less of paternal affection in the Professor's learned,
and bearded greetings.

All adult experience appeared to deprive life of something
of its warmth: Guillaume's Uncle and Aunt had probably been sharply
wounded by her rejection of their nephew's offer of marriage. And
sad it was. But a French family would believe it occurred for all
the wrong reasons - even if the suitor did not. They would be
informed, for in France proposals are regarded as collective events.
Yet Sabia Howe had not even told her own Father!

Still, as the three of them, the tall, stooped scholar,
the angular, alert and competent wife, and the young American girl
who had by a queer fate, entered the interior of their lives, moved
into the small, dingy, *salle a manger*, where a coal grate offered
the only warmth in the apartment, - it had been cleared of the Profes-
sor's papers just before the cloth was laid, - they were all as usual
talking of the absent soldier.

"Guillaume," said Professor Boncoeur, pulling down to the
proper cosy height over the table the hanging kerosene lamp suspended

70

by chains from the centre of the ceiling, and then unfolding his
napkin (which would be changed on Sunday) from its ring, while
his wife doled out the soup from the tureen, "Guillaume believes
in the holy mission of his country. Did my nephew tell you," he
suddenly said, holding out to her on the end of a knife, a piece
of grey war loaf which he had just cut against his coat sleeve,
"of his intellectual problems at Princeton University?"

"I - I think so," Sabia spoke humbly. She always felt
humble in this little apartment so closely associated with the
College de France, where books not only filled the at present un-
heated study but the salon, the passages, the dining room and even
the kitchen. "I think he'll be happier here - after the War."
Guillaume had, in fact, been intensely critical of his American
university experience. His searching, map-making instinct which
must take account of wholes, must synthesise, deduce the whys and
wherefores of things, had led him to some very negative conclusions,
and she now said so to his Uncle.

"I remember his indignation when he said to his academic
superior that 'from the philosophic standpoint' it would be inter-
esting to teach a course in French Grammar in a certain way. And
his superior -"

"You mean the 'Manager of the Department'" - snorted the
Professor. "The manager!" As in football or manufacture!"

"Well, when whoever it was, answered: 'My dear fellow,
why are you talking of Philosophy? You were hired to teach a course
in Grammar.'"

71

All of them laughed, but not happily.

"Guillaume was severe," admitted his Uncle, the man who had risen from peasant stock to be a leader in his own learned field of "but he had a right to be, didn't he? Talking of one of the foremost of American universities, who thinks so much of herself, and which he found stuffed full of men imbued with the dignity of their own functions. Is it too much to expect that a professor shall be something more than a machine for storing up facts and *efeching* *lectures*? How many do you count in the faculty of the University of men...? Guillaume saw barely four or five, and none with such profound influence on their students as we seem to have at the College de France.."

"I don't know Princeton," said Sabia, "I guess there are men, fine teachers, there, however!" She felt stifled, all of a sudden.

"At bottom, what irritated Guillaume," said the Professor, blowing into his soup spoon and almost dipping his beard in his plate in his indignation, "is the disproportion between the official view, the 'advertising value', and the real truth. Above all, between the truth and the official optimism, the childish satisfaction of those who are the greater part of them but magnificent sportsmen. A great pedagogical factory, that's what my nephew taught in..no soul but an enthusiasm for athletics!"

"We were sorry Guillaume's ability was not recognised, that he got so little advancement," said his Aunt, bitterly.

She seemed to have no idea one must *love* the muddling

72

American civilisation to succeed there. There were other appraisals
too, based on the implicit belief that the French University system,
which addressed itself to the cultured few, the picked intelligences,
mustered from all classes, to be sure, was the only one for demo-
cratic, and low-brow, many-raced America.

"I guess with us one has to spend themselves more waste-
fully to find oneself," Sabia ventured.

But the answer to that was that Guillaume had had only
limited physical strength (true, terribly true, he was only at
Princeton because considered to have a touch of T.B.) that he had
an unlimited amount of hack teaching, and gained but a pittance.
(Again true, terribly true, but not quite all the truth.)

Whereas, said Professor Boncoeur severely, some American
professors gained five thousand dollars a year and even ten thousand!

Sabia tried to explain: to reach the higher salaries, a
man must have taught many, many students, many, many hours, many,
many years - and eight or nine months in every year, too.

"But that is a disgrace: one lecture hour a week is all
a scholar can spare, and that for only three or four months a year,
at the College de France. Much better so,- a thinker, who must
contribute to the thought of his time!"

Madame nodded approval. It was all so certain in their
minds. No ifs or buts, no argument.

"Monsieur Boncoeur - may I ask you something?"

"Mais certainement, ma petite - you may ask me anything!"

73

His wife said, jokingly, her husband would quote the
whole front page of the *Temps* if she wished - he had only to read
through a page of type to remember every word. His memory was
phenomenal, she proudly declared.

It was about the mutiny in the French Army the year
before.

Professor Boncoeur stiffened, asked how Sabby knew of it.

"But from an American Army quarter. Your Allies have to
know - don't they? It makes us more eager to help, sir."

Perhaps she should not have asked, - even President Wilson
was not informed of the mutiny, it was said, until Pershing got to
France. Certainly the professor was not prepared to talk about it
to a chit of a girl. Soon he brushed past her and Madame, as they
sat knitting by the fireplace, an old hat pulled over his eyes,
his long black cape hunched around his ears, his fat serviette of
papers under his arm.

Madame Boncoeur was the most accomplished of needlewomen
and of knitters. She had taught her young friend these fireside
arts, in the pre-war year, when one sat in the salon for an hour
after every meal conversing about books, pictures, poetry, and the
monuments of Paris. Tonight she inspected a stocking heel for a
soldier, and gossiped a bit, but the atmosphere remained a bit
dismal. A French charity needed help from the American Red Cross,
Her daughter, Jeanne, needed jam and sugar for her patients - could
Sabia's Tantine help? And - here came out Madame's secret question:
why had so many American women come to France, when room on the ships

74

was needed for soldiers? Was it true that the "Y. M. C. A." was
building huts near the Front where <u>women</u> would serve and amuse the
men. <u>Bien bizarre!</u>

"They're not camp followers, madame," said Sabia, giggling.

"I know. Speensters. Adventuresses.."

How hard it was to explain anything as natural as a
Y. W. C. A. worker or a maiden aunt to a Frenchwoman!

"You're looking blooming, my dear," Madame remarked, as
she tossed on her things to leave, "Remember, men do not respect
the girls they make love to..the ones they don't ask to marry them."

"Why, madame..." Sabia felt floored indeed, by this last
bolt from the blue. "I see my men friends in our petit salon.
Tantine is almost always there. I'm the most chaperoned girl in
Paris, she said, with a serious face and an inner grimace.

"War has done away with that Victorian term, <u>chere</u>, but
not altered the natures of men. A word to the wise. Don't be
offended. I have been your guardian!"

VII

One early January night, as young Sabia lay curled up
on the <u>chaise longue</u> reading, the <u>Alerte</u> sounded. The air raids
had started about Christmas time, and there was a family dispute
about what one should do about them. But this time when the gong
d in the hotel court zoomed stridently Miss Sabia was absent and the
old fellow, Jean the valet, promptly arrived at Sabby's door, with

75

a candle in a bottle, bent on taking her to the wine cellar: just as she was, in a pink wadded dressing gown, with her hair in two braids.

"Pas de formalités avec les Boches!" he declared firmly. Besides, he had promised la Tantine to look after la petite demoiselle.

So Jean twitched her curtains closer, extinguished her light, and there were plenty of others going out, as they descended the stone stairs to the crypt-like cellar, with its pointed arches, where a mixed and rather silly-looking group of Tourainers were gathering, in a somewhat shamefaced way.

Most of them were fellow-Americans, war workers of various sorts, officers with Paris business, Red Cross doctors, setting up their brief cases in corners. But there were a few pretty European ladies, with lapdogs and jewel cases, staying their fears with drinks from some of the dusty bottles on the shelves, and offering them to the gentlemen. What the dead monks buried below thought of those who arranged bridge games on casks, screamed to waiters for chairs, Sabby did not know. There was one awful thud somewhere in the outside universe, after which voices were more frantic.

The cellar opened up in a series of arched cells, and Sabby, holding her candle and her book, wandered through, nodding as she went to those she knew, especially to the martyr-like Drum Major, Angela, who sat up very straight and still, and to Sec, who was casually reading the evening paper, tilted on two legs of a high stool, one eye however always on the watch. In this restricted

76

space, voices were noisy and echoing, perhaps a bit scared. There
were moments when all the voices suddenly hushed, listened and then
rolled up again into a wave of jittery sound.

The best way to forget it all was to read and read. Sabia
did sitting on the stone floor, with crossed legs, with her candle
beside her on a shelf. She lost herself entirely in her yellow-
back Colette and did not come to till Sec lounged up, rousing her
with the news that the "all clear" had sounded. He doubted if it
was a bad raid. Under the stone arches, which it nearly grazed, his
baldish head looked skeletal, he seemed a cousin to the monks whose
bones lay below their feet, and she smiled at him with the warmth
she really felt but rarely showed in his wife's preventive presence.

"Angela has gone on up to make cocoa - she sent me to ask
you to stop for some," he said dutifully. But he plumped right
down on the floor too, folding his long legs under him, looked
pleased with her and suggested they share a _fine_ to quiet their
nerves, called a lingering waiter to get two.

"The Touraine probably makes a good thing out of these
raids," he remarked genially, as he handed her her glass of fine
old liquor, "what's your book?"

"Usual French stuff, I see." He ran through the pages,
inquisitively. "The French have a philosophy in such matters.
In America a love affair is hardly worth the price."

"How do you mean?" This was exciting.

"Well, take a man married and middle-aged. A respected

77

member of the community. If he had anmistress - not that he would
necessarily want one, but he might - if he did his social situation
would suffer. Too much." He sighed rather heavily as if he had
something on his mind. Another confidence? She was a bit tired of
them..after Seb's unending talk about Topsy. Life was too, too
vicarious and sympathetic.

"Sabia - when I was growing up I was poor, I was engaged,
and I worked for years at a hard job to get enough to marry on...I
have rather hoped my son would marry late, do as Europeans do -
learn what women are before he marries. But no - he has told his
Mother he's all but engaged to a nurse at his camp. Jack is only
twenty-one.."

On and on. Though it was interesting, she was anxious to
get to bed, especially as the last waiter made it clear he was ready
to close up for the night.

Side by side they walked up the stairs, talking formally,
and parted with a correct handshake at the top.

Everything was all right again between them, she was so
glad! But Jean informed her that the hotel was _tres ennuye_, a
number of rare vintages disappeared in every raid; and Sec, instead
of going up for cocoa, had slid into his coon coat and was disap-
pearing into the dark, cold street.

"Have to get the dope on the raid," he muttered.

78

When Sabby got upstairs she saw a thread of light under
the petit **salon** door and supposing her Aunt had returned from her
official party, flew in with her dressing gown and braids flying
behind her, only to tumble into the quick bear-hug of an American
private who was pacing cantankerously before the dying **boulet** fire.
The little glass sentry box of the concierge by the street door of
the hotel must have been disorganised by the raid to let Seb Cole
slip past to call on the Miss Howes, so late.

The ill-fitting and clumsy wool khaki uniform of the Amer-
ican private which Sebastian wore, on principle, just as the Army
distributed it, made his grey-white skin a still more lurid hue; as
they drew stiff chairs to the warmth that lingered under the Empire
ornaments of the mantel, and he offered her a French cigarette and
was refused (it made her Aunt wild if young Sabia smoked, she had
not won that battle yet) the girl who'd picked wild flowers with him
since the age of five took soundings of the big, dark head and tender
burning eyes that, even without a mood of gloom, made one shiver, they
were so sensitive and so eager for affection.

"Had a letter from the Madam at last," He puffed the words
out in a doomful manner, raucous with the cigarette smoke. These let-
ters were the one thing a man till now unlucky in war seemed to live
for. Sebastian wrote his wife daily, in his scroll-like handwriting,
and his rather roystering literary vocabulary. If only he would hold
back - if only! Sabby had had a card from Washington Mews saying
eleven letters from France in one day had unfitted her friend Top for

79

Red Cross work. No baby had developed out of the honey of the red columbine.

"How is she - I mean SHE - the temptress, the seductress, the woman of the centuries?"

"Oh all right, I guess but -"

The "but" was that Topsy had, with no warning cable, gone off on her own hook and sent their things - all his stretchers and paintings, their heirlooms and Mexican chairs and chests and wedding presents - to Storage. Sublet the studio and gone to live with her parents in Baltimore. "Papa and Mamma" had so advised - maybe a war economy.

"Suppose I'm a selfish cuss to want her to stay in our own place waiting for me? I did, Sabby. Then nothing would be lost by my uprootedness - artists' lives are so fluid anyhow - see?" He spoke loyally, could speak no other way, but the left elbow in the clumsy, yellow-brown sleeve dropped heavily to the arm of the antique gilt arm-chair, the pointed chin fitten into the cupped, hairy hand and Seb's eyes sought the dregs of the fire. The artist had elected New York as his soul city, and he could never paint in the atmosphere of the Maryland Club and the snobberies of the Eastern Shore which Topsy took so hard.

"God, Sabby - how I wish I could get to Russia. That would be worth something!"

Just as she thought; he had a get-away-from-it-all feeling,

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which was partly pique. It was undoubtedly true that Topsy hated her man to be a private: Mrs. Doughboy Cole was not for a Fenton - Mrs. Second Lieutenant Cole would be the very least she would take who desired at heart to be Mrs. General Cole. Sabia asked, very cautiously, if Sebastian would not try for a commission.

"As a government clerk? That's all I am. Why commission a poor boob who lacks the heart to do it?"

She reminded him that he had had a heart murmur in boarding school, but he said, quite sharply, he wanted to be a common soldier - and then started to read her a paragraph from a letter - the letter, which he'd held crunched up in his right hand all this while:

"I wonder if I'm a polyandric female? I learned about 'em in Anthropology. Certainly I seem at this moment in danger of letting the excitement of a dangerous game which I do not wish to follow to its logical conclusion, fill up my winter and my thoughts. Where will it lead? Nowhere at all since I do feel, Seb, that if marriage is bourgeois, intrigue is vulgar..."

Sabia crunched her right hand into a ball and began to strike her cheek with it - to keep her words inside her teeth.

"She simply isn't facing facts," gulped Sebastian. "Fact One: I love Topsy - to distraction. Fact Two: Topsy loves me - honest she does. Fact Three: I'd blow my brains out -"

He jumped up and paced the floor again, a tall bewildered harlequin with a wry smile.

"Listen Sabby - once she said: 'If I could just go off for two weeks every three months with another man, it's all right.'"

"Shut up!" Sabia was furious now. "You tell too much. I'm Top's friend, too - as if I could not see into your mind, without -"

81

"Oh I know, I know." He sunk his head on his elbow, at one end of the mantel while the girl, leaning on the cold marble of the other, looked over the thundercloud toward the door, wishing for once with all her heart that her Aunt would walk in.

"I'm just beside myself - forgive.. Top's such a marvellous critter. Remember the story of her visit to Venice at seventeen? Somehow, she lost connections with her chaperon, and arrove on the Grand Canal at 2 A. M. Picked a famous hotel and persuaded the management to take her in. Pretty scared, by then, because a dark admirer had jumped into her gondola on the way and had to be knocked on the head by the gondolier. Well, there was a petty Austrian royalty in the hotel, with his suite. Royal personage fell for Top, sent her gold-crested notes begging for rendez-vous, filled her room with flowers and even had to be kicked out of it when she entered, one day, in the dark, to find him kneeling with lilies at her feet. Seventeen - mark you - what can you do with a gal like that?"

"Search me," said Sabby drily. "I have no experience of being a girl with red Circe curls and green snake eyes. No royalty ever fell at my feet. Nobody is ready to shoot himself for me. Oh no - I'm not even a childhood friend - I'm just a container for confidences."

"Why Sab - Sabia? What's up?"

She did not answer, began to rearrange the family photographs on the mantel, unconsciously knotted her long braids tight under her chin and then, though feeling a bit more cozy at the furry touch, was still forced to tell him to go on home and swallow his own troubles: she couldn't help.

82

He looked at her like a lost dog. And she knew - it was
always happening to her - she was now retreating too coldly because
she had advanced too sympathetically.

Perhaps Sebastian _knew_, too, for after a minute he said,
in a much quieter and more comradely tone:

"Sabby - what's your greatest fear?"

"Being swamped by the lives of others!" The answer was
breathless and deadly sincere.

"I see, I _do_ see." Her friend stood before her with rue-
ful face. "You might just as well be married to her yourself..
Sabby - do you know, that pink, raw-blue-pink is ravishing for you -
makes the same shade come through your brown cheeks?"

"Get out with your soft-soap," she said, but affectionately.
"I know I'm plain as a pikestaff - as Jennie says."

"I put everything wrong tonight," he muttered. "Trouble
with you and me, Sabby, we feel life too much as it moves along.
We're too soft-boiled."

"Say 'psychic' and be done with it!"

"Won't, hate the word. Europe, torn to pieces, France
worn to the bone, exasperated by the presence of so many Allies,
on top of so many enemies. Even Allies are aliens - it's as if
grasshoppers had come in a great black cloud and were eating all
**la belle France**is fruits and grasses - do you get that feel in your
French friends?

"Sure. But War has this - for Americans. It's wonderful
to live so deeply, and feel every drop of blood mobilised for a more
than personal use."

83

"If it is. Counting out pounds of sugar, for instance?
Well, I'll be going out into that damned weather again. Boche planes
didn't come back.. I'm probably A. W. O. L. by now.."

"Do you wish we had a guest-room. I've been mean to you."
She tried to help him into his worn leather jacket, but he shook off
her mothering hand with a shrug. However, at the door he paused,
and turned his back against it to face her again.

"And you know I like weather. The darkened, slimy streets
are damn exciting. Sliding a foot to find a curb - the thoughts one
can think from one foot to the next! The smells and sounds - the
last lone light! What seeps into a painter in a single mysterious
Paris block, if he could remember, if he could get it down, in some
symbolic form - but life is so phantasmagoric, Sabby."

"Isn't it," she murmured to herself, feeling again all too
much in key with him.

"Know what I said to my Mum at five? Asked her if she and
Dad were real. When she exclaimed that they were real indeed, and
right beside me, I said: 'But you might be dream parents!'"

The girl went to him and put a hand on either shoulder,
for that strange Portuguese look on his face was transfixing. Did he
think of Top as a "dream" wife?

"But if one puts one's head under one's arm," Sebastian
continued, trance-like, and possessed by his own ideas, "like a cat
turning its nose and whiskers upward under a paw - and looks up with
that curious, upside-down cat eye that is so much more detached than
the rightside-up human eye - then the world is all new again. Then
the artist has the saving, impersonal vision of the tragic personal

84

life.. Let's you and I be real artists, Sabby. Good ones!" He spoke urgently and his eyes look really focussed on her own.

"But I'm no artist! What an idea! Just a girl. And I want to live, Sebastian."

"I see." He sighed and began to button up his jacket.

"I advise you to forget all I said tonight. Go home and get married!"

"Thank you for nothing." It was good to feel ironic and able to shut him out. But in about one second the doorhandle turned and the meaningful face popped in again.

"Ever say you that Spanish folk couplet I picked up from a guy in Mexico? Runs something like this:"

"If life and death are a dream
And all the world dreams on
I'd give my life as a man
To dream dead in the stone."

VIII

Times were more and more phantasmagoric, as winter moved towards spring. If Sabia Howe had not been so busy with her orphans and her trips to Petitbourg, and her "adopting" of the little, lame Philippe Faure, as her filleul, and watching over him, she would have found February hard to endure. For there was a growing apprehension in the air that, in some designated spot - but where, where? - behind the iron cruelty of the German lines, padded now by many reserves, would break the expected Spring Offensive. Hindenburg and Ludendorff made no secret of their intention to win the war for Germany in 1918.

85

American war journalists, like Sec Drew and others the Howes knew, ordinary men in ordinary times, were now endowed with special powers that almost transformed them into prophets and bards. From their dangerous journeys they returned to Paris, wailing and chanting of things to come. And American war-workers, who had in their various and sundry ways come to serve this old-world fortress of enlightened civilisation, waited, in warned trepidation, for events to descend upon her hallowed towers.

Yet the vernal season was already beginning to weep below the dread and woe of France. When Sabia went to their little country-place near Versailles, with the Boncoeurs, one early March Sunday, cuckoos were calling through the throb of air-planes thick in the sunset sky, and goats and rams were skipping in the paddock. A rustic creature, at bottom, she felt the seasonal change to her marrow and the upsurge of her own blood from the chill of a stalemate winter. The cuckoos and the roosters, like the war correspondents, were announcing a doomsday.

On the journeys back and forth from Paris to Petitbourg, the spaces of wide, red-brown fields were now new turned by the plow, and flowed along by the train like a dark wave, pricked with faint, wavery lines of pale-green or pale-yellow. The breath that poured in now was not of harvest but of becoming. Here and there peasant women were again clumped or bent in the fields. One gypsy-looking young creature who looked up and waved and stretched her pregnant body as the tiny train jogged by made the New Englander who fluttered her handkerchief wonder if this one had lain down in the furrow with her soldier-man "en perm" to fertilise the planting of the grain-seed,

86

in the age-old European way.

Sabby Howe, so long a girl in a girl's world, was now a
girl in a man's world. More and more soldiers and specialists whom
they knew were arriving overseas and seeking them out. Sabia said
to her Aunt that a woman became popular at no price at all, for mere
geographic reasons: these warm-hearted American men, snatched from
their beloved women at home, were beggars for a mere word of kindness.

"Yes, dear, I know - but why not have your hair cut by my
coiffeur? - that Madchen effect of coiled braids is all out of date."

Still, the older woman spoke less possessively and on the
whole they got on better. Tantine, as time passed, was curiously
absorbed by Jim Bolton, the Nevada flying man - fifteen years younger
and always stuck at Isseaudun, the American aviation centre near Tours.
Jim, handsome, vain, beguiling a spoiled darling of fortune till now,
was slowly going crazy he said, waiting to be sent to the Front and
used his aviator's privileges to come up fairly often for a night in
the smooth sheets of the Ritz.

But for these trips to Paris, he would not know what War
was like, quoth Jim with sarcasm. For the air raids went on in Paris,
not Tours, and one night while he reposed himself at his chosen hos-
telry, after a visit to Maxim's, a bomb pierced the Ritz roof, missing
him by exactly one story. The loud and horrific smash of bombs fall-
ing so near the Touraine as the Ritz and the Place Vendome made those
who'd taken refuge in the wine-cellar that night grab their heads to
see if they were still attached to their backbones.

Miss Howe's seemingly madonna-like but really astute atten-
tion was mostly claimed by her exacting and exciting semi-official

87

life at the Red Cross. Often Sabby would go to bed and to sleep
alone in her twin bed, and only much later, become aware of a faint
light and her Aunt undressing. A bare white neck, straight and
finely cleft, with vital curly grey hair and a silver brush moving
over its ripples like a caress. One could bear to see Tantine un-
dressed, there was that bit of comfort in the shared bedroom. She
had beauty enviably. <u>Line</u>. All her niece had not. Her narrow
shoulders were really sculptural, fine-boned and determined both.

"How was the conference?" the sleepy niece would mumble
into the bedclothes.

"Crucial. Pershing was there - he outtops the French,
physically, too." Or: "General Bliss was there - he's a wise old
man."

"Was Max there?" Young Sabia could never help saying it,
though always resolved not to and the answer usually was "no."

Max was a flitter - he flitted in, he flitted out, on the
wing ever, and though usually preceded by a <u>petit bleu</u>, as a bird
by a leaf falling, one could never put salt on his tail. Neither
lady saw him alone, it was exasperating. He had the perfect art
of turning up when they were together.

Young Sabia's nerves were on edge. Lack of Max in the
flesh, Max as a friend, her friend over years of letters, produced
more and more meetings in fantasy on in that trance-like state, not
quite dream and not quite waking, when she tried to continue the
queer experience she had on the deck of the <u>Rochambeau</u>, the night
of submarine peril.

Again she would seem to be coming out of a Paris station,

88

after a visit to a Convent where orphans were lodged, to dine alone with Max for the first time. She could recover the grim look of the streets, the dark star of renewed yet accepted disaster on the Parisian brows, then coming into the salon of an hotel (it did seem like the formal salon that adjoined the court, at the Touraine) finding Max sitting there with the same tell-tale mark of doom between his sailor eyes. Newspapers on his knee.

"The news is terrible, isn't it?" she said, going in.

But she could never hear the answer. There the dream, or whatever it was, broke off abruptly, frustratingly - yet with a sense of something promising ahead.

And just as it ended, she would usually hear her Aunt say, as she wrapped herself, like a long, slim, distinguished mummy in the bedclothes of her too contiguous bed:

"Your Father thinks this," or "Your Father thinks that."

"Your Father thinks that Topsy Cole is flirting desperately. He thinks Sebastian is too much in her power - too much in subjection - or it wouldn't happen."

Providence, like all small cities, took an undue interest in its absent children of the "best families". But Sebastian Cole had retired from Providence, and if Mr. Howe's daughter, who had seen quite a bit of him in France, did not allow herself the right to think too intimately of a poor doughboy clerk, writing his elusive and subtle beloved from a hard bunk in Tours, what right had her Father to opinionate about the marriage? In a way it was a relief that Sebastian had been transferred in early February to the city

Headquarters
that had become the XXXX of the supply line of the growing A. E. F.:

89

the H. Q. of the S. O. R. - the Service of the Rear, soon to be called, euphemistically - since no two-fisted American wanted to be in the rear - the S. O. S. - the Service of Supplies.

Thinking of all this in the dark cold of the bedroom, where at any time, as Miss Howe said, mushrooms could be grown from the carpet, Sabby would try a whisper to the recumbent, hourglass form of her Aunt.

"I feel sort of responsible for Top and Seb - they met in our house."

"Nonsense - lovers have to meet through someone. Such things are fated."

Yes, Tantine if they happen to one's friends. But what if they happen to oneself? This remark was silent, of course.

Driven back from Paris and his art studies by war, in the late summer of 1914, Seb had met Topsy Fenton at Sabby Howe's in the summer of 1915. And in no time at all two adventurous, intense and colorful matures were tied up. Topsy's secret pride and arrogance and her thoroughly conventional views so far as family and social position were concerned, entirely escaped Sebastian's attention. He was simply caught into a rapture by a langorous, hipless, long-bodied, exotic-seeming girl, who flared like flame to the touch of rebel hero he brought to living. He had always intended to sail down the Volga and the Danube with his bride to the tune of a native folk-orchestra. The honeymoon in Old Mexico and New Mexico, a natural war-time substitute, was legendary enough.

But when they settled down in New York, on their not too big "family allowances", it began slowly to dawn on Topsy that, if

102

(In God's name - she's cutting me off again!) Sabby - Sabby?

"Yes, Max - I'm right here.."

"A la bonheur! I'll be in Paris tomorrow. I'm taking you both to Foyot's to dinner - remember?"

"But Max - Tantine is going on a trip."

"What's that? (Ne coupez pas!) I'm talking to a young lady. Have pity on me, my kind telephoniste) Que dis tu done?"

They always tutoyed when she was younger. But hadn't done so since they met in Paris.

"I said - Tantine will be away." Her voice was faint. She was aware that her Directrice was listening in on her end of the conversation.

"This connection is insupportable - que dis - tu?"

"I'll be alone - toute seule."

Her soft reserved New England voice sounded brazen, to her own ears.

A brief pause, filled with roarings of air and wires. The French telephone was indescribably maddening. All Americans cursed it.

"Well - are you there? Bon, I'll come for you, just the same. We'll not lose our evening - talk about History, eh? Present History. Just like old days, eh? See you're ready at seven-thirty." A light laugh, and no pause for her answer.

It had been a queer thing but she had instantly decided not to tell Tantine Max had called.

103.

103

As a matter of fact, she felt very much impelled to do
so, during the stress of her Aunt's rather fussy packing that
night. To get away from the temptation to be communicative, she
lost herself in a paper-bound novel, with her horn spectacles half
falling off her Roman nose. The evening of April 9th was cold,
and she had drawn her chair near the hearth of the salon, hoping
for at least ten uninterrupted pages. But she had not read more
than five, before perceiving that her Aunt, cap-a-pie for departure,
was tapping her foot on the fender, and impatient for attention.
Last words were natural to Aunt Sabia, a part of life's ritual,
which centred, within, in her Family, and without, on managing
life. Aware that the eagle blue eyes were now fixed critically
on her bent-over shoulders and on the skirt of her uniform, which
was hunched under her, the younger woman felt armor growing down
her spine. But as a pleasant surface meant a lot to any Howe,
young Sabia took off her specs, straightened her legs, and smiled
affectionately at her elder, who glowed back sentimentally from
under her perky sailor hat.

"That's your new uniform isn't it?" the niece said
kindly, "the Paquin one? And the Sulka skirt? You look very
smart - hope the American officers will appreciate your elegance."

"They won't," laughed the Aunt, relaxing. "A general or
two might notice the fit of a coat or a shirt but for the rest,
poor fellows - imagine their state now, trying to get railroads,
supplies and soldiers in place, with nothing to 'do with', as we

104

say. But they do like to meet a well set-up American woman - always
claim I remind them of home. When I see a certain expression steal
over an officer's face, I know what's coming: 'You are so much
like my wife!'"

Sabia smiled and reflected on what A uniform just suited
Tantine, she had something so impervious and Amazonian about her.

But this eager determination and effectiveness, which made
her so popular in an organisation like the A. R. C. did not, truly
make Tantine easier to live with in Great War Paris.

Quite characteristically, the elder woman had picked up
her niece's French book (even a novel was not your private posses-
sion) and was silently asking where it came from. Aunt Sabia's
silent questions had a devastating effect, eventually were almost
compulsively answered - if not, her niece was felt to be secretive.

"From Max - in the morning mail. Of course he meant it
for us both," she explained to the jealous stare.

"Du Cote de Chez Swann - who is this Marcel Proust?"

Miss Howe's voice was piqued. "Any good?" Tantine liked only the
peacocks with the spreading tails, in the world of authors, Sabia
felt, and in fact never read a book through.

"Well - he's an idol of Max's, - quite wonderful, really -
sort of a new genius - Henry James with incredible French nuances."

"Oh." Aunt Sabia was stuffing papers in her brief-case,
now, - a handsome case of tooled Florentine leather with S. H.
entwined in a vine. Now would come the expected parting advice.

105

Sabby was not to sit up late reading. Regular Athenia trick. Get your beauty sleep!

"Sorry -" Sabia could be caustic, too, "I do know how you feel about Athenia."

"All right enough for some girls - but not for you, dear - why?"

"To prepare me to earn my living after the War, for one thing," Sabby said stiffly.

"Silly - as if your Father would let you - as if you wouldn't go home engaged. Bet you a Doucet model you will!"

Sabby's dark cheeks flared scarlet.

"Just name a husband - one!"

"Won't you please me by going to my **coiffeur** and having your hair cut, while I'm gone? Those Gretcheny braids are too unbecoming for words, darling child."

Miss Howe had turned her back, to close her bags,- that was a Tantine trick, to turn away from an answer, when you were getting your dander up. She would never seem a real success to a Howe. On her Father's account she was sorry.

"Don't lamb, forget, will you, that you are four years too young to be overseas at all? Not that I worry much with Angela Drew in the Hotel and all our good friends..I told Angela to keep an eye on you.."

That was the last straw - really! That **bete nois** of an Angela!

106

Miss Howe had three bags assembled on the parquet, one
for bottles, one for shoes and one for clothes. It seemed a good
deal for a week's wartime trip, but the Howes loved to be followed
by groaning porters, whereas the Darcies, those vagabonds, pre-
ferred to "travel light",-- except for dogs. Her Mother was capa-
ble of smuggling a puppy even into a Pullman berth, and if she
were living at the old Touraine, some disreputable little canine
would this very minute be lolling and biting on the hearth-rug.

1077.

"Ring again - duck - the taxi is late. Nobody answers my ring."

"I'll go see." She ran downstairs two steps at a time, and on through the glass corridor that protected you from the cold air of the central court, to find the fat old curmudgeon of a Concierge. François was pulling his red beard and fuming to the Manager, because Jean was late, and the Manager, wearing his inevitable frock coat and tired smile, was all upset because Miss Hubbard, a lady who must be well served, was being delayed and annoyed.

But after all (molly thought) poor old Jean, with his game leg, and his dead soldier son, and his daughter behind the German lines in the North, perhaps having Boche babies, as he said, might have had to go all the way to the Boulevard in the pitch-dark streets, to find a taxi. Since the Offensive, Paris had still less vehicles than before. You could not invent a taxi. Ah, here he comes, le salaud, said the Concierge.

Jean, skinny little old fellow with a Gallic wit, pitched in through the door panel, whacking his thin arms for cold, over his striped apron.

"I took a newspaper for the demoiselle," he said, the hard lines in his face softening when he saw the girl who worked for the war orphans.

"The communique du soir, it does not say much mais l'on dit (on the Boulevard) / 'They' have advanced again, attacked the Brittaniques, this time near Armentieres."

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The Concierge, the Manager, the girl and the Porter were now of one mind, gathered in a knot of concern.

"Si, si, - yes, yes. It's true, after what they say. The _Ennemi_ has struck on the Lys River. Another Offensive."

Miss Howe took the news - or the rumors - as she said - equably. There had been warning of this, in high quarters, and her trip was all the more needed. War gave great play to her sweep-all-before-you-ness. And she believed in ultimate Victory.

"Sabby - would you just run find my war letters from Jim - in the _table de nuit_ drawer, tied with a red ribbon?" Tantine's voice was sentimental. Returning with the package of thin blue envelopes stamped with A. E. F. censor marks, the niece's face (she feared) wore a slightly disdainful look.

"Shall I go to the station with you, Tantine?" she said, helping with the grey astrakhan coat, for she had felt pity, like a prick of pain. It must be hard to be forty plus and not have had much happen to you except world events - and of course committees.

"To the station? In the dark? There could be a raid! Not for worlds." The tear that always trembled and fell at parting dropped on Sabby's cheek, once more she felt the wet auntly kiss, which she hated to abhor, but did.

"Oh - just one more thing. If Max turns up while I'm away, tell him I'm so sorry we can't keep the appointment to dine at Foyot's."

"Because of your trip?" said Sabia in an obscure tone.
"But, Tantine -"

109

"My trip, of course, - goodbye, dearest little one. Be a
good girl!"

While she hesitated, it had become too late to speak.

Now the door really closed, and the niece, feeling the
damp circle still on her cheek, gave an absent swab with her handker-
chief, her attention fixed on finding a good place to read. It was
her first real liberation from surveillance in seven months. Tan-
tine's omnipresence tended to keep one's very brain clotted with pro-
hibitions and prejudices.

The ornate old salon had but one sofa or couch, an Empire
affair with rolled ends - more adapted to an elongated Empress
Josephine, in high-busted dress with puffed sleeves, than to a short,
dumpy (in her own opinion) little American girl in uniform. Still,
Sabby got enormous satisfaction out of propping herself up with the
pink brocade lozenge pillows, usually appropriated by her elder, and
lighting a scented Egyptian, which she had bought in advance. Good-
bye to tabcos! So ridiculous since she had smoked like a chimney
since her Freshman year.

But, as she puffed dreamily, staring at the glass chande-
lier, instead of devoting herself to the book, savoring deeply her
blissful aloneness, she began, to her own surprise, to think in rather
homesick fashion of her Father, - of how happy they always were, when
they two got off alone on a river, stealing under a stone bridge, with
paddles drip-dripping! Or along a black bank where roots went down

110

into dark water - the dark river of life. At such times, sensitive
to nature as an animal or an Indian, he became that other creative
person, dear, dreamy person, who had loved her Mother and been loved
back. She missed him. Without him family life was too female.

Unfortunately, she could not keep this Father clear. The
Father who was elder brother to her Aunt appeared instead, the one
whose last name is on the Rochambeau nearly broke her down.

"Sabby - I must ask you to promise me one thing - don't
dine alone with a man."

"A man" was nothing but a vague entity, therefore possibly
a doubtful character. But Captain Max Pons of General Pershing's
staff, a military historian, a married her very own "third cousin
once removed," a punctilious gentleman.

Well, Sabby was sorry, she must decide, she was going any-
how to dine alone with the one who'd added knowledge to the brains
of French General after General - John J. Pershing, hope you appre-
ciate what an officer of worth you've taken on?

Here General Pershing, standing beside General Petain and
General Foch, far overtowering them, gallantly bowed and touched his
visored cap.

You see Father (why do I feel so argumentative?) you see
his influence on me - I admit an influence - is spiritual. Or in-
tellectual, if you prefer. Max's mind is fascinating and Tantine
has no mind - oh dear, you don't get me, of course your sister is
intelligent, but there is a difference between mind and intelligence,
Daddy. Really there is. I get so stale mentally, here at the Touraine.

111

Asa Howe glowered, his face full of prohibition, but she blew a smoke screen, and he disappeared. There was a little uncomfortable prick, like a flash through the smoke, which said she should do some thinking on her own account. Why bother? It was so much simpler to kick off one's shoes and slip to the fire to warm one's toes. But there were the family photographs in their leather frames, looking at her in a ghostly way. Sabby gathered them up and stuck them in a drawer, deciding for bed.

But even as she started to flee, the gold-framed mirror presented a living Howe, right here in Paris, one she always avoided seeing in a mirror she was so plain.

Not pretty enough, by half, to dine with Max Pons - are you, dear?

Was Sabia Darcy looking a little bit more attractive and awake than usual? Shell-pink lips, hazel eyes with dark pencillings, brown round cheeks with raw pink showing through, and very fat, shiny brown braids, fuzzed by the Empire pillows, tied under her chin in a knot, for she had taken out the shell pins and let them down.

She looked like the kid with the pigtails, who peered into a rock pool on the Rhode Island shore to look for sea urchins and instead saw two wavy shadows, man and woman.

Back came the rushing, pebbly, sound of the breakers they dived through, the pale dripping face of the loved one, the feel of an invincible bare arm and shoulder, that suddenly came across one's back and set one on one's feet on shelving sand.

112

The word "love" was not whispered - not even in her dreams
was it spoken, all these years. More like "treasure." Something
hoarded and banked around the heart, to keep it safe for tomorrow's
meeting.

XII

Next morning, as young Sabia hurried to her war-relief
job, she became aware of something that was moving steadily towards
her, like a train from the Midi de la France, due to arrive on time:
something one could not hold back.

The unexpected flutter of a newspage in a kiosk made her
heart turn over. A fine April day, warmer, gayer, new leaves show-
ing. From the rue St. Honore she turned on lively foot into the
rue Cambon, feeling like a bird - here a swoop to a shop window with
hats, there to a Parfumier's.

Fantine refused to let her use lipstick (just coming in)
or perfume, "loud" and flashy.

But here were flacons of gold, containing precious fluids
distilled from narcissi, salt breezes of the Mediterranean, roses
hanging heavy.. To her surprise she walked right in, bought an
expensive bottle of Jeu d'Amour, and a peach-colored lip-stick.
Even the shopwoman disapproved of that. "Your lips are already the
right color ma jolie - the color ces autres, are striving to copy."

(She meant by *ces autres*, the *cocottes*. Sebastian had
talked to Sabby about how they besieged a man, so many to each block,
you felt a brute.)

113

She reached the door of the office at the same moment
with her black-clad Directrice.

"You realise a new Offensive started yesterday, in the
British sector?"

"Oh, Madame - it's too terrible.."

"Unfortunately, my child. And the work redoubles. That
lame <u>filleul</u> of yours is giving trouble at Petitbourg. You must go
out this afternoon, again, to check up. The Sisters can't keep
such sick and fussy children - we must find some other place for the
boy."

"Today, Madame,?" asked Sabby woefully, "I have so much
desk work today."

"Absolutely. But get going on publicity, now - hundreds
of new American godmothers are needed at once. The new German attack
is disintegrating whole districts - Seventy-five dollars will keep a
child for a year, and twenty-five more will clothe him -" said the
martinet.

"Oh Madame - leave it to me!" She bolted for the chilly
filing room, the concierge had taken away the kerosene stove, the
fitful sun must now warm the Southern dormer, open on the slaty-
slóping violet tiles where doves, grey-blue as the French spring sky,
stumbled about on pink-spiked feet, and murmured plaintively of love.

<u>Roucouler, roucouler</u> the French word was best, it so gurgled out of the doves' throats.

<u>Too young to be here, too young to be here</u>, the birds of
Venus seemed to be saying that morning.

114

Sabby, ready to wring their necks, sat down at her type-
writer: to write an appeal for Cincinnati.

"I must tell you about the stations. Naturally our job at the Enfants Refugies is elsewhere - we offer permanent relief as you know to a selected group of orphaned or half-orphaned children, evacuated from the battle zone. But the selective system doesn't work out when hordes of these battle-driven humans push off the trains. We have just had to pitch in at the stations, too, and render up supplies of food and clothing.

"As I think of the stations I see just pieces of people - old women, old men, (fewer) babes at the breast, or dragging at the skirt.

"Legs for instance - generic legs, raw red flesh, regular butcher's meat, sticking into your lap, to be covered with decent black cotton stockings. Backs bent like bows under sacks of pots and even carrots. Mouths, pale bitten lips, wolfish sharp tongues, ugly, aching for hot coffee or soup. Mouths that eat only to live."

Only to live - that something, surely she thought, coming
Why it was everything!

"But the Paris siles must be emptied and refilled as fast as possible, so that the new children may be lodged and medically examined before they are placed in refuges in the country."

"You can't imagine what it's like in the Military Hospitals now the Enemy is advancing. Stretchers lying end to end on the floor, nurses stepping between, stooping to drive in a needle to match a groan. When a door half opened I could see surgeons fighting at operating tables."

"Nobody had time to answer my questions - 'later, later, get out of my way please, we must lift this stretcher - Ma Soeur - hurry, this case is crucial'. I walked through the wards; through forests of slings and pulleys with damaged limbs slung high looking for a boy from Providence whom my Father asked about."

This was too personal for Cincinnati publicity, Sabby was sure. Yet it came from her centre, from herself, her woman reality, the core of the heart that was pulling her toward the one who would be waiting in the Touraine salon, when she came back from the convent tonight.

115

Waiting, she wondered in a daze - when did Max wait for me?
I'm the one who's been waiting for Max. Except that time - that time
on the deck of the Rochambeau.

Now again she heard her voice saying: "The news is terrible, isn't it?"

And at the thought that now at last she would hear Max's
answer, that the future had arrived, the Rhode Island girl was
seized by a cold chill, clasped her Corona in both hands and laid
her head on the keys.

****************

"Yes - *very* bad." But he jumped up, and met her in an
almost youthful eagerness, news or not - holding her hand a moment
and instantly finding the real Sabia (not just Aunt Sabia's niece
and Father's daughter and Madame Desprez's volunteer) in her eyes.

"So - you are alone?"

Young Sabia nodded briskly, feeling a wonderful new sense
of security with him, and they both grinned.

"But you're late and tired, ma petite amie - what is it?"

"Nothing Max" (but her voice quivered) "just a mission to
our Convent in the country to see my little boy. He's in bad shape."

"Your little boy?"

"Why not? Someone must adopt them - godmother them. People prefer the well ones. It's a responsibility, in this case,, the child is so beaten by life. One leg gone. He wants me all the time."

116

Max shook his head incredulously, - at a child adopting
a child she supposed - and she said she'd go dress.

The Captain refused that and was quite peremptory and
dictatorial.

"I want to get you eating and talking right away - you
need food, now - I can see - and I know what I'm talking about.
These Offensives dig into your stomach somehow.. <u>Sales Boches</u>..
They have put it over again, Sabby, and I'm worried to death. For
what they're aiming at is to split the French and British armies
further. If so, <u>nous sommes fichus!</u>"

"Do you think Pershing is right to stand out for that
separate American Army?" she asked anxiously in the taxi. "Why
didn't Foch use the four ready American divisions to fill the gap
near Amiens?"

"Foch thinks your troops need more time - better quiet
sectors now, so our reserves can be released. You see, our profes-
sional staff officers are very sceptical about your officer material -
as they were about the British New Army. As for Pershing's big idea -
sometimes one wishes he were more malleable - he is so sure his sol-
diers can give the coup de grace - who knows? I am afraid there is
more of scepticism than of sympathy and faith in my make-up, Sabby.
But what can I do about it? It is a simple fact that disillusion
inevitably creeps its way along through most wars. All wars! You
understand me - young as you are. You know that we are using your
American illusions to the full - <u>nous autres français</u>."

She didn't answer.

118

"Look at our **poilus** - they are philosophers, canny disciplined veterans, doing their duty and grumbling - and **holding** except under **force majeure**. But they won't take chances any more - as the C. in C. says, they have no offensive spirit. Look at the British - touch as you like but only fighting because they have to. Then look at the A. E. F. - I tell you the elan and moral fervor I meet at Chaumont, from hard-boiled chaps makes me blush. It's only President Wilson's 'War to end War' - that's a **blague**. War to stop the Germans - that's what it is. But we are jolly lucky the U. S. A. has found a convincing ideal formula."

Again Sabia found her breath cut short. She believed deeply in war to end war.

"Girls in uniform aren't supposed to dine with officers," she said shyly as they reached Foyot's, getting a roar of laughter from Max. There was hardly a soul out, on such a night - leaves being withdrawn, and so on. The **maître d'hôtel** gave them a table in a corner, and engaged the Captain in lengthy consultations on the **carte du jour** - Sabby could see they were old friends.

"Now that's all well settled," her officer contentedly said, settling back in his chair. He still looked down though, fiddled with his soup spoon. But, come what would at last their look had to meet across the table. How are you - I mean **toi**?" Max quickly but softly shifted.

"All right - I guess - glad to see - thee. I've missed - thee," Sabby confessed with humble sincerity.

118

"So-missed me?" "I'm just the same fellow, believing in science, knowledge, understanding and the victory of the intellect - a fellow with a passionate interest in military history, no faith in women, and great dependence on them - umph?" His voice was gently teasing.

"Indeed?" she sparred, - "so you don't regret giving up the Bank?"

"Lord, no - I am so glad you threw eggs at me - I mean egged me on - that time in Rhode Island. You really affected my life choice, gave me a new lead.."

"Why Max -" she felt her color rising again - "I did not. How could I? A little girl with scratches on her legs!"

"Don't quite know - but you did." He spoke very seriously now. "It was as if a little Muse of History rose out of the Atlantic waves, and told me a secret, the secret of my way.. Honest and true and cross my heart, as you say, la-bas. I'm a realist - I recognise facts.."

She looked at her soup plate, shaky inside, feeling no match for him.

"You were the magical influence I got out of practical America. What a surprise. Instead of coming home a better banker,

I returned - to my Father's disgust, I own - the scholar I'd always really been. There was a terrible time about it all. Then -" he paused, hesitated, went on with a certain stiffness but as if he must make her understand, "I married, for one must make some bond in life - just as the natural course of human events. You've not met Marthe, have you? Strange. We must arrange it, this year."

119

This remarkable statement threw young Sabia into a still
deeper confusion. She had been a 'magical influence' - yet Max did
not care or come back. Of course he had never promised to - and why
would he to a shy, little dreamy kid, buried in books? 'In subjection'.
Still am. But just won't be.

a little."

Sabia?

"Aunt Mary?"

She seemed amused by her incredulous tone.

"Why not - a very capable, attractive woman, who likes
to run everything, knows the world, is not clever and intellectual,
likes admiration...born to the purple, as they say... The sad disap-
pointment is, we have no children. Too bad for we could afford them,
Marthe's
Frances's
well dotee."

wailing 'too late'... She could not speak, he sounded so glib. And inside a voice was

"Well, I suppose it does not make too much difference in
the end - children are a worry too." He dropped into a silence and
stared into space.

"Enough about me - what about you? How does your little
war job bear on History?"

—and not very well organised, Max—

"It's not a bit intellectual - nothing College prepared
me for. But I guess common sense, human feeling, do a lot, in such
work - they come to one's aid. When 'history's in the making. I
don't just know how to say it.." Her voice was wobbly.

"You say it very well. Congratulate you on throwing over
the blue stocking for the woman - a detached, a subtle mind is not
altogether a joy to its owner, I fear - though it is to its friends.
I used sometimes to wonder about you, getting so deep in "courses"..

"What are you reading Max," she interrupted, hastily.

120

"Moi? I've reached the dreadful stage of thinking, not reading." He tried to twinkle at her but somehow failed. He was dreadfully depressed tonight - referred to his heavy work, the uncertain situation. What he wanted of her, sitting quiet and demure opposite him, seemed to be - just to be listened to. Just to be there.

"Between ourselves, my little Sabby," he said, resting his chin on his right palm, in that eternal attitude of the thinker which always shows the ageing of a face, "things are as crucial as Hell."

"You don't think we're going to lose?" Sabia cried. The idea had never even occurred to her.

Max shrugged his shoulders, in his Gallic way, pursed his lips, threw out his hands:

"My idea is rather that the War is reaching its final phase. The blunders aren't all moss - you know our French Offensive efforts failed - last year - were very minor. But adversity stiffens you up, and makes you less theoretical. Our Generals don't believe in Pershing's soldiers yet, but they will - somebody has to take the Offensive, and I hasard the guess that our new Generalissime will try it, with the aid of Pershing and his men - numbers will do it, numbers of American Infantry, if we can get them here. No Sabby - I honestly don't think the Enemy will get his victory, now with the American forces building up so well."

"You don't?" She felt elated.

121

"But speaking as one historian to another - the Germans'
neck or nothing _politik_ is truly regrettable."

"Really?"

"Now here's the juicy little duck, the _Jainnes canard_ a
l'orange. Hope you like it? Give her the best breast slices, -
Jules _gargon_ - a nice bit of brown skin, too. Yes, for it they are beaten
now they must be broken, and from the standpoint of the balance of
power which, between ourselves, Russia's coming age has already
altered, - you know? - that seems a danger. But don't tell any of
my brother officers I said so. At G. H. G. such opinions are taboo
and also at G. H. Q... Pershing wants to go to Berlin when the time
comes - I'm being very indiscreet."

"Oh - go on, do Max - it's so wonderful to really _hear_
_something, see somebody_. When you come to see Tantine and me, you
never quite let the truth out - you're so busy accepting her little
nuggess of good advice and tucking them in your pocket and kissing
her hand.." She leaned toward him, rosy-cheeked and accusing.

Max threw back his shoulders and laughed till his young
friend felt embarrassed, and fumbled with her silverware. He had
made her lose her tongue, as Jennie would put it.

"Give the young lady more of the little green peas, _garcon_,-
and we want your best dessert."

"M. le Capitaine likes _fruits glaces_, au _Kirsch_ - how about
la _demoiselle_? I have them ice-cold in silver, the last twenty-four
hours, waiting for the Captain."

122

"Ever taste that Paris specialty, Sabby? Yes, <u>fruits glaces</u>
<u>au Kirsch</u>, but mind that, for the glory of France, there are cherries
and green almonds in them."

"It's too early for cherries, <u>mon capitaine</u>,- that's for
the month of May, and the war has eaten the green almonds."

"<u>Tant pis</u> - pour the young lady more of the Beaune - that's
a famous <u>cru</u>, my dear."

"Is it?" said young Sabia vaguely. Waves of some rare
bliss kept floating her off into an unknown but heavenly land, that
yet harbored within an old-fashioned restaurant on the <u>rive gauche</u>.

"Look here, Sabby - you must make your education in the
field of wines. You should know when somebody is wasting his money
on you.." protested her third cousin once removed.

"Why Max -" She colored hotly. It was true, nobody,
nobody had ever taken so much trouble about feeding her before. It
was just wonderful of Max to feel she was worth it.

"Like all my cousins the Americans," Max went on inexor-
ably but with a not quite straight face, "you have a tendency to
grasp a wine glass by the bowl - and to gulp down a rare vintage
like a medicine, yes. <u>Savoure-le, lentement, ma cherie, lentement,
doucement, savoure le bon vin - si comme, ca, exactement..</u>"

But Sabby made a face at him, and as she again lifted the
glass, kissed the brim. Max's pupils enlarged, and a half conscious
happiness broke over his cheeks, with their red circles on the cheek-

123

bones, and their sad hollows, and their strong lines from nose to
lip.

"You were saying," Sabby asked hastily.

"Oh yes - hum - I was saying, I guess," Max reflected,
that German naivete looks worse in deeds than it did in words before
the event - all this they are doing now was in print, before War start-
ed, but we soldiers and historians just laughed and mocked. But the
deeds are real, all too real."

Glancing up, he saw tears running down her cheeks and seemed
struck to a heap.

"What is it, dear, cherie?" He leaned across the table
and took her hand in his, and she looked back blindly, gripping it
tight.

"It is real - Fathers dead, Mothers dead, (which is worse,
as one boy said) children without legs and arms.. Farms raped."

Out came, in one burst of words, the whole tragic history
of little Philippe. How he had lost first one peasant parent then the
other. He had red-brown cuts, and such a thin wispy body, which
found a new half-leg a heavy burden to drag about. He was intelligent,
really, but resisted his books, made scenes in class, and when Sister
Agatha put him to bed, wailed hysterically for his Marraine. Only his
Marraine would do, yet if she came to Petitbourg he cried to go home
with her. Before Sabby had half finished, Max, too, was dropping a
tear or two into his plate, in sympathy, like the emotional Frenchman
he was underneath, and Sabia's eyes had to wrinkle at the corners to
cheer him.

124

At that point Max gave her a big fine white linen handkerchief from his pocket, laughed at her and with her and withdrew his firm bony hand. Then started on History, again, as if nothing had happened. But in a quite different voice.

How great military struggles were due to national overcrowding, and national aspirations - how Germany had been fanaticised till War had become the hope, the only hope of the rank and file.

"Sabby, I'm giving you personal ideas now, so listen - listen and criticise. This isn't like other wars, I have a - what do you say? Hunch, that's it, hunch, that we stand at the beginning of vast struggles for economic control - rather than political. One of the great and most unnoted facts in this conflict is the world's shrinkage - Europe is outgrown, it really is. Why - look at Russia - if she 'comes through' grows up, becomes a true nation, half European and half Asiatic, she will make the terms, the entities "Europe", "Asia" obsolete. Great Britain is already part of the balance of power, instead of its guardian. She is leaning hard on her alliance with Japan to secure the stability of Asia, right now. But just you wait till Japan wants to expand - she'll bide her time, but the favorable moment will come. Then we may have to turn to some sort of union of - well, no use speculating to the nth power."

"Why not?" said Sabby feeling brisk and intellectual once more. "Let's ask what would happen if Germany won the War - though I don't believe it."

125

"That would be worse, sure enough, that a total British-French-American victory - it would be the victory of a class in Germany that aims to make her the leader of the East against the West - a German-Russian-Japanese combination against the Atlantic world... The balance of sea power just can't be allowed to pass to Germany Sabby - if it does we'll know another kind of Universe - and a Hell of a one!"

"Max, you do make sense!"

"Do I?" He bowed ironic yet pleased.

"Well - I mean - most of the time nothing makes sense and I'm just merged with the currents of the world around me. Then suddenly I hear you and History becomes my backbone again."

"Oh no -" he sounded troubled. "History can't be a girl's backbone, oh no -"

But History interrupted him. Outside Foyot's, as they left, they found themselves in the midst of an Alerte, with horrible sounds of sirens screeching up and down their spines. The street was perfectly dark, cave dark, and seemed absolutely empty of taxicabs and human meaning. The sky had darting lights, and searchlight flashes, and they heard gunfire. It was scary, for War is sound, as well as fury, and after months of it Sabby's ears held the varied sounds of sirens, guns and airplane engines as a conchshell the gloomy soughing of the sea.

Max realised her touch of fear, and drew her back instantly

126

under an archway, held her close by his left arm through her right,
so close she could feel the strong pounding of his heart, such a
human, reassuring, masculine thing -

"Sabia.."

"Yes, Max," she said in a faint voice, for now his arm
was about her shoulders.

"I have to tell you something, dear, - may I? I said
Marthe and I have no children - but in fact I have myself a child,
a boy. A little boy of ten. Are you too American to understand?
Woman enough not to misunderstand?"

Her heart almost deserted her breast. That must have
been even before he came to Providence.

"Had him accidentally, of course, by a dancer - just a
passing affair during the time I was rather hitting things up.
The mother lives, but means nothing to me. Never did or could.
I took the boy when he was six, and he has been brought up well,
by Catholic Brothers. I have loved him a great deal, seen a lot
of him. He's what do you say? A great kid, he really is. My hope
has been that my wife would consent to an adoption. But she will
not. No, She is adamant. Claims his blood isn't good enough.
I'm so broken up about it.." His voice broke, too.

"Oh Max -" quickly she turned to him and stroked his
cheek, with her hand. How blame Max, how not give him tender feeling?
Some Puritan boundary had broken. His need of her was so startling.
She had needed him so long and now he needed her.

127

"Sabby, will you let me to take you to see the boy -
maybe tomorrow? Could you keep a secret? Forgive me, I just had
to tell you. I should value your judgment.."

They got back to the Touraine, after a long fumbling walk,
in which Max had to prove himself an Indian guide, as he said, and
came like sleep-walkers into the lighted salon with the Empire jim-
cracks. Max, as if it were the most natural thing in life, took
off her hat and her coat and put her in the big armchair by the
fire. He said nothing at all, just leaned on the mantel and looked
at her fixedly till she looked back.

"I love your little smile.."

"I guess it's a new one - for you.." she said in a shaky
tone.

"He sank right on his knees, put his head in her lap and
cried while she stroked his head, and found instinct in her tender
fingers.

"Darling - why did I not return to find you? What am I
saying? I am a miserable sinner..." He was now rubbing his head
against her breasts, making her aware of her own body, its curves,
its meaning.. Seeking her mouth, moving closer, closer, as something
in her yielded, bit by bit.

128

"Sabina!"

"Holly!"

"Yes darling.."

"You must not let me go on - unless you will go further.. I'm not - I can't be - sure of myself.." his voice was rough.

She pulled away instantly, like a shot, not intending it but doing it, and standing up,

"May - you'd better go.."

"Had I?" He stood at a distance, breathing hard, and looking all upset and strange. "Very well." He stared around for his hat, she put it in his hand and suddenly she was in his arms again and more, their bodies and mouths were joined.. for how long? Maybe only two seconds, it seemed an eternity. Then he went, but came right back, to say, he would pick her up in the morning, when she went to the office, and please save tomorrow's dinner.. a little country cafe near Versailles.

"Promise, dear?"

"Oh Max-I do."

XIII

Next morning she waked softly from an ecstatic dream and saw a finger of sunlight on a neighboring but empty bed.

There lay Du Cote de Chez Swann on the flat counterpane.

Life is sometimes good to a girl. Normally Tantine's

low
eagle eyes would be observing her from gullied pillows and a mound
of feather-stuffed quilt. For Tantine stuffed herself with feathers

secret words.
Now she could stretch herself murmuring in the dark

even in Spring, claiming that one could make a wish under the
tbeds in the dark December.

xxiii 124

Sliding to the edge of her high French bed, her bare toes delicately explored the parquet, for her mules and she tried to plan when she could find an hour to read. But the mules dropped off again and slid away over the waxed floor.

A book no longer seemed a world. A world was a man and nothing but a man. Her legs trembled, her body constricted and swayed and the blowing wind from the open window behind the faded draperies sharpened a realisation that had perhaps come out of sleep:

> Separateness and virginal immunity - where are they? I am
> conscious now of my body, of man's desire, of Max as a man.

But where do we go now? He said nothing about divorce, indeed he had sounded as if he liked..loved? his wife. The confusion was complete. In Providence men - well-bred men, did not have left-handed children - or so she thought, anyhow. And married men did not make love to well-bred girls - or did they? Was it his fault, my fault? Oh I wanted him to..

made herself barefaced admissions, She asked herself these questions, as she plunged into the tomb-like tub, behind the grey linen curtains (such was one's and bathroom at the Hotel Touraine) but they were not answered, so she came out, to find the old chambermaid, an antique like the mantel ornaments, announcing her breakfast.

said Ernestine.

"When does mademoiselle's Aunt please herself to return?"

She means - you are unchaperoned..

"My Aunt is not consulting her pleasure - the American

39. 13.0

Red Cross has sent her on a long hard trip to study the hospitals
and the needs of our soldiers." *She* spoke emphatically, brushing
her long hair.

"I know - your Army is well spoiled," said Ernestine, vindictively
Is mademoiselle's Aunt going to visit the chewing gum factory? They do say
*xxotiring*, the Americans are winning the war with chewing gum."

Sabby bit her tongue,
*Molly rushed out and to the little table in the salon,*
where the *petit de jeuner* was cooling - grey war bread, sticky
yellow jam, nothing very alluring but the letters with Censor marks -
*Sapie*
*Seb*
one for Aunt *Mary* from Jim *her young admirer* one for her from *Mab*
*Cole* - that was all.
*Tappan* *doubtless* *worried about* *Toppy* and the state of *Russe*.

She just couldn't eat, but must look through the shelter
of the dusty lace curtains, to find someone who would be in the cob-
bled court, shut in by grey walls, tiled *mansards*, and spots of
grey dove-breast.

Max sat at a spidery iron table, smoking a cigarette with
a British officer in khaki, his fine bony hand, the one she knew the
feel of, describing arcs and circles which most certainly related
to the present disastrous military events.

Withdrawing hastily, she began to dress, humming to herself:

> *The flowers that bloom in the Spring tra-la,*
> *Have nothing to do with the case.*

Not very apt, and a buttonhole tore, as she slid into a
clean shirtwaist. She reached for another, in the Armoire, but as
she opened the door, her forehead dropped to the cold glass.

Oh, before I see Max I must *think*. "What's the use of a
mind, if it can not think about your feelings?" asked the college
graduate.

40.

On the way downstairs, she ran smack into Mrs. Drew and was reproved for not being at dinner. François had reported she had gone out with the Captain.

"Was Madame Pons there, also?"
Cousine arthe

"No - no Francine is in the Midi, running a hospital on her Provençal estate.."

"I forgot..

"I see - we expect you for lunch, Sabby, Sec. and I.,
Kolly. We are dining
with the Corrigans in the evening.." The voice was icy.

"I'll be at lunch then." That was just right, since she was dining with Max.

She ran down so fast she fairly shot through the door into the courtyard. (Max might have been more pleased had she seemed less eager). He rose and saluted her, but tarried a minute more to finish a phrase.

"Going to your work, ma cousine? May I escort you part of the way?"

the cousin emphasised, the

The cool voice, formal French handshake, and cheeks graven with severe lines unnerved her. Her throat cramped, and as Max put on his kepi, his military cap, a remarkable white furrow between his eyebrows fixed her attention. Finger-size, just big enough to lay a finger in.

"Tu comprends," he murmured, looking straight ahead, as they turned left up the rue St. Honore, a street of somber seven- or hotels,teenth century houses, now devoted to commerce, "one must be prudent."

The tu was balm. Then Max gave her a little knowing look, and his mouth, with its short, dark moustache, curved into a sceptical

laughing shape, which like a leaf blown by a breeze, seemed to fly
straight to her lips and seal them as his.

Now his arm sought hers but she gently pulled away, he
must not feel her trembling.

"What do you think of that little brown hat with the
rose, Max - would it suit my brown taffeta - you know the one I
mean?" She had moved toward a milliner's window.

"Tiens" he said instantly objective, looking from the
girl to the hat in the milliner's window. "pas mal, en effet, it
would suit that round, innocent little face of thine."

"But it costs sixty francs - and one franc fifteen feeds
a war orphan for a day, Max."

"I'll buy it for you - mayn't I buy my girl a present?"

He was actually starting for the door, when she dragged
him back. He must be suffering from his bad leg, his lips were so
grim.

What is it to be the girl of a married man - a mistress?

As they turned onto the rue de Rivoli, he gave her arm
a little shake of reassurance and there was the sun, spraying over
the trees that shot up above the high iron fence of the Tuileries, gardens
pluming out like fountains of green into the blue, cloud-bedappled
sky. The smooth, dun-colored street between the Arcade and the
Garden was empty, and Max suddenly took her arm and zipped her across
spring colored xgkam space of the garden, and then, still holding her arm, moved
into the Tuileries. on kawakixgkam up the Grande Allee toward the
Concorde. There was no water in the hassin Octogonale but all about them
were the river statues with lovely names - the Loire and the Loiret, the Nile
and the Tiber, the Rhone and the Saone. And beyond was the great square of the
Concorde, with its revolutionary memories, its obelisk, its marbles of the
cities of France, Strasbourg still mourning.

Sabia

"A monument any Frenchman would die for," she said, with
a motion that embraced and revered the Champs Elysees, with the Arc
de Triomphe de L'Etoile at the end of them..

He threw her a look of gratitude, but sat down rather
hastily on a bench, his right leg thrust forward in wooden fashion,
as if it hurt.

beside me, here-

"Sit down, ma cherie, how art thou this morning, really?"

The question in her left ear, the intimate, caring look
wiped out the space that night and morning had put between them.

"Oh - quite all right Max - happy." She was surprised by
the gentle calm of her own words.

"I made myself ten thousand reproaches all night that I
unburdened myself of my troubles to one so young. Don't know what
It's this gnawing war anxiety.
got into me. Your work with the children - I felt something so
mature, womanly, tender - it melted away my prudence. I was as
surprised as you, please believe it."

cruel, separating

If he only would stop, stop saying these things..

"You think I'm a <u>jeune fille bien élevée</u> - but I'm not -
I'm a college graduate -"

He laughed uncomfortably: "This college education which
keeps a girl so young, eh?" She saw he was wondering: Well where
does she stand? What does she know? The answer was - "nothing
about illicit love."

It was true, perfectly true, that the remote amours of the
earthworm and the fern had taught her less than those hours with
Max - yes and the distilled passions of the poets. Just in one

134

evening, in a few broken phrases and murmurs, some long embraces..
Yet not enough. What did Max want?

"I don't think a girl like you should be here, at all -"
he said almost angrily, turning towards her. "It's too serious. I
wouldn't let a daughter of mine stay in Paris now doing such terri-
bly hard sad work - you should be having your own babies, not saving
ours. Suppose you have to get out in a hurry?"

"But why should I?"

Haig's

"This new Offensive on the Lys. I've just heard/Махмут
message to his Army from my English friend." He read it from a
little notebook:

"Every position must be held to the last man. With our
backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our
cause every one of us must fight to the end."

"To the end - understand? The end which is far from yet,
Sabby. Anything can happen.. Paris is no place for a young girl."

"Well - I must say, you are mean to me! Father's Red
Cross head for Providence. Besides Tantine insisted on my coming
with her and they listen to her at out house.."

"And your Mother?"

"Mother's got trust in life - and in me, too! And she has
a way of caving in when Tantine goes on the rampage."

"Yes, yes, my Cousin Sabia is a lady of much power and
influence. It seems I owe her my appointment with Pershing?" They
both laughed at that and it helped a bit. But a silence fell.

"So you had nothing to do with it?" asked Max suddenly.

135

"So it was all your Father's and Mother's and Aunt's fault that you came?" He was merciless, quizzical yet tender.

"Of course not -"

Clearly he wanted her to say she came for him. It wasn't true and she wouldn't be hired to say it.

"Max - I just couldn't help coming. History pulled me. But I take the responsibility if that's what you mean."

"Good girl. Face facts! Don't deceive yourself, above all - otherwise you'll never grow up. Well, if you are sure you came because you wanted to - then darling dear, sweet little cousines, meet me at Prunier's at twelve, eh? Langoustes and so on."

"But I thought it was dinner," Sabby said quickly and stopped herself. "I have promised to meet the Drews for lunch - you know the ones you call the Drum Major and the Drumstick. They are sort of watching over me - damn it!" she exploded fiercely, rising and preparing to be off. "So goodbye Max - nice to have seen you!"

"No, no - rest - stay a bit!" he said in the indolent tone of the lover. He held her hand fast and now he took off her right glove, and kissed her palm over and over, forgetting his own rules.

"What about the little boy - I'm not to see him?"

"Never mind - not today, dear."

He went on kissing her hand as if he had no other aim in life.

He went on kissing her hand as if he had not other aim in life.

44.

The brown earth was moist and scented, and the lilacs
were on the way, and his meaning was so explicit, his desire so
evident that she could have wept with happiness.

"I thought lunch wiser, but dinner is always better
isn't it?"

Still he sounded hesitant so she told him the Drews would be
together out, and the coast clear.

"Fate is in it, n'est ce pas? Alors ya, va 't 'en."

She flew off toward the Park gates, not looking back once.

The office sustained her that morning too, as the sea
sustains the swimmer, and she sailed home to lunch with the Drews,
a smile for them and everyone, if it were wanted.

The Drum Major looked suspicious but he was allowed to be
terribly thin man, who ate enormously, winked at her, over Le Matin.

ever
partly
They two were good friends - the friendship of those who
(Angela was one, so was Antine) though
had to get along with the tyrants.. It was funny, how men always
know it - and like it - when other men are courting you. You seem
nicer to them. Somehow Sec was a confederate, though not a word had
been spoken.

"There's a petit bleu for Mademoiselle." Francois presented it with a leer, she thought, while Angela looked狐疑but he pretended not to look but did and did disappeared in his paper again. The table, unopened waiter asked if she would have the potatoes with the omelette, or in the French way by themselves.

"No potatoes - no problem. He came over and excused himself, to get ready for the afternoon's labors." The telegram was still unopened but she paused right in the middle of the stairs to read it: she already had a

137

premonition.

"Dear Sabby: Bad news, I fear. My General has recalled me, for some mission. I'll be on my way to Chaumont when this reaches you. Regret about this evening but you understand. Make my compliments to Cousin Sabia and don't forget to read the Proust so we can talk about it soon. As well as about History, our favorite topic. We're holding the Enemy. Don't worry."

He ended with best wishes - **meilleurs sentiments.**

Not one word the elder Sabia might not read - that was
what Max was counting on for French Aunts do read a niece's letters
from a man. Tantine would not descend to that. It was hard to have
not one word of _her_ herself. Just one. She would never fuss if Max
wanted to take it back. But he'd been Gallic.

Toiling upstairs now, Sabby felt like a seed watered by
spring rain, ready to thrust itself through the hard crust of New
England earth. But some stony substance, Fate itself, had fallen
on the earth, maybe the seed would never find a way to the light.

She opened the salon door, her eyes spilling tsars. But
there was a branch of lilac in a vase, and on a chair, a small round
striped hatbox.