The Book of Susan: A Novel

So innocently delighted had she been by her pleasant suspicions, it was impossible to let her feel how sharply her raillery had pained me. But I could not reply in kind. I had merely bowed, put down the magazine in my hand, and so left her – to inevitable reflections, I presume, upon the afflicting reticence of these otherwise so agreeable allies d'outre mer. Their education was evidently deplorable. One never knew when they would miss step, inconveniently, and so disarrange the entire social rhythm of a conversation.

"Ambo," said Susan, putting her hand in mine, "do you know at all how terribly I've missed you?" She turned her head weakly on her pillow and looked at me. "You're older, dear. You've changed. I like your face better now than I ever did."

I wrinkled my nose at her. "Is that saying much?" I grimaced.

"Heaps!" She attempted to smile back at me, but her lower lip quivered. "Yours has always been my favorite face, you know, Ambo. Phil's is wiser – somehow, and stronger, too; and Jimmy's is sunnier, healthier, and – yes, handsomer, dear! Nobody could call you handsome, could they? But you're not ugly, either. Sister was adorably ugly. It was a daily miracle to see the lamp in her suddenly glow through and glorify everything. I used to wait for it. It's the only thing that has ever made me feel – humble; I never feel that way with you. I just feel satisfied, content."

"Like putting on an old pair of slippers," I ventured.

"That's it," sighed Susan happily, and closed her eyes.

"That's it!" echoed my familiar demon, "but no one but Susan would have admitted it."

As usual, I found it wiser to cut him dead.

"Well, dear," I said to Susan, "there's one good thing: you'll be able to use the old pair of slippers any time you need them now. I'm to be held in Paris, I find, for a three-months' job."

She opened her eyes again; disapprovingly, I felt.

"You shouldn't have done that, Ambo! You're needed at Evian; I know you are. It's bad enough to be out of things myself, but I won't drag you out of them! How could you imagine that would please me?"

"I hoped it would, a little," I replied, "but it hasn't any of it been my doing – Chatworth's wife's expecting a baby in a few weeks, and he wants to run home to welcome it; I'm to take on his executive work till he gets back. God knows he needs a rest!"

"As if you didn't, too!" protested Susan, inconsistently enough. Her eyes fell shut again; her hands slipped from mine. "Ambo," she asked presently, in a thread of voice that I had to lean down to her to hear, "have they told you I can never have a baby now?.. Wasn't it lucky if that had to happen to some woman – it happened to me?"

No, they had not told me; and for the moment I could not answer her.

"Jimmy's wife is going to have a baby soon," added Susan.

"Jimmy's —what!" I shrieked. Yes, shrieked – for, to my horror, I heard my voice crack and soar, strident, incredulous.

Susan was staring at me, wide-eyed, her face aquiver with excitement; two deep spots of color flaming on her thin cheeks.

"Didn't you know?"

The white door opened as she spoke, and Susan's Norman nurse hurried in, her sparrow eyes transformed to stiletto points of indignation. "Ah, m'sieu – c'est trop fort! When I told you expressly to do nothing to excite the poor little one!" I rose, self-convicted, before her.

"Tais-toi, Annette!" exclaimed Susan sharply, her eyes too gleaming with indignation. "It is not your place to speak so to m'sieu, a man old enough to be your father – and more than a father to me! For shame! His surprise was unavoidable! I have just given him a shock – unexpected news! Good news, however, I am glad to say. Now leave us!"

"On the contrary," replied Nurse Annette, four feet eleven of uncompromising and awful dignity, "I am in charge here, and it is m'sieu who will leave —tout court! But I regret my vivacité, m'sieu!"

"It is nothing, mademoiselle. You have acted as you should. It is for me to offer my regrets. But – when may I return?"

"To-morrow, m'sieu," said Nurse Annette.

"Naturally," said Susan. "Now sit down, please, Ambo, and listen to me."

For an instant the stiletto points glinted dangerously; then Nurse Annette giggled. That is precisely what Nurse Annette did; she giggled. Then she twirled about on her toes and left us – very quietly, yet not without a certain malicious ostentation, closing the door.

The French are a brave people, an intelligent and industrious people; but they exhibit at times a levity almost childlike in the descendants of so ancient and so deeply civilized a race..

"I knew nothing about it myself, Ambo," Susan was saying, "until I was beginning to feel a little stronger, after my operations at Dunkirk. Then Mona brought me letters – three from you, dear, and one long one from Jimmy. But no letter from Phil. I'd hoped, foolishly I suppose, for that. Jimmy's was the dearest, funniest letter I've ever read; it made me laugh and cry all at once. It wasn't a bit good for me, Ambo. It used me all up! And I kept wondering what you must be thinking. You see, he said in it he had written you."

"I've had no letter from Jimmy for at least five or six months," I replied.

"So many letters start bravely off over here," sighed Susan, "and then just vanish – like Phil. How many heartbreaks they must have caused, all those vanished letters – and men. And how silly of me to think about it! There must be some fatal connection, Ambo, between being sick and being sentimental. I suppose sentimentality's always one symptom of weakness. I've never been so disgustingly maudlin as these past weeks – never!"

"So Jimmy's married," I repeated stupidly, for at least the third time.

"Yes," smiled Susan, "to little Jeanne-Marie Valérie Josephine Aulard. I haven't seen her, of course, but I feel as if I knew her well. They've been married now almost a year." She paused again. "Why don't you look gladder, Ambo? Why don't you ask questions? You must be dying to know why Jimmy kept it a secret from us so long."

I had not dared to ask questions, for I believed I could guess why Jimmy had kept it a secret from us so long. For the first time in his life, I thought, Jimmy had been a craven. He had been afraid to tell Susan of an event which he must know would be like a knife in her heart.

"I suppose I'm foolishly hurt about it," I mumbled.

How bravely she was taking it all, in spite of her physical exhaustion! Poor child, poor child! But in God's name what then was the meaning of my vision back there in the hotel room at Evian? Jimmy entering this room where I now sat, tiptoeing to this very bedside, stooping down and kissing Susan – and her hand lifted, overcoming an almost mortal weakness, to touch his hair..

"You mustn't be hurt at all," Susan gently rebuked me. "Jimmy kept his marriage a secret from us for a very Jimmyesque reason. There was nothing specially exciting or romantic about the courtship itself, though. Little Jeanne-Marie's father – he was a notary of Soissons who had made a nice, comfy little fortune for those parts – died just before the war. So the Widow Aulard retired with Jeanne-Marie to a brand-spandy-new, very ugly little country house – south of the Aisne, Ambo, not far from Soissons; the canny old notary had just completed it as a haven for his declining years when he up and died. Well then, during the first German rush, Widow Aulard – being a good extra-stubborn bourgeoise– refused to leave her home – refused, Jeanne-Marie told Jimmy, even to believe the Boches would ever really be permitted to come so far. That was foolish, of course – but doesn't it make you like her, and see her – mustache and all?

"But the deluge was too much, even for her. One morning, after a night of terror, she found herself compulsory housekeeper, and little Jeanne-Marie compulsory servant, to a kennel of Bavarian officers. Then, three weeks or so later, the orderly of one of these officers, an Alsatian, was discovered to be a spy and was shot – and the Widow Aulard was shot, too, for having unwittingly harbored him. Jeanne-Marie wasn't shot, though; the kennel liked her cooking. So, like the true daughter of a French notary, she used her wits, made herself indispensable to the comfort of the officers, preserved her dignity under incredible insults, and her virtue under conditions I needn't tell you about, Ambo – and bided her time.

"It nearly killed her; but she lived through it, and finally the French returned and helped her patch up and clean up what was left of the kennel. And a month or so later Jimmy's esquadrille made Jeanne-Marie's battered little house their headquarters and treated its mistress like the staunch little heroine she is. Of course, Jimmy wasn't attached to the esquadrille then; it was more than a year later that he arrived on the scene; but it didn't take him long after getting there to decide on an international alliance. Bless him! he says Jeanne-Marie isn't very pretty, he guesses; she's just – wonderful! She couldn't make up her mind to the international alliance, though. She loved Jimmy, but the match didn't strike her as prudent. An orphan must consider these things. Her property had been swept away, and Jimmy admitted he had nothing. And being her father's daughter, Jeanne-Marie very wisely pointed out that he was in hourly peril of being killed or crippled for life. To marry under such circumstances would be to make her father turn in his grave. How can anything so sad be so funny, Ambo? Well, anyway, Jimmy, being Jimmy, saw the point, agreed with her completely, and seems to have felt thoroughly ashamed of himself for trying to persuade her into so crazy a match!

"Then little Jeanne-Marie came down with typhoid; her life was despaired of, a priest was summoned. In the presence of death, she managed to tell the priest that it would seem less lonely and terrible to her if she could meet it as the wife 'M'sieu Jee-mee.' So the good priest managed somehow to slash through yards of official red tape in no time – you know how hard it is to get married in France, Ambo! – and the sacrament of marriage preceded the last rites; and then, dear, Jeanne-Marie faced the Valley of Shadow clinging to M'sieu Jee-mee's hand. The whole esquadrille was unstrung – naturally; even their famous ace, Boisrobert. Jimmy says he absolutely refused to fly for three days." Tears were pouring from Susan's eyes.

"Oh, what a fool I am!" she protested, mopping at them with a corner of the top sheet. "She didn't die, of course. She rallied at the last moment and got well – and found herself safely married after all, and quite ready to take her chances of living happily with M'sieu Jee-mee ever afterward! There – isn't that a nice story, Ambo? Don't you like pretty-pie fairy tales when they happen to be true?"

That she could ask me this with her heart breaking! Again I could not trust myself to speak calmly, and I saw that she was worn out with the effort she had made to overcome her weakness, and what I believed to be a living pain in her breast. I rose.

"Ambo!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed, "still you don't ask me why Jimmy didn't tell us! How stupid of you to take it all like this!"

"I've stayed too long, dear," I mumbled; "far too long. I've let you talk too much. Why, it's almost dark! To-morrow – "

"No, now," she insisted, with a little frown of displeasure. "I won't have you thinking meanly of Jimmy! It's too absurdly unfair! I'm ashamed of you, Ambo."

How she idealized him! How she had always idealized that normal, likable, essentially commonplace Irish boy – pouring out, wasting for him treasures of unswerving loyalty! It was damnable. But these things were the final mysteries of life, these instinctive bonds, yielding no clue to reason. One could only accept them, bitterly, with a curse or a groan withheld. Accept them – since one must..

"Well, dear," broke from me with a touch, almost, of impatience, "I confess I'm more interested in your health than in Jimmy's psychology! But I see you won't sleep a wink if you don't tell me!"

"I've never known you to be so horrid," she said faintly, all the weariness of body and soul returning upon her for a moment, till she fought it back. She did so, to my amazement, with an entirely unexpected chuckle, a true sharp, clear Birch Street gleam. "You don't deserve it, Ambo, but I'm going to make you smile a little, whether you feel like it or not! The reason Jimmy didn't tell us was because – after Jeanne-Marie got well – he spent weeks trying to persuade her that a marriage made exclusively for eternity oughtn't to be considered binding on this side! She had been entirely certain, he kept pointing out to her, that she ought not to marry him in this world, and she had only done so when she thought she was being taken from it." Susan chuckled again. "Can't you hear him, Ambo – and her? Jimmy, feeling he had won something precious through an unfair advantage and so refusing his good fortune – or trying to; and practical Jeanne-Marie simply nonplussed by his sudden lack of all common sense! Besides which, wasn't marriage a sacrament, and wasn't M'sieu Jee-mee a good Catholic? Was he going back on his faith – or asking her to trifle with hers? And, anyway, they were married – that was the end of it! And of course, Ambo, it was – really. There! I knew sooner or later you'd have to smile!"

"Did he give in gracefully?" I asked.

"Oh, things soon settled themselves, I imagine, when Jeanne-Marie was well enough to leave. Naturally, she had to as soon as she could. A soldier's wife can't live with him at the Front, you know – even to keep house for his esquadrille. She's living here now, in Paris, with a distant cousin, an old lady who runs a tiny shop near St. – Sulpice – sells pious pamphlets and pink-and-blue plaster Virgins – you know the sort of thing, Ambo. You must call on her at once in due form, dear. You must. I'm so eager to – when I can." She paused on a breath, then added slowly, her eyes closing, "The baby's expected in February – Jimmy's baby."

The look on her face had puzzled me as I left her; a look of quiet happiness, I must have said – if I had not known.

And my vision at Evian – ?

I walked back toward the barrier down endless darkening avenues of suburban Neuilly; walked by instinct, though quite unconscious of direction, straight to the Porte Maillot, through the emotional nightmare of what my old childhood nurse, Maggie, used always to call "a great state of mind."

V

And that night – it was, I think, the thirtieth of January, or was it the thirty-first? – fifty or sixty Boche aëroplanes came by detached squadrons over Paris and, for the first time since the Zeppelins of 1916, dropped a shower of bombs on the agglomération Parisienne. It was an entirely successful raid, destructive of property and life; for the German flyers in their powerful Gothas had caught Paris napping, impotently unprepared.

I had dined that evening with an old acquaintance, doing six-months' time, as it amused him to put it, with the purchasing department of the Red Cross; a man who had long since turned the silver spoon he was born with to solid gold, and who could see no reason why, just because for the first time in his life he was giving something for nothing, he should deprive himself while doing so of the very high degree of creature comfort he had always enjoyed. He was stationed in Paris, and it was his invariable custom to dine sumptuously at one of the more expensive restaurants.

This odd combination of service and sybaritism was not much to my liking, seeming to indicate a curious lack of imaginative sympathy with the victims of that triumphing Misery he was enlisted to combat; nevertheless, I had properly appreciated my dinner. It is impossible not to appreciate a well-ordered dinner, chez Durant, where wartime limitations seemed never to weigh very heavily upon the delicately imagined good cheer. True, the cost of this good cheer was fantastic, and I shuddered a little as certain memories of refugee hordes at Evian intruded themselves between our golden mouthfuls; but the bouquet of a fine mellowed Burgundy was in my nostrils and soon proved anæsthetic to conscience. And Arthur Dalton is a good table companion; his easy flow of conversation quite as mellow often as the wine he knows so well how to select. But that night, though I did my poor best to emulate him, I fear he did not find an equal combination of the soothing and the stimulating in me.

Perhaps it was because I had bored him that I was destined before we parted to catch a rather startling glimpse of a new Arthur Dalton, new at least to me; a person wholly different from the amusing man of the world I had long, but so casually, known.

"Hunt," he said unexpectedly, over a final glass of old yellow Chartreuse, a liquor almost unobtainable at any price, "you've changed a lot since our days here together." We had seen something of each other once in Paris, years before, during a fine month of spring weather; it was the year after my wife had left me. "A lot," he repeated; "and I wish I could say for the better. You've aged, man, before you're old. You've let life, somehow, get on your nerves, depress you. Suffered your genial spirits to rot, as the poet says. That's foolish. It's a kind of defeat – acceptance of defeat. Now my philosophy is always to stay on top – where the cream lies. Somebody's going to get it if you and I don't, eh? Well, I'm having my share. I don't want more and I'm damned if I'll take less. Anything wrong with that point of view, old man? I'd be willing to swear it used to be yours!"

"Never quite, I think," was my answer; "at least I never formulated it that way. I took things pretty easily as they came, Dalt, and didn't worry about reasons. I've never been a philosophical person, never lived up to any consciously organized plan. If I had any God in those days I suppose I named him 'Culture'; or worse still 'Good Taste.' Not much of a god for these times," I added.

"Oh, I don't know," Dalton struck in; "I'm not so sure of that! I can't see that these times differ much from any others. There's a big war on, yes; but that's nothing new, is it? Looks to me pretty much like the same old planet, right now. Never was much of a planet for the great majority; never will be. A few of us get all the prizes – always have. Some of us partly deserve 'em, but most of us just happen to be lucky. I don't see anything that's likely to change that arrangement. Do you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was his turn to stare at me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But conversation soon faded out between us, as we made our way through etched mysteries of black and silver under thickset leafless branches. An occasional light beckoned us from far ahead down our pavement vista; for Paris had not yet fully become that city – not of dreadful – but of majestic and beautiful night we were later to know, and to love with so changed and grave a passion.

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

"What the hell?" muttered Dalton, holding my eyes..

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

"Sirens," said Dalton. "The pompiers are out. I guess they've come, damn them, eh?"

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

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

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

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