I put my arm firmly about her waist and almost lifted her along with me.
By the time we had reached the Pont Royal, the high-explosive bursts were directly over us; the air rocked with them. I detected, too, at intervals, another more ominous sound--that deep, pulsing growl which no one having once heard it could ever mistake.
"Gothas," I growled back at them, "flying low. They"ve ducked under the guns!"
And instantly I swung Susan across the open _quai_ to the left and plunged with her up an inky defile, the Rue du Bac.
"Where are you taking me?" she demanded, half breathless, dragging against my arm.
"To the first available _abri_," I cried at her, under the sky"s reckless tumult. "Don"t stop to argue about it!"
But she halted me right by the corner of the Rue de Lille. "If it"s going to be a bad raid, Ambo, I must get to Jimmy"s baby--I _must_!"
"Impossible! It"s at least two miles--and this isn"t going to be a picnic, Susan! You"re coming with _me_!" I tightened my arm about her; every instant now I expected the shattering climax of the bombs.
Then, just as we crossed the Rue de Lille, something halted me in my turn. About a hundred yards at my right, down toward the Gare D"Orsay, and from the very middle of the black street-chasm, a keen, bladelike ray of light flashed once and again--sharp, vertical rapier-thrusts--straight up through the thin mist-veil into the treacherous sky. Followed, doubtless from a darkened upper window, a woman"s frantic shriek: "_Espion--espion!_"
Pistol shots next--and rough cries--and a pounding charge of feet....
Right into my arms he floundered, and I tackled him and fell with him to the cobbles and fought him there blindly, feeling for his throat. This lasted but a moment. Gendarmes tore us apart, in a brief crossing flash of electric-torches--and I caught just one glimpse of a bare bullet-head, of a bloated, discolored face, of prominent staring eyes, maddened by fear. There could be no mistake. It was our little man of the Pantagruelian banquet. We had watched him eating his last fabulous meal--his farewell to Egypt.
And that is all I just then clearly remember.... I am told that nine bombs fell in a sweeping circle throughout this district; one of them, in the very courtyard of the War Office; one of them--of 300 kilos--perhaps a square from where we stood. There was a rush past of hurtling fragments--gla.s.s, chimney-tiles, chips of masonry, _que sais-je_?--and even this I report only because I have been credibly so informed.
What next I experienced was pain, unlocalized at first, yet somehow d.a.m.nably concentrated: pure, white-hot essence of pain. And through the stiff h.e.l.l of it I was, and was not, aware of someone--some one--some _one_--murmuring love and pity and mortal anguish....
"Ambo--you wouldn"t leave me--not you! Not you, Ambo--not alone...."
The pain dimmed off from me in an ebbing, dull-red wave; great coils of palpable darkness swirled down upon me to smother me; I struggled to rise from beneath them--fling them off.... From an infinite distance, a woman"s cry threaded through them, like a needle through m.u.f.flings of wool, and p.r.i.c.ked me to an instant, a single instant, of clear consciousness. I opened my eyes on Susan"s; I strove to answer them, tell her I understood. Susan says that I did answer them--that I even smiled. But I can feel back now only to a vast sinking away, depth under depth under depth, down--down--down--down....
XI
The rest, however, I thank G.o.d, is not yet silence; though it is high time to make an end of this long and all too faulty record.
They did various things to me at the hospital, from time to time; they removed hard substances from me that were distinctly out of place in my interior; they also removed certain portions of my authentic anatomy--three fingers of my left hand, among others, and my left leg to the knee. This was not in itself agreeable, and I shall always regret their loss; yet those weeks of progressive operation and tardy recuperation were, up to that period, the happiest, the most fulfilled weeks of my life. And surely egotism can go no farther! For these weeks of my triumphant happiness were altogether the darkest, saddest, cruellest weeks of the war. In a world without light, my heart sang in my breast, sang hallelujahs, and would not be cast down. Susan loved me--_me_--had always loved me! Rheims soon might fall, Amiens might fall, the channel ports, Paris, London, the Seven Seas--the World! What did it matter! Susan loved me--loved me!
And even now--though Susan is ashamed for me that I can say it--though I feel that I ought to be ashamed that I can say it--though I wonder that I am not--though I try to be--well, I am _not_ ashamed!
Final Note, by Susan--_insisted upon_: "But all the same, secretly, he is ashamed. For there"s n.o.body in the world like Ambo, whether for dearness or general absurdity. Why shouldn"t he have been a little happy, if he could manage it, throughout those interminable weeks of physical pain? He suffered day and night, preferring not to be kept under morphine too constantly. I won"t say he was a hero; he _was_, but there"s nothing to be puffed up about nowadays in that. If the war has proved anything, it is that in nearly every man, when his particular form of Zero Hour sounds for him, some kind of a self-despising hero is waiting, and ready to act or endure or be broken and cast away. We all know that now. It"s the cornerstone for a possible Utopia: no, it"s more than that--it"s the whole foundation. But I didn"t mean to say so when I started this note.
"All I meant to say was that you must never take Ambo _au pied de la lettre_. I"m not in the least as he"s hymned me--but that, surely, you"ve guessed between the lines. What is much more important is that he"s not in the least as he has painted himself. But unless I were to rewrite his whole book for him--which wouldn"t be tactful in an otherwise spoiled and contented wife--I could never make this clear, or do my strange, too sensitive man the full justice he deserves. He"s--oh, but what"s the use! There isn"t anybody in the world like Ambo."
XII
More than a year has already pa.s.sed since those dark-bright days, the spring of 1918. Down here in quiet, silvery Provence, at our nursing-home for children--I call it ours--the last of the cherry blossoms are falling now in our walled orchard close. As I write, James Aulard Kane sits--none too steadily--among a snow of petals, and sweeps them together in miniature drifts with two very grubby little hands. He is a likely infant and knows definitely what he wants from life, which is mostly food. He talks nothing but French--that is, he emits the usual baby grunts and snortings in a funny harsh accent caught from his Ma.r.s.eillaise nurse. Susan is far too busy to improve this accent as she would like to do: perhaps it would be simpler to say that she is far too busy. She is the queen-bee of this country hive; and I--I am a harmless enough drone. They let me dawdle about here and do this and that; but the sun grows more powerful daily, and I sleep a good deal now through the warmer hours. I am haunted by fewer mysterious twinges, here and there, when I sleep....
Meanwhile, the world-cauldron bubbles, and the bubbles keep bursting, and I read of their bursting and shake my head. When a man begins shaking his head over the news of the day, he is done for; a back number. Susan never shakes her head; and it"s rather hard on her, I think, to be the wife of a back number. But she"s far too thoughtful of me ever to seem to mind.
Only yesterday I quoted some lines to her, from Coventry Patmore. Susan doesn"t like Coventry Patmore; the mystical Unknown Eros he celebrates strikes her as--well, perhaps I had better not go into that. But the lines I quoted--they had been much in my mind lately--were these:
_For want of me the world"s course will not fail; When all its work is done the lie shall rot; The truth is great and shall prevail When none cares whether it prevail or not._
"Stuff! We do care!" said Susan. "And it won"t prevail, either, unless we make it. Who"s working harder than you to make it prevail, I should like to know!"
You see how she includes me.... So this book is my poor tribute to her thoughtfulness, this Book of Susan.
But sometimes I sit and wonder. Shall we ever, I wonder, go back to my ancestral mansion on Hillhouse Avenue and quietly settle down there to the old securities, the old, slightly disdainful calm? I doubt it.
Tumps, ancient valetudinarian, softened by age; Togo, rheumatic, but steeped in his deeply racial, his Oriental indifferentism--they are the inheritors of that august tradition, and they become it worthily. For them it exists and is enough; for us it is shattered. Phil, a later Waring, is lost in Russia. Jimmy is gone. But Susan will do, I know, more than one woman"s part to help in creating a more livable world for his son, and I shall gain some little strength for that coming labor, spending it as I can. It will be an interesting world for those who survive; a dusk chaos just paling eastward. I shall hardly see even the beginnings of dawn. But--with Susan beside me--I shall have lived.
Farewell, then, Hillhouse Avenue!... Make way for Birch Street!
(THE END)