Paris awoke to the 14th of July—Bastille Day—without knowing that, as it had marked the beginning of the end of the ancien régime, it was now to mark the last hour of the peril of France. It was fitting that this great national fête should bring to an end the days when the boche was to be feared, and that to-morrow was to see the beginning of the end. But Paris did not know. The air was heavy with portent; events impended.... There was present in every heart the apprehension that the unthinkable might happen, and that their beloved city might, within a period of days, fall into the hands of the enemy.... Bastille Day was the last day of the reign of fear.... The event was still on the knees of the gods; Paris could not read the future, but it could make holiday with destruction at its door. The heart of Paris was steadfast.... Its fortitude was on the eve of its reward.
Paris did not know that to-morrow the boche would lunge at its throat, throwing a weight into the thrust that it had never been able to throw before; nor did Paris know that its armies and its allies would receive that thrust without faltering, and would hurl upon it such rain of fire and steel as would crush it to the ground futile and staggering.... Paris did not know, nor did the brain of any human being know, that but three days must pass before that man of infinite patience and courage who was generalissimo of the forces which barred the path of the Hun would make his first mighty stride toward victory, a stride which should become a steady march, never flagging, never stopping, until his armies should have won the precious right to march with heads erect under that great pile which dominates their city—the Arc de Triomphe.
It was such events which impended on this 14th of July....
Kendall Ware and Andree had chosen the Place des Ternes as the most advantageous point from which to see the parade, and though it was raining a trifle when they started out, with skies which promised a drizzly day, they were not to be deterred. The little concrete oval which is the meeting-place of the Boulevard de Courcelles, the Avenue de Wagram, the Avenue des Ternes, and the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré was already crowded. People splashed about in its shallow puddles and jostled one another between its flower-booths, which were doing a thriving business. The parade was already passing with martial music and amid much clapping of hands, but less shouting than would have obtained in an American city.
Ken edged Andree as near to the street as he could. For him it was easy to look over the heads of the people and to see the marching soldiers, but little Andree might as well have been at home across the river. She could see nothing, and there was no box nor chair to be had.
“Shall I lift you up?” he asked.
“Mais non. You cannot. I am of such a largeness!... But I shall see.”
“I’ll sit you on my shoulder and tell folks you are my granddaughter,” he said.
“Regardez!” She took a small rectangular mirror from her sac and held it before his eyes. Then she turned her back on the parade and, holding the mirror at an angle above her head, looked into it with quaint intentness.
“Oh, I see!” she exclaimed. “Behol’, the parade it marches in the glass.”
Ken laughed, but he was a trifle annoyed and embarrassed. Andree herself, he thought, was so natural, so herself, that she would have not the least thought in the world of making herself ridiculous or conspicuous, but this absurd makeshift of hers would certainly attract the attention of the crowd—and nobody knew what a Parisian crowd might do. He hesitated, looked about him uncomfortably, and decided to hold his peace. It was well, for within a radius of thirty feet a dozen men and women were doing exactly as Andree did. They had come prepared. Each of them stood facing away from the procession, a mirror held above the heads of the crowd, and it was with difficulty Kendall restrained his laughter. Their expressions were all so eager, so interested. It was absurd. With all that was going on behind them, they peered as if bewitched into rectangles of glass, and shouted, or lowered their mirrors to clap their hands just as if they were seeing living soldiers instead of tiny reflections....
The crowd interested him more than the marching men. There was a good-natured simplicity, a lack of reserve, a childishness about them, yet there were a bigness, a pathos, and a grandeur in their bearing.... Boys and young men mounted into trees; couples carrying bouquets scurried up and down the line, seeking a point where they might penetrate to the street; here was a woman weeping and smiling at once. She was in black.... And everywhere flowers! Now and then a girl would run out from the curb to hand a blossom to some poilu or Italian or Englishman or Portuguese.... Every French soldier marched with a smile and with a posy nodding from the muzzle of his gun. The street was thick with flowers and the air rained flowers.
The Americans passed. In their guns were no blossoms, on their tunics were no bouquets. They marched very stiffly, erect, business-like, with eyes to the front. The French had shuffled by jovially with nods and smiles. One could tell they had seen the war and were marching men, but there was no stiffness, no rigidity. They were like the defense of their great general—elastic. The Italians grinned cheerfully; so did the Portuguese; even the English were somewhat relaxed—but all these had known four years of war.... The Americans, marching like one man, like a splendid machine, seemed, somehow, sterner, of more warlike stuff. They struck the eye and won the applause of the multitude.... But they were of no sterner stuff, nor would they have asserted themselves to be better fighting-men than the sturdy poilus or the wiry Tommies.... They were younger—that was what impressed one. Their youth cried aloud.... Amid those soldiers of France and England and Italy and Belgium they looked like boys—and yet their age might not have been greater than these others—for the others had seen four years of war.... But they were splendid, these young men from another world, and the heart of Paris went out to them....
A hand touched Kendall’s arm and he turned.
“Why, Maude!” he exclaimed, and shot a startled glance toward Andree.
She had not seen, but was peering into her mirror.
“How glad you are to see me!” She laughed. “Really, I’ve nothing catching. What’s the matter?...” She glanced about and saw Andree. “Oh!” she said. “I’m glad. I wanted to know her.”
“I told you—” he began; but it was Andree who interrupted.
“Bon jour, Mademoiselle Knox,” she said, gravely. “We have met one little time.”
“Yes, indeed, and I have wanted so much to meet you again. I have told Mr. Ware....”
“And I, too, have wanted to know you. I have said it to him, yes, many times. I have said that I shall to know thees Miss Maude Knox—but”—she shrugged her shoulders—“les Américains are droll.... He would not.”
“He can’t help himself now, can he? Now that we know we want to be acquainted with each other, there’s nothing he can do about it.”
“Oh, I do not onderstan’. You speak trop vite, mademoiselle. My English it is of the worst.”
“And my French is non-existent. But that doesn’t matter in the least, does it? We shall get on.”
For those girls there was now something of much greater importance than the parade, and they promptly forgot it. Maude moved over to Andree’s side and they began the sort of conversation that women use when they are appraising each other with serious intention. Ken listened uneasily. There was nothing he could do. This thing that he had desired not to happen had happened, and that was all there was to it. He pretended to watch the parade, but his mind was concentrated on what the girls were saying. The girls appeared to have forgotten him as well as the marching men.
Ken was acutely apprehensive, but of what he was apprehensive he did not know. The thought that Andree and Maude were together, chatting, becoming acquainted, seemed to him very threatening. He had been in a holiday humor, but that humor was gone. He frowned and was conscious of both irritation and depression. It was not right for them to meet. Something was sure to come of it.
It was not at all that he felt that Andree was not a fit companion for Maude Knox. That was not it. He was not ashamed of Andree, and, strangely enough, when one considers his temperament and the hereditary impulses which stirred within him, he was not ashamed of his relations with her. It was an intangible apprehension, a feeling that one woman whom he knew he loved and another woman with whom he might be in love could not meet without unpleasant results to him.
There was curiosity, too, which grew stronger. More than once he had compared Andree with Maude Knox when neither was present, but now they were together, at his side, under his eyes.... He edged away a trifle with elaborate unconsciousness, and presently reached a point from which he could study the girls with covert glances.
It was not so much their appearances that he compared as it was their selves as he knew them, and as they were indicated by what met the eye. He was trying to arrive at a knowledge of what each girl meant in his life, what she could contribute to his life. Perhaps this was wholly selfish, but choice must ever be selfish. It is after choice is made that one may be generous and self-denying.
The contrast between Andree and Maude was so extreme that they seemed to have nothing in common but their sex, and as Ken considered he saw they had not even this in common. At least their conception of it and of its duties and possibilities and obligations and uses were as different as the color of their eyes or the expressions of their faces. One could not see Andree without being conscious that she was a woman, of the femininity of her, and that the chief business of her life was to be the complement of some man. The first emotion that Andree excited was tenderness.... As one looked at Maude Knox his first thought was comradeship, followed by a mental note that she would be reliable, capable of taking care of herself. Maude was not beautiful, but she was pretty, with a clean-cut, boyish prettiness that spoke of health of mind and of body. She was not the sort a man would fall in love with at first sight, but rather one who would first be admired and then loved.... Andree would be loved first, then admired as the sweetness of herself unfolded under the urging of love. Andree was fragile. Ken looked at her lips, perfectly drawn, delicate, sensitive—her most eloquent feature. They were lips to kiss, lips to give kisses. There, perhaps, stood the chief difference between these girls and their attitude toward life: that Andree would give, give, give—asked no other happiness but to give of herself and her sweetness and her tenderness and her love—while Maude would demand an exchange. She, too, could love, but always there would be inhibitions and reservations. She would take thought of practical matters, be efficient in love and marriage. Not that she would be selfish, Ken felt sure, but that she would see to it her relations with the man she loved would be well organized and stabilized. She would be a wife and a comrade to the man she married, and perhaps a dominant force; Andree would be wife and sweetheart, with no thought of dominating, but only of giving, of adding to the happiness of the man she loved.
If love were cruel to Andree, and the man she worshiped unkind, she would fade silently, withdraw into herself, and suffer; Maude would have suffered, but she would have faced the matter and held her own. It would be possible for Maude to go through life alone; that Andree should do so was utterly unthinkable. This was, perhaps, because Andree thought of herself only as a woman, and as a woman whose life must be bound up with the life of some man. Maude Knox thought of herself as an individual, a distinct entity with rights and pur............