Laurel was quartered in a WAC hotel, and he couldn’t visit her there. He had no trouble in getting a suite of rooms, for half the hotels of la ville lumière were empty since the Germans had gone. The telephones were working again, and he arranged to see her after he had got a bath and a shave—with cold water because there was no fuel in Paris. When she came, they ran to each other’s arms, and then held each other off and took a good look to make sure there was nothing missing. Such a lot of adventures they had been having, and such fun it was to tell them! Ladies first, of course; Laurel narrated how one of her editors had pulled wires and had got her the chance to come to Paris only three days after the Germans had left. She had witnessed the parade of the American forces through the Arc de Triomphe and the frenzy of the massed inhabitants, the most thrilling sight of her lifetime. It had been dangerous to be an American that day because everybody, men and women, wanted to kiss you!
She had made a story out of it, and Lanny pleased her by asking to read it right away. An enthusiastic story, a little bit hysterical, like Paris itself. Four years of shame and suffering, of hatred and loathing pressed down by terror; and then had come the landing in the south, and the news of uprisings among the Partisan forces everywhere. The Germans in Paris and its environs began rounding up the Resistance leaders, and that had brought matters to a head. The Paris police declared a strike, and an insurrection of the whole city followed. The Free French seized the central portions and the government buildings; barricades were thrown up in the streets, and for four days there was fighting. This forced the hand of the Allies, just as Lanny had told Georgie Patton it would. Georgie wasn’t the one to act, being far out to the east. It was General Ike who made the decision, and he politely picked out a French armored division to have the honor of making the first entry.
Supported by American forces, General Leclerc had fought his way up from Orléans. And what a story that made for a writer of fiction! His real name was the Marquis de Hautecloque, and he had been twice captured by the Germans and had twice escaped. He had made his way to Lake Chad in Central Africa, and there had organized an army of Senegalese troops, and had led them across the Sahara Desert to take part in the fighting in Libya. Now, a general of division, he had been landed across the Channel, and French history for all time would celebrate him as the man who had delivered Paris from the Hun.
XIII
Lanny’s leave in Paris was spent mostly in beauing his wife around and watching her work. She wasn’t satisfied with what she had got, but wanted to collect more details and spend a lot of time weighing them and deciding which were the most effective. She wanted to walk in delightful autumn weather and savor the taste of the most elegant of cities in the midst of one of those great convulsions for which it is famous. She had learned her French from books, and wanted to hear it spoken. She wanted to see the sights of war before they were cleared away: the burned-out tanks, the broken walls, the proclamations posted everywhere, first by Nazis and then by patriots.
Lanny introduced her to Julie Palma, who wasn’t hard to find; all the Partisans had come out of hiding now, and in most places had become the government, replacing the Vichy masters who had fled with the Germans. The various Resistance groups had come together—the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans Français, the Front National, the Mouvement de Libération Nationale, and Ceux de la Libération. Now they called themselves Comac, for Comité d’Action Militaire, and had set up staffs to direct the struggle all over the land.
Julie, who had been in the thick of things from the beginning, told inside stories about the conduct of the struggle and about the supposed-to-be truce of which Lanny had heard reports. There had been a crucial debate in the headquarters of Comac, at which Julie had been present. The Consul-General of Sweden had been in negotiation with the Germans for several days, and he had pleaded with the liberation chiefs to be patient. General von Choltitz, the German commander, had wanted a truce and threatened that if it were not agreed to and kept he would wipe out the city. Many of the Partisans had wanted to agree because they had so few weapons.
But the fighting men had argued that the way to get weapons was to take them; to form small squads and raid the German stores, to capture German cars and tanks and turn them against the enemy. That was the way the Partisans had been getting weapons all over the country, and surely the capital city must not lag behind. If Paris let this German garrison get away, they would merely be condemning the smaller cities and towns to destruction by the same foes. So the vote was for fighting, and the barricades went up, and the German squad cars discovered that they could no longer race here and there to put down trouble the moment it started.
For four years Laurel’s husband had been declaring that the realities of this war were exceeding anything that fiction writers had thought up, and here was the proof once more. Julie took her two comrades to the place where the historic debate, so vital to the future of la ville lumière, had taken place. The underground fighters had made their headquarters in a fortress built literally underground, and in which surely no fiction writer would have asked his readers to believe. Eighty-five feet beneath the city’s surface, protected by a layer of limestone sixty feet thick, with steel doors, gas-proof, and a ventilating system pumping fresh air through it; with its own lighting and heating plant, telephone connections, and tunnels running to every part of Paris and even to distant suburbs—such was the military hideout which had been constructed by the French Minister of War in the critical year of 1939. And that secret had been kept from the German occupation for four years.
The tunnels were for the most part ancient, for through the centuries Paris had been mined with a vast network of quarries, catacombs, sewers, and finally the métro, the city’s underground railroad. The whole thing made a labyrinth in which you might have lost yourself and never come out. Julie’s friends were taken in by way of the métro station at the Place Denfert-Rochereau; because the elevators were not working, they had to go down a hundred and twenty-eight steps to the fortress doors. She gave the password, and they were admitted. Later they were introduced to Colonel Rol, the onetime sheet-metal worker who had been the active head of the Resistance all through the war.
Blond and blue-eyed, precise and elegant in manner, this man would have been taken for a poet or a scholar, and his age would have been guessed at no more than thirty. Laurel tried to get him to talk about himself, but did not succeed; he wanted her to write about the army of school children, so he called them, trained under the very noses of an enemy who thought he had the last word about youth training and also about secrecy. Colonel Rol showed them one of the textbooks which had been used in this liberation school, an innocent-looking little pamphlet with a cover showing a peasant plowing and a happy boy waving his hat. When you opened the book you read: “Chapter I: German Weapons. (A) The German Pistol. (B) The Automatic Rifle. (C) The Machine Gun.”
XIV
The next day Julie took them to the scene of one of the battles, the Préfecture de Police. It is situated on the Ile de la Cité, an island of the Seine in the heart of Paris. The grandson of Budd Gunmakers had a most vivid recollection of the place, inside as well as out, for just after the Peace Conference in the year 1920 he had fallen under suspicion of the Deuxième Bureau for having in his possession some Communist literature belonging to his “Red” uncle, Jesse Blackless. They had made Bertillon measurements of him, and a commissaire with a black spade beard had put him through a severe interrogation. Then it had seemed amusing, but during the days when Lanny had been playing a Fascist role it had caused him many a qualm to know that his identification was in the possession of both the Paris police and those of Rome.
Now Paris was in the possession of the Reds and the Pinks, plus General Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle. How they were going to get along together was a problem about which there were as many opinions as there were Frenchmen, not to mention women. Julie discussed it on the way to the Préfecture. When they came to the Boulevard du P
alais she stopped to tell them how, at this very spot, she had had to throw herself on the ground to escape German machine-gun fire. Then she had run to the Préfecture, and the door of the courtyard had been opened to let her in. The place had been full of trucks and weapon carriers captured from the enemy; and up in the windows had been men with English, French, American, and German weapons, all clamoring for more ammunition of their special sorts.
That had been a day which a former schoolmistress was never going to forget. She had gone to the place to make a report on the activities of her group and had been caught by an attack of the SS upon the ancient building. She didn’t know about shooting a gun, but had worked a switchboard at the school now and then, so she took that duty while the fight was going on, knowing all the while that if the place were taken she would be stood against a wall in the courtyard and shot. The German tanks had come in the afternoon, and their guns had blasted the door leading out to the cathedral square. The opening was blocked by trucks and sandbags, and the fighting men were filling bottles with gasoline to use upon the tanks if they tried to force their way in. The enemy infantry didn’t dare come up because of the fire from the building.
As a result of such activities Raoul’s little wife had become quite military in her conversation. She explained that city buildings, made of stone, and with windows, stairways, and roofs, are surprisingly good places for ambushes; you can shoot quickly and get away unseen. Street barricades slow up traffic, and a car going one way can shoot up a car going the other way and make its escape while the shot-up car is trying to turn, assuming that the driver is alive to try. As a result of such factors, and of careful rehearsing and “dry runs,” the losses of the Partisans during the ten days of fighting were surprisingly small compared with those sustained by the enemy. The German trucks and cars just couldn’t be protected against the numbers who were setting traps for them, and when the Allied armies arrived ten thousand of the enemy were surrounded and forced to surrender. Hitler had given orders that Paris was to be destroyed, but the orders had not been carried out, and Lanny had a guess as to the reason; General von Stülpnagel, Military Governor of France, had been active in the plot against Hitler’s life, and had managed to see that the Paris garrison was commanded by officers who shared his hatred of the Nazis.
The result of these days with Julie Palma was that Lanny’s wife fell in love with the ex-schoolmistress and wanted to put her into the magazine and perhaps into a book. It was inspiring to meet people who had lived their faith and held on to it in spite of all disappointments. So many turned into tired radicals and took to living off the movement, or quit and lived by denouncing the movement. So many human organisms were unequal to the strain of being heroes, or martyrs, or saints—whatever name you chose to give to people who accepted new truth, spoke it boldly, and stood by it regardless of consequences.
Laurel voiced that sad idea, and Julie said, “We are having a flare-up of hope and excitement now; but there is a long stretch of privation and struggle ahead of us, and maybe we shall split up into factions as we did before. People who hope for a peaceful and co-operative world have a long job of education to do, and perhaps we shan’t live to see the end.”
The literary lady from outre mer put her arm about this nervous, high-strung little Frenchwoman. “Come and let us feed you at least one square meal,” she said with a warm smile.
BOOK NINE
Feats of Broil and Battle
26
A House Divided
I
Lanny had the de Bruyne family very much on his conscience, but he put off communicating with them, hoping that he would get some definite news of Charlot. He had written to Raoul at the Toulon address, asking him to write to Ribault in Cannes to inquire what had happened. Presumably mail service along the coast was restored; the trouble was, Lanny had left his military unit, and how prompt would they be in forwarding a letter? He had written also to Jerry Pendleton’s wife, asking her to find out if she could; but the same trouble applied there also.
The news reached him by a different route. Julie Palma came with a letter from her husband in Toulon, telling how his group had blown up the bridges and railroad lines in a semicircle about that city, and had received the surrender of many groups of Germans. He added, “If you see Lanny Budd, tell him that Charlot gained the support of several officers in Cannes, but their movement was betrayed, and several days after the Americans landed Charlot was taken out behind the ice house at Bienvenu and shot. Poor fellow, he changed his mind too late. But I suppose it will help his family up north.”
So Lanny had to go as the bearer of this sad news. He took Laurel along, because she was a writer and wanted to know the French people, and this gratin sort were not so easy to meet; also, she had a normal curiosity concerning a family that had played an important part in her husband’s life. The hotel porter managed to find them a small Citroën car, with no questions asked as to the essence. They drove out into the country to the northwest, by the route which the American troops had followed in reverse, coming in under the Arc de Triomphe through the madly cheering throngs. Now those jours de gloire were over, and the highway was empty of everything except military cars and a few peasant carts bringing in produce. The autumn rains had come and the landscape was dreary.
When they got near to the place Lanny pointed out the landmarks. Here was where he had stopped his car and Marie had joined him when they had gone away together for a summertime trip through Normandy and Brittany and the “château country.” Just over there was the stile near which he had sat talking in whispers to Julie Palma a couple of months ago. And here was the red-brick villa called a château; here was the rear entrance with the gate into the garden, and here the front drive with a box hedge now permitted to grow wild.
And here was the family manservant, almost as old as his master; and the drawing-room which Lanny had so often described to his wife. While they waited to be announced she did not stand on ceremony but went straight to the fireplace in which a wood fire was burning. Over the mantel hung a portrait of a woman with delicate, rather pale features; a woman in a light summer dress, standing by a rosebush. Laurel stood gazing into her dark brown eyes; woman spoke to woman, and Lanny stood in the background, watching, but not interfering.
II
“So you are Marie de Bruyne,” said Laurel. “And you loved him.”
“I loved him as long as I had life,” said Marie.
“I can see that you are kind,” said Laurel. “You are lovely, and he was not deceived about you.”
“Surely I never tried to deceive him,” said Marie. “You do not have to be ashamed for him.”
“I have tried not to be jealous,” said the wife, with just a trace of a smile.
“He is a better husband for what I taught him,” said the amie. “It was a long time ago, but he has not forgotten.”
“No, he will never forget,” said the wife. “I have given up wanting him to forget. It is a little hard, for sometimes I think that he loved you more than he loves me.”
“There is no grading in love,” said the amie. “No two human beings are exactly alike, and no two women can give a man the same thing. Let us be kind in our memories of each other.”
“Oh, you are very sweet!” said the wife. “I cannot love him unless I love you too.”
“I would have loved you if I had known you,” said the amie—and did the portrait smile? “But you would have had to look for another man.”
“Perhaps you are right,” said the novelist. “I am thinking of putting it into a story. Would you mind?”
“Not at all,” said the Frenchwoman. “But you would have to understand our customs.”
“I have tried to,” said the lady from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. “I am still trying. You will help me.”
“Take good care of him,” said the mother. “He is not a difficult man to manage, but you mustn’t let him know that you are doing it.”
“Oh, surely not!” s
aid the wife. “It has been a great relief to meet you.”
“Perhaps we shall meet again, somewhere in the next world,” said the memory. “It will be a pleasure to compare notes.”
“Yes indeed,” said the living one. “I have the better of you now, but then, perhaps, matters will be reversed.”
III
Laurel Creston, novelist, had been advised by her husband to read one of the great American novels, The Ambassadors, by Henry James, whom Lanny described as the leisure-class historian. The central figure of this story is a young American of independent means who has chosen to reside in Paris. The members of his strait-laced Boston family wonder why, and after some years have passed they send over two of their number—the ambassadors—to find out. They meet a charming and cultured married lady, somewhat older than their young relative, and after they have come to admire her they make the shocking discovery that she is the young man’s amie in the French significance of the word; she has made the young man over into an urbane and cultivated person, and the dilemma of the family as they come to realize this fact is presented with the quietest possible humor by a shrewd observer of the well-to-do and well-pleased-with-themselves. Henry James has been described as a novelist who wrote like a psychologist, while his brother William, the psychologist, wrote like a novelist.
It was a picture of two civilizations, the puritan and the hedonist, confronting each other. The teller of the story took no side, he told you what happened, and left it for you to understand if you could, and to draw what conclusions seemed proper. To Laurel, reading it, the story seemed like a paraphrase of the one which Lanny had told her from long ago—only a little more than two decades, but what a cycle of history had intervened!
One Clear Call I Page 73