“We’ll never get there,” Eve said, as calmly as she could. “You took the wrong road.”
“Don’t see how it happened,” the driver protested in a pathetic voice.
“There isn’t supposed to be any fighting on the road, for God’s sake, or they would never have told us to come this way.”
“Maybe,” he said sullenly, “but just when it gets quiet, see, there’re Germans waiting for you. And then they get you. That’s what my corporal told me.”
“I wish he were here now. I’d tell him what I think!” It was plain, she realized, that at best they would have to wait here until daylight and rescue. There was no point in considering the worst. She wrapped the skirt of her coat firmly around her ankles and eased herself down so that she was sitting on the stones of the hearth. In spite of her fear and her anger at this idiot poilu, she couldn’t continue to ignore the fact that her feet, in her new pair of red shoes, undeniably hurt. If she was going to be killed by a shell, she might just as well be sitting down in comfort, comparatively speaking, than standing up in shoes meant for a tour de chant and nothing else.
“You got a cigarette?” the boy asked.
“I don’t smoke. Here,” she answered, handing him the packet she always carried for any soldier who wanted one.
“PUT OUT THAT MATCH!”
Eve screamed and jumped up. A group of soldiers rushed into the farmhouse. They had crept up so quietly that neither she nor the driver had heard them approach. Petrified by shock, she stood with her back to the wall, expecting to die with a bayonet through her heart, until she came to her senses and realized that if she could understand the command, it must be in French.
“Thank God, thank God, how did you know we were here? Oh, thank God you came to save us,” she whispered.
“Save you? Who the hell are you? What the devil is a woman doing here?”
“I was going to Festubert … to perform …”
“You must be mad. Mad! What a damn fool woman! It’s in the other direction. You’re almost on top of the front, opposite Lens.”
“Lens? Where’s that?”
“Lens is on the German side of the front, last I heard,” Paul de Lancel said brusquely, as he turned away from her and began to give orders to the men under his command. They had been thrown back by a surprise attack coming from one of the many fortified machine-gun nests that protected the German’s artillery.
Four men were wounded, three too gravely to walk. The remaining three were unharmed. The situation was more serious than he had first realized, Paul discovered, as he moved among them, asking quiet questions. He judged that with the full moon that had already risen and the clear visibility that was expected, there was no chance of trying to transport the wounded men back to the trenches and medical help. In the first dim and confusing light of dawn he could send someone back with the news that they were trapped here. Meanwhile, he could only wait and do his best to help them live through the night.
“Can I help?” Eve asked, walking with caution between the men on the floor and coming close to the captain, before she spoke.
“Not unless you’re a nurse.” His voice was proccupied, dismissive.
Eve retreated to the cold fireplace. She hadn’t taken any of the Red Cross classes in which so many women were engaged. She had been too busy singing at various outposts along the front and, between trips, working at any theater that offered her a job for a few weeks, just in order to pay her rent.
In silence she listened to the few words that the men grunted, words so abbreviated and so weary that they might almost have been in a foreign language. Soon, whatever could be done for the wounded had been done by the able-bodied, and all eight men, including their captain, sat or lay on what, Eve mused, had once been a scrubbed and spotless farmhouse floor, its cleanliness some woman’s pride.
There would have been a fine log fire, she imagined, to fight the darkness of this cold October night, and certainly children gathered cozily around, doing the homework they had been given in the village school. A thick soup would have been cooking, hams and sausages would have hung from the ceiling, and outside, the farmer would almost have finished his inspection of his animals, eager for the moment when he would come inside to the scene of comfort he knew so well. His harvest would have been in for weeks, and his relatively lazy winter would lie ahead, night after night of warmth and enough to eat, his wife’s companionship and the joys of watching his children grow.
Once such a simple, ordinary life would have been all but unimaginable to her, or if she had been interested enough to attempt to visualize it, she would have disdained it as being brutish. A peasant’s life, a life without possibilities of change, a life that could be written down, from birth to death, in three short sentences. No chance to dare in that life; no chance to meet the sky halfway in a big red balloon; no chance to run away to Paris with the first man she had ever kissed; no chance to walk along the Grands Boulevards to the rhythm of a maxixe; no chance to star at the Olympia. To dare and to win.
How lucky she had been! And she hadn’t really known it, not known it fully, as she did now, just as the farmer and his wife didn’t know how lucky they had been until the mortar shells of two great nations destroyed their farmhouse and laid waste to their fields.
As time passed and the moon shone more brilliantly into the pile of stones that sheltered them, Eve was able to see the soldiers more clearly than she had been earlier. None of them was asleep. The wounded were in too much pain to allow their comrades to close their eyes for so much as a minute. Their groans were muted, and came at intervals, but even without knowing the time, Eve was aware that it was still many hours until morning.
There must be something she could do, even if she knew nothing about nursing, she told herself angrily. She just couldn’t sit here and watch them suffer without at least trying to take their minds off their pain. That unpleasant officer had said she couldn’t help. Just because she didn’t know how to roll a bandage didn’t mean that she was worthless. After all, Vincent Scotto had just written the enormously popular song Le Cri du Poilu, with its rousing refrain, “Our soldiers at the front, what do they want, a woman! a woman!”
Simpleminded, perhaps, but clear and direct enough, Eve told herself, and without asking permission, she began to sing in her softest possible voice, in her voice of spring lightning that could be heard in the last seat of the third balcony, had she wished it, but which, tonight, only carried across the small space that separated her from the soldiers. She sang the first song that came to her lips, her good-luck song, her audition song, Parlez-moi d’Amour. At the sound of her voice the officer muttered an oath of surprise, but Eve ignored him and continued, following with Mon Homme, for good measure. “When he touches me, I’m finished, for I’m only a woman and I have him under my skin.”
“Requests, gentlemen?” she asked as soon as she had finished with Mistinguett’s immortal hymn to the helplessness of a woman in love and the irresistible power of a man over her. And seven men answered her, some in voices so faint that she could hardly hear them, others eagerly, but each had a song he wanted to hear.
Eve sat on the hearth, and that whole night through she sang and sang, blessing the memory of all the melodies and lyrics she had heard once and never forgotten as she walked back and forth to her lessons through the streets of Dijon, for almost all the requests were for songs that went back to her girlhood. She could see the men only where the moonlight shone through the holes in the walls. Their faces were almost hidden, but those who weren’t strong enough to speak up whispered their requests to their comrades. She even sang for the soldier whose hapless driving had brought her to this place.
Paul de Lancel, his officer’s cap pulled down over his eyes, sat quietly, cradling in his arms a man whose legs were utterly useless. With every song this woman sang, he realized, some inner wound was slowly beginning to heal in him. Her voice expanded his heart, giving him back a glimpse, an intimation, of a place where lo
ve and laughter could be found. The elemental, caressing timbre of her voice, the rich humanity of it, that deeply feminine sound, a visceral warmth that existed nowhere on the front, that had nothing to do with the war, brought back the memory of so much he had forgotten. An impermanent vision? Unquestionably, but each of her songs, and their often banal words of ordinary human needs and hopes, of the deceptions of love, the joys of love, days and nights of love, began to restore the beginning of a belief in his own continued existence, a belief he had lost long ago. Would these hours be remembered? Would the long-dormant emotions she awakened, as he was enveloped in the magical world of her voice, endure in any form beyond this night? Probably not, he thought, but oh, how good were these moments of simple forgotten contentment, of tenderness.
Paul de Lancel never asked for a song for himself, for he was unwilling to take the place of any of his men, Finally there was a lull in their requests even though, to a man, they were still awake, and he spoke up. “Do you know any of the English soldiers’ songs?”
“ ‘The Roses of Picardy,’ of course, and ‘Tipperary’—everyone knows them, even if they don’t speak English.”
“ ‘Till We Meet Again’—do you know it too?”
“ ‘Smile a while, you kiss me sad adieu’… that one?” Eve asked.
“Yes,” he said eagerly. “Please.”
“Smile a while, you kiss me sad adieu,
When the clouds roll by I’ll come to you.
Then the skies will seem more blue,
Down in Lovers’ Lane, my dearie …
Wedding bells will ring so merrily,
Every tear will be a memory,
So wait and pray each night for me,
Till we meet again.”
Eve looked up as she came to the last line, and he said only, “Again … oh, just one more time.” Before she finished the short, simple, unforgettable melody, she saw that the captain had fallen asleep, a smile on his lips.
5
“TO think that some people have the luck to be born Swiss,” Vivianne de Biron sighed pensively as she and Eve sat in her kitchen on a day in the last week of December of 1916, sharing a pot of herb tea.
“Swiss? You always said that it wasn’t a country as much as a convalescent home,” Eve retorted, disbelievingly. Two and a half years of war had made little outward change in her splendidly preserved friend. Vivianne was as irreducibly Parisian as ever, like a metal that cannot be further refined by any means.
“ ‘A calm neutrality,’ that’s what the Schultess has promised them. That and fresh cream in their real coffee, no doubt. No boring herb tea for them.”
“Schultess?” Eve’s winged brows rose higher than ever under the small black Persian lamb toque that almost covered her siren’s hair. She was elegantly thinner than she had been when she first arrived in Paris three and a half years before, and when she walked down the street she strode with the inimitable confidence and panache of a woman who belonged to this city, a woman to whom the city, without question, belonged. “Who is Schultess?”
“The new president of Switzerland, as you’d know if you read the newspapers, Maddy. And our government finds nothing better to do than to raise the tax on adultery! Oh no, don’t laugh, my girl, I’m serious. Before this miserable war, the fine for adultery was twenty-five francs. Today they’ve changed it to a hundred francs and a few days in prison! I ask you, is that reasonable? Is it logical, is it rational? Is it even French? That they’ve rationed our gas and electricity and food makes sense—but what could a little adultery take away from winning the war? In my opinion this new tax is positively unpatriotic.”
Vivianne poured another cup of tea and regarded it without favor. “Reflect on it, Maddy. If a soldier is away from home and is able to take a little comfort with someone who isn’t his wife—or if his wife misses him but in his absence finds a small pleasure to enable her to endure her loneliness—why should anyone have to pay a tax? And who is the voyeur who is going to be searching under beds for adulterers instead of being at the front where he belongs, can you tell me that?”
“It’s beyond my capacities, Vivianne. I haven’t got that much imagination,” Eve replied, trying to repress her giggles.
“Ah, Maddy, you refuse to take anything seriously. Well, that’s your privilege,” Vivianne sniffed. “I suppose you think it’s intelligent that the government won’t allow the public to come into the theaters except in street clothes, too? No more evening gowns, no dinner jackets … as if that might impress the Germans enough so that they’d all swallow a few good mouthfuls of their own poison gas, and go running back to Berlin.”
“It’s worth trying,” Eve said absently. She did read the newspapers and she was aware, as much as Vivianne, that the battles of the Somme and of Verdun, during 1916, the most frightful year yet known in human history, had taken a toll of lives so vast that it was beyond the power of the mind to comprehend.
Abruptly she pulled her thoughts back to join her friend’s chatter. “Our allies are doing their best, even you must admit it, Vivianne,” Eve said. “The King of England has vowed not to drink alcohol, not even wine or beer, to help win the war. Imagine, if the rest of the country follows his example. Think of it—all those English without their whiskey—what could it lead to?”
“A certain victory—for the Germans,” Vivianne retorted. “At least no one is suggesting giving up the music hall. There isn’t a seat in any theater in Paris, with all the soldiers on leave wanting to be distracted.”
“I know. Since Jacques Charles got out of the military hospital and took over the Casino de Paris he’s more dynamic than ever—at the Olympia we never had such sumptuous costumes, such elaborate decors. Just wait till you see dozens of girls, with nothing on but G-strings, climbing up and down ladders ten meters tall. The band is playing something from America that I’ve never heard before—it’s called ragtime.”
Vivianne looked unconvinced, not at all pleased to be told that the Casino de Paris surpassed the theater in which she had known her days of glory.
“And do you like to sing this ‘ragtime’?”
“You don’t sing it, you dance to it, more or less. But I must leave you, Vivianne, dear. Time to do a little work. At least now I can come and visit you since the coast is clear” Eve nodded in the direction of the landing, toward the apartment in which she used to live Alain Marais, thanks to the weakness of his lungs after his bout of pneumonia, had noncombatant status in the army and was stationed at a supply depot far from Paris.
Eve got up to go. Vivianne thought she looked even more vivacious and alluring than ever before, in her coat of Parma violet wool, trimmed with an immense Persian lamb collar and cuffs, and a deep fur hem. As Eve turned toward the door of the kitchen she changed her mind and turned back to Vivianne.
“Let me ask you something, Vivianne. When you took me to the Olympia for my audition, didn’t it occur to you that I’d have to see Fragson perform and then I’d discover the truth about Alain?”
“That was more than three years ago,” the older woman protested.
“That’s not the answer to my question”
“I suppose it should have crossed my mind.… Perhaps it did, and I didn’t realize it … or perhaps … well, what if I had the notion that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for you to know how less-than-wonderful your Monsieur Marais was? Perhaps I hoped it might keep you from throwing yourself away on him for too long. In any case, I didn’t do it from conscious malice—but I wouldn’t be ashamed of myself if I had.”
“I knew about Fragson months before that audition. I went to the Olympia alone one day.”
“Ah.”
“Precisely. Women in love are such pathetic fools, Vivianne. It’s like a dreadful attack of willful stupidity. And once they’re out of love, they ask themselves how they could ever have made such utter misjudgments, such obvious mistakes, but they never do find an answer. Since Alain, I’ve decided that it was much wiser never to fall in lo
ve—and I haven’t, not even a little bit He did me a favor, although it didn’t seem that way at the time.”
“Ah.”
“That’s all you have to say? ‘Ah’?”
“You’re almost twenty-one. When you’re three times as old, you can tell me that again and I promise to begin to believe you.”
“I thought you were a professional cynic, Vivianne.”
“I am. About men—and a romantic about women.”
“He says he knows you, Maddy. But he says you don’t know his name. Shall I let him in?” The guardian of the stage door at the Casino de Paris was accustomed to mobs of soldiers trying to gain entrance backstage after the curtain fell on the show, and normally, war or no war, he told them to wait until Maddy came out. However, this one had obviously given him a good tip to induce him to approach Eve directly.
“What does he look like?” she asked, preoccupied. Her stage makeup had all been removed, and her arms were raised over her head as she brushed out her hair in every direction. Eve wore a light dressing gown of pale yellow silk, for it was warm in the month of May 1917. With the aureole of strawberry blond hair like a halo around her face she looked as positive as summer yet as tentative as spring, like a flower, ravished by the sun, with its open heart showing.
“He’s an officer, lots of ribbons. Good looking, since you ask me.”
Judith Krantz Page 12