Пользователь - WORLD'S END

V

The youth and his youthful tutor had rooms in a hotel near by. The walls had white wainscoting and pink flowered silk above it, and the chairs were upholstered to match. The elevators looked as if they were made of gold, and were of open grillwork, so that you could watch people rising up or sinking down. An elderly official in a grand uniform set the front doors to revolving for them, and young women musicians in red coats and gold braid played Hungarian dances while they ate their meals. It was a life of unimaginable luxury for Jerry Pendleton, whose father owned a couple of drug stores in a town of Kansas.

They got some books and faithfully studied every morning. After lunch they walked, and looked at pictures and the other sights of Paris, and then went to relieve Lanny's mother so that she could have a nap. The pair were a comfort to Marcel; for men have to be together, it appears; they just can't stand women all the time. Men understand why you have to get out into the world, in spite of danger and death. When Marcel was able to listen, he enjoyed hearing about American college life, including football; and about a trip on a cattle boat, and then tramping over Europe, sleeping in haystacks. He wished that he had thought of something so original when he was a youth.

Also, of course, he had to know about the war. Beauty had hoped never to hear of it again, but she had to read the news to him, and learn to think about strategy instead of broken bodies. Those two armies had locked themselves together, like wild stags which have got their horns caught and are doomed to butt each other around the forest until both of them drop. All that bitter winter the armies would thrust here and yield there, until gradually they got settled down into the earth. The Germans constructed an elaborate set of entrenchments, line behind line; to the defense of these lines they would bring up everything they had, and Britain and France would do the same on the other side of "no man's land." Each army was frantically getting ready for the spring "push" that was to end the war - so the experts all said, only they differed as to what the ending would be.

Winters in Paris are disagreeable, and people of means do not stay if they can help it. But Beauty hardly ever went out, and the boys didn't mind, because they were young and everything was new and delightful. They saw motion pictures, French and American; they went to plays, and Jerry improved his French. They had a piano in their suite - for Robbie wrote that he was making a pile of money, and Lanny might have anything he wanted, provided he did not smoke or drink or go with prostitutes.

Friends came to see Beauty and Marcel: Emily Chattersworth, very serious now, completely wrapped up in the affairs of her blesses; Sophie and her Eddie, she trying so hard to keep her man entertained and hoping that the sight of poor Marcel might teach him the cruelty and wickedness of fighting. But it didn't work that way; men seemed to be drawn to death like moths into the flame; they thought of vengeance rather than of safety. Lanny wrote to Rick, telling what had happened, and it surely did not act as a deterrent with the English boy; he longed all the more to get up there in the air and hunt a Taube.

The time came when the sufferer's burns were healed enough so that the bandages could be taken off. That was a time of fresh trials for Beauty - the doctors had to warn her, she must be prepared for the worst, and not let Marcel see any trace of horror in her face. He wouldn't have a mirror, but of course he would put his fingers to his face and feel what was there. His friends must help him get used to it, and make him believe that it made no difference to them.

Beauty, who had been named for her looks, and valued hers and others' very high among the gifts of life, had chosen a man who possessed fine blond hair and mustaches, grave, melancholy features, and an expression of romantic tenderness. Now he had no hair at all, just a red scalp, and his face was a flaming scar. His lips were gone on one side, so that he could only make a pretense at articulating the letters b and p. Out of the gaping wound his teeth grinned hideously, and the gum of the lower jaw was all exposed. Some day a facial surgeon might replace the lip, so the doctors assured him. Fortunately his eyesight was uninjured, but one of his upper eyelids was gone, and most of his ears.

Beauty had to go and look at that mask, and smile affectionately, and say that it didn't matter a bit. Marcel's right hand was well enough to be kissed, and that was where she kissed him. Since he liked so much to make jokes, she told him that she would take up needlework, like other old ladies, and learn to patch up his skin. Seriously she insisted that it was his soul she cared about, and that wasn't changed. After saying all this, she went off to the little room which she had to dress in, and there wept hysterically, cursing God and the Kaiser.

Lanny and Jerry, duly warned, went in armed with cheerfulness. "Well, do you think you can stand me?" asked the victim; and Lanny said: "Don't be silly, Marcel. You know we'd like you in sections if you came that way."

Jerry added: "I read an article about what the surgeons are doing, making new faces. Gosh, it takes your breath away!"

"They've taken away pretty nearly everything but my breath," replied the painter.

Lanny said: "They've left your eyes and your hands, and you'll go back to the Cap and paint better than ever." That was the way to talk!

VI

What was Beauty going to make of this blow which fate had dealt her? She believed in happiness and talked about it as a right. A minister's daughter, raised in a stuffy, uncultured home, she had learned to loathe incessant droning of hymns and preaching of tiresome duty; she had fled from it, and still avoided every mention of its symbols. But suddenly all those hated things had sprung as it were out of the earth, had seized her and bound her with chains which there could be no breaking.

Lanny was all tenderness and kindness, and when she wanted to weep he was there to console her. In his presence she wept for Marcel; he never knew that she went alone and wept for herself. Over and over she fought this bitter battle. No use trying to get away from it - her bridges were burned. She couldn't desert this wreck of a man, and whatever happiness she found would have to be by his side. She who was so dainty had had to accustom herself to blood and stenches; and now she would have to eat and sleep and walk and talk in the presence of what ordinary people see only in nightmares.

Even from her devoted son she must hide her rage at this fate. Even to herself she was ashamed to admit that she regretted her bargain and dreamed of a happiness she might have had in a far-off land of plenty and peace. She had to force herself to be loyal to her choice; but this moral compulsion was associated in her mind with a dull and stolid religion, full of phrases which seemed to have been designed to take the gaiety and charm out of existence. Mabel Blackless, seventeen years old and bursting with the joy of life, hadn't wanted to lay her burdens at the foot of the cross, or to have any redeeming blood spilled for her; she had wanted to see Paris, and had borrowed money and run away to join her brother.

And now it seemed that she was back where she had come from; teaching herself to carry the cross. Her best friends mustn't know about it, because if they did they would pity her, and to be pitied was unendurable. She must tie herself down once for all! In that mood she went out one day and told her story to the maire of the arrondissement, and arranged for him to come to the hospital. She went back and told Marcel what she had done, and refused to hear any of his objections, pretending to have her feelings hurt by them. With two of the nurses for witnesses, they were married under the French civil law.