Kitabı oku: «The Book of Susan: A Novel», sayfa 19

II

And now, properly apprehensive reader – whom, in the interests of objectivity, which has never interested me, I should never openly address – are you not unhappy in the prospect of another little tour through trench and hospital, of one more harrowing account of how the Great War made a Great Man of him at last?

Be comforted! One air raid I cannot spare you; but I can spare you much. To begin with, I can spare you, or all but spare you, a month or so over three whole years.

You may think it incredible, but it is merely true, that I had been in Europe for more than three years – and I had not as yet seen Susan. Phil had seen her, just once; Jimmy had seen her many times; and I had run into them – singly, never together – off and on, here and there, during those slow-swift days of unremitting labor. If to labor desperately in a heartfelt cause be really to pray, the ear of Heaven has been besieged! But, in common humanity, there was always more crying to be done than mortal brains or hands or accumulated wealth could compass. Once plunged into that glorious losing struggle against the appalling hosts of Misery, one could only fight grimly on – on – on – to the last hoarded ounce of strength and determination.

But the odds were hopeless, fantastic! Those Titan forces of human suffering and degradation, so half-wittedly let loose throughout Europe, grew ever vaster, more terrible in maleficent power. They have ravaged the world; they have ravaged the soul. An armistice has been signed, a peace treaty is being drafted, a League of Nations is being formed – or deformed – but those Titan forces still mock our poor efforts with calamitous laughter. They are still in fiercely, stubbornly disputed, but unquestionable possession of the field – insolent conquerors to this hour. The real war, the essential war, the war against the unconsciously self-willed annihilation of earth's tragic egoist, Man, has barely begun. Its issue is ever uncertain; and it will not be ended in our days..

Phil and Jimmy had gone over on the same boat, via England, about the middle of October, 1914. At that time organized American relief-work in Europe was really nonexistent, and in order to obtain some freedom of movement on the other side, and a chance to study out possible opportunities for effective service, Phil had persuaded Heywood Sampson to appoint him continental correspondent for the new review; and Jimmy went with him, ostensibly as his private secretary.

It was all the merest excuse for obtaining passports and permission to enter Belgium, if that should prove immediately advisable after reaching London. It did not. Once in London, Phil had very soon found himself up to the eyes in work. Through Mr. Page, the American Ambassador – so lately dead – he was introduced to Mr. Herbert C. Hoover, and after a scant twenty minutes of conversation was seized by Mr. Hoover and plunged, with barely a gasp for breath, into that boiling sea of troubles – the organization of the Commission for Relief in Belgium. It does not take Mr. Hoover very long to size up the worth and stability of any man; but in Phil he had found – and he knew he had found – a peculiar treasure. Phil's unfailing patience, his thoroughness and courtesy, quickly endeared him to all his colleagues and did much to make possible the successful launching of the vastest and most difficult project for relief ever undertaken by mortal men. Thus, almost overnight, Jimmy's private secretaryship became anything but a sinecure. For nearly three months their labors held them in London; then they were sent – not unadventurously – to Brussels; there to arrange certain details of distribution with Mr. Whitlock, the American Minister, and with the directors of the Belgian Comité National.

But from Brussels their paths presently diverged. Jimmy, craving activity, threw himself into the actual work of food distribution in the stricken eastern districts; while Phil passed gravely on to Herculean labors at the shipping station of the "C. R. B." in Rotterdam. He remained in Rotterdam for upward of a year. Susan, meanwhile, had been driven with the Belgian Army from Furnes, and was now attached to the operating-room of a small field or receiving-hospital, which squatted amphibiously in a waterlogged fragment of village not far from the Yser and the flooded German lines. It was a post of danger, constantly under fire; and she was the one woman who clung to it – who insisted upon being permitted to cling to it, and carried her point; and, under conditions fit neither for man nor beast, unflinchingly carried on. Mona Leslie was no longer beside her. She had retired to Dunkirk to aid in the organization of relief for ever-increasing hordes of civilian refugees.

And where, meanwhile, was one Ambrose Hunt, sometime dilettante at large?

It had proved impossible for me to sail with Phil and Jimmy. Just as the preliminary arrangements were being made, Aunt Belle was stricken down by apoplexy, while walking among the roses of her famous Spanish gardens in Santa Barbara, and so died, characteristically intestate, and, to my astonishment, I found that I had become the sole inheritor of her estate; all of "Hyena Parker's" tainted millions had suddenly poured their burdensome tide of responsibilities – needlessly and unwelcomely – upon me. There was nothing for it. Out to California, willy-nilly, I must go, and waste precious weeks there with lawyers and house agents and other tiresome human necessities.

The one cheering thought in all this annoying pother was – and it was a thought that grew rapidly in significance to me as I journeyed westward – that fate had now made it possible for me to purify Hyena Parker's millions by putting them to work for mankind. – Well, they have since done their part, to the last dollar; they have spent themselves in the losing battle against Misery, and are no more. Nothing became their lives like the ending of them. But for all that, the world, you see, is as it is – and the battle goes on.

Phil kept in touch with me from the other side, in spite of his difficulties – as did Jimmy and Susan – and he had prepared the way for me when at length I could free myself and sail. I was instructed to go to Paris, direct, and fulfill certain duties there in connection with the ever-increasing burdens and exasperations of the "C. R. B." I did so. Six months later my activities were transferred to Berne; and – not to trace in detail the evolution of my career, such as it was; for though useful, I hope, it was never, like Phil's, exceptionally brilliant – I had become, about the period of America's entry into the war, a modest captain in the Red Cross, stationed at Evian, in connection with the endless, heartbreaking task of repatriating refugees from the invaded districts. And there my job rooted me until January of that dark winter of our unspeakable depression, 1918.

With the beginning of America's entry into the war Phil had gone to Petrograd for the American Red Cross, his commission being to save the lives of as many Russian babies as possible by the distribution of canned milk. Then, one evening – early in September, 1917, it must have been – he started alone for Moscow, to lay certain wider plans for disinterested relief-work before the sinister, the almost mythical Lenine. That is the last that has ever been seen of him, and no word has ever come forth directly from him out of the chaos men still call Russia. The Red Cross and the American and French Governments have done their utmost to discover his whereabouts, without avail. There are reasons for believing he is not dead, nor even a prisoner. The dictators of the soviet autocracy have been unable to find a trace of him, so they affirm; and there are reasons also for believing that this is true.

As for Jimmy, you will not be surprised to learn that Jimmy had not long been content with relief-work of any kind. He was young; and he had seen things – there, in the eastern districts. By midsummer of 1915 he had resigned from the "C. R. B.," had made a difficult way to Paris, via Holland and England, had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, and had succeeded in getting himself transferred to the French Flying Corps. Thus, months before we had officially abandoned our absurd neutrality, he was flying over the lines – bless him! If Jimmy never became a world-famous ace, well – there was a reason for that, too; the best of reasons. He was never assigned to a combat squadron, for no one brought home such photographs as Jimmy; taken tranquilly, methodically, at no great elevation, and often far back of the German lines. His quiet daring was the admiration of his comrades; anti-aircraft batteries had no terrors for him; his luck was proverbial, and he grew to trust it implicitly, seeming to bear a charmed life.

But Susan's luck had failed her, at last. On Thanksgiving Day of 1917 she was wounded in the left thigh by a fragment of shrapnel, a painful wound whose effects were permanent. She will always walk slowly, with a slight limp, hereafter. Mona Leslie got her down as far as Paris by January 20, 1918, meaning to take her on to Mentone, where she had rented a small villa for three months of long-overdue rest and recuperation for them both. But on reaching Paris, Susan collapsed; the accumulated strain of the past years struck her down. She was taken to the comfortable little Red Cross hospital for civilians at Neuilly and put to bed. A week of dangerous exhaustion and persistent insomnia followed.

I knew nothing of it directly, at the moment. I knew only that on a certain day Miss Leslie had planned to start with Susan from Dunkirk for Mentone; I was waiting eagerly for word of their safe arrival in that haven of rest and beauty; and I was scheming like a junior clerk for my first vacation, for two weeks off, perhaps even three, that I might run down to them there. But no word came. Throughout that first week in Paris, Miss Leslie in her hourly anxiety neglected to drop me a line.

And then one night, as I sat vacantly on the edge of my bed in my hotel room at Evian, almost too weary to begin the tedious sequence of undressing and tumbling into it, came the second of my psychic reels, my peculiar visions; briefer, this one, than my first; but no less authentic in impression, and no less clear.

III

I saw, this time, the interior of a small white room, almost bare of furniture, evidently a private room in some thoroughly appointed modern hospital. The patient beneath the white coverlet of the single white-enamelled iron bed was Susan – or the wraith of Susan, so wasted was she, so still. My breath stopped: I thought it had been given me to see her at the moment of death; or already dead. Then the door of the small white room opened, and Jimmy – in his smart horizon-blue uniform with its coveted shoulder loop, the green-and-red fouragère that bespoke the bravery of his entire esquadrille– came in, treading carefully on the balls of his feet. As he approached the bedside Susan opened her eyes – great shadows, gleamless soot-smudges in her pitifully haggard face. It seemed that she was too weak even to greet him or smile; her eyes closed again, and Jimmy bent down to her slowly and kissed her. Then Susan lifted her right hand from the coverlet – I could feel the effort it cost her – and touched Jimmy's hair. There was no strength in her to prolong the caress. The hand slipped from him to her breast… And my vision ended.

Its close found me on my knees on the tiled floor of my bedroom, as if I too had tried to go nearer, to bring myself close to her bedside, perhaps to bury my face in my hands against the white coverlet, her shroud; to weep there..

I sprang up, wildly enough now, with a harsh shudder, the terrified gasp of a brute suddenly stricken from ambush, aware only of rooted claws and a last crushing fury of deep-set fangs.

Susan was dying. I knew not where. I could not reach her. But Jimmy had reached her. He had been summoned. He had not been too late.

There are moments of blind anguish not to be reproduced for others. Chaos is everything – and nothing. It cannot be described.

There was nothing really useful I could do that night, not even sleep. In those days, it was impossible to move anywhere on the railroads of France without the proper passes and registrations of intention with the military authorities and the local police. I could, of course, suffer – that is always a human possibility – and I could attempt, muzzily enough, to think, to make plans. Where was it most likely that Susan would be? Was the hospital room that I had seen in Dunkirk, or in Nice, or at some point between – perhaps at Paris? It could hardly, I decided, be at Dunkirk; that stricken city, whose inhabitants were forced to dive like rats into burrows at any hour of the day or night. There was nothing to suggest the atmosphere of Dunkirk in that quiet, white-enamelled room. Nice, then – or Mentone? Hardly, I again reasoned; for Jimmy could not easily have reached them there. A day's leave; a flight from the lines, so comfortlessly close to Paris – that was always possible to the air-men, who were in a sense privileged characters, being for the most part strung with taut nerves that chafed and snapped under too strict a discipline. And in Paris there must be many such quiet, white-enamelled rooms. I decided for Paris.

Then I threw five or six articles and a bar of chocolate into my musette, a small water-proof pouch to sling over the shoulder – three years had taught me at least the needlessness of almost all Hillhouse necessities – and waited for dawn. It came, as all dawns come at last – even in January, even in France. And with it came a gulp of black coffee in the little deserted café down-stairs – and a telegram. I dared not open the telegram. It lay beside my plate while I stained the cloth before me and scalded my throat and furred my tongue. It was from Paris. So my decision was justified, and now quite worthless… I have no memory of the interval; but I had got with it somehow back to my room – that accursed blue envelope! Well —

"Susan at Red Cross hospital for civilians, Neuilly. All in, but no cause for real worry. Is sleeping now for first time in nearly a week. I must leave by afternoon. Come up to her if you possibly can. She needs you.

"Jimmy."

Four hours later all my exasperatingly complicated arrangements for a two-weeks' absence were made – the requisite motions had been the purest somnambulism – and by the ample margin of fifty seconds I had caught an express – to do it that courtesy – moving with dignity, at decent intervals, toward all that I lived by and despaired of and held inviolably dear. But the irony of Jimmy's last three words went always with me, a monotonous ache blurring every impulse toward hope and joy. Susan was not dead, was not dying! "No cause for real worry." Jimmy would not have said that if he had feared the worst. It was not his way to shuffle with facts; he was by nature direct and sincere. No; Susan would recover – thank God for it! Thank – and then, under all, through all, over and over, that aching monotony: "She needs you. Jimmy. She needs you. Jimmy."

"Needs me!" I groaned aloud.

"Plaît-il?" politely murmured the harassed-looking little French captain, my vis-à-vis.

"Mille pardons, monsieur," I murmured back. "On a quelquefois des griefs particuliers, vous savez."

"Ah dame, oui!" he sighed. "Par le temps qui court!"

"Et ce pachyderme de train qui ne court jamais!" I smiled.

"Ah, pour ça – ça repose!" murmured the little French captain, and shut his eyes.

"She needs you. Jimmy. She needs you. Jimmy. She needs – "

Then, miraculously, for two blotted hours I slept. But I woke again, utterly unrefreshed, to the old refrain: She needs you – needs you – needs you..

The little French captain was still asleep, snoring now – but softly – in his corner. Ah, lucky little French captain! Ça repose!

IV

One afternoon, five or six days later, I was seated by the white-enamelled iron bed in the small white room. Susan had had a long, quiet, normal nap, and her brisk sparrow-eyed Norman nurse, in her pretty costume of the French Red Cross, had come to me in the little reception-room of the hospital, where I had been sitting for an hour stupidly thumbing over tattered copies of ancient American magazines, and had informed me – with rather an ambiguous twinkle of those sparrow eyes – that her patient had asked to see me as soon as she had waked, was evidently feeling stronger, and that it was to be hoped M. le Capitaine would be discreet and say nothing to excite or fatigue the poor little one. "Je me sauve, m'sieu," she had added, mischievously grave; "on ne peut avoir l'œil à tout, mais – je compte sur vous."

So innocently delighted had she been by her pleasant suspicions, it was impossible to let her feel how sharply her raillery had pained me. But I could not reply in kind. I had merely bowed, put down the magazine in my hand, and so left her – to inevitable reflections, I presume, upon the afflicting reticence of these otherwise so agreeable allies d'outre mer. Their education was evidently deplorable. One never knew when they would miss step, inconveniently, and so disarrange the entire social rhythm of a conversation.

"Ambo," said Susan, putting her hand in mine, "do you know at all how terribly I've missed you?" She turned her head weakly on her pillow and looked at me. "You're older, dear. You've changed. I like your face better now than I ever did."

I wrinkled my nose at her. "Is that saying much?" I grimaced.

"Heaps!" She attempted to smile back at me, but her lower lip quivered. "Yours has always been my favorite face, you know, Ambo. Phil's is wiser – somehow, and stronger, too; and Jimmy's is sunnier, healthier, and – yes, handsomer, dear! Nobody could call you handsome, could they? But you're not ugly, either. Sister was adorably ugly. It was a daily miracle to see the lamp in her suddenly glow through and glorify everything. I used to wait for it. It's the only thing that has ever made me feel – humble; I never feel that way with you. I just feel satisfied, content."

"Like putting on an old pair of slippers," I ventured.

"That's it," sighed Susan happily, and closed her eyes.

"That's it!" echoed my familiar demon, "but no one but Susan would have admitted it."

As usual, I found it wiser to cut him dead.

"Well, dear," I said to Susan, "there's one good thing: you'll be able to use the old pair of slippers any time you need them now. I'm to be held in Paris, I find, for a three-months' job."

She opened her eyes again; disapprovingly, I felt.

"You shouldn't have done that, Ambo! You're needed at Evian; I know you are. It's bad enough to be out of things myself, but I won't drag you out of them! How could you imagine that would please me?"

"I hoped it would, a little," I replied, "but it hasn't any of it been my doing – Chatworth's wife's expecting a baby in a few weeks, and he wants to run home to welcome it; I'm to take on his executive work till he gets back. God knows he needs a rest!"

"As if you didn't, too!" protested Susan, inconsistently enough. Her eyes fell shut again; her hands slipped from mine. "Ambo," she asked presently, in a thread of voice that I had to lean down to her to hear, "have they told you I can never have a baby now?.. Wasn't it lucky if that had to happen to some woman – it happened to me?"

No, they had not told me; and for the moment I could not answer her.

"Jimmy's wife is going to have a baby soon," added Susan.

"Jimmy's —what!" I shrieked. Yes, shrieked – for, to my horror, I heard my voice crack and soar, strident, incredulous.

Susan was staring at me, wide-eyed, her face aquiver with excitement; two deep spots of color flaming on her thin cheeks.

"Didn't you know?"

The white door opened as she spoke, and Susan's Norman nurse hurried in, her sparrow eyes transformed to stiletto points of indignation. "Ah, m'sieu – c'est trop fort! When I told you expressly to do nothing to excite the poor little one!" I rose, self-convicted, before her.

"Tais-toi, Annette!" exclaimed Susan sharply, her eyes too gleaming with indignation. "It is not your place to speak so to m'sieu, a man old enough to be your father – and more than a father to me! For shame! His surprise was unavoidable! I have just given him a shock – unexpected news! Good news, however, I am glad to say. Now leave us!"

"On the contrary," replied Nurse Annette, four feet eleven of uncompromising and awful dignity, "I am in charge here, and it is m'sieu who will leave —tout court! But I regret my vivacité, m'sieu!"

"It is nothing, mademoiselle. You have acted as you should. It is for me to offer my regrets. But – when may I return?"

"To-morrow, m'sieu," said Nurse Annette.

"Naturally," said Susan. "Now sit down, please, Ambo, and listen to me."

For an instant the stiletto points glinted dangerously; then Nurse Annette giggled. That is precisely what Nurse Annette did; she giggled. Then she twirled about on her toes and left us – very quietly, yet not without a certain malicious ostentation, closing the door.

The French are a brave people, an intelligent and industrious people; but they exhibit at times a levity almost childlike in the descendants of so ancient and so deeply civilized a race..

"I knew nothing about it myself, Ambo," Susan was saying, "until I was beginning to feel a little stronger, after my operations at Dunkirk. Then Mona brought me letters – three from you, dear, and one long one from Jimmy. But no letter from Phil. I'd hoped, foolishly I suppose, for that. Jimmy's was the dearest, funniest letter I've ever read; it made me laugh and cry all at once. It wasn't a bit good for me, Ambo. It used me all up! And I kept wondering what you must be thinking. You see, he said in it he had written you."

"I've had no letter from Jimmy for at least five or six months," I replied.

"So many letters start bravely off over here," sighed Susan, "and then just vanish – like Phil. How many heartbreaks they must have caused, all those vanished letters – and men. And how silly of me to think about it! There must be some fatal connection, Ambo, between being sick and being sentimental. I suppose sentimentality's always one symptom of weakness. I've never been so disgustingly maudlin as these past weeks – never!"

"So Jimmy's married," I repeated stupidly, for at least the third time.

"Yes," smiled Susan, "to little Jeanne-Marie Valérie Josephine Aulard. I haven't seen her, of course, but I feel as if I knew her well. They've been married now almost a year." She paused again. "Why don't you look gladder, Ambo? Why don't you ask questions? You must be dying to know why Jimmy kept it a secret from us so long."

I had not dared to ask questions, for I believed I could guess why Jimmy had kept it a secret from us so long. For the first time in his life, I thought, Jimmy had been a craven. He had been afraid to tell Susan of an event which he must know would be like a knife in her heart.

"I suppose I'm foolishly hurt about it," I mumbled.

How bravely she was taking it all, in spite of her physical exhaustion! Poor child, poor child! But in God's name what then was the meaning of my vision back there in the hotel room at Evian? Jimmy entering this room where I now sat, tiptoeing to this very bedside, stooping down and kissing Susan – and her hand lifted, overcoming an almost mortal weakness, to touch his hair..

"You mustn't be hurt at all," Susan gently rebuked me. "Jimmy kept his marriage a secret from us for a very Jimmyesque reason. There was nothing specially exciting or romantic about the courtship itself, though. Little Jeanne-Marie's father – he was a notary of Soissons who had made a nice, comfy little fortune for those parts – died just before the war. So the Widow Aulard retired with Jeanne-Marie to a brand-spandy-new, very ugly little country house – south of the Aisne, Ambo, not far from Soissons; the canny old notary had just completed it as a haven for his declining years when he up and died. Well then, during the first German rush, Widow Aulard – being a good extra-stubborn bourgeoise– refused to leave her home – refused, Jeanne-Marie told Jimmy, even to believe the Boches would ever really be permitted to come so far. That was foolish, of course – but doesn't it make you like her, and see her – mustache and all?

"But the deluge was too much, even for her. One morning, after a night of terror, she found herself compulsory housekeeper, and little Jeanne-Marie compulsory servant, to a kennel of Bavarian officers. Then, three weeks or so later, the orderly of one of these officers, an Alsatian, was discovered to be a spy and was shot – and the Widow Aulard was shot, too, for having unwittingly harbored him. Jeanne-Marie wasn't shot, though; the kennel liked her cooking. So, like the true daughter of a French notary, she used her wits, made herself indispensable to the comfort of the officers, preserved her dignity under incredible insults, and her virtue under conditions I needn't tell you about, Ambo – and bided her time.

"It nearly killed her; but she lived through it, and finally the French returned and helped her patch up and clean up what was left of the kennel. And a month or so later Jimmy's esquadrille made Jeanne-Marie's battered little house their headquarters and treated its mistress like the staunch little heroine she is. Of course, Jimmy wasn't attached to the esquadrille then; it was more than a year later that he arrived on the scene; but it didn't take him long after getting there to decide on an international alliance. Bless him! he says Jeanne-Marie isn't very pretty, he guesses; she's just – wonderful! She couldn't make up her mind to the international alliance, though. She loved Jimmy, but the match didn't strike her as prudent. An orphan must consider these things. Her property had been swept away, and Jimmy admitted he had nothing. And being her father's daughter, Jeanne-Marie very wisely pointed out that he was in hourly peril of being killed or crippled for life. To marry under such circumstances would be to make her father turn in his grave. How can anything so sad be so funny, Ambo? Well, anyway, Jimmy, being Jimmy, saw the point, agreed with her completely, and seems to have felt thoroughly ashamed of himself for trying to persuade her into so crazy a match!

"Then little Jeanne-Marie came down with typhoid; her life was despaired of, a priest was summoned. In the presence of death, she managed to tell the priest that it would seem less lonely and terrible to her if she could meet it as the wife 'M'sieu Jee-mee.' So the good priest managed somehow to slash through yards of official red tape in no time – you know how hard it is to get married in France, Ambo! – and the sacrament of marriage preceded the last rites; and then, dear, Jeanne-Marie faced the Valley of Shadow clinging to M'sieu Jee-mee's hand. The whole esquadrille was unstrung – naturally; even their famous ace, Boisrobert. Jimmy says he absolutely refused to fly for three days." Tears were pouring from Susan's eyes.

"Oh, what a fool I am!" she protested, mopping at them with a corner of the top sheet. "She didn't die, of course. She rallied at the last moment and got well – and found herself safely married after all, and quite ready to take her chances of living happily with M'sieu Jee-mee ever afterward! There – isn't that a nice story, Ambo? Don't you like pretty-pie fairy tales when they happen to be true?"

That she could ask me this with her heart breaking! Again I could not trust myself to speak calmly, and I saw that she was worn out with the effort she had made to overcome her weakness, and what I believed to be a living pain in her breast. I rose.

"Ambo!" she exclaimed, wide-eyed, "still you don't ask me why Jimmy didn't tell us! How stupid of you to take it all like this!"

"I've stayed too long, dear," I mumbled; "far too long. I've let you talk too much. Why, it's almost dark! To-morrow – "

"No, now," she insisted, with a little frown of displeasure. "I won't have you thinking meanly of Jimmy! It's too absurdly unfair! I'm ashamed of you, Ambo."

How she idealized him! How she had always idealized that normal, likable, essentially commonplace Irish boy – pouring out, wasting for him treasures of unswerving loyalty! It was damnable. But these things were the final mysteries of life, these instinctive bonds, yielding no clue to reason. One could only accept them, bitterly, with a curse or a groan withheld. Accept them – since one must..

"Well, dear," broke from me with a touch, almost, of impatience, "I confess I'm more interested in your health than in Jimmy's psychology! But I see you won't sleep a wink if you don't tell me!"

"I've never known you to be so horrid," she said faintly, all the weariness of body and soul returning upon her for a moment, till she fought it back. She did so, to my amazement, with an entirely unexpected chuckle, a true sharp, clear Birch Street gleam. "You don't deserve it, Ambo, but I'm going to make you smile a little, whether you feel like it or not! The reason Jimmy didn't tell us was because – after Jeanne-Marie got well – he spent weeks trying to persuade her that a marriage made exclusively for eternity oughtn't to be considered binding on this side! She had been entirely certain, he kept pointing out to her, that she ought not to marry him in this world, and she had only done so when she thought she was being taken from it." Susan chuckled again. "Can't you hear him, Ambo – and her? Jimmy, feeling he had won something precious through an unfair advantage and so refusing his good fortune – or trying to; and practical Jeanne-Marie simply nonplussed by his sudden lack of all common sense! Besides which, wasn't marriage a sacrament, and wasn't M'sieu Jee-mee a good Catholic? Was he going back on his faith – or asking her to trifle with hers? And, anyway, they were married – that was the end of it! And of course, Ambo, it was – really. There! I knew sooner or later you'd have to smile!"