She felt a certain impatience at herself. This was to be the greatest
day in the history of the world, and while all the earth waited for the
signal guns, she waited for a man who had apparently determined not to
take her back into his life.
She went out onto her small stone balcony, on the Rue Danou, and looked
out to where, on the Rue de la Paix, the city traffic moved with a sort
of sporadic expectancy. Men stopped and consulted their watches. A few
stood along the curb, and talked in low voices. Groups of men in khaki
walked by, or stopped to glance into the shop windows. They, too, were
waiting. She could see, far below, her valet de chambre in his green
felt apron, and the concierge in his blue frock coat and brass buttons,
unbending in the new democracy of hope to talk to a cabman.
Suddenly Audrey felt the same exaltation that had been in Suzanne's
eyes. Those boys below in uniform--they were not tragic now. They were
the hope of the world, not its sacrifice. They were going to live. They
were going to live.
She went into her bedroom and put on her service hat. And as she opened
the door Suzanne was standing outside, one hand upraised. Into the quiet
hallway there came the distant sound of the signal guns.
"C'est l'armistice!" cried Suzanne, and suddenly broke into wild
hysterical sobbing.
All the way down-stairs Audrey was praying, not articulately, but in her
heart, that this was indeed the end; that the grapes of wrath had all
been trampled; that the nations of the world might again look forward
instead of back. And--because she was not of the great of the earth, but
only a loving woman--that somewhere Clay was hearing the guns, as she
was, and would find hope in them, and a future.
When a great burden is lifted, the relief is not always felt at once.
The galled places still ache. The sense of weight persists. And so with
Paris. Not at once did the city rejoice openly. It prayed first, and
then it counted the sore spots, and they were many. And it was dazed,
too. There had been no time to discount peace in advance.
The streets filled at once, but at first it was with a chastened people.
Audrey herself felt numb and unreal. She moved mechanically with the
shifting crowd, looking overhead as a captured German plane flew by,
trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. But by mid-day the sober note
of the crowds had risen to a higher pitch. A file of American doughboys,
led by a corporal with a tin trumpet and officered by a sergeant with
an enormous American cigar, goose-stepped down the Avenue de l'Opera,
gaining recruits at every step. It snake-danced madly through the crowd,
singing that one lyric stand-by of Young America: "Hail! hail! the
gang's all here!"