III
FEBRUARY
FEBRUARY dusk on the Seine. The boats are plying again, but they
stop at nightfall, and the river is inky-smooth, with the same long
weed-like reflections as in August. Only the reflections are fewer
and paler; bright lights are muffled everywhere. The line of the
quays is scarcely discernible, and the heights of the Trocadero are
lost in the blur of night, which presently effaces even the firm
tower-tops of Notre-Dame. Down the damp pavements only a few street
lamps throw their watery zigzags. The shops are shut, and the
windows above them thickly curtained. The faces of the houses are
all blind.
In the narrow streets of the Rive Gauche the darkness is even
deeper, and the few scattered lights in courts or "cites" create
effects of Piranesi-like mystery. The gleam of the
chestnut-roaster's brazier at a street corner deepens the sense of
an old adventurous Italy, and the darkness beyond seems full of
cloaks and conspiracies. I turn, on my way home, into an empty
street between high garden walls, with a single light showing far
off at its farther end. Not a soul is in sight between me and that
light: my steps echo endlessly in the silence. Presently a dim
figure comes around the corner ahead of me. Man or woman? Impossible
to tell till I overtake it. The February fog deepens the darkness,
and the faces one passes are indistinguishable. As for the numbers
of the houses, no one thinks of looking for them. If you know the
quarter you count doors from the corner, or try to puzzle out the
familiar outline of a balcony or a pediment; if you are in a strange
street, you must ask at the nearest tobacconist's--for, as for
finding a policeman, a yard off you couldn't tell him from your
grandmother!
Such, after six months of war, are the nights of Paris; the days are
less remarkable and less romantic.
Almost all the early flush and shiver of romance is gone; or so at
least it seems to those who have watched the gradual revival of
life. It may appear otherwise to observers from other countries,
even from those involved in the war. After London, with all her
theaters open, and her machinery of amusement almost unimpaired,
Paris no doubt seems like a city on whom great issues weigh. But to
those who lived through that first sunlit silent month the streets
to-day show an almost normal activity. The vanishing of all the
motorbuses, and of the huge lumbering commercial vans, leaves many a
forgotten perspective open and reveals many a lost grace of
architecture; but the taxi-cabs and private motors are almost as
abundant as in peace-time, and the peril of pedestrianism is kept at
its normal pitch by the incessant dashing to and fro of those
unrivalled engines of destruction, the hospital and War Office
motors. Many shops have reopened, a few theatres are tentatively
producing patriotic drama or mixed programmes seasonal with
sentiment and mirth, and the cinema again unrolls its eventful
kilometres.
For a while, in September and October, the streets were made
picturesque by the coming and going of English soldiery, and the
aggressive flourish of British military motors. Then the fresh faces
and smart uniforms disappeared, and now the nearest approach to
"militarism" which Paris offers to the casual sight-seer is the
occasional drilling of a handful of _piou-pious _on the muddy
reaches of the Place des Invalides. But there is another army in
Paris. Its first detachments came months ago, in the dark September
days--lamentable rear-guard of the Allies' retreat on Paris. Since
then its numbers have grown and grown, its dingy streams have
percolated through all the currents of Paris life, so that wherever
one goes, in every quarter and at every hour, among the busy
confident strongly-stepping Parisians one sees these other people,
dazed and slowly moving--men and women with sordid bundles on their
backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes,
children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies pressed
against their shoulders: the great army of the Refugees. Their faces
are unmistakable and unforgettable. No one who has ever caught that
stare of dumb bewilderment--or that other look of concentrated
horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins--can shake off
the obsession of the Refugees. The look in their eyes is part of the
look of Paris. It is the dark shadow on the brightness of the face
she turns to the enemy. These poor people cannot look across the
borders to eventual triumph. They belong mostly to a class whose
knowledge of the world's affairs is measured by the shadow of their
village steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causation
than the thousands overwhelmed at Avezzano. They were ploughing and
sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when
suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them.
And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces
and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory
of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to
slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by
drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying.
These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the
doors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, in
return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet, or
intelligible, or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a
meal-ticket--and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes...
What are the Parisians doing meanwhile? For one thing--and the sign
is a good one--they are refilling the shops, and especially, of
course, the great "department stores." In the early war days there
was no stranger sight than those deserted palaces, where one strayed
between miles of unpurchased wares in quest of vanished salesmen. A
few clerks, of course, were left: enough, one would have thought,
for the rare purchasers who disturbed their meditations. But the few
there were did not care to be disturbed: they lurked behind their
walls of sheeting, their bastions of flannelette, as if ashamed to
be discovered. And when one had coaxed them out they went through
the necessary gestures automatically, as if mournfully wondering
that any one should care to buy. I remember once, at the Louvre,
seeing the whole force of a "department," including the salesman I
was trying to cajole into showing me some medicated gauze, desert
their posts simultaneously to gather about a motor-cyclist in a
muddy uniform who had dropped in to see his pals with tales from the
front. But after six months the pressure of normal appetites has
begun to reassert itself--and to shop is one of the normal appetites
of woman. I say "shop" instead of buy, to distinguish between the
dull purchase of necessities and the voluptuousness of acquiring
things one might do without. It is evident that many of the
thousands now fighting their way into the great shops must be
indulging in the latter delight. At a moment when real wants are
reduced to a minimum, how else account for the congestion of the
department store? Even allowing for the immense, the perpetual
buying of supplies for hospitals and work-rooms, the incessant
stoking-up of the innumerable centres of charitable production,
there is no explanation of the crowding of the other departments
except the fact that woman, however valiant, however tried, however
suffering and however self-denying, must eventually, in the long
run, and at whatever cost to her pocket and her ideals, begin to
shop again. She has renounced the theatre, she denies herself the
teo-rooms, she goes apologetically and furtively (and economically)
to concerts--but the swinging doors of the department stores suck
her irresistibly into their quicksand of remnants and reductions.
No one, in this respect, would wish the look of Paris to be changed.
It is a good sign to see the crowds pouring into the shops again,
even though the sight is less interesting than that of the other
crowds streaming daily--and on Sunday in immensely augmented
numbers--across the Pont Alexandre III to the great court of the
Invalides where the German trophies are displayed. Here the heart of
France beats with a richer blood, and something of its glow passes
into foreign veins as one watches the perpetually renewed throngs
face to face with the long triple row of German guns. There are few
in those throngs to whom one of the deadly pack has not dealt a
blow; there are personal losses, lacerating memories, bound up with
the sight of all those evil engines. But personal sorrow is the
sentiment least visible in the look of Paris. It is not fanciful to
say that the Parisian face, after six months of trial, has acquired
a new character. The change seems to have affected the very stuff it
is moulded of, as though the long ordeal had hardened the poor human
clay into some dense commemorative substance. I often pass in the
street women whose faces look like memorial medals--idealized images
of what they were in the flesh. And the masks of some of the
men--those queer tormented Gallic masks, crushed-in and squat and a
little satyr-like--look like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, burnt
and twisted from their baptism of fire. But none of these faces
reveals a personal preoccupation: they are looking, one and all, at
France erect on her borders. Even the women who are comparing
different widths of Valenciennes at the lace-counter all have
something of that vision in their eyes--or else one does not see the
ones who haven't.
It is still true of Paris that she has not the air of a capital in
arms. There are as few troops to be seen as ever, and but for the
coming and going of the orderlies attached to the War Office and the
Military Government, and the sprinkling of uniforms about the doors
of barracks, there would be no sign of war in the streets--no sign,
that is, except the presence of the wounded. It is only lately that
they have begun to appear, for in the early months of the war they
were not sent to Paris, and the splendidly appointed hospitals of
the capital stood almost empty, while others, all over the country,
were overcrowded. The motives for the disposal of the wounded have
been much speculated upon and variously explained: one of its
results may have been the maintaining in Paris of the extraordinary
moral health which has given its tone to the whole country, and
which is now sound and strong enough to face the sight of any
misery.
And miseries enough it has to face. Day by day the limping figures
grow more numerous on the pavement, the pale bandaged heads more
frequent in passing carriages. In the stalls at the theatres and
concerts there are many uniforms; and their wearers usually have to
wait till the hall is emptied before they hobble out on a supporting
arm. Most of them are very young, and it is the expression of their
faces which I should like to picture and interpret as being the very
essence of what I have called the look of Paris. They are grave,
these young faces: one hears a great deal of the gaiety in the
trenches, but the wounded are not gay. Neither are they sad,
however. They are calm, meditative, strangely purified and matured.
It is as though their great experience had purged them of pettiness,
meanness and frivolity, burning them down to the bare bones of
character, the fundamental substance of the soul, and shaping that
substance into something so strong and finely tempered that for a
long time to come Paris will not care to wear any look unworthy of
the look on their faces.
