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Page 88
"That speaks well for him."
John's mind traveled back to that modest house across the Seine. It had
done so often during all the days and nights of fighting, and he thought
of Julie Lannes in her simple white dress, Julie with the golden hair
and the bluest of blue eyes. She had not seemed at all foreign to him.
In her simplicity and openness she was like one of the young girls of
his own country. French custom might have compelled a difference at
other times, but war was a great leveler of manners. She and her mother
must have suffered agonies of suspense, when the guns were thundering
almost within hearing of Paris, suspense for Philip, suspense for their
country, and suspense in a less degree for themselves. Maybe Lannes had
gone back once in the _Arrow_ to show them that he was safe, and to tell
them that, for the time at least, the great German invasion had been
rolled back.
"A penny for your dream!" said Carstairs.
"Not for a penny, nor for a pound, nor for anything else," said John.
"This dream of mine had something brilliant and beautiful and pure at
the very core of it, and I'm not selling."
Carstairs looked curiously at him, and a light smile played across his
face. But the smile was sympathetic.
"I'll wager you that with two guesses I can tell the nature of your
dream," he said.
John shook his head, and he, too, smiled.
"As we say at home," he said, "you may guess right the very first time,
but I won't tell you whether you're right or wrong."
"I take only one guess. That coruscating core of your dream was a girl."
"I told you I wouldn't say whether you were right or wrong."
"Is she blonde or dark?"
"I repeat that I'm answering no questions."
"Does she live in one of your Northern or one of your Southern States?"
John smiled.
"I suppose you haven't heard from her in a long time, as mail from
across the water isn't coming with much regularity to this battle
field."
John smiled again.
"And now I'll conclude," said Carstairs, speaking very seriously. "If
it is a girl, and I know it is, I hope that she'll smile when she thinks
of you, as you've been smiling when you think of her. I hope, too, that
you'll go through this war without getting killed, although the chances
are three or four to one against it, and go back home and win her."
John smiled once more and was silent, but when Carstairs held out his
hand he could not keep from shaking it. Then Paris, the modest house
beyond the Seine, and the girl within it, floated away like an illusion,
driven from thought in an instant by a giant shell that struck within a
few hundred yards of them, exploding with a terrible crash and filling
the air with deadly bits of flying shell.
There was such a whistling in his ears that John thought at first he had
been hit, but when he shook himself a little he found he was unhurt, and
his heart resumed its normal beat. Other shells coming out of space
began to strike, but none so near, and the Strangers went calmly on. On
their right was a Paris regiment made up mostly of short, but
thick-chested men, all very dark. Its numbers were only one-third what
they had been a week before, and its colonel was Pierre Louis
Bougainville, late Apache, late of the Butte Montmartre. All the
colonels, majors and captains of this regiment had been killed and he
now led it, earning his promotion by the divine right of genius. He, at
least, could look into his knapsack and see there the shadow of a
marshal's baton, a shadow that might grow more material.
John watched him and he wondered at this transformation of a rat of
Montmartre into a man. And yet there had been many such transformations
in the French Revolution. What had happened once could always happen
again. Napoleon himself had been the son of a poor little lawyer in a
distant and half-savage island, not even French in blood, but an Italian
and an alien.
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