Audrey was in Paris on the eleventh of November. Now and then she
got back there, and reveled for a day or two in the mere joy of paved
streets and great orderly buildings. She liked the streets and the
crowds. She liked watching the American boys swaggering along, smoking
innumerable cigarets and surveying the city with interested, patronizing
eyes. And, always, walking briskly along the Rue Royale or the Avenue de
l'Opera, or in the garden of the Tuileries where the school-boys played
their odd French games, her eyes were searching the faces of the men she
met.
Any tall man in civilian clothes set her heart beating faster. She was
quite honest with herself; she knew that she was watching for Clay, and
she had a magnificent shamelessness in her quest. And now at last The
Daily Mail had announced his arrival in France, and at first every
ring of her telephone had sent her to it, somewhat breathless but quite
confident. He would, she considered, call up the Red Cross at the Hotel
Regina, and they would, by her instructions, give her hotel.
Then, on that Monday morning, which was the eleventh, she realized that
he would not call her up. She knew it suddenly and absolutely. She sat
down, when the knowledge came to her, with a sickening feeling that if
he did not come to her now he never would come. Yet even then she did
not doubt that he cared. Cared as desperately as she did. The bond still
held.
She tried very hard, sitting there by her wood fire in the orderly
uniform which made her so quaintly young and boyish, to understand the
twisted mental processes that kept him away from her, now that he was
free. And, in the end, she came rather close to the truth: his sense
of failure; his loss of confidence in himself where his love life was
concerned; the strange twisting and warping that were Natalie's sole
legacy from their years together.
For months she had been tending broken bodies and broken spirits. But
the broken pride of a man was a strange and terrible thing.
She did not know where he was stopping, and in the congestion of the
Paris hotels it would be practically impossible to trace him. And there,
too, her own pride stepped in. He must come to her. He knew she cared.
She had been honest with him always, with a sort of terrible honesty.
Surveying the past months she wondered, not for the first time, what had
held them apart so long, against the urge that had become the strongest
thing in life to them both. The strength in her had come from him. She
knew that. But where had Clay got his strength? Men were not like that,
often. Failing final happiness, they so often took what they could get.
Like Chris.