CHAPTER VIII
When Aunt Roberta stepped foot on French soil it was to be expected that all things would begin to go well with her.
The port with its crowded docks, bulging store-houses, trains of wounded English going home, platoons of prisoners likewise boarding the transports for the concentration camps in England—"Ah! the terribleBoches!" shuddered Aunt Roberta when she saw these—the baggage lorries piled high with Red Cross supplies, ambulances coming down to the docks with the "grands blessés" immovable on their backs, the troops of "walking wounded"—all these sights and sounds affected the volatile little Frenchwoman strangely.
"Ah!non! non!This is not France—notmyFrance!" she wailed. "Let us go on to Paris—and quickly."
But to go to Paris quickly in these days of the great war one must possess the influence of a marshal of France. It was a jest aboard the train: "Evenles Bochescould not get to Paris!"
And the train itself! "Ma foi!" was Aunt Roberta's disgusted cry, "it is a cattle train—no better! It should be seen to."
"If you were English you would write to theTimesabout it," laughed Belinda. She had made up her mind to suffer discomforts of all kinds when she enlisted for service in the Red Cross, and she would not lose her cheerfulness thus early in the game.
Paris was reached at last. Aunt Roberta saw little change in the gay city. There were flowers at the street corners, and flags and trophies fluttered everywhere. It chanced to be the occasion of the visit of some important men in the councils of the Allies, and the French authorities know well the value of flowers and flags, bands and gay uniforms, to cheer the hearts of a patriotic people.
This modern struggle lacks many of the elements of the old-fashioned "pomp of war"; yet there must be some display in the French capital. Else Paris would not be Paris.
They went to a rather musty hotel, Belinda and her aunt, for a day or two while they looked for an apartment. For Aunt Roberta was to remain in Paris, and her niece would want a home to go to when she was able to have a home. One could not walk right into even a base hospital, put on one's cap and apron, and go to work. There is more red tape than that about it.
"Ah, well, the poor hotel—it is war time," sighed Aunt Roberta, trying to excuse the discomforts of the place.
But when they began their search for an apartment they soon made a discovery of moment. The gay life of the city, so attractive to the American visitor, might be at low ebb; nevertheless there were many Americans, as well as other foreigners, living in Paris. Visitors benevolent; families of those Americans serving at the front, and there were at this time nearly twenty-five thousand from the United States serving France in one capacity or another; people driven out of the actual zone of warfare and able to live in the capital. And all, it seemed, were living in furnished apartments.
They looked and looked for two foot-wearying, brain-fagging days. Always Aunt Roberta's house-wifely soul was seared by some lack in the arrangement of those rooms they saw, or she was horrified by the slovenliness of the halls, or she suspected vermin.
"Enough!" cried Belinda, at last, and with energy. "We cannot refuse to lease an apartment because you do not like the cut of theconcierge'snightcap. Time is being lost. I must get to work; but I must see you settled first."
"But my dear Belinda!" wailed the good woman. "The bath in that last place was—was archaic!"
"If you wished a modern bath in a thirty-dollar apartment you should have remained in America," declared her niece, and that was almost as "catty" a retort as she was capable of making.
Aunt Roberta had already been subdued by discouragement. The next morning they took the very first place that offered. It was on a good street, but the building, or "hotel," itself presented an air of shabby gentility that should have warned them both that it had long since harbored more guests than rent-paying ones.
Theconciergewas a dried, little, apple-cheeked man—too old for service in the army; a hungry-looking little man who was so eager for small change that he bewailed to them on first acquaintance this disability that kept him from earning a sou a day as a soldier of France.
"I am deprived of my rights by age, Mademoiselle," he said to Belinda—"the affliction of years. Yet am I not spry and active?"
"If he is," complained Aunt Roberta in private, "why does he not scrub these steps?"
The wanderers signed for the apartment, however, and moved in at once. It was on the Rue de Rivoli, among more modern apartment houses and mansions; but it was set back from the street, with a high iron fence and a very ornate gateway and grill in front of it. The courtyard was flagged, with a dry fountain on either hand as one walked to the house. A handful of dry stalks in the narrow strips of baked earth that had been garden-beds told of the summer's drought. The flowers were no more.
Dust rose from the rugs as they walked through the rooms, and Aunt Roberta sneezed.
"Gesundheit!" her niece wished absently.
"Don't! Don't dare speak that heathen tongue here!" cried Aunt Roberta in horror. "Do you wish us both to be arrested as spies?"
Then she opened her trunk, found one of her starchy print dresses, put it on, and commenced to clean. Although dinner was brought in from a restaurant, Aunt Roberta had not finished cleaning by bedtime.
"And those beds! Have they never heard of iron beds, and proper springs, and a sanitary mattress?" burst forth the good woman at last. "Ah! those canopies—reeking of the First Empire, I am con-fi-dent! The heaps of dust and debris in the closets! The pots and pans, smoky and greasy on the outside, and burned within! Thatconcierge—le sale cultivateur!—no more fit for his tasks than one of the pigs he was wont to drive before he migrated to Paris!"
"But this is Paris," Belinda ventured to remind her.
"Not the Paris of my memory," Aunt Roberta grumbled. She was beginning to realize the change.
That was a memorable night for both.
"This is truly 'embattled France,'" cried Belinda, finally driven from between the sheets of her bed by the enemy horde; and she spent the remainder of the night lying in her robe on top of the bedclothes, which she first carefully tucked in all around so as to confine the warring insects to their trenches.
Aunt Roberta was in despair. She had spent the night, it was proved, sitting upright in a chair.
"Ma foi!I send that gray-headed janitor at once for a gallon of petrol. I will myself saturate the beds. And down come those canopies!"
It was noticeable that Aunt Roberta, of her own volition, began again to use English quite as much as she had in New York. Indeed, before the day was over, Belinda heard her decrying the stupidity of theconciergebecause he did not understand certain American phrases that she had picked up in the United States.
Belinda went to theComité des Secours Américainsthat morning, and registered. It occupied a spacious, elegant suite, its windows looking toward the Seine. Its air was that of a busy American corporation office, with a bevy of stenographers and typists at work, all with wonderfully dressed hair and some with the latest model of "skimpy" skirts. Even in war time these Paris-dressed girls made one feel the inferiority of fashions in any other part of the globe.
She had desired from the beginning to be an actual aid in the work of the Red Cross for France. Not in the American division, nor yet in the work for the British soldiers. She learned that an examination was soon to be held for nurses' diplomas in the French Red Cross.
Fresh from her work in the New York hospital, she felt that this was her chance. She armed herself with Red Cross textbooks in both French and English and went home to study with confidence. To Aunt Roberta's housecleaning complaints she waved a careless hand.
"I have to study," she said. "Show me a clean corner where I can camp."
"There is no such place," sniffed Aunt Roberta. "But you may as well sit here in the dining-room and I will clean up to and around you.Mon Dieu!what a house!"
Belinda studied night and day until the very hour of the examination. Then she faced nine doctors in an oral inquest. They were polite indeed tola fille Américaine; but they were very exacting. The examination lasted two hours, and she passed with credit.
She entered the service. Actually she was a member of the French military force. She was something more than a mere volunteer Red Cross nurse. Soon she would be sent to a military hospital directly behind the fighting line.
Belinda came away from her session with the examining doctors in a spirit of buoyancy. She had accomplished something worth while, proving to herself as well as to the examination board that she had in her an ability above the ordinary. She very well knew that some of the American women who had offered themselves for the work—and with the very best intentions—had proved to be failures.
As she came down the steps of the Bureau her eyes were bright and her face glowed, flowerlike. Or so thought the young man in the gray outing suit and with the wide American straw hat to shade his freckled face, who chanced just then to be swinging down the avenue.
"Miss Melnotte!"
"Oh, Mr. Sanderson! So you have reached Paris," she said demurely.
"Well put. Came pretty near not getting here at all. You and your aunt had it pretty soft, getting those reservations—believe me. My! you look fine."
"Don't make me blush, Mr. Sanderson," she begged, smiling. Who could help smiling when this boyish young man was looking with such open admiration into one's face? "And this is such a public place," she added.
"Say," he said, seizing an opening that Belinda had no intention of giving him, "it is public here! And warm, too! There's one of the jolliest little cafés yonder. I used to patronize it when I was over here before. They serve a cold and temperate drink almost as good as you can get in New York."
"You tempt me," confessed Belinda frankly.
When she had left this young man at the rail of theBelle o' Perthit was with the intention of being coolly polite to him—that was all—if they met again. But it was thirst (she had answered questions for two hours, remember!) that led to her impulsive yielding.
She determined to give Frank Sanderson no opportunity for an extended tête-à-tête. But her recent success made her desire a confidant of her own kind and age. In a minute she was volubly telling the young man all about it.
"Bully!" said Frank, leading her to a seat in the shaded garden. "My congratulations."
They ordered. On opposite sides of the little, round iron table, was it strange if they became a bit intimate? Little as Belinda had intended, she could not help warming toward one so enthusiastic over her proposed work.
"It's fine! It's splendid of you, Miss Melnotte!" he cried. "And an officer of the French army—no less!" He saluted, with laughter. "Why, the best I can look for at first is a non-com's stripes. I believe they make 'em corporals when they have passed first flying examinations."
"But you are a professional aviator already."
"In America. Not here. The Frenchies go at the game—especially in the army—in a different way." He told her swiftly of his hopes and aspirations. "I feel, too," he added, "that I need the practice. I'm going to enlist and enter one of the aviation schools if possible—and at once."
"I hope you will have every success, Mr. Sanderson," she said, suddenly recovering her usual poise and rising to give him her hand.
He held it a moment longer than necessary.
"Miss Melnotte," he cried hastily and under his breath, "my wishes for your safety and happiness are of the warmest. I cannot express myself as I should like to—I have no right to express myself—now. But if the time ever comes——"
The girl drew away her hand. The perplexed expression that came into her eyes—eyes the moment before so bright and tender in their glance—would have closed his lips had her words not done so.
"Mr. Sanderson," she said brusquely, "aren't you forgetting yourself? Good-by—and good luck."
He had no idea that as Belinda Melnotte passed on so swiftly—a delightful bit of color to his eyes in the sun-drenched street—she pulled close her veil across her face to hide the tears. Suddenly the world seemed a sad place to her again. All the exhilaration of her success before the examination board was gone.
She went home to Aunt Roberta in a very serious frame of mind and mentioned only casually her meeting with Frank Sanderson.
The next few days were such busy ones for Belinda that she had little time for moping. She had entered upon a career that promised to fill both her mind and heart.
She had gained at least six months in advancement by joining the French Red Cross and earning a commission. Otherwise she would have been obliged to serve a term at a base hospital. Now, in two days, she was ordered away. Just where she was going she did not know. It was "somewhere in France."
Aunt Roberta wept a little over her when she learned her niece was really going. But she soon dried her eyes and went back to her everlasting cleaning of the apartment. The little woman would never be satisfied until she had these rooms in the gloomy old hotel as spick and span as the ones she had left in New York. Besides, work takes one's mind off one's afflictions.