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(Woman’s Home Companion, November 1925)

This story began three days before it got into the papers. Like many other news-hungry Americans in Paris this spring, I opened the “Franco-American Star” one morning and having skimmed the hackneyed headlines (largely devoted to reporting the sempiternal “Lafayette-love-Washington” bombast of French and American orators) I came upon something of genuine interest.

“Look at that!” I exclaimed, passing it over to the twin bed. But the occupant of the twin bed immediately found an article about Leonora Hughes, the dancer, in another column, and began to read it. So of course I demanded the paper back.

“You don’t realize—” I began.

“I wonder,” interrupted the occupant of the twin bed, “if she’s a real blonde.”

However, when I issued from the domestic suite a little later I found other men in various cafés saying “Look at that!” as they pointed to the Item of Interest. And about noon I found another writer (whom I have since bribed with champagne to hold his peace) and together we went down into Franco-American officialdom to see. We discovered that the story began about three days before it got into the papers.

It began on a boat, and with a young woman who, though she wasn’t even faintly uneasy, was leaning over the rail. She was watching the parallels of longitude as they swam beneath the keel, and trying to read the numbers on them, but of course the S. S. Olympic travels too fast for that, and all that the young woman could see was the agate-green, foliage-like spray, changing and complaining around the stern. Though there was little to look at except the spray and a dismal Scandinavian tramp in the distance and the admiring millionaire who was trying to catch her eye from the first-class deck above, Milly Cooley was perfectly happy. For she was beginning life over.

Hope is a usual cargo between Naples and Ellis Island, but on ships bound east for Cherbourg it is noticeably rare. The first-class passengers specialize in sophistication and the steerage passengers go in for disillusion (which is much the same thing) but the young woman by the rail was going in for hope raised to the ultimate power. It was not her own life she was beginning over, but someone else’s, and this is a much more dangerous thing to do.

Milly was a frail, dark, appealing girl with the spiritual, haunted eyes that so frequently accompany South European beauty. By birth her mother and father had been respectively Czech and Roumanian, but Milly had missed the overshort upper lip and the pendulous, pointed nose that disfigure the type—her features were regular and her skin was young and olive-white and clear.

The good-looking, pimply young man with eyes of a bright marbly blue who was asleep on a dunnage bag a few feet away was her husband—it was his life that Milly was beginning over. Through the six months of their marriage he had shown himself to be shiftless and dissipated, but now they were getting off to a new start. Jim Cooley deserved a new start, for he had been a hero in the war. There was a thing called “shell shock” which justified anything unpleasant in a war hero’s behavior—Jim Cooley had explained that to her on the second day of their honeymoon when he had gotten abominably drunk and knocked her down with his open hand.

“I get crazy,” he said emphatically next morning, and his marbly eyes rolled back and forth realistically in his head. “I get started, thinkin’ I’m fightin’ the war, an’ I take a poke at whatever’s in front of me, see?”

He was a Brooklyn boy, and he had joined the marines. And on a June twilight he had crawled fifty yards out of his lines to search the body of a Bavarian captain that lay out in plain sight. He found a copy of German regimental orders, and in consequence his own brigade attacked much sooner than would otherwise have been possible, and perhaps the war was shortened by so much as a quarter of an hour. The fact was appreciated by the French and American races in the form of engraved slugs of precious metal which Jim showed around for four years before it occurred to him how nice it would be to have a permanent audience. Milly’s mother was impressed with his martial achievement, and a marriage was arranged—Milly didn’t realize her mistake until twenty-four hours after it was too late.

At the end of several months Milly’s mother died and left her daughter two hundred and fifty dollars. The event had a marked effect on Jim. He sobered up and one night came home from work with a plan for turning over a new leaf, for beginning life over. By the aid of his war record he had obtained a job with a bureau that took care of American soldier graves in France. The pay was small but then, as everyone knew, living was dirt cheap over there. Hadn’t the forty a month that he drew in the war looked good to the girls and the wine-sellers of Paris? Especially when you figured it in French money.

Milly listened to his tales of the land where grapes were full of champagne and then thought it all over carefully. Perhaps the best use for her money would be in giving Jim his chance, the chance that he had never had since the war. In a little cottage in the outskirts of Paris they could forget this last six months and find peace and happiness and perhaps even love as well.

“Are you going to try?” she asked simply.

“Of course I’m going to try, Milly.”

“You’re going to make me think I didn’t make a mistake?”

“Sure I am, Milly. It’ll make a different person out of me. Don’t you believe it?”

She looked at him. His eyes were bright with enthusiasm, with determination. A warm glow had spread over him at the prospect—he had never really had his chance before.

“All right,” she said finally. “We’ll go.”

They were there. The Cherbourg breakwater, a white stone snake, glittered along the sea at dawn—behind it red roofs and steeples and then small, neat hills traced with a warm, orderly pattern of toy farms. “Do you like this French arrangement?” it seemed to say. “It’s considered very charming, but if you don’t agree just shift it about—set this road here, this steeple there. It’s been done before, and it always comes out lovely in the end!”

It was Sunday morning, and Cherbourg was in flaring collars and high lace hats. Donkey carts and diminutive automobiles moved to the sound of incessant bells. Jim and Milly went ashore on a tug-boat and were inspected by customs officials and immigration authorities. Then they were free with an hour before the Paris train, and they moved out into the bright thrilling world of French blue. At a point of vantage, a pleasant square that continually throbbed with soldiers and innumerable dogs and the clack of wooden shoes, they sat down at a café.

“Du vaah,” said Jim to the waiter. He was a little disappointed when the answer came in English. After the man went for the wine he took out his two war medals and pinned them to his coat. The waiter returned with the wine, seemed not to notice the medals, made no remark. Milly wished Jim hadn’t put them on—she felt vaguely ashamed.

After another glass of wine it was time for the train. They got into the strange little third-class carriage, an engine that was out of some boy’s playroom began to puff and, in a pleasant informal way, jogged them leisurely south through the friendly lived-over land.

“What are we going to do first when we get there?” asked Milly.

“First?” Jim looked at her abstractedly and frowned. “Why, first I got to see about the job, see?” The exhilaration of the wine had passed and left him surly. “What do you want to ask so many questions for? Buy yourself a guidebook, why don’t you?”

Milly felt a slight sinking of the heart—he hadn’t grumbled at her like this since the trip was first proposed.

“It didn’t cost as much as we thought, anyhow,” she said cheerfully. “We must have over a hundred dollars left anyway.”

He grunted. Outside the window Milly’s eyes were caught by the sight of a dog drawing a legless man.

“Look!” she exclaimed. “How funny!”

“Aw, dry up. I’ve seen it all before.”

An encouraging idea occurred to her: it was in France that Jim’s nerves had gone to pieces; it was natural that he should be cross and uneasy for a few hours.

Westward through Caen, Lisieux and the rich green plains of Calvados. When they reached the third stop Jim got up and stretched himself.

“Going out on the platform,” he said gloomily. “I need to get a breath of air; hot in here.”

It was hot, but Milly didn’t mind. Her eyes were excited with all she saw—a pair of little boys in black smocks began to stare at her curiously through the windows of the carriage.

“American?” cried one of them suddenly.

“Hello,” said Milly. “What place is this?”

“Pardon?”

They came closer.

“What’s the name of this place?”

Suddenly the two boys poked each other in the stomach and went off into roars of laughter. Milly didn’t see that she had said anything funny.

There was an abrupt jerk as the train started. Milly jumped up in alarm and put her head out the carriage window.

“Jim!” she called.

She looked up and down the platform. He wasn’t there. The boys, seeing her distraught face, ran along beside the train as it moved from the station. He must have jumped for one of the rear cars. But—

“Jim!” she cried wildly. The station slid past. “Jim!”

Trying desperately to control her fright, she sank back into her seat and tried to think. Her first supposition was that he had gone to a café for a drink and missed the train—in that case she should have got off too while there was still time, for otherwise there was no telling what would happen to him. If this were one of his spells he might just go on drinking, until he had spent every cent of their money. It was unbelievably awful to imagine—but it was possible.

She waited, gave him ten, fifteen minutes to work his way up to this car—then she admitted to herself that he wasn’t on the train. A dull panic began—the sudden change in her relations to the world was so startling that she thought neither of his delinquency nor of what must be done, but only of the immediate fact that she was alone. Erratic as his protection had been, it was something. Now—why, she might sit in this strange train until it carried her to China and there was no one to care!

After a long while it occurred to her that he might have left part of the money in one of the suitcases. She took them down from the rack and went feverishly through all the clothes. In the bottom of an old pair of pants that Jim had worn on the boat she found two bright American dimes. The sight of them was somehow comforting and she clasped them tight in her hand. The bags yielded up nothing more.

An hour later, when it was dark outside, the train slid in under the yellow misty glow of the Gare du Nord. Strange, incomprehensible station cries fell on her ears, and her heart was beating loud as she wrenched at the handle of the door. She took her own bag with one hand and picked up Jim’s suitcase in the other, but it was heavy and she couldn’t get out the door with both, so in a rush of anger she left the suitcase in the carriage.

On the platform she looked left and right with the forlorn hope that he might appear, but she saw no one except a Swedish brother and sister from the boat whose tall bodies, straight and strong under the huge bundles they both carried, were hurrying out of sight. She took a quick step after them and then stopped, unable to tell them of the shameful thing that had happened to her. They had worries of their own.

With the two dimes in one hand and her suitcase in the other, Milly walked slowly along the platform. People hurried by her, baggage-smashers under forests of golf sticks, excited American girls full of the irrepressible thrill of arriving in Paris, obsequious porters from the big hotels. They were all walking and talking very fast, but Milly walked slowly because ahead of her she saw only the yellow arc of the waiting room and the door that led out of it and after that she did not know where she would go.