A new sense of values came to Maggie, living now in the midst of scenes like these. The determinedly cheerful though somewhat cynical attitude of “the boys” in such conditions seemed to her the most wonderful thing she had ever witnessed. It was as though they said to hostile forces: “Oh, yes, we know you’ll do for us in every possible way, slight us, cheat us, betray us, but you can’t kill the real life within us, the essential us. You may make us distrustful, incredulous, disillusioned, but you can’t make us despair or corrode us with bitterness. Call us children if you like, but in spite of everything, life is worth living, and we mean to live it to the full.”
So many impressions, so many happenings crowded in on Maggie during those days that she failed to differentiate between the strange and the unusual, the calculable and the unexpected. So that on the night when a new detachment of men filed into the canteen and she glanced up to find that the tall lieutenant to whom she was handing a cup of cocoa was Peter, she did not feel at first astonished. Afterwards it came to her that, subconsciously, she had noticed how subdued, how cautious his greeting to her had been. His manner toward Mrs. Terry, whom he had known slightly in New York, seemed by contrast almost effusive.
“That,” she told herself later, angrily, “was because he didn’t want to encourage me. How he dreads me! Poor Peter. I’ll put him at his ease.”
She was to make arrangements the next day for a trip to Lake Bourget. On her way to the station she spied Peter sitting, a desolate and lonely figure, in the little parkway that ran through the broad street. He did not see her advancing and she had a chance to examine him. His face, still handsome, was thin and lined and his eyes were hopeless. She held out her hand.
He let it drop after a brief pressure.
“I was thinking of you, Maggie.”
“And I of you. How wretched you look, Peter!”
He told her, then, of his wound and of his stay in a hospital in Toul. “My arm is all right now. I’ve even been in another engagement. In a month at the most, I expect to return to the front again.”
“Do you dread it?”
He looked at her in surprise. “Dread it? My goodness, no. I think I prefer war to ordinary living. It is so quick and decisive. Of course, there are some tiresome delays. We were held up for six weeks at Brest and the transportation overseas was very slow. But I didn’t care, I made a fine friend on account of it. I wish I’d met him sooner.” He didn’t tell her the name. That, he thought morosely, would only start her off again on his social standing. “He was killed,” he ended hastily.
“I’m so sorry. That’s why you’re so dismal.”
“Perhaps, and then, I don’t understand anything more. Life is all a maze and I can’t find my way out. I hope I get killed in my next engagement.”
She bit her lip at that. How blind she had been! “Well, I’m going to obviate one difficulty for you, Peter. I’ve decided not to marry—anybody. I think I want to try life on my own. No, don’t say anything. You can’t very well thank me and there’s no use pretending you’re sorry. It was a bad business, Peter, and I’m glad it’s over.”
Before he could speak she had left him. His wound and the loss of Meriwether, his constant brooding, had wrought in him an habitual dejection. But he was conscious of a slight lifting of the pall which hung over him, a loosening of the web.
They saw very little of each other in the five or six days before his departure. Maggie was rather glad of this. She wanted no reminders to spoil her feeling of having begun everything anew with a clean slate. Her newfound independence was a source of the greatest joy. Each night she mapped out afresh her future life. When she returned to America she would start her hair work again, she would inaugurate a chain of Beauty Shops. First-class ones. Of her ability to make a good living she had no doubt. And she would gather about her, friends, simple kindly people whom she liked for themselves: who would seek her company with no thought of patronage. She would stand on her two feet, Maggie Ellersley, serene, independent, self-reliant. The idea exalted her and she went about her work the picture of optimism and happiness.
The boys called her “Sunlight.” They all liked her and she was kind to them. Some of them were fine fellows, well educated and successful. It was Maggie’s greatest secret triumph that in these particularly favorable conditions she felt no impulse to attempt to realize that old insistent ambition.
On the utmost peak of the Mont du Nivrolet, which towers east of Chambéry, directly opposite the Chaîne de l’Epine, gleams an immense cross twenty-five meters high, visible from all the surrounding country. At sunset it stood out boldly and Maggie, looking at it daily at that hour, came to regard it as a sort of luminous symbol of faith. “Oh, God, you have brought me peace; perhaps some day I shall know happiness.”
