For more than three months that map had hung on the living-room wall and Jane had thought nothing of it. She had not shared Stephen’s interest in the fluctuating battle-line. To Jane, preoccupied with desolate thoughts of Jimmy, the war had been merely an irrelevance. A quarrel of diplomats that was no concern of hers. The fantastic thought that German and French and English men were dying on those battlefields, dying by scores of thousands, had never really captured her imagination. It was another European war. Incredible, of course, in this civilized age, but no nearer to Jane, emotionally speaking, than the War of the Roses, the Napoleonic campaigns, the French defeat of 1870. Even the thought that André, at the age of thirty-nine, might be drawn into the conflict had failed to arouse her. Jane was preoccupied with desolate thoughts of Jimmy.
He had left Chicago without trying again to speak to her. He had disappeared into silence. Silence that had lasted for two months. Then she had had a picture postcard with a Chinese stamp upon it. A Chinese stamp and a picture of a little tower-like temple. Jimmy had written just four lines beneath it. “Here’s the Chinese shrine, Jane, where I’d have made you an honest woman. Today the temple bells are tinkling out of tune.”
That was all. And again there had been silence. A curious silence in which the vast echoes of war could rumble without arresting her attention, but which could always be shattered by the postman’s ring. Silence, in which Jane waited to hear again from Jimmy. Five days ago—it was the ninth of November—Jane had received his letter. At the sight of the New York stamp her heart had leapt up—was it with thankfulness or a strange, instinctive revulsion? Jimmy had returned to Agnes. Jane had opened the letter. She could not understand it. It was dated in Berlin, on the tenth day of August.
“I’m going to war, Jane. I’ve joined the German army. I joined it under the influence of a beer and a blond. I wasn’t too drunk, though, to remember my old friends Karl Marx and Bach and Beethoven and Wagner, and just drunk enough to have let Martin Luther slip my mind.
“I’ve got a pull with a Prussian I roomed with when he was a cub reporter on the New York Staats-Zeitung. He’s an officer now, and he made me an aide because of my English. It was all awfully irregular, for the army here is highly organized. Nevertheless, he did it and I’m going to see action at once. If they set me to using my English, I’ll probably be shot at dawn by the British. Anyway, I’m writing the Kaiser that, before I am, we’ve got to take Paris, because I’ve never seen it. I’d like to enter it in style the first time.
“I’m sending this letter through the lines in a spy’s pocket. He’s going to ramble around through Switzerland and Italy to Washington and hopes to come back with a blueprint or two, just in case we follow England into the war. He’ll mail it in New York, if he ever gets there.
“And now, Jane, to be quite serious for a minute, do you know that I adore you? Do you know that I feel about you just as I did on the day that I left you? Do you know that I wish to God that I didn’t? Darling—there’s nothing much to say. If you had come away with me, I certainly should not be going to war. This quarrel’s not of my making. If you had, we’d be safe in that cannibal village by this time, eating roasted missionary in an undusted living-room. But you wouldn’t, and you were wrong, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I can’t do anything about it now, not even about the way I feel—so I’m going to war, because that, at least, will be something else again. I certainly don’t want to be killed. Why, I don’t know. If you won’t marry me, there is nothing new under the sun—but there might be, under the sod, where proverbially there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage.
“I bet I live to sack Paris absentmindedly, because I will be thinking of you. Your
Jane stood staring at the map of Europe. Somewhere on that wavering battle-line, as she stood there, Jimmy was fighting in the quarrel that was not of his making, Jimmy was seeking “something else again,” under a rain of shot and shell. How like Jimmy, how terribly like Jimmy, to go to war on that casual quest! To go to a war that had become a crusade in the minds of all civilized people in an attitude of ironic detachment. To become—of all things—a Prussian officer at a moment when a Prussian officer represented to the minds of his countrymen a symbol of all evil. How like Jimmy to become a Prussian officer because of a beer and a blond and a few romantic thoughts on Karl Marx and Bach and Beethoven and Wagner! Jimmy—in a Prussian helmet, looking like a caricature of the Grown Prince. No, not that—for there would always be his quizzical eyebrows and his pointed ears and his ironical smile, exactly like a faun’s. A faun, mocking himself, in a Prussian helmet—that would be how Jimmy would look, even in the heat of battle. That would be how Jimmy would look, if he lived to sack Paris. If he lived to sack Paris absentmindedly, because he would be thinking of her.
If he lived! The thought of
