Pierre and Luce/11
March was back again with a longer day and the first songs of birds. But along with the days increased the sinister flames of the war. The air was feverish with waiting for springtime—and waiting for the cataclysm. One heard the monstrous rumbling grow in intensity, the arms of millions of enemies clashing together, heaped up for the past months against the dyke of the trenches, and all ready to spill over like a tidal bore upon the Ile de France and the nave of La Cité. The shadow of frightful rumors preceded the plague; a fantastic report of poisoned gases, of deadly venom scattered through the air, which was about, so it was said, to descend on whole provinces and destroy everything like the asphyxiating overflow from Pelée Mountain. Finally the visits of bombing Gothas, coming oftener and oftener, cleverly kept up the nervousness of Paris.
Pierre and Luce continued to refuse to recognize anything about them, but the slow fever which they breathed in, whether they would or not, from that atmosphere heavy with menace, kindled the desire that glowed in their young bodies. Three years of war had propagated in European souls a freedom of morals which reached even the most honest and straight. And of the two children, neither one nor the other, had any religious beliefs. But they were protected by their delicacy of heart, their instinctive modesty. Only, in secret they had decided to give themselves completely one to the other before the blind cruelty of mankind should separate them. They had not spoken of this. They said it to themselves that evening.
Once or twice during the week Luce's mother was kept at the factory by her night work. On these nights Luce, in order not to stay alone in that desert quarter, slept in Paris with a girl friend. Nobody kept watch over her. The two lovers took advantage of this freedom to pass a portion of the evening together and sometimes they took a simple dinner in a little out-of-the-way restaurant. On leaving after dinner on this mid-March evening they heard the bomb-alert signal sound. They took refuge in the nearest place as if it were an affair of a rain shower, and for some time amused themselves observing their chance comrades. But the danger seeming distant or no longer there, although nothing had occurred to announce the end of the bomb-warning, Luce and Pierre, who did not want to get home too late, went on their way chatting gaily. They followed an old dark and narrow street near Saint Sulpice. They had just passed a hackney coach standing idle, both horse and driver asleep, near the gate of a porte cochère. They were twenty steps away and on the other sidewalk, when everything about them shuddered: a red, blinding flash, a roll of thunder, a rain of loosened tiles and broken windowpanes! Near the buttress of a house which made a sharp projection into the street they flattened themselves against the wall and their bodies interlaced. By the gleam of the explosion they had seen their own eyes full of love and dismay. And when the darkness fell again Luce's voice was saying:
"No, Pierre. I want no more."
And Pierre felt upon his own lips the lips and the teeth of the passionate girl. They remained palpitating in the darkness of the street. Some paces away some men, issuing from the houses, picked the dying coachman from among the remnants of the smashed vehicle; they passed quite close to them with the unfortunate man whose blood was falling drop by drop. Luce and Pierre remained petrified; so closely knit together that when consciousness revived in them it seemed as if their bodies had been naked in the pressure. They loosened their hands and lips grown together which drank of the loved one like roots. And, both of them, they began to tremble.
"Let us go home!" said Luce, invaded by a sacred terror.
She dragged him away.
"Luce! you will not let me leave this life before . . . ?"
"Oh, God," said Luce, squeezing his arm, "that thought would be worse than death!"
"My love, my love!" they kept repeating, one to the other.
Once more they came to a stop.
"When shall I be yours?" said Pierre.
(He could not have dared to ask: "When shall you be mine?")
Luce noticed this and was touched by it.
"Adored one," she said to him, ". . . very soon! Let's not hurry. You can not desire it more than I wish it! . . . Let us stay this way a little while. . . . It is splendid! . . . This month longer, right to the end! . . ."
"Until Easter?" he murmured.
(This year Easter was the last day in March.)
"Yes, at the Resurrection."
"Ah," quoth he, "there's the Death before Resurrection."
"Hush!" she interposed, closing his mouth with her own.
They drew away from each other.
"This night, it's our betrothal," whispered Pierre.
Huddled against each other while they walked in the shadows, they wept gently with tenderness. The ground crackled underfoot with the broken glass and the sidewalk was bloody. Death and the night were lying in ambush round about their love. But above their heads like a magic circle beyond the embrasure of the two black walls in the narrow street, as through a chimney, the heart of a star throbbed against the deep pulpy grain of the sky. . . .
Lo and behold! The voices of the bells sing out, lights are rekindled and the streets are animate once more. The air is free of foes. Paris breathes again. Death has flown.