Late that fall Eveline came home one evening tramping through the mud and the foggy dusk to find that Eleanor had a French soldier to tea. She was glad to see him, because she was always complaining that she wasn’t getting to know any French people, nothing but professional relievers and Red Cross women who were just too tiresome; but it was some moments before she realized it was Maurice Millet. She wondered how she could have fallen for him even when she was a kid, he looked so middleaged and pasty and oldmaidish in his stained blue uniform. His large eyes with their girlish long lashes had heavy violet rings under them. Eleanor evidently thought he was wonderful still, and drank up his talk about l’élan suprème du sacrifice and l’harmonie mysterieuse de la mort. He was a stretcherbearer in a basehospital at Nancy, had become very religious and had almost forgotten his English. When they asked him about his painting he shrugged his shoulders and wouldn’t answer. At supper he ate very little and drank only water. He stayed till late in the evening telling them about miraculous conversions of unbelievers, extreme unction on the firing line, a vision of the young Christ he’d seen walking among the wounded in a dressingstation during a gasattack. Après la guerre he was going into a monastery. Trappist perhaps. After he left Eleanor said it had been the most inspiring evening she’d ever had in her life; Eveline didn’t argue with her.
Maurice came back one other afternoon before his perme expired bringing a young writer who was working at the Quai d’Orsay, a tall young Frenchman with pink cheeks who looked like an English publicschool boy, whose name was Raoul Lemonnier. He seemed to refer to speak English than French. He’d been at the front for two years in the Chasseurs Alpins and had been reformé on account of his lungs or his uncle who was a minister he couldn’t say which. It was all very boring, he said. He thought tennis was ripping, though, and went out to St. Cloud to row every afternoon. Eleanor discovered that what she’d been wanting all fall had been a game of tennis. He said he liked English and American women because they liked sport. Here every woman thought you wanted to go to bed with her right away; “Love is very boring,” he said. He and Eveline stood in the window talking about cocktails (he adored American drinks) and looked out at the last purple shreds of dusk settling over Nôtre Dâme and the Seine, while Eleanor and Maurice sat in the dark in the little salon talking about St. Francis of Assisi. She asked him to dinner.
The next morning Eleanor said she thought she was going to become a Catholic. On their way to the office she made Eveline stop into Nôtre Dâme with her to hear mass and they both lit candles for Maurice’s safety at the front before what Eveline thought was a just too tiresomelooking virgin near the main door. But it was impressive all the same, the priests moaning and the lights and the smell of chilled incense. She certainly hoped poor Maurice wouldn’t be killed.
For dinner that night Eveline invited Jerry Burnham, Miss Felton who was back from Amiens and Major Appleton who was in Paris doing something about tanks. It was a fine dinner, duck roasted with oranges, although Jerry, who was sore about how much Eveline talked to Lemonnier, had to get drunk and use a lot of bad language and tell about the retreat at Caporetto and say that the Allies were in a bad way. Major Appleton said he oughtn’t to say it even if it was true and got quite red in the face. Eleanor was pretty indignant and said he ought to be arrested for making such a statement, and after everybody had left she and Eveline had quite a quarrel. “What will that young Frenchman be thinking of us? You’re a darling, Eveline dear, but you have the vulgarest friends. I don’t know where you pick them up, and that Felton woman drank four cocktails, a quart of beaujolais and three cognacs, I kept tabs on her myself;” Eveline started to laugh and they both got to laughing. But Eleanor said that their life was getting much too bohemian and that it wasn’t right with the war on and things going so dreadfully in Italy and Russia and the poor boys in the trenches and all that.
That winter Paris gradually filled up with Americans in uniform, and staffcars, and groceries from the Red Cross supply store; and Major Moorehouse who, it turned out, was an old friend of Eleanor’s, arrived straight from Washington to take charge of the Red Cross publicity. Everybody was talking about him before he came because he’d been one of the best known publicity experts in New York before the war. There was no one who hadn’t heard of J. Ward Moorehouse. There was a lot of scurry around the office when word came around that he’d actually landed in Brest and everybody was nervous worrying where there axe was going to fall.
The morning he arrived the first thing Eveline noticed was that Eleanor had had her hair curled. Then just before noon the whole publicity department was asked into Major Wood’s office to meet Major Moorehouse. He was a biggish man with blue eyes and hair so light it was almost white. His uniform fitted well and his Sam Browne belt and his puttees shone like glass. Eveline thought at once that there was something sincere and appealing about him, like about her father, that she liked. He looked young too, in spite of the thick jowl, and he had a slight southern accent when he talked. He made a little speech about the importance of the work the Red Cross was doing to keep up the morale of civilians and combatants, and that their publicity ought to have two aims, to stimulate giving among the folks back home and to keep people informed of the progress of the work. The trouble now was that people didn’t know enough about what a valuable effort the Red Cross workers were making and were too prone to listen to the criticisms of proGermans working under the mask of pacifism and knockers and slackers always ready to carp and criticize; and that the American people and the warwracked populations of the Allied countries must be made to know the splendid sacrifice the Red Cross workers were making, as splendid in its way as the sacrifice of the dear boys in the trenches.
“Even at this moment, my friends, we are under fire, ready to make the supreme sacrifice that civilization shall not perish from the earth.” Major Wood leaned back in his swivelchair and it let out a squeak that made everybody look up with a start and several people looked out of the window as if they expected to see a shell from big Bertha hurtling right in on them. “You see,” said Major Moorehouse eagerly, his blue eyes snapping, “that is what we must make people feel… the catch in the throat, the wrench to steady the nerves, the determination to carry on.”