Of course such a balloon would be a target for the enemy. Airplanes would come darting out of the clouds at a hundred miles an hour, spitting fire as they came. “We have guns on the ground to stop them,” wrote Marcel; “guns with high-angle mountings designed especially to shoot at planes, but I fear they are not very good yet, and Lanny should tell his father to invent better ones for my protection. The shells from these guns make white puffs of smoke when they explode, so that the gunner can correct his aim. The English call the guns 'Archies,' and I am told that this comes from some music-hall character who said: 'Archibald, certainly not!' It is wonderful, the humor with which the English fellows take this messy business. I have had one as an instructor and he has explained their jokes to me. The heavy shells which make an enormous cloud of black smoke they call 'Jack Johnsons,' because of a Negro prize fighter who is dangerous. Also they call them 'black Marias' and 'coal boxes.' Doubtless there will be new names by the time I get to the front.”
Beauty broke down and couldn't read any more. It seemed to her horrible that men should make jokes about death and destruction. Of course they laughed so that they might not have to weep; but Beauty could weep, and she did. She was certain that her lover was gone forever, and her hopes died a new death every time she thought of him. Lanny, talking with M. Rochambeau, learned that his mother had cause for fear, because the job which Marcel had chosen represented just about the peak of peril in this war. A single correct observation followed by a well-placed shell might put a battery of guns out of action; so the enemy waged incessant warfare upon the stationary balloons. This far the French had managed to keep the mastery of the air, but the fighting was incessant and the death rate high. “Women must weep,” a poet in Lanny's anthology had said.
VII
Mrs. Emily Chattersworth wrote the news. Learning of the dreadful sufferings of the wounded after the great battle of the Aisne, she had lent the Château Les Forêts to the government for a hospital. Then she had been moved to go and see what was being done, and had been so shocked by the sight of mangled bodies brought in by the hundreds, and the efforts of exhausted doctors and nurses to help them, that she had abandoned her career as salonnière and taken up that of hospital director. Now she was helping to organize a society in Paris for the aid of the wounded and was asking all her friends for help and contributions. Would Beauty Budd do something? Mrs. Emily said that Marcel might some day be brought to Les Forêts; and of course that fetched Beauty. Despite her vow to economize and pay her debts, she sent a check to her friend.
Then Lanny began to observe a curious phenomenon. Having given her lover, and then her money, Beauty could no longer refuse to give her heart. So far she had been hating war; but now little by little she took to hating Germans. Of course she didn't know about Weltpolitik, and didn't try to discuss it; Beauty was personal, and recalled the hordes of Teutons who had come flocking to the Riviera in recent winters. The hotelkeepers had welcomed them, because they spent money; but Beauty hadn't welcomed them, because she loved the quiet of her retreat and they invaded it. The women were enormous and had voices like Valkyries; the men had jowls, and rolls of fat on the backs of their necks, and huge bellies and buttocks which they displayed indecently to the winter sunshine. They drank and ate sausages in public, made ugly guttural noises — and now, as it turned out, they had all the time been spying and intriguing, preparing huge engines of destruction and death!
Yes, Beauty decided, she hated all Germans; and this made for disharmony in the little island of peace which she had created at Bienvenu. Sophie didn't want to hate the Germans because it might start her Eddie off to be a hero, like Marcel. M. Rochambeau didn't want it because he was old and tired, and liable to heart attacks if he let himself get excited. “Dear lady,” he would plead, “we in this crowded continent have been hating each other for so many centuries — pray do not bring us any more fuel for our fires.” The retired diplomat's voice was gentle, and his manner that of some elderly prelate.
Lanny agreed that things were going to be harder for him if his mother became warlike. He would remind her of Kurt, and of great Germans like Goethe and Schiller and Beethoven, who belonged to all Europe. He would repeat to her the things which Robbie had told him — and of which the father kept reminding him, in carefully veiled language. When Beauty burst out that Robbie was thinking of the money he was going to make out of this war, Lanny was a bit shocked, and withdrew into himself. It wouldn't do to remind his mother that it was Robbie's money on which they were both living, and which she was giving to Mrs. Emily.
VIII
Jerry Pendleton was being a good companion. He liked to do the things that Lanny liked, and they climbed the hills and played tennis and swam and fished, and Jerry cultivated the mother of Mlle. Cerise by bringing in more seafood than the pension could consume. They enjoyed torch-fishing especially, and made themselves expert spearsmen, and got many a green moray, but never one as big as Captain Bragescu's. One night a strange adventure befell them — oddly enough the very thing that Beauty had been worried about, and for which everybody had laughed at her. It was to be that way all through the war; truth would outrun fiction, and if anybody said that a thing couldn't happen, then right away it did.
A still night, something not so common in the month of December, and two young fellows in fishing togs and sweaters, because it was cold in spite of the lack of wind. They had a torch set in the bow of the boat, blazing brightly, and were lying, one on each side, with their heads over the gunwales, looking down into the crystal-clear water. The sea growths waved gently to and fro, and it was like some enchanted land; the langoustes poked their heads out from the rocks, and fish idled here and there, many of them camouflaged, just like the Germans. Lanny thought about Marcel, doing the same kind of work, but high in the air instead of on top of the sea.
The Cannes lighthouse was flashing red and green. Not many lights on the shore, for the night life of the Golfe Juan was dimmed that winter. Not many sounds, just the murmur of distant traffic, and now and then the put-put of a motorboat. But suddenly a strange sort of splashing, the movement of a great bulk of water, and a series of waves rushing toward them, rocking their little boat so that they could no longer look into the depths. They stared toward the sound, shading their eyes from the torchlight, and gradually made out something, a dim shape. Impossible to believe it and equally impossible to doubt it — a round boxlike object arisen from the depths of the sea, and lying there, quite still!
“A submarine!” whispered Lanny; and his companion exclaimed: “Put out the torch!” Lanny was nearer, and grabbed it and plunged it into the water. A hissing sound, then silence and darkness, and the rowboat rocking in the swells.