looked up and down the platform. He wasn’t there. The boys, seeing her distraught face, ran along beside the train as it moved from the station. He must have jumped for one of the rear cars. But—
“Jim!” she cried wildly. The station slid past. “Jim!”
Trying desperately to control her fright, she sank back into her seat and tried to think. Her first supposition was that he had gone to a cafe for a drink and missed the trains—in that case she should have got off too while there was still time, for otherwise there was no telling what would happen to him. If this were one of his spells he might just go on drinking, until he had spent every cent of their money. It was unbelievably awful to imagine—but it was possible.
She waited, gave him ten, fifteen minutes to work his way up to this car—then she admitted to herself that he wasn’t on the train. A dull panic began. The sudden change in her relations to the world was so startling that she thought neither of his delinquency nor of what must be done, but only of the immediate fact that she was alone. Erratic as his protection had been, it was something. Now—why, she might sit in this strange train until it carried her to China and there was no one to care!
After a long while it occurred to her that he might have left part of the money in one of the suitcases. She took them down from the rack and went feverishly through all the clothes. In the bottom of an old pair of pants that Jim had worn on the boat she found two bright American dimes. The sight of them was somehow comforting and she clasped them tight in her hand. The bags yielded up nothing more.
An hour later, when it was dark outside, the train slid in under the yellow misty glow of the Gare du Nord. Strange, incomprehensible station cries fell on her ears, and her heart was beating loudly as she wrenched at the handle of the door. She took her own bag with one hand and picked up Jim’s suitcase in the other, but it was heavy and she couldn’t get out the door with both, so in a rush of anger she left the suitcase in the carriage.
On the platform she looked left and right with the forlorn hope that he might appear, but she saw no one except a Swedish brother and sister from the boat whose tall bodies, straight and strong under the huge bundles they both carried, were hurrying out of sight. She took a quick step after them and then stopped, unable to tell them of the shameful thing that had happened to her. They had worries of their own.
With the two dimes in one hand and her suitcase in the other, Milly walked slowly along the platform. People hurried by her, baggage-smashers under forests of golf sticks, excited American girls full of the irrepressible thrill of arriving in Paris, obsequious porters from the big hotels. They were all walking and talking very fast, but Milly walked slowly because ahead of her she saw only the yellow arc of the waiting-room and the door that led out of it and after that she did not know where she would go.
By 10 p.m. Mr. Bill Driscoll was usually weary, for by that time he had a full twelve-hour day behind him. After that he only went out with the most celebrated people. If someone had tipped off a multimillionaire or a moving-picture director—at that time American directors were swarming over Europe looking for new locations—about Bill Driscoll, he would fortify himself with two cups of coffee, adorn his person with his new dinner-coat and show them the most dangerous dives of Montmartre in the very safest way.
Bill Driscoll looked well in his new dinner-coat, with his reddish brown hair soaked in water and slicked back from his attractive forehead. Often he regarded himself admiringly in the mirror, for it was the first dinner-coat he had ever owned. He had earned it himself, with his wits, as he had earned the swelling packet of American bonds which awaited him in a New York bank. If you have been in Paris during the past two years you must have seen his large white auto-bus with the provoking legend on the side:
WILLIAM DRISCOLL
he shows you things not in the guidebook
When he found Milly Cooley it was after three o’clock and he had just left Director and Mrs. Claude Peebles at their hotel after escorting them to those celebrated apache dens, Zelli’s and Le Rat Mort (which are about as dangerous, all things considered, as the Biltmore Hotel at noon), and he was walking homeward toward his pension on the left bank. His eye was caught by two disreputable-looking parties under the lamp-post who were giving aid to what was apparently a drunken girl. Bill Driscoll decided to cross the street—he was aware of the tender affection which the French police bore toward embattled Americans, and he made a point of keeping out of trouble. Just at that moment Milly’s subconscious self came to her aid and she called out, “Let me go!” in an agonized moan.
The moan had a Brooklyn accent. It was a Brooklyn moan.
Driscoll altered his course uneasily and, approaching the group, asked politely what was the matter; whereat one of the disreputable parties desisted in his attempt to open Milly’s tightly clasped left hand.
The man answered quickly that she had fainted. He and his friend were assisting her to the gendarmery. They loosened their hold on her and she collapsed gently to the ground.
Bill came closer and bent over her, being careful to choose a position where neither man was behind him. He saw a young, frightened face that was drained now of the color it possessed by day.
“Where did you find her?” he inquired in French.
“Here. Just now. She looked to be so tired—”
Billy put his hand in his pocket and when he spoke he tried very hard to suggest by his voice that he had a revolver there.
“She is American,” he said. “You leave her to me.”
The man made a gesture of acquiescence and took a step backward, his hand going with a natural movement to his coat as if he intended buttoning it. He was watching Bill’s right hand, the one in his coat-pocket, and Bill happened to be left-handed. There is nothing much faster than an untelegraphed left-hand blow—this one traveled less than eighteen inches and the recipient staggered back against a lamp-post, embraced it transiently and regretfully and settled to the ground. Nevertheless Bill Driscoll’s successful career might have ended there, ended with the strong shout of “Voleurs!” which he raised into the Paris night, had the other man had a gun. The other man indicated that he had no gun by retreating ten yards down the street. His prostrate companion moved slightly on the sidewalk and, taking a step toward him, Billy drew back his foot and kicked him full in the head as a football player kicks a goal from placement. It was not a pretty gesture, but he had remembered that he was wearing his new dinner-coat and he didn’t want to wrestle on the ground for the piece of poisonous hardware.
In a moment two gendarmes in a great hurry came running down the moonlit street.
Two days after this it came out in the papers—“War hero deserts wife en route to Paris,” I think, or “American bride arrives penniless, husbandless at Gare du Nord.” The police were informed, of course, and word was sent out to the provincial departments to seek an American named James Cooley who was without carte d’identité. The newspapers learned the story at the American Aid Society, and made a neat, pathetic job of it, because Milly was young and pretty and curiously loyal to her husband. Almost her first words were to explain that it was all because his nerves had been shattered in the war.
Young Driscoll was somewhat disappointed to find that she was married. Not that he had fallen in love at first sight—on the contrary, he was unusually level-headed—but after the moonlight rescue, which rather pleased him, it didn’t seem appropriate that she should have a heroic husband wandering over France. He had carried her to his own pension that night, and his landlady, an American widow named Mrs. Horton,
