The Little Moment of HappinessKelland, Clarence Budington
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The Little Moment of Happiness
Kelland, Clarence Budington
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
“What have you been doing while I was away?” he asked, and asked because
he was really curious. He wanted to know something about her life away
from him, about her regular routine life. To him now she was a creature
that appeared as out of a fog, to disappear again into a fog,
untraceable, strange, mysterious. She must do something. She must have a
family. She must live in a house and sleep in a bed and take her meals
at a table. It must be that she had her friends and her little every-day
affairs, different, perhaps, from the every-day affairs of the American
girl, but nevertheless taking up the greater part of her life.... He
wished he could have the history of one of her days from waking to
sleeping, could be present to oversee one of her days.
“I have been lonely,” she said. So she always answered, and, it seemed
to him, not from any conscious effort to hide her life from him, but
rather because when she was with him it was her belief that nothing was
of interest to them but each other. It was as if she wanted to shut all
the rest of the world out, forget all the world and its business, and
remember only themselves and their little moments of happiness together.
No, it was not concealment, it was the exclusiveness of love. “I—many
times—I thought you would not come.... And I was sad.” She pressed his
arm gently.
They boarded the red car—first class—of the Metro, and it started its
rather leisurely journey westward under the Place de la Concorde and the
Champs Élysées. Kendall always insisted on riding first class on the
subway, though Andree urged it was a scandalous waste of money. One
could ride as comfortably second class, or, if the trip were very short,
the saving by taking third class was worth one’s while. The car was
crowded—women, a few old men in civilian clothes, _poilus_, officers
(one with four medals on his breast), Belgians with little gold tassels
dangling from the fronts of their caps, two English soldiers in an
advanced state of intoxication who recognized Kendall as belonging to a
kindred race and shouted joyously to him from afar.
“Hey, matey, does this ’ere car git us to the Gare St.-Nizaire?”
Kendall shook his head.
“Needn’t be so dam’ close-mouthed. Speak up like you was a officer and a
gen’lman! ’Urrah for America, says I. ’Ear me, Jock? Wi’ a will,
Jock.... ’Urrah for America.”
With enthusiasm they cheered for their newest ally, while Kendall
blushed with the embarrassment of finding himself thus elevated to a
place of prominence. The car laughed joyfully and in sympathy with the
Britishers. Andree looked up into Kendall’s face and, finding it
forbidding, pressed his arm and smiled.
“_Beaucoup_ de zigzag,” she said, philosophically, as if that explained
all and excused all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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