Page 34 of If You Were the Only Girl in the World
Ignoring her fear of facing pregnancy unwed, she set her mind to the practicalities of what she must do. The idea of abandoning her position sent her groping for a chair and bending over, her hands to her stomach, to sob her heart out.
All she had worked for, all she had sacrificed, would be lost if she were not extremely careful. Her parents whom she had once defied to attend college would love her always. But they were of their own class and milieu. Her father would sorrow that she was pregnant and unwed. Her mother would take to her bed. Neither would criticize her. Neither would abandon her or her baby.
But Emile Russell would. If and when he learned, he would berate her, disparage her character and shout her out of his presence. He’d dismiss her. Ridicule her to her face and to her colleagues at the hospital. She would resign before he’d have the satisfaction.
A hand to her mouth, she caught back a howl at the knowledge that he’d so castigate her.
She rocked herself to some sanity and with a resolve she had once owned when first she sailed away to America, she went into her little kitchen and boiled water for tea. She sat down at her tiny circular table and enjoyed it with a slice of her baguette and steeled herself to her new reality.
She was about to have a baby. A child made in rapture. A child she would love. Created in the euphoria of a great love surviving in the midst of the tragedy of war. She would honor that child now and throughout his or her life and let no one hurt this child in word or deed.
CHAPTER11
Finally after three days of trying to get a place on a cross-channel steamer, Nate had boarded an old paddle tub built in the last century. It was approved for five hundred passengers, but the Army had requisitioned spots on it for men returning to their posts in France after temporary leave. That morning, the decrepit boat chugged across with twelve hundred and four men aboard. To add to the misery of them all, the weather turned nasty with rain and sleet lashing the deck. Worse, U-boats harried the boat causing shifts and darts in the course. He arrived in Calais weary, cold and unnerved. It didn’t help that he’d just recovered from a bad case of pneumonia.
Trains to Paris were, as could be predicted, off schedule. The one constant was the brooding presence of older French soldiers in their faded peacock blue uniforms, ‘the hairy ones’ whom the French calledpoilus. The three guards for the Paris-bound trains grumbled at his question about service and predicted another would arrive that evening. But they would not guarantee the time.
He climbed aboard an incoming that afternoon at four-fifteen. That night, he arrived after two in the morning because the train had stopped twice for repairs to uncoupled tracks. Knowing that Katrina would be at work on her night shift, he registered for a room at the Ritz and left at seven-thirty the next morning to catch her as she came home from the hospital.
Since mid December, he’d received regular letters from her to the London house in Piccadilly. Cheery, she wrote of her new ventures with the hospital library and the orphanage’s grand piano. Her new efforts to learn treatments for traumatized soldiers filled him with awe. She would be on the verge of developing a new form of treatment that would revolutionize care for seriously ill and wounded. But for the last few weeks he’d received no communication from her. He was thrilled he had sick leave and was able to visit her now.
At the front door to her building, he sat on the front steps to wait. By nine-thirty, she had not yet returned home. He rose, thinking she might have changed schedules and not had a chance to write him about it. He entered the main lobby and turned for the stairs up when he noticed a sign over the mail slots. The flat on the third floor, NumberC, was to let. He paused. WasCnot her flat?
He lifted the little sign and noticed that K. Schubert’s name was not in the designated slot.
Why not?
Confused, he jogged up the stairs to the third floor and stood in amazement at the sight of the wide open door. A few pieces of furniture stood in abandon. But no sign of Katrina marked the tables or chairs. Her apartment was empty. She had moved?
Downstairs, he knocked on the door of the concierge.
“Bonjour, Madame,” he bid the older lady and asked about the empty flat on the Third floor,C. “I hope you remember me. I am the friend,” he said in French, “ofMademoiselleDoctor Schubert. Has she moved?”
“Oui, Monsieur.” She offered to have him come in to join her for tea, but he refused with thanks. “Last week, she left.” She added how she was sorry to lose her. She was so quiet and always on time with the rent.
“Where did she go?” He tried to imagine reasons for Katrina’s move. Proximity to the hospital had been why she’d chosen this flat as opposed to the one so far away on the Left Bank. “Do you know?”
The woman shrugged her shoulders. She did not know, but she thought the lady doctor talked of going home.
“ToLes États-Unis?” He was incredulous.Why go home? Now?Katrina had encountered challenges living in Paris, but from her letters to him she was recently finding greater rewards. That he had not had a letter from her in the last three weeks had not alarmed him. The mail was so unreliable. And he’d been in the hospital himself without any mail service forwarded from the London house. Yet Nate thought of another issue that might affect her negatively. Her relationship with the director of her hospital—was Russell his name?—had been professional but rocky. She’d complained of him bitterly the last few months.
The concierge shook her head. Perhaps to her home,eh?
To go home to America was nigh unto impossible.
To even get across the Channel was a difficult task. For a civilian especially. To get a ship from Portsmouth or Southampton to New York or Boston was virtually impossible. Germany had recently declared it would resume unrestricted attacks on all ships in war-zone waters, even those of neutral nations. Last month, German U-boats had sunk five American merchant vessels carrying military supplies, clothing and food to Britain. Congress had passed legislation to gear up their own forces for conflict. Downing Street expected President Wilson would declare war on the German-Austrian powers within days. Crossing the Atlantic would become an even more dangerous journey than it had been before. Katrina was going nowhere.
“Merci, Madame.” He stood in her foyer, transfixed by the news.
But the concierge raised a hand. One more thing, she told him.Mademoisellehas her friend, the French lady. She said something about visiting her.
“Madame Boyer?”
Oui, she said. A lovely lady.
He’d try Aurore’s Paris office to see if she was in the City today, but first he’d visit the hospital.
The director, Emile Russell, was a stern-faced fellow who gave Nate few clues to the news that his staff member had resigned a week ago.
