XVII

It was at the very beginning of Mimi’s work at Francine’s that an Austrian archduke was assassinated at Sarajevo. Austria, Serbia, Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium, Japan⁠—one by one they tumbled into the whirlpool of slaughter and blood and bullets. Headlines screamed and front pages were filled with stories of Belgium invaded, of the Marne and Louvain. Francine apparently was untouched except there was more work to be done now that Paris and its energies were turned to the making of guns instead of gowns. Mimi was deeply moved by the stories of scores, hundreds, thousands of deaths, but in time she scanned the headlines as she hurried home in the evenings on the subway with the calm acceptance of these horrors which long familiarity brings. Sometimes she remembered the phrase they had used in Atlanta when coloured people were subjected to indignities and injustice⁠—“You can get used to being hung if you’re only hung often enough.” Or, at other times, she accepted the stories of slaughter with a fatalistic, a not altogether hopeless philosophy which might be summed up in the words: “Oh, well, it’s white people killing white people⁠—the more they kill, the better the chance for coloured peoples.” But most of the time she thought of these things not at all, but centred her attentions on her work, her studies, the slow accumulation of enough money to bring Petit Jean to her.