Furtively we stole away.

* * * * * *

We are almost silent as we leave the Cafe des Fleurs.  It seems as if we no longer know how to talk.  Something like discontent irritates my comrades and knits their brows.  They look as if they are becoming aware that they have not done their duty at an important juncture.

“Fine lot of gibberish they’ve talked to us, the beasts!” Tirette growls at last with a rancor that gathers strength the more we unite and collect ourselves again.

“We ought to have got beastly drunk to-day!” replies Paradis brutally.

We walk without a word spoken.  Then, after a time, “They’re a lot of idiots, filthy idiots,” Tirette goes on; “they tried to cod us, but I’m not on; if I see them again,” he says, with a crescendo of anger, “I shall know what to say to them!”

“We shan’t see them again,” says Blaire.

“In eight days from now, p’raps we shall be laid out,” says Volpatte.

In the approaches to the square we run into a mob of people flowing out from the Hotel de Ville and from another big public building which displays the columns of a temple supporting a pediment.  Offices are closing, and pouring forth civilians of all sorts and all ages, and military men both young and old, who seem at a distance to be dressed pretty much like us; but when nearer they stand revealed as the shirkers and deserters of the war, in spite of being disguised as soldiers, in spite of their brisques. [note 1]

Women and children are waiting for them, in pretty and happy clusters.  The commercial people are shutting up their shops with complacent content and a smile for both the day ended and for the morrow, elated by the lively and constant thrills of profits increased, by the growing jingle of the cash-box.  They have stayed behind in the heart of their own firesides; they have only to stoop to caress their children.  We see them beaming in the first starlights of the street, all these rich folk who are becoming richer, all these tranquil people whose tranquillity increases every day, people who are full, you feel. and in spite of all, of an unconfessable prayer.  They all go slowly, by grace of the fine evening, and settle themselves in perfected homes, or in cafes where they are waited upon.  Couples are forming, too, young women and young men, civilians or soldiers, with some badge of their preservation embroidered on their collars.  They make haste into the shadows of security where the others go, where the dawn of lighted rooms awaits them; they hurry towards the night of rest and caresses.

And as we pass quite close to a ground-floor window which is half open, we see the breeze gently inflate the lace curtain and lend it the light and delicious form of lingerie—­and the advancing throng drives us back, poor strangers that we are!