“‘Nothing, for you stayed the night with me; you are my guests.’

“‘Oh, madame, we can’t have that!’

“And how they set to to make protests and compliments in front of each other!  Old man, you can say what you like—­we may be only poor devils, but it was astonishing, that little palaver of good manners.

“‘Come along!  Let’s be hopping it, eh?’

“They go out one by one.  I stay till the last.  Just then another passer-by begins to knock on the window—­another who was dying for a mouthful of coffee.  Mariette by the open door leaned forward and cried, ‘One second!’

“Then she put into my arms a parcel that she had ready.  ’I had bought a knuckle of ham—­it was for supper—­for us—­for us two—­and a liter of good wine.  But, ma foi! when I saw there were five of you, I didn’t want to divide it out so much, and I want still less now.  There’s the ham, the bread, and the wine.  I give them to you so that you can enjoy them by yourself, my boy.  As for them, we have given them enough,’ she says.

“Poor Mariette,” sighs Eudore.  “Fifteen months since I’d seen her.  And when shall I see her again?  Ever?—­It was jolly, that idea of hers.  She crammed all that stuff into my bag—­”

He half opens his brown canvas pouch.

“Look, here they are!  The ham here, and the bread, and there’s the booze.  Well, seeing it’s there, you don’t know what we’re going to do with it?  We’re going to share it out between us, eh, old pals?”

9

The Anger of Volpatte

When Volpatte arrived from his sick-leave, after two months’ absence, we surrounded him.  But he was sullen and silent, and tried to get away.

“Well, what about it?  Volpatte, have you nothing to tell us?”

“Tell us all about the hospital and the sick-leave, old cock, from the day when you set off in your bandages, with your snout in parenthesis!  You must have seen something of the official shops.  Speak then, nome de Dieu!”

“I don’t want to say anything at all about it,” said Volpatte.

“What’s that?  What are you talking about?”

“I’m fed up—­that’s what I am!  The people back there, I’m sick of them—­they make me spew, and you can tell ’em so!”

“What have they done to you?”

“A lot of sods, they are!” says Volpatte.

There he was, with his head as of yore, his ears “stuck on again” and his Mongolian cheekbones—­stubbornly set in the middle of the puzzled circle that besieged him; amid we felt that the mouth fast closed on ominous silence meant high pressure of seething exasperation in the depth of him.

Some words overflowed from him at last.  He turned round—­facing towards the rear and the bases—­and shook his fist at infinite space.  “There are too many of them,” he said between his teeth, “there are too many!” He seemed to be threatening and repelling a rising sea of phantoms.