"And he said: 'What would you have, Monsieur? _C'est la guerre?_'"
The horrible fat man, hundreds of miles away from the front, with every convenience for drying sheets, had said those identical words. And in the same greasy, gasping tone.
I gaped at the mimetic miracle. It was then that the memory of the eight-year-old child's travesty of myself flashed through my mind.
"Pardon me," said I, "but haven't you turned this marvellous gift of yours to--well to practical use?"
He grinned in his honest, wide-mouthed way, showing his incomparable teeth.
"Don't you think," said he, "I'm the model of a Colonel of the Rifles?"
He grinned again at the cloud of puzzlement on my face, and rose holding out his hand.
"Time for turning in. Will you do me a favour? Don't give me away about the circus."
Somehow my esteem for him sank like thermometer mercury plunged into ice. I had thought him, with the blazing record of achievement across his chest, a man above such petty solicitude. His mild blue eyes searched my thoughts.
"I don't care a damn, Captain Hylton," said he, in a tone singularly different from any that he had used in our pleasant talk--"if anybody knows I was born in a stable. A far better man than I once had that privilege. But as it happens that I am going out to command a brigade next week, it would be to the interest of my authority and therefore to that of the army, if no gossip led to the establishment of my identity."
"I assure you, sir----" I began stiffly--I was only a Captain, he, but for a formality or two, a Brigadier-General.
He clapped his hands on my shoulders--and I swear his ugly, smiling face was that of an angel.
"My dear fellow," said he, "so long as you regard me as an honest cuss, nothing matters in the world."
I went to bed with the conviction that he was as honest a cuss as I had ever met.
Our hosts, the Verity-Stewarts, were pleasant people, old friends of mine, inhabiting a Somerset manor-house which had belonged to their family since the days of Charles the Second. They were proud of their descent; the Stewart being hyphenated to the first name by a genealogically enthusiastic Verity of a hundred years ago; but the alternative to their motto suggested by the son of the house, Captain Charles Verity-Stewart, "The King can do no wrong," found no favour in the eyes of his parents, who had lived remote from the democratic humour of the officers of the New Army.