hand. “Take care of yourself and do not get into any more trouble…. Let me know if all goes well with you…. Good-bye, good-bye…. Ah, you are so young, aren’t you? Some day you will learn…. Good-bye, God bless you—you must hurry now—good-bye. Good-bye.”
She followed him as he went quickly down the stairs, and stood on the stairs watching him as he departed. His valise had been put out before the bureau, where he could get it easily: Yvonne and Madame Vatel were waiting silently in the office. Yvonne did not speak at all; when he spoke to Madame Vatel, she cocked her head a little and said coldly: “Monsieur?”
He seized the valise and started for the door with it at a rapid limping stride. At the door he paused, turned, and saw the Countess, still standing on the stairs and looking at him with old, sad eyes.
“Good-bye,” he cried in jubilant farewell. “Good-bye, Countess.”
“Good-bye, my boy,” her voice was so weary, old, and sad he could scarcely hear her.
Then he limped rapidly away from the hotel, across the square, and towards the station and the train.
All through the afternoon the train roared up across the fat and fertile countryside towards Paris. A late sun broke through ragged clouds of torn gold: the light was wild and radiant with a prophecy of spring. In the compartment his only companion was a young soldier: a boy of eighteen, tall, gawky, big of hand and foot and limb, looking even clumsier than he really was in his thick-soled army shoes, his blue-olive uniform—his long shanks coarsely wound with bands of olive cloth.
The boy had a friendly, olive-coloured face, a little marred by pimples and fuzzy unshaved hair; he talked constantly, amiably indifferent to his companion’s foreign speech and manner, garrulously friendly in a hoarse boy’s voice.
In the middle of the afternoon he began to unpack various bundles from the staggering impedimenta of military equipment with which he was surrounded. From a pocket of his overcoat he solemnly fished out an enormous tin of sardines. From another package he took out a gigantic bottle of red wine, and with the same gravity began to unfold from its wrapping in a newspaper a three-foot loaf of crusty bread.
Then, with the same deliberate concentration, he opened the sardine tin, uncorked the wine-bottle and took a hearty preliminary swig, pulled
