out a clasp-knife with an evil-looking six-inch blade and, holding the loaf gripped firmly between his knees, began with a backward motion to carve a crisp and liberal slab out of the crusty loaf. This done, he put the bread aside, solemnly impaled a huge sardine upon the point of his gleaming knife, smacked it down upon the slab of bread and, furnishing himself with another hearty swig of the red wine, began to poke the sandwich happily away towards its intended destination, carrying on a choked but completely unperturbed conversation with his companion as he did so.
And his fellow traveller, gazing on that coarse but appetizing fare, felt the pangs of hunger awake in him again with such maddening insistence that the whole legend of his starved desire must have been written on his yearning face and in his greedy eyes. At any rate, the young soldier, his mouth still crammed with food, uttered some inarticulate but friendly sounds, in which the word “Mangez” alone was intelligible, suddenly thrust loaf, bottle, knife, and sardine tin towards his starved companion, and with a gesture of rude encouragement, hoarsely spattered forth again:
“Mangez!”
The fellow-traveller required no second bidding. He fell to ravenously on sardines, wine, and crusty loaf; they sat there cramming themselves enthusiastically, uttering choked and muffled sounds from time to time and grinning at each other amiably.
Nothing he had ever eaten tasted as good as that coarse fare; the strong, plain wine was pulsing warmly in his veins, the food made a warm glow in his grateful belly; outside, the sun had broken through in stripes of ragged gold and bronze, above the wheels he could hear great roars of hearty country laughter from another compartment, the high, rich, sanguinary voice of a Frenchman as he cried “Parbleu!”
And he was going back to Paris again, without a penny, a prospect, or a plan, and he felt no care nor pain nor trouble any longer—nothing but wild joy and jubilant happiness such as he had never felt before. He did not know why.
XCIX
Early in April money came from home, and he was on his way again. This time he started South in true earnest, hurtling southward on one of the crack trains of the P. L. M., his nose flattened against the window of
