Page:Later Life (1919).djvu/248

240 : a table with flowers and candles; men talking amid the smoke of their cigars; the burly figure of a fair-haired officer; and some strange words which that officer had just uttered as though unconsciously, in the course of ordinary conversation: a vision calling up early years of childhood, childish play, a little girl, fair, with red flowers at her temples, dressed in white, running barefoot over great boulders in a river full of rocks, under the heavy foliage of the tropical trees, and beckoning, beckoning with her little hand to the two elder brothers who were playing with her, fascinated by their little sister. . ..

There, in that room, through the smoke of the cigars, amid the hum of indifferent talk, in three or four sentences, no more, that big, fair-haired man had said it, said it just casually, with a softening of his rough, noisy voice:

"It was wonderful, the way she had of playing. She would run over the rocks and pluck the flowers. Lord, how adorable she looked, the little witch! And we boys used to run with her, run after her, as far as ever she pleased. She only had to beckon to us . . . the damned, adorable little witch!"

And the oath sounded like a caress; and the whole thing was only a picture lasting two or three seconds, no more; and then they returned to the smell of coffee and liqueurs, the cigar-smoke, the noisy voice growing rough again, becoming coarse and jovial as the burly, fair-haired soldier told some mess-room tale