Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/126

 "Bravo! Bravo!"

He laughed as he sat down.

"I used to sing that when I was Captain of the School," he said. "A long time ago, eh? How many centuries? I was as clean a fellow as you'd meet in those days. Keen as mustard on cricket. Some bat, too! That was before the dirty war, and the stinking trenches; and fever, and lice, and dead bodies, and all that. But I was telling you about Yvonne, wasn't I?"

"Marguérite," I reminded him.

"No. Yvonne. I met her at Cassel. A brown-eyed thing. Demure. You know the type? One of the worst little sluts I ever met. Oh, a wicked little witch! Well, I paid for that affair. That policeman was wrong."

"What policeman?" I asked.

"The traffic man at Vlamertinghe. 'It's the same way to Hell,' he said, meaning Hooge. It was the other way, really. All the same, I've had some good hours. And now it's Armistice night Those fellows are getting rather blue, aren't they? It's the blinking cavalry who used to get in the way of the infantry, blocking up the roads with their ridiculous horses and their preposterous lances. Look here, old man; there's one thing I want to know. Tell me, as a wise owl."

"What is that?" I asked, laughing at his deference to my wisdom.

"How are we going to get clean enough for Peace?"

"Clean enough?"

I could not follow the drift of his question, and he tried to explain himself.

"Oh, I don't mean the soap-and-water business. But morally, spiritually, intellectually, and all that? Some of us will want a lot of scrubbing before we sit down in our nice little Christian families, somewhere at Wimbledon