Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/256

 He laughed in a most tragic way.

"Did you see those two in the car? Pierrot and Columbine?"

I nodded.

"Columbine was my wife. Pierrot is now her husband. Funny, isn't it?"

My memory went back to that night in Cologne less than six months before, when Harding had asked me to use my influence to get him demobilised, and as an explanation of his motive opened his pocket-book and showed me the photograph of a pretty girl, and said, "That's my wife she is hipped because I have been away so long." I felt enormously sorry for him.

"Come and have a whiskey in the smoke-room," said Harding. "I'd like a yarn, and we shall be alone."

I did not want him to tell me his tale. I was tired of tragic history. But I could not refuse. The boy wanted to unburden himself. I could see that, though for quite a time after we had sat on each side of the wood fire, he hesitated in getting to the point and indulged in small-talk about his favourite brand of cigars, and my evil habit of smoking the worst kind of cigarettes.

Suddenly we plunged into what was the icy waters of his real thoughts.

"About my wife I'd like you to know. Others will tell you, and you'd have heard already if you hadn't been away so long. But I think you would get a wrong notion from others. The fact is, I don't blame Evelyn. I would like you to understand that. I blame the Germans for everything."

"The Germans?"

That was a strange statement, and I could not see the drift of it until he explained his meaning.

"The Germans made the war, and the war took me