The photographs led them from one reminiscence to another; and in that little series of isolated recollections they lived again through all that had remained vivid to them of their school days.
“Heavens!” said Gerald, “who’s that? You don’t mean to say that’s Harrison! Why, I remember him when he first came, a ridiculous kid; we used to call him ‘Little Belly.’ About the first week he was there he showed his gym. belt to someone and said: ‘Isn’t it small? Haven’t I a little belly?’ ”
“And here’s Hardy,” said Roland. “Do you remember that innings of his in the final house match, and how we lined up on each side of the pavilion and cheered him when he came out?”
“And do you remember that try of his in the three cock?—two men and the back to beat and only a couple of yards to spare between them and the touchline. I don’t know how he kept his foot inside.”
And as the store of Fernhurst photographs became exhausted they found among the notes and hotel bills delightful memories of much that they had in common.
“The Café du Nord, Ghent! My son,” said Gerald, “do you remember that top-hole Burgundy? Yes, here it is—two bottles of Volnay, fifty-three francs.”
“Wasn’t that the night when that ripping little German girl smiled at us across the room?”
“And when I said that another bottle of Volnay was better than any woman in the world.”
A torn hotel bill at Cologne recalled a disappointing evening in the company of two German girls whom they had met at a dance and taken out to supper—an evening that had ended, to the surprise of both of them, in a platonic pressure of the hands.
“Do you remember how we stood under the cathedral and watched them pass out of sight behind the turning of the Hohe Strasse, and then you turned to me and said: ‘There’s no understanding women’?”