Slowly his gaze wandered over in my direction; I read in his eyes the dumb inquiry a man sometimes throws his neighbor when he wants to go halves with him over a bottle of wine.
“If the colonel will allow me,” I said, “it would give me great pleasure to drink a bottle with him.”
He agreed, plainly not unwilling. He pushed the wine list over to the waiter, lining with his finger the sort he wanted, and said in a commanding tone: “A bottle of that.”
“That is a brand I know well,” he said, turning to me, while he threw his hat on a chair and sat down at one of the tables—“it’s good blood.”
I had placed myself at a table with him so that I could see his face in profile. His look was again turned toward the window, and as he gazed past me up into the heavens, the glow of the sunset was reflected in his eyes.
It was the first time I had seen him at such close quarters.
By the look of his eyes he was lost in dreams, and as his hand played mechanically through his long beard, there seemed to rise before him out of the flood of the years that had rushed behind, forms that were once young when he was young, and which were now—who can say where? The bottle which the waiter had brought and placed at a table before us contained a rare wine. An old Bordeaux, brown and oily, poured into our glasses. I recalled the expression which the old man had used a short time before.
“I must admit, colonel, that this is indeed ‘good blood.’”
His flushed eyes came slowly back from the far away, turned upon me, and remained fixed there, as if he would say: “What do you know about it?”
He took a deep draft, wiped his beard, and gazed at his glass. “Strange,” he said, “when a man grows old—he recalls the earliest days far easier than those that come later.”