Fanshaw felt himself turn red.
"I don't imagine they have it," he said hastily and walked out of the shop. He had barely got into the cab when the French captain followed.
"Ce sale pays," he was muttering. As he climbed into the cab his usual bland smile crept back over his face. "Now we can dine," he said. "It takes more than a slight contrariety to ruffle old campaigners, eh, Captain Macdougan?"
"All right, let's have dinner," Fanshaw assented weakly.
How on earth did I get in with this ridiculous Frenchman, he was bitterly asking himself. Last day in Italy, too, that I had intended to be so pleasant. Intended to go up to Monreale to see the mosaics and the view.
"I cannot tell you, Captain Macdougan," his companion was saying, "how pleasant it is to spend an evening, after all those weary years of the war, frontier posts and that sort of thing, with a man of your culture and refinement, may I even say sophistication ... I said to myself when I met you this morning in the Red Cross office: There is a man of parts, an unusual person.... With me there are no half measures, I am a man of action.... So I immediately invited you to dinner. I am sure neither of us will regret it."
"Indeed, not for my part ..." stammered Fanshaw. They had driven up in front of a small empty restaurant. The hollow-eyed waiter at the door agitated his napkin in welcome.
Fanshaw and le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière sat in a cavernous stage box at the opera, Fanshaw with his chin on his hand leaning across the plush rail and the Frenchman sitting straight upright in his chair with his bemedalled chest expanded, nodding his head solemnly in time to the music. On one side was a mottled horeshoe of faces, on the other the dustily lighted stage across which moved processions of monks, tenors in knee-breeches, baritones with false beards; below them out of the glint of brasses and the shiny curves of violins and the gleaming bald heads of musicians the orchestra boomed and crashed. Verdi's long, emphatic tunes throatily sung brought up to Fanshaw's mind his boyish dreams out of Walter Scott and Bulwer of hazardous enterprises and maidens' love hardily won. He felt as if he wanted to cry. How silly and dusty this all is, he kept saying to himself. And here I am after the war a Red Cross captain, and everything has happened that can happen, and Wenny's dead years ago, dead as this old opera, and Nan's an old maid, and here I am sitting next to this crazy Frenchman with his medals and his stories of native women ... Right after the opera I'll leave him and go back to the hotel, get a good night's rest, and run up to Monreale before the boat goes; twelve that is; plenty of time. A long lyric duet had reached its inevitable finale. The horseshoe was full of clapping hands, nodding heads. The French captain got to his feet and clapped, leaning out from the box. Wants to have them see his medals, said a voice savagely in Fanshaw's head.
In the intermission they sat drinking Marsala in the bar.
"I didn't tell you," le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière was saying, "how I happened to be present at the battle of the Marne. It is a very funny story."