I'll say I have a headache and go home; I can't stand any more of this wretched man, Fanshaw was thinking.
"How did that happen?" he asked.
"It's very funny ... You know the little Moroccan ladies are charming. I had one at that time as a ... governess, to keep me out of mischief. I was sent from Casablanca to Marseilles on a little mission, so I got the idea of taking my little lady along and got a week's leave to go up to show her Paris. My wife was safely in Aix-les-Bains with her parents, and there we were, my Moorish governess and I, enjoying la ville lumière, when suddenly, boom, the war breaks out!" He took a sip of his glass and swept the faces of the people round the bar for a moment with his superior stare.
Too repulsive, the mentality of a man like that. It's not the immorality, it's the ugliness of that sort of thing that disgusts. When he finishes this story I'll go home. Fanshaw cleared his throat nervously.
"Of course I knew war was coming, but, as usual, I hadn't counted on its being so soon ... The first thing that happened was my wife wired to Paris that she'd meet me in Marseilles. All officers on leave were ordered back to their posts immediately. I was fond of my wife and I wanted to see her, but I knew I could never smuggle the little Moorish lady through Marseilles without her smelling a rat. What was I to do? I hung on in Paris a day trying to decide, and the next day packed off my little governess all alone. Poor little thing, she didn't know a word of French. Then I went to the Minister of War and got myself transferred to the French front and had my wife come up to Paris to see me off, and before I knew it I was right in the middle of the battle of the Marne. Comical, isn't it?"
Fanshaw laughed stiffly. The bell was ringing for the last act.
The two tenors and the two baritones had gone into a monastery. The soprano had become a hermit and lived in a cave. The contralto was disguised in a domino. The chorus promenaded with imitation torches through an arcade in the back of the bluelighted stage. Everything was monkish and ominous in the music. The two tenors threw their hoods off their heads and drew swords from under their cloaks and brandished them over the footlights and sang a duet. The baritones stepped stealthily out from behind the wings, and the duet was a quartet. The soprano threw herself shrieking between the swords of the tenors. The contralto, dressed as an abbess in purple robes, came out through a door in the back. It was a sextette. The tune, shrieked on tight vocal chords, filled to the roof the horseshoe-shaped theatre. Fanshaw half turned his head. The French captain was whispering with a stocky, sallowfaced young man who held his hat in his hand and leaned forward respectfully out of the back of the box. But things had happened on the stage. The tenors lay dying, the soprano had thrown herself to the ground, the contralto elevated a large cross with her portly arms, and the back of the stage was filling with the chorus of monks and their torches.
"Très bien, très bien!" cried le Capitaine Eustache de la Potinière as the curtain came down, and clapped with gloved hands. "No, after you!" Then, as he followed Fanshaw down the steps into the lobby of the theatre, he said: "It would be a good thing if more French and American officers were seen together at these affairs. It would improve our relations with Italy ... They are impressionable people. In Italy one must be seen."
The sallowfaced young man was waiting for them outside the theatre. "Vous suivez moi," he said in nasal French.
"But where are you going? I'm afraid I must go back to my hotel."