At table I was seated between two of the youngest officers. They had very long necks and wore extremely high collars. At first I felt myself greatly overawed in the presence of people so imposing as my neighbours. They looked snobbish and uncommunicative. Presently I discovered that they were much more timid than I, and that we should never be better acquainted unless one or the other of us resolved to overcome his own nervousness and, at the same time, that of his companions.
But my young officers were afraid only in the presence of women. When I told them I hoped they might never be engaged in a war, and especially that they might never have to do any killing, one of them answered me very simply:
“I fancy I can serve as a target as well as any other man, and certainly the people who draw on me will understand that war is on.”
They were essentially and purely English. Nothing could unsettle them, provoke them or change them in the least. At our table they seemed timid. They were nevertheless men of the kind who go into the presence of death just as one encounters a friend in the street.
At this period I did not understand the English as I have subsequently come to know them.
I left the table without remembering to ask the names of my neighbours, and when I thought about the matter it was too late.
I recalled, however, that one of them took the trouble, in the course of our conversation, to learn the name of the hotel at which I was staying. I had quite forgotten the incident when, some time after, I received a little casket, addressed to me from India.
It contained a skirt of very thin white silk, of a peculiar shape, and some pieces of silk gauze. The box was not more than sixteen inches long and was hardly taller than a cigar box. It contained nothing else, not a line, not a card. How odd! From whom could it come?
I knew no one in India. All at once, however, I remembered the dinner and the young officers. I was greatly taken with my pretty box, but I was far from suspecting that it contained the little seed from which an Aladdin’s lamp was destined to spring for my benefit.
This, of course, was the casket which I had just discovered in my trunk.