Jim was so astonished that his mouth opened, just as it would have done ten years earlier.
“By gum!” he cried. “That takes it! An’ it’s hardly a month since I saw Miss Angèle in Amiens.”
Martin’s pulse quickened. The mouth-organ in Bates’s hand brought him back at a bound to the night when he had forbidden Jim to play for Angèle’s dancing. And with that memory came another thought. Mrs. Saumarez in Paris—her daughter in Amiens—why this devotion to such nerve centers of the war?
“Are you sure?” he said. “You would hardly recognize her. She is ten years older—a woman, not a child.”
Bates laughed. He dropped his voice.
“She was always a bit owd-fashioned, sir. I’m not mistakken. It kem about this way. It was her, right enough. Our colonel’s shover fell sick, so I took on the car for a week. One day I was waitin’ outside the Hotel dew Nord at Amiens when a French Red Cross auto drove up, an’ out stepped Miss Angèle. I twigged her at once. I’d know them eyes of hers anywheres. She hopped into the hotel, walkin’ like a ballet-dancer. Hooiver, I goes up to her shover an’ sez: ‘Pardonnay moy, but ain’t that Mees Angèle Saumarez?’ He talked a lot—these Frenchies always do—but I med out he didn’t understand. So I parlay-vooed some more, and soon I got the hang of things. She’s married now, an’ I have her new name an’ address in my kit-bag. But I remember ’em, all right. I can’t pronounce ’em, but I can spell ’em.”
And Lance Corporal Bates spelled: “La Comtesse Barthélemi de Saint-Ivoy, 2 bis, Impasse Fautet, Rue Blanche, Paris.”
“It looks funny,” went on Jim anxiously, “but it’s just as her shover wrote it.”
Martin affected to treat this information lightly.
“I’m exceedingly glad I came across you,” he said. “How would you like to be a sergeant, Jim?”