* * * * *
Dined to-night with Ben at an out-of-the-way restaurant of older days, across the Seine, where boys of thirteen and fourteen masqueraded as waiters and gave us of the toll of death. My old sommelier, who always kept a special bottle for me (or made me think he did), is gone, dead in the fight around the Labyrinth. New faces everywhere. Afterwards we walked back, silently, across the blackened city, stumbling down old Paris towards the dim blur of a hooded light. Occasionally a star detached itself from the Milky Way and went wandering like a great firefly, where above us, a sentinel aeroplane patrolled the night.
We came back shoulder to shoulder, unseen to each other, in long stretches of silence. It is strange how little we can say to each other. I have not the slightest inkling to the ways of his mind. Sometimes I think him totally devoid of imagination. Perhaps I am wrong and in his inner shell his thoughts are active and relentless. His code is a strange one—very Anglo-Saxon—and I think he is still ashamed that once or twice I saw him in the raw. I of course never refer to Letty, though her presence is always between us. The nearest approach to intimacy is a dialogue like this:
“How are you to-day, Ben?”
“First rate.”
“Nothing worrying you?”
“Nothing.”
“You look more like your old self.”
“Feel so.”