My first impression of the man, of the familiarity of his type, had, I suppose, been so strong as to dull for a moment my reaction to this discovery. I had seen that vari-colored line often enough before, on the uniforms of British officers or French; I had perhaps seen it on an American, but certainly I had never seen it on an American like this. No wonder the connection was slow to establish itself. It was a decoration bar, and there must have been six ribbons at least, if not more.
For sheer incongruous association, I doubt if you’d find a more pat example in a lifetime than the man I had, on sight, conceived this one to be—the man I may as well say now he actually was—and that bar of ribbons pinned on his khaki-colored coat.
Young Homan had caught it, too, and was sending past me his deliberate stare of amazement.
It was not exactly as if we thought he hadn’t come by them honestly, but more as if we suggested to each other that he couldn’t surely have got them in the way decorations were usually got; it seemed somehow impossible that he understood their importance. And there was still something of that in our attitude when, later on, after dinner, we had drifted into the salon with the rest for our coffee, and by a kind of natural gravitation had found ourselves in conversation with our compatriot, whose jocose friendliness led young Homan to ask, half in fun to be sure, where he had got all the decorations. He showed certainly no very proper appreciation of their importance by his answer:
“Bought ’em, at the Galleries Lafayette. Get any kind you want there, y’ know.”
We laughed, all of us, for everybody had seen the cases of medals and decorations at the Galleries. I believe for an instant the youngster was half inclined to think he had bought them. I know I was. As some kind of outlandish practical joke, of course. It seemed, absurd as the idea was, so much likelier than that he could have been through the kind of experiences which result in being decorated by foreign governments. And such an imposing array! The scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor, the green of the Japanese “Rising Sun,” the brilliant stripes of Russian and English decorations, and strange ones I had never seen before!
You see, he had turned out much more Middle West than we had imagined. In the first ten minutes of our conversation he had spoken of “home,” and mentioned the name of the town—Dubuque, Iowa! And a few minutes later he gave us, by the merest chance phrase or two, involving the fact that his married sister lived “a block and a half down the street” from his mother’s house, a perfectly complete picture of that street—broad and shady and quiet, of his mother’s yellow frame house, and the other, white with a green lawn round it, where his sister lived. And the point was that he was making no effort toward such an effect. He was only being himself.
His dinner companion, the Balkan officer, came in presently and addressed Corey as “Doctor” (I adjusted myself to that, still with the Dubuque setting, however), and it was in the conversation following upon the new introduction that the object of his being in Paris came out. He told us, quite by the way, though not in the least depreciating the importance of his mission—that he was in Paris for a few days looking up anesthetics for the Serbian army. He had been working, he said, down in the Balkans since shortly after the outbreak of the war, in charge of a sanitary section. They’d been out of anesthetics for some time now—impossible to get them in—and they’d been operating, amputating the poor devils’ legs and arms, without anesthetics; and now at last he’d left things long enough to come up to Paris himself and see what could be done. He was starting back the next day or the day after that.
Corey, from Dubuque! In a makeshift Serbian field hospital, in that terrible cold, performing delicate and difficult operations—wholesale, as they must have been performed—on wounded Balkan soldiers; probing for bullets in raw wounds—that was a picture to set up beside the one we had of him in Dubuque!
And yet—it wasn’t at all a question of doubt (we’d read it all in the papers day after day); it wasn’t that we didn’t believe Corey was telling the truth; his evidence was too obvious for that—the picture didn’t somehow succeed in painting itself—I can’t to this day say why. Surely the Balkans just then—operations without anesthetics, the pageantry and blood-red color of war—surely there was pigment of more brilliant hue than any contained in the mere statement that his married sister lived a block and a half down the street from his mother’s. But the picture wasn’t painted. Corey wasn’t the artist to do it. Not, mind you, that he tried; he was as far from trying to impress one, from affectation, as a boy of fourteen.