Dicky vaguely perceived that an abyss was slowly but surely forming between this Yank and the patriots at home—an abyss only to be bridged by silence. Quite as slowly but surely Dicky’s heart opened to this enlisted man. One has to love something. Once or twice, things he saw this laughing maniac from America do made him very much ashamed of his own mental antics in a certain red room of Bombay.
XXXIII
PARIS, 1918—HADDON AND AMES
SO far as Dicky was concerned, the things of great moment in his experience in France all happened in the fall of 1918. He was in Paris at the end of that shocking summer, and found a letter from Nagar which reiterated that the curtain could not rise on the Drama of India until Great Britain was through fighting in France and the land of the Euphrates.... He was stopping at the Garonne. There was a knock at his room door one afternoon and voices outside. It was Haddon and Ames, correspondents out of New York, and they wanted money. Haddon talked first:
“... He’s off his head and in a mess. He mentioned your name. He says he sniffed some gas out in the vineyards somewhere in April, and can’t get over it. Either that, or the family he’s fouled up with is feeding him ground glass.”
“Who’s this you’re talking about?” Cobden asked, though he had heard the name.
“Melton—done some magazine stories,” said Haddon.
“You say he mentioned my name?”
“His French father-in-law picked on me first,” Ames put in. “Just happened. I’m at the Charente, where a lot of Americans are putting up. Told me a long story of wrongs to his only child—a female child now married to Author Melton. Mentioned your name——”
“He was gassed?” Dicky repeated.
“He says he was,” said Haddon. “It’s an operation case, all right. Melton will have to be cut out of that French house.”