Charles Fortune broke away from his musical fantasy of "Blear-eyed Bill" and played a bar or two of the Marseillaise in rag-time. It was a greeting to Pierre Nesle, who came into the room quietly, in his képi and heavy motor-coat, with a salute to the company.
"Bon soir, petit Pierre!" said Fortune. "Qu'est-ce-qu'il y a, donc-quoi?-avec ta figure si sombre, si mélancolique, d'une tristesse pitoyable"
Pierre Nesle inspired him to sing a little old French chanson of Pierrot disconsolate.
Pierre had just motored down from Lille—a long journey—and was blue with cold, as he said, warming his hands at the charcoal stove. He laughed at Fortune's jesting, begged a cigarette from Harding, apologised for keeping on his "stink-coat" for a while until he had thawed out—and I admired the boy's pluck and self-control. It was the first time I had seen him since he had gone to Lille to see his sister. I knew by the new lines about his eyes and mouth, by a haggard, older look he had that he had seen that sister of his—Marthe—and knew her tragedy.
It was to Brand's room that he went after midnight, and from Brand, a day later, I heard what had happened. Lie had begun by thanking Brand for that rescue of his sister in Lille, in a most composed and courteous way. Then suddenly that mask fell from him, and he sat down heavily in a chair, put his head down on his arms upon the table, and wept like a child, in uncontrollable grief. Brand was immensely distressed and could not think of any word to comfort him. He kept saying, "Courage! Courage!" as I had said to Madame Chéri when she broke down about her boy Edouard, as the young Baronne had sent word to Eileen from her prison death-bed, and as so many men and women had said to others who had been stricken by the cruelties of war.
