CROSSING PARIS
543
Martin pointed out. "Their thoughts always turn toward the past,
and memories are like wine, the older they are, the better they are.
When memories are fresh, they mean heartache as often as not. Isn't
that so?"
His neighbor responded by a kind of grunt. Martin was almost
-offended by this indifference. He considered the man's heavy profile,
his suit, worn and dirty,
his
turtle-neck sweater, and concluded that
he was dealing with a rough 'fellow, probably a laborer, and not one
of the better class at that. Martin was conscious however that his
irritation might lead him to be unjust. A sudden expansive impulse
mingled with his vague compunction, and he resumed:
"There's an old man, and all he remembers of
his
young days
is
his war in China. I was in the war of 1914, but I'm not old
enough yet to want to think about it, you can bet on that."
Grandgil ha,:ing paid no more attention to this remark than to
the one that went before it, Martin gave up making conversation
and fell to thinking of the war of his youth. As always happened
at such a time, one picture stood out
in
his memory from all the rest,
that of a young soldier of the Colonial Infantry with a long knife
stuck in his swordbelt, scaling a high wall of steep rocks above the
straits of the Dardanelles. While the cannons of the fleet were sweep–
ing the plateau, which was bordered by a line of Turkish sharp shoot–
ers, the soldier Martin Eugene saw no part of the battle save the feet
of the sergeant who went before him in the steep ascent, and, close
beside him, the little geysers of dry dirt and broken rock which the
Turkish bullets were 'raising. Suddenly, the feet on which he had
been fixing his eyes seemed to flyaway. Drawing himself up on the
edge of the cliff, the sergeant threw out his arms in a violent gesture,
and, after a moment's hesitation
in
which he seemed to be trying
to recover himself, he fell backward into the abyss. In his place rose
a tall gray form, and into it Martin Eugene, born in Envierges
Street, Paris, in 1894, thrust his knife up to the hilt.
Once or twice a year, it had been
his
habit to recount this
story of the knife thrust among his friends, or sometimes to the
women, not without an eye to greater prestige. Giving himself airs
as a dangerous customer, a rOle that was belied by his round good–
natured face, he even claimed that having once tested thus the con–
venience of a good knife well in hand, he had ever since kept upon
