French generals, French mayors, and French stationmasters. But
they were hardly satisfied. One man with an ugly bulge in his side-
pocket--you have seen at Drury Lane how quickly the revolver comes
out?--suggested that the whole collection was not worth an old
railway ticket because I had failed to comply with the latest regulation
regarding a photograph on the permis de séjour... We parted,
however, with mutual confidence and an expression of satisfaction in
the Entente Cordiale.


3


One scene is clear cut in my memory, as it was revealed in a narrow
street of Paris where a corner lantern flung its rays down upon the
white faces of two men and two women. It was midnight, and I was
waiting outside the door of a newspaper office, where my assistant
was inquiring for the latest bulletins of war. For some minutes I
watched this little group with an intuition that tragedy was likely to leap
out upon them. They belonged to the apache class, as it was easy to
see by the cut of the men's trousers tucked into their boots, with a
sash round the waist, and by the velvet bonnets pulled down
sideways over their thin-featured faces and sharp jaws. The women
had shawls over their heads and high-heeled shoes under their skirts.
At the Alhambra in London the audience would have known what
dance to expect when such a group had slouched into the glamour of
the footlights. They were doing a kind of slow dance now, though
without any music except that of women's sobs and a man's sibilant
curses. The younger of the two men was horribly drunk, and it was
clear that the others were trying to drag him home before trouble