ly place they knew how to
live, but oh, boy ..." said Tom Randolph, breaking a little loaf of
bread that made a merry crackling sound.

"It's worth starving to death on singe and pinard for four months."

After the hors d'oeuvre had been taken away, leaving them
Rabelaisianly gay, with a joyous sense of orgy, came sole hidden in a
cream-coloured sauce with mussels in it.

"After the war, Howe, ole man, let's riot all over Europe; I'm getting a
taste for this sort of livin'."

"You can play the fiddle, can't you, Tom?"

"Enough to scrape out _Aupres de ma blonde_ on a bet."

"Then we'll wander about and you can support me.... Or else I'll dress
as a monkey and you can fiddle and I'll gather the pennies."

"By gum, that'd be great sport."

"Look, we must have some red wine with the veal."

"Let's have Macon."

"All the same to me as long as there's plenty of it."

Their round table with its white cloth and its bottles of wine and its
piles of ravished artichoke leaves was the centre of a noisy, fantastic
world. Ever since the orgy of the hors d'oeuvres things had been
evolving to grotesqueness, faces, whites of eyes, twisted red of lips,
crow-like forms of waiters, colours of hats and uniforms, all involved
and jumbled in the melee of talk and clink and clatter.

The red hand of the waiter pouring the Chartreuse, green like a stormy
sunset, into small glasses before them broke into the vivid imaginings
that had been unfolding in their talk through dinner. No, they had been
saying, it could not go on; some day amid the rending crash of shells
and the whine of shrapnel fragments, people everywhere, in all uniforms,
in trenches, packed in camions, in stretchers, in hospitals, crowded
behind guns, involved in telephone apparatus, generals at their
dinner-tables, colonels sipping liqueurs, majors developing photographs,
would jump to their feet and burst out laughing at the solemn inanity,
at the stupid, vicious pomposity of what they were doing. Laughter would
untune the sky. It would be a new progress of Bacchus. Drunk with
laughter at the sudden vision of the silliness of the world, officers
and soldiers, prisoners working on the roads, deserters being driven
towards the trenches would throw down their guns and their spades and
their heavy packs, and start marching, or driving in artillery waggons
or in camions, staff cars, private trains, towards their capitals, where
they would laugh the deputies, the senato