I ENCOUNTER AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE WHO LEADS ME TO A DELIGHTFUL SURPRISE


He stood in the centre of the room, facing the door, his legs, straddled
apart, planted firmly on the ground, one hand behind his back, the
other, withered and useless like the rest of the arm, thrust into the
side pocket of his tunic. He wore a perfectly plain undress uniform of
field-grey, and the unusual simplicity of his dress, coupled with the
fact that he was bare-headed, rendered him so unlike his conventional
portraits in the full panoply of war that I doubt if I should have
recognized him--paradoxical as it may seem--but for the havoc depicted
in every lineament of those once so familiar features.

Only one man in the world to-day could look like that. Only one man in
the world to-day could show, by the ravage in his face, the appalling
weight of responsibility slowly crushing one of the most vigorous and
resilient personalities in Europe. His figure, erstwhile erect and
well-knit, seemed to have shrunk, and his withered arm, unnaturally
looped away into his pocket, assumed a prominence that lent something
sinister to that forbidding grey and harassed face.

His head was sunk forward on his breast. His face, always intensely
sallow, almost Italian in its olive tint, was livid. All its alertness
was gone; the features seemed to have collapsed, and the flesh hung
flabbily, bulging in deep pouches under the eyes and in loose folds at
the corners of the mouth. His head was grizzled an iron-grey but the
hair at the temples was white as driven snow. Only his eyes were
unchanged. They were the same grey, steely eyes, restless, shifting,
unreliable, mirrors of the man's impulsive, wayward and fickle mind.