The Major smiled and took another sip of wine. “I am deeply touched,” he said, “by your concern. You are obviously a young man who knows what comes first in this world, and what comes second. I think you will go far.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “But what happened in the end?”
“I was out of action for six months,” the Major said, smiling wanly. “But that is no hardship in the Sudan. Yes, if you want to know, I’m all right now. I made a miraduious recovery.”
That was the story Major Grout had told us at my little party on the eve of my departure for France. And it set me thinking. It set me thinking very deeply indeed. In fact, that night, as I lay in bed with my bags all packed on the floor, a tremendously daring plan began rapidly to evolve in my head. I say “daring” because by God it damn well was daring when you consider I was only seventeen years old at the time. Looking back on it now, I take my hat off to myself for even contemplating that sort of action. But by the following morning, my mind was made up.
2
I BADE FAREWELL to my parents on the platform at Victoria Station and boarded the boat train for Paris. I arrived that afternoon and checked in at the house where my father had arranged for me to board. It was on the avenue Marceau, and the family, who were called Boisvain, took paying guests. Monsieur Boisvain was a civil servant of sorts and as unremarkable as the rest of his breed. His wife, a pale woman with short fingers and a flaccid rump, was in much the same mould as her husband, and I guessed that neither of them would give me any trouble. They had two daughters—Jeanette, aged fifteen, and Nicole, who was nineteen. Mademoiselle Nicole was some kind of a freak, for while the rest of the family were typically small and neat and French, this girl was of Amazonian proportions. She looked to me like a sort of female gladiator. She could not possibly have stood less than six feet three in her bare feet, but she was nonetheless a well-made young gladiator with long, nicely turned legs and a pair of dark eyes that seemed to hold a number of secrets.