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Jack, I can see the whole thing has come to me in the last ten minutes Old Crow has been the big influence in your life. Everything else has come from that. And then the war knocked you out and you got cafard and the whole blasted business blew up and came to the surface and there you are." "Yes," said Raven, "here we are." He leaned back in his chair and laughed until he could have cried.
They say "Fed up and far from home." The more inventive French call it "Cafard." Our outlook upon life is warped, or, to use a more seasonable expression, frozen. We are not ourselves. We make sarcastic remarks about one another. We hold up for ridicule individual peculiarities of individuality. Some one, tiring of this form of indoor sports, starts the phonograph again.
"For the land's sake!" said Raven, echoing Charlotte, "And what, again for the land's sake, am I going through?" "You know," said Dick uneasily because he did hope to avoid putting it into words. "Cafard." Raven had one of his moments of silence, getting hold of himself, taking the matter in, with its forgotten enormity. "So," he said, "you've adopted your mother's word for it.
"Don't evade it," she charged him, with unabated gravity. "We mustn't, either of us. You know what I mean cafard." "Cafard!" Then he remembered Dick also had caught up the word, like a missile, and pelted him with it. He gulped. Ordinary speech wasn't going to be adequate. She belonged to this infernal age that lived by phrases.
She had to put you in a pigeon hole. Shell shock, cafard! So the next thing was to set a specialist on the job. And there you are." Raven grinned. The whole thing was more and more fantastic to him. "I wonder how Dick likes the hornet's nest," he reflected, "now he's stirred it up." "I can tell you," said Nan, a little white coming round her lips, as it did when she was excited, "how he liked me.
Perhaps it was morbid to attribute these motives to Grant Reeves, who had once been his friend, but he did attribute them; and conscious that he was actually encouraging morbid thoughts, Max wondered if he, too, were getting the cafard, the madness of the Legion?
Vaguely he knew that cafard was French for beetle, or cockroach; that soldiers who habitually mixed absinthe and other strong drinks with their cheap but beloved litre were often affected with a strange madness which betrayed itself in weird ways, and that this special madness was familiarly named le cafard.
I though Mum was right: cafard, you remember. But I've swung round into the same rut. It's a rotten system. I'm done with it." Raven looked at him in a sudden sharp misery of apprehension. First, Old Crow, then he, then Dick, one generation following another. "Don't you go that path, old man," he said. "You'll only lose your way and have to come back." "Come back?" "Yes. Old Crow did.
So did a certain cafard or dissembling religionary preach at Sinay, that Saint Anthony sent the fire into men's legs, that Saint Eutropius made men hydropic, Saint Clidas, fools, and that Saint Genou made them goutish. But I punished him so exemplarily, though he called me heretic for it, that since that time no such hypocritical rogue durst set his foot within my territories.
"So I've gone cafard," he said slowly, looking down at the fire and wondering how to answer a fool according to her folly. Or was she incredibly right? Had he some creeping sickness of the brain, the very nature of which implied his own insensitiveness to it? "Or do you say 'got' cafard? And what's your personal impression of cafard, anyway?" She had her answer ready.
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