Brand clutched me by the arm and laughed in his deep, hollow voice.
"Look at that old satyr!... I believe Daddy Small is Pan himself!"
It was the little American doctor. He was in the centre of a row of eight in the vanguard of a dancing column. A girl of the _midinette_ type--pretty, impudent, wild-eyed, with a strand of fair hair blowing loose from her little fur cap--was clinging to his arm on one side, while on the other was a stout, middle-aged woman with a cheerful Flemish face and mirth-filled eyes. Linked up with the others they jigged behind the town band. Dr. Small's little grey beard had a raffish look. His field cap was tilted back from his bony forehead. His spectacles were askew. He had the happy look of careless boyhood. He did not see us then, but later in the evening detached himself from the stout Flemish lady, who kissed him on both cheeks, and made his way to where Brand and I stood under the portico of a hotel.
"Fie, doctor!" said Brand. "What would your old patients in New York say to this Bacchanalian orgy?"
"Sonny," said the doctor, "they wouldn't believe it. It's incredible!"
He wiped the perspiration from his brow, threaded his fingers through his grey beard, and laughed in that shrill way which was his habit when excited.
"My word, it was good fun! I became part of a people's joy. I had their sense of escape from frightful things. Youth came back to me. Their songs danced in my blood. In spite of my goggles and my grey beard that buxom lady adored me as though I were the young Adonis. The little girl clasped my hand as though I were her younger brother. Time rolled back from the world. Old age was touched with the divine elixir. In that crowd there is the springtime of life, when Pan played on his pipes through pagan woods. I wouldn't have missed it for a million dollars!"
That night Brand and I and some others (Charles Fortune among them) were billeted in a small hotel which had been a German headquarters a few days before. There was a piano in the billiard room, and Fortune touched its keys. Several notes were broken but he skipped them deftly and improvised a musical caricature of "Daddy" Small dancing in the carnival. He, too, had seen that astonishing vision, and it inspired him to grotesque fantasies. In his imagination he brought a great general to Venders--"Blear-eyed Bill, the Butcher of the Boche"--and gave him a _pas seul_ in the Grande Place, like an elephant gambolling in green fields and trumpeting his joy.