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father.” He turned his wet brown eyes on me. He said, “What’s getting you? That’s not the way to talk when a fine young fellow...”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “Death takes people in different ways.” Perhaps he had really loved Pyle. “What did you say in your cable?” I asked.
    He replied seriously and literally, ‘”Grieved to report your son died soldier’s death in cause of Democracy.’ The Minister signed it.”
    “A soldier’s death,” I said. “Mightn’t that prove a bit confusing? I mean to the folks at home. The Economic Aid Mission doesn’t sound like the Army. Do you get Purple Hearts?”
    He said in a low voice, tense with ambiguity, “He had special duties.” “Oh yes, we all guessed that.” “He didn’t talk, did he?”
    “Oh, no,” I said, and Vigot’s phrase came back to me, ‘He was a very quiet American.’ “
    “Have you any hunch,” he asked, “why they killed him? and who?”
    Suddenly I was angry; I was tired of the whole pack of them with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and their wide cars and their not quite latest guns. I said, “Yes. They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair’s about, and you gave him money and York Harding’s books on the East and said, ‘Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.’ He never saw anything he hadn’t heard in a lecture-hall, and his writers and his lectures made a fool of him. When he saw a dead body he couldn’t even see the wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of democracy.”
    “I thought you were his friend,” he said in a tone of reproach.
    “I was his friend. I’d have liked to see him reading the Sunday supplements at home and following the baseball. I’d have liked to see him safe with a standardised American girl who subscribed to the Book Club.”
    He cleared his throat with embarrassment. “Of course,” he said, “I’d forgotten that unfortunate business. I was quite on your side. Fowlair. He behaved very badly. I don’t mind telling you I had a long talk with him about the girl. You see, I had the advantage of knowing Professor and Mrs. Pyle.. “
    I said, “Vigot’s waiting,” and walked away. For the first time he spotted Phuong and when I looked back at him he was watching me with pained perplexity: an eternal elder brother who didn’t understand.
     
     

CHAPTER III
(I)
     
    The first time Pyle met Phuong was again at the Continental, perhaps two months after his arrival. It was the early evening, in the momentary cool which came when the sun had just gone down, and the candles were lit on the shalls in the side streets. The dice rattled on the tables where the French were playing Quatre Vingt-et-un and the girls in the white silk trousers bicycled home down the rue Catinat. Phuong was drinking a glass of orange juice and I was having a beer and we sat in silence, content to be together. Then Pyle came tentatively across, and I introduced them. He had a way of staring hard at a girl as though he hadn’t seen one before and then blushing. I was wondering whether you and your lady,” Pyle said, would step across and join my table. One of our attaches. ..”
    It was the Economic Attaché. He beamed down at us from the terrace above, a great warm welcoming smile, full of confidence, like the man who keeps his friends because he uses the right deodorants. I had heard him called Joe a number of times, but I had never learnt his surname. He made a noisy show of pulling out chairs and calling for the waiter, though all that activity could possibly produce at the Continental was a choice of beer, brandy-and-soda or vermouth cassis. “Didn’t expect to see you here. Fowlair,” he said. “We- are waiting for the boys back from Hanoi. There seems to have been quite a battle. Weren’t you with them?” “I’m tired of flying four hours for a