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Submarine & Water Lilies. Then, when they got tired of seeing him around headquarters, they shipped him off "to school" in a country house. "It was exciting to hear strange noises in the night; to see senior officers who had burned themselves playing with fire between tea and dinner; to watch strange weapons (which occasionally worked) being tried out with live ammunition beside the wallflower beds on the lawn; to glimpse the colonel in something between a duck punt and a one-man submarine among the water lilies on the ornamental pond."
Sometimes heroes of the Resistance, "quiet, tired and irritable," filtered back from France for "refresher courses." Most of them just waited "with a doomed passiveness" to be sent back to France.
After the school came the "cover-story," the bogus life history that Millar must memorize to go with his false identification papers. He was to be an insurance publicity agent. Then he passed through "the phony-Continental-clothes-and-accessories department" which issued everything from "summer underwear to a 'housewife.' " Millar dumped his disguises somewhere in the "aquarium" as quickly as possible; they scared him.
Senators & Hairdressers. Then he went up for final briefing. "Kindly sign your field name twenty times on this sheet of paper," said the interviewer, a British officer who spoke with a strong French accent.
"What is my field name?" asked Millar. He had never bothered to find out.
"Désiré," said the officer.
"Would you mind repeating that?"
"Désiré," he said, a little sharply.
To Millar the name seemed almost as awful as the Gestapo. "Visions connected with this ghastly name flashed through my head. I saw stalwart foresters laying back their heads until the neck cords showed like bared intestines, but their voices came in a shallow unison pipe: 'Oh, Désiré.' I saw the German questioners in Gestapo headquarters. Their leader aid: 'We give you one last chance, Captain Er, Captain Um, Captain Désiré.' I aw a woman with gold teeth and dirty hair who came towards me asking: Qu'est-ce que tu désires, Désiré?' 'I refuse,' I shouted. 'I will not go with that name.' "
The officer looked down at his papers and beside a red "Secret" carefully drew a pig. "Nerves," he was thinking. Then he began to draw a second pig.
"What kind of people are called Désiré?" Millar asked him.
"Certain senators and a few hairdressers," he said gravely.
At this point they were interrupted by one of those female officials whom Millar always called "Intelligent Gentlewomen." Their voices "reeked of the Tightness of life, of tea in the nursery and snowmen with pipes in their mouths and Struwelpeter and Jemima Puddleduck. . . ." "It is rather a dreadful name," she agreed. 'Perhaps I might manage to get it changed." It was changed to Emile on that last day when, "like any important murderer, I could get anything I wanted."