You've got to place them just as carefully as a dry fly.'
'Strategy,' I said.
That's the word.
The strategy is really just the same.'
There was another of those comfortable pauses.
Presently I said:
'It'll be some time before we can go fishing out there again.'
So it was I who turned the conversation to the war.
It's difficult to keep off the subject.
He said: 'Yes - it's a great pity.
I had to come away before the water was fit to fish.
It's not much good out there before the very end of May.
Before then the water's all muddy and the rivers are running very full - the thawing snows, you know.
Later than that, in August, there's apt to be very little water to fish in, and it gets too hot.
The middle of June is the best time.'
I turned my head.
'You went out there this year?'
Because the end of May that he had spoken of so casually was the time when the Germans had been pouring into France through Holland and Belgium, when we had been retreating on Dunkirk and when the French were being driven back to Paris and beyond.
It didn't seem to be a terribly good time for an old man to have gone fishing in the middle of France.
He said 'I went out there in April.
I meant to stay for the whole of the summer, but I had to come away.'
I stared at him, smiling a little.
'Have any difficulty in getting home?'
'No,' he said. 'Not really.'
'You had a car, I suppose?'
'No,' he said.
'I didn't have a car.
I don't drive very well, and I had to give it up some years ago.
My eyesight isn't what it used to be.'
'When did you leave Jura, then?' I asked.
He thought for a minute. 'June the eleventh,' he said at last.
That was the day, I think.'
I wrinkled my brows in perplexity.
'Were the trains all right?'
Because, in the course of my work, I had heard a good deal about conditions in France during those weeks.
He smiled. They weren't very good,' he said reflectively.
'How did you get along, then?'
He said: 'I walked a good deal of the way.'
As he spoke, there was a measured crump... crump... crump... crump, as a stick of four fell, possibly a mile away.
The very solid building swayed a little, and the floors and windows creaked.
We waited, tense and still.
Then came the undulating wail of the sirens, and the sharp crack of gunfire from the park.
The raid was on again.
'Damn and blast,' I said.
'What do we do now?'
The old man smiled patiently:
'I'm going to stay where I am.'
There was good sense in that.
It's silly to be a hero to evade discomfort, but there were three very solid floors above us.
We talked about it, as one does, studying the ceiling and wondering whether it would support the weight of the roof.