Читать книгу Journal of Small Things - Helen Mackay - Страница 23

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The night Ian went out was pretty bad. There were several other officers with him, and their wives and mothers and sisters and children all came to see them off.

Every one knew quite well what it meant, and every one pretended not to know.

I had come to feel, like the rest of them, that one has simply got to pretend.

We all pretended as hard as we could that it was splendid.

There was a woman on the platform who must have been crazy, I think.

She did not belong to any one going out. She was one of those dreadful things you see in London, with a big hat heaped with feathers, and draggled tails of hair. I think she had a red dress.

She came up to us under the windows of the train, and stood nodding her dreadful feathers and waving her dreadful hands and calling things out.

She called out, "Oh, it's all very fine now, you laugh now—but you won't laugh long. You won't laugh out there. And who of you'll come back and laugh, my pretty boys, my gay boys?"

Nobody dared take notice of her. If any one of us had taken notice of her, nobody could have borne it. There seemed to be no guard about to stop her, and not one of us dared admit that she was there.

"My pretty boys, my gay boys," she kept calling out, "you laugh now, my poor boys, but you won't laugh long."

There were some little Frenchmen, cooks, I think, or waiters, from some smart hôtel, going to join the colours. They were in a third-class carriage next to the carriage of the British officers.

They heard the woman calling out like that. They were little pasty-faced cooks or waiters.

But they began to sing. They began to sing the Marseillaise to drown the woman's voice out.

They did it just for us, our men going out, there on the platform.

Our men began to whistle it and hum it and stamp it. And we tried to.

The crazy woman called out those terrible things, that were so true.

And our men and the little Frenchmen sang and whistled and stamped. And so did we.

And the train went out like that.