Читать книгу Non-combatants and Others - Macaulay Rose - Страница 16

After dinner they got out a map of the western front and spread it on a table and made John say, so far as he knew, in which parts of the line the various battalions at the moment were, and Dorothy wrote their names, very small, all down the line. Alix slipped away while they were doing this, to smell the garden. Soon they began to sing in the drawing-room. Margot sang, 'When we wind up the watch on the Rhine,' a song popular among soldiers just then. She was no doubt practising for canteen concerts. John joined in the chorus, in a baritone voice somewhat marred by trench life.

Alix went indoors and up to bed. She was shivering, as if she was cold, or very tired, or frightened. …

She undressed hastily, whistling shrilly, and got into bed and pulled the bedclothes up round her neck and read Mr. Give Bell's last book, with much of which she differed violently, so violently that she made marginal and unsympathetic notes on it in pencil as she lay.

'I'll send it to Basil and see what he thinks,' she thought.

Then Dorothy and Margot came up, merry and talking.

'You are a lazy little unsociable slacker,' Margot told her. 'John was telling us such ripping stories, too. Make him tell you to-morrow about the sergeant-major and the pheasant and the barbed wire. It was awfully funny.'

Dorothy yawned. 'Oh, I'm sleepy. Thank goodness it's Sunday to-morrow, so we can lie in. Margot, you've pinched my slippers. … Oh no, all right.'

Alix lay and read. Her cousins undressed and said their prayers and got into bed.

'Ready, Alix?' asked Margot, her finger on the switch.

'Right,' said Alix, putting Mr. Clive Bell under her pillow, where, deeply as she differed from him, he seemed to lie as a protection against something.

The switch clicked, and the room was in darkness.

Margot and Dorothy murmured on drowsily, dropping remarks about the hospital, the canteen, things John had said. … The remarks trailed away into sleep.