Suddenly the girl-mother spoke:
"Why, there's himself coming back, Mary. See him turning up from the timber
on the quay. There was sorrow in his eyes like the submarine times when he
came to tell me no boat docked this morning. Baby or no baby, I'll have to
get work for myself, for he's not given me a farthing for a fortnight."
A big Danish-looking chap was homing towards the door. Without meeting the
girl's eyes, he slunk into the doorway. His broad shoulders sagged under
his sun-faded coat, and he blocked the light from the glassless window on
the staircase as he disappeared. When he slouched out again his hand
dropped from his hip pocket.
"It's to drill he's going," The young mother snugged her shawl in more
tightly about her baby. Then she said with a little break in her voice:
"Oh, it's very pleasant, just this, with the girls jigging and rattling
their legs of a spring evening."
A girl's voice defiantly telling a soldier that if he didn't wear his
civvies when he came to call he needn't come at all, rose clearly from a
dark doorway. A lamplighter streaked yellow flame into the square lamp
hanging from the stone shell opposite. A jarvey, hugging a bundle of hay,
drove his horse clankingly over the cobblestones. Then grimly came the
whisper of the widow of the rebellion close to my ear:
"Oh, we'll have enough in the army this time.
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