“Oh, learn it again,” she said. “If we cannot laugh we cannot work. Why, I owe my life to a sense of humour.”
She spoke the last words with more than a trivial meaning. They seemed to tell of some singular episode, and Brand asked her to explain.
She did not explain then. She only said some vague things about laughing herself out of prison and stopping a German bullet with a smile.
“Why did the devils put you in prison?” asked Brand.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“In Lille it was bad form if one had not been arrested once at least. I was three weeks in a cell half the size of this, and twenty women were with me there. There was very little elbow-room!”
She proved her sense of humour then by that deep-throated laugh of hers, but I noticed that just for a second behind the smile in her eyes there crept a shadow as at the remembrance of some horror, and that she shivered a little, as though some coldness had touched her.
“It must have been like the Black Hole of Calcutta,” said Brand, measuring the space with his eyes. “Twenty women herded in a room like that!”
“With me for twenty-one,” said Eileen. “We had no means of washing.”
She used an awful phrase.