The lamps, adding the flavor of hot kerosene to the conglomeration of odors—had been lighted at Düsseldorf. The tobacco-reek had grown so dense that below their band of yellow light was a sharply defined band of opaque blue fog, in which medium colors were neutralized to monochrome, and outlines of sleeping, or chatting, or card-playing, or reading soldiers blurred into vagueness, wavered, and were blotted out for P. C. Breagh in a sudden doze.
He wakened at a late hour, to the iron measure clanked and ground and beaten out by couplings and brakes, wheels and axles. Snores of all kinds—from the shrill clarionet-note of the spectacled student of Homer to the deep 'cello-bass of the Guardsman who had hugged 'Mina's mistress in mistake for his sweetheart—resounded on all sides; the tobacco-fog had somewhat thinned.
Finding it possible to move, because his burly neighbor was soundly sleeping, pillowed upon the body of the man upon his right hand, P. C. Breagh yawned—recovered his knapsack, which had slipped from his knees to a floor which in point of cleanliness left much to be desired, removed from it with a fragment of newspaper the worst impurities it had contracted by contact, threw the newspaper out of the nearest window and, in the performance of this act, caught a not unfriendly eye.
Its owner, a huge young man, who, occupying a place on the end of the same seat, had been hitherto screened by the body of the huger private who had kissed not wisely, said, and in English of the Oxford brand:
"You find our men lacking in good manners? Yet there is much spitting on the part of English soldiers, when they are standing at ease, or off duty. I have myself observed this."
"Then you know England?" P. C. Breagh interrogated, and the private, who was very tall, very blond, very broad-shouldered, straight-featured, blue-eyed, and small-waisted, answered:
"Pretty well. I have a relative who married a lady who is your countrywoman. I have been the guest of her family at their London house. You speak our language, for I have heard you. And with a North Prussian accent, by the way."
P. C. Breagh returned:
"I spent three years at Schwärz-Brettingen. With the sole result that I can make myself understood by Germans who don't speak English. And that I owe to my landlady."
Said the Guardsman, yawning and smiling: