He switched the light off, and stood for a while in the dark. Then he opened the door and went out and stood on the landing. The servants were sitting huddled together on the staircase, nervous looking, indeed, but not frightened. It seemed to him to be remarkable that these girls should have kept their nerve as finely as they had. He smiled at them, as he closed the door behind him.
"They're making a lot of noise, aren't they?" he said.
"Isn't it awful, sir?" one of them answered.
He did not speak of the bullet which had come into the room. "It must have been a stray," he thought, "and there's no sense in upsetting them!"
"The soldiers are firing across the Green," he said aloud, "at the College of Surgeons. I think we're safe enough here, but I'd keep away from the windows!..."
"Yes, sir, we are!"
He went to his room, and sat at the window. At this height it was unlikely that any stray bullet would come near him. But he could not see any one. He could hear the wild-fowl crying in the Park ... distinctly, in the pause of the firing, he could hear a duck's quack-quack....
8
He went to bed, and tried to sleep, but could not. The firing from the machine-guns was intermittent now, but it still went on, and there was a continuous crackling of rifle-fire. Several times he got up and looked out ... he had a curious and persistent desire to see whatever was going on ... to be in it ... extraordinarily he was anxious not to miss anything. He was neither afraid nor aware of the fact that he was not afraid. He had simply the sensation that exciting things were happening, that he wanted to see as much of them as possible, that he was excited, that his blood was flowing rapidly through his veins, that there was something hitting the inside of his head, thumping it. Then when he was tired of straining to see into the darkness, he went back to bed again, and closed his eyes and tried to sleep. And sometimes he succeeded in sleeping for a while ... but always the noise of the machine-guns woke him....
He went to the window when the dawn broke, and looked across the Green to the College of Surgeons.