"Now," she said, "Puk and I will get on some dry clothes. You may as well rub him, Eve."
It must have been a narrower escape than Elizabeth would admit. As we ascended the steep path, I thought upon the manner of journey that would have been if there had been no escape at all. Pukkie, my dearly beloved son! And I reached forward and hugged him, and for the rest of the way my arm lay along his shoulders.
That night we heard firing from the fort, perhaps a dozen shots. We hear that firing every few nights. Eve and I looked out—we were just going to bed—and saw the flashes against the sky above the trees, and heard the sound as if cannon balls were being dropped on the floor over our heads. Eve wondered what it was, and I told her it was probably some tug trying to go in or out of the harbor to the east of us at a forbidden time.
"Oh," she said, relieved, "I thought that it might be submarines—or fireworks."
IX
It was on a Saturday morning about the middle of July, and it had been foggy; and I had watched the fog retreating stealthily, withdrawing one long vaporous arm and then another, slinking back like a wraith before the sun, as if trying to get away unperceived. There was no writhing and twisting in the anguish of defeat and dissolution, no jets and shreds vanishing into the hot air above. But the ways of the fog over the sea are a mystery, and I am not yet at the end of them.
I had gone over to Old Goodwin's to take my daughter, and I had left her with one of the army of starched and stiff imitations of men in buttons who haunt the house. They guard every door, so that a man cannot so much as turn a handle for himself; and one is to be found in each passage, and at every turn. They might be wooden images from a Noah's Ark, endowed with movement, but not with life. There are not so many of them as there were some years ago. They are none of Old Goodwin's doing, and Mrs. Goodwin has somewhat lost her fancy for them; and some of them, Old Goodwin told me, have enlisted. Fancy! Those men in buff uniform and many buttons enlisting! But they will be well used to wearing a uniform, and they will be well used to doing without question what they are told to do, and to keeping their faces like masks. They will make good soldiers I have no doubt, and they may be in France at this moment.