Behind the Lines by W. F.; Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

surely.”
    â€œWell, what did you think of doing, Pete?” asked Rumbald good-humouredly.
    â€œOh, I don’t know. Look round the place—register on the cathedral and all that.”
    â€œRighto, Pete. You get the cathedral off your chest while Penhurst and I register on Charley’s Bar. Where do we go afterwards, Penhurst?”
    â€œOh, we’ll get tea at Odette’s; Rawley can meet us there.”
    â€œOh, and I want to get a bath,” put in Rawley. “Where does one bath?”
    â€œCome on, I’ll show you,” said Penhurst. “This is the three-pebbles street, the local Bond Street, where one can buy anything from a camisole to a smutty post card. That’s Odette’s.” He pointed across the road to a pâtisserie . “Where we meet for tea. And these are the baths.”
    He turned in under a low archway where second-hand books were displayed on shelves. “That’s the gentleman’s lavatory as we call it euphemistically in English,” he said, and murmured “ bonjour, madame ” to an old dame seated on a stool. “These are the baths.” He pushed open a glass door on the right.
    â€œWant us to come in and hold the soap or tickle your back?” asked Rumbald. “No? Then cheerio. We’ll meet at Odette’s anon.”
    Rawley was led up a broad staircase and ushered into a small room containing a short deep metal tub covered witha sheet, into which steaming water was gushing. He took off his belt and tunic and hung them on the door hook and turned with arms akimbo to examine the unfamiliar type of bath. It seemed a sanitary idea if the sheet were clean, which it was, and anyway, the hot, deep water was an improvement upon the few tepid inches in his folding canvas bath.
    II
    Feeling comfortably clean and civilized he wandered out past the old woman still seated on her stool, into the crowded Rue des Trois Cailloux. Staff cars, mess-carts, and military motor-cycles moved in a continuous stream along the road, and on the pavements the number of British officers was hardly less than that of the native civilians. The civilized shop windows were enticing, and he lingered at one or two of them before turning down a side street towards the grey pinnacles of the cathedral. The street was narrow, winding, and cobbled, and at each turn he caught a new glimpse of the great grey rampart of stone and glass rising higher and higher above the roofs. He found himself at length in the open space before the west front. The great carved buttresses and recessed door arches were neatly sandbagged to a height of eighty feet or more to protect them from bomb splinters, but above the rampart of bleached sandbags the two great chiselled towers rose in naked splendour.
    Rawley gazed upwards till his neck ached, and then he mounted the steps and passed into the lofty tunnelof the nave. The silence and dimness and spaciousness were restful he decided. Rumbald was a good fellow, but his persistent joviality rather swamped one’s efforts at intelligent thought.
    He found Odette’s filled to overflowing with British officers of every age and rank, and among them Rumbald and Penhurst in a corner clapping tea-spoons on plates to attract his attention. He was anxious to see the famous Odette, and when she herself arrived to take their order he was surprised to find not the spoiled and painted beauty he had expected, but a quiet, pleasant-faced girl who had a smile and a friendly word for everyone, and repelled the advances of her too ardent admirers with disarming tact and competence. The ogling glances which several officers of high rank and grey hairs directed at her he found highly ludicrous and a little beastly; but she moved about the room as though unconscious of them and showed favour to none. A very competent little person he decided. Fame had exaggerated her beauty, but did bare justice to her character.
    Penhurst greeted her