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He tried insanely to drown himself in a two-foot pool of water, dived drunkenly and splendidly from fifty feet up in the rigging of the Mariposa lying at the wharf, and chartered the cutter Toerau at more than her purchase price and was only saved by his manager's refusal financially to ratify the agreement.
Before him there lay the very essence of dirt and disorder. Furniture was broken, overturned. Rugs were askew, wrinkled. The desk, upbearing broken bottles and a cluttered mess of paper, letter and debris of all description, was scratched and dented. Pictures sagged drunkenly upon the walls; hangings were torn, and draggled, and over all lay a pall of dust, dank, choking.
"Peter Creed," I repeated, "went into the house. Ike hung around the barn, waiting. He was frankly curious. In a few minutes his employer reappeared, carrying a plate heaped with an assortment of scraps. Ike peered and listened then without compunction. "'It's the best I've got, he heard Creed say grudgingly. Turner's tones were now more drunkenly belligerent.
He dropped again, and this time he could never have regained his feet had not his right arm flopped helplessly across the back of the big dog, and the beast cowered and growled, but it did not attempt to slide from under his weight. He managed to get erect again, but when he reached the low flight of steps to the front door he was reeling drunkenly from side to side.
In the bright sunlight, half-hidden under or behind heaps of debris, with crosses leaning drunkenly aslant, these graves looked woefully dreary and depressing. But the files of men moving round and between them, or stepping carefully over them, hardly gave them a glance, except where one in passing caught at a leaning cross and thrust it deeper and straighter into the earth.
There was much more of surprise than of pain in their faces, and they seemed to be puzzling as to what they had done in the past to deserve such a punishment. Other men were carried out of the trench and laid on their backs on the high grass, staring up drunkenly at the glaring sun, and with their limbs fallen into unfamiliar poses.
"It's one of my boys," he said. And he noticed that a little stream of red was trickling from Collie's mouth and nostrils. His head was snapped back and then forward at every plunge. Still he gripped the saddle with rigid knees. The outlaw bucked again, and flung herself viciously sideways, turning completely round. Collie pitched drunkenly as the horse came down again and again.
And the old graybeard who was Maid Marion was riotously drunk, and borne aloft with mad and feeble gesturings on the shoulders of two staggering young men, and after him came the aged morris dancers, only upheld from collapse in the mire by mutual upholdings, until they seemed like some monstrous animal moving with uncouth sprawls of legs as multifold as a centipede, and wavering drunkenly from one side of the road to the other, lurching into the dewy bushes, then recovering by the joint effort of the whole.
Beyond the post-office he turned toward the red-brick house that sat above the mill-pond. Eagerly he looked for the old mill, and he stopped in physical pain. The dam had been torn away, the old wheel was gone and a caved-in roof and supporting walls, drunkenly aslant, were the only remnants left. A red-haired child stood at the gate before the red-brick house and Hale asked her a question.
With a sudden phlop the rifle grenade goes drunkenly up into the mist; with a grunt of joy the Lewis gun and its warrior discharge a magazine at the dim-seen figures. And later, with intense eagerness, the ground in front will be searched with periscopes for the discovering and counting of the bag. The matter is impersonal; the dead are Huns, not individuals. . . .
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