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They were going home for a ten days' leave after a year at the front and were trying to forget the war. There was also a lounge-room and a dining-saloon, but bunks there were also already commandeered by the strategic military. It could be a worse night to walk the deck. To see what was doing a man would want to walk the deck anyway.
I was in the lounge-room below sharpening a pencil, and, there being no waste-basket handy, carefully shunting the shavings into a writing-desk drawer. The fire-alarm rang. That was the signal to hurry on deck with your life-belt, take your station by your boat, and prepare to abandon ship. But we had been doing that every day since we left home.
He got up from the table, kissed Ivan Ivanitch on the head, and staggering from repletion, went out of the dining-room. Ivan Ivanitch and I smoked in silence. "I don't sleep after dinner, my dear," said Ivan Ivanitch, "but you have a rest in the lounge-room." I agreed.
In the half-dark and warmly heated room they called the lounge-room, there stood against the walls long, wide sofas, solid and heavy, the work of Butyga the cabinet maker; on them lay high, soft, white beds, probably made by the old woman in spectacles. On one of them Sobol, without his coat and boots, already lay asleep with his face to the back of the sofa; another bed was awaiting me.
There was peace in my heart, and I longed to make haste home. I dressed and went out of the lounge-room. Ivan Ivanitch was sitting in a big arm-chair in his study, absolutely motionless, staring at a fixed point, and it was evident that he had been in the same state of petrifaction all the while I had been asleep. "Good!" I said, yawning.
I took off my coat and boots, and, overcome by fatigue, by the spirit of Butyga which hovered over the quiet lounge-room, and by the light, caressing snore of Sobol, I lay down submissively. And at once I began dreaming of my wife, of her room, of the station-master with his face full of hatred, the heaps of snow, a fire in the theatre.
He sought out a small room that is called the smoking-room to this day, relic of an age when smokers were still a race apart. In the corner sat an old man reading. He was neatly dressed in black. Beside him was a decanter of port. Leighton led the way back to the lounge-room. "Well, did you see him?" "The old man?" said Lewis. "Yes, I saw him." "That's Old Ivory," said Leighton.
After dinner they sat in the lounge-room, and Conward beguiled the time with stories of sudden wealth which had been practically forced upon men who were now regarded as the business frame-work of the country.
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