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There were wall bookcases with glass doors, a few oak-framed engravings with a pale-green, "distempered" background, several chintz-covered sofas with cushions, and plenty of easy chairs. On small tables lay very back numbers of illustrated papers and magazines. The brown-painted floor had decorative intervals of rugs, like flowery oases.
He knew the way well enough, for the fields he was crossing were level, and half a mile away, perhaps a little more, he could see the roof of the brown-painted depot, which was his destination. Once there, he would buy a ticket, get on the train, and get started away from Knoxville before the troublesome acquaintances who were waiting for him to come down-stairs had any idea where he was gone.
But so closely do things absurd and trivial jostle things august and of profound significance in daily happenings he was speedily aroused from meditation and his attention claimed by example of quite another order of pathos to that suggested by the concluding verses of the Te Deum. Some little way ahead a brown-painted furniture van was backed against the curb.
There were the rolling meadows, the stately elms, all yellow and brown now; the glowing maples, the garden-beds bright with asters, and the hollyhocks, rising tall against the parlor windows; only in place of the cheerful pinks and reds of the nodding stalks, with their gay rosettes of bloom, was a crape scarf holding the blinds together, and another on the sitting-room side, and another on the brass knocker of the brown-painted door.
These counted for naught, while, with photographic distinctness, the picture before him fixed itself sharply in his mind: the dust-colored troops on the dusty veldt, the brown-painted guns, the distant line of the enemy's fire and, far to the eastward, the wall of smoke which was fast sweeping towards them from the acres of burning veldt.
He heard a car door slam and a motor roar. He plunged onward more desperately than before. The motor raced away. And Lockley got out on the highway only in time to see the rear of a brown-painted, military-marked car some three hundred yards away. It swept around a curve of the highway and was gone.
"Is Miss Miss Daphne Wing at home?" In that peculiar "I've given it up" voice of domestics in small households, the servant answered: "Yes; Miss Disey's in. D'you want to see 'er? What nyme?" Gyp produced her card. The maid looked at it, at Gyp, and at two brown-painted doors, as much as to say, "Where will you have it?"
A short gown of brilliantly striped cotton reached to the knees, brown-stockinged arms and legs were matched by brown-painted face and neck; standing side by side with the Dutch Doll, the respective whiteness and brownness became accentuated to a positively dazzling extent, and the onlookers were jubilant with delight.
An infantry soldier in red trousers, with a shako on his head, mounted guard and stood motionless beside a brown-painted sentry-box that stood at the right. Above the gateways a new tricolor flag, in honor of the new ministry, waved in the sunshine. Against the ministerial edifice were two gas fixtures bearing two huge capital letters: R.F., ready to be illuminated on important reception nights.
Once in a while, when stopping for a moment at some group of brown-painted sheds and earth-battened shanties, the wind moaned and howled among the iron braces and brake-chains beneath the car and made such mournful noise that it was a relief to start once more and lose sound of its wailing in the general rumble.
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