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Updated: June 5, 2025
They had been gone about five minutes when the other train from Blighty came in. We couldn’t hear them singing. They were quiet and subdued. We served them with coffee and tea, candles, bootlaces, and smokes, and then, as they had some time, they started having a wash—the first since they left Blighty. The footboard of the train was the washstand, the shaving-table, and the dressing-table.
To show my mind was not centred on the occult, bootlaces, collar-studs, the two buttons on the back of ladies' coats, dyed hair, servants' feet, and a dozen and one other subjects, quite other than the superphysical, successively occupied my thoughts. Imagine, then, my surprise and the shock I received, when, on glancing at the gravel in front of me, I saw two shadows two enigmatical shadows.
And suddenly I, a happy man, began to hide my bootlaces that I might not hang myself between the wardrobes in my room when undressing at night; and ceased to take a gun with me out shooting, so as to avoid temptation by these two means of freeing myself from this life. *
He went down the road mad with indignation, and with a firm resolve to have no more to do with bootlaces, pitched them away. "Hallo, Sam!" cried a figure from the other side of the road. "Any luck?" Sam shook his head speechlessly. "You've been drinkin," said the cook as he came over. "I ain't," said Sam. Then a base idea occurred to him, and he took the other by the arm.
"They say the relations of men and officers in the new army are beautiful. Some day I may learn to love my officer but not just yet. Not till I've forgotten the operations leading up to the occupation of Cheasingholt.... He muffs his real job without a blush, and yet he would rather be shot than do his bootlaces up criss-cross.
Under the cook's glance of silent scorn he became first restive and then abusive, winding up finally by demanding his money back. "Don't you be a fool!" said the cook coarsely. "You leave it to me." "And get tied up in a chair with my own bootlaces p'raps," said the irritated seaman.
Between him and the islet was the waterway. Already he had been in the sea. Why not go in again? He stripped, packed his clothes into a bundle, tied roughly with a rope made of his handkerchief and bootlaces, and waded in. For a long way the water was shallow. Only when he was near to the island did it rise to his breast, to his throat, higher at last.
There are a good many little low-browed old shops in that street, of a wretched kind; and some are unchanged now. I looked into one a few weeks ago, where I used to buy bootlaces on Saturday nights, and saw the corner where I once sat down on a stool to have a pair of ready-made half-boots fitted on.
The questions that poured from us were hushed by a gesture of her inflexible, white hand. Dazed by the news, we were herded back to our bedroom, hurried into stiff white collars and hustled into shining Sunday shoes. There was the sound of cold water tinkling in the basin; of straining bootlaces; and of the creaking of a loose board in the floor every time Mary Ellen stepped on it.
A piece of honeycomb and six bootlaces from the cobbler, and an iron shovel from the blacksmith's. Very early next morning Bobbie got up and woke Phyllis. This had been agreed on between them. They had not told Peter because they thought he would think it silly. But they told him afterwards, when it had turned out all right.
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