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While Biddy was trying to get her kitchen in order and light a fire, Janet and Mary, with pails and mops, assisted by their cousins, were busily employed in "swabbing decks," as their father called it, and hanging up the wet bedding to dry.
On the whole, the tragic mask was not worn; the city determinedly smiled. The three floors of the warehouse, roughly divided into wards, smelled of strong soap and water and home-made disinfectants. The windows were wide; swish, swish! went the mops upon the floors. A soldier, with his bandaged leg stretched on a chair before him, took to scolding: "Women certainly are funny!
"That's so, Mops; you're just right!" said King, taking the reproof in good part, for he knew it was merited. "It's a whole lot worse to be disrespectful about your grandpeople than to carry on and make a racket, I think." "Yes, it is," said Marjorie, "and I say the rest of the time we're here, let's try to do just right. Because it's only two or three days anyway.
There were no basins, no towels, no soap, no brooms, no mops, no trays, no plates; there were neither slippers nor scissors, neither shoe-brushes nor blacking; there were no knives or forks or spoons. The supply of fuel was constantly deficient. The cooking arrangements were preposterously inadequate, and the laundry was a farce. As for purely medical materials, the tale was no better.
But when we get away from you, and off with the boys and girls, these things seem different. Were you always noble when you were little, Mother?" "No, Kingdon dear, I wasn't always. But my mother tried her best to teach me to be, so don't you think I ought to try to teach you?" "Sure, Mothery! And you bet we'll do our bestest to try to learn. Hey, Mops?" "Yes, indeedy!
She was really very glad to have Delight with her again, for she had become more attached than she realised to the little girl during their fortnight together. "Show me," repeated Delight, with an air of willingness to learn. "All right; let's have a good one. What shall it be, Mops?"
"It's horribly dilapidated and messy," said Gladys, viewing with fastidious distaste a pile of crumbled bricks and mortar which lay at the foot of the stairway, the result of an explosion which had blown a hole in the wall. "'If seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year, Do you suppose, the Walrus said, 'that they could get it clear?"
Old Screwup, the undertaker, could tell you, Sir, if he were living. Why, I was obliged to be locked up every time there was to be a funeral at Pogis. I was, I was, Sir. I used to grimace at the mutes, as he called it, and put 'em out with my mops and my mows, till they couldn't stand at a door for me.
I only said I'd like to; and I'd play it was a sea, a geranium sea, and I'd swim around in it." "Kit, you're crazy! Come on to bed, before you do anything foolish." "I'm not going to do it, really, Mops! but I like to imagine it. I'd waft myself off of this balcony, and waft down to the scarlet of the geraniums and fall in." "Yes, and be picked up with two broken legs and a sprained ankle!"
For the first time in all his years, George Dorety was seeing a real drama of life and death a sordid little drama in which the scales balanced an unknown sailor named Mops against a few miles of longitude. At first he had watched the man astern, but now he watched big Dan Cullen, hairy and black, vested with power of life and death, smoking a cigar.
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