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Firstly, the narrow aperture scarcely a window filled in with tiny squares of coarse, unwashed glass, through which the rays of the morning sun were making kindly efforts to penetrate, then the cloud of dust illumined by those same rays, and made up so it seemed to the poor tired brain that strove to perceive of myriads of abnormally large molecules, over-abundant, and over-active, for they appeared to be dancing a kind of wild saraband before Marguerite's aching eyes, advancing and retreating, forming themselves into groups and taking on funny shapes of weird masques and grotesque faces which grinned at the unconscious figure lying helpless on the rough paillasse.
The curser was apparently fast asleep, and even snoring. The Fighting Sheeney turned away disappointed, and had just reached his paillasse when he was greeted by a number of uproariously discourteous remarks uttered in all sorts of tongues. Over he rushed, threatened, received no response, and turned back to his place. Once more ten or twelve voices insulted him from the darkness.
Francezka herself realized that and spoke to me of it later, with tears in her eyes; but the helplessness of her situation swallowed up, with every man of us, all thought of inconvenience. The most habitable of the two or three rooms in the old tower had been made ready for her. Count Saxe had given up his own paillasse.
We used to make up the bed, drawing the paillasse to the front, but by keeping it against the back it gave a space in the front, then the man, folding his rug neatly and placing it in the space, made a comfortable seat for himself, his back resting against the paillasse. There are no chairs in a barrack room. Her Majesty sat on one of the cots and expressed her satisfaction at the new arrangement.
"Tom," says she "Tom Cringle, I have got tired of you, Thomas; besides, I hear my next door neighbour, Madame Adversity, tirling at the door pin; so give me my down bed, Tom, and I'm off." With that she bangs open the window, and before I recover from my surprise, launches forth, with a loud whir, mattrass and all, leaving me, Pilgarlic, lying on the paillasse.
He rose. He went quickly to his paillasse. He neither moved nor spoke nor responded to the calls for more music, to the cries of "Bis!" "Bien joue!" "Allez!" "Va-g-y!" He was crying, quietly and carefully, to himself ... quietly and carefully crying, not wishing to annoy anyone ... hoping that people could not see that Their Fool had temporarily failed in his part.
"I am going to get a bedstead, a straw paillasse, and an old hard mattress, and I am going to have them put here; and we'll get a bit of tarpaulin to put on the floor, to prevent the damp coming up; and I'll put a curtain across this window so that he needn't have too much draught, the darling; and there shall be nothing else in the room except a wooden table.
Monsieur Auguste broke in, speaking, as I thought, Russian and in an instant he and the youth in puttees and the Unknowable's cigarette and the box and the Unknowable had disappeared through the crowd in the direction of Monsieur Auguste's paillasse, which was also the direction of the paillasse belonging to the Cordonnier as he was sometimes called a diminutive man with immense mustachios of his own who promenaded with Monsieur Auguste, speaking sometimes French but, as a general rule, Russian or Polish.
Through and beyond them Marguerite gradually became aware of three walls of a narrow room, dank and grey, half covered with whitewash and half with greenish mildew! Yes! and there, opposite to her and immediately beneath that semblance of a window, was another paillasse, and on it something dark, that moved.
I intend to stay here a little while, and then to go to Kalk Bay, six miles from hence. This inn was excellent, I hear, 'in the old Dutch times'. Now it is kept by a young Englishman, Cape-born, and his wife, and is dirty and disorderly. I pay twelve shillings a day for S- and self, without a sitting-room, and my bed is a straw paillasse; but the food is plentiful, and not very bad.
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