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Behind us came twenty wagons with the sanitars; the evening was very still, plum-colour in the woods, misty over the river; the creaking of our carts was the only sound, save the "brum-brum" and the "tap-tap-tap".... I lay on my back and thought of Semyonov and myself. I had in my mind two pictures.
Now and again a step from a great distance would tap-tap-tap, a far-off delicacy of sound, and either die away down echoing side streets or come clanking on to where he stood, growing louder and clearer and more resonant, ringing again and again in doubled and trebled echoes; while he, standing far back in a doorway, watched to see who was abroad at the dead of night and then that person went away on his strange errand, his footsteps tramping down immense distances, till the last echo and the last faint tremble of his feet eddied into the stillness.
Brannan watched the slender, graceful figure vanish through the lighted door. In her trail the gambler and bartender followed. Presently a burst of music issued from the groggery; a tap-tap-tap of feet in rhythm to the click of castanets. Already the tragedy was forgotten. Brannan found himself face to face with the sailor. "I'll help you carry him somewhere," he said.
In striking contrast to the cool placidity of her face one of Eve Edgarton's boot-toes began to tap-tap-tap against the piazza floor. When she lifted her eyes again to Barton their sleepy sullenness was shot through suddenly with an unmistakable flash of temper. "Oh, for Heaven's sake, Mr. Barton!" she cried out. "If you insist upon riding with me, couldn't you please hurry?
Dave Darrin was out of bed as though he had been shot out. Like a flash he was at the window, peering out. Where, after all, was the cat's vision of which he had thought himself possessed? Some one was outside the window. Dave thought he recognized the Naval uniform, but he could not see a line of the face. Tap-tap-tap! sounded softly. Dave threw the window up stealthily.
As it happened, the quartet had the lack of intuition to play a great deal of Haydn that autumn, and to Sylvia the cheerful, obvious tap-tap-tap of the hearty old master seemed to typify the bald, unsubtle obtuseness of the home attitude towards life.
The gloom had bleached the skin to the colour of damp ivory, and against the background of his immobility they moved with a certain amazing monstrousness, interminably. No, they were never still. One wondered what they could be at. Surely he could not have had enough work now to keep those insatiable hands so monstrously in motion. Even far into the night. Tap-tap-tap!
And the slow, dark hours of that terrible night of depression tramped over me with leaden footsteps. The next morning, just as I had dropped into an uneasy doze, there came a knocking and a hammering, and a muttering outside my door. "M'sieur! M'sieur!" Tap-tap-tap. "Que diable donc! Qu'il dort! M'sieur! Profondement! Est ce qu'il est mort? Ah! c'est une bete Anglaise!" Tap-tap-tap.
The sombre pine forests gather about us; a squirrel or two runs across the route, and a solitary crow caws in the tree-top; we hear the loud "tap-tap-tap" of a woodpecker, and see through the sinuous aisles of firs some groups of negroes pattering to church.
He read it again, and as if it were the result of an uncontrollable impulse, his fingers began the rapid tap-tap-tap. And this time he substituted the new word that the big idea had suddenly thrust into his mind. Joe gave the roller a twirl, the paper rolled out, dropped to the floor, and he grasped for it eagerly. Even Joe was surprised.
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