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Updated: June 23, 2025
From the bright sunshine we passed at a step into a chamber so shadowy that we involuntarily stopped on the threshold, in order that our eyes might become accustomed to the semi-darkness before we advanced.
It was only when she put her shoulder to it and pushed with all her strength that she made an opening wide enough to squeeze through. There on the floor, lying just as he had fallen, was the old gate-tender, his unseeing eyes staring up into the semi-darkness. Nance looked at him in terror, then at the signal board and the levers that controlled the gates.
The advice that should be given to every young man starting life is if you happen to be behind the scenes at a theatre, never spring forward. The whole architecture of the place is designed to undo those who so spring. Hours before, the stage-carpenters have laid their traps, and in the semi-darkness you cannot but fall into them. The trap into which Henry fell was a raised board.
The large square parlor with mirrors in gilt frames, with a score of plush chairs placed decorously along the walls, with oleograph pictures of Makovsky's Feast of the Russian Noblemen, and Bathing, with a crystal lustre in the middle, is also sleeping, and in the quiet and semi-darkness it seems unwontedly pensive, austere, strangely sad.
The October mist was thick and keenly cold: it had that stale Parisian smell, in which are mingled the exhalations of the factories of the outskirts and the heavy breath of the town. He could not see ten yards in front of him. The light of the gas-jets flickered like a candle on the point of going out. In the semi-darkness there were crowds of people moving in all directions.
He was, as far as one could see in the semi-darkness, a tall young soldier wrapped in the coarse mantle of the private, with a helmet over his closely cut black hair. He stood stiff and immovable, and gave his message minutely. His voice had a suppressed, almost suffocated tone. "I come from Herr Captain Salfeld!" he announced.
Our eyes met in the semi-darkness. She began to haul the cord into the window, and, looking upward, I perceived that it was looped in some way over the telegraph cables which crossed the street at that point. It was a slender cord, and it appeared to be passed across a joint in the cables almost immediately above the center of the roadway.
Quintan graciously gave him her hand and said something about his kindness to her boy. Raymond was too stricken to speak and was thankful for the semi-darkness that hid his face. Mrs. Quintan continued softly, in the same sweet and overpowering manner, to purr her gratitude and try to put him at his ease. Raymond would have been a happy man could he have sunk though the parquetry floor.
And somehow, in the confusion of the flight, as the fallen wounded were snatched up in the semi-darkness from where they lay, the last burning brand having been tossed aside as useless by those who could now see their way, two of the wounded who lay with their arms secured behind them with straps were lifted and borne onward, for those who were now obeying their officers' orders were too hurried and confused, hastened as they were in their movements by the rattle and crash of firearms in their rear, to scrutinise who the wounded were.
"He says he wants to see you, sir," she said rather breathlessly, and I followed her. In the semi-darkness of the stairs I passed the three men who had been with Krebs, and when I reached the open door of his room he was alone. I hesitated just a second, swept by the heat wave that follows sudden shyness, embarrassment, a sense of folly it is too late to avert. Krebs was propped up with pillows.
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