Behind the Lines Read Online Free PDF Page B

this is with me—positively.” At the door he gripped Rawley’s hand. “Don’t go fooling round looking for trouble, Peter,” he said. “Cheerio!”
    II
    Rawley made his purchases with leisurely enjoyment, wandering to and fro in the streets and lingering before every shop window. Some time between three and four o’clock he entered a shop which sold English periodicals and newspapers. It was an old-fashioned shop. A bell jangled when one pushed back the door, and two steps led down to the dark, low-ceilinged interior of the shop. On the shelves and stands round the wall other articles besides papers were displayed for sale. There were fancy notepaper and bottles of ink, gaudily-framed reproductions of the basilica of Albert, gilt teaspoons with the arms of Doullens embossed on the handle, aluminium rings and medallions stamped with a miniature seventy-five millimetre gun,and made from old shell fuses, picture postcards—some indecent to English eyes—and greeting cards of ribbon and lace and celluloid, bearing sententious mottoes.
    There were a number of people in the shop when Rawley entered, and at first he was unable to get near the counter on which the periodicals lay. He stood pressed back against the shelf behind him to allow those on their way out to reach the door, and as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw that in addition to the civilians there were three or four English Tommies in the shop, and at the far end a girl in uniform whom, though he could see only half her face, he recognized as the driver of the ambulance that had bolted his mare that morning.
    He studied her with interest, and was pleased with what he saw. He disliked uniforms for women. One of a woman’s greatest attractions, he thought, was her individuality, and this quality she always exemplified in her dress. And this was just the quality that a uniform was intended to destroy. There was something nauseating and degrading in a row of women all alike.
    But this girl had triumphed over the disability. She did not belong to her clothes; her clothes belonged to her. Her skirt hung cleanly and neatly from her hips, and suggested lithe, clean limbs beneath. The ugly uniform jacket hung gracefully from her shoulders. It did not bulge and sag in creases about her figure as did so many women’s uniforms he had seen; nor did it hang too loosely, like a shapeless sack. It stressed her girlish figure neither too much nortoo little. On her the jacket succeeded in being entirely a woman’s garment, and not a ludicrous travesty of a man’s. And with the unpromising cap, too, she had achieved distinction, though in what it differed from others of its pattern he could not discover.
    Suddenly she turned and made towards the door, passing close to him without noticing him; and just as she reached the door it was opened from the outside. She stepped back to avoid it, and a small parcel she was carrying fell from her hand. Rawley bent swiftly to pick it up, but the girl had already stooped and their heads bumped.
    Rawley straightened with the package in his hands. “Sorry!” he said, with real distress. “I’m most awfully sorry.”
    She straightened her cap and smiled as she recognized him. It was a friendly and expressive smile. It said all sorts of things: that bumping heads was a comedy and not a tragedy, that she was sorry for his evident distress and hoped he would not think any more about it, that she knew it was an accident and was not in the least annoyed.
    â€œWe are quits now, aren’t we?” she said.
    They had reached the pavement outside and he was holding the package in his hands. He did not want her to go. He badly wanted to talk to her in a friendly, sisterly way. War made one like that, made one friendly towards one’s kind. After all, it was one show, they were all in it, men and women, for good or ill.
    She held out her hand for the