But, mark you, one must come back,
one must be there! We shall be there, and we shall be busy with
beginning again!"
On the way, he looks and winks, cheered up by finding a peg on which
to hang his ideas. He says--"I can see it from here, after the war,
all the Souchez people setting themselves again to work and to
life--what a business! Tiens, Papa Ponce, for example, the
back-number! He was so pernickety that you could see him sweeping
the grass in his garden with a horsehair brush, or kneeling on his
lawn and trimming the turf with a pair of scissors. Very well, he'll
treat himself to that again! And Madame Imaginaire, that lived in
one of the last houses towards the Chateau de Carleul, a large woman
who seemed to roll along the ground as if she'd got casters under
her big circular petticoats. She had a child every year, regular,
punctual--a proper machine-gun of kids. Very well, she'll take that
occupation up again with all her might."
He stops and ponders, and smiles a very little--almost within
himself: "Tiens, I'll tell you; I noticed--it isn't very important,
this," he insists, as though suddenly embarrassed by the triviality
of this parenthesis--"but I noticed (you notice it in a glance when
you're noticing something else) that it was cleaner in our house
than in my time--"
We come on some little rails in the ground, climbing almost hidden
in the withered grass underfoot. Poterloo points out with his foot
this bit of abandoned track, and smiles; "That, that's our railway.
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