r who blocked the doorway,
and did not attempt to move. On the doorstep was sitting a major of his
regiment, who, more politely, shifted his place a little so that Michael
should pass. Outside the smell of manure was acrid but not unpleasant,
the old sow grunted in her sleep, and one of the green shutters outside
the upper windows slowly blew to. There was someone inside the room
apparently, for the moment after a hand and arm bare to the elbow were
protruded, and fastened the latch of the shutter, so that it should not
move again.

A little further on was a rail that separated the copse from the
roadway, and here out of the wind Michael sat down, and lit a cigarette
to stop his yearning for the bubbling stewpot, which would not be
broached for half an hour yet. The day, he believed, was Wednesday,
but the whole quiet of the place, apart from that drowsy booming on
the eastern horizon, made it feel like Sunday. Nobody but the fat
Frenchwoman who bustled about had anything to do; there was a Sabbath
leisure about everything, about the dozing sow, the buzzing flies, the
lounging figures that read letters and papers. When last they were here,
it is true, there were rather more of them. Eight officers had been
billeted here last week, before they had been in the trenches and now
there were but six. This evening they would set out again for another
forty-eight hours in that hellish inferno, but to-morrow a fresh draft
was arriving, so that when next they foregathered here, whatever had
happened in the interval, there would probably be at least six of them.

It did not seem to matter much what six there would be, or whether there
would be more than six or less. All that mattered at this moment, as he
inhaled the first incense of his cigarette, was that the rain was
over for the present, that the sun shone from a blue sky, that he felt
extraordinarily well and tranquil, and that dinner would soon be
ready. But of all these agreeable things what pleased him most was the
tranquillity; to be alive here with the manure heap steaming in the
sun, and the sow asleep by the house wall, and swallows settling on the
eaves, was "Paradise enow." Somewhere deep down in him were streams of
yearning and of horror, flowing like an underground river in the dark.
He yearned for Sylvia, he thought with horror of the two days in the
trenches that had preceded this rest in the white-washed farm-house, and
with horror he thought of the days and ni