|
Showing 1 - 25 of
496 matches in All Departments
|
Marcella
Humphry Ward
|
R1,213
Discovery Miles 12 130
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
"Arthur, - what did you give the man?" "Half a crown, my dear! Now
don't make a fuss. I know exactly what you're going to say!" "Half
a crown!" said Doris Meadows, in consternation. "The fare was one
and twopence. Of course he thought you mad. But I'll get it back!"
And she ran to the open window, crying "Hi!" to the driver of a
taxi-cab, who, having put down his fares, was just on the point of
starting from the door of the small semi-detached house in a South
Kensington street, which owned Arthur and Doris Meadows for its
master and mistress.
The hands of the clock on the front of the Strangers' Gallery were
nearing six. The long-expected introductory speech of the Minister
in charge of the new Land Bill was over, and the leader of the
Opposition was on his feet. The House of Commons was full and
excited. The side galleries were no less crowded than the benches
below, and round the entrance-door stood a compact throng of
members for whom no seats were available. With every sentence,
almost, the speaker addressing the House struck from it assent or
protest; cheers and counter-cheers ran through its ranks; while
below the gangway a few passionate figures on either side, the
freebooters of the two great parties, watched one another angrily,
sitting on the very edge of their seats, like arrows drawn to the
string. Within that privileged section of the Ladies' Gallery to
which only the Speaker's order admits, there was no less agitation
than on the floor below, though the signs of it were less evident.
A bewildering three weeks spent in a perpetually changing
scene-changing, and yet, outside Paris, in its essential elements
terribly the same-that is how my third journey to France, since the
war began, appears to me as I look back upon it. My dear
daughter-secretary and I have motored during January some nine
hundred miles through the length and breadth of France, some of it
in severe weather. We have spent some seven days on the British
front, about the same on the French front, with a couple of nights
at Metz, and a similar time at Strasburg, and rather more than a
week in Paris. Little enough But what a time of crowding and
indelible impressions Now, sitting in this quiet London house, I
seem to be still bending forward in the motor-car, which became a
sort of home to us, looking out, so intently that one's eyes
suffered, at the unrolling scene. I still see the grim desolation
of the Ypres salient; the heaps of ugly wreck that men call Lens
and Lieviny and Souchez; and that long line of Notre Dame de
Lorette, with the Bois de Bouvigny to the west of it-where I stood
among Canadian batteries just six weeks before the battle of Arras
in 1917.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R383
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
|