re
widening and making solid behind. But behold I find a jumble of beams.
I'd lit on an old trench, caved in, 'vidently; half caved in--there was
some space and room. In the middle of those stumps of wood all mixed
together that I was lifting away one by one from in front of me, there
was something like a big sandbag in height, upright, and something on
the top of it hanging down.

"And behold a plank gives way, and the queer sack falls on me, with its
weight on top. I was pegged down, and the smell of a corpse filled my
throat--on the top of the bundle there was a head, and it was the hair
that I'd seen hanging down.

"You understand, one couldn't see very well; but I recognized the hair
'cause there isn't any other like it in the world, and then the rest of
the face, all stove in and moldy, the neck pulped, and all the lot dead
for a month perhaps. It was Eudoxie, I tell you.

"Yes, it was the woman I could never go near before, you know--that I
only saw a long way off and couldn't ever touch, same as diamonds. She
used to run about everywhere, you know. She used even to wander in the
lines. One day she must have stopped a bullet, and stayed there, dead
and lost, until the chance of this sap.

"You clinch the position? I was forced to hold her up with one arm as
well as I could, and work with the other. She was trying to fall on me
with all her weight. Old man, she wanted to kiss me, and I didn't
want--it was terrible. She seemed to be saying to me, 'You wanted to
kiss me, well then, come, come now!' She had on her--she had there,
fastened on, the remains of a bunch of flowers, and that was rotten,
too, and the posy stank in my nose like the corpse of some little beast.

"I had to take her in my arms, in both of them, and turn gently round
so that I could put her down on the other side. The place was so narrow
and pinched that as we turned, for a moment, I hugged her to my breast
and couldn't help it. With all my strength, old chap, as I should have
hugged her once on a time if she'd have let me.

"I've been half an hour cleaning myself from the touch of her and the
smell that she breathed on me in spite of me and in spite of herself.
Ah, lucky for me that I'm as done up as a wretched cart-horse!"

He turns over on his belly, clenches his fists, and slumbers, with his
face buried in the ground and his dubious dream of passion and
corruption.

XVIII

A Box of Matches

IT is five o'clock in the even