If Winter Comes

He thought, "No, that wasn't laughing at me. Not that. No, it wasn't. Not that—nor any of it. What did she mean when she said 'There!' like that when she gave me her hand when she first came in? And took off her glove first. What did she mean when she said she had to come? 'Well, I had to come,' she said.—What did she mean when she said she was flotsam?—Flotsam! Why? Made me angry in my voice when I asked her. I said, 'How can you be flotsam?' And how the devil can she?—Nona, with Tybar, flotsam? But she said it. I said, 'How can you be flotsam, the life you've—taken?' I didn't mean to say 'taken' like that. I meant to have said 'the life you've got, you live.' But I meant taken, chosen. She did take it, deliberately. She chose between us. I might almost have heard her choose 'Marko or Tybar? Oh, dash it—Tybar.' I never reproached her, not by a look. I saw her point of view. My infernal failing, even then. Not by a look I ever reproached her. I thought I'd forgotten it, absolutely. But I haven't. It came out in that moment that I haven't. 'The life you've—taken!' I meant it to sting. Damn me, it did sting. That look she gave! As if I had struck her.—What rot! How could it sting her? How could she mind? Only if she regretted.—Is it likely?"

He thought, "But is she happy? Is it all what it appears between them? That remark she made to that woman and the extraordinary way she said it. 'You never forget you're married, do you?' Amazing thing to say, the way she said it. What did she mean? And that woman. She said something like, 'Nor you, do you?' and looked at me and then at Tybar. And Tybar looked—at Nona, at me, as if he'd got some joke, some mock...."

He thought, "What rot! She chose. She knew he was her sort. She knew I wasn't. She chose deliberately...."

Clearly, as it were yesterday, he remembered the day she had declared to him her choice. In the Cathedral cloisters. Walking together. And suddenly, in the midst of indifferent things, she told him, "I say, Marko, I'm going to marry Lord Tybar."

And his reply, the model of indifference. "Are you, Nona?"

Nothing else said of it between them. There would certainly have been more discussion if she had said she was going to buy a packet of hairpins. And his thought had immediately been, not this nor that nor the other of a hundred thoughts proper to a blow so stunning, but merely and immediately and precisely that he would tell his father Yes to what that very morning he had told him No,—that he would go into the Fortune, East and Sabre business. Extraordinary effect from such a cause! Grotesque. Paradoxical. Going into Fortune, East and Sabre meant "settling down"; marriage conventionally involved settling down; yet, while he had visioned marriage with Nona, settling down had been the last thing in the world to think of,—because he projected marriage with Nona, he had that very morning rejected settling down. He was not to marry her; therefore, yes, he would settle down. Amazing. He had not realised how amazing till now.

And catastrophic. Not till now had he realised to what catastrophe he then had plunged. He thought, "The fact was Nona touched things in me that helped me. Without her I just shut down—I just go about—longing, longing, and all shut up, day after day, year after year—all shut up. And now there's this—she's come back like this—"

He came upon the picture of himself alone with Nona—alone with her watching her beautiful face—and saying to her, "Look here, there were three things you said, three expressions you used. Explain them, Nona. Explain 'There!' with your glove off. Explain 'Flotsam.' Explain 'Well, I had to come.' Explain them, Nona—for God's sake."

CHAPTER V

I

But it was October before he asked her to explain them. The Tybars, as he learnt when next he met her, a week after her visit to the office, were only at Northrepps for a breathing space after their foreign tour. Through the summer they were going the usual social round, ending in Scotland. Back in October for the shooting, and wintering there through the hunting season.

So she told him; and he thought while she was speaking, "All right. I'll accept that. That helps to stop me asking her. If an opportunity occurs before she goes I'll ask her. I must. But if it doesn't occur I'll accept that. I won't make an opportunity."

It did not occur, and he abode by his resolution. He met her once or twice, always in other company. And she was always then particularly gay, particularly airy, particularly bantering. But answering her banter he once caught an expression behind her airiness. He thought, "It is a shield"; and he turned away abruptly from her. He could not bear it.

This was on the occasion of a little dinner party at Northrepps to which he had come with Mabel; Major Hopscotch Millet and one or two others were among the guests. Major Millet, who had been in particularly hopscotch, Ri—te O! form throughout the evening, was walking back, but Mabel invited him to accompany them in the ancient village fly. "Ri—te O!" said Major Millet with enormous enthusiasm.

Nona came with them to the door on their departure. Sabre was last down the steps. "Well, I shan't see you again till October," she said.

"No, till October." He no more than touched her hand and turned away. He had kept his resolution.

She was close behind him. He heard her give the tiniest little catch at her breath. She said, "Shall I write to you, Marko?"

He turned towards her. She was smiling as though it was a chaffing remark she had made. Her shield!

And he answered her from behind his own shield, "Oh, well, I'm bad at letters, you know."

But their eyes met with no shields before them; and she was wounded, for he just caught her voice as he went down the steps, "Oh, Marko, do write to me!"

The Ri—te O voice of the Hopscotch. "Come on, Sabre, my boy! Come on! Come on!"

He got into the cab. Major Millet had taken the seat next Mabel. "Ri—te O, Cabby!" the Hopscotch hailed.

As the horse turned with the staggering motions proper to its burden of years and infirmity, Mabel inquired, "What was Lady Tybar talking to you about all that time?"

He said, "Oh, just saying good-by."

But he was thinking, "That's a fourth question: Why did you say, 'Oh, Marko, do write to me'? Or was that the answer to the other questions, although I never asked them?"

II

He did not write to her. But in October a ridiculous incident impelled afresh the urgent desire to ask her the questions: an incident no less absurd than the fact that in October Low Jinks knocked her knee.

Mabel spent two months of the summer on visits to friends. In August she was with her own people on their annual holiday at Buxton. There Sabre, who had a fortnight, joined her. It happened to be the fortnight of the croquet tournament, and it happened that Major Millet was also in Buxton. Curiously enough he had also been at Bournemouth, whence Mabel had just come from cousins, and they had played much croquet there together. It was projected as great fun to enter the Buxton tournament in partnership, and Sabre did not see a great deal of Mabel.

It was late September when they resumed life together at Penny Green. In their absence the light railway linking up the Garden Home with Tidborough and Chovensbury had been opened with enormous excitement and celebration; and Mabel became at once immersed in paying calls and joining the activities of the new and intensely active community.

Then Low Jinks knocked her knee.

The knee swelled and for two days Low Jinks had to keep her leg on a chair. It greatly annoyed Mabel to see Low Jinks sitting in the kitchen with her leg "stuck out on a chair." She told Sabre it was extraordinary how "that class of person" always got in such a horrible state from the most ridiculous trifles. "I suppose I knock my knee a dozen times a week, but my knee doesn't swell up and get disgusting. You're always reading in the paper about common people getting stung by wasps, or getting a scratch from a nail, and dying the next day. They must be in a horrible state. It always makes me feel quite sick."

Sabre laughed. "Well, I expect poor old Low Jinks feels pretty sick too."

"She enjoys it."

"What, sitting there with a knee like a muffin? I had a look at her just now. Don't you think she might have one of those magazines to read? She looks pretty sorry for herself."

Signs of "flying up." "You haven't given her a magazine, have you?"

"No—I haven't. But I told her I would after dinner."

"If you don't mind you won't. Rebecca has plenty to occupy her time. She can perfectly well clean the silver and things like that, and she has her sewing. She has upset the house quite enough with her leg stuck out on a chair all day without reading magazines."

And then in the extraordinary way in which discussions between them were suddenly lifted by Mabel on to unsuspected grievances against him, Sabre suddenly found himself confronted with, "You know how she hurt her knee, I suppose?"

He knew the tone. "No. My fault, was it?"

"Yes. As it happens, it was your fault—to do with you."

"Good lord! However did I manage to hurt Low Jinks's knee?"

"She did it bringing in your bicycle."

He thought, "Now what on earth is this leading up to?" During the weeks of his separation from Mabel, thinking often of Nona, he had caused himself to think from her to Mabel. His reasoning and reasonable habit of mind had made him, finding extraordinary rest in thought of Nona, accuse himself for finding none in thought of Mabel. She was his wife; he never could get away from the poignancy of that phrase. His wife—his responsibility towards her—the old thought, eight years old, of all she had given up in exchanging her own life for his life—and what was she getting? He set himself, on their reunion, always to remember the advantage he had over her: that he could reason out her attitude towards things; that she could not,—neither his attitude nor, what was more, her own.

Now. What was this leading up to? "She did it bringing in your bicycle." Puzzling sometimes over passages with Mabel that with mysterious and surprising suddenness had plunged into scenes, he had whimsically envisaged how he had been, as it were, led blindfolded to the edge of a precipice, and then, whizz! sent flying over on to the angry crags below.

Bantering protest sometimes averted the disaster. "Well, come now, Mabel, that's not my fault. That was your idea, making Low Jinks come out and meet me every evening as if the old bike was a foam-flecked steed. Wasn't it now?"

"Yes, but not in the dark."

Mysterious manoeuvring! But he felt he was approaching the edge. "In the dark?"

"Yes, not in the dark. What I mean is, I really cannot imagine why you must keep up your riding all through the winter. It was different when there was no other way. Now the railway is running I simply cannot imagine why you don't use it."

"Well, that's easy—because I like the ride."

"You can't possibly like riding back on these pitch dark nights, cold and often wet. That's absurd."

"Well, I like it a jolly sight better than fugging up in those carriages with all that gassing crowd of Garden Home fussers."

And immediately, whizz! he went over the edge.

"That's just it!" Mabel said. And he thought, "Ah!"

"That's just it. And of course you laugh. Why you can't be friendly with people like other men, I never can imagine. There're heaps of the nicest people up at the Garden Home, but from the first you've set yourself against them. Why you never like to make friends like other people!"

He did not answer.

They were at dinner. She made an elaborate business of reaching for the salt. "If you ask me, it's because you don't think they're good enough for you."

He thought, "That's to rouse me. I'm dashed if I'm going to be roused." He thought, "It's getting the devil, this. There's never a subject we start but we work up to something like this. We work on one another like acid on acid. In a minute she'll have another go at it, and then I shall fly off, and then there we'll be. It's my fault. She doesn't think out these things like I do. She just says what comes into her head, whereas I know perfectly well where we're driving to, so I'm really responsible. I rile her. I either rile her by saying something in trying not to fly off, or else I let myself go, and off I fly, and we're at it. Acid on acid. It's getting the devil, this. But I'm dashed if I'll fly off. It's up to me."

He tried in his mind for some matter that would change the subject. Extraordinary how hard it was to find a new topic when some other infernal thing hung in the air. It was like, in a nightmare, trying with leaden limbs to crawl away from danger.

And then she began:

She resumed precisely at the point where she had left off. While his mind had journeyed in review all around and about the relations between them, her mind had remained cumbrously at the thought of her last words. There, he told himself, was the whole difference between them. He was intellectually infinitely more agile (he did not put it higher than that) than she. She could not get away from things as he could. They remained in her mind and rankled there. To get impatient with her, to proceed from impatience to loss of temper, was flatly as cruel as to permit impatience and anger with one bedridden and therefore unable to join in robust exercises. He thought, "I'll not do it."

She said, actually repeating her last words, "Yes, if you ask me, it's because you don't think they're good enough for you. As it happens, there're all sorts of particularly nice men up there, only you never take the trouble to know them. And clever—the only thing you pretend to judge by; though what you can find clever in Mr. Fargus or those Perches goodness only knows. There're all sorts of Societies and Circles and Meetings up there that I should have thought were just what would have attracted you. But, no. You prefer that pottering Mr. Fargus with his childish riddles and even that young Perch without spirit enough to go half a yard without that everlasting old mother of his—"

It was longer and fiercer than he had expected. He intercepted. "I say, Mabel, what's the point of all this, exactly?"

"The point is that it makes it rather hard for me, the way you go on. I've made many, many friends up at the Garden Home. Do you suppose it doesn't seem funny to them that my husband is never to be seen, never comes near the place, never meets their husbands? Of course they must think it funny. I know I feel it very awkward."

He thought, "Girding! Sneering! Can't I get out of this?" Then he thought, "Dash it, man, it's only just her way. What is there in it?" He said, "Yes, but look here, Mabel, we started at my riding home in the dark—or rather at old Low Jinks's muffin knee. Let's work out the trouble about that."

"That's what I'm talking about. I think it's extraordinary of you to go riding by yourself all through the winter just to avoid people I'd like you to be friendly with. I ask you not to and you call it 'fugging up in railway carriages with them.' That was the elegant expression you used."

"Elegant." That was the word Nona had said she was going to have for her own.

He sat up in his chair. He was glad he had kept his mind detached all through this business. He was going to make an effort.

He said, "Well, listen, Mabel. I'll explain. This is me explaining. Behind this fork. I see what you mean. Perfectly well. I'm sorry. I'm absolutely rotten at meeting new people. I always have been. I never seem to have any conversation. They always think I'm just a fool—which, as a matter of fact, I always feel in a crowd. But apart from that. You've no idea how much I enjoy the bike ride. I wouldn't give it up for anything. I've tried to explain to you sometimes. It gets me away from things, and I like getting away from things. I feel—it's hard to explain a stupid thing like this—I feel as if I were lifted out of things and able to look at things from a sort of other-world point of view. It's jolly. Don't you remember I suggested to you, oh, years ago, when we were first—when we first came here, suggested you might ride in part of the way with me of a morning, and told you the idea of the thing? You didn't quite understand it—"

She pushed back her chair. "I don't understand it now," she said.

His eyes had been shining as they shone when he was interested or eager. He threw himself back in his seat. "Oh, well!"

She got up. She said in a very loud, very thin and edged voice, the little constrictions on either side of her nose extraordinarily deep:

"I never can understand any of your ideas, except that no one else ever seems to have them. Except your Fargus friends perhaps. I should keep them for them if I were you. Anyway, all I wanted to say I've said. All I wanted to say was that, if you persist in riding home in the dark, I really cannot allow Rebecca to go out and bring in your bicycle. After this leg of hers is over, if it ever is over, I really cannot allow it any more. That's all I wanted to say."

She left the room.

He began to fumble with extraordinary intensity in the pocket of his dinner jacket for his cigarette case. He could feel it, but his fingers seemed all thumbs. He got it out and it slipped through his fingers on to the table. His hands were shaking.

CHAPTER VI

I

A draper occupied the premises opposite Fortune, East and Sabre's. On the following afternoon, just before five o'clock, Sabre saw Nona alight from her car and go into the draper's. He put on his hat and coat and descended into the street. As he crossed the road she came out.

"Hullo, Marko!"

"Hullo. Well, there's evidently one woman in the world who can get out of a draper's in under an hour. You haven't been in a minute."

"Did you see me go in? As a matter of fact I didn't want anything. As a matter of fact, I was making up my mind—"

"Whether to come in and see me?"

She nodded.

"What about having some tea somewhere?"

"I think that's a good idea."

He suggested the Cloister Tea Rooms. She spoke to the chauffeur and accompanied him.

II

The Cloister Tea Rooms were above a pastry cook's on the first floor of one of the old houses in The Precincts. The irregularly shaped room provided several secluded: tables, and they took one in a remote corner. But their conversation would have suffered nothing in a more central and neighboured situation. Nona began some account of her summer visitations. Sabre spoke a little of local businesses: had she seen the new railway? Had he been round the Garden Home since her return? But the subjects were but skirmishers thrown out before dense armies of thoughts that massed behind; met, and trifled, and rode away. When pretence of dragging out the meal could no longer be maintained, Nona looked at her watch. "Well, I must be getting back. We haven't had a particularly enormous tea, but the chauffeur's had none."

Sabre said, "Yes, let's get out of this." It was as though the thing had been a strain.

He put her into the car. She was so very, very quiet. He said, "I've half a mind to drive up with you. I'd like a ride, and a walk back."

She said the car could run him back, or take him straight over to Penny Green. "Yes, come along up, Marko. They have rather fun in the billiard room after tea."

He got in and she shared with him the heavy fur rug. "Not that I want fun in the billiard room," he said.

She asked him lightly, "Pray what can we provide for you, then?"

"I just want to drive up with you."

III

It was only three miles to Northrepps. It seemed to Sabre an incredibly short time before a turn in the road fronted them with the park gates. And they had not spoken a word! He said, "By Jove, this car travels! I'll get down at the gates, Nona. I'm not coming in. I want the walk back."

She made no attempt to dissuade him. She leaned forward and called to the chauffeur; but as the car began to slow down, she gave a little catch of emotion and said, "Well, we have had a chatty drive. You'd better change your mind and come along up, Marko."

He disengaged the rug from about him. "No, I think I'll get out here." He turned towards her. "Look here, Nona. Get out here and walk up." He echoed the little sound of feeling she had given, pretended laughter. "It will do you good after that enormous tea."

She said something about the tea being too enormous for exertion.

The car drew up. He got out and turned to her. "Look here. Please do."

He saw the colour fade away upon her face. "What for?"

"To talk." It was all he could say.

She put away the rug and gave him her hand. Warm, and she said, "How dreadfully cold your hand is! Go on and get your tea, Jeffries. I'm going to walk up."

The man touched his cap. The car slid away and left them.

IV

They were within the gates. It had been a dull day. Evening stood mistily far up the long avenue of the drive and in the distances about the park on either hand. Among October's massing leaves, a small disquiet stirred. The leaves banked orderly between their parent trunks. Sabre noticed as a curious thing how, when they stirred, they only trembled in their massed formations, not broke their ranks, as if some live thing ran beneath them.

He said, "Do you know what this seems to me? It seems as though it was only yesterday, or this morning, that you came to see me at the office and we talked. Well, I want it to be only yesterday. I want to go on from there."

She said, "Yes."

He hardly could hear the word. He looked at her. She was as tall as he. Not least of the contributions to her beauty in his eyes was the slim grace of her stature. But her face was averted; and he wanted most terribly to see her face. "Stand a minute and look at me, Nona." He touched her arm. "I want to see your face."

She turned towards him and raised her eyes to his eyes. "Oh, what is it you want to say, Marko?"

There was that which glistened upon her lower lids; and about her mouth were trembling movements; and in her throat a pulse beating.

He said, "It's you I want to say something. I want you to explain some things. Some things you said. Nona, when you came into my room that day and shook hands you said, 'There!' when you gave me your hand. You took off your glove and said, 'There!' I want to know why you said 'There!' And you said, 'Well, I had to come.' And you said you were flotsam. And that night—when we'd been up to you—you said, 'Oh, Marko, do write to me.' I want you to explain what you meant."

She said, "Oh, how can you remember?"

He answered, "Because I remember, you must explain."

"Please let me sit down, Marko." She faltered a little laugh. "I can explain better sitting down."

A felled trunk had been placed against the trees facing towards the parkland. They went to it and he sat beside her. She sat upright but bending forward a little over her crossed knees, her hands clasped on them, looking before her across the park.

"No, you must look at me," he said.

She very slowly turned her body towards him. He thought her most beautiful and the expression of her beautiful face was most terrible to him in all his emotions.

V

She spoke very slowly; almost with a perceptible pause between each word. She said, "Well, I'll tell you. I said 'flotsam', didn't I? If I explain that—you know what flotsam is, Marko. Have you ever looked it up in the dictionary? The dictionary says it terribly. 'Goods shipwrecked and found floating on the sea.' I'm twenty-eight, Marko. I suppose that's not really very old. It seems a terrible age to me. You see, you judge age by what you are in contrast with what you were. If you're very happy I think it can't matter how old you are. If you look back to when you were happy and then come to the now when you're not, it seems a most terrible and tremendous gulf—and you see yourself just floating—drifting farther and farther away from the happy years and just being taken along, taken along, to God knows where, God knows to what." She put out the palms of her hands towards where misty evening banked sombrely across the park. "That's very frightening, Marko."

The live thing ran beneath the leaves banked at their feet. A stronger gust came in the air. A scattering of leaves clustered together and moved with sudden agitation across the sward before them; paused and seemed to be trying to flutter a hold into the ground; rushed aimlessly at a tangent to their former direction; paused again; and again seemed to be holding on. Before a sudden gust they were spun helplessly upward, sported aloft in mazy arabesques, scattered upon the breeze.

"Those leaves!" she said. And as if she had not made the interjection she went on, "Most awfully frightening. Well, all the time there was you, Marko. You were always different from anybody I ever knew. Long ago I used to chaff you because you were so different. In those two years when we were away it got awful. In those two years I knew I was flotsam. One day—in India—I went and looked at it in the little dictionary in my writing case, and I knew I was. Do you know what I did? I crossed out flotsam in the dictionary and wrote Nona. There it was, and it was the most exact thing—'Nona: goods shipwrecked and found floating in the sea.' I meant to have torn out the page. I forgot. I left it there and Tony saw it."

Sabre said, "What did he say?" In all she had told him there was something omitted. He knew that his question approached the missing quantity. But she did not answer it.

She went on, "Well, there was you. And I began to want you most awfully. You were always such a dear, slow person; and I wanted that most awfully. You were so steady and good and you had such quiet old ideas about duty and rightness and things, and you thought about things so, and I wanted that most frightfully. You see, I'd known you all my life—well, that's how it was, Marko. That explains all the things you asked. I said 'There'; and I said I had to come; because I'd wanted it so much, so long. And I wanted you to write to me because I did want to go on having the help I had from you—"

He had desired her to look at him, but it was he who had turned away. He sat with his head between his hands, his elbows on his knees.

She repeated, with rather a plaintive note, as though in his pose she saw some pain she had caused him, "You see, I had known you all my life, Marko—"

He said, still looking upon the ground between his feet, "But you haven't explained anything. You've only told me. You haven't explained why."

She said with astounding simplicity, "Well, you see, Marko, I made a mistake. I made a most frightful mistake. I chose. I chose wrong. I ought to have married you, Marko."

And his words were a groan. "Nona—Nona—"

CHAPTER VII

I

He was presently walking back, returning to Tidborough.

He was trying very hard, all his life's training against sudden unbridling of his bridled passions, to grapple his mind back from its wild and passionate desires and from its amazed coursings upon the immense prairies, teeming with hazards, fears, enchantments, hopes, dismays, that broke before this hour as breaks upon the hunter's gaze, amazingly awarded from the hill, savannas boundless, new, unpathed,—from these to grapple back his mind to its schooled thought and ordered habit, to its well-trodden ways of duty, obligation, rectitude. He had not left them. But for that cry of her name wrung from him by sudden application of pain against whose shock he was not steeled, he had answered nothing to her lamentable disclosure. This which he now knew, these violent passions which now he felt, but lit for him more whitely the road his feet must take. If he had ever tried consciously to see his life and Mabel's from Mabel's point of view, now, when his mind threatened disloyalty to her, he must try. And would! The old habit, the old trick of seeing the other side, acted never so strongly upon him as when unkindness appeared to lie in his own attitude. Unkindness was unfairness and unfairness was above all qualities the quality he could not tolerate. And here was unfairness, open, monstrous, dishonourable.

Mabel should not feel it.

But he was aware, he was informed as by a voice in his ears, "You have struck your tents. You are upon the march."

II

He approached the town. The school lay in this quarter and his way ran through its playing fields and its buildings. Nature in her moods much fashioned his thoughts when he walked the countryside or rode his daily journey on his bicycle. He now carried his thoughts into her mood that stood about him.

Nature was to him in October, and not in spring, poignantly suggestive, deeply mysterious, in her intense and visible occupation. She was enormously busy; but she was serenely busy. She was stripping her house of its deckings, dismantling her habitation to the last and uttermost leaf; but she stripped, dismantled, extinguished, broke away, not in despair, defeat, but in ordered preparation and with exquisite certitude of glory anew. That, in October, was her voice to him, stirring tremendously that faculty of his of seeing more clearly, visioning life more poignantly, with his mind than with his eye. She spoke to him of preparation for winter, and beyond winter with ineffable assurance for spring, bring winter what it might. He saw her dismantling all her house solely to build her house again. She packed down. She did not pack up, which is confusion, flight, abandonment. She packed down, which is resolve, resistance, husbandry of power to build and burst again; and burst again,—in stout affairs of outposts in sheltered banks and secret nooks; in swift, amazing sallies of violet and daffodil and primrose; in multitudinous clamour of all her buds in May; and last in her resistless tide and flood and avalanche of beauty to triumph and possession.

That was October's voice to him; that he apprehended and tingled to it, as the essence of its strange, heavy odours; secret of its veiling mists; whisper of its moisture-laden airs; song of its swollen ditches, brooks and runnels. It was not "Take down. It is done." It was "Take down. It is beginning."

Mankind, frail parasite of doubt, seeks ever for a sign, conceives no certainty but the enormous certitude of uncertainty. A sign! In death: "Take down, then; but leave me this—and this—for memory. Perhaps—who knows?—it may be true.... But leave me this for memory." In promise: "So be it, then—but give me some pledge, some proof, some sign." Not thus October. October spoke to Sabre of Nature's sublime imperviousness to doubt; of her enormous certainty, old as creation, based in the sure foundations of the world. "Take down. It is beginning."

Sabre used to think, "It gets you—terrifically. It's stupendous. It's too big to bear." He had this thought out of October: "You can't, can't walk along lanes or in woods in October and see all this mysterious business going on without knowing perfectly well that this astounding certainty must apply equally to human life. I'd wish the death of any one I loved to be in early autumn. No one can possibly doubt in early autumn. In winter, perhaps; and in spring and in summer you can know, cynically, it will pass. But in October—no. Impossible then. And not only death, Life. Life as one lives it. You can't, can't feel in autumn that in the lowest depths there is lower yet. You only can feel, know, that the thing will break, that there's an uplift at the bottom of it all. There must be."

III

Take down: it is beginning. The spirit and the message of the season (as they communicated themselves to him) began, as opiate among enfevered senses, to steal about his thoughts. Had anything happened? His feeling was rather that he was at the beginning of something; or at the end of something, which was the same thing. The place whereon he stood entered into his thoughts. He had left the main road and was skirting through the school precincts. He was crossing The Strip, historic sward whereon were played the First XV football matches. Impossible to be upon The Strip without peopling it again with the tremendous battles that had been here, the giants of football who here had made their fame and the school's fame; the crowded, tumultuous touch lines; the silent, tremendous combat in between. Memories came to him of his own two seasons in the XV; his own name from a thousand throats upon the wintry air. His muscles tautened as again he fought some certain of those enormous moments when the whole of life was bound up solely in the unspeakable necessity to win. Astounding trick of thought from what beset him! He was alone upon The Strip, in an overcoat, on the way to forty, not a sound, not a soul, and with that brooding sense of being upon the edge and threshold of something vast, dark, threatening, unfathomable.

IV

Down the steep hill flanked by masters' houses. Twilight merging now into darkness. Boys passing in and out of the gateways. Past Telfer's which had been his own house. All this youth was preparing for life; all these houses eternally, generation after generation, pouring boys out into life as at Shotley iron foundry he had seen molten metal poured out of a cauldron. And every boy, poured out, imagined he was going to live his own life. O hapless delusion! Lo, as the same moulds awaited and confined the metal, so the same moulds awaited and confined the living stuff. Mysterious conventions, laws, labours; imperceptibly receiving; implacably binding and shaping. The last day he had come down the steps of Telfer's—jumped down—how distinctly he remembered it! It was his own life he was coming down, eagerly jumping down, into.—Well, here he was, passing those very steps, and whose life was he living? Mabel's? Old Fortune's? And to what end?

V

Whose life was Nona living?

He had asked her, "Tell me about you and Tybar."

With pitiable gentleness of voice she had approached that quantity which had been missing from her first statement of her position. And she had done tribute to her husband's parts with generosity, nay with pride. "Tony does everything better than any one else." She had said it on that occasion of their first reëncounter; its burthen had been the opening of her recital of what else she had for him.

"Marko, I think Tony's the most wonderful person that ever was. He does everything that men do and he does everything best. And everybody admires him and everybody likes him. You've no idea. You've no idea how he wins everybody he meets. People will do anything for him. They love him. Well, you've only got to look at him, haven't you? Or hear him talk? I think there's never been any one so utterly captivating as Tony is to look at and to hear."

Most engagingly, with such words, she had presented him: one that passed through life airily, exquisitely; much fairy-gifted at his cradle with gifts of beauty, charm, preëminence in all he touched; knowing no care, knowing no difficulty, knowing no obstacle, or danger, or fear, or illness, or fatigue, or anything in life but gay and singing things, which touching, he made more bright, more tuneful yet; meeting no one, of whatever age or degree, but his charm was to that age or degree exactly touched; captivating all, leading all, by all desired in leadership. Fortune's darling!

"And, Marko," she at last had come to. "And Marko—this is the word—graceless. Utterly, utterly graceless. Without heart, Marko, without conscience, without morals, without the smallest scrap of an approach to any moral principle. Marko, that's an awful, a wicked, an abominable thing for a wife to say of her husband. But he wouldn't mind a bit my telling you. Not a bit. He'd love it. He'd laugh. He'd utterly love to know he had stung me so much. And he'd utterly love to know he'd driven me to tell you. He'd think—he'd love like anything to drive me to do awful things. He's tried—especially these two years. He'd love to be able to point a finger at me and laugh and say, 'Ah! Ha-ha! Ah!' You know, he hasn't got any feelings at all—love or hate or anything else; and it simply amuses him beyond anything to arouse feeling in anybody else. There have been women all the time we've been married and he simply amuses himself with them until he's tired of them, and until the next one takes his fancy, and he does it quite openly before me, in my house, and tells me what I can't see before my own eyes just for the love of seeing the suffering it gives me. You saw that Mrs. Winfred. He's done with her now. And he's as shameless about me with them as he is about them with me. And what he loves above all is the way I take it; and I can take it in no other way. You see I won't, I simply will not, Marko, let these women of his see—or let any one in the world suspect—that I—that I suffer. So when we are together before people I keep up the gay way we always show together. He loves it; it's delicious to him, because it's a game played over the torture underneath. And I won't do any other way, Marko. I will keep my face to the world—I won't have any one pity me."

"I pity you," he had said.

"Ah, you...."

VI

And he was suddenly shot into an encounter of extraordinary incongruity with his thoughts and of extraordinary intensity. A voice accosted him. He was astounded, as if suddenly awakened out of heavy sleep, to see to where he had come. He was in the narrow old ways of Tidborough Old Town, approaching The Precincts, by the ancient Corn Exchange. A keen-looking young man, particularly well set up and wearing nice tweeds, was accosting him. Sabre recognised Otway, captain and adjutant of the depot, up at the barracks, of the county regiment, one of the crack regiments, famous as "The Pinks."

Otway said, "Hullo, Sabre. How goes it? Are you going to this show to-morrow?"

He was pointing with his stick to a poster displayed against the Corn Exchange. Sabre read it. It announced that Field Marshal Lord Roberts was speaking there, under the auspices of the National Service League, on Home Defence—a Citizen Army.

"I hadn't thought about going," Sabre said. He wanted to get away.

Otway was staring at the poster as though he had never seen it before; but he had been staring at it when Sabre came along the street. "You ought to," Otway said. "You ought to hear old Bobs. Of course the little chap's all wrong."

He seemed to be talking to himself, staring at the poster, more than to Sabre. Sabre, despite his preoccupation, was surprised. "All wrong? Good lord, I should have thought you of all people—" And immediately a torrent of Otway was let loose upon him, bursting into his thoughts like a stone chucked through a study window.

Otway spun around in his keen, quick way to face him. "All wrong in the way he's putting his case, I mean. All these National Service chaps are. Home defence they talk about, nothing but Home Defence. It's like chucking sawdust into a fire—the fire being all the bloody fools who are opposed to military training. Any fool can knock the bottom out of this Home Defence business. The Blue Water fools are champions at it. They say the only defence against invasion is the Navy and that half a million spent on the Navy is worth untold millions chucked away on this 'Nation in Arms' shout. And they're damn right."

"Well, then?" said Sabre. "What's the argument? What's the harm in knocking the bottom out of—this?" he nodded towards the poster.

Otway spoke with astonishing intensity. "Why, good God alive, man, don't you see, we do want a nation in arms; we want it like hell. But we don't want it for here, at home; we want it to fight on the Continent. That's where we've got to fight,—out there. And that's where we're going to fight before we're many years older."

In his intensity he had extended his left hand and was beating his points into it with the handle of his stick. "See that?"

Sabre was not in the mood to see anything. He only wanted to be away.

"No, I'm dashed if I do. What are we going to fight on the Continent for—supposing we ever do have to fight anywhere?"

The stick hammered away again. "Because we've got obligations there. We've got to defend Belgium, for one. And if we hadn't—if we hadn't any obligations we'd pretty soon, we'd damn soon find them as soon as ever Germany breaks loose. That's what these National Service Johnnies ought to tell the people, that's what Bobs ought to tell them, that's what these blasted politicians ought to tell them: you don't want National Service to defend your perishing homes. The Navy's going to do that. You want it like hell because you've got to defend your lives—out there." He waved his stick towards "out there." "My God!" he said. He was consumed with the intensity of his own emotions. "My God!"

Despite himself, Sabre was impressed. The man would have impressed anybody. His eyes were extraordinarily penetrating. There actually were tiny little points of perspiration about his nose.

"I never thought about that," Sabre said doubtfully. "I never thought there were any obligations. I doubt any member of the Government would admit there were any."

"I know damn well they wouldn't," Otway declared. "And they'd be helped to deny it, or to evade it, by the howl of laughter there'd be in the Commons if any one had the guts to get up and ask if we had any obligations. There's no joke goes down like that sort of joke. Well—" His manner changed. He tucked his stick under his arm and took out a silver cigarette case. "Cigarette? Well—they'll laugh the other side of their chuckle heads one of these days."

Sabre took a cigarette. "You're pretty sure there's going to be a war, aren't you?"

The extraordinary man, who had become smiling and airy, immediately became extraordinary again. He had struck a match, held it to Sabre's cigarette, and was applying it to his own. He extinguished it with violent jerks of his arm and dashed it on to the pavement. "Sure? My God, sure? I tell you, Sabre, you won't be five years, I don't believe you'll be two years, one year, older before you'll not only be sure—you'll know! I've just finished a course at the Staff College, you know. We finished up with a push over to Belgium to do the battlefields. We went into Germany, some of us. They fed us in some of their messes. Do you know, those chaps in those messes there talked about fighting us as naturally and as certainly as you talk with your opponents about a coming footer match. They talked about 'When we fight you'—not 'if we fight you'—'when', as if it was as fixed as Christmas. And they didn't talk any of this bilge about fighting us in England; they knew, as I know, and every soldier knows—every soldier who's keen—that it's going to be out there. In Europe." He had not taken two puffs at his cigarette before he wrenched it from his mouth and dashed it after the match. "Sabre, why the hell aren't people here told that? Why are they stuck up with this rot about defending their shores when they can see for themselves that only the Navy can defend their shores? What are they going to do when the war comes? Are they going to lynch these bloody politicians who haven't told them they've got to fight for their lives? Are they going to turn around and say they never knew it so they'll be damned if they'll fight for their lives? Are they going to follow any of these politicians who will have betrayed them? Do you suppose any man who's been party to this betrayal is going to be found big enough to run a war? I tell you that's another thing. Do you suppose a chap who's been a miserable vote-snatcher all his life is going to turn round suddenly and be a heaven-sent administrator in a war? You can take your oath Heaven doesn't send out geniuses on that ticket. What you've lived and done in fat times—that's what you're going to live and do in lean. Heaven's chucked stocking divine fire."

"I'm with you there," Sabre said. He did not believe half this intense man said, but he conceived a sudden and great admiration for his intensity. And he had had no idea that a soldier ever thought so far away from his own subject—which was sport and one chance in a million of fighting—as to produce aphorisms on habit and development. "But you know, Otway," he said, "it's jolly hard to believe all this inevitableness of war stuff that chaps like you put up. Do you read the articles in the reviews and the quarterlies? They all pretty well prove that, apart from anything else, a big European war is impossible by the—well, by the sheer bigness of the thing. They say these modern gigantic armies couldn't operate, couldn't provision themselves. And there's the finance. They prove you can't fight without money and that credit would go and the thing would stop before it had begun, pretty well. I don't know anything about that sort of thing, but the arguments strike me as absolutely sound."

Otway was waiting with fidgety impatience. "I've heard all that. I don't give a damn for it. Of course you don't know anything about it. No one does. Least of all those writing chaps. It's all theory. Every one thought that with modern this, that and the other you were as safe on the last word in liners as in your own bedroom. Then comes along that Titanic business in April, and where the hell are you with your modern conditions? Fifteen hundred people done in. I tell you it isn't that things that used to happen can't happen now; it's simply that they'll happen a million times worse. What's the good of theories when you've got facts? Look at the things there've been with Germany just this year alone. Old Haldane over in Germany in February for 'unofficial discussions', Churchill threatening two keels to one if the German Navy law is exceeded. That was March. In April the Germans whack up their Navy Law Amendment, twelve more big ships. That chap Bertrand Stewart getting three and a half years for espionage in Germany; and two German spies caught by us here,—that chap Grosse over at Winchester Assizes, three years, and friend Armgaard Graves up at Glasgow, eighteen months. An American cove at Leipzig taking four years' penal for messing around after plans of the Heligoland fortifications. Those five yachting chaps in July arrested for espionage at Eckernforde. War, too, skits of it. Turkey and Italy hardly done when all these Balkan chaps set to and slosh Turkey. Have you seen to-day's papers? I'll bet you they'll send Turkey to hell at Kirk Kilisse or thereabouts before the week's out."

He had been ticking these points off on his fingers, much astonishing Sabre by his marshalling of scattered incidents that had been merely rather pleasing newspaper sensations of a couple of days. He presented the ticked-off fingers bunched up together. "There, there's concrete facts for you, Sabre. Can you say things aren't tightening up? Why, if war—when war comes people will look back on this year, 1912, and wonder where in hell their eyes were that they didn't see it. What are they seeing?—" He threw his fingers apart. "None of these things. Not one. All this doctors and the Insurance Bill tripe, Marconi Inquiry, Titanic, Suffragettes smashing up the West End, burning down Lulu Harcourt's place, trying to roast old Asquith in the Dublin Theatre, Seddon murder, this triangular cricket show. Hell's own excitement because there's so much rain in August and people in Norwich have to go about in boats, and then hell's own hullaballoo because there's no rain for twenty-two days in September and people get so dry they can't spit or something." His keen face wrinkled up into laughter. "Eh, didn't you read that?" He laughed but was immediately intense again. "That's all that really interests the people. By God, they'll sit up and take notice of the real stuff one of these days. Pretty soon. Tightening up, I tell you. Well, I'm off, Sabre. When are you coming up to the Mess again? Friday? Well, guest night the week after. I'll drop you a line. So long." He was off, carrying his straight back alertly up the street.

VII

His going was somehow as sudden and startling as his appearance had been sudden and tumultuous. He had carried away Sabre's thoughts as a jet from a hosepipe will spin a man out of a crowd; smashed into his preoccupation as a stone smashing through a window upon one deep in study; galloped across his mind as a cavalcade thundering through a village street,—and the effect of it, and the incongruity of it as, getting his bicycle from the office, he rode homewards, kept returning to Sabre's mind, as an arresting dream will constantly break across daylight thoughts.

Nona had said that Tybar knew she thought often of him. "He knows I think of you." That was the way she had put it. It explained that mock in his eyes when they met that day on the road, and Mrs. Winfred's remark and her look, and Tybar's, that day outside the office. Extraordinary, Otway bursting in like that with all those ridiculous scares. Here he was riding along with all this reality pressing enormously about him, and with this strange and terrible feeling of being at the beginning of something or at the end of something, with this voice in his ears of, "You have struck your tents and are upon the march"; and there was Otway, up at the barracks, miles away from realities, but as obsessed with his impossible stuff as he himself with these most real and pressing dismays. What would he, with his apprehension of what might lie ahead, be saying to a chap like Otway in two or three years and what would Otway with his obsessions be saying to him? Ah, two or three years...!

But Nona loved him.... But his duty was here.... And he could have taken her beautiful body into his arms and held her beloved face to his.... But he had said not a word of love to her, only his cry of "Nona—Nona...." His duty was here.... But what would the years bring...? But what might have been! What might have been!

VIII

He finished his ride in darkness. The Green, as he passed along it on the free-wheel run, merged away through gloom into obscurity. Points of light from the houses showed here and there. The windows of his home had lamplight through their lattices. The drive was soft with leaves beneath his feet.

Lamplight, and the yielding undertread and all around walled about with obscurity. It was new. It had shown thus now for some nights on his return. But it was the first time he had apprehended it. New. Different. A commencement. An ending.

He left his bicycle in the roomy porch. He missed Low Jinks with her customary friendly greeting. It was very lonely, this. He opened the hall door and entered. Absolute silence. He had grown uncommonly accustomed to Low Jinks being here.... Absolute silence. It was like coming into an empty house. And he had got to go on coming into it, and living in it, and tremendously doing his duty in it.

Like an empty house. He stood perfectly still in the perfect stillness. Take down: it is beginning. You have struck your tents and are upon the march.

PART THREE

EFFIE