If Winter Comes

Few spoke to Miss Bypass. Those who did were answered in the curiously defiant manner which was her habit and which was called by Mabel abominably rude, and by Sabre pathetic. As he and Mabel were taking their leave, he had Miss Bypass in momentary conversation, Mabel standing by.

"Hullo, Miss Bypass. Haven't managed to see you in all this crowd. How're things with you?"

"I'm perfectly well, thank you."

"Been reading anything lately? I saw you coming out of the library the other day with a stack of books."

Miss Bypass gave the impression of bracing herself, as though against suspected attack. "Yes, and they were for my own reading, thank you. I suppose you thought they were for Mrs. Boom Bagshaw."

Certainly her manner was extraordinarily hostile. Sabre took no notice.

"No, I bet they were your own. You're a great reader, I know."

Her tone was almost bitter. "I suppose you think I read nothing but Dickens and that sort of thing."

"Well, you might do a good deal worse, you know. There's no one like Dickens, taking everything together."

She flushed. You could almost see she was going to say something rude. "That's a very kind thing to say to uneducated people, Mr. Sabre. It makes them think it isn't education that prevents them enjoying more advanced writers. But I don't suffer from that, as it so happens. I daresay some of my reading would be pretty hard even for you."

Sabre felt Mabel pluck at his sleeve. He glanced at her. Her face was very angry. Miss Bypass, delivered of her sharp words, was deeper flushed, her head drawn back. He smiled at her. "Why, I'm sure it would, Miss Bypass. I tell you what, we must have a talk about reading one day, shall we? I think it would be rather jolly to exchange ideas."

An extraordinary and rather alarming change came over Miss Bypass's hard face. Sabre thought she was going to cry. She said in a thick voice, "Oh, I don't really read anything particularly good. It's only—Mr. Sabre, thank you." She turned abruptly away.

When they were outside, Mabel said, "How extraordinary you are!"

"Eh? What about?"

"Making up to that girl like that! I never heard such rudeness as the way she spoke to you." Sabre said, "Oh, I don't know."

"Don't know! When you spoke to her so politely and the way she answered you! And then you reply quite pleasantly—"

He laughed. "You didn't expect me to give her a hard punch in the eye, did you?"

"No, of course I didn't expect you to give her a hard punch in the eye. But I should have thought you'd have had more sense of your own dignity than to take no notice and invite her to have a talk one day."

He thought, "Here we are again!" He said, "Well, but look, Mabel. I don't think she means it for rudeness. She is rude of course, beastly rude; but, you know, that manner of hers always makes me feel frightfully sorry for her."

"Sorry!"

"Yes, haven't you noticed many people like her with that defiant sort of way of speaking—people not very well educated, or very badly off, or in rather a dependent position, and most frightfully conscious of it. They think every one is looking down on them, or patronising them, and the result is they're on the defensive all the time. Well, that's awfully pathetic, you know, all your life being on the defensive; back against the wall; can't get away; always making feeble little rushes at the mob. By Jove, that's pathetic, Mabel."

She said, "I'm not listening, you know."

He was startled. "Eh?"

"I say I'm not listening. I always know that whenever I say anything about any one I dislike, you immediately start making excuses for them, so I simply don't listen."

He mastered a sudden feeling within him. "Well, it wasn't very interesting," he said.

"No, it certainly wasn't. Pathetic!" She gave her sudden burst of laughter. "You think such extraordinary things pathetic; I wonder you don't start an orphanage!"

He halted and faced her. "Look here, I think I'll leave you here. I think I'll go for a bit of a walk."

Pretty hard, sometimes, not to—

III

At The Precincts the increasing habit of seeing the other side of things was confined, in its increasing exemplifications of how impossible he was to get on with, to the furiously exciting incidents of public affairs; but the result was the same; the result was that, just as, on opening his door on return home at night, he had that chill and rather eerie feeling of stepping into an empty house, so, on entering the office of a morning, he came to have again that sensation that it was a deserted habitation into which he was stepping; no welcome here; no welcome there. He began to look forward with a new desire for the escape and detachment of the bicycle ride; he began to approach its termination at either end with a sense of apprehension, gradually of dismay.

They were as unexpected, the conflicts of opinion, in the office as they were at home. The subject would come up, he would enter it according to his ideas and without foreseeing trouble, and suddenly he would find himself in acute opposition and giving acute offence because he was in acute opposition.

The Suffragettes! The day when Mr. Fortune received through the post letters upon which militancy had squirted its oppression and its determination in black and viscid form through the aperture of the letter box. "And you're sticking up for them!" declared Mr. Fortune in a very great passion. "You're deliberately sticking up for them. You—pah!—pouff!—paff! I have got the abominable stuff all over my fingers."

Sabre displayed the "wrinkled-up nut" of his Puzzlehead boyhood. "I'm not sticking up for them. I detest their methods as much as you do. I think they're monstrous and indefensible. All I said was that, things being as they are, you can't help seeing that their horrible ways are bringing the vote a jolly sight nearer than it's ever been before. Millions of people who never would have thought about woman suffrage are thinking about it now. These women are advertising it as it never could be advertised by calmly talking about it, and you can't get anything nowadays except by shouting and smashing and abusing and advertising. I only wish you could. No one listens to reason. It's got to be what they call a whirlwind campaign or go without. That's not sticking up for them. It's simply recognising a rotten state of affairs."

"And I say to you," returned Mr. Fortune, scrubbing furiously at his fingers with a duster, "and I say to you what I seem to be perpetually forced to say to you, that your ideas are becoming more and more repugnant to me. There's not a solitary subject comes up between us but you adopt in it what I desire to call a stubborn and contumacious attitude towards me. Whoof!" He blew a cyclonic blast down the speaking tube. "Send Parker up here. Parker! Send Parker up here! Parker! Parker! Parker! Pah! Pouff! Paff! Now it's all over the speaking tube! I am by no means recovered yet, Sabre, I am very far from being yet recovered, from your remarks yesterday on the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill. Let me remind you again that your attitude was not only very painful to me in my capacity of one in Holy Orders, it was also outrageously opposed to the traditions and standing of this firm. We are out of sympathy, Sabre. We are seriously out of sympathy; and let me tell you that you would do well to reflect whether we are not dangerously out of sympathy. Let me—"

The door porter entered in the venerable presence of the summoned Parker, much agitated.

Sabre began, "If you can't see what I said about the Disestablishment Bill—"

"I did not see; I do not see; I cannot see and I shall not see. I—"

Sabre moved towards his door. "Well, I'd better be attending to my work. If anything I've said annoyed you, it certainly was not intended to."

And there followed him into his room, "Pumice stone! Pumice stone! Pumice stone! Go to the chemist's and get some pumice stone.... Very well then, sir, don't stand there staring at me, sir!"

IV

Like living in two empty houses: empty this end; empty that end. More frequently, for these estrangements, appealed to him the places of his refuge: the room of his mind, that private chamber wherein, retired, he assembled the parts of his puzzles; that familiar garment in which, invested, he sat among the fraternity of his thoughts; the evenings with Young Perch and old Mrs. Perch; the evenings with Mr. Fargus.

Most strongly of all called another refuge; and this, because it called so strongly, he kept locked. Nona.

They met no more frequently than, prior to her two years' absence, they had been wont to meet in the ordinary course of neighbourly life; and their lives, by their situations, were much detached. Northrepps was only visited, never resided at for many months together.

His resolution was not to force encounters. Once, very shortly after that day of her disclosure, he had said to her, "Look here, we're not going to have any arranged meetings, Nona. I'm not strong enough—not strong enough to resist. I couldn't bear it."

She answered, "You're too strong, Marko. You're too strong to do what you think you ought not to do; it isn't not being strong enough."

He told her she was very wrong. "That's giving me strength of character. I haven't any strength of character at all. That's been my failing all my life. I tell you what I've got instead. I've got the most frightfully, the most infernally vivid sense of what's right in my own personal conduct. Lots of people haven't. I envy them. They can do what they like. But I know what I ought to do. I know it so absolutely that there's no excuse for me when I don't do it, certainly no credit if I do. I go in with my eyes open or I stay out merely because my eyes are open. There's nothing in that. If it's anything it's contemptible."

She said, "Teach me to be contemptible."

V

In those words he had expressed his composition. What he had not revealed—that very vividness of sense of what was right (and what was wrong) in his conduct forbidding it—was the corroding struggle to preserve the path of his duty. Because of that struggle he kept locked the refuge that Nona was to him in his dismays. He would have no meetings with her save only such as thrice happy chance and most kind circumstance might apportion. That was within the capacity of his strength. He could "at least" (he used to think) prevent his limbs from taking him to her. But his mind—his mind turned to her; automatically, when he was off his guard, as a swing door ever to its frame; frantically, when he would abate it, as a prisoned animal against its bars. By day, by night, in Fortune's company, in Mabel's company, in solitude, his mind turned to her. This was the refuge he kept locked, using the expression and envisaging it.

He used to think, "Of course I fail. Of course she's always in my mind. But while I make the effort to prevent it, while I do sometimes manage to wrench my mind away, I'm keeping fit; I'm able to go on putting up some sort of a fight. I'm able to help her."

To help her! But helping her, unfolding before her in his own measured words, as one pronouncing sentence, rectitude's austere asylum for their pains, watching her while she listened, hearing her gentle acquiescence,—these were most terrible to his governance upon himself.

VI

He said one day, "You see, there's this, Nona. Life's got one. We're in the thing. All the time you've got to go on. You can't go back one single second. What you've done, you've done. It may take only a minute in the doing, or in the saying, but it's done, or said, for all your life, perhaps for the whole of some one else's life as well. That's terrific, Nona.

"Nona, that's how life gets us; there's just one way we can get life and that's by thinking forward before we do a thing. By remembering that it's going to be there for always. What's in our hearts for one another, Nona, is no hurt to to-morrow or to next year or to twenty years hence, either to our own lives or to any one else's—no hurt while it's only there and not expressed, or acted on. I've never told you what's in my heart for you, nor you told me what's in your heart for me. It must remain like that. Once that goes, everything goes. It's only a question of time after that. And after that, again, only a question of time before one of us looks back and wishes for the years over again."

She made the smallest motion of dissent.

He said, "Yes. There's right and wrong, Nona. Nothing else in between. No compromise. No way of getting round them or over them. You must be either one thing or the other. Once we took a step towards wrong, there it is for ever, and all its horrible things with it—deceit, concealment, falsehood, subterfuge, pretence: vile and beastly things like that. I couldn't endure them; and I much less could endure thinking I had caused you to suffer them. And then on through that mire to dishonour.—It's easy, it sounds rather fine, to say the world well lost for love; but honour, honour's not well lost for anything. You can't replace it. I couldn't—"

The austere asylum of their pains. He looked back upon it as he had unfolded it. He looked forward across it as, most stern and bleak, it awaited them. He cried with a sudden loudness, as though he protested, not before her, but before arbitrament in the high court of destiny, "But I cannot help you upward; I can only lead you downward."

She said, "Upward, Marko. You help me upward."

Her gentle acquiescence!

There swept upon him, as one reckless in sudden surge of intoxication, most passionate desire to take her in his arms; and on her lips to crush to fragments the barriers of conduct he had in damnable sophistries erected; and in her ears to breathe, "You are beloved to me! Honour, honesty, virtue, rectitude—words, darling, words, words, words! Beloved, let the foundations of the world go spinning, so we have love."

He called most terribly upon himself, and his self answered him; but shaken by that most fierce onset he said thickly, "I'll have this. If ever it grows too hard for you, tell me—tell me."

VII

It must be kept locked. In grievous doubt of his own strength, in loneliness more lonely for his doubt, more deeply, as advancing summer lengthened out his waking solitude, he explored among his inmost thoughts; more eagerly, in relief from their perplexities, turned to the companionship of Fargus and the Perches. How very, very glad they always were to see him! It was the strong happiness they manifested in greeting him that most deeply gave the pleasure he had in their company. He often pondered the fact. It was, in their manifestation of it, as though he brought them something,—something very pleasurable to them and that they much wanted. Certainly he, for his own part, received such from them: a sense of warmth, a kindling of the spirit, a glowing of all his affections and perceptions.

His mind would explore curiously along this train of thought. He came to determine that infinitely the most beautiful thing in life was a face lighting up with the pleasure of friendship: in its apotheosis irradiating with the wonder of love. That frequent idea of his of the "wanting something" look in the faces of half the people one saw: he thought that the greeting of some one loved might well be a touching of the quality that was to seek. The weariest and the most wistful faces were sheerly transfigured by it. But he felt it was not entirely the secret. The greeting passed; the light faded; the wanting returned. But he determined the key to the solution lay within that ambit. The happiness was there. It was here in life, found, realised in loving meeting, as warmth is found on stepping from shadow into the sun. The thing lacking was something that would fix it, render it permanent, establish it in the being as the heart is rooted in the body.—Something? What?

He thought, "Well, why is it that children's faces are always happy? There's something they must lose as they grow out of childhood. It's not that cares and troubles come; the absurd troubles of childhood are just as terrific troubles to them as grown-ups' cares are to grown-ups. No, it is that something is lost. Well, what had I as a child that I have not as a man? Would it be hope? Would it be faith? Would it be belief?"

He thought, "I wonder if they're all the same, those three—belief, faith, hope? Belief in hope. Faith in hope. It may be. Is it that a child knows no limitation to hope? It can hope impossible things. But a man hopes no further than he can see—I wonder—"

And suddenly, in one week, life from its armoury discharged two events upon him. In the next week one upon the world.

CHAPTER III

I

Towards the end of July there was some particularly splendid excitement for the newspaper-reading public. Ireland provided it; and the newspapers, as the events enlarged one upon the other, could scarcely find type big enough to keep pace with them. On the twenty-first, the King caused a conference of British and Irish leaders to assemble at Buckingham Palace. On the twenty-fourth, the British and Irish leaders departed from Buckingham Palace in patriotic halos of national champions who had failed to agree "in principle or detail." Deadlock and Crisis flew about the streets in stupendous type; and though they had been doing so almost daily for the past eighteen months, everybody could see, with the most delicious thrills, that these were more firmly locked deadlocks and more critical crises than had ever before come whooping out of the inexhaustible store where they were kept for the public entertainment. Austria, and then Germany, made a not bad attempt on public attention by raking up some forgotten sensation over a stale excitement at a place called Sarajevo; but on the twenty-sixth, Ireland magnificently filled the bill again by the far more serious affair of Nationalist Volunteers landing three thousand rifles and marching with them into Dublin. Troops fired on the mob, and the House of Commons gave itself over to a most exciting debate on the business; the Irish Party demanded a large number of brutal heads to be delivered on chargers; and Unionist politicians, Press, and public declared that the heads were not brutal heads but loyal and devoted heads and should not be delivered; on the contrary they should be wreathed. It was delicious.

II

It was delicious and it was, moreover, reassuring. In these same days between the summoning of the Buckingham Palace Conference and the landing of the Nationalist guns, Continental events arising out of the stale Sarajevo affair reared their heads and looked towards Great Britain in a presumptuous and sinister way to which the British public was not accustomed, and which it resented. The British public had never taken any interest in international affairs and it did not wish to take any interest in international affairs. It certainly did not wish to be disturbed by them, and at this moment of the exciting Irish deadlock the Wilhelmstrasse, the Ball Platz, the Quai d'Orsay and similar stupid, meaningless and unpronounceable places intruded themselves disturbingly in British homes, much as the writing on the wall vexatiously disturbed Belshazzar's feast, and were similarly resented. Belshazzar probably ordered in a fresh troupe of dancers to remove the chilly effect of the stupid, meaningless and unpronounceable writing, and in the same way the British public turned with relief and with thrills to the gun-running and the shooting.

It was characteristically intriguing in the nature of its excitement. It was characteristically intriguing because, like all the domestic sensations to which the British Public had become accustomed, it in no way interfered with the lives of those not directly implicated in it. Like them all, it entertained without inconveniencing. They knew their place, the deadlocks, the crises and the other sensations of those glowing days. They caused no member of their audience to go without his meals. They interfered neither with pleasure nor with business.

III

Sometimes this was a little surprising. Fresh from newspaper instruction of the deadness of the deadlock, the poignancy of the crisis, or the stupendity of the achievement, one rather expected one's own personal world to stand still and watch it. But one's own personal world never did stand still and watch it.

Sabre, coming into his office on the day reporting the affray in Dublin, was made to experience this.

In the town, on his arrival, he purchased several of the London newspapers to read other accounts and other views of the gun-running and its sensational sequel. His intention was to read them the moment he got to his room. He put them on a chair while he hung up his straw hat and filled a pipe.

They remained there unopened till the charwoman removed them in the evening. On his desk, as he glanced towards it, was a letter from Nona.

He turned it over in his hands—the small neat script. She never before had written to him at the office. It bore the London postmark. She would be writing from their town house. It would be to say she was coming back.... But she never wrote on the occasions of her return; they just met.... And she had never before written to the office.

Mr. Fortune appeared at the communicating door. Sabre put the letter into his pocket and turned towards him.

Mr. Fortune came into the room. With him was a young man, a youth, whose face was vaguely familiar to Sabre; Twyning behind.

"Ah, Sabre," said Mr. Fortune. "Good morning, Sabre. This is rather a larger number of visitors than you would commonly expect, but we are a larger staff this morning than we have heretofore been. I am bringing in to you a new member of our staff." He indicated the young man beside him. "A new member but bearing an old name. A chip of the old block—the old Twyning block." He smiled, stroking his whale-like front rather as though this pleasantry had proceeded from its depths and he was congratulating it. The young man smiled. Twyning, edging forward from the background, also smiled. All the smiles were rather nervous. This was natural in the new member of the staff but in Twyning and Mr. Fortune gave Sabre the feeling that for some reason they were not entirely at ease. His immediate thought had been that it was an odd thing to have taken on young Twyning without mentioning it even casually to him. It was significant of his estrangement in the office; but their self-conscious manner was even more significant: it suggested that he had been kept out of the plan deliberately.

He gave the young man his hand. "Why, that's very nice," he said. "I thought I knew your face. I think I've seen you with your father. You've been in Blade and Parson's place, haven't you?"

Young Twyning replied that he had. He had his father's rather quick and stiff manner of speaking. He was fair-haired and complexioned, good-looking in a sharp-featured way, a juvenile edition of his father in a different colouring.

Mr. Fortune, still stroking the whale-like front, produced further pleasantry from it. "Yes, with Blade and Parson. Twyning here has snatched him from the long arm of the law before he has had time to develop the long jaw of the legal shark. In point of fact, Sabre"—Mr. Fortune ceased to stroke the whale-like front. He moved a step or two out of the line of Sabre's regard, and standing before the bookshelves, addressed his remarks to them as though what else he had to say were not of particular consequence—"In point of fact, Sabre, this very natural and pleasing desire of Twyning to have his son in the office, a desire which I am most gratified to support, is his first—what shall I say?—feeling of his feet—establishing of his position—in his new—er—in his new responsibility, duty—er—function. I like this deeper tone in the 'Six Terms' binding, Sabre. I distinctly approve it. Yes. What was I saying? Ah, yes, Twyning is now in partnership, Sabre. Yes. Good."

He came abruptly away from the shelves and directed the whale-like front towards his door in process of departure. "A little reorganisation. Nothing more. Just a little reorganisation. I think you'll find we shall all work very much the more comfortably for it." He paused before young Twyning. "Well, young man, now you've made your bow before our literary adviser. I think we decided to call him Harold, eh, Twyning? Avoid confusion, don't you agree, Sabre?"

"If that's his name," Sabre said. He had remained standing looking towards father and son precisely as he had stood and looked at the party's entry.

Mr. Fortune glanced sharply at him and compressed his lips. "It is," he said shortly. He left the room.

IV

Twyning spoke his first words since his entry. "Well, there we are, old man." He smiled and breathed strongly through his nose, as if tensing himself against some emergency that might arise.

Sabre said, "Yes, well done, Twyning. Of course he promised you this long ago."

"Yes, didn't he? Glad you remember my telling you. Of course it won't make the least difference to you, old man. What I mean is, if anything I hope I shall be able to give you a leg up in all sorts of ways. I've been telling Harold what a frightfully smart man you are, haven't I, Harold?"

Harold smiled assent to this tribute, and Sabre said, "I suppose we shall go on much as before?"

"Oh, rather, old man."

"Harold be working in your room, eh?"

"Yes, that's the idea, for a start, anyway. They're just shoving up a desk for him. Come along in and see how we're fixing it, old man."

"I'll look in presently."

"Righto, old man. Come along, Harold." At the door he turned and said, "Oh, by the way. I want you to show Harold through the work of this side of the business a bit later on."

Sabre looked quickly at him. "You want me to?"

Twyning flushed darkly. "Well, he may as well get the hang of the whole business, mayn't he? That's what I mean."

"Oh, certainly he should. I quite agree. Send him along any time you like."

"Thanks awfully, old man."

But outside the door Twyning added to himself: "You thought that was an order, my lord; and you didn't like it. Pretty soon you won't think. You'll know."

V

Sabre remained standing at his desk. He had a tiny ball of paper in his hand and he rolled it round between his finger and thumb, round and round and round and round.... In his mind was a recollection: "You have struck your tents and are upon the march."

He thought, "This has been coming a long time.... It's my way of looking at things has done this. I'm getting so I've got nowhere to turn. It's no good pretending I don't feel this. I feel it most frightfully.... I've let down the books. They'll take a back place in the business now. Twyning's always been jealous of them. Fortune's never really liked my success with them. They'll begin interfering with the books now.... My books.... It was rottenly done. Behind my back. Plotted against me, or they wouldn't have sprung it on me like that. That shows what it's going to be like.... It's all through my way of looking at things.... I've no one here I can take things to. This frightful feeling of being alone in the place. And it's going to be worse. And nowhere to get out of it. More empty at home.... And now there's this. And I've got to go back to that.... 'You have struck your tents and are upon the march' ... Yes. Yes...."

He suddenly recollected Nona's letter. He took it from his pocket and opened it; and the second event was discharged upon him.

She wrote from their town house:

"Marko, take me away—Nona."

His emotions leapt to her with most terrible violence. He felt his heart leap against his breast as though, engine of his tumult, it would burst its bonds and to her. He struck his hand upon the desk. He said aloud, "Yes! Yes!" He remembered his words, "If ever you feel you can't bear it, tell me.—Tell me."

VI

He began to write plans to her. He would come to London to-morrow.... She should come to the station if she could; if not, he would be at the Great Western Hotel. She would telephone to him there and they could arrange to meet and discuss what they should do.... He would like to go away with her directly they met, but there were certain things to see to. He wrote, "But I can only take you—"

His pen stopped. Familiar words! He repeated them to himself, and their conclusion and their circumstance appeared and stood, as with a sword, across the passage of his thoughts. "But I can only lead you downwards. I cannot lead you upwards ..."

As with a sword—

He sat back in his chair and gazed upon this armed intruder to give it battle.

VII

The morning passed and the afternoon while still he sat, no more moving than to sink lower in his seat as the battle joined and as he most dreadfully suffered in its most dreadful onsets. Towards five o'clock he put out his hand without moving his position and drew towards him the letter he had begun. The action was as that of one utterly undone. He very slowly tore it across, and then across again, and so into tiniest fragments till his fingers could no more fasten upon them. He dropped his arm away and opened his hand, and the white pieces fluttered in a little cloud to the floor.

Presently he drew himself up to the table and began to write, writing very slowly because his hand trembled so. In half an hour he blotted the few lines on the last sheet:

"...So, simply what I want to do is to let our step—if we take it—be mine, not yours. We shall forget absolutely that you ever wrote. It's as though it had never been written. On Tuesday I will write and ask you, 'Shall I come up to you?' So if you say 'Yes' the action will have been entirely mine. It will start from there. This hasn't happened. And during these days in between, just think like anything over what I've said. Honour can't have any degree, Nona, any more than truth can have any degree: whatever else the world can quibble to bits it can't partition those: truth is just truth and honour is just honour. And a marriage vow is a pledge of honour like any other pledge of honour, and if one breaks it one breaks one's honour, never mind what the excuse is. There's no conceivable way of arguing out of that. That's what I shall ask you to do on Tuesday and I'm just warning you so you shall have time to think beforehand."

He took his pen, and steadied his hand, and wrote:

"And your reply, when I ask you, whichever it is, shall bring me light into darkness, unutterable darkness.—M."

He could hear the homeward movements about the office. It was time to go. He wheeled his bicycle to the letter box at the corner of The Precincts. As he dropped in his letter, the evening edition of Pike's paper came bawling around the corner.

He shook his head at the paper the boy held out to him and rode away. What had that kind of thing to do with him?

VIII

Unutterable darkness! He lived within it during the days that followed while he awaited the day appointed to write to Nona again. He had put away that for which, with a longing that was almost physical in its pain, his spirit craved; and craved the more terribly for his denial of it. Whatever she said when he asked, whichever way she answered him, he would be brought relief from his intolerable stress. If she maintained honour above love, his weakness, he knew, would be welded into strength, as the presence of another brings enormous support to timidity; if she declared for love,—his mind surged within him at the imagination of bursting away once and for ever the squeamish principles which for years, hedging about his conduct on this side and on that, had profited nothing those on whose behalf they had been erected and his own life had desolated into barrenness.

He was little disposed, in these dismays and in this darkness, to divert attention to the international disturbances which now were rumbling across the newspapers in portentous and enormous headlines. Ireland was pressed away. It was all Europe now—thrones, chancelleries, councils, armies. He tried to say, "What of it?" Many in Great Britain tried to say, "What of it?" Crises and deadlocks again! Meaningless and empty words, for months and years past worked to death and rendered hollow as empty vessels. Some one would climb down. Some one always climbed down.

Nobody climbed down.

The cauldron whose seething and bubbling had entertained some, fidgeted some, some nothing at all concerned, suddenly boiled over, and poured in boiling fat upon the flames, and poured in flames upon the hearth of every man's concerns.

On Friday the Stock Exchange closed. On Saturday Germany declared war on Russia. In Sunday's papers Sabre read of the panic run on the banks, people fighting to convert their notes into gold. One London bank had suspended payment. Many had shut out failure only by minutes when midday permitted them to close their doors. People were besieging the provision shops to lay in stores of food.

And poured in flames upon the hearth of every man's concerns....

All his concerns, the crisis with Nona, with his honour and his love, that awaited determination, were disputed their place in his mind by the incredible and enormous events that each new hour discharged upon the world. He watched them as one might be watching a burning building and feeling at every moment that the roof will crash in, yet somehow feeling that it cannot and will not fall in. The thing was gone beyond possibility of recovery, there terribly arose now the urgency for Great Britain to declare for honour, yet somehow he felt that it could not and would not fail to be averted. It could not happen.

It did happen. On Tuesday the mounting amazements burst amain. On Tuesday the roof that could not fall in fell in. On Tuesday, the day appointed for his letter to Nona, he uttered in realisation that which, uttered in speculation, had been meaningless as an unknown word spoken in a foreign tongue: "War!"

IX

The news of Tuesday morning caused him at six o'clock in the evening to have been standing two hours in the great throng that filled Market Square gazing towards the offices of the County Times. Our mobilisation, our resolve to stand by France if the German Fleet came into the Channel, lastly, most awfully pregnant of all, our obligations to Belgium,—that had been the morning's news, conveyed in the report of Sir Edward Grey's statement in the House of Commons. That afternoon the Prime Minister was to make a statement.

A great murmur swelled up from the waiting crowd, a great movement pressed it forward towards the County Times offices. On the first-floor balcony men appeared dragging a great board faced with paper, on the paper enormous lettering. The board was pulled out endways. The man last through the window took a step forward and swung the letters into view.

Sabre said aloud, "My God! War!"

As a retreating wave harshly withdrawing upon the reluctant pebbles, there sounded from the crowd an enormous intaking of the breath. An instant's stupendous silence, the wave poised for return. Down! A shattering roar, tremendous, wordless. The figure of Pike appeared upon the balcony, in his shirt sleeves, his long hair wild about his face, in his hands that which caught the roar as it were by the throat, stopped it and broke it out anew on a burst of exultant clamour. A Union Jack. He shook it madly with both hands above his head. The roar broke into a tremendous chant. "God Save the King!"

Sabre pressed his way out of the Square. He kept saying to himself, "War.... War...." He found himself running to the office; no one was in the office; then getting out his bicycle with frantic haste, then riding home,—hard.

And he kept saying, "War!"

He thought, "Otway!" and before his eyes appeared a vision of Otway with those little beads of perspiration on his nose.

War—he couldn't get any further than that. Like the systole and diastole of a slowly beating pulse, the word kept on forming in his mind and welling away in a tide of confused and amorphous scenes; and forming again; and again oozing in presentments of speculations, scenes, surmises, and in profound disturbances of strange emotions. War.... And there kept appearing the face of Otway with the little points of perspiration about his nose. Otway had predicted this months ago.—And he was right. It had come.

War....

CHAPTER IV

I

He approached Penny Green and realised for the first time the hard pace at which he had been riding. And realised also the emotions which subconsciously had been driving him along. All the way he had been saying "War!" What he wanted, most terribly, was to say it aloud to some one. He wanted to say it to Mabel. He had a sudden great desire to see Mabel and tell her about it and talk to her about it. He felt a curiously protective feeling towards her. For the first time in his life he pedalled instead of free-wheeling the conclusion of the ride. He ran into the house and into the morning room. Mabel was not there. It was almost dinner time. She would be in her room. He ran upstairs. She was standing before her dressing table and turned to him in surprise.

"Whatever—"

"I say, it's war!"

She echoed the word. "War?"

"Yes, war. We've declared war!"

"Declared war?"

"Yes, declared war. We've sent Germany an ultimatum. It ends to-night. It's the same thing. It means war."

He was breathless, panting. She said, "Good gracious! Whatever will happen? Have you brought an evening paper? Do you know the papers didn't come this morning till—"

He could not hear her out. "No, I didn't wait. I simply rushed away." He was close to her. He took her hands. "I say, Mabel, it's war." His emotions were tumultuous and extraordinary. He wanted to draw her to him and kiss her. They had not kissed for longer than he could have remembered; but now he held her hands hard and desired to kiss her. "I say, it's war."

She gave her sudden burst of laughter. "You are excited. I've never seen you so excited. Your collar's undone."

He dropped her hands. He said rather stupidly, "Well, it's war, you know," and stood there.

She turned to her dressing table. "Well, I do wish you'd stayed for a paper. Now we've got to wait till to-morrow and goodness only knows—" She was fastening something about her throat and held her breath in the operation. She released it and said, "Just fancy, war! I never thought it would be. What will happen first? Will they—" She held her breath again. She said, "It's too annoying about those papers coming so late. If they haven't arrived when you go off to-morrow you can tell Jones he needn't send them any more. He's one of those independent sort of tradesmen who think they can do just what they like. Just fancy actually having war with Germany. I can't believe it." She turned towards him and gave her sudden laugh again. "I say, aren't you ever going to move?"

He went out of the room and along the passage. As he reached his own room he realised it again. "War—" He went quickly back to Mabel. "I say—" He stopped. His feelings most frightfully desired some vent. None here. "Look here. Don't wait dinner for me. You start. I'm going round to Fargus to tell him."

At the hall door he turned back and went hurriedly into the kitchen. "I say, it's war!"

"Well, there now!" cried High Jinks.

"Yes, war. We've sent an ultimatum to Germany. It ends to-night."

Low Jinks threw up her hands. "Well, if that isn't a short war!"

"Girl alive, the ultimatum ends, not the war. Don't you know what an ultimatum is?"

Outside he ran down the drive and ran to Fargus's door. It stood open. In the hall the eldest Miss Fargus appeared to be maintaining the last moment before dinner by "doing" a silver card salver.

"Hullo, Miss Fargus. I say, is your father about? I say, it's war. We've declared war!"

The eldest Miss Fargus lifted her head to another Miss Fargus also "doing" something on the stairs above her, and in a very high voice called, "Papa! War!"

The staircase Miss Fargus took it up immediately. "Papa! War!" and Sabre heard it go echoing through the house, "Papa! War! Papa! War! Papa! War!"

"How terrible, how dreadful, how frightful, how awful," said the eldest Miss Fargus. "You must excuse me shaking hands, but as you see I am over pink plate powder. I'm not surprised. We were discussing it only at breakfast; and for my part, though Julie, Rosie, Poppy and Bunchy were against me, I—" She broke off to turn and take her portion in a new chorus now filling the house. Sounds of some one descending the stairs at break-neck speed were heard, and the chorus shrilled, "Papa, take care! Papa, take care! Papa, take care!"

Mr. Fargus's grey little figure came terrifically down the last flight and up the hall, a cloud of female Farguses in his wake. He ran to Sabre with hands outstretched and grasped Sabre's hands and wrung them. "Sabre! Sabre! What's this? Really? Truly? War? We've declared war? Well, I say, thank God! Thank God! I was afraid. I was terribly afraid we'd stand out. But thank God, England is England still.... And will be, Sabre; and will be!" He released Sabre's hands and took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. "I prayed for this," he said. "I prayed for God to be in Downing Street last night."

The chorus, unpleasantly shocked at the idea of God being asked to go to Downing Street, said in a low but stern tone, "Papa, hush. Papa, hush. Papa, hush"; but Sabre had come for this excited wringing of his hands and for this emotion. It was what he had been seeking ever since Pike's notice board had swung the news before his eyes. When presently he left he carried with him that which, when his mind would turn to it, caused his heart to swell enormously within him. Through the evening, and gone to bed and lying awake long into the night, he was at intervals caught up from the dark and oppressive pictures of his mind by surging onset of the emotions that came with Mr. Fargus's emotion. War.... His spirit answered, "England!"

II

Lying awake, he thought of Nona. He had not written the letter to her. The appointed day was past and he had not written. He would have said, during that unutterable darkness in which he had awaited it, that not the turning of the world upside down would have prevented him writing; but the world had turned upside down. It was not a board Pike's men had swung around in that appalling moment when he had watched them appear on the balcony. It was the accustomed and imponderable world, awfully unbalanced. Nona would understand. Nona always understood everything. He wondered how she had maintained this terrific day. He was assured that he knew. She would have felt just as he had felt. He thought, with a most passionate longing for her, that he would have given anything to have been able to turn to her when he had exclaimed, "My God, war", and to have caught her hands and looked into her beautiful face. To-morrow he would send the letter. To-morrow? Why, yes, to-day, like all to-days in the removed and placid light of all to-morrows, would be shown needlessly hectic. Ten to one something would have happened in the night to make to-day look foolish. If nothing had happened, if it still was war, it could only be a swiftly over business, a rapid and general recognition of the impossibility of war in modern conditions.

Disturbingly upon these thoughts appeared the face of Otway, the little beads of perspiration about his nose.

His consciousness stumbled away into the mazy woods of sleep, and turned, and all night sought to return, and stumbled sometimes to its knees among the drowsy snares, and saw strange mirages of the round world horrifically tilted with "War" upon its face, of Nona held away and not approachable, of intense light and of suffocating darkness; and rousing and struggling away from these, and stumbling yet, rarely succumbing.

III

When he went down into Tidborough in the morning it was to know at once that this to-morrow gave no lie to its precedent day. It intensified it. The previous day foreshadowed war. The new day presented it.

The papers, as it happened, did not arrive before he left, and Mabel had more to say of her annoyance with the insufferable Jones than of what his withheld wares might contain. Her attitude towards the international position was—up to this point of its development—precisely this: she had been following the crisis day by day with appreciation of its sensational headlines while these were in the paper before her, but without further interest when the paper was read. She folded up the thrones, the chancelleries, the councils, the armies and the peoples and put them away in the brass newspaper rack in the morning room and proceeded about her duties and her engagements. But she liked unfolding them and she was thoroughly annoyed with the insufferable Jones for preventing her from unfolding them. She said she would come down into Tidborough and speak to Jones herself.

"Yes, do," said Sabre. "There'll be things to see."

There were things to see. As he rode into the town people were standing about in little groups, excitedly talking; every one seemed to have a newspaper. In a row, as he approached the news agent's, were hugely printed contents bills, all with the news, in one form or another, "War Declared."

It was war. Yesterday no dream. He could not stop to rest his bicycle against the curb. He leant it over and dropped it on the pavement with a crash and hurried into the shop and bought and read.

War.... He looked out into the street through the open doorway. All those knots of people standing talking. War.... A mounted orderly passed down the street at a brisk trot, his dispatch bag swaying and bumping across his back. Every one turned and stared after him, stepped out into the roadway and stared after him. War.... He bought all the morning papers and went on to the office. Outside a bank a small crowd of people waited about the doors. They were waiting to draw out their money. Lloyd George had announced the closing of the banks for three days; but they didn't believe it was real. Was it real? He passed Hanbury's, the big grocer's. It seemed to be crammed. People outside waiting to get in. They were buying up food. A woman struggled her way out with three tins of fruit, a pot of jam and a bag of flour. She seemed thoroughly well pleased with herself. He heard her say to some one, "Well, I've got mine, anyway." He actually had a sense of reassurance from her grotesque provisioning. He thought, "You see, every one knows it can't last long."

IV

No one in the office was pretending to do any work. As in the street, all were in groups eagerly talking. The clerks' room resounded with excited discussion. Everybody wanted to talk to somebody. He went into Mr. Fortune's room. Mr. Fortune and Twyning and Harold were gathered round a map cut from a newspaper, all talking; even young Harold giving views and being attentively listened to. They looked up and greeted him cordially. Everybody was cordial and communicative to everybody. "Come along in, Sabre." He joined them and he found their conversation extraordinarily reassuring, like the woman who had sufficiently provisioned with three tins of fruit, a pot of jam and a bag of flour. They knew a tremendous lot about it and had evidently been reading military articles for days past. They all showed what was going to be done, illustrating it on the map. And the map itself was extraordinarily reassuring: as Twyning showed—his fingers covering the whole of the belligerent countries—while the Germans were delivering all their power down here, in Belgium, the Russians simply nipped in here and would be threatening Berlin before those fools knew where they were!

He thought, "By Jove, yes."

"And granted," said Mr. Fortune—Mr. Fortune was granting propositions right and left with an amiability out of all keeping with his normal stubbornness—"and granted that Germany can put into the field the enormous numbers you mention, Twyning, what use are they to her? None. No use whatever. I was talking last night to Sir James Boulder. His son has been foreign correspondent to one of the London papers for years. He's attended the army manoeuvres in Germany, France, Austria everywhere. He knows modern military conditions through and through, as you may say. Well, he says—and it's obvious when you think of it—that Germany can't possibly use her enormous masses. No room for them. Only the merest fraction can ever get into action. Where they're coming in is like crowding into the neck of a bottle. Two thirds of them uselessly jammed up behind. A mere handful can hold them up—"

Harold put in, "Yes, and those terrific fortresses, sir."

"Precisely. Precisely. Liége, Namur, Antwerp—absolutely impregnable, all the military correspondents say so. Impregnable. Well, then. There you are. It's like sending a thousand men to fight in a street. Look here—" He went vigorously to the window. They all went to the window; Sabre with them, profoundly impressed. Mr. Fortune pointed into the street. "There. That's what it is. Here comes your German army down this way from the cathedral. Choked. Blocked. Immovable mob. How many do you suppose could hold them up? Thirty, twenty, a dozen. Hold them up and throw them into hopeless and utter disorder. Pah! Simple, isn't it? I don't suppose the thing will last a month. What do you say, Sabre?"

Sabre was feeling considerably more at ease. He felt that the first shock of the thing had made him take an exaggerated view. "I don't see how it can," he said, "now I'm hearing a bit more about it. I was thinking just now what a dramatic thing it would be if it lasted—of course it can't—but if it lasted till next June and the decisive battle was fought in June, 1915, just a hundred years after Waterloo. That would be dramatic, eh?"

They all laughed, and Sabre, realising the preposterousness of such a notion, laughed with them. Twyning said, "Next June! Imagine it! At the very outside it will be well over by Christmas."

And they all agreed, "Oh, rather!"

V

It was all immensely reassuring, and Sabre gathered up his bundle of papers and went into his room, feeling on the whole rather pleasurably excited than otherwise. But as he read, column after column and paper after paper, measures that had been taken by the Government, orders to Army and Naval reservists, the impending call for men, the scenes in the streets of London, and with these the deeply grave tone of the leading articles, the tremendous statistics and the huge foreshadowing of certain of the military correspondents, the breathless news already from the seats of war,—as his mind thus received there returned to it its earlier sense of enormous oppression and tremendous conjecture. War.... England.... The first sentence of his history, now greatly advanced, came tremendously into his mind: "This England you live in is yours...." And now at war—challenged—threatened—

It surged enormously within him. He got up. He must go out into the streets and see what was happening.

The day wore on. He felt extraordinarily shy and self-conscious about the performance of a matter that had entered his mind with that surging uplift of his feelings. It was four o'clock in the afternoon before he took himself to it and then, leaving its place, he unexpectedly encountered Mabel. She was just going into the station. She had come in, as she had proposed, and she told him what she had said to Jones and what Jones had said to her. "Abominably rude man."

Then she asked him, "Was that Doctor Anderson's gate you came out of just now?"

"Yes."

"Whatever had you been to see him about?"

He flushed. He never could invent an excuse when he wanted one. "I'd been asking him to have a look at me."

"Whatever for?"

"Oh, nothing particular."

"You couldn't have been to see him for nothing."

"Well, practically nothing. You remember when I increased my life insurance some time ago they said my heart was a bit groggy and made a bit of a fuss? Well, I thought I'd just see again so as to get out of paying that higher premium."

"Oh, that. What nonsense it was. What did he say?"

"Said I had a murmur or some rot. I say, if you're going back now, don't wait dinner for me to-night. I'll get something here. The Evening Times is bringing out a special edition at nine o'clock. I'd like to wait for it."

She assented, "Yes, bring home the paper."

He went into the office. The afternoon post had brought letters to his desk. He turned them over without interest, then caught up one,—from Nona.