E. F. BENSON (continued 3)

For half an hour after that some stir of uneasiness went on in the woods; the furred and feathered creatures were aware, by some sixth sense, that there was danger in the air. Then muffled and distant came the noise of explosions and the uneasiness of the woodland grew to panic again, with rustlings in the brushwood of hares seeking cover, and the cries of birds seeking each other, and asking what was this terror by night. Presently afterwards the beat of the propellers was again audible to human ears, and the Zeppelin passed over us once more, flying invisible at a great height, going eastwards again. It was moving much faster now, for its deadly work was over, and, flushed with its triumph, it was bearing home the news of its glorious exploit. Those intrepid crusaders, Lohengrins of the air, had taken their toll of smashed cottages, slain children and murdered mothers, and the anointed of the Lord next morning, hearing of their great valour above a small Norfolk hamlet, would congratulate them on their glorious exploit and decorate them with iron crosses to mark his shameful approval of their deed.

London at night has become a dim Joseph's coat of many colours. The authorities are experimenting in broken rainbows for the sake of our safety from above, and for our vastly increased peril on the ground. Instead of the great white flame of electric lights, and the hot orange of the gas, we have a hundred hues of veiled colour. What exactly all the decrees are which produce these rainbows, I do not know; but the effect, particularly on a wet night when the colours are reflected on wet wood pavements and asphalte, is perfectly charming, and we hope that, in compensation for the multiplied dangers of the streets, we shall be immune from the flames and fumes of incendiary and asphyxiating shells. The prudent householder—I am afraid I am not one—has had a good deal of pleasant occupation in fitting up his cellar as a place to flee unto when we are threatened with Zeppelins, and one night, shortly after my return, I had the pleasure of inspecting one of these. It lay deep in the bowels of the earth, and if the absence of air would not asphyxiate you, I am sure its refugees need fear no other cause of suffocation. There were several deck-chairs, and at a slightly withdrawn distance a serviceable wooden form on which the servants would sit, while the bombardment was going on, in a respectful row. There was a spirit-lamp on which to make tea, a tin of highly nutritious biscuits, and a variety of books to read by the light of electric torches. Upstairs the same thoroughness prevailed. Nightly, on retiring to bed, the lady of the house had on a table close at hand a bag containing the most valuable of her jewellery, and a becoming dressing-gown much padded. Her husband's Zeppelin suit, the sort of suit you might expect to find in opulent Esquimaux houses, lay on another chair, and outside in the hall was a large washing basin filled with some kind of soda-solution, and on the rim of it, hung like glasses on the top of a punch-bowl, were arranged half a dozen amazing masks, goggle-eyed and cotton-wooled, which, on the first sign of an asphyxiating bomb, would be dipped in the solution of soda and tied over the face. To provide against incendiary bombs there was a pail of sand and a pail of water at every corner, while below the cellar beckoned a welcome in case of explosions. Given a moment for preparation, this house was a fortress against which Zeppelins might furiously rage together without hurting anybody. Whether they sought to suffocate or to burn, or to blow to atoms, this thoughtful householder was prepared for any of their nasty tricks.

All this was perfectly entrancing to my flippant mind, and after dinner, when the servants had washed up, we had, at my particular request, a rehearsal of the Zeppelin game to see how it all worked. The servants and my host and hostess retired to their respective bedrooms, and we put out all the lights. As guest, I had no duty assigned to me, I was just going to be a passenger in the Ark of safety, so I remained in the hall. When I judged I had given them enough time to lie fairly down on their beds, I sounded the gong with great vigour, which denoted that a Zeppelin had begun dropping bombs in the neighbourhood. Then the house responded splendidly: in an incredibly short space of time my hostess came out of her room, with the bag containing the regalia in her hand, and her beautiful padded dressing-gown on; my host came from his with the Esquimaux suit over his dress-clothes—looking precisely like Tweedledum arrayed for battle—and the servants, with shrill giggles, waited near the basin of soda-solution. Then we all put on masks (there was one to spare, which was given me), and, omitting the ceremony of dipping them in the soda, my host caught up the basin, and we all trooped downstairs into the cellar. The servants plumped themselves down on the bench, we sat in the deck-chairs, and there we all were. The time from the sounding of the gong to the moment when the cellar door was banged, and we were safe from explosives and asphyxiating bombs, was just three minutes and five seconds. The only thing unprovided for was the event of the Zeppelin dropping incendiary bombs after we had all gone into the Ark, for in that case the house would be burned above us, and we should be slowly roasted. But that cruel contingency we settled to disregard. It would be the kind of bad luck against which it is hopeless to take precautions. So then, as it was a hot evening, my host took off his Zeppelin suit again, and after testing the nutritive biscuits, which were quite delicious, we went upstairs again with shouts of laughter. No doubt their provision had a solid base of reason, for it certainly would be very annoying to be asphyxiated in your room, when such simple arrangements as these would have resulted in your having a cup of tea in the comfortable cellar instead; but there was this added bonus of sport about it all. It was the greatest fun.

This house where I had been dining was in the neighbourhood of Bedford Square, and I left about half-past ten, with the intention of walking as far as Charing Cross, and there embarking on the underground. I had hardly gone a hundred yards from the house, when on to the quiet night there came a report so appalling that it seemed like some catastrophic noise heard in a dream. It was quite close to me, somewhere on the left, and I ran as hard as I could round the corner of a block of houses to be able to look eastwards, for there was no doubt in my mind that a Zeppelin, nearly overhead, had dropped a bomb. Before I got to the corner there was another report as loud as the first, and, looking up, I saw that the searchlights, like pencils of light, were madly scribbling about over the sky. Suddenly one caught the Zeppelin, then another, and next moment it was in the meeting focus of half a dozen of them, hanging high above my head, serene and gilded with the rays of light, a fairy creation of the air. Then began the sound of guns, one shell exploded in front of it, another far below it. Disregarding all the regulations for their protection, people ran out of their houses, and, like me, stood gaping up at it, for the excitement of it was irresistible. I noticed that one man near me put up the collar of his coat whenever there was a loud explosion, just as if a slight shower was falling, and then quite gravely and seriously put it down again. Others stepped into porches, or flattened themselves against the walls, but none did as they were told by the police regulations. A special constable was there too, who should have herded us all into cover; instead, he stared with the rest, and put the lighted end of his cigarette into his mouth. For, indeed, this was not a thing you could see every day, a Zeppelin hanging above you, and the shells from guns in London exploding round it. It fired the imagination; here was the Real Thing, which we had been reading about for a year and never seen. The air had been invaded by the enemy, and guns in the heart of the securest city in the world were belching shells at it.

Then came the end of this amazing sight: a shell burst close to that serene swimmer, and it stuck its nose in the air, and ascending with extraordinary speed, like a bubble going upwards through water, got out of the focus of searchlights and disappeared.

By this time the eastern horizon was glowing with a light that grew steadily more vivid. The airship had dropped incendiary bombs in the City, and fire-engines were racing along Oxford Street, with gleam of helmets, clanging of bells and hoarse shouts from the firemen. But there was no getting near the seat of the fire, for a cordon of police had closed all streets near it, and I walked homewards along the Embankment, with eyes fixed on the sky, and cannoning into other passengers, because I did not look where I was going, as you may see ladies doing when they gaze in a hypnotized manner into hat-shops, as they walk along the street.

Apart from the actual thrill of the adventure, there was a most interesting psychological point, which I considered as I went homewards. There were we, the crowd in the street, just average folk, just average cowards in the face of danger, and not one, as far as I could see, gave a single thought to the risk of dropped bombs or falling pieces of shrapnel. We might any or all of us be wiped out next moment, but we didn't care, not in the least because we were brave, but because the interest of what was happening utterly extinguished any other feeling. Probably the majority of the crowd had passed gloomy and uncomfortable moments imagining that very situation, namely, of having a murderous Zeppelin just above them; but when once the murderous Zeppelin was there, they all forgot it was murderous, and were merely interested in the real live Zeppelin. Just in the same way, in minute matters, we all find that ringing the dentist's bell is about the worst part of the tiresome business.

The sequel as concerns the house in which I had dined so few hours before delighted me when I was told it next day. I suppose the realistic character of our rehearsal preyed on the servants' minds, for they groped their way downstairs to the cellar in the dark, and none thought to turn on the electric light. My hostess picked up her jewel-case and groped her way after them, forgetting about the soda-solution and the masks, and my host threw open the window and gazed ecstatically at the Zeppelin till it vanished. Then he turned on the lights and fetched his household back from the cellar, since the raid was over.... It is but another instance of how, when faced with a situation, we diverge from the lines of conduct we have so carefully laid down for ourselves. I once knew a family that practised fire-drill very industriously in case that one day there might be an outbreak in the house. There were patent extinguishers to put it out with, and ropes to let yourself out of window all over the place, and everyone knew exactly what he was to do. Then the opportunity so long expected came, and a serious outbreak occurred. On which the owner forgot everything that he had learned himself and taught everybody else, and after throwing a quantity of his valuable Oriental china on to the stone terrace, he performed prodigies of single-handed valour in saving a very old piano which nobody wanted at all.... (I think this pathetic story contradicts my theory about the calmness of the crowd on the Zeppelin night, but who wants to be consistent?)

I had arrived this September at a break in the lease of my house, and six months before (see page two of the lease in question) I had given notice to the owner in writing that I should evacuate. Consequently for the last few months I had been an assiduous frequenter of house-agents' offices, and the God of addition sums alone knows how many houses I had seen over from garret to basement. The extraordinary thing about all these was that they were all exceptional bargains, such as the agent had never before known, and that in almost every case another gentleman was in negotiation for them. In spite of that, however, if I chose at once and firmly to offer the price asked, there was a strong probability of my securing one of these marvellous bargains, and thwarting the ambitions of the other gentleman. This opportunity to thwart the other gentleman was certainly an appeal to the more villainous side of human nature, and often, if a house seemed to me the sort of habitation I was on the look-out for, the thought of the other gentleman getting it was an incentive to take it myself. But never before did I realize how hopelessly traditional is that section of the human race which designs our houses for us. The type, in the modest species of abode I was looking for, never varied. There was a narrow passage inside the front door, with a dining-room and a back room opening out of it, and a staircase up to the first floor, where lay two sitting-rooms, invariably knocked into one. There was a bath on a half-landing, there were front bedrooms and back bedrooms higher up, all exactly alike, and for a long time I looked in vain for any house that was not precisely like any other house. In fact, this became a sine qua non with me, and ceasing to care whether I thwarted the other gentleman or not, I think if I had found a house where the bath-room was in the basement, or there was no staircase, so that you had to go upstairs in a basket with a rope, I should have taken it. I almost despaired of finding what I wanted, and thought of revoking, if possible, my notice of quitting, for in my present house there is something which is not quite like other houses, for some inspired tenant threw down the wall between the dining-room and the entrance passage, making a sort of hall of it, in the middle of which I dine. That there are inconveniences attaching to it I don't deny, for the guest sitting nearest the front door occasionally jumps out of his skin when the postman thunders with the evening post close by his ear; but the house isn't quite like other houses of its type, which is precisely the reason why ten years ago I took it.

With a pocket full of "orders to view," and plenty of shillings for the patient caretakers who mournfully conducted me over their charge, I used on most days to set out on these explorations after lunch, returning discouraged at tea-time. I could not see myself in any of the houses I saw, or imagine going to sleep in any of those front bedrooms, or spending the evening in the back-room behind the dining-room, or in the two sitting-rooms knocked into one. But then, though it lingered long, came the Mecca of my quest. Even at the front door I had some premonition of success, for the knocker was not like other knockers, and when the door opened, I saw, with a beating heart, that the staircase was not like other staircases. Some four feet from the ground it turned at right angles towards where the dreadful little back room should be. It couldn't go into the door of the little back room, or if it did, it would be very odd. You would have to pass through the dining-room in order to get to the bottom of the staircase.... Then advancing I saw: the staircase turned into a little hall (originally, no doubt, the dreadful little back room). Beyond lay a broad passage, and the dining-room was built out at the end. Through the open door of it I saw the windows looking out, not on to a street at all, but on to full-foliaged trees that grew in a disused graveyard. Between it and the house ran a way for foot-passengers only. Something in my brain exulted, crying out "This is it!" and simultaneously I felt a soft stroking on my shin. Looking down I saw a grave black cat rubbing against me. Was there ever such an omen? I had already settled in my mind that this must be the house intended for me (it was), and here was the bringer of good luck congratulating me on my discovery.

I made the usual grand tour, but in how different a mood, and as I mounted my spirits rose ever higher. In front was a square (so-called though it was an oblong) closed at the top end where my house was situated, so that no traffic came through it, and at the back was this big graveyard, with its church, and the dome of the Brompton Oratory (concealment is useless) rising over its shoulder like the Salute at Venice. Literally not a house was in sight; there was but the faintest sound of traffic from the Brompton Road; I might have been a country parson in his vicarage. I went straight to the house-agent's, made an offer, and didn't care one atom whether I thwarted anybody or not. Naturally I hoped I did, but it made no difference.

A little genteel chaffering ensued, for I felt so certain that I was going to live in that house, that I felt I was running no risks, and in a week it was mine, with possession at this quarter-day of September. Then having got my desire, I began to feel regretful about the house I was leaving. I had spent ten jolly years in it, and now for the first time I became aware how I had taken root there, how our tendrils, those of the house and of me, had got intertwined. The roots consisted of all kinds of memories, some sad, some pleasant, some ludicrous, but all dear. I was digging myself up like a plant, and these fibres had to be disentangled, for I could not bear to break them. For though memories are immaterial things, they knit themselves into rooms or gardens, the scenes where they were laid, and those scenes become part of them and they of those scenes. Just as a house where some deed of horror has been done retains for sensitives some impression of it, and we say the house is haunted, so even for those who are not sensitives in this psychical sense the rooms they have lived in, where there has been the talk and laughter of those they have loved, and maybe lost, have got knit into them, and must be treated tenderly if parting comes. And I imagined, when I came home after definitely settling to leave this month, that the house knew about it, and looked at me with silent reproach. For we had suited each other very well, we had been very friendly and happy together, and now I was deserting the home in the making of which we had both been ingredients, and the spirit of the house I was betraying was full of mute appeal. It did not want to be left alone, or, still worse, to be mated with people who did not suit it. But what could I do? I was going away; there was no doubt about that, and I could hardly give it a present of fresh paint or paper some of its rooms to please it. That would have been ridiculous. But I would leave it all the bulbs I had planted year by year in the garden. There would be a great show of them next spring.... Poor dear little old house!

I had got possession of my new house "as from" (this is legal phraseology, and means "on") the first of September, when the front door-key was given me; and thus I had four weeks for decoration, and took a header into the delightful sea of paints and papers and distempers. The most altruistic of friends, whom I will call Kino (which has something to do with his name but not much), vowed himself to me for the whole of that month, to give advice in the matter of colours, and not to mind if I rejected it, to come backwards and forwards for ever and ever from one house to the other, with a pencil, a memorandum-book and a yard measure incessantly in his pocket. For when you go into a new house you have to measure all that you possess to see if it fits. It never does, but you can't help believing it is going to. You have to measure curtains and curtain rods to see where they will go (the idea of leaving a lovely brass curtain rod behind was an idea before which my happiness shrivelled like a parched scroll); you have to measure brass stair-rods and count them; you have to measure blinds, and carpets and rugs and grand pianos and beds and tables and cupboards. Then with the dimensions written down in Kino's memorandum-book, we hurried across to the new house, and measured the heights of rooms by tying the tape on to the end of a walking-stick, and the spaces between the eyelets on stairs which in favourable circumstances retain the carpet rods in place, the widths of recesses, comparing them with the measurements of the articles we hoped to establish there. Also with sinkings of the heart I surreptitiously took the size of an awkward angle of the staircase (up which my grand piano must pass), and came to the conclusion that it wouldn't. I said nothing about it to Kino, because it is no use to anticipate trouble. But later in the day, when we were back in Oakley Street again, I came unexpectedly into the drawing-room and caught him measuring the piano. Of course I pretended not to see.

The previous tenant of the new house had taken away most of the fixtures, but was willing to leave certain degraded blinds, which on my side I did not want. On the other hand, I had not long ago got a quantity of new blinds for my old house, which I should have liked to use if possible, and the question of blinds became a nightmare. I had before now deplored the awful uniformity of architects in matters of building; now I raged over their amazing irregularities with regard to windows. In an insane anxiety for originality, they seemed to make every window of a different size; my drawing-room blinds were three inches too narrow for my new drawing-room, and two inches too broad for the front bedroom. Then Kino would have a marvellous inspiration, and, running downstairs, discovered that the hall window was of precisely the same width as the drawing-room windows in the old house, so that a home was found for one of the blinds. So he measured all the other windows in the new house, to find a home for the other drawing-room blind. Then we lost the measurements of the windows in my old bedroom, and I went back to Oakley Street, to measure these again and telephone the dimensions to him. On going to the telephone "the intermittent buzzing sound" awaited me, and after agitating discussions between me and the exchange, I found that Kino was simultaneously ringing me up to say he had found the list in question, and by a wonderful stroke of good luck my bedroom blinds fitted the back bedroom on the second floor. There was only one window there, so we had left over (at present) one drawing-room blind and one bedroom blind.... That night I dreamed that Kino was dead, and that I, as undertaker, was trying to fit a bedroom blind on to him as a shroud; but his feet, shod in Wellington boots, protruded, and I cut a piece off the dining-room blind to cover them up.

But through all these disturbances the work of painting and distempering went swiftly on, and the house began to gleam with the colours I loved. For a mottled wall-paper in the hall and passage which resembled brawn that had seen its best days, there shone a blue in which there met the dark velvet of the starry sky and the flare of the Italian noon. Black woodwork with panels of white framed the window, and of black and white was the staircase; a yellow ceiling made sunshine in the dining-room. The drawing-room was fawn-grey, and on the black floor would gleam the sober sunsets of Bokhara; even blinds that would not fit and brass curtain-rods that there was no use for had, so to speak, a silver lining. Marvellous to relate, there seemed every prospect of the work being finished by the twenty-ninth of the month, and with an optimism pathetically misplaced, I supposed that it was the simplest thing in the world to put the furniture of a small house into a larger one. I knew exactly where everything was to go; what could be simpler than with a smiling face to indicate to the workmen the position of each article as it emerged from the van? It is true that the thought of the grand piano still occasionally croaked raven-like in my mind, but I pretended, like Romeo, that it was only the nightingale.

I suppose everybody, however lightly enchained to possessions, has some few objects of art (or otherwise) to which he is profoundly attached. In my case there were certain wreaths and festoons of gilded wood-carving by Kent, and before the actual move took place, Kino and I had a halcyon day in fixing these up to the walls of the blue hall, where they would be safe from the danger of having wardrobes and other trifles dumped down on them. So on a certain Sunday we set off from Oakley Street in a taxicab piled high with these treasures and with hammer and nails, and with a bottle of wine, sandwiches of toast and chicken, apples and two kitchen chairs. Disembarking with care, we ate the first meal in the house, and did not neglect a most important ceremony, that of making friends with the Penates, or gods of the home, who, like my strega in Alatri and the fairies of Midsummer Night's Dream, police the passages when all are asleep and drive far from the house all doubtful presences. There on the earth we made burnt offering of the crumbs of chicken sandwiches and apple-rind, building an oven of the paper in which our lunch was wrapped, and at the end pouring on the ashes a libation from the bottle of wine. All was right that day; the nails went smoothly home into the walls, we did not hammer our fingers, and the gold wreaths arranged themselves as by magic.

The great manoeuvre began next day, when at an early hour the vans arrived to begin taking my furniture. That day they moved dispensable things, leaving the apparatus of bedrooms, which was to be transferred on the morrow, at the close of which I was to sleep in the new house. Dining-room furniture went on the first day, and when I came back that evening to sleep in the old house for the last time, I found it dishevelled and mournful. Canvas-packing strewed the floor, pictures were gone, and on the walls where they had hung were squares and oblongs of unfaded paper. The beauty and the amenity of the house were departed; I felt as if I had been stripping the robes off it, and its spirit shivering and in rags went silently with me as I visited the denuded rooms, with eyes of silent reproach. I was taking away from it all that it had reckoned as its own; to-morrow I, too, should desert it, and it would stand lonely and companionless. Never in those ten years had it been so pleasant to live with as in that last week; it was as if it were putting forth shy advances, making itself so kind and agreeable, in order to detain the tenants with whom it had passed such happy years. One by one I turned out the lights, and its spirit followed me up to my bedroom. But to-night it would not come in, and when I entered the sense of home was gone from my room.

All next day the chaos in the new house grew more and more abysmal as the vans were unloaded. The plan of putting everything instantly and firmly into its place failed to come off; for how could you put anything firmly or otherwise into the dining-room when for two hours the refrigerator blocked access to it? Meantime books were stacked on the floor, layers of pictures leaned against the walls; the hall got packed with tables and piles of curtains, and finally, about five of the afternoon, arrived the grand piano. The foreman gave but one glance at the staircase, and declared that it was quite impossible for it to go up, and pending some fresh plan for its ascension, it must needs stop in the hall too, where it stood on its side like the coffin of some enormous skate. By making yourself tall and thin you could just get by it.

Trouble increased; soon after nightfall a policeman rang at the door to tell me I had an unshaded light in a front room. So I had, and, abjectly apologizing, I explained the circumstance and quenched the light. Hardly had he gone, when another came and said I had a very bright light in a back room. That seemed to be true also, and since there were neither blinds nor curtains in that room, where I was trying to produce some semblance of order, my labours there must be abandoned. But the more we tidied, the more we attempted to put pieces of furniture into their places, the worse grew the confusion, and the more the floors got carpeted with china and pictures and books. It was as when you eat an artichoke, and, behold, the more you eat, the higher on your plate rises the débris.

About midnight Kino went home; the servants had gone to bed, and I was alone in this nightmare of unutterable confusion. Till one I toiled on, wondering why I had ever left the old house, where the spirit of home was now left lonely. No spirit of home had arrived here yet, and I did not wonder. But just before I went to bed I visited the kitchen to see how they had been getting on downstairs, and for a moment hope gleamed on the horizon. For sitting in the middle of the best dinner-service, which was on the floor, was Cyrus, my blue Persian cat, purring loudly. His topaz eye gleamed, and he rose up, clawing at the hay as I entered. He liked the new house; he thought it would suit him, and came upstairs with me, arching his back and rubbing himself against the corners.

OCTOBER, 1915

For two days the grand piano remained on its side at the bottom of the stairs, while furniture choked and eddied round it, as when a drain is stopped up and the water cannot flow away. It really seemed that it would stop there for ever, and that the only chance of playing it again involved being strapped into a chair, and laid sideways on the floor. Eventually the foreman of the removal company kindly promised to come back next morning, take out the drawing-room window, and sling the creature in. This would require a regiment of men, and the sort of tackle with which thirteen-inch guns are lifted into a ship. He hoped (he could go no further than that) that the stone window ledge would stand the strain; I hoped so too. My wits, I suppose, were sharpened by this hideous prospect, and I telephoned to the firm who had made the piano to send down three men and see if they concurred in the impossibility of getting the piano upstairs except via the doubtful window-ledge. In half an hour they had taken it up the staircase without touching the banisters or scratching the wall.

Magically, as by the waving of a wand, the constipation on the ground-floor was relieved; it was as if the Fairy Prince (in guise of three sainted piano-movers) had restored life to the house. The tables and chairs danced into their places; bookshelves became peopled with volumes; the china clattered nimbly into cupboards, and carpets unrolled themselves on the stairs. There was dawn on the wreck, and Kino and I set to work on the great scheme of black and white floor decoration which was destined to embellish in a manner unique and surprising the whole of the ground-floor.

Linoleum was the material of it, an apotheosis of linoleum. Round the walls of the passages, the hall, the front room, were to run borders of black and white, with panels in recesses, enclosing a chess-board of black and white squares. Roll after roll of linoleum arrived, and with gravers we cut them up, and tacked down the borders and the panels and the chess-board with that admirable and headless species of nail known as "little brads." The work was not noiseless like the building of the Temple of Solomon, but when it was done, my visitors were indeed Queens of Sheba, for no more spirit was left in them when on their blinded eyes there dawned the glories of the floors that were regular and clean as marble pavements, and kind to the tread. No professional hand was permitted to assist in these orgies of decoration; two inspired amateurs did it all, and one of them did about twenty times as much as the other. (The reader may form his own conclusion as to whether modesty or the low motive of seeking credit where the credit belongs to another prompts my reticence on this point.) Then there were wonderful things to be done with paint (and I really did a good deal of that); ugly tiles were made beautiful with shining black, that most decorative of all hues when properly used, and in one room the splendour given to a door and a chimneypiece put Pompeii in its proper place for ever. And all the time, as we worked, and put something of human personality into the house, the spirit of home was peeping in at windows shyly, tentatively, or hiding behind curtains, or going softly about the pleasant passages, till at last one evening, as we finished some arrangement of books in the front-room, I was conscious that it had come to stay. It did not any longer shrink from observation or withdraw itself when it thought I got a glimpse of it. It stood boldly out, smiling and well pleased, and next day, when I woke for a moment in the hour before dawn, with sparrow-twitters in the trees outside, it was in my room, and I turned over contentedly and went to sleep again. Was it that the disconsolate ghost in Oakley Street had come here, transferring itself from the empty shell? Had it followed, like a deserted cat, the familiar furniture, and the familiar denizens? Or had a new spirit of home been born? Certainly the conviction that the house had found itself, that it had settled down to an incarnate plane again was no drowsy fantasy of the night; for in the morning, when I went downstairs, the whole aspect of things had changed. I knew I was chez moi, instead of just carrying on existence in some borrowed lodging.

That morning an enormous letter, chiefly phonetic, arrived from Seraphina. It was difficult to read, because when Seraphina wished to erase a word, she had evidently smudged her finger over the wet ink, and written something on top of it. At first I felt as bewildered as King Belshazzar, when on the wall there grew the inconjecturable doom; but since I had no Daniel in fee, I managed, by dint of trying again and again, to make out the most of her message. She relapsed sometimes into the dialect of Alatri, but chiefly she stuck to the good old plan, recommended by Mr. Roosevelt, of putting down the letters like which the word, when spoken, would sound. But by dint of saying it aloud, I caught the gist of it all. No word had come from Alatri since Francis's return, and even as I read the glamour of that remote existence grew round me.

She had written before, she said, both to Signorino Francesco and to me, but she supposed that the letters had gone wrong, for they said the Government soaked off the stamps from the envelopes and sold them again. But that was all right; they wanted every penny they could get to spend against the devil-Austrians. Dio! What tremendous battles! How the gallant Italian boys were sweeping them out of the Trentino! And Goriza had fallen twenty times already. Surely it must have fallen by now. And there was the straight road to Trieste....

The flame of war had set Alatri alight; there was scarce a man of military age left on the island, except the soldiers who from time to time were quartered there. The price of provisions was hideous, but thrifty folk had planted vegetables in their gardens, and if God said that only the rich might have meat, why, the poor would get on very well without. She herself had planted nutritious beans in the broad flower-bed, as soon as the flowers were over, as she had said in her previous letter (not received), and already she had made good soup from them, since Signorino Francesco had told her to use garden produce for herself. But Signora Machonochie had come to borrow some beans, and, as the beans belonged to the Signori, Seraphina wished for permission to give her them, since they would otherwise be dried, and make good soup again when the Signori returned. For herself—scusi—she thought the Signora Machonochie was a good soul (though greedy), for she was always making mittens for the troops on the snow of the frontier against the winter-time, and went about the roads perpetually knitting, so that one day she, not looking where she was going, charged into Ludovico's manure cart, and was much soiled. So, if it was our wish that she should have some beans, she should have them, but there would be fewer bottles in the store-room.

Then Seraphina became more of a friend, less of a careful housekeeper. She continued:

"The house expects your excellencies' dear presence whenever you can return. All the rooms are like Sunday brooches: there is no speck of dust. Pasqualino has been gone this long time, for as soon as we went to war with the stinking beasts, up he goes to the military office, and swears on the Holy Book that he is just turned nineteen, and has come to report himself to the authorities. Of course, they looked him out in their register, and he was but eighteen, but he confessed his perjury when it was no longer any use to deny it, and they were not displeased with him, nor did he go to prison, as happened to Luigi. But they wanted young fellows for the Red Cross who look after the wounded, and, after many prayers, Pasqualino was permitted, in spite of his perjury, to go and serve. Gold buttons, no less, on his jacket; so smart he looked; and there was Caterina smiling and crying all in one, and she gulped and kissed him, and kissed him again and gulped, and for all the world she was as proud of him as the priest on Sunday morning, and would not have had him stay. She came up here to help in the house, and it is all for love of Pasqualino, for once I offered her some soldi for the help she had given me in dusting, and she just smacked my hand, and the soldi fell out, and we kissed each other, for then I understood; and she asked to go to Pasqualino's room and sat on the bed, and looked at his washstand, and stroked the coat he had left behind. Oh, I understand young hearts, Signor, for all that I am old, and I left her alone there, and presently she came down again and told me her trouble. It was the night before he went, and your excellency must not think hardly of him or her. Scusi, if I give advice, but they were young, and did not think, for you do not think when you are young, and they are beautiful, both of them, and when they are beautiful, who can wonder? She knows he will marry her, and, indeed, Alatri knows it too, and thus the bambino will not be blackened. Pasqualino is a good boy, and in spite of it, she wanted him to go for the sake of the wounded, thinking nothing of herself and the little one within her. Alatri will be blind to the bambino, and wait for him to make it all right.

"Eh, what a pen I have, for it runs on like a tap! All this last month I have been writing a little every day, and now it is nearly finished. But still I think the Signor would like to hear of Teresa of the Cake-shop. There was never such a wonder; it was like a miracle. Suddenly she would have no more of the cake-shop, but must needs go to Naples, and learn to be a nurse, and look after the wounded, as Pasqualino had done. Never, as the Signor knows, had she gone down to the Marina since fifteen years ago (or is it sixteen?), when she went to meet her promesso, Vincenzo Rhombo, who had come back from Buenos Ayres, and even as he landed on the Marina, was stricken in her very arms with the cholera and died that day. Never since then had Teresa gone to the Marina, whatever was the festa or the fireworks; but now nothing would serve her but that she must go to help in the war. She had money, for the cake-shop had done well all these years, and she must needs go and spend her money in learning nursing in Naples. All of a sudden it was so with her, and one day a month ago she asked me to come down with her to see her forth. And when we came to the Marina, Signor, she shut her eyes, for she could not bear to see it, and asked me to lead her along the quay to where the boats took off the passengers by the steamer. All along the quay I led her, she with eyes closed; but when we came to the steps, where Vincenzo had landed and fell into her arms a stricken man, then at last she opened her eyes, or the tears opened them, and she fell on her knees and kissed the place where Vincenzo had been joined to her. She kissed it, and she kissed it, and then suddenly her tears dried, and she stepped into the boat and waved her hand to her friends and said: 'Vincenzo wishes it; Vincenzo wishes it.' Oh, a brave woman! she had not baked her heart in the cake-shop.

"My humble duty to you, excellency, Seraphina has no more to say, but that often the step goes up and down in the studio. I think, as Donna Margherita said, that someone guards the house. It is as a sentry, who makes the house secure. But it will be a good day when I hear there the steps of the Signorino and of you. All humble compliments and the good wishes of a friend who is Seraphina.

"Scusi! Shall I sow the flower seeds in the garden that were saved from last year? If the Signori will not be here in the spring, what need to sow them, for they will keep, will they not? But if there is a chance of your coming, the garden must needs be gay with a welcome."

Right in the middle of the black cloud of war there came a rift, as I read Seraphina's budget of news. Some breeze parted the folds of it, and I saw a peep of blue sky and bluer sea, and the stone-pine and the terraced gardens, with the morning-glory rioting on the wall. But how incredibly remote it seemed, as if it belonged to some previous cycle of existence; as if the closed doors of eternity that swing shut when we are born had opened again, and I looked on some previous incarnation. I thought I remembered (before the war came) experiences like those which Seraphina's letter suggested, but they seemed like the affairs of childhood, when imagination is so mixed up with reality that we scarcely know whether there are robbers in the shrubbery or not. We pretend that there are, and even while we pretend dusk falls and the shrubbery has to be passed, and we are not certain whether there are not robbers there, after all. It was so with the recollection of the things of which Seraphina spoke (and even they were mixed up with war). I felt I might have dreamed them, or have invented them for myself, or have experienced them in some pre-natal existence. Just that one glimpse I had of them, and no more; then the rift in the clouds closed up again, and blacker than ever before, except perhaps during the days of the Retreat from Mons, grew the gigantic bastion of storm through which we had to pass.... Even so once, thunderclouds collected before me when I was on the top of an Alpine peak, gathering and growing thicker with extraordinary swiftness. A rent came in them for a moment, and through it we could see the pastures and villages ten thousand feet below. Then it closed up, and we had to pass through the clouds out of which already the lightning was leaping before we could arrive on the safe familiar earth again.

I could scarcely realize, then, what life was like before the war, and now, looking forward, it seemed impossible to imagine that there could be any end to the murderous business. This month a wave of pessimism swept over London; even those who had been most optimistic were submerged in it; and all that was possible was to go on, the more occupied the better, and, anyhow, not to talk about it. A dozen times had our hopes flared high; a dozen times they had been extinguished.

Only a few months ago we had seen the advance of the Russian armies through Galicia, and had told each other that the relentless steam-roller had begun its irresistible progress across the Central Empires, leaving them flattened out and ground to powder in its wake. But now, instead of their being flattened out in its wake, it appeared that they had only been concentrated and piled high in front of it, for now the billow of the enemies' armies, poised and menacing, had broken and swept the steam-roller far back on the beach, where now it remained stuck in the shingle with quenched furnaces and a heavy list. Przemysl had been retaken; the newly-christened Lvoff had become Lemberg again; Warsaw had fallen; Ivangorod had fallen; Grodno and Vilna had fallen. For the time, it is true, that great billow had spent itself, but none knew yet what damage and dislocation had been wrought on the steam-roller. Russia's friends assured us that the invincible resolve of her people had suffered no damage, and expressed their unshaken belief in the triumphant march of her destiny. But even the most eloquent preachers of confidence found it difficult to explain precisely on what their confidence was based.

That was not all, nor nearly all. In the Balkans Bulgaria had joined the enemy; the fat white fox Ferdinand had kissed his hand to his august brothers in Vienna and Berlin, and soon, when Servia had been crushed, they would meet, and in each other's presence confirm the salutation, and be-Kaiser and be-Czar each other. From one side the Austro-German advance had begun, from the other the Bulgarian, and it was certain that in a few weeks we should see Servia extinguished—exterminated even as Belgium had been. It was useless to imagine that all the despairing gallantry of that mountain people could stand against the double invasion, or to speak of the resistance in the impregnable mountain passes, which would take months to overcome. Such talk was optimism gone mad, even as in the Retreat from Mons certain incredible tacticians in the Press assured us that this was all part of a strategic move, whereby the German lines of communication would be lengthened. Certainly their lines of communication were being lengthened, for they were pressing the Allies, who were totally unable to stand against that first rush, across half France. So now only insane interpreters could give encouraging comments on the news from Servia. Servia, who had been but a king's pawn to open the savage game that was being played over the length and breadth of Europe, was taken and swept off the board; in a few weeks at the most we should see the power of Germany extending unbroken from Antwerp on the West to Constantinople on the East. Allied to Bulgaria and Turkey, with Servia crushed, the way to the East, should she choose to go Eastwards, lay open and undefended in front of her. It seemed more than possible, too, that Greece, who had invited the troops of the Allies to Salonika, would join the triumphant advance of the Central Empires. Our diplomacy, as if it had been some card game played by children, had been plucked from our hands and scattered over the nursery table; every chance that had been ours had been thrown on to the rubbish heap, and Germany, going to the rubbish heap, had picked up our lost opportunities and shown us how to use them. It was impossible (it would also have been silly) to be optimistic over these blunders; the Balkan business was going as badly as it possibly could.

There was worse yet. Before the end of the month no one, unless, like the ostrich, he buried his eyes in the sand and considered that because he saw nothing there was nothing to see, had any real hope of a successful issue to the Dardanelles expedition, and it was with an aching sense of regret that one recalled the brave days when the Queen Elizabeth went thundering into the Straits, and we were told that but a mile or two divided us from victory. But what miles! They seemed quite sufficient, to divide us, even as when on board ship you are told that only a plank lies between yourself and a watery grave, the plank will do very well indeed to keep off the watery grave. That mile or two had the same stubborn quality; months of valiant endeavour, endless sacrifice, and sickening mistakes had not brought us any nearer our goal.

It was useless to blink these obvious facts, and I found one morning that it would be wiser to sit down and just stare them in the face, get used to them, as far as might be, rather than shuffle them out of sight, or pretend to see silver linings to clouds which, in spite of the proverb, had not got any. There was a pit of clouds. Somehow that must be explored. It was no use to pretend to put a lid on it, and say there was no such pit. I had to go down into it.

I descended then into this "black tremendous sea of cloud." It was not the invariable daily tale of ill-success in the war that caused it to form in my brain, though I suppose it was that which consolidated it. It came like an obsession. I had gone to bed one night with hope of good news next day; I had taken pleasure in my jolly new house! I had dined with friends and I slept well. But when I woke the Thing was there. There was no bad news in the paper that morning, but in the papers and in my bed, and about my path, and in my breakfast, there was a blackening poison that spread and sprouted like some infernal mushroom of plague. I found that I did not care for anything any more; there was the root of this obsession. I thought of the friends I should presently meet when I went out to my work, and the thought of them roused no feeling of any kind. There was a letter from Francis, saying that in a week's time he would have three days' leave, and proposed that he should spend them with me. There was a letter from Kino, saying that he had found the book which I so much wanted, and would bring it round after breakfast, and should we go out, as we had vaguely planned, that afternoon to Kew, and get the country whiff from the flaming autumn? Certainly if he liked, thought I, for it does not matter. I did not want to go, nor did I want not to go; it was all one, for over all and in all was the blackness of the pit of clouds. We went accordingly, and to me his face and his presence were no more than the face and the presence of any stranger in the street. He had lost his meaning, he was nonsense; it might have been some gesticulating machine that walked by me. We looked at the flaring towers of golden and russet leaf, and I saw them as you see something through the wrong end of a telescope. I saw them through glass, through a diving bell. The sun was warm, the sky was flecked with the loveliest mackerel scales of cloud; I was with a friend stepping along mossy paths below the beech-trees, and within me was a centre-point of consciousness that only wailed and cried out at the horror of existence. The glory of the autumn day was as magnificent as ever; the smell of the earth and the tea-like odour of dry leaves had in itself all the sting and thrill that belonged to it, and by my side was the friend with whom the laying of linoleum had been so wonderful a delight, because we laid it together, and I was cut off from it all. Everything was no more than dried flowers, sapless, brittle and colourless.

Those days were no more than hours of existence, to which somehow my flesh clung, though the fact of existence was just that which was so tragic and so irremediable. By occupying myself, by doing anything definite that required attention, even if it was only acknowledging the receipt of subscriptions, or of writing begging letters on behalf of the fund for which I worked, I could cling to the sheer cliff and still keep below me that sea of cloud. But the moment that the automatism only of life was wanted, the sea rose and engulfed me again. When I walked along a street, when I sat down to eat, when, tired with conscious effort of the mind, I relaxed attention, it drowned me. The effort to keep my head above it was infinitely fatiguing, and when at nights, having been unable to find something more to do, however trivial, or when, unable to hold the dam-gate any longer, I went up to bed, the nightmare of existence yelled out and smothered me. Huge and encompassing, it surged about a pinprick of consciousness which was myself; black wrinkled clouds brooded from zenith to horizon, and I knew that beyond the horizon, and to innumerable horizons beyond that, there reached that interminable blackness in saecula saeculorum. Or, again, as in some feverish dream, behold, it was I, who just before had been a pinprick in everlasting time and space, who now swelled up to infinite dimensions, and was surrounded for ever and ever by gross and infinitesimal nothingness. At one moment I was nothing set in the middle of cosmic darkness; at the next I was cosmic darkness itself, set in a microscopic loneliness, an alpha and omega of the everlasting midnight. No footstep fell there, no face looked out from it, neither of God nor of devil, nor of human kind. I was alone, as I had always been alone; here was the truth of it, for it was but a fancy figment that there was a scheme, a connection, a knitting of the members of the world to each other, and of them to God. I had made that up myself; it was but one of the foolish stories that I had often busied myself with. But I knew better now; I was alone, and all was said.

Now there are many who have been through much darker and deeper waters than these, without approaching real melancholia. To the best of my belief I did no more than paddle at the edge of them. Certainly they seemed to close over me, except for that one fact that even where they were deepest, any manual or mental act that required definite thought was sufficient for the moment to give me a breath of air. All pleasure, and, so it seemed to me, all love had become obscured, but there was still some sense of decency left that prevented me from lying down on the floor, and saying in the Italian phrase, "Non po' combattere." There was a double consciousness still. I said to myself, "I give up!" but I didn't act as if I gave up, nor did I tell another human soul that in myself I had done so. I confessed to depression, but didn't talk about it. I wrote a perfectly normal and cordial letter to Francis, saying how welcome he would be, though I felt that there was no such person. Still, I wrote to him, and did not seriously expect that my note would be returned through the dead-letter office. And this is precisely the reason why I have written these last pages; it is to assure all those who know, from inside, what such void and darkness means, that the one anchor is employment, and the absolute necessity is behaving in a normal manner. It does not seem worth while; it seems, too, all but impossible, but it is not quite impossible, and there is nothing which is so much worth while. Until you actually go over the edge, stick to the edge. Do not look down into the abyss, keep your eyes on such ground as there is, and find something there: a tuft of grass, a fallen feather, the root of a wild plant—and look at it. If you are so fortunate as to discover a little bare root there, something easily helped, cover it up with a handful of kindly soil. (You will not slip while you are doing this.) If a feather, be sure that some bird has flown over, and dropped it from a sunlit wing; if a tuft of grass, think of the seed from which it came. Besides, if God wills that you go down into Hell, He is there also....

Hold on, just hold on. Sometimes you will look back on the edge to which you clung, and will wonder what ailed you.

It was so with me. I merely held on till life, with its joys and its ties, began to steal back into me, even as into a dark room the light begins to filter at dawn. At no one second can you say that it is lighter than it was the second before, but if you take a series of seconds, you can see that light is in the ascendant. A certain Friday, for instance, had been quite intolerable, but, just as you look out of the window, and say "It is lighter," I found on Saturday that, though nothing in the least cheerful had happened in the interval, I didn't so earnestly object to existence, while a couple of days later I could look back on Friday and wonder what it had all been about. What it had been about I do not know now: some minute cell, I suppose, had worked imperfectly, and lo! "the scheme of things entire" not only seemed, but, I was convinced, was all wrong. Subjective though the disturbance was, it could project itself and poison the world.

Two things certainly I learned from it, namely, that manual or mental employment, hateful though it is to the afflicted, is less afflicting than idleness; the second, that the more you keep your depression to yourself the better. I wish that the infernal pessimists whose presence blackens London would learn this. These ravens with their lugubrious faces and their croaking accents, hop obscenely about from house to house, with a wallet full of stories which always begin, "They say that—" and there follows a tissue of mournful prognostications. They project their subjective disturbance, and their tale beginning "They say that—" or "I am told that—" generally means that Mr. A. and Mr. B., having nothing to do, and nothing to think about, have sat by the fire and ignorantly wondered what is going to happen. Having fixed on the worst thing, whatever it is, that their bilious imagination can suggest, they go out to lunch, and in accents of woe proceed to relate that "They say that—" and state all the dismal forebodings which their solitary meditations have hatched. In fact, the chief reason for which I wish that I was a Member of Parliament is that I could then bring in a Bill (or attempt to do so) for the Suppression of Pessimists. I would also gladly vote for a Bill that provided for the Suppression of Extreme Optimists on the same grounds, namely, that to be told that the Kaiser has cancer, and that the burgesses of Berlin are already starving, leads to a reaction such as the pessimists produce by direct means. To be told that the Russians are incapable of further resistance on the authority of "They say that—" depresses everybody at once; and to be told that there isn't a potato to be had in all Germany for love or money (particularly money) gives rise to an alcoholic cheerfulness which dies out and leaves you with a headache of deferred hopes. These grinning optimists were particularly hard to bear when the terrible Retreat from Mons was going on, for they screamed with delight at the notion that we were lengthening out the German lines of communication, which subsequently would be cut, as by a pair of nail-scissors lightly wielded, and the flower of the German army neatly plucked like a defenceless wayside blossom. The same smiling idiots were to the fore again during the great Russian retreat, and told us to wait, finger on lip, with rapturous eyes, till the Germans had reached the central steppes of Russia, when they would all swiftly expire of frosts, Cossacks and inanition. But, after all, these rose-coloured folk do very little harm; they make us go about our work with a heady sense of exhilaration, which, though it soon passes off, is by no means unpleasant. At the worst extreme optimists are only fools on the right side, whereas pessimists are bores and beasts on the wrong one.

Pessimists have had a high old time all this month. They do not exactly rejoice when things go ill for us, but misfortune has a certain sour satisfaction for them, because it fulfils what they thought (and said) in September. Thus now they nod and sigh, and proceed to tell us what they augur for November. If only they would keep their misery to themselves, nobody would care how miserable they are; but the gratuitous diffusion of it is what should be made illegal. For the microbe of pessimism is the most infectious of bacteria; it spreads in such a manner that all decent-minded folk, when they have fallen victims to it, ought surely (on the analogy of what they would do if it was influenza) to shut themselves up and refuse to see anybody. But because the disease is one of the mind, it appears that it is quite proper for the sufferer to go and sneeze in other people's faces. There ought to be a board of moral health, which by its regulations would make it criminal to spread mental disorders, such as pessimism. I had so severe an attack of it myself, when the clouds encompassed me, that I have a certain right to propose legislation on the subject. Those afflicted by the painful disease which, like typhoid, is only conveyed through the mouth, in terms of articulate speech, should be fined some moderate sum for any speech that was likely to propagate pessimism. If the disease is acute, and the sufferer feels himself in serious danger of bursting unless he talks, he would of course be at liberty to shut himself up in any convenient room out of earshot, and talk till he felt better. Only it should be on his responsibility that his conversation should not be overheard by anybody, and, in suspension of the common law of England, a wife should be competent to witness against her husband.

It is not because the ravens are such liars that I complain, for lying is the sort of thing that may happen to anybody, but it is the depressing nature of their lies. The famous national outburst of lying that took place over the supposed passage of hundreds of thousands of Russians through England on their way to the battle-fields of France and Flanders was harmless, inspiriting lying. So, too, the splendid mendacity that seized so many of our citizens on the occasion of the second Zeppelin raid. That ubiquitous airship I verily believe was seen hovering over every dwelling-house in London; it hovered in Kensington, in Belgravia, in Mayfair, in Hampstead, in Chelsea, and the best of it was that it never came near these districts at all. In fact, it became a mere commonplace that it hovered over your house, and a more soaring breed of liars arose. One asserted that on looking up he had seen their horrid German faces leaning over the side of the car; another, that the cigar-shaped shadow of it passed over his blind. Of course, it passed over Brompton Square, on which the Zeppelinians were preparing to drop bombs, thinking that the dome of the Oratory was the dome of St. Paul's, and that they had thus a good chance of destroying the Bank of England. But in the stillness of the night, amid the soft murmurs of the anti-aircraft guns, a guttural voice from above was heard to say, "Nein: das ist nicht St Paul's," and the engine of destruction passed on, leaving us unharmed. Was not that a fortunate thing?

Of course, by the time the Zeppelins began to visit us, we had all had a good deal of practice in lying, which accounted for the gorgeous oriental colouring of such amazing imaginings. But the pioneers of this great revival of the cult of Ananias, were undoubtedly that multitude whom none can number, who were ready to produce (or manufacture) any amount of evidence to prove that soon after the outbreak of the war battalions of Russian troops in special trains, with blinds drawn down, were dashing through the country. It is a thousand pities that some serious and industrious historian was not commissioned by his Government to collect the evidence and issue it in tabulated form, for it would have proved an invaluable contribution to psychology. There was never any first-hand evidence on the subject (for the simple reason that the subject had no real existence), but the mass of secondhand evidences went far to prove the non-existent. From Aberdeen to Southampton there was scarcely a station at which a porter had not seen these army corps and told somebody's gardener. The accounts tallied remarkably, the trains invariably had their blinds drawn down, and occasionally bearded soldiers peered out of the windows. There was a camp of them on Salisbury Plain, and hundreds of Englishmen who knew no language but their own, distinctly heard them talking Russian to each other. Sometimes stations (as at Reading) had platforms boarded up to exclude the public, and the public from neighbouring eminences saw the bearded soldiers drinking quantities of tea out of samovars. This was fine imaginative stuff, for the samovar, of course, is an urn, and nobody but a Russian, surely, would drink tea out of an urn. There was collateral evidence, too: one day the Celtic was mined somewhere in the North Sea; she had on board tons of ammunition and big guns, and for a while the hosts of Russia did not appear in the fighting line, because they had remained on Salisbury Plain till fresh supplies of ammunition came. Bolder spirits essayed higher flights: At Swindon Station, so the porter told the gardener, they had been seen walking about the platform stamping the snow off their boots, which proved they had come from far North, where the snow is of so perdurable a quality that it travels like blocks of ice from Norwegian lakes without apparently melting even in the middle of a hot September. Or again, in the neighbourhood of Hatfield the usual gardener had heard that a képi had been picked up on the road, and what do you think was the name of the maker printed inside it? Why, the leading military outfitter of Nijni-Novgorod! There was glory for you, as Humpty-Dumpty said. The gardener fortunately knew who the leading military outfitter of Nijni-Novgorod was, while regarded as a proof what more could anybody want? How could a Russian képi have been dropped on the North Road unless at least a hundred thousand Russians had been going in special trains through England? I suppose you would not want them all to throw their képis away.

There were hundreds of such stories, none first hand, but overwhelming in matter of cumulative secondhand evidence, all springing from nowhere but the unassisted brain of ordinary Englishmen. The wish was father to the thought; in the great peril that still menaced the French and English battle-line, we all wanted hundreds of thousands of Russians, and so we said that they were passing through. Some cowardly rationalist, I believe, has explained the whole matter by saying that some firm telegraphed that a hundred thousand Russians (whereby he meant Russian eggs) were arriving. I scorn the truckling materialism of this. The Russian stories were invented, bit by bit, even as coral grows, by innumerable and busy liars, spurred on by the desire that their fabrications might be true. Bitter animosities sprang up between those who did and those who did not believe the Russian Saga. Single old ladies, to whom the idea that Russia was pouring in to help us was very comforting, altered their wills and cut off faithless nephews, and the most stubborn Thomases amongst us were forced to confess that there seemed to be a good deal to say for it, while the fact that the War Office strenuously denied the whole thing was easily accounted for. Of course the War Office denied it, for it didn't want the Germans to know. It would be a fine surprise for the Germans on the West Front to find themselves one morning facing serried rows of Russians.... They would be utterly bewildered, for they had been under the impression that Russia was far away East, on the other side of the Fatherland; but here were the Russian armies! They would think their compasses had gone mad; they would have been quite giddy with surprise, and have got that lost feeling which does so much to undermine the morale of troops. Oh, a great stroke!

But all these Russian and Zeppelin Saga were good heady, encouraging lies, tonic instead of lowering, like the dejected inventions of prostrate pessimists. I do not defend, on principle, the habit of making up stories and saying that a porter at Reading told your gardener; but, given that you are going to do that sort of thing, I do maintain that you are bound to invent such stories as will encourage and not depress your credulous friends. You have no right to attempt to rob them of their most precious possession in times like these, namely, the power of steadfast resistance of the spirit to trouble and anxiety, by inventing further causes of depression. The law forbids you to take away a man's forks and spoons; it ought also to forbid the dissemination of such false news as will deprive him of his appetite for his mutton chop.

Indeed, I fancy that by the law of England as laid down in the statute-book it is treasonable in times of national crisis to discourage the subjects of the King, and I wonder whether it would not be possible, as there has been so little grouse-shooting this year, to have a grouser-shoot instead. A quantity of old birds want clearing off. Guns might be placed, let us say, in butts erected along the south side of Piccadilly, and the grousers would be driven from the moors of Mayfair by a line of beaters starting from Oxford Street. The game would break cover, so I suppose, from Dover Street, Berkeley Street, Half Moon Street, and so on, and to prevent their escaping into Regent Street on the one side and Park Lane on the other, stops would be placed at the entrance of streets debouching here in the shape of huge posters announcing victories by land and sea for the Allied forces. These the grousers would naturally be unable to pass, and thus they would be driven out into Piccadilly and shot. This would take the morning, and after a good lunch at the Ritz Hotel the shooters would proceed to the covers of Kensington. Other days would, of course, be arranged....

But all this month the devastating tide swept on through Serbia. Occasionally there were checks, as, for a moment, it dashed against some little reef before submerging it; but soon wave succeeding wave overleaped such barriers, and now Serbia lies under the waters of the inundation. And in these shortening days of autumn the sky grows red in the East with the dawning of new fires of battle, and to the watchers there it goes down red in the West, where from Switzerland to the sea, behind the trenches, the graveyards stretch themselves out over the unsown fields of France.

NOVEMBER, 1916

Francis arrived on the last day of October, with a week's leave before his regiment embarked for the Dardanelles. For a few hours he was a mere mass of physical needs; until these were satisfied he announced himself as incapable of thinking or speaking of anything but the carnalities.

"Tea at once," he said. "No, I think I won't have tea with you; I want tea sent up to the bath-room. That packet? It's a jar of bath salts—verbena—all of which I am going to use. I saw it in a shop window, and quite suddenly I knew I wanted it. Nothing else seemed to matter. I want a dressing-gown, too. Will you lend me one? And slippers. For a few hours I propose to wallow in a sensual sty. I've planned it all, and for the last week I have thought of nothing else."

He sketched the sty. There was to be tea in the bath-room and a muffin for tea. This he would eat as he lay in a hot bath full of verbena salts. He would then put on his dressing-gown and lie in bed for half an hour, reading a shilling shocker and smoking cigarettes. (End of Part I.) Still in his dressing-gown he would come downstairs, and smoke more cigarettes before my fire, till it was time to have a cocktail. We would dine at home (he left the question of dinner to me, provided only that there should be a pineapple), after which we should go to the movies. We were then to drive rapidly home in a taxi, and, over sandwiches and whisky and soda, he felt that he would return to a normal level again. But the idea of being completely comfortable and clean and gorged and amused for a few hours had taken such hold of him, that he could not "reach his mind" until the howling beast of his body had been satisfied. That, at least, was the plan.

Accordingly, proclamation having come from upstairs that all was ready, Francis departed to his sty, and I, as commanded, waited till such time as he should reappear in my dressing-gown and slippers. But long before his programme (Part I.) could have been carried out he re-entered.

"It didn't seem worth while to get into bed," he said, "so I left that out. I loved the bath-salts, and the tea was excellent. But how soon anything that can be satisfied is satisfied. It's only——"

He leaned forward and poked the fire, stretching his legs out towards the blaze.

"I've travelled a long way since we met," he said, "and the further one goes the simpler the way becomes. The mystics are perfectly right. You can only get what you want, what your soul wants, by chucking away all that you have. The only way to find yourself is to lose yourself. I've been losing myself all these months, and I began to recover little bits of me that I didn't want over the muffin and the verbena. I was afraid I should find more if I tucked up in bed. That's why I didn't. I used to want such lots of things; now there is growing a pile of things I don't want."

I put the cigarette-box near him.

"There are the smokes," I said, "and let me know when you want a cocktail. We'll have dinner when you like. Now I have heard nothing from you for the last three months; let's have a budget."

"Right. Well, the material side of the affair is soon done with. I'm Quartermaster-Sergeant, with stripes and a crown on my arm, as you have noticed, and I live immersed in accounts and stores and supplies. I have to see that the men have enough and are comfortable, and I have to be as economical as I can. That's my life, and it's being my salvation."

He lay back in his chair, the picture of complete indolence, with eyes half closed. But I knew that to be a sign of intense internal activity. Most people, I am aware, when they are aflame with some mental or spiritual topic, walk up and down with bright eyes and gesticulating hands. But it is Francis's great conjuring trick to disconnect his physical self, so to speak, and let it lie indolent; his theory is that thus your vitality is concentrated on thought. There seems something to be said for it, when once you have learned how to do it.

"Of course, in order to get anywhere," he said, "you must go through contemplative periods and stages, and towards the end of the journey, I fancy that you enter into an existence where only that is possible. But before that comes, you have to know the sacredness of common things. It's like this. The first stage is to know that the only thing worth our consideration is the reality that lies behind common things: it is then that you think them worthless and disregard them. But further on you find out that they aren't common, because the reality behind permeates them, and makes them sacred. Later, if you ever get there, you find, I believe, that in your union with the reality behind, they cease to exist again for you. But, good heavens, what miles apart, are the first and third stages! And the danger of the first stage is that, if you are not careful, you imagine it to be the same as the third.

"I was in danger of getting like that, living in perfect comfort and peace on that adorable island. Do you know how a jelly looks the day after a dinner-party, how it is fatigued, and lies down and gets shapeless and soft? I might have stayed in that stage, if the war hadn't summoned me. I did not consciously want material things: I was not greedy or lustful, and I had a perfectly conscious knowledge that God existed in everything. But I didn't reverence things for that reason, nor did I mix myself up in them. I held aloof, and was content to think. Then came the war, and now for nearly fifteen months I have been learning to get close to common things, to see, as I said, that the sacredness of their origin pervades them. It doesn't lie in them, tucked away in some secret drawer, which you have to open by touching a spring. The spring you have to touch is in yourself, you have to open your own perception of what is always before your eyes. It doesn't require any wit or poetic sense to perceive it: it is there, a plain simple phenomenon. But in it is the answer to the whole cosmic conundrum, for there lies the Love that 'moves the sun and the other stars!' Theoretically I knew that, but not practically.

"Now, after a good deal of what you might call spade-work, I'm beginning to feel that, first-hand. For months I hated the drill, and the sordidness (so I said) and the life in which you are so seldom alone. I hated the rough clothes, and the heavy boots and the food. But I never hated the other fellows: I've always liked people. Then when I got on I hated the accounts I had to do, and the supplies I had to weigh, but in one thing I never faltered, and that was in the desire to get at what lay behind it all. There was something more in it than the fact that the work had to be done because England was at war with Germany, and because I wanted to help. That was sufficient to bring me out of Alatri, and it would have been sufficient to carry me along, even if there had been nothing else behind it. But always I had the knowledge of there being something else behind. And clearly the life I was leading gave me admirable conditions for finding that out. Everything was very simple: I had no independence; I had to do what I was told. You may bet that obedience is the key to freedom.

"There were days of storm and days of peace, of course. There were darknesses in which one was tempted to say that there wasn't anything to be perceived. Some persistent devil inside me kept suggesting that an account-book was just an account-book, and a rifle nothing more than a rifle. But I still clung to that which had grown, in all those years at Alatri, to be a matter of knowledge. I knew there was something behind, and I knew what it was, though the mists obscured it, just as when the sea-fog comes down in the winter over the island, and you cannot see the mainland for days together. But you don't seriously question whether the mainland is there because you don't see it. A child might: if you told a child that the mainland had been taken away, he would probably accept what you said.... There were days when I doubted everything, not only the reality at the back of it all, but even the immediate cause for my work, namely, that the regiment was part of the army that was fighting the Germans, and that so it was my job to help.

"And then, one day when I was least expecting it or consciously thinking of it, the knowledge came with that sense of realization that makes all the difference between theoretical and practical knowledge. I was among the stores, rather busy, and suddenly the tins of petroleum shone with God. Just that."

He turned his handsome, merry face to me: there was no solemnity in it, it was as if he had told me some cheerful piece of ordinary news.

"Now will you understand me when I say that that moment was in no sense overwhelming, nor did it interfere in the slightest degree with either the common work of the day, drill and accounts and what not, or with the common diversions of the day? It did not even give them a new meaning, for I had known for years that the meaning was there; only, it had not been to me a matter of practical knowledge. It was like—well, you know how slow I am at learning anything on the piano, but with sufficient industry I can get a thing by heart at last. It was like that: it was like the first occasion on which one plays it by heart. It did not yet, nor does it now get between me and all the things that fill the day. It is not a veil drawn between me and them, so that drudgery and little menial offices are no longer worth while: it is just the opposite: it is as if a veil were drawn away, and I can see them and handle them more clearly and efficiently, and enjoy them infinitely more. This warm fire feels more delightfully comfortable than ever a fire did. I take more pleasure in seeing you sitting there near me than ever before. There was never such a good muffin as the one you sent up to the bath-room. That's only natural, if you come to think of it. It would be a very odd sort of illumination, if it served only to make what we have got to do obscure or tiresome or trivial. Instead, it redeems the common things from triviality. It takes weariness out of the world."

"You said the petroleum-tins shone with God," I said. "Can you tell me about that? Was it a visible light?"

"I wondered if you would ask that," he said, "and I wish I could explain it better. There was no visible light, nothing like physical illumination round them. But my eyes told that faculty within me which truly perceives, that they shone. What does St. Paul call it? 'The light invisible,' isn't it? That is exactly descriptive. 'The light invisible, the uncreated light.' I can't tell you more than that, and I expect that it is only to be understood by those who have seen it. I am quite conscious that my description of it must mean nothing. I have long known it was there, and so have you, but till I perceived it I had no idea what it was like."

"There's another thing," said I, "you are going out next week to the Dardanelles. What does the business of killing look like in the light of the light invisible?"

He laughed again.

"It hasn't turned me into a conscientious objector, if you mean that," he said. "I hate the notion of shooting jolly funny rabbits, or merry partridges, though I'm quite inconsistent enough to eat them when they are shot—at least, not rabbits: I would as soon eat rats. But I shall do my best to kill as many Turks as I possibly can. I know it's right that we should win this war. I was never more certain about anything. The Prussian standpoint is the devil's standpoint, and since it's our business to fight the devil, we've got to fight the Prussians and all who are allied with them. It seems a miserable way of fighting the devil, to go potting Turks. If I could only get to know the fellows I hope I am going to kill, I would bet that I should find them awfully decent chaps. I shouldn't be surprised if they would shine, too, like the petroleum-tins. But there's no other alternative. No doubt if our diplomatists hadn't been such apes, we should be friends with the Turks, instead of being their enemies, but, as it is, there's no help for it. I've no patience with pacificists; we've got to fight, unless we choose to renounce God. As for the man who has a conscientious objection to killing anybody, I think you will find very often that he has a conscientious objection to being killed. I haven't any conscientious objection to either. I shall be delighted to kill Turks, and I'm sure I don't grudge them the pleasure of killing me."

"But you think they're fighting on the devil's side," I objected. "You don't want to be downed by the devil?"

"Oh, they don't down me by shooting me," he said. "Also, they don't think they are in league with the devil; at least, we must give them the credit of not thinking so, and they've got every bit as good a right to their view as I have. Lord! I am glad, if I may say it without profanity, that I'm not God. Fancy having millions and millions of prayers, good sincere honest prayers, addressed to you every day from opposite sides, entreating you to grant supplications for victory! Awfully puzzling, for Him! You'd know what excellent fellows a lot of our enemies are."

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed at this moment, and Francis jumped up with a squeal.

"Eight o'clock already!" he said. "What an idiot you are for letting me jaw along like this! I'm not dressed yet, nor are you."

"You may dine in a dressing-gown if you like," I said.

"Thanks, but I don't want to in the least. I want to put on the fine new dress-clothes which I left here a year ago. Do dress too; let's put on white ties and white waistcoats, and be smart, and pompous. I love the feeling of being dressed up. Perhaps we won't go to the movies afterwards; what do you think? We can't enjoy ourselves more than sitting in this jolly room and talking. At least, I can't; I don't know about you. Oh, and another thing. You have a day off to-morrow, haven't you, it being Saturday? Let's go and stay in the country till Monday. I've been in a town for so many months. Let's go to an inn somewhere where there are downs and trees, and nobody to bother. If we stayed with people, we should have to be polite and punctual. I don't want to be either. I don't want to hold forth about being a Tommy, except to you. Most people think there's something heroic and marvellous about it, and they make me feel self-conscious. It's no more heroic than eating when you're hungry. You want to: you've got to: your inside cries out for food, it scolds you till you give it some."

We put Francis's plan into execution next morning, and at an early hour left town for a certain inn, of which I had pleasant memories, on the shore of the great open sea of Ashdown Forest, to spend three days there, for I got rid of my work on Monday. St. Martin came with us and gave us warm windless days of sun, and nights with a scrap of frost tingling from the stars, so that in the morning the white rime turned the blades of grass into spears of jewellery, and the adorable sharp scent of autumn mornings pricked the nostrils. The great joyful forest was ablaze with the red-gold livery of beech trees, and the pale gold of birches, and holly trees wore clusters of scarlet berries among their stiff varnished foliage. Elsewhere battalions of pines with tawny stems defied the spirit of the falling leaf, and clad the hill-sides with tufts of green serge, in which there sounded the murmur of distant seas. Here the foot slid over floors of fallen needles, and in the vaulted darkness, where scarce a ray of sun filtered down, there seemed to beat the very heart of the forest, and we went softly, not knowing but that presently some sharp-eared faun might peep round a tree-trunk, or a flying drapery betray a dryad of the woods.

Deeper and deeper we went into the primeval aisles, among the Druid trees that stood, finger on lip, for perhaps even Pan himself had lately passed that way, and they, initiate, had looked on the incarnate spirit of Nature. Then, distantly, the gleam of sunshine between the trunks would show the gates of this temple of forest, and we passed out again into broad open spaces, covered with the russet of bracken, and stiff with ling, on which the spikes of minute blossom were still pink. Here we tramped till the frosted dews had melted and dried, and sat in mossy hollows, where gorse was still a-flower, and smelled of cocoa-nut biscuits. Across the weald the long line of South Downs, made millions of years ago by uncounted myriads of live things, was thrust up like some heaving shoulder of a marine monster above the waves. It seemed necessary to walk along that heavenly ridge, and next day, we drove to Lewes, and with pockets bulging with lunch, climbed on to that fair and empty place. There, with all Sussex lying below us, and the sea stretched like a brass wire along the edge of the land to the south, we made a cache, containing the record of the expedition, and buried it in a tin-box below a certain gnarled stump that stood on the edge of the steep descent on to the plain. Francis insisted also on leaving our empty wine bottle there, with a wisp of paper inside it, on which he wrote: "We are now utterly without food, and have already eaten the third mate. Tough, but otherwise excellent. Latitude unknown: longitude unknown: God help us!" And he signed it with the names of Queen Adelaide and Marcus Aurelius. Neither he nor I could think of anything sillier than this, and since, when you are being silly, you have to get sillier and sillier, or else you are involved in anticlimaxes, he rolled over on to his face and became serious again.