E. F. BENSON (continued 5)

"But all atheists are not unbridled hedonists," said I.

"More fools they. At least, from my point of view, the only possible bridle on one's carnal and material desires is the fact that one is not an atheist. What does the progress of mankind amount to considered by itself? A few scientific inventions, a little less small-pox. Is it for that that unnumbered generations have lived and suffered and enjoyed?"

"But can't atheists believe in and work for the progress of the world?" I asked.

"I know they do, but for the life of me I can't see why. I wouldn't stir a finger or make a single act of renunciation if all that inspired me was the welfare of the next generation. To me the brotherhood of man is a meaningless phrase unless it is coupled with the fatherhood of God."

"But you left Alatri, you went to fight, you won the V.C. you left in a taxi for the sake of men."

"No, for the sake of what they stood for," he said. "For the sake of that of which they are the manifestation."

He got up and looked at his watch.

"Blow it! I've got to go and see the manifestation known as the War Office," he said.

"After which?" I asked. "Will you be back for lunch?"

"No, I don't think so. Lord, I wish I wasn't going to the War Office, specially since you have a morning off. Why shouldn't I say that I'm tired of the war—I might telephone it—or that I have become a conscientious objector, or that I've got an indisposition?"

"There's the telephone," said I.

He buckled his belt.

"Wonderful thing the telephone," he said. "And what if it's true that there's another telephone possible: I mean the telephone between the people whom we think of as living, and the people whom we don't really think of as dead? I'm going to lunch with an Aunt, by the way, who is steeped in spiritual things; so much so, indeed, that she forgets that the chief spiritual duties, as far as we know them for certain, are to be truthful and cheerful, and all those dull affairs which liars and pessimists say that anybody can do. Aunt Aggie doesn't do any of them; she's an awful liar and a hopeless pessimist, and her temper—well! But as I said, or didn't I say it—I'm going to lunch with her and go to a séance afterwards. She's going to inquire after Uncle Willy, who was no comfort to her in this life; but perhaps he'll make up for that now. Really London is getting rather cracked, which is the most sensible thing it ever did. I think it's the cold stodgy granite of the English temperament which I dislike so. But really it's getting chipped, it's getting cracked. Aunt Aggie bows to the new moon just like a proper Italian, and wouldn't sit down thirteen to dinner however hungry she was. Oh, there are flaws in Aunt Aggie's granite, and she does have such horrible food! Good-bye."

I settled down with a book, and an electric light at my elbow, and a large fire at my feet, to the entrancing occupation of not doing anything at all. The blessed sixth morning of the week had arrived, when I was not obliged to go out to a large chilly office after breakfast, and I mentally contrasted the nuisance of having to go out into a beastly morning with the bliss of not having to go out, and found the latter was far bigger with blessing than the former with beastliness. I needn't read my book. I needn't do anything that I did not want to do, but very soon the book, that I had really taken up for fear of being surprised by a servant doing nothing at all, began to engross me. It was concerned with the inexplicable telephone to which Francis had alluded, and contained an account of the communications which had been made by a young soldier killed in France with his relatives. As Francis had said, London had got cracked on the subject....

After all, what wonder? Were there the slightest chance of establishing communication between the living and the dead, what subject (even the war) would be worthier of the profoundest study and experiment? Nothing more interesting, nothing more vitally important, could engross us, for which of the affairs in this world could be so important as the establishment, scientifically and firmly, of any facts that concern the next world? For there is one experience, namely, death, that is of absolutely universal interest. Everything else, from my little finger to Shakespeare's brain, only concerns a certain number of people; whereas death concerns the remotest Patagonian. However strongly and sincerely we may happen to believe that death is not an extinguishing of the essential self, with what intense interest we must all grab at anything which can throw light on the smallest, most insignificant detail of the life that is hereafter lived? Or, if your mind is so constructed that you do not believe in the survival of personality, how infinitely more keenly you would clutch at the remotest evidence (so long as it is evidence) that there is something to follow after the earth has been filled in above the body, from which, we are all agreed, something has departed. Without prejudice, without bias either of child-like faith or convinced scepticism, and preserving only an open mind, willing to be convinced by reasonable phenomena, there is nothing sublunar or superlunar that so vitally concerns us. You may not care about the treatment of leprosy, presumably in the belief that you will not have leprosy; you may not care about Danish politics in the belief that you will never be M.P. (if there is such a thing) for Copenhagen. But what cannot fail to interest you is the slightest evidence of what may occur to you when you pass the inevitable gates.

There are only two things that can possibly happen: the one is complete extinction (in which case I allow that the subject is closed, since if you are extinguished it is idle to inquire what occurs next, since nothing can occur); the other is the survival, in some form, of life, of yourself. This falls into three heads:

(i) Reincarnation, as an earwig, or a Hottentot, or an emperor.

(ii) Mere absorption into the central furnace of life.

(iii) Survival of personality.

And here the personal equation comes in. I cannot really believe I am going to be an earwig or an emperor. To my mind that sounds so unlikely that I cannot fix serious thought upon it. What shall I, this Me, do when I am an earwig or an emperor? How shall I feel? The mind slips from the thought, as you slip on ice, and falls down. Nor can I conceive being absorbed into the central furnace, because that, as far as personality goes, is identical with extinction. My soul will be burned in the source of life, just as my body may perhaps be burned in a crematorium, and I don't really care, in such a case, what will happen to either of them.

But my unshakeable conviction, with regard to which I long for evidence, is that I—something that I call I—will continue a perhaps less inglorious career than it has hitherto pursued. And if you assemble together a dozen healthy folk, who have got no idea of dying at present, you will find that, rooted in the consciousness of at least eleven of them, if they will be honest about themselves, there is this same immutable conviction that They Themselves will neither have been extinguished or reincarnated or absorbed when their bodies are put away in a furnace or a churchyard. There is the illusion or conviction of a vast majority of mankind that with the withdrawal from the body of the Something which has kept it alive, that Something does not cease to have an independent and personal existence.

Well, there has been lately an enormous increase in the number of those who seek evidence on this overwhelmingly interesting subject. The book which I have been reading and wondering over treats of it, and Francis has gone with his Aunt Aggie to seek it. There has been, too, it is only fair to say, an enormous increase in the exasperation of the folk who, knowing nothing whatever about the subject, and scorning to make any study of what they consider such hopeless balderdash, condemn all those who have an open mind on the question as blithering idiots, hoodwinked by the trickery of so-called mediums. Out of their own inner consciousness they know that there can be no such thing as communication between the living and the dead, and there's the end of the matter. All who think there possibly may be such communication are fools, and all who profess to be able to produce evidence for it are knaves.... They themselves, being persons of sanity and common-sense, know that it is impossible.

But other shining examples of sanity and common-sense would undoubtedly have affirmed thirty years ago, with the same pontifical infallibility, that such a thing as wireless telegraphy was impossible, or a hundred years ago that it was equally ridiculous to think that a sort of big tea-kettle could draw a freight of human beings along iron rails at sixty miles an hour. But wireless telegraphy and express trains happened, in spite of their sanity and common-sense, and it seems to me that if we deny the possibility of this communication between the living and the dead, we are acting in precisely the same manner as those same sensible people would have acted thirty and a hundred years ago.

Another favourite assertion of the sane and sensible is that if they could get evidence themselves (though they foam with rage at the very notion of attempting to do such a thing) they would believe it. That is precisely the same thing as saying you will not believe in Australia till you have been there. For the existence of Australia depends (for those who have never seen it) on the evidence of others. The evidence for the existence of Australia is overwhelming, and therefore we are right to accept it, even though we have not seen it ourselves. Kangaroos and gold, and Australian troops and postage-stamps, and the voyages of steamers, makes its existence absolutely certain; there is no doubt whatever about it. And the evidence in favour of the possibility of communication between this world and another non-material world is now in process of accumulation. It is being studied by people who are eminent in the scientific world, and it seems that there are fragments, scraps of evidence, which must be treated with the respect of an open mind by all who have not the pleasant gift of the infallibility that springs from complete ignorance. It is no longer any use to quote from Mr. Sludge the Medium....

There are a great many gullible people in the world and a great many fraudulent ones, and when the two get together round a table in a darkened room, it is obvious that there is a premium on trickery. But because a certain medium is a knave and a vagabond, who ought to be put in prison, and others are such as should not be allowed to go out, except with their minds under care of a nurse, it does not follow that there are no such things as genuine manifestations. It would be as reasonable to say that because a child does his multiplication sum wrong, there is something unsound in the multiplication table. A fraudulent medium does not invalidate a possible genuineness in those who are not cheats; a quack or a million quacks do not cast a slur on the science of medicine. In questions of spiritualism there is no denying that the number of quacks exposed and unexposed is regrettably large, and, without doubt, all spiritualistic phenomena should be ruthlessly and pitilessly scrutinized. But when this is done, it is only a hide-bound stupidity that refuses to treat the results with respect.

Other reservations must be made. All results that can conceivably be accounted for by such well-established phenomena as telepathy or thought-reading must be unhesitatingly ruled out. They are deeply interesting in themselves, they are like the traces of other metals discovered in exploring a gold-reef, but they are not the gold, and have no more to do with the thing inquirers are in quest of than have acid-drops or penny buns. Many mediums (so-called) are not mediums at all, but have that strange and marvellous gift of being able to explore the minds of others....

What is the working and mechanism of that group of phenomena, among which we may class hypnotism, thought-reading, telepathy, and so forth, we do not rightly know. But inside the conscious self of every human being there lurks the sub-conscious or subliminal self, which has something to do with all these things. Every event that happens to a man, every thought that passes through his mind, every impression that his brain receives makes a mark on it, similar, perhaps, to the minute dots on phonograph records. That phonograph record (probably) is in the keeping of the sub-conscious mind, and though the conscious mind may have forgotten the fact, and the circumstances in the making of any of these marks, the sub-conscious mind has it recorded, and, under certain conditions, can produce it again. And it is the sub-conscious mind which without doubt exercises those thought-reading and telepathic functions. In most people it lies practically inaccessible; others, numerically few, appear, in trance or even without the suspension of the conscious mind, to be able to exercise its powers, and—leaving out the mere conjuring tricks of fraudulent persons—it is they who pass for mediums.

What happens? This: A bereaved mother or a bereaved wife sits with one of those mediums. The medium goes into a genuine trance, and probing the mind of the eager expectant sitter, can tell her all sorts of intimate details about the husband or son who has been killed which are already known to her. The medium can produce his name, his appearance; can recount events and happenings of his childhood; can even say things which the mother has forgotten, but which prove to be true. Is it any wonder that the sitter is immensely impressed? She is more than impressed, she is consoled and comforted when the medium proceeds to add (still not quite fraudulently) messages of love and assurance of well-being. It is not quite conscious fraud; it is perhaps a fraud of the sub-conscious mind.

Now all this, these reminiscences, these encouraging messages from the other world, have to be ruled out if we want to get at the real thing. They are phenomena vastly interesting in themselves, but they are clearly accountable for by the established theory of thought-reading. They need have nothing whatever to do with communications from discarnate spirits, for they can be accounted for by a natural law already known to us. They do not help in the slightest degree to establish the new knowledge for which so many are searching....

Francis had come back from his lunch and his séance with Aunt Aggie, and a considerable part of these reflections are really a précis of our discussion. It had been quite a good thought-reading séance: Uncle Willy, through the mouth of the medium in trance, had affirmed his dislike of parsnips and mushrooms, had mentioned his name, and nickname, Puffin, by which Aunt Aggie had known him, and had described with extraordinary precision the room where he used to sit.

"I was rather impressed," said Francis. "It really was queer, for silly though Aunt Aggie is, I don't think she had previously gone to Amber—yes, the medium was Amber, just Amber—and primed her with regard to this information. Amber read it all right out of Aunt Aggie's mind. But then Uncle Willy became so extremely unlike himself that I couldn't possibly believe it was Uncle Willy; it must have been a sort of reflection of what Aunt Aggie hoped he had become. He was deeply edifying; he said he was learning to be patient; he told us that he had improved wonderfully. Poor Aunt Aggie sobbed, and I knew she loved sobbing. It made her feel good inside. All the same——" He let himself lie inertly on the sofa, in that supreme bodily laziness which, as I have said, gives his mind the greater activity.

"It was all a thought-reading séance," he said, "quite good of its kind, but it had no more to do with the other world than Matilda.... But why shouldn't there be a way through between the material and the spiritual, just as there is a way for telegraphy, as you said, without wires? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, no doubt, a so-called message from the other side is only a subtle intercommunication between minds on this side. It's so hard to guard against that. But it might be done. We might think of some piece of knowledge known only to a fellow who was dead."

Suddenly he jumped up.

"I've thought of a lovely plan," he said. "Go for a walk, if you haven't been out all day, or go and have a bath or something; and while you are gone I'll prepare a packet, and seal it up in a box. Nobody will know but me. And then when the next bit of shrapnel comes along and hits me instead of the potted-meat tin, you will pay half-a-guinea, I think it is—I know I paid for Aunt Aggie and myself—and see if a medium can tell you what is in that box. Nobody will know except me, and I shall be dead, so it really will look very much as if I had a hand in it if a medium in trance can tell you what is in it. A box can't telepathize, can it? The Roman Catholics say it's devil-work to communicate with the dead; they say all sorts of foul spirits get hold of the other end of the telephone. Isn't it lucky we aren't Roman Catholics?"

"And what about the War Office?" I said, chiefly because I didn't want either to go out or have a bath.

"Oh, I forgot. I'm going to be sent out to the Italian front. We've got some people there, and it seems they don't know Italian very well. I don't know what I shall be quite: I think a sort of Balaam's ass that talks, a sort of mule perhaps with a mixed Italian and English parentage. Duties? Ordering dinner, I suppose."

"Lucky devil!"

"I'm not sure. I think I would sooner take my chance in the trenches. But off I go day after to-morrow. Lord, if I get a week's leave now and then, shan't I fly to Alatri! Can't you come out, too, to look after your Italian property? Fancy having a week at Alatri again! There won't be bathing, of course; but how I long to hear the swish and bang of the shutters that Pasqualino has forgotten to hitch to, in the Tramontana! And the sweeping of the wind in the stone-pine! And the glow and crackle of the wood-fire on the hearth! And the draughty rooms! And the springing up of the freesias! And Seraphina, fat Seraphina, and the smell of frying! Fancy being heedless again for a week! I feel sure the war has never touched the enchanted island. The world as it was! Good Lord, the world as it was!"

He had sat and then lain down on the floor.

"It's odd," he said, "that though I wouldn't change that which I am, and that which I know, for anything that went before, I long for a week, a day, an hour of the time when all the material jollinesses of the world were so magically exciting. Oh, the pleasant evenings when one didn't think, but just enjoyed what was there! There's a great lump of Boy still in me, which I don't get rid of. The cache: think of the cache we were going to revisit in September, 1914! After all, It, the mystical thing that matters, was there all the time, though one didn't really know it.... But I should love to get the world as it was again. I don't want it for long, I think, but just for a little while. Rest, you know, child's play, nonsense, Italy. I would buckle to again afterwards, but it would be nice to be an animal again. I want not to think about anything that matters, God, and my soul, and right and wrong....

"I want to rebel. Just for a minute. I daresay it's the devil who makes me want. It's a way he has. 'Be an innocent child,' says he, 'and don't think. Just look at the jolly things, and the beautiful things, and take your choice!' I don't want to be beastly, but I do want to get out of the collar of the only life which I believe to be real. I want to eat and drink and sit in the sun, and hear the shutters bang, and read a witty wicked book, and see a friend—you, in fact—and do again what we did; I want to quench the light invisible, and make it invisible, really invisible, for a minute or two. I suppose that's blasphemy all right."

He lay silent a moment, and then got up.

"Oh, do go for a walk," he said, "while I prepare my posthumous packet. Or prepare a posthumous packet for me. You may die first, you see; it's easily possible that you may die first now that they're not sending me to the trenches again, and it would be so interesting after your lamentable decease to be told by a medium what you had put in the packet. Let's do that. Let each of us prepare a posthumous packet, and seal it up, and on yours you must put directions that it is to be delivered to me unopened. I needn't put anything on mine; you can keep them both in a cupboard till one of us dies. And the survivor will consult a medium as to what is in the late lamented's packet. Only the late lamented will know. Really, it will be a great test. Come on. It will be like playing caches again. Mind you put something ridiculous in yours."

I procured two cardboard boxes, of which we each took one, and went to my bedroom to select unlikely objects. Eventually I decided on a "J" nib, a five-franc piece and a small quantity of carbolic tooth-powder. These I put in my box, put directions on the top that it was to be given on my death to Francis, and went downstairs again, where I found him sealing his up. I put them both in a drawer of a table and locked it.

"Lord, how I long to tell you what I've put in mine!" said Francis.

More than half the month has passed (I am writing, as a matter of evidential data, on the 17th of January), and I desire to record with the utmost accuracy gleanable in such affairs, the general feeling of the inhabitants of London with regard to the war. Briefly, then, a huge wave of optimism—for which God be thanked—has roared over the town. Peace Notes, and the replies to them, and the replies to those replies have been probably the wind that raised that wave, or, in other words, the super-coxcomb who rules the German Empire has expressed his "holy wrath" at the reply of our Allied nations to his gracious granting of peace on his own terms. But England and France and Russia and Italy have unanimously wondered when, in the history of the world, a nation that proclaimed itself victor has offered peace to the adversary it proclaimed it has conquered. Germany, not only belligerent, but also apparently umpire, has announced that she has won the war, and therefore offers peace to her victims. That was a most astounding piece of news, and it surprised us all very much. But what must have surprised Germany more was the supposedly-expiring squeal of her victims which intimated that they were not conquered. Hence the "holy wrath" of the World-War-Lord, who had intimated, as out of Sinai, that they were conquered. They don't think so—they may be wrong, but they just don't think so. Instead they are delighted with his victorious proclamation, and take the proclamation as evidence that he is not victorious. German newspapers have been, if possible, more childishly profane than he, and tell us they are ready to grasp the hand of God Almighty, who is giving such success to their submarine warfare. They said just that; it was their duty to shake hands with God Almighty, because with His aid they had sunk so many defenceless merchant ships. Perhaps that "goes down" in Germany, for it appears that they are short of food, and would gladly swallow anything.

But here we are, the conquered beleaguered nation—and by a tiresome perversity we delight in the savage glee of our conquerors, for we happen to believe that it expresses, not glee of the conqueror, but the savage snarl of a fighting beast at bay. Rightly or wrongly, we think just that, and the louder the pæans from Germany, the brighter are the eyes here. Though still the bitterness of this winter of war binds us with stricture of frost, a belief in the approaching advent of spring, now in mid-January, possesses everybody. Reports, the authenticity of which it is no longer possible to doubt, are rife concerning the internal condition of Germany and Austria, which is beginning to be intolerable. There is not starvation, nor anything like starvation, but the stress of real want grows daily, and we all believe that from one cause or other, from this, or from the great offensive on the Western front, the preparations for which, none doubts, are swiftly and steadily maturing, the breaking of winter is in sight. Perhaps all we optimists, as has happened before, will again prove to be wrong, and some great crumbling or collapse may be threatening one of the Allies. But to-day the quality of optimism is somehow different from what it has been before. Also, the black background of war (not yet lifted), in front of which for the last two years and a half our lives have enacted themselves, has become infinitely and intensely more engrossing. But here in England and France and Italy and Russia, it is pierced with sudden gleams of sunshine; there are rifts in it through which for a moment or two shines the light of the peace that is coming. Only over Germany it hangs black and unbroken.

A king gave a feast to his lords and by his command there were brought in the spoils and the vessels which he had taken from the house of God which he had sacked and destroyed. In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote on the wall of the king's palace. Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed and his knees smote one against another. For he had lifted himself up against the Lord of Heaven, and he knew that his doom was written. There was no need to call in the astrologers and soothsayers, or to search for a Daniel who should be able to interpret the writing, or to promise to him who should read the writing and show the interpretation thereof a clothing of scarlet, a chain of gold, and that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom, for the king's captains and his lords, and the king himself, knew what the meaning and the interpretation of the writing was. In silence they sat as they read it, and they sat in silence looking in each other's eyes which were bright with terror, and on each other's faces which were blanched with dread. But most of all they looked at the king himself, still clad in his shining armour, and the cold foam of his doom was white on the lips that profaned the name of the Most Highest, and the hand that still grasped the hilt of the sword which to his eternal infamy he had unscabbarded and to his everlasting dishonour had soaked in innocent blood, was shaken with an ague of mortal fear. And this is the writing that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN, for God had numbered his kingdom and finished it; he was weighed in the balance and found wanting; his kingdom was divided.

Even so, as in the days of King Belshazzar, is the doom written of him who, above all others, is responsible for the blood that has been outpoured on the battle-field of Europe, for the shattered limbs, the blinded eyes, for the murder of women and children from below on the high seas, and from above in their undefended homes. God set him on the throne of his fathers, and out of his monstrous vanity, his colossal and inhuman ambitions, he has given over the harvest fields of the East to the reaper Death, and has caused blood to flow from the wine presses of the West. East and West he has blared out his infamous decree that evil is good, might is right, that murder and rape and the unspeakable tales of Teutonic atrocities are deeds well pleasing in the sight of God. And even as in the days when, with his fool's-cap stuck on top of his Imperial diadem, and the jester's bells a-tinkle against his shining armour, he paraded through the courts of Europe and the castles of his dupes, as Supreme Artist, Supreme Musician, Supreme Preacher, as well as Supreme War Lord, and fancied himself set so high above the common race of man that no human standard could measure him; so now his infamy has sunk him so low beneath the zones of human sympathy that not till we can feel pity for him who first left the love-supper of His Lord and hanged himself, we shall commiserate the doom that thickens round the head of the Judas who has betrayed his country and his God in hope to gratify his insensate dream of world-wide domination.

There still he sits at the feast with his lords and captains, but the wine is spilt from his cup, and his thoughts are troubled and voices of despair whisper to him out of the invading night. Low already burn the lights in the banqueting-hall that was once so nobly ablaze with the glory of those who in the sciences and the arts and in learning and high philosophy made Germany a prince among nations. He and his dupes and his flatterers have made a brigand and a pirate of her, have well and truly earned for her the scorn and the detestation of all civilized minds and lovers of high endeavour, and in the Dämmerung that gathers ever thicker round them the fingers of a man's hand trace on the wall the letters of pale flame that need no Daniel to interpret. The painted timbers of the roof are cracking, the tapestries are rent, the spilt wine congeals in pools of blood, and the legend of the decree of God blazes complete in the ruin of the shambles where they sit.

It is then this belief that ruin is moving swiftly and steadily up over the Central Empires that causes the war once more, as in its earlier days, to engross the whole of our thoughts. It is coming, as it were, in the traditional manner of a thunderstorm against the wind, for there is no use in pretending that, as far as military and naval operations go, the wind is not at the moment being favourable to our enemies. By sea the submarine menace is more serious than it has been since the war begun; there is still no advance on the West front, while on the East the complete over-running of Roumania cannot be called a success from our point of view. But in spite of this, there is the rooted belief that the collapse which we have so long waited for is getting measurably nearer. None knows, and few are rash enough to assert when it will come, or what month, near or distant, will see it, and in the meantime the broom of the new Government, to judge by the dust it raises, may be thought to be sweeping clean, and the appalling bequests of our late rulers, the accumulated remains of sloppy Cabinet puddings, are being vigorously relegated to the dustbins. With the ineradicable boyishness of the nation (which really has a good deal to be said for it), we still tend to make a game out of serious necessities, and are having great sport over the question of food. For a few weeks we amused ourselves over one of the most characteristic inventions of the last Government, and tried to see how much we could eat without indulging in more than three courses for dinner or two for lunch, which was what the late Food Controller allowed us. This was an amusing game, but as a policy it had insuperable defects, as, for instance, when we consider that the bulk of the working population takes its solid meal in the middle of the day, and would no more think of eating three courses in the evening than of eating four in the morning. There was a regular tariff: meat counted as one course, pudding another, toasted cheese another, but you were allowed any quantity of cold cheese, bread and butter (those articles in which national economy was really important) without counting anything at all. In the same way you could have as many slices of beef as you wished (as the Government wanted to effect a saving in the consumption of meat), but to touch an apple or a pear, about which there was no desire to save, cost you a course. Altogether it was one of the least helpful, but most comic schemes that could well be devised. Matilda, I fancy, thought it out and communicated it to Mr. Runciman by the telepathy that exists between bird-like brains. It is in flat and flagrant violation of human psychology, for you have only to tell the perverse race of mankind that they may only eat two dishes, to ensure that they will eat much more of those two dishes than was comprised in the whole of their unrestricted meals, while to allow them to eat as much cheese as they wish is simply to make cheese-eaters out of those who never dreamed of touching it before. But there is a rumour now that we are to go back to our ordinary diet again, which I take to be true, for when this morning I gave Matilda a list of the regulations to show her how it looked in print, she uttered a piercing yell and tore the card into a million fragments.

But with the new broom has come a powerful deal of cleaning up: there is a new Food Board, and a Man Power Board, and a fifty per cent. increase in railway fares (which will be nice for the dividends of railway companies), and hints of meatless days and sugar tickets, and there are ideas of ploughing up the parks and planting wheat there (which will be nice for the wood-pigeons). Indeed, as Francis said, we are perhaps beginning to take the war seriously, though, on the other hand, since he left the prevalent optimism has largely remedied the absence of the gaiety which he so much deplored.

FEBRUARY, 1917

Germany has proposed a toast. She drinks (Hoch!) to the freedom of the seas. And she couples with it the freedom (of herself) to torpedo from her submarines any vessel, neutral or belligerent, at sight, and without warning.

So now at last we know what the freedom of the seas means. The seas are to be free in precisely the sense that Belgium is free, and Germany is free to commit murder on them.

This declaration on the part of Germany was followed three days later by a declaration on the part of the United States. Diplomatic relations have been instantly severed, and President Wilson only waits for a "clear overt act" of hostility on the part of Germany to declare war.

America has declared her mind with regard to the freedom of the seas, and that abominable toast has led to the severance of diplomatic relations between her and Germany. Count Bernstorff has been dismissed, and in Berlin Mr. Gerard has asked for his passports. There is no possible shadow of doubt what that means, for we all remember August 4th, 1914, when we refused to discuss the over-running of Belgium by Germany. War followed instantly and automatically. "You shan't do that," was the equivalent of "If you do, we fight." It is precisely the same position between America and Germany now. Germany will torpedo neutrals at sight, just as Germany would overrun Belgium. The rest follows. Q.E.D.

But it is impossible to overstate the relief with which England has hailed this unmistakable word on the part of the United States. Many people have said: "What can America do if she does come in?" But that was not really the point. Of course she will do, as a matter of fact, a tremendous lot. She will finance our Allies; she is rich, beyond all dreams of financiers, with the profits she has reaped from the war, and the loans she will float will eclipse into shadow all that England has already done in that regard. "But what else?" ask the sceptics. "What of her army? She has no army." Nor for that matter had England when the war began. But even the sceptics cannot deny the immense value of her fleet. In the matter of torpedo-boats and of light craft generally, which we so sorely need for the hunting down of those great-hearted champions of the freedom of the seas, the German submarines, she can double our weapons, or, as the more enthusiastic say, she can more than double them. All the Government munition factories will be working like ours, day and night; she may even bring in conscription; she will devote to the cause of her Allies the million inventive brains with which she teems. This is just a little part of what America could have done, when first the Belgian Treaty was torn over, and it is just a little part of what America will do now.

But all that she can do, as I said, is beside the point. The point is, not what America can do, but what America is. Now she has shown what she is, a nation which will not suffer wrong and robbery and piracy. The disappointments of the past, with regard to her, are wiped off. She was remote from Europe, and remote from her was the wrong done to Belgium.... There is no need now to recount the tale of outrages that did not exhaust her patience. She waited—wisely, we are willing to believe—until she was ready, until the President knew that he had the country behind him, and until some outrage of the laws of man and of God became intolerable. It has now become intolerable to her, and if she is willing to clasp the hands of those who once doubted her, and now see how wrong it was to doubt, a myriad of hands are here held out for her grasping.

The splendour of this, its late winter sunrise, has rendered quite colourless things that in time of peace would have filled the columns of every newspaper, and engrossed every thought of its readers. A plot, unequalled since the days of the Borgias, has come to light, the object of which was to kill the Prime Minister by means of poisoned arrows, or of poisoned thorns in the inside of the sole of his boot. Never was there so picturesque an abomination. The poison employed was to be that Indian secretion of deadly herbs called curare, a prick of which produces a fatal result. A party of desperate women, opposed to conscription, invoked the aid of a conscripted chemist, and Borgianism, full-fledged, flared to life again in the twentieth century, with a setting of Downing Street and the golf-links at Walton Heath. To the student of criminology the Crippen affair should have faded like the breath on a frosty morning, compared with the scheme of this staggering plot. But with this Western sunrise over America to occupy our public minds, no one (except, I suppose, the counsel in the case and the prisoners) gave two thoughts to this anachronistic episode. And there was the Victory War Loan and National Service as well.

But though the public mind of any individual can be satiated with sensation, my experience is that the private mind "carries on" much the same as usual. If the trump of the Last Judgment was to sound to-morrow morning, tearing us from our sleep, and summoning us out to Hyde Park or some other open space, I verily believe that we should all look up at the sky that was vanishing like a burning scroll, and consider the advisability of taking an umbrella, or of putting on a coat. Little things do not, in times of the greatest excitement, at all cease to concern us; the big thing absorbs a certain part of our faculties, and when it has annexed these, it cannot claim the dominion of little things as well. And for this reason, I suppose, I do not much attend to the Borgia plot, since my public sympathies are so inflamed with America; but when work is done (or shuffled somehow away, to be attended to to-morrow) I fly on the wings of the Tube to Regent's Park, and, once again, ridiculously concern myself with the marks that it is possible to make on ice with a pair of skates, used one at a time (unless you are so debased as to study grape-vines). There is a club which has its quarters in that park, which in summer is called the Toxophilite, and in winter "The Skating Club" ("The" as opposed to all other skating clubs), and to the ice provided there on the ground where in summer enthusiastic archers fit their winged arrows to yew-wood bows, we recapture the legitimate joys of winter. Admirals and Generals, individuals of private and public importance, all skulk up there with discreet black bags, which look as if they might hold dispatches, but really hold skates, and cast off Black Care, and cast themselves onto the ice. An unprecedented Three Weeks (quite as unprecedented as those of that amorous volume) have been vouchsafed us, and day after day, mindful of the fickleness of frost in our sub-tropical climate, we have compounded with our consciences, when they reminded us that it was time to go back to work, on the plea that skating was so scarce, and that in all probability the frost would be gone to-morrow. To snatch a pleasure that seldom comes within reach always gives a zest to the enjoyment of it, and we have snatched three weeks of this, under the perpetual stimulus of imagining that each day would be the last. Indeed, it has been a return to the Glacial Age, when we must suppose there was skating all the year round. Probably that was why there were no wars, as far as we can ascertain, in that pacific epoch of history. Everyone was so intent on skating and avoiding collisions with the mammoths (who must rather have spoiled the ice) that he couldn't find enough superfluous energy to quarrel with his fellows. You have to lash yourself up, and be lashed up in order to quarrel, and you are too busy for that when there is skating.... Was it to the Glacial Age that the hymn referred, which to my childish ears ran like this:

That war shall be no more; And lusto, pression, crime Shall flee thy face before.

I never knew, nor cared to inquire, what "lusto" was, nor what "Thy face before" could mean. For faces usually were before, not behind.

While we have been enjoying these unusual rigours, Francis, "somewhere in Italy," at a place, as far as I can gather, which not so long ago used to be "somewhere in Austria," has not been enjoying the return of the Glacial Age at all. He has written, indeed, in a strain most unusual with him and as unlike as possible to his normal radiance of content. "On the calmer sort of day," he says, "the wind blows a hurricane, and on others two hurricanes. I can hear the wind whistling through my bones, whistling through them as it whistles through telegraph wires, and the cold eats them away, as when the frost gets into potatoes. Also, the work is duller than anything I have yet come across in this world, and I am doing nothing that the man in a gold-lace cap who stands about in the hall of an hotel and expects to be tipped because of his great glory, could not do quite as well as I. Besides, he would do it with much greater urbanity than I can scrape together, for it is hard to be urbane when you have an almost perpetual stomach-ache of the red-hot poker order. But in ten days now I go down to Rome, where I shall be for some weeks, and I shall sit in front of a fire or in the sun, if there is such a thing as the sun left in this ill-ordered universe, and see a doctor. I dislike the thought of that, because it always seems to me rather disgraceful to be ill. One wasn't intended to be ill.... But I daresay the doctor will tell me that I'm not, and it will be quite worth while hearing that. Anyhow, I shall hope to get across to the beloved island for a few days, before I return to this tooth-chattering table-land. This is too grousy and grumbly a letter to send off just as it is. Anyhow, I will keep it till to-morrow to see if I can't find anything more cheerful to tell you."

But there was nothing added, and I must simply wait for further news from him. It is impossible not to feel rather anxious, for the whole tenor of his letter, from which this is but an extract, is strangely unlike the Francis who extracted gaiety out of Gallipoli. There is, however, this to be said, that he has practically never known pain, in his serene imperturbable health, which, though I am not a Christian Scientist, I believe is largely due to the joyful serenity of his spiritual health, and that probably pain is far more intolerable to him than it would be to most people who have the ordinary mortal's share of that uncomfortable visitor. But a "red-hot poker" pain perpetually there does not sound a reassuring account, and I confess that I wait for his next letter with anxiety.

The ruthless submarine campaign has begun, and there is no use in blinking the fact that at present it constitutes a serious menace. Owing to the criminal folly of the late Government, their obstinate refusal to take any steps whatever with regard to the future, their happy-go-lucky and imperfect provision just for the needs of the day, without any foresight as to what the future enterprise of the enemy might contrive, we are, as usual, attempting to counter a blow after it has been struck. Pessimism and optimism succeed each other in alternate waves, and at one time we remind ourselves that there is not more than six weeks' supply of food in the country, and at another compare the infinitesimally small proportion of the tonnage that is sunk per week with that which arrives safely at its destination. Wild rumours fly about (all based on the best authority) concerning the number of submarines which are hunting the seas, only to be met by others, equally well attested, which tell us how many of those will hunt the seas no more. There appear to be rows and rows of them in Portsmouth Harbour; they line the quays. And instantly you are told that at the present rate of sinking going on among our merchant navy, we shall arrive at the very last grain of corn about the middle of May. For myself, I choose to believe all the optimistic reports, and turn a deaf ear, like the adder, to anything that rings with a sinister sound. Whatever be the truth of all these contradictory and reliable facts, it is quite outside my power to help or hinder, beyond making sure that my household does not exceed the weekly allowance of bread and meat that the Food Controller tells me is sufficient. If we are all going to starve by the middle of May, well, there it is! Starvation, I fancy, is an uncomfortable sort of death, and I would much sooner not suffer it, but it is quite outside my power to avert it. Frankly, also, I do not believe it in the smallest degree. Pessimistic acquaintances prove down to the hilt that it will be so, and not knowing anything about the subject, I am absolutely unable to find the slightest flaw in their depressing conclusions. They seem to me based on sound premises, which are quite unshakeable, and to be logically arrived at. But if you ask whether I believe in the inevitable fate that is going to overtake us, why, I do not. It simply doesn't seem in the least likely.

In addition to this development of enemy submarine warfare (for our discomfort), there have been developments on the Western front (we hope for theirs). The English lines have pushed forward on both sides of the Ancre, to find that the Germans, anticipating the great spring offensive, which appears to be one of the few certain things in the unconjecturable unfolding of the war, have given ground without fighting. In consequence there has ensued a pause while our lines of communication have been brought up to the new front across the devastated and tortured terrain which for so many months has been torn up by the hail of exploding shells. And for that, as for everything else that happens, we find authoritative and contradictory reasons. Some say that the Germans could not hold it, and take this advance to be the first step in the great push which is to break and shatter them; others with long faces and longer tongues explain that this strategic retreat has checkmated our plans for the great push. But be this as it may (I verily believe that I am the only person in London who has not been taken into the confidence of our Army Council), all are agreed that the bell has sounded for the final round of the fight, except a few prudent folk who bid us prepare at once for the spring campaign of 1918 (though we are all going to be starved in 1917).

The frost came to an end, and a thaw more bitter and more congealing to the blood and the vital forces set in with cold and dispiriting airs from the South-East. For a week we paid in mud and darkness and fog for the days of exhilarating weather, and I suppose the Toxophilites took possession of the skating rink again. And then came one of those miracle days, that occasionally occur in February or March, a moulted feather from the breast of the bird of spring, circling high in the air before, with descending rustle of downward wings, it settled on the earth....

I had gone down into the country for a couple of nights, arriving at the house where I was to stay at the close of one of those chilly dim-lit February days, after a traverse of miry roads between sodden hedgerows off which the wind blew the drops of condensed mists that gathered there, and it seemed doubtful whether the moisture would not be turned to icicles before morning. I had a streaming cold, and it seemed quite in accordance with the existing "scheme of things entire" that the motor (open of course) should break down on the steep ascent, and demand half an hour's tinkering before it would move again. Eventually I arrived, only to find that my hostess had gone to bed that afternoon with influenza, having telegraphed too late to stop me, and that the two other guests were not coming till next day.

Now I am no foe, on principle, to a solitary evening. There is a great deal to be said for dining quite alone, with a book propped up against the candlestick, a rapid repast, some small necessary task (or more book) to while away an hour or two in a useful or pleasant manner, and the sense of virtue which accompanies an early retirement to bed. But all this has to be anticipated, if not arranged, and I found a very different programme. I dined in a stately manner, and dish after dish (anyone who dines alone never wants more than two things to eat) was presented to my notice. At the conclusion of this repast, which would have been quite delicious had there only been somebody to enjoy it with me, or even if all sense of taste had not been utterly obliterated by catarrh, I was conducted to the most palatial room that I know in any English house, and shut in with the evening paper, a roaring fire, half a dozen of the finest Reynolds and Romneys in the world sailing about and smiling on the walls, and the news that my hostess was far from well, but hoped I had everything I wanted. As a matter of fact I had nothing I wanted, because I wanted somebody to talk to, though I had the most sumptuous milieu of things that I didn't want. Reynolds and Romney and a grand piano and an array of books and a box of cigars were of no earthly use to me just then, because I wanted to be with something alive, and no achievement in mere material could take the place of a living thing. I would humbly have asked the footman who brought me my coffee-cup, or the butler who so generously filled it for me to stop and talk, or play cards, or do anything they enjoyed doing, if I had thought that there was the smallest chance of their consenting. But I saw from their set formal faces that they would only have thought me mad, and I supposed that the reputation for sanity should not be thrown away unless there was something to be gained from the hazard. And where was the use of going to bed at half-past nine?

The most hopeful object in the room was the fire, for it had some semblance of real life about it. True, it was only a make-believe: that roaring energy was really no more than a destructive process. But it glowed and coruscated; the light of its consuming logs leaped on the walls in jovial defiance of this sombre and solitary evening, it blazed forth a challenge against the depressing elements of wet and cold. It was elemental itself, and though it was destructive, it was yet the source of all life as well as its end. It warmed and comforted; to sit near its genial warmth was a make-believe of basking in the sun to those who had groped through an endless autumn and winter of dark days. The sunshine that had made the trees put forth the branches that were now burning on the hearth was stored in them, and was being released again in warmth and flame. It was but bottled sunshine, so to speak, but there was evidence in it that there once had been sunshine, and that encouraged the hope that one day there would be sunshine again.

Quite suddenly I became aware that some huge subtle change had taken place. It was not that my dinner and the fire had warmed and comforted me, but it came from outside. Something was happening there, though it never occurred to me to guess what it was. But I pushed back my chair from the imitation of summer that sparkled on the hearth, drew back the curtain from the window that opened on to the terrace, and stepped out. And then I knew what it was, for spring had come.

The rain had ceased, the clouds that had blanketed the sky two hours before had been pushed and packed away into a low bank in the West, and a crescent moon was swung high in the mid-heaven. And whether it was that by miraculous dispensation my cold, which for days had inhibited the powers of sense and taste, stood away from me for a moment, or whether certain smells are perceived, not by the clumsy superficial apparatus of material sense, but by some inward recognition, I drank in that odour which is among the most significant things that can be conveyed to the mortal sense, the smell of the damp fruitful earth touched once again with the eternal spell of life. You can often smell damp earth on summer mornings or after summer rain, when it is coupled with the odour of green leaves or flowers, or on an autumn morning, when there is infused into it the stale sharp scent of decaying foliage, but only once or twice in the year, and that when the first feather from the breast of spring falls to the ground, can you experience that thrill of promise that speaks not of what is, but of what is coming. It is just damp earth, but earth which holds in suspense that which makes the sap stream out to the uttermost finger-tips of the trees, and burst in squibs of green. Not growth itself, but the potentiality of growth is there. The earth says, "Behold, I make all things new!" and the germs of life, the seeds and the bulbs, and all that is waiting for spring, strain upwards and put forth the green spears that pierce the soil. But earth, young everlasting Mother Earth, must first issue her invitation; says she, "I am ready," and lies open to the renewal of life....

I hope that however long I happen to inhabit this delightful planet, I shall never outlive that secret call of spring. When you are young it calls to you more physically, and you go out into the moonlit night, or out into the dark, while the rain drips on you, and somehow you make yourself one with it, digging with your fingers into the earth, or clinging to a wet tree-bough in some blind yearning for communion with the life that tingles through the world. But when you are older, you do not, I hope, become in the least wiser, if by wisdom is implied the loss of that exquisite knowledge of the call of spring. You have learned that: it is yours, it has grown into your bones, and it is impossible to experience as new what you already possess. You act the play no longer; it is for you to sit and watch it, and the test of your freedom from fatigued senility, your certificate to that effect, will lie in the fact that you will observe with no less rapture than you once enjoyed. You stand a little apart, you must watch it now, not take active part in it. But you will have learned the lesson of spring and the lesson of life very badly if you turn your back on it. For the moment you turn your back on it, or yawn in your stall when that entrancing drama of unconscious youth is played in front of you, whether the actors are the moon and the dripping shrubs and the smell of damp earth, or a boy and a girl making love in a flowery lane or in a backyard, you declare yourself old. If the upspringing of life, the tremulous time, evokes no thrill in you, the best place (and probably the most comfortable) for you is the grave. On the other side of the grave there may be a faint possibility of your becoming young again (which, after all, is the only thing it is worth while being), but on this side of the grave you don't seem able to manage it. God forbid that on this side of the grave you should become a grizzly kitten, and continue dancing about and playing with the blind-cord long after you ought to have learned better, but playing with the blind-cord is one of the least important methods of manifesting youth....

I was recalled from the terrace by decorous clinkings within, and went indoors to find the butler depositing a further tray of syphons and spirits on the table, and wishing to know at what time I wished to be called. On which, taking this as a hint that before I was called, I certainly had to go to bed (else how could I be called?), I went upstairs, and letting the night of spring pour into my room, put off into clear shallow tides of sleep, grounding sometimes, and once more being conscious of the night wind stirring about my room, and sliding off again into calm and sunlit waters. Often sleep and consciousness were mixed up together; I was aware of the window curtains swaying in the draught while I lay in a back-water of calm, and then simultaneously, so it seemed, it was not this mature and middle-aged I who lay there, but myself twenty-five years ago, eager and expectant and flushed with the authentic call of spring. By some dim dream-like double-consciousness I could observe the young man who lay in my place; I knew how the young fool felt, and envied him a little, and then utterly ceased to envy him, just because I had been that, and had sucked the honey out of what he felt, and had digested it and made it mine. It was part of me: where was the profit in asking for or wanting what I had got?

There we lay, he and I, while the night wheeled round the earth, which was not sleeping, but was alert and awake. Some barrier that the past years thought they had set up between us was utterly battered down by those stirrings of spring, and all night I lay side by side with the boy that I had been. He whispered to me his surmises and his desires, as he conceived them in the wonder of spring nights, when he lay awake for the sheer excitement of being alive and of having the world in front of him. He wound himself more and more closely to me, nudging me with his elbow to drive into me the urgency of his schemes and dreams, and I recognized the reality of them. How closely he clung! How insistent was his demand that I should see with his eyes, and listen with his ears, and write with his hand. And, fool though he was, and little as I respected him, I could not help having a sort of tenderness for him and his youth and his eagerness and his ignorance.

"I want so awfully," he repeated. "Surely if I want a thing enough I shall get it. Isn't that so?"

"Yes; that is usually the case," said I.

"Well, I want as much as I can want," he said. "And yet, if you are what I shall be (and I feel that is so), you haven't got it yet. Why is that?"

"Perhaps you aren't wanting enough," said I. "To get it, would you give up everything else, would you live, if necessary, in squalor and friendlessness? Would you put up with complete failure, as the world counts failure?"

He drew a little away from me; his tense arm got slack and heavy.

"But there's no question of failure," he said. "If I get it, that means success."

"But it's a question of whether you will eagerly suffer anything that can happen sooner than relinquish your idea. Can you cling to your idea, whatever happens?"

He was silent a moment.

"I don't know," he said.

"That means you aren't wanting enough," said I. "And you don't take trouble enough. You never do."

"I wonder! Is that why you haven't got all I want?"

"Probably. One of the reasons, at any rate. Another is that we are meant to fail. That's what we are here for. Just to go on failing, and go on trying again."

"Oh, how awfully sad! But I don't believe it."

"It's true. But it's also true that you have to go on acting as if you didn't believe it. You will get nothing done, if you believe it when you're young."

"And do you believe it now?" he asked.

"Rather not. But it's true."

He left me and moved away to the window.

"It's the first night of spring," he said. "I must go and run through the night. Why don't you come too?"

"Because you can do it for me."

"Good-night then," he said, and jumped out of the window.

All the next morning spring vibrated in the air; the bulbs in the garden-beds felt the advent of the tremulous time, and pushed up little erect horns of vigorous close-packed leaf, and the great downs beyond the garden were already flushed with the vivid green of new growth, that embroidered itself among the grey faded autumn grass. A blackbird fluted in the thicket, a thrush ran twinkle-footed on to the lawn, and round the house-eaves in the ivy sparrows pulled about straws and dead leaves, practising for nesting-time; and the scent, oh, the scent of the moist earth! In these few hours the whole aspect of the world was changed, the stagnation of winter was gone, and though cold and frost might come back again, life was on the move; the great tide had begun to flow, that should presently flood the earth with blossom and bird-song. Never, even in the days when first the wand of spring was waved before my enchanted eyes, have I known its spell so rapturously working, nor felt a sweeter compulsion in its touch, which makes old men dream dreams and middle-aged men see visions so that all for an hour or two open the leaves of the rose-scented manuscript again, and hear once more the intoxicating music, and read with renewed eyes the rhapsody that is recited at the opening of the high mass of youth. The years may be dropping their snowflakes onto our heads, and the plough of time making long furrows on our faces, but never perhaps till the day when the silver bowl is broken, and the spirit goes to God Who gave it, must we fail to feel the thrill and immortal youth of the first hours of spring-time. And who knows whether all that this divine moment wakes in us here may not be but the faint echo, heard by half-awakened ears, the dim reflection, seen in a glass darkly of the everlasting spring which shall dawn on us then?

MARCH, 1917

Never has there been a March so compounded of squalls and snows and unseasonable inclemencies. Verily I believe that my Lobgesang of that spring day in February was maliciously transmitted to the powers of the air, and, so far from being pleased with my distinguished approval, they merely said: "Very well; we will see what else we can do, if you like our arrangements so much." Indeed, it looks like that, for we all know how the powers of Nature (the unpleasant variety of them) seem to concentrate themselves on the fact of some harmless individual giving a picnic, or other outdoor festivity, for which sun and fine weather is the indispensable basis. But now in a few days I shall defy them, for I do not believe that their jurisdiction extends to Italy.

Italy: yes, I said Italy, for at last an opportunity and a cause have presented themselves, and I am going out there "at the end of this month, D.V." (as the clergyman said), "or early in April, anyhow." Rome is the first objective, and then (or I am much mistaken) there will be an interval of Alatri, and then Rome again and Alatri again: a sumptuous sandwich. How I have longed for something of the sort in these two years and a half of insular northern existence I cannot hope to convey. Perhaps at last I have reached that point of wanting which ensures fulfilment, but though I am interested in fantastic psychology, I don't really care how the fulfilment came now that it has come.

I have had no word from Francis since his letter last month from the Italian front, announcing his departure for Rome. He mentioned that he hoped to go to Alatri, and since he did not give me his address in Rome, I telegraphed to the island, announcing my advent at the end of March or early in April. Rather to my surprise I got the following answer from Alatri:

"Was meaning to write. Come out end of March if possible. Shall be here."

For no very clear reason this somewhat perturbed me. There was no cause for perturbation, if one examined the grounds of disquietude, for if he was ill he would surely have told me so before. Far the more probable interpretation was that he had already forgotten about his discomforts and his very depressed letter, and was snatching a few rapturous days now and then from Rome, and spending them on the island. He might foresee that he could do this again at the end of the month, and wanted me to come then, because he would be back at the front in April. That all held water, whereas the conjecture that he was ill did not. But though I told myself this a good many times, I did not completely trust my rendering, and his silence both before and after this telegram was rather inexplicable. My reasonable self told me that there was no shadow of cause for anxiety, but something inside me that observed from a more intimate spy-hole than that of reason was not quite satisfied. However, as the days of March went by and the time for my departure got really within focus, this instinctive and unreasonable questioning grew less insistent, and finally, as if it had been a canary that annoyed me by its chatter, I put, so to speak, the green baize of reason quite over it and silenced it. Soon I shall be sitting on the pergola, where the shadows of the vine-leaves dance on the paving-stones, telling Francis how yet another of my famous presentiments had been added the list of failures.

And, indeed, there were plenty of other things to think about. Bellona, goddess of war, has come out of her winter reverie, where, with her mantle round her mouth, she has lain with steadfast eyes unclosed, waiting her time. All these last months she has but moved a drowsy hand, just sparring, but now she has sprung up and cast her mantle from her mouth, and yelled to her attendant spirits "Wake! for winter is gone and spring is here!" And, day by day, fresh news has come of larger movements and the stir of greater forces. In Mesopotamia an advance began late in February, and gathering volume, like an avalanche rushing down a snow-clad cliff, it thundered on with ever-increasing velocity till one morning we heard that the Baghdad city was reached and fell into the hands of the British expedition. And still it rolls on with its broad path swept clean behind it....

Simultaneously the advance on the French front has continued, though without anything approaching a battle, as battles are reckoned nowadays. The Germans have been unable to hold their line, and retreating (I am sorry to say) in a masterly manner, have given us hundreds of square miles of territory. The ridge of Bapaume, which held out against the Somme offensive of last summer, has fallen into our hands; so, too, has Peronne. True to the highest and noblest precepts of Kultur, the enemy in their retreat have poisoned wells, have smashed up all houses and cottages with their contents, down to mirrors and chairs; have slashed to pieces the plants and trees in gardens, in vineyards and orchards; have destroyed by fire and bomb all that was destructible, and have, of course, taken with them women and girls. The movement has been on a very large scale, and the strategists who stay at home have been very busy over telling us what it all means, and the "best authority" has been very plentifully invoked. The optimist has been informed that the enemy have literally been blown out of their trenches, and tells us that a headlong retreat that will not stop till it reaches the Rhine has begun, while the pessimist sees in the movement only a strategical retreat which will shorten the German line, and enable the enemy both to send reinforcements to other fronts, and establish himself with ever greater security on what is known as the "Hindenburg Line." The retreat, in fact, according to the pessimist (and in this the published German accounts agree with him) is a great German success, which has rendered ineffective all the Allies' preparations for a spring offensive. According to the optimist, we have taken, the French and we, some three hundred square miles of territory, some strongly fortified German positions, at a minimum of cost. Out of all this welter of conflicting opinion two incontestable facts emerge, the one that the enemy was unable to hold their line, the other that their retreat has cost them very little in men, and nothing at all in guns.

In the midst of the excitement in the West has come a prodigious happening from Russia. For several days there had been rumours of riots and risings in Petrograd, but no authentic news came through till one morning we woke to find that a revolution had taken place, that the Tzar had abdicated for himself and the Tzarevitch, and that already a National Government had been established, which was speedily recognized by the Ambassadors of the various Powers. At one blow all the pro-German party in Russia, which had for its centre the ministers and intriguers surrounding the Imperial Family, had been turned out by the revolutionists, and the work that began with the murder of Rasputin at the end of December had been carried to completion. The Army and the Navy had declared for the new National Government, and the work of the National Government after the extirpation of German influence was to be the united effort of the Russian people to bring the war to a victorious close. The thing was done before we in the West knew any more than muttered rumours told us; it came to birth full-grown, as Athene was born from the head of Zeus. There are a thousand difficulties and dangers ahead, for the entire government of a huge people, involving the downfall of autocracy, cannot be changed as you change a suit of clothes, but the great thing has been accomplished, and at the head of affairs in Russia to-day are not the Imperial marionettes bobbing and gesticulating on their German wires, but those who represent the people. A thousand obscure issues are involved in the movement: we do not know for certain yet whether the Grand Duke Michael is Tzar of all the Russias, or the Grand Duke Nicholas the head of the Russian armies, or whether the whole family of Romanoffs have peeled off and thrown aside like an apple-paring; what is certain is that some form of national government has taken the place of a Germanized autocracy. How stable that will prove itself, and whether it will be able to set the derelict steam-roller at work again and start it on its way remains to be seen. For myself, I shout with the optimists, but certainly, if the crisis is over and there actually is now in power a firm and national Government, capable of directing the destinies of the country, it will have been the most wonderful revolution that ever happened.

And then, even earlier than I had dared to hope, for I had not expected to get away before the last week in March, came that blessed moment, when one night at Waterloo Station the guard's whistle sounded, and we slid off down the steel ribands to Southampton. In itself, to any who has the least touch of the travelling or gipsy mind, to start on a long journey, to cross the sea, to go out of one country and into another where men think different thoughts and speak a different language, is one of the most real and essential refreshments of life, even when he leaves behind him peace and entertainment and content. For two years and a half, if you except those little niggardly journeys that are scarce worth while getting into the train for, I had lived without once properly moving, and, oh, the rapture of knowing that when I got out of this train, it was to get on to a boat, and when I got out of the boat (barring the exit entailed by a mine or a submarine), it would be to get into another train, and yet another train, and at the Italian frontier another train yet, all moving southwards. Then once more there would be a boat, and after that the garden at Alatri, and the stone-pine and Francis. Even had I been credibly informed by the angel Gabriel or some such unimpeachable authority that the chances were two to one that the Southampton boat would be torpedoed, I really believe I should have gone, and taken the other chance in the hope of getting safely across and, for the present, leaving England (which I love) and all the friends whom I love also, firmly and irrevocably behind. I wanted (as the doctors say) a change, not of climate only, but of everything else that makes up life, people and things and moral atmosphere and occupations. I was aware that there were some thousands of people then in London who wanted the same thing and could not get it, and I am afraid that that added a certain edge to ecstasy. To get away from the people I knew and from the nation to which I belonged was the very pith of this remission. A few hours ago, too, I had been hunting the columns of newspapers and watching the ticking tape to get the very last possible pieces of information about all the events of which I have just given the summary, and now part and parcel of my delight was to think that for many hours to come I should not see a tape or a newspaper. The war had been levelled at me, at point-blank range; for two years and a half I had never been certain that the very next moment some new report would not be fired at me (and, indeed, I intentionally drew such fire upon myself); but now I had got out of that London newspaper office, and was flying through the dark night southwards. Here in England everything was soaked in the associations of war (though the most we had seen of it was two or three futile Zeppelins), but in Alatri, which I had never known except in conditions of peace and serenity, its detonation and the smoke of its burning would surely be but a drowsy peal of thunder, a mist on the horizon, instead of that all-encompassing fog out of which leaped the flash of explosions. I wanted desperately, selfishly, unpatriotically, to get out of it all for a bit, and Alatri, in intervals of Rome, beckoned like the promised land. I am aware that a Latin poet tells us that a change of climate obtained by a sea-voyage does not alter a man's mind, but I felt convinced he was mistaken.

Throughout that delightful journey my expectations mounted. First came the windy quay at Southampton, the stealing out into the night with shuttered portholes, and in the early morning the arrival at Havre. Then for a moment I almost thought that some ghastly practical joke had been played on us passengers, and that we had put back again into a British port, so Anglicized and khakied did the town appear. But no such unseemly jest had been played, and that night I slept in Paris, and woke to find a chilly fog over that lucent city, which again sent qualms of apprehension through me, for fear that by some cantrip trick this might be London again, and my fancied journey but a dream. But the dream every hour proved itself real, for again I was in the train that started from the Gare de Lyon, and not from my bedroom or the top of the Eiffel Tower, as would have been the wont of dreams, and in due time there was Aix-les-Bains with its white poplars and silvery lake, and the long pull upwards to Modane, and the great hill-side through which the tunnel went, with wreaths of snow still large on its northern slopes, and when we came out of the darkness again, we had passed into the "land of lands." The mountain valleys were still grey with winter, but it was Italy; and presently, as we sped clanking downwards, the chestnut trees were in leaf, and the petroleum tins stood on the rails of wooden balconies with carnations already in bud, and on the train was a risotto for lunch and a dry and abominable piece of veal, which, insignificant in themselves, were like some signal that indicated Italy. The dry veal and the risotto and the budding chestnut trees and the unwearied beneficence of the sun were all signals of the Beloved: tokens of the presence that, after so long, I was beginning to realize again. And then the great hopeless station of Turin happened, where nobody can ever find the place he wants, and trains steal out from the platform where he has left them, and hide themselves again, guarded by imperious officials in cocked hats at subtly-concealed side tracks, escaping the notice, like prudent burglars, of intending travellers. There were shrill altercations and immediate reconcilements, and polite salutings, and finally the knowledge that all was well, and I found my hat and my coat precisely where I had left them, as in some conjuring trick, in the identical compartment (though it and the train had moved elsewhere), and again we slid southwards. There were olive-trees now, green in a calm air, and grey when the wind struck them, and little ruined castles stuck on the tops of inaccessible hills, and houses painted pink, and stone-walled vineyards, and dust that came in through the windows, but it was the beloved Italian dust. Then came the sea again on the right-hand side of the train (only here was the magic of the Mediterranean), and the stifle of innumerable tunnels, punctuated with glimpses of Portofino, swimming in its hump-backed way out into the tideless sea, and the huddle of roofs at Rapallo, and the bridge at Zoagli, and the empty sands at Sestri, and the blue-jackets crowding the platform at Spezzia. All this was real; a dream, though the reality was as ecstatic as a dream, could not have produced those memories in their exact order and their accurate sequence, and when, next morning, I awoke somewhere near Rome, I thought that the years of war-time were the nightmare, and this golden morning which shone on fragments of ancient aqueducts and knuckled fig-trees was but the resumption of what had been before the unquiet night possessed and held me. Here again, as three years ago, was the serene wash of sun and southern air, untroubled and real and permanent. I could open my mouth and draw in my breath. Dimly I remembered the fogs of the north, and almost as dimly the fact that Italy was at war too, striving to put her foot on that damnable centipede that had emerged from Central Europe to bite and to sting and to claw all that resented its wrigglings and prevented its poisoning of the world.

I found that after four days in Rome I was free (except for a wallet of papers which required attention), to go wherever I pleased for the inside of a week, and you may judge where next the train took me. That morning I had sent to Francis news of my escape from Rome (how desirous "an escape from Rome" would have sounded a month ago), and the same evening, across the flames of the sunset, I saw the peaks and capes of the island, shaped like a harp lying on its back, grow from dimmest outline of dream-shape into distinctness again. There on the left was the lower horn of it, plunged into the sea; then came the inward curve, sloping downwards to the grey cluster of the town, where the fingers of the player would be, and it swelled upwards again into the larger horn which formed the top of it. Never for more than a moment, I think, did my eyes leave some part of that exquisite shape. How often in the lower horn of it had Francis and I sat perched on that little platform by the gilded statue of Our Lady, looking landwards across the blue plain of sea towards the streamer of smoke from the truncated volcano, or to the coastland northwards, where the port was whitely strung like a line of pearls along the shore of the bay. Just below the other horn is the divinest bathing-place that the world holds; on a rock a hundred yards from the shore there is a little cave, curtained by seaweed, and in it is a tin box where shall be found two cigarettes and matches to match. Those were to have been lit and smoked within two months of their concealment there, and that date has now long been buried beneath the three years' landslide of war. The matches will certainly be a mildewed fricassée of wood pulp and phosphorus, the cigarettes an almost more ignoble glue of paper and tobacco; but to-morrow morning I swear that Francis and I will swim there, and unearth the remains of the serene days before the war, and recapture the feel that there was in the world before the Prussian centipede went forth on his doomed errand. Francis, I know, will hate swimming so early in the year as this, for he is a midsummer bather; but surely one who has been through the horrors of Gallipoli and earned the V.C. in France will not absolutely refuse to go through this ordeal by water for the sake of the recovery of the peace-cache. If it is possible to feel certain of anything, it is that to-morrow morning, whatever the weather, two futile Englishmen, as happy as they are silly, will swim out to the rock below the higher horn of the harp, and verify the existence of a tin box.

The shores grew clearer, and at last through a thin low-lying haze of sunset we passed into the clear shadow of the island, and the houses and pier of the Marina on which Teresa stood to welcome the return of her promesso, who was stricken to death as he was clasped in her outstretched arms, defined themselves with the engraved sharpness of evening in the south. As we entered this zone of liquid twilight, I could see the fishing boats drawn up on the beach, the open arch of the funicular station, the crowd on the quay awaiting the mild daily excitement of the boat from the mainland, and at the sight of all those things, unchanged and peaceful, I had for the moment more strongly than ever the sense that there had been no war and there was no war, and that I should presently step back into the days that preceded those nightmare years. In a moment now I shall be able to distinguish a tall white-flannelled figure, who will wave his hat as he catches sight of me in the bow of the first disembarking boat that comes from the steamer, and he will move forward to the steps, and he will say "Hullo!" and I shall say "Hullo!" as I step ashore to find that to-day is linked on without break to the summer of 1914 when I was here last. I may have been to Naples for a night, or did I only leave by the morning boat to-day? I really do not know....

And then I saw that Francis was not among the little group of islanders on the quay. Probably he had not got the telegram I sent from Rome to-day, for the postmaster of Alatri is no friend to telegrams, and, as I have often thought, keeps one in his desk for a day or two, in order to teach you not to be in such a hurry. And when he thinks you have learned your lesson, he has it delivered, two or three days afterwards, among your letters. But in spite of this perfectly adequate method of accounting for the undoubted fact that Francis had not come to meet the boat, I felt an inward resurgence of the uneasiness with which I had received his request that I should come out in March if possible, and not wait till April. I had accounted for that at the time by a reasonable explanation, and I could account, also reasonably, for his absence. But I could now, as the funicular railway drew us up like a bucket from the well, into the higher sunlit slopes of the island, account for both by one and the same explanation. He was ill when last he wrote....

I found a porter in the Piazza, who shouldered my luggage, and I went on ahead, striving to convince myself, with quite decent success, that I was being afraid "even where no fear was," and yielded myself up, though I walked briskly in order to put an end to my ominous surmises, to the enchantment of the hour, and of the sense that I really had arrived again. The little huddled town, with the Piazza from the doors and arches of which any moment the chorus of light-opera might issue with short skirts and "catchy" chorus, was quite unchanged, save that at this hour of sunset it used always to be guttural with Teutonic tourists, and a place to be avoided by the genuine islander. Unchanged, too, was the narrow street, where two could scarcely walk abreast, that led out to the hill-side on which the villa was perched; there was the narrow slit of blue overhead, and the vegetable shop and the tobacconist's and the trattoria with the smell of spilt wine issuing from it and the lean cat blinking at the doorway. The same children apparently ran up against one's legs, the tailor was putting up his shutters, and two Americans, as always, were buying picture-postcards at the stationer's. The path dipped downwards, ran level between olive groves and villas, made a right turn and a left turn, and there above me was the flight of steps that led steeply up by the whitewashed wall of the garden, and above the wall, still catching the last rays of the sun, was the stone-pine, and behind it, greyish-white and green-shuttered, the house, where in a minute now Francis would welcome me. My bedroom shutters I saw were open, and blankets were being aired on the window-sill, and this looked as if I was expected.

I opened the garden gate, pulling at the string that lifted the latch inside, and a great wave of the scent of wallflower and freesias poured over me, warm from their day-long sunning underneath the southern wall, and intoxicatingly sweet. And even as I inhaled the first breath of it, a woman came out of the dining-room door that opens on to the terrace. She was dressed in the uniform of a hospital nurse.

"We were expecting you," she said, speaking with that precise utterance of foreigners. "I hope you have had a good journey."

The scent of the freesias suddenly sickened me.

"What is the matter?" I asked. "What has happened?"

"He wants to tell you himself," she said.

"He? And is it serious?"

She looked at me with that calm, untroubled sympathy that is the reward of those who give up their lives to mitigate suffering.

"Yes," she said. "It is very serious. Will you go up and see him now?"

"Surely. Where is he?"

"In his bedroom. The third door along the passage. Ah, I forgot; of course you know."

He was lying much propped up in bed, opposite the open window, and as he turned towards the door at my entry, I thought that this must be some wicked, inexplicable joke, so radiant and young and normal was his face.

"Ah, that's splendid!" he said. "It was ripping getting your telegram this morning."

"Francis, what's the matter?" I asked. "Why are you in bed? Why is there a nurse here?"

He had not let go of my hand, and now he clasped it more closely.

"I'll tell you the end first," he said; "quickly; just in one word. I'm dying. I can't live more than a few weeks."

There was a moment's silence, not prolonged, but at the end of it I felt that I had known this for years.

"Will you hear all about it from the beginning?" he asked. "Or would it bore you?"

He was so perfectly normal that there was really nothing left but to be normal too, or it may be that a great shock stuns your emotional faculties for a while. But I do not think it was that with me now. It was Francis's intense serenity and happiness that infected and enveloped me.

"I can't tell whether it would bore me or not," I said, "until I hear it."

"Then make yourself comfortable for about half an hour," he said. "But stop me when you like."

"It was very soon after I came out to Italy," he said, "that I kept getting attacks of the most infernal pain. Then they ceased to be attacks; at least, they attacked all the time. It was about then, when it was worst, that I wrote you a pig of a letter. Wasn't it?"

"It was rather."

"Yes. I was pretty bad in other ways as well, which I'll tell you of afterwards. At present this is just physical. I had an awful dread all the time in my mind what this might be, though I kept saying it was indigestion. Then I went down to Rome and saw Schiavetti, the doctor. And I can't describe to you—though it may sound odd—what a relief it was to know for certain that my fears were correct. The worst I had feared was true, but anyhow, the fear, the apprehension were gone. When you are up against a thing, you may dislike it very much, but you don't fear the possibility of it any longer. It's there; and nothing, even the worst, is as bad as suspense. I've got cancer."