Front matter (continued 3)

The guns had died down altogether, and the rumble from the road, though almost continuous was dulled—so that William could hear his wife's uneven breathing and the stealthy whisper of the trees. He sat holding Griselda's hand and staring into the blackness, a man dazed and confounded; who yesterday was happy lover and self-respecting citizen and to-day had suffered stripes, been slave and fugitive, learned the evil wrought on his wife.

Thinking on it afterwards, he wondered that he had closed an eye; yet he had sat in the darkness but a very few minutes when, swiftly and without warning, he fell into a heavy sleep.

CHAPTER XI

He woke with the blaze of the eastern sun in his eyes, and on the first sensation of bewilderment at finding his bed was moss, came a rush of remembrance and with it self-reproach—he had slept while Griselda suffered. He knelt and bent over her as she lay still asleep, huddled on her right side; her face was flushed, her lips were cracked, and she was breathing in heavy little snorts. As he knelt and gazed the thunder of yesterday broke out in the distance, and Griselda stirred and woke moaning.

Her first cry was for water, and in the insistence of her thirst she was oblivious of everything but her burning need to slake it; he broke cover and ran to the stream, some fifty yards away, soaked his handkerchief and made a tight cup of his hands. The cup was a failure, and the little that was left in it when he reached Griselda was spilled when she tried to drink; but the dripping handkerchief she sucked at eagerly and gave back for another soaking. He was about to break cover to wet it again when he caught sight first of one, then of half-a-dozen horsemen entering the valley by the gap; and shrank back, cowering, into the friendly shelter of the tree-trunks—sick with uncertainty as to whether or no they had seen him. He judged not when he saw them dismount and picket their horses; and having watched them long enough to see that they were making preparations for a meal, he turned and crept back to Griselda.

The terror of yesterday came down on her when she heard his whispered news. A moment before she had seemed incapable of movement, lain crumpled on her side and repulsed, with a feverish pettishness, his efforts to stir and raise her; now she clung to him and struggled to her feet, even pain forgotten in the passion for instant flight. So, holding together, they fled again: fled crawling, they knew not whither. Two instincts guided them and directed their stumbling footsteps: the instinct to leave far behind them the threat of the guns and the instinct to keep out of sight. Thus they held to the woods above the valley of silence, avoiding all paths that led out into the open; their direction, roughly, was southward—though they did not know it—and they dragged a mile, or even less, where a man in health might make five.

When they had gone some few hundred yards they struck the trickle of a hill-side rivulet on its way to join the stream in the valley. At the sound of its babble Griselda cried out and tried to hasten, and, when they came to it, slipped down till she could thrust her face into the water and drink like the sun-parched Israelites who marched with Gideon. They drank, they dabbled in it, bathed hands and feet, and Griselda washed her broken side—touching it gingerly and not daring to pull away the linen that the blood had caked to the flesh. After that William helped her to her feet and they dragged on further.

If they found water in abundance, they found but little to eat; and though Griselda made no complaint of hunger, as the hours went by it gnawed at her husband's vitals. At first their path lay chiefly through beechwoods bare of undergrowth, and they had been an hour or two on their way before they came to blackberry bushes. Upon these William fell, tearing his hands on the thorns by his eager stripping of the bushes; Griselda would hardly touch them, but he shovelled them into his mouth and ate long and voraciously. He had toiled much the day before and eaten little—a scanty breakfast and the scraps of bread and meat allotted by his captors at midday—and, shovel as he might, the berries were a poor substitute for the meal he craved and dreamed of. That was a meal which floated before the eye of his mind as phantom ham and eggs, phantom cuts from the joint, thick slabs of well-buttered bread; something solid that a man could set his teeth in and gnaw till his stomach was satisfied. He was ashamed of the way in which food and the longing for food possessed him—so that there were moments when the phantom joint was more present to his mind than Griselda or the fear of death itself.

To the phase of violent and savage hunger succeeded, with hours, a giddy dreaminess, the result of growing exhaustion. As the day wore on and exhaustion increased, his mind, like his body, refused to work connectedly; his feet often stumbled and he was incapable of consecutive thought. Once he found himself sitting with Griselda under a beech-tree, holding her fingers and considering how they had come there and why they had got to go on; and wandering off into vague recollection of the story of a knightly lover who had carried his mistress long miles through a forest in his arms. The details of the story escaped his memory and he sought for them with pettish insistence; with perhaps at the back of his mind some idea, born of brain-fag, that, did he but remember them, he could do the same service for Griselda.

He had soon lost all sense of direction; but the instinct to hide never left him, and once or twice, when the wood seemed to be opening out, he drew his wife back to the solitude under the trees. With the passing of the hours their rests by the way grew longer; Griselda was able to keep her feet for a few minutes only before she muttered or signed a request for another halt. Whereat William would lower her to the ground where she propped herself against a tree-trunk or lay huddled and silent with closed eyes.

At one such halt he fell suddenly and helplessly asleep; perhaps Griselda did the same, for though the sun was high when he sat him down the woods were heavy with blue dusk when she roused him by a tugging at his sleeve. She was craving again for water; her lips were cracked for the want of it. They rose and went blindly in search—halting every few minutes as much to strain their ears for the longed-for ripple as to give Griselda strength. More than once she was at failing point; so much so that he suggested she should lie down while he hunted further for a stream. She refused, trembling at the idea of being left alone—unreasonably, but perhaps wisely, since William, astray in the darkening woods, might well have had difficulty in finding his way to her again.

The dusk was more than dusk before they found what they sought; it was actual darkness of night descending to cover the earth. They had halted perforce more than once when Griselda could go no further; but always her thirst burned her, and she rose and struggled forward again. She was past speaking when they came on a clearing, and then on a stream that ran through it, of which they were only aware when they trod into the marshy ground at its brim. She drank heavily, lay inert and seemed to sleep.

Perhaps because he had slept for so long in the afternoon her husband was more wakeful; for hours he sat with his eyes wide and his chin propped on his hands. After nightfall had come silence from the guns and at first the only sounds were forest sounds—night-bird talk and the lapping of unseen water at his feet. Later Griselda was restless and became conversational, talking rapidly and brokenly in a delirium of pain and fever and paying no heed to his efforts to answer and calm her. Her mind, uncontrolled, had returned to a familiar channel; she was back in the world that had crumbled but yesterday, waging war as she understood it till she saw the hostages die. The Great Civil War that you fought with martyrdoms, with protests at meetings and hammers on plate-glass windows—he could hear she was back in the thick of it incoherently addressing an audience. Snatches of old-time denunciation—Asquith, McKenna, the sins of the Labour Party—and, emerging from a torrent of incomprehensibility, the names of the Leaders of the Movement. He listened, crouched in the darkness, a starving fugitive—who had seen men dismembered and done to death in a war that was not civil; and suddenly, crouched and starving in the darkness, he began to laugh out loud. He remembered—quite plainly he remembered—a letter written to the daily Press to point out with indignation that one of the Leaders of the Movement had been hurt in the ankle in the course of the Great Civil War.... He only laughed briefly; the echo of his own voice frightened him, and its cackle died swiftly away. In the grave black silence it sounded like a blasphemy, and he told himself excusingly that he had not been able to help it.

With rest and cessation of movement his brain worked more easily; and with the passing of his first savage hunger he was no longer preoccupied with the needs of his empty stomach. He considered the situation, dispassionately and curiously detached from it; deciding, with an odd lack of emotion, that to-morrow could not be as to-day. Whatever the need, Griselda could walk no further; he, for his part, was incapable of dragging her; when the light came they must just sit and wait. His mind refused to trouble itself with details of what would happen if they sat and waited too long. Looking back at that night it seemed to him that he was not able to feel very much; his capacity for emotion was exhausted, even as his body. When Griselda stirred or groaned he tried to shift her more comfortably, when she gasped for water he helped her to bend down and drink; but the power of imaginative terror had left him for the time being, and he no longer trembled and sickened at her suffering as he had done when she was first struck down.

He fell into a doze in the last hours of night, and when his eyes opened the sky was a pearly grey. He could see a wide stretch of it over the tree-tops; for at the spot to which they had wandered in the uncertainty of darkness the grouping of the trees was less close than it had been, and there was a suggestion of open space beyond them. Griselda lay sleeping or unconscious, with her knotted hair straying on her face; he smoothed it away as he knelt beside her, took her hand and called her by name. She gave no answer, and did not even stir when he kissed her. The power of imaginative terror had returned to him, and he asked himself whether she were dying? ... He knelt beside her for a few minutes, fondling her hand and whispering, imploring her to speak—and then, in a mingled curse and appeal, stretched his arms above his head towards heaven. The effort and emotion exhausted him; he collapsed both bodily and mentally, slipped back to the grass beside his wife and lay with his face to the ground.

What roused him was the sound of a man's voice near him; not words, but a grunt of surprise unmistakably human. He lifted his head and saw gazing at him from the opposite bank of the brook the man who had uttered the grunt. A man carrying a pail, very filthy and many days unshorn; with a peaked cap flattened on the back of his head, a dark muddied coat and loose trousers that had once been red. His face, for all its grime and its black sprouts of beard, was reassuring in its interest; what he said was gibberish to William's ears, but the sound of it kindly and inquiring, and, when William shook his head and pointed to his wife, he set down his unfilled pail on the grass and waded across the shallow stream. He looked at Griselda, touched her torpid hand gently and muttered more friendly gibberish; finishing by a pat on William's shoulder before he waded back to the further bank, filled his pail to the brim and walked away with it. He turned to fling back a last gesture of promise before he vanished among the trees, leaving William to stare after him, motionless and dumb, and waiting for something, he knew not what, to happen.

What happened, after an interval, was the reappearance of the pail-bearer, this time minus his pail, but accompanied, in its stead, by a comrade. The comrade was scarcely less filthy and similarly clad; the twain emerged from between the trees, splashed across the brook and exchanged rapid gibberish while they stood and looked down at Griselda. Finally, one of them, addressing himself to William, pointed to somewhere on the opposite bank and nodded with intent to encourage; whereupon the pair of them lifted Griselda, made a seat of their arms and carried her. William followed them, lurching from weakness as he walked; and after they had gone about a couple of hundred yards the little procession came out on to a highway where a hooded car, as dirty as its guardians, was drawn up at the side of the road.

On the floor of the car the two men placed Griselda, laying her down gently and arranging, with kind, dirty hands, some empty sacks as a makeshift couch and a coat as a makeshift pillow. That done, they signed to William to climb in beside his wife, and one of them, noticing his feebleness, lent a hand to him over the tailboard, while the other provided him with a hunk of bread and a large tin mug of red wine. His hunger returned with the taste of food, and he ate with a ravenous enjoyment, gulping down bread and wine together; before he had finished gulping the car had started and was rattling over the road, he knew not whither. Woods went by them and open spaces; they spanned rivers, climbed hills and descended again into valleys. Sometimes the roads were rough, and at the jolting of the car Griselda would whimper and cry out—whereat William would try to soothe her with assurance that the worst was over, they were safe and would soon be in comfort. He did not know if she understood; she never spoke coherently and hardly ever opened her eyes.

For the first wooded mile or two they had the road to themselves; after that they came across other traffic, the greater part of it heading in the same, mostly southerly, direction. It was varied traffic, mechanical, horse and foot: guns and other cars, some signed with the Geneva cross; now a cavalry patrol, now a dusty detachment of infantry; and, intermingled with soldier stragglers, little groups of non-military wayfarers, in carts and tramping afoot. All these grew more frequent as the miles went under them; so frequent as to hinder their progress, and finally, when they neared their destination, bring the pace of the car to a crawl.

Their destination—William never knew its name—was a white-walled village, whereof the one long street was crowded with the traffic of humanity; the same kind of traffic they had passed on the road, but thickened and impeded by much that was stationary in horses, in men and in vehicles. The car jolted half-way along the stone-paved street and came to a standstill in the company of three or four others; its guardians descended and one of them—the pail-bearer—looked over the tail and nodded in friendly-wise to William before he hurried away. There was a few minutes' wait, during which nothing personal happened—only the confused sound of voices, the confused sound of movement flowing incessantly, movement of feet, wheels and engines; and then the man who had nodded from the tail of the car came back, others with him—dirty soldiers like unto himself. One of these spoke to William, choosing his words with precision; and when he shook his head and answered, "I am English," there was talk and much gesticulation. (It struck him later that they took him for a Flemish-speaking Belgian and perhaps had tried him with a word or two of the language.) To the accompaniment of talk and gesticulation the tailboard of the car was let down and William, by sign, was invited to set foot on the ground; whereafter Griselda was also lifted out and laid by the roadside on a truss of hay which some one had procured for the purpose. There she lay for another ten minutes or so, unaware of her surroundings while the stream of humanity flowed by her—William, hunched beside her on the hay, wondering dumbly what would happen to them next. He knew himself among friends and was no longer afraid; but all initiative had left him, all power of action and idea. He had a dull hope that some one was bringing a doctor ... meanwhile he could do nothing but wait and obey, and when his good Samaritan, the filthy little soldier, came back and tapped him on the shoulder, he rose, passively responsive.

The man signed to him that they should lift Griselda between them; he obeyed with infinite difficulty, panting at the effort, and together they carried her some yards down the street to a cart that stood pulled up and waiting—a long, most un-English-looking country cart with a man perched in front and inside two women, many bundles, some ducks and a goat. One of the women was shrivelled and helpless with years; her head in a handkerchief and her gnarled fingers holding to her knees, she sat huddled against the protesting goat, a lump of bent, blear-eyed old age. Her companion in discomfort—possibly her daughter—was a stout, elderly peasant woman, the counterpart in petticoats of the grizzled-haired man who guided a solid grey farmhorse. She made room for Griselda, talking rapidly the while, in the straw at the bottom of the cart—thrusting ducks and bundles to one side of the vehicle with her knotted and energetic hands; perhaps she was striving to explain to William that it was impossible to accommodate another passenger and that he must follow on foot. She may have been friend or acquaintance of the dirty Samaritan, for, as the cart moved off at a foot's pace, she waved to him in friendly guise; the dirty Samaritan, for his part, clapping William on the back, pointing after the cart and showing his teeth in a final grin of encouragement. In the days that followed William often regretted that he had not known how to thank him for the bounty of his overflowing charity.

He walked after the cart as it lumbered through the village and out of it. Nourishment and the sense of relief had given back some of his strength; thus he was able, if with difficulty, to keep up with the plodding of the solid grey farmhorse—often brought to a standstill, moreover, by the traffic that cumbered the road. Sometimes the standstill was a long one, accompanied by confusion and shouting; there was a point where a stream of fugitives flowing southward met reinforcements hurrying north—and a flock of panic-stricken sheep, caught between the two, charged backwards and forwards, to the yells of their sweating drivers and the anger of a captain of cavalry. At almost every cross-roads the stream was swollen by a fresh rivulet of fugitives—refugees human and animal; thus at such junctions the pace was slower and a halt frequently called for. When it came William dropped down with thankfulness; sometimes lying torpid till the cart moved on, sometimes satisfying hunger and quenching thirst with fruit from the regiments of orchard trees that lined the sides of the road.

The stout peasant woman was more kindly than a hard face promised. She was careful and troubled about many things—the old wreck of humanity, her live-stock, the safety of herself and her bundles—and she had lost her home and her livelihood; but she found time to think of Griselda and do what she could for her. She arranged her straw pillow, wiped the dust from her face, and from time to time raised her that she might hold a cup to her lips. Somewhere about midday she attended to the general needs; the cart was halted and she doled out a ration all round—hunks of bread chopped from a yard of loaf and portions of a half-liquid cheese. William was not forgotten, and shared with the rest of the party; they ate with the cart drawn up in a field a little way from the road; the horse grazing, the goat tethered to one of the wheels, the peasants and William sitting on the ground and Griselda lying in her straw. William climbed up beside her and coaxed a little wine between her lips; she had swallowed hardly a mouthful when she turned her head aside and pushed the mug feebly away. He was not sure if she responded when he spoke to her and stroked her hand; she muttered once or twice but it was only a sound to his ears. For a moment—perhaps it was the raw, red wine that had mounted to his head—there came over him a sort of irritation at her long and persistent silence. She must know what it meant to see her suffer and have no word; he felt she might have tried to rouse herself to the extent of one little smile of comfort.

The afternoon was as the morning—a weary journeying whereof he knew not the goal. The grey horse plodded, the women sat hunched amid their bundles, and William tramped on his blistered feet at the tail of the creaking cart; when he looked ahead the road, as far as his eye could reach, was dotted with fugitive tramps and fugitive vehicles—and when he looked back there were others following in their tracks. For the most part, however, he looked neither back nor forward but trudged with his eyes on the ground through the whitened grass at the roadside. No rain had fallen for many days and the road was deep in dust; it hung heavy in the air and when a car went by it rose in clouds like smoke. The trees were thick with it, and every man's garments were powdered by its uniform grey.

More than once their way led them through a village—which might have been always the same village, so alike was its aspect and its doings. Always some of the houses would be closed and some in the act of emptying; in each and all was the same scene of miserable haste, of loading carts, of families, scared and burdened, setting out on their flight to the southward. It was a scene that grew so familiar to William that, staggering with the weight of his own weariness, he hardly turned his head to watch it; it affected him only by the halts it caused, by the need of manoeuvring through a crowd. Cut off from his fellows by the lack of intelligible speech, he trudged on like an animal at the tail of the cart, ignorant as an animal of what the next hours might bring him.

There were moments when it seemed to him that he was asleep and would surely waken; when he put out his hand to touch something and feel that it resisted and was real—a dusty axle, a gate, a wall, the dusty bark of a fruit-tree. And there were other moments when the now was real, and he seemed to have newly wakened from the dream of a world impossible—of streets and stations and meals that came regularly, of life that was decent and reasonable and orderly, with men like unto himself.... Late in the afternoon he started and lifted his head in sudden trembling recognition of a sound reminiscent, and because reminiscent beloved—the near-by whistle of a passing engine, the near-by clank of a train. The note of the whistle, the sight of a long line of trucks—but a field's-breadth away behind a fence—brought a rush of hope to his heart and a rush of tears to his eyes. His soul thrilled with the promise of them; after the vagabond horror of the last few days they stood for decency, for civilization, for a means of escape from hell. His eyes followed the train with longing as it snorted over a level meadow and wound out of sight behind a hill—followed it with longing, with something that was almost love.

A mile or two further they passed a level crossing and soon after came again on a village. It was larger than any they had so far traversed, and in ordinary times must have been of a prosperous importance; now many of its windows were bolted and shuttered, denoting the flight of inhabitants whom others were preparing to follow. The sun was red in the west when they reached its outskirts.

It was when they were about halfway along the wide paved street that there came a loud cry from the cart—so loud and so sudden that the driver pulled at his horse.

The cry had come from the hard-faced peasant woman who was leaning over Griselda. The life in William stood still as he saw her face, and she had to beckon to him twice before he moved to climb into the cart; she gave him a hand as he climbed and half jerked him over the bundles.... Griselda had died very quietly in the straw at the bottom of the cart.

CHAPTER XII

Some one, he thought, kept him back from the body while they lifted it down from the cart; there was a stir and bustle and three or four people gathered round, hiding it for a moment from his sight. One, he remembered, had the goat by the horns and was trying to drag it aside; the goat was refractory, kicked and bleated and made itself the centre of a scuffle. Afterwards he pushed through them all and stood looking down at his wife.

As he looked at her—limp, with glazed eyes and fallen jaw—there swam before his memory a pitiful vision of the dear Griselda he had married. He saw her—this huddle of rags and dirt—in her wedding garments, fussed and dainty, with her bouquet tied with suffragette ribbons. He remembered the expression, self-conscious and flushing, wherewith she had given her hand that he might place the ring on her finger; and how, when they were first alone as man and wife, he had taken the hand that wore the ring and kissed it till she drew it away. The crowd in the little house at Balham, the handshakes, the well-wishing faces—they were all so close and so present that they gave the lie to this dead woman dropped by the roadside. He looked down stupidly while the bystanders whispered and stared.

He did not know how long he sat beside her, nursing a dead hand in his own; but he knew he hated and shrank from the people around him—a group that kept forming and moving away and whispering as it gazed at himself and the body of his wife. It was a changing little crowd, never more than a dozen or so; men and women who stopped in their passing by, muttered questions, heard low answers, looked curious or pitying and moved on. He hated its inquisitiveness, he shrank from its pity, desiring to be alone with his dead. That he might not see its curious and pitying faces he pressed a hand over his eyes.

After some time—either minutes or hours—came a hand on his shoulder that stayed till he moved and looked up. He who had touched him wore the garb of a priest; was stout, not over-well washed or brushed, but kindly of manner and countenance. He spoke while the crowd stared and listened; William moved his head irritably, muttered, "I can't understand what you say," and would have covered his eyes again if he had not heard an English voice beside him. It was a woman who had caught his words and now pushed through the bystanders: a tall young woman in tweed coat and skirt, who had stayed to look over the shoulders of the shifting group.

"You are English?" she said. "What has happened?" He stared up at her for a moment, amazed at the sound of his own tongue.

"My wife is dead," he told her; and, hearing himself say the words aloud, he burst into a passion of sobbing. Through it he choked incoherent appeals to "take them away—for God's sake to let him be alone." He turned his face to the wall and wept, long and brokenly, as one who has nothing more to hope; and for a time they left him till the paroxysm should wear itself out.

When he turned his head at last the crowd that he hated had scattered; perhaps the priest and the Englishwoman had persuaded it away, for they were the only two near him. The Englishwoman, with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her tweed coat, was standing at his shoulder, waiting till he was ready to listen.

"Will you come with me?" she asked. "It will be better." Her tone, though very gentle, was authoritative and brought him instinctively to his feet; but once there he hesitated to follow her and stammered that he could not leave——

"It will only be for a moment. The priest—he will see—he will bring her."

She put a hand on his arm and led him unresisting down the street—a hundred yards or so, past the church and into a house standing back from the road in a garden. He knew afterwards that it was the village presbytery and that the little woman who moved aside from the garden gate to let them pass in was the priest's elderly housekeeper. His companion spoke to her in French, no doubt to explain their arrival; and the old woman trotted ahead to the house, opened a door to the right and ushered them into a sitting-room that smelt of unopened window. It was a ceremonious as well as a stuffy little room; there were good books lying on a table in the centre and stiff chairs ranged against the walls. Having offered them a couple of the stiff-backed chairs the housekeeper withdrew to her vigil at the garden gate; William sat where she had placed him, but the Englishwoman walked to the window.

"I wish I could help you," she said with her back towards him. "I know nothing seems any good at such a time, but if there is anything you want——"

She was giving him more than she knew by her presence, by speaking in their common tongue; the sound of the familiar, comprehensible English was as the breaking of an iron barrier between him and the rest of mankind. She was talking to him—talking, not mouthing and making strange noises. He was back in the world where you spoke and your fellows understood you, where you were human—intelligent, intelligible—not an animal guided by nod and beck or driven to labour by blows. Comprehensible speech meant not only sympathy, but the long-denied power of complaint—and the pent and swollen misery of his last few days was relieved by a torrent of words. She stood and listened while he sobbed and talked incoherently. There was small plan or sequence about his tale—he went backwards and forwards in it, started afresh and left gaps; but she realized that he was telling it not for her benefit, but for his own relief, let him pour himself out and refrained from interruption even when his talk was most entangled. She took it as a good sign when at last he paused and looked up to ask of her what it all meant, what had happened, and where he was now?

She told him, as briefly as might be, what Heinz had told him—of a world in upheaval and nations at grips with each other; the same story if not from the same point of view. She added that he was now on French soil (which he had not guessed) some miles from the Belgian frontier, and that it would be possible, she hoped, to make the journey onward by rail. The French were falling back and the district had been warned of the likelihood of enemy occupation; she supposed that the needs of the army had absorbed the local rolling-stock, for there had been no passenger train on their small branch line that day. The authorities, however, had promised one to Paris in the morning and she, herself, was waiting in the hope of obtaining a seat. She hesitated and broke off at the sound of shuffling feet in the passage outside—slow feet and uncertain, as of men who carried a burden. William heard the sound likewise and, guessing its meaning, would have risen and gone to the door; but she kept him to his seat with a hand on his shoulder and he obeyed the touch because, at the moment, it was easier to obey than to resist. He sat and trembled, twisting his fingers, while the shuffling died away into momentary silence, followed by trampling and the closing of a door as the burden-bearers went out.... Then silence again, a much longer silence, till the stout priest entered the room, moving quietly, as men are accustomed to move in the neighbourhood of those whom no sound can arouse or disturb. He spoke softly at some length to the Englishwoman, who, having listened and nodded, turned to William and told him that if he would like to go to her——

He followed the priest down the passage to a room at the back of the house; wherein, on a table, and covered by a sheet, they had laid the body of his wife. There were long candles burning around the table and on either side of her a little metal vase filled with roses. The priest stood aside in the doorway for William to enter, bowed his head in a prayer and went out; when he had gone William crept to the table, turned the sheet from her face and looked down—on Griselda dowered with a grave dignity that had never been hers while she lived.... Some one had washed away the stains of the road and arranged the disordered rags that had once been a dress; the hair was smoothed out of its three-day tangle and her poor hands crossed on her breast.

He stayed with her till dusk had thickened into darkness, sometimes standing at her side to look down on her face, sometimes bowed to his knees by the burden of the years without her. When the priest came back to rouse him he was crouched in the attitude of prayer; but his prayer (if such it might be called) was only the eternal petition of the bereaved, "Would God that I had died instead!"

The village sexton was of those who had already fled at the rumour of the oncoming German; so that night the Englishwoman, who had acquired in a west-country garden some skill in the handling of a spade, took turns with a bent old peasant in digging a grave for Griselda. When daylight failed them they dug by the shine of a lantern; the Englishwoman was not over-imaginative or nervous but she found the job an eerie one—the more so since the square-walled cemetery, like French graveyards in general, lay well away from its village—and she was glad when the moment came to pay off her companion and return to her quarters in the little Hôtel de la Gare. Other formalities in connection with the funeral there were none—for the reason that the maire and his clerk, who in ordinary seasons would have devoted much time and stationery to the subject, had departed that evening, bearing with them the archives of the commune.

William, for his part, spent the night on the priest's horsehair sofa, next door to the room where the candles burned around the body of his wife. From weariness of the flesh he dozed now and again; but for the greater part of the night lay wakeful and staring at darkness. There were moments when the horsehair sofa shook beneath his sobbing; and there were others when it seemed to him impossible that a horror so brutal and so undeserved should have mangled his harmless life. At one such moment he crept from his couch, felt his way across the room and into the passage—possessed by some wild and unconfessed thought that he might not find Griselda on the sheeted table with her hands crossed over her breast. The door, when he tried it, was locked and the key withdrawn—fastened by the priest or his housekeeper before they retired for the night; but when he knelt down to peer through the keyhole he could see two of the tall church candles and the vase with its bunch of white roses that some one had placed near her head. He crept back, knowing that she lay there indeed, and sat down to stare at the darkness till it softened from black into grey.

The morning was still flushed in the east when the old woman came to him with bread and a bowl of coffee; the coffee was hot, aromatic and sweet, after the fashion of that which had once been brewed by Madame Peys—and, remembering breakfasts not eaten alone, his tears dropped into it thickly. While he ate, sitting humped on the edge of the horsehair sofa, the street outside was already astir with traffic, nomad and military; those fugitives who had rested in the village for the night were once more taking to the road, other fugitives from the neighbourhood were dribbling in to join them, troops were moving up and to-day was even as yesterday. When he had finished his bread and coffee the old woman signed him to the kitchen sink, where she furnished him with soap and a towel; and, the process of washing completed, she produced a clothes-brush, led him out into the garden and attacked with vigour the mud and stain on his garments. He was standing passively while she scoured at his shoulders when the Englishwoman came up, and, looking anywhere except at his face, put his wife's rings into his hands. There were two of them—the new gold band, with a month's wear behind it, and the little engagement half-hoop—and at sight of them the housekeeper ceased to scour and crept away with her brush. He looked down at them lying in his palm till the tears veiled them, and knotted them slowly and tightly in a corner of his handkerchief. His companion cleared her throat and, still looking anywhere except at his face, told him that the train to Paris—very probably the last one to run—would be starting that morning.

"Yes?" he said vaguely, conscious that she expected a reply.

She explained that what she had meant was, the funeral must take place immediately.... Chiefly for the sake of breaking the silence she supposed that his wife was not a Roman Catholic?

He answered "No," staring at a row of hollyhocks and a butterfly that quivered above them.

She asked, she explained, because in that case the priest would have read the proper service. As it was ... She hoped he would understand that they had done their best to—be reverent. But there were difficulties—so many of the tradesmen were leaving or had left already. Carpenters and so on.... He listened stupidly with his eyes on the quivering butterfly, dumbly rebellious at the cruelty that tore him even from the body—and it only dawned on him what she meant by her stumbling hints when she led him through the house to the front door where a cart stood waiting with the priest at the horse's head. It was a farm-cart, borrowed by the priest from a neighbour; and on the floor of it that which had been Griselda lay coffinless and wrapped in a sheet. There were roses scattered on the folds of the sheet and the old Frenchwoman was waiting at the gate with a shapeless little wreath of her own manufacture which she pressed into William's hand.

They set out, a funeral procession of three, which at other times would have drawn many curious glances; the priest leading the horse and William and the Englishwoman walking side by side at the rear of the cart. The cemetery lay outside the village, a half-mile or so from their starting-point, and they passed wayfarers enough on the road, of whom some bared their heads and crossed themselves, and others were too busy with their own sorrows to give even a thought to the dead. The gate of the graveyard was narrow and it was with difficulty that the cart was manoeuvred between its posts. At an ordinary funeral the hearse would have remained in the road; but this was no ordinary funeral nor ordinary day, and it was as well not to tempt the footsore fugitive by the sight of a vehicle unguarded. Accordingly, the cart was manoeuvred through the gate before the priest, William and the Englishwoman lifted out the body of Griselda and carried it to the grave in the corner. The bent-backed old labourer was sitting beside it on the mound that would shortly fill it; he rose when he saw them, leaning on his spade and bared his grey hairs to the dead.

The grave was shallow—but, shallow as it was, the body, being coffinless, was lowered with difficulty and the Englishwoman led William a little way aside that he might not watch while the priest and the peasant performed the last service Griselda would require of man; he understood what she meant and stood with his back to the group round the grave, staring at a granite tombstone bedizened with massive bead wreaths. When she touched him on the shoulder, as sign that he might turn, the priest was crossing himself at his prayers and the old man standing by the heap of new turned earth. He went to the edge of the grave, looked down at the crumpled sheet and then stupidly round at his neighbour. He said nothing, but she thought he was expecting something; so, as the priest still prayed with closed eyes in silence, she struggled with the racial shyness where things of the spirit are concerned and, swallowing her tears, spoke the funeral words for Griselda.

"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live..."

"Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord ... they rest from their labours."

"Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live ... He cometh up and is cut down..."

"Lord have mercy upon us!"

It was all she could remember; and when William had whispered Amen they left the old peasant to his work.

CHAPTER XIII

At the gate of the cemetery they parted from the priest, who had charged himself with the immediate return of the haycart which he had borrowed from a neighbouring farm; he shook hands with them, nodded kindly to the Englishwoman's thanks, climbed into the cart and drove off along the dusty road. They saw him no more and often wondered what became of him when the wave of Teutonic invasion swept over his parish and himself. Their own way lay in the opposite direction—first back to the village inn, where the Englishwoman picked up her bag and a package of provisions for the journey, and then on to the station to await the arrival of the train. William followed her incuriously, without question or comment; and when she broke silence to explain what they were doing he assented, speaking with an effort and hardly knowing to what he assented.

The train to Paris had been announced by the station authorities for an early hour in the morning, but morning dragged on and became afternoon before it put in an appearance. They waited through long and shadeless hours—till two o'clock and after—at the most insignificant of railway stations with a crowd of would-be passengers; a crowd that swelled as the hours crawled on until it flowed from the platform far along the line, and it seemed doubtful if any train, however capacious, could absorb its swarming multitude. It sat in families about the platform and camped and shifted as an untidy fringe to the track; it was querulous, weeping, apathetic—it was also, in patches, malodorous. At midday it picknicked, squalidly enough, out of bottles and bulging handkerchiefs, finding momentary distraction in the process; for the rest it had nothing to do but exchange its miseries, stare at the curve which the train must round, listen uneasily to the echo of artillery and assail the station-master with complaining queries whenever he dared to show his face. For the most part that hapless and harried official—whose subordinates had been reft from him by mobilization and who was only too conscious that his time-table was a snare and a mockery—lay low in his miniature office; whence he peered out now and again to make anxious estimate of the numbers that blackened and overflowed his platform. As time went on and the throng grew denser, he gave up his attempts to reconcile the extent of the crowd with the cubic capacity of a highly problematical train, and retiring to his sanctum, in despair and for good, locked the door on intrusion and complaint.

Whenever—as happened not once, but often—an engine was sighted rounding the curve to the northward, there was instant bustle and expectation on the part of the waiting multitude. Makeshift luggage was collected and clutched at, mothers screamed to their straying young families and herded them together in anxious preparation for the formidable struggle ahead; but not once but often the alarm was a false one, the preparations in vain, as the train sped by without halt. The first to run past was a Red Cross train with bandaged men showing at the windows; as it slid between the platforms the crowd buzzed its disappointment and then—with the exception of some few determined souls who vented their annoyance in raps on the station-master's door—settled down in dejection to continue its weary waiting. Another half-hour of sweltering impatience and again the mothers screamed and rounded up their families, with the same result as before; this time the relentless and undelaying train was packed, not with wounded soldiers, but with refugees from higher up the line—like unto themselves but more fortunate. It was packed to the doors and beyond the doors—since men were hanging on the footboards.

For many reasons William and his guardian avoided the platform where the crowd was thickest and sat under the hedge by the line. During the first hour or two of their weary sojourn she judged him past rousing and left him to his own thoughts; and he sat by her side with his hands hugging his knees and seemingly unconscious of her presence. Later, about midday, when she fed him from the store of provisions she had brought for the journey, she essayed to rouse him by telling him how she had come there and who she was. Her name was Haynes, Edith Haynes; she had been some weeks in the neighbourhood, staying in the country house of some distant French cousins. They had been warned, soon after hostilities broke out, that proximity to the frontier might be dangerous, but had been unable to leave owing to the illness of one of the family. Yesterday the invalid, partially recovered, had been got off with her mother in a car procured with difficulty; as it had other occupants and could not carry the whole party, she—Miss Haynes—had volunteered to remain behind and follow to Paris by rail. William listened, occasionally nodding to show that he listened; in a way he was grateful for her presence, but nothing seemed to matter ... and, seeing that it was as yet too early to help him to other thoughts, she left him again to his silence.

It was after two when a nearing train slowed down as it reached the station—slowed down and came to a standstill to a tumult of pushing and shouting. It was a train of more than ordinary dimensions—a couple of engines to an interminable line of third-class carriages and vans—but long as it was, it was none too long for the needs of the would-be passengers. Vans and carriages alike were already well stocked with humanity; but the other humanity on the platform, rendered desperate by its waiting, hurled itself at the doors and pressed and fought a way in. The sight was not pleasant—there was trampling, expostulation, threats. The angry, frightened crowd was past minding its manners, and at times the rush for the doors was carried on almost with savagery; women were buffeted—and buffeted back—and children swept away in the press. William and his friend—she was the sturdier as well as the taller of the two—clambered up the steps of a covered truck and were thrust through its opening by the weight of those pressing behind them. The truck, when they gained it, was close, evil-smelling and crowded; so crowded that many had to keep their feet for lack of the floor space to sit. When the struggle for places was over—and it was not over quickly—the train was packed end to end with sweating and exhausted travellers.

There followed a journey that to those who endured it seemed endless, a crawl punctuated with halts. The halts were lengthy as well as frequent; sometimes in sidings where refugees perforce gave place to troop trains, sometimes in junctions where they pulled up indefinitely at a platform and where worn-out officials could give no information as to when a fresh start would be made. The waits, wearisome as they were, were by far more endurable than the wretched stages in between; which were stages of sweating heat and smells, of stifling and cramped discomfort. On the platform, at least, it was possible to stretch and breathe; in the vans it was aching backs and bones and a foulness that thickened with the miles. Children wept and sickened as the hours crawled by and all through the darkness their crying was never stilled; as wretched little wailing or angry howl, it mingled always with the throb and clank of the train.

The delicate chill of morning was as nectar after the stench of the crowded night. By special mercy, just as dawn broke they drew up in a siding with fields to the right and left of them; neither William nor his friend was asleep when the train stopped, and, crawling over recumbent bodies on the floor of the van, they dropped down stiffly from their pen and stood breathing in the clean, cool wind. With their damp clothes sticking to their heated bodies, they sucked the air into their lungs—even William, blind with his misery, conscious of the calm loveliness of morning on stretches of green after the reek of the lantern-lit van. His companion, shuddering at the sight of her hands, went in search of water and discovered a tap on the platform; whereat William, in his turn, drank thirstily and soused hands and face before they settled down in a field at the side of the line. There, on the good green turf, they shared the last remnants of their package of food, some bread and an apple apiece. for all the hours they had spent on the train they had accomplished only some half of the distance to Paris; and as refreshment rooms—closed or cleared out by the troops—could no longer be counted on to supply the needs of the traveller, they had little prospect of further sustenance till they reached their journey's end. They ate their small meal sitting as far as they deemed safe from the train and the crowd it had disgorged—ate it in silence, for William had not yet found speech. His world, for the time being, was formless and void, and, as such, incapable of expression.

All day they travelled, as they had travelled on the day before: in jolted crowds, in squalor, in heat, to the sound of the misery of children. They ached, they wearied, they sweated, they thirsted—they halted and lurched on again; too wearied even for impatience, they endured without complaint until even the children were past crying. The sun was low on the horizon when William, drowsily stupid, raised his head from his knees as his friend touched him on the arm. He looked up stupidly—the train was plodding through forest; he had ceased to hope for the journey's end and sat for the most part with his head on his knees in a dull, half-dozing resignation.

"If we don't stop again," she told him, "we ought to be in fairly soon. I think that's Chantilly we've run through. We're only half an hour from Paris—in ordinary times, that's to say."

The times were not ordinary and they took more than half an hour—very much more—to get over the twenty odd miles. They slowed to a crawl for the last stretch of the journey, and outside Paris, between Paris and St. Denis, they halted and waited till well after night had fallen. But at long last the interminable wait was ended and they creaked and crept forward to a platform of the Gare du Nord—where William for the first time set foot in the capital of France. As he did so he remembered a fact that had hitherto slipped his memory—that Heinz and his companions, when they took his pocket-book, had left him without a penny. So far the loss of his purse had not troubled him; he had lived as the beasts live and been cared for even as they; but Paris was civilization where money would be needed for a lodging. He had no resource but his companion, and, as they drifted along with the slow-moving mass on the platform, he appealed perforce to her.

"I'm afraid," he stammered, "I've got no money. They took it away from me—the Germans."

She reassured him briskly with: "Don't worry about that—I've got plenty. I'll settle the hotel and the journey—you can pay me when we get back to London. Stick close to me, whatever you do; if I once lose you in this crowd I shall never find you again."

He replied with a mutter of thanks, and, obeying her injunction to stick close, was crushed, in her wake, past the barrier at the end of the platform, past the heated officials who were striving to deal with the needs of the influx of refugees, and finally out of the station. There, in the open space before the Gare du Nord, he stepped back suddenly from the world of nightmare into the world as he had always known it. The wide, lit street in front of the station was filled with a moving and everyday crowd, in his ears were the buzz of the taxi and the warning clang of the tram. The change from the horrible to normal surroundings—from brutality and foulness to the order of a great town—was so sudden and complete that it took away his breath like a swift plunge into cold water; and as the life of the city enwrapped him and claimed him for its own, for one crazy moment it seemed to him that the last few days were impossible. Their fantastic cruelty was something that could not have been ... and he almost looked round for Griselda.

CHAPTER XIV

Edith Haynes knew her way about Paris; and the little hotel in a quiet side-street, where a taxi deposited herself and her companion, was one that had sheltered her in days less eventful and strenuous, and where Madame, in consequence, was compassionate and not contemptuous at being asked to shelter two late arrivals in the last stage of dirt and untidiness. William, before he sat down to eat, had exchanged his torn garments for the suit of an absent son, called up on the first day of mobilization; and for all his ache and dull stupor of sorrow, he knew something of the blessing of bodily relief when he washed in hot water and was clean. He had had no real sleep since the night before Griselda died; now the need for it came down on him like a heavy cloud and, great as was also his need for food, he could hardly keep his eyes open through supper. When he woke next morning it was nearing midday and he had more than slept the clock round.

He pressed the bell as he had been told to do when he woke; and with the coffee and rolls that arrived at the summons came a pencilled note from his mentor. She had gone out to look up her relatives, and also to inquire about the time and manner of the journey from Paris to London; she wrote that she might not be back at the hotel for some hours, but the envelope that enclosed her communication enclosed likewise a tactfully proffered loan for the immediate needs of her fellow-traveller's wardrobe. But for the reminder it would have hardly occurred to him that his wardrobe was in need of renewal; he had grown so accustomed in the last long days to being ordered, guided, or driven that he had lost the habit of directing his own doings. As it was, he breakfasted, dressed himself again in the suit of Madame's absent son, and was instructed by Madame herself where to find a barber for an overdue shave and an outfitter capable of English. Thither he went, made his purchases mechanically and returned to the hotel with his new suit of black in a parcel. It seemed to him, as he walked the Paris streets, as he bought and paid and spoke of things that did not matter, that his sense of loss and his longing for Griselda was stronger even than in the first hours after her death. It was accentuated by his contact with the civilized, the normal; by the sights and sounds of the everyday world to which Griselda belonged. She had had no place in the strange French village where she died, no place in the misery and dirt of the crowded truck; but here where life, to all seeming, was as usual, where the streets were like enough to English streets to produce, after country solitude and the savagery of bloodshed, the illusion of dear familiarity: here she should have walked with her arm in his. Here she would have chatted, have gazed in shop windows and bargained ... and long years faced him with their deadly never as he went his way without her.

Later, when he had returned to the hotel and changed into his new black suit, a wild fit of useless rage came over him—and alone in his third-floor bedroom he cursed the devils who had killed his wife, the devils who had made the war. Under his breath, lest he should be heard in the corridor, he called down the vengeance of God on their evil heads, breaking inevitably, as his own store of invective gave out into lyrical reminiscence of that Biblical lore with which his mother had imbued him through Sunday after Sunday of his childhood; believing in the God whose existence he had usually ignored (and often doubted) because of his need of an avenger and a present help in his trouble. In that moment the God whom he sought—and it may be found—was the Lord God of Hosts, the Mighty One of Israel, Who was wont to strike the wicked and spare not; and the desire of his shaken and rebellious soul was even as the desire of him who sang out his hatred by the alien waters of Babylon. The hotel chambermaid put an end to his whispered prayer and anathema by tapping on the door to inform him that lunch was waiting on the table.

Edith Haynes, when she returned in the late afternoon with news that the journey could be made on the following day by way of Dieppe and Folkestone, found him clad in his new-bought mourning for Griselda and poring over English newspapers. His eyes were still haggard and moved her to pity, but she took it as a good sign that his stupor of grief had passed and that he had begun (as his first question told her) to feel a need for more information which might bridge the month's gap in his knowledge of the outer world. She gave him, with such detail as she had in her possession, the story of the outbreak of war and the causes thereof: and from her he learned for the first time of the ultimatum to Servia, and the tension thereby created; of the political consequences of the invasion of Belgium, and the feverish days of hesitation in England that had ended, on the Fourth of August, with the formal declaration of war. He listened, sometimes puzzled but always intent, from time to time putting a question that revealed his blank ignorance of the network of European politics; to which she replied as clearly as she could, showing him maps and talking on in the hope of distracting him from the thoughts behind his haggard eyes. By degrees she gleaned, from his hesitating queries and disconnected comments, some understanding not only of his profound ignorance of the forces that had brought about the war, but of the upheaval of his mind and soul which was the direct and inevitable consequence of the loss of his former faith. Once or twice as they talked he quoted her scraps and jerks of anti-militarist propaganda—from Faraday, from orators of the Trades Union Congress, from a speech of Philip Snowden's in Parliament urging the reduction of the Navy—and she saw that he was trying to justify to himself his attitude and creed of yesterday. In the midst of a quotation from Faraday on the general strike as a certain preventive of war, he broke off suddenly to appeal to her with: "Every one thought he was right. He seemed so sure. I didn't see how he could be wrong!"

She noticed that, wherever their talk might stray, he came back, time and again, to his central fact—that the blankly impossible had happened and the jest was a brutal truth. That, in the beginning, was all his mind had laid hold of; now, the first stage of amazement over, he was groping instinctively, and perhaps unconsciously, after rights and wrongs of quarrel, and striving to understand how the impossible had come into existence. Edith Haynes had not passed her life in the atmosphere of Internationalism, and would have been more than human had she been an impartial guide to him where the causes of war were concerned—just as he would have been more than human had he been capable of impartial guidance. What he lacked in patriotism he made up in personal suffering; he hated the German because he had been robbed of his wife, and it added but little to the fire of his hatred to learn of faith broken with Belgium. If he listened intently when she told of it, if he pored over newspaper paragraphs dealing with German cruelty to the conquered, it was because they fitted with his mood and justified the loathing in his soul.

It was his persistent poring over English newspapers that brought him in the end the salvation of a definite purpose. An article in The Daily Chronicle—some days old—described the beginning of the recruiting campaign for the raising of Kitchener's Army; he read it as he read everything else that explained or described the war. At first the article was nothing but news to him, a mere statement of facts; but as he read further a meaning flamed into the news. Bereft as he was of guidance, his mind swinging rudderless in chaos, he was waiting unconsciously for the man or the impulse that could seize on his helpless emotion and give purpose and direction to his life; thus the journalist's vigorous appeal to the nation's patriotism was driven home by the force of his own experience and became an appeal to himself. The writer had illustrated his argument in the obvious manner, by reference to the condition of invaded Belgium and the suffering of her people under the hand and heel of the enemy; he wrote of women outraged, of hostages killed, of cities laid waste, and of houses fired with intention. He was spurred by indignation, by pity and a natural patriotism, and had laid on his colours—to all but William—with a vivid and forcible pen. To William, as he read, the result seemed lame and pitiful, an inadequate babbling of the living horrors that had burned themselves into his soul; but for all its weakness—perhaps because of it—the article gave him the impulse for which he had been waiting in torment. It may have been his very sense of the inadequacy with which it described what he had known that set his imagination to work, that drove home its purport and made of it a lead to his blind and whirling emotions. He read and re-read while he quivered with impatience at its failure; if the man had seen what he had seen, if the man had lost what he had lost, he could not have argued so tamely. His pen would have been dipped in fire; he would have written so that all men reading him would have rushed to arms. The paper dropped from his hands to the table and he sat staring at a picture of his own making—of a crowd bitter and determined, moved by the tale of wrongdoing to a righteous and terrible wrath. He saw it setting forth to execute justice and avenge innocent blood ... and himself one of it, spurring and urging it on. So he first visualized himself as a soldier—an unscientific combatant of the Homeric pattern, but nevertheless a soldier. The vision thrilled and inspired him, and out of the deep waters of his impotent misery he clutched at the knowledge that he could act, resent, resist; that, ceasing to suffer as the slave suffers, he could give back blow for blow.

There was enough of the old leaven in him to bring him up suddenly, and with something like a round turn, as he realized that the act of striking blow for blow against the German would involve the further act of enlistment and the wearing of the King's uniform. His first mental vision of his warrior crowd had been vague as well as Homeric; he had only seen faces uplifted by courage, not the khaki and buttons below them—seeing himself rather as an avenger of Griselda than as a soldier of the British Empire. But it was only for a moment that he shied Like a nervous horse at the bogey of the "hired assassin." The prophets from whom he had learned his one-time contempt for the soldier were no longer prophets to him, and his conversion was the more thorough from his ingrained and extremist conviction that the opposite of wrong must be right. Conversion, in the sense in which the word is employed by the religious, describes most clearly the process through which he had passed: conviction of ignorance, the burden of Christian; a sense of blind longing and humiliated confusion—and now, at the end, light flashed on him suddenly, salvation figured by the sword.... It was, so to speak, but a partial salvation. He had lost his capacity for absolute faith, for the rapture that comes of infallibility; but he was of all men the last who could live without guidance, and his new creed had at least this merit—it was supported by his own experience. Its articles, had he formulated them, would have been negative rather than assertive—I have ceased to believe in the old, rather than I believe in the new; but it gave him that working hypothesis without which Life to him was impossible.

When he took his seat, next morning, in the train bound for Dieppe, his mind was made up—made up fiercely and definitely—on his future course of action; and as a result something that was by comparison peace had succeeded to the chaos and dazed rebellion of his first few hours of loss. His companion noticed the change in his manner and bearing; it was not that he seemed more resigned, but that he had ceased to drift—his eyes were as haggard as yesterday, but not so vague and purposeless. So far during their brief but close acquaintance she had treated him perforce as she would have treated a child—providing for his bodily and mental needs and giving him kindly orders; now, ignorant and obedient as he still was in the matter of foreign travel, he was once more a reasonable being. He was still for the most part sunk in his own thoughts, but not helplessly and endlessly so; he was capable of being roused and at intervals he roused himself. Once when they halted she was struck by the intentness with which he gazed at a trainload of soldiers in khaki—new come from England and moving up from Havre to the front. They crossed at a wayside station, and the two trains stood side by side for some minutes while William craned out of the window to stare at the brown young faces that were thrust from the opposite carriages. The sight moved him, if not in the same fashion as it moved his companion; he felt no tightening of the throat and no pride in the men themselves. What kept his head at the window till the train moved off was chiefly the thought that soon he would be even as these sunbrowned men of war, the personal desire to know what manner of men they were, how they lived and moved and had their daily military being. Hitherto a soldier of the home-grown variety had been to him nothing more definite than an impression of uniform, khaki and occasionally red; now, with the eyes of his newborn interest, he became aware of detail that had formerly escaped him, and compared him in figure, in face and garment, with Heinz and Heinz's companions. These hot-faced lads smoking pipes and calling jests would be his own comrades in days to come; thus he studied their features, their dress, their manner, as a small boy scans and studies the bearing of his future schoolfellows. If he did not thrill at the sight of young men about to die, he sent with them (remembering Griselda) his strong desire for their great and terrible victory.

Those were the days just before Mons was fought, when France (and others with her) was hopeful of a war that would end at her frontier and beyond it; when, whatever her wiser soldiers may have known, her people in general had no premonition of the coming retreat of the Allied Armies and the coming peril of the capital. There were still some ignorant and optimistic days to live before France as a whole would be stunned by the curt official admission that the enemy was well within her borders—since his battle-line stretched across the country from the Vosges mountains to the Somme. As for railway communication on the western lines, the rush of returning tourists that had followed on the outbreak of war was over, and the rush from Paris that began with the new threat of Kluck's advance was as yet a thing of the future. Thus William and his companion, though they travelled slowly and with lengthy halts, travelled in comparative comfort—finding in unpunctuality and a measure of overcrowding but little to grumble at after their journey by cattle-truck to Paris.

Rouen kept them waiting an hour or two, and there was another long, purposeless halt on the boat in Dieppe Harbour; so that it was nigh upon sundown when they slipped into the Channel and headed north-westward for Folkestone. The day, very calm with the stillness of perfect summer, was even as that day but a month ago when William and his little bride had steamed away from Dover, sitting deck-chair to deck-chair, touching hands when they thought no one saw them. And remembering the fading of those other white cliffs, William's heart cried out against God.

It was well past midnight when they slid into Folkestone Harbour where again there were long delays; so long that morning was red over France when the train drew away from the pier. It was during the two-hour journey to Charing Cross that William first spoke to his friend of his purpose of becoming a soldier; they were not by themselves in the carriage, but the other occupants nodded off to sleep soon after the train had left Folkestone, and for all practical purposes he and Edith Haynes were alone. She was surprised by the announcement, more surprised perhaps than she should have been—less on account of his previous record than because his appearance and manner were so utterly unmilitary. The British soldier of pre-war days was a type, a man of a class apart; it was a type and class to which William Tully was far from approximating, and she found it impossible to picture his essentially civilian countenance between a khaki collar and cap. Her surprise must have shown in her manner, for he began to explain in jerks.

"It seems the only thing to do," he said. "You can't sit down and let it go on; when you've seen what I've seen, you've got to do what you can. And they want men—they're asking for them. The papers say they want all the men they can get ... it's got to be stopped—that devilry—somehow or another ... and there doesn't seem any other way..."

His voice tailed off and he turned his eyes away—to the flying fields where the dew was still wet and the shadows still long upon the grass. When, a few minutes later, he told her suddenly, "It was just as pretty as this—where it happened," she knew that he was mentally transforming the peace and greenery of a Kentish landscape into the background of such an imitation of hell as he had lived through in the Forest of Arden.

It was not till they were well on the London side of Tonbridge that he turned again to his companion. Something that she had said in appreciation of his decision—a kindly meant phrase that commended his courage—had seemingly been held in his mind.

"I don't want you to think it's courage, and I don't want you to think I'm making any sacrifice—I'm not. I'm enlisting because I want to enlist—and there isn't anything else for me to do. Everything's gone now—I haven't anything to go back to. No duties or ... I don't see how you can call it a sacrifice."

He swallowed and halted again and she could only nod in silence. She knew enough of him by this time to know that what he said was truth, having learned in the course of their days of acquaintanceship that he had lost even more than his newly made wife, his hopes of a home and children. In very deed he had nothing to go back to, neither home nor daily occupation; in losing his cocksure, infallible creed he had lost the interests wherewith his days had been filled. His meetings, his busy committees, the whole paraphernalia of his agitator's life, were with yesterday's seven thousand years. Even if Griselda had not died he, knowing what he knew, would have had to begin life again.

Near Chislehurst, reminded of the nearness of London, he put an apologetic question.

"You'll think me very ignorant," he said, "but you see I've never had anything to do with soldiers. Have you any idea how you set about joining the Army?"

She explained that he had only to offer himself, and turned up an English newspaper bought the day before at Dieppe to point out a paragraph giving the situation of the various London recruiting stations. He studied it with interest and showed her that the nearest to Charing Cross was a station on the Horse Guards Parade. She had not understood that his intention was to enlist at the moment of arrival in London, and suggested a delay of a day or two for rest if not for reflection: the life before him was a hard one physically, and he had been passing through a week of exhaustion both physical and mental. To her arguments he shook his head, stubbornly impatient; he was so urgent to translate his new convictions into immediate action that it was with difficulty she prevailed on him to delay at Charing Cross for breakfast, and only manoeuvred him into the hotel by assuring him—whether rightly or wrongly she knew not—that it was as yet far too early in the day for any recruiting official to be at his post. On that assurance he yielded, and they took their last meal together.

She had contracted an odd species of affection for the little bereft and destitute man whom chance had thrown on her hands in his hour of need; it was difficult for her to rid herself of a sense of responsibility for him and his doings: and as they disposed of their eggs and bacon she found herself wondering, with tears in her throat, how he could come through the discipline and hardship for which his soft life had done so little to prepare him. It was pathetic and even ridiculous to think of him as a soldier, this wisp of a town-bred talker; to think of him marching and bearing arms in defence of such as herself—who topped him by a good two inches and had treated him almost as a child. She coaxed him to eat a good breakfast, dawdling over her own that he should sit and rest the longer; and when he suddenly remembered to ask her how much he owed her for the expenses of the last few days, she gave him, with the hastily invented amount, her address in Somerset and made him promise to write and keep her informed of his doings. He, on his part, shrinking instinctively from those who had shared his errors in the old life, clung to her as the one person who understood the new world into which he had so lately entered—understood it because she was part of it; thus neither was unmoved when they shook hands as friends and parted at the door of the hotel. She entered a taxi for Paddington and he turned his face to Whitehall and the tent on the Horse Guards Parade.

As he walked down Whitehall his heart thudded loudly on his ribs. He remembered, with a sudden tremor of rage, how Heinz had boasted of his Kaiser at Westminster and a German entry into London. The very thought made London dearer and finer to him, and he had a vision of himself driving Heinz before him—Heinz and that other, the round-faced young man with black eyebrows who had worked his will on Griselda. He saw himself striking and stabbing at the round-faced young man—beating him down while he prayed in terror for a mercy that was not granted. His lips were a hard white line and his fingers clenched and unclenched. London! by God, it should be not London but Berlin!

He had never dreamed of rejection; he knew vaguely that recruits were required to pass some sort of medical examination, but the idea that his proffered services might be refused had never entered his head. Edith Haynes, like himself, had seen few English newspapers for weeks; thus he did not know till he came to enlist that the standard of measurement for recruits had been raised since the outbreak of war, and that he, standing under five foot five, was not up to the Army's requirements in the matter of breadth and inches. The knowledge took him like a blow between the eyes, and he stood with dropped jaw, incredulous—it was inhuman, it was monstrous that they should take from him his right to strike back. For a moment he had no words; he dressed mechanically, stupid with the shock—while the round-faced man grinned damnably over Griselda dead by the roadside.... And when, in the end, his speech came back and he tried to stammer an appeal, some one patted him good-naturedly on the shoulder, put his hat into his hand, and turned him loose into a world that had no meaning for him.

CHAPTER XV

There were many parallels to the case and conversion of William Tully in the first few weeks of the war. There is, and always will be, the self-centred temperament that can shut its eyes to the fact and tread the pathways of the paradise of fools, even if it treads them alone; but on the whole humanity is reasonable and, given a fact, however surprising and savagely unpleasant, accepts it because it must.

Those who struggled hardest against the acceptance of the War-Fact of 1914 were, naturally enough, those who had fiery little battles of their own to fight, and whose own warfare was suddenly rendered null and incompetent by a sudden diversion of energy and interest in the face of the national danger. The war was the successful rival of their own, their sectional strife, overshadowing its importance and sucking the life from its veins. Hence instinctively they sneered at it and strove to ignore its existence; hating it as a minor and incompetent artist may hate the greater professional rival who sings or acts him off the stage. Only by some such reasoning can one account for the fact that the aggressive and essentially militarist type of political enthusiast so often runs to pacifism where the quarrels of others are concerned.

But for the bitter mischance of a honeymoon spent in the Forest of Arden and the consequences thereby brought about, such would, very certainly, have been the mental attitude of William Tully in the August of 1914. His own battles would have absorbed his aggressive instincts, and, never having seen a shot fired in anger, he would have continued, for quite a long time, to think of other battles as enlarged street riots which were thoroughly enjoyed by the bloodthirsty soldiery who provoked them. He would have pooh-poohed the possibility of a war until the war actually broke out; and then, insisting that it was avoidable and should not have been, have clung angrily to his customary interests and done his small energetic best to keep his comrades from straying into that wider and bloodier field where they and their services would be lost to the sectional conflict. Such, very certainly, would have been his course of action had he made his wedding journey to Torquay. Fate and not temperament had willed it that he should be driven to enlist under the rival banner of nationality; but there were others of his kidney whom fate had not driven so brutally, and who, unable to effect, as William had done, a rapid transfer of allegiance and antagonisms, struggled desperately to uphold, in despite of war, their partially deserted standard. Of such was Faraday, dogged and fiercely indefatigable; though the man had soul and brain enough to feel the ground rock beneath him. His ignorance of European politics was a thought less profound than William's, but sufficiently profound to have bred in him a complete disbelief in the possibility of European war; hence his surprise at the international earthquake was almost as great as that of his former disciple. When the unbelievable happened he, as was but natural, was angry—all men are angry when the habit of years is interfered with; and in the first flush of his annoyance ascribed the falsification of his every prediction not to his own blundering, but to the sins of those who did not think as he did. Those who prophesied war—so he argued—had prophesied what they desired.... All the same, he was not, like William, devoid of the imaginative faculty; but the war was as yet a great way off and his hatred of the Government of his own country was real. With time he, too, came to understand that a people may have other foes than those of its own household and be threatened with death from without; when he was called up under the Conscription Act he went without protest, made an excellent soldier and died fighting in a night raid near Hulluch; but in the beginning the habit and association of years was too strong for him and his bitter dislike of his neighbour overpowered his fear of the German. During the first few weeks of the war he held peace meetings at considerable personal risk, which, as became a good fighter, he took, even with enjoyment; distributed printed appeals to pacifist and anti-British sentiment and wrote passionately, if with less than his usual clarity, in The Torch. He could not in honesty bring himself to defend every action of his country's enemies and was conscious of occasional difficulty and a sense of thin ice underneath him; at the same time it was against his tradition and principles to admit that the statesmanship of the land he was born in could ever have right on its side. Tradition and principles might have won hands down, making him ardently and happily pro-German, had it not been for the complication introduced by the attitude of other nations which, foreign even as Germany was foreign, had chosen to range themselves with England. Hence a difficulty in indiscriminate condemnation and a momentary confusion of thought and outlook of which Faraday himself was quite clear-brained enough to be conscious; it irritated him and he was sensible of failure and uncertainty.

On the day that William arrived in London and was refused for the British Army, Faraday held a small meeting in a hall in a Bloomsbury side street. The object of the meeting was to consider suitable methods of influencing for the better the existing and lamentable condition of popular opinion; the gathering was not open to the general public, only the initiated being present. Some thirty to forty of the initiated, chiefly secretaries, chairmen and other branch officials of the advanced socialist group of which Faraday was leading light and president—for the most part men, but with a sprinkling of women among them. They had been summoned together by letter and word of mouth; the meeting was private and consultative, described as for sympathizers only, and held at the headquarters of the Central London Branch—a large room, sparsely furnished with chairs and a platform, in the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road. One of the more muscular members of the branch kept watch and ward in the passage outside the hall, scrutinizing the comrades as they neared the door, lest any uninitiated person or disturber of peace should attempt to gain entry with the faithful; he was thrilled with a vague and grandiose conviction that the meeting was of perilous importance, passed in his familiars—they were all his familiars—with a mysterious nod and compared himself to a sentinel on duty in a post of extreme danger. He was a young man domiciled in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, with uncut hair, a flowing tie and a latent, if hitherto undeveloped sense of humour; and a year or two later, when the Army had claimed him, and he stood in the Ypres salient, in a post of extreme danger, he grinned unhappily between the shell-bursts as the night of the meeting came back to him.

Among his thirty or forty familiars he passed in William Tully—who had come to the hall mechanically, scarce knowing where his steps were guiding him. No wind of the meeting had come to him, but the place was one of his haunts—the Central London Branch, of which he was chairman, assembled there on business once a week. Further, it was used as the address of the Branch, and he was accustomed to call there almost daily for his official letters or the transaction of small official business. Thus it happened, at the close of a bewildered day, that he turned to it almost by instinct.

Perhaps it was a sense of homelessness that drove him to its open doors—for it was not until well towards evening that he had summoned up courage to enter his own dwelling, the little flat he had not yet lived in, made ready for himself and Griselda. If there had been anywhere else to go perhaps he never would have entered it; but his bachelor lodging, he knew, was let to a new tenant, and he had not money enough in his pocket to pay for a lodging elsewhere. His day had been spent on foot; after his refusal at the recruiting station he had walked he knew not whither—here, there, through street after street, that he might not stop and think; and when, in the late afternoon, he found himself sitting on the turf of Primrose Hill, he could not, for the life of him, remember the route by which he had reached it. Sheer weariness of body drove him to shelter, and half an hour later he was dragging his feet up the stairs that led to the flat.

The woman who was to "do" for himself and Griselda had been installed on the premises for some days past; since the outbreak of war she had been in hourly expectation of the arrival of her master and mistress and in some perturbation at the continued lack of news from them. As William was about to walk past the door she had opened to him she stayed him with an inquisitive question—he could not remember the form it took but knew that it must have referred to Griselda's absence, for he told her abruptly that his wife had died in France. She threw up her hands with a screaming exclamation as he hurried past her to shut himself into the bedroom.

There, afraid of her curious sympathy and questions, he shut and locked himself in; with the poignant loneliness of the brand-new furniture that he and Griselda had chosen and lovingly admired; with the poignant company of Griselda's photograph, smiling self-consciously from the centre of the mantelpiece and set in an ornate silver frame that was one of her wedding presents. He held it in his hands till the tears blinded him, kissed it sobbing and laid it face downwards.

The "general," burning with inquisitive sympathy, induced him, after one or two unsuccessful attempts, to open the door to her knocking; pressed on him, in spite of denials, a scratch meal of tea and poached eggs, and hovered round while he ate it. As befitted the occasion she held her apron to her eyes while she extracted as much as she could in the way of information. Later, as she washed up in the kitchen, she heard him moving from one tiny room to another—consumed with a restless misery and a restless wonder as to what he should do with his life. Still later she heard him go out again; though he had hidden away the self-conscious photograph, thrusting it out of sight into a drawer, the brand-new furniture was always there and always waiting for Griselda. The moment came when he could no longer suffer its company and went out into the street to avoid it. Other purpose in walking he had none—and thus it happened that, mechanically and without intent, he drifted into the Bloomsbury side-street where Faraday held his meeting.

The important doorkeeper would have greeted him with more than a nod—would gladly, in fact, have detained him after his four weeks' absence to exchange comments and views on the European situation; but William, in entering, made no response to his "Hallo, back again!" which it may be he did not even hear. He walked straight past the sentinel and into the bare familiar room—where everything, from the seats to their occupants, was just as it had been and where every face was known to him. Time, for a moment, turned back in its traces and yesterday unrolled before his eyes. He gazed at it and sat down slowly—by himself in the last row of chairs.... Edwardes, the Central London secretary, was hugging his ankle as he always hugged it, and Mrs. Jay-Blenkinsop, the formidable treasurer of the Golder's Green branch, frowned through her pince-nez at the speaker with her chin uplifted as of old, wore the same capacious sandals—her crossed knees showed them—and the same cold-gravy-coloured robe. And her son, young Jay-Blenkinsop, as his habit was, sprawled sideways on one chair and curled his long limbs round another. It was all as it had been; and Faraday, on the platform, was speaking with the accents of yesterday.

The important doorkeeper was not the only comrade who had noticed William's return: one or two heads were turned as he came in, but for the most part the audience was intent on the words of the speaker. The heads that turned made some sign of pleased recognition to which William responded automatically, unknowing that he did so. From his seat near the door his eyes wandered slowly over the platform, the hall and its occupants—slowly and with a dull and detached curiosity. What he saw there and heard was unreal, like a scene in an unconvincing play; he had a sense of looking at these people from a great way off, of hearing their voices from a distance. Something separated and held him removed from them.... He had great difficulty in giving his attention to what the speaker was saying; yet in the old days Faraday had always stirred him and to-night he was speaking well.

From thirty to forty convinced adherents assembled at a private conference are not the material upon which a public orator usually throws away his best endeavours; but Faraday that night was speaking not so much to his audience as to himself. Unadmitted, even to his secret soul, he had great and fierce need of conviction; it was with his own doubts that he wrestled, at his own head that he flung both his jeers and his arguments. He was of a finer because more intelligent mould than the Edwardeses and Jay-Blenkinsops who heard him and who were still thinking of the European tragedy as a red herring drawn by the cunning politician across the path of progress. Not for him was their happy imperviousness to the new idea, and, looking down from his platform on their assembled faces, it may have struck him, not pleasantly, that these people were in part of his making; they were, at any rate, the product of a system of which he, in common with politicians of every creed, had not scrupled to make full use.