The very few officers left behind at the depot were at breakfast when he arrived to keep Colonel Rattray to his word. Major Earnshaw had very pleasantly got up from the table to "put him out of his misery" there and then without formality and had "had a go at this heart of yours" in the billiard room. Withdrawn his stethoscope and shaken his head. It was "no go; absolutely none, Sabre."

"Well, but that's for a commission. I'll go into the ranks. Isn't that any different?"

No different. "You can't possibly go in as you are—now. In time, if this thing goes on, the standards will probably be reduced. But they'll have to be reduced a goodish long way before you'll get in, I don't mind telling you."

Sabre wheeled his bicycle slowly away across the barrack square. "Thank goodness, I never said anything to Mabel about it." A cluster of young men of various degrees of life were waiting outside the door of the recruiting office. The rush of the first few days was thinning down but recruits were still pouring in. They were all laughing and talking noisily. He had the wish that he could take the thing in that spirit. Why couldn't he? After all, what did it really matter that he was not able to get "in it"? Even if he had been accepted it would only have been pretending. He never would have got really "in it"; none of those chaps would; every one knew the war couldn't last long; it would be over long before any of these recruits could be trained.

VII

This "common sense" argument carried him through following days; then came another of the frightful undoings of his emotions; and just as the war definitely began for him with the glimpse of the beginnings of that "jamborino" in the Mess, so from this new occasion began, unceasingly and increasingly, and with shocking effect upon his sensitiveness, a dreadful oppression by the war and, adding to its darkness, a gnawing and unreasonable self-accusation that he was not "in it."

The occasion was that of his meeting with Harkness outside the County Times office. Harkness was a captain of the battalion that had gone out who had been left behind owing to some illness. The British Expeditionary Force had been in action. There had been scraps of news of some heavy fighting. Harkness said dully, "Hullo, Sabre. I've just been in to see that chap Pike to see if he'd got anything. We've had some news, you know." He stopped. His face was twitching.

Sabre said, "News? Anything about the Pinks?"

Harkness nodded. He seemed to be swallowing. Then he said, "Yes, the regiment. Pretty bad."

Sabre said, "Any one—?" and also stopped.

Harkness looked, not at Sabre, but straight across the top of his head and began an appalling, and as it seemed to Sabre, an endless recitative. "The Colonel's killed. Bruce is killed. Otway's killed—"

"Otway...."

"Cottar's killed. Bullen's killed—"

Endless! The names struck Sabre like successive blows. Were they never going to end?

"Carmichael's killed. My young brother's—" his voice cracked—"killed. Sikes is killed."

"Sikes killed.... And your brother...."

Harkness said in a very thin, squeaking voice, "Yes, the regiment's pretty well—The regiment's—" He looked full at Sabre and said in a very loud, defiant voice, "I bet they were magnificent. By God, I bet you they were magnificent. Oh, my God, why the hell wasn't I there?" He turned abruptly and went away, walking rather funnily.

This was the moment at which there descended upon Sabre, never to leave him while he remained not "in it", the appalling sense of oppression that the war exercised upon him. On his brain like a weight; on his heart like a pressing hand. He thought of Otway's intense, gleaming face. "My God, Sabre, you ought to have seen the battalion on parade this morning." He saw Otway's face cold and stricken. He thought of Sikes, on the table. "Well, I'm going to take nothing but socks. I'm going to stuff my pack absolutely bung full of socks." He saw Sikes flung like a disused thing in some field....

VIII

And still events; still, and always, now, disturbing things.

While he stood there he was suddenly aware of Young Rod, Pole or Perch, rather breathlessly come up.

"I say, Sabre, have you heard this frightful news about the Pinks?—I say, Sabre, I want your help most frightfully. I want you to talk to my mother. She likes you. She'll listen to you. I'm going to enlist. I've been putting it off day after day, trying to fix up things for my mother and trying to persuade her; but I haven't done much and I absolutely can't wait any longer."

Sabre said, "Good Lord, are you, Perch? Must you? Your mother, why, what on earth will she do without you? She'll—"

Young Perch winced painfully. "I know. I know. It pretty well kills me to think of it and I'm having the most frightful scenes with her. But I've thought it all out, Sabre, and I know I'm doing the right thing. I've looked after my mother all my life, and a month ago the idea of leaving her even for a couple of nights would have been unthinkable. But this is different. This is—" He flushed awkwardly—"you can't talk that sort of patriotic stuff, you know, but this is, well this is a chap's country, and I've figured it out it's got to come before my mother. It's got to. She says it will kill her if I go. I believe it will, Sabre. And my God, if it does—but I can't help it. I know what's the right thing. I'll tell you something else." His face, which had been red and cloudy as with tears, became dark and passionate. "I'll tell you something else. People are saying things about me and to me because I'm young and unmarried and haven't got a wife to support. Curse them, Sabre—what do they know about it? Aren't their wives young, strong, able to take care of themselves? My mother can't come downstairs without me and can't let any one else—"

He rubbed a hand across his eyes and broke off. "Never mind about that; I know what I've got to do. Look here, Sabre, I tell you where I want your help, like anything. You know lots of people. I don't. Well, I want to get hold of some nice girl to live with my mother and take care of her in my place while I'm away. A sort of companion, aren't they called? Like that Bypass person up at old Boom Bagshaw's, only much nicer and younger and friendlier than she is. You see, I know my mother. If it was any one of any age, she wouldn't have her in the house at any price, and she'd send her flying out of the window in about two days if she did have her. She swears no power on earth will induce her to have any one at all as it is. But I'm going to manage it if I can get the right person. I want some one who my mother will indignantly call a chit of a child"—he gave rather a broken little laugh—"can't I hear her saying it! But she'll instantly begin to mother her because she is a chit of a child, and to fuss over her and tell her what she ought to eat and what she ought to wear, and does she wear a flannel binder, and all that, just as she does to me. And in about a week she'll be as right as rain and writing me letters all day and arguing with the girl how to spell 'being' and 'been'—you know what my mother is. I say, Sabre, do for God's sake help me, if you can. Do you know any one?"

Sabre, during this greatly troubled outpouring, had the feeling that this was all of a part with the calamitous news he had just had from Harkness,—a direct continuation of it. This frightful war! Was it going to attack even that pathetic little old woman at Puncher's Farm with her fumbling hands and her frail existence centred solely in her son? He said, "I'm awfully sorry, Perch. Frightfully sorry for your mother and for you. You know best what you ought to do. I won't say anything either way. I think a man's only judge in this ghastly business is himself. Of course, I'll help you. I'll help you all I can. It's a funny coincidence but I believe I do know just the very girl that would be what you want—"

Young Perch grasped his hand in delighted relief. "Oh, Sabre, if you do! I felt you would help. You've always been a chap to turn to!"

"I've turned to you, Perch, you and your mother, a good deal more than you might imagine. I'm glad to help if I can. The chance I'm thinking about I was hearing of only a few days ago. The works' foreman in my office, an old chap called Bright. He's got a daughter about eighteen or thereabouts, and I was hearing he wanted to get her into some kind of post like yours. I've spoken to her once or twice when she's been about the place for her father and I took a tremendous fancy to her. She's as pretty as a picture. Effie, she's called. I believe your mother would take to her no end. And she'd just love your mother."

Young Perch said rather thickly, "Any one would who takes her the right way."

Sabre touched him encouragingly on the shoulder. "This girl Effie will if only we can get her. She's that sort, I know. I'll see about it at once. Buck up, old man."

"Thanks most frightfully, Sabre. Thanks most awfully."

IX

It was from Twyning that Sabre had heard that a post of some sort was being considered for Effie Bright. Her father, as he had told young Perch, was works' foreman at Fortune, East and Sabre's. "Mr. Bright." A massive old man with a massive, rather striking face hewn beneath a bald dome and thickly grown all about and down the throat with stiff white hair. He had been in the firm as long as Mr. Fortune himself and appeared to Sabre, who had little to do with him, to take orders from nobody. He was intensely religious and he had the deep-set and extraordinarily penetrating eyes that frequently denote the religious zealot. He was not liked by the hands. They called him Moses, disliked his intense religiosity and feared the cold and heavy manner that he had. He trod heavily about the workshops, looking into the eyes of the young men as if far more concerned to search their souls than their benches; and Sabre, when speaking to him, always had the feeling that Mr. Bright was penetrating him with the same intention.

Extraordinary that such a stern and hard old man should have for daughter such a fresh and lovable slip of a young thing as his Effie! Bright Effie, Sabre always called her, inverting her names. Mr. Bright had a little cupboard called his office at the foot of the main stairway and Bright Effie came often to see her father there. Sabre had spoken to her in the little cupboard or just outside it. He had delight in watching the most extraordinary shining that she had in her eyes. It was like reading an entertaining book, he used to think, and he had the idea that humor of that rarest kind which is unbounded love mingled with unbounded sense of the oddities of life was packed to bursting within her. All that she saw or heard seemed to be taken into that exhaustless fount, metamorphosed into the most delicious sensations, and shone forth in extraordinarily humorous delight through her eyes. Somewhere in the dullest day light is found and thrown back by a bright surface. It was just so, Sabre used to think, with Effie. All things were fresh to her and she found freshness in all things.

Some such apprehension of her Sabre had expressed to Twyning on the occasion that came to his mind during young Perch's entreaty for some one to live with his mother. Sabre had been standing with Twyning at Mr. Fortune's window, Mr. Bright and Effie leaving the office and crossing the street together beneath them. Twyning, who was on intimate terms with Mr. Bright, had given a short laugh and said, "Hullo, you seem to have been thinking a lot about the fair Effie!"

The kind of laugh and the kind of remark that Sabre hated and he gave a slight gesture which Twyning well knew meant that he hated it. This was what Twyning called "stuck-uppishness" and equally hated, and he chose words expressive of his resentment,—the class insistence.

"Well, she's got to earn her living, however jolly she is. She's not one of your fine ladies, you know."

Sabre recognised the implication but ignored it. "What's old Bright going to do with her?"

"He doesn't quite know. He was talking to my missus about it the other day. He's as good as we are, you know. He's an idea of getting her out as a sort of lady's companion somewhere."

This was what Sabre had remembered; and he went straight from young Perch to Twyning and recalled the conversation.

Twyning said, "Hullo, still interested in the fair Effie?"

"It's for young Perch over at Penny Green I'm asking. For his mother. He's a young man"—Sabre permitted his eyes to rest for a moment on Harold, seated at his desk—"and he feels he ought to join the army. He wants the girl to be with his mother while he's away."

Twyning, noting the glance, changed his tone to one of much friendliness. "Oh, I see, old man. No, Effie's got nothing yet. She was over to our place to tea last Sunday."

"Good. I'll go and talk to old Bright. I'm keen about this."

"Yes, you seem to be, old man."

X

Mr. Bright received the suggestion with a manner that irritated Sabre. While he was being told of the Perches he stared at Sabre with that penetrating gaze of his as though in the proposal he searched for some motive other than common friendliness. His first comment was, "They'll want references, I suppose, sir?"

Sabre smiled. "Oh, scarcely, Mr. Bright. Not when they know who you are."

The old man was standing before Sabre in the little cupboard bending his head close towards him as though he would sense out, if he could not see, some hidden motive behind all this. He contracted his great brows as if to squeeze more penetration into his gaze. "Yes, but I'll want references, Mr. Sabre. My girl's been well brought up. She's not going here, there, nor anywhere."

Extraordinary the intensity of his searching, suspicious stare! Hard, stupid old man, Sabre thought. "Dash it, does he suppose I've got designs on the girl?" He would have returned an impatient answer had he not been so anxious on the Perches' behalf. Instead he said pleasantly, "Of course she's not, Mr. Bright. You may be sure I wouldn't suggest this if I didn't know it was in every way desirable. Mrs. Perch is a very old friend of mine and a very simple and kind old lady. There'll be only herself for Effie to meet. And she'll make a daughter of her."

Nothing, of the penetration abated from the deep-set eyes, nor came any expression of thanks from the stern, pursed mouth. "I'll take my girl over and see for myself, Mr. Sabre."

Surly, stupid old man! However, poor young Perch! Poor old Mrs. Perch! The very thing, if only it would come off.

XI

It came off. Sabre went up to Puncher's Farm on the evening of the day Mr. Bright, "to see for himself", had called with Effie. Young Perch greeted him delightedly in the doorway and clasped his hand in gratitude. "It's all right. It's fixed. She's coming. I've had the most frightful struggle with my mother. But it's only her way, you know." He stopped and Sabre heard him gulp. "Only her way. I could see she took to the girl from the start. My mother's started knitting me a pair of socks and old man Bright—I say, he's rather an alarming sort of person, Sabre—had hardly opened his mouth when they arrived when the girl, in the most extraordinary, making-a-fuss-of-her kind of way, told her she was using the wrong size needles or something. And my mother, as if she had known her all her life, said, 'There you are, I knew I was. It's simply useless asking Freddie to do any shopping for me. He simply lets them give him anything they like.' And she told the girl she thought she had some other needles in one of those gigantic old boxes of ours. And they went off together to look, and heaven only knows what they got up to; they were away about half an hour and came back with about three hundredweight of old wools and nine pounds of needles, and talking about how they were going through all the other boxes, 'now I've got some one to help me', as my mother said. By Jove, the girl's wonderful. D'you know, she actually kissed my mother when she was leaving and said, 'Now be sure to try that little pillow just under your side to-night. Just press it in as you're falling asleep.' By Jove, you can't think how grateful I am to you, Sabre."

"I am glad," Sabre told him. "I felt she'd be just like that. But why have you been having a frightful struggle over it with your mother if she's taken to her so?"

Young Perch gave the fond little laugh with which Sabre had so often heard him conclude his enormous arguments with his mother. "Oh, you know what my mother is. She's now made up her mind that the girl is coming here to do what she calls 'catch me.' She'll forget that soon. Anyway, the girl's coming. She's coming the day after to-morrow, the day I'm going. Come along in and see my mother and keep her to it."

The subject did not require bringing up. "I suppose Freddie's told you what he's forcing me into now, Mr. Sabre," old Mrs. Perch greeted him. "It's a funny thing that I should be forced to do things at my time of life. Of course she's after Freddie. Do you suppose I can't see that?"

"Well, but she won't see Freddie, Mrs. Perch. He won't be here."

"She'll catch him," declared Mrs. Perch doggedly. "Any girl could catch Freddie. He's a positive fool with one of these girls after him. Now she's got to have his uncle Henry's armchair in her room, if you please. That's a nice thing, isn't it?"

"Now look here, Mother, you know perfectly well that was your own idea. You said you felt sure she had a weak back and that—"

"I never supposed she was going to have your uncle Henry's chair for her weak back or for any other back. Ask Mr. Sabre what he thinks. There he is. Ask him."

Sabre said, "But you do like the girl, don't you, Mrs. Perch?"

Mrs. Perch pursed her lips.

"I don't say I don't like her. I merely ask what I'm going to do with her in the house. When Freddie said he wanted to bring some one in to be with me, I never supposed he was going to bring a chit of a child into the house. I assure you I never supposed that was going to be done to me."

And then quite suddenly Mrs. Perch dropped into a chair and said in a horribly weak voice, "I don't mind who comes into the house, now. I can't contend like I used to contend." Immense tears gathered in her eyes and began to run swiftly down her cheeks. "I'm not fit for anything now. I can't live without Freddie. I like the girl; but all this house where we've been so happy ... without Freddie ... I shall see his dear, bright face everywhere. Why must he go, Mr. Sabre? Why must he go? I don't understand this war at all." Her voice trailed off. Her hands fumbled on her lap. A tear fell on them. She brushed at it with a fumbling motion but it remained there.

Young Perch took her hand and fondled it. Sabre saw the wrinkled, fumbling old hand between the strong brown fingers. "That's all right, Mother. Of course, you don't understand it. That's just it. You think I'm going out to fighting and all that. And I'm just going into a training camp here in England for a bit. And before Christmas it will all be over and I shall come flying back and we'll send Miss Bright toddling off home and—Don't cry, Mother. Don't cry, Mother. Isn't that so, Sabre? Just training in England. Isn't that so? Now wherever's your old handkerchief got to? Look here; here's mine. Look, this is the one I chose that day with you in Tidborough. Do you remember what a jolly tea we had that day? Remember what a laugh we had over that funny teapot. There, let me wipe them, Mother...."

Sabre turned away. This frightful war....



CHAPTER VI

I

This frightful war! On his brain like a weight. On his heart like a pressing hand.

Came Christmas by which, at the outset, everybody knew it would be over, and it was not over. Came June, 1915, concerning which, at the outset, he had joined with Mr. Fortune, Twyning and Harold in laughter at his own grotesque idea of the war lasting to the dramatic effect of a culminating battle on the centenary of Waterloo, and the war had lasted, and was still lasting.

"This frightful war!" The words were constantly upon his lips, ejaculated to himself in reception of new manifestations of its eruptions; forever in his mind, like a live thing gnawing there. Other people seemed to suffer the war in spasms, isolated amidst the round of their customary routines, of dejection or of optimistic reassurance. The splendid sentiment of "Business as usual" was in many valiant mouths. The land, in so far as provisions and prices were concerned, continued to flow in milk and honey as the British Isles had always flowed in milk and honey. In July a rival multiple grocer's shop opened premises opposite the multiple grocer's shop already established in the shopping centre of the Garden Home and Mabel told Sabre how very exciting it was. The rivals piled their windows, one against the other, with stupendous stacks of margarine and cheese at sevenpence the pound each; and then one day, "Whatever do you think?" the new man interspersed his mountains of margarine and cheese with wooden bowls running over with bright new pennies, and flamed his windows with announcements that this was "The Money-back Shop." You bought a pound of margarine for sevenpence and were handed a penny with your purchase! And the next day, "Only fancy!" the other man also had bright new pennies (in bursting bags from the bank) and also bellowed that he too was a Money-back Shop.

"The fact is the war really hasn't mattered a bit," Mabel said. "I think it's wonderful. And when you remember at the beginning how people rushed to buy up food and what awful ideas of starvation went about; you were one of the worst."

And Sabre agreed that it really was wonderful: and agreed too with Mabel's further opinion that he really ought not to get so fearfully depressed.

But he remained fearfully depressed. The abundance of food, and such manifestations of plenty as the bowls and bags of bright new pennies meant nothing to him. He knew nothing about war. Very possibly the prophecies of shortage and restrictions and starvation were, in the proof, to be refuted as a thousand other prophecies of the early days, optimistic and pessimistic, were being refuted. What had that to do with it? Remained the frightful facts that were going on out there in Belgium and in Gallipoli and in Russia. Remained the increasing revelation of Germany's enormous might in war and the revelation of what war was as she conducted it. Remained the sinister revelation that we were not winning as in the past we had "always won." Remained his envisagement of England—England!—standing four-square to her enemies, but standing as some huge and splendid animal something bewildered by the fury of the onset upon it. Shaking her head whereon had fallen stunning and unexpected blows, as it might be a lion enormously smashed across the face; roaring her defiance; baring her fangs; tearing up the ground before her; dreadful and undaunted and tremendous; but stricken; in sore agony; in heavy amazement; her pride thrust through with swords; her glory answered by another's glory; her dominion challenged; shaken, bleeding.

England.... This frightful war!

II

Remained also, blowing about the streets, in the newspapers and at meetings, in the mouths of many, and in the eyes of most, the new popular question, "Why aren't you in khaki?" The subject of age, always shrouded in a seemly and decorous modesty in England, and especially since, a few years previously, an eminent professor of medicine had unloosed the alarming theory of "Too old at forty", was suddenly ripped out of its prudish coverings. One generation of men began to talk with thoroughly engaging frankness and largeness about their age. They would even announce it in a loud voice in crowded public conveyances. It was nothing, in those days, to hear a man suddenly declare in an omnibus or tramway car, "Well, I'm thirty-eight and I only wish to heaven I was a few years younger." Other men would heartfully chime in, "Ah, same thing with me. It's hard." And all these men, thus cruelly burdened with a few more years than the age limit, would look with great intensity at other men, apparently not thus burdened, who for their part would assume attitudes of physical unfitness or gaze very sternly out of the window.

Several of the younger employees of Fortune, East and Sabre's joined up (as the current phrase had it) in the first weeks of the war. In the third month Mr. Fortune assembled the hands and from across the whale-like front indicated the path of duty and announced that the places of all those who followed it would be kept open for them. "Hear, hear!" said Twyning. "Hear, hear!" and as the men were filing out he took Sabre affectionately by the arm and explained to him that young Harold was dying to go. "But I feel a certain duty is due to the firm, old man. What I mean is, that the boy's only just come here and I feel that in my position as a partner it wouldn't look well for me practically with my own hand to be paying out unearned salary to a chap who'd not been four months in the place. Don't you agree, old man?"

Sabre said, "But we wouldn't be paying him, would we? Fortune said salaries of married men."

"Ah, yes, old man, but between you and me he's going to do it for unmarried men as well, as the cases come up."

"Why didn't he tell them so?"

Twyning's genial expression hardened under these questions, but he said, still on his first note of confidential affection, "Ah, because he thinks they ought to do their duty without being bribed. Quite right, too. No, it's a difficult position for me. My idea is not to give way to the boy's wishes for a few months while he establishes his position here, and then, if men are still wanted, why of course he'll go. Sound, don't you think, old man?"

Sabre disengaged his arm and turned into his own room. "Well, I think this is a business in which you can't judge any one. I think every man is his own judge."

An astonishing rasp came into Twyning's voice. "How old are you?"

"Thirty-six. Why?"

Twyning laughed away the rasp. "Ah, I'm older. I daresay you'll have a chance later on, if the Times and the Morning Post and those class papers have their way. And you've got no family, have you, old man?"

III

That was in the third month of the war. But by June, 1915, the position on these little points had hardened. In June, "Why aren't you in khaki?" was blowing about the streets. Questions looked out of eyes. Certain men avoided one another. And in June young Harold joined up. Sabre greeted the news with very great warmth. Towards Harold he had none of the antipathy that was often aroused in him by Harold's father. He shook the good-looking young man very heartily by the hand. "By Jove, I'm glad. Well done, Harold. That's splendid. Jolly good luck to you."

Later in the morning Twyning came in. He entered abruptly. His air, and when he spoke, his manner, struck Sabre as being deliberately aggressive. "Well, Harold's gone," he said.

"Yes, I'm jolly glad for the boy's sake. I was just congratulating him. I think it's splendid of him."

Twyning breathed heavily through his nose. "Splendid? Hur! He wanted to go long ago. Well, he's gone now and I hope you're satisfied."

Sabre turned in his chair and questioned Twyning with puckered brows. "Satisfied? What on earth do you mean—satisfied?"

"You always thought he ought to go. You're one of those who've sent him off. My boy saw it."

"You're talking nonsense. I've never so much as mentioned the subject to Harold. I told you long ago that I think every man's his own judge, and sole judge, in this business."

Twyning always retracted when Sabre showed signs of becoming roused. "Ah, well, what does it matter? He's gone now. He'll be in this precious khaki to-night. No one can point at him now." He drew out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes slowly. He stared inimically at Sabre. "I'll tell you one thing, Sabre. You wait till you've got a son, then you'll think differently, perhaps. You don't know what my boy means to me. He's everything in the world to me. I got him in here so as to have him with me and now this cursed war's taken him. You don't know what he is, my boy Harold. He's a better man than his father, I'll tell you that. He's a good Christian boy. He's never had a bad thought or said a bad word."

He broke off. He rammed his handkerchief into his trouser pocket. As though the sight of Sabre sitting before him suddenly infuriated him he broke out, "It's all right for you sitting there. You're not going. Never mind. My boy Harold's gone. You're satisfied. All right."

Sabre got up. "Look here, Twyning, I'm sorry for you about Harold. I make allowances for you. But—"

When Twyning was angry his speech sometimes betrayed that on which he was most sensitive. "I don't want you to make no allowances for me. I don't—"

"You've repeated the stupid implication you made when you first came in."

Twyning changed to a hearty laugh. "Oh, I say, steady, old man. Don't let's have a row. Nothing to have a row about, old man. I made no implication. Whatever for should I? No, no, I simply said 'All right.' I say people have sent my boy Harold off, and I'm merely saying 'All right. He's gone. Now perhaps you're satisfied.' Not you, old man. Other people." He paused. His tone hardened. "All right. That's all, old man. All right."

IV

Not very long after this incident occurred another incident. In its obvious aspect it was also related to the "Why aren't you in khaki?" question; Sabre apprehended in it a different bearing.

One morning he stepped suddenly from his own room into Mr. Fortune's in quest of a reference. Twyning and Mr. Fortune were seated together in deep conversation. They were very often thus seated, Sabre had noticed. At his entry their conversation abruptly ceased; and this also was not new.

Sabre went across to the filing cabinet without speaking.

Mr. Fortune cleared his throat. "Ah, Sabre. Ah, Sabre, we were just saying, we were just saying—" His hesitation, and the pause before he had begun quite clearly informed Sabre that what he was now about to say was not going to be—precisely—what he had just been saying. "We were just saying what a very unfortunate thing, what a very deeply unfortunate thing it is that none of us principals are of an age to do the right thing by the Firm by joining the Army. I'm afraid we've got one or two shirkers downstairs, and we were just saying what a splendid, what an entirely splendid thing it would be if one of us were able to set them an example."

Sabre faced about from the cabinet towards them. Twyning in the big chair had his elbow on the arm and was biting his nails. Mr. Fortune, revolved to face the room, was exercising his watch chain on his whale-like front.

"Yes, it's a pity," Sabre said.

"I'm glad you agree. I knew you would. Indeed, yes, a pity; a very great pity. For myself, of course, I'm out of the question. Twyning here is getting on for forty and of course he's given his son to the war; moreover, there's the business to be thought of. I'm afraid I'm not quite able to do all I used to do. You—of course, you're married too, and there we are! It does, as you say, seem a great pity." The watch chain, having been generously exercised, was put to the duty of heavy tugs at its reluctant partner. Mr. Fortune gazed at his watch and remarked absently, "I hear young Phillips of Brown and Phillips has persuaded his wife to let him go. You were at the school with him, Sabre, weren't you? Isn't he about your age?"

Sabre spoke very slowly. Most furious anger had been rising within him. It was about to burst when there had suddenly come to its control the thought, "These two aren't getting at you for any love of England, for any patriotic reason. That's not it. Don't bother about that. Man alive, don't mix them up in what you feel about these things. Don't go cheapening what you think about England. Theirs is another reason." He said very slowly, "I never told you, perhaps I ought to have told you at the time, that I was refused for the Army some while ago."

Mr. Fortune's watch slipped through his fingers to the full length of his chain. Twyning got up and went over to a bookcase and stared at it.

Mr. Fortune heaved in the line with an agitated hand over hand motion. "I'd no idea! My dear fellow, I'd no idea! How very admirable of you! When was this? After that big meeting in the Corn exchange the other day?"

"Don't tell them when it was," said Sabre's mind. He said, "No, rather before that. I was rejected on medical grounds."

"Well, well!" said Mr. Fortune. "Well, well!" He gave the suggestion of being unable to array his thoughts against this surprising turn of the day. "Most creditable. Twyning, do you hear that?"

Twyning spun around from the bookcase and came forward. "Eh? Sorry, I'm afraid I wasn't listening."

"Our excellent Sabre has offered himself for enlistment and been rejected."

Twyning said, "Have you, by Jove! Jolly good. What bad luck being turned down. What was it?"

Sabre moved across to his room. "Heart."

"Was it, really? By Jove, and you look fit enough, too, old man. Fancy, heart! Fancy—Jolly sporting of you. Fancy—Oh, I say, old man, do let's have a look at your paper if you've got it on you. I want to see one of those things."

Sabre was at his door. "What paper?"

"Your rejection paper, old man. I've never seen one. Only if you've got it on you."

"I haven't got one."

"Not got one! You must have, old man."

"Well, I haven't. I was seen privately. I'm rather friendly with them up at the barracks."

"Oh, yes, of course. Wonder they didn't give you a paper, though."

"Well, they didn't."

"Quite so, old man. Quite so. Funny, that's all."

Sabre paused on the threshold. He perfectly well understood the villainous implication. Vile, intolerable! But of what service to take it up?—To hear Twyning's laugh and his "My dear old chap, as if I should think such a thing!" He passed into his room. The thought he had had which had arrested his anger at Mr. Fortune's hints, revealing this incident in another light, was, "They want to get rid of me."

V

In August, the anniversary month of the war, he again offered himself for enlistment and was again rejected, but this time after a longer scrutiny: the standard was not at its first height of perfection. Earnshaw, Colonel Rattray, all the remnant of his former friends, were gone to the front: Sabre submitted himself through the ordinary channels and this time received what Twyning had called his "paper." He did not show it to Twyning, nor mention either to him or to Mr. Fortune that he had tried again. "Again! most creditable of you, my dear Sabre." "Again, have you, though? By Jove, that's sporting of you. Did they give you a paper this time, old man?" No. Not much. Feeling as he felt about the war, acutely aware as he was of the partners' interest in the matter, that, he felt, could not be borne.

But on this occasion he told Mabel.

The war had not altered his relations with Mabel. He had had the feeling that it ought to bring them closer together, to make her more susceptible to his attempts to do the right thing by her. But it did not bring them closer together: the accumulating months, the imperceptibly increasing strangeness and tension and high pitch of the war atmosphere increased, rather, her susceptibility to those characteristics of his which were most impossible to her. He felt things with draught too deep and with burthen too capacious for the navigability of her mind; and here was an ever-present thing, this (in her phrase) most unsettling war, which must be taken (in her view) on a high, brisk note that was as impossible to him as was his own attitude towards the war to her. The effect of the war, in this result, was but to sunder them on a new dimension: whereas formerly he had learned not to join with her on subjects his feelings about which he had been taught to shrink from exposing before her, now the world contained but one subject; there was no choice and there was no upshot but clash of incompatibility. His feelings were daily forced to the ordeal; his ideas daily exasperated her. The path he had set himself was not to mind her abuse of his feelings, and he tried with some success not to mind; but (in his own expression, brooding in his mind's solitude) they riled her and he had nothing else to offer her; they riled her and he had set himself not to rile her. It was like desiring to ease a querulous invalid and having in the dispensary but a single—and a detested—palliative.

Things were not better; they were worse.—But he made his efforts. The matter of telling her (when he tried in August) that he thought he ought to join the Army was one, and it came nearest to establishing pleasant relations. That it revealed a profound difference of sensibility was nothing. He blamed himself for causing that side to appear.

Her comment when, on the eve of his attempt, he rather diffidently acquainted her with his intention, was, "Do you really think you ought to?" This was not enthusiastic; but he went ahead with it and made a joke, which amused her, about how funny it would be if she had to start making "comforts" for him at the War Knitting League which she was attending with great energy at the Garden Home. He found, as they talked, that it never occurred to her but that it was as an officer that he would be going, and something warned him not to correct her assumption. He found with pleased surprise quite a friendly chat afoot between them. She only began to fall away in interest when he, made forgetful by this new quality in their contact, allowed his deeper feelings to find voice. Once started, he was away before he had realised it, in how one couldn't help feeling about England and how utterly glorious would be his own sensations if he could actually get into uniform and feel that England had admitted him to be a part of her.

She looked at the clock.

His face was reddening in its customary signal of his enthusiasm. He noticed her glance, but was not altogether checked. He went on quickly, "Well, look here. I must tell you this. I'll tell you what I'll say to myself first thing if I really do get in. A thing out of the Psalms. By Jove, an absolutely terrific thing, Mabel. In the Forty-fifth. Has old Bag—has Boom Bagshaw told you people up at the church what absolutely magnificent reading the Psalms are just now, in this war?"

She shook her head. "We sing them every Sunday, of course. But I don't see how the Psalms—you mean the Bible Psalms, don't you?—can have anything to do with war."

"Oh, but they have. They're absolutely hung full of it. Half of them are the finest battle chants ever written. You ought to read them, Mabel; every one ought to be reading them these days. Well, this verse I'm telling you about. I say, do listen, I won't keep you a minute. It's in that one where there comes in a magnificent chant to some princess who was being brought to marriage to some foreign king—"

Mabel's dispersing attention took arms. "To a princess! However can it be? It's the Psalms. You do mean the Bible Psalms, don't you?"

He said quickly, "Oh, well, never mind that. Look here, this is it. I shall say it to myself directly I get in, and then often and often again. It ought to be printed on a card and given to every recruit. Just listen:

"Good luck have thou with thine honour; ride on, because of the word of truth, of meekness and of righteousness: and thy right hand shall show thee terrible things.

"Isn't that terrific? Isn't it tremendous? By Jove, it—"

For the first time in her married life she looked at him, in this humour, not distastefully but curiously. His flushed face and shining eyes! Whatever about? He was perfectly incomprehensible to her. She got up. She said, "Yes—but 'Ride on'—of course you're not going in the cavalry, are you?"

He said, "Oh, well. Sorry. It's just a thing, you know. Yes, it's your bedtime, I'm afraid. I've kept you up, gassing. Well, dream good luck for me to-morrow."

His thoughts, when she had gone from the room, went, "A better evening! That's the way! I can do it, you see, if I try. That other thing doesn't matter. I was a fool to drag that in. She doesn't understand. Yes, that's the way!"

He sat late, happily. If only he could get past the doctor to-morrow!

VI

That's the way! But on the following evening the way was not to be recaptured. The old way was restored. He was enormously cast down by his rejection. When he got back that night he went straight in to her. "I say, they've rejected me. They won't have me." His face was working. "It's that cursed heart."

She slightly puckered her brows. "Oh—d'you know, for the minute I couldn't think what on earth you were talking about. Were you rejected? Well, I must say I'm glad. Up at the Knitting League Mrs. Turner was saying her son saw you at the recruiting office after you were rejected and that it was into the ranks you were going. You never told me that. I must say I don't think you ought to have thought about the ranks without telling me. And I wouldn't have liked it. I wouldn't have liked it at all. I think you ought to be very thankful you were rejected. I'm sure I am."

He said flatly, "Why are you? Thankful—good lord—you don't know—what do you mean, I ought to be thankful?"

"Because you ought to be an officer, if you go at all. It's not the place for you in your position. And apart from anything else—" She gave her sudden burst of laughter.

He felt arise within him violent and horrible feelings about her. "What are you laughing at?"

"Well, do just imagine what you'd look like in private soldier's clothing!" She laughed very heartily again.

He turned away.



CHAPTER VII

I

Up in his room he began a long letter to Nona, pouring out to her all his feelings about this second rejection. He was writing to her—and hearing from her—regularly and frequently now. It was his only vent in the oppression of these frightful days. She said that it was hers, too.

After that letter of hers, at the outbreak of the war, in which she had said that she thanked God for him that he had delayed her decision to unchain their chains and to join their lives, no further reference had been made by either to that near touch of desire's wand. It was, as he had said it should be, as though her letter had never been written. And in her letters she always mentioned Tony. She wrote to Tony every day, she told him; and there were few of her letters but mentioned a parcel of some kind sent to her husband. Tony never wrote. Sometimes, she said, there came a scrap from him relative to some business matter she must see to; but never any response to her daily budget of gossip—"the kind of news I know he likes to hear"—or any news of himself and his doings.

She once or twice said, without any comment, "But he is writing often to Mrs. Stanley and Lady Grace Heddon and Sophie Basildon and I hear bits of him from them and know he is keeping well. Of course, I pretend to them that their news is stale to me." Another time, "I've just finished my budget to Tony," she wrote, "and have sent him two sets of those patent rubber soles for his boots. Do you think he can get them put on? Every day I try to think of some new trifle he'd like; and you'd be shocked, and think I care nothing about the war, at the number of theatres I make time to go to. You see, it makes something bright and amusing to tell him, describing the plays. I feel most frightfully that, although of course my canteen work is useful, the real best thing every woman can do in this frightful time is to do all she can for her man out there; and Tony's mine. When this is all over—oh, Marko, is it ever going to be over?—things will hurt again; but while he's out there the old things are dead and Tony's mine and England's—my man for England: that is my thought; that is my pride; that is my prayer."

And a few lines farther on, "And he's so splendid. Of course you can imagine how utterly splendid he is. Lady King-Warner, his colonel's wife, told me yesterday her husband says he's brave beyond anything she could imagine. He said—she's given me his letter—'the men have picked up from home this story about angels at Mons and are beginning to believe they saw them. Tybar says he hopes the angels were near him, because he thought he was in hell, the particular bit he got into, and he thinks it must be good for angels, enlarging for their minds, to know what hell is like! As a matter of fact, Tybar himself is nearer to the superhuman than anything I saw knocking about at Mons. His daring and his coolness and his example are a byword in a battalion composed, my dear, with the solitary exception of the writer, entirely of heroes. In sticky places Tybar is the most wonderful thing that ever happened. I like to be near him because his immediate vicinity is unquestionably a charmed circle; and I shudder to be near him because his is always the worst spot.'

"Can't you imagine him, Marko?"

II

And always her letters breathed to Sabre his own passionate love of England, his own poignant sense of possession in her and by her, his own intolerable aching at the heart at his envisagement of her enormously beset. They reflected his own frightful oppression and they assuaged it, as his letters, she told him, assuaged hers, as burdens are assuaged by mingling of distress. "There is no good news," he told her, "and for me who can do nothing—and sometimes things are a little difficult with me here and I suppose that makes it worse—there seems to be no way out. But your letters are more than good news and more than rescue; they are courage. Courage is like love, Nona: it touches the spirit; and the spirit, amazing essence, is like a spring: it is never touched but it—springs!"

She was working daily at a canteen at Victoria station. She had been on the night shift "but I can't sleep, I simply cannot sleep nowadays"; and so, shortly before he wrote to her of his second rejection, she had changed on to the day shift and at night took out the car to run arriving men from one terminus to another. "And about twice a week I get dog-tired and feel sleepy and send the chauffeur with the car and stay at home and do sleep. It's splendid!"

Northrepps had been handed over to the Red Cross as a military hospital. Her answer to his letter telling of his second rejection at the recruiting office—most tender words from her heart to his heart, comforting his spirit as transfusion of blood from health to sickness maintains the exhausted body—her reply told him that on that day fortnight she was coming down to say of his disappointment what she could so inadequately express in writing. She was going out to war work in France—in Tony's name she had presented a fleet of ambulance cars to a Red Cross unit and she was going out to drive one—and she was coming down to look at things at Northrepps before she left.

* * * * *

On the following day Tidborough, opening its newspapers, shook hands with itself in all its houses, shops and offices on its own special and most glorious V.C.,—Lord Tybar.

III

Tybar's V.C. was the first thing Sabre spoke of to Nona when, a fortnight later, she came down and he went up to her at Northrepps in the afternoon. Its brilliant gallantry, rendered so vivid to him by the intimacy with which he could see that thrice attractive figure engaged in its performance, stirred him most deeply. He had by heart every line of its official record in the restrained language of the Gazette.

...The left flank of the position was insecure, and the post, when taken over, was ill prepared for defence.... When the battalion was suffering very heavy casualties from a 77mm. field gun at very close range, Captain Lord Tybar rushed forward under intense machine gun fire and succeeded in capturing the gun single-handed after killing the entire crew.... Later, when repeated attacks developed, he controlled the defence at the point threatened, giving personal assistance with revolver and bombs.... Single-handed he repulsed one bombing assault.... It was entirely owing to the gallant conduct of this officer that the situation was relieved....

Oh, rare and splendid spirit! Fortune's darling thrice worthy of her dowry!

Nona had written of it in ringing words. She flushed in beautiful ardour of the enthusiasm she joined with Sabre's at his opening words of their meeting; but she ended with a sad little laugh. "And then!" she said.

"What do you mean, Nona, 'And then'?"

She took a letter from her bag. "I only got this this morning just as I was coming away. It's in reply to the one I wrote him about his V.C. Oh, Marko, so splendid, so utterly splendid as he is, and then to be like this. Look, he says he's just got leave and he's going to spend it in Paris! One of his women is there. That Mrs. Winfred. He's taken up with her again. He says, 'Poor thing. She's all alone in Paris. I know how sorry you will feel for her, and I feel I ought to go and look after her. I know you will agree with me. I'll tell her you sent me. That will amuse and please her so.'"

She touched her eyes with her handkerchief. "It rather hurts, Marko. It's not that I mind his going. It's just what he would do. But it's the way he tells me. He just says it like that deliberately to be cruel because he knows it will hurt. So utterly splendid, Marko, and so utterly graceless." She gave her little note of sadness again. "Utterly splendid! Look, this is all he says about his V.C. Isn't this fine and isn't it like him? He says, 'P.S. Yes, that V.C. business. You know why I got it, don't you? It stands for Very Cautious, you know.'"

They laughed together. Yes, like him! Tybar exactly! Sabre could see him writing the letter. Delighting in saying words that would hurt; delighting in his own whimsicality that would amuse. Splendid; airy, untouched by fear; untouched by thought; fearless, faithless, heedless, graceless. Fortune's darling; invested in her robe of mockery.

Nona's laughter ended in a little catch at her breath. He touched her arm. "Let's walk, Nona."

IV

He thought she was looking thin and done up. Her face had rather a drawn look, its soft roundness gone. He thought she never had looked so beautiful to him. She spoke to him of what she had tried to say in her letters of his disappointments in offering himself for service. Never had her sweet voice sounded so exquisitely tender to him. They spoke of the war. Never, but in their letters, had he been able thus to give his feelings and receive them, touched with the same perceptions, kindled and enlarged, back into his sympathies again. With others the war was all discussion of chances and circumstances, of this that had happened and that that might happen, of this that should be done and that that ought not to have been done. Laboratory examination of means and remedies. The epidemic everything and the patient upstairs nothing. The wood not seen for the trees. With Nona he talked of how he felt of England:

Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand.

He told her that.

She nodded. "I know. I know. Say it all through, Marko."

He stumbled through it. At the end, a little abashed, he smiled at her and said, "Of course, no one else would think it applies. Richard was saying it in Wales where he'd just landed, and it's about civil war, not foreign; but where it comes to me is the loving of the soil itself, as if it were a living thing that knew it was being loved and loved back in return. Our England, Nona. You remember Gaunt's thing in the same play:

"This royal throne of kings, this sceptre'd isle, This other Eden, demi-paradise.... This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea.... This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England...."

She nodded again. He saw that her dear eyes were brimming. She said, "Yes—yes.—Our England. Rupert Brooke said it just perfectly, Marko:

"And think, this heart, all evil shed, away.... Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven."

She touched his hand. "Dear Marko—" She made approach to that which lay between them. "'This heart, all evil shed away.' Marko, in this frightful time we couldn't have given back the thoughts by England given if we had.—And that was you, Marko."

He shook his head, not trusting himself to look at her. He said, "You. Not I. Any one can know the right thing. But strength to do it—Strength flows out of you to me. It always has. I want it more and more. I shall want it. Things are difficult. Sometimes I've a frightful feeling that things are closing in on me. There's Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind.' It makes me—I don't know—wrought up. And sometimes I've the feeling that I'm being carried along like that and towards that frightful cry at the end, 'O Wind, if winter comes-'"

He stopped. He said, "Give me your handkerchief to keep, Nona. Something of your own to keep. There will be strength in it for me—to help me hold on to the rest—to believe it—'If Winter comes—Can Spring be far behind?'"

She touched her handkerchief to her lips and gave it to him.

V

After October, especially, he spent never less than two evenings a week with old Mrs. Perch. In October Young Perch went to France and on his draft-leave took from Sabre the easy promise to "keep an eye on my mother." Military training, which to most gave robustness, gave to Young Perch, Sabre thought, a striking enhancement of the fine-drawn expression that always had been his. About his eyes and forehead Sabre apprehended something suggestive of the mystic, spiritually-occupied look that paintings of the Huguenots and the old Crusaders had; and looking at him when he came to say good-by, and while he spoke solely and only of his mother, Sabre remembered that long-ago thought of Young Perch's aspect,—of his spirit being alighted in his body as a bird on a twig, not engrossed in his body; a thing death would need no more than to pluck off between finger and thumb.

But unthinkable, that. Not Young Perch....

Old Mrs. Perch was very broken and very querulous. She blamed Sabre and she blamed Effie that Freddie had gone to the war. She said they had leagued with him to send him off. "Freddie I could have managed," she used to say; "but you I cannot manage, Mr. Sabre; and as for Effie, you might think I was a child and she was mistress the way she treats me."

Bright Effie used to laugh and say, "Now, you know, Mrs. Perch, you will insist on coming and tucking me up at night. Now does that look as if she's the child, Mr. Sabre?"

Mrs. Perch in her dogged way, "If Mr. Sabre doesn't know that you only permit me to tuck you up one night because I permit you to tuck me up the next night, the sooner he does know how I'm treated in my own establishment the better for me."

Thus the initial cause of querulousness would bump off into something else; and in an astonishing short number of moves Bright Effie would lead Mrs. Perch to some happy subject and the querulousness would give place to little rays of animation; and presently Mrs. Perch would doze comfortably in her chair while Sabre talked to Effie in whispers; and when she woke Sabre would be ready with some reminiscence of Freddie carefully chosen and carefully carried along to keep it hedged with smiles. But all the roads where Freddie was to be found were sunken roads, the smiling hedges very low about them, the ditches overcharged with water, and tears soon would come.

She used to doze and murmur to herself, "My boy's gone to fight for his country. I'm very proud of my boy gone to fight for his country."

Effie said Young Perch had taught her that before he went away.

While they were talking she used to doze and say, "Good morning, Mrs. So-and-So. My boy's gone to fight for his country. I'm very proud of my boy gone to fight for his country. Good morning, Mr. So-and-So. My boy's gone to—He didn't want to go, but I said he must go to fight for his country.... But that's not true, Freddie.... Oh, very well, dear. Good morning, Mrs. So-and-So.—"

She used to wake up with a start and say, "Eh, Freddie? Oh, I thought Freddie was in the room." Tears.

She said she always looked forward to the evenings when Sabre came. She liked him to sit and talk to Effie and to smoke all the time and knock out his pipe on the fender. She said it made her think Freddie was there. Effie said that every night she went into Young Perch's room and tucked up the bed and set the alarm clock and put the candle and the matches and one cigarette and the ash-tray by the bed; and every night in this performance said, "He said he's certain to come in quite unexpectedly one night, and he will smoke his one cigarette before he goes to sleep. It's no good my telling him he'll set the house on fire one night. He never listens to anything I tell him." And every morning, when Effie took her in a cup of tea very early (as Freddie used to), she always said, "Has Freddie come home in the night, Effie, dear? Now just go and knock on his door very quietly and then just peep your head in."

VI

Sabre had always thought Bright Effie would be wonderful with old Mrs. Perch. He wrote long letters to Young Perch, telling him how much more than wonderful Bright Effie was. Effie mothered Mrs. Perch and managed her and humoured her in a way that not even Young Perch himself could have bettered. In that astounding fund of humour of hers, reflected in those sparkling eyes, even Mrs. Perch's most querulously violent attacks were transformed into matter for whimsical appreciation, delightfully and most lovingly dealt with. When the full, irritable, inconsequent flood of one of Mrs. Perch's moods would be launched upon her in Sabre's presence, she would turn a dancing eye towards him and immediately she could step into the torrent and would begin, "Now, look here, Mrs. Perch, you know perfectly well—"; and in two minutes the old lady would be mollified and happy.

Marvellous Effie! Sabre used to think; and of course it was because her astounding fund of humour was based upon her all-embracing capacity for love. That was why it was so astounding in its depth and breadth and compass. Sabre liked immensely the half-whispered talks with her while Mrs. Perch dozed in her chair. Effie was always happy. Nothing of that wanting something look was ever to be seen in Effie's shining eyes. She had the secret of life. Watching her face while they talked, he came to believe that the secret, the thing missing in half the faces one saw, was love. But—the old difficulty—many had love; himself and Nona; and yet were troubled.

One evening he asked her a most extraordinary question, shot out of him without intending it, discharged out of his questing thoughts as by a hidden spring suddenly touched by groping fingers.

"Effie, do you love God?"

Her surprise seemed to him to be more at the thing he had asked than at its amazing unexpectedness and amazing irrelevancy. "Why, of course I do, Mr. Sabre."

"Why do you?"

She was utterly at a loss. "Well, of course I do."

He said rather sharply, "Yes, but why? Have you ever asked yourself why? Respecting, fearing, trusting, that's understandable. But love, love, you know what love is, don't you? What's love got to do with God?"

She said in simple wonderment, as one asked what had the sun to do with light, or whether water was wet, "Why, God is love."

He stared at her.

VII

The second Christmas of the war came. The evening before the last day of the Old Year was to have given Sabre a rare pleasure to which he had been immensely looking forward. He was to have spent it with Mr. Fargus. The old chess and acrostic evenings hardly ever happened now. Mr. Fargus, most manifestly unfitted for the exposures of such a life, had become a special constable. He did night duty in the Garden Home. He chose night duty, he told Sabre, because he had no work to do by day and could therefore then take his rest. Younger men who were in offices and shops hadn't the like advantage. It was only fair he should help in the hours help was most wanted. Sabre said it would kill him in time, but Mrs. Fargus and the three Miss Farguses still at home replied, when Sabre ventured this opinion to them, that Papa was much stronger than any one imagined, also that they agreed with Papa that one ought to do in the war, not what one wanted to do, but what was most required to be done; finally that, being at home by day, Papa could help, and liked helping, in the many duties about the house now interfered with by the enlistment of the entire battalion of female Farguses in work for the war. One detachment of female Farguses had leapt into blue or khaki uniforms and disappeared into the voracious belly of the war machine; the remainder of the battalion thrust their long legs into breeches and boots and worked at home as land girls. Little old Mr. Fargus in his grey suit, and the startled child Kate with one hand still up her back in search of the errant apron string "did" what the battalion used to do and were nightly, on the return of the giant land girls, shown how shockingly they had done it.

Rare, therefore, the old chess and acrostic evenings and most keenly anticipated, accordingly, this—the first for a fortnight—on the eve of New Year's Eve. It was to have been a real long evening; but it proved not very long. It was to have been one in which the war should be shut out and forgotten in the delights of mental twistings and slowly puffed pipes; it proved to be one in which "this frightful war!" was groaned out of Sabre's spirit in emotion most terrible to him.

At ten o'clock profound gymnastics of the mind in search of a hidden word beginning with e and ending with l were interrupted by the entry of the startled Kate. One hand writhed between her shoulders for the apron string, the other held a note. "Please, Mr. Sabre, I think it's for you, Mr. Sabre. A young boy took it to your house and said you was to have it most particular, and please, your Rebecca sent him on here, please."

"For me? Who on earth—?"

He opened it. He did not recognise the writing on the envelope. He had not the remotest idea—It was a jolly evening.... could Enamel be that word in e and l? He unfolded it. Ah!

"Freddie's killed. Please do come at once. I think she's dying.—E.B."



CHAPTER VIII

I

He was alone in the room where Mrs. Perch lay,—not even Effie. One o'clock. This war! He had thought to shut it away for a night, and here was the inconceivable occupation to which it had brought him: alone in here—

The doctor had been and was coming again in the morning. There was nothing to be done, he had said; just watch her.

Watch her? How long had he been standing at the foot of the huge bed—the biggest bed he had ever seen—and what was there to watch? She gave no sign. She scarcely seemed to breathe. He would not have recognised her face. It had the appearance of a mask. "Sinking," the doctor had said. In process here before his eyes, but not to be seen by them, awful and mysterious things. Death with practised fingers about his awful and mysterious surgery of separating the spirit from the flesh, the soul from the body, the incorruptible from the corruptible.

It could not be! There was not a sign; there was not a sound; and what should he be doing to be alone here, blind watcher of such a finality? It was not real. It was an hallucination. He was not really here. The morning—and days and weeks and years—would come, and he would know that this never had really happened.

But Young Perch was dead. Young Perch was killed. It was real. He was here. This war!

II

He had gone downstairs with the doctor and had remained there some little time after his departure. Effie had been left kneeling by the bed. When he came back she was sound asleep where she knelt, worn out. The news had come on the previous evening. This was Effie's second night without sleep. Now she was overcome; collapsed; suffocated and bound and gagged in the opiates and bonds she had for thirty hours resisted. He touched her. She did not stir. He shook her gently; still no response. He lifted her up and carried her along the passage to the room he knew to be hers; laid her on her bed and covered her with a quilt. Inconceivable occupation. Was all this really happening?

Two o'clock. He went to look at Effie, still in profound slumber. Why awaken her? Nothing could be done; only watch. He returned to his vigil.

Yes, Mrs. Perch was sinking. More pronounced now that masklike aspect of her face. Yes, dying. He spoke the word to himself. "Dying." As of a fire in the grate gone to one dull spark among the greying ashes.—It is out; it cannot burn again. So life here too far retired, too deeply sunk to struggle back and vitalise again that hue, those lips, that masklike effigy.

Profound and awful mystery. Within that form was in process a most dreadful activity. The spirit was preparing to vacate the habitation it had so long occupied. It gave no sign. The better to hide its preparations it had drawn that mask about the face. Seventy years it had sojourned here; now it was bound away. Seventy years it had been known to passers-by through the door and windows of this its habitation; now, deeply retired within the inner chambers, it set its house in order to be gone. Profound and awful mystery. Dreadful and momentous activity. From the windows of her eyes turning off the lights; from the engines of her powers cutting off its forces; drawing the furnaces; dissevering the contacts. A lifetime within this home; now passenger into an eternity. A lifetime settled; now preparing to be away on a journey inconceivably tremendous, unimaginably awful. Did it shrink? Did it pause in its preparations to peer and peep and shudder?

III

He felt very cold. He moved from the bed and replenished the fire and crouched beside it.

This war! He said beneath his breath, "Young Perch! Young Perch!" Young Perch was killed. Realise the thing! He was never going to see Young Perch again. He was never going to see old Mrs. Perch again. He was never to come into Puncher's again. Another place of his life was to be walled up. His home like an empty house; the office like an empty house; now no refuge here. Things were crowding in about him, things were closing in upon him. And he was just to live on here, out of the war, yet insupportably beset by the war. Beset by the war yet useless in the war. Young Perch! How in pity was he to go on living out of the war, now that the war had taken Young Perch and killed old Mrs. Perch and shut this refuge from its oppression? He must get in. He could not endure it. He could not, could not....

Ten minutes past three. There was perceptible to him no change in that face upon the pillow. He brought a lamp from the dressing table and looked at her, shading the light with his hand. Impenetrable mask! Profound and awful mystery. Much more than a house that dreadfully engrossed spirit was preparing to leave. This meagre form, scarcely discernible beneath the coverlet, had been its fortress, once new, once strong, once beautiful, once by its garrison proudly fought, splendidly defended, added to, enlarged, adorned. Then past its glory, past attention. Then crumbling, then decaying. Now to be abandoned. It had known great stresses and abated them; sieges and withstood them; assaults and defeated them. O vanity! It had but temporised with conquest. Time's hosts had camped these many years about its walls, in ceaseless investment, with desultory attacks, but with each attack investing closer. Now a most terrible assault had breached the citadel. The garrison was stricken amain. The fortress no longer could be defended. Its garrison was withdrawing from that place and handing it over to destruction.

IV

There was some strange sound in the room. He had dozed in a chair. Some strange sound, or had he imagined it? He sat up tensely and listened. It was her breathing, a harsh and laboured sound. He stepped quickly to the bed and looked and then ran into the passage and called loudly, "Effie! Effie!"

Frightening, terrible, agonising. He was kneeling on one side of the bed, Effie at the other. The extreme moment was come to her that lay between them. She was moaning. He bowed his face into his hands. The sound of her moaning was terrible to him. That inhabitant of this her body had done its preparations and now stood at the door in the darkness, very frightened. It wanted to go back. It had been very accustomed to being here. It could not go back. It did not want to shut the door. The door was shutting. It stood and shrank and whimpered there.

Oh, terrible! Beyond endurance, agonising. It was old Mrs. Perch that stood there whimpering, shrinking, upon the threshold of that huge abyss, wide as space, dark as night. It was no spirit. It was just that very feeble Mrs. Perch with her fumbling hands and her moving lips. Look here, Young Perch would never allow her even to cross a road without him! How in pity was she to take this frightful step? He twisted up all his emotions into an appeal of tremendous intensity. "Young Perch! Come here! Your mother! Young Perch, come here!"

Telling it, once, to Nona, he said, "I don't know what happened. They talk about self-hypnotism. Perhaps it was that. I know I made a most frightful effort saying 'Young Perch.' I had to. I could see her—that poor terrified thing. Something had to be done. Some one had to go to her. I said it like in a nightmare, bursting to get out of it, 'Young Perch. Come here.' Anyway, there it is, Nona. I heard them. It was imagination, of course. But I heard them."

He heard, "Now then, Mother! Don't be frightened. Here I am, Mother. Come on, Mother. One step, Mother. Only one. I can't reach you. You must take just one step. Look, Mother, here's my hand. Can't you see my hand?"

"It's so dark, Freddie."

"It's not, Mother. It's only dark where you are. It's light here. Don't cry, Mother. Don't be frightened. It's all right. It's quite all right."

That tall and pale young man, with his face like one of the old Huguenots! That very frail old woman with her fumbling hands and moving lips!

"It's so cold."

"Now, Mother, I tell you it isn't. Do just trust me. Do just come."

"I daren't, Freddie. I can't, Freddie. I can't. I can't."

"You must. Mother, you must. Look, look, here I am. It's I, Freddie. Don't cry, Mother. Just trust yourself entirely to me. You know how you always can trust me. Look, here's my hand. Just one tiny step and you will touch it. I know you feel ill, darling Mother. You won't any, any more, once you touch my hand. But I can't come any nearer, dearest. You must. You—. Ah, brave, beloved Mother—now!"

He heard Effie's voice, "Oh, she's dead! She's dead!"

Dead? He stared upon her dead face. Where was gone that mask? Whence had come this glory? That inhabitant of this her body, in act of going had looked back, and its look had done this thing. It had closed the door upon a ruined house, and looked, and left a temple. It had departed from beneath a mask, and looked, and that which had been masked now was beatified.

Young Perch!

V

In the morning a mysterious man with a large white face, crooked spectacles and a crooked tie, and a suggestion of thinking all the time of something else, or of nothing at all, mysteriously drifted into the house, drifted about it with apparent complete aimlessness of purpose, and presently showed himself to Sabre as about to drift out of it again. This was the doctor, a stranger, one of those new faces which the war, removing the old, was everywhere introducing, and possessed of a mysterious and astounding faculty of absorbing, resolving, and subjugating all matters without visibly attending to any matter. "Leave everything to me," it was all he seemed to say. He did nothing yet everything seemed to come to his hand with the nicety and exactness of a drawing-room conjurer. He bewildered Sabre.

His car left and returned during his brief visit. Sabre, who had thought him upstairs, and who had a hundred perplexities to inquire of him, found him in the hall absorbed in adjusting the weights of a grandfather's clock.

He remarked to Sabre, "I thought you'd gone. You'd better get off and get a bath and some breakfast. Nothing you can do here. Leave everything to me."

"But, look here, I can't leave—"

"That's all right. Just leave everything to me. I'm taking Miss Bright back to my wife for breakfast and a rest. After lunch I'll run her to her home. She can't stay here. Have you any idea how this thing hooks on?"

"But what about—"

The extraordinary man seemed to know everything before it was said. "That's all right. I've sent for a woman and her daughter. Leave everything to me. Here's the car. Here they are."

Two women appeared.

"But about—"

"Yes, that's all right. The poor old lady's brother is coming down. He'll take charge. I found his name in her papers last night. Telegraphed." He was looking through the door. "Here's the answer."

A telegraph messenger appeared.

Astounding man!

He read the telegram. "Yes, that's all right. He'll be here by the eleven train at Tidborough. I'll take Miss Bright now."

Effie appeared.

Sabre had the feeling that if he opened the next thought in his mind, an undertaker would rise out of the ground with a coffin. This astonishing man, coming upon his overwrought state, made him feel hysterical. He turned to Effie and gave her both his hands. "The doctor's taking you, Effie. It's been dreadful for you. It's all over now. Try to leave it out of your mind for a bit."

She smiled sadly. "Good-by, Mr. Sabre. Thank you so much, so very much, for coming and staying. What I should have done without you I daren't think. I've never known any one so good as you've been to me."

"I've done nothing, Effie, except feel sorry for you."

He saw her into the car. No, he would not take a lift.

"Well, leave everything to me," said the doctor. The chauffeur spoke to him about some engine trouble. "Yes, I'll see to that. Leave everything to me, Jenkins."

Even his car!

VI

Sabre, passed on from the ordeal of the night to the ordeal of the day by this interlude of the astonishing doctor, did not know how overwrought he was until he was at home again and come to Mabel seated at breakfast. The thought in his mind as he walked had been the thought in his mind as he had sat on after the death, waiting for morning. After this, after the war had done this, how was he to go on enduring the war and refused part in it? He dreaded meeting Mabel. He dreaded going on to the office and meeting Fortune and Twyning. To none of these people, to no one he could meet, could he explain how he felt about Young Perch and what he had gone through with Mrs. Perch, nor why, because of what he felt, more poignant than ever was his need to get into the war. And yet with these feelings he must go on facing these people and go on meeting the war in every printed page, in every sight, in every conversation. Unbearable! He could not.

Mabel looked up from her breakfast. "Well, I do think—"

This was the beginning of it. He felt himself digging his nails into the palms of his hands. "I've been up with old Mrs. Perch—"

"I know you have. I sent around to the Farguses. I must say I do think—"

He felt he could not bear it. "Mabel, look here. For goodness' sake don't say you do think I ought to have let you know. I know I ought but I couldn't. And I'm not in a state to go on niggling about it. Young Perch is killed and his mother's dead. Now for goodness' sake, for pity's sake, let it alone. I couldn't send and there's the end of it."

He went out of the room. He thought, "There you are! Now I've done it!" He went back. "I say, I'm sorry for bursting out like that; but I've had rather a night of it. It's terrible, isn't it, both of them like that? Aren't you awfully sorry about it, Mabel?"

She said, "I'm very sorry. Very sorry indeed. But you can't expect me to say much when you speak in that extraordinary manner."

"I was with her when she died. It's upset me a bit."

"I don't wonder. If you ask me, I think it was very extraordinary your being there. If you ask me, I think it was very funny of that Miss Bright sending for you at that hour of the night. Whyever should she send for you of all people?"

"I was their greatest friend."

"Yes, I know you always liked them. But you couldn't be of any use. I must say I do think people are very funny sometimes. If Miss Bright had done the right thing, as we are their nearest neighbors, she would have sent and asked me if I could let one of the maids go over and be with her. Then you could have gone up too if you'd wished and could have come back again. I don't think she had any right to send for you."

He had sat down and was about to pour himself out some tea. He put down the teapot and got up. "Look here, do me a favour. They're dead, both of them. Don't say anything more about them. Don't mention the subject again. For God's sake."

He went out of the house and got his bicycle and set out for the office. At the top of the Green he passed young Pinnock, the son of Pinnock's Stores. Some patch of colour about young Pinnock caught his eye. He looked again. The colour was a vivid red crown on a khaki brassard on the young man's arm. The badge of the recruits enrolled under the Derby enlistment scheme. He dismounted. "Hullo, Pinnock. How on earth did you get that armlet?"

"I've joined up."

"But I thought you'd been rejected about forty times. Haven't you got one foot in the grave or something?"

Young Pinnock grinned hugely. "Don't matter if you've got both feet in, or head and shoulders neither, over at Chovensbury to-day, Mr. Sabre. It's the last day of this yer Derby scheme, an' there's such a rush of chaps to get in before they make conscripts of 'em they're fair letting anybody through."

Sabre's heart—that very heart!—bounded with an immense hope. "D'you think it's the same at Tidborough?"

"They're saying it's the same everywhere. They say they're passing you through if you can breathe. I reckon that's so at Chovensbury anyway. Why, they didn't hardly look at me."

Sabre turned his front wheel to the Chovensbury road. "I'll go there."

VII

At Chovensbury the recruiting station was in the elementary schools. Sabre entered a large room filled with men in various stages of dressing, odorous of humanity, very noisy. It was a roughish collection: the men mostly of the labouring or artisan classes. At a table in the centre two soldiers with lance corporal's stripes were filling up blue forms with the answers to questions barked out at the file of men who shuffled before them. As each form was completed, it was pushed at the man interrogated with "Get undressed."

Sabre took his place in the chain. In one corner of the room a doctor in uniform was testing eyesight. Passed on from there each recruit joined a group wearing only greatcoat or shirt and standing about a stove near the door. At intervals the door opened and three nude men, coat or shirt in hand, entered, and a sergeant bawled, "Next three!"

Sabre was presently one of the three. Of the two who companioned him one was an undersized little individual wearing a truss, the other appeared to be wearing a suit of deep brown tights out of which his red neck and red hands thrust conspicuously. Sabre realised with a slight shock that the brown suit was the grime of the unbathed. Across the passage another room was entered. The recruits dropped their final covering and were directed, one to two sergeants who operated weights, a height gauge and a measuring tape; another to an officer who said, "Stand on one leg. Bend your toes. Now on the other. Toes. Stretch out your arms. Work your fingers. Squat on your heels." The third recruit went to an officer who dabbed chests with a stethoscope and said, "Had any illnesses?" When the recruit had passed through each performance he walked to two officers seated with enrolment forms at a table, was spoken to, and then recovered his discarded garment and walked out. The whole business took about three minutes. They were certainly whizzing them through.

Sabre came last to the officer with the stethoscope. He was just polishing off the undersized little man with the truss. "Take that thing off. Cough. How long have you had this? Go along." He turned to Sabre, dabbed perfunctorily at his lungs, then at his heart. "Wait a minute." He applied his ear to the stethoscope again. Then he looked up at Sabre's face. "Had any illnesses?" "Not one in my life." "Shortness of breath?" "Not the least. I was in the XV at school." Sabre's voice was tremulous with eagerness. The doctor's eyes appeared to exchange a message with him. They gave the slightest twinkle. "Go along."

He went to the table where sat the two officers with the paper forms. "Name?" "Sabre." The officer nearer him drew a form towards him and poised a fountain pen over it. Sabre felt it extraordinarily odd to be standing stark naked before two men fully dressed. In his rejection at Tidborough the time before this had not happened.

"Any complaints?"

Sabre was surprised at such consideration. He thought the reference was to his treatment during examination. "No."

The officer, who appeared to be short-tempered, glanced again at the form and then looked quickly at him. "Absolutely nothing wrong with you?"

"Oh, I thought you meant—"

The officer was short-tempered. "Never mind what you thought. You hear what I'm asking you, don't you?"

It was Sabre's first experience of a manner with which he was to become more familiar. "Sorry. No, nothing whatever."

The fountain pen made a note. "Get off."

He could have shouted aloud. He thought, "By God!"

In the dressing room a sergeant bawled, "All recruits!"—paused and glared about the room and drew breath for further discharge. This mannerism Sabre was also to become accustomed to: in the Army, always "the cautionary word" first when an order was given. The sergeant then discharged: "All recruits past the doctor proceed to the room under this for swearing in. When sworn, to office adjoining for pay, card and armlet. And get a move on with it!"

VIII

The most stupendously elated man in all England was presently riding to Penny Green on Sabre's bicycle. On his arm blazed the khaki brassard, in the breast pocket of his waistcoat, specially cleared to give private accommodation to so glorious a prize, were a half-crown and two pennies, the most thrillingly magnificent sum he had ever earned,—his army pay. His singing thought was, "I'm in the Army! I'm in the Army! I don't care for anything now. By gad, I can't believe it. I'm in the war at last!" His terrific thought was, "Good luck have thee with thine honour; ride on ... and thy right hand shall show thee terrible things."

He burst into the house and discharged the torrent of his elation on to Mabel. "I say, I'm in the Army. They've passed me. Look here! Look at my Derby armlet! And look at this. That's my pay! Just look, Mabel—two and eightpence."

He extended the coins to her in his hand. "Look!"

She gave her sudden burst of laughter. "How perfectly ridiculous! Two and eightpence! Whyever did you take it?"

"Take it? Why, it's my pay. My army pay. I've never been so proud of anything in my life. I'll keep these coins forever. Where shall I put them?" He looked around for a shrine worthy enough. "No, I can't put them anywhere yet. I want to keep looking at them. I say, you're glad I'm in, aren't you? Do say something."

She gave her laugh. "But you're not in. You do get so fearfully excited. After all, it's only this Lord Derby thing where they call the men up in age classes, the papers say. Yours can't come for months. You may not go at all."

He dropped the coins slowly into his pocket,—chink, chink, chink. "Oh, well, if that's all you've got to say about it."

"Well, what do you expect? You just come rushing in and telling me without ever having said a word that you were going. And for that matter you seem to forget the extraordinary way in which you went off this morning. I haven't."

"I had forgotten. I was upset. I went off, I know; but I don't remember—"

"No, you only swore at me; that's all."

"Mabel, I'm sure I didn't."

"You bawled out, 'For God's sake.' I call that swearing. I don't mind. It's not particularly nice for the servants to hear, but I'm not saying anything about that."

His brows were puckered up. "What is it you are saying?"

"I'm simply saying that, behaving like that, it's not quite fair to pretend that I'm not enthusiastic enough for you about this Lord Derby thing. It isn't as if you were really in the Army—"

He wished not to speak, but he could not let this go. "But I am in."

"Yes, but not properly in—yet. And perhaps you won't ever be. It doesn't seem like being in to me. That's all I'm saying. Surely there's no harm in that?"

He was at the window staring out into the garden. "No, there's no harm in it."

"Well, then. What are we arguing about it for?"

He turned towards her. "Well, but do understand, Mabel. If you think I was a fool rushing in like that, as you call it. Do understand. It's a Government scheme. It's binding. It isn't a joke."

"No, but I think they make it a joke, and I can't think why you can't see the funny side of it. I think giving you two and eightpence like that—a man in your position—is too lovely for words."

He took the coins from his pocket, and jerked them on the table before her. "Here, pay the butcher with it."

IX

But as he reached the door, his face working, the tremendous and magnificent thought struck into his realisation again. "I'm in the Army! By gad, I'm in the Army. I don't care what happens now." He strode back, smiling, and took up the money. "No, I'm dashed if I can let it go!" He went out jingling it and turned into the kitchen. "I say, High, Low, I'm in the Army! I've got in. I'll be off soon. Look at my badge!"

They chorused, "Well, there now!"

He said delightedly, "Pretty good, eh? Isn't it fine! Look at this—that's my pay. Two and eightpence!"

The chorus, "Oh, if ever!"

High Jinks said, "That armlet, sir, that's too loose. It don't half show down on your elbow, sir. You want it up here."

"Yes, that's the place. Won't it stay?"

"I'll put a safety pin in, sir; and then to-night shift the buttons. That's what it wants."

"Yes, do, High. That's fine."

He held out his arm and the two girls pinned to advantage the splendid sign of his splendid triumph.

"There, sir. Now it shows. And won't we be proud of you, just, in khaki and all!"

He laughed delightedly. "I'm jolly proud of myself, I tell you! Now, then, Thumbs, I don't want bayonets in me yet!"

Glorious! Glorious! And what would not Nona say!



CHAPTER IX

I

Life, when it takes so giant a hand in its puppet show as to upturn a cauldron of world war upon the puppets, may be imagined biting its fingers in some chagrin at the little result in particular instances. As vegetation beneath snow, so individual development beneath universal calamity. Nature persists; individual life persists. The snow melts, the calamity passes; the green things spring again, the individual lives are but approached more nearly to their several destinations.

Sabre was called up in his Derby Class within eight weeks of his enrolment,—at the end of February, 1916. He was nearly two years in the war; but his ultimate encounter with life awaited him, and was met, at Penny Green. It might have been reached precisely as it was reached without agency of the war, certainly without participation in it. Of the interval only those few events ultimately mattered which had connection with his life at home. They seemed in the night of the war transient as falling stars; they proved themselves lodestars of his destiny. They seemed nothing, yet even as they flashed and passed he occupied himself with them as the falling star catches the attention from all the fixed and constant. They were of his own life: the war life was life in exile.

And, caught up at last in the enormous machinery of the war, his feelings towards the war underwent a great change. First in the training camp in Dorsetshire, afterwards, and much more so, in the trenches in Flanders, it was only by a deliberate effort that he would recapture, now and then, the old tremendous emotions in the thought of England challenged and beset. He turned to it as stimulant in moments of depression and of dismay, in hours of intense and miserable loathing of some conditions of his early life in the ranks, and later in hours when fatigue and bodily discomfort reached degrees he had not believed it possible to endure—and go on with. He turned to it as stimulant and it never failed of its stimulation. "I'm in it. What does this matter? This is the war. It's the war. Those infernal devils.... If these frightful things were being done in England! Imagine if this was in England! Thank God I'm in it. There you are! I'm absolutely all right when I remember why I'm here." And enormous exaltation of spirit would lift away the loneliness, remove the loathing, banish the exhaustion, dissipate the fear. The fear—"And thy right hand shall show thee terrible things"—He was more often than once in situations in which he knew he was afraid and held fear away only because, with his old habit of introspection, he knew it for fear,—a horrible thing that sought mastery of him and by sheer force of mental detachment must be held away where it could be looked at and known for the vile thing it was. In such ordeals, in Flanders, he got the habit of saying to himself between his teeth, "Six minutes, six hours, six days, six months, six years. Where the hell will I be?" It somehow helped. The six minutes would go, and one could believe that all the periods would go,—and wonder where they would find one.

But more than that: now, caught up in the enormous machinery of the war, he never could accept it, as other men seemed to accept it, as normal and natural occupation that might be expected to go on for ever and outside of which was nothing at all. His life was not here; it was at home. He got the feeling that this business in which he was caught up was a business apart altogether from his own individual life,—a kind of trance in which his own life was held temporarily in abeyance, a kind of transmigration in which he occupied another and a very strange identity: from whose most strange personality, often so amazingly occupied, he looked wonderingly upon the identity that was his own, waiting his return.

And it was when, in thought or fleeting action, he came in touch with that old, waiting identity, that there happened the things that seemed transient as falling stars but moved into his horoscope as planets,—and remained.

II

He first went to France, in one of the long string of Service battalions that had sprung out of the Pinks, in the June following his enlistment. Mabel had not wished to make any change in her manner of life while he was still in England in training and she did not wish to when, at home three days on his draft leave, he discussed it with her. She much preferred, she said, to go on living in her own home. She was altogether against any idea of going to be with her father at Tidborough, and there was no cousin "or anybody like that" (her two sisters were married and had homes of their own) that she would care to have in the house with her. Relations were all very well in their right place but sharing the house with you was not their right place. She had plenty to do with her war work and one thing and another; if, in the matter of obviating loneliness, she did make any change at all, it might be to get some sort of paid companion: if you had any one permanently in the house it was much better to have some one in a dependent position, not as your equal, upsetting things.

The whole of these considerations were advanced again in a letter which Sabre received in July and which gave him great pleasure. Mabel had decided to get a paid companion—it was rather lonely in some ways—and she had arranged to have "that girl, Miss Bright." Sabre, reading, exclaimed aloud, "By Jove, that's good. I am glad." And he thought, "Jolly little Effie! That's splendid." He somehow liked immensely the idea of imagining Bright Effie about the house. He thought, "I wish she could have been in long ago, when I was there. It would have made a difference. Some one between us. We used to work on one another's nerves. That was our trouble. Pretty little Effie! How jolly it would have been! Like a jolly little sister."

He puckered his brows a little as he read on to Mabel's further reflections on the new enterprise: "Of course she's not our class but she's quite ladylike and on the whole I think it just as well not to have a lady. It might be very difficult sometimes to give orders to any one of one's own standing."

He didn't quite like that; but after all it was only just Mabel's way of looking at things. It was the jolliest possible idea. He wrote back enthusiastically about it and always after Effie was installed inquired after her in his letters.

But Mabel did not reply to these inquiries.

III

He was writing regularly to Nona and regularly hearing from her. He never could quite make out where she was, addressing her only to her symbol in the Field post-office. She was car driving and working very long hours. There was one letter that he never posted but of the existence of which he permitted himself to tell her. "I carry it about with me always in my Pay-book. It is addressed to you. If ever I get outed it will go to you. In it I have said everything that I have never said to you but that you know without my saying it. There'll be no harm in your hearing it from my own hand if I'm dead. I keep on adding to it. Every time we come back into rest, I add a little more. It all could be said in the three words we have never said to one another. But all the words that I could ever write would never say them to you as I feel them. There! I must say no more of it. I ought not to have said so much."

And she wrote, "Marko, I can read your letter, every line of it. I lie awake, Marko, and imagine it to myself—word by word, line by line; and word by word, line by line, in the same words and in the same lines, I answer it. So when you read it to yourself for me, read it for yourself from me. Oh, Marko—

"That I ever shall have cause to read it in actual fact I pray God never to permit. But so many women are praying for so many men, and daily—. So I am praying beyond that: for myself; for strength, if anything should happen to you, to turn my heart to God. You see, then I can say, 'God keep you—in any amazement.'"

IV

Early in December he wrote to Mabel:

"A most extraordinary thing has happened. I'm coming home! I shall be with you almost on top of this. It's too astonishing. I've suddenly been told that I'm one of five men in the battalion who have been selected to go home to an Officer Cadet battalion for a commission. Don't jump to the conclusion that I'm the Pride of the Regiment or anything like that. It's simply due to two things: one that this is not the kind of battalion with many men who would think of taking commissions; the other that both my platoon officer and the captain of my company happen to be Old Tidburians and, as I've told you, have often been rather decent to me. So when this chance came along the rest was easy. I know you'll be glad. You've never liked the idea of my being in the ranks. But it's rather wonderful, isn't it? I hope to be home on the third and I go to the Cadet battalion, at Cambridge, on the fifth."

Two days later he started, very high of spirit, for England. As he was leaving the village where the battalion was resting—his immediate programme the adventure of "lorry-jumping" to the railhead—the mail came in and brought him a letter from Mabel. It had crossed his own and a paragraph in it somehow damped the tide of his spirits.

"I was very much annoyed with Miss Bright yesterday. I had been kept rather late at our Red Cross Supply Depot owing to an urgent call for accessories and when I came home I found that Miss Bright had actually taken what I consider the great liberty of ordering up tea without waiting for me. I considered it great presumption on her part and told her so. I find her taking liberties in many ways. It's always the way with that class,—once you treat them kindly they turn on you. However, I have, I think, made it quite clear to her that she is not here for the purpose of giving her own orders and being treated like a princess."