Part 26 (1/2)

The extraordinary man, who had become smiling and airy, immediately became extraordinary again. He had struck a match, held it to Sabre's cigarette, and was applying it to his own. He extinguished it with violent jerks of his arm and dashed it on to the pavement. ”Sure? My G.o.d, sure? I tell you, Sabre, you won't be five years, I don't believe you'll be two years, one year, older before you'll not only be sure--you'll know! I've just finished a course at the Staff College, you know. We finished up with a push over to Belgium to do the battlefields.

We went into Germany, some of us. They fed us in some of their messes.

Do you know, those chaps in those messes there talked about fighting us as naturally and as certainly as you talk with your opponents about a coming footer match. They talked about 'When we fight you'--not '_if_ we fight you'--'when', as if it was as fixed as Christmas. And they didn't talk any of this bilge about fighting us in England; they knew, as I know, and every soldier knows--every soldier who's keen--that it's going to be out there. In Europe.” He had not taken two puffs at his cigarette before he wrenched it from his mouth and dashed it after the match.

”Sabre, why the h.e.l.l aren't people here told that? Why are they stuck up with this rot about defending their sh.o.r.es when they can see for themselves that only the Navy can defend their sh.o.r.es? What are they going to do when the war comes? Are they going to lynch these b.l.o.o.d.y politicians who haven't told them they've got to fight for their lives?

Are they going to turn around and say they never knew it so they'll be d.a.m.ned if they'll fight for their lives? Are they going to follow any of these politicians who will have betrayed them? Do you suppose any man who's been party to this betrayal is going to be found big enough to run a war? I tell you that's another thing. Do you suppose a chap who's been a miserable vote-s.n.a.t.c.her all his life is going to turn round suddenly and be a heaven-sent administrator in a war? You can take your oath Heaven doesn't send out geniuses on that ticket. What you've lived and done in fat times--that's what you're going to live and do in lean.

Heaven's chucked stocking divine fire.”

”I'm with you there,” Sabre said. He did not believe half this intense man said, but he conceived a sudden and great admiration for his intensity. And he had had no idea that a soldier ever thought so far away from his own subject--which was sport and one chance in a million of fighting--as to produce aphorisms on habit and development. ”But you know, Otway,” he said, ”it's jolly hard to believe all this inevitableness of war stuff that chaps like you put up. Do you read the articles in the reviews and the quarterlies? They all pretty well prove that, apart from anything else, a big European war is impossible by the--well, by the sheer bigness of the thing. They say these modern gigantic armies couldn't operate, couldn't provision themselves. And there's the finance. They prove you can't fight without money and that credit would go and the thing would stop before it had begun, pretty well. I don't know anything about that sort of thing, but the arguments strike me as absolutely sound.”

Otway was waiting with fidgety impatience. ”I've heard all that. I don't give a d.a.m.n for it. Of course you don't know anything about it. No one does. Least of all those writing chaps. It's all theory. Every one thought that with modern this, that and the other you were as safe on the last word in liners as in your own bedroom. Then comes along that _t.i.tanic_ business in April, and where the h.e.l.l are you with your modern conditions? Fifteen hundred people done in. I tell you it isn't that things that used to happen can't happen now; it's simply that they'll happen a million times worse. What's the good of theories when you've got facts? Look at the things there've been with Germany just this year alone. Old Haldane over in Germany in February for 'unofficial discussions', Churchill threatening two keels to one if the German Navy law is exceeded. That was March. In April the Germans whack up their Navy Law Amendment, twelve more big s.h.i.+ps. That chap Bertrand Stewart getting three and a half years for espionage in Germany; and two German spies caught by us here,--that chap Grosse over at Winchester a.s.sizes, three years, and friend Armgaard Graves up at Glasgow, eighteen months.

An American cove at Leipzig taking four years' penal for messing around after plans of the Heligoland fortifications. Those five yachting chaps in July arrested for espionage at Eckernforde. War, too, skits of it.

Turkey and Italy hardly done when all these Balkan chaps set to and slosh Turkey. Have you seen to-day's papers? I'll bet you they'll send Turkey to h.e.l.l at Kirk Kilisse or thereabouts before the week's out.”

He had been ticking these points off on his fingers, much astonis.h.i.+ng Sabre by his marshalling of scattered incidents that had been merely rather pleasing newspaper sensations of a couple of days. He presented the ticked-off fingers bunched up together. ”There, there's concrete facts for you, Sabre. Can you say things aren't tightening up? Why, if war--_when_ war comes people will look back on this year, 1912, and wonder where in h.e.l.l their eyes were that they didn't see it. What are they seeing?--” He threw his fingers apart. ”None of these things. Not one. All this doctors and the Insurance Bill tripe, Marconi Inquiry, _t.i.tanic_, Suffragettes smas.h.i.+ng up the West End, burning down Lulu Harcourt's place, trying to roast old Asquith in the Dublin Theatre, Seddon murder, this triangular cricket show. h.e.l.l's own excitement because there's so much rain in August and people in Norwich have to go about in boats, and then h.e.l.l's own hullaballoo because there's no rain for twenty-two days in September and people get so dry they can't spit or something.” His keen face wrinkled up into laughter. ”Eh, didn't you read that?” He laughed but was immediately intense again. ”That's all that really interests the people. By G.o.d, they'll sit up and take notice of the real stuff one of these days. Pretty soon. Tightening up, I tell you. Well, I'm off, Sabre. When are you coming up to the Mess again?

Friday? Well, guest night the week after. I'll drop you a line. So long.” He was off, carrying his straight back alertly up the street.

VII

His going was somehow as sudden and startling as his appearance had been sudden and tumultuous. He had carried away Sabre's thoughts as a jet from a hosepipe will spin a man out of a crowd; smashed into his preoccupation as a stone smas.h.i.+ng through a window upon one deep in study; galloped across his mind as a cavalcade thundering through a village street,--and the effect of it, and the incongruity of it as, getting his bicycle from the office, he rode homewards, kept returning to Sabre's mind, as an arresting dream will constantly break across daylight thoughts.

Nona had said that Tybar knew she thought often of him. ”He knows I think of you.” That was the way she had put it. It explained that mock in his eyes when they met that day on the road, and Mrs. Winfred's remark and her look, and Tybar's, that day outside the office.

Extraordinary, Otway bursting in like that with all those ridiculous scares. Here he was riding along with all this reality pressing enormously about him, and with this strange and terrible feeling of being at the beginning of something or at the end of something, with this voice in his ears of, ”You have struck your tents and are upon the march”; and there was Otway, up at the barracks, miles away from realities, but as obsessed with his impossible stuff as he himself with these most real and pressing dismays. What would he, with his apprehension of what might lie ahead, be saying to a chap like Otway in two or three years and what would Otway with his obsessions be saying to him? Ah, two or three years...!

But Nona loved him.... But his duty was here.... And he could have taken her beautiful body into his arms and held her beloved face to his....

But he had said not a word of love to her, only his cry of ”Nona--Nona....” His duty was here.... But what would the years bring...? But what might have been! What might have been!

VIII

He finished his ride in darkness. The Green, as he pa.s.sed along it on the free-wheel run, merged away through gloom into obscurity. Points of light from the houses showed here and there. The windows of his home had lamplight through their lattices. The drive was soft with leaves beneath his feet.

Lamplight, and the yielding undertread and all around walled about with obscurity. It was new. It had shown thus now for some nights on his return. But it was the first time he had apprehended it. New. Different.

A commencement. An ending.

He left his bicycle in the roomy porch. He missed Low Jinks with her customary friendly greeting. It was very lonely, this. He opened the hall door and entered. Absolute silence. He had grown uncommonly accustomed to Low Jinks being here.... Absolute silence. It was like coming into an empty house. And he had got to go on coming into it, and living in it, and tremendously doing his duty in it.

Like an empty house. He stood perfectly still in the perfect stillness.

Take down: it is beginning. You have struck your tents and are upon the march.

PART THREE

EFFIE

CHAPTER I