Part 8 (1/2)

Julian promised quickly that he never would. He saw for the first time that love was not liberty, and for the moment he preferred love. He had not felt deeply enough to know that there is a way in which you may widen liberty and yet keep love.

”I shall let you go,” Marian said gently, ”and I shall try to bear it as best I can.”

At the thought of how difficult it was going to be to bear, not to be able to tell anybody anything, she cried a little. Her face was uncontorted by her tears. They streamed down her blossom-colored cheeks like drops of pearly dew. Julian thought her tears were softness, and he struck at his chance. Now perhaps she would surrender to his hidden hope.

He pleaded, with her head against his heart, that she would marry him, marry him now--at once. He could arrange it all in twenty-four hours. He presented a thousand impetuous arguments. All his wits and his ardor fought for him against her soft, closed eyes. She was his; she would be his forever. He would go with that great possession in his heart; he would go like a man crowned to meet his future.

She opened her eyes at last and moved away from him. At that instant she would have liked to marry him, she would have liked it very much; but besides the fact that she had no things, there loomed the blank uncertainty of the future. Would she be a wife or a widow, and how should she know which she was? There were more immediate difficulties.

Her parents were in Scotland; hurried weddings were always very awkward; you couldn't have bridesmaids or wedding presents; and a few hours'

honeymoon, with an indefinite parting ahead of it, would be extremely painful.

Even if a marriage under all these disabilities was legal--wouldn't it be worse than illegal--wouldn't it be rather funny?

Julian was sometimes impossible; he had been nearly overwhelming, but he was quite impossible. He might be a dangerous man to marry in a hurry.

She would have to train him first.

”It's out of the question, Julian,” she said firmly. ”The whole future is too uncertain. I should love to--but I can't do it. It wouldn't be right for me to do it. We must wait till you come back.”

Julian returned to his study of the short down gra.s.ses. He knew that if she had loved to--she would have done it. He had a moment that was bitter with doubt and pain; then his love rose up and swallowed it. He saw the uncertainty for her.

He wanted her now because he knew that he might never have her. He wanted her with the fierce hunger of a pirate for a prize; but the very sharpness of his desire made him see that it was sheer selfishness to press his point. He overlooked the fact that it would have been perfectly useless. No pressure would have changed Marian. Pressure had done what it could for her already: it had moved her to tears. She dried them now, and suggested that they had stayed on the downs long enough.

CHAPTER X

It sometimes seemed to Stella as if Chaliapine had brought on the war.

Those last long golden summer days were filled with his music, and then suddenly out of them flashed the tents in the park, the processions of soldiers and bands, the grim stir that swept over London like a squall striking the surface of a summer sea.

The town hall did not collapse, but it shook. It was a place where, as a rule, the usual things took place, and even unusual things happened usually; but there were several weeks at the beginning of the war when all day long strange things happened strangely. Offices were changed, the routine of years was swept up like dust into a dust-pan, and a new routine, subject to further waves of change, took its place. Workers voluntarily offered to do work that they were unaccustomed to do. The council hall became a recruiting office. No. 8, the peculiar sanctum of the sanitary inspector, was given up to an army surveyor. Tramps asked the cas.h.i.+er questions. It was like the first act of ”Boris Goudonoff.”

Even food was carried about on trays, and as for proclamations, somebody or other was proclaiming something all day long.

There was no religion and no dancing, but there was the same sense of brooding, implacable fate; it took the place of music, and seemed, without hurry and without pause, to be carrying them all along in a secret rhythm of its own toward an unseen goal.

Mr. Leslie Travers ruled most of the town hall committees, and he required innumerable statistics to be compiled and ready to be launched intimidatingly at the first sign of any opposition to his ruling.

Stella, to whom the work of compiling fell, had very little time to consider the war.

When she got home she usually went to sleep. From time to time she heard Mrs. Waring announcing that there was no such thing as war and Eurydice reciting battle-odes to Belgium.

For the first time in her life Eurydice shared a common cause. She was inclined to believe that England was fighting for liberty. She knew that France was, partly because France was on the other side of the channel and partly because of the French Revolution. The destruction of Louvain settled the question of Belgium. To Eurydice, whatever was destroyed was holy. Later on she became a violent pacifist because Mr.

Bolt said that we ourselves were Prussian; but for the moment n.o.body, not even Mr. Bolt, had traced this evasive parallel.

Professor Waring wrote several letters to the papers, asking what precautions the Belgians were taking about Sanskrit ma.n.u.script. He had a feeling that King Albert, though doubtless an estimable young man and useful in the trenches, might, like most kings, have been insufficiently educated to appreciate the importance of Sanskrit. That men should die in large numbers to protect their country was an unfortunate incident frequent in history, but that a Sanskrit ma.n.u.script should be destroyed was a national calamity, for the ma.n.u.script could never be replaced.

He made an abortive effort to reach Belgium and see about it himself, but at the Foreign Office he was stopped by a young man with a single eyegla.s.s, from whom the professor had demanded a pa.s.sport. The exact expression used by this ignorant young person was, ”I'm awfully sorry, sir, but I'm afraid just at present Sanskrit ma.n.u.script will have to rip.”