Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THEODORE SAVAGE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

DIANA OF DOBSON’S

WILLIAM, AN ENGLISHMAN

MARRIAGE AS A TRADE

THEODORE SAVAGE
A STORY OF THE PAST OR THE FUTURE

BY

CICELY HAMILTON

LONDON

LEONARD PARSONS

DEVONSHIRE STREET

First Published 1922.

Leonard Parsons Ltd.

Theodore Savage

I

If it had been possible for Theodore Savage to place on record for those who came after him the story of his life and experiences, he would have been the first to admit that the interest of the record lay in circumstance and not in himself. From beginning to end he was much what surroundings made of him; in his youth the product of a public school, Wadham and the Civil Service; in maturity and age a toiler with his hands in the company of men who lived brutishly. In his twenties, no doubt, he was frequently bored by his clerking duties and the routine of the Distribution Office; later on there were seasons when all that was best in him cried out against confinement in a life that had no aspiration; but neither boredom nor resentment ever drove him to revolt or set him to the moulding of circumstance. If he was destined to live as a local tradition and superman of legend, the honour was not gained by his talents or personal achievements; he had to thank for it an excellent constitution, bequeathed him by his parents, certain traces of refinement in manner and speech and the fears of very ignorant men.

When the Distribution Office—like his Hepplewhite furniture, his colour-prints and his English glass—was with yesterday’s seven thousand years, it is more than possible that Theodore Savage, looking back on his youth, saw existence, till he neared the age of thirty, as a stream of scarcely ruffled content. Sitting crouched to the fire in the sweat-laden air of his cabin or humped idly on a hillside in the dusk of summer evening, it may well have seemed, when his thoughts strayed backwards, that the young man who once was impossibly himself was a being whom care did not touch. What he saw with the eye of his mind and memory was a neat young Mr. Savage who was valeted in comfortable chambers and who worked, without urgence, for limited hours, in a room that looked on Whitehall. Who in his plentiful leisure gained a minor reputation on the golf-links! Who frequented studios, bought—now and then—a picture and collected English glass and bits of furniture. Who was passably good-looking, in an ordinary way, had a thoughtful taste in socks and ties and was careful of his hands as a woman.... So—through the vista of years and the veil of contrast—Theodore may have seen his young manhood; and in time, perhaps, it was difficult for a coarse-fingered labourer, dependent for his bread on the moods of nature, to sympathize greatly with the troubles of neat Mr. Savage or think of him as subject to the major afflictions of humanity.

All the same, he would spend long hours in communion with his vanished self; striving at times to trace resemblances between the bearded, roughened features that a fishing-pool reflected and the smooth-chinned civil servant with brushed hair and white collar whom he followed in thought through his work, his amusements, his love-making and the trivial details of existence.... And imagining, sometimes, the years and the happenings that might have been if his age, like his youth, had been soaped and collared, routined by his breeding and his office; if gods and men had not run amuck in frenzy and his sons had been born of a woman who lived delicately—playing Chopin of an evening to young Mr. Savage and giving him cream in his tea?...

Even if life in his Civil Service days was not all that it shone through the years of contrast, Theodore Savage could have had very little of hardship to complain of in the days when he added to a certain amount of private income a salary earned by the duties of the unexacting billet which a family interest had secured for him. If he had no particular vocation for the bureaucratic life—if good painting delighted, and official documents bored him—he had sufficient common sense to understand that it is given to most of us, with sufficient application, to master the intricacies of official documents, while only to few is it given to master an art. After a phase of abortive experiment in his college days he had realized—fortunately—that his swift and instinctive pleasure in beauty had in it no creative element; whereupon he settled down, early and easily, into the life and habits of the amateur.... There remained with him to the end of his days an impression of a young man living pleasurably, somewhat fastidiously; pursuing his hobbies, indulging his tastes, on the whole without much damage to himself or to others affected; acting decently according to his code and, when he fell in love and out of it, falling not too grossly or disastrously. If he had a grievance against his work at the Distribution Office, it was no more serious than this: it took much time, certain hours every day, from the interests that counted in his life. And against that grievance, no doubt, he set the ameliorating fact that his private means unaided would hardly have supported his way of existence, his many pleasant interests and himself; it was his civil servant’s salary that had furnished his rooms in accordance with his taste and made possible the purchase of his treasured Fragonard and his bell-toned Georgian wine-glasses.... The bearded toiler, through a mist of years, watched a young man dawdling, without fear of the future, through a world of daily comforts that to his sons would seem fantastic, the creation of legend or of dream.

It was that blind and happy lack of all fear of the future that lent interest to the toiler’s watching; knowing what he knew of the years that lay ahead, there was something of grim and dramatic humour in the sight of himself—yea, Theodore Savage, the broken-nailed, unshorn—arrayed of a morning in a flowered silk dressing-gown or shirt-fronted for an evening at the opera.... As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be—that, so it seemed to him in later years, had been the real, if unspoken, motto of the world wherein he had his being in the days of his unruffled content....

Of the last few weeks in the world that was and ever should be he recalled, on the whole, very little of great hurrying and public events; it was the personal, intimate scenes that stood out and remained to a line and a detail. His first meeting with Phillida Rathbone, for instance, and the chance interview with her father that led to it: he could see himself standing by Rathbone’s desk in the Distribution Office, see the bowl between his fingers, held to the light—see its very shape and conventional pattern of raised flowers.

Rathbone—John Rathbone—was his chief in his Distribution days; a square-jawed, formidable, permanent official who was held in awe by underlings and Ministers, and himself was subject, most contentedly subject, to a daughter, the ruler of his household. Her taste in art and decoration was not her father’s, but, for all the bewilderment it caused him, he strove to gratify it loyally; and for Phillida’s twenty-third birthday he had chosen expensively, on his way to the office, at the shop of a dealer in antiquities. Swept on the spate of the dealer’s eloquence he had been pleased for the moment with his find—a flowered bowl, reputed Chelsea; it was not until half an hour later that he remembered uneasily his daughter’s firm warnings against unaided traffic with the miscreants who deal in curios. With the memory uncomfortable doubts assailed him, while previous experiments came thronging unpleasantly to mind—the fiasco of the so-called Bartolozzi print and the equally lamentable business of the so-called Chippendale settee.... He drew his purchase from its paper wrapping, set it down on the table and stared at it. The process brought no enlightenment and he was still wrestling with uncomfortable doubts when Theodore Savage knocked and came in with a draft report for approval.

The worry born of ignorance faded out of Rathbone’s face as he conned the document and amended its clauses with swift pencilled notes in the margin; he was back with the solidities he knew and could make sense of, and superfluous gimcracks for the moment had ceased to exist. It was Savage who unwittingly recalled their existence and importance; when his chief, at the end of his corrections, looked up, the younger man was eyeing the troublesome gimcrack with a meditative interest that reminded Rathbone of his daughter’s manner when she contemplated similar rubbish.

“Know anything about old china?” he inquired—an outward and somewhat excessive indifference concealing an inward anxiety.

“Not much,” said Theodore modestly; but, taking the query as request for an opinion, his hand went out to the bowl.

“What do you make of it?” asked Rathbone, still blatantly indifferent. “I picked it up this morning—for my daughter. Supposed to be Chelsea—should you say it was?”

If the answer had been in the negative the private acquaintance between chief and subordinate would probably have made no further progress; no man, even when he makes use of it, is grateful for the superior knowledge in a junior that convicts him to his face of gullibility. As it was, the verdict was favourable and Rathbone, in the relief of finding that he had not blundered, grew suddenly friendly—to the point of a dinner invitation; which was given, in part, as instinctive thanks for restored self-esteem, in part because it might interest Phillida to meet a young man who took gimcracks as gravely as herself. The invitation, as a matter of course, was accepted; and three days later Savage met Phillida Rathbone.

“I’ve asked a young fellow you’re sure to get on with”—so Rathbone had informed his daughter; who, thereupon, as later she confessed to Theodore, had made up her mind to be bored. She threw away her prejudice swiftly when she found the new acquaintance talked music with intelligence—she herself had music in her brain as well as in her finger-tips—while he from the beginning was attracted by a daintiness of manner and movement that puzzled him in Rathbone’s daughter.... From that first night he must have been drawn to her, since the evening remained to him clear in every detail; always in the hollow of a glowing fire he could summon up Phillida, himself and Rathbone, sitting, the three of them, round the table with its silver and tall roses.... In the centre a branching cluster of roses—all yellow, like Phillida’s dress.... Rathbone, for the most part, good-naturedly silent, Phillida and himself talking swiftly.... In shaded light and a solid, pleasant comfort; ordinary comfort, which he took for granted as an element of daily life, but which yet was the heritage of many generations, the product of long centuries of striving and cunning invention.... Later, in the drawing-room, the girl made music—and he saw himself listening from his corner of the sofa with a cigarette, unlit, between his fingers. Above all it was her quality of daintiness that pleased him; she was a porcelain girl, with something of the grace that he associated with the eighteenth century....

After half an hour that was sheer content to Theodore she broke off from her playing to sit on the arm of her father’s chair and ruffle his grey hair caressingly.

“Old man, does my noise on the piano prevent you from reading your paper?”

Whereat Rathbone laughed and returned the caress; and Phillida explained, for the visitor’s benefit, that the poor dear didn’t know one tune from another and must have been bored beyond measure—by piano noises since they came upstairs and nothing but music-talk at dinner.

“I believe we’ve driven him to the Montagu divorce case,” she announced, looking over his shoulder. “‘Housemaid cross-examined—the Colonel’s visits.’ Daddy, have you fallen to that?”

“No, minx,” he rebuked her, “I haven’t. I’m not troubling to wade through the housemaid’s evidence for the very good reason that it’s quite unnecessary. I shall hear all about it from you.”

“That’s a nasty one,” Phillida commented, rubbing her cheek against her father’s. She turned the paper idly, reading out the headlines. “‘American elections—Surprises at Newmarket—Bank Rate’—There doesn’t seem much news except the housemaid and the colonel, does there?”

Rathbone laughed as he pinched her cheek and pointed—to a headline here and a headline there, to a cloud that was not yet the size of a man’s hand.

“It depends on what you call news. It seems to have escaped you that we’ve just had a Budget. That matters to those of us who keep expensive daughters. And, little as the subject may interest you, I gather from the size of his type, that the editor attaches some importance to the fact that the Court of Arbitration has decided against the Karthanian claim. That, of course, compared to a housemaid in the witness-box is——”

“Ponderous,” she finished and laughed across at Theodore. “Important, no doubt, but ponderous—the Court of Arbitration always is. That’s why I skipped it.” ... Then, carelessly interested, and running her eye down the columns of the newspaper, she supposed the decision was final and those noisy little Karthanians would have to be quiet at last. Rathbone shrugged his shoulders and hoped so.

“But they’ll have to, won’t they?” said Phillida. “Give me a match, Daddy—There’s no higher authority than the Court of Arbitration, is there?”

“If,” Rathbone suggested as he held a light to her cigarette, “if your newspaper reading were not limited to scandals and chiffons, you might have noticed that your noisy little friends in the East have declared with their customary vehemence that in no circumstances whatever will they accept an adverse verdict—not even from the Court of Arbitration.”

“But they’ll have to, won’t they?” Phillida repeated placidly. “I mean—they can’t go against everybody else. Against the League.”

She tried to blow a smoke-ring with conspicuous ill-success, and Theodore, watching her from his corner of the sofa—intent on her profile against the light—heard Rathbone explaining that “against everybody else” was hardly the way to put it, since the Federal Council was not a happy family at present. There was very little doubt that Karthania was being encouraged to make trouble—and none at all that there would be difference of opinion on the subject of punitive action.... Phillida, with an arm round her father’s neck, was divided between international politics and an endeavour to make the perfect ring—now throwing in a question anent the constitution and dissensions of the League, now rounding her mouth for a failure—while Theodore, on the sofa, leaned his head upon his hand that he might shade his eyes and watch her without seeming to watch.... He listened to Rathbone—and did not listen; and that, as he realized later, had been so far his attitude to interests in the mass. The realities of his life were immediate and personal—with, in the background, dim interests in the mass that were vaguely distasteful as politics. A collective game played with noisy idealism and flaring abuse, which served as copy to the makers of newspapers and gave rise at intervals to excited conversation and argument....

What was real, and only real while Rathbone talked, was the delicate poise of Phillida’s head, the decorative line of Phillida’s body, his pleasure in the sight of her, his comfort in a well-ordered room; these things were realities, tangible or æsthetic, in whose company a man, if he were so inclined, might discuss academically an Eastern imbroglio and the growing tendency to revolt against the centralized authority of the League. Between life, as he grasped it, and public affairs there was no visible, essential connection. The Karthanian imbroglio, as he strolled to his chambers, was an item in the make-up of a newspaper, the subject of a recent conversation; it was the rhythm of Phillida’s music that danced in his brain as a living and insistent reality. That, and not the stirrings of uneasy nations, kept him wakeful till long after midnight.

II

While Theodore Savage paid his court to Phillida Rathbone, the Karthanian decision was the subject of more than conversation; diplomatists and statesmen were busy while he drifted into love and dreamed through the sudden rumours that excited his fellows at the office. In London, for the most part, journalism was guarded and reticent, the threat of secession at first hardly mentioned; but in nations and languages that favoured secession the press was voicing the popular cry with enthusiasm that grew daily more heated. Through conflicting rumour this at least was clear: at the next meeting of the Council of the League its authority would be tested to the uttermost, since the measure of independent action demanded by the malcontent members would amount to a denial of the federal principle, to secession in fact if not in name.... Reaction against central and unified authority was not a phenomenon of yesterday; it had been gathering its strength through years of racial friction, finding an adherent in every community that considered itself aggrieved by a decision of the Council or award of the Court of Arbitration, and for years it had taxed the ingenuity of the majority of the Council to avoid open breach and defiance.

Before open breach and its consequences, both sides had so far manœuvred, hesitated, compromised; it had been left to a minor, a very minor, state, to rush in where others feared to tread. The flat refusal of a heady, half-civilized little democracy to accept the unfavourable verdict of the Court of Arbitration was the spark that might fire a powder-barrel; its frothy demonstrations, ridiculous in themselves, appealed to the combative instinct in others, to race-hatreds, old herding feuds and jealousies. These found vent in answering demonstrations, outbursts of popular sympathy in states not immediately affected; the noisy rebel was hailed as a martyr and pioneer of freedom, and became the pretext for resistance to the Council’s oppression. There was no doubt of the extent of the re-grouping movement of the nations, of the stirrings of a widespread combativeness which denounced Federation as a system whereby dominant interests and races exploited their weaker rivals. With the meeting of the Council would come the inevitable clash of interests; the summons to the offending member of the League to retreat from its impossible position, and—in case of continued defiance—the proposal to take punitive action. That proposal, to all seeming, must bring about a crisis; those members of the League who had encouraged the rebel in defiance would hardly consent to co-operate in punitive measures; and refusal—withdrawal of their military contingents—would mean virtual secession and denial of majority rule. If collective excitement and anger ran high, it might mean even more than secession; there were possibilities—first hinted at, later discussed without subterfuge—of actual and armed opposition should the Council attempt to enforce its decree and authority.... Humanity, once more, was gathering into herds and growing sharply conscious alike of division and comradeship.

It was some time before Theodore was even touched by the herding instinct and spirit; apart, in a delicate world of his own, he concerned himself even less than usual with the wider interests of politics. By his fellows in the Distribution Office he was known as an incurable optimist; even when the cloud had spread rapidly and darkened he saw “strained relations” through the eyes of a lover, and his mind, busied elsewhere, refused to dwell anxiously on “incidents” and “disquieting possibilities.” They intruded clumsily on his delicate world and, so soon as might be, he thrust them behind him and slipped back to the seclusion that belonged to himself and a woman. All his life, thought and impulse, for the time being, was a negation, a refusal of the idea of strife and destruction; in his happy egoism he planned to make and build—a home and a lifetime of content.

Now and again, and in spite of his reluctance, his veil of happy egoism was brushed aside—some chance word or incident forcing him to look upon the menace. There was the evening in Vallance’s rooms, for instance—where the talk settled down to the political crisis, and Holt, the long journalist, turned sharply on Vallance, who supposed we were drifting into war.

“That’s nonsense, Vallance! Nonsense! It’s impossible—unthinkable!”

“Unpleasant, if you like,” said Vallance; “but not impossible. At least—it never has been.”

“That’s no reason,” Holt retorted; “we’re not living yesterday. There’ll be no war, and I’ll tell you why: because the men who will have to start it—daren’t!” He had a penetrating voice which he raised when excited, so that other talk died down and the room was filled with his argument. Politicians, he insisted, might bluff and use threats—menace with a bogy, shake a weapon they dared not use—but they would stop short at threats, manœuvre for position and retreat. Let loose modern science, mechanics and chemistry, they could not—there was a limit to human insanity, if only because there was a limit to the endurance of the soldier. Unless you supposed that all politicians were congenital idiots or criminal lunatics out to make holocausts. What was happening at present was manœuvring pure and simple; neither side caring to prejudice its case by open admission that appeal to force was unthinkable, each side hoping that the other would be the first to make the admission, each side trotting out the dummy soldiers that were only for show, and would soon be put back in their boxes.... War, he repeated, was unthinkable....

“Man,” said a voice behind Theodore, “does much that is unthinkable!”

Theodore turned that he might look at the speaker—Markham, something in the scientific line, who had sat in silence, with a pipe between his lips, till he dropped out his slow remark.

“Your mistake,” he went on, “lies in taking these people—statesmen, politicians—for free agents, and in thinking they have only one fear. Look at Meyer’s speech this morning—that’s significant. He has been moderate so far, a restraining influence; now he breathes fire and throws in his lot with the extremists. What do you make of that?”

“Merely,” said Holt, “that Meyer has lost his head.”

“In which happy state,” suggested Vallance, “the impossible and unthinkable mayn’t frighten him.”

“That’s one explanation,” said Markham. “The other is that he is divided between his two fears—the fear of war and the fear of his democracy, which, being in a quarrelsome and restless mood, would break him if he flinched and applauds him to the echo when he blusters. And, maybe, at the moment, his fear of being broken is greater than his fear of the impossible—at any rate the threat is closer.... The man himself may be reasonable—even now—but he is the instrument of instinctive emotion. Almost any man, taken by himself, is reasonable—and, being reasonable, cautious. Meyer can think, just as well as you and I, so long as he stands outside a crowd; but neither you nor I, nor Meyer, can think when we are one with thousands and our minds are absorbed into a jelly of impulse and emotion.”

“I like your phrase about jelly,” said Vallance. “It has an odd picturesqueness. Your argument itself—or, rather, your assertion—strikes me as a bit sweeping.”

“All the same,” Markham nodded, “it’s worth thinking over.... Man in the mass, as a crowd, can only feel; there is no such thing as a mass-mind or intellect—only mass desires and emotions. That is what I mean by saying that Meyer—whatever his intelligence or sanity—is the instrument of instinctive emotion.... And instinctive emotion, Holt—until it has been hurt—is damnably and owlishly courageous. It isn’t clever enough to be afraid; not even of red murder—or starvation by the million—or the latest thing in gas or high explosive. Stir it up enough and it’ll run on ’em—as the lemmings run to the sea.”

Holt snorted something that sounded like “Rot!” and Vallance, sprawling an arm along the mantelpiece, asked, “Another of your numerous theories?”

“If you like,” Markham assented, “but it’s a theory deduced from hard facts.... It’s a fact, isn’t it, that no politician takes a crowd into his confidence until he wants to make a fight of it? It’s a fact, isn’t it, that no movements in mass are creative or constructive—that simultaneous action, simultaneous thought, always is and must be destructive? Set what we call the People in motion and something has got to be broken. The crowd-life is still at the elementary, the animal stage; it has not yet acquired the human power of construction ... and the crowd, the people, democracy—whatever you like to call it—has been stirring in the last few years; getting conscious again, getting active, looking round for something to break ... which means that the politician is faced once more with the necessity of giving it something to break. Naturally he prefers that the breakage should take place in the distance—and, League or no League, the eternal and obvious resource is War ... which was not too risky when fought with swords and muskets, but now—as Holt says—is impossible. Being a bit of a chemist, I’m sure Holt is right; but I’m also sure that man, as a herd, does not think. Further, I am doubtful if man, as a herd, ever finds out what is impossible except through the painful process of breaking his head against it.”

“I’m a child in politics,” said Vallance, “and I may be dense—but I’m afraid it isn’t entirely clear to me whether your views are advanced or grossly and shamelessly reactionary?”

“Neither,” said Markham, “or both—you can take your choice. I have every sympathy with the people, the multitude; it’s hard lines that it can only achieve destruction—just because there is so much of it, because it isn’t smaller. But I also sympathize with the politician in his efforts to control the destructive impulse of the multitude. And, finally—in view of that progress of science of which Holt has reminded us, and of which I know a little myself—I’m exceedingly sorry for us all.”

Someone from across the room asked: “You make it war, then?”

“I make it war. We have had peace for more than a generation, so our periodic blood-letting is already a long time overdue. The League has staved it off for a bit, but it hasn’t changed the human constitution; and the real factor in the Karthanian quarrel—or any other—is the periodic need of the human herd for something to break and for something to break itself against.... Resistance and self-sacrifice—the need of them—the call of the lemming to the sea.... And, perhaps, it’s all the stronger in this generation because this generation has never known war, and does not fear it.”

“Education,” said Holt, addressing the air, “is general and compulsory—has been so for a good many years. The inference being that the records of previous wars—and incidentally of the devastation involved—are not inaccessible to that large proportion of our population which is known as the average man.”

“As printed pages, yes,” Markham agreed. “But what proportion even of a literate population is able to accept the statement of a printed page as if it were a personal experience?”

“As we’re not all fools,” Holt retorted, “I don’t make it war.”

“I hope you’re right, for my own sake,” said Markham good-temperedly. He knocked out his pipe as he spoke and made ready to go—while Theodore looked after him, interested, for the moment, disturbingly.... Markham’s unemotional and matter-of-fact acceptance of “periodic blood-letting” made rumour suddenly real, and for the first time Theodore saw the Karthanian imbroglio as more than the substance of telegrams and articles, something human, actual, and alive.... Saw himself, even Phillida, concerned in it—through a medley of confused and threatening shadows.... For the moment he was roused from his self-absorption and thrust into the world that he shared with the common herd of men. He and Phillida were no longer as the gods apart, with their lives to make in Eden; they were little human beings, the sport of a common human destiny.... He remembered how eagerly he caught at Holt’s condemnation of Markham as a crank and Vallance’s next comment on the crisis.

“We had exactly the same scare three—or was it four?—years ago. This is the trouble about Transylvania all over again—just the same alarums and excursions. That fizzled out quietly in a month or six weeks and the chances are that Karthania will fizzle out, too.”

“Of course it will,” Holt declared with emphasis—and proceeded to demolish Markham’s theories. Theodore left before he had finished his argument; as explained dogmatically in Holt’s penetrating voice, the intrigues and dissensions of the Federal Council were once more unreal and frankly boring. The argument satisfied, but no longer interested—and ten minutes after Markham’s departure his thoughts had drifted away from politics to the private world he shared with Phillida Rathbone.

For very delight of it he lingered over his courtship, finding charm in the pretence of uncertainty long after it had ceased to exist. To Phillida also there was pleasure not only in the winning, but in the exquisite game itself; once or twice when Theodore was hovering near avowal, she deferred the inevitable, eluded him with laughter, asked tacitly to play a little longer.... In the end the avowal came suddenly, on the flash and impulse of a moment—when Phillida hesitated over one of his gifts, a print she had admired on the wall of his sitting-room, duly brought the next day for her acceptance.

“No, I oughtn’t to take it—it’s one of your treasures,” she remonstrated.

“If you’d take all I have—and me with it,” he stammered.... That was the crisis of the exquisite game—and pretence of uncertainty was over.

III

One impression of those first golden hours that stayed with him always was the certainty with which they had dwelt on the details of their common future; he could see Phillida with her hands on his shoulders explaining earnestly that they must live very near to the Dad—the dear old boy had no one but herself and they mustn’t let him miss her too much. And when Theodore asked, “You don’t think he’ll object to me?” Rathbone’s disapproval was the only possible cloud—which lifted at Phillida’s amused assurance that the old dear wasn’t as blind as all that and, having objections, would have voiced them before it was too late.

“You don’t suppose he hasn’t noticed—just because he hasn’t said anything!”... Whereupon Theodore caught at her hands and demanded how long she had noticed?—and they fell to a happy retracing of this step and that in their courtship.

When they heard Rathbone enter she ran down alone, telling Theodore to stay where he was till she called him; returning in five minutes or so, half-tearful and half-smiling, to say the dear old thing was waiting in the library. Then Theodore, in his turn, went down to the library where, red to the ears and stammering platitudes, he shook hands with his future father-in-law—proceeding eventually to details of his financial position and the hope that Rathbone would not insist upon too lengthy an engagement?... The answer was so slow in coming that he repeated his question nervously.

“No,” said Rathbone at last, “I don’t know that I”—(he laid stress on the pronoun)—“I don’t know that I should insist upon a very lengthy engagement. Only....”

Again he paused so long that Theodore repeated “Only?”

“Only—there may be obstacles—not of my making or Phillida’s. Connected with the office—your work ... I dare say you’ve been too busy with your own affairs to give very much attention to the affairs of the world in general; still I conclude the papers haven’t allowed you to forget that the Federal Council was to vote to-day on the resolution to take punitive action? Result is just through—half an hour ago. Resolution carried, by a majority of one only.”

“Was it?” said Theodore—and remembered a vague impulse of resentment, a difficulty in bringing down his thoughts from Phillida to the earthiness of politics. It took him an effort and a moment to add: “Close thing—but they’ve pulled it off.”

“They have,” said Rathbone. “Just pulled it off—but it remains to be seen if that’s matter for congratulation.... The vote commits us to action—definitely—and the minority have entered a protest against punitive action.... It seems unlikely that the protest is only formal.”

He was dry and curiously deliberate—leaning back in his chair, speaking quietly, with fingers pressed together.... To the end Theodore remembered him like that; a square-jawed man, leaning back in his chair, speaking slowly, unemotionally—the harbinger of infinite misfortune.... And himself, the listener, a young man engrossed by his own new happiness; irritated, at first, by the intrusion of that which did not concern it; then (as once before in Vallance’s rooms) uneasy and conscious of a threat.

He heard himself asking, “You think it’s—serious?” and saw Rathbone’s mouth twist into the odd semblance of a smile.

“I think so. One way or other we shall know within a week.”

“You can’t mean—war?” Theodore asked again—remembering Holt and his “Impossible!”

“It doesn’t seem unlikely,” said Rathbone.

He had risen, with his hands thrust deep into his pockets, and begun to pace backwards and forwards. “Something may happen at the last minute—but it’s difficult to see how they can draw back. They have gone too far. They’re committed, just as we are—committed to a principle.... If we yield the Council abdicates its authority once for all; it’s an end of the League—a plain break, and the Lord knows what next. And the other side daren’t stop at verbal protest. They will have to push their challenge; there’s too much clamour behind them....”

“There was Transylvania,” Theodore reminded him.

“I know—and nothing came of it. But that wasn’t pushed quite so far.... They threatened, but never definitely—they left themselves a possibility of retreat. Now ... as I said, something may happen ... and, meanwhile, to go back to what I meant about you, personally, how this might affect you....”

He dropped into swift explanation. “Considerable rearrangement in the work of the Department—if it should be necessary to place it on a war-footing.” Theodore’s duties—if the worst should happen—would certainly take him out of London and therefore part him from Phillida. “I can tell you that definitely—now.”

Perhaps he realized that the announcement, on a day of betrothal, was brutal; for he checked himself suddenly in his walk to and fro, clapped the young man good-naturedly on the shoulder, repeated that “Something might happen” and supposed he would not be sorry to hear that a member of the Government required his presence—“So you and Phillida can dine without superfluous parents.”... And he said no word of war or parting to Phillida—who came down with Theodore to watch her father off, standing arm-in-arm upon the doorstep in the pride of her new relationship.

The threat lightened as they dined alone deliciously, as a foretaste of housekeeping in common; Phillida left him no thoughts to stray and only once, while the evening lasted, did they look from their private Paradise upon the world of common humanity. Phillida, as the clock neared ten, wondered vaguely what Henderson had wanted with her father? Was there anything particular, did Theodore know, any news about the Federal Council?... He hesitated for a moment, then told her the bare facts only—the vote and the minority protest.

“A protest,” she repeated. “That’s what they’ve all been afraid of.... It looks bad, doesn’t it?”

He agreed it looked bad; thinking less, it may be, of the threat of red ruin and disaster than of Rathbone’s warning that his duties would part him from Phillida.

“I hope it doesn’t mean war,” she said.

At the time her voice struck him as serious, even anxious; later it amazed him that she had spoken so quietly, that there was no trembling of the slim white fingers that played with her chain of heavy beads.

“Do you think it does?” she asked him.

Because he remembered the threat of parting and had need of her daily presence, he was stubborn in declaring that it did not, and could not, mean war; quoting Holt that modern war was impossible, that statesmen and soldiers knew it, and insisting that this was the Transylvanian business over again and would be settled as that was settled. She shook her head thoughtfully, having heard other views from her father; but her voice (he knew later) was thoughtful only—not a quiver, not a hint of real fear in it.

“It’ll have to come sometime—now or in a year or two. At least, that’s what everybody says. I wonder if it’s true.”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t—unless we make it true. This sort of thing—it’s a kind of common nightmare we have now and then. Every few years—and when it’s over we turn round and wake up and wonder what the devil we were frightened about.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “when you come to think of it, it is rather like that. I don’t remember in the least what the fuss was all about last time—but I know the papers were full of Transylvania and the poor old Dad was worked off his head for a week or two.... And then it was over and we forgot all about it.”

And at that they turned and went back to their golden solitude, shutting out, for the rest of the evening, a world that made protests and sent ominous telegrams. Before Theodore left her, to walk home restless with delight, they had decided on the fashion of Phillida’s ring and planned the acquisition of a Georgian house—with powder-closet.

It was his restless delight that made sleep impossible—and he sat at his window and smoked till the east was red.... While Henderson and Rathbone, a mile or two away, planned Distribution on a war-footing.

Events in the next few days moved rapidly in an atmosphere of tense and rising life; races and peoples were suddenly and acutely conscious of their life collective, and the neighbourly quarrel and bitterness of yesterday was forgotten in the new comradeship born of common hatred and common passion for self-sacrifice. There was talk at first, with diplomatists and leader-writers, of a possibility of localizing the conflict; but within forty-eight hours of the issue of the minority protest it was clear that the League would be rent. On one side, as on the other, statesmen were popular only when known to be unyielding in the face of impossible demands; crowds gathered when ministers met to take counsel and greeted them with cries to stand fast. Behind vulgar effervescence and music-hall thunder was faith in a righteous cause; and, as ever, man believed in himself and his cause with a hand on the hilt of his sword. Freedom and justice were suddenly real and attainable swiftly—through violence wrought on their enemies.... Humanity, once more, was inspired by ideals that justified the shedding of blood and looked death in the face without fear.

As always, there were currents and crosscurrents, and those who were not seized by the common, splendid passion denounced it. Some meanly, by distortion of motive—crying down faith as cupidity and the impulse to self-sacrifice as arrogance; and others, more worthy of hearing, who realized that the impulse to self-sacrifice is passing and the idealism of to-day the bestial cunning of to-morrow.... On one side and the other there was an attempt on the part of those who foresaw something, at least, of the inevitable, to pit fear against the impulse to self-sacrifice and make clear to a people to whom war was a legend only the extent of disaster ahead. The attempt was defeated, almost as begun, by the sudden launching of an ultimatum with twenty-four hours for reply.

At the news young men surged to the recruiting-stations, awaiting their turn for admission in long shouting, jesting lines; the best blood and honour of a generation that had not yet sated its inborn lust of combat. Women stood to watch them as their ranks moved slowly to the goal—some proud to tears, others giggling a foolish approval. Great shifting crowds—men and women who could not rest—gathered in public places and awaited the inevitable news. In the last few hours—all protest being useless—even the loudest of the voices that clamoured against war had died down; and in the life collective was the strange, sudden peace which comes with the cessation of internal feud and the focusing of hatred on those who dwell beyond a nation’s borders.

Theodore Savage, in the days that followed his betrothal, was kept with his nose to the Distributive grindstone, working long hours of overtime in an atmosphere transformed out of knowledge. The languid and formal routine of departments was succeeded by a fever of hurried innovation; gone were the lazy, semi-occupied hours when he had been wont to play with his thoughts of Phillida and the long free evenings that were hers as a matter of course. In the beginning he felt himself curiously removed from the strong, heady atmosphere that affected others like wine. Absorption in Phillida counted for something in his aloofness, but even without it his temperament was essentially averse from the crowd-life; he was stirred by the common desire to be of service, but was conscious of no mounting of energy restless and unsatisfied.... Having little conviction or bias in politics, he accepted without question the general version of the origins of conflict and resented, in orthodox fashion, the gross breach of faith and agreement which betrayed long established design. “It had got to be” and “They’ve been getting ready for years” were phrases on the general lip which he saw no reason to discredit; and, with acceptance of the inevitability of conflict, he ceased to find conflict “unthinkable.” In daily intercourse with those to whom it was thinkable, practical, a certainty—to some, in the end, a desirable certainty—Holt’s phrase lost its meaning and became a symbolic extravagance.... So far he was caught in the swirl of the crowd-life; but he was never one with it and remained conscious of it always as something that flowed by him, something apart from himself.

Above all he knew it as something apart when he saw how it had seized and mastered Phillida. She was curiously alive to its sweep and emotion, and beneath her outward daintiness lay the power of fervid partisanship. “If it weren’t for you,” she told him once, “I should break my heart because I’m only a woman”; and he saw that she pitied him, that she was even resentful for his sake, when she learned from her father that there was no question of allowing the clerks of the Distribution Office to volunteer for military service.

“He says the Department will need all its trained men and that modern war is won by organization even more than by fighting. I’m glad you won’t have to go, my dear—I’m glad—” and, saying it, she clung to him as to one who stood in need of consolation.

He felt the implied consolation and sympathy—with a twinge of conscience, not entirely sure of deserving it. But for the rigid departmental order, he knew he should have thought it his duty to volunteer and take his share of the danger that others were clamouring to face; but he had not cursed vehemently, like his junior, Cassidy, when Holles, equally blasphemous, burst into the room with the news that enlistment was barred. He thought of Cassidy’s angry blue eyes as he swore that, by hook or by crook, he would find his way into the air-service.... Phillida would have sympathized with Cassidy and the flash of her eyes answered his; she too, for the moment, was one with the crowd-life, and there were moments when he felt it was sweeping her away from his hold.

He felt it most on their last evening, on the night the ultimatum expired; when he came from the office, after hours of overtime, uncertain whether he should find her, wondering whether her excited restlessness had driven her out into the crowds that surged round Whitehall. As he ran up the stairs the sound of a piano drifted from the room above; no definite melody but a vague, irregular striking of chords that came to an end as he entered the room and Phillida looked up, expectant.

“At last,” she said as she ran to him. “You don’t know how I have wanted you. I can’t be alone—if you hadn’t turned up I should have had to find someone to talk to.”

“Anyone—didn’t matter who?” he suggested.

She laughed, caught his hand and rubbed her cheek against it. “Yes, anyone—you know what I mean. It’s just—when you think of what’s happening, how can you keep still?... As for father, I never see him nowadays. I suppose there isn’t any news?”

“There can’t be,” he answered. “Not till twelve.”

“No—and even at twelve it won’t really be news. Just no answer—and the time will be up.... We’re at peace now—till midnight.... What’s the time?”

He longed to be alone with her—alone with her in thought as well as in outward seeming—but her talk slipped restlessly away from his leading and she moved uncertainly about the room, returning at last to her vague striking of the piano—sharp, isolated notes, and then suddenly a masterful chord.

“Play to me,” he asked, “play properly.”

She shook her head and declared it was impossible.

“Anything connected is beyond me; I can only strum and make noises.” She crashed in the bass, rushed a swift arpeggio to the treble, then turned to him, her eyes wide and glowing. “If you hold your breath, can’t you feel them all waiting?—thousands on thousands—all through the world?... Waiting till midnight ... can’t you feel it?”

“You make me feel it,” he answered. “Tell me—you want war?”

The last words came out involuntarily, and it was only the startled, sudden change in her face that brought home to him what he had said.

“I want war,” she echoed.... “I want men to be killed.... Theodore, what makes you say that?”

He fumbled for words, not sure of his own meaning—sure only that her eyes would change and lose their fervour if, at the last moment and by God-sent miracle, the sword were returned to its sheath.

“Not that, of course—not the actual fighting. I didn’t mean that.... But isn’t there something in you—in you and in everyone—that’s too strong to be arrested? Too swift?... If nothing happened—if we drew back—you couldn’t be still now; you couldn’t endure it....”

She looked at him thoughtfully, puzzled, half-assenting; then protested again: “I don’t want it—but we can’t be still and endure evil.”

“No,” he said, “we can’t—but isn’t there a gladness in the thought that we can’t?”

“Because we’re right,” she flashed. “It’s not selfish—you know it isn’t selfish. We see what is right and, whatever it costs us, we stand for it. The greatest gladness of all is the gladness of giving—everything, even life.... That’s what makes me wish I were a man!”

“The passion for self-sacrifice,” he said, quoting Markham. “I was told the other day it was one of the causes of war.... Don’t look at me so reproachfully—I’m not a pacifist. Give me a kiss and believe me.”

She laughed and gave him the kiss he asked for, and for a minute or two he drew her out of the crowd-life and they were alone together as they had been on the night of their betrothal. Then the spirit of restlessness took hold of her again and she rose suddenly, declaring they must find out what was happening—they must go out and see for themselves.

“It’s only just past ten,” he argued. “What can be happening for another two hours? There’ll only be a crowd—walking up and down and waiting.”

It was just the crowd and its going to and fro that she needed, and she set to work to coax him out of his reluctance. There would never be another night like this one—they must see it together and remember it as long as they lived.... Perhaps, her point gained, she was remorseful, for she rewarded his assent with a caress and a coaxing apology.

“We shall have so many evenings to ourselves,” she told him—“and to-night—to-night we don’t only belong to ourselves.”

He could feel her arm tremble and thrill on his own as they came in sight of the Clock Tower and the swarm of expectant humanity that moved and murmured round Westminster. On him the first impression was of seething insignificance that the Clock Tower dwarfed and the dignity of night reproved; on her, as he knew by the trembling of her fingers, a quickening of life and sensation....

They were still at the shifting edges of the crowd when a man’s voice called “Phillida!” and one of her undergraduate cousins linked himself on to their company. For nearly an hour the three moved backwards and forwards—through the hum and mutter of voices, the ceaseless turning of eyes to Big Ben and the shuffling of innumerable feet.... When the quarters chimed, there was always a hush; when eleven throbbed solemnly, no man stirred till the last beat died.... With silence and arrested movement the massed humanity at the base of the Clock Tower was no longer a seething insignificance; without speech, without motion, it was suddenly dignified—life faced with its destiny and intent upon a Moving Finger....

“Only one more hour,” whispered Phillida as the silence broke; and the Rathbone boy, to show he was not moved, wondered if it was worth their while to stay pottering about for an hour?... No one answered his question, since it needed no answer; and, the dignity of silence over, they drifted again with the crowd.

IV

The Moving Finger had written off another five minutes or so when police were suddenly active and sections of the crowd lunged uncomfortably; way was being made for the passing of an official car—and in the backward swirl of packed humanity Theodore was thrust one way, Phillida and the Rathbone boy another. For a moment he saw them as they looked round and beckoned him; the next, the swirl had carried him yet further—and when it receded they were lost amongst the drifting, shifting thousands. After ten minutes more of pushing to and fro in search of them, Theodore gave up the chase as fruitless and made his way disconsolately to the Westminster edge of the crowd.... Phillida, if he knew her, would stay till the stroke of midnight, later if the spirit moved her; and she had an escort in the Rathbone boy, who, in due time, would see her home.... There was no need to worry—but he cursed the luck of what might be their last evening.

For a time he lingered uncertainly on the edge of the pushing, shuffling mass; perhaps would have lingered till the hour struck, if there had not drifted to his memory the evening at Vallance’s when Holt had declared this night to be impossible—and when Markham had “made it war.” And, with that, he remembered also that Markham had rooms near by—in one of the turnings off Great Smith Street.

There was a light in the room that he knew for Markham’s and it was only after he had rung that he wondered what had urged him to come. He was still wondering when the door opened and could think of no better explanation than “I saw you were up—by your light.”

“If you’d passed five minutes ago,” said Markham, as he led the way upstairs, “you wouldn’t have seen any light. I’m only just back from the lab—and dining off biscuits and whisky.”

“Is this making any difference to you, then?” Theodore asked. “I mean, in the way of work?”

Markham nodded as he poured out his visitor’s whisky. “Yes, I’m serving the country—the military people have taken me over, lock and stock: with everyone else, apparently, who has ever done chemical research. I’ve been pretty hard at it the last few days, ever since the scare was serious.... And you—are you soldiering?”

“No,” said Theodore and told him of the departmental prohibition.

“It mayn’t make much difference in the end,” said Markham.... “You see, I was right—the other evening.”

“Yes,” Theodore answered, “I believe that was why I came in. The crowd to-night reminded me of what you said at Vallance’s—though I don’t think I believed you then.... How long is it going to last?”

“God knows,” said Markham, with his mouth full of biscuit. “We shall have had enough of it—both sides—before very long; but it’s one thing to march into hell with your head up and another to find a way out.... There’s only one thing I’m fairly certain about—I ought to have been strangled at birth.”

Theodore stared at him, not sure he had caught the last words.

“You ought to——?”

“Yes—you heard me right. If the human animal must fight—and nothing seems to stop it—it should kill off its scientific men. Stamp out the race of ’em, forbid it to exist.... Holt was also right that evening, fundamentally. You can’t combine the practice of science and the art of war; in the end, it’s one or the other. We, I think, are going to prove that—very definitely.”

“And when you’ve proved it—we stop fighting?”

Markham shrugged his shoulders, thrust aside his plate and filled his pipe.

“Curious, the failure to understand the influence on ourselves of what we make and use. We just make and use and damn the consequence.... When Lavoisier invented the chemical balance, did he stop to consider the possibilities of chemical action in combination with outbursts of human emotion? If he had...!”

In the silence that followed they heard the chiming of three-quarters—and there flashed inconsequently into Theodore’s memory, a vision of himself, a small boy with his hand in his mother’s, staring up, round-eyed, at Big Ben of London—while his mother taught him the words that were fitted to the chime.

Lord—through—this—hour

Be—Thou—our—guide,

So—by—Thy—power

No—foot—shall—slide.

... That, or something like that.... Odd, that he should remember them now—when for years he had not remembered.... “Lord—through—this—hour——”

He realized suddenly that Markham was speaking—in jerks, between pulls at his pipe. “... And the same with mechanics—not the engine but the engine plus humanity. Take young James Watt and his interest in the lid of a tea-kettle! In France, by the way, they tell the same story of Papin; but, so far as the rest of us are concerned it doesn’t much matter who first watched the lid of a kettle with intelligence—the point is that somebody watched it and saw certain of its latent possibilities. Only its more immediate possibilities—and we may take it for granted that amongst those which he did not foresee were the most important. The industrial system—the drawing of men into crowds where they might feed the machine and be fed by it—the shrinkage of the world through the use of mechanical transport. That—the shrinkage—when we first saw it coming, we took to mean union of peoples and the clasping of distant hands—forgetting that it also meant the cutting of distant throats.... Yet it might have struck us that we are all potential combatants—and the only known method of preventing a fight is to keep the combatants apart! These odd, simple facts that we all of us know—and lose sight of ... the drawing together of peoples has always meant the clashing of their interests ... and so new hatreds. Inevitably new hatreds.”

Theodore quoted: “‘All men hate each other naturally’.... You believe that?”

“Of individuals, no—but of all communities, yes. Is there any form of the life collective that is capable of love for its fellow—for another community? Is there any church that will stand aside that another church may be advantaged? ... You and I are civilized, as man and man; but collectively we are part of a life whose only standard and motive is self-interest, its own advantage ... a beast-life, morally. If you understand that, you understand to-night ... Which demands from us sacrifices, makes none itself.... That’s as far as we have got in the mass.”

Through the half-open window came the hum and murmur of the crowd that waited for the hour.... Theodore stirred restlessly, conscious of the unseen turning of countless faces to the clock—and aware, through the murmur, of the frenzied little beating of his watch.... He hesitated to look at it—and when he drew it out and said “Five minutes more,” his voice sounded oddly in his ears.

“Five minutes,” said Markham.... He laughed suddenly and pushed the bottle across the table. “Do you know where we are now—you and I and all of us? On the crest of the centuries. They’ve carried us a long roll upwards and now here we are—on top! In five more minutes—three hundred little seconds—we shall hear the crest curl over.... Meanwhile, have a drink!”

He checked himself and held up a finger. “Your watch is slow!”

The hum and murmur of the crowd had ceased and through silence unbroken came the prayer of the Westminster chime.

Lord—through—this—hour

Be—Thou—our—guide,

So—by—Thy—power

No—foot—shall—slide.

There was no other sound for the twelve booming strokes of the hour: it was only as the last beat quivered into silence that there broke the moving thunder of a multitude.

“Over!” said Markham. “Hear it crash?... Well, here’s to the centuries—after all, they did the best they knew for us!”

V

The war-footing arrangements of the Distribution Office included a system of food control involving local supervision; hence provincial centres came suddenly into being, and to one of these—at York—Theodore Savage was dispatched at little more than an hour’s notice on the morning after war was declared. He telephoned Phillida and they met at King’s Cross and had ten hurried minutes on the platform; she was still eager and excited, bubbling over with the impulse to action—was hoping to start training for hospital work—had been promised an opening—she would tell him all about it when she wrote. Her excitement took the bitterness out of the parting—perhaps, in her need to give and serve, she was even proud that the sacrifice of parting was demanded of her.... The last he saw of her was a smiling face and a cheery little wave of the hand.

He made the journey to York with a carriageful of friendly and talkative folk who, in normal days, would have been strangers to him and to each other; as it was, they exchanged newspapers and optimistic views and grew suddenly near to each other in their common interest and resentment.... That was what war meant in those first stirring days—friendliness, good comradeship, the desire to give and serve, the thrill of unwonted excitement.... Looking back from after years it seemed to him that mankind, in those days, was finer and more gracious than he had ever known it—than he would ever know it again.

The first excitement over, he lived somewhat tediously at York between his office and dingily respectable lodgings; discovering very swiftly that, so far as he, Theodore Savage, was concerned, a state of hostilities meant the reverse of alarums and excursions. For him it was the strictest of official routine and the multiplication of formalities. His hours of liberty were fewer than in London, his duties more tiresome, his chief less easy to get on with; there was frequent overtime, and leave—which meant Phillida—was not even a distant possibility. For all his honest desire of service he was soon frankly bored by his work; its atmosphere of minute regularity and insistent detail was out of keeping with the tremor and uncertainty of war, and there was something æsthetically wrong about a fussy process of docketing and checking while nations were at death grips and the fate of a world in the balance.... His one personal satisfaction was the town, York itself—the walls, the Bars, and above all the Minster; he lodged near the Minster, could see it from his window, and its enduring dignity was a daily relief alike from the feverish perusal of war news, his landlady’s colour-scheme and taste in furniture and the fidgety trifling of the office.

In the evening he read many newspapers and wrote long letters to Phillida; who also, he gathered, had discovered that war might be tedious. “We haven’t any patients yet,” she scribbled him in one of her later letters, “but, of course, I’m learning all sorts of things that will be useful later on, when we do get them. Bandaging and making beds—and then we attend lectures. It’s rather dull waiting and bandaging each other for practice—but naturally I’m thankful that there aren’t enough casualties to go round. Up to now the regular hospitals have taken all that there are—‘temporaries’ like us don’t get even a look in.... The news is really splendid, isn’t it?”

There were few casualties in the beginning because curiously little happened; Western Europe was removed from the actual storm-centre, and in England, after the first few days of alarmist rumours concerning invasion by air and sea, the war, for a time, settled down into a certain amount of precautionary rationing and a daily excitement in newspaper form—so much so that the timorous well-to-do, who had retired from London on the outbreak of hostilities, trickled back in increasing numbers. Hostilities, in the beginning, were local and comparatively ineffective; one of the results of the limitation of troops and armaments enforced by the constitution of the League was to give to the opening moves of the contest a character unprepared and amateurish. The aim, on either side, was to obtain time for effective preparation, to organize forces and resources; to train fighters and mobilize chemists, to convert factories, manufacture explosive and gas, and institute a system of co-operation between the strategy of far-flung allies. Hence, in the beginning, the conflict was partial and, as regards its strategy, hesitating; there were spasms of bloody incident which were deadly enough in themselves, but neither side cared to engage itself seriously before it had attained its full strength.... First blood was shed in a fashion that was frankly mediæval; the heady little democracy whose failure to establish a claim in the Court of Arbitration had been the immediate cause of the conflict, flung itself with all its half-civilized resources upon its neighbour and enemy, the victorious party to the suit. Between the two little communities was a treasured feud which had burst out periodically in defiance of courts and councils; and, control once removed, the border tribesmen gathered for the fray with all the enthusiasm of their rude forefathers, and raided each other’s territory in bands armed with knives and revolvers. Their doings made spirited reading in the press in the early days of the war—before the generality of newspaper readers had even begun to realize that battles were no longer won by the shock of troops and that the root-principle of modern warfare was the use of the enemy civilian population as an auxiliary destructive force.

Certain states and races grasped the principle sooner than others, being marked out for early enlightenment by the accident of geographical position. In those not immediately affected, such as Britain, censorship on either side ruled out, as impossible for publication, the extent of the damage inflicted on allies, and the fact that it was not only in enemy countries that large masses of population, hunted out of cities by chemical warfare and the terror from above, had become nomadic and predatory. That, as the struggle grew fiercer, became, inevitably, the declared aim of the strategist; the exhaustion of the enemy by burdening him with a starving and nomadic population. War, once a matter of armies in the field, had resolved itself into an open and thorough-going effort to ruin enemy industry by setting his people on the run; to destroy enemy agriculture not only by incendiary devices—the so-called poison-fire—but by the secondary and even more potent agency of starving millions driven out to forage as they could.... The process, in the stilted phrase of the communiqué, was described as “displacement of population”; and displacement of population, not victory in the field, became the real military objective.

To the soldier, at least, it was evident very early in the struggle that the perfection of scientific destruction had entailed, of necessity, the indirect system of strategy associated with industrial warfare; displacement of population being no more than a natural development of the striker’s method of attacking a government by starving the non-combatant community. The aim of the scientific soldier, like that of the soldier of the past, was to cut his enemy’s communications, to intercept and hamper his supplies; and the obvious way to attain that end was by ruthless disorganization of industrial centres, by letting loose a famished industrial population to trample and devour his crops. Manufacturing districts, on either side, were rendered impossible to work in by making them impossible to live in; and from one crowded centre after another there streamed out squalid and panic-stricken herds, devouring the country as they fled. Seeking food, seeking refuge, turning this way or that; pursued by the terror overhead or imagining themselves pursued; and breaking, striving to separate, to make themselves small and invisible.... And, as air-fleets increased in strength and tactics were perfected—as one centre of industry after another went down and out—the process of disintegration was rapid. To the tentative and hesitating opening of the war had succeeded a fury of widespread destruction; and statesmen, rendered desperate by the sudden crumbling of their own people—the sudden lapse into primitive conditions—could hope for salvation only through a quicker process of “displacement” on the enemy side.

There were reasons, political and military, why the average British civilian, during the opening phases of the struggle, knew little of warfare beyond certain food restrictions, the news vouchsafed in the communiqués and the regulation comments thereon; the enemy forces which might have brought home to him the meaning of the term “displacement” were occupied at first with other and nearer antagonists. Hence continental Europe—and not Europe alone—was spotted with ulcers of spreading devastation before displacement was practised in England. There had been stirrings of uneasiness from time to time—of uneasiness and almost of wonder that the weapon she was using with deadly effect had not been turned against herself; but at the actual moment of invasion there was something like public confidence in a speedy end to the struggle—and the principal public grievance was the shortage and high price of groceries.

Whatever he forgot and confused in after days—and there were stretches of time that remained with him only as a blur—Theodore remembered very clearly every detail and event of the night when disaster began. Young Hewlett’s voice as he announced disaster—and what he, Theodore, was doing when the boy rapped on the window. Not only what happened, but his mood when the interruption came and the causes of it; he had suffered an irritating day at the office, crossed swords with a self-important chief and been openly snubbed for his pains. As a result, his landlady’s evening grumble on the difficulties of war-time housekeeping seemed longer and less bearable than usual, and he was still out of tune with the world in general when he sat down to write to Phillida. He remembered phrases of the letter—never posted—wherein he worked off his irritation. “I got into trouble to-day through thinking of you when I was supposed to be occupied with indents. You are responsible, Blessed Girl, for several most horrible muckers, affecting the service of the country.... Your empty hospital don’t want you and my empty-headed boss don’t want me—oh, lady mine, if I could only make him happy by sacking myself and catching the next train to London!” ... And so on and so on....

It was late, nearing midnight, when he finished his letter and, for want of other occupation, turned back to a half-read evening paper; the communiqués were meagre, but there was a leading article pointing out the inevitable effect of displacement on the enemy’s resources and morale, and he waded through its comfortable optimism. As he laid aside the paper he realized how sleepy he was and rose yawning; he was on his way to the door, with intent to turn in, when the rapping on the window halted him. He pulled aside the blind and saw a face against the glass—pressed close, with a flattened white nose.

“Who’s that?” he asked, pushing up the window. It was Hewlett, one of his juniors at the office, out of breath with running and excitement.

“I say, Savage, come along out. There’s no end going on—fires, the whole sky’s red. They’ve come over at last and no mistake. Crashaw and I have been watching ’em and I thought you’d like to have a look. It’s worth seeing—we’re just along there, on the wall. Hurry up!”

The boy was dancing with eagerness to get back and Theodore had to run to keep up with him. He and Crashaw, Hewlett explained in gasps, had spent the evening in a billiard-room; it was on their way back to their diggings that they had noticed sudden lights in the sky—sort of flashes—and gone up on the wall to see better.... No, it wasn’t only searchlights—you could see them too—sudden flashes and the sky all red. Fires—to the south. It was the real thing, no doubt about that—and the only wonder was why they hadn’t come before.... At the head of the steps leading up to the wall were three or four figures with their heads all turned one way; and as Hewlett, mounting first, called “Still going on?” another voice called back, “Rather!”

They stood on the broad, flat wall and watched—in a chill little wind. The skyline to the south and south-west was reddened with a glow that flickered and wavered spasmodically and, as Hewlett had said, there were flashes—the bursting of explosive or star-shells. Also there were moments when the reddened skyline throbbed suddenly in places, grew vividly golden and sent out long fiery streamers.... They guessed at direction and wondered how far off; the wind was blowing sharply from the north, towards the glow; hence it carried sound away from them and it was only now and then that they caught more than a mutter and rumble.

As the minutes drew out the news spread through the town and the watchers on the wall increased in numbers; not only men but women, roused from bed, who greeted the flares with shrill, excited “Oh’s” and put ceaseless questions to their men folk. Young Hewlett, at Theodore’s elbow, gave himself up to frank interest in his first sight of war; justifying a cheerfulness that amounted to enthusiasm by explaining at intervals that he guessed our fellows were giving ’em what for and by this time they were sorry they’d come.... Once a shawled woman demanded tartly why they didn’t leave off, then, if they’d had enough? Whereat Hewlett, unable to think of an answer, pretended not to hear and moved away.

Of his own sensations while he watched from the wall Theodore remembered little save the bodily sensation of chill; he saw himself standing with his back to the wind, his shoulders hunched and the collar of his coat turned up. The murmur of hushed voices remained with him and odd snatches of fragmentary talk; there was the woman who persisted uneasily, “But you can’t ’ear ’em coming with these ’ere silent engines—why, they might be right over us naow!” And the man who answered her gruffly with “You’d jolly well know if they were!” ... And perpetual conjecture as to distance and direction of the glow; disputes between those who asserted that over there was Leeds, and those who scoffed contemptuously at the idea—arguing that, if Leeds were the centre of disturbance, the guns would have sounded much nearer.... Petty talk, he remembered, and plainly enough—but not how much he feared or foresaw. He must have been anxious, uneasy, or he would not have stood for long hours in the chill of the wind; but his definite impressions were only of scattered, for the most part uneducated, talk, of silhouetted figures that shifted and grouped, of turning his eyes from the lurid skyline to the shadowy rock that in daylight was the mass of the cathedral.... In the end sheer craving for warmth drove him in; leaving Hewlett and Crashaw deaf to his reminder that the office expected them at nine.

With the morning came news and—more plentifully—rumour; also, the wind having dropped, a persistent thunder from the south. Industrial Yorkshire, it was clear, was being subjected to that process of human displacement which, so far, it had looked on as an item in the daily communiqué; the attack, moreover, was an attack in force, since the invaders did not find it needful to desist with the passing of darkness. Rumour, in the absence of official intelligence, invented an enveloping air-fleet which should cut them off from their base; and meanwhile the thunder continued....

This much, at least, was shortly official and certain: nearly all rail, road and postal communication to the south was cut off—trains had ceased to run Londonwards and ordinary traffic on the highways was held up at barriers and turned back. Only military cars used the roads—and returned to add their reports to those brought in by air-scouts; but as a rule the information they furnished was for official enlightenment only, and it was not till the refugees arrived in numbers that the full meaning of displacement was made clear to the ordinary man.

It was after the second red night that the refugees appeared in their thousands—a horde of human rats driven out of their holes by terror, by fire and by gas. Whatever their status and possessions in the life of peace, they came with few exceptions on foot; as roads, like railways, were a target for the airman, the highway was avoided for the by-path or the open field, and the flight from every panic-stricken centre could be traced by long wastes of trampled crops. There were those who, terrified beyond bearing by the crash of masonry and long trembling underground, saw safety only in the roofless open, refused to enter houses and persisted in huddling in fields—unafraid, as yet, of the so-called poison-fire which had licked up the crops in Holderness and the corn-growing district round Pontefract.... Leeds, for a day or two, was hardly touched; but with the outpouring of fugitives from Dewsbury, Wakefield, Halifax and Bradford, Leeds also began to vomit her terrified multitudes. A wave of vagrant destitution rushed suddenly and blindly northward—anywhere away from the ruin of explosive, the flames and death by suffocation; while authority strove vainly to control and direct the torrent of overpowering misery.

It was in the early morning that the torrent reached York and rolled through it; overwhelming the charity, private and public, that at first made efforts to cope with the rush of misery. Theodore’s room for a time was given up to a man with bandaged eyes and puffed face whom his wife had led blindfold from Castleford. The man himself sat dumb and suffering, breathing heavily through blistered lips; the woman raged vulgarly against the Government which had neglected to supply them with gas-masks, to have the place properly defended, to warn people! “The bloody fools ought to have known what was coming and if her man was blinded for the rest of his life it was all the fault of this ’ere Government that never troubled its blasted ’ead as long as it drew its money.” ... That was in the beginning, before the flood of misery had swollen so high that even the kindliest shrank from its squalid menace; and Theodore, because it was the first he heard, remembered her story when he had forgotten others more piteous.

Before midday there was only one problem for local authority, civil and military—the disposal of displaced population; that is to say, the herding of vagrants that could not all be sheltered, that could not all be fed, that blackened fields, choked streets, drove onward and sank from exhaustion. The railway line to the north was still clear and, in obedience to wireless instructions from London, trains packed with refugees were sent off to the north, with the aim of relieving the pressure on local resources. Disorganization of transport increased the difficulty of food supply and even on the first day of panic and migration the agricultural community were raising a cry of alarm. Blind terror and hunger between them wrought havoc; fields were trampled and fugitives were plundering already—would plunder more recklessly to-morrow.

All day, all night, displaced humanity came stumbling in panic from the south and south-west; spreading news of the torment it had fled from, the dead it had left and the worse than dead who still crouched in an inferno whence they could not summon courage to fly. The railways could not deal with a tithe of the number who clamoured to be carried to the north, into safety; by the first evening the town was well-nigh eaten out, and householders, hardening their hearts against misery, were bolting themselves in, for fear of misery grown desperate. While out in the country farmers stabled their live-stock and kept ceaseless watch against the hungry.

All day the approaches to the station were besieged by those who hoped for a train; and, on the second night of the invasion, Theodore, sent by his chief with a message to the military transport officer, fought his way through a solid crowd on the platform—a crowd excluded from a train that was packed and struggling with humanity. A crowd that was squalid, unreasoning and blindly selfish; intent only on flight and safety—and some of it brutally intent. There were scuffles with porters and soldiers who refused to open locked doors, angry hootings and wild swayings backward and forward as the train moved out of the station; Theodore’s efforts to make his way to the station-master’s office were held to be indicative of a desire to travel by the next train and he was buffeted aside without mercy. There was something in the brute mass of terror that sickened him—a suggestion already of the bestial, the instinctive, the unhuman.

The transport officer looked up at him with tired, angry eyes and demanded what the hell he wanted?... Whereat Theodore handed him a typewritten note from a punctilious chief and explained that they had tried to get through on the telephone, either to him or the station-master, but——

“I should rather think not,” said the transport officer rudely. “We’ve both of us got more important things to worry about than little Distribution people. The telephone clerk did bring me some idiotic message or other, but I told him I didn’t want to hear it.”

He glanced at the typewritten note—then glared at it—and went off into a cackle of laughter; which finally tailed into blasphemy coupled with obscene abuse.

“Seen this?” he asked when he had sworn himself out. “Well, at any rate you know what it’s about. The —— has sent for particulars of to-morrow’s refugee train service—wants to know the number and capacity of trains to be dispatched to Newcastle-on-Tyne. Wants to enter it in duplicate, I suppose—and make lots and lots and lots of carbon copies. God in Heaven!”—and again he sputtered into blasphemy.... “Well, I needn’t bother to write down the answer; even if you’ve no more sense than he has, you’ll be able to remember it all right. It’s nil to both questions; nil trains to Newcastle, nil capacity. So that’s that!... What’s more—if it’s any satisfaction to your darned-fool boss to know it—we haven’t been sending any trains to Newcastle all day.”

“But I thought,” began Theodore—wondering if the man were drunk? He was, more than slightly—having fought for two days with panic-stricken devils and helped himself through with much whisky; but, drunk or not, he was sure of his facts and rapped them out with authority.

“Not to Newcastle. The first two or three got as far as Darlington—this morning. There they were pulled up. Then it was Northallerton—now we send ’em off to Thirsk and leave the people there to deal with ’em. You bet they’ll send ’em further if they can—you don’t suppose they want to be eaten out, any more than we do. But, for all I know, they’re getting ’em in from the other side.”

“The other side?” Theodore repeated. “What do you mean?” Whereat the transport officer, grown suddenly uncommunicative, leaned back in his chair and whistled.

“That’s all I can tell you,” he vouchsafed at length. “Trains haven’t run beyond Darlington since yesterday. I conclude H.Q. knows the reason, but they haven’t imparted it to me—I’ve only had my orders. It isn’t our business if the trains get stopped so long as we send ’em off—and we’re sending ’em and asking no questions.”

“Do you mean,” Theodore stammered, “that—this—is going on up north?”

“What do you think?” said the transport officer. “It’s the usual trick, isn’t it?... Start ’em running from two sides at once—don’t let ’em settle, send ’em backwards and forwards, keep ’em going!... We’ve played it often enough on them—now we’re getting a bit of our own back.... However, I’ve no official information. You know just as much as I do.”

“But,” Theodore persisted, “the people coming through from the north. What do they say—they must know?”

“There aren’t any people coming through,” said the other grimly. “Military order since this morning—no passenger traffic from the north runs this side of Thirsk. We’ve got enough of our own, haven’t we?... All I say is—God help Thirsk and especially God help the station-master!”

He straightened himself suddenly and grabbed at the papers on his table.

“Now, you’ve got what the damn fool sent you for—and I’m trying to make out my report.”

As Theodore fought his way out of the station and the crowd that seethed round it, he had an intolerable sense of being imprisoned between two fires. If he could see far enough to the north—to Durham and the Tyneside—there would be another hot, throbbing horizon and another stream of human destitution pouring lamentably into the night.... And, between the two fires, the two streams were meeting—turning back upon themselves, intermingling ... in blind and agonized obedience to the order to “keep ’em going!”... What happened when a train was halted by signal and the thronged misery inside it learned that here, without forethought or provision made, its flight must come to an end? At Thirsk, Northallerton, by the wayside, anywhere, in darkness?... A thin sweep of rain was driving down the street, and he fancied wretched voices calling through darkness, through rain. Asking what, in God’s name, was to become of them and where, in God’s name, they were to go?... And the overworked officials who could give no answer, seeking only to be rid of the massed and dreadful helplessness that cumbered the ground on which it trod!... Displacement of population—the daily, stilted phrase—had become to him a raw and livid fact and he stood amazed at the limits of his own imagination. Day after day he had read the phrase, been familiar with it; yet, so far, the horror had been words to him. Now the daily, stilted phrase was translated, comprehensible: “Don’t let ’em settle—keep ’em going.”

Back at the office, he discovered that his errand to the station had been superfluous; his chief, the man of precedent, order and many carbon copies, was staring, haggard and bewildered, at a typewritten document signed by the military commandant.... And obtaining, incidentally, his first glimpse into a world till now unthinkable—where precedent was not, where reference was useless and order had ceased to exist.

VI

That night ended Theodore’s life as a clerk in the Civil Service. The confusion consequent on the breakdown of transport had left of the Distribution system but a paralysed mockery, a name without functions attached to it; and with morning Theodore and his able-bodied fellows were impressed into a special constabulary, hastily organized as a weapon against vagrancy grown desperate and riotous. They were armleted, put through a hurried course of instruction, furnished with revolvers or rifles and told to shoot plunderers at sight.

No system of improvised rationing could satisfy even the elementary needs of the hundreds of thousands who swept hither and thither, as panic seized or the invader drove them; hence military authority, in self-preservation, turned perforce on the growing menace of fugitive and destitute humanity. Order, so long as the semblance of it lasted, strove to protect and maintain the supplies of the fighting forces; which entailed, inevitably, the leaving to the fate of their own devices of the famished useless, the horde of devouring mouths. Interruption of transport meant entire dependence on local food stuffs; and, as stocks grew lower and plundering increased, provisions were seized by the military.... Theodore, in the first hours of his new duty, helped to load an armed lorry with the contents of a grocer’s shop and fight it through the streets of York. There was an ugly rush as the driver started his engine; men who had been foodless for days had watched, in sullen craving, while the shop was emptied of its treasure of sacks and tins; and when the engine buzzed a child wailed miserably, a woman shrieked “Don’t let them, don’t let them!” and the whole pack snarled and surged forward. Wolfish white faces showed at the tailboard and before the car drew clear her escort had used their revolvers. Theodore, not yet hardened to shooting, seized the nearest missile, a tin of meat, and hurled it into one of the faces; when they drew away three or four of the pack were tearing at each other for the treasure contained in the tin.

He noticed, as the days went by, how quickly he slipped from the outlook and habits of civilized man and adopted those of the primitive, even of the animal. It was not only that he was suspicious of every man, careful in approach, on the alert and ready for violence; he learned, like the animal, to be indifferent to the suffering that did not concern him. Violence, when it did not affect him directly, was a noise in the distance—no more; and as swiftly as he became inured to bloodshed he grew hardened to the sight of misery. At first he had sickened when he ate his rations at the thought of a million-fold suffering that starved while he filled his stomach; later, as order’s representative, he herded and hustled a massed starvation without scruple, driving it away when it grouped itself threateningly, shooting when it promised to give trouble to authority, and looking upon death, itself, indifferently.

It amazed him, looking back, to realize the swiftness with which ordered society had crumbled; laws, systems, habits of body and mind—they had gone, leaving nothing but animal fear and the animal need to be fed. Within little more than a week of the night when young Hewlett had called him to watch the red flashes and the glare in the sky, there remained of the fabric of order built up through the centuries very little but a military force that was fighting on two sides—against inward disorder and alien attack—and struggling to maintain itself alive. Automatically, inevitably—under pressure of starvation, blind vagrancy and terror—that which had once been a people, an administrative whole, was relapsing into a tribal separatism, the last barrier against nomadic anarchy.... As famished destitution overran the country, localities not yet destitute tried systematically and desperately to shut out the vagrant and defended what was left to them by force. Countrymen beat off the human plague that devoured their substance and trampled their crops underfoot; barriers were erected that no stranger might pass and bloody little skirmishes were frequent at the outskirts of villages. As bread grew scarcer and more precious, the penalties on those who stole it were increasingly savage; tribal justice—lynch law—took the place of petty sessions and assize, and plunderers, even suspected plunderers, were strung up to trees and their bodies left dangling as a warning.... And a day or two later, it might be, the poison-fire swept through the fields and devoured the homes of those who had executed tribal justice; or a horde of destitution, too strong to be denied, drove them out; and, homeless in their turn, they swelled the tide of plunderers and vagrants.... Man, with bewildering rapidity, was slipping through the stages whereby, through the striving of long generations, he had raised himself from primitive barbarism and the law that he shares with the brute.

Very steadily the process of displacement continued. On most nights, in one direction or another, there were sudden outbursts of light—the glare of explosion or burning buildings or the greenish-blue reflection of the poison-fire. The silent engine gave no warning of its coming, and the first announcement of danger was the bursting of gas-shell and high explosive, or the sudden vivid pallor of the poison-fire as it ran before the wind and swept along dry fields and hedgerows. Where it swept it left not only long tracts of burned crop and black skeleton trees, but, often enough, the charred bodies of the homeless whom its rush had outpaced and overtaken.... Sudden and unreasoning panic was frequent—wild rushes from imaginary threats—and there were many towns which, when their turn came, were shells and empty buildings only; dead towns, whence the inhabitants had already fled in a body. York had been standing all but silent for days when an enemy swooped down to destroy it and Theodore, guarding military stores in a camp on the Ripon road, looked his last on the towers of the Minster, magnificent against a sea of flame. Death, in humanity, had ceased to move him greatly; but he turned away his head from the death of high human achievement.

For the first few days of disaster there was a certain amount of news, or what passed for news, from the outside world; in districts yet untouched and not wholly panic-stricken, local journals struggled out and communiqués—true or false—were published by the military authorities. But with the rapid growth of the life nomadic, the herding and driving to and fro, with the consequent absence of centres for the dissemination of news or information, the outside world withdrew to a distance and veiled itself in silence unbroken. With the disappearance of the newspaper there was left only rumour, and rumour was always current—sometimes hopeful, sometimes dreadful, always wild; to-day, Peace was coming, a treaty all but signed—and to-morrow London was in ruins.... No one knew for certain what was happening out of eyeshot, or could more than guess how far devastation extended. This alone was a certainty; that in every direction that a man might turn, he met those who were flying from destruction, threatened or actual; and that night after night and day after day, humanity crouched before the science itself had perfected.... Sometimes there were visible encounters in the air, contending squadrons that chased, manœuvred and gave battle; but the invaders, driven off, returned again and the process of displacement continued. And, with every hour of its continuance, the death-roll grew longer, uncounted; and men, who had struggled to retain a hold on their humanity and the life civilized, gave up the struggle, became predatory beasts and fought with each other for the means to keep life in their bodies.

In after years Theodore tried vainly to remember how long he was quartered in the camp on the Ripon road—whether it was weeks or a matter of days only. Then or later he lost all sense of time, retaining only a memory of happenings, of events that followed each other and connecting them roughly with the seasons—frosty mornings, wet and wind or summer heat. There were the nights when York flamed and the days when thick smoke hung over it; and the morning when aeroplanes fought overhead and two crashed within a mile of the camp. There was the night of pitched battle with a rabble of the starving, grown desperate, which rushed the guard suddenly out of the darkness and beat and hacked at the doors of the sheds which contained the hoarded treasure of food. Theodore, with every other man in the camp, was turned out hastily to do battle with the horde of invaders—to shoot into the mass of them and drive them back to their starvation. In the end the rush was stemmed and the camp cleared of the mob; but there was a hideous five minutes of shots and knife-thrusts and hand-to-hand struggling before the final stampede. Even after the stampede the menace was not at an end; when the sun rose it showed to the watchers in the camp a sullen rabble that lingered not a field’s breadth distant—a couple of hundred wolfish men and women who could not tear themselves away from the neighbourhood of food, who glared covetously and took hopeless counsel together till the order to charge them was given and they broke and fled, spitting back hatred.

After that, the night guard was doubled and the commanding officer applied in haste for reinforcements; barbed wire entanglements were stretched round the camp and orders were given to disperse any crowd that assembled and lingered in the neighbourhood. Behind their entanglements and line of sentries the little garrison lived as on an island in the flood of anarchy and ruin—a remnant of order, defending itself against chaos. And, for all the discipline with which they faced anarchy and the ruthlessness with which they beat back chaos, they knew (so often as they dared to think) that the time might be at hand—must be at hand, if no deliverance came—when they, every man of them, would be swept from their island to the common fate and become as the creatures, scarce human, who crawled to them for food and were refused. When darkness fell and flames showed red on the horizon, they would wonder how long before their own turn came—and be thankful for the lightening in the east; and as each convoy of lorries drove up to remove supplies from their fast dwindling stores, they would scan the faces of men who were ignorant and helpless as themselves to see if they were bearers of good news.... And the news was always their own news repeated; of ruin and burning, of famine and the threat of the famished. No message—save stereotyped military orders—from that outside world whence alone they could hope for salvation.

There remained with Theodore to the end of his days the dreadful memory of the women. At the beginning—just at the beginning—of disaster, authority had connived at a certain amount of charitable diversion of military stores for the benefit of women and children; but as supplies dwindled and destroying hordes of vagrants multiplied, the tacit permission was withdrawn. The soldier, the instrument of order, unfed was an instrument of order no longer; discipline was discipline for so long only as it obtained the necessities of life, and troops whose rations failed them in the end ceased to be troops and swelled the flood of vagrant and destitute anarchy. The useless mouth was the weapon of the enemy; and authority hardened its heart perforce against the crying of the useless mouth.

Once a score or so of women, with a tall, frantic girl as their leader, stood for hours at the edge of the wire entanglement and called on the soldiers to shoot—if they would not feed them, to shoot. Then, receiving only silence as answer, the tall girl cried out that, by God, the soldiers should be forced to shoot! and led her companions—some cumbered with children—to tear and hurl themselves across the stretch of barbed and twisted wire. As they scrambled over, bleeding, crying and their clothes in rags, they were seized by the wrists and hustled to the gate of the camp—some limp and effortless, others kicking and writhing to get free. When the gate was closed and barred on them they beat on it—then lay about wretchedly ... and at last shambled wretchedly away....

More dreadful even than the women who dragged with them children they could not feed, were those who sought to bribe the possessors of food with the remnant of their feminine attractions; who eyed themselves anxiously in streams, pulled their sodden clothes into a semblance of jauntiness and made piteous attempts at flirtation. Money being worthless, since it could buy neither safety nor food, the price for those who traded their bodies was paid in a hunk of bread or meat.... Those women suffered most who had no man of their own to forage and fend for them, and were no longer young enough for other men to look on with pleasure. They—as humanity fell to sheer wolfishness and the right of the strongest—were beaten back and thrust aside when it came to the sharing-out of spoil.

He remembered very clearly a day when news that was authentic reached them from the outside world; an aeroplane came down with engine-trouble in a field on the edge of the camp, and the haggard-faced pilot, beset with breathless questions, laughed roughly when they asked him of London—how lately he had been there, what was happening? “Oh yes, I was over it a day or two ago. You’re no worse off than they are down south—London’s been on the run for days.” He turned back to his engine and whistled tunelessly through the silence that had fallen on his hearers.... Theodore said it over slowly to himself, “London’s been on the run for days.” If so—if so—then what, in God’s name, of Phillida?

Hitherto he had fought back his dread for Phillida, denying to himself, as he denied to others, the rumour that disaster was widespread and general, and insisting that she, at least, was safe. If there was one thing intolerable, one thing that could not be, it was Phillida vagrant, Phillida starving—his dainty lady bedraggled and grovelling for her bread.... like the haggard women who had beaten with their hands on the gate....

“It must stop,” he choked suddenly, “it must stop—it can’t go on!”

The pilot broke off from his whistling to stare at the distorted face.

“No,” he said grimly, “it can’t go on. What’s more, it’s stopping, by degrees—stopping itself; you mayn’t have noticed it yet, but we do. Taking ’em all round they’re leaving off, not coming as thick as they did. And”—his mouth twisted ironically—“we’re leaving off and for the same reason.”

“The same reason?” someone echoed him.

“Because we can’t go on.... You don’t expect us to carry on long in this, do you?” He shrugged and jerked his head towards a smoke cloud on the western skyline. “That’s what ran us—gone up in smoke. Food and factories and transport and Lord knows what beside. The things that ran us and kept us going ... We’re living on our own fat now—what there is of it—and so are the people on the other side. We can just keep going as long as it lasts; but it’s getting precious short now, and when we’ve finished it—when there’s no fat left!...” He laughed unpleasantly and stared at the rolling smoke cloud.

Someone else asked him about the rumour ever-current of negotiation—whether there was truth in it, whether he had heard anything?

“Much what you’ve heard,” he said, and shrugged his shoulders. “There’s talk—there always is—plenty of it; but I don’t suppose I know any more than you do.... It stands to reason that someone must be trying to put an end to it—but who’s trying to patch it up with who?... And what is there left to patch? Lord knows! They say the real trouble is that when governments have gone there’s no one to negotiate with. No responsible authority—sometimes no authority at all. Nothing to get hold of. You can’t make terms with rabble; you can’t even find out what it wants—and it’s rabble now, here, there, and everywhere. When there’s nothing else left, how do you get hold of it, treat with it? Who makes terms, who signs, who orders?... Meanwhile, we go on till we’re told to stop—those of us that are left.... And I suppose they’re doing much the same—keeping on because they don’t know how to stop.”

Theodore asked what he meant when he spoke of “no government.” “You can’t mean it literally? You can’t mean...?”

“Why not?” said the pilot. “Is there any here?”—and jerked his head, this time towards the road. Its long white ribbon was spotted with groups and single figures of vagrants—scarecrow vagrants—crawling onward they knew not whither.

“See that,” he said, “see that—does anyone govern it? Make rules for it, defend it, keep it alive?... And that’s everywhere.”

Someone whispered back “Everywhere” under his breath; the rest stared in silence at the spotted white ribbon of road.

“You can’t mean...?” said Theodore again.

The airman shrugged his shoulders and laughed roughly.

“I believe,” he said, “there are still some wretched people who call themselves a government, try to be a government—at least, there were the other day.... Sometimes I wonder how they try, what they say to each other—poor devils! How they look when the heads of what used to be departments bring them in the day’s report? Can’t you imagine their silly, ghastly faces?... Even if they’re still in existence, what in God’s name can they do—except let us go on killing each other in the hope that something may turn up. If they give orders, sign papers, make laws, does anyone listen, pay any attention? Does it make any difference to that?” Again he jerked his head towards the road, and in the word as in the gesture was loathing, fear and contempt. “And in other parts of what used to be the civilized world—where this sort of hell has been going on longer—what do you suppose is happening?”

No one answered; he laughed again roughly, as if he were contemptuous of their hopes, and a man beside Theodore—a corporal—swung round on him, white-faced and snarling.

“Damn you!... I’ve got a girl.... I’ve got a girl!...”

He choked, moved away and stood rigid, staring at the road.

Theodore heard himself asking, “If there isn’t any government—what is there?”

“What’s left of the army,” said the other, “that’s all that hangs together. Bits of it, here and there—getting smaller, losing touch with the other bits; hanging on to its rations—what’s left of ’em.... And we hold together just as long as we can fight back the rabble; not an hour, not a minute longer! When we’ve gnawed our way through the last of our rations—what then?... You may do what you like, but I’m keeping a shot for myself. Whether we’re through with it or whether we’re not. Just stopping fighting won’t clear up this mess.... And I’ll die—what I am. Not rabble!”

Whether after days or whether after weeks, there came a time when they ceased to have dealings with the world beyond their wire defences; when the store-sheds in the camp were all but emptied of their hoard of foodstuffs and such military authority as might still exist took no further interest in the doings of a useless garrison. Orders and communications, once frequent, grew fewer, and finally, as military authority crumbled, they were left to isolation, to their own defence and devices. Since no man any longer had need of them, they were cut off from intercourse with those other remnants of the life disciplined whence lorries had once arrived in search of rations; separated from such other bands of their fellows as still held together, they were no longer part of an army, were nothing but a band of armed men. Though their own daily rations were cut down to the barest necessities of life, there was little grumbling, since even the dullest knew the reason; as the airman had told them, they were living on their own fat, for so long as their own fat lasted. For all their isolation, their fears and daily perils kept them disciplined; they held together, obeyed orders and kept watch, not because they still felt themselves part of a nation or a military force, but because there remained in their common keeping the means to support bare life. It was not loyalty or patriotism, but the sense of their common danger, their common need of defence against the famished world outside their camp, that kept them comrades, obedient to a measure of discipline, and made them still a community.

There had been altercation of the fiercest before they were left to themselves—when lorries drove up for food which was refused them, on the ground that the camp had not sufficient for its own needs. Disputes at the refusal were furious and violent; men, driven out forcibly, went off shouting threats that they would come back and take what was denied them—would bring their machine-guns and take it. Those who yet had the wherewithal to keep life in their bodies knew the necessity that prompted the threat and lived thenceforth in a state of siege against men who had once been their comrades. With the giving out of military supplies and the consequent breaking of the bonds of discipline, bands of soldiers, scouring the countryside, were an added terror to their fellow-vagrants and, so long as their ammunition lasted, fared better than starvation unarmed.... If central authority existed it gave no sign; while military force that had once been united—an army—dissolved into its primitive elements: tribes of armed men, held together by their fear of a common enemy. In the wreck of civilization, of its systems, institutions and polity, there endured longest that form of order which had first evolved from the chaos of barbarism—the disciplined strength of the soldier.... A people retracing its progress from chaos retraced it step by step.

VII

The end of civilization came to Theodore Savage and his fellows as it had come to uncounted thousands.

There had been a still warm day with a haze on it—he judged it early autumn or perhaps late summer; for the rest, like any other day in the camp routine—of watchfulness, of scanning the sky and the distance, of the passing of vagabond starvation, of an evil smell drifting with the lazy air from the dead who lay unburied where they fell. Before nightfall the haze was lifted by a cold little wind from the east; and soon after darkness a moon at the full cast white, merciless light and black shadow.

Theodore was asleep when the alarm was given—by a shout at the door of his hut. One of ten or a dozen, aroused like himself, he grabbed at his rifle as he stumbled to his feet; believing in the first hurried moment of waking that he was called to drive back yet another night onslaught of the starving enemy without. He ran out of the hut into a strong, pallid glare that wavered.... A stretch of gorse and bramble-patch two hundred yards away was alight, burning lividly, and further off the same bluish flame was running like a wave across a field. Enemy aeroplanes were dropping their fire-bombs—here and there, flash on flash, of pale, inextinguishable flame.

It was scarcely five minutes from the time he had been roused before the camp and its garrison had ceased to exist as a community, and Theodore Savage and his living comrades were vagabonds on the face of the earth. The gorse and bramble-patch lay to the eastward and the wind was blowing from the east; the flames rushed triumphantly at a black clump of fir trees—great torches that lit up the neighbourhood. The guiding hand in the terror overhead had a mark laid ready for his aim; the camp, with its camouflaged huts and sheds, seen plainly as in broadest daylight. His next bomb burst in the middle of the camp blowing half-a-score of soldiers into bloody fragments and firing the nearest wooden building. While it burned, the terror overhead struck again and again—then stooped to its helpless quarry and turned a machine-gun on men in trenches and men running hither and thither in search of a darkness that might cover them.... That, for Theodore Savage, was the ending of civilization.

With the crash of the first explosion he cowered instinctively and pressed himself against the wall of the nearest shed; the flames, rushing upward, showed him others cowering like himself, all striving to obliterate themselves, to shrink, to deny their humanity. Even in his extremity of bodily fear he was conscious of merciless humiliation; the machine-gun crackled at scurrying little creatures that once were men and that now were but impotent flesh at the mercy of mechanical perfection.... Mechanical perfection, the work of men’s hands, soared over its creators, spat down at their helplessness and defaced them; they cringed in corners till it found them out and ran from it screaming, without power to strike back at the invisible beast that pursued them. Without power even to surrender and yield to its mercy; they could only hate impotently—and run....

As they ran they broke instinctively—avoiding each other, since a group made a mark for a gunner. Theodore, when he dared cower no longer, rushed with a dozen through the gate of the camp but, once outside it, they scattered right and left and there was no one near him when his flight ended with a stumble. He stayed where he had fallen, a good mile from the camp, in the blessed shadow of a hedgerow; he crept close to it and lay in the blackness of the shadow, breathing great sobs and trembling—crouching in dank grass and peering through the leafage at the distant furnace he had fled from. The crackling of machine-guns had ceased, but here and there, for miles around were stretches of flame running rapidly before a dry wind. Half a mile away an orchard was blazing with hayricks; and he drew a long sigh of relief when another flare leaped up—further off. That was miles away, that last one; they were going, thank God they were going!... He waited to make sure—half an hour or more—then stumbled back in search of his companions; through fields on to the road that led past what once had been the camp.

On his way he met others, dark figures creeping back like himself; by degrees a score or so gathered in the roadway and stood in little groups, some muttering, some silent, as they watched the flames burn themselves out. There were bodies lying in the road and beside it—men shot from above as they ran; and the living turned them over to look at their distorted faces.... No one was in authority; their commanding officer had been killed outright by the bursting of the first bomb, one of the subalterns lay huddled in the roadway, just breathing. So much they knew.... In the beginning there was relief that they had come through alive; but, with the passing of the first instinct of relief, came understanding of the meaning of being alive.... The breath in their bodies, the knowledge that they still walked the earth: and for the rest, vagrancy and beast-right—the right of the strongest to live!

They took counsel together as the night crept over them and—because there was nothing else to do—planned to search the charred ruin as the fire died out, in the hope of salvage from the camp. They counted such few, odd possessions as remained to them: cartridge belts, rifles thrown away in flight and then picked up in the road, the contents of their pockets—no more.... In the end, for the most part, they slept the dead sleep of exhaustion till morning—to wake with cold rain on their faces.

The rain, for all its wretchedness to men without shelter, was so far their friend that it beat down the flames on the smouldering timbers which were all that remained of their fortress and rock of defence. They burrowed feverishly among the black wreckage of their store-sheds, blistering and burning their fingers by too eager handling of logs that still flickered, unearthing, now and then, some scrap of charred meat but, for the most part, nothing but lumps of molten metal that had once been the tins containing food. In their pressing anxiety to avert the peril of hunger they were heedless of a peril yet greater; their search had attracted the attention of others—scarecrow vagrants, the rabble of the roads, who saw them from a distance and came hurrying in the hope of treasure-trove. The first single spies retreated at the order of superior and disciplined numbers; but with time their own numbers were swollen by those who halted at the rumour of food, and there hovered round the searchers a shifting, snarling, envious crowd that drew gradually nearer till faced with the threat of pointed rifles. Even that only stayed it for a little—and, spurred on by hunger, imagining riches where none existed, it rushed suddenly forward in a mob that might not be held.

Those who had rifles fired at it and men in the foremost ranks went down, unheeded in the rush of their fellows; those who might have hesitated were thrust forward by the frantic need behind, and the torrent of misery broke against the little group of soldiers in a tumult of grappling and screeching. Women, like men, asserted their beast-right to food—when sticks and knives failed them, asserted it with claws and teeth; unhuman creatures, with eyes distended and wide, yelling mouths, went down with their fingers at each other’s throats, their nails in each other’s flesh.... Theodore clubbed a length of burnt wood and struck out ... saw a man drop with a broken, bloody face and a woman back from him shrieking ... then was gripped from behind, with an arm round his neck, and went down.... The famished creatures fought above his body and beat out his senses with their feet.

When life came back to him the sun was very low in the west. In his head little hammers beat intolerably and all his strained body ached with bruises as he raised himself, slowly and groaning, and leaned on an arm to look round. He lay much where he had fallen, but the soldiers, the crowd of human beasts, had vanished; the bare stretch of camp, still smoking in places, was silent and almost deserted. Two or three bending and intent figures were hovering round the charred masses of wreckage—moving slowly, stopping often, peering as they walked and thrusting their hands into the ashes, in the hope of some fragment that those who searched before them had missed. A woman lay face downwards with her dead arm flung across his feet; further off were other bodies—which the searchers passed without notice. Three or four were in uniform, the bodies of men who had once been his comrades; others, for the benefit of the living, had been stripped, or half-stripped, of their clothing.

He lifted himself painfully and crawled on hands and knees, with many groans and halts, to the stream that had formed one border of the camp—where he drank, bathed his head and washed the dried blood from his scratches. With a measure of physical relief—the blessing of cool water to a burning head and throat—came a clearer understanding and, with clearer understanding, fear.... He knew himself alone in chaos.

As soon as he might he limped back to the smouldering wood-heaps and accosted a woman who was grubbing in a mess of black refuse. Did she know what had become of the soldiers? Which way they had gone when they left? The woman eyed him sullenly, mistrustful and resenting his neighbourhood—knew nothing, had not seen any soldiers—and turned again to grub in her refuse. A skeleton of a man was no wiser; had only just turned off the road to search, did not know what had happened except that there must have been a fight—but it was all over when he came up. He also had seen no soldiers—only the dead ones over there.... Theodore saw in their eyes that they feared him, were dreading lest he should compete with them for their possible treasure of refuse.

For the time being a sickly faintness deprived him of all wish for food; he left the sullen creatures to their clawing and grubbing, went back to the water, drank and soused once more, then crept farther off in search of a softer ground to lie on. After a few score yards of painful dragging and halting, he stretched himself exhausted on a strip of dank grass at the roadside—and dozed where he fell until the morning.

With sunrise and awakening came the pangs of sharp hunger, and he dragged himself limping through mile after mile in search of the wherewithal to stay them. He was giddy with weakness and near to falling when he found his first meal in a stretch of newly-burned field—the body of a rabbit that the fire had blackened as it passed. He fell upon it, hacked it with his clasp-knife and ate half of it savagely, looking over his shoulder to see that no one watched him; the other half he thrust into his pocket to serve him for another meal. He had learned already to live furtively and hide what he possessed from the neighbours who were also his enemies. Next day he fished furtively—with a hook improvised out of twisted wire and worm-bait dug up by his clasp-knife; lurking in bushes on the river-bank, lest others, passing by, should note him and take toll by force of his catch.

He lived thenceforth as men have always lived when terror drives them this way and that, and the earth, untended, has ceased to yield her bounties; warring with his fellows and striving to outwit them for the remnant of bounty that was left. He hunted and scraped for his food like a homeless dog; when found, he carried it apart in stealth and bolted it secretly, after the fashion of a dog with his offal. In time all his mental values changed and were distorted: he saw enemies in all men, existed only to exist—that he might fill his stomach—and death affected him only when he feared it for himself. He had grown to be self-centred, confined to his body and its daily wants and that side of his nature which concerned itself with the future and the needs of others was atrophied. He had lost the power of interest in all that was not personal, material and immediate; and, as the uncounted days dragged out into weeks, even the thought of Phillida, once an ever-present agony, ceased to enter much into his daily struggle to survive. He starved and was afraid: that was all. His life was summed up in the two words, starvation and fear.

At night, as a rule, he sheltered in a house or deserted farm-building that stood free for anyone to enter—sometimes alone, but as often as not in company. Starved rabble, as long as it hunted for food, avoided its rivals in the chase; but when night, perforce, brought cessation of the hunt, the herding instinct reasserted itself and lasted through the hours of darkness. As autumn sharpened, guarded fires were lit in cellars where they could not be seen from above and fed with broken furniture, with fragments of doors and palings; and one by one, human beasts would slink in and huddle down to the warmth—some uncertainly, seeking a new and untried refuge, and others returning to their shelter of the night before. The little gangs who shared fire and roof for the space of a night never ate in each other’s company; food was invariably devoured apart, and those who had possessed themselves of more than an immediate supply would hide and even bury it in a secret place before they came in contact with their fellows. Hence no gang, no little herd, was permanent or contained within itself the beginnings of a social system; its members shared nothing but the hours of a night and performed no common social duties. A face became familiar because seen for a night or two in the glow of a common fire; when it vanished none knew—and none troubled to ask—whether a man had died between sunrise and sunset or whether he had drifted further off in his daily search for the means to keep life in his body. When a man died in the night, with others round him, the manner of his ending was known; otherwise he passed out of life without notice from those who yet crawled on the earth.... With morning the herd of starvelings that had sheltered together broke up and foraged, each man for himself and his own cravings; rooted in fields and trampled gardens, crouched on river-banks fishing, laid traps for vermin, ransacked shops and houses where scores had preceded them.... And some, it was muttered—as time went on and the need grew yet starker—fed horribly ... and therefore plentifully....

There were nights—many nights—when a herd broke in panic from its shelter and scattered to the winds of heaven at an alarm of the terror overhead; and always, as starvation pressed, it dwindled—by death and the tendency to dissolve into single nomads, who (such as survived) regrouped themselves elsewhere, to scatter and re-group again.... With repeated wandering—now this way, now that, as hope and hunger prompted—went all sense of direction and environment; the nomads, hunting always, drifted into broken streets or dead villages and through them to the waste of open country—not knowing where they were, in the end not caring, and turned back by a river or the sea.

The sight or suspicion of food and plunder would always draw vagrancy together in crowds; district after district untouched by an enemy had been swept out of civilized existence by the hordes which fell on the remnants of prosperity and tore them; which ransacked shops and dwellings, slaughtered sheep, horses, cattle and devoured them and, often enough, in a fury of destruction and vehement envy, set light to houses and barns lest others might fare better than themselves. But when flocks, herds and storehouses had vanished, when agriculture, like the industry of cities, had ceased to exist and nothing remained to devour and plunder, the motive for common action passed. With equality of wretchedness union was impossible, and every man’s hand against his neighbour; if groups formed, here and there, of the stronger and more brutal, who joined forces for common action, they held together only for so long as their neighbours had possessions that could be wrested from them—stores of food or desirable women; once the neighbours were stripped of their all and there was nothing more to prey on, the group fell apart or its members turned on each other. In the life predatory man had ceased to be creative; in a world where no one could count on a morrow, construction and forethought had no meaning.

VIII

In a world where all were vagabond and brutal, where each met each with suspicion and all men were immersed in the intensity of their bodily needs, very few had thoughts to exchange. Mentally, as well as actually, they lived to themselves and where they did not distrust they were indifferent; the starvelings who slunk into shelter that they might huddle for the night round a common fire found little to say to one another. As human desire concentrated itself on the satisfaction of animal cravings, so human speech degenerated into mere expression of those cravings and the emotions aroused by them. Only once or twice while he starved and drifted did Theodore talk with men who sought to give expression to more than their present terrors and the immediate needs of their bodies, who used speech that was the vehicle of thought.

One such he remembered—met haphazard, as all men met each other—when he sheltered for an autumn night on the outskirts of a town left derelict. With falling dusk came a sudden sharp patter of rain and he took refuge hurriedly in the nearest house—a red-brick villa, standing silent with gaping windows. What was left of the door swung loosely on its hinges—half the lower panels had been hacked away to serve as firewood; the hall was befouled with the feet of many searchers and of the furniture remained but a litter of rags and fragments that could not be burned.

He thought the place empty till he scented smoke from the basement; whereupon he crept down the stairs, soft-footed and alert, to discover that precaution was needless. There was only one occupant of the house, a man plainly dying; a livid hollow-eyed skeleton who coughed and trembled as he knelt by the grate and tried to blow damp sticks into a flame. Theodore, in his own interests, took charge of the fire, ransacked the house for inflammable material and tore up strips of broken boarding that the other was too feeble to wrestle with. When the blaze flared up, the sick man cowered to it, stretched out his hands—filthy skin-covered bones—and thanked him; whereat Theodore turned suddenly and stared. It was long—how long?—since any man had troubled to thank him; and this man, for all his verminous misery, had a voice that was educated, cultured.... Something in the tone of it—the manner—took Theodore back to the world where men ate courteously together, were companions, considered each other; and instinctively, almost without effort, he offered a share of his foraging. The offer was refused, whereat Theodore wondered still more; but the man, near death, was past desire for food and shook his head almost with repulsion. Perhaps it was the fever that had turned him against food that loosened his tongue and set him talking—or perhaps he, also, by another’s voice and manner, was reminded of his past humanity.

“‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’” he quoted suddenly. “Who wrote that—do you remember?”

“No,” Theodore said, “I’ve forgotten.” He stared at the cowering, hunched figure with its shaking hands stretched to the blaze. The man, it might be, was mad as well as dying—he had met many such in his wanderings; babbling of verse as someone—who was it?—had babbled in dying of green fields.

“‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’” the sick man repeated. “Well, even if we’ve forgotten who wrote it, there’s one thing about him that’s certain; he didn’t know what we know—hadn’t lived in our kind of hell. The place where you haven’t a mind—only fear and a stomach.... The flesh and the devil—hunger and fear; they haven’t left us a world!... But if there’s ever a world again, I believe I shall have learned how to write. Now I know what we are—the fundamentals and the nakedness....”

“Were you a writer?” Theodore asked him—and at the question his old humanity stirred curiously within him.

“Yes,” said the other, “I was a writer.... When I think of what I wrote—the little, little things that seemed important!... I spent a year once—a whole good year—on a book about a woman who was finding out she didn’t love her husband. She was well fed and housed, lived comfortably—and I wrote of her as if she were a tragedy. The work I put into it—the work and the thought! I tried to get what I called atmosphere.... And all the time there was this in us—this raw, red thing—and I never even touched it, never guessed what we were without our habits.... Do you know where we made the mistake?”—he turned suddenly to Theodore, thrusting out a finger—“We were not civilized—it was only our habits that were civilized; but we thought they were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Underneath, the beast in us was always there—lying in wait till his time came. The beast that is ourselves, that is flesh of our flesh—clothed in habits, in rags that have been torn from us.”

He broke off to cough horribly and lay breathless and exhausted for a time; then, when breath came back to him, talked on while Theodore listened—not so much to his words as to a voice from the world that had passed.

“The religions were right,” he said. “They were right through and through; the only sane thing and the only safe thing is humility—to realize your sin, to confess it and repent.... We—we were bestial and we did not know it; and when you don’t even suspect you sin how can you repent and save your soul alive?... We dressed ourselves and taught ourselves the little politenesses and ceremonies which made it easy to forget that we were brutes in our hearts; we never faced our own possibilities of evil and beastliness, never confessed and repented them, took no precautions against them. Our limitless possibilities.... We thought our habits—we called them virtues—were as real and natural and ingrained as our instincts; and now what is left of our habits? When we should have been crying, ‘Lord have mercy on us,’ we believed in ourselves, our enlightenment and progress. Enlightenment that ended as science applied to destruction and progress that has led us—to this.... And to-day it has gone, every shred of it, and we’re back at what we started with—hunger and lust! Brute instincts ... and the primitive passion, hatred—against those who thwart hunger and lust. Nothing else—how can there be anything else? When we lost all we loved, we lost the habit and power of loving.... ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’—of hatred and hunger and lust.”

“Yes,” said Theodore—and he, too, stared at the fire.... What the other had said was truth and truth only. Even Phillida had left him; the power of loving her was gone. “I hadn’t thought of it like that—but it’s right.... We can only hate.”

“It’s that,” said the dying man, “that’s beyond all torment.... God pity us!”

He covered his eyes and sat silent until Theodore asked him, “Does that mean you still believe in God?”