William—An Englishman

WILLIAM
AN ENGLISHMAN

BY

CICELY HAMILTON

London
SKEFFINGTON & SON, LTD.
34 SOUTHAMPTON STREET, STRAND, W.C. 2.
PUBLISHERS TO HIS MAJESTY THE KING
1919

WILLIAM—AN ENGLISHMAN

CHAPTER I

William Tully was a little over three-and-twenty when he emerged from the chrysalis stage of his clerkdom and became a Social Reformer. His life and doings until the age of twenty-three, had given small promise of the distinction of his future career; from a mild-mannered, pale-faced and under-sized boy he had developed into a mild-mannered, pale-faced little adult standing five foot five in his boots. Educated at a small private school in the suburbs of London, his record for conduct was practically spotless and he once took a prize for Divinity; further, to the surprise and relief of his preceptors, he managed to scrape through the Senior Cambridge Local Examination before he was transferred to a desk in the office of a London insurance company. His preceptor-in-chief, in a neatly-written certificate, assured his future employers that they would find him painstaking and obedient—and William, for the first six years of his engagement, lived up to the character given him. His mother, a sharp-eyed, masterful woman, had brought him up to be painstaking and obedient; it might be said with truth that as long as she lived he did not know how to be otherwise. It is true he disliked his office superiors vaguely, for the restrictions they placed upon his wishes—just as, for the same reason, he vaguely disliked his mother; but his wishes being indeterminate and his ambition non-existent, his vague dislike never stiffened into active resentment.

It would seem that the supreme effort of passing his Cambridge Local had left him mentally exhausted for a season; at any rate, from the conclusion of his school-days till he made the acquaintance of Faraday, his reading was practically confined to romantic and humorous literature. He was a regular patron of the fiction department of the municipal lending library and did not disdain to spend modestly on periodicals of the type of Snappy Bits. He was unable to spend more than modestly because his earnings, with the exception of a small sum for fares and pocket-money, were annexed by his mother each Saturday as a matter of normal routine. The manner of her annexation made discussion singularly difficult; and if William ever felt stirrings of rebellion over the weekly cash delivery he was careful never to betray them.

With his colleagues of the office Tully was a negligible quantity. He was not unpopular—it was merely that he did not matter. His mother's control of the family funds was no doubt in part accountable for his comrades' neglect of his society; but his own habits and manners were still more largely to blame, since besides being painstaking and obedient he was unobtrusive and diffident. There was once a project on foot in the office to take him out and make him drunk—but nothing came of it because no one was sufficiently interested in William to give up an evening to the job.

The crisis in his hitherto well-ordered life came when his mother died suddenly. This was in October 1910. William had gone to the office as usual that morning, leaving his mother apparently in her usual health; he returned in the evening to blinds already drawn down. A neighbour (female) was in waiting in the sitting-room and broke the great news with a sense of its importance and her own; she took William's hand, told him with sniffs that it was the will of the Lord, and entered into clinical details. William sat down rather suddenly when he realized that there would be no one in future to annex his weekly earnings; then, shocked by his lack of filial feeling, he endeavoured to produce an emotion more suited to the solemn occasion. Disconcerted by a want of success which he feared was apparent to his audience, he fidgeted, dry-eyed and awkward—and finally, all things considered, acted well and wisely by demanding to be left alone. To his relief the demand was accepted as reasonable and proper in the first moments of his grief; the sympathizer withdrew, wiping her eyes—unnecessarily—and hoping that God would support him. He locked the door stealthily and stared at his mother's armchair; he was a little afraid of its emptiness, he was also shocked and excited. He knew instinctively that more was to happen, that life from now on would be something new and different.... The arm-chair was empty; the masterful little woman who had borne him, slapped him, managed him and cowed him—the masterful little woman was dead! There was no one now to whom he was accountable; no one of whom he was afraid.... He walked on tiptoe round the tiny room, feeling strangely and pleasantly alive.

The next day increased the sense of his new-found importance; his mother had died rich, as he and she understood riches. She had trusted her son in nothing, not even with the knowledge of her income, and after the stinting and scraping to which she had accustomed him he was amazed to find himself master of a hundred and fifty pounds a year, the interest on capital gradually and carefully invested. In his amazement—at first incredulous—he trod on air, while his mind wandered hazily over the glorious possibilities of opulent years to come; the only alloy in his otherwise supreme content being the necessity for preserving (at least until the funeral was over) a decent appearance of dejection. He felt, too, the need of a friend in whom to confide, some one of his own age and standing before whom it would not be needful to keep up the appearance of dejection and who would not be shocked at the babblings of his stirred and exultant soul; and it was this natural longing for a confidant which, on the day following his mother's funeral, led to the beginning of his friendship with his fellow-clerk, Faraday.

The head of his department, meeting him in the passage, had said a few perfunctory and conventional words of condolence—whereto William had muttered a sheepish "Thank you, sir," and escaped as soon as might be. The familiar office after his four days' estrangement from it affected him curiously and unpleasantly; he felt his newly-acquired sense of importance slipping gradually away from him, felt himself becoming once again the underling and creature of routine—the William Tully, obedient and painstaking, who had earned from his childhood the favourable contempt of his superiors. It was borne in on him as the hours went by that it was not enough to accept good fortune—good fortune had to be made use of; and he began to make plans in an irregular, tentative fashion, biting the end of his pen and neglecting his work. Should he chuck the office? and if he chucked it, what then? ... Here imagination failed him; his life had been so ordered, so bound down and directed by others, that even his desires were tamed to the wishes of others and left to himself he could not tell what he desired. The need for sympathy and guidance became imperative; driving him, when the other occupants of the room had departed for lunch, to unbosom himself to Faraday.

In his longing to talk he would have addressed himself almost to any one; but on the whole, and in spite of an entire ignorance of his habits and character, he was glad it was Faraday who was left behind to hear him—a newcomer, recently transferred from another branch and, as William realized (if only half-consciously) like himself regarded by their fellow-clerks as a bit of an outsider. A sallow-faced young man, dark-haired and with large hazel eyes, he was neatly garbed as became an insurance clerk; but there was a suggestion of discomfort about his conventional neatness, just as there was a suggestion of effort about his personal cleanliness. He worked hard and steadily; taking no part in the interludes of blithesome chat wherewith his companions enlivened their hours of toil and appearing to be satisfied rather than annoyed by the knowledge of his own isolation. He had spoken to William but two or three times and always in the way of business—nor was his profile bent over a ledger particularly suggestive of sympathy; William's emotions, however, had reached exploding-point, and the door had hardly closed behind the last of their fellows when he blurted out, "I say," and Faraday raised his head.

"I say," William blurted again, "did you know—my mother's dead?"

"Ah—yes," said Faraday uncomfortably; he believed he was being appealed to for sympathy, and fidgeted, clearing his throat; "I—I had heard it mentioned. I needn't say I'm very sorry—extremely.... I suppose you were very much attached to her?"

William reflected for a moment and then answered honestly, "No."

"Indeed!" Faraday returned, surprised as well as uncomfortable. Not knowing what further to say, his eyes went back to the ledger and the conversation languished. It was William who resumed it—wondering at the difficulty of expressing his bubbling emotions.

"I don't mean to say," he explained with a twinge of remorse, "that I had anything to complain of. My mother always did her duty by me. But we weren't what you might call sympathetic."

"Indeed!" Faraday repeated—still at sea as to the motive of the conversation.

"It was unfortunate," William went on, "but it couldn't be helped. I am sure she was a very good woman." (He said this with the more confidence because, from his childhood up, he had always associated goodness with lack of amiability.) "But that wasn't what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say was, she has left me a good deal of money."

"Indeed?" said Faraday for the third time; adding something about "congratulation." He hoped the episode was over—but William was only beginning.

"I've been wondering," he said, "what I should do—now that I'm independent. I don't want to go on like this. It's a waste—when you've got money. But I don't know how to set about things.... If some one would put me in the way!"

Faraday, raising his eyes from the ledger, met the wistful appeal in William's and imagined himself enlightened.

"I see," he said interrogatively; "then you haven't got your living to earn—you are not tied here any longer? You can direct your own life and take up any line you choose?"

"Yes," William assented, pleased with the phrase; "I can direct my own life—certainly."

"Which," Faraday suggested, "was difficult for you before?"

"Very," said William emphatically.

"And," the other went on, "now that you are your own man you wish to take the line that attracts you and be of some use?"

"Oh, certainly," William assented again—perhaps a shade less emphatically. So far his ideas had run more upon pleasure than usefulness.

Faraday reflected with his chin resting on his hand.

"Why have you asked me?" he demanded suddenly—with the accent strongly on the "me."

"I know so few people," William explained humbly. "I mean, of course, people who could give me any ideas.... I thought you wouldn't mind—at least I hoped you wouldn't.... I know it's unusual—but if you could help me in any way? ... With suggestions, you know."

Again Faraday reflected with his chin resting on his hand.

"I could put you," he said at last, "in touch with people who might help you. I should be very pleased to do so.... Of course, I should like to know more of you first—what your views are——"

"Of course," William agreed vaguely, puzzled partly by the words and partly by the enigmatic manner.

"If you've nothing else to do," Faraday continued, "perhaps you'll come round to my rooms to-night for a talk? Say at half-past eight. We could discuss things more comfortably there."

William, still puzzled by the hint of mystery in his manner, murmured that he also should be very pleased, and Faraday gave him the address—returning forthwith to his ledger in sign that he considered the incident closed for the present. He had a distinctly authoritative way with him, and William, who would gladly have continued the subject, had perforce to be content with wondering what the night's discussion and exchange of "views" would bring forth; an evening spent away from home was so rare an event in his life that the prospect of his visit to Faraday's rooms afforded him food for an afternoon's busy speculation. His own domicile being in the region of Camberwell, he did not return to it after office hours but whiled away the time by dinner at an Oxford Street Lyons—secretly glorying in the length of his bill and contrasting his power of spending what he liked with the old days of doled-out allowance. He rang down a sovereign at the pay-desk, gathered up his change and strolled out of the building with an air—and at half-past eight precisely found himself outside Faraday's lodgings in a mournful side-street in Bloomsbury. A shabby maid-servant ushered him upstairs to a shabby, paper-strewn room where Faraday, pipe in mouth, rose to greet him.

They were not long in finding out that the invitation had been given and accepted under a misapprehension on both sides. Faraday, as soon as he had settled his guest in a chair, came straight to the point with "Now tell me—how long have you been interested in social questions?"

"In social questions?" William repeated blankly. "I'm afraid I don't—— What sort of questions do you mean?"

It was Faraday's turn to be taken aback, and, though he did not say it, his eyes looked. "Then what the devil——?" William's fell before them nervously, and he shifted in his chair like a child detected in a blunder.

"I'm afraid I don't——" he said again—and halted.

"Then you didn't know," his companion queried, "that I am 'Vindex' of The Torch?"

"I'm afraid not," muttered William, who had heard neither of one nor the other.

"Vindex" of The Torch sighed inwardly. He was young, ambitious, fiercely in earnest and ever on the look-out for his Chance; and, the wish being father to the thought, he had momentarily mistaken William for an embodiment of his Chance and dreamed dreams since the morning—dreams of a comrade like-minded and willing to be led, whose newly-inherited riches might be used to endow a periodical that should preach a purer and more violent rebellion even than The Torch itself. With the aid of William's three pounds a week—magnified many times over in the eyes of his eager mind—he had seen himself casting the hated insurance behind him and devoting himself heart and pen to the regeneration of the State and Race by means of the Class War. And lo!—as a couple more searching questions revealed to him—in place of a patron and comrade was a nervous little nincompoop, bewildered at finding himself for the first time out of leading-strings, to whom a hundred and fifty a year was wealth untold and who had never so much as heard of the Class War! For a moment he was more than half inclined to be angry with the nervous little nincompoop whose blundering, egoistic attempt at confidence had induced him to believe that the secret of his identity had been penetrated by an ardent sympathizer. (It was an open secret in "advanced" circles, though carefully guarded in the office.) Then, more justly, he softened, recognizing that the blunder was his own, the mistake of his own making—and, pitying William's dropped jaw and open confusion, poured him out a whisky and endeavoured to set him at his ease.

That evening in the company of Faraday and his first whisky was the turning-point in the career of William Tully. Any man stronger than himself could at that juncture in his life have turned him to right or left; a push in the wrong direction would have made of him an idler and a wastrel, and fate was in a kindly mood when she placed him mentally and morally in charge of "Vindex" of The Torch. She might, as her reckless way is, have handed over his little soul to some flamboyant rogue or expert in small vices; instead, she laid it in the keeping of a man who was clean-living, charged with unselfish enthusiasm and never consciously dishonest. The product of a Board School Scholarship and a fiercely energetic process of self-education (prompted in part by the desire to excel those he despised) Faraday, when William made his acquaintance, was beginning to realize some of his cherished ambitions, beginning, in certain Labour and Socialist circles, to be treated as a man of mark. His pen was fluent as well as sarcastic, and if his numerous contributions to the "rebel" press had been paid for at ordinary rates he would have been a prosperous journalist.

It was somewhat of a shock to William to discover on the top of the whisky that his new acquaintance was a Socialist; but after the first and momentary shock he swallowed the fact as he had swallowed the alcohol—not because he liked it, but because it was something the narrow circle of his mother's friends would have heartily and loudly disapproved of. This reactionary and undutiful attitude of mind was not deliberate or conscious; on the contrary, he would certainly have been horrified to learn that it was the dominant factor in his existence during the first few weeks of his emancipation from maternal supervision and control—urging him to drink deeply of Faraday's brand of Socialism as it urged him to partake with unnecessary sumptuousness of the best that Lyons could provide.

He acquired the taste for Faraday's political views more thoroughly and easily than the taste for Faraday's whisky. The man's authoritative and easy manner, the manner which stood him in good stead with his audiences, of assuming (quite honestly) that his statements were proven facts which no sane human being could dispute, would have made it impossible for William to combat his opinions even had his limited reading and thinking supplied him with material for the contest. He was impressed with Faraday's erudition no less than with Faraday's manner; and impressed still more when, later in the evening, a colleague of The Torch dropped in for a smoke and a chat. The pair talked Labour and International movements with the careless ease of connoisseurs and bandied the names of politicians contemptuously from mouth to mouth—William sitting by in a silence dazed and awed, drinking in a language that attracted by its wild incomprehensibility and suggestion. His mind was blank and virgin for the sowing of any seed; and under Faraday's influence his dull, half-torpid resentment against the restrictions, physical and mental, of his hitherto narrow life became merged in a wider sympathy with the general discomfort, in an honest and fiery little passion for Justice, Right and Progress. That, of course, was not the affair of one evening's talk; but even the one evening's talk sowed the seeds. He went away from it uncomfortably conscious that as yet he had lived solely for himself, never troubling his head concerning the evils that men like Faraday were fighting to overcome. The manner of his future living was decided for him when he knocked at the door of Faraday's Bloomsbury lodging.

His simple and awed admiration for his new-found friend and faith had in all probability more than a little to do with Faraday's readiness to allow the acquaintance to continue—even a rebel prophet is not insensible to flattery. William became for a time his satellite and pupil, the admiring sharer of his schemes, of his hatreds and laudable ambitions; he read Faraday's vehement articles and accepted each word and line. His very blankness of mind made him an apt pupil, and within a month of his mother's death he was living, out of office hours, in a whirl of semi-political agitation, attending meetings and cramming his head with pamphlets. In three months more all his hours were out-of-office hours; in his enthusiasm for his new creed and interests his neglect of his professional duties had become so marked that the manager, after one or two warnings, called him into his room for a solemn and last reprimand. As it happened, Faraday, the night before, had confided to William the news of his approaching appointment to the post of organizing secretary of the Independent Socialist Party, an appointment which would entail a speedy retirement from his hated desk in the City. The news, naturally, had not increased the attraction of the office for William, in whom the spirit of revolt had already fermented to some purpose; thus, to the infinite surprise of his superiors, who had known him hitherto as the meekest of meek little clerks, the threat of dismissal failing improvement was countered by a prompt resignation as truculent as William could make it. In fact, in the exhilaration of the moment, he treated the astonished representative of capitalism to something in the nature of a speech—culled principally from the writings of "Vindex."

From that day onwards he devoted himself to what he termed public life—a ferment of protestation and grievance; sometimes genuine, sometimes manufactured or, at least, artificially heightened. He was an extremist, passionately well-intentioned and with all the extremist's, contempt for those who balance, see difficulties and strive to give the other side its due. He began by haunting meetings as a listener and a steward; Faraday's meetings at first, then, as his circle of acquaintance and interest widened, any sort of demonstration that promised a sufficiency of excitement in the form of invective. The gentlest of creatures by nature and in private life, he grew to delight in denunciation, and under its ceaseless influence the world divided itself into two well-marked camps; the good and enlightened who agreed with him, and the fools and miscreants who did not.... In short, he became a politician.

As I have said, at the outset of his career he modestly confined his energies to stewarding—to the sale of what propagandist bodies insist on describing as "literature," the taking of tickets, ushering to seats and the like; but in a short time ambition fired him and the fighting spirit thereby engendered led him to opposition meetings where, on Faraday's advice, he tried heckling the enemy speakers. His first and flustered attempts were not over-successful, but, sustained by revolutionary enthusiasm, he refused to be crushed by failure and accompanying jeers and held doggedly on to his purpose. Repeated efforts brought their measure of success, and he began to be marked by his comrades as a willing and valuable member.

Within a year, he had found his feet and was a busy and full-blown speaker—of the species that can be relied on to turn on, at any moment, a glib, excited stream of partisan fact and sentiment. His services were in constant demand, since he spoke for anything and everything—provided only the promoters of the meeting were sufficiently violent in their efforts to upset the prevailing order. He had developed and was pleased with himself; Faraday, though still a great man in his eyes, was more of an equal than an idol. He was wonderfully happy in his new, unrestful existence; it was not only that he knew he was doing great good and that applause uplifted him and went to his head like wine; as a member of an organization and swayed by its collective passion, he attained to, and was conscious of, an emotional (and, as he thought, intellectual) activity of which as an individual he would have been entirely incapable. As a deceased statesman was intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, so William was intoxicated with the exuberance of his own emotions. There were moments when he looked back on his old life and could hardly believe he was the same William Tully who once, without thought of the Social Revolution, went daily from Camberwell to the City and back from the City to Camberwell.... As time went on, he was entrusted with "campaigns" and the stirring up of revolt; and it was a proud day for him when a Conservative evening paper, in connection with his share in a mining agitation, referred to him as a dangerous man. He wondered, with pity for her blindness, what his mother would have thought if any one had told her in her lifetime that her son would turn out dangerous.

As a matter of course he was a supporter of votes for women; an adherent (equally as a matter of course) of the movement in its noisiest and most intolerant form. He signed petitions denouncing forcible feeding and attended meetings advocating civil war, where the civil warriors complained with bitterness that the other side had hit them back; and his contempt for the less virulent form of suffragist was as great as his contempt for the Home Secretary and the orthodox members of the Labour Party. It was at one of these meetings, in December 1913, that he met Griselda Watkins.

Griselda Watkins, then a little under twenty-five, was his exact counterpart in petticoats; a piece of blank-minded, suburban young-womanhood caught into the militant suffrage movement and enjoying herself therein. She was inclined to plumpness, had a fresh complexion, a mouth slightly ajar and suggestive of adenoids, and the satisfied expression which comes from a spirit at rest. Like William, she had found peace of mind and perennial interest in the hearty denunciation of those who did not agree with her.

On the night when William first saw her she wore, as a steward, a white dress, a sash with the colours of her association and a badge denoting that she had suffered for the Cause in Holloway. Her manner was eminently self-conscious and assured, but at the same time almost ostentatiously gracious and womanly; it was the policy of her particular branch of the suffrage movement to repress manifestations of the masculine type in its members and encourage fluffiness of garb and appeal of manner. Griselda, who had a natural weakness for cheap finery, was a warm adherent of the policy, went out window-smashing in a picture-hat and cultivated ladylike charm.

She introduced herself to William after the meeting with a compliment on his speech, which had been fiery enough even for her; they both considered the compliment graceful and for a few minutes exchanged sympathetic platitudes on martyrdom, civil war and the scoundrelly behaviour of the Government. Even in those first few minutes they were conscious of attraction for each other and pleased to discover, in the course of their talk, that they should meet again next week on another militant platform.

They met and re-met—at first only on platforms, afterwards more privately and pleasantly. William, when his own meetings did not claim him, took to following Griselda about to hers, that he might listen entranced to the words of enthusiastic abuse that flowed from her confident lips; he had heard them all before and from speakers as confident, but never before had they seemed so inspired and inspiring, never before had he desired with trembling to kiss the lips that uttered them. Griselda, touched as a woman and flattered as an orator by his persistent presence in her audience, invited him to tea at her aunt's house in Balham; the visit was a success, and from that evening (in early March) the end was a foregone conclusion. Their friendship ripened so fast that one night at the beginning of April (1914) William, escorting her home from a meeting, proposed to her on the top of an otherwise empty 'bus, and was duly and sweetly accepted.

There were none of the customary obstacles in the way of the happy pair—on the contrary, all was plain sailing. William's original income had for some years been augmented by his earnings as a speaker, and Griselda's parents had left her modestly provided for. Her aunt, long since converted to the Movement (to the extent of being unable to talk of anything but forcible feeding), smiled blessings on so suitable a match and proceeded to consider the trousseau; and after a little persuasion on part the wedding was fixed for July.

CHAPTER II

The mating of William and Griselda might be called an ideal mating; theirs were indeed two hearts that beat as one. With each day they were happier in each other's company; their minds as it were flowed together and intermingled joyously—minds so alike and akin that it would have been difficult, without hearing the voice that spoke it, to distinguish an utterance of Griselda from an idea formulated by William. Their prominent blue eyes—they both had prominent blue eyes—looked out upon the world from exactly the same point of view; and as they had been trained by the same influences and were incapable of forming an independent judgment, it would not have been easy to find cause of disagreement between them. There are men and women not a few who find their complement in their contrast; but of such were not William and Griselda. Their standard of conduct was rigid and their views were pronounced; those who did not share their views and act in conformity with their standards were outside the pale of their liking. And this not because they were abnormally or essentially uncharitable, but because they had lived for so long less as individuals than as members of organizations—a form of existence which will end by sucking charity out of the sweetest heart alive.

It was well for them, therefore, that their creed, like their code of manners and morals, was identical or practically identical. It was a simple creed and they held to it loyally and faithfully. They believed in a large, vague and beautifully undefined identity, called by William the People, and by Griselda, Woman; who in the time to come was to accomplish much beautiful and undefined Good; and in whose service they were prepared meanwhile to suffer any amount of obloquy and talk any amount of nonsense. They believed that Society could be straightened and set right by the well-meaning efforts of well-meaning souls like themselves—aided by the Ballot, the Voice of the People, and Woman. They believed, in defiance of the teachings of history, that Democracy is another word for peace and goodwill towards men. They believed (quite rightly) in the purity of their own intentions; and concluded (quite wrongly) that the intentions of all persons who did not agree with them must therefore be evil and impure.... They were, in short, very honest and devout sectarians—cocksure, contemptuous, intolerant, self-sacrificing after the manner of their kind.

They held, as I have said, to their own opinions strongly and would have died rather than renounce, or seem to renounce, them—which did not restrain them from resenting the same attitude of mind and heart in others. What in themselves they admired as loyalty, they denounced in others as interested and malignant stubbornness. More—it did not prevent them from disliking and despising many excellent persons whose opinions, if analysed, would have proved nearly akin to their own. William, for instance, would all but foam at the mouth when compulsory service in the army was the subject of conversation, and "militarism," to him, was the blackest of all the works of the devil; but he was bitter, and violently bitter, against the blackleg who objected to compulsory service in a Trade Union, and had spoken, times without number, in hearty encouragement of that form of siege warfare which is commonly known as a Strike. He was a pacifist of the type which seeks peace and ensues it by insisting firmly, and even to blood, that it is the other side's duty to give way.

Griselda also was a pacifist—when it suited her and when she had got her way. She believed in a future World-Amity, brought about chiefly by Woman; meanwhile, she exulted loudly and frequently in the fighting qualities of her sex. Like William, she had no quarrel with Continental nations; on the contrary, what she had seen of Continental nations during a fortnight's stay at Interlaken had inclined her to look on them with favour. Like William, her combatant instincts were concentrated on antagonists nearer home; she knew them better and therefore disliked them more. It is a mistake to suppose that either nations or individuals will necessarily like the people they see most of; if you must know a man in order to love him, you seldom hate a man with whom you have not acquaintance. Nothing could have been more ideally peaceful than the relations of China and England during the Middle Ages—for the simple reason that China and England knew absolutely nothing of each other. In the same way, if in a lesser degree, Griselda and William had a friendly feeling for Germany and the German people. They had never been to Germany and knew nothing of her history or politics; but they had heard of the Germans as intelligent people addicted to spectacles, beer and sonatas, and established on the banks of the Rhine. And—the Rhine being some way off—they liked them.

As internationalists they had no words too strong for standing armies and their methods; but upon military operations against domestic tyrants they looked with less disapproval. There existed, I believe, in the back of their minds some ill-defined distinction between bloodshed perpetrated by persons clad in uniform and by persons not so clad—between fighting with bayonets and fighting with bombs and brickbats. The one was militarism and unjustifiable; the other heroism and holy. Had you been unkind enough to pen them into a corner and force them to acknowledge that there are many born warriors out of khaki, they would have ended probably by declaring that one should take arms only against tyranny and in a righteous cause—and so have found themselves in entire agreement not only with their adversary but with the Tory Party, the German Emperor, the professional soldier and poor humanity in general. The elect, when one comes to examine them, are not always so very elect. The difficulty would have been to persuade them that there could be two opinions concerning a cause they espoused; their little vision was as narrow as it was pure, and their little minds were so seldom exhausted by thinking. Apostles of the reign of Woman and of International Amity, they might have been summed up as the perfect type of aggressor.

With regard to what used to be called culture (before August 1914), the attainments of William and Griselda were very much on a level. They read newspapers written by persons who wholly agreed with their views; they read pamphlets issued, and books recommended, by societies of which they were members. From these they quoted, in public and imposingly, with absolute faith in their statements. Of history and science, of literature and art, they knew nothing, or next to nothing; and, their ignorance being mutual, neither bored the other by straying away from the subjects in which both were interested.... As I have said, their mating was an ideal mating.

The period of their engagement was not without its beauty; an ever-present consciousness of their mission to mankind did not prevent them from being blissful as loving young couples are blissful—it merely coloured their relations and spiritualized them. One evening, not long before their wedding, they sat together in Battersea Park on a bench and dedicated their mutual lives to the service of Progress and Humanity. They had invented a suitable formula for the occasion and repeated it softly, one after the other, holding each other's hands. Griselda's voice trembled as she vowed, in semi-ecclesiastical phraseology, that not even her great love for William should wean her from her life's work; and William's voice shook back as he vowed in his turn that not even Griselda, the woman of his dreams, should make him neglectful of the call of Mankind and his duty to the holiest of causes. It was a very solemn little moment; man and woman, affianced lovers, they dedicated themselves to their mission, the uplifting of the human race. They were spared the doubts which would have assailed wiser heads as to the manner of accomplishing their mission; and as they sat side by side on the bench, with their hands clasped, they knew themselves for acceptable types and forerunners of the world they were helping to create.... Man and Woman, side by side, vowed to service.

"We shall never forget this evening," Griselda whispered as the sun dipped down in glory. "In all our lives there can be nothing more beautiful than this."

She was right; the two best gifts of life are love and an approving conscience. These twain, William and Griselda, loved each other sincerely—if not with the tempestuous passion of a Romeo and a Juliet, with an honest and healthy affection; they had for each other an attraction which could set their pulses beating and start them dreaming dreams. That evening, on the bench in Battersea Park, they had dreamed their dreams—while their consciences looked on and smiled. They foreshadowed their home not only as a nest where they two and their children should dwell, but as a centre of light and duty—as they understood duty and light; a meeting-place for the like-minded, where fresh courage could be gathered for the strife with prejudice and evil. They pictured themselves (this was in June 1914) as what they would have called Powers—as a man and a woman working for progress and destined to leave their mark. The sense of their destiny awed and elated them—and they walked away from Battersea Park with their hearts too full for speech.

On the way home a flaring headline distracted Griselda temporarily from her dreams. "Who's this Archduke that's been assassinated?" she asked. (Her morning's reading had been confined to The Suffragette.)

"Austrian," William informed her. (He had read the Daily Herald.) "Franz Joseph—no, Franz Ferdinand—the heir to the Austrian throne."

"Who assassinated him?" his betrothed inquired, not very much interested.

"I can't remember their names," William admitted, "but there seem to have been several in it. Anyhow, he's been assassinated. Somewhere in the Balkans. With bombs."

"Oh!" said Griselda, ceasing to be interested at all. Her mind had turned from traffic in strange archdukes and was running on a high resolve; the solemn vow of service was translating itself into action.

"I shall go to the meeting to-morrow," she announced, "and make my protest."

William knew what was passing in her mind and made no effort to dissuade her. No more than she dared he let their mutual happiness enervate them—it must urge them to high endeavour, to struggle and sacrifice for the Cause.

"I'll go too," he said simply, "if I can manage to get a ticket."

"Oh, I'll get you a ticket," Griselda told him; "they're sure to have some at the office"—and thanked him with a squeeze of the fingers that set his pulses beating.

She was as good as her word, and the next night saw him in a Cabinet Minister's audience. From his seat in the arena (their seats were not together and the pair had entered separately) his eye sought for Griselda and found her easily in the first row of the balcony—most obviously composed and with her gloved hands folded on the rail. She was dressed in pale blue, with a flowered toque perched on her head; her blue silk blouse, in view of possibilities, was firmly connected by safety-pins with the belt of her blue cloth skirt, and her hair secured more tightly than usual by an extra allowance of combs. Previous experience had taught her the wisdom of these measures. As usual, in accordance with the tradition of her party, she had insisted in her costume on the ultra-feminine note; her blouse savoured of Liberty and there was a cluster of rosebuds at her breast. She was breathing quickly, so her mouth was more open than usual; otherwise she gave no sign of mental or physical trepidation—save a studied indifference which might have betrayed her to an eye sufficiently acute. To William she looked adorable and his heart swelled with admiration of her courage and determination to sustain her in her protest to the uttermost; he vowed to himself to be worthy of such a mate.

He did his best to prove himself worthy when the critical moment came. He waited for that moment during more than three-quarters of an hour—for Griselda was not without confederates, and three ladies in picture hats and a gentleman in the garb of a Nonconformist minister had arisen at intervals to make the running before her voice rang out. All were suppressed, though not without excitement; two of the ladies parted with their hats and the clergyman broke a chair. The chair and the clergyman having been alike removed, the audience buzzed down into silence, and for full five minutes there was peace—until the speaker permitted himself a jesting allusion to the recently exported objectors. A man with a steward's rosette in his coat was stationed in the gangway close to William; and as the laughter the jest had provoked died away, he swore under his breath, "By God, there's another in the balcony!" William swung round, saw Griselda on her feet and heard her voice shrill out—to him an inspiration and a clarion, to the steward a source of profanity.

"Mr. Chairman, I rise to protest against the speaker's gross insult to the noble women who——"

A man in the seat behind clapped his hands on her shoulders and rammed her back into her chair—where she writhed vigorously, calling him coward and demanding how he dared! His grip, sufficiently hard to be unpleasant, roused her fighting instincts and gave a fillip to her conscientious protest; in contact with actual, if not painful, personal violence, she found it easier to scream, hit out and struggle. Two stewards, starting from either end of the row of chairs, were wedging themselves towards her; she clung to her seat with fingers and toes, and shrieked a regulation formula which the meeting drowned in opprobrium. Conscious of rectitude, the jeers and hoots but encouraged her and fired her blood; and when her hands were wrenched from their hold on the chair she clung and clawed to the shoulder of her next-door neighbour—a stout and orthodox Liberal who thrust her from him, snorting indignation. One steward had her gripped under the armpits, the other with difficulty mastered her active ankles; and, wriggling like a blue silk eel and crowing her indefatigable protest, she was bundled in rapid and business-like fashion to a side entrance of the building.

"Cowards!" she ejaculated as she found her feet on the pavement.

"Damned little cat!" was the ungentlemanly rejoinder. "If you come here again I'll pare your nasty little nails for you."

And, dabbing a scored left hand with his handkerchief, the steward returned to his duties—leaving Griselda in the centre of a jocular crowd attracted to the spot by several previous ejections. She was minus her rosebuds, her toque and quite half of her hairpins; on the other hand, she held tightly grasped in her fingers a crumpled silk necktie which had once been the property of a stout and orthodox Liberal. She was conscious that she had acted with perfect dignity as well as with unusual courage—and that consciousness, combined with her experience of similar situations, enabled her to sustain with calm contempt the attentions of the jocular crowd.

"You'd like a taxi, I suppose, miss?" the constable on duty suggested—having also considerable experience of similar situations. Griselda assented and the taxi was duly hailed. Before it arrived at the kerb she was joined on the pavement by her lover, who had left the meeting by the same door as his betrothed and in much the same manner and condition; he had parted with a shoe as well as a hat, and one of his braces was broken. A hearty shove assisted him down the steps to the pavement where, to the applause of the unthinking multitude, he fell on his knees in an attitude of adoration before Griselda's friend the constable. Recovering his equilibrium, he would have turned again to the assault; but his game attempt to re-enter the building was frustrated not only by a solidly extended arm of the law but by the intervention of Griselda herself.

"You have done enough for to-night, dear," she whispered, taking his arm. "My instructions are not to insist on arrest. We have made our protest—we can afford to withdraw."

She led the retreat to the taxi with a dignity born of practice; William, now conscious of his snapped brace, following with less deportment. The vehicle once clear of the jeering crowd, Griselda put her arms round her lover and kissed his forehead solemnly.

"My dear one," she said, "I am proud of you."

"Oh, Griselda, I'm proud of you," he murmured between their kisses. "How brave you are—how wonderful!—how dared they! ... I went nearly mad when I saw them handling you—I hit out, and the cowards knocked me down.... A woman raising her voice on the side of justice—and they silence her with brutal violence——"

"It's only what we must expect, dear," she whispered back, stroking his rumpled hair. "Remember this is War—God knows it's horrible, but we must not shrink from it."

She spoke from her heart, from the profound ignorance of the unread and unimaginative ... and once more in the darkness of the taxi the warriors clasped and kissed.

CHAPTER III

After the usual hesitations and excursions they had settled on their future home—a tiny flat in Bloomsbury, central and handy for the perpetual getting about to meetings which was so integral a part of their well-filled, bustling lives. They furnished it lovingly and with what they considered good taste; Griselda brought in her friends to admire, and engaged a respectable woman who was to "do" for them and have all in readiness when they returned from their four weeks' honeymoon—and they were as foolishly happy over their nest as any other loving little couple.

They were married towards the end of July—to be exact, on the twenty-third day of the month. The wedding took place in Balham from the house of Griselda's aunt; the ceremony was performed by an enlightened vicar who had consented to omit the ignoble vow of obedience; and the church was thronged to its doors with comrades and ardent sympathizers. The advanced Press spread itself over the description of the ceremony and—in view of the fact that the bridesmaids, six in number, had all done time for assault—even the Press that was not advanced considered the event worth a paragraph. The pair were snapshotted on leaving the church with the customary direful results, and the modest residence of Griselda's aunt could hardly accommodate the flood of progressive guests. There was rice and slipper-throwing and a whirl of good wishes—and Griselda, flushed, looked pretty, and in William's eyes quite lovely.

They left by an afternoon train for Dover and crossed the next day to Ostend.

Their selection of the Belgian Ardennes for a honeymoon was due to Griselda's long-standing acquaintance with a cosmopolitan female revolutionist understood to be of Russian Polish extraction. Owing, it was further understood, to her pronounced opinions and pronounced manner of expressing them, she had long ceased to be welcome in the land that gave her birth; at any rate, she avoided it studiously and existed chiefly at a series of epoch-making revolutionary meetings which she addressed by turns in bad German, worse French, and worst English. She wrote vehement pamphlets in all these languages and prided herself on the fact that, on the Continent at least, they were frequently suppressed by the police; wore tartan blouses, a perennial smile, and a hat that was always askew. For some reason or another she was the possessor of a cottage in the heart of the Belgian Ardennes—which she visited on the rare occasions when she was not plying her epoch-making activities in London, Vienna, or New York. A week once a year was about all the use she made of it—reappearing after her seven days' seclusion with a brace of new pamphlets burning for the Press, and like a giant refreshed for the fight. This estimable woman was as good-natured as she was revolutionary, and hearing that Griselda was thinking of a rural honeymoon, she hastened to offer the happy couple the loan of her Belgian property, which was as secluded as heart could desire. Griselda, since her fortnight at Interlaken, had hankered for another stay abroad; she jumped at the offer, and William—whose acquaintance with foreign parts was limited to an International Socialist Congress in Holland—-jumped gladly in unison with her. Madame Amberg beamed with joy at their delighted acceptance of her offer; she kissed Griselda, shook hands with William and promised to make all the necessary arrangements for their stay—to write to the old woman who looked after the cottage and tell her when to expect them. She babbled rhapsodically of honeymoons and the joys of the Forest of Arden—forgetting how bored she was in the Forest of Arden at the end of a seven-days' stay there—and further directed them how to reach it, looked out trains and suggested hotels.

Heaven smiled on the opening of their married life; Dover was a receding beauty in the distance and the Channel a good-natured lake. As their boat chunked between the long piers of Ostend they held and squeezed each other's hands ecstatically, the crowd collecting on the gangway side enabling them to do so unnoticed. The consciousness of their total ignorance of the language of the country gave them an agitated moment as they set foot on foreign soil—but, taken in tow by a polyglot porter, they were safely transferred from the quay to a second-class carriage, with instructions to change at Brussels; and, having changed obediently, were in due course set down at Namur. Madame Amberg had advised them to lodge with economy at the Hotel de Hollande near the station; but another specimen of the polyglot porter pounced down and annexed them firmly for his own more distant establishment, and after a feeble resistance they followed him meekly and were thrust with their bags into the omnibus lying in wait for them. They felt it their duty as the vehicle rattled them along to make a few depreciatory and high-principled remarks on the subject of the towering fortifications; but having thus satisfied their consciences they relapsed into mere enjoyment of rest, novelty, a good dinner, and a view of the lazy Meuse. After dinner, when the fortress above them was fading into the soft blackness of a warm summer night, they walked arm-in-arm by the river and were quite unutterably happy.

They rose early in the morning to catch the little river boat for Dinant; caught it with the aid of their guardian, the porter, and camped side by side on its deck to enjoy the sauntering trip. They enjoyed it so much and engrossingly that for the space of a morning they forgot their high principles, they forgot even Woman and Democracy; they were tourists only, agape and delighted, with their green Cook's tickets in their pockets. Yet, after all, they were something more than tourists; they were young man and woman who loved each other tenderly and whose happy lives were in tune with the happy landscape. Often they forgot to look at the happy landscape for the joy of gazing into each other's dear blue eyes.

The boat puffed finally to Dinant, where they stayed the night as planned; where they stared at the cupola'd church and the cliffs, walked to the split rock on the road to Anseremme, and bought some of the gingerbread their guide-book had told them to buy. They ate it next day, with no particular approval, on the final stage of their journey, in a train that puffed and pottered between heights and orchards in the winding company of a stream. It puffed and pottered them at last to their wayside destination—where a smiling and loutish country boy slouched up to take possession of them and their modest baggage. They understood not a word of his thick-throated patois, but knew from information imparted beforehand by Madame Amberg that this was their housekeeper's grandson and deputed to serve as their guide. He gripped a bag easily in either hand, and led the way past the few small houses ranged neatly as a miniature village alongside the miniature station—and so by the white road that kept the river company. After a mile or thereabout they left the white road, turning sharply to the right at a cleft in the riverside cliff and striking a cart-track, scarcely more than a path, into a valley twisted back among the hills.

It was a valley the like of which they had never seen, which the world seemed to have forgotten; a cool green vision of summer and solitary peace. Water had cleft in the table-land above them a passage that time had made leafy and gracious and laid aside for their finding. Through the flat, lush pastures that divided the bold slopes there looped and tangled a tiny brook on its way to the Meuse and the sea, a winding ribbon of shadow, of shimmer and reflection. Up the slopes rising steeply from the pastures there clustered tree above tree—so thickly set that where the valley dwindled in the distance they might have been moss on the hill-side. There was no one in sight and no sound but their footsteps and the birds; it was all a green prettiness given over to birds and themselves.

"Isn't it wonderful?" Griselda said, not knowing that her voice had dropped and lost its shrillness. "I never thought there could be such a place."

She spoke the truth, if in hackneyed and unthinking phrase; in her busy and crowded little mind, the reflection of her busy little life, there had been no room for visions of a deep and solitary peace. Involuntarily, as they walked they drew nearer together and went closely side by side; the sweet aloofness of the valley not only amazed them, it awed them; they were dimly conscious of being in contact with something which in its silent, gracious way was disquieting as well as beautiful. Their theory and practice of life, so far, was the theory and practice of their purely urban environment, of crowds, committees and grievances and cocksure little people like themselves—and lo, out of an atmosphere of cocksureness and hustle they had stepped, as it seemed without warning, into one of mystery and the endless patience of the earth. Out here, in this strange overpowering peace, it was difficult to be conscious of grievances political or ethical; instead came a new, undefined and uneasy sense of personal inadequacy and shrinkage, a sense of the unknown and hitherto unallowed-for, a fear of something undreamed of in their rabid and second-hand philosophy.... Not that they reasoned after this fashion, or were capable of analysing the source of the tremor that mingled with their physical pleasure, their sheer delight of the eye; but before they had been in the valley many hours they sympathized in secret (they did not know why) with Madame Amberg's consistent avoidance of its loveliness, saw hazily and without comprehension why, for all her praise of its beauties, she was so loth to dwell there. The place, though they knew it not, was a New Idea to them—and therefore a shadow of terror to their patterned and settled convictions. As such their organized and regulated minds shrank from it at once and instinctively—cautiously apprehensive lest the New Idea should tamper with accepted beliefs, disturb established views and call generally for the exercise of faculties hitherto unused. They had an uneasy foreboding—never mentioned aloud by either, though troublous to both—that long contact with solitude and beauty might end by confusing issues that once were plain, and so unfitting them for the work of Progress and Humanity—for committees, agitations, the absorbing of pamphlets and the general duty of rearranging the universe.

There was something, probably, in the frame of mind in which they approached the valley; they came of a migratory, holiday race, and had seen green beauty before, if only fleetingly and at intervals. What they had lacked before was the insight into beauty born of their own hearts' content, the wonder created by their own most happy love.... They followed their guide for the most part in silence, relieved that he had ceased his well-meaning attempts to make them understand his jargon, and speaking, when they spoke at all, in voices lowered almost to a whisper.

"What's that?" Griselda queried, still under her breath. "That" was a flash of blue fire ahead of them darting slantwise over the stream. Later they learned to understand that a flash of blue fire meant kingfisher; but for the moment William shook his head, nonplussed, and hazarded only, "It's a bird."

For half-an-hour or so it was only the birds and themselves; then at a turn in the narrowing valley they came in sight of cows nuzzling the pastures. Several cows, parti-coloured black and white like the cows of a Noah's Ark; and, further on, a tiny farm house standing close up to the trees in its patch of vegetable garden. They knew from Madame Amberg of the existence of the tiny farmhouse; it was an old woman living there who would "do" for them during their stay at the neighbouring cottage—cook and clean and make tidy in return for a moderate wage. The barking of a kennelled nondescript brought the old woman shuffling to the door—to welcome them (presumably) in her native tongue and to take their measure from head to heel with a pair of shrewd, sunken eyes. Of her verbal greetings they understood nothing but the mention of Madame Amberg; but, having looked them up and down enough, the old lady shuffled back into her kitchen for the key of the revolutionist's property. She reappeared with the key in one hand and a copper stewpan in the other—wherewith she waved the signal to advance, and shuffled off in guidance, ahead of her grandson and the visitors. A quarter of an hour's more walking on a dwindling path brought them in sight of their sylvan honeymoon abode; it had originally been built for the use of a woodman, and was a four-roomed cottage on the edge of the wood overlooking the stream and the pasture of the black-and-white cows. Madame Peys (they knew at least her name) unlocked the door and ushered them into the kitchen, where the boy deposited their bags.

CHAPTER IV

The cottage was what any one who know Madame Amberg might have expected her cottage to be. It was sparsely furnished, except with explosive literature; there were very few chairs, and those few verging on decrepitude, but numerous tracts and pamphlets in divers civilized languages. Kitchen utensils were conspicuous chiefly by their absence, and presumably the owner relied consistently on the loan of the copper stewpan which had accompanied her guests from the farm. On the other hand, the kitchen walls were adorned by photographs, more or less fly-blown, of various political extremists, and a signed presentment of Rosa Luxemburg adorned a bedroom mantelpiece.

While Madame Peys made play with the stew-pan and a kettle, the honeymoon couple unpacked their bags and examined their new domain: still, to a certain extent, overawed by the silence and loneliness around it; still, unknown to themselves, speaking more gently and with more hesitation than usual. It was the familiar tang of the books and pamphlets, with which the shelves were crammed and the floor was heaped, that first revived their quieted spirits and created a sense of home. Woman and Democracy, even on the backs of books, had power to act as a tonic and trumpet-call, to reflect the atmosphere of noise and controversy where alone they could breathe with comfort. With unconscious relief they turned from the window and the prospect of the valley, green and untenanted, to entrench themselves against the assaults of the unknown behind the friendly and familiar volumes that had overflowed from Madame Amberg's deal book-shelves to Madame Amberg's uncarpeted floor. Conning them, handling them and turning their pages, they were again on the solid ground of impatient intolerance; they were back amongst their own, their cherished certainties. William in the presence of Belfort Bax felt his feet once more beneath him; Griselda, recognizing a pamphlet by Christabel Pankhurst, ceased to be troubled by the loneliness around her, grew animated and raised her voice.... And the savoury mess which Madame produced from her stewpan, combined with the no less excellent coffee that followed, dispelled for the moment the sense of mystery and the shadow of the New Idea.

The shadow obtruded itself more than once during the next three weeks or so; but on the whole they managed with fair success to be in the country and not of it—to create in the heart of their immemorial valley a little refuge and atmosphere of truly advanced suburbia. Their existence in the Ardennes valley was one of mutual affection and study—by which latter term they understood principally the reading of books they agreed with. From the cares and worries of housekeeping they were blissfully and entirely free; Madame Peys did their catering, taking toll, no doubt, of their simplicity and ignorance of French, but taking it with tact and discretion. Her bills were a weekly trouble to Griselda but not on account of their length; what she disliked was the embarrassing moment when she strove to conceal her complete ignorance of the items and difficulty in grasping the total as set forth in un-English-looking ciphers. Their tidying was also done daily and adequately, their cooking more than adequately; Madame Peys called them in the morning, set the house to rights and their various meals going, and looked in at intervals during the day, departing for the last time when supper was cooked and laid. Their daily doings fell naturally into routine; they rose of a morning to coffee steaming on the stove; and, having digested their breakfast, they usually proceeded to walk a little, concluding the exercise by sitting under the trees with a book which William read aloud to Griselda. They lunched sometimes in picnic fashion, sometimes at home; in the afternoon took another stroll or sat at home reading, with happy little interludes of talk. On two or three days they made small excursions to one of the neighbouring villages; on others William, with a pen and a frown of importance, would establish himself at the table after lunch was cleared away; he had a tract in hand on the Woman Question, and Griselda gently but firmly insisted that even in the first ecstasy of their honeymoon he should not lay it aside. Having a due sense of the value of his epoch-making work, he did not require much pressing; and while he frowned and scribbled and frowned and paused, she would sit by reading, and now and again glance up that she might meet his eye and smile. Long afterwards, months afterwards, when he had forgotten the epoch-making work and all he had meant to prove by it, he would remember how she had risen and come behind him, smoothing and fondling his ruffled hair and bending over to kiss him. He would drop his pen and lift his face to hers, sometimes in silence and sometimes murmuring foolishness.

In time, as the peaceful days crept by, they were sorry that, yielding to a romantic impulse, they had directed that neither paper nor letter should be forwarded during their absence. As a result of this prohibition their entire correspondence while they stayed in the valley consisted of one picture-postcard despatched by Madame Amberg from Liverpool at the moment of her embarkation for an extended lecture tour in the States. It was sent three days after their wedding, and expressed exuberant affection, but was singularly lacking in news of the outside world. To remove the prohibition would be to confess failure and suggest boredom, therefore neither ventured to hint at it; all the same, they knew in their secret hearts that they had overrated their resourcefulness. It was not that they palled on each other—far from it; but part at least of their mutual attraction was their mutual interest in certain subjects and limited phases of activity. Madame Amberg's revolutionary library, valuable as it was in distracting their thoughts from the silence and beauty around them and defending them against the unknown, could not entirely supply the place of daily whirl and unceasing snarl and argument; William pined unconsciously for the din and dust of the platform and Griselda missed the weekly temper into which she worked herself in sympathy with her weekly Suffragette. She missed it so much that at last she was moved to utterance—late on a still, heavy evening in August, when once or twice there had come up the valley a distant mutter as of thunder.

"Dear," she said gently, as they sat by the window after supper, "I don't know how you feel about it, but I am beginning to think that our life here is almost too peaceful. It is beautiful to sit here together and dream and forget the world—but is it a preparation for the life we are to lead? Is it a preparation for our work?"

William sighed a gentle sigh of relief, and his hand went out to his wife's in a squeeze of agreement and gratitude. As usual, their minds had jumped together and the thought of twain had been uttered by the lips of one.

"I've been thinking the same thing myself," he said. "It has struck me more than once. As you say, it's beautiful here in the heart of the country—nothing could be more beautiful. But I have wondered, especially lately, if it isn't enervating. It is good for some people, perhaps; but when you have an aim in life and the fighting spirit in you——"

"Yes," Griselda flared responsively, "it's the fighting spirit—and the Cause calling to us. I've been hearing the call getting louder and louder; we can't stand aside any longer, we haven't the right to stand aside. How can I—how dare I—rest and enjoy myself when, there are noble women struggling for freedom, suffering for freedom, keeping the flag flying——?"

And the unconscious little humbug clasped her hands and, from force of habit, rose to her feet, addressing an imaginary audience. William, an equally unconscious humbug, also rose to his feet and kissed her. It was one of those happy and right-minded moments in which inclination agrees with duty, and they were able to admire themselves and each other for a sacrifice which had cost them nothing.

The decision taken, there remained only the details of their speedy departure to settle. Their first impatient impulse was to leave for Brussels on the morrow, but on consideration they decided that the morrow would be too soon. Investigation of a local time-table revealed the fact that the connection with Brussels—the only tolerable connection—meant a start in the very early morning; but an early start meant an overnight warning to the farm-boy, Philippe, that his services would be needful to carry their bags to the station—and the farm-people, all of them, went to bed soon after the sun and were certainly by now asleep. There was, further, the old lady to settle with where financial matters were concerned, and it always took time to make out her illegible bill. On reflection, therefore, they decided for the following day.

"I hope," Griselda meditated, "that I shall be able to make Madame Peys understand that we want the boy the first thing in the morning. I expect she will see what I mean if I show her the train in the time-table and say 'Philippe,' and point to the bags. That ought to make it clear. It rather detracts from the enjoyment of being abroad—not being able to make people understand what you say. Interlaken was much more convenient in that way; all the waiters spoke English quite nicely. And the understanding is even more difficult than the speaking. To-night Madame was talking away hard to me all the time she was cooking our supper, but I couldn't make out one word she said—only that she was very excited. I said, 'Oui, oui,' every now and then, because she seemed to expect it, and I was sorry to see her upset. I thought perhaps one of the people at the farm was ill, but I've seen her son and his wife and the boy since, so it can't be that. Of course, she may have other relations in some other part of the country—or perhaps something has happened to one of the cows. I could see she was worried."

They sat until late side by side by the open window and talked in snatches of the world they were going back to—the dear, familiar, self-important world of the agitated and advanced. Its dust was already in their nostrils, its clamour already in their ears; in three days more they would be in it once again with their own little turbulent folk. The mere thought increased their sense of their own value, and they grew gay and excited as they talked and planned, instinctively turning their backs on the window and shutting out sight and sound of the country peace, the oppressive peace in which they had no part.

"What shall we do to-morrow, darling?" Griselda asked at length. The question was prompted by her longing for to-morrow to be over and her mind was in search of some method for inducing it to pass with swiftness.

They considered the point with that object in view, and decided that should the day prove fine they would spend it away from the cottage, taking their lunch with them. There was a winding path leading up through the woods to the heights which they had not yet explored except for a short distance; they would start out, provisioned, soon after breakfast, to go where the path led them, and eat their meal on the hill-top. Then home to supper, settlement with Madame, and an early departure next morning.... So they planned comfortably and without misgiving, while the world seethed in the melting-pot and the Kaiser battered at Liège.

"If it's fine," William cautioned again as they mounted the stairs to bed. "I've heard thunder several times in the distance, so we may have a storm in the morning."

There was no storm or sign of a storm in the morning. It must have passed over, Griselda said; she had listened to its faint and distant mutterings for half-an-hour before she fell asleep. Their meal of coffee and new-laid eggs was waiting on the stove as usual, and Madame Peys had vanished as usual before they came down to partake of it. They hard-boiled more eggs while they breakfasted, and, the meal disposed of, set to work to cut plentiful sandwiches and otherwise furnish their basket. As their road up the hill did not lead them past the farm, and Madame Peys had not yet put in an appearance for the process of tidying up, William inscribed in large round-hand on an envelope the word "Sorti," as a sign to their housekeeper that the preparation of a midday meal was unnecessary; and having placed the announcement on the kitchen table, duly weighted with a saucer, he took the basket on one arm, his wife on the other, and set out.

They met not a soul that morning as they mounted the winding little path—somewhat slowly, for the winding little path was not only longer than they had expected but very steep in places. Further, the day was hot even under the trees, and they rested more than once before they reached their goal, the heights that crowned the valley; rested with their backs against a beech-trunk, and talked of themselves and what interested them—of meetings past and to come, of the treachery of the Labour Party, of the wickedness of the Government and the necessity for terrifying its members by new and astounding tactics. The idea had been to lunch when the heights above them were gained; but the weight of the basket made itself felt in the heat, and they were still some distance from their goal when they decided it was time to lighten it. They did so in the customary fashion, ate well and heartily, and although they allowed an unhurried interval for digestion were even less enthusiastic about their uphill walk than they had been before partaking of lunch. It was a relief to them when at last they emerged from the trees and found themselves high above the valley and entering on a wide stretch of upland; the wide stretch of upland had no particular attraction, but it denoted the limits of their excursion and a consequent return downhill.

"Don't you think we've about been far enough?" Griselda suggested. "There's rather a glare now we're out of the wood, and it's not particularly pretty here."

William agreed whole-heartedly—adding, however, as a rider, that a rest was desirable before they started homeward, and that if they went as far as the rise in the ground a hundred yards to their right they would probably have quite a good view, and he expected there would be a nice breeze. In accordance with these expectations they mounted the knoll, found the breeze and the view they expected, and subsided in the shade of a bush. If they had but known it, they were the last tourists of their race who for many and many a day to come were to look on the scene before them. Had they but known it, they would certainly have scanned it more keenly; as it was, they surveyed the wide landscape contentedly, but with no particular enthusiasm. On every side of them were the rounded uplands—a table-land gently swelling and cleft here and there by wooded valleys. On their right was the deep cleft from which they had mounted through the woods; and before them the ground dropped sharply to the edge of a cliff, the boundary of a wider cleft running at right angles to their own green valley of silence. It was along this wider cleft that the railway ran, the little branch line that to-morrow (so they thought) was to take them on the first stage of their journey. From their perch on the hill-top they could see the three ribbons of dark track, white road and shadowed river which between them filled the valley. The wall of rock jutted forward on their left, hiding, as they knew, the wayside railway station at which they had arrived and the cluster of neat houses beside it; to the right again there was a bend no less sharp—and between the two a stretch of empty road.

"It's very pretty," said Griselda, yawning and fanning herself, "but I wish it wasn't quite so hot. I suppose there's nothing left to drink?"

William was sorry there wasn't—they had finished the last drop at lunch. Griselda sighed, stretched herself out on her elbow, with her face towards the eastern bluff, and saw coming round it a group of three or four horsemen—little toy-like horses, carrying little toy men past trees that looked like bushes. They were moving quickly; the toy-like horses were cantering on the white ribbon of road. Griselda pointed them out to William, and the pair leaned forward to watch them pass, hundreds of feet below.

"They're scampering along," she said; "they must be in a hurry. What funny little things they look from here—like insects! They'll be out of sight in a minute—no, they've stopped.... I believe they're turning back."

The funny little things had halted simultaneously at the foot of the jutting cliff which hid the village and the station from the eyes of William and Griselda. As Griselda had said, in another moment they would have been round it and out of sight, and fifty more yards or so beyond the bend would have brought them to the outskirts of the village. Instead, they halted and drew together for an instant; then one funny little thing, detaching himself from the group, scampered backwards by the road he had come, and continued scampering till he rounded the eastward bluff. His insects of companions remained grouped where he had left them, their horses shifting backwards and forwards on the white surface of the road.

"They're waiting for him to come back," Griselda concluded idly, "I expect they've forgotten something."

What they had forgotten proved to be a column of horsemen curving in swift and orderly fashion round the foot of the eastward bluff. It came on, a supple and decorative line, bending with the bend and straightening as the valley straightened.

"Soldiers," said William, with the orthodox accent of contempt—following with a pleasure he would not for worlds have admitted the sinuous windings of the troop. There is in the orderly movement of men an attraction which few can resist; it appealed even to his elementary sense of the rhythmic, and he, like Griselda, bent forward to watch and to listen to the distant clatter of hoofs echoed back from the walls of the valley. As the horsemen swung out of sight round the westward bluff and the clatter of hoof-beats deadened, he held up a finger, and Griselda asked, "What is it?"

"Guns," he said. "Cannon—don't you hear them?"

She did; a soft, not unpleasing thud, repeated again and again, and coming down the breeze from the northward.

"It must be manoeuvres," he explained. "That's what those soldiers are doing. I expect it's what they call the autumn manoeuvres."

"Playing at murder," Griselda commented, producing the orthodox sigh. She had heard the phrase used by a pacifist orator in the Park and considered it apt and telling. "What a waste of time—and what a brutalizing influence on the soldiers themselves! Ah, if only women had a say in national affairs!" ... and she made the customary glib oration on her loved and familiar text. Before it was quite finished, William held up his finger again—needlessly, for Griselda had stopped short on her own initiative. This time it was a crackle of sharp little shots, not far away and softened like the sound of the heavier guns, but comparatively close at hand and, if their ears did not deceive them, just beyond the westward bluff.

"They're pretending to fight in the village," Griselda said. "How silly! Firing off guns and making believe to shoot people."

"Militarism," William assented, "is always silly." And he, in his turn, enlarged on his favourite text, the impossibility of international warfare, owing to the ever-growing solidarity of the European working-classes—his little homily being punctuated here and there by a further crackle from below. When he had enlarged sufficiently and Griselda had duly agreed, he returned as it were to private life and suggested:

"If you're feeling more rested, shall we make a start? It's cooler under the trees."

They started, accordingly, on their homeward way, which was even longer than the route they had taken in the morning: one little wood path was very like another and they managed to take a wrong turning, bear too much to the right and make a considerable detour. When the cottage came in sight they were both thirsty, and secretly relieved that their last excursion was over.

"We'll put on the spirit-lamp and have some tea," Griselda announced as they pushed open the door. "Oh dear! it's lovely to think we shall be in London so soon. How I would love a strawberry ice! Where's the match-box?"

It was not until the match-box was found and the spirit-lamp kindled that William discovered on the kitchen table a mystery in the shape of a document. It was an unimposing looking document, not over clean, indicted in pencil on the reverse of the half-sheet of paper on which William that morning had written his announcement of "Sorti." Like William's announcement, the communication was in French, of a kind—presumably uneducated French if one judged by the writing; and like William the author of the communication (in all likelihood Madame Peys) had placed it in the centre of the table and crowned it with a saucer before leaving.

"I suppose it must be for us," William remarked doubtfully. "I can't make out a word of it—can you?"

"Of course not," Griselda returned with a spice of irritation—she was tired and her boots hurt her. "I couldn't read that ridiculous writing if it was English. It's that silly old woman, Madame Peys, I suppose; but what is the good of her writing us letters when she knows we can't read them?"

"Perhaps," William suggested, "it's to say she won't be able to cook our supper to-night?"

"Very likely," his wife agreed, the spice of irritation still more pronounced. "If that's it, we shall have to do with eggs—we used up the cold meat for sandwiches at lunch, and there's nothing else in the house. We'd better go round to the farm when we've had our tea and find out what she wants—stupid old thing! Whether she comes here or not, we must see her to get the bill and order the boy for the morning. But I don't mean to move another step till I've had my tea."

CHAPTER V

They had their tea, Griselda with her boots off and her aching feet resting on a chair; and after she had lapped up two comfortable cups her irritation subsided and she was once again her pleasant and chattering little self. William, to give her a further rest, volunteered, though with some hesitation, to make the visit to the farm alone; in his mind, as in her own, Griselda was the French scholar of the pair, a reputation due to the fact that it was she to whom Madame Peys preferred, as a rule, to address her unintelligible remarks. Griselda knew what the offer cost him and generously declined to take advantage of it—stipulating only for a few minutes more repose before encasing her weary feet again in boots. The few minutes drew out into half-an-hour or more, and the shadows were lengthening in the valley when they started on their walk to the farm. They started arm-in-arm, the wife leaning on the husband; but when they came in sight of the house Griselda took her arm from William's and they drew a little apart.

They need not have troubled to observe the minor proprieties; not a soul stirred, not a nose showed itself as they opened the little wooden gate of the garden and made for the open door. They were both of them unobservant of country sights and sounds, and it was not until they had knocked in vain on the open door and called in vain on the name of Madame Peys that they were struck by the absence of the usual noises of the farm. There was neither lowing of cows nor crowing and clucking of poultry; and the nondescript of a dog who usually heralded the approach of a visitor by strangling tugs at his chain and vociferous canine curses, for once had allowed their advent to pass unchallenged. They realized suddenly that there was a strange silence from the kennel and turned simultaneously to look at it.

"It's odd," said William. "I suppose they've all gone out, and taken the dog with them."

"Where are the cocks and hens?" said Griselda suddenly. As if in answer to her query, a scraggy pullet at the awkward age appeared on the top of the farmyard gate, flapped groundwards and proceeded to investigate the neighbouring soil with a series of businesslike pecks. Their eyes turned towards the yard whence the pullet had emerged in search of her usual bevy of feathered companions; but the satisfied cluck of the bird as she sampled a seed remained unechoed and unanswered and brought no comrade to the spot. Obviously the family excursion was unlikely to be accompanied by a lengthy procession of poultry; and moved by a common impulse of wonder William and Griselda made for the gate and surveyed the farmyard beyond ... The doors of byre and stable were standing wide, untenanted either by horse or by cow, and the two farm-carts had vanished. There was a small dark square in the corner of the yard marking the spot where yesterday an imprisoned mother had kept watch and ward over a baker's dozen of attractive yellow downlings; now the dark square was the only trace of mother, chicks and cell.

"I wish," said William, "that we could read what's written on that paper. What can have happened to them all?"

"What's happened to them is that they've gone," Griselda returned with decision. "And gone for a good long time—people don't take their cows and chickens and cart-horses with them when they go for a week-end. I suppose they're moving and taking another farm."

"Ye-es?" William agreed doubtfully. "But I shouldn't have thought they'd have moved at such short notice—with all those animals. Of course, if they're moving, they'll come back for what they've left—those spades and the wheelbarrow and the furniture. There are a lot of things still in the kitchen ... they may come to fetch them to-night."

"They're sure to," his wife said hopefully. "Besides, Madame Peys would never leave us without milk or provisions for the morning—she's much too considerate. I daresay the new farm isn't far off, and she'll either come herself or send Philippe. Then we must explain about the train to-morrow morning."

William, still doubtful in spite of Griselda's optimism, paused at the half-open door of the kitchen, pushed it more widely ajar and surveyed the interior in detail.

"They must have started in rather a hurry," he commented.

The comment was justified by the disordered appearance of the room, suggesting a departure anything but leisurely and packing anything but methodical. There was an arm-chair upturned by the hearth where the ashes of the wood fire still glowed and reddened in places, but all the other chairs had vanished. The heavy table was still in the centre of the room, but a smaller one had gone, and several pans were missing from the row that shimmered on the wall opposite the fireplace. The canary's cage and the clock on the mantelpiece had departed; and the china cupboard standing wide open was rifled of part of its contents—apparently a random selection. On the floor in one corner was a large chequered table-cloth knotted into a bundle and containing, judging by its bulges, a collection of domestic objects of every shape known to the housewife. It lay discarded at the foot of the stairs like a bursting and badly cooked pudding; its formidable size and unwieldy contour accounting in themselves for the household's decision to abandon it ... There was about the place—as in all dismantled or partially dismantled rooms—an indefinite suggestion of melancholy; William and Griselda were conscious of its influence as they stood in the centre of the kitchen which they had hitherto known only as a model of orderly arrangement.

"I wonder how long they will be," Griselda said, as she and her husband came out into the dying sunlight. "It isn't any good hanging about here; if nobody has turned up we can stroll down again after supper ... I wonder if I could make an omelette—I've often watched her do it, and it doesn't seem so very difficult. How lonely that chicken looks poking about by itself."

Her eye followed the gawky pullet as it clucked and pecked in its loneliness about the vegetable garden—and suddenly her hand shot out and caught at her husband's arm.

"William," she said in a queer little whisper, "what's that?"

"What?" William queried, half-startled by the clutch and the whisper.

"Don't you see?—that heap ... beyond the gooseberry bushes!"

He looked where she pointed, and she felt him thrill, as she herself had thrilled when her hand went out to his arm; neither spoke as they went towards the end of the garden, instinctively hushing their footsteps ... The soft earth beyond the gooseberry bushes had been heaped into a long mound, and the solitary pullet was clucking and pecking at the side of a new-made grave.

They stood looking down at it in silence—dumb and uneasily fearful in the presence of a mystery beyond their powers of fathoming. The empty, untidy house behind them was suddenly a threat and a shadow; so was the loneliness and all-enclosing silence of the valley ... The damp garden earth was still fresh and black from its turning; whoever lay under it could have lain but an hour or two; and, lest the unmistakable shape of the mound should fail to indicate what it covered, some one had laid on it a red spray torn from a rose-bush and with a stick and a knot of string had fashioned a cross for the head. Two crossed hazel shoots and a handful of roses betokened that a spirit had returned to the God Who gave it.

As they stood at the graveside in the peace of the evening, the constant mutter of distant guns sent a low-spoken threat along the valley; but they were too much engrossed in their thoughts and surroundings to give it ear or heed, and it was the pullet who roused them from their stupor of dumb astonishment. Encouraged by their stillness, she drew near, surveyed the mound and with a flap of her clipped wings alighted under the cross. William instinctively bent forward to "shoo" her away, and as she fled protesting to a safer neighbourhood the husband and wife for the first time moved and spoke.

"What can have happened?" Griselda whispered. "Do you think—— William, you don't think there has been a murder?"

William shook his head, though not with excess of confidence. "There's the cross," he objected, "and the roses. A murderer would hardly put roses——"

"I don't know," Griselda whispered back. "You hear of criminals doing such strange things—and perhaps it was done hastily, in a quarrel, and the murderer repented at once.... For all we know that paper on our kitchen table may be a confession.... I wonder whose grave it is—if it's one of the Peys. It's so odd their all having gone—there must be something wrong.... You don't suppose they've gone off to hide themselves?"

William reminded her of the absence of the farm-yard stock—and she admitted that a family seeking to elude justice would hardly be so foolish as to attempt to conceal itself from the police in the company of seven cows, two cart-horses and an entire colony of poultry. Nor, when untrodden woods lay around them, would they call attention to the crime by placing the grave of their victim in a prominent position in the garden; while it was difficult to think of the Peys family, as they had known them, as murderers and accomplices of murderers: the old lady so cheery and shrewd, her son and his wife so unintelligibly friendly, and Philippe so loutishly good-natured.

For a while a gruesome fascination held them to the side of the grave—and then Griselda quivered and said suddenly, "Let's go home." They walked away softly and closed the gate softly behind them; and, once they were well beyond it, instinctively quickened their footsteps. They walked arm-in-arm, speaking little, on their way back to the cottage, and it was not until they were almost on the threshold of their solitary homestead that it struck them that perhaps they would only be fulfilling their legal duty by informing the local authorities of the presence of the new-made grave. They discussed the idea, considered it, and after discussion rejected it: for one thing, there was the language difficulty, for another the natural shrinking of the foreigner from entangling himself in unknown processes of law—involving possible detention for the purpose of giving evidence. They decided that it would be better for the present to await events, and hope for the return of some member of the vanished family.

In after days, when after events had given him a clue, William framed his solution to the mystery of the grave and the empty farmhouse—a solution which perhaps was not correct as to detail but was certainly right in substance. Some fleeing Belgian, wounded to death, had found strength to outrun or outride the Uhlan, and seeking a refuge in the hidden valley had brought his news to the farmhouse, and died after giving it utterance. Those who heard it had buried him in haste, and straightway fled from the invader—fled clumsily, with horse and cart and cattle, leaving their scribbled, unreadable warning to the absent tenants of the cottage. Whether they fled far and successfully, or whether they were overtaken and in due course held fast behind the barrier of flesh and iron that shut off the German and his conquests from the rest of the civilized world—that William and Griselda never knew.

In the meantime, unfurnished with any clue, unknowing of the wild fury that in its scathing of the civilized world was shattering their most cherished illusions, they sought in vain for an explanation, and—without putting the fact into words—lit the lamp earlier than usual and took care to bolt the door. Usually it was fastened only on the latch, so that Madame could let herself in with the early morning; but to-night the darkness was unfriendly and the lonely valley held they knew not what of threatening.

Griselda, uneasily pondering on other matters, had no mind to give to the experiment of an omelette, and their supper was plain boiled eggs—boiled hard while she sat with wrinkled brow, unheeding of the flight of minutes. While they supped, their ears were always on the alert for a footstep or a hail from without; and perhaps for that reason they noticed as they had never noticed before the faint ghostly noises of the country—the night-calling bird and the shiver of leaves when the air stirred and sighed. They talked with effort and frequent pause, and with now and again a glance thrown sideways at the open window and the forest blackness behind it; there were no blinds to the windows, and but for the still, heavy heat they would have fastened the shutters and barred out the forest blackness. Perhaps they would have borne with the heat of a closed room had not both been ashamed to confess their fear of the window. In both their minds was the sense of being very far removed from humanity, the knowledge that between them and humanity was a lonely path and a house with its doors set open—a house deserted and half dismantled with a nameless grave before it. Unimaginative as they both were, they pictured the grave in the darkness with its roughly tied cross and its handful of wilting rosebuds.

They went upstairs earlier than usual, chiefly because they felt more comfortable when the windows below were fastened. William, coming last with the candle, took the added precaution of turning the key in the door at the foot of the stairs; and Griselda, though she made no remark, heard the click of the lock with a secret throb of relief. Upstairs they began by a little pretence of undressing—and then Griselda, with her hair down her back, sat close to William, with his coat off, and they held hands and talked in undertones in the intervals of listening for a footstep. The footstep never came; but it was not until close upon midnight that—knowing the early habits of the former tenants of the farm—they gave up all hope of hearing it and began to discuss their plans for the following day, on the presumption that they must leave the cottage and remove their luggage alone. Such unaided removal meant an earlier uprising than they had counted on—since if Madame did not prepare their breakfast they needs must prepare it themselves; and this misfortune realized, they decided to sit up no longer. They went to bed, but left the candle burning—as they said to each other, lest one of the Peys family should knock them up during the night. Neither slept much, partly from nervous uneasiness and partly from fear of oversleeping; but if they had guessed what a day would bring forth, neither would have slept at all.

CHAPTER VI

They had left their bedroom windows uncurtained, that the morning light might waken them, and they were hardly later than the August sun in opening their eyes on the world. Though they had slept but little, and by snatches, they turned out of bed without regret; the flood of sunlight brought warmth into their hearts and the shadowy horror of the night before was lifted with the mists of the valley; but all the same the place, once only faintly mysterious, was now actively malicious and distasteful, was tainted with a lurking dread. Thus to their pleasure at the thought of noise and London was added relief at the prospect of escape from a solitude grown fearful since yesterday. They dressed with haste and rising spirits; and it was with undisguised joy that they collected their few possessions and stuffed them into their hold-alls.

William, whose toilet and preparations for the journey were completed in advance of his wife's, descended first to the kitchen, where, in the continued and regretted absence of their housekeeper, he struggled valiantly with the making of breakfast while Griselda finished her packing. The meal so prepared fell short of complete success; coffee as brewed by William was not the same beverage as coffee prepared by Madame Peys, nor were its tepid attractions enhanced by the absence of their usual and plentiful ration of milk. Thanks to the defection of the Peys family, they were not only milkless but eggless; and such remains of bread and butter as they could find in the cupboard were the only accompaniment to William's suggestion of coffee. In the circumstances there was but little temptation to risk the loss of the Brussels train by lingering over the table and less than five minutes sufficed for their simple meal. Having despatched it, they strapped their hold-alls and stepped out briskly on their way to the station and home—the sun still low on the eastward ridge of the valley and the dew still heavy on the grass. They hardly turned to look back at the cottage, so glad were they to leave it behind them; and in the elation of their spirits they sped down the path with a quite unnecessary haste. They were escaping from nature and solitude, and their hearts sang cheerily of Bloomsbury.

When they rounded the bend in the path that brought them within sight of the farm their first thought was that the missing family had returned; for outside the gate were three horses, standing riderless and with heads near together. There was something reassuring in the sight of the beasts as they stood in the sunlight shifting and flicking their tails, something that gave the lie to the terrors of the night before; the presence of horses betokened the presence of men, and the presence of men dissipated the sense of mystery that had brooded over an empty house with a nameless grave in its garden. Griselda drew a comfortable breath of relief as she supposed they had time to call in and settle the last week's bill with Madame Peys.

"I do wish," she pondered regretfully, "that I could understand what she says. I must say I should like to know what the explanation is—about that grave ... I suppose they've come back to fetch away the rest of the furniture, and things—those aren't their horses, though!"

"No," William assented, considering the sleek strong beasts, "they have only got cart-horses ... I wonder." ...

A man stepped suddenly out from behind the shifting horses—so suddenly that they both started. He had been standing by the gate with the bridles gathered in his hand, hidden by his charges from William and Griselda as they had been hidden from him. When, hearing their voices, he stepped into sight, he stood with his heels together, very erect and staring at them—a young man squarely and sturdily built, with under his helmet a reddish face and a budding black moustache. He was clad in a tight-fitting greyish uniform, and a sword hung by his side. He stared and the pair stared back at him—curiously but not quite so openly.

"It's a soldier," Griselda commented—adding, like William, "I wonder——" They both wondered so much that they hesitated and slackened their pace; the presence of a military man but complicated the problem of the farm. Coupled with the absence of the Peys family, it revived their suspicions of the night before, their suspicions of crime and a hasty flight from justice ... and involuntarily their eyes turned to the garden, and sought the outline of the grave beyond the gooseberry bushes.

"It really does look," Griselda whispered, "as if there was something—not right."

As she whispered the soldier rapped out a loud monosyllable; it was enunciated so curtly and sharply that they started for the second time and came to an involuntary halt. For the space of a second or two they stood open-mouthed and flustered—and then Griselda, recovering from the shock, expressed her indignant opinion.

"How rude!" she said. "What does he shout at us like that for?"

"I suppose," her husband conjectured, "he wants us to stop."

"Well," said Griselda, "we have stopped." Her tone was nettled and embittered. It annoyed her to realize that, involuntarily and instinctively, she had obeyed an official order; it was not, she felt what her Leaders would expect from a woman of her training and calibre. It was that and not fear that disconcerted her—for, after the first shock of surprise at the man's rough manner, neither she nor her husband were in the least overawed; on the contrary, as they stood side by side with their baggage in their hands, gazing into the sunburnt face of the soldier, something of the contempt they felt for his species was reflected in their light-blue eyes. Of the two pairs of light-blue eyes William's perhaps were the more contemptuous: his anti-militarism was more habitual and ingrained than Griselda's.

What William looked at was a creature (the soldier) of whom he knew little and talked much; his experience of the man of war was purely insular, and his attitude towards him would have been impossible in any but a native of Britain. He came of a class—the English lower middle—which the rules of caste and tradition of centuries debarred from the bearing of arms; a class which might, in this connection, have adapted to its own needs the motto of the House of Rohan. "Roi ne puis; prince ne daigne; Rohan je suis," might have been suitably englished in the mouths of William's fellows as, "Officer I cannot be; private I will not be; tradesman or clerk I am." Further, he had lived in surroundings where the soldier was robbed of his terrors; to him the wearer of the king's uniform was not only a person to whom you alluded at Labour meetings with the certainty of raising a jeer, but a target at whom strikers threw brickbats and bottles with energy and practical impunity. Should the target grow restive under these attentions and proceed to return them in kind, it was denounced in Parliament, foamed at by the Press, and possibly court-martialled as a sop to indignant Labour. Thus handicapped it could hardly be looked on as a formidable adversary ... and William, without a thought of fear, stared the field-grey horseman in the eyes.

The field-grey horseman, on his side, stared the pair of civilians up and down—with a glance that matched the courtesy of his recent manner of address—until, having surveyed them sufficiently, he called over his shoulder to some one unseen within the house. There was something in his face and the tone of his loud-voiced hail that made the temper of Griselda stir within her; and for the second time that morning she wished for a command of the language of the country—this time for the purposes of sharp and scathing rebuke. As a substitute she assumed the air of cold dignity with which she had entered the taxi on the night of her protest at the meeting.

"Come on, William," she said. "Don't take any notice of him, dear."

The advice, though well meant, was unfortunate. As William attempted to follow both it and his wife, the soldier moved forward and struck him a cuff on the side of the head that deposited him neatly on the grass. Griselda, who—in order to convey her contempt for official authority and disgust at official insolence—had been pointedly surveying the meeting of hill and horizon, heard a whack and scuffle, a guttural grunt and a gasp; and turned to see William, with a hand to his cheek, lying prone at the feet of his assailant. She rounded on the man like a lion, and perhaps, with her suffragette training behind her, would have landed him a cuff in his turn; but as she raised her arm it was caught from behind and she found herself suddenly helpless in the grasp of a second grey-clad soldier—who, when he heard his comrade's hail, had come running out of the house.

"Let me go," she cried, wriggling in his grasp as she had wriggled aforetime in the hands of a London policeman, and kicking him deftly on the shins as she had been wont to kick Robert on his. For answer he shook her to the accompaniment of what sounded like curses—shook her vehemently, till her hat came off and her hair fell down, till her teeth rattled and the landscape danced about her. When he released her, with the final indignity of a butt with the knee in the rear, she collapsed on the grass by her husband's side in a crumpled, disreputable heap. There for a minute or two she lay gasping and inarticulate—until, as her breath came back and the landscape ceased to gyrate, she dragged herself up into a sitting position and thrust back the hair from her eyes. William, a yard or two away, was also in a sitting position with his hand pressed against his cheekbone; while over him stood the assailants in field-grey, apparently snapping out questions.

"I don't understand," she heard him protest feebly, "I tell you I don't understand. Griselda, can't you explain to them that I don't speak French?"

"Comprends pas," said Griselda, swallowing back tears of rage. "Comprends pas—so it's not a bit of good your talking to us. Parlez pas français—but that won't prevent me from reporting you for this disgraceful assault. You cowards—you abominable cowards! You're worse than the police at home, which is saying a good deal. I wonder you're not ashamed of yourselves. I've been arrested three times and I've never been treated like this."

At this juncture one of the men in field-grey seized William by the collar and proceeded to turn out his pockets—extracting from their recesses a purse, a pipe, a handkerchief, a fountain pen, and a green-covered Cook's ticket. He snapped back the elastic on the Cook's ticket, and turned the leaves that remained for the journey home.

"London," he ejaculated suddenly, pronouncing the vowels in un-English fashion as O's.

"London!" his companion echoed him—and then, as if moved by a common impulse, they called on the name of Heinz.

There was an answering hail from the farmhouse kitchen, whence issued promptly a fattish young man with a mug in his hand, and a helmet tilted on his nose. With him the assailants of William and Griselda entered into rapid and throaty explanations; whereat Heinz nodded assentingly as he advanced down the garden path to the gate, surveying the captives with interest and a pair of little pigs'-eyes. Having reached the gate he leaned over it, mug in hand, and looked down at William and Griselda.

"English," he said in a voice that was thicker than it should have been at so early an hour of the morning; "English—you come from London? ... I have been two years in London; that is why I speak English. I was with a hairdresser in the Harrow Road two years; and I know also the Strand and the Angel and Buckingham Palace and the Elephant." (He was plainly proud of his acquaintance with London topography.) "All of them I know, and when we arrive in London I shall show them all to my friends." He waved his hand vaguely and amiably to indicate his grey-clad companions. "You come from London, but you shall not go back there, because you are now our prisoners. I drink your damn bad health and the damn bad health of your country and the damn bad health of your king."

He suited the action to the word and drained his mug; and having drained it till it stood upright upon his nose, proceeded to throw it over his shoulder to shatter on the brick path. Whether from natural good temper or the cheering effect of potations his face was wreathed in an amiable smile as he crossed his arms on the bar of the gate and continued to address his audience—

"We shall take you to our officer and you will be prisoners, and if you are spies you will be shot."

There was something so impossible about the announcement that William and Griselda felt their courage return with a rush. Moreover, though the words of Heinz were threatening the aspect of Heinz was not; his fat young face with its expansive and slightly inebriated smile was ridiculous rather than terrifying, even under the brim of a helmet. William, thankful for the English acquired during the two years' hairdressing in the Harrow Road, admonished him with a firmness intended to sober and dismay.

"This is not a time for silly jokes. I am afraid that you do not realize the seriousness of the situation. I shall feel it my duty to make a full report to your superiors—when you will find it is no laughing matter. My wife and I, proceeding quietly to the station, have been grossly and violently assaulted by your two companions. We gave them no provocation, and the attack was entirely uncalled for. I repeat, I shall feel it my duty to report their conduct in the very strongest terms."

He felt as he spoke that the reproof would have carried more weight had it been delivered in a standing position; but his head still reeled from the stinging cuff it had received and he felt safer where he was—on the ground. It annoyed him that the only apparent effect of his words upon Heinz was a widening of his already wide and owlish smile.

"Oh, you'll report their conduct, will you?" he repeated pleasantly and thickly. "And who will you report it to, old son?"

William stiffened at the familiarity, and the tone of his reply was even colder and more dignified than that of the original rebuke.

"To the nearest police authority; I shall not leave Belgium until my complaint has been attended to. If necessary I shall apply for redress to the British Consul in Brussels."

The expansive smile on the face of Heinz was suddenly ousted by an expression of infinite astonishment. His fat chin dropped, his little eyes widened, and he pushed back his helmet, that he might stare the better at William.

"Say it again," he demanded—slowly and as if doubtful of his ears, "You shall apply to the British Consul—the British Consul at Brussels?"

"Certainly," William assured him firmly; and Griselda echoed "Certainly." The threat they judged had made the desired impression, for so blank and disturbed was the countenance of Heinz that his two companions broke into guttural questioning. The former hairdresser checked them with a gesture and addressed himself once more to William.

"I think," he announced, "you are balmy on the crumpet, both of you. Balmy," he repeated, staring from one to the other and apparently sobered by the shock of his own astonishment. Suddenly a gleam of intelligence lit up his little pig's-eyes—he leaned yet further over the gate, pointed a finger and queried—

"You do not read the newspapers?"

"As a rule I do," William informed him, "but we have not seen any lately—not since we left England."

"And how long is it since you left England?"

William told him it was over three weeks.

"Three weeks," the other repeated, "three weeks without newspapers ... and I think you do not speak French, eh?"

"My wife," William answered, "understands it—a little. But we neither of us speak it." His manner was pardonably irritated, and if he had not judged it imprudent he would have refused point-blank to answer this purposeless catechism. Nor was his pardonable irritation lessened when amusement once more gained the upper hand in Heinz. Suddenly and unaccountably he burst into hearty laughter—rocked and trembled with it, holding to the gate and wiping the tears from his cheeks. Whatever the joke it appealed also to his comrades, who, once it was imparted between Heinz's paroxysms, joined their exquisite mirth to his own. The three stood swaying in noisy merriment, while Griselda, whitefaced and tight-lipped, and William with a fast disappearing left eye awaited in acute and indignant discomfort some explanation of a jest that struck them as untimely. It came only when Heinz had laughed himself out. Wiping the tears once more from his eyes, and with a voice still weakened by pleasurable emotion, he gave them in simple and unpolished language the news of the European cataclysm.

"I tell you something, you damn little ignorant silly fools. There is a war since you came to Belgium."

Probably they thought it was a drunken jest, for they made no answer beyond a stare, and Heinz proceeded with enjoyment.

"A War. The Greatest that ever was. Germany and Austria—and Russia and France and Belgium and England and Servia."

He spoke slowly, dropping out his words that none might fail of their effect and ticked off on a finger the name of each belligerent.

"Our brave German troops have conquered Belgium and that is why we are here. We shall also take Paris and we shall also take Petersburg and we shall also take London. We shall march through Regent Street and Leicester Square and over Waterloo Bridge. Our Kaiser Wilhelm shall make peace in Westminster Abbey, and we shall take away all your colonies. What do you think of that, you damn little fools?"

There are statements too large as there are statements too wild for any but the unusually imaginative to grasp at a first hearing. Neither William nor Griselda had ever entertained the idea of a European War; it was not entertained by any of their friends or their pamphlets. Rumours of war they had always regarded as foolish and malicious inventions set afloat in the interest of Capitalism and Conservatism with the object of diverting attention from Social Reform or the settlement of the Woman Question; and to their ears, still filled with the hum of other days, the announcement of Heinz was even such a foolish invention. Nor, even had they given him credence, would they in these first inexperienced moments have been greatly perturbed or alarmed; their historical ignorance was so profound, they had talked so long and so often in terms of war, that they had come to look on the strife of nations as a glorified scuffle on the lines of a Pankhurst demonstration. Thus Griselda, taught by The Suffragette, used the one word "battle" for a small street row and the fire and slaughter of Eylau—or would have so used it, had she known of the slaughter of Eylau. And that being the case, Heinz's revelation of ruin and thunder left her calm—disappointingly so.

"I think," she said loftily, in answer to his question, "that you are talking absolute nonsense."

There are few men who like to be balked of a sensation and Heinz was not among them. He reddened with annoyance at the lack of success of his bombshell.

"You do not believe it," he said. "You do not believe that our brave German troops have taken Belgium and will shortly take Paris and London? Very well, I will teach you. I will show you. You shall come with us to our officer and you shall be shot for spies."

He came through the gate and clambered into his saddle, his companions following suit; William and Griselda instinctively scrambled to their feet and stood gazing up in uncertainty at the three grey mounted men.

"Get on," said Heinz with a jerk of his head down the valley; and as William and Griselda still stood and gazed his hand went clap to his side and a sword flashed out of its sheath. Griselda shrieked in terror as it flashed over William's head—and William bawled and writhed with pain as it came down flat on his shoulder.

"Get on," Heinz repeated—adding, "damn you!" and worse—as the blade went up again; and William and Griselda obeyed him without further hesitation. Their heads were whirling and their hearts throbbing with rage; but they choked back its verbal expression and stumbled down the valley path—in the clutch of brute force and with their world crumbling about them. It was a most unpleasant walk—or rather trot; they were bruised, they were aching from the handling they had received, and their breath came in sobs from the pace they were forced to keep up. Did they slacken it even for an instant and fall level with the walking horses, Heinz shouted an order to "Hurry, you swine!" and flashed up his threatening sword; whereupon, to keep out of its painful and possibly dangerous reach, they forced themselves to a further effort and broke into a shambling canter. The sweat poured off them as they shambled and gasped, casting anxious glances at the horses' heads behind them; and their visible distress, their panting and their impotent anger, was a source of obvious and unrestrained gratification to Heinz and his jovial companions. They jeered at the captives' clumsy running and urged them to gallop faster. When Griselda tripped over a tussock and sprawled her length on the grass, they applauded her downfall long and joyously and begged her to repeat the performance. The jeers hurt more than the shaking, and she staggered to her feet with tears of wretchedness and outraged dignity running openly down her nose—seeking in vain for that sense of moral superiority and satisfaction in martyrdom which had always sustained her en route to the cells of Bow Street. She hated the three men who jeered at her miseries and could have killed them with pleasure; every fibre of her body was quivering with wrath and amazement. Neither she nor William could speak—they had no breath left in them to speak; but every now and then as they shambled along they turned their hot faces to look at each other—and saw, each, a beloved countenance red with exertion and damp with perspiration, a pair of bewildered blue eyes and a gasping open mouth.... So they trotted down the valley, humiliated, dishevelled, indignant, but still incredulous—while their world crumbled about them and Europe thundered and bled.

CHAPTER VII

Looking back on the morning in the month of August, nineteen hundred and fourteen, when he made his first acquaintance with war as the soldier understands it, William Tully realized that fear, real fear, was absent from his heart until he witnessed the shooting of the hostages. Until that moment he had been unconvinced, and, because unconvinced, unafraid; he had been indignant, flustered, physically sore and inconvenienced; but always at the back of his mind was the stubborn belief that the pains and indignities endured by himself and his wife would be dearly paid for by the perpetrators. He could conceive as yet of no state of society in which Law and the bodily immunity of the peaceful citizen was not the ultimate principle; and even the sight of a long grey battalion of infantry plodding dustily westward on the road by the river had not convinced him of war and the meaning of war. They came on the trudging torrent of men as they debouched from the valley on to the main road; and their captors halted them on the grass at the roadside until the close grey ranks had passed. William and Griselda were thankful for the few minutes' respite and breathing-space; they wiped their hot faces and Griselda made ineffectual attempts to tidy her tumbled hair. She was reminded by her pressing need of hairpins that they had left their bags on the scene of their misfortune, outside the farmhouse gate; they conversed about the loss in undertones, and wondered if the bags would be recovered. They were not without hopes, taking into account the loneliness of the neighbourhood.... When the battalion, with its tail of attendant grey carts, had passed, Heinz ordered them forward again—and they moved on, fifty yards or so behind the last of the grey carts, and trusting that their goal was at hand.

"If they're only taking us as far as the village," Griselda panted hopefully.

They were—to the familiar little village with its miniature railway station between the river and the cliff. The column of infantry plodded dustily through and past it, but Heinz followed the rear-guard only halfway down the street before he shouted to his prisoners to halt. They halted—with an alacrity born of relief and a sense of the wisdom of prompt obedience to orders—before an unpretentious white building with a sentry stationed on either side of the door. Heinz swung himself down from his horse and went into the house, leaving William and Griselda in charge of his comrades and standing at the side of the road.

William and Griselda looked about them. They had passed through the place several times and were accustomed enough to its usual appearance to be aware of the change that had come over it. The rumbling grey carts behind which they had tramped were already at the end of the village; they could see all the sunlit length of the street and take stock of the new unfamiliar life which filled it from end to end.

It was a life masculine and military; an odd mixture of iron order and disorder; of soldiers on duty and soldiers taking their ease. The street itself was untidy and littered as they had never seen it before; its centre had been swept clear, so that traffic might pass unhindered, but the sides of the road were strewn with a jetsam of fragmentary lumber. A country cart that had lost a wheel sat clumsily in front of the church near a jumble of broken pottery, and a chair with its legs in the air was neighboured by trusses of straw. All down the street the doors stood widely open—here and there a house with starred or shattered windows looked unkempt and forlornly shabby. Beyond shivered panes and occasional litter of damaged crockery and furniture there was no sign of actual violence; the encounter that had taken place there—a cavalry skirmish between retreating Belgian and advancing German—had left few traces behind it.

The civilians of the village, with hardly an exception, were invisible. The landlord of the café was serving his soldier customers, and two labourers were unloading sacks, from a miller's dray under the eye of a guard; and when William and Griselda had been waiting for a few minutes an old man crossed the road hurriedly from opposite house to house—emerging from shelter like a rabbit from its burrow and vanishing with a swift running hobble. As for women, they saw only two—whom they were not to forget easily.

They stood, the two women, a few yards away on the further side of the road; almost opposite the door by which Heinz had disappeared and with their eyes continually fixed on it. One—the elder—was stout and grey-headed, very neatly dressed in black with a black woollen scarf on her shoulders; her hands were folded, meeting on her breast, and every now and then she bent her head over them while her lips moved slowly and soundlessly. At such moments she closed her eyes, but when she lifted her head again they turned steadily to the door. The woman who stood beside her was taller and younger, middle-aged, upright, and angular; she also wore a black dress, and above her sharp and yellowish features an unbecoming black hat—a high-crowned hat with upstanding and rusty black bows. What struck you about her at the first glance was her extreme respectability—in the line of her lean shoulders, in the dowdily conventional hat; at a second, the fact that her mouth was a line, so tightly were her lips compressed. She also stood with her eyes fixed on the door. William and Griselda looked at the pair curiously; it was odd and uncomfortable to see them standing at the side of the road, their clothes dusted by passing cars, not moving or speaking to each other.

For the rest, from end to end of the street there were only soldiers in sight. Soldiers taking their noisy ease at the tables outside the café—any number of them crowded round the little green tables while the sweating landlord ran to and fro with a jug or a tray of glasses and an obvious desire to propitiate. Other soldiers, less noisy, led a string of horses to water; and a rigid file of them with rifles grounded, was drawn up on the further side of the street not far from the waiting women; some ten or a dozen of motionless helmeted automata, with a young officer, a ruddy-faced boy, pacing up and down the road in front of them. Through a gap in the row of white houses William and Griselda saw another group of men in their shirt-sleeves at work on the railway line—the line that should have taken them to Brussels; they seemed to be repairing some damage to the permanent way; and further down the village two or three soldier mechanics were busied inquisitively at the bonnet of a heavy grey car drawn up at the side of the road. While they waited and watched other heavy grey cars of the same pattern rumbled into the street and along it; and motor cycles one after another hooted and clanked past them to vanish in a smothering trail of dust.

In after days William tried vainly to recall what he felt and thought in the long hot minutes while they waited for Heinz to reappear and for something to happen. He supposed that it was the fiercer sensations of the time that followed which deadened the impressions of the half-hour or so during which they stood in the sunny street expecting they knew not what; and though he remembered, and remembered vividly, the outward show and manner of the place—its dusty road, its swarming soldiers, its passing cars and cycles and the bearing of the two silent women—the memory brought with it no hint of his accompanying attitude of mind. All he knew was that he had not been seriously alarmed.... He might have recalled his impressions with more success had he and Griselda discussed at the time their new and surprising experiences; but an attempt to enter into conversation was promptly checked by one of their attendant guards. What he actually said was unintelligible, but his manner conveyed his meaning and thereafter the captives considered their situation in silence.

He did not know how long it was before the hostages came out into the street; but he remembered—it was his first distinct memory of a vivid personal impression—the instantaneous thrill of relief and excitement with which, after their dreary wait, he saw the first signs of movement at the sentry-guarded door. A man—a soldier—came out swiftly and went to the boy-officer, who thereupon stopped his pacing; there was a clicking of heels, a salute and a message rapidly delivered; the boy-officer turned and shouted to his men and, his men moved at the word, their rifles going to their shoulders, as if by the impulse of one will. William's eye was caught and held by the oiled swiftness, the mechanical simultaneousness of the movement; he stared at the line of uniforms, now rigidly inactive again, till a hand from behind gripped his collar and impelled him urgently sideways. One of his captors had adopted this simple method of informing him that way must be made for those about to issue from the door of the sentry-guarded house. He choked angrily and brought up against the wall—to which Griselda, taking warning, had hastily backed herself. He was still gasping when the little procession came out; a soldier leading it, a couple more with bayonets fixed—two civilians walking together—a couple more soldiers with bayonets fixed and last of all an officer, a fattish, youngish, moustachioed man whom the sentries stiffened to salute. He came a little behind his men, paused on the step and stood there framed in the doorway with his hand resting on his sword, the embodiment of conscious authority; the others, the two civilians and their guard, went on to the middle of the road. There, in the middle of the road, they also halted—the soldiers smartly, the captives uncertainly—and William saw the two civilians clearly.

One was a short and rotund little man who might have been sixty to sixty-five and might have been a local tradesman—nearly bald and with drooping moustaches, rather like a stout little seal. Essentially an ordinary and unpretentious creature, he was obviously aiming at dignity; his chin was lifted at an angle that revealed the measure of the roll of fat that rested on his collar, and he walked almost with a strut, as if he were attempting to march. Afterwards William remembered that he had seen on the little man's portly stomach some sort of insignia or ribbon; at the time it conveyed nothing to him, but he was told later that it was the outward token of a mayor. He remembered also that the little man's face was pale, with a sickly yellow-grey pallor; and that as he came down the steps with his head held up the drooping moustache quivered and the fat chin beneath it twitched spasmodically. There was something extraordinarily pitiful about his attempt at a personal dignity which nature had wholly denied him; William felt the appeal in it even before he grasped the situation the meaning and need of the pose.

The man who walked on his left hand was taller and some years younger—middle-aged, slightly stooping and with slightly grizzled hair and beard. He belonged to an ordinary sedentary type, and William, thinking him over later, was inclined to set him down a schoolmaster, or perhaps a clerk. He wore steel-rimmed eye-glasses and his black coat was shiny on the back and at the elbows; he had none of his fellow's pomposity, and walked dragging his feet and with his eyes bent on the ground. He raised them only when, as they halted in the middle of the road, the respectable woman in black called out something—one word, perhaps his name—came up to him and caught him by the shoulder. He answered her quickly and very briefly—with hardly more than a word—and for a second or two after he had spoken she stood quite still, with her hand resting on his shoulder. Then, suddenly, her sallow face contorted, her thin mouth writhed and from it there came a cry that was too fierce to be called a groan and too hoarse to be called a scream; she flung herself forward on the neck of the grizzled man and her lean black arms went round it. He tried to speak to her again, but she silenced him by drawing down his head to her breast; she held it to her breast and pressed it there; she rocked and swayed a little from side to side, fondling the grizzled hair and kissing it to a stream of broken endearment. Her grief was animal, alike in its unrestraint and its terrible power of expression; convention fell away from her; in her tidy dress and with her dowdy hat slipping to one shoulder she was primitive woman crooning over her dying mate.... When she was seized and drawn away from her man, her curved fingers clung to his garments. Two soldiers held her and she writhed between them choking out a hoarse incoherent appeal to the officer standing in the frame of the doorway with his hand on the hilt of his sword; she went on crying herself hoarser as her captors urged her further down the street and at last, in mercy to those who looked on, out of sight through an open doorway. William had his hands to his ears when the door shut. No one, in spite of the persistence of her cries, came out into the street to inquire the cause of her grief; but it seemed to William afterwards that he had been aware here and there of furtive faces that appeared at upper windows.

While they forced the dowdy woman away from him her man stood motionless, turned away from her with his head bent and his eyes on the ground, so that he started when a soldier came up behind him and tapped him sharply on the arm. The soldier—he had stripes on his sleeve and seemed a person of authority—held a handkerchief dangling from his hand; and, seeing it, the grizzled-haired captive removed his steel-rimmed eyeglasses.

"Don't look," said William under his breath. "Griselda, don't look."

For the first time mortal fear had seized him by the throat and shaken him. He knew now that he stood before death itself, and the power to inflict death, and his heart was as water within him. His wife was beside him—and when he realized (as he did later on with shame) that the spasm of terror in those first moments of comprehension had been stronger than the spasm of pity, he excused it by the fact of her presence. His fear in its forecast of evil took tangible shape. Griselda at his elbow had her eyes and her mouth wide open; she was engrossed, fascinated—and he was afraid, most horribly afraid, that in her amazement, her righteous pity, she might say or do something that would bring down wrath upon them. He remembered how bold she had been in the face of a crowd, how uplifted by sacred enthusiasm! ... He plucked her by the sleeve when he whispered to her not to look—but she went on staring, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, for the first time unresponsive to his touch and the sound of his voice.

They bandaged the eyes of the two prisoners—the rotund pompous little mayor and the man who might have been a schoolmaster. All his life William remembered the look of the rotund mayor with a bandage covering him from forehead to nose-tip and his grey moustache quivering beneath it—a man most pitifully afraid to die, yet striving to die as the situation demanded. And he remembered how, at the moment the bandage was knotted on the mayor's head, there stepped up to him quietly the stout old woman who had stood praying on the further side of the road with her eyes fixed upon the door. She held up a little crucifix and pressed it to the quivering grey moustache.... Griselda clutched William by the wrist and he thought she was going to cry out.

"Don't, darling, don't!" he whispered. "Oh, darling, for both our sakes!" ...

He did not know whether it was his appeal or her own terror and amazement that restrained her from speech—but she stood in silence with her fingers tightened on his wrist. He wished she would look away, he wished he could look away himself; he tried for an instant to close his eyes, but the not-seeing was worse than sight, and he had to open them again. As he opened them a car roared by raising a smother of dust; but as the cloud of its passage settled he saw that the two blindfolded men were standing with their backs to a blank wall—a yellow-washed, eight-foot garden wall with the boughs of a pear-tree drooping over it. It was opposite the yellow-washed wall, across the road, that the file of soldiers was drawn up; the captives were facing the muzzles of their rifles and the red-faced boy-officer had stationed himself stiffly at the farther end of the file. The dust settled and died down—and there followed (so it seemed to William) an agony of waiting for something that would not happen. Long beating seconds (three or four of them at most) while two men stood upright with bandaged eyes and rifles pointed at their hearts; long beating seconds, while a bird fluted in the pear-tree—a whistle-note infinitely careless.... And then (thank God for it!) a voice and a report that were as one.... The man with the grizzled hair threw out an arm and toppled with his face in the dust; the mayor slid sideways against the wall with the blood dribbling from his mouth.

CHAPTER VIII

Fundamentally William was no more of a coward than the majority of his fellow-men, and, put to it, he would have emulated the shivering little mayor and tried to strut gamely to his end; it was as much sheer bewildered amazement as the baseness of bodily terror that had him by the throat when he saw the hostages done to death—sickening and shaking him and, for the moment, depriving him of self-control. Never before, in all his twenty-eight years, had he seen a man come to his end; so far death had touched him only once, and but slightly, by the unseen passing of a mother he had not loved; thus the spectacle of violent and bloody dying would of itself have sufficed to unnerve and unman him. To the natural shrinking from that spectacle, to his natural horror at the slaying of helpless men, to his pity and physical nausea was added the impotent, gasping confusion of the man whose faith has been uprooted, who is face to face with the incredible. Before his eyes had been enacted the impossible—the ugly and brutal impossible—and beneath his feet the foundations of the earth were reeling. The iron-mouthed guns and the marching columns which had hitherto passed him as a dusty pageant took life and meaning in his eyes; they were instruments of the ugly impossible. There was meaning too in the lonely grave and in the lonely house—whence men had fled in terror of such scenes as his eyes had witnessed. So far, to him, the limit of human savagery had been the feeding through the nose of divers young women who, infected with the virus of martyrdom, demanded to be left to die—and now he had witnessed the killing of men who desired most greatly to live. At the time he did not—because he could not—analyse either the elements of the situation or his own attitude towards it; but he knew afterwards, vaguely but surely, that in that one bewildering and ruthless moment the heart of his faith was uprooted—his faith in that large vague entity the People, in the power of Public Opinion and Talk, in the power of the Good Intention.... Until that moment he had confounded the blunder with the crime, the mistaken with the evilly intentioned. It had not seemed to him possible that a man could disagree with him honestly and out of the core of his heart; it had not seemed to him possible that the righteous could be righteous and yet err. He knew now, as by lightning flash, that he, Faraday, a thousand others, throwing scorn from a thousand platforms on the idea of a European War, had been madly, wildly, ridiculously wrong—and the knowledge stunned and blinded him. They had meant so well, they had meant so exceedingly well—and yet they had prophesied falsely and fact had given them the lie. Until that moment he had been in what he called politics the counterpart of the Christian Scientist, despising and denying the evil that now laughed triumphant in his face. With its triumph perforce he was converted. War was: men were shot against walls. Converted, though as yet he knew not to what form of unknown faith.

He did not see what became of the two dead bodies—whither they were taken or by whom they were buried—for they had barely fallen to the ground and his eyes were still closed that he might not look on the blood that was dribbling from the mayor's moustache when a hand tapped him smartly on the shoulder and he found Heinz standing beside him. He had a glimpse of men moving round the bodies, a glimpse of his wife's face staring and sickly, another of a passing motor-cycle, and then Heinz turned him to the door where the sentries stood on guard. With his captor's hand on his shoulder he went into the low white house, along a little passage on the ground floor and into a room on the right, at the back of the house; Griselda coming after him, still staring and white-faced and likewise with a hand on her shoulder. In the room—large and sunny with windows looking on to a garden—was a man in uniform and spectacles writing at a table, and, erect and complacent beside him, the fattish moustachioed officer who had watched the execution from the doorstep. He was lighting a cigar with a hand that did not tremble. William and Griselda were escorted by their guards into the middle of the room and planted there, standing in front of him.

After what he had seen, and with the memory of Heinz's threats, William Tully believed most firmly that he too was about to die; and with the conviction there filled his heart (as it would have filled the heart of any honest lover) a great and intolerable pity for Griselda, his new-made wife. She, the woman, would be left where he, the man, would be taken—and he dared not turn his head towards her lest he might see her face instinct with the agony of the coming parting, lest, foreseeing and resisting it, she should fling her arms about him and croon over him as the sallow-faced woman in respectable black had crooned over the head of her man. Her meanings, the meanings of a woman unknown, had torn at his inmost heart; how should he bear it when Griselda, his darling, clung fast to him and cried in vain for pity? ... That he might not see Griselda's face even with the tail of an eye he stared hard and steadily over the officer's shoulder. He never forgot the wall-paper beyond the well-filled grey uniform; it was dingy mud and orange as to ground with a ponderous pattern of clumped and climbing vegetables. In one spot, opposite the window, where a blaze of sunlight struck it, the mud and orange was transfigured to shining gold—and William knew suddenly that he had never seen sunlight before. For the first time he saw it as vivid glory from heaven—when his eyes (as he thought) would soon close on its splendour for ever. Not only his sight but his every sense was alert and most sharply intense; on a sudden the thudding of guns in the distance was threateningly nearer at hand, and, in the interval between the gun-bursts, a wasp beating up and down the window-pane filled the room with a spiteful humming.

It was while he stood waiting for the doom he believed to be certain, while the German captain looked him up and down and addressed curt unintelligible questions to those who had made him their prisoner—that there stirred in the breast of William Tully the first faint sense of nationality. He did not recognize it as such, and it was not to be expected that he should, since his life for the last few strenuous years had been largely moulded on the principle that the love of one's country was a vice to be combated and sneered at. If you had told him a short day earlier that the thought of the soil he was born on could move and thrill and uplift him, he would have stared and despised you as a jingo, that most foolish and degraded of survivals; yet with his eyes (as he thought) looking their last on the blazing gold that was sunlight, with the sword suspended over his trembling head, something that was not only his pitiful love for Griselda, something that was more than his decent self-respect, fluttered and stirred within him and called on him to play the man. It bade him straighten his back before men of an outlandish race, it bade him refrain from pleading and weakness before those who were not of his blood; and for the first time for many years he thought of himself as a national, a man of the English race. Not consciously as yet and with no definite sense of affection for England or impulse to stand by her and serve her; but with a vague, unreasoning, natural longing for home and the narrow things of home. It mattered not that the England he longed for was small, suburban, crowded and noisily pretentious; he craved for it in the face of death, as other men crave for their spacious fenlands or the sweep of their open downs. England as he knew her called him, not with the noisy call of yesterday, but in a voice less strident and more tender; he knew now that it was dreadful to die away from her. Instinctively, thinking on London, he drew himself up to the height of his five foot five and—as the mayor had done before him—he lifted his chin in would-be defiance and dignity.

There—with the attempt to subdue the trembling flesh and defy brute insolence and tyranny—the resemblance between the two men's cases ended. For the time being William ran no risk of a violent and bloody ending; there was no further need of an example and he had offended the conqueror only by his poor little presence. Further—though he expressed his enjoyment of it less noisily and emphatically than his three subordinates had done—the humour of his prisoner's situation appealed to Heinz's superior officer almost as much as it had appealed to Heinz himself. He grinned perceptibly as he questioned the couple in his somewhat halting English; chuckled audibly when they confirmed his subordinate's statement as to their complete ignorance of the European upheaval; and when he had elicited the fact that the hapless pair had been spending their honeymoon in the secluded valleys of Ardennes he removed his cigar from his moustachioed lips that he might chuckle long and unhindered.

"Honeymoon," he repeated, his stout shoulders trembling with merriment. "In a nice, quiet place, wiz no one to interrupt zee kissings. Never mind—you will have a very good honeymoon with us and you will very soon be able to go back to England. Just so soon as the Sherman Army shall have been there. You should be very pleased that you are safe with us: it is more dangerous to be in London."

William, with his nerves tuned up to face a firing party, withered miserably under heavy jocularity. He knew instinctively that his life was saved to him; but the assurance of safety was conveyed in a jeer, and at the moment (so oddly are we made) the jeer hurt more than the assurance of safety relieved him. He had mastered his anguish and strung himself up—to be treated as a figure of fun; the spectacled clerk at the writing-table was laughing so heartily that he had to remove his glasses and wipe them before he continued his labours. William tingled all over with helpless rage as Griselda tingled beside him. But yesterday he would have told you loftily that both he and his wife were inured to public, above all to official, ridicule; but it is one thing to brave ridicule with an approving audience in the background, another to face it unapplauded, uncrowned with the halo of the martyr.... They reddened and quivered whilst incomprehensible witticisms passed between the captain and his clerk. It was an intense relief when a nod and a brief order signified that the jest was sufficiently enjoyed and their audience with the captain at an end. They were too thankful even to resent the roughness with which Heinz collared his man while his comrade collared Griselda.

CHAPTER IX

One of the features of the interview that struck William later on was this—during all the long minutes that it lasted Griselda had spoken no words. For once the tumult and amazement of her soul was beyond her glib power of expression and it was only as they came into the open air that—for the first time since she had seen the hostages die—she unclosed her lips and spoke.

"What are they going to do with us?" she asked. Her voice was husky and uncertain, and the words came out in little jerks.

William gave the question no answer: for one thing because his ignorance of their destiny was as thorough as his wife's; for another because speech, by reason of Heinz's firm grip on his collar, was so difficult as to be almost impossible. The man had his knuckles thrust tightly between shirt and skin; William purpled and gasped as he trotted down the street with a collar stud pressing on his windpipe. Behind him when he started came Griselda and her guard; as he could not twist his head to look over his shoulder he had no suspicion that the couples had parted company, and it was not until his captor turned him sharply to the right down a by-road leading to the station that he discovered, in rounding the corner, that his wife and her escort were no longer following in his footsteps. The momentary sidelong glimpse he caught of the road gave him never a sight of Griselda; she had vanished without word or sign. For a moment he could hardly believe it and walked on stupidly in silence; then, the stupor passing, his terror found voice and he clamoured.

"Where's my wife?" he cried out and writhed instinctively to free himself. His reward was a tightening of the German's strangle-hold, some most hearty abuse and some even heartier kicks. Under the punishment he lost his foothold and would have fallen but for Heinz's clutch upon his collar; when the punishment was over he was brought up trembling and choking. In that moment he suffered the fiercest of torments, the fire of an ineffectual hate. He hated Heinz and could have torn him; but he had been taught the folly of blind wrestling with the stronger and, for Griselda's sake, he swallowed his fury and cringed.

"Where is she?" he begged most humbly and pitifully as Heinz thrust him forward again. "For mercy's sake tell me what you have done with my wife—with my wife? ... If you will only let me know where she is? That's all—just to let me know."

He was answered by the silence of contempt and a renewed urge along the road; he obeyed because he could do no other, whimpering aloud in the misery of this new and sharpest of misfortunes. As he pled and whimpered terrible thoughts came hurrying into his brain; all things were possible in these evil times and among these evil men—and there was a dreadful, hideously familiar phrase anent "licentious soldiery": a phrase that had once been just a phrase and that was now a present horror beating hard in his burning head. He stumbled on with the tears running down his cheeks, and discovered suddenly that he was whispering under his breath the name of God—all things else having failed him. He did not realize that he was sobbing and shedding great tears until halfway along the road when a German soldier met them. The man as he passed turned his head to laugh at the sight of a face grotesque and distorted in its wretchedness; whereupon there flared up again in William that new sense of blood and breed and with it an instant rush of shame that he had wept before these—Germans! He gulped back his tears, strove to stiffen his face and clenched his hands to endure.

He had need in the hours that came after of all his powers of endurance alike of body and of mind. The day that already seemed age-long was far from being at its height when Griselda was taken away from him and all through the heat till close upon sundown he was put to hard physical toil. Level with the village the railway line had been torn up and the little wayside station was a half-burnt mass of wreckage; a detachment of retreating Belgians had done their best to destroy it, had derailed an engine and half a dozen trucks and done such damage as time allowed to a stretch of the permanent way. In its turn a detachment of Germans was hard at work at removal of the wreckage and repairs to the line; and into their service they had pressed such villagers as had not fled at their approach. A cowed, unhappy band they toiled and sweated, dug, carried loads and levelled the broken soil; some stupidly submissive, some openly sullen to their captors, some pitiably eager to please: all serfs for the time being and all of them ignorant of what the next hour might bring forth of further terror or misfortune.

To this captive little company William Tully was joined, handed over by Heinz to its taskmaster—to become of them all the most pitiable, because for the first time in all his days set to bend his back and use his muscles in downright labour of the body. What to others was merely hardship, to him became torment unspeakable; he wearied, he sweated, he ached from head to heel. When he pulled at heavy wreckage he cut his soft clumsy fingers; when he dragged a load or carried it he strained his unaccustomed back. His hands bled and blistered and the drops of perspiration poured off him; when he worked slowly because of his weariness or lack of skill, authority made no allowance for either and a blow often followed a curse. Sometimes incomprehensible orders were shouted at him and he would run to obey confusedly, for fear of the punishment meted out without mercy to the dilatory—guessing at what was required of him, sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. The day remained on his mind as an impression of muddled terror and panic intense and unceasing.

When he thought he was not being watched he would lift his head from his toil and strain his eyes this way and that in the hope of a glimpse of Griselda. Unspeakably greater than his fear for himself was the measure of his fear for his wife. He knew that somewhere she must be held by force in the same way that he was held, otherwise she would have sought him out long ere this, and, even if not allowed to approach or speak would have managed to see him and make him some sign that his heart might be set at rest. His brain was giddy with undefined horror and once or twice he started and raised his head imagining that Griselda was calling to him. Once when he looked up his eye caught the bluff towering over the valley and he remembered with an incredulous shock that it was only yesterday that he and his wife, stretched out on the turf, had watched the galloping of the ants of soldiers beneath it—that it was not a day since they had listened indifferently to the mutter of guns in the distance and talked with superior detachment of manoeuvres and the folly of militarism. Side by side on the short-cropped turf they had watched unmoved and listened without misgiving. Only yesterday—nay, only this morning when the sun rose—the world was the world and not hell.

He knew though, engrossed by his private agony, he did not give it much heed, that all the afternoon there was heavy traffic on the road that ran through the village, traffic going this way and that; now and again through the clatter of the work around him its rumble came to his ears. Noisy cars went by and heavy guns, regiments of infantry and once or twice a company of swift-moving horse that sped westward in a flurry of dust. As the hot, industrious hours crawled by even his terror for Griselda was swallowed up in the numbing and all-pervading sense of bodily exhaustion and ill-being, in the consciousness of throbbing head, parched mouth and miserable back. At midday when the captives were doled out a ration of meat and bread he lay like a log for the little space during which he was allowed to rest; and, resting, he dreaded from the bottom of his soul the inevitable call back to work. With it all was the hopeless, the terrifying sense of isolation; he was removed even from his fellow-sufferers, held apart from them not only by the barrier of their alien speech but by his greater feebleness and greater physical suffering. Only once during those sun-smitten and aching hours did he feel himself akin to any of the men around him—when a flat-capped, sturdy young German soldier, taking pity on his manifest unfitness for the work, muttered some good-natured, incomprehensible encouragement and handed him a bottle to drink from. The sharp taste of beer was a liquid blessing to William's dry tongue and parched throat; he tilted the bottle and drank in great gulps till he choked; whereat the flat-capped German boy-soldier laughed consumedly but not unkindly.

It must have been well on in the afternoon—for the shadows were beginning to lengthen though the sun burned hotly as ever—when over the noises of the toil around him and over the rumble of traffic on the road the persistent beat of guns became loud enough to make itself noticeable. All day William had heard it at intervals; during his brief rest at midday it had been frequent but distant; now it had spurted into sudden nearness and was rapid, frequent, continuous. A little group of his fellow-toilers looked up from their work as they heard the sound, drew closer together and exchanged mutterings till an order checked them sharply; and even after the order was rapped out one square-shouldered, brown-faced countryman continued to stare down the valley with stubbornly determined eyes.

William's eyes followed the countryman's, and for a moment saw nothing but what he had seen before—cliffs, the river and the hot blue sky, without a feather of cloud to it; then, suddenly, away down the valley, there puffed out a ball of white smoke, and before it had faded another. The man with the stubborn eyes grunted something beneath his breath and turned again to his work; William, continuing to gaze curiously at the bursting puffs, was reminded of his duties by a louder shout and the threat of a lifted arm. He, too, bent again and with haste to his work; to look up furtively as the thunder deepened and see always those bursts of floating cloud down the valley or against the hot horizon.

He knew, or rather guessed, in after days when his sublime ignorance of all things military had been tempered by the newspapers, by daily war-talk and by actual contact with the soldier, that the sudden appearance of those bursting puffs had indicated some temporary and local check to the advancing German divisions, that a French or Belgian force must have pushed or fought its way across the triangular plateau between the Meuse and its tributary; must have driven before them the Germans in the act of occupying it, must have brought up their guns and commanded for the moment a stretch of the lateral valley and the line of communications along it. It was not left long in unmolested possession thereof; nearer guns answered it swiftly from all directions, from other heights and from the valley; shells whined overhead, from time to time the ground shook, and it dawned upon William, as he looked and listened, that what he saw was a battle.

At first he was more impressed by the thought than he was by the actuality—since the effects of the conflict were not in the beginning terrible. True there was something threatening in the near-by thudding of a German battery when first it made itself heard. But such harm as it inflicted was unseen by William, and for the space of an hour or so it drew no returning fire and the village stood untouched and undamaged. But as the evening drew in the thunder deepened and quickened; both sides, it would seem, had brought up reinforcements, and guns opened fire from new and unexpected places, from heights, from behind garden walls. Down the road along which William had been urged with ungentleness by Heinz a gun-team clattered and jingled at breakneck speed; it pulled up close to the railway line, not fifty yards from the spot where the prisoners were working in the shadow of a clump of young trees; the gun was placed swiftly in position, the horses were led away and after a momentary interval the men began to fire—steadily, swiftly, on the order. William watched them with his mouth wide open till reminded smartly of his idleness; they were so swift, precise and machine-like. It required an effort of the imagination to remember what they were doing.

"Killing," he said to himself, "those men are killing!" And he found himself wondering what their faces looked like while they killed? Whether they liked doing it? ...

He supposed later (when that first ignorance of things military was a little less sublime) that the firing from the immediate neighbourhood of the village had at first inflicted but little damage on the opposing forces on the heights; at any rate it remained practically unanswered till close upon sunset, the French or Belgian gunners concentrating their fire upon enemies nearer, more aggressive, or more vulnerably placed. Perhaps (he never knew for certain) they had got the better, for the time being, of those other more aggressive or more vulnerable opponents; perhaps they had received reinforcements which had enabled them to push higher up the valley or had at last been punished by a fire hitherto ineffectual; whatever the cause, as the sun grew red to the westward, a first shell screamed on to the dusty road outside the village and burst in a pother of smoke and flying clods. William heard the burst and saw the cloud rise; he was still round-eyed when another shell screamed overhead to find its billet in a garden wall a few yards behind the battery, scattering the stones thereof and splintering the boughs of an apple-tree. A shower of broken fragments came pattering about the station; William was perhaps too much stupefied by pain and weariness to understand the extent of his danger but several of his fellows stirred uneasily and two of them threw down their spades and started in headlong flight. They were brought up swiftly by the threat of a bayonet in their path; one of them came back sullenly dumb, the other whimpering aloud with a hand pressed to his face. William saw that his cheek was bleeding where a flying fragment had caught it. He was looking at the man as he nursed his torn face and bemoaned himself when a third shell struck what remained of the station roof.

William did not know whether he fell on his face instinctively or was thrown by the force of the explosion; he remembered only that as he scrambled to his feet, half-deafened and crying for help, he saw through a settling cloud of dust the disappearing backs of some three or four men who were all of them running away from him. He was seized with a mortal terror of being left alone in this torment of thunder and disaster; he believed he must be hurt, perhaps hurt to the death, and a pang of rage and self-pity went through him at the thought of his desertion by his fellows. He started after the vanishing backs, calling out to them to wait, abusing and appealing, and stumbling over ruin as he ran. The distant gunners had found their enemies' range, and he had not made half a dozen yards when he ducked to the threat of another shell that burst, as he thought, close beside him. He cringed and shivered for a moment, covering his eyes with his hands; then, finding himself uninjured, darted off at an angle, still shielding his eyes and gasping out, "God, oh God—for mercy's sake, oh God!" He knew in every fibre of his trembling body that he was about to die, and his prayer was meant not only for himself but for Griselda. As he ran on blindly, an animal wild and unreasoning, a hand caught him above the ankle and he screamed aloud with rage and terror at finding himself held fast.

"Let me go," he cried struggling; then, as the hand still gripped, bent down to wrest himself free and looked into a face that he knew—a young plump face with a budding moustache surmounted by a flat German cap. It was twisted now into a grin of agony, but all the same he recognized the face of the German boy-soldier who had dealt kindly with him that afternoon in the matter of the bottle of beer. He was lying on his back and covered from the middle downwards with a litter of broken beam and ironwork blown away from the ruin of the station. The effect of the recognition on William was curiously and instantly sobering; he was no longer alone in the hell where the ground reeled and men ran from him; he was no longer an animal wild and unreasoning, but a man with a definite human relationship to the boy lying broken at his feet. He began to lift the wreckage from the crushed legs and talked as he did so, forgetting that the wounded man in all likelihood understood not a word of his English.

"All right, I'll get it off, I'll help you. You were good to me giving me a drink, so I'll stay and help you. Otherwise I oughtn't to wait, not a minute—you see, I must look for my wife. My first duty is to her—she's my wife and I don't know where she is. But I won't leave you like this because of what you did for me this afternoon." He wrenched and tugged at the shattered and entangled wreckage till the boy shrieked aloud in his torment—the cry terrified William and he desisted, wringing his hands. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it. God knows I didn't mean to hurt you and if I could be gentler I would, but it's so damnably, damnably heavy. Oh God, if some one would come and help me, if someone would only come! You see it's so heavy I can't move it without hurting you."

He explained and apologized to ears that heard not for the boy had fainted in his pain; his deep unconsciousness made extrication easier and William tugged again at the lumber until he had tugged it away. One of the wounded man's leg's was a wrenched and bloody mass; William shuddered at the sight, looked down stupidly at the dead white face and wondered what was to be done—then, feeling that something must at least be tried, put his arms round the inert body and strove to lift it from the ground. The only results were breathlessness on his part and a groan from the unconscious German. William dropped him instantly on hearing the groan, trembling at the idea of inflicting yet more suffering, torn by the thought of Griselda, longing to go and yet ashamed to leave the boy-soldier without aid. He might have hesitated longer but a for fresh explosion and crash of falling masonry; it was followed by a long-drawn screaming intolerable to hear—an Aie, Aie, Aie of unspeakable bodily pain. With a sudden sense of being hunted, being driven beyond endurance, William turned and shook his impotent fists in the direction of the unseen guns. "Can't you stop one moment?" he screamed idiotically, hating them and dancing with rage. "Can't you stop, you devils—you devils! Don't you see I'm only trying to help him?" If he had ever made any distinction between friend and enemy artillery, he had lost all idea of it now; the guns for the moment were a private persecution of himself, and he was conscious only of being foully and brutally bullied by monstrous forces with whom he argued and at whom he cursed and spat.

It was the sight of what had once been a horse that brought him again to his senses. His eye fell on it as he danced in his mad ineptitude at the side of the helpless German; it had been one of the team that galloped a gun down the by-road and was now a pulp of raw flesh, crushed bone, and most hideously scattered entrail. He stared for a moment at the horror, incredulous and frozen—then sickened, turned and ran from it in a passion of physical loathing.

For a minute or two he ran he knew not whither—straight ahead, anywhere to be away from the horror; then, as his shuddering sickness passed, there rushed back the thought of Griselda, and he reproached himself that he had halted even for a moment and even for a purpose of mercy; all his energies both of mind and body were turned to the finding of his wife. They must die, he was sure of it; he prayed only that they died together. The way he had taken lay outside the walled gardens between the village and the railway line; and as he ran he called her—"Griselda, Griselda!"—in a voice that he hardly caught himself, so persistent was the uproar of the guns. When he fled from the neighbourhood of the dismembered horse he had left behind him the path leading directly to the main street of the village—which it was his aim to reach since there he had last seen Griselda. Seeking another way to it, he halted when he came to a door in the wall, wrestled with the latch and flung himself angrily against it; it resisted, locked, and he ran on again, still panting out his wife's dear name. Twenty yards further on he came to another door in the wall and this time it opened to his hand.

In the garden beyond was no sign of the chaos that had overwhelmed his world since the morning. An orderly border of orderly flowers, espaliered walls and a tree or two ruddy with apples; and on a shaven plot of the greenest grass an empty basket chair with beside it a white cat reposing with her paws tucked under her chin. The white cat may have been deaf, or she may have been merely intrepid; whatever the cause her nerves were unaffected by the fury of conflict and she dozed serenely under shell-fire, the embodiment of comfortable dignity. She opened a warily observant eye when William rushed into her garden; but being a well-fed cat, and accustomed to deference, she took no further precaution. She stirred not even when he hurried past her to her dwelling-house, and as he entered it by an open window her nose descended to rest on her folded paws.

The room he ran into through the open window left no impression on the mind of William Tully; it was dark after the sunlight outside, and he supposed it must have been empty. He went rapidly along the short passage beyond it, making for the front door; he met no one, heard no one, and his fingers were touching the latch when he saw, through an open door to the right of him, the figure of a kneeling woman. She was stout, dressed in black and grey-headed and she knelt leaning on a chair in the middle of the polished floor; her eyes were closed, her lips moved, and her hands were clasped under her chin. The sound of William's feet did not reach her through the tumult of fighting without, nor did he stay to disturb her. When he lived in the world and not hell it would have seemed to him strange and unfitting that he should intrude on an old woman's privacy and secret prayer; now nothing was strange, nothing unfitting or impossible.... He supposed that she was the white cat's mistress, noted without emotion that her cheeks were wet with tears and thought vaguely that her face was familiar, that he had seen it somewhere before. Afterwards it came to him that he had seen it when the hostages died in the morning, that it was she who had prayed in the road with folded hands and pressed her crucifix to the mayor's long grey moustache. He wondered, then, what became of her and her well-fed indifferent cat.

That was afterwards, many weeks afterwards; for the time being he had no interest to give her, his thoughts were only of Griselda and the means by which she might be found. His plan, so far as it could be called a plan, was to run from house to house in the village street until he came to the place where she was captive; but when he stepped into the road it was to find it impossible of passage by reason of the men and vehicles that choked the stretch in front of him. Almost opposite the door he came through, a motor-ambulance, going eastward with its load, had collided with an ammunition wagon going west, thus bringing to a standstill more ammunition wagons and a battery of horse-artillery, its foremost ranks thrown back in confusion by a threatening skid of the ambulance. There was much whistling, and shouting of orders in the attempt to reform and clear the road; horses reared from the suddenness with which they were pulled up and men ran to their heads to steady them. While the locked wheels were wrestled with, a bandaged bloody face peered round the tail of the ambulance; the press swayed to and fro, filling the road from side to side, and William, unable to move, flattened back against the door from which he had issued, out of reach of the wicked heels of a restive horse. For the first moment he expected some one to seize and arrest him, and had he not unthinkingly closed the door behind him he would have beat a hasty retreat; but there was bloodier and busier work on hand than the corraling of stray civilians, and no man touched or questioned him as he pressed himself against the neat green-painted door. Struggling with their own most urgent concerns, not a soldier so much as noticed him; and it was borne in on William that if the wicked heels had caught him and kicked his life out, not a man would have noticed that either.

Further down the street was a cloud of slowly rising black smoke—and suddenly through it a banner of flame leaped up and waved triumphantly; one of the tidy two-storied houses had been set afire by a shell. As William watched the resplendent flare the crowd round the two vehicles composed itself into something like order, and the ambulance—its driver, by the excited movements of his mouth, still shouting out angry explanations—was backed from the path of the advancing troops and thrust crippled against the wall. The guns on one side of the road, the wagons on the other stirred forward—at first slowly, then, as the line straightened itself out, with a rattle of increasing speed. As they passed the house afire the smoke rolled down on them and hid them from William's sight.

CHAPTER X

With the conviction that no one was heeding his comings and goings, a certain amount of assurance came back to William Tully, and as the way cleared before him he set off down the street without any attempt at concealment. By house to house visitation he sought for his wife through the village; it was there she had been taken from him, and he thrust back the deadly suspicion that she need not have remained in the place where she had disappeared from his sight.

There was not a closed door in the length of the street, and nowhere was his entrance barred; the call to arms had temporarily cleared the houses of the invaders quartered in them, and he ran from one doorway to another unhindered, calling on Griselda as he entered, looking into every room, and then out to repeat the process. The two first houses were empty from garret to cellar, but with signs of having been left, recently and hurriedly, by the soldiers billeted therein; odds and ends of military kit were scattered about, chairs overturned and left lying; and in one room, a kitchen, on a half-extinguished fire, a blackened frizzle of meat in a frying-pan filled the air with a smell of burning. The third house he thought likewise empty; downstairs there was the same litter—overthrown furniture and food half eaten on the table; but opening the door of an upper room he came on a woman with three children. The woman started to her feet as the door opened, a child hugged to her bosom and other two clinging to her skirt; and William had a passing impression of a plump, pallid face with lips apart and wide, wet eyes, half-imploring and half-defiant. One of the children was crying—its mouth was rounded in a roar—but you heard nothing of its vigorous plaint for the louder din without. William made a gesture that he meant to be reassuring, shut the door and ran back into the street.

He went in and out desperately, like a creature hunted or hunting; and, having drawn blank in house after house, the deadly thought refused to be thrust and kept under. If they had taken her away, she might be ... anywhere! East or west, gone in any direction, and leaving no clue for her following. Anywhere in a blind incomprehensible world, where men killed men and might was right, and life, as he knew it from his childhood up, had ended in an orgy of devilry! He went on running from house to house, while shells screamed and burst and guns clattered by, and no man gave heed to his running or the tumult and torture of his fears. Upstairs and down and out again—upstairs and down and out.

He was nearing the end of the street when he found her at last; in the upper back room of a little white house some yards beyond the building in flames, and not far from the spot where they had seen the hostages die. She was alone and did not move when he flung the door open; crouched in a corner with her head on her knees, she neither saw nor heard him. For an instant it seemed to him that his strength would fail him for gladness, and he staggered and held to the door; as the giddiness passed he ran to her, babbling inaudible relief, and pulled the hands from her face. He had an instant's glimpse of it, white and tear-marked, with swollen lips and red eyes; then, as his arms went round her and he had her up from the floor, it went down on his shoulder and was hidden. He felt her clinging to him, trembling against him, sobbing against him while he held her—and all his soul was a passion of endearment and thankfulness.... So for a minute or two—perhaps longer—they clung to each other, reunited: until William, his sense of their peril returning, sought to urge his wife to the door.

She came with him for a step or two, her head still on his shoulder; then, suddenly, she shivered and wrestled in his arms, thrust him from her, rushed back to the end of the room and leaned against it, shaking with misery. Her arm was raised over her hidden face and pressed against the wall; and he saw what he had not seen before, that the sleeve was torn and the flesh near the wrist bruised and reddened. He saw also—his eyes being opened—that it was not only her hair that was tumbled; all her dress was disordered and awry. There was another tear under the armpit where the sleeve had given way and the white of her underlinen showed through the gap.... His heart cried out to him that she had struggled merely as a captive, had been restrained by brute force from escaping—but his own eyes had seen that she turned from him as if there was a barrier between them, as if there was something to hide that yet she wished him to know.... For a moment he fought with the certainty, and then it came down on him like a storm: for once in his life his imagination was vivid, and he saw with the eyes of his mind as clearly as with the eyes of his body. All the details, the animal details, her cries and her pitiful wrestlings; and the phrase "licentious soldiery" personified in the face of the man who had been Griselda's gaoler. Round and roughly good-humoured in repose with black eyebrows and a blue-black chin.... He caught her by the hands and said something to her—jerked out words that stammered and questioned—and she sobbed and turned her face from him again.... After that he could not remember what he felt or how long he stood in the middle of the room, oblivious of danger and staring at her heaving shoulders and the tumbled hair that covered them; but it seemed to him that he talked and moved his hands and hated—and did not know what to do.

In the end there must have come to him some measure of helpless acquiescence, or perhaps he was quieted and taken out of himself by the need of giving help to Griselda. After how long he knew not he found himself once more with his arms around her; she let him take her hand, he kissed it and stroked her poor hair. This time she came with him when he led her to the door, and they went down the stairway together. Near the street door she hesitated and halted, and he saw she had something to say.

"Where are we going?" she asked, with her lips to his ear. "Can we get away?"

He told her he thought so, that now was the time when they might slip away unnoticed—trying to encourage her by the assumption of a greater confidence than he felt. Fortune favoured them, however, and the assumption of confidence was justified; though the bombardment had slackened as suddenly as it had begun, the remnant of German soldiery left in the place was still too much occupied with its own concerns to interfere with a couple of civilians seeking safety in the rear of the fire-zone, and no one paid any heed to them as they made their way along the street. They turned inevitably westward—away from the guns—down the road they had come that morning: two hunted, dishevelled little figures, keeping well to the wall and glancing over their shoulders. The crush of wagons, of guns and men, had moved forward and out of the village, which, for the moment, seemed clear of all but non-combatants—save for the ubiquitous cyclist who dashed backwards and forwards in his dust. An ambulance was discharging its load at a building whence waved the Red Cross, and near at hand, but out of sight, a battery was thudding regularly; but of the few uniformed figures in the street itself there was none whose business it was to interest himself in their movements. They hurried on, clinging to each other and hugging the wall—except when a heap of fallen brickwork, a derelict vehicle or other obstacle forced them out into the road.

They were almost at the entry of the village when they came upon such an obstacle: the upper part of one of the endmost houses had evidently been struck by a shell, for a large slice of roof and outside wall had crumbled to the pathway below. It had crumbled but recently, since the dust was still clouding thickly above the ruin and veiling the roadway beyond it; hence, as they skirted its borders, it was not until he was actually upon them that they were aware of a motor-cyclist speeding furiously out of the dusk. The roar of the battery a few yards away had drowned the whirr of his machine, and Griselda was almost under it before she had warning of its coming. The stooping rider yelled and swerved, but not enough to avoid her; she went down, flung sideways, while the cyclist almost ran on to the heap of rubble on his right—then, recovering his balance, dashed forward and was lost in the dusk. Save for that momentary swerve and stagger, he had passed like a bolt on his errand, leaving Griselda crumpled in the road at William's feet. To his mind, no doubt, a mishap most luckily avoided. Griselda lay without moving, her face to the dust, and for one tortured moment William thought the life beaten out of her; but when he raised her, her lips moved, as if in a moan, and as he dragged her for safety to the side of the road she turned her head on his arm. He laid her down while he ran for water from the river; panted to its brim, soaked his handkerchief for lack of a cup, brought it back and pressed it to her forehead. Her eyes, when she opened them, were glazed with pain and her lips drawn tightly to her teeth; when he wanted to raise her to a sitting position she caught his hand thrust it from her and lay with her white face working. So she lay, for minutes that seemed hours, with her husband kneeling beside her.... Men passed them but stayed not; and once, when William looked up, a car was speeding by with helmeted officers inside it—too intent on their own hasty business of death to have so much as a glance to spare for a woman in agony of bodily pain and a man in agony of mind.

The night had come down before Griselda was able to move. With its fall the near-by battery was silenced and the distant thunder less frequent; so that William was able to hear her when she spoke and asked him to lift her. He sobbed for joy as he lifted her, gently and trembling lest he hurt her; she sat leaning on his arm, breathing painfully and telling him in jerks that it was her side that pained her most—her left side and her left arm, but most of all her side. At first she seemed dazed and conscious only of her sufferings—whimpered about them pitifully with intervals of silence—but after ten minutes or so she caught his sleeve and tugged it.

"Let's get away. Help me up!"

He suggested that she should rest a little longer, but she urged him with trembling, "Let's get away!" and he had perforce to raise her. In spite of the fever for flight that had taken possession of her she cried out as he helped her to her feet and stood swaying with her eyes shut and her teeth bitten hard together. He would have lain her down again, but she signed a "No, no!" at the attempt and gripped at his shoulder to steady herself; then, after a moment, guided his arm round her body, so that he could hold her without giving unnecessary pain.

"You mustn't press my side—I can't bear it. But if you put your hand on my shoulder——"

They moved away from the village at a snail's pace, Griselda leaning heavily on her husband. Behind them at first was the red light from burning houses; but as they crawled onwards the darkness of the valley closed in on them until, in the sombre shadow of the cliff, William could only distinguish his wife's face as a whitish patch upon his shoulder. When she groaned, as she did from time to time, he halted to give her relief, but she would never allow him to stand for more than a minute or two; after a few painful breaths there would come the tug of her fingers at his coat that was the sign to move forward again. Once or twice she whispered to know if any one were coming after them, and he could feel her whole body a-quiver with fear at the thought.

Barred in by cliff to right and river to left, they kept perforce to the road—or, rather, to the turf that bordered it. The traffic on the road itself had not ceased with the falling of night; cars were coming up and guns were coming up and the valley was alive with their rumble—and at every passing Griselda shrank and her fingers shivered in their grip upon William's sleeve.

"Can't we get away from them?" she whispered at last. "Right away and hide—can't we turn off the road?"