Chapter XVI: Part 16

Mr. Quinn did not make any answer to Henry. He slipped a little further into the bed, and lay for a long while with his eyes closed, so long that Henry thought he had fallen asleep; but, just when Henry began to tiptoe from the room, he opened his eyes again, and suddenly they were full of tears.

"The fine young fellows," he said. "The fine young lads!"

2

And at Christmas, he died. He had called Henry to him that morning, and had enquired about "The Fennels," which had lately been published after a postponement and much hesitation, and about the new book on which Henry was now working.

"That's right," he said, when he heard that Henry was working steadily on it. "It'll keep your mind from broodin'. How's the Ulster book goin'?"

"'The Fennels'?"

"Ay. You had hard luck, son, in bringing out your best book at a time like this, but never matter, never matter!..."

"I don't know how it's doing. It's too soon to tell yet. The reviews have been good, but I don't suppose people are buying books at present!"

"You've done a good few now, Henry!"

"Five, father."

"Ay, I have the lot there on that ledge so's I can take them down easily an' look at them. I feel proud of you, son ... proud of you!"

He began to remind Henry of things that had happened when he was a boy. His mind became flooded with memories. "Do you mind Bridget Fallon?" he would say, and then he would recall many incidents that were connected with her. "Do you mind the way you wanted to go to Cambridge, an' I wouldn't let you," and "Do you mind the time you took the woollen balls from Mr. Maginn's house?...."

Henry remembered. Mr. Maginn, the vicar of Ballymartin, had invited Henry to spend the afternoon with his nephew and niece and some other children. They had played a game with balls made of coloured wool, and while they were playing, Henry, liking the pattern of one of them, had put it into his pocket. It had been missed, and there had been a search for it, in which Henry had joined. He was miserable, and he wanted to confess that he had the ball, but every time he opened his lips to say that he had it, he felt afraid, and so he had refrained from speaking. He felt, too, that every one knew that he had taken it, but still he could not confess that he had it, and when they said, "Isn't it queer? I wonder where it's gone!" he had answered, "Yes, isn't it queer?" They had abandoned the search, and had played another game, but all the pleasure of the party was lost for Henry. He kept saying to himself, "You've got it. _You've_ got it!..."

He had hurried home after the party was over, and when he reached the shrubbery, he dug a hole and buried the ball in it. He had closed his eyes as he took it out of his pocket, so that he should not see the bright colours of it, and had heaped the earth on to it as if he could not conceal it quickly enough ... but burying it had not quieted his mind. He felt, whenever he met Mr. Maginn, that the vicar looked at him as if he were saying to himself, "You stole the woollen ball!...." At the end of the month, he had gone to his father and told him of it, and Mr. Quinn had cocked his eye at him for a moment and considered the subject.

"If I were you, Henry," he had said, "I'd dig up that ball and take it back to Mr. Maginn and just tell him about it!"

Henry could remember how hard it had been to do that, how he had loitered outside the gates of the vicarage for an hour, trying to force himself to go up to the door and ask for the vicar ... and how kind Mr. Maginn had been when, at last, he had made his confession!

Oh, yes, he remembered!...

"You were a funny wee lad, Henry," Mr. Quinn said, taking his son's hand in his. "Always imaginin' things!" He thought for a second or two. "I suppose," he went on, "that's what makes you able to write books ... imaginin' things! Ay, that's it!"

They sat in quietness for a while, and then Mr. Quinn fell asleep, and Henry went down to the library and worked again on his new novel, for which he had not yet found a title; and in his sleep, Mr. Quinn died.

3

Henry had finished a chapter of the book, and he put down his pen, and yawned. He was tired, and he thought gratefully of tea. Hannah would bring a tray to his father's room. There would be little soda farls and toasted barn-brack, and perhaps she would have made "slim-jim," and there would be newly-churned butter and home-made jam, which Hannah, in her Ulster way, would call "Preserve." ...

He got up from the table and went into the hall.

"Will tea be long, Hannah?" he called down the stairs, leading to the kitchens.

"Haven't I it near ready?" she answered.

He had gone up the staircase at a run, and had entered his father's room, expecting to see him sitting up....

"Hilloa," he said, stopping sharply, "still asleep!" and he went out of the room and called softly to Hannah, now coming up the stairs, to take the tray to the library. "He's asleep, Hannah!" he said almost in a whisper.

"He's never asleep at this hour," she answered.

And somehow, as she said that, he knew. He went back into the room and leant over his father, listening....

"Is he dead, Master Henry?" Hannah said, as she came into the room. She had left the tray on a table on the landing.

Henry straightened himself and turned to her. "Yes, Hannah!" he said quietly.

The old woman threw her apron over her head and let a great cry out of her. "Och, ochanee!" she moaned, "Och, och, ochanee!..."

4

He had none of the terror he had had when Mrs. Clutters lay dead in the Bloomsbury house. He went into the room and stood beside his father's body. The finely moulded face had a proud look and a great look of peace. "I don't feel that he's dead," Henry murmured to himself. "I shall never feel that he's dead!"

"I wasn't with him enough," he went on. "I left him alone too often...."

Extraordinarily, they had loved each other. Underneath all that roughness of speech and violence of statement, there was great tenderness and understanding. He spoke his mind, and more than his mind, but he was generous and quick to retract and quicker to console. "I'm an Ulsterman," he said once. "Ulster to the marrow, an' begod I'm proud of it!"

"But I'm Irish too," he added, turning to John Marsh as he said it, fearful lest he should have hurt John's feelings. "Begod, it's gran' to be Irish. I pity the poor devils that aren't!..."

He was a great lover of life, exulting in his strength and vigour, shouting sometimes for the joy of hearing himself shout. "And shy, too," Henry murmured to himself, "shy as a wren about intimate things!"

The sight of his father's placid face comforted him. One might cry over other people, but not over _him_. Henry felt that if he were to weep for his father, and the old man, regaining life for a moment were to open his eyes and see him, he would shout at him, "Good God, Henry, what are you cryin' about? Go out, man, an' get the fresh air about you!..."

He put his hand out and touched the dead man.

"All right, father!" he said aloud....

5

There was much to do after the burial, and it was not until the beginning of the Spring that Henry left Ballymartin. He had completed his sixth novel, and had asked that the proofs should be sent to him as speedily as possible so that he might correct them before he left Ireland, and while he was waiting for them, he had travelled to Dublin for a few days, partly on business connected with his estate and partly to see his friends. Mr. Quinn had spent a great deal of money on his farming experiments, the more freely as he found that Henry's books brought him an increasing income, and so Henry had decided to let the six hundred acres which Mr. Quinn himself had farmed. At first, he had thought of selling the land, but it seemed to him that his father would have liked him to keep it, and so he did not do so. He settled his affairs with his solicitors, and then returned to Ballymartin; but before he did so, he spent an evening with John Marsh, whom he found still keenly drilling.

"But why are you drilling now?" he asked. "This hardly seems the time to be playing at soldiers, John!"

"I'm not playing, Henry. I _am_ a soldier!"

It was difficult to remember how many armies there were in Ireland. The Ulster Volunteers still sulked in the North. The National Volunteers had split. The politicians, alarmed at the growth of the Volunteer Movement among their followers, had swooped down on the Volunteers and "captured" them. John Marsh and Galway and their friends had seceded, and, under the presidency of a professor of the National University, John MacNeill, had formed a new body, called the Irish Volunteers. The politicians, failing to understand the temper of their time, worked to discourage the growth of the Volunteer Movement, and the result of their efforts was that the more enthusiastic and courageous of the National Volunteers seceded to the Irish Volunteers.

"We're growing rapidly," John said to Henry. "They're flocking out of the Nationals into ours as hard as they can. We've got Thomas MacDonagh and Patrick Pearse and a few others with us, and we're trying to link up with Larkins' Citizen Army. Mineely's urging Connolly on to our side, but Connolly's more interested in the industrial fight than in the national fight. But I think we'll get him over!"

Their objects were to defend themselves from attack by the Ulster Volunteers if attack were made, to raise a rebellion if the Home Rule Bill were not passed into law, and to resist the enactment of conscription in Ireland. The burden of their belief was still the fear of betrayal. "But you're going to get Home Rule," Henry would say to them, and they would answer, "We'll believe it when we see the King opening the Parliament in College Green. Not before. We know what the English are like...."

Henry had suggested to them that they should offer the services of their volunteers to the Government in return for the immediate enactment of the Bill, but they saw no hope of such an offer being accepted and honoured. "The minute they'd got us out of the way, they'd break their word," said Galway. "Our only hope is to stay here and make ourselves as formidable as we can. You can't persuade the English to do the decent thing ... you can only terrorise them into it. Look at the way the Ulster people have frightened the wits out of them!..."

"But the Ulster people haven't frightened the wits out of them. I can't understand you fellows! You sit here with preconceived ideas in your heads, and you won't check them by going to see the people you're theorising about. You keep on saying the same thing over and over again, and you won't listen to any one who tells you that you've got hold of the wrong end of the stick!..."

"My dear Henry," said John, "our history is enough for us. Even since the war, the English have tried to belittle the Irish. They've done the most inept, small things to annoy us. They'd have got far more men from Ireland than they have done, if they 'd behaved decently; but they couldn't. They simply couldn't do the decent thing to Ireland. That's their nature.... I'd have gone myself!..."

"You?"

"Yes. I think the Germans are in the wrong. I think they've behaved badly, and anyhow, I don't like their theory of life. But the English couldn't treat us properly. We wanted an Irish Division, with Irish officers, and Irish colours, and Irish priests ... but no! They actually stopped some women in the South from making an Irish flag for the Irish regiments!... What are you to do with people like that. If they aren't treacherous, they're so stupid that it's impossible to do anything with them, and we'd much better be separate from them!"

"I should have thought that Belgium showed the folly of that sort of thing," said Henry. "A little country can't keep itself separate from a big one. It'll get hurt if it does."

"Belgium fought, didn't she?" John answered. "I daresay we should get beaten, too, but we could fight, couldn't we?"

Henry went away from them in a state of depression. It seemed impossible to persuade them to behave reasonably. Fixed and immovable in their minds was this belief that England would use them in her need ... and then betray them when her need was satisfied.

He went back to Ballymartin and corrected his proofs.

"I'll go over to England next week," he said to himself when he had revised the final proofs and posted them to his publishers.

6

Mrs. Graham had written to him when his father died. "_My dear Henry_," she wrote, "_I know how you must feel at the death of your father, and I know, too, that you will not wish to have your sorrow intruded on. A letter is a poor thing, but, my dear, I send you all my sympathy. I never saw your father, but Ninian has often spoken of him to me, and I know that his loss must be almost unbearable to you. Perhaps he was glad, as I should be glad, to slip away from the thought and memory of this horrible war, and that may bring comfort to you. If you feel lonely and unhappy at home, come to Boveyhayne for a while. You know how glad we shall be to have you. It is very quiet here now, more than a hundred of our men have gone into the Navy or the Army, and the poor women are full of anxiety about them. Ninian has just been moved to Colchester. I daresay he has written to you before this. If you would like to come to Boveyhayne just send a telegram to me. That will be sufficient. Believe me, my dear Henry, Your sincere friend, Janet Graham._"

* * * * *

He remembered Mrs. Graham's letter now, and he went to his writing desk and took it from the notes of condolence he had received. Ninian and Gilbert and Roger had written to him, short, abrupt letters that he knew were full of kindly concern for him, and Rachel had written too. There was a letter from Mary.

* * * * *

_Dear Quinny, you don't know how sorry I am. It must be awful to lose your father when you and he have been such chums. I can only just remember my father, and how I cried when he was taken away, and so I know how hard it must be for you. Your friend, Mary._

* * * * *

He read Mrs. Graham's note, and Mary's several times, and as he read them, he had a longing to go to Boveyhayne again. The house at Ballymartin was so lonely, now that his father's heavy footsteps no longer sounded through the hall. Sometimes, forgetting that he was dead, Henry would stop suddenly and listen as if he were listening for his father's voice. Since his return from Dublin, he had felt his loss more poignantly than he had before he went away. In the old days, his father would have been at the station to meet him. There would have been a hearty shout, and....

"I must go," he said to himself, "I must go. I can't bear to be here now."

He went down to the village and telegraphed to Mrs. Graham telling her that he would be with her two days later, and while he was in the post office, the _Belfast Evening Telegraph_ came in.

"I'll take my copy with me," he said to the post-mistress, and he opened it at once to read the news. There was a paragraph in a corner of the paper, which caught his eye at once. It announced the death in action of Lord Jasper Jayne.

"My God!" he said, crumpling the paper as he gaped at the announcement.

"Is it bad news, sir?" the post-mistress asked.

"A friend of mine," he answered, turning to her. "Killed at the Front!"

"Aw, dear," she said. "Aw, dear-a-dear! An' there'll be plenty more, sir. There's young fellas away from the village, sir. My own nephew's away. You mind him, don't you, sir! Peter Logan!..."

"Peter Logan!"

"Ay, he used to keep the forge 'til he married Matt Hamilton's niece, an' then he took to the land. Nothin' would stop him, but to be off. Nothin' at all would stop him. I toul' him myself the Belgians was Catholics an' the Germans was Protestants, but nothin' would stop him...."

"Sheila Morgan's husband," Henry murmured.

"Ay," she answered, "that was her name before she was married. He's trainin' now, an' in a while, I suppose, he'll be off like the rest of them. Och, ochanee, sir, isn't this a terr'ble world, wi' nothin' but fightin' an' wringlin'? Will that be all you're wantin', sir?"

"Yes, thanks," he said.

Poor old Jimphy! They had all been contemptuous of him ... and now!...

Cecily would be free now! Oh, but what of that? Poor Jimphy! He had not wished for much from life ... and sometimes it had seemed that he had got much more than he needed....

"The best of us can't do more than he did," Henry thought as he walked home. "A man can't give more than he's got, and Jimphy's given everything!"

7

He started up, and looked about the room, and while he listened, he could hear the big clock in the hall sounding three times. He was shivering, though he was not cold. In his dream, he had seen Jimphy, all bloody and broken....

"Oh, my God, how horrible!" he groaned.

He got up and went to the window, but he could not see beyond the high trees, which swayed and moaned and took strange shapes in the wind. His dream still held his mind, and as he looked into the darkness and saw the bending branches yielding and rebounding, it seemed to him that he saw the soldiers rushing forward and heard their cries, hoarse with war lust or stifled by the blood that gushed from their mouths as they staggered and fell ... and as he had seen him in his dream, so he saw Jimphy again, running forward and shouting as he ran, until suddenly with a queer wrinkled look of amazement on his face, he stopped, and then, clasping his hands to his head, tumbled in a shapeless heap on the ground ... but now it seemed to him that as Jimphy fell, his face changed: it was no longer Jimphy's face, but his own.

"My God, it's me!" he cried, shrinking away from the window, and clutching at the curtains as if he would cover himself with them. "My God, it's _me_!"

He shut his eyes tightly and stumbled back to bed. He bruised himself against a chair, but he was afraid to open his eyes, and he rolled into bed, covering himself completely with the clothes, and buried his face in his folded arms. In his mind, one thought hammered insistently: _I must live! I must live! I must live!_

8

"I'm run down," he said to himself in the morning. "That's what's the matter with me. I'm run down!"

His father's death had affected him, he thought, far more than he had imagined. He would be all right again after a rest in Devonshire. It was natural that he should be in a nervous state ... quite natural. He would go straight to Boveyhayne from Liverpool. He could catch the Bournemouth Express, and change at Templecombe. ... "That's what I'll do," he said, and he hurried downstairs to prepare for his journey.

THE SEVENTH CHAPTER

1

He changed his mind at Liverpool. "I'll go to London first," he said, "and see Roger and Rachel. I might as well hear anything there is to hear!" And so he had telegraphed to Roger who met him at Euston.

"Gilbert's going out in a few days," Roger said, when they had greeted each other.

"Out?"

"Yes. He's going to the Dardanelles!... This job's serious, Quinny!" he added grimly. "Our two months' estimate was a bit out, wasn't it? I suppose you haven't heard from Ninian lately? He hasn't written to me for a good while."

"Not lately," Henry answered, "but I shall hear of him to-morrow when I get to Boveyhayne. I'll write and let you know!"

"My Big Army book's gone to pot, of course!" Roger went on. "At present anyhow!..."

"The War's done for the Improved Tories, I suppose?"

"Absolutely. They've all enlisted. Ashley Earls is in the R.A.M.C. He went in last week. He couldn't go before ... he was ill. You remember Ernest Carr. He tried to enlist when the War began, but he was so crippled with rheumatism that they hoofed him out. Well, he's been living like a hermit ever since to get himself cured, and he says he's going on splendidly. He thinks he'll be able to join before long...."

"I wonder if I ought to join," he went on, more to himself than to Henry. "I've thought and thought about it ... but I can't make up my mind. I've got a decent connexion at the Bar now, and if I go into the Army, I shall lose it. The fellows who don't go will get my work. And if the War lasts as long as Kitchener reckons, I shall be forgotten by the time I get back ... and I shall have to begin again at an age when most men have either established themselves or cleared out of the profession altogether. I want to do what's right, but I can't reconcile my two duties, Quinny. I've a duty to England, of course, but I think I have a bigger duty to Rachel and Eleanor. If they'd only conscript us all, this problem wouldn't arise ... not so acutely anyhow. I suppose the Government is having a pretty hard time, but they do seem to act the goat rather! There's a great deal of talk about a man's duty to England, but very little talk about England's duty to the man. However!..." He did not finish his sentence, but shrugged his shoulders and looked away.

"I don't feel happy," he went on after a while, "when I see other men joining up, but I've got to think of Rachel and Eleanor.... When I was going to meet you, Quinny, I passed a chap on crutches. His leg was off!... He made me feel damned ashamed. I suppose that's why they let the wounded go about in uniform so freely; to make you feel ashamed of yourself. That's what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid I shall rush off to the recruiting office in a burst of emotion ... and I must think of Rachel and Eleanor!..."

"I don't see why you should go before I do, Roger," Henry interjected.

"Are you going, Quinny?"

Henry flushed. It hurt him that there should be any question about it.

"Yes," he said.

"I don't think of you as a soldier, Quinny!"

"I don't think of myself as one!" He paused for a moment, and then, impetuously, he turned to Roger.

"Roger," he said, "do you think I'm ... neurotic? Would you say I'm ... well, degenerate?"

"Don't be an ass, Quinny!"

"I'm serious, Roger. I'm not just talking about myself, and slopping over!"

"You're highly strung, of course, but I shouldn't say you were neurotic. You're healthy enough, aren't you!"

"Oh, yes, I'm healthy enough, but I'm such a damned coward, Roger, and sometimes some perfectly uncontrollable fear seizes me ... silly frights. I never told you, did I, how scared I was when Mrs. Clutters died!..." He told Roger how he had trembled outside the door of the dead woman's room. "Things like that have happened to me ever since I was a kid. I make up my mind to join the Army, and then I suddenly get panicky, and I can almost feel myself being killed. I'm continually seeing the War ... me in it, crouching in a trench waiting for the order to go over, and trembling with fright ... so frightened that I can't do anything but get killed ... and it's worse when I think of myself killing other people ... I feel sick at the thought of thrusting a bayonet into a man's body ... squelching through his flesh ... My God!..."

"Yes, I know, Quinny!" Roger said. "One does feel like that. But when you're there, you don't think of it ... you're more or less off your head ... you couldn't do it if you weren't. They work you up to a kind of frenzy, and then you ... just let yourself go!"

"But afterwards! Don't you think a man 'ud go mad afterwards when he thought of it? I should. I know I should. I'd lie awake at night and see the men I'd killed!..."

A passenger in the train had told a story of the trenches to Henry, who now repeated it to Roger.

"One of our men got hold of a German in a German trench, and he bayonetted him, but he did it clumsily. There wasn't enough room to kill him properly ... he couldn't withdraw the bayonet and stick it in again and finish the man ... and there they were, jammed together ... and the German was squealing, oh, horribly ... and our men had to come and haul the British soldier out of the trench. He'd gone off his head!..."

"One oughtn't to think of things like that, Quinny!"

"But if you can't help it? What terrifies me is that I might turn funk ... let my lot down!..."

"You wouldn't. You're the sort that imagines the worst and does the best. I shouldn't think of it any more if I were you. A month at Boveyhayne'll pull you all right again...."

"It's dying that I'm most afraid of. Some of these papers write columns and columns of stuff about 'glorious deaths' at the front, but it doesn't seem very glorious to me to be dead before you've had a chance to do your job ... killed like that ... blown to bits, perhaps ... so that they can't tell which is you and which is some one else!..."

Roger nodded his head. "Our journalists contrive to see a great deal of glory in war ... from Fleet Street, don't they, Quinny!"

"Sometimes," Henry proceeded, "I think that the worst kind of cowardice is to love life too much. That's the kind of coward I am. I love living. I used to cry when I was a kid at the thought that I might die and not be able to run about and look at things that I liked! And that makes you funky. You're afraid to take risks, for fear you should lose your life and have to give up the pleasure of living. I suppose that's what the Bible means when it says that 'whosoever shall lose his life, shall find it.' This hunt for security melts the marrow in your backbone!..."

"Perhaps," said Roger. "Where you go wrong, I think, is in imagining that courage consists in hurling yourself recklessly on things ... in not caring a damn. I don't think that that's courage ... it's simply insensibility ... a sort of permanent imperceptiveness. Really, Quinny, if you don't feel fear, there's not much of the heroic in your acts. That kind of man isn't much braver when he's plunging at Germans than he is when he's plunging at a motor-omnibus or getting into a 'scrum' at Rugger. He simply doesn't see any difference. It's something to plunge at, and so he plunges. I haven't much faith in the Don't-Care-a-Damn Brigade. They're more anxious to get V. C's than to get victories. Their courage is just egoism ... they're thinking, not of their country, but of themselves. The real hero, I think, is the man who makes himself do something that he's afraid to do, who goes into a thing, trembling with fright, but nevertheless goes into it. Did you ever meet Léon Lorthiois?" he said quickly.

"You mean the French painter who used to hang about the Café Royal?" Henry replied.

"Yes. He was killed the other day in France."

"I hadn't heard. Poor chap!"

"I think he showed extraordinary courage. He started off from London to join the French Army ... all his friends dined him jolly well ... and wished him good-luck, and so on, and then he went off. And a week later, he turned up again with a cock-and-bull story about having been arrested as a deserter. He said he'd escaped from prison and, after a lot of difficulty and hardship, got back to England. But he hadn't done anything of the sort. He'd funked it at the last. He got as far as Dover, and then he turned back ... frightened. He stayed in London for a while ... and then he tried again ... and this time he didn't funk it! They say he was fighting splendidly when he was killed. Men have got the V.C. for less heroic behaviour than that. He'd conquered himself. I used to despise that fellow because he wore eccentric clothes and had his hair cut in a silly fashion ... but I feel proud now of having known him!"

2

Mary met him at Whitcombe, and they walked home, sending his trunk and portmanteau on in the carriage with Widger. He had anticipated their meeting with strange emotion, feeling as if he were returning to her after a time of misunderstanding, richer in knowledge, more capable of sympathy. He had not seen her since the first performance of "The Magic Casement," and very much had happened to them since then. His desire for Cecily seemed to have died. He had not troubled to visit her in London ... he could have found time to do so, had he been anxious to see her ... but he had not the wish. He had not written to her about Jimphy ... he could not bring himself to do that ... and the thought that she might wish to see him did not stir his mind. He felt for her what a man feels for a woman he has loved, but now loves no more: neither like nor dislike, but, occasionally, curiosity that did not last long. She moved him as little as Sheila Morgan had done when he saw her in the field at Ballymartin, big with child, watching her husband drilling.

"There are permanent things in one's life, and there are impermanent things ... and you can't turn the one into the other," he thought to himself, as the little branch railway drove down the Axe Valley. "I wanted Cecily ... and then I didn't want her. There's no more to be said about it than that!"

There were very few people waiting on the platform when the train drew into Whitcombe, and so Henry and Mary saw each other immediately, and when he saw her, standing on the windy platform, with her hand to her hat, he felt more powerfully than he had ever felt it, his old love for her surging through him. Nothing could ever divert him from her for very long ... inevitably he would return to her ... whatever of permanence there was in his life was centred in her. He led her out of the station and they walked along the road at the top of the shingle ... and as they walked, suddenly he turned to her and, drawing her arm in his, told her that he loved her.

"I haven't much to offer you, Mary ... I'm a poor sort of fellow at the best ... but I need you, and!..."

She did not answer, but she looked up at him with shining eyes....

"My dear!" he said, and drew her very close to him.

3

They went up the path over the red cliffs and then climbed the steep steps that led to the top of the White Cliff. The night was beginning to gather her clouds about her, but still they did not hurry homewards. Far out, they could see the trawlers returning to the Bay, dipping and rising and plunging and reeling before the wind as from a heavy blow, and then, when it seemed that they must fall, righting themselves and moving swiftly homewards. Beneath them, the sea splashed in great thick waves that tossed their spray high in the air, and the gulls and jackdaws spun round and up and down or huddled themselves in the shelter of the cliffs.

"Mary!" he said, putting his arm about her.

"Yes, Quinny!" she answered so quietly that he could not hear her above the noise of the sea and the wind.

He raised her lips to his and kissed her.

"My dear!" he said again.

4

There was news of Ninian for them when they reached the Manor. Mrs. Graham, with his letter in her hand, met them at the door.

"He's coming home on leave," she said. "He'll be here to-morrow night. Then he's going out!..."

She turned away quickly, after she had spoken, and they followed her silently into the drawing-room. She stood for a while at the window, gazing down the avenue where the oaks and the chestnuts mingled their branches and made a covering for passers-by.

"I'll just go upstairs," Henry began, but before he could leave the room, Mrs. Graham turned away from the window and went to him.

"I've put you in your old room, Henry," she said. "How are you! You don't look well!"

"I'm tired ... but I shall be all right presently. I'll just go upstairs now!..."

He left her hurriedly, for Mary was anxious to tell her mother of their betrothal, and he wished her to know as quickly as possible. He dallied in his room so that she might have plenty of time in which to learn Mary's news. He sat on the wide window-seat and let his mind roam over his memories. It was in this room that he had first told himself that he loved Mary ... it was at this very window he had stood while he resolved that he would marry Sheila Morgan, and again had considered what Ninian and Gilbert had said about men who marry out of their class. Almost he expected to hear the door opening as Gilbert walked in, just as he had done then....

"It's no good mooning like this," he said to himself, and then he went downstairs again.

Mary was sitting beside her mother, holding her hand, and as he entered she turned to look at him, and smiled so that he knew what he must do, and so, without hesitation, he crossed the room to Mrs. Graham and kissed her.

"I'm very glad, Henry!" she said. "Sit down here!"

She moved so that he could sit beside her, and when he had settled himself, she put her hand on his shoulder. "It's nice to have you back again," she said.

They spent the time until dinner in desultory talk that sometimes lapsed into lengthy silence. A high wind was blowing up from the sea, and when they had dined, they drew their chairs close to the fire, and sat quietly in the warmth of it. They could hear the heavy rustle of the leaves as the trees swayed in the wind, and now and then raindrops fell down the chimney and sizzled in the hot coals. The lamps were left unlit, and the firelight made long shadows round the room, flickering over the old polished furniture and the silverware and the dim portraits of dead Grahams....

Mary moved from her chair and, placing a cushion on the floor between Henry and her mother, she sat down and leant her head against him. He bent forward slightly, and placed his hand on her shoulder, and as he did so, she put hers up and took hold of it and so they sat in exquisite peace and quietness until the rising wind, gathering itself together in greater strength, flung itself heavily on the house and shook it roughly. In the lull, they could hear the rain beating sharply on the windows ... and as they listened to the noise of the storm, their minds wandered away, and in their imagination they could see the soldiers in France, crouching in the dark trenches, while the wind and rain beat about them without pity; and in the mind of each of them, probing painfully, was this persistent thought: Here we are in this comfort ... and there they are _in that_!

5

When Mary had gone to bed, Mrs. Graham began to talk of her to Henry.

"I always knew that she and you would marry, Henry," she said, "even when you seemed to have forgotten about her. You ... you were very fond of Lady Cecily Jayne, weren't you, Henry?" He nodded his head. He wanted to explain that that was over now, that it had been a passing thing that had no durability, but he could not make the explanation, and so he did not say anything. "I thought her a very beautiful woman," Mrs. Graham went on. "If I'd been a boy I think I should have loved her, too. Boys are like that!"

She was so gentle and kind and understanding that he lost his shyness, and he confided in her as he would like to have confided in his mother if she had been alive.

"Inside me," he said, "I always loved Mary, even when I was obsessed by ... by some one else. I can't tell you how happy I am, Mrs. Graham. I feel as if I'd got home after a long and bitter journey ... and I don't want to go away again ever. Just to look at Mary seems sufficient ... to know that she's there ... that I can put out my hand and touch her...."

"Ninian will be glad, too," she said, speaking quickly to cover up the difficulty he had in finishing his speech.

"We've been awfully good friends, we four," he replied, "Ninian and Roger and Gilbert and I. I've always felt about them that we could go on with our friendship just where we left off, even if we were separated from each other for years. We're all proud of each other. I used to think, when we first lived in that house in Bloomsbury, that we'd never separate ... that we'd form a sort of brotherhood of work and friendship ... Roger always preached about The Job Well Done ... but, of course that was impossible. We were bound to diverge and separate ... all sorts of things compel men to do that. Roger married, and now Gilbert and Ninian are soldiers...."

"I feel proud and afraid," Mrs. Graham said. "I'm glad that Ninian has joined ... I think I should hate it if he hadn't ... and yet I wish too that ... that he weren't in it. I'm not much of a patriot, Henry. I love my son more than I love my country. I've never been able to understand those women one reads about who offer their sons gladly. I don't offer Ninian gladly. I offer him ... that's all. I know that men have to defend their country, and I love England and I'm proud to be English ... but when I've said all that, it's very little when I remember that I love Ninian. I suppose that that's a selfish thing to say ... but I don't care whether it is or not!..." She stopped for a moment or two, and then, with a change of voice, she said, "Do you think the war will last long, Henry?"

"I don't know," he replied. "Nobody seems able to form any estimate. When it began I thought it couldn't possibly last for longer than two months, but it looks like going on for a very long time yet. We move forward and we move back ... and more men are killed. That's the only result of anything at present!"

"It's strange," she murmured, "how indifferent one becomes to the death lists. I thought my heart would break when I saw the first Devon casualties, but now one simply doesn't feel anything ... just a vague regret. Sometimes I think I'm growing callous. I can't feel anything when I read that thousands of men have been killed and wounded. It's almost as if I were saying to myself, 'Is that all? Weren't there more?...' I'm not the only one like that. People don't like to admit it, but I've heard people confessing ... I confess myself ... that I get a ... kind of shocked pleasure out of a big casualty list! ... Oh, isn't it disgusting, Henry? One gets more and more coarse every day, less sensitive!..."

"Yes," he said, nodding his head and staring into the fire which was now burning down.

And everywhere, it seemed to him, that coarsening process was going on, a persistent blunting of the feelings, an itching desire for more and grimmer and bloodier details. One saw it operating in kindly women who visited soldiers in hospital or took them for drives ... an uncontrollable wish to hear the ghastlier things, a greedy anxiety for "experiences." ... And the soldiers loathed these prying women in whom lust had taken a new turn: the love lust had turned to blood lust, and those who had formerly itched for men (and even those who had not) itched now for horrors, more and more horrors.... "Tell me, now," they would say, "did you kill any Germans? I suppose you saw some awful things...."

One saw this coarsening process operating on men with incredible swiftness. Their tastes became edgeless ... they entertained themselves with big, splashy things, asking for noise and glare and an inchoate massing of colour, and crowds and crowds of bare girls. There was a demand for Nakedness, not the nakedness of cleanly, natural things, but the Nakedness that is partly covered, the Nakedness that hints at Nakedness....

"That's inevitable, I suppose," Henry thought to himself.

The sloppier journalists made a cult of blasphemy and foul speech. The drill-sergeant was regarded as the most entertaining of humourists, and decent men who had never done more than the normal and healthy amount of swearing, began to believe that it was impossible to be manly unless one bloodied every time one spoke: and swearing, which is a good and wholesome and manly and picturesque thing, suddenly became like the gibbering of an idiot.... One was led to believe that the drill-sergeant spent his time in ordering men to "bloody well form bloody fours!" It was immaterial to the sloppier journalists that the drill-sergeant did not do anything of the sort ... and so the legend grew, of a great Army going into battle, not with the old English war-cries on their lips or with new cries as noble, but with "Bloody!" for their watch-word, and "Who were you With Last Night!" for their war-song....

6

"I often wonder what things will be like when the war is over," Mrs. Graham said. "Men can't live like that without some permanent effect. Their habits will be rougher, more elementary, I suppose, and they'll value life less highly. I don't see how they can help it. You can't see men killed in that careless way ... and feel any sanctity about life. I think life will be harsher for women after the war than it was before...."

She remembered that Ninian's father had always declared that the Franco-German War had brutalised Germany.

"He'd lived in Germany for a long while," she said, "and people admitted that Germany had changed after the War ... grown coarser and leas kindly!..."

They talked on in this strain until the clock chimed twelve. The storm still blew over the house, but the rain had ceased, and when they looked out of the window, they could see a rift in the clouds, through which the moon tore her way.

"Good-night, Henry," she said, bending towards him, and he kissed her cheek and then opened the door for her.

"Good-night!" he said.

7

Ninian came home on the next day, and when they had told him the news of Henry's engagement to Mary, he was full of cheers. "Good!" he said. "Now I shall be able to keep you in order, young fellow. I shall be a Relation!..."

"Oh, I've a note for you," he exclaimed, as they drove home. "It's from Gilbert. I met him in town. He'll be on his way out before I get back. He'd like to have come down here, but he couldn't manage it. He sent his love to you, Mary, and you, mother! He looks jolly fit ... never seen him look fitter!"

He handed Gilbert's note to Henry who put it in his pocket. He would read it, he told himself, when he was alone.

"We're hopping off to France next week," Ninian said. "I suppose," he added, turning again to Henry, "you saw that Jimphy Jayne was killed. Rough luck, wasn't it? I met a fellow who was in his regiment ... home on sick-leave ... and he says Jimphy fought like fifty. Gilbert says Cecily's bearing up wonderfully!"

"He's seen her then?" Henry asked.

"Yes. She met him in the street ... and as he says, she's bearing up wonderfully. He didn't say a great deal, but I imagine he didn't admire the attitude much. Rum woman, Cecily!" He had grown together more since he had been to South America, and his figure, that was always loose-looking and a little hulking, had been tightened up by his training.

"I don't like your moustache, Ninian," his mother said, looking with disfavour at the "tooth-brush" on his upper lip.

"Nor do I," he replied, "but you have to wear something on your face ... they don't think you can fight if you don't ... and this sort of thing is the least a chap can do for his king and country. When are you two going to get married?"

His conversation jumped about like a squib.

"Oh, not yet," Mrs. Graham hurriedly exclaimed. "There's plenty of time...."

"I should like to get married at once," said Henry.

"No, not yet," Mrs. Graham insisted. "I won't be left alone yet awhile...."

There was a learned discourse from Ninian on lengthy engagements which filled the time until the carriage drove up to Boveyhayne House, where it was dropped as suddenly as it was begun.

Indoors, Henry read Gilbert's letter.

* * * * *

"_My dear Quinny_," he wrote, "_I'm writing this in Soho with a pen that was made in hell._" Then there was a splutter of ink. "_There_," the letter went on, "_that's the sort of thing it does. I believe this pen was brought to Soho by the first Frenchman to open a café here, and it's been handed down from proprietor to proprietor ever since. Ninian and I have been dining together, and as he's going down to Boveyhayne to-morrow, I thought I might as well write to you because I shan't see you again for a while. I'm off to Gallipoli in a day or two. I dined with Roger and Rachel last night, and they told me that you looked rather pipped before you went to Devonshire. I hope you'll soon be all right again. I wish we could have met, but it can't be helped. We must just meet when we can. It seems a very long while, doesn't it, since we were at Tre'Arrdur together? It'll be jolly to be there again when the war's over. You've no idea how interested I've become in this job, far more interested than I ever imagined I should be. And I've changed very largely in my attitude towards the War. I 'joined up' chiefly because I felt an uncontrollable love for England that made me want to do things that were repugnant to me, and also because I thought that the Germans had behaved very scurvily to the Belgians; but I don't feel those emotions now particularly. I do, of course, feel proud of England, and the sight of a hedgerow makes me want to get up on my hindlegs and cheer, but I've got something else now that had never entered into my calculations at all ... and that is an extraordinary pride in my regiment and a strong desire to be worthy of it. I've just been reading a book about it, a history of the regiment, and it's left me with a sense of inheritance ... as I should feel if I were the heir of an old estate. This thing has a history and a tradition which gives me a feeling of pride and, perhaps more than that, a sense of responsibility. ... 'You mustn't let it down' I keep telling myself, and I feel about all the men who served in the regiment from the time it was formed, that they are my forefathers, so to speak. I feel their ghosts about me, not the alarming sort of spook, but friendly, sympathetic ghosts, and I imagine them saying to me, 'Sergeant Farlow, you've got to live up to us!' I've not told any one else about this, because I'm afraid of being called a sloppy ass ... and perhaps it is sloppy ... but you'll understand what I feel, so I don't mind telling you. I shall write to you as often as I can, and you must write to me and tell me what you're doing. I wish we could have gone out together. Sometimes I get a creepy-crawly sort of feeling that nearly turns me inside out ... a feeling that this is good-bye for good, but I suppose most fellows get that just before they go out. I began another play about a month ago, and I think it will be good, much better than anything else I've done. I wish I had time to finish it before leaving home. This is rather a mess of a letter, and I must chuck it now, for Ninian is getting tied up in an effort to cultivate a cordial understanding with the waiter, and I shall have to rescue them both or there'll be a rupture between the Allies. Give my love to Mary and Mrs. Graham. I'd have gone to Boveyhayne to see them if I possibly could, tell them. So long, old chap!_

"_Yours Ever_,

"_Gilbert Farlow_."

* * * * *

He showed the letter to Mary, and as he gave it to her, he felt a new pleasure in his love for her, the pleasure of sharing things, of having confidences together.

"Gilbert's a dear," she said, when she had finished reading the letter. "It would be awfully hard not to be fond of him!"

He took the letter and put it in his pocket, and then he put his arm in Mary's and led her to the garden where the spring flowers were blowing. "I've had great luck," he said. "I have Gilbert for my friend and I have you, Mary, to be my wife, and I don't know that I deserve either!"

"Silly Quinny!" she said affectionately.

8