Chapter V: Part 5

The afternoon was as the morning--a weary journeying whereof he knew not the goal. The grey horse plodded, the women sat hunched amid their bundles, and William tramped on his blistered feet at the tail of the creaking cart; when he looked ahead the road, as far as his eye could reach, was dotted with fugitive tramps and fugitive vehicles--and when he looked back there were others following in their tracks. For the most part, however, he looked neither back nor forward but trudged with his eyes on the ground through the whitened grass at the roadside. No rain had fallen for many days and the road was deep in dust; it hung heavy in the air and when a car went by it rose in clouds like smoke. The trees were thick with it, and every man's garments were powdered by its uniform grey.

More than once their way led them through a village--which might have been always the same village, so alike was its aspect and its doings. Always some of the houses would be closed and some in the act of emptying; in each and all was the same scene of miserable haste, of loading carts, of families, scared and burdened, setting out on their flight to the southward. It was a scene that grew so familiar to William that, staggering with the weight of his own weariness, he hardly turned his head to watch it; it affected him only by the halts it caused, by the need of manoeuvring through a crowd. Cut off from his fellows by the lack of intelligible speech, he trudged on like an animal at the tail of the cart, ignorant as an animal of what the next hours might bring him.

There were moments when it seemed to him that he was asleep and would surely waken; when he put out his hand to touch something and feel that it resisted and was real--a dusty axle, a gate, a wall, the dusty bark of a fruit-tree. And there were other moments when the _now_ was real, and he seemed to have newly wakened from the dream of a world impossible--of streets and stations and meals that came regularly, of life that was decent and reasonable and orderly, with men like unto himself.... Late in the afternoon he started and lifted his head in sudden trembling recognition of a sound reminiscent, and because reminiscent beloved--the near-by whistle of a passing engine, the near-by clank of a train. The note of the whistle, the sight of a long line of trucks--but a field's-breadth away behind a fence--brought a rush of hope to his heart and a rush of tears to his eyes. His soul thrilled with the promise of them; after the vagabond horror of the last few days they stood for decency, for civilization, for a means of escape from hell. His eyes followed the train with longing as it snorted over a level meadow and wound out of sight behind a hill--followed it with longing, with something that was almost love.

A mile or two further they passed a level crossing and soon after came again on a village. It was larger than any they had so far traversed, and in ordinary times must have been of a prosperous importance; now many of its windows were bolted and shuttered, denoting the flight of inhabitants whom others were preparing to follow. The sun was red in the west when they reached its outskirts.

It was when they were about halfway along the wide paved street that there came a loud cry from the cart--so loud and so sudden that the driver pulled at his horse.

The cry had come from the hard-faced peasant woman who was leaning over Griselda. The life in William stood still as he saw her face, and she had to beckon to him twice before he moved to climb into the cart; she gave him a hand as he climbed and half jerked him over the bundles.... Griselda had died very quietly in the straw at the bottom of the cart.

*CHAPTER XII*

Some one, he thought, kept him back from the body while they lifted it down from the cart; there was a stir and bustle and three or four people gathered round, hiding it for a moment from his sight. One, he remembered, had the goat by the horns and was trying to drag it aside; the goat was refractory, kicked and bleated and made itself the centre of a scuffle. Afterwards he pushed through them all and stood looking down at his wife.

As he looked at her--limp, with glazed eyes and fallen jaw--there swam before his memory a pitiful vision of the dear Griselda he had married. He saw her--this huddle of rags and dirt--in her wedding garments, fussed and dainty, with her bouquet tied with suffragette ribbons. He remembered the expression, self-conscious and flushing, wherewith she had given her hand that he might place the ring on her finger; and how, when they were first alone as man and wife, he had taken the hand that wore the ring and kissed it till she drew it away. The crowd in the little house at Balham, the handshakes, the well-wishing faces--they were all so close and so present that they gave the lie to this dead woman dropped by the roadside. He looked down stupidly while the bystanders whispered and stared.

He did not know how long he sat beside her, nursing a dead hand in his own; but he knew he hated and shrank from the people around him--a group that kept forming and moving away and whispering as it gazed at himself and the body of his wife. It was a changing little crowd, never more than a dozen or so; men and women who stopped in their passing by, muttered questions, heard low answers, looked curious or pitying and moved on. He hated its inquisitiveness, he shrank from its pity, desiring to be alone with his dead. That he might not see its curious and pitying faces he pressed a hand over his eyes.

After some time--either minutes or hours--came a hand on his shoulder that stayed till he moved and looked up. He who had touched him wore the garb of a priest; was stout, not over-well washed or brushed, but kindly of manner and countenance. He spoke while the crowd stared and listened; William moved his head irritably, muttered, "I can't understand what you say," and would have covered his eyes again if he had not heard an English voice beside him. It was a woman who had caught his words and now pushed through the bystanders: a tall young woman in tweed coat and skirt, who had stayed to look over the shoulders of the shifting group.

"You are English?" she said. "What has happened?" He stared up at her for a moment, amazed at the sound of his own tongue.

"My wife is dead," he told her; and, hearing himself say the words aloud, he burst into a passion of sobbing. Through it he choked incoherent appeals to "take them away--for God's sake to let him be alone." He turned his face to the wall and wept, long and brokenly, as one who has nothing more to hope; and for a time they left him till the paroxysm should wear itself out.

When he turned his head at last the crowd that he hated had scattered; perhaps the priest and the Englishwoman had persuaded it away, for they were the only two near him. The Englishwoman, with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her tweed coat, was standing at his shoulder, waiting till he was ready to listen.

"Will you come with me?" she asked. "It will be better." Her tone, though very gentle, was authoritative and brought him instinctively to his feet; but once there he hesitated to follow her and stammered that he could not leave----

"It will only be for a moment. The priest--he will see--he will bring her."

She put a hand on his arm and led him unresisting down the street--a hundred yards or so, past the church and into a house standing back from the road in a garden. He knew afterwards that it was the village presbytery and that the little woman who moved aside from the garden gate to let them pass in was the priest's elderly housekeeper. His companion spoke to her in French, no doubt to explain their arrival; and the old woman trotted ahead to the house, opened a door to the right and ushered them into a sitting-room that smelt of unopened window. It was a ceremonious as well as a stuffy little room; there were good books lying on a table in the centre and stiff chairs ranged against the walls. Having offered them a couple of the stiff-backed chairs the housekeeper withdrew to her vigil at the garden gate; William sat where she had placed him, but the Englishwoman walked to the window.

"I wish I could help you," she said with her back towards him. "I know nothing seems any good at such a time, but if there is anything you want----"

She was giving him more than she knew by her presence, by speaking in their common tongue; the sound of the familiar, comprehensible English was as the breaking of an iron barrier between him and the rest of mankind. She was talking to him--talking, not mouthing and making strange noises. He was back in the world where you spoke and your fellows understood you, where you were human--intelligent, intelligible--not an animal guided by nod and beck or driven to labour by blows. Comprehensible speech meant not only sympathy, but the long-denied power of complaint--and the pent and swollen misery of his last few days was relieved by a torrent of words. She stood and listened while he sobbed and talked incoherently. There was small plan or sequence about his tale--he went backwards and forwards in it, started afresh and left gaps; but she realized that he was telling it not for her benefit, but for his own relief, let him pour himself out and refrained from interruption even when his talk was most entangled. She took it as a good sign when at last he paused and looked up to ask of her what it all meant, what had happened, and where he was now?

She told him, as briefly as might be, what Heinz had told him--of a world in upheaval and nations at grips with each other; the same story if not from the same point of view. She added that he was now on French soil (which he had not guessed) some miles from the Belgian frontier, and that it would be possible, she hoped, to make the journey onward by rail. The French were falling back and the district had been warned of the likelihood of enemy occupation; she supposed that the needs of the army had absorbed the local rolling-stock, for there had been no passenger train on their small branch line that day. The authorities, however, had promised one to Paris in the morning and she, herself, was waiting in the hope of obtaining a seat. She hesitated and broke off at the sound of shuffling feet in the passage outside--slow feet and uncertain, as of men who carried a burden. William heard the sound likewise and, guessing its meaning, would have risen and gone to the door; but she kept him to his seat with a hand on his shoulder and he obeyed the touch because, at the moment, it was easier to obey than to resist. He sat and trembled, twisting his fingers, while the shuffling died away into momentary silence, followed by trampling and the closing of a door as the burden-bearers went out.... Then silence again, a much longer silence, till the stout priest entered the room, moving quietly, as men are accustomed to move in the neighbourhood of those whom no sound can arouse or disturb. He spoke softly at some length to the Englishwoman, who, having listened and nodded, turned to William and told him that if he would like to go to her----

He followed the priest down the passage to a room at the back of the house; wherein, on a table, and covered by a sheet, they had laid the body of his wife. There were long candles burning around the table and on either side of her a little metal vase filled with roses. The priest stood aside in the doorway for William to enter, bowed his head in a prayer and went out; when he had gone William crept to the table, turned the sheet from her face and looked down--on Griselda dowered with a grave dignity that had never been hers while she lived.... Some one had washed away the stains of the road and arranged the disordered rags that had once been a dress; the hair was smoothed out of its three-day tangle and her poor hands crossed on her breast.

He stayed with her till dusk had thickened into darkness, sometimes standing at her side to look down on her face, sometimes bowed to his knees by the burden of the years without her. When the priest came back to rouse him he was crouched in the attitude of prayer; but his prayer (if such it might be called) was only the eternal petition of the bereaved, "Would God that I had died instead!"

The village sexton was of those who had already fled at the rumour of the oncoming German; so that night the Englishwoman, who had acquired in a west-country garden some skill in the handling of a spade, took turns with a bent old peasant in digging a grave for Griselda. When daylight failed them they dug by the shine of a lantern; the Englishwoman was not over-imaginative or nervous but she found the job an eerie one--the more so since the square-walled cemetery, like French graveyards in general, lay well away from its village--and she was glad when the moment came to pay off her companion and return to her quarters in the little Hotel de la Gare. Other formalities in connection with the funeral there were none--for the reason that the maire and his clerk, who in ordinary seasons would have devoted much time and stationery to the subject, had departed that evening, bearing with them the archives of the commune.

William, for his part, spent the night on the priest's horsehair sofa, next door to the room where the candles burned around the body of his wife. From weariness of the flesh he dozed now and again; but for the greater part of the night lay wakeful and staring at darkness. There were moments when the horsehair sofa shook beneath his sobbing; and there were others when it seemed to him impossible that a horror so brutal and so undeserved should have mangled his harmless life. At one such moment he crept from his couch, felt his way across the room and into the passage--possessed by some wild and unconfessed thought that he might not find Griselda on the sheeted table with her hands crossed over her breast. The door, when he tried it, was locked and the key withdrawn--fastened by the priest or his housekeeper before they retired for the night; but when he knelt down to peer through the keyhole he could see two of the tall church candles and the vase with its bunch of white roses that some one had placed near her head. He crept back, knowing that she lay there indeed, and sat down to stare at the darkness till it softened from black into grey.

The morning was still flushed in the east when the old woman came to him with bread and a bowl of coffee; the coffee was hot, aromatic and sweet, after the fashion of that which had once been brewed by Madame Peys--and, remembering breakfasts not eaten alone, his tears dropped into it thickly. While he ate, sitting humped on the edge of the horsehair sofa, the street outside was already astir with traffic, nomad and military; those fugitives who had rested in the village for the night were once more taking to the road, other fugitives from the neighbourhood were dribbling in to join them, troops were moving up and to-day was even as yesterday. When he had finished his bread and coffee the old woman signed him to the kitchen sink, where she furnished him with soap and a towel; and, the process of washing completed, she produced a clothes-brush, led him out into the garden and attacked with vigour the mud and stain on his garments. He was standing passively while she scoured at his shoulders when the Englishwoman came up, and, looking anywhere except at his face, put his wife's rings into his hands. There were two of them--the new gold band, with a month's wear behind it, and the little engagement half-hoop--and at sight of them the housekeeper ceased to scour and crept away with her brush. He looked down at them lying in his palm till the tears veiled them, and knotted them slowly and tightly in a corner of his handkerchief. His companion cleared her throat and, still looking anywhere except at his face, told him that the train to Paris--very probably the last one to run--would be starting that morning.

"Yes?" he said vaguely, conscious that she expected a reply.

She explained that what she had meant was, the funeral must take place immediately.... Chiefly for the sake of breaking the silence she supposed that his wife was not a Roman Catholic?

He answered "No," staring at a row of hollyhocks and a butterfly that quivered above them.

She asked, she explained, because in that case the priest would have read the proper service. As it was ... She hoped he would understand that they had done their best to--be reverent. But there were difficulties--so many of the tradesmen were leaving or had left already. Carpenters and so on.... He listened stupidly with his eyes on the quivering butterfly, dumbly rebellious at the cruelty that tore him even from the body--and it only dawned on him what she meant by her stumbling hints when she led him through the house to the front door where a cart stood waiting with the priest at the horse's head. It was a farm-cart, borrowed by the priest from a neighbour; and on the floor of it that which had been Griselda lay coffinless and wrapped in a sheet. There were roses scattered on the folds of the sheet and the old Frenchwoman was waiting at the gate with a shapeless little wreath of her own manufacture which she pressed into William's hand.

They set out, a funeral procession of three, which at other times would have drawn many curious glances; the priest leading the horse and William and the Englishwoman walking side by side at the rear of the cart. The cemetery lay outside the village, a half-mile or so from their starting-point, and they passed wayfarers enough on the road, of whom some bared their heads and crossed themselves, and others were too busy with their own sorrows to give even a thought to the dead. The gate of the graveyard was narrow and it was with difficulty that the cart was manoeuvred between its posts. At an ordinary funeral the hearse would have remained in the road; but this was no ordinary funeral nor ordinary day, and it was as well not to tempt the footsore fugitive by the sight of a vehicle unguarded. Accordingly, the cart was manoeuvred through the gate before the priest, William and the Englishwoman lifted out the body of Griselda and carried it to the grave in the corner. The bent-backed old labourer was sitting beside it on the mound that would shortly fill it; he rose when he saw them, leaning on his spade and bared his grey hairs to the dead.

The grave was shallow--but, shallow as it was, the body, being coffinless, was lowered with difficulty and the Englishwoman led William a little way aside that he might not watch while the priest and the peasant performed the last service Griselda would require of man; he understood what she meant and stood with his back to the group round the grave, staring at a granite tombstone bedizened with massive bead wreaths. When she touched him on the shoulder, as sign that he might turn, the priest was crossing himself at his prayers and the old man standing by the heap of new turned earth. He went to the edge of the grave, looked down at the crumpled sheet and then stupidly round at his neighbour. He said nothing, but she thought he was expecting something; so, as the priest still prayed with closed eyes in silence, she struggled with the racial shyness where things of the spirit are concerned and, swallowing her tears, spoke the funeral words for Griselda.

"I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live..."

"Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord ... they rest from their labours."

"Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live ... He cometh up and is cut down..."

"Lord have mercy upon us!"

It was all she could remember; and when William had whispered Amen they left the old peasant to his work.

*CHAPTER XIII*

At the gate of the cemetery they parted from the priest, who had charged himself with the immediate return of the haycart which he had borrowed from a neighbouring farm; he shook hands with them, nodded kindly to the Englishwoman's thanks, climbed into the cart and drove off along the dusty road. They saw him no more and often wondered what became of him when the wave of Teutonic invasion swept over his parish and himself. Their own way lay in the opposite direction--first back to the village inn, where the Englishwoman picked up her bag and a package of provisions for the journey, and then on to the station to await the arrival of the train. William followed her incuriously, without question or comment; and when she broke silence to explain what they were doing he assented, speaking with an effort and hardly knowing to what he assented.

The train to Paris had been announced by the station authorities for an early hour in the morning, but morning dragged on and became afternoon before it put in an appearance. They waited through long and shadeless hours--till two o'clock and after--at the most insignificant of railway stations with a crowd of would-be passengers; a crowd that swelled as the hours crawled on until it flowed from the platform far along the line, and it seemed doubtful if any train, however capacious, could absorb its swarming multitude. It sat in families about the platform and camped and shifted as an untidy fringe to the track; it was querulous, weeping, apathetic--it was also, in patches, malodorous. At midday it picknicked, squalidly enough, out of bottles and bulging handkerchiefs, finding momentary distraction in the process; for the rest it had nothing to do but exchange its miseries, stare at the curve which the train must round, listen uneasily to the echo of artillery and assail the station-master with complaining queries whenever he dared to show his face. For the most part that hapless and harried official--whose subordinates had been reft from him by mobilization and who was only too conscious that his time-table was a snare and a mockery--lay low in his miniature office; whence he peered out now and again to make anxious estimate of the numbers that blackened and overflowed his platform. As time went on and the throng grew denser, he gave up his attempts to reconcile the extent of the crowd with the cubic capacity of a highly problematical train, and retiring to his sanctum, in despair and for good, locked the door on intrusion and complaint.

Whenever--as happened not once, but often--an engine was sighted rounding the curve to the northward, there was instant bustle and expectation on the part of the waiting multitude. Makeshift luggage was collected and clutched at, mothers screamed to their straying young families and herded them together in anxious preparation for the formidable struggle ahead; but not once but often the alarm was a false one, the preparations in vain, as the train sped by without halt. The first to run past was a Red Cross train with bandaged men showing at the windows; as it slid between the platforms the crowd buzzed its disappointment and then--with the exception of some few determined souls who vented their annoyance in raps on the station-master's door--settled down in dejection to continue its weary waiting. Another half-hour of sweltering impatience and again the mothers screamed and rounded up their families, with the same result as before; this time the relentless and undelaying train was packed, not with wounded soldiers, but with refugees from higher up the line--like unto themselves but more fortunate. It was packed to the doors and beyond the doors--since men were hanging on the footboards.

For many reasons William and his guardian avoided the platform where the crowd was thickest and sat under the hedge by the line. During the first hour or two of their weary sojourn she judged him past rousing and left him to his own thoughts; and he sat by her side with his hands hugging his knees and seemingly unconscious of her presence. Later, about midday, when she fed him from the store of provisions she had brought for the journey, she essayed to rouse him by telling him how she had come there and who she was. Her name was Haynes, Edith Haynes; she had been some weeks in the neighbourhood, staying in the country house of some distant French cousins. They had been warned, soon after hostilities broke out, that proximity to the frontier might be dangerous, but had been unable to leave owing to the illness of one of the family. Yesterday the invalid, partially recovered, had been got off with her mother in a car procured with difficulty; as it had other occupants and could not carry the whole party, she--Miss Haynes--had volunteered to remain behind and follow to Paris by rail. William listened, occasionally nodding to show that he listened; in a way he was grateful for her presence, but nothing seemed to matter ... and, seeing that it was as yet too early to help him to other thoughts, she left him again to his silence.

It was after two when a nearing train slowed down as it reached the station--slowed down and came to a standstill to a tumult of pushing and shouting. It was a train of more than ordinary dimensions--a couple of engines to an interminable line of third-class carriages and vans--but long as it was, it was none too long for the needs of the would-be passengers. Vans and carriages alike were already well stocked with humanity; but the other humanity on the platform, rendered desperate by its waiting, hurled itself at the doors and pressed and fought a way in. The sight was not pleasant--there was trampling, expostulation, threats. The angry, frightened crowd was past minding its manners, and at times the rush for the doors was carried on almost with savagery; women were buffeted--and buffeted back--and children swept away in the press. William and his friend--she was the sturdier as well as the taller of the two--clambered up the steps of a covered truck and were thrust through its opening by the weight of those pressing behind them. The truck, when they gained it, was close, evil-smelling and crowded; so crowded that many had to keep their feet for lack of the floor space to sit. When the struggle for places was over--and it was not over quickly--the train was packed end to end with sweating and exhausted travellers.

There followed a journey that to those who endured it seemed endless, a crawl punctuated with halts. The halts were lengthy as well as frequent; sometimes in sidings where refugees perforce gave place to troop trains, sometimes in junctions where they pulled up indefinitely at a platform and where worn-out officials could give no information as to when a fresh start would be made. The waits, wearisome as they were, were by far more endurable than the wretched stages in between; which were stages of sweating heat and smells, of stifling and cramped discomfort. On the platform, at least, it was possible to stretch and breathe; in the vans it was aching backs and bones and a foulness that thickened with the miles. Children wept and sickened as the hours crawled by and all through the darkness their crying was never stilled; as wretched little wailing or angry howl, it mingled always with the throb and clank of the train.

The delicate chill of morning was as nectar after the stench of the crowded night. By special mercy, just as dawn broke they drew up in a siding with fields to the right and left of them; neither William nor his friend was asleep when the train stopped, and, crawling over recumbent bodies on the floor of the van, they dropped down stiffly from their pen and stood breathing in the clean, cool wind. With their damp clothes sticking to their heated bodies, they sucked the air into their lungs--even William, blind with his misery, conscious of the calm loveliness of morning on stretches of green after the reek of the lantern-lit van. His companion, shuddering at the sight of her hands, went in search of water and discovered a tap on the platform; whereat William, in his turn, drank thirstily and soused hands and face before they settled down in a field at the side of the line. There, on the good green turf, they shared the last remnants of their package of food, some bread and an apple apiece. for all the hours they had spent on the train they had accomplished only some half of the distance to Paris; and as refreshment rooms--closed or cleared out by the troops--could no longer be counted on to supply the needs of the traveller, they had little prospect of further sustenance till they reached their journey's end. They ate their small meal sitting as far as they deemed safe from the train and the crowd it had disgorged--ate it in silence, for William had not yet found speech. His world, for the time being, was formless and void, and, as such, incapable of expression.

All day they travelled, as they had travelled on the day before: in jolted crowds, in squalor, in heat, to the sound of the misery of children. They ached, they wearied, they sweated, they thirsted--they halted and lurched on again; too wearied even for impatience, they endured without complaint until even the children were past crying. The sun was low on the horizon when William, drowsily stupid, raised his head from his knees as his friend touched him on the arm. He looked up stupidly--the train was plodding through forest; he had ceased to hope for the journey's end and sat for the most part with his head on his knees in a dull, half-dozing resignation.

"If we don't stop again," she told him, "we ought to be in fairly soon. I think that's Chantilly we've run through. We're only half an hour from Paris--in ordinary times, that's to say."

The times were not ordinary and they took more than half an hour--very much more--to get over the twenty odd miles. They slowed to a crawl for the last stretch of the journey, and outside Paris, between Paris and St. Denis, they halted and waited till well after night had fallen. But at long last the interminable wait was ended and they creaked and crept forward to a platform of the Gare du Nord--where William for the first time set foot in the capital of France. As he did so he remembered a fact that had hitherto slipped his memory--that Heinz and his companions, when they took his pocket-book, had left him without a penny. So far the loss of his purse had not troubled him; he had lived as the beasts live and been cared for even as they; but Paris was civilization where money would be needed for a lodging. He had no resource but his companion, and, as they drifted along with the slow-moving mass on the platform, he appealed perforce to her.

"I'm afraid," he stammered, "I've got no money. They took it away from me--the Germans."

She reassured him briskly with: "Don't worry about that--I've got plenty. I'll settle the hotel and the journey--you can pay me when we get back to London. Stick close to me, whatever you do; if I once lose you in this crowd I shall never find you again."

He replied with a mutter of thanks, and, obeying her injunction to stick close, was crushed, in her wake, past the barrier at the end of the platform, past the heated officials who were striving to deal with the needs of the influx of refugees, and finally out of the station. There, in the open space before the Gare du Nord, he stepped back suddenly from the world of nightmare into the world as he had always known it. The wide, lit street in front of the station was filled with a moving and everyday crowd, in his ears were the buzz of the taxi and the warning clang of the tram. The change from the horrible to normal surroundings--from brutality and foulness to the order of a great town--was so sudden and complete that it took away his breath like a swift plunge into cold water; and as the life of the city enwrapped him and claimed him for its own, for one crazy moment it seemed to him that the last few days were impossible. Their fantastic cruelty was something that could not have been ... and he almost looked round for Griselda.

*CHAPTER XIV*

Edith Haynes knew her way about Paris; and the little hotel in a quiet side-street, where a taxi deposited herself and her companion, was one that had sheltered her in days less eventful and strenuous, and where Madame, in consequence, was compassionate and not contemptuous at being asked to shelter two late arrivals in the last stage of dirt and untidiness. William, before he sat down to eat, had exchanged his torn garments for the suit of an absent son, called up on the first day of mobilization; and for all his ache and dull stupor of sorrow, he knew something of the blessing of bodily relief when he washed in hot water and was clean. He had had no real sleep since the night before Griselda died; now the need for it came down on him like a heavy cloud and, great as was also his need for food, he could hardly keep his eyes open through supper. When he woke next morning it was nearing midday and he had more than slept the clock round.

He pressed the bell as he had been told to do when he woke; and with the coffee and rolls that arrived at the summons came a pencilled note from his mentor. She had gone out to look up her relatives, and also to inquire about the time and manner of the journey from Paris to London; she wrote that she might not be back at the hotel for some hours, but the envelope that enclosed her communication enclosed likewise a tactfully proffered loan for the immediate needs of her fellow-traveller's wardrobe. But for the reminder it would have hardly occurred to him that his wardrobe was in need of renewal; he had grown so accustomed in the last long days to being ordered, guided, or driven that he had lost the habit of directing his own doings. As it was, he breakfasted, dressed himself again in the suit of Madame's absent son, and was instructed by Madame herself where to find a barber for an overdue shave and an outfitter capable of English. Thither he went, made his purchases mechanically and returned to the hotel with his new suit of black in a parcel. It seemed to him, as he walked the Paris streets, as he bought and paid and spoke of things that did not matter, that his sense of loss and his longing for Griselda was stronger even than in the first hours after her death. It was accentuated by his contact with the civilized, the normal; by the sights and sounds of the everyday world to which Griselda belonged. She had had no place in the strange French village where she died, no place in the misery and dirt of the crowded truck; but here where life, to all seeming, was as usual, where the streets were like enough to English streets to produce, after country solitude and the savagery of bloodshed, the illusion of dear familiarity: here she should have walked with her arm in his. Here she would have chatted, have gazed in shop windows and bargained ... and long years faced him with their deadly never as he went his way without her.

Later, when he had returned to the hotel and changed into his new black suit, a wild fit of useless rage came over him--and alone in his third-floor bedroom he cursed the devils who had killed his wife, the devils who had made the war. Under his breath, lest he should be heard in the corridor, he called down the vengeance of God on their evil heads, breaking inevitably, as his own store of invective gave out into lyrical reminiscence of that Biblical lore with which his mother had imbued him through Sunday after Sunday of his childhood; believing in the God whose existence he had usually ignored (and often doubted) because of his need of an avenger and a present help in his trouble. In that moment the God whom he sought--and it may be found--was the Lord God of Hosts, the Mighty One of Israel, Who was wont to strike the wicked and spare not; and the desire of his shaken and rebellious soul was even as the desire of him who sang out his hatred by the alien waters of Babylon. The hotel chambermaid put an end to his whispered prayer and anathema by tapping on the door to inform him that lunch was waiting on the table.

Edith Haynes, when she returned in the late afternoon with news that the journey could be made on the following day by way of Dieppe and Folkestone, found him clad in his new-bought mourning for Griselda and poring over English newspapers. His eyes were still haggard and moved her to pity, but she took it as a good sign that his stupor of grief had passed and that he had begun (as his first question told her) to feel a need for more information which might bridge the month's gap in his knowledge of the outer world. She gave him, with such detail as she had in her possession, the story of the outbreak of war and the causes thereof: and from her he learned for the first time of the ultimatum to Servia, and the tension thereby created; of the political consequences of the invasion of Belgium, and the feverish days of hesitation in England that had ended, on the Fourth of August, with the formal declaration of war. He listened, sometimes puzzled but always intent, from time to time putting a question that revealed his blank ignorance of the network of European politics; to which she replied as clearly as she could, showing him maps and talking on in the hope of distracting him from the thoughts behind his haggard eyes. By degrees she gleaned, from his hesitating queries and disconnected comments, some understanding not only of his profound ignorance of the forces that had brought about the war, but of the upheaval of his mind and soul which was the direct and inevitable consequence of the loss of his former faith. Once or twice as they talked he quoted her scraps and jerks of anti-militarist propaganda--from Faraday, from orators of the Trades Union Congress, from a speech of Philip Snowden's in Parliament urging the reduction of the Navy--and she saw that he was trying to justify to himself his attitude and creed of yesterday. In the midst of a quotation from Faraday on the general strike as a certain preventive of war, he broke off suddenly to appeal to her with: "Every one thought he was right. He seemed so sure. I didn't see how he could be wrong!"

She noticed that, wherever their talk might stray, he came back, time and again, to his central fact--that the blankly impossible had happened and the jest was a brutal truth. That, in the beginning, was all his mind had laid hold of; now, the first stage of amazement over, he was groping instinctively, and perhaps unconsciously, after rights and wrongs of quarrel, and striving to understand how the impossible had come into existence. Edith Haynes had not passed her life in the atmosphere of Internationalism, and would have been more than human had she been an impartial guide to him where the causes of war were concerned--just as he would have been more than human had he been capable of impartial guidance. What he lacked in patriotism he made up in personal suffering; he hated the German because he had been robbed of his wife, and it added but little to the fire of his hatred to learn of faith broken with Belgium. If he listened intently when she told of it, if he pored over newspaper paragraphs dealing with German cruelty to the conquered, it was because they fitted with his mood and justified the loathing in his soul.

It was his persistent poring over English newspapers that brought him in the end the salvation of a definite purpose. An article in _The Daily Chronicle_--some days old--described the beginning of the recruiting campaign for the raising of Kitchener's Army; he read it as he read everything else that explained or described the war. At first the article was nothing but news to him, a mere statement of facts; but as he read further a meaning flamed into the news. Bereft as he was of guidance, his mind swinging rudderless in chaos, he was waiting unconsciously for the man or the impulse that could seize on his helpless emotion and give purpose and direction to his life; thus the journalist's vigorous appeal to the nation's patriotism was driven home by the force of his own experience and became an appeal to himself. The writer had illustrated his argument in the obvious manner, by reference to the condition of invaded Belgium and the suffering of her people under the hand and heel of the enemy; he wrote of women outraged, of hostages killed, of cities laid waste, and of houses fired with intention. He was spurred by indignation, by pity and a natural patriotism, and had laid on his colours--to all but William--with a vivid and forcible pen. To William, as he read, the result seemed lame and pitiful, an inadequate babbling of the living horrors that had burned themselves into his soul; but for all its weakness--perhaps because of it--the article gave him the impulse for which he had been waiting in torment. It may have been his very sense of the inadequacy with which it described what he had known that set his imagination to work, that drove home its purport and made of it a lead to his blind and whirling emotions. He read and re-read while he quivered with impatience at its failure; if the man had seen what he had seen, if the man had lost what he had lost, he could not have argued so tamely. His pen would have been dipped in fire; he would have written so that all men reading him would have rushed to arms. The paper dropped from his hands to the table and he sat staring at a picture of his own making--of a crowd bitter and determined, moved by the tale of wrongdoing to a righteous and terrible wrath. He saw it setting forth to execute justice and avenge innocent blood ... and himself one of it, spurring and urging it on. So he first visualized himself as a soldier--an unscientific combatant of the Homeric pattern, but nevertheless a soldier. The vision thrilled and inspired him, and out of the deep waters of his impotent misery he clutched at the knowledge that he could act, resent, resist; that, ceasing to suffer as the slave suffers, he could give back blow for blow.

There was enough of the old leaven in him to bring him up suddenly, and with something like a round turn, as he realized that the act of striking blow for blow against the German would involve the further act of enlistment and the wearing of the King's uniform. His first mental vision of his warrior crowd had been vague as well as Homeric; he had only seen faces uplifted by courage, not the khaki and buttons below them--seeing himself rather as an avenger of Griselda than as a soldier of the British Empire. But it was only for a moment that he shied Like a nervous horse at the bogey of the "hired assassin." The prophets from whom he had learned his one-time contempt for the soldier were no longer prophets to him, and his conversion was the more thorough from his ingrained and extremist conviction that the opposite of wrong must be right. Conversion, in the sense in which the word is employed by the religious, describes most clearly the process through which he had passed: conviction of ignorance, the burden of Christian; a sense of blind longing and humiliated confusion--and now, at the end, light flashed on him suddenly, salvation figured by the sword.... It was, so to speak, but a partial salvation. He had lost his capacity for absolute faith, for the rapture that comes of infallibility; but he was of all men the last who could live without guidance, and his new creed had at least this merit--it was supported by his own experience. Its articles, had he formulated them, would have been negative rather than assertive--I have ceased to believe in the old, rather than I believe in the new; but it gave him that working hypothesis without which Life to him was impossible.

When he took his seat, next morning, in the train bound for Dieppe, his mind was made up--made up fiercely and definitely--on his future course of action; and as a result something that was by comparison peace had succeeded to the chaos and dazed rebellion of his first few hours of loss. His companion noticed the change in his manner and bearing; it was not that he seemed more resigned, but that he had ceased to drift--his eyes were as haggard as yesterday, but not so vague and purposeless. So far during their brief but close acquaintance she had treated him perforce as she would have treated a child--providing for his bodily and mental needs and giving him kindly orders; now, ignorant and obedient as he still was in the matter of foreign travel, he was once more a reasonable being. He was still for the most part sunk in his own thoughts, but not helplessly and endlessly so; he was capable of being roused and at intervals he roused himself. Once when they halted she was struck by the intentness with which he gazed at a trainload of soldiers in khaki--new come from England and moving up from Havre to the front. They crossed at a wayside station, and the two trains stood side by side for some minutes while William craned out of the window to stare at the brown young faces that were thrust from the opposite carriages. The sight moved him, if not in the same fashion as it moved his companion; he felt no tightening of the throat and no pride in the men themselves. What kept his head at the window till the train moved off was chiefly the thought that soon he would be even as these sunbrowned men of war, the personal desire to know what manner of men they were, how they lived and moved and had their daily military being. Hitherto a soldier of the home-grown variety had been to him nothing more definite than an impression of uniform, khaki and occasionally red; now, with the eyes of his newborn interest, he became aware of detail that had formerly escaped him, and compared him in figure, in face and garment, with Heinz and Heinz's companions. These hot-faced lads smoking pipes and calling jests would be his own comrades in days to come; thus he studied their features, their dress, their manner, as a small boy scans and studies the bearing of his future schoolfellows. If he did not thrill at the sight of young men about to die, he sent with them (remembering Griselda) his strong desire for their great and terrible victory.

Those were the days just before Mons was fought, when France (and others with her) was hopeful of a war that would end at her frontier and beyond it; when, whatever her wiser soldiers may have known, her people in general had no premonition of the coming retreat of the Allied Armies and the coming peril of the capital. There were still some ignorant and optimistic days to live before France as a whole would be stunned by the curt official admission that the enemy was well within her borders--since his battle-line stretched across the country from the Vosges mountains to the Somme. As for railway communication on the western lines, the rush of returning tourists that had followed on the outbreak of war was over, and the rush from Paris that began with the new threat of Kluck's advance was as yet a thing of the future. Thus William and his companion, though they travelled slowly and with lengthy halts, travelled in comparative comfort--finding in unpunctuality and a measure of overcrowding but little to grumble at after their journey by cattle-truck to Paris.

Rouen kept them waiting an hour or two, and there was another long, purposeless halt on the boat in Dieppe Harbour; so that it was nigh upon sundown when they slipped into the Channel and headed north-westward for Folkestone. The day, very calm with the stillness of perfect summer, was even as that day but a month ago when William and his little bride had steamed away from Dover, sitting deck-chair to deck-chair, touching hands when they thought no one saw them. And remembering the fading of those other white cliffs, William's heart cried out against God.

It was well past midnight when they slid into Folkestone Harbour where again there were long delays; so long that morning was red over France when the train drew away from the pier. It was during the two-hour journey to Charing Cross that William first spoke to his friend of his purpose of becoming a soldier; they were not by themselves in the carriage, but the other occupants nodded off to sleep soon after the train had left Folkestone, and for all practical purposes he and Edith Haynes were alone. She was surprised by the announcement, more surprised perhaps than she should have been--less on account of his previous record than because his appearance and manner were so utterly unmilitary. The British soldier of pre-war days was a type, a man of a class apart; it was a type and class to which William Tully was far from approximating, and she found it impossible to picture his essentially civilian countenance between a khaki collar and cap. Her surprise must have shown in her manner, for he began to explain in jerks.

"It seems the only thing to do," he said. "You can't sit down and let it go on; when you've seen what I've seen, you've got to do what you can. And they want men--they're asking for them. The papers say they want all the men they can get ... it's got to be stopped--that devilry--somehow or another ... and there doesn't seem any other way..."

His voice tailed off and he turned his eyes away--to the flying fields where the dew was still wet and the shadows still long upon the grass. When, a few minutes later, he told her suddenly, "It was just as pretty as this--where it happened," she knew that he was mentally transforming the peace and greenery of a Kentish landscape into the background of such an imitation of hell as he had lived through in the Forest of Arden.

It was not till they were well on the London side of Tonbridge that he turned again to his companion. Something that she had said in appreciation of his decision--a kindly meant phrase that commended his courage--had seemingly been held in his mind.

"I don't want you to think it's courage, and I don't want you to think I'm making any sacrifice--I'm not. I'm enlisting because I want to enlist--and there isn't anything else for me to do. Everything's gone now--I haven't anything to go back to. No duties or ... I don't see how you can call it a sacrifice."