Chapter VI: Part 6

He swallowed and halted again and she could only nod in silence. She knew enough of him by this time to know that what he said was truth, having learned in the course of their days of acquaintanceship that he had lost even more than his newly made wife, his hopes of a home and children. In very deed he had nothing to go back to, neither home nor daily occupation; in losing his cocksure, infallible creed he had lost the interests wherewith his days had been filled. His meetings, his busy committees, the whole paraphernalia of his agitator's life, were with yesterday's seven thousand years. Even if Griselda had not died he, knowing what he knew, would have had to begin life again.

Near Chislehurst, reminded of the nearness of London, he put an apologetic question.

"You'll think me very ignorant," he said, "but you see I've never had anything to do with soldiers. Have you any idea how you set about joining the Army?"

She explained that he had only to offer himself, and turned up an English newspaper bought the day before at Dieppe to point out a paragraph giving the situation of the various London recruiting stations. He studied it with interest and showed her that the nearest to Charing Cross was a station on the Horse Guards Parade. She had not understood that his intention was to enlist at the moment of arrival in London, and suggested a delay of a day or two for rest if not for reflection: the life before him was a hard one physically, and he had been passing through a week of exhaustion both physical and mental. To her arguments he shook his head, stubbornly impatient; he was so urgent to translate his new convictions into immediate action that it was with difficulty she prevailed on him to delay at Charing Cross for breakfast, and only manoeuvred him into the hotel by assuring him--whether rightly or wrongly she knew not--that it was as yet far too early in the day for any recruiting official to be at his post. On that assurance he yielded, and they took their last meal together.

She had contracted an odd species of affection for the little bereft and destitute man whom chance had thrown on her hands in his hour of need; it was difficult for her to rid herself of a sense of responsibility for him and his doings: and as they disposed of their eggs and bacon she found herself wondering, with tears in her throat, how he could come through the discipline and hardship for which his soft life had done so little to prepare him. It was pathetic and even ridiculous to think of him as a soldier, this wisp of a town-bred talker; to think of him marching and bearing arms in defence of such as herself--who topped him by a good two inches and had treated him almost as a child. She coaxed him to eat a good breakfast, dawdling over her own that he should sit and rest the longer; and when he suddenly remembered to ask her how much he owed her for the expenses of the last few days, she gave him, with the hastily invented amount, her address in Somerset and made him promise to write and keep her informed of his doings. He, on his part, shrinking instinctively from those who had shared his errors in the old life, clung to her as the one person who understood the new world into which he had so lately entered--understood it because she was part of it; thus neither was unmoved when they shook hands as friends and parted at the door of the hotel. She entered a taxi for Paddington and he turned his face to Whitehall and the tent on the Horse Guards Parade.

As he walked down Whitehall his heart thudded loudly on his ribs. He remembered, with a sudden tremor of rage, how Heinz had boasted of his Kaiser at Westminster and a German entry into London. The very thought made London dearer and finer to him, and he had a vision of himself driving Heinz before him--Heinz and that other, the round-faced young man with black eyebrows who had worked his will on Griselda. He saw himself striking and stabbing at the round-faced young man--beating him down while he prayed in terror for a mercy that was not granted. His lips were a hard white line and his fingers clenched and unclenched. London! by God, it should be not London but Berlin!

He had never dreamed of rejection; he knew vaguely that recruits were required to pass some sort of medical examination, but the idea that his proffered services might be refused had never entered his head. Edith Haynes, like himself, had seen few English newspapers for weeks; thus he did not know till he came to enlist that the standard of measurement for recruits had been raised since the outbreak of war, and that he, standing under five foot five, was not up to the Army's requirements in the matter of breadth and inches. The knowledge took him like a blow between the eyes, and he stood with dropped jaw, incredulous--it was inhuman, it was monstrous that they should take from him his right to strike back. For a moment he had no words; he dressed mechanically, stupid with the shock--while the round-faced man grinned damnably over Griselda dead by the roadside.... And when, in the end, his speech came back and he tried to stammer an appeal, some one patted him good-naturedly on the shoulder, put his hat into his hand, and turned him loose into a world that had no meaning for him.

*CHAPTER XV*

There were many parallels to the case and conversion of William Tully in the first few weeks of the war. There is, and always will be, the self-centred temperament that can shut its eyes to the fact and tread the pathways of the paradise of fools, even if it treads them alone; but on the whole humanity is reasonable and, given a fact, however surprising and savagely unpleasant, accepts it because it must.

Those who struggled hardest against the acceptance of the War-Fact of 1914 were, naturally enough, those who had fiery little battles of their own to fight, and whose own warfare was suddenly rendered null and incompetent by a sudden diversion of energy and interest in the face of the national danger. The war was the successful rival of their own, their sectional strife, overshadowing its importance and sucking the life from its veins. Hence instinctively they sneered at it and strove to ignore its existence; hating it as a minor and incompetent artist may hate the greater professional rival who sings or acts him off the stage. Only by some such reasoning can one account for the fact that the aggressive and essentially militarist type of political enthusiast so often runs to pacifism where the quarrels of others are concerned.

But for the bitter mischance of a honeymoon spent in the Forest of Arden and the consequences thereby brought about, such would, very certainly, have been the mental attitude of William Tully in the August of 1914. His own battles would have absorbed his aggressive instincts, and, never having seen a shot fired in anger, he would have continued, for quite a long time, to think of other battles as enlarged street riots which were thoroughly enjoyed by the bloodthirsty soldiery who provoked them. He would have pooh-poohed the possibility of a war until the war actually broke out; and then, insisting that it was avoidable and should not have been, have clung angrily to his customary interests and done his small energetic best to keep his comrades from straying into that wider and bloodier field where they and their services would be lost to the sectional conflict. Such, very certainly, would have been his course of action had he made his wedding journey to Torquay. Fate and not temperament had willed it that he should be driven to enlist under the rival banner of nationality; but there were others of his kidney whom fate had not driven so brutally, and who, unable to effect, as William had done, a rapid transfer of allegiance and antagonisms, struggled desperately to uphold, in despite of war, their partially deserted standard. Of such was Faraday, dogged and fiercely indefatigable; though the man had soul and brain enough to feel the ground rock beneath him. His ignorance of European politics was a thought less profound than William's, but sufficiently profound to have bred in him a complete disbelief in the possibility of European war; hence his surprise at the international earthquake was almost as great as that of his former disciple. When the unbelievable happened he, as was but natural, was angry--all men are angry when the habit of years is interfered with; and in the first flush of his annoyance ascribed the falsification of his every prediction not to his own blundering, but to the sins of those who did not think as he did. Those who prophesied war--so he argued--had prophesied what they desired.... All the same, he was not, like William, devoid of the imaginative faculty; but the war was as yet a great way off and his hatred of the Government of his own country was real. With time he, too, came to understand that a people may have other foes than those of its own household and be threatened with death from without; when he was called up under the Conscription Act he went without protest, made an excellent soldier and died fighting in a night raid near Hulluch; but in the beginning the habit and association of years was too strong for him and his bitter dislike of his neighbour overpowered his fear of the German. During the first few weeks of the war he held peace meetings at considerable personal risk, which, as became a good fighter, he took, even with enjoyment; distributed printed appeals to pacifist and anti-British sentiment and wrote passionately, if with less than his usual clarity, in _The Torch_. He could not in honesty bring himself to defend every action of his country's enemies and was conscious of occasional difficulty and a sense of thin ice underneath him; at the same time it was against his tradition and principles to admit that the statesmanship of the land he was born in could ever have right on its side. Tradition and principles might have won hands down, making him ardently and happily pro-German, had it not been for the complication introduced by the attitude of other nations which, foreign even as Germany was foreign, had chosen to range themselves with England. Hence a difficulty in indiscriminate condemnation and a momentary confusion of thought and outlook of which Faraday himself was quite clear-brained enough to be conscious; it irritated him and he was sensible of failure and uncertainty.

On the day that William arrived in London and was refused for the British Army, Faraday held a small meeting in a hall in a Bloomsbury side street. The object of the meeting was to consider suitable methods of influencing for the better the existing and lamentable condition of popular opinion; the gathering was not open to the general public, only the initiated being present. Some thirty to forty of the initiated, chiefly secretaries, chairmen and other branch officials of the advanced socialist group of which Faraday was leading light and president--for the most part men, but with a sprinkling of women among them. They had been summoned together by letter and word of mouth; the meeting was private and consultative, described as for sympathizers only, and held at the headquarters of the Central London Branch--a large room, sparsely furnished with chairs and a platform, in the neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road. One of the more muscular members of the branch kept watch and ward in the passage outside the hall, scrutinizing the comrades as they neared the door, lest any uninitiated person or disturber of peace should attempt to gain entry with the faithful; he was thrilled with a vague and grandiose conviction that the meeting was of perilous importance, passed in his familiars--they were all his familiars--with a mysterious nod and compared himself to a sentinel on duty in a post of extreme danger. He was a young man domiciled in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, with uncut hair, a flowing tie and a latent, if hitherto undeveloped sense of humour; and a year or two later, when the Army had claimed him, and he stood in the Ypres salient, in a post of extreme danger, he grinned unhappily between the shell-bursts as the night of the meeting came back to him.

Among his thirty or forty familiars he passed in William Tully--who had come to the hall mechanically, scarce knowing where his steps were guiding him. No wind of the meeting had come to him, but the place was one of his haunts--the Central London Branch, of which he was chairman, assembled there on business once a week. Further, it was used as the address of the Branch, and he was accustomed to call there almost daily for his official letters or the transaction of small official business. Thus it happened, at the close of a bewildered day, that he turned to it almost by instinct.

Perhaps it was a sense of homelessness that drove him to its open doors--for it was not until well towards evening that he had summoned up courage to enter his own dwelling, the little flat he had not yet lived in, made ready for himself and Griselda. If there had been anywhere else to go perhaps he never would have entered it; but his bachelor lodging, he knew, was let to a new tenant, and he had not money enough in his pocket to pay for a lodging elsewhere. His day had been spent on foot; after his refusal at the recruiting station he had walked he knew not whither--here, there, through street after street, that he might not stop and think; and when, in the late afternoon, he found himself sitting on the turf of Primrose Hill, he could not, for the life of him, remember the route by which he had reached it. Sheer weariness of body drove him to shelter, and half an hour later he was dragging his feet up the stairs that led to the flat.

The woman who was to "do" for himself and Griselda had been installed on the premises for some days past; since the outbreak of war she had been in hourly expectation of the arrival of her master and mistress and in some perturbation at the continued lack of news from them. As William was about to walk past the door she had opened to him she stayed him with an inquisitive question--he could not remember the form it took but knew that it must have referred to Griselda's absence, for he told her abruptly that his wife had died in France. She threw up her hands with a screaming exclamation as he hurried past her to shut himself into the bedroom.

There, afraid of her curious sympathy and questions, he shut and locked himself in; with the poignant loneliness of the brand-new furniture that he and Griselda had chosen and lovingly admired; with the poignant company of Griselda's photograph, smiling self-consciously from the centre of the mantelpiece and set in an ornate silver frame that was one of her wedding presents. He held it in his hands till the tears blinded him, kissed it sobbing and laid it face downwards.

The "general," burning with inquisitive sympathy, induced him, after one or two unsuccessful attempts, to open the door to her knocking; pressed on him, in spite of denials, a scratch meal of tea and poached eggs, and hovered round while he ate it. As befitted the occasion she held her apron to her eyes while she extracted as much as she could in the way of information. Later, as she washed up in the kitchen, she heard him moving from one tiny room to another--consumed with a restless misery and a restless wonder as to what he should do with his life. Still later she heard him go out again; though he had hidden away the self-conscious photograph, thrusting it out of sight into a drawer, the brand-new furniture was always there and always waiting for Griselda. The moment came when he could no longer suffer its company and went out into the street to avoid it. Other purpose in walking he had none--and thus it happened that, mechanically and without intent, he drifted into the Bloomsbury side-street where Faraday held his meeting.

The important doorkeeper would have greeted him with more than a nod--would gladly, in fact, have detained him after his four weeks' absence to exchange comments and views on the European situation; but William, in entering, made no response to his "Hallo, back again!" which it may be he did not even hear. He walked straight past the sentinel and into the bare familiar room--where everything, from the seats to their occupants, was just as it had been and where every face was known to him. Time, for a moment, turned back in its traces and yesterday unrolled before his eyes. He gazed at it and sat down slowly--by himself in the last row of chairs.... Edwardes, the Central London secretary, was hugging his ankle as he always hugged it, and Mrs. Jay-Blenkinsop, the formidable treasurer of the Golder's Green branch, frowned through her pince-nez at the speaker with her chin uplifted as of old, wore the same capacious sandals--her crossed knees showed them--and the same cold-gravy-coloured robe. And her son, young Jay-Blenkinsop, as his habit was, sprawled sideways on one chair and curled his long limbs round another. It was all as it had been; and Faraday, on the platform, was speaking with the accents of yesterday.

The important doorkeeper was not the only comrade who had noticed William's return: one or two heads were turned as he came in, but for the most part the audience was intent on the words of the speaker. The heads that turned made some sign of pleased recognition to which William responded automatically, unknowing that he did so. From his seat near the door his eyes wandered slowly over the platform, the hall and its occupants--slowly and with a dull and detached curiosity. What he saw there and heard was unreal, like a scene in an unconvincing play; he had a sense of looking at these people from a great way off, of hearing their voices from a distance. Something separated and held him removed from them.... He had great difficulty in giving his attention to what the speaker was saying; yet in the old days Faraday had always stirred him and to-night he was speaking well.

From thirty to forty convinced adherents assembled at a private conference are not the material upon which a public orator usually throws away his best endeavours; but Faraday that night was speaking not so much to his audience as to himself. Unadmitted, even to his secret soul, he had great and fierce need of conviction; it was with his own doubts that he wrestled, at his own head that he flung both his jeers and his arguments. He was of a finer because more intelligent mould than the Edwardeses and Jay-Blenkinsops who heard him and who were still thinking of the European tragedy as a red herring drawn by the cunning politician across the path of progress. Not for him was their happy imperviousness to the new idea, and, looking down from his platform on their assembled faces, it may have struck him, not pleasantly, that these people were in part of his making; they were, at any rate, the product of a system of which he, in common with politicians of every creed, had not scrupled to make full use.

Be that as it may, he spoke feelingly and well that night; far better and more feelingly than was needed by the numbers, the attitude and calibre of his audience, which was comfortably and stubbornly determined to agree with him before he opened his mouth. He had not come to the meeting with intent to be so lengthy and urgent; he had planned to be nothing more than brief and business-like, to give and invite suggestions for a vigorous prosecution of the anti-war campaign; but when he rose to open the discussion he was carried away by his own doubts and emotions; and the "few remarks" he had thought to make flared out into a veritable speech. He fought with and poured scorn on himself in the name of others, rallying his feebleness with argument and sneering at his own hesitations. Thus he spoke eloquently and deserved the applause which greeted him when he sat down.

Edwardes followed him, in response to the invitation for suggestions: a little be-spectacled Labour man whose ideal was a world of committees. There had been something alive about Faraday's outpouring; it was the speech of a man who, however resentfully, understood that the world had moved. But as Edwardes quacked earnestly about branch propaganda as an antidote to militarism and a means of diffusing the international idea, the sense of unreality descended again upon William. Branch propaganda--little leaflets and meetings--when guns made a pulp of flesh and blood, and men were being shot against walls! Resolutions in minute-books against wrongs like Griselda's and his own! For the first time for many days he felt a desire to laugh, and, if it had not been for his sense of the distant unreality of the proceedings, perhaps he would have been moved to actual expression of perverted and unmirthful mirth.

It was young Jay-Blenkinsop who made the proceedings real to him; and, but for his intervention at the end of the discussion, it is probable that William himself would have taken no part in it. He would have listened for a little, perhaps to the end, and then crept out to his loneliness; but Jay-Blenkinsop roused him and swept him out of himself ... Edwardes quacked earnestly for ten minutes or so: the aggrieved outpourings of a soul to which the really serious fact of the war was that it had caused a certain amount of backsliding and even desertion amongst the weaker brethren of his branch; and when he sat down, after a moment of silence, Jay-Blenkinsop rose to his feet. (In the dark ages that had ended a week ago William thought highly of Edgar Jay-Blenkinsop, esteeming him a youth of great promise.) With his hands in his pockets, his broad shoulders lolled against the wall and his hair, as usual, drooped over an eyebrow, he drawled out fine scorn upon the leaders of the Labour Party for their treachery to the cause of the People and their lack of the sense of Brotherhood. There was no particular purport in his vaguely scathing remarks, which (the meeting being nominally for business purposes) might well have been ruled out of order; but he was enjoying the sound of his own full voice and his mother gazed up at him admiringly.

It was more himself than his vague remarks that made William flare and see red--his six feet of conceited boyhood propped sprawlingly against the wall. As he listened he was gripped with a sudden hatred of Jay-Blenkinsop, a hatred that had its roots in envy of his physical perfections; it was for lack of that broad deep chest and those long strong limbs that the recruiting officer would have none of him ... and a muscular boy, a potential soldier, lolled hands in pockets and cracked ignorant jests at men who knew better than he did, at the agony of such as himself. As the young man drawled onward William breathed fast and thickly and clutched at the chair in front of him: till Jay-Blenkinsop, having sufficiently scarified the official representatives of Labour, went on to some smartly turned gibes at the recruiting campaign and the gulls who were caught by its appeals. One of his sarcasms brought him the ready laugh he had counted on--and something on which he had not counted; at the tail of the laugh came, imperative and raucous, the order, "Sit down, you young fool!"

Every head in the room went round with indignation to William--whom most of the gathering, Faraday included, now noticed for the first time. He was on his feet, stiffened and pallid with passion; but after the cry that had cut short Jay-Blenkinsop he stood silent, with his lips apart and his hands clutching at a chair-back. His fingers knotted and worked as they clutched and his mouth was twisted and quivering; he stood like an animal backed into a corner, defying the astounded eyes and the open incredulous mouths of those who had once been his comrades ... Most incredulous of all was the mouth of Mrs. Jay-Blenkinsop, who gaped in amazement at the unprovoked attack on her son.

"May I ask----?" began Edgar Jay-Blenkinsop, less slowly and languidly than usual--whereat William, hearing the silence broken, also found words to his tongue.

"You may ask," he interrupted, "oh yes, you may ask! Anything you like. But for God's sake don't lay down the law and make ignorant assertions--for God's sake don't do that. You mustn't lay down the law until you know something, until you've really tried to find out. Then, perhaps, you'll have a right to speak; now when I hear you, I--I----" From sheer sense of the inadequacy of words his voice tailed huskily away; then, with an odd little snarl at his auditors, he burst out savagely afresh: "You child, you great impudent jackanapes! You stand there and dare to make jokes about the hell that other men have burned in. The flames and the blood and the guns and people dying in the road. You talk blank foolery and laugh about it--you laugh and turn up your nose. You think you're clever--and enlightened--and it sickens me, sickens me to hear you!"

He finished on a note that was almost a scream, and they looked at him aghast and dumfoundered. It was his face that held them even more than his disconcerting words--all but Edgar Jay-Blenkinsop, who, pricked in his vanity, would have accepted the challenge and started again had not Faraday silenced him with a turn of the head and a gesture. Still more pricked in his vanity he slid to a chair, muttering sulkily and red to the neck.

"Tully----" began Faraday with reproof in his voice--but Tully defied even his mentor. Not savagely and with contempt, as he had defied and decried Jay-Blenkinsop, but as one who had a right to be heard.

"He mustn't talk like that till he knows something. It's child's talk--ridiculous babble. I know what I'm saying--I've come from it--and I've a right to tell him what I know. Not one of you here has seen what I have--you're just guessing. When a shell bursts ... I've seen a man with his legs like red jelly and a horse..." he choked at the memory. "That's being a soldier--let him fight and he'll find it out. Now he thinks it's what he said just now--a sort of game that they like. Everything he said was mean little nonsense--how dare you listen to it and laugh at his silly little jokes? What's the good of saying that it shouldn't happen? Of course it shouldn't happen--we all know that--of course it shouldn't happen, but it does. And you can't stop it with sneers about soldiers and Kitchener.... It's hell and the mouth of hell--I've seen it. He says he wouldn't lift a finger to keep them out. Do you know why he says that? It's because he can't imagine what it means. I would. I'd die to keep them out, because I've seen ... I've seen a man shot--not a soldier, just an ordinary man--put against a wall and shot while his wife howled like a dog. Two men--and their wives standing by. They might do that to him if they came--has he ever thought of that?--while his mother howled like a dog." He shot out a quivering finger at the open-mouthed Mrs. Jay-Blenkinsop. "And his women--would he let them do as they liked with his women? They would if they came here--he can take my word for it they would. Would he ask them in politely and shake hands and give them drinks and let them? ... If they came, people would run from them, leaving everything they had--beggars. Would he like to be driven and beaten and made to work like a slave? I've had that--I've been driven and beaten and made to work. And I've run from them and starved and hidden because I was afraid. And my wife died--they killed her----"

There was a gasp, a rustle of movement and a sudden straightening of backs. Every one in the room knew Griselda Tully, many quite intimately, and not a few had been at her wedding; amazement and wrath against the disturber of the peace gave way to a real consternation, and in the silence that followed the momentary rustle William heard Faraday's "Good God!" ... They stared at him in dumb consternation, dimly conscious, perhaps, that they were in the presence of an eternal fact, and that the little man who stabbed at them with a trembling forefinger was the embodiment of that sense of injustice and agony which makes men cry to Heaven for vengeance and, Heaven failing them, take the sword and smite for themselves. Dolly Murgatroyd, Griselda's bridesmaid, who had twice accompanied Griselda to Holloway, saw and shrank from the reality of that tortured revolt which for years she had striven to simulate under the lash of her leaders' bombast.... In face of the fact that was William their theories wilted and failed them, and the new black suit of their comrade Tully was to them as the writing on the wall at the feast of Belshazzar--and came, like that other writing on the wall, at the moment when the evil from which they had hidden their faces was an evil actually accomplished. In each man's heart was a faint reflection of the amaze that had fallen on William and Griselda when their world first crumbled about them.

The sudden movement, the chairman's exclamation and the abashed silence that followed it checked William and brought him to a standstill; speech failed him and he stood with his mouth half open while the meeting stared at him motionless. There was a blank period of tension, of awkward stillness hi the presence of emotion, and then Faraday coughed uncertainly and moved. Probably he intended to say something, perhaps to adjourn the meeting; but his movement and the breaking of silence with his cough gave William back his voice and he spoke before Faraday began.

"And they won't take me in the Army. Although my wife has been killed they won't take me in the Army. I'm not tall enough; I'm only five foot five, and they won't take me. I've seen my wife die--she died in the road--and they refused me when I tried to enlist. If I were only two inches taller--God in Heaven, if I were two inches taller!"

The high, tight voice broke suddenly and he wept with his face in his hands. For the space of a painful moment there was no sound in the room but his sobs--no man knowing what to do or where to turn his eyes until Faraday came down from the platform. The tread of his feet on the gangway broke the spell of embarrassed silence--and chairs were moved softly and the occupants looked away from William as Faraday took him very gently by the arm and led him out into the street.

*CHAPTER XVI*

There was to be a gulf henceforth between William and Faraday, and the twain who had once lived so near together were to see but little of each other; yet it was Faraday who gave him the first word of comfort as he walked by the side of his former disciple on the road to William's flat. "If," he said suddenly and awkwardly--they were nearing their destination and it was the first time he had opened his lips since he led William out of the hall--"if it's this recruiting business, this refusal, that's adding to your trouble, I don't think you need be too much discouraged. Honestly--you see it isn't necessarily final. I know for a fact they're refusing men now, because they can't equip them as fast as they come in. They haven't the uniforms, the accommodation, or the arms, and that's why they sent up the standard for recruits with a rush. But if the thing's as big as they say--the common talk is that Kitchener has prophesied three years of it, and it's very likely true--they'll be wanting every man who'll come in before they've done with it. Not only the big chaps--every one. It will merely be a question of a few months--at the outside only a few months. So I shouldn't take this refusal to heart."

His message of comfort cost Faraday something to deliver; it was the sheer wretchedness of the broken little man beside him that moved him to deny his principles, by implication if not in so many words. The only audible reply that he received was a sniff, but even in the darkness he knew that his inconsistency had not been wasted, and that William had gained from it some measure of help and consolation. He said no more, and they parted with constraint on the pavement outside the flat--to tread through the future ahead of them their separate and several ways. Faraday did not go back to his meeting; he left it to break up or pursue as it would, while he walked the streets restlessly alone.

Between the uttering and fulfilment of Faraday's prophecy William's way, for the next few weeks, was the way of drift and uncertainty; it was also the way of great loneliness, an experience entirely new to him. Loneliness not only by reason of the loss of his wife, but because of the gap that the war had made between himself and his former associates. With the ending of his platform and committee career he was cut off, automatically and completely, from the fellowship of those who had been his co-workers in the various causes and enthusiasms he had once espoused and advocated. It was not that all of his former co-workers would have disagreed with his altered point of view; his was not the only perversion to militarism the stalwarts had to deplore; it was merely that he ceased to meet them. All the same the new isolation in which he lived was largely due to his own initiative or lack of it, since many, even among the stalwarts would have given him kindly welcome and done their best to be of help to him personally; but after the meeting in Bloomsbury he felt small desire to seek them out. On the contrary, he shrank into himself and avoided, as far as possible, any contact with those whose very presence would remind him of the busy, self-satisfied life he had passed in their company, of the vanished, theoretical world where he had met Griselda and loved her. It was a real misfortune that his small private income, though to a certain extent affected by the war, was yet sufficient to keep a roof over his head and supply him with decent necessaries of food and clothing. Thus, he was not driven to the daily work of hand or brain that might have acted as a tonic to the lethargic hopelessness of his mood. Nature had not made him versatile and he had lived in a groove for years; and, his occupation as a public speaker gone, he was left without interest as well as without employment. More than once, goaded into spasmodic activity by some newspaper paragraph, he offered himself vaguely for war-work--only to be discouraged afresh by the offer of an entirely unsuitable job or by delays and evasions which might have discouraged men more competent and energetic than himself.

In one respect fortune was kind to him; he was able, within a week or two of his return to London, to get rid of the lease of the haunted little flat in Bloomsbury. The place was dreadful to him, with its empty demand for Griselda, and he left it thankfully for a lodging in Camden Town. There for some weeks he lived drearily in two small rooms, with no occupation to fill up the void in his life, passing hermit days in the company of newspapers and poring over cheap war literature; he bought many newspapers and much war literature and aroused the sympathy of his elderly landlady by his helplessness and continual loneliness. What kept him alive mentally was his thirsty interest in the war; anything and everything that dealt with it was grist to his mill, and he acquired necessarily in the course of his eager reading some smattering of European history and the outlines of European geography. The pamphlet and journal soon ceased to satisfy, and he felt the need of supplementing their superficial comments and sketchy allusions by reading that was not up-to-date. A newspaper denunciation of the Silesian policy of Frederick the Great led him to Macaulay and others on the Kaiser's ancestor, and references to the Franco-German War resulted in the borrowing from the nearest Free Library of a volume of modern French history. One volume led on to others and the local librarian came to know him as a regular client.

His reading was haphazard, but perhaps, for that reason, all the more informative and illuminating. So far he had acquired such small learning as he possessed on a definite and narrow plan, assimilating only such facts as squared with his theories and rejecting all the others; where his new studies were concerned the very blankness of his ignorance was a guarantee of freedom from prejudice. He stumbled amongst facts and opinions, making little of them and yet making much--since for the first time in his life there was no glib mentor to guide him and he was thrown on his own resources. With his theories demolished and his mind blank as a child's, he became aware of phases of human idea and striving of which he had known nothing in the past, and the resulting comprehension of the existence of spheres outside his own increased his sense of the impossibility of his previous classification of mankind into the well-intentioned and the evil. His own experience had shown him that there might be at least a third class--the ignorant, the mistaken, to which he, William Tully, belonged--and his reading, by its very vagueness, confirmed that personal experience. As he floundered through histories, bewildered and at random, he realized dizzily, but none the less surely, something of the vast and terrifying complexity of these human problems upon which he had once pronounced himself with the certainty of absolute ignorance.

The Free Library, though he knew it not, was a salve to his wounded heart; all unconsciously he had done the best for himself in applying his mind to matters of which his little wife had known nothing. Bismarckian policy and the Napoleonic Wars were topics he had not discussed and interests he had not shared with her; hence they tended to come between him and her memory and distract him from lonely brooding. Without his new studies he might have drifted into sheer melancholia and helplessness; as it was, he burned midnight gas over his books and kept his brain alive. In a measure his interest in his new studies was personal; the craving to strike back was always with him and his reading fed and fanned it; beginning without system he was naturally enough attracted by the drama and movement of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic epoch, read avidly all that the librarian could give him on the subject and moulded his ideas of a soldier's life and military science on the doings of men of those days. The seed of hope that Faraday had implanted did not die, and he thought of himself as a soldier to be, while queer little ambitions flamed up in his barren heart. He read of Ney and Murat, who had carried marshals' batons in their knapsacks--until, the fervour of his obsession growing, he dreamed of himself as an avenging leader, and, with a half-confessed idea of fitting himself for the office, applied hours to the study of the art of war through the medium of an obsolete volume on military lore picked up from a second-hand bookstall in the Charing Cross Road. By its aid--it had been published in the early 'fifties--he attempted to work out the strategy of Kluck and Joffre, and spent long evenings poring over diagrams explanatory of the tactics of Napoleon at Montereau or the Archduke Charles at Essling.

For a time his only real human intercourse, and that by letter, was with Edith Haynes; he had written to her telling of his rejection for the Army and she wrote to him more than occasionally. She was fixed busily in her Somersetshire home, looking after the property of a brother fighting in Flanders, acting as bailiff and herself taking a hand in farm-work. For the first few weeks after Griselda's death she remained William's only friend in the new world of war, and it was not until he had been settled for nearly two months in his Camden Town lodging that he discovered that some at least of his former associates had seen fit, like himself, to reconsider their views and take up arms for their country. He ran against one of them--Watson, in the old days a fiery committee-member of his branch--in the garb of the London Scottish; and he did not know how lonely he had been until he spent an evening in the convert's company, talking his heart out, talking of the war and himself.

With the first announcement of the reduction in the standard of height for recruits he tried to enlist again and was again refused--this time by the doctor who seemingly had doubts about his heart. On the way home a fool woman, arrogating to herself the right to make men die for her, offered him a white feather as he stood waiting for his 'bus--whereupon he turned and swore at her using filthy words that were strange to his lips till her vapid little face grew scarlet. That day, for the first time, his books were no comfort to his soul and he thrust them away and sat brooding--understanding perhaps how personal and revengeful had been his interest in the lore of the past, understanding how strong had been the dreams and ambitions he had cherished in his empty heart. Watson, dropping in for a final chat before starting on foreign service, found him sullen and inert before his fire, and, casting about for a method of comfort, suggested application to another recruiting station; he knew, he said, of more than one man who, refused at a first medical examination, had been passed without trouble at a second. Hope was beaten out of William and he shook his head ... all the same, next morning he tubed to the other end of London, there to make his third attempt.

He asked his way to the townhall and in a species of dull resignation stood waiting his turn for the ordeal of medical inspection. When it came he went listlessly through the now familiar process, stripped, was weighed and measured, was pummelled, showed his teeth, answered questions. It was the stethoscope that had done the business yesterday, and would do it again to-day; not that there was anything the matter with him or his heart--it was just the blind cruel stupidity that was always and in everything against him.... While the doctor bent to listen he was wondering what he should do with to-morrow, what he should do with the next day, what he should do with his life!

He had made so sure of a third rejection that he could hardly believe his ears when he heard he was up to the physical standard required of a soldier of the King. "You've made a mistake," was on the tip of his tongue, and though he checked the words before they were uttered, he stood dazed and staring, much as he had done on the day he was first refused. He could not remember clearly what happened to him next or what he did; he went where he was told, he sat and waited, he repeated words which he knew must have been the oath; his fellows talked to him and he answered back ... but all he was conscious of was the stunning fact of his acceptance. It seemed to him Griselda must know and rejoice--and he had thoughts of her watching him, of her white soul blessing him to victory.

*CHAPTER XVII*

A pencilled scrawl despatched from a mushroom camp in the Home Counties told Edith Haynes that William was at last a soldier; it was brief, written shakily by a man tired in body but uplifted in spirit, informed her that he had just been absorbed into a London battalion, that he had not yet got his uniform, was sleeping in a barn and drilling hard and concluded with the words "Thank God!" She answered the scrawl by return of post and a few weeks later, hearing nothing, wrote again; but, in spite of her request for further news, for month after month she waited in vain for a successor to the shaky scribble.

When it came the war had been in progress a couple of years and the address was a procession of letters--whereof the three last were the B.E.F. that denoted service over-Channel. It was a restrained and correct little letter, on the face of it uninteresting and not much longer than the last, but differing from it in that it was written in ink and in the tidy, clerical hand which William had acquired in the days of his boyhood for the use of the insurance office. It expressed regret for his lengthy silence, but did not attempt to explain it; and went on to relate that before coming to France he had been an orderly-room clerk, that he was at present at an advanced base--he must not of course give its name--where he was employed in office work, principally the typewriting of letters. It concluded with an assurance that he had not forgotten her kindness and a hope she would write to him again ... and she read and re-read the polite little missive, half-guessing what lay between its lines.

It had been written in an interval of that typing of local official communications which was Private Tully's daily contribution to the waging of the European War; and it had not been written earlier because Private Tully was too sullen of heart to write.

For a few weeks only he had known what it was to be a soldier of England in the making; he had drilled, he had marched, he had learned to hold a rifle and his body had ached with the discipline. He had lain down at night so weary that he could not sleep, and he had risen giddily in the morning in fear of the day that was coming. Other men filled out and hardened with their training, grew healthy, muscular and brown--and he set his teeth and argued with himself that this stage of sick exhaustion was only a stage and in time he would be even as they. What he lacked in strength he made up in fiery willingness, overtaxing his energy by dogged efforts to keep level with broader shouldered, tighter muscled men, and steadfastly refusing to admit that his bodily misery was more than a passing discomfort. More than once a good-natured comrade suggested a visit to the doctor--whereat William would flush as at an insult and turn on the meddler almost savagely.

He held on longer than he could have done unaided, by virtue of much kindly help. Once, in a sudden need for sympathy he had told to one of his fellows the story of Griselda and his own conversion to militarism; and, unknown to himself, the story went the round of his mess. From the beginning the men had treated him with the instinctive kindness that the stronger feels for the weakling, but from that time forth their kindness was more than instinctive; they ranged themselves tacitly on the weakling's side in his struggle with his own deficiencies. Little odd jobs of cleaning and furbishing were done for him--often secretly, he knew not by whom--and no man was ever too weary to take on work that would spare him. They were in a conspiracy to save him from blunders--to warn him or shield him from consequences, and as far as camp life permitted they coddled him, with something of the sweet roughness wherewith Nelson was coddled by his captains.

All the same, and in spite of coddling, the breakdown came as it was bound to do in the end; the doctor who refused had been wiser than the man who passed him. There was nothing urgently or seriously wrong with his health; but he was not made soundly enough to stand the violent and sudden change from a sedentary life to a life of unceasing exertion. He had never taken much out-of-door exercise; had always trained or 'bussed it rather than travel afoot; and of late his days had been spent entirely between the four walls of his Camden Town sitting-room.

It was on the homeward stretch of a route march that his strength failed him suddenly and he knew that he could do no more; his pack was a mountain, his body was an ache, and a blackness closed upon his eyes. He fought very gallantly to save himself and, by the dogged effort of his will, kept going for a few minutes more. "I can do ten steps," he told himself and counted each step as he took it; then, the first ten accomplished, "Now I can do ten more." So he kept going for a few yards more and dragged foot after foot till he had reached the tale of two hundred; at which point--twenty tens--he staggered, fell out of the ranks in a faint and was brought back to camp on a stretcher.

That was the end of his soldiering with pack and rifle; from the day of his breakdown on the route march his platoon knew him no more and when he came out of hospital, some three weeks later, he was put on to clerical duties. As orderly-room clerk he handled a typewriter instead of a bayonet, and handled it steadily as the months lengthened into years. Others, his contemporaries, completed their training, left the camp, and went off to the front; he remained, at first savagely resentful and later sullenly resigned.

His conception of soldiering, derived as it was from his own brief and fiery experience in Belgium, from the descriptive articles of war correspondents and his reading of bygone campaigns, had never included the soldier who was merely a clerk. He had never realized that a man in uniform was not necessarily a man of blood; the revelation came to him only when he copied letters and routine orders, filed papers and, for all practical purposes, was back at his desk in the insurance office. His daily duties mocked and derided the hopes and ambitions wherewith he had joined the Army; and, ticking at his typewriter, he contrasted, half-ashamedly, the blank reality with the strenuous and highly coloured dream. One phase of that dream--inspiring then, ridiculous now--had shown him to himself as the hero of some bloody enterprise and the central figure of such a scene as he had read of in Napoleonic history; a scene of be-medalling and public praise in token of duty bravely done. He had pictured it often, awake and asleep ... and fancied Griselda looking down.

Slowly, under the benumbing influence of office routine, his revengeful ambitions faded, and with them his half-acknowledged hope of emulating Murat and Augereau. His interest in the war had been fundamentally a personal interest, and though there had grown up in him, by force of circumstance, a tardy consciousness of his Englishry, it was hardly strong enough to inspire him with pride in a humble and wearisome duty done in the name of England. Be it said in excuse for him that few men could feel pride in the labour of dealing with daily official communications--the duty of copying out vain repetitions and assisting in the waste of good paper. The stilted uselessness of half the documents was evident even to William; and there were moments when he told himself, in savage discontent, that he would have been less unprofitable in civilian idleness than busied in promoting futility.