If Winter Comes Part 26

The extraordinary man, who had become smiling and airy, immediately became extraordinary again. He had struck a match, held it to Sabre's cigarette, and was applying it to his own. He extinguished it with violent jerks of his arm and dashed it on to the pavement. "Sure? My G.o.d, sure? I tell you, Sabre, you won't be five years, I don't believe you'll be two years, one year, older before you'll not only be sure--you'll know! I've just finished a course at the Staff College, you know. We finished up with a push over to Belgium to do the battlefields.

We went into Germany, some of us. They fed us in some of their messes.

Do you know, those chaps in those messes there talked about fighting us as naturally and as certainly as you talk with your opponents about a coming footer match. They talked about 'When we fight you'--not '_if_ we fight you'--'when', as if it was as fixed as Christmas. And they didn't talk any of this bilge about fighting us in England; they knew, as I know, and every soldier knows--every soldier who's keen--that it's going to be out there. In Europe." He had not taken two puffs at his cigarette before he wrenched it from his mouth and dashed it after the match.

"Sabre, why the h.e.l.l aren't people here told that? Why are they stuck up with this rot about defending their sh.o.r.es when they can see for themselves that only the Navy can defend their sh.o.r.es? What are they going to do when the war comes? Are they going to lynch these b.l.o.o.d.y politicians who haven't told them they've got to fight for their lives?

Are they going to turn around and say they never knew it so they'll be d.a.m.ned if they'll fight for their lives? Are they going to follow any of these politicians who will have betrayed them? Do you suppose any man who's been party to this betrayal is going to be found big enough to run a war? I tell you that's another thing. Do you suppose a chap who's been a miserable vote-s.n.a.t.c.her all his life is going to turn round suddenly and be a heaven-sent administrator in a war? You can take your oath Heaven doesn't send out geniuses on that ticket. What you've lived and done in fat times--that's what you're going to live and do in lean.

Heaven's chucked stocking divine fire."

"I'm with you there," Sabre said. He did not believe half this intense man said, but he conceived a sudden and great admiration for his intensity. And he had had no idea that a soldier ever thought so far away from his own subject--which was sport and one chance in a million of fighting--as to produce aphorisms on habit and development. "But you know, Otway," he said, "it's jolly hard to believe all this inevitableness of war stuff that chaps like you put up. Do you read the articles in the reviews and the quarterlies? They all pretty well prove that, apart from anything else, a big European war is impossible by the--well, by the sheer bigness of the thing. They say these modern gigantic armies couldn't operate, couldn't provision themselves. And there's the finance. They prove you can't fight without money and that credit would go and the thing would stop before it had begun, pretty well. I don't know anything about that sort of thing, but the arguments strike me as absolutely sound."

Otway was waiting with fidgety impatience. "I've heard all that. I don't give a d.a.m.n for it. Of course you don't know anything about it. No one does. Least of all those writing chaps. It's all theory. Every one thought that with modern this, that and the other you were as safe on the last word in liners as in your own bedroom. Then comes along that _t.i.tanic_ business in April, and where the h.e.l.l are you with your modern conditions? Fifteen hundred people done in. I tell you it isn't that things that used to happen can't happen now; it's simply that they'll happen a million times worse. What's the good of theories when you've got facts? Look at the things there've been with Germany just this year alone. Old Haldane over in Germany in February for 'unofficial discussions', Churchill threatening two keels to one if the German Navy law is exceeded. That was March. In April the Germans whack up their Navy Law Amendment, twelve more big ships. That chap Bertrand Stewart getting three and a half years for espionage in Germany; and two German spies caught by us here,--that chap Grosse over at Winchester a.s.sizes, three years, and friend Armgaard Graves up at Glasgow, eighteen months.

An American cove at Leipzig taking four years' penal for messing around after plans of the Heligoland fortifications. Those five yachting chaps in July arrested for espionage at Eckernforde. War, too, skits of it.

Turkey and Italy hardly done when all these Balkan chaps set to and slosh Turkey. Have you seen to-day's papers? I'll bet you they'll send Turkey to h.e.l.l at Kirk Kilisse or thereabouts before the week's out."

He had been ticking these points off on his fingers, much astonishing Sabre by his marshalling of scattered incidents that had been merely rather pleasing newspaper sensations of a couple of days. He presented the ticked-off fingers bunched up together. "There, there's concrete facts for you, Sabre. Can you say things aren't tightening up? Why, if war--_when_ war comes people will look back on this year, 1912, and wonder where in h.e.l.l their eyes were that they didn't see it. What are they seeing?--" He threw his fingers apart. "None of these things. Not one. All this doctors and the Insurance Bill tripe, Marconi Inquiry, _t.i.tanic_, Suffragettes smashing up the West End, burning down Lulu Harcourt's place, trying to roast old Asquith in the Dublin Theatre, Seddon murder, this triangular cricket show. h.e.l.l's own excitement because there's so much rain in August and people in Norwich have to go about in boats, and then h.e.l.l's own hullaballoo because there's no rain for twenty-two days in September and people get so dry they can't spit or something." His keen face wrinkled up into laughter. "Eh, didn't you read that?" He laughed but was immediately intense again. "That's all that really interests the people. By G.o.d, they'll sit up and take notice of the real stuff one of these days. Pretty soon. Tightening up, I tell you. Well, I'm off, Sabre. When are you coming up to the Mess again?

Friday? Well, guest night the week after. I'll drop you a line. So long." He was off, carrying his straight back alertly up the street.

VII

His going was somehow as sudden and startling as his appearance had been sudden and tumultuous. He had carried away Sabre's thoughts as a jet from a hosepipe will spin a man out of a crowd; smashed into his preoccupation as a stone smashing through a window upon one deep in study; galloped across his mind as a cavalcade thundering through a village street,--and the effect of it, and the incongruity of it as, getting his bicycle from the office, he rode homewards, kept returning to Sabre's mind, as an arresting dream will constantly break across daylight thoughts.

Nona had said that Tybar knew she thought often of him. "He knows I think of you." That was the way she had put it. It explained that mock in his eyes when they met that day on the road, and Mrs. Winfred's remark and her look, and Tybar's, that day outside the office.

Extraordinary, Otway bursting in like that with all those ridiculous scares. Here he was riding along with all this reality pressing enormously about him, and with this strange and terrible feeling of being at the beginning of something or at the end of something, with this voice in his ears of, "You have struck your tents and are upon the march"; and there was Otway, up at the barracks, miles away from realities, but as obsessed with his impossible stuff as he himself with these most real and pressing dismays. What would he, with his apprehension of what might lie ahead, be saying to a chap like Otway in two or three years and what would Otway with his obsessions be saying to him? Ah, two or three years...!

But Nona loved him.... But his duty was here.... And he could have taken her beautiful body into his arms and held her beloved face to his....

But he had said not a word of love to her, only his cry of "Nona--Nona...." His duty was here.... But what would the years bring...? But what might have been! What might have been!

VIII

He finished his ride in darkness. The Green, as he pa.s.sed along it on the free-wheel run, merged away through gloom into obscurity. Points of light from the houses showed here and there. The windows of his home had lamplight through their lattices. The drive was soft with leaves beneath his feet.

Lamplight, and the yielding undertread and all around walled about with obscurity. It was new. It had shown thus now for some nights on his return. But it was the first time he had apprehended it. New. Different.

A commencement. An ending.

He left his bicycle in the roomy porch. He missed Low Jinks with her customary friendly greeting. It was very lonely, this. He opened the hall door and entered. Absolute silence. He had grown uncommonly accustomed to Low Jinks being here.... Absolute silence. It was like coming into an empty house. And he had got to go on coming into it, and living in it, and tremendously doing his duty in it.

Like an empty house. He stood perfectly still in the perfect stillness.

Take down: it is beginning. You have struck your tents and are upon the march.

PART THREE

EFFIE

CHAPTER I

I

But life goes on without the smallest regard for individual preoccupations. You may take up what att.i.tude you like towards it or, with the majority, you may take up no att.i.tude towards it but immerse yourself in the stupendous importance of your own affairs and disclaim any connection with life. It doesn't matter tuppence to life. The ostrich, on much the same principle, buries its head in the sand; and just as forces outside the sand ultimately get the ostrich, so life, all the time, is ma.s.sively getting you.

You have to go along with it.

And in October of the following year, October, 1913, life was going along at a most delirious and thrilling and entirely fascinating speed.

There never was such a delicious and exciting and progressive year as between October, 1912, and October, 1913.

And it certainly took not the remotest notice of Sabre.

In February, Lord Roberts, at Bristol, opened a provincial campaign for National Service. The best people--that is to say those who did not openly laugh at it or, being scaremongers, rabidly approve it--considered it a great shame and a great pity that the poor old man should thus victimise those closing years of his life which should have been spent in that honourable retirement which is the right place for fussy old people of both s.e.xes and all walks of life.

Sabre, reading the reports of the campaign--two or three lines--could not but reflect how events were falsifying, and continued to falsify the predictions of the intense Otway in this regard. Deliciously pleasant relations with Germany were variously evidenced throughout 1913. The King and Queen attended in Berlin the wedding of the Kaiser's daughter, and the popular Press, in picture and paragraph, told the genial British public what a thoroughly delightful girl the Kaiser's daughter was. The Kaiser let off loud "Hochs!" of friendly pride, and the Press of the world responded with warm "Hochs" of admiration and tribute; and the Kaiser, glowing with generous warmth, celebrated the occasion by releasing and handsomely pardoning three of those very British "spies"

to whose incarceration in German fortresses (Sabre recalled) the intense Otway had attached such deep significance. This was a signal for more mutual "Hochs." Later the Prince of Wales visited Germany and made there an extended stay of nine weeks; and in June the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Emperor William's accession was "Hoch'd" throughout the German Empire and admiringly "Hoch'd" back again from all quarters of the civilised globe.

It was all splendid and gratifying and deeply comforting. So many "Hochs!" and such fervent and sincere "Hochs!" never boomed across the seas of the world, and particularly the North Sea or (nice and friendly to think) German Ocean, in any year as in the year 1913.

II

Not that relations with Germany counted for anything in the whirl of intensely agreeable sensations of these excellent days. Their entirely pleasing trend prevented the scaremongers from interfering with full enjoyment of the intensely agreeable sensations; otherwise they were, by comparison with more serious excitements, completely negligible. The excitements were endless and of every nature. At one moment the British Public was stirred to its depths in depths not often touched (in 1913) by reading of Scott's glorious death in the Antarctic; at another it was unspeakably moved by the disqualification of the Derby winner for b.u.mping and boring. In one week it was being thrilled with sympathy by the superb heroism and the appalling death-roll, four hundred twenty-nine, in the Welsh colliery disaster at Senghenydd; in another thrilled with horror and indignation at the baseness of a sympathetic strike. In one month was immense excitement because the strike of eleven thousand insufferable London taxi-drivers drove everybody into the splendid busses; and in another month immense excitement because the strike of all the insufferable London bus-drivers drove everybody into the splendid taxis. M. Pegond accomplished the astounding feat of flying upside down at Juvisy without being killed and then came and flew upside down without being killed at Brooklands. One man flew over the Simplon Pa.s.s and another over the Alps. Colonel Cody flew to his death in one waterplane, and Mr. Hawker made a superb failure to fly around Great Britain in another waterplane. The suffragists threw noisome and inflammable matter into the letter boxes, bombs into Mr. Lloyd George's house at Walton and into other almost equally sacred shrines of the great, stones into windows, axes into pictures, chained their misguided bodies to railings and gates, jammed their miserable bodies into prisons, hunger-struck their abominable bodies out again, and hurled their outrageous bodies in front of the sacred race for the Derby at Epsom, and the only less sacred race for the Gold Cup at Ascot.

It was terrific!

At one moment the loyal public were thrilled by the magnificent enrolment of the Ulster Volunteers, and at another moment outraged by the seditious and mutinous enrolment of the Nationalist Volunteers; in one month the devoted Commons read a third time the Home Rule Bill, the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill and the Plural Voting Bill, and in the very same month the stiff-necked and abominable Lords for the third time threw out the Home Rule Bill, the Welsh Church Disestablishment Bill and the Plural Voting Bill. It was terrific. The newspapers could scarcely print it--or anything--terrifically enough. Adjectives and epithets became exhausted with overwork and burst. The word crisis lost all meaning. There was such a welter of crises that the explosions of those that came to a head were unnoticed and pushed away into the obscurest corners of the newspapers, before the alarming swelling of those freshly rushing to a head. It was magnificent. It was a deliciously thrilling and emotional year. A terrific and stupendous year. Many well-known people died.

III

It was naturally a year of strong partisanship. A year of violent feelings violently expressed; and amidst them, and because of them, Sabre found with new certainty that he had no violent feelings.

Increasingly he came to know that he had well expressed his const.i.tutional habit, the outstanding trait in his character, when, on the day of that talk in the office with Nona, he had spoken of his disastrous inability--disastrous from the point of view of being satisfactory to single-minded persons, or of pulling out that big booming stuff called success--to see a thing, whatever it might be, from a single point of view and go all out for it from that point of view.

"Convictions," he had said, and often in the welter of antagonistic convictions of 1913 thought again, "Convictions. If you're going to pull out this big booming stuff they call success, if you're going to be _satisfactory_ to anybody or to anything, you must shut down on everybody's point of view but your own. You must have convictions. And narrower than that--not only convictions but conviction. Conviction that your side is the right side and that the other side is wrong, wrong to h.e.l.l."

And he had no such convictions. Above all, and most emphatically, he had never the conviction that his side, whichever side it might be in any of the issues daily tabled for men's discussion, was the right side and the other side the wrong and wicked and disastrous side.

He used to think, "I can't stand shouting and I can't stand smashing.

And that's all there is. These newspapers and these arguments you hear--it's all shouting and smashing. It's never thinking and building.

It's all destructive; never constructive. All blind hatred of the other views, never fair examination of them. You get some of these Unionists together, my cla.s.s, my friends. They say absolutely nothing else but d.a.m.ning and blasting and foaming at Lloyd George and Asquith and the trade-unionists. Absolutely nothing else at all. And you get some of these other chaps together, or their newspapers, and it's exactly the same thing the other way about. And yet we're all in the same boat.

There's only one _life_--only one _living_--and we're all in it. Come into it the same way and go out of it the same way; and all up against the same real facts as we are against the same weather. That fire the other night in High Street. All sorts of people, every sort of person, lent a hand in putting it out. And that frightful railway disaster at Aisgill; all sorts of people worked together in rescuing. No one stopped to ask whether the pa.s.sengers were first cla.s.s or third. Well, that's the sort of thing that gets me. Fire and disaster--those are facts and everybody gets to and deals with them. And if there was a big war everybody would get to and fight it. And yet all these political and social things are just as much facts that affect everybody, and all anybody can do is to shout and smash up the other man's rights in them.

They all do it--in everything. Religion's as bad as any--worse. Here's one of these bishops saying he can't countenance Churchmen preaching in chapels or dissenters being invited to preach in churches because the Church must stand by the rock principles of its creed, and to preach in a chapel would mean politely not touching on those principles. You'd think heaven didn't come into the business at all. And you'd think that life doesn't come into the business of living at all. All smashing....

Well, I can't stick shouting and I can't stick smashing."

IV