If Winter Comes

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

CHAPTER IV

I

He approached Penny Green and realised for the first time the hard pace at which he had been riding. And realised also the emotions which subconsciously had been driving him along. All the way he had been saying "War!" What he wanted, most terribly, was to say it aloud to some one. He wanted to say it to Mabel. He had a sudden great desire to see Mabel and tell her about it and talk to her about it. He felt a curiously protective feeling towards her. For the first time in his life he pedalled instead of free-wheeling the conclusion of the ride. He ran into the house and into the morning room. Mabel was not there. It was almost dinner time. She would be in her room. He ran upstairs. She was standing before her dressing table and turned to him in surprise.

"Whatever—"

"I say, it's war!"

She echoed the word. "War?"

"Yes, war. We've declared war!"

"Declared war?"

"Yes, declared war. We've sent Germany an ultimatum. It ends to-night. It's the same thing. It means war."

He was breathless, panting. She said, "Good gracious! Whatever will happen? Have you brought an evening paper? Do you know the papers didn't come this morning till—"

He could not hear her out. "No, I didn't wait. I simply rushed away." He was close to her. He took her hands. "I say, Mabel, it's war." His emotions were tumultuous and extraordinary. He wanted to draw her to him and kiss her. They had not kissed for longer than he could have remembered; but now he held her hands hard and desired to kiss her. "I say, it's war."

She gave her sudden burst of laughter. "You are excited. I've never seen you so excited. Your collar's undone."

He dropped her hands. He said rather stupidly, "Well, it's war, you know," and stood there.

She turned to her dressing table. "Well, I do wish you'd stayed for a paper. Now we've got to wait till to-morrow and goodness only knows—" She was fastening something about her throat and held her breath in the operation. She released it and said, "Just fancy, war! I never thought it would be. What will happen first? Will they—" She held her breath again. She said, "It's too annoying about those papers coming so late. If they haven't arrived when you go off to-morrow you can tell Jones he needn't send them any more. He's one of those independent sort of tradesmen who think they can do just what they like. Just fancy actually having war with Germany. I can't believe it." She turned towards him and gave her sudden laugh again. "I say, aren't you ever going to move?"

He went out of the room and along the passage. As he reached his own room he realised it again. "War—" He went quickly back to Mabel. "I say—" He stopped. His feelings most frightfully desired some vent. None here. "Look here. Don't wait dinner for me. You start. I'm going round to Fargus to tell him."

At the hall door he turned back and went hurriedly into the kitchen. "I say, it's war!"

"Well, there now!" cried High Jinks.

"Yes, war. We've sent an ultimatum to Germany. It ends to-night."

Low Jinks threw up her hands. "Well, if that isn't a short war!"

"Girl alive, the ultimatum ends, not the war. Don't you know what an ultimatum is?"

Outside he ran down the drive and ran to Fargus's door. It stood open. In the hall the eldest Miss Fargus appeared to be maintaining the last moment before dinner by "doing" a silver card salver.

"Hullo, Miss Fargus. I say, is your father about? I say, it's war. We've declared war!"

The eldest Miss Fargus lifted her head to another Miss Fargus also "doing" something on the stairs above her, and in a very high voice called, "Papa! War!"

The staircase Miss Fargus took it up immediately. "Papa! War!" and Sabre heard it go echoing through the house, "Papa! War! Papa! War! Papa! War!"

"How terrible, how dreadful, how frightful, how awful," said the eldest Miss Fargus. "You must excuse me shaking hands, but as you see I am over pink plate powder. I'm not surprised. We were discussing it only at breakfast; and for my part, though Julie, Rosie, Poppy and Bunchy were against me, I—" She broke off to turn and take her portion in a new chorus now filling the house. Sounds of some one descending the stairs at break-neck speed were heard, and the chorus shrilled, "Papa, take care! Papa, take care! Papa, take care!"

Mr. Fargus's grey little figure came terrifically down the last flight and up the hall, a cloud of female Farguses in his wake. He ran to Sabre with hands outstretched and grasped Sabre's hands and wrung them. "Sabre! Sabre! What's this? Really? Truly? War? We've declared war? Well, I say, thank God! Thank God! I was afraid. I was terribly afraid we'd stand out. But thank God, England is England still.... And will be, Sabre; and will be!" He released Sabre's hands and took out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. "I prayed for this," he said. "I prayed for God to be in Downing Street last night."

The chorus, unpleasantly shocked at the idea of God being asked to go to Downing Street, said in a low but stern tone, "Papa, hush. Papa, hush. Papa, hush"; but Sabre had come for this excited wringing of his hands and for this emotion. It was what he had been seeking ever since Pike's notice board had swung the news before his eyes. When presently he left he carried with him that which, when his mind would turn to it, caused his heart to swell enormously within him. Through the evening, and gone to bed and lying awake long into the night, he was at intervals caught up from the dark and oppressive pictures of his mind by surging onset of the emotions that came with Mr. Fargus's emotion. War.... His spirit answered, "England!"

II

Lying awake, he thought of Nona. He had not written the letter to her. The appointed day was past and he had not written. He would have said, during that unutterable darkness in which he had awaited it, that not the turning of the world upside down would have prevented him writing; but the world had turned upside down. It was not a board Pike's men had swung around in that appalling moment when he had watched them appear on the balcony. It was the accustomed and imponderable world, awfully unbalanced. Nona would understand. Nona always understood everything. He wondered how she had maintained this terrific day. He was assured that he knew. She would have felt just as he had felt. He thought, with a most passionate longing for her, that he would have given anything to have been able to turn to her when he had exclaimed, "My God, war", and to have caught her hands and looked into her beautiful face. To-morrow he would send the letter. To-morrow? Why, yes, to-day, like all to-days in the removed and placid light of all to-morrows, would be shown needlessly hectic. Ten to one something would have happened in the night to make to-day look foolish. If nothing had happened, if it still was war, it could only be a swiftly over business, a rapid and general recognition of the impossibility of war in modern conditions.

Disturbingly upon these thoughts appeared the face of Otway, the little beads of perspiration about his nose.

His consciousness stumbled away into the mazy woods of sleep, and turned, and all night sought to return, and stumbled sometimes to its knees among the drowsy snares, and saw strange mirages of the round world horrifically tilted with "War" upon its face, of Nona held away and not approachable, of intense light and of suffocating darkness; and rousing and struggling away from these, and stumbling yet, rarely succumbing.

III

When he went down into Tidborough in the morning it was to know at once that this to-morrow gave no lie to its precedent day. It intensified it. The previous day foreshadowed war. The new day presented it.

The papers, as it happened, did not arrive before he left, and Mabel had more to say of her annoyance with the insufferable Jones than of what his withheld wares might contain. Her attitude towards the international position was—up to this point of its development—precisely this: she had been following the crisis day by day with appreciation of its sensational headlines while these were in the paper before her, but without further interest when the paper was read. She folded up the thrones, the chancelleries, the councils, the armies and the peoples and put them away in the brass newspaper rack in the morning room and proceeded about her duties and her engagements. But she liked unfolding them and she was thoroughly annoyed with the insufferable Jones for preventing her from unfolding them. She said she would come down into Tidborough and speak to Jones herself.

"Yes, do," said Sabre. "There'll be things to see."

There were things to see. As he rode into the town people were standing about in little groups, excitedly talking; every one seemed to have a newspaper. In a row, as he approached the news agent's, were hugely printed contents bills, all with the news, in one form or another, "War Declared."

It was war. Yesterday no dream. He could not stop to rest his bicycle against the curb. He leant it over and dropped it on the pavement with a crash and hurried into the shop and bought and read.

War.... He looked out into the street through the open doorway. All those knots of people standing talking. War.... A mounted orderly passed down the street at a brisk trot, his dispatch bag swaying and bumping across his back. Every one turned and stared after him, stepped out into the roadway and stared after him. War.... He bought all the morning papers and went on to the office. Outside a bank a small crowd of people waited about the doors. They were waiting to draw out their money. Lloyd George had announced the closing of the banks for three days; but they didn't believe it was real. Was it real? He passed Hanbury's, the big grocer's. It seemed to be crammed. People outside waiting to get in. They were buying up food. A woman struggled her way out with three tins of fruit, a pot of jam and a bag of flour. She seemed thoroughly well pleased with herself. He heard her say to some one, "Well, I've got mine, anyway." He actually had a sense of reassurance from her grotesque provisioning. He thought, "You see, every one knows it can't last long."

IV

No one in the office was pretending to do any work. As in the street, all were in groups eagerly talking. The clerks' room resounded with excited discussion. Everybody wanted to talk to somebody. He went into Mr. Fortune's room. Mr. Fortune and Twyning and Harold were gathered round a map cut from a newspaper, all talking; even young Harold giving views and being attentively listened to. They looked up and greeted him cordially. Everybody was cordial and communicative to everybody. "Come along in, Sabre." He joined them and he found their conversation extraordinarily reassuring, like the woman who had sufficiently provisioned with three tins of fruit, a pot of jam and a bag of flour. They knew a tremendous lot about it and had evidently been reading military articles for days past. They all showed what was going to be done, illustrating it on the map. And the map itself was extraordinarily reassuring: as Twyning showed—his fingers covering the whole of the belligerent countries—while the Germans were delivering all their power down here, in Belgium, the Russians simply nipped in here and would be threatening Berlin before those fools knew where they were!

He thought, "By Jove, yes."

"And granted," said Mr. Fortune—Mr. Fortune was granting propositions right and left with an amiability out of all keeping with his normal stubbornness—"and granted that Germany can put into the field the enormous numbers you mention, Twyning, what use are they to her? None. No use whatever. I was talking last night to Sir James Boulder. His son has been foreign correspondent to one of the London papers for years. He's attended the army manoeuvres in Germany, France, Austria everywhere. He knows modern military conditions through and through, as you may say. Well, he says—and it's obvious when you think of it—that Germany can't possibly use her enormous masses. No room for them. Only the merest fraction can ever get into action. Where they're coming in is like crowding into the neck of a bottle. Two thirds of them uselessly jammed up behind. A mere handful can hold them up—"

Harold put in, "Yes, and those terrific fortresses, sir."

"Precisely. Precisely. Liége, Namur, Antwerp—absolutely impregnable, all the military correspondents say so. Impregnable. Well, then. There you are. It's like sending a thousand men to fight in a street. Look here—" He went vigorously to the window. They all went to the window; Sabre with them, profoundly impressed. Mr. Fortune pointed into the street. "There. That's what it is. Here comes your German army down this way from the cathedral. Choked. Blocked. Immovable mob. How many do you suppose could hold them up? Thirty, twenty, a dozen. Hold them up and throw them into hopeless and utter disorder. Pah! Simple, isn't it? I don't suppose the thing will last a month. What do you say, Sabre?"

Sabre was feeling considerably more at ease. He felt that the first shock of the thing had made him take an exaggerated view. "I don't see how it can," he said, "now I'm hearing a bit more about it. I was thinking just now what a dramatic thing it would be if it lasted—of course it can't—but if it lasted till next June and the decisive battle was fought in June, 1915, just a hundred years after Waterloo. That would be dramatic, eh?"

They all laughed, and Sabre, realising the preposterousness of such a notion, laughed with them. Twyning said, "Next June! Imagine it! At the very outside it will be well over by Christmas."

And they all agreed, "Oh, rather!"

V

It was all immensely reassuring, and Sabre gathered up his bundle of papers and went into his room, feeling on the whole rather pleasurably excited than otherwise. But as he read, column after column and paper after paper, measures that had been taken by the Government, orders to Army and Naval reservists, the impending call for men, the scenes in the streets of London, and with these the deeply grave tone of the leading articles, the tremendous statistics and the huge foreshadowing of certain of the military correspondents, the breathless news already from the seats of war,—as his mind thus received there returned to it its earlier sense of enormous oppression and tremendous conjecture. War.... England.... The first sentence of his history, now greatly advanced, came tremendously into his mind: "This England you live in is yours...." And now at war—challenged—threatened—

It surged enormously within him. He got up. He must go out into the streets and see what was happening.

The day wore on. He felt extraordinarily shy and self-conscious about the performance of a matter that had entered his mind with that surging uplift of his feelings. It was four o'clock in the afternoon before he took himself to it and then, leaving its place, he unexpectedly encountered Mabel. She was just going into the station. She had come in, as she had proposed, and she told him what she had said to Jones and what Jones had said to her. "Abominably rude man."

Then she asked him, "Was that Doctor Anderson's gate you came out of just now?"

"Yes."

"Whatever had you been to see him about?"

He flushed. He never could invent an excuse when he wanted one. "I'd been asking him to have a look at me."

"Whatever for?"

"Oh, nothing particular."

"You couldn't have been to see him for nothing."

"Well, practically nothing. You remember when I increased my life insurance some time ago they said my heart was a bit groggy and made a bit of a fuss? Well, I thought I'd just see again so as to get out of paying that higher premium."

"Oh, that. What nonsense it was. What did he say?"

"Said I had a murmur or some rot. I say, if you're going back now, don't wait dinner for me to-night. I'll get something here. The Evening Times is bringing out a special edition at nine o'clock. I'd like to wait for it."

She assented, "Yes, bring home the paper."

He went into the office. The afternoon post had brought letters to his desk. He turned them over without interest, then caught up one,—from Nona.

Marko, this frightful war! I have thanked God on my knees for you that last week you prevented me. If I had done it with this! Tony has rejoined the Guards, he was in the Reserve of Officers. And you see that whatever has been, and is, dear, he's my man to stand by in this. Marko, it would have been too awful if I couldn't, and I thank God for you, again and again and again. Nona.

Twyning appeared. "Hullo, old man, heard the latest? I say, you look as if you're ready to take on the whole world."