THE INN OF GOOD-BYES
It might have been for exercise merely, or it might be down to the sea and away to the front for the battle of ‘Our Raj.’ The quiet hotel where people sit together and talk in earnest strained pairs is well used to such departures. The officers of a whole Division—the raw cuts of their tent-circles lie still unhealed on the links—dined there by scores; mothers and relatives came down from the uttermost parts of Scotland for a last look at their boys, and found beds goodness knows where: very quiet little weddings, too, set out from its doors to the church opposite. The Division went away a century of weeks ago by the road that the mule-battery took. Many of the civilians who pocketed the wills signed and witnessed in the smoking-room are full-blown executors now; some of the brides are widows.
And it is not nice to remember that when the hotel was so filled that not even another pleading mother could be given a place in which to lie down and have her cry out—not at all nice to remember that it never occurred to any of the comfortable people in the large but sparsely inhabited houses around that they might have offered a night’s lodging, even to an unintroduced stranger.