"Don't you feel that that is just how everything happened? Aren't you sure of it?" he asked, turning to Mrs. Tyson with a dreadful appeal in his eyes. But she could answer it honestly.
"Yes, sir, that is how it all happened," and for a moment Mr. Endicott was comforted. But immediately afterwards he sat down on a chair like a tired man and his fingers played upon the table.
"It would all be over in a few seconds," he said lamentably to Mrs. Tyson. "But, oh, those seconds! They would have been terrible--terrible with pain." His voice trailed away into silence. He sat still staring at the table. Then he raised his head towards Mrs. Tyson, and his face was disfigured by a smile of torment. "Hard luck on a young girl, eh, Mrs. Tyson?" and the very banality of the sentence made it poignant. "Everything just beginning for her--the sheer fun of life. Her beauty, and young men, and friends and dancing, the whole day a burst of music--and then suddenly--quite alone--that's so horrible--quite alone, in a minute she had to----" His voice choked and the tears began to run down his face.
"But the man?" Mrs. Tyson ventured.
"Oh, the man!" cried Endicott. "I will think of him to-morrow."
He went up the stairs walking as heavily as when he had carried his daughter in his arms; and he went again into Elsie's room. Mrs. Tyson blew out the candles upon his writing-table and arranged automatically some disordered sheets of foolscap. They were notes on the great principle of the Minimum Wage.
ONE OF THEM
[ONE OF THEM]
At midnight on August 4th, Poldhu flung the news out to all ships, and Anthony Strange, on the Boulotte, took the message in the middle of the West Bay. He carried on accordingly past Weymouth, and in the morning was confronted with the wall of great breakers off St. Alban's Head. The little boat ran towards that barrier with extraordinary swiftness. Strange put her at a gap close into the shore where the waves broke lower, and with a lurch and a shudder she scooped the water in over her bows and clothed herself to her brass gunwale-top in a stinging veil of salt. Never had the Boulotte behaved better than she did that morning in the welter of the Race, and Strange, rejoicing to his very finger-tips, forgot the news which was bringing all the pleasure-boats, great and small, into the harbours of the south, forgot even that sinking of the heart which had troubled him throughout the night. But it was only in the Race that he knew any comfort. He dropped his anchor in Poole Harbour by mid-day, and fled through London to a house he owned on the Berkshire Downs.
There for a few days he found life possible. It was true there were sentries under the railway bridges, but the sun rose each day over a country ripe for the harvest, and the smoke curled from the chimneys of pleasant villages; and there was no sign of war. But soon the nights became a torture. For from midnight on, at intervals of five to ten minutes, the troop-trains roared along the Thames Valley towards Avonmouth, and the reproach of each of them ceased only with the morning. Strange leaned out of his window looking down the slopes where the corn in the moonlight was like a mist. Not a light showed in the railway carriages, but the sparks danced above the funnel of the engine, and the glare of the furnace burnished the leaves of the trees. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers on the road to France. Then there came a morning when, not a hundred yards from his house, he saw a string of horses in the road and others being taken from the reaping-machines in a field. Strange returned to town and dined with a Mrs. Kenway, his best friend, and to her he unburdened his soul.