Ode to Duty.
Winter rushed past us like a tropical squall that year, and, before one had noted the beautiful coming of spring, young summer was upon the land. For me, serving as I did the founder and leader of The Citizens, life was filled as never before. I had never even dreamed of a life so compact of far-reaching action, of intimate relation with great causes.
I know now that the speed and strenuousness of it was telling upon all of us. But we did not realize it then. John Crondall seemed positively tireless. The rest of us had our moments of exhaustion, but never, I think, of depression. Our work was too finely productive and too richly rewarded for that. But we were thin, and a little fine-drawn, like athletes somewhat overtrained.
Published records have analyzed our progress through the country, the Canadian preachers' and our own; but nothing I have read, or could tell, gives more than a pale reflection of that triumphal progress, as we lived it. In our wake, harlots forsook harlotry to learn something of nursing by doing the rough domestic work of hospitals; famous misers and money-grubbers gave fortunes to The Citizens' cause, and peers' sons left country mansions to learn defensive arts, in the ranks; drunkards left their toping for honest work, and actresses sold their wardrobes to provide funds for village rifle corps.
There was no light sentiment, no sort of hysteria, at the back of these miracles. Be it remembered that the streets of English towns had never been so orderly; public-houses and places of amusement had never been so empty; churches and chapels had never been one-half so full. During that year, as the records show, it became the rule in many places for curates and deacons to hold services outside the churches and chapels, while packed congregations attended the services held within. And it was then that, for the first time, we saw parsons leading the young men of their flocks to the rifle-ranges, and competing with them there.
The lessons we learned in those days will never, I suppose, seem so wonderful to any one else as to those of us who had lived a good slice of our lives before the lessons came; before the need of them was felt or understood. "For God, our Race, and Duty!" Conceive the stirring wonder of the watchword, when it was no more than a month old!
The seasons rushed by us, as I said. But one short conversation served to mark for me the coming of summer. We had reached the Surrey hills in our homeward progress toward London. On a Saturday night we held a huge meeting in Guildford, and very early on Sunday morning I woke with a curiously insistent desire to be out in the open. Full of this inclination I rose, dressed, and made my way down to the side entrance of the hotel, where a few servants were moving about drowsily. As I passed out under a high archway into the empty, sunny street, with its clean Sabbath hush, Constance Grey stepped out from the front entrance to the pavement.
"I felt such a longing to be out in the open this morning," she said, when we had exchanged greeting. "It's months since I had a walk for the walk's sake, and now I mean to climb that hill that we motored over from Farnham—the Hog's Back, as they call it."
We both thought it deserved some more beautiful name, when we turned on its crest and looked back at Guildford in the hollow, shining in summer morning haze.
"Now surely that's King Arthur's Camelot," said Constance.