But one morning Aunt Adela, called out of the room to entertain callers—morning calls had never quite gone out of fashion in Brackenhurst—left the paper she was reading flung down upon the bed, and Laura’s eye was caught by such enormous headlines as she had never seen before, headlines that blared through the room like trumpets. England—she turned sideways that the paper might catch the light—England was at war. England had been at war three days.
War? In the egotism of her weakness it seemed a trifling thing. War ... war.... There had been the Boer War too.... She dropped the paper indifferently.
But a thought, not of the unrealized present, but of that dreamlike far past, remained with her, stirring her mind to exertion.
The Boer War.... She could just remember the red-white-and-blue ribbons in shops and the picture buttons of Redvers Buller, and Sir George White, and Kitchener, that she used to buy with her pennies. Father—that shadow of a shadow—had been killed in the Boer War.... He had left his business to volunteer ... that was why they were poor.... She remembered—and the memory stabbed like a sudden light in a dark room—the beady rasp of carpet against her bare knees as she twisted round from her dolls’ house at the sound of voices, at her Aunt Adela’s voice—
“Pure selfishness in a married man, I call it—though he is my brother. What’s the army for?” And then—not her mother’s answer, but her mother’s soft, angry, beautiful face....
It was like Aunt Adela not to realize that decent men were bound to volunteer when there was a war on, like the Boer War.... The Great War by Conan Doyle.... She had the book somewhere ... it had lasted three years—that great war.... Of course, this business——
She picked up the paper again and began to read.
And as she read, those overworked, willing servants the body and the brain of the body, roused themselves, as in crisis they always do, to meet the demands of the shocked spirit. She felt the clogging weakness drawing away from her as a cloud draws away from a hill-side. She turned from a remembered past that had seemed the extreme of trouble to a future that made that past a childish thing.
War....
Deliberately she put aside the emotions that she owed the event. ‘England,’ ‘Right,’ ‘Wrong,’ ‘Victory,’ ‘Sacrifice,’ ‘Our Fleet’—these were words that could wait: it was first necessary to comprehend its personal significance. This war meant—it meant danger: and before this danger, she saw already, one would be helpless: between this danger and Justin one would not be able to interpose body or soul.... This—she tried to be very clear—this was war—man’s war—a dragon from the fairy tales come to overwhelming, incredible flesh and blood life.... It was a week old and already it was clamouring for its food.... ‘Your King and Country want you.’... Father had volunteered—all decent men had to volunteer—always—in a war.... So Justin ... if Justin ... but surely Justin wouldn’t have to go? At any rate, not for months and months.... Why should Justin go? the only son of his mother.... Justin would surely understand that it was not his duty ... not yet anyhow.... He could do things at home.... No need—no need.... But if Justin went.... All decent men went.... He would go—he would go—he would go in spite of all—she would have to watch him go.... And there were more ways than one, it seemed, of losing Justin....