Chapter Twenty Six.
It seemed to Matheson that with his engagement events multiplied with such amazing rapidity that the deep significance of the step he had taken was lost sight of; its importance was swamped in the whirlpool of calamitous happenings that marked the year of 1914 in bloody letters upon the calendar of the world.
It was in July that he became engaged, and within a week of his proposal the world war had made its puling start with the faked dispute over an assassinated archduke. The insignificant start swelled to compelling significance; and the world awaited with suspended breath each new development of the most appalling disaster in the history of the nations. From the first Matheson had no doubt that Great Britain would be forced into the struggle. There was no choice about it; it was a question of national safety as well as of honour. He began to consider the subject in connexion with himself. Plainly if the country went to war it was his duty to see the matter through. Quite apart from inclination the man of military age and fitness was called upon to serve.
He talked to Macfarlane about it. Macfarlane was cautious and reserved his opinion.
“You’ve got a girl now,” he said. “You’ve got to consider her.”
“But that’s all the greater reason why a man should stand by his country,” Matheson insisted.
“Better talk it over with her first. And, look here!” Macfarlane became more alert. “This trouble, if it involves England, is going to reach out here. Have you forgotten your talk about a Boer rebellion? I thought you were rotting at the time—but you weren’t. You are something of a prophet, you know, Matheson. If England is full up with her own affairs, that’s just the time the Boers will seize for getting hold of this country. It’s all cut and dried, you can depend on that. Should there be trouble out here,” Macfarlane added in a hard decisive voice, “I am for helping to quell that anyway. If your talk of colonisation is worth anything, you will do the same.”
Matheson made no immediate answer. Macfarlane’s speech somehow visualised for him the whitewashed walls of Benfontein, and Honor’s face showing wanly in the moonlight while the low-pitched voice breathed its earnest question: “I wonder if you will ever see into the heart of the veld?”
“I can’t tell what I’ll do,” he answered after a long silence, and got up and went away with rather surprising suddenness.
July ended and August came in on the pathetic note of Belgium’s appeal against the savage bestiality of this new-born oppression which overran her territory, an appeal to which there could be but one answer. The hour for Great Britain’s intervention struck with that piteous cry for help.