“And there may be left no head of the house of Coombe,” from the Duchess.
“There will be many a house left without its head—houses great and small. And if the peril of it were more generally foreseen at this date it would be less perilous than it is.”
“Lads like that!” said the old Duchess bitterly. “Lads in their strength and joy and bloom! It is hideous.”
“In all their young virility and promise for a next generation—the strong young fathers of forever unborn millions! It’s damnable! And it will be so not only in England, but all over a blood drenched world.”
It was in this way they talked to each other of the black tragedy for which they believed the world’s stage was already being set in secret, and though there were here and there others who felt the ominous inevitability of the raising of the curtain, the rest of the world looked on in careless indifference to the significance of the open training of its actors and even the resounding hammerings of its stage carpenters and builders. In these days the two discussed the matter more frequently and even in the tone of those who waited for the approach of a thing drawing nearer every day.
Each time the Head of the House of Coombe made one of his so-called “week end” visits to the parts an Englishman can reach only by crossing the Channel, he returned with new knowledge of the special direction in which the wind veered in the blowing of those straws he had so long observed with absorbed interest.
“Above all the common sounds of daily human life one hears in that one land the rattle and clash of arms and the unending thudding tread of marching feet,” he said after one such visit. “Two generations of men creatures bred and born and trained to live as parts of a huge death dealing machine have resulted in a monstrous construction. Each man is a part of it and each part’s greatest ambition is to respond to the shouted word of command as a mechanical puppet responds to the touch of a spring. To each unit of the millions, love of his own country means only hatred of all others and the belief that no other should be allowed existence. The sacred creed of each is that the immensity of Germany is such that there can be no room on the earth for another than itself. Blood and iron will clear the world of the inferior peoples. To the masses that is their God’s will. Their God is an understudy of their Kaiser.”
“You are not saying that as part of the trick of making a jest of things?”
“I wish to God I were. The poor huge inhuman thing he has built does not know that when he was a boy he did not play at war and battles as other boys do, but as a creature obsessed. He has played at soldiers with his people as his toys throughout all his morbid life—and he has hungered and thirsted as he has done it.”
A Bible lay upon the table and the Duchess drew it towards her.