Two days afterwards George Mucklow followed the parson's son into the ranks.
CHAPTER VII
SECOND IMPRESSIONS
August—with its stupefying surprises, disappointments, and acrimonies—drew to a close. The black Sunday, at the end of the month, will never be forgotten by those who happened to be in London at the time. For a few terrible hours it was said that our Expeditionary Force had been annihilated. In the evening an official contradiction lifted the town out of a pea-soup fog of despair.
Day by day, the Hun hordes advanced. Sir Geoffrey devoured his morning papers, talked over the immeasurable possibilities with his wife and Fishpingle, and finally determined to tap fresh information at its source. He went up to London, spent three days at his clubs, and returned to Nether-Applewhite an angry and disillusioned man. Having many friends in high places, some of them old schoolfellows and kinsmen, who had become pale and anxious Cabinet Ministers, he buttonholed them all, demanding the truth in his jovial, autocratic fashion.
"A damned lot of Mandarins," he told his wife, "nodding their confounded heads and saying nothing. At the club, by Jove! I felt as if I were in a submarine with the periscope shot away. Every other fellow I met was 'credibly informed' about something or t'other, and I could have made a pot of money, my dear, laying odds against their precious bits of information. The Government is scared stiff, at the mercy of the Labourites. Out of the welter of talk and twaddle I collared this conviction: the England we love has vanished never to return. Kitchener says that we shall be bled white, and the best will be the first to go."
Lady Pomfret smiled faintly.
"George Mucklow has gone."
"Has he? I shall give Uncle a sovereign. Now, Mary, sick as I feel about the incompetence and crass stupidity of the people who have got us into this mess, I shall carry a stiff tail in the village."
"I am sure you will, dear."