Dick went out into the still night air from the close atmosphere of Joan's room, his mind a seething battleground of emotions—anger, and hurt pride, and a still small sense of pain, which as time passed grew so greatly in proportion that it exceeded both the other sensations. He had said very bitterly to Joan that she had broken his dream, but, because it had been broken, it none the less had the power to hurt intolerably. Each fragment throbbed with a hot sense of injustice and self-pity. He had not the slightest idea what to do with himself: every prospect seemed equally distasteful. He walked, to begin with, furiously and rather aimlessly down in the direction of the Embankment. The exercise, such as it was, dulled his senses and quieted a little the tumult of his mind. He found himself thinking of other things. The men to-day in his Club had been discussing the possibility of war, they had been planning what they would do; instinctively, since the thought of Joan and the scene he had just left were too tender for much probing, his mind turned to that. As he stamped along he resolved, without thinking very deeply about it, that he would volunteer for active service, and speculated on the possibility of his getting taken on at once.
"Doctors will be very needful in this war," one man had said at the Club.
"Yes, by Gad," another had answered. "We have got some devilish contrivances these days for killing our brother men."
Looked at from that point of view, the idea seemed strange, and Dick caught his breath on the thought. What would war mean? Hundreds of men would be killed—hundreds, why it would be more like thousands. He had read descriptions of the South African war, he had talked with men who had been all through it.
"We doctors see the awful side of war, I can tell you," an old doctor had once told him. "To the others it may seem flags flying, drums beating, and a fine uplifting spectacle; but we see the horrors, the shattered bodies, the eyes that pray for death. It's a ghastly affair."
And yet there was something in the thought which flamed at Dick's heart and made him throw his head up. It was the beating of drums, the call of the bugles that he heard as he thought of it; the blood tingled in his veins, he forgot that other pain which had driven him forth so restless a short hour ago.
The great dark waters of the river had some special message to give him this evening. He stood for a little watching them; lights flamed along the Embankment, the bridges lay across the intervening darkness like coloured lanterns fastened on a string. Over on the other side he could see the trees of Battersea Park, and beyond that again the huddled pile of houses and wharfs and warehouses that crowded down to the water's edge. He was suddenly aware, as he stood there, of a passionate love for this old, grey city, this slow-moving mass of dark waters. It symbolized something which the thought of war had stirred awake in his heart. He had a hot sense of love and pride and pity all mingled, he felt somehow as if the city were his, and as if an enemy's hand had been stretched out to spoil it. The drumming, the flag-waving, and the noise of bugles were still astir in his imagination, but the river had called something else to life behind their glamour. It did not occur to him to call it love of country, yet that was what it was.
His walk brought him out in the end by the Houses of Parliament, and he found himself in the midst of a large crowd. It swayed and surged now this way and now that, as is the way of crowds. The outskirts of it reached right up to and around Trafalgar Square. When Dick had fought his way up Parliament Street he could see a mass of people moving about the National Gallery, and right above them Nelson's statue stood out black against the sky.
"If they want war, these bally Germans," someone in the crowd suddenly shouted in a very hoarse and beery voice, "let's give it them."
"Yes, by God!" another answered. "Good old England, let's stand by our word."