To the inmates of Bramleigh Beeches—Nevil excepted—the crash came with startling abruptness; dwarfing all personal problems, heart-searchings and high decisions. Even Lady Roscoe forgot Family Herald heroics, and 'crossed the threshold' without comment from Nevil or herself. The weightiest matters became suddenly trivial beside the tremendous questions that hovered in every mind and on every tongue: 'Can We hold Them?' 'Can They invade Us?' 'Can it be true—this whispered horror, that rumoured disaster?' And the test question—most tremendous of all, for the mere unit—'Where do I come in?'
Nevil came in automatically through years of casual connection with the Artists' Rifles. He was a Colonel by now; and would join up as a matter of course—to his wife's secret amazement and far from secret pride. Without an ounce of the soldier in him, he acted on instinct like most Englishmen; not troubling to analyse motives; simply in the spirit of Noblesse oblige; or, in the more casual modern equivalent—'one just does.'
Roy—poet and dreamer—became electrically alive to his double heritage of the soldier spirit. From age to age the primeval link between poet and warrior is reaffirmed in time of war: and the Rajput in him recognised only one way of fighting worthy the name—the triune conjunction of man and horse and sword. Disillusion, strange and terrible, awaited him on that score: and as for India—what need of his young activities, when the whole Empire was being welded into one resistant mass by the triple hammer-strokes of a common danger, a common enemy, a common aim?
It was perhaps this sense of a clear call in an age of intellectual ferment, of sex problems and political friction, that sent so many unlikely types of manhood straight as arrows to that universal target—the Front. The War offered a high and practical outlet for their dumb idealism; to their realism, it offered the 'terrific verities of fatigue, suffering, bodily danger—beloved life and staggering death.'
For Roy, Cavalry was a matter of course. In the saddle, even Jane could find no fault with him; little guessing that, in his genius for horsemanship, he was Rajput to the marrow. His compact, nervous make, strong thigh and light hand, marked him as the inevitable centaur; and he had already gained a measure of distinction in the cavalry arm of the Officers' Training Corps. But a great wish to keep in touch with his father led him to fall in with Sir Nevil's suggestion that he should start in the Artists' Rifles and apply for a transfer later on—when one could see more clearly how this terrific business was likely to develop. George and Jerry—aged fifteen and sixteen and a half—raged at their own futile juvenility—which, in happier circumstances, nothing would have induced them to admit. Jerry—a gay and reckless being—had fell designs on the Flying Corps, the very first moment he could 'wangle it.' George—the truest Sinclair of them all—sagely voted for the Navy, because it took you young. But no one heeded them very much. They were all too absorbed in newspapers and their own immediate plans.
And Lilámani, also, found her niche, when the King's stirring proclamation announced the coming of Indian troops. There was to be a camp on the estate. Later on, there would be convalescents. Meantime, there was wholesale need of 'comforts' to occupy her and Helen and Christine.
Tara's soaring ambition would carry her farther afield. Her spirit of flame—that rose instinctively to tragic issues and heroic demands—could be at peace nowhere but in the splendid, terrible, unorganised thick of it all. Without making any ado, she proposed to get there in the shortest possible time; and, in the shortest possible time, by sheer concentration and hard work, she achieved her desire. Before Roy left England, before her best-loved brother—a man of brilliant promise—had finished learning to fly, she was driving her car in Belgium, besieged in Antwerp, doing and enduring terrible things ...
After Tara, Nevil—for the Artists' Rifles were early in the field. After Nevil, Roy—his exchange effected—very slim and soldierly in cavalry uniform; his grey-blue eyes, with the lurking gleam in them, more than ever noticeable in his sunburnt face.
The last day, the last hour were at once sad and glad beyond belief; so that Lilámani's coward heart was thankful for urgent trifles that helped to divert attention from the waiting shadow. Even to-day, as always, dress and sari were instinctively chosen to express her mood:—the mother-of-pearl mood; iridescence of glad and sad: glad to give; yet aching to keep. Daughter of Rajputs though she was, she had her moment of very human shrinking when the sharp actuality of parting was upon them; when he held her so close and long that she felt as if the tightened cord round her heart must snap—and there an end....
But, by some miracle, some power not her own, courage held; though, when he released her, she was half blinded with tears.