'This accursed war!' he broke out, when she had finished—'it makes slaves and idiots of us all. It must—it shall end!' And marching tempestuously up and down, he went off into one of the pessimist and pacifist harangues to which she was more or less accustomed. Who would rid the country of a Government that could neither make peace nor make war?—that foresaw nothing—that was making life unbearable at home, by a network of senseless restrictions, while it wasted millions abroad, and in the military camps! The Labour Party were the only people with a grain of sense. They at least would try to make peace. Only, when they had made it, to be governed by them would be even worse than to be governed by Lloyd George. There was no possible life anywhere for decent quiet people. And as for the ravaging and ruin of the woods that was going on all over England—
'The submarine return is worse this week,' said Elizabeth in a low voice.
She had gone to her own table and was sitting there till the hurricane should pass over. There was in her a fresh and chafing sense of the obstacles laid in her path—the path of the scientific and successful organizer—by the Squire's perversities. It was not as though he were a pacifist by conviction, religious or other. She had seen him rout and trample on not a few genuine professors of the faith. His whole opposition to the war rested on the limitations and discomforts inflicted on his own life. It reminded her of certain fragments of dialogue she had overheard in the winter, where she had chanced to find herself alone in a railway carriage full of a group of disaffected workmen returning from a strike meeting at Leicester. 'If there are many like these, is the country worth saving?' she was saying to herself all the time, in a dumb passion.
Yet, after all, those men had done months and years of labour for the country. Saying 'I will not go!' they had yet gone. Without a spark of high feeling or conscious self-sacrifice to ease their toil, they had yet, week by week, made the guns and the shells which had saved the armies of England. When this temporary outbreak was over they would go back and make them again. And they were tired men—sallow-faced, and bowed before their time.
But what had this whimsical, accomplished man before her ever done for his country that he should rail like this? It was difficult after a tiring day to keep scorn and dissent concealed. They probably showed in her expression, for the Squire turned upon her as she made her remark about the submarines, examining her with a pair of keen eyes.
'Oh, I know very well what you and that fellow Chicksands think about persons like me who endeavour to see things as they are!'—he smote a chair before him—'and not as you and our war-party wish them to be. Well, well—now then to business. Who wants to cut my woods—and what do they offer for them?'
Elizabeth put the papers in front of him. He turned them over.
'H'm—they want the Cross Wood—one of the most beautiful woods in England. I have spent days there when I was young drawing the trees. And who's the idiot'—he pointed to some marginal notes—'who is always carping and girding? "Good forestry" would have done this and not done that. "Mismanagement"—"neglect"! Upon my word, who made this man a judge over me?'
And flushed with wrath, the Squire looked angrily at his secretary. 'Heavens!'—thought Elizabeth—'why didn't I edit the papers before I showed them?' But aloud she said with her good-tempered smile—
'I am afraid I took all those remarks as applying to Mr. Hull. He was responsible for the woods, wasn't he? He told me he was.'