Changing Winds / A Novel

by St. John G. Ervine

"But one must go on trying. If the house be pulled down, we must build it up again. One must go on trying...."

He would get his friends together, and they would plan to save what they could from the wreckage. "And then we'll begin again! Whatever happens, we must begin again!"

He was tired of playing Patience, tired of reading, and tired of sitting still. Perhaps, he thought, he could write. It would be odd afterwards to think that he had written a story during a rebellion. There was a great German ... who was it? ... Heine or Goethe?... Oh, why couldn't he remember names!... who had gone on writing steadily, though there was battle all about him.... He settled himself to write, though he had no plan in his mind, and as he wrote, he felt that the story, whatever it might grow to be, must be comic. "I feel like a clown making jokes in the circus while his wife is dying," he said to himself....

But his restlessness persisted, and after a while he put his manuscript aside, and took up a book which he had found in the bookcase: William James's Pragmatism: and began to read it. He remembered a discussion of Pragmatism by the Improved Tories, when Gilbert had described a pragmatist as an unfrocked Jesuit....

And while he was burrowing into the first chapter, thinking more of James's graceful style than of his matter, there was a great rattle, an incessant hammer-and-rasp noise in the street.

"Good God!" he exclaimed, jumping up and dropping the book, "what's that?"

Then it ceased, and there was a horrible quietness for a few moments, followed by the crack-crack of rifles, and then again the ra-ra-ra-rat-rat-rat-rattle-rattle....

"Machine guns!" he exclaimed. He knew instinctively that they were machine guns. "It ... it startles you, that noise!"

It went on, rattling, with little pauses now and then as if the gun were taking breath, for an hour or more: a paralysing sound, as if some giant were drawing a great stick swiftly along iron railings.

"I think I'd better put the light out," he said, going across the room to where the switch was, and as he went there was a cracking sound in the window, and a bullet flew across the room and lodged in the wall....