Ye set your leisure before their toil and your lusts above their need."
Rudyard Kipling: "The Islanders."
"You've probably stirred up an ant-hill with the end of your stick before now," said Eric Lane, shading his eyes and shifting himself in bed until he could catch a glimpse of the Lashmar Woods in their riot of autumn colour. "I feel that's what the Almighty has done here; we're scattered in every direction, running about in wild confusion without knowing in the least what any one else is doing. I feel amazingly out of everything."
He had already been seven weeks in bed at Lashmar Mill-House and was white-faced and cadaverous, with bloodless lips and immense sunken brown eyes. This was the worst breakdown that he had undergone since he was a boy; but all danger was now over, and his voice was beginning to recover its strength and music. Jack had walked over to sit with him. It was their first meeting since they journeyed to Oxford together for their degrees; Jack had been training in London and was wearing for the first time the uniform of a second lieutenant.
"How soon are you going to be allowed up?"
"In another week," Eric answered. "I don't know when I shall be able to start regular work again. I've had to chuck the paper. I don't think they were sorry to get rid of me: there's been drastic staff reduction in Fleet Street since the war. It's rather a bore, though. If my play's produced in the spring, if it's a success, I may have some money; otherwise I must live on my hard-earned savings and try to find work. One of the government offices might take me. You know that Oakleigh's in the Admiralty?"
"Yes, and O'Rane's enlisted; and Jim Loring's a staff captain; and that swine Webster is driving a car for the Red Cross. Even the egregious Val Arden's taken a commission. I rather respect him—for the first time in my life; he looks three parts gone in consumption, but he got round the doctor. He wasn't going to have people saying that he was a funk, and I think he felt that he'd led a footling life and that this was the opportunity of shewing what he was made of. Most of us are feeling that we've wasted a good deal of our time.... What did they spin you for?"
"Overstrained heart. And, when I was examined, of course I was about half an hour removed from my final collapse—which I think we will not discuss.... Did you know Deryk Lancing? It was horrible about his death."
"Yes, I've been wondering whether it was an accident," said Jack. "He was so full of nerves that I should never have been surprised to hear he'd gone off his head. But what an opportunity the war would have been for him! Oakleigh told me that he was always worrying about his money and wondering what to do with it. Well, the beauty of being in the army is that you can't think about yourself; you're a tiny part in a gigantic machine, and your individuality doesn't matter a damn to any one.... When you think how every man and women you know was attitudinizing and thinking about his own personality—Jack Summertown, Val Arden, Deganway.... And the women were worse than the men. Everything sacrificed for effect. Every one looking for new emotions. Sensationalists.... You tried your personality on a new diet of excitement every day. How amazingly small it all seems when you measure it by a war of this kind! Even the biggest thing of all. A man devotes months and years of his life to engaging the affections of a woman——"