I
The first five-and-thirty years of my life were singularly unemotional. My father died when I was too young to appreciate the loss, and I had never seen death at close quarters nor known the breathless thrill of a great triumph or the bitterness of a great disappointment. There was nothing to change the tolerant scale of values, to bring about an intenser way of life or a harsher manner of speech. My world was comfortably free from extremes, and it hardly occurred to me that the architects of civilization would attack their own handiwork, or that a man's smooth, hairless fingers would ever revert to the likeness of a gorilla's paw.
The "Five Days" changed all that. On the thirty-first of July I left London for Chepstow with no greater troubles than a sense of uneasiness at the breakdown of the Buckingham Palace Conference on the Irish deadlock. My uncle Bertrand, a pedantic Constitutionalist, drove me to Paddington, and from his speech I could see he was undecided whether to lament the failure of the negotiations or rejoice that a constitutional innovation had proved ineffective. With many others he felt the situation in Ireland must be very grave to allow of the Sovereign summoning the party leaders to his Palace; equally, so drastic a course could in the eyes of ordinary men only be justified by success.
And it had failed. And the next news might well be that shots were being exchanged on the borders of Ulster.
Such a possibility brought little embarrassment to the holiday makers who thronged the station. Fighting my way through the Bank-holiday crowd, I found the nucleus of our party sitting patiently on suitcases and awaiting a train that was indefinitely delayed by the extra traffic and a minor strike of dining-car attendants. As the time went by and the crowd increased, Summertown, Mayhew and O'Rane built the luggage into a circle and sat contentedly talking, while I, who was responsible to Loring for the full complement, wandered about, list in hand, ticking off the names of the new arrivals.
"Adsum!" called out Mayhew, when I reached him. "Aren't you glad you didn't take my bet about the Archduke, George?"
"I nearly did," I said. "I thought we'd left that sort of thing behind with the Borgias."
"It was a wonderful opportunity," he observed, with the air of a connoisseur in political crime. "You've seen the Austrian ultimatum? Well, Servia's going to be mopped up like Bosnia and Herzegovina."
He nodded omnisciently and raised his eyebrows interrogatively at O'Rane, who was seated on the next suitcase with his chin on his hands, lost in thought.
"They told me at the Club that Russia was mobilizing," I said.