2
It was my turn for late duty; but, when I reached my room, I found a message:
“Captain Hornbeck’s compliments; and it will not be necessary for Commander Oakleigh to stay unless he wishes.”
Peace was not yet come, then, or Philip Hornbeck would have told me; it would come that night, or he would not have granted me leave of absence. The Admiralty, meanwhile, could not have been more silent if the old world had died in giving birth to the new.
“You got my chit?,” Hornbeck asked in an undertone, when I went to report. “Unless you want to hang about here . . .”
“My taste for bureaucracy,” I answered, with a glance of loathing at his “IN”, “OUT” and “PENDING” trays, “has been cured.” How long did Barbara say the war had lasted? Since 1914? Yes, four years and three months had passed since I began to masquerade unconvincingly as an officer of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. With the actors, artists, barristers and stockbrokers who combined to make up my section of the intelligence department, I had talked a hundred times of the day when we should have taken our last undeserved salute and laid aside the latest of our comic-opera uniforms. Now it was come. “As I’m here, I may as well lend a hand. I suppose they’re bound to sign?”
Hornbeck unlocked a row of japanned boxes and glanced perfunctorily at his secret files before plunging them in the fire.
“It won’t come through in time for the morning papers, so I’m getting rid of the evidence before I’m told not to,” he chuckled. “ ‘The eleventh hour . . . of the eleventh day . . . of the eleventh month.’ Sounds as if a journalist had had something to do with that!” One file slipped to the floor; and I read on the faded docket “Goeben and Breslau, 1914”. It had been a very long war. “Lord! These papers are a satire on the vanity of human wishes!,” he drawled. “You can give all your people leave for the day. They won’t be in a fit state to work . . . even if you had any work to give them. And I suppose you won’t have. It . . . takes you some time to grasp that it’s all over,” he added, checking half way to the fire and staring bemusedly at the papers in his hands. Looking at him, I needed time to recall that he had been a young man when war broke out. “What are you and Lady Barbara going to do with yourselves?,” he asked after a pause.
“Get away to the sun,” I answered with the grim determination of a man whose vitality was spent for lack of rest and good food.
“Wonder . . . what will happen . . . to us,” Hornbeck pondered, punctuating his words with abrupt shrieks of rending paper. “No more wars; . . . no more navies . . . or armies.”