He bobbed with forlorn little curtsies, pulling at his moustache, apologizing for the inconvenience of a European situation for which he, as the agent through which Marshington must see the world, felt a personal responsibility.
"Oh, well." Muriel turned to go.
An old woman in a man's cap, who for some inexplicable reason had planted herself on a chair by the counter, looked up at her.
"War's bloody hell," she remarked mildly. "Ah'm telling you God's truth. Two o' my lads went i' South Africa. Bloody hell. That's what it is."
She rose and hiccoughed unsteadily from the shop, the little crowd making way for her ungainly figure.
Unaccountably stirred by this brief encounter, Muriel left the shop, her mind wounded and yet quickened by the old woman's words. It was as though in her obscenity, she had been a foretaste of something to come, something sinister and violent.
The village street lay wrapped in the grey twilight of a dream. Bloody hell. Bloody hell. She saw the hell of a child's picture book, gleaming with livid flame. The blood smell faintly nauseating, like a butcher's shop on a hot day. Across the road, Connie and her mother talked to Mrs. Cartwright. "It's all over the village," Mrs. Cartwright was saying. "Mr. Marshall Gurney has telegraphed, and telegraphed, and can't get any answer through. They say that he is nearly mad with anxiety. If the war is declared against us, they're sure to be murdered."
"Nonsense," said Mrs. Hammond. "You don't murder people nowadays, even if there is a war on. The Marshall Gurneys will be all right, though I always did say that it was a mistake to go off abroad like that. It doesn't somehow belong to those kind of people."
Muriel looked at the four of them, and at their eager absorbed faces as they talked about the Marshall Gurneys. Yet somehow she felt as though her mother were not anxious so much as jealous, jealous because it was Mrs. Marshall Gurney and not herself who was enjoying the unique distinction of becoming involved in a European crisis. That Kaiser, whom every one in England was reviling, might turn Mrs. Marshall Gurney's failure into victory.