"You mean," answered Joan quietly, "that if I had let your mother die and had married your father, that he and I would have loved each other to the end; that I should have helped him and encouraged him in all things, so that his success would have been certain. Is that the argument?"

"Didn't you love him?" asked the girl, staring. "Wouldn't you have helped him?"

"I can't tell," answered Joan. "I should have meant to. Many men and women have loved, and have meant to help each other all their lives; and with the years have drifted asunder; coming even to be against one another. We change and our thoughts change; slight differences of temperament grow into barriers between us; unguessed antagonisms widen into gulfs. Accidents come into our lives. A friend was telling me the other day of a woman who practically proposed to and married a musical genius, purely and solely to be of use to him. She earned quite a big income, drawing fashions; and her idea was to relieve him of the necessity of doing pot-boilers for a living, so that he might devote his whole time to his real work. And a few weeks after they were married she ran the point of a lead pencil through her eye and it set up inflammation of her brain. And now all the poor fellow has to think of is how to make enough to pay for her keep at a private lunatic asylum. I don't mean to be flippant. It's the very absurdity of it all that makes the mystery of life--that renders it so hopeless for us to attempt to find our way through it by our own judgment. It is like the ants making all their clever, laborious plans, knowing nothing of chickens and the gardener's spade. That is why we have to cling to the life we can order for ourselves--the life within us. Truth, Justice, Pity. They are the strong things, the eternal things, the things we've got to sacrifice ourselves for--serve with our bodies and our souls.

"Don't think me a prig," she pleaded. "I'm talking as if I knew all about it. I don't really. I grope in the dark; and now and then--at least so it seems to me--I catch a glint of light. We are powerless in ourselves. It is only G.o.d working through us that enables us to be of any use. All we can do is to keep ourselves kind and clean and free from self, waiting for Him to come to us."

The girl rose. "I must be getting back," she said. "Dad will be wondering where I've got to."

She paused with the door in her hand, and a faint smile played round the thin red lips.

"Tell me," she said. "What is G.o.d?"

"A Labourer, together with man, according to Saint Paul," Joan answered.

The girl turned and went. Joan watched her as she descended the great staircase. She moved with a curious, gliding motion, pausing at times for the people to make way for her.

CHAPTER XVI

It was a summer's evening; Joan had dropped in at the Greysons and had found Mary alone, Francis not having yet returned from a bachelor dinner at his uncle's, who was some big pot in the Navy. They sat in the twilight, facing the open French windows, through which one caught a glimpse of the park. A great stillness seemed to be around them.

The sale and purchase of the _Evening Gazette_ had been completed a few days before. Greyson had been offered the alternative of gradually and gracefully changing his opinions, or getting out; and had, of course, chosen dismissal. He was taking a holiday, as Mary explained with a short laugh.

"He had some shares in it himself, hadn't he?" Joan asked.

"Oh, just enough to be of no use," Mary answered. "Carleton was rather decent, so far as that part of it was concerned, and insisted on paying him a fair price. The market value would have been much less; and he wanted to be out of it."

Joan remained silent. It made her mad, that a man could be suddenly robbed of fifteen years' labour: the weapon that his heart and brain had made keen wrested from his hand by a legal process, and turned against the very principles for which all his life he had been fighting.

"I'm almost more sorry for myself than for him," said Mary, making a whimsical grimace. "He will start something else, so soon as he's got over his first soreness; but I'm too old to dream of another child."

He came in a little later and, seating himself between them, filled and lighted his pipe. Looking back, Joan remembered that curiously none of them had spoken. Mary had turned at the sound of his key in the door.

She seemed to be watching him intently; but it was too dark to notice her expression. He pulled at his pipe till it was well alight and then removed it.

"It's war," he said.

The words made no immediate impression upon Joan. There had been rumours, threatenings and alarms, newspaper talk. But so there had been before. It would come one day: the world war that one felt was gathering in the air; that would burst like a second deluge on the nations. But it would not be in our time: it was too big. A way out would be found.

"Is there no hope?" asked Mary.

"Yes," he answered. "The hope that a miracle may happen. The Navy's got its orders."

And suddenly--as years before in a Paris music hall--there leapt to life within Joan's brain a little impish creature that took possession of her.

She hoped the miracle would not happen. The little impish creature within her brain was marching up and down beating a drum. She wished he would stop a minute. Someone was trying to talk to her, telling her she ought to be tremendously shocked and grieved. He--or she, or whatever it was that was trying to talk to her, appeared concerned about Reason and Pity and Universal Brotherhood and Civilization's clock--things like that. But the little impish drummer was making such a din, she couldn't properly hear. Later on, perhaps, he would get tired; and then she would be able to listen to this humane and sensible person, whoever it might be.

Mary argued that England could and should keep out of it; but Greyson was convinced it would be impossible, not to say dishonourable: a sentiment that won the enthusiastic approval of the little drummer in Joan's brain.

He played "Rule Britannia" and "G.o.d Save the King," the "Ma.r.s.eillaise"

and the Russian National hymn, all at the same time. He would have included "Deutschland uber Alles," if Joan hadn't made a supreme effort and stopped him. Evidently a sporting little devil. He took himself off into a corner after a time, where he played quietly to himself; and Joan was able to join in the conversation.

Greyson spoke with an enthusiasm that was unusual to him. So many of our wars had been mean wars--wars for the wrong; sordid wars for territory, for gold mines; wars against the weak at the bidding of our traders, our financiers. "Shouldering the white man's burden," we called it. Wars for the right of selling opium; wars to perpetuate the vile rule of the Turk because it happened to serve our commercial interests. This time, we were out to play the knight; to save the smaller peoples; to rescue our once "sweet enemy," fair France. Russia was the disturbing thought.

It somewhat discounted the knight-errant idea, riding stirrup to stirrup beside that barbarian horseman. But there were possibilities about Russia. Idealism lay hid within that sleeping brain. It would be a holy war for the Kingdom of the Peoples. With Germany freed from the monster of blood and iron that was crushing out her soul, with Russia awakened to life, we would build the United States of Europe. Even his voice was changed. Joan could almost fancy it was some excited schoolboy that was talking.

Mary had been clasping and unclasping her hands, a habit of hers when troubled. Could good ever come out of evil? That was her doubt. Did war ever do anything but sow the seeds of future violence; subst.i.tute one injustice for another; change wrong for wrong. Did it ever do anything but add to the world's sum of evil, making G.o.d's task the heavier?

Suddenly, while speaking, she fell into a pa.s.sionate fit of weeping. She went on through her tears:

"It will be terrible," she said. "It will last longer than you say.

Every nation will be drawn into it. There will be no voice left to speak for reason. Every day we shall grow more brutalized, more pitiless. It will degrade us, crush the soul out of us. Blood and iron! It will become our G.o.d too: the G.o.d of all the world. You say we are going into it with clean hands, this time. How long will they keep clean? The people who only live for making money: how long do you think they will remain silent? What has been all the talk of the last ten years but of capturing German trade. We shall be told that we owe it to our dead to make a profit out of them; that otherwise they will have died in vain.

Who will care for the people but to use them for killing one another--to hound them on like dogs. In every country nothing but greed and hatred will be preached. Horrible men and women will write to the papers crying out for more blood, more cruelty. Everything that can make for anger and revenge will be screamed from every newspaper. Every plea for humanity will be jeered at as 'sickly sentimentality.' Every man and woman who remembers the ideals with which we started will be shrieked at as a traitor. The people who are doing well out of it, they will get hold of the Press, appeal to the pa.s.sions of the mob. n.o.body else will be allowed to speak. It always has been so in war. It always will be. This will be no exception merely because it's bigger. Every country will be given over to savagery. There will be no appeal against it. The whole world will sink back into the beast."

She ended by rising abruptly and wishing them good-night. Her outburst had silenced Joan's impish drummer, for the time. He appeared to be nervous and depressed, but bucked up again on the way to the bus. Greyson walked with her as usual. They took the long way round by the outer circle.

"Poor Mary!" he said. "I should not have talked before her if I had thought. Her horror of war is almost physical. She will not even read about them. It has the same effect upon her as stories of cruelty."

"But there's truth in a good deal that she says," he added. "War can bring out all that is best in a people; but also it brings out the worst.

We shall have to take care that the ideals are not lost sight of."

"I wish this wretched business of the paper hadn't come just at this time," said Joan: "just when your voice is most needed.

"Couldn't you get enough money together to start something quickly," she continued, the idea suddenly coming to her. "I think I could help you.

It wouldn't matter its being something small to begin with. So long as it was entirely your own, and couldn't be taken away from you. You'd soon work it up."

"Thanks," he answered. "I may ask you to later on. But just now--" He paused.

Of course. For war you wanted men, to fight. She had been thinking of them in the lump: hurrying ma.s.ses such as one sees on cinema screens, blurred but picturesque. Of course, when you came to think of it, they would have to be made up of individuals--gallant-hearted, boyish sort of men who would pa.s.s through doors, one at a time, into little rooms; give their name and address to a soldier man seated at a big deal table. Later on, one would say good-bye to them on crowded platforms, wave a handkerchief. Not all of them would come back. "You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs," she told herself.

It annoyed her, that silly saying having come into her mind. She could see them lying there, with their white faces to the night. Surely she might have thought of some remark less idiotic to make to herself, at such a time.

He was explaining to her things about the air service. It seemed he had had experience in flying--some relation of his with whom he had spent a holiday last summer.

It would mean his getting out quickly. He seemed quite eager to be gone.

"Isn't it rather dangerous work?" she asked. She felt it was a footling question even as she asked it. Her brain had become stodgy.

"Nothing like as dangerous as being in the Infantry," he answered. "And that would be my only other alternative. Besides I get out of the drilling." He laughed. "I should hate being shouted at and ordered about by a husky old sergeant."

They neither spoke again till they came to the bridge, from the other side of which the busses started.

"I may not see you again before I go," he said. "Look after Mary. I shall try to persuade her to go down to her aunt in Hampshire. It's rather a bit of luck, as it turns out, the paper being finished with. I shouldn't have quite known what to do."

He had stopped at the corner. They were still beneath the shadow of the trees. Quite unconsciously she put her face up; and as if it had always been the custom at their partings, he drew her to him and kissed her; though it really was for the first time.

She walked home instead of taking the bus. She wanted to think. A day or two would decide the question. She determined that if the miracle did not happen, she would go down to Liverpool. Her father was on the committee of one of the great hospitals; and she knew one or two of the matrons. She would want to be doing something--to get out to the front, if possible. Maybe, her desire to serve was not altogether free from curiosity--from the craving for adventure. There's a spice of the man even in the best of women.

Her conscience plagued her when she thought of Mrs. Denton. For some time now, they had been very close together; and the old lady had come to depend upon her. She waited till all doubt was ended before calling to say good-bye. Mrs. Denton was seated before an old bureau that had long stood locked in a corner of the library. The drawers were open and books and papers were scattered about.