Mrs. Murdoch met the situation by insisting that she would put on the kettle, and Mr. Murdoch, in a burst of almost divine inspiration, insisted that his wife was quite incompetent to light the gas alone at that hour of the night. When the old folks had shuffled into the kitchen Grant found himself standing close to Phyllis Bruce.

"Why didn't you answer my letters?" he demanded, plunging to the issue with the directness of his nature.

"Because I had promised to let you forget," she replied. There was a softness in her voice which he had not noted in those bygone days; she seemed more resigned and yet more poised; the strange wizardry of suffering had worked new wonders in her soul. Suddenly, as he looked upon her, he became aware of a new quality in Phyllis Bruce--the quality of gentleness. She had added this to her unique self-confidence, and it had toned down the angularities of her character. To Grant, straight from his long exile from fine womanly domesticity, she suddenly seemed altogether captivating.

"But I didn't want to forget!" he insisted. "I wanted not to forget--YOU."

She could not misunderstand the emphasis he placed on that last word, but she continued as though he had not interrupted.

"I knew you would write once or twice out of courtesy. I knew you would do that. I made up my mind that if you wrote three times, then I would know you really wanted to remember me.... I did not get any third letter."

"But how could I know that you had placed such a test--such an arbitrary measurement--upon my friendship?"

"It wasn't necessary for you to know. If you had cared--enough--you would have kept on writing."

He had to admit to himself that there was just enough truth in what she said to make her logic unanswerable. His delight in her presence now did not alter the fact that he had found it quite possible to live for four years without her, and it was true that upon one or two great vital moments his mind had leapt, not to Phyllis Bruce, but to Zen Transley!

He blushed at the recollection; it was an impossible situation, but it was true!

He was framing some plausible argument about honorable men not persisting in a correspondence when Murdoch bustled in again.

"Mother is going to set the dining-room table," he announced, "and the coffee will be ready presently. Well, sir, you do look well in uniform.

You will be wondering how the business has gone?"

"Not half as much as I am wondering some other things," he said, with a significance intended for the ear of Phyllis. "You see--I was just talking it over with a pal to-day, a very good comrade whom I used to know in the West, and who pulled me out of No Man's Land where I would have been lying yet if he hadn't thought more of me than he did of himself--I was talking it over with him to-day, and we agreed that business isn't worth the effort. Fancy sitting behind a desk, wondering about the stock market, when you've been accustomed to leaning up against a parapet wondering where the next sh.e.l.l is going to burst! If that is not from the sublime to the ridiculous, it is at least from the vital to the inconsequential. You can't expect men to take a jump like that."

"No, not as a jump," Murdoch agreed. "They'll have to move down gradually. But they must remember that life depends quite as much on wheat-fields as it does on trenches, and that all the machinery of commerce and industry is as vital in its way as is the machinery of war.

They must remember that, or instead of being at the end of our troubles we will find ourselves at the beginning."

"I suppose," Grant conceded, "but it all seems so unnecessary. No doubt you have been piling up more money to be a problem to my conscience."

"Your peculiar conscience, I might almost correct, sir. Your responsibilities do seem to insist upon increasing. Following your instructions I put the liquid a.s.sets into Government bonds. Interest, even on Government bonds, has a way of working while you sleep. Then, you may remember, we were carrying a large load of certain steel stocks.

These I did not dispose of at once, with the result that they, in themselves, have made you a comfortable fortune."

"I suppose I should thank you for your foresight, Murdoch. I was rather hoping you would lose my money and so relieve me of an embarra.s.sing situation. What am I to do with it?"

"I don't know, sir, but I feel sure you will use it for some good purpose. I was glad to get as much of it together for you as I did, because otherwise it might have fallen to people who would have wasted it."

"Upon my word, Murdoch, that smacks of my own philosophy. Is it possible even you are becoming converted?"

"Come, Mr. Grant; come, everybody!" a cheerful voice called from behind the sliding doors which shut off the dining-room. The fragrant smell of coffee was already in the air, and as Grant took his seat Mrs.

Murdoch declared that for once she had decided to defy all the laws of digestion.

At the table their talk dribbled out into thin channels. It was as though there were at hand a great reservoir of thought, of experience, of deep gropings into the very well-springs of life, which none of them dared to tap lest it should rush out and overwhelm them. They seemed in some strange awe of its presence, and spoke, when they spoke at all, of trivial things. Grant proved uncommunicative, and perhaps, in a sense, disappointing. He preferred to forget both the glories and the horrors of war; when he drew on his experience at all it was to relate some humorous incident. That, it seemed, was all he cared to remember. He was conscious of a restraint which hedged him about and hampered every mental deployment.

Phyllis, too, must have been conscious of that restraint, for before they parted she said something about human minds being like pianos, which get out of tune for lack of the master-touch....

When Grant found himself in the street air again he was almost swallowed up in the rush of things which he might have said. His mental machinery, which seemed to have been out of mesh,--came back into adjustment with a jerk. He suddenly discovered that he could think; he could drive his mind from his own batteries. In soldiering the mind is driven from the batteries of the rank higher up. The business of discipline is to make man an automatic machine rather than a thinking individual. It seemed to Grant that in that moment the machine part of him gave way and the individual was restored. In his case the change came in a moment; he had been re-tuned; he was able to think logically in terms of civil life.

He pieced together Murdoch's conversation. "Not as a jump," Murdoch had said, when he had argued that a man cannot emerge in a moment from the psychology of the trenches to that of the counting-house. Undoubtedly that would be true of the ma.s.s; they would experience no instantaneous readjustment....

There are moments when the mind, highly vitalized, reaches out into the universe of thought and grasps ideas far beyond its conscious intention.

All great thoughts come from uncharted sources of inspiration, and it may be that the function of the mind is not to create thought, but only to record it. To do so it must be tuned to the proper key of receptivity. Grant had a consciousness, as he walked along the deserted streets toward his hotel, that he was in that key; the quietness, the domesticity of Murdoch's home, the loveliness of Phyllis Bruce, had, for the moment at least, shut out a background of horror and lifted his thought into an exalted plane. He paused at a bridge to lean against the railing and watch the trembling reflection of city lights in the river.

"I have it!" he suddenly exclaimed to the steel railing. "I have it!"

He paused for a moment to turn over his thought, as though to make sure it should not escape. Then, at a pace which aroused the wondering glance of one or two placid policemen, he hurried to the hotel.

Linder and Grant had been a.s.signed to the same room, and the sergeant's dreams, if he dreamt at all, were of the sweet hay meadows of the West.

Grant turned on the light and looked down into the face of his friend.

A smile, born of fields afar from war's alarms, was playing about his lips. Even in his excitement Grant could not help reflecting what a wonderful thing it is to sleep in peace. Then--

"I have it!" he shouted. "Linder, I have it!"

The sergeant sat up with a start, blinking.

"I have it!" Grant repeated.

"THEM, you mean," said Linder, suddenly awake. "Why, man, what's wrong with you? You're more excited than if we were just going over the top."

"I've got my great idea. I know what I'm going to do with my money."

"Well, don't do it to-night," Linder protested. "Someone has to settle for this dug-out in the morning."

"We're leaving for the West to-morrow, Linder, old scout. Everybody will say we're crazy, but that's a good sign. They've said that of every reformer since--"

But Linder was again sleeping the sleep of a man four years in France.

CHAPTER XV

The window was grey with the light of dawn before Grant's mind had calmed down enough for sleep. When Linder awoke him it was noon.

"You sleep well on your Big Idea," was his comment.

"No better than you did last night," retorted Grant, springing out of bed. "Let me see.... yes, I still have it clearly. I'll tell you about it sometime, if you can stay awake. When do we eat?"

"Now, or as soon as you are presentable. I've a notion to give you three days' C.B. for appearing on parade in your pyjamas."

"Make it a cash fine, Sergeant, old dear, and pay it out of what you owe me. Now that that is settled order up a decent meal. I'll be shaved and dressed long before it arrives. You know this is a first-cla.s.s hotel, where prompt service would not be tolerated."

As they ate together Grant showed no disposition to discuss what Linder called his Big Idea, nor yet to give any satisfaction in response to his companion's somewhat pointed references as to his doings of the night before.

"There are times, Linder," he said, "when my soul craves solitude. You, being a sergeant, and therefore having no soul, will not be able to understand that longing for contemplation--"

"It's all right," said Linder. "I don't want her."

"Furthermore," Grant continued, "to-night I mean to resume my soliloquies, and your absence will be much in demand."