LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO

 
 -
 
 THE KING'S MEN
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 PETER PARAGON
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN PALMER 
 
 LONDON 
 MART IN S E C K E R 
 
 NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET 
 ADELPHI
 
 First Published 1916
 
 TO 
 
 MY FRIENDS IN 
 
 THE NEW ARMIES
 
 A MAN was picking his way in the dark up an 
 echoing staircase in Mortimer Street. Already he 
 smelled the tobacco of his friends and heard their 
 talk. They were discussing the news in the attic 
 of Kupert Smith, a young author who distributed 
 latchkeys among his acquaintances, and was 
 always ready for unlimited conversation after 
 midnight. It was one o'clock in the morning. 
 The man on the stairs had let himself into the 
 dark passage, and now he was blundering upon 
 the top flight just under the door of the attic. 
 
 He stood for a moment outside. The conversa- 
 tion to-night was louder than usual, a fact which 
 did not surprise him. 
 
 " At last," he thought, " they really have some- 
 thing to talk about." 
 
 He meant that they were not now assessing 
 the poetry of Marinetti or interpreting Picasso, 
 people for whom it had been his way to express 
 a humorous contempt. 
 
 Then he reflected that there had been as much 
 affectation in his own smiling superiority to all 
 
 9
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 those clever attitudes of the time as in the attitudes 
 themselves ; and he frowned, for he knew that his 
 smiling was out of date. All the old pretences, 
 interests and disputations were finished now. He 
 could think of very little connected with the stair- 
 case of Kupert Smith which had not in the last 
 thirty-six hours been obliterated. 
 
 He flung open the door and fell over the legs 
 of Smith himself. Smith always sat by the door, 
 because his room was small, and usually held a 
 dozen men who needed to be supplied with biscuits 
 from the kitchen. 
 
 Then everyone in the room stopped talking and 
 shouted the name of John. 
 
 It was a custom for those who held the key to 
 shout the name of each confederate as he came. 
 " John " was not a Christian name Christian 
 names were barred as being insufficiently austere 
 for these meetings. It was the family name of 
 Mr Kenneth John. 
 
 ' You might have known my legs would be 
 there. They always are," said Smith. 
 
 ' That is mere foolishness," said John, brushing 
 his knees. " Nothing will ever again be where it 
 was before." 
 
 ' Is there any more news ? " asked a pale young 
 man from the window. 
 
 10
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 John found a chair. 
 
 " The last special edition but one said that war 
 was declared by Great Britain at eleven o'clock, 
 and the last edition of all could only add that war 
 having been declared by Great Britain, Great 
 Britain might now regard herself as being in a 
 state of war." 
 
 " There's some coffee in the urn," said Smith. 
 " Why are you so late ? " 
 
 " I've been watching the crowds." 
 
 " How do they look ? " 
 
 " Not exactly excited. Stunned, rather. I stood 
 among the people when the proclamation was read. 
 It was like attending divine service." 
 
 " I wonder," said Smith, " how long it will take 
 us to realise what has happened ? " 
 
 " I'll tell you what," jerked the young man at 
 the window. ' This puts back art and literature 
 for a generation." 
 
 Smith moved angrily in his chair. 
 
 " Shut up, Pelham," he shouted. 
 
 " You don't agree ?" 
 
 " I neither agree not disagree. I only know that 
 a fellow who talks like that to-night annoys me." 
 
 " Puts back art and literature for a generation," 
 repeated the young man stubbornly. 
 
 " Who cares ? " Smith impiously inquired. 
 
 11
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 "We all care," said the young man at the 
 window. "Smith himself cares," he continued, 
 informing the company. 
 
 " I'll show you how much I care," said 
 
 Smith. 
 
 He quietly rose to his six feet of height, shook a 
 big and attractive head, and walked to his writing- 
 desk. From the drawer he took a bulky MS. and 
 held it up to be observed. 
 
 " This," he said, " is the sole copy of the book 
 you fellows have watched me writing for three 
 years. Four days ago I pinned my career to it. 
 It was the best I could do." 
 
 He paused for an effective moment and suddenly 
 hurled the heavy packet into the waste-paper 
 basket. Then he walked back to his chair. 
 
 " That," said the pale young man unpleasantly, 
 " means nothing at all except that war between 
 Great Britain and Germany has not impaired 
 your sense of the theatre. Meantime my point is 
 made. Your MS. is in the waste-paper basket, and 
 I do you the honour to believe that literature is the 
 poorer for its lying there." 
 
 No one had ever yet successfully argued with 
 James Pelham. The frequenters of that room had 
 long become used to letting him win his point. 
 Then they would talk about something else. 
 
 12
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " The real question is this," said a dandy by the 
 fireplace. " Who is going to fight? " 
 
 " You will go, of course," said Smith. 
 
 Smith's manner of saying this was not agreeable. 
 
 " Ponsonby," he continued to the room at large, 
 " will begin pulling the wires to-morrow. He will 
 be appointed A.D.C. to a general and then he will 
 come home and write a book about it." 
 
 " What's the matter with Smith to-night ? " 
 asked John in a general way. 
 
 Everyone now expected Smith to explain himself. 
 
 "It's perfectly simple," said Smith. " I dislike 
 intensely every one of you to-night. These rooms 
 make me feel sick. When you've all gone home 
 I shall go out and sleep on the Embankment. It 
 will be fresh out there." 
 
 " You put it well," said an athletic man who was 
 sitting on the table. " We're feeling it badly." 
 
 " Speak for yourself, Rivers," retorted Pelham. 
 " We aren't all smelling our dead selves. I intend 
 to go on living as before. Why should I give up 
 poetry and ideas because you fellows are mad 
 about the war? Someone must remain to assert 
 the importance of art. I have always thought 
 Shakespeare was greater than the Duke of 
 Wellington, and I shall continue to do so." 
 
 " Pelham," interrupted Smith, "I'm glad to 
 
 13
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 believe that you will suffer for this. Do you im- 
 agine that you are going to assert the importance 
 of art by ignoring the biggest thing of your time ? 
 If you can't already see that what you please to 
 call your poetry and ideas are not all as dead as 
 door nails in a mortuary, and that we in this room 
 have simply got to begin all over again from the 
 bottom, you've been using my latchkey in vain. 
 I've no use for anybody here to-night who doesn't 
 detest himself." 
 
 " Excellent," said Rivers from the table. " This 
 war cleans the slate." 
 
 Pelham's icy blue eyes looked Rivers up and 
 down. 
 
 " I don't object to Smith," he said at last. 
 " Smith is really upset and has just thrown a good 
 book into the waste-paper basket; but Rivers is 
 contemptible. The war will change many things, 
 but it will not change Rivers. He will kill no more 
 big game in Africa ; but he will kill big Germans 
 in Belgium; and he will call it a change of soul. 
 How I do hate a fool ! " 
 
 'We always did dislike one another," said 
 Rivers genially. " At least I'm not going out to 
 fight a war that will end war." 
 
 ' Meaning me, I suppose," Pelham inquired. 
 " Just as you like," answered Rivers. 
 
 14
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Pelham glittered dangerously. " I'm not that 
 sort of fool," he said quickly. " I promise you 
 fellows that if I go out to fight it shall at least be 
 the real thing. I shall go out to take an honest 
 part in something of which I now thoroughly 
 disapprove, and I shall do it because I'm too 
 spineless to stand up for my own convictions. I 
 sha'n't delude myself into imagining that firing off 
 high explosive is the best way to bring about the 
 millennium. I'm not a hypocrite like Rivers, who 
 is going out to fight because he likes it and will 
 call it patriotism." 
 
 " Pelham is taking it badly," said Smith com- 
 passionately. " Kicking against the pricks, that's 
 what it is." 
 
 " I'll tell you what it is," said Ponsonby. " We 
 shall all have to go to the war sooner or later. It's 
 the thing to do." 
 
 " Now we know about it," said Pelham. " Pon- 
 sonby has said it is the thing to do. Who should 
 know better than Ponsonby ? " 
 
 ' There is more than the wisdom of a popinjay 
 in what Ponsonby says," put in Smith, as though 
 he were thinking aloud. ' We all know Ponsonby. 
 His object in life is to be in the thick of everything 
 that happens and to catch a reflection of importance 
 from the event. We are all aware that if he goes 
 
 15
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 to the war and gets killed like a hero, he will only 
 do so because he knows that the war is a big thing 
 and because he doesn't want to be out of it. But 
 for once Ponsonby has hit the absolute truth. 
 His snobbery is transcendentally right. We shall 
 all have to go to the war. It's the thing to do, and 
 we simply can't stay away. Pelham will go be- 
 cause he hates it. Eivers will go because he likes 
 it. Some men will go because they're anxious 
 to show they're as brave and good as the other 
 fellows, or because they're bored, or under the 
 social thumb." 
 
 " I'm not going," jerked Pelham. 
 " Oh yes, you are," continued Smith. " You 
 think you are not, but you are. I'll give you six 
 weeks to find out that you can't help it. Take my 
 advice and go at once. It will save you some 
 mental anguish." 
 
 'I'm with Jimmy Pelham," said a solidly con- 
 structed man from the sofa. " I'm not going to 
 the war." 
 
 But this man was only Baddeley. Baddeley 
 was a comfortably married man in a Government 
 office. So nobody heeded him. Pelham left his 
 seat, brandishing his forefinger at Smith. 
 
 " Anguish indeed ! There will be anguish for us 
 all when this seedy old Government gets to work." 
 
 16
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " None of your socialism," shouted Smith 
 irrelevantly. 
 
 Pelham turned at the door. His blue eyes lit 
 with frenzy. 
 
 " Idiot ! " he said, levelling an accusing finger 
 at Smith. " Do you think that because there is a 
 war this country will suddenly become wise ? It 
 will take at least a year for the public to understand 
 what it really means to come up against a scientific 
 enemy. There will be politics and strikes and do- 
 as-you-please. Things will go on exactly as before, 
 till they break down." 
 
 " You're wrong about the politics," said Rivers 
 innocently. " There is a Party Truce." 
 
 As if Rivers had touched a spring he released 
 from Pelham a swift torrent of words. 
 
 " Don't you realise," he shouted, " that your 
 silly phrase proves what I say ? If we had the 
 imagination really to see this war for what it is, 
 a Party Truce would be unthinkable. You tell 
 me the political people have agreed to postpone 
 their differences. Good heavens, Rivers, their 
 differences have ceased to exist; and they are 
 unaware of it ! There are men in this country who 
 can still think of their wretched little notions, think 
 of them so seriously that they solemnly agree to 
 say nothing about them for the present. They 
 B 17
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 think they're going to take up the old threads 
 when the war is finished. They look on the war 
 as an interlude ; and you believe that these men are 
 going to fight the biggest fight in history without 
 making every true Englishman weep bitter tears." 
 
 " True Englishmen ! " ejaculated Smith to the 
 company. " Listen to Pelham ! " 
 
 " True Englishmen," Pelham shamelessly re- 
 peated. " I mean the half-dozen men in the 
 country who have some sense of humour." 
 
 " Bien entendu" said Smith very gravely. ' We 
 have interrupted you." 
 
 " Not at all," said Pelham. " I was about to say 
 that there will be worse things than party politics. 
 Think of the Press. Think of the contractors who 
 will sell things to the army. I tell you there is no 
 infamy we shall not live to see. Think of the 
 jobbery" (here he glared at Ponsonby) "in the 
 Departments. Think of organised labour. We 
 shall be told that scientific methods of raising and 
 equipping an army are against the principles of a 
 free and self-governing people. There is no degrada- 
 tion to which we shall not descend. It is even 
 possible that the authorities will advertise for 
 soldiers ! " 
 
 Pelham paused for breath, and added in a deep 
 whisper of contempt : 
 
 18
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 ;c The authorities ! " 
 
 He left the room and the door banged behind him, 
 echoing through the uncarpeted passages of the 
 building. There was a short silence. 
 
 " To think," said Smith at last, " that a few 
 months hence Pelham will be saluting his superior 
 officer." 
 
 " I should like Pelham," said Rivers incon- 
 sequently, "if he didn't talk such absolute 
 nonsense." 
 
 " He's got a good head," said Smith. " He 
 usually knows how much nonsense he talks. To- 
 night he is simply savage; and he's right. This 
 war is not going to be exactly pleasant for any of 
 us. Even Rivers will admit that war is in some 
 ways disagreeable. Some of us are going to hate 
 it." 
 
 " Hate it," he repeated with great energy after 
 a pause. " It isn't good to have your life suddenly 
 cut off at the root. The best we can do is to start 
 fresh and pretend that we like it. But it hurts. 
 It hurts atrociously." 
 
 " I'm going to bed," he abruptly added. 
 
 No further word was said. Smith's visitors 
 went heavily down the stairs and let themselves 
 out into the street. 
 
 19
 
 II 
 
 KENNETH JOHN lived in a house by the Heath in 
 Hampstead Way, Golders Green; and he would 
 often walk down from Jack Straw's ridge to his 
 home in the summer air. 
 
 A fortnight or so after the meeting in Kupert 
 Smith's rooms, at eleven o'clock in the evening, he 
 was following his usual path along the highroad 
 which so pointedly offers the lights of London to a 
 moralist. 
 
 He tried as he walked to define his impressions of 
 he talk he had heard in these last few days in 
 Mortimer Street. He saw it as the flashing surface 
 of a full stream. He knew exactly how deep a 
 feeling lay under all the rhetoric and fierce chaff 
 of Pelham and Smith. These men belonged 
 peculiarly to the age before the war an age, 
 already so remote, of complete licence and leisure, 
 when men were able to refine at ease upon their 
 ideas. Every one of the men in Smith's room 
 had in his individual way stood for something 
 and achieved something in the life which now lay 
 with Rupert Smith's big MS. in the waste-paper 
 
 20
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 basket. The MS. was a symbol. It was to have 
 been the first of a series in which the ideas 
 and feelings of the young sentient person of the 
 day were analysed and recorded in a hundred 
 fine shades. It stood for a period in literature, 
 society and art which had been full of aesthetic 
 adventures, moral questions and defiant person- 
 alities a busy and clever time which, for all its 
 folly and egotism, had put new colours into the sky 
 and gallantly challenged the incredulous Philistine 
 upon every road. 
 
 It had been John's attitude in those days to 
 affect a polite scepticism towards the plenitude of 
 notions and the lively straw-splitting of Mortimer 
 Street. It was his little personal joke to decry the 
 intellectual ferment of a new century in its teens. 
 He used his clever pen in a genial depreciation of 
 the modern thinker. He would gently prophesy 
 the coming extinction of all his friends in an era 
 of restored simplicity and broad romance. 
 
 To-night as he walked along Turpin's old road 
 he knew that the time of which he had lightly 
 prophesied had come in earnest, and that his own 
 attitude had perished with the rest. He felt empty 
 and cold. His familiar world of music and thought 
 and form had been expunged. He could think of 
 no friendship or interest, nothing he had once 
 
 21
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 wanted or disliked, which was not affected. He 
 knew that all this must apply even more directly 
 to his friends than to himself. He at least was 
 saving one or two things out of the past. 
 
 Kenneth John had as yet no urgent problem 
 to face. He did not feel called to share in the 
 war as a combatant. John was far from being 
 obviously built for a soldier. He was short-sighted, 
 barely five feet three inches in height, and of a 
 gentle disposition. He had once tried unsuccess- 
 fully to kill a rabbit. He might have made an 
 excellent general, but the intermediate stages were 
 beyond him. Of course he could find a niche in 
 the Great War if he set about it; but it was not 
 yet clearly required of him. 
 
 That John was not at this moment urgently 
 called to the war left him free to contemplate 
 the general catastrophe. His first alarm at a 
 prospect of private ruin a prospect which seemed 
 in those days to threaten everyone had already 
 given way to an absorbed interest. The leaven of 
 war at work in a society hitherto running on the 
 assumption that order and peace were irrefragable 
 things had already presented him with some 
 astonishing discoveries. People had suddenly been 
 deprived of their habits. John had learnt more 
 about his friends and acquaintances in the last 
 
 22
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 three days than in the five previous years of his 
 London career. He had seen the best and the 
 worst in men whom before he had only known as 
 able to talk well or ill. His day was full of sur- 
 prises. He had seen selfish fear peeping out of a 
 man who had been accepted, in his days of routine 
 and security, as a daring apostle of revolution. He 
 had seen quixotry and the light of adventure in 
 men whom he had regarded as only fit for the 
 Government offices they served. He had seen men 
 reputed to be of iron on the strength of their ability 
 to live according to rule suddenly struck nervous 
 and incalculable ; and he had seen a woman whom 
 he had admired for the strong repose of her nature 
 fighting for groceries at the Army and Navy Stores. 
 
 Moreover, he had seen the life to which he in 
 spite of his affected detachment himself belonged 
 dismissed from its pride of place. He, who had 
 been living at the centre of things, sharing modestly 
 in the literary and political life of the time, now 
 counted for nothing at all. He was conscious most 
 of all to-night of being entirely out of it. Some- 
 thing tremendous was going on in which he had no 
 personal share, of which he would see very little. 
 
 Before turning down the hill towards home he 
 stood for a moment looking towards London. He 
 thought of the war as a thing which had entered a 
 
 23
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 thousand homes to sit beside the hearth as a guest 
 with whom strict terms would have to be made. 
 He was looking into a pool dreadfully stirred by 
 the angel of war perhaps an angel of healing. 
 Men and women were meeting there the test of their 
 lives. He remembered how in the crowd that 
 night he had heard a man say to his companion : 
 " This is the end of everything." 
 
 And the man had answered : 
 
 ' You are wrong, my friend. This is the 
 beginning of everything." 
 
 24
 
 Ill 
 
 WHEN John turned from his contemplation of 
 London, and the thick trees of the North Road 
 closed about him, he began to think of Monica. 
 She would be waiting for him at home with a pot 
 of cocoa and biscuits. He had had new thoughts 
 of Monica during the last few days. Up to that 
 time his marriage had been the purest comfort 
 a continuous well-being distracted with occasional 
 renewals of an earlier and more ardent time. 
 Latterly it had been the comfort which counted 
 most. He was so sure of her; so familiar with 
 every facet of her mind. Their life was a genial 
 and a peaceful intimacy. There was no more 
 striving after things inexpressible. Their relations 
 had become homely and punctual. The adventure 
 had gone out of them. They had not quarrelled 
 for an age. Everything between them had been 
 so thoroughly explored that it seemed as though 
 they must now consent to write upon their happy 
 page : Da capo al segno. 
 
 Then a few days ago John had brought to 
 Monica the news of a crisis to be met. They had 
 
 25
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 lived for the five years of their married life up to 
 the top of a small income, and this income was now 
 in jeopardy. They had to plan economies and 
 decide what was to be done if the worst should 
 happen. 
 
 The sense and courage with which Monica had 
 faced these unexpected needs had renewed in him 
 an old pride in her a selfless admiration which yet 
 again put Monica, familiar as she was, among the 
 miracles. They had returned to the first struggling 
 days of their marriage, when joy was sharpened by 
 a wolf at the door. 
 
 Clearly this companionship was more than 
 a mutual ease. It had bloomed afresh under a 
 threat. Their marriage had not yet become a 
 habit. The events of the last few days threatened 
 to destroy in a week habits which had taken many 
 years to form. But Monica remained. 
 
 The household peril had quickly passed. John 
 learned that the weekly paper he served would 
 continue to be published as usual, and that his 
 political chief still needed a private secretary. But 
 the crisis had served its turn. It had put fresh 
 life into his partnership with Monica. 
 
 She heard his key and was already warming 
 the cocoa. This was the late home-coming to 
 which he had so long been used very familiar, 
 
 26
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 domestic and assured. But to-night Monica might 
 have been a spirit brewing celestial liquor. 
 
 Monica knew this, and told him as he came to 
 her that he was a foolish man. 
 
 For an answer he kissed her very kindly, and some 
 of the milk was spilled. 
 
 " Less cocoa for both of us," she said. 
 
 "It is a token," he answered. " We were 
 beginning to be too comfortable, don't you think ? 
 It was all roast potatoes and coming home to cocoa 
 and biscuits." 
 
 " And very nice too." 
 
 " The beginning of the end." 
 
 " But, Ken dear, let us be fair to ourselves. We 
 were always very nice to one another." 
 
 " I know," John gloomily agreed. " It had 
 become a habit." 
 
 " Why didn't you tell me this before ? " 
 
 " Because I didn't know." 
 
 " And now you have made a discovery ? " 
 
 " Now," retorted John, " I'm really fond of you. 
 A fortnight ago I was simply a married man." 
 
 " I know exactly what you mean," said Monica. 
 " I want to talk to you about it. The Baddeleys 
 have been here." 
 
 John put his cup down. He was not disturbed 
 by a seeming want of connection in Monica's 
 
 27
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 remark. She would establish her own train of 
 thought. But at last, since she hesitated to go 
 on, he asked her: 
 
 " What have the Baddeleys to do with it ? " 
 
 " They bumbled." 
 
 " I don't understand." 
 
 " It was you who invented the word," said 
 Monica. 
 
 " I understand that they bumbled. But what 
 has the bumbling of the Baddeleys to do with 
 us?" 
 
 " They simply disgraced our Chesterfield. They 
 sprawled." 
 
 " Well, Monica, they are married, you know." 
 
 " All the less reason for a public display. Can't 
 the man work off his feelings in his own house? 
 But that's not the point." 
 
 " I'm waiting for the point," said John. 
 
 " The point is that Sally is mortally afraid that 
 Bob may go to the war. She was talking at him 
 the whole evening. She repeated every five minutes 
 that a man's first duty was to his wife." 
 
 ' You are putting your knife into Sally," said 
 John. 
 
 Monica grasped him by the arm. 
 
 " Kenneth," she said, " Sally had only one idea. 
 She might lose her man. That's all this business 
 
 28
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 means to her. If Bob tries to go, she will simply 
 hang upon his neck." 
 
 " Well," said John, " it's a point of view." 
 
 " I just want you to understand this," said 
 Monica urgently, "I'm not at all like Sally." 
 
 " I am sure of it." 
 
 " Be serious. I won't have you feel about me 
 as Bob will feel about Sally in a few weeks from 
 now. I'm not saying you ought to go fco the war. 
 That's your affair. But if ever you think of it, 
 Ken, let it also occur to you that I'm " 
 
 She paused. 
 
 " Well," asked John. 
 
 " That I'm willing," Monica concluded. 
 
 There was a long silence. 
 
 " Do you think I ought to go ? " John said at 
 last. 
 
 "It is for you, not for me, to decide. I just 
 want you to say at once that you won't think of 
 me as being in the way." 
 
 John sipped his cocoa and thoughtfully picked 
 his words : 
 
 " This is how I see it at present as near as I 
 can tell I must have a very strong motive for 
 going before I can rightly go. The ordinary 
 motives are not enough. I must have something 
 more than the wish not to be out of things, or the 
 
 29
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 liking for a change, or the desire to stand well with 
 people, or to see what's going on, or test myself 
 in something new. These motives would be good 
 enough supposing " 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 " If it were not for you." 
 
 " Put me out of it." 
 
 " It isn't possible. My motive for going to the 
 war has to be something which will outweigh all 
 this" he swept his arm comprehensively round 
 the room. 
 
 Monica looked at him and dropped her 
 eyes. 
 
 " Your country, Kenneth," she whispered. 
 
 " I don't feel it like that not yet. If I were 
 to go now I might call it that ; but it would really 
 be a dozen things besides selfish things some of 
 the things I have just mentioned. I should like 
 to walk about in khaki, and write letters home from 
 the front. I should like to find out what danger 
 feels like. I should like to know that I was taking 
 part in a big thing." 
 
 ' Very well, Kenneth. Why don't you 
 go?" 
 
 ;< No, Monica, I must go differently from that. 
 I'm a good deal short of a hero, but I'm at least 
 a peg above jobbing myself into the army they 
 
 30
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 wouldn't look at me in the ordinary way simply 
 to do a Cook's tour of the Great European 
 War." 
 
 Whereupon the subject dropped, and John 
 helped himself carefully to some more biscuits. 
 
 31
 
 IV 
 
 UPON a morning not long after the meeting in 
 Mortimer Street Jimmy Pelham lay on the sofa 
 after breakfast at eleven in the morning, reading a 
 volume of his own poems. His rooms, looking out 
 on Piccadilly and the Park, were thinly but choicely 
 furnished. Clearly nothing had been allowed to 
 arrive in them by accident or by contract with the 
 wholesale provider. A diorite statuette by Jacob 
 Epstein, a few drawings of Augustus John and 
 some very expensive eighteenth-century engravings 
 declared an occupier who attended personally to 
 his buying and selling. 
 
 Pelham was reading a document with a history. 
 It was the poem which had severed his married 
 life with Diana. Pelham had been married at 
 twenty-five and privately separated at twenty-seven. 
 The separation had followed a very contentious 
 discussion of the verses with which Pelham was now 
 engrossed. 
 
 It was entitled The Chemistry of Love. A young 
 lover in the heat of his passion is supposed suddenly 
 to inquire what precisely was the physiological 
 
 32
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 chemistry of the reactions which mentally were so 
 disturbing. 
 
 He had read the poem to Diana, and she had 
 immediately said : 
 
 " Well, Jimmy, if that's how you think about 
 me, I am going straight back to my mother." 
 
 This had not, of course, been a sudden decision 
 on the part of Diana. It was prepared and ex- 
 pected. The breach had begun almost as soon 
 as Pelham had recovered from the honeymoon. 
 Those first weeks had been perfect, for Pelham and 
 Diana were equally deep in love. 
 
 Then, because they profoundly and selfishly 
 loved one another, they had begun to quarrel. 
 
 One evening Pelham had discovered a lovely 
 sunset not an orthodox sunset of reds and purples, 
 but a subdued study in grey and green. He asked 
 for sympathy, but Diana, who had never seen any- 
 thing like it at Burlington House, who, moreover, 
 wanted her dinner, and was inclined on principle 
 to be jealous of Pelham' s tendency to be interested 
 in things inanimate, had made fun of his " silly old 
 sunset," and left him to admire it by himself. 
 
 This was the beginning of Pelham' s bitter realisa- 
 tion that a \voman can be everything to a man and 
 yet be wholly indifferent to many of his ideas and 
 likings. Hardly had they got home to their house 
 o 33
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 in Kensington than Diana began to cover his walls 
 with oleographs that made him angry, and with 
 furniture which broke his spirit. He found popular 
 novels on his table. Whenever he went to the 
 player-piano he had to hunt out his Borodin or 
 Bach from The Night of the Party or Dreaming of 
 Thee. 
 
 It was not as if Diana were meek and ready to 
 learn. She was far from that. When he tried to 
 educate her she told him outright that there were 
 big things and little things, and that he paid too 
 much attention to the little things. 
 
 She meant by this that if Pelham came home 
 and found her waiting to greet him in an audacious 
 new dress which left her unusually accessible, he 
 would often as not ignore her lovely arms and 
 notice that she was reading the poems of Ella 
 Wheeler Wilcox. Then, when he really wanted 
 to kiss her, she would say to him sarcastically : 
 
 ' You are quite sure I'm not out of drawing, 
 Jim?" 
 
 Then he would deny himself, and they would be 
 miserable. 
 
 Pelham, as he read The Chemistry of Love, could 
 remember a hundred such incidents the worst 
 incident of all being the poem itself. He had read 
 it to her out of bravado, knowing it expressed what 
 
 34
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 she hated most in him his craving to analyse and 
 search into all his feelings and thoughts, his in- 
 ability to take pleasure in anything of which he 
 could not see the smallest detail and implication. 
 The poem had raised in Diana a passion which 
 frightened him. How dared he read that poem 
 to her (she had stormed) ? It was disgusting. 
 Could he not take her and be thankful, without 
 wondering what was inside her? It made her 
 sick. She would never speak to him again. 
 
 Pelham remembered how at that moment he 
 had been almost ashamed of himself. Diana's 
 anger had been so very fine. 
 
 And, when Diana had really left him, he had 
 suddenly felt that art for art's sake did not quite 
 fill the big house in Kensington. So he sent the 
 keys to Diana, and moved into Piccadilly, where he 
 lived with beautiful furniture and could play all 
 day long the ironical music of M. Eavel. 
 
 As time went on he had become secretly more 
 ashamed of himself, and openly more defiant. 
 Diana had said that when he apologised for wonder- 
 ing what was inside her she would come back and 
 be a good wife to him. Pelham was frequently 
 tempted to send to her ; but there were principles 
 at stake, and he had always held that principles 
 were important. 
 
 35
 
 During the last week he had been reading the 
 newspapers, and he had perceived that principles 
 might easily become a snare. Pelham had imagina- 
 tion, and he had lived in Germany. Instinctively 
 he had already taken a fairly true measure of the 
 task that lay before the country. They would soon 
 be fighting for their lives. Every phrase, habit, 
 and category would have to be discarded which 
 impeded the fighting athleticism of the nation. 
 Pelham could not have stated in precise terms what 
 he meant by this. He only knew that certain 
 attitudes and speeches of his old acquaintances, 
 that the views of a large section of the Press and 
 of many public men whom he heard discussing the 
 general position, jarred upon him. 
 
 How did this apply to himself ? He was asking 
 this question to-day with his fingers between the 
 leaves of The Chemistry of Love. Was he, as well 
 as the politicians (he always thought of them as 
 "the politicians"), also called upon to change 
 his ways ? 
 
 He had dedicated himself to Art. He had be- 
 lieved in being international, and in the excellence 
 of contemplation. He spoke half-a-dozen languages ; 
 some of his best friends lived in Munich and 
 Vienna ; and he thought of soldiers as deedy men 
 who got in the way of progress. He believed in the 
 
 36
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 perfectibility of mankind, and he had proclaimed 
 a time when crude things like war and starvation 
 would not exist. 
 
 He had sacrificed Diana to his sensitive tempera- 
 ment and to his conviction that Art mattered more 
 than anything in the world, even though he knew 
 instinctively that Diana had been the biggest fact 
 in his life, and now he was wondering whether he 
 should also have to sacrifice to Art and to his 
 personal creed this other instinctive knowledge 
 that for him the war loomed larger than anything 
 he had yet encountered. 
 
 He threw down the book and walked to the 
 window. 
 
 " Oh, curse it," he said, " curse everything." 
 
 Since Diana had left him he had acquired the 
 habit of thinking aloud, and it usually ended in a 
 comprehensive impatience. It seemed inevitable 
 that logic and intuition should pull him like the 
 horses which killed Raveillac. Logic drove him 
 from the war as it had driven him from Diana. 
 Perhaps, after all, there was something wrong with 
 logic. There must be something wrong with 
 motives which required him to turn from the two 
 things which seemed most urgently to claim him. 
 
 " Jimmy," he said, addressing his shadow on the 
 floor, " the infernal point is this : Are you an artist 
 
 37
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 or are you really a good husband and a soldier ? I 
 am not a good husband because I won't apologise 
 to Di and how on earth can I ever hope to be 
 a good soldier ? I've always said that war is a 
 filthy business, and I'm ready to smash the head 
 of anybody who talks nonsense about its heroism 
 and moral splendour." 
 
 At this point Pelham saw that his man was 
 waiting at the door. Sands had often found his 
 master arguing hotly with himself, and Pelham 
 usually blushed when he was thus detected. 
 
 " Well, Sands, what is it ? " 
 
 It was Diana coming up in the lift. 
 
 If Diana had arrived without notice Pelham 
 would probably have kissed her; but, being an- 
 nounced, she was no longer Diana, but a problem. 
 He stood awkwardly in the middle of the room and 
 looked at her. It was the first time they had met 
 since the separation. 
 
 " He hasn't a word for me," said Diana im- 
 personally to the ceiling when Sands had left them 
 together. 
 
 It had once been great fun to talk of one another 
 in the third person. But Pelham was too seriously 
 inspired for any such playful indirection. 
 
 '' I've been thinking about you," he said. " It's 
 time we had a talk." 
 
 38
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " You're not going to apologise ? " she asked. 
 
 " Don't put it so crudely, Di." 
 
 " It's the only way I understand it." 
 
 He crossed to her and took her by the arms. She 
 looked very splendid in the sunlight. 
 
 " Can't we make it up ? " he suggested. 
 
 She did not answer, but looked round the room 
 and said inconsequently : 
 
 ' What a cheerless-looking place. Why don't 
 you have some curtains ? " 
 
 He dropped her arms. 
 
 " You know I hate bits of rag about," he said 
 testily. " What's wrong with the window-panes ? " 
 
 " You see, Jim," she said, " it simply won't 
 do. We start bickering at once. Besides you've 
 been reading that nasty poem." 
 
 She tapped the book with her foot where Pelham 
 had thrown it. 
 
 They neither of them spoke for a moment. Then 
 Pelham said slowly : 
 
 " Evidently you haven't come to make peace." 
 
 " No. I've come to talk about the war." 
 
 " You too ? " 
 
 " Naturally. What else is there ? " 
 
 " I suppose," said Pelham, grievously at fault, 
 " you've come to advise me." 
 
 " That's your egotism, Jimmy. I've come 
 
 39
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 because I don't want to lose touch with you. After 
 all, we're friends. Everyone is so unsettled now. 
 I want to know where exactly you are going to be." 
 
 " This is my address," said Pelham curtly. 
 
 " That is all I wanted to know," said Diana, 
 and started to the door. 
 
 Pelham thought he saw contempt in her eyes. 
 This had the effect of stiffening his perversity. 
 
 " So you did come to advise me after all," he 
 said in the way she hated most in him. 
 
 She turned in a flash. 
 
 " No man wants advice at this time. I came to 
 tell you that I'm going to the front almost at once 
 with Lady Penley's Red Cross unit. I'm fully 
 trained, as you know." 
 
 " Very well," said Pelham acidly. " I shall read 
 all about it in The Lady's Field" 
 
 ' This isn't a picnic ; we're going to work," said 
 Diana. 
 
 Her breath was coming short. Pelham was 
 conscious of an unruly impulse to jump at her. He 
 wanted to embrace even her anger. He also felt 
 ashamed of his remark about The Lady's Field. 
 At least he must apologise for that. 
 
 ' Di," he said, "I've made a very mean remark. 
 I'm sorry." 
 
 Then he added in a burst of anxiety :
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " For God's sake, Di, take care of yourself." 
 
 It was now Diana's turn to say the wrong 
 thing. 
 
 " We don't all think about that." 
 
 Pelham suddenly paled and his blue eyes kindled 
 like points of light upon a taper. 
 
 " Hit me ! " cried Diana in an agony of con- 
 trition. " Why don't you hit me ? " 
 
 Pelham controlled himself. 
 
 " That's all right," he said. " The fact is we've 
 both got the devil of a temper." 
 
 There was a short silence. Then Diana took her 
 bag from the table and hesitated. 
 
 * You've really made up your mind, Jim ? " she 
 said at last. 
 
 " I'm not going to be frightened into joining the 
 army, if that's what you mean. I've never been 
 afraid of anything in my life, and I'm not going to 
 be afraid of this." 
 
 Rhetoric now began to work in Jimmy's brain. 
 
 ' There are thousands of women like you, 
 Diana. They are going to divide men into two 
 classes those who go to the war and the other 
 fellows. Well, I'm not afraid of that sort of 
 hysteria. That kind of thing will keep a good 
 many decent men out of the war and it will drive 
 in whole herds of sheep."
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Including my two brothers and most of your 
 own friends." 
 
 Pelham had now so far recovered his equanimity 
 as to be annoyed that his speech should be in- 
 terrupted. 
 
 ; ' That doesn't follow at all," he said testily. 
 ' You miss the point." 
 
 Then Diana summed everything up in a way she 
 had. 
 
 "This isn't a time for points," she said. "I'll 
 leave all the points with you."
 
 DIANA had then and there departed, and Pelham 
 could find little comfort in the points she had 
 so scornfully left in his keeping. He gnawed the 
 whole matter over afresh. At last, when he had 
 decided by all the rules that the war was no concern 
 of his, he went to the club for lunch and caught 
 himself straining to hear what a General was saying 
 to some young officers at the next table. 
 
 In the smoking-room he met a man who wrote 
 for a Pacifist review. This man had exactly the 
 same convictions as Pelham. He had often said 
 that War must shortly make way for Arbitration 
 in the settlement of human differences. He did 
 not believe in frontiers. He believed in the good- 
 ness of men. He looked forward to a general 
 sheathing of the tooth and claw. Pelham had said 
 these things himself. But this man, unlike Pelham, 
 was unable to grasp a fact. Virtually he did not 
 believe there was a war. There must be some mis- 
 take somewhere. He resented the news about the 
 butcheries in Belgium. Something must have gone 
 wrong with the telegraph wires. This sort of thing 
 
 42
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 would be over in a few months. It was too terrible 
 to last. Millions of men could not go on killing 
 millions of men, because it was natural for men 
 to love one another. He talked to Pelham about 
 armament contractors and the Prussian military 
 caste. This war was nothing to do with the people. 
 He supposed we had to make some sort of military 
 demonstration ; but the enemy would soon consent 
 to retire, and then they could resume their life 
 of humanity and peace. Meantime would Pelham 
 join a small committee which was considering how 
 at the earliest moment to promote a lasting peace 
 in the interests of the democratic powers ? 
 
 It was not pleasant for Pelham to hear his own 
 arguments put at a maximum. He was rude to his 
 companion. He told him that the war would last 
 at least two years ; that he admired conscientious 
 soldiers who did what they thought was required 
 of them; that the war would quite possibly do 
 the country a great deal of good ; that a man who 
 did not realise that the war was an immense and 
 thrilling catastrophe which would awaken and 
 change the soul of Europe had no right to consider 
 himself of any value to himself or to posterity ; 
 that the people who did not believe in war would 
 do well to be inconspicuous and leave it to the 
 people who liked fighting to save the country; 
 
 44
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 that it might not be everyone's duty to fight the 
 Germans, but that it was clearly everyone's duty 
 not to get in the way. 
 
 When Pelham left the club he met a company 
 of the Royal Fusiliers marching down Piccadilly 
 to the drum and fife. He tried to think con- 
 temptuously of the routine which had turned them 
 out in such perfection, but he was caught helplessly 
 by the rhythm and style of their marching. Some- 
 thing lit in him. He felt a sob in the throat as they 
 swung splendidly past. Dust and the smell of new 
 leather was in his nostrils, and in his ears the thump 
 and shrill of a commonplace tune. 
 
 The man next him on the kerb was fat and 
 prosaic a man surely beyond reach of things 
 significant and high. But Pelham saw there were 
 tears in his eyes. 
 
 The fat man suddenly took off his hat and 
 shouted : 
 
 " God bless you, boys ! " 
 
 The last of the soldiers moved away, and the 
 fat man looked after them with a shining regard. 
 As Pelham turned from the road he heard the man 
 muttering in deep distress : 
 
 " My God, if only I were young enough ! " 
 
 His cry, absurdly issuing from so unlikely a man, 
 haunted Pelham as he walked. 
 
 45
 
 He crossed Piccadilly Circus in a dream. 
 Leicester Square suggested the tune which had been 
 played on the soldiers' fifes, and fortified Pelham 
 in a resolution to be , disgusted with the fat en- 
 thusiast. His tears had been simply an emotional 
 self-indulgence. He was the sort of man who 
 would go to patriotic plays while the war lasted 
 and enjoy thrills of vicarious devotion as he read 
 the newspapers. He would hold celebrations when 
 the troops came back from the war, and invest in 
 all the war loans with a feeling that after all it 
 was the substantial fellows at home, keeping the 
 Government in pocket, who deserved best of their 
 country. 
 
 Turning into Bedford Street, he saw Rupert 
 Smith disappearing into GofPs. He followed him 
 in and found that he was bidding himself to be 
 lavishly accoutred. 
 
 " I was gazetted this morning," Rupert explained. 
 " The 1st London R.F.A." 
 
 Pelham, filling with discontent, watched the 
 exuberant purchasing of Smith a revolver, sword, 
 field-glasses and various uniforms. 
 
 Smith, he reflected, was one of those lucky men 
 who always knew their minds. He invariably 
 acted on the spur of the occasion, and was in- 
 variably sure, when everything was finished, 
 
 46
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 that he had acted in, for him, the only possible 
 way. 
 
 They walked away from Goff's, and went by 
 agreement into a near cafe. 
 
 They were old friends, and did not speak until 
 they had sat together for an appreciable time. It 
 was Smith who spoke. 
 
 " Now, Jimmy," he said, staring at Pelham's 
 gloomy countenance, " tell me about it. The 
 same old sickly conscience, I suppose ? " 
 
 Smith bent over and put his hand on Pelham's 
 arm. 
 
 " Give it up, Jimmy. Come to France. There's 
 plenty of room." 
 
 Smith looked curiously at Pelham's clouded face. 
 Pelham suddenly had- a fanciful vision of himself, 
 under the open sky, searching an imaginary horizon 
 with field-glasses purchased from Messrs Goff. 
 Smith afterwards said that he had the face of 
 St Anthony in a crisis. 
 
 " What's keeping you ? " Again it was Smith 
 who spoke. " It isn't any of the old phrases, is 
 it?" 
 
 Pelham shook his head. 
 
 " They are as dead for me as for you." 
 
 " Well, let's have it in plain terms." 
 " It will bore you," objected Pelham. 
 
 47
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " I'll listen for an hour." 
 
 " The point is this," said Pelham, picking his 
 words. " I have always protested against people 
 who simply follow the other fellows. Your instinct, 
 like that of most able-bodied young men of your 
 class, is to get into khaki. My instinct is to be 
 bitterly angry that things like art and literature 
 are going to be put aside. My bent is not towards 
 practical, obvious things. I have always said that 
 the important things are things which distinguish 
 one man from another; and I've always persisted 
 in sticking to those things." 
 
 " Exactly," said Smith brutally. " That was how 
 you lost Diana." 
 
 Pelham, though he affected to ignore this mortal 
 thrust, was stung. 
 
 ' What," he asked, " is the use of challenging 
 the majority if immediately you are tested you 
 admit that the majority is right? Everybody's 
 rushing madly into the war. I'm going to stay 
 outside." 
 
 "It's sheer perversity, that's what it is," said 
 Smith. ' Why can't you consent to be ordinary ? 
 You know quite well that you the real and essential 
 ' you ' want to go to the war and to live happily 
 with Diana. Why do you pretend to be different 
 from everybody else when in this particular matter 
 
 48
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 you're simply a normal chap like me and 
 Rivers?" 
 
 " I am going to prove to you that I'm different 
 by staying at home." 
 
 " You'd regret it all your life if you could do it. 
 But it's beyond you. The country needs you, 
 Jimmy, and you won't be able to refuse." 
 
 Pelham slapped the table. 
 
 " If the country really needs me, let it say so 
 in a clear and reasonable way. I'm not going to 
 answer an advertisement. There is no duty at 
 present upon any man except a duty to his own 
 convictions. Service in the army is asserted to be 
 spontaneous and voluntary, and I don't happen to 
 be personally moved in that direction." 
 
 " H'm," said Smith, with a queer smile, " you 
 take our political phrases very literally." 
 
 Pelham contemptuously stared out of his blue 
 eyes. 
 
 " By voluntary service I suppose you mean 
 service which is voluntary. The fighting is to be 
 left to those who like it and believe in its moral 
 grandeur." 
 
 "I'm afraid we mean nothing of the kind," said 
 Smith decisively. " Voluntary service means that 
 every young man is expected to do the right thing, 
 and that no pressure will be spared to compel him to
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 that end. You needn't go to the war unless you 
 like, but if you don't go to the war you will be 
 called a coward, and the women will be asked not 
 to love you. Before we've done with you, Jimmy, 
 you'll either have to enlist or wear a mark like the 
 woman in The Scarlet Letter. We' ve only j ust begun 
 to work the voluntary system, but I've already 
 come upon some rather ingenious devices. I saw 
 yesterday a whole battalion of sensitive young men 
 with dependent families who thought they were 
 enlisted for home defence. They were lined up in 
 a public place, and the colonel asked all those men 
 to stand forth from the ranks who were unwilling 
 to risk their lives abroad on behalf of the country. 
 Strange to say, not one of these young men was 
 conspicuously anxious to stand forth. The whole 
 battalion will go to Flanders in due course ; and the 
 result will be talked of in certain newspapers as a 
 free and spontaneous uprising of the people." 
 
 Pelham bounded in his chair. 
 
 " Don't talk your politics to me," he shouted. 
 ' They make me feel unclean." 
 
 ' You're going to have a bad time in London, 
 Jimmy." 
 
 ' Nevertheless," said Pelham, " here I intend to 
 stay. I refuse to go with the crowd just because 
 it happens to be a bigger crowd than usual. As to 
 
 50
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 your recruiting colonels and such-tike, I promise 
 you faithfully that, Pacifist as I am, I will black the 
 eye of the first person, in uniform or out of it, who 
 insults me." 
 
 " Well," said Smith, as he rose and looked for the 
 waiter, "you'll come in your own time and not 
 before. Meantime you can help me to choose 
 some blankets." 
 
 51
 
 VI 
 
 THAT evening Rupert Smith dined with his parents 
 in Fitz John's Avenue. Mostly it was a formal 
 matter. It is true that Rupert had for his mother 
 a mild affection. But she never understood one 
 serious word he said, and Rupert had on his side 
 to take for granted the sentiments which his mother 
 was quite unable to express. Mrs Smith, in the 
 eyes of her children, was never much more than an 
 extension of their father. 
 
 Rupert, in common with the rest of the family, 
 actively disliked his father. Mr Smith had four- 
 teen children, and all but two of them had avoided 
 him as soon as they had reached an age to claim 
 opinions of their own. He was now an old man, 
 but the hard and assured tyranny of his manner 
 was in no way impaired. His words were rapped 
 out in the old crisp manner. He was an absolute 
 law in his own house. In the old days he had been 
 an equally absolute law in his workshops; but 
 infamous Truck and Factory Acts and aggressive 
 trade unions had a little limited his rule. Never- 
 theless he thanked God that he still had the ability 
 
 52
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 and spirit to deal strongly with his workpeople. 
 He paid them less and got more out of them than 
 any employer living. 
 
 He was a product of the hard individualism of the 
 late century, curiously surviving into an epoch of 
 model villages and state insurance. He kept to all 
 the phrases. Let each man do what was right in 
 his own eyes without reference to anyone else, 
 and somehow the total result would be general 
 prosperity and elevation of character. He would, 
 had it been possible, have barricaded his household 
 against the world and wielded over its members 
 the ancient patria potestas. He would similarly 
 have shut the gates of his workshops against all 
 inspectors and combinations. He openly cursed 
 the laws which crossed him. 
 
 He never explained things to his family. He 
 announced his opinions, and let it be known that 
 there was a door to his house for those who hesitated 
 to accept them. 
 
 Kupert had been one of the first to take advantage 
 of the indicated door. There was a night when 
 Rupert had looked with blazing hatred into his 
 father's face. It now seemed long ago. He had 
 left the house, and he had returned only when 
 he had achieved the beginnings of fame and in- 
 dependence. His father at first refused to believe 
 
 53
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 that he was actually making money by writing in 
 the newspapers. Then he looked into the matter, 
 and admitted that Rupert was justified. He 
 respected anyone who kept his head above the 
 industrial waters. He still told Rupert whenever 
 they met that he was a young fool the proof being 
 that Rupert might be earning ten times as much 
 money as his father's partner. But Rupert, having 
 achieved independence, could smile at his father, 
 and occasionally he would dine quarrelsomely at 
 the big house in Fitz John's Avenue. 
 
 The partnership which Rupert had refused had 
 been given to his younger brother. Except for 
 Agnes, who did not count with her father, Henry 
 was now the only child whom the old man had not 
 yet driven into rebellion. Henry was an extremely 
 able young man, who had hitherto successfully 
 avoided hard thinking or any very clear idea as to 
 what precisely he stood for. He had expensive 
 tastes; and was not tempted to probe into the 
 sources of his father's enormous wealth. He 
 dignified the obvious cynicism of his father's policy 
 in their joint commercial undertakings by decking 
 it in the fine, bold phrases of a dashing philosophy 
 idly collected. He studied the great opportunists 
 of history. He liked to think of himself as an 
 industrial Caesar crossing moral Rubicons. He saw 
 
 54
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 himself winning practically beneficent triumphs 
 over sentimental opponents whose timid altruism 
 courted defeat from a bravely unscrupulous man 
 of the hour. He studied the careers of the great 
 Italian captains of the Eenaissance, quoting 
 Macchiavelli and Nietzsche. By this means, though 
 he was quite a nice young man, he contrived to be a 
 faithful partner and disciple of his father without 
 being uneasy in his conscience. 
 
 His father gave to Henry the possessive and 
 jealous affection which his other children had 
 refused to receive. He looked forward to a day 
 when Henry would be an industrial king, and 
 strike hard blows in the drooping cause of the 
 Individual Employer. He identified Henry with 
 the ancient right of men with capital and brains 
 to make money in their own way. He intended 
 Henry to go into Parliament. Together they 
 would start a movement on behalf of the Liberty 
 of Trading. The time would come when the 
 country would tire of the expensive sentimentality 
 which played with Socialism. Then Henry would 
 make speeches in the House of Commons, and 
 together they would buy the Government and 
 obtain a free field to deal with labour in their own 
 brave way. 
 
 Rupert, as he sat to-night with the remains of 
 
 55
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 his family, saw the house in Fitz John's Avenue as 
 a rock islanded by a rising tide. His father talked, 
 and his mother in a less degree, as though the war 
 were a purely industrial event. Some men would 
 be hard hit; others would multiply their profits. 
 It would soon be finished, and then there would 
 be a swingeing income tax. 
 
 They talked in a general way till it was time for 
 Mrs Smith and her daughter Agnes to be dismissed 
 to the drawing-room. Mrs Smith's dismissal was 
 characteristic of the house. It consisted in a 
 sudden silence of Mr Smith, and a direct stare of 
 his hard eyes, which plainly said : 
 
 " Why on earth doesn't that woman leave the 
 room ? " 
 
 Mrs Smith would then rise without ill feeling. 
 She was really quite happy with Mr Smith, though 
 she rather missed her children. She was equally 
 amorphous in outline and character. She gave 
 you the impression that, if you hit her, you could 
 not hurt her for very lack of resistance to the blow. 
 This applied equally to her character and person. 
 
 But to-night she was just a little offended with 
 Eupert. Eupert had said some very bitter things 
 about the silly and selfish women who at the start 
 of the war had stripped the shops in a panic, 
 terrifying the poor, disorganising supplies and 
 
 56
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 exhibiting a selfish preoccupation with keeping 
 whatever wolf might appear from their own 
 particular door. 
 
 Mr Smith had thereupon roared with laughter, 
 and turned, full of his joke, to Rupert : 
 
 " You should see what your mother has done 
 with the attics," he said. 
 
 " She needn't do another bit of shopping for six 
 months," he continued. 
 
 Then, when he had sufficiently enjoyed himself, 
 he turned aggressively upon Rupert. 
 
 " Well, young feller, what was it you were going 
 to say? Let's hear the rest of it. It will amuse 
 your mother." 
 
 "I'm sorry, mother. But you needn't take it 
 to yourself. I dare say," he added, with a glance 
 at his father, " that it wasn't altogether your 
 doing." 
 
 " Of course not," twinkled Mr Smith. " It's 
 father who buys the bacon." 
 
 " Well," said Mrs Smith placidly, " you did warn 
 me not to run out of things." 
 
 " Rupert will tell you that that was very wicked 
 of me." 
 
 " But surely, Rupert dear," protested Mrs Smith, 
 " it was my duty to see that there was food in the 
 house." 
 
 57
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Mrs Smith would have been angry with Eupert 
 if there were such a thing as anger in her nature. 
 
 "It's all right, mother," Rupert soothed, and 
 the subject dropped. 
 
 Agnes had said nothing. She hardly uttered 
 three words during the evening. Her position in 
 the big house was curious. She was the only one 
 of three sisters who remained, and she remained by 
 virtue of an early acquired habit of outward obedi- 
 ence and a nervous distrust of the world outside. 
 She appreciated the advantage of being comfortable 
 and safe, of being respected in the shops, and under 
 no anxiety for the future. Accordingly she had 
 stifled something obscure in her which rebelled, 
 and she had refused the adventures into which her 
 sisters had rushed. She stood in that shrunken 
 home for the discipline and respectability which 
 her sisters had cast e.way. She pledged a younger 
 generation to the creed of her father. Her father 
 could not feel quite an anachronism so long as 
 Henry abetted him, and Agnes outwardly accepted 
 his will. 
 
 She was a handsome girl of three and twenty, 
 who had hardly yet become aware of her sex. 
 Her successful obedience her astonishing consent 
 to live entombed was largely due to the way in 
 which she had instinctively protected herself against 
 
 58
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 all lawless and incalculable things. She shut her- 
 self away from life, finding in books and music the 
 missing thrills of reality. Here she could adventure 
 wiuhout peril. She could soar into a limitless 
 world between well-cooked and substantial meals. 
 Her rebellion had not taken the practical turn of 
 falling in love with an ineligible suitor like her sister 
 Mabel, or of insisting upon a right to be out after 
 9 P.M. like her sister May. She simply escaped to 
 her room, and read Meredith or Zola- Her father 
 had decided that Agnes was a meek young person 
 who had little to say for herself and even less to 
 think about. He considered that Agnes was quite 
 successfully subdued. He had had his way with 
 her at any rate. He did not realise that as yet there 
 had been no real conflict between them. Agnes 
 deliberately consented to conform outwardly in 
 a way which made her virtually inaccessible to 
 pressure. Agnes had not yet taken it into her 
 head to want anything enough to fight for it. 
 Meantime she practised the doctrine of Thomas 
 Hobbes, purchasing freedom of will by an 
 acquiescence which cost her little. 
 
 To-night Agnes was even more silent than usual. 
 She would usually talk with Rupert. But she con- 
 tributed no word at all beyond the necessary 
 chatter of the table.
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 When his mother had taken Agnes into the 
 drawing-room Kupert accepted a cigar from his 
 father. Mr Smith still had small fits of chuckling. 
 He liked nothing better than to see his family 
 falling by the ears. It had been one of his chief 
 amusements in former days to set his children 
 furiously disputing one with another. Next to 
 scoring from them himself he liked to see them 
 scoring from one another. The cream of the jest 
 this evening was that Rupert had nearly quarrelled 
 with his mother, whom not even he had as yet 
 succeeded in more than superficially ruffling. 
 
 As Rupert smoked his cigar in silence, he was 
 suddenly taken with a horror for the house in which 
 he was born. Henry, who had been silent all 
 through dinner, was looking out of the window. 
 Rupert himself had often stood in that same place, 
 and found the things he saw symbolic of all he 
 detested in his father's character. The front door 
 was approached by a tall flight of stone steps, each 
 one of which was whitened each morning by a maid 
 who lived beneath them in a Victorian basement. 
 The place seemed designed for people who ate best 
 butter in the dining-room and fed the servants 
 below upon margarine. The steps seemed ex- 
 pressly built for his father to descend in the morning 
 to make money and to mount in the evening with 
 
 60
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 a cheque-book in his pocket. At the side there was 
 a mean little entrance where little boys brought 
 joints of meat and vegetables. Inside the house 
 everything was elaborately ugly the kind of 
 ugliness that has to be paid for. 
 
 Mr Smith was proud of his house, and talked of 
 his door as though beyond it security and comfort 
 ceased. He regarded his house as the justification 
 of his crude individualism. His creed was justified 
 in that it would enable any energetic and sensible 
 man to live in a house of that kind, with maids in 
 the basement and a side entrance for the butcher's 
 boy a house wherein the unbounded privileges 
 of a father might lawfully be asserted ; at whose 
 threshold all public authority ceased. 
 
 Rupert hated the view from the window of that 
 house as all his brothers and sisters had hated it. 
 In turn they had walked down those whitened 
 steps, leaving the old man to a barren empire 
 over his chairs and tables and over a wife who 
 did not know she was being ruled. They wasted 
 no sympathy on their father. Their father was 
 impregnable in his pride and assurance. 
 
 He did not look like a man to be pitied. He 
 enjoyed huge meals and drank with enjoyment. 
 Any other man would have fattened degenerately, 
 but Mr Smith had never suffered for his appetite. 
 
 61
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 The stern lines of his hard, ruddy face were as clean 
 under the trimmed white beard as they were twenty 
 and thirty years ago. 
 
 Yet Eupert was curiously moved to pity him 
 to-night. His father had never known defeat or 
 acknowledged an error; and it seemed to Eupert 
 that the time had at last come when his citadels 
 must fall. This big selfish house, all built out of 
 profit and calculation, perched above its stone 
 steps, the attics crammed with groceries, was 
 essentially an anachronism. Nothing for which it 
 stood had any reference to the events which now 
 were abroad. 
 
 " Well, Eupert," said Mr Smith, helping himself 
 to port, " you look as if you were sorry for yourself." 
 
 " No, father. I was thinking of you." 
 
 " Then drink some port, and be happy," said 
 Mr Smith, pushing over the decanter. " Henry 
 will tell you we have had an excellent day." 
 
 " It doesn't seem to have exhilarated Henry," 
 said Eupert, looking at the gloomy figure by the 
 window. Henry was straining to catch the cry 
 of a newspaper boy shouting something about 
 a success of the Eussians. 
 
 He turned upon Eupert from the window. 
 
 ' We've made a cool fifty thousand pounds this 
 morning," he said. 
 
 62
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 He flung the information defiantly at his brother, 
 as though he were challenging the world to witness 
 that he had done no wrong. 
 
 Rupert answered the challenge with his eyes. 
 
 " At whose expense ? " he asked. 
 
 " Government's expense," chuckled Mr Smith. 
 
 Rupert ignored his father. His brother shifted 
 under Rupert's steady look. 
 
 " Well ? " asked Henry abruptly. " What have 
 you got to say about it ? " 
 
 " On the face of it only this," said Rupert. 
 " The Government happens at this time to be the 
 country, and the country is fighting for its life." 
 
 Mr Smith rapped down his wine-glass on the table. 
 
 " That's enough," he said with a hard authority. 
 " Keep your romantic notions for your books. 
 They're wasted here." 
 
 Rupert turned to his father, and felt the old 
 antagonism glowing steadily. 
 
 " There is no call for romantic notions," he said 
 quietly. " I was simply wondering how Henry 
 would defend himself." 
 
 " There is nothing to defend," Henry sullenly 
 countered him. " We have given the Government 
 better terms than they would have got from any 
 other firm. We have halved our usual profits." 
 
 " In fact," said Mr Smith, " we have combined 
 
 63
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 patriotism with common-sense. We have saved the 
 Government a cool fifty thousand pounds. Also 
 Henry has forgotten to mention that we have pressed 
 at least two hundred inefficient workmen into the 
 army and filled up the shops with better men at 
 reduced wages." 
 
 Eupert stared for a moment at his father, trying 
 hard to keep his anger cold. His father's mocking 
 eyes openly challenged him to lose his temper. 
 
 " Admirable ! " said Eupert at last; " so long as 
 Henry is satisfied." 
 
 Then he walked to the door, and faced them for a 
 minute before leaving the room. 
 
 " And now," he said, "I'll go and say good-bye 
 fco mother." 
 
 " Not a long good-bye, I hope," said his father, 
 flicking the ash from his cigar. " You amuse me, 
 Eupert." 
 
 " I am afraid it will be rather long," said Eupert 
 quietly. " You evidently don't read the Gazette. 
 I got my commission this morning." 
 
 Mr Smith stared a moment at the door, then 
 turned to the son he loved. 
 
 ' That, Henry, is what actors call a Curtain'' 
 
 But Henry seemed to be staring enviously at the 
 closed door.
 
 VII 
 
 WHEN Rupert walked away from Fitz John's 
 Avenue that evening he felt as though he were com- 
 ing out of the past into the present. His father's 
 house was the symbol of a vanishing particularism. 
 It represented a segregation of interest, a privacy 
 and an independence exalted by easy living and 
 prosperity into a shibboleth. Hitherto it had 
 been an axiom that a man's life and fortune 
 belonged only to himself. If Rupert had told his 
 father that his ability and resources should be 
 placed at the service of his country, that he should 
 have insisted upon advising the Government with- 
 out reward, and have refused all profit at a time 
 when men were throwing their lives into the scale, 
 Mr Smith would have stared at him in amazement. 
 Rupert wondered how long the new conceptions 
 growing into the minds of all who at that time were 
 young and accessible would take to effect an en- 
 trance into his father's house. Would that hard 
 old man ever be brought to acknowledge that 
 the days of the separatist and the buccaneer were 
 counted ? 
 
 E 65
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Rupert felt that destiny was waiting for his 
 father. It would so obviously be just that the man 
 who had taken his selfish will for sole arbiter and 
 never once had quavered into any form of altruism 
 should at last be compelled to acknowledge that a 
 nation at war could not be indefinitely run upon 
 those lines. But how was this justice to be ad- 
 ministered? Kupert knew that his father would 
 only barricade himself the more securely as the 
 assault grew more insistent. He would lose no 
 point of the game, and yield to nothing short of 
 superior force. 
 
 At this point Rupert thought of his brother. 
 Clearly Henry was not very successfully resisting 
 the new influences. Already Henry was uneasy. 
 Maxims and examples out of Italian philosophers 
 and captains were a frail defence against a pricking 
 conscience. Henry had so far been able to dignify 
 his adherence to his father with ingenious and 
 graceful excursions of the intellect. He had given 
 to his industrial adventures a smack of the privateer. 
 He thought of himself as the Englishman Italianate 
 of the Elizabethan age, as a soldier of fortune 
 or as one who sailed for El Dorado. His room 
 was beautiful with fine editions of Hakluyt. He 
 thought of commerce in terms of piracy and war. 
 Men struck for their own hand. 
 
 66
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Eupert smiled to think how small a chance these 
 dapper pretences of his brother would have against 
 the battery of events to come. There was no real 
 basis in Henry's character for the dashing cynicism 
 he affected. He disliked the naked individualism 
 of his father. So he dressed it in the finest costumes 
 he could find for it out of history and romance. 
 
 Then there was Agnes. Rupert was very near 
 to her in many ways. Her tastes had always run 
 with his. They each had shared, in the days of 
 bondage, a young passion for books and music. 
 They had been more together than any other two 
 members of the family. She was now the only 
 sister within reach. Mabel was with her poor 
 captain of Dragoons. May was earning business 
 promotions in New York. His brothers were 
 scattered over the world, lost in their several 
 pursuits. Each had in turn been cut off with a 
 thousand pounds, and was now putting it to uses 
 more or less successful. Agnes remained. 
 
 Rupert disliked in Agnes the streak of cynicism 
 the cynicism of an easy and sensuous nature which 
 enabled her to cling to the comfort and safety of 
 Fitz John's Avenue without any pricking of the 
 heart. But he divined in her a sleeping courage 
 which made her present contemptuous obedience 
 seem somehow to belie her. How long would that 
 
 67
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 obedience endure in the face of coming events 
 events which must necessarily reveal to her the 
 deepness of the gulf between her father and herself ? 
 Her silence to-night had had in it an unusual con- 
 straint. Ordinarily her silence was the easy and 
 inevitable silence of a person who prefers to listen 
 and has no urgent thing to say. To-night it had 
 seemed a brooding and a hostile silence. 
 
 Then, when Eupert had told them in the drawing- 
 room that he had got his commission, and was 
 going into camp on Friday, Agnes had flushed with 
 pleasure, and had pressed his hands. He had left 
 her as one whose thoughts had been turned inward. 
 
 Clearly there were rebellious influences at work 
 in his father's house. But the new events would 
 not be able to bend the set and stubborn mind of 
 its ruler. In him the old generation was embodied 
 a generation bred up in traditions that now were 
 to be wholly changed. The future was with the 
 young, frank and supple men who were susceptible 
 to revolution. Men of the older generation would 
 have to change, or stiffly conform to necessities 
 which they would continue to resent. If, like his 
 father, they were strong men self-willed and 
 stubborn to resist then they would in their pride 
 of will be broken.
 
 VIII 
 
 KENNETH JOHN was the secretary of a Junior Whip, 
 a man whom the war had hit particularly hard. 
 Julius Eedway had been coming to the front upon 
 the Government side with extreme rapidity in 
 the last few years. He counted appreciably in the 
 important domestic crisis which immediately pre- 
 ceded the war; and he was intimately acquainted 
 with every factor in a problem which once had 
 governed the political situation. A speech of 
 Julius Eedway was worth a special edition in 
 the days before the war. 
 
 Then, so far as the public was concerned, Julius 
 Redway disappeared. Only the clubs knew how 
 hard he worked in the first terrible weeks of August. 
 Redway had at once perceived that the old prob- 
 lems must be, not simply laid aside, but forgotten. 
 He put his services frankly at the disposal of the 
 Government in the difficult task at times it seemed 
 impossible of persuading some of the older people 
 at Westminster that domestic controversy had to be 
 postponed. When the memoirs of this generation 
 can be published to the world without reserve, an
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 amazed posterity will incredulously contemplate 
 the political bitterness and distrust of those early 
 days. The devoted work of some of the wiser men 
 kept the rank and file of the sections from open 
 bickering. But it was difficult to preserve even the 
 armed neutrality of a party truce. 
 
 Julius Kedway, in whipping small and disgruntled 
 men into a reasonable attitude, owed much of his 
 success to the fact that he himself could partly 
 understand their point of view. He appreciated 
 how difficult it was for men of middle age, absorbed 
 in controversies which reached far back into 
 their lives, committed for years to deep personal 
 animosities, thinking naturally within established 
 boundaries, suddenly to realise that what they 
 understood as public life had virtually ceased to 
 exist. Eedway himself had spent one terrible 
 night in which he had seen his own career tumble 
 to nothing; and even now he, with many of the 
 best men in politics, felt like a pugilist who had 
 started to deliver a blow and realised before it got 
 home that he was punching at the air. He was 
 still staggering in an effort to recover his balance. 
 
 Kedway had succeeded, but there were scores of 
 men who had failed. Eedway wrestled with some 
 of these men for their souls, and for the credit of 
 his profession. He met them with patience and 
 
 70
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 sympathy. He sometimes shivered to think how he 
 himself might have fared had he been ten or fifteen 
 years older, a little less gifted with humour and a 
 sense of perspective, a little more practised in the 
 art of believing what he wished to believe. The 
 men with whom he talked supported their reluct- 
 ance to clean the political slate with phrases and 
 arguments which Eedway himself would have con- 
 sidered to be unanswerable not many months ago. 
 With many men he completely failed men in 
 whom imagination and humour had been killed by 
 long immersion in political disputing and intrigue. 
 Mostly they were men of small but hard intelligence, 
 crusted with old ways of thought and speech, in- 
 capable of readjusting their lives. They agreed 
 ostensibly to put aside the matters which absorbed 
 them before the war; but they still thought of 
 these matters as being filed for reference, as being 
 kept in a political cupboard to be taken down and 
 dealt with in the old familiar way when the war 
 was finished. They admitted the war was a grave 
 and terrible event, but they kept it as a thing apart 
 from their political life. They resented its tendency 
 to intrude and to imperil their notions. They did 
 not allow the war to work like leaven in the brain. 
 Each successive step of the Government towards 
 
 claiming the services of the country on behalf of 
 
 71
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 the country was received by them with a secret 
 distrust. 
 
 In the first days of the war the efforts of the best 
 men on both sides were all directed to preserve 
 appearances. Kedway worked night and day at 
 nothing else. He was of opinion that his leaders 
 tended to deal too gently with their least reputable 
 followers. But he loyally addressed and exhorted 
 the small men in his smoothest and most persuasive 
 manner. Before every important debate he saw 
 as many men as he could, using all the party 
 pressure he could apply to keep them silent and 
 benevolent. 
 
 Upon a morning in the early spring of 1915, 
 Kenneth John sat with Redway in their room 
 at Westminster, receiving his familiar instruc- 
 tions. Redway trusted a good deal in John's 
 ability to convey in his letters the precise degree of 
 firmness or suavity he needed. They had worked 
 together for nearly three years, and John was able 
 to catch his intentions from the briefest indications. 
 Redway this morning was beginning to weary of 
 his work. He listened as John reported upon the 
 correspondence of the day with the faint disgust 
 which leads rather to hopelessness than temper. 
 John quickly and monotonously went on with his 
 report : 
 
 72
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 L. B. wishes to be assured that his support of 
 this afternoon's motion in no way prejudices the 
 case against . . . 
 
 P. W. does not admit the necessity of conceding 
 to the Opposition the principle of ... 
 
 Sir Th. H. is of opinion that the war should not 
 be permitted permanently to impair the prospects 
 for ... 
 
 Kedway as he listened was busily unlocking 
 memories of things he had read and heard from 
 France in the last few months. These things 
 were louder and more real than the voice of his 
 secretary. 
 
 John finished abruptly and waited. Kedway 
 came from the window. 
 
 " We have had all this before," he said. " You 
 can draft replies without instructions in detail 
 from me. Deal carefully with L. B. Answer him 
 vaguely on six sheets of notepaper. He likes that 
 sort of thing. Assure him that the Prime Minister 
 has no intention of surrendering any of those 
 historic principles with which the welfare and 
 interest of the great party he is privileged to repre- 
 sent has been closely and inveterately identified. 
 But put it more clumsily than that. L. B. suspects 
 
 73
 
 THE KINCx'S MEN 
 
 the bona fides of anything with less than half-a-dozen 
 sub-relative clauses." 
 
 John made a brief note. 
 
 He was a model secretary. No trace of com- 
 ment had ever appeared upon his face. He looked 
 calmly for his instructions, asked some leading 
 questions, and jotted industriously. Kedway had 
 often wondered what his secretary thought of him. 
 Lately he hardly liked to wonder very far in that 
 direction. John did not know it, but Redway 
 admired him as an author. He found humour 
 enough in John's writings to be at times a little 
 nervous under his impassive looks. 
 
 This morning, as John snapped his notebook 
 and made to go into his own room, Redway 
 suddenly said: 
 
 " One moment, John. Suppose we talk a 
 while." 
 
 John came back dutifully into the room. 
 
 " Business ? " he asked. 
 
 ' Not altogether. It has just struck me that 
 you're younger than I am." 
 
 He paused, and then impulsively added : 
 
 '* What do the young writing people think about 
 all this ? " 
 
 'All my friends but one have asked for com- 
 missions ; and the exception proves the rule." 
 
 74
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Are you the exception, may I ask ? " said 
 Redway. 
 
 John, who was thinking of Pelham, flushed a 
 little. 
 
 "I'm not eligible in the ordinary way,'' he said. 
 " But I'm open to advice." 
 
 "I'm not going to advise you," said Redway, 
 with a smile. " I will simply point out that a 
 good secretary and a thoughtful journalist is worth 
 keeping in the country at this time. How do you 
 feel about it ? " 
 
 " I'm not exactly comfortable." 
 
 " This is alarming." 
 
 John smiled. "I'm not going to run away," he 
 said. " If I pushed in now it wouldn't be from 
 any sense of duty. It would be a sort of sky- 
 larking." 
 
 Redway put his hand affectionately on John's 
 shoulder. 
 
 " We'll talk about this again," he said. " I'd 
 no idea you were taking things so seriously." 
 
 John, between the lines of his letters, thought 
 now and then of this talk with Redway. Red way's 
 last phrase rankled a little. Redway had dwelled 
 on the word " seriously." John wondered if he 
 had expressed himself badly. Had he seemed to 
 lean towards the Pharisees? 
 
 75
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 He saw Kedway again that afternoon when the 
 letters were signed. The morning's talk had made 
 an enormous difference in their relations. Redway 
 frankly smiled as he signed the letter to L. B. 
 
 " You must find this rather amusing," he said, 
 as he handed it back to John. 
 
 " That was six months ago. To-day it makes 
 me furious." 
 
 Redway was startled by the vehemence of his 
 secretary. John thought he saw an encourage- 
 ment to go further yet. He tapped the letters in 
 his hand. 
 
 " Good God, sir," he said, " how long are you 
 going to stand this sort of thing ? " 
 
 ' That," said Redway, as he handed back the 
 last of the letters, " might almost be called a leading 
 question." 
 
 76
 
 IX 
 
 THE morning after Red way's conversation with his 
 secretary he was commissioned by the Government 
 to dine with Mr Smith at his house in Fitz John's 
 Avenue. It was one of Red way's unpleasant 
 duties to keep in social touch with certain big 
 employers. He sat at their tables as a missionary 
 of public spirit. It was his task to bring home to 
 them the need for co-operation and patriotism in 
 their dealings. Mr Smith was high upon the list 
 of such men. He was at this time very necessary 
 to the Government, and, so long as the Government 
 respected Mr Smith's claim to do what he liked with 
 his own, it was also necessary for the Government to 
 respect Mr Smith. 
 
 Mr Smith had frequently been lobbied, but never 
 on so big a scale as since he became a purveyor 
 to the Government at war. He had a grim con- 
 tempt for the men who exercised upon him their 
 charm of manner. He saw through it all so clearly, 
 and it amused him. It tickled the same sense of 
 fun in him which liked to see his children disputing 
 one with another. 
 
 77
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Upon this particular evening he was unusually 
 pleased at the prospect of entertaining a Junior 
 Whip. He was to discuss patriotism, and common- 
 sense, and he was to enjoy the fastidious disgust 
 of a man he particularly disliked. He elaborately 
 set the stage for his comedy. Rupert had written 
 to his mother saying he had a few days' leave and 
 would like to spend it at Fitz John's Avenue. 
 Rupert was thinking of Agnes, whose parting look 
 on the night he was gazetted he had not been able 
 to forget. Mr Smith welcomed an opportunity of 
 having khaki at the table. Not only was he 
 assured in Rupert of an angry spectator, but it 
 looked well to have a son quite obviously in the 
 New Armies. 
 
 To heighten the effect he invited Rivers, now 
 upon embarkation leave and staying with some 
 relatives next door, to make one of the party. 
 Rivers had long been gazetted, and was leaving for 
 the front within three days. His qualifications as 
 a linguist, an engineer, and an old Oxford Terrier 
 whose enthusiasm was a byword in several regular 
 messes had soon dropped him into an active service 
 regiment. 
 
 Rivers, as a friend of Rupert since they were 
 boys together, was as intimate with the Smiths 
 as he cared to be. Since Rupert had left home 
 
 78
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 their relations had been rare and distant. But 
 sometimes he played tennis with Agnes. He had 
 always frankly admired Agnes, but he feared her 
 erudition in art and letters. Rivers was frankly 
 athletic and pastoral. 
 
 Pelham's contempt for Rivers, lately expressed 
 in the room at Mortimer Street, was natural but 
 quite unjust. It was true that Rivers had shot 
 lions in Africa, and was now going to shoot Germans 
 in Flanders. But he did not call it a change of soul. 
 He never worried to describe the things he did. It 
 was a perfectly obvious and natural thing for him 
 to push immediately into the army. He had not 
 thought twice about it. He had the forthright 
 character of the Englishman who has lived mostly 
 in the open air. He did not think of himself as 
 patriotic or talk at all of his country. He was 
 going into a necessary and possibly exciting 
 business without fuss or any great elation. 
 
 Rivers was the first to arrive this evening. Mrs 
 Smith was being pinned together upstairs, and 
 Agnes was alone in the drawing-room. They had 
 not met since the war. 
 
 Agnes had that afternoon been visiting a lady 
 novelist who gave literary teas. She had not 
 enjoyed the conversation. It had formerly thrilled 
 her to hear familiarly of public people whose 
 
 79
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 royalties were as immense as their talents. But 
 the most original remarks of her clever friends had 
 this afternoon failed to amuse her. 
 
 She was thinking of her literary tea when Kivers 
 was announced. Her discontent had sounded a 
 depth which dismayed her. All the things she had 
 built about her as a shield in her father's house 
 her music, her books, her love of comfort and 
 beautiful clothes, her security and self-sufficient 
 tillage of the mind seemed to have lost their 
 efficacy. She was sensible to-night only of being 
 in her father's house of having implicitly con- 
 sented to be barred out of the world into which 
 her sisters had escaped. She had made believe 
 with things of the imagination, and had taken the 
 edge from her revolt with soft and secure living. 
 She was beginning to find herself out. Her father's 
 conversations with Henry to which she was now 
 an absorbed listener stimulated her anger. 
 Though she continued to be silent from habit, 
 and outwardly things went on as before, Agnes 
 knew that for her the time was coming to follow 
 her sisters. Something was shut out of the house 
 in Fitz John's Avenue something she needed to 
 find. 
 
 It was something which entered with Rivers. 
 She realised it as he came to meet her down the 
 
 80
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 whole length of the long room. It was the first 
 time anything suggestive of the New England had 
 entered into that house. His coming affected 
 Agnes in a way that alarmed her. She had always 
 assumed with Rivers a slightly superior way. He 
 so clearly wondered at her familiarity with things 
 mysterious to him. He had in her presence the 
 diffidence of a boy in the presence of a woman whom 
 he had always unquestionably accepted as too 
 beautiful for words. Agnes to-night knew in a 
 flash that this superiority had vanished. To assume 
 it now would, she felt, have been hateful. She 
 smiled in contempt of her vanished airs. 
 
 Rivers noted the smile and took it for himself. 
 He had lately thought a good deal about Agnes. 
 Though he had not thought twice about joining the 
 army, he had inevitably been brought sharply up 
 against the things which mattered most to him in 
 the last few months. Among those things was his 
 shy and desultory friendship with Agnes. At least 
 he would require her good wishes. 
 
 He would require even more than that. He 
 realised it now. 
 
 He did not see the dejected and chastened spirit 
 
 of Agnes. He saw her as very remote, waiting to 
 
 receive one of the least important guests of the 
 
 evening. He saw also the smiling contempt upon 
 
 F 81
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 her face contempt for herself. He accepted it as 
 addressed to his bran-new uniform. 
 
 When Agnes came eagerly forward and clasped 
 his hand as though she welcomed him from the 
 heart, he ascribed it to her politeness. 
 
 " Very awkward, you know," he said, still think- 
 ing of her smile. " Positively the first time I've 
 had this particular outfit on." 
 
 " Are you apologising ? " she asked, wondering 
 at his tone. 
 
 " I was answering the smile. I suppose I do 
 look a bit odd in all these new straps." 
 
 " Bob ! " cried Agnes in such dismay that he 
 opened his eyes. Then she put her hand upon his 
 sleeve. 
 
 ;< That smile wasn't meant for you, Bob. Please 
 don't think it " 
 
 Agnes was unable to go on. The strain of living 
 within herself during the last months had worn her 
 nerves. This sudden sharpening of the contrast 
 between her old superiority a superiority still 
 accepted by her companion and her inward 
 abasement was too much for her. Her lip trembled 
 and she left her words foolishly in the air. 
 
 Rivers suddenly lost his sense of her as a remote 
 and very wonderfully dressed daughter of the house. 
 He saw now only her face struggling with some 
 
 82
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 sort of emotion of which he apparently was the 
 cause. He put his hand over hers, which lay upon 
 his sleeve. 
 
 " Why, Agnes, what's the matter ? " he asked. 
 
 Agnes was staring at the sleeve of his coat with 
 that sense of crisis which suddenly imprints little 
 things irrelevantly upon the mind. She tried to 
 find words to cover the break in her voice ; but her 
 attention was stupidly held by the single star upon 
 his sleeve. 
 
 "What is that funny little blob?" she heard 
 herself say. 
 
 The tension broke. 
 
 " Oh, that ? " said Rivers, with a laugh. " That 
 means that I'm of the lowest possible rank that an 
 officer can be." 
 
 Then the inconsequence of the question struck 
 him. He looked curiously at Agnes, whose eyes 
 were lowered. Her whole demeanour puzzled him. 
 
 " What's all this about? " he suddenly said. 
 
 " I mean," he continued, startled a little by his 
 own audacity, " you seem just a bit upset." 
 
 Agnes looked at him. 
 
 " It's this," she said, " I want you to know that 
 I think you're simply splendid." 
 
 This was for Rivers quite a new idea. He even 
 wondered whether she were making fun of him. 
 
 83
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Then lie saw there were tears. He was thrilled 
 with a sense of something passing between them 
 something simple which he entirely understood, 
 but could not express. He tried to speak, but was 
 struck helpless by a surprised concentration of all 
 his faculties upon a revelation. He must be in 
 love with Agnes. He moved towards her. 
 
 Then, into the circuit of their intercourse, 
 intruded the disagreeable voice of Mr Smith. 
 
 " How d'ye do, Rivers? " it said. 
 
 Mr Smith was already beside them. To Agnes 
 it seemed he must have seen what had happened. 
 
 Rivers heard himself talking politely to Mr Smith 
 and Agnes left them to warn her mother that it was 
 time to appear. When she came back with her 
 mother Rupert and Henry were present, and 
 almost immediately Redway was announced. 
 
 The dinner which followed disappointed Mr 
 Smith. He seemed curiously unable to assert 
 himself. Redway was less respectful than a Junior 
 Whip should be. He encouraged Rupert and 
 Rivers to talk military matters, and seemed almost 
 to assume that the dinner was intended as a khaki 
 celebration in their honour. Mrs Smith beamed 
 openly in her non-committal way upon the boys 
 in uniform ; and Agnes behaved in a most extra- 
 ordinary fashion. Ordinarily she was silent and 
 
 84
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 indifferent to what was said. To-night she drank 
 flamboyantly of the best claret, talked with a 
 flushed and dishevelled enthusiasm to Rupert, and 
 was seized with sudden fits of silence which posi- 
 tively glowed as if from internal sources. Henry 
 confined himself to the smallest talk. 
 
 Redway was too greatly interested in the currents 
 he divined to be flowing under the surface of their 
 conversation to be greatly disturbed by the veiled 
 provocations continually offered by his host. Mr 
 Smith had intended this dinner to be a festival for 
 his own honour and amusement. But it was 
 nothing of the kind. Redway disregarded him. 
 Agnes refused to allow her high spirits to be checked. 
 (He wondered if her riotous behaviour had any- 
 thing to do with Rivers. This must be looked into.) 
 Rupert, repeatedly challenged, did not even trouble 
 to dispute with him. Rivers met his veiled satire, 
 not in the least understanding it, with frank good 
 humour. Finally Mrs Smith three times failed to 
 catch her husband's eye when he desired the ladies 
 to retire. She was learning how to distinguish a 
 Lieutenant- Colonel from a Colonel. 
 
 By the time Mrs Smith had taken Agnes into the 
 drawing-room Mr Smith was secretly enraged. He 
 felt obscurely out of things. 
 
 His instinct was sound, erring only in not 
 
 85
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 perceiving the degree of his remoteness. Agnes, in 
 her gaiety and spasmodic fervour, was outwardly 
 changed, and this her father could well enough 
 perceive. But he had a very inadequate idea of all 
 that was athroe in her. She sat wrestling to keep 
 her amazing new happiness from breaking out 
 into an open and foolish display. After months of 
 depression, in which she had seemed to be held in a 
 cage which contracted upon her, she had suddenly, 
 in blundering against the bars, flung open a gate 
 into the air. She was hardly conscious of what she 
 said or did. Everything she heard or saw was like 
 a gauze or transparency floating between her and 
 this transfiguration of her inner life. When her 
 father made one of his characteristic attempts to 
 draw her into a disputation (he did this systematic- 
 ally because normally she liked to be silent) she 
 seemed to be viewing him from the wrong end of a 
 telescope. He had become small and far away. 
 She curtly evaded him and continued to chatter 
 with Rupert. Now and then she looked at Rivers, 
 and found that his eyes were frankly searching 
 her. Then, intolerably happy, she turned away 
 and sprinted with Rupert into nonsense. 
 
 Rivers, on his part, was possessed with simply 
 one idea. He wanted to be assured that he had 
 not been dreaming. Had his moment of divination
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 anything to go upon? He talked; and his food 
 was gradually removed. But a smothered argu- 
 ment was swinging this way and that in his mind. 
 He loved Agnes, and he had seen tears in her eyes. 
 Was there anything else ? He looked towards her 
 for confirmation. She was drinking a lot of claret 
 and talking at a great rate with her brother, and 
 her eyes were shining. He wondered if the dinner 
 would never end. 
 
 So far as Mr Smith was concerned, Rivers was 
 not much better than Agnes. They seemed to be 
 equally beyond his reach. 
 
 Then there was Redway. Redway had come 
 to-night to show Mr Smith the steel beneath the 
 velvet of the Government. He was deliberately 
 less agreeable than usual. It was his mission to- 
 night to alarm, but not on any account to estrange, 
 Mr Smith, and he was inclined at times to improve 
 on his instructions. 
 
 This more particularly appeared when Mrs Smith 
 had taken Agnes into the drawing-room. They 
 were discussing an afternoon's debate in the House 
 of Commons. An attack had been made on certain 
 employers of labour, and Redway, seizing the 
 opportunity he was waiting for, challenged Mr 
 Smith, at whose works a strike was toward. 
 
 " Confess," he said, " the attack was better 
 
 87
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 justified than the Government was able to admit. 
 The rigours of business cannot now be pleaded 
 against the public interest. If profits are too closely 
 pursued they will have to be checked by law." 
 
 Mr Smith stared at Redway. Here was a 
 Government emissary, from whom he had expected 
 nothing but complaisance, talking like a socialist. 
 
 " Is this you, Redway ? " he asked, with a keen 
 look of his hard blue eyes. " Or is it the Party ? " 
 
 " It is the country, and the war, and the general 
 position. We cannot long avoid acting on the as- 
 sumption that in every direction private interest will 
 have to be squared with what the country needs." 
 
 " I don't find this in any of the Government 
 speeches," objected Mr Smith. 
 
 " It was said," Rupert interjected. 
 
 " Any young fool can say things," retorted his 
 father. 
 
 Redway smiled happily upon Rupert. 
 
 " Watch the young fools," he said to his host. 
 ; ' They will have a good deal to say in the time to 
 come, more especially the young fools in khaki. 
 They will be in touch with the new notions which 
 this war will bring into the country. You and I," 
 he amiably continued, ignoring the stiffening of Mr 
 Smith, " stand for the old order of things. It won't 
 be easy for some of us to change." 
 
 88
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " How deep " it was Henry who, to his father's 
 surprise, now intervened " will these changes go ? " 
 
 It seemed as if he were asking this of himself 
 rather than of Redway. 
 
 Mr Smith laughed without enthusiasm. 
 
 " I take it," he said, chinking his syllables, " that 
 there will still be buying and selling, and things 
 like five per cent, and bills of exchange." 
 
 Henry moved uneasily as his father spoke, and 
 this was not lost upon Redway. 
 
 " The Junior Partner is beginning to be pricked," 
 he thought. 
 
 " There is no doubt at all of the buying and 
 selling," he said aloud. " We shall soon be spending 
 over three millions a day." 
 
 Henry seemed suddenly to come to a decision. 
 He leaned forward between Redway and his father. 
 
 " How, practically, will the changes come ? " he 
 asked. 
 
 " Overwork," commented his father silently. 
 He made a mental note that Henry must have a 
 holiday. He remembered that Henry had lately 
 been taciturn and pale, and had shown but little 
 pride in his undertakings. Redway looked for a 
 moment at Henry, noting his taut anxiety. Henry 
 had the appearance of a man who desired reinforce- 
 ment for his better angel. 
 
 89
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " They can come in two ways," said Eedway 
 deliberately. " Either everyone will suddenly 
 realise for himself that private affairs are no 
 longer possible, or there will have to be Acts of 
 Parliament." 
 
 " For example?" 
 
 " Take industry. Perhaps our workers will in- 
 stinctively feel that it is not possible at this time 
 to strike for their class, and perhaps our employers 
 will instinctively feel that big war profits are dis- 
 loyal. The thing may come about quite naturally." 
 
 " Does the Government," Mr Smith asked with 
 a cutting restraint of his temper, " think that the 
 country can be successfully run on terms that will 
 deny to its industries a fair profit ? " 
 
 " I hope we are all ready to make sacrifices." 
 
 "I'm an old-fashioned man," said Mr Smith. 
 " I think the best way to serve the general interest 
 is to look to the soundness of one's own affairs. 
 Patriotism that cannot be made to pay will end 
 by ruining the country. I'm not going to help win 
 the war by running into bankruptcy." 
 
 "I'm afraid it is hardly within the control of any 
 single person to be bankrupt or flourishing. It 
 depends on the solvency of the country. There is 
 no limited liability." 
 
 " But in practice," urgently insisted Henry. 
 
 90
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " How in practice are we to decide what to 
 do?" 
 
 " I was under the impression," said Mr Smith, 
 coldly regarding his son, " that we had decided 
 already. We have given the Government good 
 terms and we are transacting business as usual." 
 
 Redway pointedly ignored Mr Smith. He turned 
 to Henry. 
 
 " We shall easily decide what to do," he said, 
 " if the spirit is right. But there are old habits to be 
 discarded. If we cannot discard them spontane- 
 ously for ourselves, necessity will drive the Govern- 
 ment into some sort of action. We shall have to 
 prohibit strikes, limit profits, take over the work- 
 shops, fix wages by arbitration, restrain prices, and 
 pool the country's resources on behalf of the state 
 there will be no end to it." 
 
 Mr Smith set down his glass. 
 
 " Is this your private opinion ? " he asked point- 
 blank of Redway. " Or is it a threat ? " 
 
 " It is a point of view which appeals every day to 
 a greater number of people." 
 
 " Who are these people ? " 
 
 " The people who are most closely in touch with 
 the problems lying ahead of us. This war is going 
 to be largely a war of material. We have tried to 
 get the material by contract with private firms. 
 
 91
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 The success of this experiment depended on a com- 
 plete disappearance of class feeling and competition. 
 There had to be no disputing between capital and 
 labour, and no rivalry of profiteers. It looks 
 as if the private shops had failed. There is only 
 one remedy. They will have to be turned into 
 Government shops." 
 
 " In a word," said Henry, as though he were 
 driven to admit a truth he had long resisted, " there 
 cannot be business as usual." 
 
 " There can be no business which is not the 
 nation's business. Decent men cannot read the 
 Roll of Honour in the morning and haggle for a 
 penny an hour in the afternoon." 
 
 Rupert and Rivers were now talking apart. 
 Henry sat back in his chair in a way which suggested 
 that for him the discussion was finished. 
 
 Mr Smith realised that he had received a warning, 
 and began from that moment to regard Redway as 
 an enemy to be treated with caution. Mr Smith kept 
 his bad temper for his friends and acquaintances. 
 In business he was cool and coldly agreeable. The 
 fact that Redway had now become his enemy had 
 the instant effect of making him less quarrelsome. 
 
 To-night, moreover, he was at a disadvantage. 
 He did not know exactly how much was behind 
 Red way's exalted sentiments. Had the Grovern- 
 
 92
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 ment any practicable plans ? He was too old a 
 campaigner to fling himself violently against a 
 position which he had not personally reconnoitred. 
 He would say no more for the present. 
 To Eedway, with a sudden affability, he remarked : 
 " There is, of course, a good deal in what you 
 say. Shall we go into the drawing-room ? " 
 
 93
 
 X 
 
 IN the drawing-room Agnes was playing the piano. 
 Her father noted the immediate sweep of her eyes 
 in search of Rivers. Rivers also noted it, and the 
 silent doubt of his late impatient moments in the 
 dining-room was obliterated. He wondered how 
 he could contrive to get a few moments alone with 
 her. 
 
 By request she played the tune of Tipperary. 
 Rupert and Redway made it the text of a con- 
 versation. Even here it seemed to Mr Smith that 
 he was being indirectly threatened. The talk was 
 all of enormous changes in the outlook of all kinds 
 of people. 
 
 " A few months ago," Rupert was saying, " I 
 should have strongly objected to Tipperary. The 
 soldiers have improved it by exchanging the music 
 hall whine for a military beat, but it is hardly 
 yet an aesthetic masterpiece." 
 
 " Nevertheless " Redway suggested. 
 
 " Nevertheless," Rupert continued, " it has taken 
 into action the finest army we ever made, and the 
 tune means so much to us now that it often makes 
 
 94
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 us wonder what sort of prigs we were less than a 
 year ago." 
 
 " It's all a matter of perspective," said Red way. 
 " A year ago a commonplace musical cadence 
 seriously mattered to some of us." 
 
 " Play it again, Agnes," said Rupert, " just the 
 tune ; none of your stylish embellishments." 
 
 Agnes, as she played it, saw a company of dusty 
 men singing it very quietly as they marched past 
 her waiting car. It was knit in her memory with 
 the first stir in her of emotions which to-night were 
 supreme. She finished the tune very quietly and 
 sat in a heavy silence after she had finished. 
 
 Agnes raised her eyes from the keys, and abruptly 
 turned to Rivers : 
 
 " Bob," she said, " I want to show you how the 
 gardener has hung the tennis net. I'm sure it's not 
 high enough." 
 
 She all at once had felt it was absurd to wait and 
 to manoeuvre for the meeting they both desired. 
 The people who stood between them were shadows 
 to be ignored. 
 
 Rivers was for an instant staggered by the 
 directness of her appeal. Then he boisterously 
 accepted it. 
 
 Agnes was conscious, as they walked across the 
 lawn, that her father was watching her from the 
 
 95
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 window. They halted beside the net, and for the 
 first time Rivers looked long and openly at Agnes 
 for confirmation of his dream. Already it was too 
 dark to see her very clearly, but her face was 
 thrown into relief by the lighted window. It caught 
 the same beam which lit the leaves of a large 
 laurel. 
 
 He had no doubt of her from the moment he 
 looked. Her eyes seemed to shine by their own 
 light. 
 
 " I can hardly believe it is true," he said. He 
 shook with the novelty of the thing. 
 
 They felt the presence of the lighted window. 
 They moved instinctively into the shadow. Agnes 
 slipped towards him. To Rivers it seemed that 
 the wet earth and smells of the garden, the drops 
 shaken from the trees by the wind, were part of 
 their story. These things lived for days to come in 
 his memory with the splashes of light upon the grass, 
 the sense of a brief and perilous privacy, and the 
 leaf of ivy which fell upon her face as she lay with 
 her head thrown back upon his arm. Her passion 
 almost frightened him. Her first confession had 
 come to him in tears, and there was the hysteria of 
 nerves tried to breaking in her present attitude. 
 She lay rigidly clutching his coat with her eyes 
 closed.
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 A heavier gust than usual shook the trees. The 
 cold drops fell upon her shoulders. Rivers, whose 
 consciousness was minutely recording every small 
 thing, felt the water spatter on to her arm between 
 his fingers. It sensitised him to her warmth and 
 her light pressure. The night air seemed suddenly 
 to threaten her. 
 
 * We must go in," he said, shy of any spoken 
 endearment. 
 
 She drew herself away from him. 
 " Bob dear, when will you have to go ? " 
 " I've got three days." 
 
 They were silent a moment. Then he said 
 suddenly : 
 
 " Why didn't we find this out before ? " 
 " I could not wish to find you in a better way. 
 Bob darling, I am too happy. You can't know 
 what this means to me. You have given me a 
 part in the new life." 
 
 If anyone had talked like this to Rivers yesterday 
 he would have thought it was intended to be 
 obscurely humorous. Now he simply accepted the 
 position. 
 
 They were approaching the lighted windows. 
 He stopped a moment to think of a practical way 
 of meeting. 
 
 " Rupert has a tea-party in Mortimer Street 
 G 97
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 to-morrow," he said. " Come early and we can 
 talk before the others turn up. I'll tell Kupert 
 about it." 
 
 Agnes shivered slightly at this. To-morrow 
 would be the first of three remaining days. She 
 would then be alone again in her father's house. 
 
 " I'll be there at three o'clock," she said. 
 
 When they entered the drawing-room Redway 
 had already started to leave. Mr Smith was 
 speeding him with a smooth cordiality which boded 
 ill for the future. Henry had said good-night to 
 Redway and was now deeply retired within a 
 remote corner of the room. 
 
 Redway warmly shook hands with Rivers, God- 
 speeding him to France. Agnes felt the eyes of her 
 father searching her as the near departure of Rivers 
 was mentioned. 
 
 When Redway had left the house Rupert, after 
 a short and homely talk with his mother, challenged 
 Rivers to see him on his way. He was spending 
 the night in Mortimer Street. Rivers, whom Mr 
 Smith had already begun to transfix for examina- 
 tion, was glad to get away. Agnes, fearing to 
 trust her nerves under the probing of her father, 
 had said good-night. 
 
 Outside the house Rupert lost no time in coming 
 to the point with Rivers. 
 
 98
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 As they went down the familiar steps, and Rivers 
 was wondering how to disburthen his mighty news, 
 Rupert squeezed his arm, and, to his friend's 
 amazement, said: 
 
 " Bob, you're a lucky fellow. She's worth two 
 of any one of us. If I'd ever had the sense to hope 
 for anything so splendid, I should have prayed that 
 you two would some day feel about one another 
 as you feel to-night." 
 
 "Good God!" ejaculated Rivers. " Is it as 
 plain as that ? " 
 
 " I should think it was. Even Redway noticed 
 it." 
 
 They walked on in silence for a moment with 
 arms linked. 
 
 " When are you meeting her again," Rupert asked 
 at length. 
 
 " That's just the point. I thought she might 
 come early to our tea-party to-morrow. What 
 do you say ? " 
 
 Rupert again squeezed his arm. 
 
 " I'm simply delighted." 
 
 " I may as well tell you," he went on, after Rivers, 
 as his way was, had failed to express himself, " I 
 came to dinner to-night simply to see Agnes. She's 
 been having a poor time lately, and I was getting 
 anxious about her. My idea was to get her to 
 
 99
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 myself this evening, and talk to her. But I soon 
 saw that that wasn't my business any longer." 
 
 " I suppose," said Kivers, with the air of making 
 a deep discovery, " that she isn't altogether in 
 touch just now with her with your with Mr 
 Smith." 
 
 Rupert laughed. " Bob," he said, " love is 
 giving you a wonderful perspicacity. I am glad 
 to think that my wicked old father is coming to 
 judgment. Agnes was bound to run down the 
 steps of his house before very long. She will now 
 defy him and be happy and save her soul. I even 
 begin to perceive signs of conscience in Henry. 
 Then there is Red way. Thank heaven for Red way. 
 You heard him to-night. But of course you didn't. 
 Father has seen the writing on the wall. He has 
 had a good run, but the rope at last is short." 
 
 Rupert Smith, of the Royal Field Artillery, 
 flung his cap into the air. 
 
 ' What on earth are you talking about ? " asked 
 Rivers in amazement. 
 
 " Bob," said Rupert very gravelv, " you have 
 just three days to get Agnes out of that infernal 
 house. It will be the best work you will ever do. 
 You will never know how good it is." 
 
 " If it's anything to make Agnes happy I shall 
 certainly know how good it is." 
 
 100
 
 " Happy ! " exploded Rupert. " Thank heaven 
 there are better things in life than being happy." 
 
 He turned to Rivers, and with deep feeling 
 pressed his hand. 
 
 " Bob," he said, " I think you love Agnes. 
 Well, so do I, and I tell you this. The Agnes we 
 love has only just begun to be alive. It has been 
 your privilege to save all that was worth while in 
 her all that was really Agnes." 
 
 "I'm dashed," said Rivers, staring at his friend. 
 
 Then, as Rupert made towards the " Under- 
 ground," he shouted : 
 
 " You're not going to leave me, Rupert ? " 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 " I've such heaps to tell you. It was I who 
 intended to do the talking." 
 
 Rupert poked at him with his stick. 
 
 " Think better of it, dear chap. You're a most 
 incompetent talker. I've done all the talking that 
 is necessary, and I'll expect you to-morrow at 
 three o'clock." 
 
 101
 
 XI 
 
 AGNES, at about half -past two ont he following day 
 in Mortimer Street, was delighted with the freedom 
 of her progress. She had rarely come into town 
 on foot. She had never visited Mortimer Street. 
 London for her was the theatre by motor car, 
 Self ridge's, and walks in Hampstead and St John's 
 Wood. Goodge Street station was now the gate- 
 way of her emancipation. The stalls of vegetables, 
 fish, old iron and petticoats in Charlotte Street were 
 her first free glimpse into life. 
 
 Kupert had often described the shop a shop 
 where terrifying surgical instruments were dis- 
 played above which he lived. From the door she 
 could see the great flag of the Red Cross floating 
 above the Middlesex Hospital. This, and a huge 
 notice in the window of the shop itself to the effect 
 that every grade of outfit for field hospitals could 
 there be obtained, created about the place what 
 Rupert had described as a homely and persuasive 
 atmosphere of enlistment. 
 
 Rupert's enthusiastic welcome made her feel 
 just a little ashamed of the reserve which had 
 
 102
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 hitherto kept them apart. Kupert had always 
 treated her as though he were waiting for a con- 
 fidence which was denied him. She had suppressed 
 in herself the things which drew them together. 
 
 " Bob has told you ? " she asked him when he 
 had put her into the chair behind the tea-table. 
 
 " On the contrary," said Rupert. " It was I 
 who did all the talking." 
 
 "I'm sure it was," she said, with a happy laugh. 
 
 " The point is," said Rupert, " where are you 
 going to live. It's no use bickering along with 
 father. My idea is that you should have these 
 rooms till something else turns up. Mrs Baines, 
 who looks after me, would not usually accept the 
 charge of a " lady," but she will do it now, at first 
 for my sake, and afterwards for yours." 
 
 " Would it be respectable ? " 
 
 " Mrs Baines will see to that." 
 
 " When are you leaving ? ' : 
 
 " I've got to report myself to-morrow. You can 
 move in as soon as you like." 
 
 He paused a moment. 
 
 " I suppose," he continued, " that you and Bob 
 haven't yet thought of getting married. That 
 will be later on." 
 
 Agnes flushed. 
 
 " Rupert," she said, " if only Bob would think 
 
 103
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 of it. Could it be done, do you think, in the time ? 
 I should be happier to let him go." 
 
 Rupert was surprised by his sister's vehem- 
 ence. 
 
 " Suppose we look it up," he said, crossing to his 
 book-shelf. " Or perhaps we might consult Mrs 
 Baines." 
 
 Mrs Baines, when she came with high plates of 
 bread and butter, at once pointed out that marriage 
 by publication of the banns was not possible in 
 two days. There were certain irregular courses of 
 which she had heard, but she was not at all clear 
 as to the time required. A neighbour of hers had 
 been married after some three weeks of mysterious 
 negotiation with an official who had a room at the 
 police court. Her name had been placarded with 
 others for all the district to view. Mrs Baines did 
 not approve of this. 
 
 " In Mrs Baines," said Rupert when she had left 
 them, " we have drawn a blank. I wonder if it 
 would be in The Statesman's Year Book." 
 
 They found it at last in a Short History of the Law 
 of Contract. 
 
 " It seems," said Rupert, after a careful reading 
 of some extremely close print, " that you and Bob 
 are just in time to be married by licence before 
 the Registrar. The thing now is to convince Bob 
 
 104
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 that it can be done. What do you bet he doesn't 
 mention it himself ? " 
 
 Rivers was already on the stairs. He came into 
 the room. Rupert edged discreetly towards his 
 bedroom. Rivers rounded upon him at once. 
 
 ' You're not going, are you, Rupert? " he asked 
 with a cheerful tact. 
 
 " Not altogether," said Rupert evasively. " If 
 you want my advice about anything I shall not be 
 far away." 
 
 Rivers, alone with Agnes, felt at first strangely 
 remote from her. He could hardly believe that he 
 had so familiarly held her yesterday in the garden. 
 They were almost equally shy. 
 
 ' This, Bob," said Agnes at last, as he sat on the 
 arm of her chair, " is the first of our two days." 
 
 Rivers was silent a moment. Then he violently 
 gripped her hand. 
 
 " I've been thinking, dear. Suppose we I mean 
 what would you say the fact is there's just 
 time for us to be married. I don't know how it 
 strikes you. I might get pipped, you know. And 
 it would be something. It would help me no end 
 out there to think of us as in a way belonging 
 together. It's a bit selfish. What do you think? " 
 
 Agnes smiled as he wrestled with his sentiments. 
 
 " So you think it's selfish, Bob ? " she said when 
 
 105
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 he seemed to have reached an end. " Now shall 
 I tell you what I think? I think you're a bat. 
 Don't you realise that, now I have so much, I want 
 just everything. I want to have a claim upon you 
 stronger than all the others." 
 
 " But you have that already. Surely a fellow's 
 girl " 
 
 " A fellow's girl," she laughed; " someone he 
 fancies he knows and who fancies she knows him. 
 I think," she quaintly added, " that when it is really 
 put to you you will acknowledge that a fellow's 
 wife must necessarily be more to him and to her- 
 self than a fellow's girl." 
 
 Rivers looked at her. It all now seemed very 
 obvious, and he was strangely moved by it. He 
 became curiously aware of something in her which 
 desired to be his. Her sudden scorn for their 
 present tentative communion promised him a 
 revelation infinitely rich when their love had more 
 intimately been tested. He said quite simply : 
 
 " Then it's aU right, darling ? " 
 
 " Yes, it's perfectly all right." 
 
 They talked after that of ways and means, and 
 Rupert was called into consultation. Rivers 
 arranged to get the licence in the morning. They 
 would be married at the Hampstead office on the 
 following day. Rupert would then be away, but 
 
 106
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 John could be asked to act as a witness with Mrs 
 Baines. 
 
 John arrived shortly after this, with Monica. 
 Kupert had that morning asked him to bring 
 Monica to keep Agnes in countenance. Agnes was 
 the first woman to breach the monastic pale of 
 Mortimer Street. After John came Ponsonby, 
 already back from the front with interesting 
 abrasions of the scalp. Last of all Pelham appeared 
 at the door completing the group as far as any 
 group of young men in London could now be 
 completed. 
 
 Pelham was obviously checked at the sight of 
 Agnes and Monica. 
 
 " Come right in," Kupert called. " I think you 
 know my sister." 
 
 " Well enough to be shocked," said Pelham, 
 bowing awkwardly towards Agnes. " I thought 
 that in these rooms we were cenobites, and stylites, 
 and eremites and celibates." 
 
 " All those rules were made before the war," said 
 Smith. 
 
 "I'm sorry, Jim," said Monica, who knew Pelham 
 rather well. " I know how precious to men is the 
 practice of excluding women from their serious 
 conversation." 
 
 Pelham raised his eyebrows. 
 
 107
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " I suppose," he said distastefully, " we shall 
 soon be answering to pet names." 
 
 " Don't grouse, Pelham. Come and help with 
 the tea," said Smith. " We have some news for 
 you," he added. 
 
 " So I observe," said Pelham, indicating the back 
 of Rivers, now deeply retired into a private talk 
 with Agnes. 
 
 " When did it happen ? " he asked. 
 
 " Quite recently," said Smith. 
 
 " I see. It's a war match." 
 
 " Jimmy," said Rupert briefly, " say nothing, and 
 take this tea to Ponsonby." 
 
 " Well, Pelham," said Ponsonby cheerfully, as 
 Pelham handed over the cup, " how's your soul ? " 
 
 " None the better for meeting you," Pelham 
 growled. 
 
 " There's a remedy, James," said Ponsonby. 
 " We've an interpreting job in our brigade. You'd 
 forget all about your soul out there." 
 
 Pelham turned to Smith. 
 
 " Is this a recruiting meeting or a tea-party ? " 
 he asked. 
 
 " Pelham," said Rupert severely, " we know 
 about your sufferings. Control yourself." 
 
 ' The fact is," said Monica, offering him cake, 
 " James expected to find an audience, and he is 
 
 108
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 disappointed. We've come to listen to Captain 
 Ponsonby." 
 
 Then a remarkable thing happened. Ponsonby 
 had never yet refused an audience. But this after- 
 noon he was sheepish. He would not say a word 
 about the fighting. He had been mentioned in 
 dispatches for conspicuous gallantry ; and Pelham 
 made ready to endure the hero who is also an 
 historian. But Ponsonby disappointed him. Soon, 
 indeed, Ponsonby was talking in, for Ponsonby, a 
 most amazing way. He said that men did not refer 
 to these things, or think about them. They just 
 happened. Men hated them to be remembered or 
 discussed. He himself had suddenly lost his head 
 in quite a primitive way. He had discovered later 
 that he had, at some risk, saved the life of his 
 colonel, and killed an enemy. He seemed ashamed 
 of it. 
 
 Pelham blankly stared at him. Pelham had 
 seemed to foresee exactly how Ponsonby would 
 allude to his share in the war how, with a charming 
 modesty entirely aware of itself, he would depreciate 
 his small services; how he would report, with a 
 half-humorous detachment, that of course he felt a 
 bit nervous to begin with, but how " one gets used 
 to that sort of thing, don't-you-know" ; how he 
 would refer with a vague discretion to advice and 
 
 109
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 conversation shared with this or that distinguished 
 officer-in-command. 
 
 But Ponsonby was changed. There was no 
 doubt of it. The pose had gone out of him. He 
 seemed quite careless of the impression he made. 
 When Pelham tried to draw him into heroic tales 
 he became morose. 
 
 " James," he snapped at last, " I was once a 
 chronicle ; but it was years ago. I shall never do 
 it again." 
 
 " But war," said Kupert, " what is war ? We 
 want to know." 
 
 " I can't tell you that. I can only tell you what 
 are the trimmings of war. There' s dirt, and vermin, 
 and bad smells, and waiting for your meals, and 
 getting bored to death, and angry with noise and 
 cold. Those are the things one can talk about. 
 They aren't the important things." 
 
 He would say no more than that. But he was 
 thinking of a friend, no longer to be recognised, 
 carried up out of the trenches clenching his teeth 
 with pain and telling the subalterns to " carry on " ; 
 of a late orderly, full of exasperating high spirits 
 and Cockney slang, who had got upon his nerves 
 one day till he had vehemently cursed him, and of 
 the hysterical tears he had shed later over his 
 twisted body; of his own shameful speculations 
 
 110
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 as to whether his thirst for distinction would be 
 strong enough to overcome his very definite reluct- 
 ance to risk a final exit from the stage ; and of his 
 quick sense, after he had looked war in the face, 
 that neither his thirst nor his fear weighed with 
 him at all, but only a quiet hope that he would be 
 worthy of simple fellowship with men who had 
 died or were beside him now, counting upon his 
 partnership. Ponsonby had beheld his vain self 
 wither and perish. He had gone out to fight, eager 
 to enrich his personality with new experiences and 
 sensations, impelled by a wish to be proud of him- 
 self. Then, all at once, he had discovered himself 
 to be doing things without the old inevitable seat 
 reserved in his consciousness for an applauding 
 onlooker. He had not seen himself at all in the 
 deed which was mentioned in dispatches. He 
 received his congratulations with a sense of shame. 
 It seemed indecent that he should be asked to wear 
 the laurel, even, as he said, on behalf of all the 
 brave unnamed. These laurels were against the 
 spirit of their enterprise. They made him feel like 
 a small boy, conscious of being no better than he 
 should be, but cited before his fellows as a model of 
 virtue. They stood for a personal distinction he 
 had never sought. The words of the dispatch 
 " Lt. Ponsonby at once decided, in the face of almost 
 
 111
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 certain death, to make the attempt . . . " these 
 words did not in any sense correspond with the 
 truth. He had decided nothing. He had seen 
 something to be done a thing such as his comrades 
 were doing daily without a thought and he, equally 
 without a thought, had done it. He just happened 
 to be there. 
 
 It was Pelham who most obstinately pursued him 
 this afternoon. Pelham wanted to be sure that 
 Ponsonby's conversion was less complete than it 
 seemed. The conversion of Ponsonby made the 
 war more than ever formidable to his peace of mind. 
 Pelham sought with so much energy to be reassured 
 that Rupert at last intervened on Ponsonby's 
 behalf. 
 
 " Jimmy," he said, " it would doubtless comfort 
 you to find that Ponsonby is still exactly as he used 
 to be; but in your anxiety to be soothed your 
 manners are not nice. It's obvious to everyone 
 but you that Ponsonby does not want to talk." 
 
 " Manners indeed," said Pelham. " There was a 
 time, a happy time, when there was no such thing 
 as manners in Mortimer Street." 
 
 "I'm sure," said Monica, " we don't want to 
 introduce them, do we, Agnes? Manners were 
 invented by men to keep women in order." 
 
 " If you must be clever," said Pelham in a tired 
 
 112
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 voice, " you might do something better than a 
 clumsy paraphrase of Meredith." 
 
 " What did Meredith say ? " asked Monica, who 
 always pretended to Pelham she never read any- 
 thing. 
 
 Pelham was drawn. He was drawn further than 
 was comfortable for anyone. 
 
 " Meredith said that woman would be the last 
 creature to be civilised by man. It seems that is 
 now an official opinion. Is your best boy in khaki, 
 what ? We're inclined, for the moment, to abolish 
 the male Press Gang. We leave it to the women." 
 
 " You see," said Monica to Agnes, " what it 
 means to come to the rooms of a bachelor. We 
 hear the truth about ourselves." 
 
 " It's very interesting," said Agnes shyly. She 
 had never heard anything in the least resembling 
 all this. She was rapt by its brutality. 
 
 Then Monica turned upon Pelham. Monica had 
 a rough way with men who seemed to require it. 
 She talked to them very privately but in public. 
 John, who was quiet and diplomatic in his more in- 
 timate approaches, always rather dreaded Monica's 
 bursts of candour. He realised that one of them 
 was at this moment due. 
 
 He pulled out his watch. 
 
 " Monica," he suggested, " it's half -past four." 
 
 H 113
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " In a moment, Ken," she answered. "I'm 
 anxious about James. He seems unhappy." 
 
 " Not at all," said Pelham shortly. " Listen to 
 your husband. He says it is half -past four." 
 
 " But I'm anxious about you," gently persisted 
 Monica. " You're behaving in the oddest 
 way." 
 
 " Instance ? " Pelham inquired. 
 
 " Soon after you came into the room," said 
 Monica, " you gave us very aggressively to under- 
 stand that the war was not your affair. Yet you 
 have spent half your time talking about it yourself, 
 and the other half tryiDg to make Captain Ponsonby 
 talk about it. It seems to me that the war is on 
 your mind." 
 
 " On my mind ? " Pelham almost shouted. " Is 
 it surprising that it's on my mind ? I offered my 
 seat to a woman this morning in the Tube. She 
 said she only accepted seats from gentlemen in 
 khaki. I came up into the street and met a 
 sandwich man. The board on his stomach suggested 
 that I was not as brave as I might be, and the 
 board on his back asked what my children would 
 be likely to think of their civilian father in the years 
 to come." 
 
 " If you feel it so badly, why don't you enlist ? " 
 asked Monica. " It's the obvious thing." 
 
 114
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " I've no talent for the obvious thing," said 
 Pelham curtly. 
 
 " Don't lose your temper, James," said Monica. 
 She spoke like an indulgent nurse. " Obviously 
 you can't endure to be a civilian, so why don't you 
 enlist?" 
 
 " You miss the point." Pelham was now in a 
 white heat of rage. There were times when he 
 hated Monica. He hated her especially when she 
 shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders now. " Point ! " 
 she exclaimed. 
 
 The encounter between Monica and Pelham was 
 beginning to shape like a personal fray. Rupert 
 felt it was time to intervene. 
 
 "Isn't this all rather unnecessary?" he asked. 
 He looked as he spoke at Pelham. 
 
 " Ask Monica," said Pelham. 
 
 " Jimmy," Rupert gently persisted, " it isn't 
 your business to govern the country. Let the 
 political people decide how they are going to raise 
 our armies. Your job is to decide for yourself." 
 
 " But they don't let me decide for myself," said 
 Pelham. " They cant at me from every corner of 
 the street. I am free to choose ; but I must choose 
 as they advise me to choose." 
 
 ' Who is canting at you ? " asked Ponsonby. " Is 
 115
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 it cant to suggest that it's a fellow's duty to 
 turn out ? " 
 
 " But that is precisely what they don't suggest," 
 said Pelham. " If only they would say it outright 
 and in an Act of Parliament, I would gladly " 
 
 " Gladly ! " interrupted Ponsonby. " This seems 
 to be an advance." 
 
 " Not at all," retorted Pelham. " So long as the 
 war is a matter of personal taste it isn't my affair. 
 If, on the other hand, it were a matter of public 
 duty I should naturally do what I was told to do." 
 
 There was a short silence. John again pulled at 
 his watch. 
 
 " You haven't a leg to stand on, Jimmy." It 
 was John who spoke, as he rose to go. 
 
 " John," said Pelham, " you say little enough 
 as a rule, and it is usually time to go when you say 
 it. Do you intend seriously to intervene, or is this 
 good-afternoon ? " 
 
 " I stand here for the facts," said John. " There 
 are three men in this room who have joined the 
 army, in spite of the fact that they all consider the 
 present system of recruiting to be vile all except 
 Rivers, who doesn't think at all." 
 
 " To tell the truth," said Rivers, " I don't quite 
 see what all this is about. Somebody's got to pull 
 out the chestnuts, and the fellows who don't lend 
 
 116
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 a hand don't count. It's always like that. Of 
 course this advertising and all that some of it's 
 about the limit. But that's not my affair. It's 
 nothing to do with me." 
 
 " Good for Bobby ! That is almost a speech," 
 laughed Rupert. 
 
 " It's good enough," said John. " It makes it 
 fairly clear that some men join the army without 
 greatly worrying how they got there. You are a 
 logician, James, therefore be logical. You object 
 to pressure scientifically applied to sensitive young 
 men in order to drive them into a ' voluntary ' army. 
 Very well. We agree that the pressure is nasty, 
 and that some of it is rather absurd. You have two 
 alternative remedies. Either you can refuse with 
 dignity to be coerced, or you can indulge in a free 
 and spontaneous uprising of Pelham, and enlist 
 in the army. There is no middle way. The war 
 matters to you personally or it doesn't. If it 
 matters, get as soon as you can into khaki. If it 
 doesn't matter, go home and play the piano. Your 
 present conduct is neither one thing nor the other. 
 You allow yourself to be worried and enraged by a 
 persecution to which, on your own showing, every 
 man of spirit should be indifferent. I advise you to 
 go into the country where the posters cease from 
 troubling." 
 
 117
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " That," said Pelham to the company, indicating 
 John as he accompanied Monica to the door, " is 
 what is usually described as an old head upon young 
 shoulders." 
 
 The talk died down after John and Monica 
 had gone. Pelham and Ponsonby left the house 
 together, Pelham wishing to assure Ponsonby that 
 he bore no malice. 
 
 Rupert then left his sister and Rivers to them- 
 selves. They spent a happy hour an hour which 
 was mainly silent, but, for Agnes, thronged with 
 new thoughts. The careless and frank bluntness of 
 her new friends was to her a startling revelation 
 of the possibilities of human intercourse. She 
 felt that life was before her. The coming loss of 
 the man she loved was yet but the faintest of 
 shadows in a far corner. She was for the moment 
 engrossed by the novelties of an existence enriched 
 upon every side with unsuspected treasures of 
 mind and heart. There was also secretly at work, 
 threading the strange new sense of adventure to 
 which she yielded, an almost physical unrest 
 something which shook her to the heart, and 
 smouldered in her eyes whenever she became 
 conscious of the intimacy and silence of the room. 
 
 They talked of their coming marriage, in the vein 
 of their first approach that afternoon. They talked 
 
 118
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 of it, that is to say, as an affair of sentiment and 
 high privilege. Then, as the shadows deepened, 
 they were silent again ; and to Rivers it seemed as 
 though Agnes were about to be richly changed. 
 She seemed to be waiting. They gradually became 
 more tremulously aware of one another than they 
 had ever been before. 
 
 Afterwards they each remembered a moment of 
 still surprise. It had come as the climax of their 
 sympathy, and it gave to their relations an urgency 
 not felt before. Hours later, when Agnes lay in her 
 room, stretched and still, it again intruded into her 
 thought of the marriage which was distant from 
 her now by only a day's breadth. It gave to her 
 thoughts a direction which added a fresh signifi- 
 cance to that event thoughts which held her 
 breathless. 
 
 119
 
 XII 
 
 UPON the morning after the tea-party in Mortimer 
 Street John was walking, not very briskly or 
 happily, down Whitehall. It was a bright February 
 day which in the fullness of its light and colour 
 permitted one to overlook even the sanguine re- 
 cruiting posters upon Scotland Yard. It is not 
 easy for a healthy young man to be wretched 
 shortly after breakfast when the sun is warm and 
 the air has a February bite ; but John, neverthe- 
 less, was thoroughly dejected. He could find no 
 reasonable excuse for himself. He had newly come 
 to a reckoning which he regarded as a final and 
 sensible end to all his doubts. He had definitely 
 ascertained by personal application that he was 
 not in the ordinary way eligible for service in the 
 army ; and he had accepted the assurances of his 
 chief and of his friends that his present work was 
 as useful as any employment at or near the front 
 could be into which he might conceivably be jobbed. 
 There was no reason for his present unsettled con- 
 dition, or the sense which possessed him that with 
 each sunny minute that passed he was somehow 
 losing caste. 
 
 120
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 "I'm envious," John told himself as he turned 
 into Red way's rooms opposite the Victoria Tower; 
 " that's what's the matter with me. I'm like the 
 majority of small men who can't see the Victoria 
 Tower at fifty yards. I'm panting for military 
 glory, and instead of making myself cheerfully 
 useful at something I can do, I want to be the hero 
 of a tale by Rudyard Kipling. I must take some 
 of the medicine I recommended to Pelham yesterday. 
 I must really make up my mind." 
 
 He put these thoughts away from him as he sifted 
 Redway's correspondence, but an interim discussion 
 was going on continually under the cover of his 
 actual employment a discussion which occasion- 
 ally came to the surface in unuttered phrases. 
 
 Kenneth John had had an evil three days. 
 Rupert had gone to the front. He had read of a 
 rival novelist gazetted to a divisional staff. He was 
 to act to-morrow afternoon at the wedding of his 
 friend Rivers, who was leaving for France in the 
 morning. He had thought chafingly of the way 
 in which all these lives were to be enriched. He 
 even wondered again whether he might not push 
 himself somehow into a breach. 
 . This was an old, and he had coolly decided that 
 it was an ignoble, prompting. He was obviously, 
 so long as Redway was useful to the Government, 
 
 121
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 of more value as a confidential secretary than as 
 an officer jobbed into the firing line without any 
 special call. The war did not present itself to him 
 as an opportunity for sacrifice, but as a glittering 
 lure. When he had, that morning, turned away 
 from his farewell to Rupert, he had suddenly 
 remembered a long forgotten and very poignant 
 sensation of his childhood when he had been 
 brought by his parents to see the Lord Mayor's 
 procession, but had arrived too late. He keenly 
 recalled his childish tears of vexation and thwarted 
 excitement as he had stood screaming upon the 
 pavement of a back street, too far away to see any- 
 thing except the heads of the mounted policemen. 
 Each fresh outburst of the brass bands and the 
 cheering of the people had drawn from him fresh 
 wails of agony, just as to-day he suffered cumula- 
 tive twinges as each of his friends or acquaintances 
 passed away to the war. 
 
 A little later John went into his chief's room for 
 the morning interview; it was always a relief to 
 talk with Redway. Redway so clearly assumed 
 that John was a useful member. 
 
 But Redway, this morning, did not appear to 
 be making any serious preparation for work. Red- 
 way' s temper had been uncertain of late. He found 
 his duties as political persuader continually more 
 
 122
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 intolerable ; and several times in the last few weeks 
 he had hinted to his secretary that Junior Whipping 
 was a waste of energy. 
 
 This morning, however, he was almost radiant. 
 John, after waiting for instructions which did not 
 seem to be forthcoming, at last ventured to interrupt 
 the happy thoughts of his employer. 
 
 " The news/' he suggested, " is good this 
 morning ? " 
 
 Red way was grave in a moment. 
 
 " On the contrary. You have seen for yourself 
 that the news is bad. However, I've got something 
 for you personally." 
 
 " Something that pleases you? " 
 
 " Something that relieves me enormously," said 
 Red way. ' ' There' s to be no more junior whipping." 
 
 " You're giving up your work ? " 
 
 ' We'll call it a change of employment." 
 
 John's thoughts were instantly flung back into 
 an old and familiar confusion. His position was 
 overturned. Red way's work was now his only 
 serious employment, for he had broken with the 
 journal for which he had lately written. He did 
 not believe, as his editor required him to believe, 
 that the war would be over in August. He 
 jumped at the open door offered him by Red way's 
 announcement. 
 
 123
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " This," he said, " leaves me, I take it, free for 
 other work." 
 
 Redway, reading his secretary, smiled and said : 
 
 " On the contrary. I'm going to talk to you for 
 an hour. At the end of that time you will realise 
 that I've got you faster than ever. I will help you 
 to find a place at the war, if you like. But if you 
 go to the war, you will go, in my opinion, as a 
 deserter." 
 
 Redway was entirely frank as to his motives for 
 throwing up his present employment. There had 
 lately become apparent a clear division in public 
 opinion. There were those who held that the war 
 could be fought without any drastic changes, who 
 held to old sayings, and would only be driven to 
 any sort of compulsory organisation as a last resort. 
 It was this party which for the moment had the 
 upper hand. 
 
 Others were beginning to askimportant questions. 
 How long would an unregimented personal en- 
 thusiasm stand the terrible strain which would 
 shortly be put upon it ? How was it possible for 
 men who were bred in a rivalry of classes, who were 
 safe from immediate harm, and earning better 
 wages than ever in their lives before, to realise 
 what the war implied ? Could we continue to fight 
 the war with an army of gallant adventurers ? How 
 
 124
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 were the suspicious and undisciplined workers of 
 the country to be brought to see that their work- 
 belonged no longer to themselves ? How were 
 masters and men, enemies for a generation, to be 
 brought to regard themselves as friends and 
 partners ? Could we continue to regard unlimited 
 service to the country as something heroic, capri- 
 cious, and exceptional ? 
 
 The general political attitude to all these questions 
 was to answer them opportunely, one by one, as 
 they arose. If there were difficulties, industrial or 
 military, let them be dealt with as they came. Let 
 men be raised from day to day as they were wanted. 
 Let industrial services be claimed by law only when 
 they could no longer be obtained in other ways. 
 Let there be special legislation, if necessary, for the 
 factories, for the armies, for the easing or postpone- 
 ment of civil liabilities. 
 
 Red way dissented, from this. He desired to see 
 the general principle affirmed that the lives and 
 fortunes of every citizen belonged of right to the 
 country. He held that, if this general point of 
 view were declared in a law of general and obliga- 
 tory national service, every other difficulty would 
 disappear. The greater discipline would include 
 the less. The community industrial, capitalist or 
 military would be, in atmosphere and intention, a 
 
 125
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 national army. Profiteering, striking, and the pull, 
 in all classes, between private and public motives 
 would disappear. Eedway, though he did not in- 
 sanely desire to see every man a soldier, strongly held 
 that the industrial and the military problem alike 
 could only be solved by declaring the moral liability 
 of every eligible man to serve the country in arms. 
 
 Redway did not believe that labour could be 
 disciplined by special legislation aimed at the 
 factories. Already there was talk of this among 
 those who saw symptoms of the breaking down of 
 the private contract system of supplying the armies. 
 But Redway could not understand how it would be 
 possible to exact from specified trades an obligation 
 which was not imposed on the public at large. 
 Either it was the duty of every man to put aside his 
 individual interests or it was not. If the duty were 
 asserted, it must be asserted generally and in its 
 most elementary form. The miners or makers of 
 munitions could not justly be compelled to serve in 
 the mines or shops by civil or military penalties 
 aimed specifically at themselves alone. They could 
 be mobilised only upon equal terms with all other 
 citizens. There could, in reason, be no special 
 compulsion of a citizen simply as a miner. The 
 only possible compulsion in a democratic country 
 was the accepted discipline of a nation in arms. 
 
 126
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 In practice this amounted to universal military 
 service, not because every man would have to fight, 
 but because every man must learn to regard himself 
 as a fighter. The country could best be regimented 
 from the military side, the duty of every man in 
 the last resort to defend his country in arms being 
 the most elementary form of citizenship, from which 
 every other degree and kind of service was naturally 
 derived. Only thus, Redway believed, could the 
 Government avert in time the clashing and disput- 
 ing of interests and classes. In no other way could 
 any sort of discipline be asserted without bitter 
 misunderstandings, without invidious, spasmodic 
 and sectional tyrannies which might bring the 
 country to the edge of revolution. 
 
 Red way put his views at a maximum as he walked 
 in a growing excitement up and down the little 
 room in Westminster. He pointed to evidence 
 already in being of the things he feared. In the 
 absence of any clear understanding that all work 
 at this time was national work, the old conditions 
 of labour against capital held. The contractors 
 were full of business, and their men suspected enor- 
 mous profits. Already the men were demanding that 
 labour should have its share. There was disputing 
 and cessation of work. There was, moreover, a 
 disastrously rigid insistence upon the trade union 
 
 127
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 discipline which insisted that everyone should 
 labour according to strict limits of time and output. 
 The nemesis of a vile period was at hand a period 
 in which workers stinted their work to defeat the 
 profiteering of masters who stinted their wages. 
 Nothing short of a thorough application of the ideal 
 of national service could root out the prejudices 
 and feuds of a generation feuds which had taken 
 from the workmen all pride in their work and from 
 the employers all sense of responsibility for the 
 well-being of their men. 
 
 Several ministers in the Cabinet had long been 
 vaguely apprehensive that private contracting was 
 at this time a blunder which might have to be 
 lavishly atoned for in blood and treasure ; but they 
 had the intelligence to see that the alternative 
 of discipline and regimentation must begin with 
 obligatory military service an approach barred by 
 fierce political prejudice and an uncertainty as to 
 how the country would receive it. They had con- 
 sented with misgivings to the experiment of private 
 contract. 
 
 Eedway was unable to consent. He had decided 
 that he could be more usefully employed as an 
 unofficial prophet of discipline. There was at 
 that time no single person or party to set forth 
 consistently and without reserve the case for 
 
 128
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 compulsion. Speakers and writers played with the 
 idea, discreetly threw out opportunities for the 
 public to express its views, and occasionally con- 
 sidered some aspect of the question. But this was 
 done with care to keep open a way of retreat from 
 an unpopular position; and the most important 
 points, in Ked way's opinion, had not been examined 
 at all. The interdependence of civil and military 
 obligation the key to the whole position had not 
 been publicly recognised. Only the more obvious 
 evils of the privateering system had been noticed, 
 such as the devastating enlistment of men who 
 at home were worth ten soldiers in the field, or 
 the expensive publicity and feline pressure of the 
 recruiting methods. 
 
 The plan for which Redway required the help of 
 his secretary had to do with a weekly review of 
 which he was proposing to become a rather more 
 active proprietor. He invited John to help him as 
 a skilled journalist in the prosecution of a new 
 campaign. Their review would stand unofficially 
 for the party of discipline. It was already a 
 journal carefully watched by the Press as repre- 
 senting the views of an increasing number of 
 politicians. It would henceforth serve the double 
 purpose of forming and testing public opinion. 
 
 John listened to Redway for an hour. Red way's 
 i 129
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 diagnosis coincided with his own less knowledgeable 
 views. Already one thing was clear. He was held 
 faster than ever before in London. The work he 
 was offered, so far as journalism was of any value 
 at all at that time, was of the first importance. 
 There was a short silence when Red way had finished. 
 
 " Well," asked Red way at last, " what is it 
 going to be ? I'll put it to you quite frankly. I 
 want a man who will devotedly repeat himself once 
 a week. We have to tell the public continually 
 the same things; we have to tell them every 
 Saturday that the war is life and death, that nothing 
 can be as usual. It will be dull work ; and it will 
 make you many enemies of your own craft. I shall 
 require you to chasten your naturally brilliant style 
 for fear that our ideas may fall under suspicion by 
 being too cleverly put. You will have to reiterate 
 our main contentions till they become meaningless 
 to you, and till you begin to believe in the other side. 
 Moreover, you will never have the least chance of 
 seeing anything of the war. The war, so far as 
 you are concerned, will be mainly a newspaper 
 controversy. What do you say ? " 
 
 " You put it attractively," said John, with a 
 wry smile. "I'll consider myself definitely out of 
 things." 
 
 Redway pressed his arm affectionately. 
 
 130
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Then that's that," he said. " I'll take you 
 round and introduce you to my man of straw." 
 
 John, as Eedway made ready to accompany him, 
 bade a last farewell to his military career. He was 
 lost in a contemplation of innumerable articles, 
 written with conviction and no pleasure at all 
 anonymous, elderly and persuasive. 
 
 Red way, struggling into his coat, noted John's 
 dismal expression and exhorted him : 
 
 " It can't be as bad as that," he said. " You look 
 as if I had buried you. Come out into the sun." 
 
 They left the building and walked towards 
 Charing Cross. 
 
 " What will my position be in this affair ? " asked 
 John, after they had gone some way in silence. 
 
 " You will have to take charge of your editor," 
 said Red way. " It will not be difficult. He's not 
 really interested in the war, and he will be glad to be 
 relieved of his politics. He will despise you, and 
 he will leave you entirely alone. He will suspect 
 that I have put you in charge for some crooked 
 design in pursuit of my own political advancement, 
 and he will leave us to do our own dark work in our 
 own illiterate way." 
 
 They waited at Downing Street as a Minister 
 passed them in his car. He nodded to Redway. 
 
 " There goes a man who will be grateful to us," 
 
 131
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 said Red way, as they went on. "He is not a 
 happy man ; and he is unable to make his distress 
 tell sufficiently upon his colleagues." 
 
 " When do we start ? " 
 
 " At once," said Red way. " Already we have 
 a theme. You've heard of this strike at Smith's 
 works ? " 
 
 " I have seen it mentioned." 
 
 "It is a test. I have dined with Smith. He 
 is playing entirely for his own hand, and he has 
 naturally come up against his men straight away. 
 You know him ? " 
 
 " Hardly," said John. " I only know him from 
 the point of view of his son Rupert." 
 
 " He's a very strong old man. He stands de- 
 liberately and consciously for the thing we have 
 to destroy. In a way I rather admire him. He is 
 unique in being thoroughly aware of what he is 
 doing. There are hundreds who will act as he 
 acts, but they will think they are helping to save 
 the country." 
 
 ' You have studied him ? " 
 
 " It was when I was dining with Smith that I 
 finally realised how useless it was for me to con- 
 tinue my Junior Whipping. It is impossible to 
 deal with Smith till we have roused the country. 
 Smith cannot be persuaded, and he cannot be 
 
 132
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 compelled. Still less can we hope to persuade or to 
 compel Smith's men. You can, of course, make it 
 illegal to strike, and you can fine the men five pounds 
 a day. But you cannot exact the penalty. Besides 
 there is no sanction or principle or justice in coercing 
 Smith or his men unless the country at large has 
 been put most strictly upon its honour." 
 
 They walked on, deep in this theme, and with 
 every step of the way John found himself more 
 obviously committed to his new work. 
 
 133
 
 XIII 
 
 AGNES and Elvers had quickly arranged the details 
 of their wedding. Agnes was to take possession of 
 her brother's rooms as soon as Eivers had departed 
 for Folkestone. They spent some fast hours of 
 preparation, and Eivers, on the morning before the 
 wedding, decided that they had time for a holiday. 
 Agnes decided to put off the farewell scene with 
 her father. 
 
 Eivers, who lived at Maidenhead, proposed a 
 visit to the river, and they were soon at lunch 
 in a punt upon the almost deserted river. 
 
 Agnes had not consciously avoided her father 
 during the last twenty-four hours. He simply 
 had not occurred to her. She had suddenly come 
 out into a sunlight which made her old existence 
 indistinguishably dark. She could not regard as 
 at all belonging to her the years that went before 
 these last vivid hours with Eivers. All the old 
 things that had ruled and mattered were now 
 obscure. 
 
 Of Eivers she became more intensely conscious 
 every hour of his strength and radiant health, of 
 
 134
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 his simple delight in her, of her own desire to make 
 their last moments together as perfect for him as 
 possible. This thought grew for her almost an 
 obsession. It seemed somehow to be her share in 
 the sacrifice he was making a sacrifice of which 
 he was so entirely unaware. 
 
 Rivers, on his side, was dazzled by the thrilling 
 complaisance of a woman in whose presence he 
 would normally have chosen to feel an inarticulate 
 humility. 
 
 " It beats me," he said at last, after one of her 
 many expressions of pride in him. They were 
 moored in a lovely reach of the river and he was 
 uncorking cider. 
 
 " What is it that beats you ? " she asked him, with 
 a happy laugh. " You see, Bob, there are so many 
 things. You are too fond of saying that things 
 beat you. I don't believe they do really." 
 
 " Well, here's something that does," said Rivers 
 decidedly. "It beats me to know exactly how you 
 make me out a wonder. It makes me nervous." 
 
 " But why ? " asked Agnes, with a mouth full 
 of lobster. 
 
 " Well, I simply can't live up to it that's all. 
 One of these days I shall come off the pediment, and 
 you'll be crying over the pieces." 
 
 " You're not on a pediment at all, dear." 
 
 135
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " And I love you," she added, with an abandoned 
 zest in the phrase. 
 
 Eivers felt the whip of passion behind this 
 sudden confession, and he flushed. He could not 
 for the world have said these things himself. He 
 was as yet shy of his love. The audacity of Agnes 
 thrilled him the more violently as it tore away 
 reserves which he wished away but had not the 
 courage to approach. He was glad even now that 
 intense preoccupation with a cork allowed him fco 
 ignore the tension. 
 
 This tension grew unevenly as the day wore, 
 receding during intervals of pure merriment and 
 delight in the golden weather, but intruding when 
 silence shut them in. At those times Agnes 
 became quite painfully aware of his nearness as 
 he leaned beside her in the punt. 
 
 Rivers picked up some letters at his rooms, 
 where they had some tea; and he ordered by 
 telephone an early dinner at a riverside hotel 
 between Maidenhead and Marlow. They started 
 up to Marlow soon after four. Rivers now gave 
 all his attention to the punt, and they made 
 fair progress. Agnes listened for a quiet hour to 
 the swish and fuss of the water under their 
 bow. She could not tire of the driving stroke 
 of the pole as Rivers thrust it rhythmically 
 
 136
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 forward. She liked to have his vigour thus at 
 her service. 
 
 They reached the hotel for dinner in excellent 
 time. Agnes in the following hour felt her happi- 
 ness pulsing like an echo of the strokes that had 
 driven them to this enchanted place. Their window 
 gave upon the river. Noises of the water, of pass- 
 ing boats, and conversation at a near table soothed 
 rather than troubled their privacy. They entirely 
 lost their shyness. The long day in the air, the 
 warmth of the room, their frank enjoyment of the 
 food and wine, gave to Agnes an uplifted sense of 
 well-being the exaggerated and intense illusion of 
 vitality which is snatched in happy hours only by 
 the delicate. 
 
 Barriers that had seemed to rise inexorably 
 between them now fell completely away. Their 
 love required no halting interpreter in speech or 
 gesture. It looked frankly out of their eyes and 
 spoke straight out in commonplace endearments 
 which, winged by their passion, seemed each a 
 poem. 
 
 They sat long over their coffee, and it was late 
 when Rivers reminded her of the miles still to be 
 covered. They pushed ofi into a streaming water- 
 way of colour. The sun had set ; but there were 
 heavy clouds in the east, whose edges were brightly 
 
 137
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 fired. The light fell on the water and was broken 
 into polished fragments. It fell, too, on the moving 
 leaves of the willows. Agnes thought suddenly 
 of epipsychidion, of the white light of eternity 
 stained and shivered by time. The river and the 
 woods were masses of light spilled and broken. 
 After a while a chill crept over the water and the 
 light of the sky became precious as a fire which 
 falls together and scatters suddenly a last alms. 
 The heavy clouds were coming up fast. Agnes 
 realised suddenly that the way was late and long. 
 The wind was unfolding a dark blue curtain from 
 the east which soon must blot out the light. Warm 
 days in spring often have such an end as this. 
 
 " It's getting unpleasantly black over there," 
 said Rivers at last. 
 
 He trailed the pole a moment, and surveyed 
 Agnes at full length among the cushions. She 
 looked very frail against the dark blue background 
 of the travelling sky. 
 
 " We must cover you up," Rivers said suddenly. 
 
 He came forward, unrolled a rug and laid it over 
 her. She thanked him with a faint return of their 
 old reserve. 
 
 They noticed, in passing, a house-boat on the 
 side of the river, for it was lighted and alive with 
 a homely warmth and murmur which emphasised 
 
 138
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 the forlornness of the darkening river. Agnes 
 watched a star engulfed by the blue cloud she 
 seemed to have lost a friend. The noise of the 
 water began to tell melancholy and cold stories. 
 The face of Eivers was now indistinct and grey. 
 A few large drops of rain had already fallen, and 
 the air was threatening a mist. 
 
 "I'm sorry," said Rivers, breathing hard under 
 the anxious, rapid thrust of the pole. " I ought to 
 have seen this coming." 
 
 " How far is Maidenhead? " asked Agnes. 
 
 " It's another mile." 
 
 " That's all right," she assured him. " I'm as 
 cosy as can be." 
 
 " Yes; but it's going to be worse, and there's no 
 shelter to be had." 
 
 An idea occurred to Agnes. She sat up in the 
 punt. 
 
 " If the worst happens, Bob, there's father's 
 house-boat." 
 
 " Is there anybody there ? " asked Rivers. The 
 rain was now beginning to pelt. The trees came 
 down to the river and made it dark. 
 
 " There will be nobody there," said Agnes. " I 
 think we should see it from here. We hide the 
 key under the mat and a woman visits it for cleaning 
 once a week. It's called the Leda" 
 
 139
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " What will your father say ? " protested Rivers. 
 
 Nevertheless he made towards the right side of 
 the river. The position, as he saw it, with the deep 
 solicitude of a sturdy man for a woman whose 
 fragility he exaggerated, was becoming serious. 
 The thin rug was already heavy with rain, for a 
 sudden storm had now caught them, ferociously 
 lashing the water. Rivers was soaked to the skin. 
 He drove the punt under the lee of a dark house- 
 boat blurred with rain. 
 
 " This seems to be the fellow," he shouted. Agnes 
 was cowering under the rug. Rivers jumped on 
 board and found the key under a drenched and 
 threadworn mat. He opened the door. 
 
 " Now," he said, coming to Agnes, "I'm going to 
 carry you in rug and all." 
 
 He lifted her from the punt before she had time 
 to realise that they were moored, and carried her 
 into the boat. 
 
 For a moment they had time to be thoroughly 
 wretched. Rivers was steaming with wet and 
 extreme exercise. Agnes was thoroughly chilled. 
 
 " Idiot that I am," Rivers groaned ; " you will 
 catch your death of cold." 
 
 They could now look faintly about them. Agnes 
 saw that Rivers' clothes were clinging to him, and 
 dripping copiously. This roused her. 
 
 140
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " It's perfectly all right now," she said; " here 
 we are, and here we shall have to stay for the time 
 being." 
 
 " But what are we going to do ? " 
 
 " My father manages his house-boat as he 
 manages everything else. We shall probably find 
 all that we want." 
 
 She went to a cupboard and found some matches. 
 Then they shut out the wind and lit the lamp. 
 Rivers pounced at once on a well-laid fire. By the 
 time he had persuaded this to be really warm 
 Agnes reappeared from an inner room with a 
 dressing-gown and some flannel trousers. She 
 herself had already removed her wet skirt. 
 
 " Henry's," she said briefly, as she threw the 
 trousers at Rivers. 
 
 Rivers made many difficulties, but was persuaded 
 at last to change. It was only when he went into 
 the room where Agnes had left her things that he 
 became acutely sensible of the pass to which the 
 storm had brought them. He listened anxiously 
 to the rain hammering the roof and thence to the 
 empty dress upon the bed. 
 
 When he returned to the outer room he found 
 that Agnes had produced coffee and condensed 
 milk from the cupboard and was boiling a kettle 
 on the fire. 
 
 141
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " We shall be late home to-night," said Eivers, 
 drawing up a large settee to the fire. " It's another 
 mile to Maidenhead." 
 
 " That's all right," said Agnes, stirring vigorously 
 at the coffee. " It probably means that I shall 
 have to settle with father before the wedding instead 
 of after it." 
 
 " Would you like me to come along and support 
 you ? " asked Rivers. 
 
 "No, thank you," said Agnes. " I don't seem to 
 mind father at all now. I seem suddenly to have 
 grown out of all that." 
 
 She looked at Eivers with lit eyes, and Eivers 
 saw the veins in her throat quiver. 
 
 " I don't mind anything to-night," she suddenly 
 added. " It's just you and me." 
 
 There were many things apart from the urgent, 
 breaking tone of this confession to give to this 
 moment a peculiar expressiveness. The rain and 
 wind outside were at their worst, giving to their 
 refuge a sense of shelter against all exterior things. 
 The moan and rattle of the storm prompted in 
 them a desire to be yet more familiar, to come yet 
 closer as in a league against some raging enemy. 
 Then, also, they stood within the shadow of their 
 coming separation a shadow which already lay 
 across the mind of Agnes, starkly dividing this 
 
 142
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 intimate present from an uncertain future. Her 
 unconscious shivering against the chill of that 
 advancing time prompted her to creep more 
 closely into the comfort of the immediate hour. 
 
 They talked of indifferent things as they re- 
 freshed themselves and waited for the storm to 
 pass. Agnes had hung her wet skirt by the fire, 
 and sat loosely wrapped upon the hearthrug. 
 Rivers, now feeling very homely and at ease, 
 watched from the settee the light playing on her 
 face. There was something so domestic in their 
 situation that he could not fail to remember con- 
 tinually that to-morrow she would be his wife. 
 The thought troubled, yet greatly sweetened, the 
 cosiness of their adventure. 
 
 Suddenly Agnes turned from the fire, and looked 
 over at him. 
 
 "I'm not sorry we're here," she said abruptly. 
 
 " The rain doesn't seem to be drying up," Rivers 
 irrelevantly answered. 
 
 " There's plenty of time," protested Agnes. 
 
 " But " Rivers hesitated. 
 
 " Aren't you anxious about getting home ? " he 
 ended, a little lamely. 
 
 Agnes seemed to be blotting something from her 
 mind. She raised herself on her knees and leaned 
 upon the settee beside him. 
 
 143
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Why should I be anxious ? " she asked. " This 
 is just what I wanted. I have got quite away." 
 
 She became urgent, almost vehement. 
 
 " Please, dear," she continued, " don't think of 
 me as having any life at all apart from you. Every- 
 thing else is outside." 
 
 Rivers was moved by her urgency ; and the near 
 prettiness of her disarray awoke in him a delight 
 he could no longer deny. Her eyes and hair swam 
 in a mist of blue and gold, and then suddenly he 
 was kissing her. For a long while they stayed 
 together, listening to the wind as it passed 
 gradually to a lower and softer note. 
 
 It came to them as a shock that the thrumming 
 of the rain had ceased. Rivers gently left Agnes 
 by the fire and went to one of the windows. The 
 storm had passed, and a cold moon was racing 
 between gaps of cloud. He came back and looked 
 at Agnes. 
 
 ; ' We can tidy ourselves now," he said, " and 
 start for Maidenhead." 
 
 She sat up on the settee. 
 
 " Anyone would think," she said, " that you were 
 impatient to go." 
 
 " I am thinking of you." 
 
 " Think of yourself. That will please me 
 better." 
 
 144
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Rivers pulled at the rug which had covered 
 Agnes in the punt. He was at heart as reluctant 
 as Agnes to start off into the cold. His delight 
 in her caused his hand to tremble as he folded the 
 rug. He hardly dared to speak or to look lest he 
 should betray how sensible he had become of her 
 nearness. 
 
 The letters he had picked up at Maidenhead, and 
 thrown as unimportant into the punt, tumbled on 
 to the floor. Mechanically to cover his unrest he 
 picked them up and put them on the table. 
 
 "Oughtn't you to read them?" suggested 
 Agnes. 
 
 The trace of irony in her voice hurt him. He 
 crossed towards her. Before he could speak she 
 was entreating his forgiveness. 
 
 " It hurts me to find you so ready to end our 
 time together. It seems as if it did not matter 
 to you enough." 
 
 " Agnes dear," he stammered, holding her fast, 
 " I cannot tell you how much it matters. Thank 
 heaven I shall leave you, when the time comes, as 
 my wife. At least we shall have had that." 
 
 They stood together for a moment. Then Agnes 
 
 drew gently away, and began to put straight her 
 
 hair, in front of the fire, at a mirror above the 
 
 mantelpiece. She took her skirt from the fireplace, 
 
 K 145
 
 passed her hand over the damp fringe, and went 
 into the inner room. 
 
 Rivers, left alone, again began to turn over his 
 letters. He noticed now, among a number of 
 circulars, that one was briefed " On His Majesty's 
 Service." 
 
 " I ought to have opened this before," was his 
 faint thought in a consciousness vivid with Agnes. 
 
 Then he found himself trying to master the sense 
 of something impertinent and absurd something 
 which hammered again and again upon his absent 
 brain till at last it had stunned him to all but its 
 own significance. Then he felt as if he were holding 
 back from his mind, by virtue of a sheer refusal to 
 accept it, a truth which threatened him. 
 
 He told himself to read 'again the words which 
 frightened him, minutely and coolly. He obeyed, 
 and saw there was no doubt at all. He was ordered 
 to report himself at Folkestone in the morning for 
 service in France. All further leave was stopped, 
 and no possible exception could be made. 
 
 "When Agnes came into the room Rivers had looked 
 his disappointment in the face and mastered it. 
 
 She was pinning on her hat by the fireplace. 
 
 " Agnes," he began, but the constraint of his 
 voice dismayed him, and he stopped. He could 
 not find the words to continue. 
 
 146
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 She turned abruptly, almost hearing the news in 
 the tone of his voice. 
 
 He handed her the order. Disappointment was 
 frankly written upon his open face. Something 
 stirred in her. She took the letter and realised the 
 order in a flash. 
 
 No thought of self intruded into her immediate 
 and instinctive action. In an instant she had 
 taken him into her arms. The pretence that he 
 did not care was simply swept aside. Without 
 disguise she began to comfort him. 
 
 But at last he drew away. 
 
 " Well," he said, with a cheerful affectation 
 that jarred horribly the quiet of the room. " The 
 milk's properly spilled this time and no mistake. 
 I shall have to come home on an early leave 
 supposing 
 
 He suddenly left his sentence in the air, for Agnes 
 was quietly looking at him. Almost she seemed 
 to be smiling with the mockery of one who refused 
 to take seriously the thing she heard. 
 
 ' You do care very much," she said at last, 
 irrelevantly. " Don't you, dear ? " 
 
 She saw in his eyes how much he cared, and she 
 remembered the phrase he had lately used : " At 
 least we shall have had that ! " By all the rules it 
 was not now to be allowed them. She was required 
 
 Ui
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 to send him away and perhaps they were not again 
 to meet. 
 
 She came beside him. He leaned to her and 
 took her by the arms. 
 
 " I was a fool to pretend," he said. " Of course 
 I care. It hurts. I I wanted you just now. It 
 would have helped me out there." He kissed her ; 
 then he put her away. 
 
 She rose quietly from beside him and took the 
 pins out of her hat. 
 
 He watched her a moment, then he became almost 
 afraid. 
 
 "Why do you do that?" he began. "You 
 don't mean " 
 
 He hesitated and broke off helplessly. 
 
 Agnes extinguished the lamp and after a moment 
 of darkness he was aware of her beside him in the 
 firelight. 
 
 " I shall stay here to-night," she said. 
 
 148
 
 XIV 
 
 Two days after his encounter with Eivers and 
 Monica in Mortimer Street Pelham was striding 
 the platform at Paddington Station waiting for the 
 Exeter train. He had had a letter that morning 
 from a friend who lived in Devonshire and now 
 urgently invited him to come down. He seized 
 upon this invitation as his means of escape. 
 
 John's words had bitten home. Either he must 
 put the war clean out of his thoughts, or yield. He 
 could no longer resist by halves. 
 
 Here, however, a decisive test was offered. 
 Willoughby Graham was a near friend of his college 
 years. They had planned together their scheme 
 of things. Equally they had agreed that the only 
 salvation for a man was in singularity in a resolute 
 refusal to be herded. Graham had been prompted 
 to discover an eclectic personality in his nobly 
 endowed capacity to enjoy things. He had early 
 begun to refine upon his pleasures till they seemed 
 to be leading him up to a revelation denied to the 
 mere frequenter of the market and the synagogue. 
 He made a great point of denying that the 
 
 149
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 senses and the soul were disparate. He put aside 
 religion, morality, and the merely prudent modera- 
 tion of bhose who followed in all things the middle 
 way. These were blind alleys for the sheep. He 
 would adventure along his purely individual way 
 as his fastidious ear and touch and taste urged him. 
 
 
 
 He would forgo no pleasure that he needed for 
 his self-discovery. He would omit no means of 
 beautifully expressing his own character and will 
 in the things he said and did and, above all, col- 
 lected. He collected most things pictures, books, 
 music, furniture, flowers. He had also, as will 
 shortly appear, collected Phrene. 
 
 He had a great deal in common with Pelham. 
 They agreed that the sole duty of a man was to be 
 himself. Graham took the way of taste whereas 
 Pelham took the way of reason. But each found 
 precisely the same pleasure in following his chosen 
 path. A successful argument gave to Pelham 
 precisely the satisfaction which Graham derived 
 from an original Degas, a rare saxifrage, a seven- 
 teenth-century first edition, or an excellent dinner. 
 
 Pelham wondered, as he walked the platform at 
 Paddington, why exactly he had been sent for. 
 Was his friend in need of him ? Had he, too, 
 felt the challenge of events? Was he calling 
 for assistance ? 
 
 150
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 A phrase of his letter repeatedly recurred to 
 Pelham. " Here at Sticklehampton," Graham had 
 written, " I can promise you quite definitely you 
 will hear nothing of the war. That gigantic im- 
 pertinence I have excluded and shall continue to 
 exclude." Pelham was too well read in his own sore 
 battles with this " impertinence" not to detect in 
 the over-protesting of his friend a signal of distress. 
 
 Yet his friend was well protected. When Pelham 
 left the express at Exeter, and began a slow journey 
 into the wilds of Devonshire, he was approaching 
 a fortress where human wilfulness might well be 
 expected to fight on even terms with whatever 
 common purpose might come to shake it. For 
 the first time since war broke out, and there had 
 come this universal threat to blend all men in- 
 differently in the discipline of a big, inexorable 
 service, Pelham felt, as he receded farther and 
 farther from the beaten ways of England, the 
 possibility of shelter and peace. He looked from 
 the windows of the train upon vast spaces of moor 
 with glimpses of wild tide and climbing forest. 
 Before these deserted and stolid hills, the unbroken 
 lines of the sea, and a shadowed sky which drew 
 all eyes indefinitely from the earth, history seemed 
 a broken and vague fretting of nations uneasy and 
 astray. 
 
 151
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " I hold by that sea and sky," thought Pelham, 
 turning restlessly from the window. " It is better 
 to discover for oneself some part of their secret 
 than to stand in a regiment with all the heroes." 
 
 He argued with himself as the lonely stations 
 flickered past. There had been wars before the 
 present war, and they had all receded to a vague 
 noise and tumult, lit with occasional deeds which 
 lived by virtue of the beauty with which dead 
 poets had invested them. If to-day, Pelham 
 reflected, there happens to be some unknown poet 
 who is quietly, away from the world, achieving some 
 work to rank with the greatest, it is he who will 
 mark this year for mankind more indelibly than the 
 field armies. The, present war oppresses us only 
 because it is present, and because it very rudely 
 disturbs a modern school of philosophers. 
 
 He landed late upon the wind-swept platform of 
 Sticklehampton. Graham was waiting with a car. 
 They greeted briefly and started across the moors 
 towards the sea with hardly a word between them. 
 The wind in their ears made conversation difficult ; 
 but Graham stopped the car on the top of a rise 
 which gave to them a superb outline of hill and 
 sea, on which the relics of a sunset imprinted all 
 degrees of violet and blue. They looked in silence 
 for a while. 
 
 152
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Well," said Graham, as he started the car down 
 into the dale, " I suppose that looked pretty much 
 the same in the time of Alexander the Great." 
 
 Pelham looked at his friend. This echo of his 
 late meditations in the train struck home. 
 
 " You too ! " he briefly exclaimed. 
 
 They had an almost telepathic knowledge of one 
 another. Graham understood the cryptic exclama- 
 tion of his friend. Pelham noted in Graham faint 
 but sure signs that the epicurean tenor of his 
 existence had lately been ruffled. 
 
 Graham was of an athletic and sanguine tempera- 
 ment, who gave one an impression of singleness 
 and unreserve. It was really his frankness his 
 inability to tolerate in himself any hesitation or 
 periphrasis which had made him an agnostic 
 champion of taste. He lived frankly for health 
 and pleasure and he required a philosophy which 
 would honestly allow him to open out quite natur- 
 ally to the sun. Pelham had never before seen 
 him in any way occluded. But this evening 
 Graham had, in the act of enjoying a beautiful 
 prospect, actually appeared to be troubled with side 
 thoughts. This was unlike Graham ; and Graham's 
 eyes, with their unfamiliar reserve, were equally 
 unlike. He appeared to have thoughts which he 
 did not desire to confess. 
 
 153
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Graham had built his house in one of the loveliest 
 spots in England a house he had largely designed 
 for himself with a view to comfort and air and the 
 framing of his possessions. Strange critics objected 
 to its modernity its innocence of English atmos- 
 phere and tradition. Too obviously it had not 
 grown out of the soil on which it rested. It 
 suggested Epicurus in exile. Though it went 
 excellently with the hills and the sea, though the 
 lines were simple, and the stone chosen to look 
 well in an English light, it was clearly not an 
 English house. 
 
 But Graham derided the critics. He defied 
 anybody to build him a house which was more 
 innocent of all unpleasant associations. There was 
 not a stone of it which suggested he was living in 
 a Christian country, and there was not a trace of 
 any one of the innumerable features commonly 
 employed by modern architects to decorate the 
 steel frames of Government and industrial offices. 
 
 Pelham, as he entered the house, was more con- 
 scious than usual of its exotic atmosphere. Leaving 
 the sweep of the moor and sea, so generously offered 
 to its western side, was like coming out of England 
 into a place where all ages and nations met to 
 celebrate a festival. Egypt and Greece, Italy of 
 the Renaissance, and France of the Grand Monarque, 
 
 154
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 were as near and familiar as Tudor England. To 
 add further point to the indifferent hospitality of 
 the house to all times and races, Phrene stood 
 to welcome him on the stairs. 
 
 Phrene was a French Greek with a genius for 
 sensation. She had for the past two years been 
 the wife of Graham, a loyal partner in his search 
 for the exquisite. They had lived a wandering life 
 between England and Greece, where Graham had 
 a villa not far from Athens. 
 
 Phrene was fair, with violet eyes and finely cut 
 features. But her mouth and gesture corrected 
 the aquiline severity of her face. In repose she 
 gave one the impression of a temperament fatally 
 serious. She had the grave intentness of a woman 
 engrossed by the intensity and complexity of her 
 emotions. But when she was speaking, or actively 
 interested in persons or things, the swift progress 
 of her thought was physically legible. 
 
 Graham found in her the perfection of his ideal. 
 His friends had smiled when he married her. One 
 of them, a Frenchman, had said that by marrying 
 Phrene he had robbed Europe of a woman who 
 clearly was marked out to be a genius of the half 
 world. Graham, who once had had this thought 
 himself, promptly challenged his friend and broke 
 his arm with a pistol. 
 
 155
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 He had married Phrene for many reasons. He 
 desired that there should be nothing in the least 
 limited in their companionship. He wanted her 
 to be equally at home with him everywhere, and 
 he wanted her entirely and for ever. 
 
 Therefore, though he knew well enough that she 
 would have accepted any kind of alliance he might 
 propose, he had nevertheless asked her to be his 
 wife. Her gladness in accepting this proposal 
 sprang solely from the present evidence it gave her 
 of his complete need. Marriage, for her, was no 
 more than a perfect liaison. 
 
 But marriage had profoundly modified her 
 attitude. Graham had at first been for her no 
 more than the means of her adventure. But 
 gradually this means had become an end. All her 
 life of sensation and delight in people and things 
 was now centred, past remedy, in an intense and 
 inexhaustible communion with the man who had 
 helped her to so much. Graham's motive in 
 marrying Phrene was justified. All her genius 
 was for him alone. 
 
 To-night, as she greeted Pelham, she had the 
 appearance of a fire too roughly blown by the wind. 
 Her flame lay prone, but ready to blaze, vertically, 
 with an added light, when the wind should cease. 
 Pelham saw in her at once the complement of the 
 
 156
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 change he had already noted in his friend. Clearly 
 this house now held, not only its treasures, but also 
 its problem. 
 
 Pelham passed to his room and dressed for 
 dinner. When he joined Phrene in the drawing- 
 room he was oddly prompted to think of Diana. 
 There could be no greater contrast than between 
 the two women. Each of them was equally vital, 
 but there was an entirely different quality in their 
 vitality. They had met. They had disliked one 
 another. To Diana there was something almost 
 abandoned in the way Phrene enjoyed things. Her 
 pleasure was too physical and too emphatic. 
 
 Diana, on the other hand, had all that high 
 reserve which regards with suspicion anything in 
 the nature of excess or ingenuity in passion. Phrene 
 might almost be described as flaunting her woman- 
 hood and this had offended Diana. 
 
 Pelham recalled this curiously instinctive an- 
 tagonism of Diana and Phrene as he saw his 
 hostess to-night standing alone, dressed with that 
 sure belief in her beauty which was part of her 
 charm. The antagonism seemed to him symbolic 
 of something wider than a want of personal sym- 
 pathy. Phrene was so obviously out of all relation 
 to the life he had left behind him in London. She 
 stood for that individualism, that personal and 
 
 157
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 anarchic cultivation of self, to which he himself 
 was clinging, and for which Diana had shown him 
 her hostility and contempt. Pelham assumed that 
 in Phrene, at any rate, he had found a sincere 
 disciple of his creed. She would have no under- 
 standing, Pelham assumed, of the altruist passion 
 which, as he already had perceived, was pulling 
 at the heart of Graham. 
 
 Pelham realised that Phrene was speaking. 
 
 " It's good of you to visit us," she said. 
 
 " Not at all," said Pelham, coming abruptly out 
 of his thoughts. " This place is too heavenly. 
 Willoughby stopped the car on the top of the moor 
 to enjoy the sea." 
 
 " And did he really enjoy it ? " she asked. 
 
 Pelham looked at her sharply, and she added : 
 ' You wonder at my question ? " 
 
 " A little," answered Pelham. " Willoughby, I 
 always imagine, enjoys everything." 
 
 There was a silence and Phrene smiled. Her 
 smile was a riddle. She also shrugged a little ; 
 but under the shrug Pelham thought he detected 
 that her nerves were twisted. 
 
 " Willoughby doesn't enjoy things as he used to 
 do," she said. 
 
 The thought came uninvited to Pelham that if 
 Graham could not find his anodyne in Phrene he 
 
 158
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 could hardly hope to find it elsewhere. The stretch 
 of her nerves caused her to convey more than usual 
 an impression of responsive sensibility, of a capacity 
 for pleasure, stored and quintessential. Quick as 
 light she read in his eyes the homage he paid to her. 
 She- flung out her hands with the gesture of one 
 holding herself out to be prized : 
 
 " He ought to be satisfied, don't you think ? " 
 
 Pelham's " By Jove, I should think so ! " was 
 stifled by his sense of an anti-climax in this British 
 heartiness. He silently bent his head. 
 
 Graham joined them, and they went in to dinner. 
 Pelham remarked that he seemed to be the only 
 guest. 
 
 "I've never known it happen here before," he 
 said. 
 
 " We've been alone for months," Graham lightly 
 explained. " We had a full house in July last. 
 Then they vanished." 
 
 ' You have been here alone since July ? " asked 
 Pelham. 
 
 " As you see," said Phrene. 
 
 ' You're a wise and happy pair," said Pelham. 
 " But you might have thought sooner of me. 
 London is not a comfortable place just now. It is 
 mainly a case of saying good-bye and being left 
 behind." 
 
 159
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " You have stood it pretty well," said Graham, 
 looking at his friend. 
 
 " Why not ? " asked Pelham, with an affected 
 carelessness. 
 
 " Well, it's rather annoying suddenly to find that 
 all your friends have rather different tastes than 
 you imagined," answered Graham. 
 
 " To me," he continued, " it has come as a shock 
 that most of my companions cannot resist the thrill 
 of putting themselves in peril of sudden death. I 
 exhausted that very crude sensation years ago." 
 
 Graham was referring to his adventures as a 
 Greek interpreter in the Balkan campaign of 1912. 
 Pelham painfully recognised in his tone just that 
 need for self -justification with which he had himself 
 so sorely wrestled. He sat silent, feeling as though 
 he were the audience of his own individual comedy 
 played by another. 
 
 " The fact is," Graham persisted, while Phrene 
 watched him with a melancholy care, " most 
 fellows have a wrong idea of war. Modern war is 
 exciting for a week, and then it is the most tedious 
 thing in the world tedious and dirty. It's a thing 
 to keep out of till you are absolutely needed. It's 
 like paying income tax. People don't offer to pay 
 income tax till they are asked to do so by law. 
 They don't do it for fun." 
 
 160
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Fun ? " echoed Pelham, filling in the painful 
 silence which naturally follows a monologue. 
 
 " Of course," Graham pursued, " I'm not much 
 of a politician, but I take it that if there were any 
 real necessity for anyone but the eager amateurs 
 of war to come forward, they would make it a law. 
 But I understand that military service in this 
 country is voluntary. The men who go now are 
 going because they like it." 
 
 Pelham in his mind's ear heard the hollow re- 
 verberation of a mental fist beating upon a door 
 wilfully barred. He had himself used almost these 
 identical words. He turned to Phrene in his 
 distress, almost rudely ignoring his friend. 
 
 " You know, Phrene," he said, " this is a breach 
 of faith. Willoughby said in his letter I should 
 hear nothing at all of the war." 
 
 " We are not talking of the war. We are talking 
 of our friends," protested Graham. 
 
 " The distinction is too fine for us," laughed 
 Phrene. 
 
 Thereafter an exaggerated lightness of heart was 
 their sole tribute to the cloud that hung between 
 them. Graham talked with a painfully emphatic 
 enthusiasm of some treasures lately added to the 
 house a cabinet by Shearer, a first edition of 
 Congreve, some drawings of Augustus John. 
 L 161
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 After dinner they amused themselves with 
 modern music and the higher criticism. Not a 
 word was said to suggest that any stone had lately 
 stirred the surface of the water, and now lay, known 
 to them all, at the bottom of the pool. 
 
 When, however, Phrene said good-night to 
 Pelham on the stairs she said to him: 
 
 " I thought it would be good for Willoughby to 
 have you with him here. But now I am not so 
 
 sure." 
 
 Then, without another word, she left him. 
 
 An hour later Pelham, looking from the window 
 of his room over a sea splendidly lit with a moon 
 absurdly round, saw Graham come out upon the 
 terrace beneath him. For half-an-hour Graham 
 was striding restlessly about, stopping at intervals 
 to fill himself with the shining peace. 
 
 Then Phrene came to meet him, warmly wrapped. 
 Graham turned to her and held out his hands. 
 They looked closely at one another for a moment, 
 and then Graham with a gesture as of one who threw 
 every doubt away pressed Phrene towards him. 
 She seemed a moment to resist. But as Pelham 
 looked away she was passionately reconciled. The 
 two figures stayed awhile looking to the sea, then 
 passed beneath him slowly into the house. 
 
 162
 
 XV 
 
 MOONLIGHT and water that same night had sus- 
 pended the soul of Agnes in a region where all 
 material things were lost. Moonlight crossed the 
 tiny room of the boat, where she watched, in solid 
 bars ; and water played in shadow upon the walls. 
 The chuckle of the river alone broke a quiet, 
 curiously light, as of a world not so much oppressed 
 as relieved by its silence. 
 
 She rested, exquisitely awake to the beauty of 
 her remoteness from the world, poised in a free 
 space between the passion of her marriage and the 
 farewell which had yet to be spoken. 
 
 She stirred a little, and held her watch to the 
 light. It was still an hour or more to the dawn. 
 
 The sun was breaking through the mist as, hours 
 later, she remained at the window of the boat 
 looking towards the reach of water where Rivers 
 had disappeared in the grey of the morning. Never 
 had she felt more utterly at peace, more assured 
 of the inevitable Tightness of things done. She 
 even told herself that she was glad of the accident 
 that had put her beyond the law. 
 
 163
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Her thoughts floated as idly as the water, catch- 
 ing happily at remembered words and moments, 
 governed by a deep physical rest. She had not 
 yet begun to think of her shattered arrangements 
 for breaking with her home life in Fitz John's 
 Avenue. 
 
 But her dreaming had soon to be broken. She 
 turned reluctantly from the lit water, and began 
 mechanically to get herself ready to leave the boat. 
 Eivers had arranged with her to send a messenger 
 to the wedding-party. She herself decided to 
 collect her personal property from Fitz John's 
 Avenue and move into the care of Mrs Baines. 
 Mrs Baines would have to be told about the frus- 
 trated wedding, and of Eivers' intention to get 
 leave as soon as he reasonably could. Happily 
 there was no need to explain at any length. Mrs 
 Baines would assume that Agnes had spent the 
 night at home. Agnes, though she had not the 
 least desire to be mysterious, did not feel called 
 upon to publish her conduct. 
 
 She made herself as presentable as she could in 
 her spoiled dress, and put in order the tiny rooms 
 of the boat. Then she looked her farewell at the 
 place which now possessed her most intimate 
 memories and opened the door. The sun warmed 
 her generously as she stood upon the little bridge 
 
 164
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 and she found it hard to go. At last, however, she 
 turned towards the land. 
 
 She was annoyed to see that a man was walking 
 towards her across the field path which led down 
 to the river. She realised how conspicuous she 
 was ; and, as she did not want to attract notice or 
 curiosity, she drew back into the boat awhile to 
 allow the man to pass. 
 
 His progress was slow and tedious, and she 
 turned to her window again and sank deeply into 
 her thoughts. She lived again through the farewell 
 of the morning, when she had seen in Rivers a deep 
 anxiety. She had set herself to drive that anxiety 
 away, and she had amazed herself by an impetuous 
 and frank eloquence in which she had gloried in 
 their escapade. 
 
 "What did he fear?" she had asked. He 
 would surely return; and if he did not (he had 
 felt her shudder at the words) she would have a 
 memory of which nothing could bereave her. 
 
 She had intoxicated him afresh with her certainty. 
 He had shared with her again, as she had spoken, 
 levels of emotion too far above the world's routine 
 to be affected by any further disquiet. He had 
 gone away, at peace and happy, but resolute to 
 worry immediately for the necessary leave as soon 
 as he had obeyed his orders to report himself. 
 
 165
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 She had not at that moment thought of his 
 return, lost in the contemplation of his vanishing 
 figure, giant-like in the mist. 
 
 Even now, as she thought of this exalted parting, 
 she 'recovered that feeling of being above and 
 beyond the world. Desolation was lurking for her, 
 but she still could keep the expanding emptiness 
 away with memories invoked and held. 
 
 She held them now, and breathed rapidly of the 
 clean morning air. 
 
 Then, suddenly, she heard steps on the bridge 
 from the river bank to the boat. The intruding 
 noise called her back to the present. The man she 
 had seen seemed actually to be coming to find her. 
 
 She moved angrily towards the door, and made 
 ready to warn him away. Then the door was flung 
 wide open, and there was a simultaneous call of 
 astonishment from Agnes and from the man who 
 entered. 
 
 It was her brother Henry. 
 
 166
 
 XVI 
 
 IT is not pleasant for a young man, naturally 
 fastidious, who has had the habit of regarding him- 
 self as something rather finer than the average, and 
 has instinctively saved his self-respect in difficult 
 places by an ingenious blindness to the truth, 
 suddenly to find himself involved in an accumulat- 
 ing disgrace. At the first hint of trouble in his 
 father's works fear had shot into Henry. He felt 
 a shaking in the foundations of his life a peril 
 which threatened not merely his present honour 
 but a cruel unveiling of his past. He had lived 
 in a shallow acquiescence with things indefensible. 
 He had accepted his father's economic creed out 
 of an ignoble laziness. He had never really tested 
 it or referred it to a cool and painful judgment. 
 He liked the things which wealth commanded, and 
 he easily assumed that the wealth he shared with 
 his father was the reasonable wages of captaincy 
 in an industrial war with lower forms of intelligence. 
 He despised, as well he might, the men who, claim- 
 ing to stand for the power and honour of labour, 
 haggled with his father for extra pennies and fewer 
 
 167
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 hours. It was right that organised labour, with 
 its deliberate encouragement of bad work and its 
 sordid politics, should be resisted with a firm hand. 
 He was content to be his father's ally because he 
 bitterly disliked his father's enemies. Further 
 he had never troubled to look. Nevertheless he 
 sometimes allowed himself to hope for a day when 
 he would be quit of commerce with its offensive 
 contacts and disputes. 
 
 Then the war had arrived, and thrust misgivings 
 thickly upon him. His father's steadily cynical 
 pursuit of his interests as an employer opened up 
 avenues of reflection, blocked perpetually with 
 abrupt, unanswered questions. He began very 
 clearly to see, as a new party to the strife between 
 his father and his father's men, a third and even 
 more interested party, which hitherto had been not 
 in the least considered. He began, in fact, to realise 
 that the country itself was a party. 
 
 It was at this point that Henry, confronted with 
 the evil and harsh results of the creed he had 
 accepted ; thrust face to face and held, day by day, 
 in a thicket of intrigue; seeing his father's men bitter 
 with suspicion that their patriotism was enriching 
 their natural enemy seeing these men clinging 
 to the rules of a feud which forbade them any 
 pride of craft ; counting their minutes and weighing 
 
 168
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 out their strength; ready rather to disown their 
 English brotherhood than yield to their capitalist 
 master; distrustful of any appeal to their con- 
 sciences as a device of the profiteer; their sense 
 of country dulled and thwarted by their sense of 
 class it was at this point that Henry began to 
 look back into the past and to ask himself squarely, 
 and with a growing shame, as to how and why all 
 pride and honour had gone out of the industrial 
 life of England. 
 
 His questions had bulked and multiplied as the 
 weeks went by; and, when the climax came, and 
 his father's men were preparing to push their quarrel 
 to extremes, he could no longer avoid an answer. 
 
 Henry's father had already observed his disquiet, 
 and had masterfully insisted that Henry should 
 meet the men himself. He calculated, as often 
 before, upon his son's disgust with the men's 
 narrow and obstinate leaders. He did not realise 
 that his son was looking beyond accidents of the 
 moment to an old sowing. 
 
 The dispute at his father's works came to a 
 head in the week of Red way's visit to Fitz John's 
 Avenue. Henry spent a distressful day at the 
 works a day which sent him for counsel, not to 
 his father's house, but to his flat in Bloomsbury. 
 He had realised in dealing with the men that he 
 
 169
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 could no longer repeat to them any of the old 
 formulae. He realised, in fact, that his chief anxiety, 
 was, not to beat the men, but at all costs to avoid 
 a breach with them. Before meeting his father, 
 who would bitterly denounce his conduct of the 
 negotiations, he wanted time to reflect. 
 
 He had appealed to the men's leaders to work on 
 behalf of their comrades in France and Flanders. 
 They had answered bitterly that they were working, 
 not for their comrades, but for an employer who 
 had reduced their wages whenever they had in- 
 creased their output. He had pointed out that 
 their organised restrictions upon labour were 
 directly helping the enemy. They had pointed out 
 that without these restrictions they were helpless 
 to resist exploitation. They clearly regarded his 
 appeal to them as an attempt to use the public 
 need for the advantage of the firm. Their patriot- 
 ism, it seemed, was to be used, not to defeat the 
 enemy, but to increase the dividends of Messrs 
 Smith. The bitterness of their suspicion, the 
 inveterate and reflex character of their hostility, 
 their regarding of the dispute as a matter which 
 concerned only themselves and their master, at 
 first disgusted and amazed Henry. But he was 
 shortly asking how these feelings had arisen. Were 
 they not entirely natural ? Was he not himself 
 
 170
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 for the first time in his life talking of the public 
 need ? 
 
 There was the point. The idea was new. Men 
 who had grown old in contests from which that idea 
 of the State had been systematically excluded could 
 not be expected to change their habits in a moment. 
 It was essential to inquire into the origin of their 
 selfishness. Who had first invented and practised 
 a system in which citizenship and pride of work 
 could hardly count at all ? 
 
 These were the questions which drove Henry up 
 and down his elegant room in Bloomsbury, starting 
 in him trains of thought which led him by different 
 ways to the same end. 
 
 He took his hat and coat and went down into 
 the street. He was feverish with his task. He was 
 going to his father as an enemy. 
 
 He arrived at Fitz John's Avenue in time for 
 dinner. His father had received a report of the 
 day's proceedings and was waiting to challenge 
 him. Hardly a word was spoken at dinner. The 
 empty chair of Agnes seemed to deepen the silence 
 between father and son. 
 
 Mrs Smith was dismissed from the table almost 
 before she had finished her dessert, and they waited 
 intently for the servants to go. 
 
 When the door was finally closed upon them Mr 
 
 171
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Smith quickly went to a bureau in the corner and 
 drew from it a typewritten document. He came 
 back to the table. Father and son looked at one 
 another for a moment. It was question and 
 answer between them. At last the old man looked 
 away. He knew the expression in Henry's eyes 
 too well. He had seen it in all his children. 
 
 " Well, Harry," he said in hard, brittle tones, 
 " I see it's come at last. You're going to follow 
 the rest of my dutiful family. You'll make it a 
 dead heat with Agnes." 
 
 " Agnes ? " said Henry, startled out of his own 
 affair. 
 
 " I said Agnes," rapped his father. 
 
 " What has happened to Agnes ? " 
 
 " She is getting married. At least I hope it's 
 no worse than that. If you hadn't been quite so 
 deeply occupied with yourself you might have seen 
 the state she's been getting into." 
 
 " Bob Rivers ! " exclaimed Henry in sudden 
 enlightenment. 
 
 " That is really clever of you," said his father. 
 " But we'll come to the point." 
 
 He hit the papers on the table. 
 
 " Am I to understand that you've been giving 
 the firm away to a lot of whining rascals ? " 
 
 Henry was silent. His father waited in cold anger. 
 
 172
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " I've been thinking," said Henry at last. 
 
 " And this, I suppose" Mr Smith tapped the 
 papers" is the result? I'll trouble you in future 
 not to do your thinking at my expense." 
 
 ' What are you going to do ? " said Henry. 
 
 Now that the issue was clear between them he 
 was curiously cairn. 
 
 " I have already countermanded your concessions 
 to the men." 
 
 " Very well. I resign my partnership." 
 
 This was more than Mr Smith expected. He 
 looked round the deserted room, whose chairs the 
 years had emptied and left vacant beside the wall. 
 He was suddenly brought very near to misgiving. 
 He rose and walked up and down the room for a 
 moment, fighting with his temper. At last he came 
 to Henry. 
 
 " Listen to me, my boy," he said, sitting to the 
 table. ' We're not going to waste words one way 
 or the other. I'll just be frank. I don't want 
 to lose you. We've been good partners, and I 
 thought we were going to run together to the end. 
 What's all this about? What's come to you, 
 Harry ? You used to be as firm as I was in 
 standing up to these blackguards. Are you 
 going to give way now and let them kill the 
 business ? " 
 
 173
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Are you thinking of the business, father, or of 
 the profits ? " 
 
 " I don't propose to run the business as a 
 bankrupt." 
 
 " We've got to run the business on any terms. 
 Our clear duty is to keep it running. To do that 
 we've got to remove from the men all ground for 
 suspecting that we ourselves are going to benefit 
 by their work." 
 
 " Then you propose to yield them everything 
 they ask ? " 
 
 " I propose to face the facts. So long as our 
 men believe they are working for us they will 
 continue to work under a discipline which forbids 
 them to work their best at any time, and prompts 
 them to stop work altogether on the least pro- 
 vocation. It's useless going behind this state of 
 things and asking who's to blame. There it is 
 the men won't work for us. We've got to prove to 
 them that they are not working for us at all, but 
 for the country." 
 
 " The men don't care a tuppenny curse for the 
 country. They're working for themselves." 
 
 ' ' Then we' ve got to set them an example. We' ve 
 got to show them that we care nothing at all for 
 ourselves, that we care only to deliver our stuff to 
 the Government. Personally, I should like to see 
 
 174
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 all our war profits confiscated to pay for, the 
 war." 
 
 There was a short silence. Each of them knew 
 that argument would only widen the rift between 
 them. Henry waited for a formal repetition of his 
 father's belief in the remorseless laws of industry. 
 
 But Mr Smith abruptly rose from his chair. 
 
 " Then you are leaving me, Harry ? " he briefly 
 asked. 
 
 Henry looked at his father, hoping to see some 
 sign that he was accessible. He was appalled by 
 the set resolve of the mouth and eyes confronting 
 him. He saw that neither reason nor affection 
 could effect a breach in his father's will. 
 
 The question in Henry's eyes was answered 
 outright by his father. 
 
 " I have lived by my own light for sixty years," 
 he said. "I'm not to be changed in an hour. I 
 shall meet my men to-morrow, and offer them what 
 is strictly their due. If they put down their tools, 
 it's their own affair. I'm not responsible for what 
 they do." 
 
 An hour later Mr Smith sat alone in his work- 
 room, dealing with the facts and figures of the case 
 in dispute between himself and his men. He heard 
 a slamming of the door, and saw his son going down 
 the steps of the house. 
 
 175
 
 Agnes at that moment was lying beside Rivers 
 in the boat at Twickenham. Her father knew only 
 that she had not as yet come home. But he did 
 not now expect that she would. This was a trifle 
 beside the defection of Henry, his favourite son. 
 
 He watched Henry go down the steps, and the 
 figures before him faltered a little. 
 
 Then, quickly, he shut his lips firmly together, 
 and returned to the papers in front of him. 
 
 
 176
 
 XVII 
 
 THE following morning Henry had to start his life 
 afresh, and he felt the need of a place, remote and 
 quiet, to put his thoughts in order. The boat at 
 Maidenhead was often his private haunt. He 
 drove out of town and walked across the fields to 
 the river. 
 
 He was thinking as he went of the tangle of affairs 
 to be settled before he could get free of the past 
 wondering, too, whether he ought not to retain 
 as closely as possible an interest in his father's 
 business. Conditions, he foresaw, would change. 
 He remembered the warnings of Redway. Possibly 
 his father, finding himself at a later stage entirely 
 out of touch, would, under pressure, retire. His 
 father would never consent to work under public 
 control. Henry and his father could not work 
 together, but the time was coming, Henry saw 
 clearly now, when his father would not be able to 
 work at all. Was it not his duty to hold himself 
 in reserve against that time? 
 
 He would dearly have liked to be clear of all 
 contact with the business. His fresh, raw insight 
 M 177
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 into its quality, left him sensitively eager to escape. 
 The thought of meeting again the men who yester- 
 day had thrust before him the corruption of their 
 citizenship, and forced him to admit that he and his 
 father shared it, and were in the last resort respon- 
 sible, filled him with disgust. Henry dreaded all 
 unseemly things. His first impulse was to round 
 off his old life and start afresh. 
 
 He wanted to apply for a commission. This 
 would make his rebellion complete and spectacular. 
 But in his awakened honesty he realised that this 
 would be bravado in a man whose business 
 experience must sooner or later be helpful. In 
 the coming changes Henry could hardly avoid 
 having an important share. 
 
 By the time he reached the river Henry had come 
 to clear terms with himself. For him the coming 
 months would hold no pretty or romantic secrets. 
 He was richly paid for the idle and dashing 
 pretences whereby he had hitherto disguised the 
 essential vulgarity of his life. 
 
 It was at this point that he came face to face with 
 Agnes. 
 
 There had been no deep confidence or affection 
 between them ; but Henry's first thought, when he 
 saw her there, was that now they were closely 
 allied, and that this meeting was somehow expressive 
 
 178
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 of their alliance. Each of them had come out of 
 the old life into something remote and new. They 
 met in a secluded emancipation of their own. 
 
 They exclaimed at meeting. Their rebellion 
 needed no explaining, but each was curious as to 
 the precise way in which it had been declared. 
 
 Agnes, instinctively protecting her own secret, 
 feverishly inquired of Henry: 
 
 " Why have you come to the Leda ? " 
 
 " It's something to do," Henry answered, his 
 eyes searching about the room for evidence of his 
 sister's purpose there. 
 
 " But your work ? " Agnes persisted. 
 
 " I have no work," said Henry. 
 
 " You have left the firm ?" 
 
 " I can't come to terms with father." 
 
 " What are you going to do ? " 
 
 Her questions came without pause. She wanted 
 to put off the moment when Henry's silence would 
 wait for her. 
 
 " As yet," said Henry, " I don't know what I 
 shall do. I think I shall wait till father retires 
 from the business." 
 
 " He's fond of you," said Agnes. Her quick 
 mind saw her father entirely in the cold and struck 
 where alone he was vulnerable. 
 
 Henry thrust her sentiment aside. 
 
 179
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " He's less fond of me," he said in tones as cutting 
 as any his father could use, " than of his own 
 wicked way. In me he saw his tool and inheritor, 
 one who would continue to carry out his ideas. 
 He finds now that I'm a human being, like 
 his other children. He only tolerated any of us 
 when we never opposed him. We were a sort of 
 fringe." 
 
 Henry spoke thus bitterly to quench a disposition 
 to think sadly of his father's house, emptied of its 
 children, and of a bitter old man persisting in 
 courses that were doomed. 
 
 He retorted upon his sister. 
 
 " If you really feel sorry for father you had 
 better go and comfort him. He was talking about 
 you last night. He notices everything." 
 
 " I was to be married to-day." 
 
 The words dropped from Agnes before she had 
 thought to begin just in that way. Instinctively 
 her mind had seized on the fact which convention- 
 ally went some way towards her justification. She 
 was not ashamed ; but somehow it was by no 
 means easy to say to one whom she had always 
 associated with morning dress and a respectable 
 firm of hardware manufacturers how she had spent 
 the last few hours. 
 
 Henry was now aware that something was amiss. 
 
 180
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 ' You were to be married," he repeated. " Has 
 anything happened to prevent it ? " 
 
 ' Yes," said Agnes ; " Bob had suddenly to report 
 himself." 
 
 There was a needless defiance in her manner. 
 Henry wondered at her excitement. 
 
 "Couldn't you arrange things in time?" he 
 asked. 
 
 " We opened the letter here late last night." 
 
 " I see," said Henry after a pause. 
 
 There was a further silence. Agnes waited. He 
 understood what had happened ; and he was 
 amazed to realise how little his sister's breach of 
 the code mattered to him. Some fierce reagent 
 was at work upon the social fabric. Habits were 
 broken up. Men and women were acting in un- 
 accountable ways. 
 
 " Well, Henry," said Agnes at last, " what 
 have you got to say to me ? " 
 
 He was surprised by her challenge. He felt that 
 he had lost heavily by his late exclusion from her 
 confidence. He crossed to her impulsively. 
 
 " We ought to be better friends," he said. " We 
 must think of ourselves as together now if you 
 
 can." 
 
 They confirmed the alliance in a warm pressure 
 of the hand. 
 
 181
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " I think," said Henry with a sudden delicacy, 
 " you will want to be alone. Suppose I go back 
 to the station? " 
 
 " No, Harry," said Agnes, snapping the tension 
 between them, "I'm starting off to arrange my 
 affairs in town." 
 
 Henry saw his sister dwindling up the field 
 towards the village. Her news had given to the 
 ruins of his formal existence a more romantic 
 appearance. His private catastrophe was only 
 part of a general process of destruction and renewal 
 amid which those who obeyed the call to live bravely 
 would find their part and place. He could not 
 definitely explain his new content. Agnes had 
 somehow justified him. She had seemed for a 
 moment to knit up his own rebellion with the 
 general crisis. 
 
 182
 
 XVIII 
 
 As the spring wore slowly into early summer 
 Kenneth John steadily sank into a deeper depres- 
 sion. The one thing which kept him loyal to his 
 task was the increasing evidence of its need. All 
 that Redway had feared regarding the impossibility 
 of claiming services piecemeal from the country 
 was being fulfilled. Many of the worst features of 
 English life before the war still rankly nourished. 
 The trade unions were stinting their labour; the 
 whole of the mining industry was upon the edge of 
 a general strike ; many classes of employers and 
 work-people alike were earning more money than 
 ever they had earned before, and spending it 
 lavishly. 
 
 But though the need was clear, and though the 
 remedy to John was obvious, he could not keep 
 down that sense of being parasitic and ineffectual 
 which is the burden of all writers in an active time. 
 It was difficult, in spite of Red way's encouragement, 
 to believe that his work could have the slightest 
 effect. 
 
 There were times when he asked his friends not 
 
 183
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 to write to him from Flanders. The contrast 
 between his own work and theirs was too 
 severe. 
 
 Nevertheless he clung to an honest conviction 
 that his post of service lay in London. Unhappily 
 he discovered that one may possess a conviction 
 without being in the least resigned to it. 
 
 He was ruminating this bitter truth upon an 
 evening in May as he sat in a taxi-cab jammed in 
 the traffic at the bottom of Regent Street. He was 
 on his way to a men's party at Red way's house in 
 Great Cumberland Place. 
 
 London had never looked so lovely as in the early 
 summer twilight of 1915. There is no city which 
 better responds to a discreet and reasonable lighting. 
 To-night her irregular buildings, toned by years of 
 dust ar.d rain and fog, went up into the steely blue 
 air as though they had grown naturally out of 
 the glimmering pavements. Miracles of light and 
 atmosphere were wrought in the middle air, where 
 the sparse yellow lamps and windows of the streets 
 and buildings came to terms with the remnants 
 of a sunset. 
 
 John rejoiced in the old and irregular genius of 
 the city as it presented itself thus transfigured. 
 But he soon lost his pleasure in a bitter reflection 
 that at the earliest possible moment advertisement 
 
 184
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 and the common needs of a metropolis would restore 
 the flaring illumination of peace. He turned 
 from it to observe the people crowding to the 
 theatres in motor cars unusually new. These were 
 the newest rich people, to whom the war had 
 given in a few months what normally would have 
 taken them years to secure. John hardly needed 
 an evening poster, referring to a coming strike 
 of the miners, to remind him of an obverse side 
 to all this agreeable prosperity. The doctrine of 
 private spoils still held the field. 
 
 At dinner that night Redway kept the con- 
 versation steadily upon the changes which had 
 begun in England and would, he held, remain after 
 the war was finished. John, partly in honest doubt 
 and partly to disburden himself of his unhappy 
 mood, was dismal and incredulous. 
 
 " I don't believe the country will be one jot 
 better for the war," he flung out. 
 
 Furiously set upon, he challenged his critics. 
 ' Tell me how this miracle is going to happen. 
 Shall we be better socially ? " 
 
 " Certainly," said Redway. " We shall get new 
 blood into London through the New Armies, and 
 we shall drop the Theosophists, Vorticists, and the 
 democratic pushers. Also we shall have to spend 
 our money with more discretion." 
 
 185
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " What are you going to do with the people who 
 buy their way in with war profits ? " 
 
 " Snub them." 
 
 " I don't think so. You won't be able to afford 
 it." 
 
 " Our politics will be better," said Red way. 
 
 " On the contrary," objected John. " The war 
 is fast proving to the country that in the face of 
 a democracy really on the make an over-civilised 
 Government is powerless." 
 
 " Well," laughed Red way he could laugh be- 
 cause he knew that John was not expressing his 
 opinions, but unloading his cares " you will at 
 any rate admit that art and literature will be better. 
 You were always an unbeliever in this new and 
 clever century; and you will now be rejoicing in 
 your great romantic revival in favour of simple 
 things." 
 
 " There will be no art and literature," said John. 
 " All the best men will be busy in other ways. The 
 new fashion will be to affect a hearty barbarism. 
 Things like Futurism and the novel of detail have 
 been knocked out; and for that I cannot profess 
 to be sorry. But we shall get nothing in its place. 
 We shall read detective stories and visit the revues" 
 " Of course you don't believe a word of all this," 
 said Red way. " Just throw back your mind to our 
 
 186
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 last delightful evening here before the war. Mean- 
 time I'll talk to Baddeley." 
 
 John returned to his fish, which was sauced for 
 him with memories of many such evenings as that 
 to which Redway particularly referred. Redway 
 had been a collector of social types ; and John had 
 only to think for a few minutes to realise how 
 completely all that once had excited this particular 
 table had vanished. 
 
 He looked round this evening upon the few men 
 Redway had been able to get together. They had 
 all played a lively part in the restless social period 
 into which Redway had introduced him as a young 
 and interested spectator hardly three years ago. 
 Many forgotten interests crowded upon him as he 
 admitted to his consciousness pallid memories of that 
 vanished time. John could hardly believe that, sit- 
 ting beneath these candlesticks, he had had heady 
 discussions with many of these men that grave 
 man, opposite him, in khaki, for instance, who was 
 now talking so earnestly on the propulsive qualities 
 of cotton on all kinds of topics which had never 
 once been mentioned since the war broke out. His 
 mind went back to a time when London was a 
 magnet for all the charlatans in art, religion and 
 philosophy, as well as a city which commanded, for 
 cash down, the pick of the world's genius. Often 
 
 187
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 in that room they had misused the riches of a dozen 
 empires enjoying with an equally frivolous zest 
 the mighty with the trivial entertaining them- 
 selves as heartily with exuberant theorists, eager 
 to explain some new secret which was to reform 
 the arts and transcend all that had hitherto been 
 achieved, as with the divine products of genius 
 itself. All was admitted even the truly great 
 so long as it ministered to the general need for colour 
 and sensation. 
 
 It was clever of Red way to evoke these memories ; 
 for they justified his frank incredulity as to John's 
 professions of hopelessness. Whatever the future 
 held, it would be something less indiscriminate and 
 irresponsible than the past. Seen against a back- 
 ground of evenings when wit was rampant and 
 logic was unchained, and the whole world was 
 devoured to make one paradox, the present gather- 
 ing took upon itself an unwonted austerity and 
 depth. This low-lit room, shut off from a city 
 perplexed and darkened, solemn with the voices of 
 men in sober discussion, promised to the future an 
 assured and temperate health. 
 
 There must needs be a deepening of the current. 
 Less effervescence there would undoubtedly be, 
 and less apparent opulence and diversity. But 
 only the trash would be blown away. 
 
 188
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 It was Baddeley's voice which first broke into 
 these reflections. His voice suggested to John that 
 some things at any rate remained firm amid the 
 general mobility. Baddeley was a Balliol man and, 
 like most Balliol men, he was at the Foreign Office. 
 
 But Baddeley's voice, as John's reflections 
 gradually made room for external things, began 
 .to be attached to some information which he was 
 imparting to Redway. 
 
 " And so," Baddeley was saying, " I have crossed 
 the Rubicon." 
 
 John leaned forward and looked across Redway 
 to his friend. Baddeley was the last man in the 
 world to cross the Rubicon. To-night he looked 
 unusually comfortable. He glistened with pros- 
 perity and had that comfortable air of premature 
 middle age which only comes to well-paid and 
 uxorious young men who have passed too many 
 examinations. 
 
 " What is this, Badders ? " John smilingly asked 
 him. " Are you going to buy a new house or 
 something ? " 
 
 " No," said Baddeley shortly. " I've enlisted." 
 
 " Not only enlisted," chuckled Redway, " but 
 enlisted in defiance of the Government." 
 
 ' Then he ought to be ashamed of himself," said 
 John, covering an appreciable sinking of the heart 
 
 189
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 with a fine show of indignation. ' c A fellow oughtn' t 
 to show off at Baddeley's time of life." 
 
 " That's just the point," said Baddeley. " I 
 was beginning to realise that my youth was slipping 
 away. It was now or never for me to assert that I 
 am not yet thirty-two. Another six months and my 
 whole life would have been a foregone conclusion." 
 
 " I see," said John tartly. " This is equivalent 
 to dyeing your moustache. Why not grow old 
 decently ? " 
 
 " It isn't decent for any man to grow old at 
 thirty-two," retorted Baddeley. 
 
 Baddeley's retort was weighted with a gravity 
 whose origin John appreciated well enough. 
 Baddeley, indeed, had lately become a byword 
 among the men of his own generation. They 
 regarded him as definitely surrendered to the 
 pleasures of a good table and a complaisant help- 
 meet. He was growing fat. His philosophy and 
 temperament were fast developing into a com- 
 prehensive purr. He had showed himself in public 
 as foolishly and all too palpably satisfied with his 
 house and his goods and his wife. Baddeley had 
 been by common consent regarded as a finished 
 man ruined by a safe post and a pretty woman. 
 
 Baddeley was right. This sort of thing had not 
 been decent. 
 
 190
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 John made amends to Baddeley by showing a 
 handsome interest in his plans. Baddeley had 
 gone into the Public Schools Battalion as a private. 
 It suited his purpose well to become a private. 
 Fatigue duty as a private would serve admirably 
 to medicine his self-indulgence. In Baddeley' s 
 house there were always hot towels in the bath- 
 room ; and in his bedroom at home Baddeley had 
 an electric heating apparatus which he could turn 
 on before he ventured from under the eider-down. 
 
 The expression in John's face when Baddeley had 
 explosively introduced himself as an enlisted soldier 
 had not been lost on Redway. Redway went with 
 John into the hall when the time came for him to go. 
 
 " John," he said, closing the door behind him, 
 " you must have a holiday." 
 
 " It can't be done," John answered promptly. 
 
 " On the contrary," said Redway, "if it isn't 
 done you will be playing on me the trick which 
 Baddeley has played on the Foreign Office. It 
 would be rather difficult to bring off in your case, 
 but I have heard of people learning the sight card 
 by heart. Besides, you have too many friends 
 in the War Office to make it at all safe for me 
 to take any risks. So I'm going to send you to 
 France." 
 
 " To France ? " 
 
 191
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " For a holiday. France is the best tonic I can 
 think of for your particular complaint. Men who 
 have been in France don't think of the war as a 
 specific against old age. It's making too many of 
 them prematurely grey." 
 
 But " 
 
 " The thing's settled. I can't have your face 
 going down like a thermometer every time one of 
 your friends goes into the army. In France, young 
 man, you'll come to terms with your duty. We'll 
 see about your papers to-morrow." 
 
 192
 
 XIX 
 
 DUEING the three days of his preparations for 
 France John exhibited towards Redway an in- 
 creasing doubtfulness. 
 
 " You may judge," he said, " of the effect my 
 journey is likely to have on me by what you see 
 of me now." 
 
 " Not at all," said Red way. 
 
 " I don't quite follow your train of thought," 
 persisted John. " You are sending me where I 
 shall come up against the active work of the war as 
 a sort of tourist. Could anything be more certain 
 to increase my misery ? " 
 
 " Nothing could be more certain to increase your 
 misery," Red way cryptically echoed. 
 
 " Already," John continued, " my spirits have 
 descended several degrees. I sat in the French 
 Consulate for two hours this morning waiting for 
 my vise. I had no business to be there at all, and 
 I knew it." 
 
 " Excellent," said Redway. 
 
 " Do you think I'm likely to feel less intrusive 
 in the military zone ? " 
 
 N 193
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 ' I think you will come back to me a wiser and a 
 better man," said Red way. 
 
 John thought a minute, and then, flushing, he 
 looked Redway in the face. 
 
 " At any rate tell me this. I shall see plenty 
 of hardship out there. You're not intending to 
 frighten me." 
 
 But Redway continued to smile. 
 
 John to the last remained indifferent and a little 
 perplexed as to his expedition. He sailed upon a 
 heavenly day from Folkestone bound for Dieppe 
 and Paris. It was planned that he should stay 
 awhile in Paris, and attempt to form some opinion 
 as to the mood of civilian France. Then he would 
 proceed into the country behind the lines with safe 
 conducts from the Invalides. Finally he would use 
 his military pass. 
 
 The resources of the ordinary traveller, duly 
 supplemented with visits to the Intelligence Anglaise 
 and the commissaire of police carried John to the 
 edge of the fighting area. But before he had 
 reached Senlis, or heard the guns, the miracle was 
 accomplished. It began in Paris, and it was com- 
 pleted on the battlefields of the Marne. 
 
 For three weeks he sunned himself in the serenity 
 of Paris. Each day he felt himself more and more 
 remote from the heart-searching and perplexity 
 
 194
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 which at that time distracted the English public. 
 In Paris he came into touch with a people which 
 had made definite terms with the war. Every man 
 he met had a fixed duty and position. In place 
 of the interrogation, public and private, which in 
 England was pressing continually upon the country's 
 nerves, John found in Paris an atmosphere of 
 settlement, and a hopefulness grounded on the 
 dependable war sense of a nation for whom de- 
 feating the enemy was its business and daily bread. 
 
 He talked with men who were in touch with the 
 national factories men who stared at him when 
 he asked whether the Government anticipated any 
 difficulties with labour. 
 
 " There really is no such thing as labour," was 
 the invariable tenor of their reply. " There are 
 only soldiers." 
 
 Some of these men confirmed Red way's opinion 
 that national service was needed rather to temper 
 the spirit and to secure the discipline of nations at 
 war than to raise their armies. It was equivalent 
 to the old Roman proclamation: Ne quid res 
 publica detrimenti capiat. No such proclamation 
 had issued from the leaders of Great Britain. 
 Advertisements to catch a hero were no real evidence 
 of the country's need. Service was still regarded 
 as a proof of exceptional merit. 
 
 195
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 John was better able to appreciate the bearing 
 of this when he came into touch with the armies 
 of France and noted the way in which they were re- 
 garded by the people. Neither in the Press nor in the 
 public of Paris was there any worship of the poilu. 
 The poilu was treated as an ordinary citizen, called 
 up to perform duties necessary to the existence of 
 France. He was regarded as being about exactly 
 the same business as the men in the factories and 
 upon the land. 
 
 Some poignant illustrations of the way in which 
 the people of France had come to regard the war 
 as part of their lives as a thing to be accepted 
 without exclamation were offered to John in the 
 course of a long afternoon spent in the great 
 military hospital of Val de Grace. He talked with 
 men, mutilated and broken in health, who clearly 
 expected nothing better than the bleak reward of a 
 skilful surgery. Men who were decorated regarded 
 their honours simply as compensation for services 
 rendered, and in many pitiful cases as granted in 
 definite exchange for the loss of a limb or faculty. 
 "Pour mon ceiV was all that John could extract 
 from a man who was wearing the medaille militaire. 
 He would never forget that man, seated in a bare 
 room, in his soiled and torn uniform, uncomforted 
 and uncherished. He remembered, for contrast, the 
 
 lye
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 return of an English hero to his native town the 
 whole English Press in attendance and a recruiting 
 officer hard at work in the crowd. 
 
 Paris was tranquil, because here the war was 
 regarded as a public service. No man was craven 
 or a hero ; but simply a patriot under orders. 
 There were no problems and no controversy. 
 There was a national enterprise which was regarded 
 by all alike as a sober, practical business belonging 
 to everyone alike. 
 
 To come from the political and industrial rumour 
 of London into an atmosphere such as this was to 
 lose all sense of the war as an opportunity for 
 personal gallantry or distinction. John realised 
 how discreditable was his English malady. It had 
 risen out of a snubbed vanity, which resented being 
 kept out of something historical and fine. He was 
 shamed by the spirit he found in France. Had he 
 been inspired by that same spirit himself, he would 
 have unregretfully accepted the work he was best 
 fitted to do work, whose value now that he was 
 well away from it he could quite impartially 
 measure. 
 
 John had loved Paris from the moment when, 
 as a mere week-ending Englishman, he had first 
 set foot in it. He had never made the vulgar 
 mistake of looking for Paris in Montmartre. He 
 
 197
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 had seen Paris from the first as frugal, austere, 
 intellectually hard and direct, wisely critical in 
 her laughter, aiming in her higher types at a 
 balanced employment of all the faculties. He 
 thought of Paris as a city which bred excellent men 
 of the world. Paris was the only city he knew 
 which could follow the doctrines of Epicurus 
 without degrading them. 
 
 John, in fact, had ruled out of his idea of Paris 
 all that makes Paris most dear to the cosmopolitan 
 rout who loudly possess her in time of peace ; so 
 that he was less astonished to find her now a true 
 city of the soul. 
 
 One of his kindest friends in Paris was a French- 
 man who, as the prefect of a French town now 
 submerged under the German occupation, had seen 
 some of the most terrible of the earlier scenes of the 
 war. To him John often tried to explain the differ- 
 ence between the atmosphere of Paris and London. 
 
 " They are not so serious in England ? " asked his 
 friend. 
 
 " In a way they are more serious," John had 
 answered. " They are, at any rate, more worried. 
 This, for example" they were at the Theatre Fran- 
 $ais and John waved his hand at the audience 
 " is not possible in London." 
 
 " There are no theatres in London ? " 
 
 198
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " On the contrary, there are too many theatres. 
 But you could not collect in London to-day an 
 audience like this, which has come here for reason- 
 able recreation and refreshment. The people here 
 are really amusing themselves in the intervals of 
 their national business. They are doing their 
 work, and they can take a holiday. Now we 
 English I mean, of course, the civilian English 
 cannot amuse ourselves in a natural and normal 
 way. Either we forswear amusement altogether as 
 incompatible with the terrible seriousness of the 
 war, or we rush to the other extreme and shrill 
 with laughter at nothing at all. Our theatres are 
 either shut or they are packed with people who are 
 trying to forget." 
 
 " I see. Your conscience is not good." 
 " We haven't as yet anything settled or fixed to 
 go upon. Our spirits vary with the evening papers. 
 I am amazed at the equable temper of Paris. 
 Everyone here seems to have got into a fixed 
 relation with the war." 
 " The Germans are in France." 
 " I wonder if that explains it altogether." 
 " We had little to boast of in France before the 
 Germans came. But to-day I am proud." 
 
 Later that same evening, as John sat with 
 his friend in rooms near the Madeleine, he 
 
 199
 
 THE K I N G'S M E N 
 
 firmly grasped the nettle of his own particular 
 case. 
 
 " What is the attitude of France," he asked, 
 " to the man who serves his country as an 
 emhusque ? " 
 
 " He is pitied." 
 
 " You mean he is despised ? " 
 
 " Not at all. He has his orders. It is his 
 misfortune not to be serving with the armies." 
 
 " What does he feel about it himself ? " 
 
 
 
 " He shrugs his shoulders. France requires him 
 to be where he is." 
 
 " I have had from the French Press rather a 
 different impression." 
 
 ' That was earlier in the war. Many excited 
 things were said. Some men wanted glory, and 
 others avoided death. But that is finished. Only 
 one thing matters to-day the thing which France 
 requires. The spirit is everything. The spirit is 
 more than the uniform. We all desire the uniform 
 to-day, but not all of us can wear it." 
 
 John, as he picked his way carefully back to his 
 hotel that night, took from this last speech the cue 
 he needed. His personal hankerings were stilled. 
 His country did not require him as a soldier. But 
 he had work to do which he honestly thought was 
 serviceable work. He was clearly bound to accept 
 
 200
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 it. His vaguely heroic desires were a selfish crying 
 for the moon. 
 
 He came from under the black bulk of the Made- 
 leine and walked towards the river. By the time 
 he had reached the wide, dark space of La Concorde 
 he had divested his ambitions of all pomp and 
 circumstance. Ever afterwards he associated his 
 recovered honesty and peace with the deep silence 
 of Paris as she lay that night, tranquil and assured 
 behind her fighting men. He lingered upon the 
 bridge, over against the Chamber of Deputies, 
 passing in review all he had seen of the sleeping city 
 in the last few days young men waiting for the 
 call, women filling without fuss all possible gaps 
 in the line, soldiers who had given all they had, as 
 men pay debts that are due. 
 
 Paris, seen thus in a hundred crowding details, 
 remembered and confirmed in fresh revelations 
 during the next few days, revealing in her shuttered 
 streets, in the quiet work of her women, in her 
 responsible and intelligent reception of each small 
 incident of the field of war, in her miraculous 
 economy and phlegm, in the grave resolution of a 
 nation which had come to terms with its burden 
 this Paris had dispelled his last misgivings when 
 John departed into the country and towards the 
 armies. 
 
 201
 
 XX 
 
 JOHN afterwards remembered most clearly four 
 notable moments in his journey. The first was 
 when he stood upon the bridge in Paris. The 
 second was when he stood within the orchard of 
 the farm at Champfleury whence von Kluck had 
 watched the turn of the great battle of the Marne. 
 
 He had eluded the kind and eloquent people 
 who were willing to show him everything as it had 
 occurred ; and he stood now alone, where a few 
 months before the German Staff had stood, looking 
 out over a few of the most dearly prized acres in 
 France.. 
 
 Champfleury was a spot which seemed to have 
 been specially designed by thoughtful destiny to be 
 historic. It commanded the country like a well- 
 placed seat in an amphitheatre; and it seemed 
 to inherit, as though by right, the tremendous 
 associations which will henceforth be inseparable 
 from its name. 
 
 Behind John, as he faced the land on which the 
 French had turned at bay, was the farm itself, 
 scarred and shattered. He stood in the shade of a 
 
 202
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 tree into the branches of which the officers of the 
 German Staff had jammed an iron green-painted 
 chair, the better to observe the fighting. Paris 
 had trembled in the scale as they watched, for it 
 was exactly here that the plan of the German Staff 
 first went astray. 
 
 John was naturally prone to those sentiments 
 which love to brood upon the vesture of deeds 
 which previously have stirred the mind from a 
 distance. He could not deny the thrill of his 
 present contact with events which only a few 
 months previously he had followed upon the map, 
 and reached after in imagination. The broken 
 trees of the orchard, the ruin of the near buildings 
 and the worn grass, filled him with a sense of near- 
 ness to history, almost of personal touch with the 
 things whose traces were all about him. 
 
 He had first surrendered to it as he stood among 
 the wreckage of the room behind him, looking from 
 the table where von Kluck had distracted himself 
 with billiards to the fragments of a French obus 
 which had plastered the four walls with the stuffing 
 of the General's favourite chair; and he had come 
 from the house to indulge to the full his memories 
 of this fatal time at Champfleury. They returned 
 to him from those wild days in London when every 
 small message from the front was seized by an 
 
 203
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 anxious public. His greedy and hitherto unsatisfied 
 imagination fed upon the actual setting and upon 
 intimate relics of things it had so often attempted 
 to body forth. 
 
 It was then that John was for the last time 
 revisited by an old distress. He envied the men 
 whose feet had tramped down this grass ; who had 
 made the hot events in whose ashes his fancy now 
 was raking for some spark of warmth ; who had 
 contributed to make the ground on which he stood 
 a place of pilgrimage for a curious posterity. 
 
 But a quick reaction left him proof against all 
 further rage. Hitherto he had seen at Champ- 
 fleury only a distracting evidence of swift and 
 clamorous events with which he had always desired 
 to be somehow related. But now, as the anger and 
 envy in him died, he noticed things of a deeper 
 significance than was suggested by material vestiges 
 of the German occupation. 
 
 He had often read of the speed with which the 
 ravages of war were effaced by time and by the 
 normal activities of peace. On the way to Champ- 
 fleury he had naturally looked for signs of the 
 fighting. He found them here and there in a 
 shattered tree, or tree trunk drilled with a shell. 
 He found them in the villages whose houses were 
 spattered with small fire, or whose buildings were 
 
 204
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 occasionally wrecked. But he soon realised that 
 in the open country even where the fiercest fight- 
 ing had taken place it would be possible except 
 for one recurring proof to cross the entire area 
 of the battlefield of the Marne without suspecting 
 that anything unusual had occurred. The trenches 
 and shell pits had been filled in. All the spoil and 
 litter had been cleared away. Crops or pasturage 
 were growing over the face of the entire country. 
 The sole witnesses that remained were the graves 
 of the fallen. 
 
 He had not realised the full bearing of this till 
 now, at Champfleury, he could look out over the 
 entire country and follow the whole course of the 
 fighting to and fro on the slopes beneath him. 
 
 As he followed the fighting from field to field 
 John gradually began to perceive a homely reason 
 for the disappearance of all traces of the battle. 
 The graves of the French soldiers were conspicuously 
 marked with little flags of- the tricolour. The 
 whole country was bright and astir with their 
 flickering. Beside them, or aloof, were the gaunt 
 black crosses above the German dead. But it 
 was not these conspicuous signs on which the eye 
 finally came to rest. It was rather the bent forms 
 of old men and women, tilling the fields. 
 
 Here John was again brought sharply in contact 
 
 205
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 with the calm sense of a nation to whom the war 
 was a sober matter of every day. France, invaded 
 and embattled, had yet to live, and make the most 
 of her recovered acres. She had accordingly set 
 to work, on the morrow of her shining victory, to 
 smooth out the tracks of war, and to plant, right 
 up to the edge of the graves of her fallen soldiers, 
 crops for the coming season. Here again was the 
 same spirit which John had found in Val de Grace. 
 But here the spirit was expressed to the physical 
 eye. The invisible idealism of France lit the 
 whole of that country-side with the colour and 
 movement of her flag; and, hard by, typical of 
 the practical sense of a nation engrossed upon 
 a specific and necessary task, her peasants were 
 harvesting. 
 
 Here was France expressed in little; and, as 
 upon the bridge at Paris, John was humbled. His 
 heady visions of an active share in heroic and fine 
 events paled into shabbiness. 
 
 Driving down the hill from Champfleury, he 
 resisted the impression he had received from those 
 graves, close bordered by the crops, only so far 
 as to ask whether he were not indulging a sense for 
 meanings which largely were self-created. These 
 peasants, whom he found so expressive, might, after 
 all, be expressing little beyond the callousness of 
 
 206
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 minds incorrigibly rustic. Possibly they were 
 indifferent to their dead. 
 
 This doubt was itself resolved as he pulled up his 
 horse beside one of the larger graves of the soldiers 
 killed in the pursuit towards the Aisne. He had 
 stopped his horse the better to listen to a sound 
 he had not yet heard a sound strangely solemn 
 in the evening dusk hollow, and deep, and seem- 
 ing to fall on the air like the blow of a heavy bar 
 of muffled iron. It was the sound of distant 
 artillery, and it made every other sound seem 
 impertinent. 
 
 As he listened he was aware of steps coming 
 down the narrow road. An old man came into 
 view, carrying his tools. He came forward to- 
 wards the carriage, paused a moment beside the 
 large grave by the side of the road, and removed 
 his hat. He had been working all day in the fields 
 beneath Champfleury. 
 
 He stood almost within reaching distance of the 
 wheels ; and John, looking down upon his muddied 
 boots and clothes, wondered what sad thoughts 
 were in him, thus pausing beside the grave. In- 
 stinctively he, too, removed his hat. 
 
 The man turned at this, and lifted to John a face 
 bitten by time and the wind. But the eyes were 
 young and bright, and these, to John's surprise, 
 
 207
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 were not saddened by what they saw at the 
 grave-side. 
 
 The old man indicated his bare head with a shrug, 
 almost apologetic, and with a gesture towards the 
 grave : 
 
 " Us le meritent" he said, and turned with an 
 adieu to go down the hill. 
 
 His steps faded down the dip of the road, and 
 John heard again the solemn note of a far gun. 
 
 The encounter, as he pondered it, sitting erect 
 in the increasing dark, filled him with a deep 
 disgust of his further pilgrimage. What right 
 had he to share even in the homage of that old 
 man, rendered without false elevation, without the 
 embellishment of any fine sentiment or flourish. 
 He felt beside that grave, within hearing of the 
 guns, more than ever like a tourist an intruder 
 into events and places where his own particular 
 work neither invited nor excused him. 
 
 This was the third notable moment of his journey. 
 
 He turned his horse, and drove quickly back upon 
 his tracks towards the town of Meaux. 
 
 The fourth and last moment occurred to him 
 upon the following day. He had risen early in 
 Meaux, and, down by the river, he had talked 
 with several men of the district who had asked 
 him many questions. They inquired especially 
 
 208
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 concerning that English army which had suddenly 
 rilled the town in a famous summer week less than 
 a year ago and had mysteriously disappeared 
 while the townsmen slept. They wanted to know 
 concerning the strange warriors, aux petits jupons, 
 whom they imagined to have come from some far 
 outpost of the British Empire. 
 
 Then, when the town had settled to its work, 
 John lingered upon the bridge of the mill, and 
 watched in fancy the passing of the tired English, 
 now almost at the end of their wonderful retreat 
 from Moris. This was the first English ground he 
 had stood upon in France. It was English work 
 that ruined arch of the bridge. 
 
 ' The first English ground," John repeated to 
 himself, and asked himself whether it should not 
 also be the last. He had turned back upon his 
 journey into ruined France, because he could no 
 longer bear to be an intruder. He was asking 
 himself whether this same sense that had come 
 to him of being shamefully a sight-seer would not 
 equally follow him, with his military papers, into 
 the English lines. France speaking to him in the 
 simple gesture and phrase of a peasant going about 
 his work among the heroic dead a peasant who 
 had shown himself in so simple a fashion as grate- 
 ful to these dead for the acres they had redeemed 
 o 209
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 and seemed still to be watching from their graves 
 had shamed him from treating her labour and strife 
 as fodder for his needs. 
 
 How did this bear upon his intention to follow 
 up his English quest ? 
 
 He spied a landing-stage with light river boats 
 moored to the edge of it. It had once been his 
 habit, when he was at Oxford and wished to come 
 to a resolution, to take a boat far down the river. 
 The rhythm of his exercise, spaced with quiet 
 intervals when even the leap of a fish rudely 
 shattered the silence, had in the past solved him 
 many a problem. The mind awoke by snatches to 
 discover that a further stage had been reached. 
 The boats upon the Marne reminded John of this 
 former habit. He went down to the river and 
 hired a skiff from the boy of twelve who now was 
 managing the business. 
 
 He had soon left behind him every trace of the 
 town. The peace of the river was deep, for the 
 fields which bordered it were emptied of their men. 
 
 In the pauses of his rowing John found himself, 
 in the old way, putting aside his problem, allowing 
 it to settle itself quietly in his mind. Ostensibly 
 he was interested in the drop of a rat from his hole 
 in the high bank ; in the distress of a blackbird 
 surely an English blackbird; in the darting of a 
 
 210
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 water-fly ; in an unknown flower which grew upon 
 the margin. Yet he began to be aware, gradually, 
 and without a conscious disputing, that when he 
 turned his boat towards Meaux he would be 
 turning it towards England and his work. 
 
 The last point touched in his progress brought 
 him to a wide reach of the river between banks 
 unusually high. The water was deep, and the 
 current hardly perceptible. He rested his oars on 
 the water and waited for the silence and for the 
 tiny noises which broke it in the way he loved. 
 
 But when the rattle of the water under his bows 
 was stilled, and the silence fell, it was a silence less 
 complete than hitherto. Above him on the far 
 bank there was it seemed a jingle of horses 
 driven, and the voice of a man who urged them. 
 The bank was too high to bring the horses as yet 
 into view, but the sounds of their approach grew 
 each moment louder. 
 
 John waited for them to top the bank. The 
 bank itself lay mirrored on the water, absurdly 
 clear. It was impossible to tell where the reality 
 met its image, and the bank seemed in the invisible 
 water to be twice its actual height. Then suddenly 
 the horses appeared magnificently bold against 
 the sky, deep chestnut and with huge flanks strain- 
 ing at the plough. The old man who followed them 
 
 211
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 skirted the river for a time, so that their progress 
 was pictured in the water for several yards. Finally 
 the reflection with its origin diminished, and the 
 loud jingle and creak of the harness was suddenly 
 muted by the intervening bank. 
 
 John began almost unconsciously to swing out 
 his boat into the stream, to be turned about by a 
 faint current which ran upon his own side of the 
 river. 
 
 He could not positively say that this sudden and 
 stalwart apparition of France, peacefully ploughing 
 her battlefields almost in the eye of war, determined 
 the moment of his resolution to return. 
 
 But this was the fourth moment of his pilgrimage ; 
 and he afterwards remembered it as the precise 
 moment in which he decided that, unless he could 
 intrude among the- English armies as one devoted 
 to their daily business, he would not intrude at all. 
 
 By the time he had sighted the stern of his boat 
 upon a mark which would take him into the next 
 reach of the river he was quite definitely striking 
 out for Paris and for England. 
 
 212
 
 XXI 
 
 THE morning which Pelham saw from his window 
 some three months after his arrival in Devonshire 
 as he dressed for breakfast would have dismayed 
 him in town ; for it was grey and sunless. But it 
 made the beauty of this Devon hermitage more 
 delicate. The mists which curled and drifted about 
 the sea, the extravagant green and red of the 
 broken cliffs veiled by the saturated air, the uniform 
 sky revealed on the floor of the sea as compact 
 of moving lights and shadows, the impression of 
 fertility and refreshment conveyed by the steaming 
 vapour which in cities was nauseous fog these 
 things were well worth exchanging for the obvious 
 comforts and colours of the sun. 
 
 They had planned that day Pelham and Graham 
 and Phrene a trip by boat to a beach in Cornwall ; 
 and Pelham, as they ran out from the little bay 
 which lay at the foot of his friend's estate, felt, as 
 often he had felt before, that here indeed he might 
 escape, if escape were possible. The sea filled him. 
 The ancient life of the fishermen upon the beach ; 
 the mere fact that the morning newspapers had not 
 
 213
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 yet come in ; the presence of Phrene and Graham 
 absorbed in one of the frequent renewals of their 
 content; the freshened capacity in himself under 
 the stimulus of change arid relief to enjoy and 
 think and vaguely to plan his work all helped 
 him to escape the problem from which three 
 months previously he had fled. 
 
 They ran up upon a beach of shingle the water 
 light green and marvellously clear. They sat upon 
 the stones, and Graham began throwing pebbles 
 vigorously at a rock in the middle distance. Pelham 
 admired his athletic gesture. He told himself that 
 when so likely a fighter sat thus idle and free he 
 at any rate need feel no pricking of the heart. 
 Then he frowned, for he realised that yet again his 
 obsession had reared and struck him. 
 
 Graham turned abruptly and said : " Well, 
 Jimmy, how do you like it ? " 
 
 " It's perfect," said Pelham. 
 
 " There's one thing I shall never do," said 
 Graham " I shall never return to town." 
 
 Pelham wondered whether this were pure en- 
 thusiasm for the sun now striking the sea with 
 beams of yellow mist, or whether there was in this 
 announcement a sense of exile. Graham had loved 
 all things, and not least he had loved his happy, 
 swift excursions into the life of London. He had 
 
 214
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 never wanted for invitations when he came to town, 
 and he had never yet missed the best weeks of the 
 season. 
 
 " You couldn't return to town even if you 
 wanted to," said Pelham ; " there is no such thing 
 as town." 
 
 " Your English town is always bad," said Phrene. 
 
 " It has always admired you, Phrene," retorted 
 Pelham. 
 
 " It has admired me as a statue," said Phrene. 
 " As a woman it hasn't admired me at all. I'm 
 going to bathe." 
 
 She went with Graham to a hollow in the rock. 
 Pelham lay idle, watching the sea, which changed 
 every moment its light and colour. The sun was 
 now dispersing the last of the mist, which smoked 
 reluctantly upon a headland to the east. Before 
 the swimmers had come down to the sea the 
 pebbles were warm. 
 
 He watched them vanishing round the edge of 
 the bay. Phrene, taking the water, openly re- 
 joiced. The pleasure she had in herself was never 
 so insolent as when she swam. 
 
 Pelham, left alone, and afraid of being thrown 
 back into himself, forced himself to dwell upon his 
 friend. How right and wise was Graham to find 
 here the fullness of life. 
 
 215
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 He saw them again soon, flashing towards 
 him in a race. Their arms were lifted dripping, 
 and disappeared. They came out of the water 
 breathless and glistening. 
 
 The three of them lunched at the edge of the sea. 
 The rocks on which they spread their food were 
 dedicated to an old smuggler who all through the 
 Napoleonic wars had run his boat into this bay and 
 defeated the coastguards by ruses which still were 
 the theme of the country-side. 
 
 Pelham, listening to these tales, reflected between 
 the lines that here was a local hero who, when his 
 country was at war, cheated it of a necessary 
 revenue. Clearly war was not always so seriously 
 taken. War was the business of an army and a 
 government. The modern view of war as everyone' s 
 affair was the general voice of an unbalanced mind. 
 London was not a healthy place. It made men 
 morbid and destroyed their sense of proportion. 
 
 They chaffed him for not wanting to bathe. 
 
 " How you resist it I can't imagine," said Phrene, 
 waving at the lit sea with a sandwich. 
 
 " He never could stand a shock," said Graham. 
 " He's a Laodicean ; and his doom in the next world 
 will be to stand shivering, up to his middle, in the 
 tideless sea." 
 
 Graham meant nothing at all by this ; but Pelham 
 
 216
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 miserably applied his metaphor to the subject 
 which obsessed him. 
 
 Would he never get away, be safe from these 
 actions and reactions ? He squirmed on the 
 pebbles. 
 
 They put back to the house in a rising wind. 
 The little boat required careful handling in the 
 heavy water, and the journey was not without 
 excitement. They rounded the edge of the bay 
 in a whirl of spray. 
 
 They could not immediately land, for the fisher- 
 men on the beach were dragging a seine net. 
 They stood off a little and watched. 
 
 The scene was so remote from to-day all its 
 furnishings so ancient and its progress so self- 
 engrossed that Pelham, after his scamper through 
 the waves, felt that the burden had again rolled 
 from his mind. Here he would eventually be able 
 to forget ; to bring his instincts logically to heel. 
 
 The net came to shore, and there was a lively 
 reckoning as to the size and value of the jerking 
 fish. 
 
 Graham thrust in the boat, and they hauled it 
 up the shingle. Then they stood for a while, 
 watching the fishermen and listening to their talk 
 talk salted with a wit which was quick and fear- 
 less, alive with the cut-and-thrust of lively and 
 
 217
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 wilful opinions. Their language had almost as little 
 changed as their manners since their ancestors liad 
 put to sea in the amateur fleet of Lord Howard. 
 
 The whole scene filled Pelham with a tremulous 
 happiness. He had escaped escaped for the 
 twentieth odd time in three months. He was 
 getting to know these men, and already he could 
 share some part of their immemorial life. He could 
 even understand at this moment Graham's deter- 
 mination to return no more to town. " Town " 
 had become a cheap, superficial and distant thing 
 upon this windy beach, within beat of the sea, busy 
 with a brave, perpetual labour. They turned away, 
 and, in the falling dusk, began to go up the beach. 
 
 " By Jove ! " Pelham suddenly cried out. "I'm 
 glad indeed that I came to this place." 
 
 They weathered the cliff, and the noise of the 
 surf was lost. 
 
 Then Phrene pointed quietly to a figure which 
 was waiting for them on the terrace of the house. 
 
 Pelham drew near, and quivered a little as a 
 renewed desolation swept back into the calm he 
 had won. 
 
 Baddeley was waiting for them on the terrace, 
 and Baddeley was in khaki. 
 
 218
 
 XXII 
 
 ALL that Pelham had suffered, and much of what 
 he had successfully kept at bay during the last 
 three months in Devonshire returned upon him 
 now and threatened to submerge him. 
 
 Baddeley's sudden apparition in uniform hit 
 him sharply on a rawly sensitive place. It had 
 the air of being a stroke of Fate. He had fled from 
 London (he had to admit now that he had fled) ; 
 and still he was hunted hunted and struck again 
 just as he seemed to be escaping. 
 
 He fortified himself in a resolute anger. 
 
 " Curse Baddeley ! " he said, as he fumbled with 
 his tie. 
 
 He felt that Baddeley was an enemy who had 
 tracked him down. He thought of him as a creditor 
 who pursued a debt. 
 
 Baddeley had never yet been able to do 
 anything competently. His telegram must needs 
 go astray, and he must needs surprise them in 
 a martial costume for which none of them was 
 prepared. 
 
 Why had he come here, of all places ? How had 
 
 219
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 he come unfastened from his foolish wife ? Would 
 he make a proselyte of Graham ? Pelham began 
 to argue aloud, disjointedly, as he finished off his 
 civilian toilet. 
 
 " What is Baddeley to me ? ... Let Baddeley 
 be a warrior if it pleases him. ... I must warn 
 Phrene. . . . Graham is in rather a bad way. . . . 
 If Graham were to go ... That would be a nasty 
 
 one." 
 
 His mind went in a maddening circle ; and, as he 
 turned the handle of the door, he said to himself, 
 in a parting remark : 
 
 " Jimmy, you fool, you're not feeling very well. 
 You've got to pull yourself together." 
 
 He found Baddeley talking with Phrene in the 
 drawing-room. 
 
 Baddeley was offensively radiant. He had a 
 boisterous eye and a shining face. Pelham 
 examined him, morosely vigilant for opportunities 
 to be unkind. 
 
 " I like the life," Baddeley was saying, as Pelham 
 approached ; and Phrene asked, with the faintest 
 of irony : 
 
 " What exactly is that ? I mean what exactly 
 is it you call the life ? " 
 
 " He means forming fours and drinking tea out 
 of a pannikin," said Pelham. " After several years 
 
 220
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 in a Government office it must seem a dashing sort 
 of existence." 
 
 " It's doing me no end of good," said Baddeley in 
 perfect good humour. " I feel as fit as a fiddle." 
 
 Graham entered, and they went into the dining- 
 room. 
 
 Dinner was not a happy meal. Graham was 
 abstracted. Pelham was as nearly hysterical as 
 a man can be ; and Phrene was clouded. Baddeley, 
 on the other hand, could not talk enough. When 
 Phrene had left them he took his friends by main 
 force into his confidence. 
 
 " I suppose," he said, as the door was closed 
 behind Phrene, " that you fellows want to know 
 all about it." 
 
 There was a long silence, indecently blank. 
 
 " I mean," went on Baddeley, puffing happily 
 at his cigar, " you are quite naturally curious as to 
 why I have suddenly got into khaki." 
 
 " I suppose you've joined the army," Pelham 
 politely suggested. 
 
 " As you say, James," said Baddeley, unruffled. 
 " I have joined the army and " here he levelled 
 his cigar at Graham " I have saved my soul alive. 
 I'll tell you about it." 
 
 " You needn't, unless you like," Pelham assured 
 
 him. 
 
 221
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Jimmy," said Graham in a loud aside, 
 " Baddeley is our guest. If he wants to tell us 
 about his soul we can't very well prevent him. 
 Let Baddeley testify." 
 
 Baddeley watched them. 
 
 "I'm a bit slow," he said when Graham had 
 finished, " and doubtless lacking in that keen sense 
 of the ridiculous which is Jimmy's especial gift, 
 but I can read you fellows pretty well." 
 
 ' He has divination and the gift of tongues," 
 said Pelham. 
 
 Baddeley sipped his wine. 
 
 " I'm not going to prophesy," he quietly began, 
 "I'm simply pointing to myself. A few weeks 
 ago I was a comfortable clerk, absolutely settled. 
 There was no more adventure for me nothing but 
 good meals and an assured income. I had accepted 
 the life of a safe and respectable Government servant 
 of middle age. I loved the money I was saving. I 
 enjoyed my beef and beer. I read the best fiction, 
 and played a good game of chess. I lived the 
 life of a ' mean, sensual man ' and I was content." 
 
 He paused a moment. 
 
 " Even as these publicans," Pelham softly 
 interjected. 
 
 Baddeley suddenly rose from his chair. There 
 came almost a passion into his words. He had 
 
 222
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 begun in jest, but his Scottish blood was up. He 
 began to glow with an enthusiasm which was more 
 religious than he knew. Essentially, now, he was 
 bearing witness. 
 
 " I've broken loose," he continued ; " and it 
 was a hard thing to do. I make no secret 
 of that. Morally I was out of condition all 
 soft and pliable; I had to stop revolving upon 
 my own centre and to find another; and I tell 
 you fellows in perfect seriousness that I've begun 
 to understand what religious people mean by 
 conversion." 
 
 He paused, realising, half sheepishly, how serious 
 he had become. 
 
 There was no doubt at the last of his emotion 
 the fierce proselytising emotion of a Puritan Scot. 
 Graham shrank inwardly. Something in Pelham 
 leaped at the throat of the man who so flagrantly 
 preached at him. 
 
 He rose and stood beside the mantelpiece. 
 Baddeley, his hand shaking a little, flicked the ash 
 from his cigar, and sat down in his chair. Pelham 
 stood insolently at ease. 
 
 " Is that all you have to say ? " he asked of 
 Baddeley. 
 
 " I've said enough," said Baddeley. His fire 
 had gone out and he sat back smouldering. 
 
 223
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Very well," said Pelham. " Now we will talk 
 sense." 
 
 Graham stirred uneasily. He saw in Pelham 
 a temper he would be sorry to have loose upon a 
 guest. 
 
 " Suppose we drop it," he said. " Phrene will 
 wonder what's become of us." 
 
 " One moment," said Pelham. " I haven't much 
 to say. Baddeley has chosen to tell us about his 
 soul, and I'm going to put him right. He seems 
 to believe that he's sacrificing his ease on behalf of 
 an idea. He's doing nothing of the kind." 
 
 Baddeley sat up in his seat. Pelham was bring- 
 ing fuel to a fire which might otherwise have 
 gone out. Baddeley no longer smouldered. He 
 threatened to blaze, and Graham expected a scene. 
 He remembered how years ago these two men had 
 invariably enraged one another. 
 
 " Be careful, Jimmy," said Baddeley, gripping 
 the elbows of his chair. " No one knows better 
 than you that I'm simply doing what every fellow 
 ought to do." 
 
 " Let it alone," Graham expostulated. 
 
 " I want to explain to Baddeley," said Pelham, 
 " that he has deprived his country of the services 
 of an administrative expert and offered her instead 
 the services of a useless warrior." 
 
 224
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Admitting I might really have been more useful 
 in the Foreign Office," retorted Baddeley, " I should 
 have thought you at any rate might have left that 
 side of the matter severely alone." 
 
 " What exactly do you mean by that ? " asked 
 Pelham. 
 
 The question was a reflex from Baddeley 's thrust, 
 but Baddeley was quite willing to explain. 
 
 " You aren't exactly making yourself useful, are 
 you? " he said. 
 
 For an instant Graham thought that Pelham 
 would spring physically at his enemy. But Pelham 
 mastered himself, and said in a voice which he kept 
 with difficulty under control : 
 
 " I admit that, so far. as I am not employed under 
 Government, I am more liable than yourself to 
 join the army. But I haven't any very pressing 
 private reasons for doing so as a voluntary amateur 
 of war. I am quite aware that other people are 
 finding the war an excellent means of escape 
 from the tedium of home life, from the paralysis 
 of middle age, or from unfortunate domestic 
 embarrassments " 
 
 Baddeley reared like a whipped horse. 
 
 " Which of these things," he broke in, " do you 
 particularly apply to me ? " 
 
 " You may have them all if you like," said Pelham.
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " You say you left the Foreign Office to save your 
 soul. I think you might have saved your soul in 
 a more manly fashion than by bolting into the 
 army." 
 
 "I'm damned if I'll hear another word," said 
 Baddeley, rising in a passion. " Your devilish 
 tongue's about the limit." 
 
 " I've said some true things in my time," said 
 Pelham complacently ; " and I'll just add another 
 to the list." 
 
 Baddeley turned at the door. 
 
 " It's just this," said Pelham quietly. " If 
 ever I got into such a beastly state as 
 to regard a European war in the light of an 
 opportunity to save my wretched little soul, I 
 shouldn't go and shoot the Germans. I should 
 shoot myself." 
 
 But the door had shut upon Baddeley' s retreat. 
 Pelham, unable to halt immediately, continued, 
 ostensibly to Graham : 
 
 " Our guest has bolted again. He bolts into the 
 trenches because he hasn't the capacity to deal 
 with himself at home. And now he's bolted into 
 your drawing-room because he's afraid of hearing 
 the truth." 
 
 Graham had risen. 
 
 " Shall we go in ? " he said. 
 
 226
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Pelham, thus arrested, felt the life go out of him. 
 The two men saw in each other's eyes a secret which 
 neither would confess. 
 
 Graham abruptly switched ofi the light. 
 
 227
 
 XXIII 
 
 PELHAM in Phrene's drawing-room covered his 
 distraction as well as he could ; but the effort 
 became continually more impossible. Graham 
 drifted about the room, showing Baddeley some 
 of his things. Phrene at intervals played and 
 sang at the piano. 
 
 Pelham was struggling between two contrary 
 ideas. He was sure he had been strictly just to 
 Baddeley, but he wanted to apologise. 
 
 Then his thoughts began to fester inwardly. 
 He went to the window and drew the curtain. 
 
 The sea was falling under the moon in. loud surf 
 upon the pebbles. The rocks and the fishermen's 
 boats with their clear shadows were etched upon a 
 dazzling background, where wet shingle had been 
 left by a retreating tide. The tenuousness and grace 
 of the lit water offered relief to a shuttered brooding. 
 
 Pelham slipped out on to the terrace quietly 
 and went down to the sea. The noise of his steps 
 was soon lost in the noise of the water. He rounded 
 a rock left dry by the tide and sat in a sheltered 
 corner of the beach.
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 He emptied his mind of all thought, the better 
 to allow the monotony and power of the sea to 
 work upon him. He tried to lose all sense of his 
 particular self in a vague contemplation of universal 
 space and light and sound. He submitted to the 
 rhythm of the waves. He endeavoured to cut 
 himself away from the present, to abolish time, 
 and lose all sense of his confinement to an English 
 shore. The stern of a boat beached on the farther 
 side of the point he had rounded climbed to the 
 moon above him. A beaten and worn sail, furled 
 upon its mast, lay horizontally, and thrust at the 
 sea. It gave to the boat the appearance of a 
 rostrum. Was there anything here, indeed, to 
 suggest a later thing than Rome. He might have 
 sat thus under the walls of Tarentum, Carthage, or 
 Piraeus, to which cities by virtue of all he had 
 thought or read he as surely belonged as to the 
 land of his birth. 
 
 For a while there was nothing to disturb his quiet 
 mooning. Then, gradually, he became aware of 
 tiny intrusions into the swept house of his brain. 
 He hunted them through the chambers, and they 
 vanished, leaving him to dream again. But they 
 returned, little biting creatures, or forms that 
 were vague and large. It became a constant effort 
 to keep his mind clear of them. 
 
 229
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 At last into an interval of tranquillity broke the 
 rattle of stones and a cry of shingle pressed and 
 scattered. Pelham looked up, and saw Graham 
 walking beside the sea. 
 
 Pelham shrank into the shadow of the rock. He 
 had a horror of being found out there. 
 
 Graham stood looking towards the sea. He 
 seemed at last like an ebony statue, for he stood 
 so still and so long, and his shadow lay with the 
 shadows of the rocks. 
 
 At last he turned, and for the second time that 
 evening he and Pelham were face to face with the 
 truth. 
 
 Neither of them spoke. Graham came quietly 
 up the beach and flung himself down. 
 
 He played with the stones, building small castles, 
 childishly idle. 
 
 Then, suddenly, he swept his arm over what he 
 had built and looked at Pelham. 
 
 " Jimmy," he said, " the game's up. I'm 
 finished." 
 
 His voice forbade all further trifling. Pelham' s 
 first defensive impulse to misunderstand, and avoid 
 the threatened crisis, shrivelled under Graham's 
 steady look. 
 
 Pelham went directly to the point. 
 
 " Have you spoken to Phrene ? " he asked. 
 
 230
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Phrene will understand," said Graham quickly, 
 but there was no conviction in him. 
 
 " Phrene will not understand," said Pelham. 
 " At least you mustn't count upon it. Phrene is 
 really and in fact what you have only pretended 
 to be. The war for her means nothing more nor 
 less than fighting. She regards fighting as an 
 experience which every man ought to have. But 
 you have had it already. She will simply regard 
 you as deserting her for better fun elsewhere." 
 
 : ' Phrene will understand," persisted Graham. 
 
 " Phrene," said Pelham quietly, " understands 
 a good deal. But she will not understand why a 
 voluntary system of recruiting compels an English- 
 man to fight for England." 
 
 He paused ; but Graham had nothing to urge. 
 
 " We have no real right," Pelham went on, " to 
 expect that Phrene will comprehend instinctively 
 the mind of a Christian Englishman more par- 
 ticularly the mind of a Christian Englishman who 
 has always denied that he is anything of the kind ! 
 You've protested for months that the war is no 
 concern of yours. You've now got to convince 
 Phrene that it is." 
 
 Graham silently allowed the truth of this. 
 Pelham gripped him by the arm. 
 
 " Old boy," he said, " we're in the same boat. 
 
 231
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 We're getting rid of our dead selves; only your 
 dead self happens to be married." 
 
 There was another silence. Pelham caught 
 greedily at the keen relief of an unwonted frank- 
 ness, after months of avoidance. He wanted now 
 to invite and exchange confidences on the theme 
 from which for weeks past he had doubled like a 
 hare. 
 
 " When did it begin ? " he asked excitedly. 
 " When did you begin to know that the game 
 was up ? " 
 
 " I have known from the first," said Graham. 
 ' There was nothing to hold me back except 
 Phrene. I have thrown off the other trash." 
 
 Then he added hastily : "I don't mean there was 
 nothing in our views. But I've simply failed to live 
 up to them. They were one half pretence, and the 
 other half mere insolence. I thought I could be 
 magnificent and exceptional. But as soon as 
 something big came along I found myself pulled 
 along with the dear old multitude. I've either got 
 to ' fall in ' with the others or live uncomfortably 
 for the rest of my life." 
 
 Pelham, as he listened to Graham, heard the 
 voice of his own conscience proclaiming in open 
 terms lurking truths which obscurely had under- 
 mined his protesting wilfulness. The truth was 
 
 232
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 out at last under the sky. His relief was incredible. 
 He could have shouted. Why had he wrestled 
 so foolishly when at the last he was so gladly 
 beaten ? 
 
 ' Willoughby," he burst out, " you at least had 
 Phrene. But I have had nothing at all except 
 my own conceit." 
 
 " I've often wondered about you," said Graham, 
 looking at his friend. " I knew it was bound to be 
 with you rather an agonising affair. All your 
 brains were against you." 
 
 " Exactly," said Pelham. " And they won 
 crowning victories every time, their last engage- 
 ment ending in a complete discomfiture of 
 Baddeley. We might even call it a Pyrrhic 
 victory." 
 
 " And now," said Graham, rising from the stones, 
 " I take it you're going to look for a commission." 
 
 Pelham detected in his friend's voice an envy 
 that the problem for him should be so simple. He 
 took Graham's arm as they turned to walk up the 
 beach. He was anxious for his friend. 
 
 " Leave me out of it," he said, and then abruptly 
 added : 
 
 " What are you going to do yourself ? " 
 
 Graham did not answer. He seemed to be 
 listening.
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Above the sound of the sea, and dividing the 
 intimate thread of their talk, Pelham heard that 
 Phrene was singing. 
 
 They ascended to the terrace and entered the 
 house. 
 
 234
 
 XXIV 
 
 THE next morning Baddeley was due to leave by an 
 early train. Graham drove with him to the station, 
 and to Baddeley' s surprise Pelham, at the last 
 moment, also jumped into the fly. Pelham noted 
 the expression of his late antagonist. 
 
 " Don't be alarmed," he said cheerfully. "I'm 
 coming to apologise." 
 
 Baddeley looked more closely at Pelham and 
 saw a change in him. 
 
 " Is that aU ? " he asked. 
 
 " By no means," said Pelham. 
 
 His eyes were dancing with an amused confession. 
 
 " We shall meet on some stricken field," he added. 
 
 Baddeley turned to Graham. He did not intend 
 an inquiry, but it was written in his looks. Pelham 
 spoke for his friend. 
 
 "That's all right," he said. " WiUoughby is 
 also by way of being saved; but Willoughby" 
 here his voice sank under an affectionate solicitude 
 which redeemed his profaning of the text " but 
 Willoughby," he repeated, " has great possessions." 
 
 They did not speak again. Graham affected a 
 
 235
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 preoccupation with his horse. They topped the 
 steep hill which shut out the fast world of steam, 
 and began to run down into the valley. To Pelham 
 it seemed as though, after having retired into the 
 wilderness, they had suddenly come again within 
 reach of cities. The wayside station linked them 
 up with things. His decision of the night before, 
 from being a passionate interior experience, now 
 appeared concrete and prosaic. He would have 
 to make his arrangements. 
 
 When Baddeley had gone, and they were re- 
 turning over the hill, Pelham secretly wondered 
 whether Graham had yet said anything to Phrene. 
 He had watched her narrowly the night before, 
 after they had come in from the beach, and she 
 had puzzled him. She had smiled frequently, as 
 though she enjoyed a superior thought. 
 
 They had reached the summit of the cliff when 
 Graham spoke. His house lay far below. Graham 
 was going down to his problem. The smoke from 
 the village chimneys stood in the little valley like 
 grey stalagmites. 
 
 " I spoke to Phrene last night," said Graham at last. 
 
 Pelham waited, and Graham went on after a 
 pause : 
 
 " I spoke to her, and that's about all there is 
 to it." 
 
 236
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " But what did you say ? " asked Pelham. 
 
 " I said there was something we should have 
 to discuss." 
 
 "AndPhrene?" 
 
 " You noticed Phrene last night ? " 
 
 " I have never seen her more perfectly lovely." 
 
 ' Well, she smiled, and asked me to forget all 
 about it for twenty-four hours." 
 
 " I see," said Pelham; " and the rest is not for 
 publication." 
 
 They were silent again. Pelham wondered what 
 would happen when Phrene* s hour had struck. 
 He could not quite understand her now. Had she 
 simply petitioned for another perfect day ; or did 
 she hope that when Baddeley had gone she might 
 recover Graham? 
 
 He repeatedly asked that question through the 
 day. Phrene seemed to hold a secret, and to enjoy 
 herself inwardly. She looked frequently at Graham 
 with a teasing affection. At times she appeared to 
 Pelham like a woman who punishes a child. He 
 began to doubt whether they might not possibly 
 be misreading her. 
 
 The evening came with light, warm winds and 
 a late moon. Pelham did not want to leave 
 Graham before everything was settled ; but he 
 was also impatient to get away. 
 
 237
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 He had begun to think of Diana. He had 
 thought of her immediately on leaving Graham 
 the night before. 
 
 He was mastered by an intense reaction, the 
 result of his long resistance. When first he had 
 thought of Diana in his room at night a swift 
 abjection had flung him mentally upon his knees. 
 
 He had thought of her again when, after their 
 return from the station, he saw Graham and Phrene 
 again swimming in the sunlight. The feeling that 
 he made an unnecessary third in the intimate crisis 
 about to arise between them brought Diana in- 
 evitably to mind. He wondered at his late per- 
 versity. He had sold Diana for a song, though he 
 had secretly known she mattered most to him. 
 
 The evening passed, and Graham had not spoken. 
 They dined ; and after Phrene had left the dining- 
 room the two men walked silently on the terrace. 
 At last Pelham stopped abruptly. 
 
 " Willough," he said, " I'm going to write letters 
 in my room for at least two hours." 
 
 " I see," said Graham, " this is an outburst of 
 tact. Incidentally you are leading a horse to the 
 water." 
 
 Pelham walked quickly away, and Graham fell 
 back a while into his thoughts. 
 
 He had lately come to hate all that he had and 
 
 238
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 all that he was. Phrene alone remained. Yester- 
 day, when he was showing one of his treasures 
 to Baddeley, he had suddenly desired to dash it 
 violently to the ground. It represented, along 
 with his other treasures, ten years of ardent con- 
 noisseurship. It stood for exactly that personal 
 delicacy and distinction which had made for him 
 an ivory palace of art built high above common 
 rumour. It had set him aloof, and had flattered 
 his refinement. He had made himself very rare, 
 professing a creed which denied him a coarse 
 fellowship with the multitude. 
 
 And now he detested it all all except Phrene, 
 who, even though he closely associated her with the 
 wreck of his old ideas, mysteriously survived them. 
 He dreaded to lose one ray of her. That she would 
 consent without foolish anger or an evil grudge 
 he knew well enough. But he could not believe 
 that she would gladly consent. He could not hope 
 that he would carry her good will with him. She 
 had held herself curiously aloof from his misgivings. 
 She had seemed simply to watch him. She eluded 
 his efforts to implicate her one way or the other. 
 Frequently he had found her anxious, sometimes 
 he had detected in her a muffled rebellion, and at 
 other times he had suspected a lurking amusement. 
 
 Last night she had simply used her power, with 
 
 239
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 a curiously bitter delight in his subjection, to make 
 him put aside his purpose. She desired to be once 
 more acknowledged ; he had never known her more 
 intoxicating. 
 
 Pelham, as if in a whimsical insistence upon the 
 crudity of his late hint, had walked, not into the 
 house to write letters, but down to the beach to 
 enjoy the sea. Graham, going in the opposite 
 direction, found Phrene in her furs, waiting for 
 him at the door of the drawing-room. 
 
 " You must take me to the top of the cliff," she 
 said, as he came within speaking distance. ' The 
 night is too lovely." 
 
 " You will be cold," said Graham, wrapping the 
 furs more closely about her. 
 
 " Then you can get me another cloak." 
 
 Graham went into the house and upstairs into 
 Phrene' s room. It was a room that expressed her, 
 lit with colour and heavily fragrant with masses of 
 cut flowers. As he went out of the room to meet 
 his reckoning with her he looked about him in a 
 weak farewell. 
 
 They climbed a deep lane to the top of the cliff. 
 The dog roses shone in masses. There was a smell 
 of wet earth, and last year's growth decayed and 
 enriching its former soil. The sea met them at the 
 top with a faint noise of the tide, with a wide 
 
 240
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 expanse of water crossed by a wrinkled wake of 
 moon, and with ghostly lines of surf running in a 
 sudden hurry up the shingle. 
 
 They stood in a shadow of a high rock worn 
 smooth and round as a castle keep by centuries 
 of wind and rain. The perfection of what they saw 
 might well have absorbed them. But to Graham 
 there was something unlawful in the pleasure he 
 still derived from it. His pleasure seemed to require 
 a sanction. He remembered a desolate moment 
 of the night before when suddenly his possession 
 of Phrene when most it was perfect had also 
 seemed to be unauthorised and incomplete. Why 
 could he no longer feel that their life together was 
 enough ? Then, in swift amazement, he realised 
 that Phrene was uttering his own prevailing 
 thought. 
 
 " Why is it impossible simply to enjoy things ? " 
 she said. She was looking to the sea. 
 
 He turned to her, and Graham was suddenly 
 aware that his problem no longer existed. He 
 could hardly believe it. He asked for confirmation. 
 
 " You mean ? " he began. 
 
 " I mean why cannot we be satisfied with all 
 this ? Is it because we have never paid for it ? 
 Is it because we have never risked or suffered 
 anything ? " 
 
 Q 241
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 ; ' Then you too " Graham began. 
 
 But in surprise and humiliation he stopped short. 
 He realised he had never once in these last months 
 seen things as Phrene had seen them. He had been 
 ludicrously wrong about her. He had seen only 
 his own side. He knew now that Phrene had a 
 deeper reading of what was asked of them. 
 
 She looked at him as he abruptly stopped. She 
 read his abasement and forgave him for his failure. 
 But she was not immediately appeased. She 
 began the longest speech of her life. 
 
 " I have a right to be angry," she said, " and I 
 see that you admit it. You have thought of me 
 during these last months as simply standing in the 
 way. You have absurdly divided your life into 
 two parts. You have begun to acknowledge 
 another loyalty than your loyalty to me ; but you 
 don't yet understand even now what you are 
 doing. You imagine that you are turning away 
 from all this" she put out her hand towards the 
 sea " and that you are, in a sense, deserting me. 
 That simply means that I am not yet really your 
 wife. I am one of your possessions, like all those 
 things down there in the house. But" here she 
 profoundly smiled, proud of her deep knowledge 
 " but I know better than that. You are not leaving 
 the things which have made our life so happy ; and 
 
 242
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 you are not turning away from me. You are going 
 to put a new meaning into all these things. You 
 are going to discover that I am, indeed, your wife. 
 Last night we were only half in touch ; and I nearly 
 succeeded it was a bitter triumph in making 
 you forget your resolution to be entirely yourself. 
 Henceforth you will know me better, or not at all. 
 You are going to discover that there is in these 
 hills, and in that water, and in me also, something 
 which you have not yet seen. You are not turning 
 away from your past. You are going to discover 
 it." 
 
 She paused. Graham almost rose to the level 
 of her sibylline mood. He had never so com- 
 pletely realised her strangeness her ability, not at 
 all English, to express herself in speech and gesture 
 with an impressive opulence. He could have 
 kneeled to her. 
 
 " I do not know," she went on after a pause that 
 seemed to be bridged inaudibly, " why it should be 
 necessary to put a thing in peril before we are able 
 to value it. I simply know that I would rather 
 have you go away from me now, and have you 
 never return, than I would have you spend a 
 hundred years with me here and never go at all. 
 For, even if you never returned, you would 
 have given to the days we have already had an 
 
 243
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 immortality. I could not have said these things in 
 this way a week ago. I rebelled at first and insisted 
 upon the things we had. I opposed the necessity 
 to pay. But I found that by refusing to surrender 
 the things we had we should soon result in having 
 nothing at all to surrender. Things are worth 
 nothing till we are ready to lose them." 
 
 She ended, and Graham, amazed and shaken at 
 the way in which she had grown out of his know- 
 ledge, was some time before he could measure how 
 far she had transcended him. Finally he caught 
 for reassurance at the idea that at least their ways 
 had, unknown to him, lain parallel. 
 
 " You too have struggled," he said at last. 
 " And you too have come to see that we cannot 
 escape the sacrifice." 
 
 "It is not a sacrifice," Phrene corrected him. 
 " It is a fulfilment." 
 
 Then, to them both, the name they gave to the 
 act no longer mattered. They were now agreed. 
 They had come, by the same emotional way, to 
 their decision the way already taken by thousands 
 of men and women in England, swiftly or gradually, 
 deliberately or unaware, articulately or without a 
 word equally the way of a patriot sacrificing to 
 his country or of a homeless Greek who had no 
 country and regarded sacrifice as an evil thing. 
 
 244
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Graham had reached with Phrene that night a 
 height where many philosophies have met before. 
 Epicurus leads his disciples to the same austere 
 necessity as the Nazarene. 
 
 They walked together for a while upon the cliff. 
 This was their most perfect hour. Now that the 
 thing was settled, and Graham knew that Phrene 
 was the comrade of his enterprise, he found that 
 his senses were opened afresh to the light of the 
 sea and the smell of the land. Each moment 
 passed, rounded and complete. He discovered 
 that the gorse beside them was in flower, that the 
 turf sprang under his foot, that Phrene' s dress 
 had gathered leaves from the hedge. This was his 
 reward. The earth was again his own, now that 
 he was ready to surrender it. For months he had 
 deliberately caught at every small thing in nature 
 in order to escape the imperious call of a prompter 
 within himself, and Nature had denied him. She 
 had blunted his senses and put over the world a 
 veil which obscured her. But the veil was now 
 withdrawn and Nature was transfigured. Phrene 
 was right. He had not really turned away from 
 the world. He was setting out to discover the 
 world. 
 
 At a turn of the lane, as at last they began to go 
 down to the sea, he caught Phrene by the hands 
 
 245
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 and looked at her for a time in silence. He saw 
 the mist upon her hair, the line of her cheek against 
 the hedge, the escape of her foot from the caught 
 folds of her dress. When he had looked at her for 
 a moment he released her hands and they went 
 on down the hill. He did not desire to make love 
 to her. Their mood was beyond it. 
 
 They walked on to the fresh rustle of the night 
 air, the stir of leaves and grasses, the scent of farm 
 and field. The lane wound inland for a short 
 distance to avoid a bluff of the headland, and they 
 had lost for some time their view of the village. 
 
 An acrid smell of burning lingered here which 
 reminded Graham of many an autumn smouldering 
 and for the moment defeated his vernal impulses. 
 
 Then the village came into view, and they stopped 
 in swift astonishment at what they saw. 
 
 A dense mass of smoke was pouring from the 
 windows of Graham's house. The servants were 
 hurrying to and fro, removing the furniture into 
 the garden, and fishermen from the village were 
 rushing into every open door and window with 
 water. 
 
 The whole scene was lit by the moon, striking 
 upon the outer smoke, which was blown and 
 shredded into white and fleecy masses towards 
 the sea. Graham had not yet recovered from his 
 
 246
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 amazement when a bright tongue of flame curled 
 venomously out of one of the higher windows. 
 
 They stood without speaking for several minutes ; 
 and saw that the fire was out of hand. Tiny jets 
 of water from the hose were clearly making no 
 impression. The building was richly timbered and 
 the nearest fire station was three miles away over 
 the hill. 
 
 Graham's first instinct on recovering from his 
 first surprise was to hurry down the hill. He 
 started forward, but Phrene put her hand upon his 
 arm, detaining him. 
 
 He understood. She was looking intently down 
 at the hurry and confusion beneath her, absorbed 
 by the significance of the burning house. Already 
 the flames were entirely claiming it, and disputing 
 with the moonlight. Why should they spoil their 
 present hour with fretting to save a few material 
 shreds of the past ? Graham saw Pelham actively 
 directing the salvage so that in any case he him- 
 self could personally do very little. 
 
 They remained upon the hill-side watching, as it 
 seemed, their past life eaten and vanishing. Upon a 
 silver background of sea, and of rocks and hedges 
 turned black and bold by the fierce new light of the 
 fire, their home stood out in fiery red and black. 
 The tiny figures hurrying to and fro upon the lawn 
 
 247
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 seemed to Graham in their ineffectual and busy zeal 
 to resemble the little dark thoughts which in his 
 own mind had darted about the inner citadel of his 
 past during the long weeks of his indecision. All 
 their hurry was of no avail to save what an elemental 
 force had so obviously mastered. He could almost 
 have shouted down the hill to bid these restless 
 figures stand back, and no longer fussily oppose the 
 inevitable. 
 
 That was Phrene's window out of which the 
 last great flame had roared. He remembered his 
 farewell as he had left it not two hours ago. He 
 knew now how ignoble was his former pang a pang 
 which had sprung out of his ignorance of Phrene 
 and his disloyal conception of his pleasure in her as 
 something thwarted by his call to a finer manhood. 
 Yet it was difficult to repress a sudden sinking of 
 the heart when he thought of that fragrant and 
 haunted room blistered and distorted in the fire. 
 
 He turned to Phrene, but saw in her no trace of 
 his own misgiving. 
 
 The men upon the lawn now stood back and 
 watched. There was no more to be done. Burn- 
 ing beams were already falling, and at each fall 
 the flames leaped and quivered. Masses of flames 
 were suddenly detached from the fire and snatched 
 into the air. Graham's moment of regret passed 
 
 248
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 rapidly. He caught the mood of Phrene, who 
 stood with her hands clasped in front of her, taking 
 in every detail of the burning in her strangely vivid 
 way. He began to rejoice in this amazingly apt 
 and lovely presentment, in the concrete, of his 
 interior drama. 
 
 By the time his house was ready to collapse in 
 a fiery splendour Graham shared to the full the 
 rapture of Phrene. When the moment came and 
 the walls seemed suddenly to crumble and the roof 
 to fall they looked at one another in the red light, 
 possessed by the same inexpressible thought. The 
 torch of their epithalamium was burning to an 
 end; and in the swiftly fading light they were 
 conscious as they went down the hill that they 
 had entered into a second marriage. 
 
 249
 
 XXV 
 
 AGNES did not live long in the solitary rooms in 
 Mortimer Street. Kenneth John insisted within 
 a week of her perching there that she should 
 come and stay with Monica until Rivers returned. 
 Neither he nor any of her friends took a tragic 
 view of the accident which had parted her suddenly 
 from Rivers. 
 
 For several days no news of Rivers came. Then 
 they heard, in a heavily censored letter, that he 
 was under orders to accept a special charge in an 
 attack that was preparing. An immediate return 
 was out of the question. 
 
 Agnes took the news bravely enough at first. 
 She was proud, and even happy, to abstain from 
 any signal of distress. 
 
 Between Agnes and Monica a warm friendship 
 sprang up. Upon the side of Agnes it was based 
 upon the comfort she derived from a more level 
 temperament. Monica, on the other hand, divined 
 in Agnes a latent hysteria which appealed to her for 
 assurance and protection. She intuitively feared 
 for the future of Agnes, and secretly wished, for 
 
 250
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 no reason she could definitely give, that Kivers 
 would soon return. 
 
 As the days went by Agnes began to look with 
 a keener expectation for more news, and to feel 
 correspondingly disappointed when no news came 
 beyond brief assurances that all was well. She 
 had hot fits of joy, out of all reason, followed 
 by desolate reactions. There were times when the 
 cold shadow of formal years in her father's house 
 fell across her memory and filled her with mis- 
 giving. She exaggerated her secret outlawry, and 
 felt herself menaced by things unknown. 
 
 Sometimes she came almost to the point of send- 
 ing Rivers an urgent summons. She even came to 
 wonder whether Monica guessed what had happened 
 in the house-boat, or whether she would not be 
 deeply scandalised if she were told of it. She some- 
 times found it hard to resist a quite gratuitous 
 impulse to confess. 
 
 Then she heard from Rivers that he was to be 
 moved to a quiet section of the line, and that he 
 would soon be reasonably able to ask for leave. 
 It was three months since he had gone down the 
 river from Maidenhead. 
 
 The day after Agnes had received her letter 
 John had a scrawl from Rupert Smith. Rivers 
 had been struck down upon the day immediately 
 
 251
 
 preceding his removal. John brought the news 
 to Monica as they were changing for dinner, and 
 together they contemplated their terrible task as 
 Agnes chattered with an almost painful excitement 
 through an endless meal. Monica accepted the 
 duty as her own, and John after dinner went to his 
 study. 
 
 Agnes had that evening a feverish radiance. Now 
 that the burden had rolled away she realised how 
 heavy it had lain. A constriction had been re- 
 moved. She breathed as she had not breathed 
 before. She could not now deny that a curious fear 
 had oppressed her a fear which was almost a 
 physical thing. The removal of this fear impelled 
 her to an excess of joy in which she could hardly 
 keep her secret. She could only with difficulty 
 abstain from sharing with others the comedy which 
 she and Rivers were about to play in derision of 
 the rules. 
 
 " I am to be married to my own husband," she 
 told herself, and she laughed with tears in her 
 eyes. 
 
 Monica had long suspected something queerly 
 hidden in Agnes. She had even questioned John 
 as to what exactly had happened on the evening 
 when Rivers had been called away. Agnes had 
 not behaved like a woman whose marriage had 
 
 252
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 merely been postponed. At any rate that post- 
 ponement had, for her, been a very vital experience. 
 
 Now that the time had come for Monica to deliver 
 her news, she was more than ever struck by her 
 friend's behaviour. She instinctively felt that the 
 message she had to deliver would mean for Agnes 
 something different from the simple news that her 
 betrothed had been killed in action. 
 
 They talked at first of trivial things, Monica 
 desperately wondering how she could approach 
 her task. She found the openings so rare, and 
 so swiftly closed, as Agnes went from subject to 
 subject, that she at last resolved to rush into the 
 delivery of her message at the next opportunity, 
 however slender it seemed. 
 
 Suddenly she realised that Agnes was talking 
 of the casualty lists. Monica's heart stopped as 
 she heard her friend speaking with a dreadful 
 distinctness and relevance. 
 
 " You know, Monica, I once imagined that 
 everyone first heard of their people being killed by 
 looking in the papers. And I used to wonder how 
 a woman would feel suddenly and without warning 
 to find the name there of the man who mattered." 
 
 " Agnes dear " Monica began. 
 
 She could not control her voice, and Agnes, even 
 in the midst of her racing monologue, was arrested. 
 
 253
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 She looked across at Monica, and saw something 
 in Monica's face that startled her. She waited. 
 
 " How do you think a woman ought to feel? " 
 said Monica. 
 
 Agnes was struck serious. 
 
 " I don't think she would feel at all," she answered. 
 
 " I know how I should feel," said Monica, " I 
 should feel proud." 
 
 " Are you quite sure of that ? I think the pride 
 would come afterwards." 
 
 " You mustn't say that, Agnes dear. Pride is 
 the first thing the greatest thing of all." 
 
 Agnes was suddenly frightened. Why mustn't 
 she say this or that ? She had begun to receive 
 her message. 
 
 Her eyes were full of fear as Monica came quickly 
 towards her. 
 
 " Tell me, tell me," Agnes whispered. " What 
 has happened ? " 
 
 There was a short silence, during which Agnes 
 divined the truth. Monica was terrified by an 
 increasing pain in the eyes which questioned her. 
 
 Suddenly Agnes stood up in her place, tightly 
 drawn to her full height, her fists clenched to her 
 sides. 
 
 " Tell me outright," she said. " You have heard 
 something. He is dead." 
 
 254
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Monica took her by the arms, and tried to make 
 her sit down. 
 
 " Agnes dear," she pleaded, " let me help you 
 to bear it." 
 
 But Agnes did not hear. She all at once had 
 three clear and separated thoughts. They had the 
 distinctness of things printed, and they stood out 
 upon a background of absolute darkness. She saw 
 them as in a schedule : 
 
 " I have lost him. 
 
 " I am not married. 
 
 " I am going to have a child." 
 
 255
 
 XXVI 
 
 AGNES, in the fever that followed her collapse, was 
 watched continually by Monica. Monica did not 
 need the doctor's diagnosis to reveal to her the full 
 truth. She had known it from the moment she had 
 laid Agnes upon the sofa and rung for help ; and 
 she knew more than she liked to know as the nighfc 
 wore on and Agnes spoke, out of her fever, of the 
 interior life through which she had lately passed. 
 Frequently, in order that she might not hear what 
 Agnes was saying, she busied her mind with plans 
 for making things as easy as she could for her friend 
 in the months to come. She wondered whether 
 Agnes would have the courage to accept her position 
 reasonably and quietly when she was well enough 
 to realise it. 
 
 Then, after several anxious days, Monica one 
 morning saw that Agnes was calmly awake and 
 watching her. The sunlight made a pattern on 
 the floor, and the room was cheerful with flowers. 
 Monica crossed to the bed, but Agnes was the first 
 to speak. 
 
 " I suppose you know all about me now, 
 Monica." 
 
 256
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 ' Yes, dear. But you're not allowed to 
 talk." 
 
 " I'm going to have a child, Monica. Do you 
 know that ? " 
 
 " My orders," said Monica, " are strict. You're 
 not to worry." 
 
 "I'm not worrying," protested Agnes. 
 
 " I think I have always known what would 
 happen," she continued. " That is why I kept him 
 with me. Then, afterwards, I got into a panic. 
 That was my father. But I am free of my 
 father now. I sha'n't be afraid again." 
 
 She then went quietly to sleep. 
 
 One of the first visitors to see Agnes during her 
 convalescence was her brother Henry. 
 
 The death of Rivers had already been published, 
 and Rupert, home again upon leave, had shown it 
 to Henry. Henry had received the news with a 
 sharp pang for his sister's sake. Rupert, moreover, 
 charged him with a mission. Rupert had been with 
 Rivers at the time of his death, and had received 
 from his friend a message with regard to Agnes. 
 Rivers had died upon Rupert's promise to look 
 particularly to his sister. Rupert, before he visited 
 Agnes, wanted to know whether she were fit to 
 receive him. He feared lest the ordeal of their 
 meeting, and the explanations, coming hard upon 
 R 257
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 the news itself, would be too much for her. Henry 
 had undertaken to inquire at Monica's house. 
 
 Agnes welcomed him gladly, propped among 
 the pillows. 
 
 " It was good of you to come," she said. " But 
 I am through with it now. I'm just going to get 
 strong again." 
 
 She paused, and her eyes, unnaturally large above 
 their dark rings, were looking at some hidden thing. 
 
 " Henry," she said quietly, " does father know 
 anything about the night Bob went away ? " 
 
 " Not that I know of," said Henry, a little 
 awkwardly. 
 
 He was surprised that Agnes should herself allude 
 to this. He continued : 
 
 " He, of course, knows nothing about our meeting 
 in the house-boat." 
 
 After a short silence Agnes, with the calm of an 
 invalid, drifting along her train of thought, said : 
 
 " Father will have to know about it, Henry." 
 
 Henry for a moment had lost the thread. Then, 
 when he had recovered it, he had to pause a moment 
 before grasping the significance of his sister's remark. 
 She watched him with a mild curiosity. She had 
 so entirely conquered her misgiving that she had 
 a kind of subdued pleasure in waiting for the 
 effect upon her brother of her implication. 
 
 258
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Henry' s first thoughts were mere confusion. Then 
 he was seized with a deep solicitude for his sister. 
 Finally he realised her present mood with an 
 astonishment which overpowered every other 
 emotion. His comment was mere ejaculation: 
 
 " Well," he foolishly exclaimed, " you're a 
 very cool young woman ! " 
 
 Agnes smiled. She had followed the succession 
 of her brother's thoughts, and she therefore 
 was not offended by the banality of his final 
 remark. 
 
 " I wasn't always so cool," she said. " I was 
 terrified at first. And the curious thing is 
 that I was terrified before I knew. But now I 
 have something to live for. Besides, I have 
 found such wonderful friends. I feel safe with 
 Monica." 
 
 Henry wondered why he had so utterly 
 neglected his sister. 
 
 " Agnes," he said, "I've been a brute, don't you 
 think?" 
 
 " How ? " 
 
 " Well, I never really worried about you till 
 Rupert came to my rooms this morning. He 
 showed me the Roll of Honour." 
 
 " Agnes eagerly sat up in bed." 
 
 " Is Rupert home, then ? " 
 
 259
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Rupert's a wounded soldier. He was with 
 Bob in the last advance." 
 
 " Then he can tell me about it." 
 
 " I've arranged with Monica to bring him here 
 to-morrow." 
 
 " Why not to-night ? " 
 
 " Rupert has to go to Brighton to-day for a 
 Medical Board. Besides, I'm dining with father 
 to-night, Agnes." 
 
 Agnes clasped her hands. 
 
 " Oh, Henry. Is it a victory ? " 
 
 Henry's eyes lit with a sombre satisfaction. 
 
 " Yes, Agnes, I fancy it is a victory. I've had 
 a letter. It simply calls me to a business interview. 
 I think I know what it means. You see I've been 
 getting into touch with the Ordnance Department. 
 It is now admitted that the system of private 
 contract has broken down. Another strike is 
 threatened at the works, and I believe that father 
 has been warned of the intention of the Government 
 to control certain picked establishments." 
 
 Agnes had a pang of sentiment. She saw her 
 father grey-haired, deserted and beaten. She 
 thought of the desolate, large house stripped of its 
 children, and the big table with its solid china and 
 glass and metal lying vastly between her parents. 
 
 " Poor father ! " she sighed. 
 260
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Henry arrested her quickly. 
 
 " I shouldn't waste your pity if I were you," he 
 said. " He's had his wicked run, and it's up to us 
 to undo as much as we can of his bad work." 
 
 Agnes was startled by the vehemence of her 
 brother. 
 
 " Henry," she said, " I believe you're going to 
 be the hardest of the family. Rupert's hard 
 enough where father's concerned. But I think 
 you're going to be harder." 
 
 " I've got to make up for arrears," said Henry, 
 grimly shutting his mouth in a way his father had. 
 " Anything I can do to smash the vile work I and 
 my family have done during the last half-century 
 will at once be put in hand. I can assure you of 
 that." 
 
 He paused a moment, and saw that Agnes was 
 tired. 
 
 "I'm shouting at you like an orator," he said, 
 " which isn't sensible. I shall want all my steam 
 to-night. Father isn't defeated yet by any 
 
 means." 
 
 " Suppose" Agnes hesitated " suppose he asks 
 after me. What will you say ? " 
 
 " I shall say sha'n't I? that you're well and 
 happy." 
 
 " That will do very well," said Agnes, faintly 
 
 261
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 closing her eyes. " But don't lose your temper, 
 Harry." 
 
 She added inconsequently : 
 
 " I wonder what father would say if he knew all 
 there is to know." 
 
 Henry shrank a little. He heard in imagination 
 his father's inevitable and curt description of his 
 sister's conduct. 
 
 " He will learn nothing from me," said Henry. 
 
 262
 
 XXVII 
 
 HENRY dismissed his cab that evening at some 
 distance from the house in Fitz John's Avenue. 
 It was a fine evening ; and summer, almost at the 
 full, pushing its way into London, had filled the 
 town with blossom. But Henry wanted, not so 
 much to enjoy the summer as to prepare himself 
 for the meeting with his father. 
 
 He could not easily overthrow the habit of a 
 lifetime. The coming interview roused in him 
 an ingrained and customary trepidation. He was 
 sure of himself and of his case. His apprehension 
 was simply of nerves ; but it was strong enough to 
 make him feel the need of all his weapons. 
 
 Why had his father summoned him? Was he 
 to be offered some sort of compromise an alliance 
 upon terms ? Or was his father simply in need of 
 information ? The old man must surely know of 
 his son's correspondence with the authorities ? 
 
 Henry shut his lips more firmly together. He 
 was filled with the ardour of a man converted. He 
 was going to meet, not his father, but a Prince 
 of Darkness, behind whom was ranked industrial 
 
 263
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 England. Of industrial England he was ready to 
 talk at length. 
 
 How would his father meet him as a man 
 subdued by the event, or as a man ready to break 
 rather than yield ? He could not imagine his father 
 as yielding an inch in argument or practice. If his 
 father had said that high explosive could not hurt 
 a man Henry could conceive him as standing at 
 the mouth of a gun and continuing to assert the 
 harmlessness of high explosive while the opposing 
 gunner made ready to prove the contrary upon his 
 flesh and blood. 
 
 Henry had arrived at his father's house. He 
 ascended the steps and pulled at the iron bell 
 handle. The beating of his heart surprised him. 
 
 His mother was in the drawing-room. He had 
 curiously forgotten his mother. All her children 
 tended to forget her, since first the long feud began 
 between the older and the younger generation in 
 Fitz John's Avenue. They regarded her as some- 
 one attached to their father; and, except in 
 occasional kindness, not to be distinguished. There 
 were times when she seemed to them forlorn 
 when they compassionately remembered her as a 
 pale and patient attendant upon their enemy. 
 Then they would call at the house and speak to 
 her nicely. 
 
 264
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Henry had not thought of her in connection with 
 the present crisis, no more than Agnes, that morning, 
 had thought of her in connection with her own 
 event. On seeing her, however, in the large room, 
 Henry fed afresh his hostility to his father upon his 
 mother's desolation. It was a desolation the more 
 penetrating owing to the innocence of the victim. 
 His mother did not feel her tragedy ; and by that 
 its extent was measured. The placid years of her 
 absolute acceptance of her husband's will years 
 absorbed in the decorous administration of his house 
 and family had atrophied all the nerves whereby 
 tragedy can make itself felt. Even as Henry came 
 towards her across the big room she perceived, on 
 rising to greet him, a piece of white thread upon the 
 carpet, picked it up and threw it into the fire. 
 Something stabbed at Henry as he saw her do this. 
 
 " Well, mother," he said, kissing her upon a 
 lightly offered cheek, " how are you ? " 
 
 " Very well, Henry dear," she said, as though she 
 answered what was simply a polite formula. She 
 fingered an ornament on the table, and arranged it 
 more symmetrically. 
 
 " Your father will be down soon," she added. 
 
 It was a phrase very familiar to Henry. For 
 visitors, or for her own children, it was invariable. 
 Their father would be down soon. Meantime she 
 
 265
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 would do her best to meet a gap which could never 
 be adequately filled. 
 
 Henry was shaken with a savage desire to find in 
 her a spark of rebellion. 
 
 " Father can wait," he curtly said. " I want to 
 hear about yourself." 
 
 " About me ? What is it you want to know ? " 
 
 What indeed was it that he wanted to know? 
 He wanted to know why she was content to let 
 herself be robbed of her children ; how she could go 
 on living in this empty house ; whether she never 
 felt lost and comfortless ; how she could persevere 
 in her monstrous allegiance to a man in whom he 
 had never once detected a spark of affection or 
 respect for her. He wanted suddenly to know all 
 these things. But he said : 
 
 " Suppose you tell me about the rheumatism." 
 
 ' Thank you, Henry. I've been very comfortable 
 these last few days, which is a great blessing, for 
 the maids have been very troublesome. Mary has a 
 young man at the war, and he's been home on leave. 
 She stayed away from the house all last night. Of 
 course I wanted to dismiss her. But your father 
 only laughed. He says that there will be no more 
 English family life after the war." 
 
 " Doubtless things will be a little different," said 
 Henry. 
 
 266
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 He looked at his mother, tranquilly knitting, 
 quite unconscious of any sinister significance in the 
 phrase she had used. She had tried English family 
 life upon a large scale, and she did not even know 
 that she had failed. 
 
 " Everything seems to be changing," his mother 
 restfully continued. " I had to give two shillings 
 a pound for hake this morning, and the fishmonger 
 was unable to send it to the house." 
 
 Henry rose impatiently. 
 
 " Yes, mother. And poor Bob Kivers was killed 
 in Flanders seven days ago, and Rupert " 
 
 " Yes, Henry. Rupert came to see me this 
 morning. It was a great surprise for me, you may 
 be sure. He looked so well and hearty in spite 
 of his wounded arm. He wanted to know what I 
 had done with Agnes." 
 
 " Well, mother, what have you done with Agnes ? " 
 
 " Why, my dear boy, I haven't, of course, done 
 anything with Agnes. I believe she's staying 
 with Mrs Kenneth John in Golders Green." 
 
 " Aren't you at all anxious about her ? " 
 
 Mrs Smith looked up in mild surprise from her 
 knitting. 
 
 " Why should I be anxious ? " she asked. " Your 
 father has told me not to worry about it. But 
 
 Henry saw upon his mother's face the small 
 
 267
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 flutter of dutiful preparation which always heralded 
 his father's approach. It began in a slight tremor 
 of the lips, and ended in her eyes an almost 
 imperceptible expression of alertness and strain. 
 
 " But here is your father," she concluded. 
 
 Henry had already seen him out of the side of 
 his eye. He came forward with that sardonic 
 affectation of hospitality which Henry had so often 
 witnessed as the prelude of a vigorous offensive. 
 
 " Well, my boy," he said, " come along and 
 have some food. I' ve had a heavy day, an unusually 
 heavy day." 
 
 They went into the dining-room, and they dined. 
 Henry detected malice in the way they dined. 
 The soup was rich and plentiful. The fish was 
 itself a meal. The capon was fattened to perfection. 
 Mr Smith, with napkin well tucked in at the neck, 
 literally discussed these things with an insolent 
 satisfaction, in which Henry found himself mocked 
 and challenged without an opportunity of rejoinder. 
 Mr Smith radiated the assumption that, after a 
 successful and deserving day, he had won the right 
 to dine as he chose, and to hold the earth to ransom. 
 
 " Just a little more clove in the bread sauce, 
 Harry, don't you think ? " 
 
 He looked at Henry over a loaded fork. His 
 eyes danced with a hard amusement. Henry had 
 
 268
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 already stirred under the prod of his father's 
 mockery. 
 
 " I don't know," said Henry. " Does it enor- 
 mously matter, do you think ? " 
 
 " It matters enormously to me," retorted Mr 
 Smith, sipping at an excellent Burgundy. 
 
 " Cloves are scarce," mildly observed Mrs 
 Smith. 
 
 " But money's plentiful, my dear," countered her 
 husband. " At least I find it extremely plentiful; 
 and so, apparently, does the Government. The 
 Government seems to believe in the old maxim 
 that breakages are good for trade. We're all going 
 to be rich and prosperous, and the Government is 
 going to be richest of all. That's why they don't 
 think it necessary to tax us eh, Henry ? They're 
 going into business themselves, and they're going 
 to make so much money that they will be able to 
 pay everybody five per cent, for the necessary 
 accommodation. 
 
 " The taxes will come," said Henry briefly. 
 
 The dinner wore uncomfortably to an end. 
 Henry wished he had stipulated for a merely 
 business interview. He was at the end of his 
 patience when his father, in place of his customary 
 nod, said to Mrs Smith : 
 
 " Now, my dear, run away to your own 
 
 269
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 apartments. Henry and I are going to talk over 
 some business." 
 
 Henry went with his mother to the door and 
 closed it after her. He came back to the table. 
 Mr Smith was trimming and lighting a cigar. His 
 manner was insolently confidential. Henry flamed 
 out into an anger which he could no longer control. 
 He felt instinctively that his father, with a wicked 
 skill, was treating him in this casual way in order 
 to retain the advantage of his years and prestige. 
 His father's affected, sub-current amusement dis- 
 concerted him. He hotly resolved to end it. He 
 remained standing beside the table while his father 
 quizzed him from above the spirit lamp at which 
 he was lighting his cigar. 
 
 " Well, Harry," he said, " what are you going 
 to do about it ? " 
 
 Henry clenched his hands upon the back of his 
 chair. 
 
 " Drop it, father," he said, and immediately 
 felt how absurdly boyish he was. 
 
 " You've had your dinner, and you've had your 
 fun, such as it is," Henry went on. " I want to 
 know now why you've sent for me. Either you 
 treat me seriously, or I'll say good-night and save 
 my temper." 
 
 " Save your temper by all means, Harry. I'm 
 
 270
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 going to treat you very seriously indeed. In fact 
 I'm going to treat you as my immediate and sole 
 inheritor." 
 
 Henry felt the ground slipping from under him. 
 What sort of a victory was this ? There was no 
 sign of defeat in the old man. Mr Smith's hard 
 blue eyes invited him with amused irony to a 
 friendly council. His chin had the old aggressive 
 thrust, and the mouth was set firm in a grim, con- 
 templative smile. Henry impertinently remembered 
 that Agnes that morning had pitied this invincible 
 old man who seemed just now to be admitting he 
 was beaten. Henry still held himself erect. 
 
 " I don't understand you at all," he said. 
 
 " That's what we're here to remedy, my boy. 
 You're here, among other things, to learn that I've 
 decided to retire from business. I left the factory 
 this morning for the last time. You can go there 
 yourself to-morrow, and do what you like with it. 
 You have my free permission to blow it up, burn 
 it down, sell it or give it away in charity." 
 
 The old man paused, and suddenly hurled his 
 new cigar into the fire. His blue eyes lit with 
 fury. 
 
 " In fact, Harry," he concluded, " you can go to 
 the devil in your own tomfool way, and you needn't 
 even be civil about it." 
 
 271
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 This sudden blaze of temper told Henry what 
 most he desired to know. 
 
 " In plain English, father, you're beaten." 
 
 Mr Smith recovered his composure. 
 
 " On the contrary," he incisively said, " it means 
 that I do not choose to be beaten. That will be 
 left to you. I've won all my battles, and I'm 
 retiring with the spoil. Please listen to what I 
 have to say." 
 
 " That's what I'm here for," said Henry. 
 
 " To begin with, you will be faced to-morrow at 
 the works upon one side with a list of grievances 
 from the men and upon the other side with strong 
 recommendations from the Government to concede 
 the majority of the points demanded. The men 
 are ready to strike upon a given signal. Their 
 strike will seriously delay the delivery of goods 
 promised to the Government, and I have, in fact, 
 already been threatened by the Government with 
 intervention. Intervention, unfortunately, coming 
 from this Government, means one thing only. The 
 blackmail levied on the country by these black- 
 guards at the works will be paid, and their employer 
 will be required to pay it. The long and short 
 of the matter is that I am not going to be that 
 employer. I'm one of the few living men who have 
 never allowed themselves to be frightened or bullied 
 
 272
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 by organised labour, and I'm not going to do the 
 dirty work of a Government which has lapped up the 
 spittle of the trade unions for a generation. That 
 is your job, Harry, my boy. I know you're just 
 pining to join the congregation which worships any- 
 thing in the shape of a federation, and I can promise 
 you as fine a bellyful of dirt in the next few months 
 as anyone could desire to eat in a lifetime. Not a 
 step can be taken to-day, even though the country's 
 safety depends upon it, until the Government has 
 asked permission of the Labour leaders. Our 
 politicians have put organised labour above the 
 law, and they have allowed it to become a revolu- 
 tion. And now, when these blackmailers are 
 threatening to starve our armies for a penny a day, 
 and systematically cheating their employers of 
 time and work, they are to be flattered and bribed. 
 That, Henry, is something I prefer to see from a 
 distance. I'm not taking part. The Government 
 must find a younger man someone who is a little 
 more supple at the knees." 
 
 " Someone, also, whom the men can trust," 
 suggested Henry. 
 
 Mr Smith brought the flat of his heavy hand 
 violently down upon the table. A wine-glass jumped 
 into the air and shivered upon the floor. 
 
 " I've played square in all my dealings," he said. 
 s 273
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " You've played square by your own rules," 
 said Henry in a voice that trembled ; " but they 
 were false and abominable rules. You've only two 
 points against the men, and they're points which 
 score harder against you than against them." 
 
 " I should like to have this explained to me." 
 
 " I grant all you say about the men at the works. 
 They have lost the only good thing in life. They 
 have no pride in their work. There is no honesty 
 in what they do. But that is only because they 
 have been cheated in the past of an honest price. 
 Limitation of output was not casually inspired by 
 the essential vileness of the working man. It was 
 a rejoinder. It is your worst point against them 
 to-day, and it is your own bad coin returned." 
 
 " And your second point, my son ? " 
 
 " My second point is that these men are fighting 
 for their own hand at a time when they ought to 
 be fighting for the State. But who first set them 
 the example ? Who first opposed capital to labour 
 and ignored the country ? " 
 
 Henry paused for breath. His excitement was 
 painful. 
 
 " So that is your case ? " Mr Smith politely 
 inquired. 
 
 " It is the essential part of it." 
 
 Mr Smith took another cigar, and lit it in silence. 
 
 274
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Then he walked over to a large bureau in the corner 
 of the room and produced a sheaf of papers. He 
 showed no trace of having considered or felt in the 
 least his son's indictment. 
 
 " Shall we get to business, Harry ? " he said, 
 returning to the table. " I will explain to you how 
 I propose to effect my retirement." 
 
 Henry winced under the insult of his father's 
 absolute ignoring of his challenge. 
 
 " Have you nothing to say to me, sir ? " he asked 
 in hot anger. " Won't you justify yourself at 
 all?" 
 
 Mr Smith's eyes narrowed in a concentrated 
 contempt for the young man in front of him. 
 
 " You young fool," he said in tones that cut, 
 " do you imagine that I'm going to answer such 
 nonsense at my time of life ? I've fought my men 
 for fifty yeajs. I know them for a lazy herd which 
 has got to be mastered before it can be of the 
 
 o 
 
 slightest use to itself or to anyone else. I've ruled 
 my men for fifty years, and I could rule them now. 
 But I'm not allowed any longer to be master in my 
 own shop. You and your political confederates 
 think you see a better method. Very well. I'm 
 not going to stand in the way." 
 
 " Bufc- -" 
 
 The old man tapped the papers. 
 
 275
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " We will get to work," lie rasped. " There is 
 no more to be said." 
 
 It was several hours before they had disposed 
 of the necessary technical business. The house and 
 street had become very quiet by the time they had 
 finished. When Mr Smith began to lock up his 
 papers the fire had burned itself to a few dull 
 ashes in the grate, and the ticking of the elaborately 
 ornamental clock upon the mantelpiece had become 
 oppressively loud. 
 
 " You will stay with us to-night, Harry? " asked 
 Mr Smith indifferently, as he turned away from the 
 bureau. 
 
 " No, thank you, father. I will walk back to my 
 rooms." 
 
 For a moment they looked awkwardly at one 
 another. Old associations crowded about them. 
 The figures and facts which had filled their 
 negotiations of the past few hours themselves 
 witnessed to an old familiar intercourse in dozens 
 of triumphant enterprises. For a moment it 
 seemed as though they might more softly part than 
 the bitterness of their late argument had promised. 
 
 Then Henry saw appear in his father's eye a 
 lurking amusement at the way in which they stood, 
 thus awkwardly, under a spell. 
 
 He shook himself free in an abrupt resentment. 
 
 276
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Good-night, father," he said, and moved to 
 the door. 
 
 " One moment," said Mr Smith. 
 
 Henry turned. Mr Smith was taking from his 
 pocket-book a slip of paper. 
 
 " I do not wish ever to be reminded of to-night's 
 work. We shall probably not meet again in the 
 ordinary way." 
 
 He put the pocket-book back into his pocket, 
 and unfolded a soiled sheet of paper. 
 
 Henry aloofly watched him. Did his father, 
 after all, desire to part with him as a friend? 
 Something told him that, far from this, he was 
 about to be challenged afresh. 
 
 Mr Smith offered him the paper. Henry came 
 forward hesitatingly and took it. It was a soiled 
 and crumpled letter ordering Second Lieutenant 
 Rivers to report himself for active service. 
 
 More than ever before Henry hated his father 
 in that moment. Something in^ him prayed that 
 the old man would not insult his own daughter. 
 His father was speaking. 
 
 " That document," he said, " was found by my 
 caretaker with other evidence in our house-boat at 
 Maidenhead. Tell Agnes from me, if she is still 
 interested in my existence, that all I desire with 
 regard to her is to remain in complete ignorance of 
 
 277
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 anything she may do. I have an idea that ignorance 
 will be best." 
 
 Henry crushed the note and flung it into the 
 grate. 
 
 " Is that aU, father ? " 
 
 " Yes, Henry, I think that is all I have to say." 
 
 Henry without further farewell turned and went. 
 
 Mr Smith remained a moment in the room till he 
 had heard his son let himself out into the street. 
 Then he switched off the light. As he reached 
 the door the smouldering ball of paper into which 
 he note had been crushed burst into flame. He 
 turned to see what it was. A few shadows from 
 the chairs and tables flickered on the walls of the 
 empty room, and a few dying cinders rustled to a 
 cold and desolate extinction upon the hearth. 
 
 278
 
 XXVIII 
 
 PELHAM alighted from the train at Waterloo on the 
 morning after Henry had come to terms with his 
 father. His future had already been settled. His 
 expert knowledge of chemistry and his claims upon 
 an uncle highly placed in the Royal Engineers 
 guaranteed h,im a useful post without any very 
 serious delay. 
 
 When he found himself at the great military 
 terminus of Waterloo, thronged with khaki and 
 busy with the evidence of war, he was secretly 
 happy to contrast the impression made on him by 
 these things with the impression they had made 
 on him during his outward journey to Devonshire 
 some twelve weeks ago. Gladly he felt now that 
 he had a share in all this. He had cast away, in a 
 vivid reaction, all his old misgivings. Conversations 
 with Graham and Phrene, prolonged deeply into 
 the few nights they had spent after the fire in a 
 west country inn, had smoothed out his decision 
 with a show of logic. He had been brought to 
 fight by the same imperious necessity which all 
 men instinctively acknowledged; but Phrene's 
 
 279
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 attitude had enabled him to ignore the inconsistency 
 between his former professions and his present 
 conduct. The cultivation and the sacrifice of self 
 meet and agree at their journey's end. His late 
 professions had broken down only because they 
 had not gone far enough. He must be content to 
 lose his life before it could be worth very much 
 to him. He must fight, if only for his right to be 
 unlike other men ; and, if he died, he would at least 
 have put in a claim for his ideals upon the Roll of 
 Honour. 
 
 This was how he put it quietly to himself, but 
 he did not in any way intend to play the tedious 
 moralist with a new philosophy to match his 
 khaki. Having come to terms with himself, he 
 disencumbered himself of any further meditation. 
 
 He could have slapped the soldiers wholesale 
 between the shoulders as he saw them at Waterloo, 
 standing in groups with their packs and rifles. He 
 was ineradically a boy, and joy was uppermost 
 to-day. 
 
 He took a cab to his rooms in Curzon Street. 
 The recruiting bills no longer offended him. He was 
 charmed with the joviality of an invitation extended 
 in the Strand to all who might desire to teach 
 a Turkish bird to say " Rule, Britannia." The 
 clamour of the meaner sort of appeal he could now 
 
 280
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 dismiss with a shrug. It was none of his business. 
 Pelham mentally wrote off these things as the 
 concern of a few dingy politicians who sat within 
 the shadow of a sham Gothic masterpiece, and 
 talked about never sheathing the sword. The 
 future would belong to the men who grappled with 
 their several decisions and not with their leaders 
 who refused to command them. 
 
 His cab was stopped for a moment by a press of 
 traffic in Trafalgar Square. The meek lions hold- 
 ing in their mouths an urgent message from the 
 throne looked more than ever as if they had just 
 been ordered from the stores. From four sides of 
 the plinth the spectacle was offered to an indifferent 
 public of a " free and spontaneous uprising of the 
 people." Upon the side nearest his cab some 
 Indians, back from the trenches, were invited by 
 their English officers to insult comprehensively the 
 Imperial white slackers who surrounded them. 
 
 This they did, with smiling readiness and point- 
 one stalwart young civilian being asked in Hindu- 
 stanee whether he had been created male or female. 
 Upon another side a breezy sergeant-major from 
 the Colonies first assured his audience that they 
 only wanted men who were willing and eager to join. 
 Then he advised any employer who might be 
 present to dismiss all his fit young men of military 
 
 281
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 age. Finally he urged one or two young women 
 who were standing near to adopt the policy of 
 Lysistrata the Athenian. 
 
 Pelham would once have been most bitterly 
 enraged by all this ; but to-day he found it droll. 
 He even took a professional interest in the pro- 
 ceedings, and amiably wished the rather self- 
 conscious young subalterns on the plinth good 
 sport and a full bag. 
 
 He drove on to his rooms, and found there a 
 wire from Diana. 
 
 Diana hitherto had remained silent. She now 
 explained in a lengthy telegram that she had been 
 distracted with work in her big hospital at Boulogne, 
 but was in London for twelve hours, collecting 
 stores. She would be at the house in Kensington 
 at three o'clock. 
 
 Pelham rejoiced. Diana's silence had been the 
 one blot upon his Dew content. Nevertheless the 
 nearness of their meeting a little daunted him. 
 Would he be able to throw off all constraint and 
 acknowledge generously that there really had been 
 no depth in their late estrangement ? For Diana, 
 he clearly saw, had in a sense been right. He had 
 sacrificed her, not to any deep necessity, but to 
 habits of thought which he had never seriously 
 
 tested. 
 
 282
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Would he be ready to admit all this when he 
 actually saw her in her well-remembered Philistian 
 pride. There were limits to his new humility. 
 Diana, after all, had been as wrong as he. He had 
 been superficial and pedantic, but she had scarcely 
 been more generous. Pelham would never admit 
 that, in hating Diana's callousness much of it 
 assumed to the things which deeply moved him, 
 he had been wrong; and for that he would not 
 ask to be forgiven. It was not a case of simply 
 falling into her arms, however much he desired it. 
 There were more ways than one in which their 
 interview might go seriously astray. 
 
 Pelham went to lunch at a very junior literary 
 club in Piccadilly. There in the smoking-room 
 he suddenly felt himself beaten on the back, and, 
 turning, saw Eupert Smith. 
 
 " Jimmy," Rupert shouted, " what on earth 
 are you doing here ? I thought you were hiding 
 in Devonshire." 
 
 " Was," said Pelham briefly. 
 
 " It's for you to explain," he added. " I thought 
 you were fighting." 
 
 " I'm a wounded soldier," Rupert said. 
 
 They settled to some coffee and cigarettes. 
 
 " And now," said Rupert, when the waiter hadgone, 
 " tell me about it. What are you doing in town ? " 
 
 283
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " I am quite delighted to tell you," said Pelham. 
 
 His eyes were dancing with fun. It was good 
 to meet his old friend like this, aware that there 
 was no longer anything to irk their sympathy. 
 Rupert looked at him as he paused to take his 
 coffee. 
 
 " You needn't tell me one thing, Jimmy," he said. 
 " You needn't tell me you're going to join the 
 army. You've got militarism stamped all over 
 you." 
 
 "I'm converted," said Pelham gravely. "I'm 
 coming into your magnificent war. I want to kill 
 hundreds of Germans. It came upon me quite 
 suddenly when I was sitting upon a beach in 
 Devonshire that war was a glorious and a civilising 
 influence. It makes people refined and merciful." 
 
 " Well, Jimmy," said Rupert, " I don't grudge 
 you your ironical spirits so long as you're happy. 
 What's it going to be the Army Service Corps or 
 the Great General Staff ? " 
 
 " I think it will be poison gas," said Pelham. 
 " Poison gas will suit me rather well. It will 
 pander to my missionary zeal." 
 
 " Seriously, Jimmy, please." 
 
 " Seriously, it will very probably be poison gas. 
 I've had the promise of a place with five other 
 chemists, one of whom has already administered 
 
 284
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 several litres of poison gas to a herd of rats. They 
 all died in very great agony. We're going out in 
 a batch within the next few days 148th Division 
 Royal Engineers." 
 
 Rupert looked sidelong at his ; friend, and hesi- 
 tated while he nicked the ash from his cigarette. 
 
 " I like your high spirits, Jimmy," he said at last. 
 " But you won't talk like that when you've seen the 
 fighting." 
 
 He paused, and seemed to be looking at things 
 which had left their mark upon him. 
 
 " I once saw one of our fellows in a trench," he 
 continued after a pause, " jammed up against a 
 German he had tried to kill. He hadn't done it 
 cleanly, and there was no elbow-room to finish what 
 he had begun. The German was screaming into 
 his ear; and we carried our own man out of the 
 trench stark mad with horror. That sort of thing, 
 Jimmy, civilises a man, unless he's a wolf by nature. 
 You won't talk like a savage, even 'in fun, when 
 you've seen a few things of that kind." 
 
 There was a short silence. Neither of the men 
 needed to speak again. Pelham quietly accepted 
 his friend's rebuke. In the more serious temper it 
 gave to their conversation Rupert said : 
 
 " You've seen the news about Bob Rivers? " 
 
 Pelham nodded. 
 
 285
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " He's the first of our set to go," said Rupert. 
 ' You've said some bitter things to one another, 
 Jimmy, in your time." 
 
 Pelham threw his cigarette into the fireplace. 
 "I'm thankful to say," he said, in solemn 
 honesty, " that the bitter things we said to one 
 another were always said with the best intentions." 
 Then, after a pause, he added : 
 ' This will have been a hard blow for your sister." 
 ' I'm seeing her to-night at Kenneth John's 
 place. I'm taking her Bob's sword, and a story 
 which will make her proud. You ought to come 
 with me, Jimmy." 
 
 " No, Rupert, I'm too happy to-day. I should 
 jar." 
 
 They talked a little longer, till Pelham found 
 it was time to go to Diana. 
 
 He left the club shortly before three, and walked 
 towards the Park. 
 
 Pelham imagined Diana as she had last left him. 
 He remembered her intolerance, her urgent will to 
 prevail with him, her quickness to take offence and 
 demand from him a full submission. 
 
 This was the woman who ruled equally his hopes 
 and fears the woman he hoped to claim, but half 
 expected to estrange. 
 
 Then, as he crossed the room towards her, he left 
 
 286
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 his memory of this hard and brilliant woman at 
 the door. Diana was rapidly checking hospital 
 linen as she passed it into a large hamper. She 
 looked up as he was announced, and Pelham saw 
 she was tired, with faint circles of sleeplessness 
 under her eyes. The plain lines of her uniform made 
 her severe, yet fragile, to the eye. There was none 
 of the brilliance, the outward pressure of her 
 personality, of which he had always been so keenly 
 aware ; and this was clearly due, not to any loss in 
 herself of individuality or power, but to an acquired 
 new knowledge that the things she had once asserted 
 were for the moment negligible. They had no 
 part in her present intent and devoted life. 
 
 The Queen of Philistia, with whom Pelham had 
 come to treat, had somehow changed into a tired 
 woman who was abusing her strength. 
 
 He came shyly forward. 
 
 " You have had my letters," he began. 
 
 She seemed to be equally embarrassed. She 
 was about to say something, but the sudden excite- 
 ment put a strain upon her nerves. She put out 
 her hand vaguely and her mouth moved. Pelham 
 thought she was going to faint. 
 
 He came to her quickly, and made her sit down. 
 He spoke to her'' in short phrases, abrupt with 
 
 feeling. 
 
 287
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " Di dear, you're simply worn out. Let me do 
 something. You really must take a rest. I had 
 no idea." 
 
 She withdrew from his arm. 
 
 " Jim," she said, with suspense in her eyes, " why 
 have you corne to town ? You said you had 
 something to tell me. What is it ? " 
 
 " It's all right, Di. I'm trying to become a 
 righting man. But that's not the point. You 
 ought to be in bed and asleep. What' s all this you' re 
 doing ? It simply won't do, you know." 
 
 Their shyness fell away. There was nothing 
 now to discuss. The old days of difference upon 
 unessential things unessential in the presence of 
 their present union upon the same big enterprise 
 had become ridiculous. Something had dwarfed 
 all their differences and brought them humbly into 
 touch. 
 
 "I'm finishing this packing. It's against the 
 rules to leave it to anyone else. Then I'll rest. You 
 see I've got to take the boat back to-night." 
 
 " Is that essential ? " 
 
 " I'm afraid it is." 
 
 " Very well," said Pelham. " Let me see you 
 finish." 
 
 He watched her as she checked the last item on 
 the list and flung down the lid of the hamper. 
 
 288
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Then he pulled the sofa to the fire and arranged 
 the cushions. 
 
 "Have you had anything to eat lately?" he 
 asked, as he made her comfortable. 
 
 ; ' That's all right, Jim. I'm going to have a 
 good square meal with tea before starting to 
 Victoria. I've got just a couple of hours. But, 
 Jim" she rose on one elbow and looked at him 
 " don't you want to talk to me or anything ? " 
 
 He leaned to her, and fell in love with her fathoms 
 deep. 
 
 " Di dear," he said, " I don't want to talk to you 
 at all. I've been talking all my life, and I'm sick 
 of it. I want nothing at all now except to see you 
 go to sleep for two full hours." 
 
 A moment later, just before she slept, she said: 
 
 " You don't know, Jimmy, how glad I am." 
 
 After that there was no sound in the room, as 
 Pelham sat in the chair beside her. Once he added 
 to the fire, and sometimes the cinders dropped 
 explosively into the hearth. But it was in the 
 midst of a deep silence, rhythmic with the quiet 
 breathing of Diana, that Pelham finally heard a 
 great scurrying of rats in the wainscot of his brain. 
 An invisible piper was playing to a joyful self- 
 destruction all the phrases, ideas, formulae, pre- 
 possessions, justifications, eccentricities and original 
 T 289
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 principles which had gnawed at his increasing 
 purpose during the last wretched months of his life ; 
 and it was a simple soldier, without misgiving or 
 reserve, who woke Diana with a kiss at half-past 
 four. 
 
 290
 
 XXIX 
 
 UPON the evening of that day, when Pelham was 
 waving good-bye to his wife at Folkestone, Kupert 
 was waiting for his sister in the drawing-room at 
 Golders Green. 
 
 Agnes came in with a flush of welcome; and 
 Rupert, as he kissed her, saw that she had passed 
 the worst of her grief. 
 
 "You've been in England two days," Agnes 
 began. 
 
 " But yesterday I had to be in Brighton. Besides 
 I wanted to be sure you were ready to see me. 
 That's why I sent Harry to you yesterday." 
 
 "I'm ready for you, Rupert." 
 
 Rupert paused a moment. 
 
 " I was with Bob," he said at last. " He told 
 me about you. He was greatly troubled, and I 
 promised him " 
 
 Rupert paused, not knowing how to finish what 
 he had to say. 
 
 " I've brought you his sword," he added. 
 
 Agnes looked at the sword, which lay beside them 
 on the table, and she said quietly : 
 
 291
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " I'm happy to think that this" she touched 
 the sword " belongs to me by right, and that 
 one day perhaps " 
 
 And now it was Agnes who stopped, daunted by 
 the intimacy of her thought. She came closer 
 to Rupert and said: 
 
 " Tell me how he died." 
 
 " He died like an English officer. He was helping 
 one of his men back to the trench. The man had 
 been wounded on patrol, and Bob insisted on 
 fetching him in. I was back in the third line, and 
 when Bob was carried past, he saw me and stopped 
 the bearers. I saw there was no hope. I shall 
 never forget it as long as I live. He died in my 
 arms. Four men in his company went out that 
 night and accounted for the fellow who shot him." 
 
 " Pipped ! Pipped ! " cried Agnes, with a quiet 
 little laugh, as the tears started into her eyes. 
 " Thatfs what he called it." 
 
 She leaned against the table, and Rupert moved 
 towards her in alarm, but she straightened 
 herself. 
 
 " I'm quite all right," she said. " But I think 
 we'll sit down till Monica comes in." 
 
 They talked after that of Rupert's own experi- 
 ences, and of his near return to France. They did 
 not speak again of Rivers. 
 
 292
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 Rivers, indeed, was not once mentioned in the 
 evening which followed. But for all of them alike, 
 for John and Monica, for Henry and Rupert, as 
 well as for Agnes, it was an evening dedicated to him. 
 All that was said in the house that night was ruled 
 by his presence in their thoughts. The sword which 
 lay in the house turned every way to restrain their 
 speaking. 
 
 When Monica took Agnes from the table the 
 conversation dropped for a moment. 
 
 Rupert felt acutely the strangeness of having his 
 brother Henry there. Compared with John, Henry 
 was almost a stranger. His presence in that 
 colloquy of three was a continual reminder of 
 changes made by the war in places far from the 
 line of battle. Henry, in a corner of the drawing- 
 room, before dinner, had told Rupert of the result 
 of his last interview with their father. Rupert 
 could hardly believe that the masterful will which 
 had been for him as permanent and unalterable a 
 thing as England herself had been obliterated. 
 
 " There's something I should like to know," 
 Rupert threw out suddenly into the smoky silence 
 of the room. " What sort of a people shall we be 
 when the war is finished ? " 
 
 " Much the same sort of people," said John. 
 " We went into the war as amateurs. We're 
 
 293
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 fighting it as amateurs, and we shall be amateurs 
 at the end." 
 
 " Kenneth," said Kupert, " you've got your face 
 too close to the stone. Just look away from your 
 leading articles for a moment, and tell me if we're 
 not getting indirectly in our English way, some- 
 thing very good. We haven' t, it is true, your solemn 
 league and covenant of all Englishmen enforced 
 by the State. But every Englishman who matters 
 is arriving at a covenant with himself. In most 
 cases he has had to face a strictly personal and 
 domestic crisis, and for this reason alone the war 
 must leave upon England a deeper mark than 
 upon any other country in the world. 
 
 John looked at Kupert. 
 
 " Is this," he asked, " a defence of the voluntary 
 system ? " 
 
 " I don't mean it in that way. Politics to-night 
 are barred. Let us look only at New England. 
 I am simply asking whether a system which dis- 
 graces our leaders will not be recognised in days 
 to come as exactly the school we needed for the 
 recovery of our English virtue. What do our 
 leaders matter ? They stand for the age in which 
 our English citizenship was lost. But I believe 
 that our political disgrace is bringing its own painful 
 remedy. There is hardly a person in the country 
 
 294
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 who by reason of the absence of leading iruour 
 Government has not had to ask and to answer for 
 himself what his citizenship implies." 
 
 John rose from his seat, and took another cigarette 
 from the box. 
 
 " Tell me this," he said. " How do you propose 
 to save the men who have discovered what their 
 citizenship implies from being outvoted by those 
 whom the war has failed to inspire. Our system 
 of fighting with the picked men of the country has 
 just this small drawback. It is an aristocratic 
 system, and Great Britain happens to be organised 
 politically as a democracy. The best men are 
 fighting; but the best men have only one vote 
 apiece." 
 
 " The new generation," said Henry, intervening 
 with diffidence in a kind of conversation to which 
 he was not accustomed, " will never fall under the 
 old. I can tell you from my own experience that 
 our divisions to-day are hated even by the men who 
 make them. They belong to the past. Take the 
 settlement in which I am myself engaged. All the 
 younger men at the works are beginning to hate 
 the quarrels to which their elders have committed 
 them. I am amazed at the ease with which I have 
 won over the younger men." 
 
 " It is an omen," said Rupert. 
 295
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 He turned to John. 
 
 " Do you doubt it ? " lie asked. 
 
 " I have never doubted it," said John. " I have 
 never doubted that the future will be finer than 
 the past. The omens are all about us. We are 
 thinking to-night not only of the sword which 
 lies in this house. There is the news of Jimmy 
 Pelham and Willoughby. There is Rupert here 
 and Ponsonby out in France. Think of the old 
 nights in Mortimer Street the things which excited 
 us. We considered ourselves to be the most in- 
 teresting people in the world. We analysed our 
 selves and characters in lengthy autobiographies. 
 We wrote books about ourselves; and there was 
 one thing on which we were all agreed. We held 
 ourselves strictly aloof from all simple and vulgar 
 abstractions, such as patriotism and service. 
 We were predatory and critical. We industriously 
 nursed ourselves ; and we had an opinion for every- 
 thing under the sun." 
 
 " Moreover," John continued, looking with a smile 
 towards Henry, " at that time our young tradesmen 
 were fighting one another for customers and their 
 work-people for wages ; and our politicians " 
 
 " Tabula rasa," said Rupert. 
 
 " Agreed," said John. " We will turn from 
 those days to a fresher time. Rupert bravely 
 
 296
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 destroyed a masterpiece of analytical decadence 
 upon the evening war was declared. Henry has 
 annihilated his own father. Pelham has learned 
 the precise worth of ideas in a vacuum. Graham 
 has discovered anew the old truism that he who 
 would really find himself must be ready to lose 
 himself. Baddeley is by way of becoming some 
 sort of a man. Ponsonby has turned from a looking- 
 glass hero into the real thing. I myself am atoning 
 for years spent in a non-committal and a shrugging 
 taciturnity by earnestly repeating a weekly liturgy 
 composed of democratic truisms. Bob " 
 
 He paused a moment, pulled up by the incon- 
 gruity of his garrulous progress with the silence 
 which here was most fitting. 
 
 " Bob," he concluded, " has the best of us all." 
 
 There was a short silence. It was Rupert who 
 broke it. 
 
 " And yet," he said to John, " you seemed just 
 now to doubt that all would be well." 
 
 " I do not really doubt it, but I hate to think 
 that young England must be so long in the making. 
 I want to see young England as, literally and at 
 once, a nation in arms, not simply as a nation 
 which greedily accepts the service of its best men 
 and reluctantly allows itself to be leavened." 
 
 He paused and turned personally to Rupert. 
 297
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " And I want you fellows out there, if you can 
 ever think of me at all, to think of me as doing what 
 I can always to get young England recognised as a 
 fighting democracy." 
 
 " You will not succeed," said Eupert. " England 
 will never be really a democratic country. The 
 whole spirit of England is aristocratic. It will 
 always be the part of her best men to act for the 
 rest. Patriotism will never be logically recognised, 
 in an Act of Parliament, as due from every citizen. 
 You will never get your principle. England has 
 never proceeded by principle, but always by in- 
 stinct and by the drift of events acting upon the 
 most impressionable and vital characters. Young 
 England will come as a reassertion of our old aristo- 
 cratic habit of allowing the best men to save the 
 country. This habit, reinforced and reasserted, 
 will destroy, without any Act of Parliament or any 
 apparent revolution, the burlesque democracy of 
 the last thirty years a democracy which conferred 
 rights upon our citizens without exacting services 
 and allowed the State to lie at the foot of rival 
 interests." 
 
 " And how do you propose to make your aris- 
 tocracy a permanent thing ? What is there to 
 prevent young England drifting back into the old 
 condition? " 
 
 298
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 ' There is nothing to prevent it," said Rupert. 
 " We have always drifted back into the old con- 
 dition. You cannot make aristocracy into a system 
 without destroying it. The paradox and the credit 
 of English life is this : wherever the need arises, the 
 men are found the men of all classes who to-day 
 are fighting and working for England even though 
 the conditions are against them. We have lately 
 called ourselves a democratic country a description 
 under whose sanction we allowed all the demo- 
 cratic vices to nourish without publicly cultivating 
 a single democratic virtue. Nevertheless, when 
 the need arose, our democratic leaders quietly 
 abdicated and invited our best men to save the 
 country. We are fighting the war not as a demo- 
 cratic but as an aristocratic nation. The country 
 is now in process of being tuned up to the level of 
 its best men ; and this is being done, not by a pub- 
 licly enforced discipline, but by a gradual pressure 
 which sifts the best from the second best and ranks 
 the nation, high and low, according to its virtue." 
 
 John shook his head. 
 
 " I envy you, Rupert," he said. " But I cannot 
 agree with you. The time for warfare on the 
 aristocratic principle is past. Even your best men 
 confess it by their methods of recruiting. The 
 nations are fighting to-day, not by heroes, but by 
 
 299
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 hordes. There are not enough of your best men to 
 save the country. We must work for a general 
 average and raise armies by a general law. Other- 
 wise we shall be compounding a sham. At present 
 our methods are neither aristocratic nor democratic. 
 They are simply fraudulent." 
 
 " Some part of the way," said Kupert, " I go 
 with you. I read your articles, Kenneth, and I 
 agree with nearly every word of them. Probably 
 we shall have to come to terms with your demo- 
 cratic idea since we are fighting a democratic war. 
 But if I know anything of England's amazing 
 strength and her equally amazing perversity, you 
 will find that when we are actually brought face to 
 face with the fact of national service we shall com- 
 promise with it in a way which will virtually deny 
 the principle. I do not believe that England will 
 ever become an organised democracy. Even if we 
 had to demand general service by compulsion we 
 should find a way of doing it without admitting the 
 straight, clear principle of the thing. The principle 
 of aristocracy is so deeply rooted in our character 
 that, even if every single citizen in the country were 
 pressed into the country's service, we would rather 
 think of ourselves as a nation wholly composed 
 of aristocratic volunteers than admit we were a 
 straightforward democracy." 
 
 300
 
 ' Do you defend this lack of clarity in the 
 English ? " 
 
 " In a sense I do. I am defending England." 
 
 ' Then what do you s.ay to me ? I am working 
 as hard as I can to destroy it." 
 
 " I say that you are doing essential work. Our 
 English distrust of definition is a national asset, 
 but it has continually to be tempered by criticism. 
 Why are Englishmen always allowed unlimited 
 liability to criticise their countrymen? Because 
 we know instinctively that, without such criticism, 
 the opportunism, the distrust of logic, and the 
 reliance we place upon our national reserves of 
 energy would probably destroy us, unless they were 
 continually corrected and opposed. We are the 
 most successful opportunists in history the real 
 inheritors of Rome for two reasons. First, we 
 never commit ourselves, except under strict 
 necessity, to any definition or system; we are 
 therefore elastically fit to adapt ourselves to the 
 surprises which history holds in reserve for all 
 nations alike. Second, we take care to keep a 
 critic on the hearth who prevents us from falling 
 dead asleep; and is immediately ready in a crisis to 
 work for the organisation and discipline which our 
 national genius normally refuses to accept." 
 " Sophistry," protested John. " I cannot admit 
 
 301
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 the advantage of keeping a muddled brain. You 
 are trying to make out that England is great 
 because England refuses to think." 
 
 " Not at all. England is great because England 
 is richer in her intuitions than in her thoughts. 
 She is saved from the incurable levity of logicians 
 by a providential stupidity. Nothing is so frivolous 
 as the brain working by its own rules. There was 
 a time when you protested yourself against the 
 modern worship of ideas. You yourself in 1914 
 would have made the speech I am making now." 
 
 " In 1914," Henry interposed, " we were different 
 people." 
 
 " The ideas of 1914," said John, " are neither 
 here nor there. At present I am pleading for an 
 idea which is accepted everywhere but in England, 
 and would be accepted here to-day if it were put 
 into an Act of Parliament. It will have to be 
 admitted." 
 
 " It will never be admitted." 
 
 " You expect to win upon a fraud ? " 
 
 " I expect to win as we have always won. I 
 expect to win upon a legal fiction. There will be 
 no new principles in young England. There will 
 be only a new spirit." 
 
 There was a long pause, at the end of which 
 John rose from his chair. 
 
 302
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 " You have brought our discussion to a point 
 where we can all agree. Let us leave it there. I 
 will go and see if Monica and Agnes would like us 
 to join them." 
 
 He left the room, and crossed the hall to the 
 drawing-room. As he did so Monica came from 
 her dressing-room upstairs and called to him. She 
 was leaning over the banisters with her hands on 
 the rail. 
 
 " We have given you up for lost," she said. 
 " Agnes and I are having a talk of our own. You 
 may go back." 
 
 John ran up the stairs. 
 
 " What are you talking about ? " he asked. " Is 
 that a possible question ? " 
 
 " I think it is, Ken. We are talking about the 
 future." 
 
 He kissed her hand upon the rail. 
 
 " It is the only theme for to-day," he said. 
 
 The telephone bell rang in the hall. John 
 went down to it, and Monica went back to 
 Agnes. 
 
 It was Kedway who rang, and they talked at 
 length about the grave new telegrams from South 
 Wales. When he had finished John hung up the 
 receiver and stood a moment in the silent hall. 
 After his friends had gone he would go into his 
 
 303
 
 THE KING'S MEN 
 
 study and distastefully write into the night. He 
 could feel the pen now between his fingers. 
 
 Some coals dropped noisily upon the drawing- 
 room hearth, and through the open door sudden 
 flames flung shadows all about him. John's eyes 
 were caught by a shining light on the table. The 
 worn leather of the sword of his dead friend 
 reflected the fire. 
 
 John opened his hand to wipe out the sensation 
 of a pen tightly held, and turned to go back to the 
 dining-room. 
 
 Turning, he saw thrown upon the dark wall beside 
 him the enormous shadow of the hilt of the sword 
 projecting from the table. He stood still a moment 
 while the fire died down and the shadow disappeared. 
 
 Then he opened the door and went back to his 
 friends. 
 
 They were talking still of young England. 
 
 THE END 
 
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 LETTERS FROM GREECE. By John Mavrogordato. 
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