MORNING'S 
 WAR 
 
 C.E.MONTAGUE 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
THE 
 MORNING'S WAR 
 
 A ROMANCE 
 
 BY 
 
 C. E. MONTAGUE 
 
 This battle fares like to the morning's war, 
 When dying clouds contend with growing light." 
 
 Third Part of King Henry VI., Act ii. sc. 5. 
 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 1913 
 
Ci [ 
 
 Copyright, 1913. 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 Published August, 1913 
 
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PROLOGUE 
 
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 " Escape. A garden plant growing wild in'thti ntids. A species 
 thus continued, in a soil and climate strange to it, may in time 
 exhibit remarkable changes in its characteristics." 
 
 Handbook of Botany. 
 
 IT may have looked less like a sowing of seed than 
 a casting of some weed into the fire when Frank 
 Browne, a sadly wild fellow, drained his last can in the 
 London of 1610, fell asleep full of beautiful thoughts 
 on a bench close to Ludgate and found, when next 
 things came clear, that he was ascending a hill, wet 
 with a fog that beaded his hair, in a light that could 
 only be dawn, and he with a musket in hand, wonder- 
 ing what could have sent him soldiering. Had he been 
 nabbed while he slept? Or was he there of his own 
 motion, a Maccabee saving his country, urged by some 
 vision that had visited his bench? It must have been 
 this second way ; he preferred it ; and there were such 
 calls; Joan of Arc might have had one, for all that 
 they said ; a lowly vessel, no doubt, but the hundred or 
 so that marched with him now looked lowly too ; if such 
 stones were to head any corners at all it must be 
 Heaven's, so clearly had this world's builders rejected 
 them all. The nude has its glories, and clothes that 
 cohere have theirs: here you saw neither, but a chill 
 turpitude: mangy cats looked so; for the very fleas, 
 in their shrinking coverts, the future must have a dis- 
 quieting air. It was surely a call that had come. 
 
2 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 What a thing, he mused, dozing again as he tramped 
 up to Higl-gate, it is for a man to know what is what! 
 Here was he, Fortune's confidant, feeling with her in 
 her strange and right choice of tools, in her eye for 
 effect, her humor; a fool, in his place, might now 
 have been cracking a fool's jests — " Did powder not 
 want its food dressed? " and that sort of stuff, whereas 
 he — this it was to have breathed, though it were but 
 unstudiously, Oxford's quick air; it gave your mind 
 eyes. A sense of this great blessing glowed in Frank 
 like some fire-lit corner, a warm nook to bask in and 
 dream. Dream he did, till the hardest kick that his 
 young life had sustained awoke him to see a sergeant 
 bulging and bluish-red with wrath at a dreamer's mus- 
 ket dropped in the mud. 
 
 A kick may work fast on the generous mind : in an 
 instant Frank had kicked back. But the mind can 
 work faster yet on a kick : in less than that instant 
 Frank's mind running out, still in dream, to the doors 
 of the body to see who had knocked there so unkindly, 
 had caught at that unexplained shock and spun it 
 ligaments of meaning and cause, till, like a play's cli- 
 max, the crash was led up to; Frank saw it as just 
 the last term in the series of wise good turns that his 
 race had done him since he was a boy, the Benjamin of 
 a big house. He saw how his father had tried to teach 
 him to carry his wine, as was kind, and had cut him 
 adrift for carrying more, as was fair enough; and had 
 put him to no trade — what trade could he sweat at, 
 with his blood ? — but gave him, instead, as much money 
 as he could half live upon — for the heir of the house 
 
PROLOGUE 3 
 
 must live too: Frank quite saw the justice of that — 
 and how the orifice of the family door in Soho had 
 long been narrowing to a slit proportioned inversely, 
 quite justly, to that smell which Frank carried about 
 him, on these suppliant calls, as of husks that swine 
 do eat, till at last the door opened, for once, strangely 
 wide, and a shape that he readily knew now for the 
 good genius of his father's house crossed the hall — 
 it neared him — Iwrribilc znsit, it ran — was a running 
 kick gathering momentum ? He turned in flight ; then 
 he awoke, having dreamed not wholly untruly. 
 
 Not that his friends would have kicked him, before 
 men. Their hearts would have bled to know that the 
 world knew that in that nest of nests a bad egg could 
 be laid. Yet Frank smelt to heaven : into the outer 
 darkness he had to pack, one way or other, and if in a 
 fog, it would become him. They did not feel this, 
 however, just now, being indeed all asleep, and that not 
 on their feet, like this wicked one, but supine, like the 
 just. All the tribe, except Frank, had great heads; 
 they would sit half the night drinking less than ap- 
 peared with a fuddlesome prince, or enduring the man- 
 ners of some boor or goose of a great man with places 
 to give, or refraining from throwing the first or any 
 subsequent stone at ladies whom kings delighted to 
 honor; and, these dues to charity paid, they would 
 sleep their ten hours apiece and look like good babies 
 till their untroubled gray eyes opened and sought the 
 sources of loaves and fishes again, as a child's seek 
 the light. 
 
4 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 A dog may have been whipped pretty tame by its 
 owner and yet fly at the man who affronts that true 
 god. Frank had reciprocated the sergeant's kick, not 
 so much in wrath for himself — long tavern practice had 
 made him a thought lax as a sentinel of his private 
 honor — but lest the pure name of his house should 
 take a stain if even its scapegoat, stumping off into the 
 desert, accepted a kick gratis from a low man. But 
 all sergeants do not draw these distinctions; so it was 
 under arrest that Frank marched on from Highgate to 
 prosecute his conquests. He grieved at this : he hated 
 black looks; he classed them with unfilled cans. His 
 way to be at peace with men was a stream's way with 
 stones : when his devious flow brought him down on a 
 large and hard one, he gave, rounded him, and wound 
 on. By the time they had dipped down from Finchley 
 to ford the bogged hollow beyond and climb to the 
 houses capping Barnet Hill, Frank's spirit had broken 
 already, good-humoredly, to get round this boulder- 
 some sergeant. 
 
 From Barnet the posse of scarecrows dropped again 
 to cross the wide scoop to Ridge Hill, and from Ridge 
 Hill the abbey church of St. Albans was seen huge on 
 its opposite height, its straight lines lifting out of the 
 cumulus clouds of tree-top round it. That was their 
 day's work, to reach St. Albans. It was a Sunday ; 
 nearly all day there was a ringing of bells, rising and 
 falling as each village came to the marchers' feet and 
 was passed, the peal behind them scarcely tinkling 
 away into silence before they crossed the rim of the 
 circle of music shaken out by the belfry that came next. 
 
PROLOGUE 5 
 
 In his pleasures Frank was no bigot; he took any; 
 failing good wine, and then bad, he would get drunk 
 on things heard and seen. He swam luxuriously now 
 in a sense of Sabbatical, pastoral peace suave to 
 battered town ears. Bells stopped and a cock crowed ; 
 he heard it wonderfully far away. It cleared and the 
 birds burst out together, singing grace after rain, and 
 the bells went at it again, hill talking to hill about God 
 — so Frank imaged it; he was a rapturous Christian for 
 several hours ; peace on earth was the thing, and good- 
 will to sergeants. As they trailed uphill in the dark 
 into St. Albans, the two that had kicked at dawn 
 were made one by exchange of intimate thoughts 
 on the traits without which ale would scarcely be 
 ale. 
 
 Monday would launch them on the ruled, horrible 
 straightness of the Roman road north-westward, the 
 brown mud whitening on their boots till they dragged 
 balled heels out through the high nick in the chalk 
 sky-line, past Dunstable, and washed the white off in 
 the Hockley puddles. On Tuesday morning, no doubt, 
 they would sweat and swear up the long slant to Brick- 
 hill, still topped to-day by the tiny court of assize that 
 they saw, and let themselves down to the green floor 
 wetted or, as books say, drained by the Ouse. And 
 then the next day, and the next, and the next; one's 
 vision dims as they go; they recede towards Chester 
 and Ireland. From live men, of whom one would 
 always spit on his hand where his musket slipped, and 
 another at every halt would shift the rag on a raw toe, 
 they sink into a " force ' : and Frank's self into a 
 
G THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 ' type," the common Reuben who, being unstable as 
 water, and much averse from it, could not excel. 
 
 Yet this Reuben was to beget in the West a dynasty 
 nearer to Levi's in function, and puissant enough in 
 body to make meetly leonine sons for the lion's whelp, 
 Judah. In the winter of 1887-8 a boat capsized on 
 Lough Neagh and one of the two men drowned was 
 a Father James Browne. They gave him a great 
 funeral, to vex the Protestants. Eight Brownes, rods 
 of the house of Frank, walked after the coffin, five of 
 them priests and all the eight men of a fine bony struc- 
 ture, like hunting horses, six feet one or two apiece, 
 and grand leapers and swimmers in youth, like the one 
 now drowned, who had swum half a mile towards 
 shore in his clothes, towing the boat by the painter, 
 keel upwards, with two boatmen praying and wailing 
 astride it, until the cold cramped the stout Father's 
 muscles up into knots and he sank in the act of absolv- 
 ing the men horsed on the keel. 
 
 The eight sat up a long time that night, gabbing 
 family history: even priests will, at a birth or funeral. 
 One of the clan had been all but made head of May- 
 nooth ; that was a great thing. The grayest was made 
 to retell how his father had told him in 1830 the way 
 that his father was carried home dying in 1798 with 
 his entrails exposed where the English had flogged him 
 upon the abdomen. The others listened as Christians, 
 about the year 100, might hear from an aged witness 
 how Christ's eyes had turned this way and that on the 
 Cross. And then the family manfully faced the black 
 fact of " souper " Browne that went thrice to the 
 
PROLOGUE 7 
 
 Protestant church in the old Penal days, to save the 
 rich land that he had. 
 
 " x\h, then, if the souper were all," broke out Father 
 John, a child of impulse ; but even he checked at the 
 look he got from the rest. Grief behind grief, shame 
 beyond shame — if you probe far enough, in the 
 very best houses you may attain the unmention- 
 able. 
 
 Patrick, the big grazier from Banaghan, plunged, 
 for escape, into talk of a great hope he had that the 
 family name might not be Browne at all, nor anything 
 English, but Brian itself. If one man would set foot 
 in a Protestant church to keep a hold of his land, what 
 would prevent another from stripping the very name 
 off his own back, or putting an English look on it, to 
 keep the life in him, God help him? 
 
 The seven strained hard to believe. No use ; a 
 savage honesty, that would have been looked on and let 
 whole civilizations founder for want of a lie, compelled 
 them. What hope could there be? For more than 
 two hundred and sixty years there had been tenant 
 Brownes on the books of Lord Dunster, beyond. And 
 there was the tough old tradition of that English 
 trooper ancestor; even his ring was here, on Father 
 Horace's hand ; broad gold with an oval engraved gem, 
 Greco-Roman, some Renaissance find, it had worn 
 thinner now on eight generations of little fingers, the 
 only finger an Irish Browne could put into it — thinner, 
 and yet, as evidence, it was still gross. They handed it 
 round. Father Horace translated the words inscribed 
 inside the gold band : — 
 
8 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 " Francisco Browne, d.d. W.S. Londin. MDCVII." 
 
 Shakespeare himself might have given the thing to 
 a young Oxford wit, or enjoyer of wit, wild for the 
 playhouse. 
 
 They considered the letters. " London " — that was 
 deadly. " Ach, they're cut to the depth of a ditch," 
 Patrick said gloomily, handing it back to the head of 
 the family. Wear it another hundred years and per- 
 haps — The head of the family rubbed it round ab- 
 sently on his finger. 
 
 They sought comfort from figures. The Frank of 
 the ring was said to have married some decent woman ; 
 their child would be half-Irish. That child's child, if 
 again there were no misalliance, would be Irish three 
 parts out of four ; its child, again, would have only one- 
 eighth of it English; the next, one-sixteenth. They 
 themselves would be Irish at least to the length of a 
 hundred and twenty-seven to one. Not a doubt, that 
 was why Father John, the first time that ever he spoke 
 the Gaelic, had felt that his tongue had not been a fit 
 for his mouth till that day. 
 
 Part of their bodies' history stared out of them. All 
 that was clay was glorious ; muscles modeled in potent 
 thongs that clenched and gave, gave and clenched, 
 musingly flicking under clear skins on which the red 
 lived and flitted; full eyes, bright and wild like a 
 caught animal's; heads not stuck on stumps of thick 
 poles, but lifted on swayed stems with the look that 
 some flowers have of reaching up at the sun, with a pull 
 on their moorings to earth. They walked like the 
 
PROLOGUE 9 
 
 creatures of unjaded gait — blood horses, greyhounds, 
 red deer and some athletes when young — in whom each 
 step seems to be an inquisitive and shy caress offered 
 to the ground, as if the feel of the earth, its mass and 
 springiness, were a fresh marvel still. 
 
 The clay told of the pit from which it was dug. 
 Earth-loving earth, you might figure them crumbling 
 clods, from farms of their own, in affectionate hands, 
 alone with the tilth and the straining life in themselves 
 and the cutting leash of their Irish chastity. Some 
 tricks of look might have been caught from fathers 
 on whom the lines that old age found waiting for it to 
 fix had been drawn and redrawn as they peered with 
 half -closed eyes through the fog that ascends from 
 steaming and slipping droves, or along the last furrow 
 at twilight, or watched from under the drip of their 
 eaves the day-long beat, beat of rain that lodged the 
 year's oats or rotted the year's potatoes, their hearts 
 still somberly filial to the soil that their minds cried out 
 on : the niggard, the harridan, what did she do for a 
 son? 
 
 So these eight felt, like their fathers; and after a 
 while, if you heard them talk, you might see what it 
 was that kept this bitter and disenchanted affection 
 short of despair and disablement. They were all 
 priests in a way ; more so than most priests ; they had 
 cowls in their dispositions ; they felt, with the positive- 
 ness of bodily sense, that to live was only to stand 
 awhile in a lobby, with everything, that men could have 
 come for, waiting beyond the next door. Gymnasts 
 will pass from one swinging trapeze to another, high 
 
10 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 in the air : so these Brownes seemed to have let go the 
 common human idea — yours and mine, whatever we 
 say — of life as a whole and round thing, to be lived out 
 with a will; they had clutched at the thought of it all as 
 no more than a blank hour's wait in the cold for a dawn. 
 The new grip had swung them away from the old, 
 through naked space, and now they felt safe while the 
 grip held, but still redoubtably committed ; it gone, they 
 could see their way out of their minds. Black, beyond 
 soupers, would any one be who loosened another's 
 grasp; the mind had to search far for the likeness of 
 that last baseness. Rats that the Dutch hunt to death 
 lest they bore the hole that may flood a province? 
 No. Rats are innocents; they do not know. Say, 
 rather, a guard put in charge of a dike, who opens the 
 sluices by night to drown out country and friends. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 " But they — their day and night are one. 
 
 What is't to them that rivulets run, 
 
 Or what concern of theirs the sun? 
 
 It seems as though 
 
 Their business with these things were done 
 
 Ages ago." 
 
 William Watson. 
 
 INTO the lustrous peace that had hushed, one still 
 afternoon in September, the westward-turned ter- 
 race of Roc-a-Voir Inn, high on a sunned alp of the 
 Valais, there broke, as a boy's stone fractures the 
 pensive and unaware glass of a pond, the news that 
 some one was certainly coining uphill — might indeed 
 reach the inn in two hours. A waiter's eye, sleepily 
 roaming the landscape, had sighted a speck, one that 
 moved. Like a black fly it traversed a bleached shoot 
 of stones, three thousand feet under the terrace. A 
 speck, or two specks? Running in for the glass he 
 made sure. One speck, strictly speaking: one mon- 
 sieur only ; the other, simply a guide. 
 
 The waiter awoke the bureau; for there, too, in- 
 visible poppies were seeding. The faint buzz-uzz-uzz 
 of the voice of the landlady, totting up columns of 
 
 11 
 
12 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 francs in her bower, had thinned down to stillness; 
 will failed her, the strong bee invaded by autumn, even 
 to index the dying year's honey ; she leant back, her 
 eyes slowly filming ; dozing, she mused on those other 
 dozers, four of them, out on the terrace, her summer's 
 lingering roses — the last, she half hoped, if the hope 
 were not sin ; were they gone, bees could sleep and not 
 dream of missed provender. Roused by the waiter she 
 mastered a sigh and heard him out benignly. Her 
 equity valued his dutiful soul. At eight thousand feet 
 any news is a thrill that should be in the gift of a land- 
 lady, no one less. He had done well ; he had not, while 
 she slept, usurped the prerogative. Issuing forth she 
 imparted the glass to the terrace. " Pardon ! A gen- 
 tleman — mounting — now, at the end of the season. It 
 is a resolute. He will be English." 
 
 So Madame tactfully said; for our own was the 
 speech that had drowsed, for some ten minutes past, on 
 the lips of the four semi-recumbents whose four iron 
 chairs, stilled for that space, now resumed their life's 
 task of scrunching the neatly-raked miniature desert of 
 round pebbles in which they stood. For the inn, 
 though high, was not rude; had it been so, it would 
 have been empty to-day; far from it, the legs of terrace 
 chairs waded here in pebbles as round, loose and dry 
 as any that crepitate under the planes of the first hotels 
 of Lausanne. The resumptive sound of scrunching 
 was loudest, as the recess had achieved deepest silence, 
 under the person of Gabriel Newman, a pink and 
 pleased man of about twenty-three, with thinning blond 
 hair plastered tight, in the fashion, and damply gloving 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 13 
 
 the skull, and with scarcely more lines or puffs as yet 
 on his forehead and cheeks than if he had lived well. 
 What with the gentle bend of the chin, the softly aqui- 
 line nose, the smoothly-filled cheeks and the bulge of the 
 eyes, and the curvilinear lines of the smile with which 
 he always talked, his shaven face might strike you 
 as just a little too rich a system of convexities, much as 
 Michelangelo's luxuriant " Drunken Bacchus " might 
 afflict a trainer. But any grazier would say that man 
 or beast could not have looked more evenly fed. One 
 thing this goodly frame wanted — a left leg; it used one 
 of wood, or else the faith fullest image that Nature 
 could carve, in her own flesh and bone, of that work of 
 man. No one knew which, nor had Newman been 
 known to admit, by so much as a wince or an oath — 
 though he had the latter within easy call — that he 
 walked with some pain on two sticks which were all 
 but crutches, still less that he ever had to halt when 
 minded to walk in the ways of his heart and in the 
 sight of his eyes. 
 
 This sovereign spirit had drooped for some instants : 
 a crossing shadow had chilled it. How unripe a 
 knowledge, how stumbling a reason, how shallow a 
 flow of conjecture did this Yankee paper from Paris, 
 that now sprawled despised on his knees, address to the 
 Autumn Handicaps, soon to stir England ! Newman 
 had mourned for his kind, that it should not do better. 
 Then Nature, good to her infants, had filled him that 
 bath of rose-tinted warmth from the west, and his eyes 
 had closed to be soothed by it, some unspent virtue of 
 luncheon assisting. Newman snored and care left 
 
14 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 him. Guy Hathersage, basking more containedly beside 
 him, lifted one eyelid, as sleeping cats do at a sound, 
 and smiled to himself as the mouth of his friend fell 
 a-gape and the newspaper slipped to the ground from 
 his friend's slackening fingers. Simple system of or- 
 gans, Gabriel ! 
 
 Guy let fall the eyelid and mused on that system. 
 To Guy it had charmless piquancy. Many things had, 
 and most people. If nothing excited him, plenty of 
 things made him slightly curious about them at first. 
 An olive-skinned slip of a man, full of grace, a swayed 
 osier to look at, Guy was bodily young for his twenty- 
 two years. His pretty brown eyes had, when he talked, 
 the quick, shy shift of a boy's when they will not be 
 still lest you catch the wild soul in them. Guy's mind, 
 however, was aged; friendlily, equably aged. Semi- 
 amused almost always, hardly ever delighted, from 
 people he looked for no thrill — only some neat, new 
 patness of proof that no miracles come to vary the 
 working, and ceasing to work, of the known springs 
 and checks in a shopful of watches of many shapes — 
 yet not so very many, and none novel, and most of 
 them dusty. 
 
 Thirty yards off — the younger men had been smok- 
 ing, and manners survived in the Hathersage family — 
 Guy's sister sat by their father, a sixty-year man with 
 a trim beard, not carved, but compendious by nature, 
 and now hemmed with gray, and so perfectly brushed 
 that you seemed to have seen no brushed beard before; 
 a man so well bred that each feature showed like a sign 
 in some new code specially made for the quick and safe 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 15 
 
 conveyance of fragile perceptions and courtesies; 
 round, opened eyes like a wren's, bright in an instant 
 with delicate ventures and fears; lips modeled as if 
 to shape ironies gently or soften a tone in mercy to 
 humble absurdity. 
 
 June, the girl of nineteen, had Guy's good looks, 
 or more; but not, you would say, his tireless good- 
 humor. At present she eyed with settled disfavor, 
 through almost closed lids, some three of the ten noblest 
 snow peaks in Europe. They stood up, beyond the 
 now blackening trench of the valley below, paraded like 
 Graces before this youthful she-Paris, and she found 
 them wanting, like some other things in the past month 
 of travel, her father's and hers. Venice and Paris, 
 Florence and Fiesole, Rimini, Vallombrosa, Ancona, 
 all were reviewed and rebuked. Paris was dust and 
 white faces and leaves early dead, and dresses tried on 
 — memory shuddered at thought of all that trying-on; 
 and then all that time in the train ; the waking in the 
 sleeping-car to see an old Frenchwoman, risen at grisly 
 dawn, remake her face of bluish white against the new 
 day; and what a day! — of perpetual pattering rain, 
 gazed upon numbly through streaming or misted panes 
 during long, nauseous dining-car meals that paused 
 much in their middles, but little between each one and 
 the next. And, all the way south from Lugano, 
 churches, galleries; galleries, churches, and always — 
 she hated herself for remembering — the voice of her 
 father, seemlily modulous, weaving its webs of picked, 
 relevant comment between her and so many things 
 which — she dimly suspected — had little to do with the 
 
16 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 world he walked in, a world of culture fallen rather 
 a-weary, half-understanding everything, placing every- 
 thing, summoning up at the instance of every new 
 thing, or thing newly seen, its appropriate mood of 
 semi-emotion, as settled by balance of expert authority. 
 Webs of blown rain between her and the St. Gotthard 
 snows; webs of pertinent, passionless words between 
 her and Bellini's tranced sense of the wonder of 
 motherhood ; curtains of ordered, raptureless reverence 
 hung between her and that " Crucifixion " at Rome 
 just when it seemed as if — one instant more and she 
 might have held and made hers the strange, poignant 
 delight of knowing, really knowing, as one knows one's 
 headaches, what Christ had borne; everywhere wisps 
 of one cobwebby lawn or another drawn between some- 
 thing in her that desired to put itself forth and attain 
 completeness and something outside her that must, 
 surely, answer to this, some new visibleness awaiting a 
 quickened sight, like the many stars that must be 
 shining only just out of reach of one's eyes. She came 
 out of reverie frowning, to take Madame's offered 
 field-glass without curiosity. 
 
 " Far down, mademoiselle. Now ! Now ! — they 
 pass Bonaveau." 
 
 Two miles downhill a spot of black crossed swiftly 
 the whitewashed wall of a tiny wayside chapel. 
 
 " There ! There ! " Madame fretted lest June 
 miss the thrill. " Where the path runs out from un- 
 der the pines." 
 
 "Yes, yes; one has eyes." And then June, with 
 the glass at her eyes, bit her lip, vexed at her petulance. 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 17 
 
 Three days before she had prayed in that very chapel, 
 a little dourly, that she might be better-tempered. 
 Already the fleeting stain was off the white wall. 
 " How they run ! " she said to her father. How little 
 she cared if they flew. 
 
 "Two Oreads?' murmured the elder. 'Swift 
 as a horse up a steep hill.' He had always at call 
 some one else's apt word. When brought up against 
 a new thing he would act like a yachtsman touching a 
 pier, swinging out fenders wherever his paint might be 
 scraped against some reality's rude balks of timber. 
 Letters and art — to change the figure — this sensitive 
 soul had learned to spread like a gelatine film over all 
 its naked, soft surface, lest life, the neat strength of the 
 acid, bite through and engrave. ' Is it he that should 
 come? " he asked June. 
 
 "Father Power? No. He comes to-morrow. 
 Didn't I tell you the day? " 
 
 " Doubtless, my dear. You printed on dust — my 
 poor memory." 
 
 June could almost have shrieked at that mild, let- 
 tered playfulness. Then, at a thought of her own, 
 crossness collapsed in contrition. " Oh, father, it's I 
 that forget. I was to have ordered his room, and I've 
 not told Madame he is coming. Madame ! ' 
 
 ' Mademoiselle ? ' : The landlady listened. A friend 
 of her guest's, a cure from Ireland — " Catholic, Ma- 
 dame, like you too, and us " — was going to Rome, a 
 pilgrim ; he would be passing by train to-morrow, 
 down there in the valley, and wished to break the 
 journey. Could Madame receive him? 
 
18 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 ' But yes." Madame's gesture embraced in its 
 scope the two walkers now breasting the steep, and this 
 later clerical advent. ' It recommences, the season." 
 
 June had handed the glass to her father, whose 
 courtesy used it, not his desire. Two thousand eight 
 hundred feet lower the sun, as Mr. Hathersage looked, 
 caught the sweat on the guide's dripping face and on 
 a chest bared to get air. They shone ; they might have 
 been vizor and breastplate in Paradise. " Ah ! " said 
 the sensitive gentleman. Softly he shuffled across, to 
 leave the glass with Newman, and went indoors to read 
 Pascal in coolness. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 " And deliver us from our daily bread." 
 
 Mariana's Prayer. 
 
 IT was not in Newman to be surprised visibly. To 
 animate narratives, later, he might say that this or 
 that imbecility of a friend's had amazed him; but no 
 one, he justly boasted, had ever seen him knocked all of 
 a heap, like some poor lambs, by any impact of circum- 
 stance. So, when he had taken a long stare through 
 the glass and, putting it down, said " Gorlummy ! " it 
 was as a virtuoso in popular speech that he said it, 
 and not as one from whom the orison was really torn 
 by the shock of an idea's entry on the spirit. 
 
 Guy breathed a lazy " Amen." 
 
 " Know one Browne at Oxford? " asked Newman. 
 "Didyer? One Browne?" 
 
 "Of Auriol?" 
 
 " Yes. Year junior to me." 
 
 " I don't know about ' know.' I've met him, per- 
 haps." 
 
 " You'll meet him again. He's that Derby winner 
 that's belting uphill." 
 
 Guy took the glass, without ardor, and looked. 
 " The more shining face, or the less? " 
 
 " The unsweatiest. How's he to sweat, with the life 
 he led? Now, do you know" — Newman gathered 
 
 19 
 
20 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 impressiveness — " that man would come into Pole's 
 rooms at Auriol dead sober — you see, you were always 
 supposed to be blind in Pole's rooms — and there he'd 
 be, making a fool of himself, sitting up in a chair, 
 among all of us." 
 
 "Preaching?" 
 
 ' No. Just looking on. No, he isn't a pi man, 
 exactly. I do say that for him. A pi man I knew 
 took him on — about his soul, that sort of lay; found 
 he didn't believe a Jack thing. And yet, do you 
 know " — again Newman's manner grew graver — " I've 
 seen that man reading away at the Bible as if it were 
 some other book — as if he liked it." 
 
 ; ' Ah? ' Guy encouraged the vein. It was sport to 
 see Newman, in sketching this newcomer, sketch him- 
 self too. 
 
 '* Caught him at it in bed," pursued Newman, " one 
 night I got lost. I was crossing the quad, time of 
 night when a path gets as broad as it's long. I fell 
 into his rooms and there he was, at it. I thought he 
 must be ill or something. 'What's wrong?' I said. 
 ' Going to be hanged in the morning? ' I said, just to 
 cheer him. He let a yell. ' Wrong! I should think 
 not ! The man who wrote " Job " was all right. Lis- 
 ten, about all these beasts ! ' And off he went, spout- 
 ing whole chunks. It might have been the evening 
 paper." 
 
 " I give you the thanks of the Press." 
 
 " Press ? What ? Oh, I forgot that you own a rag 
 
 now." 
 
 Three-sixteenths only — the merest shred of a — 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 21 
 
 must we say? — rag. So far has the will of a great- 
 aunt involved me. Don't stop. What did you say 
 when Browne — " 
 
 " Say? I bolted for my stable. Didn't seem right, 
 somehow, having a good time like that with the Bible. 
 Very next night I met Chadd — it was under Blunt's 
 table, I think ; anyhow, things had run a bit clear in 
 my head and I told him. It troubled Chadd fearfully. 
 ' Why, for a skeptic to do it,' said Chadd, ' it's like 
 drawing a check on a bank you've no money at.' 
 Chadd cried to think of it. You see, although he could 
 take his drink like other people, Chadd was a serious 
 man, really — plowed in divinity, that sort of thing, 
 and a curate by now. ' Think of the sinfulness ' — 
 that's what he said — ' sheer false pretenses, like saying 
 ' Gorblimey ! ' although you're an infidel." Well, 
 there's a good lot in that. Whajja think? ' 
 
 ' I was thinking," Guy said, with an air of innocent 
 dreaminess, " that I remembered Browne well. He 
 used to speak sweetly of you." 
 
 'Eh? What?' Newman pricked up disquieted 
 ears. 
 
 ' He said, ' I just like the very notion of Newman ' 
 — Browne was staring across through the smoke at 
 you; ' I like that honest hatred he has of learning and 
 poverty. He's such a spess ! ' Browne doated upon 
 you, like a collector. He told me a charming story; 
 he'd brought to your rooms some pundit who'd won 
 half the 'Varsity prizes, and you had said afterwards, 
 ' One or two blighters like that were enough to ruin 
 a whole college.' " 
 
22 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " Well, what would you say, with that sort of owl 
 coming flapping round, when you had some hopes of 
 the freshers? " 
 
 ' I should bleed for you. Browne, no doubt, did ; 
 or — " Guy dangled the unuttered words like a cast 
 of dry flies. 
 
 " Well ? " Newman rose to them. 
 
 " You know his trade? " 
 
 " Lord, no ! " 
 
 " Proud man! I do. I'm half in it." 
 
 "Mean he's a blooming reporter?" 
 
 " Novelist, journalist, dramatist — all the same thing, 
 you know; workers in fiction. You've read his 
 novel?" 
 
 " Not heard of it." 
 
 ' Yet the world does — and of a play that's just com- 
 ing. And now do you guess? " 
 
 "Eh?" 
 
 " That at Pole's you were — possibly — sitting?" 
 
 " D'you mean he'd have the wickedness to — ? ' 
 
 " These artists do use the model, you know." 
 
 Like a child, that without wilful cruelty tickles a 
 worm with a leaf, Guy fretted his friend. Newman 
 was only a book, the one nearest to hand, the library's 
 latest futility, sent to amuse if it could. Guy gave it 
 its chance, hoping little ; he languidly turned the pages ; 
 he opened the stout, vulgar soul at new chapters, its 
 boasts and pluck and lusts and tremors. Any paper- 
 knife served; Browne, this orient author, as well as 
 another. Guy really remembered Browne now — their 
 few meetings at Oxford, and then a slight gap while 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 23 
 
 Browne was obscure, and then how Guy had thought 
 they really must have Browne to dinner ; they always 
 had rising authors to dinner, on the off-chance that 
 they might be amusing. Blabbing to Newman what 
 Browne had said of him might not have been very nice, 
 now that Guy came to think of it. Still, if it made 
 any trouble, he would not have meant the trouble ; in- 
 deed, he would wish quite sincerely that harm had not 
 come, and would stand off a little and eye himself with 
 mild wonder and ask, without harshness, what could 
 have made him do it. 
 
 All the harshness the family had of that kind was 
 lodged in his sister, a true hanging judge of herself 
 when the mood was on her. Vexed that she had for- 
 gotten that room — she who had specially asked Father 
 Power to come — she was going assize at this moment, 
 hounding to judgment each poor little lapse from grace, 
 or from graciousness, during their month's stern chase 
 of civilized pleasure. How she had murmured! "Oh, 
 I am vexed! v " I've been so disappointed! ' " I've 
 had such a horrible time!" — one of these forms or 
 another seemed to have opened all her talks with her 
 father. " You feel relief now that it's fresher? " the 
 poor man had timidly asked, one moon-lit night, at the 
 end of a querulous day in the sunshine near Venice, 
 when ripples of water and ripples of music, indistin- 
 guishable in their rhythmic coolness, were lapping under 
 their gondola. June's answering snap — " I might, if 
 this frock didn't hurt me so under the arms " — came 
 back now to plague its inventor. Then that day of 
 shame at Perugia! Seeing her gaze from the hill, 
 
24 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 out over blue Umbria, he had asked friendlily, nerv- 
 ously, what she was thinking, and she had brutally 
 dashed his hopes of fit local emotions with " I was just 
 wondering when my head means to stop aching." And 
 oh, the first morning at Florence ! — the start to walk 
 down from Fiesole, where they had stayed; how, as 
 they set out, his mind was happily fingering Dante and 
 Pater and Ruskin and Browning, and all the kind in- 
 terveners between its soft tissues and stark Middle 
 Ages or unbated Tuscany, until, scarcely over the 
 threshold, June had banished content with the desperate 
 saying: "I promise myself no pleasure at all from 
 this walk, the wind blows my hat so." That clay was 
 the nadir. On entering the windless Uffizi her father 
 had ventured tremblingly, " Now I hope you'll feel 
 better," and she had snarled, " Yes, so do I, I am 
 sure "; and at dinner had said, as she viciously shook 
 her napkin out, " This evening meal is one of the worst 
 plagues of the day " — a devil's grace. Grace after 
 meat too : her father had offered to read Michelangelo's 
 sonnets, out on the Fiesole terrace, the Val d'Arno 
 spread out below them in deepening purple and crim- 
 son, and she had said darkly : " It might help to make 
 us to forget what we've eaten." The thought of each 
 slip into some base sourness, and of his uncontrollable 
 wince, or taxed courtesy, pierced her with rusty skew- 
 ers. And yet, was she wrong? Wrong to wound 
 him, of course; why should he bear the sins of the 
 world ? But to find Europe dusty, dust underfoot and 
 a dust-filled air? — what else was it? Paris was dust 
 and white faces and — so the old wheels of bafflement, 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 25 
 
 rage, self-pity, self -censure, each turning the next with 
 its cogs, ground oillessly round in her mind. 
 
 Guy roused her. " I bring you a marvel," he said, 
 but his tone said that marvels were all an old fable. 
 The man coming up, he told her, was an acquaintance. 
 
 She looked up, incurious. " The marvel would be 
 if he weren't. Wasn't the man we ran down on 
 Lugano — the swimmer — your first fag at Harrow? 
 Or was that the godson of some one papa knew in 
 Parliament? Why, the beggar we found at Torcello 
 had cleaned boots at Rome, at the Embassy, when 
 Uncle Conrad was there." 
 
 " My poor sister, you touch on a fatal truth. One 
 friendly soul like papa can run through a whole fam- 
 ily's fortune of newness in people it meets. Papa 
 leaves us no lands undiscovered. We run our frail 
 shallops ashore, you and I, on some stranger — we hope 
 so, at least ; we leap from the bows ; all ardent, we run 
 up appropriate flags; tiptoe, we peer through the jun- 
 gle. And lo ! in the first clearing, embers ! Remains 
 of a bamboo erection, signs of a garden, of civiliza- 
 tion. Despair! — it is one of papa's disused resi- 
 dencies! Yet let me be just. It is not papa, it is 
 Newman, nay, it is I, who have met yonder climber." 
 
 " Climber? ' Climber or walker, little she cared. 
 
 She was girding within at Guy's irony. Why should 
 it play round their father's dear head? But had not 
 her own murmur started it? So the old wheels of 
 complaint and compunction jarred on while Guy spoke. 
 
 " So reason tells me. Thus : he that comes has a 
 guide. But no one takes guides to come here and no 
 
26 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 further. What follows? They climb in the morn- 
 ing one of these evil eminences?" 
 
 He drew her eyes round to the snows of three tall 
 peaks to the south-east, behind and above the inn, and 
 now flushing to warmth in the first red of sunset. Up 
 there, for an eye that had its health, all was dressed 
 in illusion, to wear for an hour at most ; frost would 
 then model dead whiteness in iron where now the high 
 snowfields were soft laps edged with pink, restful to 
 lie in, it seemed ; sunny ledges and terraces, hoisted and 
 tilted for basking upon ; and all like some place happily 
 dreamt of, aglow with a visionary glamour; made, too, 
 like things in good dreams, without hardness of struc- 
 ture; fold yielded to fold, stair swelled convex or wave- 
 like to pass into stair; only, at the southernmost 
 peak's north-eastern corner — the Dent Rouge Guy told 
 her the peak was — there ran up a steep sky-line, a 
 framing ridge with its dark rocks half bare, a slanting 
 line of black dots like a route pricked out on a map, 
 with the fields of rose-tinted snow below it, and fields 
 of sun-searched blue air above. It looked as if it 
 must lead to some world's wonder. So, at least, June 
 dimly felt, not having the single eye's vision, and yet 
 having a blurred sense that it could be had, did one 
 know whither to strive. 
 
 Guy prattled on about Browne — " one of those 
 dragons of energy, enemies to peace " — how he would 
 drag three reluctants from bed on a midsummer Sun- 
 day at hours unthought of, mythical, before Oxford's 
 earliest bell, to scull and tow upstream right through 
 the sun's working day, unwinding strange coils of the 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 27 
 
 Isis among distant meads. " He says ' Come ' and one 
 cometh. I went myself once, I with my large use for 
 sleep, to maintain my amenity. How the man diva- 
 gates ! ' Guy was looking down through the glass. 
 The two moving spots on the side of the mountain, still 
 a long mile from the inn, would part for a while and 
 rejoin; the track of the one drew with a plodding pen- 
 cil the easiest upward route; the other drew loops on 
 each side of that line; it would turn aside, visit boul- 
 ders and gullies, or loiter at white broken water, and 
 then, coming back straight and fast, move again for a 
 while, by the side of the slow, even goer. ' Convince 
 yourself " — Guy gave his sister the glass — " that it is 
 not a lady exercising a dog." 
 
 ' Is there a wind," she asked, looking, ' down 
 there? Here the air's fainting." 
 
 Guy looked. From the excursive figure's left hand, 
 hanging close to its side, a handkerchief, held by one 
 corner, streamed out horizontal behind him, like a 
 blown pennon. Guy took other evidence. " Not a 
 pine stirring. The breeze is his make. The wind 
 of his haste." 
 
 ' Winds are to the tempestuous," their father said 
 softly, remelting into their company. Sunset was 
 come, and sunsets had their dues ; their place in Turner 
 was safe; they were in poetry's peerage; like saints 
 they were calendared ; no rude, startled act of adora- 
 tion was meet, but a liturgy, something apt from sensi- 
 bility's rubric, a collect fitted to hour and place, the 
 right choice among art's canonical forms of vespers. 
 " And now the sun had stretched out all the hills " — 
 
28 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 he crooned it over twice, watching the black spike of 
 shade thrown down on the snow by each western peak ; 
 swiftly each shadow lengthened, its tip marching 
 down the far side of the valley, then lost for a time 
 in the valley's black bottom, then sighted again, rush- 
 ing up the slope on this side, past where they stood, 
 to the west-facing snows overhead. Higher and 
 higher up the rosy radiance was driven before these 
 invaders ; its rosiness seemed to be penned in and deep- 
 ened as space for it failed, as if the same portion of 
 dye were suffusing a lessening ground. 
 
 "And over piney tracts of Vaud 
 The rose of eve steals up the snow," 
 
 the man of culture was murmuring, half-absently fin- 
 gering the words, like beads on a rosary. 
 
 Night involved the two travelers below. Far down 
 the mountain a spark struck itself, as it seemed, strug- 
 gled and blinked for a moment, then steadied itself 
 and burned on, a pin-prick of light in the wide pit 
 of blackness. They watched from the terrace for two 
 or three minutes, silent, till Guy's eye met June's. 
 Each saw that the other was waiting — Guy lazily 
 tickled and June in torment — until there should come 
 from their father the lines about lated travelers hasting 
 — what was it? — to gain timely inns. 
 
 " It's chilly. Do let us go in," she burst out, with 
 a shiver that was of the mind mainly. Her father 
 returned to Pascal with a lingering, discomforting 
 sense of dues not exhaustively paid. Guy agreed, 
 without hope of joy, to learn euchre from Newman. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 20 
 
 June went to her room to write letters; doing that, she 
 could sometimes attain plumbless depths of absorption. 
 She wrote by her window; she wondered at first what 
 it meant, and how long she had sat, when she saw 
 shafts of lantern-light dashed this way and that on 
 the gravel outside and heard casual words in a voice 
 that seemed fresh as the plash of a laugh in the dark 
 from a boat coming home. 
 
"W 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 " Murmur of living, 
 Stir of existence, 
 Soul of the world ! " 
 
 Matthew Arnold. 
 
 E had all been fairly original works of crea- 
 tion," Guy wrote to a friend late that evening, 
 " all during the soup and up to halfway through the 
 fish (conceive it! They hoist fish up hither: 
 despiciunt montem pisccs — guess how my father 
 abounded!), and then the man Browne came in, 
 and lo! we were faded old replicas, prints from the 
 third state, and not good impressions at that, for here 
 was the real proof etching, all edge and luster, sham- 
 ing us. He goes about, liking things insanely ; pitches 
 himself like an infant at what amuses him. I can see 
 him yelling ' Bags I ! ' and annexing the Forum or 
 pouching the Vatican. Yet is he modest ; he bounds 
 not. June and my father, poor Newman and I, all sat 
 and blinked while he spilt out, as well as shyness would 
 let him, his cornucopious gains of travel — a prize-fight, 
 some new and more earth-shaking Rodin at Paris, the 
 way they act Ibsen at Munich, the way they make cider 
 near Caen — he gets drunk on the difference between it 
 and how they make cider in Devonshire. Quite a 
 sound type, you know, only a little cyclonic for us quiet 
 people. To-morrow, at earliest cock-crow, or sooner, 
 
 30 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 31 
 
 he whirls me up some sky-impaling mountain behind 
 the premises. In very truth, sir, I had as lief be 
 hanged, sir, as go, but June has an impulse to rush out 
 and do something violent ; also, the deuce knows why, 
 one feels that one would be out of the proper main 
 stream if one stayed — the same notion, no doubt, that 
 makes the dust follow motors. I had it, that Sunday 
 he tore you and me from our beds, our altars, our 
 simple, devout student life, to toil up the river all 
 day." 
 
 That day on the Oxford river had come up at din- 
 ner — an obvious topic for people with few common 
 memories. Guv had begun it. Did Browne still se- 
 duce the devout — " ' little ones which believe,' like 
 me" — from prayers on Sundays? Or had he learnt 
 better? Had he ordered his millstone? 
 
 June shivered. Guy's jets of chaff could not hurt 
 those they were aimed at; his spirit had no drop of 
 vitriol in its aspersions; but why not take care what 
 he splashed by the way? In churches in Italy June 
 had not cared to see children gambol with dogs on the 
 steps of altars. It was uncivil. 
 
 Browne's eye caught her overstrained frown at the 
 venial ribaldry. He was surprised, and in that sur- 
 prise came the first clear impression he had of her, 
 body and mind — a Flora sitting in judgment, Hebe 
 turned Grand Inquisitor, a Rhadamanthine rose. 
 
 " The sin would have been not to go," Browne re- 
 plied, and unintendingly made Mr. Hathersage easy; 
 it gave him a cue; he could turn from Browne's and 
 Guy's to another going-a-Maying, more classic: 
 
32 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " ' Nay! not so much as out of bed? 
 When all the birds have matins said, 
 And sung their thankful prayers: Tis sin, 
 Nay, profanation to keep in.' " 
 
 He hummed the words lingeringly; so a bee hums 
 and hovers before folding wings on the one flower 
 that she was looking for. 
 
 Browne sucked in the sound of the lines ; they were 
 new to him. " That was just it, sir," he said. The 
 lines seemed to work on him; he set off eagerly, bun- 
 glingly, trying to tell how he had waked that day 
 early, to streets shining and silent, the first shadows 
 reaching to all lengths about them, in unfamiliar direc- 
 tions. His talk had no gloss or run, like a Hather- 
 sage's; more like the babbling of some one still in a 
 marvel's presence, interjecting broken surprise and 
 delight. 
 
 It was crude ; it was like some undressing begun 
 in public ; it might go to all lengths. June felt her 
 face tingle with shame, as one does, in one's safety, for 
 some rash taker of foolish odds. Oh, to have this 
 man away and to make Guy tell her it all. For Guy 
 had been there ; how Guy must have kindled ! Guy 
 had felt that auroral freshness and wonder ; only some 
 overflow from secret raptures of Guy's could have 
 animated this alien. 
 
 Guy, seeing some one begin to abound in a vein, 
 drew him on. They strung reminiscences — Godstow 
 at eight in the morning, mists on the move, the mead- 
 ows still littered with diamonds; and breakfast there, 
 on pink trout, by the door of the inn. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 33 
 
 " We as pink as the trout," put in Guy, " from that 
 swim at the weir. My teeth chatter to think of it." 
 
 June looked at Guy still; she was glad of his lithe- 
 ness and full eyes, their mild brown enisled in clear 
 bluish white; no teeth were so white as his, either; 
 she saw his lips set for the dive, and how they would 
 rise laughing after it, out of the lasher's race. And 
 Guy could dissemble that ecstasy ! ' Then, above 
 Godstow? " she asked. " Do go on," she added impa- 
 tiently. 
 
 " Oh. you tow miles and miles," Browne went on, 
 " with your head among the larks and your naked toes 
 feeling cowslips." He fumbled for some word, then 
 stumbled along. " The grass is in varnish — you know 
 the look ? Deep grass — the trees wade in it deeper 
 each Sunday." 
 
 Many bathes, jocund meals, pipes in Elysium — the 
 girl grew aware of them, found them all good, of a 
 goodness not physical only, but poignant with some 
 fleeting and flower-like grace of young delight. 
 Lamely Browne told the day out — how the evening 
 was happy years long; " the sun found the right place 
 in the sky, and stayed there "; then home in the warm 
 dark, at rest on the rhythm of the oars. June held 
 her breath, fearing for Guy, lest some stupid man in 
 the boat — this Mr. Browne, perhaps — should speak 
 and drown the note of one drip from a blade on the 
 feather ; each note fell round and cool and lay whole 
 like a pearl on the cushion of silent night. 
 
 The talk, when June took it in next, was of pictures 
 — or books, was it? — talk, on her father's and 
 
34. THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 brother's side, modern, equipped, lightly glancing; 
 only, not eager. They mooned in the van of all the arts, 
 rode at will with the head of each column and pitied 
 its hopes and were kind to its middlingness; nothing 
 was left remarkable under their visiting eyes; and yet 
 they kept on, they marched over the waste, urged by 
 some habit of well-bred forbearance blent with some 
 unspent instinct of caste captaincy. And they had 
 solaces, privacies, tiny reserves of less deep disap- 
 pointment with somebody's work, here and there, that 
 had not been smirched with a fame too vulgar ; failing 
 others, you had Leopardi to read; Shakespeare, al- 
 though he wrote much else, had written the better of 
 the Sonnets; and there were the pictures of Maris, 
 " the Maris that counts," the right one of the three. 
 
 Browne had waved an audacious flag and w r as now 
 looking shamefaced, as youth does when wisdom re- 
 ceives its flags and clarion blasts with bland lassitude. 
 June, with a twinge of compassion for culture so half- 
 baked, had heard him throw out the raw notion that 
 now was the time to be living in : painting, sculpture, 
 the novel, the play — in every garden the roses, the 
 perfected roses, the pick, were, perhaps, only just 
 bursting; the day of days might be at hand and we, 
 the lucky men in the lottery, lucky beyond Pericleans, 
 Augustans, Elizabethans, we might have drawn the 
 great hour of all — high noon, high tide, high midsum- 
 mer. He tumbled it out like that, garishly. So there 
 followed a pause soft and deep, a bed of feathers and 
 sand held out for the arrow, so witlessly loosed, to 
 sink into harmlessly. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 35 
 
 June felt with her kindred ; but also she now saw 
 their mood as if from without. It was like a dispirited 
 god's, sad-eyed and clement, bearing with mankind 
 after a Fall ; the world was like some storied place 
 whose story was forfeited ; it was to them a Stratford 
 that Shakespeare had never been near; a Westminster 
 Abbey detected as modern and, if you looked into it, 
 smart in design, nothing more. Essentiality was 
 gone. The trees had no hamadryads, poor things. 
 
 In mercy to Browne's raw gawkishness Guy led the 
 way round to themes that might — it was to be hoped — 
 let a mountaineer shine, if to shine were in him. Mr. 
 Hathersage helped ; he cited distinguished eulogists of 
 the open air, the life in the sun, of " enduring hard- 
 ness," a fashion raging just then among imitant minds. 
 Had Browne read Nature's last confidant? Some one 
 was named who had railed or pouted readably at roofs 
 and the tablecloth. Browne seemed to be at a loss. 
 
 " The man with a style," Guy explained, ' and a 
 cough, who was out two whole nights — you remem- 
 ber? He drove his pyjamas, piled on an ass, from a 
 sleeping-place under a bank of wild roses to one to 
 leeward of a clump of honeysuckles. You smile? 
 You alarm me. Is it not all moral beauty, as well as 
 dog-roses? " 
 
 Browne laughed. " When I was a boy, and slept 
 out, up the river, it used to be shirking one's tooth- 
 brush." 
 
 " ' Now I know,' ' Mr. Hathersage crooned, having 
 found what he sought, " ' the secret of the making of 
 the best people. It is to live in the open air and to eat 
 
36 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 and sleep with the earth." He fancied he thought 
 so, but few men would more surely and swiftly come 
 in when it rained. 
 
 Browne launched off again, with his usual effort at 
 starting. ' It's very nice of the bards and sages, sir; 
 only mayn't they change hares next moment and go 
 whooping off on some other line — perhaps saying, this 
 time, that the true virile game is to stand up to soot 
 and germs in East Ends and Black Countries and — ? 
 Why — " Not alone that which goeth into the 
 mouth intoxicateth a man. Browne looked round the 
 table exaltedly, caught at the first eye that he lit on, 
 which chanced to be Newman's, and rushed ahead : 
 ' Why, Newman, haven't there been in our time three 
 immense revolutions in collars, and — ? " 
 
 He meant no harm. For all that he noticed, New- 
 man might have been wearing no collar at all. But he 
 was. And in these matters of fashion Newman not 
 only followed the chase, but would sometimes ride 
 over the hounds; even now he was wearing a collar 
 that might in three months be a stroke of conformity 
 more consummately timed than to-day. So his heart 
 told him ; and, having insolences of his own to let off 
 on occasion, he thought he spied one in this unwitting 
 blunderer. 
 
 Mr. Hathersage saw how the coltish ears had flicked 
 back; he hurried to make a diversion with more book- 
 ish stuff about life far from books. Why not "go 
 back to Nature "? — that was the gist of it. 
 
 Browne, flushed and with eyes alight, caught the 
 thrown ball. "Back, sir? How far, though? To 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 37 
 
 tents and no meat from the butcher? Why stop at 
 that? Why not beech-mast and acorns?' 
 
 " Go the whole hog, as they say? " Mr. Hathersage 
 purred. 
 
 " Oh, doesn't our elderly friend, or aunt, Common 
 Sense — ?" Guy murmured, to lubricate speech in 
 Browne. 
 
 Browne turned to Guy, joyously free ; one could not 
 quite rally the graybeard. " Common Sense comes 
 me cranking in? — yes. And then we bolt back to our 
 dear old complexities? Last month a little book 
 came out; I got it; a kind of tramp's manual; amateur 
 tramp, of course, with a check-book about him, done 
 up in oiled silk. All chapter one was a lyric — joy of 
 living; over-safety of this effete age; out upon offices, 
 dining out, Consols, fixed hours, libraries? — so on, ad 
 lib, till page forty. From there to the end it was all 
 how to rig up some wonderful tent, and to steam fish 
 and brew a quite ineffable punch, and buy the most 
 magical frying-pans, sleeping-bags, spirit-stoves — as if 
 poor, passionate man, when he'd once got a spirit- 
 stove, ever could stop on this side of a big, shiny 
 kitchen-range, tying his soul to the earth. Oh, I beg 
 pardon — " He turned with a start to the lady. 
 He thought she had made a sound. 
 
 She only said, " Please go on." But he was grav- 
 eled, aghast; he had let himself go, in the first words 
 that came — stupid ones, doubtless. Besides, on what 
 toes might he not have come down ! 
 
 June did not like him; he was unrestful to do with; 
 he trumpeted; he was incalculable, though naif; to 
 
38 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 have him ahout was like taking a walk in the park with 
 some one who might at any time leap upon one of the 
 green chairs and preach, at the top of a childlike voice, 
 some outlandish doctrine, and make your face hot for 
 him. Nor had he a physical right to be like that in 
 mind. He was not built for a crank. In body and 
 face he was mere standard youth, with that clean blue- 
 ness of eye and whiteness of tooth and puissancy of 
 neck and wrist, ripe brown with stored sunshine. He 
 ought to be merely commonplace-minded, like other 
 young British Apollos, running fountains of stock 
 banalities, desolators of garden-parties in Surrey ; then 
 she could contemn him at ease. As it was, he was an 
 irritant. But she had breeding and a quick mercy for 
 the abashed. She would set on his feet the floored 
 dancer of galliards. 'Why rough it at all, then?' 
 she asked, encouraging. 
 
 Browne looked round the table for help. Would no 
 one explain? They must all know how, better than 
 he. No one spoke. He had the lead and must keep 
 it, and fluency, like a summer-dried fountain, had 
 failed when the need was sorest. " Do you think," 
 he said limply, " one does it to get at the feel of — well, 
 of not roughing it? " 
 
 'By contrast?' June's questioning look offered 
 help. 
 
 ' Well, by coming at it from behind, as it were — 
 from the time before comfort was yet thought of. I 
 found out one night " — the spasmodic flow quickened 
 a little — " the rare good invention a pillow is. We'd 
 been caught on the Weisshorn, Louis — my guide 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 39 
 
 here — and I. The first half of the night I lay 
 flat on a rock. Then I had a great notion and rested 
 my head on a rucksack with bottles, a loaf and a great 
 pair of boots in it. It was divine! " 
 
 " Voluptuary! " Guy breathed. 
 
 " Yes," said Browne, eagerly ; " simply." 
 
 " And I had thought you Antseus," Guy softly chid, 
 " coming to your mother for a kiss! " 
 
 " Kiss ? Dear old tigress ! The sport is to feel 
 your head's outside her mouth; and you can't if you 
 won't pop it in, just an inch or so. Try. Come up 
 the Dent Rouge to-morrow with Louis and me." 
 
 " Eh — ? " Guy ruefully scanned the proffered ad- 
 venture. June fixed amazed eyes on him. Could he 
 decline it? No, he could not; but a debility in him, 
 not a fervor, accepted. See a pith ball feebly dance 
 at the call of a piece of electrified glass — Guy was like 
 that, half animated by any impulse that fired those 
 who were nearest him. Gales that blew in their spirits 
 would set faint draughts stirring in his, light airs with 
 just enough motion to keep the miniature sails of his 
 will perceptibly flapping until he drifted rather than 
 steered across some new starting-line, not of his own 
 choosing. And meanwhile the idle and curious eye of 
 his mind was full of cool light; with amusement it 
 watched what he did, just as it took in traits in others, 
 virtues or failings, not wishing them anything else; 
 were they not parts of the scenery? 'I am the 
 clay," he said suavely to Browne, " thou art the 
 potter." 
 
 June had longed for his voice to come soon and be 
 
40 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 ardent. When it came, lifelessly bland, she felt she 
 had to give up a hope and lose a memory. This, then, 
 was how Guy had gone up that magical and sacred 
 river, a pressed man suffering Eden; his banter was 
 not a mere veil; it was all of him. Dinner was over; 
 she rose bewildered with that effacement of an imag- 
 ined brother. Yet all was not loss; she, if not he, had 
 just lived with a will that old day of his, a day unlike 
 any that came now; it shone with a glamoursome 
 goodness of light, like some lustrous single days re- 
 membered since childhood or seen in stories told her of 
 Ireland by her own Irish mother, three years dead. 
 
 At a door leading straight to the terrace they passed 
 from the dining-room's heat into a night fresh as a 
 bath ; in it their voices splashed coolly. No wind blew, 
 but June felt the air all astir as a brimming river is, 
 at high tide, when it does not flow nor ebb, and yet 
 moves, fingering its banks and arranging its waters: 
 space was a vessel filled; it held something that groped 
 and strove to be felt ; and some sense in June strained 
 to take up the challenge; it craned, it shook itself out, 
 a floating film of absorbency, on the charged air. Al- 
 most — it seemed — overhead, that north-east ridge of 
 the Dent Rouge, the one by which Guy was to go, sped 
 up through the snows to the region where stars in the 
 high frost winked and flashed; they seemed to have life 
 and intention, such pulse had their fierce sparks, and 
 now and then one would dart to earth slantwise, or fall 
 headlong as Lucifer from the dome's roof. Behind 
 the inn a wood fire was burning ; sparks flying up from 
 it met those others and crossed them. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 41 
 
 a i 
 
 Angels of God, ascending and descending.' 
 Browne's voice, not far from her, made a note of 
 their look, for himself, but what he said fitted her feel- 
 ing, and carried it on, a feeling as if in this heaving 
 darkness some world-transforming whisper were steal- 
 ing close up to the line across which new sounds slip 
 into hearing. How not to miss it? What if the 
 chance should go by, like a passing ship's rope acci- 
 dentally trailed, brushing the face of one drowning 
 unnoticed? Panic beset her; she saw the ridge spring 
 like a new Jacob's ladder into a sky strangely opened. 
 
 " Guy " — she spoke low, drawing close to her 
 brother — " let me come." 
 
 "To-morrow? Up that unspeakable gradient?' 1 
 
 " Let me come with you," she said entreatingly. 
 
 "With me? Say instead of me. June, my poor 
 lamb, could you take Isaac's place on the altar ?' : 
 
 She stamped to hear his voice rippling along, tri- 
 fling. " You know I can't go with these strange men, 
 alone. And I must go." 
 
 Guy's shrug came out well in the starlight, as main 
 architectural outlines do. 
 
 " ' Some hae meat and winna eat, 
 And some hae nane, that want it.' " 
 
 He sighed the words mildly and then spoke of many 
 things needed by climbers which she had not got — an 
 ice-ax, snow-spectacles, great nails, so on. 
 
 She countered each point quickly. Axes? — a sheaf 
 of them stood for sale in the hall; blue spectacles too; 
 
42 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 in the open wood-shed, at that very moment, the 
 porter was hanging new nails by candle-light into a 
 boot. 
 
 But the one guide, Guy feared, would not do for 
 the three of them. That checked her, an instant, but 
 " You must consult Mr. Browne," she doggedly said, 
 not yet yielding. 
 
 Joy ! Mr. Browne pooh-poohed the objection. 
 Why, he was — well, no, not a guide, but quite a porter; 
 he had the experience, though not the diploma. Be- 
 sides, the banger of nails in the wood-shed had both ; 
 they would take him ; Madame could well spare him, 
 now. 
 
 " Oh, thank you! " June cried in a tone too elate — 
 so it sounded to her ; it gave her a twinge of shamed 
 pride ; why bare even the least space of her soul's 
 surface to any stranger? 
 
 " What hour to start ? " Guy asked Browne re- 
 signedly. 
 
 " No hurry. Three'll do. We can't very well 
 climb the ridge itself before daylight, and that's not 
 till five, and it's only two hours' walk to the foot. If 
 they'll call us at two — " 
 
 Guy went to give orders. Browne and June were 
 alone. " How safe one's face feels in the dark! " he 
 said, quite simply, after a moment. The words 
 seemed to fall on that bare place in her and cover it, as 
 the naked are clothed in the innocence of others. He, 
 too, she was somehow aware, had winced, perhaps 
 flushed, with a sense of the twinge that had crossed 
 her, and then had been glad that no one could see him 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 43 
 
 wince, and now let it out unwittingly, like a child for 
 whom, in some abashed moment, to go into the dark 
 is to go into ease, and avow it. June wondered. Ex- 
 cept in a child she had never seen the penetrative kind 
 of simplicity. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 " Nur wo du bist sei alles, immer kindlich, 
 So bist du alles, bist uniiberwindlich." 
 
 Goethe. 
 Rough English Translation 
 " Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye 
 shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." 
 
 AT five the guide halted to blow out the lantern; 
 dawn was an hour off yet, but the sky had 
 turned violet, blenching down eastwards into a thin 
 and cold blue, astringently sharp like the blue of 
 skimmed milk. Due east the longish crest of Mont 
 Bouquetin, seen across a wide glacier, bit its black edge 
 into this paleness. 
 
 Above the five climbers' heads there rose the ridge 
 of their hopes; first a snow slope, steep and a little 
 concave ; its profile rushed up in one soar, like the line 
 of light swept by a rocket ; above it the ridge seemed 
 to be of dark rock, its shape indistinct; yet higher, and 
 also lighter in color and so lifting spectrally out of the 
 twilight, the ridge rose as a twisted stake fence of wild 
 pinnacles; one or two failing stars blinked feebly 
 among them, yet still the ridge soared on and lost 
 itself up there. It looked endless to June, it felt end- 
 less to Guy, as the five, roped in file, kicked steps for 
 themselves up the rustling snow slope for an hour, 
 and then scrambled on up the tumbled dark rocks 
 
 44 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 45 
 
 above, Guy at times on all fours and asking himself, 
 without indignation, why he was there. 
 
 They found a good flat place and breakfasted. 
 While they ate dawn came, dewless and birdless, with 
 no pretty ways; a last star went out and then an un- 
 dazzling orb, its rim studded with short darts of light, 
 drew clear of the earth with even, purposeful speed. 
 Guy eyed it. " A somewhat bald pageant," he said 
 in a measured tone, like one eschewing severity. 
 
 Browne chuckled. ' The classical style, I sup- 
 pose." 
 
 " No, no. The romantic," June cried, and then 
 stopped, clutched by self-criticism. Rubbish! What 
 rubbish! Stock raptures of female effusiveness. 
 Then, as suddenly, came an impulse of salvage, to try 
 to lift into truth the word let fall by rote. ' Isn't 
 'romantic' what's splendid and strange? And just 
 listen." 
 
 Far down, in the glacier that curved round the foot 
 of their ridge, the straining ice creaked ; then it re- 
 settled. They heard it out, silently. Stillness re- 
 froze itself round them; all the air seemed a palace of 
 stillness, with only infinitesimal winds stealing about 
 its vacuous chambers. June heard, in her resting 
 body, some pulse or breath that the climb had fluttered ; 
 it rustled — a sound like crushed feathers; it seemed 
 as if the others must hear, but they heard their own. 
 
 Browne looked at her friendlily, curiously. " I 
 meant the sun," he explained — " the big, bare way 
 that he has with him — ' not trick't or flounc'd,' you 
 know, like — " 
 
46 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " Like our poor Surrey daybreaks? ' : 
 
 " Ones that are all wet eyelash and twittering lawn? 
 No. Surrey hasn't the trick." 
 
 " Trick ? " she asked, rather august, as she always 
 grew when she felt at a loss. 
 
 He was confounded. " Her own trick — oh, yes. 
 I only meant — not the classical one." 
 
 "What's that?" she asked, more clemently. 
 
 Still, a prostrating demand. " The classical 
 dodge?" He got the question confirmed, to gain 
 time. 
 
 " Yes." She was waiting. 
 
 He had to plunge. " Isn't it— well, is it this— for 
 the sun, or the earth, or whatever it is, to be just its 
 bare self and yet take your breath away — like the old 
 boys who could say in their poems that somebody died, 
 or cried, and lo ! it's tragic?" 
 
 He inwardly groaned at himself; was that all he 
 could say, out of all that he meant? But in this air, 
 at this hour, ideas could pass and repass; it was a con- 
 ductor. Besides — though he could not know this — his 
 voice had self-attesting tones, in a word here and 
 there, of a zestful veracity, turns and returns of the 
 hound, nose to ground, caring about the scent only. 
 June thought. So the sun, the mere sun, was all that 
 to some people. And, strangely, a breath of that 
 gusto invaded her, some stir of the troubled delight of 
 sense put forth on things primal and vast, like the be- 
 ginning of worlds. 
 
 She came out of reverie shivering. Time to go on : 
 that was clear. And now, without slighting the 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 47 
 
 recreations of others, Guy made it known that his mind 
 was enriched with this sport to the height of its needs, 
 and that " brother body " craved ease. At eve, dewy 
 eve, he would freely accept any impressions the others 
 might bring back of the summit. June looked piteous 
 at this, and he made haste to add that, of course, he 
 would go down alone; the rest must go on. When 
 June's eyes signaled a refusal of this composition 
 Guy's brightened with silent, confidential laughter at 
 bourgeois prudishness, escorts, chaperons; they were 
 vieux feu, his looks said; they were not for the clean 
 of to-day. That moved her, and then he said the 
 slighter things that could be said ; unless she went on 
 he would go on and perish and leave his bones whiten- 
 ing, the ridge being no place for their transport. So 
 it was settled, except that the porter must go 
 back with Guy; the glacier below was not for lone 
 walkers. 
 
 While Louis repacked broken victuals, Browne and 
 June silently watched the two others diminishing down 
 the snow ridge. June turned at a sound ; it was Louis, 
 pawing the ground, athirst for the enemy. , 
 
 The guide advanced, first on the rope, the girl 
 second. That rope can do wonders ; currents of gay 
 comradeship spark along it ; sulks and reserves it con- 
 ducts harmlessly into the earth. Browne nodded to- 
 wards Louis as June was starting, her ten yards behind 
 him. " He'll sing in a moment," Browne whispered, 
 smiling. 
 
 She too was merry, at ease, a surprise to herself. 
 " The band plays the corps into action ? Dear 
 
48 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 Louis ! ' The three might have climbed together for 
 weeks, they were such friends. And, surely enough, 
 the lyric impulse was soon uncontainable. 
 
 " Montagnes d'Evolene, 
 Vous etes mes amours; 
 Cabanes fortunees 
 Ou j'ai regu le jour," 
 
 Louis trolled till breath failed. It did soon. For the 
 ridge changed. So far it had been a fair causeway, 
 narrow enough but, from left edge to right, pretty 
 level, a gangway-plank running up steep but true. 
 Now it was taking a list to the left; the gangway's 
 left edge had somehow dipped down; to go on they 
 would first have to crawl up the slant to the higher 
 right edge of the plank, so to speak, and then work 
 up that as they might. 
 
 Louis diffused himself over the slabby slant, gur- 
 gling with joy like a fish-fed cat, made nondescript 
 movements, and in a few seconds sat puffing and crow- 
 ing astride of the sharp upper edge. June followed. 
 Arrived, she looked over the edge. It had no other 
 side to be seen; the crest that she clung upon beetled 
 out over a void, like an eave; all was cut away under 
 it. Holding on with one hand and her knees, June 
 searched about, scraped a stone out of a cleft and 
 dropped it over. It fell clear through air for two hun- 
 dred feet, then struck a wall of hard snow and spun 
 along down it, making a faint, distant hiss. 
 
 " Good — isn't it?" Browne, who had scrambled up 
 after her, panted out, breathless with haste and rap- 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 49 
 
 ture. The gaze of both followed the stone where it 
 still spun or slid or leapt on, now out of hearing, two 
 thousand good feet down the wall, until at the top of 
 its speed it was fielded extinguishingly by a waiting 
 crevasse, a shark's slit of a mouth with soft lips of 
 snow curved over parted ice teeth. At each hazard of 
 its descent Browne had made tiny noises uncon- 
 sciously, little grunts of happy absorption, holdings of 
 breath as the stone neared a rock or a hole, releases of 
 breath when it cleared them, almost a sigh when the 
 run ended. June heard these sounds while watching 
 the stone ; or rather — absurd, but it seemed so — hear- 
 ing them was watching the stone more absorbedly 
 than she had known that she could watch any- 
 thing. 
 
 Attention relaxed, they looked up and she saw in 
 his face a glee new to her ; yet she knew it ; she felt it 
 rise in her too — the glee of a safety no longer unfelt 
 or tasteless, like safety down there in the valley; now 
 it was made salt to the sense ; it was prized because 
 worked for; it glowed, a triumph for all the taut 
 muscles; it stood in relief, cut out on a beautiful back- 
 ground of risk; it was saved from being a matter of 
 course, taken for granted. She felt her world widen- 
 ing again; there were some, then, to whom such joys 
 were not fortuitous flashes ; they knew where to come 
 for them. What might one not know? — how to use 
 them, perhaps, as avenues up to yet other heights of 
 strange delight that no one had told her of. 
 
 " It is best," Louis said, with Greek moderation, 
 " not to slip here." 
 
50 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 Overhead the ridge was a file of shattered towers: 
 it mounted wavering; now four or five of these towers, 
 one after another, would shoot straight up at the sky; 
 then some blast from the south would seem to have 
 caught a whole troop of them — all their tips swayed 
 to the north; like a row of blown flames they bent out 
 over space ; and then the blown look would pass and a 
 fifty-foot splinter of straight stone would shoot up 
 again. The party had been working into the north 
 while the sun had rounded towards south ; now they 
 were in their mountain's own shadow, but far above 
 them the staggering column of stone stakes emerged 
 into sunlight ; the topmost turrets had rest and basked 
 pensively. June looked at these. " How they muse ! " 
 she said aloud, though to herself. 
 
 ( Yes." Browne for a moment considered her. No, 
 it was not gush ; she saw things, this girl ; in a town 
 she would know how high towers dream in hazes of 
 luminous dust, over unrest ful streets. He considered 
 her. 
 
 Round or else over each of those sentinel spires the 
 climbers must go. Soon Louis was scaling the first; 
 from twenty feet up an obelisk, thirty feet high, his 
 boot nails gleamed over the heads of the others. His 
 toes ground off the rock a small hail of granules of 
 crushed ice that pattered on hats below and bit the 
 warm flesh at a sleeve. Soon it was June's turn. 
 How easy it was — just to let fall away, like a cloak 
 from the body, an incapacity put on — when could it 
 have been that she put it on ? It was no part of her. 
 Merely to live with a will in the reach of an arm up to 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 51 
 
 grasp a stone knob overhead, holding her breath, with 
 a child's gleeful cunning, to keep her chest close to the 
 rock while she did it. That was all. 
 
 From the top she watched Browne coming up. He 
 moved with bold care; each hold that he used was 
 tested with rigor, but, once tried, was utterly trusted, 
 and grasp passed into grasp to make one continuous, 
 sinuous, act of adhesion, the whole body working to- 
 gether in movements that sent rippling folds down the 
 back of his coat as the ordered power ran wave-like 
 along the muscles below. 
 
 From the obelisk's tip they dropped a few feet, on 
 its upper side, to a thin edge of snow that led to the 
 base of the pinnacle next on the ridge, some forty feet 
 on. Each side of this edge was a thousand-foot ice- 
 chute, and south winds had modeled the snow, as it 
 fell on the ridge, so that the edge had a jutting cor- 
 nice ; it curled over northward so that the pointed 
 shaft of an ax, driven straight down at the place that 
 looked at first fittest to walk on, made a clean hole that 
 showed daylight below and the cold bluish shine of 
 the ice-chute, three hundred feet under. 
 
 " A porter's job, Louis," said Browne, and, chang- 
 ing places, addressed himself to the traverse, hacking 
 the fair and false cornice away with his ax as he 
 went, and trimming and trampling the upright snow 
 edge to the width of a slim garden wall. 
 
 Soon he was thirty feet out from the start; halfway 
 across, but the rope was tightening between him and 
 June ; she must start before he was over. Louis un- 
 easily made himself fast; he adjured her to sit on the 
 
52 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 edge, to bestride it and hoick herself on with the hands. 
 'Every one does it," he said, to square her pride; 
 'the best climbers; I myself, often." She did her 
 best not to. " It would make monsieur safer," Louis 
 urged. She weighed that. But, no. Comrades owed 
 not help alone but that help untarnished. She walked 
 lance-straight through mid-air — so it felt — to the 
 midst of the traverse and, planted there, kept fear at 
 bay for ten minutes, second by second, till Browne, 
 now across and on good rock, turned and saw her 
 neck lifting like some gracious symbol of pride. 
 
 The pinnacle next was easy; the one after, hard; 
 the one after that, impossible, frontally: Louis must 
 turn its flank cannily. Out of snow-covered ice the 
 pinnacle rose as a lower tooth from a gum, the gum 
 scarcely less steep than the tooth. But, just where the 
 stone tooth rose out of the snow, the snow swelled out, 
 gum-like, a little ; not that the ice which it covered was 
 less steep there than below; but a little more snow 
 could cling to it there, by freezing on to the unsunned 
 rock ; and so for a couple of feet from the base of the 
 tooth the gum only fell away convex, before dropping 
 sheer. By this hanging shelf the guide set out to steal 
 round the foot of the pinnacle, gingerly stamping the 
 snow at each step until it would form a hard tread, 
 frozen fast to the steep ice beneath. He was well out 
 of sight round the bulge when his shout came for June 
 to come carefully on. She committed herself to his 
 vestiges. Aubrey, well planted, paid out the rope to 
 her frugally. Warily coasting the swell of the tooth 
 she paused where it pushed her out furthest. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 53 
 
 "What's it like?" Aubrey called. Could she be 
 giving? 
 
 She glanced back, a merry thought curling her lip. 
 " It's like walking on one stilt. It's made of an icicle, 
 with a hard snowball stuck on to its side, and that's 
 the stilt's step." So he saw she had gone clean 
 through fear, if she had felt it, and come out beyond, 
 to the mood in which people say, not " Surely, that's 
 not a ghost? " but " What a fine ghost, to be sure! ,: 
 
 Joyful yells proclaimed Louis restored to the ridge. 
 June, once round the bulge, almost ran up the neat 
 little stairway of steps he had made in the snow to its 
 crest, where he sat gaily reviling the circumvented 
 enemy. " Dog of a gendarme! " * he mocked, " and 
 easy, too ! But yes ! Absolutely ! ' : Louis had 
 courage, not chivalry. June laughed, glad to have 
 him so. In her old thoughts valor had always tow- 
 ered like some regal grace or tall plume. Frigid 
 image, uncompanionable ; beside it how good this stout 
 clay that blood warmed, all common, sun-baked and 
 dust-stained, that laid on in fight like a good one, and 
 boasted about it when done, and kicked at the slain 
 like a triumphing child ! 
 
 Soon they lost count of separate towers topped or 
 turned. Above, there never seemed to be fewer to 
 pass; indeed, sometimes more; each time that the 
 next stretch of ridge became aquiline, file after file of 
 new pinnacles moved into sight as the climbers sur- 
 mounted the convexity; points that had looked as if 
 
 * The slang term of mountaineers for a pinnacle of rock 
 standing on a ridge. 
 
54 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 the summit were there became taking-off places for 
 fresh upward leaps of the old spiky edge. The three, 
 from their black-frozen north, where no icicle lost 
 hold, looked out of Greenland into the Tropics. What 
 a noon must be blazing, up there ! While a wet glove 
 cased hard on the hand, they saw the highest turret- 
 tops bleach and ache in a shimmer of heat on a sky 
 blue as skies in a song. 
 
 ' Much more of it, Louis? " asked Aubrey. 
 
 The guide gave the shrug of a guide. " Were the 
 ridge in condition — perhaps forty minutes. At pres- 
 ent — two hours, perhaps four, who knows ? ' : 
 
 The ridge was not in condition. Each chink in the 
 rocks had been stuffed with the flying flakes of some 
 snowstorm; the tiniest ledge had held its white pat, 
 with wind-beveled edges; and then these had half 
 melted and then refrozen. They were now ice, and 
 on these ledges capped with their little ice-cushions, 
 the party must find or make foothold; in those ice- 
 choked clefts they had to rummage for hold for their 
 fingers. 
 
 Meal-time had come round. Huddled under a rock, 
 lest stones or ice fall from above, where the sun was 
 at work, they crouched on their heels ; they ate and 
 drank and their souls enjoyed good in their labor. 
 What a savor the salt had ; what goodness, to June, the 
 villainous red wine ! They drank, two by two, to the 
 health of the third; it seemed natural. In the world 
 there were only three persons ; all day their three lives 
 were being laid, turn by turn, in the keeping of each, 
 and held safe there with passionate care, and then 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 55 
 
 handed on, with lightsome trustfulness, to the next. 
 While they ate they said trivial things with a kind of 
 blithe gravity. All meals — the saying is old — are 
 sacraments really; only some vulgarization of them, 
 or of us, repels us at most times ; we cannot communi- 
 cate. This time there came no frustration. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 " Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? " 
 
 Job xxxviii. 22. 
 
 EACH pinnacle now seemed worse than the last. 
 Two hours on from the place of their meal came 
 the hardest of all. It rose eighty feet from the ridge, 
 which was here of pure ice, blue and hard, its crest 
 about as wide as a plank. There was no going round 
 that pinnacle; right and left its sides fell smooth and 
 sheer into ice almost as sheer. Straight in front, too, 
 attack would be hopeless. The pinnacle straddled 
 across the ice plank, barring it, bulging out far to each 
 side of it, much as a chimney-stack does on the ridge 
 of a roof. For the first twelve feet of its height, just 
 where the plank led up to it, not a wrinkle of rough- 
 ness diversified the vertical stone. 
 
 There was only one chance. As far away to the 
 right as a tall stride from the ice plank might reach 
 out through space, Louis descried on the pinnacle's 
 face a ledge an inch wide and some eight inches long ; 
 not a flat ledge, alas ! — it sloped outwards a little and 
 had a poor edge; but there was no choice. And, five 
 feet above the ledge, two nearly upright fissures, ten 
 inches apart from each other and each about an inch 
 wide, could be seen ; for a couple of feet they ran 
 upwards till one of them widened to five or six inches. 
 And, yet two feet higher, this fissure held in its clutch 
 
 56 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 57 
 
 a small stone, lodged there during some downfall of 
 broken rock from above. 
 
 Sitting thirty feet off on the last rock before the 
 plank bridge, they considered it all. Could a hand only 
 get at that little jammed stone -nine feet up ! Were it 
 once grasped you might hang from it, safe while your 
 grasp held. And. while it held, sharp nails on the inner 
 edge of a right boot, thrust well out once more to the 
 right, might bite on another minute excrescence of 
 rock, another three feet out over space. If the nails 
 bit, the hands might then be invited to quit the jammed 
 stone, their one comfort and stay in the passage, and 
 grope for projections to grip, or depressions to occupy, 
 in certain bas-reliefs out, again, to the right, and 
 higher. Fondly remembered by Louis as having lain 
 within his reach when his right foot, in some other 
 year, had trusted itself to that second excrescence of 
 rock, these reliefs were now buried under the lower 
 end of a ribbon of loose snow that seemed to run up, 
 curving spirally round, towards the ridge at the back 
 of the tower, the party's one aim in life. Could they 
 once gain that snow, Louis averred, they were made; 
 beneath it were all sorts of good things. Trust him — 
 were he there he would stick his claws into all that 
 would be wanted. 
 
 They stood by for the venture. Louis walked the 
 plank of ice first, and then June. At its far end she 
 stood at his back, ready to close in and wait, steadied 
 against the pinnacle's base, as soon as he quitted the 
 ridge. Should he slip, and so fall down the right- 
 hand precipice, she was to jump down the one on the 
 
58 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 left, that so they might both come to rest, hung to the 
 ridge by the rope, like a donkey's two panniers. 
 Browne was not to cross yet, but sit fast ; with a turn 
 of the rope twisted round a good firm wart of rock, 
 he would now be the caravan's saving point of ad- 
 hesion to absolute fixity. Also, while Louis climbed, 
 Browne, thus posted afar, would watch and might tell 
 him of boons to be reached by a groping finger-tip, out 
 of its owner's sight. 
 
 First, leaning out from the ridge, the guide, with his 
 extended ax, chipped the ice off the first one-inch 
 ledge ; he picked some out, too, but not much, from the 
 fissures above. He then slung his ax to his wrist and 
 glanced back at Browne. " You're fixed? " he asked, 
 almost severely. 
 
 Browne patted the stone wart and nodded. 
 
 ' Eh, well — " said Louis and made the big step. 
 
 With pricked ears that read sounds like print, June 
 heard the rim of serrated steel round Louis' sole grind 
 as it bit on the tiny ledge; then give, with an ominous 
 scrape, for some infinitesimal distance upon it; and 
 then, finding an answering roughness, bite and hold 
 fast, while the guide, in the same swinging movement, 
 drew off his left foot from the ridge, reached up with 
 both hands, and committed the good of the cause to 
 what he might find in the two upright cracks. Then 
 the fighting began. Louis climbed with a wrestler's 
 quick, felicitous cunning at seeing the way to a new 
 grip, its use, and the time when its use would be past. 
 At one moment his arms would be crossed, and what 
 clamped him on to the vertical rock was only the 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 59 
 
 lateral pressure and counter-pressure of two open 
 palms pulling in towards each other from opposite 
 sides of an upright lamina of stone ; at another he used 
 only one of the vertical cracks for both hands, making 
 as if to tear it wider open, his fingers straining out- 
 wards sideways against its two opposite walls; and 
 once, as he went higher, he seemed to have no de- 
 scribable handhold or foothold at all, but to plaster 
 himself to the crag by the aggregate friction of elbows, 
 knees, toes, chin and palms, all nuzzling into shallow 
 depressions of its surface and feeling out any square 
 inch of more merciful gradient. 
 
 To June, standing steady on guard, there had come 
 now the exaltation of sober sense that danger brings 
 to the unafraid. In half-seconds she saw whole 
 ranges of practical things and could think out long 
 trains of cause and effect, compare and speculate; an 
 instant gave infinite leisure ; time, the old fetter, was 
 knocked off the mind. One trifle she noticed was 
 how, on that first ill-sloping inch of stone ledge, Louis' 
 boot had come down not square but with a slope too, 
 its sole parallel to the ledge's surface. Was that why 
 it slipped, just a little, at first? 
 
 " It's the right way; " Browne's voice came across 
 as she wondered. Odd — another obstruction gone 
 too? Did thought pick up thought without the old 
 signaling? "Gives the boot more bite," he said. 
 " More nails get a go at it." 
 
 She nodded, rejoicing at Louis, to see how each 
 trooper in that battalion of sinews could mind its own 
 work, and the captaining wits be left free to make for 
 
CO THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 this opening or that, like a chief who has only to run 
 on ahead at the enemy, knowing the breath of his 
 men will be hot on his neck as he draws near the 
 trenches. And all through the fight the guide 
 pshawed, groaned and swore to himself, making it up 
 to his spirit, for any pangs of daring in action, with 
 free leave to wallow in over-expression of fear and 
 disgust, as some surgeons will grunt and snarl their 
 way through big operations, or soldiers go blenching 
 or blubbering into an action that wins them a cross. 
 
 Once begun, the bout had to go quickly. Merely to 
 cling to the rock by such holds was hard work; to 
 hoist by them, harder; no one could keep it up long. 
 Besides, every grasp was on rock glazed with ice; the 
 climber raced oncoming numbness; the difficulty must 
 be passed before fingers lost feeling. And now 
 Browne saw that Louis was going to be checked. He 
 had reached the lower end of the ribbon of snow, but 
 he was only mounting it slowly and painfully, digging 
 his fingers and boot-toes searchingly in, but seeming 
 nowhere to find what he sought. He had overrated 
 their chance. The holds he had thought to find under 
 the snow were masked in ice ; till he was twenty feet 
 higher, at least, the most he could do — if he could do 
 that — would be not to slip; he could nowhere stand 
 squarely enough to resist any pull on the rope from 
 below. And already the rope was straightening be- 
 tween him and June. Soon it would tighten. Five 
 feet more and the guide would be held back, clinging 
 to some frozen crevice or knob with fingers themselves 
 freezing fast. The girl must then start up the worst 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 61 
 
 piece of all with no chance of help from the rope from 
 above; worse — with a certainty that if she slipped she 
 would drag the guide off. Then the two would fall 
 backwards through the air, till the rope held by 
 Browne would grow taut — for one instant only ; even 
 the best ropes have limits of strength. 
 
 One thing, he saw, could be done. The whole 
 length of their rope, being more than double the length 
 of the part between Louis and June, would give the 
 guide freedom to climb nearly up to the ridge and to 
 find on the way, if he could, some square foot of flat 
 rock or snow. Planted there, with the rope in both 
 hands, if they were still able to feel it, Louis might 
 stand a fair strain. It would mean Browne's quitting 
 their one firm anchorage. Still — 
 
 " All right there? " he asked June. 
 
 " Splendid." Her voice had a kind of glow. 
 
 " Good. I'm coming." 
 
 He walked the plank swiftly and faced her, he 
 poised on the ice ridge, she leaning her back against 
 the tower. " Louis needs rope," he said ; " may I untie 
 your 
 
 She worked the knot round on her chest into reach 
 of his hand. What a knot! — evil in kind and now 
 frozen rigid. 
 
 "Oh, Louis, Louis!' Browne apostrophized under 
 his breath as he tugged and picked at the tangle of 
 petrified hemp. " How he loves that wicked old over- 
 hand knot ! " 
 
 " The dear goose ! " June chid too, as over a nice, 
 naughty child. Both could speak thus, each knowing 
 
62 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 the other loyal in mind to the comrade fighting above. 
 
 The knot gave at last, but only a little, and Louis 
 had climbed on, meanwhile, to the end of his tether; 
 the rope came down taut; not even so much of slack 
 was left as was needed to loosen the knot completely 
 and run the loop large, so as to lift it up over June's 
 arms. Twenty seconds would finish the job, but not 
 without ten or twelve inches more play in the rope; 
 and now Louis was straining up on it as though every 
 inch more it could yield was a lift towards deliverance. 
 They stared about with one quest in their eyes; was 
 there no stone, no lump of snow or ice, nothing to raise 
 up her feet those few inches for those twenty seconds ? 
 
 " Bend your knee. I'll stand on it," she suddenly 
 said. 
 
 He could not reject the risk for her. They were 
 like one person now, a staunch one, in whom the 
 members do not tremble one for another. She found 
 means to hold fast while he closed in and pressed a 
 bent knee to the rock, and then to step up and stand 
 on his leveled thigh ; she balanced deftly, one hand 
 capping the ball of his shoulder and one pressed flat 
 against the smooth rock. Twenty seconds? — they 
 did it in ten. June had the noose slipped over her 
 head and one arm, and half over the other, when 
 Louis' voice, sharp with anxiety, came to them. 
 " Sir, I can hold here no longer. I must have more 
 rope. Untie the young lady." 
 
 " It's done, Louis. Pull away — much as you like," 
 Browne shouted ; and June, from her perch on his 
 knee, looked up, calling, " Oh, well climbed, Louis ! 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 63 
 
 Well climbed!" before Browne, with both hands on 
 her waist, set her down like a rose-vase too full of 
 water. She was unroped — a torment to him to see. 
 "Well played, you! Well played, you!' he kept 
 murmuring as he undid the knot tying himself at the 
 end of the rope and tied June there instead, to be 
 ready to start on a call from above. 
 
 It came soon. The guide, once let out of the leash, 
 had gone fast. A falsetto whoop of delight, a wild 
 scraping on rock by boot-nails which some solid hand- 
 hold had set free from care, and a shower of snow 
 kicked away from the long-coveted platform — all 
 brought the news of a fortress taken. June set out, 
 exulting to move again. Browne could steady her off 
 from the ridge; the tip of the shaft of his ax, stretched 
 out to rest on the first minute ledge, made the footing 
 there sure. Above it the tip of the ax could still, for 
 a few feet, be pressed up under a groping boot. But 
 she needed help little. In five minutes more she was 
 niched beside Louis on two square feet of flatness, un- 
 doing her end of the rope with numb hands — Louis' 
 were too numb now — to let down to Browne. Its 
 frozen kinks came to him dancing and curling in air 
 and, sped by the guide's entreaty to come fast, lest 
 their hands be frost-bitten, he tied on in haste, went off 
 with a rush and, on reaching the little stone jammed 
 in the crack, did not wait to grasp at it from its own 
 rear and base and so jam it only the more with his 
 pull. He grabbed at its top from outside and it came 
 right out in his hand : he hung from the rope. 
 
 Oh, Louis, I'm sorry," he groaned. His body 
 
G4 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 began to rotate, spit-fashion, horribly. Then the rope 
 gave a little, and then he saw the guide's look of dread 
 as it slipped yet another inch through his dead fingers. 
 
 Above the point on the rope where Louis held it a 
 coil of it lay at June's feet. There was that much to 
 slip through his fingers, and then — 
 
 " Can you — ? ' The guide looked half round, but 
 June was before him — had twisted the rope, eighteen 
 inches above where he held it, round both of her hands 
 and was pulling up hard and straight from her heels, 
 as an oarsman drives from the stretcher. Browne saw 
 her face, busy and set, behind Louis' aghast one, and 
 then the rope held ; the four hands could just do it. 
 Three seconds more and Browne, swinging round with 
 a jerk to get his face to the rock, had thrust both hands, 
 open and edgewise, into the two upright cracks and 
 then clenched his fists till each hand was a lump large 
 enough to stick fast in the narrows. 
 
 " Right. Slacken a little," he called. Bending his 
 elbows the little he could, he drew up his body some 
 three or four inches, unclenched and took out his left 
 hand and again put it into the crack and reclenched it, 
 those three or four inches higher, then drew up his 
 body again and took out the right hand, and did it all 
 again, till at last a foot swung out to the right could 
 find hold. Not much of the skin of his knuckles was 
 left to complain when he reached his friends and found 
 Louis rubbing June's right hand with snow. Browne 
 groaned again, to see the groove the rope had indented 
 there, and how the flesh did not spring up when re- 
 leased. 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 65 
 
 She was quelled by the cold, quelled past trusting 
 her voice to sound buoyant. They all were. Oh, to be 
 out of that bitter black North — icy rock, rocky ice, and 
 that brutal pain in their fingers, an indistinct ache as of 
 crushed limbs; it bruised the spirit. 
 
 They re-roped in order and made their way on in 
 dead silence, each of their cowed hearts keeping its 
 numbness all to itself, lest it discourage the hearts that 
 each felt to be still uncowed in the others. June did 
 not look up; it seemed to be of no use; it was so long 
 since there had ever been sun in the world. Once, as 
 they struggled on over more of the old rocky teeth, 
 she had a queer fancy that some rock she touched with 
 her left hand was warm. Luxurious fancy ! She 
 checked it, almost in fear — was she growing light- 
 headed? Why, they were in shadow, in midwinter 
 rigors; Louis, above her, was audibly cutting steps up 
 a slant of hard ice, their old enemy. " Canst thou not 
 suffer and be silent? " June tried to say to herself, over 
 and over, like a prayer, holding despair off with the 
 words. Droning it, with her eyes on her feet, she 
 heard, as sounds fail away while a doze becomes sleep, 
 the hacking of Louis' ax growing less loud, the 
 strokes slower, more wide apart; they stopped; a rust- 
 ling noise, short, crisp, delicious, heard long ago in 
 some happier time, had succeeded them. Starting, she 
 looked up; she saw Louis, transfigured in sunshine, 
 stroll up a soft white bank bejeweled like dewed grass, 
 and then her own face was in heaven's good warmth, 
 bathed in it. 
 
 Louis was turning, his face one repose of beatitude. 
 
66 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " We are arrived ! " Louis said. Where he stood the 
 last incline died off on the crown of a huge cap of 
 snow, the roof of the mountain. It swelled, rose and 
 fell, like a down, a genial, incredible, softly-rolling 
 world to be found at the tip of that ladder thrust up 
 into the air. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 "What must be the delight of a mind rightly touched, to gaze 
 on the huge mountain masses for one's show, and, as it were, 
 lift one's head into the clouds ! The soul is strangely rapt with 
 these astonishing heights." Conrad Gesner. 
 
 THEY dropped on the snow; every muscle ran 
 slack; the rope lay out loose; from rucksack 
 and pockets they spilt food, maps, bottles, corkscrews, 
 pell-mell, for the joy of doing things carelessly. 
 There they sat or lay, glorious, luxurious, replete 
 with mere remission of tensity, taking long, leisurely 
 pulls at the great tankard of their achieved safety: 
 it bubbled and sparkled. 
 
 " What o'clock? " June asked, out of depths of in- 
 difference. " Is it eleven yet? Hardly." 
 
 Louis smiled toward the sun. 
 
 " Three forty," said Browne. They all laughed. 
 So time goes when you live. 
 
 Louis half-heartedly put it that even the easy way 
 down, which they meant to take, needed daylight. The 
 others derided him. 
 
 " Eh, well ! " said Louis, and lit a pipe blissfully. 
 No flame from the struck match was seen in the sun- 
 light; only a quiver of smoke rising over it — straight, 
 the air was so still. 
 
 " Cost what cost, we must stay awhile," June smiled 
 to Louis, who wished to learn English. 
 
 67 
 
68 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 The world, now a conquest of theirs, lay out below 
 like a great map spread on a floor. Almost under the 
 lowered sun Mont Blanc stood obtuse amidst arrowy 
 peaks, like a house among poplars. Eastward the 
 Matterhorn's bent tip, monstrous, a whim, and a child's 
 whim, not an architect's, brazened it out, its queer dis- 
 tinction killing lovelier rivals. Along the Rhone val- 
 ley's dark trench the eye felt its way down forty 
 miles till it hit on a speck of the Lake of Geneva's blue. 
 Eighty miles away snows on the Dauphiny Mountains 
 were shining, hoisted into mid-air on black plinths. 
 And southward the whole Lombard plain stretched and 
 lengthened out, endless, dim with deepening purples 
 of farness and of evening. 
 
 Browne picked out a point that he knew in the Mari- 
 time Alps ; it showed through a gap in the Graians. 
 ' From there," he told June, " when the air has been 
 well washed with rain, you see Corsica — only a blur, of 
 course, rising out of the level shine when the sun's on 
 the Mediterranean." He turned, searched the north, 
 and found the dorsal fin of an Oberland mountain. 
 ' From up there you see the Black Forest — right into 
 Germany." 
 
 She gazed and gazed, thrilled with the feel of a new 
 reach in the one sense which up here was at work, 
 where all was blank for the rest. The last scent had 
 died off behind them eight hours ago, at some grass 
 with orchises on it; the last sound not made by them- 
 selves — the creak of a chough or some scared mar- 
 mot's whistle — had come scarcely higher. Sight's own 
 task had been simplified : not busy now with the near, 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 60 
 
 tumbled riches of lowlands, it put forth its strength 
 on sheer distance, and, stirred by its own strength and 
 drunk with it, took on new powers and visions of 
 powers. 
 
 " See that dip? " Browne pointed north-eastward. 
 She saw. " The St. Gotthard is there. The Rhine 
 and the Rhone and the Po are all there, scrambling for 
 water. It's thrown them like coppers; Adriatic and 
 North Sea fight for a snow flake." 
 
 June stared as one stares at the fire and tries to 
 recall some old view and to think out a path for the eye 
 through the banked mists that had bounded it. Now 
 the path opened; the bodily eye seemed aware of more 
 and yet more, till June could not tell sight from reverie. 
 Europe was lying before her unrolled; she stood at its 
 center and saw the mills there grind the powder that 
 spread Holland out on the sea and let Venice rise from 
 it ; reaching across to where the Bernina gleamed high 
 in the East, she could lean over pools where the waters 
 are gathered that moat Bulgaria and carry the grit 
 that redraws the Black Sea. Rivers appeared in all 
 their lengths, with their adventures, their dawdlings 
 and hastenings; the Rhine, after all its swayed ferry- 
 boats, lazy at last among tulips and windmills; the 
 Danube constricted to tear past Belgrade and Vienna, 
 between speeding walls, like a horse breaking through 
 a cordon. " What's that? " she cried. 
 
 The roar of a far-off explosion was reaching them, 
 dreamy and bodiless first, and then rounding and hard- 
 ening into fullness. A rattle of minor artillery fol- 
 
70 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 lowed it, each crack, again, muffled at first as if some 
 muting membrane enwound it. 
 
 ' See ! On Mont Bouquetin ! " Louis pointed. 
 
 Browne added, " Low down — near the glacier by- 
 no w." 
 
 Through a mile and a half of quivering glare June 
 saw a trail of black specks fall pausingly, second by 
 second, down a ledged precipice. " The everlasting 
 hills!" said Browne. Slowly the commotion ended; 
 the spilt scuttle of coal — so it looked — was coming to 
 rest at the foot of the crag, spoiling a snowfield. " A 
 thousand tons less of the Bouquetin now! " 
 
 Long after all was at rest, to the eye, the last blurred 
 report of rock smashing on rock droned across through 
 the heat to them. Then stillness twice as still as before 
 settled on all the immobile, glittering desert of stone 
 and snow, rising and falling, falling and rising. June 
 had felt something — not learnt, but felt; all of the 
 earth that seems hard and lasting was tumbling away, 
 over there, into rubbish ; she saw the hills as they are — 
 a last ruin almost, and how the tips of to-day's peaks 
 had lain in black bottoms of valleys. Something be- 
 fell her ; time went the way space had gone ; it shrank 
 into a thing excitingly small; fancy could grasp it and 
 play with it here, where the work of a million quarry- 
 ing frosts and suns lay out to be seen like a stone- 
 breaker's finished heap by a road. 
 
 Ecstasy caught her; the earth's convexity seemed 
 a thing real to sense; the foot braced itself to it; the 
 eye felt a glee at it ; poised on the ball spun in space, 
 June held her breath with delight at its revolution. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 71 
 
 And then with a sudden tenderness she espied some- 
 thing. Down the bed of a valley a railway, a road and 
 a stream twisted their triple cable, the strands plaiting 
 over and under. It moved her oddly; the two tiny 
 threads, carefully fitted in with the third, had the 
 touching dearness of children's minute and fugitive 
 engineering. What was it that had put bars till now 
 between her and such good pangs and pleasures? 
 Between her, too, and her comrades of all times in this 
 place, her peers in drawing the lot for this high adven- 
 ture of being alive, ever since Alps were first Alps? 
 Where were the passes, she asked gaily, eagerly — 
 where were the old famous passes over to Italy ? 
 
 " Which of them first ? " Browne asked. He looked 
 at her in wonder. Her mouth, like a bud long kept 
 back, had broken into incredible bloom, a rose with the 
 many curves of all its soft-lipped petals not fixed and 
 assembled, but changing, successive, melting curve into 
 curve. 
 
 " The Mont Cenis, please." She had heard of it 
 
 most. 
 
 He picked out two pretty high points in the distant 
 south-west. " The road runs just below them, a little 
 beyond them." 
 
 They fell to work, taking light from each other's 
 excitement; they set trains and pomps of old travelers 
 tramping across — Frankish kings on their way to be 
 crowned, and Holy Roman Emperors and other great 
 ones of the earth — Louis the Pious drawing rein on the 
 top of the pass and founding the guest-house, and 
 Charles the Bald dead on the way. Neither knew any 
 
72 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 history, to speak of; only, in each of their minds, some 
 visible fact had stuck, here and there, at some time or 
 other, and then lain forgotten; now these emerged 
 from the closet, turned into morsels of livid, tingling 
 experience. The two capped reminiscences shyly, 
 afraid of swaggering. 
 
 " Didn't Henry the Fourth go that way to Ca- 
 nossa? " she asked, like a born Catholic. 
 
 Browne could believe it. And people, four hundred 
 years later, tobogganed. " A Duchess of Saxony — 
 fancy some dragonsome dowager — tearing across in 
 the snow, to help a Duke of Burgundy, was it? She 
 slid from the top down to — Lanslebourg, isn't it? ' 
 
 She laughed. He had wanted her to, that the rose 
 might curl more petals. He looked at them. ' Then, 
 a mere hundred years after, Montaigne," he added, 
 when only to look would begin to be rude. 
 
 She grew serious again. " And, all the time, pil- 
 grims — long chains of black spots on the snow, both 
 ways, in and out — drawn in on Rome and sent out 
 from it, as people's blood is — " She stopped, her little 
 figure of speech taking fright at itself. So she looked 
 a little august again, and remote. She always did 
 when alarmed or abashed. 
 
 He did not know that. He only saw what looked 
 like a gesture of quick withdrawal into dim inner re- 
 cesses of orthodoxy. So that was her line, he reflected 
 lightly. He gave her time to come out; then they 
 began the game over again, picking out a fresh pass ; 
 the Genevre it was, a nick in a ridge a great way off; 
 they romped through the sights you might have seen, if 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 73 
 
 you had sat there by the road, with time done away 
 with — Caesar's bald crown, damply beaded perhaps, 
 coming up into sight, on his way to the taking of Gaul; 
 and drift on drift of rug-headed Lombards surging 
 across; and then the Franks pushing them back; and 
 Charlemagne crossing, it might be, to take in old Lom- 
 bard)' ; " and the Pope, Innocent the " Browne 
 
 was rollicking on. 
 
 " A Pope up there? " June checked for an instant : 
 the petals drew in as anemone petals will do, even for 
 a light cloud. 
 
 " A Pope and an Emperor," Aubrey rushed on, to 
 blow the cloud away; " Frederick the First and a king 
 or two — Charles the Eighth was it?— to fall upon 
 Italy; Louis the Thirteenth with Richelieu beside him; 
 and then a short pause, and a French army swings up 
 the road; it's off to Magenta, Solferino." 
 
 Europe's life marched in serried procession; it had 
 the color and clangor of one pageant, gone through 
 in an hour, as Europe's whole face had come within 
 sight, and the make and whirling of the earth into 
 reach of the body's senses. In that world transfigured 
 into radiant coherence they sat god-like, fingering their 
 treasures, till some peak a mile off in the west threw a 
 shadow that stole up the snow to their feet. Not two 
 hours till dark! Louis was fidgeting. 
 
 With stiff, happy muscles they stumped away over 
 the dome to its southern edge and began to lower them- 
 selves, ledge by ledge, down a rude natural staircase, 
 ruined and rock-strewn, leading down some thousands 
 of feet. Browne went first now, Louis last. They all 
 
74 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 fell silent again as they plodded on, only with some 
 jocund word of companionship now and again, blithe 
 like a lamp lit in early twilight. Then the light thick- 
 ened, and the silence, and in the silence the reinsula- 
 tion of minds began. June felt a grasp giving way, 
 helplessly; could she not keep any hold on that untur- 
 bid and lightsome world? Would it be all gone that 
 night when in bed she tried to live back through the 
 day ? Was it going from Browne, too, she wondered ? 
 She peered at what she could see of him — only some 
 short curling hairs that had looked fair just now on 
 the back of a neck burnt brown. If the vision were 
 failing him, too, she was sorry and wished she could 
 help; and then in a spasm of angry shame she struck 
 her wish down. To think she could help, or had any 
 part in it all ! Vanity, vanity ! Why, it was his eye 
 that made things over again; what you saw with his 
 help was like what poets had worked on, or legends 
 grown to; it rose to the state of things primal or 
 storied; his mind took in a thought and appareled it, 
 somehow, by that very act with glamour or grandeur 
 or magical simpleness. What might it not do, that 
 power? Not merely things seen and touched might 
 now be fallen from grace and waiting in rust and dust 
 till the mind came that could break on them like the 
 dawn, that both sees life and gives it. Courage, con- 
 trol, charity, faith — no, he had not religion; she knew 
 by his courtesy when their talk neared it. But if he 
 did ever have it — 
 
 Their way was a zigzag now; in the last of the light 
 his face was in profile at one moment, then it came full 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 75 
 
 and then turned away again. If one were dead and in 
 some pallid heaven it would be good to escape for a 
 moment and see a face red and brown like poppies in 
 corn, and eyes with lids dropped at the outer end a 
 little, as if with looking through wind and rain into 
 distance, and wrists where the joint was a modeled 
 steel nut among swart, hairy straps, and a neck that 
 indexed a fit frame's whole volume of litheness. She 
 stumbled and, flushing unseen in the dusk, recovered 
 herself quickly and tried to fasten her eyes on the 
 path. But she looked on at Browne now and then: 
 she had to : she had to verify things about him — to see 
 what was well made and what not ; well or ill, they 
 were all rather touching, somehow, because they were 
 just what they were, as a baby's face is, for better or 
 worse. Soon it was only one outline she saw, and 
 then none; it was dark; they had relit the lantern and 
 Louis and Browne had changed places. 
 
 Nine o'clock and the inn still a good hour off. Ten, 
 and the turn of a corner brought its lights into sight, 
 some of them fixed, some four or five not; these swung, 
 rose and fell, flitting this way and that about the inn 
 door; one dived into darkness and then re-emerged 
 with two more beside it. All must be carried in hand 
 by a gathering company. 
 
 Louis sniffed wrathfully. " Euh ! A search party ! 
 Sheep sent to look for lost sheep ! ' He yodeled de- 
 rision ; alas ! unheard, for the flitting lights drew into a 
 group and then out into a line, a relief-column mobil- 
 ized. 
 
 Louis ran over its probable units bitingly : cook of 
 
76 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 the inn; under-boots — " Cretin de premiere force, je 
 vous dis franchement ! " ; head waiter — " boule de 
 suif, absolument! "; the brother of Mademoiselle; 
 and the good God alone knew what poor creatures be- 
 sides, " and to rescue — me, for example ! ' : But how to 
 stop the imbeciles ? " Monsieur, assist me ! ' : He 
 waved the lantern aloft, and all the might of his in- 
 dignation put itself into a bawl, Browne chiming in 
 soul fully. 
 
 The lights below ceased to move. Their stricken 
 immobility made each, to June, a symbol ; it stood for 
 a figure listening with held breath. Louis improved 
 his advantage by letting a yell that tore almost a visible 
 rent in Night's tympanum. 
 
 That did it: through space an answering shout 
 could be felt slowly winging; it came spent and small. 
 By now all intentness was gone from the lanterns 
 yonder. Some of them waved a response; all of them 
 moved, but not as before. The face of a remitted 
 purpose was drawn on the darkness with the same pen 
 of light that had drawn the braced look of a muster 
 and then the strained air of listeners. To June it was 
 thrillingly legible. Was it not ? — she was about to ask 
 Browne, but stopped. Bars that were melted at noon 
 were re-forming now, as icicles were. Browne stood a 
 little behind the lantern; silhouetted black, square, 
 monumental, he seemed withdrawn into enigma. She 
 left it unsaid, and they tramped on. Louis was silent 
 too, dourly figuring that under-boots to himself and 
 maturing jibes for emission at supper-time. 
 
 Two of the lanterns came up a few hundred yards 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 77 
 
 to meet theirs. One was in Guy's hand. ' Unhappy 
 young people! " his flute voice purled like one of the 
 many streams that had come into hearing again as they 
 descended; " a few minutes more and the emotions of 
 rescue were ours! The chef was translated; the eyes 
 of the under-boots had strange lights. And lo ! you 
 are safe all the time and our unheroism repossesses us." 
 
 " My dear rash young lady, the fright that you've 
 given us ! ' This came from the other lantern. 
 
 June turned in surprise. " Father Power ! You 
 here ! " 
 
 " At your bidding." His voice had a tinge of re- 
 monstrant austerity. 
 
 " Oh, do forgive me ! ' : She had the contrition of 
 one at last fully waked, for the first incoherences of 
 arousal. " Tell me — about all this horribleness at 
 Cusheen." 
 
 " To-night ! And you famished ! ' The priest's 
 voice was kind again. 
 
 " Yes — now." ' 
 
 Browne, lingering at good-nights with Louis, heard 
 her insist. Two minutes later he trailed his battered 
 feet down the inn's long matted corridor, now a deli- 
 cious tunnel of warm light, bored into the mountain 
 night's solid, cold darkness. Through a door on one 
 side he saw June, with her tired eyes hugely, lucently 
 dark, leaning over a sitting-room table, her back 
 crushed under its load of exhaustion. She seemed to 
 be importuning the priest. Under the hanging oil 
 lamp her wide mountain hat half shadowed her face 
 into mystery. Hearing his step she looked up, rose 
 
78 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 and said good-night and thanked him — " for such a 
 good day," with the civil stress formally lavished, as 
 if the lamplight dazed comradeship. 
 
 " What's this they're like? " he thought to himself, 
 meaning her dilated eyes. Something it was that he 
 knew ; it had attracted him once, or often. He went to 
 bed fumbling to find the lost likeness, and then thought 
 he had it, but was not sure. They had gleams like 
 deep water awash under lamp-lighted bridges on sum- 
 mer nights, when it seems good to dive into and swim 
 in. Was that it, or was she like some one he seemed 
 to know better than any one else in the world? 
 — yet he could not think whom. He fell asleep with it 
 unsettled. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 'The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of 
 cruelty." Psalm lxxiv. 20. 
 
 THE priest had been fencing. " We'll talk it all 
 over to-morrow," or " Wait and we'll have a 
 great talk in the morning," the fatherly man of forty- 
 five had replied to June's queries. 
 
 But June, like a child excited and tired past sleep, 
 grew fluent, elate, tried to find ways round his guard, 
 told him how she had been shown where the old 
 pilgrims' road ran, over the snows. " It's still now, up 
 there ; only the hot air quivering over the old roads to 
 Rome; no one on them — only that glass-colored 
 shiver, like a flame made out of water. It seemed like 
 an old thing burnt out, and all the time you were down 
 there in the train, rushing towards Italy." Almost 
 light-headed, she tried to be cunning, as tipsy men do. 
 
 He saw through it : any one could. " Ay, and a 
 right tired pilgrim. You'll let him rest now ? ,! 
 
 ' I'm sorry. I didn't think. Just tell me one thing." 
 
 " About your poor bedesmen in Connaught? ' : 
 
 " Just how they were when you left? " 
 
 ' God help them! But wait till the morning." 
 
 " But, Father—" 
 
 " To bed with you ! Off, now ! " 
 
 "I will, only—" 
 
 " Only you'd argue the point with your priest." 
 
 79 
 
80 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 ' No, but — did you know ? — there's the man here 
 that Cusheen belongs to? " 
 
 ' How wouldn't I know, and I just after — ? No, 
 not a word till the morning." 
 
 " Guy knows Mr. Newman. They were out here 
 while father and I were in Italy. I made a plan. I 
 asked Guy to meet us. I hoped he might bring Mr. 
 Newman. He did, and then I wrote off to beg you to 
 come." 
 
 " The diplomacy of you ! " 
 
 " I thought, if some one could tell Mr. Newman — " 
 
 " You've been at him? " 
 
 ' I ! ' She glowed, a fierce Daphne. She canvass 
 the satyr ! But she made allowances. " You haven't 
 met him." 
 
 ' That have I, these few hours back." She looked 
 at him quickly; there were things, then, that, priest 
 as he was, he could not see so surely as she. 
 
 He had a light too. He saw her seeing, and guessed 
 what she saw and all that it meant. ' You've a right," 
 he said, " to feel as you did, and I with the thumbs of 
 me pricking and he a perch off." Official omniscience 
 must learn as it goes. " You must leave him to me to 
 deal with." By this time he felt, in good faith, that it 
 had been he that espied the goat legs, and she that had 
 missed them, as maidens, no doubt, ought to. " The 
 fact is, I hope that — " 
 
 " Yes? " She settled to listen. 
 
 He laughed, not to be caught. ' You'd wheedle 
 me on till I'd have it the weight of the world on my 
 mind that I'd talked the life out of you. Come now." 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 81 
 
 She fell into place at last, like a child long drilled, 
 under his benedictive hand. " Good-night to you 
 now," he said with an authentic paternal goodness, 
 rather touchingly out of place on comely features that 
 had not quite done with their youth. " The blessing 
 of God be upon you and stay with you." 
 
 June laid to rest limbs content with sane weariness; 
 with them the mind too fell backwards gently. Once, 
 for a moment, her whole body shuddered uncontrol- 
 lably; she had recalled a look of Newman's that flashed 
 into her mind a sudden knowledge of how Moors price 
 slave-girls, and Newman's smile when he talked to 
 herself — a smile not at anything said at the time, but 
 at something implied, as it seemed, to underlie all speech 
 between young women and men, some horrible winking 
 of whole sex at whole sex, a jauntily-hinted collusion 
 between demure female lures and leering male read- 
 iness. There in the dark her face burned loathingly. 
 Yet — oh, assuaging thought, to wash the bespattered 
 mind white — she knczu now that a girl of her age and 
 a strange man of Newman's could be in a wild 
 together, all through a long day that assayed them both 
 in some new way in each of its changeful hours, and 
 the girl not once feel that her sex was deranging com- 
 radeship. Knowledge of that kept the earth clean; it 
 preserved the stars. 
 
 • ••••• • 
 
 Guy, restored to his sphere, the terrace, had brought 
 together there the parish priest of Cusheen and its 
 owner. " And how're the wicked husbandmen?'' 
 Newman had genially asked. 
 
82 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 The priest took a measuring look at him. l That's 
 what he's like, then?' the look might have meant. 
 ' You heard," he said, " of the hunger, a year back? ' 
 
 " Hunger? Don't you believe it." 
 
 " Ah ! You were there? " You could not have told 
 it was not serious, eager inquiry. 
 
 "I! I was not. I've a use for my life. But there 
 wasn't a shot at Dan Joyce — you know Joyce, my 
 agent? — the whole blessed winter, and that's what 
 they do, the first thing, as soon as they're peckish." 
 
 Guy was beginning " My dear sir — " to Newman. 
 It seemed a waste not to let a light into his mind — so 
 as to find out what he would make of a hint of the way 
 that pastors regard murder done by their lambs. 
 
 But the priest's humility was much too proud to 
 take help against an infidel's boorishness. He made a 
 very slight opening movement with one hand, as if to 
 let fall through its fingers such specks of stray dirt as 
 the Newmans of this world; he went on, persistently 
 suave. " Mr. Newman, if you could be with us there, 
 but for the length of a day — " 
 
 ' Last day I'd be anywhere, eh? No, sir; I let 'em 
 the land; I didn't promise to throw in the shootin'." 
 
 Any scorn that may have blazed inside Father 
 Power was smokeless. He raised no protest beyond 
 going on from that word of his own at which this being 
 had failed " — you'd see the potatoes are rotted, and 
 they not ripe." 
 
 " A man takes the risks of his business," said New- 
 man, his chronic smile stiffening as if it might end set 
 fast as a rigid sneer or bare-toothed snarl. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 83 
 
 Still no tang of asperity soured the priest's tongue. 
 - I'm told," he said, " the great landlords in England 
 take a share in the risks of the farmers." An old hand 
 with the froward, he went about Newman, he tried to 
 get in, as though into a house shut in his face, patiently 
 trying each window. So ; that one was fast ; he went 
 to the next. " There isn't the food in the place, nor 
 money to buy it — and pay the rent too." 
 
 •' Don't fear for me. We'll shake the rent out of 
 'em." 
 
 " But," Guy was beginning, fearing a too early end 
 for this engaging passage of arms, " if the stone really 
 is bloodless — " when Newman cut cheerfully in. 
 
 " Joyce and I'll manage, so long as there's no 
 ' humane ' bleaters about." 
 
 " I've the fear," said the priest, " that you'll have 
 half the land on your hands." 
 
 But Newman was off on a trail of his own. : ' Only 
 last Christmas some sickener from England came 
 nosing round at evictions. Contracts! — oh, he'd not 
 heard of them. ' Barbarity ' — that was his game. I 
 heard he had the wickedness to snivel about it in some 
 rag, up in the Black Country." 
 
 " Eh? " said Guy, playfully anxious. 
 
 " The Northerner — that was the name." 
 
 Guy enacted chagrin. " My heart told me. New- 
 man, 'tis mine — three-sixteenths of it." 
 
 " Keep 'em away from the other thirteen, then, or 
 you'll have 'em mangy." 
 
 " Your idea of property's rights is one-sided, my 
 friend." Guy's eyes roamed the air; his voice was the 
 
84 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 very breath of idly provocative thought. " Think. 
 May not a paper, too, be some poor soul's, and that soul 
 have its yearning, also, for revenue — revenue not to be 
 had, perhaps, if the paper be not endeared to yet other 
 poor souls by giving them something to cry about? ' 
 
 ' Well, I don't want to be hard. Let 'em cry about 
 me when no one plays up with the rents." 
 
 ' Did you know," Power asked, " that all the rent 
 paid you last Christmas was found by that English 
 reporter — the ' sickener ' ? " 
 
 ' That's interesting," Newman said, with an air of 
 preparedness to face any nonsense that came. Guy 
 liked this duel between two contrasted forbearances. 
 
 Power continued : ' The people in England, away 
 in the north, when they read what he said of the state 
 we were in, made a fund up among them and sent it to 
 me, and no sooner had each of the tenants his share of 
 the cash than off he'd be to your agent to have the rent 
 paid and be done with it." 
 
 " Oh, they're great people. They'd not draw a 
 pound from the bank — " 
 
 " Is it savings, and they eating grass! " The priest 
 all but broke bounds. 
 
 " When they're sick — I believe you. They'd not 
 walk to Tubber post-office to draw out the bit they owe, 
 but they'd cadge on poor, soft-hearted lambs over here. 
 Well, they're free men, and I ain't a tyrant. As long 
 as I'm paid I don't care how they get it." 
 
 " You don't? " the priest asked, with intention. 
 
 " I do not." 
 
 " You'd not be against it? " 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 85 
 
 " Fd not take the trouble." 
 
 " Joyce did, last winter. He put a taboo on the 
 Northerner man till there wasn't a bed or a car he 
 could get in the place." 
 
 " He's a great mind, is Joyce." 
 
 " No, but it's you are magnanimous. Joyce put a 
 stop to a job that was doing you more good than any 
 one. Three- fourths of the rents the man from the 
 Northerner got out of England, and he'd not have 
 rested until he'd got all, and arrears, and food for the 
 people, if Joyce could have let him alone. I ask, would 
 you have him impeded again if he came back 
 to-morrow? " 
 
 "Well — ? ''' It was Newman's pride that no 
 passion, however sacred, should keep back from birth 
 whatever might live to be good business. 
 
 " I don't say he will," the priest said, " after the 
 way he was treated. Only, it's autumn now, the time 
 English papers can't tell what on earth to be at, and 
 they wanting to seem fit to read. God knows but we 
 might find one that would quit asking what age to 
 marry, or why go to church, and would give people all 
 the occasion to cry that anybody could want, with 
 telling the way it is at Cusheen." Something of frailty 
 did cling to the priest ; for disdains that he mastered 
 or hid he had to make up to himself with tiny oozings 
 of irony squeezed out now and again. 
 
 Guy noticed; it felt as if he had bitten an olive, the 
 epicure. Newman's palate told him of no taste; his 
 mind, though, descried still more clearly what might 
 turn out to be business, the fine gold of business, calling 
 
86 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 out to be disengaged from such dross as attended it. 
 " Well," he said, " it depends — for one thing, on which 
 rag it is. Here's our friend owns an eighth of a rag 
 and a little bit over. Now if he'd give the office to all 
 the wild eighths to behave — " 
 
 Guy disclaimed power over the Northerner. Still 
 he might put up a prayer — he had never done it yet — 
 to the editor. So much he said, for he liked people's 
 plans to go forward ; it drew people out. 
 
 Newman proved that it did. " What I can not 
 stand," he said with some fervor, " is having ' human- 
 ity,' that sort of slime, daubed all over the place. I 
 don't so much mind if a tramp comes round begging. 
 You see, it's his game. Even a thief; well, it's all 
 right to set the dog on him; that's your game ; still, he's 
 sort of a man and a brother; he's playing to win, same 
 as yourself. But to have pure philanthropists poking 
 round — it's the true holy terror. You're not an arch- 
 angel, thank God " — Guy bowed to the eulogy — " only 
 I want to know where you come in — your paper, I 
 mean — the whole boiling of vulgar fractions. Excuse 
 country manners, but what I say is, if a man's straight 
 you ought to see where he comes in." 
 
 Guy reassured him gaily. Had Newman not heard 
 Father Power? What could profit a journal more than 
 to melt readers' hearts and then give them its shoulders 
 to weep upon, at its usual price ? 
 
 " You think, swelpyergud, it's an asset ? ' : 
 
 " Sterling," Guy testified gravely. 
 
 " Put it at that, for the moment. Next point — ■ 
 who's your man ? Some mad idiot, same as last year, 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 87 
 
 running down us poor landlords ? Or some one who'd 
 not make a beast of himself, but would take a look 
 round with Dan Joyce and go into the facts and put it 
 down fair in the paper, how God hadn't come up to 
 time with the fruits of the earth, and would man 
 kindly see to it ? That's good religion. I'm not a pi 
 man, but I'm not against decent religion." 
 
 During this allocution the priest practised virtues, 
 and Guy's contentment was flecked by his considerate 
 sense of the priest's pangs of suppression ; so it seemed 
 to be for the best that the moment's awkward silence 
 which followed was broken by the all-seeing waiter. 
 "Pardon, messieurs! The caravan, which arrives!' 
 He offered the field-glass again and indicated the top 
 of the Dent Rouge. 
 
 It was the moment when June, from their hell of 
 cold, was to see Louis ascend into heaven. The priest 
 found the place with the glass. " I see only flashes of 
 light," he said. " One, then another, another, and 
 they timed like the ticks of a clock. Is it some kind 
 of a signal they're making? ' : 
 
 The waiter, elate to know better, expounded. ' The 
 guide's ax. He lifts it; he lets it fall; each time he 
 lifts it the sun strikes the steel." 
 
 Two specks of black, Father Power now saw, 
 attended the recurrent gleam. Its flashing stopped 
 suddenly. Then a third speck, Louis, lost till now in 
 the dazzle he made, was black on the snow. The 
 priest turned to Guy. " There are three of them in it? ' 
 
 " My sister, a guide, and — " Browne, somehow, 
 seemed to need delicate definition. 
 
88 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 'A porter?' The priest's voice did not lessen 
 Guv's sense of that need. 
 
 'His wicked pride says so," Guy laughed; "an 
 amateur, really." 
 
 " Ah ! a relation of yours? " 
 
 ' An Oxford acquaintance of Newman's and mine. 
 ' Driftwood spars,' you know, ' that meet and pass,' as 
 my father would say." 
 
 " I see," said the priest, and tried to. 
 
 Newman was thoughtful too. Through the glass 
 he watched those three, who were not lame, come to 
 rest like happy gods, uplifted in visionary sunlight, 
 throned on the summit of the earth. A pang of ex- 
 clusion privily bit the unwhining cripple. They were 
 ' in it," not he; it made them "a set," with mutual 
 bonds of their own, each bond a fresh blackball to him. 
 June, by herself, was null to him; Browne was null 
 too ; June as a girl whose rank put her beyond casual 
 pursuit, Browne as a poor grotesque, a curio of crazy 
 motives and valuations. Yet the tw T o, so void singly, 
 hurt him together : such pairs needed severance. 
 
 ' A writer," Guy was telling the priest. Guy had 
 had an idea. Not people only but chance, too, had its 
 humors, its moods, its little fumblings at plans. Let 
 it, too, be helped to do its germs of amusingness jus- 
 tice, such as they were. "A novelist, dramatist, cer- 
 tainly; journalist, possibly." Guy trailed the words 
 temptingly. 
 
 One of the trout rose. "Journalist?" Power 
 asked; " on the Northerner, is it? " 
 
 " Not — yet, that I know of." 
 
THE MORNIXG'S WAR 89 
 
 " You mean that he might be? " 
 
 Guy gave a shrug that said, " How can one tell, in 
 this ramshackle world? But perhaps we might try," 
 and looked around at Newman. So did the priest. 
 Their eyes agreed, up to a point. As Newman lowered 
 the glass Guy began sweetly : " How can you thank 
 Father Power enough? He suggests the redoubtable 
 Browne — " 
 
 " Browne? ' The priest's voice was sharp. 
 
 " Our friend up aloft," Guy explained. 
 
 " Yes, yes, yes " — the priest hushed up his own 
 interjection. "Of course the name's common in 
 England." 
 
 Guy took up his thread. " He suggests that if 
 Browne were asked nicely he might — with Mr. Joyce's 
 concurrence — do you that service." 
 
 " Eh? " Newman was grimly suspensive. 
 
 " The friend," Guy softly tripped on, " of your 
 youth; the artist — one who — you hoped, did you not? 
 — might do greater things if he turned, say, to land- 
 scape, or genre, to pathetic genre, than if, mistaking 
 his vein, he labored at portraiture." 
 
 Newman stared. It piqued Guy to plant notions 
 in him, floating the seeds to their place on flimsy 
 attached wings of irony. Newman saw only the thistle- 
 down flying, and while he thought "Rubbish!' the 
 seeds rooted. 
 
 Guy babbled on, half turning to Power. " For New- 
 man's friend, Browne, what a crisis! He stands at 
 crossways, with uncertain feet, like the hymned 
 maiden. A step to the right and he makes for the fame 
 
90 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 of the novelist, satirist, artist in caricature; he lives 
 in London, in Surrey, in the great world, guying its 
 types. A step to the left and he may be shunted into 
 a siding — was it a parting of roads that he stood at 
 just now? Or of waters? Or railways? Newman, in 
 your pure prayers be my poor metaphors remembered. 
 Yet why talk of them in this your moment of distress 
 — your tragic choice for your friend? No, I turn 
 back ; I cannot do it ; I withdraw Father Power's sug- 
 gestion ; I say to you, ' Pause, Newman, pause ; con- 
 sider how, if the Northerner fasten but one claw in 
 your friend, his bright genius, from which you have 
 hoped so much, might be lost to portrait art — wasted, 
 perhaps, in padding for life those stodgy columns in 
 the obscure North." 
 
 " You mean, if he slobbers all right on a specimen 
 job—" 
 
 " You are hot on the trail of my fear." 
 
 " They'd take him on as one of their regular 
 bleaters ? " 
 
 " Say roarers. They tell of a dearth of young lions. 
 Editors scan the horizon of Libya anxiously." 
 
 " Well — " Weighing the matter, Newman looked 
 up again through the glass at the three infinitesimal 
 images of beatified rest. ' They're taking their time," 
 he said almost acidly. " When do you want this thing 
 done?" 
 
 The priest hid his joy. " I'll be back at Cusheen 
 this day fortnight. Any time then." With a casual 
 air that was very well done he held out a hand for the 
 glass and looked through it. " It's desperately tiring 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 91 
 
 work for your sister," he said to Guy, putting it 
 down. 
 
 " Well, we go home to-morrow," said Guy. 
 
 " Is it early to-morrow? " 
 
 " The afternoon." 
 
 " That's the way. Then there'll be time for your 
 sister to hear all the news of Cusheen. It was for it 
 she brought me." 
 
 The deuce she did, Newman reflected. Could no- 
 body let his affairs alone? Still, there were points in 
 this precious plan. It stank, in a way; a sniveling, 
 puling business, it reeked of ' good works " in the 
 sniffiest of inverted commas. But rents were rents, 
 come in how they might ; land your fish in a butterfly- 
 net, it would still be salmon. And caricature, that new 
 and beastly menace, might be kept off. And that little 
 gang of two up there might be pretty well broken up if 
 Browne could really be shipped off into the North, 
 where no one was heard of, and whites, he fancied, 
 soon sank almost into natives. So the three below, 
 with their variously mixed and qualified cross-wishes 
 and half-intentions, struck up between them a cold 
 league to mature that arrangement, and meanwhile the 
 sun left the tip of the Dent Rouge and the three on it 
 took motion and vanished towards the pit of shadow 
 beyond. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 "Even so quickly may one catch the plague?" 
 
 Twelfth Night, I. v. 
 
 IT was noon next day before June was alone. From 
 the inn she could see Browne flat on a rock, in the 
 flannels of ease, bathing in mist-filtered sunshine. She 
 had a mission and went to him straight, defying her- 
 self to find it hard, or furtively sweet: that way would 
 sentiment lie, the fen of treaclesome slime, a vain trap 
 to set for clear spirits. She would prove that : one clear 
 spirit, with something to ask of another, would ask 
 erectly, with fronting eyes. 
 
 She came to it soon. ' You've seen Father Power? ' 
 
 He laughed. " Have I not ? And your brother, and 
 New r man. Such pulling of wires! — the whole inn 
 creaked." 
 
 He was easier now to talk to ; people are, with whom 
 you have faced hardness, even in play. Yet June's 
 embassage halted. Before she came out she had known 
 what to say ; it was framed in her mind, and the words 
 picked. But now mere improvisations pushed in, 
 shoving aside those accredited envoys. ' You write? ' 
 — an abrupt : You write?" — was one of the inter- 
 lopers. 
 
 " I try," he said, a little abashed at the stand-and- 
 deliver tone under which she hid tremors : he did not 
 see them. 
 
 92 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 93 
 
 " To write — what ? " The thought crossed her that 
 " Father or Guy would not have said that "; but she 
 stuck to her question. Why not? She had not read 
 a word of his writing. 
 
 " That's the trouble," he said. 
 
 "To choose?" 
 
 " Yes, between the gorgeous impossibilities." 
 
 " Impossibilities? " 
 
 " Pretty well." 
 
 "What are they?" She was sitting; she or her 
 dress made a settling gesture; her clothes seemed to 
 say, " Let us go into this." 
 
 He caught her mood cheerfully. "Well; number 
 one — you may write to — to bring news." 
 
 "News?" 
 
 " What the great ones bring — the big ideas that no 
 one had thought of — new ways of taking things — 
 everything." 
 
 "Why not try that?" She smiled, with a waken- 
 ing sense of seeing what he could not see. Did he not 
 know that he had the touch — that he was king and 
 could cure the evil and raise eyes and ears from the 
 dead? 
 
 " To bring news you must have it. I haven't." 
 
 " I see." She laughed low, with a quick pleasure. 
 His self-undiscernment was like a child's, and a child 
 can be helped and not help others only. " Well, and 
 the other impossible? " 
 
 " That's to bring what isn't news now, though it 
 was — to tell people things that they heard long ago, 
 but don't know, they were told them so dully." 
 
94 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 " That mountains are high, and that one sees from 
 them ? " 
 
 " Yes, and all the copy-book headings shining dis- 
 coveries, unexplored islands — " 
 
 " Sighted from mastheads at dawn." Her face 
 sparkled: her mind took the road with his; it ran on 
 ahead, laughing. 
 
 " And even one's country worth liking ; "' he fol- 
 lowed, wondering. Why, she could understand any- 
 thing, even the simplest things. Wondering, he looked 
 at her. She had her hands round her knees as she 
 sat ; one of them held a raised sunshade. Her hat of 
 brown straw had a great brim, not closely woven; jets 
 of light pierced it; and now the sunshade, inattentively 
 held while the talk grew eager, drooped to one side 
 and would half recover itself, and droop again, so 
 that over her face light and shade flickered and chased 
 till her eyes were like water dancing in Venice between 
 sunlit walls, and her cheeks like ripe wheat across 
 which a wind puffs fleet shadows. 
 
 Time stopped, for him, as he looked ; but to her his 
 long look was physical touch, yet not loathsome. It 
 shook her to find that; she had to withdraw herself, 
 not from the look, but from her own abashed sense 
 that nothing within her resented it. " I have two 
 countries," she said, just to say something, to make 
 a break. 
 
 "England and — ? " There his voice hung for a 
 moment, lingering out the lease the unfinished speech 
 gave of a right to gaze at those scudding chequers of 
 light and half-light. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 95 
 
 Again she broke it off. " Ireland." 
 " I have them too. Do they fight in yon? ' 
 "No," she said offhand; and then, with less sure- 
 ness, " No. But I was never in Ireland." 
 
 " Xor I. And yet, isn't this odd? When yon speak 
 it seems as if I had come to some place that I know 
 better than England." 
 
 "Yon feel that, too? v They eyed each other 
 gravely, like children exchanging the marvels of their 
 vast experience, and so the sunshade swayed in a 
 slacker hand and the gleam and shadow flitted the 
 faster over her face till all that was she in it. all that 
 he would have liked to disengage from that fugitive 
 interposed fantasy, showed like a bright thing sunk in 
 rippled clear water; it baffled and broke and challenged 
 and eluded. In their unashamed wonder they looked 
 and looked on, with the web already forming over their 
 eyes that Nature, to gain her own splendid and pitiless 
 immortality, weaves from the red of the rose and the 
 honey of heather to mesh into its service the uncon- 
 scious senses of her soon-spent butterflies and 
 bees. 
 
 " How much are you Irish ? " he asked, in a voice 
 that, since he last spoke, had traveled and had ex- 
 periences. 
 
 " Half. It was my mother. And you — how 
 much ? " 
 
 " Oh, ninety-nine hundredths, no doubt." 
 She marveled. Only "no doubt"! And that dis- 
 missive " Oh " of indifference. " Surely your name 
 isn't Irish," she said. 
 
96 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 " The odd one hundredth's name ; some trooper of 
 James — or Elizabeth — lost in the bogs." 
 
 " Don't you want to find out? " She chafed at his 
 incurious tone; it was part of a naive classlessness in 
 him, not like her own men's old Whig pose of out- 
 wardly equal membership in an implied republic of 
 the elect, but something that seemed, without any 
 malign intention, to show up that quaint concessive 
 irony as a mere masking and mincing class pride. Guy 
 and her father had felt it through all Browne's cru- 
 dities ; it had attracted them; in it their passionless 
 equity saw a thing they had tried to do, only it was 
 done better; and they were not jealous. But June was 
 for them. Why, if they walked on hidden cork legs 
 of race conceit, should any one else have flesh limbs? 
 "Couldn't you hunt up old records?" she too perti- 
 naciously asked; "old registers — the births and 
 marriages? " 
 
 " Ours were burnt with the churches, my father 
 said, in the Penal times." 
 
 June said, "You were Catholics, then?" her face 
 lighting. 
 
 " All, till my father. He changed." The words 
 put out that light, and so he felt like a boor and he had 
 to go on saying something or other; to leave it there 
 seemed too blunt. "I don't know about it exactly; 
 my father would not talk about it — about religion at 
 all. He was generous. He wanted to leave me free." 
 
 " Poor little boy ! " she exclaimed, with a little 
 flinch of the lip at this picture of infant liberty. 
 
 " Oh, I was all right," he said sharply, disclaiming 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 97 
 
 pathetic interest ; his face was hot at the thought that 
 he might have seemed to claim it; that were indeed to 
 be the sorriest sneak of emotionalism — and a fraud, 
 too; what day of his childhood had not been happy 
 adventure ? 
 
 At his coldness the look shrank with which she had 
 spoken, a look like that of a friendly stranger bending 
 over a child whom some one has left free to earn itself 
 food. So he read it ; it seemed oddly easy to read, like 
 a page in a book known long ago. Oh, yes, of course 
 he remembered ; his mother had looked like that once. 
 It was after his father's death, when she was slipping 
 back terrified towards the fold that he knew they had 
 left together in their young courage. She had, by a 
 coincidence, used the same words — had said " Poor 
 little boy ! " as she kissed him good-night at a time 
 when, as he guessed, some children said prayers. And 
 now he must talk again, and that lightly, to soften the 
 seeming rebuff — what a bungler he was, and his talk a 
 mere train of efforts to mend blunder with blunder! 
 So the next moment he felt he had been too personal, 
 for he had said, " It's curious; you have a look of my 
 mother — a lift of the eyes." 
 
 She laughed mercifully. " As if the lower lid had 
 to be climbed by the pupil, for it to see over. Guy 
 always laughs at that trick. But you're wrong. It's 
 my mother that gave me it." There a pause left her 
 graver. " It was a wish of hers made me come out to 
 you now." He looked a question. She added, ' No; 
 she is dead long ago." 
 
 " So is mine." 
 
98 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 She waited, feeling her way. He fetched no polite 
 rubbish to fill up the space. When blanks of silence 
 came, in the talk that ensued, they were left to run on 
 until words came again of themselves, as nature lets 
 the underground reservoirs refill at ease for each jet 
 of her intermittent streams. Nor did any abruptness 
 of either's trouble the other much. Swimming to- 
 gether, the thoughts of each dived where they would 
 and came up where they would. 
 
 She cast back to where they had started. ' You've 
 seen Father Power? " 
 
 " Yes, and all the intriguers. They have a great 
 scheme. They all want different things, and two of 
 them — oh, not your brother — are like dog and cat; 
 they stiffen with hating each other, at sight. And yet 
 they make out that if I came into the game, and also 
 some editor up in the North, they'll all win." 
 
 " So shall I." She got it out bravely. " I came to 
 ask you to do it." 
 
 They waited, and thought worked. They told 
 you," she presently asked, " all about the starvation? ' 
 
 " Only a little. It seemed to — pain Newman." 
 
 She emitted scorn like a physical ray, a shaft of 
 fierce light with visible edges. As soon as she could 
 she spoke restrainedly. 
 
 " Households of people not sleeping all night with 
 the pain of being hungry. Babies crying and crying, 
 the way babies cry for a moment or two in nurseries 
 while a nurse rushes to warm the food for them — only, 
 those babies cry on and on, through whole days. 
 Nothing to give them. Their mothers just wait and 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 99 
 
 hear the crying grow weaker." Before the angry blaze 
 was quite sunk in her eyes her mouth was tremulous at 
 sight of her own circumstantial vision of these mis- 
 eries. He thought her arms moved a little, in some 
 rudimentary gesture of nascent instinct, as if to draw 
 in and pillow a small and troubled head on her breast ; 
 the unfixed opalesque luster of girlhood deepened 
 itself for the moment to one clear glow, constant and 
 warm, the radiance of something that, like the sun, 
 would mother all children all over the world. 
 
 "How you know the place!" Browne said 
 amazedly. 
 
 " In a way — yes. I'm never to see it, though. Oh, 
 I can't tell you why," she said, to his look of surprise; 
 she straightened and hardened a little, as some people 
 of spirit do when they call up affronting recollections. 
 An instant of this and again she had herself in hand 
 and could make for her aim. " But I was to help the 
 people there always — my mother wished that — and to 
 get other people to help them. Will you? J 
 
 What could he do but one thing? She looked at 
 him full, with a noble, frank importunacy, unflinching 
 and unwheedling; the effort was proudly forced to 
 look effortless, almost ; only the slightest ruffling of the 
 beauty of her petitioning lips betrayed it; roses full 
 blown and brave, a little vexed by the wind, had that 
 look, he thought. What could he do? Merely to say 
 " Yes " was nothing. He lied hard to make her be- 
 lieve that it was not she that had turned him ; his will 
 to unload her of debt to him rushed out to meet half- 
 way her resolve to incur it. 
 
100 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 She saw, and had to give, too, what she had, if only 
 a confidence. ' Some one," she plunged at it, " did 
 these poor people a wrong; some one close to my 
 mother; at least, one of them was; there were two." 
 She broke off again, with a moment's lapse into small 
 petulance, that of her old, unfired days. She said, 
 " Oh, you can't understand; you aren't a Catholic." 
 Then ruth pricked her again for turning on him the 
 roughness of her own wrestle with her own task. 
 ' Oh. I don't mean that; only, it was a baseness. I 
 don't know it all — I don't even know the worst per- 
 son's name. I was not to. Nobody spoke of them. It 
 was as if they'd been hung for murder." 
 
 He could not guess ; he scarcely tried to ; little the 
 whole enigma mattered to him, except for the flame 
 and the clouds that it brought to the girl's face, and the 
 combats that this and that impulse of frankness and 
 shame and pride and impatience lost or won on that 
 beautiful battlefield. How she changed! Her color 
 was changed; not the tint fixed, at least for an hour, on 
 cherries or pinks, but a rising and falling, a beating 
 pulse of tone, not beating by rule — or only by this one, 
 that through every change the blood was true to the 
 emotion; the lights on neck and brow signaled can- 
 didly. More; the flush was the very emotion; the look, 
 disdainful or kind, was thought itself; body and soul 
 and mind in her ran into one, like the thing a song 
 means and the way it is said and the tune that it is 
 sung to ; like the last note of a cadence the least of the 
 curls of sunned hair on her neck could thrill his sense 
 with the splendor of all of her. Looking at one, he 
 
THE MORNING'S .WAR 101 
 
 asked, without caring to know, " Had they owned 
 the land, those two, and sold the poor wretches to 
 Newman ? " 
 
 "If that were all ! No. There have always been 
 Newmans out at Cusheen, and rainy years, and blights 
 on the potatoes. They're nothing. Oh, what a brute 
 I am ! " and her eyes, that had flung his suggestion off, 
 lit on him like a touch on the arm from a self-humbling 
 friend, " and you going there to help them against all 
 these plagues — of course they do matter; why, they're 
 the only ones my mother and I ever helped them with, 
 either. We owed it them ; they gave up freely a lot of 
 things — things they could live on — things that had 
 come from those — oh, can't vou see? ' She seemed to 
 cry out upon some slowness of wit in him that would 
 not abridge these pangs of revelation. 
 
 He made haste to say, : Yes, the Judas — some 
 Judas, with silver," not really guessing at all, nor car- 
 ing, except to smooth out of her forehead three lines 
 that had creased it strainedly, dragging the skin. As 
 to this mighty secret, why, the truth about other peo- 
 ple's family secrets was surely the dullest of all mice 
 born to mountains. But she was auriferous soil, the 
 true gold under dust; plaintive or cross about trifles, 
 royally genial when tried, her face, that would scowl 
 and flinch at the squeak of a chair on the floor, had 
 cleared like a sky when she had spied danger. Full 
 face she was a right Hebe, with that benign roundness 
 of outline, the curve of the chin sweeping round, soft 
 and full, from ear to ear. But as soon as she half 
 turned to profile, the Hebe was gone, with her mere 
 
.102 THE .MORNING'S WAR 
 
 fruit-like plumpness; now, from the point of the chin 
 there sprang up to the further ear a curve noble and 
 strong as that line of sustinent, continent grace, the 
 outward stoop and lift of a vase or a sailing-ship's 
 bow or a column's capital. Rounding the chin it drew 
 in to a slight concave in passing the tip of the mouth, 
 and then, as if collecting its strength, it filled and 
 reached puissantly out and did not draw back till it 
 held the modeled mass of the brow resting supreme 
 on its glorious bracket ; glorious always, awesomely 
 queenly at times, as when she had said, " Can't you 
 see? " and had seemed to retreat into twilight thickets 
 of family chagrin, or of hurt faith, or of daughterly 
 loyalty. All twilit woods are enchanted if you peer 
 in from without. This one held menaces, even, in 
 some of the dim vistas, down which the girl receded 
 at times, beyond grasp or sight, a dryad whose oaks 
 might be everything to her, and no man anything. But 
 now she was clement again. 
 
 They talked plans — how he might have to go to 
 Brabburn, to see this editor-body of Guy's; Guy would 
 write to that worthy ; they both felt sure — so airy is 
 youth — that he must be a worthy, with all that the 
 word implies of bleared sight and numbed tentacles. 
 Were it so, Browne would still come back to London 
 before he went to Ireland — should the good man in the 
 North indeed desire him to. Then Browne must 
 certainly come to Up-Felday to stay for a night at 
 least. Her father and Guy, she said, insisted. June 
 was wholly the hostess now; she was affable with a 
 will. She acted as if for a wager, or rather by way of 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 103 
 
 argument with herself. If she were really shaken by 
 something in this man, could she press hospitality on 
 him as frankly as on any common ' person worth 
 knowing " ? No, clearly. And so she would prove she 
 was whole. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 " She is not fair to outward view 
 As many cities be." 
 
 BRABBURN is not a pretty city; nor is it Arcady 
 around her. When steam was first used to turn 
 wheels, a rash of towns broke out on the county's clear 
 moorland skin. The rash is almost confluent now ; all 
 that is left of " country " for ten miles round Brabburn 
 is patches of sooty grass going bald mangily, spots here 
 and spots there, some scraggy and worried remains 
 of thorn hedges, their failing powers of disjunction 
 eked out with barbed wire, and some wide puddles in 
 which, no doubt, cows of pastoral idyll, knee-deep 
 among water-lilies, mused on the hot days of a cen- 
 tury ago; now they are silted up with Swiss milk tins, 
 old pans, and barrel-hoops sticking half out. At night 
 all the main aggregations of urban light are tied to 
 one another by unbroken strings of lamps, and up and 
 down these slanting lines of beaded light the electric 
 tramcars flit, rather like shooting stars, visiting those 
 larger constellations. 
 
 By day some parts of the earth are seen to have 
 been disemboweled in mining for coal, and part of the 
 entrails left to lie on the body's outside in a mess that 
 has caked hard and blackish ; the rain that ran down 
 the sides of these heaps, as Browne neared Brabburn, 
 made gullies or furrows of paler dirt-color, much as 
 
 104 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 10.5 
 
 sweat does on the face of a sweep. For the last four 
 miles the train ran level over low roofs, a mean sea 
 of ridged ripples of slate. Peering down into the 
 troughs between these he could spy now and then, 
 when the wind tore a hole in their lids of damp smoke, 
 a girl with a shawl on her head, or some whirled rag 
 of a child, jug in hand, holding back hard while the 
 storm blew her clothes before her over a shining wet 
 pavement. Clothes-lines, now empty and whipping the 
 air, crossed most of these streets, proclaiming that in 
 unconquerable minds cleanliness held desperately out 
 against the whole investing league of sodden air, sun- 
 lessness and hanging reek. " Many the wondrous 
 things, but the most wondrous is man." Browne, 
 compassionate but not depressed, hummed the old 
 descant of happy surprise that is fresh as often as 
 spring, and young' again whenever any one who has 
 read it feels the stir of his own youth. 
 
 At the train's last stop, two miles before Brabburn, 
 the door flew instantly open, and through this sluice 
 there surged into the carriage, with jubilant howls of 
 " Play up, Brabburn! " and " Good old City! " a spate 
 of pasty adolescence. They seemed to move not by 
 separate personal impulse; rather, to be molecular 
 units of tumbled froth in some turbid irruption of a 
 liquid seeking lower levels. All wore the same foot- 
 ball favor; their caps were cocked alike; they all 
 smoked cigarettes, and did it with the same technique ; 
 when the first ecstasy of capture was spent, each 
 seemed to let fall a slackened, but not weakly-made, 
 lower lip till there spilt over its edge, like a child's 
 
106 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 wilfully unmastered saliva, a dribble of gross, but not 
 lascivious expletion, decking the tale of how Brabburn 
 City ought to have won, and how gracelessly Bowton 
 had beaten them, how venal the referee's judgments 
 ("Talk aboul whistlin'!" "Bloody tram-driver!") 
 had proved him, how tragically Brabburn's paladin, 
 1 1 itch, had been out of form. 
 
 " Itch," one of them suddenly turned to Aubrey, 
 " 'e's one o' them fast lads, an' last week 'e bashed 'is 
 girl an' got a week an' only come out at eight this 
 mornin'. The seven nights on the boards done 'im no 
 good." He spoke as if Browne and he had been long 
 acquainted. And then Browne saw a thing he had 
 missed — that none of these youths knew the rest five 
 minutes ago, any more than he did. He had not heard 
 in the South this unhampered talk, with its instant 
 assumptions of some universal interests in life, and 
 also of every one's fitness to be accosted at sight as at 
 least a probationary comrade. 
 
 Censure passed on from Bowton's players to Bow- 
 ton's friends in the crowd. " Rough devils, they Bow- 
 ton fellies ! " said one critic, looking down as from 
 Versailles on an impolite world. 
 
 " 'Ear 'em taak, too ! ' said another. " Gawd 
 amighty, it's bleedin' awful." 
 
 A chorus of "Ah's " assented. Somebody went one 
 better. " Taak abaht Bowton!' he said. " Owd- 
 ham's place fer roughyeds. I see last train out, fer 
 Owdham way, Saturday neet. One chap come to 
 bookin'-office window. ' Gie's a ticket,' 'e says. 
 1 Wheer fer?' says clerk. ' Whoam,' says 'e. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 107 
 
 ' Wheer's 'ome?' says clerk. ' What th' 'ell's that to 
 thee? ' says t' roughyed. ' Righto! ' says clerk, ' 'ere's 
 tha ticket. I can see thee's fra Owdham.' 
 
 All laughed, saluting a truth. Browne was en- 
 chanted ; the prospect was widening; new social land- 
 scape, plane behind plane of unaffected manners, 
 opened out into the far distance. " Owdham's aal 
 reet," another went on, " but was th' ever at Blackston? 
 They don't mak' folk at aal — not to caal whole folk — 
 at Blackston. Nobbut offal an' boilin' pieces." 
 
 The talk passed to whippets, wild-fowling, rlower- 
 shows, contests between brass bands. Browne saw 
 another thing then; under their uniform of manner 
 and outward habit they could be furiously diverse. 
 Every one swore, contradicted, was bursting to back 
 some preference of his own. And then again they 
 would come together, naively, in some sudden unison 
 of gusto. A youth took out of the crown of his hat 
 a single bloom of some uncommon lily; he handed 
 it round. The connoisseurs wagged silent heads. 
 " There's a lot of work in them petals," the owner 
 claimed, and the others said " Ah! " allowing to Na- 
 ture's fret-saw the precious forced praise of experts, 
 not courtiers. Then, in the harshest, unsentimental 
 way, as if he were cursing a sudden twinge of pain in 
 his stomach, another youth interjected : — " Eh, but a' 
 wish March throstles 'ud start whistlin' ! " and. once 
 more, all said assentively, " Ah ! " 
 
 Browne shivered with pleasure. Northern England 
 was opening before him — the mills amid heather; the 
 soot on peat-moss and bracken ; the droves of " hands ' : 
 
108 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 herded to work and back with whistle and hooter; 
 rocks of the prime sticking out in streets of slums at 
 the foot of high fells, where the townspeople seem at 
 first like so many house-sparrows twittering samely 
 from urban eaves, but break now and then into speech 
 that thrills like the unexpected call of a grouse; the 
 sane earthen humor and harsh pith of mind : the so- 
 ciable rudeness. 
 
 Brabburn; the train stopped; here, too, were deli- 
 cious differences. The cabs were of the dark ages. 
 Browne's hansom, by two modes of jolting, reported 
 by turns two kinds of stone setts, the one small, rough, 
 iron-hard, the other large, softer, and worn into holes 
 that must be like small fonts; like fonts, too, these 
 cavities seemed to have been treasured. Yet this was 
 a city of wealth, spirit, great history, sometimes of 
 national leadership. Clearly it had its own notions 
 of what was worth having. Good place! Browne 
 was prepared to be kind to it. After all, why should 
 not some good come out of the provinces? Browne, 
 alone with his glee in the lightless cab, made an ex- 
 ultant grimace. His thoughts ran ahead ; they probed 
 for other surprises that might come. He was going 
 now to visit the Northerners editor, Mullivant. Mul- 
 livant might be uncommon? Not very likely, though. 
 An editor — that meant banality. No, it was hopeless. 
 Aubrey had never seen the Northerner, but he per- 
 ceived that it was hopeless. Still, a provincial editor 
 might have a house good to wake up in; a lawn to 
 look out on, red with the night's fall of beech leaves, 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 109 
 
 perhaps; a long view, possibly, up to dim Pennine 
 Hills. 
 
 Revolving these things he was dropped on a grudged 
 ledge of footpath under a cliff of bald brick. Was the 
 cabman sure? They had not left the station three 
 minutes. Yes, that there was Middleton House, the 
 driver said, with a temperate note of contempt. White 
 faces, niched in dark shawls, flitted in and out at the 
 door, each of their owners adding an infinitesimal in- 
 crement of polish to the varnished dirt-stain at elbow 
 level on the yellow brick. One of them passed to the 
 cabman, now paid and swinging up to his box, an 
 audible jibe at the new castaway on such rocks as a 
 Brabburn tenement block. The cabman's wit reacted 
 with ribald fertility; Browne enjoyed it while climbing 
 the three pair of stairs, half in and half out of the 
 building, to Mullivant's rooms. No, Mr. Mullivant 
 wasn't in yet, said a middle-aged slattern, who lived 
 in the tenement next his and said that she " did " for 
 him ; she had come with the key when Browne knocked. 
 She let him in, first making sure that he was licensed 
 to come, lighted the lamp, introduced him with a ges- 
 ture to the general contents of the interior and left 
 him. 
 
 Browne looked round, charmed. Life never failed; 
 its surprises bettered your hopes of its infinite vivacity. 
 The room was big and was all book-lined, except 
 where Samuel Palmer's tiny etching of Milton's lark 
 rising at dawn looked fair as the one star in a sky. A 
 terrier, curled up on the hearth like a whiting cooked, 
 glanced up out of sleep, whined out a loud yawn and 
 
110 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 re-imbedded its head in its tail, disgusted that this was 
 not Mullivant. There were two tables and three 
 chairs. What else the room held looked as if it were 
 there because it had not been noticed. In a brown 
 Delft jar in one corner a parched sheaf of bulrushes 
 rustled dry in the draughts that soughed under the 
 door and puffed up the carpet in traveling patches of 
 convexity as they traversed the floor. 
 
 Browne snuffed up the scent of a mind that took its 
 own way absorbedly. There were books of price — the 
 Second Folio, Keats in first editions, the Vicar of 
 Wakefield the same, a Baskerville Virgil — and there 
 was that one heaven's window of a print, monoga- 
 mously loved, and there was the shocking carpet undu- 
 lating unimpeded; a wet gust whipped the panes, the 
 curtains bellied, the terrier rose as if levered up by the 
 blast, revolved twice on his basic area, still in the shape 
 of a couchant capital C, and again, on a lull, collapsed 
 into unquiet sleep; the bulrushes huddled and shud- 
 dered with small, sere crepitations. Mullivant must 
 have put them there five or ten years ago. Oh, happy 
 absence of mind ! Strung up to his pitch of to-day, 
 Browne could see what success in life meant — to be 
 taken up, blood, brain and heart, the whole man, into 
 some passion as strong as lust, only good, that will use 
 you up in a tranced unawareness of anything else as 
 being worth while. 
 
 Soon Mullivant came, not as people come into rooms 
 now, but as they did in the first tale of adventure that 
 your father told you, your thrilled expectancy robing 
 them. He was forty-three; he was six feet tall; 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 111 
 
 though lean, he weighed thirteen stone; his head thrust 
 and peered a little, as if his sight were shortening. 
 The body's air of decayed magnificence was confirmed 
 by its clothes, which were of fine stuff, finely cut in a 
 fashion dead for several years; coat and collar pro- 
 claimed the date of their owner's last note of what 
 other men wore. His face at first nearly appalled; 
 the beetling of his forehead merged on menace; the 
 quite black eyes questioned you grimly, keeping you off 
 meanwhile as with pitchforks ; and a strong, ugly nose 
 — the one ugly feature — and mighty chin contributed 
 liberally to the sum of awesomeness. Then, of a 
 sudden, all the awesomeness broke down. Some comic 
 vision, evoked by a phrase in their greetings, tickled 
 this dragon; his head flung back with a roar of laugh- 
 ter like an enormous boy's; the whole redoubtable 
 enigma of the face was solved into large, genial ele- 
 ments — huge good-will ; huge simplicity ; some shy- 
 ness, not egoistic, but humble; eager respect, like a 
 child's, for the unpacked contents of the next moment 
 or of a new friend. 
 
 They supped at a space cleared of books, talking, 
 of course, about Oxford at first, as both had been 
 there; and, as Browne had been there but the other 
 day, he talked about the men of genius in the place, 
 his good friends, the sinewy minds of junior dons and 
 the broad wings of the last moment's poets. Mulli- 
 vant listened and liked it : these ardors — so his look 
 said — ought to go on ; and Browne saw, in Mullivant's 
 mirroring eye and sneerless laugh, the young Theban 
 eagles fall on their feet, perhaps in the Treasury, and 
 
112 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 no harm done, or build their eyries, like temple-haunt- 
 ing martlets, amid the Virginia creepers of rectories. 
 The meat, cooked by the slattern you heard of, was 
 not distinguishably mutton or beef, but just cooked 
 meat, something generic, that might have been the un- 
 flavored basis of all the kindly individual meats of 
 the earth. But both the eaters had harvesters' vitals, 
 and there was good wine, dating back like Mullivant's 
 coat, and talk flowed with it. 
 
 'You've written before? ' : Mullivant asked when 
 they had made friends and slowly fetched round to 
 business, with both pipes alight. 
 
 Browne's face must have grown a little expressive 
 at this. Had his firstling, his novel, not penetrated 
 these wilds? 
 
 " Oh, your yarn? " Mullivant laughed — a kind and 
 shy minor laugh that he had; it said and did many 
 things for him — met the shyness or fumbling of other 
 people halfway and comprehended all sorts of things 
 and made all kinds of allowances. " Yes; most jolly. 
 I liked your cheek in spinning it out of high spirits, 
 like that, without any observation behind 'em. All 
 right for once, you know; only — " Again the small 
 laugh let the point in unwoundingly. " Do write an- 
 other, some day, about real people. But what I was 
 meaning was stuff in our line." 
 
 Hurriedly Browne digested the note on his master- 
 piece. Yes, that was what he had tried to keep from 
 himself when people had praised it for what it was not 
 — that it was really no novel at all ; he had just let fly, 
 in the joy of his youth, and bluffed them. Praise 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 113 
 
 tasted good, and yet it was better to have this fellow- 
 workman's undeceived eye seeing how little one came 
 to, so far. 
 
 "Articles, essays, you know?" Mullivant asked. 
 "You've brought something? Good. Read — do you 
 mind? I'll not look at you." 
 
 What Browne now read out he had written in Lon- 
 don last night. Mullivant's invitation had asked for 
 " specimens " of his handiwork. Browne, surveying 
 his own past magnoperations, and musing on what 
 these newspapers were, had found in his desk nothing 
 so unclean and common that it could be trusted to tell 
 with an editor. Stooping to conquer, he took a trite 
 theme of the day, and, half ashamed and half gleeful, 
 penned on the spot some sagacious remarks not too 
 searching, he hoped, for " the general reader's " wits, 
 nor too nicely minted for that oaf's sense of form. The 
 stuff was certainly not quite, quite — so he felt while he 
 blotted the last page; still, some kinds of jeweler's 
 work could only be done in alloys : with an inward sigh 
 he owned it. 
 
 He now recited this goodly creation, sitting, to do 
 it, in the full light of the shaded lamp. Mullivant, 
 sunk in an arm-chair, in shadow, his face to the fire, 
 was perfectly still for the first few minutes. He then 
 shifted uneasily, like the terrier in the draught. Then 
 he quiesced again, for a shorter time, but his next 
 movement verged on convulsion, the springs of his 
 chair squeaking abruptly, as if all the thirteen stone 
 had fallen back on them together, after writhing or 
 bounding up two or three inches in uncontrollable 
 
1U THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 agony. Browne read on, but wished he were out of 
 the lamplight. Once, at a paragraph's end, he saw the 
 firelit silhouette of Mullivant's face staring at a fixed 
 point high on the wall as though he had toothache and 
 wanted to mesmerize himself into apathy. Again, at 
 some phrase in which Browne hoped he had caught the 
 tone of the trade, the audience let out a grunt of dis- 
 relish, not loud but deep. Browne shirked nothing 
 of what he had brought on himself. It was much. He 
 felt that a whole world was gaping at him, posed there 
 in limelight to show off his emptiness. 
 
 At last silence fell ; it lasted some moments, with 
 Mullivant still collapsed in his chair, the leaping light 
 of tiny flames dappling his crag of a face, and Browne 
 drawn back from the lamp, for darkness to cover him. 
 Speech had to come, soon or late. It came late. As 
 Mullivant's face turned at length, a coal fell in and 
 threw up a bigger flame, and Browne could see, with 
 poignant gratitude, the extraordinary ruthfulness of 
 his eyes. He began, " My dear boy," with a kind of 
 wrathful affection, as if a visitation endured together 
 had ripened friendship swiftly, " don't let me ever see 
 you do that again." 
 
 The patient muttered contritely ; he " feared he had 
 not got the tone " — he " had read newspapers too 
 little." 
 
 Mullivant groaned. 'Too little! Within one half- 
 hour you've said that something or other advanced by 
 leaps and bounds, and something else should be more 
 honored in the breach than the observance, that some 
 one was out of touch with the age and somebody not in 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 115 
 
 contact with vital realities. A's taste was ' execrable,' 
 and B's satire ' scathing.' and C's public virtue a ' van- 
 ishing point,' and D's judgment ' conspicuous by its 
 absence.' And you think you don't read the papers! ' 
 He worked himself up to a frenzy of tender brutality, 
 pulling and throwing about the misfitting vesture of 
 ready-made words in which Browne had dressed him- 
 self, thinking, poor wretch, to have the right uniform. 
 Mullivant first stripped away the re-dyed old feathers 
 of speech, the " mute, inglorious Miltons," the 
 " Frankenstein's monsters," the " Pyrrhic victories," 
 the " Sisyphean labors," the " Homeric laughter." 
 " What d'you want with calico flowers from dust- 
 holes? " he cried, as he stamped on them. " ' French 
 esprit/ too, good Lord ! and ' German thoroughness,' 
 and ' Parthian darts,' and ' Chinese stagnation.' Why, 
 it's an international exhibition of used fireworks." 
 Then he ripped up the seams, or what should have 
 been seams, the pastings and tackings together with 
 sham-naive " ands " and " fors," and " as regards " 
 and "in relation to"; and, this done, he visited the 
 fundamental imbecilities of structure, the way that 
 clause knocked down clause and page unsaid page and 
 the whole came to nothing. 
 
 Browne felt naked, and yet, strangely, he did not 
 mind now. There was a saving kindness, almost a 
 praise, in the very way the stripping was done. It 
 seemed to imply that he was able to afford it; that 
 clothes were not the whole of him; that, these gone, 
 there would be something left which could see what 
 rubbish was and eschew it. In the half-light that is 
 
116 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 good for confidences each could see that the other was 
 sorry and friendly, the battered trash uniting him who 
 had made to him who had rent it. 
 
 " Of course, if you want to be liked," said Mulli- 
 vant, tranquilly now, " you should write like that, just. 
 People love it. It's merely a fad not to give it 'em. 
 Sport, though — to make 'em read just what they hate." 
 
 " ' How if 'a will not stand '? " Browne delightedly 
 quoted. 
 
 " Make him. Use your wit till people will take it 
 from you that they're fools almost as well as they take 
 it from lickspittles that they're all Solons. They'll 
 want lies and then you must sharpen and sharpen pre- 
 cision till it will tickle like irony. Or they'll want 
 whooping and brag, and then you must still down your 
 quietness till, with the blether that's going on all round, 
 it tells like an epigram." Mullivant pulled up, some- 
 what abashed; was he giving a lecture? 
 
 " They do stand it ? " Browne asked, wondering. 
 
 Mullivant made a grimace. " Of course, trash must 
 pay best, for a while yet — the whole of our time, no 
 doubt. And of course we have owners to feed, and 
 wolves to repel from several large, green doors in 
 Mayfair." 
 
 " I know." Browne had seen Guy gracefully 
 browsing on three-sixteenths of what was left over 
 after the current expenses of Mullivant's honor had 
 been subtracted from current profits on Mullivant's 
 
 wits. 
 
 That was all right, for Mullivant. He was well 
 enough pleased that his fellow-owners — his own share 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 117 
 
 was a single sixteenth — should eat up their twenty 
 thousand pounds a year in peace, a good long way off, 
 and leave him and a friend to their whim of keeping 
 the paper decent. His life in a slum was quite cheap, 
 as well as delightful. But finance was not to be talked 
 about with this boy. Their talk ran again on the sport 
 of palming coherence and continence off on customers 
 who had come out to buy rant or slops — " ringing a 
 pig's nose, all over again, every morning, to drag him 
 along, and making him pay a penny a day for the 
 ring," Mullivant called it, but could not disguise his 
 love of the pig — " a most dear beast he is, really — 
 bound to turn out a god if we don't bedevil him 
 now." 
 
 Then Mullivant really let himself go; his talk, as he 
 warmed, gained a headlong brilliancy; gleaming and 
 turbid, it tumbled along in flood, with audacious 
 ellipses, leaps from point to point, rapid assumptions 
 that this or that need not be labored, that compre- 
 hension was waiting, ready, in Browne's mind, needing 
 only a hail. And — good miracle of mental comrade- 
 ship — waiting it was ; the taxed wits in Browne girt 
 themselves up to keep pace, and did it; they rose to 
 it, even rose off the known ground and looked around 
 over new, exciting expanses with eyes that found they 
 could transcend old view-limiting hills. The firelight 
 flickered lower and mellower, quickening the adventur- 
 ing spirit. Browne's made long voyages. Once, at a 
 pause, he noticed the storm was over outside. He 
 looked at the clock. Three hours had passed, as 
 though in climbing a mountain. He said so. 
 
118 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " You care about mountains? Come for a walk in 
 the Pennine to-morrow," said Mullivant. 
 
 " Rather." 
 
 " Bruntwood is coming," Mullivant said as he lit 
 his guest bedward. " You ought to know Brunt- 
 wood." 
 
 " Your business manager, didn't you say? ' : 
 
 " Yes, it's he runs the paper, really." 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 "A mind 
 That nobleness made simple as a fire." 
 
 W. B. Yeats. 
 
 IN the dead waste and middle of the night some 
 madman in wooden shoes came stamping along 
 the street and knocked furiously at every door. So it 
 seemed to Browne at his own violent awakening. Ten 
 minutes' silence ensued. Nobody seemed to resent the 
 outrage. Then two more wooden shoes could be 
 heard shuffling out of a house and pegging away down 
 the street ; others issued at lessening intervals until the 
 darkness, now blenching, dinned with the hammering, 
 tapping and slithering of wood on stone; the dots of 
 sound, running together, became a line and a thick 
 one. Then a turn came; the din slackened, the dots 
 were separable again. And then, when all seemed to 
 be subsiding there burst forth the strangest jangle 
 of cacophonies, a monstrous jostle of steam-blown 
 whistles, hooters, drones, sirens, buzzers, some a few 
 hundreds yards off, others a mile or two, all of them 
 shrilling, howling, or desperately holding out one note, 
 as if armadas of sinking ships were bellowing for help 
 in a fog. 
 
 Browne, sleepy and rueful, still had to laugh. It 
 seemed like some vast and primitive jest, a gigantic 
 skit on Oxford's bird-like clangor of morning bells. 
 
 119 
 
120 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 Then, still and small through the uproar, a clock 
 struck, and one by one the dissonant choristers threw 
 up their parts, some with the unashamed bathos of a 
 note of deflation, some with a strident last snort flung 
 out ferociously on the aching air; one, that had not 
 struck in till the prime of discord was past, completed 
 its truculent cadence as a solo. Two or three last pairs 
 of clogs were heard fleeing down the street, as from 
 some pursuant wrath, and, next thing that he knew, 
 Browne was once more being awakened, this time by 
 Mullivant's rap on his door. 
 
 Day was come, blank and chill. Behind the squat 
 houses, and ten times as high, there bulked rectangular 
 frameworks looking like travesties of festal palaces, 
 all window, with every pane ablaze in each long tier of 
 their eight or nine piled stories. Breakfast done the 
 two walked to the station; Bruntwood would meet 
 them there. As they walked Mullivant solved for 
 Aubrey the riddle set him at dawn, explained the 
 " knocker-up's " trade and the separate voice with 
 which each mill or yard gave its own army the word 
 to fall in. 
 
 " Another marvel of ours — here ! ' Over the side 
 of a bridge Mullivant showed a little river running 
 thirty feet lower, between house walls, and still break- 
 ing over the rock of its bed as it had done when a 
 trout-stream. But it was opaque and stank, and it was 
 light blue. Aubrey stared. 
 
 " Orange to-morrow, perhaps," said Mullivant. 
 " Yesterday, mauve. It's too often mauve. Poor 
 color, mauve." 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 121 
 
 " Does nobody murmur? " Browne asked. 
 
 "At all the mauve?" 
 
 "And the stink?" 
 
 " The old grumbler, the Northerner, does. It's 
 illegal, of course. But half the bench pollute rivers 
 themselves. So when a friend poisons all the fish in a 
 stream, or kills a few children with typhoid, they fine 
 him a shilling and sneer at the prosecutor. Bruntwood 
 noticed the game and gave me no rest till we set on the 
 rogues." 
 
 "Successfully?" 
 
 Mullivant waved a hand towards the azure filth. 
 " Si monimentum quaeris " — he laughed. " Still, it 
 had some effect. It got Bruntwood blackballed at 
 Rose's, a club here." 
 
 That loitering almost lost them the train. It was 
 crowded. Brabburn Races had ended last night and 
 bookmakers, tipsters, three-card men and more direct 
 thieves were homing to London and Birmingham. 
 Browne and Mullivant parted, each to jump in where 
 he could; they would rejoin at Howden, the moorland 
 station for which they were bound; no doubt they 
 would meet Bruntwood there. 
 
 Browne found he had plumped into the thick of a 
 debate. His entry reduced its heat for one moment, 
 like a spoon plunged into boiling water; the last comer 
 into a full compartment seems to be, by some law of 
 our nature, an alien and suspect, until by lapse of time 
 and the silent operations of the soul he becomes in- 
 sensibly a brother-in-arms against any yet later en- 
 trant. But any warmth lost was restored swiftly. 
 
122 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 Those were the happy first weeks of the Boer War, so 
 long desired, so ardently wooed; the spirited part of 
 the press was firing our hearts with daily assurances, 
 dear to the non-combatant heart, that the fight was 
 between heroes and ogres, and that the ogres had ugly, 
 flat-footed wives and ill-kept infants. Browne soon 
 perceived that four or five pillars of sport from Lon- 
 don, and two or three Northern workmen, had just 
 been fused into one substance by some effective story 
 of Boer barbarity. At first the only insoluble object 
 that could be seen was a little weasel-like man with 
 feet dangling well clear of the floor, a hard-bitten 
 sticker to proof, with the wizened calm and hus- 
 banded asperity found in some disputants long inured 
 to man's usage of strictly logical persons. 
 
 A clearly unfinished rebuke to this slave of reason 
 was now resumed by a London " bookie," a big, red, 
 personable varlet, over-dressed, vast-necked and triple- 
 chinned, with a belly that he swaggered like a medal, 
 and bibulous eyes, from which the aqueous part of 
 his liquor seemed to lip uncontainably over the lower 
 lids. ' Strikes me" he said, " yer little better'n a 
 try tor." 
 
 "Do it?" said the weasel. "Well, it ain't the 
 point." 
 
 " Oh, yn't it? " sneered the other. 
 
 ' Point is," the drastic thinker rejoined, " is it right? 
 
 Jus' you keep to that. Is this war right ? Now then ! " 
 
 : Ark at 'im ! " the bookie appealed to men and 
 
 gods. 'Is it rahyt?' 'e says. Is 'is ahn country 
 
 rahyt?' : Sympathetic horror was legible on several 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 123 
 
 faces. Inspired by so much backing the big man 
 turned abruptly on the little one and asked him in 
 mock-confidential tones, as if parched with genuine 
 thirst for information — " 'Ere, mite, 'o\v much a week 
 d'yer git fer syin' that? " 
 
 " Eh, but that's it," put in a virtuous-looking work- 
 man, with conviction, raising his eyes from a paper 
 in which the upper half of the open page seemed to 
 be one tall stack of printed outcries. 
 
 "An' 'oo pyes 'im?" the bookmaker's clerk sup- 
 ported his principal. 
 
 The little man clearly felt lonely. Still, all he would 
 yield to unreason was to fall back on a general aspira- 
 tion which fools might mistake, if they chose, for 
 something other than a crusher to themselves. ' Well, 
 God defend the right," he said; " that's all I say." 
 
 The bookie almost shrieked, " Didn' I sye 'e was a 
 trytor? Garn! Prow-Bower!" 
 
 It was clear to public opinion, thus capably led, 
 that the little man had established the fact of his 
 villainy. " Wants 'is 'ead knocked orf," said a third 
 sporting expert, in a heavy fur coat and fantastically 
 discolored linen, speaking apparently in soliloquy. 
 
 " Arskin' fer it ! " said a fourth. 
 
 " Ow, choke 'im, fer Chrahyst's sike ! " said a fifth. 
 
 It looked as if there might be a mobbing. The little 
 man sat next but one to a window. Between it and 
 him sat a man in a Norfolk jacket. He was as tall and 
 as broad as the big bookie, but not at all so deep below 
 the waist; his face had an expression of slowly-travel- 
 ing but surely arriving good-sense which made 
 
124 tup: mornings war 
 
 Browne, now that he noticed its wearer, think of the 
 Suffolk Punch breed of cart-horse and want to stroke 
 him gently on his roughly-t weeded shoulder and say, 
 " Good horse, Dobbin," feeling sure that to kick or 
 bite was not in him. For some time he had been de- 
 taching himself by degrees from the study of a large- 
 scale map open on his knees and taking in the drift 
 of the debate; and now, just when it promised to be- 
 come physical, he touched the menaced minority man 
 on the arm, heaved a gradual head towards the win- 
 dow, and said, in a tone at once phlegmatic and casual, 
 " Mind changing places with me? Bit of a draught." 
 
 The small man had complied before he knew 
 whether he was doing a good turn or getting one. 
 And somehow the change seemed to quench all hope 
 of a scuffle. It put the little man strangely far out of 
 reach. Beyond those puissant tweed thighs he was 
 lodged as if at the inner extremity of a cave. 
 
 The good cause had undergone a setback. While 
 the intervener re-immersed himself in his map the 
 patriot chief discreetly ascended from the particular 
 to the general. " Pineful," he said to the congregation 
 at large, " that's wot I call it — the wye forr'n gaowld 
 degrides a 'uman bein'. Pineful. Sime level as vermin 
 it degrides 'im. Nah, too, when our brive lads are 
 ficin' — well, yesterday I'd a said ficin' a few stinkin' 
 Bowers, but to-dye I sye ficin' a fow contemp'ible in 
 pint of stren'th an' currij', but a fow as refrines from 
 naow outrige on yoomanity — killin' the wounded, re- 
 fusin' all quarter, abusin' the wahyt flag. Wahy, it's 
 within mahy pers'n'l knowledge that the monsters in 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 125 
 
 femile shipe they call their women 'abitch'ly turn aht, 
 after battle, lahyk, just to mut'lite ahr dead, sime as 
 Afghan squaws do." 
 
 The man in the Norfolk put down a finger to keep a 
 place on his map, looked leisurely up and said in a 
 friendly tone, " Oh, that's not true, you know," as if 
 the other had dropped a pipe or a glove and would 
 like to be told. 
 
 The orator gaped. His eyes bewilderedly sized up 
 the culprit, his weight, height, probable reach, and also 
 his clothes; and the cringing instinct of class told the 
 bookie that he must make himself much more drunk 
 with words before he could effectively affront a social 
 better. So he spoke almost calmly : " Ahr f rien', I 
 see, is not a reader of ahr pytriotic press. More at 
 'ome, mye-be, with all them forr'n gutter rags 'at dily 
 charges our gallan' army with crahyms so 'orrible as 
 aownly exists in the diseased imaginytion of 'im that 
 says it." 
 
 " Killing the wounded, refusing all quarter, abusing 
 the white flag?' : Printed, it looks like a tu quoque; 
 as uttered by him of the tweeds it was like one 
 builder's friendly hint to another that he is forgetting 
 a brick. 
 
 But the angel of wrath was now winging on too 
 grandly to fold his wings yet. " Ahr frien' does credit 
 to 'is teachers. I 'ope they knaow 'ah well 'e's doin'. 
 But wot are we to sye, my frien's, of one 'oo mikes the 
 en'my's cause 'is aown?" 
 
 ' Wring 'is bleedin' neck," squealed a stunted 
 phthisical youth in the corner remotest from the pro- 
 
126 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 posed beneficiary by the suggestion, whose eyes now- 
 settled on the youth, with an exploratory and con- 
 jectural expression wholly benevolent, while the more 
 gifted speaker, concerned for his climax, held up a 
 hand. 
 
 " Wite, I sye. Wite. Wot are we to sye of one 
 'oo comes 'ere in ahr midst, 'oldin' a brief for the 
 murd'rers of 'is countrymen? Wot — ? ' 
 
 The sitter for this portrait, having framed by now 
 a conception of the bloody-minded consumptive, 
 turned to attend to the main stream of commination. 
 In the same helpful voice, as though he were wishing 
 his censors were making a better job of it, he asked, 
 " What was it I said, now? Try back, my dear sir." 
 
 But the bookie was soaring beyond human aid. 
 " Naow, my f rien', naow ! Naow use shufflin'. I sye, 
 wot maowtive can any man 'ave — wot maowtive bar 
 one — fer shieldin' the murd'rers of ahr brothers an' 
 sons — yours and mahyn, fellah-countrymen?' His 
 gestures expanded; he spoke to a nation. 
 
 "Ah?' The man in the Norfolk was more ani- 
 mated. " You have a son at the war? ' : 
 
 "Ah — if you aownly 'ad!" mocked the Cockney. 
 He gave a forensic sigh. 
 
 " I have two," said the other, without any sense of 
 value in the words as repartee. " One in Ladysmith. 
 Yours, sir — where ? " 
 
 The bookie fled off into figures of speech. " Yn't 
 we all sons of ahr country? Yn't we all brothers? 
 Yn't — ?' He was graveled for a moment. 
 
 The other went on from his own thought, " It 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 127 
 
 makes one wish one were surer that this war is just." 
 He looked round, as if to put a private experience into 
 the pool were the normal way of human intercourse. 
 Browne's eyes met his and offered, perhaps, a kind of 
 support, but the offer was not embraced; the other, it 
 seemed, would as soon stand alone — or at least not 
 make one in a " set," a tacit league of the civilized, 
 against poor brutes. 
 
 The rhetorician was fumbling back along the track 
 of his own eloquence for a good place to start from 
 afresh. "Did I sye 'murd'rers'? 'Ounds, I should 
 sye — 'ounds, savidges, 'oose dev'lish caowd degrides 
 'em b'laow all civ'lized bein's. An' sneaks, to that. 
 Curs, sime as 'ounds are." 
 
 The Norfolked man said in his slow way, " I can't 
 feel sure they were two thousand curs who beat those 
 five thousand of our men last week." Browne could 
 see that the man had no irony, no humor; he merely 
 imparted a difficulty ; he only wanted to know. 
 
 But at the words Browne could feel, too, that a 
 shudder traversed the company's soul. These non- 
 combatants had need that the enemy they were not 
 fighting should have every baseness. It was a faith 
 and, like many faiths, it flinched away from the fingers 
 of sincerity; it bleated or stormed to be spared any 
 glimpse of what might have to be faced if its own 
 creed were true. Why raise such questions at all ? 
 What could this man want, hanging about the safe? 
 If he was honest, why did he not go away? One little 
 thimble-rigger, wrung to the vitals, gasped out, " 'E's 
 pide for it." 
 
128 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " That's abaht it," groaned somebody else. 
 
 " 'Ow much a week for the two?" squeaked the 
 undersized youth, embracing- in one basilisk glance the 
 massive heretic and his own brother atomy ensconced 
 behind that infidel bulk. 
 
 And yet Browne felt indescribably, inexplicably 
 sure that in some uncorrupted layer of a few of their 
 minds there was germinating in the dark a dismaying 
 admission that this beast was braver than they, though 
 a beast, and clean, as salt water is clean, though nause- 
 ous. Those who had not the means in themselves to 
 find this in his face imagined other dread possibilities 
 there. His eyes, unapprehensive, seeking, appraising 
 perhaps, roamed slowly over the patriots' persons; 
 could he be weighing their relative rights to be thrown 
 through the window? "Ah, my frien's," the orator 
 again subsided into generalities, " if you noo all the 
 things I knaow abaht wot Bower gaowld is doin' — " 
 
 'In England? You think many Englishmen take 
 it?' The heathen's voice expressed an unexhausted 
 assurance that there must be something in what people 
 said, if you could get at it. 
 
 The bookie shrugged. He threw himself upon pub- 
 lic opinion. 
 
 'Bribes?' 1 The other had rummaged out slowly 
 the unready word. 
 
 " I'm not argyin'. I'm simply tellin' yer." The 
 bookie looked anxious. 
 
 The other's eyes widened with interest. " You can 
 tell us ? Cases you know of ? " 
 
 " I tell yer I'm not argyin'," the bookie spluttered. 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 129 
 
 Who is not flustered to find his chaff inopportunely 
 taken for grain? A damp fell round these ardent 
 souls so chillily that at the next station the parched 
 little devotee of reason got out in peace. 
 
 When they started again the engine labored ; the 
 train was ascending a long mountain valley ; the line 
 contoured high on one flank, with a chain of dammed 
 lakes below in the bed of the dale, in the Northern 
 way ; every fit glen, up there, must become a town's 
 cistern. 
 
 Public opinion was not silenced yet, only disquieted. 
 The bookie fell back from the firing line of debate, 
 but the virtuous British workman, good soul, lowered 
 his vociferous newspaper, challenged the troubler with 
 a look of " Frankly, come now, man to man," and 
 said, " After all, I s'pose you'd allow it would be right 
 your country's enemies should fight fair, like? ' : 
 
 Browne could see the thoughts muster, in answer, 
 like slow, intent children, before the words came. 
 " I'd go even further, I think. I'd say every one ought 
 to." As it was uttered it was not a snub, nor a cut- 
 ting retort, nor an uncutting platitude; rather, it was 
 like the rediscovery of a lost region, humbly communi- 
 cated by a diffident finder. So Browne thought, but 
 the rest were only the more disturbed. They gave it 
 up; their inward peace was menaced; where would it 
 end if we all were to look at things in that way, with 
 that disloyalty to accepted tacit precautions for taking 
 the sting out of truth? And yet, deuce take the man, 
 somehow he mattered. Browne read that much in 
 their silence. 
 
130 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 The quick grunts of the mounting engine stopped, 
 almost at a platform. Howden it was. Browne 
 jumped out at once and saw Mullivant coming to meet 
 him. No; to meet somebody else, seen over Browne's 
 shoulder. ' Morning, Bruntwood," Mullivant said, 
 with a look of content. 
 
 Browne looked round. ' Morning," the man in the 
 Norfolk jacket was answering, with a quiet, long-last- 
 ing smile of equally deep contentment. 
 
 ' You didn't guess? " Mullivant asked of Browne. 
 
 ' No. I knew Pistol at once, and Bardolph and 
 one or two others, but — " 
 
 " But not Sir Bors? " laughed Mullivant. 
 
 Bruntwood's look said, " What's this recondite allu- 
 sion? " His looks often did. 
 
 Mullivant beamed on the other's perplexity. " Only 
 a buffer in Tennyson,* rather like you." 
 
 *Possibly Mullivant thought of the lines in the " Holy Grail," 
 a poem still much read at that time : 
 
 " Sir Bors it was 
 Who spake so low and sadly at our board ; 
 And mighty reverent at our grace was he ; 
 A square-set man and honest ; and his eyes, 
 An out-door sign of all the warmth within, 
 Smiled with his lips." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 " This other Eden, demi-paradise, 
 . . . . this little world, 
 
 This blessed plot." 
 
 King Richard II., Act ii. Scene I. 
 
 AT the station they left the main valley and walked 
 ^/V. for two hours up a tributary defile. It narrowed 
 and blackened till both its sides were steep slants of 
 dark shale, with the solid rock cropping out from it in 
 low vertical tiers of crag, each with its own refuse- 
 shoot of broken stone streaming away from its foot. 
 The sides converged at last to form a rough gully of 
 scree. Up it the three walkers stumbled and puffed, to 
 emerge above on the upper story of Northern England. 
 Color and form conspired to give Browne a sense of 
 soft undulation in this high moor. Purple and tan and 
 chocolate, grave green and clear green and greenish 
 gray, the unlevel carpet of mixed heather, bracken, 
 bilberries, many grasses and emerald weed, rose and 
 fell, mile beyond mile, the light and the dark in its 
 pattern sometimes stressing and sometimes rendering 
 less salient the modeling of the land, as the paint on 
 an actor's face deepens a dimple or erases a line. 
 
 Bruntwood and Mullivant seemed to know what 
 they were making for. Browne did not ask. There 
 is a good taste of their own about places you come to 
 
 131 
 
132 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 without knowing how; they have the disconnection of 
 dreams from the cumbrance of all questions of access; 
 it only englamours their memory more to feel that you 
 could not by any means find your way back to them 
 now. An hour's wading through heather and bil- 
 berries led them out on to a plateau a little higher still. 
 It was springy ground, barer now, and peat-dark. 
 The two leaders gazed intently over this bog, seemed 
 to agree, and set off again towards a group of slight 
 swellings upon its surface. 
 
 They walked thus for another half hour, commu- 
 nicative grunts between Bruntwood and Mullivant 
 growing more frequent. Then these two stopped, cast 
 about for some minutes like hounds that have all but 
 got good scent, and finally came to a stand at a boss or 
 tussock of peat, perhaps a yard square and rising, like 
 thousands of similar tussocks round it, a couple of feet 
 above the bed of the eroded trenches that reticulated 
 the whole surface of the moss. 
 
 Mullivant stood on the boss. He kicked it, simu- 
 lating casualness. " Top of England — this hum- 
 mock," he said to Browne, with his little laugh a little 
 embarrassed. 
 
 " Not, of course," Bruntwood said, word by word, 
 " the very highest point." 
 
 Mullivant's face delighted in the literal man. 
 'No," he said; "no disrespect to Scawfell. But the 
 ridge of the roof. See ! " 
 
 Browne's eyes followed the speaker's, and saw. 
 From the flooded outer cells at one side of the soaked 
 sponge under Mullivant's feet the brown bog-water 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 133 
 
 oozed out at his pressure and trickled a few inches 
 down its outer wall, a drop at a time, till it neared the 
 line of another broken drip from a few inches off. 
 The two came together with the pause and sudden em- 
 brace of raindrops meeting on a pane, and hurried on. 
 Three inches further another drop rushed to join them, 
 and then another and another, till in the bed of the 
 trench at the foot of the little peat wall there was 
 enough water moving to break on a stone in its way 
 with an infinitesimal plash, the first cry of an infant 
 river. 
 
 " The Mersey ! " Mullivant said, with his face 
 kindling. The shyness of a child avowing a great find 
 was being burnt up by a child's ungovernable jubila- 
 tion. " Now come over here." 
 
 Browne stepped across the hummock and over the 
 little ditch on its far side, and turned to look. Out of 
 this wall of the hummock there welled slow drop after 
 drop, each remoistening for a second a track down the 
 wall to a tiny moat of wine-dark bilge at its foot, stag- 
 nant except at one end ; there, when the air stirred the 
 bilge, its ripples lipped over a chance dam formed in 
 the peaty trash and fell a few inches into a lower 
 reach of the trench. There was more water there ; it 
 had other feeders; at the far end it moved away 
 visibly. 
 
 " If you might call the other the Mersey, then per- 
 haps you might call this the Trent! ' Bruntwood said 
 this and then exploded in a big laugh at the violence 
 of the verbal gambol that he had executed. 
 
 " Jump on the hummock," said Mullivant. ' All 
 
134 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 jump. Make a flood in the German Ocean and Irish 
 Sea." 
 
 Bruntwood roared. If he ever understood a figure 
 of speech it was as a tremendous practical joke, a big 
 guiltless lie by which you naturally take care that no 
 one shall be taken in. " Inundate Liverpool and 
 Hull ! " he said, in a tone to which notes of exclama- 
 tion can do no justice, and roared again. 
 
 Mullivant visibly doated on Bruntwood when 
 Bruntwood gave way like this to his temperament. 
 "Now, all together ! " Mullivant ordered, crowding the 
 three of them on to the big peaten footstool. All 
 three jumped as one man, till from each of its sides 
 the dark juice gushed and spurted; the minute cisterns 
 that caught it were all astir. 
 
 ' Cease jumping! " said Mullivant, blowing. There 
 was a moment's pause, half awkward, but only half. 
 Browne was being initiated into something. He felt 
 and liked it. Each of the two wise babies was taking 
 him tacitly into the league that bound them, each 
 other's opposites as they were, and sent them up into 
 these moorland places to play at such games as tracing 
 pairs of rivers and seas to their first rivalry as suitors 
 for oozings from the gorged tissues of one cubic foot 
 of a bog. With a little glow of pride Browne felt he 
 was fit to come in. He had drunk before of the cup 
 of their drunkenness, upon the Dent Rouge, when 
 Europe unrolled itself like a scroll. How things be- 
 longed to each other ! How they closed in, all of them 
 good, as if to some one great end or high happiness! 
 What brought him here, to find elder brothers ? What 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 135 
 
 sent him and that girl who was now a figure in every 
 landscape of thought — what sent them up the moun- 
 tain together and lit the fire in his blood? Chance? 
 Accidents, then, could conspire, counsel and authorize. 
 Everything grew to one point; he was waved towards 
 it by hand after hand. 
 
 " Do you remember," Bruntwood asked Mullivant, 
 " that field near Naseby — the one where the Avon 
 starts, close to the church, and the Nen just over the 
 way?" 
 
 " And the Welland too, in the parson's cellar," said 
 Mullivant, " three miles away. What a place to be 
 buried in ! " 
 
 " Naseby ? " asked Aubrey. 
 
 Bruntwood explained. " Yes, the men, or at least 
 some of the men, that were killed in the fight. They 
 are in a big pit. The earth has sunk in a little." 
 
 " England's dead center, that place," Mullivant said 
 — " the tip top; she falls away from it all around." 
 
 " There are brambles round the pit," Bruntwood 
 toiled on at his own internal picture. 
 
 Mullivant rushed on with his. " The Trent, and 
 the Thames, and the Ouse, and the Stratford Avon all 
 come up to your feet. And Edgehill in sight — a long 
 ridge. Remember, Brunt, how it stuck up in the sun- 
 set?" 
 
 Bruntwood had finished his own small Naseby land- 
 scape within him at last. He emerged from absorp- 
 tion. "Yes, during the 'orgy,'" he said, surround- 
 ing the last word with laughter as though with vast 
 inverted commas. 
 
136 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 Some other huge joke, thought Browne, and glanc- 
 ing at Mullivant, saw its mildness and age in Mulli- 
 vant's look of affectionate mirth at the beloved dullness 
 of his friend. ' Bruntwood refers," he said, " to a 
 bu'st we once had, of topography." 
 
 " Yes? " Browne importuned. 
 
 ' We walked all along England's spine. We began 
 at the Border and came South, keeping right up on the 
 main watershed, so that we never crossed a river. 
 That was the game. They all fell away, right and left, 
 before us. Down as far as the Peak we could go 
 pretty straight. Then we had to fetch a big bend to the 
 right — the west, you know — so as not to wet our feet 
 in the head of the Trent; then back to the left — the 
 east — to Naseby, to dodge round all the tips of the 
 Avon; and then west again, for a deuce of a way, to 
 keep up from the Thames, and so on. That was the 
 orgy." 
 
 ' Well, I'm blowed," said Browne, cordially. 
 
 Mullivant warmed. ' So were we. I found I had 
 never seen England till then. Bits of her I'd seen, of 
 course, but not her — the whole figure. We looked 
 down from the top into every Jack one of the water- 
 tight hollows she's made of, and saw what it was like, 
 and the river in each one like a big leafless tree — trunk 
 and branches and twigs ; when you touched a twig all 
 the tree came into sight, right down to the sails of 
 barges out on the H umber. Just look." He pointed 
 where, far out to their left, there ran, broken and dim, 
 a bar of high ground, a rib of England's skeleton, trek- 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 137 
 
 king crookedly away across lowland Yorkshire's 
 broad stretch of green. Browne saw. 
 
 " ' Little England ! ' cried Mullivant. " People 
 sneer at it ! Thank all your gods it's so small. Only 
 just small enough to be seen; still, it's possible. Beg 
 pardon, though; you're an Irishman." 
 
 " Is it lovers of different mistresses that would be 
 jealous? " said Browne; not that he had, as yet, a love 
 like this for any place. But he knew love when he saw 
 it; here was the real thing, in Mullivant's face and 
 voice — the ecstasy over visible traits of love's object, 
 the craving of sense to take it all in, round and 
 whole as a jewel, small and embraceable, apt to lovers' 
 diminutives. 
 
 Two Cordelias abetting each other to doat on one 
 wayward parent could scarcely have talked sentiment 
 less than Mullivant and Bruntwood did for the rest of 
 that day. Still, they would let out a reference now and 
 again to some old walk or ride; one or other would 
 look up a name here and there in the joint mental index 
 that they kept of their funded visions; and Browne, 
 now on the watch, would catch glimpses of Evesham 
 orchards as they are when the enamored eye sees 
 them dropping apples to float in Shakespeare's slow 
 Avon ; of Tudor houses knee-deep in the mists of win- 
 ter sunsets; and then, again, of the roaring Strand 
 with the air a dust of gold on fine afternoons; or of 
 the wind planing the South coast into shape with the 
 rub, rub of shingle pressed, always the one way, by the 
 Atlantic's hand; or the make of this great triple-lay- 
 ered Pennine arch, astride of North England — how 
 
138 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 the crown of the arch was worn off till the edges of 
 all its coating layers showed raw — red rock and coal 
 and dark rock. Browne could shut his eyes and see 
 the layered floor crumple itself into hills. 
 
 Once, as they sat smoking after their sandwiches, 
 something political made its way into the talk. Then 
 the shocking last truth about Bruntwood came undis- 
 guisably out. He was a voluptuary; only, his secret 
 revels were all on equities, decencies, uncompelled 
 fairnesses. Old, platitudinous tags about conduct, 
 ' Do as you would be done by," and so on, would go 
 to this hedonist's head like new wine. He would fix 
 ravenous teeth in some precept long dead, canonized 
 and moldering into dust, like " Blessed are the peace- 
 makers," and devour, whole, all that was left, no mat- 
 ter what it did in his vitals. Sayings of Christ's that 
 drop upon most men like the gentle rain from heaven, 
 pattering softly on the sound roof of the soul and 
 giving point and piquancy to the complacent snugness 
 within, would beat right into the unslated spirit of 
 this incomplete person, and search and scour the in- 
 terior. Browne began, as the day went on, to under- 
 stand the singleness of eye that fills the whole body of 
 a St. Francis with inadequately-shaded light. But 
 self-sacrifice? — not a bit of it. Keeping a newspaper 
 clean was his sport and hobby ; he let his mind run on 
 it always, just as another man will let his mind run, 
 even in working hours, on his high hopes of his golf. 
 He was a man of pleasure, unbridled. 
 
 Sometimes he wrote for the paper. It was not his 
 line ; his writing had almost every known imperfection. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 139 
 
 But Mullivant made him, whenever he saw that Brunt- 
 wood's appetite was fastening on some relevant old 
 saw as if it had been brought down that morning from 
 Sinai, or up from Bethlehem, shining and salt as the 
 last paradox. There had just come such a season. 
 Bruntwood had now for some weeks been giving it 
 out in his club-footed style that a nation, even one's 
 own nation, may not be the better for doing a thing 
 that, if done by a man, would get him blackballed at 
 clubs. It was the kind of idea that skilled navigators 
 of life will chart and buoy out like a shoal, to keep their 
 craft well off it. Bruntwood had not that wit. Yet 
 the things the crank said seemed to count. Even the 
 wise found they could not just look the other way, as 
 they would like, when some discomforting truism dug 
 up by Bruntwood was awkwardly breaking the bands 
 of the grave, or some two and two were being joined 
 together that man for his peace had put asunder. 
 
 ' If you or I," Mullivant said to Browne, late in 
 that day, when Bruntwood was out of hearing, " were 
 ever to sit down and write, with our admirable arts 
 of persuasion, that cheating at cards is not quite the 
 thing between nations, we should be prigs, and the 
 stuff dead as mutton. Bruntwood can do it, though; 
 does it as if he were telling you what's won the Derby. 
 People listen, too — swear, but listen. They have to. 
 The word's made flesh and dwells with 'em. They'd 
 ignore us. But him! Crusoe couldn't ignore the live 
 foot on the sand." 
 
 He spoke as if Bruntwood were not of his species. 
 Browne saw better. At least, in being weather-beaten 
 
140 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 together, the dyes of the two had stained pretty deep 
 into each other. Bruntvvood's joy, behind all his 
 phlegm, in conceiving a duty or bearing a right re- 
 straint had at first tickled Mullivant, in his youth, then 
 rather touched him, then animated him. Once he had 
 thought of such things only as denials, voids, chills, 
 provender for the worst Nonconformists, a diet of east 
 wind; here was a marvel — a man whom they warmed 
 and lit. Bruntwood had gone to school, too, to his 
 friend the enjoyer of shapely utterance and imagina- 
 tive play. He had been wiled into making an idol, a 
 graven image of England, as seen on hundreds of such 
 days as this with the lover's transfiguring eye. Pool- 
 ing their whims together the two had made a joint fad 
 of a novel — or is it antiquated? — patriotism, remote 
 from the current modes of that virtue. For scarcely 
 any spite went to the making of it, and no fear at all ; 
 it had not been come at by trains of reasoning, nor 
 taken out of a book, nor was it a hot sense of having 
 the title-deeds to a fat estate, nor a caterer's impulse 
 to meet any demand his customers might make for 
 special emotions. It was mere, sheer affection. A 
 schoolboy attuned to the wisdom of the age could 
 show in a moment that people like these two were 
 nook-shotten, cast away far from the main march of 
 mind, and that lust is not lust if one's own nation 
 feels it, nor theft theft if there be no jail in which it 
 could cause her hair to be cut. To these truths the 
 two were impenetrable now. For one thing, they did 
 not know the ends of the earth and had never lived 
 on black, brown or yellow men. But what misled 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 141 
 
 them most was the way they knew England, every look 
 of her face and the shape of its bones. English 
 downs with dawn breaking over them seemed to put 
 up a troubling petition that they might not be befouled. 
 When clear-eyed men from Simla and Cairo would 
 show that Falstaff had erred and that it is not in men 
 but in nations that honor is a scutcheon only, the 
 two would feel a sick rage as though some brother, 
 who had not lived much at home, came in with a plan 
 for making the old mother get drunk or pick pockets. 
 No matter if people proved she would not be caught; 
 the two would not learn ; all they knew was that they 
 did not want the Thames of their youth to be a seam 
 in the face of a slut, or Land's End a cad's eye. When 
 our prudent rulers abandoned our wards for Abdul 
 Hamid to murder, Bruntwood felt as if the white- 
 walled dale where he fished in the Peak were plastered 
 with some physical filth of dishonor; Mullivant found 
 that something living was hanging its head in the 
 silent miles of river meadow up by Lechlade in the 
 autumn twilights. 
 
 The weather was changing all day ; hardy, raw air 
 in the morning, a child's secret delight to go out in ; 
 then two or three hours of sun and racing shadows; 
 then a whole sky cleared for one rickety tower of 
 storm-cloud, piled floor above floor, to stalk across the 
 hills, a mile off; while that was still lurching away 
 top-heavily into the east a pack of thinner vapors 
 rushed after it, overtook it, drew across it a gauzy, 
 smoke-colored curtain, shaded in lines that slanted 
 down eastwards, through which the towering stack 
 
142 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 behind them showed black ; and then those dropping 
 veils had packed away in their turn, whipped in by 
 their own fussing rear-guard; many weathers, many 
 climates, all of them good, blowing changefully over 
 one island that Browne could see whole now, like a 
 raised map modeled in stone and laid, not quite flat, 
 on the ground — indeed with one corner sunk into it. 
 North-westward was nothing but stone — stone walls 
 to the stony fields, stone-gray cottages, stone inter- 
 leaving coal in the pits, stone sticking out rawly in 
 streets and twisting the tips of plows. South-east- 
 ward the plaque of stone dipped and dived down as a 
 sloping landing-stage slants into a high tide; a sea of 
 soft clays and sands closed level over it. It was all 
 one; he had seen affection, the only maker of Edens, 
 render it so. 
 
 In his room that night he could not go to bed for a 
 while, the good things that he had to think of thronged 
 in so throbbingly, tightening the hot forehead. He 
 had to stand at an open window to cool and breathe, 
 looking down on the rain-washed midnight city silent 
 under him. Presently from a neighboring window 
 there rose the choruses of a late party, some of the 
 voices half-tipsy and barbed with the poignancy of 
 expiring youth. Fugitive youth, fugitive poignancy, 
 mystical treasures flowing past in a stream. The 
 chorus trailed off into silence, a door slammed, good- 
 nights were heard in the resonant street; then silence 
 congealed till from a mile away there lifted into clear- 
 ness the ringing owl notes of the buffers of trucks 
 shunted at some siding. These, too, had beauty; it 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 143 
 
 rent and enchanted and cried out for rescue from its 
 own inarticulateness. All things had that riddlesome 
 beauty that numbed and evoked, half inspired and half 
 left you bewildered, dimly aware of wonderful things 
 to be done and noble, unavailable powers in you to do 
 them ; the powers wandered about helplessly seeking 
 the place to begin, the order to take, the one call for 
 them to obey in a universe of summoning clarions. 
 Now it came clear. From that racket of call and 
 cross-call, impulse and counter-impulse, his new 
 friends at Brabburn had found a way out ; they, at 
 least, were clear of the forest and marched along sing- 
 ing; they had pierced to the secret — he saw it now — 
 of all the every-day miracle-doers; like corn they could 
 make strength from clay, and could draw good cheer, 
 like vines, out of granite and rain. They were what 
 he had wished he might be, though it was not till now 
 that he knew he had wished it: they were the men; if 
 he might he would stand with them. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 " Nearing, her god breathed on her, till she seemed 
 More tall and spoke, like gods, compellingly." 
 
 Virgil : iEneid, Book vi. 
 
 WHEN the End House door at Up-Felday was 
 opened to Browne at two the next day there 
 rose on his ear, like scent from a hottle uncorked, the 
 voice of his host from some room within : it was mur- 
 murous, suavely petulant, tinting mere space into an at- 
 mosphere. ' Figure it ! Now — in October ! A garden- 
 party ! ' The voice, with its soft suffusiveness, shed 
 itself out through some open door into the hall as the 
 smell of dried rose-leaves did. " Colchicum, what 
 things are done in thy name ! " 
 
 " Father, it isn't October at large; it's this October." 
 June's voice was no tint or shade, but a line, a couched 
 spring, a pulse, elasticity. 
 
 She must be at a window, Browne thought, with her 
 eyes on the red and gold of the garden. Late autumn 
 had burst into radiance ; London had glowed that 
 morning when he was crossing it; liquid light, with a 
 rosiness in it, had seemed to be washing about between 
 the houses, like water carried in a red wheel-barrow. 
 
 ' Well, then, my dearest, since 'tis so, 
 Since naught remains but that we go — " 
 
 Runs it not thus? Let us catch cold, then, because it 
 
 144 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 145 
 
 is fine. Ah ! this is pleasant " — Mr. Hathersage, cross- 
 ing the library door-mat, had sighted the entering 
 Browne. 
 
 "Will you come with us?" June was saying to 
 Browne a few minutes later, "or are you too tired? 
 Such a garden, the Anthons' ! — a piece of stage 
 scenery, crowded with prettinesses — the last cry in 
 quaintness, and all cut out of the side of a hill," she 
 pattered on, playing the cordial entertainer. 
 
 Browne could only half listen. He looked at her 
 clothes with a disconcertment. They were not the 
 ones that he knew. Of course not. Why should they 
 be ? Yet the change seemed to hold him off from her. 
 What she had worn had been part of her, part of her 
 manner at any rate, worn by her as she wore her looks 
 and remembered by him in all their gestures, and now 
 there was this estranging lodgment, of something that 
 might still be she, amidst new femininities. 
 
 Mr. Hathersage stood with a hand on the door. 
 " You go to the slaughter with us? " 
 
 Browne collected his wits. Yes, he would enjoy it. 
 
 June looked at her father. " I'll tell them — shall I 
 — to balance the cart for four? " 
 
 A faint little fussiness effervesced for a moment in 
 Mr. Hathersage, rounding and brightening his mild 
 eyes. " Perhaps Mr. Browne would bear with a coun- 
 try habit of ours — perhaps if we just drove ourselves 
 in the — " 
 
 June understood; so did Browne, when the time 
 to start came. The horse that had brought him up 
 from the station was standing again at the door, but 
 
146 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 not in the shafts of the same goodly dog-cart. A 
 lowly, tarnished conveyance had taken its place, a 
 shallow hollow in basket-work, such as old ladies of 
 that period would sometimes use in the country. Some 
 touch of spickness or spanness seemed to have faded, 
 too, from the man who had driven Browne and who 
 stood at the horse's head now. 
 
 June drove them the two miles through lanes 
 scooped out of sand, under arching hedges of hazel. 
 Sunned sand and pine, gorse and heather with bees 
 still astir in them, sent up a warm, scented hum. 
 It was the heart of the choiceness of Surrey. Even 
 the blind had seen that: jimp huts and toy farms told 
 where solvent gropers after the beauty of life had 
 ceased groping awhile and thought they had found it; 
 two or three preposterous, pretty palaces, hooded with 
 hillsides of tile, tried to be seen wooing solitude. 
 ' They bring us new and pleasant neighbors," said 
 Mr. Hathersage, eyeing without overt disrelish the 
 newest stack of gables and vanes, chimneys and 
 weather-boards, white paint and red. No vibration of 
 irony could be discerned in his voice; the old patrician 
 kept his disdain to himself to feed on: his hospitality 
 stopped short of sharing that dainty with Browne, the 
 last guest picked up from the highways or byways of 
 this coarse world. 
 
 Browne saw it and chafed at a self-assurance hoisted 
 and poised so high above the common vulgarities of 
 arrogance. Why, it was worse, it was arrogance twice 
 distilled, the quintessence, the finest coxcombry of ex- 
 clusion. So that was why they were sitting a foot 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 147 
 
 from the ground, on faded cushions. Shabbiness, the 
 foregoing of show, was a badge that he must have 
 made for his caste in this mid-Surrey world of 
 splashed money and shining and out-shining appoint- 
 ments. It was oppressive to think of that still, with- 
 drawn, innermost keep where pride lived by itself, un- 
 competing and effortless, so guarded away from the 
 strife without that it had the leisure to pamper its 
 own lonely and delicate love of itself with mock hu- 
 milities of surrender. 
 
 Just once, in that drive, it was as if a boy with some 
 warmer blood of merry mischief in him had lightly 
 mounted the coping of that frigid citadel, shaking de- 
 risive fists at an uncouth besieger. June, with a quick 
 laugh and pointing nod, drew their eyes as they passed 
 to an arched pole, eighteen inches high, at the foot of 
 the garden wall of a resplendent week-end cottage 
 with a double coach-house. In the wall there were 
 many doors, each with its title painted above it, to 
 guard against intrusive pollutions — " Visitors' En- 
 trance," " Coachman's Entrance," " Tradesmen's 
 Entrance." A cock, aloft on fastidious stilts, was 
 picking its way through the hole, and over the arch 
 some rustic wag had hastily chalked up " Fowls' En- 
 trance." 
 
 Browne laughed out; Mr. Hathersage laughed too, 
 a little, and wintrily. He saw the point of everything; 
 it was his life to do that; yet there was something in 
 him that half withheld itself from savoring a wit that 
 tasted so of the earth, as the delicate wonder and 
 doubt at the rude meals of health. June's laugh, 
 
148 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 nipped by that touch of frost, turned to a fret on the 
 lips; she gave all her eyes to her driving; the jovial 
 human hail from the fortress walls was suppressed; 
 all that was left was a glimpse of hope that the garri- 
 son might not always be wholly at one with itself. 
 Perhaps the hope could be seen in his face when June 
 saw it next, for when she spoke it was more in her 
 father's vein than her father himself; she did penance 
 jealously, making occasions for it; she started a strain 
 of Olympian charity towards Sir Valentine Anthon, 
 the host they were going to. 
 
 Mr. Hathersage took it up, happy in mind again. 
 ' Really a quite intelligent man, on some subjects. 
 An oculist, now retired, a little ' perplexed wi' 
 leisure,' perhaps. Let me advise you to ask him 
 about the French Emperor's eyes. An entertaining 
 story." 
 
 " He is our Lord of the Manor," said June. 
 
 ' So that really we owe him," her father said, 
 " what courtesy is in our power." 
 
 Thus did these two, though no longer quite one, 
 agree for the moment to shut Browne formally out of 
 their high Roman thoughts on the inrush of Vandal 
 and Hun, on the flushed arriving stockbrokers and law- 
 yers, or new-risen baronets shining uneasily in en- 
 larged skies. Such was Sir Valentine Anthon, a kind 
 little man bewildered with wealth and loss of function, 
 and straying about his great house and fine garden 
 like some cat bereft of its last kitten, looking for what 
 he had hoped, during fifty years' toil, that rest after 
 toil would be. Mr. Hathersage gave him, for some 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 149 
 
 twenty minutes, illusions of finding it, so benign is the 
 force of good manners. 
 
 June practised the great manner too. Lady Anthon 
 was lame ; she asked, would Miss Hathersage show Mr. 
 Browne their little attempt at gardening. June 
 showed off the money-made tit-bits with loyal gravity; 
 Browne must not miss the grotto, the Faun, the me- 
 chanical rainbow, Pomona's temple, the copper beech 
 that really was copper, with fountainous twigs ; turn 
 a tap and they played. Browne met her on that level. 
 Coldness and stiffness? — well, so let it be. So she 
 went on, giving the poor gauds their chance, and he 
 would not take it away. They walked and talked for 
 a while, with their tongues keeping step in the stiff, 
 chivalrous exercise. 
 
 Garden and house were perched like a golf -ball on a 
 hanging lie. Wealth, as if with one cut of a spade, 
 had sliced out for their site a flat step under the top of 
 a woody hill. "Look!' said June, suddenly, in a 
 new tone. They were on the terrace, the edge of that 
 step. A balustrade, late Italian and florid, held it in, 
 seeming to keep the whole place from slipping down- 
 hill. From the lawn, where people were playing, a 
 tennis-ball had just gone over the coping. They looked 
 over, watching it roll half a mile down steep turf, with 
 precarious persistence, now almost motionless, then 
 again quickening. It came to rest in a ditch. 
 
 Browne let his breath go. " In the crevasse ! " he 
 said. 
 
 She laughed. For a moment they were on that other 
 mountain again. 
 
150 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " It's good here," he said, looking out, with rising 
 gusto; no mere exercise now. He backed away two 
 or three yards from the balustrade ; over it, then, the 
 first thing that his eye met was a windmill at work, 
 two miles away, low on the wide floor between two 
 ranges of downs. Beyond it, a mile further off, was 
 another windmill ; a third, yet a mile or two further 
 away, gleamed intermittently, like a revolving light, 
 some bright part of its sails, no doubt, catching the 
 westering sun at a certain point in each revolution. 
 The three mills measured the receding plain ; mile be- 
 hind mile it lay stilled with autumn and distance, only 
 the sails moving. He stood enriching it with his en- 
 joyment. 
 
 " Is nothing flat to you? " she said, almost pettishly. 
 
 He laughed. " All that plain is ! " 
 
 She did not laugh. To her sense the flatness of flat 
 things was beginning to be re-filled with the power 
 to thrill that it had when she was a child and when 
 wood thrilled her fingers because it was tepid and iron 
 because it was cool. She felt she was worked on, and 
 some resistent sentinel within her stood to its arms. 
 She said, almost roughly, " How moral you are ! ' 
 
 He was puzzled. " I moralize? " 
 ' You ' find good in everything ' anyhow." 
 
 " Good fun? There is a good lot. Is it priggish to 
 like it?" 
 
 " It's a rebuke to us others." 
 
 "Rebuke? No. Defiance. Avaunt, you ascetics. 
 It's you have the taint of saints about you." 
 
 "We, the incurious, unthankful — ?" 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 151 
 
 " You the people who give up, who lay clown, who 
 go without things.*' 
 
 " Things we don't want, we're so blind to them." 
 
 " By your own will, isn't it, so that then you can 
 walk through the fair and not gape at the things there, 
 and fiddles can play and you not want to dance ? ' 
 
 " I love dancing." 
 
 " Oh, good ! Bad, I mean, and most welcome." 
 
 Slowly and not by regular steps they made their 
 way back towards frank friendliness, each trying the 
 mind of the other and finding that it had the right 
 resilience, that it could give where you touched and 
 then spring back into shape. " I suppose," she said, 
 without petulance now, " there's a time to dance and 
 a time to refrain from dancing." 
 
 " None to refrain from enjoying, one way or other. 
 Wouldn't that be as if Adam salted the garden? " 
 
 She was grave again. "Is that fair? I don't 
 mean to me, of course. I've never given anything up 
 in my life. All I've done is to fail to like splendid 
 things — Rome and the Alps and everything. Still, I 
 know there's a way of giving up things, at the right 
 time, that makes it what's most worth doing of all — 
 giving up food and health even, willingly? ' 
 
 " Unsouredly? Do they love giving them up? " 
 
 " I'll ask you that when you've seen them? ' 
 
 "Oh, it's your friends at Cusheen?" 
 
 " They could have been, not rich of course, but less 
 poor. They could have had help in their fishing. 
 They gave it all up." 
 '•Why on earth?" 
 
152 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 She winced as if treated rudely. " Perhaps for no 
 reason on earth," she said, " but a good one else- 
 where — they may have supposed," and then she winced 
 worse at her own lapse towards crossness and rhetoric. 
 ''' Oh, I can't tell you about it," she flurriedly said, and 
 colored, shamefaced or angry. 
 
 He looked away over the champaign, giving her 
 time. ' Two windmills — three," he counted slowly 
 aloud, lest silence should hang too heavily; " three and 
 — is it a fourth, but not working, up higher? ' 
 
 She had collected herself. " That's the Mill on the 
 Hill. It's deserted. It has a great view on fine nights : 
 you see to the sea and to London — gleams on the 
 waves, and the glow over London. It links them." 
 
 "Oh, good!' : He thought of Mullivant's jewel- 
 some England, threaded on such strings. 
 
 She thought of the Dent Rouge. " You would like 
 it. Guy must arrange. You cross — when ? ' : 
 
 " To Dublin? To-morrow night." 
 
 " Guy must take you to-night. I must see him." 
 She looked round. ' He ought to be here ; he was to 
 have come here straight from town, with a friend." 
 
 "Newman?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " I see Newman coming, in custody." 
 
 With a quick flinch, as if snatching clear of some 
 foulness, June interposed a tall bush between them 
 and Newman, now hobbling nearer, the prey of a vol- 
 uble, loud lady. 
 
 ' I think it so hard," the lady was saying, " to know 
 what to get taught to one's children — about religion, 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 153 
 
 you know — in the way of a special belief, you know. 
 If only Pip, our boy, were more like his father ! Dear 
 George was always so good and steady ; he never 
 needed any religious support." 
 
 There was no failing to hear it ; June's eyes and 
 Browne's met on the vision of George's established 
 soul, Browne's twinkling at sight of that fortress, 
 June's unamused, only scornful. The mother made no 
 pause. " The girls, of course, must be taught some- 
 thing. With all this spiritual trouble that there is, 
 even in quite nice novels, now, it may be so painful 
 for a young girl at dinner, or at a dance, if she has 
 nothing at all to say about that sort of thing." 
 
 " Feel out of it, eh? ' Newman filled up a pause 
 of an instant. 
 
 'So painfully! And then the world is so full of 
 pain already, I do want to spare my darlings any I 
 can ; only it's so hard to know what is right! '' 
 
 ' Sure to be some little shilling book about it," said 
 Newman, " if only one knew. Or what d'you say 
 to — ? " The next words were blurred. 
 
 The lady broke in penetratingly : ' Oh, don't you 
 know? Dear Miss Hathersage is such a Catholic! ' 
 
 June drew off at the name, with a hot cheek and 
 cold voice, hedged with proud privacies. ' There is 
 my brother," she said, " I'll go to him. Don't come." 
 
 For a moment or two her last words immobilized 
 Browne. They were imperious, as if she meant, 
 " There — it is talk about me. Hear the worst." What 
 did it matter to her, in her pride, that he should be 
 planted there, eavesdropping? 
 
154 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 The lady was babbling on. " Why, she gets red if 
 you say Roman Catholic just. And, if she were I, 
 she'd simply go to a priest and ask him what to do, 
 and then do it, and then if it went wrong it wouldn't 
 be her fault. That's what's so nice for them. Oh, 
 it's so cruel to have to think out all these things for 
 oneself. I do really feel sometimes the Reformation 
 must have been all a mistake, they worry me so — or 
 was it the Renaissance when the Catholics split off 
 from the Church of England? " 
 
 " I 'spect both helped," said Newman, cautiously. 
 
 " They're sure to have," said the lady. 
 
 Browne had marked the later prattle too little to 
 smile. Able to move again now, he went to greet Guy, 
 whom June had left. 
 
 Yes, there was almost the fullest of moons to-night, 
 Guy said; Browne must certainly see the big view. 
 " Quite a thing not to be missed." Guy spoke as if no 
 one who had failed to see it could quite know how trite 
 the world was. 
 
 Sunset had reddened when June approached Aubrey, 
 people were leaving, dew falling. ' You heard? " she 
 imperiously asked, as if an hour had not passed. 
 
 "The ribaldry? Yes. And I've met Mr. Roads 
 since, the wonderful husband. He offered to buy me. 
 I fear I was rude." 
 
 She broke in. She was august with an exaltation 
 of wrath. " I want to tell you," she said, " what I — 
 wouldn't — couldn't just now. People like that woman, 
 rich, idle people — has Mr. Roads told you, they own 
 all the basest papers there are? — luxurious people — 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 155 
 
 oh, I know I'm one — may talk as she does, but at 
 Cusheen the women would see their sons drown before 
 they'd be helped by any one who had broken vows of 
 religion. And I love them for it, I love them. I'll tell 
 you—" 
 
 She paused, shaken, as if it were too difficult, even 
 now. But she looked taller, seemed to have straight- 
 ened out and shot up like a flame ; like a flame her 
 beauty rose too, flushed up into the cheek and blazed 
 in the eye ; it warmed and might burn, was splendor 
 and danger, lit from some lamp high out of sight and 
 rooting down for its strength to central fires of passion 
 under the earth. Browne was awed ; this was her real 
 life, then — so he mused ; she had hold of infinite things 
 by that old handle, odd-looking to him, of a creedful 
 of dogmas. What matter the shape of the handle, 
 though, if only it held? He said, "You are chival- 
 rous," letting the words go, unintended, like a held 
 breath. 
 
 She looked down from the height of her queenliness, 
 shamefaced a little. Had she been ranting? "We 
 ought to be," she answered humbly, touching the cord 
 of some lay fringe of a Roman Order that went round 
 her waist, "we belted knights;" she smiled ruefully. 
 Had she been boasting? That was her silencing 
 thought while Browne was thinking what an earth's 
 wonder she looked, with that noble confusion quench- 
 ing the glow still aflame where a noble pride had lit it ! 
 She did not go on. 
 
 ' The garden is empty ! " she cried in amazement. 
 She had come back to herself. A star was blinking 
 
156 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 out bravely, alone in the violet vault over the darken- 
 ing weald. Her father was wrapping his throat in the 
 hall. They drove back through lanes of somber en- 
 chantment, where flat shapes of motionless trees lay 
 black on the crimson west whither the homing horse, 
 sped by his own single thought, hastened them eagerly. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 " A man to whom God hath given riches, wealth, and honor, 
 so that he wanteth nothing for his soul of all that he desireth, 
 yet God giveth him not power to eat thereof." 
 
 Ecclesiastes vi. 2. 
 
 THE dining-room at the End House might have 
 made a kitchen in heaven, it was so cosily chaste 
 in its lowliness of attire, so purged of decorative sin. 
 White wood; many white tiles; white curtains — not 
 of lace; rush-bottomed chairs fastidiously simple; all 
 along one wall, a dresser, with plates on it, ranged like 
 their toiling kin elsewhere, but these had leisure and 
 were of breeding; some had histories; one recorded, 
 like a medal, an old sea-fight. Browne was now told 
 things about it not printed in books but only borne 
 down the stream of a ruling caste's gossip, its heir- 
 looms of intramural tattle — how that fight's hero, a 
 darling of credulous England's, had flown a white flag 
 in another battle, the next year, with an actress of 
 small parts, a notable pirate in that age. Mr. Hather- 
 sage told it with nice touches of irony, reticent sym- 
 pathy, allowance. " ' But on the field ' — how does it 
 go? ' ; He ended the tale with a modest sham-failing 
 of memory. " Is it — 
 
 " ' But on the field of love alone 
 The glory lies in flying ' ? " 
 157 
 
158 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 He was talking his best to-night about the great 
 world that he knew. Through the glass that he put to 
 Browne's eyes it heaved into sight like some old moon, 
 waste and huge, a cold globe of spent craters. A 
 Queen's page, an attache, a member of Parliament, 
 cousin and private secretary to a Premier — he had 
 been all these; many good things, as men count, had 
 come up to him of themselves, to be tasted, and all had 
 proved themselves middling. He had been at the hubs 
 of the most dazzlingly whirling of wheels and had 
 found at each a core of slowness, not the concentration 
 of the speeding glory of the tire, but its retardation, 
 down to tedium. He flowed out in anecdotes now. 
 " ' If you want to love your kind,' : ' he would quote 
 between one and the next, " ' you must not expect too 
 much from them.' All his stories were, surely, re- 
 ductive of over-high hopes. He had known " every- 
 body worth knowing," had heard the most famously 
 saintly of laymen bully his wife, had opened the letter 
 in which a sage asked for a knighthood, and seen 
 earth-shaking statesmen pushed, pulled, or bodily 
 borne through their seismic labors by mute, inglorious 
 clerks. 
 
 " Moses' arms were held up, after all," he would 
 add, in excuse. He had no spite, no bias of creed, class 
 or race. A Roman prelate was hero to one of the 
 stories: "To hell with you!' this divine had once 
 said to his Irish chaplain, from whom the story had 
 come with the note — " I never before heard his Grace 
 say the like of that, drunk or sober." Or some royal 
 duke was so frugal as not to give people enough to eat 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 159 
 
 when they dined at his house, nor light to eat it by; 
 " You used to be bidden to darkness and gnashing of 
 teeth." Wherever some illusion of some one's youth 
 might reasonably have perished, the round, rimmed, 
 hedge-sparrow eyes would brighten frostily for a mo- 
 ment. 
 
 As dinner went on, the rest fell silent, or only put in, 
 now and then, some ministering query. In pauses the 
 waiting butler seemed like stillness in motion ; light 
 airs had begun to roam round the house at dark; 
 they rose on the ear as if thrown into relief by those 
 feet's quietude. Guy was silent contentedly; surveys 
 of mankind, every man steeped in his humor, and none 
 momentous or rare, were the food Guy had been raised 
 on. Two brothers, still in the raising, were at table 
 too, boys of twelve and fourteen in mere count of 
 years and inches, but old already, in many parts of 
 the soul, as Ecclesiastes or autumn; grave, rational, 
 quenched, too skeptical even to disbelieve with a will, 
 they had outgrown both ardor and rudeness. They 
 cracked nuts sedately, and listened, and aged. 
 
 June had become silent too, more enigmatically. 
 Her eyes were open and blank as glassed seas, her lips 
 symbols unused; so, Brow T ne thought, might one paint 
 the face of Japheth or Shem when he would not see his 
 father's nakedness. Once their looks met, his 
 staunchly vacant, as if, for all he knew, she, too, might 
 be sere, like her family of yellow leaves, and not 
 merely loyal to them; her looks withheld as proudly 
 the least gleam of thanks to his eyes for offering her 
 no ray of comprehension. Outside, as their emptied 
 
160 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 eyes met, the wind was sniffing at the house; a rose- 
 bough knocked on a pane lightly. He fancied her ears 
 caught at the sounds: could something in her be 
 stifling, in this distilled air, for that rude and strong 
 one? No sign. Her father's voice, like a clear, tiny 
 bell, tinkled on; Guy's laugh, with its musical, infinites- 
 imal chimes, still struck in to help out the case against 
 having one's breath ever taken away, and the little boys 
 listened and cracked more nuts without greed, and 
 ripened towards the grave. 
 
 Dinner over, the boys went to bed from the half- 
 lighted drawing-room where Mr. Hathersage shuffled 
 softly from point to point, with the flow of his talk 
 falling slack, till he faded away almost insensibly, like 
 a cadence, into his study; its rose-shaded lamp on a 
 letter-strewn table shown through an open door be- 
 yond a darkling second drawing-room, as harbor lights 
 shine across intervening seas. He left the doors open, 
 and so, from their own half-light, the rest saw through 
 the medial darkness to where he sat, image-like, in a 
 luminous niche. Soon Guy — he was sorry — must go 
 off to read Roman Law, with a coach shared by New- 
 man and him, at Brunt Farm, where Newman had 
 rooms. When Guy had gone, and some topic with 
 him, June plunged at another abruptly, with forced 
 airiness, like one who keeps things going for a wager. 
 "About Brabburn? Is it appalling?" 
 
 " It's glorious." He put it high, by instinct, to bind 
 himself over to fight out his line. 
 
 She said " Oh? " rather coldly, as if to ask, not " Is 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 161 
 
 that chaff?" but "What special line of chaff may 
 that be?" 
 
 He tried to laugh. " A lepers' island, you'd heard ? ' 
 
 " No, but — well, lusterless." 
 
 •• Waterloo was, till they fought there." 
 
 " But — Brabburn ! A by-word ! Tennyson, Ruskin, 
 Thackeray, Meredith even — how they all scorned it! ' 
 She warmed to the conflict, finding it real. 
 
 So did he. " Dante scorned Genoa; yet Garibaldi 
 came from it." He winced at this slip — to a Catholic — 
 made in his heat. " Columbus too," he added hastily. 
 
 His visible twinge of compunction made her lower 
 her point till it passed. " Father," she said, " had a 
 friend, once, from Brabburn, a merchant. They were 
 both in Parliament then. He stayed here when I was 
 a child. Telegrams came for him all day ; the baker's 
 wife, who keeps the post-office, was ill afterwards. He 
 was ' nice ' ; a little wooden, but quite ' nice,' only — " 
 
 Browne, too, re-engaged. " Only — from Brabburn. 
 See how it clings. If you could say ' I am from Brab- 
 burn,' your friends would say in a strained, gentle 
 voice, ' Ah! — from Brabburn? ' and try to be kind to 
 you, as if you had said ' My grandfather was hanged ' 
 and they said ' Oh? ' softly and quitted the subject — 
 stole out on tiptoe. Or they'd say ' Well, and how 
 do you like your life in Brabburn? ' to show they knew 
 you were a missionary and not really one of the can- 
 nibals." 
 
 " Would that be a happiness? ' 
 
 "The happiness; wouldn't it? Brabburn is Lon- 
 don before they'd built Westminster Abbey; Oxford 
 
1G2 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 before universities came; it's pre-Shakespeare Strat- 
 ford. All the overblown flowers are seeding all round 
 it; it isn't out yet; it's coming. The big things are 
 all to be done there still — not just the crowding up 
 after they're done, the commemorating and gushing." 
 
 June had tinder for that spark; she could light at 
 the thought of being in at the painful birth of a great 
 glory. Yet she must muster against it what forces 
 she might ; she could not tell why ; some half-heard in- 
 ternal imperative set her throwing up dams against 
 some half-apprehended flood. " The big things? " she 
 asked. 
 
 " The undone ones." 
 
 "What are they?" 
 
 ' If one could say, one could do them. They're all 
 novel, indefinable, aren't they, like building Rome — 
 till they're done? What's the South Pole like? To 
 say is to get there." 
 
 " One could sail south ; one could start anyhow. 
 But how start, even, at Brabburn? " 
 
 " Why not write every day in a newspaper for forty 
 years? " 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 "You disdain it?" 
 
 " Not what you're going to do, at Cusheen, just for 
 once. But then — " 
 
 'One mustn't wholly 'sink into a journalist'? 
 ' Mere ephemeral writing,' and so on? Isn't that just 
 'Ah — from Brabburn!' over again? A whole craft, 
 almost, is unmade as yet, waiting, crying out to be 
 brought to life, as the place does." 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 1G3 
 
 " But can it be ever made noble? Think of the — 
 She named Roads' last triumph in marketing mean 
 ness fresh daily. 
 
 " Can flesh face steel? Think how sheep run from 
 
 it!" 
 
 She gave a small confident laugh which might have 
 meant, " Don't deliver your whole cause into my 
 hands by extravagance." " Don't say that the work is 
 like a soldier's," she said. 
 
 " No. Drums and bugles don't play while you're 
 doing it." 
 
 " It's not facing death." 
 
 " The death-rate in Brabburn is thrice that of Alder- 
 shot." 
 
 " But— in war?" 
 
 " Brabburn babies died faster last summer than our 
 troops did at Colenso." 
 
 She chilled, hating the line of thought. " You be- 
 little brave men? " 
 
 " I honor them even up to the height of being sure 
 they chafe at the thought, when medals and orders 
 come — ' They burnt Joan of Arc ; they put Wallace to 
 death ; they lionize me.' Wasn't that General Neville 
 you spoke with, to-day, at the party, the old, sad 
 Bayard?" 
 
 " My god-father; yes." 
 
 " I saw him in uniform once. You have, of course. 
 You remember his coat was too small for all the medals 
 and stars and crosses ? What a life to have had ! And 
 can't you fancy him now looking back over it, asking 
 himself is there any last crown of joy that he has 
 
164 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 missed, and saying, ' Yes, one — to have had all those 
 things to do, and no one applaud '? " 
 
 She could not fancy it : sex, with its specialized gen- 
 erosity, would not let her; had their talk been of some 
 achievement and peril kept for women alone, she could 
 have done it : but then he could not have. Now he was 
 eager; he would not give in; and the lamp had burnt 
 propitiously low; the sinking fire looked old; he pressed 
 on: " Seems, somehow, as if a brave act began to go 
 bad as soon as praise forms on it — when the flies buzz 
 up and swarm on it — all the little timorous people. 
 They soil it ; they would have called the man a crank, 
 perhaps even a sneak, if they'd seen him go at it, at 
 first ; when it's done he's some one whose ship has 
 come in ; he has broken the bank ; he has come off, and 
 all cowards swear by him. They can be dodged, 
 though. I found that out at Brabburn. There's work 
 done that nobody daubs with praise, and people are 
 used up in doing it well, in the dark, and sneered at 
 for being staunch. They get battles to fight where 
 public opinion's for running away, and the man who 
 runs best is given a title : a man who ran till he 
 dropped might get a grave in the Abbey." 
 
 At each rhetorical sentence's end he thought " Have 
 I done for myself in her mind?" and then made the 
 next more provocative still, doggedly putting his all in 
 jeopardy, as a man searches a lonely house for armed 
 burglars, forcing himself from room to room. She 
 was not with him in sympathy; that he could see. To 
 her the martial qualities were of blood royal; they had 
 divine rights; she hated any upstart virtue that dared 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 105 
 
 to measure itself against them. And yet, he was giv- 
 ing himself away; she could see that; it challenged her 
 own spirit; besides, he had raised the image of a lost 
 battle fought out to the end ; and that thrilled, though 
 only an image. So she said, with some haughtiness, 
 yet half-relentfully : " Does the world contain such a — 
 journalist? " getting the last word out with a gulp at 
 its evil taste. 
 
 "Two, Bruntwood and Mullivant. You never 
 heard of them? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Though your brother employs them ? Good ! See 
 how nameless journalists are! ' 
 
 She was forestalled. What he said was just what 
 she would have said, but she would have meant " In- 
 glorious trade ! " And now she could not say it. She 
 could not even think it. It was as though he had 
 looked past her, over her shoulders, to some one be- 
 hind, more generous, and she had turned to see who it 
 was and found that this other person was she herself, 
 her more real self, and that what she had taken to be 
 herself before was only a screen, an outworn, second- 
 rate version of her, put up for show or defense. ' But 
 what do they do that's so fine? " she asked hastily, in 
 her first chafing at this disablement of her outworks. 
 
 " Just sit at a desk every night, snubbing baseness. 
 It canvasses them." 
 
 "To do what?" 
 
 " To tell people they're right when they're not." 
 He held in the rhetoric now, a defiant instinct of 
 straightness shunning the use of the jockeying word 
 
166 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 where it might not hinder, but help. " Not very thrill- 
 ing? ' He prompted her to be unmoved if she would. 
 ' Well," she said suspensively, out of her inward 
 confusions of rearrangement, " no." 
 
 ' No rushing out of the ranks, with armies ad- 
 miring? " 
 
 " I suppose they're esteemed in their own profes- 
 sion," she ventured, attempting the austere tone proper 
 to safe assumption. 
 
 " You spoke of the ," he said. " That's the 
 
 head of the trade — Mr. Roads' last paper. How could 
 Mr. Roads esteem people who don't care to sell lies? 
 If praise soils, the game is clean as the sea. Oh, you 
 want Birkenhead decks? You'll get 'em to stand on, 
 but you'll be alone, or with one or two more, and the 
 rest of your corps sneering at you ' Crank ! ' ' Fad- 
 dist ! ' ' It's moral cowardice, really ! ' while they 
 swarm into the boats. It'll be keeping straight gratis 
 — just the bare bones of decency." 
 
 He spoke as if it were she at the cross roads: she 
 answered as if it were he; she tempted him. 
 
 " If you lived as a soldier you might die like one." 
 
 ' A ball in the brain, you mean, at the head of a 
 charge ? " 
 
 " Would you give that up too ? " 
 
 : You'd have to. I don't believe Enoch miracles 
 come off in Brabburn. Cancer, a pain in the heart or 
 spine for a few years, a week's suffocation — there's 
 no bolting from them. You'd have to face death — 
 the true horrors of it, the ' natural ' ones." He still 
 forced the note of offense, lest he should shirk it. She 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 167 
 
 never hedged and he would not ; better be cleanly 
 maimed by the utter loss of her than gain toleration 
 by bating a jot of his distasteful ardors. 
 
 Surely enough her air was one of distaste. She 
 was chill ily bewildered. Not that, like quite vulgar 
 souls, she hugged in mean panic what was current — 
 the filed judgments and registered valuations. They 
 were worth something: spots of dry ground amid 
 waters, at least they gave foothold. But June had 
 the fortitude of equity; she could be harsh to her own 
 fears and coldly refuse to deny that footholds, even 
 one's own, may have to go sometimes, with none in 
 sight to take their places; a haughty fairness ruled 
 her and scorned the cheap conceit of finality in her own 
 old appraisements and took it for granted that what 
 any one else said for a view that was not hers must be 
 less than the most that he could say for it if he would. 
 But she was bewildered and disarranged. Things that 
 he said made queer new calls on her ; they assumed she 
 was a person, detached, like a nation, with frontiers, 
 a being autonomous, equal, free and yet novelly bur- 
 dened, bound to make out for herself what was right 
 and what wrong and to stand by whatever result she 
 came to. June dismayedly felt that she never yet had 
 been a person, only a piece of the flesh of a family, and 
 a cell in its brain. What thought of hers had she not 
 taken on trust? Which of her admirations had not 
 been formed by proxy? Was there, of all the things 
 she had said to-day, one that had not been spoken by 
 rote? 
 
 When June was dismayed her face and voice would 
 
168 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 grow icy ; she looked most distantly regal when every- 
 thing in her was praying for help, or running to and 
 fro, seeking a life-belt, or abasing itself in deep dusts 
 of contrition. It was beyond Browne to read her 
 then. He did not see that the frozen aspect was help- 
 lessness steeling itself not to wince. He only saw her 
 austere and spiritually tall, looking securely out from 
 untold reserves of cold certitude. 
 
 So for a silent minute each of them thought how 
 awesomely strong a case it must be that could count 
 for so much in the other's mind, till Mr. Hathersage, 
 brushing the carpet's nap with soft feline pads, came 
 across to bring them a find from his night's reading, 
 a sight of the life of the old British India — how envoys 
 would set out on missions to courts many hundred 
 miles off, and not move in the heat of the day nor in 
 the dark of the night; a few miles on a walking ele- 
 phant's back before breakfast, and then the long day's 
 peace. He read to find such things and show them to 
 people, but also to keep up the good accent with which 
 he could talk to many kinds of learned men in the 
 dialects of their own several studies, as he talked 
 French and Italian. He read out cooingly, resting 
 himself on the thought of that quaint leisure, unlike 
 to-day's rackety haste. 
 
 They listened to the urbane treason to life; they did 
 not let their looks meet. She, as the helpless will 
 sometimes do, tried to be angry with Browne ; who, 
 after all, was this stranger, that he should be let into 
 knowledge of what was failing under her? Browne 
 caught no glimpse of that; for all he saw, she might 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 169 
 
 be heart and soul with her father now, and life, which 
 is always to-day, would never be anything to her, 
 either, but some bawling cad who must be endured with 
 only such compensations as irony has for its right 
 users. Then Mr. Hathersage yawned with a candor 
 so child-like that it was not rude; rather, a confidence; 
 he seemed to have gone, with his guest, behind Madam 
 Courtesy's back, and to trust his guest not to tell her. 
 " Youth, youth! " he crooned, with a little shiver, on 
 hearing about their plan for the mill : to go they were 
 only waiting for Guy. " ' Lusum it Maecenas, dor- 
 mitum ego,' he murmured, and crept up to bed as 
 ten struck. 
 
 June, moving about to replace a used book, stood 
 still for a second; she looked up, through a window 
 and through the glass roof of a greenhouse outside. 
 Browne's eyes, following hers, saw a round moon, 
 remote and abstract beyond the filtering screen of 
 double glass and interposed room, ride high in bare 
 skies. 
 
 " What a night ! ' he said. Indeed Lorenzo and 
 Jessica might have capped ecstasies in it. 
 
 She said " Yes," with a reluctance, as though her 
 mind flinched at the scent of some twilight idea not yet 
 made out, as horses will sweat and hold back, at night, 
 with a dim but positive sense of the approach of some- 
 thing of which all they know is the way their ears 
 twitch and their breath goes. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 "A dream that a lion had dreamed 
 Till the wilderness cried aloud, 
 A secret between you two, 
 
 Between the proud and the proud." 
 
 W. B. Yeats. 
 
 THEY set out. It was calm now; in the stillness 
 they heard the owls calling and answering, far 
 off and near, in firm notes; one huge inquisitive fellow 
 came floating over their heads in a chain of linked 
 circles that moved with them, lying outspread on the 
 air without sound or effort. They passed through a 
 hamlet sleeping its deepest already against the coming 
 of daylight and work; only in one or two cottages, 
 ruled, as June knew, by babies, did lighted panes make 
 yellow squares against the milky radiance that filled 
 outer space. Past the hamlet they toiled up a path in 
 loose sand to the edge of the Hurtwood, a huge com- 
 mon, miles square, of pine, gorse and heather capri- 
 ciously patterned out, here a few acres of one, and 
 then another. 
 
 The first mile of the three to the mill they walked 
 almost silently. Guy smoked, by June's leave ; June 
 laved her cheeks in the cool air — they had dust and 
 heat on them, she felt ; dust of her father's and 
 brother's probing and peering about among things that 
 turned dusty under their hands at their incantatory 
 
 170 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 171 
 
 murmur of " Yes — everywhere cobwebs! " heat of her 
 inner fight against giving them up, those two — and 
 against not giving them up. Oh, it was all heat and a 
 maze, and unbearable things calling out to be done, 
 this way and that : impossibles had to be chosen among. 
 
 By the end of the mile she thought she had put 
 things in order within. She tested it — tried how well 
 she could make talk of trifles — of Italy, Oxford, the 
 Temple, where Guy now lived and Aubrey had meant 
 to. She thought she was getting on well. As they 
 walked, the mill, now in sight, black on the sky-line, 
 bulked always larger and higher. June pattered away 
 at her skimmy stuff; had Aubrey noticed, the air was 
 warm where the pines were, but it chilled at once where 
 the gorse began, and was it not sure to be fine all night ? 
 — the pheasants were roosting far out on the boughs. 
 She scarcely waited for answers. She clung nervously 
 to the lead, the social command, the hostess's suze- 
 rainty over people's relations. 
 
 The mill rose high out of pines, with tough old 
 heather under them, leathery stems and broomy 
 sprays ; feet caught in them or slipped on them ; it was 
 a breathless stumble up the last slope ; even June's vol- 
 uble trepidation was put to silence; before they had 
 reached the top Guy, the man of inaction, was puff- 
 ing. Arrived at the door he dropped on a long bench 
 beside it. Many farmers had polished the seat already 
 a century since, sitting there to talk of Boney and how 
 the great war went, while the meal that they had come 
 for was being ground out to the end. 
 
 " For me," fluted Guy, " enough of ambition. 
 
172 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 J'y suis, j'y reste. In, you others; follow aloft the 
 phantom of aesthetic repletion. Here, below, man 
 wants but little — a warm coat, tobacco, woolly gloves 
 — the means of life and of contemplation. I have 
 them. In, my friends; leave me." 
 
 ' Oh, Guy!" June broke out to upbraid, and then 
 stopped in dismay at her own dismay and trod down 
 as a weakness the instinct that had cried out. 
 
 In at the little unfastened door the two stooped, 
 with Guy's last benediction on their attire amid the 
 dusty hazards of the interior : forty years had the mill 
 been disused. They lit match after match; they picked 
 a way across the rotten boards of the floor to the first 
 of the three ladders leading up from story to story. 
 
 ' Ought to be chockful of tramps," he said at one 
 pause. They listened. No sound came, of moving or 
 snoring. Each heard only the other's breath rise and 
 fall in its own rhythm. " Harvest late, perhaps." 
 
 : Yes, they'll be all in the barns," she said quickly, 
 wanting to know, by the sound of her voice, that she 
 was at ease. Strange things followed. In that domed 
 bell of bricks one's voice rang; hers, when so mag- 
 nified, seemed to herself like some private gesture spied 
 upon with a telescope. Why ? What were the words 
 themselves ? Nothing. That was the trouble : the null- 
 ness of words was ceasing to avail; screens were fall- 
 ing; speech, the old veil, without which the mind might 
 be naked and shamed, was lifting like mist. 
 
 They had to walk the floor daintily, not to drop 
 through to the cellarage. One board in two had been 
 stripped off, to cook some past wanderer's supper or to 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 173 
 
 warm supperless hands. The moon gave no help ; all 
 it did was to baffle, leaking through chinks of the shut- 
 tered windows to play freakish fantasies of spots and 
 streaks before their feet; once it tricked June into 
 putting a foot through the crumbling paste of lath and 
 plaster between two cross beams. She gave the slight- 
 est quick cry and then snatched back, before she stood 
 safe, the hand that she had held out and he taken. 
 
 " Oh, let us get up," she said oppressedly, " out of 
 this hole," and cut off his next words as if they might 
 hit her. " Do let us hurry," she pressed. 
 
 They hurried, and clambered at last out into the air 
 through a window-like door, and stood on a ledge of 
 lead that ran round the base of the roof, leaning their 
 backs against the lead dome, with the gawky sails 
 above and below them fixed at the angles which chance 
 first, and then rust more rigidly, had ordered for their 
 last quiescence. As they leant he heard her breath's 
 troubled stir ; it was like some small animal struggling 
 silently. 
 
 "You're fagged?" he asked, and, quick in alarm, 
 "giddy?" 
 
 " No, no! " she jerked out, with impatience, not at 
 him, but at the wild Daphne in her that could have 
 leaped clear from their ledge into space. She chid it 
 down — vain, immodest timidity; shame on its presag- 
 ing! 
 
 " Look ! " she said, ruling her voice. " What we 
 came for ! ' She pointed. From east and south, a 
 mile or two off, there ran out to meet one another two 
 long-backed hills, black masses, and then they stopped 
 
174 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 before meeting and dropped sHarply down to the floor 
 of the great southern weald, leaving between them a 
 space like the bright gap that is cut out of the dark 
 when the curtain goes up on a stage. The gap was 
 living with light ; beyond it the moon's full lamp hung 
 high over the plain, where ground mists, visionary in 
 this light, were afloat on illuminated meadows. 
 
 He made some sound, not of words, and she forced 
 a light tone. " Docs that mean you feel just a kind of 
 balked willingness to be charmed? The feeling one 
 has at a Baedeker place with three asterisks? I'm 
 sorry. I shouldn't have trumpeted so." She rushed 
 on; she had to be talking; what might not be heard 
 if a stillness came, what flood topping its banks? 
 Low, rolling pine music was round them : she clutched 
 at the topic. " Isn't it like the noise of London, far 
 off, heard from Kensington Gardens — the middle of 
 them?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Do you know, it never quite ceases? There's no 
 air so still? " 
 
 "No?" 
 
 She kept her voice sounding. " Strange, how easy 
 it is to tell that soughing noise from the murmuring 
 of beeches! " 
 
 " Yes, or from dry grass when it shrills." 
 
 She had wished him to talk, but now, when he did, 
 there sprang up in her, sudden, touching, disarming, a 
 sureness that he too was doing what she was; he too 
 was far out at sea, as alone and unhelped as she, on his 
 own little improvised raft of words, the first comers to 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 175 
 
 hand, all that he had to put between self-mastery and 
 deep waters. Her peril drew back; she felt, for the 
 moment, sorry only for him ; she saw him a child that 
 has some need, or pain, but will not cry out. 
 
 " Look! The sea! ' Her voice was self-forgetful 
 for the first time. " Quick, while the gleam lasts." 
 
 She pointed out southward, but he did not look the 
 right way. " Quick — it's going," she said. Trying 
 eagerly to put him right, she touched his arm with a 
 hand. 
 
 He did not look, even then; he said to himself, 
 " The kind hand! " as if he were alone and caressing 
 a memory that enchanted. Half aroused from that, he 
 looked round and down and met eyes that were up- 
 turned and shone, bent on him, lost in him ; some film 
 was on them, like that on profoundly stilled pools, yet 
 they quivered; each little glistening lake vibrated un- 
 broken; they swayed as a moored boat sways in a 
 stream and yet is moored tautly. Then he too lost all 
 hold but that; all of him lived along the line of his gaze 
 into those deeps. Not like people who choose what to 
 do, or who think " This may be right," or " Thus far 
 may one go," they drew to each other. There was that 
 thing to do in the world, nothing else; the nobleness 
 of life was to do thus. Yet in this rush of their first 
 rapture each of their staunch souls was ruled by the 
 firm powers built up in itself through all its continent 
 youth, she to a gallant trust that would have given him 
 even her lips, and he to a passionate guard over pas- 
 sion; he kissed only the lids of her eyes as they closed 
 on the love that they had let in. 
 
176 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 How long had they clung so? Neither could tell. 
 The rolling pine music had rolled on through lives and 
 round worlds. It is said that in dreams you may live 
 years in the instant in which you are awaked. Guy 
 had not called, the moon still hung where she did, when 
 each drew loose a little from the other's arms and 
 looked at the face which had once been unwon. 
 Speech had to come. She broke their descent to that 
 earth. " The sea ! " she said, letting them down on the 
 wings of a playfulness; " you never answered me." 
 
 " It was so long ago." 
 
 ' I must show you again." She pointed to where, 
 through a rent torn in drift mist, a sheen was seen 
 dancing. " The moon on the Channel," she said, and 
 then, simply : " You have not religion. Yet you are 
 near it." 
 
 " I ! " he said, wondering. 
 
 " You're like God, the way a child is like a father. 
 You can do things in His way. ' The earth is His and 
 He made it,' and you can look at things and they're 
 new ; they're made at that moment, and the morning 
 and the evening are the first day." She spoke almost 
 wildly, as if she fluttered wild wings against the walls 
 of inexpressiveness that cage love. 
 
 He cherished her, soothing those wings. " Love, it 
 is love ; it is like that ; I felt it to-night — you remember, 
 at dinner, the way the wind prowled and whined round 
 the house. I caught myself laughing with glee at the 
 very thought of a house, a room, the first room ever 
 made — the cute little cube of still warmth safe and 
 snug in the middle of all the rush of coldness." 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 177 
 
 He laughed, and her mood drew in to his. ' And 
 I sat by my fire last night," she responded, " and sud- 
 denly felt a sort of glow of the triumph the man must 
 have had who first lit one." 
 
 " The jolly miracle ! " 
 
 " Yes, warming his toes." 
 
 " We're being born, really," he said. " The first 
 time was nothing — mere passing out of sleep into a 
 doze." 
 
 " Yes, all the dear hum and thud of the big world 
 thrown away, wasted on us." 
 
 " Yes, or only just booming and droning on into a 
 place in the ends of old dreams." 
 
 The two drifted down the same eddying current of 
 reverie ; each voice trailed the very rhythm of the 
 other. " But now — " As they breathed that together, 
 too, their eyes joined and were tangled again. She 
 nestled close, barring everything out of her heart but 
 the moment's indestructible joy. Let everything wait 
 but that; she had to be harvesting. Long afterwards, 
 over her head as it lay against him, his voice came to 
 her, from distances; he had come out of their trance; 
 he must have been — yes, she was sure he had been 
 turning back to what she had said : " religion " — she 
 heard the word and then " it's dim to me, all that 
 side," he was saying; "not ugly darkness, or cruel; 
 only an end that comes to light, harmlessly, the way it 
 does in the evening." 
 
 The words were being pressed out of him, one by 
 one, each of them hard sought, for the help it might 
 give to a frankness that tried not to hurt. She gave a 
 
178 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 slight moan, not at his words, but at the breaking of 
 her ecstasy. He did not know that. 
 
 Aroused, she looked up with eyes wet with tender- 
 ness ; tenderness shook and lowered her voice, it had 
 possessed her so. He did not know. How could he 
 think love for him stronger than that mystic passion 
 of which he knew nothing except that half the world 
 seemed to be moved by it? He saw only the shock of 
 his creedlessness bruising her. 
 
 She saw part of his trouble and broke out in con- 
 solations, assurances, hopes — he might find faith at 
 Cusheen; there were miracles there — he would see; 
 one might happen to him. " When you come back I 
 shall look out from the walls for you, shading my eyes 
 with my hands. I shall know by the light round your 
 head." Her voice had that wildness again; she was 
 rapt, and he could not analyze. Her exaltation was 
 beautiful to him; he gloried in it; and yet in those 
 transports she seemed to be less his; lustrous, as visions 
 are, she took on, too, the precariousness of a vision 
 as if, when she knew him for what he was, she might 
 fade back, with her kind eyes still on him, into estrang- 
 ing brake and mist. 
 
 Panic seized him; he wanted her back; to hold her 
 he took her name, now his to caress, and played with it 
 — what name was like it — June, the sweet o' the year? 
 
 Why, his, she retorted; Aubrey, Aubrey, it had the 
 dawn in it — rose-colored mists, and the first lark, and 
 diamonded lawns. 
 
 They flitted from this to that, not talking much 
 about love, nor like lovers in books, for there were no 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 179 
 
 readers there who had to understand them. They 
 rambled; they made little rushes hither and thither, 
 taking possession of new corners of Eden with little 
 happy, irrelevant, incoherent cries of discovery. 
 
 " Twelve o'clock and a starry night, but a wind 
 rising." Guy's voice came up to them, placid and cool 
 as spring water. He had strolled out from his bench ; 
 his cigarette's end could be seen, a pulse of light, rising 
 and falling. " Is London in sight, good people? ' 
 
 Oh — London? They looked for it. Clouds had 
 mounted the north-east sky on the wind, their under 
 side sullenly flushed with a turbid glow, with more of 
 darkness in it than light. That was London, flaring 
 sootily up to heaven. More clouds rose fast ; the wind 
 roughened; the two shivered on their high perch. 
 They groped their way down in thickening darkness; 
 the moon was put out. But he held her hand now. 
 Blow wind, come blackness and winter, he held her 
 hand. All the way home the cries of the owls, the bark 
 of a fox, the far-away whistle of a night mail were 
 calls blown on bugles and clarions, tossing triumphantly 
 up and down, here clear on the crest and there lost in 
 the trough of the long waves of sound now heaving on 
 seas of murmuring pines. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 " When that I was and a little tiny boy." 
 
 Twelfth Night, Act v. Sc. i. 
 
 BROWNE was legging it hard up and down the 
 deck before the mail boat cleared Holyhead Har- 
 bor and struck out for — well, for what? What was Ire- 
 land more than a word to him ? How would it feel to 
 be there ? Now that he asked, he found out that he had 
 not even a formed expectation. What a young ass he 
 must have been not to question his Irish parents more ; 
 they must have loved to talk about everything Irish, 
 yet scarcely a word of what they had said occurred to 
 him now as he went back the way they had come. He 
 rummaged his early memories. Vivid and small they 
 came back as his walk quickened, the things they used 
 to recall of their life before he was born — the in- 
 finitesimal flat at Florence, the vintage at Dijon, at 
 Bellinzona a grumpy innkeeper, the doctor at Paris 
 who talked bad metaphysics ; each recollection began 
 to shine out, as his mind warmed, like one small picture 
 on a bare wall. But almost everything Irish had 
 faded. Oral tradition went back no further than those 
 two years of foreign travel before he was born. 
 
 They must have come to England to nest for him. 
 That must have been why they pitched upon Strand- 
 on-the-Green, with mid-London and all its good 
 schools within reach, and bought the ugly small house 
 
 180 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 181 
 
 looking out sunnily on to the Thames which no one 
 could build over. Houses, of course, had been cheap 
 on that decayed waterway of moldering names — 
 Chiswick, Brentford, Isleworth, places with foreshores 
 lined with leavings of atrophied occupations, with fly- 
 blown taverns, ferries that only just paid; barge- 
 builders' wharves from which the ring of hammers, 
 turned to music by the liquid sounding-board, came 
 always slower than last year ; eyots with banks slipping 
 down and baring the roots of great trees, nobody 
 minding; stretches of ageing green mud between the 
 eyots and the mainland, with water-logged boats, and 
 bones of old barges, sticking half out of it. Shutting 
 his eyes he stood still for a moment; yes, he could 
 place each faded green summer-house, speckled with 
 burst paint blisters, rotting away at the river end of 
 the long-grassed garden of some house to let, the pleas- 
 ance, no doubt, in its day, of some Georgian cit. 
 
 He walked on, still more gaily; the vivid image of 
 melancholy things delights happy people, as firelight 
 gains a last charm from the sound of dripping eaves. 
 And merely to image anything was delight ; how one's 
 mind leaped about, running to this side and that, as 
 one walked, like a dog out with a man! He let it; he 
 looked on, amused, almost patronizing; it brought 
 half-forgotten old things to his feet for sport, as re- 
 trievers do — the first joy of the river, forbidden at 
 first, and how he had won the freedom of it by force 
 and fraud, the furtive wadings at first ; the perception, 
 when a ninth birthday brought manhood, that now 
 he must swim; the swift, guilty stripping among the 
 
182 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 osiers in April; the drying with handkerchief and cap, 
 and then the return home, the detected damp curls 
 and blue nose and the slapping and putting to bed; 
 and, next day, more swimming practice, but just after 
 breakfast, so that all the rest of the morning might go 
 to running about at high speed and rolling down a 
 grass slope, to induce perspiration and dirt, for safety; 
 and how, with these precautions, the cause had 
 marched prospering till he could throw off at dinner, 
 as if by the way, the remark that now he could swim 
 right across at high tide. No storm had broken ; his 
 father had only asked him " What stroke ? " — a lum- 
 inous question. The duck never lived that would like 
 to hatch hens. 
 
 Recollection gamboled along, taking the order of 
 time — how, when once free of the river, he caulked 
 with red lead, penuriously saved up for, a marvelous 
 old canoe that a former tenant had left in a shed. 
 Why, aboard her he must have spent almost every 
 holiday hour for five or six years, ravished with the 
 perpetual entertainment of seeing the way rivers work 
 and the way they look while working — all the various 
 symbolic boilings and twirls of surface eddies over 
 different submerged objects; the wayward-seeming 
 tricks of silting and scouring that drew and re-drew 
 the lines of channels; the consternation of water-rats 
 when a great tide had flooded their holes and they had 
 to kill time by swimming and running about, with 
 their nerves all on edge, till the deluge had abated ; 
 the way the stream did not flow straight down its bed, 
 as you might have thought, but stumbled along like a 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 183 
 
 drunken man in a walled lane, first bumping into one 
 bank and then rebounding obliquely to cannon against 
 the other. 
 
 How splendid his father and mother had been, not 
 to set upon him and take away from him firmly the joy 
 of prying into his dear river's life, and prove her a 
 pest in a book, with a mileage and tributaries. At 
 twelve he had not read a word of geography, only the 
 JEncid with his father, and plenty of Horace, and 
 Telemaque with his mother, and Hugo's Quatre-vingt- 
 treize, and by himself, Don Quixote, in Jarvis's Eng- 
 lish, and Galland's Arabian Nights, Smollett, The 
 Newcomes, The Vicar of Wakefield and Robinson 
 Crusoe, read over and over again till he knew the 
 rhythms of every part that he liked, as one knew the 
 lines of a friend's shoulders. 
 
 This profane learning, unsicklied by any close traffic 
 with grammar or history, an Aubrey of twelve had 
 carried to Blackfriars, noblest of London's great day- 
 schools. London had opened then; London was his — 
 streets full of things to get a delighted sense of; fallen 
 horses to be watched with agonies of compassion, but 
 utter inability to miss the minutest detail of their 
 resurrection; drunken men, captive or yet free; fire 
 engines to pursue to any extremity; once an attempt 
 at suicide — a swollen bundle of clothes floating up on 
 the tide, and a boat making after it with the oars 
 bending! once a corpse on the Blackfriars foreshore, 
 stiff as a short stick and bloated beyond thought, with 
 a policeman on guard in his pride of official insensi- 
 bility. Oh, ample life ! 
 
184 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 Then the rise of the theater: first, the slow matur- 
 ing of plans for a Saturday afternoon when his parents 
 would not be at home to miss him, then the hard run 
 at noonday from school to the two hours' fight for his 
 place at the old Lyceum's gallery door; you fought 
 for your place in those days. It was Irving and Terry 
 in Much Ado About Nothing. How the world had 
 swelled! On the heels of the vast emotions, with 
 which he had perspired and shivered all that afternoon, 
 had come the first misgiving that some parts of life 
 were left out in the house in the river mists, where all 
 the talk was of what the Vatican was to do next, and 
 the terrible prices of things, and where no word seemed 
 to have come of this game of human gaiety sparking 
 at contact. People, he now saw, had friends to their 
 houses ; they danced ; some one made music. Much 
 Ado About Nothing proved that. He must learn to 
 dance now, at his ripe age of fourteen, as Claudio and 
 Benedick did, and other men of the world. 
 
 After some weeks of coming close up to the plunge 
 and then shying away, the explorer of life had pushed 
 irrevocably through a greasy baize door labeled 
 ' Bellaggio : Dancing for Stage and Drawing-room," 
 in a small street of blighted appearance, off Drury 
 Lane, and near Aubrey's way home, and had asked a 
 lady with a bluish face in high impasto what it would 
 cost to learn to dance " like other people," or, as he 
 alternatively defined it, " enough to go to parties." 
 A pact had ensued that imposed on Aubrey six months' 
 daily walking or running of four extra miles, to save 
 train fares, the bluish lady consuming the fruits of this 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 185 
 
 retrenchment, while Aubrey danced gravely for twelve 
 separate hours among knowing youths, giggling young 
 women, and persons who were there not wholly as de- 
 votees of the art. And all to what end? 'Little 
 idiot I was! " he could say to himself now, with kindly 
 contempt. For he had clean forgotten, like Robinson 
 Crusoe, to think how he should launch the craft when 
 it was fashioned. Dance he never so featly, where 
 should he do it? No other child had ever entered 
 the house at Strand-on-the-Green, nor any adult friend 
 either. The talent, new from the mint, must lodge 
 in him useless — so he had owned to himself with apol- 
 ogetic candor a day or two after the twelfth lesson 
 was over. 
 
 A sager inspiration had followed. To dance, two 
 were needed; music, heavenly music, was cultivable 
 by one. But what instrument ? Strings, for choice : 
 it was strings in that scene in Much Ado About Noth- 
 ing. And, conning advertisements hard, he had per- 
 ceived that the only serious stringed instrument really 
 in question, for men of his means, was the banjo. The 
 means — amassed during another six months — were 
 nine shillings; frugality at the mid-day meal-time 
 could no more. With these nine a remote Whitechapel 
 barber had had to be faced; he had announced an old 
 banjo at ten, but it fell to the nine after a desperate 
 set-to, in which Aubrey, half -dead with shyness, had 
 doggedly hung on, bringing into the field every ruse he 
 had seen his mother practise of late at the side door in 
 combat with hawkers. 
 
 When swords were dropped and the barber, like the 
 
18G THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 exalted spirit he was, had thrown in a sixpenny manual 
 of the instrument, Aubrey had limped home with the 
 spoils, covenanted and uncovenanted, making faces 
 with exultation in shadows where no one could see. 
 Only late on that day of triumph, when he would fain 
 have struck his lyre, had he run right up against a 
 second dead wall — he could not tell which note was 
 which; he had no "ear"; he never could even tune 
 the thing. For hours he strummed at the strings, 
 hoping dimly that recognizable melody might emerge, 
 and searching the book for some clue to the exit from 
 a perplexity which must surely have vexed the noviti- 
 ate of many masters. No use. At bed-time he had 
 hidden his banjo away, for good, in a dark corner, 
 well at the back of the loft, without internal whining; 
 at least he had not that shame to soil or sour the fun of 
 remembering all that foolishness now. Walking alone 
 he had picked himself up whenever he fell and had 
 rubbed his shins and gone on. 
 
 His shattered finances had sent him next to cheaper 
 fields than those arts. Once he had walked to Epsom, 
 a bare fourteen miles, stared all day, ravished above 
 earth, at races, the ring, the booths, the welshers, 
 three-card-men and tipsters, and stumped home at 
 night with his legs re-entering into his body, but his 
 mind brimming jocundly with the day's takings. For 
 milder joys there was the National Gallery; standing 
 for some time and thinking of nothing in presence of 
 the big Turner beside the big Claude would induce a 
 turbid, inarticulate solemnity and melancholy that felt 
 luxurious; there were the docks, where the sight of 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 187 
 
 bales labeled Bagdad and Balsora produced agreeable 
 sensations; and there were the parts of Mayfair that 
 came into The Neivcomes, preferably Park Lane, 
 where he would stand on the opposite curb, consider 
 the make of the houses, relish the forms of blinds or 
 the dusky gleam of a picture-frame caught by the sun, 
 and meditate possession later. Thence he would re- 
 turn home slowly, in measureless tranquil beatitude, 
 his senses, well fed as they were, still able to take light 
 refreshment en route from the sweet sea-like roar of 
 the Strand. That music would turn off and on when 
 two fingers placed on the ears were pressed down or 
 raised up, as though on the holes of a flute, or, with 
 both ears open, he hearkened musingly to the gentler 
 thud of the hoofs as the 'buses slowed down to form 
 queue through the gut, now gone, west of the island 
 church of St. Clement's. He trailed dusty feet home- 
 wards, with no dust on his spirits ; it would have been 
 laid by the blithe way the first lamps decked the first 
 twilight, or spirited away in some vesper rhythm of 
 thought set going by the whole restward trail of the 
 black-coated hosts homing for the night, looking so 
 extraordinarily different from their morning faces 
 and walks. 
 
 He had had a regard for these beings. Safely as- 
 sured that they would not speak to him, he would pur- 
 sue their possible doings out of his sight, image with 
 regret the precipitate breakfast of one who had run 
 for the train, or lay out, for those who seemed rich, 
 delectable draft lives of going to races all day and 
 plays every night. He had tracked some of them into 
 
188 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 their various churches. He had never been brought 
 to church, but it seemed to be one of the things that 
 people ran after, like going to races, and so he must 
 see to it. He had not known at first whether you paid 
 at the door, as in theaters, or when you left at the end, 
 as on Hammersmith Bridge, or when. So it was in 
 some fear of ejection, he being a very apostle for des- 
 titution just then, that he penetrated to one or two 
 shrines, apiece, of Anglicanism, Dissent, the Roman 
 Catholics, the Jews, and the conscious, pleased Athe- 
 ists. He preferred the Roman and Anglican modes, 
 putting the Anglican first, for the lovely sound of its 
 prayers. " Almighty God, the Father of all mercies, 
 we, Thine unworthy servants, do give Thee most hum- 
 ble and hearty thanks — " To hear this was like being 
 stroked on the hair when tired; it was not praying, 
 but having prayers answered. Still, the Roman use 
 had its virtues; for one, the remote, sinking hum of 
 some parts of the Mass, like the ambrosial softening 
 of a bumble bee's buzz as it passes out through the 
 window into hot sunshine; that golden droning made 
 one's own thoughts run sweetly, whatever they were; 
 it elevated inattention to itself into absorption in other 
 ideas, unlike the Nonconformist worship, which jolted 
 and exacted and kept you in torment lest the man 
 praying should not know what to say next, and be 
 vexed. 
 
 Queer sort of being, Aubrey began to think, to offer 
 itself to June, for her to be with, all her life. A close 
 little animal, too. Not a word about those vast adven- 
 tures had he ever said to his father or mother. He 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 189 
 
 tried to remember now ; no, not one : it had not even 
 occurred to him. During meals the parents had nearly 
 always talked about household bills and Biblical critics. 
 He had listened and, somehow, never asked questions. 
 Neither had they. Unhelped and unhampered, his 
 mind had poked and peered about, this way and that, 
 touching things, stroking them, left alone with his 
 own sense of the feel of them. It had seemed natural 
 so. But why? It was odd, really; so he felt now. It 
 was not as if he had not cared for his parents, or they 
 for him. Affection between the three had been not, 
 perhaps, a caress, but a clutch, silent and almost grim ; 
 the inner flame had burnt up all outward profession, 
 it was so fierce. He thought how in his bed one night 
 at Strand-on-the-Green he had imagined one of them 
 dead, and remembered the pains he had taken before 
 breakfast next day to clear from his face the stains of 
 the night's shamefaced agonies. He had been ill the 
 month before and his father had sat by him, so unable, 
 for grief and fear, to play the cheerful, sick-visiting 
 elder that Aubrey, peering at the stern face from out 
 his blankets, had wondered whether his father was 
 thinking of killing him — quite justly, the way the cat 
 killed its young ones when they were sick and both- 
 ered her. " And I never saw ! Little brute ! ' 
 
 He was sorry and yet he could not wholly regret 
 anything. To the man newly happy in love all his old 
 life is a chain of miracles miraculously linked. Had 
 but one link been not what it was, he might not have 
 ever met her. So all the links are treasures; he doats 
 on them all; queer things that some of them looked, 
 
100 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 perhaps, at the time, they touch him now with their 
 dim and faithful striving, as of kind blind hands, 
 towards the divine end that has come. Aubrey was 
 not rent now when he saw, for the first time clearly, 
 how his own crescent needs had made passionate 
 misers of two generous people. The deck he walked 
 on was empty, the ship light ; elate on the sea she 
 skimmed like a plate thrown flat over the surface of 
 water, with preternatural-seeming buoyancy, helping 
 thought to be buoyant. The night was beautiful with 
 stars, and the sea only moved as the flesh does in sleep, 
 with the lovely heave of the measure of life. He was 
 not rent, but touched, as if by some old sad thing 
 turned to beauty in a book. In that way he saw how 
 his mother, at some point in talk over swollen school 
 bills, would leap up to lower the gas by which she 
 read Renan to his father, or would flinch away at the 
 last moment, jibe the conductor never so rudely, from 
 the halfpenny bus which she used to take sometimes 
 when much tired and parcel-laden with the day's for- 
 aging. He had ruled all that shopping ; his growth 
 had taught her to feel, like yachtsmen, for each breath 
 of favoring air that rippled the least patch of the mar- 
 ket, swiftly diverting her custom from her old grocer, 
 grown too grand, to the little man just setting up and 
 straining his prices to catch business. Aubrey and no 
 other, by kicking his toes through his boots, had shown 
 her how little the world's rough classification of but- 
 termen, one as dear and another as cheap, reflected 
 the undulant diversity of truth; one, when you came 
 to know, had fair eggs at the price, another charged 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 191 
 
 frightfully much for all but bacon, for butter you 
 threw your money away if you did not go to a third. 
 It was when Aubrey's plunging elbows and knees had 
 outgrown her tailoring that she foreswore certain 
 orders of shops altogether and bought from hawkers, 
 whose fish and greens she would beat down at her 
 door, steeling herself to assume a forced tactical calm 
 while the indignant adversary withdrew, at the crisis 
 of a bargain, almost to the garden gate, her prescient 
 heart saying he would come back, broken, to take the 
 penny off the plaice. What deceits she had learnt 
 from him. Her privy share in the household washing 
 had grown like a British Empire. Soon after the talk 
 of Aubrey's going to Oxford began she had annexed 
 to her sphere his father's white shirts and collars, the 
 laundry profession's last inch of ground in the house. 
 Not to wound Bridget the general servant's respect 
 for her place, the prey would be hidden till Bridget's 
 night out; the moment the garden gate clattered be- 
 hind her a guilty pair flew to the scullery, one to 
 wash, wring, dry and iron in tremulous haste; the 
 other — half seen by Aubrey through reek as he de- 
 scended with some stumper in /Eschylus for solution 
 — abetting the principal in the fraud by reading aloud 
 the last big German on Genesis. 
 
 Possibly some potential, semi-presentient father in 
 Aubrey helped to soften remorse in Aubrey the son. 
 We are all young gods in our turn and accept sacrifice 
 coolly from women and men. Perhaps it works round 
 to something roughly just in the end, and debts can be 
 paid, if not to those whom they were owed to. When 
 
192 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 we, too, turn into worshipers, after our godhead has 
 lapsed, then we too would not have the smell of our 
 incense spoiled for the real gods, the new, young gods, 
 by their knowing how incense has to be scraped for, 
 sometimes. Aubrey had ceased walking; he stood in 
 the bows, leaning over, watching the ship's stem press 
 eagerly through the luminous water. The sound held 
 him; it was like that of some audible motion too swift 
 to go on, like the swish of a paper-knife quickly cut- 
 ting a page. Not agonizingly, nor yet sentimentally, 
 he wished that those two could be alive; he would have 
 been frank with them now ; he would have given away 
 every secret of that absurd, burrowing, surmising imp 
 that he had been; he would have liked them to know 
 he was theirs more, not less, for this new love ; and they 
 would surely have liked the thought of him here, with 
 the wind of the boat's speed cool on his face, as it 
 carried him through the mild night, back to their Ire- 
 land. 
 
 Somewhere in the ship's vitals a bell struck ; the 
 engines stopped. Under the bows the cleaving sound's 
 insistency failed by degrees; the tall new page was 
 almost cut now. He watched till the prow scarcely 
 rippled the water. Then he looked up, and lo, it was 
 Ireland — lights on a pier; a lighted train waiting; be- 
 hind that, a sleeping town lightless and enigmatic in 
 morning twilight; behind that, again, all the reserve 
 of dark hills. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 "I have been here before, 
 
 But when or how I cannot tell : 
 I know the grass beyond the door, 
 The sweet, keen smell. 
 The sighing sound, the lights around the shore." 
 
 D. G. Rossetti. 
 
 IN Aubrey's first letter June read : — " I had a new 
 joy when I landed. Every one talked in the way I 
 should have done if I had been in the place of him. 
 Porters and beggars and newspaper boys — they were 
 all I, put to those jobs. It's a strange place — I know 
 it better than any I ever was in. It isn't the brogue; 
 it's the way their minds catch a thing when it's thrown 
 them — the gesture, its naturalness. So it's like coming 
 home ; at home no one is odd. 
 
 " This hotel is the one that priests stay at; scarcely 
 a tweed coat at breakfast. The priests seem most 
 natural, to me, of all. Perhaps it's because they're 
 what English parsons are trying to be, only the par- 
 sons can't quite get it out, and so the priests are more 
 like them than they are themselves, as good portraits 
 are. The way the priests argue, the way they quote 
 Horace, the way they talk about their bishops, the 
 way they're nice to the heathen, and yet he's a heathen 
 — it's all part of something I seem to know as I never 
 knew England nor anything there, except you. 
 
 193 
 
104 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " All clay I have been clinging to side-cars, going 
 about to see people, show my first credentials, and get 
 others, and all that. I called on the great prelate — I 
 had a letter to him — and his welcome matched every- 
 thing else ; a courtly prince of your Church, and yet I 
 was mystically prepared for the thing he'd say next. 
 ' You're an Irishman too ? ' he asked, towards the end. 
 I had felt it coming. ' The County Monaghan, is it? ' 
 As if I could tell! My father never seemed to have 
 time to talk of things here. But I recollected just then, 
 by good luck, how my mother had let it out once that 
 a Cardinal Doran had been some remote cousin. I 
 couldn't forbear; I played my cardinal, proudly. I 
 think it did good. The Archbishop looked quite in- 
 trigued, and his chaplain, who'd hovered about all this 
 time, pulled up dead for a second as soon as I put my 
 trump down. No doubt it was just polite show of 
 interest — all the questions they asked after that. 
 They all have manners, your clergy. I told all I could, 
 by way of acknowledging it. 
 
 " The Chaplain has come round this evening. 
 They're wonderful. He had a plan, all made up, to 
 save me trouble by passing me on from one parish 
 priest to another, all through the whole West. I'm 
 starting to-morrow. I shall be like a bucket used at 
 Maynooth to put out a fire. There — see how I can 
 babble about the things that don't matter, and nothing 
 about the only great thing. I've tried, and given up. 
 
 " ' Dumbed by aiming utterance great, 
 Up to the miracle of my fate.' 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 195 
 
 " I have a great fear, too, of saying some things 
 the wrong way — lest the pain come up in your face, 
 and I not there to tell you the way I'd meant it." 
 
 The first time that June read the letter she felt she 
 must have missed the chief part of it out. After the 
 fifth or sixth reading she knew that what she had 
 missed was not there ; it was only a letter, and not he. 
 She had furtively hoped that, each time he wrote, it 
 would be, while she read, as if he were back; she 
 would be as she was when beside him she looked 
 along the line of his sight and bent up, for her own use 
 and delight, his communicable strength. No hope of 
 that, she saw, now; he was really gone; parted was 
 parted; letters would only animate thoughts of that 
 miracle ; they would not do it. 
 
 She scanned the letter first in her room, in a hurry, 
 half afraid of it, glancing over the pages of unread 
 words as if they were the upturned faces of a crowd 
 that might do to her she knew not what. Then it was 
 all read through in the garden among the crumbling 
 hollyhocks, and again on the caked field-path through 
 stubble as June walked to the village, and then, many 
 times, in the afternoon, in the secure solitude of the 
 Hurtwood pines, her horse standing wondering what 
 the delay was and bending round looks of mild chiding 
 at her long motionlessness. The gentleness of his re- 
 monstrances touched her at last; she put the letter 
 away, patted his neck and apologized; now they would 
 have a good gallop. She needed it ; she had grownchilly 
 before she looked up. She looked round; everywhere 
 
196 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 brownness and fall, an ebb and a closing in. She had 
 exulted in it only yesterday; youth always does, when 
 its own flame is undamped ; morning and spring in the 
 blood delight in their own effortless victory over what- 
 ever it is that casts down the ageing year. But, just 
 now, a frightening thought blew up like a cloud, she 
 could not tell whence, and traversed her sky — that her 
 spirit had no valiant heat of its own at all, no high, 
 unborrowed will to live greatly; that she was like 
 water; it could be heated, but not heat itself; as soon 
 as you took it away from the fire, ardor began to die 
 out of it; so might hers, too, cool away to nothing in 
 that cold, extinguished moon-world of her father's and 
 Guy's. She wrote that night to Aubrey, among other 
 things : 
 
 " Do go on loving me. You are cheated, I know ; 
 if you could see me, even for one glimpse, just as I 
 am, you'd leave me. You couldn't not do it. You'd 
 have to say, ' Fool that I've been! ' I hate to cheat 
 you, and yet I'm in fear, much more dreadful, lest 
 you get back your sight and just go. 
 
 "How tiny that Irish world is! My mother was 
 some most remote kinswoman of Cardinal Doran's too. 
 I'll work it out some day ; I'll write to my Aunt Kate — 
 she is a nun at Rathfarnham. She knows all family 
 history; she'll help. 
 
 " The days are short now ; the heather under the 
 mill was shiny with dew this afternoon although it 
 was sunny. Do love me very much — find some way of 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 197 
 
 loving me so that you would go on though you found 
 me out utterly." 
 
 Aubrey wrote next from Banturk, from a priest's 
 house : — 
 
 " I'm right on the edge of the world of trains, shops 
 and inns. From here you look out westward, over the 
 verge, and across wet hills, to where Cusheen must 
 be. Down with these endless wet hills; they're too 
 like the sea, with the sun setting beyond it, when 
 you're alone. I shiver a little; I want you here to 
 draw close to. 
 
 " It isn't a merry journey from Dublin. Things 
 appeared which I hadn't thought of ; and yet, when I 
 saw them, I knew them and felt half ashamed of hav- 
 ing been caught forgetting. I came by a night train 
 to Croom and woke in the bad light before dawn, the 
 chilled gray, like mist and ashes and fainting faces 
 and lead. There were crows standing still on the pal- 
 ings of stations we passed ; they watched the train in 
 and out; nobody noticed them. Nobody got in or out, 
 except two policemen with guns. As the light grew 
 I saw there were skeletons of villages lying about in 
 the fields, bones of old houses and churches, half out 
 of sight under nettles ; ivy was sprawling on them. 
 
 " I changed to a slower train at Croom and a slower 
 still at Kanteer. We reached Banturk before eight, 
 but the priest was waiting. The way they all befriend 
 me makes me ashamed ; when the next thing to do is 
 not certain, a good black-coated genie springs up and 
 
108 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 directs. We walked up a slope to his house. At the top 
 I looked round and the train was some way off already, 
 scuttling back to the East with quick, aghast little 
 puffs, like a beast that had taken fright at the place. 
 
 " The priest, Father O'Keel, has his reserve ; per- 
 haps I seem English. Banturk was ' disturbed,' he 
 says, a few years ago. He took me a walk after break- 
 fast; he'd point to a cabin; 'the man of the house,' 
 he'd say, ' there, was convicted thrice \ ; or another had 
 served ten months; or ' When I was in Croom jail my- 
 self I'd see a good third of my people below in the 
 yard, at their exercise.' He described it aggressively, 
 almost, and unconfidentially. Poor man, he must have 
 thought me an Austrian. I told him what a full- 
 blooded Venetian I am. He did not quite warm, even 
 then — he only became more urbanely guarded. 
 
 " The potatoes are bad even here — ' not fit to offer 
 a goose, let alone a clean pig,' a man said. The soil is 
 famished; the bald slopes rise and fall, mile beyond 
 mile, treeless, featureless ; rain soaking into them week 
 after week; the wind blows it into the cabins. ' Will 
 that not content you?' Father O'Keel asked me. 
 ' Two hundred souls in it, and fifty policemen; pig's 
 food, and that only, to eat for the winter; and next 
 week, or the week after that, the sheriff's men coming 
 to drive off any stock that's not starved on -them al- 
 ready. Will nothing do for you at all but Cusheen 
 itself? ' He had a dour ruth in his voice, as if it were 
 I that was going to be hurt. They're all kind here, 
 but it's shiversome. Keep close, comrade; let's keep 
 all the lights up in our hearts and the fire roaring." 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 199 
 
 June read it with a new glow. He had been shaken 
 by something; that grieved her. The way he wrote 
 made her see how his face would look if it were 
 haggard; it hurt her to think of him so. But he had 
 called out to her — it was the first time — as if she could 
 help in some need, and pain was lost in that joy, as a 
 mother's is when she first wakes in the night to a bit- 
 ter little cry for her ministration to some small neces- 
 sity. Then she scolded herself, as her way was. Had 
 she not wanted him strong? Had she not felt only 
 two days before that all her own strength was the 
 overflow of a few drops from the full vessel of his? 
 That was true, but so was the other; she craved his 
 strength, but also his weakness. Let the discord re- 
 solve itself how it could, she would not shrink from it ; 
 she would exult in the two clashing notes. 
 
 She walked about the lanes for hours that day, try- 
 ing to stow away into a tranquil place in her treasury 
 of gladnesses the uncontrollable ecstasy of that dis- 
 covery. It took long. That day was her richest, she 
 half knew that no more treasure could come; she had 
 climbed to the top-gallant of joy. As she came home 
 the moment's perfectness almost weighed on her; the 
 world seemed ripe ; it hung finished, lustrous, its great 
 time reached. A presentient light came ; she saw that, 
 ten years after, if she should walk in these lanes, she 
 might feel " how that oak has failed now," or think, 
 perhaps, that some young ash was a scraggy, poor 
 thing as yet, or wonder for what strolling lovers some 
 overblown flower had decked a great day. But not 
 now. Nothing was past its true prime now, or before 
 
200 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 it; everything had lived only to be as it was then; 
 even the things gone to seed by the way could hardly 
 have their hearts in the past, or the very young things 
 be pushing towards to-morrow. People, too, of many 
 ages and kinds, all stood at the delicious crisis of their 
 lives; for this they had lived, old women with seamed 
 and drawn faces to be the perfected paintings of pa- 
 tience and waiting that they were now, and boys to be 
 running wild with their heels flinging up, for figures 
 of youth. The world stood up perfect, with no old 
 transports of joy to ache back at, nor far-off ends for 
 desire to live in; she stood as though at the middle of 
 a wheel, with all things and times and people run- 
 ning in on it like spokes, bent on it and centering 
 at it. 
 
 But the note of ecstasy, like that of agony, will not 
 be held. You may climb from peak to peak of joy, 
 but the way between them must dip. June was down 
 from the heights and out of the glow when the next 
 letter came — from Cusheen at last. 
 
 " I have crossed the moor to Cusheen. Such a 
 moor ! I don't know how wide — leagues and leagues ; 
 the only moor in the world ; ' a heath,' ' a blasted 
 heath ' — Shakespeare dreamt it, the time his mind 
 was just on the brink. We drove for five hours and 
 saw no one; not a goat, even. There was a wind; the 
 grass by the road whistled loud enough for a while, 
 then it dropped to a whine, and then thinned right 
 away into odd wisps of whimpering. Then it stopped 
 quite — not the wind ; it must have been the grass that 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 201 
 
 stopped; it starved by the road till the wind had none 
 left to play on. Then we came to Cusheen. 
 
 " Cusheen is not made of earth, like other places 
 that people live in. It's stone — one rumpled sheet of 
 it; some drift dirt in the wrinkles, of course, but the 
 rest just naked; it streamed and shone with rain, like 
 wet slates in moonlight. That's all I've seen yet. The 
 few hours I've been here the Father has not let me out 
 of his sight. He seems to fear I might be knocked 
 down by the sight of his parish unless he were there to 
 interpret God's ways. He's always with me — no, al- 
 ways a little way off; they all are; I'm coming to feel 
 like a child that has found its way into a wood full of 
 gnomes of some kind that won't come out and parley, 
 but peep and draw back and watch from behind trunks 
 of trees and whisper together and pass him on deeper 
 into the wood; it always opens a little in front and 
 closes in behind me. I avow it, I'm solitary, with this 
 cordon all round, wherever I move, and all with the 
 one manner — civil and helpful and that, but oh, their 
 paralyzing tact! It's as if I were going to be hanged 
 and they might have to hold me down yet. I'm not 
 of the fold, of course; that must be it. 
 
 " You see, I tell all, without shame; if I shiver you 
 hear the teeth chatter. Still, it is all, I think. I'll say, 
 after to-morrow. On into the wood to-morrow." 
 
 No letter came next day, or the next. Through 
 those two days June thought she was standing it well; 
 too well? — she asked herself once or twice, chidingly; 
 had she grown hard? At the end of the second day 
 
202 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 panic broke with a rush through the wall on which she 
 had mounted guard with the staunchness that she had 
 taken for want of heart. The thing came in the dark; 
 she had put out her light, she was going resolutely to 
 sleep, when suddenly the darkness changed ; it ceased 
 to be innocent ; first an infinitesimal buzz was abroad, 
 the beat of a droning hot pulse; and then the be- 
 leaguering terror ran in on her — it came from all 
 round, it was like a multitude, it was everywhere, as 
 if the whole air were cellular and every cell of it a fear 
 for Aubrey, all of them pressing in at the beset brain 
 to possess it. 
 
 She must have slept at moments after that, for some 
 of the night's train of torments were dream, mostly 
 the fleet portrait-dreams that stab lovers and friends; 
 not illusions of action, with time passing, but fugitive 
 visions of something itself immobile or arrested, as if 
 she saw, through shifting breaks in a mist, one or 
 another poignant set look on the most dear face. At 
 times she saw him appealingly small, a child rendingly 
 alone with some trouble or frustrate plan. When she 
 awoke from that, fear itself had to wait while love 
 grew into twice itself by musing on all that she had 
 lost of him, the years before they met, when he must 
 have had a child's sky-darkening griefs and a boy's 
 dumbly-swallowed humiliations, and she not there. 
 Other dreams, too; one, monochromatic with dust, of 
 an end to the world ; every one else in this dream was 
 dead ; they had not loved enough ; only Aubrey and 
 she were alive, and he ill in a dim cell of a room under- 
 ground, out of a tunneled corridor; she tended him, 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 203 
 
 keeping his heart up, until, going out about some of 
 his needs, she returned to see the earth wall of the 
 room crumbling loose, and then the bed-clothes slip- 
 ping away into shapelessness too, like loose sand. 
 1 Yes, of course, they were spun out of dust, they 
 couldn't cohere," she was hurriedly telling herself in 
 the dream, and then saw that his hand, where it lay out 
 on the sheet, was trickling away into dust too; its dust 
 and the dust of the sheet streamed over the edge of 
 the bed together and made one heap on the floor; then 
 she looked for his face and awoke and lay panting 
 with the scream still stuck in her throat. And then 
 it all came again in another form, and then another. 
 
 She told him only the last of these, before the light 
 of release. Night throbbed through at length; as soon 
 as one bird piped it seemed fair to say, " I have fought 
 it through now," and to go to her eastern window to 
 wait for the sun, to make sure of the sun. There was 
 a little table there, with a candle on it and things for 
 writing. She wrote while she waited: — "I have 
 awaked from a freakish half-dream — that you were at 
 sea, or out on a wild heath, I couldn't tell which, and a 
 storm was coming. I heard it pass my window on 
 its way to you ; all the garden rustled and the poplars 
 must have shuddered white, I thought — a light was 
 thrown up on the ceiling, but I couldn't warn you, for 
 some reason, and then the rushing thing was gone past 
 and the dead leaves danced behind it like bits of paper 
 after a train; I was too late, it would reach you before I 
 could ; I couldn't warn you. How good to wake and look 
 out into the garden ! Ancient, immovable stillness out 
 
204 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 there — nothing had stirred except in my crazy night- 
 mare. It was all right. The light in the east was just 
 beginning to draw the poplars in black, with an edge 
 like black lace, flat on a sky like a sheet, pearly blue — " 
 
 She wrote "was" and not "is"; her letter must 
 come as word of a little mischance wholly over, not as 
 a cry out of distress. Love may fear all things, in 
 secret, but hope of all things must ring in its voice. 
 So she resolved, but day lingered ; could she be even 
 sure that the candle was paling? Remember, the blood 
 was low — she had hardly slept, and it had been 
 autumn's first frost ; up from her bare feet to the knees 
 the cold numbed her, it deadened her fingers past writ- 
 ing. That undid her again ; for the writing had 
 helped; stoutly to seem to be of good heart is almost 
 to be of it. Losing the pen she lost hold of herself; 
 the leagued agues of the shuddering flesh and of ter- 
 rified tenderness shook her with paroxysms not to be 
 mastered at first, only kept from convulsive wailing 
 by dropping down on her knees to kill down thought, 
 to head it off, instant by instant, with set mechanic 
 exercises of prayer. 
 
 " I prayed for you to Mary, Mother of God," she 
 wrote on, when she could. That much, perhaps, she 
 would not hide. And then day came ; the undiscour- 
 aged miracle of morning broke over downs of dia- 
 monded gray. Friendly and faithful flame! Surely 
 no rocket answering a spent ship's burning cry could 
 ever have burst a ball of kinder fire against the domed 
 ceiling of night. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 " Some veil did fall— I knew it all of yore." 
 
 D. G. Rossetti. 
 
 IT rained itself out in the night after Aubrey last 
 wrote. By dawn the clouds had lifted enough to 
 form a flat awning ; the eye saw uncannily far in the 
 stratum of clean- washed air between that dark roof 
 and the ground. 
 
 " A grand day for a view," said the priest, after 
 breakfast; "you'd like to step up to a place that I 
 have in my mind — not above a few perches from here. 
 You'll see every acre that's in it." He fingered his hat 
 nervously, though the words had been cold. A cold 
 nervousness had been freezing their talk over breakfast 
 into a few brittle, impotent icicle-stumps of polite con- 
 versation. 
 
 Inland the awning of cloud was impaled on a black 
 mountain. They walked a mile towards its foot, with 
 a civil fuss about who should go first at each stile. 
 Then Power turned. " Will you look now? " he said. 
 
 Aubrey did. As he turned, moor, mountain and 
 sea composed themselves into a unity, seemed to have 
 modeled themselves, like a clay that was its own sculp- 
 tor, into the image of — what was it? "Why, it's 
 like — " Aubrey stared at the effigy. 
 
 " Yes? " The priest waited. 
 
 " Like a bird's foot wading into the sea." 
 
 205 
 
206 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " Yes," said the priest, with a smile of wintry pa- 
 tience, as if one more child had done an old sum. 
 \ubrey thought he could see all the times that Power 
 had come to this spot to show English strangers his 
 cure of stone and brine and to watch straw fires of pity 
 Hare up for the moment in their eyes and voices. 
 " You're struck with the way the shank of the leg 
 comes down out of the clouds? And the size of the 
 bird you'd imagine above? Did you ever see claws the 
 equals of those? Or a match for the venomous clench 
 they have, into the bottom of the sea? " 
 
 Aubrey was looking. The seaward foot of the 
 mountain, Mulvrack, spread into five spined, convex 
 promontories, high and knuckle-like. Their aquiline 
 ends struck downwards into the silently tumbling 
 whiteness of distant waves, and between each of these 
 claws and the next was a webbing of lower land, half 
 submerged, its seaward end a fiord. To the side of one 
 of the rocky talons, a little below where the two watch- 
 ers stood, but high above the sea, there adhered a hud- 
 dle of pigmy haystacks. 
 
 " I've lost the village," said Aubrey. 
 
 " Didn't you take it for haystacks, now? " — Power 
 made some poor joke — " hard to find needles, ay, or 
 whole cabins, in haystacks." He must have made it 
 before ; his smile was a faded one. 
 
 Aubrey stared across with unreconciled eyes at the 
 kraal of mud huts, not even whitewashed; dirt-col- 
 ored, pendent, they seemed, from here, to stick like 
 swallows' mud nests to a wall. " But there are no 
 people ! " he said. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 207 
 
 The priest pointed a great way down to the shore. 
 " You see the specks stirring below there? Half out 
 of the water?" 
 
 " Men? " Aubrey asked, with his eyes on them. 
 
 "Ay, and women; scraping the sea-weed off from 
 the rocks. Look, now." Aubrey's eye followed the 
 priest's pointing finger. Up from the little group of 
 amphibians a dotted line of other specks, all in motion, 
 ascended crookedly to a high place inland, just under 
 the awning of cloud, where the naked stone of the 
 mountain began to glisten with wet. 
 
 "Women, the climbing dots are," said the priest; 
 " they take the weed up on their heads. Then it's 
 laid on the slabs you see shining there." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " Ach, a seed'll strike root in it, all in good time." 
 
 Aubrey was puzzled ; a little hurt too. He thought : 
 " The man brought me out here to see how bad things 
 were. Now he makes light of them." 
 
 " There's an advantage," Power pursued. ' When 
 there's a frost on the peak there, and then sun in the 
 morning, you'd see the rock come rattling down from 
 above till it's ground into shale, ay, and that into 
 sand, almost, to mix with the weed, the way it would 
 soon nourish potatoes." He seemed to be arguing 
 now; and that not with Aubrey either, but with some 
 one standing beside or behind him. Power's look, too, 
 went that way — past Aubrey's shoulder, as though he 
 stood impeding the priest's view of some more taking 
 figure or scene, of the mind's making. 
 
 Aubrey groped for a clue ; dim work for a conscious 
 
208 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 heathen; still, it absorbed and excited; it turned him 
 for the moment into a being of faculties happy in exer- 
 cise, gleefully nosing at new trails, because they are 
 trails, as a healthy dog does. He marveled; so the 
 priest could go into trance; the priest was the real 
 thing; he had the stare of the true visionary whose 
 soul is holding out to the last the high-pitched note of 
 some difficult beatitude. Could he be seeing, up there 
 where the rocks sent down from above came to rest, 
 and the weeds brought up from below were laid, his 
 God and his own race mystically leagued to broaden 
 the life-bearing earth ? Rare, glorious illusion, good to 
 think about. Aubrey admiringly left him possessed 
 until any more silence might seem like comment. 
 " Could they not fish? " he asked, to set their tongues 
 moving. 
 
 "Is it fish?" The Father looked at him sharply. 
 " Fish, on a coast the like of that? ' : A gesture almost 
 extravagant called to witness all the visible miles of in- 
 dented, harborless stone on which the rollers of the 
 Atlantic were breaking. 
 
 " Is that not a breakwater ? " Aubrey had fancied 
 he saw a low, ruler-drawn line that ran out from the 
 end of one of the claws set down into the sea, till it 
 almost met the tip of another, enclosing a tiny space 
 with no white fret in it. 
 
 " Not a boat is there in it," said Power, as if he were 
 contradicting a slander. " They did make an offer, a 
 long time back, at fishing of some description. Many 
 were drowned at it, one way and another. You'd hear 
 of their bodies found floating away in the North, dear 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 209 
 
 knows how far. How in the world would a curagh* 
 find the way in at a hole like the door of a house in the 
 dark night? " He spoke agitatedly, pressing his case 
 without any need that Aubrey could see, and then 
 abruptly dropping it. " Step with me this way a min- 
 ute," he said, and led the way, first uphill and then to 
 the right — the South, as the country priest called it. 
 In this way they crossed from the ridge of the upper 
 tendon of one of those stone claws to that of the next, 
 so that a new hollow came into sight beyond the new 
 ridge ; and, looking into the new hollow, Aubrey saw a 
 color he had not seen since Banturk. Between the 
 white breakers below and the faded velveteen brown of 
 the mountain moor above there stretched a huge mea- 
 dow of grass. It was luscious ; his eye loved the good 
 green ; how it must wave in summer, he thought, when 
 gusts blew in from the west and printed on it in fugi- 
 tive shadings the scud of their fan-shaped pressure ! 
 
 Power was eyeing him. " Now, isn't that the good 
 land?" he asked, when Aubrey could take his eyes 
 from it. " Not a century back it was stone, as naked 
 as where they're working above. Their grandparents 
 made it the fat earth it is. They were put out of it 
 when it was done; they had to do it again, higher up, 
 and again higher up, and their children's children are 
 at it to-day." 
 
 " It's beastly," said Aubrey, flushing, the wrong was 
 so vivid. He had not known of such things. 
 
 The priest did not concur and did not dissent. He 
 
 *A curagh is a rude boat made of canvas stretched over a 
 framework of wood. 
 
210 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 only went on. " Three pounds an acre they pay Mr. 
 Newman for letting them turn his rock into pasture, 
 for him to lease to a big grazier at Croom; that and a 
 half-crown apiece for leave to take the weed from his 
 ocean to do it with. If it should go on a thousand 
 years more there'll be cows to the tip of Mulvrack, and 
 not a tittle left of Cusheen but a few stones in the net- 
 tles. Isn't it natural? How would the honey be got 
 and nobody smoking the bees out that made it ? ' 
 
 Aubrey was glad of the irony. It was of this world ; 
 it seemed to exhale from good human passions, sane 
 anger and scorn, homely and sound-seeming moods 
 after that other remote, warped mood of mystic acqui- 
 escence in things cruel and foul. And then, in a mo- 
 ment, the satisfaction was gone ; the priest's look had 
 seemed to dismiss his own sarcasm ; it had been noth- 
 ing to him, or only a means to keep Aubrey off, to 
 hold him in play outside, to amuse him, after his kind, 
 with trifles, while others unwound behind closed doors 
 the innermost coils of ecstasy. Aubrey, the black- 
 balled, the sentenced waiter in ante-rooms, tried to 
 muster a civil, cheerful defiance; he braced himself 
 to abide, in this rarefied air, by his vulgar judgments. 
 " It's beastly," he said, " beyond words." 
 
 The priest looked him over. Aubrey's eyes were 
 away on the fenced Eden of emerald ; still, he felt the 
 look through his skin, and what the look meant, as he 
 imagined — that he was a decent heathen, and that, in a 
 beast which must go on its belly all the days of its life, 
 it was something to have even the wish to put some 
 things right on the earth. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 211 
 
 " There's a beauty about it, too," Power said, in a 
 tone of secure, proud understatement, as he might have 
 told a child, who could pick out an A, that there are 
 fine things in books. He looked Aubrey over again, as 
 if seeking some point on his person at which the right 
 arrow, if one could find it, might penetrate. ' Would 
 you believe it," he said, " that in this and five parishes 
 round there was never heard of a girl that went wrong 
 nor a theft but once only? ' Then he gave up, as if he 
 had suddenly seen or just remembered that it was of 
 no use. " Not but we're beggars," he broke off with a 
 little laugh of rather savage humility. " Beggars we 
 are and taking your help at this minute." 
 
 Aubrey could almost have fancied there was a faint 
 stress on the "your." "Taken for English again!' 
 he thought. To lighten the talk he told eagerly how 
 he was Irish ; he rummaged his mind for the few odd 
 shreds his father had told him about early days — 
 about the famine and cholera, most of them — how on 
 a country ride his horse would shy at a body here and 
 a body there, of those who had died on the road. 
 
 Queer man the priest was! He showed, with per- 
 fect civility, no trace of interest. He could not have 
 cared less if this sort of thing happened daily and 
 every one from England turned Irish on his hands. 
 He almost snatched, in fact, at another subject, forcing 
 it into connection by hurriedly taking up Aubrey's last 
 word. " A road beyond there — you came by it last 
 night — was made in the Famine; " and then Power 
 checked, with a bitten lip, as if it were not what he 
 would have said if he had waited. 
 
212 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 They were walking already across rises and dips m 
 the shabby brown gloss of the moor, towards the raw 
 end of the road. It stopped a mile from Cusheen as if 
 its desire to get there had suddenly failed. From the 
 cut end of this artery any traffic that coursed it so far 
 had to spurt out on the open moor; thence the road 
 only pointed the way to its aim. From where the last 
 macadam lay, the two looked up the road inland; it 
 rose for a furlong or two, to a clear sky-line, and 
 there, drawn large and dark on the sky, was a singular 
 sight — a man descending swiftly on Cusheen, not on 
 the road, but beside it, in the rough of the moor, mak- 
 ing huge strides from tussock to tussock of boggy grass 
 and leaping springily across the drain trenches. 
 
 Power named him almost before Aubrey saw that 
 he was of middle-age, large-boned and fine-drawn with 
 hard work and spare feeding. " Horgan, a harvester, 
 back out of England." 
 
 The home-comer had to be greeted. " You're hav- 
 ing grand exercise, Horgan." 
 
 " I am that, your reverence. The drains on the 
 shoulder above there are the width of the world. And 
 the number! Three miles or four have I walked in 
 standin' leps, out of twenty that's in it from Croom." 
 
 " And what in the wide world is wrong with the 
 road? " Aubrey heard his own voice trail an answering 
 rhythm, as if it had picked up a tune it had liked once 
 and forgotten afterwards. 
 
 Horgan looked to the priest ; he seemed to implore 
 extrication. The priest gave no help; he looked 
 troubled himself. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 213 
 
 " Whethen," Horgan spluttered it out, " we med 
 up our minds, the whole four of us, three and twenty 
 years back, that we'd not put a fut to it — Francy Joyce, 
 an' Kilfoyle, an' Michael M'Gurk an' meself. God rest 
 the souls of the three of them; an', while I'll last, 
 please God, I'll keep off it enough for the set of us." 
 
 " Ah, you're a foolish fellow," the priest chid, with- 
 out harshness, as if a child had made itself ill with 
 some mad labor of love. 
 
 ' Well, I'll be leggin' it home. From this out there's 
 no bother about it," said Horgan, eyeing with appro- 
 bation the roadless mile of bog that remained. 
 
 'Why was it?" asked Aubrey when Horgan was 
 gone. 
 
 For a moment the priest seemed to be choosing be- 
 tween words. The ones he chose were, " That man 
 was a cholera baby." 
 
 Odd phrase ! — and yet Aubrey knew it. Nothing 
 is lost from memory — only stored out of the way, and 
 the key of the drawer mislaid for a while. The key 
 turned in the lock. ' I've heard about cholera babies," 
 he said, surprised that he could say it. 
 
 "You have?" 
 
 ' Some one or other told me. He'd been to a cholera 
 hospital — some sort of barn, a fitted-up thing — and 
 two nurses were at a back door shaking the bodies of 
 dead babies out of their night-shirts on to a heap of 
 other small bodies they'd done with. The new bodies 
 slipped about on the heaped ones." 
 
 " Horgan was treated so." 
 
 "Thrown out for dead?" 
 
214 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 " He was that. He was born in the Famine. They 
 went for the rent and found the father and mother 
 dead on the floor, and she with her mouth full of grass 
 she'd been chewing, the way she might have milk for 
 the child. I've heard the child was past crying; noth- 
 ing he'd do but keep his mouth open and move his head 
 this way and that, like a young bird starving. They 
 took it for cholera. So away he was brought and put 
 to bed in the cholera barns till the head of him ceased 
 moving, and then I'll engage they were in a hurry, 
 with this and with that, and there'd be another child 
 to put into the night-shirt." 
 
 " And then? " The priest was too much, with his 
 labored coldness of tone. Aubrey was modern enough; 
 anti-sentimentalism was good in his eyes, but not this 
 stony cataloguing of horrors. It was not honest cal- 
 lousness — that he was sure of ; nor yet a fair overture, 
 such as some men make when moved, for a compact 
 of understatement; it was a blind, a fence, another 
 implement of exclusion. And why? Aubrey chafed. 
 Need one be thought a petrified brute for not being a 
 Catholic? 
 
 " Some one was passing that thought there was life 
 in the child and took it home, wrapped it up warmly 
 and gave it nourishment — not a thing else did it need." 
 The priest's voice was slow and frozen; each word, as 
 it dripped, was like a drop added on to an icicle. 
 
 Still, Aubrey felt better now. He had a warming 
 sense of the deep, plain satisfactoriness of that other 
 man, who had eyes and a working pity and knew what 
 to do. " That was the kind of man to have passing," 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 215 
 
 he grunted, trying to keep a firm lip. He added, in 
 thought, " And not a priest, or a Levite." 
 
 " He was the man," Power said with a gulp, " who 
 made the road at your feet." 
 
 "Made it?" 
 
 " Made it be made. A Famine relief work. He 
 gave them no rest in Dublin till they'd set about it." 
 
 " Yet Horgan won't use it? " 
 
 " You've seen." 
 
 " Although that man made it ? " 
 
 " No, but because he did." 
 
 Aubrey stared blankly. It was not lifelike, all this 
 sailing dead against strong head winds of natural mo- 
 tive; it all belonged to the theater, or to old novels; 
 people in Victor Hugo, people who only existed to cap 
 a surprise or bring clown a curtain, might be like that. 
 
 The priest watched him. " Ach, don't I know," he 
 said. " that it's foolishness ! ' To the Greeks, foolish- 
 ness.' Still — " He stopped. His gesture was one 
 of despair of prevailing over a natural darkness like 
 night. It was as if he said, " There was I going to 
 talk about colors, and quite forgot you were born 
 blind." Then his courtesy came back in a compunc- 
 tious abundance. " You'd like to get on? " he asked 
 gently. 
 
 They left the amputated end of the road. The 
 Northerner's correspondent was plunged for the rest 
 of that morning in economic researches. They were 
 a joy and relief. If you just did them hard, some- 
 thing came. It was like rowing a boat. And if some- 
 thing good came it would seem good to Mullivant. 
 
210 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 That was dead sure. There was still a world where 
 effect followed cause and the better was always pre- 
 ferred to the worse. As Aubrey went on with his 
 work he felt a hankering love for plain bread and thick 
 wool and stout timber. In the back of his mind he 
 made lists of such things, and of people like them, 
 plain people of whole-meal good sense and fleecy geni- 
 ality and oaken staunchness. Commonplace thoughts 
 for a " brilliant " young author; but he was in a queer 
 place and was not sure that its queerness was not in- 
 vading him; so he felt his way back to take hold of 
 things that any one can be sure of. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 " It's that queer, what people will do for religion." 
 
 From the Hedge Schoolmaster's Lucretius. 
 
 AT the mid-day meal the cold was intense in their 
 talk. To Aubrey the priest's house had grown 
 horrible. Everywhere oil-cloth and oleographs of 
 saints and trashy stained glass in acrid blues and fero- 
 cious or sugary reds ; it worked like a morgue on Au- 
 brey; it gave him cramp in the jaws; the polite words 
 had to be ground out singly. 
 
 Still, he could get away soon to his room, to write, 
 to transfer to the Northerner's readers the blow 
 that Cusheen gave to the eye. He went at it hard and 
 it did him good ; it reassured him that there was still 
 work on which the will could put itself forth as the fist 
 does in punching a fixed ball, secure of an unevasive 
 resistance. The poor devils here were cut off as 
 though at the top of a burning house; the Brabburn 
 people had ladders; the thing was, to let them know. 
 As he wrote, the job bared itself down, in his sight, to 
 a quest of clear loudness and speed in a call for rescue. 
 Such work, while in hand, makes all things simple 
 and turns many courses to one. At least it arrests or 
 suspends perplexity and misgivings. There was June 
 — their way on together ran up into mists, as if it were 
 up Mulvrack ; well, wherever it went, they might hold 
 together not the less tightly for his having got this 
 
 217 
 
218 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 tiling done. There was the priest, with his frigid sig- 
 naling to a fellow across estranging deeps ; it hurt to 
 be on such terms with any one; still, the priest was a 
 saint, surely enough, and a saint must have got hold 
 of Tightness, whatever queer end he gripped of it; 
 then, whatever was right must somehow be all of a 
 piece ; its bits must fit in together at last, like a puzzle 
 map, to make up one whole, though they looked hard 
 to assort, certainly. So, if this thing were worth 
 doing, at least he could stand no worse with Power 
 for putting it through. 
 
 He had heard that the post went at sunset. The 
 letter-box was below, Power said, as he gave Aubrey 
 tea some three hours later. It stood in the village 
 " square." " Will you give me your letters to post? ' ; 
 Power asked. " I'd as lief walk one way as the 
 other." 
 
 No; Aubrey would have no marble pillars of 
 churches mobilizing themselves to run with his letters. 
 He said he wanted some air and a smell of the sea. 
 The priest said he would show him the way. 
 
 Aubrey's spirits were up, with the craftsman's heat 
 still aglow in his head. Was his host really free? he 
 asked eagerly. Yes. Would it tire the Father if they 
 went down to the shore now, instead of to-morrow, to 
 see the weed-gathering? 
 
 " Ach, is it tire?' : Aubrey liked the sound-limbed 
 priest's disdain of the idea. Power looked at his 
 watch. There was an hour till dark. Work would be 
 ceasing, but two or three of the creatures would be at 
 it yet ; John Devine certainly, while he could see ; John 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 219 
 
 was queer in the head, and never any great hand at the 
 work, and must stick to it longer before he'd have as 
 much done as another. Power talked on about this 
 John diffusely, as if perhaps he wanted to think about 
 something else and must run up a screen of words be- 
 hind which to do it. 
 
 The thin final segment of the sun was dropping be- 
 yond the high wall of fore-shortened sea when they 
 left the house; before they had gone the three hundred 
 yards to the Cusheen cabins the last ray was gone, the 
 wall of sea was cold black, fretted with cold white, 
 and the wind, which had never stopped, went whim- 
 pering about like a starved thing in the clear, colorless 
 light. Fugitive, apprehensive and cruel, in that light, 
 if in any, you might think that malice herself was 
 abroad ; it makes children impish. As Power 
 and Aubrey came into the " square " at one end — it 
 was no square, only a small space, a triangular gan- 
 glion made by the meeting of three rough tracks, with 
 hovels about it — two urchins of nine or ten were con- 
 fessing the influence of the hour. The hour itself was 
 told at the middle point of the " square," on a public 
 clock at the top of a small, neat column, an odd sight 
 in a west coast village. Suddenly one boy, possessed 
 by peremptory inspiration, picked up a handful of mud 
 and flung it, with the address of a marksman, full in 
 the white face of the clock. For a moment he mused 
 on the success of this defilement, before communicat- 
 ing it to his friend. 
 
 " Jemmy," he said, " I'm just after throwin' a gran' 
 slam of mud at th' ould divil's clock." 
 
220 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 Jemmy reviewed the good work benignly. " Th' 
 ould divil!' he said with assenting aversion. Both 
 picked up more mud. 
 
 " Be off out of that," the priest called. They fled 
 to earth somewhere between the cabins, with rabbit 
 promptitude, but their voices were faintly heard con- 
 tumaciously chanting far off, " We'll hang ould 
 
 on a sour apple-tree." " Ould " — what ? What was 
 the name? Aubrey could not quite catch it where it 
 recurred in this litany of derision, and yet he thought 
 he had caught it the first time, and yet he could not 
 say now what it was that he thought he had caught, 
 so elvish, at times, are sense and recollection as well as 
 boys. 
 
 Father Power looked vexed; he walked faster, si- 
 lently, down towards the sea. The ground became 
 broken; it kept Aubrey's eyes on his feet for some 
 minutes. When he looked up the straight line he had 
 seen from above, ruled on the sea as though on paper, 
 was close below — a little stone pier, rude but sufficient, 
 holding a snug, minute haven. Not a craft was there 
 in it of any kind. 
 
 Aubrey turned to the Father, wondering. At the 
 pier's head a beacon was blinking into brightness, kind 
 and jocund in the first twilight, but strangely idle above 
 that boatless sea. Along the pier a man was walking 
 landward ; he must have lit the lamp. 
 
 " It was not the want of a light, then — ? " Aubrey 
 began. The priest could not have lied that morning. 
 There must be some honest clue to this riddle. Aubrey 
 was sure the priest had not lied. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 221 
 
 Power opened his hands, as one throws up a game. 
 " I deceived you," he said; " I tried to." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " I'm not flint." He gave Aubrey a new look of 
 remote and melancholy kindness. It lasted some sec- 
 onds, as though it might stay there till more were said. 
 Then it wavered and fell off ; a gap seemed to break in 
 the straight line of a purpose. Still, he went on as if 
 through each stage of that mustering and flagging of 
 a resolve Aubrey's thought must have kept step with 
 his and would be where it stood when it found speech 
 again. " When he saw the rate they were drowned, 
 at the fishing, he sold a farm that he had at Kilmurry 
 and hired a party of masons and smiths from the town 
 and went out with them daily. Great work they had 
 at the start with the rock that the light is on, and it 
 only bare of the sea for one hour or two in the 
 twelve." 
 
 "The breakwater, too — that man made it?' 
 Aubrey glanced up to where, high on the moor, the 
 contemned road ran white to its abrupt end. 
 
 " Ay did he, of strong stone. It'll last till there's 
 nothing but cows to look at it here, coughing out in 
 the fields that Cusheen'll be then — they or the one man 
 that's paid to be minding the lamp and keeping the 
 clock beyond at it for ever." 
 
 " He saw to that, too?" 
 
 " Ay, in his will. There's no end to it." 
 
 Aubrey digested it, looking about him. Behind 
 them six struck on the clock that had undergone the 
 lustral pollution — a tinkling chime, rather melodious; 
 
222 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 it sounded innocent. Things were all in a tale. ' So 
 that put an end to their fishing? " he said, not needing 
 to be told. 
 
 " I don't say they're wise," Power said. " I've told 
 them they're fools. But they're holy." He spoke as 
 a parent might of a daughter who starved to keep 
 chaste. " Ah, then, aren't there terms," he broke out, 
 as though entreating Aubrey, for pity's sake, to see 
 through the dark, " on which you'd be offered good 
 things and have every right in the world to accept 
 them, and yet — " He made again that gesture of giv- 
 ing it up. 
 
 Aubrey thought, " My paganism again? Darkness 
 is darkness — that's what he means, I suppose." ' He 
 did it on terms, then? " he said. 
 
 " Not at the time. The terms came of what he did 
 after. Ah, wouldn't a man — " Power plunged off 
 again, giving himself to another quick gust of invited 
 passion, as if he must speak so, or not get words at 
 all — " wouldn't a man that had had an old coat, or a 
 new one itself, for a present from Judas throw it away, 
 and he stiff with the cold, the time he heard who had 
 sold the Lord God?" 
 
 " Isn't Judas set free for an hour, each Christmas, 
 for having given a leper a coat? ' 
 
 " Ay, but how're we to know the leper didn't perish 
 of cold in the end liefer than make use of it after? ' : 
 
 Aubrey considered. He then said: "You say God 
 was betrayed in Cusheen? " 
 
 Power paused. The gust had sunk that had lifted 
 him. He spoke now as if in compunction, saying no 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 223 
 
 more than he must. " He was parish priest here for 
 eight years. See the place that it is. Wouldn't he be 
 entitled to feel he was trusted by God almost out of 
 His sight? And to break his vows then! And the 
 poor woman ! " 
 
 Aubrey's thoughts ran on the faster. Things rushed 
 to connect themselves, headlong. This was what June 
 had on her mind, here was the faith that did miracles, 
 the lives not to be taken as gifts from an apostate, the 
 wrong done to these people by that pair of whom one 
 shamed her by being of her blood. He thought it out, 
 first to himself for some way, and then, where the 
 roads of conjecture forked, out aloud. ' He was akin 
 to Miss Hathersage?" 
 
 " He was not," Power answered. 
 
 " He married her kinswoman? " 
 
 " No priest could marry." 
 
 "At law, I mean?" 
 
 " God marries; not law. Would He sanction a per- 
 jury?" 
 
 "Still— at law?" 
 
 Power shrugged. " Does it matter? " 
 
 " To them, perhaps, not. But, say they had a 
 child?—" 
 
 The priest was distressed ; Aubrey could see it. He 
 thought Power looked like a woman affronted by some 
 loose speech, and he was sorry. ' I understand," he 
 conceded hurriedly, " it would be, anyhow, only a child, 
 in your eyes, of illicit love?" 
 
 " Ay, and worse." 
 
 "Of adultery?" 
 
224 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " Worse than that." 
 
 "Incest?" 
 
 " Ay. Do you think any woman could go to con- 
 fession and she not able to speak to the priest the way 
 a motherless girl would speak to her father at home ? ' 
 
 " Is that how all Catholics think? — the Hathersages, 
 for instance? " 
 
 "Think? Of the son?" 
 
 Oh, there was a child, then, Aubrey mused, still 
 piecing away in his mind. 
 
 The priest went on, picking words as with effort : 
 " They're proud, and they're pious? " 
 
 'What! Guy?' : Aubrey's mind, working within 
 at its inferences, came out for an instant to smile at 
 the door. 
 
 ' Guy is a good practical Catholic. So is his father. 
 The women are that and more to it. The mother had 
 one other sister and " — so it was June's maternal aunt 
 that married this priest who broke free; Aubrey 
 caught it up swiftly — " the poor girl was taking her 
 vows at the time, at Rathfarnham; the shame almost 
 killed her. Mrs. Hathersage never could rest till she 
 died, for wanting to make it up to the creatures here 
 for the loss they were at by their piety. Now it's the 
 same with the girl. Not one of them all could have 
 lived but for hoping that all these years would fade out 
 the mark of dirt they had on them all. God knows 
 what they'd do if it ever came back on what's left of 
 them." 
 
 " How could it? " Aubrey asked idly. His thought 
 was more practical. What a non-Catholic he was! 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 225 
 
 And, if this were true, that the priest was saying, what 
 a Catholic June ! There were hazards before them. 
 But hazards are challenges, opportunities; so they are 
 good. He felt strong and secure. 
 
 The priest was replying : " The world's not so large. 
 God knows how soon any person at all might meet 
 with another." 
 
 Really the man was fantastic, poor zealot, thought 
 Aubrey. " Well, there are pretty good odds against 
 it," Aubrey said cheeringly. 
 
 "Mind now," said Power; "it's slippery work on 
 these stones." They were down within reach of the 
 flying spray now; they walked over rounded rocks 
 slimy with weed. " Where at all is Devine? " said the 
 priest. On the way they had met other sheep of his 
 flock, gaunt and blue with long wading, and now 
 trailing dead feet uphill. " Not a one is left at it 
 but he." 
 
 He knows each one, as if they were not sheep 
 merely, but cows, Aubrey thought, as they pressed on, 
 over the splashed stones. The priest was quickening. 
 "Where in the wide world — ?' he muttered, and 
 then, again, " What were they all about, to leave him 
 in that way ? ' And then, " And he the creature he is, 
 as apt to do any one thing as another! ' He was run- 
 ning now, this way and that, slipping and using his 
 hands to keep up, with his hat pushed back from a 
 forehead hot with anxiety as well as haste ; from each 
 fresh stone that he topped he peered outward to where 
 the waves at its seaward base were thumping and 
 splitting. 
 
226 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 " I'll engage it was here he was working," said 
 Power, scrambling on to another smooth and high boss 
 with a wet nap of green; and, surely, from there they 
 saw a singular sight. Eight or ten yards out to sea, 
 as if drawn away from the rocks by a backwash, a 
 short, shapeless bundle of cloth was floating, most of 
 it under water, but part still emergent and dry and 
 looking unnatural there, and horrible. The priest gave 
 a sob and slid over the edge of the rock into eight feet 
 of water and struck out with short, clumsy strokes for 
 the bundle. Then Aubrey first saw that it was a man's 
 back, with the head and legs hanging down under 
 water. Luckily Aubrey had a good high take-off on 
 that rock; he could dive pretty well half the way 
 through the air, and, swimming hard from the instant 
 his own body was under, he opened his eyes to see 
 the drowning man bulk dim between them and the day- 
 light above, the pendent head and legs like the ends of 
 the golden fleece on a coat of arms. Aubrey came up 
 outside it and had the man fast by the back of the 
 clothes, with the drooping head held clear of the water, 
 when, as his eyes sought the shore, he felt a glow of 
 delight that almost made him cry. The priest was ar- 
 riving — the old brick! — the most absurd, beautiful 
 sight in the world, with his little, ineffectual strokes 
 and grave, intent look, and the black coat ballooning 
 high over his back with all the air from about the rest 
 of his person gone into it. 
 
 There was work for ten minutes, to bring the three 
 in to the little spit of stones, between bigger rocks, 
 where Devine had been scraping weed when a wave 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 227 
 
 took his tired feet from under him. Aubrey feared at 
 one moment that Power was done for; he had to be 
 helped; but on shore he toiled again like a good one 
 and knew what to do: how to empty the water out of 
 their man, where to rub, and the way the arms should 
 be worked to set the lungs going, if it could be done. 
 They labored absorbedly ; minutes it might have been 
 for, or hours, for all they could tell. No, though ; it 
 could not be hours : it was not dark yet when Devine 
 began to splutter and fight in their hands and wail in 
 the Gaelic, "Not into the sea again!' And when 
 Aubrey and Power were free to look at each other 
 across him, each had light to see that the other's face 
 was green with these last urgent minutes of terror. 
 That exchange gave them an instant of vast, flowless 
 pleasure; each found out the other, and lo! what he 
 found was himself. It was like one of the fugitive 
 beatitudes that visit a few moments of awaking, when 
 some happy thought comes first and nothing else is 
 remembered yet. Then they remembered other things, 
 as the awakened sleeper does. 
 
 They could not rest yet. Devine was burnt and 
 stabbed with pains as the blood moved again; he had 
 worked foodless all day and was for collapsing and 
 trying to sleep. He had to be hustled homeward and 
 finally shouldered by Aubrey, the priest trotting stoutly 
 beside the big younger man, showing the way through 
 the dusk and telling Devine, as hearteningly as his own 
 chattering teeth would permit, of the great glass of grog 
 that would surely be lawful for once, and he perishing. 
 
 It was dark when they left Devine's cabin; darker 
 
228 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 than it would be soon, for clouds were packing away 
 and on the horizon a luminousness that spread as it 
 mounted showed where the moon — what was left of 
 the mighty moon of Mill Hill — was about to rise. 
 They had chattered till then, to keep Devine's mind 
 running on the right things, as a man makes a noise 
 to a horse while grooming it. Now they fell wholly 
 silent. It was a short way they still had to walk, but 
 rough; the priest knew every yard by its feel; Aubrey 
 did not; once he stumbled slightly over a stone. The 
 priest's arm was in his in a moment. ' God help you, 
 God help you! " he said in a voice of extraordinary 
 kindness. 
 
 Aubrey laughed. ' No harm done." But when 
 they came into the lamplight within the priest's door, 
 there was still on the priest's face the look of hurt and 
 sore compassion that it must have had when he spoke, 
 for the voice had been that look made audible. 
 
 " Off and away with you now to your room," he 
 said ; they had kicked off their boots in the hall, on the 
 ugly oil-cloth, under the paraffin lamp and the oleo- 
 graphs of martyrs. Power was playing the brisk, im- 
 perious host, but it was a manner superimposed; that 
 other mood, of a tormented affection or pity, showed 
 through it. 
 
 Insensibly Aubrey reacted, resisted. He would not 
 be fathered; he was autonomous; he was all right. 
 Yes, he would change his clothes, he said, but no bed 
 or hot bottles for him ; he had liked the bathe. 
 Whisky? Yes, that would be jolly, and then he would 
 turn out and walk himself warm before supper. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 "Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main." 
 
 Clough. 
 
 THERE was only one way Aubrey could walk : the 
 one road was to Banturk. He caught its raw 
 end by the white gleam on the blackening moor, and 
 strode along, always faster and faster. The blood 
 tingled back into fingers and toes ; into the brain too, 
 no doubt, for soon thought was astir and bubbling; it 
 danced and sang through him. What liquor the 
 priest's was ! — brown velvet and honey and amber and 
 Rembrandt and old fiddle varnish — trains of similes 
 for it tripped across the hot mind. And the priest, 
 what a staunch old Trojan ! Soft-hearted too — he had 
 gurgled over Devine like a mother cat. And decent to 
 Aubrey, the heathen, too. And then there were all his 
 ruthful withholdings and temperings of Athanasian 
 curses on that other heathen, the breakwater-builder. 
 What a man that must have been, too ! He would have 
 to tell June what he thought of that man. 
 
 Aubrey tried to figure him clearly, piecing him out 
 from the things that Power had said of him. They 
 were but small things — he felt that the more, now that 
 he made them all come back; they were false starts, 
 each had begun and then stopped, and each had been 
 
 229 
 
230 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 said with a wince and a picking of phrases, as if some 
 sting had to be taken out in the wording. And yet this 
 man of the light and the clock and the road was real 
 and vivid, even poignantly real, as those people are 
 whom one knows best of all ; his takings of means to 
 ends were all touching, like those of a friend alone in a 
 house at night and seen from outside a window. 
 Aubrey could swear he knew just what that man had 
 felt when the infant Horgan re-embraced the grand 
 adventure of living. Why, Aubrey could hear what 
 the man's very voice had been like. 
 
 They were strange, these priests; they were all of a 
 piece, or a piece of them all was. O'Keel had his 
 touch of Power's own visible twinge of controlled 
 compunction towards Aubrey. All these priests had 
 had it, only each more than the last, ever since Aubrey 
 had landed. No, that was wrong; it was since the 
 time he saw the Archbishop. It had begun from the 
 moment of that little boast of his, surely harmless 
 enough, of his mother's kinship to one of their own 
 august selves, the Cardinal. Yet they were different 
 men, all these like-mannered priests. The mind could 
 not vision the archepiscopal chaplain going to work 
 as Power had done on the plain, humdrum, secular 
 job of landing Devine — mere physical sport for Au- 
 brey's young strength, as he knew, but a tax on cour- 
 age in those non-amphibians. O'Keel, again, would 
 not have looked just the way Power did, that time 
 when the boys scuttled off in the twilight between 
 cabin walls, singing, " We'll hang ould " — ould what 
 was it ? What was it ? He found he was importuning 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 231 
 
 his memory now as he might have asked a doctor 
 whether an illness of June's was mortal. 
 
 The man had been Aubrey's father. He walked 
 back to Cusheen knowing it. No one had told him. 
 The knowledge rose up in him like a night flood, fur- 
 tive and sudden. At one moment it seemed as if no 
 conscious suspicion or fear were pressing; the next, 
 all the dikes gave together ; the long effort, secret even 
 from his own sense, to bank out each trickling advance 
 of the oncoming deluge was quite over. " We'll hang 
 ould Browne " — why, one lobe, or whatever it was, of 
 his mind, had heard it clearly; the other had only just 
 managed to hush it up. And every look and tone of 
 these priests had been throwing the fact at his eyes and 
 ears. More than that, he felt now as if he had all but 
 known it since he was a child ; it was the only key that 
 there could ever have been to so many of the silences 
 of home. 
 
 The end gave him no pain at first. They say a good 
 bullet traveling fast will go through your vitals so 
 cleanly that you may be left not writhing nor even 
 bleeding much, but only musing, " I'm done for," or, 
 with detachment, " That other poor buffer that was 
 ' I ' is done for," and taking in whatever there is to see 
 — high grass or cairned stones or things going on in 
 the sky — with the eager liking the spirit has for the 
 concrete things of which it is to take leave. So Aubrey 
 at first felt a kind of dry pity, as if for some man in 
 a semi-vivid book who had set out on his way whis- 
 tling, like other people, and then some brute of an un- 
 killed force had broken loose from the dark ages and 
 
232 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 mauled him. He could not feel more than that yet ; he 
 was, indeed, unconsciously resting, as hunted fugitives 
 find a great peace at first when they are caught. But 
 the place at which he was hit had become already 
 curiously memorable. The first Cusheen cabin was 
 near; squat under its thatch it thrust a rude angle, 
 anyhow, out at the track, now no longer a road ; in a 
 window, a squalid, square port-hole in mud, a candle 
 just lit was struggling and blinking into steadier flame. 
 He had a rather hunger-like thought of the state of 
 those who were round that bleared light, to whom 
 nothing had happened. 
 
 The priest, crouching over the parlor fire, looked 
 up from his Latin A-Kempis when Aubrey came in. 
 The priest saw, directly. He made Aubrey sit in a 
 chair and stood behind him with both hands on his 
 shoulders. " You know ? " Power said. 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 The priest, in misery, pressed and stroked the big 
 shoulders. " Ah, you're the kind, bold fellow," he al- 
 most wailed. " You've been it this day, and will al- 
 ways." 
 
 The wheedling's beginning, thought Aubrey. He 
 made a hard voice. " You want me to skulk away 
 into the dark." 
 
 " Is it ' dark ' ? Isn't it two weeks only, or three, 
 since ever you set eyes on your cousins ? And is it out 
 of the sky the sun would be dropping now if they were 
 to go their own way from this out, and you yours? ' : 
 
 " Yes." Aubrey was beaten too weary to hold up 
 secrets now. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 233 
 
 The priest's hands ceased for an instant to press 
 Aubrey's shoulders. Then they urged down again 
 warmly as if instant in some caressing adjuration, be- 
 fore he could muster the words he wanted. "They 
 say there was once a village in England, maybe the size 
 of Cusheen, and those that were in it found the Great 
 Plague had come to them, God knows how, all the 
 great way from London ; and what did they do but 
 shut themselves up from the world, the way it would 
 burn itself out in them only? Skulkers off into the 
 dark would any one say that they were? Or is it 
 heroes and martyrs? " 
 
 Aubrey listened and noted intently, ploddingly, with 
 an impassioned diligence. How would June see it 
 all? He had to make that out; he must take means to 
 that end. The Catholic June, the directress of her 
 whom he knew, was unknown to him, only surmised 
 and dimly feared as an estranging sea of un fathomed 
 depth. He must plumb it, if only conjecturally, by 
 taking soundings of Power and, through him, of these 
 devotees in the mass. He asked, in his matter-of-fact 
 way, " Something immodest, noisome — you'd feel I 
 was like that? " 
 
 The priest was in torment. " The acts of the 
 fathers, you know — they're ' visited.' " 
 
 " Oh, say ' sins ' if you like; it can't harm my father 
 with me." Aubrey returned to the quest. ' A Cath- 
 olic woman, we'll say — she'd feel the house stinking, 
 round her, with me in it? " 
 
 Again the poor priest shied away. The children 
 
234 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 reap whirlwinds; isn't it nature? Ah, come away to 
 your supper." 
 
 Over the food they talked about rents and the 
 orient hope of land purchase, and how kelp was burned 
 and the product sold to makers of — iodine, was it, or 
 some iodide ? Aubrey forgot which, and came back to 
 Power, just before bedtime, to get it right for the 
 Northerner. Lights were out in the house at eleven, 
 Aubrey's the last. In bed, with his journey-work 
 done, he let loose his imaging mind. It fell to, like a 
 draftsman long starved of paper; it drew him June 
 posed as she stood that time when she spoke of women 
 who would not take a gift of a son's life from a rec- 
 reant. How she glowed now in his vision, and grew 
 taller again, a very pillar of exaltation! He did not 
 reason now, but evoked sequent images, or they came ; 
 cause and effect rose before him in pictures of June — 
 June drawing in, like flowers at night, on a light word 
 from Guy about prayer; June awesome in towering 
 scorn of that ribald woman's chatter with Newman; 
 June crying, " I love them for it ; I love them " at 
 thought of these self-starvers, self-stunters here at 
 Cusheen, fantastic fakirs of a cramping superstition; 
 June as the June of those moments might look when 
 first she heard what he was, her neck lifting up, more 
 columnar, more white, its warm curves straightening 
 and chilled ; her eyes thrown on guard and looking out 
 at him over lids that had turned into estranging fences. 
 
 Moated and walled, she would gaze out and down. 
 She loved him, but what help was that? Probably 
 worse than none; love would only challenge her pride 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 235 
 
 to crush it ; he saw her fastidious, disdainful, pagan 
 really, like some one whim-driven by chivalric honor, 
 romantic unreason, inhaled irrevocably; she would 
 not wince while she paid any horrible tax on human 
 affection and happiness ; she would glory ; the knight's 
 soul in her would exult in its chance of peril and pain. 
 Why, it was for that he loved her; she would not be 
 June without her ardent yieldings to unenforceable 
 rule and her flushed, vibrant staunchness; like a flame 
 or a lance it burned and pierced up at — nothing, per- 
 haps; empty air, or air turbid with old myths, fables 
 of dead men that took life again and of unnatural 
 childbirth — horrible dregs of mycologist's stuff, like 
 Dionysus and Pan ; worse, because people soiled kind- 
 ness and courage and all the good things by trying to 
 make them " rest on " those vulgar credulities. 
 
 Reason with her? It was hopeless. Had June's 
 faith come of reason, reason might pierce to it. Rea- 
 son ! Why, she stood fenced with distrust of the brain, 
 the tool used in fashioning meanness; if she saw evi- 
 dence coming her doors would clang to ; she would not 
 even look while proof, the mountebank, contorted it- 
 self outside in the mud. If all the world came up to 
 show that her creed was a thing bygone and outworn, 
 her mettle would only be steeled to stand by it in 
 troubled days. That was June too — to be like that; 
 had he not loved her for being like that? He had 
 thought, what mattered the object of generous pas- 
 sion? — the passion itself was the thing; who would 
 not know how to choose between a cold world always 
 right and a blind one on fire with foolish loyalties? 
 
236 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 Why, he loved her the more even now as he thought, 
 oh, she will carry it through. Proof of confusion 
 would make her faith only the more imperturbable; it 
 would be stronger for its cobweb flimsiness; any bul- 
 lets the mind could devise would glance off those 
 feathers and spend themselves uselessly on that light 
 sand. 
 
 His body was hot ; he must have walked slowly, or 
 stopped dead, for some longer time than he knew, 
 when he was hit; he had some little "chill," as they 
 call a shiversome glow that burns for relief in more 
 and more heat. He drew up his legs, drew the clothes 
 over his head; the body's fire began to burn like red 
 embers blown white, and the mind caught heat from it ; 
 whatever thought came was lit, at each return, with a 
 fiercer incandescence of clarity. He entered, he 
 thought he was entering, into June's steadfast horror 
 of him as he was; he heard it like music; it had the 
 mounting, passionate urgency of some great strain 
 drawn out on violins, one long, importunate scaling of 
 illimitable height ; he saw it a preternatural spire that 
 never ceased to reach up further at the retreating sky. 
 
 What to do, then? He did not even try, yet, to 
 resolve. All that he saw was many impossibles. He 
 could not write to June and not tell her. He could 
 bate nothing, to her, of the love and honor that he had 
 renewed here for his father. He could not relinquish 
 her — play the kind brute and tell her some stage lie — 
 that he did not love her really; that would be loath- 
 some; it reeked of pink sentiment, stuff for half-made 
 women to maunder over in books. And it must fail, 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 237 
 
 lies were so feeble; think of them both alive after the 
 clap-trap of self-immolation was done; the world 
 would not hold them both; from the ends of opposite 
 winds their souls would beckon and rush together. 
 Why, what was there to keep them apart? They were 
 all but touching now, her desire and his reaching out 
 to each other like visible breaths that pierce a frosty 
 air; between them was nothing impenetrable, even by 
 loveless stars. Rival impossibilities everywhere, and a 
 choice of dead walls. Only this much he settled, in 
 his pedestrian way; he must walk right up to those 
 walls and feel them all over with his hands. 
 
 Could he say that he was wretched ? He asked him- 
 self that. Self-pity, the sneak, had come whining 
 round him, eyeing him for a weak place, trying hard 
 to corrupt happy memories into sorry plaintive ones, 
 whispering maudlin questions — had he not been, when 
 a boy, a pitiful figure with his great projects lamely 
 framed in solitude, and their frustrations stolidly 
 borne in it? Had it not all come again, plan and 
 frustration ? Had he not been inoffensive ? And now 
 this foul beast of an unspent force had broken out of 
 its limbo and hit him. " Say, ' Oh, my God, why am I 
 forsaken?' just to yourself, here in the dark," the 
 whimpering tempter prompted. It made his mind 
 shudder to see how near to one's feet could be brought 
 the top of that greased slope down into pits of slime. 
 So he asked what he really felt. Misery? Nothing 
 like any misery ever ascribed, in any book that he 
 knew, to an ill-starred lover. Had no writer ever 
 known what it was ? — or was he unlike natural people ? 
 
238 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 F or — he could not blink it — he had an exultation even 
 now; some part of him had wings and rose from this 
 new earth of vast pains and unbelievable crushings of 
 hope, and gloried, against all reason, in seeing its 
 vastness and strangeness outspread. It was anguish, 
 but vision too; it opened the burning heart of life. 
 And it was adventure, like all shipwrecks; it roused; 
 it gave things to do, or attempt ; and he was alive ; the 
 miraculous license to move, to watch, to do this and 
 not that, was still his; even to-night the next breath 
 always came, the ache of the instant before was over, 
 and some infinitesimal cell in his brain the stronger 
 to bear the next if he had borne the last with a will. 
 He had sweated the chill away now and lay at length, 
 tired and cool, hearing the endless, desolate splash 
 of the waves on the rocks below, where the priest had 
 turned human. 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 "When we find an element in different contexts, it acquires 
 new meanings for itself, and it gives new meanings to the ele- 
 ments in these contexts. The element remains in a sense the 
 same, but it is also continually changing with every new con- 
 nection into which it is brought. The progress of knowledge 
 may therefore be represented as the pursuing of identities through 
 ever-increasing differences." R- L- Nettleship. 
 
 FOR two more days Aubrey worked on at Cusheen; 
 it helped him; at least it put off, illusively; work 
 that is hard and worth doing can make the doer feel 
 as if surely the rest of the world must be coming to 
 rights. On the third day, an hour before Aubrey left, 
 the priest received a telegram. They were at lunch : 
 Power passed it across. " It's to you," he said, " that 
 it ought to have been. I amn't the one that's drawn 
 water out of the rock." 
 
 It seemed that people had read in the Northerner 
 Aubrey's first screed from Cusheen and were sending 
 money in haste, and plenty of it — " More than 
 enough," Power said; " it's a grand thing for any man 
 to be able to write the way you could make them do 
 that, and they English." 
 
 Aubrey looked at him, trying to guess what he 
 meant. " I suppose," he thought, " it is * Damn them 
 both, father and son. Can't we ever be quit of their 
 cursed help?' or ' I won't be rough on him; I'll send 
 the money back quietly after he's gone.' 
 
 239 
 
240 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 He told Power he wanted some help : he was going 
 to Dublin; he had to go into some things — family 
 things, of his own. 
 
 Alarm sprang up in the priest's face. 
 
 ' Oh, I'll do it skulkingly," Aubrey assured him. 
 
 " It's only this," Power said humbly, " your aunt 
 that's a nun at Rathfarnham is delicate. Any shock 
 now — " 
 
 ' I'll have a false name, if you wish. But I must 
 find out. They were my father and mother. Oh, 
 yes, I know, I know — " Aubrey waved away whole 
 cloud-armies of deprecatory fears and demurs half- 
 discerned in the looks of the priest. " But I must 
 see where they lived. I must see people who knew 
 them and knew their fathers and mothers — knew 
 everything. There must be people like that. They 
 both died before they were old. You can help me to 
 that?" 
 
 '' I'll do what I can. For God's sake, be careful. 
 It's not like the great world — this little country. It's 
 just the one village, and everything's known about 
 every one in it. The wonder is it was only the Arch- 
 bishop's chaplain that first had a notion of who in the 
 world you were." 
 
 1 I'll take any precaution you want. I'll be Mike 
 from Australia, a cousin's fifth cousin, burning to 
 work out a pedigree. May I take the addresses ? ' : 
 
 When shy men begin to be brazenly dogged, then 
 obstacles, if they are versed as priests are in the ways 
 of our froward hearts, are apt to take themselves out 
 of the way. Power gave Aubrey addresses. Some 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 241 
 
 were of his maternal kinsmen, O'Gormans and 
 Kennedys, cousins of whom he had not before heard 
 so much as the names. 
 
 Power annotated each name as it came: "a big 
 stockbroker in Dame Street ;" or " not a thing in the 
 world will he do but polo-playing from one year's end 
 to the next;" or "the greatest whisky-drinker in 
 Leinster, God help him, and he with a talent for bank- 
 ing if he could be steady." They seemed a poor lot, 
 full of money and indistinction. There were priests, 
 too, on Power's list; these were not of the family. 
 Aubrey stiffened, perhaps, at the first of their names. 
 Power winced. " You'll not hear a word," he said, 
 " that'd hurt you." 
 
 "You're telling them nothing?" 
 
 The priest held out to Aubrey the circular letter of 
 introduction that he had been writing to these divines. 
 Aubrey waived the perusal, but looked at Power sur- 
 prisedly. So the elfin cordon was broken a little at 
 last; the human child decoyed into the wood had even 
 made friends with one of its peering gnomes till it 
 would keep a small secret of his from the others. And 
 all, he fancied, because he had once had his wits about 
 him and knew how to swim. Curse all the caprice of 
 these mad assessments of people's conduct; the cards 
 that " made " among these devotees were as strange as 
 the cards that did not make. Still, this time unreason 
 had got him a thing he wanted; let that make its peace; 
 thanks to it, he would go on his quest as an unknown 
 crank delving at family history harmlessly; people 
 would humor him. 
 
242 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 Power was pressing his last hospitality — cham- 
 pagne, of all things; a bottle was brought in, open, 
 with word that the car stood at the door. Aubrey was 
 glad of the wine. There must, anyhow, have been 
 discord between their dun thoughts and their acted 
 genialities of speeding host and of guest sorry to go. 
 But that they should pledge each other, at parting, in 
 that jocund heart's blood of unreserve — this lifted the 
 scene into barbaric grotesque; so Aubrey felt, and was 
 piqued to act the fantasy out in its own wild key; it 
 was easier so. 
 
 He took his last look at Cusheen as the outside car 
 went over the shoulder of the high moor. A dull 
 afternoon was closing in early; the place looked 
 effaced; all he could make out, for sure, was the petu- 
 lant white hem of foam fretting between the lead of 
 the sea and the lead of the land. He looked till it went 
 out of sight, and then sat very still on his side seat, 
 back to back with the driver, and stared straight be- 
 fore him with eyes nearly closed, seeking the half- 
 trance that may come of a dazed, bleared intentness of 
 sense, not on this thing or that, but on palpableness, 
 the whole range of it. Soon it came; there ceased to 
 be here a rock, there a cloud, there a wind-vexed 
 stump of a tree; there were not separate things any 
 longer, only a rush and a passing; not drifting objects, 
 but drift, motion set free to be a self of its own, not 
 a mere state of selves other than it. And he was se- 
 cure and snug; he was no object now, either; not a 
 person; only a sense, a perception, released from the 
 service of a possessor; it had no past to mind and no 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 243 
 
 future; all cables were cut and it floated off, a tissue 
 of disinterested sentience; it and that disengaged soul 
 of motion were all that was left of all that there ever 
 had been; and then they too began to lose their differ- 
 entness from each other: which was it that felt and 
 which that was felt? Foolish question! — so he mused 
 in his trance; why, all those old childish illusions of 
 subject and object were gone; act and consequence, 
 cause and effect, one's self of to-day and the self it 
 builds for to-morrow, yes and to-day and to-morrow 
 themselves, and oneself and that which had seemed to 
 be outside oneself — all the illusive haunting distinc- 
 tions that used to be matters of course were dried up 
 like early mists; nothing was left but clear conscious- 
 ness poised in a void; unhampered, unmoved, unre- 
 lated, a consciousness only of being penetratingly con- 
 scious. A god might be like that for ever, it has been 
 thought. Aubrey sat like a god of that kind for he 
 knew not how long; an hour, perhaps, or a second; 
 time does not count in those states. 
 
 Suddenly his divinity ended. Some solid with- 
 drew from behind his back: he turned in time to see 
 the driver alight, a loose heap, on the road ; he seemed 
 to have fainted and rolled off the car. Luckily he 
 had not taken the reins with him. Aubrey pulled up 
 the scandalized horse, which was for bolting, drove 
 back to the spot and found the man conscious now, 
 wriggling and groaning and soon well enough to feel 
 for the bump he had on his head and to rub it thought- 
 fully, sitting squat in the mud. Nothing but hunger 
 ailed him; he called the inopportune faint a " quare- 
 
244 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 ness," confessed he had had it before, and sought to 
 pass it off as an innocent fad of the body's. Aubrey 
 came the priest over him, dourly tickled to find how 
 easy it came — bullied and tricked the truth out of 
 him, then drove the car into Banturk, with one hand 
 on this ragged genius of famine, to keep it in 
 place. 
 
 They ate the best meal to be had at the public- 
 house near the station. The landlord had wine; it 
 seemed the thing to make the food stay on a starved 
 stomach. When they had eaten they sat half an hour 
 together to finish the bottle and smoke and await 
 Aubrey's train. The man expanded, was almost a 
 wit; he gave his history genially, seeing it with the 
 eye of tolerant humor, back to his wild youth in the 
 days of th' ould priest before Father Power, "him 
 that's in tormint, plase God." 
 
 Aubrey made no return of autobiography. But 
 he encouraged the willing witness; he kept up a grin 
 and put leading questions and drew replies that could 
 make him wince, though he was toughening. It was 
 good practice, he thought, for what he would have to 
 do now. Rather a dirty trick, though, when one came 
 to play it. It was too easy; this driver would rise 
 to any fly you could cast; he would say, with a happy 
 sense of hitting the mark, the last things that in his 
 good nature he would have said had Aubrey been 
 frank. Aubrey felt like a sneak, and a bruised one, 
 afterwards, as he sat in the train. But he would go 
 through with this; he did not have even to will it now; 
 it was the one road to be gone; the depth of the mud, or 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 245 
 
 the hits he might take on the shins, were things that 
 he might wish away, but as to the route, there was 
 no other. 
 
 He carried the quest right through. When once 
 he had made up his mind to soiled hands, the rest was 
 as easy as pumping that driver. His mother's broth- 
 ers and sisters and her own mother and father were 
 soon almost visible to him, immensely far off and im- 
 mensely clear. He saw their life as geologists see the 
 old tropical Thames with the hippopotami half sunk 
 in hot mud at noon, their beatified backs gently surg- 
 ing and sinking. James O'Gorman, his grandfather, 
 loomed out like a veritable monster of the prime. An 
 old priest at Merrion had known him. " A thoroughly 
 good practical Catholic; never missed Mass and would 
 walk all round Dublin after it, seeing was there a 
 ground rent for sale at a price a person could look at." 
 A gray chapel-keeper near Drogheda had kept James's 
 books when James set up in youth as a wine merchant. 
 "God help us all," he said, "when a pipe of sherry 
 was bottled and there was not in it the number of 
 bottles he'd hoped for." "Holidays, is it? He 
 neither gave them nor took them." " He hadn't a 
 prejudice in him. ' So long as a Protestant pays,' 
 he'd say, ' let God do the rest to him.' Pieced into 
 life in Aubrey's mind by a score of such touches, the 
 old O'Gorman got on his feet, exciting, redoubtable, 
 grisly, an Irishman of the breed that England has 
 raised for herself as the Christian has bred for himself 
 the stinged Jew. Aubrey could see him, acquisitive, 
 obstinate, all his pride stowed away in his bunkers 
 
246 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 as coal for his engines; could even fancy minutely 
 how his flesh crawled, in secret, when some English- 
 man, driving a bargain, would lug in his " plain sense 
 of duty " every third minute, the horse smelling the 
 camel and loathing it, only not to the marring of in- 
 stant business. 
 
 Then there was word to be had of how this dragon 
 had wived — " a grand thing it was for the two of 
 them, he with the money he'd made and she with a 
 fortune the fellow of it, that her father had made with 
 the great contriving he had with shares when the first 
 railways were made, and she with a turn for saving, 
 the equal of his. James's whole family couldn't bear 
 her stepping in — he'd done everything for them till 
 then — and you may engage she returned it in the way 
 she got shut of them cliver and clane, in a short time, 
 and her own people too, that had nothing to do but 
 have her tormented, asking for money, till she put a 
 stop to it. The end of it was they were left in a 
 great house in Merrion Square that they had, alone 
 with the children." 
 
 "They had children?' Aubrey dishonestly asked 
 the old clerk. 
 
 " They had. Three girls that are living, may be, 
 to this day, and two boys that were one as wild as the 
 other, God rest them. Dempsey's place was the death 
 of them." 
 
 Dempsey's : Aubrey's mind made a note which led 
 him to penetrate, the next night, to a small cube of 
 strong light and convivial stuffiness tucked away at the 
 far end of a burrow-like entry. Bloods of the present 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 247 
 
 age were sitting pleased on the ends of casks and a 
 landlord of forty years old was not concealing his own 
 belief that they were grand fellows; Dempsey to 
 Dempsey succeeds, and blood to blood. 
 
 " It was the one bit of pleasure that came to them," 
 so the old clerk had gone on. " Never a card would 
 the mother have in the house, and scarcely a book, 
 nor give them a horse to ride, and they great at it; 
 ' What could they do,' she'd say whenever they asked, 
 ' but break its knees on the road or destroy it out 
 hunting?' Indeed, the hunting was what they both 
 wished to be at. And never a latch-key between them, 
 down to the day the last died. I lived in the house 
 at the time, and she'd lie awake every night of the 
 week to call out to each of the boys, and he crawlin' 
 upstairs on all fours, ' Did you bolt the front door 
 when you'd entered ? ' to show she was seeing the kind 
 of work they were about. 
 
 " When they were gone there was only the husband 
 in it for her to torment, besides women. Dear, but she 
 was the hard one; you'd be entitled to think her body 
 was all the one piece with her nails. Nothing would 
 do her, if James displeased her at all, but to take a 
 whole pack of the foreign bonds that he had, th' in- 
 stant minute he'd quitted the house, and have them 
 hid away on him and he coming home in the evening: 
 you'd hear him all through the darkness of night 
 walkin' about like th' unquiet dead in his pain and 
 callin' out, ' Give me my bonds,' on the stairs and 
 landin', in the deep voice he had, the moral, for all the 
 world, of blood cryin' out from the ground, until you'd 
 
248 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 be frikened to hear, but herself, that was a great 
 sleeper, not mindin' at all. 
 
 " He died, at the end, of a pain in his bowels, the 
 sort they'd cut out of you now with a knife in the 
 time a horse would be wag-gin' his tail, but he didn't 
 over it. Great work she had with him, three nights or 
 four, sitting up in her clothes by the bed till she'd have 
 him persuaded to make a new will the way he'd leave 
 nothin' at all to the three girls for their own, but wait 
 till their mother'd see how they got on. Biddy Foy, 
 that was housekeeper then, and myself were kept 
 perishin' out in the cold at the door, to be witnesses, 
 while he'd be moanin' and yowlin' within, and herself 
 comin' back to it always, as soon as you'd hear for the 
 groans, that Kate, who'd just gone to the convent, 
 would not need a penny again in this world, and as for 
 Minnie—" 
 
 " June's mother — so that was her name," Aubrey 
 silently noted. 
 
 " — why, in the state she was in since the brothers 
 had died on her, she'd be as apt as not to fling it away 
 to the poor, every sixpence; and God only knew what 
 wild work was the next thing Nora'd be at — " 
 
 Aubrey winced at his mother's name, though he had 
 seen it coming. 
 
 " — and she not at Mass for a month past; and 
 wasn't it only a poor lookout he'd have, where he was 
 goin', if he didn't give his mind to it now and see that 
 nothin' desprit was done with his money after? Great 
 talkin' she had, an' she not seemin' to be in a hurry at 
 all, or anxious itself, and it a close race, with the 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 249 
 
 stren'th to write goin' out of his body — I question will 
 I or any one else in the world see the finish to equal it. 
 She was a wonderful woman; she bate all, and he left 
 every penny to her, that was jinglin' with money 
 already, before he went shriekin' out of his senses. I 
 do assure you, Biddy and I had no sooner written our 
 names than we lep' down the stairs, a match for a 
 couple of greyhounds, holdin' our hands to our ears." 
 " Biddy Foy ? They tell me she's caretaker now at 
 Barnbrack, the great house in Wicklow that Mrs. 
 O'Gorman bought for herself when James had left her 
 the richest woman in Ireland. When she died it went 
 to the daughter Minnie that married an Englishman 
 from Dublin Castle; he was a Catholic though; the 
 mother took good care of that; she'd the earth and the 
 fullness thereof at that time and she wasn't the woman 
 to miss Heaven too, when the time for it came." 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 " Love, no one can beat you. You have at the rich ; you can 
 step over a sea ; there you are, at your work, in quiet houses out 
 in the country. There isn't the saint can say he's shut of you 
 surely, and what of the rest of us all, the May-flies we are. The 
 time you come in, understanding quits out of us." 
 
 From the Hedge Schoolmaster's Sophocles. 
 
 NEXT day Aubrey made for Barnbrack, a great, 
 frigid, classical house; like an iceberg astray 
 in the Gulf Stream, it rose white and cold, that mild 
 day, out of Wicklow's wild roses, fuchsias and lush 
 honeysuckles. None of these idlers climbed on its 
 actual walls; the lady's puissant reason had vetoed 
 that, " and they with nothing to do but bring earwigs 
 in at the window." Biddy Foy reported this judg- 
 ment to Aubrey ; and so the house stood naked as when 
 it was born, and was moated about, like the Roc-a- 
 Voir Inn, with loose stony gravel " the depth," as 
 Mrs. Foy said, " of the world; it'd break the heart of 
 a grub to set foot on it." She toddled over it pain- 
 fully, showing Aubrey the place. 
 
 She was a palpable relic, this Mrs. Foy, a lingering 
 trace like a blasted tree, or a glacier-marked stone in a 
 green dale, of the mightiness of old, spent forces. 
 When she took heart a little and let herself go, in her 
 talk, she made Aubrey think of the faint resurgent 
 stirrings of grass after the roller has done with it. 
 Now and then she would seem to be sure for some mo- 
 ments that Mrs. O'Gorman was wholly dead, and that 
 
 350 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 251 
 
 the souls of the living were their own once more. 
 Then would peep out " a wish she had in her mind, 
 for some reason or other," to live in a house that was 
 all " a smother of creepers." And then again, like 
 the poor Indian, she would see Mrs. O'Gorman in 
 clouds or hear her in the wind, and back would the 
 well-beaten subject come to her duty with " After all, 
 she was the wonderful woman," or <: There was the 
 depth in her sayings," or (steeling herself) " I often 
 wish I could have a talk with her now." 
 
 Biddy was vivid, if spiritless. She had been printed 
 upon by some gleams of the dreary splendor with 
 which the widow O'Gorman had celebrated till death 
 her triumphant return to " the land." Biddy, showing 
 the stables, partly undid a swathed carriage, a 
 monstrous piece, swung from the C springs of an- 
 tiquity. " Not a day but the mistress would set out 
 at two and be driven the whole country round, and she 
 very inclined to be sick in a carriage. She hoped she'd 
 conquer it yet. One man only she'd have on the box, 
 and two standing behind on a board, and the nakedest 
 dog you ever saw in your life, a mass of black spots, 
 legging along for dear life beneath. She'd not have 
 dog or cat near her, except in that situation only. 
 1 They'd not do a thing in the house but eat,' she'd say, 
 ' and they won't do that properly.' She was a won- 
 derful woman at knowing the time to spend and the 
 time to let it alone. Not a servant would stay in the 
 house. ' They'd like to have more scope,' she said to 
 me once, ' in batter puddings, but where would it end 
 if I once began spoiling them? ' Yet she'd do things 
 
252 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 in style when the time for it came. People in Dublin 
 itself will talk to this day of the way she buried the 
 master. She'd speak of it often herself. ' Would any 
 one ever believe,' she'd say to Miss Minnie, ' the 
 frightful price the man charged for the coffin? ' 
 
 "Miss Nora? The new paint wasn't dry on the 
 house before she was off and away to England, or God 
 knows where in the wide world, to live in a poor 
 shabby way, as if she had no respect for herself. 
 Dear, but the mother hated her for it. She'd burn 
 every letter, fresh from the post, and it not opened, 
 and there was the row, I can tell you, the day Miss 
 Minnie let on, coming back from confession, the way 
 she had written, ay, and several times, to her sister. 
 Terrible fond of each other the two girls were, and I 
 don't rightly know that Miss Minnie ever had her 
 health after the writing was stopped on her. She'd 
 be in there in the drawing-room saying she only wished 
 to do this or do that and be minding the poor or 
 going off into the convent after Miss Kate, till her 
 mother'd be angry and say, ' Why, you fool,' she'd 
 say, ' why don't you go and get married?' Married 
 she was, in a twelvemonth. What with the two broth- 
 ers dead, and one sister with vows of poverty taken, 
 and one quit out of the place wholly, the girl w r as the 
 best match in Ireland. Not a tittle of love had she in 
 her, for all the signs I could see; she'd as lief marry 
 this one as that, and none at all better than any. The 
 mother did it; she'd never let her alone till she had 
 her engaged, and then, when the horrors of bein' mar- 
 ried were near, Miss Minnie would say why shouldn't 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 2.5.3 
 
 she suffer as well as another, and anyway hadn't she 
 promised? She had pride too, in a way of her own, 
 though she never could keep a stiff lip to the mother. 
 Too meek to please me. altogether. 
 
 " Miss Nora? — that was the wild Irish girl, as they 
 say. Not a thing came into her head but she'd say it. 
 The night Patrick, her last brother, had died, Father 
 Browne of Cusheen reached the house half an hour 
 too late, and what should she do but say to his face 
 that she wouldn't wonder if God weren't hard on the 
 boy at all, and he just after dying without the rites of 
 the Church? You'd be astonished to see the way the 
 priest took it. ' I'm thinking that too,' said he, ' a 
 good while back.' She was afraid when she'd spoken, 
 but, when he said that, I give you my word she looked 
 as if she were more frikened still because he had not 
 up and told her that it was no thing to be saying. 
 I'll engage she was thinking what work he might have 
 with the bishop, and not of herself at all. I was a 
 favorite of hers, but she was the worry. You couldn't 
 depend on her not to come home with her watch given 
 away to a tramper that told her some tale on the road, 
 the moral of those wild Fijians there in the paper, 
 that can't elevate their position because no one comes 
 and asks for a thing but they give it. The mistress 
 never forgave the way she got on. ' Step in here at 
 once,' she called to me over the stairs the day after 
 Miss Nora quit out of it. ' Sign that,' said she, ' and 
 mind what you're about with the ink on the furniture.' 
 It was a new will, you may depend, and she in a des- 
 perate hurry to see to it lest she should die in the night 
 
254 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 and the daughter not be deprived of her fortune. Miss 
 Nora had come to me late on the evening before, and 
 she not able to sleep with the way her thoughts had 
 her tormented, what with her being wild, by that time, 
 to be out of the place, and not wanting to go from the 
 sister. ' Me heart's broke, Biddy,' she'd say the wan 
 moment — she'd talk like the country people to me — 
 and the next she'd be singing low to herself, ' My 
 heart in the far world is yearning to roam ' — it came 
 out of a song she'd heard Father Browne singing that 
 day. He was great at the singing. Midsummer eve 
 it was, and a strong light still in the sky and it after 
 ten at night, the way I could see the gleams come in 
 her eyes and go out again." 
 
 ' Was it very like water under a bridge at night," 
 Aubrey asked, " with a lamp on it? " 
 
 ' Maybe it was, and the cheeks of her flushing 
 darker, and going light the next minute. She was the 
 beautiful woman for color. You'd see a little pink 
 cloud, like the light the sun 'ud send through the leaf 
 of a rose, and it crossing the width of her face like 
 the little shadows of clouds that do be running over 
 the side of a hill, or the patches flytin' about on a field 
 of corn with the little winds blowing." 
 
 " Yes, yes." 
 
 " You've seen her? " 
 
 " I've seen some one like it." 
 
 " There wasn't her aquil ever, if you could have 
 seen her that night, with her voice like a warm creature 
 nestled in her and she in a heave with the big wishes 
 she had, and that gleam in her eyes in the dark till 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 255 
 
 ycu'd think of the loveliest fearful wild thing in a 
 forest until you'd be terrified. That was the room, up 
 above there." 
 
 The two were fording the loose depths of gravel 
 back to the door, from a paintless and moldering 
 bench whence they had viewed the garden front of the 
 house. Death could not be stiller than this place where 
 passionate hearts had hurt with very fullness of life 
 in the June night's passionate dusk. It was afternoon 
 now, humid and motionless; sleep began to invade 
 Mrs. Foy, sleep and the fear that she might have said 
 more than enough about her old likings and wonder- 
 ments. What could the gentleman care about them? 
 So she became elegant and impersonal, took up a news- 
 paper lying about in the hall and, vaguely indicating 
 a page, began to make talk of wider interest. ' I see 
 from the paper that Belgium's a wonderfully indus- 
 trious country. The women that's in it are all bent 
 double with working. The men are idle — you'd see 
 them sittin' out at the doors — I don't know whether 
 it's that lager beer that they're at, or what?' 
 
 " Did you hear from Miss Nora again? ' 
 
 " I did not, and she a great warrant to write, or 
 talk itself, about anything ever she saw till she'd have 
 you excited with wishing you'd seen it, the way I'd 
 liefer read one of her letters than ten of Miss Kate's, 
 that were all desiring your prayers and wondering 
 could nothing at all be done for Rev. Mother Su- 
 perior's toothache, and that only." 
 
 He lingered, making up questions. None of them 
 mattered much; at least, the direct answers did not — 
 
256 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 only the gleams that would come now and then from 
 the glow of his mother's youth, retracted fitfully from 
 this old mirroring mind. They were enough to see 
 everything by. Imagination can piece out reality fast 
 when it works with passion, burning along each line 
 of conjecture and reaching mightily out to span breaks 
 of connection. Feeling back all the way through his 
 own youth to childhood, he read at every turn some 
 inscription illegible then, not even a matter of cu- 
 riosity; now explicit, voluminous. Why, his father 
 and mother had always been talking about and around 
 it all, every day till one of them died, in a code of 
 luminous silences, flashingly significant now, like let- 
 ters cut out of a stencil plate, where blankness is legi- 
 ble. Once he had seen a man at a fair stand flat 
 against a white board and another man throw two- 
 score of black knives that stuck in the board all round 
 him, a nail's breadth from hurting him, so that at last, 
 when the man stood away from the board, his figure 
 was drawn upon it, as unstabbed space. It was like 
 that. All his life the knives had been flying and now 
 the figures stood out; the void was graphic. 
 
 Where he did not know how this or that passage 
 had gone, he knew how it must have. He knew like 
 the back of his hand the old ruffian O'Gorman and 
 that fell, notable dragoness, with her stomachic crav- 
 ing for land and a hulking barouche and a Danish 
 dog to shank along after it; what a union of reason, 
 and what hell for its children ! He knew all about the 
 dismal large house in a sunken capital — all the un- 
 humanized, humorless social rising, the hatred of play 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 257 
 
 and mirth as unacquisitive things and doors into vice; 
 probably there had been frozen dinner-parties, where 
 every one kept his facial muscles jammed fast in a 
 selected position, implied his own proper share of im- 
 portance in everything that he said, and looked out for 
 faults in the entertainment, to talk about afterwards 
 with his wife. Poor devils of boys, his uncles, grow- 
 ing up tortured with hunger for all the unpaid dues 
 of their youth. Only the other day he had been young, 
 and the year's youth and the day's so working on his 
 that it seemed almost vile to be reading indoors; it 
 was self-mutilation; the sensuous blood had run bub- 
 bling, crying out to be slaked in ecstasies of union with 
 the June meadows and the sunned stream. He had 
 had these, and they had had Dempsey's and that mo- 
 ment of cheap magic, about the third glass, when all 
 the voices fuse into one mellow luster of sound, the hum 
 of an easier, more friendly world. Entering it so, they 
 were done for; they had been given no chance; " through 
 the pit infernal, down to the grave of McGinn and 
 Burns," he watched them slipping and tumbling. 
 
 When they had been executed by phthisis at last, 
 and the windows thrown up in the house for the 
 waxen smell to escape, all that were left became only 
 clearer; the father and mother putting it harshly to 
 God that the fault was not theirs; Kate cowering back 
 to the nunnery where she had cowered at school till a 
 few months before, perceiving now that outside its 
 palings there could be nothing but evil; Minnie numbly 
 fumbling away, for an anodyne, at good works; and 
 the other, the one that was all light and air, throb and 
 
258 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 glow, flaming out at the tall young priest and gasping 
 to find that he had been changing too. Was that the 
 beginning of their great love? It might have been. 
 For they must have gazed at each other quite simply 
 when he had spoken; yes, both had done that — Aubrey 
 knew them; and there might have been a silence that 
 swore them comrades in consciousness of the great 
 ship sinking under them, and of the frailty of rafts, 
 and the width of the sea. 
 
 Then, of course, they had had to lose themselves, 
 separately, lest the mud that flies round unfrocked 
 priests should bespatter poor Kate or Minnie or some 
 other innocent — Minnie's possible children, perhaps. 
 That must have been why they lived all that time in 
 Italy, Switzerland, France, and then by the tidal 
 Thames' Babylonish waters. They were extinct there; 
 all the past part of them was; they had cut their lives 
 in two and become like a man and woman born 
 mature, alone and relationless as Adam and Eve, and 
 set on remaining so, bent on keeping clear for their 
 young one the newly-made world in which their old 
 world's marks would be rubbed off the slate and life 
 could be what the owner made it. So that was why 
 even he had never been told ; he was to start fair. As 
 if that were possible! Why, the mere fact that they 
 were in hiding at Strand-on-the-Green, and he not to 
 know it, had swelled and swelled till it ruled all their 
 ways with each other at home; it had planted crepus- 
 cular woods of reserve and annealed chilly steels of 
 hard self-reliance. He could see now the way that he 
 had been made, and why he had been so queerly fur- 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 259 
 
 tive in pushing his great schemes when a child, and 
 grotesquely stoic in taking defeats that need not have 
 come; what roundabout ways he had taken to scraps 
 of common knowledge that other children, no doubt, 
 got for the asking. He might be the same now ; prob- 
 ably was, for made is made and cannot go back; lie 
 might be walking as far round now, to run up against 
 a near dead wall in the end, as he was when he made 
 his idiotic attempts to dance and learn music; perhaps 
 he was standing now as far outside the world of scru- 
 ples and awes in which a young Catholic woman must 
 live, as he had been outside the whole universe of 
 social lightsomeness when he was paying dues to Si- 
 gnor Bellaggio. He must make surer, must go to places 
 where his warped mental sight might be helped — to 
 churches where there was Mass, or where veiled 
 women were flitting in to confess in chapels out of the 
 aisles. He dimly understood that his mind had lost the 
 unconscious bloom of its first health; it had to think 
 out possible aids and do repairs in itself and guard 
 against maladies. First he pored over June's letters 
 again, forcing himself to give weight to whatever he, 
 being made as he was, might have minded too little. 
 " I prayed for you to Mary, Mother of God." He 
 fixed on the words; he strove to prevent himself from 
 shirking; he strained till all the letter's passion was in 
 them, telling himself all the time that he could not 
 bend himself that way enough, could not hope ever to 
 figure, by any effort, all the depth and dream of June's 
 abandonment of her reason and will to the mystic rule 
 of her faith. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 
 " O the sacrifice ! 
 How ceremonious, solemn, and unearthly 
 It was i' the offering ! " 
 
 The Winter's Tale, Act iii., sc. I. 
 
 THE ante-chapel is large and ill-lit in the Chelsea 
 Church of the Holy Name; through the gap in 
 the screen that walls it off from the rest of the church 
 the crowd of last comers and born choosers of lower 
 seats look from obscurity into light, and, if they are 
 placed near the middle, see the thin veils of incense 
 pushing or dispersing up, a great way off, like the 
 smoke almost burnt into flame over a furnace. Au- 
 brey, sitting more at one side, could not see the altar; 
 all that was to be done there would be round a corner, 
 for him; he would have to infer its progress from 
 what the people did who could see; a wave of genu- 
 flection, no doubt, would roll out at the right moments 
 through the break in the screen and so unbrokenly on, 
 round its corners. He had been in this place when a 
 boy; at first, in those days he had wanted to find what 
 to think about people's squabblesome creeds and patent 
 rights in bliss or damnation; but soon he had let all 
 that rest; there were no ghosts, and dead people did 
 not get up, but why should not any one say they did, 
 if he liked? People often said their blood boiled, or 
 their tongues were tied; no doubt it was only meant 
 
 260 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 2G1 
 
 in that way. Christ's life was another matter — not 
 to be thought about in such places, but read and wept 
 over in secret with shamefaced agonies of love and 
 admiration for one who would be so hooted if he lived 
 now. That tragic and lovely life could have nothing 
 to do with the composed unction of priests as they 
 sprinkled the holy water — no more than the Psalm- 
 ist's rending cries of writhing self-pity could have 
 to do with the congregations who poured out the 
 words of them, looking so glad of their good clothes. 
 It had all been semi-private theatricals then, and not 
 to be treated rudely by any visitors; so he had blinked 
 up reverently towards the aspersing Roman brush and 
 had inwardly applauded the Anglican vicar of Coway, 
 near home, for that telling break and slow recovery 
 of his voice, as if with undisguisable effort, when he 
 had just said a moving thing in a sermon — that though 
 tenderness, was not easy for him at all; the youthful 
 Aubrey had once heard him rating the little soiled rag 
 of a girl from the workhouse who did the rough work 
 at the parsonage. 
 
 Music began, distant and muted like sounds of the 
 street heard in illness. Music had never said things 
 of its own to Aubrey — merely made his thoughts 
 fluent; recollection and anticipation ran where they 
 would, like our easily triumphing powers in dreams. 
 Now he was picturing June, still a child, as she must 
 have been on those old Sundays, nearing already the 
 heart of this mystic marvel, soaking its essences in till 
 all the tissues of mind and heart were charged and 
 stained with them unchangeably, while he had prowled 
 
262 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 and peeped from outside like the boys round a tent 
 where there may be a circus. And all the time June 
 and he had been drawing nearer and nearer; that old 
 fancy of all lovers next filled him; he trembled, as all 
 of them do, to think how many miracles of choice and 
 of chance had conspired throughout their lives along 
 the two convergent lines, wavering, broken, uncertain, 
 rushing together at last. Had his parents not settled 
 in England, had he not been bitten with that mountain 
 mania, or not gone to Oxford, or had Guy and he not 
 met there — . Guy had attracted him oddly at Oxford 
 — the pretty boy, prettily spoken, prettily mannered, 
 amusingly, puzzlingly proof against the young sum- 
 mer's intoxicant loveliness. Guy had disturbed him 
 then; he remembered now how he had tried to put to 
 himself what it was about Guy or his ways that made 
 you want to hear what he would say next and to see 
 what he would do. They had said good-night in the 
 resonant Broad as the clock struck the quarter before 
 midnight; Aubrey had leant for a while out of his 
 window, cooling himself at the antique hoariness of 
 night shed on an Oxford moonlit and stone-cold. 
 What had worked in him, heated him, even then? 
 Groping impulses, instincts, a blind curiosity stirring 
 like seeds that push furtively up through the dark 
 clay, dim precognitions drawing him subtly towards 
 June the unseen, as two spars adrift far apart at even- 
 ing draw to each other strangely through all the night 
 and are locked together at dawn? Coincidence — was 
 there any such thing? Or was it only that there were 
 spaces uncharted as yet, across which soul could hail 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 263 
 
 soul, sending a ripple running over some unperceived 
 sea that was not a bar, but a bond? 
 
 Thought, shifting and eddysome, played round that 
 fancy awhile and then drifted on. The music was 
 rising and quickened his reverie. Then an intoning 
 yoice droned, with no care for what the words were, 
 as if sense were dross, and reason no more than the 
 mud on the earth is to one flying over it. Of course; 
 they must seem so to June, who was free of this air; 
 all the things he could say, the ways he could plead, 
 must seem ignobly ugly to her, no better than some 
 cretin's stuttering struggle to make clear his poor 
 soiled desires. He was excluded; rightly or wrongly, 
 what mattered it which? Perhaps they had got hold 
 of something, these mystics — the ones that cared 
 really. Perhaps it was all a mistake, an ageing world's 
 maudlin effort to have back the dreams of its youth. 
 What did it matter? He was excluded. 
 
 There came rolling out through the door in the 
 screen a chant or sung collect, the words of it poised 
 aloft on the tips of clear treble voices: — 
 
 "Gratiam tuam, quaesumus, Domine, mentibus nostris infunde, 
 Ut qui, angelo nuntiante, Christi filii tui incarnationem cog- 
 
 novimus, 
 Per passionem ejus et crucem in Resurrectionis gloriam per- 
 
 ducamur." 
 
 He could have fallen down and worshiped the beauty 
 of cadences falling like those, stooping like humbled 
 queens, or floating like mists of high waterfalls down 
 through a sunlit air, or alighting on earth with a snow- 
 
264 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 flake's hesitant tenderness. They were delight, and 
 yet hunger came from hearing them, thought ached 
 and craved at them — flowers in ripening corn were 
 like that; they preyed like lost loves; as if from some 
 house of barred doors, to which we had lost them, 
 they looked out through windows but never quite saw 
 us, their eyes were so drowsed with fumes of their 
 own beatitude. June was there, in that locked house 
 of mystical ardors whose speech was these melodies. 
 She had the key; she could hold the note of high rap- 
 ture; she could build for herself, out of this spilt 
 wealth of superb unreason; arch-like, it must lock its 
 splendors together in strength when the keystone she 
 had was put in ; palace-like it must rise, arch upon 
 arch of ordered, articulate ecstasy. 
 
 Then he saw her. He had just been thinking she 
 might be there, when some one moved out of a seat 
 far up the chapel, and there, in a space thus made, 
 was the profile that no other could ever be like. It 
 was upturned and grave; and behind it the light 
 blazed whitest, throwing up dark, from the throat to 
 the hair, the line from which the puissance and grace of 
 all perfect curves of vases and daffodils, cornice and 
 arch, must have come. She was watching the priest, he 
 felt sure; Aubrey's eyes strove to bore through the air 
 to reach hers; they seemed to do it; he fancied he saw 
 her looks change as she followed the Mass out through 
 its symbolist drama of abnegation transfigured into 
 glory. Eager pity, loyalty, triumph — the shadow or 
 light of each of these seemed to fall on her, cast by 
 the invisible celebrant at the altar. How he played 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 2G5 
 
 on her; what could cope with that power to fire and 
 thrill and persuade? While Aubrey gazed, the glow 
 appeared to whiten and also recede, with June in it, 
 drawing her back from the eye till she was a speck, 
 still with its outline poignantly fair, but remote in 
 quivering flame. 
 . 
 He sat back when the service ended. Best wait 
 there and let her go first, he thought, and then slip 
 out himself and sneak off. Before he could know 
 what to say when they met, he would have to digest 
 all this, that he had just taken in. But priest and 
 assistants and choir had all to troop out through the 
 ante-chapel; so those who sat there must stand up and 
 watch the warm core of the rite breaking its shell, 
 like a tropical thing over-ripe, and shedding itself 
 abroad through the screen, still aglow and melodious 
 and odorous, spilling its sensuous affluence. June 
 passed, and then Aubrey waited on in the emptying 
 building; horrible emptiness, not a clean void, but in- 
 fested, deflowered, staling, all dust and used breath and 
 flat fumes from the cup of the rite's glorious drunken- 
 ness. People too — as the last of them left he thought 
 he could see illusion die out on their lips and eyes as 
 fast as a rose afterglow sinks to dead white on the 
 snow when real night comes. June would be different; 
 she would not change ; could he see her now she would 
 be still the staunch fanatic, shaming those weak ones. 
 Or might she — ? Oh, it was useless, all this putting 
 off; it was shirking; it only gave time for maudlin 
 delusion to sneak its way in; the firing line was wher- 
 
266 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 ever June was; it was only there that the thing to do, 
 whatever it was, could be found. He rose and ran 
 after her, slipping and pressing through the thinned 
 rear of the leaving crowd. 
 
 She was in sight; that was good; she was alone, 
 walking fast. ' Miss Hathersage! " Aubrey called, at 
 her shoulder, hardening himself to forego the right, 
 lost or suspended, to say " June! " 
 
 She turned at the touch of the voice. She darted 
 a hand out, or both; both, he thought afterwards. 
 ' You! " she cried; " Aubrey! " and looked as people 
 do at a thing just thrown up in the air, with wide eyes 
 and the lips apart, and the head back a little, so that 
 the light fell clear on her face; it had a flush so sud- 
 den and strong that it seemed to move over her cheeks 
 like a beautiful patch of red shadow. 
 
 " I saw you in that place," he said dully. All his 
 might had been put into that first effort to speak to her 
 coldly, and she had not even seen it; her generosity 
 could not perceive it. 
 
 'You'll come down to-morrow?' she eagerly 
 pressed him. 'Early? No? In the afternoon, then. 
 I go back to-night. You can't stay in the house. 
 It's being painted and father and Guy are away for 
 two days; I biouvac in my room and the drawing- 
 room, the only dry spots. You'll stay at Brunt Farm. 
 You don't know it, of course — our annexe, half a 
 mile off, a place like a Swiss hotel's — a dependance; 
 we put people there, to sleep, when there's no room at 
 home. We have not many bedrooms, you know." 
 
 She ran on, the little things that she had to say 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 267 
 
 tumbling over each other. Her eyes had no rest, 
 either; now they would glance past his neck on one 
 side and then on the other and then straight into his 
 face, most shiningly, and then drop as if hit, and then 
 lift and take light again. It was strange to Aubrey at 
 first; he did not recognize it — had never seen any one 
 else overjoyed, nor known that the word could ever 
 mean all that it claims, and that the first rush of a 
 happiness could be distraction and fritter its own ex- 
 pression away into incoherence. All the time she would 
 talk, breaking off and restarting and flitting from 
 this to that as if each theme were the only one in the 
 world for one moment, and trivial the next — Cusheen; 
 and Aubrey's play that had been performed — oh, tri- 
 umphantly — while he was there; and a first brief of 
 Guy's — or would that come later? — anyhow, a suc- 
 cess of some sort; and the trouble it was to hold up 
 their little secret — they really must give up their fur- 
 tive trinket of privacy now. She talked as if harm 
 might happen if there were a silence. " You'll find 
 other guests at the farm — Dr. Schweinfurth, the 
 African traveler, anthropologist, father's old friend; 
 he's writing a book on our wild English ways; and — " 
 her voice checked for the first time. 
 
 " Newman? " said Aubrey. 
 
 " Yes. He is still there. Guy seems to like him, 
 and father, too. They think I judge harshly." 
 
 " He comes to your house ? " 
 
 " Every day, when they're here. But now there's 
 a rest. And you're coming. You're coming. You're 
 coming." She had congealed for a moment; she 
 
2G8 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 melted again, with a little fling of gladness, saying the 
 words over and over again as if at the first time she 
 had found something precious and then held it to 
 gaze at. ' Why did you not write any more?" she 
 suddenly asked in a voice that did not chide, and 
 scarcely inquired, but meant, " You might not write 
 for a year, you might not give a sign, and I would not 
 fear or doubt." 
 
 He stammered some lie about preoccupations. He 
 had a dry throat ; it had come on him while she talked. 
 He failed; he had come out to tell her the truth, but 
 the truth had changed — part of it had; for she was 
 not what he had then foreseen; the thing to be 
 wounded or crushed when he spoke was as much more 
 a thing to be guarded and spared than he could ever 
 have thought before, as life is more to be spared than 
 a statue. 
 
 She did not wait for his last husky word; she broke 
 in with an inarticulate murmur of soft remonstrance 
 to soothe away the idea that she could exact excuses 
 from him; why, she had not half thanked him for 
 " all he had done " — it had made Cusheen rich, paid 
 all its rents and upset beside it a cornucopia of new 
 clothes and maize and seed potatoes. " Father Power 
 has written and told me everything — oh, yes, every- 
 thing." 
 
 Out of breath, her eyes dark with dilation, she 
 looked at him with a fond wildness. Everything! 
 Aubrey's teeth bit on the irony of it. Doubtless his 
 little swimming practice with Power was " every- 
 thing." Lithe, noble creature, generous and wild, 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 269 
 
 that did not yet know it was caged; it licked the bars 
 unsuspectingly. Aubrey turned from her, disabled 
 again. 
 
 When they said good-by his hand returned her full 
 pressure. He groaned for it when she was gone. He 
 had done nothing yet, had drifted on, only. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 " O that 'twere possible, 
 
 After long grief and pain. 
 
 To find the arms of my true love 
 
 Round me once again ! " 
 
 Tennyson. 
 
 JUNE had two callers next day, before Aubrey- 
 came. First, Lady Roads, wife of the sovereign 
 vendor of baseness in print. Honor had found her 
 out since the day when she brought angry blood to 
 June's cheeks on the Anthons' lawn. It had not made 
 her unpractical. " I had to come, dear," she said; she 
 had been a small actress, and called people dears; " to 
 beg a thing of you." 
 
 " Tell me." In spite of the " dear " June thawed 
 to the distress in the voice. 
 
 "You darling! But if it's the slightest trouble 
 you'll send me straight home? — promise. It's this — 
 do you think you'll be seeing that dear Mr. Browne 
 who was with you — three weeks ago, is it?' 
 
 " He's coming to-day. Not to stay here. At the 
 farm. You don't know Brunt Farm ? " June rose ; 
 she wanted to turn her face away for a moment. 
 She went to the open door-window. " It's down 
 there," she said, pointing across bleaching stubble to 
 where a low roof basked in a sun-filled hollow. 
 
 " And then he'll be coming here. Might I come in, 
 
 270 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 271 
 
 some time when he's here, just to explain how 
 wretched my poor George is for having flown 
 out the way he did — oh, you don't know, of 
 course ? " 
 
 June remembered. Roads had coveted Aubrey for 
 a recruit to the gainful business of rotting England's 
 brain and heart towards their fall. June hearkened 
 patiently. 
 
 " It was at dear Lady Anthon's. I thought you 
 must really have heard — George's voice does penetrate 
 so; not when he's arguing — George never argues; he 
 knows too well what people are; he only told Mr. 
 Browne the plain truth, because he thought he could 
 speak to him like a father — that he was just a young 
 man, with the world to face still." 
 
 "Was he not?" 
 
 "Then? Yes, of course. But George hadn't a 
 notion that Mr. Browne was going to come off, the 
 way he has done, with those letters that made people 
 send all the money, and now this play that everybody 
 is talking about? " 
 
 " Are they? ,: It was not straightforward of June. 
 She knew. But she could not help angling for even 
 the poorest take of the delicious praise. 
 
 " My dear, it's the boomiest boom. Even the stupid 
 old critics all say it's good — that's the queer thing — ■ 
 and yet it's quite simple; George says that nobody else 
 would dare write that way, for fear of not seeming 
 to know enough. George and I saw it last night. 
 He almost cried in the box." 
 
 "Poor Mr. Browne! At his comedy?' 
 
272 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 ' No, but it hurt George so, not to be friends with 
 a person like that, when he might have been. ' Why, 
 he's a natural force,' George kept on saying, ' same 
 as springs that table waters come from. He's like a 
 mint running wild,' George said; ' it's Nature, fair 
 broke loose and spouting money, like the oil-wells.' 
 George does love to be at peace with Nature — just 
 as if we were still quite poor, he's so conscientious. 
 Oh!" 
 
 That moving stillness, the End House butler, mani- 
 festing itself near her elbow, startled the pleading 
 wife. Her own butler, the " Oh! " seemed to say, was 
 less still. Dr. Schweinfurth had called, the still but- 
 ler said. He would not come in yet; he had gone to 
 the library; there were a note and a parcel left for him 
 there by Mr. Hathersage. 
 
 June smiled. The old friend was free of the house. 
 : You know him? " she asked Lady Roads. 
 
 The man who knows all about the little, short 
 African savages? " 
 
 " Yes. He has torn himself from them now, for a 
 year, to discover England." 
 
 Then Aubrey came. June's back was turned to 
 the door, but she knew he was there, before she had 
 seen him or heard the name, whether it was that he 
 pressed through the air in a way that no one else had, 
 so that a ripple reached her which only he could have 
 shaped, or whether his tread alone was, like a voice, 
 wholly personal. 
 
 There was a soft but full light in the room, not like 
 the murk of London yesterday, where one could only 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 273 
 
 make out the main signals run up in another's face by 
 the moment's quickened blood or a thrilled nerve; 
 here all the book of expression lay open. And in June 
 it had been filled; Aubrey saw she had grown in a 
 way that made the petulant girl of the Roc-a-Voir 
 dining-room seem a thing crude, like green fruit, to 
 remember. Her whole face had attained a more 
 serene oval ; every f rettish or querulous line that had 
 drawn it before must have let itself go. Yet her 
 forehead had pensiveness, not corrugative, but a 
 benign glow; not a shadow, and yet it foreshadowed; 
 he had not imagined till then how much of the maiden 
 mind may be already wedded, from when it is pledged, 
 and mothering to-morrow's world. 
 
 She was transparent, plane behind plane, far into 
 the deep place, behind her eyes, from which her soul 
 ran to embrace him; over that, not wholly hiding it, 
 played the hostess' frank kindness, done with a will — 
 he might have been some guest so little cared for that 
 courtesy, fearing to fail, filled the cup till it spilt. And 
 over all that, in its turn, there sparkled, for him only 
 to see, her affection's amusement to find itself flaunt- 
 ing that mask. 
 
 She said soon, " May I leave you two people a 
 moment ? Lady Roads has a mission to you," she 
 smiled to Aubrey, " and I a little one to Dr. 
 Schweinfurth. My father has left a gift for 
 him." 
 
 Then she was gone, and the air flat, and the baro- 
 net's lady was losing no time. " Do tell me, now, 
 just what it's like, to wake up one morning and find 
 
274 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 yourself famous?' And then, without pausing an 
 instant, " Sir George was so glad." 
 
 ; ' Glad ? ' Aubrey echoed inanely, his eyes on 
 the crack of the door, shamelessly, like a turned-out 
 collie's. 
 
 ' So glad — and I know you would want to be just, 
 and I can't bear to see my poor darling suffer, the way 
 he was doing last night, when they cheered your play 
 so — the whole house was furious, I heard, the first 
 night, because you weren't there. It was his dread, 
 you know, lest he had wronged a great soul. There's 
 something so fine about George — he's so utterly 
 frank and good in that way — so ready always to 
 say ' I was wrong,' don't you know, like the 
 Prayer Book — ' erred and been deceived.' You 
 believe it, don't you? — if he could ever have dreamt 
 what last night would be like, or how splendid your 
 letters would be, in that dreadful paper, he couldn't 
 have said one word that could ever wound you. You 
 do believe that? " 
 
 He heard idly, as people look, from a blurring dis- 
 tance, at something that might be curious if it were 
 near. " Oh, yes, I do." 
 
 " Thank you, so much." She rambled on, 
 ending, "And you're friends with George? You'll 
 come — ? " 
 
 " Ah ! ,: He had jumped up. Dr. Schweinfurth 
 came, radiant. Big, blond and mild, he advanced with 
 effulgent moist eyes, one hand holding June's with a 
 gesture of unexhausted or still incompletely expressed 
 affection or thanks, the other holding a longish, slim 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 275 
 
 case of fine rosewood, lidded with plate glass and 
 brassy with purposeful locks like a jewel casket's. 
 Under his beard his lips moved each time he gave the 
 box a look of devotion. He simmered with rapture; 
 in happy, warm words it lipped over: "Your father's 
 liberal knowledge;" "his great intelligence;" "he 
 understands " — the Teuton's last, vastest eulogy. 
 
 June introduced them all, playfully puffing Aubrey 
 — " our new British dramatist." She was impelled to 
 say the last things that she would have said if he were 
 yet her known lover. 
 
 " Dramatist ? So ? " The German's eyes, willing 
 to be polite, but unable, wavered between Aubrey's 
 face and the rosewood. 
 
 June laughed and gave in to the child in the big 
 man. She looked at the box, to let him look too. 
 " My father was given it," June said, " by Major 
 Legard — you know Major Legard? " 
 
 " Know Legard ! Why, we were there — at the 
 same time — in Africa." 
 
 " Oh, then you would meet, of course," Lady Roads 
 babbled in, meaning no irony. 
 
 " Legard," Schweinfurth tolled momentously, 
 " has — Legard had" he amended, giving a jubilant tap 
 on the case's glass lid, " three of what nobody else in 
 Europe or Asia has. As for America, I cannot say. 
 Legard had three of the genuine, perfect war-arrows 
 used by the Malantu, with all the poison on. The 
 Malantu — you know about them?" His eye ranged 
 the company. 
 
276 THE MORNING'S AVAR 
 
 " I am so sorry, I fear I don't," June said, for them 
 
 all. 
 
 " The tribe was — the glory is gone, but it was — the 
 one fighting race in all the unspoiled part of Africa, 
 that had the two sitmma bona of primitive life to- 
 gether — good, thin tips of steel for its arrows, and 
 good, strong, quick poison to dip them in — poison to 
 kill, at the very worst, in an hour, often in only a half, 
 and to paralyze sooner, first the limbs, then the body, 
 last the brain also. At that stage of civilization, what 
 a thing for a people ! How they got the steel — that is 
 one of the wonders. And now Legard has given your 
 father one of the only three arrows! Love, indeed, 
 beyond love of brothers, when men make such gifts. 
 And your father has given it me ! " 
 
 He opened the case with musing tenderness, took 
 out the minute dart and held up its delicate tip. ' Per- 
 fect ! " he almost maundered. " Look at the poisonous 
 glaze, aqueous, turbid a little, as on a good Persian 
 vase. One tear in the skin, one prick, and — man is but 
 a shadow — do not waste your half hour in seeing the 
 doctor. Myths there have been, of old demi-gods, that 
 could throw off the poison. Myth is good, but, for 
 proof, the doctors have tried, first the poison and then 
 all the antidotes in the world, upon great dogs, 
 baboons, pigs, every beast most correspondent to man. 
 One, at last, by an accident, on himself. Useless! 
 They nothing could." 
 
 His eyes doted awhile on the tiny winged death. 
 Sir Bors might have looked at the Holy Grail so, 
 
THE MORNING'S WAlt 277 
 
 Aubrey thought. Then, detaching his eyes, the great 
 man said to June, " I am glad I have come." 
 
 She laughed affectionately. Lady Roads held her 
 breath till the case closed again; the released air es- 
 caped in a little gasp, unaffected for once. 
 
 ' It is rather awful, isn't it? " June said, in extenua- 
 tion of those flinching nerves. Her own had not 
 winced. 
 
 But Lady Roads was real no longer than she was 
 afraid. " So awful! " she prattled, making her voice 
 pretty again, " and yet the poor things had to do what 
 they could. Such a noble epitaph that, I do think — 
 ' He did what he could '; I've always thought it was 
 what I should like for dear George. Well, I must 
 rush. Good-by, Dr. Schweinfurth; I have been so 
 much interested. Good-by, Mr. Browne, my husband 
 will be so glad. I'll write to you. Good-by, dear." 
 June would have been kissed had her prescient dread 
 of it not shed a quick mist of delicate coldness over 
 the parting. 
 
 . Schweinfurth had stowed his treasure in some vast 
 inner pocket. He probed his coat's outer wall at short 
 intervals, lest the case should have missed the right 
 orifice. June went out with him into the hall when he 
 left. Her voice could be heard, round and full, as they 
 traversed it, then suddenly distant and thin, at the 
 opened front door. 
 
 Then it closed; her steps were returning, eager, 
 quickening as she came on. Aubrey had sat down. 
 He jumped up and went to the open door- window and 
 stood looking out, his back half turned to the room; 
 
278 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 lie did not know why he did that ; he had not decided 
 to do it ; it was not a chosen step towards some other 
 step after it ; but he had done it when June, at his 
 shoulder, called him by name; he had foregone the 
 embrace that was his to take. He turned his head to 
 her, woodenly. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 " Hamlet. I did love you once. 
 Ophelia. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. 
 Hamlet. You should not have believed me." 
 
 Hamlet, Act iii., sc. I. 
 
 JUNE had in her hand an unopened letter. She 
 must have picked it up in the hall on her way. 
 When Aubrey held back, her eyes fell to it. " From 
 my Aunt Kate," she said ; " from Rathfarnham ; the 
 answer to mine." She flicked the closed envelope on 
 to a table, to wait. 
 
 Aubrey looked out again, as her eyes rose. " It's 
 good here,'' he said. Over the undulant hills and used 
 cornlands the brown autumn stillness was shed like a 
 mood. He shammed admiration; it made an excuse 
 for flinching away from the sight of her face, where 
 the lights were a little sunk that her joy had hung out 
 for their festival. 
 
 "Is it?' : she asked quaintly, refusing to be de- 
 ceived. She put a light, deprecant touch on his arm. 
 " Tell me," she said, not quite as a mother prompts a 
 child to say out something it has on its mind, nor yet 
 as a child asks its father to tell it about the great 
 world, but still with a trace of the tenderness of the 
 one and the wist fulness of the other. 
 
 He turned to her sharply, in fear of softening. 
 "About what?" 
 
 279 
 
280 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 " Everything." 
 
 " May we go out? " 
 
 She stepped into the garden, obedient. There was 
 a lawn under the windows. Flanking the lawn, on one 
 side, like an aisle, with a hedge between, was a plot of 
 flower-beds veined with a maze of pebbled path. 
 Looking over it, southward, a seat of red brick, an 
 Italianate toy, a piece of " taste," was canopied with 
 trailing vines. They had reached it before either 
 spoke, June awaiting an answer, Aubrey holding at 
 bay what had come and treasuring each unruined 
 second. 
 
 With a gesture she made him sit there. She sat 
 down, too, with a space between them, both looking 
 out sunwards over the motionless, waiting flowers. 
 Each was a little turned in towards the other. 
 
 ' Begin," she said, more like the mother now than 
 the boy. 
 
 He made a gulping effort and then shied away at the 
 last, and only gave up delayful silence to clutch at 
 delayful speech. 
 
 " Oh, I — caught the night mail out from Euston," he 
 pattered ; " another night mail west from Dublin — " 
 ' Two nights with no sleep. You poor one." 
 
 "Oh, no; I slept." 
 
 " You woke early, in that ghastly light — like faint- 
 ing faces, you said. I know; it discourages; I awoke 
 too. No, I had been awake, thinking; you seemed so 
 indescribably little out there, like a child lost in a 
 desert." 
 
 She had not moved on the seat, but her voice and her 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 281 
 
 eyes had come nearer; like lights and bells of a haven 
 they offered rest. More than that ; she was enriched 
 again and ripened ; within her some rose of precarious 
 and poignant delight had burst into passionate bloom, 
 its petals aglow in her cheek and their curves on her 
 lips, a beauty that shed every sheathing, to spill round 
 the senses its odor and luster of treasuring tender- 
 ness. 
 
 What could he do, that had the passion himself of 
 the full, contained vessel of youth? Values were 
 changing, purposes melting, in this rose mist that he 
 swam in. One thing he could hold to — she must not 
 be cheated; she had to be told. But when she should 
 hear? He foresaw her face streaming as if with blood 
 from that blow r . Need he hasten her marring? Time, 
 in this yellowing garden, had lost motion. Not a leaf 
 rustled; the sun hung becalmed in still haze; the 
 earth's hastening was over. What was a minute, or 
 more, in that timeless world ? 
 
 " About Cusheen? " she asked. 
 
 "That dreadful place?' 1 he said, merely putting 
 her off to gaze at her as she still was. 
 
 "Dreadful?" 
 
 He roused from his gazing, a little. He had to find 
 something to say, merely to keep both of the forking 
 roads untaken for one minute more. " Why didn't 
 you tell me about it?" he said, in a voice of forced 
 hardness. For softness would have been one of the 
 roads. 
 
 " I didn't know," she pleaded. " Tell me." 
 
 She almost whispered these words, with a quick 
 
282 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 outstretch of her face — some infinitesimal part of an 
 inch, but it seemed to bring her whole body nearer, as 
 though the spirit that Hung itself towards his were 
 carrying with it its envelope. Aubrey lost strength 
 for a moment or two ; for that time their fate hung un- 
 certain ; it fluttered in air like a flake of snow that has 
 not alighted yet, over the ridge of the Andes; still 
 poised between Atlantic and Pacific, the flap of an 
 insect's wing might decide to which of two oceans it 
 shall go. Some breath of a gadding wind makes the 
 great choice for the flake ; in Aubrey there stirred the 
 remembrance of June in the Anthons' garden, the 
 devotee wounded. "Tell you what?' he asked, 
 harshly. 
 
 " All that you found at Cusheen." 
 
 " Oh, I saw women hunting potatoes in little 
 patches of mud. They all coughed." 
 
 " Yes? " She did not harden at his hard voice. It 
 only moved her, as mothers awaked in the night are 
 moved at feeling sick babies beat and kick at the breast 
 with minute, troubled limbs. 
 
 " There were men who scraped weed off the rocks 
 and laid it on flat stones, to cheat seeds into thinking 
 them earth. Good work, good worm's work — you 
 know the big book about earthworms — Darwin's, 
 isn't it? That's Cusheen's history." 
 
 " All of it? " There was a silence. Then she said, 
 as a comrade says to a sure comrade who holds back a 
 little thing for an instant, " Don't keep me out of it 
 all. It hurts." 
 
 He had no hope but in rollicking hardness now. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 283 
 
 " Oh, yes, things hurt; they're for that. I found that 
 out there." 
 
 Her hand went out and lit on his arm. " Aubrey," 
 she said most softly, inviting his eyes. 
 
 He could double no more. Her challenging love 
 had brought him to bay under the dead wall to which 
 he had known they must come. " No, curse it ! " he 
 groaned, " I can't have you touch me," and let his arm 
 fall slack from under her hand. 
 
 Even then he had made no choice of a course. What 
 he did could hardly be said to be willed. Falling down 
 the face of a crag, he was grasping, not at the best 
 hold, but at anything. He stood up. " No; sit there," 
 he ordered. Almost behind her he stood, to escape 
 seeing her eyes. ' Listen. The thing I found out was 
 — it's no use — my trying to love you." 
 
 : You don't ? ' It was hardly even a wail, for a 
 wail may have life, but this was the very ashes of pain. 
 She seemed to sink into herself and grow small, as the 
 faces of people expiring do, she was so pressed in 
 upon, from without, by mobbing griefs and shames. 
 
 1 Shall I go ? " he asked with some stupid impulse to 
 lie no more than he need, or at least to let silence do 
 the rest of the lying. 
 
 ' Not yet." She got the words out as soon as, in 
 some dim war which she must be fighting within, she 
 had gained a moment's mastery. Then the war went 
 on. 
 
 Unendurable silence ; he could not keep it. " Hate 
 me, hate me, hate me ! " he prompted her savagely. 
 
284 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 " See what a brute ! You can't clo it yet as you should. 
 You must, when you see." 
 
 " No, no, no ! ' She was heard speaking far off, as 
 people are who, with matters of moment to heed, blow- 
 away almost absently any dust-specks of intrusion that 
 settle on them. 
 
 " You'll think of forgiving! " he jibed, straining to 
 bind himself over, to cut off retreat. ; You do, you 
 people that have religions. Forgive!' 
 
 " Wait ! " For a little longer she held off from her 
 the things that he said, while she mustered her own 
 battered remnant of will. Then she began : "Au- 
 brey—" 
 
 " Still? " he said, at the name. 
 
 " Till you go — may I ? " 
 
 He relaxed guard a little ; she seemed to accept ; per- 
 haps it was all done now. He even began already to 
 look back as a Cain might do to all the time in which 
 he had not hurt Abel, and see his lost riches shining, a 
 great way off, like some old delight in a book. The 
 brutal lie severed them now, by his act; the flaming 
 sword stood at the gate ; he stared at it numbly, think- 
 ing, " I made it." 
 
 She was speaking. " You are you still, and I I," 
 she began. She looked round and up and he saw in 
 her face a flicker yet of the light he had stamped upon. 
 
 He only half hardened again. ' No, we're stone 
 dead; I, at least; can't you see? Things that one does 
 may be death, and more than it; they put an end to 
 more than what stops when your body dies and your 
 soul hasn't groveled. Think? " 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 285 
 
 She rose, her eyes on him ; in them the flicker, that 
 Aubrey had thought to quench, was leaping again into 
 flame. 'As if I could think! Do a sum, all about 
 you? Count up what's good and bad in you and then, 
 if the bad things are more, give you up! I can't. It's 
 not like that. It's all just an aching awareness of your 
 being you and my wanting you and that I'm nothing 
 without you — no more than a fiddle would be, after 
 everybody was dead." 
 
 She spoke like an incarnation of love, unashamed, 
 unafraid, unexacting, unjudging, more self-surrender- 
 ingly his, to take and keep, than she ever had been. 
 He might have turned back, even then. But he was 
 distracted. He saw her as men in a falling fort, who 
 are shooting their wives and daughters to keep them 
 from more cruel ends, may look at faces that they have 
 only wounded in trying to kill. Murder's mad lust for 
 completion was frenzied the more by anguished tender- 
 ness. ' Damn it, I swear I don't love you," he 
 growled; 'I swear. Won't that do you? I thought 
 you were proud." 
 
 He went on ; he forced the brutality wildly, heaping 
 affronts on her, desperately trying to stun her before 
 the sight of her, with the blows falling upon her, could 
 break him. At last she went slack, her body shrinking 
 down on the seat. She did not weep, but looked out 
 lifelessly over the still flowers, as if sick with dull pain. 
 
 He stood there, sick too. All the garden was tense 
 with sick pain ; the still haze on the hills was the look 
 of a paralyzed animal put to the torture. " Shall I 
 go? " he said, when he could. 
 
286 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 She just moved her head; he went, upon that. In a 
 convex mirror placed at the alley's end he saw her last, 
 a tiny figure of devastation, her face not yet in her 
 hands ; he was shut out from the right to see that. 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 "Death will find some way to untie or cut the most Gordian 
 knots of life." Sir Thomas Browne. 
 
 AT seven that evening supper was on at Brunt 
 Farm, in an antique kitchen, now a kitchen no 
 longer, but prized above parlors by amateurs of the 
 quaint. It was windowless, almost; the fireplace filled 
 a whole wall; the shut nail-studded door of the farm 
 was half the wall opposite. Candlelight made the place 
 snugly cavernous, deepened the sockets of people's 
 eyes and aspired intently up through the quiet air with 
 the straight, striving flame that can bring a few sec- 
 onds' trance if you gaze at it with a set will like its 
 own. Aubrey tried for that anodyne once, at a mo- 
 ment of silence. He and Schweinfurth were supping 
 alone ; Newman was out " to his tea," as the farmer's 
 wife told them, at Mr. Nick-Ross's. 
 
 The name recalled Oxford to Aubrey, his second 
 year there, and a Harrow freshman, a boy like a finely- 
 bred flower, the infantine grace of his urbane face 
 scarcely flecked then, sodden soon afterwards. Au- 
 brey remembered : he noticed that he remembered : 
 parts of him went on, just as they used to. Like one 
 who comes to himself after a fall, his mind moved a 
 little, felt at its limbs, bent a joint here and there, 
 wondering what would still work. Battered with loss, 
 
 287 
 
288 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 rolled in the mud of his lying, still he did not want to 
 be broken: his instinct was loyal to life; like a torn 
 tissue in highly vascular flesh, an unquestioning im- 
 pulse, practical, plodding, strove already to build up 
 again tiny cell upon cell. 
 
 Kings may be blest, but the German was glorious. 
 " Like them that dream " did he eat wild duck and the 
 milk pudding of Britain. They were well cooked, 
 there was good claret too, and he was a traveler. 
 " It's good to be here," he said, with a fork upheld 
 tridentwise; nothing at Brunt Farm could revolt him 
 now, not the hill of manure that sloped to the duck- 
 pond and stained it sour brown, nor the stable where 
 John, the laborer, slept in his clothes among the feet 
 of his horses. All is well where your own Holy Grail 
 has appeared : his lay on the far end of the table, be- 
 yond the white cloth; his eyes sought it at times, to 
 drink rapture, leaving the meat that perisheth. Aubrey 
 listened, at first as the very sick look out from their 
 beds when a little better, pondering dully on having 
 the use of their reopened eyes. Then he talked; the 
 tongue worked of itself, it was queer how fluently — 
 more than if no blow had fallen. Soon he took or 
 found cues like a host ; he chattered along, making a 
 little, or nothing, go a shameless long way ; he retailed, 
 for twice what they were worth, little things he had 
 heard, it might be at third hand — how John, in his 
 cups, had once broken a leg and lain between hospital 
 sheets for some weeks in great misery, sleepless till he 
 could get his discharge and flee back to the fouled 
 straw, the crunch of the corn in the mangers, the 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 289 
 
 breath and sighing of heavy beasts in the night, the 
 stench and the buzzing flies. 
 
 •' Wise child that knows its own schlummerlied," 
 Schweinfurth would babble back; " ' Schlaf, Kindlein, 
 schlaf,' say the flies, and John knoweth their voice as 
 your ship-boy in Shakespeare hears the imperious 
 surge saying, ' Hushaby." " Schweinfurth was maud- 
 lin with doating on his own treasure; he spilt his con- 
 tentment all round him, letting it fall, like the 
 warmth of a sun, on the bad and the good. 
 
 Aubrey could see what he himself was to this 
 beatified soul — some little figure intent on trifles, its 
 fugitive interests, its chatter of Johns and stable flies; 
 a small-talker, living for transiencies, he had to be 
 humored; small beer must be served out to keep him 
 in play, in harmless play, on the outer steps of the 
 door of the mansion of the intelligent. Aubrey could 
 see it all with a new clearness, frigid, transparent, 
 incredible, like an old view seen again through 
 strangely washed air on a rare, ninless evening after 
 rain. It would have made him drunk once, with de- 
 light; now he was cold, and that was strangest of all; 
 not anguished, but just cold, with opened eyes. He 
 wondered, was it like that to be old — to see so much 
 more and mind it so little; to find your old impedi- 
 ments gone, and nothing beyond them? He set his 
 voice going again. It ran on, undismayed by any thrill 
 of wonder, as if all talk were of things he had long 
 ago seen out to their ends. " I that used to be shy as a 
 sheep ! " he thought; speech, that used to come in short 
 spurts, precarious rushes, apt to be checked, he could 
 
200 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 not tell when, by a suddenly collaring sense of the 
 staggering moment of what he was speaking about — 
 speech was effortless now, and his own voice sounded 
 to him like bells tinkling outside; the airy, shrewd stuff 
 that he gave off was heard by himself as if it came 
 from old colonels or dowagers. And people had tried 
 to describe calamities ! Could they have ever felt 
 them? Or was he somehow deficient? No tempest 
 of grief was raging in him; he could not say that grief 
 gnawed him, or that he was stunned. What he was 
 bearing was not like what he had ever read of a man 
 who had lost what he loved, or his honor ; his was no 
 taxing pang or high trial or call for sore effort; only 
 an unthrilled, sinister ease ; nothing mattered, nothing 
 resisted, no wheel in him all found good rough ground 
 to bite on; the thing that was gone was the push of the 
 water back on the oar, the exacting, enchanting chal- 
 lenge of hardness and hazard in all the things that had 
 ever had to be done. 
 
 They were now on Nick-Ross; mention of New- 
 man had led to him. Nick-Ross should have been 
 here, Aubrey vowed, to meet Schweinfurth. Yes, he 
 remembered; Nick-Ross was just off to East Africa. 
 
 "He also? Exploring?" 
 
 " Only big game, I'm afraid. He's a soldier, or 
 was." 
 
 Schweinfurth pondered. He sought the connection, 
 "A soldier, then, not of profession? A voluntary? ' : 
 
 " No, no! In the Grenadier Guards." 
 
 Schweinfurth wondered again till Aubrey brought 
 a seeming solution. " He's out of them now." 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 291 
 
 "So?" The German's brow cleared. 'In your 
 army, too, is no room for idlers? " 
 
 "Cashiered? Dear no. Nick-Ross came into his 
 kingdom, his thirty thousand acres. His father had 
 died. And so farewell, as your German national poet, 
 your Shakespeare, says, to the great wars and the 
 tented field." 
 
 "He is how old?" 
 
 " Say, twenty-five." 
 
 "And after?'" 
 
 " He'll marry; be serious; perhaps hunt a pack of 
 his own; tell stories of camp and court after dinner — 
 he was a Queen's page once." 
 
 "Before being a soldier?" Schweinfurth was at- 
 tending. 
 
 " Yes. When a boy." 
 
 " It is a parallel ! " Schweinfurth's eyes sparkled. 
 He rose. " May I read you five words only, out of my 
 book? A book not yet out. On the Malantu." He 
 made for the door. Then he remembered. : You will 
 keep guard? ' He nodded his head towards the arrow 
 and hastened out. 
 
 Aubrey sat still for a moment and then went to the 
 arrow, took it out of the case and looked at it nar- 
 rowly. No thrill there, either; the tiny passport to 
 Lethe, easy and sure as Cleopatra's asp, stirred noth- 
 ing in him. He put it down listlessly. Schweinfurth 
 was back; he came in engrossed in a roll of proofs; he 
 was a man of successive absorptions, each of them ab- 
 solute. Smoothing a long slip of paper out, he read 
 aloud with zest: — 
 
292 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 The Malantu. The men of the ruling class serve 
 as pages in youth. From eighteen to twenty-five they 
 are classed as Elmorans, or warriors. After that age 
 they marry, settle down, and live on their lands, which 
 are tilled for them by villains or landless churls. The 
 Elmorans spend the rest of their lives in hunting. 
 They live chiefly on meat, they do not drink water, 
 and it is a point of honor with them not to work.' 
 The reader looked up, happy. " A true analogy, sur- 
 vival perhaps. I will go and make a note." The new 
 interest engaged the whole man; as he went out he did 
 not so much as look at the arrow, his cynosure, of ten 
 minutes ago, left lying exposed by the listless Aubrey, 
 nor hear two nearing sounds, in the outer darkness — 
 the brisk tap, tap of Newman's two sticks as he 
 stumped up the flagged garden-path, and the lilt of a 
 music-hall song of the day, knowing, leering and cruel : 
 
 " They may wriggle, they may struggle, but I've got 'em in my 
 eye—" 
 
 The tune gave a stagger, was lost for a few bars, and 
 then shambled on — 
 
 " — I shall have 'em by and by." 
 
 The tapping stopped; in the stillness Aubrey could 
 hear a hand wandering, exploring, over the outside of 
 the door, seeking the latch. Holding his breath, 
 Aubrey listened, and sickening thoughts came. Cruel, 
 gross hand, some time it might wander like that, in 
 the dark, besotted, cunning, deflowering, greedy, over 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 293 
 
 the face of a bride, over — oh, hell! Imagination, too, 
 had turned fluent; it raced, to no good, like a screw 
 out of water; its foul visions were physical, full, cir- 
 cumstantial; nothing would stop them — except, per- 
 haps, action. He jumped up and opened the 
 door. 
 
 Newman stood black against a young moonrise, a 
 figure precariously planted now that the door, its 
 third prop, was withdrawn. Such was the tea of 
 Nick-Ross. But Newman carried liquor with skill 
 and a will. His tongue was almost itself; when he 
 sat, his legs need not count; the one Bacchic influence 
 not to be mastered was preoccupation, whole-souled 
 and indignant, with a small wrong. 
 
 " 'Straor'n'ry chap, Nick-Ross!' he opened on it 
 at once. " Been out to tea with Nick-Ross. Thought 
 I'd ask his advice. Thought Nick was a man of the 
 world. Would you b'lieve it — hadn't a needle in the 
 whole house? Man o' th' world!" 
 
 For a moment or two he scorned and mourned 
 silently. Then, "You got a needle, now?" Aubrey 
 was suddenly asked, as if to give the world one more 
 chance of amending itself. 
 
 " No." 
 
 "Pin, even? Not a tin pin, mind. Gol', silver, 
 some presh's metal ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 Newman stared, at the other's curtness. ' Can't be 
 plagued, can't you, t'help fellow-creature? Oh, you're 
 all right. Your ship's come in. Y\ nat's human suf- 
 ferin' to you now you're famous and got pots of 
 
294 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 money, and boards np with ' House Full ' all over the 
 place! No symp'thy, no 'maj 'nation — that's what's 
 th' matter 'th you — don't puchself in's place." New- 
 man was fumblingly loosening his left cuff. " What'd 
 you say " — he rolled back coat and shirt sleeve, ex- 
 posing a large " I " tattooed on that forearm — " what'd 
 you say to having a blame thing like that on your arm, 
 and you going courting? ' : Newman's aggrieved tone 
 seemed to put Heaven itself in the dock, with Aubrey. 
 '' And just when you're moving the one letter on and 
 wanting a ' J,' next thing in your game." 
 
 "Game?" 
 
 " Goo' strong un too. Just when you're pressing 
 the beauty, hitch up your cuff a bit, show her the one 
 loved letter, an' blushin'ly own your folly. ' You — 
 that is. Been done two years.' I tell you it fetches 
 'em — small things like that. Tact — sort o' chivalry. 
 Understan' now? " 
 
 "What?" Newman had said "J." "J!" 
 That this ' I ' has bloomin' well got to turn into 
 a 'J.'" 
 
 'How?' : It was not a question really; more like 
 an outstretched arm, or raised stick, to keep an alight- 
 ing vulture off for a moment more from the eyes of 
 one lying disabled. 
 
 ' How? Grow a tail. Don' tadpoles do it? Drop 
 'em too, when they're done with; sensible beasts. 
 Something to last a fair fortnight — that's all I want. 
 No more everlasting debentures for me, way these 
 professionals let you in when they tattoo you — fast 
 dyes and every blame hole they prick like the shaft of 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 295 
 
 a pit. No, a nice drop of ink, a clean needle an' — 
 got s' much's a penknife?" 
 ' "No." 
 
 Newman drunkenly pondered his way to a chuckling 
 guffaw. " Gorlummy, I might 've borrowed a needle 
 from Miss June herself." 
 
 "She!" He had known it was coming and yet 
 had refused to know, or to figure June pestered by 
 bestial solicitations. 
 
 Newman stared. "What's wrong with her?' : 
 
 "Wrong?" 
 
 Newman seemed quite anxious. ' Looks all right, 
 doesn't she? Quite decent people — father's side any- 
 how? 'Course I know," he added concessively, " she's 
 got her head bunged up with religion — philanthropy, 
 that sort of muck — but it'll come right when a chap 
 puts it straight to her — chap with a right to. Why, 
 it's the making of any woman that's all right at bot- 
 tom — marriage is." Reassurance came in like a glow 
 with the bracing exercise of shedding this wisdom. 
 Newman's eyes ranged round him complacently. 
 " Lummy, I've got it," he suddenly said, and strug- 
 gled on to his feet. The razor-bright point of the 
 arrow had caught the agitated gleam of a candle 
 blown askew, perhaps by the breath of this elo- 
 quence. 
 
 Aubrey watched silently, not choosing between 
 silence and speech, nor feeling that there was a choice. 
 He looked on as you look at history when it is writ- 
 ten, at some old working of fate, or the linked proc- 
 esses of suns, far out of your governance. 
 
296 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 'Kim up." Newman lifted the arrow. "What- 
 ever dam surgeon has been in the place? Praise be! 
 'Sprov'dence; same old Godsprov'dence. Ram in the 
 bushes f'r Abr'am; food for young ravens; catering 
 done for sparrows; lancets free f'r any one wants 
 'em." He held the steel to the light with a tipsy aping 
 of circumspection and once more certified " 'Sprov'- 
 dence." 
 
 Newman had often said to friends, " When I see a 
 thing has got to be done, I do it." Laying the arrow 
 down on the table, its point punctiliously clear of all 
 possible dirt, the man of action took off his coat and 
 turned back his left sleeve, right to the elbow. 
 
 The " I " stood out monumental, blue-black on the 
 white expanse of the plump cripple's womanish arm. 
 To Newman himself, or the maundering liquor in him, 
 the letter seemed, as monuments do, to spring half- 
 recollections that had to be paused for and made clear 
 and whole. "Ivy — that's it. Rum little girl, Ivy; 
 long hair down her back. I was at Harrow then. Ivy 
 — a rum little beast — she went it blind afterwards, 
 somebody told me. They do." 
 
 " With a start," Aubrey let go his held breath 
 enough to put in; his eyes had ceased from even the 
 common blinking of nature; they had to miss nothing 
 now. 
 
 Newman had picked up the arrow. He maundered 
 on, with it upheld in his right hand, his eyes still on 
 the " I," the remembrancer. " Weird bit of luck — it 
 did twice. 'Sprov'dence again. Ida — rotten name 
 Ida. Had her to mind some roses I grew in a little 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 297 
 
 garden at Kidlington — little house in the garden, of 
 course — my last year at Oxford — ' Ga-rrr-er ye roses 
 while ye may ' — decentish song she'd sing in the even- 
 ings — Midsu-rr-er evenings — moths coining blunder- 
 ing in at th' window, butting at everything. Silly rot, 
 really. Tebb — remember Tebb? — man we called 
 Splosh — took on the small holding afterwards — roses 
 and Ida — everything. All silly rot, if y'ask me. Gem- 
 married and put down the tandem, that's what I say; 
 go about 'n a carriage all over cushions an' tell the 
 man drive you dam slow, and a little brandy on the 
 front seat, case 'v acc'dent." 
 
 Tongue and limbs shared a finite measure of 
 soberness; they took turns at its use. As Newman's 
 voice trailed away into drivel, his right hand took a 
 good grasp of the arrow-. Pen-like, it impended over 
 the " I." 
 
 "Ink ready?" said Newman. "Oh. blast the 
 cuff! ' It had slipped down again till it half hid the 
 letter. "Prop it up, will you?' He held out the 
 arm. 
 
 " No." The reply was instant; it was not willed or 
 chosen; Aubrey himself wondered at it and at the 
 hoarse voice; the whole inside of his mouth must be 
 dry; he must have been gaping a long time at the drift 
 that was carrying this beast to extinction. 
 
 " Manners, m'young friend, manners," Newman 
 corrected blandly. 
 
 Aubrey had wet his tongue now. " Put it down," 
 he commanded roughly. 
 
 Newman mimicked a nurse who must make a rude 
 
298 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 child say its " Please." " PI . . ., pi . . .," he 
 prompted. 
 
 ' Put it down, blast you." Aubrey rose, furious 
 and red. he could not tell why. He wished Newman 
 dead; vermin ought to be dead; it was unreason to 
 keep them crawling about and stinking and stinging; 
 it was not fair to people; it was not loyal to June, 
 whom this pest was to plague. But it was like lust; 
 the impulse bore down all reason. He jumped up and 
 stood over Newman, bullying. 
 
 Newman was not a coward. And he was drunk. 
 He shrugged, tucked up the sleeve unhelped, and ad- 
 dressed himself to the work. The arrow's point 
 hovered over the " I," picking its first place to puncture 
 the skin. It had picked, but not touched it, when 
 Aubrey reached down, caught hold of the arrow be- 
 tween Newman's hand and the tip, and snatched it 
 away. But not easily. At the assault Newman's 
 fingers had tightened their grip; the smooth shaft had 
 slipped through Aubrey's hand till the barb checked 
 the slipping. The barb pierced the edge of his 
 clenched palm and tore its way through skin and flesh 
 as he dragged. 
 
 Aubrey looked at the tear, with his rage suddenly 
 gone. He must try to comprehend quickly, quickly; 
 that was all he could feel; he must comprehend the 
 things to be done in the hour at most, half hour per- 
 haps, that could now be heard running down head- 
 long in hurrying, creaking ticks of the farmer's cheap 
 clock. Had the clock bolted? Oh, no, of course, it 
 was his head that he had to keep. 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 299 
 
 Newman was spluttering, outraged. He sought an 
 oath big enough. " Well, I am — " 
 
 "You are. You'd not be if this — " Aubrey held 
 out the arrow in his whole hand. Some menial faculty 
 in him came to his mind's kitchen door to keep New- 
 man in play. 
 
 'You don't mean — !' Newman gaped at the 
 arrow, his pink face turning to tallow. 
 
 4 Poison : good, quick stuff — an hour or so." 
 
 'By God, what a let off! Hullo, though, it's run 
 into you. Suck it, man. I'll drive like hell for a 
 doctor." 
 
 ' No. He'd make the right faces — that's all — and 
 use up the time." 
 
 Newman calmed. 'What made you do it?' he 
 asked. 
 
 ' The deuce knows." Aubrey had suddenly put 
 himself into motion, as if a thought that changed 
 much had occurred. He had let the arrow fall on the 
 table, had run for his boots and was head down, drag- 
 ging one on. 
 
 ' If you'd told me — " The self-exculpatory im- 
 pulse was growing and groping in Newman. " You 
 just swore and grabbed at it." 
 
 'Yes, yes; most hasty," said Aubrey, knotting the 
 last lace. The words meant, " Oh, don't bother. 
 Take what you want." 'Good-night!' he called 
 back from the door, more friendlily. 
 
 "Going out! Where the—?" 
 
 "Good-night!" 
 
 The click of the gate at the garden's end followed 
 
300 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 quick. The fellow was running. Newman flopped 
 into a chair, bewildered. " 'Straor'nary chap," he 
 mused quite aloud. 
 
 The door was flung open next moment, and Browne 
 plunged in, breathless. " Forgot the blamed thing," 
 he panted. The arrow still lay on the table; he hur- 
 ried it into its case, turned the key and threw the key 
 over to Newman. ' Give it the German," said 
 Browne; " the beastly thing's his. It may be spoilt — 
 tell him I'm sorry — I can't wait." 
 
 He bolted out into the night again. Newman, who 
 had half risen, collapsed again into his chair. " Mos' 
 'straor'n'ry chap," he repeated, " I ever saw in my 
 life." 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 "Has this been thus before? 
 
 And shall not thus time's eddying flight 
 Still with our lives our love restore 
 
 In death's despite, 
 And day and night yield one delight once more?" 
 
 D. G. Rossetti. 
 
 FROM the hole where the farm lay the lane ran 
 nearly level awhile; then it made the rest of the 
 rise in one sharp slope ; from its top to the End House 
 all would be easy. Aubrey ran hard ; the false start 
 had wasted a minute or more. He planned hard, as he 
 ran ; he would rush the slope, lest there should be any 
 steepness left when his legs began to give; on the flat 
 he might get along, even then, somehow. 
 
 As the lane rose it cut into gravel and sand — lane 
 and watercourse too, for three centuries' traffic and 
 rain. Over his head he saw on each side bare roots of 
 the hazel hedges that arched the way leafily, turning its 
 sandy trough into a tunnel, dark now, though the moon 
 could be seen caught in a tangle of boughs. He stum- 
 bled on, sweating and losing breath; each hundred 
 yards was great gain; five minutes more to the top of 
 the hill ; then another five ; that would be all. En- 
 chanting, the grip of clenched thighs on a slope, the 
 clip of the knees as they bow to take hold; always en- 
 chanting to him, not merely now, when he might make 
 
 301 
 
302 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 too much of what he was losing, as people do. But 
 now, how enchanting! He could feel that, and smell 
 the hazels and sand deeply and slowly, and think about 
 trivial humors — how he would stagger the butler by 
 bursting in, hatless and hot ; and yet the whole time his 
 mind was on June, not thinking but just envisioning 
 her, sinking all sequent thought in mere ecstatic, mo- 
 tionless sense of the aspect, melting and kind, that he 
 was again free to call into her face, could he but reach 
 her. Death was coming, but then death was over, too, 
 in a way; passionate life and the passionate love of 
 life, which is life's heart, were astir and warm after 
 that Ice Age of numbness too dead to be even pain. 
 
 He was nearly up the hill now; the right and left 
 sky-lines of banked sand were dipping down to him, 
 hoisting the moon up the sky. Six yards more, and the 
 flat stretch would begin. But a strange thing happened. 
 He felt as if his body were not upright, but leant back, 
 at right angles to the lane's slope. Why, he might 
 topple backwards, he carefully thought. He forced his 
 head and shoulders well forward, and instantly fell on 
 his hands and one knee, scraping away cloth and skin. 
 He scrambled up, but nothing would balance now ; he 
 had to fall either forward or back. A field gate was 
 ahead on his left, six yards on, the coveted six yards. 
 He made a falling rush at it, threw his arms over the 
 top bar and hung by them rather than stood on his 
 failing feet. 
 
 So it was coming, but not sheer disablement yet. 
 His mind was unclouded ; more cloudless, perhaps, than 
 ever before; all powers were its, in new strength — 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 303 
 
 vision and passion and swiftly-building reason — as 
 though at the opened door of endless night the quick 
 spirit bent itself up to show what it might have done 
 yet in the sun. His arms were sound too, and his legs 
 to the knees. Walking was done with, but there was 
 all fours; he dropped to the ground and set off in- 
 stantly, scuttling on hands and knees, half in the sandy 
 dust and half on the wayside grass where the raw knee 
 flinched less. All the time he was calculating closely; 
 twenty more minutes at this pace should do it ; no, say 
 twenty-five, for his legs began to drag like a fly's that 
 have been in the cream. Still, his arms held out well ; 
 that was fine ; he shuffled on, almost elate, till a wrist 
 gave way and let him down, rolling first on his right 
 side and then on his back in the white dust. He wrig- 
 gled to rise, but the other arm gave, and both legs. He 
 tried to roll over and over, barrel-like, in the direction 
 he wanted to go, but he found that, even for this, live 
 limbs were needed, to make the trunk turn, and he was 
 a torso now, tied to dead weights. 
 
 He lay still in the dust, working it out. Three hun- 
 dred yards still to the house; two hundred and fifty 
 perhaps. Some one might pass in the moments left. 
 It would be miracle, almost; the hamlets were all 
 asleep; still, it was only just nine, and a moon-flooded 
 night ; some child might be ill and a father go that way 
 for the doctor. Some one might pass. But, were it a 
 winged Mercury, could it bring June word in time? 
 And would she come ? Oh, yes, she would come ; that 
 was safe; she had all the proud generosities. He must 
 be ready if any one passed; he must have his message 
 
304. THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 framed, and also his means to make a passer believe 
 that he was not drunk or an idiot, to lie in the 
 dirt and bid ladies come to him. That done, he 
 listened and listened, his ears becoming creative and 
 modeling dim shapes of the craved sounds of footsteps 
 and voices out of the chaos of infinitesimal whispers 
 that make up the breath of the earth in its sleep; then 
 back, with a rush, came the thought of his hoarded 
 minutes pouring themselves out to waste, and he was 
 convulsed with another effort to move, like a weaken- 
 ing horse that is lashed again after its stronger strug- 
 gles to move the cart have all failed. He strained till 
 cramp came and sweat matted his hair and made it 
 feel heavy; drops of sweat crawled on his face and 
 tickled like flies. 
 
 But the miracle happened — as if you were starving 
 and wished, without hope, that a gold coin might lie 
 in the mud at your feet — and it lay there. The spasm 
 was over ; the ears were again at their post, and lo ! 
 while they had been away, sharing the body's agony, 
 sounds had found shape that did not need conjuring — 
 oncoming steps that rustled clear in the dust ; and then 
 breathing, shallow and quick; and another rustle, 
 rhythmic and, as he thought, quickening — the rub of 
 two parts of a dress on a woman walking and then 
 walking faster and then running: some country girl, 
 no doubt, scared at her night walk and wanting to get 
 it done. Would she faint when he spoke? To guard 
 against that waste of time he set about crooning, the 
 tuneless best way he could, some words of the first 
 song he could think of : 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 305 
 
 "Oh, you'll tak' the high road and I'll tak' the low road, 
 And I'll be in Scotland before you." 
 
 He heard her breath stop, her step check ; no cry, 
 though; and then she came on unfalteringly. ' Good 
 one ! " he thought, and hummed away : 
 
 " — me and my true love will never meet again 
 By the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond." 
 
 She was near; she must see him now; he would 
 speak tranquilly, say he was suddenly ill, beg her to run 
 very fast to the End House, ask to see Miss Hather- 
 sage instantly, tell her — 
 
 Held down on his back he saw little but sky and 
 trees ; no road at all. The woman came on in shadow 
 at first; she heaved into sight an undelimited white- 
 ness, scaling the dome of his visible world as a white 
 cloud sails up a night sky. Then the moon fell on this 
 cloud, a white shaft on a white face; as she ran to the 
 voice and stooped down to him quickly, all of him that 
 had longed for her coming, his love and regret and 
 pity, cried out her name over and over, embracing it. 
 " Oh, June, June, June! " 
 
 On her knees, with one hand under his head and the 
 other pushing back his wet hair, she did not speak 
 words, and yet was not silent; a murmurous haze or 
 audible breath of tenderness shed itself on him. Help- 
 lessness made him, for that moment, hers utterly; she 
 had a rending joy like a mother whose wild son is 
 carried home to her ill and as full of needs again as 
 the infant she once nursed. She could not even ask 
 anything yet; she only sat in the dust with his head in 
 
306 THE MORNINGS WAR 
 
 her lap, between her hands, pouring about him that 
 mist of caressing low sound. 
 
 " I was lying," he said; " I do love you." 
 
 " Ah ! " she said, strangely, as if she had known. 
 ' I kept loving you more and more, all that time I 
 was lying." 
 
 " Dear, kind one." 
 
 " We had been caught in a trap ; we had walked 
 right into it; we couldn't know; but it's all right now; 
 it's all right." 
 
 Yes, yes ! " she broke out in triumph. 
 
 ' I thought about ways to get us both out of the 
 trap, together — to break the thing. There wasn't one 
 that I could see anywhere. Then I went mad and tried 
 just to cut you out of it, hacking you like a brute, any- 
 how!" 
 
 "No, no!" 
 
 " Yes. I can't tell you it all—" 
 
 " I know it all." 
 
 "You?" 
 
 ' My dear love, my cousin." The shunned word 
 came, playful and tender. He took it in dazedly, try- 
 ing to grasp the changed world that it made. The dead 
 wall was down; it had never been there; he had lost 
 her for nothing; he had played traitor for nothing; 
 in his crazed fume at the farm he had thrown away life 
 for a striker's whim of not saying a plain word in time. 
 Oh, long list of his blindnesses! 
 
 June was speaking. " It was that letter — my Aunt 
 Kate's. I opened it when you were gone. Then I 
 guessed — no, I had a faint, sneaking hope — that this 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 307 
 
 might be why you were giving me up — that you wanted 
 to let me off, oh, my dear blind one ! Wasn't I shame- 
 less? — you'd kicked me away, and I let myself cling to 
 your boots, in my thoughts. But I couldn't go to you 
 and throw myself at you and say, ' I'm your cousin. I 
 know, but still will you take me ? ' I wasn't trying to 
 see you. I couldn't stay in — that was all. I wanted 
 to look at the house where you were, from a little way 
 off — there are trees on a knoll — I could not have been 
 seen, and then I'd have stolen away. And there were 
 you, coming to me, all the time, and it's all right in the 
 end." She was exalted; she threw up her head to 
 shake back a tress and he caught in her moon-filled eyes 
 a light wild and yet steadfast, a fit fire-signal of em- 
 barkation on love the adventure, the taxer of staunch- 
 ness, the violent rearranger of lives. So must his 
 mother have looked, on that other night. 
 
 She found earth again. " What a brute I am. 
 You're ill — you're hurt in some dreadful way — oh, 
 what is it?— and I doing nothing. I'll run, I'll bring 
 people to carry you." She moved, to rise. 
 
 He pressed his head down on her lap detainingly. 
 " Darling, I'm dying," he said, sorrowfully, feeling it 
 hard to have no arms to hold her in, while the words 
 
 fell. 
 
 She did not cry out, or flinch. All he felt was a 
 tightened clasp of her hands under and over his head, 
 as if they had felt it slipping away. She had con- 
 tracted a little, the whole of her body, and then be- 
 come taut, as does an attacked army whose outposts 
 draw in and stand fast. 
 
308 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 He turned his head this way and that between her 
 hands, so as to rub against them softly, a kind of em- 
 brace. ' A fluke," he said, " a scratch, an accident at 
 the farm with that arrow." 
 
 " You didn't— !" 
 
 ' No, no. I've loved living — even then ? You 
 understand? Newman had it. I snatched it away in 
 a temper and so I got scratched." 
 
 "Where? Show me, quickly." 
 
 He could not point to it; the outworks of life were 
 all down; only the captaining brain, cut off and in- 
 vested, held out still in its citadel. " Don't look for it, 
 June; the poison's gone far from it now; it may be 
 flowing into my brain or my heart ; let us love out our 
 minutes." He mustered the scattered parts of a 
 thought. " You didn't think of me the way the priest 
 did?" 
 
 " Oh, no, no." 
 
 " I was afraid. I thought of you at that party — the 
 way you looked when Mrs. Roads spoke." 
 
 " I was angry — I wasn't religious. I had been 
 shaken and doubting for ever so long. It made me all 
 the more furious when people who didn't believe were 
 ribald or pert — it's so holy and lovely whenever any 
 one does believe anything really, and stands by it. 
 Sometimes I wavered back, when I was tired or weak. 
 That morning I wrote to you — " 
 
 " Yes, my dear, dear." He did not need to recall 
 the words of her letter : " I prayed to Mary, Mother of 
 God." They had burnt into him. Without his mis- 
 reading of them he might not have blundered into all 
 
THE MORNINGS WAR 309 
 
 this. "You wouldn't have minded the shame?' he 
 asked. " Cousin and wife of the son of a runaway 
 priest." 
 
 "And at Brabburn?' 1 She tenderly mocked. 
 
 Some pang traversed his body, enforcing a moment 
 of silence and closed eyes. She bent down, raising his 
 head a little. They stayed so, till her lips felt his eye- 
 lashes lifting. 
 
 " You kissed me," he murmured, musing in paradise. 
 
 " You fainted? You are in pain? " 
 
 " Pain ! No ! You kissed me. Isn't the mill some- 
 where here? ' : The mind, uneasy in its shaken house, 
 began to go hither and thither. 
 
 "There! There!" She lifted his head and 
 pointed. 
 
 From the dark swell of the Hurtwood the sails rose, 
 dark too, against a sky white with strewn stars; the 
 ledge where they had first kissed was drawn black and 
 sharp on that ground. He was shaken; he found dying 
 hard, and she lost hold of her voice and tears and had 
 to be silent above his head, hiding a face crumpled like 
 a child's with pain, while the defrauded love in each of 
 them beat, alone and in secret, on the unhearing bars 
 of their cage. 
 
 So they remained, held apart by the resolution of 
 each not to break the strength of the other, till Aubrey 
 had suffered the whole of conscious death, to the last 
 sting it can plant in life-loving tissue. He had sunk 
 choking slowly through gray water that sang in the ear 
 and pressed in on the mouth and darkened through 
 dusk into night over his upturned eyes. Then all that 
 
310 THE MORNING'S WAR 
 
 had fought and striven in him gave up, and rest came 
 on and on; it called, it invited, like a made bed after 
 nights of lying awake in day clothes; but no, it had not 
 a form, it was a glow, a suffusion, a luminousness that 
 brightened and spread; it was widening and paling 
 round him, but chiefly above, and he was a bubble of 
 air rising through gray water slowly, without effort or 
 will of his own, merely watching the light grow and 
 grow overhead as he drew to the surface and broke like 
 a bubble there; eyelids broke open, and June's face was 
 there, bent over the waters ; it filled his emerging eyes. 
 She had closed them, for she, too, had suffered his 
 death and had thought, as she drew those curtains, 
 could there be any mirrors so eager, ever again? And 
 now they were open ; they took the light ; they filled 
 themselves with her. She knew, without knowing 
 how, that he had come back with his life ; the gleam of 
 the salvaged treasure was in his face; and he knew too, 
 for the news shone in hers even before he felt in his 
 limbs the tingling reveille of the drugged troops of life. 
 Had he sweated the mortal drop out of his veins? 
 Had its lethal virtue gone stale? Or had some freak 
 of luck spiced his blood with its antidote? Or — but 
 what did it matter? He looked up at June. They had 
 come through, unbroken; they had not squared fate; 
 they had each kept pride clean, to bring to the other. 
 And no poor life was ahead; romance had begun it; 
 romance it would be; not the old fanfaronnading ro- 
 mance of the cheering lists and the sun on the plumes 
 — the trumpeting boy's paradise and the unassayed 
 girl's, but romance strung afresh to the pitch of the 
 
THE MORNING'S WAR 311 
 
 grown strength of women and men, even of woman- 
 and-man, the unmanned unit, the two-chambered heart 
 of the race, the twin power-house of high desire and 
 will ; the romance of new, harder, unpraised feats to 
 do, of dark places to traverse without any fairy lamp 
 in the hand, of glamourless risks to affront, of all the 
 flintier flints that there were for steelier steel to strike 
 the old fire from. 
 
 She did not speak, nor did he, under that first rush 
 and oppression of instant and of waiting happiness. 
 Words must have been made by man for telling about 
 quite small delights only, and lighting the dim spaces 
 between people who did not know how to be friends ; 
 they might, with their poorness, have wronged that 
 morning flame of life and joy, or blurred the vision 
 that each lover had gained of the other's completing 
 soul. 
 
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