On the tenth of December, Daphne, Alix, and Nicholas went down to Cambridge. Liverpool Street Alix found restful. Liverpool Street, as the jumping-off place for East Anglia, has a soothing power of its own. Stations often have, probably because they indicate ways of escape, never the closed door.
But Cambridge, which they reached all too soon, was not restful. Cambridge city, even out of term time, even during terms such as these, which all the young thinkers are keeping in trenches overseas, is too conscious of the world's complexities and imminent problems and questionable destinies, to be peaceful. Cambridge is the brain of Cambridgeshire, which, having all its more disturbing thinking thus done for it, can itself remain quiet, like a brainless animal.
Daphne's sphere of work did not include Cambridge, which already thought about these things, and heard, gladly and otherwise, Mr. Ponsonby on Democratic Control and Lord Bryce on International Relations, and many other people on many other subjects. All she did in Cambridge was to foster and stimulate the life of the already existing branch of the S.P.P.P., and to make it her centre for propaganda in Cambridgeshire.
Nicholas and Alix, having been brought up in Cambridge, did not know Cambridgeshire much. Alix discovered Cambridgeshire, through this quiet, pale December. There are moments in some lives when it is the only shire that will do. Many feel the same about Oxfordshire; more about Shropshire, Sussex, Worcestershire, Hampshire, or the north, or the southwest. The present writer once knew some one who felt it about Warwickshire, but these, probably, are few. Most people may like Warwickshire, to live in or walk in or bicycle in, but will give it no peculiar place as healer or restorer. It is, perhaps, essentially a shire for the prosperous, the whole in body and mind; it has little to give, beyond what it receives. But Cambridgeshire, 'of all England the shire for men who understand,' in its quiet, restrained way gives. It is not for the rich, and not for sentimentalists, and not for Americans; but it is for poets and dreamers. To those who leave it and return it has a fresh and sad significance, like the face of a once familiar and understood but half-forgotten friend, whose point of view has become strange. New meanings, old meanings reasserted, rise to challenge them; the code of values inherent in those chalky plains that are the setting of a quiet city seem to emerge in large type. Cambridge is of a quite different spirit. In Cambridge is intelligence, culture, traditionalism, civilisation, some intellectualism, even some imagination, much scholarship, ability, and good sense, above all a high idealism, a limitless fund of generous chivalry, that would be at war with the world's ills, the true crusading spirit, that can never fit in with the commercial.
And round it, strangely, lies Cambridgeshire, quiet, chalky, unknown, full of the equable Anglian peoples and limitless romance; the country of waste fens and flat wet fields and dreamy hints of quiet streams, and grey willows, and level horizons melting into blue distance beyond blue distance, and straight white roads linking ancient village to ancient village, and untold dreams; and probably not one Cambridge person in two hundred understands anything at all about it; they are too civilised, too urban, too far above the animal and the peasant. Here and there some Cambridge poet, or painter, or even archæologist, has caught the spirit of Cambridgeshire; but mostly Cambridge people are too busy, and too alive, to try. You need to be of a certain vacancy....
But, though they understand so little of it, in times of need it sometimes raises quiet hands of healing to them. Sometimes, again, it doesn't.
Alix, wandering over it with Daphne, who held meetings, found it grey, toneless, faintly-hued, wintry, with larks carolling over the chalky downs and brown ploughed fields. That country south of Cambridge seemed to her the truest Cambridgeshire, rather than the level plains of Ely and the fenlands, and rather than the border regions of the north-west, where Royston, among its huddle of strange hills, broods with its hint of a hostile wildness. Royston is rather terrifying, unless you use it for golf, and Daphne had a poor meeting there.
Meetings in Cambridgeshire are often poor, that is the truth (excepting only in election time, when apathy gives place to fierce excitement). Whether they are about National Service, or Votes for Women, or Tariff Reform, or Free Trade, or Welsh Disestablishment, or Recruiting, or Peace—you cannot really rely on them. Cambridgeshire, rightly believing that the day for toil was given, for rest the night, does not lightly thwart this dispensation of Providence. And the few borderland hours of twilight or lamplight which providence has set between these two spaces of time, are, there seems little doubt, given us for the purposes of tea, smoking, conversing, and courting. So meetings do not really come in.
But Daphne held them, all the same, and some people came. She usually held them in the village schoolroom. Sometimes she got the vicar's permission to address the children during school hours, sometimes that of the vicar's wife to speak to the Mothers' Meeting while it met. But she preferred evening meetings, because of her lantern slides, which showed the photographs she had taken on her travels of men, women, and children in the other villages of other countries, thinking, so she said, the same thoughts as these men, women, and children in Cambridgeshire, saying, in their queer other tongues, the same things, playing, very often, with the same toys. (This, of course, was by way of Promoting International Sympathy.)
The women and children liked these meetings and slides. The women, being open-hearted, kindly, impressionable, pacific, saw what Daphne meant, and said, 'To think of it! I expect those mothers, pore things, miss their boys that are fighting, the same as we do ours. Well, it isn't their fault, is it? it's all that wicked Keyser.'
The children said merely, 'Oo-ah! look at that!'
Then Daphne would go on from that starting-point to expound that it wasn't all, not quite all, that wicked Keyser. That it was, in fact, in varying degrees, not only all governments but all peoples, who had made war possible and so landed themselves at last in this.
This was less popular. The women didn't mind it; they were receptive and open to conviction, and didn't much mind either way, and were prepared to say, 'Well, to be sure, we're none of us very good Christians yet, are we?' For ideas didn't matter to them very much, nor the wrongs and rights of the war, but the fact of the war did. But some man behind, who had made up his mind on this business and knew that black was black and white was white, would sometimes observe, with vigour and decision, 'Pro-Hun.'
'I am not a pro-anyone,' said Daphne, 'nor an anti-anyone. But I am, in a general way, pro-peace and anti-war, as I am sure we all are in this room.' Then those who believed themselves to differ would shout 'Fight to a finish,' and 'Crush all Germans,' and 'Smash the Hun,thenyou may talk of peace,' and 'Here's some soldiers back here, you hear whatthey'vegot to say about it,' and other things to the same purpose; and once or twice they sang patriotic songs so loud that the meeting closed in disorder. But at other times they gave Daphne a chance to explain that she meant by peace, peace in general and in future, not a premature end to this particular war. That end, she remarked, must now be left to be decided by others; it was the future they were all concerned with. When once she got through to this point, the room usually began to listen again, and heard, with varying degrees of attention, interest and tolerance, how they could help to make a permanent peace, and even put up good-humouredly with hearing how they had helped, for some centuries, to make war, by encouraging commercialism, capitalism, selfishness, ignorance, and bad habits of thought.
On the whole, and with exceptions, so far as Cambridgeshire listened to Daphne at all, it was receptive and not unkind. The villages, of course, varied, as villages will. In some the squire and the vicar and the other chief people would not allow the meeting at all, rightly thinking it pacificist. In others they allowed it and came, and sat in front, and differed, asking Daphne if she had not heard the recommendation,Si vis pacem, para bellum, and remarking that while we are in a war is not the time to talk of peace. 'You might as well say,' said Daphne 'that while we are suffering from a plague is not the time to talk of measures to prevent its recurrence.'
Villages, as has been said, differ. Some, for instance, are more intelligent than others. Great Shelford is rather intelligent, and means well; many of its inhabitants are leisured, and will readily, if advised, form study circles and read recommended literature. In fact, they did. Quite a promising little nucleus of the S.P.P.P. was established there. Sawston, two miles and a half away, is otherwise; so is Whittlesford. Of Linton, Pampisford, Landbeach, Waterbeach, the Chesterfords, and Duxford, it were better, in this connection, not to speak. Frankly, they did not understand or approve the S.P.P.P. They thought it Pro-German.
'That silly word,' said Daphne helplessly, to Nicholas, after a rather exhausting evening at Sawston. (Nicholas's own evening had been restful, for he had spent it at home, reading Russian fairy-stories.) 'What does itmean? Do they meananythingby it? Do theyknowwhat they mean?'
'Oh, they know all right,' returned Nicholas, grinning. 'They mean you have exaggerated sympathies with the Hun.'
'Have I?' Daphne wondered. 'Well, I suppose one tries to have some sympathies with every one—even with nations which prepare for and start wars and brutally destroy small adjacent nations in the process. But as little, almost as little, with these as it is possible to have.... When will people understand that what we're out to do is not to sympathise or to apportion blame, but simply to learn together the science of reconstruction—no, of construction rather, for we've got to make what's never yet been. People do so leave things to chance—mental and spiritual things. When it's a case of reconstructing material things, as we shall have to do in Belgium and France after the war, no one will be allowed to help without proper training; people are training for it already, taking regular courses in the various branches of constructive science. But we seem to think that the nations can build themselves up spiritually without any learning or preparing at all, just because it's not towns and villages and trades and wealth and agriculture that will need building up, but only intelligence and beauty and sanity and mind and morals and manners. The building up has got to be done in the same industrious and practical spirit; you can't leave spiritual things to grow into the right shape for themselves, any more than material ones. You've got to have your constructionists, with their constructive programmes; you can't leave things to luck, sit down and say 'Trust in Time, the great mender,' or 'Wait and see.' Time isn't a mender of anything: time, unused, is like an aged idiot plodding along a road without signposts into nowhere.... We can't each go about our individual businesses grabbing our share of the world without troubling ourselves to get a grasp of the whole and help to shove it along the right track. It's uneducated; it's like the modern Cretan, so different from his early ancestors, who saw life steadily and saw it whole—at least that's what one gathers from his remains.' (Daphne had, just before the war, been in Crete, excavating.)
Nicholas said, 'You over-rate the early Cretan. I've noticed it before. You over-rate him. He wasn't all you think; and anyhow, he had a smaller island to think out; any one could have got a grasp of Cretan affairs. He was probably really as selfish as—as Alix, or me.'
'I can't imagine,' said Daphne, considering him with disapproval, 'why you don't join the S.P.P.P., Nicky, or some other good educative society, and help me a little.'
'I? I never join anything. I never agree with anybody. I don't want to educate any one. Why should I? I leave these things to enthusiasts, with faith, like you and West. I've no faith in my own ideas being any better than other people's, so I let them go their ways and I go mine.'
'You won't always do that,' Daphne told him, encouraging him, because she had faith in the spirit of his fathers, which looked despite himself out of his eyes. 'When you're my age....'
'I shall then,' said Nicholas, 'doubtless be suffering from what is, I believe, called by the best people 'the more embittered temper and narrower faith of age.' You need entertain no further hopes for me then.'
During the Hauxton meeting, which was in the schoolroom on the afternoon of new year's eve, Alix sat on the low churchyard wall in faint sunshine and looked over brown fields and heard the larks. Hauxton is quiet, and smells of straw, and has a little grey church with a Norman door. Its road runs east and west, and there are geese on the little green. On this last afternoon of the year it lay quietly asleep in the pale winter sunshine. Whenever the little east wind moved, wisps and handfuls of straw drifted lightly down the road. The larks carolled and twittered exuberantly over bare fields. From time to time a flock of chaffinches rose suddenly from the ricks and flew, a chattering flutter of wings, down the wind. Beyond the fields, cold, faintly-hued horizons brooded. Hauxton looked drowsily to the sunset and the dawn, to the past and future, to the old year and the new.
'The future is dubious,' Daphne had been saying in the schoolroom, before Alix came out. Well, of course futures always are, if you come to that. 'In this dim, dubious future, let us see that we build up one positive thing, which shall not fail us....' And by that, of course, she meant Peace.
Peace: yes, peace must be, of course, a positive thing. Here, in Hauxton, was peace; a bare, austere, quiet peace, smelling of straw. No one had had to make that peace; it just was. But the world's peace must be made, built up, stone on stone. No, stones were a poor figure. Peace must be alive; a vital, intricate, intense, difficult thing. No negation: not the absence of war. Not the quiet, naturally attained peace of Samuel Miller and Elizabeth his wife, who slept beneath a grey headstone close to the churchyard wall, having drifted into peace after ninety and ninety-five years of living, and having for their engraven comment, 'They shall come to the grave in the fullness of years, like as a shock of corn cometh in in his season.' Not that natural peace of the old and weary at rest; but a young peace, passionate, ardent, intelligent, romantic, like poetry, like art, like religion. Like Christmas, with its peace on earth, goodwill towards men. Like all the passionate, restless idealism that the so quiet-seeming little Norman church stood for....
Alix believed that it stood for the same things that Daphne stood for. It too would say, build up a living peace. It too would say, let each man, woman, and child cast out first from their own souls the forces that make against peace—stupidity (that first), then commercialism, rivalries, hatreds, grabbing, pride, ill-bred vaunting. It too was international, supernational. It too was out for a dream, a wild dream, of unity. It too bade people go and fight to the death to realise the dream. Only it said, 'Inmyname they shall cast out devils and speak with new tongues,' and the S.P.P.P. said, 'In the name of humanity.' There was, no doubt, a difference in method. But at the moment Alix had more concern with the likenesses, with the common aim of the fighters rather than with their different flags.
The pale sun dipped lower in the pale west, and was drowned in haze. It was cold. The little wind from the east whispered along the bare hedges. The year would soon be running down into silence, like an old clock.
Daphne and the meeting came out of the school. Alix went to meet her. Daphne looked satisfied, as if things had gone well. The few women and many children coming out of the meeting looked good-hearted, and still full of Christmas cheer.
'Such dears,' said Daphne, as they got into the car. (Lest a damaging impression of Daphne be given, it may be mentioned that she always drove her own car herself, and only, in war time, used it for meetings for the public good and for taking out wounded soldiers.) 'So attentive and nice. I left pamphlets; and I'm coming again after the Christmas holiday to speak to the children in school. I told them about German and Austrian babies.... The mothers loved it.... It'sfundoing this. People are such dears, directly they stop misunderstanding what one is after. Understanding—clear thinking—it nearly all turns on that; everything does. Oh for morebrainsin this poor old muddle of a world! Educate the children's brains, give them right understanding, and then let evil do its worst against them, they'll have a sure base to fight it from.'
Alix thought of and mentioned the Intelligent Bad, who are surely numerous and prominent in history.
But Daphne said: 'Cleverness isn't right understanding. I mean something different from that. I mean the trained faculty of looking at life and everything in it the right way up. It's difficult, of course.'
Alix thought it was probably impossible, in an odd, upside-down world.
The sun set. The face of Cambridgeshire, the face of the new year, the face of the incoherent world, was dim and inscrutable, a dream lacking interpretation. So many people can provide, according to their several lights, both the dream and the interpretation thereof, but with how little accuracy!
The Sandomirs, in their house in Grange Road, saw the new year in. They drank its health, as they did every year. Daphne, though she suddenly could think of nothing but Paul, who would not see the new or any other year, nevertheless drank unflinching to the causes she believed in.
'Here's to the new world we shall make in spite of everything,' she said. 'Here's to construction, sanity, and clear thinking. Here's to goodwill and mutual understanding. Here's to the clearing away of the old messes and the making of the new ones. Here's to Freedom. Here's to Peace.'
'Heaven help you, mother,' Nicholas murmured drowsily into his glass. 'You don't know what you're saying. All your toasts are incompatible, and you don't see it. And what in the name of anything do you mean by Freedom? The old messes I know, and the new ones I can guess at—but what is Freedom? Something, anyhow, which we've never had yet.'
'Something we shall have,' said Daphne.
'You think so? But how improbable! After war, despotism and the strong hand. You don't suppose the firm hand is going to let go, having got us so nicely in its grasp. Rather not. War is the tyrant's opportunity. The Government's beginning to learn what it can do. After all this Defending of the Realm, and cancelling of scraps of paper such as Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus, and ordering the press, and controlling industries and finance and food and drink, and saying, 'Let there be darkness' (and there was darkness)—you don't suppose it's going to slip back intolaissez-faire, or open the door to mob rule? The realm will go on being defended long after it's weathered this storm, depend on it. And quite right too. Lots of people will prefer it; they'll be too tired to want to take things into their own hands: they'll only want peace and safety and an ordered life. They'll be too damaged and sick and have lost too much to be anything but apathetic. Peace, possibly (though improbably): but Freedom, no. Anyhow, it's what neither we nor any one else have ever had, so we shouldn't recognise it if we saw it.... There are too many pips in this stuff,' he grumbled. 'Much too many.'
Daphne finished hers and stood up, as midnight struck, with varying voices and views as to the time, from various church clocks in Cambridge city. 'So,' she said, 'that's the end ofthatyear. No doubt it is as well.... And now I'm going to bed. I've a great deal to do to-morrow.'
She went to bed. She had a great deal to do on all the days of the coming year. But the first thing she did (in common with many others this year) was to cry on the stairs, because it was a year which Paul would never see, Paul having been tipped out by the last year in its crazy career and left behind by the wayside.
Nicholas and Alix lay languidly, in fraternal silence, in their chairs. They never went to bed or did anything else with Daphne's prompt decision. At a quarter past twelve Alix said, 'I'm thinking of joining this funny society of mother's.'
Nicholas opened his small blue eyes at her.
'You are? I didn't know you joined things.'
'Nor did I,' said Alix. 'But I'm beginning to believe I do.... I think I shall very probably join the Church, too, before long.'
Nicholas opened his eyes much wider, and sat up straight.
'TheChurch? The Church of England, do you mean?'
'I suppose that would be my branch, as I live in England. Just the Christian Church, I mean.... Do you think mother'll mind much?'
Nicholas cogitated over this.
'Probably,' he concluded. 'She doesn't like it, you know. She thinks it stands for darkness.'
'That's so funny,' said Alix, 'when really it seems to me to stand for all the things she stands for—and some more, of course.'
'Exactly,' Nicholas agreed. 'It's the "more" she takes exception to.'
'Oh well,' Alix sighed a little. 'Mother's very large-minded, really. She'll get used to it.'
Nicholas was looking at her curiously, but not unsympathetically.
'Why these new and sudden energies?' he inquired presently. 'If you don't mind my asking?'
'It's what I told you once before,' Alix explained, and the memory of that anguished evening attenuated her clear, indifferent voice, making it smaller and fainter. 'As I can't be fighting in the war, I've got to be fighting against it. Otherwise it's like a ghastly nightmare, swallowing one up. This society of mother's mayn't be doing much, but it'stryingto fight war; it's working against it in the best ways it can think of. So I shall join it.... Christianity, so far as I can understand it, is working against war too; must be, obviously. So I shall join the Church.... That's all.'
'H'm.' Nicholas looked dubious. 'Not quite all, I fancy. There are things to believe, you know. You'll have to believe them—some of them, anyhow.'
'I suppose so. I dare say it's not so very difficult, is it?'
'Very, I believe. I've never tried personally, but so I am told by those who have.'
'Oh well, I don't care. Lots of quite stupid people seem to manage it, so I don't see why I shouldn't. I shall try, anyhow. I think it's worth it,' said Alix with determination.
'Well,' said Nicholas, after a pause, 'I dare say you're right. Right to try things, I mean. I suppose it's more intelligent.'
For a moment the paradox in the faces of both brother and sister was resolved, and idealism wholly dominated cynicism.
'Well,' said Nicholas again, 'here's luck!'
He finished his punch. It had, as he had said, too many pips, so that he drank with care and rejections rather than hope.
On this (surely) most unusual planet, nothing is more noticeable than the widely differing methods its inhabitants have of spending the same day. One person's new year's eve, for instance, will be quite different from another.
Even within the Orme family, they were different. Margot spent the evening at a canteen concert. She took a prominent part in the programme, having a charming, true and well-trained contralto voice. She sang charming songs with it, some of them a little above the taste of the majority of soldiers, but pleasing to the more musical, others not. It was a long and miscellaneous programme, varying from Schubert and Mendelssohn to 'Stammering Sam' and 'Turn the lining inside out till the boys come home,' so every one was pleased.
Dorothy Orme was assisting at a dance at the hospital. (You must do something with soldiers on new year's eve; it is particularly urgent that they should be kept indoors, because of the Scotch.) It was a jolly dance, and both the soldiers and nurses enjoyed it extremely. When twelve struck they joined hands and sang 'Auld Lang Syne,' and every one hopefully wished every one else a Happy new year. (Only two Jocks had got out and kept their Hogmanay elsewhere and quite elsehow—a creditably small proportion out of forty men.) Dorothy got home by two, said it had been a topping evening and she was dead tired, and went to bed.
At Wood End, Mr. and Mrs. Orme entertained Belgians. Nine Belgian children, and parents and guardians to correspond. They played games, and danced a little, and fished for presents with a rod and line in a fish-pond in a corner of the dining-room, where Mr. Orme lay curled up, secretive and helpful, so that the right things got on to the right hooks.
It was a great success, and ended at ten. Mrs. Orme's head ached, and Mr. Orme's back.
They had had a great deal to do; they had had Mademoiselle Verstigel to help them, but none of their children, who were all busy elsewhere, and whom, therefore, they did not grudge. They were generous with their children, as well as with their time, energy and money.
Betty Orme, who has hitherto been only remotely referred to in these pages, spent the evening driving three nurses and a doctor from Fruges to Lillers. She was a steady, level-headed child, with a fair placid face looking out from a woollen helmet, and wide blue eyes like Terry's. She acted chauffeur to a field hospital, drove perfectly, repaired her car with speed and efficiency, and was extremely useful. Her nerves, health, and temper were of the best brand; horrors left her unjarred and merely helpful.
The nurse at her side, a garrulous person, said, 'Why, it's new year's eve, isn't it? How funny. I've only just remembered that!... I wonder what they're all doing at home, don't you?'
But Betty was only wondering whether her petrol was going to last out till Lillers.
'I know I'd a lot rather be out here, wouldn't you?' said the talkative nurse.
'Rather,' said Betty abstractedly.
Even through their helmets and motorcoats and thick gloves they felt the wind very cold, and a few flakes of snow began to drift down from a black sky.
'More snow,' said Betty. 'It reallyisthe limit.... I wonder if it'll be finer next year.'
John Orme was in a trench, not far from Ypres. It was bitterly cold there; snow drifted and lay on his platoon standing to, their feet in freezing mud. They were standing to at that hour of the night (11.30P.M.) because they had been warned of a possible enemy attack. They had been badly bombarded earlier in the evening, but that was over. There had been four men hit. The stretcher-bearers hadn't come for them yet; they lay, roughly first-aided, in the mud. John, vigilantly strolling up and down, seeing that no one slept (John was a very careful and efficient young officer), passed a moaning boy with his arm blown off and his tunic a red mess, and said gently, 'Hang on a bit longer, Everitt. They won't be long now.' Everitt merely returned, beneath his breath, 'My God, sir! Oh, myGod!' He could not hang on at all, by any means whatever. And there were no morphia tablets left in the platoon.... John turned away.
Some one said, 'New year'll be in directly, Ginger. How's this for a bright and glad new year?'
John remembered, for the first time, that it was December the 31st. It didn't mean anything more to him than the 30th. After all, it must be some day, even in this timeless and condemned trench.
He didn't believe in this attack, anyhow. It had been a ration party rumour, and ration parties are full of unfulfilled forecastings. But he wished he had a morphia tablet for that poor chap....
Terry Orme was in his dug-out, which was called Funk Snuggery. It was a very noisy night. The enemy seemed to be having a special new year's eve hate. Whizz-bangs, sugar-loaves, beans, all sorts and conditions and shapes of explosive missiles filled the earth and heavens with unlovely clamour. It was disturbing to Terry, who was reading Moussorgsky. (Terry belonged to that small but characteristic class of persons who read themselves to sleep with music. John preferred Mr. Jorrocks.) Terry dug his fingers into his ears, and perused his score.
There was another man in Funk Snuggery. The other man looked at his watch, waited three minutes, and said 'Happy new year.' Terry, stopping his ears, did not respond, till he shouted it louder.
Terry looked up. 'What's that?' he inquired. 'Oh, is it? Fancy! Thanks; the same to you.... But Ishan'tbe happy this year unless they let me hear myself think. Beastly, isn't it?... They say after a time it spoils one's ear. Wouldn't that be rotten. Have a stick?'
The stick was of chocolate, and they each sucked one in drowsy silence. It was next year, and still they would not let Terry hear himself think. He put away Moussorgsky with a sigh, and curled up to go to sleep.
Hugh Montgomery Gordon was in billets, in a village in Artois. He and a friend went out for a stroll in the evening; they visited anestaminet, where they found poor wine but a charming girl. They told her it was new year's eve; she told them it wasla veille du jour de l'an. They taught her to say 'Happy new year' and other things. She and they all spent a very enjoyable evening.
'Absolutely it, isn't she?' said Hugh Montgomery Gordon languidly to his friend as they walked back to their billets. 'Don't know when I've seen anything jollier.' He yawned and went indoors, and spent the rest of the year playing auction.
Basil Doye, in camp on the Greek mountains, sat and smoked in a tent assaulted and battered by a searching north-east wind from Bulgaria. He and his platoon had been occupied all day in digging trenches, and spreading wire entanglements which caught and trapped unwary Greek travellers on their own hills. Basil Doye was tired and bored and cold, in body and mind. A second lieutenant who shared the tent was telling him a funny story of a bomb the enemy had dropped on Divisional H.Q. last night, and of the General and staff, pyjama-clad, rushing about seeking shelter and finding none.... But Basil was still bored and cold.
'O Lord!' said the other subaltern presently, 'the year'll soon be done in. It's going out without having given us a scrap with the Bulgars; how sickening!... Why in anything's name couldn't they have sent us out hereearlier, if at all?'
'Our government,' said Basil, abstracted and unoriginal, 'is slow and sure. Slow to move and sure to be too late. That's why. So here we are, sitting on a cold hill in a draught, with nothing doing, nor likely to be.'
To himself he was saying, 'She'd fit on these hills; she'd belong here, more than to Spring Hill. She's a Greek really ... that space between the eyes, and the way she steps ... like Diana.... Oh, strafe it all, what's the good of thinking?' Savagely he flung away his cigarette.
A great gust of wind from Bulgaria flung itself upon the tent and blew it down. Then the sleet came, and the new year.
West was in church. The lights were dim, because of Zeppelins. The vicar was preaching, on the past and the future, from the texts 'They shall wax old, as doth a garment; as a vesture shalt thou lay them aside, and they shall be changed,' and 'Behold, I make all things new.'
The year was going to be changed and made new in nineteen minutes and a half. West (and the vicar too, perhaps), though tired and despondent (the week after Christmas is a desperate time for clergymen, because of treats), were holding on to hope with both hands. A desperate time: a desperate end to a desperate year. But clergymen may not, by their rules, become desperate men. They have to hope: they have to believe that as a vesture they shall be changed, and that the new will be better than the old. If they did not succeed in believing this, they would be of all men the most miserable.
West sat in his stall, looking, so the choirboys opposite thought, at them, to see if any among them whispered, or any slept. But he did not see them. He was looking through and beyond them, at the vesture, ragged and soaked with blood, which so indubitably wanted changing. Once his lips moved, and the words they formed were: 'How long, O Lord, how long?' Which might, of course, refer to a number of things: the war, or the vicar's sermon, or the present year, or, indeed, almost anything.
The sermon ended, and there was silent prayer till twelve o'clock struck. Then, as is the habit on these occasions, they sang hymn 265 (A. and M.).
Violette had a new year's eve party. A quiet party; only the Vinneys to chat and play quiet card games and see the new year in.
At half-past eleven they had done with cards, and were conversing. Kate had gone to church at eleven. Vincent and Sidney Vinney were now in khaki; they had, in view of the coming compulsion scheme, joined the army (territorials) and got commissions. Vincent, being married, had applied for home service only. Sidney, as he had just pointed out to Evie, might get sent anywhere at any moment. But Evie, receiving letters from Hugh Montgomery Gordon at the battle front, and, indeed, from many others, was not to be touched by Sid Vinney.
Evie was talking to young Mrs. Vinney about the fashions.
'Those new taffeta skirts at Robinson's are ten yards wide, I should think. You wouldn't believe it, the amount there is to them. And quite a yard off the ground. We shall have to think so much about ourfeetthis next year. Feet—well, more than that, too!'
Mrs. Vinney said, 'Well, do you know, I don't think it'sright, at a time like this. Nottenyards. I say nothing against six; because we women must try and carry on, and look smart and so on. It would never do for the men to come home and find us skimpy and dowdy and peculiar, like some of those suffragettes.... What I say is, it'll be lucky for the girls with neat ankles this year....'
They said a little more like this, till it was time to mix the punch. Then they drank it, and said 'Here's how,' and 'A very happy new year to all and manyofthem,' and 'Here's to our next festive gathering,' and 'Here's to the ladies,' and 'Luck to our soldiers,' and other things respectively suitable. Then the Vinneys went home to bed, because Mrs. Vinney did not approve of making nights of it at times like these.
Soon after twelve Kate came back from church.
Kate said, 'It's turned so cold outside, I shouldn't wonder if we get snow.... Those Primmerose people are spending a terribly loud evening; I heard it all across the common. You'd think people would want to be somewhat quieter on new year's eve, and this year in particular' (with all these sorrows and Zeppelins about, she meant). 'A quiet evening with a few friends is one thing; but it doesn't seem quite fitting to have all that shouting and banjos. And I could smell the drink as I passed, for they had a window open, and it was wafted right out at me.'
'Well now,' said Mrs. Frampton, 'just fancy that!'
The year of grace 1915 slipped away into darkness, like a broken ship drifting on bitter tides on to a waste shore. The next year began.