Part 7

Every evening, the Colonel, possessed of a firm belief in the efficacy of the commercial barometer as an index of the political outlook, came in to gather John Dare’s latest observations of it. And he too could tell with one glance at John Dare’s face how things were going.

When Mr Dare was late, as often happened, he generally found the Colonel sitting there waiting for him and doing his best meanwhile to cheer Mrs Dare. But, try as they all might, their cheerfulness was of a gray autumnal character which foresaw wintry weather before any hope of Spring.

From the mere business point of view the fact of Great Britain being dragged into the mêlée could not make matters very much worse for Mr Dare than they were. But that dreadful possibility entailed others of so intimate a character that it was impossible to close one’s eyes to them.

“I wish those two were safely home,” said Mrs Dare, busy with her sewing one evening, as the Colonel, in Mr Dare’s easy chair, sat waiting with her for its proper occupant’s arrival.

“I’m sure you needn’t worry about them, dear Mrs Dare,” said the Colonel emphatically. “Ray knows his way about and they’ll be perfectly all right. We may get a wire from them at any moment saying they’ll be here in an hour.”

“I’m surprised we’ve had no word of any kind since Ray left.”

“I expect things are all upside down all over the Continent. We’ll hear from them all right in time.”

Then Mr Dare came in and they saw by his face that the City barometer was still at stormy.

“Rumours galore,” was his report, “and mostly disturbing. Sir Edward Grey is doing everything in his power for peace, but the general feeling is that the Kaiser means war, and the City is preparing for it. Bank-rate is up to 4. It may be 8 to-morrow. Consols down to 70. Everything is in suspense. No business doing.”

“And what do they say as to our being dragged in?” asked the Colonel anxiously.

“General idea is that only a miracle can keep us out, and that miracles aren’t common.”

“Any talk of mobilising?--fleet and army?”

“No orders yet, as far as one can learn, but there is little doubt word has been sent round to be ready. I saw Guards marching through this morning. In fact there is an undoubted sense of war in the air.”

“And how do they feel as to our preparedness, if it comes to that?”

At which Mr Dare shook his head. “Not a doubt as to our readiness at sea. But on land----” he shrugged discomfortingly, “Well, the general feeling is that what we have is good, but so small as to be of very little account among the huge masses that may be engaged over there. They say there may be ten million men fighting----”

“How awful!” said Mrs Dare. “Ten millions! And all with relatives of one kind or another! Just think of the aftermath--the suffering and misery! I am not a violent person, but, truly, there is no ill I could not wish for the men who bring such a horror about.”

“They’ll suffer!” said the Colonel.

“We too,” said Mr Dare soberly. “And here is how it comes home to us. If we’re drawn in there will be an urgent call for more men----”

“Quite right!” said the Colonel. “If you’d listened to advice we’d have had ’em ready. Now we shall have to do the best we can with what we can get.”

“The Territorials will be mobilised----”

“But they are surely for home defence,” said Mrs Dare.

“They will be needed at the front. Presumably the choice will be given them.”

“And they’ll go,” said the Colonel. “They’re not half as bad as some folks have been trying to make out, and this will buck them up to top notch.”

“That means your Ray will be in it.”

“He wouldn’t be my Ray unless he was, sir.”

“And our Noel. He’s been at us for days past for permission to join,” said Mrs Dare without enthusiasm.

“He’ll go London Scottish with Ray of course. Good lad!”

“He was up seeing about it to-day,” said Mr Dare. “And he’s hoping he can get into the Second Battalion if they form one. He’s put down his name for it anyway and I suppose he’ll have to go. I never knew him so keen on anything in his life before.”

“Good lad!--The right sort! Does honour to his parents.”

“And Con is expecting to be called up,” said Mrs Dare.

“And I bet you Alma will want to be in it. Our two families are doing their duty. Da-ash it! If all the others would come up to the scratch as well there’d be no lack of fighting-men.”

“And suppose they none of them come back,” said Mrs Dare forebodingly.

“One never supposes such things, ma’am. If they go, they go to the duty God has called them to. And if they never come back they’ll have done their best for their King and their country, and that is the noblest thing any man or woman can do.”

“I know, Colonel, but ... all the same, it would be very sore to lose them.”

“It would be sorer still for Germany to ride rough-shod over England. They’re great fighters, and if it comes it’ll be hot work. Thank God, they’re not barbarians, however, and they’ll fight decently and respect the rules of the game.”

But even in that thought Mrs Dare found but little comfort, and try as she might she could not attain to the Colonel’s altruistic heights of patriotism.

“It is different,” she said to herself. “After all, his two are not bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, and that makes all the difference in the world.”

“Where are they all to-night?” asked Mr Dare. For the thought that before very long partings might come unconsciously distilled within him a curious little desire to know they were still within reach. “Noel came up to have lunch with me and to tell me about the London Scottish. I understood he was coming straight home.”

“He came and told me about it,” said Mrs Dare. “It has given him a new zest in life. He was on the links all afternoon, and then he insisted on taking the girls into town to ‘When Knights were Bold.’”

“H’m!” said Mr Dare. “I must be out of touch with eighteen and a half. I can’t say I feel like the theatre myself.”

“Young blood runs red,” said the Colonel. “The jump in it that makes him want to go to the theatre will help him through tight places later on.”

“Do you think it will be a long business, Colonel?” asked Mrs Dare, in pursuance of her own thoughts.

“Hard to say, ma’am. Personally I should be inclined to say not. The expense of all those men in the field will be so enormous,--to say nothing of the upsetting of business and life generally. One or two tremendous battles and it may be over. War is full of surprises. One side or the other may crumple up unexpectedly and cry ‘enough.’ On the other hand it is not easy to think of Germany doing that, after all her bumptiousness. And I’d hate to think of France and Russia giving in. Auntie Mitt is hard at work knitting winter socks and comforters, and Balaclava helmets.”

“Goodness me! Does she think it will last as long as that?”

“She says she remembers hearing they were badly wanted in the Crimea,--which was a fact. I’ve been hinting to her that she probably remembers making them at that time, and, being a good Conservative, instinct impels her to do as she did then.”

“Too bad!” smiled Mrs Dare. “She could hardly have knitted for the Crimea.”

“I’m not so sure of that. She’s frightfully close and touchy about her age. She’s wonderfully well-preserved, and she’s a good little soul, but I do enjoy chaffing her. It’s a pleasure to see the prim and extremely lady-like way in which she takes it. She always makes me feel like a little boy at school again. You’ve no definite word from Con yet?”

“He’s all ready packed to start at a moment’s notice, and is quite sure he will have to go. Nothing more than that. It’s all very disturbing to one’s peace of mind.”

“Not half as disturbing, ma’am, as if the Germans got across here. Let us be thankful that if there is to be fighting it’ll be on the other side of the water. Business is quite at a standstill, I suppose, Dare?”

“Mine is, and most other people’s. If the mere threat of war curdles things up like this it’s hard to imagine what they’ll be like if it actually comes.”

“It’ll be a case of everybody helping everybody else,” said the Colonel, gallantly and meaningly, and on that note jumped up to go. “I must run along and see how Auntie Mitt’s getting on with those Balaclava helmets!” he said, and shook hands with them warmly, and went.

X

The unsettled state of international politics affected the younger folk much as it did their elders, only in a different way and to a less extent.

It produced in them an excitement and effervescence of spirits which left no room for broodings or forebodings. They closed their eyes to the grimmer possibilities and saw only the picturesque and dramatic and thrilling.

They were all most keenly interested in every move in the mighty game, and somewhat impatient of the slow development of the intricate situation. The number of evening papers that found their way into both houses was astonishing, and extremely wasteful.

Their local weekly paper arranged for a telephonic news-service with a London paper, and posted in its windows irregular bulletins, the more startling the better. Whoever went into the village was expected to bring back the latest rumours. Mrs Dare, when she went, was content to carry the items of any importance in her mind. The Colonel, and Noel, and Honor, and Victoria Luard invariably bought latest editions as well, sometimes of half-a-dozen different papers, in the hope that one or other would contain something illuminating which had escaped the rest. And in the anxious search for that illuminating item they read the same news over and over again in all the papers, till, as Noel said, they “got fairly fed up with chewing the same bit till there was no taste in it.” Yet the exercise seemed only to leave them the hungrier for more startling later editions. They all, in fact, had a pretty severe attack of news-fever, and it grew worse with every day that passed and with all the thin and unsatisfying pabulum it fed upon.

Noel and the girls and young Gregor MacLean spent much time on the links. There was no talk of going away for holidays this year, not at all events while things were in their present unsettled condition.

The Luards had planned to spend September in Switzerland, at Saas-Fée and Zermatt. Noel and Honor were to have gone with them, and Mr and Mrs Dare had intended making a round of visits in Scotland.

Connal Dare and Alma Luard, if they could get off at the same time, had been going to friends on Dartmoor not far from Postbridge. As for Miss Mitten, she never would hear a word about going away. No place was as comfortable as home, she averred,--she had everything there that she wanted, so why should she make a change which could only be for the worse?

But all plans had had to be given up, and the younger folk consoled themselves with much golf and tennis, and flung themselves into these things with the gusto of players whose time might be short.

But, among them all, bad as things looked, there was still--except in the mind of the Colonel, and perhaps also of Mr Dare,--a strong undercurrent of feeling that so incredible a catastrophe as a general European war, in this year of grace 1914, was impossible. Things had looked threatening before, time and again, and the clouds had rolled by without breaking. The men at the head of affairs, Mr Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, were eminently safe and experienced, and pre-eminently set on peace. It was all mighty interesting, thrilling indeed at times, though the thrills of the evening were not seldom found to have been wasted when they eagerly scanned the more sedate morning papers. But it would--they could not but believe--all end in smoke, as it had so often done before.

And so the younger folk got all the thrills the papers could afford them, and all the enjoyment out of life that was to be had under the circumstances; and no one, from their merry talk and laughter, would have imagined that just across the water issues so tremendous for the future of the world were surely and quickly coming to grips.

Gregor MacLean lived with his widowed mother at White Lodge, on the other side of Willstead Common. He was an only son, but, through the good Scotch common-sense of his parents, had escaped the usual penalty of only sons. He was in fact a genuinely good fellow, somewhat reserved and unexpressive of his feelings, and in no way spoiled either by his mother’s delight in him or the good-sized shoes he had stepped into at his father’s death.

He was on the Stock Exchange, in his late father’s firm, Dymoke and MacLean, of Draper’s Gardens. But the Stock Exchange was for the time being dead, and as Gregor said he saved in every way,--money, gray matter, and nervous energy--by stopping at home, he stopped at home and enjoyed himself,--gauging the pulse of affairs by the price of Consols and the Bank-rate in the evening and morning papers, and laying in stores of health on the links, while yet there was time, against the demands the future might make upon him.

The firm of Dymoke and MacLean was of long-standing and high repute. It had a solid old connection which at the best of times did little in the way of speculation, and never dreamed of realising when things were at their worst. It did, occasionally, when the bottom had fallen out of things generally, confer ponderously with the heads of the firm and empower them to buy for it good old reliable stock which the less fortunate had had to jettison, and sometimes it invested on a large scale, as provision for younger sons and unmarried daughters. And so the business was an eminently safe one and satisfactorily profitable, and old John Dymoke could sit comfortably in his big swing-chair in his office in Draper’s Gardens, no matter what wild storms swept the Street outside, and young Gregor could spend his days on the links with perfect equanimity, though the virus of possible war had thrown the Exchanges of the world into convulsions such as they had not known for generations.

Mr Dymoke played neither golf nor tennis. He loved Draper’s Gardens and the society of his old cronies of the Exchange. Gregor MacLean took great interest both in golf and tennis and in the play of Miss Honor Dare, and looked upon Draper’s Gardens as one of the necessities of a comfortable existence but not as a place to spend more time in than was absolutely imperative.

And that is how he came to be spending profitable days on the links while his less-pleasantly-situated fellows were worrying themselves gray over the slowly unfolding developments of international politics.

Between him and Honor there existed an entente cordiale which Gregor hoped in time to consolidate into a more comprehensive alliance. Honor understood him very well,--far better than he understood her, and she was not averse to an eventual acquiescence with his hopes and views as to her future. But in the meantime--partly no doubt as the result of her close intimacy with Victoria Luard--she was in no hurry to surrender her entire freedom of action even for what most girls would have considered the higher estate of an affiance with Gregor MacLean.

She liked him better than any of the other young men to whom her pretty face and comradely ways proved so great an attraction. He was, as she not infrequently told him, if anything too well endowed with this world’s goods. So well that no incentive to arduous work was left him.

To which he would reply that you couldn’t judge of a fellow entirely by his form at tennis or his handicap on the links. She should see him on ’Change, wrestling with beasts at Ephesus, and carrying fortunes on his bare head.

At which Honor’s merry laugh would ring out and set him to soul-searching for means of approving himself to her in larger and loftier ways.

Between Noel Dare and Vic also there existed a distinct feeling of something more than friendliness, which was not without its humorous aspects both to themselves and their families.

They had known one another intimately for ten years. At the beginning, when they were both about of an age--between eight and nine--Noel had genially bullied her and Honor to his heart’s content, ordered them about, pulled their pig-tails when he pleased, and called them kids, and they had accepted his masterfulness as quite in the natural order of things.

By the time they reached fourteen they were on a level, and Noel found his powers of command over them gone. He might order, but they only laughed and went their own way.

And now, at nineteen, their positions were reversed. Victoria had developed into a young woman of advanced and very decided views, with aims in life and immense energy in carrying them out. And Noel felt himself little more than a schoolboy in her presence.

As to touching her hair!--it would have been a desecration! He never dreamed of it,--not of actually doing it anyway. It was something even to touch her hand. And he sombrely said to himself at times that she was getting beyond him. And he doubted within himself, whether even the most assiduous devotion to St Mary Axe could ever place him in the position he aspired to regarding her.

They all four came clattering into the hall at Oakdene one afternoon, after a splodgy round of the links, damp and bedraggled and thirsting for tea. Auntie Mitt had it served in next to no time, and between little sips at her own cup sat busily knitting and listening to their wonderful flow of spirits, which found vent in a jargon that was still utterly unintelligible to her, in spite of the amount of it to which in her time she had listened.

But by the time they had finished their third cups they had fought the battle all through again, had explained away all their failures to the entire satisfaction of those chiefly concerned, had replumed themselves on their more outstanding successes, and then, as the boys lit their cigarettes with sighs of satisfaction, their minds came down again to mundane affairs.

“Where’s Uncle Tony, Auntie Mitt?” asked Victoria.

“Sir Anthony is just coming up the drive, my dear,” said Auntie Mitt, with a glance out of the window. “He went down to the village to see if there was any news,” and Uncle Tony came in, paper in hand.

“Ah-ha!” said he, “Mudlarks!...”

“And as merry, sir,” said Gregor. “Damp but undaunted”....

“Dirty but not dispirited,” said Honor briskly.

“Defeated but defiant,” said Vic. “Your turn, No.”

“Oh, dash!” said Noel, who was not over-good at that kind of mental gymnastics.

“My copyright!--since Victoria-who-should-by-rights-have-been-Balaclava won’t allow me to say damn,” said the Colonel.

“Of course I won’t,--with Auntie Mitt, sitting there listening with all her ears----”

“I heard it not infrequently before you were thought of, my dear,” said Auntie Mitt, with her little bird-like uplook and smile. “It was, I think, much more commonly used even in the best society than it is now. I believe even the Duke himself”....

“Ah--he needed me to keep him in order. I wonder you didn’t do it yourself, Auntie Mitt.”

“Oh,--my dear!”

“Any news, sir?” asked Gregor.

“Bank-rate 8 per cent----”

“Deuter-on-omy!”

“And the Stock Exchange closed till further notice.”

“Gee-willikins! Things are shaping badly then, sir!”

“Very badly, I fear. Russia and Germany are practically at war, though no formal declaration has yet been made, I believe.”

“And how do we stand now, sir?” asked Noel eagerly.

“On the brink, my boy. Sir Edward Grey is still working his hardest for peace. But, personally, I should say the chances are of the smallest.”

“I wonder where Lois and Ray have managed to get to,” said Honor anxiously.

“You trust Ray, my dear. They’ll be all right. I just called in to reassure your mother. I knew her first thought would be for them when she heard the news.”

“But surely we ought to have heard from them before this----”

“Not under the circumstances. Nothing would pass into or out of Germany the moment they began to mobilise,--no letters, no telegrams, certainly no foreigners. But they would start at the latest on Monday. This is Friday. They ought certainly to be well on their way by this time. But, you see, they may have had to take some roundabout route,--perhaps off the beaten track. We shall hear from them all right in time. They don’t cause me the slightest anxiety.”

“Think of closing the Exchange! ... and eight per cent! That shows what the big pots think of things anyway,” said Gregor, beating a soft tattoo on the floor with his heels in his amazement. “Shows I was right in stopping away too! Sight better here than mouching about down there! I wonder when they’ll open shop again.”

“If we’re right into it--as we shall be,” said the Colonel, with conviction, “it’s impossible to say how things will go on. We’ve never had such a crisis before, you see, and I don’t suppose any living man can foresee just how things will work out. Money will be very tight, I expect. Provisions may go up beyond anything we’ve ever known. That will depend on the fleet. If we can hold the seas----”

“Why, of course we can, sir. What’s our fleet for?” said Gregor.

“They have some ships too, I believe.”

“They have, and we’ll give them beans if they’ll give us half a chance,” said Noel.

“It might be wise to lay in a stock of provisions,” suggested Miss Mitten. “I remember during the--I mean, hearing--that food went to extraordinary prices during the Crimean War.”

“Go it, Auntie Mitt! We’ll go up to the Army and Navy to-morrow and clear them out,” laughed Vic. “This really sounds like war times.”

“You’d better load us up too, while you’re at it, Vic,” said Honor, “or maybe we’ll be sitting by the roadside crying for a crust.”

“Wait a moment, you giddy young people,” said Uncle Tony, nodding his gray head sagely at them. “Let us look at this matter for a moment. Suppose everybody acts on that idea. What is going to be the result?”

“The bulls will clear the market and outsiders will go short,” said Gregor.

“Exactly! And the outsiders would be in the proportion of a hundred--perhaps a thousand--to one. I’ve no doubt some--perhaps even many--will do as Auntie Mitt proposes. It will naturally suggest itself to the provident housekeeper,”--with a conciliatory little bow to the already conscience-stricken little lady,--“but the effect will be bad all round. It will drive up prices unnecessarily. It will deplete stocks. It will emphasise the gap between the rich and the poor. Carried to extremes it might well lead to riot and revolution, for starving men stick at nothing.”--Miss Mitten clasped her thin little black-mittened hands as though she saw them coming and begged for mercy, and her face was woe-begone. “Indeed, in such a case, I would hold a man justified in storming any house which had provisioned itself in such a way----”

Miss Mitten unclasped her hands and waved them at him in gentle deprecation, saying almost with a sob, “I am sorry, Sir Anthony. I stand rebuked. The matter had not presented itself to me in that light. But I assure you I was thinking of you all rather than of myself, or indeed of anybody else. I was in the wrong. I see it.”

“You never thought of yourself before anybody else in all your life, my dear,” said the Colonel gallantly. “We know you were thinking only of us. But all the same, as you see, it would be an unpatriotic thing to do and we will set our faces against it. If prices go up--as they will--we’ll pay ’em. If supplies run short we’ll do the best we can. We can always fall back on porridge,”--which was Miss Mitten’s particular detestation.

“It is said to be very sustaining,” she said meekly, at which he choked violently through politely endeavouring to swallow a chuckle.

“How’ll we be off for men, sir?” asked Noel.

“Short as the dev--the deuce, my boy. Have you heard from your London Scottish yet?”

“Not yet, sir. There’s hopes of a Second Battalion, but it’s not decided yet. I shall go up again to-morrow----”