William Hollis, having defeated the boy, turned his back to the sun and
was assured by the Blackhampton _Star_ that he was living in a great
moment of the world's history. Germany had, it seemed, until twelve
o'clock that evening to decide whether she would take on England. She
had taken on France, Russia and Belgium already; a few hours hence, if
she wasn't careful, she would have to fight the British Empire.
Even to Bill Hollis, dizzied by the sheer magnitude of the headlines
of his favorite journal which actually surpassed those of the Crippen
trial, the sinking of the _Titanic_ and the late King Edward's visit
to Blackhampton, that phrase "the British Empire" was full of magic.
Lurking somewhere in a compound of half-baked inefficiencies was the
vision of a poet, and at this moment it was queerly responsive to this
symbol.
"It's all up with 'em if they take on Us." In strict order of priority
that was the first message to flash through the sentient being of Mr.
William Hollis to be duly recorded by the central office. Hard upon it
came a second message. "They've got a Nerve--them Germans."
In the column for late news were blurred fragments of the speech of
the Foreign Minister in the House of Commons. Intellectually William
Hollis was not conspicuously bright, but, as he read the simple words,
the nature of the terrible misprision against the human race came home
to him and he could only gasp.
He got up presently and moved away from the band. As always the band
was very nice, but for some reason or other he didn't want to hear it
just now. For a short time he walked about on the brown grass, the
President's cup under his arm, wrapped in the _Evening Star_. But he
wasn't thinking now of the President, of the cup, of Melia, of the
injustice of Fate to a private citizen. His thoughts were centered on
a Thing that made all these other things, painfully intimate as they
were, of no moment at all. These were but trivial matters, and he was
now in the presence of the inconceivable, the stupendous.
Coming back to the throng, perhaps for the latent solace these clusters
of fellow beings afforded him, he saw from their blank eyes, their set
faces, that his own terrible thoughts were shared more or less by them
all. The boy had sold his papers already. Other boys had sold theirs.
The whole place was alive with fluttering news sheets, gleaming white
and spectral in the sun. Already these people, these stout females
in farcical clothes, for the most part trundling queer abortions on
the end of a string, and these hard-faced, grasping men who were
always overreaching one in trade, were living in a different world.
They were not thinking now of flowers and vegetables, of bands or
dancing, although the first couples of juniors had just begun to sway
rhythmically to the strains of "Hitchy Koo." Something else had come
into their lives.
Passing the tent sacred to the President and Committee, it gave him one
more thrill to mark the bearing of the grandees. The famous white hat
no longer adorned the head of the President. The great man nursed it
upon his fat loud-checked knees. All the reluctant geniality a public
function had inspired had passed from his ugly face. Yet in the purview
of his son-in-law it looked a little less ugly at that moment than he
ever remembered to have seen it. Those fierce eyes were not occupied
now with the narrow round of their own affairs, nor with a swelling
vision of self-importance. The world was on fire. He was simply a man
among his fellow men; and like them he was wondering what ought to be
done.
At seven o'clock a vaguely excited but profoundly depressed William
Hollis made his way out of Jubilee Park. He turned down Short Hill in
the direction of his home. But by the time he had reached the foot of
that brief declivity, and was involved in an airless maze of bricks and
mortar, the thought of his home grew suddenly intolerable. He needed
freedom and space, he needed an atmosphere more congenial. Melia would
not understand. Or if she did understand she would be dumb and just
now he simply longed for a little human intercourse.
At the end of Love Lane, a mean and crooked little street debouching
from the Mulcaster Road which wound a somber trail to the very heart
of the city, he stood a moment gazing at the dingy sign a few doors up
on the left, W. Hollis, Fruiterer. The obvious course was to go and
deposit the prize he had won on the dresser in the back sitting room,
or still better, give it into the personal care of Melia. But instead,
he wrapped up the trophy a little more carefully, resettled it under
his arm, and then allowed himself to drift slowly with the throng in
the direction of the Market Place.
As was usual with him now, his actions were aimless and uncertain.
There was no particular reason why he should be going to the Market
Place beyond the fact that other people seemed to be going there, as
somehow they always did seem to be going there at great moments in
the national life. The factories and warehouses who happened to be
working that day had disgorged their human cargoes and these under the
stimulus of hourly editions of the _Evening Star_ were moving slowly
and solemnly towards the nodal point.
What the Market Place is to the city as a whole, Waterloo Square is
to the teeming, close-packed population of its southeastern area.
And at the busiest corner of Waterloo Square, at its confluence with
Mulcaster Road, that main artery which leads directly to the center
of all things, is the Duke of Wellington public house. William Hollis,
drifting with the tide, felt a sudden, uncontrollable desire to "have
one" at this famous landmark of the local life.
The Duke of Wellington was a "free" house and Mr. Josiah Munt had
been able to maintain in its integrity the declining art of brewing
Blackhampton Old Ale. This had a bite and a sting in it, with which the
more diluted beverages of "tied" houses could not compare. At the Duke
of Wellington you paid for the best and you got it; therefore it was
patronized by all in the neighborhood who knew what was what; it had,
moreover, peculiar advantages of tradition and geography which gave it
a cachet of its own.
"To have one" at the Duke of Wellington, in the eyes of those who
lived near by, was almost on a par with "looking in" at Brooks's
or the Carlton. It conferred a kind of diploma of local worth and
responsibility. At the same time no form of politics was barred, but
the proprietor himself was a staunch conservative and it was very
difficult to find a welcome in the bar parlor without sharing that
faith.
It could not be said that William Hollis had ever aspired to the good
graces of the house. There were obvious reasons why this was the
case. For sixteen years he had not passed through its doors; in that
long period he had not even entered the humbler part of the premises
known as "the vaults," sacred to Tom, Dick and Harry, where the more
substantial patrons of the establishment disdained to set foot.
To-night, however, new and strange forces were at work in Bill. Borne
along a tide of cosmic events as far as those fascinating doors he was
suddenly and quite irrationally mastered by a desire to go in.
Partly it may have been bravado; certainly it was a daring act to
cross that threshold. But Josiah himself, for whose personal prowess
his son-in-law had a wholesome respect, was safe at the Show; besides,
the proprietor was too great a man these days to visit the house very
often. Years ago he had ceased to reside there with his family; and in
his steady social ascent he was careful not to emphasize a dubious but
extremely lucrative connection with that which regarded in perspective
was but a common public house.
The chances were that Bill Hollis would be spared this evening an
encounter with his father-in-law and former master. But why he should
decide so suddenly to take the risk was hard to say, unless it was
the half fantastic reaction of an exceedingly impressionable mind to
a crisis almost without a precedent in human experience. By nature a
sociable fellow, he had now an intense desire to exchange ideas with
responsible, knowledgeable people, with those possessing more light
than himself. The Duke of Wellington was the headquarters of such
in that part of the city; it was the haunt of the quidnuncs and the
well informed; and it may have been for that reason that Bill dived
suddenly through the swing doors, an act he had not performed for
sixteen years, and crossed the dark, cool passage with its highly
spiced but not unattractive odors.
It may have been the magnitude of the situation in Europe which had
suddenly rendered all private matters ridiculous, or it may have
been the talisman under his arm which inspired him with an unwonted
hardihood, but instead of turning into the taproom, the first on the
left, which would have satisfied the claims of honor and wisdom, he
pushed boldly on past the glass-surrounded cubicle of the celebrated
but haughty Miss Searson, into the Mecca of the just and the good,
sublimely guarded by that peri.
In a kind of dull excitement he entered the famous Bar Parlor. To his
surprise, and rather perversely, to his relief, it was empty, except
that, behind a counter in a strategical angle that commanded the room
as well as the passage, Miss Searson was overwhelmingly present, but
absorbed apparently at that moment in crocheting a two-inch lace border
to an article of female attire sacred to the pages of the realists.
Nothing seemed to have altered in sixteen years, even to the fly-blown
advertisement of Muirhead's Pale Brandy facing the door, and
surrounding Miss Searson the double row of brass taps, it had once been
a part of his duties to keep clean. And that lady herself, sixteen
years had altered her surprisingly little, if at all. She was what is
known technically as a chemical blonde, a high-bosomed, high-voiced,
large-featured, large-earringed lady, with remarkable teeth and an
aloofness of manner which might almost be said to enforce respect at
the point of the bayonet.
When Miss Searson looked up from her crochet she could hardly believe
her eyes. William Hollis, in his former incarnation, had been known
to her as Bill the Barman, and she in that distant epoch had been
known to him as a Stuck-Up Piece. Unofficially of course. Outwardly
everybody paid deference to Miss Searson; even the proprietor himself,
if he could be said to pay deference to any human being, had always
adopted that attitude to Miss Searson; as for Bill the Barman, he had
been hardly more than a worm in her sight. And then had come the Great
Romance. It had come like a bolt out of clear sky, knocking a whole
world askew as Miss Searson understood it; a whole world of sacred
values by which Miss Searson and those within her orbit regulated their
lives.
The entrance of Bill Hollis into the bar struck Miss Searson dumb with
surprise. In a mind temporarily bewildered sixteen years were as but a
single day. This was the first occasion in that long period that the
incredible adventurer who had suborned the eldest daughter of his stern
master into marrying him had dared to revisit the scene of his crime.
To weak minds a great romance, no doubt, but the lady behind the bar
had not a weak mind, therefore she was not in the least romantic. She
saw things as they were, she knew what life was. It was very well for
such things to happen in the pages of a novel, but in the daily round
of humdrum existence they simply didn't answer.
It seemed an age to Miss Searson before William the Incredible girded
his courage to the point of ordering a pint of bitter. She drew it in
stately silence, handed it across the counter and accepted threepence
with superb hauteur.
He drank a little. It was no mean brew; and he felt so much a man for
the experience that he was able to ask Miss Searson what she thought of
the news.
"News," said Miss Searson loftily. "News?"
"War with Germany."
"Oh, that!" A Juno-like toss of Miss Searson's coiffure. But there she
stopped. War with Germany was none of her business, nor was it going to
be her business to be forced into conversation with a character whose
standing was so doubtful as the former barman. Miss Searson was not a
believer in finesse. Her methods had a brutal simplicity which made
them tremendously effective.
However, this evening they were less effective than usual. The world
itself was tottering, and a deep, deep chord in the amazing Bill Hollis
was responsive to the cataclysm. This evening he was not himself, he
was more than himself; his appearance in the Private Bar was proof of
it.
Miss Searson was but a woman, a human female. She meant nothing, she
meant less than nothing in this hour of destiny. "Yes, that!" He
filled in the pause, after waiting in vain for her to do so. "War with
Germany. Do you realize it?" His voice was full of emotion.
But Miss Searson did not intend to be drawn into a discussion of
anything so fanciful as war with Germany. She was practical. A
censorious mouth shut like a trap. She regarded Bill with the eye of a
codfish.
"D'you realize what it means?"
By an adroit turn of the head towards the farther beer-engine she gave
William Hollis the full benefit of a pile of stately back hair. And
then she said slowly, as if she were trying to bite off the head of
each blunt syllable, "Do you realize that the Mester sometimes looks in
about this time of a Thursday?"