It sometimes seemed to Stella as if Chaliapine had brought on the war.
Those last long golden summer days were filled with his music, and then
suddenly out of them flashed the tents in the park, the processions of
soldiers and bands, the grim stir that swept over London like a squall
striking the surface of a summer sea.
The town hall did not collapse, but it shook. It was a place where, as a
rule, the usual things took place, and even unusual things happened
usually; but there were several weeks at the beginning of the war when
all day long strange things happened strangely. Offices were changed,
the routine of years was swept up like dust into a dust-pan, and a new
routine, subject to further waves of change, took its place. Workers
voluntarily offered to do work that they were unaccustomed to do. The
council hall became a recruiting office. No. 8, the peculiar sanctum of
the sanitary inspector, was given up to an army surveyor. Tramps asked
the cashier questions. It was like the first act of "Boris Goudonoff."
Even food was carried about on trays, and as for proclamations, somebody
or other was proclaiming something all day long.
There was no religion and no dancing, but there was the same sense of
brooding, implacable fate; it took the place of music, and seemed,
without hurry and without pause, to be carrying them all along in a
secret rhythm of its own toward an unseen goal.
Mr. Leslie Travers ruled most of the town hall committees, and he
required innumerable statistics to be compiled and ready to be launched
intimidatingly at the first sign of any opposition to his ruling.
Stella, to whom the work of compiling fell, had very little time to
consider the war.
When she got home she usually went to sleep. From time to time she heard
Mrs. Waring announcing that there was no such thing as war and Eurydice
reciting battle-odes to Belgium.
For the first time in her life Eurydice shared a common cause. She was
inclined to believe that England was fighting for liberty. She knew
that France was, partly because France was on the other side of the
channel and partly because of the French Revolution. The destruction of
Louvain settled the question of Belgium. To Eurydice, whatever was
destroyed was holy. Later on she became a violent pacifist because Mr.
Bolt said that we ourselves were Prussian; but for the moment nobody,
not even Mr. Bolt, had traced this evasive parallel.
Professor Waring wrote several letters to the papers, asking what
precautions the Belgians were taking about Sanskrit manuscript. He had a
feeling that King Albert, though doubtless an estimable young man and
useful in the trenches, might, like most kings, have been insufficiently
educated to appreciate the importance of Sanskrit. That men should die
in large numbers to protect their country was an unfortunate incident
frequent in history, but that a Sanskrit manuscript should be destroyed
was a national calamity, for the manuscript could never be replaced.
He made an abortive effort to reach Belgium and see about it himself,
but at the Foreign Office he was stopped by a young man with a single
eyeglass, from whom the professor had demanded a passport. The exact
expression used by this ignorant young person was, "I'm awfully sorry,
sir, but I'm afraid just at present Sanskrit manuscript will have to
rip."
Professor Waring promptly addressed letters of remonstrance and advice
to several German professors upon the subject. They were returned to him
after three weeks, with a brief intimation that he was not to
communicate with the enemy. Professor Waring had considered German
professors to be his natural enemies all his life; this had been his
chief reason for communicating with them. He was fitted, as few
officials in the Foreign Office can ever have been fitted, to point out
to the German professors the joints in their armor.
They had a great deal of armor and very few joints, and it discouraged
Professor Waring to leave these unpierced spots to the perhaps
less-practised hands of neutrals.
But it was not until the destruction of Louvain that he grasped to the
full the reaction of his former antagonists. When Professor Waring read
a signed letter from some of the German professors agreeing to the
destruction of the famous Belgian library he acquiesced in the war. He
stood in front of his wife and woke Stella up in order to make his
declaration.
"Henrietta, there _is_ a war," he announced. "It is useless for you to
assert that there is not. Not only _is_ there a war, but there should be
one; and if I were twenty years younger, though wholly unaccustomed to
the noisy mechanisms of physical destruction, I should join in it. As it
is, I propose to write a treatise upon the German mind. It is not one of
my subjects, and I shall probably have to neglect valuable work in order
to undertake it; still, my researches into the rough Stone Age will no
doubt greatly assist me. Many just parallels have already occurred to
me. I hope that no one in this house will be guilty of so uneducated a
frame of mind as to sympathize with the Teutonic iconoclasts even to the
extent of asserting, as I believe I heard you assert just now,
Henrietta, that none of them exist."
Mrs. Waring murmured gently that she thought an intense hopefulness
might refine degraded natures, but the next day she bought wool and
began to knit a muffler. She had capitulated to the fact of the war.
While she knitted she patiently asserted that there was no life, truth,
intelligence, or force in matter; and Stella, when she came home in the
evening, picked up the dropped stitches.
It was strange to Stella that her only personal link with the war was a
man whom she had seen only once and might never see again. She thought
persistently of Julian. She thought of him for Marian's sake, because
Marian was half frozen with misery. She thought of him because
unconsciously he stood in her mind for England. He was an adventurer,
half-god, half-child, who had the habit of winning without the
application of fear. She thought of him because he was the only young,
good-looking man of her own class with whom she had ever talked.
Marian was afraid that Stella might think she had been unsympathetic to
Julian about his mission. She told Stella, with her usual direct
honesty, how angry she had been with him.
"I know I was nasty to him," she said. "I can't bear to have any one
involve me first and tell me about it afterward."
"Of course you can't," agreed Stella, flaming up with a gust of
annoyance more vivid than Marian's own. "How like him! How exactly like
him to be so high-handed! Fancy whirling you along behind him as if you
were a sack of potatoes! Of course you were annoyed, and I hope you gave
him a good sharp quarrel. One only has to look at Julian to see that he
ought to be quarreled with at regular intervals in an agreeable way for
the rest of his life."
"I don't like quarrels," Marian said slowly. "They don't seem to me to
be at all agreeable; but I don't think Julian will act without
consulting me again."
Stella looked at Marian curiously. What was this power that Marian had,
which moved with every fold of her dress, and stood at guard behind her
quiet eyes? How had she made Julian understand without quarreling that
he must never repeat his independences? Stella was sure Marian _had_
made him understand it. It would be of no use to ask Marian how she had
done it, because Marian would only laugh and say: "Nonsense! It was
perfectly easy." She probably did not know herself what was the secret
of her power; she would merely in every circumstance in life composedly
and effectively use it. Was it perhaps that though Julian had involved
her actions, he had never involved Marian? Was love a game in which the
weakest lover always wins?
"Of course I've never been in love," Stella said slowly, "and I haven't
the slightest idea how it's done or what happens to you; but I fancy
quarreling might be made very agreeable. Love is so tremendous, isn't
it, that there must be room for concealed batteries and cavalry charges;
and yet of course you know all the time that you are loving the person
more and more outrageously, so that nothing gets wasted or destroyed
except the edges you are knocking off for readjustments."
"I don't think I do love Julian outrageously," Marian objected. "I
didn't, you see, do what he wanted: he had a mad idea of getting a
special license and having a whirlwind wedding, leaving me directly
afterward. Of course I couldn't consent to that."
"Couldn't you?" asked Stella, wonderingly. "I don't see that it matters
much, you know, when you give that kind of thing to a person you love.
If you do love them, I suppose it shows you're willing to marry them,
doesn't it? But how, when, or where is like the sound of the
dinner-bell. You don't owe your dinner to the dinner-bell; it's simply
an arrangement for bringing you to the table. Marriage always seems to
me just like that. I should have married Julian in a second if I'd been
you; but I should have made him understand that I wasn't a sack of
potatoes, if I'd had to box his ears regularly every few minutes for
twenty-four hours at a stretch."
"Surely marriage is sacred," said Marian, gravely. Stella's point of
view was so odd that Marian thought it rather coarse.
"But it needn't be long," objected Stella; "you can be short and sacred
simultaneously. In fact, I think I could be more sacred if I was quick
about it; I should only get bored if I was long."
"You have such a funny way of putting things," said Marian, a little
impatiently. "Of course I know what you mean, but I don't like being
hurried. I love Julian dearly, and I will marry him when there is time
for us to do it quietly and properly. Meanwhile it's quite awful not
hearing from him. I have never been so miserable in my life."
Stella sat on the floor at Marian's feet with Marian's misery. She
entered into it so deeply that after a time Marian felt surprised as
well as comforted. She had not thought grief so pictorial. She felt
herself placed on a pinnacle and lifted above the ranks of happier
lovers. She thought it was her love for Julian that held her there; she
did not know that it was Stella's love for her. Stella for a time saw
only Marian--Marian frozen in a vast suspense, Marian racked with
silences and tortured with imagined dangers. She did not see Julian
until Marian had gone, and then suddenly she put her hands to her
throat, as if she could not bear the sharp pulsation of fear that
assailed her. If all this time they were only fearing half enough and
Julian should be dead?
She whispered, "Julian dead!" Then she knew that she was not feeling any
more for Marian. She was feeling for herself. Fortunately, she knew
this didn't matter. Feeling for oneself was sharp and abominable, but it
could be controlled. It did not count; and she could keep this much of
Julian--the fear that he might be dead. It would not interfere with
Marian or with Julian. Hopes interfere: but Stella had no personal
hopes; she did not even envisage them. She claimed only the freedom of
her fears.