The threat lightened as they dined alone deliciously, as a foretaste of housekeeping in common; Phillida left him no thoughts to stray and only once, while the evening lasted, did they look from their private Paradise upon the world of common humanity. Phillida, as the clock neared ten, wondered vaguely what Henderson had wanted with her father? Was there anything particular, did Theodore know, any news about the Federal Council? … He hesitated for a moment, then told her the bare facts only—the vote and the minority protest.
“A protest,” she repeated. “That’s what they’ve all been afraid of. … It looks bad, doesn’t it?”
He agreed it looked bad; thinking less, it may be, of the threat of red ruin and disaster than of Rathbone’s warning that his duties would part him from Phillida.
“I hope it doesn’t mean war,” she said.
At the time her voice struck him as serious, even anxious; later it amazed him that she had spoken so quietly, that there was no trembling of the slim white fingers that played with her chain of heavy beads.
“Do you think it does?” she asked him.
Because he remembered the threat of parting and had need of her daily presence, he was stubborn in declaring that it did not, and could not, mean war; quoting Holt that modern war was impossible, that statesmen and soldiers knew it, and insisting that this was the Transylvanian business over again and would be settled as that was settled. She shook her head thoughtfully, having heard other views from her father; but her voice (he knew later) was thoughtful only—not a quiver, not a hint of real fear in it.
“It’ll have to come sometime—now or in a year or two. At least, that’s what everybody says. I wonder if it’s true.”
“No,” he said, “it isn’t—unless we make it true. This sort of thing—it’s a kind of common nightmare we have now and then. Every few years—and when it’s over we turn round and wake up and wonder what the devil we were frightened about.”
“Yes,” she agreed, “when you come to think of it, it is rather like that. I don’t remember in the least what the fuss was all about last time—but I know the papers were full of Transylvania and the poor old Dad was worked off his head for a week or two. … And then it was over and we forgot all about it.”
And at that they turned and went back to their golden solitude, shutting out, for the rest of the evening, a world that made protests and sent ominous telegrams. Before Theodore left her, to walk home restless with delight, they had decided on the fashion of Phillida’s ring and planned the acquisition of a Georgian house—with powder-closet.
It was his restless delight that made sleep impossible—and he sat at his window and smoked till the east was red. … While Henderson and Rathbone, a mile or two away, planned Distribution on a war-footing.
Events in the next few days moved rapidly in an atmosphere of tense and rising life; races and peoples were suddenly and acutely conscious of their life collective, and the neighbourly quarrel and bitterness of yesterday was forgotten in the new comradeship born of common hatred and common passion for self-sacrifice. There was talk at first, with diplomatists and leader-writers, of a possibility of localizing the conflict; but within forty-eight hours of the issue of the minority protest it was clear that the League would be rent. On one side, as on the other, statesmen were popular only when known to be unyielding in the face of impossible demands; crowds gathered when ministers met to take counsel and greeted them with cries to stand fast. Behind vulgar effervescence and music-hall thunder was faith in a righteous cause; and, as ever, man believed in himself and his cause with a hand on the hilt of his sword. Freedom and justice were suddenly real and attainable swiftly—through violence wrought on their enemies. … Humanity, once more, was inspired by ideals that justified the shedding of blood and looked death in the face without fear.
As always, there were currents and crosscurrents, and those who were not seized by the common, splendid passion denounced it. Some meanly, by distortion of motive—crying down faith as cupidity and the impulse to self-sacrifice as arrogance; and others, more worthy of hearing, who realized that the impulse to self-sacrifice is passing and the idealism of today the bestial cunning of tomorrow. … On one side and the other there was an attempt on the part of those who foresaw something, at least, of the inevitable, to pit fear against the impulse to self-sacrifice and make clear to a people to whom war was a legend only the extent of disaster ahead. The attempt was defeated, almost as begun, by the sudden launching of an ultimatum with twenty-four hours for reply.
At the news young men surged to the recruiting-stations, awaiting their turn for admission in long shouting, jesting lines; the best blood and honour of a generation that had not yet sated its inborn lust of combat. Women stood to watch them as their ranks moved slowly to the goal—some proud to tears, others giggling a foolish approval. Great shifting crowds—men and women who could not rest—gathered in public places and awaited the inevitable news. In the last few hours—all protest being useless—even the loudest of the voices that clamoured against war had died down; and in the life collective was the strange, sudden peace which comes with the cessation of internal feud and the focusing of hatred on those who dwell beyond a nation’s borders.
Theodore Savage, in the days that followed his betrothal, was kept with his nose to the Distributive grindstone, working long hours of overtime in an atmosphere transformed out of knowledge. The languid and formal routine of departments was succeeded by a fever of hurried innovation;
