“You may ask,” he interrupted, “oh yes, you may ask! Anything you like. But for God’s sake don’t lay down the law and make ignorant assertions—for God’s sake don’t do that. You mustn’t lay down the law until you know something, until you’ve really tried to find out. Then, perhaps, you’ll have a right to speak; now when I hear you, I—I—” From sheer sense of the inadequacy of words his voice tailed huskily away; then, with an odd little snarl at his auditors, he burst out savagely afresh: “You child, you great impudent jackanapes! You stand there and dare to make jokes about the hell that other men have burned in. The flames and the blood and the guns and people dying in the road. You talk blank foolery and laugh about it—you laugh and turn up your nose. You think you’re clever—and enlightened—and it sickens me, sickens me to hear you!”
He finished on a note that was almost a scream, and they looked at him aghast and dumbfounded. It was his face that held them even more than his disconcerting words—all but Edgar Jay-Blenkinsop, who, pricked in his vanity, would have accepted the challenge and started again had not Faraday silenced him with a turn of the head and a gesture. Still more pricked in his vanity he slid to a chair, muttering sulkily and red to the neck.
“Tully—” began Faraday with reproof in his voice—but Tully defied even his mentor. Not savagely and with contempt, as he had defied and decried Jay-Blenkinsop, but as one who had a right to be heard.
“He mustn’t talk like that till he knows something. It’s child’s talk—ridiculous babble. I know what I’m saying—I’ve come from it—and I’ve a right to tell him what I know. Not one of you here has seen what I have—you’re just guessing. When a shell bursts … I’ve seen a man with his legs like red jelly and a horse …” he choked at the memory. “That’s being a soldier—let him fight and he’ll find it out. Now he thinks it’s what he said just now—a sort of game that they like. Everything he said was mean little nonsense—how dare you listen to it and laugh at his silly little jokes? What’s the good of saying that it shouldn’t happen? Of course it shouldn’t happen—we all know that—of course it shouldn’t happen, but it does. And you can’t stop it with sneers about soldiers and Kitchener. … It’s hell and the mouth of hell—I’ve seen it. He says he wouldn’t lift a finger to keep them out. Do you know why he says that? It’s because he can’t imagine what it means. I would. I’d die to keep them out, because I’ve seen … I’ve seen a man shot—not a soldier, just an ordinary man—put against a wall and shot while his wife howled like a dog. Two men—and their wives standing by. They might do that to him if they came—has he ever thought of that?—while his mother howled like a dog.” He shot out a quivering finger at the open-mouthed Mrs. Jay-Blenkinsop. “And his women—would he let them do as they liked with his women? They would if they came here—he can take my word for it they would. Would he ask them in politely and shake hands and give them drinks and let them? … If they came, people would run from them, leaving everything they had—beggars. Would he like to be driven and beaten and made to work like a slave? I’ve had that—I’ve been driven and beaten and made to work. And I’ve run from them and starved and hidden because I was afraid. And my wife died—they killed her—”
There was a gasp, a rustle of movement and a sudden straightening of backs. Everyone in the room knew Griselda Tully, many quite intimately, and not a few had been at her wedding; amazement and wrath against the disturber of the peace gave way to a real consternation, and in the silence that followed the momentary rustle William heard Faraday’s “Good God! …” They stared at him in dumb consternation, dimly conscious, perhaps, that they were in the presence of an eternal fact, and that the little man who stabbed at them with a trembling forefinger was the embodiment of that sense of injustice and agony which makes men cry to Heaven for vengeance and, Heaven failing them, take the sword and smite for themselves. Dolly Murgatroyd, Griselda’s bridesmaid, who had twice accompanied Griselda to Holloway, saw and shrank from the reality of that tortured revolt which for years she had striven to simulate under the lash of her leaders’ bombast. … In face of the fact that was William their theories wilted and failed them, and the new black suit of their comrade Tully was to them as the writing on the wall at the feast of Belshazzar—and came, like that other writing on the wall, at the moment when the evil from which they had hidden their faces was an evil actually accomplished. In each man’s heart was a faint reflection of the amaze that had fallen on William and Griselda when their world first crumbled about them.
The sudden movement, the chairman’s exclamation and the abashed silence that followed it checked William and brought him to a standstill; speech failed him and he stood with his mouth half open while the meeting stared at him motionless. There was a blank period of tension, of awkward stillness hi the presence of emotion, and then Faraday coughed uncertainly and moved. Probably he intended to say something, perhaps to adjourn the meeting; but his movement and the breaking of silence with his cough gave William back his voice and he spoke before Faraday began.
“And they won’t take me in the Army. Although my wife has been killed they won’t take me in the Army. I’m not tall enough; I’m only five-foot-five, and they
