shrilled clear a moment over the turgid swayed and broke away from where the outpouring of muddy minds: figure had fallen. There were plenty of policemen now that the need for their intervention was past. The vast crime, the unparalleled lunacy of war! If I have a private quarrel and I kill my opponent, I am hanged for a felon. If the Government I live under has a public quarrel, and at their bidding I kill some man I never saw before, I am a patriot. No! I am a murderer. That was more than the soldiers could stand. They joined in the rush for the column. Yet, as Napier remembered afterward, the soldiers who by implication had been called murderers were less like wild beasts in their fury than the men who had stayed at home. The men were n't in khaki who strove, vainly at the first assay, by dint of climbing on other men's shoulders to storm the platform. As for Napier, he would never have been able to get anywhere near the speaker but that his precipitation was taken by those about him for uncontrollable rage. Even with the aid of hatred to forge him a way he found getting to the front a cursedly impeded business. Then came that moment of sheer physical sickness at his closer vision of the pack of wolves ravening below the unfriended figure. It was long before Napier would shake himself free of that impression-Julian, facing the onset, facing the hate-inflamed eyes in heads just appearing above the platform. Ruffians with villainous faces, and simpletons fired with the responsibility of standing up for England, doing it so safely, too, by means of breaking the head. of one young gentleman, up the platform they scrambled after their ringleaders and closed round the speaker. In those last few hard-won yards. Napier had collected a policeman. But up above the attackers had fought Julian to the edge of the platform. Napier had an instant's glimpse of him with a splash of scarlet down his cheek before they threw him over. Upon that, a new emotion seized the crowd, a panic born of the consciousness of limits to police indifference. The mass Napier shouted to them for an ambulance as he ran forward. Of the faces bent over the figure lying limp at the foot of the platform, one was lifted-Nan Ellis's. "Wait!" Napier called to one of the policemen. "Get that lady out of this, will you?" But the lady would come when she could take "him" along. "A taxi, please." Some one had given her a large-sized pocket-handkerchief. She made a bandage and tied it round the bleeding head. Some one else fetched a cab for the lady. And the ambulance would be there in a minute. "Oh, he 'll hate the ambulance! Help me to get him to the cab!" she besought. His eyelids opened, and he moaned a little as between Napier and one of the policemen Julian was carried through the alley which had been opened in the crowd. As the limp figure was borne past they muttered and jeered. CHAPTER XXI LATE that night Gavan left a note in Berkeley Street, to be given to Lady Grant in the morning. He told her that he had got a doctor and a nurse, and "Julian has come off better than I could have believed." Before ten o'clock the next day Lady Grant appeared at her son's new lodging with the avowed intention of taking him. home and seeing that he was properly attended to. Julian, in a fever and many bandages, flatly refused to be moved. There was a grievous scene. In the midst of it in walked Miss Ellis. The same evening, comfortably established in his old Berkeley Street bedroom, Julian put Napier in possession of the issue of that encounter of the morning. "Nan turned against me. She and my mother together are too many for me." fectly beautiful nature as Julian!' Was n't that American?" Lady Grant smiled. "I told her I would make Sir James see it as I did, and that it would all come right." In those next days Gavan ran in whenever he had a quarter of an hour, to find a Julian very weak, yet in bewildering good spirits, visited daily by Nan, and even, for the term of the exigency, received back. into his mother's favor. JULIAN'S way of helping it all to "come "Do they meet, those two?" Arthur right" was to employ his convalescence in asked. carrying on the propaganda from his sick. "My mother and Nan? Rather. They bed with unabated ardor. get along like a house afire.” If Napier had doubted that before, he doubted no longer after a little talk down in the drawing-room with Lady Grant on a certain gloomy evening toward Christmas. Whispers had begun to be heard in privileged circles of British shell shortage at the front. The Germans had shells to spare. They had been bombarding Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Whitby; five hundred casualties, the papers said. Julian was better. You could read that news in his mother's face. "I believe he 'll be able to go over to America early in the new year," she said. "To America!" Napier repeated, slightly dazed. "It would be everything to have him. out of England till the war is over." Julian's mother had broached the idea to Miss Nan. "I've had my eye on that young woman. It's true she takes Julian's mad ideas for the law and the prophets, but a wife should. Julian might do worse, don't you agree?" "So they 're engaged!" was all that Napier could bring out. "Not properly engaged, I gather. But when was Julian properly anything? The girl's no fool. She has naturally thought we should n't like it, so I took occasion to say a word to her. She looked rather confused," said the lady, reflectively. "She must have been confused, for what do you think she said? That I had misunderstood. That she had never said she would marry Julian. I told her he was an odd creature, but I was sure that was what he wanted. 'And I can't be wrong in thinking you care for him,' I said. And then she burst out with: 'How can I help caring about anybody with such a per That name of "Messenger" which Napier had secretly given Nan recurred to him again and again. Messenger, indeed, carrying contraband, not to say high explosive, to and from the sober precincts of Berkeley Street! The worst of it was that Nan showed no sign of revolt against being made the agent of this traffic. The cold truth was that she liked it. That was the heartbreaking thing about the whole sorry business. She would come back from private talks with Julian's revolutionary friends, from semi-public meetings, electric with excitement, brimming with her news. Julian's eagerness to hear and hers to tell did not always await the more private hour. Nan's air of tumbling it all out, equally without selective care and without consciousness of offense, did much to ease the situation between Julian and his mother. Their relationship had been too embittered to Lady Grant did, to be sure, tighten her lips and stiffen her back in face of some of the talk that went on across her son's paper-strewn bed-table. During one of Napier's visits he had seen her rise and leave the room. When she came back she found Julian laughing as he had n't for many a day. Ultimately Lady Grant was able to confront the familiar mention of persons ostracized and implications outrageous with that patience women know how to draw upon in dealing with their sick. Sometimes the messenger did n't spare the mixed audience in Berkeley Street a graver, more passionate mood. "I told you," she said suddenly to Julian, soon after her entrance one evening"I told you Mr. Oswin Norfolk's book was practically finished. Yes. Well, the authorities are n't going to let it be published." "What!" Julian very nearly leaped out of bed. "Suppress the greatest contribution to sane thinking since 'Progress and Poverty?' To dare to ban the 'Philosophy of Force' and pretend we are fighting for liberty!" "You ought not to have told him," Lady Grant said to Nan. Julian caught her up. "Not tell me? Of course she had to tell me. She knows if she did n't bring me the news here, I'd have to go where I could depend on getting it." His mother exchanged looks with Gavan. "I told them what I'd do." Nan said it with that little catch of excitement in her voice. "I'd get Mr. Oswin Norfolk's book over to America. They would n't be afraid to publish it over there." "Why should they? The Americans are n't standing in the breach," said Lady Grant, with heightened color. Nan looked away. Her mouth quivered a little. It was clear that she was reminding herself, Julian's mother! "America! The very thing!" In the baggy dressing-gown Julian had twisted the upper part of his thin body sidewise, leaning toward the messenger. "The trouble is," she began in a lower voice, and then hesitated. "What's the matter?" Julian demanded. His impatience made him irritable. "You are n't so silly as to suppose we can't say what we like before Gavan and my mother?" "No, oh, no," she answered with a haste that convicted her. "I was just going to tell you Mr. Norfolk seems to think"-her voice sank-"the mails are n't safe." "Not safe?" She shook her head. "Not any more. Mr. Norfolk says there's a―a supervision already." "What?" "Oh, not openly." "A secret censorship! Hah! Hear that?" he challenged his friend. "That 's what your policy 's come to!" "What makes Norfolk think"-Gavan began at his calmest. "He does n't think. He knows." There was a little pause. "Things don't get through. And the things that don't get through, they 're always, he says, things of a certain kind." She broke the strain of the next moment's silence. "I said if they did n't trust the mails, why should n't Mr. Norfolk take his book over along with your 'League of Nations Manifesto' that they're all so wanting to get into President Wilson's hands. They asked me what I thought the inspectors would be doing while Mr. Norfolk was walking about with contraband literature under his arm. Did you ever hear such an excuse? I said: 'Do you think the inspectors would stop you? Well, the inspectors would n't stop me! Yes," she added in a slightly offended tone, "they laughed, too. laughed, too. I did n't mind that so much as to see them accepting the-interference, and just sitting there. Talking! It made me wild. 'Do you really want to get that into the President's hands?' I asked them. 'Very well. You give it to me.' "You 'd take it!" The involuntary exclamation slipped over Gavan's lips. Julian had n't needed to ask. "You darling!" He held out his hand. "Not at all," said Miss Nan, with flushed dignity. "And, anyhow, Mr. Norfolk won't trust me with his precious book. 'Let me take Mr. Grant's 'Manifesto,' then,' I said. But they seemed to think the 'Manifesto' was still more what they called 'inflammable material at this juncture.' 'It would be better for you to be found with a bomb in your trunk,' they said." "They are bound to consider the question of personal risk," said Gavan, seriously. "What risk? Nobody can tell me that. I'm an American. The British Government has n't any right to tell me what I may carry to my own country. Besides, they would n't find it. And suppose they did, the English could n't shoot me. I told them this afternoon. 'I 'm not bound by your horrid war regulations.' But, no," she said lugubriously through the others' smiling, "they won't send me. Everybody 's afraid." "Except you and me, Nan." Julian held out a hand again, his eyes shining in his moved face. "It's a great bond." THE last time Gavan was ever to see those two together was one evening toward the end of January, about half past six. Julian's convalescence, not so rapid as his mother expected, was steadily progressing. The newsboys, at that period still vocal in London streets, were shouting: "Zepp raid! Bombs dropped on King's Lynn!" as Gavan was admitted at the Grants' door. Nan was coming downstairs. "And where are you off to this time?" He led her into Sir James's library. "I suppose I shall hear of you on the Nelson plinth next, being pelted." She seemed not yet to have received that mandate. But again she was full of America, what America was to do for the war-maddened world, America and the labor parties everywhere. Away from that slavery to sick-room sensibilities, Gavan could n't bear it. With a vehemence foreign to him, he poured out his indictment against a divided national policy, against the treason of weakening the home front. He flayed the stop-the-war people as though a prince of the peacemongers were n't lying in the room above. Their colossal ineptitude in thinking they alone really want peace! They had sent deputations to Sir William, who had just lost his second son! "Not Niel! O Gavan, Niel!" "Niel! Niel, too!" she cried. "If only they had been able to stop it in time!" "Stop it! Stop men from going into a war like this! I'm not an idealist myself," he could n't, to save his life, keep bitterness out of his voice,-"but I do know there have been men who went into this war to defend the weak and to right wrong. A good many of those men can't speak for themselves any longer-" For a moment even Gavan could n't speak for them. He began again in a level voice, "In those casualty lists-nearly every friend I had." "Not the greatest friend of all; not Julian." "Except Julian," he said dully, "our lot is practically wiped out. And now the younger men, the boys, Niel and the rest. They go and they go." He turned on her with a vehemence that cloaked his emotion. "I'm not saying that all the men out there feel the same about the war, but they fight on, some of them becauseother men have died and must n't have died in vain. The dead are the best recruiters. It's the dead who call loudest, 'Come, join up!' |