“The world,” he said, startling Mrs. Britling with his sudden speech, “will be intolerable to live in, it will be unendurable for a decent human being, unless we win this war.

“We must smash or be smashed....”

His brain was so busy with such stuff that for a time he stared at Mrs. Harrowdean’s belated telegram without grasping the meaning of a word of it.  He realised slowly that it was incumbent upon him to go over to her, but he postponed his departure very readily in order to play hockey.  Besides which it would be a full moon, and he felt that summer moonlight was far better than sunset and dinner time for the declarations he was expected to make.  And then he went on phrase-making again about Germany until he had actually bullied off at hockey.

Suddenly in the midst of the game he had an amazing thought.  It came to him like a physical twinge.

“What the devil are we doing at this hockey?” he asked abruptly of Teddy, who was coming up to bully after a goal.  “We ought to be drilling or shooting against those infernal Germans.”

Teddy looked at him questioningly.

“Oh, come on!” said Mr. Britling with a gust of impatience, and snapped the sticks together.

Section 14

Mr. Britling started for his moonlight ride about half-past nine that night.  He announced that he could neither rest nor work, the war had thrown him into a fever; the driving of the automobile was just the distraction he needed; he might not, he added casually, return for a day or so.  When he felt he could work again he would come back.  He filled up his petrol tank by the light of an electric torch, and sat in his car in the garage and studied his map of the district.  His thoughts wandered from the road to Pyecrafts to the coast, and to the possible route of a raider.  Suppose the enemy anticipated a declaration of war!  Here he might come, and here....

He roused himself from these speculations to the business in hand.

The evening seemed as light as day, a cool moonshine filled the world.  The road was silver that flushed to pink at the approach of Mr. Britling’s headlight, the dark turf at the wayside and the bushes on the bank became for a moment an acid green as the glare passed.  The full moon was climbing up the sky, and so bright that scarcely a star was visible in the blue grey of the heavens.  Houses gleamed white a mile away, and ever and again a moth would flutter and hang in the light of the lamps, and then vanish again in the night.

Gladys was in excellent condition for a run, and so was Mr. Britling.  He went neither fast nor slow, and with a quite unfamiliar confidence.  Life, which had seemed all day a congested confusion darkened by threats, became cool, mysterious and aloof and with a quality of dignified reassurance.