“You!” said Teddy, regarding her coldly, and proceeded ostentatiously to talk of other things.

Section 6

“Hugh’s going to be in khaki too,” the elder junior told Teddy.  “He’s too young to go out in Kitchener’s army, but he’s joined the Territorials.  He went off on Thursday....  I wish Gilbert and me was older....”

Mr. Britling had known his son’s purpose since the evening of Teddy’s announcement.

Hugh had come to his father’s study as he was sitting musing at his writing-desk over the important question whether he should continue his “Examination of War” uninterruptedly, or whether he should not put that on one side for a time and set himself to state as clearly as possible the not too generally recognised misfit between the will and strength of Britain on the one hand and her administrative and military organisation on the other.  He felt that an enormous amount of human enthusiasm and energy was being refused and wasted; that if things went on as they were going there would continue to be a quite disastrous shortage of gear, and that some broadening change was needed immediately if the swift exemplary victory over Germany that his soul demanded was to be ensured.  Suppose he were to write some noisy articles at once, an article, for instance, to be called “The War of the Mechanics” or “The War of Gear,” and another on “Without Civil Strength there is no Victory.”  If he wrote such things would they be noted or would they just vanish indistinguishably into the general mental tumult?  Would they be audible and helpful shouts, or just waste of shouting?...  That at least was what he supposed himself to be thinking; it was, at any rate, the main current of his thinking; but all the same, just outside the circle of his attention a number of other things were dimly apprehended, bobbing up and down in the flood and ready at the slightest chance to swirl into the centre of his thoughts.  There was, for instance, Captain Carmine in the moonlight lugging up a railway embankment something horrible, something loose and wet and warm that had very recently been a man.  There was Teddy, serious and patriotic—­filling a futile penman with incredulous respect.  There was the thin-faced man at the club, and a curious satisfaction he had betrayed in the public disarrangement.  And there was Hugh.  Particularly there was Hugh, silent but watchful.  The boy never babbled.  He had his mother’s gift of deep dark silences.  Out of which she was wont to flash, a Black Princess waving a sword.  He wandered for a little while among memories....  But Hugh didn’t come out like that, though it always seemed possible he might—­perhaps he didn’t come out because he was a son.  Revelation to his father wasn’t his business....  What was he thinking of it all?  What was he going to do?  Mr. Britling was acutely anxious that his son should volunteer; he was almost certain that he would volunteer, but there was just a little shadow of doubt whether some extraordinary subtlety of mind mightn’t have carried the boy into a pacifist attitude.  No! that was impossible.  In the face of Belgium....  But as greatly—­and far more deeply in the warm flesh of his being—­did Mr. Britling desire that no harm, no evil should happen to Hugh....