“If I’m as happy as can be expected in the circumstances, I think it my duty to look happier.”

It was a valiant philosophy.

The falling of a chimney-stack brought me up against Daniel Gedge, who before the war did all my little repairs.  The chimney I put into the hands of Day & Higgins, another firm of builders.

A day or two afterwards Hosea shied at something and I discovered it was Gedge, who had advanced into the roadway expressing a desire to have a word with me.  I quieted the patriotic Hosea and drew up by the kerb.  Gedge was a lean foxy-faced man with a long, reddish nose and a long blunt chin from which a grizzled beard sprouted aggressively forwards.  He had hard, stupid grey eyes.

“I hope you ’ll excuse the liberty I take in stopping you, sir,” he said, civilly.

“That’s all right,” said I.  “What’s the matter?”

“I thought I had given you satisfaction these last twenty years.”

I assented.  “Quite correct,” said I.

“Then, may I ask, sir, without offence, why you’ve called in Day & Higgins?”

“You may,” said I, “and, with or without offence, I’ll answer your question.  I’ve called them in because they’re good loyal people.  Higgins has joined the army, and so has Day’s eldest boy, while you have been going on like a confounded pro-German.”

“You’ve no right to say that, Major Meredyth.”

“Not when you go over to Godbury”—­the surging metropolis of the County some fifteen miles off—­“and tell a pack of fools to strike because this is a capitalists’ war?  Not when you go round the mills here, and do your best to stop young fellows from fighting for their country?  God bless my soul, in whose interests are you acting, if not Germany’s?”

He put on his best platform manner.  “I’m acting in the best interests of the people of this country.  The war is wrong and incredibly foolish and can bring no advantage to the working man.  Why should he go and be killed or maimed for life?  Will it put an extra penny in his pocket or his widow’s?  No.  Oh!”—­he checked my retort—­“I know everything you would say.  I see the arguments every day in all your great newspapers.  But the fact remains that I don’t see eye to eye with you, or those you represent.  You think one way, I think another.  We agree to differ.”

“We don’t,” said I.  “I don’t agree at all.”

“At any rate,” he said, “I can’t see how a difference of political opinion can affect my ability now to put a new chimney-stack in your house, any more than it has done in the past.”

“In the past,” said I, “political differences were parochial squabbles in comparison with things nowadays.  You’re either for England, or against her.”

He smiled wryly.  “I’m for England.  We both are.  You think her salvation lies one way.  I think another.  This is a free country in which every man has a right to his own opinion.”