He steered along the narrow road by the black dog-rose hedge, and so into the high road towards the village.  The village was alight at several windows but almost deserted.  Out beyond, a coruscation of lights burnt like a group of topaz and rubies set in the silver shield of the night.  The festivities of the Flower Show were still in full progress, and the reduction of the entrance fee after seven had drawn in every lingering outsider.  The roundabouts churned out their relentless music, and the bottle-shooting galleries popped and crashed.  The well-patronised ostriches and motorcars flickered round in a pulsing rhythm; black, black, black, before the naphtha flares.

Mr. Britling pulled up at the side of the road, and sat for a little while watching the silhouettes move hither and thither from shadow to shadow across the bright spaces.

“On the very brink of war—­on the brink of Armageddon,” he whispered at last.  “Do they understand?  Do any of us understand?”

He slipped in his gear to starting, and was presently running quietly with his engine purring almost inaudibly along the level road to Hartleytree.  The sounds behind him grew smaller and smaller, and died away leaving an immense unruffled quiet under the moon.  There seemed no motion but his own, no sound but the neat, subdued, mechanical rhythm in front of his feet.  Presently he ran out into the main road, and heedless of the lane that turned away towards Pyecrafts, drove on smoothly towards the east and the sea.  Never before had he driven by night.  He had expected a fumbling and tedious journey; he found he had come into an undreamt-of silvery splendour of motion.  For it seemed as though even the automobile was running on moonlight that night....  Pyecrafts could wait.  Indeed the later he got to Pyecrafts the more moving and romantic the little comedy of reconciliation would be.  And he was in no hurry for that comedy.  He felt he wanted to apprehend this vast summer calm about him, that alone of all the things of the day seemed to convey anything whatever of the majestic tragedy that was happening to mankind.  As one slipped through this still vigil one could imagine for the first time the millions away there marching, the wide river valleys, villages, cities, mountain-ranges, ports and seas inaudibly busy.

“Even now,” he said, “the battleships may be fighting.”

He listened, but the sound was only the low intermittent drumming of his cylinders as he ran with his throttle nearly closed, down a stretch of gentle hill.

He felt that he must see the sea.  He would follow the road beyond the Rodwell villages, and then turn up to the crest of Eastonbury Hill.  And thither he went and saw in the gap of the low hills beyond a V-shaped level of moonlit water that glittered and yet lay still.  He stopped his car by the roadside, and sat for a long time looking at this and musing.  And once it seemed to him three little shapes like short black needles passed in line ahead across the molten silver.