al soul.

Laurier was not only a masterful person and a wealthy property owner and
employer--he was president, Bert learnt with awe, of the Tanooda Canning
Corporation--but he was popular and skilful in the arts of popularity.
In the evening quite a crowd of men gathered in the store and talked of
the flying-machine and of the war that was tearing the world to pieces.
And presently came a man on a bicycle with an ill-printed newspaper of a
single sheet which acted like fuel in a blazing furnace of talk. It
was nearly all American news; the old-fashioned cables had fallen into
disuse for some years, and the Marconi stations across the ocean and
along the Atlantic coastline seemed to have furnished particularly
tempting points of attack.

But such news it was.

Bert sat in the background--for by this time they had gauged his
personal quality pretty completely--listening. Before his staggering
mind passed strange vast images as they talked, of great issues at a
crisis, of nations in tumultuous march, of continents overthrown, of
famine and destruction beyond measure. Ever and again, in spite of his
efforts to suppress them, certain personal impressions would scamper
across the weltering confusion, the horrible mess of the exploded
Prince, the Chinese aeronaut upside down, the limping and bandaged
bird-faced officer blundering along in miserable and hopeless flight....

They spoke of fire and massacre, of cruelties and counter cruelties, of
things that had been done to harmless Asiatics by race-mad men, of the
wholesale burning and smashing up of towns, railway junctions, bridges,
of whole populations in hiding and exodus. "Every ship they've got is in
the Pacific," he heard one man exclaim. "Since the fighting began they
can't have landed on the Pacific slope less than a million men. They've
come to stay in these States, and they will--living or dead."

Slowly, broadly, invincibly, there grew upon Bert's mind realisation
of the immense tragedy of humanity into which his life was flowing;
the appalling and universal nature of the epoch that had arrived; the
conception of an end to security and order and habit. The whole world
was at war and it could not get back to peace, it might never recover
peace.

He had thought the things he had seen had been exceptional, conclusive
things, that the besieging of New York and the battle of the Atlantic
were epoch-making events between long years of security. And they had
been bu