awn 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 a