ut-of-doors in all the slumbering land....

For a time a little thing caught hold of his dreaming mind. Continually
as he ran on, black, silent birds rose startled out of the dust of the
road before him, and fluttered noiselessly beyond his double wedge of
light. What sort of bird could they be? Were they night-jars? Were they
different kinds of birds snatching at the quiet of the night for a dust
bath in the sand? This little independent thread of inquiry ran through
the texture of his mind and died away....

And at one place there was a great bolting of rabbits across the road,
almost under his wheels....

The phrases he had used that afternoon at Claverings came back presently
into his head. They were, he felt assured, the phrases that had to be
said now. This war could be seen as the noblest of wars, as the crowning
struggle of mankind against national dominance and national aggression;
or else it was a mere struggle of nationalities and pure destruction and
catastrophe. Its enormous significances, he felt, must not be lost in
any petty bickering about the minor issues of the conflict. But were
these enormous significances being stated clearly enough? Were they
being understood by the mass of liberal and pacific thinkers? He drove
more and more slowly as these questions crowded upon his attention until
at last he came to a stop altogether.... "Certain things must be said
clearly," he whispered. "Certain things--The meaning of England.... The
deep and long-unspoken desire for kindliness and fairness.... Now is the
time for speaking. It must be put as straight now as her gun-fire, as
honestly as the steering of her ships."

Phrases and paragraphs began to shape themselves in his mind as he sat
with one arm on his steering-wheel.

Suddenly he roused himself, turned over the map in the map-case beside
him, and tried to find his position....

So far as he could judge he had strayed right into Suffolk....

About one o'clock in the morning he found himself in Newmarket.
Newmarket too was a moonlit emptiness, but as he hesitated at the
cross-roads he became aware of a policeman standing quite stiff and
still at the corner by the church.

"Matching's Easy?" he cried.

"That road, Sir, until you come to Market Saffron, and then to the
left...."

Mr. Britling had a definite purpose now in his mind, and he drove
faster, but still very carefully and surely. He was already within a
mile or so of Market Saffron before