uffragettes smashing up the West End, burning down Lulu
Harcourt's place, trying to roast old Asquith in the Dublin Theatre,
Seddon murder, this triangular cricket show. Hell's own excitement
because there's so much rain in August and people in Norwich have to go
about in boats, and then hell's own hullaballoo because there's no rain
for twenty-two days in September and people get so dry they can't spit
or something." His keen face wrinkled up into laughter. "Eh, didn't you
read that?" He laughed but was immediately intense again. "That's all
that really interests the people. By God, they'll sit up and take notice
of the real stuff one of these days. Pretty soon. Tightening up, I tell
you. Well, I'm off, Sabre. When are you coming up to the Mess again?
Friday? Well, guest night the week after. I'll drop you a line. So
long." He was off, carrying his straight back alertly up the street.

VII

His going was somehow as sudden and startling as his appearance had been
sudden and tumultuous. He had carried away Sabre's thoughts as a jet
from a hosepipe will spin a man out of a crowd; smashed into his
preoccupation as a stone smashing through a window upon one deep in
study; galloped across his mind as a cavalcade thundering through a
village street,--and the effect of it, and the incongruity of it as,
getting his bicycle from the office, he rode homewards, kept returning
to Sabre's mind, as an arresting dream will constantly break across
daylight thoughts.

Nona had said that Tybar knew she thought often of him. "He knows I
think of you." That was the way she had put it. It explained that mock
in his eyes when they met that day on the road, and Mrs. Winfred's
remark and her look, and Tybar's, that day outside the office.
Extraordinary, Otway bursting in like that with all those ridiculous
scares. Here he was riding along with all this reality pressing
enormously about him, and with this strange and terrible feeling of
being at the beginning of something or at the end of something, with
this voice in his ears of, "You have struck your tents and are upon the
march"; and there was Otway, up at the barracks, miles away from
realities, but as obsessed with his impossible stuff as he himself with
these most real and pressing dismays. What would he, with his
apprehension of what might lie ahead, be saying to a chap like Otway in
two or three years and what would Otway with his obsessions be saying to
him? Ah, two or three years