sight of Keith and the sound of his voice telling me that we were going to have an Oxford breakfast three courses, that is to say, without porridge, and a preposterous quantity of toast in large slices. I was swept back on the instant to good ante-bellum days.

VIII

I GOT home during the morning of Monday. There were one or two other people I had intended to see and one or two things I had intended to do on Monday, but I decided to catch the first possible train, because I wanted to take with me the full flavour of Keith's quiet antidote. I had no doubt as to its efficacy, and never feared that it could wear off like the smell of his bath-salts (it is Keith-like to be careless in his clothes and extravagant in toilet sundries); but I somehow felt that the sooner it was, so to speak, rubbed in, the more beneficial it must be, and also I was as anxious to test my new frame of mind as one is to try a new toy; and it was certaintly as definite and real a possession to me as a putter, say, or a cleek.

I had a practice-shot in the train. Two Tommies (superior clerks they had been, I should think), nice chaps with brown faces and tough limbs, were in my carriage. One passed the other his paper, pointing with his finger to some verses; the other read them slowly and with an obvious effort of concentration.

Well, what d'you think of it?" said his friend. The other grunted, thinking deeply; their manner suggested to me that they were leading members of their chapel's literary club.

"It's all right," the other pronounced, handing the paper back. "It has the universal note."

His friend produced a pair of folding scissors and proceeded to cut out the poem, running his scissors up the paper with a quickness that showed he had made many cuttings from papers, and put the cutting in his pocket-book.

"But there's this," the slow other brought out, to be remembered. That chap utters one side of the job only. Of course it's poetry right enough to think of dying for your country and so on; but it's business to wipe up as many Germans as possible, in whatever way the C.O. sees fit."

"You're so modern," said his friend. can't have realism in poetry."

"But you

"I grant that. What I say is - and I've always said it: poetry's got to illuminate facts."

I know you've said it. And this war just proves you're wrong, if nothing else does. How can poetry illuminate the effect of a well-placed shell on a unit? Not Milton nor yet Byron could do that."

That's

"Well, if it can't, it's not much use to me. all I know. As soldier I mean. There's a sight too much of all this dying for your country to please me. I'm going to take every snitch of cover I can find, and do in every German I can pot; and if I'm done in, so much the worse for me."

"You don't mean you're going to give up reading poetry?" He spoke with awe in his voice, as though the other were a minister who had thought of giving up preaching.

"On the war, yes," he sternly declared.

"Takes

the heart out of a man who's got to kill, and got to want to kill."

They were sitting in opposite corners, speaking in low earnest voices, leaning forward arms on knees. The device they took to shield their talk from the carriage carried it to my ear. Never having heard soldiers speak of the war before, I was intensely interested, so much so that I was tempted to join in, if only to congratulate my stern neighbour on the soundness of his common sense. I knew that I was all right, just as surely as I knew that had I heard that low-voiced talk before being armed with Keith's good weapon, the voices would have started wrangling within me, leading to Heaven knows what disturbance. But I listened with amusement and with strong approval of the stern speaker's common sense. Poetry illuminating facts roused in me the picture of myself, a very small boy, painting texts in red and blue on Sunday afternoons. I should have quietly gone farther still and said that the function of poetry was to turn the mind away from facts, to emphasise, for example, the glory of patriotism and war and sacrifice, so that no one should think of the dirty facts, the mud, the blood, the fear, the hatred, the lust, the terrible boredom and filth of war and the effect of high explosive on a unit.

It was good to be at home, free of that wicked ingratitude which had turned a paradise to a hell. My dear women-folk! I thought, as I entered the hall and found them drinking milk after a walk. They were surprised to see me, expecting me to re

turn by a much later train, in time for dinner in the evening. Their pleasure touched me, and showed with beautiful clearness how very dear I was to all three. But there was nothing ostentatious, nothing exaggerated either, about their manner of expressing it or my manner of receiving it. No, everything was sensible and right, delightfully right.

"Dear boy, what a nice surprise!" said my mother.

"How jolly you've come!" said Doris.

And Amy stood nestling confidingly near me after I had kissed her, holding my jacket, and she said with meaning, but simply and nicely, in a way I immensely liked: "I am glad you're back."

Trivial enough, no doubt, and commonplace. But it was precisely the triviality and commonplaceness round which I rolled my tongue. The vin ordinaire of life; the "good little wine good little wine" of the country, which would not travel without turning sour. Ah, my womenfolk! my home! to think I could ever have been bored by them; ever found them irksome; ever allowed their place of habitation to get upon my nerves! The memory of my past folly made me blush as I stood there in the hall in their midst.

They did not understand me? Mother, in wanting me to marry Amy, that dear little wife for any nice man? Amy, in the way she treated me? Doris, at all, in any way? Why should they understand me? What in me had I wanted them to understand? My bad temper? My nerves? Precisely that exaggerating and exaggerated side of me that it was my wish to cut out? I saw how unfair