Derby had been a crisis. He would obey no more: not one more stride. If they summoned him he would disappear: or find some means of fighting them. But no more obedience: no more presenting himself when called up. By God, no! Never while he lived, again, would he be at the disposal of society. So they moved south--to be one step removed. They had been living in this remote cottage in the Derbyshire hills: and they must leave at half-past seven in the morning, to complete their journey in a day. It was a black morning, with a slow dawn. Somers had the trunks ready. He stood looking at the dark gulf of the valley below. Meanwhile heavy clouds sank over the bare, Derbyshire hills, and the dawn was blotted out before it came. Then broke a terrific thunderstorm, and hail lashed down with a noise like insanity. He stood at the big window over the valley, and watched. Come hail, come rain, he would go: forever. This was his home district--but from the deepest soul he now hated it, mistrusted it even more than he hated it. As far as _life_ went, he mistrusted it utterly, with a black soul. Mistrusted it and hated it, with its smoke and its money-power and its squirming millions who aren’t human any more. Ah, how lovely the South-west seemed, after it all. There was hardly any food, but neither he nor Harriet minded. They could pick up and be wonderfully happy again, gathering the little chestnuts in the woods, and the few last bilberries. Men were working harder than ever felling trees for trench-timber, denuding the land. But their brush fires were burning in the woods, and when they had gone, in the cold dusk, Somers went with a sack to pick up the unburnt faggots and the great chips of wood the axes had left golden against the felled logs. Flakes of sweet, pale gold oak. He gathered them in the dusk, in a sack, along with the other poor villagers. For he was poorer even than they. Still, it made him very happy to do these things--to see a big, glowing pile of wood-flakes in his shed--and to dig the garden, and set the rubbish burning in the late, wistful autumn--or to wander through the hazel copses, away to the real old English hamlets, that are still like Shakespeare--and like Hardy’s _Woodlanders_. Then, in November, the Armistice. It was almost too much to believe. The war was over! It _was_ too much to believe. He and Harriet sat and sang German songs, in the cottage, that strange night of the Armistice, away there in the country: and she cried--and he wondered what now, now the walls would come no nearer. It had been like Edgar Allen Poe’s story of the Pit and the Pendulum--where the walls come in, in, in, till the prisoner is almost squeezed. So the black walls of the war--and he had been trapped, and very nearly squeezed into the pit where the rats were. So nearly! So very nearly. And now the black walls had stopped, and he was _not_ pushed into the pit, and the rats. And he knew it in his soul. What next then?