From the yard came a riotous cackling of chickens and quacking of ducks, mingled with the peeping of the little broods. In the middle a girl in blue gingham, sleeves rolled up as far as possible on her brown arms, a girl with a mass of dark hair loosely coiled above the nape of her neck, was throwing to the fowls handfuls of grain with a wide gesture. "And to think that only yesterday ..." said Martin to himself. He listened carefully for some time. "Wonderful! You can't even hear the guns." CHAPTER IX The evening was pearl-grey when they left the village; in their nostrils was the smell of the leisurely death of the year, of leaves drying and falling, of ripened fruit and bursting seed-pods. "The fall's a maddening sort o' time for me," said Tom Randolph. "It makes me itch to get up on ma hind legs an' do things, go places." "I suppose it's that the earth has such a feel of accomplishment," said Howe. "You do feel as if Nature had pulled off her part of the job and was restin'." They stopped a second and looked about them, breathing deep. On one side of the road were woods where in long alleys the mists deepened into purple darkness. "There's the moon." "God! it looks like a pumpkin." "I wish those guns'd shut up 'way off there to the north." "They're sort of irrelevant, aren't they?" They walked on, silent, listening to the guns throbbing far away, like muffled drums beaten in nervous haste. "Sounds almost like a barrage." Martin for some reason was thinking of the last verses of Shelley's _Hellas_. He wished he knew them so that he could recite them. "_Faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks in a dissolving dream._" The purple trunks of saplings passed slowly across the broad face of the moon as they walked along. How beautiful the world was! "Look, Tom." Martin put his arm about Randolph's shoulder and nodded towards the moon. "It might be a ship with puffed-out pumpkin-coloured sails, the way the trees make it look now." "Wouldn't it be great to go to sea?" said Randolph, looking straight into the moon, "an' get out of this slaughter-house. It's nice to see the war, but I have no intention of taking up butchery as a profession.... There is too much else to do in the world." They walked slowly along the road talking of the sea, and Martin told how when he was a little kid he'd had an uncle who used to tell him about the Vikings and the Swan Path, and how one of the great moments of his life had been when he and a friend had looked out of their window in a little inn on Cape Cod one morning and seen the sea and the swaying gold path of the sun on it, stretching away, beyond the horizon. "Poor old life," he said. "I'd expected to do so much with you." And they both laughed, a little bitterly. They were strolling past a large farmhouse that stood like a hen among chicks in a crowd of little outbuildings. A man in the road lit a cigarette and Martin recognised him in the orange glare of the match.