England -- Fiction; Imaginary wars and battles -- Fiction
There was no light sentiment, no sort of hysteria, at the back of these
miracles. Be it remembered that the streets of English towns had never
been so orderly; public-houses and places of amusement had never been so
empty; churches and chapels had never been one-half so full. During that
year, as the records show, it became the rule in many places for curates
and deacons to hold services outside the churches and chapels, while
packed congregations attended the services held within. And it was then
that, for the first time, we saw parsons leading the young men of their
flocks to the rifle-ranges, and competing with them there.
The lessons we learned in those days will never, I suppose, seem so
wonderful to any one else as to those of us who had lived a good slice
of our lives before the lessons came; before the need of them was felt
or understood. "For God, our Race, and Duty!" Conceive the stirring
wonder of the watchword, when it was no more than a month old!
The seasons rushed by us, as I said. But one short conversation served
to mark for me the coming of summer. We had reached the Surrey hills in
our homeward progress toward London. On a Saturday night we held a huge
meeting in Guildford, and very early on Sunday morning I woke with a
curiously insistent desire to be out in the open. Full of this
inclination I rose, dressed, and made my way down to the side entrance
of the hotel, where a few servants were moving about drowsily. As I
passed out under a high archway into the empty, sunny street, with its
clean Sabbath hush, Constance Grey stepped out from the front entrance
to the pavement.
"I felt such a longing to be out in the open this morning," she said,
when we had exchanged greeting. "It's months since I had a walk for the
walk's sake, and now I mean to climb that hill that we motored over from
Farnham--the Hog's Back, as they call it."
We both thought it deserved some more beautiful name, when we turned on
its crest and looked back at Guildford in the hollow, shining in summer
morning haze.
"Now surely that's King Arthur's Camelot," said Constance.
And then we looked out over the delectable valley toward the towers of
Charterhouse, across the roofs of two most lovable hamlets, from which
blue smoke curled in delicate spirals up from the bed of the valley,
through a nacreous mist, to somewhere near our high level.
We gazed our fill, and I only nodded when Constance murmured:
"It's worth a struggle, isn't it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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