simply rotten pipping out.  I like being alive, and I’d like to have tons more of it—­but there it is, I can’t believe anything so weird and it’s no use trying.  And if I don’t pip out after all, it’ll be such a jolly old surprise and lark that I shall be glad I couldn’t believe in it here.’  Johnny, I remember, said to her (those two were always ragging each other), ’Ah, you may be wishing you only could pip out, then....’  But I told him that I wished he wouldn’t, even in joke, allude to that bogey of the nurseries of my generation, a place of punishment.  That terrible old teaching!  Thank God we are outgrowing much of it.  I must say that the descriptions They give, when They give any, of Their place of being, do not sound very cheerful—­but it cannot at all resemble the old-fashioned place of torment, it sounds so much less clear-cut and definite than that, more like London in a yellow fog.

5

I do not think I slept that night.  I am bad at sleeping when I have had a shock.  My idiotic nerves again.  Crane, in his book, Right and Wrong Thinking, says one should drop discordant thoughts out of one’s mind as one drops a pebble out of one’s hand.  But my interior calm is not yet sufficient for this exercise, and I confess I am all too easily shaken to pieces by trouble, especially the troubles of those I love.

I felt a wreck when I met Percy at an early breakfast next morning.  He, too, looked jaded and strained, and ate hardly any breakfast, only a little force and three cups of strong tea—­an inadequate meal, as I told him, upon which to face so trying a day.  For we had to have strength not only for ourselves but for our children.  Giving out:  it is so much harder work than taking in, and it is the work for us older people always.

Percy passed me the Haste, pointing to a column on the front page.  That had been part of his business last night, to see that the Haste had a good column about it.  The news editor had turned out a column about a Bolshevik advance on the Dvina to make room for it, and it was side by side with the Rectory Oil Mystery, the German Invasion (dumped goods, of course), the Glasgow Trades’ Union Congress, the French Protest about Syria, Woman’s Mysterious Disappearance, and a Tarring and Feathering Court Martial.  The heading was ’Tragic Death of the Editor of the Daily Haste,’ and there followed not only a full report of the disaster, but an account of Oliver’s career, with one of those newspaper photographs which do the original so little justice.

‘Binney’s been pretty sharp about it,’ said Percy approvingly.  ’Of course, he had all the biographical facts stored.’

6

We went up by the 9.24, and went straight to Hampstead.

Quietly and sadly we entered that house of death.  The maid, all flustered and red-eyed with emotional unrest, told us that Jane was upstairs, and Clare too.  We went up the narrow stairs, now become so tragic in their associations.  On which step, I wondered, had he fallen, and how far?