“I was there before nine, and even then Hickson’s shop was crowded—­crowded, my dear!”

“What have you got?” said Mr. Britling with an inquiring movement towards the automobile.

She had got quite a lot.  She had two sides of bacon, a case of sugar, bags of rice, eggs, a lot of flour.

“What are all these little packets?” said Mr. Britling.

Mrs. Faber looked slightly abashed.

“Cerebos salt,” she said.  “One gets carried away a little.  I just got hold of it and carried it out to the car.  I thought we might have to salt things later.”

“And the jars are pickles?” said Mr. Britling.

“Yes.  But look at all my flour!  That’s what will go first....”

The lady was a little flurried by Mr. Britling’s too detailed examination of her haul.  “What good is blacking?” he asked.  She would not hear him.  She felt he was trying to spoil her morning.  She declared she must get on back to her home.  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said.  “I’ve got no end of things to do.  There’s peas!  I want to show cook how to bottle our peas.  For this year—­it’s lucky, we’ve got no end of peas.  I came by here just for the sake of telling you.”  And with that she presently departed—­obviously ruffled by Mrs. Britling’s lethargy and Mr. Britling’s scepticism.

Mr. Britling watched her go off with a slowly rising indignation.

“And that,” he said, “is how England is going to war!  Scrambling for food—­at the very beginning.”

“I suppose she is anxious for the children,” said Mrs. Britling.

“Blacking!”

“After all,” said Mr. Britling, “if other people are doing that sort of thing—­”

“That’s the idea of all panics.  We’ve got not to do it....  The country hasn’t even declared war yet!  Hallo, here we are!  Better late than never.”

The head of the postman, bearing newspapers and letters, appeared gliding along the top of the hedge as he cycled down the road towards the Dower House corner.

Section 3

England was not yet at war, but all the stars were marching to that end.  It was as if an event so vast must needs take its time to happen.  No doubt was left upon Mr. Britling’s mind, though a whole-page advertisement in the Daily News, in enormous type and of mysterious origin, implored Great Britain not to play into the hands of Russia, Russia the Terrible, that bugbear of the sentimental Radicals.  The news was wide and sweeping, and rather inaccurate.  The Germans were said to be in Belgium and Holland, and they had seized English ships in the Kiel Canal.  A moratorium had been proclaimed, and the reports of a food panic showed Mrs. Faber to be merely one example of a large class of excitable people.

Mr. Britling found the food panic disconcerting.  It did not harmonise with his leading motif of the free people of the world rising against the intolerable burthen of militarism.  It spoilt his picture....