“Only I did not want to go; my will was all the other way about.  I had so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility:  I was still so fresh a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness of what I ought to do had no power at all to touch my will.  My will was to live, to gather pleasures and make my dear lady happy.  But though this sense of vast neglected duties had no power to draw me, it could make me silent and preoccupied, it robbed the days I had spent of half their brightness and roused me into dark meditations in the silence of the night.  And as I stood and watched Evesham’s aeroplanes sweep to and fro—­those birds of infinite ill omen—­she stood beside me watching me, perceiving the trouble indeed, but not perceiving it clearly—­her eyes questioning my face, her expression shaded with perplexity.  Her face was gray because the sunset was fading out of the sky.  It was no fault of hers that she held me.  She had asked me to go from her, and again in the night time and with tears she had asked me to go.

“At last it was the sense of her that roused me from my mood.  I turned upon her suddenly and challenged her to race down the mountain slopes.  ‘No,’ she said, as if I had jarred with her gravity, but I was resolved to end that gravity, and make her run—­no one can be very gray and sad who is out of breath—­and when she stumbled I ran with my hand beneath her arm.  We ran down past a couple of men, who turned back staring in astonishment at my behaviour—­they must have recognised my face.  And half way down the slope came a tumult in the air, clang-clank, clang-clank, and we stopped, and presently over the hill-crest those war things came flying one behind the other.”

The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description.

“What were they like?” I asked.

“They had never fought,” he said.  “They were just like our ironclads are nowadays; they had never fought.  No one knew what they might do, with excited men inside them; few even cared to speculate.  They were great driving things shaped like spear-heads without a shaft, with a propeller in the place of the shaft.”

“Steel?”

“Not steel.”

“Aluminum?”

“No, no, nothing of that sort.  An alloy that was very common—­as common as brass, for example.  It was called—­let me see—­” He squeezed his forehead with the fingers of one hand.  “I am forgetting everything,” he said.

“And they carried guns?”

“Little guns, firing high explosive shells.  They fired the guns backwards, out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with the beak.  That was the theory, you know, but they had never been fought.  No one could tell exactly what was going to happen.  And meanwhile I suppose it was very fine to go whirling through the air like a flight of young swallows, swift and easy.  I guess the captains tried not to think too clearly what the real thing would be like.  And these flying