Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/263

 we are told. Such a war-time that let loose the foulest feelings of a mob, particularly of "gentlemen," to torture any single, independent man as a mob always tortures the isolated and independent.

In despair, Somers thought he would go to America. He had passports, he was Rejected. They had no use for him, and he had no use for them. So he posted his passports to the Foreign Office, for the military permit to depart.

It was January, and there was a thin film of half-melted snow, like silver, on the fields and the path. A white, static, arrested morning, away there in the west of Cornwall, with the moors looking primeval, and the huge granite boulders bulging out of the earth like presences. So easy to realise men worshipping stones. It is not the stone. It is the mystery of the powerful, pre-human earth, showing its might. And all, this morning, static, arrested in a cold, milky whiteness, like death, the west lost in the sea.

A man culminates in intense moments. This was one of Somers' white, deathlike moments, as he walked home from the tiny post-office in the hamlet, on the wintry morning, after he had posted his passports asking for visas to go to New York. It was like walking in death: a strange, arrested land of death. Never had he known that feeling before: as if he were a ghost in the after-death, walking a strange, pale, static, cold world. It almost frightened him. "Have I done wrong?" he asked himself. "Am I wrong, to leave my country and go to America?"

It was then as if he had left his country: and that was like death, a still, static, corporate death. America was the death of his own country in him, he realised that.

But he need not have bothered. The Foreign Office kept his passports, and did not so much as answer him. He waited in vain.

Spring came—-and one morning the news that Asquith was out of the government, that Lloyd George was in. And this was another of Somers' crises. He felt he must go away from the house, away from everywhere. And as he walked, clear as a voice out of the moors, came a voice saying: "It is the end of England. It is the end