Page:When It Was Dark.djvu/163

Rh Most of the women around Mrs. Buscall drank gin. The doings of Cyril Hands were sufficient tonic for her.

Spence glanced at the bulky packet with its Turkish stamps and peculiar aroma — which the London fog had not yet killed — of ships and alien suns. Hands was a good correspondent. Sometimes he sent general articles on the work he was doing, not too technical, and Ommaney, the editor of Spence's paper, used and paid well for them.

But on this morning Spence did not feel inclined to open the packet. It could wait. He was not in the humour for it now. It would be too tantalising to read of those deep skies like a hard, hollow turquoise, of the flaming white sun, the white mosques and minarets throwing purple shadows round the cypress and olive.

"Neque enim ignari sumus," he muttered to himself, recalling the swing and freedom of his own travels, the vivid, picturesque life where, at great moments, he had been one of the eyes of England, flashing electric words to tell his countrymen of what lay before him.

And now, after the chill of his bath and the rasping torture of shaving in winter, he must light all the gas-jets as he sat down to breakfast in his sitting-room!

He opened the Wire and glanced at his own work of the night before. How lifeless it seemed to him!

"Many years ago Bagehot wrote that 'Parliament expresses the nation's opinions in words well, when it happens that words, not laws, are wanted. On foreign matters, where we cannot legislate, whatever the English nation thinks, or thinks it thinks, as to the critical events of the world, whether in Denmark, in Italy or America, and no matter whether it thinks wisely or unwisely, that same something, wise or unwise, will be thoroughly well said in Parliament.'