"_Ach, du lieber Gott!_" he said, as though she had spoken to him. "That was my regiment—the 115th. Perhaps I shall be called in—I also have been a soldier."
She looked at him and she understood. He, too, was _Soldat_, he too could carry his gun and take his place with the best, he too had been taught to bear his share worthily in the highest of all human callings—one saw the pride of it in his face. And he was not alone. He was typical of all, of a whole nation in arms.
A sort of panic seized her. She turned and fled, thrusting her way through the thinning crowd with the strength of despair. Only one thought possessed her—to get away, to escape from a force which she had learnt to fear. Panting, disordered, scarcely knowing what she did or meant to do, she reached her home at last. Silence greeted her—silence and an absolute darkness. She entered the drawing-room and turned on the light. No one. Her husband’s door, locked when she had gone out, stood wide open.
"Wolff!" she called. Her voice shook. She called again, and then her brother’s name, but the silence remained unbroken. She looked about her, and her eyes chanced to rest an instant on her table; she saw that a letter was lying on the blotting-case, which had not been there before. She ran and picked it up. It was addressed to her in Miles’s handwriting.
"Johann has just run in to look for Wolff," he scrawled. "He says war is declared, and I’m off. There is a train leaving at eight, and I have no time to lose. Sorry I can’t say good-bye, old girl. I wish you could come, but I suppose you can’t. We’ll come and fetch you though, never fear!"
A cry broke from Nora’s trembling lips. He had gone—he had left her. He had the right to go! And she was alone. She looked at the clock ticking peacefully on the mantelpiece. She had no clear plan, but she saw that it was half-past seven, and she reckoned that the Potsdamer Bahnhof could not be more than twenty minutes away. If she could get a cab there would be time. For what? She did not know. She was still panic-stricken. The silence oppressed her with a greater horror than the roaring of the crowd. The little room, with its cheap, ugly ornaments, had become absolutely unfamiliar to her. She felt that it was impossible she could ever have lived here, she felt that she had wandered into a stranger’s house, and that he might come back any minute and find her. She ran to the door. No bond, no link of memory or past happiness held her back. Not even the grey _Litewka_ hanging in the hall, with its silent reminder, could change the headlong course of her resolution. She saw it, she even stopped to look at it. It spoke to her of a man she had known long ago, who had gone out of her life and was no more than the memory of a dream. Because it had been a beautiful dream she bent and kissed the empty sleeve, but she did not hesitate, and her eyes were tearless. Stronger than that memory was the craving for home and the fear of the stranger who would return and find her. Thus she fled, and the door of the little flat closed with a melancholy clang. It was empty now—when the stranger came there would be no one there to trouble his peace. She felt neither remorse nor pity. All that had been love for her husband had turned to bitterness. He had come between her and those dear to her; he had insulted her and her whole nation; he had trampled on her pride; he had deserted her, leaving her to fight her battle alone, whilst he had followed his ambition behind locked doors, which even she could not open. As she drove rapidly through the streets he stood before her mental vision, not as the lover or the husband, but as the man who had faced her on the preceding night, stern, resolute, pitiless, sweeping her from his path as he would have done a valueless toy. He had had no thought for her sufferings, he had not even tried to comfort her, but had gone to his room and—worked. And between this man of iron and routine and the immense implacable force which had revealed itself to her in the crowd, there was a resemblance, nay, an affinity of mind and purpose. Both threatened her home, her people, and her life. She hated both.