Читать книгу Time and the Hour - Howard Spring - Страница 21

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Emily put on a fur coat and a fur hat and fur boots. She walked to her front gate—a big gate through which a carriage could come. But they didn’t use a carriage: Ferdinand had bought a motor-car. Everybody was doing that now, except old stagers like Gustav who stuck to their carriages and pairs. Everything was changing, and Ferdinand, whose wisdom she never doubted, said that the changes seen now were nothing to those that would soon come. “If there is a war, everything will be speeded up enormously.”

“A war!” she cried with horror. “What should there be a war about?”

“Oh, anything. A war comes when it is wanted. What excuse is made is a small point.”

“But who wants war?”

He smiled at her; he did not like the harsh world he knew to touch her. “How would you like to change your name?” he asked with apparent irrelevance.

She would hate to change her name. It had taken some getting used to. Signing it had been a struggle at first, but now she had tamed it and was proud of it.

“You see, I am a captain—a medical officer of the British Army. I know we Territorials are laughed at—Saturday afternoon soldiers. I don’t like being a British officer with quite such a German name.”

“But, darling, Bradford is full of people with German names, and they’re as English as I am.”

He looked at her with speculation. “I wonder. But I, at all events, am English. My family for three generations, and I myself, owe everything to this country. I have been thinking of having my name changed to Fieldhouse.”

He left it at that, and it didn’t make much impression on Emily’s mind. Ferdinand was an old sobersides who tended to worry about the oddest things. For herself, some immediate exhilaration could outweigh any amount of troubled thought, and it was exhilarating to-night to hear these joyous shouts in the road, to feel the sharp tingle of the frost, and to see the children shooting down the grey glissade under the shine of the stars. She watched them, leaning over her gate, and thinking: “For two pins I’d join them. But I’m afraid that would be a bit too much even for Ferdinand.”