Читать книгу The Oaken Heart онлайн

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It is a nice little train, with a high-pitched tootle and a fearsome tendency to rock like a boat in the high winds from over the saltings; but it is very useful indeed for freight too bulky for the Osborne family's buses, which are our main means of transport.

At the other end of the village, on the main Auburn-Flinthammock road, is the school. It is my honest opinion (and certainly speaking for myself) that most of us were so busy fighting to keep the school open that we completely missed the first rumblings of the war. That is the worst of a Cause. The more parochial and intimate it is the more absorbing it becomes. I notice M. Maurois, in his heart-rending What Happened to France, accuses the English of thinking so much of their little green lawns that they did not see the danger until too late. That is terribly true, except that it was not our lawns but our little evergreen liberties which engrossed us then as ever. To be really free takes a lot of time and trouble.

I think probably the first occasion that most of us in Auburn ever seriously considered the possibility of another European war in our time was one night when Mr. Vernon Bartlett came out with a sudden note of alarm in that chatty voice of his on the radio. The wireless is odd like that. It seems to do the same thing to a voice as an overbright light does to a face. Anything genuine leaps out at one. Anything false grates on one's nerves. I cannot remember the exact date of the talk, but it was when Germany left the League. The family was listening attentively because Charles Ulm was flying to Australia at the time, and he had been to see us, and so everyone was anxious to know if he was going to be all right. That broadcast on foreign affairs was the first of all the radio talks to turn our hearts over suddenly, although I don't honestly think it was fear of fighting or even dying which gave us that sudden chill inside. It was rather the first of the misgivings, the first hint that this new world which we were knocking together so fast, and wherein time and distance were so happily vanishing, might not produce the universal brotherhood after all, or at least not overnight. There was even a sneaking presentiment, I remember, that to know all might not be to forgive anything, and to live in proximity to the other nations might not be to live in harmony.