CHRISTOPHER'S DAY

"I judge more than I used to--but it seems to me that I have
earned the right. One can't judge till one is forty; before
that we are too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition too
ignorant."

HENRY JAMES.

I

The War had the City in its grip. There was now, during these early
weeks of November, no other thought, no other anxiety, no other
interest. The shock of its reality came most severely upon those whose
lives had been most unreal. Here, in the midst of their dining and their
dancing, was the sure fact that many whom they knew and with whom they
had been in the habit of playing might now, at any moment, find death--

Here was a reality against which there was no argument, and against the
harshness of it music screamed and food was uninteresting.

During that first month of that war, so new a thing was the horrid
grimness of it, that hysteria was abroad, life was twopence coloured.
For everyone now it was the question--"What might they do?"

Something to help, something to ease that biting truth--"Your life has
been the most utterly useless business--no purpose, no strength, no
unselfishness from first to last--what now?"

Christopher's life had not been useless and he knew it. The reality of
it had never been in doubt and death--the haphazard surprise of it and
the pathos and melodrama and sometimes drab monotony of it--had been his
companion for many years.

Christopher, although he had been a hard worker from his childhood, had
always taken life lightly. He loved the gifts of this world--food and
amusement and exercise and pleasant company. He loved, also, certain
people whose lives were of immense concern to him. He also believed in a
quite traditional God about Whom he had never argued, but Whose definite
particular existence was as certain to him as his own.

He had faults that he tried to cure--his temper--his pleasure in food
and wine.

He had three great motives in his life--His love of God, his love of his
friends and his love of his work. He hated hypocrites, mean persons,
cruel persons, anyone who showed cowardice or deceit or arrogance. He
was dogmatic and therefore disliked anyone else to be so. He was humble
about his work, but not humble about his position in the world, which he
thought, quite frankly, a very good one.

His interest in his especial friends was compounded of his love for them
and also of his curiosity about them, and he