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But as yet there was no war, nor any appearance that sensible people interpreted as a sign of war at the time of Morrie's return. It stood alone, as other past returns, the return from Bombay, the return from Canada, the return from Cape Colony, had stood, in its sheer awfulness. To Frances it represented the extremity of disaster. They might have known what was coming by Grannie's behaviour.
They came back at nine in the evening and found Dorothy, Michael and Nicholas sitting up for them. Michael and Nicky were excited, but Dorothy looked grown-up and important. "Uncle Morrie's come," they said. "Dorothy saw him first " "Nicky let him in " "He hadn't got a hat on." "We kept him in the schoolroom till Nanna could come and put him to bed."
That was the procedure they invariably adopted. "I wonder," Grannie said, "what he can be coming back for!" Each time she affected astonishment and incredulity, as if Morrie's coming back were, not a recurrence that crushed you with its flatness and staleness, but a thing that must interest Louie because of its utter un-likeliness. "I wonder," said Louie, "why he hasn't come before.
And in the grown-up Morrie's place, under the shells of Ladysmith, she saw Nicky. For Nicky had declared his intention of going into the Army. "And I'm thinking of Morrie," Dorothy said. "I don't want him to miss it." Frances and Anthony had hung out flags for Mafeking; Dorothy and Nicky, mounted on bicycles, had been careering through the High Street with flags flying from their handlebars.
And while other important and outstanding things, and things that he really wanted to remember, disappeared in the poisonous flood let loose in Morrie's memory, he never for one moment lost sight of the fact that it was he and not Anthony, his brother-in-law, who had enlisted and was wounded. He was furious with his mother and sisters for not realizing the war.
Before the war Morrie's great drinking came seldom, by fits and bursts and splendid unlasting uprushes; after the war the two states tended to approach till they merged in one continual sickly soaking.
They must learn," Anthony said, "to realize facts." They realized them rather sooner than he had expected. Nobody but Louie had allowed for the possibility of Morrie's sailing by the same steamer as his letter; and Louie had argued that, if he had done so, he was bound either to have arrived before the letter or to have sent a wire.
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