Mr and Mrs Hathaway were so moved with relief that neither said a word to the other. To have commented on this transformation would have been a disloyalty.

Digging went on through Tuesday and Wednesday. They were making a shelter now as well as trenches. Emil had organized the workers into competitive gangs. On Wednesday the news came that the Prime Minister was going to Munich, but no one slackened for that; and that evening Emil and Mr Cobb rigged up lighting and the younger men worked on most of the night. On Thursday morning a load of timber was found neatly stacked beside the shelter. On it was a piece of paper with the words: ‘Mr K. with compts. from an unknown friend.’189

Emil had flashed into such popularity that when young Jimmy Barnes inadvertently dropped a pick on his foot a shout of wrath and despair went up. The First Aid detachment hurried out with bandages and the stretcher. Emil caused himself to be conveyed in a wheelbarrow to where the children were filling sandbags and worked on with them. At sundown they wheeled him home, refusing to let anyone else handle their hero, and spilling him twice.

‘You must go straight to bed,’ said Mrs Hathaway.

‘I probably won’t sleep.’

‘You must. Really, you must. You are much too valuable to wear yourself out now. You must be kept in trim for when—’She stopped. The question jumped up in her mind: What would happen to Emil in a war—in a war which would make him an enemy alien?

‘For when the curtain goes up, eh?’ His high forehead was plastered with mud. The small mouth was open in a brilliant, breathless smile. ‘I go to bed, then. Thank you very much.’

Afterwards she went to his room and looked in. He was asleep. Hitherto she had seen only his waking countenance. Sleeping, his face was rigid and melancholy. The corners of the small mouth turned down, the arched eyebrows, doll-like by day, now gave him an expression of agonized bewilderment. She glanced round the room. His clothes, his brushes, his washing things. Nothing else. Not a photograph, not a book. It was a spare room, with a week-end visitor asleep in it.

Downstairs was Henry, checking off the names of those who had been measured for gas masks.190

‘This awful waiting,’ she said. ‘I never thought I’d hope for war. I don’t even know if I do. Henry, what is one to think?’

‘It will be the news in a minute,’ he answered, stretching out his hand to the wireless. She sat down, nerving herself to listen.

The morning papers carried the headlines: ‘Agreement Reached, Occupation to Begin To-morrow. Mr Chamberlain Flying Back’, and in smaller type, ‘Prague Agrees to Further Concessions.’ Like a nose-bleeding, a ghastly, warm trickle of relief began to move in her. She realized that for the last twenty-four hours she had been counting on this.

Mr Kirchner was still asleep, said Hannah. She was taking him up his breakfast. Mrs Hathaway put a newspaper on the tray. ‘Don’t wake him,’ she said.