Section 8
That day of vast anticipations drew out into the afternoon. It was a day—obsessed. It was the precursor of a relentless series of doomed and fettered days. There was a sense of enormous occurrences going on just out of sound and sight—behind the mask of Essex peacefulness. From this there was no escape. It made all other interests fitful. Games of Badminton were begun and abruptly truncated by the arrival of the evening papers; conversations started upon any topic whatever returned to the war by the third and fourth remark….
After lunch Mr. Britling and Mr. Carmine went on talking. Nothing else was possible. They repeated things they had already said. They went into things more thoroughly. They sat still for a time, and then suddenly broke out with some new consideration….
It had been their custom to play skat with Herr Heinrich, who had shown them the game very explicitly and thoroughly. But there was no longer any Herr Heinrich—and somehow German games were already out of fashion. The two philosophers admitted that they had already considered skat to be complicated without subtlety, and that its chief delight for them had been the pink earnestness of Herr Heinrich, his inability to grasp their complete but tacit comprehension of its innocent strategy, and his invariable ill–success to bring off the coups that flashed before his imagination.
He would survey the destructive counter–stroke with unconcealed surprise. He would verify his first impression by craning towards it and adjusting his glasses on his nose. He had a characteristic way of doing this with one stiff finger on either side of his sturdy nose.
"It is very fortunate for you that you have played that card," he would say, growing pinker and pinker with hasty cerebration. "Or else—yes"—a glance at his own cards—"it would have been altogether bad for you. I had taken only a very small risk…. Now I must—"
He would reconsider his hand.
"Zo!" he would say, dashing down a card….
Well, he had gone and skat had gone. A countless multitude of such links were snapping that day between hundreds of thousands of English and German homes.