Chapter 2 - Page 2

make a nice mess for the Bosnians and Servians because they have been
rather troublesome about wanting to be united into one country instead
of two, and called Greater Serbia. That seems a silly sort of reason for
throwing bombs and killing people. But foreigners have a way of thinking
bombs settle everything. Harriet brought out her old school geography
and we looked up Sarajevo on the map of Austria-Hungary. It was hard to
find because the print was small and it was spelt Saraievo--without any
j in it. It was just on the line between Bosnia and Servia and the
geography said it was the chief city in Bosnia. Harriet said it was a
queer thing how these places on maps never seemed like real places when
you looked them up and just read their names and yet probably the people
in them were as real to themselves as we were, and there were streets in
them as real as Lupton Street where we were sitting, finding them on the
map on the sitting-room table. I said that bombs were pretty real things
and the sound of this one when it exploded seemed to have reached a long
way to judge from the newspapers and the talk in London. Harriet said my
putting it like that gave her a queer feeling--almost as if she had
heard it and it had made her jump. Somehow it seemed something like it
to me. At any rate we sat still a minute or two, thinking it over. Then
Harriet got up and went into the kitchen and made some nice toasted
cheese for our supper before we went to bed."

Men of the James Simpson type were among the many who daily passed
Coombe House on their way to and from their office work. Some of them no
doubt caught sight of Lord Coombe himself as he walked or drove through
the entrance gates. Their knowledge of him was founded upon rumoured
stories, repeated rather privately among themselves. He was a great
swell and there weren't many shady things he hadn't done and didn't know
the ins and outs of, but his remoteness from their own lives rendered
these accepted legends scarcely prejudicial. The perfection of his
clothes, and his unusual preservation of physical condition and good
looks, also his habit of the so-called "week-end" continental journeys,
were the points chiefly recalled by the incidental mention of his name.

If James Simpson, on his way home to Lupton Street with his friend
Crawshaw, chanced to see his lordship's car standing before his door a
few days after the bomb throwing in Sarajevo, he might incidentally have
referred to him somewhat in this wise:--

"As we passed by Coombe House the Marquis of Coombe came out and got
into his car. There were smart leather valises and travelling things in
it and a rug or so, as if he was going on some journey. He is a fine
looking man for one