After that, he shut up the house at Market Saffron altogether, and came to London permanently to live mostly at the club.
For two or three weeks he was busy enough, but after that time started to lie heavy on his hands again.
And still he could get nothing to do in the war.
It was spring by then, and a most lovely spring it was.
After the hard whiter we had had, it was like opening a door.
Each day he went for a walk in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and watched the crocuses as they came out, and the daffodils.
The club life suited him.
He felt as he walked through the park during that marvellous spring that there was a great deal to be said for living in London, provided that you could get away from it from time to tune.
As the sun grew stronger, the urge came on him to get away from England altogether for a while.
And really, there didn't seem to be any great reason why he should remain in England.
The war in Finland was over, and on the western front there seemed to be complete stalemate.
Matters in France were quite normal, except that on certain days of the weeks you could only have certain kinds of food.
It was then that he began to think about the Jura.
The high alpine valleys were too high for him; he had been to Pontresina three years previously and had been very short of breath.
But the spring flowers in the French Jura were as beautiful as anything in Switzerland, and from the high ground up above Les Rousses you can see Mont Blanc.
He wanted passionately to get where he could see mountains.
'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,' he said, 'from whence cometh my help.'
That's how he felt about it.
He thought that if he went out there he would be just in time to see the flowers come thrusting through the snow; if he stayed on for a month or two he would come in for the fishing as the sun got wanner.
He looked forward very much to fishing in those mountain streams.
Very unspoilt they were, he said, and very fresh and quiet.
He wanted to see the spring, this year - to see as much of it as ever he could.
He wanted to see all that new life coming on, replacing what is past.
He wanted to soak himself in that.
He wanted to see the hawthorn coming out along the river-banks, and the first crocuses in the fields.
He wanted to see the new green of the rushes by the water's edge poking up through the dead stuff.
He wanted to feel the new warmth of the sun, and the new freshness of the air.
He wanted to savour all the spring there was this year - the whole of it.
He wanted that more than anything else in the world, because of what had happened.
That's why he went to France.
He had much less difficulty in getting out of the country' than he had expected.
He went to Cook's, and they told him how to set about it.
He had to get an exit permit, and that had to be done personally.
The man in the office asked him what he wanted to leave the country for.
Old Howard coughed at him.
'I can't stand the spring weather in England,' he said.
'I've been indoors most of the winter.
My doctors says I've got to get into a warmer climate.'
A complacent doctor had given him a certificate.
'I see,' said the official.
'You want to go down to the south of France?'
'Not right down to the south,' he said.
'I shall spend a few days in Dijon and go to the Jura as soon as the snow is off the ground.'
The man wrote out a permit for three months, on the grounds of health.
So that wasn't very difficult.
Then the old man spent a deliriously happy two days with Hardy's, the fishing tackle makers in Pall Mall.
He took it gently, half an hour in the morning and half an hour in the afternoon; in between he fingered and turned over his purchases, dreamed about fishing, and made up his mind what he would buy next...
He left London on the morning of April the 10th, the very morning that the news came through that Germany had invaded Denmark and Norway.
He read the news in his paper in the train on the way to Dover, and it left him cold.
A month previously he would have been frantic over it, jumping from wireless bulletin to newspaper and back to the wireless again.