“Damned old mist—damned lucky old Irishman—Damnation.” He felt a dim wonder that he was to know death but his thoughts turned as ever to England, and three faces came in sequence before him. Clara’s, Dick’s and Eleanor’s. It was all such a mess. He’d like to have gone back and finished that conversation. It had stopped at Rochester—he had stopped living in the station at Rochester. How queer to have stopped there—Rochester had no significance. Wasn’t there a play where a man was born in a station, or a handbag in a station, and he’d stopped living at— what did the Irishman say about cloaks, Eleanor said something about cloaks; too, he couldn’t see any cloaks, didn’t feel sentimental—only cold and dim and mixed up. He didn’t know about God— God was a good thing for curates—then there was the Y. M. C. A; God—and he always wore short sleeves, and bumpy Oxfords—but that wasn’t God—that was just the man who talked about God to soldiers. And then there was O’Flaherty’s God. He felt as if he knew him, but then he’d never called him God—he was fear and love, and it wasn’t dignified to fear God—or even to love him except in a calm respectable way. There were so many God’s it seemed—he had thought that Christianity was monotheistic, and it seemed pagan to have so many Gods.
Well, he’d find out the whole muddled business in about three minutes, and a lot of good it’d do anybody else left in the muddle.
Damned muddle—everything a muddle, everybody offside, and the referee gotten rid of—everybody trying to say that if the referee were there he’d have been on their side. He was going to go and find that old referee—find him—get hold of him, get a good hold—cling to him—cling to him—ask him—
Published in The Nassau Literary Magazine magazine (June 1917).
