“Yes. I’m lucky. I always was lucky. Give the lie to the stupid small gods at the mere price of being temporarily submerged in—”
“There were tears,” I said. “She sat flat on the earth to weep them.”
“Ay; tears,” he said. “The flowing of all men’s tears under the sky. Horror and scorn and hate and fear and indignation, and the world seething away to sluttishness while you look on.”
“No; she sat flat in a green afternoon and wept for the symbol of your soul.”
“Not for the symbol, but because the empire saved it, hoarded it. She wept for wisdom.”
“But there were tears. . . . And you’ll see to it? You’ll not go away?”
“Ay,” George said; “tears.”
In the hospital it was better. It was a long room full of constant movement, and I didn’t have to be afraid all the time that they would find him and send him away, though now and then it did happen — a sister or an orderly coming into the middle of our talk, with ubiquitous hands and cheerful aseptic voices: “Now, now. He’s not going. Yes, yes; he’ll come back. Lie still, now.”
So I would have to lie there, surrounding, enclosing that gaping sensation below my thigh where the nerve- and muscle-ends twitched and jerked, until he returned.
“Can’t you find it?” I said. “Have you looked good?”
“Yes. I’ve looked everywhere. I went back out there and looked, and I looked here. It must be all right. They must have killed it.”
“But they didn’t. I told you they were going to forget it.”
“How do you know they forgot it?”
“I know. I can feel it. It jeers at me. It’s not dead.”
“But if it just jeers at you.”
“I know. But that won’t do. Don’t you see that won’t do?”
“All right. I’ll look again.”
“You must. You must find it. I don’t like this.”
So he looked again. He came back and sat down and he looked at me. His eyes were bright and intent.
“It’s nothing to feel bad about,” I said. “You’ll find it some day. It’s all right; just a leg. It hasn’t even another leg to walk with.” Still he didn’t say anything, just looking at me. “Where are you living now?”
“Up there,” he said.
I looked at him for a while. “Oh,” I said. “At Oxford?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” I said. . . . “Why didn’t you go home?”
“I don’t know.”
He still looked at me. “Is it nice there now? It must be. Are there still punts on the river? Do they still sing in the punts like they did that summer, the men and girls, I mean?” He looked at me, wide, intent, a little soberly.
“You left me last night,” he said.
“Did I?”
“You jumped into the skiff and pulled away. So I came back here.”
“Did I? Where was I going?”
“I don’t know. You hurried away, up-river. You could have told me, if you wanted to be alone. You didn’t need to run.”
“I shan’t again.” We looked at one another. We spoke quietly now. “So you must find it now.”
“Yes. Can you tell what it is doing?”
“I don’t know. That’s it.”
“Does it feel like it’s doing something you don’t want it to?”
“I don’t know. So you find it. You find it quick. Find it and fix it so it can get dead.”
But he couldn’t find it. We talked about it quietly, between silences, watching one another. “Can’t you tell anything about where it is?” he said. I was sitting up now, practicing accustoming myself to the wood-and-leather one. The gap was still there, but we had now established a sort of sullen armistice. “Maybe that’s what it was waiting for,” he said. “Maybe now . . .”
“Maybe so. I hope so. But they shouldn’t have forgot to — Have I run away any more since that night?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” He was watching me with his bright, intent, fading eyes. “George,” I said. “Wait, George!” But he was gone.
I didn’t see him again for a long time. I was at the Observers’ School — it doesn’t require two legs to operate a machine gun and a wireless key and to orient maps from the gunner’s piano stool of an R.E. or an F.E. — then, and I had almost finished the course.
So my days were pretty well filled, what with work and with that certitude of the young which so arbitrarily distinguishes between verities and illusions, establishing with such assurance that line between truth and delirium which sages knit their brows over.
And my nights were filled too, with the nerve- and muscle-ends chafed now by an immediate cause: the wood-and-leather leg. But the gap was still there, and sometimes at night, isolated by invisibility, it would become filled with the immensity of darkness and silence despite me. Then, on the poised brink of sleep, I would believe that he had found it at last and seen that it was dead, and that some day he would return and tell me about it. Then I had the dream.
Suddenly I knew that I was about to come upon it. I could feel in the darkness the dark walls of the corridor and the invisible corner, and I knew that it was just around the corner. I could smell a rank, animal odor. It was an odor which I had never smelled before, but I knew it at once, blown suddenly down the corridor from the old fetid caves where experience began.
I felt dread and disgust and determination, as when you sense suddenly a snake beside a garden path. And then I was awake, rigid, sweating; the darkness flowed with a long rushing sigh. I lay with the fading odor in my nostrils while my sweat cooled, staring up into the darkness, not daring to close my eyes. I lay on my back, curled about the gaping hole like a doughnut, while the odor faded. At last it was gone, and George was looking at me.
“What is it, Davy?” he said. “Can’t you say what it is?”
“It’s nothing.” I could taste sweat on my lips. “It isn’t anything. I won’t again. I swear I shan’t any more.”
He was looking at me. “You said you had to come back to town. And then I saw you on the river. You saw me and hid, Davy. Pulled up under the bank, in the shadow. There was a girl with you.” He watched me, his eyes bright and grave.
“Was there a moon?” I said.
“Yes. There was a moon.”
“Oh God, oh God,” I said. “I won’t again, George! You must find it. You must!”
“Ah, Davy,” he said. His face began to fade.
“I won’t! I won’t again!” I said. “George! George!”
A match flared; a face sprang out of the darkness above me. “Wake up,” it said. I lay staring at it, sweating. The match burned down, the face fell back into darkness, from which the voice came bodiless: “All right now?”
“Yes, thanks. Dreaming. Sorry I waked you.”
For the next few nights I didn’t dare let go into sleep again. But I was young, my body was getting strong again and I was out of doors all day; one night sleep overtook me unawares, and I waked next morning to find that I had eluded it, whatever it was.
I found a sort of peace. The days passed; I had learned the guns and the wireless and the maps, and most of all, to not observe what should not be observed. My thigh was almost reconciled to the new member, and, freed now of the outcast’s doings, I could give all my time to seeking George. But I did not find him; somewhere in the mazy corridor where the mother of dreams dwells I had lost them both.
So I did not remark him at first even when he stood beside me in the corridor just beyond the corner of which It waited. The sulphur reek was all about me; I felt horror and dread and something unspeakable: delight. I believe I felt what women in labor feel. And then George was there, looking steadily down at me. He had always sat beside my head, so we could talk, but now he stood beyond the foot of the bed, looking down at me and I knew that this was farewell.
“Don’t go, George!” I said. “I shan’t again. I shan’t any more, George!” But his steady, grave gaze faded slowly, implacable, sorrowful, but without reproach. “Go, then!” I said. My teeth felt dry against my lip like sandpaper. “Go, then!”
And that was the last of it. He never came back, nor the dream. I knew it would not, as a sick man who wakes with his body spent and peaceful and weak knows that the illness will not return. I knew it was gone; I knew that when I realized that I thought of it only with pity. Poor devil, I would think. Poor devil.
But it took George with it. Sometimes, when dark and isolation had robbed me of myself, I would think that perhaps in killing it he had lost his own life: the dead dying in order to slay the dead.
I sought him now and then in the corridors of sleep, but without success; I spent a week with his people in Devon, in a rambling house where his crooked ugly face and his round ruddy head and his belief that Marlowe was a better lyric poet than Shakespeare and Thomas Campion than either, and that breath was not a bauble given a man for his own pleasuring, eluded me behind every stick and stone. But I never
