“Ay; tears. Corinthia will at least cherish a tenderness for me from now on.”
“Yes; but if you’d only not got out at all. Or having not got in at all. Falling into that filthy lock just to complete a gesture. I think—”
“Do not think, my good David. When I had the choice of holding on to the skiff and being haled safely and meekly away, or of giving the lie to the stupid small gods at the small price of being temporarily submerged in this—” he let go one oar and dipped his hand in the water, then he flung it outward in dripping, burlesque magniloquence. “O Thames!” he said. “Thou mighty sewer of an empire!”
“Steer the boat,” I said. “I lived in America long enough to have learned something of England’s pride.”
“And so you consider a bath in this filthy old sewer that has flushed this land since long before He who made it had any need to invent God . . . a rock about which man and all his bawling clamor seethes away to sluttishness. . . .”
We were twenty-one then; we talked like that, tramping about that peaceful land where in green petrification the old splendid bloody deeds, the spirits of the blundering courageous men, slumbered in every stone and tree.
For that was 1914, and in the parks bands played Valse Septembre, and girls and young men drifted in punts on the moonlit river and sang Mister Moon and There’s a Bit of Heaven, and George and I sat in a window in Christ Church while the curtains whispered in the twilight, and talked of courage and honor and Napier and love and Ben Jonson and death.
The next year was 1915, and the bands played God Save the King, and the rest of the young men — and some not so young — sang Mademoiselle of Armentieres in the mud, and George was dead.
He had gone out in October, a subaltern in the regiment of which his people were hereditary colonels. Ten months later I saw him sitting with an orderly behind a ruined chimney on the edge of Givenchy. He had a telephone strapped to his ears and he was eating something which he waved at me as we ran past and ducked into the cellar which we sought.
II
I told him to wait until they got done giving me the ether; there were so many of them moving back and forth that I was afraid someone would brush against him and find him there. “And then you’ll have to go back,” I said.
“I’ll be careful,” George said.
“Because you’ll have to do something for me,” I said. “You’ll have to.”
“All right. I will. What is it?”
“Wait until they go away, then I can tell you. You’ll have to do it, because I can’t. Promise you will.”
“All right. I promise.” So we waited until they got done and had moved down to my leg. Then George came nearer. “What is it?” he said.
“It’s my leg,” I said. “I want you to be sure it’s dead. They may cut it off in a hurry and forget about it.”
“All right. I’ll see about it.”
“I couldn’t have that, you know. That wouldn’t do at all. They might bury it and it couldn’t lie quiet. And then it would be lost and we couldn’t find it to do anything.”
“All right. I’ll watch.” He looked at me. “Only I don’t have to go back.”
“You don’t? You don’t have to go back at all?”
“I’m out of it. You aren’t out of it yet. You’ll have to go back.”
“I’m not?” I said. . . . “Then it will be harder to find it than ever. So you see about it. . . . And you don’t have to go back. You’re lucky, aren’t you?”
“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
