Guy looked up quickly. «Don’t worry about his old age,» he said in a strange harsh voice, very different from the gentle, elaborately modulated tone in which he generally spoke. «He won’t have an old age. His chances against surviving are about fourteen to three if the war goes on another year.»
«Come,» said Roger, «don’t let’s be pessimistic.»
«But I’m not. I assure you, I’m giving you a most rosy view of George’s chance of reaching old age.»
It was felt that Guy’s remarks had been in poor taste. There was a silence; eyes floated vaguely and uneasily, trying not to encounter one another. Roger cracked a nut loudly. When he had sufficiently relished the situation, Jacobsen changed the subject by remarking:
«That was a fine bit of work by our destroyers this morning, wasn’t it?»
«It did one good to read about it,» said Mr. Petherton. «Quite the Nelson touch.»
Roger raised his glass. «Nelson!» he said, and emptied it at a gulp. «What a man! I am trying to persuade the Headmaster to make Trafalgar Day a holiday. It is the best way of reminding boys of things of that sort.»
«A curiously untypical Englishman to be a national hero, isn’t he?» said Jacobsen. «So emotional and lacking in Britannic phlegm.»
The Reverend Roger looked grave. «There’s one thing I’ve never been able to understand about Nelson, and that is, how a man who was so much the soul of honour and of patriotism could have been—er—immoral with Lady Hamilton, I know people say that it was the custom of the age, that these things meant nothing then, and so forth; but all the same, I repeat, I cannot understand how a man who was so intensely a patriotic Englishman could have done such a thing.»
«I fail to see what patriotism has got to do with it,» said Guy.
Roger fixed him with his most pedagogic look and said slowly and gravely, «Then I am sorry for you. I shouldn’t have thought it was necessary to tell an Englishman that purity of morals is a national tradition: you especially, a public-school man.»
«Let us go and have a hundred up at billiards,» said Mr. Petherton. «Roger, will you come? And you, George, and Guy? «
«I’m so incredibly bad,» Guy insisted, «I’d really rather not.»
«So am I,» said Jacobsen.
«Then, Marjorie, you must make the fourth.»
The billiard players trooped out; Guy and Jacobsen were left alone, brooding over the wreckage of dinner. There was a long silence. The two men sat smoking, Guy sitting in a sagging, crumpled attitude, like a half-empty sack abandoned on a chair, Jacobsen very upright and serene.
«Do you find you can suffer fools gladly?» asked Guy abruptly.
«Perfectly gladly.»
«I wish I could. The Reverend Roger has a tendency to make my blood boil.»
«But such a good soul,» Jacobsen insisted.
«I dare say, but a monster all the same.»
«You should take him more calmly. I make a point of never letting myself be moved by external things. I stick to my writing and thinking. Truth is beauty, beauty is truth, and so forth: after all, they’re the only things of solid value.» Jacobsen looked at the young man with a smile as he said these words. There is no doubt, he said to himself, that that boy ought to have gone into business; what a mistake this higher education is, to be sure.
«Of course, they’re the only things,» Guy burst out passionately. «You can afford to say so because you had the luck to be born twenty years before I was, and with five thousand miles of good deep water between you and Europe. Here am I, called upon to devote my life, in a very different way from which you devote yours to truth and beauty—to devote my life to—well, what? Pm not quite sure, but I preserve a touching faith that it is good. And you tell me to ignore external circumstances. Come and live in Flanders a little and try . . .» He launched forth into a tirade about agony and death and blood and putrefaction.
«What is one to do?» he concluded despairingly. «What the devil is right? I had meant to spend my life writing and thinking, trying to create something beautiful or discover something true. But oughtn’t one, after all, if one survives, to give up everything else and try to make this hideous den of a world a little more habitable? «
«I think you can take it that a world which has let itself be dragooned into this criminal folly is pretty hopeless. Follow your inclinations; or, better, go into a bank and make a lot of money.»
Guy burst out laughing, rather too loudly. «Admirable, admirable!» he said. «To return to our old topic of fools: frankly, Jacobsen, I cannot imagine why you should elect to pass your time with my dear old guardian. He’s a charming old man, but one must admit» He waved his hand.
«One must live somewhere,» said Jacobsen. «I find your guardian a most interesting man to be with. — Oh, do look at that dog! ‘: On the hearth-rug Marjorie’s little Pekingese, Confucius, was preparing to lie down and go to sleep. He went assiduously through the solemn farce of scratching the floor, under the impression, no doubt, that he was making a comfortable nest to lie in. He turned round and round, scratching earnestly and methodically. Then he lay down, curled himself up in a ball, and was asleep in the twinkling of an eye.
«Isn’t that too wonderfully human!» exclaimed Jacobsen delightedly. Guy thought he could see now why Jacobsen enjoyed living with Mr. Petherton. The old man was so wonderfully human.
Later in the evening, when the billiards was over and Mr. Petherton had duly commented on the anachronism of introducing the game into Anthony and Cleopatra, Guy and Marjorie went for a stroll in the garden. The moon had risen above the trees and lit up the front of the house with its bright pale light that could not wake the sleeping colours of the world.
«Moonlight is the proper architectural light,» said Guy, as they stood looking at the house. The white light and the hard black shadows brought out all the elegance of its Georgian symmetry.
«Look, here’s the ghost of a rose.» Marjorie touched a big cool flower, which one guessed rather than saw to be red, a faint equivocal lunar crimson. «And, oh, smell the tobacco-plant flowers. Aren’t they delicious! «
«I always think there’s something very mysterious about perfume drifting through the dark like this. It seems to come from some perfectly different immaterial world, peopled by unembodied sensations, phantom passions. Think of the spiritual effect of incense in a dark church. One isn’t surprised that people have believed in the existence of the soul.»
They walked on in silence. Sometimes, accidentally, his hand would brush against hers in the movement of their march. Guy felt an intolerable emotion of expectancy, akin to fear. It made him feel almost physically sick.
«Do you remember,» he said abruptly, «that summer holiday our families spent together in Wales? It must have been nineteen four or five. I was ten and you were eight or thereabouts.»
«Of course I remember,» cried Marjorie. «Everything. There was that funny little toy railway from the slate quarries.»
«And do you remember our goldmine? All those tons of yellow ironstone we collected and hoarded in a cave, fully believing they were nuggets. How incredibly remote it seems! «
«And you had a wonderful process by which you tested whether the stuff was real gold or not. It all passed triumphantly as genuine, I remember! «
«Having that secret together first made us friends, I believe.»
«I dare say,» said Marjorie. «Fourteen years ago—what a time! And you began educating me even then: all that stuff you told me about gold-mining, for instance.»
«Fourteen years,» Guy repeated reflectively, «and I shall be going out again to-morrow . . .»
«Don’t speak about it. I am so miserable when you’re away.» She genuinely forgot what a delightful summer she had had, except for the shortage of tennis.
«We must make this the happiest hour of our lives. Perhaps it may be the last we shall be together.» Guy looked up at the moon, and he perceived, with a sudden start, that it was a sphere islanded in an endless night, not a flat disk stuck on a wall not so very far away. It filled him with an infinite dreariness; he felt too insignificant to live at all.
«Guy, you mustn’t talk like that,» said Marjorie appealingly.
«We’ve got twelve hours,» said Guy in a meditative voice, «but that’s only clockwork time. You can give an hour the quality of everlastingness, and spend years which are as though they had never been. We get our immortality here and now; it’s a question of quality, not of quantity. I don’t look forward to golden harps or anything of that sort. I know that when I am dead, I shall be dead; there isn’t any afterwards. If I’m killed, my immortality will be in your memory. Perhaps, too, somebody will read the things I’ve written, and in his mind I shall survive, feebly and partially. But in your mind I shall survive intact and whole.»
«But I’m sure we shall go on living after death. It can’t be the end.» Marjorie was conscious that she had heard those words before. Where? Oh yes, it was earnest Evangeline who had spoken them at the school debating society.
«I wouldn’t count on it,» Guy
