“Oh!” he murmured; and he wondered if the divided feeling she had from the first roused in him had been this hatred, not perhaps of her, but of her unvarying acquiescence, her untroubled inadequacy.
“They interested me very much,” she said, feeling, no doubt, that, whatever he was, he was not pleased. “They made me see, I mean, all the things you have been through.”
“Sad things, you call them. You know, I rather feel as if I’d heard you call hell sad.”
She looked up at him quickly, and it was now she who was taken aback and, as she had been the other day, at a loss. And, as on the other day, she found the same answer, though she offered it deprecatingly, feeling his displeasure. “But hell doesn’t exist.”
“Don’t you think anything horrible exists?”
They turned at the end of the meadow. It seemed to him, although he felt as if he hated her, that they were suddenly intimate in their antagonism. He would force that antagonism, and its intimacy, upon her—to its last implication.
“Horrible? Oh, yes, yes!” she said, startled, and that was, he reflected grimly, to the good. “But it would have to be irretrievable, wouldn’t it, to be hell?” she urged.
“Do you suggest that it’s not irretrievable? You own it’s horrible. Irretrievably horrible, I call it. And that’s what I call hell. Yet all that you can find to say of my poems is that they are sad.”
She hesitated, feeling her way, hearing in the recurrent word how it had rankled. “I meant sad, I think, because of you; because you had suffered so much.”
“You seem always to imply that one might not have suffered!” And thrusting aside her quickly murmured, “Oh, no, no!” he went on: “I can’t understand your attitude of mind. Do you realize at all, I sometimes wonder, what it has all meant, this nightmare we are living in—we, that is, to whom it came? Can you imagine what it was to me to see boys, dead boys, buried stealthily, at night, under fire? Boys so mangled, so disfigured—you read that poem, 'Half a Corpse'?—that their mothers wouldn’t have known them; featureless, dismembered boys, heaped one upon the other in the mud. Has your mind ever dwelt upon the community of corruption in which they lie, as their mothers' minds must dwell? I do not understand you. I do not understand how you can dare to call such things sad.”