“Please, please do,” she said. “Try to be gentle and to understand. I’ll go by what you say. So there it is: Do you believe in immortality, Bevis?”
There it was, indeed, and no wonder he had shrunk. If it had come to him as a test before the war, how easy it would have been, with a sincerity sad, for all its personal gain, to say, “I don’t know; I really don’t know what I believe, darling; but it doesn’t seem to me at all likely.” But now, leaning over her, still looking at her, he had to answer in the only verbal form that fitted with his thought, and as he did so he felt himself grow pale. “Yes,” he said; “I do believe in immortality, Tony.”
She, too, then grew very pale. It was as he had foreseen. She had not really believed. It had only been a haunting dream. And her hope had been that he would tell her that to him, too, it was only a dream. Poor child! Poor, poor child. And poor Malcolm. Was it with this face he was welcomed back among the realities of her world? She continued to look at him in silence, taking it all in, with a trust, an acceptance, pitiful indeed; and suddenly, seeing in her despair his full justification, he took her into his arms;—was it to comfort, or to claim her, against his conviction and her despair? “My darling,” he said, pressing his head against hers, “it can’t part us. It shan’t part us. I won’t let you destroy your life and mine.”
She had, piteously, put her arms around his neck and she clung to him like a frightened child.
“Listen, dearest,” he said; “when I say it I don’t mean it in the way you feel and fear it. I don’t know how to say what I believe. It doesn’t go into words. But it all means love. That’s what I’ve come to know. I can’t explain how. It came to me, one night, in a sort of inner vision, Tony, after dreadful things had happened—over there, you know. But he is safe and we are safe. We are all held round by love. That’s what I believe, Tony. It’s God that makes the meaning of immortality, not immortality that makes the meaning of life.”
Nothing, he knew it as he held her, could ever bring them nearer than this moment. He had never in his life been so near any creature. Reticent, and, with his English nature, passionately shy, never in his life could he have believed himself capable of uttering such words. It was doing himself a violence to utter them, yet sweet to do himself the violence for her. And, as if he had cut out his heart to show to her, it seemed to him that it must bring her his conviction: must light faith in her from the flame it bared.
But, in the silence that followed and as she still clung to him, his child and not his lover, it came to him that he had lighted nothing. She groped in a bewilderment of darkness.
“But he’s there,” she said. “He knows and feels and suffers, if he’s there.”
“No, no, Tony. It’s not like that. We are all together, your love and his and mine, in the eternity where Malcolm is.”
“All together? When you tell me that it’s you I want—not him? I don’t know what you mean, Bevis. How can he not suffer when I forget him in loving you?”