“All the time,” said he. “My bedroom is full of stuff that I cleared out of here. Last night, Copplestone, your ever-lengthening face was a lovely study, and I have wondered ever since how I kept in my laughter.”
“You young villain,” cried I, overjoyed to find that Cæsar was still my bright friend of the R.N.V.R. “How shall I ever get even with you?”
“I owe you some reparation,” said he, “and here it is.” He hobbled over to his desk and drew out a great roll of paper. “This is the first instalment; there are lots more to come. For the last month I have been trying to remember, not to forget. I am writing of everything that I have done and seen and heard and felt during those two splendid years. Everything. It will run to reams of paper and months of time. When it is finished you shall have it all. Take it, saturate yourself in it, add your spells to it. We will stir up the compound of Copplestone and Cæsar until it ferments, and then distil from the mass a Great Work. It shall be ours, Copplestone—yours and mine. Will you have me as your partner.”
“With the greatest pleasure in life,” I cried.
We discussed our plans in full detail, and parted the best of friends. Cæsar is rekindling the ashes of a life which I had thought to be extinguished; soon there will be a great and glowing fire of realised memory which will keep warm the years that are to come. He has solved the problem of his immediate future. But what of those others, those tens of thousands, who when the war is over will seek for some means to keep alive the fires which years of war have lighted in their hearts? Are they to be merged, lost, in the old life as it was lived before 1914? Are they to degenerate slowly but surely into S.O.B.s, intent only upon earning a living somehow, playing bad golf, or looking on at football matches? I do not know, I have no data, and it is rather painful to indulge oneself in speculation.
This sketch was published a year ago. Two months after I had visited Cæsar at Oxford he called upon me in London. He was in uniform, and explained that he had quickly grown tired of sick leave and had recalled himself to Service. “I can’t go to sea again,” said he, “with this timber toe, but I am at least good for an office job ashore.” But Cæsar was not made to fit the stool of any office, and when I last heard from him was an observer in the R.N.A.S.
In this fashion he has rounded off his experiences, and basely failed me, his friend and biographer, of the scanty data with which to answer the question set forth in the first sentence of this chapter.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE