"Neither, I think," Lawanne answered slowly. "A man like that is certainly not himself when he breaks out like that. Bland has the cultural inheritance of his kind. You could see that he was stupefied by what he had done. When he rushed away into the woods I think it was just beginning to dawn on him, to fill him with horror. He'll never come back. You'll see. He'll either go mad, or in the reaction of feeling he'll kill himself."
They went into Lawanne's cabin. Lawanne brought out a bottle of brandy. He looked at the shaking of his fingers as he poured for Hollister and smiled wanly.
"I don't go much on Dutch courage, but I sure need it now," he said. "Isn't it queer the way death affects you under different circumstances? I didn't see such an awful lot of action in France, but once a raiding party of Heinies tumbled into our trench, and there was a deuce of a ruction for a few minutes. Between bayonets and bombs we cleaned the lot, a couple of dozen of them. After it was all over, we stacked them up like cordwood—with about as much compunction. It seemed perfectly natural. There was nothing but the excitement of winning a scrap. The half-dozen of our own fellows that went west in the show—they didn't matter either. It was part of the game. You expected it. It didn't surprise you. It didn't shock you. Yet death is death. Only, there, it seemed a natural consequence. And here it—well, I don't know why, but it gives me a horror."
Lawanne sat down.
"It was so unnecessary; so useless," he went on in that lifeless tone. "The damned, egotistic fool! Two lives sacrificed to a stupid man's wounded vanity. That's all. She was a singularly attractive woman. She would have been able to get a lot out of life. And I don't think she did, or expected to."
"Did you have any idea that Mills had that sort of feeling for her?" Hollister asked.
"Oh, yes," Lawanne said absently. "I saw that. I understood. I was touched a little with the same thing myself. Only, noblesse oblige. And also I was never quite sure that what I felt for her was sympathy, or affection, or just sex. I know I can scarcely bear to think that she is dead."
He leaned back in his chair and put his hands over his eyes. Hollister got up and walked to a window. Then on impulse he went to the door. And when he was on the threshold, Lawanne halted him.
"Don't go," he said. "Stay here. I can't get my mind off this. I don't want to sit alone and think."
Hollister turned back. Neither did he want to sit alone and think. For as the first dazed numbness wore off, he began to see himself standing alone—more alone than ever—gazing into a bottomless pit, with Fate or Destiny or blind Chance, whatever witless force was at work, approaching inexorably to push him over the brink.