"Why should I enlist?" His smile was so disarming that I regretted my move at once.
"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "You are not needed, and you never will be. Besides——" My voice trailed off into the insincere platitudes that always come to the lips when conscience is to be drugged.
He lit a cigarette. "Pest," he said, "most men are participants in life; a few, like myself, are onlookers. It was my choice when I was a mere youngster—wisely or not, I do not know—but the pose has become reality now. I am a jester at the court of the world, a wordy fellow with a touch of melancholy in his humor, watching and commenting on the real things of life. Before there was a war I blew bubbles, and now I am fit for nothing else. Have a cigarette?"
"Thanks."
He passed his hand across his brow with the same weariness I had noticed before.
"To gaze on life," he went on after a pause, "and not to live it, spares one many sorrows. Even love, which comes to most men as an overwhelming passion, stole into my life like a perfume of Cashmere. When I was twelve years of age and living on the south coast, I used to pass a little dream-girl of seven years or so. The purity of her face stayed with me like a melody a mother sings to her child. Then she was ill, and for three weeks I never saw her. Finally she came one day in a chair, and her beauty was the most exquisite thing I had ever seen. It made me think that the God who gave us this beautiful world sometimes cherishes a soul as sweet as hers and keeps it in a body that is frail, so that through life He can watch it like a flower, tenderly, lovingly;… and when He wants it back again He has but to whisper, and, like a violet bending to a summer breeze, it hears and obeys…. I have sometimes thought that even tears shed for such a one have in them the quality of dew, and serve to keep the memory green and pleasant.
"The next day I brought her a rose. Though we had never spoken, she took it, and gave me her face to kiss…. I lost my mother when I was very young, but this dream-girl's kiss supplied that inspiration for the ideal that a child takes from its mother. I could not have been impure after that—I could not have been unkind. The next day she was gone, and I never saw her again until I went to Surrey to visit young Oxley. She was his sister."
"And you found?"
"That the dream-child had become a woman—the charm of Spring had softened to the witchery of Summer."
He shrugged his shoulders and relit his cigarette, which had gone out.