"I shan't see the wreck and misery you others will have to see," he says. "Horrors don't exist any more for my eyes. I shall see the country in all its beauty as it was before the war. And who knows but I shall find my dog?" (Brian lost the most wonderful dog in the world when he was wounded.) He is always hoping to find it again!
He doesn't feel that he accepts charity from the Becketts. He believes, with a kind of modest pride, that we're really indispensable. Afterward—when the tour is over—he thinks that "some other scheme will open." I think so too. The Becketts will propose it, to keep us with them. They will urge and argue, little dreaming how I drew them, with a grappling-hook resolve to become a barnacle on their ship!
To-morrow we move to the Ritz. The Becketts insist. They want us near them for "consultations"! This morning the formal request was made to the French authorities, and sent to headquarters. On the fourth day the answer will come, and there's little doubt it will be "yes."
Can I bear to go on deceiving Jim Beckett's father and mother, or—shall I take the other alternative? I must decide to-night.
Since I wrote that last sentence I have been out, alone—to decide. Padre, it was in my mind never to come back.
I walked a long, long way, to the Champs-Élysées. I was very tired, and I sat down—almost dropped down—on a seat under the high canopy of chestnut trees. I could not think, but I had a sense of expectation as if I were waiting for somebody who would tell me what to do. Paris in the autumn twilight was a dream of beauty. Suddenly the dream seemed to open, and draw me in. Some one far away, whom I had known and loved, was dreaming me! What I should decide about the future, depended no longer on myself, but upon the dreamer. I didn't know who he was; but I knew I should learn by and by. It was he who would come walking along the road of his own dream, and take the vacant place by me on the seat.
Being in the dream, I didn't belong to the wonderful, war-time Paris which was rushing and roaring around me. Military motors, and huge camions and ambulances were tearing up and down, over the gray-satin surface of asphalt which used to be sacred to private autos and gay little taxis bound for theatres and operas and balls. For every girl, or woman, or child, who passed, there were at least ten soldiers: French soldiers in bleu horizon, Serbians in gray, Britishers and a sprinkling of Americans in khaki. There was an undertone of music—a tune in the making—in the tramp, tramp, of the soldiers' feet, the rumble and whirr of the cars-of-war, the voices of women, the laughing cries of children.
I thought how simple it would be, to spring up and throw myself under one of the huge, rushing camions: how easily the thing might be taken for an accident if I stage-managed it well. The Becketts would be angels to Brian when I was gone! But the dreamer of the dream would not let me stir hand or foot. He put a spell of stillness upon me; he shut me up in a transparent crystal box, while outside all the world moved about its own affairs.
The mauve light of Paris nights filtered up from the gleaming asphalt, as if through a roof of clouded glass over a subterranean ballroom lit with blue and purple lanterns. Street lamps, darkly shaded for air-raids, trailed their white lights downward, long and straight, like first-communion veils. Distant trees and shrubs and statues began to retreat into the dusk, as if withdrawing from the sight of fevered human-folk to rest. Violet shadows rose in a tide, and poured through the gold-green tunnel of chestnut trees, as sea-water pours into a cave. And the shadow-sea had a voice like the whisper of waves. It said, "The dream is Jim Wyndham's dream." I felt him near me—still in the dream. The one I had waited for had come.