It was the studied carelessness of her gesture that released the trigger of his indignation and made it leap out beyond control. There was in his mind the
vision of those blood-baths of the Somme, where men had drowned in the putrescence and been flattened by shells like flies against a wall. They hadn't all been good before they had reached their ordeal. They had come, as most men come, from every kind of prison-house of lust and human error. But they'd been good when they had died. They'd been reborn into valor and tenderness. And now, to hear their imperfections discussed in this pleasant room, so entirely feminine, where everything was safe and warm! Their imperfections were so small as compared with their sacrifice. Modern-day Christs, that's what they were! Christs by the thousands, who had found no Josephs of Arimathea to hide their defilement in garden-sepulchres. There they lay at this moment in the wilderness of corruption where they had fallen, while living people between puffs of cigarettes, undertook to explain why they should not be regretted.
"Puts him out of the running! It doesn't."
He leapt to his feet and commenced to drag himself up and down the room, limping backwards and forwards, while she pressed lazily against the cushions at a loss to account for his excitement.
"It doesn't," he repeated, pausing opposite to her. "He's still in the running. The Dawn whom I knew was a very silent man. He was a man with a sorrow. It made him careless. He was in the war to die. We all knew it. The men adored him because of it. He was the finest officer in the finest of battalions."
He became aware that he was frightening her
and sank his voice. The lowered tone only made what he said the more dreadfully impressive.
"There was something funny about him." He all but whispered it. "Something funny that we couldn't understand. We couldn't understand why he should want so much to die. The reason why we couldn't understand was a woman's photograph."
She looked up at him timidly. "Yes!"
"Wherever he went he carried it. When he went into an attack, he carried it next his heart. In billets he slept with it beneath his pillow. He pinned it against the walls of dug-outs. That was where I saw it. I remember now. It was smeared with the mud of a hundred trenches—Boche trenches as well as ours. It looked down on curious sights, did that woman's printed face in the photo." He laughed harshly. "Sights that those of us who were there will spend the rest of our lives in an effort to forget. And here you and I sit and talk—— Well, as I was saying, we couldn't fathom why he should be so keen on death when there was that woman in the world for whom he cared—for whom he cared right up to the last. It was at the Somme, in the attack on Pozières, that he went west. He was in command of a company that got cut off. When we found him, he had that bit of cardboard so tightly clasped that we couldn't take it from him."