“Good Lord!” I said. “You don’t really think—you can’t think, that your silly old Parliament is going to matter now; that you politicians will be allowed to go on talking, that there will be divisions in the House, and elections and all that foolishness.”
Gorman, still heroically erect, still enormously swelled in chest, winked at me with careful deliberation. I was immensely relieved.
“Thank God,” I said. “For a moment I thought you really meant it—all that great-council-of-the-Empire business, you know. It would have been a horrible disappointment to me if you had. I’ve come to have a high regard for you, Gorman, and I really could not have borne it. But of course I ought to have known better. You couldn’t have believed in that stuff, simply couldn’t. Nobody with your intelligence could. But seriously, now, I should like to know—I’m sure you won’t mind telling me—— What are you going to do? Your party, I mean. It seems to me you’re in rather a hole. The Irish people will expect you to take the regular line of backing the enemy.”
“The Irish people be damned,” said Gorman; “our game is to support the Government.”
CHAPTER XIX.
I look back on the time I spent soldiering—soldiering under war conditions—as a curious blank in an otherwise interesting and amusing life. From the day on which I rejoined my regiment until the day, about five months later, when I escaped from the hospital in which I was incarcerated, my mind stopped working altogether. I took no interest whatever in any of the things which used to excite me, which are now, I am thankful to say, beginning to amuse me again. Politicians, I believe, pranced about with fascinating agility. I did not care to look at them. Newspaper proprietors demanded the immediate execution of one public man after another. I do not believe I should have cared if a guillotine had been set up in Piccadilly Circus and a regular reign of terror established. I lost sight of Gorman. The Aschers faded from my memory.
I spent three months or so in camp with my old regiment. I worked exceedingly hard. I ate enormously. I slept profoundly. I attained an almost incredible perfection of physical health. I ceased to think about anything. My experience of the business of actual fighting was brief. I had little more than a month of it altogether. Then they sent me home with a shattered leg. I worked harder than ever when I was at the Front. I was often very uncomfortable. I remained amazingly healthy. I suffered at last a good deal of physical pain. I did not think at all, even about the progress of the war.
I date my awakening again to the interests of life from the day when Gorman paid me his first visit. I was convalescent and had made myself fairly comfortable in a cottage near Guildford. I had got rid of the last of a long series of nurses. My leg had ceased to cause me any active annoyance, but I was beginning to find myself a good deal bored and not a little depressed. When Gorman walked in I was not, just at first, particularly glad to see him.
“Let me congratulate you,” he said.