“So they invalided you out after all.”
“Yes. I could have got an office-job; but I wouldn’t take it.”
“Why not?”
“Frankly, Pat, I don’t know. Somehow or other, I feel done in. It wasn’t so bad in hospital, you see one had other”—he looked down at his legs—“cripples to talk to. But London. . . . No, I don’t think I could stick London. The streets, you know; and getting in and out of tubes. People jostle one.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“Oh, write, I suppose.”
The last sentence struck Patricia as the most hopeless words she had ever heard from human lips. She felt desperately sorry—yet furiously angry with him. She said to herself: “Here is a man who is almost whole. He has enough money to live on. He has brains. The one thing that he cares for in the world is literature, there is nothing to prevent him. . . .”
But at that, Patricia’s anger vanished: for intuition, and her own love for Peter, told her clearly that “literature” was not the one thing in the world for which Francis Gordon most cared. She remembered the photograph incident at Mecklinburgh Square, the postcard she had read unwittingly at Brighton, his look when she chaffed him about being in love at the end of her Christmas Eve visit to Endsleigh Gardens. Her curiosity itched to ask him about this mysterious girl in America. Why didn’t he marry her? Or was she already married? Wouldn’t she have anything to do with him? Had they quarrelled? Couldn’t they make it up? . . .
But Francis, during his stay at Sunflowers, repelled every attempt to extract confidences; kept conversation rigidly to the impersonal. Somehow, he frightened Patricia. It seemed to her as though he had lost all interest in life. Except for his own writing-room, he left all arrangements at Glen Cottage to Prout. The war, he never mentioned: “as far as I’m concerned,” he said, “it’s over.” Literature, he referred to contemptuously as “the last resource of people who hadn’t the capacity for doing real things.”
Even the children noticed this change. “What’s the matter with Uncle Francis?” asked Evelyn, now a precocious long-legged creature of eight. “He always used to talk such a lot, and now he hardly talks at all.”