"Funny, funny, funny!" he said aloud, and lazily rolled over to stare into blue space.
Probably it was quite as funny out there. The people like himself on those other worlds would be the sport of confusing impulses, in the long run obeying some deeper instinct whose source was in the parent star dust, wandering or taking root in their own strange soils. But why not wander when the object of it all was so obscure, so apparently trivial? Enough others would submit to rule from the hidden source, take root like the willow—mate! That was another chain upon them. Women held them back from wandering. That was how they were tricked into the deadly home feeling his father warned him of.
"Funny, funny, funny!" he said again.
From an inner pocket he drew a sheet of note paper worn almost through at the fold, stained with the ooze of trenches and his own sweat. It had come deviously to him in the front line a month after his meeting with Patricia Whipple. In that time the strange verse had still run in his mind—a crown of stars, and under her feet the moon! The tumult of fighting had seemed to fix it there. He had rested on the memory of her and become fearless of death. But the time had changed so tremendously. He could hardly recall the verse, hardly recall that he had faced death or the strange girl.
"Wilbur, dear," he read, "I am still holding you. Are you me? What do you guess? Do you guess we were a couple of homesick ninnies, tired and weak and too combustible? Or do you guess it meant something about us finding each other out all in one second, like a flash of something? Do you guess we were frazzled up to the limit and not braced to hold back or anything, the way civilized people do? I mean, will we be the same back home? If we will be, how funny! We shall have to find out, shan't we? But let's be sporty, and give the thing a chance to be true if it can. That's fair enough, isn't it? What I mean, let's not shatter its morale by some poky chance meeting with a lot of people round, whom it is none of their business what you and I do or don't do. That would be fierce, would it not? So much might depend.
"Anyway, here's what: The first night I am home—your intelligence department must find out the day, because I'm not going to write to you again if I never see you, I feel so unmaidenly—I shall be at our stile leading out to West Hill. You remember it—above the place where those splendid gypsies camped when we were such a funny little boy and girl. The first night as soon as I can sneak out from my proud family. You come there. We'll know!"
"Funny, funny, funny—the whole game!" he said.
He lost himself in a lazy wonder if it could be true. He didn't know. Once she had persisted terribly in his eyes; now she had faded. Her figure before the broken church was blurred.
Sharon Whipple found him the next afternoon teaching two new men the use and abuse of a tractor, and plainly bored by his task. Sharon seized the moment to talk pungently about the good old times when a farm hand didn't have to know how to disable a tractor, or anything much, and would work fourteen hours a day for thirty dollars a month and his keep. He named the wage of the two pupils in a tone of disgruntled awe that piqued them pleasantly but did not otherwise impress. When they had gone their expensive ways he turned to Wilbur.