Here was a reality against which there was no argument, and against the harshness of it music screamed and food was uninteresting.
During that first month of that war, so new a thing was the horrid grimness of it, that hysteria was abroad, life was twopence coloured. For everyone now it was the question—"What might they do?"
Something to help, something to ease that biting truth—"Your life has been the most utterly useless business—no purpose, no strength, no unselfishness from first to last—what now?"
Christopher's life had not been useless and he knew it. The reality of it had never been in doubt and death—the haphazard surprise of it and the pathos and melodrama and sometimes drab monotony of it—had been his companion for many years.
Christopher, although he had been a hard worker from his childhood, had always taken life lightly. He loved the gifts of this world—food and amusement and exercise and pleasant company. He loved, also, certain people whose lives were of immense concern to him. He also believed in a quite traditional God about Whom he had never argued, but Whose definite particular existence was as certain to him as his own.
He had faults that he tried to cure—his temper—his pleasure in food and wine.
He had three great motives in his life—His love of God, his love of his friends and his love of his work. He hated hypocrites, mean persons, cruel persons, anyone who showed cowardice or deceit or arrogance. He was dogmatic and therefore disliked anyone else to be so. He was humble about his work, but not humble about his position in the world, which he thought, quite frankly, a very good one.
His interest in his especial friends was compounded of his love for them and also of his curiosity about them, and he always loved someone the more if he or she gave him the opportunity to practise his inquisitiveness upon them.
After Rachel Seddon he cared more, perhaps, for Francis Breton than anyone in the world. He had also of late been interested in Roddy, who was a far better fellow than he had expected.
One puzzle, meanwhile, obstinately and continually beset him. What had happened to Breton during this last year? Something, or in surer probability someone, had been behind him. Christopher might have flattered himself that he had been the influence, but he knew that, if that had been so, Breton's attitude to him would have implied it. Breton was fond of him, but did not owe that to him. Who then was it?