At last the Corporal broke a very long silence. “Mother, it’s something to have lived.”
Melia did not answer at once, but presently she sighed a little and said, “I wonder, Bill.”
He plucked a spear of grass. “It’s a rum thing to say, but if it hadn’t been for this war I don’t suppose I ever should have lived, really.”
She didn’t understand him, and her large round eyes, a little like those of a cow, told him so.
“I’ve always been thinking too much about it, you see.” His voice was curiously gentle. “All my life, as you might say, I’ve always been telling myself what a wonderful day it was going to be to-morrow. But to-morrow never comes, you see. And you keep on thinking, thinking, until you suddenly find that to-morrow was yesterday. That’s how it was with me. And if I hadn’t had the guts to join up just when I did, my belief is I should never have lived at all. Understand me?”
She shook a placid head at him, not understanding him in the least. But this was the mood in which he had first captured her, in which he had first impressed her with his intellectual quality, for which, as a raw girl, who knew nothing about anything, she had had a sort of reverence. But as she had come to see, it was this very power of mind, which she had told herself was not shared by other, more common men, that had been his undoing, that had brought them both to the verge of ruin. It was fine and all that, but it didn’t mean anything. It was just a kink in the machine which prevented it from working properly.
The tears sprang to her eyes as she listened to him, and her youth and his came back to her, but she turned her face to the river so that he could not see it. Still it was not all pain to hear him talking. It was the old, old way that she had loved once and had since despised, but now lying there in the shade of those old trees, with the music of the Weir and the glory of the earth and the sky all about her, she loved again. Strange that it should be so! But the sad voice at her elbow blended marvelously with all the things she could see and hear. And what it said was quite true. By some miracle both were living now more fully than ever before.
“I’ll always have one regret, Mother.” His voice had grown as deep as the water itself. But it broke off in the middle suddenly.
A feeling came upon her that she ought to say something. “Don’t let us have no regrets, Bill.” Those were the words she wanted to utter. “I’ll not have none.” But they were not for her to speak. At that moment she was not able to say anything. She waited tensely for him to go on talking.