“Hate you!—and you were Jim’s chum!”
“I always came as Jim’s chum,” Wally said heavily. “From the very first, when I was a lonely little nipper at school, I sort of belonged to Jim. And now—well, I just can’t realize it, Norah. I can’t keep on thinking about him as dead. I know he is, and one minute I’m feeling half-insane about it, and the next I forget, and think I hear him whistling or calling me.” He clenched his hands. “It’s the minute after that that is the worst of all,” he said.
For a time they did not speak. They walked on slowly, along the pleasant country lane with its blossoming hedges.
“I know,” Norah said. “There’s not much to choose between you and Dad and me, when it comes to missing Jim. But as for you—well you did come as Jim’s chum first—and always; but you came just as much because you were yourself. You know you belonged to Billabong, as we all did. You can’t cut yourself off from us now, Wally.”
“I?” he echoed. “Well, if I do, I have mighty little left. But I felt that you couldn’t want to see me. I know what it must be like to see me come back without him.”
“I’m not going to say it doesn’t hurt,” said Norah. “Only it hurts you as much as it does us. And the thing that would be ever so much worse is for you not to come. Why, you’re the only comfort we have left. Don’t you see, you’re like a bit of Jim coming back to us?”
“Oh, Norah—Norah!” he said. “If I could only have saved him!”
“Don’t we know you’d have died quite happily if you could!” Norah said. “Just as happily as he would have died for you.”
“He did, you know,” Wally said. All the youth and joy had gone out of his voice, leaving it flat and toneless. “Two or three times that morning he kept me out of a specially hot spot, and took it himself. He was always doing it: we nearly punched each other’s heads about it the day before—I told him he was using his rank unfairly. He just grinned and said subalterns couldn’t understand necessary strategy in the field!”
“He would!” said Norah, laughing.