Nicky didn't. But that was only because Nicky had something that the others hadn't got; that he, Michael, hadn't. It was all very well to say, as he had said last night: "This ends it"; or, as their phrase was, "Everything goes in now." It was indeed, as far as he was concerned, the end of beauty and of the making of beauty, and of everything worth caring for; but it was also the beginning of a life that Michael dreaded more than fighting and killing and being killed: a life of boredom, of obscene ugliness, of revolting contacts, of intolerable subjection. For of course he was going into the ranks as Nicky had gone. And already he could feel the heat and pressure and vibration of male bodies packed beside and around him on the floor; he could hear their breathing; he could smell their fetid bedding, their dried sweat.
Of course he was going through with it; only--this was the thought his mind turned round and round on in horror at itself--he funked it. He funked it so badly that he would really rather die than go through with it. When he was actually killed that would be his second death; months before it could happen he would have known all about it; he would have been dead and buried and alive again in hell.
What shocked Michael was his discovering, not that he funked it now, which was natural, almost permissible, but that he had funked it all the time. He could see now that, since the War began, he had been struggling to keep out of it. His mind had fought every suggestion that he should go in. It had run to cover, like a mad, frightened animal before the thoughts that hunted it down. Funk, pure funk, had been at the bottom of all he had said and thought and done since August, nineteen-fourteen; his attitude to the War, his opinion of the Allies, and of the Government and of its conduct of the War, all his wretched criticisms and disparagements--what had they been but the very subterfuges of funk?
His mother had known it; his father had known it; and Dorothy and John. It was not conceivable that Nicky did not know it.
That was what had made the horror of the empty space that separated them.
Lawrence Stephen had certainly known it.
He could not understand his not knowing it himself, not seeing that he struggled. Yet he must have seen that Nicky's death would end it. Anyhow, it was ended; if not last night, then this morning when he posted the letter.
But he was no longer appeased by this certainty of his. He was going out all right. But merely going out was not enough. What counted was the state of mind in which you went. Lawrence had said, "Victory--Victory is a state of mind."
Well--it was a state that came naturally to Nicky, and did not come naturally to him. It was all very well for Nicky: he had wanted to go. He had gone out victorious before victory. Michael would go beaten before defeat.
He thought: "If this is volunteering, give me compulsion." All the same he was going.