“Dear Father and Aunt [it read]: Offered chance to join aviation training corps, Long Island, at once. No time to come home. Wish me luck enough to get over soon. Love. Hal.”
Well, that was sensation enough for her. He had acted with divine independence.
The months that followed until the Armistice were dull and tragic. She would a hundred times rather have gone over herself, though it be as a rank flag-waver. It was all stupid, cunning, criminal, got up by old men to kill young ones. It would be stupid enough to take Hal, her playmate. Night after night she saw him, mutilated or dead; she got so she could picture exactly the way a small hole looked in a man’s forehead, just the degree of red and blue about its tiny rim, and the relaxed, livid expression of a face that had been dead several hours. These pictures haunted her wakeful nights in many different guises, but always with Hal’s features. She learned in imagination how flesh looked when it was laid open or gangrened, and the appearance of the end of a limb that had been taken off. And she grew so bitter that she found she could not pray, though she had always experienced a soothing pleasure from the language of the Book of Common Prayer. She never said those pieces again. She would sit up suddenly in bed, as though she had been wakened by a barrage, and talk by fitful candlelight to her portrait.
XI
“And you aren’t really sorry you didn’t get over?”
“Sorry? Wouldn’t you be?”
“Well, I don’t know. Considering the hordes of disillusioned veterans I’ve met this winter—”
“At least they had a chance to get disillusioned in action. Something for their money. With me it’s just two years—practically three years—gone to pot, and a sort of feeling it isn’t worth while to go back at all. To college, I mean.”
“You couldn’t start this time of year, could you?”
“I suppose I could do something.”