Possibly she had been dreaming by the fire of the other, who had not returned. I sat there, trying to answer her questions and finding it difficult. It is not easy to talk about the war. The point of view is so different. All that I have lived has been so inevitable, so part of the instincts of the man who fights, that I find it hard to comprehend the curiosity of those who look on it from the outside. To me still it is this other life that is incomprehensible and chaotic, and profoundly disturbing. When men must fight, it is better to forget.—With all the home memories thronging about me, sitting there with Aunt Janie’s hand in mine, I was thinking but one thing.
“In two months I shall return to it—the grim gamble—where those who stake their lives must lose in the end inevitably,—as all gamblers do.”
III
The next night Molly and I drove over to the Brinsmades’. Anne had been insistently in my thoughts all day. All my revolt from the dead weight of emptiness in life was instinctively towards her. Yet I can hardly explain to myself now the strangeness of my conduct, once in her presence, nor the motive that prompted me deliberately to wound her, as though I were seeking once for all to reject her from my life. Was it some savage instinct of honesty towards her, or a strange unhuman bitterness that entered my soul,—a resentment for the thing offered against the thing denied? I do not know. I cannot yet see clearly.
Yet I do know that I came there eagerly, with a great need of the affection of my old playmate. For what Bernoline had waked in me, the discovery of the harmonious companionship of a true woman, had left me with a new feeling of dependence. Perhaps, also, in the years of absence, I had idealized my very human little friend.
* * * * *
I do not know if such contradictory impulses are true to others or only to me. I imagine that few persons would understand me. Yet it is true that in the desolate loneliness against which I was struggling, I longed to find in some one, some one known and kind, some measure of that deep womanhood of the Bernoline who had gone.
* * * * *
When we arrived the dance was in full swing. I stood staring, unable to adjust myself to the carnival note. For months I had not looked on such a scene. For months I had forgotten the existence of this world, where color fired the imagination and music awoke disturbing needs of pleasure. Anne hurried forward, we shook hands, and—a sudden shyness came between us. Others crowded up, an old friend or two, chance acquaintances; an indiscriminate, curious crowd that, to my annoyance, insisted on treating me as a hero. I resented it all. The men offended me. I forgot I had once been like them. How unrelated to actualities they were, these men, mostly of my generation, of the generation of wasted opportunities, well-set-up, pleasing, clean-cut, but so untested, so devoid of the stamp of leadership. What could they know of the realities that were gathering on the horizon? The sobered France of Bernoline lay outside. Light and shadow, I thought. Half the world dancing, while the other half staggers through the night!
Then I thought of the leaping call to duty which, in the coming day, would startle them in the midst of their playtime. And, knowing what I know, the irony of it all stood out. How little they could divine the future or what the immutable, slow-moving course of little things could mean to each.