He could not see Christy, but heard him moving about the inner room.
“Why, to bring a new life into the world. Was it a boy?”
“Yes,” said Bertram, “it was going to have my name.”
“A boy, eh? Oh, Lord, no! I couldn’t bring a boy into a world like this. It wouldn’t be fair. Not yet awhile, until we see how things are going to shape out. Major”—he still kept to Bertram’s old rank—“I’m afraid I’m becoming a coward.”
He came to the half open door, and leant against the frame of it, looking in at Bertram, who sat in a low leather chair with his back to a long casement window through which the dusk of a grey day crept from the darkening Thames below. So Christy had often stood in the entrance of a dug-out when he and Bertram lived in the earth not far from an enemy’s line.
“What are you afraid about?” asked Bertram, with a curious thrill, like the sensation he had had as a boy when his nurse told him ghost stories.
“I’m afraid of this civilisation of ours, and of all sorts of forces creeping up to destroy it.”
For an hour or more he talked of the things he had seen.
He had been to Eastern Europe, from which civilisation was passing. Poland was poverty-stricken, disease-stricken, and utterly demoralised.
Austria was no more than the corpse of a nation which had once been a mighty Empire, and now was a bulbous-headed thing without a body.