“Don’t you remember?” he said. “Wetherall, of the State Society.”
“Oh, Lord, yes!”
I grasped his hand, and tried to keep the startled look out of my eyes. But he saw it, and smiled.
“Four years as a prisoner of the Turk has altered me a bit. This white hair, eh? And I feel like Rip van Winkle.”
He put into words something which I had been thinking since my arrival in Susy’s rooms.
“We are the revenants, the ghosts who have come back to their old haunts. We are pretending that everything is the same as before, and that we are the same. But it’s all different, and we have changed most of all. Five years of war have dug their hoofs into the faces of most people in this crowd. Some of them look fifteen—twenty years older, and I expect they’ve been through a century of experience and emotion.”
“What’s coming out of it?” I asked. “Anything big?”
“Not from us,” said Wetherall. “Most of us are finished. Our nerves have gone to pieces, and our vitality has been sapped. We shall put down a few notes of things seen and understood. But it’s the next generation that will get the big vision—or the one after next.”
Then I was able to shake hands with Susy Whincop, and, as I have said, she left me in no doubt about the change that four years of war had made to me.