‘Life will be hard for Hugo,’ she said. ‘I know that. I have always known it; but it will be worse if we put it off. We can’t run away,’ she said. ‘We can’t shut ourselves up for always. He has to go out into the world and fight some time, you know, Helen. Oh, my little Hugo—I would save him if I could!’ She turned suddenly away and sobbed.
I had never seen her cry; she was so quiet and calm as a rule; my mother called her cold—and it frightened me, I felt more than ever that something momentous had happened.
That afternoon we sat in our Happy Tree and told stories and talked very solemnly, about school and life and growing up. After tea Cousin John took us riding on our ponies. He was kind and cheerful as he always was, and did not seem to feel that anything tragic was happening at all. He never understood things as Cousin Delia did, but we enjoyed our ride and were happier after it; and the next morning when we woke up, the grief was less.
This sounds, I expect, a great fuss about nothing. What is it, you will say one little say—boy going to school? But even now, when I think of that day, it seems just as heart-breaking, just as momentous, as it did then. It is not, after all, the event itself that makes the tragedy, or significance, but the effect of that event on the people concerned. Guy’s going to school was not tragic; Hugo’s was. It was like going to the war; like being killed—at least in one way—something terrible to be faced and gone through with; and he did face it and go through with it; and it was not less painful because we were children.
V
We were happy again that summer, as the days and weeks passed by, but the shadow of the coming autumn was over us. We would remember suddenly in the middle of playing, and stop. One said without thinking, ‘We will do that in the winter—or when the nuts are ripe’—or something of that sort, and then remembered that Hugo would not be there.
Guy was very kind to Hugo.
He said to me:
‘I am sorry for Hugo. You see, I like school. It is different for me—but Hugo minds things more.’
Once, many years later, he said almost the same again. When he was in hospital and very ill, he said: