“But, John, if you will say startling, strong things to an impressionable girl—and I suppose that's all I was then—you can't expect her to forget them right away.”
His face relaxed into a faint, fleeting smile. But she went earnestly on.
“Of course I know it wasn't really long ago. Not if you measure it by weeks. But if you measure it by human experience it was—well, years.”
He was sober again; cheek on hand, gazing out into those lengthening, deepening shadows.
“That was what we quarreled about, John. I felt terribly upset. I was blue—I can't tell you! Just the thought of all your life meant to you, and how I seemed to be spoiling it.”
A strong hand drew one of hers down and closed about it. “I'm going to try to tell you something, dear,” he said. “You thought that what I said to you, on the ship, was an expression of a real philosophy of life.”
“But what else could it have been, John?”
“It was just a chip—right here.” He raised her hand and with it patted his shoulder. “It was what I'd tried for years to believe. I was bent on believing it. You know, Betty, the thing we assert most positively isn't our real faith. We don't have to assert that. It's likely to be what we're trying to convince ourselves of.... I'm just beginning to understand that, just lately, since you came into my life—and during the fighting. I had to bolster myself up in the faith that a man can run away, live alone, because it seemed to be the only basis on which I, as I was, could deal with life. The only way I could get on at all. But you see what happened to me. Life followed me and finally caught me, away out here in China. No, you can't get away from it. You can't live selfishly. It won't work. We're all in together. We've got to think of the others..... I'm like a beginner now—going to school to life. I don't even know what I believe. Not any more. I—I'm eager to learn, from day to day. The only thing I'm sure of”... he turned, spoke with breathless awe in his voice... “is that I love you, dear That's the foundation on which my life has got to be built. It's my religion, I'm afraid.”
Betty's eyes filled; her little fingers twisted in among his; but she didn't speak then.
The shadows stretched farther and farther along the hillside. The sun, a huge orange disc descending amid coppery strips of shining cloud, touched the rim of the western hills; slid smoothly, slowly down behind it, leaving a glowing vault of gold and rose and copper overhead and a luminous haze in the valley. Off to the eastward, toward Shau T'ing and the crumbling ruins of the Southern Wall (which still winds sinuously for hundreds of miles in and out of the valleys, and over and around the hills) the tumbling masses of upheaved rock and loess were deeply purple against a luminous eastern sky.