Changing Winds / A Novel

by St. John G. Ervine

He became obsessed with the belief that Gilbert still lived. He went about expecting to see him suddenly turning a corner and shouting, "Hilloa, Quinny!" At any moment, a door might open, and Gilbert would walk in and say, "Well, coves!" There was a printed copy of "The Magic Casement" in the house, and Henry would pick it up, and turn over the pages.... "But he can't be dead," he would say to himself, as he fingered the book. "It's absurd!..." Even when hope died, there came times when the belief in Gilbert's survival thrust itself into his mind. When the Lusitania was torpedoed, he said to himself, "Why, we saw her just after the war began, Gilbert and I, and we cheered!..."

The brutality of the war smote him hard. In less than a year from the day when they had stood on the rocks at Tre'Arrdur Bay, lustily cheering as the great Atlantic liner sailed up the sea to the Mersey, Gilbert was dead and the proud ship was a wreck, sneakily destroyed....

Gilbert had left the beginning of a play behind him. He had regretted that he could not finish it before going out to the peninsula ... had believed that in it he would create something finer and deeper than he had yet done ... and now it would never reach completion. The mind that imagined it was no more than the rubbish of the fields when the harvest is gathered....

His own work became tasteless to him. He turned with disrelish from his manuscript. "What's the good of it," he said to himself, whenever he looked at it. He tried to put himself into communication with Gilbert's spirit, remembering that night below the White Cliff, when, he now believed, Gilbert had tried to tell him of his death. A month before, he would have ridiculed any one who suggested to him that he should attempt to speak to the dead. "Spookery!" he would have said. But now, in his eagerness to atone, as he said, for his failure to respond when Gilbert had tried to speak to him, he put faith in things that, before, would have seemed contemptible to him. But with all his will to believe, he could not call Gilbert to him. There was a blankness, a condemning silence....

"I failed my friend," he groaned to himself once, "When he felt for me most, I ... I failed him!"

2

He had gone up to the Common with Mary, and had lain there, talking of Gilbert ... of what Gilbert had been doing this time a year ago ... of something that Gilbert had said once ... of an escapade at Rumpell's ... and then Mary and he had gone home across the fields. As they walked up the lane to the house, they saw a telegraph messenger ahead of them. They quickened their pace. There was an anxious, strained look on Mary's face, and as the messenger, hearing them behind him, turned and stopped, she made a clutching movement with her hands. "Oh, Quinny!" she said, turning to him with frightened eyes. The boy waited until Henry went up to him, regarding them both with curiosity.

"Is it for us?" Henry asked, knowing that it was, and the boy nodded his head. "I'll take it," he went on. "It'll save you the trouble of going up to the house!"

"Thank you, sir!" the messenger said, and then he handed the telegram to Henry. "Is there any answer, sir?" he asked.

"I don't know," Henry replied. "We'll ... we'll bring it down to the post-office, if there is!"