"I've not got the courage to hear people say she married me out of pity for a blind man," he answered through closed teeth, "if that's what you mean."
"I have only asked you to see her for five minutes before you go down to Melton," I reminded him.
He covered his face with his hands and turned away.
"Did your friend on the hospital train tell you that when I was delirious I shouted her name till they heard me the other end of Boulogne? I'm flesh and blood like other people old man; I know my limitations——"
"What shall I tell her?" I asked as I got up to go.
"Anything you like! The flat's yours, you can let in whom you please.... No, I don't want to make your position any harder, but the account's closed. I paid for the fun of bringing her back from Innspruck by telling her what I thought of her. It may have done her good.... She's got no claim on me, and I don't see that I'm bound to meet her."
As we sat down to breakfast I was handed a telegram from Val Arden, asking if I should be lunching at the Club, as he was home on leave. I am growing used to this as to a thousand other developments of war, yet I long found it strange to meet a man driving from Victoria in the mud that had plastered his clothes in the trenches, to see him change into mufti, dine and spend the evening at a music-hall, hurry away to the country for a day's shooting and return to his regiment ninety-six hours after leaving it.
I have met a score of friends enjoying this short reprieve, all in riotous spirits and splendid health, full of confidence for the future and treating war and its ghastly concomitants with the cheerful flippancy that makes our race the despair of other nations. And if these meetings had their macabre side, I hope it was hidden at least from my guests. Yet I should be sorry to count the men who have scrambled back, leave over, into the trenches to be killed almost before their feet touch the ground.
"You must come and help, Raney," I said, after reading the telegram. From hints in Loring's rare letters I gathered—what any but a professional soldier might have guessed—that all men are not equally fitted to shoulder a rifle and that more than six months' route-marching and musketry practice was needed to turn a neurotic novelist into a nerveless fighter. Indeed, there are few professions so modest as the army in its assumption that a few months' drill and a shilling manual will make a soldier. "Pick me up at the Admiralty and we'll go together."