When her maid came to dress her, I went to my own room. Night had fallen silently; and, when I looked towards the corner of Park Lane, the streets were more empty than on the night of an air-raid. Once or twice I heard the echo of subdued revelry; but, in ten minutes, I counted only four men and two women walking rapidly westward, closely buttoned against the biting air. Any vision of what this day would be had nothing in common with the patchwork I had seen. Dawdling luxuriously—for the first time in four years—over my dressing, I could recall scraps of altercation with Bertrand, flashes of speculation with Hornbeck, confidences with Crawleigh. Jerkiness, incompleteness, artificial reserve, an overwhelming perplexity and a relief too great to be expressed were what I carried away from the armistice; and I should think that most people in England experienced the same confused emotions and lay down that night with the same confused recollections.
There was none of the vulgar debauchery that had disgraced the capital of a great empire on Mafeking night: in nineteen years our pride was more chastened and our thankfulness more heartfelt, even if we did not know how to give it words.
“I thought you promised to arrange a survivors’ dinner,” said Barbara, as we went up to bed.
“Only about six of us survived,” I answered. “And we’re all scattered. We’re tired, too. The war went on too long.” Though I was almost too exhausted to think, I remembered a far-away debate at Melton on the first anniversary of the war, when the greatest headmaster and the wisest man that I have met warned me that a long war would be followed by an even longer moral reaction: a bruised world, said old Burgess, would go back to the ways it knew and to the fleshpots it loved. “We shall be useless for years,” I said.
“I wonder if it was worth it,” Barbara mused.
“That depends on what you expected or wanted. We’ve secured our terms. And, if it’s not too rhetorical, I believe that every man who voluntarily offered his life, at a time when we thought we were degenerating, has to a great extent saved his soul. This country has been spared invasion.”
Barbara parted the curtains in her room and looked down on the silent street.
“The first night of peace since Jim’s last party at Loring Castle,” she murmured. “We . . . Well, I suppose we go on from that?”
“If we want to.”
“Well, don’t you? For the last four years we haven’t been able to call our souls our own.”