“That’s where I want your advice,” he explained gravely, as though in all his thirty-five tempestuous years of life he had ever taken advice from anybody.
“And I want yours,” I told him. “I’m sorry to find Raymond butting in: I expect to need your help much more.”
That evening after dinner, when the others had gone away to gamble, we talked of the war and of that other evening, when we stood on the dividing ridge between two worlds. Of the men who dined at Loring Castle on the last night of peace, he and I alone had survived. We talked of the war that was over as then we had talked of the war that was coming. I quoted him the words in which he had described his vision of what the world might be after the war; and I challenged him to say whether he still believed in the perfectibility of man.
“I’ve acquired a lot of patience in the last four years,” he answered.
Then I tested him with Hornbeck’s prediction that wars would be fought so long as the human race survived to fight them.
“I want you to help me organize a general strike against war,” I said, as I began to blow out the candles. Then I paused to frame a question which I had kept unasked since our last evening of peace: “D’you remember blowing out the candles that night?” He nodded. “You left two. Why?”
As he hesitated, I saw that he was frowning. I saw also that, like the rest of us, he had aged in the last five years, though the thin face had its old passionate vitality and the fine black hair its old gay disorder. Slight as ever, boyish as ever, he was none the less lined with the mental and physical tortures of the war. His very hesitation was a subtle mark of decline, as though for the first time in his life he doubted himself.
“I knew in my bones that only two of us would come through,” he muttered. “I should be one; I couldn’t make a guess at the other.”
“There aren’t more than half-a-dozen left out of all our generation,” I told him. “The old club-groups at Oxford. . . . I can’t look at them.”
“And I couldn’t see ’em if I did look. Not that I need to be reminded of them.” . . . The unseeing eyes flashed in sudden exaltation. “What death takes away, George, is very little by comparison with what he leaves! The men I’ve loved best in the world have been my father and your uncle and old Burgess and you and Jim. Three of you, thank God!, are alive: I stayed with Burgess for his last night before he retired from Melton; but you’re no more alive than my father and Jim. Nothing can take away the time I spent with them. . . . I shan’t see again in this world, but nothing can take away all that I’ve seen in the past. I still see the men I recruited, the men who trained with me, though I helped to bury more than a few.”