Again that strange impulse to confide in me! in me the stranger whom he, if anything, disliked. I wondered whether our whole lives were to be punctuated by these spasmodic confidences, and whether the forging of a number of such links would finally weave together a chain of friendship? I reflected that he, the analyst, could probably explain the kink in men’s brains by which confidential expansion is not necessarily based on sympathy, but I admitted to myself that I was routed by the problem.
I liked his letter; it produced in me a sensation of peace and light, and of a great broadening. I envied him his balance and his sanity. I envy him still more now that peace has come, and that the rapid perspective of history already shows me the precision of his judgment.
I showed part of the letter to Ruth, curious to observe the impression which Malory’s reflections would produce on a primitive and uncultivated brain. I knew that that letter was not the outcome of a transitory or accidental frame of mind, but that, like a rock gathering speed as it bowls down the side of a hill, the swell and rush of his considered thought had borne him along until his fingers, galloping to the dictation of his mind, had covered the sheets I now held in my hand. Ruth frankly understood no word of his letter. She merely asked me in her direct way whether I thought Mr. Malory was sorry her brother-in-law had been killed. Privately I thought that some devilish cynicism in the man, some revolting sense of artistic fitness, would rejoice in a detached, inhuman fashion, at the pertinence of the tragedy.
He said in his next letter to me—a reply to a letter of mine:—
“... Destiny and nature are, after all, the only artists of any courage, of any humour. Do they take Rawdon Westmacott? for whose disappearance all concerned must pray; no, they take Daphnis, who, of the thirty or forty million fighting men, is in the minority that should be spared.
“From the beginning they have exercised their wit on these innocent country people. How can we escape from their humour, when it gambols around us in the unseen? we cannot escape it, we can only hope to cap it with the superlative humour of our indifference.
“Around how many homes must it be gambolling now! from the little centre in the Weald of Kent, which is known to both you and me, to the little unknown centres of human life in the heart of Asia, where anxiety dwells, and where no news will ever come, but where hope will flag and droop day by day, till at last it expires in hopeless certainty.
“If you do not hear of me again, you may conclude that the arch-joker has taken me also, but remember that I shall have had the laugh on him after all, for I shall not care. However, I shall probably be spared, for no man or woman would weep for me.
“One’s chief need, one’s principal craving, I find, is to get Death into his true proportion. We have always been accustomed to think of Death as a suitable and even dignified ending to life in old age, but to regard the overtaking of youth by Death in quite a different light, as an unspeakable calamity. Here, of course, such an overtaking is of everyday occurrence. This, you will say, is a truism. I answer, that there is no such thing as truism in war; there is only Truth.
“If I take all my reflections about Death, slender as is their worth, and pass them through a sieve of analysis, what do I get? I get, as a dominant factor, Pity. Pity, yes, pity that these young men should have missed the good things life would have given them; not horror so much that they should be in the blackness below the ground, as pity that they should not be above it in the light....”