Now, while Maurice lounged and reflected, he sat at his littered writing-table, a pipe between his teeth, two deep furrows in his forehead. Beyond that littered table the room held no other signs of work. Easel and modelling pedestal stood empty. A woeful tidiness prevailed, and Mark himself looked older, Maurice thought. Small wonder, seeing all that he must forgo at a stroke when his name appeared in the ‘Gazette.’
So, throughout Great Britain, in the same casual unemotional fashion, men of every grade were making the supreme sacrifice, cheerfully putting behind them all that made life worth living—possessions, talents, hardly earned distinction, cherished hopes and still more cherished homes. No doubt many of them, like Maurice, privately rebelled; but they, too, were carried forward by the infection of brave example, if by no higher motive. In Mark’s company, Maurice had felt that infection strongly: but on this his last evening of freedom the artist in him raged afresh against the hideousness and waste and cruelty of modern war.
For ten minutes Mark had been smoking steadily and silently. He had a difficult letter on his mind. Maurice, who had the horrors of Tirlemont on his nerves, felt suddenly impelled to more candid speech than he had hitherto indulged in, lest he be misjudged.
‘I don’t know what your private feelings are, Forsyth,’ he plunged boldly; and Mark started as if he had been waked from a dream. ‘But the more I look at this business of enlisting and going out to slaughter Germans—not to mention the chance of their returning the compliment—the more heartily I hate the whole thing. It’s nothing so simple as mere funk. And it’s not that I’m shirking—you understand.’
‘Oh, yes. I understand,’ Mark rejoined, setting his teeth on the stem of his pipe.
But he did not seem disposed to enlarge on his understanding of his private feelings; and Maurice, whose mixed emotions were clamouring for expression, went on: ‘Mere funk would at least give one something to tackle and overcome. It’s this cursed inferno going on inside one’s head that does the damage. And the beastly thing seems quite independent of one’s thoughts or attention. Just keeps on automatically at the back of my brain. Even when I’m reading or talking, I can hear those infernal guns and shells. I can see the mangled fragments that once were men—the wounds—the blood—the slopes of the Liége forts—’
‘Damn you! Shut up!’ Mark leaned forward suddenly, a spark of anger in his eyes. ‘D’you suppose you’re the only one that’s plagued with an imagination?’
Maurice sighed.
‘Sorry, old chap,’ he said, disappointed, but contrite. ‘It’s a relief all the same. And I thought—you understood—’
‘Of course I do: a long sight too well.’ Mark’s tone was gentler now. ‘If it’s relief you’re after, you’ll get that most effectively by going out yourself; seeing things with your actual eyes: doing things with your actual hands that’ll give you no time for cinematographs in your head. You can thank your stars you’re a man. It’s the women given that way who’ll have the devil’s own time of it. My mother’s one, worse luck; and it’ll come hard on her—when I’m gone.’