"You talk like Allen," he said, "and you haven't even his excuse."
"I've seen the primeval for the first time," Lambert answered.
"I'll admit it has qualities," Wandel yawned. "Anyway, I'm off."
Mrs. Planter came back to George's mind, momentarily as primeval as a man surrendered to the battle lust. What one saw, except in self-destructive emergencies, he told himself, was all veneer. Ages, epochs, generations, merely determined its depth. The hell after war! Did Wandel mean there was danger then of an attempt to thin the veneer? Was Lambert, of all people, going to assist the Allens to plane it away?
"It would mean another dark ages," he mused.
His own little self-imposed coat he saw now had gone on top of a far thicker one without which he would have been as helpless as a bushman or some anthropoidal creature escaped from an unexplored country.
He laughed, but uncomfortably. Those two had made him uneasy, and Squibs, naturally, was at Lambert's folly. There had been a letter a day or two ago which he had scarcely had time to read because of the demands of an extended movement and the confusion of receiving replacements and re-equipping the men he had. He read it over now. "Understanding," "Brotherhood."
"You are helping to bring it about, because you are helping to win this war."
In a fit of irritation he tore the letter up. What the devil was he fighting the war for?
The question wouldn't let him asleep. Lambert, Wandel, and Squibs between them had made him for the first time in his life thoroughly, uncomfortably, abominably afraid—physically afraid—afraid of being killed. For all at once there was more than Sylvia to make him want to live. He didn't see how he could die without knowing what the deuce he was fighting this man's war for, anyway.