“I could not help thinking of that when I recalled another little matter yesterday—in Judenbach. Once when we were little, my brother Paul and I quarreled. My mother and I were alone afterward. I told her of the tragedy. Everything seemed lost since I had lost Paul. She said, 'Some time you will find your real playmate, if you are good and search very hard.' I suppose she has forgotten. I forgot for years. But it came to me here.... You see I never suffered before, never was tested, everything came smoothly, everything covered up—”
“You are good to let us listen,” Fallows said quietly. He was staring at the ceiling.
“Here in Judenbach the relations of all other days began to match up. It was as if the whole war was to show me, each department carried on clearly. I didn't know a man could stand so much. Day before yesterday morning, I wanted to quit. I had a kind of madness from it all—an ache that wouldn't break or bleed, and was driving the life out of me. I found the way out by going into the hospital. I had to forget myself or go under.... When it seemed all over to-day, and the sentry was marching me here (you see I had gone back to the house of amputations and couldn't find any of you, and then to the Court of Execution, and you were not there), it was all slipping away in a loneliness not to be described, when I found you here—”
Fallows straightened his head and blinked.
“'It was all slipping away in a loneliness not to be described,'” he repeated. “We know that. This is too fine.”
Peter laughed. He was thinking of what Lonegan had said on the night he came back from Berthe's door, after she had asked him not to come in.... “Peter, you're lying. I don't believe you'd let anybody see your fires—not even how well you bank 'em.”
They seemed to require further talk from him. He did not want the two men, sorry they had drawn up their chairs. His heart was very tender to them—Fallows and Abel, and the woman who had changed him. They were before him now as messengers from the benignant empire of the future—strange strong souls gathered together now in waiting at the end of a road.... He told them of the bomb-proof pit, the naked animalism of Kohlvihr, the infantry advances and of Samarc. Presently his heart was light again, the pent forces of expression springing gladly into use.
“...The laughable thing about it,” he finished, “—the thing that held me speechless as Samarc left my side there in the dark corner of the pit—was that just a few minutes before Kohlvihr had promised to see that the Little Father decorated him. He had almost reached the General when my throat worked, and I called, 'Samarc.' It was as if he didn't hear me. Nothing would have stopped him. It was his idea, yet I think he meant only to stop the order of another infantry advance. He had ceased to kill, you know....”
Peter ended it hastily. They were all interested to know why Samarc was to have been decorated. This opened the earlier part of the day, and his strange wandering with Samarc among the hills—the magic of the hospital steward's coat, the scent of the cedars, and Peter's persistent sense of Berthe's nearness.
“Actually, I had to stop and think,” he explained. “Each time I fell into an abstraction, it struck me that she was there. It seems yesterday, too—”