"They would all line up on the deck, I suppose, and you would have your choice."
I laughed. "I should have no gun. Besides, I am a civilian. That is against me. Civilians seem to have no chance worth mentioning."
Eve was looking at me thoughtfully, and there was a look deep in her eyes that I could not fathom.
"You are a civilian," she said softly, "and civilians have no—and what then, Adam? Did you think of—"
"They don't want doddering old men of forty-three, and there is no need. But if my clam beds were in danger I should not feel so amiable. I might even strain a point and try to get a standing that would enable me to shoot alien trespassers properly. But why, Eve? Did you want me to—"
"No," she answered quickly. "Oh, no. I was only thinking."
"I have been thinking. If we had to have a war I am glad that it has come now. Pukkie cannot possibly go, and he might want to. How would you like that?"
Pukkie is our son, and he is ten years old. I knew how it would feel to have him go. I took him off to school last fall. It is a beautiful school, with fine men for masters, and dignified buildings and extensive grounds, nearly three hundred acres, with woods and a lake. I wish I could have gone to such a school. It would have done me good. I mooned about with Pukkie, seeing his room and the other dormitories, and the dining hall and the gymnasium and the classrooms, and the football field, and the woods and the lake, and I tried to be cheerful, but I did not make a success of it. I could not say much. Pukkie was silent too.
And all too soon it was time for me to start on my three-mile ride for the station, and I gave him a long hug and a short kiss behind a clump of bushes; the last kiss, I suppose, that I shall ever give my little son. I have not forgotten how a boy of ten feels about that. And I jumped quickly into the car, and we started. I looked back and waved to him as long as I could see, and he waved to me once or twice. But he looked very small, standing there in the middle of three hundred acres, gazing after the car and waving his cap, and I almost broke down then. It seemed almost as if I were deserting my small son among strangers—enemies, perhaps, for he did not know a soul; my little son who had never before been away from home a single night without Eve or me. For Eve had taught him up to that time, and I had done what I could,—with his Latin and the groundings of his Greek, the very beginnings of it,—what one of my students once called the radishes. I had not the heart to inflict science upon him. I hate it. I ought not to, for I was bred in it, and taught it for some years, which are well behind me. But that was small comfort to me then, and I had hard work to keep myself in control all the way home. But Pukkie did not break down. He may have come near it. I do not know. He has never said anything about it. I have—to Eve. She understood. She always understands. That is the comfort of it.