Audrey began to cry.
Jimmie said, “God almighty!”
Bluish shadows had been moving up the brown hill, hiding the half-camouflaged Guernsey cows and evaporating the sharp relief of the white barn and the little outbuildings. The wind still fanned the cold river sweetly and it brought the voices of the invisible cattle. The girl wept quietly. Jimmie sat still. In that pastoral, his mental pictures were a shocking contrast. Under the bland luxury of Audrey’s home—luxury displayed for the world to envy—was the harsh substance of human inhumanity. All over the earth inhumanity crept, lunged, flew screaming, with its assorted cargoes of malice—of malice crystallized in laboratories like his own, killing malice, flesh-ripping malice, malice that hurt worse than death. Surely, man had somehow perverted the laws of nature in the search for his selfish ends; surely nature was exacting an appalling payment—in homes where nature was scorned, and in lands where nature was denied its freedom.
The little tragedy of being an Audrey seemed great, in the coupe by the river, in that hour of beatitude. The great tragedy of being English, or German, or Czech, seemed faraway and small by that same criterion. Perhaps, where the little one was rooted, the big ones bloomed in poisoned proliferation. Perhaps, when men as individuals absconded from responsibility and insisted upon advantage, men as groups paid back the debt in bloody struggles of nihilism enforced, and nihilism rejected by force. There was a Hitler in Audrey’s home—and in his own. But Hitler was, after all, just a symbol of the mad determination of mankind to have its willful way. Only that—and absolutely nothing more.
He did not even notice that Audrey had stopped crying. He turned when she said, “What are you thinking about?”
“Audrey?”
“Yes, Jimmie.”
“I don’t want to start this crazy business of seeing you.”
“Neither do I. In a way. I just must.”
“But I mustn’t.”