Part 34 (1/2)

CHAPTER XIX.

I look back on the time I spent soldiering--soldiering under war conditions--as a curious blank in an otherwise interesting and amusing life. From the day on which I rejoined my regiment until the day, about five months later, when I escaped from the hospital in which I was incarcerated, my mind stopped working altogether. I took no interest whatever in any of the things which used to excite me, which are now, I am thankful to say, beginning to amuse me again. Politicians, I believe, pranced about with fascinating agility. I did not care to look at them.

Newspaper proprietors demanded the immediate execution of one public man after another. I do not believe I should have cared if a guillotine had been set up in Piccadilly Circus and a regular reign of terror established. I lost sight of Gorman. The Aschers faded from my memory.

I spent three months or so in camp with my old regiment. I worked exceedingly hard. I ate enormously. I slept profoundly. I attained an almost incredible perfection of physical health. I ceased to think about anything. My experience of the business of actual fighting was brief.

I had little more than a month of it altogether. Then they sent me home with a shattered leg. I worked harder than ever when I was at the Front.

I was often very uncomfortable. I remained amazingly healthy. I suffered at last a good deal of physical pain. I did not think at all, even about the progress of the war.

I date my awakening again to the interests of life from the day when Gorman paid me his first visit. I was convalescent and had made myself fairly comfortable in a cottage near Guildford. I had got rid of the last of a long series of nurses. My leg had ceased to cause me any active annoyance, but I was beginning to find myself a good deal bored and not a little depressed. When Gorman walked in I was not, just at first, particularly glad to see him.

”Let me congratulate you,” he said.

”On being alive? Is that a blessing?”

I had been brooding over the fact that I was lame for life. Gorman's breezy cheerfulness rather jarred me.

”Of course it's a blessing to be alive,” said Gorman, ”but I wasn't thinking of that. What I was congratulating you on was being a hero.

D.S.O., isn't it? Tell me all about it, won't you?”

I have been given the right of appending those three letters to my name, so I suppose I must have avoided the worst kinds of blundering and incompetence. But I have no recollection of doing anything to deserve the honour. I fear I answered Gorman rather ill-temperedly.

”There's nothing whatever to tell,” I said. ”I just crawled about in a trench, generally muddy. Everybody else did exactly the same.”

Gorman is still the same man he always was, amazingly tactful and sympathetic. He realised at once that I hated talking about the war and was in no mood for recounting my own experiences. Instead of pressing me with silly questions until he drove me mad, he dropped the subject of my D.S.O. and began to babble agreeably about other things.

”Politics,” he said, ”have got into a frightful state. In fact there are hardly any politics at all. We haven't had a decent rag since the war began. We all sit round cooing at each other like beastly little green lovebirds in a cage. It can't last long, of course. Sooner or later somebody's bound to break out and try to bite; but for the present Parliament's the dullest place in Europe.”

I began to feel slightly interested.

”I remember hearing,” I said, ”that you Nationalists promised not to cheer for the Germans.”

”We did more than that,” said Gorman. ”We rallied to the Empire at the very start and have kept on rallying ever since. It felt odd at first, but you get used to anything in time, even to being loyal. You'd have been surprised if you'd heard me singing, 'G.o.d Save the King' in Dublin last week.”

”Did you really?”

”Twice,” said Gorman, ”on two consecutive days.”

A world in which such things could happen might, I began to feel, be worth living in after all. I smiled feebly at Gorman. He responded with a delicious wink.

”What's happened to Home Rule?” I said.

”For the present it's hung up; a case of suspended animation; our idea is that if we're thoroughly loyal now the English people will be so grateful to us----”

”But they'll be just as grateful to the Ulstermen,” I said. ”They're loyal, too, I suppose.”

”That's the difficulty, of course,” said Gorman. ”But what else could we do? If we'd allowed the Orangemen to make a corner in loyalty at the present crisis----”

”Crisis!” I said. ”How that word brings it all back to me? Are we still going through a crisis? Fancy the word surviving!”