Part 63 (1/2)

The low white ceiling sagged and bulged above him. For three nights the room had been as if Nicky and Veronica had never gone from it. They had compelled him to think of them. They had lain where he lay, falling asleep in each other's arms.

The odd thing had been that his acute and vivid sense of them had in no way troubled him. It had been simply there like some exquisite atmosphere, intensifying his peace. He had had the same feeling he always had when Veronica was with him. He had liked to lie with his head on their pillow, to touch what they had touched, to look at the same things in the same room, to go in and out through the same doors over the same floors, remembering their hands and feet and eyes, and saying to himself: ”They did this and this”; or, ”That must have pleased them.”

It ought to have been torture to him; and he could not imagine why it was not.

And now, on this fourth night, he had no longer that sense of Nicky and Veronica together. The room had emptied itself of its own memory and significance. He was aware of nothing but the bare, spiritual s.p.a.ce between him and Nicky. He lay contemplating it steadily and without any horror.

He thought: ”This ends it. Of course I shall go out now. I might have known that this would end it. _He_ knew.”

He remembered how Nicky had come to him in his room that night in August. He could see himself sitting on the side of his bed, half-dressed, and Nicky standing over him, talking.

Nicky had taken it for granted even then that he would go out some time.

He remembered how he had said, ”Not yet.”

He thought: ”Of course; this must have been what he meant.”

And presently he fell asleep, exhausted and at the same time appeased.

It was morning.

Michael's sleep dragged him down; it drowned and choked him as he struggled to wake.

Something had happened. He would know what it was when he came clear out of this drowning.

Now he remembered. Nicky was killed. Last Sunday. He knew that. But that wasn't all of it. There was something else that followed on--

Suddenly his mind leaped on it. He was going out. He would be killed too. And because he was going out, and because he would be killed, he was not feeling Nicky's death so acutely as he should have thought he would have felt it. He had been let off that.

He lay still a moment, looking at the thing he was going to do, feeling a certain pleasure in its fitness. Drayton and Reveillaud and Lawrence had gone out, and they had been killed. Ellis and Mitch.e.l.l and Monier-Owen were going out and they would certainly be killed. Wadham had gone out and young Vereker, and they also would be killed.

Last Sunday it was Nicky. Now it must be he.

His mind acknowledged the rightness of the sequence without concern. It was aware that his going depended on his own will. But never in all his life had he brought so little imagination to the act of willing.

He got up, bathed in the river, dressed, and ate his breakfast. He accepted each moment as it arrived, without imagination or concern.

Then his mother's letter came. Frances wrote, among other things: ”I know how terribly you will be feeling it, because I know how you cared for him. I wish I could comfort you. We could not bear it, Michael, if we were not so proud of him.”

He answered this letter at once. He wrote: ”I couldn't bear it either, if I were not going out. But of course I'm going now.”

As he signed himself, ”Your loving Michael,” he thought: ”That settles it.” Yet, if he had considered what he meant by settling it he would have told himself that he meant nothing; that last night had settled it; that his resolution had been absolutely self-determined and absolutely irrevocable then, and that his signature gave it no more sanct.i.ty or finality than it had already. If he was conscript, he was conscript to his own will.

He went out at once with his letter, though he knew that the post did not leave Renton for another five hours.

It was the sliding of this light thing and its fall into the letter-box that shook him into realization of what he had done and of what was before him. He knew now why he was in such a hurry to write that letter and to post it. By those two slight acts, not dreadful nor difficult in themselves, he had put it out of his power to withdraw from the one supremely difficult and dreadful act. A second ago, while the letter was still in his hands, he could have backed out, because he had not given any pledge. Now he would have to go through with it. And he saw clearly for the first time what it was that he would have to go through.

He left the village and went up to Renton Moor and walked along the top for miles, without knowing or caring where he went, and seeing nothing before him but his own act and what must come afterwards. By to-morrow, or the next day at the latest, he would have enlisted; by six months, at the latest, three months if he had what they called ”luck,” he would be in the trenches, fighting and killing, not because he chose, but because he would be told to fight and kill. By the simple act of sending that letter to his mother he was committed to the whole ghastly business.

And he funked it. There was no use lying to himself and saying that he didn't funk it.