The words came without thought, and then, seeing the hesitation or whatever it was on his face, she remembered to think and said, ‘Oh, but of course you don't want to come away from the party. Good-bye.’
But he was behind her when she said something to the host and to Mia and when she went downstairs and pulled her coat from the pile he was still there and held it up for her while she put it on. Only when the closed door shut out the noise of the party and the sinister noise of the bombers was back again deep and strong and inevitable as if it would always be filling the sky day and night, as if it were the noise of the earth's self revolving, he hesitated and seemed to hold on to the handle of the closed door so that she wondered if he would really rather have stayed. But he came with her into the street.
‘Shall we go by bus or by tube?’ she asked him. With distant surprise she heard him answer at once, ‘By tube’, when he couldn't have known which was better, not knowing where she lived.
The moon was up now showing the empty bed of the street and the black bank of the opposite houses and the whitened, moon frosted roofs which might have been snowy escarpments. It was all very drear and deserted and becoming traditional and no different from the other cities unlighted and waiting amongst their ruins under the moon. In her travelling she had seen so many cities change over from darkness to light, and she remembered suddenly and completely a harbour at nightfall, the waterfront brilliant with lights, the lost sun still ghostly gold on the Kaikoura mountains across the Strait.
‘It's queer how it grows on you,’ he said. They were walking towards the tube station.
‘What?’
‘Having one's life up there instead of on the ground.’ She saw his face lifted up to the noise of the planes and his head tilted. ‘I don't feel at home down here. I don't belong any more. There seems to be no place where I fit in. I wanted to feel like other people again, so I thought I'd go to parties and talk to women and that would make it all right. But it doesn't work out somehow. I still feel outside. I'd like to be the same as I used to be and feel like other people again.’
‘I suppose you never write anything now?’
‘Good God, no.’
What a fiendishly efficient machine war is, she thought, remembering him as he was and the writing, a bit immature but sensitive and direct and with much integrity. Now he would never write the things he might have written when he had learned to write well enough. It destroyed very thoroughly this war machine, this incinerator of individuality and talent and life, forging the sensitive and creative young into the steel fabric of death, turning them out by the million, the murder men, members of Murder Inc., the big firm, the global organization. Suddenly, she felt acutely angry with him.
‘How could you let them do it to you?’ she said. ‘How can you let us all down?’
He was not listening, walking beside her in the uniform that he wore as if he had never worn anything else. He was walking too fast for her, like a man in a hurry to get somewhere, and now he said, looking up still at the throbbing sky, ‘They've got a great night for it,’ and she said, ‘The others have too.’
‘I'd hate to be on the ground in a bad raid,’ he said. ‘I certainly would hate to be down here.’ He stared up at the sky.
‘Don't you ever think what it is you're doing up there?’ she asked him.
They were at the tube station, and going into the light she noticed again in his eyes the nervous intent look of a rider waiting for the start of a hard race, his movements rather jerky and stiff, and she began to feel sorry because something was wrong somewhere. She looked to see what was wrong, but in place of the man with the young face who looked at her with bright bloodshot eyes there came the house in another country and the trees with cormorants in them and the morepork was calling and there was no way of seeing anything else.
Then in the train it was gone and she attended to him again: but now with anger reviving in her he was only the murder man, and having no clear idea of the inside of a plane, she saw only an anonymous robot, padded, helmeted, hung about with accoutrements and surrounded by switches and dials, sowing catastrophe from a lighted box in the sky.
‘How do you ever sleep?’ she asked the man who was sitting by her in the blue clothes, here, in the underground. ‘Don't you feel frightened to go to sleep?’
‘It's our people or theirs. You know that.’
‘I know that because there's a murder committed next door all the rest of us in the street don't have to start killing our neighbours.’ ‘It's war,’ he said. ‘I simply do my job. Do you suppose I enjoy bombing civilians? Is it my fault?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If you know what you're doing and acquiesce in it that makes you guilty.’
‘No. You're not fair.’
She looked at him and saw his eyes screwed up painfully as they would be when he looked into the sun. The wrinkles around his eyes looked strange on the young face, almost like painted lines.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘The morepork was calling for you all right. This is the worst badness that could have happened to you, that you should turn into a murderer.’
The train was stopped in a station and a woman, hearing, turned in the doorway as she was getting out and said, ‘How dare you speak like that to one of our glorious boys?’ Then the doors slid shut in front of her outraged face and Ken made a sound like a laugh that was not really amused and she, sitting beside him, laughed too and said, ‘Spreading dismay and despondency among His Majesty's forces. I could be put in jail.’
And, because of the laughter, she recognized the young face for which, somewhere, she had had some affection, regretting again dimly the eyes strained and screwed up as if they were hurting, and said, ‘Don't take any notice of me; I suppose I'm a bit crazy’, falling easily into the pattern she ran her life by.
That was the easy pattern, to let people think she was a little mad. And it was true that she was a way they never would be able to understand, with the woolgathering, and now the picture and that bad luck bird that had come with Ken in the light in front of them all. She heard him say, ‘It's all right’, and then there was nothing more said and it was time to get out of the train.
The platform was crowded and most of the bunks occupied. Here and there people slept already and a man near the tea urns was wandering up and down selling buns from a tray slung on a strap round his neck. There were more shelterers than there usually were.
‘Warning's just gone,’ one of them said, close to her, as they passed, and Ken said quickly, ‘What?’
‘The warning,’ she told him, stopping because he had stood still suddenly. ‘The glorious boys in the different uniform.’
Of course it's lunacy: we've all of us gone insane, she said to herself, thinking of the planes streaming out, crossing the incoming enemy stream up there in the freezing sky. Did they signal like passing ships or just ignore one another? The demented human race destroying itself with no god or external sanity intervening. Well, let them get on with it. Let it be over soon. She was very tired of the war-world and only wanted everything to be over. It seemed not to matter any more what happened. There had been far too much happen already. Queer how tired apprehending a war made you. The war had always been there in the different countries, but it had taken London to bring her the apprehension of war. This can't go on, she thought sometimes, waking suddenly in the night or moving about a room: this can not go on. But it went on and on and she went on somehow, only feeling always more and more tired. She thought a little about how tired she was.
Walking along the platform, keeping pace with Ken who walked slowly now, the woolgathering took possession of her and all the way up in the lift she was dreaming the double stream of destruction, feeling the composite entity of the bomber-streams, gigantic cruising serpents of metal horror circling and smashing the world.