"It was unusual," she said, "where I came from. My brother. . ." She caught her breath sharply.
"Of course," he said quickly, snatching at a memory before it went again, "you had a brother, hadn't you? He was a friend of mine too."
"Let's stop playing this game," she said, "Please." They opened their eyes simultaneously on the suave room.
He said, "I want to leave here."
"No," she said, "stay. Please."
"Why?"
"You are safe here."
He smiled. "From more bombs?"
"From a lot of things. You are happy here, aren't you?"
"In a way."
"There" -- she seemed to indicate the whole external world beyond the garden wall -- "you weren't happy." She added slowly, "I would do anything to keep you happy. This is how you should be. This is how I like you."
"You didn't like me out there?" He tried to catch her humorously in a contradiction, but she wouldn't play.
She said, "You can't go on seeing someone unhappy all day every day without breaking."
"I wish I could remember."
"Why bother to remember?"
He said simply -- it was one of the few things of which he was certain, "Oh, of course, one's got to remember. . ."
She watched him with intensity, as though she were making up her mind to some course of action. He went on, "If only to remember you, how I talked to you. . ."
"Oh, don't," she said, 'don't," and added harshly like a declaration of war, 'dear heart."
He said triumphantly, "That was how we talked."
She nodded, keeping her eyes on him.
He said, "My dear. . ."
Her voice was dry like an old portrait: the social varnish was cracking. She said, "You once said you'd do impossible things for me."
"Yes?"
"Do a possible one. Just be quiet. Stay here a few more weeks till your memory comes back. . ."
"If you'll come often. . ."
"I'll come."
He put his mouth against hers: the action had all the uncertainty of an adolescent kiss. "My dear, my dear," he said. "Why did you say we were only friends. . .?"
"I wasn't going to bind you."
"You've bound me now."
She said slowly, as though she were astonished, "And I'm glad."
All the way upstairs to his room, he could smell her. He could have gone into any chemist's shop and picked out her powder, and he could have told in the dark the texture of her skin. The experience was as new to him as adolescent love: he had the blind passionate innocence of a boy: like a boy he was driven relentlessly towards inevitable suffering, loss and despair, and called it happiness.
7
Next morning there was no paper on his tray. He asked the woman who brought his breakfast where it was, but all she could tell him was that she supposed it hadn't been delivered.
He was touched again by the faint fear he had felt the previous afternoon when Poole came out of the sick bay, and he waited impatiently for Johns to arrive for his morning chat and smoke. But Johns didn't come. He lay in bed and brooded for half an hour and then rang his bell. It was time for his clothes to be laid out, but when the maid came she said she had no orders.
"But you don't need orders," he said. "You do it every day."
"I has to have my orders," she said.
"Tell Mr Johns I'd like to see him."
"Yes, sir" -- but Johns didn't come. It was as if a cordon sanitaire had been drawn around his room.
For another half an hour he waited doing nothing. Then he got out of bed and went to the bookcase, but there was little that promised him distraction -- only the iron rations of learned old men. Tolstoy's What I Believe, Freud's The Psycho-Analysis of Everyday Life, a biography of Rudolph Steiner. He took the Tolstoy back with him, and opening it found faint indentations in the margin where pencil marks had been rubbed out. It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable and he read:
"Remembering all the evil I have done, suffered and seen, resulting from the enmity of nations, it is clear to me that the cause of it all lay in the gross fraud called patriotism and love of one's country. . ."
There was a kind of nobility in the blind shattering dogma, just as there was something ignoble in the attempt to rub out the pencil-mark. This was an opinion to be held openly if at all. He looked farther up the page: "Christ showed me that the fifth snare depriving me of welfare is the separation we make of our own from other nations. I cannot but believe this, and therefore if in a moment of forgetfulness feelings of enmity towards a man of another nation may rise within me. . ."
But that wasn't the point, he thought; he felt no enmity towards any individual across the frontier: if he wanted to take part again, it was love which drove him and not hate. He thought: Like Johns, I am one of the little men, not interested in ideologies, tied to a flat Cambridgeshire landscape, a chalk quarry, a line of willows across the featureless fields, a market town. . . his thoughts scrabbled at the curtain. . . where he used to dance at the Saturday hops. His thoughts fell back on one face with a sense of relief: he could rest there. Ah, he thought, Tolstoy should have lived in a small country -- not in Russia, which was a continent rather than a country. And why does he write as if the worst thing we can do to our fellow-man is to kill him? Everybody has to die and everybody fears death, but when we kill a man we save him from his fear which would otherwise grow year by year. . . One doesn't necessarily kill because one hates: one may kill because one loves. . . and again the old dizziness came back as though he had been struck over the heart.
He lay back on his pillow, and the brave old man with the long beard seemed to buzz at him: "I cannot acknowledge any States or nations. . . I cannot take part. . . I cannot take part." A kind of waking dream came to him of a man -- perhaps a friend, he couldn't see his face -- who hadn't been able to take part; some private grief had isolated him and hidden him like a beard -- what was it? he couldn't remember. The war and all that happened round him had seemed to belong to other people. The old man in the beard, he felt convinced, was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them, rather than be saved alone?
But that reasoning, it could be argued, excused your enemy. And why not? he thought. It excused anyone who loved enough to kill or be killed. Why shouldn't you excuse your enemy? That didn't mean you must stand in lonely superiority, refuse to kill, and turn the intolerable cheek. "If a man offend thee. . ." there was the point -- not to kill for one's own sake. But for the sake of people you loved, and in the company of people you loved, it was right to risk damnation.
His mind returned to Anna Hilfe. When he thought of her it was with an absurd breathlessness. It was as if he were waiting again years ago outside -- wasn't it the King's Arms? -- and the girl he loved was coming down the street, and the night was full of pain and beauty and despair because one knew one was too young for anything to come of this. . .