CHAPTER II

I

I have a preposterous weakness for youth, and I fancy there is something
in me which makes it accept me as a coæval. It may be my profession. If
you are a busy lawyer without any outside ambitions you spend your days
using one bit of your mind, and the rest remains comparatively young and
unstaled. I had no wife and few near relations, and while I was daily
growing narrower in my outlook on the present and the future I cherished
a wealth of sentiment about the past. I welcomed anything which helped
me to recapture the freshness of boyhood, and Vernon was like a spring
wind in my arid life. Presently we forgot that I was nearly twice his
age, and slipped into the manner of contemporaries. He was far more at
his ease with me than with the men of his own year. I came to think that
I was the only person in the world who _knew_ him, for though he had an
infinity of acquaintances and a good many people who ranked as friends,
I suppose I was his only comrade. For I alone knew the story of his
dreams.

My flat in Down Street became his headquarters in London, and I never
knew when he would stick his head into my Temple chambers and insist on
our dining or lunching together. In the following winter I went to
Oxford occasionally, nominally to visit Charles; but my nephew led a
much occupied life, and it generally ended by my spending my time with
Vernon. I kept a horse with the Bicester that season and we hunted
occasionally together, and we had sometimes a walk which filled the
short winter day, and dined thereafter and talked far into the night. I
was anxious to learn how his contemporaries regarded him, and I soon
found that he had a prodigious reputation, which was by no means
explained by his athletic record. He at once impressed and puzzled his
little world. I think it was the sense of brooding power about him which
attracted people and also kept them at a respectful distance. His
ridiculous good looks and his gentle courtesy seemed to mark him out for
universal popularity, but there was too much austerity for a really
popular man. He had odd ascetic traits. He never touched wine now, he
detested loose talk, and he was a little intolerant of youthful follies.
Not that there was anything of the prig in him–only that his character
seemed curiously formed and mature. For all his urbanity he had a plain,
almost rugged, sagacity in ordinary affairs, a tough core like steel
harness under a silk coat. That, I suppose, was the Calvinism in his
blood. Had he been a less brilliant figure, he would probably have been
set down as “pi.”

Charles never professed to understand him, and contented himself with
prophesying that “old Vernon would be the devil of a swell some day.” On
inquiry I found that none of his friends forecast any special career for
him; it would have seemed to them almost disrespectful to condescend
upon such details. It was not what Vernon would do that fired their
sluggish imaginations, but what they dimly conceived that he already
was.

There was the same fastidiousness about all his ways. I have never known
a better brain more narrowly limited in its range. He was a first-class
“pure” scholar, and had got a Craven and been _proxime_ for the
Hertford. But he was quite incapable of spreading himself, and his
prospects looked bad for “Greats” since he seemed unable to acquire the
smattering of loose philosophy demanded by that school. He was strictly
circumscribed in his general reading; I set it down at first to
insensitiveness, but came soon to think it fastidiousness. If he could
not have exactitude and perfection in his knowledge, he preferred to
remain ignorant. I saw in him the makings of a lawyer. Law was just the
subject for a finical, exact, and scrupulous mind like his. Charles had
once in his haste said that he was not a man of the world, and Charles
had been right. He was a man of his own world, not the ordinary one. So
with his intellectual interests. He would make his own culture, quite
regardless of other people. I fancy that he felt that his overmastering
private problem made it necessary to husband the energies of his mind.

During that year I think he was quite happy and at peace about the
dream. He had now stopped hoping or fearing; the thing had simply become
part of him, like his vigorous young body, his slow kindliness, his
patient courage. He rarely wanted to talk of it, but it was so much in
my thoughts that I conducted certain researches of my own. I began by
trying the psychological line, and plagued those of my acquaintances who
had any knowledge of that dismal science. I cannot say I got much
assistance. You see I had to state a hypothetical case, and was always
met by a demand to produce the patient for cross-examination–a
reasonable enough request, which of course I could not comply with. One
man, who was full of the new Vienna doctrine, talked about “complexes”
and “repressions” and suggested that the dream came from a child having
been shut up by accident in a dark room. “If you can dig the memory of
it out of his subconsciousness, you will lay that ghost,” he said. I
tried one evening to awake Vernon’s earliest recollections, but nothing
emerged. The dream itself was the furthest-back point in his
recollection. In any case I didn’t see how such an explanation would
account for the steady development of the thing and its periodicity. I
thought I might do better with family history, and I gave up a good deal
of my leisure to the Douglas-Ernotts. There was nothing to be made of
the Ernotts–gross utilitarian Whigs every one of them. The Douglas
strain had more mystery in it, but the records of his branch of the
great Scottish house were scanty, and sadly impersonal. Douglases many
had endured imprisonment and gone to the scaffold, but history showed
them as mere sounding names, linked to forays and battles and strange
soubriquets, but as vague as the heroes of Homer. As for the Milburnes,
I got an ancient aunt who had known Vernon’s father to give me her
recollections, and a friend on the Northern Circuit collected for me the
Lancashire records. The first of them had been a small farmer somewhere
on the Ribble; the second had become a mill-owner; and the third, in the
early nineteenth century, had made a great fortune, had been a friend of
William Wilberforce and later of Richard Cobden, and had sat in the
first Reform parliament. As I looked at the portrait of that whiskered
reformer, bland and venerable in his stiff linen and broadcloth, or at
the early Millais of his son, the bearded Evangelical, I wondered what
in them had gone to the making of Vernon. It was like seeking for the
ancestry of a falcon among barnyard fowls.

II

In the spring of 1914 I badly needed a holiday, and Lamancha asked me to
go cruising in his yacht. He gave me permission to bring Vernon, whom he
knew slightly, for I wanted to be near him on the first Monday of April.
We were to join the yacht at Constantinople, and cruise through the
Northern Ægean to Athens, and then by way of the Corinth canal to Corfu,
where we would catch the steamer for Brindisi and so home. Vernon was at
first a little disinclined, for he had a notion that he ought to be at
Severns, but when he allowed himself to be persuaded he grew very keen
about the trip, for he had been little out of England.

He and I travelled by the Orient Express to Constantinople, and after
three days there and one day at Brousa shaped our course westward. We
landed one morning on the Gallipoli peninsula, and found birds’ eggs on
Achi Baba where, in a year’s time, there was to be nothing but barbed
wire and trenches. We spent a day at Lemnos, which at that time few
people had visited except the British Navy, and then turned south. On
the first Monday of April we had half a gale, an uncomfortable thing in
those shallow seas. It blew itself out in the afternoon, and after tea
we anchored for the night under the lee of a big island. There was a
little bay carved out of the side of a hill; the slopes were covered
with heath and some kind of scrub, and the young green of crops showed
in the clearings. Among the thyme of the nearest headland a flock of
goats was browsing, shepherded by a little girl in a saffron skirt, who
sang shrilly in snatches. After the yeasty Ægean the scene was an idyll
of pastoral peace. Vernon had all day shown signs of restlessness, and
he now proposed a walk; so, leaving the others playing bridge, we two
were put ashore in the dinghy.

We walked northward towards the other horn of the bay, past little
closes of fruit blossom, and thickets of wildwood, and stony patches of
downland bright with anemones and asphodel. It was a strange, haunted
world, bathed in a twilight of gold and amethyst, filled with a thousand
aromatic scents, and very silent except for the wash of the waves and a
far-off bleating of goats. Neither of us wanted to talk, being content
to drink in the magic of the evening. Vernon walked like a man in a
dream, stopping now and then to lift his head and stare up the long
scrubby ravines to the sharp line of the crest.

Suddenly a cuckoo’s note broke into the stillness and echoed along the
hillside. When it died away it seemed to be answered by a human voice,
sweet and high and infinitely remote, a voice as fugitive as a scent or
a colour.

Vernon stopped short.

“Listen to that,” he cried. “It is the Spring Song. This has probably
been going on here since the beginning of time. They say that nothing
changes in these islands–only they call Demeter the Virgin Mary and
Dionysos St. Dionysius.”

He sat down on a boulder and lit his pipe. “Let’s burn tobacco to the
gods,” he said. “It’s too enchanted to hurry through…. I suppose it’s
the way I’ve been educated, but I could swear I’ve known it all before.
This is the season of the Spring Festival, and you may be sure it’s the
same here to-day as it was a thousand years before Homer. The winter is
over, and the Underworld has to be appeased, and then the Goddess will
come up from the shades.”

I had never heard Vernon talk like this before, and I listened with some
curiosity. I am no classical scholar, but at that moment I too felt the
spell of a very ancient and simple world.

“This was the beginning of the year for the Greeks, remember,” he went
on–“for the Greeks as we know them, and for the old Mediterranean
peoples before them whose ritual they absorbed. The bones of that ritual
never altered…. You have to begin with purification–to feed the
ghosts of the dead in the pot-holes with fireless and wine-less
sacrifices and so placate them, and to purify your own souls and bodies
and the earth by which you live. You have your purgation herbs like
buckthorn and agnus castus, and you have your _pharmakos_, your
scapegoat, who carries away all impurities. And then, when that is done,
you are ready for the coming of the Maiden. It is like Easter after Good
Friday–the festival after the fast and penitence. It is always the
woman that simple folk worship–the Mother who is also the Maid. Long
ago they called her Pandora or Persephone, and now they call her the
Blessed Virgin, but the notion is the same–the sinless birth of the
divine. You may be sure it is she whom the peasants in this island
worship, as their fathers did three thousand years ago–not God the
Father.

“The Greeks had only the one goddess,” he went on, “though she had many
names. Later they invented the Olympians–that noisy, middle-class
family party–and the priests made a great work with their male gods,
Apollo and the like. But the woman came first, and the woman remained.
You may call her Demeter, or Aphrodite, or Hera, but she is the same,
the Virgin and the Mother, the ‘mistress of wild things,’ the priestess
of the new birth in spring. Semele is more than Dionysos, and even to
sophisticated Athens the Mailed Virgin of the Acropolis was more than
all the pantheon…. Don’t imagine it was only a pretty fancy. The thing
had all the beauty of nature, and all the terror too.” He flung back his
head and quoted some sonorous Greek.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Euripides,” he replied. “It has been well translated,” and he quoted:

“‘For her breath is on all that hath life, and she floats in the air
Bee-like, death-like, a wonder.’

“I can see it all,” he cried. “The sacred basket, the honey and oil and
wine, the torches crimsoning the meadows, the hushed, quiet people
waiting on the revelation. They are never more than a day or two from
starvation all the winter, and the coming of the Maiden is a matter for
them of life and death. They wait for her as devout souls to-day wait
for the Easter Resurrection. I can hear the ritual chant and the thin,
clear music of the flutes…. Yes, but they were seeing things which are
now hid from us–Dionysos with his thyrsus, and goat-feet in the
thickets, and the shadows of dancing nymphs! If you starve for three
months and put your soul into waiting for the voice from heaven, you are
in the mood for marvels. Terror and horror, perhaps, but unspeakable
beauty, too, and a wild hope. That was the Greek religion, not the
Olympians and their burnt offerings. And it is the kind of religion that
never dies.”

I thought this pretty good for the scion of an evangelical family, and I
said so.

He laughed. “It isn’t my own creed, you know. I dislike all kinds of
priestcraft. But, though I’m a stout Protestant, I’m inclined to think
sometimes that it is a pity that we have departed from the practice of
all other religions and left out the Mother of God…. Let’s go on–I
want to see what is on the other side of the cape.”

Beyond the little headland we came suddenly on a very different scene.
Here was the harbour of the island. Beside a rude quay some fisher-boats
lay at anchor with their brown sails furled. Along the water-front ran a
paved terrace, a little dilapidated and with bushes growing in the
cracks of the stones. Above rose a great building, showing to seaward as
a blank white wall pierced with a few narrow windows. At first sight I
took it for a monastery, but a second glance convinced me that its
purpose had never been religious. It looked as if it had once been
fortified, and the causeway between it and the sea may have mounted
guns. Most of it was clearly very old, but the architecture was a
jumble, showing here the enriched Gothic of Venice, and there the
straight lines and round arches of the East. It had once, I conjectured,
been the hold of some Venetian sea-king, then the palace of a Turkish
conqueror, and was now, perhaps, the manor-house of this pleasant
domain. The owners, whoever they might be, were absent, for not a
chimney smoked.

We passed the quay and wandered along the great terrace, which was as
solidly masoned as a Roman road. For a little the house hung sheer above
us, its walls level with the rock, with in three places flights of steps
from the causeway ending in small postern doors. Obviously the main
entrance was on the other side. There were no huts to be seen, and no
sign of life except a little group of fishermen below on the shore, who
were sitting round a fire over which a pot was boiling. As we continued
along the terrace beyond the house we came to orchards and olive yards,
no doubt part of the demesne, and had a glimpse of a rugged coast
running out into the sunset.

The place impressed even my sluggish fancy. This great silent castle in
the wilds, hung between sky and earth, and all rosy in the last fires of
the sun, seemed insubstantial as a dream. I should not have been
surprised if it had vanished like a mirage and left us staring at a
bare hillside. Only the solid blocks of the causeway bound us to
reality. Here, beyond doubt, men had lived and fought far back in the
ages. The impression left on my mind was of a place inhabited for æons,
sunk for the moment in sleep, but liable to awake suddenly to a fierce
life. As for Vernon he seemed positively rapt.

“There’s your castle in Spain,” he cried. “Odd thing! but I seem to have
seen all this before. I knew before we turned the corner that there were
olive trees there, and that the rocks tumbled just in that way into the
cove. Listen!”

The sound of voices drifted up from the beach, and there was a snatch of
a song.

“That’s Antiphilos of Byzantium–you remember in the _Anthology_–the
fisher-boys singing round the broth-pot. Lord! what a haunted spot! I’d
like to spend the night here.”

I can give no reason for it, but I suddenly felt a strange uneasiness,
which made me turn back and stride at a good pace along the terrace. We
seemed to have blundered outside the ordinary natural world. I had a
feverish desire to get away from the shadow of that pile of masonry, to
get beyond the headland and in sight of the yacht. The place was
wonderful, secret, beautiful, yet somehow menacing. Vernon clearly felt
nothing of all this, for he grumbled at my haste. “Hang it, we’re not
walking for a wager,” he complained. “There’s loads of time before
dinner…. I want to stay on here a bit. I never saw such a place.”

At the beginning of the paved terrace, close to the quay, we came
suddenly upon two men, probably from the fishermen’s party we had seen
on the shore. They were well-set-up fellows, with handsome, clear-cut
faces, for the true Greek strain is still found in the islands. We came
on them by surprise as we turned the corner of a rock, and they may have
thought from our direction that we were coming from the house. Anyhow
they seemed to get the fright of their lives. Both leaped aside and
looked at us with startled angry eyes. Then they flung up their right
hands; and for a moment I thought they were going to attack us.

But they contented themselves with spitting on their breasts and each
holding out a clenched fist with the little finger and the thumb
extended. I had seen this before–the ancient protection against the
evil eye. But what impressed me was the expression in their faces. It
was at Vernon that they stared, and when their stare moved from him it
took in the pile of the house above. They seemed to connect us in some
way with the house, and in their eyes there was an almost animal fear
and hate…. I looked after them when they had passed, and observed that
they were hurrying with bent heads up the path which may have led to
their village.

Vernon laughed. “Queer chaps! They looked as scared as if they had seen
Pan.”

“I don’t like this place,” I told him when we were approaching the
dinghy. “Some of your infernal gods and goddesses have got loose in it.
I feel as if I want to run.”

“Hullo!” he cried. “You’re getting as impressionable as a minor poet….
Hark! There it is again! Do you hear? The Spring Song?”

But the thin notes which drifted down from the upland no longer seemed
to me innocent. There was something horrible about that music.

* * * * *

Next morning, when we were steaming south in calm weather with the
island already dim behind us, I found Vernon smoking peacefully on deck
and looking at sea-birds through a glass. He nodded gaily as I sat down
beside him.

“I had the dream all right–one room nearer. But the room in which I
wait has changed. It must be due to being out here, for hitherto I’ve
always spent April in England. I suppose I furnished it unconsciously
with things I had seen at home–there was a big lacquer cabinet for one
thing, and something like pictures or tapestry on the walls–and there
were great silver fire-dogs. But now it’s quite bare. The same room of
course–I couldn’t mistake it–but scarcely any furniture in it except a
dark lump in a corner…. Only the fire-dogs are the same…. Looks as
if the decks were being cleared for action.”

I had expected to find him a little heavy about the eyes, but he
appeared as fresh as if he had just come from a morning swim, and his
voice had a boyish carelessness.

“Do you know,” he said, “I’ve lost every scrap of funk or nervousness
about the dream? It’s a privilege, not an incubus. Six years to wait! I
wish I knew how I was going to put them in. It will be a dull business
waiting.”

III

Fate contrived that to Vernon, as to several million others, the next
four years should scarcely deserve the name of dull. By the middle of
August I was being cursed by a Guards sergeant in Chelsea barrack yard,
and Vernon was training with his Yeomanry somewhere in Yorkshire.

My path was plain compared to that of many honest men. I was a bachelor
without ties, and though I was beyond the statutory limit for service I
was always pretty hard trained, and it was easy enough to get over the
age difficulty. I had sufficient standing in my profession to enable me
to take risks. But I am bound to say I never thought of that side. I
wanted, like everybody else, to do something for England, and I wanted
to do something violent. For me to stay at home and serve in some legal
job would have been a thousand times harder than to go into the
trenches. Like everybody else, too, I thought the war would be short,
and my chief anxiety was lest I should miss the chance of fighting. I
was to learn patience and perspective during four beastly years.

I went to France in October ’14, and Vernon dined with me before I
started. He had got a curious notion into his head. He thought that the
war would last for full six years, and his reason was that he was
convinced that his dream had to do with it. The opening of the last door
would be on the battlefield–of that he was convinced. The consequence
was that he was in no hurry. My nephew Charles, who was in the same
Yeomanry, spent his days pleading to be sent abroad and trying to
exchange into any unit he thought would get away first. On the few
occasions I met him he raved like a lunatic about the imbecility of a
Government that kept him kicking his heels in England. But Vernon, the
night he dined with me, was as placid as Buddha. “I’m learning my job,”
he said, “and I’ve a mighty lot to learn. I ought to be a fair soldier
in six years’ time–just when the crisis is due.” But he was very
anxious about me, and wanted to get into the Guards to be beside me.
Only his fatalism kept him from agitating for a change, for he felt that
as he had begun in the Yeomanry, Providence most likely meant him to
continue there. He fussed a good deal about how we were to correspond,
for I seemed to have taken the place of his family. But on the whole I
was happy about him, his purpose was so clear and his mind so perfectly
balanced. I had stopped thinking seriously about the dream, for it
seemed only a whimsy in the middle of so many urgent realities.

I needn’t tell you the kind of time I had in France. It was a long
dismal grind, but I had the inestimable advantage of good health, and I
was never a day off duty because of sickness. I suppose I enjoyed it in
a sense; anyhow I got tremendously keen about my new profession, and
rose in it far quicker than I deserved. I was lucky, too. As you know, I
stopped something in every big scrap–at Festubert, Loos, Ginchy, Third
Ypres, Cambrai, and Bapaume–so that I might have covered my sleeve with
wound-stripes if I had been so minded. But none of the damage was
serious, and I can hardly find the marks of it to-day. I think my worst
trial was that for more than three years I never had a sight of Vernon.

He went out in the summer of ’15 to the Dardanelles and was in the
Yeomanry fight at Suvla, where a bit of shrapnel made rather a mess of
his left shoulder. After that he was employed on various staff jobs, and
during ’16 was engaged in some kind of secret service in the Ægean and
the Levant. I heard from him regularly, but of course he never spoke of
his work. He told me he had learned modern Greek and could speak it like
a native, and I fancy he had a hand in Venizelos’s revolution. Then he
went back to his regiment, and was in the “Broken Spurs” division when
the Yeomanry were dismounted. He was wounded again in Palestine in ’17,
just before the taking of Jerusalem, and after that was second in
command of a battalion.

When I was on leave in February ’18 Charles dined with me at the Club–a
much older and wiser Charles, with an empty sleeve pinned to his tunic,
who was now employed in home training.

“It’s a bloody and disgusting war,” said my nephew, “and if any fellow
says he likes it, you can tell him from me that he’s a liar. There’s
only one man I ever met who honestly didn’t mind it, and that was old
Vernon, and everybody knows that he’s cracked.”

He expatiated on the exact nature of Vernon’s lunacy.

“Cracked–as–cracked, and a very useful kind of insanity, too. I often
wish I had half his complaint. He simply didn’t give a hang for the old
war. Wasn’t interested in it, if you see what I mean. Oh, brave as
you-be-damned, of course, but plenty of other chaps were brave. His was
the most cold-blooded, unearthly kind of courage. I’ve seen the same
thing in men who were sick of life and wanted to be killed and knew they
were going to be killed, but Vernon wasn’t that sort. He had no notion
of being killed–always planning out the future and talking of what he
was going to do after the war. As you know, he got badly mauled at
Suvla, and he nearly croaked with malaria in Crete, and he had his head
chipped at Neby Samwil, so he didn’t bear what you might call a charmed
life. But some little bird had whispered in his ear that he wasn’t going
to be killed, and he believed that bird. You never saw a fellow in your
life so much at his ease in a nasty place.

“It wasn’t that he was a fire-eater,” Charles went on. “He never went
out to look for trouble. It was simply that it made no difference to him
where he was or what he was doing–he was the same composed old fish,
smiling away, and keeping quiet and attending to business, as if he
thought the whole thing rather foolishness.”

“You describe a pretty high class of soldier,” I said. “I can’t
understand why he hasn’t gone quicker up the ladder.”

“I can,” said Charles emphatically. “He was a first-class battalion
officer but he wasn’t a first-class soldier. The trouble with him, as I
say, is that he wasn’t interested in the war. He had no initiative, you
understand–always seemed to be thinking about something else. It’s like
Rugby football. A man may be a fine player according to the rules, but
unless his heart is in the business and he can think out new tactics for
himself he won’t be a great player. Vernon wasn’t out to do anything
more than the immediate situation required. You might say he wasn’t
dead-set enough on winning the war.”

I detected in Charles a new shrewdness. “How did the others get on with
him?” I asked.

“The men believed in him and would have followed him into hell, and of
course we all respected him. But I can’t say he was exactly popular. Too
dashed inhuman for that. He ought to fall in love with a chorus-girl and
go a regular mucker. Oh, of course, I like him tremendously and know
what a rare good fellow he is! But the ordinary simple-minded,
deserving lad jibs at Sir Galahad crossed with the low-church parson
and the ‘Varsity don.”

The Broken Spurs came to France in the early summer of ’18, but I had no
chance of meeting them. My life was rather feverish during the last
weeks of the campaign, for I was chief staff-officer to my division, and
we were never much out of the line. Then, as you know, I nearly came by
my end in September, when the Boche made quite a good effort in the way
of a gas attack. It was a new gas, which we didn’t understand, and I
faded away like the grin of the Cheshire cat, and was pretty ill for a
time in a base hospital. Luckily it didn’t do me any permanent harm, but
my complexion will be greenery-yallery till the day of my death.

I awoke to consciousness in a tidy little bed to learn that the war was
all but over and the Boche hustling to make peace. It took me some days
to get my head clear and take notice, and then, one morning, I observed
the man in the bed next to me. His head was a mass of bandages, but
there was something about the features that showed which struck me as
familiar. As luck would have it, it turned out to be Vernon. He had been
badly hit, when commanding his battalion at the crossing of the Scheldt,
and for a day or two had been in grave danger. He was recovering all
right, but for a time neither of us was permitted to talk, and we used
to lie and smile at each other and think of all the stories we would
presently tell.

It was just after we got the news of the Armistice that we were allowed
to say how d’ye do. We were as weak as kittens, but I, at any rate, felt
extraordinarily happy. We had both come through the war without serious
damage, and a new world lay before us. To have Vernon beside me put the
coping-stone on my contentment, and I could see that he felt the same. I
remember the thrill I had when we could stretch out our arms and shake
hands.

Slowly we began to build up each other’s records for the four years. I
soon knew, what I had guessed before, the reason of that inhuman
composure which Charles had described. Vernon had had a complete
assurance that his day of fate was not due yet awhile, and therefore the
war had taken a second place in his thoughts. Most men who fought bore
the marks of it in harder lines about the mouth and chin and older eyes.
But Vernon had kept his youth intact. His face had always had a certain
maturity beyond his years, and his eyes had been curiously watchful.
These traits were perhaps slightly intensified, but otherwise I noticed
no difference.

“You remember what I told you when we last met in October ’14?” he said.
“I was wrong and I’m rather sorry. I thought the war would last for six
years, and that the last stage of my dream would be in the field. That
would have been such a simple and right solution. As it is, I must
wait.”

I asked if the dream had come regularly in the past four years.

“Quite regularly,” was the answer. “The room hasn’t changed either,
except that the dark shadow in the corner has moved, so I think it must
be a human figure. The place is quite bare and empty now, except for the
silver fire-dogs…. I think there is a little window in the wall,
rather high up.”

“You have only two years more to wait,” I said, “less–a year and a
half.” It was then November ’18.

“I know…. But I am impatient again. I thought the climax would come in
the war, so I stopped speculating about it…. I thought I would be
called on as a soldier to do something very difficult, and I was quite
ready…. But that has all gone, and I am back in the fog. I must think
it all out again from the beginning.”