“Yes. Soldiers never know why they are fighting.”
“Don’t they?”
“They treat everyone as if they were already dead.”
“Perhaps they do.” His eyes flashed at me.
“As if they were dead themselves,” I said.
We had by this time reached the door of Alice’s house. On the steps he stopped, as if he had remembered something. He still had the knowledgeable look on his face. “I forgot,” he said. “Annabelle is with Alice this afternoon.”
“Annabelle?” I said. I wondered if he would not go in because I was there. I felt that he was even capable of knowing what had happened between Annabelle and me that morning. Then I remembered what had happened between her and him. “What is Annabelle doing with Alice?” I said.
“What? Just seeing her. I don’t think I should go in at the moment, perhaps.”
“All right,” I said. We walked away again. I was beyond even being surprised at his calmness about Annabelle, although I felt, with a shock, that there was something uncanny about it.
“I wonder if you would be very kind and do something for me,” he said.
“Of course.” He seemed embarrassed, and I thought he was going to ask me something about Annabelle.
“I wonder if you would very kindly put me up in your room for a short while until I go home. I remember staying with you before, and I will only be sleeping there.”
“Of course,” I said. “You are leaving Alice’s?”
“Yes, I think so.” I did not ask why. It seemed extraordinary that he should not then have preferred to go to a hotel. “That is really very kind of you,” he said.
We stopped. I felt that I should leave him, but there was an awkwardness that held us. “You are going away soon?” I said.
“Yes. I saw in the papers to-day that there has been trouble in my island.”
“Trouble?”
“Rioting. I must get back for it.”
“Will we ever see you again?”
“I hope so,” he said.
“You all seem to be intent on killing yourselves.”
“Didn’t we say a long time ago that we were already dead?” he said, flashing his eyes again at me.
I said good-bye to him. As I turned to go he stopped me; and then, almost formally, with great embarrassment again, he said, “I must thank you for what you did for my wife before she died, you cannot know how much it meant to us, I am sorry I have not said this before to you, but I want to thank you now and tell you how important I think it was. Perhaps I have to thank you for many things.”
“No,” I said. “No.” I found myself as embarrassed as he.
“That is why I tell you not to worry,” he said.
He turned to go. I did not understand him, I did not know why I should not worry, but I was filled with such a peculiar remorse that I found myself running after him, saying, “Marius, tell me, am I a lunatic?”
“No,” he said, “surely, I don’t think so at all.”
When I got back to my room I found a message from Peter asking me to ring him up. I did so. He was out.
I sat on the edge of the bed. I thought: It would have been easier if Marius had said I was mad.
All confidence had gone. I could not remember it. Marius had talked about a war, and if there was war then I was a refugee and not a participant. I was lost, bewildered — a man wandering up a road with his belongings left behind him.
The road was crawling as if with ghosts. The armies went past, heedless, in a different direction. What war? The war between good and evil, light and darkness — was there really a world of which I knew nothing? A world in which a war was being fought by people to whom it was the only reality, who marched and acted and who in the intervals could afford to be frivolous because frivolity is part of war, the jokes of serious people are part of their armoury. If the war was true, the world of which I knew nothing, then I could forgive them their jokes. But I was still a fugitive, in the wrong direction.
I rang up Peter again. This time he answered. As I listened to his voice the road thickened until it was difficult to keep up on the surface.
“I had to tell you,” he said, “it was really most extraordinary. I have been talking to Father Jack, you know, like you suggested, we went on from where we left off at breakfast, and he says he absolutely agrees with me, agrees with me entirely, that it’s all right for me to be as I am, to go on as I am, don’t you think that’s odd? I said that faith seemed nonsense to me, all the contradictions and so on, and he said, yes, of course, to some people it does; and I said Is that all right then? And he said Yes, indeed it is; and then I said about just sticking to right and wrong, and my conscience, or whatever it is, and he said, Good, that’s perfect, and gave me a pat on the back. Don’t you think that’s odd?”
“He told you not to worry?” I said.
“Yes, exactly, he is really a most sensible man, he understood me directly, he has an extraordinary faculty for knowing what I mean, which is more than most people do. Isn’t it funny? Perhaps his racket’s all right after all, perhaps it’s all quite proper. These priests are really far less bigoted than one thinks.”
“Did he talk about a war?”
“What war?”
“Nothing. Marius talks about a war.”
“Oh that, yes, that’s all about the spirit, it is very complicated, I don’t understand a word.”
“What spirit?”
“But that doesn’t matter either, you see, because everyone’s got this spirit, apparently, even me — isn’t it funny? — and we battle like anything.”
“How the devil can one battle without being in an army?”
“But that’s just it, one fights the devil, people do it in different ways, Father Jack says so, his way is not better than anyone else’s.”
“He said that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“He did, so that makes his racket just an ordinary one, like any of the others.”
“I think he’s mad.”
“Why? It makes it all right for you and me.”
“I don’t want it to be all right.”
“You can’t have it both ways. What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t believe a word that any of them say.”
“It seems all right to me. And it’s one in the eye for Annabelle.”
“Why?”
“She won’t like it at all.”
“It was better when they thought us crazy.”
“I’m quite happy,” he said. I rang off.
I went back to my bed. I was in the ditch now, with the ghosts of the road on top of me. If everything was in terms of war then all was fair in terms of the war, and they were capable of anything. Truth became propaganda, love became defence-work, actions might be camouflage or bluff. Looking back on the afternoon it seemed that Marius might have meant anything by asking if he could stay with me, Annabelle might have meant anything by visiting Alice, Father Manners might have meant anything by talking to Peter. My suspicions rose in a body until I was suffocated by what I did not understand. I found that I had even lost the power of introspection, since I was as suspicious of myself as of others. Nothing was real — the chairs and tables might be phantoms — the world was haunted by a world that was not there. This haunting, this intrusion of what was deathly, was worse than the loneliness that I had known before. Now I felt the necessity for company like someone who has been frightened. It was with an enormous relief that I remembered Marius was coming to stay with me. Perhaps that was why he was coming. Questions were futile.
But there was the whole of the evening in front of me. Alone it was not bearable. Aloneness is insufferable in a world of ghosts. I went out into the street, and walked, rapidly. I found myself going towards Alice’s house. I thought that there I might find Annabelle, or if I did not I would at least find with Alice a world which was familiar to me.