V

box at my elbow. No one had mumbled “For Christ’s sake put that light out”; which was lucky, for I felt very wide-awake. How were things going at Bazentin, I wondered. And should I be sent for tomorrow? A sort of numb funkiness invaded me. I didn’t want to die⁠—not before I’d finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow. “The quick-silvery glaze on the rivers and pools vanished; from broad mirrors of light they changed to lustreless sheets of lead.” The words fitted my mood; but there was more in them than that. I wanted to explore the book slowly. It made me long for England, and it made the War seem waste of time. Ever since my existence became precarious I had realized how little I’d used my brain in peacetime, and now I was always trying to keep my mind from stagnation. But it wasn’t easy to think one’s own thoughts while on active service, and the outlook of my companions was mostly mechanical; they dulled everything with commonplace chatter and made even the vividness of the War ordinary. My encounter with David Cromlech⁠—after three months’ separation⁠—had reawakened my relish for liveliness and originality. But I had no assurance of ever seeing him again, or of meeting anyone who could stir up my dormant apprehensions as he did. Was it a mistake, I wondered, to try and keep intelligence alive when I could no longer call my life my own? In the brown twilight of the tent I sat pondering with my one golden candle flame beside me. Last night’s talk with David now assumed a somewhat ghostlike character. The sky had been starless and clouded and the air so still that a lighted match needed no hand to shield it. Ghosts don’t strike matches, of course; and I knew that I’d smoked my pipe, and watched David’s face⁠—sallow, crooked, and whimsical⁠—when he lit a cigarette. There must have been the usual noises going on; but they were as much a part of our surroundings as the weather, and it was easy to imagine that the silence had been unbroken by the banging of field batteries and the remote tack-tack of rifles and machine-guns. Had that sombre episode been some premonition of our both getting killed? For the country had loomed limitless and strange and sullenly imbued with the Stygian