It was growing dark. Over the plain the bark of heavy guns and the crackle of rifles had stopped. Camp-fires were lighting, a circle of them hemming in the town. Even the near-by road had grown quite quiet, like any country road where the stillness is broken by the rare clatter of hoofs or the curses of some stumbling pedestrian.
His hands were pulling at mine and I leaned down over him in the darkness. He could only whisper those last few words.
One hand slipped from mine; from the other life seemed to have gone, it was so still and listless.
I leaned so close over the dark form that my face touched his. I knew that he was going from me, and I wanted to hold him back. It was so terrible for him to die this way, in this lonely field with no wise hand to help him. My useless hands would have shaken him to arouse his life again, but I stayed them.
I knew that it was futile to speak, that my voice was falling on dulled ears, but what else could I do to stir him to fight for life?
"I'll tell them--we will tell them together," I cried. "We will go home to Penelope, you and I, and they shall know how you fought. And they will be proud of you, Professor; I know they will. And how glad they will be to see you--how glad Penelope will be! Can't you hear me?"
I looked up, straining my ears for the sound of hoofs, but the road was as quiet as any country lane before dawn. I leaned over the dark form and listened, and I knew that his march was ended.
Through what quiet lanes of trivial circumstance do we move toward the momentous events of our lives? We go our way, whistling thoughtlessly; we turn a corner and stand face to face with the all-important. In my boyhood I went fishing and tumbled into a mountain stream; I overheard Boller of '89 speaking to Gladys Todd; I walked the Avenue at half past three in the afternoon and met Penelope Blight. How finely spun is the thread which holds together my story! A firmer foothold on the bank, an ear less quick to catch an undertone, a moment's delay before setting out on my daily airing, and there might have been no story to tell you; the valley might have been all the world I know and the wall of mountains my mind's horizon.
Then I come to the matter of Philip Bennett's motor. It was always breaking down. The delays that it caused as we journeyed north from Naples were annoying, but at the time these were trivial events, as we usually found a comfortable inn where we could wait while Bennett's man lay in the dust and peered up into the vitals of the machine. It was an adventurous thing to trust one's self to the mercy of the Italian highway in the untrustworthy little cars of those days, but Stephen Bennett insisted on our joining his brother, and as I was travelling back to England with him after a hard year in the Sudan I consented.