In a little while the silence of the Corporal began to trouble Melia. A cold hand crept into his. "What is it, love?" she said softly.
Not daring to look at her, he kept his eyes fixed on the sky.
"What is it, love--tell me?" He hardly knew the voice for hers; not until that moment had he heard her use it; but it had the power to ease just a little the intolerable pressure of his thoughts.
"I was wondering," he said slowly, at last, "whether it would not have been better never to have been born."
She shivered, not at his words, but at the gray look on his face.
"Stanning said the night before he went he thought that taking it altogether it would have been better if there had never been a human race at all. I'll never forget that last talk with him, not if I live to be a hundred--which I shall not." The Corporal had begun to think his thoughts aloud. "You see, he knew then that his number was up. I can see him settin' there, Mother, just as you are now, lookin' at that old sunset, his back to that old canal--the Yser, I think they call it--an' stinkin' it was, fair cruel. 'Auntie,' he said suddenlike, 'tell me what brought you into this?' I said, 'No, boy'--just like a child he was as he set there--'it's for me to ask _you_ that question. You're a big gun, you know, a shining light; I'm a never-was-er.' That seemed to make him laugh; he was one that could always raise a laugh, even when he felt most solemn. 'I come of a long stock of high-nosed old Methodists,' he said. 'Always made a thing they call Conscience their watchword and fetish. There was a Stanning went to the stake for it in the time of Bloody Mary; there was another helped Oliver Cromwell to cut the head off King Charles. A poisonous, uncomfortable crowd, and all my life they've seemed to come back and worry me just at the times I should have been most pleased to do without them. People talk about free will--but there isn't such a thing, my dear.'
"I allowed that there wasn't in my case. Then I told him about Troop Sergeant Major Hollis, who fought at Waterloo. 'Yes,' he said, 'yours is an old name in the city, older than mine, I dare say.' 'Well,' I said, 'according to Bazeley's Annals there was a William Hollis who was mayor of the borough in the year of the Spanish Armada.' 'Good for you, Auntie,' he said, chaffing-like; he was a rare one for chaff. 'One up to you. Then,' he said, 'there was William Hollis who was "some" poet in the eighteenth century, who wrote the famous romantic poem, "The Love Lorn Lady of Corfield." Still,' he said, 'these things don't explain you dragging your old bones to rot out here.' 'They do in a way, though,' I said. 'When we come up against a big thing it isn't us that really matters, it's what's at the back of us. I used to set in my old garden on The Rise,' I said, 'in those early days when those dirty dogs opposite was just beginning to wipe their feet on Europe. And I said to myself, Bill Hollis, how would _you_ like it if they broke through the fence into your garden, trampling your young seeds and goose-stepping all over your roses and your tulips. And I tell you, Jim--we got to be very familiar those last few weeks--it used to make me fair mad to read in the _Tribune_ what they'd done ... Louvain one time ... Termondy another ... et cetera.... And I kept on settin' there day after day, in my old garden on the top o' The Rise, saying to myself, Hollis, it's no use, me lad, you're going into this. You've failed in every bloody thing so far, and if you take on this you'll not be man enough to stick it out. War isn't thinking, it's doing, and you've never been a doer, you've not. Then I read in the _Tribune_ one morning that they'd got Antwerp and I said to myself, I can't stand this no more. And I went right away to the Duke of Wellington and had a liquor up--but only a mild one, you know--and then round the corner to the Recruiting Office and gave my age as thirty-six and here I am admiring this bleeding sunset with the eye of an artist.'