It will be a grim, dark story in that lonely part of the sea, when he
confesses to sailors, blown too far north, the dreadful thing he
plotted against man. The date on which he is seen will be told from
sailor to sailor. Queer taverns of distant harbours will know it well.
Not many will care to be at sea that day, and few will risk being
driven by stress of weather on the Kaiser’s night to the bergs of the
haunted part of sea.
And yet for all the grimness of the pale-blue phantom, with cuirass
and helmet and eyes shimmering on deadly icebergs, and yet for all the
sorrow of the wrong he did against man, the women drowned and the
children, and all the good ships gone, yet will the horrified mariners
meeting him in the mist grudge him no moment of the day he has earned,
or the coolness he gains from the bergs, because of the kindness he
did to the wounded men. For the mariners in their hearts are kindly
men, and what a soul gains from kindness will seem to them well
deserved.
Last Scene of All
After John Calleron was hit he carried on in a kind of twilight of the
mind. Things grew dimmer and calmer; harsh outlines of events became
blurred; memories came to him; there was a singing in his ears like
far-off bells. Things seemed more beautiful than they had a while ago;
to him it was for all the world like evening after some quiet sunset,
when lawns and shrubs and woods and some old spire look lovely in the
late light, and one reflects on past days. Thus he carried on, seeing
things dimly. And what is sometimes called “the roar of battle,”
those aërial voices that snarl and moan and whine and rage at
soldiers, had grown dimmer too. It all seemed further away, and
littler, as far things are. He still heard the bullets: there is
something so violently and intensely sharp in the snap of passing
bullets at short ranges that you hear them in deepest thought, and
even in dreams. He heard them, tearing by, above all things else. The
rest seemed fainter and dimmer, and smaller and further away.
He did not think he was very badly hit, but nothing seemed to matter
as it did a while ago. Yet he carried on.
And then he opened his eyes very wide and found he was back in London
again in an underground train. He knew it at once by the look of it.
He had made hundreds of journeys, long ago, by those trains. He knew
by the dark, outside, that it had not yet left London; but what was
odder than that, if one stopped to think of it, was that he knew
exactly where it was going. It was the train that went away out into
the country where he used to live as a boy. He was sure of that
without thinking.
When he began to think how he came to be there he remembered the war
as a very far-off thing. He supposed he had been unconscious a very
long time. He was all right now.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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