I had never till now
been alone with death, and it should have found me terribly alone.
. . . I closed his eyes. . . . And this had been my friend, my
schoolfellow, cleverer than I and infinitely more thoughtful, lacking
no grace but good fortune, and lacking that only by strength of a
spirit too gallant for its fate. In all our friendship it was I that
had taken, he that had given; in the strange path we had entered and
travelled thus far together, it was he that had supplied the courage,
the loyalty, the blithe confidence that life held a prize to be won
with noble weapons; he who had set his face towards the heights and
pinned his faith to the stars; he, the victim of a senseless bullet;
he, stretched here as he had fallen, all thoughts, all activities
quenched, gone out into that night of which the darkness gathering in
this forsaken glade was but a phantom, to be chased away by
to-morrow's sun. To-morrow . . . to-morrow I should go on living and
begin forgetting him. To-morrow? God forgive me for an ingrate, I
had begun already. . . . Even as I bent over him, my uppermost
thought had not been of my friend.
Pages:
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351