“I suppose it’s not very late,” he said.
“A quarter past ten.”
“Are you wearing a watch?”
“Yes, I’d forgotten it. I’ll put it under the pillow.”
He laughed. “That’s rather funny.”
“Well, I always wear it. Otherwise it keeps me awake.”
“Well, keep it on, then.”
“I’ll put it on your side. It won’t bother me.”
*
“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked.
“Eh?”
“I said, do you know where you’re going? When you——”
“Oh, well, not officially. They tell us on board. We can guess pretty well.”
“I don’t suppose you like the idea.”
“Can’t say I do.” He was flippant. “But everyone’s in the same boat.”
He seemed restless and unsatisfied, as she knew he would be, and later on he began to talk again. “You will write to me, won’t you? I mean, I can rely on it?”
“Yes, of course, if you want me to.”
“I’d be glad so if you would. I don’t get many letters. From home, of course … But one grows out of one’s parents.”
“I know that.”
“I don’t mean it—you know—it’s nothing to be proud of. But my last leave wasn’t up to much, pretty ghastly really. They tried to be so good and yet we just hadn’t anything to say to each other. I mean, we were quite friendly and all that, but … I can’t explain it quite, only I don’t feel I want to see them again. Probably shan’t, anyway. I say, do you mind if I put your watch somewhere else? It does make a row.”
“There’s a side-table by the bed, if you can find it.”
*
In the darkness they heard some of the city clocks strike after a while.
“By the way, you’d better forget what I said about embarkation leave, it’s supposed to be secret.”
“Oh, I will, don’t worry.”
“I suppose we ought to go to sleep. I’m tired enough to sleep for a week, but I just don’t feel like it. This war, it’s mucked everything up. All happened so naturally, but my God it’s made a mess of things.” He paused. “Broken the sequence, so to speak. I mean, I knew pretty well what I was going to do, my career and so forth. All gone to blazes. Of course, if I come through, I suppose I can go on—but the funny thing is, I don’t much care now. Awfully difficult to explain to one’s parents.”
*
“I say, I’m sorry, but this watch of yours still worries me.”
“What?”
“Can I put your watch somewhere else?”
“Do what you like. I’ll put it on again.”
“No, don’t. I don’t want to hear it. Put it right away somewhere.”
“Give it me. Go to sleep.”
“But if one doesn’t! … I mean, there aren’t two ways about it. One’s got to have some sort of aim in life, or you might as well be dead. Listen who’s talking. My chances aren’t worth much. But take these blokes who are getting married, there was one only last week; I think it’s silly of them, downright silly. What’s the point of it? You leave the girl, and get yourself wiped out … I don’t only mean it from a practical point of view——”
“Go to sleep.”
“I mean who’s got anything to offer anyone these days? Badly put. I say, I’m sorry to burble like this. But it’s not worth while. Obviously it’s the only worth-while thing, a career and getting a family, increasing and multiplying, whatever that means. But when you don’t feel it—I mean, if I asked you, for instance, to marry me, you’d refuse, wouldn’t you … wouldn’t you?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, there you are, then.”
*
“Bit of a lark it would be, though.”
“Aren’t you asleep yet?”
“I was only thinking it would be funny. Lose one Katherine, gain another.”
“What d’you mean?”
“My niece. How pompous that sounds. Jane’s daughter. She was called Katherine.”
“She wasn’t, she was called Lucy.”
“Lucy was only her first name. Jack called her that after his mother, who died—oh, it must be fifteen years ago. Before you met him. Her second name was Katherine —Jane chose that.”
“So you see you are almost one of the family. There’d be no——”
“Robin, I do want to go to sleep. Don’t say any more. I’m too tired.”
*
There was the snow, and her watch ticking. So many snowflakes, so many seconds. As time passed they seemed to mingle in their minds, heaping up into a vast shape that might be a burial mound, or the cliff of an iceberg whose summit is out of sight. Into its shadow dreams crowded, full of conceptions and stirrings of cold, as if icefloes were moving down a lightless channel of water. They were going in orderly slow procession, moving from darkness further into darkness, allowing no suggestion that their order should be broken, or that one day, however many years distant, the darkness would begin to give place to light.
Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them, crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep.