RUSSELL COMES TO Hardy's room to tell him that Rupert Brooke has died—something Hardy already knows from the Times. He comes in without knocking, interrupting a conversation Hardy is having with Sheppard. " 'Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed,'" Russell reads aloud, " 'with classic symmetry of mind and body . . .' And they say Winston Churchill wrote this!"
"I sense a distinctly Edwardian pen behind those words," Sheppard says.
"They reek of what our friend Mr. Lawrence might call Marsh-stagnancy," adds Hardy.
"Very funny. Fine time to joke, with a young man dead. And Marsh's paw prints all over his body."
Hardy looks at his lap. The truth is, he has never subscribed to what he's lately heard called "the cult of Rupert Brooke." To him, Brooke was merely a handsome, rather pallid young man who radiated an aura of self-regard and anomie; inclined, out of the blue, to make the most scabrous remarks: against Jews, against homosexuals—this, though at meetings of the Society he often spoke of sleeping, in his youth, with boys; of having lost his virginity to another boy. Brooke liked James Strachey and hated Lytton; seemed always to be having sexless affairs with women; wrote what Hardy thought to be banal and sentimental verse. And now he is dead. Is Marsh to blame?
Sheppard says he doesn't think so. "Admit it, Bertie," he says, "you're being too hard on Eddie."
"He might as well have murdered him. He seduced him. Brought him into his posh circles, introduced him to Asquith, put it in his mind to be the great hero. Wasn't Brooke living in Eddie's flat?"
"Still, it was Brooke himself who enlisted."
"Eddie got him the commission."
"Only because he insisted upon it. He would have gone regardless."
"Yes, but so quickly?"
"Eddie might have been trying to save him," Hardy says. "He might have been trying to get him the safest commission he could find."
"Not that it did any good. Brooke was hell-bent on dying," Sheppard says.
"And now he has died—of sunstroke, the Times tells us," says Hardy.
"Apparently not, in fact," Russell says. "That was only what they thought at first. It was blood poisoning, from a mosquito bite."
"A mosquito bite!"
"Sunstroke makes better propaganda, though."
"Brought down by glorious Phoebus' rays," Sheppard intones. "Buried, like Byron, where Hellenic light bathes his grave, far from home."
"And to think that he never even saw battle."
"Didn't he? I thought he was in Antwerp."
"He was, but his battalion never fought."
"Felled by a mosquito en route to Gallipoli. A pity, when he hoped so badly to be shot, or blown up by a mine."
"He managed to get those war poems published quickly enough."
"Have you read them?"
"I have." He recites:
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary.
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
"I suppose we're the half-men," Hardy says. "Singing our dirty songs."
"Into Condy's Fluid leaping, more like it," Russell says, crumpling the obituary in his fist.