Chapter Text
John Watson, outstanding in many facets of his character, is above all the most sincere man I have known. He may keep quiet, if he does not wish to be frank, but he will not mislead you; and even in silence a lift of his brows or an indrawn breath often speaks eloquently for and in spite of him. Sincerity is an enormously attractive thing: not least because of the single-minded loyalty it engenders in him, once his friendship is declared. The courage required to attain that kind of whole-souled clarity is enormous. It indicates a man on whom you may rely without question.
As a man of quite another bent, to whom acting is as instinctive to my nature and as necessary to my profession as the pulse of my blood, I sometimes wonder why he trusts me. He has seen me enact a thousand characters in as many days, and in each shift of voice and breath and tone and angled wrist and changing tread I believe the chimera created appears as natural as the one before. If I were him I should not feel I knew me. I will say this: I am honest. Not with his sincerity, changeless and innate, but with the truest truth of whichever man I am creating; I never say a thing which that man would not. Sometimes I wonder if there is a way to learn what he saw in me: if there was any idea of me he held to, or if he loved me for all my selves.
He loved me, I knew that, as a man loves a brother-in-arms, or a knight his shield-bearer. He would likely argue that I am the knight, and he my shield-bearer, but I differ. Still he wasn’t wholly mine any longer, but Mary’s, and steadfast at her side six days out of seven. I couldn’t trust myself to see him for a while after he left me. Whatever he might have needed from me then, it wasn’t the only self I could find in those weeks, the furious and lonely self bared and howling for what I had lost, for a quick smile every bright morning across the breakfast table; for his step at my side, unmistakable as a signature, one stride caught up just slightly short in memory of Afghanistan and a burning bullet; for a gentle hand tucked into my elbow, or touching my shoulder as he passed; for the low, warm laugh I could provoke when we were sleepy and talking nonsense by the fire—just for his company.
I had not anticipated how the loss would unravel me. I am not a narcissist: I had no idea of claiming a right to him. But neither am I the self-sufficient sage I have invented for my most often lived-in self. I do not think he knows it, but I need him. So at last I found a way to gather myself up and come asking for him, offering whatever I had, my stories and my work and my company. It seemed to be enough for him. He was happy when I came.
And then there was a change. One frosty morning he sat across from me in his old chair, smoking a cigarette, while I talked to him about the Professor; Moriarty, of infamy then still to come. I had only just recognized the fact that his name came up peripherally in case after case, a stray thought, a secret behind secrets, and that his influence was all about me in the City without anyone’s realising how he’d intertwined himself about us. I was intrigued. Disturbed, too, with a faint unease far from the loathing I would later conceive for him; but deeply interested, God help me, in a man who seemed capable of camouflaging himself and his unrighteous capacities in plain sight of society, with dignity and ease. I was talking to John, as I do at times, as though to myself, swept away in the flow of speculation, when a turn and a glance at him brought me up short.
He was listening still, but with a look on his face I had not seen in years—an apathy, a kind of surrender of his courage in the slump of his shoulders and his downturned mouth. He was with me, but I was struck with the sense that something had been emptied out of him.
“Watson,” I said, and he started.
“I’m sorry, Holmes.” He sounded the same as always. “I’m a little abstracted.”
“What’s wrong?” I am not usually so direct: I prefer to tease him toward happiness with little gallant unmentioned attentions when he is low. But I was so surprised at him, I spoke without thinking.
He laughed. It was a sorry-sounding thing. “Is it so obvious?”
“No.” Not nearly obvious enough. “Not at all: I’ve only noticed just this minute, and I ought to have known you were sad when you walked in. Watson, tell me.”
“I don’t know that I should.” He looked at me wistfully; then, to my dismay, shame shadowed his features; his eyes dropped. “I don’t want to upset you.”
I flung myself down into my own chair and stared. I was used to his reticence and the dignity that demanded it, but this was new—to be denied even a glimpse at what worried him, for fear of my taking offense. “As I wish to be your friend,” I said, trying for a calm and reasonable tone, “that isn’t possible. Whatever's troubling you, I want to help.”
For some moments he regarded me in silence. I couldn’t read his face at all, which was more frightening to me than everything else so far; but then he blinked, and determination writ itself across his forehead. “All right,” he said. “I’ll hold you to that in a minute. Holmes—I’m having difficulty—that is to say, Mary and I—” He stopped, and sighed, and rubbed his chin, clearly discomfited; his eyes dropped again. “I’ve not been able to fulfill my duties to her.”
“What on earth do you mean?” Whatever I might have guessed, it wasn’t that. I couldn’t imagine a more satisfactory husband existed in England than John Watson.
“I mean—I am not able to love her. Not—I don’t mean I don’t care for her, but—in our own bed, I can’t love her as I should. I can perform the act, but only just.” He gave me a quick little look and went back to staring at his knees. I was speechless. He went on, “I suppose you’ll say that’s my own private business.”
“I wouldn’t.” That, at least, I could say. I knew he hadn’t the faintest conception of why this particular topic was sensitive to the touch, for me; his trouble was all for himself and Mary, and I had to rally myself to his need. “Is she angry?”
“No, only disquieted. I think she’s afraid I’ve lost my affection for her.”
“And—have you?” They had seemed so eager to take up the reins of married life. It hadn’t occurred to me they could be anything but happy together, in spite of my own misery over it all.
“No—that is to say—no. My feelings toward her are the same as ever, only—I’m afraid they may not have been enough. Not from the start.” His voice was sinking lower, his hands pressed hard together. My own began to tremble slightly. “I thought—I believed it would all be quite natural, once we began.”
“Your intimacies?” Heat was rising up my neck, and I prayed Heaven he would not look up at me then. He did not.
“Yes. I—kissed her, Holmes, for the first time, when I pledged her my life, and it was pleasant enough; but it wasn’t much to me. I’m afraid to say—I was a little disappointed.”
“Oh.”
“Quite. It grew pleasanter as we went on, and I supposed when we came together the joy would follow, but—” A deep sigh. A slight shake of his golden head. “I don’t much enjoy it. I find I have to distract myself from what I'm doing. I think—” A peep at me, at last, to see how I was taking it. “I believe I’m deficient somehow.”
I was, of all men on earth, the least worthy of advising anyone on the subject of the marriage bed and deficiencies discovered therein. John knew this. I knew this. I sat immobile, terrified, but strangely warmed, that he should trust me so, absolutely inadequate as I was to the question. He took my silence well, considering; glanced at me repeatedly, and rubbed his hands together, and sighed again; but his shoulders had loosened, and he sat straighter in his chair.
“I know little of women,” I said, finally, at which he smiled the slightest bit, “and nothing of marrying them, but I think you ought to explain to her. At the least, she won’t need to fear she’s lost your attentions by her own fault.”
His whole face changed. “Do you think she would think so? She mustn’t. But to admit I’ve never found my way to love her as I ought—I promised her everything!” His eyes were filling up with grief. “There must be some way to help myself—a specialist, a chemical aid, a treatment of some kind. I ought to try. She is good to me.” He looked at me, pleading, and my heart sank. What he wanted seemed unlikely. If a help for this kind of problem existed, would the creator not be known? Wouldn’t John have heard of it already in the course of his studies? But I was not a doctor; and I had never sought a medical correction to the course of my own development.
“You can try,” I said, at last. It was an ineffectual answer, and I could hear the lack of conviction in my own voice. I rose, to get us each a glass of something, and turn away my face. He had no need to witness my dismay. But I could clasp his shoulder in comfort, as I passed him, and that was something. He took the good strong port I offered, and stayed, and let me play for him a long time. He left me at last with a look and a word of kindness; and that was a great deal indeed.
When he had gone, I sank into my chair, and tried to collect myself, but it was no use; my blood was up. After a few minutes of deep breaths and blank silence, in imitation of the sages of the East who seek enlightenment, which attempt merely made me intimately acquainted with the anxiety possessing me, I sprang up. There was another way to free myself from myself. I went into my room, and collected my boxing gloves from under the bed; stripped to the waist, and removed my slippers and stockings, and began a methodical pummeling of the old-fashioned punching ball which stood beside my bed. After a few minutes of this the rhythm got into my blood and bones and all the whirlpool of my mind drained into that single point of focus, the drum-drum-drum of fists against leather. The cool of the room soothed the heat in me; the sweat ran down my face; and the fear subsided.
I must say here that John was not to blame: he did not know what he was doing. I had never expressed to him what was to me the inadmissible, the subrational tide rushing the shores of my self-command. I did not wish him to know. I wished to Heaven I did not know myself what I wanted. If only I might go on, as many a man did, with the day’s work and the night’s drink comforting and covering over my nature with layers of civilised distraction. I could act, at least, as though I did not want anything more than work and more work. Acting is sometimes almost the same as being in truth.
Still, as I lay in bed that night, one single thought went round and round my mind: He did not love her.
The days wore on; and we went on together, as close as we could be when he slept six miles distant from my door. Some days he appeared cheerful and steady, and seemed to have forgotten we had ever spoken of his troubles. But sometimes I saw him grieving silently, and a little bitterness crept into the corners of his mouth that had only held gentleness and good-humour in its generous shape for years. I watched him sinking into himself with no little horror: I had forgotten the look of John regretting himself. I despised it. Of all men alive he was the one least fit to wear that look; and it was the sight of him slumped in the corner of a hansom, staring sightlessly down at his clasped hands, with almost a sneer on his lip, that finally broke my reverence for his privacy. We had been talking of the case just concluded, but had fallen into silence as I ruminated with still-uncomprehending interest (my Lord, the arrogance of me) over the fact the the Professor’s name had come up once again, this time in connection with the financier of a dealer of weaponry among the shabbier and more desperate gangs. I had been rambling on, but I glanced up at last, and saw that look on his face, and found myself saying, apropos of nothing, “Nothing has cured you?”
He started, and stared. “Holmes!” was all the response I got at first, in a disbelieving tone, followed by a shake of the head, and then (most improbably) a small smile. “How on earth did you know what I was thinking of? No—” And for the first time since I had known him, he amended the question. “Never mind. I don’t need to hear how transparent I am."
“Only to me,” I reminded him, and he smiled a little more.
“I know. At any rate, no, there has been no appreciable change in my—condition. There is nothing in the literature of any use. One doctor laughed me out of his practice; another told me to drink cocoa instead of liquor in the evenings; a third recommended I give up frigging myself and pay her better attention. It cost me all my restraint to keep my seat and thank him for his time, instead of knocking him over.”
I’d have done it for him. “And she doesn’t yet understand?”
“I don’t understand it at all myself, Holmes. I had thought it would all be quite natural, and yet—and yet—I ought to have noticed that I was not all right. I might have known.”
“What do you mean?”
He did not answer. His face was turned to the window, his features falling into shadow and rising again into light as we passed beneath the streetlamps, through the silent streets, hushed beneath the cold. I could not catch his expression. His soft-gloved hand rested on his knee, inches from my own. I could have placed my hand atop his, stroked it, pressed my knee to his in comfort. I did not move at all. Something was just then occurring to me. “You found you didn’t care for kissing her, and that surprised you. Hadn’t you ever before…?” I faltered. I didn’t know how to find my way through the thought without embarrassment, but he compressed his lips and looked at me, finally.
“You would remember that. No, I hadn’t. Nor wanted to. It should have made me think. At school, my studies occupied me, and then there was the excitement of enlistment, and my duties on the field of war; and I supposed then that I had a little more capacity for concentration than my fellows, and a little cooler blood. I could have taken my pleasure cheaply, I do realize that—but paying for a woman’s time held no appeal for me. I never met a girl I really liked, till Mary. There’s something in her—a familiarity, a sense of confidence—” He faltered, searching visibly for verbal expression. “It’s like we’re two children who’ve found each other in the dark, and held on for safety. Something in my soul trusts hers.” He had said as much in his account of their meeting. I had been struck then by the strange innocence of his feelings; but I had not lingered over it, as I was then doing my utmost to avoid dwelling on the fact of her existence. He was looking now as he had then, when he spoke of her—a little anxious, a little dreamy. “She’s a comfort to me, and I think I am to her. I feel as if I may rely on her, but—dear God.” His voice broke a little. “She feels more. She looks at me like the answer to a question she’s asked all her life.”
A sound escaped me at that. He glanced up at me, surprised. He must have thought me uncharacteristically pained to the heart on Mrs. Watson’s behalf. His brow contracted; he leaned forward, and under that look it began to be difficult to breathe. I held his gaze with all my strength: it seemed the worst possible time for my practiced serenity to fail, but it was faltering badly. Thank God, he did not understand. “I’ve said too much,” he said, after a moment’s earnest scrutiny of me, and sat back, releasing me from the effect of his bright, worried eyes. “Forgive me, this is precisely the irrational kind of tragedy you might have expected for me when I indulged in the absurdity of marriage. You did warn me.”
I had done worse than warn him; I’d mocked him. I’d goaded and scorned him, out of my anger. I was well and truly repaid now. “I was wrong to do that. I do not think it absurd. You may tell me whatever you choose.” I sounded an automaton.
He blinked, and ran a hand over his eyes wearily. “You are very kind, Holmes.”
His politeness made it worse. He needed me, and I could not help him. I could have groaned aloud, but constrained by his silent presence I sat still, watching our breaths cloud the chilly air between us. After a minute he tipped his head back against the seat, and rested there, looking out into the night. With that reprieve I was able to compose myself a little, so that by the time we reached Baker Street I had re-formed a semblance of calm. I stepped with him into the light of our front hall, and hung up our hats side-by-side, and set his cane against the wall, while he started slowly up the stairs. He moves with more difficulty in bitter weather, and any other day I might have caught up to him and offered him my arm, but instead I stood unwinding my muffler, meeting my own gaze in the little mirror that hung there.
I had not meant to feel for Mary. I had hoped (when I thought of her at all) to be distantly courteous regarding her, and never see her. I did not want to grieve for her. There was nothing I desired less than to comprehend precisely what she wanted from John Watson. I had long accepted that love made a fool of most, and a goblin of me. I wanted unforgivable things, things that would ruin me, things that would repulse him. But his tender, wistful tone when he’d talked of what she felt—he honoured the sentiment; and just then I could not remember why I was required to despise it in myself.
Christmas came and went. The year turned silently from old to new in darkness, without any appreciable change in the quality of our existence. The city huddled hungry and half-cowed beneath the lowering sky, sending up layers of defiant soot to stain the clouds. London was sunk into the mire of a dreary March, John absent from my rooms for three months entire, and I dropped down into the depths of a blank, black mood of the kind that left me feeling there was no substance left to my soul, when John rapped on the half-open sitting room door one morning, and came inside, cheeks pinked by the cold, and smiling. As he stopped to hook his cane over his chair, with a cheerful, “Hello, Holmes,” I stumbled to my feet and stared.
Both his brows rose at that. He said, “Steady, there. All right?” and strode across the room to meet me, shoulders back, eyes alert, Captain Watson readying himself to do battle for my health and sanity. He took my hand in his, to test its temperature. His eyes dropped to my neck, looking for the racing or sunken pulse that would indicate the influence of what he called my poisons; then he looked to my pupils. His hand rose to brush gently across my cheek, my brow, in search of a sweat or a chill. I shivered.
“I am sober,” I said, and he stepped back with a sigh. I nearly swayed forward after him, so strong was the sense that he’d appeared suddenly on the road to rescue me after an endless, perilous journey. “I’m fine,” repeated, and he gave me a long look, but said no more, only took his chair with a small sound of relief. His hip must have been hurting him badly.
“Brandy?” I offered.
“Yes, thanks.” He smiled at me again. I turned away quickly to hide a surge of gratitude so strong it frightened me. When he added, curiously, “Anything to do?” I couldn’t answer; only shook my head, and poured out his drink with a hand that was not steady.
I waited a moment till I was all right, then carried it to him. “Can you stay all day, then?”
He studied me. His mouth softened in sympathy. “Yes, of course. You’ve been having a hard time of it, haven’t you.”
I could not hold his gaze. “You know I’m a moody fellow.”
“Yes, I do. My dear boy.” Compassion in his tone. “Shall I read you the morning news?”
“Please.”
He took up the paper from the stand, and turned over its pages slowly. “Well, then.”
John has a marvelous voice, warm and clear and dry. He reads charmingly, with little asides on the interesting bits, and small bouts of laughter when he strikes on something unexpected. I tucked myself into my arm chair, with my head on a velveteen cushion, and closed my eyes, the better to savour the experience. The heat of the fire seeped into my skin, the wind whistled in the chimney-grate, and his voice went on steadily, while the world fell to rights around us.
After an hour or so he grew quiet. I opened one eye to find him taking a peppermint drop from the bowl beside his chair, and opening up the notebook he’d left there, the paper set aside. He must have thought I was sleeping. I did not disabuse him of the notion, but watched him with one half-opened eye while he began to write. He is a study in earnest endeavour: he frowns, and bites on his lip, and puts out the tip of his tongue, and taps the pencil twice against a completed sentence which he finds especially satisfactory. If he knew I watched him, he would grow self-conscious; so I used to ration out the pleasure, and allow it to myself only when most needed. I hadn’t had the chance in a long while. The trouble, of course, was that in watching him I was given time to think, and it became harder and harder to contain myself, until, “Watson,” I burst out, and he started.
“Holmes,” with a laugh. “Have you been awake all this time?”
“Only thinking,” which was true enough. “Watson, has anything happened?”
He set down his pencil. “No—why?”
“I’ve been—” How to finish that sentence? “I’ve been wondering about you and—Mary.”
“Oh.” Surprise lit his face. He set aside the notebook. “In that case, yes. I’ve found some help at last.”
“Oh?” I sat up, and found I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I folded them, and did my best to offer him a courteous expression of interest.
“It was quite unexpected, actually. I had gone a month ago to meet with an old friend from King’s—Dr. Maxwell, who’s written a recent analysis of the rapid transmission of influenza amongst the lower classes. Do you know it?” I shook my head. We were on his grounds now. “At any rate, I wanted to consult with him about his methods of treatment, but as we were in his home and at our leisure, after that we fell to talking about old times.” He smiled at me. “Things are much better with me now than I’d have dared hope, then. I said so, and he asked me how you were. He thought I was still with you. He hadn’t heard I’d been married. He looked quite startled when I said so.”
Why? I wanted to ask, but did not. Most people seemed to think it was perfectly natural.
“At any rate, I explained about Mary, and then I found myself telling Maxwell about my current troubles. I stammered a good deal, and found it far harder to put the case to a friend than I had to strangers; but he seemed interested. He asked me a dozen questions no one else had thought of, about my diet, my history, mental and physical, and about Mary. About my experience, too, or the absence of it. Then—” and for the first time John hesitated, and searched my face. “Holmes, if I go on, promise me you won’t allow me to say more than I should. If I make you uncomfortable—”
“I’d like to know.”
He nodded once; his breath shortened, and a flush stained his cheeks, setting my heart to racing; he sat up straighter in his chair. “All right, then. I’ll hope for you to hear me out, anyway.”
“You know I will. Of course I will. Watson—”
“He asked me if I had read anything on the subject of constitutional inversion. I said I didn’t know what he meant, and he looked at me for a moment without making me any reply. Then he changed tack entirely, I thought, and said, ‘What about literature? Did you study the Iliad at school? Or have you read the old play, Damon and Pythias?’ I said I had, of course. He went on, ‘I have a suspicion which may startle you. I don’t mean any harm by it: it’s all quite blameless, but you may not think so.’
“Of course I told him to go on. ‘I’ve seen a good deal of life,’ I said. ‘I am not easily shocked.’ He said, ‘You’ve told me you haven’t enjoyed close contact with your wife, but you are very fond of her. Were there any friends at school, or in your regiment, who were as significant to you? As Damon to Pythias, or Achilles to Patroclus?’”
“There were one or two who’d come near, and I admitted it, but, ‘Holmes is the only one now,’ I told him, and he smiled a little, as though he’d anticipated that. Well, he’s been reading the Strand, so perhaps he had. ‘I trust him with my life,’ I said, ‘and I think he feels the same.’”
I nodded. I could not have spoken; but John was caught up visibly in a powerful emotion, and hurried on. “He asked, then, ‘Have you ever embraced a friend?’”
My heart seized in my chest.
“I hadn't, and said so. ‘Or wanted to?’ he went on, and I was bemused. I didn’t understand what he was getting at. I told him I’d had a friend at school, George Ingham, who used to cast his arm about my shoulders when I’d done well at the pitch, and wrestle me around a bit, and I’d liked that; but the fellows at King’s had kept their distance, as I was so serious, and kept to myself, and the men on the field wouldn’t have been so familiar with their captain.”
“Well, he shook his head at that, and said, ‘No wonder.’ He sounded almost sorry. ‘You’ve been all alone,’ he said. I began to protest, but he wasn’t finished. ‘You’ve had your work, of course. Still, one begins to feel the need of a companion. I’ve known a number of fellows like you, with no natural affinity for women. Some marry anyway. Some of them go on to live quite happily on their own; philosophical company, or public works, or artistic endeavours, take up the place in their soul which a family might have come to occupy; and that is no poor outcome, of course. But some turn to one another.’”
“I must have looked lost. I didn’t understand, even then. He added, carefully, ‘I mean they look to each other for love.’ I said, ‘As spouses do—they love each other?’ and he nodded. ‘Body and soul’—those were his words. ‘And while the practice is unusual, it seems to settle them, much as marriage does another kind of man. Some waste their time and their energies on hired boys, as a rake would on women. Some despise their own nature, and are unable to accept any kind of comfort in it; but given your intelligence and your self-respect, I think you will do better than that—if this idea strikes you in any significant way.’ And he smiled at me. I think he hoped to reassure me. I was stunned. I am still stunned, but—I have considered it, and I think—I believe he is right.”
I can’t imagine what I looked like then, faced with him sitting there quite calmly in the midst of the unspeakable. I might have said anything; but what I burst out with was, “And that pleases you?”
“To have an answer? To understand my own condition? Yes.” His colour was rising. “You are offended.”
“I can’t believe you’d never heard of such things.”
“That some men sought other men? Of course I had. But it was always suggested there was a licentious excess there, not a difference in their essential nature.”
“It’s not natural. It's a pathology of the mind!” I was breathless. He rose to his feet, red-faced, and stumbled a little as his stiff leg failed to hold him. He bit his lip against the pain, steadying himself. When he spoke his voice was worryingly quiet.
“Is it? Do you think I am mad?”
I did not. I could not. Faced with his furious clarity, I felt all my protection falling to pieces about me. I cast about me for some role to inhabit, some character who might have an answer for him, and found nothing but my naked self left undefended.
“No,” I said, finally, defeated, and placed my head in my hands. “But I thought I might be.”
I had just enough time to watch new depths of black self-loathing opening within me, when, “Oh,” he murmured. I heard the catch in his breath that meant he was moving carefully against his injuries; looked up, to find him just taking his seat again. He watched me in attentive silence; and the abyss retreated from me under his gaze.
“I didn’t expect to speak of it,” I said, finally, when it was evident he was waiting for me.
“You never do,” he said. He sounded terribly gentle.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You never tell me anything. Is this why—? Holmes, loneliness isn’t madness. You’re all right. You’re quite sane.”
My emotions rose, and nearly choked me. I was quite idiotic in my helplessness, but he only waited for me quietly while I put my hand over my face and counted my breaths till I could slow them. Finally he asked, low, “Were you ashamed of it, then?”
“Yes.”
“Was there someone—have you ever—”
“Yes. A long time ago. It ended very poorly and my mother never forgave me. Please don’t ask me about it.”
He blinked at me, absorbing this; nodded. “Are you ashamed of me?”
“I am not,” I protested immediately. “I couldn’t be, you are—you are—” But I found myself at a loss for words again. He softened immediately, though, and sat back in his chair again; took up a cigarette, and lit it, giving me time to collect myself. The silence between us was sympathetic, now. I was too lightheaded from the sudden exposure to feel much relief; but still—I had said it. And he had stayed.
“Maxwell, your friend,” I said, finally. “Did he offer you any studies on the subject? Any evidence for his views?”
“Clinical experience, no more. He did offer me an introduction to a society of such men, if it interested me. But he expected I would want time to consider my choices.”
“A society?” That startled me. I would have expected the brothels and back alleys would serve well enough for buggers’ connexions. I supposed high-class liaisons might be arranged at the wilder society parties, but I’d never imagined a convivial group of chatterers having drinks in a gentlemen’s club. But then—“You’re not going to go behind Mary’s back?”
Quick anger in his look; blank weariness after. “No, Holmes. I’m going to talk to her.”
I'm sure I gaped at him. “How can you?”
“How can I not? She’s lent me her strength throughout my confusion. I’m quite sure I owe her the truth as I know it. If I frighten her too much, she can tell me so; but you must understand this is a problem that belongs to us both. I asked her to share my life.” He still spoke bravely, but his eyes were growing desolate. To a man of his loyalty—
“You didn’t know,” I said. “You couldn’t have known.”
“Thank you,” he murmured, but it was clear he was not all right.
We sat silent together in the morning light from the east window. It was a little as though the end of days had passed over us, and left us just coming to our senses, lost and amazed, on the charred new earth.