Page 144 of Hard Home

"I want to ask you about Selsey," said Mary.

Denny took his hand off the wall.

"I have been wondering when you would," he said.

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They sat on the flat table-tomb by the south porch, which was the driest place, and out of the wind, and from which you could see the pale ground beginning nine yards off among the graves;and Mary took out a pocket-book, and Denny looked at it and said, "Not this time."

"I always write things down."

"I know you do. Not this. If you write it down you will be listening as a person who is writing it down, and I want you to hear it as the thing it was." He put his hands between his knees. "You may write it after. I shall not say anything I am not willing to have written."

Mary put the pocket-book away.

"Ask me," said Denny.

"What is it like. Hour to hour. On the inside. Everybody tells me what a wardisand nobody has ever told me what it is to be the person holding one, and I am trying to decide something and I will not decide it out of ignorance."

Denny was quiet for a while, looking at the wrong-colored grass.

"At the beginning it is not like anything," he said. "That is the first thing nobody tells you. You lay it, and it is the hardest thing you have ever done, and you are proud of it, and then for a week it is like having laid a good hedge — it is there, you made it, you look at it. And you think, this is not so much. Men make too much of this.

"And then it starts asking."

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"A ward is not a wall," said Denny. "They tell you it is a wall because it is the quickest way to make a recruit understand which side he is on. It is not a wall. A wall, you build it and it stands and you go away.

"A ward is a thing you are holding shut. Every hour. Waking and sleeping. It does not matter what else you are doing — you may be eating, or marching, or asleep, or drunk, or in a fever — some part of you is holding that thing shut the entire time, andit never stops, and you cannot put it down, and after a while you cannot remember what it was like not to be holding it.

"At Selsey I held nine miles of coast for fourteen months. There were four of us to begin and then three and then, for the last five months, two, and then it was Fenn and me, and then it was me."

"Fenn," said Mary. "The one who—"

"The one they wrote down as a deserter, yes. He did not desert. He gave out. It is not a thing that happens all at once; a man does not fall down. He gets thinner, the way your father is getting thinner, and quieter, and one morning he cannot lift his part of it, and he says so, and you take up his part as well as your own, because there is no one else, and he sits in the sun for a fortnight getting no better and then his people come and take him home. And in the book it saysdeserted, because there is no other word the army has got for a man who is standing right there and is no longer any use."

Mary said nothing.

"I am telling you the worst of it first," said Denny, "because you did not come to me to be comforted, and everybody else will comfort you, and you have Mr. Darcy who will tell you the honorable version and your sister who loves you and will tell you the brave version, and I am the only one who has actually done it and I am not going to do you the discourtesy of making it sound bearable."

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"Then tell me the rest of it," said Mary. "The part that is not the worst."

Denny looked at her.

"There is a part that is not the worst," he said. "I did not expect you to ask for it. Most people do not; they hear the worst and they have got what they came for.

"The rest of it is this. When you are holding a thing that would drown four hundred people if you let go — when you have been doing it for a year, and it has cost you the most of what you had, and you know it is going to cost the rest — there is an hour, usually about first light, when you are out at the edge of it alone, and everybody you are holding it for is asleep in their beds and does not know your name and never will.

"And it is the only hour of your life when you are entirely certain that you are not wasting your time.

"I have never been able to explain that to anybody and I have stopped trying. It is not happiness. I was not happy at Selsey; I was frightened and tired and I ached in my back and my chest for fourteen months. But I have not, since, ever again beencertain, the way I was certain at four in the morning on that shingle. And I think about it every day, and I would not go back, and I miss it the way you miss a person."

Mary sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the pale ground among the graves.

"That is the thing I needed," she said at last. "Not the cost. I had worked out the cost; I am good at arithmetic. It was the other side of the ledger that nobody would give me, because nobody will say a true good thing about a course that is going to hurt you, in case they are thought to be pushing you toward it."