And he felt suddenly vicious. This was ridiculous. He wanted to stride toward her, haul her to her feet, and shake her. But good God, why? Because he was not comfortable in his own home? Did he imagine she was?
He swallowed a mouthful of port.
“I think your brother and I,” he said, “might have been the closest of friends at school if we had not been so similar.”
And where had that comment come from? Except that she always somehow reminded him of Graham. She irritated him in the same ways her brother had. As though even her silences—especially her silences—were accusatory. He had never thought of Graham and himself being similar, though. Quite the opposite, in fact.
She lifted her head from her work again, and he expected her to look skeptical, incredulous. She seemed exceedingly fond of her brother, after all. Instead she nodded.
“Yes,” she said, “I have noticed.”
What the devil? He frowned, swirled the liquor in his glass, and took another gulp of it.
“Pigheaded, both of us,” he said. “Espousing untenable ideals. Both of us.”
“Pacifism is untenable?” she asked.
“Of course it is,” he said impatiently. “No man is going to stand by and watch his mother and his wife and his daughters raped before his eyes without wreaking murder and mayhem to prevent it.”
“Graham said much the same thing when he was here,” she said.
“Did he?”
“And is the ideal of fighting to end tyranny untenable?” she asked.
“Of course it is,” he said again. “Tyranny will never be ended. Neither will violence nor aggression nor injustice nor cruelty nor any of the other evils humans are prone to.”
“So we do away with soldiers and constables and magistrates and judges?” she asked him as he crossed the room to stand on one side of the hearth, his elbow on the mantel. “We allow tyranny and anarchy to spread unchecked because we can never stamp them out? But we lash out at anyone who threatens those nearest and dearest to us?”
He swirled what was left of his drink but did not raise the glass to his lips.
“I was a naïve fool,” he told her. “I thought war in a righteous cause was a glorious thing—dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and all that nonsense. It is sweet and right to die for one’s country. There is nothing sweet or right about war. Officers are vain and lazy and corrupt and often cruel. The common soldier is the spawn of the gutters and prisons of England. Battle is madness and chaos and blood and entrails and smoke and screaming. And when it is over, one shares a canteen of water or spirits and pleasantries with an enemy survivor of roughly equal rank while one sorts out one’s own dead and wounded and he sorts out his—as though it had all been a pleasant day’s game, like cricket.”
It struck him that he ought not to be talking to a lady about such things. And why was he talking about them, anyway? Where had this conversation sprung from?
“And yet,” she said, “it was through such chaos and such deadly games and with such frail, often undesirable human beings that the Duke of Wellington drove a wedge into the oppressive empire Napoleon Bonaparte had built and brought it tumbling down. It needed to be brought down.”
“You do not support your brother’s stand, then?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But I respect him for it. We are all entitled to our ideals. Most beliefs are neither right nor wrong in themselves. None of them ever contains the whole truth.”
However had they got into this? He drained off the rest of his port in one mouthful and swirled it about his mouth before swallowing. She had lowered her head and was sewing again. It was still a man’s handkerchief, he could see, though a different one from before. The colors were different.
“Graham’s beliefs do not kill anyone,” he said. “Mine do.”
She put her work away after a tap on the door heralded the arrival of the evening tea tray. Ralph waited for the footman to set it down before her and leave. He watched her lift the teapot to pour.
“None for me,” he told her.
“It was not your beliefs that killed men,” she said. “It was not your beliefs that killed your three friends. It was war that did that—a terrible solution to a terrible problem, but perhaps the only one or at least the right one for that particular provocation. You participated because you believed in the cause. Your friends died because they believed in it, even if it was you who drew their attention to it.”
And persuaded them into going with him.
Is this how you persuaded your friends to go to war with you?
“And you almost died,” she said. She set the teapot down and looked up at him with troubled eyes. “How do you recover from such experiences, Ralph? How does anyone recover? How does anyone carry on with his life after he has been to war? And how does any man go on with life after not going to war?”
He frowned. “Graham?”
“In his own way,” she said, “he feels as guilty as you—for the deaths of countless hundreds of men while he remained safely at home wondering how he would react if his pacifism was ever put to the test. For the deaths of your three friends, who were also his friends.”
“He told you this?” he asked her.
“No,” she said. “Not in so many words. And I did not even think about it until the last time I talked with him. We have lived through dreadful times, Ralph, and none of us has been exempt from suffering. But perhaps everyone, all down through the ages, lives through dreadful times. Perhaps it is the human condition. I used to think the only suffering war brought was the death of soldiers and the physical pain of the wounds of others. Those things are not even the half of it, are they?”