In the bright morning, he girded himself. He requisitioned the plane he needed through Major Ingalls. He explained that requirement by saying that he was going to bomb a battery of big guns. The plane offered was an old one. Hugo had seen enough of flying in his French service to understand its navigation. He ate the huge meal he had planned. And then, a cool and grim man, he made his way to the hangar. In fifteen minutes his last adventure would have commenced. But a dispatch rider, charging on to the field in a roaring motor cycle, announced the signing of the Armistice and the end of the war.

Hugo stood near his plane when he heard the news. Two men at his side began to cry, one repeating over and over: “And I’m still alive, so help me God. I wish I was dead, like Joey.” Hugo was rigid. His first gesture was to lift his clenched fist and search for an object to smash with it. The fist lingered in the air. His rage passed—rage that would have required a giant vent had it occurred two days sooner. He relaxed. His arm fell. He ruffled his black hair; his blacker eyes stared and then twinkled. His lips smiled for the first time in many months. His great shoulders sagged. “I should have guessed it,” he said to himself, and entered the rejoicing with a fervour that was unexpected.

XVI

There must be in heaven a certain god—a paunchy, cynical god whose task it is to arrange for each of the birthward-marching souls a set of circumstances so nicely adjusted to its character that the result of its life, in triumph or defeat, will be hinged on the finest of threads. So Hugo must have felt coming home from war. He had celebrated the Armistice hugely, not because it had spared his life—most of the pomp, parade, bawdiness, and glory had originated in such a deliverance—but because it had rescued him from the hot blast of destructiveness. An instantaneous realization of that prevented despair. He had failed in the hour of becoming death itself; such failure was fortunate because life to him, even at the end of the war, seemed more the effort of creation than the business of annihilation.

To know that had cost a struggle—a struggle that took place at the hangar as the dispatch-bearer rode up and that remained crucial only between the instant when he lifted his fist and when he lowered it. Brevity made it no less intense; a second of time had resolved his soul afresh, had redistilled it and recombined it.