“Nothing but a lot of gun flashes. Of course the searchlights poked around the sky and once in a while they found a plane but most of the time they didn’t. Anyhow it was pretty as— It was very pretty, specially if it was a nice night.”

As he had often realized before, John Grandin noticed again how the man of action seems unable to recapitulate what he has been through. Cliff’s stories consisted largely of great gaps, nothing was really accounted for, nothing narrated, so that one had to ask a dozen questions to find out—and even the questions produced answers which answered nothing. It was almost as if the dramatic things of life (at least for the purposes of “story”) happened to the wrong people; they were seldom able to communicate the event. They did not remember the telling detail which, reproduced, would have made the experience come alive again, recognizable as truth; and if they were unable to call up the significant touch, it may well have been because they had not experienced the thing in any real sense, the sense of getting something out of it—had not, so to speak, been aware of what they had been through. The revealing episode which one recognized as having actually happened without question, and which would have enabled one to identify oneself with the story, was always missing. Perhaps, he reflected, “experience” requires more than experience: perhaps it takes imagination as well.

“I should think that after you’d got settled down,” Grandin suggested, “you’d have been mad as hell for being called out every night?”

“Mad? I don’t know, maybe we were, Johnnie, I can’t remember. But when everything got going at once, we forgot about it. A little excitement never hurt anyone, you know. We were kept so hopping busy we never had time to think whether we were mad or not. Gee, it was fun, in a way. I mean exciting.”

“Fun?”

“Well, I suppose it wasn’t fun, maybe. Maybe that’s the wrong word.” But it was obviously the right one. Cliff’s zest in talking about it told all too plainly that it had been fun, great fun; and that if he were given the choice right now between a night like that and a mild Nantucket evening, there was little doubt as to which he would choose.