After John Calleron was hit he carried on in a kind of twilight of the
mind. Things grew dimmer and calmer; harsh outlines of events became
blurred; memories came to him; there was a singing in his ears like
far-off bells. Things seemed more beautiful than they had a while ago;
to him it was for all the world like evening after some quiet sunset,
when lawns and shrubs and woods and some old spire look lovely in the
late light, and one reflects on past days. Thus he carried on, seeing
things dimly. And what is sometimes called “the roar of battle,”
those aërial voices that snarl and moan and whine and rage at
soldiers, had grown dimmer too. It all seemed further away, and
littler, as far things are. He still heard the bullets: there is
something so violently and intensely sharp in the snap of passing
bullets at short ranges that you hear them in deepest thought, and
even in dreams. He heard them, tearing by, above all things else. The
rest seemed fainter and dimmer, and smaller and further away.
He did not think he was very badly hit, but nothing seemed to matter
as it did a while ago. Yet he carried on.
And then he opened his eyes very wide and found he was back in London
again in an underground train. He knew it at once by the look of it.
He had made hundreds of journeys, long ago, by those trains. He knew
by the dark, outside, that it had not yet left London; but what was
odder than that, if one stopped to think of it, was that he knew
exactly where it was going. It was the train that went away out into
the country where he used to live as a boy. He was sure of that
without thinking.
When he began to think how he came to be there he remembered the war
as a very far-off thing. He supposed he had been unconscious a very
long time. He was all right now.
Other people were sitting beside him on the same seat. They all seemed
like people he remembered a very long time ago. In the darkness
opposite, beyond the windows of the train, he could see their
reflections clearly. He looked at the reflections but could not quite
remember.
A woman was sitting on his left. She was quite young. She was more
like some one that he most deeply remembered than all the others were.
He gazed at her, and tried to clear his mind.
He did not turn and stare at her, but he quietly watched her
reflection before him in the dark. Every detail of her dress, her
young face, her hat, the little ornaments she wore, were minutely
clear before him, looking out of the dark. So contented she looked you
would say she was untouched by war.
As he gazed at the clear calm face and the dress that seemed neat
though old and, like all things, so faraway, his mind grew clearer and
clearer. It seemed to him certain it was the face of his mother, but
from thirty years ago, out of old memories and one picture. He felt
sure it was his mother as she had been when he was very small. And yet
after thirty years how could he know? He puzzled to try and be quite
sure. But how she came to be there, looking like that, out of those
oldest memories, he did not think of at all.
He seemed to be hugely tired by many things and did not want to think.
Yet he was very happy, more happy even than tired men just come home
all new to comfort.
He gazed and gazed at the face in the dark. And then he felt quite
sure.
He was about to speak. Was she looking at him? Was she watching him,
he wondered. He glanced for the first time to his own reflection in
that clear row of faces.
His own reflection was not there, but blank dark showed between his
two neighbours. And then he knew he was dead.