Since I’ve been over here this time, I’ve come to believe in immortality. Do you?”
Claude was confused by this quiet question. “I hardly know. I’ve never been able to make up my mind.”
“Oh, don’t bother about it! If it comes to you, it comes. You don’t have to go after it. I arrived at it in quite the same way I used to get things in art, knowing them and living on them before I understood them. Such ideas used to seem childish to me.” Gerhardt sprang up. “Now, have I told you what you want to know about my case?” He looked down at Claude with a curious glimmer of amusement and affection. “I’m going to stretch my legs. It’s four o’clock.”
He disappeared among the red pine stems, where the sun-light made a rose-coloured lake, as it used to do in the summer . . . as it would do in all the years to come, when they were not there to see it, Claude was thinking. He pulled his hat over his eyes and went to sleep.
The little girl on the edge of the beechwood left her sack and stole quietly down the hill. Sitting in the heather and drawing her feet up under her, she stayed still for a long time, and regarded with curiosity the relaxed, deep-breathing body of the American soldier.
The next day was Claude’s twenty-fifth birthday, and in honour of that event Papa Joubert produced a bottle of old Burgundy from his cellar, one of a few dozens he had laid in for great occasions when he was a young man.
During that week of idleness at Madame Joubert’s, Claude often thought that the period of happy “youth,” about which his old friend Mrs. Erlich used to talk, and which he had never experienced, was being made up to him now. He was having
