In Memoriam

by Alice Winn

He wondered what it was like to be someone like Ellwood, who contributed to the beauty of a place, rather than blighting it.

I should work for the Recruitment Office, he thought wryly. The Amazing Pacifism Cure! One Embrace Will Send Conscientious Objectors Fleeing to the Front!

Ellwood was in love with Gaunt. Gaunt was thoroughly decent and conventional.

What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.

Perhaps I would rather Ellwood had played at loving me, if only for a few weeks, than never to have had anything at all. (Ellwood would tell me there’s a Tennyson quotation for that.) There’s an empty space in my mind where those memories might have been.

You say that what is left of you is not worth much. I can only respond by assuring you it is worth a great deal—to me.

What a waste Sandys’ last days had been, thought Gaunt. Pathetically attempting to overcome a grief that would never have time to heal.

Ellwood wanted to punch him. He wanted to make him bleed, and then tend to the wounds.

If Ellwood were a girl, he might have held his hand, kissed his temple. He might have bought a ring and tied their lives together.

He looked even more like a painting than usual. He radiated peace and prosperity. He was 1912; a world where savagery had been purged from the human spirit, for ever and ever.

Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.

It was as if Ellwood hovered in some unreal place where the living faded and the dead took form, and all the world was vague.

“If Gaunt had been a girl, I should have married him in an instant,” he said.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

“I think,” said Gaunt, watching her set the dollhouse to rights, “that if he gave me the smallest hope—I should wait forever.”