The Rainbow
Page 238A strange, distracted feeling came over her, a sense of
potent unrealities.
"Why would you want to go?"
"I should be doing something, it would be genuine. It's a
sort of toy-life as it is."
"But what would you be doing if you went to war?"
"I would be making railways or bridges, working like a
nigger."
"But you'd only make them to be pulled down again when the
armies had done with them. It seems just as much a game."
"If you call war a game."
"What is it?"
"It's about the most serious business there is,
fighting."
A sense of hard separateness came over her.
"Why is fighting more serious than anything else?" she
asked.
serious enough, killing."
"But when you're dead you don't matter any more," she
said.
He was silenced for a moment.
"But the result matters," he said. "It matters whether we
settle the Mahdi or not."
"Not to you--nor me--we don't care about
Khartoum."
"You want to have room to live in: and somebody has to make
room."
"But I don't want to live in the desert of Sahara--do
you?" she replied, laughing with antagonism.
"I don't--but we've got to back up those who do.
"Why have we?"
"Where is the nation if we don't?"
"But we aren't the nation. There are heaps of other people
"They might say they weren't either."
"Well, if everybody said it, there wouldn't be a nation. But
I should still be myself," she asserted brilliantly.
"You wouldn't be yourself if there were no nation."
"Why not?"
"Because you'd just be a prey to everybody and anybody."
"How a prey?"
"They'd come and take everything you'd got."
"Well, they couldn't take much even then. I don't care what
they take. I'd rather have a robber who carried me off than a
millionaire who gave me everything you can buy."
"That's because you are a romanticist."
"Yes, I am. I want to be romantic. I hate houses that never
go away, and people just living in the houses. It's all so stiff
and stupid. I hate soldiers, they are stiff and wooden. What do
you fight for, really?"
"For all that, you aren't the nation. What would you do for
yourself?"
"I belong to the nation and must do my duty by the
nation."
"But when it didn't need your services in
particular--when there is no fighting? What would you do
then?"
He was irritated.
"I would do what everybody else does."
"What?"
"Nothing. I would be in readiness for when I was needed."
The answer came in exasperation.
"It seems to me," she answered, "as if you weren't
anybody--as if there weren't anybody there, where you are.
Are you anybody, really? You seem like nothing to me."