The Wanderer in Unknown Realms Read Online Free

his grave. She asked me whatthe countryside looked like, over there.
    â€œIt wasn’t much to see when I left it,” I said, “but I expect the grass has grown back now, and there are flowers in the meadows. Perhaps some trees have survived. I don’t know. But it won’t be the same as it was before, not for anyone.”
    â€œAnd you?” she asked gently. “You must have lost someone, too?”
    But she already sensed the answer. She would not have asked otherwise. Women have a way of detecting absences.
    â€œWe all lost someone,” I said, as I stood and wiped my hands and mouth.
    I could see that she wanted to inquire further, but she did not. Instead she said, “Pain and loss are so strange, are they not?”
    â€œI’m not sure I know what you mean.”
    â€œI mean that we have all suffered in the same war, and we all have spaces in our lives now that were once filled by people whom we loved, but none of us experiences it in exactly the same way,” she said, and her gaze was set far from me and far from the inn. “When we talk about it—if we talk about it—nobody quite understands what we’re saying, even when we’re speaking to someone who is also living with such loss. It’s as if we are speaking versions of the same language, but the most important words have slightly different meanings to each one of us. Everything has changed, hasn’t it? It’s just as you said: the world can never be the same as it was before.”
    â€œWould you want it to be so?” I said. “The seeds of the war were sown in the old world. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of it all is that those seeds have been blasted from the earth and will never grow again.”
    â€œDo you really believe that?” she said.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œI don’t, either. But we have to hope, don’t we?”
    â€œYes,” I said, “I suppose we do.”
    MRS. GISSING came to the inn shortly after. She was a small, dour woman of indeterminate age but probably somewhere between forty and fifty, and dressed entirely in black. The landlord’s wife had told me that Mrs. Gissing lost two sons in the war, one at Verdun and the other at Ypres, and was now entirely alone, having been widowed when her boys were still infants. It was about a mile or so to Bromdun Hall, and Mrs. Gissing informed me that she usually walked to and from there, so I walked with her.
    We had to pass through the village to reach Bromdun Hall, and the usual greetings were given and received, although nobody asked me my name or my business, and I could only assume that those who did not know did not care, and those who did care already knew from the men who had kept me company at the bar the night before. At the center of the village was a small green, and on it stood a war memorial with fresh flowers laid at its base. Mrs. Gissing kept her face to the road, as if she could not bear to look at the monument. Perhaps I should have kept quiet but, as Quayle pointed out, I had a perverse habit of speaking my mind, and the landlord’s wife had set me to thinking.
    â€œI was sorry to hear of your loss,” I said to Mrs. Gissing.
    Her features tightened for a moment, as though reacting to a physical pain, then resumed their previous expression.
    â€œTwelve boys left this village and never came back,” she said. “And the ones who did come back left something of themselves over there in the mud. I still don’t understand the point of it all.”
    â€œI was there, and I don’t understand the point of it, either,” I said.
    She softened at that: just a little, but enough.
    â€œWere you at Verdun, or Ypres?” she asked. I heard a kind of hope in her voice, as though I might have been able to tell her that I knew her sons, and they had spoken of her often, and their deaths were quick, but I could tell her none of those things.
    â€œNo. The war