They had
faded into the immeasurable distance. What more was there to be
said or hoped, and his dejected heart gave back the answer:
nothing. He slept that night in a cheap hotel. The next day he
bought a suit of civilian clothes and sought the office of the
auditor's department. Here he received something more like a
welcome. Many of the clerks, with whom he had scarcely been on
nodding terms, now came up and shook him warmly by the hand. The
superintendent sent for him and told him that his place had been
held open, hinting, in the exuberance of the moment, at a slight
increase of salary. The assistant superintendent made much of him
and invited him out to lunch. The old darkey door-keeper greeted
him like a long-lost parent. Raymond went back to his desk, and
resumed with a sort of melancholy satisfaction the interrupted
routine of twenty years. In a week he could hardly believe he had
ever quitted his desk. He would shut his eyes and wonder whether
the war had not been all a dream. He looked at his hands and asked
himself whether they indeed had pulled the lanyards of cannon,
lifted loaded projectiles, had held the spokes of the leaping
wheel. His eyes, now intent on figures, had they in truth ever
searched the manned decks of the enemy or trained the sights that
had blown Spanish blockhouses to the four winds of heaven? Had it
been he or his ghost who had stood behind the Nordenfeldt shields
with the bullets pattering against the steel and stinging the air
overhead? He or his ghost, barefoot in the sand that sopped the
blood of fallen comrades, the ship shaking with the detonation of
her guns, the hoarse cheering of her crew re-echoing in his half-
deafened ears? A dream, yes; tragic and wonderful in the
retrospect, filled with wild, bright pictures; incredible, yet
true!
He was restless and lonely.
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