With a nod to Alain, with 17 years of service, whom I met today. I am not Blake though, and could only listen.
Captain Blake pulls a face as he puts his satchel on his desk. This morning's encounter on the street just in front of this building was disturbing enough to stick in his mind.
In deep thought, he takes off his cap and goes to the window to look outside. Even if he did not know this man, he was still a former comrade from the Navy – not a contemporary, but a veteran of the same branch of service – and as an officer he felt responsible.
This morning, just in front of the gate, the veteran had approached him, had spoken to him without even a good morning, as if he were continuing a conversation they had started a long time ago. "You know, the birds are wonderful, captain."
Surprised, Blake had stopped and the man had continued a rapid flow that Blake had to concentrate to understand. "I have just finished reading my new book on ornithology, and the birds, they are something, you know. They have no tools, nothing at all, and yet the architecture of their nests is something so great ... "
The man's eyes were gleaming and exalted as he spoke – but too wide and bulging for sanity – looking into void, far away towards the trees on the other side of the street and he had spoken at length of these birds that amazed him, while the captain listened, speechless and fascinated. "... and they do not wage war, at least. And they are right about that I think. Why are there wars?"
And in a few modest words the man evoked a memory of what had marked him the most during his years of service. Blake then put a hand on his shoulder, compassionately, to comfort him, and accompanied him to one of the Yard's offices where he had found someone to connect the other man with the Veterans Agency. Most importantly, he had instructed them not to leave the older man alone.
Now back in his office, Captain Blake wonders if he could not have done more. Those large bright, illuminated, eyes reminded him of another equally fervent look, just as out of the world, and oh, so passionate. Strange, as society regarded the one as a mildly crazy man who had to be pitied and cared for, and tolerated the other whose fulminations were perhaps more complicated and less comprehensible. They had illuminated looks, both the somewhat simple veteran and the passionate scientist. But in Mortimer's case it was true that these eyes were quieter, less wide, and his speech was far from fearful and anxious.
When the veteran spoke of the war, Blake had almost wanted to reply that he worked every day, with so many others, so that the wars they had known would never happen again. But something had held him back; it did not seem legitimate to talk about it, to bring the situation back to him at the risk of removing this man from his sweet dream - his self-protection.
And as much as he had wanted to comfort this man, he would give everything, do anything, so that Mortimer would never feel so lost – so that the brightness of his eyes, when speaking of his passion, would not harden with fear or lose its innocence.
When Mortimer speaks to him thus, his eyes shining, lost in his explanations, Blake drinks in the fervent and luminous expressions avidly; he memorizes and archives each of these magical and intelligent glances, and appreciates and cherishes them again, thinking back to them later. He even sometimes allows himself to dream that one day, perhaps one day, Mortimer would turn those same eyes to him, and look at him with that same radiant glow and fervour.