He was a landscape architect.

All day he planned Dutch gardens: rectangular, squared with tulips; Italian gardens: dark with myrtle, thick with running water; English gardens: prim, box-edged, espaliered fruit trees flickering on walls, borders of snap-dragons, pansies, marjoram, rue.

On Saturday afternoons, he did not walk into the country. He paid a quarter and went to a cinema show, and gazed — gazed — at marching soldiers, at guns firing and recoiling, at waste grounds strewn with mutilated dead. When he took off his glasses, there was moisture upon them, and his eyes hurt. He could not see to use a periscope, they said, yet he could draw gardens.

His firm dismissed him for designing a military garden: forts, and redoubts, and salients, in hemlock and yew, and a puzzle of ditches, damp, deep, floored with forget-me-nots. It was a wonderful thing, but quite mad, of course.

When they took his body from the river, the eyes were wide open, and the lids were so stiffened that they buried him without closing them.