Will lay in a bed near the end of a long ward in the City infirmary. His bed was against the inner wall, and whenever his eyes opened they gazed at a square of sky, sometimes grey, sometimes blue. He lay on his back so that it was no effort to look at the sky, framed by the top part of the tall window. Its colour seemed to have something to do with his mood. When he was weary and sleepy, it was grey, but when he felt a bit brighter it was blue, and then the stiff dull aches of his body were not so tiresome. At first it was more comforting to be weary and sleepy; but by degrees the blue became less bright, more tender, and he could gaze at it for long periods, forgetting his weariness, forgetting even to blink his eyes.
He was glad when the doctor moved on or the nurse was finished with him, for then he could lie back and, after the turmoil of the visitation had subsided, could open his eyes and gaze at the sky with an added ease. He had not even to think of it as sky; in fact, he did not think of it at all: it was colour and light, far away and high up. Sometimes he so lost himself in this piece of sky that he became the piece of sky himself. It would come down to him, daze him slightly by its near presence, then take him away back with it through the air. He never saw anything on those trips; never wanted to see anything; he just became one with the piece of sky. Now and then it was a lovely airy feeling, and he fell asleep with a smile on his face, like a child in a cradle.
His nurse did not like this habit of childlike gazing. She was a well set-up, buxom girl from the Lewis, with plenty of energy, but with dark soft eyes. Her voice, too, was soft and pleasant, even when she made it cheerfully peremptory. But he did not want to bother with her very much, and was always glad to be left alone. Often he pretended not to be aware of her presence, particularly if the sister was with her; and one day he heard her say: “I don’t like the way he lies there gazing for hours at the sky.”
“Why?” asked Sister coolly.
“I don’t know,” said Nurse, with discomfort in her voice.
“Have you a superstition that he is to be taken away?” asked Sister, with light but penetrating irony.
“Oh no,” said Nurse, obviously sorry now she had spoken.
“Forget it then,” said Sister.
For the first time, a faint humour spread through Will, and that evening, as Nurse was going off, he beckoned to her.
“Do you think”, he asked in a solemn, if weak, whisper, “that I am to be taken away?”
Her eyes opened wide in dismay. “Oh no! What nonsense! You——” Then she looked at him more closely. “Are you trying to have me on?”
He wrinkled his brows as in vague lack of understanding, but could not keep the humour from welling in his eyes.
“You are!” she said. “You overheard me talking to Sister?”
He smiled at her, and a blush went right over her face. She nodded with business-like decision. “My lad,” she murmured, putting the sheets unnecessarily straight, “you watch if I won’t sort you for this!” But her decisive tone did not seem at all vindictive.
“You have a soft way with you, Nurse.”
“Soft, did you say? I’ll soft you before you leave here.”
“And——”
“Yes?”
“You are rather charming.”
She regarded him sternly. “None of your impertinence, young man, or I’ll report you to Sister.”
“That’s one thing you won’t do anyway,” said Will, and closed his eyes. He opened them as she moved off and gave her the ghost of a wink. She looked very indignant.
The effect of this humour, the surprise of it, came back into his mind now and then. It was an odd new experience, like something softer to lie on, and his back was often painful enough. He did not care so much for the night nurse. She was too practical, too competent, and had no soft colour or light about her. During the night, however, when the sky was shut out, his eyes would roam occasionally over the other beds in the long ward.
His early reluctance to know anything about those beds, or the people in them, or what went on around him, was partly a desire to be left alone, to be left alone, for example, with the sky. This reluctance began to be pierced, not so much with human curiosity, as with the strange night pattern the ward made, the passage between the double row of beds up which the white-clad figure came, the dim light; everywhere whiteness and straight lines. It had provided him with an austere satisfaction, unearthly as his mood, but sometimes now when a voice moaned in its sleep or in pain, the mood was touched with an unearthly sadness.
Then one day Sister came up the ward with a tall broad man, and said to Will brightly: “I have brought a friend to see you.”
Will looked at the man and murmured: “Nice of you.” He did not want to be intruded upon by strangers.
“He says he has met you once or twice, but probably you have forgotten him,” Sister explained, watching Will.
The man was looking at him with a friendly steady smile. “We met at political meetings. My name is Joe, Joe Wilson.”
Will’s brows troubled for a moment. “I seem to know your face,” he said politely.
“The Labour Rooms committee meeting,” Joe explained. “And once down by the river. I had to see a fellow called Jamie, who had lost an arm in an accident.” He spoke slowly. “You may not remember the circumstances. Jamie came for me the night you had your accident and told me all about it, so I thought I’d come along and see how you were getting on.”
“Thank you,” said Will. “I am getting along very well. They are quite good to me here.” He acknowledged Sister with a vague smile.
“He’s quite a good patient,” she said to Joe pleasantly. “But he doesn’t seem to remember anything about the accident. It must have come upon him very suddenly, for it’s a complete blank. No wonder, in a way, because he got a bad smashing.”
“Did he?” said Joe. “Was there much damage?”
“You would think a herd of cattle had gone over him. But only two ribs broken. Wasn’t he lucky?”
“He was indeed.” Joe smiled to Will. “You don’t remember much about it?”
“No,” muttered Will, with a certain uneasiness, as if the conversation were aleady tiring him.
“You don’t remember Mr. Wilson?” Sister asked Will.
“No,” he replied and let his head fall inertly back.
Sister gave Joe a significant look, and then said: “I have never got the right story about it. What exactly were the details?”
Joe spoke quietly to her, as if his remarks were meant for her alone. Will had closed his eyes. He went over the main incidents of the scene and fight as Jamie had described them to him.
“And who was this girl, Ivy?” Sister asked.
“Just a girl of the streets,” said Joe.
“She knew him?”
“Yes.”
Will had opened his eyes again and was staring at the patch of sky.
“Well,” said Sister, “wasn’t it nice of Mr. Wilson to come and see you?”
“Yes. Thanks very much,” muttered Will.
“Good-bye,” said Joe. “I’ll look in again to see how you’re getting along.”
Will moved restlessly, but when they had gone he was relieved, and in a very short time had forgotten all about Joe’s visit.
When he saw his day nurse coming towards him, he closed his eyes.
“So you’ve had a visitor, I hear,” she said cheerfully.
He did not open his eyes. She was going to add something, but thought better of it and left him.
When he saw the usual stately procession approaching of surgeon, house surgeon, sister, and, this time, two nurses, he felt himself getting stupidly tired, and what responses he gave were dull and automatic.
The surgeon was obviously puzzled. “I wonder now?” he said. “His symptoms don’t seem to fit a simple case of concussion and exhaustion. Could there be a psychological factor involved also, do you think? A defence mechanism of some sort? Probably quite unconnected with what we have heard about him so far.”
“The scene”, replied the houseman, “was certainly rather extraordinary for a fellow in his position. Before he landed himself in it, I can’t help thinking there must have been some unusual urge. I have talked to one or two of his friends. They were amazed. Sister here.…”
There came a thoughtful muttering from the surgeon to the effect that it seemed outside his province now. “… Better ask a psychologist to come up—probably Ross—he is good with this type of case.…”
Will caught the drift of the talk but without much real interest. There was a barrier made out of mist, behind his mind. And they had no idea of the energy it was going to take to tear it away.
A man trying to see the earth through a floor of white cloud. Well, he just couldn’t see it.… And there was no great point in seeing it anyway, so long as he could see the blue sky and fly in light. Effort and stress would come soon enough.…
On the next visiting day, Joe came back. Will did not know him, and, to get over the discomfort of worrying over why he did not know him—for his loss of memory had now been openly discussed and the psychologist had sympathetically tried to get him to co-operate—he let Joe talk.
When Joe’s head went up, Will followed the astonished look on his face. Nurse Macleod was bringing a girl visitor, and presently announced her as a friend to see him.
She was dark, with a rather thin face, made up, but not too noticeably. Her eyes were very bright; glittered, in fact, as if they had been washed in a drug. Her defensive manner, slightly, if unnaturally, militant, suffered an awkward moment when she looked at Will’s bandaged head. He had been shaved that morning, and his face was death-pale and frail. His eyes gleamed at her from between half-closed lids; then automatically a tired smile came upon his face and it broke her stare.
The nurse tried to put her at ease. “He is getting on very well.”
“I’d be all right,” said Will, “only I have a difficult time with my nurse. You don’t happen to be a nurse?”
“No,” she said.
He looked at her. “May I ask your name?”
“Ivy.”
His brows gathered for a moment. Then he slowly oscillated his head. “The old mechanism refuses to function.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I didn’t think you would remember me. But I——”
“Please don’t be upset because I don’t remember.”
“I’m not upset—about that,” said Ivy, struggling with the emotions that the unusual situation was generating in her. “I only came because I hoped to be able to help you.” She looked mistrustfully at Nurse Macleod and at Joe.
“You may as well say it to me, too,” said Joe. “I’m looking after the case, as you know.”
Nurse Macleod withdrew, a little against her inclination, for she had heard about Ivy and had been taking long side looks at her.
“I know who did it,” Ivy said to Joe quickly. “I’ve got his pocket-book back. There’s no money in it, but—I know. And I’ll swear it. I’ll go into court.”
“That’s plucky of you,” said Joe. “That is plucky. But don’t get that lot against you. You haven’t told any one?”
“What do you think? How was I going to get the pocketbook back, unless I tore it out of the bas——, out of the fellow? I frightened him a whole lot,” concluded Ivy, correctly.
Joe smiled. “All right, Ivy. If you come and have tea with me when we go out, we’ll get down to the business. We must be very careful what we say, and for goodness’ sake don’t let the police know what you know. Not any one.”
“Not likely!… But—why?”
“Well, you see, you know him.” He nodded towards Will. “Tell me, do you think he’s capable of squashing the whole thing in order to save any one, even the young bastard who did it on him?”
Ivy looked at Will, then she looked away. “He is,” she had to acknowledge, nervously twisting the handle of her black bag.
“So what can we do? By the way, have you his pocketbook?”
“Yes. Will I take it out here?”
Joe nodded and Ivy produced a brown leather pocketbook. Joe opened it and then handed it to Will. “You don’t happen to know this?”
Will slowly examined it. It was quite empty; money, visiting cards, stamps and odds and ends, all gone. “Can’t say I know it,” he replied.
“Will I stick to it?” Joe asked Ivy.
She looked at him keenly, and then decided to trust him.
“This is simply a piece of evidence for the accident you were in,” Joe explained to Will.
Will smiled, but now a trifle wearily.
Joe looked at Ivy. “Well, I’ll have to go. Would you care to come now or——”
Ivy glanced at Will, and found him staring down the ward with a terrible intensity. The nurse was walking towards them, accompanied by a tall golden girl carrying a small bunch of long-stemmed daffodils.
They came right to the bedside, but Nurse Macleod’s cheerful words about another visitor were left unspoken in her amazement at the concentration of Will’s gaze on the visitor’s face. The concentration was so naked, so burningly intense in the eyes, that it was extremely painful even to look at. Then his body caught the concentration and strained upward a few inches, the head actually leaving the pillow, and hung there a moment, before it dropped back in a dead slump.
The nurse immediately went to him, and, turning round after a few seconds, said with an audible expulsion of breath. “It’s only a faint, I think. Please go.”
As Jenny turned from the death-pale face and bandaged head, she met Ivy’s eyes. For a few moments the two women looked at each other. Automatically Jenny’s small social smile came to her face and, passing Ivy, she walked up the ward carrying her daffodils.
Though Jenny’s advent “shocked” the memory into him, Will could see that the doctor or house surgeon was more worried than ever about him. He was sorry in a way, for he liked the doctor. Obviously he had been a country lad, not because his speech was without trace of the characteristic rhythm of the City speech, but because of the way he looked and held his head. Will could feel the country wind blowing about the head and shoulders, smoothing and shaping them, knitting the eyebrows over the sea-coloured eyes, that concentrated and stared. He was truly concerned about Will, but also he did not like to be beaten. More than that, he had contrived to make it plain that if a person in Will’s condition had made up his mind to die, then nothing could stop his dying, and yet he wanted to make Will live despite himself. Had they been boys in the country they would have had a fight over it and the doctor would probably have walloped him!
What the doctor could not understand was that, in the personal sense, it really was no concern of his whether Will lived or died. How much less then could he understand that it was a matter of no concern to Will?
Which was all interesting enough to Will, even had he not been able—as he was—to appreciate the lingering thought at the back of the doctor’s country-bred mind that any one who did not want to live, who would not put up a fight, was fundamentally a weakling.
The doctor questioned him and probed him. “Now it all rests with yourself. You’re all right. Say to yourself, get it into your mind: I want to get better. I know how weak you feel. But don’t give into that weak feeling.” He smiled with the kindest expression. “Pull yourself together!”
“Right,” said Will quietly, smiling back.
The doctor concentrated on Will’s eyes, searched them as deeply as he could, but all he found was a pleasant baffling.
As they moved away, he said to Sister: “I can make nothing of him. Frankly, he is dying on our hands.” It annoyed him.
But Will had the pleasure of being left to himself.
For one thing he had now conquered entirely was the fear of death. Sometimes, lying there, with his mind working in its clear detached effortless way, he would have liked to be able to tell them how important this conquering of the fear of death was, important because it gave the mind a feeling not only of freedom but also of force and—he had to suppose—of dignity. For once you conquer the fear of death, you conquer the last fear of all, you surmount the last barricade. But the calm assurance of this he could never hope to convey. Certainly not to the doctor who wanted him to fight on his feet until death walloped life out of him, until it left him dead and defeated! Yet it was so obvious that that was the wrong way to fight death, entirely the wrong technique!
This had a humour of its own, too, for he felt completely calm.
Who would imagine, looking down on his white sickly face, with its weak voice, looking down on this patient who had not the energy to bite his thumb, who had so palpably given in and was “sinking”, that he was yet capable of this clarity of thought?
What did people think about when they were dying, when at last the mind was coming away from the sickly humours and obscurities of the body and was free to make its own clear patterns of thought? What was important then?
That was a teaser! Money? Status? War? Equality?… Will smiled.
He thought of Joe and would not have minded laying a few considerations before him, on the purely personal aspect of death!
But first of all, if only he could have laid a few things before them (those whom it might concern) regarding what he had found important in life! Not the horrors and tragedies and social savageries and razor-slashings and bomb smashings, not that welter of emotional sensation by which humanity was glutted, and horribly fascinated, and glutted again, not all that, which was the unresolved desperation of the human mind, but—and this would be extremely difficult to do because it was so simple, so incredibly simple—
Nurse Macleod stood beside him.
“Ah,” he murmured, “was I sky-gazing again?”
“You were.”
“It’s beginning to look”, he suggested, “as if you were right about that!”
“Nonsense,” she said. “You made me ashamed of myself. I am disappointed with you.”
“I made you blush anyway.”
“What’s that?” She stooped over him. His voice was weak. “Well,” she replied, “you at least won’t have the satisfaction of making me blush again.”
How subtle her woman’s instinct, “shocking” him into being interested!
“I could make you blush now.”
“You?”
He nodded.
She smiled satirically.
“What you bet?” he asked.
“Sixpence.”
His head moved negatively.
“Well?” she demanded.
“A small one. On forehead, if you’re frightened of proper place.”
“Well?” she demanded.
He looked at her, an eerie gleam gathering in his eyes. “You should be ashamed”, he said slowly, “of way you carried on with him last night. You went a bit too far.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you deny it?”
“Certainly I do.” Her eyes were wide on him, with a touch of superstitious fear, as if he had “the sight”.
“Nurse!” His voice strengthened. His face became unearthly calm, his eyes large. “Do you understand what you have done?”
“What?”
“You have denied the true love you have for each other.”
“I didn’t deny it,” she said swiftly. Then she saw the glimmer come back into his eyes, the small smile of mockery and triumph, and right over her face and neck went a deep lovely blush.
“You!” she said, bending her head and putting the straight clothes as straight as they were.
“The forehead—if you’re frightened of my poor dry mouth.”
“I wouldn’t touch you”, she said, “with the handle of a broom. Besides,” she added, “how could I do it here?”
“True,” he said. “I’ll let you off—if you promise to do it when I’m dead.”
That dismissed the blush, but she faced up with spirit. “You dead? You’re too wicked to die before ninety.” All the same she glanced at him uneasily and glanced away. “How did you know…?”
“About last night? I’ll tell you. And this is simple truth. Three times to-day I saw you—gazing at sky. Yesterday I saw you gaze once, but excited, restless. To-day, you got lost in sky—and came back with a small shiver of delight, and then you looked about you quickly.”
“I hope you’re not exciting him too much,” said Sister.
Nurse Macleod started guiltily. Will smiled: “No, Sister. She is my only tonic.”
“Do you feel equal to a visitor?” Sister asked.
“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”
“It’s a Mrs. Armstrong, who says she wants particularly to see you. Your landlady, I gather, from the country.”
Will’s brows wrinkled. “All right,” he said. “But give me a few minutes.”
He closed his eyes at once and let his body get its “suspended” feeling. The little business with Nurse had drained him a bit. But he knew exactly how to get rid of the physical stress, and in fact within three minutes he was feeling completely “free” again.
Mrs. Armstrong must be having a long conversation with Sister, he thought, after ten minutes. They would be going into his history and wondering what could be done about him!
But when at last he saw her coming up the ward, her broad embosomed figure “of Flora and the country green”, her glowing face shy a little, and when she drew near and he saw the smile inhabiting the very texture of her skin and gleaming in her kind eyes, he experienced the sharp poignant stab of an emotion very like dismay.
He saw, too, the quick stab of dismay his appearance gave her, though she hid it in a moment.
“This is a fine way to frighten us!” she said, taking his hand.
He smiled, unable to speak. Lord, he had hardly realized how weak he was!
“And when are you coming out to the farm so that I can feed you up?” Her eyes were growing unnaturally bright. He turned his head away. Oh, God, he was going to weep! He felt the disgrace coming upon him, the sickening impulse to weep like a bairn. He shut his teeth as hard as he could and kept his eyes closed.
Mrs. Armstrong took the opportunity to wipe her own eyes. “I’m just an auld wife,” she said to the sister, smiling, trying to excuse herself. The two women spoke to each other, until the spasm had subsided in Will. He had not wept, but his eyes were wet, and while he took his handkerchief from under his pillow, Mrs. Armstrong continued to tell the sister about her farm.
“Kind of you to come,” said Will, with an uncertain smile.
“I’ve just been longing to come. What a shock you gave us!”
The sister said she would be back in a minute or two.
“Are they good to you here?” Mrs. Armstrong asked in a quick whisper.
Will smiled, feeling light-hearted. “Would you like to have me under your eye?”
“Faith, I would,” said Mrs. Armstrong. “Wouldn’t you like to come?”
“Yes.”
“Well, why not get better as quick as you can—I mean, well enough so that you can be shifted?”
She looked so innocent—as if she hadn’t just been told that he was going under!
“What a bother I’d be to you.”
“Bother? How can you say that?” Her eagerness was almost hurt. What a genuine woman this was! Her whole nature, to give, to give. Not to take, not to demand her dues, but to give. And a landlady at that!
“Thank you very much,” he murmured.
“It’s not thanks I’m wanting.”
“I know.”
“Well—will you promise me you’ll come—as soon as you can?”
“All right.”
“That’s settled.” She nodded firmly, ignoring his unconvincing tone. “That’s fine. Well, well, now. What a steer you put us into!”
“Did I?”
“When you didn’t come on the Saturday night, I thought you would just have been up to one of your ploys! But when you didn’t come by Sunday afternoon, I felt sure there was something wrong. Jenny just laughed at me. She said I didn’t understand the present generation. As if I was an old wife!”
But Will was looking at her as though his earthly mind were finding slight difficulty in following all this. “I thought”, he said, at last, “that Jenny was away for the week-end?”
“Her? Not she! I gave her a good scolding when she trooped in on the Saturday, large as life. ‘Och!’ says she, ‘when it came to the bit I couldn’t leave my garden.’ Did you ever hear the like?” Will had turned his gaze to the window. Mrs. Armstrong studied his expression now with shrewd penetrating eyes and rambled on: “By the Monday I was quite convinced something had gone wrong, so I asked her to find out from your office. She phoned, it seems, and you hadn’t turned up. Then she got a bit anxious, and in some way or other found out you were in the infirmary. She came out late at night to give me the news. We were in a gey state about you, I can tell you!”
“Were you?” said Will smiling, but with scepticism deep in his eyes.
“We were that. She phoned the infirmary every day and either came out or wrote me.”
“Nice of her.”
“Ah, but you don’t know how nice Jenny can be until you get behind her reserve. And that’s mostly shyness! She’s one of the finest lassies in the world. If Jenny was on your side, she’d die for you as natural as—as—eat her porridge. But I’m wearying you out?”
“No. I just get little tired. Don’t mind that.” His eyes slowly closed and his breath came out in small open-mouthed gusts. She sat quietly beside him. Was she going too far too quickly? Her shrewd expression grew soft and she was manifestly threatened by emotion again. He looked so frail, she could have taken him in her arms and carried him away.
He opened his eyes. “Thank you for coming.”
“Is there anything I can get for you, anything you would like?”
“No, thanks.”
His smile twisted the heart in her. “Is there any one you would like to see?” she asked gently. “Jenny would like to come and see you, but she’s frightened to—to trouble you.”
A touch of the old mocking humour came to his face. “I’d rather have yourself.”
“Me? An auld wife? Tut! Tut!”
“No one has been so kind to me.”
“Oh, now, now! Promise me”, she pleaded suddenly, her reserves down, “that you will get well.”
He looked at her steadily, but did not speak. For the first time she felt clearly that he was removed from her, from every one, and that he was going to die. Awe and compassion overwhelmed her. They spoke to each other with their eyes. The intimacy was dear and, in her case, terrible, but, in his case, calm.
“Well?” said Sister. “When is he going to be well enough to go out to see you?”
Will lifted his eyes and stared at her, too. “Soon, I hope,” he said with deadly calm.
“Now, that’s the way to talk!” Sister nodded.
Mrs. Armstrong had some last words for him. He did not hear them properly, because he apprehended more clearly the message of her eyes, and her eyes did not ask anything; they gave without measure out of the store of her loving kindness.
After she had gone, he found that he had lost the flawless calm of his assurance. He became restless and much more conscious of his physical aches. He stared at the sky, but could not get its remote calmness. This vexed him and he began to feel the prickling sensation of fever. His thought, too, became erratic. He tried to clarify his thought by deliberately thinking of Jenny. Assuming Mrs. Armstrong had come specially to tell him Jenny hadn’t gone away for the week-end, what then? He saw the implication—that his loss of Jenny had subconsciously inhibited any eager desire for life and accordingly a “defence mechanism” had been raised up.… But how humanly trivial, how absurd—as if men and women did not die without such romantic excuse! It was an indignity heaped upon a man’s integrity and loneliness. The next thing they would be doing would be bringing Jenny to see him, as their last trump card! That would finally be unbearable.
Clearly, too, if Jenny had not gone away for her week-end there was some hitch in their programme. She would not back out of an arrangement like that at the last minute. She was not that kind of girl; and, anyway, he would despise her if she did.
Damn them, why couldn’t they leave him alone!
When, later, Nurse Macleod came and took his temperature, he did not speak to her or observe the astonished look on her face. She stuck down the black dot on his chart and went hurriedly away.
House surgeon and Sister appeared on the scene. He didn’t mind. Visitors were forbidden. Philip Manson was denied for the second time. Mac and Don went away silent.
Oh, he knew all right what was happening; he knew the paraphernalia of the business, but presently his mind lost interest even in that, for it entered the confused but at times intensely vivid world of delirium.
In this world there came upon him a compelling conviction. The straight lines, the whiteness, the dim night light, the high-up window showing but shutting out the sky (night and daylight at the same time) became a prison, and not a stable prison, for sometimes the white lines, the solid edges of the rectangular beds, could tilt up threateningly against his desire to escape.
The more he was defeated in this way the fiercer his conviction became. And his conviction was simply this: that if he could get to the place where he saw the wild geese, all would be well with him again. He did not think of being bodily well in life. He thought of bright ease and peace and light, kindly light, glistening with the singing of birds, and an air cool, cool, cool on his face and along the skin of his body and cool to the sky. A divine loveliness of being, slyly and laughingly aware, and free.
Now he realized, in his delirium, that his resources were slight, that the prison was strong, and that his only chance lay in cunning. Once or twice, however, his conviction grew so overpowering that he threw caution aside and started up swiftly…but at once the forces in the prison gripped him and pushed him back.
As with a sea-anemone that has been roughly touched, his resources drew inward, to protect the core of his being. For he realized quite clearly that it was a very small core, about the size of a nut, and now he had to defend it lest, of itself, it should pass into nothingness.
The extremities of his physical body, left unprotected, were growing cold. He could hardly feel the doctor’s hands on his feet. The doctor was deeply interested in his case, because it baffled him and he did not like to be baffled.
But now he could not afford to think of the doctor, for the core of his being was losing its stability, its central assurance, was wanting to float away…
And presently Will did in fact have the perfectly clear and delightful feeling of floating out of his body, floating above it, and looking down on it. He saw the doctor’s tense puzzled attitude, his bluff shoulders, as he stood upright staring down at Will’s face. Sister drew back from the bed. It was all over. Nurse Macleod was silently affected. As the deathscreen was set up, the doctor turned away.
And now Nurse Macleod approached to pull the sheet up over his face. Will gathered all his resources and sent them to his face, but he could not move a muscle. With an energy that to him was herculean, blinding, he tried to move an eyelid. And faintly, but yet perceptibly, to the tender human eyes of the girl from Lewis, the right eyelid quivered. The sheet dropped from her hand and she involuntarily called out: “Doctor!”
The doctor came back.
An hour later the doctor was able to inform Mrs. Montgomery that her nephew had got over the crisis and that there was a fair chance now of a complete recovery. “Although”, he added, “I can guarantee nothing, for the case is a very complicated one.”
She was moved in a way that made her look heavy and stupid.
“I hope you will consider, doctor, that this is your private case. As for the infirmary, I hope that I know my duty.”
He glanced at her closely, for she had spoken with dignity; then he accompanied her to the outer door.
When he came back, he said lightly to the sister: “The human mind is a profound mystery.”
The sister answered: “She wouldn’t miss an odd thousand anyway.”
The doctor smiled. He was feeling tired.