Hospital
Often I am sad because I cannot worry enough about the 11, Charles. I forget him even when I am in the ward. His is the bed I see first when I look through the holes of the paint in the glass-topped door, opposite, away at the far end of the ward. There he has been, always, every day, through all the endless months since the Marne, propped up against a table board and two pillows and a sheet of black rubber. He breathes always more and more painfully, and coughs always more and more. The fever lines on his chart zigzag up and down, in long dreadful points. He has become very cross and exacting. He scolds us in little feeble gasps, with little feeble gestures. He is twenty-one years old, and has very long eyelashes.
Yesterday when I went to say good-bye to him at the end of the day he was crying there in his corner, quietly, all by himself. His long eyelashes were all wet. I said, "Oh, little Charles, oh, little Charles!" and kept saying it over and over, and had nothing else in all the world to say. I patted his hands, that always lie both of them together upon the strap which is fastened round the bar at the foot of the bed, by which he is sometimes able to pull himself up.
His hands are white and thin and crooked, like the roots of things that belong in the earth; while I patted his hands I was thinking that they did not seem to belong in the light and air at all.
This morning I thought, "How absurd to have brought him a little pot of cream!" A little pot of cream for a man who is dying.