A FACE
Vagueness lay for Brian in that shack room where the noise of forest trees mourned always at the window. Only pain was sharp … colossal, rearing misshapen out of the blur induced by an awful weakness. Sleep wrenched him for horrible dreaming minutes from his world of pain. Pain wrenched him back. At times a mammoth terror lay in his soul, undefined yet grotesquely positive, as if, pushing back, his consciousness foresaw that horrific catastrophe of noise and belching terror, and waited, unable to sense any of its details save the single one of personal tragedy and pain. There were cramped minutes when the rafters of the peaked roof seemed pressing down upon him … and minutes of a diffused reaching out when the world, torn by internal explosion, seemed flying away from him in fragments, even walls receding from his cot which stayed, by a miracle, alone upon a wind-swept moor.
Intervals were an eternity. Familiarity with the detail of the room engendered frantic loathing. His brain conned over the faded colors in the rag rug and encountered the unchangeable, bayonet-like crack in the mirror with nervous fury. No peace came with the darkness. Each familiar thing persisted, looming clearer to his tired mind by the very effort his straining eyes made to reach it. There was the table clogged with doctors' litter … and there the other cot where Frank pretended to sleep and kept his vigil … there the chair … and there the dab of yellow in the rug that the sun struck into faded gayety in the morning … and there the crack across the mirror, the wriggling, distorted, foolish crack that seemed alive for all its sameness. And there was always the noise of wind which became a corollary of his pain, pulsing with it, never quiet, an overtone that tragically would not yield.
Into the blur of wind and weakness and pain came two miracles—a red geranium peering out of the dusk of the room like a glowing coal, unfamiliar and therefore a delight—a bit of velvet laughter in the drab that caught his whole attention … the other a face. The face came first in a cloud of flower-spotted purple that he knew clearly was in some way related to the hypodermic needle Frank had plunged into his arm while the sunset still lay painted on the window. … It took form in the purple like a pansy—that face—grew sweet and vivid and very real. Mercifully its loveliness was changeable, losing its pansy purples and gaining glints of gold … becoming less a pansy … more a face flower-like with compassion.
"And now?" wondered Brian when the face came again.
"It is morning," said Joan.
At the sound of her voice there came within him an extraordinary fusing, at once a pain and a delight … fragments of memory … a moonbeam … tears … the crackle of a fire … a quarry mist … the glory of stars … a meaning … a motive that startled and defied him.
"There should be moonlight on your hair," said Brian, drifting slowly back to a knowledge of reality and pain.
"Moonlight?"
"You are Joan."
"Yes. At least until Doctor Cole finds someone else, I am at times your nurse. The pain, Brian?" She bent over him, straightening a pillow, touching his forehead with cool, questioning fingers.
"Not worse," said Brian.
"I am glad."
"There was a purple cloud," he said, frowning.
"The drug. Doctor Barrington wanted you to sleep."
"And the geranium?" His eyes sought it with relief.
"Kenny found it. Grogan's wife had it in her window. I think he must have bullied her a little—"
"Bless him! … Where's the mirror?"
"Downstairs. I'm sleeping there."
"Thank God!" He closed his eyes, his color ebbing. "This plaster cast," he apologized, "is like a suit of armor. It bothers me."
"Poor fellow! … Can you eat?"
"Not—yet… Who's cooking?"
"Sometimes Don; sometimes I—unless the doctor sends me here. Once—Kenny."
Brian smiled.
"You are very good," he said simply.