When he was removed and they had left him, Nona said to Hapgood as they came down the steps of the County Hospital, "There was a thing he was so fond of, Mr. Hapgood:
"...O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
"It comes to me now. There must be a turning now. If he dies ... still, a turning."
CHAPTER VIII
I
Hapgood across the coffee cups, the liqueur glasses and the cigarettes, wagged a solemn head at that friend of his, newly returned from a long visit to America. He wagged a solemn head:
"She's got her divorce, that wife of his....
"Eh?... Well, man alive, where do you expect me to begin? You insinuate yourself into a Government commission to go to America to lecture with your 'Sketchbook on the Western Front', and I write you about six letters to every one I get out of you, and you come back and expect me to give you a complete social and political and military record of everything that's happened in your absence. Can't you read?...
"Well, have it your own way. I've told you in my letters how he went on after that collapse, that brain hemorrhage. I told you we got Ormond Clive on to him. I told you we got him up here eventually to Clive's own nursing home in Welbeck Place. Clive was a friend of that Lady Tybar. She was with Sabre all the time he was in Queer Street—and it was queer, I give you my word. Pretty well every day I'd look in. Every day she'd be there. Every day Ormond Clive would come. Time and again we'd stand around the bed, we three,—watching. Impenetrable and extraordinary business! There was his body, alive, breathing. His mind, his consciousness, his ego, his self, his whatever you like to call it—not there. Away. Absent. Not in that place. Departed into, and occupied in that mysterious valley where those cases go. What was he doing there? What was he seeing there? What was he thinking there? Was he in touch with this that belonged to him here? Was he sitting in some fastness, dark and infinitely remote, and trying to rid himself of this that belonged to him here? Was he trying to get back to it, to resume habitation and possession and command? It was rummy. It was eerie. It was creepy. It was like staring down into a dark pit and hearing little tinkling sounds of some one moving there, and wondering what the devil he was up to. Yes, it was creepy....