‘I’ll tell you to-morrow,’ the Sergeant answered. ‘But it’s no good thinking about things just now.’
Again there was a silence, and it lasted for a full hour. The rank petroleum lamp in the sconce burnt out and left a sickening stench upon the air. The whole space in which the wounded men lay went dark, and the wild free wind and the cruel driving rain beat at the window. In the black darkness voices spoke here and there. There were notes of fever from wounded men, and once or twice there was a last message whispered to a nurse’s ear, never to be delivered. Dark and storm, and the heroic long-suffering soul released from the heroic long-suffering body, and going home at midnight.
Sick men who have been half-starved for a year or two, and who have run through every note of the gamut of emotion, may be quicker to appreciate these influences than common people are: but Polson Jervase, lying on his back and staring upwards in a futile endeavour to trace the semi-circular ring of smoke upon the ceiling, felt them all deeply.
Whilst he lay there, staring upwards, there was a sudden patter of bare feet on the bare floor at his side, and a hand clutched him.
‘Look here,’ said Major de Blacquaire, and even in his half dream he knew the voice instantly, as if he had been wide awake and the room had lain in broad daylight. ‘Look here, what the devil did you do it for?’
‘Get back into bed,’ said Polson, ‘and I’ll try to talk to you.’
The beds were not more than twenty inches in width, and there was barely a foot between them, so that a man by the stretching of a hand could touch a comrade.
Out of the dark, to the Sergeant’s intense surprise, there came a groping hand, which sought his own, and found it and Clutched it.
‘What the devil did you do it for?’ said De Blacquaire.
‘Well,’ said the wounded Sergeant, ‘it’s pretty hard to say. I suppose it’s a mixed-up kind of thing altogether. I saw you drop, and you promised to break me in the morning, and if I’d let your chance go by, d’ye see——’