"How do you know he means that?" I asked. "How can you possibly have found out?"
"We got pictures, nurse. We showed 'im kids, and 'e said 'e got ten—six girls and four boys. We showed 'im pictures of kids."
I had never seen Henry before, never knew he existed. But in the ward opposite the poor T.B.'s had been holding conversations with him in window-seats, showing him pictures, painfully establishing a communion with him ... Henry, with his hair done up in hairpins!
Although they showed him off with conscious pride, I don't think he really appeared strange to them, beyond his colour. I believe they imagine his wife as appearing much as their own wives, his children as the little children who run about their own doorsteps. They do not stretch their imaginations to conceive any strangeness about his home surroundings to correspond with his own strangeness.
To them Henry has the dignity of a man and a householder, possibly a rate-payer.
He seems quite happy and amused. I see him carrying a bucket sometimes, sharing its handle with a flushed T.B. They carry on animated conversations as they go downstairs, the T.B. talking the most. It reminds me of a child and a dog.
What strange machinery is there for getting him back? Part of the cargo of a ship ... one day ... "a nigger for Central Africa...."
"Where's his unit?"
"Who knows! One nigger and his bundle ... for Central Africa!"