The ward has put Mr. Wicks to Coventry because he has been abusive and violent-tempered for three days.
He lies flat in his bed and frowns; no more jokes over the lemonade, no wilfulness over the thermometer.
It is in these days that Mr. Wicks faces the truth.
I lingered by his bed last night, after I had put his tea-tray on his table, and looked down at him; he pretended to be inanimate, his open eyes fixed upon the white rail of the bed. His bedclothes were stretched about him as though he had not moved since his bed was made, hours before.
His worldly pleasures were beside him—his reading-lamp, his Christmas box of cigars, his Star—but his eyes, disregarding them, were upon that sober vision that hung around the bedrail.
He began a bitter conversation:
"Nurse, I'm only a ranker, but I had a bit saved. I went to a private doctor and paid for myself. And I went to a specialist, and he told me I should never get this. I paid for it myself out of what I had saved."
We might have been alone in the world, he and I. Far down at the other end of the room the men sat crouched about the fire, their trays before them on chairs. The sheet of window behind Mr. Wicks's head was flecked with the morsels of snow which, hunted by the gale, obtained a second's refuge before oblivion.
"I'd sooner be dead than lying here; I would, reely." You hear that often in the world. "I'd sooner be dead than——" But Mr. Wicks meant it; he would sooner be dead than lying there. And death is a horror, an end. Yet he says lying there is worse.
"You see, I paid for a specialist myself, and he told me I should never be like this."