When Madeleine telephones to me, "I'm living in a whirl...." it disturbs me. Suddenly I want to too, but it dies down again.
Not that it is their world, those trenches. When they come in wounded or sick they say at once, "What shows are on?"
Mr. Wicks has ceased to read those magazines his sister sends him; he now stares all day at his white bedrail.
I only pass him on my way to the towel-cupboard, twice an evening, and then as I glance at him I am set wondering all down the ward of what he thinks, or if he thinks....
I may be quite wrong about him; it is possible he doesn't think at all, but stares himself into some happier dream.
One day when he is dead, when he is as totally dead as he tells me he hopes to be, that bed with its haunted bedrail will bend under another man's weight. Surely it must be haunted? The weight of thought, dream or nightmare, that hangs about it now is almost visible to me.
Mr. Wicks is an uneducated and ordinary man. In what manner does his dream run? Since he has ceased to read he has begun to drop away a little from my living understanding.
He reflects deeply at times.
To-night, as I went quickly past him with my load of bath-towels, his blind flapped a little, and I saw the moon, shaped like a horn, behind it.
Dropping my towels, I pulled his blind back: