"Needn't have troubled to have brought him," said the hospital orderly, as blood dripped fast from the stretcher, black in the light of the lantern. "He's pretty near dead now. He won't last long."
CHAPTER VII
"So you like it, Will? You like this sort of thing?"
Martin Howe was stretched on the grass of a hillside a little above a cross-roads. Beside him squatted a ruddy-faced youth with a smudge of grease on his faintly-hooked nose. A champagne bottle rested against his knees.
"Yes. I've never been happier in my life. It's a coarse boozing sort of a life, but I like it."
They looked over the landscape of greyish rolling hills scarred everywhere by new roads and ranks of wooden shacks. Along the road beneath them crawled like beetles convoy after convoy of motor-trucks. The wind came to them full of a stench of latrines and of the exhaust of motors.
"The last time I saw you," said Martin, after a pause, "was early one morning on the Cambridge bridge. I was walking out from Boston, and we talked of the Eroica they'd played at the Symphony, and you said it was silly to have a great musician try to play soldier. D'you remember?"
"No. That was in another incarnation. Have some fizz."
He poured from the bottle into a battered tin cup.