'Tell him,' he would say, his unsteady forefinger on the first of these, 'that I must be fit for travel by this date. Tell him to give me more medicine—I shall take two pills every half hour. Tell him I cannot wait.'
And again, two or three days later, his finger back on the page,—
'There is no use in trying to catch this boat now. But tell him that the next one goes two weeks later. Surely he can cure me in two weeks; tell him that that’s fourteen days.'
The weeks crept by and, one after another, the Japanese steamers sailed without him; but in his mind, which was slowly losing its clearness, a new hope dawned each day. I began to dread the hours beside his bed. It was hard to listen to the plans for his work which, under the stress of mounting fever, often trailed off to incoherent muttering, and to watch the thin profile of his face showing an ever sharper line against the pillow; hard to follow the doctor to his car and hear his passionless, hopeless words; harder still to go back and face the crazily bright eyes of Babanchik and, in response to his questions, lie cheerfully and so extravagantly that it seemed that only a madman could believe.
Yet he believed. For, one morning, I found him ruling a sheet of paper on a lapboard—he had fumed until the nurse had given him his pen. The vertical lines cut unsteadily across the page, and at the top of the columns he had written:—
'Date.'—'Car Number.'—'Destination.'—'Cargo.'
'You see, my dear,' he explained eagerly, 'there will be a great deal of purely mechanical work, such as this, to be done, and much of it I can do beforehand. For I shall be too busy, in Tiflis, and I cannot expect an assistant at this time.'
On that day I did not go back to his room. The doctor’s words had been fewer than usual, and there are times when one does not lie.
But, before bedtime, seeing his light burning, I tiptoed in. He stared dully.
'You have been talking long—I fell asleep waiting. And I wanted you to tell your doctor that I am losing all patience. If he cannot make me well enough to go at once, I shall find some other way to go—without his help. Keeping me in a warm room, the rain shut out, while my boys are lying in trenches! When I could be counting cars—' His breath failed him and he closed his eyes. Only when I looked back at him, with my hand on the door-knob, did he finish the sentence—'for Russia.'