A fierce revolt shook the woman by the window. She sat on there till the moon dropped into the sea, and everything was still in the little echoing hotel. And then though she went to bed she could not sleep.
* * * * *
After her coffee and roll in the little salle à manger, which with its bare boards and little rags of curtains was only meant for summer guests, and was now, on this first of November, nippingly cold, Bridget wandered a little on the shore watching the white dust of the foam as a chill west wind skimmed it from the incoming waves, then packed her bag, and waited restlessly for Dr. Vincent. She understood she was to be allowed, if she wished, two visits in the hospital, so as to give her an opportunity of watching the patient she was going to see, without undue hurry, and would then be motored back to D—— in time for the night boat. She was bracing herself therefore to an experience the details of which she only dimly foresaw, but which must in any case be excessively disagreeable. What exactly she was going to do or say, she didn't know. How could she, till the new fact was before her?
Punctually on the stroke of eleven, a motor arrived in charge of an army driver, and Bridget set out. They were to pick up Vincent in the town of X—— itself and run on to the Camp. The sun was out by this time, and all the seaside village, with its gimcrack hotels and villas flung pell-mell upon the sand, and among the pines, was sparkling under it. So were the withered woods, where the dead leaves were flying before the wind, the old town where Napoleon gathered his legions for the attack on England, and the wide sandy slopes beyond it, where the pine woods had perished to make room for the Camp. The car stopped presently on the edge of the town. To the left spread a river estuary, with a spit of land beyond, and lighthouses upon it, sharp against a pale blue sky. Every shade of pale yellow, of lilac and pearl, sparkled in the distance, in the scudding water, the fast flying westerly clouds, and the sandy inlets among the still surviving pines.
'You're punctuality itself,' said a man emerging from a building before which a sentry was pacing—'Now we shall be there directly.'
The building, so Bridget was informed, housed the Headquarters of the Base, and from it the business of the great Camp, whether on its military or its hospital side, was mainly carried on. And as they drove towards the Camp her companion, with the natural pride of the Englishman in his job, told the marvellous tale of the two preceding years—how the vast hospital city had been reared, and organised—the military camp too—the convalescent camp—the transports—and the feeding.
'The Boche thought they were the only organisers in the world!—We've taught them better!' he said, with a laugh in his pleasant eyes, the whole man of him, so weary the night before, now fresh and alert in the morning sunshine.
Bridget listened with an unwilling attention. This bit of the war seen close at hand was beginning to suggest to her some new vast world, of which she was wholly ignorant, where she was the merest cypher on sufferance. The thought was disagreeable to her irritable pride, and she thrust it aside. She had other things to consider.
They drew up outside one of the general hospitals lined along the Camp road.
'You'll find him in a special ward,' said Vincent, as he handed her out.
'But I'll take you first to Sister.'