I had gone outside for a drink of tea when his voice recalled me. It was not me he called, but a bombardier who had been killed at his side six years before in Flanders. I sat by him while he revisited all his life's hours of stress. Now shells were dropping on his O.P. at Armentières; now the hump-backed African oxen jibbed in the plough or the brick-makers let the kiln fires go out; in the Carpathian darkness with his dying men he waited for the Austrians; or his hoe struck rock before Dick's grave was deep enough.
And through it all ran his love for Norah, like the theme of a fugue or the thread on which a rosary of pain was strung.
As the day wore on, his earlier memories were blocked by the horror of the last fortnight. I felt no shame at eavesdropping on his soul. To save him, I must gauge the malady of mind, as well as body.
So, during days and nights of delirium, I pieced together some sequence of what Archie had suffered on the shores of Tanganyika. It was screamed at me in oaths and prayers; whispered in obscene words; veiled in symbolism of delirium. With foul names he assailed the woman of his life; with writhing fingers he tore at Dick's throat; hyænas with blind eyes swarmed on to the rafts; the lake changed from azure to blood; Dick grinned on the ground by the filled-in grave and Norah screamed under the wet earth....
From the insane medley, one clear fact emerged. Archie was racked, less by his guilt than his love. The shadow, not of his crime, but of something that Norah had done, pursued him inexorably. One phrase again and again seemed to burst, rather from his chest, than from his cracking lips.
'Norah, why did you? ... Norah, why did you?'
When night fell, his cries sank to a murmur that, by the time Norah came to relieve me, had yielded to sleep.
'Is he going to live?' were her first words.
'Does he want to?' I countered, 'do you want him to?'
Her grave eyes considered me.