The Doctors, this time civilians, used to come to him twice a day. They were quiet, reserved men, positively glowing with efficiency.
They dressed his wound, tested the reflex actions of his nerves, gazed through holes in bright mirrors at his eyes, and made him watch perpendicular pencils moving horizontally across his line of vision.
But life was racing back into his limbs. Hourly his strength was returning. He no longer lay staring listlessly in the bottom of the bed. He liked now to work himself up, to lose nothing of what was going on around, to share in the talk, and, until the next headache came, to live.
He wallowed in the joy of reaching harbour.
Such rapid progress did he make that they began, in a few days, to treat him as a rational human being. They allowed him meat, and once, owing to a mistake on the part of the young Hurrier, a whisky-and-soda. They allowed him to smoke a restricted number of cigarettes, and to read as often as he liked. But aspirin they barred.
He had not many friends in London, so during visiting hours he was left in comparative peace.
One morning his mother came. As the door opened and she hurried into the room with her quick, bird-like grace, he felt that she was a stranger to him. Somehow their old intimacy seemed dissolved, and would have, piece by piece, to be built up again. Her round, appealing eyes of palest brown stirred him as no other eyes—even her own—had ever done before.
Her slim shoulders delighted him.
"Waddles!" he said; "you're priceless!"
He loved to call her "Waddles."