Those who have touched the realities of war will tell you that they have seen men with faces pinched as by a frost, their teeth chattering like castanets, even under the blaze of an African sun. It was at the breakfast-table that Parker Steel read those two ominous letters. The man looked ill and yellow, and his nerves were none too steady, to judge by the way he had gashed himself in shaving. The very clothes he wore seemed to have grown creased and shabby in a week, as though they felt the wearer’s figure limp and shrunken, and had lost tone in consequence.
It may be remembered that the Immortal Three displayed varying symptoms when at grips with death. The tongue of Ortheris waxed feverishly profane; the Yorkshireman broke out into song; Mulvaney, the Paddy, was incontinently sick. Parker Steel emulated the Irishman in this eccentricity that morning, save that his nausea was inspired by panic, and not by heroic rage.
Shaken and very miserable, he sat down at the bureau in his consulting-room, leaned his head upon his hands, and shivered. For two nights he had had but short snatches of sleep, brief lapses into oblivion that had been rendered vain by dreams. The imminent dread of a hundred ignominies had held him sick and cold through the short darkness of the summer nights. Dawn had come and found him feverish and very weary. To a coward it is torture to be alone with his own thoughts.
The third night he had taken sulphonal, a full dose, and had slept till Symons knocked at his bedroom door. The fog of the drug still clung about his brain as he sat at the bureau and tried to think. He seemed incapable of putting any purpose into motion, like an exhausted battery whose cells have been drained of their electric charge.
Parker Steel picked up a pen after he had crouched there silently for some twenty minutes. He opened a drawer, drew out several sheets of note-paper, and began to scribble confused, jerky sentences, to alter, to reconsider, and to erase. The power to determine and to act, even on paper, were lost to him that morning. He wrote two letters, only to tear them up and scatter the pieces in the grate, where a lighted match set them burning. He was still on his knees, turning over the charred fragments, when the door-bell rang.
The sedate Symons came to announce a patient.
“Mrs. Prosser, sir.”
“Tell her I can’t see her.”
Symons stared. Her master had something of the air of an angry dog.
“Tell her I’m busy. She can call again.”