The doctor snapped the black elastic round his note-book and walked off.
“He ought to be boiled in muck,” said the cook.
Five minutes later this sympathetic and expressive soul made a dash down the road after a figure in a muddy greatcoat, a figure that had sneaked out of the cook-house with a staggering determination to escape. Brent collapsed under a hedge outside a cottage, lying face downwards in the mud. His temperature was 104.7°.
“What did you do it for, chum?”
Brent could not explain. He had fainted.
A field ambulance car collected Paul Brent and carried him off to another village where he lay in a barn for half an hour, flushed and torpid, yet resenting the efforts of an orderly to make him drink hot cocoa. An officer came and examined him, a very quiet man with a big fair moustache and intelligent eyes. Ten minutes later Brent was put on a stretcher in one of the big Daimlers, with a card in a brown envelope fastened to one of the buttons of his greatcoat; there were two other patients in the car. The quiet officer climbed in and assured himself that Brent was well covered with blankets.
“Feel warm enough?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t you worry. You’ll soon be comfortable.”
The officer’s voice made Brent do an absurd thing; he turned his face towards the canvas, and wept.