“What’s all this noise?”
Then a strange thing happened to Brent. He sat up in the bed, staring at the woman with eyes of anger and of horror.
“What’s she doing here? Take her away—take her away, or I’ll—I’ll cut her blasted throat!”
The nurse screwed up her eyes at him, and backed away.
“He’s delirious,” said one of the orderlies; “lie down, old chap.”
Brent made a sort of futile grab in the direction of the nurse.
“Let me . . . She’s a devil!”
The nurse walked away down the ward with the detached dignity of a woman whose professional soul moved calmly through the world of sickness and of words, and Brent fell back on his pillows.
“What’s she doing here,” he kept saying; “why can’t they let me alone?”
Paul Brent came very near death in that hospital at Charleroi. Influenza passed into broncho-pneumonia, and for days he lay there in a quiet stupor with bluish lips and a grey face. He was just so much pulp, not caring whether he lived or whether he died, and capable of but two semi-intelligent mental reflexes, the turning of his face to the wall when the yellow-haired nurse came near, and the insinuating of a flabby hand under his pillow to make sure that those German notes were there. He occupied a corner bed, and sometimes there was a red screen round it. His neighbour in the next bed nicknamed him “Arthur,” and told everybody that he was “a bit balmy.”