But Brent’s illness passed, and he lay there hour by hour, watching life, and beginning to react and to think.
He saw the high, bare, yellow walls, the rows of beds with red quilts, the scrubbed floor, the canvas-shoed orderlies, the nurse, the doctor with “gig-lamps” and a bald head, the other men who dozed and chattered, or read magazines and books and letters from home. Some of the men wrote letters, and Brent’s neighbour offered him a field postcard.
“What about the missis, Arthur?”
“Haven’t got one,” said Brent.
The red screen annoyed him. There was something irritating in the colour, a vague suggestion of officialdom, red tape, tyranny. Brent asked to have it taken away. He spent most of his time staring straight up at the ceiling, and at a black smudge of cobweb in the corner where the chimney jutted out. The dirty whiteness of the ceiling was restful; he saw pictures on it, pictures that helped him to think. There was no pattern on the ceiling; it was like a fresh sheet, a clean piece of canvas upon which Brent could paint what he pleased; and lying through those long days he worked out his pictures on the plaster, and underneath them was written the word, “Escape.”
He realized that he would have to lose himself again, for the Machine had reclaimed him and would pass him with stupid efficiency on its Trucker system to some place where he would be sorted out and railed back to England. He began to live in fear of being recognized by some chance friend. Even the blond-haired nurse’s absurd likeness to that other woman who had died in England still roused in Brent an elemental antipathy and a fierce alarm. He sulked, and turned over into the blind corner whenever she came near his bed.
“What is the matter to-day, Beckett?”
Her voice was an echo of that other woman’s voice, a metallic voice that attacked. Brent’s back remained churlishly on the defensive.
“Don’t want to be bothered—that’s all.”