“Why do you want to go to Boves?”
“I shall find a doctor at Boves. I want one, don’t I?”
And Brent understood. Like that German at Arras, Louis Blanc was tame; he had the fear of death in him, or the fear of blindness, which is the living death. Every step that he took was so much ground covered on the road to a place where a man might be found with hands that could heal.
A queer, elemental pity stirred in Brent, a feeling that even penetrated and suffused itself through his physical loathing of this man.
“You want to go to Boves?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Where does the road turn off?”
“Past the farm called Des Ormes, a clump of dead elms close to the road.”
“I’ll look out for it,” said Brent.
He kept his promise, and managed to make out these ghostly trees reaching out their black and maimed tentacles towards the stars, and learning from Bibi that the road to Boves branched off on the right hand about a hundred yards farther on, he watched for it, and found the road as a greyish streak diverging across the darker fields.