Vereker thinks he may conclude that Fenwick is talking for talk's sake, and humours him. He can get to the memory-subject later.
"A patient of mine," he says, "who's been living at Spezzia, was telling me about a fruit that was very good there, diosperi he called them. They must be very unlike sloes by his description."
"And naturally sloes made you think of them. I wonder what they are—diosperi—diosperi——" He repeated the word as though trying to recall it. Dr. Conrad helped the identification.
"He said they are what the Japs call jelly-plums—great big fruit, very juicy."
"I know. They're persimmons, or a sort of persimmons. We used to get lots of them in California, and even up at the Klondyke...."
He stopped abruptly and remained silent. A sudden change in him was too marked to escape notice, and there could be no doubt about the cause. The doctor walked beside him, also silent, for a few paces. Then he spoke:
"You will have to bear this, Fenwick, and keep your head. It is just as I told you it would be. It is all coming back." He laid his left hand on his companion's shoulder as they stood side-by-side on the chalk pathway, and with his right felt the wrist that was nearest him. Fenwick was in a quiver all through his frame, and his pulse was beating furiously as Dr. Conrad's finger touched it. But he spoke with self-control, and his step was steady as they walked on slowly together the moment after.
"It's all coming back. It has come back. I shall remember all in time." Then he repeated Vereker's words, "I must keep my head. I shall have to bear this," and walked on again in silence. The young man beside him still felt he had best not speak yet. Just let the physical perturbation subside. Talking would only make it worse.
They may have walked so for two minutes before Fenwick spoke again. Then he roused himself, to say, with but little hint in his voice of any sense of the oddity of his question: "Which is my dream?—this or the other?" Then added: "That's the question I want to ask, and nobody can answer."