“You must have a long, long rest, and do nothing at all and think of nothing at all.”
He tried to smile at the nurse’s pleasant face. “You’ve done me a bad turn in bringing me back to life,” said he.
When they thought him capable of grappling with his personal affairs, they brought him his bulging pocket-book, and bade him count his money. He laughed. It was quite safe. He handed back the roll of notes into the nurse’s keeping. But the other contents of the case he looked at dismally: the passport, with the foreign visas; the railway tickets; the letters to Prague and Warsaw. What were the good of them now? He would never go to Poland. When he got strong, all the fighting would be over. And when he did get strong, in a few months or a year, he would probably be lame, with odds and ends of organs gone wrong inside him. He tried to read the letters; but they were written in Polish—unintelligible now in spite of his strenuous short study of the language. They bore a signature which he could not decipher. But it was certainly not Boronowski. His mind soon tired of the puzzle. What was the good of keeping the letters? Drearily he tore them in pieces and gave them to the nurse to dispose of, when she brought him a meal.
Tired with the effort he slept. He awoke to a sense of something final done, or something important left undone. As his brain cleared, he realized that subconsciously he had been thinking of his duty to Boronowski. Of course, he must be informed at once of the reason for his defection.
And then dismay overwhelmed him. He had no address to Boronowski. The only channels of communication with him, the Prague and Warsaw letters, he had destroyed. A happy idea struck him. He toyed with it for what seemed interminable hours until the nurse came to his bedside. He called for writing materials, which were smilingly denied him. He was too weak. But the nurse would write a short letter from dictation. He dictated two identical letters, one to the Polish Legation, one to the Polish Consulate, asking for the address of Mr. Paul Boronowski, late of 21 Hillditch Street, St. Pancras. By return of post came polite replies from Legation and Consulate. Both disclaimed any knowledge of the identity of Mr. Paul Boronowski. Legation and Consulate were blandly ignorant of the existence of their confidential agents. Then he remembered the baffling signature to the two letters. He laughed somewhat bitterly. His life seemed to be involved in a tangle of false names.
After all, what did it matter? But it did matter, vitally. If ever he had set his soul on a true thing, he had set it on keeping faith with Boronowski. And Boronowski like the rest of the world would set him down as an impostor. In his desperate physical weakness the tears rolled down his cheeks; and so the nurse found him, with one of the letters clutched in his thin hand.
“My only friend in the world,” said he.
“Dead?” asked the nurse.
“No. Lost.”
He gave her the letter.