Watchmakers, jewellers, station-masters, dress-designers, actors,
travellers in underwear, bank clerks ... they come here in uniforms and
we put them into pyjamas and nurse them; and they lie in bed or hobble
about the ward, watching us as we move, accepting each other with the
unquestioning faith of children.
The outside world has faded since I have been in the hospital. Their
world is often near me--their mud and trenches, things they say when
they come in wounded.
The worst of it is it almost bores me to go to London, and London was
always my Mecca. It is this garden at home, I think. It is so easy not
to leave it.
When you wake up the window is full of branches, and last thing at night
the moon is on the snow on the lawn and you can see the pheasants'
footmarks.
Then one goes to the hospital....
When Madeleine telephones to me, "I'm living in a whirl...." it disturbs
me. Suddenly I want to too, but it dies down again.
Not that it is their world, those trenches. When they come in wounded or
sick they say at once, "What shows are on?"
Mr. Wicks has ceased to read those magazines his sister sends him; he
now stares all day at his white bedrail.
I only pass him on my way to the towel-cupboard, twice an evening, and
then as I glance at him I am set wondering all down the ward of what he
thinks, or if he thinks....
I may be quite wrong about him; it is possible he doesn't think at all,
but stares himself into some happier dream.
One day when he is dead, when he is as totally dead as he tells me he
hopes to be, that bed with its haunted bedrail will bend under another
man's weight. Surely it must be haunted? The weight of thought, dream or
nightmare, that hangs about it now is almost visible to me.
Mr. Wicks is an uneducated and ordinary man. In what manner does his
dream run? Since he has ceased to read he has begun to drop away a
little from my living understanding.
He reflects deeply at times.
To-night, as I went quickly past him with my load of bath-towels, his
blind flapped a little, and I saw the moon, shaped like a horn, behind
it.
Dropping my towels, I pulled his blind back:
"Mr. Wicks, look at the moon."
Obedient as one who receives an order, he reached up to his supporting
handle and pulled his shoulders half round in bed to look with me
through the pane.
The young moon, freed from the trees, was rising over the hill.