But if I find it hard to tell the story of our long flight through the
air overseas, at least that dawn in France stands cold and clear and
full. I see again almost as if I saw once more with my bodily eyes the
ridges of sand rising behind ridges of sand, grey and cold and
black-browed, with an insufficient grass. I feel again the clear, cold
chill of dawn, and hear the distant barking of a dog. I find myself
asking again, “What shall we do now?” and trying to scheme with brain
tired beyond measure.
At first my uncle occupied my attention. He was shivering a good deal,
and it was all I could do to resist my desire to get him into a
comfortable bed at once. But I wanted to appear plausibly in this part
of the world. I felt it would not do to turn up anywhere at dawn and
rest, it would be altogether too conspicuous; we must rest until the
day was well advanced, and then appear as road-stained pedestrians
seeking a meal. I gave him most of what was left of the biscuits,
emptied our flasks, and advised him to sleep, but at first it was too
cold, albeit I wrapped the big fur rug around him.
I was struck now by the flushed weariness of his face, and the look of
age the grey stubble on his unshaved chin gave him. He sat crumpled up,
shivering and coughing, munching reluctantly, but drinking eagerly, and
whimpering a little, a dreadfully pitiful figure to me. But we had to
go through with it; there was no way out for us.
Presently the sun rose over the pines, and the sand grew rapidly warm.
My uncle had done eating, and sat with his wrists resting on his knees,
the most hopeless looking of lost souls.
“I’m ill,” he said, “I’m damnably ill! I can feel it in my skin!”
Then—it was horrible to me—he cried, “I ought to be in bed; I ought to
be in bed... instead of flying about,” and suddenly he burst into
tears.
I stood up. “Go to sleep, man!” I said, and took the rug from him, and
spread it out and rolled him up in it.
“It’s all very well,” he protested; “I’m not young enough—”
“Lift up your head,” I interrupted, and put his knapsack under it.
“They’ll catch us here, just as much as in an inn,” he grumbled and
then lay still.
Presently, after a long time, I perceived he was asleep. His breath
came with peculiar wheezings, and every now and again he would cough. I
was very stiff and tired myself, and perhaps I dozed. I don’t remember.
I remember only sitting, as it seemed, nigh interminably, beside him,
too weary even to think in that sandy desolation.
No one came near us; no creature, not even a dog. I roused myself at
last, feeling that it was vain to seek to seem other than abnormal, and
with an effort that was like lifting a sky of lead, we made our way
through the wearisome sand to a farmhouse. There I feigned even a more
insufficient French than I possess naturally, and let it appear that we
were pedestrians from Biarritz who had lost our way along the shore and
got benighted.
This explained us pretty well, I thought, and we got most heartening
coffee and a cart to a little roadside station. My uncle grew more and
more manifestly ill with every stage of our journey. I got him to
Bayonne, where he refused at first to eat, and was afterwards very
sick, and then took him shivering and collapsed up a little branch line
to a frontier place called Luzon Gare.
We found one homely inn with two small bedrooms, kept by a kindly
Basque woman. I got him to bed, and that night shared his room, and
after an hour or so of sleep he woke up in a raging fever and with a
wandering mind, cursing Neal and repeating long, inaccurate lists of
figures. He was manifestly a case for a doctor, and in the morning we
got one in. He was a young man from Montpelier, just beginning to
practise, and very mysterious and technical and modern and unhelpful.
He spoke of cold and exposure, and _la grippe_ and pneumonia. He gave
many explicit and difficult directions.... I perceived it devolved upon
me to organise nursing and a sick-room. I installed a _religieuse_ in
the second bedroom of the inn, and took a room for myself in the inn of
Port de Luzon, a quarter of a mile away.