It was very bad and seemed to go on for some time; he was only distantly conscious of Ralph speaking to him and couldn’t answer; but by the time Ralph had done the blackout and got over to the light, he was able to say, “Sorry. All right now.”
“Sit down,” said Ralph. He used what Laurie thought of as his court-martial voice. He guided Laurie to an armchair; even at this moment there was some dim reminiscence in the fact that it was the only one in the room. Having settled him there, he stood looking down at him for a moment, then walked sharply across to the cupboard. Laurie had been longing to be let alone, but had had just enough control not to say so. The, first white flash of pain had sunk to a red smolder; confusedly he recalled that he had had a silly mood of some kind, which had caused him to go blundering about the room in the dark; but this crude sensation had effaced it, the image of it was gone.
Ralph came up with a glass. “Here. Get this down.”
“What is it?”
“Navy rum. Tip it down. It’ll fix you up all right. They’d have taken off your leg with it in Nelson’s day.”
“I wish they bloody well had,” said Laurie bitterly. He looked at the glass. “And if I drank that, I should think they could. God, what do you think my head’s made of?”
“It’s only a double tot. Just enough to make you happy.”
The pain now was no worse than it had been several times before. Suddenly Ralph looked touching, standing there in anxious muddled kindness with the rum. “No, it’d make it worse. Tip it back, go on. All I need’s three aspirin and some army char.”
“Tea?” said Ralph blankly, and then, “Of course, my dear. If the mice haven’t had it.”
From the bottom of the cupboard he produced a tin kettle. This also must be where the rum had come from, for Laurie could hear him pushing aside some bottles. This must have been one of the servants’ rooms when the house was new; the teak joinery didn’t reach so high. The cupboard, the shoes, the kettle, would still have been like the study; but the faint clunk of the bottles had snapped the thread of illusion and now it wasn’t like school any more.
Ralph had extracted the kettle from the back of the cupboard; he stood up. Mixed with the weakness of physical shock Laurie felt a strange complex of emotions. He said, “You shouldn’t let me make such a nuisance of myself.”
Ralph came up to the chair, changing the kettle over from his right hand to his left. For a few moments he stood there silent, then he touched Laurie’s shoulder. “Spud.”
“Yes?” said Laurie, looking up.
Ralph’s face changed. He said in his officer’s voice, “You damned fool, why didn’t you have that drink? You look like death.”
“I’d rather have tea.”
“Lie down over there.” It was an order. He held out his hand; obediently Laurie took it and was lifted up. This, he found, was what he wanted. He felt tired and sick and it was wonderful not to be obliged to think, or to be in charge of himself. Ralph half carried him across the room, taking the weight easily: his face was older than his years, but he moved like an athletic boy in hard training and one remembered then that he was only twenty-six. He pulled the cotton counterpane off the bed and settled Laurie’s head on the pillow. Afterwards he folded the counterpane neatly, edges together, not fussily but as if it wouldn’t have occurred to him not to do this. He sat down beside Laurie and said, “I think we should look at this knee before you walk on it again.”
“Oh, it’s all right, I’d feel it if anything had gone.”
“You might not. Better let’s look. Every ship I’ve been in for years that hasn’t carried a doctor, I’ve always done this job. I won’t hurt you.”
“All right,” said Laurie relaxing. Suddenly he felt free of it all. It had been taken over. He had been quite long enough in hospital to know that even a surgeon wouldn’t swear to anything without X-rays, yet this knowledge seemed curiously irrelevant to his passive trust. He untied his boot and dropped it on the floor, and lay in an irresponsible peace while Ralph undid the bandage, and with an intent grave gentleness manipulated the joint. It was evident that he had some experience and knew what he was looking for. Laurie, who was used to the detached curiosity of doctors, felt something different here: Miss Haliburton had it, but in her it was overlaid with a complex technique, and in becoming mechanically perfect lost something of its nature. In Ralph it was direct and human, as it used to be in the old country bone-setters who came to their trade with nothing but an instinct in their hands of tactile sympathy with pain.
Laurie thought: At school, we were always discussing him. The thing about Lanyon is that he’s this, or that. That’s how he manages to do that, or this. And all the time no one knew anything.
“You ought to have been a doctor,” he said.
“I’ve only had to cope sometimes when there wasn’t anyone better. While I was living with Alec I did try to read up a bit of anatomy and so on; but he told me unqualified people messing about were a menace to society, and of course he was quite right.”
“Ralph. If you’d gone up to Cambridge and everything, what were you going to have done?”
“Some sort of geographical survey work, I rather thought. There are quite a few odd corners still left to do.”
“Yes,” said Laurie. “Yes, of course.”
By now, he would have fulfilled his destiny. He wouldn’t have struggled for it; it would have come to him inevitably from a course of knowing first what needed doing, and doing it rather sooner and more thoroughly than anyone else; from an accumulation of confidence which would have been forced on him by the trust of other people, such as F.R.G.S.s and porters and village priests. His profound happiness in it wouldn’t have come often into his conscious mind. He wasn’t made to accept his limitations without trying to compensate; being what he was he could only have done it on some such scale as this. He could have worked out his salvation, if they had let him alone; all he had ever asked had been to work his passage. You’d think, after seven years, they might have let him keep his ship, said Laurie to himself; he used the soldier’s “they,” having been long enough an infantryman to find the disposing powers—Divisional Headquarters, the Government, God—all very remote and hard to isolate one from another.
“I’m not as handy as I used to be,” Ralph said. “Excuse bad pun.”
“You’ve got a lot of grip in it, so soon after.”
“One has to practice it. Have a rest while I make this tea.”
He picked up his glove from the floor. Laurie said, “Don’t be silly.”