9 LOS ROBLES:
First Phase
There was slimy, spinning darkness. Sometimes it was the inmost self which whirled and the darkness which was stationary; sometimes this law, in each case seemingly immutable, was violently reversed.
The self became aware of its body—and he was afraid with a fear which was so terrible as to be exalting. And he began to doubt the darkness: perhaps there was no darkness: perhaps he only thought there was darkness.
The darkness ceased whirling but he remained still. The stillness was more frightful than the movement had been.
He was Otto Falken and there was a dull ache in his head and agony in his legs. He was Nils Jorgensen—and both his legs were broken. He had been shot down? He had been wounded? He had been injured by a bomb fragment? No—he was Jorgensen. He was in America. But his legs were broken—he knew that. Both his legs. There had been an explosion. . . .
He knew everything—suddenly, in a flash of memory and comprehension which left his body shaking.
There was softness beneath and around him. The softness of a bed. There was a heavy constraint about his head which was nothing to do with the pain inside it, and his legs were each of them bound and stiffly constricted and immovable in spite of efforts which shot him through with darts of anguish.
He was in a bed and there were bandages around his skull and splints upon his legs—and he could not see. A cold sweat of fear broke out all over him. He could not see.
He lay very still and thought about his eyes—and found that the muscles in lids and cheeks were stiffly contracted, screwing the eyes tightly shut like those of a child who has been frightened by a vivid light.
Perhaps he could see. Perhaps he was neither blind nor in darkness. Perhaps he had just clamped his eyes shut like this and failed to order them to open.
He ordered them to open—and nothing happened. He was conscious of the rigidity, as if they were frozen, of the little muscles beneath the skin.
He tried again, and the lids lifted heavily. There was light and he could see it. It was a soft, shaded light and it came from somewhere beyond his range of vision and it did not hurt his eyes.
He could see. Beyond doubt he could see. He saw, directly above him as he lay, a white ceiling divided by thick yet graceful beams of some dark and glowing wood. He saw, below these and at the end of his vision-range, the upper part of a wide, white-framed window, outlining a rectangle of that grey-shot blackness which is forerunner of dawn. He could see.
A little groan of relief came from his lips. He tried to turn upon his side to see yet more—and the moan became a groan, almost a cry, at the pain which the fruitless effort had caused. He lay limply as he was. His lungs laboured as if he had been running and again he felt the sweat cold upon his forehead.
He heard a whisper of movement, and into his vision, at the left side of him as he lay, came a figure. But it was out of his sight immediately, and all he knew was that it was a woman’s.
She stood at the extreme head of the bed, and there was a little rattling of glass or china. He tried to move so that he could see her, but failed by reason of new and breath-taking hurts.
She moved again. She bent over him—and he could see her face.
The most extraordinary thing happened to him then, inside his mind. He knew that he did not know this girl; had never so much as been aware of her existence, whosoever and whatsoever she might be. But he knew, too, as he looked into the dark softness of the wide-set eyes, that here was no stranger. In a blinding flash of that clear and instinctive sanity which may so often and so easily be mistaken for its very antithesis, he knew that his essential and basic self had recognized another.
His eyes widened and he was for a moment oblivious to the pain which had increasingly been flaming through him. For a checked instant of time, the dark eyes widened too and in them he thought he saw reflection of that same momentarily paralysing shock of surprise.
And then she spoke, in a clear, cool young voice which was curiously deep yet had in it no hint of masculinity. She moved a little as she spoke, and the strange, binding spell between their eyes was broken and he saw her for the first time.
She was young, younger than her voice and her eyes: if she had reached her twenties, the accession was recent. She was, perhaps, a little under the middle height of American women but she was lithe and free-moving and slim without angularity. Her hair was smooth and shining. It was unshorn, and it coiled about her proud neat head in a dark soft rope which was like a halo framing from above the oval of her face; an oval whose purity of outline somehow welded into a fascinating and compelling unity features which did not intrinsically fit with one another—the wide-set eyes dark and luminous beneath their fine uptilted brows, the charming and memorable and indefinable nose, the strong yet gentle sweep of the jaw, the high cheekbones with the faint suggestion of gauntness in the shadows beneath them, the wide and generous and vivid mouth, upturning at the corners and with a lower lip of delectable fullness.
She said: “Be quiet now. You’re all right. But you have to sleep. The doctor left something to make you sleep.”
She bent over him and gently lifted his left arm from the sheets and began to push back the sleeve of the silk pyjama coat whose softness he had felt unknowingly.
He tried to see her eyes again, but all that met his gaze was the nape of her neck, soft and smooth and golden-tanned beneath the smooth coilings of the gleaming dark hair. He tried to speak, but his lips felt stiff and unwieldy and his tongue seemed awkwardly heavy. He tried again and managed a few creaking words.
“Where . . . is . . . this?” he mumbled.
She said: “You mustn’t talk yet. It’s all right.”
He felt something wet and cold upon the outside of his upper arm and then firm strong fingers which pinched around the cold place and then a stinging little jab.
“There,” said the deep young voice. “You’ll go to sleep now.”
He was in a deep warm pit. It was soft and cloudily comfortable and the only sign of pain in him was memory which made present peace all the more delicious.
He bathed, he wallowed, in the heavenly nothingness.
And then after hours or æons the voices began. They were very quiet at first, little formless rustlings which should have enhanced the delight of this endless irresponsible drowsing like rain upon the roof. Should have but did not—for it became imperative to his mind that he should catch their words, and peace began to slip from him, layer by lovely layer.
The voices grew louder, one at a time, against the for ever rustling background of the others. They rocketed up out of the rustling and hurled their words at his cringing ears and subsided into the obbligato again and were replaced by others. He could not escape them—and the peace was transmuted into a strange hell where he cowered from words as if they were jagged missiles which would bruise and tear his head to pulp.
“This is not work which will bring you public honour!” they screamed at him. “Sale boche!” they screamed—and followed the words with a harsh sound of spitting. “Could you lend me a pencil—it is seventy-one minutes past the hour. . . . I’m all right, Bob: are you all right, darling?” They were endless and relentless. They screamed at him.
“Yer in the fifth bloody column!” they screamed. “I say, could you help me clear this stuff away—my mother’s in there! . . . A bleedin’ German masqueroodin’ as a Swede! . . . Come on, Mother—where’s your life-belt? . . . The good old U.S., son—Noo York! . . . Come and help me, Bob: are you all right, darling?”