Otto stared before him, a frown creasing deeply into his forehead. He said, turning his head a little:
“Please, how long have I been here?”
He had spoken to Lena many times upon many days before this, and she had answered. But there must have been a new quality in his voice, for she stared at him and ceased her work and came across the room to stand by the bed and look down at him with her hands on her hips and a wondering smile upon her face.
“Landsakes, Mizr Johnson!” she said happily “You sure’s a powerful lot mended!”
Otto did not understand a word of this. So he smiled up at her and tried again. He said:
“How long have I been here? Is it . . . many days?”
Lena concentrated upon this problem: she cast down her eyes and moved her lips, and with a small rustling sound the fingers of both hands beat out rapid scales upon the sides of her starched apron.
“It’s full twenty days, Mizr Johnson. . . .” She retired within herself for further calculation. “No! no, sir! It sure’s three weeks to the jot.” There was triumphant certainty now in the rich voice. “That’s what, Mizr Johnson, sir—three weeks to the jot this evenin’ since Mizr Ingolls an’ Miz Clare they brung you in.”
“Three weeks!” said Otto—and frowned again with amazement and dismay and the effort of relegating all the fillings-in upon the map to their relative places within the grid-hnes of the time-chart.
“Please,” he said. “What is the date of the month? To-day?”
She told him—and continued to stand looking down at him with a widening smile which managed to combine without effort the pleasant emotions of maternal pride, clinical satisfaction, response to male attraction, and broad human sympathy.
“H’mn!” He grunted, and repeated the date and wrestled with his stiffly working mind to discover why the existence of a figure upon the calendar should fill him with sick foreboding.
And then there came the sound of the door opening and footsteps and the quick, decisive, pleasantly harsh voice of Waldemar Ingolls.
“Morning,” it said. “How d’you feel?”
The man himself came into the field of Otto’s vision and stood by the foot of the bed. He wore blue jeans and a vividly checkered shirt and the heels of his riding-boots lifted him to an almost giant height. He was lean and erect and sure-moving, and the iron-grey hair above the sharp, tanned face seemed handsomely incongruous until one looked more closely at the face itself and saw that here was a man who, although he had wasted no minute of any, had yet lived through many years.
Otto smiled at him, but Lena spoke. She said:
“Ah was ajest on’y sayin’ to Mizr Johnson, Mizr Ingolls, that he sure was amendin’ right fast!”
Otto said:
“It is a strange thing, Mr. Ingolls, but I this moment realized that I have not been . . . been . . .” He fumbled for the right phrase, being very careful. “. . . been aware of Time.”
He would have gone on, but was not permitted. The quick voice said:
“I know what you mean. Exactly. Been that way myself. You’re all right up to a point—but healing. So they take Time away from you. It’s an intricate device which sick men mustn’t fool with.” He moved away from the foot of the bed and dropped his length into the chair by the bed and sat forward and scanned Otto’s face with the hard grey eyes. They suddenly lifted at the corners and radiated a myriad wrinkles, and the firm lips parted and there was a white flash of teeth between them. He said:
“Yes. You’re a whole lot better. New stage now—definitely convalescent. Lena, you go on with your work before Miss Clare catches you gossiping.”
Lena beamed. “Yezzr,” she said happily, and went back to the far end of the room and the broom and dusters.
Otto said: “Mr. Ingolls, I have to say . . . to express . . .” He hoped that this difficulty with the English tongue—a difficulty which had almost vanished before he was hurt—was only temporary. He tried again, while the grey eyes watched him with a gleam of amusement somewhere in their depths. He said:
“I must tell you that I am so grateful for your . . .”
Ingolls’ smile came again, and an interruption.
“That’ll be enough,” he said. “In the first place it was common humanity—in the second . . .”
He was interrupted in his turn—by the opening of the door, and the voice for which Otto had longed but which now, surprisingly, made him feel fear. It said:
“Oh, hello, Boss! Didn’t know you were up here.”
“Any rule against it?” Ingolls said—and then, as she came into Otto’s sight: “He’s a lot better this morning. Convalescent now. You might stop him from trying to pull expressions of gratitude out of his hat, will you?” He smiled at Otto as he spoke and there was no sting in the words.
She stood behind her father’s chair, with one hand resting upon its back. She was slim and poised and real with a sort of divine reality which put fantasy to shame. She was dressed in something which was slight and simple and cool and blue and above it the coiled dark hair seemed to gleam with a light of its own.
“Look at him!” said Ingolls. “See what I mean?”
She looked at him—but somehow, though Otto strove to make them, her eyes did not meet his. She spoke to her father.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. He’s . . . all the way back.” She looked towards the other end of the room—and suddenly she smiled and her eyes crinkled at the corners like her father’s and the beauty of her mouth stabbed through Otto with a hot, searing pain which was part fear and part delight. She said:
“Lena! Remember it’s porch-wash day! It’s porch-wash day, Lena!”
There was a clattering of brooms and dustpan, and then Lena’s voice, in a cry of alarm, half-genuine, half-seriocomic.
“Landsakes alive, Miz Clare—if ah don’t done forgot!”
Ingolls grinned suddenly. He said:
“Don’t forget that spiders’ nest, Lena. In the corner by the dining-room windows. Roust ’em out!”
“Mizr Ingolls!” It was a muted shriek, and was immediately followed by a clattering rush and the closing of the door and a chuckling from the passageway.
“Now,” said Clare to her father, “she won’t go near the porch, and John’ll have to do it!”
Otto said: “Mr. Ingolls; Miss Ingolls, please you must allow me to express . . .”
“There he goes again!” said Ingolls.
Clare sat upon the arm of his chair. She looked at Otto and smiled and he thought her eyes might stay upon his but they did not. She said:
“He means it. Don’t you, Boss? He doesn’t—we don’t—want to be thanked. There’s nothing to thank us for. There isn’t really. First of all . . .”
Ingolls put back his head and laughed with an infectious barking. He said:
“I was giving him that already. Wasn’t I, Jorgensen? You remember? First of all, it was common humanity—and so on.” The laughter died out of his face, but there remained a taut, wry smile. He said:
“But there’s another reason, Jorgensen. You may as well have it now; then perhaps you’ll realize you don’t have to thank us. That train-wreck was called ‘sabotage’—but to me, and to very many others in America, it was more than that—it was an act of war; from a treacherous, underhand enemy who hasn’t had the courage to declare himself openly. That makes you, wounded by the enemy, in the same relation to us as an injured R.A.F. pilot would be to any Britisher whose field the boy landed in. Only it’s a bit more, even, in our case. It’s more than just a plain duty, it’s a pleasure as well, because it gives us a feeling that, by patching you up, we’re striking a more direct blow against the enemy than we’d be allowed to otherwise in the present situation, which is what a Senator would probably call ‘unclarified’ if he had to find a word for it.”