Another smothering billow of fog had engulfed him; but the Thing wasn’t in it. He didn’t mind now, so long as the Thing was gone.
He opened his eyes and glimpsed a square of blue sky through a real window. The curtain fluttered. A motor churned in a court somewhere below; gears rasped, gravel scrunched. Ice tinkled in a glass, near at hand. A starched nurse, eyes intent on her watch, fumbled for his forearm. The sharp tip of a thermometer dug cruelly into the roots of his tongue. That was what ailed it, then—all this awkward gouging while he had been unconscious.
He had become aware of the steady drone of an electric fan, the metallic whir of a lawn-mower in parched grass; had dully explored his cracked lips with a clumsy tongue; had regarded with apathy the nurse who bent over him; and, after a few hoarse croaks, had contrived to ask where he was. She told him. Sluggishly, he surmised that his presence at Brightwood indicated there was something wrong with his head. There was; it ached abominably, and was bandaged. He felt of it gingerly, and inquired.
“A hard bump. But you are doing very nicely. Drink this, please!”
And then he had slept some more. A dim light was burning when he awoke. Everything was very quiet; so he decided to go to sleep again. Another day came … two or three of them, maybe … he couldn’t remember.
A young, redheaded doctor, in a white coat, had appeared and asked some questions of the nurse. He seemed a friendly person … but young. Doctor Hudson was the big man at this place. If there was something the matter with his head, he wanted Hudson.
“I say,” he had called, stiffly turning his eyes toward the doctor, “why doesn’t Doctor Hudson look in? He knows me. I’ve been at his house. Does he know I’m here?”
“I’m Doctor Watson, Mr. Merrick. I’m looking after you. Doctor Hudson is not in the city …”
After Doctor Watson had left the room, he had beckoned the nurse to the bedside. Had Miss Hudson called? … No; but that was because he wasn’t seeing visitors yet … that is, not many … Yes, his grandfather had been in … and a Mr. Masterson … The accident? … Oh yes, they would tell him all about that, a little later … What he needed now was sleep; lots and lots of it; no worry or excitement … What we wanted now to make us well was sleep … Then we could have visitors, and the visitors would tell us everything we wanted to know … That kind of silly babytalk! … Hell’s bells!
This morning however he had grown impatient. These people were carrying their stupid silence strike too far! Obviously he had been in some sort of a scrape. Very well … It was not the first time. There would be some way to settle it. There always had been. Was he not accustomed to paying for smashed fenders, broken china, splintered furniture, outraged feelings, and interrupted business? If anybody had a grievance, let him make a bill of it, and he would draw a cheque! It wasn’t any of this hospital’s business, anyway! Or … was it? … What could he have done to their damned hospital? … Run into it?
“Tell me this much, won’t you, Miss … ?”
“Bates.”
“… Miss Bates; just how did I get this whack on my head? … And I won’t ask you any more questions.”
“There was a mast or something flew around and knocked you off a boat.”
“Thanks.”
A mast had knocked him off a boat! He grinned; tried to remember. Well—that was that; but how did the hospital get in it?
At noon, his nurse had been relieved for an hour by a no less important factotum that Mrs. Ashford herself, superintendent of the hospital.
She sat by the window with a trifle of needlework in her hands, apparently intent upon it; but quite aware of her patient’s mood and expectant of an outburst.
Bobby studied her face and decided in its favour. It was a conclusion to which patients at Brightwood customarily arrived with even more promptness, but he was in no state of mind to lose his heart impetuously to anyone in this establishment where he was being treated with such contemptuous indifference.
He found himself guessing her age. Everybody indulged in such speculations on first sight of Nancy Ashford. Her maternal attitude toward the staff, the nurses, the patients, was premised solely upon her white hair. The fact that she had come by it in her early twenties, at the time of her husband’s fatal illness, in no way discounted the matronly authority it gave her as the general counsellor at Brightwood. Notwithstanding her quite youthful face and slim, athletic figure, many people who outranked her in years called her mother—a perfect specimen of the type that instantly invites confidences. She had become a repository for a wider diversity of confessions than come to the ear of the average priest.
Doctor Hudson’s tragic death had been a deeper sorrow to her than anybody connected with Brightwood was ever going to know certainly—whatever might be guessed; and the business of bearing it with precisely the right outward expression of regret was the most serious problem she had ever faced.
For fifteen years Mrs. Ashford had grown more and more indispensable to Doctor Hudson. Entering his experimental hospital as an operating nurse, shortly after the death of her husband—a promising young surgeon and a protégé of the brain specialist—she had quickly and quietly transferred many an administrative responsibility from her chief’s shoulders to her own,
