n
without a word. He had not cared whether he ever got up or not. He lay
staring up at the extraordinary brilliance of the sky, his throat very
sore, his eyes tired and smarting, a feverish tremor in his limbs,
refusing food, and even when the engine stopped, giving no sign that he
was aware of any change in their fortunes. It had only been when Mr.
Cassar informed him of the sloop bearing down upon them that he rose on
an elbow and croaked hoarsely:

"Show a white flag; handkerchief or something," and fell back, drawing
the blanket over himself. He had been very sick. The surgeon, without
waiting for a temperature reading, had carried him away into an
extremely hygienic sick-bay, where between a boy with tonsillitis and a
stoker with a burnt arm, he had lain all the way to Malta. And after
that, during weeks of dreary waiting, he had looked out of the high
windows of the Bighi Hospital across the Harbour to Valletta, watching
the ships go in and out, and seeing the great flame of the sunset show
up the battlements of the Lower Barracca and die in purple glory behind
the domes and turrets of the city.

For it seemed to him, in his intervals of lucid reflection, that the
taste of life had gone, not to return. It had gone, and in place of it
was an exceedingly bitter flavour of humiliation and frustrated dreams.
It was almost too sudden a revelation of his own emotional folly for any
feeling save a numb wonder to remain. He had told Esther that he felt as
though he had had a long dream and was suddenly woke up. And while this
was true enough of his mind, which maintained a dreary alertness during
his sickness, his heart on the other hand was in a condition of stupor
and oblivious repose. Even when sufficiently recovered to walk abroad
and sit at the little tables in the arcades by the Libreria, or to
journey across the Marsamuscetto to Sliema and follow the long smooth
white beach, he moved slowly because he had no accurate means of gauging
his intensity of existence. He would mutter to himself in a sort of
depressed whisper: "What's the matter with me, I wonder?"

The surgeons had called it something ending in osis and prescribed
finally "light duty." He remembered that light duty now well enough; a
commission as lieutenant and the visiting of many offices in the
formidable buildings which constituted the dockyard. And gradually, as
the scope and meaning of this work became apparent, he found a certain
interest return