formulate any opinion at
all. When not delirious or comatose, he had the devil of pleurisy
tearing at the wall of his lung like a wild cat. Only gradually did he
begin to observe and to question. That noiseless woman in coot blue and
white was a nurse. He knew that. So he must be in hospital. But the
room was much smaller than a hospital ward; and where were the other
patients? The question worried him for a whole morning. Then there was
a pink-faced man in gold spectacles, Obviously the doctor. Then there
was a sort of nurse whom he liked very much, but she was not in
uniform. Who could she be? He realized that he was ill, as weak as a
butterfly; and the pain when he coughed was agonizing. It was all very
odd. How had he come here? He remembered walking along a dusty road in
the blazing sun, his head bursting, every limb a moving ache. He also
vaguely remembered being awakened at night by a thunder storm as he lay
snugly asleep beneath a hedge. The German Ocean had fallen down upon
him. He was quite sure it was the German Ocean, because he had fixed it
in his head by repeating "the North Sea or German Ocean." Mixing up
delirious dream with fact, he clearly remembered the green waves
rearing themselves up first, an immeasurable wall, then spreading a
translucent canopy beneath the firmament and then descending in awful
deluge. He had a confused memory of morning sunshine, of a cottage, of
a hard-featured woman, of sitting before a fire with a blanket round
his shoulders, of a toddling child smeared to the eyebrows with dirt
and treacle whom he had wanted to wash. Over and over again, lately, he
had wanted to wash that child, but it had always eluded his efforts.
Once he had thought of scraping it with a bit of hoof-iron, but it had
turned into a Stilton cheese. It was all very puzzling. Then he had
gone on tramping along the high road. What was that about bacon and
eggs? The horrible smell offended his nostrils. It must have been a
wayside inn; and a woman twenty feet high with a face like a
cauliflower--or was it spinach?--or Brussels sprouts?--silly not to
remember--one of the three, certainly--desired to murder him with a
thousand eggs bubbling up against rank reefs of bacon. He had escaped
from her somehow, and he had been very lucky. His star had saved him.
It had also saved him from a devil on a red-hot bicycle. He had stood
quite still, calm and undismayed, in the awful path of the straddling
Apollyon whose head w