‘Why are you up here? Don't you feel well?’ the nurse said, coming into the ward.
‘I'm all right,’ he said. He looked at her and was glad because it was this nurse who had come for him, the pretty fair one, who would not make a fuss or ask too many questions.
‘You haven't forgotten you've got a visitor, have you?’ she said. ‘You surely haven't forgotten about your fiancee coming? She's downstairs now and you’ ought to have been there to meet her. Did you forget to-day was visiting day?’
So, he thought, here it is: it's come now, the time when I have to do the impossible thing. And for a second he felt sick inside, but that passed, and he was behind the glass and feeling nothing at all.
‘No, I hadn't forgotten,’ he said.
He swung his legs off the bed and stood up tall and lean, and unhooked his coat while the nurse straightened the pillow and then came with him down the ward and waited while he held his comb under the tap at the wash-basin and tugged at the unmanageable brown hair that never would lie flat whatever he did to it with water or brilliantine.
He saw the nurse watching, and said, ‘This is a kind of experiment, isn't it? To see how I get on with Nora, I mean’
‘Doctor thinks it will do you good to see her,’ she said. ‘That's why he told her she could come down from London to-day. It's not going to be very easy for her, you know. She's been awfully worried about you. It's up to you to show her that you're going to be quite all right.’
‘Yes,’ he answered, out of the glass.
They were downstairs now at the door of the waiting-room. The nurse opened the door and stepped back and he went into the room which was empty except for the girl standing close to the window; quick-smiling face and tapping heels, he watched her come quickly towards him now. Again he felt hollow sick because of the hopeless attempt, the effort which had to be made, thinking inside himself, Do I have to do this? Is it absolutely necessary to try this impossible thing? But then it passed, he felt her breath and her light kiss on his cheek, it was over, he was in his glass cell and it seemed quiet there and he felt nothing at all.
‘It's a lovely afternoon,’ the girl said presently. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’
‘All right,’
She was nervous, not knowing how to begin knowing him again, and, remembering his loose colonial stride and how he liked being out in the open places, she walked with him away from the town and the cinema where she would have felt at home.
She's a sweet girl really, he thought with a vague pang that was gone almost before he felt it at all. It was not her fault that he could not even feel sorry because she had come to him when he was no longer there. She was not in the least to blame. How could she know that he was a hollow thing; only wheels and a pendulum working inside a case? Because he had not found the young man with the scarred cheek he could not come to her through the glass.
She was talking to him as they walked in the thin sunshine beyond the hospital grounds. The sun was getting very low and the seagulls were flying low over the downs where they walked. He looked at her face between him and the sky. She was walking with her head turned to him and the sinking sun shone on her pleasantly powdered face and he could see that she was trying hard to make contact with him. He heard the sea make a noise just over the rise of the hill.
‘No further,’ he said, standing still. ‘I don't want to go on any further,’
She looked at him with surprise and said, ‘Don't you want to look at the sea? Let's just walk up to the top where we can see it now that we're here. It's quite close now.’
He felt the bad feeling come on him again, but this time there was no sickness, only a sudden sinking and emptiness, as when a small ship lurches and rolls suddenly, so that he waited for the crash and slither of loose objects falling: but there was only the wind and the gulls and the waves breaking below the edge of the hill. It passed, and he started to walk on again up the slope, because it did not matter really. Nothing mattered, he thought, because nothing could reach him while he was inside the glass.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let's go and look at the sea.’
And really when he saw it it did not matter: it was quite easy to look at the agitated empty pale sea that was faintly touched with lilac feathers under the sunset sky. Except that he would rather not have seen the breaking waves on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. It was quite a high cliff to which the track had led them over the downs. The girl was looking out to sea and smiling with the wind blowing back the short bits of hair round her face.
‘It's fine up here, isn't it?’ she said to him.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it's the wrong sea.’
He saw the bewilderment and distress and incomprehension come instead of the smile on her face because of what he had said; and he thought that he ought to try and explain something, but it was impossible because there was nothing but the swinging pendulum with which to explain.
And at the same time he saw on sunnier cliffs barelegged girls, perhaps his sisters, riding barebacked on ponies with rough manes flying, he saw the bleached gilt hairs on the brown girls’ legs and heard girls’ high voices calling and laughing often.
‘You've always been mad on the sea,’ a girl's voice was saying.
Yes, the sea was the one thing he had always been crazy about. But what had become of those other oceans? What had become of the sapphire blue deep water, the quick, clear small waves on the beaches, the purple submerged peninsulas of the reefs? Now he remembered the steady smooth rush of the sailing boat through blue sunlit water and the satisfactory slap of water on the sides of the boat. He remembered the huge seas marching past the tanker, huge and heavy and whale coloured, marching in manic persistence, the staggering deck, the water bursting endlessly over the catwalk. And for a second he remembered the time on the gun when they brought the plane down at sunrise, and for a second he was that young gunner triumphant and in his glory, the sea lunging pink stained into oblivion past the gun sights. Then he remembered the horror that came later, the freezing, strangling, devilish masses of water, the horror of blazing oil on the water and Shorty screaming out of the flaming water. Then the cold blankness settled again and he could not remember whether he had known these things or what had become of them.
Now it was this town girl he had met on leave in the city to whom he had to attend. She was a good-looking girl; and perhaps before the glass closed round him he had felt something for her, but now there was just this impossible thing, this effort he could not make He knew he ought to explain something. She was trying to be sweet and kind to him. But he knew he could never do the impossible thing. And just then it occurred to him that he was shaking under his khaki coat.
‘What is it, Lennie?’ she asked him.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It's cold standing around. Let's walk into town and get tea there. Let's get away from the sea.’
‘Don't you like the sea any more?’ she asked. She was looking at him walking away from the cliff, and biting her lip.
‘No,’ said the man. ‘I don't think so. I think I hate it.’
But then, feeling the hollow, vague coldness inside the glass, and going away from the sea, there was nothing at all left and nothing mattered at all.
‘I don't feel anything about it,’ he said. ‘I don't feel anything about anything.’
On the way to the town she took his arm and they walked like that for a bit while he thought of the effort which he was required to make. He had known all the time he would not be able to make it. He knew that he had to do this tremendous thing and he wanted to do it and it was his duty to do it; but he knew that it was impossible, that he would never make the attempt now, and soon she unlinked her arm and began telling him about a picture with Spencer Tracy.