Part 21 (1/2)

Rees told me, ”She turned her head ahen she saw me arm”

”I did once, Rees”

He looked down at the alnizable twelve inches which we call ”Rees's wound,” and considered how this red inch had paled and the lips of that incision were drawing together ”'Tisn' no th, ”than” he paused for a simile ”'Tisn' me arm, it's me wound,” he finally explained

His arles from his bed in an iron cradle, and has been for six ht,” he said, ”I felt ers an' tried to scratchthat's bin coht it see forces Rees's reason to lay some claim to his arm, but when it ceases to hurt hihost-arm familiar to all amputations has arrived, as it were, by mistake

The new VAD doesn't talk ht I can believe she rite in her diary as I wrote in mine: ”My feet ache, ache, ache” Add to that that she is hungry because she hasn't yet learnt how to break the long stretches with hurried gnawings behind a door, that she is sick because the philosophy of Rees is not yet her philosophy, that her hands and feet grow cold and her body turns to wars so to sit on a bed that she can almost visualize the depression her body would e of time and of the effect of custoer and the ache are barely remembered

It makes ain infaht and another this reat burly h bandages applied in seven places, and who for all thatbefore those wounds are healed he will diagnose himself better than that!

”I'm well” That's to say: ”I'm alive, and I have reached this bed, and this bit ofin a tin!” He answers by his standards

But in a few days he will think, ”I aht be better”; and in a feeeks, ”Is this, after all, happiness?”

How they sleep, the convoy rave pleasure--the passports to this wonderful sleep

Then when the last safety-pin is in they lie back withoutup a sheet or turning once upon the pillow, and sleep just as the head falls

How little women can stand! Even the convoy cannot mend the pains of the new VAD I dare not speak to her: she see for the last straw

But ash the bowls together wewashed and scrubbed, rinsed, dried, and piled basins into little heaps, and while ashed we examined each other

She is a born slave; in fact, I almost think she is born to be tortured

Her manner with the Sisters invites and entices them to ”put upon” her

Her spiritual back is already covered with sores

I suppose she is hungry for sympathy, but it isn't really a case in which sympathy can do as much as custo them to be very solid food