He opened his eyes and saw Milly, quite clearly, in relief against the reading-lamp, blackness all round her and he was aware that she was bewildered and hopeless and needed him and that he was dying; it seemed to him that she was watching him with horror as if he was the first of all men whom sooner or later she must come to know; he unsealed his ears and heard the breathing catch in her throat. He put his foot against the rail and urged his jaw to open, his muscles to respond; then there was pain
and a sense of something breaking and the taste of blood and his throat filling and a struggle to
breathe.
He never knew that he screamed in spite of his broken
jaw; but with curious irrelevance, out of the darkness, after they had left him and
his pulses had ceased beating and he was dead, consciousness returned for a fraction of a second, as if his brain had been a hopelessly shattered
mirror, of which one piece caught a passing light. He saw and his brain recorded the sight: twelve men lying uneasily awake in the public ward with the wireless headpieces clamped across their
ears, and a nurse reading under a lamp, and nobody beside his bed.
Text: Graham Greene, It’s A Battlefield (1934)
No comments:
Post a Comment