"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 returning, an anticipation of the next week and perhaps month. But of the years he did not dare to think just yet.
Because, once established there, he had sought, as a homing pigeon its cotes, to find Ada. He had written, full of weariness and a sort of gentle contrition, and implored her to write. He had missed all the mails since the _Tanganyika_ had gone--she must make allowances for the hazards of the sea, and try again. He had put a shy, boyish postscript to it, a genuine afterthought--"I want so much to see you again," and mailed it on the Marseilles boat.