Noch erkannt und sehr gering

Unser Herr auf der Erde ging …

Lissington … Stamford Magna … Pumphrey … Marsland Junction. One changed there, and, with nothing else to do for ten minutes, one often watched the tank engine shunting round to the other end of the train, ready for the return journey to Calderbury. Then the second train came in, for Creston and Sandmouth only. The little doctor found a compartment, saw someone he knew slightly, nodded, and settled down with his paper again. For half a mile the express went back along the same line, then at the junction swerved aside to show the single track to Calderbury wandering away into a green distance. And somehow, vagrantly, the thought came to David that Calderbury was lost and that the line was trying to find it.

At Sandmouth he walked immediately to the Promenade, turning into the side street where the clifflike boarding houses soared from area basement to attic, bourgeois castles, flaunting their cruets on bay-window dining tables with an air of buxom integrity. How little it mattered where anything happened compared with what did happen; and this sense of fatefulness came to him as he climbed the flight of steps that led to one of the closed front doors. He was really rather nervous about this visit, and with some idea of getting it over he took it first on his list.

The landlady showed him to a room on the first floor overlooking the street. He had not, a week earlier, disclosed his own profession, lest admission might be refused to a sick person; and now he thought it simpler to keep up the assumption of some private friendship with the girl. He was startled a little, though he made no comment, when the woman said: “I don’t think your young lady’s very well. Maybe it’s her arm. I’d take her to see a doctor if I were you.”

A moment later he was investigating. The girl seemed less agitated in mind — that was something; she greeted him cheerfully. But her wrist was still inflamed and obviously painful — which was not surprising, after her previous neglect of it. He told her frankly that it was her own fault for not obeying the instructions he had given her at Calderbury; how could she possibly have danced with broken bones chafing each other at every sudden movement? And now, as a result, the mending would be more difficult; there might even be complications; at any rate, she would have to carry her arm in a sling for weeks.

She nodded when he had finished, accepting both the situation and the blame for it. That made him smile and ask, more gently: “Do you like it here?”

She nodded and smiled back.

Yes, she was more cheerful; that was a great deal — more important, really, than her wrist.

“I think you’d better stay another week — since it seems to be doing you good. You’re not lonely?”