He felt a warm trickling over his right cheek. He turned—and the floor rose up at him and he fell. He tried wildly to save himself this bitter indignity—and found himself ludicrous upon hands and knees, like an uncle playing pony for the children.
He heard a movement somewhere and reached out blindly and felt the arm of a heavy chair, comfortingly solid. Desperately, he dragged himself up on to the seat of it before he could be helped.
The effort seemed to take sight from him and there was a black whirling before his eyes. He muttered something and forced his head down low and felt the warm stream angle over his chin and drip upon his hands.
His head cleared and he raised it cautiously. He was alone in the room, but one of the inner doors stood open. He found blood on his hands and shirt and felt with tentative fingers at the eye. Above it was a hard swelling lump and below, over the high cheekbone, a soft dough-like puffiness.
She came through the open door carrying a small tray of bright metal upon which were a little bowl of china and other things which he could not see. He made a movement as if to stand but she quelled it with a gesture.
He leant back in the chair and mopped at the blood on his face with a handkerchief. The right temple was throbbing and his whole head ached a little—but it was nothing. He wished that he had lost an eye rather than fallen like that, awkward and ludicrous and abased.
She put the tray upon a side-table and moved this near to the chair. She took a little towel of linen from the tray and put it around his neck, above his collar, and in a moment was bathing the cut above his eye.
She ceased the bathing and said: “This will hurt,” and dabbed something cold upon the cut.
It did hurt—and while he was thinking about it, she took more wet cotton and wiped the dried blood from his cheek and chin. He said:
“You should not do this. It is all right. . . . I can do this.”
“Be quiet!” Her voice was so soft that it was almost a whisper.
She stood behind him and he could not see her, but he knew from the voice that her eyes had changed.
The towel was twitched from beneath his chin—and in a moment he felt her hand laid softly upon the uninjured side of his forehead and again he felt the curious tingling shock which came at her touch.
And so Nils Jorgensen, resident and registered alien and hero of the
Alvin Gray’s headquarters were at Welham Park in the State of New Jersey, and there Nils Jorgensen joined the staff and rapidly showed marked aptitude for his work and became without effort a favourite with his colleagues and with Gray himself and also with numerous young and middle-aged residents of the pleasant little town, particularly the family with whom he lodged.
He was there for nearly a month before anything happened—and although Nils seemed always his quiet and simple and charming and industrious self, Otto was possessed by a seething fury of impatience. So much so, indeed, that at times he was hard pressed to keep the tension from showing in the face and behaviour of Nils: he bethought himself of Carolyn Van Teller’s advice about protective colouring and began upon comprehensive study of Democracy’s so-called viewpoint: he took distorted satisfaction, since his duty made him a liar, in being a really intensive-one. Since duty forbade his being violent against the foes of his country, he found fierce, ever-growing pleasure in being violent
And, by the end of the second week of this self-imposed training course in enemy viewpoint, he could quote—and frequently did—whole passages of Roosevelt, Churchill and De Gaulle in bitter arguments with any critic, however well-intentioned, of the Allied Cause or its defenders.