“That’s not fair,” she said. “It was always yours as much as mine. I left everything and I went wherever you wanted to go and I’ve done what you wanted to do. But I wish we’d never come here.”
“You said you loved it.”
“I did when you were all right. But now I hate it. I don’t see why that had to happen to your leg. What have we done to have that happen to us?”
“I suppose what I did was to forget to put iodine on it when I first scratched it. Then I didn’t pay any attention to it because I never infect. Then, later, when it got bad, it was probably using that weak carbolic solution when the other antiseptics ran out that paralyzed the minute blood vessels and started the gangrene.” He looked at her, “What else?”
“I don’t mean that.”
“If we would have hired a good mechanic instead of a half-baked Kikuyu driver, he would have checked the oil and never burned out that bearing in the truck.”
“I don’t mean that.”
“If you hadn’t left your own people, your goddamned Old Westbury, Saratoga, Palm Beach people to take me on—”
“Why, I loved you. That’s not fair. I love you now. I’ll always love you. Don’t you love me?”
“No,” said the man. “I don’t think so. I never have.”
“Harry, what are you saying? You’re out of your head.”
“No. I haven’t any head to go out of.”
“Don’t drink that,” she said. “Darling, please don’t drink that. We have to do everything we can.”
“You do it,” he said. “I’m tired.”
Now in his mind he saw a railway station at Karagatch and he was standing with his pack and that was the headlight of the Simplon-Orient cutting the dark now and he was leaving Thrace then after the retreat. That was one of the things he had saved to write, with, in the morning at breakfast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the mountains in Bulgaria
