“If you knew how I suffer from that woman,” he whispered. “She is not at all unkind to me. On the contrary. But I can’t stand people with that sort of stolid face. I shiver when she touches me.”
“No, it is so difficult. I can’t bring myself to do it. Once she is here she has certain claims on me.”
Percy was silent for a moment, then he stretched out his hand entreatingly:
“Perhaps you could help me, Stellan? Hasn’t the Army some connection with the Red Cross? Oh, if you could find me in some way a more bearable face!”
Stellan suddenly had an idea, a strange half-impossible idea which, however, at bottom seemed to him to be curiously charged with infinite possibilities. “Hedvig!” he thought. “Hedvig!” He had to make an effort to recover his normal, smooth and kindly tone.
“I could speak to my sister Hedvig,” he said. “She is a nurse. But I tell you beforehand that she has a sombre and strange temper. But her face is really something for an artist to look upon.”
Percy became quite excited and was filled with touching gratitude:
“A face, a temperament, a human being! Oh, how grateful I should be to you!”
“Good, I’ll speak to her if she can get free. Anyhow this grinning monster must be got rid of!”
With this Stellan took a warm good-bye. But at the door he turned round with his most charming and unconcerned expression.
“By the way, Percy, I am going about with a damned little bill in my hip pocket. You would not like by any chance to put your scrawl across it?”
Stellan stepped whistling out of Hill’s villa and, in excellent temper, resumed his command over his dusty and perspiring platoon.
The same evening Stellan went to see Laura. He had got into the habit of running up to her to talk things over before he settled anything important.
Laura was dressing to go to the theatre. He helped her to fasten her frock behind.
“Percy has had a hæmorrhage of the lungs and is dissatisfied with his nurse. I offered to get Hedvig for him. What do you think about it?”
“You must talk about sacrifice, and give her an opportunity to look long-suffering.”
Stellan rang up the Red Cross at once. There he was given another telephone number and rang again. A weak tremulous voice replied:
Hedvig came to the telephone. Stellan presented his case. He made Percy as ill as possible and begged her to sacrifice herself for their old friend. Hedvig’s distant voice assumed a peculiarly hard resigned note.