But the pneumonia had given way; this morning he was distinctly better. If they still had such old-fashioned things as crises, he had passed his crisis. He was Hanno Dietrich again instead of a great, gasping fish. No, not a fish, not cold-blooded—burning-blooded, appropriately a whale. (He looked down at the great mound of his body.) It was a whale, Leviathan he had been then, and they would not permit him to come up to the surface to breathe. Each time he surfaced, the harpoon went through his back into his lungs and down he went, pierced and gasping … aah … aah.… But this morning the waves of fever had parted, the blood-red seas had parted and the harpoon had been the pneumonia. (The agitated whitecaps only nurses’ caps?) The nurse who came in then with a basin, sponge and towel was staring at him as if she couldn’t believe what she saw, but he was accustomed to that, after all. In the first place, he was a sight, so enormous, so much of him; in the second, a celebrity. Soon she would tell him that she had just loved him in The Quicker Hand or in Mr.
