yes,” said Jane, “as far as that goes. Only one somehow doesn’t want to tell it. Well, quite suddenly, like when an engine is started, there came a puff of air out of its mouth, with a hard dry rasping sound. And then there came another, and it settled down into a sort of rhythm—huff, huff, huff—like an imitation of breathing. Then came a most horrible thing: the mouth began to dribble. I know it sounds silly but in a way I felt sorry for it, because it had no hands and couldn’t wipe its mouth. It seems a small thing compared with all the rest but that is how I felt. Then it began working its mouth about and even licking its lips. It was like someone getting a machine into working order. To see it doing that just as if it was alive, and at the same time dribbling over the beard which was all stiff and dead looking. . . . Then three people came into the room, all dressed up in white, with masks on, walking as carefully as cats on the top of a wall. One was a great fat man, and another was lanky and boney. The third . . .” here Jane paused involuntarily. “The third . . . I think it was Mark . . . I mean my husband.”
“You are uncertain?” said the Director.
“No,” said Jane. “It was Mark. I knew his walk. And I knew the shoes he was wearing. And his voice. It was Mark.”
“I am sorry,” said the Director.
“And then,” said Jane, “all three of them came round and stood in front of the Head. They bowed to it. You couldn’t tell if it was looking at them because of its dark glasses. It kept on with that rhythmical huffing noise. Then it spoke.”
“In English?” said Grace Ironwood.
“No, in French.”
“What did it say?”
“Well, my French wasn’t quite good enough to follow it. It spoke in a queer way. In starts—like a man who’s out of breath. With no proper expression. And of course it couldn’t turn itself this way or that, the way a—a real person—does.”
“Did you understand any of what was said?”
“Not very much. The fat man seemed to be introducing Mark to it. It said something to him. Then Mark tried to answer. I could follow him all right, his French isn’t much better than mine.”
“What did he say?”
“He said something about ‘doing it in a few days if it was possible.’”
“Was that all?”
“Very nearly. You see Mark couldn’t stand it. I knew he wouldn’t be able to: I remember, idiotically, in the dream, I wanted to tell him. I saw he was going to fall. I think I tried to shout out to the other two, ‘He’s going to fall.’ But, of course, I couldn’t. He was sick too. Then they got him out of the room.”
All three were silent for a few seconds.
“Was that all?” said Miss Ironwood.
“Yes,” said Jane. “That’s all I remember. I think I woke up then.”
The Director took a deep breath. “Well!” he said, glancing at Miss Ironwood, “it becomes plainer and plainer. We must hold a council at once. Is everyone here?”
“No. Dr. Dimble has had to go into Edgestow, into College, to take pupils. He won’t be back till evening.”
“Then we must hold the council this evening. Make all arrangements.” He paused for a moment and then turned to Jane.
“I am afraid this is very bad for you, my dear,” he said; “and worse for him.”
“You mean for Mark, sir?”
“Yes. Don’t think hardly of him. He is suffering. If we are defeated we shall all go down with him. If we win we will rescue him; he cannot be far gone yet.” He paused, smiled, and added, “We are quite used to trouble about husbands here, you know. Poor Ivy’s is in jail.”
“In jail?”
“Oh yes—for ordinary theft. But quite a good fellow. He’ll be all right again.”
Though Jane had felt horror, even to the point of nausea, at the sight (in her dream) of Mark’s real surroundings and associates, it had been horror that carried a certain grandeur and mystery with it. The sudden equation between his predicament and that of a common convict whipped the blood to her cheeks. She said nothing.
“One other thing,” continued the Director. “You will not misunderstand it if I exclude you from our council to-night.”
“Of course not, sir,” said Jane, in fact, misunderstanding it very much.
“You see,” he said, “MacPhee takes the line that if you hear things talked of you will carry ideas of them into your sleep and that will destroy the evidential value of your dreams. And it’s not very easy to refute him. He is our sceptic; a very important office.”
“I quite understand,” said Jane.
“That applies, of course,” said the Director, “only to things we don’t know yet. You mustn’t hear our guesses, you mustn’t be there when we’re puzzling over the evidence. But we have no secrets from you about the earlier history of our family. In fact, MacPhee himself will insist on being the one who tells you all that. He’d be afraid Grace’s account, or mine, wouldn’t be objective enough.”
“I see.”
“I want you to like him if you can. He’s one of my oldest friends. And he’ll be about our best man if we’re going to be defeated. You couldn’t have a better man at your side in a losing battle. What he’ll do if we win, I can’t imagine.”
II
Mark woke next morning to the consciousness that his head ached all over, but specially at the back. He remembered that he had fallen—that was how he had hurt his head—fallen in that other room, with Filostrato and Straik . . . and then, as one of the poets says, he “discovered in his mind an inflammation swollen and deformed, his memory.” Oh, but impossible, not to be accepted for a moment: it had been a nightmare, it must be shoved away, it would vanish away now that he was fully awake. It was an absurdity. Once in delirium he had seen the front part of a horse, by itself, with no body or hind legs, running across a lawn, had felt it ridiculous at the very moment of seeing it, but not the less horrible for that. This was an absurdity of the same sort. A head without any body underneath. A head that could speak when they turned on the air and the artificial saliva with taps in the next room. His own head began to throb so hard that he had to stop thinking.
But he knew it was true. And he could not, as they say, “take it.” He was very ashamed of this, for he wished to be considered one of the tough ones. But the truth is that his toughness was only of the will, not of the nerves, and the virtues he had almost succeeded in banishing from his mind still lived, if only negatively and as weaknesses, in his body. He approved of vivisection, but had never worked in a dissecting room. He recommended that certain classes of people should be gradually eliminated: but he had never been there when a small shopkeeper went to the workhouse or a starved old woman of the governess type came to the very last day and hour and minute in the cold attic. He knew nothing about the last half-cup of cocoa drunk slowly ten days before.
Meantime
