of the room he could hear the man breathing. He was not even asleep, for his eyes were open. He was not unconscious, for his eyes rested momentarily on Mark and then looked away. “I beg your pardon, sir,” began Mark, and then stopped. The Deputy Director was not listening. He was so far from listening that Mark felt an insane doubt whether he was there at all, whether the soul of the Deputy Director were not floating far away, spreading and dissipating itself like a gas through formless and lightless worlds, waste lands and lumber rooms of the universe. What looked out of those pale watery eyes was, in a sense, infinity—the shapeless and the interminable. The room was still and cold: there was no clock and the fire had gone out. It was impossible to speak to a face like that. Yet it seemed impossible also to get out of the room, for the man had seen him. Mark was afraid; it was so unlike any experience he had ever had before.
When at last Mr. Wither spoke, his eyes were not fixed on Mark but on some remote point beyond him, beyond the window, perhaps in the sky.
“I know who it is,” said Wither. “Your name is Studdock. What do you mean by coming here? You had better have stayed outside. Go away.”
It was then that Mark’s nerve suddenly broke. All the slowly mounting fears of the last few days ran together into one fixed determination and a few seconds later he was going downstairs three steps at a time. Then he was crossing the hall. Then he was out, and walking down the drive. Once again, his immediate course seemed quite plain to him. Opposite the entrance was a thick belt of trees pierced by a field path. That path would bring him in half an hour to Courthampton and there he could get a country ’bus to Edgestow. About the future he did not think at all. Only two things mattered: firstly, to get out of that house, and secondly to get back to Jane. He was devoured with a longing for Jane, which was physical without being at all sensual: as if comfort and fortitude would flow from her body, as if her very skin would clean away all the filth that seemed to hang about him. The idea that she might be really mad had somehow dropped out of his mind. And he was still young enough to be incredulous of misery. He could not quite rid himself of the belief that if only he made a dash for it the net must somehow break, the sky must somehow clear, and it would all end up with Jane and Mark having tea together as if none of all this had happened.
He was out of the grounds now: he was crossing the road: he had entered the belt of trees. He stopped suddenly. Something impossible was happening. There was a figure before him on the path; a tall, very tall, slightly stooping figure, sauntering and humming a little dreary tune; the Deputy Director himself. And in one moment all that brittle hardihood was gone from Mark’s mood. He turned back. He stood in the road; this seemed to him the worst pain that he had ever felt. Then, tired, so tired that he felt his legs would hardly carry him, he walked very slowly back into Belbury.
III
Mr. MacPhee had a little room on the ground floor at the Manor which he called his office, and to which no woman was ever admitted except under his own conduct; and in this tidy but dusty apartment he sat with Jane Studdock shortly before dinner that evening, having invited her there to give her what he called “a brief, objective outline of the situation.”
“I should premise at the outset, Mrs. Studdock,” he said, “that I have known the Director for a great many years and that for most of his life he was a philologist. I’m not just satisfied myself that philology can be regarded as an exact science, but I mention the fact as a testimony to his general intellectual capacity. And, not to forejudge any issue, I will not say, as I would in ordinary conversation, that he has always been a man of what you might call an imaginative turn. His original name was Ransom.”
“Not Ransom’s Dialect and Semantics?” said Jane.
“Aye. That’s the man,” said MacPhee. “Well, about six years ago—I have all the dates in a wee book there, but it doesn’t concern us at the moment—came his first disappearance. He was clean gone—not a trace of him—for about nine months. I thought he’d most likely been drowned bathing or something of the kind. And then one day what does he do but turn up again in his rooms at Cambridge and go down sick and into hospital for three months more. And he wouldn’t say where he’d been except privately to a few friends.”
“Well?” said Jane eagerly.
“He said,” answered MacPhee, producing his snuff-box and laying great emphasis on the word said, “He said he’d been to the planet Mars.”
“You mean he said this . . . while he was ill?”
“No, no. He says so still. Make what you can of it, that’s his story.”
“I believe it,” said Jane.
MacPhee selected a pinch of snuff with as much care as if those particular grains had differed from all the others in his box and spoke before applying them to his nostrils.
“I’m giving you the facts,” he said. “He told us he’d been to Mars, kidnapped, by Professor Weston and Mr. Devine—Lord Feverstone as he now is. And by his own account he’d escaped from them—on Mars, you’ll understand—and been wandering about there alone for a bit. Alone.”
“It’s uninhabited, I suppose?”
“We have no evidence on that point except his own story. You are doubtless aware, Mrs. Studdock, that a man in complete solitude even on this earth—an explorer, for example—gets into very remarkable states of consciousness. I’m told a man might forget his own identity.”
“You mean he might have imagined things on Mars that weren’t there?”
“I’m making no comments,” said MacPhee. “I’m merely recording. By his own accounts there are all kinds of creatures walking about there; that’s maybe why he has turned this house into a sort of menagerie, but no matter for that. But he also says he met one kind of creature there which specially concerns us at this moment. He called them eldils.”
“A kind of animal, do you mean?”
“Did ever you try to define the word animal, Mrs. Studdock?”
“Not that I remember. I meant, were these things . . . well, intelligent? Could they talk?”
“Aye. They could talk. They were intelligent, forbye, which is not always the same thing.”
“In fact these were the Martians?”
“That’s just what they weren’t, according to his account. They were on Mars, but they didn’t rightly belong there. He says they are creatures that live in empty space.”
“But there’s no air.”
“I’m telling you his story. He says they don’t breathe. He said also that they don’t reproduce their species and don’t die. But you’ll observe that even if we assume the rest of his story to be correct this last statement could not rest on observation.”
“What on earth are they like?”
“I’m telling you how he described them.”
“I mean, what do they look like?”
“I’m not just exactly prepared to answer that question,” said MacPhee.
“Are they perfectly huge?” said Jane almost involuntarily.
MacPhee blew
