in the planet Venus—taken there by these eldils.”
“Venus is inhabited by them, too?”
“You’ll forgive me observing that this remark shows you have not grasped what I’m telling you. These creatures are not planetary creatures at all. Supposing them to exist, you are to conceive them floating about the depth of space, though they may alight on a planet here and there; like a bird alighting on a tree, you understand. There’s some of them, he says, are more or less permanently attached to particular planets, but they’re not native there. They’re just a clean different kind of thing.”
There were a few seconds of silence, and then Jane asked, “They are, I gather, more or less friendly?”
“That is certainly the Director’s idea about them, with one important exception.“
“What’s that?”
“The eldils that have for many centuries concentrated on our own planet. We seem to have had no luck at all in choosing our particular complement of parasites. And that, Mrs. Studdock, brings me to the point.”
Jane waited. It was extraordinary how MacPhee’s manner almost neutralised the strangeness of what he was telling her.
“The long and the short of it is,” said he, “that this house is dominated either by the creatures I’m talking about, or by a sheer delusion. It is by advices he thinks he has received from eldils that the Director has discovered the conspiracy against the human race; and what’s more, it’s on instructions from eldils that he’s conducting the campaign—if you can call it conducting! It may have occurred to you to wonder, Mrs. Studdock, how any man in his senses thinks we’re going to defeat a powerful conspiracy by sitting here growing winter vegetables and training performing bears. It is a question I have propounded on more than one occasion. The answer is always the same: we’re waiting for orders.”
“From the eldils? It was them he meant when he spoke of his Masters?”
“I doubt it would be; though he doesn’t use that word in speaking to me.”
“But, Mr. MacPhee, I don’t understand. I thought you said the ones on our planet were hostile.”
“That’s a very good question,” said MacPhee, “but it’s not our own ones that the Director claims to be in communication with. It’s his friends from outer space. Our own crew, the terrestrial eldils, are at the back of the whole conspiracy. You are to imagine us, Mrs. Studdock, living on a world where the criminal classes of the eldils have established their headquarters. And what’s happening now, if the Director’s views are correct, is that their own respectable kith and kin are visiting this planet to red the place up.”
“You mean that the other eldils, out of space, actually come here—to this house?”
“That is what the Director thinks.”
“But you must know whether it’s true or not.”
“How?”
“Have you seen them?”
“That’s not a question to be answered Aye or No. I’ve seen a good many things in my time that weren’t there or weren’t what they pretended to be; rainbows and reflections and sunsets, not to mention dreams. And there’s hetero-suggestion too. I will not deny that I have observed a class of phenomena in this house that I have not yet fully accounted for. But they never occurred at a moment when I had a note-book handy or any facilities for verification.”
“Isn’t seeing believing?”
“It may be—for children or beasts,” said MacPhee.
“But not for sensible people, you mean?”
“My uncle, Dr. Duncanson,” said MacPhee, “whose name may be familiar to you—he was Moderator of the General Assembly over the water, in Scotland—used to say, ‘Show it me in the word of God.’ And then he’d slap down the big Bible on the table. It was a way he had of shutting up people that came to him blathering about religious experiences. And granting his premises, he was quite right. I don’t hold his views, Mrs. Studdock, you understand, but I work on the same principles. If anything wants Andrew MacPhee to believe in its existence, I’ll be obliged if it will present itself in full daylight, with a sufficient number of witnesses present, and not get shy if you hold up a camera or a thermometer.”
“You have seen something, then?”
“Aye. But we must keep an open mind. It might be a hallucination. It might be a conjuring trick . . .”
“By the Director?” asked Jane angrily. Mr. MacPhee once more had recourse to his snuff-box. “Do you really expect me,” said Jane, “to believe that the Director is that sort of man? A charlatan?”
“I wish, ma’am,” said MacPhee, “you could see your way to consider the matter without constantly using such terms as believe. Obviously, conjuring is one of the hypotheses that any impartial investigator must take into account. The fact that it is a hypothesis specially uncongenial to the emotions of this investigator or that, is neither here nor there. Unless, maybe, it is an extra ground for emphasising the hypothesis in question, just because there is a strong psychological danger of neglecting it.”
“There’s such a thing as loyalty,” said Jane.
MacPhee, who had been carefully shutting up the snuff-box, suddenly looked up with a hundred Covenanters in his eyes.
“There is, ma’am,” he said. “As you get older you will learn that it is a virtue too important to be lavished on individual personalities.”
At that moment there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” said MacPhee, and Camilla entered.
“Have you finished with Jane, Mr. MacPhee?” she said. “She promised to come out for a breath of air with me before dinner.”
“Och, breath of air your grandmother!” said MacPhee with a gesture of despair. “Very well, ladies, very well. Away out to the garden. I doubt they’re doing something more to the purpose on the enemy’s side. They’ll have all this country under their hands before we move, at this rate.”
“I wish you’d read the poem I’m reading,” said Camilla. “For it says in one line just what I feel about this waiting:
Fool, All lies in a passion of patience, my lord’s rule.”
“What’s that from?” asked Jane.
“Taliessin through Logres.”
“Mr. MacPhee probably approves of no poets except Burns.”
“Burns!” said MacPhee with profound contempt, opening the drawer of his table with great energy and producing a formidable sheaf of papers. “If you’re going to the garden, don’t let me delay you, ladies.”
“He’s been telling you?” said Camilla, as the two girls went together down the passage. Moved by a kind of impulse which was rare to her experience, Jane seized her friend’s hand as she answered “Yes!” Both were filled with some passion, but what passion they did not know. They
