When Mark was bundled out of the police wagon into the dark and rain and hurried indoors between two constables and left at length alone in a little lighted room, he had no idea that he was at Belbury. Nor would he have cared greatly if he had known, for the moment he was arrested he had despaired of his life. He was going to be hanged.
He had never till now been at close quarters with death. Now, glancing down at his hand (because his hands were cold and he had been automatically rubbing them), it came to him as a totally new idea that this very hand, with its five nails and the yellow tobacco stain on the inside of the second finger, would one day be the hand of a corpse, and later the hand of a skeleton. He did not exactly feel horror, though on the physical level he was aware of a choking sensation; what made his brain reel was the preposterousness of the idea. This was something incredible, yet at the same time quite certain.
There came a sudden uprush of grisly details about execution, supplied long since by Miss Hardcastle. But that was a dose too strong for the consciousness to accept. It hovered before his imagination for a fraction of a second, agonising him to a kind of mental scream, and then sank away in a blur. Mere death returned as the object of attention. The question of immortality came before him. He was not in the least interested. What had an after life to do with it? Happiness in some other and disembodied world (he never thought of unhappiness) was totally irrelevant to a man who was going to be killed. The killing was the important thing. On any view, this body–this limp, shaking, desperately vivid thing, so intimately his own–was going to be returned into a dead body. If there were such things as souls, this cared nothing about them. The choking, smothering sensation gave the body’s view of the matter with an intensity which excluded all else.
Because he felt that he was choking, he looked round the cell for any sign of ventilation. There was, in fact, some sort of grating above the door. That ventilator and the door itself were the only objects to detain the eye. All else was white floor, white ceiling, white wall, without a chair or table or book or peg, and with one hard white light in the centre of the ceiling.
Something in the look of the place now suggested to him for the first time the idea that he might be at Belbury and not in an ordinary police station. But the flash of hope aroused by this idea was so brief as to be instantaneous. What difference did it make whether Wither and Miss Hardcastle and the rest had decided to get rid of him by handing him over to the ordinary police or by making away with him in private–as they had doubtless done with Hingest? The meaning of all the ups and downs he had experienced at Belbury now appeared to him perfectly plain. They were all his enemies, playing upon his hopes and fears to reduce him to complete servility, certain to kill him if he broke away, and certain to kill him in the long run when he had served the purpose for which they wanted him. It appeared to him astonishing that he could ever have thought otherwise. How could he have supposed that any real conciliation of these people could be achieved by anything he did?
What a fool–a blasted, babyish, gullible fool–he had been! He sat down on the floor, for his legs felt weak, as if he had walked twenty-five miles. Why had he come to Belbury in the first instance? Ought not his very first interview with the Deputy Director to have warned him, as clearly as if the truth were shouted through a mega-phone or printed on a poster in letters six feet high, that here was the world of plot within plot, crossing and double-crossing, of lies and graft and stabbing in the back, of murder and a contemptuous guffaw for the fool who lost the game? Feverstone’s guffaw, that day he had called him an ‘incurable romantic’, came back to his mind. Feverstone…that was how he had come to believe in Wither: on Feverstone’s recommendation. Apparently his folly went further back. How on earth had he come to trust Feverstone–a man with a mouth like a shark, with his flash manners, a man who never looked you in the face? Jane, or Dimble, would have seen through him at once. He had ‘crook’ written all over him. He was fit only to deceive puppets like Curry and Busby. But then, at the time when he first met Feverstone, he had not thought Curry and Busby puppets. With extraordinary clarity, but with renewed astonishment, he remembered how he had felt about the Progressive Element at Bracton when he was first admitted to its confidence; he remembered, even more incredulously, how he had felt as a very junior Fellow while he was outside it–how he had looked almost with awe at the heads of Curry and Busby bent close together in Common Room, hearing occasional fragments of their whispered conversation, pretending himself the while to be absorbed in a periodical but longing–oh, so intensely longing–for one of them to cross the room and speak to him. And then, after months and months, it had happened. He had a picture of himself, the odious little outsider who wanted to be an insider, the infantile gull, drinking in the husky and unimportant confidences, as if he were being admitted to the government of the planet. Was there no beginning to his folly? Had he been utter fool all through from the very day of his birth? Even as a schoolboy, when he had ruined his work and half broken his heart trying to get into the society called Grip, and lost his only real friend in doing so? Even as a child, fighting Myrtle because she would go and talk secrets with Pamela next door?
He himself did not understand why all this, which was now so clear, had never previously crossed his mind. He was unaware that such thoughts had often knocked for entrance, but had always been excluded for the very good reason that if they were once entertained it involved ripping up the whole web of his life, cancelling almost every decision his will had ever made, and really beginning over again as though he were an infant. The indistinct mass of problems which would have to be faced if he admitted such thoughts, the innumerable ‘something’ about which ‘something’ would have to be done, had deterred him from ever raising these questions. What had now taken the blinkers off was the fact that nothing could be done. They were going to hang him. His story was at an end. There was no harm in ripping up the web now for he was not going to use it any more; there was no bill to be paid (in the shape of arduous decision and reconstruction) for truth. It was a result of the approach of death which the Deputy Director and Professor Frost had possibly not foreseen.
There were no moral considerations at this moment in Mark’s mind. He looked back on his life not with shame, but with a kind of disgust at its dreariness. He saw himself as a little boy in short trousers, hidden in the shrubbery beside the paling, to overhear Myrtle’s conversation with Pamela, and trying to ignore the fact that it was not at all interesting when overheard. He saw himself making believe that he enjoyed those Sunday afternoons with the athletic heroes of Grip while all the time (as he now saw) he was almost homesick for one of the old walks with Pearson–Pearson whom he had taken such pains to leave behind. He saw himself in his teens laboriously reading rubbishy grown-up novels and drinking beer when he really enjoyed John Buchan and stone ginger. The hours that he had spent learning the very slang of each new circle that attracted him, the perpetual assumption of interest in things he found dull and of knowledge he did not possess, the almost heroic sacrifice of nearly every person and thing he actually enjoyed, the miserable attempt to pretend that one could enjoy Grip, or the Progressive Element, or the NICE–all this came over him with a kind of heart-break. When had he ever done what he wanted? Mixed with the people whom he liked? Or even eaten and drunk what took his fancy? The concentrated insipidity of it all filled him with self-pity.
In his normal condition, explanations that laid on impersonal forces outside himself the responsibility for all this life of dust and broken bottles would have occurred at once to his mind and been at once accepted. It would have been ‘the system’ or ‘an inferiority complex’ due to his parents, or the peculiarities of the age. None of these things occurred to him now. His ‘scientific’ outlook had never been a real philosophy believed with blood and heart. It had lived only in his brain, and was a part of that public self which was now falling off him. He was aware, without even having to think of it, that it was he himself–nothing else
in the whole universe–that had chosen the dust and broken bottles, the heap of old tin cans, the dry and choking places.
An unexpected idea came into his head. This–this death of his–would be lucky for Jane. Myrtle long ago, Pearson at school, Denniston while they were undergraduates, and lastly Jane had been the four biggest invasions of his life by something from beyond the dry and choking places. Myrtle he had conquered by becoming the clever brother who won scholarships and mixed with important people. They were really twins, but after a short period in childhood during which she had appeared as an elder sister, she had become more like a younger sister and had remained so ever since. He had wholly drawn her into his orbit: it was her large wondering eyes and naif answers to his accounts of the circle he was now moving in which had provided at each stage most of the real pleasure of his career. But for the same reason she had ceased to mediate life from beyond the dry places. The flower, once safely planted among the tin cans, had turned into a tin can itself. Pearson and Denniston he had thrown away. And he now knew, for the first time, what he had secretly meant to do with Jane. If all had succeeded, if he had become the sort of man he hoped to be, she was to have been the great hostess–the secret hostess in the sense that only the very esoteric few would know who that striking-looking woman was and why it mattered so enormously to secure her good will. Well…it was lucky for Jane. She seemed to him, as he now thought of her, to have in herself deep wells and knee-deep meadows of happiness, rivers of freshness, enchanted gardens of leisure, which he could not enter but could have spoiled. She was one of those other people–like Pearson, like Denniston, like the Dimbles–who could enjoy things for their own sake. She was not like him. It was well that she should be rid of him.
At that moment came the sound of a key turning in the lock of the cell-door. Instantly all these thoughts vanished; mere physical terror of death, drying the throat, rushed back upon him. He scrambled to his feet and stood with his back against the furthest wall, staring as hard as if he could escape hanging by keeping whoever entered steadily in sight.
It was not a policeman who came in. It was a man in a grey suit whose pince-nez as he glanced toward Mark and towards the light became opaque windows concealing his eyes. Mark knew him at once and knew that he was at Belbury. It was not this that made him open his own eyes even wider and almost forget his terror in his astonishment. It was the change in the man’s appearance –or rather the change in the eyes with which Mark saw him. In one sense everything about Professor Frost was as it had always been–the pointed beard, the extreme whiteness of forehead, the regularity of features, and the bright Arctic smile. But what Mark could not understand was how he had ever managed to overlook something about the man so obvious that any child would have shrunk away from him and any dog would have backed into the corner with raised hackles and bared teeth. Death itself did not seem more frightening than the fact that only six hours ago he would in some measure have trusted this man, welcomed his confidence, and even made believe that his society was not disagreeable.
12
Wet and Windy Night
‘Well,’ said Dimble. ‘There’s no one here.’
‘He was here a moment ago,’ said Denniston. ‘You’re sure you did see someone?’ said Dimble.
‘I thought I saw someone,’ said Denniston. ‘I’m not positive.’
‘If there was anyone he must still be quite close,’ said Dimble.
‘What about giving him a call?’ suggested Denniston. ‘Hush! Listen!’ said Jane. They were all silent for a few moments.
‘That’s only the old donkey,’ said Dimble presently, ‘moving about at the top.’
There was another silence.
‘He seems to have been pretty extravagant with his matches,’ said Denniston, presently, glancing at the trodden earth in the firelight. ‘One would expect a tramp–’
‘On the other hand,’ said Dimble, ‘one would not expect Merlin to have brought a box of matches with him from the fifth century.’
‘But what are we to do?’ said Jane.
‘One hardly likes to think what MacPhee will say if we return with no more success than this. He will at once point out a plan we ought to have followed,’ said Denniston with a smile.
‘Now that the rain’s over,’ said Dimble, ‘we’d better get back to the car and start looking for your white gate. What are you looking at, Denniston?’
‘I’m looking at this mud,’ said Denniston who had moved a few paces away from the fire and in the direction of the path by which they had descended into the dingle. He had been stooping and using his torch. Now he suddenly straightened himself. ‘Look!’ he said, ‘there have been several people here. No, don’t walk on it and mess up all the tracks. Look. Can’t you see, Sir?’
‘Aren’t they our own footprints?’ said Dimble.
‘Some of them are pointing the wrong way. Look at that–and that.’
‘Might they be the tramp himself?’ said Dimble. ‘If it was a tramp.’
‘He couldn’t have walked up that path without our seeing him,’ said Jane.
‘Unless he did it before we arrived,’ said Denniston.
‘But we all saw him,’ said Jane.
‘Come,’ said Dimble. ‘Let’s follow them up to the top. I don’t suppose we shall be able to follow them far. If not, we must get back to the road and go on looking for the gate.’
As they reached the lip of the hollow, mud changed into grass under foot and the footprints disappeared. They walked twice round the dingle and found nothing; then they set out to return to the road. It had turned into a fine night: Orion dominated the whole sky.
The Deputy Director hardly ever slept. When it became absolutely necessary for him to do so, he took a drug, but the necessity was rare, for the mode of consciousness he experienced at most hours of day or night had long ceased to be exactly like what other men call waking. He had learned to withdraw most of his consciousness from the task of living, to conduct business, even, with only a quarter of his mind. Colours, tastes, smells and tactual sensations no doubt bombarded his physical senses in the normal manner: they did not now reach his ego. The manner and outward attitude to men which he had adopted half a century ago were now an organisation which functioned almost independently like a gramophone and to which he could hand over his whole routine of interviews and committees. While the brain and lips carried on this work, and built up day by day for those around him the vague and formidable personality which they knew so well, his inmost self was free to pursue its own life. That detachment of the spirit, not only from the senses, but even from the reason, which has been the goal of some mystics, was now his.
Hence he was still, in a sense, awake–that is, he was certainly not sleeping–an hour after Frost had left him to visit Mark in his cell. Anyone who had looked into the study during that hour would have seen him sitting motionless at his table, with bowed head and folded hands. But his eyes were not shut. The face had no expression; the real man was far away suffering, enjoying, or inflicting whatever such souls do suffer, enjoy or inflict when the cord that binds them to the natural order is stretched out to its utmost but not yet snapped. When the telephone rang at his elbow he took up the receiver without a start.
‘Speaking,’ he said.
‘This is Stone, Sir,’ came a voice. ‘We have found the chamber.’
‘Yes.’
‘It was empty, Sir.’
‘Empty?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Are you sure, my dear Mr Stone, that you have found the right place? It is possible…’
‘Oh yes, Sir. It is a little kind of crypt. Stonework and some Roman brick. And a kind of slab in the middle, like an altar or a bed.’
‘And am I to understand there was no one there? No sign of occupation?’
‘Well, Sir, it seemed to us to have been recently disturbed.’
‘Pray be as explicit as possible, Mr Stone.’
‘Well, Sir, there was an exit–I me
an a tunnel, leading out of it to the South. We went up this tunnel at once. It comes out about eight hundred yards away, outside the area of the wood.’
‘Comes out? Do you mean there is an arch–a gate–a tunnel-mouth?’
‘Well, that’s just the point. We got out to the open air all right. But obviously something had been smashed-up there quite recently. It looked as if it had been done by explosives. As if the end of the tunnel had been walled up and had some depth of earth on top of it, and as if someone had recently blasted his way out. There was no end of a mess.’
‘Continue, Mr Stone. What did you do next?’
‘I used the order you had given me, Sir, to collect all the police available and have sent off search parties for the man you described.’
‘I see. And how did you describe him to them?’
‘Just as you did, Sir: an old man with either a very long beard or a beard very roughly trimmed, probably in a mantle, but certainly in some kind of unusual clothes. It occurred to me at the last moment to add that he might have no clothes at all.’
‘Why did you add that, Mr Stone?’
‘Well, Sir, I didn’t know how long he’d been there, and it isn’t my business. I’d heard things about clothes preserved in a place like that and all falling to pieces as soon as the air was admitted. I hope you won’t imagine for a moment that I’m trying to find out anything you don’t choose to tell me. But I just thought it would be as well to…’
‘You were quite right, Mr Stone,’ said Wither, ‘in thinking that anything remotely resembling inquisitiveness on your part might have the most disastrous consequences. I mean, for yourself, for, of course, it is your interests I have chiefly had in view in my choice of methods. I assure you that you can rely on my support in the very–er–delicate position you have –no doubt unintentionally–chosen to occupy.’
‘Thank you very much, Sir. I am so glad you think I was right in saying he might be naked.’
‘Oh, as to that,’ said the Director, ‘there are a great many considerations which cannot be raised at the moment. And what did you instruct your search parties to do on finding any such–er–person?’
‘Well, that was another difficulty, Sir. I sent my own assistant, Father Doyle, with one party, because he knows Latin. And I gave Inspector Wrench the ring you gave me and put him in charge of the second. The best I could do for the third party was to see that it contained someone who knew Welsh.’
‘You did not think of accompanying a party yourself?’
‘No, Sir. You’d told me to ring up without fail the moment we found anything. And I didn’t want to delay the search parties until I’d got you.’
‘I see. Well, no doubt your action (speaking quite without prejudice) could be interpreted along those lines. You made it quite clear that this–ah–Personage–when found, was to be treated with the greatest deference and–if you won’t misunderstand me–caution?’
‘Oh yes, Sir.’
‘Well, Mr Stone, I am, on the whole, and with certain inevitable reservations, moderately satisfied with your conduct of this affair. I believe that I may be able to present it in a favourable light to those of my colleagues whose good will you have, unfortunately, not been able to retain. If you can bring it to a successful conclusion you would very much strengthen your position. If not…it is inexpressibly painful to me that there should be these tensions and mutual recriminations among us. But you quite understand me, my dear boy. If only I could persuade–say Miss Hardcastle and Mr Studdock–to share my appreciation of your very real qualities, you would need to have no apprehensions about your career or–ah–your security.’
‘But what do you want me to do, Sir?’
‘My dear young friend, the golden rule is very simple. There are only two errors which would be fatal to one placed in the peculiar situation which certain parts of your previous conduct have unfortunately created for you. On the one hand, anything like a lack of initiative or enterprise would be disastrous. On the other, the slightest approach to unauthorised action– anything which suggested that you were assuming a liberty of decision which, in all the circumstances, is not really yours –might have consequences from which even I could not protect you. But as long as you keep quite clear of these two extremes, there is no reason (speaking unofficially) why you should not be perfectly safe.’