‘You seem to have got it into your head,’ Dr Forester said, ‘that you have a talent for detection, that you were a detective perhaps in your previous life . . .’
‘That was a joke,’ Digby said.
‘I can assure you you were something quite different. Quite different,’ Dr Forester repeated.
‘What was I?’
‘It may be necessary one day to tell you,’ Dr Forester said, as though he were uttering a threat. ‘If it will prevent foolish mistakes . . .’ Johns stood behind the doctor looking at the floor.
‘I’m leaving here,’ Digby said.
The calm noble old face of Dr Forester suddenly crumpled into lines of dislike. He said sharply, ‘And paying your bill, I hope?’
‘I hope so too.’
The features reformed, but they were less convincing now. ‘My dear Digby,’ Dr Forester said, ‘you must be reasonable. You are a very sick man. A very sick man indeed. Twenty years of your life have been wiped out. That’s not health . . . and yesterday and just now you showed an excitement which I’ve feared and hoped to avoid.’ He put his hand gently on the pyjama sleeve and said, ‘I don’t want to have to restrain you, to have you certified . . .’
Digby said, ‘But I’m as sane as you are. You must know that.’
‘Major Stone thought so too. But I’ve had to transfer him to the sick bay . . . He had an obsession which might at any time have led to violence.’
‘But I . . .’
‘Your symptoms are very much the same. This excitement. . . .’ The doctor raised his hand from the sleeve to the shoulder: a warm, soft, moist hand. He said, ‘Don’t worry. We won’t let it come to that, but for a little we must be very quiet . . . plenty of food, plenty of sleep . . . some very gentle bromides . . . no visitors for a while, not even our friend Johns . . . no more of these exciting intellectual conversations.’
‘Miss Hilfe?’ Digby said.
‘I made a mistake there,’ Dr Forester said. ‘We are not strong enough yet. I have told Miss Hilfe not to come again.’
Chapter 2
THE SICK BAY
‘Wherefore shrink from me? What have I done that you should fear me?
You have been listening to evil tales, my child.’
The Little Duke
1
WHEN a man rubs out a pencil-mark he should be careful to see that the line is quite obliterated. For if a secret is to be kept, no precautions are too great. If Dr Forester had not so inefficiently rubbed out the pencil-marks in the margins of Tolstoy’s What I Believe, Mr Rennit might never have learnt what had happened to Jones, Johns would have remained a hero-worshipper, and it is possible that Major Stone would have slowly wilted into further depths of insanity between the padded hygienic walls of his room in the sick bay. And Digby? Digby might have remained Digby.
For it was the rubbed-out pencil-marks which kept Digby awake and brooding at the end of a day of loneliness and boredom. You couldn’t respect a man who dared not hold his opinions openly, and when respect for Dr Forester was gone, a great deal went with it. The noble old face became less convincing: even his qualifications became questionable. What right had he to forbid the newspapers – above all, what right had he to forbid the visits of Anna Hilfe?
Digby still felt like a schoolboy, but he now knew that his headmaster had secrets of which he was ashamed: he was no longer austere and self-sufficient. And so the schoolboy planned rebellion. At about half-past nine in the evening he heard the sound of a car, and watching between the curtains he saw the doctor drive away. Or rather Poole drove and the doctor sat beside him.
Until Digby saw Poole he had planned only a petty rebellion – a secret visit to Johns’ room; he felt sure he could persuade that young man to talk. Now he became bolder; he would visit the sick bay itself and speak to Stone. The patients must combine against tyranny, and an old memory slipped back of a deputation he had once led to his real headmaster because his form against all precedent – for it was a classical form – had been expected by a new master to learn trigonometry. The strange thing about a memory like that was that it seemed young as well as old: so little had happened since that he could remember. He had lost all his mature experience.
A bubble of excited merriment impeded his breath as he opened the door of his room and took a quick look down the corridor. He was afraid of undefined punishments, and for that reason he felt his action was heroic and worthy of someone in love. There was an innocent sensuality in his thought; he was like a boy who boasts of a beating he has risked to a girl, sitting in the sunshine by the cricket-ground, drinking ginger-beer, hearing the pad-pad of wood and leather, under the spell, day-dreaming and in love . . .
There was a graduated curfew for patients according to their health, but by half-past nine all were supposed to be in bed and asleep. But you couldn’t enforce sleep. Passing Davis’s door he could hear the strange uncontrollable whine of a man weeping . . . Farther down the passage Johns’ door was open and the light was on. Taking off his bedroom slippers, he passed quickly across the door-way, but Johns wasn’t there. Incurably sociable he was probably chatting with the house-keeper. On his desk was a pile of newspapers; he had obviously picked them out for Digby before the doctor had laid his ban. It was a temptation to stay and read them, but the small temptation didn’t suit the mood of high adventure. Tonight he would do something no patient had ever voluntarily done before – enter the sick bay. He moved carefully and silently – the words ‘Pathfinder’ and ‘Indian’ came to his mind – downstairs.
In the lounge the lights were off, but the curtains were undrawn and the moonlight welled in with the sound of the splashing fountain and the shadow of silver leaves. The Tatlers had been tidied on the tables, the ash-trays taken away, and the cushions shaken on the chairs – it looked now like a room in an exhibition where nobody crosses the ropes. The next door brought him into the passage by Dr Forester’s study. As he quietly closed each door behind him he felt as though he were cutting off his own retreat. His ribs seemed to vibrate to the beat-beat of his heart. Ahead of him was the green baize door he had never seen opened, and beyond that door lay the sick bay. He was back in his own childhood, breaking out of dormitory, daring more than he really wanted to dare, proving himself. He hoped the door would be bolted on the other side; then there would be nothing he could do but creep back to bed, honour satisfied . . .
The door pulled easily open. It was only the cover for another door, to deaden sound and leave the doctor in his study undisturbed. But that door, too, had been left unlocked, unbolted. As he passed into the passage beyond, the green baize swung to behind him with a long sigh.
2
He stood stone still and listened. Somewhere a clock ticked with a cheap tinny sound, and a tap had been left dripping. This must once have been the servants’ quarters: the floor was stone, and his bedroom slippers pushed up a little smoke of dust. Everything spoke of neglect; the woodwork when he reached the stairs had not been polished for a very long time and the thin drugget had been worn threadbare. It was an odd contrast to the spruce nursing home beyond the door; everything around him shrugged its shoulders and said, ‘We are not important. Nobody sees us here. Our only duty is to be quiet and not disturb the doctor.’ And what could be quieter than dust? If it had not been for the clock ticking he would have doubted whether anyone really lived in this part of the house – the clock and the faintest tang of stale cigarette smoke, of Caporal, that set his heart beating again with apprehension.
Where the clock ticked Poole must live. Whenever he thought of Poole he was aware of something unhappy, something imprisoned at the bottom of the brain trying to climb out. It frightened him in the same way as birds frightened him when they beat up and down in closed rooms. There was only one way to escape – the fear of another creature’s pain. That was to lash out until the bird was stunned and quiet or dead. For the moment he forgot Major Stone, and smelt his way towards Poole’s room.
It was at the
end of the passage where the tap dripped, a large square, comfortless room with a stone floor divided in half by a curtain – it had probably once been a kitchen. Its new owner had lent it an aggressive and squalid masculinity as if he had something to prove; there were ends of cigarettes upon the floor, and nothing was used for its right purpose. A clock and a cheap brown teapot served as book-ends on a wardrobe to prop up a shabby collection – Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship, lives of Napoleon and Cromwell, and numbers of little paper-covered books about what to do with Youth, Labour, Europe, God. The windows were all shut, and when Digby lifted the drab curtain he could see the bed had not been properly made – or else Poole had flung himself down for a rest and hadn’t bothered to tidy it afterwards. The tap dripped into a fixed basin and a sponge-bag dangled from a bedpost. A used tin which once held lobster paste now held old razor-blades. The place was as comfortless as a transit camp; the owner might have been someone who was just passing on and couldn’t be bothered to change so much as a stain on the wall. An open suitcase full of soiled underclothes gave the impression that he hadn’t even troubled to unpack.
It was like the underside of a stone: you turned up the bright polished nursing home and found beneath it this.
Everywhere there was the smell of Caporal, and on the beds there were crumbs, as though Poole took food to bed with him. Digby stared at the crumbs a long while: a feeling of sadness and disquiet and dangers he couldn’t place haunted him – as though something were disappointing his expectations – as though the cricket match were a frost, nobody had come to the half-term holiday, and he waited and waited outside the King’s Arms for a girl who would never turn up. He had nothing to compare this place with. The nursing home was something artificial, hidden in a garden. Was it possible that ordinary life was like this? He remembered a lawn and afternoon tea and a drawing-room with water-colours and little tables, a piano no one played and the smell of eau-de-Cologne; but was this the real adult life to which we came in time? had he, too, belonged to this world? He was saddened by a sense of familiarity. It was not of this last he had dreamed a few years back at school, but he remembered that the years since then were not few but many.
At last the sense of danger reminded him of poor imprisoned Stone. He might not have long before the doctor and Poole returned, and though he could not believe they had any power over him, he was yet afraid of sanctions he couldn’t picture. His slippers padded again up the passage and up the dingy stairs to the first floor. There was no sound here at all: the tick of the clock didn’t reach as far: large bells on rusty wires hung outside what might have been the butler’s pantry. They were marked Study, Drawing-Room, 1st Spare Bedroom, 2nd Spare Bedroom, Day Nursery. . . The wires sagged with disuse and a spider had laid its scaffolding across the bell marked Dining-Room.
The barred windows he had seen over the garden wall had been on the second floor, and he mounted unwillingly higher. He was endangering his own retreat with every step, but he had dared himself to speak to Stone, and if it were only one syllable he must speak it. He went down a passage calling softly, ‘Stone. Stone.’
There was no reply and the old cracked linoleum creaked under his feet and sometimes caught his toes. Again he felt a familiarity – as if this cautious walking, this solitary passage, belonged more to this world than the sleek bedroom in the other wing. ‘Stone,’ he called, ‘Stone,’ and heard a voice answer, ‘Barnes. Is that you, Barnes?’ coming startlingly from the door beside him.
‘Hush,’ he said, and putting his lips close to the key-hole, ‘It’s not Barnes. It’s Digby.’
He heard Stone sigh. ‘Of course,’ the voice said, ‘Barnes is dead. I was screaming . . .’
‘Are you all right, Stone?’
‘I’ve had an awful time,’ Stone said, so low that Digby could hardly hear him, ‘an awful time. I didn’t really mean I wouldn’t eat . . .’
‘Come to the door so that I can hear you better.’
Stone said, ‘They’ve got me in one of these strait-jackets. They said I was violent: I don’t think I was violent. It’s just the treachery . . .’ He must have got nearer the door, because his voice was much clearer. He said, ‘Old man, I know I’ve been a bit touched. We all are in this place, aren’t we? But I’m not mad. It just isn’t right.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I wanted to find a room to enfilade that island from. They’d begun to dig, you see, months ago. I saw them one evening after dark. One couldn’t leave it at that. The Hun doesn’t let the grass grow. So I came through into this wing and went to Poole’s room . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I didn’t mean to make them jump. I just wanted to explain what I was after.’
‘Jump?’
‘The doctor was there with Poole. They were doing something in the dark . . .’ The voice broke: it was horrible hearing a middle-aged man sobbing invisibly behind a locked door.
‘But the digging?’ Digby asked. ‘You must have dreamed . . .’
‘That tube . . . It was awful, old man. I hadn’t really meant I wouldn’t eat. I was just afraid of poison.’
‘Poison?’
‘Treachery,’ the voice said. ‘Listen, Barnes . . .’
‘I’m not Barnes.’
Again there was a long sigh. ‘Of course. I’m sorry. It’s getting me down. I am touched, you know. Perhaps they are right.’
‘Who’s Barnes?’
‘He was a good man. They got him on the beach. It’s no good, Digby. I’m mad. Every day in every way I get worse and worse.’
Somewhere from far away, through an open window on the floor below, came the sound of a car. Digby put his lips to the door and said, ‘I can’t stay, Stone. Listen. You are not mad. You’ve got ideas into your head, that’s all. It’s not right putting you here. Somehow I’ll get you out. Just stick it.’
‘You’re a good chap, Digby.’
‘They’ve threatened me with this too.’
‘You,’ Stone whispered back. ‘But you’re sane enough. By God, perhaps I’m not so touched after all. If they want to put you here, it must be treachery.’
‘Stick it.’
‘I’ll stick it, old man. It was the uncertainty. I thought perhaps they were right.’
The sound of the car faded.
‘Haven’t you any relations?’
‘Not a soul,’ the voice said. ‘I had a wife, but she went away. She was quite right, old chap, quite right. There was a lot of treachery.’
‘I’ll get you out. I don’t know how, but I’ll get you out.’
‘That island, Digby . . . you’ve got to watch it, old man. I can’t do anything here, and I don’t matter, anyway. But if I could just have fifty of the old bunch . . .’
Digby reassured him gently, ‘I’ll watch the island.’
‘I thought the Hun had got hold of it. They don’t let the grass grow . . . But I’m sometimes a bit confused, old man.’
‘I must go now. Just stick it.’
‘I’ll stick it, old man. Been in worse places. But I wish you didn’t have to go.’
‘I’ll come back for you.’
But he hadn’t the faintest idea of how. A terrible sense of pity moved him; he felt capable of murder for the release of that gentle tormented creature. He could see him walking into the muddy pond . . . the very clear blue eyes and the bristly military moustache and the lines of care and responsibility. That was a thing you learned in this place: that a man kept his character even when he was insane. No madness would ever dim that military sense of duty to others.
His reconnaissance had proved easier than he had any right to expect: the doctor must be taking a long ride. He reached the green baize door safely, and when it sighed behind him, it was like Stone’s weary patience asking him to come back. He passed quickly through the lounge and then more carefully up the stairs until he came again within sight of Johns’ open door. Johns wasn’t there: the clock on his desk had only moved on twelve minutes: the
papers lay in the lamplight. He felt as though he had explored a strange country and returned home to find it all a dream – not a single page of the calendar turned during all his wanderings.
3
He wasn’t afraid of Johns. He went in and picked up one of the offending papers. Johns had arranged them in order and marked the passages. He must have been bitten by the passion for detection. The Ministry of Home Security, Digby read, had replied months ago to a question about a missing document in much the same terms as in the later case. It had never been missing. There had been at most a slight indiscretion, but the document had never left the personal possession of – and there was the great staid respected name which Johns had forgotten. In the face of such a statement how could anyone continue to suggest that the document had been photographed? That was to accuse the great staid name not of an indiscretion but of treason. It was perhaps a mistake not to have left the document in the office safe overnight, but the great name had given his personal assurance to the Minister that not for one second had the document been out of his possession. He had slept with it literally under his pillow . . . The Times hinted that it would be interesting to investigate how the calumny had started. Was the enemy trying to sap our confidence in our hereditary leaders by a whisper campaign? After two or three issues there was silence.
A rather frightening fascination lay in these months-old newspapers. Digby had slowly had to relearn most of the household names, but he could hardly turn the page of any newspaper without encountering some great man of whom he had never heard, and occasionally there would crop up a name he did recognize – someone who had been a figure twenty years ago. He felt like a Rip Van Winkle returning after a quarter of a century’s sleep; the people of whom he had heard hardly connected better than he did with his youth. Men of brilliant promise had lapsed into the Board of Trade, and of course in one great case a man who had been considered too brilliant and too reckless ever to be trusted with major office was the leader of his country. One of Digby’s last memories was of hearing him hissed by ex-servicemen from the public gallery of a law court because he had told an abrupt unpalatable truth about an old campaign. Now he had taught the country to love his unpalatable truths.