They screamed at him and he could not shut his ears to them nor his memory. He knew each voice, and with the knowledge went exact and vivid memory of its owner.
“Goering and Churchill and Someone and Mussolini and Henry Armstrong!” they screamed. “Nils, you were wonderful—smile at them! . . . And there it was, chaps, a German sub! . . . Much and high appreciation of this wonderful country: it is truly a free land! . . . An Evil Idea cannot beat a Good Idea! . . . I’m all right, Bob: are you all right, darling?”
They screamed at him—and they came faster and faster up out of the rustling depths until there was no pause between them; no surcease. They screamed:
“Turn around so that I can see your profile quick those big doors in the side I’m all right Bob the thirtieth of February is the day are you all right darling you do not know the German language not one single word the F.B.I.’ll be around like ants come and help me Bob where’s her life-belt there’ll be nothing left of Tipping or Coley or anything all officers in the Mess-Hall in five minutes Derek go up on deck at once they are not bad you know not the young men you will help to teach them come and help me Bob my mother’s in there are you all right darling my mother’s in there chaps are you all right darling my mother’s in there Bob come and help me my mother’s in there my mother’s in there my mother’s in there are you all right my mother’s in there. . . .”
The mounting torture spurred him to impossible action. With a wild wrenching of every force in mind and body and self he tore free of them. There was fire and the whirling again and he burst through the veil which had held him away from reality and heard a hoarse wordless cry from his own lips.
The room, except for the corner in which his bed stood, was flooded with sunshine. There were trees outside the wide white window and in them the birds cheeped and twittered. There was a light slight ghost of a breeze and it came cool into the room with the warm yellow sunshine and made the leaves on the trees dance and gently sway.
He lay absolutely still. His body was wet and shaking and it was difficult to breathe. But he felt relief like a god-sent salve: it flowed over and in and through him and the grinding pain in legs and head and body was constant and welcome proof of reality.
Through the open window came the warm and thudding and satisfactory sound of a horse’s hoofs on turf. Somewhere in the sunlit, invisible distance was a throaty rattling of frogs and the somnolent whirring of a mower. From below this room where he lay came a burst of rich, chuckling laughter and then a throaty, soft-lined voice which shouted words he could not hear but which he knew by the rich and indescribable tonal quality to belong to a coloured woman.
He turned his head with slow and deliberate disregard of the hurt the movement caused him. He looked out at the room for the first time. It was a large room, irregularly shaped—and it was like nothing he had expected nor anything he had ever seen. It had a rich, cool depth of space and comfort and permanence. It was serene and ageless and graceful, and the furnishings seemed, like the place itself, to belong to no order or plan except their admirable own.
His head hurt and he slowly laid it back upon the soft pillow which smelt evanescently of fresh lavender. He gazed out of the facing window at the sun-dappled, swaying leaves. He heard, from the farther side of the house, the sound of a car as it came to a halt upon a gravel surface and then a man’s voice and, answering, the clear, deep young voice which had told him, “You’ll go to sleep now”; the clear, deep young voice of the girl about whom he had been afraid to think in case she were an unreality.
He lay and waited. His body was trembling but he heeded neither this nor its pain. He heard feet upon a stairway—and then the slight clicking sound of a doorhandle gently turned and a little, extra stirring of the air in the room, and then, hushed almost to a whisper, her voice.
“I think he’s still asleep, doctor,” it said.
Otto moistened his lips with his tongue. He was going to speak—and then he would see her again and know whether it had been true, the tremendous, the vital importance of that recognition between them. He was afraid to find out—but he must. He said:
“Please, I am awake,” and waited without breathing while the light feet and the heavy approached the bed and then came into his sight.
He saw a man first—and his eyes went past the man and saw her—and he knew that it had been true. The dark eyes flickered over his, barely grazing his steady gaze—but it was enough. He found that his whole body had been taut, but now he relaxed it. He was breathing fast.
The doctor pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed and peered down at his patient. He said:
“Well, well. Feeling a little more like yourself, I see.” He put out a hand and felt for the pulse in Otto’s wrist. “You’re a very lucky young man—very lucky!”
And, after that first waking, after the realization that she was there and was real, time ceased to have its ordinary applications for him. It was not that he was unconscious for long periods, or delirious or drugged or out of his senses, although he may have been, for brief intervals, each and all of these. It was rather that, for him in his illness, time functioned upon a different basis from the normaclass="underline" the earth went around the sun in vague rotation—but beyond that point ceased all similarity to time as he had known it. He was here, and his body was broken and sick: he was here, and while his body was mending, the dividing-lines of man-made time, those barrier-lines which mark off minutes and hours and days and weeks, all faded into nothingness: instead of a rigidly charted, ever-adding sequence of periods was just a round map of being. Things happened upon this map, haphazard and almost incessantly, but they marked no progression in any mathematical dimension; they were unco-ordinate fillings-in of the blankness of the map; fillings-in which would eventually complete the map and make him whole.
So he lay—and things happened and the fillings-in mounted and added and brought him ever nearer to recovery. But because the pressure of the time-chart had been removed from him, the happenings which made the fillings-in were each an individual problem or excitement or pleasure or suffering: they made no chain; they were unconnected units of Event, objective in the main but sometimes of his own engineering.
As, for instance, the question of drugs. They wished to give him drugs: they said that drugs would help his recovery by making sleep easier for him. They said this and much more—but he would not take the drugs, after they had once or twice been given to him, because he was afraid.
The fear was two-headed: he was afraid, equally, that with no command over himself he might in some way betray Nils Jorgensen and the Machine, and he was afraid, with a sick and different fear, of the pictures he might see. The pictures, as he found when they gave him morphia again that first time the doctor came, were worse even than the voices.
To win his fight for no drugs he had to have help, her help. He achieved it simply, by asking her for it. She was sitting in a deep chair by the window which faced the foot of his bed: she was reading, and the light of a shaded lamp cast its soft gold circle downwards and touched bright gleamings from the coiled smooth darkness of her hair.
He spoke—and she set down the book and rose and was beside him in a swift, graceful instant.
And he told her. He said:
“They must not give me drugs. The sleep is not good then.” His voice was laboured and the words were slow and heavy with the care of their selection. He said: